Okayyyy, that’s enough tablet time. Photo by Lars Ploughmann 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. What, again? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Smartwatch market declines 51.6% in the third quarter as platforms and vendors realign • IDC

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The worldwide smartwatch market experienced a round of growing pains in the third quarter of 2016 (3Q16), resulting in a year-over-year decline in shipment volumes. According to data from the International Data Corporation, (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, total smartwatch volumes reached 2.7 million units shipped in 3Q16, a decrease of 51.6% from the 5.6 million units shipped in 3Q15. Although the decline is significant, it is worth noting that 3Q15 was the first time Apple’s Watch had widespread retail availablity after a limited online launch. Meanwhile, the second generation Apple Watch was only available in the last two weeks of 3Q16.

“The sharp decline in smartwatch shipment volumes reflects the way platforms and vendors are realigning,” noted Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC’s Wearables team. “Apple revealed a new look and feel to watchOS that did not arrive until the launch of the second generation watch at the end of September. Google’s decision to hold back Android Wear 2.0 has repercussions for its OEM partners as to whether to launch devices before or after the holidays. Samsung’s Gear S3, announced at IFA in September, has yet to be released. Collectively, this left vendors relying on older, aging devices to satisfy customers.”

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Total sales: 2.7m, of which Apple was 1.1m. Pretty much the entire decline compared to last year is fewer Apple Watch sales. Android Wear’s biggest vendor was Lenovo – 0.1m.
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Spies for hire • The Intercept

Jenna McLaughlin:

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the idea of a UAE-based company recruiting an army of cyberwarriors from abroad to conduct mass surveillance aimed at the country’s own citizens may sound like something out of a bad Bond movie, but based on several months of interviews and research conducted by The Intercept, it appears DarkMatter has been doing precisely that.

Most of those who spoke with The Intercept asked to remain anonymous, citing nondisclosure agreements, fear of potential political persecution in the UAE, professional reprisals, and loss of current and future employment opportunities. Those quoted anonymously were speaking about events based on their direct experience with DarkMatter.

Margaritelli isn’t the only one who insists that DarkMatter isn’t being truthful about its operations and recruitment. More than five sources with knowledge of different parts of the company told The Intercept that sometime after its public debut last November, DarkMatter or a subsidiary began aggressively seeking skilled hackers, including some from the United States, to help it accomplish a wide range of offensive cybersecurity goals. Its work is aimed at exploiting hardware probes installed across major cities for surveillance, hunting down never-before-seen vulnerabilities in software, and building stealth malware implants to track, locate, and hack basically any person at any time in the UAE, several sources explained. As Margaritelli described it in an email to me, “Basically it’s Big Brother on steroids.”

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Microsoft’s evolving hardware business • Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson says Microsoft needs new revenues sources in hardware, because Windows isn’t cutting much mustard:

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Surface has been one of the bright spots of Microsoft’s hardware business over the last two years. Indeed – this home-grown hardware line has compared very favorably to that acquired phones business we were just discussing:

As you can see, Surface has now outsold phones for four straight quarters, and that’s not going to change any time soon. Overall, Surface revenues are growing year on year, which is easier to see if you annualize them:

However, what you can also see from that first Surface chart is that revenues for this product line are starting to settle into a pattern: big Q4 sales, followed by a steady decline through the next three quarters. That’s fine as long as there is new hardware each year to restart the cycle, but from all the reporting I’ve seen it seems the Surface Pro and Surface Book will get only spec bumps and very minor cosmetic changes, which leaves open the possibility of a year on year decline. Indeed, this is exactly what Microsoft’s guidance says will happen:

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We expect Surface revenue to decline as we anniversary the product launch from a year ago.

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I suspect the minor refresh on the existing hardware combined with the push into a new, somewhat marginal, product category (all-in-ones) won’t be enough to drive growth.

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Ugh. “Anniversary” used as a verb. Anyway, the phone business is all but gone. So it’s Surfaces all the way down.
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Samsung offers upgrade program for South Korea Note 7 customers • Reuters

Se Young Lee:

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Samsung Electronics is offering an upgrade program option to Galaxy Note 7 customers in South Korea who trade in their recalled device for a Galaxy S7 phone, marking its latest attempt to retain customers.

In a statement on Monday, Samsung said customers who trade in their Note 7 phone for either a flat-screen or curved-screen version of the Galaxy S7 can trade up for a Galaxy S8 or Note 8 smartphone launching next year through an upgrade program.

The world’s top smartphone maker permanently ended Note 7 sales due to continued reports of fire from the flagship device. In addition to offering refunds or exchanges for a Galaxy S7 smartphone, Samsung has already offered financial incentives amounting to 100,000 won ($88.39) to affected customers in South Korea.

Users in the upgrade program will need to pay only half the price of a Galaxy S7 device, rather than the full amount, before exchanging to the S8 or the Note 8, Samsung said.

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I’m puzzled. What sort of customer would really want to go through a downgrade to an S7/S7 Edge (because they could have bought either already this year, but chose not to) and then in a few months’ time change phone again? It’s going to feel like a bad experience, even with the financial incentive.
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Microsoft to raise prices by up to 22% after slump in pound • Daily Telegraph

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Costs for Microsoft enterprise customers will increase by 13% for computer software and 22% for so-called online cloud services, where the company hosts a customer’s data in a virtual storage centre.

Microsoft is one of the biggest sellers of business software in the UK, led by its suite of Office programs such as Word, Powerpoint and Outlook. Its cloud service, Azure, sells access to vast computing power and is used by customers including the Ministry of Defence.

The price rise, which comes into effect at the start of next year, could cost the Government tens of millions of pounds a year.

While the Cabinet Office did not comment on how much it spends on Microsoft contracts, it is believed to be at least £100m a year.

The intended price rise comes at a bad time for the Government, given a major effort in Whitehall to reduce IT spending as part of a wider focus on civil service costs.

The price rise will only apply to new purchases, rather than ongoing contracts, and Microsoft said it would not increase prices for consumers.

However, the rise is likely to deal a blow to businesses, which may have to raise IT budgets or sacrifice other projects in order to pay for the increased charges.

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So it’s a price rise coming in next year which won’t affect consumers or existing contracts. Seems a bit half-cocked, put like that. I think other price rises are also in the works.
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Why the WikiLeaks attack fizzled • RealClearPolitics

Bill Scher:

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In failing to turn unvarnished internal political machinations into a paralyzing scandal, WikiLeaks may have inadvertently raised the bar on what constitutes a successful act of political cyberwar. If all an email hack accomplishes is the temporary embarrassment of some political aides and supersized serving of gossip for Washington cocktail parties, then the hack is hardly potent ammo.

The truth is, if we saw the raw email from the Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush or Bernie Sanders campaigns we would surely see similar political calculations over tricky issues, deliberations how to quash negative media narratives and intemperate comments made about adversaries or even allies. (Whereas the Trump campaign emails are probably in their own category of insanity.) What we see in the Podesta emails is the grist of political life. It’s doesn’t make our politicians fundamentally dishonest or our democracy a sham.

After seeing how the Clinton sausage got ground, perhaps the voting public will now be more likely to view the contents of stolen emails through the prism of political reality. Without a truly scandalous bombshell, each subsequent cyberattack on Clinton’s team, or that of another politician, may be greeted with bigger and bigger shrugs.

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Yes, we can validate the Wikileaks emails • Errata Security

Rob Graham:

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Recently, WikiLeaks has released emails from Democrats. Many have repeatedly claimed that some of these emails are fake or have been modified, that there’s no way to validate each and every one of them as being true. Actually, there is, using a mechanism called DKIM.

DKIM is a system designed to stop spam. It works by verifying the sender of the email. Moreover, as a side effect, it verifies that the email has not been altered.

Hillary’s team uses “hillaryclinton.com”, which as DKIM enabled. Thus, we can verify whether some of these emails are true.

Recently, in response to a leaked email suggesting Donna Brazile gave Hillary’s team early access to [Democrat-on-Democrat] debate questions [in March, against Bernie Saunders], she defended herself by suggesting the email had been “doctored” or “falsified”. That’s not true. We can use DKIM to verify it.

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Brazile was caught bang to rights (though it was probably unnecessary for the Clinton team to see the questions). But it’s good to know we can do this to validate emails for future leaks, which one can feel sure we will see.
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Banning tablets is best for children • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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A funny thing happened when I banned tablets in my house on weekdays and curtailed their use on weekends. My children, ages 6 and 4, became less cantankerous. They also became happier, more responsive and engaged in more imaginative play. They rediscovered their toys. Outside the home, they became less demanding and better at self-regulating.

Friday, the American Academy of Pediatrics validated my experiment, recommending that children younger than 18 months get zero screen time, and those ages 2 to 5 be limited to one hour a day—half of its prior recommendation. The group recommended that the hour be “high quality programming” that parents watch with their children.

The academy doesn’t set limits for older children, but suggests curtailing screen time before bedtime and when it conflicts with healthy activities…

…Avoiding social media and email on my phone has certainly made me more available to my children, and has helped shape their behavior. I saw how screens affected my children’s lives, and had to think about how to reintroduce screens. I continue to be surprised by what I’m learning from the exercise, and if you’re a parent of young children, you might be too.

“One of the more troubling things I see as a pediatrician is a child getting an immunization and being handed an iPad or an iPhone to try to comfort them afterward,” says Dr. Christakis. “It often works, but think about what’s being displaced there — what they need is a hug, not an iPhone.”

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In short: we’re holding them wrong.
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Here’s what I learned about Julian Assange while working alongside him • BuzzFeed News

James Ball:

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Assange is routinely either so lionised by supporters or demonised by detractors that his real character is lost entirely.

Far from the laptop-obsessed autist he’s often seen as, he’s a charismatic speaker with an easy ability to dominate a room or a conversation. He may have little interest in listening to those around, but he can tell whether or not he has your attention and change his manner to capture it. He has, time and again, proving a savvy media manipulator, marching the mainstream media up the hill and down again to often damp squib press conferences. His technical skills are not in doubt.

What’s often underestimated is his gift for bullshit. Assange can, and does, routinely tell obvious lies: WikiLeaks has deep and involved procedures; WikiLeaks was founded by a group of 12 activists, primarily from China; Israel Shamir never had cables; we have received information that [insert name of WikiLeaks critic] has ties to US intelligence.

At times, these lies are harmless and brilliant: when, on the day the state cables launched, WikiLeaks’ site wasn’t ready (we hadn’t even written the introductory text), the site was kept offline after a short DDoS attack, with Assange tweeting that the site was under an unprecedently huge attack.

Six hours later, when we were done, all eyes were looking: What was so bad in the cables that someone was working so hard to keep the site offline? The dramatic flourish worked, but other lies were dumb and damaging – and quickly erode any kind of trust for those trying to work closely with him.

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Ball is entirely trustworthy on these points (even though Wikileaks boosters will try to deny this). Terrible headline, but excellent piece pointing out that Assange is far from the simple personality that many portrayals would want you to believe.
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China electronics firm to recall some US products after hacking attack • Reuters

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Chinese firm Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co Ltd said it will recall some of its products sold in the United States after it was identified by security researchers as having made parts for devices that were targeted in a major hacking attack on Friday.

Hackers unleashed a complex attack on the Internet through common devices like webcams and digital recorders, and cut access to some of the world’s best known websites in a stunning breach of global internet stability.

The electronics components firm, which makes parts for surveillance cameras, said in a statement on its official microblog that it would recall some of its earlier products sold in the United States, strengthen password functions and send users a patch for products made before April last year.

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It’s a start. Though one that shouldn’t have to be made.
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Not transparent, certainly not accountable: Google and the Right To Be Forgotten • Eerke Boiten’s blog

Boiten went to an event in London on RTBF, where Google’s European PR Peter Barron was on the panel:

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Accountability is even more central to my second point. Barron talked at some length about notifications – i.e., when something has been delisted, the publisher of the information is informed of this by Google. I have argued before that this is done in the first place to stir up a censorship storm. I concede Barron’s comment that these storms have subsided a little now (though several newspapers and the BBC still publish delistings – you will understand why I won’t link to those).

Barron’s justification for these notifications sounded quite credible. Delistings interfere with the publishers’ rights, so they deserve to be told. However, we need to examine that very closely. If Google does something, on behalf of an “injured” third party, that removes a publication from certain search results, Google wishes to be accountable to the publisher for the interference with their rights. So what if Google does something on its own behalf that removes a publication from certain search results? Or just moves it down so far the search results that it is effectively deleted? Would Google admit that the outcome of PageRank incurs an accountability to the web page publishers for how highly ranked their pages are? And, given that there are no third parties involved, would Google seek to accommodate challenges to ranking outcomes on the basis of publishers’ listing rights being infringed? Of course not.

So Google’s “accountability” through notifications is extremely selective. Google chooses to be “accountable” for something it doesn’t want to be doing and for which it can lay the blame elsewhere. It supports naive journalists in their view that Google search is a public good that presents an objective view of the world which gets distorted by RtbF.

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From Dropbox to iCloud Drive: a review and some thoughts • Finer Things in Tech

David Chartier has shifted 1TB of stuff from Dropbox over to iCloud Drive:

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For personal uses, iCloud Drive has performed pretty well for me the past couple months. The speed of saving files to and retrieving files from iCloud Drive feels on par with Dropbox on both iOS and Mac, thanks in part to improvements in macOS Sierra. However, I should restate that I do much less collaboration with raw files these days. I create and manage nearly all of my work in apps and services like Ulysses, Quip, Todoist, and Trello, then share or publish it with others in online systems like WordPress (this site), Weebly (my personal and business sites), Quip, or Google Drive. Of course, your mileage will vary.

The few raw files I still work with are things like PDF books I download, or media resources I snag from Unsplash, Envato, and elsewhere for content and blogging. If I need to receive files, I can of course still use my free Dropbox space, or I can visit Dropbox share links in a browser on any device. When it’s time to share files with others, Dropbox can still work, but so can Droplr.

Others who have made this transition told me there’s a noticeable performance boost to be had by uninstalling Dropbox from a Mac, which I just did yesterday. They weren’t kidding.

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Removing Dropbox speeds things up? This is getting worse and worse.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Google’s aiming to get rid of the unknowns when you browse the web. Photo by Paul Jacobson on Flickr.

Hello web readers! 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. Email readers, don’t read this.

A selection of 12 links for you. May contain truth. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook employees pushed to remove Trump’s posts as hate speech • WSJ

Deepa Seetharaman:

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Facebook—which stands to collect an estimated $300 million from online political advertising this year, according to Nomura analysts—has strived to appear nonpartisan and neutral, amid complaints that the company and key executives favor Democrats. A May report from tech blog Gizmodo alleged Facebook contract workers manipulated its trending topics feature for political purposes. Facebook denied bias, but in August, fired the contractors so that it could run the feature largely by software.

“They are confronting in a very real way for the first time the political dimensions of their platform,” said Anna Lauren Hoffmann, who teaches information ethics at the University of California, Berkeley.

About 44% of Americans get at least some of their news from Facebook, according to Pew Research.

The company insists it is a neutral platform for open debate. Yet it has strict rules around what users can post. The rules, which Facebook has tightened in recent years, ban discrimination toward people based on their race and religion. Facebook typically removes content that violates the rules.

Legal experts say Facebook isn’t bound by the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time rules, which require radio stations and broadcast networks, with exceptions, to devote the same airtime to political candidates.

Issues around Mr. Trump’s posts emerged when he posted on Facebook a link to a Dec. 7 campaign statement “on preventing Muslim immigration.” The statement called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Mr. Trump has since backed away from an outright ban based on religion, saying his policies would target immigrants from countries with a record of terrorism.

Users flagged the December content as hate speech, a move that triggered a review by Facebook’s community-operations team, with hundreds of employees in several offices world-wide.

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Among those who complained directly to Zuckerberg was a Muslim. Facebook has a growing problem: either it gives this stuff to machines (which would probably zap Trump’s posts – so you’d need human oversight) or you accept that you have to do it by humans. So looks like it’s humans, in which case you get called out for your inconsistencies.
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The cheap phone is dead in China – Bloomberg

Bruce Einhorn:

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Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo all make phones that stack up well against most iPhones and Galaxies, and together they ship 40% of the world’s phones in the $500-and-up category that Apple and Samsung dominate.

The average sales price for those leading three Chinese brands has risen above $300, says Jessie Ding, an analyst in Shanghai with market research company Canalys. “People want more premium phones,” she says. “People are now thinking about good quality and service instead of just low prices.” That’s one reason Beijing-based Xiaomi, which made a splash in 2014 and 2015 selling inexpensive devices, has faded; its average phone sales price is about $180.

As their ambitions grow, China’s phone makers are benefiting from a unique agreement the government reached with Qualcomm in 2015. To settle antitrust charges, the San Diego chipmaker agreed to pay a fine of $975m and reduce the royalties it charges in China. Royalties on Qualcomm’s industry-standard technology there are now based on 65% of a given phone’s in-country sales price, not 100%.

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Helpful of the Chinese government. But that trend towards more expensive devices is one to watch.
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Akamai finds longtime security flaw on two million Internet of Things devices • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

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It’s well known that the Internet of Things is woefully insecure, but the most shameful and frustrating part is that some of the vulnerabilities that are currently being exploited could have been eradicated years ago. Now evidence of how these bugs are being used in attacks is calling attention to security holes that are long overdue to be plugged.

New research released this week from the content delivery network Akamai takes a closer look at how hackers are abusing weaknesses in a cryptographic protocol to commandeer millions of ordinary connected devices — routers, cable modems, satellite TV equipment, and DVRs — and then coordinate them to mount attacks. After analyzing IP address data from its Cloud Security Intelligence platform, Akamai estimates that more than 2 million devices have been compromised by this type of hack, which it calls SSHowDowN. The company also says that at least 11 of its customers — in industries like financial services, retail, hospitality, and gaming — have been targets of this attack.

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The Insecurity of Things: part two • Xipiter

Stephen Ridley:

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With some really dead-simple techniques this device was easily compromised. Furthermore not only can you attack your own device, but an attacker could (without purchasing a device) potentially just download the firmware image from the manufacturer (as linked from the manufacturer’s wiki), extract the filesystem image using binwalk and unsquashfs, and navigate to the right directories on the filesystem to retrieve the ssh private keys used to access the manufacturers backend.

From there potentially (if SSH works the way we think it does), this key can be used to access ALL THE OTHER devices like it in the world currently connected to the internet. It should be noted that as the interns discovered these vulnerabilities in this device, they found “prior art” vulnerabilities found by D. Crowley (then of Trustwave Spider Labs) although there was no explicit mention of the ability to potentially access all the other devices via the manufacturer’s servers (via the hardcoded SSH keys).

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Basically, showing how you’d take over one of those IoT devices which brought down a chunk of the internet last week.
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Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon is frustrated by his Apple iPad • Fortune

Barb Darrow:

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Earlier this week, New England Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick unleashed an atypical, long-winded rant (six minutes!) about his mis-behaving Microsoft Surface device. Earlier in the month, he was seen on national TV spiking the tablet.

On Wednesday, Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon had to deal with a malfunctioning Apple iPad before the fourth game of the National League Championship Series (NLCS).

Fox’s fox FS1 commentators noted that Maddon couldn’t use his iPad to enter lineups before the game between the Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers, causing him to spend 90 minutes with technical support before the game to address the issue. Apparently, it was a futile effort because he ended up using his phone to do the job.

It was unclear whether the problem was with the device itself, the software running it, the wireless network—or some combination of all of the above.

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Can’t do real work on tablets, I guess. (Thanks @papnic for the link.)
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The Independent returns to profit after axing newspaper • FT

David Bond:

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The company says its digital switch has been vindicated by significant growth online — from 15.8m unique users in February to 21m in June ahead of the UK’s referendum on EU membership, before falling back to 16.2m in August, according to ComScore, the research firm.

By comparison, ComScore said Mail Online was the biggest newspaper website in the UK with 26.4m unique users in August, while the Guardian had 24m.

Separate figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation show the Independent had 74.3m unique browsers in August 2016 — a 41% year-on-year increase. Its Facebook page has 5m likes — 1.3m more than the Telegraph.

The company says its digital advertising revenues have grown by 45% year on year and that it is likely to record about £20m of revenues in 2016.

With a younger staff on lower salaries and no printing or distribution costs, the Independent said it now had a sustainable long-term future.

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Unexpected. But that last paragraph probably sums it up. Also a smaller staff.
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The weird economics of Ikea • FiveThirtyEight

Oliver Roeder:

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Although [Boston University economist Marianne] Baxter can’t yet prove its particulars — more data cleaning and analysis is necessary for her ultimate Ikea project — there is a sort of evolutionary dynamic at play in the annual Ikea catalog: survival of the fittest furniture. She noticed that the company tends to discontinue products that remain expensive. “If they can’t figure out how to make them more cheaply, or retool them or slightly redesign them, it seems like the things disappear,” she said.

Indeed, the products have evolved. In 1992, part of the Poäng was changed from steel to wood, allowing the chair to ship more densely and efficiently in the company’s flat packs. (“Shipping air is very expensive,” [Ikea product PR manager Marty] Marston said.) And the Lack table was changed from solid wood to a honeycomb “board on frame” construction, decreasing production costs and increasing shipping efficiency. Baxter theorizes, though, that if a product is finicky — requiring design in Sweden, manufacture in China and intricate pieces from Switzerland, say — it may eventually be abandoned.

Marston thought the Darwinian idea was interesting, but that the deletions from the catalog were less about persistently high prices and more about popularity. “If a product doesn’t perform well — we have certain sales expectations — then it will cease to exist. The public didn’t like it for some reason, so why continue to sell it?” she said.

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Apple approached Time Warner about possible merger before AT&T talks • WSJ

Shalini Ramachandran, Dana Mattioli and Keach Hagey:

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Apple approached Time Warner about pursuing a combination a few months ago, and though the discussions didn’t progress beyond a preliminary stage, Apple is now monitoring the media giant’s talks with AT+T, people familiar with the matter said Friday.

AT+T is now in advanced talks to purchase Time Warner, The Wall Street Journal has reported, and a deal could come together within days…

…From Apple’s end, executives under Chief Executive Tim Cook were involved in the earlier talks. Apple has pursued plans to build an online TV service and has begun creating original programming of its own. Before its most recent approach, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of internet software and services, brought up a potential combination in a meeting with Time Warner’s head of corporate strategy Olaf Olafsson last year, the people said, though the talks never went further than that. The Financial Times earlier reported last year’s approach.

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Crazy. Then again, if the cars thing isn’t going to work…
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LG Electronics to eliminate ‘modules’ for its next smartphone (G6) • Korean Electronics News

Keonil Yun:

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LG Electronics is not going to apply modularized structure for its next strategic Smartphone called ‘G6 (tentative)’ that is expected to be released in 2017. It is basically withdrawing its strategy of modularization that was first introduced to G5 in just a year.

According to an industry on the 20th, LG Electronics has decided not to apply modularized Smartphone structure, which was introduced for G5, for G6. It is currently developing G6 according to internal policies. G6 is expected to have an integral structure just like previous LG Smartphones and other products.

“It is heard that LG Electronics has decided not to modularize its next Smartphone.” said multiple representatives from multiple industries. “Corresponding products such as boards and audio chips are currently being prepared accordingly.”

LG Electronics released world’s first modularized Smartphone called G5 at the end of March. Because bottom part of this product can be separated, users can attach additional devices such as audio module or camera module.

At that time, it had drawn huge attention since it was a new attempt that was not done before to previous Smartphones. However LG Electronics was not able to achieve results that it expected because need for modules was not really needed when people have actually started using G5…

…It is heard that LG Electronics is internally worried from withdrawing its modularization strategy. It can possibly lose trust from markets after changing its strategy in just a year and devices that were sold can be useless since they won’t be compatible with Smartphones that will be released in the future.

LG Electronics is focusing on not repeating its mistakes. Also it is planning to restore its benefits through stable products rather than having to put up with risks.

“It probably was not easy for LG Electronics to put up with risks since its Smartphone business is already not doing too well.” said a representative for an industry.

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Let’s see.. we were told LG “will keep toying around” with the modular idea back in the summer. Back in February, I said that “Modularity in the handset kills premium pricing even faster than OS modularity.” In between we’ve seen the death of Project Ara. Motorola is trying it, in a small way; given its losses, I don’t think it will stick with it. Guess modular smartphones aren’t destined to be a thing.
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Google has quietly dropped ban on personally identifiable web tracking – ProPublica

Julia Angwin:

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this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.

The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer.

The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on the keywords they used in their Gmail. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.

The move is a sea change for Google and a further blow to the online ad industry’s longstanding contention that web tracking is mostly anonymous. In recent years, Facebook, offline data brokers and others have increasingly sought to combine their troves of web tracking data with people’s real names. But until this summer, Google held the line.

“The fact that DoubleClick data wasn’t being regularly connected to personally identifiable information was a really significant last stand,” said Paul Ohm, faculty director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law…

…Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville emailed a statement describing Google’s change in privacy policy as an update to adjust to the “smartphone revolution”

“We updated our ads system, and the associated user controls, to match the way people use Google today: across many different devices,” Faville wrote. She added that the change “is 100% optional – if users do not opt-in to these changes, their Google experience will remain unchanged.”

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Personalised ads earn more, and Google now needs to earn more from mobile ads as desktop gets ever less important.
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There is a blind spot in AI research • Nature News & Comment

Kate Crawford and Ryan Calo:

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“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.” This is how computer scientist Pedro Domingos sums up the issue in his 2015 book The Master Algorithm. Even the many researchers who reject the prospect of a ‘technological singularity’ — saying the field is too young — support the introduction of relatively untested AI systems into social institutions…

…As a first step, researchers — across a range of disciplines, government departments and industry — need to start investigating how differences in communities’ access to information, wealth and basic services shape the data that AI systems train on.

Take, for example, the algorithm-generated ‘heat maps’ used in Chicago, Illinois, to identify people who are most likely to be involved in a shooting. A study8 published last month indicates that such maps are ineffective: they increase the likelihood that certain people will be targeted by the police, but do not reduce crime.

A social-systems approach would consider the social and political history of the data on which the heat maps are based. This might require consulting members of the community and weighing police data against this feedback, both positive and negative, about the neighbourhood policing. It could also mean factoring in findings by oversight committees and legal institutions. A social-systems analysis would also ask whether the risks and rewards of the system are being applied evenly — so in this case, whether the police are using similar techniques to identify which officers are likely to engage in misconduct, say, or violence.

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Slow-motion wrecks: how thawing permafrost is destroying Arctic cities • The Guardian

Alec Luhn, in Norilsk:

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Cracking and collapsing structures are a growing problem in cities like Norilsk – a nickel-producing centre of 177,000 people located 180 miles above the Arctic Circle – as climate change thaws the perennially frozen soil and increases precipitation. Valery Tereshkov, deputy head of the emergencies ministry in the Krasnoyarsk region, wrote in an article this year that almost 60% of all buildings in Norilsk have been deformed as a result of climate change shrinking the permafrost zone. Local engineers said more than 100 residential buildings, or one-tenth of the housing fund, have been vacated here due to damage from thawing permafrost.

In most cases, these are slow-motion wrecks that can be patched up or prevented by engineering solutions. But if a foundation shifts suddenly it can put lives at risk: cement slabs broke a doctor’s legs when the front steps and overhanging roof of a Norilsk blood bank collapsed in June 2015. Building and maintenance costs will have to be ramped up to keep cities in Russia’s resource-rich north running.

Engineers and geologists are careful to note that “technogenic factors” like sewer and building heat and chemical pollution are also warming the permafrost in places like Norilsk, the most polluted city in Russia. But climate change is deepening the thaw and speeding up the destruction, at the very same time that Russia is establishing new military bases and oil-drilling infrastructure across the Arctic. Greenpeace has warned that permafrost thawing has caused thousands of oil and gas pipeline breaks.

«

Have a look at the temperatures in Norilsk on your favourite weather app. It’s damn cold. But not cold enough any longer, it seems.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Crazy untruthful partisan posts get shared more on Facebook. Photo by torbakhopper 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. Flim-flam free. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Musical.ly’s teenage revolution: how the trend-setting lip-sync app is changing the music industry • Billboard

Chris Martins:

»

Musical.ly is many things: a hit mobile app that topped the iOS App Store Free chart in July 2015 and hasn’t fallen from the top 40 since; a scorching-hot startup with a $500 million valuation (as estimated by TechCrunch in May) and more than 133 million “Musers” worldwide; and a promotional platform embraced by the music industry for its ability to translate song clips into streams and sales. And with half of all American teens (according to the company’s estimate) using the app, Musical.ly has become a bona fide cultural phenomenon, even inspiring pearl-clutching among “olds,” from parents fretting over sexualized youth and online predators to traditionalists questioning the artistic validity of lip-syncing. It may not be Elvis thrusting his hips or Public Enemy speaking truth to power — but then again, would anyone who’s not a teen admit it if Musical.ly did represent a new frontier in pop?

Like any youthquake, some savvy adults set off the first tremors. “It was organic growth — word-of-mouth,” is how Alex Hofmann, Musical.ly’s 35-year-old president of North America, explains the app’s leap from 10 million total users one year ago to now, when 13 million are added every month. “Teens on other platforms would see someone share a Musical.ly video, like it, download the app and then ask their friends to try it.”

«

link to this extract

Security bug lifetime • codeblog

Kees Cook:

»

In several of my recent presentations, I’ve discussed the lifetime of security flaws in the Linux kernel. Jon Corbet did an analysis in 2010, and found that security bugs appeared to have roughly a 5 year lifetime. As in, the flaw gets introduced in a Linux release, and then goes unnoticed by upstream developers until another release 5 years later, on average. I updated this research for 2011 through 2016, and used the Ubuntu Security Team’s CVE Tracker to assist in the process. The Ubuntu kernel team already does the hard work of trying to identify when flaws were introduced in the kernel, so I didn’t have to re-do this for the 557 kernel CVEs since 2011.

«

Spoiler: it’s still five years. Many eyes don’t do much to bugs. Given how many IoT things rely on Linux, this is concerning.
link to this extract

Hyperpartisan Facebook pages are publishing false and misleading information at an alarming rate • BuzzFeed News

Craig Silverman:

»

The rapid growth of these pages combines with BuzzFeed News’ findings to suggest a troubling conclusion: The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear. This approach has precursors in partisan print and television media, but has gained a new scale of distribution on Facebook. And while it isn’t a solely American phenomenon — the British Labour party found powerful support from a similar voice — these pages are central to understanding a profoundly polarized moment in American life.

For example, in late September, Freedom Daily, a Facebook page with more than 1 million fans, scored a viral hit with a post that filled its audience with racial outrage.

The post linked to an article on the Freedom Daily website with the headline “Two White Men Doused With Gasoline, Set On FIRE By Blacks – Media CENSORED (VIDEO).” The text that accompanied the link on Facebook connected the attack to recent Black Lives Matter protests and urged people to share the post “if you’re angry as hell & aren’t going to take it anymore!”

«

Social media abhors the vacuum of reasonableness.
link to this extract

Nintendo’s next console, Switch, is a console/tablet hybrid coming in March • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

In a three-minute “Preview Trailer” released this morning (and teased last night), Nintendo gave the world the first glimpse of the mysterious “Project NX,” over 19 months after the company first mentioned the “dedicated game platform with a brand-new concept.” The system is called the Nintendo Switch.

As was widely rumored, that “new concept” involves a console/portable hybrid system with two detachable, one-handed controllers that sit alongside a tablet-style screen. Nintendo is referring to these publicly as “Joy-Con” controllers, which “can be employed by numerous people for a variety of gameplay options. They can easily click back into place or be slipped into a Joy-Con Grip accessory, mirroring a more traditional controller.” The system will also support a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller with a more traditional dual-analog stick form factor, and support local multiplayer gaming on multiple Switch tablets at once, according to a press release.

“In addition to providing single and multiplayer thrills at home, the Nintendo Switch system also enables gamers to play the same title wherever, whenever and with whomever they choose,” Nintendo said in a press release announcing the system. “The mobility of a handheld is now added to the power of a home gaming system to enable unprecedented new video game play styles.”

«

I don’t understand why in October you would announce something that won’t be available until March. I believe that a very popular shopping season occurs in between those two dates.

(Also: looks bonkers.)
link to this extract

LeEco’s big vision for the US needs fleshing out • Tech.pinions

Jan Dawson on the latest Chinese entrant hoping to make it big in the US:

»

Aside from the unfinished content story, LeEco’s other big challenge will be branding and marketing. Today, the brand is entirely unfamiliar to US customers, although the company did acquire TV maker Vizio recently. Unless that changes, none of the ecosystem or other benefits the company talked up on Wednesday will make any difference, because no one will ever know about them. LeEco talked up the economic benefits of its direct sales model (its LeMall website is a sort of single-brand Amazon) in terms of cutting out middlemen and reducing marketing and branding spend but the big disadvantage of going online-only is customers won’t encounter the LeEco brand in familiar stores. Vizio TVs will presumably continue to be offered through third-party distribution but it’s less clear that LeEco-branded devices will be.

The other major Chinese consumer tech companies have used both wireless carrier relationships and sponsorships of sports teams and events to gradually familiarize US consumers with their brands but it’s unclear whether LeEco has any similar plans. Starting from the ground up without either third party distribution or a massive brand awareness campaign seems like a recipe for failure. It doesn’t help that, as executives joked on stage, the “Le-” prefix conjures up misleading French associations, as well as being plain awkward when it’s so widely and inconsistently used (some sub-brands use the Le prefix joined to a word, like LeEco, while others use it as a separate prefix, as in the Le Pro3 phone, while the Eco element is used separately in lower case names for product lines like “ecophones” and “ecotvs”).

«

I definitely would have thought that LeEco was a French company if not told otherwise.
link to this extract

Agony, alarm and anger for people hurt by Theranos’s botched blood tests • WSJ

Christopher Weaver:

»

The Journal interviewed more than a dozen patients who got improbable test results from the California lab or Theranos’s other lab in Arizona, including some relating to tests that haven’t been voided or revised. Patients are still grappling with unanswered questions about their results.

The Journal also reviewed undisclosed regulatory documents that quantify the severity of Theranos’s accuracy problems.

Notes from the CMS inspection show that 834 out of 2,890 quality-control checks run on the Edison in October 2014, or 29%, exceeded the company’s threshold of two standard deviations from its average result. Standard deviation is a statistical measurement of variation.

In addition, 80% of the 834 quality-control checks that raised a red flag under Theranos’s internal standards were more than three standard deviations from its average result, the inspection notes show. Theranos has told regulators it used the Edison from November 2013 to June 2015.

«

Numbers on a page, but people on the receiving end: this is the sharp end of overconfident funding.
link to this extract

Zeynep’s Eclectics by zeynep tufekci

»

An eclectic newsletter! My thoughts and notes that are too long for Twitter, not polished enough for my New York Times column, and not ready or a good fit for Facebook or elsewhere. Also notes and reactions about books I’m reading, the cutting room floor from my articles in the New York Times and elsewhere. I’ll include updates as well. None of this is secret, but I’m not archiving my newsletters publicly.

«

Tufekci is so smart; if you’re not following her on Twitter, you should be. This is a must-subscribe. (No indication yet on how often it will come out.)
link to this extract

Hillary Clinton’s three debate performances left the Trump campaign in ruins • Vox

Ezra Klein:

»

Clinton was able to make Trump’s treatment of women the issue in part because she and her campaign had prepared to make Trump’s treatment of women the issue, and in part because she is a woman and her assault on Trump flummoxed his usual mode of defense, which is to dominate and insult the other men on the stage. By the end of the final debate, Trump was reduce to spitting that Clinton was “such a nasty woman,” a line that spoke to both his horror at being challenged by a woman and his complete inability to control what came out of his mouth after 80 minutes on a stage with Clinton.

Two things have been true throughout the debates. One is that Trump has been, at every turn, underprepared, undisciplined, and operating completely without a strategy. In one of the third debate’s most unintentionally revealing moments, Trump said, “I sat in my apartment today … watching ad after false ad, all paid for by your friends on Wall Street,” an inadvertent admission that he was inhaling cable news when he should have been prepping for the debate.

But the other reality is that Clinton has been, at every turn, prepared, disciplined, and coldly strategic. She triggered Trump’s epic meltdown purposely, and kept Trump off balance over multiple weeks that probably represented his last chance to turn the election around.

«

As Klein also points out, her insistence on constantly addressing him as “Donald” seems to have peeved him. Why? Who knows – but that’s the sort of thing that good opposition research finds out. Trump’s team, by contrast, never seems to have found the secret to rattling her.
link to this extract

Debate over: IBM confirms that Macs are $535 less expensive than PCs • Jamf

Jni Asaba:

»

In 2015, IBM let their employees decide – Windows or Mac. “The goal was to deliver a great employee choice program and strive to achieve the best Mac program,” Previn said. An emerging favorite meant the deployment of 30,000 Macs over the course of the year. But that number has grown. With more employees choosing Mac than ever before, the company now has 90,000 deployed (with only five admins supporting them), making it the largest Mac deployment on earth.

But isn’t it expensive, and doesn’t it overload IT? No. IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 – $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan. “And this reflects the best pricing we’ve ever gotten from Microsoft,” Previn said. Multiply that number by the 100,000+ Macs IBM expects to have deployed by the end of the year, and we’re talking some serious savings.

Needless to say, the employees at IBM got it right. And with 73% of them saying they want their next computer to be a Mac, the success will only increase with time.

«

Geez, I thought this debate had been settled in the 1990s, but OK. Five admins is pretty impressive. (How many said “I want a Linux machine”?)
link to this extract

Pixel, iPhone 7, and grading on a curve • iMore

Rene Ritchie:

»

They were segmented like iPhones, priced like iPhones, and they even looked like iPhones — roughly the same shape, with the same “ugly” antenna lines, and the same big-chin-and-forehead bezels. (Despite not having a Home button on the bottom front.)

Google made a point of how they controlled the hardware this time, from design to features. Google could have made the Pixel look like anything — like a Galaxy S7 Edge, like an LG G5, like a Moto X, or like something completely new and refreshing. Google carefully, deliberately, chose to make it look like an iPhone 6s, though. And that means they get to own that choice. As do we.

So, everyone who’d been criticizing Apple and iPhone design immediately called Google out for aping it?

Not so much.

Well, at least they called Google and Pixel out for the same things they called Apple and iPhone out for?

Again, not so much.

Surely they drew the line at Google’s 2016 flagship missing optical image stabilization — not just in the regular-size, but in the Plus XL model as well — stereo speakers, and water resistance — things that were pointed to last year as indicators Apple was falling behind?

Turns out, not deal-breakers either.

It’s almost like the Pixel is being graded on a curve. And that’s terrible for consumers. “You slagged iPhone for XYZ, but now that Google has XYZ, but is missing ABC, it’s the greatest thing ever? Um…. close browser, delete bookmark!”

«

The tech press’s view of Google, and especially its (many) hardware efforts, bears examination. There’s a lot of contradiction in there.
link to this extract

Feds walk into a building, demand everyone’s fingerprints to open phones • Forbes

Thomas Fox-Brewster:

»

In what’s believed to be an unprecedented attempt to bypass the security of Apple iPhones, or any smartphone that uses fingerprints to unlock, California’s top cops asked to enter a residence and force anyone inside to use their biometric information to open their mobile devices.

FORBES found a court filing, dated May 9 2016, in which the Department of Justice sought to search a Lancaster, California, property. But there was a more remarkable aspect of the search, as pointed out in the memorandum: “authorization to depress the fingerprints and thumbprints of every person who is located at the SUBJECT PREMISES during the execution of the search and who is reasonably believed by law enforcement to be the user of a fingerprint sensor-enabled device that is located at the SUBJECT PREMISES and falls within the scope of the warrant.” The warrant was not available to the public, nor were other documents related to the case.

«

That’s not how warrants should work. But legal precedent suggests that taking fingerprints, even without permission, doesn’t break US law. Question: can you force someone to apply their fingerprint to something they own?
link to this extract

iPhone 7 Plus: a tale of two personalities • Cellular Insights

“Milan MP” put the Qualcomm LTE modem up against the Intel LTE modem in the two models of iPhone to the test. The Intel one performs poorly:

»

To put this into perspective, we have compared the edge of cell performance of a few other flagship devices to see how these iPhones compare in less than favorable conditions:

In all tests, the iPhone 7 Plus with the Qualcomm modem had a significant performance edge over the iPhone 7 Plus with the Intel modem. We are not sure what was the main reason behind Apple’s decision to source two different modem suppliers for the newest iPhone. Considering that the iPhone with the Qualcomm modem is being sold in China, Japan and in the United States only, we can not imagine that modem performance was a deciding factor.

«

When you have multiple suppliers, it’s almost certain you’ll get variation between them. In something like this, Intel is so far behind it’s not funny.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: for another view on Bill Belichick dumping the tablets, read Peter Bright at Ars Technica: Patriots’ Bill Belichick dumps Surface tablets in five minute rant. Still not sure it’s great for Microsoft’s reputation.

See the guy in the middle not using a Microsoft Surface? That’s Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots. Photo by FLC 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. Use as shampoo at own risk. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Scientists accidentally discover efficient process to turn CO2 into ethanol • Popular Mechanics

Avery Thompson:

»

Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol, potentially creating a new technology to help avert climate change. Their findings were published in the journal ChemistrySelect.

The researchers were attempting to find a series of chemical reactions that could turn CO2 into a useful fuel, when they realized the first step in their process managed to do it all by itself. The reaction turns CO2 into ethanol, which could in turn be used to power generators and vehicles.

The tech involves a new combination of copper and carbon arranged into nanospikes on a silicon surface. The nanotechnology allows the reactions to be very precise, with very few contaminants.

«

I’ll drink to that.
link to this extract

Good enough defeats great • Chuqui.com

Chuq von Rospach:

»

Photography is more popular now than ever before with billions of new images being created each day. And that’s what’s really driving the changes in photography and the thing so many photographers have trouble understanding: the value in their images was in scarcity, not in their skill. And as imagery becomes increasingly available and the technology of cameras makes it easier and easier to take better images, which shrinks the part of photography where a professional photographer adds value.

Or more precisely, where a professional photographer adds value that a buyer cares about, because when something becomes “good enough” the buyer really doesn’t care how much better yours is. At that point, price and discoverability win.

“Good enough” wins, and it will kill great, because the number of people who care about great is too small to sustain a big industry.

It can sustain a small industry, and that’s what photography is turning into: effectively, if you shoot with a DLSR or a Mirrorless system you are now photography’s equivalent of an audiophile, arguing to someone with iTunes Music and a set of earbuds that they really ought to buy this $1200 pre-amp.

Not gonna happen. What they have is good enough.

«

So many people overlook this; the point about audiophiles is particularly apt.
link to this extract

Google Assistant is only an incremental advance over current voice search • Search Engine Land

Greg Sterling:

»

You want it to do more. That was my feeling about the Google Assistant after using the new Pixel XL for several days.

The Pixel is a very nice phone with a great camera and a beautiful screen. It’s going to be a hit. But an iPhone killer it is not.

Google is promoting the Pixel as “The first phone with the Google Assistant built in.” The Google Assistant is useful and holds great promise, but in this “1.0” version, Google has oversold it. What you get is a user experience identical to what Google is delivering in Allo, but with voice playback. Allo’s version of the Assistant is mute.

Danny Sullivan discusses what he feels are shortcomings around Google Assistant usability on MarketingLand. He focuses on the fact that you can’t manually type a question into Google Assistant; it can only be initiated by voice. My frustrations were not focused on that issue so much as the fact that you can’t hold a true “conversation” with the Assistant.

«

I think this is far too short-term. This year’s Pixel is just the very beginning; Google has big plans for Assistant, and for Pixel, and they’re bound together. Judging Assistant on what it’s like today won’t compare with what it’s like in six months, which won’t compare with a year or four years.
link to this extract

Donald Trump is on a presidential death march we’ve never seen before • The Ringer

Tim Miller has been there, done that:

»

On Jeb Bush’s campaign, we experienced one of the most painful and seemingly unending death marches imaginable. From the top of the polls in June to all but dead by October, with three long winter months to go before preliminary voting even began. There are days when you just dream of not getting out of bed and having to see or talk to anyone to just have a momentary respite from the constant reminder of your failure. Any good mood could be stripped away by one glance at your phone revealing a new poll showing the campaign losing ground. It is all-encompassing.

Yet every day you have to wake up with steely resolve and go out into the world and make the case for why you or your candidate are the best person to lead, even when it appears that you will not. Why people should ignore all the polls and the news and the criticism and put their faith in you, even when you’ve already lost faith that you can actually win.

It can be too much for staffers to bear. In 2007, on John McCain’s first death march  —  he resurrected only to march again in 2008  —  I was working for the campaign in Iowa when news came down that there were going to be layoffs. When I was brought into the campaign manager’s office to hear my fate, I am embarrassed to report that I was overcome with despair after I heard the news — I had been retained. My death march was going to continue.

As hard as it is on the staff, it is the candidate who faces the real test.

«

This is so insightful, and so easily forgotten: how do you keep psychologically up when you know you are going to be publicly kicked to hell?
link to this extract

Apple listed as an exhibitor at MWC 2017 • FierceWireless

Colin Gibbs:

»

Apple appears to be scheduled to have an official presence at Mobile World Congress next year in Barcelona in a move that would mark a dramatic shift for the company.

The Mobile Network reported this morning that Apple is listed as an exhibitor on Mobile World Congress’s website, having booked three meeting rooms. The company is scheduled to be in Hall 8 at the App Planet Stand as well as two locations in the walkway stand above Hall 2.

«

This would be a hell of a change. Apple has never, ever exhibited at MWC.
link to this extract

Apple, Samsung, and good design — inside and out • The New Yorker

Om Malik:

»

In 2012, a jury told Samsung to pay a billion dollars in damages to Apple. The award was reduced to five hundred and forty-eight million dollars last year, and Samsung is now challenging about four hundred million of that amount. The Supreme Court will weigh in on whether damages should be awarded based on the entire phone, or just on those parts that infringed Apple’s patents.

That Samsung is facing such steep costs suggests the appeal of the original Apple design. When I asked John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, why, then, people have turned on the design of the iPhone 7, he pointed out that perhaps these critics “seem to believe that there’s some as yet unimaginable transcendence that can happen in a small, palm-shaped, rectangular device.” Maeda said that he spent time with designers at Sony and felt their frustration designing a television set “because all you can really do is design the rectangle that the TV sits within. . . . Everything else around that screen really doesn’t matter.” The same problem holds for the iPhone. All that matters is the screen—its size, brightness, and resolution. “Now that we have all those dimensions sated, it’s basically the challenge of designing a TV set all over again,” he added.

«

link to this extract

Gene therapy is curing haemophilia • MIT Technology Review

Antonio Regalado:

»

Sure, gene therapy has been tried before. What’s different is that Spark’s therapy so far appears to work well every time it’s attempted—a consistency that’s eluded previous efforts. “Right now this looks very close to being as good as it gets,” says Edward Tuddenham, a hematologist at University College London, who led a competing study and consults with some of Spark’s rivals.

The results are satisfying news for people like Maurits, as well as for scientists who’ve struggled for three decades to get gene therapy right. Two gene therapies for ultra-rare inherited disease are approved in Europe, including one cleared last month to treat severe immune deficiency.

But hemophilia could be the big one. It affects about one in 5,000 men (women are rarely affected). And there’s already a lucrative $10-billion-a-year market in blood factor replacements. “Curing hemophilia would be a signal to the marketplace that gene therapy has hit prime time,” says Eric Faulkner, who studies disruptive medicines at Evidera, a consultancy.

Only a larger study will reveal for sure whether Spark’s treatment proves out. “This is four subjects. We are going to need more,” says Katherine High, the hematologist who is Spark’s president and founder. “If you saw that in 40 subjects, then maybe … well, it’s very exciting.”

«

Gene therapy has been a “next year, for sure!” technology for ages. Let’s wait for the bigger test. Wonder how this would go down with the factor IX makers: there’s a lot of money in that business.
link to this extract

The iPlayer is fading away as internet video booms – what is the BBC’s next online trick? #iplayer • Talk About Local

William Perrin in May 2015:

»

In the wider internet beyond the BBC there has been a colossal growth in the use of video – the numbers for this Adobe report in the USA or this for the EU are staggering.  So by comparative standards the iPlayer is struggling.

There are many reasons this might be:

BBC strategy over recent years has been deeply conservative, regarding the internet largely as a form of playout for Radio and TV content, rather than a creative medium in its own right.

video and radio on the iPlayer is served up in huge lumps, whole shows at a time, just like on telly.  It is nearly impossible to share, particularly to someone’s mobile.  If for instance you are daring enough as a humble citizen to disagree with the great creative mind that created the 45 minute show and just want to share with your mates the brilliant bit at 37.45 where Anne gets her head chopped off you can’t link to it – you are forced to link to the whole damn thing – YouTube fixed this years ago.

«

Latest data shows iPlayer usage actually declining on mobile, though growing on TV; this inability to share snippets looks likely to be a cause. But iPlayer has, after its initial shocking success, been allowed to drift; it’s not adapting to the world of short sharing.
link to this extract

Agent of Influence 2.0 • Medium

“The Grugq”, with a criticism of The Intercept’s coverage of the leaked DNC and Hillary Clinton emails, quoting Jeremy Rue of UC Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism:

»

[This post] speaks to a problem in journalism when entities try to use journalists as distributors for their message. Journalists like to claim simply publicizing information doesn’t mean advocating any one side (a form of RT != endorsement) but in a subtle way it always does. By disseminating information, journalists play a significant role in promoting it. Even in an age of social media, journalists still hold an influential role of validating a story. (Just as when people complain that mainstream media isn’t covering an issue, when social media has disseminated it to numbers far beyond what MSM reaches.)

«

The Intercept’s reporting on emails which show, surprise, that politicians try to influence journalists has seemed a little pearl-clutching.
link to this extract

Bill Belichick conference call transcript 10/18 • New England Patriots

Belichick is head coach of the American football team; Microsoft pays the NFL bazillions to get touchline coaches to use Surface tablets. Now read on:

»

As you probably noticed, I’m done with the tablets. I’ve given them as much time as I can give them. They’re just too undependable for me. I’m going to stick with pictures as several of our other coaches do as well because there just isn’t enough consistency in the performance of the tablets, so I just can’t take it anymore. The other communication systems involve the press box to the coaches on the field, and then the coach on the field, the signal caller, or the coach-to-quarterback, coach-to-signal caller system. Those fail on a regular basis. There are very few games that we play, home or away, day, night, cold, hot, preseason, regular season, postseason, it doesn’t make any difference; there are very few games where there aren’t issues in some form or fashion with that equipment. And again, there’s a lot of equipment involved, too. There are headsets in the helmets, there’s the belt pack, that communication, there’s a hookup or connection to internet service or that process and so forth with the coaches and the press box. So, there are a number of pieces of equipment, there is a number of connections that are on different frequencies. Again, not that I know anything about this but as it has been explained to me there are a lot of things involved and inevitably something goes wrong somewhere at some point in time. I would say weekly we have to deal with something. Dan Famosi is our IT person and he does a great job of handling those things. This is all league equipment so we don’t have it. I mean we use it but it isn’t like we have the equipment during the week and we can work with it and ‘OK, this is a problem. Let’s fix this.’ That’s not how it works. We get the equipment the day of the game, or I’d say not the day of the game but a few hours before the game and we test it and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

«

The branding is so good he doesn’t even know their name.
link to this extract

Peak iPhone carrier expansion strategy • The Technalyzer

Eduardo Archanco:

»

The iPhone carrier expansion strategy had a clear goal for Apple: support the growth of its new business. The above graph shows us how little Apple earned with the iPhone in its early years. Not even $15 billion between 2007 and 2009.

But something happened in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, revenues doubled the amount generated in the three previous years (from $15 billion in 2007, 2008 and 2009 to $30 billion in 2010). In 2011, revenues doubled again, from $30 billion to $60 billion.

What was going on?

«

This is a great piece of research, which bears out a simple metric: the more phone carriers you’re on, the more phones you’ll tend to sell. But it’s the subtleties of regions that tells the important story.
link to this extract

Twitter goes virtual reality: hires team, preps Periscope 360 video • Variety

Janko Roettgers:

»

Twitter has hired AngelHack founder Gregory Gopman to work on its nascent virtual reality (VR) initiative, Variety has learned. The company may add native 360-degree video integration as well as 360-degree video live streaming to its products in the coming months.

«

Very hard to know why anyone at Twitter thinks this is a good idea when it is bleeding red ink, hugely overstaffed and is not going to be bought by anyone.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Your first port of call to see Apple and Google’s newest trademarks. Photo by kingston99 on Flickr.

Thanks to all those who came to my talk on Tuesday evening in London on “Social networks and the truth”. I’ll aim to put up the slides, with some commentary, on this site in the next week or so.

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

Shame on Y Combinator • Marco.org

Marco Arment:

»Y Combinator is extremely influential in tech startups and startup culture.

Peter Thiel, an investor who often participates in Y Combinator, is donating $1.25m to Donald Trump’s political efforts, which has incited outrage among the tech community with many calling for Y Combinator to sever ties with Thiel.

Y Combinator has apparently decided not to. President Sam Altman defended this position in a blog post, framed as a Clinton endorsement, that begins with a partial overview of how reprehensible and dangerous Trump is, but ends with a defense of continuing Thiel’s involvement in Y Combinator that’s effectively framed as a free-speech or tolerance issue.

«

Altman ties himself in knots, suggesting that having Thiel around is a sort of “diversity” thing. That’s right – what Y Combinator’s board really needs is a gay right-wing rich white man, to balance out all those straight left-wing rich white men.

Arment is having none of it:

»Wrapping reprehensible statements or actions as “political beliefs” doesn’t protect them or exempt their supporters from consequences. Racism is racism. Sexual assault is sexual assault. Labeling reprehensible positions as “political beliefs” is a cowardly, meaningless shield.

«

Expect this to develop over the next week or so. Altman is going to wake up with the cognitive dissonance pinging around his brain.
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Disney dropped Twitter pursuit partly over image • Bloomberg

Alex Sherman , Chris Palmeri , and Sarah Frier:

»Walt Disney Co. decided not to pursue a bid for Twitter Inc. partly out of concern that bullying and other uncivil forms of communication on the social media site might soil the company’s wholesome family image, according to people familiar with management’s thinking.

The producer of family fare like “Finding Dory” had gone so far as to hire two investment banks, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Guggenheim Partners LLC, to help evaluate a bid for Twitter. Disney management also listened to a presentation about the business from Twitter executives, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private.

There were other reasons for Disney not to pursue Twitter. The social media pioneer, creator of the 140-character tweet, is losing money and yet sports a market value of almost $12 billion. That would a big deal even for Disney, which has a market value 12 times that. Some of Disney’s largest investors called the company over the past few weeks to express their displeasure with a Twitter purchase for those reasons, people close to the companies said.

«

Everyone hates Twitter who isn’t Twitter.
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Samsung’s uneven handling of Galaxy Note 7 fires angers Chinese • The New York Times

Sui-Lee Wee:

»Zhang Sitong was saving a friend’s phone number on his Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone when it started to vibrate and smoke. He threw it on the ground and told his friend to start filming.

Two employees from Samsung Electronics showed up at his house later that day, he said, offering a new Note 7 and about $900 in compensation on the condition that he keep the video private. Mr. Zhang angrily refused. Only weeks before, even as Samsung recalled more than two million Note 7s in the United States and elsewhere, the company had reassured him and other Chinese customers that the phone was safe.

“They said there was no problem with the phones in China. That’s why I bought a Samsung,” said Mr. Zhang, a 23-year-old former firefighter. “This is an issue of deception. They are cheating Chinese consumers.”…

…After he rejected the offer from Samsung, Mr. Zhang quit his job and hit the road. He joined up with Hui Renjie, another man who said his Note 7 had also blown up, to visit laboratories to figure out the problem with their phones. The trip and the testing were paid for by CCTV [China’s state broadcaster], which featured the two in Tuesday’s report.

In the report, CCTV said an independent lab could not determine the cause of the fire that consumed Mr. Zhang’s phone. It said an external heat source was not responsible for the fire that destroyed Mr. Hui’s phone.

«

This might just be accident – some phones do combust – but chances are not. And it was already struggling for sales in China.
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Five reasons why Netflix just said no to China • Tech In Asia

Steven Millward:

»1. China’s streaming sites are really strong
China has nearly a dozen well-established and well-funded video sites run by some of its biggest tech giants – like Alibaba-owned Youku and Baidu spin-off Qiyi.

They started out as spaces for people to upload videos of their kid falling off a bike, but now they’re focusing a lot more on movies and TV series – ones they license from around the world, as well as some commissioned by the companies themselves.

All these Chinese streaming sites are largely free and ad-supported, even for big-name shows and films.

2. Prices are low
But… an increasing amount of content is being restricted to “VIP” users who pay a monthly or annual fee. Jack Ma’s ecommerce powerhouse Alibaba took that one step further just over a year ago with the launch of its subscription-only streaming service, TBO, which is available only to owners of its set-top box.

As Chinese consumers move slowly away from piracy and ad-supported streaming, companies are being careful to make the price tag as tiny as possible.

On both TBO and Youku, Alibaba charges just over five bucks per month or US$59 per year. Those are way below the US$10 monthly fee Netflix charges in the US – or even the more gentle US$8 in India.

3. Censorship and restrictions are crazy
This is actually the biggest barrier to Netflix – China’s media environment is not just “challenging,” the legislation is downright hostile to foreign companies.

«

Three’s more than enough.
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Driverless cars will be like ‘Learners’, so we’ll bully them • The Memo

Oliver Smith:

»Surveying some 12,000 drivers, the London School of Economics and Goodyear found that many drivers expect these autonomous cars to be extra cautious and patient on the road, and that they plan to take ruthless advantage of this.

“The autonomous cars are going to stop. So you’re going to mug them right off,” said one participant. “They’re going to stop and you’re just going to nip round.”

The survey found that especially among more “competitive” drivers driverless cars are perceived as a potential nuisance, an opportunity to take advantage of, or “bully” on the roads.

Overall there was a feeling that autonomous vehicles would lack “common sense” on the roads.

So next time you see a car struggling to edge out on a roundabout, will you be the sympathetic one to let the driverless car out?

«

These cars are going to get slaughtered in London traffic.
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We’re afraid of getting hacked, but we’re not doing much about it • Bloomberg

Max Chafkin:

»Since the group last polled the public in 2014, the percentage of people worried about threats like malware and identity theft either fell or held constant. This year’s poll found that a large majority of Americans, 69%, is concerned about email hacking—but that’s down from 71% in 2014.

That’s surprising, given that the 2014 poll was conducted before the Sony Pictures hack, widely considered a wakeup call that companies should be more careful with their data.

Most people don’t appear to have taken this message to heart, said Stefan Hankin, the Lincoln Park Strategies pollster. “People are saying, ‘I’m not the DNC, I’m not Hillary’s campaign,’” Hankin said. “People should be freaked out, but they’re not connecting the dots.”

Not yet, anyway. Hankin thinks that at some point consumers will begin to punish companies that don’t care for their data. “We’re one more hack away,” he said, from people beginning to take security and privacy more seriously.

«

Poll paid for by Craig Newmark of Craigslist.
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The “social graph” is neither • Pinboard Blog

The peerless Maciej Ceglowski on Silicon Valley’s over-eagerness to create graphs out of “links” between people:

»But when you start talking about building a social graph that transcends any specific implementation, you quickly find yourself in the weeds. Is accepting someone’s invitation on LinkedIn the same kind of connection as mutually following them on Twitter? Can we define some generic connections like ‘fan of’ or ‘follower’ and re-use them for multiple sites? Does it matter that you can see who your followers are on site X but not on site Y?

One way to solve this comparison problem is with standards. Before pooling your data in the social graph, you first map it to a common vocabulary. Google, for example, uses XFN as part of their Social Graph API. This defines a set of about twenty allowed relationships. (Facebook has a much more austere set: close_friends, acquaintances, restricted, and the weaselly user_created).

But these common relationships turn out to be kind of slippery. To use XFN as my example, how do I decide if my cubicle mate is a friend, acquaintance or just a contact? And if I call him my friend, should I interpret that in the northern California sense, or in some kind of universal sense of friendship?

In the old country, for example, we have two kinds of ‘friendship’ (distinguished by whether you address one another with the informal pronoun) and going from one status to the other is a pretty big deal; you have to drink a toast with your arms all in a pretzel and it’s considered a huge faux pas to suggest it before both people feel ready. But at least it’s not ambiguous!

And of course sex complicates things even more. Will it get me in hot water to have a crush on someone but have a different person as my muse? Does spouse imply sweetheart, or do I have to explicilty declare that (perhaps on our 20th anniversary)? And should restrainingOrder be an edge or a node in this data model?

«

It’s five years old, but still perfectly nails all the flawed attempts by sites to make us fit into their “graphs”.
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‘We’ve created a monster’: Publishers vent ad tech frustrations • Digiday

Jessica Davies:

»“What used to be small [exchange] partners have now totally disintermediated us from our customers, our control of pricing and distribution,” said a national newspaper programmatic director who preferred to stay anonymous. “We’ve created a monster which now has greater influence than we do.”

We spoke to a range of national newspaper and magazine publishers about their biggest concerns. All spoke under condition of anonymity. Here are the takeaways:

1) Eroding Trust
Publishers, both large and niche, are more suspicious of ad tech’s “agenda” than ever for a mix of reasons. Chief among them: the shift in power. “In the early days of programmatic, publishers gave ad tech a foothold, supporting vendors on the promise of partnership, empowerment and incremental business value,” said one programmatic chief at a national newspaper. That has certainly worked: Publishers have managed to squeeze much-needed additional revenue as a direct result of ad tech partners. The same exec likened this relationship to that of a “crocodile having its teeth cleaned by a plover bird,” to both parties’ mutual benefit and happy co-existence.

But somewhere along the way, an imbalance has taken root. “For publishers and tech, it’s developed into a perverse situation: akin to a leech growing bigger than the body from which it draws blood,” said the exec. “As a result, we’ve become hugely suspicious of ad tech’s agenda, which we’ve found to be driven by aggressive pursuit of short-term business value.”

«

There are plenty more. Jared Diamond’s investigation into civilisations’ collapse suggests that overcomplexity strangles them. Ad tech and online news increasingly looks like an example of that, happening before our eyes. Eventually both collapse.
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Companies try out selfies as password alternatives • WSJ

Trisha Thadani:

»Selfies, long derided as a symbol of narcissism and oversharing, have found a more serious purpose.

Companies and government agencies—ranging from the ride-hailing service Uber Technologies Inc. and credit-card giant MasterCard Inc. to the Alabama Department of Revenue—are asking people to snap self-portraits on their smartphones as proof of identity.

As the quality of smartphone cameras improves and facial-recognition software becomes more affordable, the digital future might involve fewer convoluted passwords and more selfies. But there’s a downside: some cybercrime experts worry that people might be too quick to offer up their smiling faces, saying the technology is rife with privacy and security concerns.

“People see this technology and presume that it is automatically safe, but in the end, it all just comes down to math,” said Marc Goodman, a global security consultant. and author of the book “Future Crimes.”“There is nothing safer about [facial recognition], except that it rules out the challenges of password management.”

«

At least you don’t have “face123”. But you are relying on the facial recognition system’s false positive/negative rate.
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LG V20 will cost $799 unlocked from Newegg and B&H, include free G Pad tablet • Android Police

Richard Gao:

»While customers who pre-ordered the V20 from select carriers will get the $150 B&O PLAY H3 in-ear headphones as a launch bonus, those of you who buy from B&H or Newegg will have a $150 LG G Pad 7.0″ tablet thrown in instead. Considering this G Pad’s 800p screen, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage, I think I’d rather have the headphones.

The G Pad’s specs may be weak, but the V20’s certainly aren’t. The phone sports a 5.7″ 1440p display, a Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage, 16MP and 8MP rear cameras, and a removable 3200mAh battery. It’s also got an excellent DAC, and it’s (technically) the first phone to ship with Android 7.0 Nougat.

«

I don’t see that LG’s brand is strong enough, nor any of those specs exclusive in any way, to justify that price. Sure, iPhones are pricey – but Apple brings the iOS ecosystem exclusively to them, along with the stores and extras. LG brings exactly the same stuff that every other Android OEM in the US does, namely Google Play and other Google services.

The only thing that might swing it for a few people is the removable battery – but that’s beginning to look like a truly antiquated feature.
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The boy geniuses of Silicon Valley are totally deluded if they think they can fix online dating • Daily Telegraph

Zoe Strimpel is well qualified to talk on this, as she is completing a PhD in the history of dating:

»Is it better to date via niche sites like the pro-beard app Bristlr, huge sites like Plenty of Fish, expensive sites like eHarmony, or free ones like OkCupid? Should the “algorithm” control who you see, or should you? Are people even capable of engaging in proper conversations anymore? Impossible to say.

I would suggest that their problem is insurmountable. That is to say that a healthy haul of complete weirdos (and indeed pleasant but woefully incompatible try-hards) is inextricable from internet dating as an activity. Shorn of “co-presence” (sociological jargon for being in the same space at the same time as another person) there is no easy way to ensure compatibility. And without the robust quality control which comes with recommendations through friends and real-life social networks, it’s hard to be sure of what you’re getting. But that is the price we pay for the one thing, the only thing, that technology can do for dating: sheer numbers.

Online dating is about scale. It drastically decreases the cost, and thereby increases the frequency, of your contact with potential partners. They say there’s plenty more fish in the sea; why not be a trawler? Of course all these extra “contact hours” mean you are much more likely to encounter people you don’t want to; that’s the nature of the beast. No $7 fee, no option to “like” a photo, no being “dropped into a story”, will do the rest of the work. The bare truth is that if the people you meet are wrong, you’ll need to meet more. Denizens of the dating world don’t need new app features: they need patience.

«

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Why Jamaica knows about Apple’s new products before the rest of the world — Quartz

Joon Ian Wong and Christopher Groskopf:

»The tech giants are exploiting a US trademark-law provision that lets them effectively claim a trademark in secret. Under this provision, once a mark is lodged with an intellectual property office outside the US, the firm has six months to file it with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). When the firm does file in the US, it can point to its original application made abroad to show that it has a priority claim on the mark.

In the meantime, though, the provision prevents competitors from guessing at a firm’s product plans from public filings. “Competitors could search, ‘What has Apple filed for? What are they thinking about?’” says Nehal Madhani of legal-software provider Alt Legal, who has researched the issue. Think of it as arbitraging global intellectual-property laws.

The filings made overseas aren’t, of course, actually secret—they’re just not easy to access if you can’t go in person. For instance, the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office allows visitors to search filings in person at its office in Kingston. People can also ask the office to search filings for them, but a Jamaican address is required to receive the results, and the process takes three weeks. A lawyer in Jamaica, however, can be appointed to perform the search, the office told Quartz. It said it has no current plans to put its filings database online. Alt Legal compiled a list of 65 other countries with offline trademark databases like Jamaica’s.

«

This is a story about Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, among others. You’ll know Apple’s brand really has trouble when headlines on stories like this one mention Google rather than Apple. (Notice how Microsoft has faded from view in that sense.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Facial recognition systems depends on knowing how much faces vary. Photo by TheSeafarer on Flickr.

Last chance: it’s tonight.

Going to be in London on October 18th? I’ll be giving a talk: “Social Networks and the Truth“:

How many people do you follow on Facebook or Twitter whose political views you fundamentally disagree with?

It’s probably in the single digits. Yet there are millions of them out there. So why aren’t you following them? And if you aren’t, does that make their views wrong – or yours?

What happens when an election cycle or a referendum runs around opposing camps of social media opinions? How important are news media in such a situation? And would you believe that being online is polarising us, rather than making us more willing to listen to other viewpoints?

This talk will explore that – and its consequences.

Some tickets left; £10 secures your place. Discounts available: http://bit.ly/2dhMMhy

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. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How a facial recognition mismatch can ruin your life • The Intercept

Ava Kofman:

»In 2009, following the National Academy of Sciences’ call for stricter scientific standards to underpin forensic techniques, the FBI formed the Facial Identification Scientific Working Group to recommend uniform standards and best practices for the subjective practice of facial comparison. But the working group’s mission soon ran up against an objective difficulty: Like some other forensic sciences, facial comparison lacks a statistical basis from which its conclusions may be drawn.

This is, in part, because no one knows the probability of a given feature’s distinctiveness. As a FAVIAU slide on the “Individualization of People from Images” explained, “Lack of statistics means: conclusions are ultimately opinion-based.” To remedy this flaw, a 2008 FBI report recommended that the agency undertake research to quantify the frequency of facial features. But such efforts, which have been underway since at least the late 19th century, have so far proved inconclusive.

“What is similar enough? Nobody can tell you. It’s in the eye of the beholder,” said Itiel Dror, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. “You need to know that if this person has a right nostril bigger than the left nostril, are the chances one out of a million or is it every second person?”

«

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Google has unleashed Factivism to smite the untruthy • The Register

Andrew Orlowski:

»A year ago Google floated the idea that it should now act as an arbiter, a kind of Ministry of Truth, by ranking search results according to its own metric of accuracy. Now, just in time for the 2016 Elections, Google News is going to give factivism a lift by promoting “fact checking” sites into news clusters, and giving “fact checking” stories a special tag. The tag will indicate that you can believe the tagged stories a bit more than you can the others. Not surprisingly, this has caused some disquiet.

For a start, “fact checking” sites are just a bit more subtle about advancing an agenda than other PR or activism hubs. Is it sufficient to self-certify as a fact-checking site to gain the promotion, and boost in attention? Who checks the fact checkers?

One fatal flaw is that it supposes the existence of a Brahmin caste, a Priesthood of dispassionate fact-checkers, who will deliver a verdict everybody will trust. Such a Priesthood doesn’t exist, and given what a decade of dubious appeals to authority, with the media complicit in these exaggerated and often apocalyptic tales – people are not likely trust what it says anyway.

«

I’m still wondering how Google knows whether a site using the fact-checking schema really checks facts.
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Could Limited Ad Tracking make Apple the largest ‘adblocker’? • MIDiA Research

Karol Severin:

»You may have noticed the setting on your iPhones and iPads called ‘Limit Ad Tracking’ – LAT (Setting➡️Privacy➡️Advertising➡️Limit Ad Tracking), or if you are most people, you may not have. Toggle it on, and much of your user data tracking for ad purposes will be disabled.

If you’re wondering what it is and why I’m writing about it, in short this means that ad companies are unable provide as individually targeted ads to LAT users as they can when LAT is off. In other words, they can’t sell their best products to their customers that are using the iOS version of their apps. This creates an ecosystem-within-an-ecosystem dilemma. This forces them to make a choice:

1) Sell a sub-par ad experience to LAT users to avoid revenue decline, but at the risk of annoying them even more

OR

2) Stop serving ads to LAT users altogether. As crazy as this may sound, this option could make sense for Facebook and Google.

«

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The vigilante faking Wikileaks docs to dupe trump trolls • The Daily Beast

Ben Collins:

»If you’re not paying attention, it looks like a smoking gun—a leaked expense report tying Hillary Clinton to the media’s most powerful groups.

The numbers from the supposedly leaked document—printed out and marked up with a highlighter, for good measure—are damning: $75,000 directly from the Clinton Foundation to polling firm Public Policy Polling. Over $333,000 sent, somehow, to the Black Panthers. Then the kicker: $30,000 to the “Sharia Law Center.”

Of course, the whole thing is totally fake. The header for the page, “Voter Suppression,” probably should’ve given it right away. But for Trump supporters on Twitter and Facebook, a Fox News contributor, and even radio hosts like Hal Turner, it is still very much real to them.

Chris from Massachusetts (who declined to give his last name) got ’em again. He’s spent all week trying to assuage anyone responding to his tweet with doubts about the paper’s veracity that it is the truest WikiLeak of all.

«

Anyone who thinks this is funny – including the creator – is seriously misguided. There are people who will believe this stuff, and hang decisions on it. At a time when there’s enough misinformation around, trolling doesn’t help anyone. How would “Chris” feel if his pranks led to Trump being elected?
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Google’s AI can now learn from its own memory independently • ScienceAlert

David Nield:

»Another example the researchers give is a public transit system, like the London Underground. Once it’s learned the basics, the DNC can figure out more complex relationships and routes without any extra help, relying on what it’s already got in its memory banks.

In other words, it’s functioning like a human brain, taking data from memory (like tube station positions) and figuring out new information (like how many stops to stay on for).

Of course, any smartphone mapping app can tell you the quickest way from one tube station to another, but the difference is that the DNC isn’t pulling this information out of a pre-programmed timetable – it’s working out the information on its own, and juggling a lot of data in its memory all at once.

The approach means a DNC system could take what it learned about the London Underground and apply parts of its knowledge to another transport network, like the New York subway.

The system points to a future where artificial intelligence could answer questions on new topics, by deducing responses from prior experiences, without needing to have learned every possible answer beforehand.

«

This feels significant, and cloud-the-size-of-a-man’s-hand worrying.
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Some comment on the Twitter buyout rumours • Bronte Capital

John Hempton, writing before everyone decided they weren’t interested in buying Twitter any more:

»Losses seem stubbornly stuck at half a billion per annum. That is real money – just burnt – and burnt by a business that is already established.

In other words costs have gone up by $1.5 billion give or take something. That is billion with a b.

Now if costs were rising that fast and the service were noticeably improving and engagemet growing then you could be tolerant. Making money is far less important in a growing tech company than increasing your relevance and the moat that surrounds your business. (Amazon is the leading example of a company which increases the moat every day.) The short-hand for that thinking is that revenue follows relevance.

But – as a pretty dedicated tweeter (with almost 20 thousand followers) – I have noticed almost no changes in twitter that improve my user experience. It is almost impossible to find out what they spend that $1.5 billion extra per annum on. I gather there are some improvements in the monetisation side but this is just a website – and it does roughly what it did in 2012 – and but spends well over a billion dollars more to do the same thing. [From my perspective the marginal improvement is that I am seeing fewer failed-to-load pages… but that is it.]

Twitter has become a parody of bad Silicon Valley management – the sort of management that existed in the dot-com boom where quite literally burning shareholder funds was considered a mark of innovation.

«

Hempton reckons it needs a good ol’ Gordon Gekko (aka “Wall Street Bastard”) to buy it in a LBO and shake it into shape. Not sure that’s going to happen now, but it’s fun to imagine.

(Via Ben Thompson’s Stratechery newsletter.)
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Remarks by the President in opening remarks and panel discussion at White House Frontiers Conference • whitehouse.gov

This, from Barack Obama:

»The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy.  This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view.  And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things.  And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences – setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio – then I think those suggestions are terrific.  (Laughter and applause.)  That’s not, by the way, to say that there aren’t huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked.  No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans.  And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.

«

The whole speech and discussion are worth a look, especially his point about accepting scientific findings and fact: “Sixty years ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny that Sputnik was up there.”
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How Apple scaled back its titanic plan to take on Detroit • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Alex Webb:

»Apple has drastically scaled back its automotive ambitions, leading to hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes building its own car, according to people familiar with the project.

Hundreds of members of the car team, which comprises about 1,000 people, have been reassigned, let go, or have left of their own volition in recent months, the people said, asking not to be identified because the moves aren’t public.

New leadership of the initiative, known internally as Project Titan, has re-focused on developing an autonomous driving system that gives Apple flexibility to either partner with existing carmakers, or return to designing its own vehicle in the future, the people also said. Apple has kept staff numbers in the team steady by hiring people to help with the new focus, according to another person.

Apple executives have given the car team a deadline of late next year to prove the feasibility of the self-driving system and decide on a final direction, two of the people said. Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr declined to comment.

«

Doing prototypes is easy, but it’s the go-to-market strategy for a “car” that’s so difficult. Do you build it yourself (on contract)? With a partner? How do you sell it in the first or second case? How do you make it special? Who will want it? How much will they pay? What’s the correct scale to aim at? Those are the question that have to be answered alongside the simple technological ones – which aren’t trivial either.
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Apple poaches Imagination Technologies COO • Business Insider

Kif Leswing:

»The biggest hire is John Metcalfe, whose LinkedIn profile says he’s been working as a senior director at Apple since July. He was Imagination Technology’s COO for a decade before that, and was nearly a 20-year veteran of the company. Last October, Apple hired Imagination’s VP of Hardware Engineering to be a director based in the United Kingdom.

The moves are notable as Apple is reportedly the third-largest shareholder in Imagination Technologies.

Other recent hires from Imagination Technologies now work for Apple in London in positions like GPU Architect, Engineering Manager, FE Hardware Design, and Design Manager. The hires worked on Imagination Technology’s PowerVR product, which is what is included in the iPhone.

Six technical employees from Imagination Technologies have joined Apple since September. The hires may be working on GPU technology in Greater London. Apple has long been rumored to be working on its own GPU design but it has never been confirmed. The company has a GPU-focused office in Orlando, Florida as well.

«

Neil Cybart (of Above Avalon) reckons this is Apple bringing GPU design expertise in-house for future designs. Pretty hard to read it any other way, after Apple declined to buy Imagination Technologies in March. It’s basically picking people off now.
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A women’s history of Silicon Valley • Medium

Jessi Hempel:

»On a recent Sunday morning, a friend texted me a photo from the checkout line of a Palo Alto Whole Foods. It was the cover of a Newsweek special issue entitled “Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley.” Seven faces graced the cover: Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. David Packard. Bill Hewlett. Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. Steve Jobs.

Three words for you, Newsweek: What the hell?

Ok, put aside the fact that three of those men don’t live in the Bay Area. At least one of them wasn’t born when the valley’s orchards were first being transformed into ground zero for the computer revolution. And any history that holds up seven white men as the founders of the computer revolution obscures the true collective nature of innovation.

Most important, it eliminates a valuable recruiting tool for getting women into tech, and for propelling them to more powerful positions: representation. As Marian Wright Edelman, Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund said in the 2011 documentary Miss Representations: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

«

Her list of founding mothers of Silicon Valley is terrific. (And that Newsweek one is appalling. Jeff Bezos?!)
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Adspend on mobile display overtakes PC for first time • Internet Advertising Bureau UK

»The PwC / Internet Advertising Bureau UK Digital Adspend report also shows the amount spent on mobile display ads (£802m) overtook that of PC and tablet display (£762m) for the first time. This significant development reflects the rapid growth of time spent on smartphones.

Total mobile ad spend, including search and classifieds, increased by 56.1% in the first half of 2016. Consequently, 36p in every £1 spent on digital advertising now goes to mobile, up from 4p just five years ago.

“Mobile use today is more akin to a computer than merely a phone, as people increasingly rely on them as their information, entertainment and communications hub,” said the IAB UK’s Chief Strategy Officer, Tim Elkington. “People now spend more time online on their mobile than they do on a computer. Consequently, marketers devote more ad spend to mobile as they increasingly cotton on to the fact that people essentially carry an ad platform with them wherever they are.”

«

link to this extract

Google may be stealing your mobile traffic • Alex Kras

Kras tried AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – the Google-ordained “faster HTML” – for his site, but realised something was off:

»Unfortunately, in the process of fixing the Web, Google broke something else. It used to work like this:

• Search Google
• Find interesting result
• Go to the site
• Explore the site further OR hit the back button to go back to Google search results

Now it works like this:

Search Google
• Find interesting result
• Read the content without leaving Google
• Try to explore the original site AND get redirected back to Google search results.

The web used to be the place where anybody could publish quality content, help thousands of people, and earn a few dollars along the way. Google Adsense was one of the main products that made this reality possible.

A lot of authors hope that people would find their content useful, stay for a while and come back in the future. None of this will work if readers are not able to get to the site in the first place.

In addition, given the wide spread of Ad Blocking software, mobile platform remains one of few places where ad revenue continues to be a viable option.

By hijacking the mobile traffic and keeping users from leaving their site, Google gets to benefit from somebody else’s content while at the same time displaying their ads. This cuts further into already narrow margins of independent publishers.

«

As the growth in internet users stalls but the demand for growing revenues continues, I expect Google to put more ads in front of people (as it’s doing for its own products on its homepages) and do things like this which help it, but not content producers.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Huaqiangbei: the electronics everything market. Photo by Nagarjun on Flickr.

This happens tomorrow!

Going to be in London on October 18th? I’ll be giving a talk: “Social Networks and the Truth“:

How many people do you follow on Facebook or Twitter whose political views you fundamentally disagree with?

It’s probably in the single digits. Yet there are millions of them out there. So why aren’t you following them? And if you aren’t, does that make their views wrong – or yours?

What happens when an election cycle or a referendum runs around opposing camps of social media opinions? How important are news media in such a situation? And would you believe that being online is polarising us, rather than making us more willing to listen to other viewpoints?

This talk will explore that – and its consequences.

Some tickets left; £10 secures your place.

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.

Google News now has a “Fact Check” tag • Poynter

»The links tagged as “fact checks” are from websites that apply a corresponding label to their code, ClaimReview markup. Google will also flag fact-checking content from “sites that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks,” though these too will need to use the ClaimReview markup. This is currently in use by fewer than 10 domains. A Google spokesperson wouldn’t confirm the full list of websites; searches for the moment yield results from PolitiFact and Full Fact.

In the announcement, Google Head of News Richard Gingras writes that the organization is “excited to see the growth of the Fact Check community and to shine a light on its efforts to divine fact from fiction, wisdom from spin.”

Fact-checking guru Bill Adair called this move a “huge step” on Twitter.

This tagging may well lead to increased traffic for fact-checking outlets, which are already seeing record growth in the United States. Whether it will help “crowd out” false claims on the internet remains to be seen.

«

What’s to stop a site which just makes stuff up from using the ClaimReview label? Sure, it’s a little twiddly, but if there’s Google News traffic in it.. why not?
link to this extract

Samsung Galaxy Note 7: usage [was] highest ever as explosions continue • Apteligent

»Our original post outlined how users of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 were defying the recall, and were still using their devices at roughly the same rate a week later. Usage did drop off slightly in the midst of the recall but has trended upwards in the past few weeks as replacement devices have largely been distributed. Unfortunately new reports are out this past week that show replacement devices continue to explode.

As of this past Monday, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 now has the highest usage rate in its history. In fact, Note 7 usage was over 23% higher on Monday than the date of the recall. We urge consumers to stop using this phone immediately.

Update: Graph updated through end of day Thursday the 13th. Note 7 usage is now equal to the usage on the recall date.

«

Apteligent has some nifty tools if you want to see the spread of device use in different countries.
link to this extract

Yahoo not to hold quarterly earnings call or webcast • Reuters

Anya George Tharakan:

»Yahoo Inc said on Friday that it would not hold a call or webcast when it reports third-quarter results on Tuesday, citing its pending $4.83bn deal with Verizon Communications Inc.

Last month, Yahoo disclosed a massive data breach in 2014 that affected at least 500 million of its email accounts.

Verizon’s general counsel said on Thursday that the company has a “reasonable basis” to believe the hack represents a material impact that could allow it to withdraw from the deal to buy the company.

«

I’ve never heard of a company putting off an earnings call just because a deal is pending.
link to this extract

a single byte write opened a root execution exploit • daniel.haxx.se

Daniel Steinberg is the lead developer of curl (grabs content of a webpage through the terminal) and works at Mozilla. He gets bug reports:

»As one of the maintainers of the c-ares project I’m receiving mails for suspected security problems in c-ares and this was such a one. In this case, the email with said subject came from an individual who had reported a ChromeOS exploit to Google.

It turned out that this particular c-ares flaw was one important step in a sequence of necessary procedures that when followed could let the user execute code on ChromeOS from JavaScript – as the root user. I suspect that is pretty much the worst possible exploit of ChromeOS that can be done. I presume the reporter will get a fair amount of bug bounty reward for this.

The setup and explanation on how this was accomplished is very complicated and I am deeply impressed by how this was figured out, tracked down and eventually exploited in a repeatable fashion. But bear with me. Here comes a very simplified explanation on how a single byte buffer overwrite with a fixed value could end up aiding running exploit code as root.

«

A single byte. Ever more worried for the internet of things.
link to this extract

What $50 buys you at Huaqiangbei, the world’s most fascinating electronics market • Keyboardio

The folks at Keyboardio decided to see how many items they could get for a cool US$50 at the wonderful electronics market in Shenzhen. One was a smartwatch with phone functionality:

»The economics of how to make a watch phone for $9.74 were completely bewildering to us. If we could get the price down to 65 CNY just by buying 30, how much could they possibly cost to make?
As it happens, a friend of ours in Shenzhen has a friend who is a salesperson at a smartwatch factory. We talked him into calling his friend and asking her what she knew about watches like the ones we bought.

She asked for photos….and then told us that her factory sells an identical model. She told us that next time, we should just deal with her directly, as we could have saved a lot of money. If we bought 30 watches directly from the factory, they would only cost us $7.49 each. So, the reseller made about $67 profit on us.

If the factory sold the watches for $7.49, how much could they possibly cost to make? That’s a question that can be awfully hard to get answered. Not really expecting an answer, we asked our friend to ask his friend. She was happy to tell us: $6.

Six dollars.

Six dollars for: a GSM chipset, a CPU, an LCD screen, a battery, a PCB, a metal housing, a molded silicone watch band, a microUSB cable, and a box. And the labor to assemble and test all of that.

«

It’s a fabulous piece. (I wrote about my own visit to Huaqiangbei – pronounced “Huang-sheow-bay”, as I understand it – a couple of years ago.)
link to this extract

Flirting with the iPhone 7: why I just couldn’t do it • AndroidAuthority

Kris Carlon tried out an iPhone 7 for a few weeks (though he wasn’t forced to rely on it):

»As for the software, well, it’s iOS. I enjoyed finding my way around the interface over the first few days, but I have to admit iOS isn’t exactly rocket science to figure out. I suppose this is one of its strengths: that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out.

But unfortunately for me, as someone who likes a little complexity because it affords more control, I started to get bored with iOS after only a week.

I was amazed by just how little there was to contend with in the iPhone’s software. A lock screen you can’t do much with, endless home screens full of app icons, a two-tab notifications shade accessed with a swipe from the top of the screen and a command center for Quick Settings buttons at the bottom.

I understand now why iPhone fans like iOS. It’s simple, generic and always the same. For folks like me that’s the very antithesis of what I like in a phone’s software. I love the novelty factor of constantly switching between manufacturer skins, custom ROMs and stock Android. This is why I’m pumped for the new Pixel experience from Google and probably the same reason I enjoyed iOS as long as I did.

«

Perhaps he should have grabbed an Android user off the street to try it, since “novelty factor” users are a tiny percentage of the total – something that Cyanogen has learned to its cost. But it’s a reasonable review, once you get past that self-selection element.
link to this extract

The real Republican adversary? Population density • Dave Troy

»Curious about the correlation between population density and voting behavior, I began with analyzing the election results from the least and most dense counties and county equivalents. 98% of the 50 most dense counties voted Obama. 98% of the 50 least dense counties voted for Romney.

This could not be a coincidence. Furthermore, if the most dense places voted overwhelmingly for Obama, and the least dense places voted overwhelmingly for Romney, then there must be a crossover point: a population density above which Americans would switch from voting Republican to voting Democratic.

So I normalized and graphed the data, and there is a clear crossover point.

At about 800 people per square mile, people switch from voting primarily Republican to voting primarily Democratic. Put another way, below 800 people per square mile, there is a 66% chance that you voted Republican. Above 800 people per square mile, there is a 66% chance that you voted Democrat. A 66% preference is a clear, dominant majority.

So are progressive political attitudes a function of population density? And does the trend hold true in both red and blue states?

«

This turns out to be one of those “town v country” things. But the implications of that go deep too. Similar effects were seen in the UK over Brexit – except in Scotland, which voted to remain.
link to this extract

Uber’s ad-toting drones are heckling drivers stuck in traffic • Technology Review

Michael Reilly:

»Drivers stuck in traffic in Mexico City lately have found themselves being buzzed by a fleet of sign-toting drones. “Driving by yourself?” some scolded in Spanish. “This is why you can never see the volcanoes” — a reference to the smog that often hovers over the mega-city and obscures two nearby peaks.

It wasn’t exactly a plea for environmentalism, though—it was an ad for UberPOOL, part of Uber’s big push into markets across Latin America. As Bloomberg points out, Uber already does more business in Mexico City than any other city it operates in, and Brazil is its third-largest market after the U.S. and India. Uber sees Latin American countries as generally easier targets for expansion than either of its top two markets.

«

“Hand me the crossbow, honey.”
link to this extract

Password storage in sensitive apps • BBQ and 0days

Jon Sawyer:

»Last week I was contacted by a forensic specialist for a law enforcement agency. They had a phone that could make or break a very sensitive case, and their commercial mobile forensic tools were failing to do, well anything. They could not extract any data off the device. After verifying their identity and purpose, I agreed to help. Using a backdoor, very much like Pork Explosion, and some trickery we were able to fully extract all data off the device. This had me thinking, what next? What if this criminal was using another layer of security? What if they had a “secure storage” app, what if their photos, videos and what not were encrypted in an addition layer of security?

Off to the Google PlayStore, searched for “Secure Photo” and downloaded the first result, sure enough the files stored were encrypted…. but the PIN was stored in plaintext as a shared preference. Ok no fun, so I install the second result.

«

Long/short: you’re going to be hunting some time for an app that *really* stores your data securely, despite the promises. He looks at Android, though for iOS I guess the security is there in the passcode-encrypted file system.
link to this extract

Election 2016: publishing hacked private emails is a slippery slope • Fortune

Mathew Ingram:

»Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci said on Twitter that she believes while media outlets seem incapable of resisting the lure of an email dump from a prominent figure, there are risks to publishing indiscriminately from such hacks that could have long-lasting impact.

One of the biggest risks, Tufekci says, is the destruction of personal privacy—for example, the Podesta dump included details of an ordinary staffer’s suicide attempt, which was subsequently tweeted out by Wikileaks and discussed on the air on CNN.

Theoretically, breaching someone’s privacy—even that of a quasi-government official—should be something that we do when there is a compelling argument for it, some broader social policy aspect, as there arguably is with the tape recordings of Donald Trump admitting to horrible behavior towards women.

«

What I’ve seen of the Podest emails seems to show absolutely what I’d expect: people trying to get access to Clinton, Podesta discussing ideas with people. It’s like West Wing, but the storyline is just real life, and not squashed into an hour with a dramatic arc. It might be impossible to secure email completely – in which case the answer might be to move to other communications channels such as Signal.

Tufecki is right, though. (I’ve never come across a point she’s made that I disagree with.)
link to this extract

Google pushing Pixel pre-orders with popup on Google homepage • Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

»Google really, really wants you to pre-order a pixel, or at least to be aware that it exists. If you head to the Google homepage, you very well may see a popup encouraging you to pre-order the Pixel. Forget for a minute that most variants of the Pixel are sold out—Google is getting as much attention as possible for this phone.

The notification is popping up at the bottom of the screen on both mobile and desktop platforms (you can see the mobile version above). If you tap “Yes Please,” you’ll go right to the Made By Google site. From there, it’s just one click to the Google Store where, again, the Pixel is mostly sold out. The ad doesn’t appear all the time, but it’s fairly widespread.

«

Well, it has sunk north of half a billion dollars into it, so may as well use the world’s most prominent and (for Google) cheapest possible online advertising space to push it. It’s also doing this with Allo and previously with Duo, and before that of course with Chrome. How soon before we get ads for Google Chromebooks – and will the floodgates open some time after that, to anyone?
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Your social media fingerprint gives away details about you – and it’s easy for websites to see it. Photo by sohacki.info on Flickr.

Next Tuesday, why not come to London on October 18th? I’ll be giving a talk: “Social Networks and the Truth“:

How many people do you follow on Facebook or Twitter whose political views you fundamentally disagree with?

It’s probably in the single digits. Yet there are millions of them out there. So why aren’t you following them? And if you aren’t, does that make their views wrong – or yours?

What happens when an election cycle or a referendum runs around opposing camps of social media opinions? How important are news media in such a situation? And would you believe that being online is polarising us, rather than making us more willing to listen to other viewpoints?

This talk will explore that – and its consequences.

Some tickets left; £10 secures your place.

A selection of 12 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Clinton campaign chief’s iPhone was hacked and wiped, photos suggest • Ars Technica UK

Dan Goodin:

»

Unconfirmed evidence builds a strong case that an Apple iCloud account belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief, John Podesta, was accessed and possibly erased by hackers less than 12 hours after his password was published on WikiLeaks.

So far, Clinton campaign officials have confirmed only the compromise of Podesta’s Twitter account after it was used to urge followers to vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump. Several screenshots circulating online, however, strongly suggest that the iCloud account tied to Podesta’s iPhone was also illegally accessed by people who tried—and possibly succeeded—to wipe the device of all its data. The images raise the specter that no one inside the Clinton campaign locked down the Podesta iCloud account in the hours following the WikiLeaks dump. iCloud accounts often provide a wealth of sensitive information, including real-time whereabouts, contacts, and confidential messages. Clinton officials didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this post.

The screenshots began appearing on Wednesday night, less than 12 hours after a new batch of Podesta e-mails published on WikiLeaks revealed that his iCloud password was “Runner4567.” Researchers can’t be certain how the iCloud and Twitter accounts were compromised, but several descriptions, such as this one of now-deleted threads on the 4chan discussion board, claim participants who saw the WikiLeaks post discovered that “Runner4567” remained a working password and used it to illegally access Podesta’s iCloud account.

«

The astonishing thing is that after the Democratic National Committee hack became public, the Clinton campaign didn’t make two-factor authentication mandatory across every sort of account. This is simply negligent by Podesta and his staff.
link to this extract

Your social media fingerprint: what are you logged in to? • Github

Robin Linus:

»

Without your consent most major web platforms leak whether you are logged in. This allows any website to detect on which platforms you’re signed up. Since there are lots of platforms with specific demographics an attacker could reason about your personality, too.

For most web platforms there’s a way to abuse the login mechanism to detect whether a user is logged in to that service.

Although this vulnerability has been well known (2012) for several years (2008) most companies won’t fix it.

«

Concerning. Seems I’m logged in to 11 services – three of them Google ones, even though I try to avoid Google services, and use UBlock.
link to this extract

HP Inc to cut 3000-4000 jobs over next three years • Reuters

Rishika Sadam in Bengaluru:

»

HP Inc, the hardware business of former Hewlett-Packard Co, said it expects to cut about 3,000 to 4,000 jobs over the next three years, sending its shares down 1.3% in extended trading.

The company said it expects adjusted profit for fiscal 2017 to be $1.55-$1.65 per share. Analysts on average had expected $1.61 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

«

That’s a lot of jobs. One also observes: Bengaluru is in India; the task of writing short takes on American conglomerates is easily transferable.
link to this extract

Decade-old SSH vuln exploited by IoT botnet armies to hose servers • The Register

John LEyden:

»

Hackers are exploiting a 12-year-old vulnerability in OpenSSH to funnel malicious network traffic through Internet of Things (IoT) gizmos, Akamai warns.

The SSHowDowN Proxy attack [PDF] exploits a lingering weakness in many default configurations of internet-connected embedded devices. Compromised gadgets are being abused to fire tidal waves of junk packets and traffic that exploits vulnerabilities against Akamai customers and others.

Crucially, the commandeered gear masks the source of the malicious traffic as the packets appear to originate from the weak devices. This is good for miscreants to hide behind, especially if they can use this tunneling to attack internal networks from external gear.

IoT gear infected with the Mirai botnet malware was used to thoroughly smash the website of security researcher Brian Krebs offline.

Ryan Barnett, principal security researcher at Akamai, explained that the SSHowDowN Proxy attack threat is distinct from the Mirai IoT botnet. Mirai exploited weak default passwords in CCTV cameras and other gear to gain control of systems, whereas malware exploiting SSHowDowN attacks builtin SSH servers to route bad traffic.

“This research is not related to Mirai,” Barnett told El Reg. “This is about new abuse of a known weakness/vulnerability in SSH.”

«

Needs admin password. But there’s a ton of devices out there on default admin passwords.
link to this extract

Android grows in major markets; iOS set for rise in China • Kantar Worldpanel

»

“The US, British and German markets have a couple of things in common. First, the Google Pixel, announced October 4, will be available through select retail partners in these markets beginning in mid-October. Second, the combined sales shares of Samsung and Apple represent more than 60% of all smartphones sold in these regions, with the rest scattered among brands in decline, such as Motorola and Sony, and those in growth, like Huawei and Alcatel,” Guenveur added. “The US and Britain have always been considered premium markets, but we are starting to see a shift to lower-cost devices as the prices of flagship products reach upwards of $800. For Google, this represents a unique challenge, as consumers weigh the features of the Pixel against those of other similarly priced products like the iPhone 7 and Galaxy S7, and against ‘good value for money’ Android-based brands that many consumers have started to view as alternatives.”

«

The best-selling phone in Britain, according to Kantar? The iPhone SE. Android, though, still dominates – 80% of sales in Germany. But why would you buy an expensive Google phone when you could get a cheaper phone from almost anywhere else?
link to this extract

Verizon just raised a big warning flag for Yahoo • Washington Post

Ellen Nakashima and Brian Fung:

»

Verizon on Thursday said that it was moving toward the conclusion that the massive data breach disclosed three weeks ago by Yahoo was a “material” event, a determination that likely would halt the telecom giant’s purchase of the tech firm’s core business.

“I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that impact is material,” Verizon General Counsel Craig Silliman told a small group of reporters. “And we’re looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact if they believe it’s not. They’ll need to show us that, but the process is in the works.”

«

Uh-oh.
link to this extract

Steam is reportedly adding ‘1000 new VR users every day’ • UploadVR

Joe Durbin:

»

Today marked the start of Steam Dev Days — a developer-only conference in Seattle — and although press is not allowed on the show floor, some major news has leaked via Twitter updates. Of these limited updates, one stands out as being particularly significant:

"We have over 1000 new VR users on Steam every day"#SteamDevDays

— Oshry @ SteamDevDays (@DaveOshry) October 12, 2016«

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

According to the above tweet, issued by a developer attending the conference, Steam is adding 1,000 new VR users each and every day on its Steam software distribution platform. This is major news for the immersive industry as actual numbers concerning the growth of its market are being played very close to the chest by the major headset manufacturers.

«

Something’s happening, for sure.
link to this extract

Blackberry: meditation at the grave • Medium

Jean-Louis Gassée:

»

I realize that this is easy, after-the-fact theorizing, but technology didn’t kill Nokia. Human error did. This wasn’t “seeing but not seeing”, as in BlackBerry’s case; Stephen Elop’s memo shows he clearly understood the war of ecosystems and the need to jump to another platform. But he made an incomprehensible mistake: He Osborned Nokia.

Turning to Redmond, we don’t have to look far for the cause of the failure of the Windows Phone platform. Initially, Android’s aim was to prevent a Microsoft monopoly in the smartphone space by creating an OS that wasn’t just more competent than Windows Mobile (an aging Windows CE derivative), it was free. This killed any hope for Microsoft to build a smartphone licensing business. The company improved its mobile operating system (now called Windows Phone), but was never able to get a licensee of any size.

Today, Microsoft’s handset business is effectively nonexistent. For the future, company execs loftily say they’re going to focus on phones for enterprise, a ‘paradigm shift’ that they are betting will make Windows 10 Mobile competitive.

Neither technology nor humans are to blame here. Failure came from an insurmountable business model obstacle.

«

History now shows that the table stakes for developing a competitive mobile OS are about a billion dollars. (You can extract those numbers from HP’s acquisition of webOS from Palm, from BlackBerry’s BB10 efforts, and probably somewhere in Microsoft’s accounts.) But that’s only the beginning; then you need handsets that will run it, and a broader strategy to build an ecosystem that will act as a virtuous circle. Get it wrong, and the writedowns are multiple billions. The downside is far greater than the initial cost (though the upside is, hey, an ecosystem).

Question now is which other platforms will demonstrate this. Wearables? IoT? AI assistants?
link to this extract

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provided data access for a surveillance product marketed to target activists of color • ACLU of Northern California

Matt Cagle of the American Civil Liberties Union:

»

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.

We are pleased that after we reported our findings to the companies, Instagram cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts, and Facebook has cut its access to a topic-based feed of public user posts. Twitter has also taken some recent steps to rein in Geofeedia though it has not ended the data relationship.

Further steps are required if these companies are to live up to their principles and policies by protecting users of all backgrounds engaging in political and social discourse. So today the ACLU of California, the Center for Media Justice, and Color of Change are calling on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to commit to concrete changes to better protect users going forward. Read our letters here and here. 

We first learned about these agreements with Geofeedia from responses to public records requests to 63 California law enforcement agencies. These records revealed the fast expansion of social media surveillance with little-to-no debate or oversight.

«

This is a natural, logical spinoff of the surveillance implicitly embedded in targeted advertising-based products. Problem for Twitter et al: how do you know whether a third party which buys access to your API isn’t using it like this?
link to this extract

From crisis to creative destruction at Samsung • WSJ

Geoffrey Cain, a Seoul-based journalist, in an op-ed:

»

Samsung, having reached the top of the global industry, can no longer rely on the culture of crisis that once kept it moving. The Galaxy Note 7 blunders far outstrip what happened in 1995—and are unthinkable for a world-class corporation. Samsung now needs to prevent crises so it can stay on top, not use them to catch up.

Today the company is staffed by some of the world’s finest engineers and designers whose careers don’t depend on an emperor. The workforce is more professionalized but less enthusiastic. Employees say the company is beset by bureaucracy, complacency and petty internal politics—similar to the problems that undid erstwhile rival Sony.
Under Vice Chairman Lee, Samsung has made some progress at reform, selling off noncore assets and affiliates to trim down this sprawling empire. But the pace of change has been modest.

Now an unusual trifecta of problems is suddenly converging, offering Vice Chairman Lee an opportunity to prove himself. In the short term, he will have to reboot the Galaxy phone brand. In the long term, he’ll need to define a clearer direction into new growth areas and against Chinese handset makers.

Finally, and the most sensitive of all, he’ll need to simplify Samsung’s complicated ownership structure and smooth relations with shareholders such as Elliott Management.

«

Being compared to Sony’s gotta hurt.
link to this extract

Two key metrics show the perception of Samsung’s entire brand has tumbled over its exploding phones • Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly:

»

Samsung’s “recommend score” — a measure from 100 to -100 of whether people are likely to recommend the brand to a friend or tell them to avoid it — has dropped in the US from 46 back in June to a score of 29 when the most recent survey was taken. Samsung suspended shipments of the device on August 31, less than two weeks after its release.

The brand’s purchase consideration — where survey participants are asked to pick the brands they would consider when they were next in the market to buy a specific product — has fallen from 42% to 31% in the same period.

YouGov Brand Index

Both are statistically significant declines.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s “Buzz” score —a measure of sentiment, where participants are asked whether they have heard anything positive or negative about the brand in the past two weeks — has also plummeted. Samsung had a score of 27 at the end of June, but that has since dropped to -6.9.

«

The key question will be how rapidly these recover.
link to this extract

Mixmsg is a Spotify-powered mixtape creator for Apple iMessage • Musically

Stuart Dredge:

»

The app is called Mixmsg – Make Mixtapes with Friends, and it was released as a free iOS download this week. “Mixmsg helps you create and share two-sided mixtapes as easily as texting,” explains its App Store blurb.

“Easily share life news, all the feels or favourite tunes & bands with a custom mixmsg tape or mixmsg Flyer. Rewind to a time when music said it all.”

Where does its music come from? We’ve given that away in the headline: the “provided by Spotify” text within the app shows the source. Two people can add songs and then play songs in full if they’re Spotify users.

There’s no obvious business model here, and we suspect this kind of thing will ultimately be an iMessage extension for services like Spotify. Even so, it’s an inventive spin on messaging and playlist creation.

«

Smart by Spotify: use the platform of your rival (in music) against it.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: from yesterday: IDC’s figures for “PC shipments” do include Chromebooks but not 2-in-1s; Gartner’s include 2-in-1s but not Chromebooks. I’ve fired my research assistant. (Thanks Max Rogowsky for pointing out the error.)

It’s time to understand why people will do this, because they’re not “idiots” – they’re rational. Photo by Tony Webster on Flickr.

Why not come to London on October 18th? I’ll be giving a talk: “Social Networks and the Truth“:

How many people do you follow on Facebook or Twitter whose political views you fundamentally disagree with?

It’s probably in the single digits. Yet there are millions of them out there. So why aren’t you following them? And if you aren’t, does that make their views wrong – or yours?

What happens when an election cycle or a referendum runs around opposing camps of social media opinions? How important are news media in such a situation? And would you believe that being online is polarising us, rather than making us more willing to listen to other viewpoints?

This talk will explore that – and its consequences.

A few tickets left; £10 secures your place.

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. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors • The Washington Post

Caitlin Dewey:

»

in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system — and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended — the site has repeatedly promoted “news” stories that are actually works of fiction.

As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate. On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record.

“I’m not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended,” one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. “It was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code.”

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link to this extract

Why your next iPhone won’t be ceramic • Atomic Delights

Greg Koenig:

»

Your typical phone has a stamped metal frame that gets placed into a mold to have the plastic outside shell injected around it. Total cycle time per phone of perhaps 20 seconds, and it isn’t like this makes a chintzy part – the same process is used to make the frame of a Glock. To build a million phone enclosures a day [as Apple does for the iPhone], you would need a few hundred machines and could fit the entire operation into a healthy sized Shenzhen industrial building. You can, of course, add some glitz and finishing processes to gussie up your plastic phone a bit, but those additions don’t add very much time.

An iPhone however, starts as a block of aluminum and is faced, milled, drilled, tapped, and de-burred in a bevy of machining operations, getting passed (mostly by hand, but increasingly by robot arm) through a series of mills, each set-up with precision fixtures that hold one side of the phone to face the spindle. Just the interior cavity of an iPhone requires 3-4 minutes of takt time while micro end mills carve out the tiny details and features that the interior components will locate against and fasten to. Just that one operation requires 3000 CNC mills to meet the 1 million per day demand. Add more machines to do the other sides of the phone, plus the crazy high-tech multi-axis lathes that make the buttons, plus production for iPads,and iMacs, and MacBooks, and Watches, and many of the accessories.

A murder of Fanuc Robodrills

This high cycle time is why Apple is the world’s largest owner of CNC milling machines and swiss style lathes. Rumors are that the number is around 40,000 with about half dedicated to iPhone production. I’ve seen pictures of one shop with acres of Fanuc Robodrills making iPhones, and that was only one of about a dozen such facilities. Apple is such a huge buyer of a particular kind of mill (BT30 spindle drill-tap centers) that Fanuc, Brother and DMG Mori each have factories dedicated to building machines exclusively for Apple.

This is not a position that happened overnight; it is a capability and scale that could only come about through iterative, strategic, long-term evolution. This started well over a decade ago with the MacBook Air’s unibody and has been relentlessly improved, deep partnerships cultivated, and new CNC machining techniques created to achieve the position Apple is in today. In many ways, Apple is far more dedicated to aluminum machining than the company ever was to the PowerPC and switching away will be far more tricky.

«

Mindblowing.
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Why Trump voters are not “complete idiots” • Medium

Chris Arnade is a photographer and writer; he wrote this on May 30, but its message is more important to understand than ever – and it applies too over “Brexit”:

»

When the Democrats under Clinton in the early ‘90s shifted towards a pro market agenda, they made a dramatic shift towards accepting the Republicans definition of value as being about the economic.

Now elites in both major parties see their broad political goal as increasing the GDP, regardless of how it is done.

This has failed most Americans, other than the elite, in two ways. It has failed to provide an economic boost (incomes are broadly flat), and it has forgotten that many people see value as being not just economic, but social. It has been a one-two punch that has completely left behind many people.
For many people value is about having meaning beyond money. It is about having institutions that work for you. Like Church. Family. Sports Leagues.

In addition, the social nature of jobs has been destroyed. Unions provided more than just economic power, they also provided social inclusion.

You can scrap this entire analysis as silly if you want, but please try and understand the core point missing from much of the current dialogue — large parts of the US have become completely isolated, socially and economically.

Kids are growing up in towns where by six, or seven, or eleven, they are doomed to be viewed as second class. They feel unvalued. They feel stuck. They are mocked. And there is nothing they feel they can do about it.

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His explanation of the step change between the two levels, and why those on the lower level would welcome disruptive change, is salutary.
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Bitfinex recovery right tokens • Bitfinex blog

»

It is possible that some or all of the bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex will be recovered, perhaps through the efforts of law enforcement or through our own outreach to the hackers. .

To further reward BFX token holders converting to equity, we have created a new token, the Recovery Right Token (the RRT) to compensate victims of the security breach and, thereafter, to offer a priority to early BFX token conversions.

If there is any recovery of the property stolen from Bitfinex on August 2nd, the first priority will be to use any recovery amounts to repay the then-outstanding (unconverted) BFX tokens.

«

This sounds like the sort of thing you could trade.. so there’s a market in missing, and possibly never-recoverable, bitcoins? This is meta.
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English man spends 11 hours trying to make cup of tea with Wi-Fi kettle • The Guardian

Bonnie Malkin:

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All Mark Rittman wanted was a cup of tea. Little did he know he would have to spend 11 hours waiting for his new hi-tech kettle to boil the water.

Rittman, a data specialist who lives in Hove, England, set about trying to make a cup of tea around 9am. But thanks to his Wi-Fi enabled kettle it wasn’t long before he ran into trouble, tweeting: “Still haven’t had a first cup of tea this morning, debugging the kettle and now iWifi base-station has reset. Boiling water in saucepan now.”

Three hours later the kettle was still having problems. The main issue seemed to be that the base station was not able to communicate with the kettle itself.

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Pentagon confronts a new threat from ISIS: exploding drones • The New York Times

Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt:

»

Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State in northern Iraq last week shot down a small drone the size of a model airplane. They believed it was like the dozens of drones the terrorist organization had been flying for reconnaissance in the area, and they transported it back to their outpost to examine it.

But as they were taking it apart, it blew up, killing two Kurdish fighters in what is believed to be one of the first times the Islamic State has successfully used a drone with explosives to kill troops on the battlefield.

In the last month, the Islamic State has tried to use small drones to launch attacks at least two other times, prompting American commanders in Iraq to issue a warning to forces fighting the group to treat any type of small flying aircraft as a potential explosive device.

The Islamic State has used surveillance drones on the battlefield for some time, but the attacks — all targeting Iraqi troops — have highlighted its success in adapting readily accessible technology into a potentially effective new weapon. American advisers say drones could be deployed against coalition forces by the terrorist group in the battle in Mosul.

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Flying IEDs. Technology is neither good nor bad, but neither is it neutral.
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Worldwide PC shipments declined 5.7% in third quarter of 2016 • Gartner

»

“There are two fundamental issues that have impacted PC market results: the extension of the lifetime of the PC caused by the excess of consumer devices, and weak PC consumer demand in emerging markets,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “According to our 2016 personal technology survey, the majority of consumers own, and use, at least three different types of devices in mature markets. Among these devices, the PC is not a high priority device for the majority of consumers, so they do not feel the need to upgrade their PCs as often as they used to. Some may never decide to upgrade to a PC again.

“In emerging markets, PC penetration is low, but consumers are not keen to own PCs. Consumers in emerging markets primarily use smartphones or phablets for their computing needs, and they don’t find the need to use a PC as much as consumers in mature markets.”

«

IDC’s results say much the same (with not quite such a big decline). That point about “consumers not being keen to own PCs” is pretty telling. PC sales for the third quarter were the lowest they’ve been since 2006; concentration of production (80% by the top six) was at its greatest ever, and is going to increase once Lenovo takes over Fujitsu. I do wonder how long Samsung will persist.

Neither set of numbers, however, includes Chromebooks or 2-in-1s. Chromebooks in particular are zooming ahead. It’s about time that one of these groups included them: they’re becoming important in education, from where they could break out. They’re a slow low-end disruption playing out over a decade, as children graduate from school.
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Apples and oranges: Why a TV viewer does not equal an online video view • Digiday

Sahil Patel:

»

A year ago, Yahoo became the first company to live stream a regular-season NFL game all around the world. The broadcast netted 15.2m unique viewers worldwide. With most Sunday NFL games in the U.S. averaging 10m to 20m viewers, Yahoo seemed to have hit a TV-sized NFL audience.

Except it didn’t. If you were to measure Yahoo’s live stream the same way TV is measured, the viewership was far smaller: an average of nearly 2.4m viewers across the 195-minute live stream.

This, in a nutshell, is the biggest difference between how viewership is defined on TV versus the web: Whereas TV looks for the average number of viewers across the entire program, the web prioritizes the cumulative number of people who have watched a video.

«

There is a problem with journalists who don’t know how TV measures numbers and think that “views” equates to “viewers”, and so lap up numbers provided (without that important context) by Facebook or Google. It’s worth looking at how those are measured officially, so that you can understand future claims that “the Presidential debates were watched by far more people online!” TV remains an incredibly powerful medium for the broader population.
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It’s time for science to abandon the term ‘statistically significant’ • Aeon Essays

David Colquhoun:

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it’s high time that we abandoned the well-worn term ‘statistically significant’. The cut-off of P < 0.05 that’s almost universal in biomedical sciences is entirely arbitrary – and, as we’ve seen, it’s quite inadequate as evidence for a real effect. Although it’s common to blame Fisher for the magic value of 0.05, in fact Fisher said, in 1926, that P = 0.05 was a ‘low standard of significance’ and that a scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if repeating the experiment ‘rarely fails to give this level of significance’.

The ‘rarely fails’ bit, emphasised by Fisher 90 years ago, has been forgotten. A single experiment that gives P = 0.045 will get a ‘discovery’ published in the most glamorous journals. So it’s not fair to blame Fisher, but nonetheless there’s an uncomfortable amount of truth in what the physicist Robert Matthews at Aston University in Birmingham had to say in 1998: ‘The plain fact is that 70 years ago Ronald Fisher gave scientists a mathematical machine for turning baloney into breakthroughs, and flukes into funding. It is time to pull the plug.’

The underlying problem is that universities around the world press their staff to write whether or not they have anything to say. This amounts to pressure to cut corners, to value quantity rather than quality, to exaggerate the consequences of their work and, occasionally, to cheat.

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Colquhoun is a professor of pharmacology at University College London and a Fellow of the Royal Society, so this isn’t some bit of randomness. I read this with growing amazement, but it makes sense. 5% has always been arbitrary; the incentives to push things over that “significance” line, and the logical flaws inherent in using it, which Colquhoun points out, are now a problem.
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Pigs (Three Different Ones) – Live – Desert Trip – Indio Ca – October 9, 2016 • YouTube

Roger Waters performing one of the songs from Pink Floyd’s 1977 album “Animals”. Watch the graphics, all the way through. The lyrics, it turns out, are still relevant.

(Also have to love how even during the guitar solo, the spotlight isn’t allowed to come off Waters.)
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Samsung slashes profit forecast due to Galaxy Note 7 recall • WSJ

Jonathan Cheng and Eun-young Jeong:

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In a reflection of the widening financial impact of its product safety crisis, the South Korean technology giant lowered its operating profit estimate for the three months ended Sept. 30 to 5.2trn Korean won ($4.6bn) from an original estimate of 7.8trn ($6.99bn) won.

It also lowered its expected revenue for the quarter to 47trn won ($4.21bn) from an original estimate of 49trn won ($4.39bn).

Samsung said last week that its preliminary third-quarter earnings guidance figures took into account the Galaxy Note 7 recall. But the new numbers now factor in the increased likelihood that customers will seek a refund for their Galaxy Note 7 rather than an exchange for a Samsung phone, leading to lower expected earnings for the quarter.

“The expected direct cost of the discontinuation of the Galaxy Note 7 has been reflected,” a company spokeswoman said.

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The mobile division may make an operating loss. My records for Samsung only go back to 2009, and that’s never happened in that period. What’s shifted is that “refund rather than replacement” – an acknowledgement of the cost of the brand damage.
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Samsung breached limits in its bid to trump Apple • Financial Times

Song Jung-a in Seoul and Louise Lucas in Hong Kong:

»

A similar bid to leap ahead saw Samsung adopt ultra-thin separators to keep anode and cathode elements apart in the battery cells and thus prevent short-circuiting. By making the separators thinner, the batteries are lighter, leaving more space to pack density into the positively and negatively charged parts of the cell. 

“Samsung was bold in adopting the very thin separators. And they may have stretched themselves in taking on this challenge in a short space of time before the iPhone 7 came out,” said Noboru Sato, a visiting professor at Nagoya University and a former executive of battery supplier Samsung SDI.

Super-thin separators are mostly supplied by Japanese companies, including Toray, Teijin and Asahi Kasei. Mr Sato said the separators are unlikely to be at fault. Instead, he questioned whether Samsung had the surrounding technologies to manage these latest-generation separators.

“You have to be extremely precise in handling these new separators, but it’s plausible the trouble occurred because testing was insufficient,” he said. 

Teijin said its separator was not used in the Galaxy Note 7, while Toray and Asahi Kasei did not comment.

An industry player in Europe suggested processor overloading could be the problem, saying rapidly changing consumer demands meant algorithms built into the processor to “shove more energy” into devices can easily overload the battery, triggering overheating. 

For Kim Young-woo, an analyst at SK Securities, Samsung’s obsession with waterproofing was to the detriment of heat control technology, which had not been a problem in the past. 

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link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An Airbus A300 cockpit. Note: contains hidden assumptions. Photo by Jexweber.fotos on Flickr.

Why not come to London on October 18th? I’ll be giving a talk: “Social Networks and the Truth“:

How many people do you follow on Facebook or Twitter whose political views you fundamentally disagree with?

It’s probably in the single digits. Yet there are millions of them out there. So why aren’t you following them? And if you aren’t, does that make their views wrong – or yours?

What happens when an election cycle or a referendum runs around opposing camps of social media opinions? How important are news media in such a situation? And would you believe that being online is polarising us, rather than making us more willing to listen to other viewpoints?

This talk will explore that – and its consequences.

A few tickets left; £10 secures your place.

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.

Google warns more than a dozen Russian journalists and activists about ‘government-backed attackers’ • Global Voices

Kevin Rothrock:

»

More than a dozen Russian journalists and activists received a strange warning from Google earlier today, notifying them that “government-backed attackers” may be “trying to steal” their passwords. According to the security alert, Google says it “can’t reveal what tipped [it] off because the attackers will take note and change their tactics.” The company says these attacks happen to “less than 0.1% of all Gmail users.”

According to opposition activist Oleg Kozlovsky, at least 16 people—including Bellingcat researcher and RuNet-Echo contributor Aric Toler—have received warnings from Google. Kozlovsky says he’s been alerted, along with Transparency International Vice President Elena Panfilova, former Moscow city council member Maksim Kats, journalist Ilya Klishin, and others.

Alexey Shlyapuzhnikov, a security consultant for Transparency International, says the hackers were targeting, in part, three domains belonging to the NGO, as well as the email addresses of staff at regional and international offices.

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Just another day in 2016.
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Apple-Samsung iPhone patent feud leaves U.S. top court struggling • Reuters

Andrew Chung:

»

The $399m penalty stemmed specifically from Samsung’s violation of three Apple patents on the design of the iPhone’s rounded-corner front face, bezel and colorful grid of icons that represent programs and applications.

While the justices signaled a willingness to reduce the potentially huge penalties imposed for ripping off someone else’s patented design, some expressed skepticism over how, in practice, juries could figure out the importance of a specific design trait in a product in order to calculate damages.

“If I were a juror, I wouldn’t know what to do,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said.

Several justices struggled with how they would devise a test for lower courts and juries to use to determine design patent damages.

Using as an example the Volkswagen Beetle’s unique automobile body contour, Justice Elena Kagan suggested it might be difficult for a jury to decide how much damages to award based on a theoretical patent infringement of its shape, when that trait might be the main factor driving consumers to buy it.

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Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster • The Guardian

Tim Harford:

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It is possible to resist the siren call of the algorithms. Rebecca Pliske, a psychologist, found that veteran meteorologists would make weather forecasts first by looking at the data and forming an expert judgment; only then would they look at the computerised forecast to see if the computer had spotted anything that they had missed. (Typically, the answer was no.) By making their manual forecast first, these veterans kept their skills sharp, unlike the pilots on the Airbus 330. However, the younger generation of meteorologists are happier to trust the computers. Once the veterans retire, the human expertise to intuit when the computer has screwed up could be lost.

Many of us have experienced problems with GPS systems, and we have seen the trouble with autopilot. Put the two ideas together and you get the self-driving car. Chris Urmson, who runs Google’s self-driving car programme, hopes that the cars will soon be so widely available that his sons will never need to have a driving licence. There is a revealing implication in the target: that unlike a plane’s autopilot, a self-driving car will never need to cede control to a human being.

Raj Rajkumar, an autonomous driving expert at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks completely autonomous vehicles are 10 to 20 years away. Until then, we can look forward to a more gradual process of letting the car drive itself in easier conditions, while humans take over at more challenging moments.

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But as Harford has illustrated with an earlier example from an Air France crash, only giving humans the challenging moments carries dangerous presumptions in itself.
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The danger of smart communication technology • Arc

Evan Selinger:

»

Although outsourcing is inevitable, not all outsourcing is good for us. In What Money Can’t Buy, Harvard ethicist Michael Sandel gives a great example of what many of us would consider an improper instance.

Sandel asks us to imagine someone delivering a moving best man speech who hides the fact that he outsourced its writing — purchasing the text online from a service that excels in generating poignant prose. Even if the toast was born of good intentions, a genuine desire to deliver a memorable and moving presentation that makes everyone happy, a problem remains: the groom’s best friend, a highly trusted confidant, passed off a commodity as something else. Deceptively, he presented another’s work as heartfelt sentiment that came to mind after deep soul-searching. The lack of authenticity strikes most of us as appalling, which is why the best man wouldn’t open his speech honestly by revealing its origins.

While Sandel’s example retains its force even if it’s a machine, not a human-based online service, that has created the enchanting speech, the problem doesn’t go away when we consider outsourcing communication in more mundane, everyday uses. To get a better sense of the main problems with using Allo and related smart communications products, it helps to consider their features in light of the six basic existential characteristics that apply to all forms of outsourcing.

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From there, one goes to…
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Terms of endearment, computer-generated • ROUGH TYPE

Nicholas Carr:

»

there’s something deeper going on here. Allo’s message-generation algorithm reveals, in its own small way, the strange view of personal relations that seems to hold sway in Silicon Valley. To the entrepreneurs and coders who run today’s massive social networks, our conversations are data streams. They can be tracked, parsed, and ultimately automated to enhance efficiency and remove kinks from the system.

We already use computers to converse, so the next logical step, in this view, is to use software to conduct the conversations themselves. By relying on an AI to compose our messages, we can optimize our productivity in managing our relationships. Call it the industrialization of affiliation.

Last year, in an online question-and-answer session, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he thinks “there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.” Stripped to our essence, we humans are just aggregations of data, and it’s only a matter of time before information scientists discern the statistical pattern that defines our beings. At that point, we’ll all be perfectly programmable.

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Carr has a talent for finding the weirdness underlying all the assumptions of Silicon Valley.
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A sequence of spankingly bad ideas • Medium

Alec Muffett is a specialist in security and privacy, and isn’t impressed with the UK government’s plans to introduce mandatory age verification (AV) for access to online porn:

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If our goal is to implement AV then any or all of the solutions may be implemented; however:

• all of the mechanisms are circumventable
• multiplying or combining them will leave them still circumventable, whilst reducing usability and practicality still further.
• at least one of these mechanisms may have significant collateral impact upon mechanisms which defend us against fraud
• at least one of these mechanisms operates in direct contravention of the policies of major source of information that it utilises
• at least two of these mechanisms involve the creation of — presumably huge — databases which may be repurposed in future for monetisation, e.g.: advertising web-tracking, data mining, etc.
• one of these mechanisms seeks to leverage any or all of the other mechanisms; if they are unfit for purpose, so is it

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Still, at least it will satisfy the Conservative backbenches.
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Battery life and charge time – the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus review: iterating on a flagship • Anandtech

Joshua Ho and Brandon Chester:

»

Looking at our WiFi web browsing test, it’s genuinely ridiculous how well the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus perform in this test. The iPhone 7 Plus is definitely down on battery life compared to the Galaxy S7 Edge, but it’s within 5% despite using a battery that’s almost 20% smaller. The iPhone 7 is actually comparable in battery life to the iPhone 7 Plus, and is significantly above the Galaxy S7 with Exynos 8890. Of course, the iPhone 7 has a significantly lower resolution display and a smaller battery, but the nature of smartphone design is that larger devices will generally have better battery life because the board area needed remains mostly constant while the amount of area for battery increases. The iPhone 7 has significantly improved in battery life here, likely due to a combination of A10 Fusion’s power optimizations – particularly the small CPU cores – and the removal of the headphone jack, which teardown photos show to have been partially replaced with the battery. However if you do the math efficiency sees a relatively minor uplift.

One other interesting point is that Brandon accidentally ran the battery test on his iPhone 7 with a Safari Content Blocker enabled, which blocked all the ads on the sites that the test visits. In doing so, battery life rose from the normal result of 9.22 hours to 10.03 hours, demonstrating how the increased workload and long-running network requests from ads and trackers really impacts a smartphone’s battery life.

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Some fascinating stuff in this (long, as ever) review. Including this thing at the start:

»

It’s interesting to write a review like this, because for better or worse, I didn’t have serious exposure to the iPhone from the beginning. When the first iPhone launched in 2007, I was in school and still used a flip phone that spent most of its time functioning as an alarm and a timer and not much else.

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Tempus fugit.
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No bots please, we’re European! • Creative Strategies

Carolina Milanesi:

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At Creative Strategies we set out to ask 1250 consumers across the top 5 European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK) how they felt about digital assistants and interacting with bots.

Eighteen% of our European panel said to be using a voice assistant every day. Another 22% use a voice assistant four to six times a week and 39% use it between one and three times a week. Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google are slowly but steadily creeping into our lives and we seem pretty happy about it. Thirty-three present of the panel said that it is more convenient to speak than to type and another 25% think it is actually fun to use. While not everybody is quite a believer yet trying it out does not seem to be a big problem as 28% did just that. Only 15% of the panel said they are more comfortable typing than speaking reflecting the fact that the panel did not include Gen Z consumers who will be more likely to embrace voice and touch first UIs.

Despite our familiarity with, and interest in voice assistants, we seem to be happier to interact with them in a more casual fun way than rely on them for life-critical operations. When it comes to interacting with bots in a more business environment consumers would prefer to interact with bots in the car (27%) and in the home (26%). When it comes to banking, something that many consumer still do not trust doing on a mobile phone, consumers preference to have a bot interaction drops to a mere 12%.

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I think I’m in the 22%, but mostly only to do stuff like set timers. It’s very dependent on your context: if you’re mostly in a shared workspace, you probably won’t use it that much.
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How Julian Assange turned WikiLeaks into Trump’s best friend • Bloomberg

Max Chafkin and Vernon Silver:

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WikiLeaks has long sought expanded privacy rights and a diminished role for the U.S. abroad—strongly opposing secret wiretaps, drone strikes, and the Guantánamo Bay prison facility. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has suggested “closing up the internet,” expanding extrajudicial killings, and making Gitmo—a longtime WikiLeaks bête noir—a permanent and expanded institution. Assange started his hacktivism career in the late 1980s and has expressed admiration for the antinuclear activists of that era; Trump has often wondered, out loud, if we shouldn’t consider using nuclear weapons more often.

None of this has seemed particularly to trouble Assange, who has mined the leaked Democratic National Committee e-mails, as well as publicly available e-mails from Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, for any meme-worthy tidbit to reinforce the case against her candidacy. He has used these finding to give cover to thinly sourced theories about Clinton’s health—in late August, he dug up an e-mail that showed that Clinton once received information about a Parkinson’s disease drug—and inventing new anti-Clinton theories out of whole cloth…

…on Friday, WikiLeaks released about 2,000 private e-mails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, just minutes after the leak of Trump’s vulgar remarks caught on video in 2005. It seemed like an effort to blunt the damage to Trump while arming him ahead of the second debate.

Longtime allies have generally been horrified by these developments, with friends and supporters suggesting that Assange has been so intent on playing the media that he may be in danger of losing control. “I’m not sure what to make of this turn to the alt-right,” says John Kiriakou, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was imprisoned for telling ABC News that the government had tortured suspected terrorists. Among fellow whistleblowers and their friends, Kiriakou says, “There’s no consensus other than maybe Julian is just going nuts.” ([British journalist and Wikileaks editor Sarah] Harrison disputes this, but not entirely. “There are big psychological pressures,” she says. “It’s difficult for him.”)

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And the illustration accompanying the piece is priceless:

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Journalistic and economic values are, unfortunately, not correlated. For now • Monday Note

Frederic Filloux nails the problem news organisations have online, with a fictional example of a paper covering the crash of a plane in their area:

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In every large newsroom of the country, reporters on the transportation beat will move heaven and earth to squeeze their sources in the airlines sector, especially at the National Transportation Safety Board in charge of the post-crash investigation. At this stage, the notion of exclusivity sets in: if a reporter gets her hands on a flight-recorder transcript, the story will score high in terms of economic value. In theory. In fact, due to the structure of a traditional website and the way ads are sold, this scoop is unlikely to carry a higher value than yet another third-hand Kim Kardashian robbed in Paris “report”.

This unfortunate trend has been reinforced over recent years because the share of sales done through automated market places is on the rise: according to e-marketer, the share of programmatic ad spending will reach 73% of the total US market with a year-to-year growth of 44%. And none of the machines that assign an economic value to journalistic work are able to see the difference between a conspiracy theory and an investigation!

You get the point: the market doesn’t reward exclusivity, nor traditional journalistic legwork (the painstaking but crucial craft of cultivating sources).

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As he points out, TV has solved this (and print has too) but we’re a long way from it online. He’s going to be working on it at Stanford; it seems like the sort of project that Google’s Digital News Initiative in Europe should be doing too, with some urgency. (Filloux represented a French publisher in the DNI launch.)
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Actually, Ken Bone is bad • Gizmodo

Sophie Kleeman:

»

First, let’s rewind and look back at what, exactly, Ken Bone asked.

“What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?”

Are you fucking kidding me, Ken?

This question is equivalent to asking, “So, what do you think about all that stuff going on in Syria?” or “Man, police brutality, huh?” It’s one of the broadest, softest questions imaginable, and it doesn’t even mention climate change by name. Ken Bone chose to devote his precious rhetorical capital to the business side of science, while leaving out the actual science almost entirely.

The candidates, of course, were delighted. “I think it’s such a great question,” cooed Donald Trump, who denied ever denying climate change during the [first] debate. He then went on to bloviate about “clean coal,” which, besides not actually existing, also allowed him to neatly side-step any tough statements about climate change, climate science, or any of the specific issues currently plaguing our planet that will almost certainly cause our downfall in about 100-odd years. Hillary Clinton went on about turning America into a “21st century clean energy superpower,” though she did acknowledge — extremely briefly — that climate change is a “serious problem.” You don’t say.

That climate change — and science in general — didn’t come up in any real way during the debate shouldn’t come as a surprise, because we are the country, after all, that continues to deny the problem exists in the first place.

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I came prepared to disagree completely with Kleeman, but she persuaded me. Bone’s question was a missed chance to identify important political fault lines.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified