Tag Archives: bbc

Start up: Google’s image search ads, Intel’s iPhone deal, Tabooillion!, Runkeeper confesses, and more

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Is mommy blogging about to hit a speedbump? Montage by Mike Licht on Flickr.

Why didn’t you sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email?. Unless you’re reading this on email.

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

Google is including ads in image search results for first time • Digital Trends

Trevor Mogg:

»Perhaps the most surprising thing about the news that Google is now including ads in its Images search results is that it didn’t do it sooner.

It’s true – the company that makes all its cash from search ads has until now included not a single sponsored message among its image results. But that’s all changing.

The initiative is designed to tempt the shopper in you, so if, say, you do a Google image search on your smartphone for a coffee table, among those many pages of lovely photos of gorgeous tables you’ll also see ads for them. These will link directly to a merchant’s site, enabling you to part with your cash in just a couple of clicks. The merchant wins, you win … oh, and Google wins, too.

«

Every place Google can put an ad, it’s going to put an ad. Google News next?
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Intel obtains up to 50% of modem chip orders for upcoming iPhone • Digitimes

Julian Ho and Jessie Chen:

»Intel will supply up to 50% of the modem chips for use in the new iPhones slated for launch in September 2016, according to industry sources.

Intel will itself package the modem chips for the upcoming new iPhones, but have contracted Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and tester King Yuan Electronics (KYEC) to manufacture the chips, the sources said.

«

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The main reason why people are not already using ad blockers should worry publishers • Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly:

»The principal reason why most people haven’t yet switched on an ad blocker is simply because they are not aware they could block ads — a stat that should worry businesses that rely on online advertising to make money.

Wells Fargo Securities and Optimal.com — a startup that offers an “ethical” ad blocker — surveyed 1,712 US smartphone users to ask about their attitudes to ad blocking.

Of the 1,320 respondents who don’t already block ads (either on desktop or mobile,) 45.6% said they were not aware they could do so.

«

(That survey number suggests 23% already blocking ads.) Notice also of those not yet blocking, there are 22% who either know of it but can’t figure out how, or else intend to when they “have the time”. Those who don’t mind ads, or don’t want to harm content creators: 18.1%, or less than one in five.

Rob Leathern of Optimal goes into more detail about what the figures mean.
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Taboola crosses the one billion user mark, second only to Facebook as the world’s largest discovery platform • Globe Newswire

»Taboola has achieved a significant “network effect” within the discovery space, more than doubling its reach from 500 million unique users just one year ago. As more users around the world are exposed to Taboola’s personalized recommendations, more Fortune 500 advertisers are achieving scale across the platform. In the US, where the company first launched its discovery platform in 2010, every American Internet user sees Taboola at least 70 times a month, and the platform reaches 95.3% of the 15+ year old demographic, surpassing Google, Facebook, and Yahoo Sites (according to comScore’s monthly Demographic Report, March 2016).

“For the past eight years, our team has been committed to building the best predictive technology in the world, and it’s been incredible to see how that personalization-driven mission has resonated across new markets in just the past twelve months,” said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO at Taboola.

«

A billion?? Flipping heck.
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MCX postpones rollout of Apple Pay rival CurrentC, lays off 30, will focus on bank deals • TechCrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

»As merchants like Walmart move ahead on their own mobile payment strategies, a consortium that once counted Walmart — along with a number of other big retailers and brands — behind it, has taken a step back. Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) today announced it would postpone a nationwide rollout of CurrentC, a smartphone payment initiative originally conceived as a mobile wallet rival to smartphone-led services like Apple Pay and Android Pay. As a result, MCX said it would lay off 30 people as it shifted its focus to working with financial institutions.

«

Dead.
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Indian smartphone shipments declined for the second consecutive quarter in Q1 2016 • IDC

»According to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, 23.5m units of smartphones were shipped in India in Q1 2016 registering 5.2% growth over the same period last year. However, smartphone shipments shrank by 8.2% over Q4 2015, dipping consecutively for two quarters.

According to Karthik J, Senior Market Analyst, Client Devices, “The first quarter of the year is usually expected to be slow after the festive season in the last quarter of the year. However, the contraction in Q1 2016 is mainly propelled by the decline in shipments from all the Top 5 smartphone vendors of previous quarter. Shipments of key Indian vendors Micromax, Intex and Lava put together dropped 20.4% sequentially as they struggled to push their inventories into the market.” On the other hand, new entrants like Reliance Jio grew sharply over previous quarter as they prepare before the official launch.

«

India and China have about the same population; the Indian smartphone market is about a quarter the size of China’s, which has already peaked.
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China quietly targets US tech companies in security reviews • The New York Times

Paul Mozur and Jane Perlez:

»Chinese authorities are quietly scrutinizing technology products sold in China by Apple and other big foreign companies, focusing on whether they pose potential security threats to the country and its consumers and opening up a new front in an already tense relationship with Washington over digital security.

Apple and other companies in recent months have been subjected to reviews that target encryption and the data storage of tech products, said people briefed on the reviews who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the reviews, Chinese officials require executives or employees of the foreign tech companies to answer questions about the products in person, according to these people.

The reviews are run by a committee associated with the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s Internet control bureau, they said. The bureau includes experts and engineers with ties to the country’s military and security agencies…

…Ultimately, the reviews could be used to block products without explanation or to extract trade secrets in exchange for market access. Those secrets could be leaked to Chinese competitors or expose vulnerabilities, which, in turn, Chinese hackers could exploit.

«

Would also explain Apple investing a billion dollars in Uber-rival Didi.
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When the data bubble bursts, companies will have to actually sell things again • Co.Exist

Douglas Rushkoff:

»How can a company with no revenues still make money? It’s not a trick question. The answer is at the very foundation of the digital economy: advertising.

No matter how dire things get for musicians, writers, movies, websites, smart phone apps, video games, or whole social media platforms, no matter how hard it might be for companies to charge for content, services, or convenience, almost everything we are doing in the digital marketplace can serve as the advertisement for something else. The video game promotes a movie, the movie promotes an app, and the app promotes a video game. Heck, this article indirectly promotes a book.

The trouble is, if everyone is in it for the advertising dollar, who is left to advertise? At no point in history has advertising, marketing, and research ever accounted for as high a percentage of GDP, or total economic activity (and that’s being extremely generous). But right now, it’s pushing at the very top of that range. The reason it can’t go higher is that only so much economic activity can go to promoting the rest of our economic activity. The coming crash in the tech market—and quite possibly beyond—will be triggered by the growing realization that every company in the world can’t be a marketing company.

«

Rushkoff is usually ahead of the curve; I remember how in 1999 he said he was going to buy all his Christmas presents via Amazon.
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Nate Silver unloads on The New York Times • Columbia Journalism Review

Bill Wyman:

»The catalyst for Silver’s unleashing was a column from [Jim] Rutenberg, who stepped into the vacant David Carr job at the beginning of the year. The piece ruminated on the myriad errors made by the media over the course of the utter mayhem that has been the 2016 presidential race. The column wasn’t entirely focused on Silver; it mentioned failures in Times prognostications as well. But Rutenberg did seem to go out of its way to bring up FiveThirtyEight, especially in noting a bad call for the Indiana Democrat primary, in which FiveThirtyEight had favored Hillary Clinton to win but Bernie Sanders ended up taking in a romp.

There was subtext there, too. Several times in the piece, Rutenberg advocated for “shoe-leather reporting”—talking to “actual humans,” as he put it—and concluded:

»

That’s all the more reason in the coming months to be as sharply focused on the data we don’t have as we are on the data we do have (and maybe watching out for making any big predictions about the fall based on the polling of today). But a good place to start would be to get a good night’s sleep, and then talk to some voters.

«

«

What Rutenberg overlooks is that Silver writes stories which are based on people talking to voters – for polls. Rutenberg (in his article) also doesn’t seem to understand Monte Carlo simulations: a 90% chance for Hillary in a state doesn’t mean she was going to win 90% of the votes. He describes Sanders winning by a “comfortable” 5%: that would be 52.5-47.5? Hardly comfortable either way.

I think Silver’s data journalism has a better chance of telling us the outcome ahead of time than “shoe leather”.
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A message to our users • Beyond the Miles

Runkeeper CEO Jason Jacobs, following yesterday’s complaint about its app:

»Recently, the Norwegian Consumer Council filed a complaint regarding how Runkeeper handles user data. We immediately began investigating the issue and have found a bug in our Android app involving the app’s integration with a third-party advertising service. Like other Android apps, when the Runkeeper app is in the background, it can be awakened by the device when certain events occur (like when the device receives a Runkeeper push notification). When such events awakened the app, the bug inadvertently caused the app to send location data to the third-party service.

Today we are releasing a new version of our app that eliminates this bug and removes the third-party service involved. Although the bug affected only our Android app, we have decided to remove this service from our iOS product too out of an abundance of caution. The iOS release will be made available once approved by Apple.

«

Apologies and regrets. My thought: doesn’t this mean that its privacy policy was either meaningless, or ignored? Sure, it was a bug; but “we made a mistake” doesn’t wash for the people in accounts. Why for programs? And why did it take the Norwegian Consumer Council, rather than Runkeeper’s testing, to spot it? This opens up more questions than it answers.
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The BBC are removing recipes from their website. This blog is free and always will be. • COOKING ON A BOOTSTRAP

Jack Monroe:

»In light of the BBC announcement that they are removing a lot of their recipes from their website, I will be publishing all of my recipes in full on http://www.cookingonabootstrap.com over the next few days. This includes 220 recipes from both of my books and around 100 more Guardian recipes. There are also recipes from Waitrose Kitchen and Sainsburys, the Daily Mirror, restaurants I have consulted for and others that will go on too.

It’s a big job but an essential one.

I learned to cook on the dole using free recipes online and for the BBC to reduce this vital service is an abomination. (Apologies to all of my friends who work there, but I just don’t understand this.) I hope I can go some way to filling the gap left for free, instructional, simple recipe resources and cookery guidance, which is vital for so many people.

«

The reaction to the BBC move – which still leaves a lot of recipes on its site, as well as a BBC food site – was fascinating: people who might never have looked up a recipe are outraged. What wasn’t explained is why these recipes had to be removed rather than just moved to the remaining BBC food site.

And lo and behold, by the end of the day that’s just what happened. The question of what cost saving there would have been remains as mysterious as before.

One non-BBC media source suggested to me that this was a perfectly executed PR stunt by the BBC: “they picked the puppy everybody loves”. The Tories want to shut down bits of the BBC; the BBC is showing them that people won’t stand for it.
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Dear Mommy Blogger • Josi Denise

Denise goes on an absolutely epic must-not-miss rant about the whole “mommy blogging” scene:

»//NOBODY IS READING YOUR SHIT

I mean no one. Even the people you think are reading your shit? They aren’t really reading it. The other mommy bloggers sure as hell aren’t reading it. They are scanning it for keywords that they can use in the comments. “So cute! Yum! I have to try this!” They’ve been told, like you, that in order to grow your brand, you must read and comment on other similar-sized and similar-themed blogs. The people clicking on it from Pinterest aren’t reading it. They are looking for your recipe, or helpful tip promised in the clickbait, or before and after photo, then they might re-pin the image, then they are done. The people sharing it on Facebook? They aren’t reading it either. They just want to say whatever it is your headline says, but can’t find the words themselves. Your family? Nope. They are checking to make sure they don’t have double chins in the photos you post of them, and zoning in on paragraphs where their names are mentioned.

Why? Because your shit is boring. Nobody cares about your shampoo you bought at Walmart and how you’re so thankful the company decided to work with you. Nobody cares about anything you are saying because you aren’t telling an engaging story. You are not giving your readers anything they haven’t already heard. You are not being helpful, and you are not being interesting. If you are constantly writing about your pregnancy, your baby’s milestones, your religious devotion, your marriage bliss, or your love of wine and coffee…. are you saying anything new? Anything at all? Tell me something I haven’t heard before, that someone hasn’t said before. From a different perspective, or making a new point at the end at least if I have to suffer through a cliche story about your faceless, nameless kid.

«

By this point she’s only just getting started, and it gets better and better. I like to imagine her declaiming this from a podium at a mommy blogging conference.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Euler programs, adblocking wars redux, Android M’s security measure,

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At last: HTML5 iPlayer on the desktop. Only a beta for now.. Photo by Julie70 on Flickr.

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

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

(No, there aren’t any links about the new Google offerings – two phones and a tablet – because I couldn’t find any useful analysis of them beyond “they’re phones” and “it’s a tablet with a keyboard”. If you do want to know about them, try “The nine most important things from Google’s Nexus event” from The Verge.)

About » Project Euler

What is Project Euler?
Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.

Who are the problems aimed at?
The intended audience include students for whom the basic curriculum is not feeding their hunger to learn, adults whose background was not primarily mathematics but had an interest in things mathematical, and professionals who want to keep their problem solving and mathematics on the cutting edge.

The first problem should feel pretty easy if you’ve done any programming. If not, give yourself a little time to solve it. (A different sort of programmer hacked its database in August.) They’re presently up to problem 527; No.528 is up on October 3.
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IAB enters publicity, engineering war against ad blockers – Special: Advertising Week 2015 » Advertising Age

Nat Ives:

The IAB has come up with code, for example, that it said will help small publishers detect consumers who show up with ad blocking activated. “We believe this script will actually help enable them in their fight just by enabling their ability to detect,” said Scott Cunningham, senior VP at IAB and general manager of the IAB Tech Lab, at a press conference during the annual IAB Mixx conference, which coincides with Advertising Week.
Related Stories

Some publishers that see ad-blocking visitors arrive greet them with dialogue boxes encouraging a change of heart or, failing that, perhaps becoming paid subscribers. But the open architecture of many web pages has allowed ad blockers to hide even those dialogue boxes, Mr. Cunningham said. The IAB is recommending that publishers switch to more secure protocols to prevent that.

Going to war with people because they’re not your customers isn’t the way to persuade them to become your customers.
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Medium: PR Newswire revisited » Business Insider

Biz Carson:

“With this [$57m funding] round we aim to make Medium the dominant pipeline for connecting quality content and conversation,” Andy Doyle wrote. “We don’t focus on page views, unique visitors, or click metrics. We don’t litter the platform with ads that are low-quality, high-clutter.”

That part is true. There are no ugly ads that flash advertising before crashing your browser.

Instead, everyone from San Francisco’s local supervisors to the White House are publishing articles, essays, and press releases, surrounded by the same swaths of white and clean fonts. The bylines are tucked away in the top left corner.

Companies may call this “content.” A lot of it looks like advertising.

And let’s face it: Medium has become a dumping ground for a different generation’s press releases.

Seems harsh, but Carson has a point. Then again, that makes Medium a pretty good “native advertising” supplier; there’s lots of other non-advertising, desirable, readable content in there. I keep finding links to it.
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New HTML5 Player beta trial for BBC iPlayer » BBC Internet Blog

James East, product manager for media playout:

Although we’ve been using HTML5 to deliver video to iOS devices for some time, until recently we felt that the consistent experience and efficient media delivery offered by Flash outweighed the benefit of moving to HTML5 on the desktop. However, we’ve been regularly evaluating the features offered by the most popular web browsers and we’re now confident we can achieve the playback quality you’d expect from the BBC without using a third-party plugin.

To opt in, visit our HTML5 Player beta page. This will allow you to set a cookie in your browser so you can access our HTML5 player on BBC iPlayer. If you clear your cookies or switch browsers, you’ll have to return to this page to re-enter the trial. You can also visit this page if you want to opt out and return to our non-beta player.

At last. Alternatively, do what I do: uninstall Flash and invoke the “developer” option in Safari (Preferences » Advanced » “Show Develop menu in menu bar”), and when you visit the BBC and it wants Flash to play a video, change the user-agent to “iPad”. (Via Stef Pause.)
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Android Marshmallow’s best security measure is a simple date » The Verge

Russell Brandom:

Android security has always faced a daunting challenge — scrambling to get users, manufacturers, and carriers in sync — but the new Marshmallow operating system has a small feature that could make a big difference in that fight. You’ll find it in the Settings menu, a header titled “Android security patch level,” followed by a date. As of that day, your device is protected with all known Android patches.

Championed by Adrian Ludwig, Google’s head of Android security, the date represents a public bet on the industry’s ability to keep Android devices updated. “It should make it really simple for users to understand the state of the device,” Ludwig says, as part of Android’s larger push toward “making sure that security information and patch level information is available to users.”

That’s going to be a good one to watch.
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You can now turn off ads on Techdirt » Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

We’ve even been approached by multiple companies who claim to offer a form of ad blocker blocker, that will either insert new ads even when users have ad blockers, or otherwise pester users with ad blockers turned on.

This seems like the exact wrong approach. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the way the RIAA and MPAA reacted to the internet challenging their business models. Rather than listen, recognize what the public wanted and adapt, they whined, screamed about ethics and went to court. And how’s that worked out for everyone? We’ve always said that those who adapt to these challenges are likely to do better, and part of that means actually listening to your fans and helping them do what they want. So that’s what we’re doing: if you choose to disable ads, you just need to go to your preferences and click a button and that should do it.

Such a smart move. Masnick has built a strong community at Techdirt, and so offering this – while pointing out gently that it costs money to run the site, and there are ways to donate – is a terrific way forward.
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The dark, scammy history of JustFab and Fabletics » BuzzFeed News

Sapna Maheshwari:

while JustFab has revenue streams befitting a unicorn, its predecessor companies were less ethereal beasts. For more than a decade, starting at MySpace’s parent company, [Adam] Goldenberg and [Don] Ressler’s customers have frequently complained of getting tricked into recurring credit card charges and fooled by deceptive advertising and misleading promises — promises the FTC said sounded “like magic pixie dust” in a warning to consumers regarding the diet product Sensa. It made more than $300 million in sales before the federal regulator intervened.

The ugly hallmarks of those past enterprises live on in JustFab: The company and its affiliates, for all their happy customers, have often been accused of deceiving shoppers who think they’re making a single purchase into signing up for a subscription that automatically charges them each month unless they opt out within a five-day window. The sites use terms like “VIP Membership” instead of “subscription,” and JustFab and Fabletics in particular downplay the options for avoiding charges each month; cancellations require lengthy phone calls.

Ugh. Inertia marketing – such a horrible, scummy business model, and doomed to failure once customers get wise. The only question is how long that will take.
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Axel Springer buys Business Insider » Re/code

Peter Kafka:

The deal values Business Insider at $442m — we had previously told you it would peg the site’s value at $560m — but Springer already owned 9% of the company, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had previously put his own money into the company, will leave it in there. When factoring out the cash still on the books, the value comes down to $390 million. Springer will end up writing a check for $343m when the deal closes; it says Business Insider has 76 million readers and 325 employees worldwide.

However you count it, the deal sets a new mark for native digital publisher sales, previously held by the Huffington Post, which AOL acquired for $315m in 2011. While several big digital publishers have taken on financing that values their companies above Business Insider’s sale price, none of them have actually sold at those levels yet.

That’s a big vote of confidence in people carrying on reading content online. 76 million readers is substantial.
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Marissa Mayer’s take on ad blocking: ‘It hurts the Web experience’ » Digiday

Ricardo Bilton:

The Yahoo CEO told an Advertising Week audience that ads, particularly those tied to people’s interest and browsing history, actually improve the experience of using the Web rather than hurt it.

“I think that for anyone that uses their browser’s incognito mode and starts getting untargeted ads or no ads at all, the experience on the Web becomes a lot less rich. I personally think it’s a mistake to install ad blockers,” she said at an IAB event during Advertising Week in New York City on Monday. “If I have friends or family members asking if they should install them, I tell them ‘please don’t because I think that your experience on the Web will get worse’.”

As Bilton then points out, Yahoo was responsible for serving malware to millions of people through its ads for nearly a week in August. Those using adblockers will have been fine.

But, you know, tell people what they want to hear.
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Start up: iOS 9 and the BBC, AdBlock v Chrome/YouTube, Imogen Heap’s blockchain, and more

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And we just happen by great good fortune to know a good source of women who aren’t wives too. Photo by James Maskell on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Tested on humans for irritancy. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Ashley Madison’s parent company secretly operated an escort website » Daily Dot

Dell Cameron:

After the details of roughly 33 million Ashley Madison accounts were posted online, the hackers responsible, known as Impact Team, leaked more than 197,000 private emails from the inbox of Noel Biderman, the former CEO of Avid Life Media (ALM), a Toronto, Canada–based company that operates the Ashley Madison site. Documents and emails contained in the trove and reviewed by the Daily Dot detail the company’s escort-related businesses.

Escorts.ca was leased in 2013 through a shell company called Pernimus Limited, which is listed among ALM’s “legal entities” on an internal company memo. According to a leaked contract, ALM leased the escort-service property from an Ontario-based company called Steeltown Marketing Inc., on Feb. 20, 2013.

The escorts.ca website was still active until roughly 6pm ET on Tuesday, when it was abruptly suspended. A version of the site from Aug. 1, 2015, can still be viewed, however, via the Wayback Machine.

Innocent explanation: ALM was into teh sexy bsns, so having an escort company as well as a “YOLO BE UNFAITHFUL” site was just consistent corporate thinking.

Malevolent explanation: 1) have a site encouraging guys to be unfaithful; 2) funnel them towards escorts 3) Profit!

Hang on, further down:

The document shows that ALM’s intention for the site, which did not charge users to browse its pages, was to funnel traffic to Ashley Madison and other ALM properties.

Having some trouble making the innocent explanation work here.

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Apple’s iOS 9: Tweaks not revolution for video, photos and audio » BBC Blogs: College of Journalism

Marc Settle, who specialises in smartphone reporting for the BBC Academy:

Doesn’t time fly. It’s already a year since my now-traditional blog post examining what’s in the latest version of iOS, the operating system on iPhones and iPads. It’s also therefore a year since the equally traditional complaint of ‘preferential treatment’ to Apple over Android, the operating system that runs on around 80% of smartphones globally.

However, it remains the case that iPhones are the device of choice for many leading news organisations around the world – not just the BBC – for their employees to gather and send broadcast-quality footage at a far lower cost than traditional methods.

It’s also the case that this review of iOS 9 will be far more relevant, far more quickly, to iPhone owners if the pattern of previous releases is repeated. iOS 8 came out on 17 September 2014; a week later it was running on more than a third of compatible devices (as shown on the graph above).

In stark contrast, the latest version of Android, called Lollipop, was released in November 2014 but nine months later it’s still barely on 20% of devices.

Seems iOS 9 doesn’t add much, apart from some little tweaks in video editing. It has been noticeable in the latest reports on the refugee crisis that some of the BBC reporters are doing the reports with iPhones; one did a whole report using the front-facing camera and flash so that he could show the extent of the problem.
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YouTube ads aren’t being blocked in Chrome / Recently Reported / Knowledge Base » AdBlock Support

And lo, there was great consternation that YouTube might have found a way to make people view ads. But it turned out not to be:

Some users have been able to confirm, that removing YouTube app from Chrome (by navigating to chrome://apps on Chrome) fixes YouTube ads, which are not blocked.

According to the EasyList forum post on this topic (you can read the original Google Code issue if you’d like to know the gory details) it’s caused by a recent Chrome security update, not the ad blockers or YouTube finding a way around the current filters.

At this point, we’re waiting for news about another update to Chrome which will fix this. In the meantime, we recommend switching to Firefox or Safari, which continue to block ads in YouTube videos just fine

In the Chromium discussion, a Chromium developer says “It was a security fix tracked in bug 510802 which we can’t make public yet, but it has the details.” (I can’t find a way to view bug 510802, so maybe it’s a doozy.)

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Michael Dell sees consolidation among PC makers in next few years » Reuters

The top three global PC makers would be able to raise market share in the next few years through consolidation amid shrinking sales of personal computers, Dell Inc chief executive Michael Dell said on Monday.

Lenovo Group Ltd tops global PC shipment ranking with a 20.3% market share, followed by Hewlett-Packard Co at 18.5% and Dell at 14.5%, according to research firm International Data Corp.

The top three companies could corner about 80% of the market in the next five to seven years, Dell said at a roundtable conference with journalists in Bengaluru, India.

“In the first half of this year, we outgrew the two in notebooks and we have grown now 10 quarters in a row,” Dell said.

IDC last month forecast PC shipments to fall 8.7% this year, steeper than its earlier estimate of a 6.2% decline, and said they are expected to return to growth in 2017.

Presently those top three have 53%; it would take quite a consolidation (such as the collapse/withdrawal of a player like Acer with 6.5% share and a smaller one like Toshiba with maybe 3% share) to reach that. But the ongoing consolidation is steady.

Read it too for Dell’s comment on smartphones.
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Imogen Heap: saviour of the music industry? » The Guardian

Jamie Bartlett on how one British artist aims to use blockchain technology to create an accountable system for buying and listening to and crediting music:

Because [Imogen] Heap now produces her own music independently she’s not contracted to release her song via the usual route. Instead, she will be placing the studio-recorded song, video, live performance and all Tiny Human-related data as files on her website, open to those developing new tech for the blockchain. All the taggable associated data that could interest fans or potential clients (film and TV, brands, other artists), such as the lyrics, photographs, the instruments she used, the musicians who played, etc (“I think I’ll add this article too,” she told me) will prove inspirational, she hopes.

Crucially, she’ll also include simple contracts, revealing under what terms the music would (ideally, as this is an experiment) be downloaded or used by third parties, such as advertisers, and how any money earned will be divided up among the creatives involved. All payment received – using crypto-currencies – will be routed to the recipients, as set out in the contract, within seconds. (It typically takes between weeks and months for royalty payments to work their way through the chain at the moment.)

It’s a long but worthwhile article. There’s a fair amount of handwaving around how it will work, though I suspect that’s just as much because really getting into the details of how the blockchain system would work might frighten the horses (as in, regular non-techie readers) too much.

And remember, MP3 started as a way to compress background music and sounds for video games.
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Premium Android hits the wall: discussion » Hacker News

Among the discussion of my post elsewhere on this blog is this anecdote:

My wife went into the EE shop (UK mobile company) recently to see what was on the market as her old Galaxy S2 was dying.

She came out with a list of six Samsung phones alone and a couple of Sonys. Is a Galaxy Alpha better than an S6? What’s a Galaxy Mini? So bewildered by the permutations that she just threw away the list and bought a second-hand Galaxy S4 on eBay. Potential sale for Samsung lost.

Android vendors might think they’re satisfying all possible market requirements but actually they’re confusing potential customers. As you say, probably easier just to go to the Apple store and choose between two.

I know anecdotes aren’t data, but I think the contrast between a plethora of choices and a couple makes a difference. Note too how few features Apple adds at each release. (Read the full discussion too.)
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Negative feedback: attack on a YouTube channel » Dell SecureWorks Security and Compliance Blog

Joe Stewart of CTU Research on how an “attack” (lots of dislikes) against a YouTube channel might have been organised via hijacked routers in Vietnam:

All it takes to bounce traffic through a vulnerable broadband modem is to know the standard administrative username/password pair used by the ISP, something trivially obtained by analysis of the device’s firmware image or even by brute force scanners. Once you can configure the modem, you can set up port forwarding and relay traffic inbound to a specific TCP port to an outside site (i.e. YouTube). This isn’t a proxy in the conventional sense, where one can arbitrarily tunnel all HTTP traffic through another IP, but it can work in essentially the same way for a single destination site.

Vietnam is certainly not the only country with this problem. A rush to create broadband infrastructure in some countries where ISP choices are limited has led to a dangerous monoculture of vulnerable router deployments. As consumer operating systems are increasingly becoming more secure against exploitation that would cause them to become part of the botnet ecosystem, we are increasingly seeing broadband routers being abused for these purposes instead.

It used to be that shonky Windows installations in developing countries were the main problem for such attacks; now it’s broadband routers in developing countries too. (Via Stefan Pause.)
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Why you hate Google’s new logo » The New Yorker

Sarah Larson:

Now Google is so smart and powerful, across so many platforms—Androids, a translation service, Chrome, Maps, Earth, self-driving cars, our collective brain—that our trust, our connection to that first thrilling moment, that gratitude and excitement, should be essential to maintain. You’d think the company would get that, and that rebranding, generally, feels suspicious. When I see that shifty new rainbow-colored “G” bookmarked on my toolbar, I recoil with mild distrust, thinking of when Philip Morris became Altria — No cigarettes here, see? Just rainbows! — or when British Petroleum suggested we think of it as Beyond Petroleum, or when the Bush Administration would name something Freedom.

Zingg! (Personally, though, I don’t like the new logo. I prefer the old one.)
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Start up: Tim Cook’s stock question, Samsung’s pen trouble, bending the iPhone 6S, and more

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Yeah, Sanford Wallace probably preceded you here. Photo by epSos.de on Flickr.

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

Apple CEO Tim Cook got 280,000 Apple shares the day of the market rout » Fortune

Philip Elmer DeWitt:

By coincidence or design, Tim Cook was scheduled to receive a boatload of Apple stock the same day he stopped a market rout.

Apple disputes it, but the note Tim Cook sent CNBC’s Jim Cramer Monday, could, in theory, have personally saved him millions of dollars in unvested Apple shares.

Here’s the background.

In August 2011, when Tim Cook was tapped to replace the ailing Steve Jobs, Apple’s board of directors awarded him 1 million restricted stock units (RSUs), half to vest in five years, the rest in 10. At the time they were awarded, the shares were worth $323 million.

At Cook’s request, the terms by which those shares are distributed were changed two years later; the shares now vest on a yearly basis by a complicated formula that includes a performance incentive tied to the company’s performance.

It’s complicated. Cook had better have got that email read by a lawyer before he hit send (some time between 0500 and 0600 – by which time he’d have been up for a couple of hours already). Else things could get ugly. Credit to Daniel Tello who first brought this up.

Update: Tello says that “the latest info on [the] Cook stock reveals he actually picked the only day he could NOT benefit, instead makes a rebound worse for him.” Storm over, looks like. (Though there will doubtless be some more back and forth over revealing details about mid-quarter performance to a journalist who also holds some stock.)

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Facebook ‘Spam King’ guilty for sending 27 million messages » Bloomberg Business

Joel Rosenblatt:

A Las Vegas man pleaded guilty to sending more than 27 million unsolicited messages through Facebook Inc. servers after gaining access to about 500,000 accounts on the social network, according to prosecutors.

Sanford Wallace, 47, known as the “Spam King,” admitted to his mass spamming in 2008 and 2009 while pleading guilty Monday to fraud and criminal contempt, San Francisco U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag said in a statement.

Oh, but that’s not nearly enough context. Sanford Wallace has been a spammer for absolutely ages; he goes back to the neolithic age of the web. Read the Wikipedia entry. And reflect: once a spammer, always a spammer.
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Meet Wileyfox, an ‘edgy’ new mobile brand powered by Cyanogen » CNET

Rich Trenholm:

Among the new features offered by Cyanogen are security features that will appeal to consumers worried about their privacy. The unlock screen can scramble the numbers to make it harder for snoops to spy on your PIN. And if you’re alarmed by apps like Spotify that ask for access to unexpected parts of your phone, you can turn on and off individual app permissions. So for example, you can permit an app access to your camera but not your contacts, or require the app to ask each time it wants to use a different part of your phone. It also shows you the last time an app dipped into the further reaches of your phone, which is bound to be an eye-opening experience.

As a new brand, the company needs to carve attention from phone fans. “It’s an edgy brand,” says industry analyst Ben Wood of CCS Insight, “but it needs to be so it whips up a frenzy of social media interest. That’s the lifeblood for brands like this.”

Pretty standard phone (though it has dual SIM – unusual in western Europe). Cyanogen makes it more unusual: it’s not clear from the screenshots whether this is running Google Mobile Services (GMS) or not. Seems not, to my eye (but take a look for yourself).
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Nigerian network operators deactivate 10.7m SIM cards » Techpoint Nigeria

Yemi Johnson:

Dr. Tony Ojobo, Director of Public Affairs, NCC, speaking yesterday on Channels TV about the current SIM card deactivation being witnessed by network subscribers across the country said that about 10.7 million lines in the country have been barred from all GSM networks by the operators.

According to Ojobo, the commission had returned 18.6 million SIM cards data to MTN; 7.4 million to Airtel; 2.2 million to Globacom and 10.4 million to Etisalat for corrections back in September 2014, stressing that the returned SIM cards had one challenge or the other, including some that were pre-registered and others without the required biometric information. Yet, the Telcos failed to respond to the NCC’s warning to get those lines properly registered, even in ensuing meetings until now.

The call to deactivate unregistered lines however, came from the NCC, after its meeting with the office of the National Security Adviser (NSA), Department of State Security (DSS), the network operators. The parties present at the meeting had pointed attention to crimes committed in the country via unregistered telephone lines across various networks.

Odd: is this to do with Boko Haram, or something else?
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Aluminum and strength » All this

Dr Drang watches a video in which “Lew” tries to bend what seems to be the new iPhone 6S case, and then has it analysed by professionals:

While it’s obvious that zinc is the primary alloying element, which means the alloy is in the 7xxx series, the software didn’t find a good match in its database. Lew didn’t say anything about this in the video, but you can see it in the area I’ve circled at the top of the report.

I did a little looking around in my aluminum references, and I didn’t find a match, either. What’s weird is the tungsten (W) at 0.106%. I don’t have any aluminum specifications that call for tungsten, and in the 7xxx specs I’ve seen, “other” elements are limited to 0.05%.

In the video, Lew finesses this unknown by calling the new material “7000 series,” which is certainly true, but it’s not the whole truth. To me, the fact that the aluminum in the new shell doesn’t meet a standard specification is one of the most interesting findings. It suggests that Apple has developed its own proprietary aluminum alloy.

It wouldn’t be the first time Apple’s done this. The Apple Watch Sport uses a proprietary 7xxx alloy, which is mentioned on both the “Craftsmanship” page and in Jony Ive’s “Aluminium” video, which is where I got that splashy image.

The natural question is “Is this new iPhone aluminum alloy the same as the Apple Watch Sport alloy, or was it developed specifically for the iPhone?” Since I haven’t seen the chemistry of the Sport alloy, I have no idea what the answer is.

Is there any other company for which you’d get a lab involved for a leak of a shell of a phone? (That said, this stuff is so educational. Do read on for what he says about the difference heat treatment makes to aluminium strength.)
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Mobile ads: Media companies are losing the battle » Fortune

Mathew Ingram:

Is piggy-backing on Facebook’s platform the only way publishers can make mobile work? Perhaps. Entering into that kind of relationship also involves a significant transfer of power from the media outlet to the giant social network, something that has long-term risks. But for most publishers—and even for the New York Times—subscriptions aren’t generating enough revenue, and few people are paying for their apps.

For many companies that are watching the mobile chasm grow ever larger, in other words, there may be no other option. Their revenues are already so anemic that they can’t afford to build or buy anything that is going to move the needle. They can either play ball with Facebook and hope that will get them where they need to be, or they can stay on the sidelines and ultimately fade away.

The next year or two is going to be truly fascinating. Possibly ugly too.
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Reluctant licence fee payers don’t like life without the BBC after all » The Guardian

Roy Greenslade:

What would it be like to live without the BBC? How would people react to losing the chance to see the corporation’s TV channels, hear its radio programming or access its online output?

The BBC commissioned research to find out how people might cope (or not cope) without the broadcaster. So 70 families in 15 locations across the UK agreed to the blocking of all BBC services for nine days. Of those, 48 had previously said they were either in favour of not paying the £145.50 [US$227] annual licence fee (and doing without the BBC) or paying only a reduced fee.

According to the study, carried out on the BBC’s behalf by research agency MTM, by the end of the period of deprivation two thirds had changed their minds.

Those nine days “saved” them £3.60 (US$5.63). The BBC is a bloody bargain – especially after you get exposed to the repeatedly fresh hell that is US TV, which has the attention span of a gnat. (There are no ad breaks on the BBC.) As with mobile phones and medical bills, the US doesn’t know how badly off it is when it comes to TV in comparison to the UK.
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I Don’t Own, I Uber » Medium

Megan Quinn:

the move [from San Francisco to London, UK] meant [the car] had to go, and so it was sold for next-to-nothing to a really nice dad with two kids.

While I may have been sad to see my car go, I wasn’t concerned about being car-less because — when not on strike — public transportation is pretty good in Europe, and Uber is nearly ubiquitous in major cities. I knew Uber was more expensive in London, but everything was more expensive in London and I had factored that into my decision to move in the first place.

What I didn’t expect was that depending on Uber (UberX specifically) would actually be cheaper than owning and driving a car. Much cheaper. Yes, the company says this, but I didn’t think it was realistic yet.

Well, it is. At least for me.

About half the price, even allowing for the fact that petrol costs virtually nothing in the US compared to the UK. And that’s before amortisation of the car’s value. Mark this: it’s significant.
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Probable Note 5 design flaw can cause S Pen to break pen detection when inserted backward, or get hopelessly stuck » Android Police

David Ruddock:

On the Note 5, inserting the S Pen the wrong way provides exactly as much resistance as inserting it the right way. Which is to say: basically none at all. Once you insert the pen far enough in the wrong direction (again, which causes no strange resistance or feel than putting it in the right way), it will get stuck. It doesn’t even have to “click” in. At this point, of course, you will panic. And you will try to get it out – and most likely, you’ll succeed. The problem is that if you do succeed, there’s a very real possibility you’ll break whatever mechanism the device uses to detect whether the pen is attached or detached from the phone. Which is exactly what happened to our review unit.

Yes, seriously. Watch the video.

We’re really not sure how this made it past testing at Samsung – it seems like such an obvious thing to design into the S Pen slot, especially when Samsung has full reason to know that inserting the pen the wrong way can damage the direction-sensitive detection mechanism in the slot.

Android Police was the site that discovered this flaw (not “probable flaw” – it is, no question; and Ruddock does call it that in the comments.) It’s really quite a doozy. (“Antennagate” was easily solved with a bumper, and “Bendgate” seems to have been more about care of larger phones than anything.) Samsung’s response, reported by The Verge: “We highly recommend our Galaxy Note5 users follow the instructions in the user guide to ensure they do not experience such an unexpected scenario caused by reinserting the S pen in the other way around.” Recommendations don’t come much higher.
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A week without the Apple Watch » waitingtoDOWNLOAD

Lee Peterson survived:

I’ve missed notifications, workout tracking and the ability to control what’s playing on my iPhone the most – I miss the connivence of it.  Could I do without it, well yes and no – I mean yes I can live without it but now it’s opened up a whole new world I don’t think I could go without it.  It’s kept me in the moment more, stopped me from checking social media so much and for the first time I’m able to see how active (or inactive) I am allowing me to do something about it.

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