Tag Archives: fraud

Start up: malware for all!, Tim Cook v FBI, US gov seeks source code, bedtime for robots, and more

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Facebook discovered that tons of ads are as fake as this “pound coin”. Photo by Steve Parker 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. Off you go. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Building towards value with Atlas » Facebook Atlas Solutions

Dave Jakubowski, head of ad tech, Facebook:

»Marketing pioneer John Wanamaker once famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Despite the promises of the past two decades, digital still faces the same issue.

Through Atlas and the people-based layer that powers it, we’ve been able to identify and measure where most waste comes from: exchanges and banners.

We realized this by testing out a buying platform in Atlas last year. During that test, we plugged into a number of the usual exchanges and bought across several formats. There were two major takeaways:

1: We were able to deliver ads to real people with unprecedented accuracy, but came up against many bad ads and fraud (like bots). While we were fortunately able to root out the bad actors and only buy quality ads, we were amazed by the volume of valueless inventory.
2: Only two ad formats delivered significant value: native & video.

Based on those findings, we began to dig into the ads that came through LiveRail. And when we saw the same thing, we immediately shut off the low quality ads. In fact, we removed over 75% of the volume coming from our exchange by turning off publishers circulating bad inventory into LiveRail.

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Wonder how many news sites will take note of those points.
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AceDeceiver: first iOS trojan exploiting Apple DRM design flaws to infect any iOS device » Palo Alto Networks

Claud Xiao:

»We’ve discovered a new family of iOS malware that successfully infected non-jailbroken devices we’ve named “AceDeceiver”.

What makes AceDeceiver different from previous iOS malware is that instead of abusing enterprise certificates as some iOS malware has over the past two years, AceDeceiver manages to install itself without any enterprise certificate at all. It does so by exploiting design flaws in Apple’s DRM mechanism, and even as Apple has removed AceDeceiver from App Store, it may still spread thanks to a novel attack vector…

…To carry out the attack, the [malware] author created a Windows client called ”爱思助手 (Aisi Helper)” to perform the FairPlay MITM attack. Aisi Helper purports to be software that provides services for iOS devices such as system re-installation, jailbreaking, system backup, device management and system cleaning. But what it’s also doing is surreptitiously installing the malicious apps on any iOS device that is connected to the PC on which Aisi Helper is installed. (Of note, only the most recent app is installed on the iOS device(s) at the time of infection, not all three at the same time.) These malicious iOS apps provide a connection to a third party app store controlled by the author for user to download iOS apps or games. It encourages users to input their Apple IDs and passwords for more features, and provided these credentials will be uploaded to AceDeceiver’s C2 server after being encrypted. We also identified some earlier versions of AceDeceiver that had enterprise certificates dated March 2015.

As of this writing, it looks as though AceDeceiver only affects users in mainland China.

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So it’s really a Windows infection?
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275 million Android phones imperiled by new code-execution exploit » Ars Technica UK

Dan Goodin:

»The NorthBit-developed attack exploits a Stagefright vulnerability discovered and disclosed last year by Zimperium, the security firm that first demonstrated the severe weaknesses in the code library. For reasons that aren’t yet clear, Google didn’t fix the vulnerability in some versions, even though the company eventually issued a patch for a different bug that had made the Zimperium exploits possible. While the newer attack is in many ways a rehash of the Zimperium work, it’s able to exploit an information leak vulnerability in a novel way that makes code execution much more reliable in newer Android releases. Starting with version 4.1, Android was fortified with an anti-exploitation defense known as address space layout randomization, which loads downloaded code into unpredictable memory regions to make it harder for attackers to execute malicious payloads. The breakthrough of Metaphor is its improved ability to bypass it.

“They’ve proven that it’s possible to use an information leak to bypass ASLR,” Joshua Drake, Zimperium’s vice president for platform research and exploitation, told Ars. “Whereas all my exploits were exploiting it with a brute force, theirs isn’t making a blind guess. Theirs actually leaks address info from the media server that will allow them to craft an exploit for whoever is using the device.”

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Affects versions 2.2 through to 4.0, and 5.0 and 5.1. Which is 41.1% of phones, according to latest data from Google. Would have thought that is more than 275m, actually.
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Microsoft apologizes for GDC party with skimpily-clad dancers » Reuters

Anya George Tharakan:

»Microsoft Corp apologized for hiring dancers dressed as skimpily-clad schoolgirls for its Game Developer Conference (GDC) afterparty in San Francisco on Thursday night, responding to media reports citing attendees’ pictures on Twitter and Instagram.

“It has come to my attention that at Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was absolutely not consistent or aligned to our values,” Microsoft’s head of Xbox Phil Spencer said in a statement.

“That was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated,” Spencer said.

Photos purportedly from the party surfaced on Twitter and Instagram, with many users expressing their anger at Microsoft’s actions.

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“Will not be tolerated”? What’s the penalty? Of course it would have been better if this hadn’t happened in the first place. Ah, San Francisco.
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Google could beat Apple at fashion – just like it did phones » Co.Design

Mark Wilson:

»”when you think about things people wear, they have really diverse styles. It isn’t the case that one style fits all, in any clothing or accessory or other kind of apparel,” David Singleton, VP of Android Wear, says. “A lot of our DNA working on Android has always been to create an ecosystem of partners to work together to create something bigger than the sum of its parts, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”

That strategy worked for Android Wear’s first fashion partnership, Fossil, which cites its Fossil Q Founder as its top-selling watch, period, of the 2015 holiday season. At $295, it’s more or less the Bentley of Fossils. But watches are just one small swatch of a much larger piece of fabric. Google’s open platform is poised to leave a much larger impact on the $1.2 trillion fashion industry than it has on smartphones—because while everyone is happy to use the same phone as the person sitting next to them, fashion is a form of personal expression. Even those who ride the latest trends don’t want to be matchy-matchy with everyone else on the street…

…what gets concerning about the viability of Apple’s strategy — if we really are to consider it a fashion company now — is how its closed approach not only will limit overall adoption of the Apple Watch, but limit the extent to which Apple can keep afloat in the sheer depth of wearables to come.

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This would be a strong argument if Android Wear weren’t miles behind Apple Watch in sales; and the article doesn’t offer any explanation for what would make its adoption increase.
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Silicon Valley’s unchecked arrogance » Medium

Ross Baird and Lenny Mendonca:

»Snapchat may be solving an important problem for well-connected young people in America who don’t have to worry about basic needs. But whether it’s unemployed young people in St. Louis looking for their next paycheck or a family in Flint, Michigan worried about clean water, many Americans have more immediate problems.

Because most of today’s entrepreneurs have their basic needs taken care of, their problem-solving often seems frivolous to the rest of the country.

Take Uber, for example. Uber’s great at solving how people with smartphones and disposable income can get around major cities — a small fraction of the global population. Uber is less good at helping the drivers, whose income is much lower than the riders, benefit from this new paradigm. Uber has hailed their impact as letting people work flexibly and use assets more productively, but strategically is investing hugely in driverless cars.

And we don’t blame Travis Kalanick (actually we do, but that’s not the point of this story). Uber’s founders’ experiences are as riders, not drivers. But imagine an ownership structure in which, for example, drivers could earn fractional equity in the company for each ride they gave. What if a percentage of the $50bn valuation were shared among the drivers, based on a merit-based system?

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It’s quite a thought, isn’t it? Now *that* would be a sharing economy.

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US government pushed tech firms to hand over source code » ZDNet

Terrific scoop by Zack Whittaker:

»The US government has made numerous attempts to obtain source code from tech companies in an effort to find security flaws that could be used for surveillance or investigations.

The government has demanded source code in civil cases filed under seal but also by seeking clandestine rulings authorized under the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a person with direct knowledge of these demands told ZDNet. We’re not naming the person as they relayed information that is likely classified.

With these hearings held in secret and away from the public gaze, the person said that the tech companies hit by these demands are losing “most of the time.”

When asked, a spokesperson for the Justice Dept. acknowledged that the department has demanded source code and private encryption keys before. In a recent filing against Apple, the government cited a 2013 case where it won a court order demanding that Lavabit, an encrypted email provider said to have been used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, must turn over its source code and private keys.

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The fact that Justice Department says it might demand the same from Apple does slightly imply that it doesn’t have it already.
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Can we teach robots right from wrong by reading them bedtime stories? » Public Radio International

Elizabeth Shockman:

»“We’re still at a simpler stage,” [computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Mark] Riedl says. “Natural language processing is very hard. Story understanding is hard in terms of figuring out what are the morals and what are the values and how they’re manifesting. Storytelling is actually a very complicated sort of thing.”

Eventually, however, Riedl hopes it will be possible to give robots entire libraries of stories.

“We imagine feeding entire sets of stories that might have been created by an entire culture or entire society into a computer and having him reverse engineer the values out. So this could be everything from the stories we see on TV, in the movies, in the books we read. Really kind of the popular fiction that we see,” Riedl says.

He doesn’t worry about robots being able to determine what right or wrong is in a story — whether it’s better to side with a heroic figure in a story or an anti-hero.

“What artificial intelligence is really good at doing is picking out the most prevalent signals,” Riedl says.

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Full transcript of TIME’s interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook » TIME

Nancy Gibbs and Lev Grossman:

»Q: As a business person, as the guy running Apple, should this go to Congress, they rule, goes against you, how bad is it for Apple from a business point of view?

COOK: I think, first of all it’s bad for the United States. Because going against us doesn’t just mean going against us. It means likely banning, limiting or forcing back doors for [everyone]. I think it makes the U.S. much more vulnerable. Not only in privacy but also in security. The national infrastructure, everything. And I can’t imagine it happening because it would be outlandish for something like that to happen. I think everybody has better judgment than that.

But at the end of the day, we’re going to fight the good fight not only for our customers but for the country. We’re in this bizarre position where we’re defending the civil liberties of the country against the government. Who would have ever thought this would happen?

«

Absorbing read; the only point where Cook seems to bodyswerve the question is when he’s asked “what if it’s about finding out where the terrorist’s nuclear bomb is ticking down, or the child is being tortured?” Which is of course the question which pours grease onto the slippery slope.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: risky USB-C cables, Google’s travel funnel, Uber’s tax diversion, bye-bye 747, and more

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This damn thing was silently eating huge chunks of iOS time – and battery – at least until last October. Photo by edowoo on Flickr.

Last chance this week to sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You won’t believe what happens next. (OK, you might.)

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

Google engineer Benson Leung finds a USB Type C cable that isn’t just dangerous on paper — it allegedly fried his hardware » Android Police

Bertel King:

Not all USB Type C cables are created equal. Some charge better than others. A number ignore USB spec so much that they run the risk of actually damaging your hardware. This could happen gradually, or in the worst-case scenario, it could be instant.

Googler Benson Leung has taken on the task of going through Amazon and reviewing whichever USB Type C cables he can get his hands on. We’ve recommended a number of them in past deals, feeling confident that we’re steering readers in the direction of safe accessories. We don’t test these products ourselves, so we consider what he does a real service.

Unfortunately, Leung may be taking an extended break. After plugging Surjtech’s 3M USB A-to-C cable (the item shows up now as not available, but here’s the 1M option you’ll presumably also want to avoid) into his 2015 Chromebook Pixel and two USB-PD Sniffer devices, he says the latter failed immediately. Resetting the analyzer and reflashing the firmware did not bring the hardware back to life.

Shouldn’t there be a proper certification system for USB-C? Having to rely on one Google engineer seems barmy. Especially in light of this.
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Facebook’s iOS bug led ComScore to overestimate time spent » AdAge

Tim Peterson, on a rejigging after it was realised that Facebook’s app used all sorts of trickery on iOS to make itself appear to be active (silent audio, etc) to the OS:

When looking at Facebook’s iPhone app specifically, total time spent [after some of the bugs – but note, not all – were fixed] was 40% lower in November compared to September [before the fix], and the average amount of time spent per person was 41% lower. For Facebook’s iPad app, total time spent was 39% lower, as was the average amount of time spent per person.

For comparison, total time spent in Facebook’s Android app increased by 2% and average time spent per user was flat when comparing September and November; ComScore’s Android figures are considered more reliable than its iOS figures because the firm is only able to take into account activity when the app is running in the foreground.

A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment.

Amazing – Facebook’s iOS app really was the spawn of the devil in the way it abused battery life through to October 2015. (And it’s hardly innocent now.)

That up-to-October period includes a lot of testing of new iPhones “in real-life situations” by gadget reviewers, as it happens.
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Google revamps travel search queries, almost making web results irrelevant » Search Engine Land

Barry Schwartz:

Google has quietly revamped the mobile user interface for travel-related searches. The result of the change makes it really hard to get to the organic web results once you click on the “more destinations” button. Let me walk you through the experience.

This is called “thrusting the user head-first into the sales funnel”.
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Why the sun is setting on the Boeing 747 » The Conversation

Guy Gratton:

Today, the industry has moved towards twin-engine aeroplanes such as the Boeing 777 and the Airbus A330, with three-engine aeroplanes being relatively unpopular because of the high labour costs of working on an engine bedded into the aeroplane fin. The four-engine 747 retained a clear place in the market because twin-engine planes must stay within a certain distance from an airport in case of engine failure. This allowed the 747 to achieve shorter journey times on the longest routes because it can use more direct flight paths.

However, improving engine reliability means authorities have slowly increased the distance a twin-engine airliner can fly from a runway, gradually reducing the advantage of having four engines. And of course, those newer, more reliable engines have also been bigger and more efficient.

Of course, the slowdown in 747 production doesn’t mean the original jumbo jet will disappear from our skies just yet. The latest models are much longer, bigger and operate with more modern engines and instruments than the earlier 747-100s (no longer do the crew have to take sextant readings through the cockpit roof), and the newer aircraft are likely to stay in service for at least another 20 years.

Then: “Where’s the sextant?”
Now: “Where’s the sextant app?”
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Uber’s Dutch businesses had zero employees in 2013 » Business Insider

Oscar Williams-Grut:

A European member of parliament has accused Uber’s European business of being “specifically designed, from the start, to reduce its tax liabilities.”

Labour’s Anneliese Dodds made the comment to Business Insider over email after we pointed out that two Dutch companies closely involved in running Uber’s UK business had no employees for up to a year after it launched here.

Uber employed eight people in its Amsterdam offices in 2013. But the corporate entity that immediately controlled the UK operation had none.

*grinds teeth* We’re now at the stage where if an American tech company pays more in tax than the average Briton we’re shocked.
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The end of Twitter » The New Yorker

Joshua Topolsky:

what should worry Twitter isn’t the value of its stock. (USA Today reported that, given its cash reserves, the service could run for another four hundred and twelve years with current losses.) What should worry Twitter is irrelevance, and there is growing data to suggest that that is where the company is headed. If Twitter’s real-time feed is its most powerful asset (and it is), it’s not difficult to see a future in which Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or even a newcomer like Peach (yes, I am citing Peach) focus enough on real-time news that they obviate the need for Twitter’s narrow, noisy, and oft-changing ideas about social interaction. Considering the fact that Kevin Weil, the head of product, left the company to join Instagram, it’s easy to imagine that service mutating or bifurcating into a speedier, more social platform for sharing links and having conversations. And, for many users—particularly young users, according to a recent survey—Snapchat is already their most important destination. We live in the Age of the Upgrade, and the generation raised on the Internet is the most fickle of brand champions: it loves something passionately, until it doesn’t. Then it moves on.

Ultimately, Twitter’s service is so confused and undifferentiated in the market that it’s increasingly difficult to make a clear case for its existence.

That’s not quite right; it’s more that lots of other services have come along and do similar things (text, pictures, links) but Twitter has always had the focus on The Moment – that it is the place where you see the world unfold, if the world cooperates. Nowhere else can do that.
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Why Alto’s Adventure will be free on Android » The Verge

Andrew Webster:

According to both [Ryan] Cash [of development company Snowman] and Noodlecake’s Ryan Holowaty, one of the main reasons they decided to make the game free on Android is piracy. “Piracy on Android is a much bigger issue on the platform especially in the case of premium iOS titles that charge more than $0.99,” Holowaty explains. When Noodlecake ported iOS game Wayward Souls to Android, for example, the studio found that only 11% of installed copies of the game were paid for. The studio even uploaded a special version of its game Shooting Stars on a number of torrent sites as an experiment, one that couldn’t be completed if you were playing a pirated copy.

There were also factors outside of piracy that contributed to the decision. “It made sense to us because of the state of mobile gaming and the reality that the vast majority of players do not pay for games,” says Holowaty. “In addition, Android has a much larger install base than iOS internationally, and games that release in countries like China and Japan are basically free-to-play only at this point. So to really capitalize on the market internationally, it made sense to have a free version.”

That’s Alto’s Adventure, which was released 12 months ago on iOS. Does anyone monitor how long it takes games and other non-platform apps to reach Android from iOS?
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Regulators are failing to block fraudulent adverts » FT.com

John Gapper:

Malware robots — “bots” in advertising jargon — are estimated to sit on 10 per cent of home computers in the US, browsing away in the background while the owners do other things, or sleep.

Second, the world of programmatic advert buying and selling is highly automated and bafflingly complex, filled with layers of intermediaries doing slightly different things for commissions. An advertiser places adverts through an online network contracted by its media buying agency. The network may find inventory on which to place them on an exchange such as Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange, into which thousands of publishers plug.

That is the simple version. There are more obscure ways to do it, enabled by automation and the internet. The result is that no one knows everyone with whom they trade, or can be sure where ads end up being shown. This makes it easy for fraudsters to infiltrate and infect the advertising supply chain.

Third, companies are desperate. The economics of digital publishing are under severe strain, with publishers being paid small amounts for millions of page views. They need traffic and some are tempted into buying it from brokers that can mysteriously rustle it up. Such publishers look the other way rather than delving too deeply into where the traffic comes from.

I’m currently reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s book about the people who realised – slowly but with growing horror and delight – that the bond market built around US subprime mortgage loans was unsustainable, and began to bet against it (“shorting” it). The film derived from the book is fabulous. Go and see it.

Reading the book, you try to think like those people: to look for opportunities in giant, unsustainable businesses whose precise workings aren’t really understood and whose collapse is inevitable, yet which the participants (with an interest in its continuation) insist is fine and dandy.

The online ad business begins to look like that to me.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Google’s ad stop, hacking phishers, the lost phone mystery, the adblocking browser and more

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A game with these will give you an insight into production processes. Photo by judy_and_ed on Flickr.

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

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

Why is your team falling behind? Ask ‘The Penny Game’ » Atomicobject

Eric Shull:

The book Velocity describes an enlightening simulation, a model of a simple manufacturing line. The game uses pennies and dice to represent pieces of work flowing through stations in a factory. It may be simple, but the penny game can improve our understanding of how software teams work, how the interaction of variable processes affect the system as as whole.

In the penny game, pennies come in at one end of the line, are processed by each station, then exit at the other end. This would be rather mundane but for one complication: each station does not always process the same number of pennies.

In the simulation, rolled dice indicate how many pennies each station is allowed to move.

This is fascinating – and gives you real insight into the problems that have to be overcome in manufacturing to tight deadlines. Imagine now if you were processing millions of “pennies”, except they were phones.
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Google disabled 49% more ads in 2015 » WSJ Digits blog

Alistair Barr:

More than 1,000 of Google’s 60,000 employees monitor and remove ads, an important task because the company gets about 90% of its revenue from advertising. It’s also been hit financially for not adequately monitoring ads. In 2011, the company agreed to pay $500m to settle allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that ads for Canadian online pharmacies contributed to the illegal importation of prescription drugs. In the settlement, Google acknowledged it acted “improperly.”

Google blocked more than 12.5m ads in 2015 for drugs that were unapproved or that made misleading claims, up from 9.6m a year earlier.

Ads making misleading weight-loss claims were a big source of user complaints last year, prompting Google to suspend more than 30,000 websites from its ad systems. It declined to give a comparable number for 2014.

Rob Leathern has the growth figure for ad disabling: it’s growing by 50% annually, but still a long way short of catching them all.
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How I stumbled upon thousands of Facebook passwords » Medium

“Rukshan”, a Colombo-based medical undergrad and hacker, received a Facebook phishing email and twiddled around with the phishing page:

after modifying the url I checked the folder which contained the php script that handles the post requests and I knew at that moment I hit the jackpot.

There was no index.html file to make sure no one else see the files in that directory or any .htaccess modification, well like I said phishing people are too bored to do all these tech stuff anyway, they’d rather get the passwords and go away.

So I opened the password.html file and I was greeted to the sight of hundreds of Facebook passwords, and by looking at the credentials one there was a pattern:

•Almost all of these accounts belonged to girls who are in their early 20s or teens.
• Almost all of the accounts belonged to females who are from Colombo.

Neat idea; neater still would be to wipe the files. But that would be one sizeable hack further (and probably illegal).
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Why don’t you have an Android version? (Or why we develop for iOS first) » Impossible Ventures

Joel Runyon:

Android users may download more apps, but they spend less money than iTunes users.

But that’s not just fake studies either, in our experience with Paleo (io) – a top 20 app in iTunes and ranked even higher in Google Play – we make about 3x the sales on our iTunes listing as we do on Google Play (even though we have a higher ranking in Google Play than iTunes).

Which brings me to the next point: apps are not free to make.

As an app developer, you have to spend time & money on this concept that you have in your head to bring it to reality. The  MVP on an app can cost anywhere between $2k and $20k to build and launch. It might not seem like much if you spend all your time raising VC money and have a $1M+ in the bank, but it can add up if you’re bootstrapping.

In fact, with every dollar you spend, there’s a very real cost (along with another equally as real, opportunity cost).

Of course the argument is completely different in Asia, where it’s generally Android-first (except in Japan, and who knows in China?).
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Finding the tennis suspects » Medium

Russell Kaplan, Jason Teplitz, and Christina Wadsworth:

The tennis world was sent reeling when BuzzFeed News and the BBC jointly published The Tennis Racket, which revealed “evidence of widespread match-fixing by players at the upper level of world tennis”. But BuzzFeed refused to publish the names of those players.

We dove into the data and found the names ourselves.

Unless you follow tennis really closely you won’t have heard of any of the names but one, and I do wonder if that one is thrown up by some weird quirk of the analysis. Seems robust, though. I think this might dissuade players – and administrators – from trying to hide this in future, knowing that there are people analysing public data for oddities. Will it put off the gamblers, though?
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Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones? » Fusion

Kashmir Hill:

It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together. An angry family came knocking at their door demanding the return of a stolen phone. Two months later, a group of friends came with the same request. One month, it happened four times. The visitors, who show up in the morning, afternoon, and in the middle of the night, sometimes accompanied by police officers, always say the same thing: their phone-tracking apps are telling them that their smartphones are in this house in a suburb of Atlanta.

But the phones aren’t there, Lee and Saba always protest, mystified at being fingered by these apps more than a dozen times since February 2015. “I’m sorry you came all this way. This happens a lot,” they’d explain. Most of the people believe them, but about a quarter of them remain suspicious, convinced that the technology is reliable and that Lee and Saba are lying.

“My biggest fear is that someone dangerous or violent is going to visit our house because of this,” said Saba by email. (Like this guy.) “If or when that happens, I doubt our polite explanations are gonna go very far.”

It’s billed as “a tech mystery”, and it really is.
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Brave is the name, ad-blocking the game of new browser » Computerworld

Former Mozilla CEO (for 11 days) Brendan Eich is behind a new browser for desktop and mobile which blocks all ads and tracking by default:

“We are building a new browser and a connected private cloud service with anonymous ads,” Eich said.

In effect, Brave will first scrub websites of most of their ads and all tracking, then replace those ads with its own. But the latter will be aimed not at individuals but at the anonymous aggregate of the browser’s user base. If enough people gravitate to the browser, Brave will share its ad revenue with users and content publishers.

“We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie,” Eich said. “By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot.”

No user data will be recorded or stored by Brave, Eich promised.

Elsewhere, Eich said that 55% of Brave’s revenue would be shared with site publishers, and 15% with users, who could then turn that money over to their favorite sites or keep it.

Al Hilwa, an analyst with research firm IDC, applauded the concept of creating an alternate revenue stream from traditional advertising, but wondered whether the browser could compete, even in the niche that Eich described. “This is a laudable idea, but fighting ‘free’ is always risky,” said Hilwa in an email reply to questions.

Not sure the world has an appetite for a new browser, but one can envisage adblocking becoming built in and then enabled, just as pop-up blocking in browsers went from “pop-up what?” to “optional” to “on by default”.
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Apple pushes to bolster market share in India » WSJ

Newley Purnell:

India’s smartphone market is expanding quickly and by next year it should overtake the U.S. as the world’s second-biggest behind China, according to research firm IDC.

Just 35% of mobile phones sold in India now are smartphones, meaning there is room for growth as people upgrade from basic devices. Indian consumers, however, tend to purchase inexpensive devices: The average smartphone selling price in the country is likely to fall to $102 in 2018 from $135 in 2014, IDC says.

Apple’s problem has been that the sweet spot for smartphone sales in India has been handsets that cost less than $150. In a country where the average person earns about $1,500 a year and even middle-class consumers make less than $8,000 a year, the standard iPhone — which usually costs between $500 and $1,000 without a data plan — was just too expensive for most people to consider.

“Buying an iPhone is so expensive,” said Sakshi Maurya, a 20-year-old university student in New Delhi. She said she doesn’t understand why an iPhone is five times as expensive as some locally available Android phones. “It’s a luxurious thing.”

India poses a particular marketing challenge for Apple: it’s a mixture of very tech-savvy buyers and low-income buyers. Which does it target first, and how?
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iPhone 6S/6S Plus underperform year-ago sales » Consumer Intelligence Research Partners

CIRP finds that the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus accounted for 67% of total US iPhone sales, with iPhone 6s at 48% and iPhone 6s Plus at 19%. In the December 2014 quarter, iPhone 6 and 6 Plus accounted for 75% of total US iPhone sales with 30% iPhone 6 Plus.

“The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus did quite well,” said Josh Lowitz, CIRP Partner and Co- Founder. “Yet, they did not dominate the same way that iPhone 6 and 6 Plus did a year ago. The total share of the new flagship models fell below the share of the then-new phones in 2014, and the large-format iPhone 6s Plus share of sales dropped compared to the iPhone 6 Plus as well. Customers continue to choose the year-old iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and even the two-year old iPhone 5S.”

CIRP can’t say whether total sales are higher or lower (it samples 500 buyers of Apple devices in the previous quarter), just the mix. This looks like a subtle price deflation of the iPhone as people opt for 2014’s models over 2015’s – after all, they look the same to other people, even if the newer models has extra features.
link to this extract

 

Issue 3434 – android – Add APIs for low-latency audio – Android Open Source Project – Issue Tracker

On Tuesday, Apple released its “Music Memos” app, which is intended to let musicians (of any standard) record little musical thoughts that come to them on the guitar or piano directly to their iPhone or iPad, and add musical accompaniment.

Android doesn’t have that, because as has been noted here before its audio latency is too long – over 10 milliseconds, which is the longest pro musicians can bear. So how long have developers been prodding Google to improve Android’s audio latency?

I am developer of real-time audio signal processing applications. I am interested in creating
applications for sale in the android marketplace, but found that android has no method for real-
time low latency audio.

This is the first entry in a bug/feature request which continues to the present (latest entry is June 2015). The date of the entry? July 31, 2009 – slightly over nine months after the first Android phone. Is six and a half years a long time for a feature request to lie open? (And here’s Google’s official list of device latencies. Look for any at 10ms or below.)

Apple effectively gets 100% of the professional audience through this feature.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Apple’s $8bn tax bill?, the tech funding squeeze, Friends Liquidated, Samsung ‘Live Photos’+ more

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At least you knew that the advert might be seen by real people. No such assurances in the online world. Photo by University of Pittsburgh Libraries 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 12 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why you should never consider a travel planning startup » Tnooz

Nadav Gur, principal at NG Vanguard Enterprises:

First, you need to acquire users. Guess what — if they’re not planning a trip, they’re not interested in travel planners. They don’t even acknowledge their existence.

People are bombarded by new websites/apps/brands all the time, and they filter for what’s relevant.

That’s what you see GEICO ads on TV all the time – cause the only way to get your attention those 1–2 times a year when you give a damn about insurance, is to be in front of you all the time.
No matter how much press/word-of-mouth/viral exposure you’re getting, it only registers if/when it happens to be relevant.

Inevitably this means that you too have to advertise a lot. And no, free user acquisition schemes like SEO do not work in 2015 at scale in established markets.

The Priceline Group spends over $2bn per year on Google Ads alone. Guess why?

Not so easily disrupted. And that’s before you get to the question of how many people spend enough on travel for any affiliate amounts to be worthwhile.
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Tech faces hour of reckoning as fundraising drops, layoffs rise » USA Today

Jon Swartz:

Is tech in for a rude awakening this year after a magic carpet ride the past few years?

The numbers, and recent actions by once-highflying start-ups, would seem to suggest so.

Consider: Mega-rounds, defined as funding of more than $100 million for venture capitalist-backed companies, are in free fall. The rate of private start-ups attaining unicorn status — a valuation of at least $1 billion — are grinding to a crawl. Friday layoffs at tech start-ups, deemed Black Fridays, are increasing. Bellwether tech stocks such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon have been taking it on the chin.

“It’s a time to re-calibrate — so many companies can’t burn extraordinary amounts of money forever,” says Sunil Panel, co-founder of Sidecar, a pioneer in the crowded ride-sharing space that shuttered operations on Dec. 31.

Last year, Silicon Valley projected unbridled swagger. Today, “there is definitely an era of reckoning,” says Chris Sacca, a venture investor with stakes in Uber and Twitter. “Reality is setting in.”

Not sure about “grinding to a crawl” (note to USA Today subs: things grind to a halt, or slow to a crawl), but the slowdown in stupid ideas is palpable.
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European antitrust chief takes swipe at privacy issue » The New York Times

Mark Scott on the EC’s Margrethe Vestager’s speech at the DLD conference:

“If a few companies control the data you need to cut costs, then you give them the power to drive others out of the market,” Ms. Vestager said at the DLD conference, a gathering of digital executives and policy makers.

She said that “it’s hard to know” how much data is given up when using an online messaging service.

“But it’s a business transaction, not a free giveaway,” she continued. “As consumers, we need to be treated fairly.”

Ms. Vestager’s warning shot in the often-rancorous privacy debate comes ahead of a Jan. 31 deadline for Europe and the United States to reach a new data-sharing agreement…

…A number of European executives echoed Ms. Vestager’s fears about how a small number of American tech companies could use their large-scale data collection to favor their own services over those of rivals. Among them was Oliver Samwer, the German entrepreneur who co-founded Rocket Internet, one of the region’s most high-profile tech companies.

“If someone like Google or Facebook has all of the data, then that’s not good,” Mr. Samwer said here on Sunday.

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Whatsapp goes free, says it won’t introduce ads » Mashable

Whatsapp readily acknowledges that killing its only source of income will raise questions about introducing third-party ads. But the company has a different idea.

“Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight,” the post reads.

We reckon Whatsapp will charge organizations and business for establishing channels with their users through the service, though no details were announced. The idea is by no means new; a Bloomberg report in May 2015 claimed Whatsapp might foray into B2C messaging in the “longer term.”

Perfectly sensible business idea, and could also turn it into a platform like WeChat (whose capabilities and inclusions dwarf those of any western app).
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Friends Reunited website to close down » BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

Friends Reunited launched in the year 2000 and was bought by broadcaster ITV for £175m ($250m) in 2005.

However, it failed to keep pace with other social networks.

It was sold to comic publisher DC Thompson for only £25m in 2009 and Mr Pankhurst wrote in a blog post that the company had offered it back to him a couple of years ago.

Pankhurst and business partner Jason Porter agreed to take on the site for a trial period to see if they could revitalise it.

“It became clear that most of the actual users coming to the site were using it purely as a messageboard,” wrote Mr Pankhurst.

“And I also realised that of the more than 10 million users registered, a lot had done so over a decade ago and hence their contact details were out of date. But importantly – it hasn’t covered its costs and like any business this can’t continue indefinitely. Therefore, whilst it’s sad, I believe it’s time to move on and put Friends Reunited to bed.”

Quite why ITV or DC Thompson bought it is one of those mysteries of business; it was never remotely a fit with either. So after ruining many marriages (of people who looked up old school flames), it’s handing that particular torch over to Facebook, where people can do exactly the same…
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Pakistan lifts ban on Youtube after launch of own version » Reuters

Tommy Wilkes:

Pakistan said on Monday it had removed a three-year ban on YouTube after the Google-owned video-sharing website launched a local version that allows the government to remove material it considers offensive.

Pakistan banned access to YouTube in September 2012 after an anti-Islam film, “Innocence of Muslims”, was uploaded to the site, sparking violent protests across major cities in the Muslim-majority country of 190 million people.

The Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom said in a statement that under the new version of YouTube, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority can ask for access to offending material to be blocked.

“On the recommendation of PTA, Government of Pakistan has allowed access to recently launched country version of YouTube for Internet users in Pakistan,” the ministry said.

“Google has provided an online web process through which requests for blocking access of the offending material can be made by PTA to Google directly and Google/YouTube will accordingly restrict access to the said offending material for users within Pakistan.”

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November 2013: Bitcoin under pressure » The Economist

The Economist doesn’t name writers, but I happen to know this is by Glenn Fleishman, writing back in 2013:

Server farms with endless racks of ASIC cards have already sprung up. But as part of Bitcoin’s design, the reward for mining a block halves every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every four years. Sometime in 2017, at the current rate, it will drop to 12.5 Bitcoins. If the returns from mining decline, who will verify the integrity of the block chain?

To head off this problem, a market-based mechanism is in the works which will raise the current voluntary fees paid by users (around five cents per transaction) in return for verification. “Nodes in the peer-to-peer network will try to estimate the minimum fee needed to get the transaction confirmed,” says Mr Hearn.

Bitcoin’s growing popularity is having other ripple effects. Every participant in the system must keep a copy of the block chain, which now exceeds 11 gigabytes in size and continues to grow steadily. This alone deters casual use. Bitcoin’s designer proposed a method of pruning the chain to include only unspent amounts, but it has not been implemented.

As the rate of transactions increases, squeezing all financial activity into the preset size limit for each block has started to become problematic. The protocol may need to be tweaked to allow more transactions per block, among other changes. A further problem relates to the volunteer machines, or nodes, that allow Bitcoin to function. These nodes relay transactions and transmit updates to the block chain. But, says Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins University, the ecosystem provides no compensation for maintaining these nodes—only for mining. The rising cost of operating nodes could jeopardise Bitcoin’s ability to scale.

Following Mike Hearn’s farewell the other day, I think Fleishman is allowed to say “told you so”.
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“Bitcoin Boulevard” no longer booming » Marketplace.org

Elizabeth Miller:

It’s been almost two years since a group of businesses in a Cleveland suburb started accepting digital currency bitcoin as a form of payment. The response at first was huge.  Visitors from around the world stopped at what became known as “Bitcoin Boulevard.” But now, the bitcoin hype has subsided. 

Along a lane of small retail stores, restaurants and bars, nine independent Cleveland Heights businesses banded together to form Bitcoin Boulevard in May 2014. But today, two of those businesses have closed, one is not actively accepting bitcoin, and a wine shop ceased most of its bitcoin transactions after the Ohio Division of Liquor Control banned alcohol purchases with the digital currency.

Mitchell’s Fine Chocolates is one of the original nine businesses. Owner Bill Mitchell says he started seeing a drop in bitcoin payment when its value dwindled at the beginning of 2015.

“Since the latter part of the winter of this year going through the end of October, it’s been deader than a doornail,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell isn’t the only one seeing a drop in bitcoin business. Shawn Paul Salon says it has only had six bitcoin transactions in the past 18 months. That’s a lot less exciting than everyone had hoped.

Reality check.
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The problem with Adgorithms’ prospectus » Investors Chronicle

Alex Newman, on the AIM-listed ad tech company whose shares have plummeted by 80% from their IPO:

So what went wrong? This is what the company said in its first profit warning, on 9 October, explaining a “significant” and indefinite impact on revenue:

“In recent weeks, the online advertising market has experienced severe disruption, resulting in a loss of supply for major online advertising exchanges and a drop in demand from major media buyers.”

In fact, this disruption had begun several months before, even prior to Adgorithms’ listing. In April, media trading platform news site adexchanger.com reported that AppNexus – which, together with fellow ad exchange Adap.TV related to the majority of Adgorithms’ 2014 revenues – had started screening out unverifiable media inventory. AppNexus’ chief executive, who followed several other ad exchanges when he launched the clean-up in November 2014, later acknowledged that more than half of the impressions flowing through his platform were failing the test. This has had the dual effect of suppressing Adgorithms’ revenues and – according to Peel Hunt analyst Alex DeGroote – increasing the cost of digital media.

Adgorithms certainly should have known about AppNexus’ clean-up plans before listing, and was aware that at least one of its peers had been hit by the broader changes. In April, fellow Israeli ad tech group Matomy Media (MTMY) issued a profit warning, citing the “implementation by one of the leading media trading platforms [this was AppNexus] of a new media verification and screening tool that resulted in an immediate decrease in the amount of digital media available for purchase”.

“Unverifiable” inventory is what can also be called “fraudulent” ads – shown to bots on sites that humans never visit. It’s worth visiting the AdExchanger link (“screening out unverifiable…”) which points to just how much junk and fraud there may be going on.

Seriously, online ads have ended the age of “half of what I spend on advertising is wasted”. Now you have no idea what proportion it may be if you’re using an ad network.
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Samsung to launch Live Photos rival called Vivid Photo with Galaxy S7 » Android Geeks

Marius Maria:

Back in September, Apple launched the iPhone 6S which comes with Live Photos, a feature which captures 1.5 seconds of video before and after a picture is taken. HTC’s Zoe Capture was capable of doing the same thing long before Live Photos, but this gimmick only became cool now because Apple has it on its phones.

But Samsung wants to jump into the Live Photos bandwagon, too. According to one of our sources the software engineers of the South Korean phone maker are testing a Live Photos-like feature that is supposed to debut with the Galaxy S7 later this year.

Not sure about the “But” beginning that second paragraph. All sorts of words fit better: “Now”, “Predictably”, “Unsurprisingly”. Cold comfort for HTC.
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App economy jobs in the United States (Part 1) » Progressive Policy Institute

Michael Mandel:

Is 1.66 million a reasonable figure for US App Economy employment? This figure is based on our estimate of roughly 550,000 core app economy workers. That’s out of roughly 5 million people employed in computer and mathematical occupations or as computer and information systems managers. In effect, core app economy workers make up roughly 11% of the tech workforce.

Informal discussions with tech executives suggest that it’s reasonable to attribute roughly 11 percent of the tech workforce to the App Economy in the United States. Large portions of software development involve backend systems, such as financial and operation databases, which are not mobile specific. On the other hand, software development focused on online consumer or individual interactions must necessarily involve apps, because Americans increasingly access the Internet via their smartphone or other mobile devices. Going forward, mobile is likely to become more important rather than less, further pushing up the number of App Economy jobs.

We can do another comparison. In 2007, before the introduction of the iPhone, there were roughly 3.9 million people employed in computer and mathematical occupations or as computer and information systems managers. Since then tech employment has risen by 1.1 million, suggesting roughly half the net gain in tech occupational employment since 2007 has come from the App Economy.

For the job breakdown, it puts iOS at 1.4m (87%), Android at 1.1m (70%), BlackBerry at 107,000 (6%) and Windows Phone/Mobile at 45,000 (3%). Adds up to 166% because some people (two-thirds?) work on multiple ecosystems. (Via Horace Dediu.)
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Apple may be on hook for $8bn in taxes in Europe probe » Bloomberg Business

Adam Satariano:

The European Commission contends that Apple’s corporate arrangement in Ireland allows it to calculate profits using more favorable accounting methods. Apple calculates its tax bill using low operating costs, a move that dramatically decreases what the company pays to the Irish government. While Apple generates about 55% of its revenue outside the US, its foreign tax rate is about 1.8%. If the Commission decides to enforce a tougher accounting standard, Apple may owe taxes at a 12.5% rate, on $64.1bn in profit generated from 2004 to 2012, according to Larson, a litigation analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.

Apple is perhaps the highest-profile case of US companies facing scrutiny from officials in Europe. Starbucks, Amazon and McDonalds also have had its tax policies questioned.

Several senators came to the defense of US companies on Friday. In a letter to US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, bipartisan members of the Senate Finance Committee asked the administration to make sure that European regulators won’t impose retroactive penalties like those that would hit Apple.

Odd if Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter aren’t also in this.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: boarding pass hacks, Microsoft Surfaces, the truth about Android Auto, ad fraud explained, and more

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Kindle display at Waterstone’s: they were coming soon, now they’re gone. Photo by DG Jones on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Contains no additives. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

What’s in a boarding pass barcode? A lot » Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs was contacted by a reader who had looked at a friend’s boarding pass:

“I found a website that could decode the data and instantly had lots of info about his trip,” Cory said, showing this author step-by-step exactly how he was able to find this information. ‘

“Besides his name, frequent flyer number and other [personally identifiable information], I was able to get his record locator (a.k.a. “record key” for the Lufthansa flight he was taking that day,” Cory said. “I then proceeded to Lufthansa’s website and using his last name (which was encoded in the barcode) and the record locator was able to get access to his entire account. Not only could I see this one flight, but I could see ANY future flights that were booked to his frequent flyer number from the Star Alliance.”

The access granted by Lufthansa’s site also included his friend’s phone number, and the name of the person who booked the flight. More worrisome, Cory now had the ability to view all future flights tied to that frequent flyer account, change seats for the ticketed passengers, and even cancel any future flights.

The information contained in the boarding pass could make it easier for an attacker to reset the PIN number used to secure his friend’s Star Alliance frequent flyer account. For example, that information gets you past the early process of resetting a Star Alliance account PIN at United Airline’s “forgot PIN” Web site.

Worrying. Keep it on your phone instead.
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Every device is a compromise, part 2 » Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson:

immediately after the SP4 was introduced, we were shown the Surface Book. Which is a laptop. And Panos Panay, the presenter, started out by talking about all the things a laptop does that the Surface Pro does poorly – a better typing experience, a bigger screen, and so on. This was one of the most bizarre juxtapositions I’ve ever seen at a tech event. After 30 minutes of talking about how the Surface Pro 4 could replace your laptop with no compromises, the very same presenter offered up a laptop which was clearly better, because it didn’t make certain of those compromises.

Taking a step back for a minute, both products look really promising. I’ll withhold final judgment until I get to use these devices (or at least until others I trust have done so and shared their opinions). But this “no compromise” nonsense continues to do a massive disservice to Microsoft and to its customers.

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Microsoft has warmed my cold cynical heart with hot new hardware » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

The brand new Surface Book is, like the original Surface Pro, another effort at complete reinvention. The Surface Book deconstructs the laptop and reconstitutes it in the shape of a hybrid device of the sort we’ve never seen before. Microsoft didn’t just make a new tablet with a detachable keyboard, it designed a whole new hinge and attachment mechanism, and it intelligently split up the internal components to deliver both a light and sleek tablet and a powerful laptop. The discrete Nvidia graphics chip sits among a battery of batteries inside the keyboard dock, liberating the tablet of most of its heft when power is not a priority, but keeping it substantially PC-like when the whole thing is connected and operating as one.

I am hugely impressed by the clear-eyed purpose underpinning every one of the decisions that Microsoft has made with its two Surface devices introduced today. The boundlessly charismatic Panos Panay — now in charge of both the Lumia and Surface product lines at Microsoft — simply didn’t allow a moment’s questioning or dubiety. Every time he presented a new feature or change, he asked the rhetorical “why?” question himself, and he answered it convincingly. Here are a thousand levels of pressure sensitivity for the stylus, and here’s what you can do with that. Here’s a keyboard with 1.6mm of travel and here’s why you’d want to mash your fingers against it. Panay elicited something that every tech company strives for, but few achieve: desire.

Presentation is so important, as is explaining why something needs to exist; that’s something Steve Jobs really used to do well. Apple doesn’t have anyone who can enunciate the need for something to exist in the way he could, and technology really needs that skill.

That said, Microsoft hasn’t priced these (or its Surface Pro 4) cheaply. Which means the rest of the PC OEMs will be left scrapping for dollars while, if these sell at all, Microsoft reaps both the hardware and software profits.
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Verizon scraps its exclusive Sony phone before it even launches » CNET

Roger Cheng:

Sony said both companies agreed on the cancellation. “The decision was made after we have taken into consideration such factors as the competitive landscape and launch timing,” said a company spokeswoman. A Verizon spokesman echoed those sentiments without offering additional specific details.

There have been hints of problems with the Xperia Z4v, which was a modified version of the Xperia Z4 that added a larger battery and wireless charging. After its initial unveiling in June, both companies grew silent about the product. A Sony event held in New York over the summer was dominated by games from PlayStation, its virtual reality system, and other products like cameras, with only a single small area dedicated to showing off the Xperia Z4v.

Then there is the Xperia Z5 family, which debuted at the IFA trade show in September. The announcement of the three new phones rendered the Xperia Z4v outdated before it even launched.

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Fraud is a million $ business; Here’s how they’re doing it » LinkedIn

Mike Nolet digs into a “golf” site which had fencing content (huh) and an absurd number of video views per visitor (177 per week?) but whose referrers seemed to be porn sites, among others:

as I mentioned in my disclaimer there’s never a way to know for sure, but here’s what I suspect:

• Unsurprisingly, I think the site is fake. No real users that go there.
• Traffic is sourced from adware programs and porn sites and show the site in popups, most likely hidden from view.
• They used to do display fraud, but got busted, and so started putting fake display ads to make the site seem more legitimate. They still get away with Video.
• They run a series of checks to try to determine whether or not they are being watched, and if they are, the sites behave normally.
• When they’re not being watched that they spam as many videos into a popup as they can.
• Gross they are generating $1.5m/week in ad impressions on this one site which is clearly part of a network of sites.
• Now, this traffic was caught, but even if only 2% of their traffic gets past the filters, it’s still a million $ business.

Scary. And this is just one site in a huge network. Hurrah for online advertising!
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13 cool facts about the 2017 Porsche 911 » Motor Trend

Jonny Lieberman:

There’s no technological reason the 991/2 doesn’t have Android Auto playing through its massively upgraded PCM system. But there is an ethical one. As part of the agreement an automaker would have to enter with Google, certain pieces of data must be collected and mailed back to Mountain View, California. Stuff like vehicle speed, throttle position, coolant and oil temp, engine revs—basically Google wants a complete OBD2 dump whenever someone activates Android Auto. Not kosher, says Porsche. Obviously, this is “off the record,” but Porsche feels info like that is the secret sauce that makes its cars special. Moreover, giving such data to a multi-billion dollar corporation that’s actively building a car, well, that ain’t good, either. Apple, by way of stark contrast, only wants to know if the car is moving while Apple Play is in use. Makes you wonder about all the other OEMs who have agreed to Google’s requests/demands, no?

That’s Acura, Chevrolet, Honda, Hyundai, and Volkswagen to start with. (Insert joke about the VW data being worthless.) None of the stories which used this snippet then bothered to ask Google if it’s true – apart from Android Police, which was told:

we take privacy very seriously and do not collect the data the Motor Trend article claims such as throttle position, oil temp and coolant temp. Users opt in to share information with Android Auto that improves their experience, so the system can be hands-free when in Drive, and provide more accurate navigation through the car’s GPS.

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Apple acquires startup developing advanced AI for phones » Bloomberg Business

Jack Clark and Adam Satariano:

Apple [has] acquired Perceptio, a startup developing technology to let companies run advanced artificial intelligence systems on smartphones without needing to share as much user data.

The company’s leaders, Nicolas Pinto and Zak Stone, are both established AI researchers who specialize in developing image-recognition systems using deep learning. Deep learning is an approach to artificial intelligence that lets computers learn to identify and classify sensory input…

Perceptio’s goals were to develop techniques to run AI image-classification systems on smartphones, without having to draw from large external repositories of data. That fits Apple’s strategy of trying to minimize its usage of customer data and do as much processing as possible on the device.

Apple said last week that it had acquired a U.K.-based software startup that made AI technology to create Siri-like digital personal assistants capable of having longer conversations.

Apple really is going all-in on AI. Which of course it needs to.
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Waterstones is removing Kindles from stores » The Bookseller

Lisa Campbell:

Waterstones is removing Amazon’s Kindle devices from many of it stores as sales “continue to be pitiful”.

The company’s managing director James Daunt said there had been no sign of a “bounce” in Kindle sales, so the company was “taking the display space back” to use for physical books instead. 

He told The Bookseller: “Sales of Kindles continue to be pitiful so we are taking the display space back in more and more shops. It feels very much like the life of one of those inexplicable bestsellers; one day piles and piles, selling like fury; the next you count your blessings with every sale because it brings you closer to getting it off your shelves forever to make way for something new. Sometimes, of course, they ‘bounce’ but no sign yet of this being the case with Kindles.”

David Prescott, chief executive of Blackwell’s, has also confirmed that fewer e-reading devices were being sold at his chain. “We’re not seeing a great deal of people who are buying an e-reader for the first time now,” he said. “People are buying e-reader replacements, but that’s it.”

Douglas McCabe, analyst for Enders, said it was “no surprise” Waterstones was removing Kindle device sales from its shops. “The e-reader may turn out to be one of the shortest-lived consumer technology categories,” he said.

I dunno, have to compete with the Kinect there.
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Taking pictures with flying government lasers » Generalising

Andrew Gray:

A few weeks ago, the Environment Agency released the first tranche of their LIDAR survey data. This covers (most of) England, at varying resolution from 2m to 25cm, made via LIDAR airborne survey.

It’s great fun. After a bit of back-and-forth (and hastily figuring out how to use QGIS), here’s two rendered images I made of Durham, one with buildings and one without, now on Commons:


The first is shown with buildings, the second without. Both are at 1m resolution, the best currently available for the area. Note in particular the very striking embankment and cutting for the railway viaduct (top left). These look like they could be very useful things to produce for Commons, especially since it’s – effectively – very recent, openly licensed, aerial imagery…

You can play too – just download QGIS (open source, Windows/Mac/Linux) and find the place where you live. Oh, LIDAR? Laser Interferometry Detection And Ranging (though Wikipedia has it as “Laser Imaging”). You’re welcome. The whole Generalising blog is worth browsing if you like people noodling with data. They do it wonderfully.
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Scrivener crashes after upgrading to El Capitan (OS X 10.11) » Literature & Latte Support

There is a bug in El Capitan that can cause crashes in 32-bit applications when they try to access font data. Because Scrivener is 32-bit, some of our users have reported frequent crashes when Scrivener is used after updating OS X to 10.11 El Capitan. These crashes often occur when Scrivener is launched, but sometimes they may occur while it is in use.

The fix involves a little twiddling in the Terminal. Included because if you’re doing writing of any sort, you should use Scrivener. Also available on Windows.
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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.

Start up: the Foodpanda takeaway scam, watch iOS 9 grow!, 2 billion lines of Google, and more

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“Hi! You look like you want an (artificially) intelligent conversation!” Photo by RomitaGirl67 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. May cause. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mixpanel Trends » Mixpanel Mobile Analytics

The link is to the iOS 9 adoption curve from Mixpanel; it’s live, so when you click through it’ll be the latest figures. At the time of writing, three hours after iOS 9 went live, its adoption was at 3.2%, against 7.2% for “older than iOS 8” and 89.6% for iOS 8. (Apple’s own stats on September 14 were 87% iOS 8, 11% iOS 7, 2% earlier.)
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The trouble with Foodpanda » Livemint

Ashish Mishra with a terrific tale of a much-funded startup which didn’t quite figure out that not everyone is honest:

Let’s say you are a restaurant. Now, place 10 orders using 10 names or even the same name, each for Rs.300. Every order is a takeaway. Pay online using the BOGO voucher, a campaign (Buy One Get One) run by Foodpanda. So for Rs.300, get Rs.300 free. So for a Rs.600 order, you paid only Rs.300. How much does Foodpanda have to return to you, the restaurant? Rs.600. After deducting 12% as its cut, Rs.528. How much did you make in the process? Rs.228 . Did you have to deliver that order? Nope. So, a straight profit of Rs.228.

Now, let’s say you processed 100 such orders a day. For a month. Total investment: Rs.9 lakh. Reimbursed by Foodpanda: Rs.15.84 lakh. Your total gain, by just processing fake orders: Rs.6.84 lakh.

Now imagine you are not the only restaurant on the platform doing this.

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Issue 178139 – android – Android full lockscreen bypass – 5.1.1 PoC » Android Open Source Project

John Gordon at the University of Texas at Austin:

Android 5.1.1 Lockscreen Bypass
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Summary: Unlock a locked device to access the homescreen, run arbitrary applications, and enable full adb access to the device. This includes access to encrypted user data on encrypted devices.
Prerequisites: Must have a password lockscreen enabled. (PIN / swipe untested)
Hardware: Nexus 4
Software: Google factory image – occam 5.1.1 (LMY47V)

Attack details:
Pasting a sufficiently large string into an input field will cause portions of the lockscreen to become unresponsive and allow the user to terminate those processes. An attacker can construct a large string by typing characters into the Emergency Dialer, then select all + copy + paste repeatedly to increase the string size exponentially. Once the string has been pasted, either into the Emergency Dialer or the lockscreen password prompt, attempting to type more characters or performing other intaractions quickly and repeatedly causes the process to become overloaded and crash, or produce a dialog allowing the user to kill the process. If done in a password prompt in the foreground of the camera application, this crash results in the homescreen or Settings applcation being exposed.

PIN/swipe is untested, rather than safe (as far as we can see). This seems to be pretty hard to do – the video is 18 minutes long, involving lots of copy/pasting. It’s not really a giant flaw like Stagefright; and Apple has had some egregious lockscreen bypasses in the past. (Though none in iOS 8 that I’ve seen.) The problem though is that this doesn’t help Android’s reputation among businesses considering whether to buy it. It’s not the exploit; it’s the suggestion of vulnerability.
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Popping the publishing bubble » Stratechery

Ben Thompson, in his weekly “free to view” article, says that iOS 9’s adblockers are just going to finish what was already happening:

It is easy to feel sorry for publishers: before the Internet most were swimming in money, and for the first few years online it looked like online publications with lower costs of production would be profitable as well. The problem, though, was the assumption that advertising money would always be there, resulting in a “build it and they will come” mentality that focused almost exclusively on content product and far too little on sustainable business models.

In fact, publishers going forward need to have the exact opposite attitude of publishers in the past: instead of focusing on journalism and getting the business model for free, publishers need to start with a sustainable business model and focus on journalism that works hand-in-hand with the business model they have chosen. First and foremost that means publishers need to answer the most fundamental question required of any enterprise: are they a niche or scale business?

• Niche businesses make money by maximizing revenue per user on a (relatively) small user base
• Scale businesses make money by maximizing the number of users they reach
The truth is most publications are trying to do a little bit of everything: gain more revenue per user here, reach more users over there.

Worth it for the illustrations. You should subscribe so he can afford an iPad Pro and a stylus.
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Google is 2 billion lines of code — and it’s all in one place » WIRED

Cade Metz:

Google has built its own “version control system” for juggling all this code. The system is called Piper, and it runs across the vast online infrastructure Google has built to run all its online services. According to [Google’s head of… big stuff? Rachel] Potvin, the system spans 10 different Google data centers.

It’s not just that all 2 billion lines of code sit inside a single system available to just about every engineer inside the company. It’s that this system gives Google engineers an unusual freedom to use and combine code from across myriad projects. “When you start a new project,” Potvin tells WIRED, “you have a wealth of libraries already available to you. Almost everything has already been done.” What’s more, engineers can make a single code change and instantly deploy it across all Google services. In updating one thing, they can update everything.

There are limitations this system. Potvin says certain highly sensitive code—stuff akin to the Google’s PageRank search algorithm—resides in separate repositories only available to specific employees. And because they don’t run on the ‘net and are very different things, Google stores code for its two device operating systems — Android and Chrome — on separate version control systems. But for the most part, Google code is a monolith that allows for the free flow of software building blocks, ideas, and solutions.

The point about Android and Chrome being on separate version control systems is one to note. Can’t merge the code until those two come together.
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IPv6 will get a big boost from iOS 9, Facebook says » Computerworld

Stephen Lawson:

Even when all the pieces are in place for IPv6, iOS 8 makes an IPv6 connection only about half the time or less because of the way it treats the new protocol. With iOS 9, and IPv6 connection will happen 99% of the time, Saab predicts. 

IPv4 is running out of unused Internet addresses, while IPv6 is expected to have more than enough for all uses long into the future. Adoption has been slow since its completion in 1998 but is starting to accelerate. The release of iOS 9 may give a big boost to that trend. 

“Immediately, starting on the 16th, I’m expecting to see a lot more v6 traffic show up,” said Samir Vaidya, director of device technology at Verizon Wireless. About 50% of Verizon Wireless traffic uses IPv6, and Vaidya thinks it may be 70% by this time next year as subscribers flock to the iPhone 6s. 

Apple’s change should help drive more IPv6 use on Comcast’s network, too. About 25% of its traffic uses the new protocol now, and that figure could rise above 50% by early next year, said John Brzozowski, Comcast Cable’s chief IPv6 architect. 

This is the point, again and again. Android has the installed base; but iOS adoption is so rapid that it can drive change almost immediately.
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Barbie wants to get to know your child » The New York Times

James Vlahos:

Hello Barbie is by far the most advanced to date in a new generation of A.I. toys whose makers share the aspiration of Geppetto: to persuade children that their toys are alive — or, at any rate, are something more than inanimate. At Ariana’s product-testing session, which took place in May at Mattel’s Imagination Center in El Segundo, Calif., near Los Angeles, Barbie asked her whether she would like to do randomly selected jobs, like being a scuba instructor or a hot-air-balloon pilot. Then they played a goofy chef game, in which Ariana told a mixed-up Barbie which ingredients went with which recipes — pepperoni with the pizza, marshmallows with the s’mores. ‘‘It’s really fun to cook with you,’’ Ariana said.

At one point, Barbie’s voice got serious. ‘‘I was wondering if I could get your advice on something,’’ Barbie asked. The doll explained that she and her friend Teresa had argued and weren’t speaking. ‘‘I really miss her, but I don’t know what to say to her now,’’ Barbie said. ‘‘What should I do?’’

‘‘Say ‘I’m sorry,’ ’’ Ariana replied.

‘‘You’re right. I should apologize,’’ Barbie said. ‘‘I’m not mad anymore. I just want to be friends again.’’

We now return you to our regular scheduled programming of “Philip K Dick short stories brought to life.” Take your pick: War Game, Second Variety or The Days of Perky Pat?
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One great reason to update to iOS 9 – a nasty silent AirDrop attack is in town » Forbes

Australian researcher Mark Dowd, who heads up Azimuth Security, told FORBES ahead of Apple’s iOS 9 release on Wednesday that the flaw allowed anyone within range of an AirDrop user to install malware on a target device and tweak iOS settings so the exploit would still work if the victim rejected an incoming AirDrop file, as seen in the video below.

Users should update to iOS 9 and Mac OS X El Capitan, version 10.11, as soon as possible to avoid losing control of their phones and PCs to malware. Any iOS versions that support AirDrop, from iOS 7 onwards, are affected, as are Mac OS X versions from Yosemite onwards. There are few protections outside of upgrading, other than turning AirDrop off altogether. The service is off by default, though it’s possible to start it running from the lockscreen.

By carrying out what’s known as a “directory traversal attack”, where a hacker enters sections of the operating system they should not be able to access, Dowd found it was possible to exploit AirDrop and then alter configuration files to ensure iOS would accept any software signed with an Apple enterprise certificate. Those certificates are typically used by businesses to install software not hosted in the App Store and are supposed to guarantee trust in the provenance of the application. But, as FORBES found in a recent investigation into the Chinese iPhone jailbreaking industry, they’re often used to bypass Apple security protections.

I dunno, getting AirDrop to work is usually the biggest challenge I face. (The mitigation is pretty easy on any version – turn off Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or turn Airdrop to accept files from Contacts Only or off; this leaves Wi-Fi and Bluetooth untouched.)
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Google taken to court to uncloak ebook pirates » TorrentFreak

Early June, GAU [the Dutch trade organisation representing dozens of book publishers in the Netherlands] reported that Google appeared to be taking steps to prevent rogue sellers from offering illegal content via its Play store. The group also noted that BREIN was attempting to obtain the personal details of the ‘pirate’ seller from Google.

Unsurprisingly that wasn’t a straightforward exercise, with Google refusing to hand over the personal details of its user on a voluntary basis. If BREIN really wanted the seller’s identity it would have to obtain it via a court order. Yesterday the anti-piracy group began the process to do just that.

Appearing before the Court of The Hague, BREIN presented its case, arguing that the rogue seller was not merely a user of Google, but actually a commercial partner of Google Play, a partnership that earned revenue for both parties.

“The case is clear,” BREIN said in a statement.

“There was infringement carried out by an anonymous seller that was actually a commercial ‘partner’ of Google via Google Play. This is how Google refers to sellers in its own terms of use.”

BREIN says that ultimately Google is responsible for the unauthorized distribution and sales carried out via its service.

“There is no right to anonymously sell illegal stuff, not even on Google Play while Google earns money,” the anti-piracy group concludes.

In the UK I think this would be a fairly straightforward “Norwich Pharmacal” case. Wonder if Holland has anything comparable.
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Start up: wearables grow, adblocking as chemo?, how silent calls lead to fraud, Acer woes, and more

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Replace “George Davis” with “Google” and you get its message. Photo by ross mcross on Flickr.

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

Apple debuts at the number two spot as the worldwide wearables market triples in 2Q15 » IDC

In its first appearance in the wearables market, Apple finds itself within striking distance of the established market leader, Fitbit. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, Apple shipped a total of 3.6 million units in the second quarter of 2015 (2Q15), just 0.8m units behind Fitbit’s 4.4m units. Total shipment volume for the quarter came to 18.1m units, up 223.2% from the 5.6m units shipped in 2Q14.

“Anytime Apple enters a new market, not only does it draw attention to itself, but to the market as a whole,” noted Ramon Llamas, Research Manager for IDC’s Wearables team. “Its participation benefits multiple players and platforms within the wearables ecosystem, and ultimately drives total volumes higher. Apple also forces other vendors – especially those that have been part of this market for multiple quarters – to re-evaluate their products and experiences. Fairly or not, Apple will become the stick against which other wearables are measured, and competing vendors need to stay current or ahead of Apple. Now that Apple is officially a part of the wearables market, everyone will be watching to see what other wearable devices it decides to launch, such as smart glasses or hearables.”

This rather mixes oranges and.. um, because the Fitbit is not a “watch”. I’d prefer to see “watches” and “bands” separated, but that might be tricky. Telling that none of the Android Wear watches did more than 0.6m; and that Samsung’s early lead hasn’t translated into, well, anything. The figure for Apple Watches feels high, though.

Also: “hearables”?
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The realities of a $50 smartphone » Engadget

Daniel Cooper:

“If you had asked me this a year ago, I would have said that it was impossible.” Wayne Lam is the principal telecoms analyst for IHS, a market intelligence firm that looks at the technology market. As part of the experiment, he offered to cook up a hypothetical device that, if someone built it today, could probably be mass-produced for under $50. He worked out that the upper limit for a bill of materials would be around $42, and worked backward to build out a spec list from there. It wasn’t pretty, since “any time you put a constraint on the design, like a maximum price, you end up having to make compromises.”

Really impressive. Of course, that doesn’t leave any margin for distribution, marketing, or R+D, but it’s amazing the market has come so far in just eight years.
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Dark patterns : user interfaces designed to trick people

Harry Brignull and others:

Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of the creator as being sloppy or lazy but with no ill intent. This type of bad design is known as a “UI anti-pattern”. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind. We as designers, founders, UX & UI professionals and creators need to take a stance against Dark Patterns.

You can send them your examples via the site.

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Acer honourary chairman Shih would ‘welcome’ takeover bid » The Register

Paul Kunert:

The major players, such as HP, Lenovo and Dell, would gain nothing on the technology front from buying Acer – which derived 65% of its revenues from PCs last year – save for perhaps some low-margin market share.

Surely it would be cheaper to let the company continue to wither on the vine?

More than a decade ago, Acer said it was the PC maker of the future, based partly on the relatively tiny workforce – it employs 7,000 heads, which is fewer than some vendors employ in their country operations.

As we pointed out recently, Acer is running out of runway and something has to give. We doubt any of the majors in the industry will want to buy the business, and the politics involved in merging with Taiwanese rivals HTC or Asus make such a move unlikely, though not entirely implausible.

Becoming a question of whether Acer or HTC will be forced into someone else’s arms first. Acer is bigger, but shrinking fast.
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Handling App Transport Security in iOS 9 » Google Ads Developer Blog

Tristan Emrich, mobile ads developer relations:

All iOS 9 devices running apps built with Xcode 7 that don’t disable ATS [App Transport Security, which forces HTTPS connections] will be affected by this change. The following log message appears when a non-ATS compliant app attempts to serve an ad via HTTP on iOS 9:

“App Transport Security has blocked a cleartext HTTP (http://) resource load since it is insecure. Temporary exceptions can be configured via your app’s Info.plist file.”

While Google remains committed to industry-wide adoption of HTTPS, there isn’t always full compliance on third party ad networks and custom creative code served via our systems. To ensure ads continue to serve on iOS9 devices for developers transitioning to HTTPS, the recommended short term fix is to add an exception that allows HTTP requests to succeed and non-secure content to load successfully.

Publishers can add an exception to their Info.plist to allow any insecure connection.

Translation: ads are insecure, and trackable, but let them through. (Obviously, many app developers will need to for revenue.) Once again, Apple is forcing the pace on advertisers.
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Why phone fraud starts with a silent call » All Tech Considered : NPR

Aarti Shahani:

Maybe you gave your number to Target or some other big retailer that got hacked. Maybe you entered an online raffle to win a free iPhone.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, these robocalls are on the rise because Internet-powered phones make it cheap and easy for scammers to make illegal calls from anywhere in the world.

That initial call you get, with silence on the other end, “[is] essentially the first of the reconnaissance calls that these fraudsters do,” Balasubramaniyan says. “They’re trying to see: Are they getting a human on the other end? You even cough and it knows you’re there.”

The next step is gathering information about your bank or credit card account. You get a call with a prerecorded voice that tells you, for example, “[we’re] calling with an important message about your debit card. If you are the cardholder please stay on the line and press 1. Otherwise please have the cardholder call us at 1-877…”

If you’re thinking about ignoring it, the message tries to scare you into paying attention with a warning: “A temporary hold may have been placed on your account and will be removed upon verification of activity.”

That number leads to another automated system that prompts you to share personal details like your date of birth, your card number and secure PIN, the expiration date, your Social Security number.

It can be tricky because many real banks have a similar system.

Foolish of the banks, really.
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Improving quality isn’t anti-competitive » Google Europe Blog

Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel:

The response we filed today [to the EC] shows why we believe those allegations [of stifling competition] are incorrect, and why we believe that Google increases choice for European consumers and offers valuable opportunities for businesses of all sizes.

The Statement of Objections [SO] says that Google’s displays of paid ads from merchants (and, previously, of specialized groups of organic search results) “diverted” traffic away from shopping services. But the SO doesn’t back up that claim, doesn’t counter the significant benefits to consumers and advertisers, and doesn’t provide a clear legal theory to connect its claims with its proposed remedy.

Our response provides evidence and data to show why the SO’s concerns are unfounded. We use traffic analysis to rebut claims that our ad displays and specialized organic results harmed competition by preventing shopping aggregators from reaching consumers. Economic data spanning more than a decade, an array of documents, and statements from complainants all confirm that product search is robustly competitive. And we show why the SO is incorrect in failing to consider the impact of major shopping services like Amazon and eBay, who are the largest players in this space.

Funny thing: I’ve skim-read the SO (it’s long – 100+ pages) and it picks away at lots of these traffic analysis claims (which were themselves dismantled thoroughly by Foundem, one of the complainants to the EC). Among the SO’s complaints was that Google didn’t provide enough data about shopping traffic. I don’t think the EC is going to roll over on this one. Nor, evidently, is Google. Though in arguing “choice for consumers” it’s using the wrong antitrust doctrine – that applies in the US, but not the EU.

Can’t find where Google has published its response, either. Surely it would want that public too? Also: an analysis of Google’s blogpost by “Focus On The User” (anti-Google, not involving Microsoft).
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Apple’s content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech » Doc Searls Weblog

Searls calls “tracking” ads (eg Doubleclick etc) “adtech”, as opposed to simple brand ads:

• Apple’s iAd is for brand advertising, not adtech. At least that’s what I gather from Apple’s literature. This puts them on the side of [advertising] wheat, and Apple’s competitors — notably Google, Facebook and all of adtech — on the side of chaff.

• Apple has put a big stake in the ground on the subject of privacy. This is clearly to differentiate itself from adtech in general, and from Google and Facebooks in particular.

• Brand advertising is more valuable to publishers than adtech. Its provenance and value are clear and obvious, it sells for better prices, and — while some of it may be annoying — none of it shares its business model with spam, which adtech does. Nor is brand advertising corrupted by fraud, which is rampant in adtech. So rampant, in fact, that T.Rob Wyatt, a security expert, calls adtech “the new digital cancer.”

This is why content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech. It is also why it is essential for everybody involved in the advertising-funded online ecosystem to start separating the wheat from the chaff, and to make clear to everybody that the wheat — plain old brand advertising — is (to mix metaphors) the baby in the advertising bathwater.

(Searls was taken to task for using “chemo” and “cancer”; he pointed out that he has had loved ones die of cancer, and “I’m not sure they would have disapproved of the metaphor.”)

As bandwagons go, the anti-adtech one is rolling downhill at top speed. I’ve already got three different ones I’m testing on an iOS 9 phone.
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The Labour Purge…. and social media privacy. » Paul Bernal’s Blog

Bernal notes that the Labour Party is trawling social media to try to find out if newly joined members really “support” the party:

We should not expect people to have social media profiles – let alone identifiable social media profiles. What is more, this is particularly important for some of the people that Labour should care about and support the most. People may be ‘digitally excluded’, for a start – but they might also have extremely valid reasons to be pseudonymous on the internet. Vulnerable people, in particular, might need pseudonymity to protect them from those to whom they are vulnerable. Whistleblowers. People with abusive spouses. People with abusive or manipulative employers. Trade unionists, for example, might have that status used against them – there’s a reason that Trade Union membership is considered ‘sensitive personal data’ under the Data Protection Act. People might wish not to have their religion revealed to all and sundry. People might wish to separate their personal and professional lives for perfectly good reasons.

There is much more to say on this subject – but the underlying issue is the one that is most disturbing. What the Labour Party is doing may well breach the Data Protection Act – there is a discussion to be had here – but it is certainly at least verging on the creepy.

The Labour Party has long had a problem with privacy; it tried really hard to introduce ID cards (with biometrics!), and was only stopped by losing an election.
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