Tag Archives: hacking

Start up: the convertible laptop dream, Pagefair’s malvertising hack, Samsung’s bulging bottom, and more

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Keeping your personal information out of other sites is hard too. Photo by xiaming on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Count them if you like. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Laptop is a state of mind | Karma

Paul Miller:

There’s no such thing as “best of both worlds” in computers. Choices matter. Hybrids like the Surface Book are great for people who perfectly straddle the tablet and laptop use cases — who constantly switch between keyboard and pen, desk and walk-and-talks, angry memos and Angry Birds. Everyone else’s perfect “laptop” will probably be a lot more boring, and a good deal cheaper.

But.

You know what would be cool? A world where we actually needed Surface Books. What if our lives were like Microsoft Surface commercials? We’d flit effortlessly between different roles. An architect for one moment, consulting with a professional on your home remodel. Then you’re drawing up a clever football play for Russell Wilson. Then you’re playing Madden, streamed from your Xbox. Then you’re answering work emails and flicking away distractions with your finger. And then you’re in some big song-and-dance number, and you can’t even remember where you put your Surface Book because your life is amazing and who even cares anymore you’re going to die happy, loved by your family and respected by your peers.

The Surface Book is not an inferior product because its hardware is too ambitious. It’s an inferior product because its hardware is more ambitious than the digital lives we’ve thus far concocted.

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CryptoWall 3.0 cost victims $325m – report » Infosecurity Magazine

Phil Muncaster:

The report noted:

“It was discovered that a number of primary [bitcoin] wallets were shared between campaigns, further supporting the notion that all of the campaigns, regardless of the campaign ID, are being operated by the same entity.”

Unfortunately for those unlucky enough to get infected by CryptoWall 3.0, the report paints the picture of a highly efficient operation running solid encryption, meaning victims usually do have to pay up to get their files back.

Even an FBI Special Agent was quoted as saying last week that it might be better for infected businesses to just pay the ransom.

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Who knows what about me? A survey of apps’ behind-the-scenes personal data sharing to third parties » Technology Science

Jinyan Zang, Krysta Dummit, James Graves, Paul Lisker, and Latanya Sweeney:

We found that the average Android app sends potentially sensitive data to 3.1 third-party domains, and the average iOS app connects to 2.6 third-party domains. Android apps are more likely than iOS apps to share with a third party personally identifying information such as name (73% of Android apps vs. 16% of iOS apps) and email address (73% vs. 16%).

For location data, including geo-coordinates, more iOS apps (47%) than Android apps (33%) share that data with a third party. In terms of potentially sensitive behavioral data, we found that 3 out of the 30 Medical and Health & Fitness category apps in the sample share medically-related search terms and user inputs with a third party.

Finally, the third-party domains that receive sensitive data from the most apps are Google.com (36% of apps), Googleapis.com (18%), Apple.com (17%), and Facebook.com (14%). 93% of Android apps tested connected to a mysterious domain, safemovedm.com, likely due to a background process of the Android phone. Our results show that many mobile apps share potentially sensitive user data with third parties, and that they do not need visible permission requests to access the data.

Hardly seems a source of complaint if they’re sharing with Google and Apple, if it’s with permission. As for safemovedm.com, it seems to exist – since February 2008 – but not actually be active in any way; that makes it sound like an Android function.
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Chrome OS is here to stay » Google Chrome Blog

Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP Android, ChromeOS and Chromecast:

Over the last few days, there’s been some confusion about the future of Chrome OS and Chromebooks based on speculation that Chrome OS will be folded into Android. While we’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there’s no plan to phase out Chrome OS.

With the launch of Chrome OS six years ago, we set out to make computers better—faster, simpler and more secure—for everyone. We’ve since seen that vision come to life in classrooms, offices and homes around the world. In fact, every school day, 30,000 new Chromebooks are activated in U.S. classrooms—that’s more than all other education devices combined. And more than 2 million teachers and students in more than 150 countries have the Share to Classroom Chrome extension, which launched in September and gets students onto the same webpage, instantly. Meanwhile, companies such as Netflix, Sanmina, Starbucks and of course Google, are using Chromebooks given the ease of deployment, the ability to easily integrate with existing technologies, and a security model that protects users at all levels, from hardware to user data. (Chromebooks are so secure you don’t need antivirus software!)

“Working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems” implies that the two are coming together somehow – you wouldn’t have a third OS. Android isn’t going away. So Lockheimer hasn’t explained how ChromeOS is here to stay; instead, by avoiding the question while also acknowledging that something is happening, he’s making it more mysterious.
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The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus review » Anandtech

Ryan Smith and Joshua Ho:

The only real issues I can think of are that the iPhone 6s doesn’t have OIS and that the base SKU is still 16GB of storage. To be fair, the 16GB SKU can become a noticeable user experience issue if you’re constantly dealing with the limits of this storage, and the jump from 16 to 64 GB feels like it’s simply designed to encourage buying a more expensive SKU. There are arguments that users that don’t really take a ton of photos or videos and stream all their media will be fine, but it’s still a user experience problem in this day and age. However, despite these issues I would argue that the iPhone 6s’ are the best phones you can buy today.

Of course, this sounds like a rather hollow recommendation to those that have followed our reviews for the past year. This year, more than ever it feels like Android smartphones at the high end have stood still, as if smartphone improvements have become a zero sum game. To make the best phone this year is therefore a pretty low bar to clear.

The benchmarks, especially for storage, are remarkable: the new iPhones seem to knock everything aside in the raw processing power space. They stumble only a little in the battery life area, and even there it’s not a huge difference. (Thanks @papanic for the link.)
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Samsung sells more phones — but for less money » WSJ Digits blog

Jonathan Cheng:

Samsung has been selling more cheaper smartphones, and fewer high-end premium devices, than it did even compared to Samsung’s rocky 2014, according to numbers from data firm Counterpoint Technology Market Research.

Samsung doesn’t separately disclose smartphone sales numbers.

Samsung shipped 84m smartphones in the third quarter of 2015, 6.3% more than during the same stretch last year and more than the No. 2 and No. 3 players, Apple and Huawei Technologies, combined, according to Counterpoint.

But while 55% of its smartphones were priced at $301 per unit or more at this time last year, that high-end segment has fallen to just 40% of Samsung’s overall smartphone sales, Counterpoint said.

Phones priced $200 or below now account for 38% of total units shipped at Samsung, versus 30% this time last year.

So while Samsung is indeed shipping more smartphones, it isn’t charging as much for them — or making as much money from them as it may have during the salad days of 2012 and 2013.

But the numbers also suggest that Samsung is willing and able to take the fight to the low-cost Chinese competitors that emerged in 2013 and 2014, eating away at its market share and profits.

If you calculate the numbers (I did) this means that Samsung sold 10m fewer phones in the $300+ bracket than last year – effectively ceding that chunk of the market to Apple – and sold 8m more than last year in the sub-$200 bracket.
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Brazilian smartphone users quicker to adopt new Android OS than Indian users » Jana Blog

Globally, 93% of Android users are using versions of either the Lollipop, KitKat, or Jelly Bean operating systems on their devices. When we looked at the market share of each Android OS in India and Brazil among mCent users, we saw a similar theme. 98% of mCent users in India and 97% of users in Brazil are using either Lollipop, KitKat, or Jelly Bean. KitKat is the most popular OS among mCent users in both countries…

…In the case of Samsung, the top device brand in India and Brazil, older versions of the Galaxy and the Note will never get the new Marshmallow OS update. So while some users may want to upgrade, they simply may not be able to depending on which device and carrier they have…

…When looking across the three popular Android OS, Lollipop, KitKat, and Jelly Bean, Brazilian users are currently pretty evenly spread out across the three. But when we look at India, the majority of users—52%— are on KitKat. As users in Brazil move to new operating systems, users in India are staying on older OS versions much longer.

This is hardly amazing; Jelly Bean was released in late 2012. You’d be more surprised if newcomers to the smartphone market were on much older OSs.
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What do recruiters look for in a resumé at first glance? »Quora

Abra Benjamin responded:

Our world is a lot simpler than you think. “Does this candidate seem like they stand a chance of being a good match for this role? If yes, proceed to next step. If no, reject.” Each recruiter is different, so there’s no one way to answer this question. But I’ll highlight briefly (actually, not so briefly) how I personally absorb a resume.  I should preface this by saying that currently I primarily recruit for senior-level software engineers.

It’s definitely useful if you’re looking around for jobs, especially the stuff about education not mattering much, nor formatting (duh), nor “uncomfortably personal details”, nor cover letters.
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Halloween Security Breach » Inside PageFair

Pagefair being, of course, the company which is complaining about the cost of adblocking to publishers, and which offers analytics to them:

If you are a publisher using our free analytics service, you have good reason to be very angry and disappointed with us right now. For 83 minutes last night, the PageFair analytics service was compromised by hackers, who succeeded in getting malicious javascript to execute on websites via our service, which prompted some visitors to these websites to download an executable file. I am very sorry that this occurred and would like to assure you that it is no longer happening.

The attack was sophisticated and specifically targeted against PageFair, but it is unacceptable that the hackers could gain access to any of our systems. We identified the breach immediately, but it still took over 80 minutes to fully shut it down.  During this time, visitors to websites owned by the publishers who have placed their trust in us were targeted by these hackers.

The damage was mitigated by our standard security practices, but the attackers still gained access.  I want to take some time here to describe exactly what happened, how it may have affected some of your visitors, and what we are doing to prevent this from ever happening again.

Spearphish email to take over account on CDN (Content Distribution Network) which offered a fake Adobe Flash advert which would install a bitcoin mining trojan. The breach was spotted within 5 minutes – but it took another 80 to regain control. Among the sites infected was Anandtech.

Once more, episodes like this make people who use adblockers utterly certain that they’ve made the right decision, while making those who haven’t wonder if they should. It’s a ratchet.
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Apple indoor positioning app ‘Indoor Survey’ spotted on iOS App Store » Apple Insider

Mikey Campbell:

According to Indoor Survey’s iOS App Store page, spotted by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, the Apple-branded software enables indoor positioning within a venue by using radio frequency signals and an iPhone’s onboard sensors.

“By dropping ‘points’ on a map within the Survey App, you indicate your position within the venue as you walk through,” reads the app description. “As you do so, the indoor Survey App measures the radio frequency (RF) signal data and combines it with an iPhone’s sensor data. The end result is indoor positioning without the need to install special hardware.”

While not an exact match, the described system smacks of technology pioneered by indoor positioning startup WiFiSLAM, a Silicon Valley firm Apple snapped up for $20m in 2013.

Google has been doing something similar since 2012 for museums and a SLAM (simultaneous location and mapping) system since September 2014.
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Start up: Google’s antitrust expansion, Morocco goes solar, Apple Music revealed?, IoT hacked again, and more

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What makes a great selfie? Ask a neural network. Photo by Verónica Bautista on Flickr.

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

EU antitrust chief Vestager speaks about Google and other key cases » WSJ

Amazing to think it’s a year since Vestager took over (and the Google case[s] still aren’t resolved…). She tells Tom Fairless and Stephen Fidler in a long interview that with the cases against various bits of Google’s operations:

what they have in common is that the name Google appears in each one, but apart from that they are very different. And therefore I do not think of it as one Google case but literally as different investigations and different cases.

WSJ: So there’s not a read across from the shopping case to the others?

MV: Well, there may be a lesson learned. It’s a very fine balance. The shopping case may have similarities when we eventually look at maps and travel and a number of other related services, because the complaints sort of tell the same story. People feel or experience that they are either being demoted, or Google preferences its own services. But there is no such thing as you have done one, you’ve done them all. You can’t do that. On the other hand, if you look at the shopping case then there will be insights that will probably also be valid when it comes to other neighboring markets. But it’s a very, very fine balance, because we cannot do one case and then say the rest is the same. In a union of law and with due process, this cannot be the case.

WSJ: But equally, Google has many business lines besides shopping and could have many more in the future, and you would presumably not want to open a new case each time. So you would want to establish some sort of precedent?

MV: Yes, but still whatever precedent comes out has to be taken from the finalization of the case. And since we’re not there yet, it is very difficult to see where that will take us.

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What a deep neural network thinks about your #selfie » Andrej Karpathy

Karpathy set a neural network to examine a few million not-liked and well-liked selfies, and draw conclusions:

A few patterns stand out for me, and if you notice anything else I’d be happy to hear about in the comments. To take a good selfie, Do:

• Be female. Women are consistently ranked higher than men. In particular, notice that there is not a single guy in the top 100.
• Face should occupy about 1/3 of the image. Notice that the position and pose of the face is quite consistent among the top images. The face always occupies about 1/3 of the image, is slightly tilted, and is positioned in the center and at the top. Which also brings me to:
• Cut off your forehead. What’s up with that? It looks like a popular strategy, at least for women.
• Show your long hair. Notice the frequent prominence of long strands of hair running down the shoulders.
• Oversaturate the face. Notice the frequent occurrence of over-saturated lighting, which often makes the face look much more uniform and faded out. Related to that,
• Put a filter on it. Black and White photos seem to do quite well, and most of the top images seem to contain some kind of a filter that fades out the image and decreases the contrast.
• Add a border. You will notice a frequent appearance of horizontal/vertical white borders.

You can also tweet your selfies to @deepselfie and get a score (100% is top!).
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Morocco poised to become a solar superpower with launch of desert mega-project » The Guardian

Arthur Neslen:

When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will occupy a space as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and generate 580MW of electricity, enough to power a million homes. Noor 1 itself has a generating capacity of 160MW.

Morocco’s environment minister, Hakima el-Haite, believes that solar energy could have the same impact on the region this century that oil production had in the last. But the $9bn (£6bn) project to make her country’s deserts boom was triggered by more immediate concerns, she said.

“We are not an oil producer. We import 94% of our energy as fossil fuels from abroad and that has big consequences for our state budget,” el-Haite told the Guardian. “We also used to subsidise fossil fuels which have a heavy cost, so when we heard about the potential of solar energy, we thought; why not?”

Solar energy will make up a third of Morocco’s renewable energy supply by 2020, with wind and hydro taking the same share each.

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Lawsuit accuses Apple’s iOS 9 Wi-Fi Assist of burning through $5M+ in data » Apple Insider

Neil Hughes:

Apple was slapped with a class-action suit on Friday, claiming that the company failed to properly warn users that the new Wi-Fi Assist feature in iOS 9 will use data from their cellular plan.

In the complaint, plaintiffs William Scott Phillips and Suzanne Schmidt Phillips allege that because of costs related to Wi-Fi Assist, the “overall amount in controversy exceeds” $5m. Filed in a U.S. District Court in San Jose on Friday, the suit was first discovered by AppleInsider.

Once users update to iOS 9, Wi-Fi Assist is turned on by default. Its goal is ensure a smooth internet experience, switching to cellular data in the event that the user is connected to a weak Wi-Fi signal.
The lawsuit claims that Apple “downplays the possible data overcharges a user could incur” from Wi-Fi Assist.

Some who don’t understand how Wi-Fi Assist works, or even that it exists, have alleged that the new feature has caused them to use more cellular data than anticipated. But the new class-action suit alleges it should be Apple who should reimburse customers for any overages [excess data use].

Default-enabling something that could burn through your mobile data is plain stupid. Why not offer people the chance of whether to use it the first time the chance comes up? This is poor focus – putting user experience in the narrow field of device use ahead of the wider user experience of “how big is my mobile bill?”

It puzzles me how implementations like this get through Apple’s processes. (See also: the pain of being the person working on Wi-Fi inside Apple.)
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TalkTalk boss says cybersecurity ‘head and shoulders’ above competitors » The Guardian

Josh Halliday:

TalkTalk chief executive Dido Harding has insisted the company’s cybersecurity is “head and shoulders” better than its competitors in the wake of the massive hack attack affecting thousands of customers.

In an interview with the Guardian, Harding conceded it would be “naive” to rule out the prospect of the telecoms firm suffering a similar cyber-attack in the future, describing the threat from hackers as “the crime of our generation”.

Asked about claims by an IT researcher that he raised concerns about TalkTalk’s security with her office last September, Harding said its security had “improved dramatically” in the last year.

TalkTalk’s customer account details (excluding bank details, but including usernames and phone numbers) were stolen from an India call centre last year, and again, and now it has been hacked in a big way. The hackers are miles ahead of the companies here – which is becoming a depressingly common refrain. Also see the blogpost from last October showing how poor TalkTalk’s cybersecurity was.
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Content paywalls on the agenda for digital news sites » FT.com

Matthew Garrahan:

Business Insider, which was acquired by German media group Axel Springer last month for close to $390m already charges for its research service and is now on course to be one of the first digital only news operations to erect a paywall around some of its general content. John Ore, Business Insider’s product manager, said in a recent blog post that the company was planning a broad “subscription offering” for readers “who prefer to pay us directly”.

Sweeping changes to the online advertising market mean other free news sites may follow suit. Sir Martin Sorrell thinks all newspapers should charge for content: the chief executive of WPP, the world’s largest advertising group said this week that paywalls were “the way to go”.

The problem, he says, is the lack of growth in digital advertising — an issue which is likely to get worse as ad blocking software grows in popularity. Ad blockers pose a real threat to the revenues generated by news sites. Meanwhile, rampant online ad fraud and the fact that brands often do not know whether their campaigns are being seen by real people, has shaken confidence in an industry that could do without the additional anxiety.

Would Business Insider try to block people using adblockers, as Axel Springer has?
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New screenshots purportedly show Apple Music for Android ahead of release » 9to5Google

Mike Beasley:

In bringing its software to Android, Apple has taken a slightly different approach from Google’s own iOS apps. While Google’s apps attempt to mimic the company’s Material Design principles—even going so far as to include custom-made toggle switches and other elements—Apple relies on UI elements built into Android rather than attempting to recreate the iOS versions of them. The main navigation has even been moved from an iOS-like tab bar to a more Android-friendly slide-out sidebar.

Despite this, the company hasn’t managed to stick completely to Google’s design guidelines and has injected some of its own style into the app. For example, the For Me page almost identically mirrors its iOS counterpart.

The images appear to be legitimate and match up with the design Apple teased during the Apple Music announcement at WWDC this year. Not every feature of the app is shown off in the screenshots below, but you can get a feel for how the app will look and behave from our gallery of screenshots.

Looks quite Android-y, though not a full dive into Material.
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DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt » Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow:

The Justice Department lawyers argue [in a case where a defendant’s phone has been seized but they won’t give up the passcode; Apple has however acknowledged that it can bypass the code in pre-iOS 8 devices] that because Apple licenses its software – as opposed to selling it outright – that it is appropriate for the government to demand that Apple provide assistance in its legal cases.

To my knowledge, this is an entirely novel argument, but as I say, it has far-reaching consequences. Virtually every commercial software vendor licenses its products, rather than selling them. If the DoJ establishes the precedent that a product’s continued ownership interest in a product after it is sold obliges the company to act as agents of the state, this could ripple out to cars and pacemakers, voting machines and tea-kettles, thermostats and CCTVs and door locks and every other device with embedded software.

Might work in this particular case, but devices running iOS 8 onwards it won’t. That of course doesn’t apply to the many more internet-enabled “things”. Though those bring their own associated problems…
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Compromised CCTV and NAS devices found participating in DDoS attacks » Slashdot

the security firm Incapsula [reports] that its researchers discovered compromised closed circuit cameras as well as home network attached storage (NAS) devices participating in denial of service attacks. The compromised machines included a CCTV at a local mall, just a couple minutes from the Incapsula headquarters.

According to the report, Incapsula discovered the infections as part of an investigation into a distributed denial of service attack on what it described as a “rarely-used asset” at a “large cloud service.” The attack used a network of 900 compromised cameras to create a flood of HTTP GET requests, at a rate of around 20,000 requests per second, to try to disable the cloud-based server. The cameras were running the same operating system: embedded Linux with BusyBox, which is a collection of Unix utilities designed for resource-constrained endpoints.

The Internet of Compromised Things is growing faster than our ability to cope with its effects.
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Start up: sneaking iOS apps, spoofing Spotify, CIA director gets hacked, and more

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One of these is probably chewing up your battery by playing silent audio (on Android too). But which? Photo by microsiervos on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Like champagne for the mind! Perhaps. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

iOS apps caught using private APIs » SourceDNA

Nate Lawson and team:

we noticed that these functions were all part of a common codebase, the Youmi advertising SDK from China.

We then associated the clusters of this SDK’s code with the release dates of the apps that contain them to see how it has evolved over time. The older versions do not call private APIs, so the 142 apps that have them are ok. But almost two years ago, we believe the Youmi developers began experimenting with obfuscating a call to get the frontmost app name.

Once they were able to get this through App Review, they probably became more confident they weren’t being detected and added the above behaviors in order. They also use the same obfuscation to hide calls to retrieve the advertising ID, which is allowable for tracking ad clicks, but they may be using it for other purposes since they went to the trouble to obfuscate this. The latest version of the Youmi SDK (v5.3.0), published a month ago, still gathers all the above information.

Apple has been locking down private APIs, including blocking apps from reading the platform serial number in iOS 8. Youmi worked around this by enumerating peripheral devices, such as the battery system, and sending those serial numbers as a hardware identifier.

Find out now! Just select your developer accounts from a list, and we’ll tell you what we found about your apps. We’ll also show the commercial and open-source code you’re using and alert you to future issues we find.

We found 256 apps (est. total of 1 million downloads) that have one of the versions of Youmi that violates user privacy. Most of the developers are located in China. We believe the developers of these apps aren’t aware of this since the SDK is delivered in binary form, obfuscated, and user info is uploaded to Youmi’s server, not the app’s. We recommend developers stop using this SDK until this code is removed.

Apple’s yanking the apps. Developer? Check it here. It’s always China, isn’t it? But nothing to stop apps from other countries doing the same.
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The background data and battery usage of Facebook’s iOS app » MacStories

Federico Viticci:

With iOS 9’s improved energy consumption stats, it’s easier to guess one of the various tricks Facebook may be employing to stay active in the background and drain battery. On my girlfriend’s iPhone, for instance, iOS 9 reports 5 hours of on-screen usage for the last 7 days, and another 11 hours of background audio usage with Background App Refresh turned off.

My guess is that Facebook is hijacking audio sessions on iOS by keeping silent audio in the background whenever a video plays in the app. And because, by default, videos on Facebook auto-play on both Wi-Fi and Cellular and few people ever bother to turn it off, that means there’s a high chance the Facebook app will always find a way to play a video, keep audio in the background, and consume energy to perform background tasks. I’m not alone in noticing the mysterious “Facebook audio” background consumption, and video auto-play seems to me the most likely explanation at this point. I don’t know if turning off auto-play may fix the problem, but I’d recommend doing that anyway to save data.

Un-fricking-believable. The web is suddenly alive with people who have used iOS 9’s better battery monitoring system and discovered that Facebook is eating their battery like nobody’s business.

More discussion here, and a full-on Medium post, which shows Facebook using 3.4hrs in the background with background app refresh turned off.

Just delete it, and use the mobile site – navigate there and create a home page icon for it. And close the tab when done.
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Microsoft announces price of 1TB Surface Book — $500 more than the top 13-inch MacBook Pro » GeekWire

James Risley:

The top-of-the-line 1TB Surface Book comes with 16GB RAM and a Core Intel i7 processor for a cool $3,199, $500 more than the fully tricked out 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the same price as the fully enhanced, much larger 15-inch option. The Surface Book does have a few more tricks up its sleeve than the MacBook Pro, including a touchscreen, removable keyboard and a 360-degree hinge, so the price difference isn’t without reason.

The 1TB option joins the lineup that starts at $1,499 for a 128GB Core i5 version. Microsoft isn’t offering many fine-grained customizations for its first laptop, like allowing for more RAM on its 128GB model, but most models look adequately powerful for the everyday user.

“Everyday user”? Wasn’t the point of the Surface Book that it was for some slightly mythical ultra-user? As for the touchscreen and removable keyboard… the case for the touchscreen is still pretty weak for the “everyday user”.
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Teen says he hacked CIA director’s AOL account » New York Post

Philip Messing, Jamie Schram and Bruce Golding:

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email scandal didn’t stop the head of the CIA from using his own personal AOL account to stash work-related documents, according to a high school student who claims to have hacked into them.

CIA Director John Brennan’s private account held sensitive files — including his 47-page application for top-secret security clearance — until he recently learned that it had been infiltrated, the hacker told The Post.

Other emails stored in Brennan’s non-government account contained the Social Security numbers and personal information of more than a dozen top American intelligence officials, as well as a government letter about the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” on terrorism suspects, according to the hacker.

The FBI and other federal agencies are now investigating the hacker, with one source saying criminal charges are possible, law enforcement sources said.

The hacker is getting investigated for criminal charges? Brennan is the one who ought to be prosecuted. If a kid in high school could do this, any Chinese or Russian hacker would have.
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Why it’s OK to block ads » Practical Ethics

James Williams:

Think about the websites, apps, or communications platforms you use most. What behavioral metric do you think they’re trying to maximize in their design of your attentional environment? I mean, what do you think is actually on the dashboards in their weekly product design meetings?

Whatever metric you think they’re nudging you toward—how do you know? Wouldn’t you like to know? Why shouldn’t you know? Isn’t there an entire realm of transparency and corporate responsibility going undemanded here?

I’ll give you a hint, though: it’s probably not any of the goals you have for yourself. Your goals are things like “spend more time with the kids,” “learn to play the zither,” “lose twenty pounds by summer,” “finish my degree,” etc. Your time is scarce, and you know it.

Your technologies, on the other hand, are trying to maximize goals like “Time on Site,” “Number of Video Views,” “Number of Pageviews,” and so on. Hence clickbait, hence auto-playing videos, hence avalanches of notifications. Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it.

But these design goals are petty and perverse. They don’t recognize our humanity because they don’t bother to ask about it in the first place.

Neatly argued, by stepping right back from the debate as framed by the ad industry.
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I built a botnet that could destroy Spotify with fake listens » Motherboard

William Bedell:

I decided to prototype a robot with an endless appetite for music to see if Spotify could detect what it was doing.

Here is what I coded into life:

Image: William Bedell
First, a remote server used browser automation to sign up for Spotify accounts with randomly generated names, ages, and email addresses. This gave me a limitless supply of accounts to stream songs, so as not to alert Spotify by having a handful of users with inhuman amounts of activity.

A central command server periodically sent out Spotify login credentials to cloud servers (or repurposed personal computers) running dozens of Spotify clients, all masked behind virtual private networks. Each “user” logged in, listened to a few hours of music, then logged out. Their playlists were random selections from various artists I like. Then, I deployed the botnet using a patchwork of free cloud instances and my own hardware.

It was mesmerizing to watch the plays rack up. Unknown albums from minor celebrities I adore suddenly had tens of thousands of hits, where before they had virtually none. With minimal effort, I was generating $32.26 per day in royalties. Inevitably, my thoughts wandered to greed: how profitable would this music royalty factory be if I turned it on music I owned the rights to?

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Intel has 1,000 people working on chips for the iPhone » VentureBeat

Mark Sullivan:

Intel now has a thousand people or more working to outfit a 2016 iPhone with its lauded 7360 LTE modem chip, sources say. If all goes well, Intel may end up providing both the modem and the fabrication for a new Apple system on a chip.

Sources close to the matter say Intel is pulling out the stops to supply the modems for at least some of the iPhones Apple manufactures in 2016. This phone will likely be the iPhone 7. VentureBeat was the first to report on the two companies’ work together, and more pieces are falling into place as the project progresses and grows.

Apple may dual-source the LTE modems in its new iPhones from both Intel and Qualcomm. Today, Qualcomm’s 9X45 LTE chip is baked into all iPhone modems.

This story makes one go “hmm..” right up to the point where it talks about dual-sourcing. Then it suddenly makes perfect sense: Apple would look to play the two off against each other, as with CPU supply.
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E.U. rule change could be big headache for small businesses » Advertising Age

Kate Kaye:

“I think everybody was hoping [the ECJ] wouldn’t [rule against Safe Harbour], but we were kind of expecting them to rule it this way,” said Acxiom Chief Privacy Officer Jennifer Glasgow. But, she said, “This is not going to disrupt a lot of data flow today or tomorrow or next week.”

The Safe Harbor compact has helped streamline the data flow for more than 4,000 companies including data brokers, ad technology firms and ecommerce companies among others for 15 years. But alarmed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, the E.U. court decided the agreement is not strong enough to protect Europeans’ privacy, including against U.S. spies.

Most large firms handling massive amounts of data such as Google, Facebook and Amazon should already have other legal contracts in place, including previous agreements guiding heavily-regulated health and financial data, that should allow them to continue data transfer as usual. Smaller marketers and data vendors won’t be so lucky, which could have ripple effects throughought the marketing ecosystem.

Correction: the ECJ wasn’t “alarmed” by the revelations; it made a judgement in the light of those revelations about whether EU law could still be applied to data transferred to the US under Safe Harbour.

What’s weird is how people are acting as though this won’t make a difference. If you’re not allowed to transfer data US-owned servers on the basis that it might be rifled through by the US government, how can it not? (Of course, everyone would be howling for safety if these were Chinese-owned servers and companies; witness the US administration’s lockout of China’s Huawei from communications contracts.)
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The secrets of a billionaire’s blood-testing startup » The New Yorker

Eric Lach:

Part of the Theranos story is the tension between commerce, science, and secrecy. Ken Auletta explored this tension in the magazine late last year, in his December profile of Holmes. For most of its existence, Auletta wrote, Theranos has “operated with a stealth common to many Silicon Valley startups.” The company has published little data in peer-reviewed journals describing its devices or its test results, and it has kept the workings of its technology a closely guarded secret. Holmes herself prefers speaking about the coming revolution that her company will bring rather than the specifics of the technology itself.

Holmes and the company say this is normal, that Theranos is only trying to protect itself and its trade secrets while it creates something new. The company says that it has taken steps to get its tests approved by the F.D.A. But there are many who say that health-care technology can’t be afforded the same hushed reception as a new model of the iPhone. “Science is peer-reviewed,” Lakshman Ramamurthy, a former F.D.A. official and a vice-president at the consulting company Avalere Health, said, reacting to the Journal article this week.

Of course, Holmes could be a billionaire, or a zeroinaire, depending how things pan out over the next few months.

What the WSJ story also shows (by its impact, and the puzzled followups) is how little understanding there is of biotech among most journalists. Science journalists tend to shy away from it because it involves business, and business journalists aren’t good at figuring out what questions to ask experts about the science.
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Start up: lightening YouTube, more Flash vulnerability, farewell to Apple’s store fan, NSA cracking, and more

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“Yeah, pretty frazzled after a long day writing clickbait headlines. You?” Photo by peyri on Flickr.

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Page weight matters » Chris Zacharias

At YouTube, Zacharias was challenged to get the standard 1.2MB page down below 100KB:

Having just finished writing the HTML5 video player, I decided to plug it in instead of the far heavier Flash player. Bam! 98KB and only 14 requests. I threaded the code with some basic monitoring and launched an opt-in to a fraction of our traffic.

After a week of data collection, the numbers came back… and they were baffling. The average aggregate page latency under Feather had actually INCREASED. I had decreased the total page weight and number of requests to a tenth of what they were previously and somehow the numbers were showing that it was taking LONGER for videos to load on Feather. This could not be possible. Digging through the numbers more and after browser testing repeatedly, nothing made sense. I was just about to give up on the project, with my world view completely shattered, when my colleague discovered the answer: geography.

The explanation is rather smart.
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Forbes: a quick adtech video » Medium

Rob Leathern wanted to read an article – you know, one of those text things – on Forbes:

In order for me to read that one article I had to receive 1,083 URL calls from 197 different domains adding up to 18.3 Megabytes of data, summarized here in an Excel spreadsheet. I closed any videos as soon as I could if they had the ability to do so.

Is it worth it? I like Alex Konrad and the article was probably a good one, but given I’m not sure where my data is going, or who some of these entities are (jwpltx.com? wishabi.com?) I just don’t know.

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Auto-generating clickbait with recurrent neural networks » Lars Eidnes’ blog

To generate clickbait, we’ll train such an RNN [recurrent neural network] on ~2,000,000 headlines, scraped from Buzzfeed, Gawker, Jezebel, Huffington Post and Upworthy.

How realistic can we expect the output of this model to be? Even if it can learn to generate text with correct syntax and grammar, it surely can’t produce headlines that contain any new knowledge of the real world? It can’t do reporting? This may be true, but it’s not clear that clickbait needs to have any relation to the real world in order to be successful. When this work was begun, the top story on BuzzFeed was “50 Disney Channel Original Movies, Ranked By Feminism“. More recently they published “22 Faces Everyone Who Has Pooped Will Immediately Recognized“. It’s not clear that these headlines are much more than a semi-random concatenation of topics their userbase likes, and as seen in the latter case, 100% correct grammar is not a requirement.

The training converges after a few days of number crunching on a GTX980 GPU. Let’s take a look at the results.

The results are spooky – such as “Taylor Swift Becomes New Face Of Victim Of Peace Talks” and “This Guy Thinks His Cat Was Drunk For His Five Years, He Gets A Sex Assault At A Home”. Because, you know, if you looked out of the corner of your eye, isn’t that what was on some site somewhere? (They weren’t.)

One feels Eidnes’s work should have happened in a Transylvanian laboratory in a thunderstorm. Next you get a machine to write the story that fits the headline, and.. we can all knock off for the century.
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Broadband in the UK ‘to stay top of the 5 major EU countries until 2020’ » ISPreview UK

Mark Jackson:

A new BT-commissioned report from telecoms analyst firm Analysys Mason has perhaps unsurprisingly found that the take-up and availability of superfast broadband (30Mbps+) connectivity in the United Kingdom is ahead of Spain, Germany, Italy and France, and will remain there until at least 2020.

The benchmarking report marks the United Kingdom as the “most competitive broadband market of all the countries it features“, although there are a few caveats to its findings. For example, the report overlooks most of Europe’s other states, including those with superior broadband infrastructure to ours, and seems to only focus on fixed line networks.

Furthermore it also makes an assumption that the current roll-out progress will hold to the Government’s promised targets, which may well be the case but we won’t know for certain until 2020. In addition, the study only appears to consider “superfast” services (defined as 30Mbps+ in the report), which overlooks the important area of “ultrafast” (100Mbps+) connectivity.

BT tweeted this headline and added “thanks to BT’s rollout of fibre”, and the culture/media/sport minister Ed Vaizey retweeted it without comment.

Is it really healthy that during an Ofcom examination of BT’s position a minister is doing that? Meanwhile Jackson’s longer analysis provides much-needed scepticism about the claims, and the lack of data in the report.
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Adobe Flash Player security vulnerability: how to protect yourself » BGR

Zach Epstein:

The fun never ends with Adobe Flash.

Just one day after Adobe released its monthly security patches for various software including Flash Player, the company confirmed a major security vulnerability that affects all versions of Flash for Windows, Mac and Linux computers. You read that correctly… all versions. Adobe said it has been made aware that this vulnerability is being used by hackers to attack users, though it says the attacks are limited and targeted. Using the exploit, an attacker can crash a target PC or even take complete control of the computer.

And now for the fun part: The only way to effectively protect yourself against this serious security hole is to completely uninstall Flash Player from your machine.

Here’s the security note: “Adobe is aware of a report that an exploit for this vulnerability is being used in limited, targeted attacks. Adobe expects to make an update available during the week of October 19.” Spear phishing, no doubt; but Flash really is beginning to look like the worst thing you can have on your machine, especially if you’re in any sort of sensitive work.
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Why Google is wrong to say advertisers should shift 24% of their TV budgets to YouTube » Business Insider

Lindsey Clay in chief executive of Thinkbox, which just happens to be a commercial TV marketing body, and doesn’t like Google’s suggestion:

why would an advertiser remove a quarter of the money they invest in the most effective part of their advertising and give it to something that hasn’t shown any proof of actually selling anything? 

However, it needs a response lest anyone believes Google on this. Here are some things to consider:

This is Google’s data. We’ve asked to see the data itself, but usually Google doesn’t share. If and when it does, we’ll comment on it but we obviously need to comment now. We understand the TV elements are based around a panel of Google users managed by Kantar that does not measure all TV and that the YouTube element is provided by Google themselves.

If that isn’t flaky and biased enough, it is also unaudited. They even called it the “Google Extra Reach Tool”; it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And does it take account of the 50% of online ads that are not seen by humans? And how does it square with the report in the FT recently revealing that YouTube has been selling fraudulent ad views to advertisers?

Their recommendation also seriously challenges common sense when official industry sources including comScore show that YouTube accounts for 7.5% of 16 to 24-year-olds’ video time, with TV at 65%. The numbers for the whole population are 3.5% and 81%. Ad minutage on commercial TV is approximately 15% of that time, but is much lower on YouTube, and that is before you consider users’ impatient use of its ‘Skip ad’ button.

Clay is hardly impartial, but she raises worthwhile points.
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Apple’s biggest fan has died » The Washington Post

Michael Rosenwald:

There are plenty of goofballs — like me — who stand outside Apple stores all night waiting for the company’s latest, thinnest, must-have offering.

There was nobody like Gary Allen, who died Sunday from brain cancer at 67.

Allen didn’t care so much about Apple’s new products (though he bought many of them.) He cared about the stores, the sleek and often innovative ways Apple presented itself to the world — the winding staircases, the floor-to-ceiling glass, the exposed brick.

Allen, a retired EMS dispatcher, traveled around the world — obsessively and expensively — to be among the first in line at the company’s new stores. He attended more than 140 openings, collecting all sorts of trivia. He could even tell you where Apple store tables are made (Utah; he stopped by the factory once to say thanks).

The headline is a trifle unfair; Allen was a fan of the stores, and their design. Rosenwald recounts a story of someone who just liked paying attention to detail; it’s a delightful mini-obituary.
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How is NSA breaking so much crypto? » Freedom To Tinker

Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger:

The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand.

However, the documents do not explain how these breakthroughs work, and speculation about possible backdoors or broken algorithms has been rampant in the technical community. Yesterday at ACM CCS, one of the leading security research venues, we and twelve coauthors presented a paper that we think solves this technical mystery.

The key is, somewhat ironically, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, an algorithm that we and many others have advocated as a defense against mass surveillance. Diffie-Hellman is a cornerstone of modern cryptography used for VPNs, HTTPS websites, email, and many other protocols. Our paper shows that, through a confluence of number theory and bad implementation choices, many real-world users of Diffie-Hellman are likely vulnerable to state-level attackers.

Estimated cost: $100m for a system that could break a single Diffie-Hellman key per year. But after two years, with the correctly chosen keys, you could passively eavesdrop on 20% of the top million HTTPS sites. Don’t underestimate the NSA. But of course, don’t underestimate the Chinese, Russians, and so on..
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Start up: inside a content factory, US reacts to Safe Harbour sinking, why Surface?, Android lemons and more

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In China, such literalism might really happen. Photo by GotCredit on Flickr.

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The Chicago End-Times » The Awl

Sam Stecklow on the “content factory” at the Chicago Sun-Times, churning out meaningless content because ads:

Network staffers were concerned with the quality of work they were being asked to do, too. Marty Arneberg, a former intern, told me, “When I was applying to jobs, I would send very few Sun Times Network articles. I would mention in my résumé, forty hours a week I worked here, but I would not send them any examples. Because it was such a content factory, you just had to pump stuff out all the time. It was just like, get it out there, we need some pageviews now.” A former editor told me, “I wouldn’t read most of what I wrote if given the choice.” He added, “Spending more than thirty minutes on any article was generally frowned upon.” Arneberg told me that a “post got me the most pageviews of any post that I wrote and it was complete bullshit. It was a total hoax,” he said. “The weird thing is, when it came out that that was a hoax, nobody spoke to me. Nobody said anything, like, ‘Hey, you gotta watch out for that.’ It was just ignored.”

The question of whom, exactly, Sun Times Network is supposed to be for is one I asked everyone I interviewed for this story, and none of them could provide a good answer. I can’t either.

Stecklow’s descent into the toxic hellstew is well-described; it’s like a modern version of The Jungle. This is where content is heading. And not long after that, the stories will be “written” by computers, and you’ll wonder why we don’t just get computers to read them too, and go and do something more worthwhile, such as digging ditches. Oh, and reading The Awl.
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The company behind Relish wireless broadband makes a big loss » Engadget

Nick Summers:

Relish’s dream to connect London homes with wireless broadband, rather than traditional landlines, could be in trouble. UK Broadband, the company behind the service, has reported losses of £37.5m for 2014 – almost four times what it was the year before. To make matters worse, turnover slipped from roughly £2m to £1.5m over the same period. Relish was launched in June 2014 as a simpler, but capable broadband alternative to the likes of BT, Sky and Virgin Media. Instead of copper and fibre cables, the company relies on 4G connections to deliver the internet to its customers. The advantages are plentiful — you don’t need to pay for a landline, and because Relish’s network is already up and running, you don’t need an engineer to install anything. Once you’ve signed up, a router is sent round within the next working day and you can instantly get online. The concept is similar to the mobile broadband packages offered by EE, Three and other UK carriers, although here there are no restrictive data allowances. So what’s gone wrong?

Nobody, it seems, knows.
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China is building the mother of all reputation systems to monitor citizen behaviour » Co.Exist

Ben Schiller:

“They’ve been working on the credit system for the financial industry for a while now,” says Rogier Creemers, a China expert at Oxford University. “But, in recent years, the idea started growing that if you’re going to assess people’s financial status, you should equally be able to do that with other modes of trustworthiness.”

The document talks about the “construction of credibility”—the ability to give and take away credits—across more than 30 areas of life, from energy saving to advertising. “It’s like Yelp reviews with the nanny state watching over your shoulder, plus finance, plus all of these other things,” says Creemers, who translated the plan.

The system, overseen by the State Council, is made possible by two factors. One, it’s now possible to gather information about behavior as never before. As we use the Internet and different devices, we’re leaving behind a huge footprint of data. Second, the Chinese government sees no reason to safeguard its citizens’ data rights if it thinks that data can benefit them, says Creemers.

“In Europe and the U.S., there’s a notion that the state should be constrained, that it’s not right to intervene in people’s lives, unless for justified reasons. In China, the state has no qualms about that. It says ‘data allows us to make society for better, so we’re going to use it,'” he says.

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Behind the European privacy ruling that’s confounding Silicon Valley » NYTimes.com

Robert Levine:

American technology firms are especially worried because they routinely transfer so much information across the Atlantic. “International data transfers are the lifeblood of the digital economy,” said Townsend Feehan, chief executive of IAB Europe, which represents online advertising companies including Google as well as small start-ups. The ruling “brings with it significant uncertainty as to the future possibility for such transfers.”

As Mr. Schrems sees it, however, what is at stake is a deeper conflict between the European legal view of privacy as a right equivalent to free speech and that of the United States, where consumers are asked to read and agree to a company’s terms of service and decide what’s best for themselves. “We only do this in the privacy field — dump all the responsibility on the user,” Mr. Schrems said. He pointed out that consumers are not expected to make decisions about other complex issues, like food or building safety. “In a civilized society,” he said, “you expect that if you walk into a building it’s not going to collapse on your head.”

But if it collapses on your head and kills you, then you sue! No, hang on. (Bonus point to Levine for the handwringing quote from the advertising industry.)
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Microsoft Surface: from cross-bearer to standard-bearer » Fast Company

Ross Rubin:

As the Surface Pro customer base has grown, it’s likely that Microsoft is just accommodating potential customers who prefer a more laptop-like device than the Surface Pro 4, which is still a tablet propped up with a kickstand.

While Microsoft is quick to compare its “ultimate laptop”—which starts at $1,500 and goes way, way up—to Apple’s portables, it will walk a far narrower tightrope in competing with its own hardware partners with the Surface Book. Not only does the first model stand to do battle with the best that HP, Dell, Acer, and Lenovo have to offer, but the company is poised to come downmarket with a lower-priced mainstream version, as it did with the $500 Surface 3.

The Surface experience story isn’t quite as good as it looks on paper. Even with the considerable reconciliation of Windows 10 and the arrival of a touch-optimized Office as well as other universal apps, Windows’ interface is still in transition. Many people with Surfaces spend much of their day working not so differently than they would with a no-touch Windows 7 laptop. Even on the marketing side, Microsoft needs to rethink the Surface Pro, which it’s been promoting as the tablet that can replace your laptop. Now that the company wants to sell you a laptop, where does that leave the Surface Pro?

This is slightly the problem: why Surface Pro, if there’s Surface Book? Rubin also thinks there’s a Surface iMac (for want of a better name) brewing in Redmond. This seems unlikely though – the sales figures would be so miniscule it would never make money for anyone. Speaking of which…
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Why Apple is still sweating the details on iMac » Medium

Steven Levy was given access to Apple’s Ergonomic Design Lab to get the inside story of how the new iMacs and Magic Mouse and so on were built. But what are they for? Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, explains:

“The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things! The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, What’s its job?”

Good question. And the answer?

“Its job is to challenge what we think a computer can do and do things that no computer has ever done before, be more and more powerful and capable so that we need a desktop because it’s capable,” says Schiller. “Because if all it’s doing is competing with the notebook and being thinner and lighter, then it doesn’t need to be.”

But – take note – no intention of introducing a touchscreen iMac. None at all, says Schiller: “The Mac OS has been designed from day one for an indirect pointing mechanism. These two worlds are different on purpose.”
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​Android security a ‘market for lemons’ that leaves 87% vulnerable » ZDNet

Liam Tung:

“The difficulty is that the market for Android security today is like the market for lemons,” Cambridge researchers Daniel Thomas, Alastair Beresford, and Andrew Rice note in a new paper.

“There is information asymmetry between the manufacturer, who knows whether the device is currently secure and will receive security updates, and the customer, who does not.”

Their analysis of data collected from over 20,000 Android devices with the Device Analyzer app installed found that 87% of Android devices were vulnerable to at least one of 11 bugs in the public domain in the past five years, including the recently discovered TowelRoot issue, which Cyanogen fixed last year, and FakeID.

The researchers also found that Android devices on average receive 1.26 updates per year.

“The security community has been worried about the lack of security updates for Android devices for some time,” Rice said.

The “security community” hasn’t had much effect, then. The study was part-funded by Google.
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US says Apple e-books antitrust monitor no longer needed » Reuters

Nate Raymond:

The US Justice Department has determined that Apple Inc has implemented significant improvements to its antitrust compliance program and that a court-appointed monitor’s term does not need extended, according to a court filing.

The Justice Department in a letter filed late Monday in Manhattan federal court said its recommendation was despite Apple’s “challenging relationship” with Michael Bromwich, who was named monitor after the iPad maker was found liable for conspiring to raise e-book prices.

The Justice Department said its decision to not recommend extending the monitorship beyond its two-year term was “not an easy one,” as Apple “never embraced a cooperative working relationship with the monitor.”

But the department said it was giving greater weight to Bromwich’s “assessment that Apple has put in place a meaningful antitrust compliance program than to the difficult path it took to achieve this result.”

Apple is still considering an appeal to the Supreme Court. The antitrust thing must feel like a stain.
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Start up: Facebook’s dwindling teens, Safe Harbour or balkanisation?, the privacy tsunami, and more

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No, really, no difference. Move along there and find another story. Photo by Bob Jouy on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Soluble in alcohol. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook is big, but big networks can fall » Bloomberg View

Megan McArdle:

Looking at the most recent Pew study on Internet usage among young people,  I see that 71% of teens use Facebook, with the median user having slightly less than 150 friends; 41% of them report that they use Facebook most often. But when I look at a similar Pew study from 2013, it looks to me as if 76 percent of teens were using Facebook, with a median number of 300 friends, and 81% of social media users reported that they used Facebook most often. If I were Facebook, those numbers would keep me awake at night – not because Facebook can’t survive with only 70% of the market, but because a network that is getting smaller and less valuable to its users is a network that is very vulnerable to disruption.

What’s actually astonishing is just how evanescent such strategic advantages have proven. Fifteen years ago, people worried that Microsoft’s network-effect advantages made it unstoppable; now it’s an also-ran in everything new-market except gaming consoles. The rotting corpses of old social media sites litter the landscape. And of course, finding a place to send Aunt Maisie that birthday telegram is getting darned hard.

She also makes a point about network effects: the thing about “all your photos are in Facebook” isn’t a network effect, but a switching cost – a quite different thing.
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Apple says battery performance of new iPhone’s A9 chips vary only 2-3% » TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

In a statement to TechCrunch, Apple said that its own testing and data gathered from its customers after a few weeks with the device show that the actual battery life of both devices varies just 2-3%. That’s far, far too low to be noticeable in real-world usage.

With the Apple-designed A9 chip in your iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, you are getting the most advanced smartphone chip in the world. Every chip we ship meets Apple’s highest standards for providing incredible performance and deliver great battery life, regardless of iPhone 6s capacity, color, or model.

Certain manufactured lab tests which run the processors with a continuous heavy workload until the battery depletes are not representative of real-world usage, since they spend an unrealistic amount of time at the highest CPU performance state. It’s a misleading way to measure real-world battery life. Our testing and customer data show the actual battery life of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, even taking into account variable component differences, vary within just 2-3% of each other.

Though there have been a bunch of articles and videos about how much power one chip or the other uses, the tests have largely been what Apple calls ‘manufactured’. Basically, they are unrealistic machine-driven tests that do not and can not reflect real-world usage.

So this year’s iPhonegate lasted slightly less than 24 hours. Apple is even managing to balance supply and demand here too.
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EU Safe Harbour ruling a ‘nightmare’: Wikipedia founder » CNBC

Arjun Kharpal:

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said the regulatory issues that could come with this might be a problem for some businesses.

“You want your data to be secure, you don’t really care or you shouldn’t have to care where it sits,” Wales told CNBC in an interview at IP EXPO Europe in London.

“If I’m in Europe I hope they are near me on a server in Europe, but other than that I want them to provide the best technical experience for me. And if they suddenly have all those requirements and have to keep certain pictures in certain places, it just sounds like a nightmare, so I like the idea of uniformity in the law so that we can all not worry about it.”

Wales added in a separate session with reporters that the ECJ ruling could lead to a “balkanized era where data has to be secure very specifically across many many different jurisdictions”.

Great point. So does this mean he’ll be lobbying the US to implement strong data protection rules that match those of Europe? I do hope so. I mean, that’s the best way to protect everyone’s interests, isn’t it, Mr Wales?
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Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy? » The Guardian

Cory Doctorow:

The only way to be sure you don’t leak data is to not collect or retain it, and Big Data’s hype and the cheapness of hard drives has turned every pipsqueak tech company into a Big Data packrat with a mountain of potentially toxic personal info on millions of people, all protected by a password that’s simple enough for a CEO to remember it.

Every week or two, from now on, will see new privacy disasters, each worse than the last. Every week or two, from now on, will see millions of people who suddenly wish there was more they could do to protect their privacy.

For privacy advocates in 2015, the job is clear: have a plan in your drawer. A plan: how to safeguard your privacy, how to understand your privacy, how to understand the breach. A plan that explains that your lack of security isn’t a fact of nature, it’s the result of conscious decisions made by people who were either hostile or indifferent to your wellbeing, who saved or made money through those decisions. A plan that shows you what you can do to keep you and yours safe – and whose head your should be demanding on a pike.

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Get AMP’d: Here’s what publishers need to know about Google’s new plan to speed up your website » Nieman Lab

Joshua Benton:

What’s it all mean for publishers?

As I said, AMP [Accelerated Mobile Pages] is full of terrific ideas. It really does speed up load times.

But that success comes with tradeoffs. For most publishers, you’re being asked to set up two parallel versions of your stories. (Unless you really think you won’t need to ever do anything outside what AMP allows on any page, which is unrealistic for most.) That takes significant time and resources. You’re being asked to set aside most or all of the ad tech and analytics that you use. You’re trading in open web standards for something built by Google engineers who, despite what I don’t doubt are the best of intentions, have incentives that don’t line up perfectly with yours. And you’re becoming an disempowered actor in a larger Silicon Valley battle over ad tech. (Google advocating something that blocks enormous slices of contemporary ad tech can’t be viewed in isolation from the fact Google is the dominant force in online advertising, and as interested as any company is in extending its power.)

And it’s yet another case of a technology company coming along to promise a better experience for users that takes one more bit of power away from publishers.

The fact that publishers’ interests aren’t exactly aligned with Google’s shouldn’t be overlooked. And Google’s interests aren’t aligned with third-party ad networks at all, except that they all want to serve up ads. (Meanwhile, iOS 9 content blockers still block ads on the AMP demo.)
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This is why Android Pay is asking you for a ‘Google Payments PIN’ when making purchases » Android Central

Andrew Martonik:

when you have a card from one of these supported banks (check the latest list from Google here) in Android Pay, it’s amazingly seamless to make payments. Just unlock your phone, tap the terminal and you just paid.

Confusingly, though, Android Pay actually lets you add unsupported cards to the app as well.

This is a hold over from the old days of Google Wallet, which had an entirely different system that worked without the cooperation of the banks. With Google Wallet, every time you made a transaction it actually made that purchase with a virtual prepaid debit card from “Bancorp Bank” and then that same amount was subsequently charged to your own bank. It was clunky, less secure and downright confusing to everyone involved — and the most annoying user-facing part of this system is the need for an extra PIN code to make a payment.

As Google Wallet hands the reigns over to Android Pay in this transition of mobile payments, this legacy system of using an unsupported card is actually still baked into Android Pay — though Google isn’t exactly promoting it as such. This is partially due to the fact that you can bring previously-used debit and credit cards from Google Wallet into Android Pay, and partially because Android Pay just doesn’t support that many banks yet — just 10 at the time of writing.

My first reaction was that this is a poor user experience; why make people who are new to Android Pay have to use a PIN? Then I realised that most Americans aren’t used to PINs for purchasing, and are just adjusting to chip-and-sign. So this might be faster. (The fact that you might have two cards, and one will require a PIN and one won’t, seems like bad design though.)
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Former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys found guilty of three counts of hacking » Motherboard

Sarah Jeong:

In 2010, Keys posted login credentials to the [his then former employer] Tribune Company content management system (CMS) to a chatroom run by Anonymous, resulting in the defacement of an LA Times article online. The defacement was reversed in 40 minutes, but the government argued the attack caused nearly a million dollars in damage…

…”This is not the crime of the century,” Segal said, adding that nonetheless Keys should not get away with his acts. At minimum, he may receive probation. Sentencing is scheduled for January 20, 2016.

Keys said he was disappointed with the verdict, and worried about the sentence affecting his ability to work. However, he also expressed his intention to appeal the conviction, and was optimistic it would be overturned.

Keys added that a few months after his first story about Anonymous, he was approached by the FBI, but Keys refused to allow them to scan his computer. He was indicted a couple of years later.

In order to be convicted under the CFAA, the damage had to exceed $5,000. The government claimed that Keys caused $929,977.00 worth of damage. During the trial, the defense tried to cast doubt on the total damages, claiming that the expenditures in response to the hack were not reasonable, and Tribune employees had grossly inflated the hours spent on incident response.

Lesson 1: change passwords ex-employees had access to. Lesson 2: don’t post passwords of companies that you used to work for on Anonymous chatboards.
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Will digital books ever replace print? » Aeon

Craig Mod used to read only ebooks (on Kindle) but now finds he has fallen out of love with it in favour of the physical form again:

Take for example the multistep process of opening a well-made physical edition. The Conference of the Birds (2009), designed by Farah Behbehani and published by Thames and Hudson, is a masterclass in welcoming the reader into the text.

The object – a dense, felled tree, wrapped in royal blue cloth – requires two hands to hold. The inner volume swooshes from its slipcase. And then the thing opens like some blessed walking path into intricate endpages, heavystock half-titles, and multi-page die-cuts, shepherding you towards the table of contents. Behbehani utilitises all the qualities of print to create a procession. By the time you arrive at chapter one, you are entranced.

Contrast this with opening a Kindle book – there is no procession, and often no cover. You are sometimes thrown into the first chapter, sometimes into the middle of the front matter. Wherein every step of opening The Conference of the Birds fills one with delight – delight at what one is seeing and what one anticipates to come – opening a Kindle book frustrates. Often, you have to swipe or tap back a dozen pages to be sure you haven’t missed anything.

Because the Kindle ecosystem makes buying books one-click effortless, it can be easy to forget about your purchases. Unfortunately, Kindle’s interface makes it difficult to keep tabs on those expanding digital libraries: at best, we can see a dozen titles at a time, all as inscrutably small book covers. Titles that fall off the first-page listing on a Kindle cease to exist. Compare that with standing in front of a physical bookshelf: the eye takes in hundreds of spines or covers at once, all equally at arm’s length. I’ve found that it’s much more effortless to dip back into my physical library – for inspiration or reference – than my digital library. The books are there. They’re obvious. They welcome me back.

The pile of unread books we have on our bedside tables is often referred to as a graveyard of good intentions. The list of unread books on our Kindles is more of a black hole of fleeting intentions.

The comparison of a bookshelf to the limited real estate on a screen is so important in many contexts: when we got into a supermarket or bookshop we can scan hundreds of items at once. How many on a screen when you don’t know what you’re searching for?
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Sony buys Belgian image sensor technology firm » Reuters

Ritsuko Ando:

Japan’s Sony Corp said it bought Belgian image sensor technology company Softkinetic Systems for an undisclosed sum, stepping up investment in an area that has become one of its strongest amid weak sales of its TVs and smartphones.

Softkinetic specializes in a type of technology that helps measure “time of flight”, or the time it takes for light to reflect off an object and return to an image sensor, Sony said.

Put like that, it sounds like “you’re measuring light round trips? Those are nanoseconds, right?”. Judging from the site, though, it’s more about location in 3D and general position sensing and mapping in domestic environments. So does this mean we’ll go to 3D photos next?
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Start up: the Nexus puzzle, Stagefright 2.0 (bigger!), T-Mobile US data hack, Fiorina’s iPod miss and more

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How do you make cakes sell better if they make people feel guilty? Photo by ricardogz10 on Flickr.

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Google’s Nexus phones are just ads » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

new Nexus phones are also profitless love letters to fans, designed to induce goodwill for the Google brand. How can a company that depends on making money from each unit of hardware sold hope to compete with that?

Motorola went all-out with the Moto X Pure this year, seeking to deliver the cleanest possible Android experience, best possible specs, and lowest possible price, all while operating independently of carrier interference. That’s as close to Google’s Nexus ideal as any Android manufacturer has ever come. So if Google’s Nexus motivation was truly to set a template of good practices to follow, to define a user experience benchmark, and to seed the development of a better Android ecosystem, it would have stopped and applauded Motorola for its efforts this year.

Instead, Google is undercutting the $399 Moto X Pure with the $379 Nexus 5X, which has the added benefit of a fingerprint sensor and matches the Moto X with a highly rated camera capable of 4K video. I don’t know whether to describe this as a knife in the back or an arrow to the knee, but Google’s actions are certainly doing violence to its Android partners’ best-laid plans.

Lenovo/Motorola’s mobile division loses money. So it’s pretty certain that if the Nexus phones undercut them, they lose money. That makes them deflationary to the Android ecosystem; it’s as though Microsoft were selling $150 full-spec PCs under its own brand. Savov hits the nail on the head (once more): the Nexus program just doesn’t make sense in a wider view.
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Stagefright 2.0: MP3 and MP4 can hack billion Android phones » Fortune

Robert Hackett:

It’s time to evacuate the Android dance floor—lest you be infected by the sound.

Two new critical vulnerabilities in Google’s mobile operating system announced by security researchers on Thursday put more than a billion Android devices at risk of being hacked. That means “almost every Android device” is affected, ranging from Android version 1.0 to the latest version 5.0, also known as “Lollipop,” the researcher said.

Attackers can exploit these computer bugs by tricking users into visiting websites that host malicious MP3 or MP4 files. Once a victim previews one of these infected multimedia files, which commonly package music or video, that person’s machine can swiftly be compromised. The issue involves how Android processes these files’ metadata through a media playback engine named Stagefright.

Yes, it’s Stagefright, and it’s back; it can once more access data, cameras, microphone and photos. But on pretty much any Android phone ever. It’s incredibly unlikely to be exploited by any but state-level hackers.

Still, Google was told on 15 August, and sent updates to OEMs and carriers on September 10. Have they rolled out? Find out by using Zimperium’s Stagefright detector app. (You have to love the reviews complaining that it shows “false positives”.)
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Amazon to ban sale of Apple, Google video-streaming devices » Bloomberg Business

Spencer Soper:

Amazon.com is flexing its e-commerce muscles to gain an edge on competitors in the video-streaming market by ending the sale of devices from Google and Apple that aren’t easily compatible with Amazon’s video service.

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Amazon’s streaming service, called Prime Video, doesn’t run easily on its rival’s hardware.

Filed under “strategy tax”. Possibly the profits on the Apple TV and Chromecast weren’t very high, but Amazon still sells smart TVs that don’t play Prime Video.
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CEO responds to Experian data breach » T-Mobile

John Legere:

We have been notified by Experian, a vendor that processes our credit applications, that they have experienced a data breach. The investigation is ongoing, but what we know right now is that the hacker acquired the records of approximately 15 million people, including new applicants requiring a credit check for service or device financing from September 1, 2013 through September 16, 2015. These records include information such as name, address and birthdate as well as encrypted fields with Social Security number and ID number (such as driver’s license or passport number), and additional information used in T-Mobile’s own credit assessment. Experian has determined that this encryption may have been compromised. We are working with Experian to take protective steps for all of these consumers as quickly as possible.

Obviously I am incredibly angry about this data breach and we will institute a thorough review of our relationship with Experian, but right now my top concern and first focus is assisting any and all consumers affected. I take our customer and prospective customer privacy VERY seriously.

Sure, you take it seriously, Mr Legere (and I mean that seriously) but there’s a single point of failure in the way that you trusted a third party with your customers’ data. That’s poor system design, which means that actually customer privacy wasn’t taken that seriously. Wonder if a class action will follow.
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Xiaomi confronts an unnerving time » WSJ

Li Yuan speaks to Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun:

How Xiaomi responds [to new challengers] could offer a clue to how well China’s booming tech industry transitions to its next stage. Riding a wave of growing mobile Internet adoption, China’s technology sector has churned out significant global companies and minted fortunes. But growth is slowing across the board, presenting challenges to a new generation of entrepreneurs who must learn how to manage in tougher times.

Mr. Lei sees a five-year lull in smartphone innovation that will make “wow” moments harder to come by, and will require competitors to focus on user experience to differentiate and tap consumer niches. The key, he says, is to provide value.

“We’re doing what Uniqlo, Muji and Ikea have been doing,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to make good but cheap things.”

That five-year lull is quite a thing to contemplate.
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The cost of mobile ads on 50 news websites » The New York Times

Gregor Aisch, Wilson Andrews and Josh Keller:

Ad blockers, which Apple first allowed on the iPhone in September, promise to conserve data and make websites load faster. But how much of your mobile data comes from advertising? We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers.

It’s a hell of a graphic. The “cost to load” data is eye-opening: it’s pretty much always far, far bigger than that of the editorial. (Why? I mean, one comes for the editorial, including pictures; why are ads so much bigger?) The Guardian comes a long way down the list – as in, it has a very low ad load – which might be, I suspect, because the US version of the site doesn’t yet have that many ads.

There’s an accompanying article by Brian X Chen, which also appeared in print.

Note too that articles like this fulfils one of my expectations ahead of the launch of iOS 9: it spreads the word of the existence of this facility on iOS, which will lead to Android users wanting to know how they can get it too.
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A creativity lesson from Betty Crocker » Psychology Today

Drew Boyd:

In the 1950s, General Mills launched a line of cake mixes under the famous Betty Crocker brand. The cake mixes included all the dry ingredients in the package, plus milk and eggs in powdered form. All you needed was to add water, mix it all together, and stick the pan in the oven. For busy homemakers, it saved time and effort, and the recipe was virtually error free. General Mills had a sure winner on its hands.

Or so it thought. Despite the many benefits of the new product, it did not sell well. Even the iconic and trusted Betty Crocker brand could not convince homemakers to adopt the new product.

General Mills brought in a team of psychologists. Something unusual was going on. The company needed to make its next move very carefully if it was going to get this product off the ground.

Why were consumers resisting it? The short answer: guilt. The psychologists concluded that average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product.

Now think carefully: what’s your next step? (Scrapping the line is not an option.) I wonder if there are any lessons for smartphone makers in this.
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How Steve Jobs fleeced Carly Fiorina » Medium

Steven Levy utterly destroys any claims to negotiating competence that would-be Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina might have, pointing to the many ways that Jobs steamrollered her (from the colour of the iPod to the pre-installation of iTunes on HP PCs). But this is the coup de grace:

The ultimate irony is that if Fiorina had been familiar with the assets of the company she ran, she might have had much more leverage to cut a better deal with Jobs. When she made her disastrous 2002 acquisition of Compaq, HP took possession of its patents, including those generated by the research division of the Digital Equipment Corporation, the iconic minicomputer company that Compaq itself bought in 1998. It turns out that researchers in DEC’s Palo Alto lab had created a hard-disk MP3 player — essentially inventing key parts of the iPod several years before Apple did. The project never got any love, though a clunky version of it had actually been announced at CES in 2000. Still, among the patents DEC secured were some very broad ones regarding the way music was drawn from the disk drive while conserving battery power. Had Fiorina known this, she might had been able to get a much better deal with Apple  —  because she could have credibly claimed that the iPod infringed on HP’s intellectual property.

Based on this, you’d have to (holds nose) vote for Trump. At least he has actually succeeded in negotiations, and created rather than destroyed shareholder value. If, that is, you think those are things that matter in presidential candidates. Which isn’t self-evident.
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EMV’s reality: more online fraud » PaymentsSource

Rurik Bradbury:

Only 22% of small to mid-sized retailers reported that they are prepared to meet the [October 1] deadline [when retailers have to make customers use EMV-compliant payment terminals]. And, according to a recent SoftwareAdvice.com study, 23% believe upgrading to EMV is unnecessary.

Additional data from a large research firm suggests that almost 50% of U.S. retailers will not be EMV-compliant by the end of 2015. These merchants, just under half of all U.S. retailers, will be in for a rude awakening when they start receiving chargeback bills for fraudulent transactions.

The shift to EMV should significantly reduce in-store fraud for retailers that upgrade their payments processing systems, as the new cards will have an embedded chip that generates a unique token for each transaction, making them extremely difficult or nearly impossible to counterfeit. However, fraudsters will not just throw in the towel and get day jobs, they will simply change their tactics to exploit less secure payment channels.

In many ways, criminal fraud is like running water, when one area is firmly sealed off, it simply flows to the next open gap, which in this case is e-commerce. In the digital world, only the card digits and Card Verification Value (CVV) are used, and chip technology cannot help, which will make digital payments an easier, more lucrative target for fraudsters to target. According to a study by the Aite Group, in Australia, online or card not present (CNP), fraud increased from $72.6 million AU in 2008 to $198.1 million AU in 2011 – a 100 percent increase in CNP fraud in three years following the EMV upgrade. A similar spike occurred in Canada and the UK after each country migrated to EMV terminals.

The same, or worse is expected to happen in the U.S.

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Apple’s software king Eddy Cue on streaming battles, the iPhone 6s and getting rid of roaming charges » London Evening Standard

Jimi Famurewa got some time just ahead of the iPhone launch. Most of the interview is straightforward, but for this snippet at the end:

[Cue] taps his phone and makes an offhand comment about “trying not to get roaming charges” while in London which, I note, proves how insanely expensive phone calls and data can be abroad. “It’s sad, it’s another problem,” says Cue. “We’re trying to fix it and we’re making a little bit of progress but you’ve got to convince a lot of people.” It sounds like an impossible task. But that, you would imagine, is where the famous flair will come in.

“We’re trying to fix it”? That throwaway remark is going to fuel a lot of “OMG Apple roaming MVNO” talk. But it’s certainly not an accident.
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The new Apple Maps vs. Google Maps: which is right for you? » Howto Geek

Chris Stobing:

If you’ve been using Google Maps for a number of years and your account already has all your contacts saved – great, go for Google. If you prefer to use Siri to launch your Maps application or want to be able to see where you’re going without having to unlock the phone, Apple Maps is on the job. There may have been a point in time when Google Maps held the crown as the best (and for awhile; only) real map app out there, but now Apple Maps lives alongside its legacy with just as much functionality and flexibility as the rest.

“Apple Maps in ‘no longer as bad as on first day'” shocker. (Plus “Google Maps unable to improve beyond where it was three years ago”.) The biggest gap is in public transport; while apps can close that, it’s still unsatisfying when your only offerings are cars or Shanks’s pony.
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Samsung TVs appear less energy efficient in real life than in tests » The Guardian

Arthur Nelsen:

The lab studies found that Samsung’s ‘motion lighting’ feature reduced the TV sets’ brightness – and power consumption – under international electrotechnical commission (IEC) test conditions. These involve the playback of fast sequences of varied material, such as recorded TV shows, DVDs and live broadcasts.

But under real-world viewing conditions, no reductions in power consumption were registered, making the sets’ power consumption, fuel bills and carbon emissions correspondingly higher.

After tests in February, a ComplianTV report, which did not name Samsung, said: “The laboratories observed different TV behaviours during the measurements and this raised the possibility of the TV’s detecting a test procedure and adapting their power consumption accordingly. Such phenomenon was not proven within the ComplianTV tests, but some tested TVs gave the impression that they detected a test situation.”

“Samsung is meeting the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law,” Rudolf Heinz, the project manager of ComplianTV’s product lab, told the Guardian.

Oh, come on, Samsung would never.. oh.
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Start up: a shorter rounder Pebble, VW v DMCA redux, Lenovo’s other spyware, IAB defends ads, and more

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This bloke’s car might offer some clues about Apple’s future offering. Photo by Konabish on Flickr.

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Pebble debuts its first round smartwatch with the Pebble Time Round » TechCrunch

Greg Kumparak:

Pebble is thus far known for its solid battery life; in a world where most smartwatches last a day or so at best, Pebble’s lightweight OS and e-ink display traditionally let it crank on for closer to a week.

Curiously, though, the Pebble Time Round has shaved off a fair bit of that signature battery life in favor of a lighter, slimmer design — instead of five or six days of battery life, Pebble Time Round promises two days. A quick charge feature lets you add 24 hours of juice with just 15 minutes on the charger — but you won’t be taking this one for week long camping trips.

Less battery life?
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You have the right… to reverse engineer » getwired.com

Wes Miller:

This NYTimes article about the VW diesel issue and the DMCA made me think about how, 10 years ago next month, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) almost kept Mark Russinovich from disclosing the Sony BMG Rootkit. While the DMCA provides exceptions for reporting security vulnerabilities, it does nothing to allow for reporting breaches of… integrity.

I believe that we need to consider an expansion of how researchers are permitted to, without question, reverse engineer certain systems. While entities need a level of protection in terms of their copyright and their ability to protect their IP, VW’s behavior highlights the risks to all of us when of commercial entities can ship black box code and ensure nobody can question it – technically or legally.

Miller advised Russinovich on whether he could publish. The VW case is surely going to lead to a lot of questions about the DMCA and engine control unit (ECU) software – as highlighted yesterday.
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What will the Apple Car look like? Jony Ive’s taste for Bentleys and Aston Martins could influence design » IB Times

David Gilbert:

So what will Apple’s car look like? By talking to the people in the industry and those who know Ive and his work, IBT gleaned some idea.

“If you look at the Apple philosophy of less is more, then apply that to a car then you would have an Apple product,” said Chris Longmore, founder if U.K.-based automotive design consultancy Drive. Longmore, who has worked with Ford, Nissan and Rolls Royce who believes it is a huge benefit for Apple to be starting with a blank sheet of paper. “If you take the iPhone and move into different areas, because the building blocks would be common throughout that, the DNA would be common across all the products and that’s how they should be looking to do it,” he said.

That too is the view of Ive’s former boss, Martin Darbyshire, CEO and founder of London-based design company Tangerine, who worked with Ive for 18 months before he moved to Apple.

“Sometimes coming at something with a fresh perspective is fundamental to finding something new and developing a paradigm shift. Of all the design teams in the world one would expect Apple to do something interesting and different,” Darbyshire told International Business Times.

Smart move asking Darbyshire. When you look at all the fan-generated renders of the “iWatch”, you realise the gulf between what people wish for and what Apple really does.
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Lenovo collects usage data on ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and ThinkStation PCs » Computerworld

Michael Horowitz:

The task that gave me pause is called “Lenovo Customer Feedback Program 64”. It was running daily. According to the description in the task scheduler: “This task uploads Customer Feedback Program data to Lenovo”.

I have setup my fair share of new Lenovo machines and can’t recall ever being asked about a Customer Feedback program.

The program that runs daily is Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.Agent.exe and it resides in folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Lenovo\Customer Feedback Program.

Other files in this folder are Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.Agent.exe.config, Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.InnovApps.dll and Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.OmnitureSiteCatalyst.dll.

According to Wikipedia, Omniture is an online marketing and web analytics firm, and SiteCatalyst (since renamed) is their software as a service application for client-side web analytics.

So, while there may not be extra ads on ThinkPads, there is some monitoring and tracking.

Lenovo confirms in a support note that it does this, but says it’s non-personal. It seems the purpose is to see which applications, service and offers you go for during system setup. Which says something about the parlous state of crapware on Windows PCs in its own right.
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The Apple bias is real » The Verge

Vlad Savov, bravely:

The next time you read an iPhone review, keep all these biases in mind. The iPhone is the favored tech product of a vast swathe of our planet’s population, serving both utilitarian and aspirational purposes. It is the catalyst for and sole supporter of entire ancillary industries. It is the nexus where communication and commerce blend most easily, and it is the surest harbinger of the future that is to come. Any review that doesn’t account for all of these factors might be considered technically objective and ubiased, but it would also be frightfully uninformative. Assessing an iPhone against a blank canvas is akin to describing Notre Dame or Sagrada Família as old, large, religious buildings.

Apple bias exists in reviews because it exists in the real world. The company’s track record with the iPhone and other products like it — characterized by a great deal more right decisions than wrong ones — encourages optimism about its riskier new ventures today. The Apple Watch is credited with greater potential than the Samsung Gear S2 because of the two companies’ different histories. The Huawei Mate S has Force Touch similar to the iPhone 6S, but only Apple’s phone is expected to turn that technology into a transformative new mode of interaction.

That’s justified bias. That’s relevant context derived from history and experience. Without it, we’d be reciting facts and figures, but no meaning. Megabytes and millimeters matter only after they’ve been passed through the prism of human judgment, and we shouldn’t pretend that it can, or should, ever be unbiased.

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Functioning ‘mechanical gears’ seen in nature for the first time » Phys.org

Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.

The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement – the legs always move within 30 ‘microseconds’ of each other, with one microsecond equal to a millionth of a second.

This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect’s primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in “yaw rotation” – causing the Issus to spin hopelessly out of control.

“This precise synchronisation would be impossible to achieve through a nervous system, as neural impulses would take far too long for the extraordinarily tight coordination required,” said lead author Professor Malcolm Burrows, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

“By developing mechanical gears, the Issus can just send nerve signals to its muscles to produce roughly the same amount of force – then if one leg starts to propel the jump the gears will interlock, creating absolute synchronicity.

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Ad blocking: the unnecessary internet apocalypse » Advertising Age

Randall Rothenberg is president and chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau:

Let’s take these challenges in order. Advertising (as everyone reading these words knows well) pays for the ability for nearly anyone around the world to type in any URL and have content of unimaginable variety appear on a screen. Advertising also subsidizes the cost of apps, which can take hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, but are often free or low-priced.

Without advertising, digital content and services either will vanish, or the cost for their production and distribution will come directly from consumers’ wallets.

Of even greater importance is the impact on the economy itself. Advertising represents $350 billion of the U.S. gross national product, and consumers depend on it to help make $9 trillion of annual spending decisions. “Advertising helps the economy function smoothly,” said Nobel Laureate economists Kenneth Arrow and George Stigler. “It keeps prices low and facilitates the entry of new products and new firms into the market.”

Ad blocking disrupts this engine of competition. I wish I were crying wolf, but I’m not. Some websites, particularly those with millennial audiences, are already losing up to 40% of their ad revenue because of ad blocking. Our own IAB research found at least 34% of U.S. adults use ad blockers.

Good grief, where to start?
(1) Content was online long before advertising shoved its sweaty arse in front of us;
(2) Advertising doesn’t pay for smartphones, PCs or internet connectivity;
(3) advertising doesn’t subsidise the production, it subsidises the presentation of many apps – but substantial numbers are simply paid-for (think of UsTwo’s Monument Valley);
(4) the cost of content etc already comes from our wallets, because the cost of advertising is a factor in any company’s costs and so its products
(5) adblocking isn’t going to kill the whole advertising industry, just the bit that behaves unreasonably online
(6) adblocking actually intensifies competition, because it creates a new space where would-be advertisers have to figure out how to get their message across
(7) wouldn’t it have been good to notice that your members were pissing people off before desktop adblocking had been adopted by a third of one section of your audience, Mr Rothenberg?
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Shut Up: Comment Blocker » iOS App Store

Richard Romero:

Shut Up spares you from Internet troglodytes by hiding all comment sections when browsing the web in Safari. You can even set your favorite websites to show comments by default.

This stuff is only just getting started.
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Malware with your news? Forbes website victim of malvertising attack » FireEye Inc

From Sept. 8 to Sept. 15, 2015, the Forbes.com website was serving content from a third-party advertising service that had been manipulated to redirect viewers to the Neutrino and Angler exploit kits.  We notified Forbes, who worked quickly to correct the issue.

This type of malicious redirection is known as malvertising, where ad networks and content publishers are abused and leveraged to serve ads that redirect users to malicious sites.

I promise that FireEye is not paying for its position here or in the next links. It’s just on top of the relevant news. Also: pretty good case for desktop adblocking there.
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Protecting our customers from XcodeGhost » FireEye Inc

Immediately after learning of XcodeGhost, FireEye Labs identified more than 4,000 infected apps on the App Store. FireEye has since updated detection rules in its NX and Mobile Threat Prevention (MTP) products to detect the malicious apps and their activity on a network.

FireEye NX customers are alerted if an employee uses an infected app while the iOS device is connected to the corporate network. It’s important to note that, although the CnC servers have been taken down, the malicious apps still try to connect to them using HTTP. This HTTP session is vulnerable to hijacking by other attackers.

FireEye MTP management customers have full visibility when a mobile device is infected in their deployment base. End users receive on-device notifications of malware detection and IT administrators receive email alerts of the infection.

Four thousand is a lot. Does Apple have any means to killswitch those apps? It can’t kill them based on the developer certificate, because there are lots of developer certificates involved – it’s not a single malicious developer, it’s a single malicious library (or set of libraries) used by many developers.
Apple also has an FAQ up about the exploit.
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Guaranteed clicks: mobile app company takes control of Android phones » FireEye Inc

FireEye Labs mobile researchers discovered a malicious adware family quickly spreading worldwide that allows for complete takeover of an Android user’s device. This attack is created by a mobile app promotion company called NGE Mobi/Xinyinhe that claims to be valued at more than $100M with offices in China and Singapore.

The malicious adware uses novel techniques to maintain persistence and obfuscate its activity, including installing system level services, modifying the recovery script executed on boot, and even tricking the user into enabling automatic app installation. We have observed over 300 malicious, illegitimate versions of Android apps being distributed, including: Amazon, Memory Booster, Clean Master, PopBird, YTD Video Downloader, and Flashlight…

…has infected 20 different versions of Android from 2.3.4 to 5.1.1. Victims with 308 different phone models from more than 26 countries and four continents have been infected.

Another day…
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Start up: DMCA v Volkswagen, cruel opt-outs, self-parking cars win, HP’s irrelevance, and more

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The tsunami that hit the Fukushima reactor nearly led to a meltdown – but how many people died from radiation release? Photo by NRCgov 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.

Researchers could have uncovered Volkswagen’s emissions cheat if not hindered by the DMCA » Electronic Frontier Foundation

Kit Walsh:

Automakers argue that it’s unlawful for independent researchers to look at the code that controls vehicles without the manufacturer’s permission. We’ve explained before how this allows manufacturers to prevent competition in the markets for add-on technologies and repair tools. It also makes it harder for watchdogs to find safety or security issues, such as faulty code that can lead to unintended acceleration or vulnerabilities that let an attacker take over your car.

The legal uncertainly created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act also makes it easier for manufacturers to conceal intentional wrongdoing. We’ve asked the Librarian of Congress to grant an exemption to the DMCA to make it crystal clear that independent research on vehicle software doesn’t violate copyright law. In opposing this request, manufacturers asserted that individuals would violate emissions laws if they had access to the code. But we’ve now learned that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, Volkswagen had already programmed an entire fleet of vehicles to conceal how much pollution they generated, resulting in a real, quantifiable impact on the environment and human health.

This code was shielded from watchdogs’ investigation by the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA. Surprisingly, the EPA wrote in [PDF] to the Copyright Office to oppose the exemptions we’re seeking.

With a headline like that, it sounds like an episode of Scooby-Doo. The EPA’s argument in the linked letter is actually reasonable: you know that people will hack the ECM, especially if they get the source code.
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The Cruelest Opt-Out Forms » Tumblr

A project in which @lydialaurenson collects all those forms where, when you decline, you’re meant to feel guilty for doing so. Such as this:

Of course you don’t have to read it. You could just miss the best chance of your life.
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Self-parking cars are better than humans at parking » Fusion

A new study from the AAA put human drivers who considered themselves adept at parallel parking in a “park-off” against five models of self-parking cars. The result? Human drivers got absolutely destroyed by the automated cars in a test of basic parking skills.

Nearly 80% of survey respondents contacted by the AAA said they were “confident in their parallel parking abilities.” But self-parking cars hit the curb 81% less often than human drivers in the road test, and parked themselves with 47% fewer maneuvers. Self-parking cars were also able to park 37% closer to the curb than human drivers, and—to add insult to injury—they did it 10% faster than the humans.

“Self-parking cars” somehow doesn’t sound as sexy, you know? But the clincher is: only one in four of the people in a survey said they’d trust a car to do the parking. This is the knowledge gap that’s so crucial: we don’t know how good robots are at things.
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One million Android users infected with malware through an IQ testing application » Softpedia

Catalin Cimpanu:

The app is called Brain Test and is a simple IQ testing utility, which comes packed with a combination of complex malware strands.

According to Check Point’s research staff, the application was detected via the company’s Mobile Threat Prevention system, first on a Nexus 5 device.

Because its owner, after receiving the malware alert, did not manage to uninstall the malicious app, this prompted Check Point’s team to have a closer look at the source of the infection.

By reverse-engineering the Brain Test app, researchers found a very well-designed piece of malware, which allowed attackers to install third-party applications on the user’s phone, after previously rooting the device and even managing to become boot-persistent.

Brain Test came with a complex detection avoidance system

Looking even further into the issue, researchers found a complex system that allowed the malware to avoid detection by Google’s Bouncer, an automated app testing system that checks for known security issues.

The malware contained code that prevented it from executing if it detected it was being run from certain IP ranges, or domains containing “google”, ”android”, ”1e100.”

After managing to get around Bouncer’s checks and getting installed on a user’s phone, Brain Test would execute a time bomb function whenever the user would run it for the first time.

Even after Google zapped it, the app was re-uploaded five days later. Software that detects when it’s being tested really is the flavour of the month, isn’t it?
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London Collision Map Beta

Discover where road traffic collisions have happened in London since 2005; then filter by year, road user, collision severity and age group.

Figures for 2014 show that the number of people Killed or Seriously Injured (KSI) on London’s roads fell to the lowest level since records began. Safe Streets for London, London’s road safety plan, set out the ambition to work towards roads free from death and serious injury and the Mayor’s new target is to halve the number of KSIs by 2020 compared to the Government baseline.

Nice idea, but it’s pretty hellish to use. Heatmaps might have worked better.

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Why HP is irrelevant » Om Malik

A few years ago, in a conversation with my friend Pip Coburn (who spent a long time as a tech-stocks strategist for UBS before starting his own firm, Coburn Ventures), I mentioned that a certain company was dead, though not many realized it. And by “dead,” I didn’t mean that it was bankrupt, out of money or out of business. I meant it was dead in its ability to find growth, excitement and new ideas. Any positive energy had flattened and turned negative. “With that lens on, HP has been ‘dead’ for 15+ years,” Pip emailed me this morning.

Pip says that “companies have a space and time and purpose and when those fade the company would be wise to steadily shut itself down.” Like some other large tech companies, HP fits that bill. In a note to some of his clients, Pip pointed out, “The company [HP] doesn’t even do a good job of pretending to have a strategy.” And he is right.

It’s true: HP hasn’t made a market since, what the inkjet printer? Bubblejet printer? Laser printer? Whichever, it’s been a long time.
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When radiation isn’t the real risk » The New York Times

George Johnson:

This spring, four years after the nuclear accident at Fukushima, a small group of scientists met in Tokyo to evaluate the deadly aftermath.

No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation — a point confirmed last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise.

But about 1,600 people died from the stress of the evacuation — one that some scientists believe was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels at the Japanese nuclear plant.

None of the workers who went into the stricken plant has died of radiation poisoning. The biggest problem for those workers is heatstroke caused by the extra protective equipment they wear.

Truly, the media reaction to Fukushima was enormously overblown; we are all bad at evaluating risk, but the media perhaps worst of all because “if it bleeds, it leads”.
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BT pledges better broadband for UK » BBC News

BT has hit back at rivals calling for its break-up, with a strategy to make the UK the fastest broadband nation.

It revealed plans to connect 10 million homes to ultrafast broadband [300-500Mbps] by the end of 2020 and raise the minimum broadband speed for homes that cannot get fibre to 5-10Mbps (megabits per second).

It comes in a week when rivals have denounced the quality of UK broadband.

In a letter to the Financial Times on Monday, they said BT should be split.

Sky, Vodafone and TalkTalk were among signatories to the letter which claimed that millions of customers currently have a “substandard” broadband service.

Homes currently passed by fibre, according to Ofcom: 23.6m (with 30% takeup, ie 7.1m users).
Households in UK: 26.4m.

However, the gap between that pledge of ultrafast and minimum is just absurd. And it’ll be those who need the faster speeds – in rural areas – who won’t get it.
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Soft underbelly » Asymco

Horace Dediu suggests that existing carmakers are underestimating the threat they face from computer-industry entrants:

Traditional car making is capital intensive due to the processes and materials used. There are however alternatives on the shelf. iStream from Gordon Murray Design proposed switching to tubular frames and low cost composites.  BMW has an approach using carbon fiber other composites. 3D printing is waiting in the wings. All offer a departure from sheet metal stamping.

With new materials, costs for new plants can be reduced by as much as 80% and since amortizing the tooling is as much as 40% of the cost of new car, the margins on new production methods could result in significant boosts in margin.

There is a downside however. What is usually compromised when using these new methods is volume and scale of production. So that becomes the real question: how many cars can Apple target? 10k, 50k, 100k per year? Could they target 500k? That would be 10 times Tesla’s current volumes but only a bit more than the output of the Mini brand.

Now consider that the total market is 85 million vehicles per year. For Apple to get 10% share would imply 8.5 million cars a year, a feat that is hard to contemplate right now with any of the production systems. On the other hand selling 80 million iPhones and iPads in a single quarter has become routine for Apple and that was considered orders of magnitude beyond what they could deliver. Amazing what 8 years of production ramping can offer.

Given that cars are increasingly computers with fancy cases on wheels, you really don’t want to rule out low-end or even high-end disruption.
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Ad tech always wins: Ad blocker users are the new hot ad-targeting segment » Digiday

Lucia Moses:

“We want to find ways to reach these consumers in ways that suit how they want to be communicated to and with,” Laura Mete Frizzell, gm of search/analytics/media at 360i. “They are part of an audience for which the brand is relevant and can offer utility.”

The potential to target ad blockers is “on the radar,” said Jon Anselmo, senior vp, managing director of digital innovation at MediaVest. “People’s behaviors, including ad blocking, do provide us insights about who they are and what they care about. A tech-savvy nature could absolutely be one such insight.”

On the seller side, too, the idea of targeting blockers is starting to pop up in conversations with publishers like Complex, said its CEO and founder Rich Antoniello. “Those are the hardest to reach people,” he said. One response by Complex has been to use the space normally given over to ads to present ad blocker users with a message asking for their emails to target them regardless.

Mark that last one, because it must surely be the dumbest thing you’ll see today. (Via Rowland Manthorpe.)
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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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