Tag Archives: antitrust

Start up: Azure’s machine learning, explaining Apple’s taxes, Sony v Samsung, EC v Google redux, and more

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Image recognition reckons this could be a cardigan. Photo by jdlasica on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Spread liberally. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Announcing the general availability of Azure Machine Learning » Microsoft TechNet Blogs

Joseph Sirosh:

We built Azure Machine Learning to democratize machine learning. We wanted to eliminate the heavy lifting involved in building and deploying machine learning technology and make it accessible to everybody. Supporting open source innovation and enabling breakthrough learning capabilities with big data were important. So were supporting community-driven development and the ability for developers to easily create and monetize cloud-hosted APIs and applications. Most importantly, we wanted our customers to easily leverage future advancements in data science. 

And now that future is taking shape. Today, at Strata + Hadoop World, we are announcing the general availability release of Azure Machine Learning, a fully-managed, fully-supported service in the cloud. No software to download, no servers to manage – all you need to start doing data science is a browser and internet connectivity.

Smart – and also clever: I bet it will be difficult to export the “learning”. Already has some big-name customers. Machine learning is going to be a boom area in a couple of years – and this will help.

YouTube and its alternatives » Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson sees a threat to YouTube by its own hand:

YouTube, with moves such as those Digiday covered today, is actually making it tougher for content creators to monetize on YouTube in the way they see fit. Videos on YouTube generate tiny amounts of money per view for content creators, and one of the ways they’ve overcome this challenge is through sponsorships. That’ll now be banned under YouTube’s new terms of service regarding advertising. At the same time, Vessel, AOL and others are targeting YouTube content creators with an emphasis on better monetization of their viewership. I’ve been skeptical of these efforts, but YouTube is playing right into their hands with some of these moves, which makes me more open to the idea that it might actually start to suffer as a result of competitive inroads from Facebook but also these smaller platforms.

EU probe into Apple’s taxes: It’s NOT to do with double-Dutch-Irish anything sandwiches • The Register

From June 2014, Tim Worstall digs in on all the rows about Apple’s giant cash hoard in Ireland:

Stripped of all of the legal complexity and jargon, the way that Apple operates outside the US is this: the main company is an Irish subsidiary of Apple. This buys all of the parts for all iKit, makes the contracts with the factories that assembles it, ships it all on (there’s all sorts of fun stages in Singapore and so on but they’re irrelevant for our purposes) and then sells it to the various Apple country operating companies. To Apple UK, Apple AG, Apple Oz and so on.

Clearly, the price at which Apple Ireland (recall, the company with all those lovely deals like the Double Dutch and so on) sells to those Apple country companies is going to determine where the profits get booked. Sell at a low price and Apple UK will, heaven forfend, make a good profit to be taxed by Osborne. Sell at a high price and the profit will be in Apple.ie where no one seems to think very much about taxing it. And the price at which such sales take place, the entire subject of those prices, is called “transfer pricing”…

…In practice, Apple tends to sell from Apple.ie into the other national subsidiaries at a price where those national companies just about scrape a profit but not very much. They can cover their retail and wholesale, their marketing costs, wages and so on, but leave only a lean slice of extra cash that gets taxed. Almost all of the profits end up in Ireland.

This isn’t, however cute we might think it is, illegal nor even naughty in a tax sense.

This is remarkably (and valuably) clear explanation of what transfer pricing is all about. Recommended, even (especially?) if you hate what Apple and others do with their profits.

Sony’s Challenges and the Future of Samsung » Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin after Sony’s announcement that it’s going to organise itself into silos, some profitable (making things like camera sensors, Playstations and financing things), some less so (TVs and mobile):

Sony is still an innovative company. However, it may be their future is in empowering others to commercialize their innovations rather than their own product brands.

All of this makes me wonder if Sony’s struggles foreshadow a fate for Samsung. Many of the same fundamental issues surrounding Sony also surround Samsung. Their branded products are facing rapid commoditization. Samsung has been able to fend off issues that hit Sony thanks to a massive marketing budget. They are mostly out of selling PCs for similar reasons as Sony. Their mobile unit continues to see steep declines as competing with smartphones with similar specs and lower prices becomes extremely difficult. Their TV business remains a top seller but you have to wonder how long that can last, particularly if the Chinese enter the US market with good quality 4k and then 8k, and then 4k and 8k OLED TVs at extremely low cost.

The emptiness at the heart of both Samsung and Sony – both control their hardware design language, but not the software that runs it – is surprisingly similar.

EU competition chief Vestager speaks on Gazprom, Google and tax » WSJ

The EC has asked complainants in the Google antitrust case to reiterate their points to its new competition chief, explain Tom Fairless and Stephen Fidler:

WSJ: What is the second round of questions about in the Google case? Why would you need more information?

Margrethe Vestager: When you discuss commitments for a time then the case information gets outdated. And therefore I found that for me to take the case forward, I needed an updated file. And what we see is that we sent out requests for information just before Christmas with a deadline at the end of January. And people have been very forthcoming in the information that we get. But that of course sometimes raises new questions, and therefore we just had a second round in order to get the full picture… I would like to take some of the mystery out of meeting complainants. Because they do not come here with flying [flags], they come here very calmly, stating their case, trying to underpin it with the facts of the world as they see it. So even though there is a lot going on about the case as such, when we do the casework here, it is very much boiled down to the facts that can support your views, how things are being seen. I think that is very important. Talking about speed, the stronger a case you have, the less risk it will end up in endless court proceedings. And that in any case time is an issue. Any business involved in an antitrust investigation would like us to be as fast as possible.

WSJ: Any sense how long it will take to come to a decision on Google?

MV: It’s too early to say.

Here’s a putative timetable: statement of objections by summer, some sort of settlement in autumn. Might get more complicated if Android gets rolled in; Vestager’s team is also investigating whether Google’s conditions there are anticompetitive, and has demanded a lot of information from Android phone OEMs, slightly to their discomfort.

We asked some of the smartest computers to identify this picture » Bloomberg Business

Jack Clark:

Within the past half-decade, AI research and development has been supercharged, thanks partly to academics at Stanford University, New York University, and the University of Toronto, and researchers at Google, IBM, and various startups. They’ve accomplished things in computer vision that were unimaginable years ago, but the results of our computer eye exam show that, although machines are getting very good at some things, they still come up with strange or nonsensical answers every now and again.

Where these systems fail tells us a lot about why computers won’t be replacing us for general image recognition tasks anytime soon.

Identifying Mark Zuckerberg as “cardigan” does seem obtuse.

Mainstream use of bitcoin may be plateauing at a low level » MIT Technology Review

Mike Orcutt:

The design of Bitcoin and the blockchain, its public transaction ledger, make it challenging to distinguish specific types of transactions. Nonetheless, researchers from the U.S. Federal Reserve determined in a recent analysis that the currency is “still barely used for payments for goods and services.” Last week, nearly 200,000 bitcoins changed hands each day, on average. But fewer than 5,000 bitcoins per day (worth roughly $1.2m) are being used for retail transactions, according to estimates by Tim Swanson, head of business development at Melotic, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency technology company. After some growth in 2013, retail volume in 2014 was mostly flat, says Swanson.

If only 2.5% of activity is in retail (or at least, legal retail) that’s still not a currency – it’s a speculative item. The blockchain still seems like the innovation with the most promise, not bitcoin itself.

How a single email can badly break your Android email app » Graham Cluley

Graham Cluley explains how Hector Marco has discovered a problem affecting the Email app on Android (potentially, only on Samsung devices – though that’s quite a lot of devices) which makes them crash continually due to a malformed email header:

Fortunately, there is an easy solution. The most obvious is to log into the web version of your email and delete the offending email there. Your Android mail app will no longer attempt to download the email (because it has been zapped) and so won’t see any offending email headers that might cause it to trip over itself.

Of course, that’s quite a nuisance if someone keeps emailing you malicious emails designed to crash your mail app.

But the permanent solution should be even simpler. If you can, update your email app to version 4.2.2.0400 or higher.

Unfortunately, as Marco explains, that may not be possible for everybody because of the hairy nature of software updates on the Android platform.

Start up: periodic Health, iPods not guilty, Xiaomi’s reprieve, Samsung’s pay plan, Sony’s TV squeeze, and more

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NOT GUILTY YOUR HONOUR. Photo by Jacob Christensen on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Do not return after lighting. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How self-tracking apps exclude women >> The Atlantic

Rose Eveleth:

[Menstruation-tracking site] Monthly Info was really designed for Rivers, but she added a user signup system mostly because it was easy. And people signed up. A lot of people. “It kind of took off on its own from there and grew to over 100,000 users,” she said. “There was apparently a need for something like this, because it didn’t take much energy to make or grow.” Now, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps on the market. Considering the gender imbalance in tech, it’s fair to guess most of them are made by men. Rivers joked that it’s not hard to spot a fertility-tracking app designed by a man. They focus on moods (men want to know when their girlfriends are going to be grouchy) and treat getting pregnant like a level in a video game. “It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you,” said Rivers, who is now an engineer working on other projects. “‘We men don’t like to be blindsided by your hormonal impulses so we need to track you, like you’re a parking meter.’”

Utterly brilliant article. To my great embarrassment, I’d never noticed that Apple’s Health app doesn’t include an option to record days when you menstruate – which for 50% of the population is a really big deal, and a significant omission. (And nobody pointed it out to me, until now.)

But as Eveleth shows, it’s a problem that’s common across the whole “tracking” field. (Also: 420 comments. None of the ones I scanned worth any of your time.)

Jury finds Apple not guilty of harming consumers in iTunes DRM case >> The Verge

An eight-person jury has decided that Apple is not on the hook for what could have been more than $1bn in a trial centering on extra security measures the company added to iTunes and iPods starting in 2006.

Delivering a unanimous verdict today, the group said Apple’s iTunes 7.0, released in the fall of 2006, was a “genuine product improvement,” meaning that new features (though importantly increased security) were good for consumers. Plaintiffs in the case unsuccessfully argued that those features not only thwarted competition, but also made Apple’s products less useful since customers could not as easily use purchased music or jukebox software from other companies with the iPod.

The decision means Apple did not violate antitrust laws, something that would have potentially led to damages of more than $1bn.

Plaintiff’s (singular) attorney planning an appeal. Here’s part of what his summing up against Apple said:

I’ve been trying to think of an analogy, and I’ve been living on Snickers bars for the past couple weeks. Now if the Snickers bar was bigger, or contained more chocolate, that would be better. But if that Snickers bar had a preservative in it that was toxic — that was lethal — that would not be an improved Snickers bar.

This probably had the effect of making the jury both hungry and unsure if he was all there.

Xiaomi’s India ban partially lifted >> Tech In Asia

Last week, Chinese phone maker Xiaomi was hit with a sales ban in India. Today, that has been partially lifted by the Delhi High Court, reports The Hindu.

Today’s ruling allows Xiaomi to sell only Qualcomm-powered smartphones in India, and only until January 8, 2015. This allows Xiaomi to sell three of the four models it had launched in India – the Redmi Note 4G, the Mi3, and the Redmi 1S. The MediaTek-powered Redmi Note remains fully banned.

This is a temporary reprieve for Xiaomi – its intellectual property battle in India is far from over. We’ve contacted Xiaomi to ask when its online sales will recommence (Update: No comment for now).

Google faces €15m fines over privacy breaches in Netherlands >> The Guardian

Chris Johnston:

The search company is failing to abide by the data protection act in the Netherlands by taking users’ private information such as browsing history and location data to target them with customised ads, according to the country’s Data Protection Authority (DPA).

The Dutch regulator has given Google until the end of February to change how it handles the data it collects from individual web users.

Google has also been under investigation in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain for its handling of user data since introducing new company guidelines two years ago.

Jacob Kohnstamm, DPA chairman, said: “This has been ongoing since 2012 and we hope our patience will no longer be tested.”

Holland isn’t alone – other European countries are looking to fine Google over this. The amounts, though, are piddling compared to its profits.

Samsung in talks with LoopPay for wireless phone payments >> Re/code

Jason Del Rey:

Samsung has discussed a deal with a payments startup that would help the smartphone maker unveil a wireless mobile payments system in 2015 to rival Apple, according to multiple sources.

The technology would allow people with certain Samsung phones to pay in the vast majority of brick-and-mortar stores by waving their phones instead of swiping with a credit card or cash.

It is not yet clear if Samsung has reached a deal with the startup, Burlington, Mass.-based LoopPay. One source said the deal could still fall apart. A prototype of the payments system working on a Samsung phone has been created, the other source said…

…LoopPay’s technology can wirelessly transmit the same information stored on a debit or credit card’s magnetic stripe to a store’s checkout equipment without swiping a card.

1) It’s a copy of the credit/debit card details, so not as secure as Apple Pay (which sends a one-time encrypted version, aka “tokenisation”). LoopPay “hopes” to use tokenisation.

2) How long before Google shows up at Samsung’s door and tells it to quit harshing on Google Wallet’s mellow?

When does your OS run? >> Gustavo Duarte

Here’s a question: in the time it takes you to read this sentence, has your OS been running? Or was it only your browser? Or were they perhaps both idle, just waiting for you to do something already?

These questions are simple but they cut through the essence of how software works. To answer them accurately we need a good mental model of OS behavior, which in turn informs performance, security, and troubleshooting decisions. We’ll build such a model in this post series using Linux as the primary OS, with guest appearances by OS X and Windows. I’ll link to the Linux kernel sources for those who want to delve deeper.

The fundamental axiom here is that at any given moment, exactly one task is active on a CPU.

A good introduction for just what your computer is up to when you aren’t looking. Or are looking. Educational value: high.

Russia – heading for recession, mobile market will contract >> Counterpoint Technology Market Research

Peter Richardson:

The Russian mobile device market has held up surprisingly well in 2014. However device manufacturers, who have been swallowing price rises to a substantial degree so far, cannot hold out much longer. OEM’s supply chains are dollar denominated. We fully expect handset OEMs will start passing on the higher Ruble prices to their channels and likely to the end consumer. A device with an ex-factory price of $100 this time last year would have translated to 3300 Rubles. Today (16th December 2014), the same device costs over 7100 Rubles. Given how tight margins are, no OEM can swallow that rate of change.

Most consumers will tend, on average, to pay approximately the same amount when they change their mobile phone. Given the rapid advance in technology this means that someone upgrading after two years will be able to buy a substantially better product than the one they have been using. Displays, processors, memory size, camera sensors and other parts of the phones improve at greater or lesser speeds, but all do improve.

However for the Russian consumer in 2015, this will no longer hold true.

He forecasts a total market of about 40-44m devices in 2015, down from 51m or so in 2014. “Super-premium” products won’t be affected as much – the rich tend to stay rich (or are non-ruble-denominated, so they actually get richer).

Comments aren’t dead. They’re just broken. — Medium

Mat Yurow (of the New York Times’s audience development team):

Currently, comment threads do a lousy job of surfacing the best content — paving the way for vitriol to rise to the top. Again, much of this can be attributed to design.

As previously stated, comments about an article are typically aggregated in a single module at the bottom of the page. But what exactly is someone supposed to comment on at the bottom of the article? A specific passage, the article as a whole, the weather? Without any sort of direction, it’s easy to image how things can spiral out of control.

Conversation requires context. Context provides the connectivity and relevance that users have come to expect on the internet. In an era of algorithms, we are conditioned to expect a personalized and finely-curated experience across the web.

Medium’s method of putting “comments” out of sight beside the actual article is better, but still doesn’t answer the argument – which also arises – of how, exactly, comments are meant to feed into the story above/beside. Is the story meant to change because of the comments? What’s their purpose, other than to show that people have fingers and keyboards?

Sony’s TV business mends, but will it be enough? – WSJ

Eric Pfranner and Takashi Mochizuki:

In the third quarter of this year, Sony had an 8% share of TV revenue world-wide, well behind Samsung Electronics Co. at 27% and LG Electronics Inc., another South Korean manufacturer, at 15%, according to research firm DisplaySearch. Sony predicts sales in its home entertainment and sound segment, which includes TVs as well as hi-fi systems, DVD players and other audiovisual devices, will shrink to around ¥1.1trn ($9.2bn) in its fiscal year ending in March 2018. For the current year, the company is expecting segment sales to rise slightly to ¥1.2trn.

The TV unit will post a slim operating profit for this year, with the margin rising to between 2% and 4% by fiscal 2018, Sony forecasts.

Some analysts say that short of a 5% margin, it makes little sense for Sony to keep making TVs, and the company should focus instead on its more promising operations, including PlayStation videogames, smartphone camera sensors, movies and television programming.

The TV set business is so cut-throat that it’s incredible. Sony’s business, meanwhile, is suffering death by a thousand cuts: first the PC, then the TV, until it has just the Playstation, components and Sony Pictures Entertainment to bolster it. And the latter isn’t having a great time lately.

Start up: Android bloatware, did vinyl really sell?, Samsung shakes up, and more

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A selection of 10 links for you. Slippery when wet. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Carriers can now install apps on Android handsets without customers’ permission >> Forbes

Matt Hickey:

The fact that bloatware was a notorious failure doesn’t mean that everyone’s been paying attention, of course. A company called Digital Turbine has a new service – called Ignite — for Android handsets that allows a carrier to install apps on customers’ smartphones “for more advertising revenue” whenever it wishes. In other words, carriers can now push garbage apps onto their users handsets to make a few bucks here and there whether the user wants it or not, and it seems as if the practice is perfectly legal.

Digital Turbine claims Verizon and T-Mobile as customers (among others), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those carriers are currently using the service to push apps, but it does mean that they could if they wished. That said, some users have as recently as this week claimed that they were pushed updates called “DT_Ignite” for “performance enhancements”. The update apparently asks for permission to access almost any part of the phone’s system, making it not just annoying but also potentially dangerous.

So it’s not quite “without permission”, but it’s certainly “without transparency”. Users who noticed it find it annoying.

Google Glass deal thrusts Intel deeper into wearable devices >> WSJ

An Intel chip will replace a processor from Texas Instruments Inc. included in the first version of Glass, the people said.

Intel plans to promote Glass to companies such as hospital networks and manufacturers, while developing new workplace uses for the device, according to one of the people.

Google launched the Internet-connected eyewear in 2012 as a consumer gadget, but it was criticized by privacy advocates and widely regarded as nerdy. But Glass shows early signs of catching on as a workplace-computing device.

Through a program it calls Glass at Work, Google is working with software developers including Augmedix Inc. and APX Labs LLC to encourage use of Glass in industries such as health care, construction and manufacturing where employees work with their hands but need information.

Smart; no doubt Intel will subsidise it, as part of its desperate ongoing efforts to get into mobile. However Google still seems to think consumers will want Glass: 300 staff work on Glass, but only 5% (that’s 15) focus on “Glass at Work”.

Huawei Technologies has big plans, faces big questions >> The Seattle Times

One area Huawei is unlikely to return to, unless the market changes: Windows Phone.

Huawei produced two models running Microsoft’s smartphone OS before it said it was putting its plans for future Windows Phones on hold.

“We didn’t make any money in Windows Phone,” Kelly said. “Nobody made any money in Windows Phone.”

Huawei is also facing stiff competition in the smartphone market from Beijing-based Xiaomi, which in the third quarter of this year bypassed Huawei to become the world’s third biggest smartphone vendor, according to IDC.

Xiaomi, founded just four years ago, has ascended quickly due mainly to a strategy of offering high-end features for low prices, resulting in high-volume sales figures, especially in its home country.

Huawei says it isn’t looking to compete in the low-margin arena, and is instead concentrating on high-end phones.

“We will lose volume in that shift,” Kelly acknowledged.

Why Eric Schmidt doesn’t know how Google works >> VentureBeat

Darius Lahoutifard is an entrepreneur with a withering critique of Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg’s new book “How Google Works”:

the authors are confusing causation and correlation. Schmidt points out a series of characteristics of Google as a company and presents them as the reasons for Google’s success, but in my opinion, they are all consequences of Google’s success.

For example the authors write: “Their plan for creating that great search engine, and all the other great services was equally simple: Hire as many talented software engineers as possible, and give them freedom.” Well, this worked because the search was already successful enough to fund that freedom. I would love to see one single company that isn’t dominating a market with no cash cow in-flow that can succeed without strict discipline, sharp focus, hard work, and hands-on management.

If this management style is the reason for Google’s success, then why have the majority of initiatives at Google either failed or been financially inefficient and unprofitable? If they were standalone startups, they would have most likely already been dead.

Another special characteristic of Google is its sales force. When interacting with sales people at Google, I am shocked to see how untrained and inefficient they are.

No punches pulled. At all. (Google was very, very focussed as a startup. The post-IPO moonshot stuff has been a bit hit-and-miss. Well, miss, apart from Android and Maps.)

Small Data: Is lots of vinyl being sold? >> BBC News

Anthony Reuben:

This year is the first time that more than a million vinyl albums have been sold [in the UK] since 1996. This was based on Official Charts data released by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), going back to 1994, which was when they started keeping count.

There was nothing particularly wrong with the figures, except that 1994 is quite a bad year to start looking at vinyl, as the graph above shows.

Look at the graph, and you suddenly realise what a non-story this was.

Samsung mobile chief survives shakeup >> Korea Times

“We expect the mobile business will get better under Shin’s leadership,” Lee Joon, head of communications at Samsung’s Future Strategy Office, told reporters in a briefing.
He explained its critical consumer electronics business affiliate had no option but to pursue “stability” rather than radical changes as Chairman Lee, who makes key decisions, was still recuperating.

Now, Samsung is seeing a transition of power to Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong.

“When the junior Lee takes over completely, then Samsung will see real changes in management,” said a senior executive at a components affiliate by telephone.

Samsung Electronics only promoted three presidents, the lowest number since 2008.

“This year, the performance of Samsung Electronics and other affiliates wasn’t that good,” Lee Joon said.

Is Uber’s rider database a sitting duck for hackers? >> The Washington Post

A person who had a job interview in Uber’s Washington office in 2013 said he got the kind of access enjoyed by actual employees for an entire day, even for several hours after the job interview ended. He happily crawled through the database looking up the records of people he knew – including a family member of a prominent politician – before the seemingly magical power disappeared.

“What an Uber employee would have is everything, complete,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the company.

A more sophisticated – and malicious – person with that access could have scraped data on a massive scale, then used powerful analytical software to learn things that Uber users might want to keep private, for professional or personal reasons.

So for once, the headline doesn’t conform to Betteridge’s Law.

Rohinni produces the ‘world’s thinnest’ LED lights using 3D printing, and it adds light anywhere >> 3ders.org

The paper-thin Lightpaper is made by mixing ink and tiny LEDs together and then printing the mixture out on a conductive layer. This layer is then sealed between two additional layers. The tiny diodes are about the size of a red blood cell. When a current runs through the paper, the tiny, randomly-dispersed diodes will light up.

Rohinni’s LightPaper is much thinner than current lighting technology OLED, which has been used in flat screen televisions and allowed TV screens thinner than tenth of an inch to be manufactured. But it seems that the company is more interested in using LightPaper in the automotive industry, as a new means for make excellent taillights, or branding.

Its application potential was endless, said Nick Smoot, chief marketing officer. He said they were thinking about printing lamp shades, so lamps would not need light bulbs. “Anywhere there is a light, this could replace that.” He also said that eventually people will be able to print their own at home. “You will be able to design and print you own light,” he said. “Right now we are printing the light, but we are going to be putting that back in the hands of the people.”

An easily repairable and upgradeable mobile phone >> Puzzlephone

Another modular smartphone, like the Google Ara, but more limited: you can replace the battery, screen and OS. (It’s not clear what else.) Designed and built in Finland, and aims to start shipping in 2015.

Steve Jobs’ testimony expected to play major role in iPod antitrust lawsuit >> Mac Rumors

The complaint focuses on Apple’s older iPod models, which only supported music purchased on iTunes and songs downloaded from CDs. Also being disputed is Apple’s FairPlay system of encoding purchased music, which limited music playback to the iPod and not competing MP3 players. In the suit, consumers claim Apple violated antitrust law by deliberately limiting interoperability with competitors, while exclusively promoting its products and services.

The email testimony is expected to paint Steve Jobs as an aggressive businessman who worked hard to ensure the success of the iPod and iTunes. This success often came at the expense of smaller competitors, which were not allowed to connect to Apple’s popular iPod ecosystem. In one already released email, Jobs addresses Apple’s lack of support for the-then upcoming MusicMatch music store.

“We need to make sure that when Music Match launches their download music store they cannot use iPod,” he wrote. “Is this going to be an issue?”

This relates to 2004 and 2005. Apple will argue that the purpose was to improve the platform for the consumer. (Side note: in January 2013 the US FTC decided that Google’s manipulation of search results to the disfavour of competitors was not an antitrust matter, because it benefited consumers.)

Start up: Google’s Europe problem, spyware (and Syria), why do bigger bras mean larger sales?, and more

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“Get me to the Alibaba bikini sale!” Photo from Xinjiang by Manal on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Come on, it’s Friday. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Send me links or observations.

 Spyware 2.0 >> Aral Balkan

Spyware 2.0 is not cloak and dagger. It’s not hiding in the shadows; it’s hiding out in plain sight like some saccharine Ronald McDonald statue. Spyware 2.0 is all cute doodles and loveable dinosaurs. It’s all the colours of the rainbow. Spyware 2.0 is so damn adorable that you just want to hug it as tightly as you can and never let it go. Spyware 2.0 loves you like a kitten.

The only difference between Spyware 1.0 and Spyware 2.0 is that the purveyors of spyware in the Internet era are not doing it entirely in secret.

I say entirely because they are not completely transparent either.

High costs and errors of German transition to renewable energy >> SPIEGEL ONLINE

“Join in and start today,” [German environment minister Peter] Altmaier writes in the introduction. He then turns to such everyday activities as baking and cooking. “Avoid preheating and utilize residual heat,” Altmaier advises. TV viewers can also save a lot of electricity, albeit at the expense of picture quality. “For instance, you can reduce brightness and contrast,” his booklet suggests.

Altmaier and others are on a mission to help people save money on their electricity bills, because they’re about to receive some bad news. The government predicts that the renewable energy surcharge added to every consumer’s electricity bill will increase from 5.3 cents today to between 6.2 and 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour – a 20% price hike.

German consumers already pay the highest electricity prices in Europe.

Phasing out the nuclear plants (in reaction to Fukushima) turns out not to have been so smart.

How Alibaba is using bra sizes to predict online shopping habits >> Quartz

Alibaba’s rival JD.com booked over 14m orders on Singles Day, using information on what shoppers are buying to make decisions on future inventory. “When you have a sale where you have 14m data points in a single day, that’s going to be extremely helpful to your strategy,” Josh Gartner, senior director of international communications at JD.com, told Quartz.

But data can also befuddle. JD.com found that iPhone 5 sales during Singles Day were nine to 10 times higher than usual. Gartner isn’t sure why. In 2012, Alibaba was surprised to find bikini sales on Singles Day were the highest in the landlocked western region of Xinjiang.

There’s an explanation, but you’ll have to read the article.

Uber’s Android app is not ‘literally malware’ >> The Next Web

Owen Williams:

Let’s nip this one in the bud: it’s incredibly unlikely that Uber’s app is any kind of malware, and from our investigations, the worries in the original post are unfounded. The majority of the permissions listed in the post that calls the company out for being too broad with permissions are required by Android to do many of the app’s basic functions.

Despite what some are claiming, there’s no evidence that Uber accesses any data on your phone other than that used explicitly for the purpose of getting you a ride, nor does it send any of your SMS’, images or other data off your phone.

There’s no reason for Uber to collect data beyond what it needs; it’s certainly not in the company’s best interest.

It’s just that standard Android permissions are so difficult to distinguish from malware, perhaps.

Google only has itself to blame if Europe succeeds in breaking up the company >> Business Insider

Jim Edwards:

Merely being a monopoly is not a transgression, even in Europe. (It’s often a sign of natural success.) Rather, EU antitrust law applies when companies abuse their monopoly to manipulate markets around them unfairly.

On that measure, Google has more than qualified for scrutiny over the way it distorts markets that have nothing to do with search.

The best evidence for that came from Yelp and a coalition of companies it has formed who believe they are being screwed out of their natural, “organic” ranking in search results because Google simply dumps its own — often unhelpful — content on top of the “real” search ranking of which sites are best.

Yelp’s evidence was elegant and simple: It used Google’s own search API to create a browser extension that displayed Google search results without results that include promo boxes generated from Google+, the unpopular identity/social network product that Google launched to counter Facebook. The extension shows you the “real” result generated by Google’s algorithm, without the self-promotional fluff that Google layers on top of it.

The difference is alarming.

Meet Telecomix, the hackers bent on exposing those who censor and surveil the internet >> Forbes

Andy Greenberg:

As the globally-distributed hackers combed Syria’s networks and posted their findings in a crowd-sourced document, one American member of the group, who uses the handle Punkbob, spotted a Windows FTP server filled with data he recognized: logs from a Proxy SG 9000 appliance built  by the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company Blue Coat Systems. In Punkbob’s day job at a Pentagon contractor, he says, the same equipment had been used to intercept traffic to filter and track staff behavior. The Syrian machine’s logs showed the Internet activity of thousands of users, connecting the sites they attempted to visit and every word of their communications with the IP addresses that pointed directly to their homes. In short, he had discovered American technology being used to help a brutal dictatorship spy on its citizens.

They downloaded 600GB of data, showing precisely which sites the Syrian government was blocking – using Blue Coat’s products.

Microsoft to unveil Windows 10 consumer features at January event >> The Verge

Microsoft is planning to detail the consumer features of Windows 10 at an event in January. While Microsoft will be present at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, sources familiar with the company’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft will hold a separate press event in late January to unveil the consumer preview of Windows 10. Microsoft previously promised “early 2015” for a discussion on consumer features, and it appears the company is on track.

I thought Microsoft had given up going to CES. Apparently there’s a new touch interface “dubbed Continuum” for switching between touch and non-touch environments.

Anita Sarkeesian battles sexism in games, #gamergate harassment >> Businessweek

Sarkeesian is the front-cover story (which is good). This part in the story seems telling:

The industry’s main trade group, the Entertainment Software Association, tries to emphasize how mainstream the industry is, even as many of the games themselves undermine its message. The ESA trumpets the fact that the proportion of women playing all video games—not just on Xbox-style consoles, but also on tablets and other devices—has grown to 45%, and that 51% of U.S. households own at least one video game console.

The range of games being produced overall has grown, with a far broader swath of the population engaging in online play as it’s become a fixture of smartphones and iPads. But a single hit console game, such as Call of Duty, can generate more than $1bn in revenue a year, and anything that might disturb that revenue stream presents obvious economic risk.

A clip from the latest instalment in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, produced by Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, features a first-person character who picks up a sickly looking hooker on the street, has sex with her in his car, then gets annoyed with her chattering and punches her in the face before running her over and driving away.

Films show bad things happening, and being done by people with bad intent too. But where are the romcom video games? As the article points out, it’s pretty rare to find strong women characters. And also:

At one point, Sarkeesian spent two days replaying every game to satisfy a hunch that first-person characters had the capacity to stare at the butts of female characters, but not at the backsides of men. She was right.

Europe gets [Android] One too >> CSS Insight blog

Peter Bryner:

Karbonn’s Sparkle V runs Google’s Android One version of KitKat on a quad-core MediaTek 1.3 GHz processor. It has a 4.5in display, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of storage and a microSD slot. Android One devices have not been particularly popular in India, partly because of limited support by brick-and-mortar retailers, which have been reluctant to support such low-margin products.

But the real story here isn’t this particular device or the holiday price but rather Karbonn’s push into Western markets. While Karbonn already sells smartphones in countries outside India, including Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, this is the company’s most ambitious market expansion yet. It’s too early to say if Karbonn can establish its brand in Europe. Its products are already available in Spain and an entry into the highly competitive UK market is a key step. In addition to Android phones, the company is also expected to sell Windows Phone devices.

Other Indian phone makers such as Micromax are certainly watching Karbonn’s European holiday push closely. The market is getting crowded and commoditised. Some established brands will have to pay the price.

This could cost brands such as HTC, Samsung and Sony some market share.

Given the market segment Karbonn is aiming it, seems more likely to hurt Samsung than either of the others, which are premium brands. But perhaps Android buyers are more price-sensitive than brand-sensitive?

Most motherboard players to focus on gross margins in 2015 >> Digitimes

Asustek’s annual motherboard shipments are expected to return back to 22m units in 2014, but the increased volume will come mainly from its competitors, especially second-tier players such as Micro-Star International (MSI), ASRock and Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), not growth in the overall motherboard market.

With motherboard demand from China expected to slow down in 2015, Gigabyte Technology has turned to focus on pushing high-end motherboards to maintain its profits.

ASRock has been impacted the most from the price competition in terms of both shipments and profitability. MSI’s gaming notebook business is expected to contribute strong profits in 2014, helping the company to cover its motherboard business’ decline. But for 2015, the two players will both stop pushing for shipments and will try to keep their businesses profitable.

However, China-based motherboard vendors are seeing their market shares shrinking rapidly. Large players such as Colorful, Onda and Maxsum are struggling to survive with profits sliding each year, while small players such as Jwele, Topstar, Jetway and M-One may soon be eliminated from the market.

I’m fascinated by the motherboard market; there’s hardly any information about quite where the products go (self-build? Repair? OEMs whose products are then counted by IDC and Gartner in the “Others” column of PC shipments?). But it’s clearly suffering a squeeze. Would love to know more about its distribution.