Tag Archives: dell

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

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

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

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

Michael Weinberg:

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

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

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

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

«

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

David Colarusso:

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

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

«

Graphs like this:

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

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

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

«

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

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The End of Scale • rafat.org

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

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

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

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

The tyranny of scale.

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

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

…Who were we trying to fool?

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

There is no outside savior coming to rescue.

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

»

TouchID
That passcode screen is miserable.

«

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

Hosain Rahman is CEO of Jawbone:

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

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

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

«

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

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

Matthew Herper:

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twitter is betting a lot on this relatively simple notion.

«

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2016 Mobile Adblocking Report • PageFair

»Quick Facts:

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

«

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

Here’s the presentation:

There’s a PDF report too.

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

James Fontanella-Khan and Leslie Hook:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Start up: more iPhone rumours, tablet use falls, six useful algorithms, and more

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TV in the US is losing its audience, and especially its paying audience. Photo by quinn.anya on Flickr.

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

Introducing comment moderation for Periscope • Medium

»Dear Periscope Community,

We’ve seen incredible communities and real-life friendships form on Periscope because it’s live, unfiltered and open. We’ve also seen broadcasters get discovered and quickly grow a large, public following. But with this openness comes an increased risk for spam and abuse, and this is something that we take seriously.

Above all, we want our community to be safe on Periscope. Comments are a vital part of the experience and we’ve been working hard on a system that still feels true to the live and unfiltered nature of our platform. Specifically, we want to develop a system that is: transparent, community-led, and live.

«

It was inevitable. Let’s see how this goes.
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Apple moving to 3-year ‘major’ iPhone cycle, adding complex vibrations to 2017 model – report • Apple Insider

Roger Fingas:

»Apple will likely be waiting until next year to debut its next major iPhone refresh, treating this year’s “iPhone 7” as yet another interim upgrade, a Japanese report said on Tuesday.

The 2017 iPhone is expected to make the switch to OLED, among other important design changes, Nikkei said. While that would support recent rumors, the business publication also made an original claim that the device will have a new vibration motor, capable of producing more complex patterns than earlier iPhones.

That could indicate that Apple will use an evolved version of its “Taptic Engine,” found in devices like the Apple Watch and the iPhone 6s. The technology lets devices produce different, subtle responses to user actions and notifications.

The “iPhone 7” is likely to stay mostly the same, Nikkei said, the most noticeable difference being the removal of the 3.5-millimeter headphone jack. Camera, water resistance, and battery technology should be improved, the paper continued, also mentioning that “a high-end version of the model will give users better-quality photo capabilities via correction functions.”

Rumors have suggested that the standard iPhone 7 might gain optical image stabilization, while a “7 Plus” will have a dual-lens camera.

«

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Tablet usage declines • Global Web Index

Katie Young:

»Certainly, tablets have enjoyed healthy growth in recent years; since 2011, the numbers getting online via these devices have more than trebled – jumping from just 10% at the start of the decade to more than 1 in 3 in 2016.

However, from market to market, region to region, a closer look at these figures reveals that the boom days for tablets appear to be over. The speed of the increases slowed dramatically during 2015 and, in the first quarters of 2016, tablets have now started to decline. What’s more, 16-24s now lag behind virtually all other age groups in terms of usage.

Clearly, these devices are struggling to convince many that they are must-have rather than just nice-to-have devices. So, unless tablets can provide a level of functionality sufficiently higher than mobiles to warrant the expense, we can expect this trend to continue.

«

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Nearly 1 in 4 people abandon mobile apps after only one use • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»Based on data from analytics firm Localytics, and its user base of 37,000 applications, user retention has seen a slight increase year-over-year from 34% in 2015 to 38% in 2016.

However, just because this figure has recovered a bit, that doesn’t mean the numbers are good. Instead, what this indicates is that 62 percent of users will use an app less than 11 times.

Says the report, “this is not a sustainable business model.”

These days, 23% launch an app only once – an improvement over last year, but only slightly. For comparison’s sake, only 20% of users were abandoning apps in 2014.

On iOS, user retention saw some slight improvements. The percentage of those only opening apps once fell to 24% from 26% last year, and those who return to apps 11 times or more grew to 36% from 32% in 2015.

«

That seems depressing. Then again, thinking of my own use, I tend to install apps, and not use them for ages; then I’ll suddenly discover a use, and go with it. It’s not quite “abandonment”. There aren’t that many apps that I have to use every day, or even every month. But there are lots that I might use once a year. (And there’s no particular distinction between mobile and desktop in that regard.)
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The TV industry will unravel faster than you think — Lightspeed Venture Partners • Medium

Alex Taussig says it’s all going to go bad for the big networks:

»The most obvious beneficiaries of the decline of old TV media will be the dominant social networks who nail video: Facebook, Snapchat,* and perhaps Twitter, if the whole Periscope thing works out. (A new social network built natively with video could also be a contender. Email me if that’s what you’re working on!) They each have their own power law dynamics and, by most measures, are significantly larger and more global than the TV networks. Their data allows them to target videos more precisely; so, despite larger quantities of social video in the world, the odds of a specific consumer engaging with a given video are (in theory) much higher. If properly executed, they could expand the $73bn TV advertising market today by transforming it from an audience-based to a performance-based medium.

The second group of beneficiaries will be the new stream aggregators: Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Twitch, and the like. These streams will continue to aggregate and package long tail content and form direct relationships with consumers. Again, there will only be a few winners here.

«

Taussig points to two key bits of data: US pay TV penetration rates are falling

and only those aged over 65 now watch more TV than they did five years ago:

Hard to argue with his reasoning.
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Dell reveals industry’s first 17in 2-In-1 laptop • Twice

Joseph Palenchar:

»The PC industry’s first 17-inch two-in-one convertible Windows laptop is among six new Inspiron two-in-one laptops unveiled by Dell at Computex in Taiwan, Microsoft announced.

All six of the convertible two-in-ones come with touchscreen display and secure Windows Hello login via optional or standard built-in infrared cameras. A 360-degree hinge delivers four modes: laptop mode, tent mode for presentations, stand mode for playing movies, and tablet mode.

«

OK, that’s too big. Thanks, Dell, for showing us the limit, beyond which you’ve gone.
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Six algorithms that can improve your life • WNYC

Manoush Zomorodi:

»There’s been a lot of negative press lately about algorithms (Facebook, Snapchat, the prison system). But this week we’re exploring ways that mathematical and scientific algorithms can actually help improve how we live.

Brian Christian co-wrote the book “Algorithms to Live By” with his friend, Tom Griffiths, a psychology and cognitive science professor at UC Berkeley. Brian is all about the intersection of technology and humanity, and figuring out how to use data to help people optimize their lives.

In their book, Brian and Tom offer really practical applications for scientific principles, which we’ll get to in a minute. But first, here’s the catch: There’s no formula for perfection. Even if you apply these algorithms to your life, things will go wrong. But by trying out these algorithms, you can statistically give it your best shot.

«

Includes: how to find stuff on your desk, stop tagging/filing your emails, arrange appointments faster, and more. Also with audio.
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Economist editor: ‘We don’t want to be the grandpa at the disco’ • The Guardian

Mark Sweney interviews Zanny Milton Beddoes, editor of The Economist:

»Despite this success, as at other publishers print sales at the Economist have fallen across the globe, although the circulation still stands at 1.25m copies a week. Digital edition sales have broken through the 300,000 mark, up by 50% or more year-on-year in most markets, including the UK but not North and South America. Minton Beddoes says the print decline is in part to do with a “drive to quality” – getting rid of bulk copies and converting readers to paid subscribers.

“The overall circulation is slightly down but the profitability of our circulation is rising and print is still holding up remarkably well,” she says. “I’m completely agnostic [about whether] people read print or digital, I really want them to have a premium subscription giving them access to both.” The Economist is still willing to embrace the potential of print, as is shown by it launching 1843, a bi-monthly magazine (which replaced Intelligent Life) aimed at the “globally curious” which aims to speak to them “when they have their feet up, on a weekend break, on holiday”.

Minton Beddoes says the Economist is not feeling the same extreme pressure as advertising-reliant newspaper publishers. “I’m very simple about this. You make money out of things people pay for,” she says. “Subscriptions is the bulk of our business, ads are nice to have on top of that. We are in the midst of a massively changing disrupted industry and that is incredibly exciting but it is also challenging. There are going to be winners in that and losers. It is foolish for anyone to be complacent. I am confident and hopeful and paranoid at the same time.”

«

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Are Trump hotels taking a ‘yuge’ hit? • Tailwind by Hipmunk

Kelly Soderlund on data from hotel-booking system Hipmunk:

»The Trump brand is associated with a variety of hotels, apartments, and products. On one hand, a growing number of political supporters could boost sales of Trump products; on the other, a growing number political detractors could lead people to avoid his brand. So which of these two forces is stronger?

We set out to answer this question by comparing the number of bookings at Trump Hotels’ most-booked locations this year on Hipmunk to bookings in the same locations the year prior (before he attracted national political attention).

The results? The share of bookings at Trump Hotels on Hipmunk as a percent of total hotel bookings are down, decreasing 59% compared to the same period last year.

While overall Hipmunk hotel bookings have been on the rise year-over-year, that has not been the case with bookings of Trump Hotels.

«

You could think of all sorts of possible reasons, but just not wanting to put any money into Trump’s pockets, and instead favouring Any Other Hotel Chain, seems like the immediately most plausible.
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Forced Windows 10 upgrades push users to dangerously disable Windows Update • PC World

Brad Chacos:

»Ironically, improved security is one of Windows 10’s selling points. But by pushing it on users in such a heavy-handed way, Microsoft is encouraging users who have very valid reasons to stick with Windows 7/8 to perform actions that leave their machines open to attack. That’s bad. Very bad.

For the record: Don’t disable Windows Updates unless you’re an advanced user who wants to parse and manually install Windows patches. Instead, leave them active but also install GWX Control Panel or Never10, free tools that block the Get Windows 10 pop-ups and behavior. Microsoft’s been known to push out new patches that work around those tools in the past, however—again, violating Windows Update’s sanctity to push its new OS. Be sure to read the fine print if a GWX pop-up does appear in order to avoid being tricked into Windows 10.

«

Coming to something when people complain of feeling “tricked” into getting an operating system for free that they would have been queueing around the block to pay for a few years ago. Well, 20 years ago.
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How big an issue is the nausea problem for virtual reality products? • Quora

Steve Baker is ex-Rediffusion Simulation, Hughes Aircraft, L3 Simulation:

»I’ve been working with helmet mounted displays in military flight simulation for several decades – I am an expert in the field.

IMHO – these devices should be banned – but that may not be necessary because after the first wave of early adopters I think it’ll go the way of 3D televisions. But that’s just my opinion. Let me explain why.

Everyone thinks these things are new and revolutionary…but they really aren’t. All that’s happened is that they dropped in price from $80,000 to $500…and many corners have been cut along the way.

There are several claims that the nausea problem has either been fixed, or will soon be fixed, or that application design can be used to work-around the problem.

The claims that it’s been fixed are based on the theory that the nausea is caused by latency/lag in the system, or by low resolution displays or by inaccurate head motion tracking…all of which can (and are) being fixed by obvious improvements to the system. Sadly, the $80,000 googles we made for the US military had less latency, higher resolution displays, and more accurate head tracking than any of the current round of civilian VR goggles…and they definitely made people sick – so this seems unlikely.

«

He has plenty more to say too about focal lengths and depth perception, and aftereffects. Worth considering. Of course, you could always assume that your users are going to be confused to begin with…
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VR Party Game is a ridiculously confusing virtual reality experience for Cardboard • Android Police

Rita El Khoury:

»What if virtual reality was just reality, with a small asterisk? What if you could strap on your VR headset, regardless of the brand or technology behind them, and see the same thing that’s in front of you… but mirrored? Or upside down? Or delayed by 2 seconds? Ha, what a novel idea!

VR Party Game does just that. It’s a Cardboard app/game that transmits your smartphone’s rear camera view onto the screen, but applies one of three special effects to confuse you. It can delay the view by 2 seconds, mirror it, or flip it upside down. The idea is to use it as a party game with friends, asking each other to complete a few tasks while wearing the Cardboard headset…

…VR Party Game is just mindless fun and as such, you may find the price a little steep. The app costs $0.99 but that only gives you the delay and mirror modes. Upside down is another $0.99 IAP.

«

OH NO. A WHOLE $1.98??
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Apple’s QA question, the ChromeOS Pixel C?, racism on eBay, Dell’s revenue drop, and more

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Why can’t China make good versions of these? Photo by superfem on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Now free of polonium. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Steve Jobs and Apple’s iTunes gutted the music industry, Pandora CFO Mike Herring claims » Sydney Morning Herald

The chief financial officer of customising music streaming service Pandora, Mike Herring, has torn into iTunes, which had sold more than 35 billion songs as of last year.

No-one subscribes to Apple Music, Herring claimed in a conference call to investors about Pandora’s future, as reported by Billboard, even though the app exists permanently on hundreds of millions of phones.

“They spend a lot of their real estate on this phone trying to drive people to music,” Herring said. “You can’t even get it off – it’s like a permanent thing on there and still no-one subscribes.

“Well, I guess a few million people do but the reality is … to get people to choose to do that is a much bigger trick. You have to have a great product.”

Herring said Pandora was trying to bring back the music industry after a tough 15 years.

“I mean Steve Jobs eviscerated the music industry with the launch of iTunes and it’s been downhill ever since,” he said. “And the download was supposed to save it, that didn’t happen.”

“Now on-demand streaming is supposed to save it. We will see if that happens.”

Herring later apologised on Twitter for his comments and added “my own bone-headed comments don’t reflect Pandora’s perception of our partners at Apple”.

Pandora has 3.9m subscribers, and 79m users in total all in the US, according to Herring, speaking earlier in the conference call.
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Apple opens secret laboratory in Taiwan to develop new screens » Bloomberg Business

Neat scoop by Tim Culpan:

The Apple building in Longtan has at least 50 engineers and other workers creating new screens for devices including iPhones and iPads, the people said, asking not to be identified because the details aren’t public. Apple has recruited from local display maker AU Optronics Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., which used to own the building, the people said.

Kristin Huguet, a spokeswoman for Apple in Cupertino, California, declined to comment.

Apple began operating the lab this year as it aims to make products thinner, lighter, brighter and more energy-efficient. Engineers are developing more-advanced versions of the liquid-crystal displays currently used in iPhones, iPads and Mac personal computers, the people said. Apple also is keen to move to organic light-emitting diodes, which are even thinner and don’t require a backlight, they said.

link to this extract

The Pixel C was probably never supposed to run Android » Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

In our view, the Pixel C’s irregularities all have a single explanation: the Pixel C was originally a Chrome OS device.

Back in July 2014, a new “Ryu” board (a “board” is just a reference to “motherboard” — a Chrome OS device under development) popped up in the Chrome OS open source repository. Further trips through the Chrome OS source code revealed that “Ryu” had a light bar, USB Type-C connectors, an Nvidia Tegra SoC, and wireless charging. That sounds an awful lot like the Pixel C (especially the wireless charging, which is used to charge the keyboard via the tablet’s battery when closed).

Open up the Pixel C’s software and take a look at Android’s build.prop file—which lists all sorts of base information about the device—and you’ll see “ro.product.name=ryu” listed in the properties. Based on this commit, it’s safe to say that at one point Google was definitely developing Chrome OS for its new Android tablet.

It appears that the Pixel C was planned as launch hardware for a new, all-touch version of Chrome OS which at some point got cancelled — necessitating a switch to Android. The story is a lot more complicated than that, though. What follows is the best timeline we could piece together showing the Pixel C’s troubled development history.

As Amadeo points out, Digitimes – the Taiwanese paper which people love to laugh at – actually got this exactly right during the development process back in February: “runs Android in the tablet form and Chrome when attached to a keyboard”. Then the Chrome bit went bye-bye.
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Whites earn more than blacks — even on eBay » The Washington Post

Ana Swanson:

In a study published in October by the RAND Journal of Economics, Ian Ayres and Christine Jolls of Yale Law School and Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard looked at how the race of the seller affected 394 auctions of baseball cards on eBay.

Some of the postings were accompanied by a photo of the card held by a light-skinned hand, and some with the card held by a dark-skinned hand, as in the photos above. The study shows that the cards held by an African-American hand sold for around 20 percent less than the cards held by Caucasian sellers.

In addition, the cards that were held by the African-American hand actually ended up being worth more, suggesting they should have sold for more than the other batch. That is, when the researchers added up how much they had originally paid for all of the cards sold by the black hand versus the white hand, the first total was larger.

Clever experiment design. Depressing result. Clear lesson: hide your hand in eBay photos.
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17: Worrying Apple trends with guest Russell Ivanovic » The Blerg podcast

Chris Lacy:

Guest Russell Ivanovic joins me to discuss a variety of Apple’s not-so-great recent trends. We dig into a great many of the warts increasingly appearing around Apple’s ecosystem, including the experience when first running a device, the less than universally acclaimed new Apple TV remote, the stagnant App Store and app review process, general product stability and more.

We also chat about Apple’s ever expanding and confusing product lines, Jony Ive’s accountability, as well as discussing Apple’s trend to make their cheapest product versions less appealing than was previously the case.

I’ve never linked to a podcast before, but this one, by Lacy and Ivanovic (who are both very experienced developers – Ivanovic on both iOS and Android), is really worth listening to. Many of their complaints hit home, because as Lacy says, it’s about the customer experience: if Apple neglects that, as in the experience of logging on to the new Apple TV, then what has it got? Should be required listening for Apple executives.

There’s also a followup episode, in which Rene Ritchie of iMore joins Lacy and refutes some of the points (ie, provides evidence that disproves them, not just saying “nah nah nah”) – though for others he simply says “yup” and explains why things (like the Apple TV logon) are a mess. A disclosure: I’ve previously appeared on The Blerg to talk about premium Android.
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Dell’s finances show revenue decline, similar to rivals’ » WSJ

Robert McMillan:

Dell’s revenue declined by 6% year-over-year to $14bn in its quarter ended in July. However, unlike competitors such as IBM and the former Hewlett-Packard Co., which in November split into separate corporate-computing and PC-and-printer companies, Dell’s revenues were up in the company’s fiscal year ended January 2015, rising 5%.

“Dell has executed well. We’ve invested wisely to drive growth, and we’re pleased with our performance,” said David Frink, a company spokesman.

Dell has paid off $4.5bn in debt over the past two years, but those payments left the company with less cash than it had when it traded publicly, and the move to private management hasn’t boosted profit. During Dell’s fiscal 2015, the company’s operating profit totaled $3.2bn excluding charges. In 2013, that figure was $4bn.

“These numbers reinforce that it is going to be a highly leveraged transaction,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. He believes that Dell will assume a sizable debt of $51bn to conclude the deal.

“It is no surprise that they’re looking to try to sell some assets,” he said.

The purchase of EMC was always going to be a python swallowing a cow, but the python seems to be smaller and the cow a lot bigger than we thought. This could turn into a horrible mess.
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Tormented Texas plumber sues dealership over ‘jihad’ truck » LA Times

Matt Pearce:

A year ago, Mark Oberholtzer was down in Corpus Christi, Texas, when his secretary called to tell him the news:

One of his old plumbing trucks had been hijacked by jihadists.

On social media, a Syrian rebel group had posted a photo showing a black 2005 Ford F-250 — except now the plumber’s truck was thousands of miles away, armed with a large antiaircraft gun.

In the photo, an enormous flame burst from the muzzle as a rebel fired the gun from the bed. The words MARK-1 PLUMBING, plus the Texas City business’ phone number, were still clearly visible on the side of the truck, looking as if Oberholtzer had placed a NASCAR-style endorsement on militants in Syria.

If it isn’t happening to you, it’s funny. For him, it’s a nightmare, including death threats. He’s seeking $1m in damages (of course) from the dealership he sold the truck to in October 2013.
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Why can’t China make a good ballpoint pen? » Marketplace.org

Rob Schmitz:

After [Chinese premier Li Keqiang] grumbled about Chinese pens last June, state-run broadcaster CCTV devoted an hour-long program to the topic, a talk show where three CEOs of China’s most innovative and successful manufacturers sat onstage alongside a host. Sitting nervously at a table in front of the studio audience was Qiu Zhiming, president of one of China’s largest pen manufacturers. Qiu explained to the other CEOs that China supplies 80% of the global market for pens.

The core technology of each pen — the stainless steel ball and its casing — is imported from Japan, Germany, or Switzerland, said Qiu. Only Switzerland, he said, has a machine with the precision required to make the best ballpoint pen tips. China, Qiu said sadly, hasn’t developed a machine like this.

Dong Mingzhu, the CEO of Ge li (Gree), a Chinese air conditioner manufacturer, frowned at Qiu from her perch onstage.

“Think about it. How much money have the foreigners made from us because they have better technology?” asked Dong. “You don’t have this technology and they’re taking your profits! You know what I’m going to do? I’ll have my best people make you a machine like the Swiss have! I’ll make it in a year and sell it to you for half the price!”

I am honestly surprised that there aren’t machines in China capable of making the balls to the correct tolerances. Schmitz’s piece points to more widely felt unease among manufacturers in China: the home market isn’t sufficiently rewarding.
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The $75,000 problem for self-driving cars is going away » The Washington Post

The problem being the initially expensive LIDAR (laser interferometry detection and ranging) systems that the SDCs use to figure out where they are, and what’s around them, as Matt McFarland explains:

Velodyne and other players in the self-driving space are delivering drastically cheaper LIDAR, suggesting the price of the sensors won’t hold back the rollout of autonomous driving.

“Our customers are telling us they want it to be below $100, that’s kind of the roadmap we’re working from in the back of our mind,” Eggert said.

Velodyne is developing a sub-$500 LIDAR sensor, the VLP-32, that it says will be powerful enough for high-level assisted driving, and autonomous driving. (It declined to reveal exact technical specifications.) Velodyne has development contracts with two manufacturers, one in North America and one in Japan, to deliver the sensor in the first four months of 2016.

And the new sensor isn’t going to be a hulking piece of equipment either. It’s small enough that some players have expressed interest in putting the sensor in vehicle side mirrors. Others may put it on the roof, the easiest way to get a 360-degree view.

Quanergy chief executive Louay Edlada believes LIDAR will cost below $100 in five years. It’s releasing a solid state LIDAR — meaning none of the parts move — next month for $250.

That’s $75,000 to $250 in about eight years – halving in price every year. (Is it a Moore’s Law system?)
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: SXSW’s silencing problem, the Strava bicycle thief, Apple claims Android switchers, Google gets chippy, and more

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Vox Media and The Verge will not attend SXSW unless it takes harassment seriously » The Verge

After the organizers of the SXSW conference canceled an anti-harassment panel due to alleged Gamergate-related “threats of violence,” Vox Media is reevaluating its participation in the SXSW conference. Vox, the parent company of The Verge, says it will not be participating in this year’s conference unless changes are made.

This is quickly going to turn into a big problem for SXSW (which made a stupid decision in the first place) unless it reinstates the panels; you can see more organisations making the same stand, until not withdrawing comes to look like supporting Gamergate’s lunatic fringe (which is basically all of it).
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The superconductor that works at earth temperature » MIT Technology Review

The world of superconductivity is in uproar. Last year, Mikhail Eremets and a couple of pals from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, made the extraordinary claim that they had seen hydrogen sulphide superconducting at -70 °C. That’s some 20 degrees hotter than any other material—a huge increase over the current record.

Followers of this blog will have read about this work last December, when it was first posted to the arXiv. At the time, physicists were cautious about the work. The history of superconductivity is littered with dubious claims of high-temperature activity that later turn out to be impossible to reproduce.

But in the months since then, Eremets and co have worked hard to conjure up the final pieces of conclusive evidence. A few weeks ago, their paper was finally published in the peer reviewed journal Nature, giving it the rubber stamp of respectability that mainstream physics requires. Suddenly, superconductivity is back in the headlines.

It’s not going to be in use in a hurry – it requires gigantic pressures to form the material – but it’s significant because liquid nitrogen, which is cheap and plentiful, has a temperature of -96C.
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Douglas Adams live on stage with Pink Floyd » YouTube

For Douglas Adams’s 42nd birthday his friend David Gilmour gave him the opportunity to join Pink Floyd on stage during their 1994 tour live at Earls Court in London. Douglas played rhythm guitar on the tracks Eclipse and Brain Damage. While it was always known by Douglas’ family that the concert had been filmed by someone in the audience, the tape of the event could never be found. That is, until now.

That’s 21 years ago today! Adams wasn’t some random person; he was very accomplished and had a huge guitar collection. If you still think “oh, it’s only playing a guitar on a stage” – ask yourself how you’d fare playing football as one of Chelsea, Arsenal, etc. And they have 10 other players, unlike a band.
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Google is leading a ‘chip development effort’ that could turn the heat up on Apple » Business Insider

Alexei Oreskovic and Jillian D’Onfro:

new job listing shows Google is seeking a “multimedia chip architect” who can “lead a chip development effort” and “work with other engineers to take chip to product shipment.”

The phrasing of the job posting suggests Google is about to get a lot more serious about designing, and perhaps even building, its own chips, following in Apple’s footsteps.

The job posting comes from the company’s Pixel team, which recently announced its high-end productivity tablet, the Pixel C, a person close to the matter tells Business Insider.

Apple bought an entire chip design company. Google’s hiring a couple of people?
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Thieves use Strava and other sites to find homes with expensive bikes » Sticky Bottle

Police forces are warning cyclists who use ride-sharing sites and apps – such as Strava – that thieves are now searching them to identify houses with expensive bikes to rob.

Ireland is in the middle of what can only be described as a bike-theft epidemic; with the rate of bikes being stolen now higher than ever and increasing faster than any other crime type.

Most of the bikes being stolen are taken from the streets; after their owners have ridden into urban areas and locked them up.

The Garda [Irish police force] has reacted by conducting a number of specialist policing operations, but they have only just begun and their success or otherwise is still unclear.

Aside from on-street thefts, there have been countless cases of cyclists with expensive racing and training bikes being targeted in their homes.

Location-awareness considered harmful.
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Siri’s next trick needs to be multitasking » number23

Philip McDermott on how Siri’s “modal” – interrupt-everything-stop-for-this – interaction model needs to evolve:

Imagine this: you are browsing recipes in Safari and want to save one to your recipes collection. Right now, you can say: “Hey Siri, add this to my recipes note” and the link will be appended to the end of your note entitled Recipes. While this is, let’s be honest, pretty impressive, why stop there? Why should you not carry on scrolling through the website while you carry out this task? You can multitask, your touch-input methods can multitask: why not your voice input?

Another example: you’re writing in a text editor on your iPad, and you remember something for later: “Hey Siri, remind me to take the recycling out when I leave the house later”. But why stop the flow of writing while Siri listens and acts?

Why indeed? Especially as Siri is always listening.
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Google Brings Podcasting to Play Music Streaming Service, Android » Re/code

Mark Bergen:

The Alphabet company is getting ready to open a dedicated home for podcasts on its Google Play hub. Today the company is letting podcast creators upload shows to Google Play Music, its streaming service; it says listeners will be able to listen to those shows “in the coming months.” It will be, remarkably, the first native app for podcast listening on Android in the content market where Apple carries disproportionate weight.

But Google isn’t just trying to create more Serial fanatics on Android. No, it wants to reach people that have never listened to podcasts. And it wants to broaden its media offerings in the fight with Apple, the frequent go-to platform for media producers.

In so doing, Google plans to use radio shows to bolster its plan to deliver media tailored for the listener’s interests, activities, even moods. That directive is evident in the product’s lead: Elias Roman, co-founder of the streaming service Songza, whose main schtick was building these contextual playlists before Google acquired it last year.

There isn’t (wasn’t) a native podcast app on Android; how will this affect third-party makers of podcast apps? Is Google getting into that space, or leaving it to them?
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Making sense of Dell + EMC + VMware » Business Insider

Jamie McGurk, Stephen McDermid, Vishal Amin, Irvin Chan from Andreessen Horowitz explain how “the python can swallow the cow”:

The ultimate question is — will it work? Are all these financial acrobatics going to deliver on the promise of the Dell-EMC deal as the two companies walk a high-altitude tightrope?

We’re not sure what else companies on the backside of their growth curves can do when competing with more nimble competitors, other than to consolidate, split, or restructure. We have players like IBM and Microsoft aggressively acquiring new companies to make a shift to new platforms as their core businesses decline; HP and others bifurcating themselves into more focused, slimmer, and presumably more agile players with streamlined operations so they can better address secular platform shifts; and now, we have Dell + EMC (+ VMware) consolidating their businesses to stay competitive in a rapidly changing world.

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Apple earnings lifted by iPhone sales in China » WSJ

Daisuke Wakabayashi:

[Tim] Cook said many iPhone consumers still haven’t upgraded to the larger-screen iPhone. He says about two-thirds of iPhone’s customer base before the first batch of larger iPhones were introduced in 2014 haven’t upgraded to newer models.

At the same time, Apple said it is winning over customers from rivals. Mr. Cook said 30% of consumers who bought an iPhone replaced a smartphone running Google Inc.’s Android operating system during the quarter. He said this is the highest rate of Android “switchers” that Apple has ever measured.

Apple said it sold 48.04m iPhones in the July-September quarter, compared to 39.27m units a year earlier; that’s 22% growth at a time when the smartphone market growth has been slower. That 30% figure is remarkably high: it suggests 14m switchers from Android. Perhaps those are buyers in China. It doesn’t make sense for the 30% to be “buyers new to iPhone”, because that suggests 70% from Windows Phone, BlackBerry and featurephones. (Might be, but seems to stretch it.)
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Start up: Dell, the movie!, Surfacebook reviewed, why WD bought SanDisk, IT disasters sized, and more

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Studying by the light of a solar lantern. Photo by Barefoot Photography on Flickr.

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Theranos CEO: company is in a “pause period” » WSJ

John Carreyrou:

Theranos Inc. founder and Chief Executive Elizabeth Holmes said Wednesday that the Silicon Valley laboratory company is in a “pause period” as it seeks to get its proprietary technology approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“We have to move, as a company, from the lab framework and quality systems to the FDA framework and quality systems,” Ms. Holmes said, speaking at the WSJDLive global technology conference in Laguna Beach, Calif.

At the conference, she confirmed that the company is down to offering just one test using a few drops of blood and is performing the other more than 240 blood tests it offers by using larger blood samples drawn with needles from patients’ arms.

The downslope beckons.
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Microsoft Surface Book review » SlashGear

Chris Davies:

I’m warily wiling to put most of the flakiness down to early hardware and work-in-progress drivers, but it’s clear that the practicalities of this new architecture are still being ironed out. In theory, the Clipboard shouldn’t allow itself to be detached if it’ll make the system unstable; in practice, that’s not always the case.

Throw in underwhelming battery life for the Clipboard alone, and it’s clear that thinking of the Surface Book as both a laptop and a tablet isn’t really accurate. This isn’t a replacement for your MacBook Pro and your iPad; it’s a PC that tells you to take an hour or so of downtime with a Netflix video before getting back to work. I can’t help but hope that Microsoft uses the same hybrid mechanism in a smaller form-factor, with more of a focus on equal battery life between the halves.

For all the launch day excitement it caused, Surface Book will inevitably be a niche product. As the standard bearer for a new architecture of modular graphics, though, it may be in Microsoft’s better interests in the long run if, Nexus-style, other OEMs see what’s been done and experiment with the same approach themselves.

So not quite a laptop or tablet replacement.
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Chip merger pace rises with Western Digital, Lam deals » Bloomberg Business

The merger wave sweeping the computer-chip industry is now engulfing the makers of the machines needed to crank out semiconductors.

Lam Research Corp. said Wednesday that it would buy KLA-Tencor Corp. for $10.6bn in cash and stock. Within four hours, Western Digital Corp. announced a deal to acquire SanDisk Corp. for about $19bn. The pacts added to what was already a record year for chip deals – a total of $76bn before Wednesday.

With half of the spending on the manufacturing equipment coming from just three chipmakers – Samsung Electronics Co., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Intel Corp. – suppliers of the gear need to pool resources to keep up with the increasing pace of spending on research and development.

Consolidation is a sign of shrinking profit too. WD is struggling because the disk business is shrinking; the NAND business (where SanDisk) is growing, but getting tougher. Next question: whither Seagate?
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Forget “Steve Jobs,” get ready for “Michael Dell” » CONAN on TBS

From my book Digital Wars:

[Bob] Ohlweiler [then at Windows MP3 player MusicMatch] recalls seeing the prototype for the third-generation iPod during a discussion with Apple executives. Steve Jobs made an appearance – “he would kind of drift in and say ‘this is shit’, and walk out,” Ohlweiler recalls. “Or he would say ‘this is far too big. It’s too bulky.’ Then he’d walk out.” (The picture that emerges is of Jobs prowling the corridors of Apple, caroming between meetings in which he offers minimal but essential advice and then moves on to the next one.)…

A month or so later Ohlweiler was at the headquarters of Dell Computer in Austin, Texas. Dell was eager to get into this burgeoning market, reasoning that it could use Microsoft’s software, design its own hardware (as it did with PCs) and use its buying heft to drive down costs to undercut Apple. Dell’s revenues at the time were six times larger than Apple’s. It was going to be easy. The market was there for the taking.

Or perhaps not. Ohlweiler recalls being handed a prototype for the Dell DJ player, which like the iPod used a 1.8in hard drive. “Jeez, this thing is HUGE!” he thought, but managed not to say.

It was noticeably deeper than Apple’s existing iPod, and substantially more so than the forthcoming iPod… Dell had done its part of the horizontal model: it had driven down costs by dual-sourcing components from Hitachi and from Toshiba. The result, though, was a bulkier machine: “one of the Dell designers explained that that was because the Toshiba version of the hard drive had its connector on the side, and the Hitachi one had it on the bottom, but because they were dual-sourcing they could get the price down by 40 cents,” Ohlweiler recalls. “That was the difference in a nutshell. Apple was all about the industrial design and getting it to work. Dell was all driven by their procurement guys.”

Sometimes satire is about telling the truth in a new way.
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Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on self-driving cars » Business Insider

Jillian D’Onfro:

In the last year, Uber has poached more than 40 autonomous vehicle experts from the robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as top car security researchers. 

This move comes at a time when the likes of Google, Apple, and Tesla are all working on some sort of autonomous-driving projects. Kalanick says he believes Google to be the farthest ahead, but that we’re still a while away from seeing any company’s self-driving cars on the roads.

“Getting Google’s cars to a 90% solution is going to happen soon,” he said, but he asks, “when do they get to that 99.99% success level?” By his count, it could be five, 10, even 15 years. 

“It’s going to be interesting, ultimately, to see how cities handle these disruption waves, which are going to be coming faster and faster,” he said. “Some cities are going to allow it, and then they’re going to be the bastion of the future, and the other cities are going to look like they’re in the middle ages.”

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The truth and distraction of US cord cutting » REDEF

Liam Boluk:

During the past five and a half years, the cable ecosystem has been hit with heavy losses. Nearly 8.9M net subscribers have been lost (versus 3.3M in net gains from Q3 2004 to Q4 2009) – a fact obsessed upon by journalists and bloggers alike. But at the same time – and with significantly less media coverage – Satellite (DirecTV and Dish) and Telco (i.e. AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS) MVPDs have surged to the point of offsetting (or reclaiming) nearly 95% of these net losses.

Looks to me like people are moving away from the standard set of cable offerings. “Gradually, and then suddenly” is how it works.
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How solar lanterns are giving power to the people » National Geographic magazine

Michael Edison Hayden:

Prashant Mandal flips on a candy-bar-sized LED light in the hut he shares with his wife and four children. Instantly hues of canary yellow and ocean blue—reflecting off the plastic tarps that serve as the family’s roof and walls—fill the cramped space where they sleep. Mandal, a wiry 42-year-old with a thick black beard and a lazy eye, gestures with a long finger across his possessions: a torn page from a dated Hindu calendar, a set of tin plates, a wooden box used as a chair. He shuts down the solar unit that powers the light and unplugs it piece by piece, then carries it to a tent some 20 yards away, where he works as a chai wallah, selling sweet, milky tea to travelers on the desolate road in Madhotanda, a forested town near the northern border of India.

“My life is sad, but I have my mind to help me through it,” Mandal says, tapping the fraying cloth of his orange turban. “And this solar light helps me to keep my business open at night.”

It’s white LED lights that have made this possible; 40W solar panel feeds them for a long time.
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Semantic sensors » Pete Warden’s blog

Pete Warden (you know, the machine learning bought-by-Google guy):

I think we’re going to see a lot of “Semantic Sensors” emerging. These will be tiny, cheap, all-in-one modules that capture raw noisy data from the real world, have built-in AI for analysis, and only output a few high-level signals. Imagine a small optical sensor that is wired like a switch, but turns on when it sees someone wave up, and off when they wave down. Here are some other concrete examples of what I think they might enable:

• Meeting room lights that stay on when there’s a person sitting there, even if the conference call has paralyzed them into immobility.
• Gestural interfaces on anything with a switch.
• Parking meters that can tell if there’s a car in their spot, and automatically charge based on the license plate.
• Cat-flaps that only let in cats, not raccoons!
• Farm gates that spot sick or injured animals.
• Streetlights that dim themselves when nobody’s around, and even report car crashes or house fires.

And lots more. The only questions are how soon, and would we throw away the images or keep them?
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Rumor: AMD making custom x86 SOC for Apple’s 2017 and 2018 iMac designs » WCCFTech

Khalid Moammer:

At the 2017-2018 timeframe AMD will have two high performance CPU cores, an ARM based design code named K12 and a second generation Zen “Zen+” x86 design. However the report explains that as the x86 ISA is a necessity in the high-end desktop and prosumer level Apple products a Zen based design is most likely.

In addition to driving cost significantly down for Apple, another high-profile design win for AMD would serve as viability booster for the company’s semi-custom business following its success in the consoles. Both companies have entered a long-standing partnership, with AMD providing the graphics chips for the current iMac and Mac Pro designs.

A semi-custom SOC x86 for the iMac would have to include a high performance x86 component, namely Zen, in addition to a graphics engine to drive the visual experience of the device. Such a design would be very similar to the current semi-custom Playstation 4 and XBOX ONE Accelerated Processing Units, combining x86 CPU cores with a highly capable integrated graphics solution.

Filed under “far enough away that it could even happen”. Chip fab lead times are very long, though, which could make this a reasonable timeframe.
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The staggering impact of IT systems gone wrong » IEEE Spectrum

We’ve scoured our archives to create a rogues’ gallery of the most notable, interesting, and emblematic failures from the past decade. We’ve included a diverse assortment of failures, which means there’s no single metric for measuring their impact. Some, like failed IT system upgrades or modernization projects, have straightforward financial consequences. Others, like operational outages and disruptions, are better measured by the time wasted and the number of people affected.

Keep in mind that the failures below are just the tip of the iceberg. They’re just a tiny fraction of the hundreds of incidents we’ve covered in Risk Factor, and an even smaller fraction of the global total. A complete list would be several orders of magnitude larger.

The UK comes out top for the NHS IT writeoff! Hooray! No, wait. (Via Matt Ballantine.)
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Start up: Tor for iOS 9?, Google wins book appeal, HTC’s new (i)Phone, DNA suspects, and more

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A crucial part of some fake Amazon reviews. Photo by Joe Shlabotnik on Flickr.

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New Tor apps for iOS 9 headed to iPhone, iPad » Daily Dot

Patrick Howell O’Neill:

The new iOS offering will come from a group led by Chris Ballinger, founder of ChatSecure and including Frederic Jacobs of Open Whisper Systems; Mike Tigas, who wrote Onion Browser; and Conrad Kramer, a former device jailbreaker. 

That group is working on iCepa, a system-wide iOS Tor client that can change the way every app on iOS connects to the Internet by routing traffic from each app through the Tor network.

Older versions of iOS lacked key capabilities that would allow for an effective Tor app, Freitas said. But certain changes implemented in iOS 9 — specifically the ability to incorporate Tor into multiple apps simultaneously — make the mobile operating system far more attractive for Tor developers.

“iOS has some new capabilities in it,” Freitas said. “You can create a device-wide [virtual private network], and it can be a Tor-based VPN. So we can create an Orbot-like service on iOS 9, which is exciting.”

Orbot empowers other Android apps to use Tor. It’s an anonymity amplifier that’s been impossible on iOS up until now because Tor could only run in a single app at a time.

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Dear reader, we’re closing comments » IOL Beta

Adrian Ephraim, managing editor of the South Africa Independent:

Dear IOL reader, we need to talk …

I thought you should be the first to know that Independent Online (IOL) will be closing comments on its online articles with immediate effect.

It is a difficult but necessary decision to make and we arrived at it after careful consideration of all the factors at play.

The freedom of expression guaranteed by our Constitution was never meant to override the personal freedoms and human rights of our fellow citizens.

Let me be clear that commenting on an article is not a right, but a courtesy afforded to you by IOL as a reader.

If you are prone to being racist or sexist in your thinking, by all means express yourself on other platforms that may find such behaviour acceptable, but not on IOL.

We are of the view that instances of abuse in our comments section have become untenable.

..And another one. Just keeping tabs, really.
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HTC One A9 photos leak: It’s an iPhone » BGR

Zach Epstein:

We’ve seen a number of leaked images of the upcoming HTC One A9 in the past, but the clearest pictures yet were just accidentally published by European wireless carrier Orange. HTC is already in deep trouble following its One M9 flop, but this phone may very well get the struggling smartphone maker sued into oblivion.

It really does look amazingly like an iPhone 6 (or 6S). Then again, so did the Galaxy S6. Hard to see it making any difference to HTC’s gradual demise.
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Getting LEAN with Digital Ad UX » IAB

Scott Cunningham , svp of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech and Ad operations, begins this post “We messed up”. But the mea culpa also has a nostrum explicatum:

We engineered not just the technical, but also the social and economic foundation that users around the world came to lean on for access to real time information. And users came to expect this information whenever and wherever they needed it. And more often than not, for anybody with a connected device, it was free.

This was choice—powered by digital advertising—and premised on user experience.

But we messed up.

Through our pursuit of further automation and maximization of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimize publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty.

Loose translation: “We did so much good that we made things worse.” Now the IAB is suggesting ads should be “light; encrypted; ad choice supported; non-invasive”. Nice idea. Not sure “encrypted” is necessary; is that to stop people like AdBlock Plus?
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After undercover sting, Amazon files suit against 1,000 Fiverr users over fake product reviews » GeekWire

Jacob Demmitt:

Fiverr is an online marketplace that lets people sell simple services to strangers, like transcribing audio, converting photos or editing video. Amazon simply had to contact Fiverr users who advertised their review-writing services and set up the transaction.

The company said most people offered the undercover Amazon investigators 5-star reviews for $5 each.

One Fiverr.com user that went by bess98 offered to write the reviews from multiple computers, so as to deceive Amazon. Another user, Verifiedboss, unwittingly told the investigators, “You know the your [sic] product better than me. So please provide your product review, it will be better.”

As in the previous lawsuit, Amazon alleges that these reviewers often arranged to have empty boxes shipped to them in order to make it look like they had purchased the products.

Amazon is not suing Fiverr. The company noted in the court filing that these kinds of services are banned by Fiverr’s terms and conditions and Fiverr has tried to cut down on the practice.

Would love to know which products these people reviewed.
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Appeals court gives Google a clear and total fair use win on book scanning » Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

The Authors Guild’s never-ending lawsuit against Google for its book scanning project has been hit with yet another blow. The 2nd Circuit appeals court has told the Authors Guild (once again) that Google’s book scanning is transformative fair use. This is not a surprise. Though this case has gone through many twists and turns, a few years ago it was also before the 2nd Circuit on a separate issue (over the appropriateness of it being a class action lawsuit) and the 2nd Circuit panel ignored that question, saying that it shouldn’t even matter because it seemed like this was fair use. Thus it was sent back to the district court, where Judge Danny Chin correctly said that the scanning was fair use. That ruling was appealed, and the AG trotted out some truly nutty legal theories (arguing that it wasn’t fair use because someone like Aaron Swartz might hack into Google’s computers and free the books).

These arguments did not work. The 2nd Circuit has affirmed the lower court ruling and given another nice appellate ruling establishing the importance of fair use — and a reminder that, yes, commercial uses can still be fair use:

Google’s making of a digital copy to provide a search function is a transformative use, which augments public knowledge by making available information about Plaintiffs’ books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the Plaintiffs’ copyright interests in the original works or derivatives of them.

Pretty convincing win for Google.
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Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect » WIRED

Brendan Koerner:

In [Michael] Usry’s case the crime scene DNA [from an unsolved killing in 1969] bore numerous similarities to that of Usry’s father, who years earlier had donated a DNA sample to a genealogy project through his Mormon church in Mississippi. That project’s database was later purchased by Ancestry, which made it publicly searchable—a decision that didn’t take into account the possibility that cops might someday use it to hunt for genetic leads.

Usry, whose story was first reported in The New Orleans Advocate, was finally cleared after a nerve-racking 33-day wait—the DNA extracted from his cheek cells didn’t match that of Dodge’s killer, whom detectives still seek. But the fact that he fell under suspicion in the first place is the latest sign that it’s time to set ground rules for familial DNA searching, before misuse of the imperfect technology starts ruining lives.

Mitch Morrissey, Denver’s district attorney and one of the nation’s leading advocates for familial DNA searching, stresses that the technology is “an innovative approach to investigating challenging cases, particularly cold cases where the victims are women or children and traditional investigative tactics fail to yield a solid suspect.”

Not sure if UK police would be able to demand access in the same way. Previously they didn’t need to – there was a national DNA database which included completely innocent people.
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Apple’s iPhone finds more fans on Samsung’s home turf » MarketWatch

Jennifer Booton notes that the iPhone has hit a 14% sales share in South Korea over the summer:

Samsung was able to recoup some of the losses incurred from Apple by going after the smaller manufacturers, such as LG Electronics and Pantech. LG’s share slid to 22% from 29%, while Pantech’s nose-dived from 4% to 1%, according to the Counterpoint research. Apple’s influence is having an effect, though.

“Samsung still has a loyal following in Korea,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager at industry tracker IDC. “But Apple is certainly making a run.”

Apple’s share in South Korea, where users have long been accustomed to the Samsung Galaxy Note phablets and other larger-screen Galaxy phones, has been gaining ever since the launch of the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, Apple’s first large-screen iPhone, Kang said. Its share gain was most prominent right after the iPhone 6 Plus launched, growing sevenfold in the fourth quarter of 2014.

While the growth rate has since slowed, Kang said he believes there’s still room for Apple to grow there as the “iPhone ecosystem effect” — the idea that Apple’s interconnected operating systems and devices keep users within the Apple brand — begins to take hold.

“Mature smartphone users (mostly Android) have started to upgrade to Apple iPhones,” he said.

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Soul of a virtual machine » Medium

Jerry Chen:

In 2005, as the product manager for VMware’s enterprise desktop business, I made the pilgrimage down to Round Rock, Texas to meet the executives running Dell’s PC business. This was a year before I created VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and VMware was still the small but fast growing, and recently acquired division of EMC. For almost an hour I pitched Dell on the virtues of desktop virtualization. The Dell executives smiled, nodded politely, and at the end of the meeting they asked me, “You understand that we sell PCs here? Why would we ever want to commoditize our differentiation with virtualization?”

I collected my things and flew back to Palo Alto.

2015: Dell buys EMC, including VMWare, for $67bn, as its PC business keeps struggling. Now, VMWare didn’t kill off the PC business directly, but it certainly helped the move to the cloud that has forced Dell into this catchup acquisition.

Note how similar the Dell execs’ question is to Jerry Yang at Yahoo, who in 1997 told two guys with a new search algorithm “but we want people to click multiple search pages, because we can show them ads.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t come back. Yahoo isn’t dead, but it’s a zombie.
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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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