Google plans to make adblocking a default in Chrome next year. Photo by Mr Exploding on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Hey, is it getting warmer in here? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Notes from an emergency • Idlewords

Maciej Ceglowski, in a transcript of a speech given in Berlin on May 10:

»

Facebook is the dominant social network in Europe, with 349 million monthly active users. Google has something like 94% of market share for search in Germany. The servers of Europe are littered with the bodies of dead and dying social media sites. The few holdouts that still exist, like Xing, are being crushed by their American rivals.

In their online life, Europeans have become completely dependent on companies headquartered in the United States.

And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all your data. This leaves you in a very exposed position. US residents enjoy some measure of legal protection against the American government. Even if you think our intelligence agencies are evil, they’re a lawful evil. They have to follow laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously.

But there are no such protections for non-Americans outside the United States. The NSA would have to go to court to spy on me; they can spy on you anytime they feel like it.

This is an astonishing state of affairs. I can’t imagine a world where Europe would let itself become reliant on American cheese, or where Germans could only drink Coors Light.

In the past, Europe has shown that it’s capable of identifying a vital interest and moving to protect it. When American aerospace companies were on the point of driving foreign rivals out of business, European governments formed the Airbus consortium, which now successfully competes with Boeing.

A giant part of the EU budget goes to subsidize farming, not because farming is the best use of resources in a first-world economy, but because farms are important to national security, to the landscape, to national identity, social stability, and a shared sense of who we are.

But when it comes to the Internet, Europe doesn’t put up a fight. It has ceded the ground entirely to American corporations. And now those corporations have to deal with Trump. How hard do you think they’ll work to defend European interests?

«

As ever with his talks, you should read it all. He says things you hadn’t realised, crystallises them until you can almost hold them in your hand. (And he has also bought Delicious – the bookmarking site which was bought for millions by Yahoo, dumped, given millions in VC funds, and left to go dark – for just $35,000. Hilarious triumph over the foolishness of big money.)
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Here’s how to track the smartphone apps that are tracking you • Fast Company

Glenn Fleishman:

»

The ReCon project publishes some data derived from a few hundred early users, listing apps, the kind of data they passed, a severity score, whether a developer was notified, and when misbehavior was fixed (if indeed it was).

For those who have installed the app, ReCon has a web-based console that allows users to block or modify information that’s sent. For instance, a user can block all examples of a given kind of PII, or block all location data sent from a given app. However, because some apps fail without location coordinates, the team is looking into coarsening GPS information instead of blocking it entirely. An app’s backend still gets relevant information, “but other parties aren’t able to pin down where you are to a few meters,” Choffnes notes.

Of course, examining a flow of data from users itself raises massive privacy red flags, which is part of the evolution of ReCon. Its creators don’t ask for passwords, try to avoid storing the values sent, and check only to see whether, say, a password is obviously being passed without encryption. The group ultimately wants to perform distributed machine learning without users disclosing private or secret information, such as domains they’re visiting.

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Identity manager OneLogin has suffered a nasty looking data breach • Motherboard

Joseph Cox: On Wednesday,

»

OneLogin—a company that allows users to manage logins to multiple sites and apps all at once—announced it had suffered some form of breach. Although it’s not clear exactly what data has been taken, OneLogin says that all customers served by the company’s US data centre are impacted, and has quietly issued a set of serious steps for affected customers to take.

“Today we detected unauthorized access to OneLogin data in our US region,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Notably, the public blog post omitted certain details that OneLogin mentioned to customers in an email; namely that hackers have stolen customer information.

“Customer data was compromised, including the ability to decrypt encrypted data,” according to a message OneLogin sent to customers. Multiple OneLogin customers provided Motherboard with a copy of the message.

The message also directed customers to a list of required steps to minimize any damage from the breach, which in turn gave an indication of just how serious this episode might be.

According to copies of those steps, users are being told to generate new API keys and OAuth tokens (OAuth being a system for logging into accounts); create new security certificates as well as credentials; recycle any secrets stored in OneLogin’s Secure Notes feature; have end-users update their passwords, and more.

“Dealing with aftermath,” one customer told Motherboard. “This is a massive leak.”

«

Go to OneLogin’s main page and see how long it takes you to find the announcement. Note also Cieglowski’s talk about castles of data, and the temptation they breed.
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Google will help publishers prepare for a Chrome ad blocker coming next year • WSJ

Jack Marshall:

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Google has told publishers it will give them at least six months to prepare for a new ad-blocking tool the company is planning to introduce in its Chrome web browser next year, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

The new setting, which is expected to be switched on by default within the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome, will prevent all ads from appearing on websites that are deemed to provide a bad advertising experience for users.

To help publishers prepare, Google will provide a self-service tool called “Ad Experience Reports,” which will alert them to offending ads on their sites and explain how to fix the issues. The tool will be provided before the Chrome ad blocker goes live, the people familiar with the plans say…

…Unacceptable ad types include those identified by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group made up of various trade bodies and online advertising-related companies that says it aims to improve consumers’ experience with online advertising.

The group’s initial list of unacceptable ad types, released in March, included pop-ups, auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads that count down before displaying content. Google is a member of the group, alongside fellow ad giant Facebook , and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp .

«

This is antitrust territory. Dominant search engine; dominant browser; a dominant advertising supplier. What’s the harm to the consumer? The lack of choice in what they see, and the inability to decide what ads they do and don’t see. I hope Margrethe Vestager is on this preemptively; I’m sure publishers in Europe will be at her door.
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Postscript: Frank Deford • The New Yorker

Nicholas Dawidoff on the sports writer who died last weekend aged 78:

»

Deford’s most celebrated pieces were all “bonuses,” the bonus being the coveted slot at the back of the Sports Illustrated reserved for the week’s long feature. Soon after I met him, Deford explained his theory of how to structure the bonus—a variation of Chekhov’s rifle. The Russian famously ordained that if in the first chapter (or act) a rifle is on the wall, before the end it must be brought down and fired. The man from Baltimore said that in a bonus, you began by telling the reader something that made him interested. Then, once the reader was completely engaged, you moved on to other matters, to the point where the reader forgot the first thing. Then, toward the end, you brought it up again. The act of forming, breaking, and reforming the chemical bond, he said, deepened the reading experience. I was in my early twenties at the time, and the notion that the magazine’s revered figure was sharing his sweetest science with me made me almost overwhelmed with gratitude. You could be good and also, well, good.

Several years later, we drove together in his car from New York City to his family’s home in Connecticut. Deford was as excited as I ever saw him, owing to something new. We would not need to stop, wait in a long line, and pay a toll at a booth along the highway, he said, because of a recent traffic innovation. There was now an electronic pass keyed to a collection sensor that enabled a driver to pay the toll by simply driving through the booth. It was hardly necessary even to slow down. I didn’t believe it? Just wait! Soon, he had me beyond excited in anticipation of such impossible, magical, laser-age technology.

«

Dawidoff, en route to a neat payoff. Deford inspired me: I used to type out his pieces and analyse them to try to understand why they worked so well. It turned out to be a combination of great reporting and clever construction. If you remember tennis’s 1985 US Open, this is a pretty good description of it. And it’s pretty good even if you don’t.
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How to fight the bloatware of AI • Medium

Peter Sweeney is an entrepreneur and inventor of AI technologies, and he takes issue with the idea that we need a human-like AI. What we need, he argues, is one which narrowly does the rational part we’ve only recently learned to do:

»

it’s only within the past few centuries, beginning with the scientific revolution, that humans began making consistent, predictable progress through the creation of good knowledge. Earlier humans produced a wealth of bad knowledge, most of it long forgotten.

This isn’t to say humans were incapable of producing good knowledge. The point is that good knowledge creation was exceedingly rare. We wouldn’t model flight using a bird that failed to fly at such a spectacular rate. As a model for machine intelligence, shouldn’t humans be subject to the same standard of criticism?

We can further hone our expectations for good knowledge to scientific disciplines. According to Gary Marcus, “What society most needs is automated scientific discovery.” Demis Hassabis [founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind] holds similar ambitions. “I’ve always hoped that A.I. could help us discover completely new ideas in complex scientific domains.”

We expect machines to embody superhuman intelligence. Only scientific progress embodies the sort of revolutionary knowledge creation that we imagine for our machines. It’s knowledge that arrives in conjectural leaps, defies our past experiences, and redefines what’s possible.
This process of knowledge creation is a human invention, not a natural phenomenon. Yet on closer inspection, our knowledge of how scientific knowledge is created is younger still! It was only in the 20th century, with Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, that there emerged a strong consensus of how scientific knowledge is created.

Naturally irrational humans are deeply flawed knowledge creation machines. We’ve only recently acquired the skills we need from machines and our knowledge of how we do it has not been broadly disseminated. Nature doesn’t provide a model of what we want from intelligent machines, namely revolutionary scientific knowledge, nor is the process that humans use to create this knowledge a naturally occurring phenomenon.

«

Or as Lewis Wolpert used to put it, “science isn’t common sense. It’s usually the direct opposite.” (Think of Earth revolving around the sun, or the reason for gravity. Common sense doesn’t predict them.)
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How to lose $8k worth of bitcoin in 15 minutes with Verizon and Coinbase.com • Medium

Cody Brown had his phone account, and then his email, and then his bitcoin wallets hacked:

»

Before we begin, its worth mentioning that yes, yesssssssssssssssssssss, I did not have enough protection around my Gmail account. I’ve used Google Authenticator before, for my personal account and for various work emails, but I stopped using it at a certain point out of convenience. I deeply regret doing so and you can certainly say, “HA, YOU HAD THIS COMING TO YOU DUDE, MY BITCOIN IS ON AN ENCRYPTED THUMBDRIVE IN A SECRET UNDERGROUND LOCKBOX COLD STORAGE FACILITY.” But there are many coin spectators out there with a similar vulnerability and, as more novices join, this vulnerability will only become more of a problem.

Of all the things that went down in the factors that lead to this hack, Verizon Wireless is what I was massively unprepared for. After talking at length with customer service reps, I learned that the hacker did not need to give them my pin number or my social security number and was able to get approval to takeover my cell phone number with simple billing information. This blew my mind and seemed negligent beyond all possible reason but it’s what they do. The main thing that struck me by the hack was the extraction speed possible in the current cryptocurrency ecosystem. $8,000 in 15 minutes is faster and more lucrative than robbing a suburban bank.

«

The key failing (besides his lack of two-factor non-SMS authentication on his Gmail account) was Verizon letting someone in effect take over his SIM. He had SMS authentication on his account. Guess what happened when the hackers tried to log in to his account? They could reset the password and get an SMS sent to “his” number. Cue disaster.

Coinbase (which has become a target for such hacks) is not above a lot of criticism either.
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The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure • Bloomberg

Noah Smith:

»

There is reason to suspect that high US costs are part of a deeper problem. For example, construction seems to take a lot longer in the US than in other countries. In China, a 30-story building can be completed in only 15 days. In Japan, giant sinkholes get fully repaired in one week. Even in the US of a century ago, construction was pretty fast – the Empire State Building went up in 410 days.

Yet today, it takes the US many years to spend the money that Congress allocates for infrastructure. New buildings seem to linger half-built for months or years, with construction workers often nowhere to be found. Subways can take decades. Even in the private sector, there are problems – productivity in the homebuilding sector has fallen in recent decades.

That suggests that US costs are high due to general inefficiency – inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking US construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.

Unfortunately, this is going to be hard, given all the vested interests and institutional inertia blocking deep reform of the construction sector. As [Matt] Yglesias ruefully notes, a study by the Government Accountability Office looking into the problem of high train-construction costs was recently killed by Congress, with no explanation given.

«

Before you kneejerk, the article goes through possible culprits (salaries; unions; land acquisition costs; geography) and finds none explains it. A side-by-side comparison of two projects, one in the US and one elsewhere, would be educative. But it seems the GAO has been told not to look into this either.
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Keeping your company data safe with new security updates to Gmail • Google Blog

Andy Wen is senior product manager for Counter abuse technology:

»

Machine learning helps Gmail block sneaky spam and phishing messages from showing up in your inbox with over 99.9% accuracy. This is huge, given that 50-70% of messages that Gmail receives are spam. We’re continuing to improve spam detection accuracy with early phishing detection, a dedicated machine learning model that selectively delays messages (less than 0.05% of messages on average) to perform rigorous phishing analysis and further protect user data from compromise.

Our detection models integrate with Google Safe Browsing machine learning technologies for finding and flagging phishy and suspicious URLs. These new models combine a variety of techniques such as reputation and similarity analysis on URLs, allowing us to generate new URL click-time warnings for phishing and malware links. As we find new patterns, our models adapt more quickly than manual systems ever could, and get better with time.

«

I see very, very few phishing emails on my Gmail account. I see a fairly constant amount of spam on it, though, despite marking the stuff (always claiming to be from department stores, and not being addressed to my ur-address) as junk consistently.

That spam hasn’t become a bigger, or even overwhelming slice of email is a success for all the organisations such as Spamhaus fighting it.
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About Newcastle libraries’ data • Newcastle City Council

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In Newcastle Libraries we are endeavouring to open up as much of our data as possible. As library workers sharing and facilitating access to knowledge and information is part of our role; here we apply this principle to the information we collect about your library service. We believe that we are only the custodians of this information, and by publishing it in the public domain (under Creative Commons Licence 0) we are simply giving it back to you.

«

Newcastle Libraries has better open data policies than the US White House. Let that sink in.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Twitter doesn’t have a business incentive to get rid of bots – and that’s a problem for the rest of us. Photo by Rog01 on Flickr.

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

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

Apple is manufacturing a Siri speaker to outdo Google and Amazon • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Alex Webb:

»

Apple is already in your pocket, on your desk and underneath your television. Soon, a device embossed with “Designed by Apple in California” may be on your nightstand or kitchen counter as well.

The iPhone-maker has started manufacturing a long-in-the-works Siri-controlled smart speaker, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple could debut the speaker as soon as its annual developer conference in June, but the device will not be ready to ship until later in the year, the people said. 

The device will differ from Amazon.com’s Echo and Alphabet’s Google Home speakers by offering virtual surround sound technology and deep integration with Apple’s product lineup, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss products that aren’t yet public.

Introducing a speaker would serve two main purposes: providing a hub to automate appliances and lights via Apple’s HomeKit system, and establishing a bulwark inside the home to lock customers more tightly into Apple’s network of services. That would help combat the competitive threat from Google’s and Amazon’s connected speakers: the Home and Echo mostly don’t support services from Apple. Without compatible hardware, users may be more likely to opt for the Echo or Home, and therefore use streaming music offerings such as Spotify, Amazon Prime Music or Google Play rather than Apple Music.

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“Started manufacturing” would suggest an autumn release. Still waiting for the really persuasive reason to use these things. (Might be the sort of thing that would work for people who don’t have an Apple Watch, I guess.)
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Windows 10 on Snapdragon 835: a promising demo • Mobile Geeks

Myriam Joire:

»

Today at Computex 2017, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 835 Mobile PC Platform to help with Microsoft’s effort to bring Windows 10 to ARM-based devices. In addition, ASUS, HP, and Lenovo have committed to launching Snapdragon 835-based Windows 10 products in the next few months. These will be sleek, fanless, and always connected 2-in-1 mobile PCs with all day battery life aimed squarely at the productivity market.

In case you forgot, Microsoft recently announced that Windows 10 now features an emulation layer that lets users seamlessly run x86 apps on ARM devices. With the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm already offers a powerful, efficient, tiny (10nm process), and always connected (Gigabit LTE) platform for standalone VR/MR headsets and flagship smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Essential Phone, so it’s a no-brainer to extend support to mobile PCs running Windows 10.

In other words, Snapdragon 835 is eating the world.

«

Interesting little challenge for Apple here. Second time around for Microsoft, but seems to be getting the pieces right this time – and ARM, as an architecture, has come a long way.
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All thumbs: why reach navigation should replace the navbar in iOS design • Medium

Brad Ellis:

»

Oh my gosh, so many great reasons to use a navbar in your project. Except, damn! It’s hard to get your thumb up there now.

That being the case, let’s talk some Navbar cons:

• It’s harder to go back. You can swipe from the edge, as long as the view you’re on doesn’t have anything that scrolls horizontally, but if it does then you’re in stretch-town.
• Naming all the views is a pain. Not all screens need a persistent title, and some require labels too long to fit. Leaving a blank navigation area wastes screen space and looks barren.
• Navigating requires two hands. If you can hold a device in one hand, you should be able to operate the device with one hand. It feels better, and it’s more convenient in a world full of shopping carts to push, and babies to carry.
• Simple apps become more complex than necessary. Navbars tend to lead to information architecture that runs deep. It’s easy to develop for horizontal progressive disclosure, which means it can be a battle to expand inline or use a sheet.

All right. Now we know how navbars can be crap. So what are we doing?

«

Design is evolving quite rapidly, though it feels like this should have been obvious a couple of years ago.
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The autonomous vehicle ‘trolley problem’ will be solved by lawyers, not ethicists • WIRED

Aarian Marshall:

»

In a paper published in Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford University researcher Bryan Casey deems the trolley problem irrelevant. He argues that it’s already been solved—not by ethicists or engineers, but by the law. The companies building these cars will “less concerned with esoteric questions of right and wrong than with concrete questions of predictive legal liability,” he writes. Meaning, lawyers and lawmakers will sort things out.

“The trolley problem presents already solved issues—and we solve them democratically through a combination of legal liability and consumer psychology,” says Casey. “Profit maximizing firms look to those incentivizing mechanisms to choose the best behavior in all kinds of contexts.” In other words: Engineers will take their cues not from ethicists, but from the limits of the technology, tort law, and consumers’ tolerance for risk.

Casey cites Tesla as an example. Drivers of those Muskian brainchildren can switch on Autopilot and let the car drive itself down the highway. Tesla engineers could have programmed the cars to go slowly, upping safety. Or they could have programmed them to go fast, the better to get you where you need to be. Instead, they programmed the cars to follow the speed limit, minimizing Tesla’s risk of liability show something go awry.

«

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Twitter has a serious problem—and it’s actually a bigger deal than people realise • Mother Jones

AJ Vicens:

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Bots make it easy to spread a given message, but that also creates a problem: Twitter followers often don’t know they’re retweeting or forwarding deliberately false information from unknown sources, which can then potentially further polarize the populace and overstate a message or a candidate’s actual support. In his opening statement to the committee, Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent, explained the influence campaign was part of a yearslong Russian effort to undermine US institutions. “Tailored news feeds from social media platforms have created information bubbles where voters see only stories and opinions suiting their preferences and biases,” he said, “ripe conditions for Russian disinformation campaigns.”

Whatever the source of the bots, it seems unlikely that the state-sponsored disinformation variety will be stopped anytime soon. Twitter didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But Nu Wexler, a former public policy spokesperson for Twitter, tells Mother Jones that as long as users aren’t violating Twitter’s content rules, they’re not going to be censored.

“Twitter’s agnostic when it comes to political content and nationality,” Wexler said. “Accounts in compliance with the Twitter Rules are allowed to stay up, whether they’re in France, Mexico, or Russia. Suspending pro-Trump bots and allowing anti-Trump bots would just invite charges of political bias.”

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Perverse incentive in the business model: showing adverts to bots generates money just like showing them to humans. Therefore no business reason to remove bots.
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Lexmark patent racket busted by Supremes • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Patent law grants patent holders a limited monopoly on their goods for the duration of the patent. But when the goods are sold, patent rights are said to be exhausted, which allows third parties to resell the items without obtaining a license from the patent holder.

Lexmark wanted to prevent competitors from buying used ink cartridges, refurbishing them, and selling them to its printer customers – presumably because it would make more money by controlling that market.

So the company imposed contractual terms to limit resale of ink cartridges obtained through its cartridge Return Program in the US. What’s more, it tried to prevent ink cartridges obtained abroad from being resold in the US through claimed patent rights.

In 2010, the printer maker began filing a series of lawsuits in Ohio to enforce its claims against ink cartridge recyclers who acquired cartridges outside the US. Most of the defendants in those cases chose to settle, agreeing not to obtain Lexmark cartridges abroad.

In 2013, Lexmark sued Impression Products, based in Charleston, West Virginia, for violating its patent rights by reselling contractually controlled Return Program cartridges and by reselling ink cartridges bought abroad.

In 2016, the Federal Circuit Court agreed with Lexmark’s position.

The Supreme Court, however, has overturned that decision. It ruled that while Lexmark may have an enforceable claim under contract law for Return Program ink cartridges acquired in the US and resold there, the company may not make a patent claim.

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I thought that this might have some reading on Apple’s patent row with Qualcomm, but people on Twitter are telling me no. Even so, this is momentous.
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The addicts next door • The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot with a hugely detailed look at the place in the US with the highest ratio of opioid deaths:

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Recently, Martinsburg has begun to treat the heroin crisis more openly as a public-health problem. The police chief, a Chicago transplant named Maurice Richards, had devised a progressive-sounding plan called the Martinsburg Initiative, which would direct support services toward children who appeared to be at risk for addiction, because their families were struggling socially or emotionally. In December, Tina Stride and several other local citizens stood up at a zoning meeting to proclaim the need for a detox center. They countered several residents who testified that such a center would bring more addicts, and more heroin, to their neighborhoods. “I’m here to say that’s already here,” a woman in favor of the proposal said. “It’s in your neighbor’s house, in the bathroom at Wendy’s, in our schools.” She added, “We’re talking about making America great again? Well, it starts here.”

That night, the Board of Zoning Appeals voted to allow a detox center, run by Peter Callahan, the psychotherapist, to occupy an unused commercial building in town. People in the hearing room cheered and cried and hugged one another. The facility will have only sixteen beds and won’t be ready for patients until December, but the Hope Dealer women were thrilled about it. Now they wouldn’t have to drive halfway across the state every time an addict called them up.

John Aldis, who was sitting next to me during the vote, breathed a sigh of relief. He said later, “It’s like that Winston Churchill quote: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ ”

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One notable quote is about making Narcan (which can bring people out of an opioid coma) free: there’s some opposition from people who blame addicts for their problems.
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Apple registers new Macs and iPads in Eurasia ahead of WWDC on June 5 • Macrumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

Just five days ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where it is widely expected to announce new Macs, French website Consomac has discovered a new Russian-language regulatory filing, in the Eurasian Economic Commission database, that points towards at least five new models running macOS Sierra launching soon.

The five new Macs, identified only with the model numbers A1289, A1347, A1418, A1419, and A1481, are likely to be new 13in and 15in MacBook Pros alongside a new 12in MacBook, with the outside chance of a new upgraded MacBook Air also in the frame. At the same time, it’s worth noting that these numbers differ from the AXX prefixes attributed to current MacBook models, so nothing is completely certain until Apple makes its announcements.

As well as spare parts for the Macs, the discovered numbers also include a possible new wireless keyboard (model A1843) and four numbers classified under iOS 10 (A1671, A1709, A1670, and A1701), pointing to the possible launch of a rumored new iPad Pro model.

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All good to hear; wireless keyboard even more interesting. Would it have TouchID (as on the MacBook Pros) and how would that be implemented?
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Crispr causes many unwanted mutations, small study suggests • New Scientist

NAME:

»

Most studies have found few if any unwanted mutations with [the amazing new gene editing technique] CRISPR. However, almost all of these studies looked for off-target changes by predicting what these were likely to be, and then seeing if they could find them.

Stephen Tsang of Columbia University Medical Center and his team have now used a more extensive method, sequencing the whole genomes of two CRISPR-edited mice, and comparing these with a non-edited control. In this way, they identified more than a thousand common mutations in the two edited mice that they think were caused by CRISPR.

This is a very small study, and we don’t know yet if other teams will get similar findings when they use the same technique.

Even if the results are replicated, the issue could turn out to be with the specific way that CRISPR was used in this instance. But if further experiments suggest there is a problem with CRISPR in general, this should still be solvable. Other teams have already modified the CRISPR/Cas9 system to reduce the risk of off-target changes, and there are many potential alternative proteins to try using with CRISPR which might turn out to have fewer unwanted effects.

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But it’s not quite what we wanted to hear, even so.
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American retail’s fast, furious decline • National Review

Kevin D. Williamson:

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The migration of retail out of shops and onto the Internet has been significant — last year saw online retail pass a symbolically important milestone, accounting for 51% of all purchases — but it wasn’t radical or unexpected. In fact, the retail building boom really kicked off at the same time as the rise of online commerce: in the middle to late 1990s. Which is to say, the retail-space bubble inflated in parallel with two other important bubbles: the dot-com bubble and the much more significant housing bubble.

When housing prices were skyrocketing around the turn of the century, Americans did not use all that new wealth to pay down household debt or start high-tech enterprises in their garages or anything like that: They monetized that equity and bought gigantic televisions. They bought new furniture and clothes and shoes, and the consumer-goods market began to look like another one of those can’t-miss propositions that come along and cause trouble every few years. Retailers and developers responded by building new shops and strip malls, taking advantage of millennial-era cheap money to leverage the hell out of themselves in the quest for growth and volume. They loaded themselves up with debt that is perfectly bearable when profit margins are 11% but deadly when they’re 7%.

In addition to cheap money, they also took advantage of a lot of free money: Note that even as it struggles with a zombie mall and high vacancy rates in nearby retail centers, Midwest City is using tax dollars to subsidize the development of yet more retail space on the other side of town, the world of Panera and Starbucks. More retail space means more sales-tax revenue, and if you take a short-term and relatively narrow view — the typical political view — then spending a few million dollars to make sure that whatever new conglomeration of Pei Wei, HomeGoods, and Lane Bryant is getting built gets built in your taxing jurisdiction rather than the one next door looks like a pretty good investment. Which it is.

Until it isn’t.

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Again, the collapse of US retail is going to be one of the stories that will come upon people gradually, and then suddenly, and the economic effects have a wide blast radius. People lose jobs. Cities lose tax revenue from people and retailers. You don’t have to pull on that thread for long to see bad effects.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A curry house in London has been the target of fake news which could shut it down. Photo (of a generic curry) by thomasstache on Flickr.

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

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

Eli Pariser predicted the future. now he can’t escape it • Backchannel

Jesse Hempel:

»

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring. Yes, no doubt, social media is pushing stories that are just plain false. But what most people encounter online isn’t news at all. “The thing that wins now mostly has always won, and is not even news at all,” he says. “The thing that wins now is some guy surfing off his roof into a garbage container.”

The problem with online distribution, Pariser believes, is that specific, true information can’t compete with that guy surfing off his roof. “Is the truth loud enough?” he asks. “If the problem is that the truth isn’t loud enough, it points in very different directions than if the problem is that fake news is misleading people.” I caught up with Pariser last week to discuss how his notion of the filter bubble has evolved.

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It’s a worthwhile interview. Such as this answer:

»

After the election, I felt gratified that the idea that I had put out in the world was useful to people, but also worried that people were taking it a little too far. The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election. I think even if you’re talking about the conservative media ecosystem, my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservative fake news.

«

link to this extract

Why I started Essential • Essential blog

Andy Rubin:

»

For all the good Android has done to help bring technology to nearly everyone it has also helped create this weird new world where people are forced to fight with the very technology that was supposed to simplify their lives. Was this what we had intended? Was this the best we could do?

I left that night reflecting deeply on what was great and what was frustrating with the current state of technology today. After another long talk with my friend we decided that I needed to start a new kind of company using 21st century methods to build products for the way people want to live in the 21st century.

The result is Essential, and this is what we believe:

• Devices are your personal property. We won’t force you to have anything on them you don’t want to have.
• We will always play well with others. Closed ecosystems are divisive and outdated.
• Premium materials and true craftsmanship shouldn’t be just for the few.
• Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you.
• Technology should assist you so that you can get on with enjoying your life.
• Simple is always better.

«

Sounds great. Reality: bezel-less screen (this year’s must-have), $699 price (or so), home thing (for the ecosystem). Overall, it could be a niche hit, but there’s nothing so far that suggests this is going to blow the world away.

That was sort of true with Sidekick and Android originally, but they seemed like crazy ideas. This one just seems blah.
link to this extract

Uber fires former Google engineer at heart of self-driving dispute • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

»

Uber has fired Anthony Levandowski, a vice president of technology and the star engineer leading the company’s self-driving automobile efforts, according to an internal email sent to employees on Tuesday.

Mr. Levandowski’s termination, effective immediately, comes as a result of his involvement in a legal battle between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving technology unit spun out of Google last year. Waymo claims that Uber is using trade secrets stolen from Google to develop Uber’s self-driving vehicles, a plan aided by Mr. Levandowski, a former longtime Google employee.

Uber has long denied the accusations. But when Mr. Levandowski was ordered by a federal judge to hand over evidence and testimony to that end, he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, seeking to avoid possible criminal charges, according to his lawyers. Uber has been unable to convince Mr. Levandowski to cooperate.

«

The soap opera continues.
link to this extract

Android malware Judy’ hits as many as 36.5 million phones • Fortune.com

David Morris:

»

While the actual extent of the malicious code’s spread is unknown, Checkpoint says it may have reached as many as 36.5 million users, making it potentially the most widely-spread malware yet found on Google Play. Google removed the apps after being notified by Checkpoint.

The malicious apps primarily included a series of casual cooking and fashion games under the “Judy” brand, a name borrowed for the malware itself. The nefarious nature of the programs went unnoticed in large part, according to Checkpoint, because its malware payload was downloaded from a non-Google server after the programs were installed. The code would then use the infected phone to click on Google ads, generating fraudulent revenue for the attacker.

The infection may have spread even more widely than Checkpoint’s estimates, since not all of the extensive line of “Judy” apps are included on Checkpoint’s tally – it’s missing Fashion Judy: Magic Girl Style and Fashion Judy: Masquerade Style, among others. All installments of the series do appear to have been pulled from Google Play.

The “Judy” apps were published by an apparently Korean entity known as ENISTUDIO. However, iterations of the same attack were found on a handful of apps from other publishers.

«

link to this extract

Coming off a slow 2016, smartphone shipment volume expected to recover in 2017 and gain momentum into 2018 • IDC

»

According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, worldwide smartphone shipments are expected to rebound slightly in 2017 with expected growth of 3.0% over the previous year. In 2016, year-over-year growth was 2.5%, marking the lowest growth the industry has ever experienced. With several major devices entering the market this year, IDC anticipates shipment volumes will grow to 1.52 billion in 2017. And IDC expects this momentum to carry into 2018, when smartphone shipments are forecast to grow 4.5% year over year, fueled by improved economic conditions in many emerging markets and a full year of new iPhone shipments from Apple.

«

It’s kinda “meh”. Forecast total sales for 2017: 1.5bn. Forecast total sales for 2021: 1.74bn. That’s just 3.4% compound; the smartphone world caught fire, and now we have embers. (Also note that IDC used to be very optimistic about PC sales; then smartphones came along. Never rule out the unexpected.)
link to this extract

People are creating their own fake news stories and they’re going viral • Buzzfeed

Craig Silverman and Sara Spary:

»

Shrina Begum couldn’t understand why people were calling her Indian restaurant to accuse it of selling human meat. The calls started on May 11, and by the next day Begum says she and her staff had answered hundreds of them.

“Both of our phone lines went off and people starting screaming, ‘Why are you selling human meat?’” she told BuzzFeed News.

Business at Karri Twist, her restaurant in London, soon dropped by half. Begum had to reduce hours for some staff, and she feared the business might not survive the false rumor. “During one of the calls, [my employee] managed to calm a person down to find out where they’d seen this, and they were like, it’s been sent to them via Facebook. I just couldn’t believe it whatsoever.”

Begum eventually tracked down the origin of the false rumor: A website called Channel23news.com had published a story claiming that her restaurant, Karri Twist, was caught selling human meat and that its owner had been arrested. The completely fake report, replete with spelling mistakes and the wrong name of the owner, featured a picture of Karri Twist and said nine bodies had been found on the premises in the freezer.

The story looked like any other news report when shared on Facebook, and it quickly spread on the site, as well as on Twitter and WhatsApp. People who clicked on the link were brought to a page with the story, and beside it was text that read, “You’ve Been Pranked! Now Create A Story & Trick Your Friends!” Channel23News.com’s homepage is in fact a form that enables anyone to create a fake news story, add an image, and instantly share it on Facebook…

…Channel23news.com isn’t an isolated make-your-own-fake-news site. Using domain registration records, BuzzFeed News identified two separate networks that together own at least 30 nearly identical “prank” news sites and that published more than 3,000 fake articles in six languages over the past 12 months. They’re also generating significant engagement on Facebook: The sites collectively earned more than 13 million shares, reactions, and comments on the social network in the last 12 months.

«

And money. Don’t forget the money. Now view this story in the light of the following one.
link to this extract

Facebook concerned over German plan to tackle fake news • Business Insider

Sam Shead:

»

In March, the German government proposed legislation to fine social media companies if they fail to remove slanderous or threatening online postings quickly. The plans were approved by Germany’s cabinet in April but they are yet to come into force.

Now Facebook has responded to the new law, which is being referred to as the “Network Enforcement Act” or “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz” in German (NetzDG, for short).

The Californian tech giant issued a statement over the weekend explaining why the draft law “is not suitable to combat hate speech and false news.”

In the statement, Facebook says: “The draft law provides an incentive to delete content that is not clearly illegal when social networks face such a disproportionate threat of fines.”

The company added: “It would have the effect of transferring responsibility for complex legal decisions from public authorities to private companies. And several legal experts have assessed the draft law as being against the German constitution and non-compliant with EU law. Facebook is committed to working in partnership with governments and civil society on solutions that will make this draft law unnecessary.”

«

link to this extract

Apple is working on a dedicated chip to power AI on devices • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple devices currently handle complex artificial intelligence processes with two different chips: the main processor and the graphics chip. The new chip would let Apple offload those tasks onto a dedicated module designed specifically for demanding artificial intelligence processing, allowing Apple to improve battery performance.

Should Apple bring the chip out of testing and development, it would follow other semiconductor makers that have already introduced dedicated AI chips. Qualcomm Inc.’s latest Snapdragon chip for smartphones has a module for handling artificial intelligence tasks, while Google announced its first chip, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), in 2016. That chip worked in Google’s data centers to power search results and image-recognition. At its I/O conference this year, Google announced a new version that will be available to clients of its cloud business. Nvidia Corp. also sells a similar chip to cloud customers.

The Apple AI chip is designed to make significant improvements to Apple’s hardware over time, and the company plans to eventually integrate the chip into many of its devices, including the iPhone and iPad, according to the person with knowledge of the matter. Apple has tested prototypes of future iPhones with the chip, the person said, adding that it’s unclear if the component will be ready this year.

«

Gurman says it’s known internally as the “Apple Neural Engine”. Makes perfect sense to put it on the phone – leave the GPU and CPU alone where possible.
link to this extract

AppsFlyer helps mobile advertisers beat back ad fraud via machine learning • VentureBeat

Dean Takahashi:

»

AppsFlyer is helping mobile game and app developers deal with the severe problem of fraudulent advertising responses via third-party ad networks. In doing so, the company said it has already saved brands tens of millions of dollars since 2016.

Today, the San Francisco-based maker of mobile attribution and marketing analytics is launching Active Fraud Insights 2.0, hoping to set a new marketing industry standard for detecting fraud. The platform leverages metadata from 98% of the world’s mobile devices, and it uses proprietary advances in big data and machine learning. Ad fraud is causing an estimated $7.2 billion to $16.4 billion losses a year.

AppsFlyer’s tool can review ad network partners in an effort to combat mobile fraud, where an ad network or other party creates a fake user that tricks the advertiser into believing that a real human is downloading or using an app or game.

«

The scale of this is probably a lot bigger than we think.
link to this extract

India cancels mega plans to build coal power stations due to falling solar energy prices • Indiatimes.com

Shreya Kalra:

»

13.7GW of planned coal power projects have been cancelled so far this month and this goes to show the rate of change regarding solar energy.

In January 2016, Fortum, a Finnish company, got on board to generate electricity in Rajasthan at record low prices.

The Director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said, “For the first time solar is cheaper than coal in India and the implications this has for transforming global energy markets is profound.

“Measures taken by the Indian Government to improve energy efficiency coupled with ambitious renewable energy targets and the plummeting cost of solar has had an impact on existing as well as proposed coal fired power plants, rendering an increasing number as financially unviable.

“India’s solar tariffs have literally been free falling in recent months.” According to him investors from the world over are interested in India’s fast-growing solar market.

«

Lots of debate in the comments about how useful solar really is to satisfy base load. But nobody expects it to be base load.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Flying toasters: great screensaver (which by definition makes it hard to photograph them). Photo by calamity_sal on Flickr.

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

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

The lost joys of the screen saver • The Paris Review

Zack Hatfield:

»

When I first encountered Jorge Luis Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” a short story whose narrator runs with madness through an endless labyrinth, a remote feeling of déjà vu eased into one of bizarre, welcome recognition. The house’s infinite doors, its emptiness, the dizzy futility—Borges seemed to be describing a popular screen saver from the nineties. Surely you know the one, the Windows maze, that redbrick warren of untold pivots summoned by the computer monitor when no one was around.

The ending of Borges’s story, wherein the narrator is revealed as the slain minotaur of Greek mythology, only reinforced the connection; to me, screen savers have always afforded some tenuous connection to the afterlife. The first one I can remember, on my family’s household desktop, featured a crimson psychedelia that overtook the screen’s blackness, a kaleidoscope of paisleys and helixes forever in a state of irresolution. Late at night, I’d prepare an unhealthy snack and sit patiently in front of the monitor to watch it, a child beseeching death. How fitting would it be, I thought then, if we all ended up trapped behind a pane of glass roiling with pixels?

My instinct was only reaffirmed by a childhood friend’s widowed grandmother, who held onto the conviction that her husband was trying to communicate to her through her Dell’s wispy screen saver. She spent her evenings careful not to disturb the cursor, basking in her lover’s strange séance.

If screen savers still have an eschatological tinge for me, it’s also because of their own demise…

…Visually mesmerizing, intellectually engaging, and nearly decommodified, the best screen savers achieve the virtues of multiple art movements. They even make a damning statement: the faintest human touch breaks their spell. Websites like ScreenSaverGallery circumvent institutional gatekeepers by encouraging users to download a new artwork in the form of a screen saver each month. I enjoy downloading these screen savers despite their poetic futility: today, any laptop that runs a screen saver is burning more energy than it’s saving.

«

A wonderful excursion through a topic that you thought you’d forgotten.
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Tesla Autopilot Review: Bikers will die • Medium

Heather Knight is a Stanford postdoc in robotics, which she will be teaching from autumn at Oregon State University:

»

C [USER-SET TARGET VELOCITY] — dangerous: autopilot seeks to achieve the cruise-control set speed as long as there is not an obstacle. this works fine on the a consistent street like a highway, but we discovered the hard way when we exited the highway onto a country road, switched autopilot on, and it tried to go from 30 to 65mph at maximum acceleration. expert users would be familiar with this, but we think tesla can do better.

A+ [SITUATION AWARENESS DISPLAY] — this display helps the human drivers have a mental model of what the car sees. I’d estimate that Autopilot classified ~30% of other cars, and 1% of bicyclists. Not being able to classify objects doesn’t mean the tesla doesn’t see that something is there, but given the lives at stake, we recommend that people NEVER USE TESLA AUTOPILOT AROUND BICYCLISTS!

C [GIANT TOUCHSCREEN] — hire UX designers, tesla!! yes, it’s a big screen. now make it intuitive to find things… it took us 5 screens to turn off the car. From a usability perspective this is a system for experts not novices.

«

She and her fellow tester also managed to lock themselves out of the car when they stepped outside to take a photo. They’d have been stuffed if they hadn’t had a phone, and service, and a friend back at base who had used the car the day before and so could unlock it remotely.

Also, the thing about cyclists. Though you’d be unlikely to engage the autopilot in a space where there are lots of (comparatively slow-moving) cyclists, would you?
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How should I vote to stop a destructive Brexit? • InFacts

»

Put your constituency in our search engine to find the candidate to vote for to stop a destructive Brexit. Don’t know the name of your constituency? Search by postcode here. We have also explained the methodology behind our recommendations.

«

Notable how there’s now a broadly available methodology for deciding how to vote tactically. In some constituencies, it’s just possible this could make a difference.
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Revealed: how Facebook chief, Sheryl Sandberg, lobbied Taoiseach Enda Kenny over data protection role and taxation • Independent.ie

Brian Carroll:

»

The documents released under the Freedom of Information Act cover 11 months of correspondence between the Taoiseach, his officials and Sheryl Sandberg [chief operating officer of Facebook].

Beginning on January 3 2014, the Taoiseach’s officials set up a one-to-one meeting between the Taoiseach and Ms Sandberg in meeting room ME22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The meeting was to take place at 11am sharp on January 23. The correspondence reveals that Ms Sandberg sets the time of the meeting and confines it to 15 minutes because of her ‘tight schedule’.

At the meeting, Ms Sandberg lobbies Mr Kenny on taxation and on the spies issue, specifically advancing Facebook’s position in relation to proposed European Data Protection regulations. Later that evening Ms Sandberg ‘dropped by’ an IDA dinner at Davos.

Two days after the Davos meeting Ms Sandberg writes to Mr Kenny, and is sure to warn how changes to taxation or privacy laws might lead Facebook to consider ‘different options for future investment and growth in Europe’.

«

FOI is such a marvellous tool.
link to this extract

How to ask the right questions when reporting on political Facebook ads • Tom Davenport

Davenport on the story in The Observer about Labour ads apparently being pushed out by Conservative ones:

»

here’s a few thoughts on how the Conservatives might have genuinely pushed out the Labour ads.

Look at the engagement numbers just above the comments in this picture.

2.5k reactions. 987 shares. 1k comments.

That’s huge engagement. And almost certainly not all from people in one location. The Conservatives will have been running this ad across the country.

High engagement, wherever it comes from, is proof to Facebook that an ad has clout. All the Conservatives then need to do is run ads across the country, turn off the weaker ads, and keep directing the ‘good’ ads to new audiences.

There’s a key technical point here. They’re not just duplicating the ad and running it to a new audience, because that would wipe the engagement every time.

They’re running the /same/ ad, with the same ID number, but to a new audience. This keeps the engagement from before, and gives it an unfair advantage with the new audience.

«

(Disclosure: Davenport helped me set up the Mailchimp email feed for The Overspill.)
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What’s that drone flying in over the horizon? It’s a scout from Islamic State • LA Times

Nabih Bulos:

»

Islamic State now has air power. It’s not the equivalent of the 2,250-pound unmanned aerial vehicles that have become a lethal mainstay for the U.S. Air Force. Instead, the extremist group is deploying simple, commercially available drones — like the one that was hovering over the Ghazlani neighborhood of Mosul in March — on missions that are subtly changing the dynamics of the war in Iraq.

Camera-equipped drones can scout out targets for mortar strikes. Small, lightweight explosives can now be delivered by air. Some Islamic State units have used drones to shoot propaganda footage.

“It’s the job of the troops in the back of the column to keep watch for drones,” said Staff Maj. Ammar Ubaidi, a member of Iraq’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service.

“They relay the specifications and ask headquarters if it’s a friendly drone. If it’s not, they warn the units in the front and start shooting.”

A member of the Iraqi Special Forces shoots his machine gun at an Islamic State militant drone in the al-Barid district in Mosul on Dec. 18, 2016. (Manu Brabo / Associated Press)
Islamic State, along with other militant factions like the former Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, began using drones in 2014 to take footage of operations in Iraq and Syria for propaganda.

But it was Islamic State that developed their use further: According to internal documents from the group recovered in Mosul and published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Islamic State established the Baraa bin Malek Brigade, a dedicated cadre of drone pilots that is subordinate to the group’s Committee of Military Manufacturing and Development, its R&D section.

«

It is quite weird to think that small commercial drones are being battle-proven – literally. But this is what they’re really ideal for: as disposable surveillance.
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AMOLED to become mainstream smartphone panels • Digitimes Research

Jen-Chieh Yang:

»

AMOLED panels, due to superiority in color saturation, thinness and power consumption over TFT-LCD panels, have seen increasing adopted for smartphones and will eventually become mainstream smartphone, as well as a dominate solution for VR head-mounted devices (HMD), according to Digitimes Resaerch.

Global AMOLED shipments are forecast to increase from 370 million units in 2016 to 452 million in 2017 and 1.127 billion in 2021, with the corresponding penetration of smartphones to rise from 24.3% to 27.6% and 53.0%, Digitimes Research indicated.

It has so far been difficult for AMOLED panels to replace TFT-LCD units for use in smartphones because smartphone vendors except Samsung Electronics are worried about Samsung Display dominating global supply of AMOLED panels. However, China-based makers have begun producing AMOLED panels and poised to break Samsung Display’s dominance, making smartphone vendors more willing to adopt AMOLED panels for even mid-range and entry-level models. AMOLED panels based on plastic substrates also enable more flexible design for smartphones.

«

The expectation is that Apple is going to join this bunch, so it’s a safe bet.
link to this extract

“Yes, it was entertaining”: A twisted tale of Twitter trolls and fake terror victims • New Statesman

Amelia Tait:

»

When I reach out to Sam to ask why she stole the image of a 19-year-old Minnesotan man to post on her Twitter account, the first thing she says is: “Am I getting paid?” The day after the Manchester Arena bombing, Sam took the profile picture of a man named Abdulfatah and posted it alongside a 137-character tweet. “Please retweet to help find Abdul,” she wrote. “He has chemo and we’re very worried. We last heard from him before Ariana’s concert”. She rounded it off with a hashtag. #PrayForManchester.

“Please retweet to help find Abdul. He has chemo and we’re very worried. We last heard from him before Ariana’s concert #PrayForManchester pic.twitter.com/LZa91mnOtZ” — sam (@skrrtskrtt) May 23, 2017

Abdulfatah was not a victim of the Manchester bombing and nor was he at Ariana’s concert, as he has been living in Cairo for the last year. Sam’s tweet was a lie that generated (at the time of writing) 1,280 retweets, mostly from people simply trying to help after a tragic terrorist attack. Over the last few years, trolls have responded to terrorism and other catastrophes by opportunistically pretending that their friends and family are among the victims of attacks. After the Manchester bombing, a handful of accounts continued this trend – for varied reasons.

“I had no aim,” is Sam’s simple response to being asked why she posted her tweet.

Sam explains that she wants me to pay her so she can “feed [her] team”, who she says are called the Halal Gang. After explaining that I cannot ethically pay for her interview, she concedes to speak when I say that I will link to her twitter account…

«

This quickly becomes much too complex for Tait to handle without meeting any of these people face-to-face – and quite a few won’t even answer a phone, won’t provide anything that might prove their identity. It feels like 4chan playing someone for the lolz – which is roughly what one of the psychologists tells Tait, in a roundabout way.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Now you can be hacked via subtitles. Yes, really. Photo by froussecarton on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. May contain traces of anonymous sources. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How terrorists slip beheading videos past YouTube’s censors • Motherboard

Rita Katz:

»

as I’ve stated before, terrorist propaganda comprises a lot more than the gory execution videos which detection technologies may seek to find. And, just as troublingly, terrorist groups have repeatedly found ways to bypass unwanted attention from non-supporting users and administrators.

For instance, in order to prevent users from flagging explicit or inflammatory extremist videos, terrorist media groups and disseminators like The Upload Knights and AQ’s As-Sahab Media Foundation often label YouTube videos as “unlisted,” meaning that the videos cannot be searched—only accessed if you are given the link. This feature works well to keep a video somewhat contained to supporters and prospects. They are also just as easy as any other link to find on the messaging service Telegram, though, after which they can be further disseminated on social media.

IS video (left) and AQAP video (right) uploaded to YouTube and marked as unlisted. Image: SITE

Terrorist groups also upload videos that are not the actual videos they are advertised to be. Instead, audio plays over a still image with a message at the bottom directing users to alternative links provided in the description section. Take an April 26 video from IS’ Ninawa Province for example: the image in the video reads, “The link is in the video description,” where another YouTube link is provided.

In the comments section of this YouTube upload, which was eventually removed, were several more links, making the YouTube page look a lot like a password-protected jihadi forum or private Telegram chat group.

«

Google has a really big problem on its hands, which mean we all have a big problem. And as Katz points out, it’s not just about Muslim extremists.
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A Time to Kill iTunes • 500ish Words

MG Siegler on the news that Apple is going to make iTunes available for the Windows Store to run on Windows 10S:

»

at this point, it’s old hat to rag on iTunes. It has been so bad, for so long, that the joke is stale. And yet, somehow Apple doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. Because if they were, surely iTunes would no longer exist.

Yeah, yeah, I know such software has to exist for a huge number of users. Mainly those who still want to sync their music (and/or files) from their computer hard drives without using the cloud. It is 2017. And yet this is still a thing. And it is a thing for many people.

But there’s no reason that such software has to be iTunes. Apple could easily make a more svelte piece of software that handles the syncing tasks. And they should. Because iTunes is a bloated piece of junk.

Most of the time when I listen to music these days, I do it through my iPhone. This is true even if I happen to be using my computer. It’s just so much easier and better to play music through my device than through my desktop. Earlier this week, I found myself loading iTunes for the first time in a while to try to listen through my MacBook and it was a comedy of errors.

Pop-up alerts galore. Sign in screens. TOS updates. Then came the automatic downloads. iTunes decided I might want to download all six seasons of Lost in HD right then and there. And a bunch of other old shows. Like a terabyte of data. Even more beachballs.

«

This isn’t my experience; and iTunes is only doing what he told it to do with the downloads. The real argument about iTunes is whether it should be a single program, or many. If it were many, you’d have to sign into each one, and you’d hate it. Instead you have a single one, and it can be unwieldy. That’s why it has a search field..
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While Android leaps forward, Samsung’s software still has trouble catching up to its hardware • XDA Developers

Daniel Marchena:

»

While everyone’s baseline for what is acceptable is different, it is hard to deny that bloated options like the Samsung Experience have a detrimental effect on device performance. I am jealous every time I watch a video showing off the HTC U11 or Google Pixel; they are just so instantaneously responsive, something my S8 cannot match even on its best days.

It’s not just the amount of added applications and services, it is also the optimization of them that matters. On your Galaxy S8 right now, there are dozens of services running that simply do not need to be there for most users, that are taking up valuable system resources, and even if the impact of them is low it is still something running that simply does not perceptibly or substantially add to our experience. These running services take up your available RAM, but more importantly are using valuable CPU time and attention. Have you ever used the the Samsung DeX system? Well, its software is running on your S8. Ever used Samsung’s woefully broken and useless “Connect” or “Bixby” services? Well, those services are running right now on your S8. Even if you have never applied a theme to your phone, there are at least two themes services that are running that have no need to be, because if disabled, your phone works exactly as it did prior to disabling them; I know, I have them disabled. If you have ever used GearVR, the Oculus suite is installed and stays running at all times, even if you haven’t used your headset in days or weeks or since a reboot. Normally most users won’t even notice one or two of these services running in the background, but when those services add up to dozens of unneeded running tasks, it quickly becomes a problem. 

Samsung’s insistence on adding a growing amount of limited use and poorly-optimized software adds little more than a bullet point during an announcement and some usefulness to a small subset of users. Inversely, its negative impact affects all users of the device even if they never use the services or even know it exists. There is a reason why one of the most common comments in Galaxy S8 reviews was the skepticism over if the device will remain responsive, because the Galaxy S6 and S7 have not aged as gracefully as their less-bloated brothers from other manufacturers, and it’s not because the S7’s Snapdragon 820 magically got slower over time.

«

link to this extract

Nintendo ramping up Switch production • Financial Times

Leo Lewis and Kana Inagaki:

»

People involved in Nintendo’s hardware supply chain say the Kyoto-based games maker is now targeting Switch hardware production of 18m units for the 12 months ending March 2018.

According to people close to the company, the production increase reflects fears of “customer tantrums” as Nintendo prepares to release its flagship Mario Odyssey game in November.

Nintendo denied that it had plans to boost production to that level, sticking to its official hardware shipment target of 10m for the console that was launched in March. But analysts have assumed for months that the company would substantially exceed that number.

Some, such as Hirotoshi Murakami at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley, believe that Nintendo is being intentionally conservative in its guidance and predicts that it will produce as many as 20m consoles by the end of the financial year.

But the company may be constrained in its effort to ramp up production by the availability of key components such as liquid crystal display screens.

The difficulty of obtaining a Switch in Japan has created a side market based on the way that some retailers offer free guaranteed bookings of product delivery on a specific date. People who have managed to secure those guarantees have found they can sell the consoles online to desperate gamers: the market price for a guaranteed Switch delivery in July, for example, has been pushed to about ¥14,000 ($126).

«

The Switch won’t be as big as the Wii (100m units lifetime) because of two differences: it doesn’t appeal to non-gamers as the Wii did, and everyone has smartphones now. But it is doing very good business for a games console.
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As Trump’s problems mount, Breitbart’s numbers are cratering • Vanity Fair

Tina Nguyen:

»

Measuring web traffic is an inexact act, but other web-analytics companies reflect a similar, unusually steep decline in Breitbart’s traffic. ComScore estimated that Breitbart had nearly 23 million unique visitors during the month of November 2016, but only drew 10.7 million in April 2017, a 53% drop. Last month, the site had fewer visitors than it did in April 2016, when 12.3 million people visited the site. In contrast, the four sites that Breitbart benchmarked itself against saw nowhere near that drop—and, in the case of both Fox News and Buzzfeed, saw small increases in traffic since the November election…

…Other conservative media sites have also experienced declines in traffic in recent months, but none as pronounced as Breitbart’s. According to Alexa data, National Review Online, Infowars.com, The Daily Caller, and Drudge Report all saw slumps in their rankings. Over the last week, as Trump was engulfed in the Comey scandal, Fox News’s viewership dropped to third place behind CNN and MSNBC for the first time in 17 years.

At the most basic level, Trump’s struggles are producing a passion gap among news consumers. “If you’re anti-Trump, there’s never been a better time to read news. It’s like Christmas every morning,” an editor at another conservative media outlet told me. “So every time you open the newspaper or open Twitter or turn on Facebook, you get to enjoy the fact that there are a lot of other people who don’t like Trump and there’s a lot of news stories that show Trump in a negative light. Whereas if you’re Breitbart, you’re scrambling to explain or defend or continue to back the guy that you backed throughout the election. And eventually, if your posture continues to just simply be reactive and trying to explain away things that are happening to or by the president, I think people slowly become sort of disheartened by politics.”

«

The two theories pinging around social media: this one; or that it was all just bots 🙄. In the absence of conflict, Breitbart is just what it always was: a repository of the absurd which is easily contradicted and put into perspective by stepping outside the door.
link to this extract

Hacked in Translation: from subtitles to complete takeover • Check Point Blog

»

Our research reveals a new possible attack vector, using a completely overlooked technique in which the cyberattack is delivered when movie subtitles are loaded by the user’s media player. These subtitles repositories are, in practice, treated as a trusted source by the user or media player; our research also reveals that those repositories can be manipulated and be made to award the attacker’s malicious subtitles a high score, which results in those specific subtitles being served to the user. This method requires little or no deliberate action on the part of the user, making it all the more dangerous.

Unlike traditional attack vectors, which security firms and users are widely aware of, movie subtitles are perceived as nothing more than benign text files. This means users, Anti-Virus software, and other security solutions vet them without trying to assess their real nature, leaving millions of users exposed to this risk.

The attack vector relies heavily on the poor state of security in the way various media players process subtitle files and the large number of subtitle formats. To begin with, there are over 25 subtitle formats in use, each with unique features and capabilities. Media players often need to parse together multiple subtitle formats to ensure coverage and provide a better user experience, with each media player using a different method. Like other, similar situations which involve fragmented software, this results in numerous distinct vulnerabilities… To date, we tested and found vulnerabilities in four of the most prominent media players: VLC, Kodi, Popcorn Time and Stremio

«

Check Point puts the number potentially at risk in the “hundreds of millions”. There’s a video too:

A long time ago, the then video producer for Nine Inch Nails showed me how he had written a firmware hack so that playing a DVD video single (that’s how long ago it was) would load a program that would take over your DVD. But he never distributed it, because the record company pointed out they could all be done for hacking. Nowadays, of course, you download your own destruction.
link to this extract

Accused of underpaying women, Google says it’s too expensive to get wage data • The Guardian

Sam Levin:

»

Google argued that it was too financially burdensome and logistically challenging to compile and hand over salary records that the government has requested, sparking a strong rebuke from the US Department of Labor (DoL), which has accused the Silicon Valley firm of underpaying women.

Google officials testified in federal court on Friday that it would have to spend up to 500 hours of work and $100,000 to comply with investigators’ ongoing demands for wage data that the DoL believes will help explain why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women.

Noting Google’s nearly $28bn annual income as one of the most profitable companies in the US, DoL attorney Ian Eliasoph scoffed at the company’s defense, saying, “Google would be able to absorb the cost as easy as a dry kitchen sponge could absorb a single drop of water.”

The tense exchanges in a small San Francisco courtroom emerged in the final day of testimony in the most high-profile government trial to date surrounding the intensifying debate about the wage gap and gender discrimination in the tech industry.

The DoL first publicly accused Google of “systemic compensation disparities” during a hearing in April, saying a preliminary inquiry had found that the Mountain View tech firm underpays women across positions.

«

Amazing that Google is still taking this approach, especially in view of this:

»

In one revealing exchange, Frank Wagner, the company’s director of compensation, admitted in court that if women are paid less than men in the same positions, those salary disparities can persist even if the employees perform at the same level.

Asked about a hypothetical, Wagner explained that if a female employee starts at a lower salary than a male colleague in the same job at Google, she may continue to make less even if they both excel in their first year and score the same on evaluations.

Wagner claimed that eventually, their wages would likely be adjusted to match each other: “There would be convergence over time.”

«

Is that in the same way the sun will absorb the Earth “over time”? The longer this goes on, the more Google looks like it’s covering up. The principle is weak here.
link to this extract

Qualcomm says BlackBerry award doesn’t affect legal battle with Apple • The Motley Fool

Evan Niu on the news that Qualcomm is paying $815m, plus some legal fees (which could be substantial) to BlackBerry:

»

The arbitration decision would seem to imply that there are situations where Qualcomm has been overcharging for royalties, as the decision sided with BlackBerry and the Canadian company will now receive a refund for those overpayments. That could suggest that Apple [which is suing Qualcomm over standard essential patent fees] has more of a case, if another licensee has won its own fight over royalty overpayments. However, Qualcomm reminded investors that these two cases are not related.

In its statement, Qualcomm noted: “The arbitration decision was limited to prepayment provisions unique to BlackBerry’s license agreement with Qualcomm and has no impact on agreements with any other licensee.” Qualcomm likely anticipated that there could be a tendency to connect BlackBerry’s win to Apple’s current lawsuits. The mobile chip giant said that the BlackBerry case revolved around a single issue on whether Qualcomm’s voluntary per-unit royalty cap applied to BlackBerry’s non-refundable royalty prepayments for subscriber units between 2010 and 2015.

«

If I’m reading this correctly, BlackBerry had to pay upfront back in 2010 for the number of devices it thought it was going to sell. It sold far fewer than it expected (hello BlackBerry collapse!), and so it argued that Qualcomm owed it a rebate.

This is, as Qualcomm says, an entirely different matter from whether it has been charging Apple and its suppliers too much for the licences on its standards-essential patents (SEPs). Though I wouldn’t take it as a great sign if I were Qualcomm.
link to this extract

A year of Google Maps & Apple Maps • Justin O’Beirne

»

Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last June, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on:

Coincidence or not, it was interesting. And it made me wonder what else would change, if we kept watching. Would Google keep adding detail? And would Apple, like Google, also start making changes?

So I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps [default maps only, no personalisation]. And 13 months later, we now have a year’s worth of images:

«

The inference seems to be that Google is adding places and altering its icons, so that it looks increasingly like Apple’s – except it has more detail about places. If you like design, you’ll like this analysis.
link to this extract

The atomic bomb considered as Hungarian high school science fair project • Slate Star Codex

Scott Alexander:

»

A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.

The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.

But maybe we shouldn’t be joking about this so much.

«

This is an amazing post, which will lead you through teaching, the Manhattan Project, genetic disease, ghettos, to an amazing conclusion, and then a coda that will leave you slightly aghast. You can find backing for his conclusion in the location of much of the startup energy in the west outside America; his coda isn’t necessarily the end.

Other material to read: Steven Pinker on a similar topic; Adam Rutherford giving his opinion on this piece (an example of Twitter at its best).
link to this extract

Sony to discontinue ‘Premium Standard’ smartphones; don’t expect a successor to Xperia X and X Compact • Xperia Blog

“XB”:

»

Sony Mobile has confirmed plans to drop the ‘Premium Standard’ segment from its future smartphone portfolio. Devices launched under this tier included the Xperia X and Xperia X Compact in 2016 – they were designed to offer a reasonable price point with an almost flagship specification.

When details of these phones were announced, many of you bemoaned the fact that these weren’t flagship devices, and it looks like this apathy translated into lacklustre sales. Whilst in Japan, these models hit 85% of its intended volume targets for the year, outside of Japan this number fell to a paltry 31%. It’s fair to say that volumes fell spectacularly short of targets – the lack of resonance outside Japan led to the company only hitting 43% of its targets in this segment globally.

Sony confirmed the news at its 2017 Investor Day, along with the fact that it will now only focus on flagship and mid-range models going forward.

«

Yes, but look at the slide from the investor day:

Basically, anything outside Japan was a bust. As the slide shows, Sony sold 14.6m units in the whole financial year, when it was hoping for 20m. Compared to Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and even LG, It’s a sideshow – albeit the only Android OEM besides Samsung which is demonstrably profitable. (We just don’t know about Huawei, Oppo or Vivo.)
link to this extract

The world is running out of sand • New Yorker

David Owen (not the political one) with an amazing excursion through the difficulty of getting the right sort of sand for all sorts of applications:

»

One engineer I spoke to told me that transporting sand and stone for ordinary construction becomes uneconomical after about 60 miles, and that builders usually make do with whatever is available within that radius, even if it means settling for materials that aren’t ideal. In some places, though, there are no usable alternatives. Florida lies on top of a vast limestone formation, but most of the stone is too soft to be used in construction. “The whole Gulf Coast is starved for aggregate,” William Langer, the research geologist, told me. “So they import limestone from Mexico, from a quarry in the Yucatán, and haul it by freighter across the Caribbean.” Even that stone is wrong for some uses. “You can build most of a road with limestone from Mexico,” he continued, “but it doesn’t have much skid resistance. So to get that they have to use granitic rock, which they ship down the East Coast from quarries in Nova Scotia or haul by train from places like inland Georgia.” When Denver International Airport was being built, in the nineteen-nineties, local quarries were unable to supply crushed stone as rapidly as it was needed, so vast quantities were brought from a quarry in Wyoming whose principal product was stone ballast for railroad tracks. The crushed stone was delivered by a freight train that ran in a continuous loop between the quarry and the work site.

Deposits of sand, gravel, and stone can be found all over the United States, but many of them are untouchable, because they’re covered by houses, shopping malls, or protected land. Regulatory approval for new quarries is more and more difficult to obtain: people don’t want to live near big, noisy holes, even if their lives are effectively fabricated from the products of those holes. The scarcity of alternatives makes existing quarries increasingly valuable. The Connecticut quarry I visited is one of a number owned by Stanley’s company, and like many in the United States it’s in operation today only because it predates current mining regulations.

«

This is an amazing piece. Beach volleyball sand? Specialised. Desert sand? No use to anyone (grains too round). And plenty more.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It probably got your heart rate correct, but the calories could be iffy. Photo by unexxx on Flickr.

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

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

Apple’s App Store is creating twice as many million-dollar publishers as Google Play • Sensortower

Randy Nelson of Sensortower:

»

When it comes to building a successful business, Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence data reveals that more app publishers are achieving an important milestone on Apple’s App Store than on Google Play. Based on our analysis of in-app revenue—not inclusive of advertising revenue—nearly double the number of publishers made their first $1m in annual revenue last year on the U.S. App Store compared to Google Play. In all, 66 publishers met or surpassed this benchmark figure on Apple’s store in 2016, which was 1.7 times more than the 39 that managed the same degree of success on Google’s platform.

What’s more, as you can see in the chart above, the number of publishers who had their first $1m or greater year on the US App Store in 2016 nearly doubled over 2015, when 34 surpassed that mark in terms of annual US revenue.

While it still trails behind the App Store by this measure, Google Play grew its number of equivalent publishers on its US store considerably more than Apple’s platform in 2016, by nearly 2.8 times from 14 in 2015. This is a promising figure for Google, which, when combined with the impressive year-over-year revenue growth we’ve witnessed from its platform over the past few quarters, signals that developers are enjoying a growing measure of success monetizing on Google Play.

«

That “not inclusive of advertising revenue” could be significant. Note too that these are first-time million-dollar earners (47% on iOS and 75% on Android are games). This goes against the general narrative that you can’t make any money from apps. But this isn’t a lot of organisations – 105, if there’s no overlap.
link to this extract

MH17: a darker truth • Medium

Mark Zee:

»

This will be uncomfortable reading, but [MH-17 being shot down over Ukraine] was a preventable tragedy.

As industry experts, we’ve comforted ourselves knowing that “Nobody considered that civil aircraft, at cruising altitude, were at risk” (Dutch Safety Board report). When fingers were pointed at Malaysia Airlines for overflying a war zone, we were quick to tell the public “Not fair. Everybody else did as well”.

We were all apparently operating under the same misguided reassurance that this was a war going on underneath the airways, and that cruising at 33,000 over the top of it would be just fine. As an airline pilot at the time, I did the same as everyone else using the eastern Ukraine routes, and monitored the conflict beneath us with interest on each flight, but without concern.
But what if we could have known — what if the risk information was actually there, but for some reason we weren’t seeing it?

Well, it was.

International aviation uses a simple system to tell pilots essential flight information: NOTAMS. Notices to Airmen. An average 3 hour flight will have 20 pages of them, and they look like this:

«

It is, as he clearly explains, a case where complexity has run away from comprehensibility – with potentially disastrous results.
link to this extract

China’s Lenovo to reboot after losing PC crown to HP • WSJ

Kathy Chu:

»

Lenovo has axed at least 2,000 U.S. jobs since buying Motorola. The company continues to lose talent because some employees are unsure about the company’s direction, said a handful of insiders, who declined to be named because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.

A Lenovo spokesman said that the company’s attrition rates are in line with the industry and Lenovo has been adding new talent, signs that “morale has improved and that Motorola continues to be a place where technology-loving employees want to work.”

Kitty Fok, IDC’s managing director for China, cautioned against reading too much into Lenovo losing its No. 1 position in the PC market to HP. The first calendar quarter is traditionally Lenovo’s weakest quarter, so this slide may only be temporary, Ms. Fok said.

Meanwhile, even though Lenovo’s smartphone business is still not profitable, its global shipments are stabilizing, according to Strategy Analytics executive director Neil Mawston. Lenovo holds only a 1% market share in China, but is growing rapidly in India, where its market share has risen to 9% from 7% in the past year, according to the research firm.

“For Lenovo at the moment, China is a dark cloud, the U.S. is a gray cloud, while India is a sunny day,” said Mr. Mawston.

The analyst said that if Lenovo can cut costs further and continue to expand in India, its smartphone business could return to profitability by 2018.

«

Since Lenovo acquired Motorola in October 2014, smartphone profitability has always been just six months away. Meanwhile that division has had eight straight quarters of operating losses.
link to this extract

May 2012: Post-traumatic life expectancy of phone vendors • Asymco

Horace Dediu, back in May 2012:

»

RIM [since renamed to BlackBerry] has just entered what I call the Post-traumatic period of a phone maker’s life. This period is defined as beginning with a loss-making quarter and ending  with the company’s exit from the business. These post-traumatic periods were visualized first here and the pattern was first discussed about a year ago here.

I’ve updated the chart with the current data and added the bar chart below to illustrated the “post-traumatic life expectancy” for the companies shown. Companies still operating are shown with bars without color while companies that have exited are shown with solid color bars.

The pattern may be that companies either have short post-trauma lives of about two to three years or relatively long post-trauma lives lasting 4 to 5 years. What determines this life expectancy and how long do RIM, Nokia and LG have?

There is precious little data, but perhaps one hypothesis I could offer could be that the bigger the commitment to the industry (in terms of having no fall-back options) the longer the post-traumatic period lasts. In other words, as there is no easy way out, the fight lasts longer.

This can also be interpreted using Porter’s “barriers to exit” force analysis where companies which can liquidate a division see it as a low cost of exit whereas companies that need to restructure (usually more than once) and then seek either a buyout or rescue may interpret exit as a very costly endeavor.

«

Nokia and RIM both exited; Motorola was acquired and sold and acquired; Sony bought out Ericsson; the stubborn one, in that respect, is LG, which first fell into loss at Q4 2009, and is still going (with losses).
link to this extract

Land ownership map • Who owns England?

»

Who owns land is one of England’s most closely-guarded secrets. This map is a first attempt to display major landowners in England, combining public data with Freedom of Information requests. To follow the investigation and help us fill in the gaps, visit the Who Owns England? blog.

The map also displays some data for Wales and Scotland, where landowners’ data includes this; our project is focused on England. Investigation by Guy Shrubsole, map by Anna Powell-Smith.

«

But of course Powell-Smith would be involved – she does great mapping/data stuff. “Overseas companies” own nearly a quarter of a million acres, in some very odd places.
link to this extract

China censored Google’s AlphaGo match against world’s best Go player • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

DeepMind’s board game-playing AI, AlphaGo, may well have won its first game against the Go world number one, Ke Jie, from China – but but most Chinese viewers could not watch the match live.

The Chinese government had issued a censorship notice to broadcasters and online publishers, warning them against livestreaming Tuesday’s game, according to China Digital Times, a site that regularly posts such notices in the name of transparency.

“Regarding the go match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo, no website, without exception, may carry a livestream,” the notice read. “If one has been announced in advance, please immediately withdraw it.” The ban did not just cover video footage: outlets were banned from covering the match live in any way, including text commentary, social media, or push notifications.

It appears the government was concerned that 19-year-old Ke, who lost the first of three scheduled games by a razor-thin half-point margin, might have suffered a more damaging defeat that would hurt the national pride of a state which holds Go close to its heart.

«

Bet they found out anyway. AlphaGo won the second match as well, even though Ke played the first 50 moves “perfectly” – in AlphaGo’s judgement, at least. I expect playing against it is something like Kasparov found against Deep Blue: you can expect a human to err under pressure, but there’s no emotion on the other side of the board, which pushes that liability of mistiming a move back onto you, the human.
link to this extract

Bitcoin surges 11% to all-time high above $2,700 • CNBC

Evelyn Cheng:

»

At Thursday’s record, Bitcoin has now gained more than 45% since last Thursday and more than 180% for the year so far.

“There is no question that we are in the middle of a price frenzy,” said Brian Kelly of BKCM LLC and a CNBC contributor, in a note to clients Thursday. “There will be a correction and it could be severe, but it’s unclear if that correction will start from current prices of $2700 or from some place much higher.”

Kelly manages a hedge fund focused on digital currencies.

The globally, 24-hour traded asset swept past $2,400 and $2,500 on Wednesday Eastern Time, following a late Tuesday announcement that brought some resolution to a heated debate about the future development of the digital currency. The Digital Currency Group said in an online Medium post that 83% of bitcoin miners supported a “Bitcoin Scaling Agreement” for a specific technological upgrade.

«

This is all quite bonkers; it seems untethered by any rational explanation. So maybe we just treat it as an irrational speculative product.
link to this extract

Fitness trackers accurately measure heart rate but not calories burned • Stanford Medicine

»

Millions of people wear some kind of wristband activity tracker and use the device to monitor their own exercise and health, often sharing the data with their physician. But is the data accurate?

Such people can take heart in knowing that if the device measures heart rate, it’s probably doing a good job, a team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine reports. But if it measures energy expenditure, it’s probably off by a significant amount.

An evaluation of seven devices in a diverse group of 60 volunteers showed that six of the devices measured heart rate with an error rate of less than 5%. The team evaluated the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear S2. Some devices were more accurate than others, and factors such as skin color and body mass index affected the measurements.

In contrast, none of the seven devices measured energy expenditure accurately, the study found. Even the most accurate device was off by an average of 27%. And the least accurate was off by 93%.

“People are basing life decisions on the data provided by these devices,” said Euan Ashley, DPhil, FRCP, professor of cardiovascular medicine, of genetics and of biomedical data science at Stanford. But consumer devices aren’t held to the same standards as medical-grade devices, and it’s hard for doctors to know what to make of heart-rate data and other data from a patient’s wearable device, he said.

«

Here’s the graphic on energy expenditure (which was measured using oxygen consumption). Fitbit Surge did best, followed by Microsoft Band, and then Apple Watch – though the researchers say overall “of the devices tested, the Apple Watch had the most favorable error profile while the Samsung Gear S2 had the least favorable error profile”.

Why the variability? The researchers note that “10,000 steps have been observed to represent between 400 kilocalories and 800 kilocalories depending on a person’s height and weight”. That’s a lot of variation in how our bodies burn energy.
link to this extract

Gatwick Airport launches indoor navigation system to help passengers find their way • The Next Web

Matthew Hughes:

»

Serving the London region, Gatwick Airport is the UK’s second busiest airport, after London Heathrow. As you’d expect, it’s a gargantuan place, and getting around its two massive terminals can be a nightmare.

To ameliorate this, Gatwick has taken the unusual step of installing 2,000 bluetooth-powered beacons that tell passengers where they are in the airport’s two terminals.

The beacons are the product of a collaboration with London startup Pointr, and are accurate to three meters — so pretty damn accurate.

The first incarnation of the system shows travelers where they are on a digital map, with their location visualized as a blue dot. Gatwick eventually intends to introduce an augmented reality system that guides users with turn-by-turn directions, using real-world visual data.

At first, Gatwick plans to integrate this network of beacons into its own app, and is in talks with airlines about sharing access to the data.

Conceivably, this could be used to tell passengers that they’re running late, or help the airline to figure out whether to offload luggage if a late passenger is far away.

«

Your basic augmented reality (AR) implementation.
link to this extract

New Penn research assesses financial viability of municipal fiber networks • Penn Law

»

Using industry standard financial analysis tools on five years of official data, the study finds that 11 out of the 20 fiber networks assessed do not generate enough cash to cover their current operating costs and only two out of the 20 are on track to recover their total project costs during their 30-40 years of expected useful life. Key findings include:

• 11 of 20 projects studied are cash-flow negative, many substantially so.
• 5 of the 9 cash-flow positive projects are generating returns that are so small that it would take more than a century to recover project costs.
• 2 of the 9 cash-flow positive projects would have a recovery period of 61-65 years, beyond the expected useful life of a fiber network.
• Only 2 of the 20 projects studied earned enough to expect to cover their project costs during the useful life of the networks, one of which is an outlier that serves an industrial city with few residents.
• The analysis also models the returns for a hypothetical project, finding it would take over 100 years to recover expected project costs. 

«

That’s all reasonable enough within itself (this is only municipally-funded, ie debt-funded, networks, not Google Fiber et al). But I wonder if it’s not too shallow in that the full report ignores positive externalities that might arise. Many of these are in low-density population areas: it could be that having high-speed internet preserves the population base (which is important in other ways to a municipality), or even serves to attract businesses and others to the area, which would create a positive feedback effect. In the short term, high-speed broadband (especially if there’s a delta compared to a neighbouring area) can even shore up property prices. So it’s not just about the obvious bottom line. (The report’s author told me by email that he hoped the findings so far would feed into Ofcom assessments; and that a further study comparing similar areas which did and didn’t go for superfast broadband could be worth doing.)
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s a straight line from the ZX Spectrum to Frank Sidebottom (here seen in statue form in Timperley). Come and follow it. Photo by Pimlico Badger on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Say your prayers. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Makers of the Panono 108MP 360-degree camera filing for bankruptcy • Digital Photography Review

Lars Rehm:

»

German media reports that the founders of the company behind the Panono 360-degree ball camera have filed for insolvency proceedings at a court in Berlin, Germany. Unfortunately this means it’s very unlikely that the backers of the original crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo will ever receive their camera. 

The small number of buyers who purchased a Panono through retail channels after the Indiegogo campaign could be affected as well. At this point it is unknown if the the Panono servers, which power the automatic stitching of the Panono’s 360-degree images, will remain functional for the foreseeable future.  

Initially things had gone well for the German start-up. The Indiegogo campaign generated 1.25 million dollars in 2013. However, it soon became obvious that the team had miscalculated the development time for the camera which back then only existed in prototype form.

The final product was due to ship in 2014 but instead there was only a second prototype in February 2015. A few months later first shipments were announced, but not to the project backers.

«

“a throwable panoramic ball camera which captures everything in every direction for amazing 108 megapixel, 360° X 360° full-spherical panoramic images.” Nothing on the page itself, so far.
link to this extract

How the ZX Spectrum helped bring about famed pop parody Frank Sidebottom • The Conversation

Rhys James Jones:

»

Sitting at their keyboards, bedroom coders [in the 1980s in the UK] had unique, almost auteur-like, visions for their code. Like film directors Alfred Hitchcock or Francois Truffaut, many had full control, with only occasional suggestions from a software distributor. They could earn rock star size royalty cheques, but this was not necessarily about the money. Micros were seen as creative tools, much like a musical instrument.

The late Chris Sievey knew this better than most. Frontman of new wave band The Freshies, he restlessly experimented with new ideas, including self-produced videos. In 1983, with the band on hiatus, Sievey went solo. His single Camouflage saw his producer Martin Hannett at his most commercial on an expansive, hook-heavy track which used the Cold War as a metaphor for love’s frustrations.

Camouflage’s B-side was even more significant, as it contained three programs written by Sievey on his newly-gifted Sinclair ZX81. Software on vinyl wasn’t a new concept, but the true innovation was the first of the programs: a computerised promo video for Camouflage itself.

Once loaded, the user was asked to press a button on the ZX81 when the first chord of the record kicked in. Thanks to Sievey’s graft, Camouflage’s lyrics were then perfectly synchronised. With the length of each delay loop decided by his trial-and-error, and the ZX81’s frame rolls made into art, Camouflage – though it was a flop on release – remains an inspiration today.

«

But this is only the prelude to the curtain-raiser for Sidebottom.
link to this extract

Why do people join ISIS? Here’s what they say when you ask them • Defense One

Patrick Tucker:

»

Perhaps one of the most important findings is that the fighters’ motivations tended to vary by their country of origin.

Foreign fighters from places like the United States and Western Europe were far more likely to be facing some sort of identity crisis, a desire for a personal sense of recognition that ISIS provides. They were also more likely to be motivated by a rejection of Western culture. A story in the New York Times over the summer, titled “ISIS and the Lonely Young American” details how ISIS sympathizers who are able to make contact with curious and socially isolated Westerners and then manufacture a sense of community and belonging through constant online interaction (not simply one-way messaging, as some have suggested.)

People who joined ISIS from another Muslim country, however, are far more motivated by the perceived plight of the Syrian sunnis. For this group, the report found that  “fighting the Assad regime are the most common catalysts (45%).”  They are primarily thrill and status seekers.

The fact that joining ISIS could have a benefit in terms of one’s immediate social status underscores how differently ISIS is perceived in the Arab world than in the West.

Internal ISIS fighters — Sunni fighters primarily from Syria and Iraq — were also motivated by money and status. “Internal fighters believe they have a mission to defend their community (duty, Jihad) but they also have personal interests (money, staying alive),” according to the report.

«

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A mum didn’t sell anything at a craft fair so Twitter bought everything • Buzzfeed

December 2016:

»

Martyn Hett is a 28-year-old from Manchester, England. What you can’t see in this photo is that he’s actually son of the year after he saved his mum’s knitting career via Twitter.

«

This is only one of many acts of joyful sharing by Hett, who was killed by the bomb detonated at the Manchester Arena. Remember people for their deeds and the happiness they bring.
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Comcast vendor sent cease-and-desist to operator of anti-Comcast website • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

A Comcast vendor sent a cease-and-desist letter to the operator of “Comcastroturf.com,” a website that helps people find out if their names were used by bots that have flooded the Federal Communications Commission with anti-net neutrality comments.

Fight for the Future, the advocacy group that operates the site, issued a press release accusing Comcast of censorship and posted an image of the letter that accuses the group of trademark infringement. The letter was sent by LookingGlass Cyber Security Center on behalf of its client, Comcast, and demands that Fight for the Future “take all steps necessary to see that the Domain Name [Comcastroturf.com] is assigned to Comcast.”

The Comcastroturf website violates a law against “using domain names that are identical or confusingly similar to someone else’s trademark,” the letter said.

“Our client is… prepared to resolve this matter amicably and without pursuing its claims for damages, but only if you immediately comply with its demands,” the letter said.

Despite the threatening letter, Comcast told Ars that it has decided not to take any further action.

«

Those bots are infuriating: people are discovering their names being used to post fake comments all over. Who’s behind it? Is the aim to make the public comments so poisoned that they’ll be ignored?
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US international tourism market share is falling under Trump, Foursquare data shows • Buzzfeed

»

The United States’ slice of the international tourism pie is declining, according to a new report from Foursquare that looks at data from millions of phones worldwide.

The US share of international tourism dropped 16% in March 2017 compared with the previous year. And it declined an average of 11% year over year in months spanning October 2016 to March 2017, according to the report.

The drop coincides with the final month of the US election, the Trump transition, and the early months of the Trump administration, which notably imposed a travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries in January 2017 that was eventually halted in court but is currently under appeal. Declines in tourism market share from people originating in the Middle East were more pronounced than the rest of the world, down 25% this January, along with a smaller decrease from South America, Foursquare found.

The data accounts for the percentage of international tourism coming to the US and not the absolute number of tourists, but Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck told BuzzFeed News that it’s unlikely tourist visits to the US increased while share declined.

«

Foursquare previously got it right for data on Chipotle seing a downturn and McDonalds revenues recovering. So don’t ignore this.
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Google now knows when its users go to the store and buy stuff • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg:

»

To power its multibillion-dollar advertising juggernaut, Google already analyzes users’ web browsing, search history and geographic locations, using data from popular Google-owned apps like YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and the Google Play store. All that information is tied to the real identities of users when they log into Google’s services.

The new credit-card data enables the tech giant to connect these digital trails to real-world purchase records in a far more extensive way than was possible before. But in doing so, Google is yet again treading in territory that consumers may consider too intimate and potentially sensitive. Privacy advocates said few people understand that their purchases are being analyzed in this way and could feel uneasy, despite assurances from Google that it has taken steps to protect the personal information of its users.

Google also declined to detail how the new system works or what companies are analyzing records of credit and debit cards on Google’s behalf. Google, which saw $79bn in revenue last year, said it would not handle the records directly but that its undisclosed partner companies had access to 70% of transactions for credit and debit cards in the United States.

“What’s really fascinating to me is that as the companies become increasingly intrusive in terms of their data collection, they also become more secretive,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He urged government regulators and Congress to demand answers about how Google and other technology companies are collecting and using data from their users…

…Google executives say they are using complex, patent-pending mathematical formulas to protect the privacy of consumers when they match a Google user with a shopper who makes a purchase in a brick-and-mortar store.

The mathematical formulas convert people’s names and other purchase information, including the time stamp, location, and the amount of the purchase, into anonymous strings of numbers. The formulas make it impossible for Google to know the identity of the real-world shoppers, and for the retailers to know the identities of Google’s users, said company executives, who called the process “double-blind” encryption.

The companies know only that a certain number of matches have been made. In addition, Google does not know what products people bought.

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Inside Snap’s growth struggles • The Information

Tom Dotan:

»

Last summer, members of Snap’s growth team presented CEO Evan Spiegel and other executives with worrying data showing user growth had slowed sharply. In one week, the company had lost 1 million daily active users, out of its total of around 150 million.

The growth team spelled out to Mr. Spiegel a number of likely causes. Among the top factors was Instagram’s recent launch of its copycat feature Stories, the team said. But Mr. Spiegel initially refused to accept there was a growth problem at all, according to two people familiar with the matter. Instead, he asserted the user slowdown was due entirely to a recent move Snap made to deactivate an old version of the Android app, which meant some Android users had been cut off. He told other executives the data itself was flawed, according to the people.

The growth team spent the next several weeks working to prove the data was sound and that the mothballed Android app couldn’t have caused the entire slowdown. Mr. Spiegel eventually was convinced that Snap’s growth was indeed decelerating and the company needed to take action. But his response at that point was, in part, to kill a feature he thought annoyed people—Auto Advance, which automatically transitioned one person’s story to the next. One person close to Snap says there was no data suggesting Auto Advance was hurting user growth. 

Mr. Spiegel also focused on a more widely acknowledged problem: reducing glitches in the Android version of the app. He went so far as to personally pull engineers off other tasks to work on the Android fix. Snap declined to comment…

…People involved with Snap say that the company could have done more in response to the slowdown, including more testing to understand the cause better. Or it could have embraced more aggressive push notifications to users to prompt them to use the app. But Mr. Spiegel has made plain that he dislikes such tactics.

«

You and I probably side with Spiegel, but push notifications and keeping old Android versions supported does actually work in the real world. He doesn’t want the app to become “spammy”; clearly his vision is that it serves a niche which desires it, rather than feels it’s a needy pet.
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Google Assistant will make money from ecommerce • Recode

Tess Townsend:

»

Google Assistant, the search giant’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, will make money from ecommerce, according to Google ads chief Sridhar Ramaswamy.

The revenue model for Google’s AI service, which lives on devices like Home and smartphones like Pixel, had remained unclear until now. Apple’s main revenue source, the iPhone, clearly benefits from its AI platform, while Amazon’s Alexa technology is designed to stoke more buying on Amazon.

Earlier this year, a promotion that played on Google’s Home devices was a clue to how ads might work. Google said the promotion, for the Disney film “Beauty and the Beast,” wasn’t a paid spot, just an experiment.

“Promotion is only one aspect,” said Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce, at the Google Marketing Next conference in San Francisco Tuesday. “More transactional than ads is how I would think about it right now.”

He mentioned the option to purchase items from select partners through Assistant, a feature added in February, as an example of Google’s approach to making money with Assistant. Google would likely take a cut of each sale, essentially the equivalent of an affiliate fee.

«

This could easily go ever so wrong if the pushiness gets too insistent.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Rick Fillion wasn’t credited as the author of the Agilebits blogpost about 1Password’s Travel mode. Sorry, Rick.

What if you got an AI to name paint colours? Photo by Muffet on Flickr

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

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

An AI invented a bunch of new paint colors that are hilariously wrong • Ars Technica

Annalee Newitz:

»

At some point, we’ve all wondered about the incredibly strange names for paint colours. Research scientist and neural network goofball Janelle Shane took the wondering a step further. Shane decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors, complete with appropriate names. The results are possibly the greatest work of artificial intelligence I’ve seen to date.

Writes Shane on her Tumblr, “For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue colour values.) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colours and give them attractive names?”

Shane told Ars that she chose a neural network algorithm called char-rnn, which predicts the next character in a sequence. So basically the algorithm was working on two tasks: coming up with sequences of letters to form colour names, and coming up with sequences of numbers that map to an RGB value. As she checked in on the algorithm’s progress, she found that it was able to create colours long before it could actually name them reliably.

The longer it processed the dataset, the closer the algorithm got to making legit colour names, though they were still mostly surreal: “Soreer Gray” is a kind of greenish colour, and “Sane Green” is a purplish blue. When Shane cranked up “creativity” on the algorithm’s output, it gave her a violet colour called “Dondarf” and a Kelly green called “Bylfgoam Glosd.” After churning through several more iterations of this process, Shane was able to get the algorithm to recognize some basic colours like red and gray, “though not reliably,” because she also gets a sky blue called “Gray Pubic” and a dark green called “Stoomy Brown.”

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I wonder if we’ll look back on stories like these in 5-10 years’ time and think “aww, those baby steps” or if it will be more like “why is this stuff still no better than that?”

There’s a whole ton more of AI-generated titles for all sorts of things on her blog.
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Introducing Travel Mode: Protect your data when crossing borders • AgileBits Blog

»

Let’s say I had an upcoming trip for a technology conference in San Jose. I hear the apples are especially delicious over there this time of year. 🙂 Before Travel Mode, I would have had to sign out of all my 1Password accounts on all my devices. If I needed certain passwords with me, I had to create a temporary travel account. It was a lot of work and not worth it for most people.

Now all I have to do is make sure any of the items I need for travel are in a single vault. I then sign in to my account on 1Password.com, mark that vault as “safe for travel,” and turn on Travel Mode in my profile. I unlock 1Password on my devices so the vaults are removed, and I’m now ready for my trip. Off I go from sunny Winnipeg to hopefully-sunnier San Jose, ready to cross the border knowing that my iPhone and my Mac no longer contain the vast majority of my sensitive information.

After I arrive at my destination, I can sign in again and turn off Travel Mode. The vaults immediately show up on my devices, and I’m back in business.

Your vaults aren’t just hidden; they’re completely removed from your devices as long as Travel Mode is on. That includes every item and all your encryption keys. There are no traces left for anyone to find. So even if you’re asked to unlock 1Password by someone at the border, there’s no way for them to tell that Travel Mode is even enabled.

«

Available for those with 1Password membership ($3 per month, 12-month membership). It’s a neat idea – enhancing travellers’ security in response to emerging threats. And also profiting from it. Win-win. (Should we wait for it to be accused of being used by a terrorist, rather than an innocent computer geek?)
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The Persuaders – Main Title HD ( John Barry ) • YouTube

»

The Persuaders titles and synthesiser theme, music by John Barry, establish the background and current identities of the protagonists via split-screen narrative technique: two folders, one red, one blue, labelled Danny Wilde and Brett Sinclair simultaneously narrate their lives. As the biographies approach their current ages, the screen splits diagonally, connoting their excitingly peripatetic lifestyles. The conclusion shows them together enjoying a life of sport, drink, women, and gambling. The titles were specifically designed so that neither actor would appear to have top billing, something both [Roger] Moore and [Tony] Curtis stipulated when they agreed to co-star.

«

Roger Moore – who died on Tuesday – starred in many series (The Saint, etc) and was of course James Bond; but The Persuaders was the series that allowed him to be seriously ridiculous. The plots were wonderfully overwrought; a low-budget Bond every week. But oh, that theme music. Unbeatable – and it fed into the themes of many bands and TV series (the first Portishead album, among others).
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LeEco cuts 70% of US staff in massive retreat • CNET

Roger Cheng:

»

LeEco had unveiled a smart mountain and road bike at the [Consumer Electronics Show] conference [in January], complete with a 4in touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and laser beams (yep, lasers) that shot out of the handlebars. It, of course, ran on Android. Bowman, who regularly biked with his colleagues near LeEco’s office in San Jose, California, was more than game. He rode the mountain bike version, while I jumped on the road bike version.

It wasn’t even close. Bowman smoked me.

Over the next few months, however, the victories would be harder to come by at LeEco. On Tuesday, the company said it was cutting 325 employees, or 70% of the workforce of its US business, due to a lack of funding. Bowman is among the employees leaving, and those smart bikes will never hit the market.

The news, which comes just days after Jia Yueting stepped down as the CEO of the publicly listed sister company Leshi, marks a nail in the coffin of the company’s ambition to be the next major US consumer electronics player on par with an Apple or Samsung. LeEco’s sudden rise and equally quick fall is a testament to the difficulty of appealing to fickle US consumers. It’s also a reminder that grand promises to consumers about changing the way they view entertainment means little if they have no idea who you are.

“They showed a lot of ambition without thinking through how to build a sustainable structure and foundation,” said Chris Dong, an analyst at IDC.

LeEco will continue to operate in the US but will focus on the narrower segment of Chinese-speaking households, according to a company spokeswoman.

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The other shoe drops. Surprised it’s only 70% – some thought it was going to be a complete wipeout of staff.
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About • Lolatravel

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We’re a new kind of travel company that provides on-demand, personal travel service through a smartphone app. The Lola app instantly connects people to our team of travel agents who find and book flights, hotels, and cars for our customers. We also provide support while they’re on their trips.

The name Lola is shorthand for longitude and latitude, a system created to make seaborne navigation easier, and in that same spirit, we started Lola to give more people access to a premium level of travel care.

«

Human travel agents? Weren’t they supposed to be out of work now? Turns out: no. My daughter has been trying to book travel abroad, and our local travel agent has done far better at finding affordable travel and accommodation. Neat idea; an app for iOS only, for now. (Via Tim O’Reilly’s talk in Cambridge on Tuesday.)
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Introducing the H. Moser Swiss Alp watch Zzzz • Hodinkee

Stephen Pulvirent:

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The Zzzz has a white gold case in that familiar soft-rectangle shape and with those familiar wire lugs that give the Swiss Alp Watch its character. But, below the curved crystal sits a deep glossy black dial with no signatures at all and just a simple pair of white gold leaf hands floating over the top. You could, from even a relatively close distance, mistake this for an Apple Watch if you weren’t paying close attention.

To me, it’s the most successful play on the idea of the Swiss Alp Watch yet, being both a little subversive and a little playful, all while still being a quality mechanical watch.

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It looks exactly like an Apple Watch. So Jony Ive is the designer not just for Samsung but for the Swiss watch industry too?
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DeepMind’s AI beats world’s best Go player in latest face-off • New Scientist

Matt Reynolds:

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Google DeepMind’s Go-playing AI has defeated Ke Jie, the world’s number one player, in the first of three games played in Wuzhen, China.

The AI won by just half a point – the smallest possible margin of victory – in a match that lasted four hours and fifteen minutes. Though the scoreline looks close, AlphaGo was in the lead from relatively early on in the game. Since the AI favours moves that are more likely to guarantee victory, it doesn’t usually trounce its opponents.

In March last year, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top Go players, winning four out of five matches. The AI challenged more Go masters in January 2017, winning a series of 50 online games including two victories against Ke Jie.

In a press conference after the AI’s latest victory, Ke said that AlphaGo had clearly learned from its recent victories against Go champions. “In the past it had some weaknesses but now I feel that its understanding of the Go game and its judgments are beyond our ability,” he told the audience through a translator.

Ke had closely studied AlphaGo’s strategy and tried to use some of the AI’s unconventional tactics against it during his match, opening the game with a couple of moves that are seldom used by human players. “We were very intrigued to see how AlphaGo would deal with its own strategies,” said Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind.

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I thought Lee Sedol was the top player, but whatever.
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Hackers unlock Samsung Galaxy S8 with fake iris • Motherboard

Joseph Cox:

»

Biometric locks for phones are just getting more and more elaborate. Not content with fingerprints, some devices now offer facial recognition tech for accessing a device, and in the Samsung Galaxy S8’s case, an iris scanner too.

Despite Samsung stating that a user’s irises are pretty much impossible to copy, a team of hackers has done just that. Using a bare-bones selection of equipment, researchers from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) show in a video how they managed to bypass the scanner’s protections and unlock the device.

“We’ve had iris scanners that could be bypassed using a simple print-out,” Linus Neumann, one of the hackers who appears in the video, told Motherboard in a Twitter direct message.

The process itself was apparently pretty simple. The hackers took a medium range photo of their subject with a digital camera’s night mode, and printed the infrared image. Then, presumably to give the image some depth, the hackers placed a contact lens on top of the printed picture.

And, that’s it. They’re in.

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This is where Minority Report comes in.
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Hiding in plain sight: how the ‘alt-right’ is weaponizing irony to spread fascism • The Guardian

Jason Wilson:

»

Last week, the Data & Society Institute released a report on the online disinformation and manipulation that is increasingly shaping US politics. The report focused on the way in which far-right actors “spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture”.

One the report’s authors, Dr Alice Marwick, says that fascist tropes first merged with irony in the murkier corners of the internet before being adopted by the “alt-right” as a tool. For the new far-right movement, “irony has a strategic function. It allows people to disclaim a real commitment to far-right ideas while still espousing them.”

Marwick says that from the early 2000s, on message boards like 4chan, calculatedly offensive language and imagery have been used to “provoke strong reactions in outsiders”. Calling all users “fags”, or creating memes using gross racial stereotypes, “serves a gate-keeping function, in that it keeps people out of these spaces, many of which are very easy to access”.

Violating the standards of political correctness and the rules of polite interactions “also functions as an act of rebellion” in spaces drenched in adolescent masculinity.

This was played up by Milo Yiannopoulos in an infamous Breitbart explainer last year, in which he insisted that the “alt-right” movement’s circulation of antisemitic imagery was really nothing more than transgressive fun.

“Are they actually bigots?”, Yiannopoulos asked rhetorically. “No more than death metal devotees in the 1980s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.”

What Yiannopoulos left out, according to Marwick, is that these spaces increasingly became attractive to sincere white supremacists. They offered them venues for recruitment, and new methods for popularising their ideas.

In other words, troll culture became a way for fascism to hide in plain sight.

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Another reason to really dislike trolling.
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Netgear ‘fixes’ router by adding phone-home features that record your IP and MAC address • The Register

Richard Chirgin:

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Netgear NightHawk R7000 users who ran last week’s firmware upgrade need to check their settings, because the company added a remote data collection feature to the units.

A sharp-eyed user posted the T&Cs change to Slashdot.

Netgear lumps the slurp as routine diagnostic data.

“Such data may include information regarding the router’s running status, number of devices connected to the router, types of connections, LAN/WAN status, WiFi bands and channels, IP address, MAC address, serial number, and similar technical data about the use and functioning of the router, as well as its WiFi network.”

Much of this is probably benign, but posters to the Slashdot thread were concerned about IP address and MAC address being collected by the company.

The good news is that you can turn it off: the instructions are here.

It’s probably unlikely that any significant number of users will do so, given the number of people who never get around to changing their default passwords.

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It is amazing how many companies just assume we don’t mind them grabbing all the data they possibly can.
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Donald Trump’s path-independent theory of mind • Bloomberg

Cathy O’Neil:

»

When Google is trying some new shade of blue in the background of their ads, they will perform what’s called an “A/B test” to see what generates more clicks. If more people go for the ad with a lighter shade of blue, they will stick with it. What they won’t do, critically, is consider the possibility that their audience liked the light shade of blue only because it came after the darker shade. They will assume that the audiences are independent of each other, constantly refreshed and “new.”

The same approach might have worked well for Trump as a businessman. He probably would have encountered a wide range of scenarios: For every deal that went through, dozens might have failed. So trying X one day and Y the next would be like a real science experiment. Over time, he might develop pattern recognition, figuring out which tactic works best in certain kinds of situations. I assume that’s where he learned to put pressure on business partners for unreasonable terms and to demand oaths of loyalty from his employees…

…I’d argue that Trump’s path independence operates on multiple levels. It’s evident at a meta-political level when he takes a stab at sweeping campaign promises that he never intends to fulfill. It’s also visible at the micro level, even within a given sentence: in his very strange recent interview with The Economist, for example, he kept attempting to adjust his message to obtain approval from his interviewers. He keeps things vague, and then pokes his way into a given explanation, but leaves himself room to change direction in case he senses disapproval.

It doesn’t always work for him. That said, he probably can’t act any other way. Consistency has no attraction for him, because he is fundamentally principle-free.

Trump’s problem now is that the audience isn’t refreshing. It’s all of us, nationwide and globally. We remember what he said and did yesterday. We notice when he changes his story, and we’re not amused. Meanwhile, he’s left truly confused as to why things aren’t working out in his favour.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Which sites from then are still going today? Photo by Leo Reynolds on Flickr.

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

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

Which websites from 1995 are still online? • The Atlantic

Adrienne LaFrance:

»

Today there are more than 1 billion sites on the web. But in 1995, the year AltaVista and Amazon launched, there were 23,500. (The year before that, there were only 2,738 websites, according to Internet Live Stats, a site that tracks web trends.) “For anyone with a computer, modem and so-called browser software, the place to be in 1995 is the World Wide Web, a section of the Internet overflowing with sights and sounds,” the [New York] Times wrote in its 1995 “site-seeing” guide.

The first site it recommended was “everyone’s favorite plastic oracle, on line,” a place where you could consult a Magic 8-Ball. It’s funny now: The tenor of the early web, with its gimmicks and sense of play, was eventually repeated in the early app environment. Remember when having an iPhone meant demonstrating a smattering of silly apps—things like Magic 8-Balls, virtual lighters, and digital beer that disappeared when you tilted the device?

The Magic 8-Ball website from 1995 is still live, remarkably, but it has changed. “The ‘Magic 8-Ball’ went away because of a letter from Tyco’s lawyers indicating that they didn’t appreciate my abuse of their Copyright,” a message on the site now says. “Thank you Tyco, for giving me the impetus to create a far cooler web site.”

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Lovely idea; great detective work.
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Apple launches website for android switchers • Tech Narratives

Jan Dawson on Apple’s new Switch site area:

»

targeting that audience of Android switchers specifically makes perfect sense.  The site focuses on a few aspects of buying and owning an iPhone: ease of use, ease of switching, camera quality, speed, privacy and security, iMessage extensions, support from Apple people, and environmental responsibility.

Out of all the possible things Apple could emphasize, that’s an interesting list – design, for example, isn’t one of them, though the word appears in other contexts three times on the site, and all the things highlighted here are functional rather than aesthetic.

In fact, other than one oblique shot of an iPhone at the top, there isn’t a single full shot of an iPhone or any shot with the screen on until you get to the “buy” section at the bottom. Given how central the design message and product shots have traditionally been to Apple promotional material, that’s an interesting departure and likely reflects research on why people switch from Android.

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How Facebook allows users to post footage of children being bullied • The Guardian

Nick Hopkins:

»

Documents also show the site allows the “sharing of footage of physical bullying” of children under seven, as long as there is no caption.

The social media group has ruled that anyone with more than 100,000 followers on a social media platform is a public figure, with “no exceptions for minors”.

The details appear in documents that detail how Facebook attempts to deal with cruel, insensitive and abusive posts on the site.

The training manuals for moderators say Facebook regards bullying as “an attack on private persons with the intent to upset or silence them”. But they add that you are only “a ‘private person’ if you are not a public figure”.

According to the documents, public figures include politicians, journalists, people “with 100,000 fans or followers on one of their social media accounts”, or people “who are mentioned [by name or title] in the title or subtitle of five or more news articles or media pieces within the last two years”.

Under the headline “People excluded from protection”, one document adds: “We want to exclude certain people who are famous or controversial in their own right and don’t deserve our protection.”

The types of groups and individuals excluded from protection include Jesus, the mass murderer Charles Manson, Osama bin Laden, rapists and domestic abusers, any political and religious leaders before 1900 and people who violate hate speech rules.

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Hopkins is The Guardian’s investigations editor; this is the second day of what is sure to be a multi-day onslaught of revelations about Facebook’s moderation practices. You’d think the company might be trying to get out ahead of them, but seems not.
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China’s LeEco founder cedes control of listed unit amid cash crunch • Reuters

Sijia Jiang and Jake Spring:

»

The founder of LeEco, a Chinese Netflix-to-Tesla-like conglomerate, has stepped down as the CEO of the group’s main listed unit, as the company begins to streamline and cut debt after rapid expansion led to a cash crunch.

Jia Yueting, who will remain as chairman and CEO of LeEco, envisions the group maintaining its separate unlisted automotive unit but rolling all other areas of business into Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp Beijing, according to a transcript of his remarks to journalists on Sunday.

The firm has also trimmed loans by nearly half from a peak of 10 billion yuan ($1.45bn), Jia said.

Shenzhen-listed Leshi said in a stock exchange filing that Liang Jun, a long-time Lenovo Group Ltd executive who joined Leshi in 2012, will replace Jia as chief executive officer. Leshi’s finance chief Yang Linjie, who resigned for personal reasons, will also be replaced by Zhang Wei.

The restructuring comes several months after the group received a much-needed $2.2bn investment from property developer Sunac China Holdings Ltd.

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It’s been a fun ride, but now it’s back to nothing much.
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EU to conclude Google antitrust cases in next few months • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

EU antitrust regulators will rule in the “next few months” whether Alphabet’s Google abused its dominance of internet searches and other areas, a senior European Commission official said on Monday, an outcome that could lead to a hefty fine.

The world’s most popular internet search engine has been in the Commission’s crosshairs since 2010 over the promotion of its own shopping service in internet searches at the expense of the services of rivals.

The EU competition enforcer opened a second front against Google last year as it charged the company with using its dominant Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals.

It has since leveled a third charge, that of blocking rivals in online search advertising. This relates to Google’s “AdSense for Search” platform, in which Google acts as an intermediary for websites such as online retailers, telecoms operators or newspapers. These searches produce results that include search ads.

“In the next few months, we will reach a decision on the Google cases, Google search, AdSense and to me the most interesting is Android,” Tommaso Valletti, the Commission’s chief competition economist, told a conference organized by the University of Oxford Centre for Competition Law and Policy.

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But it already knows that Google has abused this; that’s why it has sought remedies, which have been rejected by complainants. I’ve no idea now what Margrethe Vestager is waiting for.
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AMP: breaking news • Andrew Betts

Betts takes issue with Google’s AMP format, which showed him a page of “news” whose format had been stripped by AMP so it looked like any other:

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I tapped a link in the Twitter app, which showed as google.co.uk/amp/s/www.rt.c…, got a page in Twitter’s in-app webview, where the visible URL bar displays the reassuring 🔒 google.co.uk. But this is actually content from Russia Today, an organisation 100% funded by the Russian government and classified as propaganda by Columbia Journalism Review and by the former US Secretary of State. Google are allowing RT to get away with zero branding, and are happily distributing the content to a mass audience.

This is not OK. This is catastrophic.

Ambiguous content attribution at scale is a scary thing indeed, but beyond the negative effect that AMP, and other distributed content systems, have on the authenticity of independent journalism, there are other significant issues too. Googlers like to consider AMP-the-format and AMP-the-platform separately, and while I think they are inseparable as concerns let’s look at the problems with each independently…

…There is more, but in summary, AMP forces technical restrictions on publishers that limit their ability to create value for their customers, limit their ability to further engage the user beyond reading the initial article, and prevent them iterating on their business model with the freedom they would normally have. Added to this AMP may not actually be any faster than the publisher’s own webpages…

…So that brings us back to Russia Today.

Truth and evidence and nuance are hard to find, hard to represent accurately and fairly, expensive to distill into a consumable product, and hard to understand quickly. If the world’s biggest content discovery and delivery platforms prioritise security, performance and popularity, over authenticity, evidence and independence, well, the likely result is an exponential rise of simplistic, populistic thinking, inevitably spreading and amplifying until false beliefs become tacitly accepted as facts.

When I imagine a Maslow’s pyramid of needs in relation to news, I think the need for truth is more important than the need for speed.

«

I’m noticing a growing amount of opposition to AMP from web designers, though nothing substantial from publishers. But the latter tend not to respond to problems until well past the time when it would have been a good idea to do so.

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Exclusive: Hackers hit Russian bank customers, planned international cyber raids • Reuters

Jack Stubbs:

»

Russian cyber criminals used malware planted on Android mobile devices to steal from domestic bank customers and were planning to target European lenders before their arrest, investigators and sources with knowledge of the case told Reuters.

Their campaign raised a relatively small sum by cyber-crime standards – more than 50 million roubles ($892,000) – but they had also obtained more sophisticated malicious software for a modest monthly fee to go after the clients of banks in France and possibly a range of other western nations.

Russia’s relationship to cyber crime is under intense scrutiny after U.S. intelligence officials alleged that Russian hackers had tried to help Republican Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency by hacking Democratic Party servers.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the allegation.

The gang members tricked the Russian banks’ customers into downloading malware via fake mobile banking applications, as well as via pornography and e-commerce programs, according to a report compiled by cyber security firm Group-IB which investigated the attack with the Russian Interior Ministry.

The criminals – 16 suspects were arrested by Russian law enforcement authorities in November last year – infected more than a million smartphones in Russia, on average compromising 3,500 devices a day, Group-IB said.

«

This seems to have been taking advantage of flaws in Android OS, but without more detail it’s hard to be sure. Killer quote from a Sherbank spokeswoman:

»

“It isn’t clear which specific group is being referred to here because the fraudulent scheme involving Android OS (operating system) viruses is widespread in Russia and Sberbank has effectively combated it for an extensive period of time.”

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Special glasses give people superhuman colour vision • New Scientist

Chris Baraniuk:

»

It’s sometimes practically impossible to tell similar colours apart. Even side by side, they look the same. A special pair of spectacles gives us new power to see more distinct colours, and could one day help to spot counterfeit banknotes or counteract camouflage.

The glasses, devised by a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, basically enhance the user’s colour vision, allowing them to see metamers – colours that look the same but give off different wavelengths of light – as recognisably distinct hues.

Human colour vision relies on three types of cone cells that react to short (blue), medium (green) and long (red) wavelengths. While brushing up on his knowledge of the eye before teaching a photonics class, physicist Mikhail Kats had a brainwave. Could the eye be tricked into effectively having another type of cone cell?

In theory, this could take our vision from being trichromatic, which uses three colour channels, to tetrachromatic. Some animals see in four (or more) channels. Goldfish, for example, have cells for red, blue, green and ultraviolet light. Some researchers suggest that a very small number of humans may be tetrachromats too.

«

So neat. I love tetrachromats (there are plenty of them about).
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The real radicals are now on the right – and the left can’t stand it • The Spectator

Jamie Bartlett:

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Every counter-culture – especially youthful ones – tends to share two features, both of which are currently found in the radical right more than anywhere else.

First, they oppose whatever the establishment values happen to be with a reckless, gleeful abandon. Granted, the word ‘establishment’ is often used to lazily denigrate opponents (hardly anyone says they are part of the establishment). But it is possible to identify a set of received wisdoms that are held by the overwhelming majority of people in positions of economic, political or cultural power. These include the value of cultural and religious diversity, the importance of certain limits on free speech, the need to fight certain forms of social and economic inequality, (relatively) open borders especially within the EU, and so on.   

The radical right revel in tearing into all this, and plainly enjoy the offence they cause each time they trample over polite society’s holy screeds. Donald Trump at times appeared to run much of his election campaign on this very basis. Although only a small, and probably over-hyped, wedge of this new radical right, the ‘alt-right’ culture is a good illustration. Its origins are found in 4chan, the notorious image sharing board famous for its subversive memes, anything-goes trolls, hackers and general taboo breaking. Many alt-righters are grown-up 4channers, uncertain of where their genuine beliefs stop and gratuitous offence starts (and preferring to keep the boundary blurred). 

Is it not thrilling to rebel with such a carefree attitude, after all? Is it not more exciting to take on every social taboo? Transgression against any kind of dominant idea is what people, especially young people, always do. Therefore, when those dominant ideas change, so do its recalcitrant challengers.

«

I think Bartlett’s right: consider the 1967 “summer of love”, whose participants appalled (many of) its parents’ generation for its inclusive, anything-goes approach. And now those people are parents, or even grandparents. While it’s stupid to say “conservatism is the new punk” (because that misunderstands what punk essentially was: rebellion against highly structured, highly organised forms of music and the music business), the idea of rebellion is consistent down the ages.
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Another large-scale cyberattack underway, experts say • The Japan Times

»

Instead of completely disabling an infected computer by encrypting data and seeking a ransom payment, Adylkuzz uses the machines it infects to “mine” in a background task a virtual currency, Monero, and transfer the money created to the authors of the virus.

Virtual currencies such as Monero and Bitcoin use the computers of volunteers to record transactions. They are said to “mine” for the currency and are occasionally rewarded with a piece of it.

Proofpoint said in a blog post that symptoms of the attack include loss of access to shared Windows resources and degradation of PC and server performance, effects that some users may not notice immediately.

“As it is silent and doesn’t trouble the user, the Adylkuzz attack is much more profitable for the cyber criminals. It transforms the infected users into unwitting financial supporters of their attackers,” said Godier.

Proofpoint said it has detected infected machines that have transferred several thousand dollars worth of Monero to the creators of the virus.

The firm believes Adylkuzz has been on the loose since at least May 2, and perhaps even since April 24, but due to its stealthy nature was not immediately detected.

“We don’t know how big it is” but “it’s much bigger than WannaCry,” said Robert Holmes, Proofpoint’s vice president for email products.

A U.S. official on Tuesday put the number of computers infected by WannaCry at over 300,000.

«

This is from last week but points to something interesting. ProofPoint says that *this* one, which preceded Wannacry, shuts down SMB networking – and so could have limited the spread of Wannacry. Does that imply that they’re separate groups behind the two? Or that Wannacry was an attempt to monetise the same attack more quickly?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Open-plan offices: how much of a threat are they to work? Photo by Rum Bucolic Ape on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Please tell us you’re not “completely exhausted”. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s perfect future will always be just around the corner • WIRED

David Pierce:

»

For two and a half hours, CEO Sundar Pichai and a handful of execs rattled off a staggering list of futuristic features and products: A camera that understands what it sees! AI tools a high-schooler can use to help detect cancer! An omniscient, omnipresent virtual assistant! Independent, incredible, immersive virtual reality! To watch the address was to feel like the future had just arrived, all at once, right before your eyes.

Then you go down the list of actual new things, the stuff you can try right now. An Assistant app for iPhone, a way of sending simple email replies without typing them, Google for Jobs. And you realize I/O felt less like a Jobsian product reveal and more like a TED talk: good ideas, educated guesses, and impressive research, but precious little practical application. The same could be said for last year’s event, too. Remember that awesome Google Home launch video? You’re still waiting for many of the things it promised. It was a vision for a product, not a product.

Google’s not alone. In many ways, the entire tech world finds itself in limbo. The internet, smartphones, and Facebook conquered the world and are now ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the next wave of technology lingers just around the corner: Self-driving cars ruling the road, a world filtered through augmented-reality glasses, and artificial intelligence in every person, place, and thing. All of that and more is definitely coming. Someday. And every day it doesn’t, it feels late.

«

I certainly feel like tech is in a limbo period. In that way, it’s like the period from 2000 or so to 2007 in phones. That’s how long this not-happening stuff can go on.
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Why Google DeepMind’s work with the NHS is being investigated by the regulators • Business Insider

Sam Shead:

»

A letter leaked to Sky News and published on Monday shows that the National Data Guardian (NDG), Dame Fiona Caldicott, wrote to The Royal Free in February 2017 to let them know that the legal basis for the data-sharing deal that they used to test Streams was “inappropriate”.

“Given that Streams was going through testing and therefore could not be relied upon for patient care, any role the application may have played in supporting the provision of direct care would have been limited and secondary to the purpose of the data transfer,” she wrote. “My considered opinion therefore remains that it would not have been within this reasonable expectation of patients that their records would have been shared for this purpose.”

Those words can’t have gone down well with execs at DeepMind or The Royal Free. 

So if “direct care” wasn’t the legal basis for the data-transfer deal then what was? DeepMind and The Royal Free are yet to specify another legal basis for their deal, possibly because it doesn’t satisfy any of them. 

Julia Powles, a technology law professor at Cornell University, told Business Insider: “Any other basis required approval in advance — and DeepMind had no such approvals.” 

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Global renewables are growing, but are only managing to offset the decline in nuclear production • Our World In Data

Hannah Ritchie:

»

What we see from 2005 onwards is a distinct divergence in renewable and nuclear trends (they are essentially a mirror image of one another). Renewable energy’s share has increased by 4-5%, meanwhile nuclear energy’s share has decreased by approximately the same (4-5%). Our share of ‘low-carbon’ electricity has remained unchanged. We have simply substituted one low-carbon energy source (renewables) for another (nuclear energy).

What we don’t produce from renewables or nuclear is, of course, produced from fossil fuels. In the chart [below in the post] we have plotted the share of electricity production from fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas), and our combined low-carbon (nuclear plus renewables) sources from 1990-2014. We see that despite an increase in renewable energy production, the share of electricity production from fossil fuels has remained almost completely flat (or even increased marginally) over the last decade. It still represents 66-67% of electricity production.

Whilst the world is making progress in the uptake of renewable technologies, it appears our growing aversion to nuclear has been offsetting progress in decarbonising our electricity grids.

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How The Economist thinks • Current Affairs

Nathan J Robinson on the popular magazine’s worship of free markets:

»

I remembered Current Affairs’ ostensible rivalry with The Economist, and thought it might be a good idea to at least read the damn thing if we’re going to be selling bumper stickers calling for its execution. [They say “Death to The Economist”.] I am nothing if not open-minded and fair.

What, then, did I find upon navigating over to The Economist’s website? The very first article on the page was a piece called “A selective scourge: Inside the opioid epidemic,” subtitled “Deaths from the drugs say more about markets than about white despair.” Its theme is classic Economist: the American opioid epidemic is not occurring because global capitalism is ruining lives, but is the tragic outcome of the operation of people’s individual preferences.

«

I recall that many, many years ago, my brother was studying accountancy and my parents offered to buy him a subscription to The Economist. He turned them down, saying in his letter to them that the Economist was “V V RIGHT WING”. (He wasn’t.) For myself, I was hugely amused by its attempts to explain the 2008 global recession brought on by too-lax regulation on some form of inefficiency in the markets.

As long as you know what you’re getting – and what the biases are – you can extract value. Robinson’s argument is that too few Americans know what they’re getting.
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Open-plan offices kill productivity, according to science • Inc.com

Geoffrey James:

»

Earlier today, I got a story pitch on the “office of the future” that featured the following bullet points:

• Remote Work Will be the New Norm: According to recent Fuze research, 83% of workers don’t think they need to be in an office to be productive, and 38% said they would enjoy their job more if they were allowed to work remotely.
• Physical Space Will Shrink: We’ll see more companies shift to a more collaborative office space model with workspaces that bring together teams, spark conversation, and create the best ideas.
• Traditional Desks Will Disappear: The so-called cubicle farm will become a distant memory and people will start embracing an environment that suits their needs — whether it be a table at a coffee shop, a standing desk, or collaboration space.
• “Office Hours” Will Become Obsolete: The workday isn’t 9 to 5 anymore, it’s 24/7. In fact, a recent Fidelity survey found that Millennials will take a pay cut for a more flexible work environment.

The list (which is very much “conventional wisdom”) illustrates the crazy-making way that companies think about open-plan offices. Can you see the disconnect? Bullets 1 and 4 are saying that people don’t want to work in an office, while bullets 2 and 3 are defining the very office environment where people don’t want to work.

And isn’t that the sad truth? Most people would rather work at home and or tolerate angry stares from the other patrons in a coffee shop (should one need to make a call) than try to get something done in an open-plan office.

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When I think about it, I realise I worked in open-plan – or semi-open – offices all the time. Never had a specific room.
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Facial recognition helps parents find son 27 years after abduction • Vocativ

Jennings Brown:

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In 2009, nearly two decades after Gui was kidnapped after school, he uploaded the earliest photo he had of himself, taken when he was 10, adding it to the database of tens of thousands of images. In January of this year, Gui’s father uploaded a photo of Gui when he was 4.

Baidu’s AI was capable of matching the two images, taken six years apart.

Since Baobeihuiji [Baby Back Home, an NGO dedicated to reconnecting lost children to their parents] began using Baidu’s AI a couple of months ago, they have found a few matches. So far one has been verified by a DNA test — Gui’s. Baidu arranged a meeting between Gui and his biological family, but Gui was suddenly hospitalized. Instead their first reunion took place over video conference on April 8. Gui’s birth mother was overcome with emotion when she saw her son’s adult face on a phone screen. The family later visited him at the hospital.

Baidu has been working on facial recognition AI for six years and will no doubt continue to find ways to use the technology for security and surveillance. But the company says it is committed to using it for other altruistic causes.

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Got to love the throwaway tone of that “no doubt continue.. security and surveillance”.
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Android: celebrating a big milestone together with you • Google blog

Dave Burke, VP of engineering:

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When I started working at Google in early 2007, it was before Android, before iOS. Mobile was still niche. And while many of us had a sense that mobile was going to be big, I’m not sure we really realized just how big it was going to get. Fast forward to today, and there are now 2 billion monthly active Android devices globally. This is an extraordinarily humbling milestone—and it’s the largest reach of any computing platform of its kind. Today at Google I/O, we celebrated that milestone and showcased a number of ways we’re working to make Android even more useful, including a beta release of Android O and a new initiative to help bring Android to the next billion users.

«

This is interesting because Apple claims a billion active devices, which includes Watches, Macs, iPhones, Apple TVs and iPads. Android’s includes phones, tablets, Chromebooks, smartwatches, and TVs. There might be a lot more iPads in use than Android tablets, though it’s odd how Android tablets keep outselling iPads.

If one ignores the Chromebooks, smartwatches and TVs – and the Macs (about 80-100m) – then it implies that iOS has a bigger share of devices in use than sales stats (80% Android) would suggest. Neat of Google to give us the data.

I also noticed this:

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TVs: With 1 million new device activations every two months, Android TV has doubled its number of users since last year. And today we announced Android TV is revamping its home screen with a new channel-based, content-first experience so you can discover new shows and watch your favorites even faster.

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A run rate of 6m per year has doubled the number of users? That’s not a very big user base by these standards.
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Real lack of interest in virtual reality • WSJ

Miriam Gottfried:

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There were $1.48bn in VR hardware sales in 2016, according to SuperData Research. That is far from the $12.65bn the research firm is forecasting for 2020. That estimate has come down, and there is still reason to question whether VR will get there.

In a March, digital marketing research firm Thrive Analytics asked the question to internet users who were not interested in owning a VR headset. The survey, as summarized by eMarketer, showed many of the expected reasons: the headsets were too expensive, lack of virtual reality content and poor quality of what was out there and fear of motion sickness.

The biggest chunk, some 53%, said they were “just not interested.”

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The problem with VR, at least at present, is that either you spend a ton on a super-high-end PC for a top-end experience (but content is hard to find) or you have the phone version which is much cheaper, and has super-cheap “headsets”.
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Trump fatigue? The good times for politics publishers are over • Digiday

Max Willens:

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Four months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, most politics-focused publishers are tallying monthly traffic totals that are flat, or sometimes even lower, than the totals they fetched during the same period last year, according to comScore data.

In April, Attn:, a policy-focused social publisher that’s quietly turned into a giant of distributed video, saw its monthly traffic totals drop more than 10% year over year. Politico’s declined 3 percent. The Daily Beast, which puts politics front and center on a menu of many topics, saw a steep drop, from over 18 million unique visitors to just 11 million. Even The Hill, which attracted more than twice as many unique visitors — 18 million — this past April than it did a year earlier, has seen its traffic decline for three consecutive months, down from a January high of 25 million unique visitors.

Politics is a seasonal interest for most Americans. But the slide should also give pause to the many publishers that were starting to put politics more front and center to capitalize on interest in the first reality-TV president, and it may also signal that it’s time for even the more laser-focused publications to begin broadening their coverage, particularly on platforms like Facebook.

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Perhaps it’s flat year-on-year because last year was crazy too? Though it’s also engagement (shares etc) that are falling.
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What to know about The Guardian-Rubicon Project lawsuit • Digiday

Jessica Davies on the case where the Guardian news organisation is suing a programmatic ad trader, alleging it held back fees paid by advertisers:

»

Whatever the outcome, big transparency issues exist in ad tech, and publishers across geographies are fighting for more control in the digital media supply chain. The Guardian isn’t the first publisher to have questions for Rubicon Project about hidden fees. Dutch media group De Persgroep was frustrated by certain fees the vendor drew in the last year that the publisher hadn’t initially known about, according to Digiday sources. De Persgroep has not filed a lawsuit.

A spokesperson for the publisher said: “De Persgroep has not filed a lawsuit against Rubicon Project, but [it is] following the discussion closely. We, too, want an ecosystem with transparent cost models and an unbiased exchange for both publisher and buyer. This lawsuit [with the Guardian] is part of the broader debate on transparency in programmatic trading.”

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Rubicon was meant to be the way the Guardian and others escaped the grip of Google and Facebook for ads. Turns out not to have been nirvana at all.
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The strange mix of reasons why bitcoin is setting new price records • Quartz

Joon Ian Wong:

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All markets have their own complexities and odd wrinkles, but bitcoin has a special array of oddities. I spoke to a range of institutional traders, exchange owners, and informed observers of the bitcoin markets. This is the picture that emerged. It connects the dots between (are you ready?): bitcoin’s civil war; Wells Fargo and a Taiwanese banking freeze; an obscure cryptotoken known as Tether; Japanese payments regulations; an explosion of interest in the usually anemic market for altcoins; and the phenomenon known as the initial coin offering (ICO), which is being touted as a mechanism to upend traditional venture capital raising.

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Good luck if you can follow the chain of reasoning behind this. Bitcoin, as the author says, is now the reserve cryptocurrency; all cryptocurrencies that are going to fiat, and vice-versa, pass through it, and any crimp on its liquidity pushes up the price.
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Clean the keyboard of your MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015) and later • Apple Support

»

If your MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015) and later has an unresponsive key, or a key that feels different than the other keys when you press it, follow the instructions below to clean the keyboard with compressed air.

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Hm. Never had this with the old key design, did we?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified