Tag Archives: japan

Start up: more Alphabet trouble, peak desktop?, hacking the Philippines, Japan quakes hit iPhones, and more

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A URL shortener would be easier to write, but might it be hacked? Photo by MrZebra on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Eerie, isn’t it? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

When a nation is hacked: Understanding the ginormous Philippines data breach » Troy Hunt

Hunt delves into the hacking of 55 million Filipino voters’ details on a government system. The government insisted that no sensitive data was disclosed. Hunt checked with people who were on the released data via his Have I Been Pwned service:

»Yesterday I emailed a number of HIBP [Have I Been Pwned] subscribers and got back some pretty quick responses with everyone willing to assist. I found them spread out across two tables in the data breach, the first being a table called “irdoctable2014” which has the following fields:

# FORM_ID, APP_TYPE, REGISTRATION, LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME, MATERNALNAME, SEX, CIVILSTATUS, SPOUSENAME, RESSTREET, RESPRECINCT, RESPRECINCTCODE, RESREGION, RESBARANGAY, RESCITY, RESPROVINCE, MAILSTREET, MAILEMBASSY, MAILCOUNTRY, REGCOUNTRY, REGEMBASSY, REPSTREET, REPBARANGAY, REPCITY, REPPROVINCE, EMAIL, ABROADSTATUS, ABROADSTATUSSPECIF, FLASTNAME, FFIRSTNAME, FMATERNALNAME, MLASTNAME, MFIRSTNAME, MMATERNALNAME, REPLASTNAME, REPFIRSTNAME, REPMATERNALNAME, DOBYEAR, DOBMONTH, DOBDAY, BIRTHCITY, BIRTHPROVINCE, CITIZENSHIP, NATURALIZATIONDATE, CERTIFICATENB, COUNTRYRES, CITYRESYEAR, CITYRESMONTH, PROFESSION, SECTOR, HEIGHT, WEIGHT, MARKS, DISABLED, ASSISTEDBY, TIN, PASSPORTLOST, PASSPORTNB, PASSPORTPLACE, PASSYEAR, PASSMONTH, PASSDAY, REGBARANGAY, REGREGION, REGCITY, REGPROVINCE, REG_DATE, STATIONID, LOCAL_ID, CREATE_TIME, UPDATE_TIME, IS_EXTRACTED, IS_EXPIRED, IS_CANCELLED, CONTACTNUMBER, EXPIRATION_DATE, APPOINTMENT_DATE, APPOINTMENT_TIME, SCHED_TIME, COUNTER_CHANGES, REFERENCENUMBER, ERBDATE, USER_ID, EMAIL_ID, EXTRACTED_DATETIME, IS_DELETE, UPDATED_DATETIME, IS_FRONTPAGE, IS_REPRINT, IS_OV, IS_COUNTED

This is a very large amount of data and reading through those column names, clearly many of them would be considered sensitive personally identifiable data. However, some of the data is encrypted, namely the person’s name and their data of birth. Part of the irony here though is that the email addresses appear in the clear and often contains both the first and last name anyway! Not all the fields are populated but plenty of them are and they contain very personal info.

«

That’s not the worst of it, though. In some cases fingerprint scans were also leaked. And as Hunt says, “you don’t get to reset that stuff once it’s been released into the wild”. Trend Micro has more analysis of the dataset.
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What is the Apple Watch good for? » Martiancraft

Richard Turton evaluates what does work and what doesn’t:

»Third-party watch apps all suffer from slow loading and slow or unreliable communication with the phone. Many of these limitations are inherent in the current generation of hardware and software. But, rather than wave our hands and say that third-party apps might suck now, but it’s all Apple’s fault and it’ll be great on Watch 2, it’s worth taking a look at what our watch apps should be doing and what we, as app creators, should be thinking about.

The watch is not just a small-screened iPhone, in the same way that an iPhone is not just a small-screened Mac. The usage patterns, interactions and user intentions are completely different. No matter how great the watch hardware becomes, users are never going to want to interact with it for more than a few seconds.

«

Don’t forget that eight years ago people were struggling with the concept of how to pack desktop apps into 3.5in screens. (Some still are.) The difference is that the Watch screen won’t get bigger. But as Turton says, you have to embrace what it does well, and avoid what it doesn’t.
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Researchers crack Microsoft and Google’s Shortened URLs to spy on people » WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»For anyone with minimalist tastes or an inability to use copy-paste keyboard shortcuts, URL shorteners may seem like a perfectly helpful convenience. Unfortunately, the same tools that turn long web addresses into a few characters also offer the same conveniences to hackers—including any of them motivated enough to try millions of shortened URLs until they hit on the one you thought was private.

That’s the lesson for companies including Google, Microsoft, and Bit.ly in a paper published today by researchers at Cornell Tech. The researchers’ work demonstrates the unexpected privacy-invasive potential of “brute-forcing” shortened URLs: By guessing at shortened URLs until they found working ones, the researchers say that they could have pulled off tricks ranging from spreading malware on unwitting victims’ computers via Microsoft’s cloud storage service to finding out who requested Google Maps directions to abortion providers or drug addiction treatment facilities.

«

This always seemed a possibility if you slogged through enough shortened URLs; eventually you’ll hit on something interesting. (A few years ago I tried it in a limited way; all one tended to find were scam links set up by, well, scammers doing it on an industrial scale.) Stories like this, though, once you read further, always have a slight letdown: the risk was in the past, because responsible disclosure means they’ve told the companies, who (reluctantly in Microsoft’s case) have changed their practices.
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HubSpot is good people » Medium

Todd Garland was at Hubspot early on:

»As you’d expect, meetings were painfully long, and the tiny conference rooms built for eight started to get more crowded with every hire. There was a reason that happened. We were determined to treat our initial customers like family. Heck, a few may have even been family. We knew that if we could solve their pain points, there would eventually be hundreds, if not thousands, of companies lining up to work with us. We imagined it. How couldn’t we? It felt good. It felt like we were on the cusp of trapping lightning in a bottle.

HubSpot, since the very beginning, has been committed to helping small and medium sized businesses grow. It’s all that we cared about back then. I’ve tried to take that same customer commitment with me to BuySellAds. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t draw inspiration from both Brian and Dharmesh. Their passion for helping small and medium sized business was inspiring.

«

This little extract doesn’t quite capture the oleaginous, hagiographic quality of the whole piece, but then it’s the cumulative effect that leads one to the feeling summed up by Private Eye by the phrase “pass the sick bag, Alice.” Hubspot, of course, is the company so beautifully skewered by Dan Lyons in his latest book; this piece reads like something from a cult member, and makes me want to read Lyons’s book all the more.
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How the desktop computer will rise again » CNN.com

Peter Shadbolt:

»Poor internet connectivity, uncertain power supply and a simple lack of money have meant that billions have been locked out of the knowledge economy.

Matt Dalio, CEO of Endless Computers, wants to change all of that with the first simplified, robust and affordable desktop aimed at emerging market consumers.

Dalio told CNN he got the idea to create a $169 computer while he was traveling and noticed that, while most homes did not have a desktop computer, they often had an HD screen.

“It was one of those micro-epiphanies,” he said. “I was in India and I looked over at a television and then I looked at my hand and there was a phone in it and I thought why not connect the two?”

«

Tell us how this computer fits in your pocket, Mr Dalio, and what it’s like with phone calls, WhatsApp.. oh, also, we have some news for you just coming up.
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Has desktop internet use peaked? » WSJ

Jack Marshall:

»The amount of time people spend accessing the Internet from desktop devices is showing signs of decline, according to online measurement specialist comScore.

Data from the research company indicate overall time spent online in the U.S. from desktop devices—which include laptop computers—has fallen for the past four months, on a year-over-year basis. It dipped 9.3% in December 2015, 7.6% in January, 2% in February and 6% in March.

«

“Great story, Jack! What’s the data look like?”

“Um… here you go. I’ve done it as a graph.”

“Hmm – should we mention the four-month dip in 2014? No, probably better if we don’t. Just leave that out of the story.”

(I suspect desktop use is probably falling, but this isn’t quite proof yet.)
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Japan quakes disrupt Sony production of image sensors used in Apple iPhones » Reuters

Makiko Yamazaki and Shinichi Saoshiro:

»Electronics giant Sony Corp said a factory producing image sensors for smartphone makers will remain closed while it assesses the damage from two deadly earthquakes which hit southern Japan. One of its major customers is Apple, which uses the sensors in its iPhones.

Sony said it will extend the closure of its image sensor plant in Kumamoto, which is in the southern island of Kyushu, after major tremblors on Thursday and Saturday rocked the key manufacturing region.

The PlayStation maker said operations at its image sensor plant in Nagasaki, also in Kyushu, will be partially suspended and it does not yet have a timeline for full resumption of operations.

Sony controls about 40 percent of the market for complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors, a type of integrated circuit that converts light into electrical signals. In smartphones they are used to convert images into digital data.

«

Not just iPhones; I think other smartphone companies use them too.
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The future: a cat litter box and DRM » Medium

Jorge Lopez:

»I took the SmartCartridge and realized I could just open it up, and fill it myself. Great, I’ll order new ones and get it by Tuesday and I’ll just fill this one up with water for now. So I filled it up with water, and put it into the machine….

It didn’t stop beeping, it knew this wasn’t it’s SaniSolution. Somehow it knew. I wasn’t able to even force it to run without the solution. I did some Googling, and I found that the “Smart” in SmartCartridge is that it has an RFID chip inside of it to keep track of how much solution it has, and once it runs out, well, you can’t refill it. I honestly did not believe this and tore one of the cartridges apart, and there it was, looking back at me, a tiny chip holding up it’s little metal finger.

Seriously CatGenie, you added fairly sophisticated DRM to a litter box? I’m a tad hurt you spent my money on building in a restriction instead of figuring out how to avoid constantly cooking poop.

This made me realize that I don’t actually own a CatGenie, I’m renting it.

«

Could get rid of the cat?
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EA lets slip lifetime Xbox One and PS4 consoles sales » Ars Technica

Mark Walton:

»Lifetime Xbox One sales have reached 19m units—at least if EA’s CFO is to believed. During a financial call last night, Blake Jorgensen said the combined install base of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 had hit an estimated 55m units, a mere two years into the life of the current generation.

While Microsoft has long stopped reporting on the absolute number of Xboxes sold, Sony continues to push out its own figures. Most recently, Sony revealed it has sold an impressive 35.9m PS4s, which—when deducted from EA’s 55m figure — leaves around 19m units for the Xbox One.

“I think our business seems to be operating pretty consistent as it has been over the last couple of years,” said Jorgensen. “The console purchases are up through the end of calendar year ’15. Our estimate is 55 million units out there which has exceeded virtually everyone’s forecast for the year and now almost 50% higher than previous console cycle so, all of that is very, very positive.”

While Sony has a significant lead in terms of units sold, as Jorgensen pointed out, both consoles are doing better than their predecessors did at the same point in their lifecycle.

«

This is from January, but the figures won’t have shifted very much. So that’s two-thirds of the business gone to Sony. Note also that these aren’t big numbers in the context of sales of smartphones, or even PCs: both consoles have now been on sale for two and a half years, or 30 months. That’s an average of less than two million consoles sold per month.

Sony has shipped (and likely sold) more smartphones than PS4s in the same period. It’s made a big loss on the smartphones. Yet the consoles are also meant to be sold at a loss. The difference? The consoles create an ecosystem for Sony. The smartphones don’t. (Since you ask, Microsoft sold more smartphones than it did consoles, and at a loss too.)
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Google’s skunkworks loses its leader to Facebook — and has yet to produce any hits » MIT Technology Review

Tom Simonite:

»Facebook just made a high-profile hire from rival Google, luring away Regina Dugan, head of a research team tasked with inventing groundbreaking new hardware known as Advanced Technology and Projects, or ATAP. She will start a similar lab at Facebook. It’s unclear what will happen to the team she’s leaving behind, which has produced many striking demos but no hits.

Dugan previously led the Pentagon research agency DARPA and was hired to set up ATAP by Motorola in 2012, after the mobile phone company was acquired by Google for $12.5 billion. When Google sold off the company to Lenovo for almost $10 billion less in 2014, ATAP stayed behind. It was supposed to inhabit a middle ground between Google’s product development teams and the horizon-scanning “moon shot” laboratory, Google X.

Dugan established the group with a ground rule that projects should produce a marketable product within two years or be abandoned.

«

I guess she didn’t produce a marketable product within two years, so…? Two ways to look at this: ATAP is so young that it’s expecting a lot to think it would come out with a product in less than four years. Or: this looks like another example of an Alphabet division which simply isn’t making stuff happen. Contrast the breathless article in The Verge from May 2015:

»Dugan describes everything ATAP does as “badass and beautiful,” and after watching [360-degree live-action monster movie] Help!, I’m inclined to agree.

«

I’m inclined to think some people can’t tell the difference between a demo and a business. (ATAP is also behind the much-promised oft-delayed Project Ara modular smartphone idea.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Apple stalls, Japan’s zombies, Samsung on iOS?, the truth about terror, and more

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But what are your respective ratings? Photo by ChrisGoldNY on Flickr

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

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

Apple’s iPhone growth era comes to an end » FT.com

Tim Bradshaw:

Total revenues for Apple’s fiscal first quarter ending in December rose by just 2% to $75.9bn, a marked slowdown compared with 30% growth in the same period a year earlier, as iPhone sales in the US and Japan declined.

Apple increased net profits to $18.4bn, beating its own record set a year ago for the most profitable quarter in US corporate history, with earnings per share up 7% to $3.28, in line with expectations.

However, iPhone unit sales for the holiday quarter were less than 0.5% higher than the same period a year ago at 74.8m, despite chief executive Tim Cook’s firm insistence three months ago that the iPhone “will grow” in the most important period in the Apple calendar.

Wall Street’s fears that the March quarter would see iPhone sales drop for the first time since its 2007 debut were confirmed by Apple’s revenue guidance, which was below analysts’ consensus of around $55bn.

According to a note by RBC Capital Markets before the release of the results, $50bn in sales would imply iPhone unit shipments of 45m, down 26% on the same period a year earlier.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Like many premium smartphone makers, Apple is now hitting the point where the slowing market, combined with the slowing economy, creates a ceiling for sales. Apple legitimately blamed currency, but that’s hurting everyone.
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Japan must let zombie companies die » Bloomberg View

Noah Smith:

Imagine that you’re a Japanese 26-year-old with big dreams. You graduated from Waseda University, an elite private school, with a degree in electrical engineering. You and your college buddies used to hang around your apartment, watching anime on your LCD television, which was made by Sharp Corp. — the world’s 10th-largest LCD TV manufacturer. Even then, you had ideas about how to improve the product.

Now, after graduating and working for four years in the research division of an LCD manufacturer, you’re sure that you have figured out how to make LCD panels more cheaply, at higher quality. You also believe that you could market these TVs more effectively to young people with cool, fun designs. Instead of giving the idea to the higher-ups in your giant corporation — which, knowing Japan, might get you little more than a pat on the head — you decide to leave your job and start a business with your college buddies. You just know that you can beat lumbering, struggling incumbents like Sharp.

Sharp, which is perennially struggling. But is to be bailed out by the Japanese government. Which makes it a zombie which is blocking progress.
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I found out my secret internal Tinder rating and now I wish I hadn’t » Fast Company

Austin Carr:

Referred to inside the company as an “Elo score,” a term the chess world uses to rank player skill levels, Tinder’s rating system helps it parse its user base in order to facilitate better matches…

…Tinder CEO Sean Rad confirmed the scoring system to me while I was reporting Fast Company’s recent profile of the company. Rad, who tells me his Elo score is “above average,” stresses that the rating is technically not a measure of attractiveness, but a measure of “desirability,” in part because it’s not determined simply by your profile photo. “It’s not just how many people swipe right on you,” Rad explains. “It’s very complicated. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it.”…

…Rad teased me about it several times over dinner one evening, gauging what my score might be as he swiped through a slew of Tinder profiles on my phone. It was one thing to know my Uber rating, but did I really want to know my Elo score on Tinder? When I asked whether he could look up my rating, Rad responded, “Do you want me to do it now?” All he needed was my email address.

But of course Sean Rad is above average. And that’s not a worrying security hole. Is it?
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Exclusive: Samsung plans to bring almost all its apps to iOS » SamMobile

Asif S:

We’ve recently received information from our trusted insiders that Samsung is planning to bring most of its apps (if not all) to Apple’s iOS platform later this year.

According to the information that we’ve received, Samsung is working on Gear Fit Manager for iOS. This will allow people who own the Gear Fit to pair it with an iPhone. To compliment the Gear Fit Manager and Gear Manager apps, Samsung will also release the S Health app for iPhone. S Health app can be used to log daily activity, workouts, food intake, and sleep.

In terms of home entertainment, Samsung is bringing iOS support for the Galaxy View. The company is developing the Remote Control and Family Square apps for the iOS, which can be used to remotely control the Galaxy View using an iPhone and allow different users to stream content to the movable display. There are plans to release the Level app for Samsung’s Level audio devices as well, which will enable iPhone users to use these devices and make use of various effects and an official way of control.

Looks like a way of expanding the total addressable market (TAM) for its peripherals and other products to iPhone users. Sensible.
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The Google Pixel C Review » Anandtech

Brandon Chester and Joshua Ho were really, really unimpressed:

On top of the issues with this specific Android build, Android itself is simply too far behind the competition as far as functionality and apps are concerned. I have commented on this in several Android tablet reviews, but the fact that Google is shipping their own tablet makes it important to go over it once again. Quite frankly, I still have yet to see a single app that has an UI that is both optimized for tablets and is as fluid as its iPad counterpart, and with the iPad offering multitasking while Windows offers an entire windowing system, there’s absolutely no way for the Pixel C and other Android tablets to be competitive. This applies just as much to Google’s own apps as it does to third party ones, and it’s really not a stretch to say that they behave like you’re using a blown up smartphone. In the past few years both Apple and Microsoft have stepped up their games with their respective tablet OSes go, but it feels like Android has never really advanced past the first generation of tablet OSes, which leaves Android badly lagging the competition.

Statements from Google engineers make it clear that Google has some changes coming to Android in the future to bring features like multitasking, but at this point it seems to me that either nobody Google really understands what a tablet should be, or they are unable to come to a consensus to get something developed. Adding multitasking doesn’t do anything to fix the fundamental issue with application quality, and Google doesn’t want to take the first step in making proper applications so that other developers can follow.

Note too that Chester points to terrible graphics transitions – and yet in the GPU benchmarks, the Pixel C beats everything else. Another case where benchmarks don’t tell the whole story.
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Unpacked: global ad blocker usage on smartphones » Tech.pinions

Ben Bajarin (on a paywalled piece, hence no diagram below) has data much the same as Global Web Index:

over 20% of the global internet audience is already using an ad blocker on their smartphone. 16.1% have not begun using an ad blocker but are interested in doing so. Just over 30% haven’t used an ad blocker and aren’t interested in going through the trouble to install one.

In light of what Matt and I discovered, I decided to slice the answers by demographic to see how different age groups answered the same question.

In line with the discovery Matt [Richman] and I made, ad blocking is most common among the millennial demographic. I can’t stress enough how valuable this demographic is from an advertising standpoint. As ad blocking becomes more the norm with this group, on smartphones and on PCs, it will require significant adjustment. What is also interesting is many of these ad blocking services are not free. Currently over 25% of millennials using an ad blocker paid for it. This has massive consequences for this with advertising-supported business models.

I’ve articulated before my conviction that free-with-ads business models may become things of the past. They certainly are no longer viable in emerging markets.

The point about emerging markets is important: India is a big source of adblocking on mobile, for example.
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OPPO sold 50m smartphones in 2015 » Gizmochina

OPPO’s R7, R7S and R7 Plus constituted 15m units in sales alone which is an incredible figure. Specifically speaking the smartphones priced between 2000 Yuan [£210,$300] to 3000 Yuan [£320,$450] segment were highest selling smartphones.

That’s up 67% year-on-year. That would put it around fifth in the world, nudging LG and Sony and behind Xiaomi, Huawei, Apple and Samsung. The big Chinese name nobody in the west has heard of.
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The threat is already inside » Foreign Policy

Rosa Brooks (formerly a senior advisor at the US State Department):

By now, the script is familiar: Terrorists attack a Western target, and politicians compete to offer stunned and condemnatory adjectives. British, Chinese, and Japanese leaders thus proclaimed themselves “shocked” by the Paris attacks, which were described variously as “outrageous” and “horrific” by U.S. President Barack Obama; “terrible” and “cowardly” by French President François Hollande; “barbaric” by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; “despicable” by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; and “heinous, evil, vile” by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who possesses a superior thesaurus.

The Paris attacks were all these things. One thing they were not, however, was surprising.

Occasional terrorist attacks in the West are virtually inevitable, and odds are, we’ll see more attacks in the coming decades, not fewer. If we want to reduce the long-term risk of terrorism — and reduce its ability to twist Western societies into unrecognizable caricatures of themselves — we need to stop viewing terrorism as shocking and aberrational, and instead recognize it as an ongoing problem to be managed, rather than “defeated.”

Politicians don’t like to say any of this. But we’re not politicians, so let’s look at 10 painful truths.

Essential reading, really.
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Xavier Niel explores move to enter UK mobile market » FT.com

Niel set up Free, a French mobile network which has been a great hit, as Daniel Thomas explains:

Interest from Mr Niel’s telecoms group in the British market will worry rivals, given its record of offering low prices that deeply undercut existing offers.

The launch four years ago of Free, Iliad’s mobile offering in France, disrupted the market, leading to an intense price war that slashed profits among the existing three operators. Orange’s proposed acquisition of Bouygues Telecom is an attempt to reverse the effects of the introduction of the low-cost rival.

A similar deal is being proposed in the UK with the purchase of O2 by Three, the UK’s smallest mobile group, which is owned by Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison. If the deal were to go through, it would reduce the number of competitors from four to three.

However, the deal is set to be challenged in the next week by the European competition regulator, which will set out a range of objections given the potential loss of competition for customers as well as third-party mobile providers that use the two networks under wholesale contracts.

The UK mobile market really is very competitive. Adding Free would shake it up even further.
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Internet of Things security is so bad, there’s a search engine for sleeping kids » Ars Technica

JM Porup:

Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams.

The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores, according to Dan Tentler, a security researcher who has spent several years investigating webcam security.

“It’s all over the place,” he told Ars Technica UK. “Practically everything you can think of.”

We did a quick search and turned up some alarming results [of a sleeping baby in Canada, kitchen in Spain, classroom in China, someone’s house].

The cameras are vulnerable because they use the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) to share video but have no password authentication in place. The image feed is available to paid Shodan members at images.shodan.io. Free Shodan accounts can also search using the filter port:554 has_screenshot:true.

Shodan crawls the Internet at random looking for IP addresses with open ports. If an open port lacks authentication and streams a video feed, the new script takes a snap and moves on.

link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: S6 battery life, Datasift squeezed, notifying Apple Watch, and more

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Endangered species (one of many)? Photo by DaveCrosby on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Spread straight from the fridge. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

A Japanese court has ordered Google to take down negative business » Quartz

Google was ordered by a Japanese court today to take down anonymous negative business reviews of a medical clinic, written by people who said they were former patients. The decision is the latest sign of the spread of the “right to be forgotten” concept from Europe to Asia.

The case pitted a Japanese medical clinic against the search engine, Japan’s largest. The plaintiff, an unnamed doctor, said in a signed affidavit that the reviews complaining of poor service were false, one person briefed on the case said.

In the ruling, which was not made public but was reviewed by Quartz, Chiba District Court court ruled that Google must remove the reviews from its local and global search results, or face a ¥300,000 ($2,494) fine.

Google will appeal, but reversal is unlikely.

A ‘darker narrative’ of print’s future from Clay Shirky » NYTimes.com

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’s ombuds..person, relaying emails from Shirky, who thinks we’re currently in a lull of print decline (which he says will go fast – which the US saw in 2007-9 – and then slow, as now, and then fast at some time in the near future:

The problem with print is that the advantageous returns to scale from physical distribution of newspapers become disadvantageous when scale shrinks. The ad revenue from a print run of 500,000 would be 16 percent less than for 600,000 at best, but the costs wouldn’t fall by anything like 16%, eroding print margins. There is some threshold, well above 100,000 copies and probably closer to 250,000, where nightly print runs stop making economic sense. This risk is increased by The New York Times’s cross-subsidy of print, with its print+digital bundle. This bundle creates the risk of rapid future readjustment, when advertisers reconsider print CPM in light of reduced consumption and pass-around of print by all-access subscribers. (Public editor note: C.P.M. is the cost to the advertiser per thousand readers or viewers, a common measurement in advertising.)

Both your Sunday and weekday readerships are already near important psychological thresholds for advertisers — one million and 500,000. When no advertiser can reach a million readers in any print ad in the Times (2017, on present evidence) and weekday advertising reaches less than half a million (2018, using the 6 percent decline figure you quoted), there will be downward pressure on C.P.M.s. [cost to the advertiser to reach a thousand readers; high CPMs are good for a publisher].

And then things unravel, Shirky suggests.

Galaxy S6 Edge battery life – first 24 hours » Android Authority

Nirave Gondhia is starting a series where he tests the battery life on his new phone:

Testing battery life can be subjective as each person’s usage will vary widely but to try and provide some context to these battery tests, I copied all my data and apps from my Galaxy Note 4 (running Lollipop). Whereas the Galaxy S6 Edge lasted just over 14 hours, my Galaxy Note 4 would usually last 18 to 22 hours with largely the same apps and services running.

The first thing you will notice about the Galaxy S6 Edge battery is that the first 10% seems to drain very quickly. After this initial short burst, the battery begins to level off and settle down. It’s a strange occurrence that many people have reported but it’s possible this is due to the handset being new – after a few days usage, will it still drain the first 10%?

Reviewers have pointed to the S6 having less battery life than the S5; worth watching how this pans out in real life.

Lost In Mobile to close on 18th April » Lost In Mobile

Shaun McGill:

It’s been a good run, but the time has come to finally close LIM. As you will be aware, the content has dropped significantly in recent weeks and this has been due to workloads elsewhere and a continual problem finding mobile news that I consider worthy of sharing.

The mobile industry has changed to the point that I believe that one-man blogs are unable to offer the kind of benefits readers used to receive and with so many resources and larger services out there, I am struggling to find the motivation to keep posting content.

Been going 13 years. A sign of the times?

It’s time to stop tiptoeing around Joni Mitchell’s health condition » The Globe and Mail

Russell Smith:

No news items have revealed what exactly caused her sudden hospitalization, but all have mentioned that she “suffers from Morgellons disease.” This is because Mitchell herself described the affliction and used its name in an interview in 2010. News stories may then carefully allude to the fact that this “disease” is “mysterious” or even “controversial.” But the damage is done: The phrase “suffers from Morgellons” is quite simply inaccurate, and even harmful, in that it perpetuates a delusion.

Those who claim to be suffering from it are more likely suffering a psychiatric illness, experts say. If that’s the case with Mitchell, we should really be saying she “revealed in 2010 that she suffers from delusional parasitosis.” The name Morgellons was invented by a person who is not a doctor and is not employed by any hospital, university or research institution. It was intensely studied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, and the CDC’s conclusions, released in 2012, were straightforward: Researchers found no common cause of the disease, and say those who believe they have it have often self-diagnosed after encountering websites that describe it. In other words, it is a delusion that is spread by the Internet.

The fact that newspapers are being so tactful about the possibility of psychiatric disturbance in Mitchell’s case is incongruent with the supposedly new attitudes about mental illness that are being trumpeted in those same newspapers. Aren’t we constantly reading about how we should “end the stigma” when it comes to mental illness? Aren’t we being told that there is no shame in psychiatric disorders, that their sufferers should not be morally judged, that they should be open about their ailments?

Smith’s article makes the point strongly: artists are separate from their creations. If Mitchell (whose music I love) has a mental problem, that doesn’t subtract from her music or any of her achievements. It just means she has a mental problem.

To our users: a community update » PressureNet.io

Pressurenet is an Android app that measures barometric pressure and then tries to crowdsource it for, well, weather and related forecasting. But as happens, it has to try to make some money somewhere – including the sale of past data that it collected:

We are aware of the sensitive nature of selling user-contributed data and we want to be open about exactly what information we collect and what control you have over it.

The data is anonymous and is comprised of: an alphanumerical user id that is not directly linked to any personal user information, atmospheric pressure, location (latitude, longitude, and altitude) and time of the pressure reading, phone model type, whether the phone was charging at the time the reading was sent, as well as some other metadata. PressureNet does not and has never collected any personally identifiable information.

Umm. A location doesn’t identify a person, but if you could track the phone by any other means, you’d have a ton of data.

Twitter ends its partnership with DataSift – firehose access expires on August 13, 2015 » Datasift Blog

Nick Halstead:

With the end of our partnership with Twitter the disruption is not only measured by the impact on our 1,000 direct customers, but on the tens of thousands of companies that use applications that are “DataSift-powered”. Many of these companies create insights that drive direct advertising revenue back into Twitter. A direct switch to Twitter/GNIP will not mitigate that disruption. Today, 80% of our customers use our advanced processing capabilities that are not available from Twitter/GNIP.

Really bad news for Datasift (a British company that was one of the first into the “big data” social space), which is now going to turn to Facebook. What happens if that decides to go in-house, though? Maybe DataSift needs to look at processing for private clients such as finance.

What the Apple Watch means for the Age of Notifications » Medium

Steven Levy:

the Age of Notifications is about to face its biggest mess yet, as alerts move from phone screens to watch faces. Notifications are just about the entire point of a smart watch — you’re not going to be reading books, watching movies or doing spreadsheets on them. And a tilt of the wrist is the perfect delivery system for those little blips.

But having that delivery system on your body makes notifications much harder to ignore. It’s jarring enough to get a phone-buzz notifying you of an alert. When it’s something zapping your skin, it’s even more compelling. What’s more, because it’s so easy to simply twist your wrist to see what the fuss is about, the temptation is all the harder to resist.

I don’t get this. It makes it sound as though people are helpless children who can’t figure out what classes of notification (as in, from which app) interest them. The example he gives – a pointless notification from MLB – would have me deciding that MLB was never again going to get the chance to bother me. You don’t need to know about every incoming email (VIPs is fine, for me). Perhaps some people need to retreat a bit from their phones. But that’s no bad thing, whether it comes from buying a smartwatch or just realising they’re failing to live in the moment.

Start up: Apple squeezes leakers, Google pushes health, Samsung exiting Japan?, tablet puzzles, and more

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Yes, human, I’m registering how you kicked me on that icy day in the parking lot. Let’s see how you like it in a few years.

A selection of 10 links for you. Spread to taste. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple threatens to ban iPhone, iPad accessory makers that design based on leaks » 9to5Mac

Jordan Kahn:

Apple is working to step up the secrecy surrounding future iPhone and iPad models by targeting a frequent source of leaks: third-party accessory makers. 9to5Mac has learned that in fall 2014, just before the iPhone 6 launched, Apple demanded that a number of leading accessory makers sign agreements barring them from seeking out information about future Apple devices, according to four sources with first-hand knowledge of the matter.

On one hand, the agreement dangled the loss of “future business opportunities that Apple and/or its affiliates may present to you” as a potential consequence of violating or not signing the agreement.

Ah. This would explain why, when I was interviewing companies for my piece about the size of the iPhone accessory market after its launch, they were very quick to deny any suggestion that they based their designs on leaked prototypes – even though there seemed no other explanation.

Introducing Spot » YouTube

Boston Dynamics (owned by Google) shows off its quadruped robot, Spot (in the video at the top of the post). Notable how the back legs have the same hinging mechanism as horses and other quadrupeds – though the front ones do too. And it can withstand being kicked and keep its balance on icy ground.

Scary. Imagine one of these chasing you over open ground or through a forest.

A remedy for your health-related questions: health info in the Knowledge Graph » Official Google Blog

Product manager Prem Ramaswami:

this stuff really matters: one in 20 Google searches are for health-related information. And you should find the health information you need more quickly and easily.

So starting in the next few days, when you ask Google about common health conditions, you’ll start getting relevant medical facts right up front from the Knowledge Graph. We’ll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is — whether it’s critical, if it’s contagious, what ages it affects, and more. For some conditions you’ll also see high-quality illustrations from licensed medical illustrators. Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor.

We worked with a team of medical doctors (led by our own Dr. Kapil Parakh, M.D., MPH, Ph.D.) to carefully compile, curate, and review this information. All of the gathered facts represent real-life clinical knowledge from these doctors and high-quality medical sources across the web, and the information has been checked by medical doctors at Google and the Mayo Clinic for accuracy.

That doesn’t mean these search results are intended as medical advice.

If I were a family doctor, I think I’d read this with a sense of foreboding, in the expectation of seeing many more hypochondriac patients quite soon.

Chinese hackers attack blue-chip groups via Forbes website » FT.com

Sam Jones and Hannah Kuchler, in a piece that is basically a roundup of “who got hacked today” (also separately including Twitter’s CFO and Newsweek’s Twitter account):

Visitors to Forbes who worked for defence companies and banks were those who were subsequently targeted most, Mr McBride said.

“An attacker would choose to use a major publisher because it is a legitimate website that earns the trust of users who visit on a regular basis with confidence,” said Oren Falkowitz, a former NSA employee who runs Area 1 Security, another cyber security firm. “What they want is a platform with a large audience so they can get the users that they want in that pool and then be very discriminating about who they want to go to the next stage with.”

The attack was launched through Forbes’ “thought for the day” pop-up screen that welcomes visitors to the site and is run using Adobe software.

Codoso, the Chinese hacking group, was able to exploit the pop-up because of a loophole they had discovered in Adobe’s software. A second loophole then enabled them to bypass security on Microsoft operating systems that would ordinarily have blocked the attack.

I’ve never had Flash on my phone, and I’ve removed it from my laptop. Its only real purpose now is as an avenue for malware.

Samsung considers withdrawing smartphone business from Japan » BusinessKorea

Jung Suk-yee:

Samsung Electronics chose Japan as the first country in which to release the Galaxy Note Edge in October 2014, where YOUM technology was used on both sides of the phone. The company made its bid to increase its share of the Japanese market, the world’s largest premium market, through the new model. However, the results were not good. 

According to industry sources on Feb. 9, Samsung is in a quandary over its struggling smartphone business in Japan. Some in the company are reportedly saying that continuing the business only causes losses rather than profits. 

The Korean tech giant accounted for 4% of the Japanese smartphone market as of December of last year, which put the firm in 6th place. Samsung was kept out of the top 5 for two years, and its share decreased from 17% to 4%. 

Apple topped the list, and Sony and Sharp followed. The Galaxy Note Edge only sold tens of thousands of units for four months after its launch.

Not clear if those tens of thousands of sales are for Japan, or worldwide. But it feels like it makes sense to withdraw from a market that only causes you pain and loss. Samsung already pulled out of the TV business in Japan back in 2007 – and that hasn’t hurt its position as the biggest TV maker in the world.

But it’s getting into the withdrawing habit a bit. Pulled out of PCs in Europe.. smartphones in Japan.. what next?

About that UK digital biz renaissance? Not so fast » The Register

Marcus Gibson:

The Tech City quango last week claimed to conduct the “first national” survey of the UK’s digital businesses, covering 2,000 companies, according to a report in the Financial Times. The quango’s survey drew on a youthful database firm DueDil, run by US-born, Groton-educated Damian Kimmelman, and it makes a number of questionable methodological assumptions.

Although Kimmelman does not list it as a source, the report appears to be based on the number of new companies being registered at Companies House. This is a dangerous move, and one that is avoided by experienced trend-watchers. Why? Many firms give the address of their accountant or lawyer, or the owner’s home address – not their office address. (The Register is based in London, but its administrative address for Companies House purposes is in Southport).

Secondly, tens of thousands of foreign-born individuals have registered themselves as companies in order to buy UK homes and avoid stamp duty. DueDil’s own survey of immigrant-founded startups a few years ago listed more than 600 new firms in the Reading-Bracknell area started by German nationals – though we couldn’t find any evidence of any dramatic surge in new companies there. It makes geographic surveys hazardous if not impossible.

Bear this in mind for the next time you’re told there’s “documentary evidence” of London being a super-amazing explosive site for tech company creation. It might be, but this isn’t the proof that’s needed.

Cyanogen tapping tech giants to build war chest for a non-Google Android » Re/code

Ina Fried:

Beyond who ends up signing up for the round, Cyanogen’s valuation is significant, especially for a company that has yet to show how it can make significant revenue from its efforts. As with Google’s flavor of Android, the core of Cyanogen’s offering — CyanogenMod — is free and open source. Cyanogen the company, meanwhile, could make money by bundling other services and software on top of the open source core.

In theory, it could put together a flavor of Android that bundled together services from, say, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, in much the same way the Google version of Android bundles YouTube, Chrome, Gmail and the Google Play store, among other services.

The company’s most significant deal is one to provide its software on phones sold by India’s Micromax. It has also made a number of high-profile hires in the last year as it expands both its technical and business ranks.

I wonder if Google is at all worried by this. The Micromax deal is important, because that’s now the largest smartphone OEM in India.

The rumoured Google MVNO: what’s likely & unlikely? » Disruptive Wireless

Dean Bubley on “those rumours”, which he mostly downplays:

One possibility for Google could be a unique form of pricing rather than standard “monthly plans” – perhaps part-subsidised by itself or others, perhaps customised on a per-user basis. (My idea from a couple of years ago was insurance-style pricing for mobile data). A “freemium” model could also work. This could be adjusted based on the balance of WiFi vs. cellular access, whether the user tended to consume advertising-rich apps, and so on. 

All that said, unless this is just another Google small-scale experiment, it would be extremely tough for it to scale to millions or tens of millions of users, without huge investments in sales and support infrastructure.

Instead, perhaps a likelier option is that this is – like Apple’s SIM – a tablet-oriented service rather than a smartphone-based one. This gets around two problems – firstly, it doesn’t need a conventional numbered “phone service”, and secondly it can be pitched to the operator partners as a way of adding extra cellular devices to the market, rather than competing for market share of existing ones. Data-only connections also don’t come with lots of the traditional perceptual baggage of being a “monthly plan”.

Remember how excited everyone got over the Apple SIM? Notice how it’s had virtually zero impact? And take note of Bubley’s “what not to expect” list (which is long).

TurboTax temporarily suspends e-filings on fraud concerns » WSJ

The largest online tax-software company in the U.S. temporarily halted electronic filing of all state returns after more than a dozen states spotted criminal attempts to obtain refunds through its systems.

Intuit Inc., based in Mountain View, Calif., said Friday that its TurboTax unit stopped transmitting state e-filing tax returns Thursday after seeing attempts to use stolen personal information to file fraudulent returns for tax refunds.

Intuit wasn’t hacked, but there have been so many breaches of systems that US usernames and passwords are easy to come by – they’re like air for criminals.

Tablet vendors taking new strategies to rekindle sales in 2015 » Digitimes

Apple’s shipments of iPad devices in 2014 also highlighted the falling momentum of tablets, said the sources, noting that shipments of iPad devices slid 14% on year to 63.4 million units in the year.

Additionally, consumers’ enthusiasm over iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 launched in October 2014 has not been strong, said the sources. Shipments of other tablets, including those from Xiaomi Technology and HTC (the Nexus 9) have also been lower than expected.

Apple’s strategy of launching the anticipated 12-inch iPad aims to create a new application market to revive the declining trend, the sources commented.

Notebook vendors, including Asustek Computer, Acer and Lenovo, are expected to reduce their R&D projects for tablets although they will continue to roll out tablets in order to maintain their bargaining chips for the purchase of related parts and components, as well as their brand images, said the sources.

I’ve heard from an industry source that HTC shipped fewer than 100,000 Nexus 9s in the fourth quarter. I’d really love to see some stats for usage of Android tablets with Android apps (ie not YouTube or simple web browsing). I suspect it’s really low despite how well Android tablets sell.)