Start up: uncommenting The Verge, Siri v lights, the washing machine trials, web ad delights, and more

Posted on July 7, 2015 by charlesarthur

Life without the Apple Watch: which word fits? Photo by alexknowshtml on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you: laugh and point at the screen as though you found something funny. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

We’re turning comments off for a bit » The Verge

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief:

What we’ve found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative — a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since. It’s hard for us to do our best work in that environment, and it’s even harder for our staff to hang out with our audience and build the relationships that led to us having a great community in the first place.

That’s a bad feedback loop, and we want to stop it. So we’re going to call timeout for a while and turn comments off by default on all posts for the next few weeks. It’s going to be a super chill summer.

We’re still dedicated to community, so our forums will remain open — in fact, we’ll be doing more to promote great posts from the forums on our front page and on our social channels than ever before. And we’ll be turning comments on on a post-by-post basis when we want to open things up, so look for that.

But in the meantime, let’s all take that minute and relax. Let someone else curate your playlists, you know? Comments will be back. There will always be another party. Freedom lasts forever.

I refer the honourable ladies and gentlemen to my analysis from last November of how Gresham’s Law explains precisely this phenomenon. We’ll see how the “comments will come back, honest” works out.

And here’s the Verge forum discussing it. Guess which tech company the discussion quickly degenerates into accusing The Verge of favouring? It’s the tech version of Godwin’s Law, and just as corrosive.

Aparna Chennapragada, head of Google Now, discusses apps, search, AI » Re/code

Mark Bergen:

Chennapragada spelled out the three-pronged direction of the product — what she called the “bets” her team is taking. The first bet was embedding Now with Google’s full “Knowledge Graph” — the billions-thick Web of people, places and things and their many interconnections.

The second is context. Now groks both the user’s location and the myriad of signals from others in the same spot. If you enter a mall, Now will tailor cards to what people in that mall typically ask for. “Both your feet are at the mall. You shouldn’t have to spell it out,” Chennapragada said. “Why should I futz with the phone and wade through 15 screens?”

And this is where the third benchmark for Now comes in: Tying that context to the apps on your phone, or ones you have yet to download. In two years, Google has indexed some 50 billion links within apps. In April, it began listing install links to apps deemed relevant in search. Indexed apps will be included in Now on Tap when it arrives in the latest Android version this fall.

Your phone knows you’re at the mall. Is this a place where I need my phone to know I am? I find these scenarios puzzling, because “things I might be at the mall to do” are truly difficult to narrow down, and enunciate, and likely aren’t the same between visits. The times I’d need Google Now to leap into action would be when I found myself somewhere unscheduled and without transport. That’s when I want help.

Hacking Team responds to data breach, issues public threats and denials » CSO Online

Steve Ragan:

Newly published documents from the cache include invoices for services with Italian law enforcement, Oman, South Korea, UAE, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Lebanon, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Egypt, and Vietnam. The total value of the invoices is €4,324,350 Euro.

The hack went without comment for several hours, until members of Hacking Team woke on Monday morning. One of the company’s staffers, Christian Pozzi, offered several comments on the breach, despite his statement that he couldn’t comment.

“We are awake. The people responsible for this will be arrested. We are working with the police at the moment,” Pozzi wrote.

“Don’t believe everything you see. Most of what the attackers are claiming is simply not true…The attackers are spreading a lot of lies about our company that is simply not true. The torrent contains a virus…”

Pozzi took to Twitter to repeat the same message for the most part, the key points being that Hacking Team is working with law enforcement on this matter, that the massive torrent file has malware in it (it doesn’t), customers are being notified, and that his company has done nothing illegal: “… We simply provide custom software solutions tailored to our customers needs…”

My week without Apple Watch » Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin:

When I had the Apple Watch on, I averaged 28 fewer times I looked at my iPhone each day. This is a good proxy of how notifications on the watch help minimize the number of times I need to look at my phone to see the nature of each notification.

After reflecting on what looking at my phone fewer times meant in my daily life, I concluded the experience was less disruptive. Don’t get me wrong — I love my iPhone. It is my primary computer. However, having to respond to your phone or pull it out of your pocket or bag for each phone call or text message turns out to be fairly disruptive. As I’ve observed my wife’s behavior as well with her Apple Watch, she articulates similar feelings. As she is out and about, not having to fumble through her purse each time her phone dings is a less disruptive experience in many daily situations. Particularly since not all notifications are important or in need of an immediate response. However, without the use of the Apple Watch, you would not know this without getting your phone out and looking at it. This is an area of immense value that can only be understood once experienced.

I’d agree with this: I’m using an Apple Watch, and the value in not having to have your phone right there is substantial – but also difficult to quantify, because of course you can do without it. Filtering notifications matters; but being able to see or respond to the ones you deem urgent matters a lot.

(If you have an Apple Watch, Bajarin is working with a company called Wristly to do research; you could join.)

Hats off to web advertising. No, really. » WSJ

Chris Mims:

Vast advertising markets that had to decide what ad to show in milliseconds meant that from the very beginning of internet advertising, unprecedented amounts of data were flowing into growing quantities of computing power.

Like a kind of Manhattan project for data, solving the problem of ad matching and delivery meant taking formerly obscure areas of research and transforming it into something everyone could use. “Powerful machine learning techniques were just starting to be developed in academia,” says [Gokul] Rajaram [formerly lead engineer at early ad network Juno, then Google and Facebook, and now at Square], but ad networks would have been impossible without them.

As I researched, I discovered the alumni of ad tech platforms are everywhere, launching startups and leading projects within established companies. What they all have in common is an unusual and broadly powerful toolkit that is being applied to everything from agricultural drones and cybersecurity to food safety and the improvement of hiring practices.

It’s a fair point: we love to hate ads, but the necessity of making them work has driven a lot of improvement.

Here’s what it’s like to control your lights with Siri » The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

If you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately begin using this ability to mess with the people you live with: turning off lights so that they’re sitting in a dark room, turning on a light while they’re set up to watch Netflix. I didn’t see the Siri control as much more than a novelty at first, but the utility became more apparent once I set up two lamps in the same room. At that point, it became easier to turn them on and off simultaneously with Siri than to walk over to each one individually. It’s a basic start, but there’s so much more you could do once additional pieces of the home become connected.

Must be a hell of a big room for it to be easier to talk to the phone than to stand up. Also, what is the “so much more” you can do? Lights are the classic “wrong application”: we usually turn lights on when we enter a room, turn them off when we leave. In between, there’s hardly ever anything we want to do to them – and if we do, then it’s either a short reach, or a couple of steps. Pretending otherwise is automation for its own sake.

Home automation still needs really simple sensors and actuators that we can fit ad-hoc to things we choose, not devices where it’s built-in but not actually useful.

Chaebol slapfight: Samsung, LG in first trial over washing machine vandalism » BusinessKorea

Cho Jin-young:

In the first trial between the two Korean home appliance giants, the legal representatives for LG gave an item-by-item rebuttal of the allegations that CEO Cho Seong-jin and two other officials at the company broke the doors of three Samsung washing machines intentionally.

“The doors of the front-door washing machines are big and heavy, so they can naturally tilt downward to some extent and swing a little bit, which can be easily found in other washing machines,” a legal representative for LG appealed.

The attorney also raised suspicions about the authenticity of the damaged washing machines presented to the court as evidence, arguing that the products seemed to have had more scratches than before, and that they could not be the results of Cho touching the washers.

What’s “de minimis non curat lex” in Korean? (Also: “first” trial?)

YouTube is the No.1 music streaming platform – and getting bigger » Music Business Worldwide

Scary news for those who don’t feel YouTube is paying music rights-holders enough: it’s the biggest music streaming service on earth, and it’s growing faster than Spotify or any of its rivals.

That’s according to MBW analysis of the latest market stats out of the UK and US, which show that YouTube increased its market share of total on-demand streams in the first six months of this year on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the first half of 2015 in the US, overall on-demand streams grew 92.4% year-on-year to 135.2bn.

The majority of this growth was down to YouTube (plus Vevo and other video services), which saw a stream volume increase of 109.2% to 76.6bn.

Though it seems like Vevo is a big player in this. But yes, YouTube swamps everything else.

Start up: bitcoin for Greece?, news apps’ key problem, when hamburger menus are good, and more

Posted on July 6, 2015 by charlesarthur

Coming to the UK on 14 July? Apple Pay photo by DopiesLife.com on Flickr.

A selection of 7 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why it’s totally okay to use a hamburger icon » UXmatters

Steven Hoober:

Not too long ago, I was observing a test in which the subject was a mechanic in a truck repair shop. He didn’t have a computer at home, had no access to a smartphone, so had no base of knowledge. But we gave him a smartphone and an app to try out. He did fine with the big, obvious bits on the screen and performed every task. Then, we got to the tricky part. We asked him to reconnect the phone to the IoT (Internet of Things) device we were testing, then refresh the display on the screen.

“Hmm… I don’t see it. Maybe in here?” he said, tapping Menu, where he found the Refresh button. He said, “Ah, there it is,” as he tapped it.

I’ve experienced this sort of observation over and over again. Why? Well, first because of a fundamental behavior of mobile-device users, who do not scan a page top to bottom and left to right, but always gravitate toward the center. In Figure 3, you can see a chart showing where users tapped when presented with a scrolling list of selectable items.

The same preference for the center applies to tap accuracy, speed, and comprehension. When designing, I assume users view and read the center, then move outward if they do not find the information they need.

This is actually starting to become a design principle of mine. Assume that users focus on and interact with things at the center of a page, and make sure that you can live with their missing or ignoring things at the top and bottom edges.

Some pushback in the comments: how do you get back from the hamburger?

The problem every news aggregation app faces » Medium

Simon Owens:

The chief problem I have with many news apps is they don’t deliver the level of customization that I can get on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. I launched my Twitter account in late 2008. In the intervening years I’ve accumulated a list of over 700 people whom I follow, and for a significant portion of those people I wouldn’t be able to remember my reasoning for following them. In some cases they’re colleagues I’ve worked with. In others they’re writers and journalists I admire. But there are still plenty more I followed because something in their profile caught my eye or they authored an article I enjoyed but have long since forgotten.

But despite not having a complete understanding of all my follow choices, my Twitter feed is a well-oiled machine, one that produces a rich tapestry of news and commentary (and plenty of jokes) every time I open it.

True, but it’s taken him six years to reach that level of aggregation on Twitter. News apps don’t get that. But his key point is that

“The problem is that news tastes go beyond mere categories and keywords.”

And that’s the crux of it.

Some miners generating invalid blocks » bitcoin.org

For several months, an increasing amount of mining hash rate has been signaling its intent to begin enforcing BIP66 strict DER signatures. As part of the BIP66 rules, once 950 of the last 1,000 blocks were version 3 (v3) blocks, all upgraded miners would reject version 2 (v2) blocks.

Early morning UTC on 4 July 2015, the 950/1000 (95%) threshold was reached. Shortly thereafter, a small miner (part of the non-upgraded 5%) mined an invalid block – as was an expected occurrence. Unfortunately, it turned out that roughly half the network hash rate was mining without fully validating blocks (called SPV mining), and built new blocks on top of that invalid block.

Note that the roughly 50% of the network that was SPV mining had explicitly indicated that they would enforce the BIP66 rules. By not doing so, several large miners have lost over $50,000 dollars worth of mining income so far.

All software that assumes blocks are valid (because invalid blocks cost miners money) is at risk of showing transactions as confirmed when they really aren’t. This particularly affects lightweight (SPV) wallets and software such as old versions of Bitcoin Core which have been downgraded to SPV-level security by the new BIP66 consensus rules.

Now bitcoin is getting the inertia problems of widespread use and software updates.

Leak suggests iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will be able to capture 4K video » MobileSyrup.com

Igor Bonifacic:

If a new leak is to be believed, the next iPhone will feature a 12 megapixel rear-facing camera that is able to capture 4K video.

The leak comes courtesy of anonymous poster on China’s Sina Weibo website.

If true, that will mean that the 6s and 6s Plus will boast cameras that are a significant upgrade from the already excellent shooters that are found on their predecessors.

While 4K TVs and computer displays still have a long way to go before they’re ubiquitous, there’s a case to be made that consumers could still get use out all those extra pixels. Current smartphones, TVs and computers might not be able to display 4K content at its native resolution, but consumers will still see an improvement in visual quality through downsampling.

A couple of things. (1) “If a new leak is to be believed”? This takes arms-length writing to an extreme. Later in the piece he says “Of course, it’s impossible to verify a rumour like this one”, which is patently untrue. You just need much, much, much better connections. (2) It can’t be surprising that the next iPhones will have better cameras. The only question will be how much better. (3) I’d like a clearer explanation of how it’s useful to shoot video at that resolution.

Apple Pay expected to go live in the U.K. on July 14th, £20+ transactions starting this fall » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Apple appears to be planning to enable its Apple Pay iPhone mobile payments service in the United Kingdom on July 14th, according to sources at multiple retailers. Apple has informed some Apple Retail employees in the U.K. that Apple Pay support will go live on that Tuesday, while an internal memos for supermarket Waitrose plus an additional retail partner indicate the same date…

Apple will also begin training its U.K staff on supporting Apple Pay on July 12th.

Given that the UK has widespread availability of NFC terminals, the UK could quickly become the largest location for Apple Pay payments – the penetration of iOS devices is high (32% or so of smartphones).

Huawei says Honor brand on track to sell 40 million smartphones » Chinadaily.com.cn

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd’s Honor brand has sold 20m smartphones in the first half of 2015 and by should reach its goal of 40m shipments by the year end, double the 2014 figure.

Honor’s sales amounted to $2.6bn of revenue during the first half of the year, Honor President George Zhao said at the launch of the Honor 7 phone in Beijing.

Huawei, the world’s No. 4 handset maker, has invested heavily in the past two years to establish Honor as a stand-alone brand to compete against Beijing-based Xiaomi Inc to win over young, fashion-conscious customers.

Zhao said that he expected 15%, or 6m, of the unit’s total sales this year to come from overseas, with the majority coming from China.

Since you’re wondering, that gives the Honor an average selling price (ASP) of $130 – which puts it some way below the top-end Android price, and lower even than Lenovo.

Fearing return to drachma, some Greeks use bitcoin to dodge capital controls » Reuters

Jemima Kelly:

Although absolute figures are hard to come by, Greek interest has surged in the online “cryptocurrency”, which is out of the reach of monetary authorities and can be transferred at the touch of a smartphone screen.

New customers depositing at least 50 euros with BTCGreece, the only Greece-based bitcoin exchange, open only to Greeks, rose by 400% [translation: tripled – CA] between May and June, according to its founder Thanos Marinos, who put the number at “a few thousand”. The average deposit quadrupled to around 700 euros.

Using bitcoin could allow Greeks to do one of the things that capital controls were put in place this week to prevent: transfer money out of their bank accounts and, if they wish, out of the country.

“When people are trying to move money out of the country and the state is stopping that from taking place, bitcoin is the only way to move any value,” said Adam Vaziri, a board member of the UK Digital Currency Association.

The problem is that in order to translate your euros into bitcoin, you have to find someone willing to take your euros – and you also have to have the euros available. It’s getting money out of the Greek banks that has been the problem lately. And this remains a minority sport.

Start up: Apple Music’s likely effects, no Paypal in Greece, how Bitstamp was hacked, and more

Posted on July 3, 2015 by charlesarthur

Of 58 aboard, only 15 survived. But was the crash due to machine or human error?

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

Why the next few months of Apple Music will throw up a few surprises » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan:

As we revealed on our MIDiA Research report on Apple Music back in March 28% of iOS users stated they were likely to pay for the service. Among downloaders the rate is 39% and for existing subscribers that rate rises to 62%. Consumer surveys of course always over-report so we shouldn’t expect those rates of paid adoption but the relative values are interesting nonetheless.

Given that 50% of existing subscribers are iOS users the implications are that a big chunk of Spotify et al’s subscribers will at the very least try out Apple’s 3 month trial, which is plenty enough time to get build a comprehensive library of playlists and to get hooked. But there is also going to be a big wave of downloaders that do not currently subscribe that will try it out.

As the iOS 8.4 update virtually pushes iTunes Music users into starting the trial on updating, expect pretty widespread uptake of the trial. Apple reached 11 million users for iTunes radio within 5 days of launch, 21 million within 3 months. Apple Music has had a far bigger build up and is much more deeply integrated into iOS so a fairly safe bet is that those numbers will at the very least be matched.

It’s getting people to pony up that’s hard. Adding Android users (with Apple Music for Android in autumn) might just be the icing on the cake; iOS is where the numbers and easy money will be.

Mulligan points to other surprises too – read on there.

Reddit’s AMA subreddit down after Victoria Taylor departure » Business Insider

Biz Carson:

The iAMA and Science subreddits both were set to private today after Reddit’s director of Communications, Victoria Taylor was allegedly dismissed. In a Reddit thread about her departure, she replied that she was “dazed” and “hopefully” plans to stay in the PR field.

Reddit and Taylor have not yet responded to request for comment.

One of Taylor’s job duties was coordinating the site’s popular AMAs. Two of the site’s most popular posts ever are AMAs: the one with Barack Obama and a conversation with a man with two penises. The AMA subreddit became such a popular section of the site that Reddit eventually spun it out into its own app.

Something’s up at Reddit; it’s either going to come through this much stronger, or run into the sand.

40 states line up with Mississippi in Google Adwords pharma scrap » The Register

Andrew Orlowski:

Attorneys General representing 40 US states have filed an amicus brief backing Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood’s investigation into Google.

In December, the giant multinational sued the state of Mississippi after it had opened an investigation into Google’s business practices (claiming Hood’s complaints did not come under state law jurisdiction), and earlier this year a District Court froze this investigation.

The attorneys say if the freeze is upheld, it will have a chilling effect on investigative subpoenas across the US.

Hood’s 79-page subpoena inquires mainly into Google’s advertising practices, focussing on the sale of illegal and controlled substances.

Four pages consist of inquiries into how Google deals with IP enforcement. It follows from a 2011 non-prosecution agreement (NPA) between Google and the FBI, the FDA and Rhode Island into rogue drug traffickers, who used Google Adwords to move their wares. Google agreed to a $500m fine, $230m of which was funnelled to Rhode Island.

The NPA lapsed in 2013, three months early, with no indication from Federal authorities that Google had actually complied. That’s when the states got serious.

This is an odd case. Hood comes across as a little obsessed (but is that bad in a lawman?), but Google comes across as vindictive – and not a little defensive.

Bitstamp Incident Report (PDF) » Bitstamp

The bitcoin exchange had 18,000 BTC, worth (then) about $5m, stolen:

On 9 December 2014, Bitstamp’s Systems Administrator, Luka Kodric, received a phishing email to his Gmail account. Unlike some of the others targets, Kordic did have access to Bitstamp’s hot wallet. The email header had been spoofed to appear as if it had been sent from konidas@acm[.]org, although it was actually received from a Tor exit node [the email chain and header details can be seen in full at Appendix A].

ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, which describes itself as the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. The sender was offering Mr. Kodric the opportunity to join Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE), the International Honour Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines.

The UPE site is hosted within the acm.org domain. On 11 December, as part of this offer, the attacker sent a number of attachments. One of these, UPE_application_form.doc, contained obfuscated malicious VBA script. When opened, this script ran automatically and pulled down a malicious file from IP address 185.31.209.145, thereby compromising the machine.

As the security researcher The Grugq observed, “Computer security is such an unsolved problem that Bitstamp lost $5m because someone had macros enabled in Microsoft Word.”

The (slight) rise of _nomap » OpenSignal blog

Samuel Johnson, on OpenSignal’s checking of how many Wi-Fi networks added the suffix “_nomap” to stop Google mapping their location:

This graph also shows a rise beginning at the end of 2013 and continuing into 2014. Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s privacy incursions occurred during the summer of 2013 – and so it is possible that the heightened awareness about privacy issues could have led to more people taking care that Google was not recording their Wi-Fi hotspot. However, compared to the number of global Wi-Fi networks detected by OpenSignal, it is clear that the number that adopted Google’s solution is very small.

So why is this? Obviously it was deeply concerning that Google were tracking payload data – but it is not in itself concerning that they are collecting Wi-Fi SSIDs (after all, this is what we at OpenSignal do). Those technologically savvy enough to have followed the story (and continued to do so months after the initial outburst of outrage) will know that Google had publicly pledged to stop tracking Wi-Fi payload data, and so any appending _nomap to their Wi-Fi hotspots would not make any difference to that.

We’ve finally hit the breaking point for the original Internet » The Washington Post

Brian Fung:

It’s finally happened. The North American organization responsible for handing out new IP addresses says its banks have run dry.

That’s right: ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, has had to turn down a request for the unique numbers that we assign to each and every smartphone, tablet and PC so they can talk to the Internet. For the first time, ARIN didn’t have enough IP addresses left in its stock to satisfy an entire order — and now, it’s activated the end-times protocol that will see the few remaining addresses out into the night.

The end of IPv4 has been forecast for a few years now. Looks like it’s actually going to happen, and we’ll move to IPv6.

PayPal no longer works in Greece—and why that matters » Quartz

Shelly Banjo:

Adding to their list of woes, Greeks can no longer use their PayPal accounts.

Limits on how much money Greeks can take out of banks put in place by their debt-stricken government as it negotiates with lenders have effectively crippled the online payment service, which relies on traditional banks and credit cards to transfer money.

According to a PayPal spokesman:

Due to the recent decisions of the Greek authorities on capital controls, funding of PayPal wallet from Greek bank accounts, as well as cross-border transactions, funded by any cards or bank accounts are currently not available. We aim to continue serving our valued customers in Greece in full, as we have for over a decade.

Except that they can’t serve their valued customers. So, why does it matter?

PayPal’s shutdown in Greece reminds us how difficult it is to disintermediate banks from the flow of money.

Well duh. Did you think it was all going to bitcoin? As the Bitstamp link above shows, good luck with that.

Faulty credit card-sized connector led to crash of 20-tonne plane » Bloomberg Business

Tim Culpan:

A faulty connector about the size of a credit card helped trigger a series of mechanical and human failures that led to the crash of a 20-ton aircraft in February, killing 43 people, investigators in Taiwan found.

Microscopic tests of a soldered connector joint on the TransAsia Airways Corp. plane engine showed potential cracking, and the connector failed post-crash tests, the Aviation Safety Council said in a report today.

That failure is at the heart of why the ATR72 twin-propeller plane incorrectly sounded a cockpit warning and an engine adjustment known as autofeather. That set in motion a series of pilot errors that eventually crashed the aircraft into a downtown Taipei river Feb. 4.

The autofeather made the engine ineffective. Pilot error then played a big part: they shut down the other engine, wrongly thinking it was the affected one.

How do you design faults like those out of a system? First the machines screw up, then the humans.

Start up: Wi-Fi password sharing?, machine intelligence smart and stupid, Pebble Time review, and more

Posted on July 2, 2015 by charlesarthur

You’ll never believe what happens if you play it backwards. Photo by Janitors on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Show them eagerly to the person beside you! I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

UH OH: Windows 10 will share your WiFi key with your friends’ friends » The Register

Simon Rockman:

A Windows 10 feature, Wi-Fi Sense, smells like a security risk: it shares WiFi passwords with the user’s contacts.

Those contacts include their Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) contacts, Skype contacts and, with an opt-in, their Facebook friends. There is method in the Microsoft madness – it saves having to shout across the office or house “what’s the Wi-Fi password?” – but ease of use has to be teamed with security. If you wander close to a wireless network, and your friend knows the password, and you both have Wi-Fi Sense, you can now log into that network.

Wi-Fi Sense doesn’t reveal the plaintext password to your family, friends, acquaintances, and the chap at the takeaway who’s an Outlook.com contact, but it does allow them, if they are also running Wi-Fi Sense, to log in to your Wi-Fi. The password must be stored centrally by Microsoft, and is copied to a device for it to work; Microsoft just tries to stop you looking at it. How successful that will be isn’t yet known.

“For networks you choose to share access to, the password is sent over an encrypted connection and stored in an encrypted file on a Microsoft server, and then sent over a secure connection to your contacts’ phone if they use Wi-Fi Sense and they’re in range of the Wi-Fi network you shared,” the Wi-Fi Sense FAQ states.

Has been on Windows Phone for ages, yes, but most WP users don’t know any significant number of other WP users (because they’re so few). Not so with Windows. Microsoft says it only allows internet access and not LAN access – via port restrictions? That’s going to get hacked for sure.

Or could people maliciously spread their Wi-Fi details to try to sniff people’s viewing habits and details?

Pebble Time review » Wareable

Sophie Charara:

First things first, the Pebble looks better in real life than the pics you’ll have seen online. The black model is a little boring but will look neat under suit sleeves – for the record, we prefer the red and black Time.

Admittedly, the Time is plasticky, with a stainless steel bezel, but it retains the toy-like charm of the original Pebble while adding friendlier, more unisex curves. It’s very light at just 42.5g including the standard strap, 20% thinner at 9.5mm and the new slightly curved body helps to make it comfortable to wear on the wrist.

It’s amazing how many smartwatch manufacturers are satisfied with making devices that sit flat on top. The Time is the kind of smartwatch you can forget you’re wearing, until it vibrates.

I bought an original Pebble on Kickstarter. This? Looks like a toy compared to the Apple Watch. Not quite half the price, but really nothing like half as attractive.

Apple Sim iPads change the international data roaming game » Fortune

This morning, Apple and GigSky teamed up to offer travelers the ability to instantly connect to a local data network in more than 90 countries and territories upon touchdown—no need to visit a kiosk, talk to a service agent, or really, do anything at all. Instead, iPads with AppleSIM cards will automatically offer the option to sign up for a data plans as soon as a local network is in reach. (The GigSky network includes most of Western Europe, from France and Germany to the Netherlands; Australia; South Africa; parts of the Middle East; and beyond.)

Because travelers are accessing onto local networks, rather that roaming from their domestic carrier, prices are impressively affordable as long as you’re traveling on the beaten path. Entry-level data plans begin at just $10, covering anywhere between 10MB (in Papua New Guinea) to 75 MB (in Italy); in countries with better access, the premium plans top out at 3GB for $50. By comparison, AT&T’s best deal currently charges $30 for 120 MB or $120 for 800 MB.

Latest iPads only have them preinstalled, although for older ones you can get Apple SIMs in its stores, apparently.

Superconductivity record bolstered by magnetic data » Scientific American

Edwin Cartlidge:

The long-standing quest to find a material that can conduct electricity without resistance at room temperature may have taken a decisive step forward. Scientists in Germany have observed the common molecule hydrogen sulfide superconducting at a record-breaking 203 kelvin (–70 ˚C) when subjected to very high pressures. The result confirms preliminary findings released by the researchers late last year, and is said to be corroborated by data from several other groups.

Some physicists urge caution, however. Ivan Schuller at the University of California in San Diego, says that the results “look promising” but are not yet watertight.

Pressure of 1.5 million atmospheres. Don’t hold your breath for this one.

Why the BBC is wrong to republish ‘right to be forgotten’ links » The Guardian

Julia Powles:

The reaction to [BBC Online managing editor Neil] McIntosh’s post was predictable, inaccurate and devastating. The Times led with “BBC lists stories on abusers and rapists hidden under ‘right to be forgotten’”, gratuitously highlighting two stories.

The first was a 12-year-old story about a settlement between an alleged rape victim and the Catholic church, over incidents that occurred a half-century ago. The long-deceased abuser clearly couldn’t have filed the obscurity request with Google – leaving, rather less salaciously, the victim.

The second case concerned a nanny jailed for child abuse. Even a cursory Google search coupled with the basics of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act would have told the journalist that an unspent conviction for such an offence clearly denied any reasonable claim to delisting. Caution raised, a bit more searching would have revealed the truth: that the conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal. That former nanny has been exculpated under the law of the land – but not by Google and not, it seems, by the press either.

Other publications followed suit. Boing Boing drew attention to a rape story. Given it concerned a fairly recent conviction in 2012, clearly the sex offender has no entitlement to be delisted.

But what about his friend who was also named in the article because he happened to be in the house where the attack took place?

The “right to be forgotten” is so poorly understood, which frustrates the hell out of me. (See the comments under the article.) I wrote an explanation of what it is, and what it is not; please, before you discuss the topic with me (or anyone), read and absorb it. The topic is simple. It just takes a bit of thought.

Growing conspiracy theory: is spy equipment really included in Samsung smartphone batteries? » BusinessKorea

Cho Jin-young:

A video circulating on Facebook and YouTube that was posted at the beginning of the last week of June shows that after tearing off a sticker that wraps around the battery of the Galaxy S4, the man in the video points to a small coil inside, saying, “This is the spy equipment.”

He remarked, “Samsung can record pictures on your smartphone and overhear your calls through the coil shaped like this antenna,” adding, “So, you’d better tear off the sticker that wraps the battery first and use the phone.”

In fact, this video attracted 12 million views on Facebook only four days after it was initially posted, and around 300,000 people reportedly shared the video.

However, local media outlets pointed out that this conspiratorial video originated from a misunderstanding about the Near Field Communication (NFC) antenna, a communication technology that makes it possible to transmit different kinds of wireless data to a distance of 10 cm.

Would be fun to know how weird ideas like this get started. I’ve seen a few incoming search queries on this to this blog, and wondered what was going on (it was because I wrote about Samsung obviously knowing whether people use replacement batteries).

DRAM spot prices hit 28-month low, says Taiwan Central News Agency » Digitimes

Jessie Chen:

Spot prices for 4Gb DDR3 chips already declined 17.55% in the second quarter, after falling 12.77% in the first quarter, the report quoted DRAMeXchange as saying.

Since 2015, DRAM spot prices have been dragged down by sluggish PC sales and a slowdown in smartphone demand, the report noted.

Hadn’t heard about this slowdown in smartphone demand anywhere else. China has, but elsewhere? Dram prices are often an early warning though.

Google apologises for Photos app’s racist blunder » BBC News

Google says it is “appalled” that its new Photos app mistakenly labelled a black couple as being “gorillas”.

Its product automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software.
The error was brought to its attention by a New York-based software developer who was one of the people pictured in the photos involved.

Google was later criticised on social media because of the label’s racist connotations.
“This is 100% not OK,” acknowledged Google executive Yonatan Zunger after being contacted by Jacky Alcine via Twitter.

“[It was] high on my list of bugs you ‘never’ want to see happen.”

Machines can’t be racist, of course; but quite how Google is going to prevent this happening again is an open question. Neural network/deep learning like this isn’t something you can tweak directly. You can’t really peer inside it. Great when it’s drawing arcane pictures, not good when it’s mislabelling pictures.

Could this computer save your life? » CNN

Jillian Eugenios:

“In one panel of scans that we looked at, when you look at the number of times that radiologists sent someone home with a clean bill of health, about 7% of the time that patient was ultimately found to have cancer,” said John Zedlewski, a data scientist with Enlitic, a medical technology company.

When Zedlewski used Enlitic’s algorithm against the same panel, there weren’t any mistakes.

How does it work? Enlitic’s technology uses machine learning — which some say is a version of artificial intelligence. It takes medical information from one patient — whether it’s a CT scan, an X-ray or details about, say, a tumor — and then converts it into a mathematical representation. It’s then added to a large pool of data and compared to other patients who have experienced similar issues.

Think of it as crowdsourcing your symptoms. And not just with one or two people, but millions. The more data the computer has, the smarter it gets, and the more accurate the diagnoses.

At least that’s the dream.

Seems to have a large base of data.

Start up: Apple’s antitrust, querying Google, Microsoft’s coming writedown, unprivate faces, and more

Posted on July 1, 2015 by charlesarthur

Things like this can make Sony rich. Photo by Steys on Flickr.

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

Facial recognition privacy talks: why I walked out » Slate

Alvaro M. Bedoya:

On June 16, consumer privacy advocates walked out of talks to set voluntary rules for companies that use facial recognition technology. They explained that they were withdrawing from the talks because industry would not agree to critical privacy protections. I was one of those advocates.

There is a growing divide in Americans’ right to privacy. As checks strengthen on government surveillance, tech companies are evading even basic limits on their ability to collect, share, and monetize your data. At the heart of this divide is an increasingly formidable force: industry lobbying.

Facial recognition lets companies identify you by name, from far away, and in secret. There’s little you can do to stop it. You can’t change your fingerprints or the unique dimensions of your face—not easily. And while you leave your fingerprints on only the things you touch, every time you step outside, your face appears, ready for analysis, in the video feeds and photographs of any camera pointing your way.

And there are more of those cameras than ever before.

The US’s lack of data protection law is beginning to catch up with it – in fact, it has run right past it and now looks ready to lap it.

Sony to invest billions in its image sensor business » AndroidAuthority

Rob Triggs:

To raise the necessary funds for this expensive investment, Sony will be issuing new shares for the first time since 1989, which caused an 8.25% fall in Sony’s share price. The company is planning to raise around $3.6bn through a combination of selling new shares and convertible bonds.

Of the total, much of the proceeds are earmarked for investment into additional production capacity for smartphone image sensors, such as those used in Apple and Samsung products, as well as its own handset line-up. Despite high demand for Sony’s cutting edge camera modules, its current production capacity is preventing the company from maximising its revenue.

Appeals court upholds Apple price-fixing conspiracy in ebook case » Fortune

Jeff John Roberts:

A long-running fight between Apple and the Justice Department is finally over after an appeals court affirmed a ruling that the iPad maker fixed book prices.

An appeals court in New York on Tuesday upheld a 2013 verdict that Apple organized an illegal conspiracy with five book publishers to raise the price of ebooks, noting that so-called horizontal price-fixing is “the supreme evil of antitrust.”

The ruling ends a long-running legal fight between Apple and the U.S. Justice Department, and paves the way for Apple to start issuing payouts to consumers in a related class-action settlement.

Apple set aside $450m in case it lost this one. One of Steve Jobs’s lousiest-ever ideas. Though others in the executive chain need to accept responsibility too. And continuing the antitrust theme…

Yelp researchers take aim at Google search results » LA Times

Daina Beth Solomon:

Yelp said the new report, which it presented to European regulators Friday, could put pressure on the investigation and encourage additional research.

“We believe these revelations are timely given the active inquiries into these very issues by antitrust authorities,” said Luther Lowe, Yelp’s vice president of public policy.

But others said the report wouldn’t prompt serious action, saying it did not prove a deliberate effort by Google to harm its rivals.

“I think hyperbole has gotten ahead of the fact,” said David Balto, an antitrust lawyer in Washington and former policy director for the FTC. “There’s a long journey to take before anyone can say this violates the competition laws.”

The research by Yelp instead appeared to be an attempt to “hobble” Google, he said, forcing the company to spend time and money justifying its conduct.

Here’s the report. The point to note is that it echoes what Google itself found during its own internal studies; it had to change its approval criteria before it could justify the changes favouring its own services.

Oh, and David Balto? As Luther Lowe (Yelp’s PR chief) pointed out, he’s been a paid writer for Google, but somehow forgot to mention it in a pro-Google article he wrote. Hyperbole and fact indeed.

Samsung GS6 US sales bode well for Android June quarter » Kantar Worldpanel

“The first full month of sales of the Galaxy S6 allowed Samsung to regain the market lead in the US and grow its share of Android sales from 52% in the three months ending in April to 55% for the three months ending in May,” reported Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. “Samsung’s share of the US smartphone market grew period-over-period, as the Galaxy S6 became the third best-selling smartphone in the US, after the iPhone 6 and the Galaxy S5.Samsung’s year-over-year performance also improved, with its US market share now down only 0.5 percentage point compared to 1.6 percentage points in the three months ending in April.”

In the US, the momentum of iOS slowed as share declined, both period-over-period and year-over-year. “Sales of Android-based smartphones were fueled not only by Samsung, but also by LG, which was able to nearly double its share of the US smartphone market year-over-year,” Milanesi added. “Other tier-one Android players, such as HTC and Motorola, had a more difficult period, with their share decreasing both year-over-year and period-over-period, raising hopes for competitors – such as Huawei and Sony, who have yet to wow US consumers – that share could be up for grabs.”

Across Europe, demand for the iPhone 6 remained strong, with this model topping the chart in Great Britain, Germany, Italy and France. “Britain remains the iOS stronghold, forcing Android vendors to rely more on winning customers from Apple than from other Android players,” said Dominic Sunnebo, business unit director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Europe.” In the three months ending in May, only 5% of new Android buyers came from Apple, compared to 11% for the same period in 2014.”

The GS6 is the third best-selling phone? That’s weird. Sunnebo’s data on Apple-to-Android movers only tells half the story, of course. What also matters is movements in the other direction. And we don’t know how comparable these are in volume from year to year.

Getting the ‘iCloud Music Library can’t be enabled’ error? Here’s a fix! » iMore

Rene Ritchie:

If you just updated to iOS 8.4 and Apple Music and are now getting an error stating “Cloud Music Library can’t be enabled”, you’re not alone. I got it too, and here’s how I fixed it… at least for now!

My guess is that Apple servers are being slammed and iTunes is getting some occasional errors. So, patience and persistence wins out. Here’s what I did and how I got iCloud Music Library to work.

Note: iCloud Music Library seems to be the new name for iTunes Match and/or similar features contained as part of Apple Music.

“How-to” articles relate to Apple Music are going to do big business in the next few weeks.

These could be the Kickstarters the Feds go after next » Forbes

Abigail Tracy:

According to Helen Wong, an attorney with the FTC, investigators used consumer complaints in the case against [Erik] Chevalier [who was fined $112,000 for deceiving backers of his Kickstarter campaign for a board game] and the government agency will continue to listen to such complaints as it monitors the crowdfunding space moving forward. To identify other allegedly fraudulent campaigns that could be the next investigation targets, Forbes filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FTC, seeking all complaints filed with the government agency about Kickstarter campaigns.

Smart thinking.

Microsoft could write off billions on Nokia deal as early as Wednesday » Computerworld

Gregg Keizer:

It’s not known how much of a write-down Microsoft will take, as companies have some flexibility in how they account for such balance-the-books moves. Three years ago, Microsoft had $6.4bn of goodwill related to the aQuantive acquisition before it wrote down 97% of that.

In its April 2015 filing, Microsoft said it carried $5.5bn in goodwill from the Nokia deal, as well as another $4.5bn in intangible assets. Because “goodwill” is the difference between the purchase price and the actual assets, tangible or otherwise, the $5.5bn, or something close to it, would be the likeliest number.

If Microsoft does write off the majority of the Nokia purchase – which ultimately cost it $7.9bn by the time the deal closed in the first half of 2014 – it would be but the latest move by the company to recast the acquisition.

Told you it was coming. And why it will stick with phones, despite their being a money pit.

Start up: China’s Uber ripoff, Microsoft’s maps and ads exit, Google v Oracle redux, and more

Posted on June 30, 2015 by charlesarthur

Low power, but still pretty powerful. Photo licensed from Apple, I guess, on Flickr.

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

One driver explains how he is helping to rip off Uber in China » Bloomberg Business

To create a fake trip, an Uber driver has essentially two options, according to drivers interviewed by Bloomberg, who asked not to be named discussing information that may get them barred by the company.

The first is a do-it-yourself option where the driver buys a hacked smartphone that can operate with multiple phone numbers and therefore multiple Uber accounts. Drivers use one number to act as a rider and request a lift, and then accept the trip as a driver with another phone number.

A driver like Li, for example, may know that he has a legitimate fare waiting for him at the airport, but he doesn’t want to make the trip there without getting paid. He could then request a trip as a rider, let the booking show up on Uber’s GPS tracking software as his car heads to the airport and then get paid by Uber for taking a “customer” on the route.

The second option involves working with other scammers over the Internet. If a driver doesn’t have a hacked phone, he can go into one of several invitation-only online forums and request a fake fare from professional ride-bookers. These bookers are referred to as “nurses” because they use specially tailored software to put an “injection,” or location-specific ride request near the driver.

Uber acquires part of Bing’s mapping assets, will absorb around 100 Microsoft employees » TechCrunch

Alex Wilhelm:

Uber will acquire assets from Microsoft Bing, including roughly 100 employees focused on the product’s image collection activities. In short, Uber is absorbing data-collection engineers from Microsoft to bolster its own mapping work.

The companies confirmed the transaction with TechCrunch, but each declined to name the terms of the agreement. Microsoft handing Uber part of its operating expenses is minor, given the financial scale of the firms. The technology transfer is far more interesting.

Uber’s app is essentially a map with add-ons, so that it would want to pick up engineers — currently the hottest Silicon Valley commodity1 — isn’t surprising. And that Microsoft might want to shed some talent that isn’t precisely core to its larger platforms and productivity efforts doesn’t shock.

So that’s one cost centre gone (and a nice win for Uber). One shoe drops..

Microsoft said to exit display ad business, cut 1,200 jobs » Bloomberg Business

Dina Bass:

Microsoft Corp. is shutting down its Web display advertising business and handing operations over to AOL Inc. and AppNexus Inc., a person with knowledge of the matter said.

About 1,200 jobs at Microsoft will be impacted, with some positions to be moved to AOL and AppNexus, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deal hasn’t yet been announced. Some people will be offered other positions at Microsoft, while other jobs will be cut, the person said.

The software maker is shedding the business as Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella works to sharpen focus on three key areas: personal computing, cloud platforms and business productivity.

And now we wait for the other other shoe to drop. Note how these disposals have come just ahead of the end of the fiscal quarter; Nadella is cleaning house.

CVE-2015-3113 (Flash up to 18.0.0.160) and Exploit Kits » Malware don’t need Coffee

Patched four days ago (2015-06-23) with Flash 18.0.0.194, the CVE-2015-3113 has been spotted as a 0day by FireEye, exploited in limited targeted attacks. It’s now making its path to Exploit Kits

In other words, if there’s a Flash installation on your network that hasn’t been patched in the past four days, it’s vulnerable. (In this case, to malware aiming to exploit IE11 on Windows 7.)

If you haven’t removed Flash from your computer.. why not? YouTube will work fine (it goes to HTML5).

Reddit is an incubator of hate » BuzzFeed News

Charlie Warzel, pulling no punches:

At the core of the problem is Reddit’s newfound vow to police hate only when it manifests into real-world harassment — that is, to create a distinction between ideas and behavior that doesn’t actually exist. Ideas inform and incite behavior; we see this both in the physical world and on Reddit, where the ideals and discussions of its thousands of communities are reflected in the actions — both good (raising money for a Kenyan orphanage as well as a terminally ill cancer patient) and bad (Violentacrez, r/creepshots, and The Fappening) — of its members.

What’s more, there’s credible research to suggest that right-wing extremist online communities are frequently linked to hate crimes. An April 2014 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center found that more than 100 murders have been linked to Stormfront.org, a white nationalist website and forum that first emerged in 1995. The author of the report, Heidi Beirich, told The Guardian that her research showed that online hate forums helped nurture and strengthen already formed prejudices and, in the case of Stormfront, transform them into real-world violence

Benchmarks show iPhone performance difference when iOS 9’s Low Power mode is activated » Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

Without Low Power mode activated, an iPhone 6 Plus scored 1606 on the single-core processor test and 2891 on the multi-core processor test. When Low Power mode was turned on, the same iPhone 6 Plus scored 1019 on the single-core test and 1751 on the multi-core test, suggesting there’s a significant performance reduction when Low Power mode is enabled to save as much battery as possible.

Results were similar on an iPhone 5s, with performance reduced by about 40%. We saw single/multi-core scores of 1386/2511 without Low Power mode and scores of 816/1405 with Low Power mode turned on.

Low Power mode activates when an iPhone is at 10% or 20% battery level, providing a popup that lets users toggle it on quickly. It can also be turned on via the new Battery section of the Settings app. When it’s turned on, in addition to lowering CPU speeds, Low Power mode also disables Mail Fetch, Background App Refresh, motion effects, and animated wallpapers.

At a guess, most people won’t notice the difference in processing power of engaging Low Power, but will like the battery life difference. And iOS 9 (in my own early testing) has remarkable battery life if you don’t have the phone baseband running, ie on non-LTE iPads and phones with Airplane mode engaged but Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on (so mobile calls and data aren’t on). And it’s still only beta 2.

The secret to groovy drumming may be math » Science/AAAS

Kerry Klein:

Holger Hennig, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, and colleagues decided to analyze the technique of prolific drummer Jeff Porcaro, one of the more famous musicians most people have never heard of. For more than a decade he drummed for the band Toto, and as a session musician he kept time for an extensive list of musical icons including Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Michael Jackson, and Madonna. Porcaro died of a heart attack in 1992. Hennig and his colleagues chose to study Porcaro’s technique because the paper’s lead author, physicist Esa Räsänen of the Tampere University of Technology in Finland, is himself a drummer and admires Porcaro’s work.

As a representative sample of Porcaro’s timekeeping skills, the research team focused on the studio recording of the 1982 hit “I Keep Forgettin’ ” by singer Michael McDonald. The rapid, high-pitched tink-tink-tink-tink keeping the beat is the hi-hat, a clamshell arrangement of two small cymbals that a drummer opens and closes with a foot pedal and simultaneously strikes with a drumstick. With one hand, Porcaro hit the hi-hat four times on every beat, in subbeats known as sixteenth notes, and motored out almost 400 of them in every minute of the song.

It turns out that fractals are lurking. (Though when did he drum for Pink Floyd, exactly? I thought that was Nick Mason’s job.)

Hacker News » Premii

If you ever read Hacker News, you’ll have been frustrated by the way you have to click away to read the article, then click back (or to another tab) to read the comments on the story.

No more: now it’s in a convenient interface on Premii.

Do you trust Google to be the gatekeeper of your kids’ content? » Digital Content Next

Chris Pedigo (who is SVP of government affairs at DCN):

Google’s YouTube for Kids service is getting some attention recently from regulators and policymakers in Washington, DC. The FTC and now Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) are asking questions about how content is selected for YouTube for Kids and how Google helps young viewers understand the difference between content and advertising. It has been alleged that some content is not appropriate for children and that some advertising in or around the content may not be labeled clearly enough for children and their parents.

While Google has a history of innovation, upending old business models and creating new opportunities and experiences via the internet, their “developer mentality” of breaking things to create even better new things may not work the same when it comes to products targeted to kids.

YouTube is great if you’re an adult, a disaster area (from a parent’s point of view) if you’re a child. Dividing the world into “over 18/under 18” really doesn’t work.

Oracle v. Google Android-Java copyright case goes back to San Fran: Supreme Court denies Google petition » FOSS Patents

Florian Müller (who has followed the ins and outs of this case over the years):

Now that the Supreme Court has denied Google’s petition and appellate attorney Joshua Rosenkranz (of Orrick Herrington Sutcliffe) has once again shown why he was dubbed the “Defibrillator” (for bringing cases back to life that appeared to have been lost), the sizable litigation caravan that had gone from California to Washington DC for the appellate proceedings–where an amazing reversal of fortunes occurred, with Oracle now having the upper hand–can finally head back all the way to the West. There, “fair use” will be the topic du jour. And, provided that Oracle wins (which I’ve always believed it will), remedies. This means injunctive relief more than anything else. The strategic implications are not described accurately by portraying this as a billion-dollar case.

On this occasion I do wish to say a few things about fair use. About a year ago I explained why I ultimately concluded that Google Books probably should fall under the “fair use” exception, but Android should not. What is really the idea of “fair use”? At a philosophical level, it’s all about whether, on balance, an unauthorized use of copyrighted material does more good than harm.

It’s difficult to get a handle on this case, but Müller is fairly sure that Google is going to have to pay something – perhaps quite a large something – to Oracle. (Note: Müller acts as a consultant to Oracle, and others. But his line on this case has been consistent since before Oracle hired him.)

Sky reveals evidence of Openreach service failure and calls for market investigation » Sky

In the submission, Sky sets out details of the standard of service delivered to consumers by BT’s Openreach division, which operates and maintains the UK’s national telecoms network. The evidence highlights how a history of under-investment has led to range of service quality problems including an excessive number of network faults, failure to meet targets for repairing faults, long waits to have new lines installed, appointments that are missed and jobs that are not completed.

Key findings from Sky’s submission include:

More than 90% of new line installations, which require an Openreach engineer to attend, take 10 calendar days or longer. Almost one in ten installations takes longer than 30 days.
• Openreach changes the agreed installation date for Sky customers on average around 36,000 times a month.
• Openreach misses over 5002 appointments each month to install new lines for Sky customers and fails to complete a further 4,000 jobs per month.
• Fault rates across Openreach’s network increased by 50% between 2009 and 2012, the last year for which reliable data is publicly available.
• Openreach’s performance in fixing faults is consistently below the targets set out in agreements with service providers.

BT Openreach is such an anomaly. The electricity grid is owned separately from power generators; the railway lines aren’t owned by the train operators. So why does the dominant landline provider get to own the company doing landline upkeep and determine its budgets?

Galaxy S6 sales to reach 45 mln units in 2015: report » Yonhap News

“Samsung continues to struggle at the low-to-mid end, while the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge combined look on course to reach a respectable 45m units this year,” EE Times said, citing a report released by Deutsche Bank.

If the sales estimate is accomplished, the Galaxy S6 will manage to catch up with the Galaxy S4, which holds the current annual sales record at 45m units.

The latest estimate, however, falls behind expectations made earlier by other market analysts.

Industry tracker DRAMeXchange had earlier estimated combined sales of 55m units for the new lineup, while Hong Kong-based researcher Counterpoint had offered a 50m sales figure for this year.

Start up: the forcePhone, analysts cut Samsung Q2 forecasts, bogus Beats?, the jailbreak economy, and more

Posted on June 29, 2015 by charlesarthur

Like this (from a MacBook), but in a phone. Photo by LoKan Sardari on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple suppliers start making iPhones with Force Touch » Bloomberg Business

Tim Culpan:

Apple has started early production of new iPhone models with a feature called Force Touch, which senses how hard users are pressing down on a screen, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Its newest iPhones, in the same 4.7in and 5.5in versions as the current iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus devices, will have a similar exterior design, the people said. Volume manufacturing is scheduled to ramp up as soon as next month, they said.

Apple is bringing Force Touch, first unveiled for the Apple Watch and the newest MacBook model, to the iPhone at least two years after it started working with suppliers to perfect the pressure-sensitive displays.

Totally makes sense; why do you think Apple has been making so much noise about this feature on its PCs?

China adds 20 million 4G users in May » Chinadaily.com.cn

Xinhua (the official Chinese news agency):

The number of 4G users in China continued to grow in May, with 20 million added during the period, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said on Thursday.

There are now 200 million 4G clients in China, as the country steps up investment in the telecom industry to expand broadband coverage. In total, there were 657 million mobile broadband users, including 3G and 4G users, at the end of May.

Even if it’s a some way off, China is still the biggest 4G provider in the world.

Taylor Swift may have triumphed, but Apple will still call the tune » The Guardian

I wrote about the whole Apple/Swift/streaming shenanigans:

Martin Goldschmidt, the founder and chief executive of independent record label Cooking Vinyl, whose artists include Marilyn Manson, Amanda Palmer, Billy Bragg and Groove Armada, says that Swift’s decision could certainly not have been because the video service pays better.

“YouTube has a revenue-sharing scheme from adverts, not per-stream, but compared to Apple or Spotify it pays one-tenth to one-twentieth as much per play,” he says. “People see music on YouTube as promotion – wrongly – and Spotify as the destination, the endgame. The reality is that YouTube is the biggest place for music consumption on the planet.

“The reason is that YouTube has colossal reach. We’re in the strange situation where 10m plays on Spotify is viewed as lost sales, while 10m plays on YouTube is a marketing success.”

It’s often overlooked that YouTube’s ad-supported streaming makes Spotify’s look like chicken feed.

Of Ma and malware: inside China’s iPhone jailbreaking industrial complex » Forbes

Great piece by Thomas Fox-Brewster:

Any hacker who can provide the full code for an untethered jailbreak, where the hack continues to work after the phone reboots, can expect a big pay check for their efforts. “Many experts agree the price for an untethered jailbreak is around $1 million,” says Nikias Bassen, aka Pimskeks, a lanky 33-year-old iOS hacker who is part of the evad3rs hacker collective. More often, sellers of iOS zero-day vulnerabilities – the previously-unknown and unpatched flaws required for jailbreaks – make thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chinese firms, private buyers or governments, in particular three-letter agencies from the US.

Such big sums are on offer due to the explosion of the third-party app store industry in China. There are at least 362 million monthly active mobile app users in China, according to data provided by iResearch. Whilst smartphone owners in Western nations are content within the walled gardens of Apple and Google app stores for their games, media and work tools, the Chinese are fanatical about apps and want the broadest possible choice from non-Apple app stores. Jailbreaks, which do away with Apple’s chains and allow other markets on the device, are thus vital to meeting that demand.

Super-detailed piece, which also points to Alibaba’s involvement in this shady practice.

Google helps British criminals polish their image – but what about the innocent » The Register

Andrew Orlowski:

Just to make sure of Google knew its obligations, the Judges pointed out that information had to be “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” for an applicant to succeed. This would seem to rule out figures in public life wanting details related to their professional lives from succeeding in scrubbing them away … or serious criminals: under UK law, a conviction resulting in a sentence of more than four years is never “spent” under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. In serious criminal cases the public interest is unambiguous.

However, someone who has committed no major crime – or merely done something embarrassing – should usually be allowed to have it forgotten at some point rather than having the incident follow them around on the internet forever.

How do ordinary people who have done ordinary things, for whom the law was designed, fare? It’s difficult to say. No deletion requests have been sent to the ICO for the Courts to decide – Google has acted as judge and jury, voluntarily. Google says it has removed 39,000 links and declined to remove 66,000 in the UK. In many cases, academic Julia Powles explained to us, it’s an incidental character such as a witness who actually lodged lodged the request rather than the subject of the story. Requesters are understandably reluctant to attract publicity. Until an academic conducts a credible study.

Yet from the Telegraph and BBC lists, it’s clear that people convicted of serious crimes are getting their reputations cleaned – even if they didn’t request the original deletion. Surely that’s the opposite of what the law intended: Google is rewarding the guilty.

Uh-oh: Beats teardown apparently used Beats knockoffs » Core77

Rain Noe:

The prototype engineer who did the breakdown, Avery Louie, never mentions what model of Beats he tore down. But he refers to the price as $199, which is consistent with Beats’ Solo 2 headphones. However, the color scheme in Louie’s photos doesn’t match the Solo 2 offerings, indicating he used Beats’ discontinued Solo HD, which also retailed for $199. And here’s where it starts to unravel.

Louie found just two drivers, one per ear, in his teardown. But the Solo HD contains four drivers, two per ear. So it appears Louie’s been given a bogus pair.

Entirely possible – wander around Shenzhen and there are “Beats” headphones absolutely everywhere.

Between Kickstarter’s frauds and phenoms live long-delayed projects » Ars Technica

Casey Johnston:

Ethan Mollick, a professor in management at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, does some of the most quoted research on the business of crowdfunding. In a 2013 study, he found that 316 of the 471 successfully funded projects analyzed—all with estimated delivery dates of July 2012 or earlier—promised to deliver a physical product. Only three of those 471 projects had declared failure and offered refunds, while another 11 dropped off the map and stopped responding to their backers. Actual shameless fraud appeared rare.

“The concerns about the ability of projects to deliver, however, are supported,” Mollick wrote. Only 24.9% of the projects analyzed delivered on time, and 33% “had yet to deliver” at the time of analysis. The average delay measured 2.4 months. Projects that raise ten times their goal are half as likely to deliver on time.

Mollick also found a correlation between how much money a project raised and delays: projects that raised under $50,000 had a near-perfect delivery rate after eight months’ delay, while projects that raised more than $50,000 hovered around a 75 percent delivery rate eight months later. According to the New York Times Magazine, Mollick reported that since his 2012 evaluation, another 14 percent of projects had delivered either nothing or a subpar product.

Mollick takes the opposite stance. “I’m impressed so many things get delivered at all,” he told Ars.

Good to have some statistics on this.

The Samsung Galaxy S6 is the world’s fastest smartphone » Tom’s Guide

Sam Rutherford and Alex Cranz:

A fast phone shouldn’t just score well in benchmarks. It should deliver swift, everyday performance, too, whether it’s opening a large file, gaming without lag or firing up its camera faster than you can say “cheese.” We pitted six of the latest smartphones against each other in nine rounds of competition, and the Galaxy S6 blew away the field, finishing first in 6 out of 9 real-world tests and synthetic benchmarks.

The LG G4 is our runner-up, turning in the fastest camera-open time and storage benchmark score. The iPhone 6 finished third, tying for first in our real-world gaming test and second in our PDF load-time score. The biggest letdown was the Nexus 6, which finished fifth overall and dead last in opening our PDF, camera-open and gaming tests.

Turns out there’s barely any difference – could you tell the difference between a camera load time of 52.5 milliseconds v 61.5ms? OK, the Nexus 6 load time of 128ms is a lot more. But many of these are the sorts of “differences that don’t make much difference”.

Estimates of Samsung Electronics’ Q2 profits adjusted downward » BusinessKorea

Cho Jin-young:

Korea Investment & Securities adjusted its forecast downward from 7.717trn won (US$6.957bn) to 7.046trn won (US$6.352bn) on June 24, adding that the profits of every business unit but semiconductors are predicted to fall short of expectations.

[Other analysts cut their forecasts too.] According to financial information provider WISEfn, the average estimate fell from 7.4565trn won (US$6.7222bn) to 7.3488trn won (US$6.6244bn) between late March and early this month, and then to 7.2518trn won (US$6.5376bn) on June 24. As recently as a month ago, Hyundai Securities, IBK Investment & Securities, and HMC Investment & Securities used to expect that it profits would exceed 8trn won.

The drop in estimates can be attributed to sluggish smartphone sales. “It seems that the sales volume of the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge have been less than expected, due to a supply shortage and consumer preference for the iPhone 6,” Mirae Asset Securities explained. Nomura Securities recently lowered its Galaxy S6 shipment estimates for the second quarter by three million to 18m units.

18 million is still a lot.

BlackBerry might have no BB7 users left by February 2016 – and that’s a big, bad problem

Posted on June 26, 2015 by charlesarthur

John Chen, BlackBerry’s chief executive, is a smart guy – but he’s got really big problems ahead. Photo by jdlasica on Flickr.

They really will let any old nonsense onto Seeking Alpha. On Wednesday there was a piece suggesting that “BlackBerry had a decent quarter; turnaround an extremely high probability“.

Yeah, and pigs will fly.

BlackBerry has a real problem, and it only becomes evident when you dig into the numbers. It’s this: BB7 users, who make up about 22m of its 33m subscribers, are deserting the platform at the rate of about 5m per quarter, while it’s only adding about 1m BB10 subscribers in the same period.

If this pattern continues, then by the end of this fiscal year – that is, February 2016 – there will be next to zero BB7 users, and only slightly more than 15m BB10 users. That will represent probably the bottoming out in subscribers, but will also mean that two key sources of revenue for BlackBerry – service revenues and handset sales – will effectively stop.

And in the just-gone quarter, those two categories made up 78% of its revenues – and the profit on the services, which only applies to BB7 users, amounted to about $211m.

Here’s the problem: once the BB7 users are gone, so are pretty much all the service revenues. And look how soon that could happen:

BlackBerry 7 users leaving; BB10 joining slower

BB7 users are departing the platform five times faster than they’re being replaced by BB10 users

With 15m handsets in use, and BB users replacing theirs roughly every three years (as I found previously), that means 5m handset sales per year, which is about where the company is now – and it currently makes horrendous operating losses on handsets. There just isn’t the scale.

Without the service revenue, and because the handsets are horrible money pits, BlackBerry is left with just its software revenues for profit. And oh dear, those aren’t pretty.

Let’s get stuck in

Here are some extra facts dug out of BlackBerry’s Q1 2016 10-Q, the quarterly detailed report:

• 33m subscribers (I estimated 34m; so it has fallen 4m from the previous quarter, an acceleration in decline)

• 81% of the 1.1m phones sold were BB10 (so 0.89m BB10, 0.2m BB7). Recall that BB7 was effectively dead with the launch of BB10 – back in January of 2013. Yet they’re still getting cleared out of the system.

• a total of 1.3m phones were sold through to end customers. That means that over the past eight quarters BlackBerry has “sold” (recognised revenue on) 15m phones, and sell-through has been 23.3m – that’s 55% more. Clearly, there was a gigantic amount of channel stuffing going on previously. And of those 15m phones (or 23.3m, take your pick) only 9.7m were BB10 models.

We know how many subscribers there were when BB10 was introduced, and we know how many there are now; we also know how many BB10 handsets have shipped. That means we know the split between BB7 subscribers and BB10 subscribers.

On the basis that every BB10 handset goes to a new user… it’s still not great.

In short, there are still twice as many BB7 users (22m or so) as BB10 users (10.8m). In the just-gone quarter, a total of 4.9m BB7 users left, and 0.89m “joined” BB10. Some of those “joining” will have been ex-BB7 users, of course, but the direction of travel is clear; if that 5:1 pattern continues, then when the last BB7 user exits, BB10 will only have 15.2m users.

And the graph above shows that if it’s a straight line, that will be February next year.

• that much-vaunted jump in software revenues (from $54m to $137m year-on-year, and from $67m to $137m sequentially – a rise of $70m) was actually due to a mysterious patent deal, one with Cisco and another with an unnamed company.

Some thought the rise heralded BlackBerry rising from the ashes as a profitable software business; the stock popped on the early results. But as was clarified in the earnings call and the documents, compared to the year before, software revenues rose by over 20% (Chen suggested “22-23-24%”); as the documents then make clear, software revenues alone actually fell compared to the previous sequential quarter.

As the year-ago software revenue was $54m, and the previous quarter software revenue was $67m, and 67/54 = 1.24, it’s evident that software revenues grew less than 24%. This $67m is the underlying quarterly software revenue figure you can rely on; multiply that by four, and you get pure software revenues for the fiscal year of about $270m.

That’s a long way short of the $500m (which excludes any BBM revenues, which I don’t see happening in a hurry) that Chen is aiming for this year. Of course, if he can sell off – I mean license – lots of patents, then he could be on course for that target; the extra $70m from licensing helps. Multiply that by four (one big deal per quarter!) and you get $280m, so if the licensing people can keep hitting home runs, and everything goes fine, he might hit that $500m target, just.

But there’s no indication that the licensing revenues will keep coming; this might have been a $70m one-off. Or (as is also hinted) the company might just sell some patents, and count those in its “licensing” revenue.

But even that is a downscaling from expectations of a $600m annual software revenue, and the analysts all zeroed in on the sleight of hand in the earnings call. The stock selloff that has followed is clearly their reaction to what weren’t such good numbers after all.

• the sequential rise in US revenues (from $147m to $216m, or $69m) was mostly caused by the licensing deal. (This actually emerged in the earnings call.) According to BlackBerry’s execs, US revenues excepting the licence did grow, slightly; which means we can peg one licensing deal at just under $69m. That leaves the other licensing deal at somewhere around $1m – because the total extra from licensing was about $70m.

Future imperfect

Soooo… you’ve got a handset platform (BB7) that people are abandoning at a remarkable rate, while they aren’t joining the new platform with any great alacrity. If things continue as now, by February 2016 there will be 15m BlackBerry users, and zero service revenue, and lossmaking handset revenue.

The saving grace is that the software is very profitable – about 84% gross margin. (This is in the annual 10K report published in March.)

So how does this look? If we have software revenues of about $125m, that generates $105m of gross profit (ie before expenses like R+D and keeping the lights on).

Now set against that the costs of the hardware business: it made a gross profit (by my calculations using the software profitability) of $13m on 1.1m sales. So everything’s rosy, right?

Unfortunately not – as Chen admitted, getting handsets to operating profitability (where you account for sales/general/administration and R+D) is much harder. By my calculation, allocating those costs in line with hardware revenues, the handset side hasn’t been operationally profitable since November 2011. I don’t think the handsets will ever come back to operating profit. Still, gross profit, eh?

Let’s see how the sums go. For the latest quarter, R+D was $139m, and SGA was $174m.

If those costs stay the same, your mostly-software-and-a-few-handsets company has gross profit of $118m, and immediate costs of $313m – that’s a loss of $195m, before any other costs arising (such as amortisation or inventory writedown or debenture revaluation). And make no mistake, there will be other costs arising.

Conclusion

If BlackBerry holds on to its hardware business, it’s going to run into the sand. It’s also losing its old BB7 userbase extremely fast. John Chen doesn’t have much time to start generating revenue from licences and software. I’d expect to see some sort of crisis point in a couple of quarters. But then, BlackBerry is always in crisis. And nobody much seems to care, either.

Start up: what Chinese hackers steal, Snapdragon overheats Sony, eternal Spotify streaming, and more

Posted on June 26, 2015 by charlesarthur

Think you could pretend to be one of these? Photo by anotherjesse on Flickr.

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

The Reverse Turing Test: pretending to be a chatbot is harder than you think » Motherboard

Uri Bram, with a wonderfully executed idea:

You don’t fully realize how complicated human conversation is until you try to look at it through the eyes of a bot. Alison’s “How about you?” is an example of what the professionals call a tag question. “How about you?” on its own is meaningless; it’s implicitly referring back to my own previous question of “How are you doing today?” Within a few short words you already have a complex system of meaning the bot needs to understand.

Soon Alison was bombarding me with dialogue.

“I am going swimming later. Then I’m going to be an astronaut. I like chocolate. Do you?”

While this isn’t exactly a normal human conversation, a human can easily deal with it. Think about all the things your brain does to process those sentences.

It knows that “I’m going [swimming]” and “I’m going [to be an astronaut]” encode completely different meanings, even though they have superficially similar structures.

Figuring out the gaps when you try to be a bot is surprisingly useful for figuring out what bots need to do. (Tiny voice asks: why do we want bots to be able to fool us, precisely?)

Windows Phone is like religion – it gets people when they are down » The Register

Paul Kunert:

A division of the shipments shows Microsoft grabbed 7.6% of sales [0.57m handsets] during the quarter, up from 5.8% in the prior year quarter. The total market [for UK smartphone sales] declined 1.5% to 7.6m.

“Microsoft is slowly building share without a flagship or high-spec handset – they are after the volume end of the [professional] market. This strategy will probably change when Windows 10 comes out,” Coulling said.

Despite this, Windows barely touches the sides of the sprawling UK shipments achieved by phone royalty Samsung and Apple, the combined sales of which came to 4.93m units.

Sammy declined 8.5% in Q1 to 2.54m devices, giving it a 33.6% share of spoils, as it continued to work through the inventory bottleneck that ruined profits in 2014.

…Apple sales recovered on the back of the iPhone 6’s release, growing 7.8% to 2.43m units, narrowing the gap that Samsung opened up a year ago.

Windows Phone still not really doing anything. Maybe those are being bought by businesses?

Australian metal detector company counts cost of Chinese hacking » Reuters

Byron Kaye and Jane Wardell:

Donald McGurk, chief executive of Australian communications, metal detection and mining technology firm Codan, has watched sales and prices of his firm’s metal detectors collapse since Chinese hackers stole its designs three years ago to sell cheap imitations into Africa.

With the Australian government wary of rocking the boat ahead of this month’s historic signing of a free trade deal, McGurk says he was forced to hire a private investigative firm in China to stage a series of raids on counterfeit factories.

“They said you’re on your own,” McGurk told Reuters, referring to the Australian government officials he lobbied to help with his problem. The Australian government did not immediately respond to queries about Codan.

Codan’s experience provides a rare look at the longer-term impacts of hacking on companies, as most keep the extent of an incident under wraps. In fact, experts say many firms continue to turn a blind eye to cybersecurity even as hackers become increasingly sophisticated.

Often forgotten that hacking has a purpose; often to steal intellectual property. (Though that’s how countries have advanced themselves down the centuries.)

EU questions e-commerce firms as part of sector probe » WSJ

Tom Fairless:

Europe’s antitrust regulator has asked a broad swath of Internet commerce firms to hand over sensitive business information and copies of contracts as part of a sweeping investigation into possible abuses in the sector.

The investigation, announced in March, aims to establish whether some firms are raising contractual or other barriers to limit how consumers can shop online across national borders inside the European Union. The probe could lead to formal antitrust cases against individual companies that are suspected of abusing their dominant market position to restrict trade, in violation of EU law.

Margrethe Vestager really is getting serious.

Samsung offers to cover the difference if you buy a 64GB Galaxy S6 instead of 32GB (via a $100 rebate) » Android Police

Ryan Whitwam:

Samsung calls this the “Ultimate Upgrade.” You have until the end of the day on July 5th to make your purchase.

As with most deals of this sort, you’ll need to submit a copy of your receipt, the device’s MAC address, and the IMEI. It needs to be purchased in the US (sorry, guys) from a carrier or national retailer (i.e. not on eBay or Craigslist). Samsung says it also needs to be purchased at “full price,” which I assume means no additional discounts. Presumably you can still do a contract or payment plan with your carrier.

We’re coming to the end of the Galaxy S6’s first full quarter on sale, and Samsung is offering discounts to encourage sell-through of higher-priced models. This doesn’t seem like a resounding vote of confidence in its sales. It’s also pricey, in marketing terms (though people are pretty rubbish at taking advantage of rebates).

Google’s new self-driving cars can now be spotted on Mountain View roads » 9to5Google

Stephen Hall:

According to Google, the speed of the cars is currently capped at a pretty conservative 25 miles per hour, and they’re driving around at that “neighborhood-friendly” speed using the same software that powered the Lexus line. Ultimately, the goal is for them to be completely autonomous, but it would make sense that Google wants to take that slow to avoid any more sensationalized stories about their safety…

The company announced in the middle of May that the cars had gotten the green light to be put on the road “this summer,” and it looks like “this summer” means right now. Assuming this round of tests go well, we’ll surely be seeing more cars hit the roads over the next few months.

Watch the Xperia Z3+ camera crash in about 3 seconds » AndroidPIT

Kris Carlon:

We were pretty excited to get the Xperia Z3+ in for review. That is until we found one of the worst launch bugs we’ve ever seen. The problem is that the Xperia Z3+ camera crashes almost instantaneously when you throw anything even vaguely heavy at it.

By ”heavy” I simply mean using augmented reality mode or shooting 4K video for a few seconds. These are standard camera modes on the Z3+ so there really shouldn’t be any problems, especially in a phone that’s less than a week old. But we’ve been seeing the camera crash in 4K ever since the Z2. How Sony has failed to correct the issue two generations later is beyond me.

Commenters concur. The Snapdragon 810 chipset seems to be at the core (sorry) of the problem. And this does look like a problem.

Stream your favorite artist forever » Eternify

Eternify leverages music from Spotify’s catalog in increments of 30 seconds, the minimum length that counts as a play—and as a royalty payment.

Pick your favorite artist, then watch in real time as you generate an average of $.005 for your artist with each play.

Appears to be registered in Germany. Can’t see Spotify allowing this to continue for long.

Start up: HTC and LG struggle, Getty’s Google complaint, Circa’s bad news, and more

Posted on June 25, 2015 by charlesarthur

Now adjust your calendar. Geographical layout of the London Underground by DigitalUrban on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. See how they run. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Optus hands over customers’ numbers to websites » ZDNet

Josh Taylor:

Optus is sending the mobile phone numbers of customers to websites that those customers are accessing, but has defended the practice, stating that information is only handed to “trusted partners”.

Last week, a user on broadband enthusiast website Whirlpool found, when visiting certain websites that Optus has a commercial relationship with, that their phone number was included in the HTTP header of the web request to that site, through a practice known as HTTP Header Enrichment.

The poster said that they discovered the number had been passed on after receiving premium subscription services to a site they had not signed up to.

Optus is in Australia, but such amazingly sleazy behaviour is likely found elsewhere too.

Getty Images takes Google grievance to EU antitrust regulators » Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

Getty Images has become the latest company to take its grievances with Google to EU antitrust regulators as it accused the world’s most popular Internet search engine of favoring its own images service at the expense of rivals.

The complaint comes as the European Commission waits for Google to respond to charges of abusing its market power in a dozen EU countries since 2007 by distorting search results to favor its shopping service.

The renowned photojournalism archive said its troubles with Google started in early 2013.

“Web search results that link directly to the Getty Images website are placed low in the search results, frequently, and remarkably, not on the first page of results,” the companysaid on its website.

“This means Google is benefiting from the use of Getty Images content, used to generate results within Google Image Search, without sending the image searchers to the Getty Images website or other competing image search engines.”

It never rains but it pours..

Debugging and reverse engineering: Samsung deliberately disabling Windows Update » BSOD Analysis

Patrick Barker, who is a Microsoft MVP:

On my home forum Sysnative, a user (wavly) was being assisted with a Windows Update (WU) issue, which was going well, aside from the fact that wavly’s WU kept getting disabled randomly. It was figured out eventually after using auditpol.exe and registry security auditing (shown below later) that the program that was responsible for disabling WU was Disable_Windowsupdate.exe, which is part of Samsung’s SW Update software.

SW Update is your typical OEM updating software that will update your Samsung drivers, the bloatware that came on your Samsung machine, etc. The only difference between other OEM updating software is Samsung’s disables WU.

Terrible move by Samsung. It said it did this to prevent WU screwing with Samsung’s drivers.

The bigger puzzle to me is why Samsung continues with PCs. It sells a tiny number (perhaps a couple of million a quarter?) and can’t be making any profit worth writing home about.

HTC ships 4.75m HTC One M9 in three months; unlikely to make new breakthrough in China » Digitimes

Kai-Ti Chiang and Steve Shen:

HTC has so far shipped only 4.75m units of its new flagship smartphone, the HTC One M9, since the model launched in the latter half of March, down 43.75% as compared to shipments of the HTC One M8 during its initial three months, according to a Chinese-language China Business Journal report.

HTC’s market value has also declined to around US$2bn recently compared to its all-time high of US$33.8bn a few years ago, the paper added.

The mid-range to high-end smartphone market (models priced at CNY1,600 (US$258) and up) in China has become mature, but HTC’s flagship models are still set at CNY4,000, pushing consumers to pick up iPhone devices, the journal quoted China-based iiMedia Research as saying.

This would explain the profit warning earlier this month.

Farewell to Circa News » Medium

Matt Galligan:

It’s with great disappointment that we let you know that Circa News has been put on indefinite hiatus*. Producing high-quality news can be a costly endeavor and without the capital necessary to support further production we are unable to continue. Our mission was always to create a news company where factual, unbiased, and succinct information could be found. In doing so we recognized that building a revenue stream for such a mission would take some time and chose to rely on venture capital to sustain. We have now reached a point where we’re no longer able to continue news production as-is.

“Continued negotiations” around its assets and staff.

iOS 9 and Safari View Controller: the future of web views » MacStories

Web views on iOS 9, that is, where apps will be able to present browser windows without needing their own browser code – which will be handled by Safari:

Apple is making sure that user privacy and security are highly valued in how Safari View Controller operates. Safari View Controller runs in a separate process from the host app, which doesn’t “see” the URL or navigation happening inside it. Therefore, Apple claims that Safari View Controller is entirely “safe”, as private user data stays in Safari and is never exposed to a third-party app that wants to open a link in it.

Because of this, Apple has been able to port many of the features that users know from Safari to any app that uses Safari View Controller in iOS 9. Safari View Controller shares cookies and website data with Safari, which means that if a user is already logged into a specific website in Safari and a link to that website is opened in Safari View Controller, the user will already be logged in. This alone could make for a drastically superior experience when tapping, for instance, links to services like Amazon, Pinterest, or Facebook from third-party apps. If those services use Safari View Controller and the user is already logged in from Safari, she’ll get a continuous and consistent experience.

But there’s more.

Popular with developers; likely to roll out fast.

Apple Music signs Beggars Group, Merlin: sources » Billboard

Shirley Halperin and Lars Brandle:

In a letter sent to Merlin members, CEO Charles Caldas writes, “I am pleased to say that Apple has made a decision to pay for all usage of Apple Music under the free trials on a per-play basis, as well as to modify a number of other terms that members had been communicating directly with Apple about. With these changes, we are happy to support the deal.”

The announcement comes on the heels of the company’s 180-degree turn on a deal term asking labels to forego royalty payments during a 90-day-free trial offered to Apple Music users. Criticism was loud and prompted Taylor Swift to write an open letter asking the company to reverse its policy.

In a way, Swift’s blog helped ward off a slew of bad publicity the company had weathered in recent weeks. Apple was staring down a full-scale revolt from indie labels not affiliated with the majors and major-owned distributors. As it stands, most indie distributors say their labels hadn’t signed, anticipating a new contract for indies with revised terms.

Impossible to know whether this was coming with or without Swift. Seems likely she was the final, very public, straw.

Why adblocking is the new speeding » The Next Web

I wrote this because it occurred to me that the two sides of this debate just can’t hear each other, for the most part:

people who use adblockers aren’t interested in what the publishers or journalists say: just as when you’re in a car, cut off from the world with the radio turned up loud, the complaints of the people standing on the pavement really don’t impinge on your world. The two sides of the argument are cut off from each other. The speeding driver in their air-conditioned car, the adblocking reader at their desk, are both in essence the same.

I’m not condemning adblocking, by the way. I’m not condoning it either. I’m trying to show the two sides why they can’t agree.

So what’s the solution? You know how it works with speeding in local communities: the community organises, and either gets the police (who turn up occasionally) or get something concrete done – usually in the form of actual concrete ‘sleeping policemen,’ or other ‘road calming’ that makes it impossible for drivers to speed.

Publishers and advertisers need to find the online equivalent of road calming too.

Note, above all, that I am not suggesting that adblocking can kill people. Also: contains GIF of kangaroos fighting.

Google owns the platform – twice over » Eerke Boiten’s blog

Boiten wants the granular permissions of Android M because he doesn’t like the landgrab of Android apps at present, as he tweeted:

An interesting discussion with the makers of the London Tube Map (@TubeMapLondon) followed. It turned out that the app actually didn’t have a feature using the calendar! Rather, they were catering for adverts that might want to add calendar events. My first objection to that was that ads could use apps with the appropriate permission to change the calendar, rather than doing it themselves. More importantly though, surely this couldn’t scale? All apps with ads, grabbing all the permissions that all their ads might potentially want? I stuck with not installing the app (it also wants in-app purchases, media, and call info, by the way) and thought no more of it.

Weeks later, on my next visit to London, I used the London Tube Map app again (still the old version, of course). With ads. And suddenly it all became crystal clear. Ads served by … Google. The same Google who give whatever permissions they like to the built-in Android apps that you can’t remove. They own the platform. By serving the ads on third party apps, they own the platform twice over.

Analysts cut Q2 profit forecasts as the LG G4 underperforms » AndroidAuthority

At launch, the LG G4 had been expected to sell 8m units in 2015, meaning that around 2.6m G4s would need to be sold in each remaining quarter of the year. However, second quarter shipments are expected to come in at less than 2.5m units for Q2, meaning that actual sales will be even lower than that. This is a rather poor result for the flagship’s first quarter on the market. Last year’s LG G3 sold 5.9m units in its first year and LG was hoping to beat this target by at least 20%.

There are several possible reasons as to why LG G4 sales may be lower than initially expected. Pricing could be a factor, as could the lack of major differences from last year’s G3. It’s also possible that LG’s promise of another higher-end flagship later this year has resulting in potential customers deferring their purchases.

In addition to under performing sales, LG has also seen its marketing expenditure increase this quarter.

Analysts halved their forecasts for LG mobile operating profit to 60-65bn won ($54m-58m), down from 1Q of 73bn won. The G4 was well received critically, and has a great camera.