Tag Archives: google

Start up: explaining XcodeGhost, Monument Valley goes VR, will Venice sink BlackBerry?, and more

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What’s the common factor in iOS devices bricked by trying to update to iOS 9? Photo by marc falardeau 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.

Monument Valley’s creators just made a stunning VR game » WIRED

Liz Stinson:

Like most early VR games, Land’s End is in many ways an experiment designed to discover what does and doesn’t work in the medium. Ustwo’s Ken Wong, Peter Pashley and Dan Gray spent more than a year developing the game, with many stops and starts and do-overs along the way. “It took a long long time to reinvent all these fundamental things about how you move around a world and how you interact,” says Wong.

Things like navigation took some toying with. “We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to let people move around these worlds in a way that felt kind of almost subconscious,” says Pashley. You make your way through the levels by glancing at “lookpoints,” shimmering spheres of light that burst open and propel you forward when you look at them. The motion is slow and controlled; it feels almost like a moving sidewalk at the airport.

This looks terrific. Presently for Samsung Gear VR + Oculus only. I’d happily buy the soundtrack.
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BlackBerry Venice » YouTube

A pretty much full-size touchscreen Android phone sort of running some sort of BlackBerry software. With a big keyboard that slides out from below. See for yourself.

Notice that he never actually tries to type anything. This may be significant: the top end of the phone would have to be very light to stop it overbalancing.

I wonder (with @charlesknight) whether this is John Chen’s last attempt at hardware; if this flops – which seems pretty likely – there’s little point carrying on. In a few quarters, BlackBerry should have swallowed Good Technology completely and can live on software and services revenues, which are much more profitable.
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What you need to know about iOS malware XcodeGhost » Mac Rumors

The story so far (which I did notice over the weekend; I apologise for not including it in Monday’s Start Up): impatient iOS developers in China downloaded hacked copies of Xcode from Baidu servers because the ones from Apple came over slow-as-snails links from the US. The hacked copies included malware libraries that were included by default in any apps developed with them. The apps got through Apple’s approval process – and were then noticed by Palo Alto Networks, which itself noticed it on Weibo after analysis by Alibaba researchers.

Q How does XcodeGhost put my iOS devices at risk?
iOS apps infected with XcodeGhost malware can and do collect information about devices and then encrypt and upload that data to command and control (C2) servers run by attackers through the HTTP protocol. The system and app information that can be collected includes:

• Current time
• Current infected app’s name
• The app’s bundle identifier
• Current device’s name and type
• Current system’s language and country
• Current device’s UUID
• Network type

Palo Alto Networks also discovered that infected iOS apps can receive commands from the attacker through the C2 server to perform the following actions:

Prompt a fake alert dialog to phish user credentials; hijack opening specific URLs based on their scheme, which could allow for exploitation of vulnerabilities in the iOS system or other iOS apps; read and write data in the user’s clipboard, which could be used to read the user’s password if that password is copied from a password management tool.

Q Can XcodeGhost affect users outside of China?
Yes. Some of the iOS apps infected with XcodeGhost malware are available on the App Store in countries outside of China. CamCard, for example, is a popular business card reader and scanner app available in the United States and several other countries, while WeChat is a popular messaging app in the Asia-Pacific region.

Q Why would some Chinese developers download Xcode from Baidu?
Xcode is a large file that can take a long time to download from Apple’s servers in China, leading some developers to download Xcode from unofficial sources.

Q How are Apple and Chinese developers dealing with XcodeGhost?
Palo Alto Networks claims that it is cooperating with Apple on the issue, while multiple developers have updated their apps to remove the malware.

There’s a list of affected apps.

This is a significant attack, but it’s also a remarkably hard one to do more than once. I suspect the next attack will involve some sort of man-in-the-middle on security certificates that Apple will surely enforce on Xcode downloads.

Rich Mogull has a great writeup in which he says it’s about the economics of security:

Apple doesn’t believe all attacks can be stopped, and certainly not those from governments or well-funded criminal organizations, but if you make the cost of attack higher than the benefits, you knock out entire categories of bad guys and reduce the impact on users.

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French regulator rejects Google appeal on scope of ‘right to be forgotten’ » WSJ

Sam Schechner:

France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, said that Google must now adhere to a formal order in May directing it to apply Europe’s right to be forgotten to “all domain names” of the search engine, including google.com—or face possible sanctions proceedings.

Established just over a year ago by the European Union’s Court of Justice, the right to be forgotten gives European residents the ability to request that search engines remove links that appear in searches for their own name. Google has applied the ruling, but insisted on only removing results from European domain names, such as google.fr, not from google.com.

Google on Monday reiterated that it doesn’t believe the French regulator has the authority to expand the scope of the rule. “As a matter of principle we respectfully disagree with the idea that one national data protection authority can assert global authority to control the content that people can access around the world,” a spokesman said.

Ever so tricky. The US has claimed jurisdiction over sites that are hosted and authored elsewhere in the world that use the “.com” suffix; is that the same?

One suspects that Google will – if it loses in any appeal – work around this by offering filtered content to any IP address identified as being in France, just as it does to identify who to serve .fr content to.
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Apple iPhones, iPads BRICKED by iOS 9’s ‘slide-to-upgrade’ bug » The Register

Shaun Nichols:

Reg reader Carlton told us today: “I have just updated my iPad to iOS 9 and found to my horror that once it has ‘successfully’ installed and then gone through the initial setup phase, I cannot progress past the second request to ‘slide to upgrade’ page.

“The setup order is ‘passcode’ – ‘slide to upgrade’ – ‘select Wi-Fi’ – ‘slide to upgrade’ at which point no further actions are possible.”

He was eventually able to upgrade his device to the new iOS using Apple’s suggested clean install procedure, though he said it took multiple attempts to accomplish.

Other fans reported similar problems when they tried to get the latest and greatest version of iOS on their iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch players.

While the issue appeared to be largely relegated to devices running iOS 7 skipping over to iOS 9, Apple would not confirm if that was in fact the case. No word yet on when a fix for the bug will be released.

Apple already has its hands full patching flaws with its firmware updates.

Commenters seem to concur: works fine if you’re just going from iOS 8, kills the device if you’re trying to skip upwards from iOS 7. An Apple support note says “This will be resolved soon in an upcoming iOS update”. Let’s see. (Meanwhile, Apple said in an aside in its press release about the release on Friday of the new iPhone that 50% of devices contacting the App Store as of September 19 were using iOS 9. In less than a week?!)
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How to record a phone call on your iPhone – no additional kit of apps required » BBC College of Journalism

Marc Settle discovered (via Mashable) a terrific way to record a call:

A statement is never as good as an interview, which is where the ‘advanced’ function comes in, even if it needs a little willingness from your guest.

Call them from your iPhone and explain what you plan to do. Press ‘add call’ and then call the phone number you’re ringing them from. Yes, you did read that correctly: you need to call your own number from your own phone. As you’re on the phone, your answerphone will kick in. At this point tap ‘merge calls’: you and your interviewee will now be recording your conversation on your answerphone. End the call and then proceed as above to access the recording.

This reminds me of the “huh??” method that used to exist for running (old, old) pre-OSX Macs entirely from RAM, no disk access required, which meant gigantic battery life: you loaded a minimal OS, and then dragged your hard drive into the Trash. Honest. You just had to remember not to empty it.
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Why we need a competition inquiry into the UK broadband market » TalkTalk BlogBlog

Dido Harding, TalkTalk chief executive:

Over 500 telecoms companies exist in the UK, but most depend on a shared set of wires that connect individual homes to our networks. When BT was privatised, it was allowed to keep control of this network on behalf of the whole industry, and it is managed today by Openreach, a BT company. It’s like one gas supplier owning the national grid, or one airline owning Heathrow.

Unfortunately, that system isn’t working because BT has used its sole control over the network to its advantage, rather than to benefit the network or customers. Openreach makes a lot of money, but it hasn’t invested enough in maintaining the network, leaving customers suffering from poor quality of service and facing long waits to repair faults or install new lines. It allows BT to abuse its control to restrict choice for customers. It also makes it harder for the regulator to enforce the rules and be a powerful consumer champion. Put simply, it’s a tired model not fit for a superfast future.

Openreach is TalkTalk’s biggest supplier; we couldn’t operate as a business without it. So naturally, I’ve got a vested interest in this debate. But what matters about today’s letter is the breadth of the coalition calling for change. It includes some of the biggest companies in the industry who have tried – and failed – for years to improve the system, as well as smaller players battling to bring innovation and choice to the market, but let down by Openreach.

Agree. Where do I sign up too?
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600 ad companies blacklist The Pirate Bay » Music Week

Coral Williamson:

The Pirate Bay has been blacklisted by more than 600 advertisers.

The blacklist, comprising 10 sites so far, is the result of a partnership between anti-piracy group Rights Alliance and Swedish Advertisers, an association of advertisers with more than 600 member companies.

Swedish Advertisers has published a list of  recommendations designed to keep advertisers away from unlicensed sites, including observing good ethics, avoiding advertising contracts that include bulk sales, and considering where ads are ultimately placed.

OK, I have to ask. Is it unethical to use adblockers on torrent sites?
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The number of people using search engines is in decline » Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly:

search is facing a huge challenge. The paid search business was built on a desktop browser model. And consumers are increasingly shifting to mobile. On mobile, consumers say they just don’t search as much as they used to because they have apps that cater to their specific needs. They might still perform searches within those apps, but they’re not doing as many searches on traditional search engines (although Google, Bing, and so on do power some in-app search engines.)

It sounds obvious, but there’s new data to show it’s a trend that’s really happening. And it could have a severe impact on Google’s (and Bing, and Yahoo’s) core search business. Indeed, data from eMarketer shows search ad spend growth is set to decline from 2014 through to 2019.

Speaking at digital trade show Dmexco in Cologne earlier this week, global communications agency ZenithOptimedia’s chief digital officer Stefan Bardega and research company GlobalWebIndex’s head of trends Jason Mander gave a mobile trends presentation. It was the slides on search that made the audience really sit up and start taking notes and photos.

And it’s this:

App usage and voice search both contribute too. How do you sell an ad beside a voice search?
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Advertising is unwanted, day 2 » Scripting News

Dave Winer, in a followup to a post of a day earlier, suggesting news orgs need to find new ways to bring their readers together:

Here’s an idea for a geography-based news org (i.e. a newspaper) – give readers a place to talk about movies, and then sponsor movie nights based on their interests. Encourage people to provide lists of their favorite movies and do some collaborative filtering. Then collate the reviews and present them alongside your professional reviewer’s post. Work with the movie industry. It can have incredible promotional value, for the movie, the theater, you, the whole idea of going to the movies (as opposed to watching on your home TV, phone or tablet). What’s great for your community is they get to meet people who like the same kinds of movies they do. And you get to know who they are! It’s such a huge, easy win, all-around. That more local news orgs haven’t done it tell you how stuck in old print models we still are. This is an example of a kind of idea that really can only blossom online.

Creating community is a great idea. But what if the community lives all over the world? How does this physically-based idea work?
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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
—–
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: hacked ATMs in Mexico, Cyanogen + Cortana, iPhone forecasts, Apple TV v consoles, and more

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Content blockers are days away from going live with iOS 9. Photo by Dave Lanovaz on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Wash at 40 degrees. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Should police have the right to take control of self-driving cars? » Techdirt

Karl Bode:

Just how much power should law enforcement have over your self-driving vehicle? Should law enforcement be able to stop a self-driving vehicle if you refuse to? That was a question buried recently in https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2388355/rand-rr928.pdf (pdf) which posits a number of theoretical situations in which law enforcement might find the need for some kind of automobile kill switch:

“The police officer directing traffic in the intersection could see the car barreling toward him and the occupant looking down at his smartphone. Officer Rodriguez gestured for the car to stop, and the self-driving vehicle rolled to a halt behind the crosswalk.

Commissioned by the National Institute of Justice, the RAND report is filled with benign theoreticals like this, and while it briefly discusses some of the obvious problems created by giving law enforcement (and by proxy intelligence agencies) this type of power over vehicle systems and data, it doesn’t offer many solutions.

That’s quite a question. Then again, would you try to make a getaway in an SDC?
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Intelligent machines: Making AI work in the real world » BBC News

Eric Schmidt – you know, the Google guy – wrote a piece for the BBC’s machine learning week. Most of it is blah. Then there’s this bit:

In the next generation of software, machine learning won’t just be an add-on that improves performance a few percentage points; it will really replace traditional approaches.

To give just one example: a decade ago, to launch a digital music service, you probably would have enlisted a handful of elite tastemakers to pick the hottest new music.

Today, you’re much better off building a smart system that can learn from the real world – what actual listeners are most likely to like next – and help you predict who and where the next Adele might be.

As a bonus, it’s a much less elitist taste-making process – much more democratic – allowing everyone to discover the next big star through our own collective tastes and not through the individual preferences of a select few.

This is being taken as a dig at Apple Music with its human-curated lists. Well, sure, but the “radio” function in Apple Music isn’t human-curated. And music choice “democratic”? Isn’t that how it already works?
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iOS dev: why Apple TV is game over for Xbox One and PS4 » Forbes

Dave Thier:

It’s hard to imagine an immediate threat to Microsoft MSFT -0.93% Xbox One and Sony PS4 running games like Halo and Uncharted. But I talked to Jeff Smith, CEO of the popular Karaoke app Smule , and a developer who’s been with the iOS platform since the beginning. He says that Xbox One and PS4 fans shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the Apple TV as a serious gaming contender. The key, he says, is that Apple is a developer-friendly platform, and that means more content, and, as iOS has shown, more quality content as well.

“We think it’s significant if you consider the console market today: it’s been a market where there have been high barriers of entry to get into that market,” Smith says. “You have to get Sony and Microsoft or Nintendo to get you on to the platform, you have to have a custom deal, and they’re all proprietary platforms. With Apple bringing tvOS, which is a subset of iOS, onto a console-like platform, we think it lowers the barrier of entry. And I think you’ll see a lot more developers on the console market than ever before.”

Suitably overdone headline, but it’s certainly a mistake to dismiss the Apple TV out of hand. It has an install base of 25m, which isn’t much (the PS3 and Xbox 360 are at about 70m, the PS4 and Xbox One rather less so far), but the next version will attract a lot more people. And you don’t need to pay to put a game on iOS.
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Tracking a Bluetooth skimmer gang in Mexico » Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

“–Sept. 9, 12:30 p.m. CT, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico: Halfway down the southbound four-lane highway from Cancun to the ancient ruins in Tulum, traffic inexplicably slowed to a halt. There was some sort of checkpoint ahead by the Mexican Federal Police. I began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have brought along the ATM skimmer instead of leaving it in the hotel safe. If the cops searched my stuff, how could I explain having ultra-sophisticated Bluetooth ATM skimmer components in my backpack?”

The above paragraph is an excerpt that I pulled from the body of Part II in this series of articles and video essays stemming from a recent four-day trip to Mexico. During that trip, I found at least 19 different ATMs that all apparently had been hacked from the inside and retrofitted with tiny, sophisticated devices that store and transmit stolen card data and PINs wirelessly.

In June 2015, I heard from a source at an ATM firm who wanted advice and help in reaching out to the right people about what he described as an ongoing ATM fraud campaign of unprecedented sophistication, organization and breadth. Given my focus on ATM skimming technology and innovations, I was immediately interested.

Krebs gets up to some amazing jaunts.
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Google found guilty of ‘abusing dominant market position’ in Russia » WSJ

Olga Razumovskaya and Alistair Barr:

Google has been found guilty in a rapid Russian antitrust probe, a spokesperson for the country’s antitrust regulator told The Wall Street Journal.

In February, Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service opened a probe into Google for alleged anticompetitive practices related to how the company bundles apps with its Android mobile operating system.

The company was found guilty of “abusing its dominant market position,” but not of “unfair competition practices,” the regulator told The Wall Street Journal.

The Russian agency will have 10 business days to issue its ruling on the case in full. “We haven’t yet received the ruling,“ Google’s Russia spokeswoman said. “When we do, we will study it and determine our next steps.”

Form an orderly queue behind the EC, Canada and the rest, please, Russia. Also, how do you have dominance abuse but not unfair competition?
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Cortana on Cyanogen: CEO Kirt McMaster on building the next great smartphone OS » IB Times

David Gilbert:

Cyanogen has not announced any partnerships with hardware manufacturers beyond what is already on the market, but to really reach the masses, it will have to partner with a well-known name – and for companies like Sony, HTC and LG, all struggling to make Android work, Cyanogen could be an enticing option.

Of course, with Microsoft’s Lumia range failing to capture any significant market share since the company bought Nokia’s mobile phone division, it, too, could be on the lookout for something new.

While McMaster tells it like it is about Microsoft’s smartphone woes, he says Microsoft is still a great company and builds great services, one of which is going to be key in building the next version of Cyanogen – and that is Cortana.

Microsoft’s digital personal assistant has grown significantly since it began life on the company’s smartphones and this summer had its biggest update to date when it was deeply integrated into Windows 10 and Microsoft’s Edge browser.

McMaster revealed that Cyanogen is working with Microsoft to deeply integrate Cortana into the next version of Cyanogen OS. This is key to catapulting Cyanogen into the mass market, he asserts: Cortana is currently available as an app on Android, but in order for it to make a real difference, it needs to be able to be integrated at the OS level so that its full potential can be leveraged.

So how would that work in a phone running Google services? Wouldn’t Cortana and ‘OK Google’ fight like cats in a sack?
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Next up: iPhone preorder sales data » BTIG Research

Walter Piecyk:

The focus of investors is squarely on the number of phones that can be sold over the next three and a half months. Our estimate is that it can sell 80 million units in the December quarter versus a consensus view that expects little to no growth this year. We believe 3D touch is a much bigger deal that many think and wrote about that and our hands-on experience with all of Apple’s new products. (Link). Of course the bigger issue is that 70% of existing iPhone users are carrying 5s or older models, of which the 6 and 6S models are big upgrades. As we have discussed in the past, the lower hurdles to upgrade those phones in the United States could be a key driver of sales.

Last year at this time Apple shipped 74.5m phones; only Samsung has previously shipped 80m or more smartphones in a quarter (which it’s done four times).

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Hands on with three iOS 9 content blockers: 1Blocker, Blockr and Crystal » TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

ahead of iOS 9’s release, a number of companies and indie developers have been building content blockers of their own and testing them out with iOS 9’s sizable group of beta testers.

While many consumers will likely gravitate toward AdBlock Plus because of their familiarity with the brand’s name and reputation, there will be a good handful of new apps on the horizon as well, which are also worth a look.

As she says, you can choose from super-twiddly, a bit twiddly, and simple. I’d bet that simple will actually be the one people pick.

Meanwhile…
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Advertisers complain about format & approval obstacles with iOS 9’s News app » Apple Insider

Roger Fingas:

Although publishers like CNN, Time, and Vox are making most of their content available in the app, some are said to be planning to offer a few dozen stories a day at most. Standouts in that sense include companies that depend on paid subscription models, such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Some ad executives have complained that common tools like real-time placement bidding aren’t in place for the News launch, and that Apple is requiring 48 hours notice before approving a campaign. The company is also allegedly demanding that pre-roll ads before video segments get their own approval.

Apple is moreover refusing to support Google’s DoubleClick ad platform. Edward Kim, a member of the online marketing company SimpleReach, argued to the Post that Apple is attempting to use News to build up iAd. That platform has struggled to gain ground in a market dominated by Google — whereas Google ads can reach virtually any device, iAd is unusable in some key spaces, like Android.

“Real-time placement bidding” is what quickly leads to malware and “bounce you out to App Store install” ads.
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Google reveals plans to increase production of self-driving cars » The Guardian

Mark Harris (who has done so much great original reporting on this topic):

[Sarah] Hunter [head of Google X] also shared new details about how the existing driverless prototypes work. “All [the car] has is a ‘go’ button, a ‘please slow down and stop’ button and a ‘stop pretty quickly’ button,” she said. “The intention is that the passenger gets in the vehicle, says into microphone, take me to Safeway, and the car does the entire journey.”

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Google’s self-driving cars currently require highly detailed maps of the areas they’re operating in, with centimetre accuracy of road features like lanes, roundabouts and traffic lights. They are also limited to 25mph so that Google could get them on to public roads without expensive and time-consuming crash tests. Even more importantly, they need safety drivers able to take control back in an instant if the system malfunctions. California is slowly working on regulations that will pave the way for the operation of completely driverless vehicles by the public.

All of this means that Google is unlikely to move its self-driving technology into full production any time soon. “We haven’t decided yet how we’re going to bring this to market,” admitted Hunter. “Right now, our engineers are trying to figure out … how to make a car genuinely drive itself. Once we figure that out, we’ll figure out how to bring it to market and in which way. Is it something that we manufacture at scale for sale to individuals? Or is it something that we own and operate as a service?”

Is it a taxi, a bus or an owned device? Seems trivial; actually gets to the heart of what a “car” is.
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Start up: Apple’s AI hires, Spotify’s smart music, why refugees have smartphones, and more

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What’s the motive for downloading the top 40 every week from a torrent site? Completism? Photo by DigitalTribes on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Handle with care. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Apple ups hiring, but faces obstacles to making phones smarter » Reuters

Apple has ramped up its hiring of artificial intelligence experts, recruiting from PhD programs, posting dozens of job listings and greatly increasing the size of its AI staff, a review of hiring sites suggests and numerous sources confirm.

The goal is to challenge Google in an area the Internet search giant has long dominated: smartphone features that give users what they want before they ask.

As part of its push, the company is currently trying to hire at least 86 more employees with expertise in the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, according to a recent analysis of Apple job postings. The company has also stepped up its courtship of machine-learning PhDs, joining Google, Amazon, Facebook and others in a fierce contest, leading academics say.

But some experts say the iPhone maker’s strict stance on privacy is likely to undermine its ability to compete in the rapidly progressing field.

It’s certainly the case that Apple’s privacy stance is, as Sameer Singh says, its “strategy tax” (a strategy tax is an approach to a business area that prevents you exploiting it to the maximum: “Windows everywhere” was Microsoft’s strategy tax that prevented it doing mobile really well, Google’s is the need to collect data). The question is how much you do need that pooled personal information (as opposed to anonymous information) to do this well.
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Field Notice: FN – 63697 – Protective Boot on Certain Network Cables Might Push the Mode Button and Cause an Unexpected Reset on the 48-Port Models of Cisco Catalyst 3650 and 3850 Series Switches » Cisco

“Certain” network cables being “pretty much every Ethernet cable you buy”. Like this:

Design screwups like this deserve their own Tumblr. Of note: the Cisco 3650 was released on October 10 2013; this note is dated October 30 2013. Of course it wasn’t caught in testing, but one suspects that customers discovered this pretty much on day one.
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Inside Spotify and the future of music » Tech Insider

Alex Heath:

Spotify’s progress in sorting its library of 35 million songs can be traced back to The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company that was created within the MIT Media Lab a decade ago. Spotify bought The Echo Nest last March in what was reported to be a $100m deal.

Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest, tells Tech Insider that his team of about 70 people are focused on delivering “the right listening experience at the right time” within Spotify.

They do this by analyzing the makeup of every song, how people are talking about music online, and how people are listening to it. While the company continues to work with clients like Rdio, Microsoft, Sirius, and Vevo, as it did before it was sold, its most cutting-edge work is developed and honed for Spotify.

One of The Echo Nest’s first projects for Spotify, reported last September on FiveThirtyEight, was developing dossiers of every user’s listening habits, which are now called “taste profiles.”

Ajay Kalia, who oversees the project, tells us they realized early on that there’s an important distinction between the music you listen to and music you actually like.

For example, just because I play a lot of instrumental, ambient music while I’m at work doesn’t mean that I have a particular affinity for those kinds of artists. And just because your significant other plays a lot of country music while you’re both in the car doesn’t mean you want a bunch of country playlists shoved at you.

This “listen to but not like” has often been the problem about music. This makes it sound as though Echo Nest is human-curated, which it really isn’t.
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Google nears re-entry to mainland China » The Information

Amir Efrati:

As part of its broader China push, Google is expected to offer new incentives to phone makers to upgrade Android phones to the latest versions of the operating system, says one person briefed on its plans. The company wants more phones to run the advanced version of Android so that the software platform and experience can be more consistent for app developers and consumers.

As more Chinese app developers look to extend their apps beyond China’s borders and more non-Chinese app makers try to tap the Chinese market, Google wants to ensure all the apps work well across Android devices globally. Thus, hardware partners that will distribute Android Wear or Google Play in China will need to adhere to certain global compatibility standards, says the person familiar with the plan.

For its app store, Google has promised authorities that it will follow local laws and block apps that the government deems objectionable, say the people familiar with Google’s plans. In some parts of the world and among Internet policy wonks, this move will be viewed as a back-tracking from Google’s posture following its departure from China in 2010. At that time Google ended its engineering operations in China and moved its Chinese-language Web-search engine to a Hong Kong-based Web domain, out of reach of mainland China officials, after being breached from a cyber attack that it linked to the Chinese government.

Authorities denied involvement in the attack, which successfully breached many American companies and is known as Operation Aurora. At the time, though, Google co-founder Sergey Brin publicly compared China to the totalitarian Soviet Union in which he grew up. (Mr. Brin is now part of Alphabet, Google’s soon-to-be parent company, and isn’t involved in Google’s day-to-day affairs.)

Some forces within Google always believed that the company’s and Mr. Brin’s response was rash. It should have viewed the China-based hacking, which occurred in late 2009, as a natural consequence of being a major tech company in an age of increasing cyber attacks by all governments.

A long extract (but it’s a long article). That last paragraph is telling; Eric Schmidt was the pro-China voice, Brin the no-to-China voice, and Larry Page effectively had the casting vote back in 2010. Sundar Pichai clearly leans towards Eric Schmidt’s stance: better to deal than to stand on principle.
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Police raid fails to dent UK Top 40 music piracy » TorrentFreak

Police arrested a Liverpudlian who was a determined uploader of the top 40 releases to torrent sites:

Yet again it appears that the arrest last week was a case of rightsholders and police targeting low-hanging fruit. Using widely available research tools we were able to quickly uncover important names plus associated addresses, both email and physical. It seems likely that he made close to no effort to conceal his identity.

Due to being in the police spotlight it will come as little surprise that there was no weekly upload of the UK’s Top 40 most-popular tracks from OldSkoolScouse last Friday, something which probably disappointed the releaser’s fans. However, any upset would have been very temporary indeed.

As shown below, at least four other releases of exactly the same content were widely available on public torrent sites within hours of the UK chart results being announced last Friday, meaning the impact on availability was almost non-existent.

But who, seriously, actually wants to listen to all the top 40 tracks week after week? It would be pretty numbing even if you worked in the business. I bet this guy barely listened to the music. He, and the downloaders who waited avidly for the songs, strike me as more like stamp collectors: uninterested in what is conveyed, obsessed with completing sets.
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iPhone supply chain makers set to see strong sales in September, say sources » Digitimes

Monica Chen and Steve Shen:

Incoming parts and components orders for the new iPhones are even stronger than orders for the iPhone 6 devices in the corresponding period of a year earlier, indicated the sources, adding that shipments of updated iPhones will once again squeeze sales of other vendors including Samsung Electronics, Sony Mobile Communications and LG Electronics, commented the sources.

Thus, sales of the new iPhones are expected to dominate smartphone sales globally in the fourth quarter of 2015 as current sales of LG Electronics’ G4, HTC’s One M9/M9+ series products and Sony Mobile’s Xperia Z3+ have been lower than expected, indicated the sources.

To lessen the impact of the release of the new iPhones, Samsung has been implementing a “Ultimate Test Drive” program that encourages current iPhone users to pay US$1 to test its Galaxy Note 5 or Galaxy S6 Edge+ for one month.

Good luck with that, Samsung.
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Academic study reveals urban and rural broadband speed gaps » ISPreview UK

Mark Jackson:

The study (‘Two-Speed Britain: Rural Internet Use‘) claims that more than 1 million people in Britain are “excluded or face challenges in engaging in normal online activities because they live in remote rural areas“, where slow or non-existent Internet connectivity is still a serious problem.

The report separated areas into several groups and examined each separately: Deep Rural (remote), Shallow Rural (less remote) and Urban internet users. It reveals that just 5% of those in Urban areas had an average broadband speed below 6.3Mbps, but in Deep Rural areas only 53% could achieve this “modest speed“.

Furthermore the gap is unsurprisingly found to be most pronounced in upland areas of Scotland, Wales and England, but also in many areas in lowland rural Britain. It affects 1.3 million people in deep rural Britain, and 9.2 million people in less remote areas with poor internet connection (or ‘shallow’ rural areas).

The report itself isn’t available for download (yet?) because neither Oxford University nor dot.rural has actually put a usable link up.
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Surprised that Syrian refugees have smartphones? Sorry to break this to you, but you’re an idiot » The Independent

James O’Malley, in somewhat straightforward mood:

So we know that Syria isn’t dirt poor and we know that there’s a lot of mobile phones: but why smartphones? Well, why not? In the West many people own desktop computers, laptops and tablets as well as smartphones. But if you had to give up many of your possessions and live on $1850/year, after clothes and food, what would you buy next? It is hard to think of a more useful thing to own than a smartphone, especially if you’re fleeing your home.

Even when utility isn’t considered, the reason Syrians are using smartphones and not old Nokia 3210s is the same reason that benefits claimants have (gasp!) “flatscreen” TVs… have you tried buying any other kind lately? Budget Android smartphones can be picked up for well under £100, and come with cameras, large screens and everything you would expect from a modern phone. As we’re now in the habit of replacing our phones with a new model every year or two the price of slightly older phones also drops significantly.

The headline certainly falls into the “no mimsy hedging here” bucket.
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Start up: iOS 9 and the BBC, AdBlock v Chrome/YouTube, Imogen Heap’s blockchain, and more

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

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

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

Dell Cameron:

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

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

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

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

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

Hang on, further down:

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

Having some trouble making the innocent explanation work here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Larson:

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

Zingg! (Personally, though, I don’t like the new logo. I prefer the old one.)
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Start up: Huawei’s ambition, HTC R+D layoffs, 3D copyright, Google’s odd war on app ads, and more

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But not with “Google Here”, thank you. Photo by x-ray delta one on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Still nothing about logos. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

FTC settles with Machinima for paying YouTube influencers to endorse Xbox One » GamesBeat | Games | by Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi:

According to the FTC’s complaint, Machinima and its influencers were part of an Xbox One marketing campaign managed by Microsoft’s advertising agency, Starcom MediaVest Group. Machinima guaranteed Starcom that the influencer videos receive at least 19 million times.

In a statement, Machinima said, “Machinima is actively and deeply committed to ensuring transparency with all of its social influencer campaigns.  Through collaboration with the FTC, we are pleased to have firmly resolved this matter, related to an incident that occurred in 2013, prior to Machinima’s change of management in March 2014. We hope and expect that the agreement we have reached today will set standards and best practices for the entire industry to follow to ensure the best consumer experience possible.”

In the first phase of the marketing campaign, a small group of influencers received access to prerelease versions of the Xbox One console and video games in order to produce and upload two endorsement videos each. According to the FTC, Machinima paid two of these endorsers $15,000 and $30,000 for producing You Tube videos that garnered 250,000 views and 730,000 views, respectively.

After that, Machinima promised to pay a larger group of influencers $1 for every 1,000 video views, up to a total of $25,000. Machinima did not require any of the influencers to disclose they were being paid for their endorsement.

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Huawei chips away at Samsung » WSJ

Juro Osawa:

For the past three years, Samsung Electronics Co. has been the world’s top seller of smartphones, but its global lead is now under attack from fast-growing Chinese rival Huawei Technologies Co.

Long known as a telecommunications-equipment supplier to global carriers, Huawei has already toppled Samsung in China, the world’s biggest market, where 425 million smartphones are expected to be shipped this year. Globally, the Shenzhen-based company became the third-largest smartphone maker in the second quarter, according to data from IDC. This is due, in part, to its ability to gain market share in the Middle East and Africa, where smartphone growth exceeds that of any other region.

With handset revenue up 87% in the first half of this year, Huawei expects profit from its smartphone business to more than double this year. If its pace of growth continues, Huawei hopes to challenge top competitors Samsung and Apple in the smartphone market.

Huawei doesn’t (yet?) break out its handset profits. It’s aiming to ship 109m smartphones this year – a weirdly precise figure – having shifted 47m in the first half, so 62m to go. Apple sold 192m phones in 2014, and 109m in the first half of this year, so the challenge might take a little while yet.

Cleverly, it introduced a phone with a “Force Touch”-style capability at IFA on Wednesday; it showed it estimating the weight of an orange resting on the screen. Not an apple?

The biggest challenge will be teaching non-Chinese how to say the name (Hoo-waa-way).
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Chinese mobe market suffers pre-pwned Android pandemic » The Register

G DATA found that more than two dozen phones from different manufacturers were already compromised straight out of the box.

Kit from manufacturers including Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi have pre-installed espionage functions in the firmware. G DATA suspects that middlemen modified the device software to steal user data and inject their own advertising to earn money.

Other possibilities include unintentional infection through compromised devices in the supply chain (a problem which affected Vodafone Spain back in 2010) or intentional interference by government spies. Many of the models implicated in the malfeasance sell well in China.

The pre-pwned device issue has become a perennial problem for privacy-conscious smartphone users. Sticking to the Play Store, avoiding dodgy websites and following common-sense security precautions are no help in such cases.

If the phones got to G DATA then it seems unlikely to have been the Chinese government, non? More like middlemen seeking cash for ads.
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HTC to lay off 600 employees working in Taiwan » Digitimes

Trevor Huang and Steve Shen:

About 400 out of the more than 9,000 employees currently at HTC’s headquarters in Taoyuan will be laid off, confirmed the Taoyuan City Government, which has received the layoff plan from HTC. The 400 employees include production line works, R&D and backup personnel.

The New Taipei City Government also confirmed that it had received a notification from HTC about discharging 200 workers at its Xindian plant by the end of October. Those who will lose their jobs at the Xindian plant, which has a total of 2,912 employees, are mostly R&D personnel.

Cutting R+D staff seems like an obvious thing to do when finances are tight, but tends to leave you with nothing to go forward with when – if – you emerge from the squeeze.
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Apple receiving G/G touch samples for 2016 iPhone » Digitimes

Siu Han and Alex Wolfgram:

Makers have already begun sending samples of fully laminated G/G technology to Apple and Corning along with Asahi Glass have also reportedly sent glass samples.

Market observers have recently noted that Apple is in discussions over whether to go back to G/G instead of in-cell technology for future iPhone devices as in-cell technology is currently struggling with various production bottlenecks that are preventing Apple from adding new features as well as increasing resolutions. As a result, touch panel makers are aiming to create G/G touch panels that would allow Apple to create smartphones similar in thickness to current iPhones equipped with in-cell touch panels.

G/G touch panels may also help Apple develop bezel-free smartphones as in-cell touch panels reportedly are struggling with touch sensitivity on the edges. Additionally, in-cell touch panels also make it difficult for vendors to pursue higher resolutions including Ultra HD (4K) due to current bottlenecks, the observers said.

Tells you something about what Apple might have planned for 2016. Incremental steps every time.
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What happened to the Readymake: Duchamp chess pieces? » Scott Kildall

Kildall and Bryan Cera had scanned these very rare pieces and uploaded the scanned files to Thingiverse, a site for sharing Makerbot 3D printing files:


The answer is that we ran into an unexpected copyright concern. The Marcel Duchamp Estate objected to the posting of our reconstructed 3D files on Thingiverse, claiming that our project was an infringement of French intellectual property law. Although the copyright claim never went to legal adjudication, we decided that it was in our best interests to remove the 3D-printable files from Thingiverse – both to avoid a legal conflict, and to respect the position of the estate.

Disputes like this might become commonplace if 3D printing really breaks through.
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Beautiful New Designs for Full-Screen In-App Ads » Inside Google AdWords blog

Pasha Nahass, product manager:

Nearly 60% of smartphone users expect their favorite apps to look visually appealing. We’ve always believed that in-app ads can enhance an app’s overall experience by being well designed. So today we’re announcing a completely new look for our interstitial in-app ad formats – also known as full-screen ads – that run on apps in the AdMob network and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Ah. So let’s walk through this.
• Full-screen interstitials for apps from mobile search results = bad, attracting search ranking penalties
• Full-screen AdWord ads inside existing apps = good. Especially if, as this post suggests, you use the full-screen interstitials for a mobile app install campaign.

On Twitter, this was described to me as “just don’t block the front door [from search] with an interstitial.” Which makes sense; if you’re already inside the app, you’re less likely to bounce away from a full-page ad.
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Silk Road case: US agent investigating dark web drug site admits to $800,000 Bitcoin theft » City A.M.

Clara Guiborg:

Former secret service agent Shaun Bridges has pleaded guilty to Bitcoin theft, admitting to sending over $800,000 worth of the digital currency to his personal account while he was investigating the dark web drug trafficking site.

Silk Road was shut down in the autumn of 2013, having netted Bitcoin sales of over $200m of drugs and other illegal items during its two years of operations. The site’s founder, Ross Ulbricht, who went by the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts”, was sentenced to life imprisonment during a highly-publicised case.

But the investigation itself led to further illicit uses of Bitcoin.

Bridges is the second US federal agent to have fallen foul of Bitcoin theft temptation during the investigation, after former agent Carl Force pleaded guilty to this just two months ago.

Did they think that bitcoins were untraceable? Strange.
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Almost no one sided with #GamerGate: a research paper on the internet’s reaction to last year’s mob » Superheroes in Racecars

Livio de la Cruz is a program manager at Microsoft, and has done an exhaustive study on coverage and reactions of Gamergate:

The Week compared GamerGate to a soccer team that has only ever managed to score on its own goal and responds with self-congratulatory remarks on a job well done. Their efforts to silence feminist and political critique of games actually ended up inspiring more of it. Their efforts to convince journalists to stop critiquing gamers for their sexist, bigoted behavior has only amplified people’s awareness of society’s misogyny problem. Their efforts to discredit Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu have led to them becoming some of the most respected voices in games, as more people are inspired by their work against abuse and their advancement of the medium itself. Their efforts to scare women out of the games industry actually led to more money, time, and talent being dedicated towards fixing tech’s diversity problem.

Before GamerGate, people might have had a rough idea of how diversity in teams was good for companies and how online harassment was maybe a problem that needed to be fixed. But now I suspect that people’s thought processes tend to go like this: Why do we need diversity in tech? Because of GamerGate. Why do need to fix online harassment? Because of GamerGate. Why is feminism so important? Because: GamerGate.

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Windows 10 first month worldwide usage well ahead of that recorded by Windows 8 » StatCounter Global Stats

In its first calendar month since launch, Windows 10 worldwide usage share far exceeds that of Windows 8 in the same time period, according to independent web analytics company StatCounter. Its analytics arm, StatCounter Global Stats finds that Windows 10 level of usage after one month also exceeds that recorded by Windows 7.

StatCounter conducted a special analysis of the take up of Edge by Windows 10 users. It found that Edge usage on Windows 10 peaked at 20.1% on 30th July, the day after the global launch, but fell back to 14.1% on the 31st August.

Easy to explain that dropoff: people went back to work on the August Monday (it wasn’t a holiday in the US), stopped using their Windows 10-updated machines at home, and used the old-OS machines at work. The peak in July is probably explained in the same way – people were on holiday.

Remarkable what happens when you force-upgrade peoples’ machines for free.
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Google shut down a secret Google Maps project called ‘Google Here’ » Fortune

Nice scoop by Erin Griffith:

The product was called Google Here, according to a document obtained by Fortune that describes the project’s specifications. The effort spanned multiple departments and was led by Dan Cath, a strategic partner manager, and the Google Maps team. The launch included partnerships with retailers, including Starbucks SBUX -2.03% . Had it launched, Google Here would have been available to more than 350 million Android users by early 2015, with plans to support iOS later in the year.

But people familiar with the project say it was shut down for two reasons: Google Here was potentially too invasive, and the company wasn’t sure if many retailers would want it. (Not helping matters, Nokia has used the name “Here” for its own mapping service.) A Google spokesman declined to comment.

Google Here worked by sending a notification to a smartphone user’s lock screen within five seconds of their entering a partner’s location. If the user clicked on the notification, a full screen HTLM5 “app” experience would launch. Google Here would know when to send the notification via Google Maps and beacons placed in the stores of participating partners. Google planned to supply the beacons to partners for the launch, according to the document. The experience could also be found by going to the Google Maps app.

Too invasive? Probably more likely retailers weren’t prepared to put the money in for an unclear return, since it would be permission-based (and hence isn’t really that invasive).
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Start up: Wikipedia’s blackmail ban, Ashley Madison redux, Google OnHub meta-reviewed, and more

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“Adblocking? Yeah, I heard about it on the radio.” Photo by Skyco on Flickr.

A selection of 12 links for you. Contains nothing about logo changes, so keep moving along. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hundreds of Wikipedia editors got banned for secretly promoting brands » Motherboard

Jordan Pearson:

Wikipedia has 381 fewer editors today, after hundreds of accounts were banned for taking undisclosed pay to create and edit “promotional articles.”

According to a post on Wikipedia’s administrator board, Wikipedia’s CheckUser team investigated for months to uncover the accounts clogging the site with bogus articles for cash. The 381 banned accounts were active between April and August, but the “nature and quality” of the edits suggests that the scam had been carrying on for some time, the post states.

The “sock puppet” accounts, as they’re called, were essentially extorting their customers. First, they would create a draft article and populate it with promotional links. Next, they contacted their victim, often posing as more established Wikipedians, and requested a fee to publish the article. To keep the page from being edited or taken down, the accounts charged their victims $30 per month, in some cases.

This story is the front-page lead (“splash”) in Wednesday’s Independent newspaper in the UK, where it is branded an “exclusive”. Clearly a new use of the word.
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Mobile-friendly web pages using app banners » Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Daniel Bathgate, Google Search software engineer:

sometimes a user may tap on a search result on a mobile device and see an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content and prompts the user to install an app. Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page.

Starting today, we’ll be updating the Mobile-Friendly Test to indicate that sites should avoid showing app install interstitials that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page. The Mobile Usability report in Search Console will show webmasters the number of pages across their site that have this issue.

After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly.

Note what Google is actually saying here. It isn’t saying it will penalise all interstitials; only those which are a call to install an app and which cover a lot of the page. So page-covering interstitials that aren’t for app installs are OK. Remember that it’s bad for Google if people install apps: they then tend not to use Google search so much on mobile. This is exactly what Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman predicted only last week after that slightly flakey Google study about app install interstitials. Now the other shoe drops.

One thing I wonder about: how will Google detect these? Won’t sites just hide those app interstitials from the Googlebot, and then use them for normal users? It’s what I would do.
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Encryption, lock mechanism vulnerabilities plague lock app AppLock » Threatpost

Chris Brook:

A researcher is claiming that the app, which is supposed to securely store photos, videos and other apps, doesn’t really use encryption to do so, it simply hides the files elsewhere on the phone, where an attacker could theoretically read them.

The app also suffers from what Noam Rathaus, a researcher who blogs about vulnerabilities for the portal SecuriTeam, dubs a weak PIN reset mechanism and a weak lock mechanism. Rathaus, who is also the Chief Technology Officer for Beyond Security, published technical details on the vulnerabilities, along with step by step methods to exploit them on Monday.

Rathaus claims that when users save files on AppLock, they’re actually stored in the read/write partition of the filesystem and not in the one assigned to the application. This means that an attacker would only have to install a file manager application and guide themselves to a certain SQLite database, then a PATH, to find the images.

100 million users can’t be wrong.. can they?
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Alliance for Open Media Established to Deliver Next-Generation Open Media Formats

Seven leading Internet companies today announced formation of the Alliance for Open Media – an open-source project that will develop next-generation media formats, codecs and technologies in the public interest. The Alliance’s founding members are Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix.

John Paczkowski’s tweet-headline for this is absolutely perfect: “Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Partner On Next Failed Open-Video Format”.

Don’t believe me/him? The press release tacitly acknowledges that Google’s WebM project has run into the sand:

“Google launched the WebM Project in 2010 in the belief that web video innovation was too slow and too closed, and that broad collaboration — in the open — would fix both problems. The Alliance for Open Media is a big leap forward for these core philosophies, and we’re gratified that our AOMedia partners share this vision. Our combined strength, resources and expertise will drive the next generation of web media experiences much further and faster than WebM can do alone,” said Matt Frost, Head of Strategy and Partnerships, Chrome Media.

Let’s circle back and reach out in a couple of years, eh?
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Fluid Coupling » Asymco

Horace Dediu on the question of “when exactly did enterprises become late adopters of technology” – given that they were (relatively) early ones for high-priced products such as the first computers:

companies have procedures for accepting technologies (capital expenditures) which require high degrees of interaction and decision making. In order to step though these procedures, the vendors need to have sales people who need to invest lots of their time and therefore need to be compensated with large commissions. If those commissions are a percent of sale then the total sales price needs to be large enough “to make it worth while to all parties”. As a result, paradoxically, an enterprise technology must be sufficiently slow and expensive to be adopted.

Mobility was disruptive to enterprise because the new computing paradigm was both too fast and too cheap to be implementable.

This implies that the problem with enterprises is not the stupidity of its buyers. They are no less smart than the average person – in fact, they are as smart with their personal choices for computing as anybody. The problem is that enterprises have a capital use and allocation model which is obsolete. This capital decision process assumes that capital goods are expensive, needing depreciation, and therefore should be regulated, governed and carefully chosen. The processes built for capital goods are extended to ephemera like devices, software and networking.

It does not help that these new capital goods are used to manage what became the most important asset of the company: information. We thus have a perfect storm of increasingly inappropriate allocation of resources to resolving firms’ increasingly important processes. The result is loss of productivity, increasingly bizarre regulation and prohibition of the most desirable tools.

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Ashley Madison code shows more women, and more bots » Gizmodo

Annalee Newitz, who must feel like it’s Christmas every single day as she wades through the data and code dumps:

Once the man struck up a conversation, the bot would say things like this:

Hmmmm, when I was younger I used to sleep with my friend’s boyfriends. I guess old habits die hard although I could never sleep with their husbands.

I’m sexy, discreet, and always up for kinky chat. Would also meet up in person if we get to know each other and think there might be a good connection. Does this sound intriguing?”

It’s unclear what else the engager would say—either the bots really are this simple, or further chat phrases weren’t in the code. Most likely, based on what I saw from other bot code, the bot would urge the man to pay credits to talk further.

Mr. Falcon pointed out that there’s actually a special bot service, called “RunChatBotXmppGuarentee.service.php,” apparently designed just for interactions with customers who paid the premium $250 for a “guaranteed affair.” When I checked the code, I found Mr. Falcon was right. It appears that this bot would chat up the man, urge him to pay credits, and then pass him along to what’s called an “affiliate.” Likely the affiliate is a third party that provides a real person for the man to chat with. It might also be connecting him to an escort service…

…Ashley Madison aspired to be a global network of people breaking the bonds of monogamy in the name of YOLO. Instead, it was mostly a collection straight men talking to extremely busy bots who bombarded them with messages asking for money.

Plus: it was popular with (real) women who were looking for women for a fling. The data don’t lie.

I do hope Newitz will collect all this into a book. This deserves to be a huge story that’s read and re-read. And it puts every other dating site under just that little extra bit of suspicion.

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Amazon curtails development of consumer devices » WSJ

Greg Bensinger:

Fallout from the Fire phone flop has hurt morale at Lab126, according to current and former employees, and raises questions about Amazon’s ability to develop compelling consumer devices. The $180 Echo virtual assistant, a voice-activated speaker, has developed something of a cult following, if not yet mass appeal.

Some workers say Lab126’s shifting and, at times, enigmatic priorities, including a planned high-end computer for the kitchen, have contributed to a frenetic workplace and ill-defined roles. That has led a number of workers to take jobs at other tech firms, the people said.

Amazon established Lab126—the 1 and 26 stand for the letters A and Z—in 2004 under former Palm Computing Vice President Gregg Zehr to develop what became the popular Kindle e-reader in 2007. Located in Sunnyvale, Calif., some 800 miles from Seattle, the division has since rolled out more than a dozen products, including several versions of the Kindle and the generally well-received Fire tablet.

Last year, Lab126 released a flurry of 10 devices, including a television set-top box, the Echo and a wand for scanning bar codes at home.

“What Amazon makes are devices that are not too flashy, but they are inexpensive and they are simple to use,” said Tom Mainelli, an IDC analyst. “Mostly they are another way to serve up content that Amazon can sell you.”

I’m not sure that it’s really “consumer devices” that Amazon is curtailing, but consumer devices that don’t fit into that latter description from Mainelli. The Fire Phone was a bad idea; the Kindle a great one. The Dash button (press it and it orders [item] from Amazon) is a really smart idea; the Echo, unproven.
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Quick Thoughts: Google’s OnHub router » Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson has the meta-analysis:

To my mind, the OnHub router is also a symbol of Google’s disjointed approach to so many of its projects, and I worry that the Alphabet reorg will only make things worse. Google already has a home automation business, Nest, which not only makes its own products but has been the vehicle for both making further home automation acquisitions (Dropcam) and for acting as a hub for other home automation gear (the Works with Nest strategy). And yet, this product isn’t branded Nest, nor does it apparently sit under Tony Fadell’s hardware group, which also includes Google Glass.

In fact, Mark Bergen of Recode and Amir Efrati of The Information have both suggested that this product actually came out of the Google Fiber team. I’ve written previously about how disconnected from the rest of Google the Fiber project has seemed, and it’s ironic to now see Google proper appropriate this technology just as Fiber is being hived off into a separate Alphabet company. The good thing about Google is that people throughout the organization feel free to experiment with various things, some of which eventually become products. The bad thing is that this means you could have several separate teams working on similar things in isolation, and in some cases you end up with several products apparently chasing the same use case (e.g. the Nexus Q, Chromecast, and Google TV/Android TV).

Meanwhile, on the performance, Glenn Fleishman’s review of the reviews is the one to read.
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Howard Stern just sent adblocking mainstream » Medium

Howard Stern (for non-US readers: he’s a widely-listened to broadcaster in the US) discovered on-air that he can install an “ad blocker”, with a predictably vociferous reaction. Ian Schafer picks up on the likely fallout:

as Richard Blakely suggested on Twitter, we’ll all probably be installing ad blocking extensions on our parents’ browsers this Thanksgiving.

As more consumers learn to (and are able to) pay for ad-free versions of their favorite content, they are beginning to prefer media choices that give them that option. “Premium” versions of ad-supported media are becoming the norm.

So why would people want to see ads (hint: they don’t)? And what does that spell for the future of ad-supported media?

If you’re a brand, you should be dedicating efforts to figuring out how to get your message in front of consumers without running “ad units”. This could be in the form of “content”, “utility”, or anything else that provides some sort of value. But you should be allocating resources to figuring this out now so you can have a competitive advantage.

If you’re a creative agency, you need to figure out what you’re going to be making or doing in a world where consumers are ad avoidant. Core advertising services are destined to change, and innovation should be happening as much on the business and operations end as it is on the creative and technology side of the business.

If you’re a media agency, you should be figuring out what side of history you want to be on, and whether you want to evolve beyond the current state of affairs, or go down with the ship.

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Content blockers on iOS 9 will be 64-bit device only » Twitter

Benjamin Poulain (of Apple’s Safari team) tweeted thus:

Content Blockers do work on 32 bits, but the App Store policies restrict them to 64 bits devices as @reneritchie said.

The extensions already work on 32-bit devices (I’m testing three on an iPhone 5C), but Poulain then says the reason for the limitation is because of the performance of the compiler on the largest extensions. (The blockers are compiled on the fly, as I understand it.)

Cynics will say this is Apple trying to get people to upgrade from 32-bit devices to 64-bit ones. (And other extensions do work on 32-bit..) Depends how compelling you think content blocking is, of course.
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Encounter with the Google car today… » Cycling Forums

“Oxtox”:

a Google self-driving Lexus has been in my neighborhood for the last couple of weeks doing some road testing.

Near the end of my ride today, we both stopped at an intersection with 4-way stop signs.

The car got to the stop line a fraction of a second before I did, so it had the ROW. I did a track-stand and waited for it to continue on through.

It apparently detected my presence (it’s covered in Go-Pros) and stayed stationary for several seconds. it finally began to proceed, but as it did, I rolled forward an inch while still standing. the car immediately stopped…

I continued to stand, it continued to stay stopped. then as it began to move again, I had to rock the bike to maintain balance. it stopped abruptly.

We repeated this little dance for about 2 full minutes and the car never made it past the middle of the intersection. the two guys inside were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop, I guess trying to modify some code to ‘teach’ the car something about how to deal with the situation.

Lots of little situations like this will make the difference between self-driving cars other road users like and which they really don’t. (Can an SDC be “rude”?)
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Google’s driverless cars run into problem: cars with drivers » The New York Times

Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty:

Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.

It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book.

“The real problem is that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who studies autonomous vehicles. “They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”

If it’s about the culture, might be a while before we see them in France or (especially) Italy. Or [insert country where you gaped at the driving].
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Start up: Android Wear on iOS, will Slack kill Dropbox?, India v Google, after the adblockers, and more

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One other piece of technology – besides the lifejackets and boat – probably kept them alive. Photo by Irish Defence Forces on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Blimey, it’s September (here at least). I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Android Wear now works with iPhones » Official Google Blog

David Singleton, director of engineering for Android Wear:

When you wear something every day, you want to be sure it really works for you. That’s why Android Wear offers countless design choices, so you can find the watch that fits your style. Want a round watch with a more classic look? Feel like a new watch band? How about changing things up every day with watch faces from artists and designers? With Android Wear you can do all of that. And now, Android Wear watches work with iPhones.

Android Wear for iOS is rolling out today. Just pair your iPhone (iPhone 5, 5c, 5s, 6, or 6 Plus running iOS 8.2+) with an Android Wear watch to bring simple and helpful information right to your wrist.

Key problem – and I think it will be a problem – is that it won’t be able to show reply to iMessages on the Wear watch. And iMessage is a huge part of using an iPhone (demonstrated by the volume sent each day), and, in my experience, the Apple Watch. The picture in the blogpost shows Google Hangouts; if you’re that dedicated to Hangouts, you’ll be on Android. Also: no third-party (Android Wear, nor, obviously, iOS) apps. Harry McCracken has a useful rundown – mostly of what it doesn’t do on iOS – at Fast Company.

So this might goose Android Wear watch sales a little, but I don’t see it lasting.
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Dropbox: the first dead decacorn » Thoughts from Alex Danco

Slack (the workplace collaboration tool) is going to kill it, Danco reckons:

The problem for Dropbox is that our work habits are evolving to make better use of what’s available; specifically, the awesome power of the internet. And on the internet, the concept of a ‘file’ is a little weird if you stop and think about it. Files seem woefully old-fashioned when you consider organization tools like Evernote, task management tools like Trello, and communication channels like Slack. Files are discrete objects that exist in a physical place; the internet is … pretty much the opposite of that. And while it made sense that the birth and early growth of information and the internet would contain familiar, old-school ideas and organizing systems, and some point the other shoe was bound to drop. To me, Slack feels like the first truly internet and mobile-native productivity platform – especially as it expands beyond messaging and into workflow automation, helper bots, and who knows what else. Dropbox might be the pinnacle of file management, but Slack is the beginning of what comes next.
  
I don’t think files are going to completely disappear; not anytime soon, anyway. They’ll certainly still exist as data structures, deep inside our servers and our phones, for a very long time – and yet most people will be indifferent to their existence. I’m pretty sure Dropbox’s multi-billion dollar valuation isn’t an anticipation of this new reality – it’s simply a projection of our current world, played in fast-forward. This is gravely shortsighted. Dropbox may not be the first Unicorn to slide slowly and then quickly towards irrelevance and death – but it’ll happen.

Having used Slack, I can believe a lot of that. If you haven’t used Slack, you’ll be harrumphing at this. (People who still put music and video files onto SD cards to slot into their phones will be incredulous.) It’s just a matter of time.
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India’s competition authority charges Google with rigging search results; Flipkart, Facebook corroborate complaints » The Economic Times

Deepali Gupta:

Flipkart, Facebook, Nokia’s maps division, MakeMy-Trip.com and several other companies have corroborated complaints that US Internet giant Google abused its dominant market position, in their response to queries raised by the Competition Commission of India.

Based on the responses from 30 businesses spanning search, social networks, ecommerce, travel and content sites, the CCI director-general last week filed a report that accuses Google of abusing its dominant position to rig search outcomes, both the actual search result as well as sponsored links. This marks the first case globally where an antitrust body is formally raising such charges against Google.

Flipkart’s complaint – that its position in organic results varied on how much it spent on ads with Google – is an eye-opener; often whispered, never made part of a complaint.

The list is comprehensive; if anything, Google faces more fires here than in Europe. What’s not clear is how determined, and meticulous, the CCI is. Anyone know? Google has to respond by September 10.
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Adobe aims to bring Photoshop to mobile masses with upcoming app » CNET

Stephen Shankland:

“Project Rigel is designed and built in a way that serves the needs of professionals familiar with retouching tools on the desktop, but more so for people not familiar with Photoshop tools like content-aware fill or spot healing,” Manu Anand, Adobe’s senior product manager for digital imaging, said in an interview at Adobe’s offices here. “It democratizes them and makes them easier to use.”

The app itself has a touchscreen interface, with a menu of editing options across the bottom, pop-out tool adjustments on the left side and a strong zoom ability to offer precision when selecting areas of an image with fat fingertips. It’s even got face recognition technology that Photoshop for PC lacks, a feature that identifies facial features then lets people enlarge or tilt eyes or raise the corners of a subject’s mouth to emphasize a smile.

Bringing Photoshop to the mobile masses is crucial for Adobe as it tries to adapt its business to modern computing trends. The company has no desire to suffer Microsoft’s fate, being largely left behind by the meteoric rise of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, the software that powers nearly all smartphones and tablets.

Not sure Adobe gets a choice there. It has clung on to the desktop with Flash, and it’s hard to see how Photoshop is really that relevant for mobile; it feels like overkill. (Adobe has a large, unseen-by-consumers business in web measurement too.)
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A 21st-century migrant’s essentials: food, shelter, smartphone » The New York Times

Matthew Brunwasser:

The tens of thousands of migrants who have flooded into the Balkans in recent weeks need food, water and shelter, just like the millions displaced by war the world over. But there is also one other thing they swear they cannot live without: a smartphone charging station.

“Every time I go to a new country, I buy a SIM card and activate the Internet and download the map to locate myself,” Osama Aljasem, a 32-year-old music teacher from Deir al-Zour, Syria, explained as he sat on a broken park bench in Belgrade, staring at his smartphone and plotting his next move into northern Europe.

“I would never have been able to arrive at my destination without my smartphone,” he added. “I get stressed out when the battery even starts to get low.”

Not a thing one would have been likely to forecast even five years ago. GPS and WhatsApp are now essential.
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Apple iPhone 6 Plus vs. Samsung Galaxy Note 5 » Business Insider

Lisa Eadicicco:

After spending a week switching between the two, here’s what I came away with. 

• Both phones are gorgeous, but with the Note 5 you get a slightly larger screen packed into a phone that’s the same size as the iPhone 6 Plus.
• The Note 5’s screen displays colors more vibrantly than the iPhone, but it’s not any sharper than the iPhone’s screen even though it’s a higher spec.
• The iPhone is still much more simple to use than Samsung’s phone.
• The Note 5’s S Pen feels natural and the multiwindow feature is useful, but Samsung’s version of Android is still too cluttered for me.
• Both phones take excellent photos. It’s a win-win here, but, as is the case with the Note 5’s display, its camera also sometimes exaggerates color. 

She also liked the Note’s split screen, and found the pen useful too.
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The mobile video ad lie » Medium

Rob Leathern found a page apparently with no video ads on the NY Post was loading 10MB. But how?

The large JPG files I referenced earlier make up the majority of the payload of this page — and are coming from the images.fusevid.com domain. Here again are those example1 and example2 of the image files.

Remember, I didn’t see any video content nor any video ads at all. If there is not willful fraud here, loading ads in the background that are impossible to see, then at the very least it is ‘user-hating’ irresponsible behavior to have a 10+mb payload with hundreds of http calls in a mobile browser.

Many publishers simply must have a sense that something nasty is going on — when their users complain about slow page loads on mobile web — but they either don’t have the tech savvy and/or more likely, they won’t ask questions about how their site could possibly be monetizing as well as it is when simple math indicates that their users aren’t watching that many video streams. Many simply turn a blind eye.

Ad industry insiders talk about “improving viewability” — but make no mistake, these are likely not mistakes made by inexperienced workers — just as mobile ads that pop up iTunes Store pages for mobile app installs are not casual errors — this is an industry that persists by helping already-fraught businesses like newspapers and online publishers survive at the expense of the advertisers who supposedly help us users have free content.

Is it any wonder desktop ad blocking has been on the rise, and many iOS users are excited at the prospect of using content blocking in iOS9 to get rid of mobile ads? The industry has only itself to blame.

I find these stories – which are growing in volume – fascinating. This is a boil that the internet community is looking to lance with vigour.
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Life after content blocking » Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassee:

What are the smaller publishers to do?

Displaying their outrage by posting “Access Denied” when reached by an “offending” browser won’t work.

Some very specialized sites, such as Ben Thompson’s Stratechery and Ben Bajarin’s TechPinions, are able to generate membership revenue because the quality of their content — sober analysis versus mere reporting — makes it worth the price of subscription.

But these are exceptions. Too many sites are just echo chambers, they rewrite news releases, add strong adjectives and adverbs, and a bit of spin. Competition for attention, pageviews, and advertising dollars drives them to shout from the rooftops. If they don’t want to disappear or be rolled up into a larger entity to “optimize expenses”, they’ll have to get us to pay for their content.

This is much easier said than done. It’s difficult to conjure up a picture in which we’ll have subscriptions to most of the sites we graze today in their ad-supported form.

An alternative to subscriptions for content we may or may not actually “consume” is pay-as-you-go. In principle, this isn’t very different from what we do when we buy an episode of Breaking Bad. We gladly pay $2.99 to watch what we want, when we want, and without ads.

This works well for TV shows, but it doesn’t easily translate to websites.

I do foresee a number of those middling sites selling up to others which reckon they can make a go of it.
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We have no interest in competing with Apple: John Sculley of Obi Worldphone » Business Today

Interviewed by Manu Kaushik:

[Inflexionpoint chief executive] Neeraj [Chauhan] and I sat down. I asked him why he thought there’s an opportunity for us to go into this industry. He said that we have skills of distribution and supply chains, we know how to negotiate with various vendors, and we can run on a different business model.

At the same time, we were looking at the opportunity of buying BlackBerry. We were approached by the Canadian government. We have big operations in Toronto with another one of our companies. They said that we would like to keep BlackBerry a Canadian company and would you consider acquiring it. We studied BlackBerry’s business practices. We realised that they had 7,000 people in their handsets division at that time. That was incredible number of people. There’s no way you can make money with that. Eventually, BlackBerry pulled the auction [down]. They brought a talented CEO to run the company John Chen. They should have brought him in three years earlier.

But it opened our eyes. I asked Neeraj how many people you would need to run BlackBerry’s handset business. He said that he could do it with hundreds of people.

Via Charles Knight, who adds: “You have to wonder who else in Canada they approached.” It’s probably a long list.
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Start up: Chrome v Flash (and Google v iOS 9), HTC delays Vive, streaming’s true problem, and more

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Suggested caption: “I wish I’d never mentioned the bloody sealion”. Can a computer do better? Picture from MCAD Library on Flickr.

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

Google makes it official: Chrome will freeze Flash ads on sight from Sept 1 » The Register

Shaun Nichols:

Back in June, Google warned that, in cooperation with Adobe, it would change the way Flash material is shown on websites.

Basically, “essential” Flash content (such as embedded video players) are allowed to automatically run, while non-essential Flash content, much of that being advertisements, will be automatically paused.

As we explained a couple of months ago, it’s effectively taking Chrome’s “Detect and run important plugin content” feature, and making it the default: only the “main plugin content on websites” will be run automatically. That should put a stop to irritating ads around the sides of pages.

Google’s reasoning for the move is largely performance-based, apparently. The Chocolate Factory worries that with too many pieces of Flash content running at once, Chrome’s performance is hamstrung, and, more critically, battery life is drained in notebooks and tablets running the Flash plugin.

A performance and battery hit? From Flash? I’m shocked, shocked to hear of such a thing.
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Handling App Transport Security in iOS 9 » Hacker News discussion

Remember the Google Ads blogpost from last week explaining how developers could enable non-HTTPS ads to show on iOS 9, which enforces (almost) HTTPS? The discussion on Hacker News include some who’ve been in the trenches:

At my last job, we did something similar to what iOS 9 is now doing, where we migrated a survey engine to serve all forms over https. There was high fiving and champagne all around the engineers desks, while media was freaking out that their impressions took the sharpest reverse-hockey-stick in the world. Ad networks are seriously the worst when it comes to https traffic. Given the dozens of redirects and pixel injections and iframes slapped into a media page, it’s nearly impossible to serve secure traffic since it only takes one network to downgrade the https request to http and then the page is “broken”.

Other comments provide useful insight too.
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The wait for HTC’s Vive VR headset just got longer » ReadWrite

Adriana Lee:

Other projects and software features are likely in the works [from Oculus Rift] as well. (We may know more at the Oculus Connect 2 developer conference in Los Angeles next month.) 

There’s also increasing competition from VR hardware startups and other (bigger) competitors eyeing virtual and augmented reality—including Sony, Google, Samsung and Microsoft. Apple may also be pursuing virtual and augmented reality behind closed doors.

All of which makes HTC’s decision to delay the Vive’s consumer release rather risky—especially if the company is relying on this initiative to make up for its flagging smartphone business. For end users and developers, however, the scenario points to something else: Next year is going to be absolutely huge for all realities virtual. 

Can HTC hang on long enough to ride that wave? Testers say it’s terrific quality. Most valuable asset?
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Chromebooks gaining on iPads in school sector » The New York Times

Natasha Singer:

In terms of the sheer numbers of devices sold, however, Microsoft remained in the lead. In 2014, about 4.9m Windows devices, including notebooks and desktops, shipped to schools, giving Microsoft a roughly 38% market share in unit sales, IDC said.

Apple, meanwhile, shipped about 4.2m devices for schools, including desktops, notebook computers and tablets, accounting for about 32% of the education market, according to the report.

But the Chromebook category is fast gaining traction in the United States.

Last year, about 3.9m Chromebooks were shipped in the education sector, an increase in unit sales of more than 310% compared with the previous year, IDC said. By contrast, iPad unit sales for education fell last year to 2.7m devices, compared to 2.9m in 2013, according to IDC data.

“Even if Microsoft is No. 1 in volume and Apple is No. 1 in revenue, from the growth perspective, nobody can beat Chromebook,” said Rajani Singh, a senior research analyst at IDC who tracks the personal computer market and is the author of the report.

In the first half of this year, she said, roughly 2.4m Chromebooks shipped to schools compared with about 2.2m Windows-based desktops and notebook computers.

Maybe this is where Chromebooks begin to eat away at Windows. They certainly should be a lot easier to secure and manage.
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We built a robot to help you win The New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest » The Verge

Michael Zelenko and Frank Bi:

Each week The New Yorker runs a cartoon contest on its back page, where the publication invites readers to submit captions to cartoons drawn by the magazine’s illustrators. Winning the contest is notoriously difficult — writers have to generate a quip that’s funny, but also perfectly mimics the magazine’s sensibilities. A deep knowledge of The New Yorker is a prerequisite. Or is it?

We’ve collected all the first, second, and third place winning entries going back to when the magazine introduced the competition in 2005 — all 1,425 of them. Then, we ran them through a Markov text generator program that analyzes the winning captions and generates new, randomized entries that echo the original set.

Observation: using this won’t even get you to the last three in the caption contest. Maybe when the robots have taken all the other jobs, “comedian” will still remain for humans.
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The real problem with streaming » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan:

Even without considering the entirely intentional complexity of details such as minimas, floors and ceilings, the underlying principle is simple: a record label secures a fixed level of revenue regardless, while a music service assumes a fixed level of cost regardless.

Labels call this covering their risk and argue that it ensures that the services that get licensed are committed to being a success. Which is a sound and reasonable position in principle, except that in practice it often results in the exact opposite by transferring all of the risk to the music service. Saddling the service with so much up front debt increases the chance it will fail by ensuring large portions (sometimes the majority) of available working capital is spent on rights, not on building great product or marketing to consumers.

None of this matters too much if you are a successful service or a big tech company (both of which have lots of working capital). Both Google and Apple are rumoured to have paid advances in the region of $1 billion. While the payments are much smaller for most music services, Apple, with its $183bn in revenues and $194bn in cash reserves can afford $1bn a lot more easily than a pre-revenue start up with $1m in investment can afford $250,000.  Similarly a pre-revenue, pre-product start up is more likely to launch late and miss its targets but will still be on the hook for the minimum revenue guarantees (MRG).

It is abundantly clear that this model skews the market towards big players and to tech companies that simply want to use music as a tool for helping sell their core products. 

 
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Heads-up, Google: fighting the EU is useless » Bloomberg View

Leonid Bershidsky:

Microsoft can tell Google exactly what happens next; indeed, Google’s lawyers realize there will be other antitrust investigations. One, concerning the Android operating system and its links to Google services, is already in the works, although no official charges have been brought. Another may soon hit Google where it really hurts, challenging its dominance in online advertising. Google will fight and probably lose, because Europe doesn’t like big U.S. companies to dominate its markets. 

Lobbying and complying with whatever demands still can’t be avoided is a less painful path. Microsoft spent 4.5 million euros last year, a million more than Google, on efforts to get EU officials to see its points on issues such as data protection and cloud computing. Among other things, the European Parliament is now considering a Microsoft proposal that would cap fines for Internet privacy violations at 2m euros a case, instead of 2% of a company’s international turnover.

It’s admirable that Google now wants to fight for its principles and against the dilution of its superior offering. It makes me cringe, however, to think of the time and money that will be burned in this hopeless battle.

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The fembots of Ashley Madison » Gizmodo

Annalee Newitz:

In the data dump of Ashley Madison’s internal emails, I found ample evidence that the company was actively paying people to create fake profiles. Sometimes they outsourced to companies who build fake profiles, like the ones Caitlin Dewey wrote about this week in the Washington Post. But many appear to have been generated by people working for Ashley Madison. The company even had a shorthand for these fake profiles—“angels.” Perhaps this is a tip of the hat to Victoria’s Secret models, also known as angels.

Ashley Madison created their angels all over the world, and the dump contains dozens of emails where Avid Life Media management arranged to generate more. Here you can see a July 4, 2013 email from Avid Life Media’s director of internal operations, Nora Abtan, to CEO Noel Biderman and other managers, with the subject “summary angels status”…

…An email chain between Sandra Simpson and an employee named Eduardo Borges, dated July 30, 2012, suggests that quality control on the angel profiles was actually pretty rigorous. Borges asks whether it’s OK to reuse photos if they are in different states, and Simpson says no—she notes that many members travel and they might spot the duplicates.

Such great journalism; such a scammy business. The question becomes, did the company take this direction from the start, or was it forced towards fakery by circumstance?
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Apple is about to lay down its TV cards » TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

It stands to reason that Apple will be able to push the A8 much, much further than it ever has before given that the Apple TV is plugged into the wall, and not dependent on battery.

This will enable developers of games and other resource-intensive applications to produce higher quality and more demanding apps. Among the demos I’d expect to see on stage next month are content apps, games, and broadcast companies. These apps fit the venue (fixed, but large and participatory) and purpose of your television — and the apps that people will build for the Apple TV would do well to take those factors into account as well.

A native SDK that takes advantage of the hardware fully will, for the first time ever, turn the Apple TV into a platform, a self-sustaining life form that Apple likely hopes will dominate competitors who have done only slightly better about adding third-party support.

To control the new Apple TV? A new remote. One major feature of which was pretty much nailed by Brian Chen in an article earlier this year. It’s slightly bigger and thicker, with physical buttons on the bottom half, a Touchpad area at the top and a Siri microphone.

I thought the Apple TV would get its own SDK
back in 2012. Totally wrong; it just wasn’t ready.
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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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