Fires burning near Fort McMurray: if you had a smart home, you could watch it burn down like one unlucky man. Photo by Premier of Alberta on Flickr.

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

Another thing your connected home will let you do: watch it burn • The Verge

Vlad Savov:

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A major wildfire near Fort McMurray in Canada has forced more than 100,000 people to evacuate the area and destroyed roughly a fifth of local homes. One of the affected houses belonged to a man by the name of James O’Reilly, who got a uniquely intimate perspective on his home’s demise thanks to a connected security camera.

O’Reilly shared the above video with the Edmonton Metro, after first witnessing it on his iPhone while driving away from the fire. It’s a deeply unsettling thing to watch, with crackling noises and small tufts of smoke being the first signs of the fire’s invasion. The living room is eventually deluged by the flames while alarms bleat and the camera turns monochrome shortly before it cuts out.

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11 everyday things that won’t exist In ten years’ time • Buzzfeed

Cisco made the list, so I’ll save you the trouble: traffic jams; physical credit cards; headphones; plasters (eg Elastoplast); delivery people; remote controls; passwords; physical media; wired chargers; phone towers; “offline”.

Me: they’ll all be safely around in 2026, perhaps apart from “offline”.
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Google said to be exploring an ‘acceptable’ ads policy • Digiday

Lucia Moses:

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Google, with its tech chops and its control over digital ad delivery, is positioned to do what individual publishers and their associations can’t do on their own, though, by requiring that ads are not obtrusive or annoying — a main reason people choose to block ads. While it is unclear how a Google scheme would work, a likely scenario is that Google would ensure that only ads that meet its standards can run on its own site and YouTube, and also through its DoubleClick ad exchange through which publishers sell their inventory.

Currently, publishers face resistance from advertisers that don’t feel the pressure to change their ads to make them load faster. Having the backing of a big player, Google, could give publishers sway with those advertisers. “Clearly, someone has to grab hold of this situation that has scope,” one publishing exec with direct knowledge of Google’s plans.

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The aim being to forestall the growth of adblocking. Speaking of which…
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Adblock Plus and (a little) more: 100 million users, 100 million thank-yous • AdBlock Plus

Ben Williams:

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Today, on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in Brooklyn, our co-founder Till Faida announced that we now have more than 100 million active users (by “active users” we mean “active installations,” i.e. you may be counted as more than one “user” if you’ve got ABP active on multiple devices). These are our latest numbers, which we’ve been working for months on getting more accurate without breaking our strict privacy policy. Harder than it sounds … Happily, we’ve got some stupid smart data scientists who’ve figured out a way to get an accurate estimation.

While user numbers in countries where ad blocking is fairly well-known, like Germany and France, are pretty stable, in countries like the US and UK people are really coming on to the benefits of taking back control of their online experience.

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Like to see the adoption curve.
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Former Facebook workers: we routinely suppressed conservative news • Gizmodo

Michael Nunez:

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Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

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Weeeelll. Facebook’s been trying to kill “fake news” on Facebook, and arguably that also includes “junk news”. You could think of some left-wing sites that might be as junky; then you’d have to see whether they got the same treatment. (I suspect so.) Basically, Facebook tried to run a “respectable” news organisation. One feels a littttttle bit of resentment from the (conservative) former curators who have come forward.
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China Focus: Investigation finds Baidu’s objectivity compromised by profit model • Xinhua

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The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) on Monday demanded an overhaul of China’s leading search-engine Baidu following an investigation.

The CAC said Baidu relied excessively on profits from paid listings in search results, and did not clearly label such listings as the result of commercial promotion, compromising the objectivity and impartiality of search results.

Like other search engines [in China], Baidu sells links that appear in search results. The more an advertiser pays, the higher it will appear in the search results. The public are likely to be misled by the search results they find on Baidu, the CAC said.

NASDAQ-listed Baidu was already in the eye of a public-relations storm after the death of Wei Zexi, 21, a computer science major at Xidian University in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province.

Wei was diagnosed with synovial sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, in 2014 and had been undergoing a controversial cancer treatment advertised on Baidu, at the Second Hospital of Armed Police Beijing Corps, which the Wei family also found through a Baidu search. The treatment was unsuccessful and Wei died on April 12.

In February, on question-and-answer website Zhihu, a Chinese version of Quora, Wei directly accused Baidu of being at least partly to blame for his troubles. The anger of netizens who claim the search engine does not properly check the credentials of advertisers has been growing ever since.

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Wow. You’d think that someone might have chosen to use Google’s search algorithm, on the basis that it works pretty well and puts you ahead of the rest.
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Autonomous robot surgeon bests humans in world first • IEEE Spectrum

Eliza Strickland:

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the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) did a better job on the operation than human surgeons who were given the same task.

STAR’s inventors don’t claim that robots can replace humans in the operating room anytime soon. Instead they see the accomplishment as a proof of concept—both for the specific technologies used and for the general concept of “supervised autonomy” in the OR.

Pediatric surgeon Peter Kim, one of the researchers, didn’t sound threatened when he spoke to reporters in a press call yesterday. “Even though we surgeons take pride in our craft at doing procedures, to have a machine that works with us to improve outcomes and safety would be a tremendous benefit,” he said.

For this study, published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers programmed their robot to carry out a procedure called intestinal anastomosis, in which a piece of intestine that’s been cut through is stitched back together. It’s like repairing a garden hose, said Ryan Decker, the senior engineer on the team, in that the sutures must be tight and regularly spaced to prevent leaks. STAR performed this task both on ex vivo tissue in the lab and on in vivo tissue in an anesthetized pig, and experienced human surgeons were given the same tasks. When the resulting sutures were compared, STAR’s stitches were more consistent and more resistant to leaks.

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What’s its bedside manner like?
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Cheating students at Rangsit University blacklisted • Bangkok Post: news

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Rector Arthit Ourairat said on Monday the three students caught red-handed while cheating on the university-organised direct admission tests for College of Medicine, and Faculties of Dental Medicine and Pharmacy will not be allowed to retake the exams for May 31 and June 1.

“The university has put the three students on the blacklist and the won’t be able to apply for seats with us again. I cannot say whether they will be allowed to take exams at other universities,” he told reporters.

The university in Muang district in Pathum Thani found the three using hi-tech devices to cheat on the tests. Their smartwatches had answers written in a code sent from a private tutorial institution or probably more than one.

Proxies wearing camera-equipped glasses were sent to take the exams. After filming the exam sheets by the camera, the gang members left the test centre with the information [after staying the minimum 45 minutes of the three-hour exam]. Another person waiting outside downloaded the tests to a computer and emailed them to one or more tutorial schools. They sent the answers back to the students on their smartwatches.

All test supervisors were alerted on Saturday when the university seized one smartwatch in the morning session and another in the afternoon. The third watch and two glasses were seized on Sunday.

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The questions are easy enough to be answerable in code? Also: finally, a sales case for smartwatches among today’s youth.
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Cost cutting at Dropbox and Silicon Valley startups • Business Insider

Eugene Kim:

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Dropbox has made other changes to its famously lavish employee perks lately, reflecting its more cutthroat attitude toward cash management.

In a company-wide email in March, Dropbox said it was cancelling its free shuttle in San Francisco and its gym washing service, while pushing back dinner time by an hour to 7 p.m. and limiting the number of guests to five a month. (Previously it was unlimited, a big perk given its open bar on Fridays.)

Those changes will have a direct impact on Dropbox’s profitability. The company wrote in the email that employee perks in total have been costing Dropbox at least $25,000 a year for each employee. Based on Dropbox’s roughly 1,500 headcount, that would translate to about $38m a year. At that scale, any kind of cost savings would help improve its bottom line. Dropbox declined to comment.

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To an outsider, that spending sounds insane. “Gym washing”? What is that? Kim’s story makes clear that others are cutting back too.
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A bomb just dropped in endpoint security… and I’m not sure anyone noticed • Alex Eckelberry

Eckelberry used to run Sunbelt Software, though he’s better now; but still interested in the antivirus scene. His comments on Google ending non-contributory access to VirusTotal (noted yesterday):

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here’s the dirty little secret that very few people know. There are a number of endpoint products that use VirusTotal to determine if a file is malicious. Without any contribution to the community. Without giving anything in return. 

They simply pay VirusTotal a subscription fee, and receive the information.

And some of these companies have been getting a lot of attention for their supposed prowess. But for some mysterious reason, they refuse to put their own engines on VirusTotal. Could it be because they don’t want to contribute back? Maybe. Or it could be that they just don’t want everyone else to see how poorly their products actually perform.

Unfair? Yes.
Using VirusTotal information without any contribution back to the community is patently unfair. The people who are actually writing detections are sharing their results with the rest of the community, while a small group of endpoint products have been boasting of their extraordinary abilities, while working off the backs of other researchers. 

So as a customer, perhaps you can ask the next endpoint security vendor if they’re on VirusTotal. If they are, they’re contributing to the antivirus community. If they’re not, they’re not. Whatever their PR story, that’s the simple truth.

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Which will have ramifications for those who have bought products from the non-contributors, he says.
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Please Enter Your Password • unexpected error !?

Nick Forge:

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It is generally established in much of the tech industry that improving “quality” by improving the design and implementation of your product is a smart business strategy. Every password prompt you show without a legitimate reason will leave your users slightly less certain about either your product – “ugh, it should already know my password, this product is stupid!” – or less certain about themselves, their knowledge and their competence – “what am I doing wrong, why do I have to keep entering my password?”. No matter what their exact response is, it’s almost certainly going to be negative for either the user, your product and company, or both.

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Forge explains neatly why you keep getting those requests for your password at time when you shouldn’t need to enter your password. Essentially, it’s network problems where the code design has got lazy.
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Second Oracle v. Google trial could lead to huge headaches for developers • Ars Technica

Joe Mullin:

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The Federal Circuit’s rule allows a company to use copyright law in order to stop others from calling on its APIs and interacting with its code. In the eyes of many tech companies, software developers, and open source advocates, that’s going to create a lot of unnecessary legal risk. In the wake of Oracle v. Google, calling on someone else’s API could get you sued.

In the EFF’s view, the Federal Circuit decision was wrong and conflicts with existing 9th Circuit cases, like Sega v. Accolade (1992) and Sony v. Connectix (2000), which allow for interoperability between systems, whether a copyright owner likes it or not.

Because of the Federal Circuit decision, a developer or company can be subject to a copyright suit over use of an API. Some of those lawsuits will be brought by copyright owners who just want to shut down competition, Stoltz said. That means developers will “spend more time talking to their lawyers, and they’ll be more worried.”

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And Oracle’s damages claim is huge too. Nothing good is coming from this, even if Google wins on all counts: copyright on APIs puts others at risk.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Facebook’s face recognition system is quite a lot better than this – which has led to lawsuits over privacy invasion. Photo by Chris Devers on Flickr.

You could always sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. Unless you’re reading this in email. (I’d love to prevent this bit appearing in the email, but can’t.)

A selection of 14 links for you. Things happened, OK? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A selection of 14 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Software security suffers as upstarts lose access to Google-owned virus data • Reuters

Joseph Menn:

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A number of young technology security companies are losing access to the largest collection of industry analysis of computer viruses, a setback industry experts say will increase exposure to hackers.

The policy change at the information-sharing pioneer VirusTotal takes aim mainly at a new generation of security companies, some with valuations of $1 billion or more, that haven’t been contributing their analysis. Older companies, some with market valuations much smaller than the upstart rivals, had pressed for the shift.

Alphabet Inc’s Google runs the VirusTotal database so security professionals can share new examples of suspected malicious software and opinions on the danger they pose. On Wednesday, the 12-year-old service quietly said it would cut off unlimited ratings access to companies that do not share their own evaluations of submitted samples.

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Windows 10 adoption hits 300 million as Microsoft warns the free upgrade will end soon • PCWorld

Mark Hachman:

»Microsoft says that 300 million devices now run Windows 10. And if yours isn’t among them, time is running out.

On Thursday, Microsoft began showing potential customers of Windows 10 the carrot as well as the stick, touting Windows 10’s success but also warning that the free upgrade offer would expire in a couple of months. If consumers don’t upgrade their PCs from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 by July 29, Microsoft will charge $119 for a copy of Windows 10 Home when they eventually do.

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But the benefit is that the “upgrade to Windows 10” app will stop bugging you.

The free upgrade translates to billions of foregone revenue and profit.
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New research exposes risks in privatising the UK Land Registry and restricting its data • Open Data Institute

Peter Wells:

»Some of this data is already open so government is already seeing some of this extra tax revenue. The current openness of Land Registry data contributes to it, particularly price paid data which is used by organisations such as Zoopla, Land Insight and RentSquare. This extra tax revenue is incremental to the regular surplus shown in the Land Registry’s accounts.

But the consultation on moving the operations of the Land Registry to the private sector leaves the door open for any future owner of the Land Registry to release additional data under restrictive licensing or paid models. The future owner might even choose to keep some data closed so that only they can use it. As the research shows us, these actions will inhibit GDP growth and reduce that tax revenue.

A private owner has a legal duty to maximise profit for their shareholders. By necessity they will seek to maximise their own return. It is government’s job to consider the impact on the economy as a whole.

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The ODI is doing all the research on added value from open data that I wish I’d had ten years ago when the Free Our Data campaign started. Wells, by the way, is looking for examples of companies which have benefited from making their data openly available. I thought of Netflix releasing data to get people to improve its film selection algorithm. Any others?
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Digital pioneer, Jaron Lanier, on the dangers of “free” online culture • WIPO Magazine

Catherine Jewell:

»Q: What are your main concerns about the digital market today?

Lanier: We have seen an implosion of careers and career opportunities for those who have devoted their lives to cultural expression, but we create a cultural mythology that this hasn’t happened. Like gamblers at a casino, many young people believe they may be the one to make it on YouTube, Kickstarter or some other platform. But these opportunities are rare compared to the old-fashioned middle-class jobs that existed in great numbers around things like writing, photography, recorded music and many other creative pursuits.

Economically, the digital revolution has not been such a good thing. Take the case of professional translators. Their career opportunities have been decreasing much like those of recorded musicians, journalists, authors and photographers. The decimation started with the widespread Internet and is continuing apace. But interestingly, for professional translators the decrease is related to the rise of machine translation.

Automated translations are mashups of real-life translations. We scrape the translations made by real people millions of times a day to keep example databases up to date with current events and slang. Elements of these phrases are then regurgitated into usable machine translations. There is nothing wrong with that system. It’s useful, so why not? But the problem is we are not paying the people whose data we are taking to make these translations possible. Some might call this fraud.

All these systems that throw people out of work create an illusion that a machine is doing the work, but in reality they are actually taking data from people – we call it big data – to make the work possible. If we found a way to start paying people for their actual valuable contributions to these big computer resources, we could avoid the employment crisis that otherwise we will create.

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Inside the crash of London’s $2.7bn unicorn Powa Technologies • Business Insider

Oscar Williams-Grut:

»[Powa CEO Dan] Wagner had been trying to give prospective clients a demonstration of the company’s newest and most exciting product — PowaTag.

The app stored people’s credit-card details and let them quickly buy products with a few clicks on their smartphone by scanning QR codes, ads, audiowaves, and iBeacons. Wagner had raised $76 million on the back of the product and said the app would help turn Powa into “the greatest technology company of all time.”

Except right now, during this demo in early 2014, it wasn’t working.

“Dan Wagner comes down to level 34, which was rare, bellowing and F-ing and blinding at people,” a former employee who witnessed the incident told Business Insider. Wagner believed the company’s firewall was preventing the PowaTag demo from working, our source said. “Bearing in mind what PowaTag does, it holds your credit-card details in a database, his solution — and he screamed this across the office — was to ‘take the f—— firewall down right now.’”

If the firewall went down, all the world’s hackers could have cherry-picked customer details from Powa’s servers.

“We didn’t have many consumers, but you don’t take down the firewall on something that’s holding credit cards,” says the former employee who witnessed the confrontation.

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This is a great collection of all the things that really weren’t good about Powa. I met Wagner a couple of times; the promise always seemed ahead of the reality. I thought Powa was perhaps a startup worth a few million. Quite how it got to be a unicorn escaped me.
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The world’s most expensive medicine is a bust • Technology Review

Antonio Regalado:

»when the Berlin physician Elisabeth Steinhagen-Thiessen wanted to give a patient Glybera last fall, it wasn’t so easy. She says she had to prepare a submission as thick as “a thesis” for German regulators and then personally call the CEO of DAK, one of Germany’s large sickness funds, or insurers, to ask him to pay the $1 million price tag.

Last September, she gave 40 injections to the muscles of a 43-year-old woman with an ultra-rare disease called lipoprotein lipase deficiency. Such patients don’t process fat correctly. “You draw blood and you are astonished, there is no red blood, it’s cream,” Steinhagen-Thiessen says. One symptom is debilitating abdominal pain. Her patient had been hospitalized more than 40 times.

A dose of Glybera contains trillions of viruses harboring correct copies of the lipoprotein lipase gene. And Steinhagen-Thiessen says the treatment, at Charite Hospital in Berlin, was a success. The woman hasn’t been back to the emergency room since the treatment and is now “living like you and me.”

But this single use of the drug just proves that Glybera is a flop. The problem is its staggering million-dollar price tag, too few patients, and questions about how effective it is.

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When I was writing about science from 1995-2003, the promise of gene therapy cures was held out again and again; but the only trials went badly wrong. Cystic fibrosis was always the target – single gene, should be easy to hit – but without success.
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Facebook to face privacy lawsuit over photo tagging • USA Today

Jessica Guynn:

»A San Francisco federal judge rejected Facebook’s request to toss a lawsuit alleging its photo-tagging feature that uses facial recognition technology invades users’ privacy.

U.S. District Judge James Donato allowed the case to move forward against Facebook under an Illinois law that bans collecting and storing biometric data without explicit consent.

“The Court accepts as true plaintiffs’ allegations that Facebook’s face recognition technology involves a scan of face geometry that was done without plaintiffs’ consent,” Donato wrote in Thursday’s ruling.

Facebook launched the photo-tagging tool in 2010. It automatically matches names to faces in photos uploaded to the social network.

In 2008, Illinois passed a Biometric Information Privacy Act, that requires companies to get consent from consumers before collecting or storing biometric data, including “faceprints,” which is what companies such as Facebook and Google use to identify people in photos.

In March, Google was hit with a lawsuit alleging its photo-tagging system violates Illinois law.

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Lenovo and Apple are fastest growing among India’s top 10 smart phone vendors • Canalys

»India’s smart phone market grew by 12% year on year, with 24.4 million units shipping in Q1 2016. The top five vendors stayed the same, with Samsung in the lead, followed by Micromax, Intex, Lenovo and Lava. Lenovo grew the most, thanks to its value-for-money handsets and offline channel strategy – its shipments were up 63% on Q1 2015. Established international brands Microsoft, BlackBerry, Sony and LG were the biggest losers as the market shifted toward low-cost and value-for-money handsets…

…But other vendors are maneuvering to move up the market share rankings. Though in eighth place, Apple continued to climb in India, increasing shipments by 56% to make it the second fastest-growing vendor in the top 10. ‘Apple is outperforming the overall market in India, and still has great growth potential,’ said Canalys Mobility Analyst Wilmer Ang. It is seriously challenging Samsung’s dominance of the premium segment. For devices priced over US$300 (INR20,000), Samsung’s market share fell from 66% in Q1 2015 to 41% in Q1 2016, while Apple grew its market share from 11% to 29%. Successive price cuts to the iPhone 5S made it the most popular Apple device on the market, despite its smaller screen and outdated hardware.

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Not clear how much the $300+ market is growing, though.
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Digital prejudice: When software doesn’t play fair • The Boston Globe

Hiawatha Bray:

»The issue caught fire three years ago. That’s when Latanya Sweeney, a computer scientist and professor of government at Harvard University, discovered that Google searches of her name were usually accompanied by ads for companies offering criminal background checks. An African-American woman of spotless character, Sweeney got curious. She soon found that names that sounded like they belonged to black people, like Latanya, were 25% more likely to trigger ads for criminal records than names that sounded white, say, Kristen.

Is Google’s search software racist? Not likely. It merely contains algorithms — step-by-step instructions — that alter the program’s performance, depending on how humans use it. Imagine thousands of searches like “Latanya criminal records.” The searchers might be racist white people, or black people trying to check out a new best friend. Either way, if Google gets many such requests, background-check ads will appear whenever someone types “Latanya.” Google’s algorithms learn from our behavior, whatever its motive.

Similar cases abound. Last year, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University found that Google’s advertising service seems to discriminate by gender. Internet users who identified themselves as female were less likely to see ads for high-paying jobs than male users. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Maryland found that Google searches of Democratic presidential candidates produced more flattering results than those of Republicans. Searching, say, “Hillary Clinton” delivers more upbeat Web pages than “Donald Trump.”

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The fault lies not within Google, but ourselves, of course.
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Garbage in, garbage out: why Ars ignored this week’s massive password breach • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»Earlier this week, mass panic ensued when a security firm reported the recovery of a whopping 272 million account credentials belonging to users of Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, and a variety of overseas services. “Big data breaches found at major email services” warned Reuters, the news service that broke the news. Within hours, other news services were running stories based on the report with headlines like “Tech experts: Change your email password now.”

Since then, both Google and a Russia-based e-mail service unveiled analyses that call into question the validity of the security firm’s entire report.

“More than 98% of the Google account credentials in this research turned out to be bogus,” a Google representative wrote in an e-mail. “As we always do in this type of situation, we increased the level of login protection for users that may have been affected.” According to the report, the compromised credential list included logins to almost 23 million Gmail accounts…

…What has been clear all along to anyone paying attention is that the plaintext credentials recovered by Hold Security almost certainly didn’t come from hacks on the e-mail providers. Instead, they most likely were collected by hackers who hit dozens, hundreds or thousands of third-party Web services over the years and dumped the account databases into a single list.

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Which is why you should use different passwords at every site. There are simple methods for doing this
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Logical fallacies in the hunt for Satoshi • Hacking, Distributed

Emin Gün Sirer is a professor at Cornell:

»The task of identifying Satoshi goes far beyond user authentication. Satoshi is not Anonymous#4356365 on a forum. He is not trying to edit an old post. And more importantly, we, the public at large, are not a computer system, narrowly tasked with making a simple access control decision. What is at stake is larger than the $500m in coins thought to belong to Satoshi: intellectual standing and social status far in excess of any figure that can be captured with a dollar sign.

Critically, having access to Satoshi’s funds is not the same thing as being Satoshi. The problem here is broader, less like user authentication in a computer system, and more like unveiling the true identity of the pseudonymous author of a book. This problem of “persona authentication” is complicated, as it necessarily relies on human factors.

Can a Satoshi claimant recall unique facts about interactions he/she has had with others?

Can a Satoshi claimant accurately account for the time he/she spent developing Bitcoin?

Can a Satoshi claimant convince others that he/she possesses the technical know how to be Satoshi?

These are the real questions. Anyone who cannot answer them will have failed to resolve the Satoshi mystery, even if they collect the coins.

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In other words, it’s a lot more than just moving a few bitcoins.
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Mashable’s costly path to video • The Information

Tom Dotan:

»after talks with Time Warner’s Turner division, the [effort to sell Mashable] fell through. Mashable’s $300m price tag was too high. Instead, Turner led a $15m fundraising, the second by a Time Warner unit in Mashable.

Mashable’s dive into video has shown some positive early returns. The company had a 46% growth in revenue during the first quarter compared with last year, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person said Mashable expects to maintain that growth rate through the year. After some heavy cost cutting—including layoffs of 30 employees, many of whom worked on the editorial side—it expects to turn profitable this year. But one person who has looked at Mashable’s books believe that the company may need to invest more to meet those revenue growth targets, potentially delaying profitability.

The expense of ramping up video production has been a challenge for many digital publishers. Even with great demand, BuzzFeed struggled last year with the long lead times it takes to create branded video, often dealing with hands-on agency executives who demanded more creative input in the final product than they did for sponsored articles. BuzzFeed faces higher talent costs: the company has had to start signing its best-known personalities to two-year contracts, cutting them in on branded video deals, to stop them defecting.

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Video is this year’s media saviour – following on from “just being online”, “having a paywall”, “having a mobile app” and “having a tablet app”. No doubt in a year or two it will be “having VR content”. (Some have already started that.)
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Truth and Trumpism • The New York Times

Paul Krugman expressing concern that US media, in its absurd pursuit of “balance”, will mischaracterise the presidential candidates’ policies and support:

»I’ve seen claims that Tea Partiers were motivated by Wall Street bailouts, or even that the movement was largely about fiscal responsibility, driven by voters upset about budget deficits.

In fact, there was never a hint that any of these things mattered; if you followed the actual progress of the movement, it was always about white voters angry at the thought that their taxes might be used to help Those People, whether via mortgage relief for distressed minority homeowners or health care for low-income families.

Now I’m seeing suggestions that Trumpism is driven by concerns about political gridlock. No, it isn’t. It isn’t even mainly about “economic anxiety.”

Trump support in the primaries was strongly correlated with racial resentment: We’re looking at a movement of white men angry that they no longer dominate American society the way they used to. And to pretend otherwise is to give both the movement and the man who leads it a free pass.

In the end, bad reporting probably won’t change the election’s outcome, because the truth is that those angry white men are right about their declining role. America is increasingly becoming a racially diverse, socially tolerant society, not at all like the Republican base, let alone the plurality of that base that chose Donald Trump.

Still, the public has a right to be properly informed. The news media should do all it can to resist false equivalence and centrification, and report what’s really going on.

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Siri’s creators say they’ve made something better that will take care of everything for you • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»Ask Siri to “buy me a ticket for the Beyoncé concert” and she’ll pull up a link to Ticketmaster’s Web page. Ask her to reserve a table at a restaurant near your house and she can pull up the time and date you requested, but you can’t book the reservation unless you have the OpenTable app installed.

That wasn’t how it was supposed to be, Kittlaus said. The original Siri wasn’t supposed to be a clever AI chatbot. The goal was to reinvent mobile commerce itself. When it initially launched as an independent app in 2010, Siri could buy tickets, reserve tables and summon a taxi — all the while bypassing search pages and without a user having to open or download another app. She was able to siphon data from 42 Web services, including Yelp, StubHub, OpenTable and Google Maps.

But nearly all of the partnerships were dissolved once Apple took over. To build them, Kittlaus had essentially gone door-to-door to various tech companies asking for permission to connect to their stores of proprietary data. Kittlaus and Cheyer, who became close with Apple’s Steve Jobs before his death in 2011, will not discuss what happened beyond this from Kittlaus: “Steve had some ideas about the first version, and it wasn’t necessarily aligned with all the things that we were doing.” Kittlaus quietly left Apple the following year. A third of the original Siri engineering team members, including Cheyer, eventually followed him and are now building Viv.

«

Viv will be shown off in public today, Monday. Apple’s decision to pull back seems odd now, but at the time the app economy was riding high; Jobs might have wanted to keep it growing, because that benefited Apple. Now, six years on, the landscape is different, and that decision has become a strategy tax.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Google is feeding romance novels into its systems to make them more conversational, darling. Are you feeling _ucky? Photo by Profound Whatever on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. But it’s Friday now, so there is that. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Can Google and Apple pull the plug on the PC market? • Thurrott.com

Paul Thurrott:

»where Microsoft’s Windows 10 and Windows phone are still precarious from a mobile app perspective, Apple iOS and Google Android have steadily improved on the productivity app side. Ironically, they’ve done so with Microsoft’s help: The Microsoft Office apps, in particular, not to mention its ever-growing collection of other apps for Android and iOS, are both excellent and full-featured. What Android and iOS are missing, however, are platform features that make those systems more suitable for the traditional productivity tasks that we now perform on PCs.

Surely – surely – those shortcomings will soon be addressed. And it’s not coincidental, I think, that both Google and Apple have shipped in the past six months devices —the Pixel C and the iPad Pro, respectively — that can replace traditional Windows laptops. All that’s missing, of course, is a bit of sophistication in the underlying software.

And sitting here on the cusp of that revolution, we can finally see how Microsoft’s Windows phone and Windows RT failures have deeper ramifications than just the smart phone and tablet markets: It is much easier to improve mobile platforms enough to replace PCs than it is to try and simplify PCs and make them more suitable for mobile usage scenarios. Especially when you have Microsoft helping you on the app side of the equation. Imagine how much of a blocker it would be for enterprises if Microsoft Office wasn’t already available on Android and iOS.

«

There’s a hell of a lot of inertia behind the PC market, with big OEMs with big investments in the PC market continuing; the Pixel C and iPad Pro are both pricier than pretty much all the PCs sold at any time. But there’s something in this: as today’s teenagers grow up, they’ll not want to have to learn Windows.

About an hour after I wrote that, Apple announced an enterprise linkup with SAP – pushing IoS and especially iPads into enterprise. So perhaps Thurrott is right.
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Many middle-class Americans are living paycheck to paycheck • The Atlantic

Neal Gabler:

»[In a survey] The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47% of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47%.

I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

«

Tell me again how you don’t understand how Donald Trump’s populist neo-fascist calls to bring work back to America strike a chord with some.
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A journalist turned content marketer’s take on Dan Lyons’ Disrupted, a Book that hits close to home • LinkedIn

Dan Levy:

»For what it’s worth, here’s what I think happened:

Halligan and Shah [at Hubspot] hired Lyons because they thought it would be cool to have a real journalist in the fold and that he could be an asset to their content team. With the IPO on the horizon, the publicity around the hire wouldn’t hurt either. Once on board, Lyons was passed off to some well-meaning but inexperienced managers who didn’t know what to do with him. Not being someone who plays well with others to begin with – particularly young women whom he views as intellectually inferior – he rejected the quirky, youth-oriented culture that was poles apart from the hardboiled newsroom environment he was used to. He pitched a few ideas for making himself useful but got frustrated when they weren’t picked up. He made some unfortunate enemies – ironically, it was his cartoonish rivalry with the PR woman he calls “Spinner” that really set things off – and was saddled with a jealous boss who made his life miserable. By the time he left the company he’d already scored a gig at HBO and decided to parlay his weird experience into an entertaining, if mean-spirited memoir. He’s a writer after all.

«

There’s a lot more, though.
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GM, Lyft to test self-driving electric taxis • WSJ

Mike Ramsey and Gautham Nagesh:

»General Motors Co. and Lyft Inc. within a year will begin testing a fleet of self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric taxis on public roads, a move central to the companies’ joint efforts to challenge Silicon Valley giants in the battle to reshape the auto industry.

The plan is being hatched a few months after GM invested $500 million in Lyft, a ride-hailing company whose services rival Uber Technologies Inc. The program will rely on technology being acquired as part of GM’s separate $1bn planned purchase of San Francisco-based Cruise Automation Inc., a developer of autonomous-driving technology.

«

City yet to be announced. Detroit?
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Longform reading shows signs of life in our mobile news world • Pew Research Center

Ann Mitchell, Galen Stocking and Katerina Eva Matsa:

»A unique, new study of online reader behavior by Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, addresses this question from the angle of time spent with long- versus short-form news. It suggests the answer is yes: When it comes to the relative time consumers spend with this content, long-form journalism does have a place in today’s mobile-centric society…

…The analysis finds that despite the small screen space and multitasking often associated with cellphones, consumers do spend more time on average with long-form news articles than with short-form. Indeed, the total engaged time with articles 1,000 words or longer averages about twice that of the engaged time with short-form stories: 123 seconds compared with 57.1

This gap between short- and long-form content in engaged time remains consistent across time of day and the pathway taken to get to the news story. However, when looking solely within either short- or long-form content, engaged time varies significantly depending on how the reader got to the article, whether it is midday or evening, and even what topic the article covers, according to the study.

«

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Google is feeding romance novels to its artificial intelligence engine to make its products more conversational • BuzzFeed News

Alex Kantrowitz:

»“Her blouse sprang apart. He was assaulted with the sight of lots of pale creamy flesh bursting out of a hot pink bra, the cleavage high and perky. It was a gorgeous surprise, all that breast she’d been hiding under her crisp tailored shirts.”

That passage may not turn you on, but it’s certainly working for Google’s artificial intelligence engine.
For the past few months, Google has been feeding text like this to an AI engine — all of it taken from steamy romance novels with titles like Unconditional Love, Ignited, Fatal Desire, and Jacked Up. Google’s AI has read them all — every randy, bodice-ripping page — because the researchers overseeing its development have determined that parsing the text of romance novels could be a great way of enhancing the company’s technology with some of the personality and conversational skills it lacks.

«

Whaaat?

»

And it’s working, too. Google’s research team recently got the AI to write sentences that resemble those in the books. With that achievement unlocked, they’re now planning to move on to bigger challenges: using the conversational styles the AI has learned to inform and humanize the company’s products, such as the typically staid Google app.

«

For reference, look at what happened when IBM fed the Urban Dictionary to Watson. The outcome is what’s known in Fleet Street newspaper parlance as a “reverse ferret”. (Thanks Evelyn Smith for the links.)
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Apple hires Google X’s co-founder for its health projects • MarketWatch

Jennifer Booton:

»Apple Inc. may have a solution to quash criticism that it’s lost its innovation mojo. The company recently hired Yoky Matsuoka, the co-founder of Google X, a semi-secret division within Google responsible for things like smart contact lenses and driverless cars.

Matsuoka, who originally moved to the US from Japan to pursue a tennis career but has since earned a Ph.D. in robots from MIT, will report directly to Apple COO Jeff Williams. Williams oversees Apple’s futuristic health initiatives, such as HealthKit, ResearchKit and the new CareKit.

Apple confirmed the hiring to MarketWatch, but did not provide details about her role. Matsuoka’s LinkedIn page has been updated to reflect the move, but she doesn’t list a specific title.

Matsuoka most recently served as CEO of Quanttus, an app that gathers biomedical data, such as blood pressure, so that users can monitor key health trends. Her role at Apple will likely involve the company’s new smart-health initiatives, which includes apps that track health data via Apple Watch.

«

Hiring one person will quash criticism? Some hope. But note the outflow of high-level people from Google X. And what will happen to Quanttus, which got $14m in venture funding in early 2014?
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I’m Sorry • Dr. Craig Wright

»I believed that I could do this. I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot.

When the rumors began, my qualifications and character were attacked. When those allegations were proven false, new allegations have already begun. I know now that I am not strong enough for this.

«

“Craig Wright now doubts he is Satoshi Nakamoto”.
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Alibaba grows to 423m active shoppers • Tech In Asia

»Alibaba’s increasingly mobile shoppers are the latest evidence that China is long past its PC era. People are not just using their phones for reading and games – they’re now doing pretty much everything on those smartphones, from basic grocery shopping to in-store payments to managing an online personal wealth fund.
China as a whole will see 55.5 percent of ecommerce spending done on mobile in 2016, according to projections from eMarketer, so Alibaba’s customers are ahead of the curve. The country is well ahead of America, which remains the United States of PC. Over in the US, mobile commerce will be an estimated 25 percent of total ecommerce this year.

«

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The problems with forcing regular password expiry • CESG Site

»The problem is that this doesn’t take into account the inconvenience to users – the ‘usability costs’ – of forcing users to frequently change their passwords. The majority of password policies force us to use passwords that we find hard to remember. Our passwords have to be as long as possible and as ‘random’ as possible. And while we can manage this for a handful of passwords, we can’t do this for the dozens of passwords we now use in our online lives.
To make matters worse, most password policies insist that we have to keep changing them. And when forced to change one, the chances are that the new password will be similar to the old one.
Attackers can exploit this weakness.

«

Finally, finally, a government advisory – from the UK’s spy agency GCHQ no less – which tells us what we all knew but could not complain about because it was Policy.

“Look, it’s a smartphone gamer who spends money!” Photo by chris_rivait on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Leaves no sticky traces. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hardly pocket change: mobile gamers spend an average of $87 on in-app purchases » Slice Intelligence

»There’s a reason why free-to-play games have major advertising campaigns: it turns out,  users spend a lot via in-app purchases. Slice Intelligence just revealed that people who bought products in mobile video games last year spent an average of $87 dollars on their “free-to-play” games. This redefines how we view hardcore gamers: people who purchase games for traditional consoles and PCs spend only $5 dollars more on average on their gaming entertainment.

«

Ah yes, but pay attention to the way that “average” works out. As you might guess, it’s amazingly skewed: loads of people spend nothing, a tiny number spend huge amounts. Here’s what it looks like:

»

Data shows that only 10% of the mobile in-game purchasing population accounts for 90% of mobile gaming sales. Further listening to the statical sonar reveals that the top one percent, the “white whales”, of mobile gamers account for an astonishing 58% of the mobile gaming revenue from in-app purchases. This trend doesn’t occur among traditional games, where roughly 28% of the audience accounts for 90% of game sales.

«

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Samsung’s VR Plans Include Standalone Headset, Hand-Tracking Tech » Variety

Janko Roettgers:

»Samsung’s plans for virtual reality go beyond the company’s current Gear VR headset: The company is working on a standalone virtual reality (VR) headset that will incorporate positional tracking similar to the technologies now available on higher-end headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, revealed the company’s head of R&D for software and services Injong Rhee during the company’s developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday.

“We are working on wireless and dedicated VR devices, not necessarily working with our mobile phone,” Rhee said. Some of the other features that Samsung is exploring for the next generation of VR headsets is hand and gesture tracking. However, Rhee cautioned that it may take a few more years before we see these kinds of features in devices from Samsung, or anyone else for that matter. “VR is amazing, but the industry is still at its infancy,” he said.

«

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Minister says NHS needs more data sharing » UKAuthority

Rob Merrick:

»The UK risks falling behind in the race to use health data to save lives because of protests over privacy, a Government minister has warned.

George Freeman revealed his “frustration” that progress is being held back by a combination of public and media ignorance and, he admitted, “badly communicated policy”.

During a Commons debate, the life sciences minister issued a rallying cry for the widespread use of data to “accelerate the search for cures and to prevent unnecessary suffering”.

Freeman told MPs: “It is all too easy to jump on a bandwagon and launch a campaign to say, ‘No data to be used’. That would profoundly betray those who are suffering from disease today who want their experience to help to prevent disease tomorrow.”

The minister spoke of his “frustrations with the situation”, adding: “The truth is that healthcare is digitalising very fast.

“That is not just driven by commercial app manufacturers. Many doctors are developing apps for their own benefit and that of their patients. Many patients are also developing apps. The revolution is coming.”

«

Not clear that this was sparked by the Google DeepMind/NHS data share, but that has risen up the agenda.
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Seven reasons customers are changing faster (and slower) than we thought » Fluxx Studio Notes on Medium

Paul Dawson:

»Every year, OFCOM produces a 200 page report into media habits in the UK. It represents real, mainstream activity — normal mass market customers, not early adopters or insiders. At Fluxx, we use the report as a sense check when designing products and services. This is what stood out this year.

1. Death of the desktop and laptop
“There has been a considerable rise (from 6% in 2014 to 16% in 2015) in the proportion of adults who only use smartphones or tablets to go online, and not a PC/laptop.”

Who’s up? Companies who built responsive websites

Who’s down? Companies who built responsive websites — yes, you read that right. 84% of the adult population still uses their desktop/laptop (sometimes) to go online, but that is not 84% of your customers, and when they use that particular device, they’re choosing it for a reason.

You simply don’t know if they will care, or not care about the degraded/simplified experience that might be implicit in a responsive website design until you get close to them and their needs.

So What? Disregard the generalised stats. Before you make such a big investment decision, get close to your customers to see what they actually need. The answer may be something entirely different…

«

Plenty more, and all worth considering.
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The great music biz money pit: How streaming services have lost $1bn » Music Business Worldwide

Tim Ingham audits the financials for all the streaming services (apart from Apple and Google, which don’t publish separately; Google doesn’t even publish subscriber numbers):

»what have we learned?

Well, the biggest independent streaming services in the US and Europe are losing millions of dollars every month (caveat: that’s a bit of an assumption when it comes to TIDAL).

Therefore, they all require gigantic levels of future investment to deal with their cash burn.

Not a huge problem for the likes of Spotify ($1bn recently secured) or Deezer ($110m recently secured).

But when you look at platforms such as Rhapsody/Napster, and its 3.5m subscribers, things look a little more fragile.

(The company took on a $10m loan from Real Networks and an unnamed co-owner last March – money which, according to our net loss analysis, would have lasted it just over three months.)

«

So basically, wait for the dominoes to fall.
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Lead water pipes in 1900 caused higher crime rates in 1920 » Mother Jones

Kevin Drum on a new scientific study:

»the effect is consistently positive. “Based on the lowest and highest point estimates,” the authors conclude, “cities that used lead pipes had between 14 and 36 percent higher homicide rates than cities that did not.” They present further versions of this chart with various controls added, but the results are largely the same. Overall, they estimate that cities with lead pipes had homicide rates 24 percent higher than cities with iron pipes.

As a check, they also examine the data to see if lead pipes are associated with higher death rates from cirrhosis and infant diarrhea, both of which have been linked with lead poisoning:

As expected, we observe large, positive, and statistically significant relationships between a city’s use of lead pipes and its rates of death from cirrhosis and infant diarrhea. Unexpectedly, we find that cities that used lead water pipes had higher rates of death from scarlet fever and influenza. Cities that used iron pipes, in contrast, had higher rates of death from circulatory disease, cancer, and cerebral hemorrhage. We know of no scientific literature to motivate these latter relationships.

So it looks like lead really is the culprit, and it really is associated with higher crime rates.

«

The other suspicion is that lead additives in petrol affected crime rates too, but that that’s now tapering off.
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Apple increases iPhone prices by steep 29% » The Times of India

»Apple has increased prices of iPhones in India. The surprise revision in retail prices comes at a time when the company’s new device SE got a poor response and managed to sell only a few thousand units. And, the hike is as steep as 29% for the iPhone 6 device. The company also decided to tinker with pricing of iPhone 5S, making it costlier by 22% to nearly Rs 22,000.

Sources said Apple decided to withdraw some of the discounts offered in January-March 2016 period. “It was felt that SE, which was criticized for having a ‘high price tag’, will not be able to see much traction if prices of bigger-sized iPhone 6 and 6S devices are not corrected. So, the decision was taken to revise the price upwards,” a source said.

«

I missed this originally (it’s datelined April 23). It’s either madness, or supreme confidence, to raise prices like this – a decision made ahead of the rejection of imported refurbished iPhones earlier this week.
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US woman forced to provide her fingerprint to unlock seized iPhone » Ars Technica UK

Cyrus Farivar:

»A Southern California woman was recently ordered to provide her fingerprint to unlock a seized iPhone, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.

The case highlights the ongoing balancing act between security and convenience and how the law treats something you know (a passcode) as being quite different than something you are (a biometric). Under the Constitution, criminal defendants have the right not to testify against themselves—and providing a passcode could be considered testimonial. However, being compelled to give up something physiological or biometric (such as blood, DNA sample, fingerprint or otherwise), is not.

As the Times reports, Paytsar Bkhchadzhyan was ordered by a federal judge to provide her fingerprint on February 25, and the warrant was executed and unsealed on March 15.

«

The long gap between the warrant and its execution probably means that she wasn’t aware of it; the police served it on her on the 14th or 15th. Any longer than 48 hours since using the passcode would mean fingerprint unlock wouldn’t work.
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Apple hiring in Orlando amid rumors company designing own GPU » Business Insider

Kif Leswing:

»Graphics experts who want to work for Apple might not need to move to California. The company is currently hiring several graphics-chip specialists in its Orlando, Florida, offices.

In the past week, Apple has posted seven new job listings for graphics-processing unit (GPU) engineers in Orlando. Four of the positions are listed as graphics-verification engineers and one listing is for a graphics-software engineer, and Apple is also looking for a graphics RTL (register-transfer level) designer.

«

Virtual reality and augmented reality systems both need high-quality GPUs. Just sayin’.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Android Wear hasn’t been a hit, even among Android fans. Howcome? Photo of a Samsung Gear Live by pestoverde 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. Try not to confuse it with today’s second link.

A selection of 12 links for you. Too soon? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Want to know what Facebook really thinks of journalists? Here’s what happened when it hired some » Gizmodo

Michael Nunez:

»if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team—“news curators” as they’re known internally—Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm.

«

Server farms, like humans, require temperature control, but they don’t demand free lunch. So in time any tech company will try to replace the latter with the former.
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I Want Your Email Address » Moneylab

»Can I have your email address? I’ll be here when you’re ready.

Give It To Me

Can I please have your email address before you go?

I’m trying to increase my subscriber rate by 600%, so you should be typing in your email address right about now.

«

This is brilliant. Scroll all the way through. Enjoy.
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Speaker maker Bowers & Wilkins sells out to a tiny Silicon Valley startup » Bloomberg

Joshua Brustein:

»Bowers & Wilkins’s most devoted customers will probably be skeptical about a Valley startup being the best steward for a fancy speaker brand. Audiophiles often turn their noses up at digital music companies, which have a reputation for sacrificing fidelity for convenience. “It will take some explaining,” said Atkins. “I think when the verdict comes back, it will be clear that this is exactly what Bowers & Wilkins should be doing.”

Atkins will become CEO of the combined company, and Yu will be executive chairman. They will drop the name Eva in favor of the much more familiar Bowers & Wilkins brand. Yu and Atkins said there will be no staff cuts, and the company will continue to sell the current lineup of Bowers & Wilkins products. Atkins, who owns 60% of Bowers & Wilkins, will take a significant ownership stake in the new company. Bowers & Wilkins’s outside investors, Caledonia Investments and Sofina, will cash out.

Yu has been a Silicon Valley dealmaker for years. He was chief financial officer at YouTube when Google bought the company for $1.65bn. At Facebook, he helped the social network raise money from Microsoft Corp. As a partner at Khosla Ventures, he was an early investor in Square Inc. He also owns part of the 49ers and championed the football team’s new stadium in the Valley.

Yu said his latest deal is a potential model for other well-funded startups. “I think there will be others to follow,” he said. “This is the way that Silicon Valley and other industrial companies raise the game for consumer-brand electronics.”

«

It’s certainly the only way to add value; simply being high-end hardware isn’t sufficient in any space now. You need software, and something special.
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TalkTalk to scrap separate line rental charge » TalkTalk Telecom Group PLC

»TalkTalk is leading the way in making broadband pricing simpler and more transparent by putting an end to separate line rental charges.

The UK’s fiercely competitive broadband market has been increasingly characterised by attention-grabbing broadband prices, underpinned by less prominent – and more costly – landline charges. Government, consumer groups and the Advertising Standards Authourity all agree that presenting landline and broadband costs separately adds unnecessary complexity and risks broadband deals appearing misleadingly cheap. However, TalkTalk is the only provider to have openly and consistently called for change.

Today, TalkTalk is going one step further by announcing that it is set to become the first major broadband provider to end the practice of separate pricing. TalkTalk will instead move toward a single monthly cost including line rental, known as ‘all-in pricing’, which will come into effect this autumn.

«

Good move, though it looks as though the regulator Ofcom will force this in time, so this is “we’re jumping before you push us”. The additional line rental cost has always been a bugbear in all the adverts for broadband services.
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Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto » New Web Order

Nik Cubrolovic with some interesting insight into Craig Wright’s business dealings:

»What Wright did was establish a company for the purpose of carrying out research and development on e-learning software it had acquired from Wrights own trust. Wright would inject $30 million in Bitcoin to fund the company, $29 million of which would be paid to Wright’s trust to acquire the software and $1 million of which would fund operational costs – including an office in Sydney and 40 employees.

The purpose for the structure and why someone could commit fraud in this way becomes clear in the next action the company takes:

»

Further to incurring a range of expenses, the Company lodged its GST return for the September 2013 quarter, claiming a GST refund of $3.1 million (“the GST refund”). After various discussions and correspondence, the ATO issued a notice to the Company on 20 January 2014 notifying that it intended to withhold the refund pending further verification of transactions and the treatment of Bitcoin.

«

The sales tax (GST) component of the $29 million invested by Wright into the company was eligible for a refund. Thus by shuffling around some Bitcoin between entities you control yourself, it is possible to trigger a sales tax refund (in real cash).

Another Wright entity, DeMorgan, made the largest ever R&D tax concession claim in Australia – as per their own press release. The R&D tax concession is a program in Australia where companies investing in R&D are eligible for a 45% tax refund on each dollar spent. We know now that the supercomputers that were claimed to be part of this spending didn’t exist, so it is possible that the refund was an attempt to make a false claim.

While it is still early in the investigations against Wright’s companies, one can come away from reading about his firms with the conclusion that their primary business was to seek tax refunds from the government, and that most of the businesses were set up precisely for this.

«

You have to admit that if it’s fraud, it’s rather clever. So why would Wright claim to be Nakamoto? Because it could help him raise some *real* money.
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Apple’s plan for refurbished iPhones in India faces opposition » Bloomberg

Saritha Rai:

»India has rejected Apple Inc.’s request to import and sell refurbished iPhones to the world’s second largest mobile population, a telecommunications ministry official said Tuesday.

The U.S. company’s application has been turned down, the official said, asking to not be identified, citing official policy. Apple has been seeking permission to import and sell used phones to court price-conscious consumers with a similar proposal rejected in 2015 by the environment ministry.

Apple declined to comment.

Apple’s rivals have mounted a public campaign against the effort, arguing that such a move would trigger a flood of used electronics while defeating the government’s Make-in-India program to encourage local manufacturing.

«

Oh, and they also didn’t like it because it would also allow Apple to sell more iPhones. Quite a blow for Apple. Speaking of which…
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iPhone warning signs » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart has substantially reduced his forecasts for how many iPhones will be sold over the next 18 months, citing a number of key shifts (such as China Mobile as a one-off, India not being China, and so on):

»When looking at all of these iPhone warning signs, it is becoming clear that Apple has a significant iPhone growth problem on its hands. The combination of a slowing iPhone upgrade rate and declining number of growth catalysts for expanding the iPhone’s addressable market will make it very difficult for management to report unit sales growth going forward given its current strategy. In addition, the iPhone SE highlights how any strategy to fix some of these issues will likely end up jeopardizing iPhone ASP and margin trends.

It is important to note that the iPhone business is not imploding. Satisfaction rates and loyalty trends remain industry-leading. Apple has a very attractive iPhone installed base numbering close to 550 million users with additional users purchasing an iPhone in the grey market. Each quarter, Apple is still bringing new people to the iOS ecosystem. Instead, it is becoming much more difficult for Apple to grow iPhone unit sales each year.

All of this seems a bit surreal. Apple just recorded its best quarter for iPhone sales in 1Q16. How can there now be so many iPhone warning signs only a few months after this milestone to the point that even Apple management was caught off guard?

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus masked deteriorating iPhone trends. While those two iPhone models ushered in a wave of sales from both existing iPhone users and consumers new to iOS, upon closer examination the iPhone installed base had become much more diverse than first thought when it comes to thoughts on upgrading.

«

Bear in mind that Apple has been locked into two-year design cycles for the iPhone since 2008, meaning that even if there had been realisation in 2015 that everything would be different by now, there would be no way to stop it. The market has shifted, and it is extremely hard to see Apple ever returning to the record-setting numbers of the past.
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Rant: has Android Wear failed to make a case to normal users? » Android Police

David Ruddock:

»When someone asks me if they should buy an Android Wear device, I always answer with something along the lines of, “not if you actually expect to get your money’s worth.” The desirable smartwatches are all generally $250+, the cost of a decent entry-level smartphone these days. The inevitable next question is “what does it actually do better than a phone?” My stock response generally focuses on the ability to swipe away low-priority notifications without pulling out your phone, the ability to voice-dictate an SMS or text on major messaging platforms, media controls (when they work), track your steps, and the ability to perform simple voice commands or queries. And, of course, to look neat.

And the responses I receive each and every time? Either “but a smartphone already does that” or “but is it actually better at those things than my phone?” And the answer to the latter is plainly no. A phone allows you to type responses to messages. A phone allows you to see more text in a notification, or to expand it into the app full a complete view. A phone supports more voice commands and full web searches. A phone can track your steps. A phone – or often even your headphones – has media controls.

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Quite a few of these criticisms are specific to Android Wear; reading the comments, people want to be able to use their Wear watches to do contactless payments too. The Apple Watch already does these things (including pay, steps and maps). But of course the Watch too has struggled so far to make progress beyond the early adopters.

Suspect there’s a big update, probably including payment, coming up for Wear at Google I/O. But will that really change anything? Android Wear still has fewer than 5m activations in more than 18 months. Apple has lapped it at least twice.
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The secret culprit in the Theranos mess » Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton says the tech press bears some of the responsibility for failing to ask tougher questions:

»When I’ve asked V.C.s why they didn’t pour millions of dollars into a company that appeared to be changing the world, I was told that it wasn’t for lack of trying on Holmes’s part. She met with most top venture firms. But when the V.C.s asked how the technology worked, I was told, Holmes replied that it was too secret to share, even to investors. When they asked if it had been peer-reviewed, she insisted once again it was too secret to share—even to other scientists.

Maybe the tech press should have chosen to do the same thing. If Holmes wouldn’t explain how the technology that they were writing about actually worked, the blogosphere shouldn’t have written about it in the first place.

Since Carreyrou’s initial story was published, Holmes has stopped doing her endless media and speaking tours, and is instead trying to save her company and, presumably, her job. She has even abandoned social media. Her last tweet is a relic from December, back when the director of stage content at TEDMED tweeted a link to a story about Theranos, and subsequently defended the company and its founder by noting that the “media is so quick to idolize and then tear down brilliant change-makers, esp women.” Holmes replied with a single, terse word: “humbled.”

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“Investigate and deeply understand the technology” is not a compatible requirement of journalists who are also required to churn out a ton of posts per day. The WSJ investigation took months, and was sparked by an inside source – but the key method, of asking ex-employees and peers how it could work, is open to anyone.

The chin-stroking over “why didn’t the US tech sites get this?” is exactly the same as it was over the Snowden revelations, and has the same answer: it’s not what they’re incentivised to do, as Bilton points out.
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First Response’s Bluetooth pregnancy test is intriguing — and a privacy nightmare » The Verge

Ashley Carman:

»This is a list of the app’s permissions on Android, emphasis my own:

• Device & app history – retrieve running apps
• Identity – find accounts on the device
• Calendar – read calendar events plus confidential information, add or modify calendar events, send email to guests without owners’ knowledge
• Contacts – read your contacts, find accounts on the device
• Phone – read phone status and identity, directly call phone numbers
• Photos/Media/Files – modify or delete the contents of your USB storage, read the contents of your USB storage
• Storage – modify or delete the contents of your USB storage, read the contents of your USB storage
• Device ID & call information – read phone status and identity
• Other – full license to interact across users, receive data from the internet, full network access, view network connections, pair with Bluetooth devices, access Bluetooth settings, prevent device from sleeping, use accounts on the device.

Church and Dwight also list a Privacy Policy for the app, which explicitly says in bold, “If you opt-in, we may share your Personal Information with third parties for third party marketing purposes.” Not only can the app call users’ contacts without their permission, search their device for social media accounts, and send emails to calendar event guests without permission, but it can also use all that data to create tailored ads.

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The company told Carman: “Church & Dwight Co., Inc. puts users’ privacy first and works to ensure that the trust users place in our products is recognized and respected with the utmost discretion.”

Which notably isn’t “we would never send emails or messages to everyone without your permission saying HEY SHE’S PREGGERS!”
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Flaws in Samsung’s ‘smart’ home let hackers unlock doors and set off fire alarms » WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»The security research community has been loudly warning for years that the so-called Internet of Things—and particularly networked home appliances—would introduce a deluge of new hackable vulnerabilities into everyday objects. Now one group of researchers at the University of Michigan and Microsoft have published what they call the first in-depth security analysis of one such “smart home” platform that allows anyone to control their home appliances from light bulbs to locks with a PC or smartphone. They discovered they could pull off disturbing tricks over the internet, from triggering a smoke detector at will to planting a “backdoor” PIN code in a digital lock that offers silent access to your home, all of which they plan to present at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy later this month.

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Feels like we’re roughly at the Windows95 level of device security, but with hackers working at the Windows 7 level.
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Nelly Furtado: ‘YouTube pays more than nothing. That doesn’t make it fair’ » The Guardian

Nelly Furtado:

»I was lucky enough to meet and open for Prince and see him live several times over the years. He stood for pure music and honouring music with proper reverence. Prince’s death reminds all of us artists to wake up and smell the coffee. As I sit here writing this, I am listening to Zayn Malik’s new album – absolutely transported by the freedom, beauty and universality in it – and I’m certain of the labour put into making it great. I am putting the finishing touches on my new album right now, and I won’t stop working on it until it feels complete, much like a cabinet maker or a window cleaner would. We are all “working” class. This work is valid and has value. I love YouTube, but I think it is underpaying and getting away with it. I know the truth hurts, but someone’s got to tell it.

1. YouTube needs to use its Content ID system in a more productive way. It is interesting to note that it is ultra-efficient at removing anything pornographic or beyond certain limits of taste. But it seems not so effective for artists’ music, publishers, and labels. Let’s not forget that YouTube is owned by a technology company with the ability and resources to solve the problem.

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And she has more points. But principally, it’s that YouTube is getting away with murder.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Yesterday’s photo was by cjjgbella on Flickr.