Tag Archives: 3dprinting

Start up: 3D scan copyrights, 2016 internet trends report, smartphone growth stalls, Jawbone lives!, and more

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Race or income: which matters more when you’re accused in the state of Virginia? Photo by karen_neoh on Flickr.

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

New Whitepaper on 3D Scanning and (the Lack of) Copyright • Shapeways Blog

Michael Weinberg:

»We are excited to announce a new whitepaper, 3D Scanning: A World Without Copyright*.  As the name suggests, the paper examines how 3D scanning intersects with copyright law.  We are big fans of 3D scanning here at Shapeways, and so we thought it was important to start a discussion around how copyright might impact all of the scans that are coming into the world.

It may come as a surprise, but in many cases 3D scans will not be protected by copyright.  That does not mean that scans are not important, but it does mean that people making and distributing scans should understand what rights they do – and do not – have in those scans.

Why aren’t the scans protected by copyright?  One of the key requirements for copyright in the United States is originality. Even if it takes a large amount of skill to create a scan, if making the scan does not involve originality it is simply not eligible for copyright protection.

The vast majority of scans fall squarely in that category.  By definition, most 3D scans attempt to create a perfect digital replica of the model being scanned.  Injecting “original” content that deviates from the object being scanned into that digital file would undermine the purpose of the scan.

«

Wonder where this puts the Nefertiti 3D Scan which was nicked from a museum’s server.
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Uncovering big bias with big data • Lawyerist

David Colarusso:

»A while back, two of my colleagues were arguing about which is a bigger problem in the criminal justice system: bias against defendants of color or bias against poor defendants. My first inclination was to suggest we could settle the dispute if we had the right dataset. (I’m an attorney turned data scientist, so yes, that really was my first thought.1) That being said, the right dataset magically appeared in a tweet from Ben Schoenfeld.

What follows is the story of how I used those cases to discover what best predicts defendant outcomes: race or income. This post is not a summary of my findings, though you will find them in this article. It is a look behind the curtain of data science, a how to cast as case study. Yes, there will be a few equations. But you can safely skim over them without missing much. Just pay particular attention to the graphs.

«

Graphs like this:

It’s a terrific walk through how to deal with a big dataset and draw conclusions from them. No, I’m not going to skip to the end; read it.
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2016 Internet Trends Report • Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers

»The 2016 edition of Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report covers today’s Internet growth and an in-depth look at the following:

Global Internet users have surpassed 3B; India has supplanted the US as the world’s second-largest Internet market.
• Internet user growth remains consistent (led by acceleration in India), while smartphone user and shipment growth have slowed.
• In the face of a slowing global economy, key macro growth drivers from the past 2 decades are less certain.
• Internet advertising (particularly via mobile) continues to grow, but so does ad-blocking, pushing the envelope on development of more innovative ad formats.
• New online-first brands have rapidly grown in popularity for the millennial generation with their focus on omni-channel and personalized distribution strategies.
• In communication, video and images shared are growing as a means of storytelling; creators, consumers, and advertisers are taking part.
• Messaging has evolved from simple, expressive conversation to business-focused use cases, with Asian platforms often leading the way.
• More efficient and often more convenient than typing, voice-based interfaces are ramping quickly and creating a new paradigm for human-computer interaction.

«

And much more. You might take issue with some of the detail (it overstates the iPhone’s ASP, but the general direction is right) but it’s a reference, as usual. Question is, is it predicting the future or just setting up how the past looked? Anyway, here’s the whole 213 pages, if you have a spare five minutes.

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The End of Scale • rafat.org

Rafat Ali was the founder of PaidContent (which he sold to the Guardian Media Group; it later sold it at a loss) and more recently of Skift, a travel intelligence company:

»2016 is a seminal moment in media business history. The year where digital scale finally got exposed as a false proxy to actually building a real business.

The promise of trillion device universe, the promise of infinite distribution.

The promise of infinite user time. What were we thinking?

The tyranny of scale.

Time, attention, value, real tangible utility value to the daily lives of people. We all got fooled into thinking those could be replaced by tonnage of shares/views/interactions, forgetting there were humans on the other end, who at some point would get tired of the distraction and deception. We all got fooled by the startup ecosystem, by the investors drunk of dreams of unicorns (in media, of all places!), by the media who were covering all of this, desperate to look relevant and cool.

If you are the type that sees analogies everywhere – I am one of them – then you can see a lot of parallels among this the rise and crash of media scale chasing era with the bundling and rebundling of crappy mortgages and passing them onwards to be rebundled and sold to the gullible, only to come crashing down only seven years ago. Chasing scale in finance, at any cost, same as chasing scale in media businesses, at any cost…

…Who were we trying to fool?

Therein comes the biggest lie in all this, now exposed: There is no secret sauce in media.

There is no outside savior coming to rescue.

It is all you. The value you build with your editorial. The value you can create by being focused on doing a few things very very well.

«

Quite scary, in its way.
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AMD prices 3D tech to spur virtual reality market • WSJ

Don Clark on AMD’s release of its new Polaris-based graphics cards:

»the need for a PC with an add-in card that includes a beefy 3-D graphics chip is another barrier that stands in the way of widespread adoption of VR. An online survey conducted in April by the Advanced Imaging Society found that 68% of respondents said VR equipment was too expensive.

“Less than 1% of PC users have systems that are capable of doing VR,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect of AMD’s Radeon technologies group. “The entry point is very, very high.”

AMD said its new Radeon RX cards, certified for use in VR by HTC and Oculus VR, deliver performance equivalent to that of $500 graphics cards used for VR.

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy briefed on AMD’s strategy, estimated that the current minimum price on cards comparable to AMD’s new models is $399. He said the $199 pricing comes as a surprise.

“It’s great for getting more people into VR,” said Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest Computer Systems Inc., a boutique maker of gaming PCs that serves the market.

«

Except that would require people to upgrade their PC to one capable of doing it. More likely they’ll do it via their smartphone, surely.
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Worldwide smartphone growth forecast to slow to 3.1% in 2016 as focus shifts to device lifecycles • IDC

»According to a forecast update from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, smartphone shipments are expected to grow 3.1% in 2016, which is a substantial slowdown from the 10.5% growth in 2015 and 27.8% in 2014. Shipments are expected to hit 1.48 billion in 2016 and grow to 1.84 billion in 2020. The new forecast is 2.6 percentage points lower than IDC’s previous forecast for 2016 on the basis of the continued slowdown in mature markets and China.

IDC expects large markets like the United States, Western Europe, and China to see low single digit growth rates in 2016 while Japan and Canada are expected to contract by 6.4% and 6.9%, respectively. In all these markets, smartphone buying behavior is changing in many ways. In operator-driven markets the transition away from two year subsidized contracts toward monthly installment plans are slowly taking place. Meanwhile, many retail heavy markets are seeing a surge in the eTailer channel, better known as online marketplaces.

“Consumers everywhere are getting savvy about how and where they buy their smartphones, and this is opening up new doors for OEMs and causing some traditional channels to lose some control of the hardware flow,” said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. “Smartphones sold into eTailer channels grew 65% in 2015 and are expected to account for roughly 12% of smartphone shipments in 2016, up from just 4% in 2013. Consumers are having more say over which brands they want and at the same time able to bargain shop.”

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Phablets will do well, Windows Phone won’t, iPhones to see slight drop from 232m in 2015 to 227m in 2016, BlackBerry to.. fade to black, probably.
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Apple Watch 2 wishlist • Hypergeusia

Ryan Considine’s list (faster, better app launcher, ambient display and more) is right on the spot. And I have to agree with him on this wish:

»

TouchID
That passcode screen is miserable.

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I have to do the passcode first thing every morning. It’s not a great experience.
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We’re still committed • The Jawbone Blog

Hosain Rahman is CEO of Jawbone:

»As some of you may have recently seen, there have been a few incorrect media reports that Jawbone is exiting the wearables business or going out of business altogether. These reports are unequivocally false. This speculation appears to emanate from wrongful insinuations made in a blog post in which the particular digital publication has since made a “Correction.” Jawbone was not contacted on the specific insinuations prior to the post and other media picked them up before the digital publication posted a correction, further spreading this false information.

To be clear, Jawbone remains wholly committed to innovating in and building great wearables products. We have never been more excited about our pipeline of technology and products and look forward to sharing them with the world when ready.

We have always managed our inventory positions according to internal business processes and strategic product lifecycle objectives. This situation is no different and we will continue to support all of our products. UP2, UP3 and UP4 are still hugely popular and continue to sell well. We’re also continually inspired by stories of how our UP® community is using our products to live better.

«

The “particular digital publication” appears to be Tech Insider (aka Business Insider), where the story from Friday May 27 has been seamlessly updated to include this denial from June 1.

I’m not quite getting an unequivocal feeling that Jawbone is feeling strong. But it also shows how the world of zero-deadline digital can lead to messups; at least with a print deadline, you know when you need to answer. (That didn’t stop screwups, but it gave you a time by which to prevent them.)
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From $4.5bn to nothing: Forbes revises estimated net worth of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes • Forbes

Matthew Herper:

»Theranos has been hit with allegations that its tests are inaccurate and is being investigated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies. That, plus new information indicating Theranos’ annual revenues are less than $100m, has led FORBES to come up with a new, lower estimate of Theranos’ value.

FORBES spoke to a dozen venture capitalists, analysts and industry experts and concluded that a more realistic value for Theranos is $800m, rather than $9bn. That gives the company credit for its intellectual property and the $724m that it has raised, according to VC Experts, a venture capital research firm. It also represents a generous multiple of the company’s sales, which FORBES learned about from a person familiar with Theranos’ finances.

At such a low valuation, Holmes’ [50%] stake is essentially worth nothing. Theranos investors own preferred shares, which means they get paid back before Holmes, who owns common stock.

«

If that’s the case about Holmes’s stock, she was poorly advised. Forbes also thinks she won’t raise money at a higher valuation again, has too many unknowns, hasn’t delivered on promises (or threats), and might not have a target market.

Apart from that, Ms Holmes, how was the play?
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Twitter is betting everything on Jack Dorsey. Will it work? • Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton, who has been a splendid biographer of the Borgia-style goings-on at the top of Twitter, updates his book with the latest:

»I have been told by people close to the company that, in the face of mounting pressure from Wall Street, Twitter occasionally resorted to what most start-ups do when they need to goose the numbers: they kind of faked it. This happens at virtually all social networks; the company sends an e-mail to inactive users who haven’t been on the service in a few months, informing them there is a problem with their username or account, which leads people to log in to fix the situation. Magically, those people become monthly active users even if they were not.

And while Dorsey wasn’t employing that trick, his magic was not yet apparent to investors on Wall Street. Months into his turnaround campaign, user growth was relatively flat and Twitter’s stock was now down nearly 60% from where it had stood when Costolo was convening his staff in [the meeting room called] Waterthrush. Twitter, which once had a market valuation of nearly $40bn, was now worth about half that…

…There are few things about Twitter’s future that anyone can say for certain, but I’ll offer one prediction with absolute assuredness: there will not be a fourth Jack Dorsey era. Recently, when I met with executives at the company—including the executive chairman of the board, the chief financial officer, and the director of communications—there was one query that seemed to catch everyone off guard. What was Plan B, I asked, if Dorsey couldn’t turn the company around? “There is no Plan B,” I was told. “This is it.”

The solution to Twitter’s problems, they all reiterated, along with Dorsey, is that word “live.” “We now know what inhibits usage, and what doesn’t,” Dorsey explained to me. He said he has a slew of new features—including hosting live video from the N.F.L., where people can talk about the game as they watch it—that will grow the audience and focus on that single, live strategy.

Twitter is betting a lot on this relatively simple notion.

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2016 Mobile Adblocking Report • PageFair

»Quick Facts:

• At least 419 million people (22% of the world’s 1.9bn smartphone users) are blocking ads on the mobile web.
• Both mobile web and in-app ads can now be blocked.
• As of March 2016 an estimated 408 million people are actively using mobile adblocking browsers (i.e., a mobile browser that blocks ads by default).
• As of March 2016 there are 159 million users of mobile adblocking browsers in China, 122 million in India, and 38 million in Indonesia.
• As of March 2016 in Europe and North America there were 14 million monthly active users of mobile adblocking browsers.
• A further 4.9 million content blocking and in-app adblocking apps were downloaded from the app stores in Europe and North America since September 2014.
• Adblocking is now the most hotly discussed topic in the digital media industry.

«

Those figures for China, India and Indonesia add up to 319 million – leaving about 111 million outside those three countries. Adblocking is most prevalent (ie most urgent to users) where data is expensive and phones are slow(er).

Here’s the presentation:

There’s a PDF report too.

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Delaware court finds Dell’s $24bn buyout underpaid investors • FT.com

James Fontanella-Khan and Leslie Hook:

»“The sale process functioned imperfectly as a price discovery tool, both during the pre-signing and post-signing phases,” said Travis Laster, vice-chancellor of Delaware’s special corporate court.

The ruling is a black eye for Mr Dell and Silver Lake, which were attacked at the time for underpaying and then changing the voting rules to prevent the offer being blocked.

Magnetar Capital, a hedge fund, could net about $15m as it has legal rights to about 3.8m shares.

Dell’s $24bn sale to its founder came under scrutiny as many investors believed Mr Dell was conflicted: playing seller and buyer at the same time. A spokesperson for Dell declined to comment on Tuesday’s ruling.

In the wake of the financial crisis, Dell’s PC sales had slipped, causing share prices to fall — and presenting Mr Dell with an opportunity.

The efforts by Mr Dell and Silver Lake to take Dell private were contested by shareholders from the beginning. Shareholders who opposed the deal included billionaire activist Carl Icahn as well as T Rowe Price, which believed the market was underpricing Dell.

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In total, it’s about $20m in extra payments. Not huge, but it’s the principle: how can it be right for Dell to be both seller and buyer? Here’s the ruling.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Xiaomi’s money trouble, instructing Alexa, the App Store problem, Uber’s sick loophole, and more

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The final position of AlphaGo’s third win in a five-game match Lee Sedol, the top Go professional. But what does that mean for human competition? Screenshot by kenming_wang on Flickr.

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

A selection of 15 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I stayed in a hotel with Android lightswitches and it was just as bad as you’d imagine » mjg59

The “switches” were Android tablets. He hooked up an Ethernet connection to see what was going on:

»wireshark revealed that [the data protocol] was Modbus over TCP. Modbus is a pretty trivial protocol, and notably has no authentication whatsoever. tcpdump showed that traffic was being sent to 172.16.207.14, and pymodbus let me start controlling my lights, turning the TV on and off and even making my curtains open and close. What fun!

And then I noticed something. My room number is 714. The IP address I was communicating with was 172.16.207.14. They wouldn’t, would they?

I mean yes obviously they would.

It’s basically as bad as it could be – once I’d figured out the gateway, I could access the control systems on every floor and query other rooms to figure out whether the lights were on or not, which strongly implies that I could control them as well. Jesus Molina talked about doing this kind of thing a couple of years ago, so it’s not some kind of one-off – instead, hotels are happily deploying systems with no meaningful security, and the outcome of sending a constant stream of “Set room lights to full” and “Open curtain” commands at 3AM seems fairly predictable.

We’re doomed.

«

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MIT unveils 3D solar arrays that produce up to 20 times more energy » 3tags

»Intensive research around the world has focused on improving the performance of solar photovoltaic cells and bringing down their cost. But very little attention has been paid to the best ways of arranging those cells, which are typically placed flat on a rooftop or other surface, or sometimes attached to motorized structures that keep the cells pointed toward the sun as it crosses the sky.

Now, a team of MIT researchers has come up with a very different approach: building cubes or towers that extend the solar cells upward in three-dimensional configurations. Amazingly, the results from the structures they’ve tested show power output ranging from double to more than 20 times that of fixed flat panels with the same base area.

«

They’re not pretty, but they are efficient.
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Fanfare for the Common Man – Emerson, Lake & Palmer (Olympic Stadium Montreal) » YouTube

Bloody cold (snow all over the ground) and they must have been shooting the video for at least five hours, judging by the clocks you can see at various points. This is shorter than that. The first use of the polyphonic synthesiser (able to play more than one note at a time) in a rock song. Farewell, Keith Emerson.
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Listen up: your AI assistant goes crazy for NPR too » KWBU

Rachel Martin (in a transcript from her radio program on NPR:

»OK. Go ahead and turn up the volume because this update is for you, Alexa. Last week, we talked about Alexa, the voice-activated assistant that operates on a speaker sold by Amazon called the Echo. The technology is Amazon’s way of connecting to your home as part of a future where you walk into your house and you say – out loud – turn off the alarm. Dim the lights. Preheat the oven. Well, some of you out there already own an Amazon Echo, and our story activated your Alexas. I guess her ears were burning.

Listener Roy Hagar wrote in to say our story prompted his Alexa to reset his thermostat to 70 degrees. It was difficult for Jeff Finan to hear the story because his radio was right next to his Echo speaker, and when Alex heard her name, she started playing an NPR News summary. Marc-Paul Lee said his unit started going crazy too and wrote in to tell us this – let’s just say we both enjoyed the story. So Alexa, listen up – we want you to pledge to your local member station. You hear me? Lots and lots of money. Did you get that, Alexa?

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Xiaomi – hard life » Radio Free Mobile

Richard Windsor is a sceptic about the prospects of the venture capitalistis’ starry-eyed kid:

»Xiaomi owns 30% of Xunlei and has incorporated its acceleration technology into its ecosystem from MIUI6 (2014) going forward. As a result of this, the performance of Xunlei’s advertising revenues gives some indication of how usage is faring within Xiaomi’s ecosystem and the numbers are not encouraging.

Xunlei’s Q4 2015A revenues declined 1.1% to US$35m however within that online advertising revenues were $1.7m growing 24% YoY with mobile advertising making a contribution for the first time.

Xiaomi claims to have 170m MIUI users all of which have the Xunlei technology but if Xunlei can only generate $1.7m from those users, difficult questions have to be asked with regards to engagement. This makes me concerned that although Xiaomi devices register strong usage, much of that usage may be occurring within the services of its rivals rather than its own…

…if all Xiaomi is doing is providing nicely specified devices at rock bottom prices then it is in fact helping its competitors rather than itself. This is exactly the same problem that other Android handset makers have outside of China. These handset makers slash each other’s throats to put better and better devices in the hands of users but it is Google that reaps all of the benefit from the subsequent usage increases.

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Yahoo announces plans to kill off Games, Livetext, Boss, and more regional sites » VentureBeat

Eil Protalinski:

»Yahoo today announced its Q1 2016 progress report, highlighting the closure of several products and regional sites. As shared in its last earnings call, the company wants to focus on just seven core consumer products: Mail, Search, Tumblr, News, Sports, Finance, and Lifestyle.

First off, the company is shutting down its Yahoo Games site (first launched in 1998!) and publishing channel on May 13, 2016. This impacts all territories: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S.

Starting March 14, 2016, users will no longer be able to make in-game purchases on the Yahoo Games site. Yahoo says it has reached out to game publishers and asked them to develop a transition plan for players who have made in-game purchases.

Next, Yahoo Livetext is being shut down at the end of March 2016. The company launched the silent video chat app in July 2015 — we weren’t crazy about the app when we tried it out. As you might expect, Yahoo says Livetext let the company “experiment with new user experiences and features,” which it will try to incorporate into its existing products. Specifically, the company said Yahoo Messenger will have the most to gain here.

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It’s also closing Yahoo Astrology in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and India. I’m sure they saw it coming though. As for Yahoo, its fate seems to be to pare off more and more of its sites until there’s just a nameplate on an office somewhere in Delaware.
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A typo stopped hackers siphoning nearly $1bn out of Bangladesh » The Register

John Leyden:

»At least 30 transfer requests were made on 5 February using the Bangladesh Bank’s SWIFT code, out of which five resulted in successful transfers, AP reports, citing Bangladeshi newspaper reports.

If all the transfers were effected thieves would have made off with $950m. However, a spelling mistake in the name of one recipient led Deutsche Bank, which was involved in routing funds, to raise a query. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York flagged up the unusual transfer of funds to private accounts to the Bangladesh central bank at around the same time.

“Four requests to transfer a total of about $81m to the Philippines went through, but a fifth, for $20m, to a Sri Lankan non-profit organisation, was held up because the hackers misspelled the name of the NGO, Shalika Foundation,” Reuters reports.

The crooks misspelled “foundation” in the NGO’s name as “fandation”, prompting the query from Deutsche Bank.

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How would you fare at the global negotiating table? » World Economic Forum

Donald Armbrecht:

»You’re a great negotiator at home, but how would you fare on the world stage? Strong negotiating skills in one culture can actually be a disadvantage in another, according to Erin Meyer, author of Getting to Si, Ja, Oui, Hai and Da.

Some cultures are emotionally expressive, even in the meeting room. Laughing, raising your voice or physical contact beyond a handshake can be considered normal in countries such as Italy and Spain. Whereas in the United States there’s a level of friendliness with limits. Meanwhile, business cultures in countries like Germany and Japan can find such behaviour inappropriate or unprofessional.

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Also needs “what do phrases actually mean?” – given that when a Briton says “really?” they usually mean “that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”.
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What no indie developer wants to hear about the App Store » iMore

Rene Ritchie:

»I hate hearing it as much as I hate writing it. It’s far easier to simply blame platform owners for failing to pull levers and influence economies; for treating Facebook or HBO better than they treat the 76th Notes app to launch this year.

If the absolutely capricious and often maddening [Apple App STore] review process and lack of attention really did chill innovation, though, it should be easy to point to Google Play and its over half-a-decade of relatively lax approval policies, and see year after year of ground-breaking, platform-making, device-selling apps that would never come to market on the App Store.

That would be the fastest way to get Apple to change review policies — force them to scramble into recovery mode, show the company rather than tell. But there’s nothing to show. Google Play isn’t full of universe-denting mobile software that iPhone and iPad owners simply can’t get. It has a few things like custom launchers, but those remain incredibly niche.

All the truly important apps of the last few years, from Instagram to Uber, all work just fine on the iPhone. In fact, they often work sooner and better.

If Apple did provide for trials and upgrade pricing and allowed more direct customer relationships, it’s uncertain how much that would really change things either. We live in an age of venture capital and mega corporations who can easily afford to release high-quality apps frequently and for free.

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It is an unbeatable riposte to “trials would make all the difference” to say “well, it hasn’t for developers on Android”. Now read on..
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Life and death in the App Store » The Verge

Casey Newton:

»Last month, Apple announced it had paid $40 billion to developers since the App Store opened, saying the store was responsible for “creating and supporting” 1.9 million US jobs. More than half a million iOS developers have created apps; the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference is so popular that tickets have to be distributed via a lottery. “[Apple] made our company,” Sykora says. “If Apple didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have a company at all.” And the market for apps is growing: between iOS, Android, and smaller platforms, apps could generate $101 billion annually by 2020, according to market research firm App Annie.

But the App Store’s middle class is small and shrinking. And the easy money is gone.

For a time, Pixite was a shining example of the businesses made possible by the app economy. Like thousands of other developers, Pixite’s founders took what had been a side project and turned it into a full-fledged career. But the company’s recent financial problems illustrate a series of powerful shifts in the industry toward consolidation and corporatization.

«

The death of the middle class here reflects wider changes in the outside world – but with evolution speeded up thousands of times. In passing, this article by Newton, and the interview below by Sam Byford, are two excellent pieces of journalism: as long as they need to be, well-researched, intimate, illuminating.
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Artificial intelligence: Google’s AlphaGo beats Go master Lee Se-dol » BBC News

»A computer program has beaten a master Go player 3-0 in a best-of-five competition, in what is seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence.

Google’s AlphaGo program was playing against Lee Se-dol in Seoul, in South Korea.
Mr Lee had been confident he would win before the competition started.

The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess.

“AlphaGo played consistently from beginning to the end while Lee, as he is only human, showed some mental vulnerability,” one of Lee’s former coaches, Kwon Kap-Yong, told the AFP news agency.

«

This is what people overlooked in thinking that Se-dol would be able to pull things back even if he lost the first game. There’s no emotion in the machine; it just slogs on (and like chess, Go gets easier to compute towards the end). The human feels the pressure of being behind, and the pressure to win. The machine won’t blunder. The human can. I’m certain it will be a 5-0 result.
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DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis on how AI will shape the future » The Verge

Sam Byford, in a terrific wide-ranging, intelligent interview:

»SB: So let’s move onto smartphone assistants. I saw you put up a slide from Her in your presentation on the opening day — is that really the endgame here?

DH: No, I mean Her is just an easy popular mainstream view of what that sort of thing is. I just think we would like these smartphone assistant things to actually be smart and contextual and have a deeper understanding of what you’re trying to do. At the moment most of these systems are extremely brittle — once you go off the templates that have been pre-programmed then they’re pretty useless. So it’s about making that actually adaptable and flexible and more robust.

SB: What’s the breakthrough that’s needed to improve these? Why couldn’t we work on it tomorrow?

DH: Well, we can — I just think you need a different approach. Again, it’s this dichotomy between pre-programmed and learnt. At the moment pretty much all smartphone assistants are special-cased and pre-programmed and that means they’re brittle because they can only do the things they were pre-programmed for. And the real world’s very messy and complicated and users do all sorts of unpredictable things that you can’t know ahead of time. Our belief at DeepMind, certainly this was the founding principle, is that the only way to do intelligence is to do learning from the ground up and be general.

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This is a must-read; Hassabis is thinking so far ahead, but also so clearly. (I’ve previously said that I think the AI capabilities of phones will feed into the next pervasive thing – a bit like the selfie.)
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What do games tell us about intelligence? » Medium

Johan Ugander is an assistant professor of management science and engineering at Stanford. The whole essay is terrific – he describes AlphaGo as “moving past the horizon of human Go ability” (chess programs have long since vanished over it) – but this part really makes you think:

»Imagine organizing a “Turing tournament” where all the subjects were human, but an interrogator was told that half of the subjects were machines. Tasked to determine which subjects were human and which were machine, the interrogator would be forced to choose which subject was “more human.” As a result, it is therefore possible to measure “how human” each human is. Or at least: how well each human performs human intelligence.

The next natural step is that there’s no reason to believe that computer programs can’t “out-human” us, achieving Elo ratings in the imitation game much higher than any human. This observation is particularly true if the interrogator in the game is human; the natural next step would be to put in place a machine interrogator, who would probably be able to discern the difference between subjects better than any human. As a first step in this direction, research on CAPTCHAs targets precisely this task of discriminating between machines and humans.

But beyond CAPTCHAs, at what point can a machine no longer tell the difference between a human and a machine?

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One of the greatest art heists of our time was actually a data hack » Ars Technica

You already knew that it wasn’t a guerrilla 3D scan with a Kinect, because you read it here last week. Annalee Newitz has a neat followup, though:

»the true story of how the artists got their scan might actually be more revealing than the Kinect hoax. [Cosmo] Wenman [who has used high-quality photos to create scans] points out that many museums have high-quality scans of their artwork that they refuse to release to the public. He writes:

»

I know from first-hand experience that people want this data, and want to put it to use, and as I explained to LACMA in 2014, they will get it, one way or another. When museums refuse to provide it, the public is left in the dark and is open to having bogus or uncertain data foisted upon it.

Museums should not be repositories of secret knowledge, but unfortunately, as I’ve noted elsewhere, Neues is not alone in keeping their scan data to themselves. There are many influential museums, universities, and private collections that have extremely high quality 3D data of important works, but they are not sharing that data with the public.

«

He lists dozens of high-quality scans that are being hoarded by museums, from famous Rodin and Michelangelo sculptures, to Assyrian reliefs that are thousands of years old. If the artists behind The Other Nefertiti would come clean about where their scan came from, they might inspire other artists to force museums to open up their archives and allow many other artworks to return home— or come into our homes, making art part of our everyday lives.

«

There’s the scent of a novel in this. Which is real, the scan or the “original”?
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Uber riders say they were charged massive cleaning fees for messes they never made » BuzzFeed News

Leticia Miranda:

»Uber customers are warning others to be wary of using the ride-hailing app after they say they were charged hundreds in vehicle cleaning fees for messes they claim they never made.

Jordan Hunter, a 22-year-old senior at University of Texas, says she and a group of friends were left stunned after a six-mile Uber ride in Austin left them with a triple-digit bill for what Uber said were cleaning purposes.

The group of six friends took an Uber home early on Saturday, Feb. 7, Hunter told BuzzFeed News. The friends were irritated by the surge pricing, but were willing to cough up the $68 it would cost to get home safely.

After arriving home, the friends were shocked to see they had been charged an additional $100 for a cleaning fee.

«

Sounds like drivers figuring out a way to make some extra cash on the side. If there’s a wrinkle, people will find it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: 3D TV is dead, Samsung’s S7 in brief, tablets to grow and shrink, the faked Nefertiti, and more

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By the time you read this, the world’s best human Go player will have won – or lost – against the world’s best AI Go player. Photograph (of a standard corner formation) by Peter on Flickr.

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

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

How AlphaGo illustrates the “warm bath and ice bucket” view of technology progress » Tech.pinions – Perspective, Insight, Analysis

This is by me; I’ve started writing at Techpinions.

»Remember the last time you took a bath or shower and it started lukewarm but you gradually warmed it by adding more hot water, until it reached a temperature so hot you could never have got into it at the start? Isn’t it strange how we can be immune to subtle, slow changes all around us?

Then there’s the other extreme – the ice bucket experience, where you’re abruptly plunged into something so dramatically different you can’t think of anything else.

The warm bath and the ice bucket: that’s how technology progresses, too.

«

By the time you read this, the first game of the five-match Go tournament pitting Google Deepmind AlphaGo program v Lee Sedol, the world’s best Go player, will have been played. The result will be at https://gogameguru.com/alphago-1/.

But which is AI, do you think: the warm bath or the ice bucket?
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Detachable tablets set to grow from 8% of tablet market in 2015 to 30% in 2020 » IDC

»Worldwide tablet shipments will drop to 195m units in 2016, down -5.9% from 2015, according to a new International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker forecast. Looking beyond 2016, IDC expects the overall market to return to positive growth, albeit single digit, driven by growing demand for detachable devices. This somewhat hybrid category that brings together slate tablets and PCs is expected to grow from 16.6m shipments in 2015 to 63.8m in 2020.

“Beyond the growing demand for detachable devices, we’re also witnessing an increase in competition within this segment that will help drive design, innovation, and a decline in average prices,” said Jean Philippe Bouchard, Research Director, Tablets. “At the latest Mobile World Congress, we saw new entrants, like Alcatel and Huawei, coming from the mobile space and expanding their portfolio to address the demand for detachables. Everyone in the industry recognizes that traditional personal computers like desktops and notebooks will potentially be replaced by detachables in the coming years and this is why we will see a lot of new products being introduced this year.”

The change from slate form factor to detachables will bring along two other changes to the tablet industry. First, devices with larger screen sizes (9″ and above) will experience growth throughout the forecast while those under 9inches will decline. And second, Microsoft-based devices will begin taking share from the other platforms, most notably Android.

«

This “detachable” v “slate” v “you can get an extra keyboard as an add-on” is confusing as hell, and IDC isn’t making it any clearer. Nowhere in this release, or anywhere on IDC’s site that I’ve seen, is there a definition of what makes a “detachable”. Is the Surface Pro? The Surface Book? The iPad Pro? An iPad to which you add a Logitech keyboard?
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Mossberg: Samsung’s new Galaxy S7 phones are beautiful » The Verge

Walt Mossberg:

»I had three hardware problems. First, the standard S7 ran hot, sometimes uncomfortably so. Second, the backs of both new Galaxies were slippery. I almost dropped each once.

My worst hardware problem — and it’s quite annoying — is that the fingerprint reader, built into the rectangular physical home button, failed on me. On both models, I kept getting a message to wipe off the home button and try again, even though the button and my thumb were each bone dry. If I left my thumb on the reader a bit longer, or pressed harder, it would work, but this was still a fail because it made unlocking the phone with my thumb a chore. Oddly, this didn’t happen with a second finger. Samsung had no explanation, but that same thumb has unlocked several other brands of handsets quickly and reliably…

…As has happened so often in the past, Samsung’s best efforts at hardware are let down by software. The company told me it had stopped trying half-baked software ideas, and reduced duplication of Samsung and Android apps by about 30%.

I agree that the S7’s have the cleanest software build of any Galaxy I’ve tested, and that Samsung’s TouchWiz interface has been toned down. But there’s still too much duplicate software for my taste. For instance, out of the box, there are still two email apps, two music services, two photo-viewing apps, two messaging apps, and, except on Verizon, two browsers and dueling wireless payment services. (Samsung says Verizon barred including Samsung’s browser and Samsung Pay out of the box.) And Verizon builds in a third messaging app…

…Worse, despite Samsung’s newfound software restraint, the company couldn’t stop itself from offering a complex new system of software shortcuts on the larger S7 Edge model. This is the new iteration of a useless feature from last year’s Edge model, and it is better. But it’s the kind of thing that just strikes me as a gimmick. You can swipe in from a small area of the right edge to see various different vertical rows of supposedly quick-action icons: frequent contacts, favorite apps,news, automated tasks and more. Some of these actually can be expanded to two vertical rows.

It sounds at first glance like a time-saving idea, but I found it to be a sort of competing user interface which I frequently forgot about.

«

So the hardware is beautiful.. and then the problems start? Terrible headline which doesn’t do the job a headline should. The phone running hot will be down to the Snapdragon 820 chip. And what does “reduced duplication by 30%” mean?
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With a bullet to the head from Samsung, 3D TV is now deader than ever » CNET

Nice scoop by David Katzmaier, who got a Samsung source telling him its 2016 range won’t support 3D, going instead for smart functionality:

»LG, the No. 2 TV maker worldwide, is actually holding steady. Tim Alessi, director of new product development, told CNET that 3D “still remains a meaningful step-up feature for many” consumers. About a third of the 2016 series TVs it will sell in the US support the feature. On the other hand, all of them will be high-end 4K OLED and LED LCD models.

Case in point: LG’s main series of flat 4K OLED for 2016, the B6, won’t support 3D. That’s a shame for any remaining 3D fans because its 2015 predecessor, the EF9500 series, delivered the best 3D image quality we’ve ever tested.

Then there’s Vizio. A major brand in the US but not worldwide, Vizio hasn’t offered 3D on any of its TVs since 2013; even the exceedingly expensive Reference Series is 2D-only. And Sony’s rep told CNET that only two of its US series, the X930D and X940D, will support 3D in 2016. The cheapest costs $3,200.

3D movies continue to be released in theaters, and 3D Blu-ray discs will likely be sold for a few more years, so owners of current 3D TVs still have some use for those glasses. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Vudu still offer a few titles too, but they can be difficult to find, and the new 4K Blu-ray disc format contains no provisions for 3D support at all.

«

Yeah, 3D TV is dead; Philips is giving up on it too, and broadcasters have abandonedit. There was never a reason for it, too big an installed base to fight against, and the requirement for special glasses (what if you had friends round?) too taxing.

So let’s remind ourselves of the breathless reports from CES 2010 and CES 2011, when we were told 3D TV would be the next big thing.
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There’s something fishy about the other Nefertiti » The Great Fredini’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Fred Kahjl on the claims by Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles to have used a Kinect to make a high-quality 3D scan of the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum:

»One theory is that the scan is actually generated by Photogrammetry, a technique of capturing images of the sculpture from a variety of angles. The images are then fed into software such as Agisoft Photoscan that analyzes all the images for common points, and generates a 3D model of the subject. Paul Docherty is a researcher who has extensively used photogrammetry to reconstruct historic artifacts and sites, including a model of Nefertiti’s bust using available imagery he gathered online. He catalogued the process in his article 3D Modelling the Bust of Queen Nefertiti, and also spoke on the 3D in Review podcast about his efforts. Mr. Docherty has since gone on to question the Nefertiti Hack scan in his article Nefertiti Hack – Questions regarding the 3D scan of the bust of Nefertiti, in which he agrees that there is no way this scan was captured with a Kinect. So, its possible that the scan could have been made using a series of 45-120 high res images covertly gathered with a cellphone, but if that’s the way it was done, why show the Kinect in the video?

The last possibility and reigning theory is that Ms. Badri and Mr. Nelles’ elusive hacker partners are literally real hackers who stole a copy of the high resolution scan from the Museum’s servers. A high resolution scan must exist, as a high res 3D printed replica is already available for sale online. Museum officials have dismissed the Other Nefertiti model as “of minor quality”, but that’s not what we are seeing in this highly detailed scan. Perhaps the file was obtained from someone involved in printing the reproduction, or it was a scan made of the reproduction? Indeed, the common belief in online 3D Printing community chatter is that the Kinect “story” is a fabrication to hide the fact that the model was actually stolen data from a commercial high quality scan. If the artists were behind a server hack, the legal ramifications for them are much more serious than scanning the object, which has few, if any legal precedents.

«

More detail from Kahl points out that a Kinect could never have done this – it lacks the precision. So a server hack seems most likely.
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SoC and NAND performance – the Samsung Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge review, part 1 » Anandtech

Joshua Ho:

»While we’re ready to move on to newer benchmarks for 2016, our system performance benchmarks from 2015 are still going to provide a pretty good idea for what to expect from the Galaxy S7 and Snapdragon 820 by extension. For those that are unfamiliar with what the Snapdragon 820 is, I’d reference our previous articles on the Snapdragon 820.

In essence, we’re looking at a 2×2 CPU configuration with 2.2 GHz Kryo cores for the performance cluster, and 1.6 GHz Kryo cores for the efficiency cluster. Binding the two clusters together are some power aware scheduling at the kernel level and a custom interconnect to handle coherency between the two clusters. Memory is also improved relative to the Snapdragon 810, with a bump to LPDDR4-1800 over the former’s LPDDR4-1600. Of course, there’s a lot more to talk about here, but for now we can simply look at how the Snapdragon 820 compares in our benchmarks.

«

Yes, have a look. What stands out is that in 11 comparative benchmark tests, the S7’s 820 processor beats the six-month-old IPhone 6S Plus in just three. I’m not much of a believer in the importance of benchmarks – they won’t tell you how smoothly a screen will scroll, no matter what the frame rate, because animation code is a different thing from simply refreshing the screen – but this seems remarkable. How soon before Apple’s lead isn’t just six months, but a year?

And then take a look at the battery life figures, where Ho comments:

»looking at the iPhone 6s Plus relative to the Galaxy S7 edge it’s pretty obvious that there is a power efficiency gap between the two in this test. Despite the enormous difference in battery size – the Galaxy S7 edge has a battery that is 33% larger than the iPhone 6s Plus – the difference in battery life between the iPhone and Galaxy in this test is small, on the order of half an hour or 5-6% [longer for the S7 Edge]. This is balanced against a higher resolution (but AMOLED) display, which means we’re looking at SoC efficiency compounded with a difference in display power.

«

But of course it’s the people who are upgrading from two-year-old phones who will see the dramatic difference in speed and, on this evidence, battery life. (Thanks @papanic for the link.)
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Amid Andrews trial, female sports reporters open up about safety » SI.com

Richard Deitsch:

»Erin Andrews’s lawsuit and trial this month against the Nashville Marriott (Andrews is suing the hotel for allowing a stalker to book the room next to hers and surreptitiously film nude videos of her in 2008 while she worked for ESPN) has not gone unnoticed for front-facing women in the sports media who travel regularly for work. Last week I contacted seven women who appear on television regularly (ESPN’s Josina Anderson, SNY’s Kerith Burke, Fox Sports reporter Laura Okmin, SportsNetLA Dodgers host and reporter Alanna Rizzo, NBC Sunday Night Football reporter Michele Tafoya, YES Network’s Yankees reporter Meredith Marakovits and Kusnierek). With them, I discussed the topic of security while on the road. I was curious if what happened to Andrews changed their approach about where they stay, what they do at hotels, or produced any new travel precautions for them.

“I don’t have a lot of say in where I stay or what hotel chains my company uses,” said Burke. “I do remember feeling sad and scared after what happened to Erin. I travel with Band-Aids to put over the peepholes. I prefer to join a coworker at the hotel restaurant or bar so strangers don’t approach me as much. There’s a noticeable difference when I eat or drink alone. I don’t like hotel rooms on the first floor. I don’t like rooms by the elevators. Depending on the length of my stay, I don’t get maid service because I don’t want anyone in my room except me.”

“I am very cautious,” said Rizzo. “I never post on social media where the team is staying. I used to stay under my actual name at hotels but this year that will be changed. There have been several occurrences when savvy fans have located the team hotel and have called my room asking me for a date or for money for their fundraisers.”

«

Erin Andrews was awarded millions of dollars against the hotel chain which failed to prevent the stalker making reservations.

Most men don’t realise how for women staying alone in a hotel isn’t necessarily a fun-packed fest; it’s more like a test of nerve, where they take multiple precautions. (It’s not just female sports reporters.)
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Tim Sweeney is missing the point; the PC platform needs fixing » Ars Technica

Peter Bright responds to a (slightly puzzling) piece by Tim Sweeney of Epic Games in The Guardian, and says that for a lot of people smartphones and tablets feel a lot more secure, by design:

»Beyond the API-level checking to get in the store, the sandboxing means that apps simply can’t access things they shouldn’t.

This combination of security, isolation, compatibility, reliability, and predictability has given consoles, smartphones, tablets, and even Chromebooks substantial appeal when compared to the PC. Smartphones, consoles, and Chromebooks are all growing, expanding markets. Windows PCs aren’t, and the perceived failings in these areas are among the reasons that many users say they prefer their iPhone or their iPad to their PC. Their iPads are safe and consistent, and users just know that they’ll work in the right way.

The traditional PC has none of that, which is why Microsoft is trying to build it. The Store is central to this. UWP provides big parts of the infrastructure, in particular, sandboxed security and clean installation and uninstallation. The Store provides other parts. It provides infrastructure such as app updating and in-app purchasing, and it also allows Microsoft to enforce various technical rules, such as prohibiting the use of some APIs, mandating adequate performance in certain scenarios, and informing developers if their apps are crashing too much. Microsoft needs both the Store and UWPs together to deliver the kind of platform that consumers have shown they want. Take away the Store, and the platform concept as a whole is compromised.

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Strong arguments.
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Verizon settles with FCC over hidden tracking » The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

»The Federal Communications Commission said Monday that it had reached a settlement with Verizon Wireless for its use of hidden tracking technology known as “supercookies,” which were used for targeted advertising without customers’ permission.

As part of the settlement, Verizon Wireless was fined $1.35m and is required to notify consumers of its data collection program, as well as get permission from users before sharing consumer data with third-party partners.

The penalty was small, but the enforcement action drew wide attention from the telecom industry as a glimpse of the F.C.C.’s expanding ambitions into privacy regulation. The agency is expected to soon consider first-time privacy rules for Internet service providers that could include mandates that wireless and fixed broadband providers get permission from users before tracking their behavior online.

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Guess who now works at the FCC? Jonathan Mayer, who discovered Google’s hacking of Safari to plant Doubleclick cookies, and another company that was using Verizon supercookies to recreate its own. Expect more enforcement from the FCC.
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How adblockers drive YouTubers to shill for mobile game makers » GamesBeat

Jeff Grubb:

»“I think what many people still don’t realize is that: YouTube Red exists largely as an effort to counter Adblock,” PewDiePie wrote on his blog. “Using Adblock doesn’t mean you’re clever and above the system. YouTube Red exists because using Adblock has actual consequences.”

The biggest of those consequences is a reduction in the CPMs (cost per 1,000 views) that marketers will pay to YouTube and the video creators. And that dropping value leads to the creation of services like YouTube Red and Roostr.tv.

“It’s not a secret to anyone that the CPMs people have been earning are dropping lately,” Roostr.tv content producer Elena Nizhnik told GamesBeat. “So a lot of gamers that are doing this full-time have been looking for additional ways to get supplemental income. If it’s not direct sponsorships for gear or something brick-and-mortar, many have been looking at doing deals with mobile publishers.”

An estimate from anti-adblock service Pagefair claims that 198 million people use software to black ads on the Web, and that number is growing rapidly. Nizhnik says she makes YouTube videos herself, and the dropping CPMs are affecting her.

“I’ve seen how my earnings have been dropping this year compared to last,” she said. “So many people are using Adblock. And you only monetize the views where Adblock isn’t on.”

«

The consequence is that they start to push “cost per install” deals from games companies. But do they really believe what they’re pushing?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.