Tag Archives: ipad

Start up: Gravity’s mystery CEO, Android audio latency, Engadget v Wikipedia v AI, and more

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The Pill – so well-known and powerful it only needs the noun to describe it. Photo by Beppie K on Flickr.

Haven’t you heard? You can receive each day’s Start Up post by email. None of this “web” nonsense. (You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.)

A selection of 10 links for you. Aren’t they pretty. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The CEO paying everyone $70,000 salaries has something to hide » Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Karen Weise does a wonderful job of just checking the damn facts about Dan Price, the guy who cut his own salary and raised his staff’s to $70,000 on 13 April:

In a follow-up interview in mid-November, I pressed Price about the inconsistency. How could what he told me about being served two weeks after announcing the raise be true when the court records indicated otherwise?

“Umm, I’m not, I have to look,” he said. The court document, I said, definitely says March 16. “I am only aware of the suit being initiated after the raise,” he replied.

“The court record shows you being served on March 16 … at 1:25 p.m.,” I said. “And actually, your answer to it was dated April 3,” also before the pay hike.

“I am only aware of the suit being initiated after the raise,” he repeated. I asked again how that could be, saying the declaration of service shows Price was served with the complaint, the summons, and other documents, “that you are a male, who is white, age 30, 5-feet-8-inches, medium height, dark hair.”

He paused for 20 seconds. “Are you there?” he asked, then twice repeated his statement that he was only aware of the suit being initiated in late April. “I’d be happy to answer any other questions you may have,” he added.

That’s not the end of it either. There’s deeper stuff to come.
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Android audio latency in depth: it’s getting better, especially with the Nexus 5X and 6P » Android Police

Martim Lobao:

In a study published by the Audio Engineering Society, researchers attempted to determine the lowest latency detectable by different kinds of musicians…

What they found was a set of values below which absolutely no kind of delay or artifact was detected at all. With an 80% confidence level, this value was at least 28 ms for keyboards, whereas for drums, guitars, and bass, it was 9 ms, 5 ms, and 5 ms, respectively. Predictably, the lowest value found was for vocals, where singers only began to notice some slight artifacts at around 2 ms.

Using this data, we drew up another chart to compare these values with several Nexus devices running different versions of Android, as well as the iPhone 6, the iPad Air 2, and human reaction times to various kinds of stimuli. The red and green dashed lines represent the typical thresholds for detecting audio lags and for perceiving audio artifacts, respectively.

While it’s clear that OS updates play a large role (perhaps even the most important one), not everything can be attributed to software alone. Devices with older hardware like the 2013 Nexus 7 still have a latency of 55 ms, compared to the 15 ms on the Nexus 9 — and yet both are running Android 6.0. On the other hand, the Note 5 is roughly on par with the Nexus 5, even though the former runs Lollipop and the latter runs Marshmallow.

Audio latency is a perennial “it’ll get better next time, honest” challenge for Android. What the graph clearly shows is that every iOS device runs under the “detectable lag” threshold, and that every tested Android device runs above that same threshold. (Lobao calls this “unfortunate” and “an unfair advantage”, as though iOS were somehow cheating.)

Lobao pulls out some excellent examples of what the real-world effect of different delays sound like, such as this from SoundCloud.
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Doing real design work on an iPad » Subtraction.com

Khoi Vinh (who works at Adobe):

Some folks may have little tolerance for hoop jumping at all when OS X is so powerful and precise, and many people I talk to find my desire to go all iPad all the time to be somewhat pointless. But it’s more than an academic exercise to me; I genuinely enjoy using my iPad more than my MacBook. It’s lightness and portability is a joy, and its nimbleness—I can use it in portrait or landscape, with or without a Bluetooth keyboard, seated, standing or even walking—makes it right for almost every usage scenario. I also like its ability to run iOS apps because that’s what I’m thinking about in my day-to-day work more than anything; it’s invaluable to me to be embedded in the native environment and mostly free from accessing desktop apps.

I’ve already written a column about the “real work” conundrum for next Sunday’s Tech Monthly in The Guardian. Notable how articles like this are cropping up more and more.
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Samsung pulls out of cameras in the UK, cites decline in interest » Pocket-lint

Rik Henderson:

Samsung has confirmed to Pocket-lint that it will phase out the sale and marketing of digital cameras, camcorders and related accessories in the UK.

The company had been rumoured to be considering such a move on a global scale, with some suggesting that it would make a formal announcement during the CES trade show in Las Vegas in January. However, in response to such speculation in September, Samsung replied that it would be continuing with production of cameras and lenses.

It just won’t be selling them in the UK anymore, it seems.

First PCs, now this. Hard to think anyone is buying digital cameras or camcorders in appreciable numbers any more.
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I taught a computer to write like Engadget » Engadget

Aaron Souppouris:

Building on this, you can seed Engadgetbot with an idea by adding some “primetext” that it’ll build a sentence or paragraph from. A few examples, with the primetext in italics:

A display with 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, for all it’s worth, is an excellent companion at $200.

The problem with Android is one that affects the search to find a standard chipset for Android.

The problem with iPhone is products of the same section and everything is closer than one of the plungentications.

Some of those sentences are more prescient than others, and I don’t know where it learned “plungentications” from, but structurally all of these sentences are perfect. An RNN certainly can’t replace an Engadget writer, but an RNN can definitely form sentences like an Engadget writer.

Definitely. I can see it getting its own blog pretty soon.
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Despite privacy scare, Adele smashes secondary ticketing » MusicAlly

Stuart Dredge:

Coldplay’s six UK dates had 17,631 tickets available across the three secondary sites; Rihanna’s six UK gigs had 9,290 tickets available; and Adele’s 12-concert run had 649 tickets for secondary sale.

Or to put it another way, the average number of secondary tickets per Coldplay gig was 2,939, compared to 1,548 for Rihanna and just 54 for Adele:


Sources: Seatwave, GetMeIn, StubHub – evening of 1 December 2015

Even with caveats – Adele is playing arenas while Coldplay and Rihanna are playing stadiums, and StubHub had no Adele tickets available at all – those figures are startling.

The promise by Adele’s management that “the resale of tickets will not be tolerated” appears to have been followed through with action that hugely restricted the secondary market for the most-anticipated tour in years – Songkick said more than 500,000 people registered on Adele’s website for the pre-sale.

What action? “Songkick provided the opportunity to allow fans to register, and to use its proprietary technology to identify touts, reduce their ability to purchase tickets when advance sales commenced on December 1 and to cancel as many tickets appearing on secondary ticketing sites as possible,” claimed that company’s statement.

No further details have been given, but we suspect there’s a bigger story in that “proprietary technology to identify touts”.

Adele’s manager later said that 18,000 “known or likely touts” had been deregistered before presales, and more than 100 tickets cancelled after appearing on secondary sites. Chalk another one up to Adele and her management.

Wonder if they’ll share the “known or likely” list with other sites and/or artists?
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The Pill versus the Bomb: what digital technologists need to know about power » Medium

Tom Steinberg:

The oral contraceptive pill doesn’t, at first glance, appear to have the same visceral connection to power as a bomb or an engine. And yet as a technology that shifts power around it is perhaps unmatched.

This is because the Pill allowed women from the late 1960s onwards to control their own fertility, which allowed them to postpone marriage, postpone the birth of their first child, and turn these advantages into more education and greater involvement in the employment markets. Put together this gave women with access to the pill relatively greater power than they had before, both through greater earnings and through greater ability to choose how to live their own lives.

But what is most interesting to me about the nature of this technological power shift is that it did not dissipate as the technology became ubiquitous.

…Like a diode, the power of the Pill only flows one way.

(Emphasis in original.) Steinberg, who set up MySociety, and was a technology adviser to the 2010-2015 coalition in the UK, is now looking for people who’ve got comparable power-spreading technologies.
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Nokia’s Ozo VR camera marks a rebirth for the phone giant » WIRED

Maurizio Pesce:

The Ozo is set to be unveiled on November 30 in Los Angeles, and expected to cost around $50,000. That’s about three times the price tag of the GoPro Odyssey. However, while the GoPro’s footage must still be assembled in laborious post-production processes, the Ozo can generate a full 360-degree stereoscopic video in real time. Thanks to HD-SDI connections on the body, the camera can stream 1.5 Gbps of compressed RAW footage to store data from the streams from the eight lens, broadcast full 360-degree panoramic video, and also stream a low-res feed for monitoring. The camera is Wi-Fi enabled, too, allowing filmmakers to control the system remotely in real time while shooting.

Nokia’s bold move into virtual reality is a clear statement that the Finns are still alive, and that they’re more interested in the projected $150bn dollar VR industry than they are in the mobile handset industry.

It’s less a “rebirth” – Nokia’s network business has been doing OK – than a new direction, but the point about the VR industry compared to the handset business is a good one. And this is clearly aimed at content producers, a smart move.

So… when does Apple update Final Cut Pro to handle VR? Or will it introduce something entirely new?
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Wikipedia deploys AI to expand its ranks of human editors » WIRED

Cade Metz:

With his new AI project — dubbed the Objective Revision Evaluation Service, or ORES — [senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, Aaron] Halfaker aims to boost participation by making Wikipedia more friendly to newbie editors. Using a set of open source machine learning algorithms known as SciKit Learn—code freely available to the world at large—the service seeks to automatically identify blatant vandalism and separate it from well-intentioned changes. With a more nuanced view of new edits, the thinking goes, these algorithms can continue cracking down on vandals without chasing away legitimate participants. It’s not that Wikipedia needs to do away with automated tools to attract more human editors. It’s that Wikipedia needs better automated tools.

“We don’t have to flag good-faith edits the same way we flag bad-faith damaging edits,” says Halfaker, who used Wikipedia as basis for his PhD work in the computer science department at the University of Minnesota.

In the grand scheme of things, the new AI algorithms are rather simple examples of machine learning. But they can be effective. They work by identifying certain words, variants of certain words, or particular keyboard patterns. For instance, they can spot unusually large blocks of characters. “Vandals tend to mash the keyboard and not put spaces in between their characters,” Halfaker says.

I CAN TYPING confirmed as fact. Next step: get the AI to write the Wikipedia articles. (Step after that: humans stop bothering to read Wikipedia?)
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The Surface Phone you’ve always wanted is happening » Windows Central

Daniel Rubino:

Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans have revealed that the rumored Intel-powered Windows 10 phone slated for May 2016 has been cancelled. Instead, an all-new flagship phone lead by Panos Panay and the team of engineers that built the Microsoft Surface and Surface Book has been given the green light. Slated for a release in the second half of 2016 this may be the long-wished-for Surface phone. Here is what we know and what we don’t.

What we know:
1) it’s about five years too late.
2) that’s all, really. It doesn’t matter if it’s a super-amazing premium flagship able to cure cancer while landing on the moon. Nobody (to a sufficiently good approximation) will buy it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: truths about music, neural nets for you, PC v iPad, Apple Watch abandonment, and more

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Saturn’s rings. What if they were around Earth instead? We have pictures. Photo by alpoma on Flickr.

Lots of other people have already signed up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. Unless that’s where you’re reading it. Remember how you clicked a confirmation link to avoid spam?

A selection of 10 links for you. Ooh look, December already (where I am, anyway). I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The running list of things that I hate hearing about the music business » Medium

Ethan Kaplan has a fine (and growing) list, of which this is an example:

There are two forms of intelligence that will help you find music: machine and human. Music discovery companies target the type of music listener who’s heuristics will always yield better results from the machine. They bring enough probabilism to bear to ensure good outcomes from collaborative filtering.

This is not most people. Most people won’t have inputs such as “post punk from Boston between 1980 and 1984 who toured along side but not with R.E.M.”

Most people have inputs like “something inoffensive that won’t bother me and that my kids won’t fight about.” For most people the music discovery engine that matters still has an actual name. It always did. It may be Keith McPhee [music supervisor on the Tonight Show] or Kevin Weatherly [SVP of programming at CBS] or Bob Pittman [CEO of iHeartMedia, formerly ClearChannel].

It isn’t and never will be the name of that latest startup.

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Apple Music comes to Sonos on December 15 » BuzzFeed News

John Paczkowski:

Sonos will let people access Apple Music’s For You, My Music, New, and Radio — basically everything but “Connect,” a social feature intended to link artists with their fans. The focus is curated streaming, which Sonos co-founder and CEO John MacFarlane says drives most of the music listening that occurs on Sonos speakers these days.

“Well over 90% of the music people listen to on Sonos speakers is from streaming services,” MacFarlane told BuzzFeed News. “We think Apple Music is going to be a catalyst that will raise that percentage even higher. What we’ve found is that as Sonos owners discover streaming services like Apple Music they use the local collections they have on their home computers and cell phones less and less.”

For Sonos, which has long offered a robust menu of streaming music services that includes everything from Spotify to Tidal, the addition of Apple Music seems a no-brainer, particularly since its Beats Music predecessor had been available on Sonos since January of 2014 until it was shut down on November 30. So why wait? Why did Apple not offer Apple Music right out of the gate? “It’s important to get the integration right the first time out,” [Apple software and services veep Eddy] Cue told BuzzFeed News. “Apple has a high bar for this stuff; So does Sonos. Apple Music isn’t even six months old yet, so this really did not take much time at all.”

Here’s the signup for the beta. Personally, this is the Christmas present I really want.
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Application-ready deep neural net models » Deep Detect

Below are a range of deep neural network models that are free, even for commercial use in your applications. These models have been trained over images for a range of domains. Thus they should accomodate a range of applications, from fashion item recognition to sports and gender classification.

This page lists a growing list of available models, along with information on how to use them and how they were built.

If you have a business of any appreciable size which works on data, I’d suggest you should be investigating what a neural network could do. Even the simple result on the page is remarkable.
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Apple Watch and dissatisfaction » Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin on the results from a Wrist.ly survey of people who gave up using their Watch:

Here are the top five reasons this group gave for giving up on the Apple Watch.

The most insightful part of this particular question was the follow on, fill in the blank area where 300 people who took the survey wrote a comment about the product. I read through them all and a number of things stood out. The biggest theme in the critiques was about performance. Many thought the Apple Watch was too slow, particularly around data retrieval and third party apps. The other was about battery. Many commented on their desire to have the watch face be visible at all times and not have to charge daily. Another interesting thread in the comments was the high number of people who said they would have liked it more if it was more independent from the iPhone. This is a similar thread to comments from our larger Wristly panel of satisfied owners. Another common thread I saw from this group was the price. Many who commented suggested the price was too high and we know from this panel 65% of those who responded bought a Sport. This indicates that even $349 felt too expensive for the value for this group.

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What would Earth’s skies look like with Saturn’s rings? » The Planetary Society

Illustrator and author Ron Miller specializes in, among other things, incredible visualizations of other worlds. He has rendered the surface of Titan, peered into black holes for Discover magazine, and designed a Pluto stamp that is currently hurtling toward the far reaches of our solar system aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

Now, Miller brings his visualizations back to Earth for a series exploring what our skies would look like with Saturn’s majestic rings. Miller strived to make the images scientifically accurate, adding nice touches like orange-pink shadows resulting from sunlight passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. He also shows the rings from a variety of latitudes and landscapes, from the U.S. Capitol building to Mayan ruins in Guatemala.

We’ll start with Washington, D.C. and work our way southward.

These are very beautiful, and thought-provoking, images. Wish that a film like Interstellar had used something like them. (Is there a film of Ringworld in production? If not, why not?)
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Six Features That Allow Your PC To Do More Than Your Phone » About.com

Hilarious advertorial from Intel. See what you make of the six things, which are

• it offers a much larger screen
• It has uncompromised performance
• You don’t have to worry about paying for data
• It doesn’t skimp on software
• It’s upgradable and expandable
• There’s no middleman

Any of these alone could raise a laugh, but my favourite may be “you don’t have to worry about paying for data”. Intel magically makes data appear? Love it. Now let’s move on to our next entry…
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Can the MacBook Pro replace your iPad? » Fraser Speirs

Yes, you did read that headline correctly:

Despite their far greater size, and consequently weight, there is no MacBook Pro model that gets better battery life than the iPad Pro. You have to wonder about the efficiency of the Intel platform. The MacBook Pro line also requires device-specific chargers. Although most recent models use the MagSafe 2 connector, each model comes with its own rating of charger. Compared to the iPad Pro’s use of the widely-available Lightning connector and its ability to charge from small battery packs, this significantly reduces your chances of being able to just borrow a charger for a quick top-up when out and about. Not to mention the fact that none of those increasingly-common public charging lockers support MagSafe 2.

While we are on the subject, let’s talk about ports. The designers of the MacBook Pro seem to have gone port-crazy. The MacBook Pro takes up a lot of space on the sides of the device for ports that most people will likely not use very often: SD Card readers, HDMI connectors and even dual thunderbolt ports. Having multiple ports that do the same thing is probably confusing for many users, which is likely why you see newer designs like the 2015 MacBook moving closer to the iPad approach to connectivity with a single port for power and peripherals.

There’s a point at which trolling (and satire) are indistinguishable from real life. This is one of those times.
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BlackBerry exits Pakistan to avoid state’s email monitoring » Bloomberg Business

Faseeh Mangi:

BlackBerry Ltd. said it’s shutting its Pakistan operations to avoid allowing authorities in the nation to monitor its main business enterprise server and e-mail messages.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority notified the country’s mobile phone operators in July that BlackBerry’s BES servers would no longer be allowed to operate for security reasons, Marty Beard, chief operating officer at BlackBerry, said in a blog post on Monday. “The truth is that the Pakistani government wanted the ability to monitor all BES traffic.”

The regulator is still in talks with BlackBerry and “hopefully it’ll be sorted out,” Pakistan Telecommunication Authority Chairman S. Ismail Shah said by phone. The discussions will go on for a month and could be extended, he said.

Going to leave 5,000 BES customers there high and dry. What do Apple and Google do there, though?
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US Retail Black Friday report 2015 » IBM Commerce

Lots of data, such as:

• Consumers balance mobile and desktop shopping: consumers continued to shop via their mobile devices — mobile traffic exceeded desktop, accounting for 57.2% of all online traffic, an increase of 15.2% over 2014. Mobile sales were also strong, with 36.2% of all online sales coming from mobile devices, an increase of nearly 30% over last year.

• Tablets outspend desktops: for the first time, tablets’ average order value of $136.42 exceeded that of desktops, which ended the day at $134.06. Smartphone shoppers spent $121.06 per order, an increase of 4.3% over 2014.

• Smartphone shoppers dominate: smartphones remained the Black Friday shopper’s device of choice. Smartphones accounted for 44.7% of all online traffic, 3.5x that of tablets at 12.5%. Smartphones surpassed tablets in sales, driving 20.6% of online sales (up nearly 75% over 2014) versus tablets at 15.5%.

Of course tablets aren’t used for “real work”. Also some data about iOS/Android split in spending terms – which goes as you might expect.
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Lost in music: the world of obsessive audiophilia » The Guardian

Jonathan Margolis:

although I have been immersed in this world for 25 years, I still don’t quite know who buys the stuff. Hi-fi stores are often in modest, ordinary towns and suburbs. Who is it in Crewe that is spending the price of a very nice new car on speaker wires?

Some of the enthusiasts, of course, are the rich and famous. Douglas Adams had a system in his Islington home that reputedly cost £25,000. The crime writer Ian Rankin is an aficionado, having been a hi-fi reviewer in the 1980s. Celebrity physicist Brian Cox reportedly loves “high end” hi-fi. And the internet says Frank Zappa was big on it, along with Clint Eastwood and Hugh Laurie – and that Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has a system by Naim, a Salisbury manufacturer.

In a proper hi-fi dealer, Richer Sounds included, you can buy a good system of parts from various manufacturers for as little as £1,000. The bits won’t match, though – heaven forbid they should look nice. None of it will have what hi-fi men call WAF – Wife Acceptance Factor.

Yep this is a thing. Non-ironic. I believe.

Women broadly have too much sense to be audiophiles…

…my wife believes hi-fi is the male version of wrinkle cream – dubious claims, expensive prices, results only apparent to the buyer.

I think his wife is right on the money.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Google adds mobile ads, the sensing wearable, paying for snoops, and more

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“Wait – that’s no moon!” Photo of the iPad Pro by portalgda on Flickr.

Something something receive each day’s Start Up post by email mutter mutter. Rhubarb rhubarb confirmation link mutter mutter.

A selection of 11 links for you. Curl up with them for the weekend. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s efforts to monetize mobile pay off, but sites see a hit to organic visits » Search Engine Land

Andy Taylor notes that since August, there are now three ads rather than two before “organic” results on mobile phones in Google searches – and paid-for click-through rates (CTR) on ads have leapt accordingly:

One explanation is that some of the ads now getting impressions in the third spot above the organic results were already getting impressions below the organic results prior to the change. Thus, when the ads got the bump to the top of the page, the likelihood of a click went up substantially.

However, we see average position moving farther down the page, and Google is still showing ads at the bottom of the page, indicating that any ads that were moved up to the top were probably “replaced” at the bottom by additional ads. Thus, this probably isn’t causing the substantial improvement in mobile CTR we’re observing.

Rather, it’s possible that by adding a third text ad and pushing organic links even farther down the page, Google has broken the will of users who would have clicked on an organic link if they could find one at the top of the page but are instead just clicking ads because they don’t want to scroll down.

This would mean the addition of the third text ad may have pretty seriously impacted searcher behavior on phones, resulting in more ad clicks and spend headed Google’s way.

Just in case you were wondering how Google boosted its mobile revenue in the latest quarter, despite fewer than half of people doing one search per day on mobile. Taylor points to other methods too – very big “product listing ads” twice the size of earlier this month.
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The iPad Pro: the start of something new » Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin:

the most interesting observation I made was not how I used the tablet but how my oldest daughter, who is twelve, used the iPad Pro. She goes to a private school where each kid uses an iPad all day, every day. They use the iPad in every aspect of their education, from textbooks and learning materials, to real-time collaboration, notes, making movies during class, presenting, and much more. When we were checking out this school, we spent time watching kids use their iPads to do a range of things in the classroom. I was stunned by their fluency and efficiency. How fast they type, how quickly they multi-task between taking notes or a picture of the teacher’s notes on the board and then mark up their own notes on top of that. These kids were more literate with the iPad than many people I know who are highly technical, including myself. This ingrained literacy is the result of using a touch-based computer and the apps built on top of the mobile ecosystem, every day. After watching them for a day, I’m honestly not sure I could have accomplished as much as they did in as short of a time using a traditional laptop.

So I should not have been surprised when my daughter started playing with the iPad Pro for a few hours and came back and showed me all the things she had done: movies she made, photos she took outside (which she edited/mashed up using the different apps she also uses in creative projects at school) and taking advantage of the unique benefits of the Apple Pencil. With nearly everything she showed me, I had to ask her how she did it.

Do you really think she’s a future Surface user?
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EM-Sense wearable knows what objects you’re touching » Digital Trends

Chloe Olewitz:

The human body is naturally conductive, so the electromagnetic noise that most electrical and electromechanical objects emit is propagated throughout the person touching it. Using a small, affordable radio-powered wearable, researchers at Disney and Carnegie Mellon University were able to develop a custom smart watch that detects the electromagnetic noise traveling through the body. Paired with their software definition system, the EM-Sense smart watch can identify what specific objects the wearer is touching at any given moment.

Examples of the EM-Sense’s detection capabilities are what really bring the technology to life. The main function allows the EM-Sense smart watch to simply identify objects, like a doorknob, a toothbrush, or a kitchen appliance. But that’s just the beginning. With a bit more development, EM-Sense’s creators think the technology could be used to automate frequent actions and augment important aspects of our daily routines.

Neat – definitely like the idea of your smartwatch or band being able to identify what you’re dealing with. (Beware the web page’s autoplay video, though.)
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DynamicPricer PUP disables browser updates » Malwarebytes Unpacked

Pieter Arntz:

Although this one has been around for a while, DynamicPricer deserves some attention because of the different approach it uses compared to other Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs).

What’s different?

Where other adware applications look for sneaky ways to invade your up-to-date browsers or even install their own browser on your system, this one just installs an old version of Chrome and then disables the automatic updates for Chrome and Firefox.

As far as I could retrieve the version of Chrome it installs dates back to February of 2014. My guess is because that was the first build that included an API to take actions depending on the content of a page, without requiring permission to read the page’s content.

So sneaky to prevent the upgrading.
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Fossil Group to buy Misfit for $260m » WSJ

Yuliya Chernova:

Watchmaker Fossil Group Inc. has agreed to acquire startup Misfit Inc., a maker of wearable fitness trackers, for $260m.

Richardson, Texas-based Fossil Group has its Fossil and Skagen brands, and it licenses a host of others, including Michael Kors, Diesel and DKNY.

“If you don’t have a brand it is hard to be legit in this space,” said Sonny Vu, chief executive and co-founder of Misfit. He will become president and chief technology officer of connected devices for Fossil Group after the transaction closes, which Fossil expects before the end of the year.

Consolidation in the wearables space already?
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Cloud computing promises fall short » WSJ

Angus Loten and Rachael King on the shift to on-demand off-premise cloud computing not quite being the nice elasticated experience companies expected:

Frank Sirianni, CIO of Fordham University, said the university recently shifted from using an on-premises version of Ellucian Inc. business software to the cloud version. Although he agreed to a three-year-deal, Ellucian sought to lock him in for a longer term with variable pricing from month to month and a minimum monthly charge. Mr. Sirianni said he opted for a fixed monthly price, in order to avoid paying more if the university used more computing cycles, but not less if usage declined. Fordham wanted more predictable software spending over the course of the year, he said.

Ellucian said it doesn’t comment on the specific pricing that any client may pay for its products or services. “Our focus is to deliver significant value in these arrangements and enable our customers to leverage their entire investment in technology and services by going to the cloud,” said a company spokeswoman.

Translation: “we don’t want to lose revenue when customers make this shift.”
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YouTube and the attention economy » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan points out that YouTube is the one to deal with because “Free music streamers – of which YouTube is the largest single component – comprise 92.5% of all music streaming users and just 32% of all streaming revenue.” So how to balance those numbers?

YouTube is not suddenly going to start delivering dramatically better music stream rates, largely because labels and publishers haven’t had the courage to demand the requisite fair share it should pay. Rights owners’ fears are understandable: one senior label executive recounted a YouTube negotiator saying ‘Don’t push us. Right now you don’t like us much and we’re your friend. Imagine what we’d be like if we weren’t your friend.’ Sooner or later bullying tactics need standing up to. But that will not be a quick process, regardless of the steps currently being taken behind the scenes.

So in the meantime artists and labels need to figure out how to get more out of YouTube in a way that complements the other ways they make money digitally. Put simply that means making more non-music video content to generate more viewing hours and thus more ad revenue from YouTube. Heck, they might even generate some YouTube subscription revenue some time. But do it they must, else they’ll forever be leaving chunks of YouTube money on the table.

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Broadband bills will have to increase to pay for snooper’s charter, MPs are warned » Technology | The Guardian

Alex Hern:

For [Matthew] Hare [chief executive of ISP Gigaclear], the other major problem is that separating “metadata” from “content”, as the law mandates for the purposes of mass surveillance, is a very difficult technical challenge.

For a simple connection like a phone call, the difference is easy: information like the number dialled and length of the call is clearly metadata, while the audio transmitted over the line is clearly content. But for a typical internet user, a number of different services are being used at any one time, and they all blur the lines between the two categories.

“The web isn’t a single application, that’s the fundamental problem I’ve got,” Hare said. He outlined a common scenario: “A teenager is currently playing a game using Steam, that’s not a web application … and then they’re broadcasting the game they’re playing using something called Twitch. They may well also be doing a voice call where they’re shouting at their friends, and those are all running simultaneously. At any one time any of those services could drop in, drop out, be replaced.”

MPs discover it isn’t just a series of pipes.
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TomTom to provide data for Uber driver app »TomTom

TomTom has signed a global, multi-year agreement to provide maps and traffic data for the Uber driver app.   

TomTom’s advanced map-making technology, combined with its world class traffic information, will ensure Uber has a seamless navigation experience, accurate arrival times and efficient journeys in more than 300 cities around the world.

“We are excited to provide Uber with our best-in-class location data.” said Charles Cautley, Managing Director Maps & Licensing at TomTom. “TomTom is a truly independent map provider with the platform for the future. With this platform, TomTom is the trusted partner for innovative and future proof location technology for the global automotive and consumer technology industry.”

Edging just that little bit further away from Google; surprised some that it didn’t go with Nokia’s HERE. TomTom is also a traffic and maps data supplier to Apple. Will Uber buy TomTom? Does Apple have a break clause if someone buys TomTom?
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Experts still think uBeam’s through-the-air charging tech is unlikely » IEEE Spectrum

Lee Gomes:

In some regards, uBeam is already walking back some of the more extravagant claims it has made in the dozens of stories that have been written about it. A September piece in TechCrunch, said uBeam “could power up your phone while it’s in your pocket when you’re at a café.” While that sort of ubiquitous charging would be appealing for its simplicity and convenience, experts consider it to be impossible on account of the line-of-sight nature of ultrasound waves.

A TechCrunch interview from Saturday concedes the point, saying, The system “requires a line of sight and can’t charge through walls or clothes.” The latest story, though, didn’t address the obvious discrepancy with the earlier account. The most recent story says uBeam could transmit up to 4 meters, far less than the 30 feet (9 meters) claimed in an earlier piece.

While the company has made several technical advances involving ultrasound, “the idea that uBeam is going to eliminate the need for wires is ridiculous,” said one person with knowledge of the situation.

Leaning towards IEEE Spectrum’s sources knowing more about this topic than Techcrunch’s.
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I’m going to make Facebook’s AI predict what happens in videos » New Scientist

Yann Lecun is Facebook’s head of AI:

Q: Are there problems that you think deep learning or the image-sensing convolutional neural nets you use can’t solve?
JL: There are things that we cannot do today, but who knows? For example, if you had asked me like 10 years ago, “Should we use convolutional nets or deep learning for face recognition?”, I would have said there’s no way it’s going to work. And it actually works really well.

Q: Why did you think that neural nets weren’t capable of this?
JL: At that time, neural nets were really good at recognising general categories. So here’s a car, it doesn’t matter what car it is or what position it is. Or there’s a chair, there are lots of different possible chairs and those networks are good at extracting the “chair-ness” or the “car-ness”, independently of the particular instance and the pose.

But for things like recognising species of birds or breeds of dogs or plants or faces, you need fine-grained recognition, where you might have thousands or millions of categories, and the differences between the different categories is very minute. I would have thought deep learning was not the best approach for this – that something else would work better. I was wrong. I underestimated the power of my own technique. There’s a lot of things that now I might think are difficult, but, once we scale up, are going to work.

link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Satya Nadella uses a Lumia 950 XL.

Start up: how self-driving cars will change life, why *is* http on port 80?, iPad Pro reviewed, and more

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How Uber’s autonomous cars will destroy 10 million jobs and reshape the economy by 2025 » Zack Kanter

Industry experts think that consumers will be slow to purchase autonomous cars – while this may be true, it is a mistake to assume that this will impede the transition. Morgan Stanley’s research shows that cars are driven just 4% of the time, which is an astonishing waste considering that the average cost of car ownership is nearly $9,000 per year. Next to a house, an automobile is the second most expensive asset that most people will ever buy – it is no surprise that ride sharing services like Uber and car sharing services like Zipcar are quickly gaining popularity as an alternative to car ownership. It is now more economical to use a ride sharing service if you live in a city and drive less than 10,000 miles per year. The impact on private car ownership is enormous: a UC-Berkeley study showed that vehicle ownership among car sharing users was cut in half. The car purchasers of the future will not be you and me – cars will be purchased and operated by ride sharing and car sharing companies.

And current research confirms that we would be eager to use autonomous cars if they were available. A full 60% of US adults surveyed stated that they would ride in an autonomous car, and nearly 32% said they would not continue to drive once an autonomous car was available instead.

Today’s children are the last generation that will have to pass a driving test. Think about that briefly. Then read the rest of Kanter’s piece. (It’s actually optimistic, overall.) And one more thing: it doesn’t have to be about Uber.
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Fantastical designs from the frontier of subway maps » Washington Post

For many designers, creating a better subway map is an irresistible puzzle — “infinitely alterable, incredibly vexing, with no definitive answer,” writes Emily Badger. Badger’s new article looks at some amazing examples of metro maps from the frontier of design, including the beautiful 2010 diagram of all of the rails in the Tokyo region, designed by Kim Ji-hwan.

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Rooted, Trojan-infected Android tablets sold on Amazon » Help-Net Security

Zeljka Zorz:

If you want to buy a cheap Android-powered tablet, and you’re searching for it on Amazon, the best thing you can do is carefully read all the negative reviews you can find. If you are lucky, you’ll see some that will warn you about the device being rooted and coming pre-installed with malware.

Security researchers from Cheetah Mobile have recently discovered a slew of these devices – over 30 tablet brands in total – being sold on Amazon and other reputable online stores.

Here’s a short overview of affected devices, along with a sample of reviews warning about the malware.

The malware in question is the Cloudsota Trojan, which allows remote control of the infected devices and conducts malicious activities without user consent.

Remember, a Trojan is for life, not just for Christmas. Estimated that over 17,000 have been sold.
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The case against a Google phone » The Information

Amir Efrati on the rumours that Google is looking to design its own phone chips:

the ecosystem of partners that build and sell Android phones has matured to some extent; those companies have 1.4bn customers (there’s one third as many iPhones in customer’s hands, by contrast). While many of those customers aren’t necessarily loyal, and surprising upstarts are gaining ground, Google won’t be able to suddenly capture a significant amount of market share with a better device, at their expense. (It would also risk its chance to return to China, given that it is working with local handset brands to do so.) There is no going back.

Even if Google wanted to compete on price by offering devices cheaper than the iPhone, it would still have to engineer a marketing apparatus so impressive that it convinces smartphones buyers that the Google phone is the best in the world. That’s the only way it could convert iPhone and even some Samsung Galaxy S users — who are wealthier than typical Android users — to the Google phone. Good luck with that.

Then there’s the fact that prices for phones have come down so much as components become cheaper that it’s become exceedingly difficult for existing Android phone brands to stand out in the market.

Even if the Google phone struck a chord, it’s hard to see it selling more than tens of millions of devices in the next few years, and that’s optimistic.

I can believe that Google is interested in designing ARM architecture chips. But I think it’s more likely considering them for its server farms. People inside Google already know Efrati’s argument (which holds water). Sundar Pichai is hardly the sort to hang on to an idea for pride. He killed Google+, remember?
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Ad Replacer: turn spammy ads into breaking news

We take those terrible, misleading ads that take you to garbage websites (or worse!) and switch them out for real-time, human-curated headlines and links from ONLY the most trusted, reliable websites.

Sites that never end in best-deals-4-everyone.ru. Sites that never pop up 8 windows asking if you’re SURE you want to click away. Just sites you like and stories you want to read, all seamlessly integrated into your browsing experience before you even notice it’s changed. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Neat idea; Chrome extension only for now.
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Facebook Messenger adds facial recognition » Tech Insider

Alex Heath:

Adding facial recognition to Messenger may seem odd given that it’s primarily considered to be a messaging app, but when you consider that people send a staggering 9.5 billion photos through Messenger every month, the decision begins to make more sense.

Messenger is very proactive in prompting to share a photo with friends it thinks are in a photo — the app will send a notification asking you to send a photo to people on Facebook it thinks are tagged. (This specific behavior can be turned off in the Messenger app’s settings.)

Australia only for now, but your feeling on whether this is creepy or great will probably depend on age. Note though that it’s machine learning/AI being deployed as utterly normal; even five years ago this would have been hard to implement on such scale.
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iPad Pro review: jack of all trades, master of most » WSJ

Joanna Stern:

On paper, 12.9 inches may not seem much bigger than the standard iPad’s 9.7 inches, but the Pro screen made me more productive. I spent much of my week writing in Microsoft Word on the left hand of the screen and toggling between websites and my inbox on the right. Text looks incredibly crisp, especially in comparison with my MacBook Air’s display, which has just half the pixels.

The A9X processor and 4GB of RAM kept those apps running swiftly. But most impressive? When I exported the same 4K video in iMovie on both the Pro and my Intel Core i5-powered MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, the iPad reached the finish line a minute and a half faster. And, unlike the Air, it didn’t sound like it was about to blast off from Cape Canaveral.

For real work, it’s all about attaching Apple’s $170 Smart Keyboard. You don’t do this via Bluetooth, but rather with the new magnetic Smart Connector. I quickly fell in love with the feel of the bouncy fabric keys, and it became second nature to hit Command+Tab to toggle between apps. Oh, and did I mention the keyboard is spill-proof? Seriously, my iced latte just wiped right off.

Still, many times I wished for something closer to Microsoft’s Surface Type Cover. Apple’s keyboard only props the screen at a 120-degree angle; attaching it and folding it take origami skill. It all almost toppled off my lap a few times, and the keys aren’t backlit. Plus, there’s no trackpad, like the Type Cover’s. I constantly had to reach out and touch the screen to scroll or select text and icons…

…Despite iOS 9’s improved multitasking, there are still shortcomings. You can’t customize the home screen’s comically large icons with files or other shortcuts. You can’t place the same app—say two Safari windows—side by side. And iOS’s lack of real file management can be maddening. Microsoft saddles its Surface Pro with full-blown desktop Windows while the iPad Pro is still too closely related to an iPhone. Apple has to keep working to find the happy middle.

Pricey. But here’s the kicker:

There’s one thing the iPad has over all other laptops and competing tablets though: incredible apps. The Pro helped me realize that I’ve been living in the past, using legacy desktop programs to accomplish things.

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Why was 80 chosen as the default HTTP port and 443 as the default HTTPS port? » How To Geek

According to superuser jcbermu:

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a department of ICANN, a non-profit private corporation that oversees global IP address allocation, the Domain Name System (DNS), well-known ports, and other Internet Protocol-related symbols and numbers.

During March of 1990, they published a document (RFC 1060) where they listed all the well-known ports at that time. In that list there was no protocol assigned to port 80 (it jumped from 79 to 81). 79 was assigned to “finger” (find out if someone was online) and 81 to HOSTS2-NS, the HOSTS2 Name Server.

At that time, port 80 was officially free. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee issued the first version of HTTP in a document (HTTP 0.9) where he stated “If the port number is not specified, 80 is always assumed for HTTP.”

HTTPS? Lost in time. Blamed on someone at NCSA Mosaic. So there’s your pub quiz question/answer pair.
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Apple Music » Android Apps on Google Play

It arrived as an app on Android, as version 0.9.0:

Introducing the beta of Apple Music on Android.
Notes about the beta period:
• Music videos are coming soon.
• Family membership sign-ups and upgrades require Mac or iOS.
• Sign-up process to be optimized for Android.

Notable that it hasn’t attracted the hate reviews that the “Move to iOS” app did; there are actually a lot of five-star reviews. (Average 3.1.) The key element looks like the “family membership” element; that’s a really powerful reason for Apple to want to reach Android users – because families are mixed users.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Surface Book review, Google v EC redux, where are the iPad Pro apps?, after Google Flu, and more

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Final words – the Microsoft Surface Book review » Anandtech

Brett Howse likes it a lot. Apart from the lack of ports. And also..

The other issue with the hardware is one that plagues all 2-in-1 devices which offer a detachable display. Because the display has to house all of the PC components it gets heavy. The Surface Book display/Clipboard is 1.6 lbs (726 grams) and all of this weight is out over the hinge. The Surface Book does better than any other detachable convertible device for balance, but at the end of the day it is still more top heavy than a traditional notebook. On a desk it’s not going to be an issue, but if you do have to type in your lap, depending on the seating arrangement, it may want to tip backwards. This is compounded by the feet on the bottom not having a lot of grip. The Surface Book’s display travel is also limited to prevent it from tipping over, although it does open far enough that it should not be an issue for almost any situation.

The hardware is overall very good. Where the Surface Book is let down though is on software. It’s kind of ironic that the hardware is well done but the software can’t keep up when you consider Microsoft is first and foremost a software company, and one that has only been in the PC market for a couple of years at that. But there have been a lot of issues with software. When the Surface Book first launched, it suffered from display driver crashes along with hue changes and flickering on the screen when doing certain tasks. Luckily these issues seem to have been corrected with a firmware update issues on November 2nd. But there are still outstanding issues. The fact that you can’t close the lid and expect the laptop to actually go to sleep is a terrible bug. Leaving the Surface Book unplugged but sleeping is going to result in a dead battery. Just yesterday, I closed the lid on the Surface Book, only to notice the fans had kicked in and it was very hot.

I find the coexistence of a laptop that can turn into a tablet (Surface Book) and a tablet that can turn into a laptop (Surface Pro) suggestive of a “let’s turn this ship around any way we can” approach. Also, the Surface Book sure is pricey.

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Google faces new round of EU probing over Android mapping apps » Bloomberg Business

Aoife White:

Google faces a fresh round of European Union questions about its Android operating system for mobile devices as regulators quizzed rivals and customers over applications for maps, e-mail and other services.

The EU wants to know whether Google Maps for phones has supplanted portable or in-car navigation devices, such as those produced by TomTom NV and the HERE unit of Nokia Oyj, according to a document sent to companies and seen by Bloomberg.

Officials are also seeking data, such as user numbers, about downloaded or pre-installed mapping apps on devices, as well as costs mapmakers face to produce a mobile-ready app.

Wonder how long that one will take to reach any decision. 2017? 2018?
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Google EU antitrust response argues Amazon, eBay robust competitors » Re/code

Mark Bergen, who has seen a redacted copy of Google’s response to the EC:

Google points to the number of online price aggregators — sites that collate retail prices elsewhere on the Internet — born in Europe: 180 between 2008 and 2014. The EU’s charge sheet, or statement of objections (SO), “focuses on a handful of aggregators that lost free Google traffic, but ignores many that gained traffic,” Google’s lawyers wrote. Google says it drove 20bn “free clicks” to these aggregators in Europe over the past decade.

More critical to Google’s defense is the argument that online marketplaces, like eBay and Amazon, should be considered peers to Google’s shopping service, a position at odds with the EU, which charges that these merchants are “irrelevant” when it comes to price comparisons. Google’s lawyers claim, using internal data, that Web visitors prefer merchant links over aggregators and go directly to Amazon for product searches. (They do.) Google also argues that these giant merchants consider the smaller price aggregators as rivals as well — in the response, Google cites Amazon SEC filings where the e-commerce company lists “comparison shopping websites” and “Web search engines” as competitors. Ergo, Google contends, the EU should see them that way too.

And echoing the company’s internal note to the charges in April, Google spells out how Amazon and eBay are far more dominant as online retailers in Europe than Google’s service.

Pretty much all these points of Google’s were rebutted thoroughly by Foundem (a price aggregation service which complained to the EC) in June.
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Where are Apple’s iPad Pro apps for pros? » Lou Miranda

There’s a big gap in Apple’s pro app lineup, with Aperture being retired along with iPhoto. iPhoto’s replacement is the Photos app, but there is no Aperture replacement yet. What better device to introduce a Photos Pro app than a giant-screened iPad Pro with a pressure sensitive Pencil?

Likewise with Final Cut Pro X. There’s no reason to make it iPad Pro-only, but it would certainly shine on an iPad Pro. This is similar to Macs: sure you can run Photoshop or FCP X on a MacBook Air, but they really shine on a MacBook Pro or Mac Pro. I discussed this at length in my post “There’s No Such Thing as an iPad App“.

So why would Apple release an iPad Pro without its own pro apps?

My feeling is that the iPad Pro is much like Apple TV: the hardware was ready before the software, and Apple is soft-pedaling both, mostly to developers and early adopters. (You could argue Apple does this with every new device, and I wouldn’t argue with you.)

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AI will reorganize the human population » Medium

Silver Keskkula, who is working on the “Teleport” app which aims to find the best place for you to live:

Matching people to locations is hard — there are more things to account for than might be feasible to code into a human understandable model. Although today we’ve managed to keep things simple and are missing a purely machine learning driven parameter from our search, I’m more than convinced that in the very near future we will need to resort to AI to help guide people’s search into where to live (our first tests are quite encouraging).

All and all we’re all just inefficient computational machines running on wetware and largely biased by evolutionary adaptations more suited to the hunter-gatherer era, so getting AI involved in our next wave of migrations might not be such a bad thing.

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This is how you design your mobile app for maximum growth » First Round Review

[Primer CEO] Kamo Asatryan may very well be one of the best kept secrets in the startup ecosystem. He’s one of a small handful of people who have observed hundreds of mobile apps, thought deeply and scientifically about their mechanics, and determined what they could change to grow faster.

To demonstrate his particular brand of magic: Asatryan’s team recently worked with an app that required users to swipe through four screens explaining the product in-depth before they could sign up. Then the permissions screen literally begged them to let the app access their location data. 60% said no and went on to a dead-end experience.

To turn things around, Asatryan tested a radically different approach: assume that users who installed the app already understood the need to provide their location data. This allowed them to axe the long-winded welcome flow and make the permissions request the second screen. The text was changed to say that users needed to “Enable Location Permissions” (making it clear that it would be for their benefit), and they were literally not able to move on from the screen without saying yes. This sounds risky, but after the shift, 95% of users said yes and went on to a much better product experience.

This is a long article, but every single element of it will be useful if you’re in any way involved in designing or critiquing mobile app design. Today’s must-read. (Via Dave Verwer’s iOS Dev Weekly.)
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New flu tracker uses Google search data better than Google » Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

With big data comes big noise. Google learned this lesson the hard way with its now kaput Google Flu Trends. The online tracker, which used Internet search data to predict real-life flu outbreaks, emerged amid fanfare in 2008. Then it met a quiet death this August after repeatedly coughing up bad estimates.

But big Internet data isn’t out of the disease tracking scene yet.

With hubris firmly in check, a team of Harvard researchers have come up with a way to tame the unruly data, combine it with other data sets, and continually calibrate it to track flu outbreaks with less error. Their new model, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, out-performs Google Flu Trends and other models with at least double the accuracy. If the model holds up in coming flu seasons, it could reinstate some optimism in using big data to monitor disease and herald a wave of more accurate second-generation models.

I wrote about the failure of Google Flu Trends in March 2014; in 2008 it had claimed 90% correlation. Google said then it would “welcome feedback”. The old data is still available.
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TLC NAND SSDs: The crippling problem storage makers don’t advertise » PCWorld

Jon Jacobi:

With last week’s release of Crucial’s BX200 SSD, a drive that features TLC (triple-level cell) NAND, it’s time to shine a light on this burgeoning segment of the SSD market—especially as vendors happily quote numbers that would have you believe that these SSDs perform just like any other.

Most of the time TLC SSDs perform quite well. But copy a large amount of data to a TLC drive, and part way through the operation you’ll see something discomforting—a startling drop in write speed. With some drives it’s relatively mild, but in the case of many recent TLC drives, the drop is so drastic you’ll wonder if the SSD is dying. It’s not, but you may wish it was.  

While this is true, it turns out you’ll only hit the problem if you’re transferring more data than fits in the disk cache – which could be 3GB or more. Still, a subtle gotcha.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shows ‘iPhone Pro,’ reveals how much time he spends on email » IB Times

David Gilbert:

Speaking at the company’s Future Decoded conference in London on Tuesday, Nadella, who took the reins at Microsoft over 18 months ago, demonstrated the power of Windows 10 and gave us a glimpse into what he does and how he works on a day-to-day basis.

Using Delve — an Office 365 app which automatically tracks a user’s activities throughout the week by monitoring calendars, emails and the other productivity tools — Nadella showed the audience that last week he spent a total of 16 hours in meetings, well within his goal of under 20 hours per week.

Nadella failed to meet his goal of spending less than nine hours per week on emails, clocking up 9.6 hours in the past seven days. He also fell short on the time he wanted to spend focusing – which he described simply as “time for work.” Nadella considered himself “focused” for only two hours last week, just half of his assigned goal.

Notice how he didn’t show us what devices – and in particular phone – he uses. (Sure, it will be a Lumia, but which?) The “iPhone Pro” is just an iPhone loaded with Microsoft software. Puzzled by how a machine measures your “focus hours”. How does it know?
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No Comcast app on the new Apple TV » Tech Insider

Tim Stenovec:

Marcien Jenckes, the executive vice president of consumer services for Comcast Cable, told Tech Insider in an interview last week that Comcast isn’t working on an app for the new Apple TV.

“We’re not philosophically against it,” Jenckes said of developing an app for the new device. “We just haven’t seen the need to run out and do that, given the fact that we’re already delivering content to the TVs in a way that has our customers already satisfied.”

If American customers were that satisfied, they wouldn’t be buying set-top boxes and TV sticks by the million.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none reported.

Start up: Samsung Pay to win?, Apple on Siri/Photos privacy, mystery ministry mujahadeen hack, and more

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Lockpickers 3D print TSA master luggage keys from leaked photos » WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

If you have sensitive keys—say, a set of master keys that can open locks you’ve asked millions of Americans to use—don’t post pictures of them on the Internet.

A group of lock-picking and security enthusiasts drove that lesson home Wednesday by publishing a set of CAD files to Github that anyone can use to 3-D print a precisely measured set of the TSA’s master keys for its “approved” locks—the ones the agency can open with its own keys during airport inspections. Within hours, at least one 3-D printer owner had already downloaded the files, printed one of the master keys, and published a video proving that it opened his TSA-approved luggage lock.

Those photos first began making the rounds online last month, after the Washington Post unwittingly published (and then quickly deleted) a photo of the master keys in an article about the “secret life” of baggage in the hands of the TSA. It was too late.

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Samsung Pay: the mobile wallet winner? » Mobile Payments Today

Will Hernandez:

During a panel discussion about the current state of ATMs, bitcoin, and mobile wallets, ATM Industry Association CEO Mike Lee unapologetically threw his support behind Samsung Pay as the mobile wallet that will “win.”

Lee’s Samsung Pay endorsement can be boiled down to a single feature that is supposed to separate it from other mobile wallet providers: magnetic secure transmission technology support on the device itself. 

Samsung acquired the rights to the technology when it bought LoopPay earlier this year, and has since embedded it into Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones. The devices still rely on NFC chips to enable users to conduct tap-and-pay transactions at contactless-enabled point-of-sale terminals. Should contactless be unavailable, MST can “communicate” with the magnetic stripe reader currently present on all terminals in the United States. Samsung Pay will sense which option is available and transact accordingly.

But whether MST is really that true game changer in the industry remains to be seen.

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Apple addresses privacy questions about ‘Hey Siri’ and Live Photo features » TechCrunch

Matt Panzarino:

With ‘Hey Siri’, “In no case is the device recording what the user says or sending that information to Apple before the feature is triggered,” says Apple.

Instead, audio from the microphone is continuously compared against the model, or pattern, of your personal way of saying ‘Hey Siri’ that you recorded during setup of the feature. Hey Siri requires a match to both the ‘general’ Hey Siri model (how your iPhone thinks the words sound) and the ‘personalized’ model of how you say it. This is to prevent other people’s voices from triggering your phone’s Hey Siri feature by accident.

Until that match happens, no audio is ever sent off of your iPhone. All of that listening and processing happens locally.

Live Photos:

Because Live Photos record motion before your still image, they are continuously buffered beginning the moment you open your camera app and see the Live icon (orange circle) at the top of your screen. Apple says that this 1.5 second recording only happens when the camera is on, and this information is not permanently saved until you take a picture, period.

“Although the camera is “recording” while you’re in Live Photo mode, the device will not save the 1.5 seconds before until you press the camera button,” says Apple. “The pre-captured images are not saved to the user’s device nor are they sent off the device.”

The 1.5 seconds after the still capture are also recorded because you’ve tapped the camera button in live mode.

From what we’ve gleaned, Live Photos are a single 12-megapixel image and a paired motion format file, likely a .mov. They are presented together by iOS but are actually separate entities tied to one another.

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With iOS 9, ‘Hey Siri’ gains a new setup process tailored to your voice » Apple Insider

“Appleinsider Staff”:

Setting up “Hey Siri” is a simple, five-step process where users must speak a number of commands. If the iPhone or iPad does not properly hear the user, they are instructed to speak again.

Users say the words “Hey Siri” three times, then “Hey Siri, how’s the weather today?” followed by “Hey Siri, it’s me.” Once this is completed, iOS 9 informs the user that “Hey Siri” is ready to use.

Previously, in iOS 8, “Hey Siri” was enabled without a setup process. On occasion, the voice-initiated function would not work properly and took multiple tries. Presumably Apple’s new setup process will address some of those issues from iOS 8.

Smart to personalise it, if that is what this is. I’ve had Siri go off while plugged in and the radio’s on: stories about Syria tend to be the cause. Not sure this will help any iPhone-owning newsreaders, though.
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App Programming Guide for tvOS: On-Demand Resources » Apple Developer Documents

On-demand resources are app contents that are hosted on the App Store and are separate from the related app bundle that you download. They enable smaller app bundles, faster downloads, and richer app content. The app requests sets of on-demand resources, and the operating system manages downloading and storage. The app uses the resources, and then releases the request. After downloading, the resources may stay on the device through multiple launch cycles, making access even faster.

Each app stored on Apple TV is limited to a maximum of 200MB. In order to create an app greater than this amount, you must break up your app into downloadable bundles. In Xcode, create tags and attach them to the required resources. When your app requests the resources associated with a tag, the operating system downloads only the required assets. You must wait until the assets are downloaded before you can use them in your app.

So many people saw the headline that each app is limited to 200MB and thought that that is the upper limit for everything related to an app on AppleTV. As this clearly says, it isn’t – and note also that point about “After downloading, the resources may stay on the device through multiple launch cycles, making access even faster.”

But reading dev documents takes effort. Tweeting “200MB OMG” is much simpler.
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Whatever happened to Google Books? » The New Yorker

Tim Wu on the project that has been stalled since 2011:

There are plenty of ways to attribute blame in this situation. If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people’s work. Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it’s Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded, particularly when it came to weighing abstract and mainly worthless rights against the public’s interest in gaining access to obscure works. Finally, the outside critics and the courts were entirely too sanguine about killing, as opposed to improving, a settlement that took so many years to put together, effectively setting the project back a decade if not longer.

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Who controls the off switch? » Light Blue Touchpaper

Ross Anderson (who leads some of the UK’s best academic security researchers:

We have a new paper on the strategic vulnerability created by the plan to replace Britain’s 47 million meters with smart meters that can be turned off remotely. The energy companies are demanding this facility so that customers who don’t pay their bills can be switched to prepayment tariffs without the hassle of getting court orders against them. If the Government buys this argument – and I’m not convinced it should – then the off switch had better be closely guarded. You don’t want the nation’s enemies to be able to turn off the lights remotely, and eliminating that risk could just conceivably be a little bit more complicated than you might at first think. (This paper follows on from our earlier paper On the security economics of electricity metering at WEIS 2010.)

Anderson doesn’t need to scare people for money. But what he points to is often worrisome.
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Cabinet ministers’ email hacked by Isil spies » Telegraph

So this is how modern media – well, I use the word “modern” in its loosest sense – works. Writing this story took four journalists, so please stand up, Claire Newell, Edward Malnick, Lyndsey Telford and Luke Heighton, for this 22-paragraph story which begins:

Jihadists in Syria have hacked into ministerial email accounts in a sophisticated espionage operation uncovered by GCHQ, the Telegraph can disclose.

I know! Blimey, you think. Hacked in to their accounts? They must have found a ton of stuff there, right?

You then plough on through tons of paragraphs about drone strikes and various bits of handwaving, but no detail. You carry on, and eventually – in the 13th paragraph – there’s this:

The recent cyber threat first emerged in a warning to Whitehall security officials in May and it is understood that the plans to attack Britain were exposed by the GCHQ investigation.

It is unclear what information the extremists were able to access, but it is understood that no security breaches occurred. However, officials were told to tighten security procedures, including changing passwords.

And that’s it. No more detail. So what do we think actually happened? Based on this very thin gruel, my guess is that the ministerial email had two-factor authentication, and someone got phished, and it set all sorts of alarm off in Cheltenham (where GCHQ is). No breach, but someone had been very stupid.

And of course “hacked” in the headline is overplayed. “Targeted” might work. Classic Sunday journalism: no paper will be able to follow this up for a Monday story, because there aren’t any facts to it. The story falls apart in your hands.
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Ten years later, this is how Techmeme has avoided clickbait, autoplay ads, and more » LinkedIn

Gabe Rivera, the site’s chief executive and frequent editor:

In 2015, supporting an online news operation with advertising when your page view and unique visitor numbers aren’t massive is always an uphill battle. Media sites in this predicament are often tempted to run ads units that pay more but repel and infuriate readers.

Fortunately what Techmeme does have is the attention of the people who lead the tech industry. (Ask your CEO “where do you get your tech news?”) When a news destination is a hub for industry decision-makers, companies will want to reach its readers, making it possible to sell the far more welcome form of “ads” that Techmeme does include. These include posts from sponsors’ blogs, catchy taglines from companies that want you to check out their job openings, and events that companies want you to consider attending. While not all companies are used to making these sorts of marketing buys, many are learning how, and Techmeme is here to serve them.

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FBI says ‘Australian IS jihadist’ is actually a Jewish American troll named Joshua Ryne Goldberg » Brisbane Times

Elise Potaka and Luke McMahon:

The Australi Witness persona fooled members of the international intelligence community as well as journalists, with well-known analyst Rita Katz of SITE Intelligence Group saying the “IS supporter” held a “prestige” position in online jihadi circles and was “part of the hard core of a group of individuals who constantly look for targets for other people to attack”.

Ms Katz has previously acted as a consultant for US and foreign governments and testified before Congress on online terrorist activities.

The Australian Federal Police were unaware of Australi Witness’s real identity as Goldberg until contacted by journalists working on behalf of Fairfax Media.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a troll.
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Why Xbox Kinect didn’t take off » Business Insider

Matt Weinberger:

The Kinect also introduced voice commands and a gesture interface to the Xbox 360 itself. You could pause a movie with your voice, or log in to your account on the console by standing in front of the camera.

But as cool as that all sounded, the Kinect was still a new technology, and there were some glitches with those cool new interface tricks.

“It does do magic, but only 85% correctly. When you encounter the 15%, it’s frustrating,” the former Xbox insider said.

Serious gamers care about precise movements, like landing a perfect Super Combo in “Street Fighter IV” or nailing a headshot in “Call of Duty.” Similarly, if you have voice controls for a movie, it had better work the first time, or else you’re just shouting “pause” at your TV over and over.

In both cases, it wasn’t quite the totally accurate experience that people wanted.

“It’s essentially a less precise replacement for a lot of things which, once the novelty wears off, is not valued by the market. So it’s real value is for new experiences impossible before without it. There isn’t enough interest or investment in those,” the ex-insider says.

Worse, the longer people used Kinect, the more they found places and situations where it just fell short and didn’t work as well as it should have.

In my apartment, playing a Kinect game requires moving furniture around to give the sensor the field of view that it needs to work well. It’s a big problem for lots of gamers, since you need 6 to 10 feet between you and the sensor.

Try playing that in a dorm room or small apartment.

Yes, precisely.
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iPad Pro won’t replace the PC any time soon » Teschspective

Tony Bradley:

Perhaps the biggest change that has occurred over the past few years that makes the iPad Pro viable as a potential PC replacement is Microsoft. The shift in strategy by Microsoft to embrace the cross-platform ecosystem and make Microsoft Office and other key Microsoft products available across rival devices removes one of the biggest obstacles for the iPad as a laptop replacement. Microsoft was at the Apple event this week and stood on stage to reveal that it has improved apps developed specifically for iOS 9 and the iPad Pro that will make Microsoft Office arguably better on the iPad Pro than it is on a standard Windows PC or even on the Surface Pro 3 itself.

The flip side of that, though, is that the iPad Pro still runs iOS. It is still primarily a mobile device trying to be a PC—whereas the Surface Pro tablet is a PC trying to be a mobile device. Not much has changed since my experience using the iPad as a laptop replacement for 30 days. It is still a suitable device for a limited range of tasks and applications. It still won’t work as well as a traditional PC for a number of specific functions.

More importantly—at least as it relates to the ability of the iPad Pro to compete with Windows PCs in a business environment—it can’t run the software that organizations have already invested in and rely on to get things done.

Thus you have the bear (pessimist) case on the iPad Pro. But it’s that last sentence which betrays the flaw in the argument. Lots of organisations can’t get the new things done they want to on older systems. An iPad begins as a mobile device; the Surface yearns to be a laptop (just look at its screen ratio).
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Start up: Chrome v Flash (and Google v iOS 9), HTC delays Vive, streaming’s true problem, and more

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

Shaun Nichols:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adriana Lee:

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

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

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

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

Natasha Singer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Zelenko and Frank Bi:

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

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

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

Mark Mulligan:

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

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

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

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

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

Leonid Bershidsky:

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

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

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

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The fembots of Ashley Madison » Gizmodo

Annalee Newitz:

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

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

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

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

Matthew Panzarino:

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

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

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

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

I thought the Apple TV would get its own SDK
back in 2012. Totally wrong; it just wasn’t ready.
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Start up: dual-app iPads?, Pebble’s cash call, improving S6 battery life, Chromebook sales and more

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Future of iPad: dual-app viewing mode, then J98/J99 ‘iPad Pros,’ multi-user support » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Facing slowing growth for the first time since the iPad’s 2010 debut, Apple is working on several significant software and hardware updates to reinvigorate the tablet over the next year. Apple is developing a dual-app viewing mode, 12-inch iPads codenamed “J98″ and “J99,” as well as support for multi-user logins, according to sources briefed on the plans. First planned for debut last year, the split-screen applications feature for the iPad could be introduced as soon as June at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, while multi-user login support and the 12-inch iPads will apparently arrive later…

In Gurman we trust. He’s never told us they’re working on a TV. And these improvements would help the iPad in businesses, which is the next frontier for tablet penetration.

Adult dating site hack exposes millions of users » Channel 4 News

Geoff White:

Channel 4 News has been investigating the cyber underworld, discovering which websites have been hacked and exposing the trade in personal information of millions of people through so-called “dark web” sites.

The investigation led to a secretive forum in which a hacker nicknamed ROR[RG] posted the details of users of Adult FriendFinder. The site boasts 63 million users worldwide and claims more than 7 million British members. It bills itself as a “thriving sex community”, and as a result users often share sensitive sexual information when they sign up.

The information of 3.9m Adult FriendFinder members has been leaked, including those who told the site to delete their accounts…

…The front page of Adult FriendFinder, which is based in California, features photos of dozens of attractive young women. Yet the hacked data, contained in 15 spreadsheets, reveals how few females appear to use Adult FriendFinder.

Among the 26,939 users with a UK email address, for example, there are just 1,596 who identified as female: a ratio of one woman to every 16 men.

How.. unsurprising.

Rumor has it that Pebble is on the rocks even with $18m in the bank » TechCrunch

John Biggs:

Smartwatch maker Pebble seems to be in some trouble. According to sources close to the company, the company is having trouble maintaining its growth and has turned to a Silicon Valley bank for a $5 million loan and $5 million line of credit. Valley VCs have been turning down the company’s requests for new capital.

Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky offered no comment.

Actually this feels like cashflow: it has to commit factory time to make those watches, and VC money isn’t what it needs; it needs a line of credit to pay for that. Whether it’s in trouble is a different question. I’d be surprised if it were.

Few business takers yet, but ​Chromebook sales grow to 7.3 million this year » ZDNet

Liam Tung:

The number of the low-cost Google-powered laptops sold this year is on track to grow 27m, up from 5.7m units in 2014 to 7.3m in 2015, research from analyst house Gartner shows.

The Chromebook’s growth contrasts markedly with the shrinking global PC market. However, sales of the devices remain heavily skewed towards the US and within that market, they’re largely used in schools, despite growing interest from consumers in the country.

In 2014, the US accounted for 84% of all Chromebooks sold, with 60% of sales coming from education, 39% from consumers, and 1% from business.

Last year, noting signs of growing interest among businesses for Chromebooks, Gartner forecast that by 2017 sales to the education sector could rise to over 6m units, driving total sales for the year to 14 million laptops sold.

Its outlook for the next two years is more conservative, with the analyst predicting shipments to rise to 7.9m by 2016, suggesting growth of under 10% for next year.

This in a market of about 300m PCs per year. Not the dramatic displacement that had been expected. Chromebooks began in 2009. Do they really offer too little utility, or are people too wedded to Windows even though cloud services would serve them fine?

Not so fast: connected cars could cause data traffic jams » Reuters

Eric Auchard:

Traffic jams in the future could cause potentially dangerous data snarl-ups as cars packed with entertainment, safety and navigation features vie for airwaves with smartphones, tablets and networked features in other vehicles, according to a study.

By 2024, mobile networks will see machine-to-machine (M2M) connections jump 10-fold to 2.3 billion from 250 million in 2014. Half these links will be automotive, said the study published on Thursday by Machina Research.

On the roads, about one in five vehicles worldwide will have some form of wireless network connection by 2020, or more than a quarter of a billion connected vehicles, according to a forecast from technology research firm Gartner.

This one tweak could boost battery life on your Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge » ZDNet

My ZDNet colleague, Matthew Miller, bought and then returned a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. He liked the phone, but in the end, the poor battery life he experienced was a deal-breaker.

That’s the same problem Business Insider’s Antonio Villas-Boas found after using a Galaxy S6, essentially the same handset but without the curved edge displays, for a month. Villas-Boas learned that one single setting solved his battery life issues, however.

“I switched off Google Now, Google’s digital assistant, and my battery life skyrocketed to last me about 36 hours on a single charge with relatively decent usage, including music streaming, but without using Bluetooth or GPS. I charge it every night, but I usually have just under 50% battery left before I go to bed.”

That’s interesting for a few reasons. First of all, if it addresses the short run-time on a single charge, the setting change provides a reasonable workaround for Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge owners.

Second, there’s something else going on with Google Now on these particular handsets: The always listening feature of Google Now stopped working on these two handsets for many people in the middle of April. Google is aware of the problem, publicly noting on April 23 that it is actively working on a solution.

Some suggestions that Google Now is optimised (somehow) for Qualcomm processors; the S6 and S6 Edge uses Samsung’s own Exynos. That’s a problem is Google Now is killing the battery, though.

The clock is ticking for Dropbox » Business Insider

Eugene Kim, with a good investigative piece:

After coming out of Y Combinator in 2007, Dropbox hit 100 million users by 2012, and 300 million by 2015. That rapid growth made some people feel like they’d already made it. “There wasn’t that sense of ‘We haven’t won yet,'” this former employee says.

This person also tells us that DfB growth was “not stellar” as of the middle of last year.

Another person who left Dropbox last year said that the company has become noticeably slower as it’s gotten larger. (Dropbox went from 500 to 1,200 employees in the past 12 months.)

For example, a simple team change request had to go through multiple HR managers, creating a culture of heavy “process” that many engineers dislike.

In fact, in one of the internal surveys that asked if the engineers felt they were empowered to perform at full potential, almost half of them said “No,” according to this person.

What’s Dropbox’s USP?

Myntra sales dip 10% in app-only mode, rivals Amazon, Snapdeal, eBay to play safe for now » The Economic Times

Varun Jain:

Myntra.com, India’s largest online fashion retailer, has seen a 10% drop in sales since it shut its website and turned a mobile app-only etailer last week. The company, owned by Flipkart, had factored in such a decline and hoped to return to the level of sales prior to the move in the coming weeks, according to a source. Its closest rivals, Snapdeal and Amazon, however, said they had no plans to wind up their websites and focus only on mobile phone users.

“Our data shows that there are still many customers who use PCs to shop online. We do not want to force our customers to use one specific medium to shop on Snapdeal,” a Snapdeal spokesperson said.

The app-only approach seems to follow this logic: if you’re dependent on web visits for traffic and hence revenue, you’re vulnerable to someone who has better SEO or the vicissitudes of the dominant search engine. Better therefore to build up a loyal audience on the app, and drive people there through advertising.

Start up: correcting Google, science says videogames don’t make sexists, iPhone forecasts, and more

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Electric cars won’t spread even with rapid chargers: Toyota engineer » Yahoo Finance

Electric vehicle (EV) supporters have touted developing high-speed charging technology as the way forward for cars like Nissan Motor Co’s Leaf. But Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief engineer of Toyota’s hydrogen fuel-cell car Mirai, said that would guzzle so much energy at once as to defeat the purpose of the EV as an ecologically sound form of transportation.

“If you were to charge a car in 12 minutes for a range of 500 km (310 miles), for example, you’re probably using up electricity required to power 1,000 houses,” Tanaka told a small group of reporters at the first test-drive event for the production version of the Mirai, the world’s only mass-market fuel-cell car.

“That totally goes against the need to stabilize electricity use on the grid.”

Ah. Good point.

Sub-Rs 10,000 smartphones contributing 75% of sales: Lenovo » India Times

Chinese tech major Lenovo today said almost three-fourth of its smartphone sales is coming from devices priced below Rs 10,000 [US$160].

The company offers smartphones priced in the range of Rs 4,000 to Rs 30,000.

“The industry itself sees about 75% of the sales coming from smartphones priced under Rs 10,000 and we have more or less a similar split,” Lenovo India Director Smartphones Sudhin Mathur told PTI.

The company started as a premium player but now have devices across entry, mid and premium segments, he added.

How many iPhones did Apple sell last quarter? » Fortune

Philip Elmer DeWitt:

BTIG’s Walter Piecyk has the low estimate (50m), independent Faizai Kara of the Braeburn Group the high (64m). The average estimate of each group — pros at 55.6m and amateurs at 59.3m — are not that far apart. Either would represent double-digit growth from the same quarter last year.

Last year’s figure was 43.7m. Apple financials are released after US market close on Monday.

Indian companies pull out of Facebook’s Internet.org amid battle over net neutrality » WSJ Digits blog

Aditi Majhotra:

A viral crusade to keep the Internet equally accessible to all users has won the backing of some of the country’s biggest online companies, which late Wednesday pulled out of a partnership with Facebook’s Internet.org over fears it could allow telecom operators to choose which web applications users can access and how fast.

India’s sophistication in this space shouldn’t be a surprise, yet it is.

From Product Club to Thington Inc. — Welcome to Thington » Medium

Tom Coates:

The more we explored the space, the more we found that however good and interesting the hardware was in the Internet of Things, the software and service layers were generally awful. Gradually, we came to believe that huge problems in these layers were hiding all of the value and the potential of the technology.

Which brings us to Thington! We decided that we wanted to build a new user interface and service layer that would push past all these problems and in the process bring in our experience working on social systems, location sharing, privacy, hardware and the web of data. And we’re super excited by what we’ve come up with. So excited in fact that we’ve put our money where our mouths are and have formally changed the name of the company from Product Club to Thington Inc.

Keep an eye on this: Coates and colleagues have a solid track record in making useful stuff.

The Search for Harm » Official Google Blog

Knowing that the EC would issue a Statement of Objections (because it sent them to Google ahead of time), Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President, Google Search, put his name to this blogpost which aimed to show that all the EC complaints are nonsense.

And it’s Google, so it’s all going to be built on really robust data, right? Except that the blogpost has been updated at least twice:

*Update: An earlier version of this post quoted traffic figures for Bild and The Guardian, researched on a third-party site. The Guardian data were for the domain guardian.co.uk, which is no longer the main domain for the paper. We’ve removed these references and we’re sorry for the error.

That was the first. And then:

Yelp has pointed out that they get 40% of their searches (not their traffic) direct from their mobile apps. They don’t appear to disclose their traffic numbers. We’re happy to correct the record.

Did I start the ball rolling querying the numbers in Singhal’s post? Yes, I did. Someone has to ask questions of Google, and it seems all the bloggers and reporters feverishly writing hot takes didn’t.

But if those two statistics are wrong… what about all the others in Singhal’s blogpost? Guess we’ll have to look at it all in detail at some point soon.

L.A. school district demands iPad refund from Apple » LA Times

The contract with Apple was approved by the Board of Education in June 2013 as part of a deal expected to reach at least $500m. Another $800m was earmarked to improve Internet access at schools.

Under the contract, Pearson was to provide English and math curriculum. The district selected Pearson based only on samples of curriculum — nothing more was available.

L.A. Unified made the deal anyway; it wanted to bundle the curriculum and the device into a single price. A three-year license to use the curriculum added about $200 to the $768 cost of each iPad. The entire purchase then was financed through school construction bonds, which can be used to purchase computers.

L.A. Unified bought 43,261 iPads with the Pearson curriculum. The district purchased another 77,175 iPads under the contract without the Pearson curriculum to be used initially for state standardized tests.

Pearson could offer only a partial curriculum during the first year of the license, which was permitted under the agreement. Teachers and principals never widely embraced the product.

Nearly a year ago, L.A. Unified sent Apple a letter demanding that it address problems with the Pearson curriculum.

“Only two schools of 69 in the Instructional Technology Initiative … use Pearson regularly,” according to an internal March report from project director Bernadette Lucas.

Seems like it’s the Pearson curriculum that’s screwed up more than the iPads, though the two also seem intertwined. The whole contract has unwound horribly.

Sexist Games=Sexist Gamers? A longitudinal study on the relationship between video game use and sexist attitudes » Abstract

Enlisting a 3 year longitudinal design, the present study assessed the relationship between video game use and sexist attitudes, using data from a representative sample of German players aged 14 and older (N=824). Controlling for age and education, it was found that sexist attitudes—measured with a brief scale assessing beliefs about gender roles in society—were not related to the amount of daily video game use or preference for specific genres for both female and male players. Implications for research on sexism in video games and cultivation effects of video games in general are discussed.

Unfortunately the study itself is paywalled, but this is the first potentially rigorous scientific study I’ve seen into the topic. So do we conclude that sexist dolts who play games would just be sexist dolts regardless? I think that’s pretty easy to answer. (Thanks to Jay Kannan for the link.)

Given enough money, all bugs are shallow » Coding Horror

Jeff Atwood on the trouble with open source and bugs (or even just code and bugs):

While I applaud any effort to make things more secure, and I completely agree that security is a battle we should be fighting on multiple fronts, both commercial and non-commercial, I am uneasy about some aspects of paying for bugs becoming the new normal. What are we incentivizing, exactly?

Money makes security bugs go underground

There’s now a price associated with exploits, and the deeper the exploit and the lesser known it is, the more incentive there is to not tell anyone about it until you can collect a major payout. So you might wait up to a year to report anything, and meanwhile this security bug is out there in the wild – who knows who else might have discovered it by then?

If your focus is the payout, who is paying more? The good guys, or the bad guys?

SanDisk forecasts first full-year revenue decline in three years » Reuters

Arathny Nair:

There is strong demand for SanDisk’s solid-state drives and memory chips.

But lower pricing, lean inventory, unplanned maintenance at its chip foundry last year and delay in sales of certain embedded parts has led to two revenue forecast cuts this year, including a warning last month.

“It looks like SanDisk is going to have pretty tough road ahead to haul in 2015,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Betsy Van Hees, adding that the company’s spending is high and will continue at “elevated levels”…

…The company had said in January it had lost a major customer, widely believed to be Apple Inc, which switched to using solid state drives made by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in its MacBooks.

Would love to know quite how the (SD) memory chip demand is going in smartphones. Something about SanDisk’s SD business reminds me of Iomega – seemed like a great business offering consumer storage, which abruptly collapsed (when CD-Rs got cheap). SanDisk’s financials suggest the glimmerings of a fall in revenue in its “removable” business.

Start up: Samsung’s leukaemia compensation, Glass’s failure dissected, Pinterest v single ladies, unwritten Bitcoin tales, and more

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Encryption (look closely). Photo by iceplee on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Do not apply to sensitive areas. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hutchison may bid $13.6bn for UK’s O2, Sunday Times says » Bloomberg

Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. (13), the conglomerate controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, is in early talks to bid for UK mobile operator O2, the Sunday Times reported, citing sources it didn’t name.

Hutchison, which owns the Three mobile network in the UK, may pay O2’s owner Telefonica SA (TEF) as much as £9bn ($13.6bn) for the carrier, the newspaper said.

Telefonica has hired investment bank UBS AG to explore options for O2, according to the Times. The company, which is looking for ways to exit the UK to help pay off debts, may also consider selling shares of O2 to the public. Hutchison has hired Moelis & Co (MC) to look for possible deals in the UK, the newspaper said.

Telefonica has around €41.2bn of debt as of September and all its numbers (revenue, operating profit, EPS) are going negative. This would go some way to sorting some of that out.

Amid Bitcoin’s Bloodbath, Silence From Silicon Valley Press » RealClearMarkets

Andy Kessler:

So Tim Draper [who bought the bitcoins seized by the FBI in an auction in July and December 2014] invests some $18m in about 32,000 Bitcoin and today (wait for it…) they’re worth a whopping $6.7m, losing 63% in six months. Don’t get me wrong. I like Tim Draper. He’s a bit quirky and has an awful taste in ties. [Alternative successful auction bidder Barry] Silbert’s stake is now worth $10m – down 43% in a rotation of the moon. My point is less about the epic FAIL of their at the time hyped Bitcoin investing prowess. Jeez, we all make mistakes. No, my beef is more about the coverage.

Sure, Draper lost $11 something million in six months. Fool…money…etc. But my problem is that you wouldn’t know any of this from reading the Silicon Valley press, websites or blogs. Nothing. Pando Daily has run 14 stories on Bitcoin in the last month. But type “Tim Draper” into the search box in Pando. Nothing about the price drop. Try it at Techcrunch. Bupkis about the shellacking. My friend Kara Swisher at Re/Code? Zippo. Well, a pointer to an article in the New Statesman. Any mention of Draper or Second Market in that article? Nope. The new Valleywag? Surely old “Fake Steve Jobs” Dan Lyons is all over this? Oops. Not a peep. Venture Beat? Nah.

Um, good point.

Google Glass for work: still going strong » Business Insider

Julie Bort:

Google is instead shifting its attention to focus on the one area where Glass has done reasonably well: businesses. The Glass for Work program has about a dozen partners involved, all of whom are still writing apps for the device, our source says.

A business that wants ” a 100 [pairs of Glass] tomorrow, they can get it. They want 1,000 tomorrow, they can get it,” this source told us, and Google confirmed.

“We’ll continue to invest in our Glass at Work offering for enterprise developers and companies,” a spokesperson told us.

We’re not going to pretend that Glass for Work is a major focus or priority at Google. Other sources at the company have indicated to us that it isn’t, at least not yet.

But within the Glass for Work community, the death of the so-called Explorers program (in which Google sold the device to individuals for $1,500 a pop) is being met with a shrug.

Makes sense. Glass has also looked much more sensible as a product for specialist product niches than for consumers.

Pinterest congratulates single women on marriage » NYMag

A whole bunch of women are tweeting about an email they received from the manic pixie dream start-up that congratulated them on their impending nuptials. Super thoughtful— except most of them don’t even have significant others.

Some of the users think it’s because they’ve been pinning wedding-related objects like invitations and dresses to their boards…

Algorithms considered harmful.

“Open data could improve rail travel for disabled passengers” say industry and passenger groups » Open Data Institute

Developers are already creating applications that turn data about train times, accessibility and facilities at stations into information that’s easy to access for those with disabilities. There are many existing applications that are useful for people with disabilities to help plan their journeys, including Twitter, Station Master (comprehensive 3D maps that show steps, lift access and ticket points of London Underground stations), Rail Point (live travel updates) and Realtime Trains (help users track their trains and find their platforms in advance).

So what is stopping more products and services from being developed to benefit commuters with disabilities?

For Google Glass to succeed, Tony Fadell needs to rip out the camera » Co.Design

Mark Wilson:

people don’t always just get used to it, and I learned that from my own case study with a wearable camera. After my son was born, I attempted to wear a Narrative camera most of the time. The Narrative is a diminutive, auto-shooting camera, the size of a small lapel pin, optimized to capture candid moments in your life. But family member after family member would spot it, ask what it was, and slowly tense in my presence, even when I’d promise these photos were private and wouldn’t be shared on Facebook. The next time they’d visit, their eyes would lower to my chest pockets again.

Nobody likes worrying they’re being recorded, and a subtle, spy-worthy piece of hardware does nothing to alleviate that concern. It made me realize that smartphone cameras didn’t offend anyone, because they live in a pocket, and it’s always obvious when someone’s taking a photograph with one. Along the same lines, I believe an embedded photographer photographing us with a large SLR would have offended my guests less than my tiny lapel camera. A few weeks into the experiment, I removed the Narrative to never wear it again, even though it captured some great shots.

Andrew Bower: The encryption ban makes us look like the Thick Party » Conservative Home

Opening paragraphs:

This week the Prime Minister introduced a policy of banning strong encryption in the UK in order to deny terrorists ‘safe spaces’ in which to operate. Sounds robust, doesn’t it? In practice such a policy is impossible to implement and so would never yield any security benefit. It would, however, leave all of us vulnerable to trivial cyber-attacks and David Cameron’s vision of a Digital Britain in tatters…

…By mobilising against encryption the government is contradicting the advice of its Information Commissioner on data protection for organisations and its own advice to the general public about being safe online.

About the author: “Andrew Bower works in the ‘Silicon Fen’, graduated in Computer Science from Cambridge University and has served as an Conservative Association officer.”

For non-UK readers, this means a member of prime minister David Cameron’s own party, the Conservatives, is telling him on a prominent site for his own party that his idea is complete and utter tosh.

Well, let’s hope one of his advisers reads it, at least.

Samsung to compensate all leukaemia-stricken workers » Korea Times

Kim Yoo-chul:

Samsung Electronics will compensate all former workers who contracted leukaemia and other diseases after working at its display and semiconductor facilities, the company said on Friday.
 
“Samsung Electronics will compensate all former workers who have developed leukaemia or incurable diseases, the families of the deceased and also current employees battling illness at our display and semiconductor plants,” said Samsung Electronics’ chief negotiator Baek Soo-hyun.

He made the remarks at a new round of compensation talks in downtown Seoul to resolve leukaemia-related issues with representatives of affected families.

“Samsung Electronics decided to widen the company’s scope of those who will be compensated,” Baek said during the talks. “In accordance with that principle, we will include all workers who’ve been suffering from acute lymphoid leukaemia-related diseases.”

This has been a long-running dispute in which relatives have sought compensation. This resolution is good.

iPad observations heading into Apple earnings » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

Where do iPad sales go from here? Exhibit 4 highlights three possibilities: 1) increase and start to  track iPhone adoption, 2) remain relatively steady to slightly down until a more sustainable sales level has been reached, 3) decline due to other reasons. My 2015 iPad estimates run with a scenario that falls somewhere between options 2 and 3.

Cybart, a former Wall Street analyst (though not of Apple), reckons Apple will sell 59m-60m iPads this financial year (from Oct 2014-Sep 2015), with shipment growth only showing in the April-June quarter. Why? It’s complicated.