Tag Archives: lenovo

Start up: Apple’s conundrum, watch birds migrate!, the 5am startup, and more

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A Go endgame: where would you play next? DeepMind’s systems would know. Photo by chadmiller on Flickr.

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

Apple wants to be a services company » Business Insider

Jay Yarow with a neat summary of Apple’s conundrum:

So, Apple is in this weird cycle: It wants to grow services revenue, but services revenue depends on iPhone sales. Currencies are falling because the global economy is weak relative to the US economy, which is leading Apple to raise prices on the iPhone, which is hurting iPhone sales, which will limit services revenues.

Apple could lower prices of the iPhone to sell more units and then grow services, but it doesn’t seem to want to do that.

Cook said Apple already had a variety of price points, from the low-tier iPhone 5s to the high-end iPhone 6s Plus.

“I don’t see us deviating from that approach,” Cook said.

This makes sense since Apple is a hardware company. If it were a services company, it would lower prices, go for smartphone unit volume, then get more money from that. But it is not a services company.

It is not principally a services company. The money it does make from services is actually pretty substantial, and threatens to overtake iPad revenue. Poor iPad.
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iPhone Headwinds » Tech-Thoughts

Sameer Singh:

Apple also increased iPhone channel inventory by 3.3m over the quarter compared to a decline of 0.2m in the same quarter last year. Keeping in mind that Apple reports sell-in (shipments), not sales to end users, this implies that iPhone sell-through actually declined by 4.3% YoY, from 74.7m to 71.5m units. This is the first such decline in the history of the product.

In addition to this sell-through decline, Apple’s revenue guidance for the next quarter implies a steeper YoY decline in unit sales. And finally, this was accompanied with a YoY increase in average selling price (ASP) which suggests that the iPhone mix is shifting towards higher end models…

…As Clay Christensen is fond of saying, “Disruption is a process, not an event”. The mechanics of low-end disruption have been working ever since the first Android smartphone was unveiled in 2008. The key test for the iPhone will be the iPhone 7 cycle, starting in fiscal Q1 [Oct-Dec] 2017. In a “redesign year”, it will be easier to gauge whether meaningful product improvements can continue to generate increased demand or if today’s smartphones have already reached “good enough” territory.

The sell-through point is valid (only BlackBerry also gives the same data). The odd thing is that rising ASP: it points to people having the disposable income to buy the pricier models, which argues against the “low-end disruption” thesis.

But the gap between the average selling price of an Android handset and the average selling price of an iPhone has never been larger. That must have knock-on effects. But what?
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Google AI algorithm masters ancient game of Go » Nature

Elizabeth Gibney:

DeepMind’s program AlphaGo beat Fan Hui, the European Go champion, five times out of five in tournament conditions, the firm reveals in research published in Nature on 27 January. It also defeated its silicon-based rivals, winning 99.8% of games against the current best programs. The program has yet to play the Go equivalent of a world champion, but a match against South Korean professional Lee Sedol, considered by many to be the world’s strongest player, is scheduled for March. “We’re pretty confident,” says DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.

“This is a really big result, it’s huge,” says Rémi Coulom, a programmer in Lille, France, who designed a commercial Go program called Crazy Stone. He had thought computer mastery of the game was a decade away.

The IBM chess computer Deep Blue, which famously beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, was explicitly programmed to win at the game. But AlphaGo was not preprogrammed to play Go: rather, it learned using a general-purpose algorithm that allowed it to interpret the game’s patterns, in a similar way to how a DeepMind program learned to play 49 different arcade games.

This means that similar techniques could be applied to other AI domains that require recognition of complex patterns, long-term planning and decision-making, says Hassabis. “A lot of the things we’re trying to do in the world come under that rubric.” Examples are using medical images to make diagnoses or treatment plans, and improving climate-change models.

This is a gigantic result; being good at Go requires a subtle intuition and feel for space. (At least, for a human.) It’s far, far more complex than chess. And that this was done by a non-specific program has colossal implications.

As Nature’s leader on the topic comments, as these systems spread into our lives, “The machine becomes an oracle; its pronouncements have to be believed… Intuitive machines will need more than trust: they will demand faith.”

As a side note, DeepMind looks like one of Google’s smartest purchases – perhaps after YouTube.
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Nest thermostat goes from ‘Internet Of Things’ darling to cautionary tale » Techdirt

Karl Bode:

[Tech writer Stacey Higginbotham’s] Nest device began trying to cook her family in the middle of the night, something Nest first tried to blame on her smart garage door opener, then tried to blame on her Jawbone fitness tracker (Nest never did seem to pinpoint the cause). Her report suggests that an overall culture of “arrogance” at Nest shockingly isn’t helping pinpoint and resolve bugs:

“One Nest partner, who declined to be named to preserve his business relationship with the company, said that Nest being quick with the blame didn’t surprise him, citing a culture of arrogance at the company. When something went wrong during integration testing between his device and Nest’s, problems were first blamed on his servers and team.”

And fast-forward to last week, when researchers putting various internet of thing devices through tests found that the Nest thermostat was one of many IOT devices happily leaking subscriber location data in cleartext (with Nest, it’s only the zip code, something the company quickly fixed in a patch). Granted Nest’s not alone in being an inadvertent advertisement for a product’s “dumb” alternatives. In 2016, smart tea kettles, refrigerators, televisions and automobiles are all busy leaking your private information and exposing you to malicious intrusion (or worse).

It’s a fascinating, in-progress lesson about how our lust for the sexy ideal of the connected home appears to be taking a brief pit stop in reality.

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Vigilant solutions and the spread of police surveillance » The Atlantic

Conor Friedersdorf:

Throughout the United States—outside private houses, apartment complexes, shopping centers, and businesses with large employee parking lots—a private corporation, Vigilant Solutions, is taking photos of cars and trucks with its vast network of unobtrusive cameras. It retains location data on each of those pictures, and sells it.

It’s happening right now in nearly every major American city.

The company has taken roughly 2.2bn license-plate photos to date. Each month, it captures and permanently stores about 80m additional geotagged images. They may well have photographed your license plate. As a result, your whereabouts at given moments in the past are permanently stored. Vigilant Solutions profits by selling access to this data (and tries to safeguard it against hackers). Your diminished privacy is their product. And the police are their customers.

Sounds a bit similar to the UK police’s Automatic Number Plate Reader network, which extends around the UK, except this is historic too. (Then again, the UK’s ANPR system probably is too.)
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How to wake up at 5am and build your startup » Medium

Patrick Park (once he’s got past the stuff about how to, you know, get up at 5am, and gets on to the stuff about building your startup):

It’s hard to admit, but no one really knows what they’re doing at first. Even the largest startup unicorns in the world, took a long time to find their footing. AirBnb survived by selling political themed cereal Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s. #Slack came out of a failed game “Glitch.” Even YouTube began as a video dating service “Tune in Hook Up.”

Micro-startups work well with the Lean Startup methodology. Not only are micro-startups easier to implement, but provide a shorter feedback loop that keeps you more in touch with your audience. With 75% of all startups failing, would you rather spend 100 days in a basement building a product your customers “might” like or connect with your audience everyday “while” you adapt your startup to address your customer’s pain-points? Don’t build another Blockbuster.

Start with the assumption that you’re wrong. Constantly validate your theories through micro-experiments. When I first started “Krown.io”. I explained the service as an “Annotation Blogging Platform.” That was, until I found out the majority of people have no idea what “Annotations” are. We tried a variation of “Smart Blogging,” “Highlight Blogging,” “Feedback Blogs,” and “Contextual Blogging Platform.” Which surprise, surprise. People still had no idea what we were talking about. So we added a bare-to-the-bones explanation, “Highlight a text and add comments directly on the highlighted text.” Validate your hypothesis.

The startup advice is fine. Waking up at 5am isn’t that hard, but he makes it sound like one of the 12 tasks of Hercules.
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Lenovo used 12345678 as hard-coded password in SHAREit for Windows » Graham Cluley

Cluley is amazed – as you will be:

The first vulnerability [of four, all of which could be exploited remotely] (CVE-2016-1491) is perhaps the most infuriating. CoreLabs discovered that whenever SHAREit for Windows is configured to receive files, this process creates a Wi-Fi hotspot that is ‘protected’ by the password “12345678”.

Not surprisingly, this password just recently earned a top spot on the latest list of worst passwords you could possibly choose.

What is surprising is the fact that Lenovo would incorporate such an insecure password into its application — and one that does not change, no less!

Then again, I suppose the issue could be worse. In the second vulnerability (CVE-2016-1492), which applied only to SHAREit for Android, there is no password set up to protect the Wi-Fi hotspot when the app is configured to receive files.

To be sure, it doesn’t say much when Lenovo could have mitigated two separate vulnerabilities by adhering to the most basic principles of password security.

But moving right along. The third vulnerability (CVE-2016-1490) discovered by CoreLabs builds upon the insecure Windows password issue discussed above

When elephants do software while dancing. Yes, it was Lenovo which preinstalled Superfish.
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Mesmerizing migration: watch 118 bird species migrate across a map of the western hemisphere » All About Birds

Pat Leonard:

For the first time, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have documented migratory movements of bird populations spanning the entire year for 118 species throughout the Western Hemisphere. The study finds broad similarity in the routes used by specific groups of species—vividly demonstrated by animated maps showing patterns of movement across the annual cycle.

There’s also a version showing which species is which.
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Apple India enterprise head Sharad Mehrotra quits, starts up with Hyve Mobility » timesofindia-economictimes

Muntazir Abbas:

Sharad Mehrotra, iPhone maker Apple’s enterprise mobility head in India, has quit and set up a handset company to compete in the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market. Mehrotra, who was with Apple India since October 2007, has cofounded Hyve Mobility , which will launch smartphones using Android, the operating system that rivals Apple’s iOS, by March.

“While consumers today have a lot of options to choose a smartphone, the element of customer delight is seriously missing,” he told ET, adding that it was high time to get into the smartphone market…

…”In the current Android scenario, no brand enjoys customer loyalty and we want to bring the change with our path-breaking products portfolio and service offerings,” said [Aditya] Agarwal, MD of Hyve Mobility.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none noted.

Start up: Samsung’s S6, why clickbait works, the music industry’s pain, Lenovo’s clean pledge, and more

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What happens when you don’t have enough people in these? The music business hurts. Photo by eldeeem on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Adjust for daylight savings. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Samsung Galaxy S 6 and Galaxy S 6 edge » Business Insider

The Galaxy S 6 is made entirely of metal and glass and will come in two variations: The “regular” Galaxy S 6 and the Galaxy S 6 edge, which has a curved screen.

Samsung started designing the Galaxy S 6 from the ground up about a year ago under a program it called Project Zero. Whereas the last few Galaxy models were designed with the previous model in mind, the Galaxy S 6 is entirely new. Samsung even abandoned some of its earlier principles in order to highlight the design of the Galaxy S 6. It’s not waterproof. You can’t swap out the battery. And there’s no slot to insert extra memory.

Both models do all the same stuff, except the Galaxy S 6 edge has a few extras. It lets you swipe over from the curved portion of the screen to view a list of your favorite contacts and get alerts when you have a missed call or text from one of them. Other than that, Samsung says the curved screen doesn’t serve any function other than to look good. (It’ll also be more expensive, but Samsung hasn’t said how much either phone will cost yet.)

Besides the physical design, Samsung has cleaned up its software too. The phone isn’t bogged down with a bunch of unnecessary features and extras. The new version of Samsung’s TouchWiz skin for Android is cleaner and easier to navigate. All the basic apps like email, calendar, and music have a new look. Plus, the phone will ship with some of Microsoft’s Android apps like OneNote, OneDrive, and Skype.

As expected (and using its own Exynos processor), though Samsung appears to have used the iPhone 6 as its design template – from some angles you wouldn’t know which was which. I linked to Business Insider because it was the only site I could find easily which had a concise and balanced overview of what’s there in the phone and what’s not.

The list of features it has dumped from previous Galaxy flagships is now longer than those still there. Stuff that’s been dumped yet was previously “essential”: waterproofing, battery swapping, SD card slot, and of course things weird software “features” such as Air View, Air Gesture, Smart Stay and so on.

I have a feeling that this will actually be a bigger success for Microsoft than Samsung. “A curved screen that just looks good”?

Lenovo’s promise for a cleaner, safer PC » Lenovo Newsroom

After that Superfish shenanigans:

by the time we launch our Windows 10 products, our standard image will only include the operating system and related software, software required to make hardware work well (for example, when we include unique hardware in our devices, like a 3D camera), security software and Lenovo applications.  This should eliminate what our industry calls “adware” and “bloatware.”  For some countries, certain applications customarily expected by users will also be included. 

Lenovo is the biggest PC maker in the industry. Rival companies including Acer preinstall third-party apps. Will this force them to stop those installations, with the consequent impact on their margins? If so, that’s going to make it harder for them to thrive against Lenovo – which will get bigger, until Acer (and Asus?) are forced into a niche in the industry.

Why the Music Aficionado was to blame for declining music sales in 2014 » Music Industry Blog

Mark Mulligan:

Music Aficionados are consumers that spend above average time and money with music. They represent just 17% of all consumers but a whopping 61% of all recorded music spending. These consumers shape the fortunes of the music business. In the past this did not matter so much because:

• So many passive majority music fans were spending strongly
• Aficionados were behaving predictably

Now that has all changed. Passives are sating their appetites on YouTube while Aficionados are making major changes to their buying habits. Last year 14% of Aficionados said they were stopping buying CDs while 23% said they were buying fewer albums of any kind and 23% also said they were buying fewer downloads. The 2014 revenue numbers show us just what impact these changes had.

If we extrapolate those percentages to Aficionados’ share of spending in those markets in 2014 we see:

• Aficionados spent $192m less on CDs, which was 67% of the total $326m lost CD spend in 2014
• Aficionados spent $250m less on downloads, which was 86% of the total $290m lost CD spend in 2014

Amazing how concentrated it is – rather like the games app industry which relies on “whales”.

Yes to the Dress? » Medium

Paul Ford, in a masterful piece about media organisations’ reactions to That Story About The Dress (about which in two years’ time we’ll all say, “oh, yeah, wasn’t that stupid?”), and how Buzzfeed got 25 million page views in a day for it:

What I saw, as I looked through the voluminous BuzzFeed coverage of the dress, is an organization at the peak of a craft they’ve been honing since 2006. They are masters of the form they pioneered. If you think that’s bullshit, that’s fine—I think most things are bullshit too. But they didn’t just serendipitously figure out that blue dress. They created an organization that could identify that blue dress, document it, and capture the traffic. And the way they got those 25 million impressions, as far as I can tell from years of listening to their people, reading their website, writing about them, and not working or writing for them, was something like: Build a happy-enough workplace where people could screw around and experiment with what works and doesn’t, and pay everyone some money.

Great!

This is not said as an endorsement of BuzzFeed.

Oh. But it is an endorsement of building organisations that work. Trouble is, most media organisations experiment, but they don’t do it scientifically. That’s the real, fundamental fault.

Microsoft to cut 9,000 Nokia jobs in China » MarketWatch

Microsoft plans to shut two mobile-handset manufacturing plants in China formerly run by Nokia Corp., cutting about 9,000 jobs in total, various reports said Thursday. Microsoft, which bought Nokia’s handset business last April, scheduled the closure of the plants – located in Beijing and the southeastern city of Dongguan – earlier this month and plans to ship some of the manufacturing equipment there to Vietnam, according to a report in the government-run Beijing Youth Daily.

It quoted an unidentified Microsoft China executive as saying the closures and transfer of production capacity to Vietnam would likely be completed by the end of March. The layoffs are part of an estimated 18,000 job cuts which Microsoft announced in the wake of its purchase of the Nokia unit for $7.2bn.

At one time, according to Tomi Ahonen, it was the largest and most modern handset manufacturing facility in the world. Not sure when that time was, though. Think there are probably lots more factories making handsets now.

Why is the internet overrun with clickbait? » The Makegood

Tom Hespos:

I have an undergrad degree in journalism, I’ve been a business journalist for over 15 years, and I’ve worked at newspapers and even started my own. So I like to think I’m a decent headline writer. I wrote the original headlines for a handful of content pieces and watched the numbers roll in.

Some pieces bombed. Others did well. On the suggestion of our sales rep, we decided to test multiple headlines for each content piece. So we wrote 10-12 new headlines for each piece and tested them in isolation. Some of those headlines were typical of what a newspaper editor might write after reading the content. Others were deliberately controversial or, in some cases, playing to fear or uncertainty. You might even say they were starting to skirt the “clickbait” line.

So everything else was kept the same – the visual, the content, the media environments and everything else.  We just ran different headlines. Sure enough, the provocative headlines outperformed campaign averages. Big time. As in 15x lift.

We like to make fun of done-to-death lines like “You’ll never guess what happens next…” or “You’ve been doing [X] wrong your whole life…” We might even wonder out loud how many people actually click on such things. Perhaps we shouldn’t make fun.

I wonder what would happen if newspapers were to do the same with their headlines. You can see it being done by organisations like Taboola, where you can see an evolutionary progression going on with the headlines trying to get people to click through to stories.

Then again, businesses that rely simply on clicks are going to create clickbait. It’s as logical as night following day.

Futures of text » Whoops

Jonathan Libov:

I’m skeptical of a future where we communicate with computers primarily by voice. The visions in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Her portray voice as the most effortless interaction, but voice actually requires a lot more cognitive and physical effort than pointing with a mouse, typing on a keyboard, or tapping on app icon and then navigating the UI. Consider all those times you’ve exchanged a million texts with someone while making plans when voice would have resolved it much more quickly. Text is often more comfortable even if it’s less convenient.

I believe comfort, not convenience, is the most important thing in software, and text is an incredibly comfortable medium.

Great piece looking at developments in messaging.

Cybergeddon: why the Internet could be the next “failed state” » Ars Technica

Sean Gallagher:

“If we think our kids and grandkids are going to have as awesome and free an Internet as the one we have, we really have to look at why we think that,” Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council of the United States, told Ars.

The alternative futures for the Internet are not pretty. In presentations at multiple security conferences, Healey has suggested that the Internet could “start to look like Somalia”—a failed state where security is impossible, going about daily life is hazardous, and armed camps openly wage war over the network.

Healey’s analysis has been reinforced by events over the past two years: record data breaches, zero-day vulnerabilities released that affected a preponderance of Internet services, and visibility into the vast state surveillance of the Internet. The Internet has been “weaponized,” not just by the NSA and its foreign counterparts but by other states and Internet crime organizations. A thriving market for vulnerabilities attracts the bright and ambitious to work on discovering “zero days” for profit.

Sometimes you need an “e-” prefix, sometimes you need “cyber-“. Odd how “cyber-” wins for bad news – cyberwarfare, cyberhacking, and “e-” wins for the nice stuff. Apart from email, obviously.

Google just bought the entire .app web domain for $25m » Cult of Android

Killian Bell:

Fancy a .app web address? You’re going to be buying it from Google. The search giant has splashed out just over $25m on the entire .app web domain, which is around $19m more than any other company has paid for a top-level domain so far.

The actual figure Google paid to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) is $25,001,000. The second-most expensive domain is .tech, which sold for $6.76m, and the third-most expensive is .reality, which sold for $5,588,888.

Google applied for the top-level domain (TLD) back in 2012, Business Insider reports, four years after ICAAN decided to expand the overall number of TLDs. The company also applied for .docs, .android, .free, .fyi, .foo, and others around the same time.

Makes sense, though now it has all the fun of being a registrar. Will all Google Play apps automatically get a .app address to make them visible in search?

Also, most expensive? Has nobody bought .sex?

Samsung’s rise and fall » Business Insider

Terrific, detailed piece by Steve Kovach:

The success of Samsung’s Mobile in the US began a rift with the Korean headquarters. Sources say the more successful Samsung was in the US, the more complicated the relationship with headquarters got. Instead of getting credit, the US team felt they were being chastised for doing their jobs well. (Samsung declined to comment on this story.)

It got so bad, a source told us, that Samsung flew a plane full of executives to the mobile division’s office in Dallas for an unannounced audit that lasted three weeks in 2012. The Dallas-based employees had to go through all materials they used to sell and market Samsung’s mobile products. They were accused of falsifying sales, bribing the media, and a bunch of other damaging actions that hurt morale in the office. The same US-based office that helped turn Samsung into a brand as recognizable as Apple was suddenly being punished for its work…

…during one meeting with the global teams at Samsung’s headquarters in Korea, executives made the US team stand up in front of several hundred of their peers in an auditorium. The executives told the employees to clap for the US team as encouragement since they were the only group failing the company, even though it was clear to everyone the opposite was true.

Jawdropping.

Start up: another Lenovo preinstall, abandoning GPG, video game breasts (yup), the watch business, and more

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Bank of England: visualise this. Photo by Michael Sissons on Flickr.

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

August 2013: renegade Windows App Store Pokki lands Lenovo as its latest OEM partner, will preload on its PCs » TechCrunch

Alex Wilhelm, in August 2013:

After securing Acer as its first major OEM deal, Pokki, an alternative Windows application marketplace and Start Button replacement, today secured Lenovo as its newest partner. The deal will see Pokki’s game arcade and Start Menu shipped with Lenovo machines, greatly boosting its marketshare in the PC ecosystem.

I’ve asked Lenovo about this: it hasn’t so far been able to tell me how much Pokki paid to be installed. It seems to me a fair presumption that Pokki did pay to be included – it offers various shareware apps via its menu. (Pokki doesn’t interfere with network traffic.) Here’s Pokki’s blogpost on the “partnership”. (That’s an Internet Archive link because I can’t get the original to load.)

Superfish might be the most recent, but it wasn’t the first time Lenovo was trying to improve its margins with preloaded software.

Meet Ross, the IBM Watson-powered lawyer » PSFK

Adriana Krasniansky:

Lawyers using Ross ask a legal question, and the program sifts through thousands of legal documents, statutes, and cases to provide an answer. Ross’s responses include legal citations, suggest articles for further reading, and even calculate a confidence rating to help lawyers prepare for cases. Because Ross is a cognitive computing platform, it learns from past interactions, meaning that Ross’s responses will grow to be more accurate as lawyers continue to use its system.

Via Mark Gould, who says that this sort of thing could automate legal functions… so what happens to those white-collar jobs?

Windows was less vulnerable than OS X, Linux, and iOS in 2014: report » NDTV Gadgets

Robin Sinha, somewhat perfunctorily:

Apple’s OS X operating system was the most vulnerable in 2014, according to a new report by the US National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

As per the report, OS X leads the list followed by iOS, Linux, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Vista, and Windows RT. It has been noted that 7,038 new vulnerabilities were added last year, which results in 19 new vulnerabilities per day.

The report adds that out of the 7,038 vulnerabilities, 80 percent were said to come via third-party applications, 13 percent from operating systems and 4 percent via hardware devices. It is worth mentioning that in 2013 the vulnerability number was low at 4,794. Also, out of the 7,038 vulnerabilities, 68 percent was said to fall under the ‘medium’ severity, 24 percent in ‘high’ and the remaining 8 percent in ‘low’.

OK, I get it had the most vulnerabilities. Was it the most exploited, though?

Data Visualisation Competition – Are you a Viz Whizz? » Bank of England

“Viz Whizz”. Cringe. But it’s real, and could be fun:

Three criteria will be used to judge the entries. Is the visualization:

• showing something novel or insightful that is relevant to the Bank?
• clear and easy to understand?
• aesthetically pleasing and original?

Prize
Those entries that make the finalist day on Thursday 4 June will receive a tour of the Bank of England and its archives in the morning, followed by lunch.
Judging will take place in the afternoon where finalists will present their entries to an expert panel.
The winning entry will then be announced and the winning team will receive the prize of £5000. Refreshments will then be served for the contestants who will have the chance to mingle with the judges and other Bank staff.
The prize will be for the entry (and not per person).

Wristwatch industry statistics » Statistic Brain

Fascinating data: 1.2bn watches sold annually, 29.2m Swiss watches, almost all the rest from China and Hong Kong. Average values hugely different. It’ll be fun to see how the annual revenues for Swatch/Omega and Rolex look in a year’s time. (Via Robin H.)

Experts dubious of Gemalto claim its SIM keys weren’t stolen by GCHQ » Forbes

Thomas Fox-Brewster on the pushback against SIM card maker Gemalto’s claim that no siree, the keys are all locked in this safe:

First, [Gemalto] has assumed that its “highly secure exchange processes” have not been compromised. Second, Gemalto’s report was put together in a week, which might not be enough time to uncover far more surreptitious activity across its network, especially given the technical ingenuity of the alleged adversary. “Do they know the truth? Do they seriously believe they can conduct an investigation uncovering the truth in less than a week? This is a rush job to placate shareholders. Hopefully, they will keep investigating,” said Dr Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, who runs Comsecuris, a security research and consulting company. “Attacking SIM card vendors is a very economic solution to breaking encryption of cellular telephony.”

Perhaps the most worrying of Gemalto’s assertions is that it’s not possible to break connections over 3G or 4G using the methods described in the report. As Gemalto must know, it’s possible to force phones to “fail over” to easily-crackable 2G by jamming 3G and 4G connections.

My money’s on GCHQ. Those people are smart.

GPG And Me » Moxie Marlinspike

“Marlinspike” is a pretty adept crypto developer:

When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the feeling that I don’t want to read it. Sometimes I actually contemplate creating a filter for them so that they bypass my inbox entirely, but for now I sigh, unlock my key, start reading, and – with a faint glimmer of hope – am typically disappointed.

I didn’t start out thinking this way. After all, my website even has my GPG key posted under my email address. It’s a feeling that has slowly crept up on me over the past decade, but I didn’t immediately understand where it came from. There’s no obvious unifying theme to the content of these emails, and they’re always written in earnest – not spam, or some form of harassment.

Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG…

… I think of GPG as a glorious experiment that has run its course. The journalists who depend on it struggle with it and often mess up (“I send you the private key to communicate privately, right?”), the activists who use it do so relatively sparingly (“wait, this thing wants my finger print?”), and no other sane person is willing to use it by default.

Been available 20 years, yet has only 50,000 “strong” keys and under 4m published in the keypool. I’ve had a lot of PGP keys and forgotten the passwords to them all.

How video game breasts are made (and why they can go wrong) » Kotaku UK

Patricia Hernandez did a lot of research:

One developer who I’ll call “Alex,” because they didn’t want to be identified by their own name, told me about a situation where breasts had gone wrong—and it wasn’t the result of tech limitations. Alex told me that their studio was very concerned with its depiction of breasts. Even so, there were stumbles along the way.

“The very first thing I noticed when [the studio was] animating breasts is, I would look at them, and they were just not moving in a way that was even remotely natural,” Alex said.

“I remember saying to the artist, ‘the breasts are moving wrong.’ And I remember directly asking him, ‘Have you watched breasts move? Have you actually watched breasts move?”

Game developers have all the interesting conversations. It’s a fascinating piece as much as anything for the explanation of how developers *do* cope with the problem. (As one commenter asks, should the uncanny valley of video game breasts be called the uncanny cleavage?) So much effort, and then the premise of the game is ridiculous…

On WordPress.com and Bitcoin » Matt Mullenweg

WordPress is ending the ability to pay for its services using bitcoin, principally because it’s working on a code rewrite of its payment system, and wants less complication in the number of currencies it has to support. So some questions were put to Mullenweg:

Q: You mention that bitcoin has low volume compared to other payment methods, has this always been the case? Has its volume share changed over time?

A: The volume has been dropping since launch, in 2014 it was only used about twice a week, which is vanishingly small compared to other methods of payment we offer. We supported Bitcoin for philosophical reasons, not commercial ones.

Something of a reality check there. Although Mullenweg also says:

I believe Bitcoin or some other blockchain-like system will be the basis of the majority of financial transactions in the future, from small remittances to multi-billion dollar corporate acquisitions. I think transaction costs should follow Moore’s law, and I don’t think we’re going to get there with the centralized gateways that currently account for the overwhelming majority of transactions. I also personally hold Bitcoin, I’m an advisor to Stellar.org, and my friends make fun of me for bringing up Bitcoin and the blockchain in unrelated conversations.

(Via Ben Thompson)

Start up: Siri’s smart sibling, testing Magic Leap, more Superfish flaws, Cook the CEO, reviving Wallet, and more

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The 2014-15 Louisville Leopard Percussionists rehearsing Kashmir, The Ocean, and Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin.
The Louisville Leopard Percussionists began in 1993. They are a performing ensemble of approximately 55 student musicians, ages 7-12, living in and around Louisville, Kentucky. (Or watch it on YouTube.)

A selection of 10 links for you. If you love them, set them free. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Viv, built by Siri’s creators, scores $12.5m for an AI technology that can teach itself » TechCrunch

Broadly, the same idea as what Google-purchased Deep Mind is working on – a system that can learn (Deep Mind’s learning applies to games). This was an interesting data point though:

Siri investor Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, who also invested personally in Viv Labs’ new round, agrees.

“Now 500 million people globally have access to Siri,” he says. “More than 200 million people use it monthly, and more than 100 million people use it every day. By my count, that’s the fastest uptake of any technology in history – faster than DVD, faster than smartphones – it’s just amazing,” Morgenthaler adds.

As for Viv, it

can parse natural language and complex queries, linking different third-party sources of information together in order to answer the query at hand. And it does so quickly, and in a way that will make it an ideal user interface for the coming Internet of Things — that is, the networked, everyday objects that we’ll interact with using voice commands.

Wonder if Apple will add this to its shopping list.

What it’s like to try Magic Leap’s take on virtual reality » MIT Technology Review

Rachel Metz certainly sounds impressed, and this is the first description of how this method works that I’ve seen:

while Oculus wants to transport you to a virtual world for fun and games, Magic Leap wants to bring the fun and games to the world you’re already in. And in order for its fantasy monsters to appear on your desk alongside real pencils, Magic Leap had to come up with an alternative to stereoscopic 3-D—something that doesn’t disrupt the way you normally see things. Essentially, it has developed an itty-bitty projector that shines light into your eyes—light that blends in extremely well with the light you’re receiving from the real world.

As I see crisply rendered images of monsters, robots, and cadaver heads in Magic Leap’s offices, I can envision someday having a video chat with faraway family members who look as if they’re actually sitting in my living room while, on their end, I appear to be sitting in theirs. Or walking around New York City with a virtual tour guide, the sides of buildings overlaid with images that reveal how the structures looked in the past. Or watching movies where the characters appear to be right in front of me, letting me follow them around as the plot unfolds. But no one really knows what Magic Leap might be best for. If the company can make its technology not only cool but comfortable and easy to use, people will surely dream up amazing applications.

Superfish vulnerability traced to other apps, too » PCWorld

Lucian Constantin:

it gets worse. It turns out Superfish relied on a third-party component for the HTTPS interception functionality: an SDK (software development kit) called the SSL Decoder/Digestor made by an Israeli company called Komodia.

Researchers have now found that the same SDK is integrated into other software programs, including parental control software from Komodia itself and other companies. And as expected, those programs intercept HTTPS traffic in the same way, using a root certificate whose private key can easily be extracted from their memory or code.

Some users have started compiling lists with the affected software programs, their certificates and their private keys. Those affected products include Keep My Family Secure, Qustodio and Kurupira WebFilter.

“I think that at this point it is safe to assume that any SSL interception product sold by Komodia or based on the Komodia SDK is going to be using the same method,” said Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at CloudFlare, in a post on his personal blog.

Rogers says:

this means that those dodgy certificates aren’t limited to Lenovo laptops sold over a specific date range. It means that anyone who has come into contact with a Komodia product, or who has had some sort of Parental Control software installed on their computer should probably check to see if they are affected.

This problem is MUCH bigger than we thought it was.

Tim Cook and contradicting the founder-CEO » The Information

Jessica Lessin:

Since Cook first took over in August 2011, I have been asking Apple employees about how he has been leading the company. I often expect anecdotes revealing a numbers-driven management style, reinforced in profile after profile discussing how he climbed Apple’s ranks by squeezing pennies from its suppliers.

But employees consistently paint a different picture. In meetings over topics like how to fix Apple Maps or which features to include in the first Apple Watch, he takes the approach of asking the bigger questions like “Is this the Apple Way? Is this how we do things? Is this a product we can be proud of?”

That sounds to me like someone who sees his role as trying to provide some spiritual leadership at the company.

(Subscription required. I do wish The Information wrote better headlines.)

Wikipedia and the oligarchy of ignorance » Uncomputing

Remember that guy who went through Wikipedia editing out any occurrence of “comprised of” on the grounds that it was ungrammatical? He was wrong. David Golumbia widens the search:

Henderson’s work connects to the well-known disdain of many core Wikipedia editors for actual experts on specific topics, and even more so for their stubborn resistance (speaking generally; of course there are exceptions) to the input of such experts, when one would expect exactly the opposite should be the case. (As a writer in Wired put it almost a decade ago, “The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: ‘Experts are scum.’”)

Can any connection be drawn between Wikipedia’s general approach and the hostility of Jimmy Wales (from whom a fair bit of Wikipedia culture derives) to the ECJ ruling on the right to be delisted?

Texas Hold’em odds visualization » Chris Beaumont

You can think of the full dataset of probabilities as a 4D hypercube (one dimension for each of the four cards dealt between two players). The panel above is a 2D slice through this 4D cube; it is a detailed view of the strength of one particular hand.

Amazing visualisation of the possibilities in the 1.3 trillion hands of heads-up Texas Hold’em.

App developers bailing on Fire Phone, in new challenge for Amazon » GeekWire

Tricia Duryee:

It’s no secret that Amazon’s first smartphone was a flop with consumers, but behind the scenes, the Fire Phone is also struggling with another key group: app developers.

Several developers who made apps for the first Fire Phone — investing significant time and money to support its unique features, without a major payoff in revenue or customer adoption — tell GeekWire that they aren’t planning to build apps for future versions of the device.

This creates an additional challenge for Amazon as the company tries to recover from the Fire Phone’s lackluster debut, because apps remain a key driver of consumer interest in smartphones.

It’s really, really, really dead, Jeff. (And yes, I was the first person to point out how poorly Fire Phones were selling, and put a number on it.)

To revive Wallet, Google tries to wrangle unruly partners » WSJ

Alisair Barr:

Persuading Android partners and financial-service companies to support its payment service requires Google to “herd the many cats involved,” wrote Tim Sloane, a payments analyst at Mercator Advisory Group, in a January research report. “It’s a mess,” he added in an interview.

Still, Google has to aim for success, because Apple Pay could become a draw for people to buy iPhones, instead of Android phones. Mr. Cook said last month that Apple Pay accounted for $2 of every $3 spent using contact-less payments on the largest payment networks.

Apple Pay “has changed the dynamics” of mobile payments, said Marc Freed-Finnegan, a former Google Wallet executive who is chief executive of retail-technology startup Index Inc. “If payments become a standard feature of phones, Google has to have a service on a par with Apple or better.”

Carriers in the US (and perhaps elsewhere) are more willing to listen to Google, because Apple doesn’t give them anything in Apple Pay, but any concessions Google makes to them means it gets even less than zero. And Samsung’s move acquiring Loop is a definite “no thanks” to Wallet.

The CD was dying, and Starbucks just killed it » Fusion

If you’re a person born after 1995 who’s gone to Starbucks lately, you may have seen some strange objects for sale near the cash register. Thin, rectangular, with pictures on the front and shiny circles inside. Believe it or not, these things weren’t decorative coasters for your flat white—they were some of the last surviving specimens of a music distribution technology known as the “compact disc,” or CD.

Now, you’ll no longer be confused by these odd items, because Starbucks is quitting the CD business. According to Billboard:

Starbucks, the coffee giant with over 21,000 retail stores throughout the world, will stop stocking and selling physical compact discs, Billboard has confirmed, with the CD clean-out due to start next month.

“We will stop selling physical CDs in our stores at the end of March,” a rep for the Seattle-based company tells Billboard, adding: “Starbucks continually seeks to redefine the experience in our retail stores to meet the evolving needs of our customers.”

CD sales are hitting an all-time low, and it’s hard to see them ever rising again. This is a tipping point, again.

Android malware hijacks power button, empties wallet while you sleep » The Register

Iain Thomson:

“After pressing the power button, you will see the real shutdown animation, and the phone appears off. Although the screen is black, it is still on,” said AVG’s mobile security team in an advisory.

“While the phone is in this state, the malware can make outgoing calls, take pictures and perform many other tasks without notifying the user.”

Once the malware is installed by the user – it’s typically bundled within an innocent-looking app, but AVG isn’t naming names – it asks for root-level permissions and injects code into the operating system’s system server. Specifically, it hijacks the mWindowManagerFuncs interface so it can display a fake shutdown dialog box when the power button is pressed – and display a fake shutdown animation too. It then blanks the screen and to make the mobe look like it’s switched off.

The malware is then free to send lots of premium-rate text messages and make calls to expensive overseas numbers. The code shown by AVG appears to contact Chinese services.

Another day, another system-level hijack; but as with the vast majority, this is limited to China so far.

Start up: Sony-signed malware, robots watching videos, Nexus 6’s lost finger lock, are tablets desktops?, and more

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I love robots, by Duncan on Flickr.

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

Swedish police raid The Pirate Bay, site offline >> TorrentFreak

This morning, for the first time in months, The Pirate Bay disappeared offline. A number of concerned users emailed TF for information but at that point technical issues seemed the most likely culprit.

However, over in Sweden authorities have just confirmed that local police carried out a raid in Stockholm this morning as part of an operation to protect intellectual property.

“There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” read a statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement.

‘Destover’ malware now digitally signed by Sony certificates >> Securelist

Functionally, the backdoor contains two C&Cs [command & control servers for computers taken over by the malware] and will alternately try to connect to both, with delays between connections:

208.105.226[.]235:443 – United States Champlain Time Warner Cable Internet Llc

203.131.222[.]102:443 – Thailand Bangkok Thammasat University

So what does this mean? The stolen Sony certificates (which were also leaked by the attackers) can be used to sign other malicious samples. In turn, these can be further used in other attacks. Because the Sony digital certificates are trusted by security solutions, this makes attacks more effective. We’ve seen attackers leverage trusted certificates in the past, as a means of bypassing whitelisting software and default-deny policies.

We’ve already reported the digital certificate to COMODO and Digicert and we hope it will be blacklisted soon. Kaspersky products will still detect the malware samples even if signed by digital certificates.

Everyone says “ooh! Thailand again!” (a previous part of the hack was linked to a hotel in Bangkok) but nobody says “hmm, Time Warner.” What if the hackers are based in the US? (Speaking of which, has Re/Code walked back – as one says – on its claim that North Korea was behind the Sony hack?)

Android source reveals scrapped Nexus 6 fingerprint sensor >> Ars Technica

Methods like “FINGERPRINT_ACQUIRED_TOO_FAST” and “FINGERPRINT_ACQUIRED_TOO_SLOW” in the fingerprint API suggest it supported a “swipe” style fingerprint reader, which, unlike Apple’s stationary fingerprint reader, requires the finger to be moved across a sensor at the right speed. Another file said the system would show a picture indicating which part of the finger would need to be scanned next, which again points to it being more like a swipe reader and less like a whole-fingerprint scanner.

The fingerprint API would be open to multiple apps, with a comment saying Google had built “A service to manage multiple clients that want to access the fingerprint HAL API.” Presumably this would allow apps like Google Wallet to use your fingerprint as authentication.

Motorola had a fingerprint scanner in the Atrix in 2011. Sucked.

The real reason why Google is dropping the tablet v desktop distinction – it’s the user context, stupid! >> Search Engine Land

Looking at the huge amount of search query data that they have access to, Google picked up on a pattern in the way people use their devices. What they noticed is that user context trumps everything else.

“User context” refers to the time, location and device from which a search is conducted, and as [group product manager of Global Mobile Search Ads at Google] Surojit [Chatterjee] put it: “User context drives what people search for, and the actions they take. So for example, say I am at home in the evening, and I’m doing a search. The actions that I will take will be largely the same if I’m using a smartphone, tablet or notebook, because the context is the same. Particularly between notebook and tablet, the query patterns are very similar.”

Similarly, the types of searches that we typically think of as “mobile” searches are the ones that people make when they’re out and about, away from home or work – and that user context is actually far more important than the physical device they are using.

Also: “Currently, 80% of tablet traffic occurs in the home, in the evening, and Google is much more interested in user context vs. user hardware.”

In other words, tablets are the new laptops/desktops.

Korea’s shrinking market: domestic smart device market size likely to shrink for two years >> BusinessKorea

[Research company IDC] mentioned a decline in smartphone supply as the main culprit of the negative growth of the domestic market. The smartphone segment used to account for 80% of the overall smart device market, but the domestic supply is forecast to drop by 20.5% to 17.54m units and the sales by 29.2% to 12.345trn won (US$11.1bn) this year.

“The smartphone market has already reached a saturation point, and the market downturn has been accelerated by the recent suspension of the business of mobile carriers, the Terminal Distribution Structure Improvement Act and the crisis of Pantech,” IDC Korea explained.

Non-tablet PC demand is on the decline as well, with more and more people using their smartphones and tablet PCs instead of conventional PCs.

That’s a steep drop in Samsung’s and LG’s homeland.

OMG! Mobile voice survey reveals teens love to talk >> Official Google Blog

Mobile voice searches have doubled in the past year, says Google, which commissioned a study of 1,400 US adults so it could commission an annoying infographic:

We weren’t surprised to find that teens — always ahead of the curve when it comes to new technology—talk to their phones more than the average adult. More than half of teens (13-18) use voice search daily — to them it’s as natural as checking social media or taking selfies. Adults are also getting the hang of it, with 41% talking to their phones every day and 56% admitting it makes them “feel tech savvy.”

Those numbers feel high. Would love to know how they break down between smartphone platform; Google doesn’t specify that, and doesn’t show what the actual questions on the survey are.

Given that about half of smartphone owners in the US have iPhones, could it be that a significant portion of those people who use voice commands (because that’s what the survey asks about – not voice search) were actually asking Siri to do stuff?

Note though how Google cleverly elides from “voice search” (what it offers in the Google app) to voice commands – which don’t necessarily involve Google at all.

Digitimes Research: Lenovo mobile device shipments to lead Samsung by 9 million units in 2015 >> Digitimes

Note that by “mobile” it’s excluding smartphones, which might strike some as contrary. But anyway, Jim Hisiao and Joanne Chien report:

Despite difficulties to achieve further shipment growths for its tablet business, Lenovo with its advantage as the largest notebook brand vendor worldwide and aggressive promotions of its inexpensive and phone-enabled tablets is expected to achieve 50m in total tablet and notebook shipments in 2015, widening its gap with Samsung to 9m units.

Because tablet demand will weaken in 2015, Lenovo’s and Samsung’s strategies for the mobile computing device market are expected to focus on maintaining their tablet shipments. Digitimes Research believes Lenovo’s shipments for tablets with phone functions to emerging markets in 2015 are expected to remain strong…

…Samsung’s aggressive expansion of its tablet product line in the first half of 2014 did not receive a good response from the market. Since the company is expected to turn conservative about its tablet business and place most of the resources on the smartphone business in 2015, Digitimes Research expects the Korea-based vendor’s tablet shipments to drop to 36m units in the year.

As for the notebook business, after phasing out from the market in the second half of 2013, Samsung’s shipment volume has dropped rapidly and is only expected to reach 5m units in 2015.

Samsung’s essential weakness compared to Lenovo is its failure to make any profit from selling PCs.

Editorial: No comments. An experiment in elevating the conversation >> St Louis Post-Dispatch

Last Sunday, we challenged our region to have the serious discussion on race that it has been avoiding for decades. Such difficult discussions are made more challenging when, just to present a thoughtful point of view, you have to endure vile and racist comments, shouting and personal attacks.

If you’ve watched many of the talking heads on cable television try to discuss the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, you know what we’re talking about. Unfortunately, sometimes comments on newspaper stories and columns have a similar effect.

In fact, it has a name: “The nasty effect.”

That’s what University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele dubbed the negative effect certain comments can have on a reader’s understanding.

Comments on general news sites are a waste of the readers’ (and arguably writers’) time. I wonder how much further this trend will go.

Apple trial continues, without a plaintiff for now >> Associated Press

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers scolded Marianna Rosen and her attorneys on Monday for not providing more complete information about the iPods Rosen had purchased. That came after Apple lawyers successfully argued that the devices purchased by Rosen were not among those affected by the lawsuit.

But the judge also rejected Apple’s argument that the case should be dismissed because it’s too late to name a new plaintiff. She ordered the attorneys suing Apple to identify a new person, by Tuesday, who can serve as a lead plaintiff.

Both sides estimate about 8 million people bought iPods that are potentially affected by the lawsuit, which focuses on Apple’s use of restrictive software that prevented iPods from playing music purchased from competitors of Apple’s iTunes store. The plaintiffs say that amounted to unfair competition and that Apple was able to sell iPods at inflated prices because the software froze makers of competing devices out of the market.

Apple is carving out entirely new areas of law. There was the antitrust case where it had the minority share (in ebooks), and now a class action (also with antitrust implications) where none of the plaintiffs shows up. Presumably a suitable plaintiff will have to show that they bought music from Real and that it was deleted… but that they then couldn’t reload it or play it on any device, or only on the iPods? Did Apple explicitly promise that they would be able to buy music bought from anywhere on it? (I don’t think so.) The limits of this case aren’t clear.

Robots, not humans, fake 23% of web video ad views, study finds >> Bloomberg

Computers being remotely operated by hackers account for almost one in four views of digital video ads worldwide, according to a study that estimates such fraud will cost advertisers $6.3bn next year.

The fake views, which also account for 11% of other display ads, often take place in the middle of the night when the owners of the hijacked computers are asleep.

The result is retailers, automakers and other companies paying for web advertisements that are never seen by humans, or are seen by fewer people than they are paying for, according to the report released today by the Association of National Advertisers, whose members include Wal-Mart Stores, Ford Motor Co. and Wendy’s.

“We’re being robbed,” said Bob Liodice, president and chief executive officer of the New York-based association, which has 640 members that spend more than $250bn a year in advertising. “This isn’t about system inefficiencies or process sloppiness. This is about criminal activity.”

Between this and Google’s announcement that half of all online ads aren’t actually viewed, a lot of the basis for the online advertising business begins to look a bit shaky.

China’s polluted soil is tainting the country’s food supply >> Businessweek

A new study from the China National Environmental Monitoring Center examines the results of nearly 5,000 soil samples from vegetable plots across China. Roughly a quarter of the sampled areas were polluted. The most common problem is high soil concentrations of heavy metals—such as cadmium, lead, and zinc—which leach out from open mines and industrial sites and into surrounding farmland.

Plants grown in tainted soil can absorb heavy metals. People who ingest high levels of heavy metals over an extended time can develop organ damage and weakened bones, among other medical conditions.