Tag Archives: india

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

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

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

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

Trevor Mogg:

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

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

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

«

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

Julian Ho and Jessie Chen:

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

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

«

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

Lara O’Reilly:

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

«

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

Ingrid Lunden:

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Mozur and Jane Perlez:

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

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

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

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

«

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

Douglas Rushkoff:

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

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

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

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

Bill Wyman:

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

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

»

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack Monroe:

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

It’s a big job but an essential one.

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

«

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

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

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

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

»//NOBODY IS READING YOUR SHIT

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

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

«

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

Start up: the stuck smart home, McAfee’s hack trick, ICO probes Deepmind deal, Flash the zombie, and more

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Yes, Runkeeper tracks your runs. But Norway’s consumer council thinks it tracks more than that. Photo by Gordon 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 11 links for you. Ain’t that something? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The smart home is stuck • Tech.pinions

Jan Dawson:

»The challenge, then, is the addressable market for most smart home technology is pretty small, composed of innovators and early adopters in the classic technology diffusion curve. As a result, many products are attempting to squeeze every opportunity out of these small markets until they’re maxed out. Nest has been criticized for not innovating more around its original product but I suspect this is the result of a deliberate strategy to saturate many individual product markets rather than focus on ongoing significant improvements in a single market. This helps to explain Nest’s acquisition of Dropcam, its smoke and carbon monoxide detector, and the other products it’s been rumored to be working on. There’s more mileage in opening up new markets than there is in squeezing incremental value out of existing markets already nearing saturation.

I see some people referring to Amazon’s Alexa as a more mainstream smart home or home automation product, and I think that’s actually a red herring. Yes, it can be used to control smart home devices but I suspect (a) only a subset of Alexa devices are used for this purpose and (b) such a focus would limit its appeal to a niche within that smart home early adopter category. I think Alexa’s potential is much broader than that and it’s precisely because it isn’t just a smart home controller. Alexa isn’t extending the smart home market – it’s more mainstream precisely because it’s not limited to that small and limited opportunity.

«

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Mobile traffic dominates among the web’s most popular sites • The Atlantic

Adriene Lafrance:

»More than half of Facebook’s roughly 1.7 billion monthly users visit the site exclusively from their smartphones—that’s 894 million mobile-only users each month, up from 581 million such users last year and 341 million mobile-only users in 2014, according to the company’s latest earnings report.

Google confirmed last year that more searches come from mobile devices than computers in 10 countries, including the United States. Over the holiday season, Amazon said more than 60% of shoppers used mobile. And Wikipedia, which recently revamped the way it tracks site traffic, says it’s getting more mobile than desktop visits to its English language site.

In April, Wikipedia had about 361 million unique visits from smartphones and tablets compared with some 229 million from desktops—meaning roughly 61% of traffic to the English-language version of Wikipedia came from mobile devices, according to data provided by a spokeswoman.

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Didn’t know the Wikipedia stat, but that’s really persuasive.
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John McAfee apparently tried to trick reporters into thinking he hacked WhatsApp • Gizmodo

William Turton:

»McAfee has a history of being shifty with the press about his alleged cybersecurity exploits. In March, for instance, during a media tour that included appearances on CNN and RT, McAfee claimed he would be able to hack into the phone of San Bernadino terrorist Syed Farook. McAfee never proved his claims, and later admitted that he was lying in order to garner a “shitload of public attention.” And earlier this year, McAfee hedged on his terrorism-prevention ideals for America during an interview with CNN about his Libertarian candidacy for president, saying that his strategy for preventing homegrown terrorism was “difficult to explain.”

Now, it seems McAfee has tried to trick reporters again, by sending them phones pre-cooked with malware containing a keylogger, and convincing them he somehow cracked the encryption on WhatsApp. According to cybersecurity expert Dan Guido, who was contacted by a reporter trying to verify McAfee’s claims, McAfee planned to send this reporter two Samsung phones in sealed boxes. Then, experts working for McAfee would take the phones out of the boxes in front of the reporters and McAfee would read the messages being sent on WhatsApp over a Skype call.

«

Pointless.
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ICO probes Google DeepMind patient data-sharing deal with NHS Hospital Trust • Computer Weekly

Caroline Donnelly:

»The Information Commissioner’s Office, the data protection watchdog, confirmed an investigation into the arrangement is underway, on the back of at least one complaint from the general public.

The deal gives DeepMind access to the healthcare records of 1.6 million patients that pass through three hospitals in North London, which fall under the care of the Royal Free Hospital Trust.

The complaint, seen by Computer Weekly, questions whether DeepMind will be expected to encrypt the patient data it receives when at rest.

“Whilst the information-sharing agreement insists that personally identifiable information – such as name, address, post code, NHS number, date of birth, telephone number, and email addresses, etc – must be encrypted whilst in transit to Google, it does not explicitly prohibit that data being unencrypted at the non-NHS location,” the complaint read.

«

First there’s a deal; then it turns out it’s not directly approved. The complaint is essentially that individuals at Google/Deepmind might access personal data. This is the essential battleground of the coming years: how compatible is tight data regulation with data mining?
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Let’s talk about Amazon reviews: how we spot the fakes • The Wirecutter

Lauren Dragan:

»Amazon has a history of trying hard to deal with offenders and shut them down. In fact, in April, Amazon sued another round of companies that are accused of selling fraudulent reviews. But by the time those companies are caught, their clients have already made a bunch of sales, and the fraudulent reviewers will likely pop up again under new names to repeat the process.

(Want to know more? Wirecutter headphones editor Lauren Dragan talks to Marketplace Tech about compensated Amazon reviews and how to tell real crowdsourced opinions from astroturfing.)

You have a few ways to suss out what may be a fake review. The easiest way is to use Fakespot. This site allows you to paste the link to any Amazon product and receive a score regarding the likelihood of fake reviews.

For example, we ran an analysis on some headphones we found during a recent research sweep for our guide about cheap in-ear headphones. You can see from the results below that the headphones’ reviews didn’t score so well.

«

Hadn’t come across Fakespot before; it seems pretty useful.

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The real cost of big tech’s accounting games • FT.com

Jonathan Ford:

»How much did LinkedIn make over the past three years? Sounds a simple enough question doesn’t it? But it is also one that is capable of being answered in multiple and very diverse ways.

First, let’s look at the figure the US online networking site wants you to focus on. That’s a mouthful called adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda), and the total there between 2013 and 2015 came in at a positive $1.7bn.

Sounds pretty hunky dory? Well, now check out the operating profit line for the business — the one calculated according to the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) that companies must present but often don’t emphasise. Over the same period, LinkedIn racked up a $67m loss.

What explains the yawning $1.8bn difference between those two figures? It isn’t simply the depreciation and amortisation charges the company took against the value of its assets. Those, while pretty hefty, came to just $791m. No, the biggest single reason for the negative swing was the $1bn cost of the stock LinkedIn stuffed into its employees’ pay packets over those three years.

«

Why does it matter if the company gives stock to employees? As Ford explains, it’s because by doing that

»the firm denies itself the chance to sell those shares or options for value in the market. Failing to recognise that forgone cash effectively understates the cost the company has incurred in employing those individuals.

«

So stock grants are a cost. So they come off the bottom (operating) line. I’m constantly surprised by how many companies’ non-GAAP results are reported as if they were the ones to compare.
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Google faces record-breaking fine for web search monopoly abuse • Sunday Telegraph

Christopher Williams:

»Google faces a record-breaking fine for monopoly abuse within weeks, as officials in Brussels put the finishing touches to a seven-year investigation of company’s dominant search engine.

It is understood that the European Commission is aiming to hit Google with a fine in the region of €3bn, a figure that would easily surpass its toughest anti-trust punishment to date, a €1.1bn fine levied on the microchip giant Intel.

Sources close to the situation said officials aimed to make an announcement before the summer break and could make their move as early as next month, although cautioned that Google’s bill for crushing competition online had not been finalised.

The maximum possible is around €6.6bn, or a tenth of Google’s total annual sales.

It will mark a watershed moment in Silicon Valley’s competition battle with Brussels. Google has already been formally charged with unlawfully promoting its own price comparison service in general search results while simultaneously relegating those of smaller rivals, denying them traffic.

«

I’m hearing the same about the timing and intention from my sources; the fine, meanwhile, is indeterminate.
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This fitness app tracks you too much, consumer advocates claim • Fortune

David Meyer:

»According to the Norwegian Consumer Council, which has lodged a complaint with the country’s data protection authority, Runkeeper transmits data about its users all the time, not just when the app is in use.

The Norwegian data protection commissioner, Bjørn Erik Thon, confirmed to Fortune that his office has received the complaint and will now look into it.

“Everyone understands that Runkeeper tracks users while they exercise, but to continue to do so after the training session has ended is not okay,” said Finn Myrstad, the consumer council’s technical director.

The data in question includes timestamped location information, as well as Google advertising IDs that can be used to identify the individual.

“Our users’ privacy is of the utmost importance to us, and we take our obligation to comply with data protection laws very seriously,” Runkeeper CEO Jason Jacobs told Fortune. “We are in the process of reviewing the issues raised in the complaint, and we will cooperate with the Norwegian [data protection authority] if it has any questions arising out of the complaint.”

According to the council, Runkeeper’s terms and conditions do not explain how regularly data is transmitted, and users do not give consent to being monitored in this way. The council claims this breaches Norwegian and EU data protection laws.

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Here’s Runkeeper’s privacy policy. It’s astonishingly vague (though in that respect, probably not so different from other privacy policies). What intrigues me is why the Runkeeper CEO didn’t just say “nah, we don’t collect data after your run.”
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Five things you can get in India with a missed call • WSJ

Shefali Anand:

»Want to transfer funds from your account? Give your bank a missed call. Want to hear Bollywood music? Dial a number and hang up.

Making a missed call by calling a number and letting it ring is a popular way of communicating in India because the caller doesn’t have to spend money. Marketing companies, politicians, banks and others now use this practice to reach millions who have cellphones but limited means.

«

Brilliant. Recalls how, in the days when long-distance calls were expensive, kids on their travels would call the operator and ask to set up a reverse-charge call to their parents. Parent’s phone rings: “Alley Okey is calling from Wichita, Kansas. Will you accept the charge?” Parent: “No.” Conversation ends, with parent knowing that the kid is OK and presently in Wichita.
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Chinese smartphone market has slowed, but Huawei, Oppo & Vivo have not • Counterpoint Technology

»According to the latest research from Counterpoint’s Market Monitor service, the demand for smartphones in China softened during Q1 2016 (Jan-Mar) as the smartphone shipments were down 2% annually and 13% sequentially.

Commenting on the results, Research Director, Neil Shah, said: “In spite of the Chinese holiday season quarter, the Chinese smartphone market demand reached a standstill. This has led to intense competition between the players as they struggle to take share away from each other. In a market with hundred of brands, growth is now limited to a handful of players with the greatest marketing budgets and headturning designs, and available at competitive price points.

“Only five brands registered healthy growth during the quarter. Oppo, Huawei and Vivo drove the majority of the volume, capturing a combined 40% of the total Chinese smartphone market. Demand for rest of the brands declined, especially Apple after the strong demand for iPhone 6 & 6 Plus in the quarter a year ago, and lacklustre performance from Lenovo, ZTE and Coolpad.”

The Chinese smartphone market saw a lull in the first two months of 2016, however sales for smartphones started to pick up in March, with the largest sales contribution from Huawei, Oppo and Vivo, the new leaders in Chinese domestic market.

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Other notable points: 98% of phones sold were smartphones (hence Microsoft’s 90% year-on-year drop); the “premium” segment of RMB3000+ ($450+) makes up a fifth of the market, with Apple, Samsung and Vivo dominating.
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HTML5 by default: Google’s plan to make Chrome’s Flash click-to-play • Ars Technica UK

Peter Bright:

»In a plan outlined last week, Flash will be disabled by default [in Google Chrome] in the fourth quarter of this year. Embedded Flash content will not run, and JavaScript attempts to detect the plugin will not find it. Whenever Chrome detects that a site is trying to use the plugin, it will ask the user if they want to enable it or not. It will also trap attempts to redirect users to Adobe’s Flash download page and similarly offer to enable the plugin.

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Great!

»

There will be a few exceptions to this policy, with Google planning to leave Flash enabled by default on the top 10 domains that depend on the plugin. This list includes YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and Amazon.

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Crap.

»

Even this reprieve is temporary. The plan is to remove sites from the list whenever possible—Twitch, for example, is switching to HTML5 streaming, so should start to phase out its use of Flash—and after one year the whitelist will be removed entirely. This means that after the fourth quarter 2017, Flash will need to be explicitly enabled on every site that tries to use it.

«

“After the fourth quarter of 2017”, aka 2018. Flash, the desktop web’s malware zombie. (Notice that all those sites somehow muddle through on mobile, which is far bigger, without Flash.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Twitter’s falling tweet count, Google forgets more, cops v iPhone, how gravity waved, and more

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The new essential tool for Indian farmers. Photo by Desiree Catani on Flickr.

It’s Friday! Save yourself a click on Monday – sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

(Someone told me the other day that they’d been reading the site for weeks and hadn’t noticed the signup in the above paragraph. Web design, eh?)

A selection of 8 links for you. Friday! I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter API data show the number of tweets is in serious decline » Business Insider

Jim Edwards:

The number of tweets per day created by Twitter’s users has fallen by more than half since a peak in August 2014, according to a sampling of data from Twitter’s API. (An API — application programming interface — is the portal through which other apps access Twitter so their software can function together.) The data was given to Business Insider by an app developer who has tracked Twitter users since 2013.

Tweets per day reached a peak in August 2014 of 661m, our source says. That 30-day sampling period included the World Cup final. In January 2016, there were only 303m tweets per day, on average, during the 30-day period.

This story came out before Twitter’s results, which showed the number of users was flat at best. Twitter responded at the time that “This data is not correct”; but it begins to feel correct. My only suspicion though is that Twitter now doesn’t use sequential tweet IDs, so the sampling method might be sensitive to that. More detail on how the sampling is done would be useful.
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WhatsApp is changing the way people in India grow and buy food » TakePart

Sarah McColl:

Farmers Santhosh Kittur and Abhijit Kamath wanted to grow pesticide-free vegetables between the rows of banana plots each separately owned. Their shared interest in old-fashioned agricultural practices brought them together to grow bitter gourd, cucumbers, beans, cabbage, tomatoes, green chiles, red peppers, onions, and garlic—staples of the Indian customers and kitchens they planned to serve. But their modern approach to marketing has put them in direct contact with customers in a high-tech manner.

Across India, WhatsApp groups are not only connecting farmers to their customers in the virtual market—they’re creating a network of resources and support for the country’s farmers who need it most.

In Kittur and Kamath’s WhatsApp group, created last August, the two farmers post updates from their farms, including photographs, as well as what produce is available to the group’s 80 members. Vegetables are sold on Thursdays and Sundays. Members can place dibs on the quantity of specific vegetables they want and can pick up their order or have it delivered.

There’s a famous piece of research by Upsalla University from 2006 about how mobile phones benefited Tanzanian fishermen. It would be good to see a comparable piece of research around smartphone apps in emerging economies.

(And it’s always amusing to hear Americans’ amazement that people use Whatsapp. Like SMS in the early part of this century, it’s huge outside the US, small inside it.)
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Apple entrusts TSMC with all application processor orders for iPhone 7 » ETNews Korea

Han Juyeop:

Taiwan’s TSMC has won a battle against Samsung Electronics and is going to produce 10-nano application processors (AP) that will be installed in Apple’s upcoming iPhone7. Samsung Electronics has entered a state of emergency system to prevent declination of rate of operation of factories.

Samsung Electronics is aiming for an all-out-war in 14-nano foundry business by going after middle-rank chip businesses in China and Taiwan instead and it is also going to focus its capabilities on maintaining supplies of Qualcomm’s 10-nano. It is also important for Samsung Electronics to plan out high-intensity innovations so that it can take back Apple’s supplies in 7-nano.

According to semiconductor IP and EDA industries on the 10th, Apple has entrusted TSMC with all production of next 10-nano AP called ‘A10’. A10 is so called a brain of iPhone7, which is expected to be released in this fall. TSMC is planning to enter a state of mass-production system of 10-nano chips starting from June.

Recall that Apple dual-sourced from both TSMC and Samsung for the iPhone 6S/Plus, though the TSMC ones seemed to do slightly worse on battery than the Samsung ones.

If true, this is going to hurt Samsung: Apple is a big customer, and the semiconductor division is now the most profitable one, well ahead of smartphones.
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Gravitational waves exist: the inside story of how scientists finally found them » The New Yorker

Nicola Twilley:

It took years to make the most sensitive instrument in history insensitive to everything that is not a gravitational wave. Emptying the tubes of air demanded forty days of pumping. The result was one of the purest vacuums ever created on Earth, a trillionth as dense as the atmosphere at sea level. Still, the sources of interference were almost beyond reckoning—the motion of the wind in Hanford, or of the ocean in Livingston; imperfections in the laser light as a result of fluctuations in the power grid; the jittering of individual atoms within the mirrors; distant lightning storms. All can obscure or be mistaken for a gravitational wave, and each source had to be eliminated or controlled for. One of LIGO’s systems responds to minuscule seismic tremors by activating a damping system that pushes on the mirrors with exactly the right counterforce to keep them steady; another monitors for disruptive sounds from passing cars, airplanes, or wolves.

“There are ten thousand other tiny things, and I really mean ten thousand,” Weiss said. “And every single one needs to be working correctly so that nothing interferes with the signal.” When his colleagues make adjustments to the observatory’s interior components, they must set up a portable clean room, sterilize their tools, and don what they call bunny suits—full-body protective gear—lest a skin cell or a particle of dust accidentally settle on the sparkling optical hardware.

This is the one story to read today about this amazing finding. Detail and insight.
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Nextbit’s cloud-savvy Robin phone is set to fly. Good luck catching one – CNET

Roger Cheng:

Chief Design Officer Scott Croyle warns that the early supply will be limited.

“There will be maybe 3,000 to 6,000 phones available,” he said in an interview Wednesday. In comparison, Apple sold 13m iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Pluses in their first three days.

The launch of the online store and the Robin marks the culmination of an unorthodox journey for a phone maker. Rather than go through a carrier, which is how most people shop for handsets, or even set up an online store, Nextbit tested the waters by asking for commitments through Kickstarter and nearly tripled its goal of raising $500,000.

Nextbit isn’t the typical unknown startup. Co-founders Tom Moss and Mike Chan were part of Google’s original Android team. Croyle was behind the critically acclaimed HTC One phone.

But this is part of the future for smartphones – niche players offering a quirk (in this case, tons of cloud storage) which don’t need huge capitalisation because they sell online with low inventory.
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What Everyone’s Got Wrong About Twitter (Including Twitter) » Re/code

Ian Schafer is founder and chairman of Deep Focus:

Twitter is a platform unlike any other, in that it has enough real-time data and intelligence that can be mapped against over 300 million active users. These users are more likely to be more influential and use other media concurrently (especially TV).

Therefore, a compelling argument can be made that, if used properly, Twitter’s real-time user behavior and media-consumption data can be among the most valuable consumer data. In most cases, advertisers will be willing to pay a premium for that. But because so many scrutinize Twitter’s ad experience, doubts abound.

There’s a lot of talk from people who want Twitter to open up its APIs again. I think they’re half-right.

If Twitter wants to realize its full potential, it will make its data completely portable for advertisers, becoming the primary source for real-time business and consumer intelligence. It will use its (and its users’) media savviness to feed a global dataset that ad exchanges, app developers, advertisers and corporations will pay increasingly large amounts of money to access, making it a media-led data company. It has already displayed success in this area; the Twitter Audience Platform and MoPub have gained traction, and with Facebook’s Parse shutting down, Twitter’s Fabric toolkit should gain traction with third-party app developers, as well.

Can you guess that Deep Focus is an ad agency?
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Google to scrub web search results more widely to soothe EU objections » Reuters

Julia Fioretti:

The French data protection authority in September threatened to fine Google if it did not scrub search results globally across all versions of its website, such as Google.com.

But the company has stuck to its position that it should clean up search results only on European domains such as Google.fr or Google.de because to do otherwise would have a chilling effect on the free flow of information.

To address the concerns of European authorities, the Internet giant will soon start polishing search results across all its websites when someone conducts a search from the country where the removal request originated, a person close to the company said.

That means that if a German resident asks Google to de-list a link popping up under searches for his or her name, the link will not be visible on any version of Google’s website, including Google.com, when the search engine is accessed from Germany.

The company will filter search results according to a user’s IP address, meaning people accessing Google from outside Europe will not be affected, the person added.

Since the ruling in 2014, Google has received 386,038 requests for removal, according to its transparency website. It has accepted about 42% of them.

The lesson one tends to draw from this is “the threat of a fine makes Google act”.
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Police destroy evidence with 10 failed passcode attempts on iPhone » Naked Security

Lisa Vaas:

In January 2014, a Massachusetts cop was swearing into his mobile phone while working a traffic detail at a construction site.

The F bombs appeared to upset an elderly lady walking by, so a man on a nearby front porch asked the officer, Thomas Barboza, to stop swearing.

The cop’s response: “Shut the f–k up and mind your own business.”

George Thompson’s response: he started recording Barboza on his iPhone.

According to court documents, Barboza shoved 53-year-old Thompson to the ground, arrested him, handcuffed him, and put him in jail for a night.

Police in the city of Fall River also tried to get into Thompson’s iPhone, where the footage of Barboza was stored.

But all the police managed to do was to destroy the evidence, wiping the phone clean after entering the wrong password 10 times.

Really clear that the cops wanted to get into the phone to wipe the evidence. (They accused Thompson of wiping it remotely; a forensics report showed that was a lie.) Yet another instance where security of the phones is potentially a good thing for the citizenry.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: real China lessons, map the past, India’s phone problem, and more

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A Surface Pro: wouldn’t these yank up falling PC figures? Don’t get your hopes up too high. Photo by 麻吉小兔 on Flickr.

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Beyond the copycats: 5 things I learned about the internet in China » Medium

Chenyu Zheng: In July 2014, my colleague and I moved to China to set up Whisper’s operations in Shenzhen. The subsequent 14 months were my first real experience working in China, on a startup. I was fully immersed in China’s booming tech scene. This humbling journey not only made me more grounded and connected to my roots, but also taught me life-long lessons.

She has five observations, of which this is the key one:

China is far beyond copying the West. Great innovation is happening everywhere in China.

Copying a popular app directly to China does not work — only when a validated need is combined with proper localization by the right team at the right timing. In Chinese, we say 天时地利人和。

(1) For example, Zhihu (30m registered users as of Aug 2015 and raised series C funding from Tencent in Nov 2015) is a leading Q&A platform with significant media distribution in China. At first glance, it could be China’s version of Quora, but it’s far beyond a copycat.

In my mind, it combines Pinterest-style lifestyle, fitness, inspiration photos with Quora’s Q&A and knowledge sharing. Their motto 与世界分享你的知识、经验和见解, which translates to “Share with the world your knowledge, experience and opinion.” Interestingly, the founders are journalists turned entrepreneurs and their stand-alone app Zhihu Daily is a leading media distribution platform in China. For tech worker or lifestyle blogger, having your article selected by Zhihu Daily is a great honor and adds credibility.

Most of my Western friends know about major SNS [social network services] such as Weibo, Wechat, QQ, but for any real China insider, Zhihu is a blossoming platform that people are rushing to build a presence on. It is similar to the trend I observe that Instagram influencers now direct their fans to follow them on Snapchat. The quality and $ value per Zhihu follower are way above Weibo.

(2) With 600m MAU [monthly average users] as of Aug 2015, WeChat is the Facebook of China. It is no exaggeration to regard it as a Swiss Army knife. When you make new acquaintance, the first thing to ask is not their phone number, but scan each other’s WeChat QR code.

On Wechat, I order my Didi taxi, pay for grocery at 711, AA with friends at a meal, top up my cellphone, pay for water & utility, order a ferry ticket to Macau, you name it. In addition, I can order fresh produce, snacks, fresh made yogurt from Wechat official accounts. Not to mention that most of my news and media consumption are from WeChat moment. Everything I need to make life convenient is all within Wechat.

When the smartphone isn’t the platform, but gets abstracted away. How soon will that happen in the west?
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Maps from the past – programmatically »Thenmap

Use the Thenmap API to fetch historical geodata as GeoJSON or TopoJSON, or prerendered maps as SVG files.

Pass a year and preferred coordinate system or projection, and the API will give you all borders in return. Like the world in 1956, or Swedish municipalities from 1979.

The Thenmap API currently holds:

• World borders, from 1945
• Swedish municipalities, from 1974 (a few borders in southern Sweden still missing from 1973)
• Swedish counties, from 1968
• Finnish municipalities, from 2011
• US states, from 1865
• Municipalities of Greenland, from 1979

Learn more by reading the full documentation.

Neat. Built by Leo Wallentin of Journalism++Stockholm.
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PC market finishes 2015 as expected, hopefully setting the stage for a more stable future » IDC

Gloom and doom – the figures for “traditional” PCs are back down to 2007 levels, with only Apple growing year-on-year, while the big players grab more of the market.

Note this though, because IDC doesn’t count these:

Detachable tablets, which are counted separately from PCs, are growing quickly but from a small base. Adding those units to PC shipments would boost growth by roughly 6 percentage points in the fourth quarter and 3 percentage points for all of 2015, bringing year-on-year growth for 4Q15 to a decline of about -5% and -7.5% for all of 2015. The impact for 2016 will be larger as detachable tablet volume grows, boosting earlier forecasts of PC growth in 2016 from -3.1% to growth of 1 to 2%.

That translates to about 4m “detachables” (ie they come with a keyboard, rather than offering the keyboard as an extra – so the iPad Pro is a tablet, not a detachable) shipped in Q4, and 8m in the whole year.

I think the Surface Pro also counts as a “tablet” under IDC’s definition. Nobody’s happy with this, of course.

So the numbers are pretty small, but they’re principally where the profit is – if you’re not Apple.
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Digital publishers face a winter of discontent » Digiday

Ricardo Bilton:

The sunny days of hot growth for digital publishers are fading into a memory as many now face a long, dark winter.

Many venture-backed publishers are coming up to the limits of scale. Their models were based on eye-popping audience-growth figures and the presumption that business would follow. That’s not always the case. And traffic growth inevitably hits a ceiling.

At Business Insider, for example, traffic increased 10% to 40m monthly uniques over the past year, following an 80% increase the year prior. BuzzFeed’s growth was flat this year, at 75.3m uniques in November, after a year in which it grew 42%. (All figures are U.S. cross-platform figures, from comScore.) Mashable’s traffic, on the other hand, grew at a faster rate from November 2013 to November 2014 compared to a year later: 18% vs. 32%. Gawker Media, which spent most of last year in turmoil, has seen a 16% year-over-year decline in unique visitors.

“There’s that sense that not all of these digital news startups will see continuing hockey stick-like growth,” said Ken Doctor, principal analyst at Outsell. “Fall behind in growth, and the current value of these companies may plummet; it’s a momentum game, win or lose.”

A notable point in this: Buzzfeed pays millions of dollars annually for Facebook traffic. Mashable, of course, is reckoned to be shopping itself around.
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A billion users may not be enough for India’s phone industry » Bloomberg Business

Bhuma Shrivastava :

India just signed up its billionth mobile-phone customer, joining China as the only countries to cross that milestone.

Yet that 10-digit base may not be enough to keep the industry from struggling. Asia’s third largest economy is crowded with a dozen wireless carriers – more than in any other country – spectrum is hard to come by and regulatory risks are high. Add it all up and it’s no wonder they deliver lower profitability than phone operators in other parts of Asia, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

“There are too many of them all fighting for limited spectrum,” said Chris Lane, a telecommunications analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in Hong Kong. “In China by comparison, 1.3 billion subscribers are serviced by just three operators. The government in China allocates spectrum on the basis of need, and at no cost to the operators. As a result, the Chinese operators get scale benefits that Indian operators are unable to achieve.”

Raises the question of what the optimum number of mobile (or other) operators is for any country to create a competitive but also sustainable market. Four? Five?
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Software turns smartphone into 3-D scanner » BetaBoston

Nidhi Subbaraman:

A team led by Brown professor Gabriel Taubin developed software that could sync up a basic light-pattern projector with a smartphone or camera that can work on “burst” mode.

The patterns illuminate an object in the right sequence as the camera takes photographs, creating a series of images that can then be stitched together to create a 3-D rendering, to use as a model on the computer or to run through a 3-D printer.

You could pick up any object — the curved receiver of a rotary phone, say — scan its surface, upload that scan to a computer program, and print out a replica.

“You need to capture an image at the proper time. You need the camera and the projector to be synchronized,” Taubin said.

The team presented its research at the Association of Computing Machinery’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference in November.

Disruption.
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Why women aren’t buying smartwatches » Racked

Nicola Fumo:

Part of the advantage fitness trackers have over smartwatches with female consumers seems to be their simplicity. “The common knock against general-purpose smartwatches today is that they’re very overwhelming; they do too much,” Fitbit CEO James Park told The Verge. Kaspar Heinrici, who designs traditional watches as well as connected devices for Fossil as its associate creative director, told Racked that the most common pushback it gets from women on wearables is a similar lack of seeing the need. “The first reaction to technical products from women is ‘Oh, I don’t really need that functionality,’ or ‘That’s too much for me,'” he says. Fitness trackers are straightforward and, even more importantly, they offer the promise of a better self.

Aspiration is a strong tool in selling fashion. Think of the purchase motivations behind clothes, jewelry, or cosmetics. Largely, these aren’t replenishment buys like razor blades or socks, and they’re not thoughtful “big gadget” investments like televisions or washing machines. An internal tick is convinced life will be better with the confidence that comes with a dress that fits just so, a designer bag that communicates status, or the seamless disguising of under eye circles. Fitness trackers make an obvious path to an improved self; an increased awareness of behaviors that can be altered for results (more rest, fewer pounds, what have you). With all of their notifications and connected apps, smartwatches have yet to leverage the siren call of “me, but better.”

Though I’d say I know as many women who have Apple Watches as men. Android Wear, however – only men.
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A top venture capitalist thinks startups are causing inequality. He’s wrong. » Vox

This critique is a week old, but Ezra Klein makes a number of good points (all of them worth reading) about this much-debated essay, including this:

An important point Graham makes is that while people are angry about income inequality, they usually prioritize fixing other problems. When it comes down to it, they really care about poverty, or social mobility, or median wages, or political power.

Consider two worlds. In one, the Gini coefficient — the standard measure of inequality — remains the same, but median wages are double their current level. In another, the Gini coefficient falls, but median wages are 10 percent lower and poverty is 3 percentage points higher.

Would anyone choose the second world? Bueller?

But having made that point, Graham spends much of his essay grappling with strawmen. Statements like “Ending economic inequality would mean ending startups” confuse the conversation. No one is talking about ending startups. No one is even talking about ending inequality. And you can certainly ameliorate inequality without destroying the ability to found new companies. Sweden, for instance, has a higher startup rate than America, and less income inequality — as do a number of other countries.

He also includes this useful graphic to show that, au contraire Mr Graham, the number of startups is actually falling as a percentage of all companies in the US:

It feels important to bear these things in mind: Silicon Valley suffers from an extreme myopia, which is fine if you’re trying to build a web service, less so if you’re doling out world advice.
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Google picks former Obama adviser to lead global public policy » The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

Google, facing increased scrutiny from European regulators, has hired a former senior adviser to President Obama to lead its global public policy team.

Caroline Atkinson, who left her position as a White House deputy national security adviser last month, will join Google in March and be based in Washington.

Her most pressing task will be to temper concerns by antitrust enforcement officials in the European Union, which has accused the company of abusing its dominance in web search.

Ms. Atkinson, who joined the administration in 2011, is the latest in a string of Obama administration officials to join Silicon Valley companies. David Plouffe, also a former adviser, joined Uber in August 2014, and Jay Carney, a former press secretary, was hired by Amazon early last year.

Replaces Rachel Whetstone, who left for Uber in May.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: adbock in India, no ISIS internet?, Galaxy S7 hints, what else Adele CD buyers buy, and more

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“Yeah, let me tell you about my previous job.” Photo by steveleenow on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. No cadmium was harmed in the making of this post. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

iPhone users in India embrace ad blocking: survey » Livemint

Dhanya Ann Thoppil:

iPhone users in India are warming up to the US phone maker’s move to introduce ad blocking on its devices, as mobile banner blocking gains grounds in one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world.

A recent survey by market researcher GlobalWebIndex shows that 42% of India’s iPhone 6 users use the software to block ads on their devices compared with a global average of 31%…

…“There’s a sizable audience who are likely to adopt a similar approach on their smartphones and this is a behaviour which could spread quickly across devices, which could spell the end of the mobile ad banner,” the survey said…

…India ranked fourth among the 34 countries surveyed by the market researcher—after Russia, Poland and Indonesia—in terms of adoption of ad block.

To be sure, Apple accounts for only a tiny share of India’s smartphone market. According to Counterpoint Research, Apple has a 1.5% share of the 190m smartphones sold in India thus far. Android-based devices accounted for 93% of the market.

Interesting split. Bandwidth is really expensive in India. But so of course are iPhones.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai outlines plan to capture Indian market with free Wi-Fi, recruitment and faster access – but not Android One » IB Times

David Gilbert:

In 2016, there will be more people using Android in India than there will be in the United States. Very few of those however will be using Android One, Google’s specially engineered version of its mobile software for emerging markets. On Wednesday Sundar Pichai, the new CEO of Google, addressed a large crowd in New Delhi where he avoided mention of the failed Android One effort and instead focused on Google’s new three-pronged approach to get people online and at the same time put Android and Google search right at the heart of India’s internet revolution.

The new approach will see Google aggressively increase its recruitment of developers in the region; getting people online with free Wi-Fi and an initiative to get women to use the internet; and by making the experience of using the internet much better — even for those with limited connectivity.

The Hindustan Times report is here but Gilbert’s has better background. Notable from the HT story: in India, mobile search passed desktop search in May 2013 – about two years before more developed countries.
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No, you can’t shut down parts of the Internet » Errata Security

Rob Graham:

ISIS doesn’t have any “ASN” [Autonomous System Number] of their own. (If you think otherwise, then simply tell us the ASN that ISIS uses). Instead, ISIS has to pay for telecommunications links to route traffic through other countries. This causes ISIS to share the IP address space of those countries. Since we are talking about client access to the Internet, these are probably going through NATs of some kind. Indeed, that’s how a lot of cellphone access works in third world countries — the IP address of your phone frequently does not match that of your country, but of the country of the company providing the cellphone service (which is often outsourced).

Any attempt to shut those down is going to have a huge collateral impact on other Internet users. You could take a scorched earth approach and disrupt everyone’s traffic, but that’s just going to increasingly isolate the United States while having little impact on ISIS. Satellite and other private radio links can be setup as fast as you bomb them.

In any event, a scorched earth approach to messing with IP routing is still harder than just cutting off their land-line links they already have. In other words, attacking ISIS at Layer 3 (routing) is foolish when attacking at Layer 1 (pysical links) is so much easier.

You could probably bomb fiber optic cables and satellite links as quickly as they got reestablished. But then, you could disable ISIS by doing the same thing with roads, bridges, oil wells, electrical power, and so on. Disabling critical infrastructure is considered a war crime, because it disproportionately affects the populace rather than the enemy. The same likely applies to Internet connections — you’d do little but annoy ISIS while harming the population.

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Samsung adding pressure-sensitive display, high-speed charging port to Galaxy S7 » WSJ

Jonathan Cheng:

Next year’s flagship will look largely similar to the Galaxy S6, and many of the new features take cues from other handsets already available on the market.

The pressure-sensitive display, for instance, will be similar to that offered by rival Apple Inc. on the iPhone 6s earlier this year. The responsive display allows the phone to interpret different taps and touches depending on how the user presses on the touch screen.

The Galaxy S7 will likely also feature a next-generation charging and connection port called a USB Type-C port, the people said, which will allow for a full day’s charge in under 30 minutes and in some cases significantly faster than that. The port has already appeared in smartphones manufactured by LG Electronics Co., Huawei Technologies Co. and others.

The noncurved version of the Galaxy S7 will likely also include an external memory card slot, one of these people said.

The retina scanner, which the company is considering for some versions of the phone, would come after handset makers, such as China’s ZTE Corp., have included the feature on some smartphones. 

So let’s see – stepping away from the S6’s wireless charging and lack of microSD; adding in pressure sensitivity (and USB-C, of course). Samsung can’t seem to make its mind up what features are important.
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Samsung restores its PC business by establishing independent business team » ETNews

Han Juyeop:

[The] New PC Business Team will hire additional employees by end of this year and will reorganize product lines with the aim of releasing products in the second half of 2016. It will also newly develop premium PCs that will become the sign of all products and will lay out its strategy for expanding shipment in thre years from now after organization product lines. However modification on whom will be in charge of tablet business is not decided yet. There is a high chance that PC Business Team will be in charge of products based on Windows OS.

Samsung Electronics’ PC business that was almost going to bankrupt rapidly grew between 2009 and 2012. After it went over a hump by shipping 10 million PCs for the first time in 2010, its brand was in the top 10 in industries for the first time. In 2011, it shipped out 14.3 million PCs. While traditionally strong PC businesses such as HP and Dell were growing at an one-digit rate or going through de-growth, Samsung Electronics along with Apple and Lenovo increased their shipments by 20 to 30% every year. Samsung Electronics once presented a blueprint that it would become a top 3 global PC business in 2015.

However its PC business went downhill after IT Solution Business Department disappeared and as PC business was absorbed and combined to Wireless Business Department within IM Sector due to reorganization of group at the end of 2012.

The estimate is its PC shipments for 2015 will total about 3.5m, almost halved from 6m in 2014, and down from a peak of 15m in 2012. Finding its way back will be challenging.
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The EU data law’s effect on online advertising industry – Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly:

The European branch of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB Europe) interpretation of what has been released of the new rules so far identifies two key concerns: that the idea of “personal data” has now been widened, and that internet companies worldwide will now need to gain consent from European users before they use their data to serve targeted advertising to them. Furthermore, the raising of the digital age of consent to 16 from 13 could be hugely disruptive to companies that have strong teen user bases.

Townsend Feehan, the CEO of IAB Europe, the trade body that represents the European internet advertising industry, told Business Insider: “It’s the amputation of a significant revenue stream just at the moment publishers are having such a challenge in switching to digital.”

One of IAB Europe’s key concerns is that “everything” will now be considered personal data, according to Feehan. She added that the new rules include language suggesting that “some identifiers that could not possibly be used to trace back to an individual person” will be included under the “personal data” bucket.

Expect more popups, and agreement possibly hidden as small X marks or similar. Wonder if the US will take up this idea?
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Why Facebook still worries about Android » The Information

Amir Efrati:

Google’s future app notification filtering might be akin to the way Google automatically categorizes some Gmail email as “promotional” — advertising — or as spam, in which case it doesn’t even deliver the email to the inbox.

Several years ago Google began charging browser-based website owners like Yelp for using Google Maps on their sites, such as when visitors to Yelp located a restaurant. The rate Google charged depended on how much the sites used Google Maps. That caused an uproar and some website developers began using alternative mapping services like OpenStreetMap.

There’s no indication that Google is planning to start charging big mobile-app developers for using Google Maps on mobile or for using Google Cloud Messaging for notifications, especially given that Apple doesn’t charge developers for such privileges, either. But at Facebook, there was a sense that Google, under pressure to make money from Android, was interested in wringing some compensation out of Facebook.

Facebook is unique in its reliance on Android. It has upwards of a billion Android users and owns the two most-used mobile apps in the world, Facebook and WhatsApp, with two of its other apps, Instagram and Messenger, not far behind. As such, its app activity dwarfs that of other developers. In terms of advertising revenue, it generates more ad revenue from Android than any company other than Google itself.

The headline isn’t quite right; it should be “Why Facebook still worries about Google”. Android itself isn’t the concern. It’s what Google chooses to do with it.

The data about advertising revenue is a useful one, though.
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Hello from the shopping aisle: what (else) are Adele fans buying? » Nielsen

According to the HomeScan panel, Adele’s CD purchasers were more likely to be employed full time in professional/managerial roles and, as such, have higher than average incomes. Over 56% of them have household incomes of $70,000 (compared with 38% of total U.S. households) and 38% have household incomes of over $100,000 (compared with 23% of total U.S. households). With their higher incomes, they spend 48% more at retail than the general population: a total of $5,505 each year, compared with the average $3,713 for total U.S. households.

So what else is in these shopping carts? Adele CD buyers over-index for nonessential comfort/mood-related items—not unlike an Adele album—such as magazines, women’s fragrances, men’s toiletries, candles and incense, seasonal merchandise, cordials and liqueurs, and liquor. They also over-index for healthier food items like fresh vegetables, herbs and fruit. They spent more dollars on computers and electronic products, health and beauty aids and hair care compared to other buyers of those items, suggesting they might not just be buying more but also be buying higher-quality, more expensive items.

They really spend heavily on electronics – 2.49x more than the average person, making that the biggest divergence from the average. No word on gender split, though.
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Is Adele really ‘dumb and uneducated’ and mean to her fans for keeping her album off Spotify? » Auddly

Helienne Lindvall:

XL Recordings left it up to Adele and her management to decide for themselves if the album would go on streaming sites. Though many more artists and songwriters would like to follow her lead, most of them are, however, at the mercy of their publishers, labels and PROs – companies and collecting societies that can afford to take a gamble on streaming, led by decision makers on salaries, unlike artists and songwriters. Likewise, when Spotify doesn’t make a profit, its employees still get paid every month.

This is why the music creators’ wishes may not always tally with their labels, publishers or PROs, but still needs to be respected. Some streaming proponents argue that artists “only” need 100 streams to equal the revenue of a single download (there are differing calculations on this with some claiming it’s more like a couple of hundred). It may not sound like a lot, but taking a look at my iTunes library it’s clear that not even my favourite records have reached that many listens – and I’m an avid listener. And what about Spotify users that don’t pay?

The elephant in the room, though, is YouTube. You can find the entire album there multiple times for “free”, with the top one having nearly half a million plays already. There’s no way to keep it off, either; you’d just be playing whack-a-mole. So while Adele’s decision is perfectly valid, it’s actually not changing the power balance that existed before streaming.
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Orifice Space » thewalrus.ca

Natalie Zina Walschots:

“I have to relabel all these asses. It’s going to take a thousand years.”

With less than an hour left in the workday, my boss opened his office door and spewed stress all over everyone in the content-creation department, located on the main floor of a squat office building in downtown Toronto. Grey carpet and beige walls, banks of cubicles on the lower floors and big offices with big windows for the executives above: this could be any content farm in the city.

All that sets my office apart from any other is that, instead of an insurance company or consulting firm, it houses an Internet pornography curator. We dozen or so staff writers share a space with customer service. Tech-support calls come from frantic, semi-erect subscribers unable to access our latest video uploads. The keywords for the content we generate comprise sex acts, positions, and assorted vulgarities: Rimjob. Doggy style. MILF. I once watched a co-worker Photoshop a porn star’s armpit stubble out of every single frame of a video in which it appeared.

So anyway, you were telling us about your tedious job that you hate. (Though this is not quite as good as – and is a lot shorter than – one of the internet’s Great Lost Treasures, the wonderful Diaries of a Porn Video Store Clerk; we’d would probably require Indiana Jones to unearth those, however.)
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Vulnerable parking apps allow hackers to steal your login and credit card details » Graham Cluley

Conducted by information assurance firm NCC Group, the assessment analyzed six parking applications for the Android operating system. Some of the apps had been downloaded from Google Play between 5,000 and 10,000 times, whereas others boasted one million registered users.

The number of installs for each app ultimately did not matter, however, as all of the applications were affected by security vulnerabilities.

According to an NCC Group blog post the review determined that while all of the apps used encryption to protect their customers’ sensitive information – something from which four major airlines should learn a lesson or two – not one verified the certificate used by the server.

Attackers could subsequently exploit this oversight to conduct man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, especially if the application used Android WebView and contained a bridge that could enable JavaScript running from WebView to access native device functions.

NCC didn’t look at iOS, which seems strange. As I understand it iOS 9 forces use of HTTPS, unless an exception is given, and checks the certificate except in particular circumstances. So if I’m reading this correctly, iOS 9 apps wouldn’t be susceptible to this MITM attack. Park safely!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: hackers for hire, Chrome grows, Tinder’s CEO chats, and more

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Google Timeline: law-enforcement-friendly, at least in theory. Picture by portalgda on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Free as in cabbage. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hired-gun hacking played key role in JPMorgan, Fidelity breaches » Reuters

Jim Finkle and Joseph Menn:

The trio, who are accused of orchestrating massive computer breaches at JPMorgan Chase & Co and other financial firms, as well as a series of other major offences, did little if any hacking themselves, the federal indictments and a previous civil case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicate.

Rather, they constructed a criminal conglomerate with activities ranging from pump-and-dump stock fraud to Internet casino break-ins and unlicensed Bitcoin trading. And just like many legitimate corporations, they outsourced much of their technology needs.

“They clearly had to recruit co-conspirators and have that type of hacker-for-hire,” said Austin Berglas, former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York cyber division, who worked the JPMorgan case before he left the agency in May. “This is the first case where it’s that clear of a connection.” Berglas, who now heads cyber investigations for private firm K2 Intelligence, said additional major cases of freelance hacking will come to light, especially as more people become familiar with online tools such as Tor that seek to conceal a user’s identity and location.

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Living in different worlds » Benedict Evans

A few years ago, one of the big UK retailers told me an anecdote from some market research they’d done into cameras. Their customers had said they wanted a solution for storing all the camera cards they had. This puzzled the researchers, so they dug a little further, and found out that a lot of their customers had dozens and dozens of memory cards.…

[they] just took the memory card out of the camera at the end of a trip, and when they wanted to show people the photos they’d taken they retrieved the card and put it back into the camera. 

I recognise this behaviour because it’s what my father-in-law does – and when he wants to print something from his computer, he takes a photo of the screen, takes out the camera’s memory card, slots it into the printer and prints out the photo (he also made quite a lot of money day-trading Imagination Tech – over the phone). 

As we go from 1.5bn PCs, of which only half are consumer, to 3bn iOS and Android devices today and 4-5bn in the future, this will become ever more important.

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Chrome’s number of monthly active users on mobile devices has doubled over the past year

Bertel King:

During the keynote address yesterday for this year’s Chrome Dev Summit, VP of Chrome Darin Fisher shared some numbers about the mobile web browser’s rate of adoption. tl;dr, people are flocking to Chrome, and fast. Over the past year, the number of 30 day active users has doubled from 400 million to 800 million.

Chrome’s adoption has been boosted by an increasing number of devices now shipping the browser by default. Chrome for Android users visit 100+ sites a month on average, showing a decent level of engagement.

The power of defaults. Once it was Internet Explorer; now it’s Chrome. That final sentence is maddening, though. Where’s the evidence that that’s a decent level of anything? What does it compare to? Three different sites per day is “decent engagement”? Seriously? There’s a new generation of people writing content who seem incapable of doing simple maths and following its thread. (1.4bn Google Android monthly active users, 800m Chrome monthly active users. Think about that too.)
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Exclusive: Samsung Pay to launch in China, Spain, and the UK in Q1 2016 » SamMobile

As per the information that we’ve received, Samsung is planning to launch Samsung Pay in China, Spain, and the UK in the first quarter of 2016. Currently, only five Samsung devices – the Galaxy S6, the Galaxy S6 edge, the Galaxy S6 edge+, the Galaxy Note 5, and the Gear S2 – support Samsung Pay, though the Gear S2 only supports NFC payments.

Samsung uses MST technology, which mimics card swipes at regular checkout equipments to make payments, in Samsung Pay-enabled smartphones.

Card swipes are useless in the UK and Spain, as everything is chip-and-PIN. But Samsung Pay does support those too. Wonder if that will help sales of the high-end phones at all.
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How law enforcement can use Google Timeline to track your every move » The Intercept

Jana Winter:

The recent expansion of Google’s Timeline feature can provide investigators unprecedented access to users’ location history data, allowing them in many cases to track a person’s every move over the course of years, according to a report recently circulated to law enforcement.

“The personal privacy implications are pretty clear but so are the law enforcement applications,” according to the document, titled “Google Timelines: Location Investigations Involving Android Devices,” which outlines the kind of information investigators can now obtain.

The Timeline allows users to look back at their daily movements on a map; that same information is also potentially of interest to law enforcement. “It is now possible to submit a legal demand to Google for location history greater than six months old,” the report says. “This could revitalize cold cases and potentially help solve active investigations.”

Familiar? Exactly the same realisation for iOS in 2011, which was then quickly encrypted. Android was already doing that too.

Four years later, nothing’s really changed.
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Tinder? I’m an addict, says hook-up app’s co-creator and CEO Sean Rad » London Evening Standard

Charlotte Edwardes swipes quite a weird interview, including this:

He’s obsessed with journalists — “too many are not seeking truth but fame” — and baffled by critics because “you can’t deny Tinder is what the world wants”. His own “truth” is that Tinder is “wonderful” — “we’ve solved the biggest problem in humanity: that you’re put on this planet to meet people.” 

In September Vanity Fair accused Tinder of heralding the “dawn of the dating apocalypse” in an article that interviewed twentysomethings in New York who used it solely for casual sex. 

Rad is “defensive” and still “upset” about the article, muttering  mysteriously that he has done his own “background research” on the writer Nancy Jo Sales, “and there’s some stuff about her as an individual that will make you think differently.” He won’t elaborate on the matter.

His argument for why the piece was “wrong” veers from “our research shows 80 per cent of users are looking for a long-term meaningful relationship” to “we believe in democracy. If society just wants to ‘hook up’, who am I to judge?” 

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WhatsApp reneges on their promise of true message encryption » Medium

Dawud Gordon:

In interviews with journalists WhatsApp stated that they would use Public Key Encryption, where only the sender and recipient can unencrypted content. Indeed they did, but they used the same key for every user. This makes the Brno hack possible, meaning anyone on the same network as your phone could gain access to the content of your messages. Also, it means that WhatsApp themselves still have access to all message content. Moreover, their parent corporation Facebook has access as well and the ability to target you with advertising based on the content of your WhatsApp messaging. While this is surprising given WhatsApp’s previous PR, it does explain the mysterious $19bn price tag that Facebook was willing to put on WhatsApp.

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India to overtake US next month with 402 million internet users » Tech In Asia

Malavika Velayanikal:

The number of internet users in India will reach 402 million next month, nearly 50% more than what it was last year, according to a study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International. With the latest surge, India will overtake the US to have the second-largest internet user base in the world, next only to China. This will be music to the ears of mobile and internet-based businesses targeting the fast-growing digital market in India.

It took a decade for India to move from 10 million internet users to 100 million, but only four years to quadruple that figure. The primary driver of this takeoff is the boom in affordable smartphones over the past couple of years. But two-thirds of India’s population remain outside the internet, and broadband availability is poor.

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Google Glass successor dumps some glass » The Information

Jessica Lessin:

So much for the screen. We’ve learned that Google’s revamped Google Glass project, dubbed Project Aura, is working on a wearable with a screen—and at least one without.

People tell us there have been three versions of the head-mounted device in development, although the three may be consolidated into two. One version, targeted at enterprises, has a screen. The others, one of which is targeted at “sport” users, doesn’t and relies on audio. They use bone conduction, like the original Google Glass. In other words, headphones worn on your face.

Or even like headphones worn on your head?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: payday search predators, the natural nuclear reactor, Facebook’s code problem and more

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Shh! Don’t tell Facebook! Photo by The Keenes on Flickr.

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People’s deepest, darkest Google searches are being used against them » The Atlantic

Adrienne Lafrance:

Consider, for example, a person who googles “need rent money fast” or “can’t pay rent.” Among the search results that Google returns, there may be ads that promise to help provide payday loans — ads designed to circumvent Google’s policies against predatory financial advertising. They’re placed by companies called lead generators, and they work by collecting and distributing personal information about consumers online. So while Google says it bans ads that guarantee foreclosure prevention or promise short-term loans without conveying accurate loan terms, lead generators may direct consumers to a landing page where they’re asked to input sensitive identifiable information. Then, payday lenders buy that information from the lead generators and, in some cases, target those consumers—online, via phone, and by mail—for the very sorts of short-term loans that Google prohibits.

But look, if Google bans those ads, then it’s taking a position. Shouldn’t it only accept ads from organisations that it has vetted? Or just not accept ads on those searches?
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In the 1970s, scientists discovered a two billion-year-old nuclear reactor in west Africa » Medium

The Physics ArXiv blog explains:

When the ore in Gabon was laid down some 2 billion years ago, the concentration of uranium-235 would have been about 4%, more than enough for a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

The idea is that when a neutrons hits an atom of uranium-235, the atom splits producing two smaller nuclei and several neutrons. These neutrons go on to split other atoms in an ongoing chain reaction.

However, the liberated neutrons are high-energy particles that tend to fly away rapidly. So nuclear reactors usually contain a moderating material that slows down the neutrons so that they can interact with other uranium atoms.

It turns out that water is a reasonable neutron moderator. So an important component of this natural reactor was the presence of water seeping through the uranium ore. And this had an interesting impact on the way the reactors operated.

Nuclear scientists believe that the Oklo reactors operated in pulses. As water flowed into the rock, it moderated the neutrons, allowing a chain reaction to occur. But this increased the temperature of the rock, boiling the water into steam which escaped.

Kept running for 300,000 years. More useful than that is what it taught scientists about how fission waste products migrate from burial sites. Turns out the answer is: not that much.
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Facebook’s code quality problem » Graham King

Facebook has a software quality problem. I’m going to try to convince you with three examples. This is important because it demonstrates the time-honored principle that quality matters. In demonstrates it, as Facebook engineers like to say, at scale. I don’t work at Facebook or any competitor, I’m just an observer.

The three examples – 18,000 Objective-C classes in the iOS app with 429 people working on it (note: delete the app), database restarts and the fact that the site works better when its engineers aren’t there, all speak to a classic problem.
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Hackers claim million-dollar bounty for iOS zero-day attack » WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

On Monday, the security startup Zerodium announced that it’s agreed to pay out that seven-figure sum to a team of hackers who have successfully developed a technique that can hack any iPhone or iPad that can be tricked into visiting a carefully crafted web site. Zerodium describes that technique as a “jailbreak”—a term used by iPhone owners to hack their own phones to install unauthorized apps. But make no mistake: Zerodium and its founder Chaouki Bekrar have made clear that its customers include governments who no doubt use such “zero-day” hacking techniques on unwitting surveillance targets.

In fact, Bekrar tells WIRED that two teams of hackers had attempted to claim the bounty, which was announced in September with an October 31st deadline. Only one proved to have developed a complete, working iOS attack. “Two teams have been actively working on the challenge but only one has made a full and remote jailbreak,” Bekrar writes. “The other team made a partial jailbreak and they may qualify for a partial bounty (unconfirmed at this time).”

I’d like to see documentary proof of the hack before I take this at face value. Zerodium is clearly seeking publicity; and the incentive to, um, bend the truth around seven-figure annoucements is high.
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Ranking Digital Rights – Ranking ICT sector companies on respect for free expression and privacy

For the inaugural Index, Ranking Digital Rights analyzed a representative group of 16 companies that collectively hold the power to shape the digital lives of billions of people across the globe. Leading global ESG research and ratings provider, Sustainalytics, co-developed the methodology.

Eight publicly listed Internet companies and eight publicly listed telecommunications companies were selected based on factors including geographic reach and diversity, user base, company size, and market share. These companies were assessed on 31 indicators across three categories – commitment, freedom of expression, and privacy – drawn heavily from international human rights frameworks, as well as emerging and established global principles for privacy and freedom of expression.

The research revealed a deep need for improvement:

Only six companies scored at least 50% of the total possible points;
The overall highest score was only 65%;
Nearly half the companies in the Index scored less than 25%, showing a serious deficit of respect for users’ freedom of expression and privacy.

Google came top in internet companies. List at https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2015/. Apple isn’t there – doesn’t it have any impact?

Anyhow, speaking of digital rights and freedom of expression…
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A surprisingly difficult question for Facebook: do I have boobs now? » The Guardian

Hannah Jane Parkinson talks to Courtney Demone, a trans woman (ie born male) who asks the question that Facebook apparently finds exceptionally hard to answer:

Demone says that Facebook likes to present itself as a liberal and progressive organisation, but that most of its actions in this regard are decidedly low-risk. She mentions Facebook’s introduction of a widget allowing users to overlay their profile pictures with a rainbow flag and notes that it was to celebrate a gay marriage law which had been passed by the US supreme court – not before, in support of it.

Demone says that [Facebook’s] allowing users to define their gender in a free-form field, and offering a choice of pronouns, is progressive, but it is decidedly lower risk rather than, say, challenging the paradigm that female nipples should be covered up. This, of course, would run the risk of offending advertisers and in the case of Instagram, result in a 17+ user rating in app stores.

This gets to such a deep question: why should American organisations get to decide the mores of the countries that they export their business to? Mark Zuckerberg once said he hoped Facebook could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict by making people friends. But topics such as this shows why it can be seen as more like an enemy of social change.
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India LTE smartphone shipments grew 2400% annually climbing to 10m units in Q3 2015 » Counterpoint Technology Market Research

Tarun Pathak has the details. Here’s one of the more interesting pullouts (from lots) about a local OEM:

Micromax maintained the second position in both overall mobile phone market and the smartphone segment with a market share of 13.7% and 17.7% respectively.

The brand’s share from online channel increased during the quarter. However, it is now facing pressure competition in $50-$100 price segment from Intex, Lava and others.

Micromax’s Cyanogen based online only brand ‘Yu’ launched its cheapest LTE model ‘Yunique’ during the quarter and the brand has been growing steadily ever since its launch.

Micromax Yu brand alone is now selling more smartphones than Xiaomi online, depicting it’s going to be challenging even for popular brands such as Xiaomi to scale in Indian market

If Xiaomi can’t succeed in India, it’s going to have a real problem.
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Google abandons plan for a retail store in New York City » Crain’s New York Business

Daniel Geiger:

Google has abandoned plans to open its first-ever retail store in New York City.

The company is trying to sublease a 5,442-square-foot SoHo space it leased last year, and wants $2.25m annually in rent for it, according to sources.

The decision to abandon its retail store came after the Internet giant spent $6m renovating the 131 Greene St. location. The outpost was supposed to be one of Google’s first stand-alone stores in the U.S., putting it in direct competition with Apple, which has a host of brick-and-mortar shops that showcase and sell its products in the city, as well as other tech firms with a retail presence. Just last week, Microsoft opened its flagship store on Fifth Avenue.

A spokeswoman for Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to reports, Google planned to begin opening stores to sell products such as the Chromebook, a line of laptops and desktop computers made by several manufacturers that operate on Google software, and smartphones that run its Android operating system. Because Google is subleasing the Greene Street location, it would appear that the company has changed its mind and is pulling back on its plan to open physical stores. However, Google reportedly recently opened a kiosk within a larger electronics store in London earlier this year.

Even so. Why would you have a Google store? It doesn’t make sense.
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Over 40% of China’s online sales counterfeit, shoddy: Xinhua » Reuters

Adam Jourdan:

More than 40% of goods sold online in China last year were either counterfeits or of bad quality, the official Xinhua news agency said, illustrating the extent of a problem that has bogged down the fast-growing online sector.

According to the report, which was delivered to China’s top lawmakers on Monday, just under 59 percent of items sold online last year were “genuine or of good quality”, Xinhua said.

China has been trying to shake off a notoriety for pirated and counterfeit goods, long a major headache for global brands targeting the Chinese market from iPhone maker Apple to luxury retailer LVMH.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has been lobbying to stay off a US blacklist for fakes after coming under renewed pressure this year over suspected counterfeits sold on its shopping platforms.

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It’s official: Amazon is opening its first-ever bookstore in Seattle » GeekWire

Taylor Soper:

Internet giant Amazon.com, which got its start selling books online, confirmed this afternoon that it will open its first-ever brick-and-mortar bookstore at Seattle’s University Village on Tuesday morning.

The company sent a letter to customers on Monday with details about the store, which is called “Amazon Books.” In the letter, Amazon Books VP Jennifer Cast calls the store a “physical extension of Amazon.com.”

Someone should disrupt that thing…
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Microsoft reneges on ‘unlimited’ OneDrive storage promise for Office 365 subscribers » ZDNet

Ed Bott:

Here’s the key part of tonight’s announcement:

We’re no longer planning to offer unlimited storage to Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers. Starting now, those subscriptions will include 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
100 GB and 200 GB paid plans are going away as an option for new users and will be replaced with a 50 GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016.

Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new. The 15 GB camera roll storage bonus will also be discontinued. These changes will start rolling out in early 2016.

Microsoft blames a few greedy storage users for the change in heart. “A small number of users,” they wrote, “backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.”

That shouldn’t be surprising. If you advertise “unlimited” cloud storage, perhaps you should expect that some people will take you at your word and move large collections to the storage space you so generously offered?

Bott also portrays a division in some upheaval, which doesn’t quite fit the calm exterior Microsoft has been trying to put forward over its cloud work.

That “14,000 times the average” suggests that the average person was storing 5GB of data. Though that probably amounts to 10 Microsoft Word documents, given how the format has bloated. (Thanks @pedrostephano.)
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Start up: Apple Music for Android enters beta, how many Ubuntu phones?, Samsung’s dead Milk, and more

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If only it were as simple as this for phones. Photo by Bradford Timeline on Flickr.

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Google brings you closer to your customers in the moments that matter » Inside AdWords blog

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce:

Customer Match allows you to upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google in a secure and privacy-safe way. From there, you can build campaigns and ads specifically designed to reach your audience.

Let’s say you’re a travel brand. You can now reach people who have joined your rewards program as they plan their next trip. For example, when these rewards members search for “non-stop flights to new york” on Google.com, you can show relevant ads at the top of their search results on any device right when they’re looking to fly to New York. And when those members are watching their favorite videos on YouTube or catching up on Gmail, you can show ads that inspire them to plan their next trip.

Using Customer Match, you can also generate Similar Audiences to reach new customers on YouTube and Gmail who are likely to be interested in your products and services. For example, you can drive awareness on YouTube for new non-stop flights by showing TrueView ads to prospective customers who have similar interests and characteristics to your rewards members.

The quest for “relevant ads” must be pursued continuously. (Facebook already has a similar system.)
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Bringing the Internet to more Indians—starting with 10 million rail passengers a day » Official Google Blog

Sundar Pichai, Google CEO:

on the occasion of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to our U.S. headquarters, and in line with his Digital India initiative, we announced a new project to provide high-speed public Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across India.
 
Working with Indian Railways, which operates one of the world’s largest railway networks, and RailTel, which provides Internet services as RailWire via its extensive fiber network along many of these railway lines, our Access & Energy team plans to bring the first stations online in the coming months. The network will expand quickly to cover 100 of the busiest stations in India before the end of 2016, with the remaining stations following in quick succession.

Even with just the first 100 stations online, this project will make Wi-Fi available for the more than 10 million people who pass through every day.

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Microsoft announces changes to financial reporting structure » Yahoo Finance

Beginning in fiscal year 2016, the company will report revenue and operating income based on three operating segments: Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.   

The Productivity and Business Processes segment includes results from Office and Office 365 for commercial and consumer customers, as well as Dynamics and Dynamics CRM Online. 

The Intelligent Cloud segment includes results from public, private and hybrid server products and services such as Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center, Azure, and Enterprise Services. 

The More Personal Computing segment includes results from licensing of the Windows operating system, devices such as Surface and phones, gaming including Xbox consoles, and search.

This is surely going to obfuscate things more than ever; the latest scheme, which had seven reporting segments, had only been in place for three years – replacing one with six segments. The fewer reporting buckets, the less help it is trying to understand what is and isn’t working at the company.
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Apple Music for Android beta invites spotted in the wild » Techaeris

Justin Jelinek:

The e-mail comes from a service called Betabound, a site that allows users to request access to different varieties of beta programs. In this instance though, it’s a doozy. The notice — in its entirety below — simply states:

We’re excited to invite you to come test Apple Music for Android. If you’re a current Android user that would like to join the beta for the new music streaming service, you won’t want to miss this opportunity. To learn more and apply, click the link below. Best of luck! The Betabound team.

Once you follow the link, you’ll be hit with a series of music related questions, some of which are real head-scratchers.  For example:

If you could only listen to 5 albums for the rest of your life, what would they be and why?

How do you even answer that? I’d be hard pressed to come up with an answer, though if the successful completion would get me into the Apple Music for Android beta I’m sure I could come up with something.

If you want to try your luck and see if you can get into the beta, you can sign up on Betabound’s website.

Yup, it’s really there. Big questions:
• will it follow Android’s Material design, or look like an iOS app?
• Will it try to integrate iTunes content, or just offer streaming/DRM downloads?
• How will it avoid the relentless one-star trolling of Android fans that greeted the “Move to iOS” app?

And now…
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Apple Music’s functionality failure » Lefsetz Letter

Bob Lefsetz is an acerbic viewer of what’s happening in the music business, and he doesn’t like how Apple is handling its own shift:

this is death in tech. If you’re not willing to destroy the old business model on the way to the new, you’re gonna lose in the long run.

Yes, Apple has zillions of credit card numbers. Yes, Apple is the world’s most valuable company, a juggernaut. But IBM is a shadow of what it once was, as is Microsoft. Nothing is forever. When the great disruption comes you’ve got to sacrifice what once was, however profitable it might be, or you will die in the future.

The problem with streaming in the United States is that most people just don’t see the need to subscribe. Furthermore, they don’t see the need to experiment. Getting someone to try something is the hardest part. And when they do try something and they get less functionality than before, they’re out.

This is what’s happening with Apple Music, and this hurts not only Apple, but the music business at large.

It’d be like having a CD player that spins vinyl. Actually, they tried this. Needless to say, it failed.

As for streaming sound quality, Clayton Christensen went on to say that the new solution may not equal the quality of the old, but it’s good enough and it’s cheap. If you’re an iTunes customer you’re going to go to streaming, you just don’t know it yet. Because streaming is cheaper if you’re a heavy buyer, and owning nothing you can gain improvement along the way.

His argument that you want different apps for music you “own” and for “streams” feels right. Apple’s problem though would be how do you make people start to use the “streams” one? There must have been big fights over this internally. The present system feels like a compromise that hasn’t quite worked.
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Samsung’s Milk Video to be shut down November 20 » Variety

Janko Roettgers:

Samsung is shuttering its Milk Video service in November. The company announced the shut-down on Google Play Monday, writing: “While we remain committed to providing premium entertainment services, we have decided to end support for the Samsung Milk Video app as of November 20, 2015.”

A Samsung spokesperson declined to comment on how the closure will affect Milk Video staff.

The closure comes almost to the day a year after Samsung launched Milk Video as a mobile-focused service focusing on short-form video content. Samsung at one point envisioned Milk Video as part of a larger suite of content-focused apps for mobile devices, which also includes the company’s Pandora-like Milk Music service.

Samsung struck some deals with Vice, Funny or Die and others for exclusive short-form content, and complemented these clips with aggregated videos from YouTube, Vevo and other sources.

Roettgers wrote about layoffs in those units back in May. Is this the end of Samsung’s content strategy?
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The Apple Watch is perfect. On paper. » getwired.com

Wes Miller (who generally likes his Apple stuff) is taking his Apple Watch back, after a week, because he can’t find anything really relevant that it does for him:

The former product manager (and former development manager) in me sees how we arrived at this point. The Apple Watch team was established long ago, and started on their project. At one point, pressure from above, from outside, from investors, who knows… forced Apple to push up a launch date. The hardware was reasonably ready. But the software was a hot mess.

Traditionally, Apple excelled when they discarded features that weren’t ready, even if competitors already did them in a half-assed way – winning over consumers by delivering those features later when they’re actually ready. Unfortunately, you often get a product manager in the mix that pushes for a feature, even if it can’t really be implemented well or reliably. The Apple Watch feels like this. It offers a mix of checkbox features that, yes, you can argue, kind of work. But they don’t have the finish that they should. The software doesn’t respect the hardware. In fact, it’s giving a middle finger to the hardware. Even WatchOS 2 fails to deliver adequate finish. The list of features that the Watch promises sound nifty. But actually living with the Watch is disappointing.

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Apple iPhone 6s vs iPhone 6s Plus Water Test! Is it secretly waterproof? A waterproof review » YouTube

If you don’t want to watch – he dunks the new phones in some bowls of water for an hour. They keep working. Apple has said nothing about the waterproofiness of the new iPhones.

Moving on…
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Sony changes stance on waterproof phones: do not use underwater » Xperia Blog

Sony Mobile has made a hugely controversial change to its advice around Xperia waterproof devices. Despite most recent Sony Xperia waterproof devices achieving an Ingress Protection rating of IP68 for water resistance, the highest possible, Sony now says that they should not be used underwater.

If you head over to Sony Mobile’s support page on water and dust protection, you will find several statements on Sony’s new policy including: “Remember not to use the device underwater” and “The IP rating of your device was achieved in laboratory conditions in standby mode, so you should not use the device underwater, such as taking pictures.”

Specifically: don’t put it in seawater or chlorinated water such as swimming pools. Or in juice. Distilled water might be OK. It’s not quite the selling point it used to be, is it? Especially as it had promotional campaigns showing the phones being used to take photos underwater. And people *do* use them to take photos underwater – and like them for that.

Kudos to the Xperia blog, which has pulled together a slew of ads where Sony has shown the phones in water to push that “waterproof” idea. Over to you, Sony.
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How many Ubuntu Phones are there? » RPadovani

Padovani, an Ubuntu contributor, does some maths:

As app developer, and mainly as big supporter of the project, it’s a question I ask myself often.

I don’t have the answer, but I can try to make a guess using a useful statistic I have: the number of times the Calculator App has been updated.

The statistic I have access is the number of unique users that have updated the calculator app at least once. The last update of calculator is from 8 Jun ‘15. So phones that have been sold later probably already included the update. Let’s say then the number of users I guess is updated to end of July ‘15.

This means the only market we consider is Europe. Russia, India, China and the rest of the world have started to have available the phones later this year.

His conclusion: probably about 25,000 by the end of September. Yes, twenty-five thousand. Remember when Ubuntu/Linux/Firefox OS was going to be the future third/fourth mobile ecosystem?
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CEO John Chen shows off the BlackBerry Priv, gets lost » SlashGear

JC Torres:

Just because BlackBerry has finally admitted that it does have an Android smartphone doesn’t mean everyone might be on board with the plan. And “not everyone” might even include CEO John Chen. The chief executive gave the Business News Network an exclusive glimpse at a working BlackBerry Priv, the company’s first “true” Android smartphone. But in trying to demo the smartphone that “runs Google”, Chen is visibly seen struggling to figure out how to actually use the device, as well as probably some hints of unresponsiveness with the touch screen.

In his defense, Chen is, after all, the CEO of BlackBerry, not of Samsung, of LG, or Motorola, or any other Android device maker.

That’s not a defence. Can you imagine any tech CEO struggling so badly as this with the device they hope to make money on? They haven’t even sorted out the naming: Chen pronounces it “Priv”, with a short “i” (as in “privet hedge”), and then talks about it offering “pryvacy” (with a long “i” as in “prying”). Can’t operate the phone, isn’t on top of the marketing. That’s bad. BBN took the original video down and offered it in a non-embeddable view on its site, hence this link to a YouTube re-upload.


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Start up: Android Wear on iOS, will Slack kill Dropbox?, India v Google, after the adblockers, and more

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

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

Android Wear now works with iPhones » Official Google Blog

David Singleton, director of engineering for Android Wear:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deepali Gupta:

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

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

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

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

Stephen Shankland:

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

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

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

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

Matthew Brunwasser:

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

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

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

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

Lisa Eadicicco:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jean-Louis Gassee:

What are the smaller publishers to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interviewed by Manu Kaushik:

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

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

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

Via Charles Knight, who adds: “You have to wonder who else in Canada they approached.” It’s probably a long list.
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Start up: Apple Pay in the UK?, 10m Chromecasts, the hacker whose cat betrayed him, and more

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OK, definitely seen harder than that. Photo by health_bar on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Do not plant in acidic soil. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Due to me screwing up, the headline yesterday about finding Waldo referred to an article that’s in today’s list. Hope you didn’t spend too long looking for it.

Is there a battle looming in the UK between Apple Pay and Zapp? » Mobile Payments Today

Will Hernandez:

While Apple has yet to reveal a hard date for Apple Pay’s launch in the UK, pundits speculate that it could happen in April. This also happens to be about the same time Zapp is supposed to make its debut in the U.K.

Zapp relies on banks building it into their mobile apps, although as those banks own Zapp’s parent company, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. The system is intended to provide real-time payments between consumers and merchants — both online and at the point of sale — without the need for a digital wallet. Zapp will generate digital tokens that will hide customer bank account details from merchants, and it is intended to work with different technologies such as NFC, Bluetooth, QR codes and PIN-entry point-of-sale terminals.

Zapp, however, has faced launch delays since at least the third quarter of 2014. Meantime, it announced in October retail partnerships that will go into effect this year. Asda, Sainsbury’s, House of Fraser and Shop Direct are among some of the major High Street retailers that will support Zapp. Earlier in the year, HSBC, first direct, Nationwide, Santander and Metro Bank announced their support for the system.

I’d never heard of Zapp either. Apparently it’s “a mobile payments system from Vocalink, which created the Faster Payments Service and is owned by all the major UK banks.”

Zapp has lots of benefits (cost, data sharing with retailers) and so could have a UK advantage – this is a good article for getting an idea of the competitive landscape in the UK as Apple prepares to land.

Android Wear’s newest trick, playing a full-length movie » Android Community

John Hoff:

Apparently, your Android Wear smartwatch can be taught to do cooler tricks – cooler than, say, playing Minecraft or Doom, or even running Windows 95. Once again, smart hacker Corbin Davenport has shown us that there’s a lot of stuff – not necessarily important world-changing stuff – just a lot of stuff that can be done to your Android Wear smartwatch when you have a lot of time on your hands.

“You haven’t watched a movie—until you’ve watched it on your watch,” Davenport proudly proclaims of his newest wild idea, which he shows via YouTube. The demo shows Davenport playing Star Trek: Into Darkness on his Android Wear, which is probably a delightful coincidence as he shows us that Android Wear devices can really go where no smartwatch has gone before (excuse the pun, we couldn’t help it).

Davenport has done some weird, weird stuff there.

Big three mobile phone markets beyond China » Counterpoint Technology Market Research

According to the latest research from [the] Market Monitor program for Q4 2014 (Oct-Dec), total mobile phone shipments for India, Indonesia and Bangladesh stood at 89m as smartphone demand skyrocketed and the total smartphone shipments contributed to more than a third of all mobile phones shipped during the quarter. These three markets combined offers an opportunity for mobile phone industry players looking to grow beyond the saturating China mobile phone market.

“Smartphone growth in these regions touches almost all the price segments with regional brands being prominent in the entry level smartphone segment. Apart from this we have seen Chinese vendors entering these geographies for the first time in CY 2014 and enjoyed a significant success rate. However it will be important to keep an eye on  Online only players on how they capture the smartphone growth in rural areas in these regions” says Tina Lu Sr. Consultant at Counterpoint research

Mobile phones, not just smartphones – note. By comparison, Japan bought about 25.7m smartphones in 2014 and that is expected to rise to 27m in 2015. (About half of that total would be iPhones, judging by Kantar’s figure.)

The utterly crazy story of the death threat hacker » We Live Security

Graham Cluley on a Japanese hacker who caused lots of problems via trojan-infected PCs in Japan in 2012:

the police arrested four separate people, and allegedly managed to “extract” confessions from some of those whose computers had posted death threats to a popular messageboard.

However, the confessions were clearly unreliable (one wonders how the confessors were “encouraged” to make them), as the suspects had in fact had their computers infected by the hacker’s malware, which had posted the death threats without their knowing.

It became clear to the police that they had made a colossal blunder, when the hacker – who went by the alias Oni Koroshi (Demon Killer) – continued to send taunting emails to the police force and local newspapers.

You can just imagine how embarrassing that must have been for the Japanese police, in what was becoming a high profile case.

Er.. yeah. But then it gets utterly weird, when the hacker sends a series of clues to the police, and it all ends up with a showdown involving a cat, an island and a sikrit chip worn on the cat. If Ian Fleming were alive today and writing this stuff you’d call it too far-fetched.

(Also, stupid hacker. Should have stopped when the people confessed.)

License plate scanners also taking photos of drivers and passengers » American Civil Liberties Union

The Drug Enforcement Agency is using its license plate reader program not only to track drivers’ locations, but also to photograph these drivers and their passengers, according to newly disclosed records obtained by the ACLU via a Freedom of Information Act request.

One internal 2009 DEA communication stated clearly that the license plate program can provide “the requester” with images that “may include vehicle license plate numbers (front and/or rear), photos of visible vehicle occupants [redacted] and a front and rear overall view of the vehicle.” Clearly showing that occupant photos are not an occasional, accidental byproduct of the technology, but one that is intentionally being cultivated, a 2011 email states that the DEA’s system has the ability to store “up to 10 photos per vehicle transaction including 4 occupant photos.”…

…Some law enforcement agencies that employ ALPRs recognize that the technology should not be used to capture photos of vehicle occupants. We obtained an ALPR policy from Tiburon, California that speaks to our privacy concerns. The policy states that “cameras will be directed only to capture the rear of vehicles and not into any place where a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ might exist.”

Tricky argument. You can see that it would be useful for law enforcement to know who’s driving a car. And do you have “a reasonable expectation of privacy” when you’re driving a car on a public road where people can take pictures of you and your car – as happens here?

(By the way, in the UK we call it an “Automatic Number Plate Reader”. Even though it now has letters and numbers.)

Twitter cuts off employee access to its metrics » Re/code

Kurt Wagner:

There’s no metric more important to the social network than the number of people that use the service — more specifically, its monthly active users, or MAUs. Recent events inside the company show how sensitive Twitter’s top brass can be about this number, which also partly explains the company’s push to use other metrics to showcase Twitter’s reach.

The company used to grant all employees access to its MAU figure through an internal intranet, but that access was revoked a few weeks ago, according to multiple sources familiar with change. Now, the MAU metric is only available on a need-to-know basis.

There has been so much noise ahead of Twitter’s results (which came out after I added this) that one has to feel there’s something weird going on there. A culture clash? Internal political struggle? Whatever, this will be the year it plays out.

Xiaomi has a San Francisco press event scheduled for 12 February… but it’s still not entering the US market » Android Police

Any tech journalist worth his silicon would probably assume that Xiaomi intends to finally push into the US market to take on the likes of Apple and Samsung, possibly even with new mobile hardware. But apparently that’s not the case. We specifically asked Xiaomi’s PR representative about the possibility of a North American expansion, and this is the response that we were given:

We can also confirm that Xiaomi will not be launching in the US or entering the US market this time, but this is an opportunity to get to know the company and leadership a bit more.​

Any tech journalist worth her or his silicon would know that Xiaomi would face insuperable IP issues in trying to enter the US market, and also that it’s simply the wrong sort of market to try to get in to just now for Xiaomi.

At least they called Xiaomi to have their castles in the air shot down.

Google sold 10 million Chromecasts last year » Korea Times

Google has sold about 10 million Chromecast, a streaming-media dongle for high-definition (HD) TVs, globally in 2014, Google Korea said Wednesday.

Chromecast, which made its debut in July 2013, now supports more than 350 apps and services, including YouTube, Tving and Hoppin in Korea.

It started selling the device in Korea in May 2014, the first marketing debut in the Asian market.

This number sounds entirely feasible; it also sounds like the sort of thing that Google Korea might blurt out, when its corporate headquarters has only ever said “millions”.

Ten million is pretty impressive. Now, of course, we can divide all the numbers it has put out to get average use, such as its “used for one billion ‘casts’” stat in the January earnings call: that works out to an average of about 100 “casts” per device over the whole of 2014 (but of course not all were in use all through 2014).

So probably double that 100 figure (or even treble it) for those bought early in the year; halve it, or one-third, for those bought later. Sound good?

Here’s Waldo: computing the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo » Randal S. Olson

I decided to approach this problem as a traveling salesman problem: We need to check every possible location that Waldo could be at while taking as little time as possible. That means we need to cover as much ground as possible without any backtracking.

In computer terms, that means we’re making a list of all 68 points that Waldo could be at, then sorting them based on the order that we’re going to visit them. So now we just need to try every possible arrangement of the points and find the one with the shortest distance traveled. Easy, right? Wrong.

Those 68 points can be arranged in ~2.48 x 1096 possible ways. To provide some context, that’s more possible arrangements than the number of atoms in the universe. That’s so many possible arrangements that even if finding Waldo became an international priority and the world banded together to dedicate the 8.25 million computing cores from the world’s 10 largest supercomputers to the job, it would still take ~9.53 x 1077 years — about 6.35 x 1067x longer than the universe has existed — to exhaustively evaluate all possible combinations. (Generously assuming that each core could perform 10,000 evaluations per second.) In other words: if we don’t have a smarter solution, Waldo is as gone as Carmen Sandiego.

I admit I was disappointed that he didn’t do it by image recognition. And anyhow, his solution (probable regions) doesn’t help you at all with Wizard Whitebeard, Wenda, Wilma, Odlaw, Woof or the Waldo Watchers.