Tag Archives: patent

Start up: trouble with bots, big data’s fable, Google and the White House, beware iCloud phishers, and more

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Google search for various speech-related commands
“Call mom” has overtaken “call home” in Google search – probably voice commands. Dad still lingers a way behind.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Well, it is Monday. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How big data creates false confidence » Nautilus

Jesse Dunietz:

»If I claimed that Americans have gotten more self-centered lately, you might just chalk me up as a curmudgeon, prone to good-ol’-days whining. But what if I said I could back that claim up by analyzing 150 billion words of text? A few decades ago, evidence on such a scale was a pipe dream. Today, though, 150 billion data points is practically passé. A feverish push for “big data” analysis has swept through biology, linguistics, finance, and every field in between.

Although no one can quite agree how to define it, the general idea is to find datasets so enormous that they can reveal patterns invisible to conventional inquiry. The data are often generated by millions of real-world user actions, such as tweets or credit-card purchases, and they can take thousands of computers to collect, store, and analyze. To many companies and researchers, though, the investment is worth it because the patterns can unlock information about anything from genetic disorders to tomorrow’s stock prices.

But there’s a problem: It’s tempting to think that with such an incredible volume of data behind them, studies relying on big data couldn’t be wrong. But the bigness of the data can imbue the results with a false sense of certainty. Many of them are probably bogus — and the reasons why should give us pause about any research that blindly trusts big data.

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Google’s remarkably close relationship with the Obama White House, in two charts » The Intercept

David Dayen:

»[Mikey] Dickerson led the U.S. Digital Service, a new agency whose mission was to fix other technology problems in the federal government. Ex-Google staffers were prevalent there as well. Dickerson attended nine White House meetings with Google personnel while working for the government between 2013 and 2014.

Meetings between Google and the White House, viewed in this context, sometimes function like calls to the IT Help Desk. Only instead of working for the same company, the government is supposed to be regulating Google as a private business, not continually asking it for favors.

Much of this collaboration could be considered public-minded — it’s hard to argue with the idea that the government should seek outside technical help when it requires it. And there’s no evidence of a quid pro quo. But this arrangement doesn’t have to result in outright corruption to be troubling.

The obvious question that arises is: Can government do its job with respect to regulating Google in the public interest if it owes the company such a debt of gratitude?

Google doesn’t think its activities present an antitrust problem. It doesn’t feel constrained from holding incredible amounts of data. But should Google be in a position to make that determination itself? How much influence is too much influence?

«

It’s a very, very comprehensive look at how close Google is to the White House. Would it be any different under Clinton?
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SMS phishing attackers continue to pursue Apple users » WeLiveSecurity

Graham Cluley:

»A week ago I reported on my personal blog how criminals were spamming out SMS messages that claimed to come from Apple, but were actually designed to steal personal information for the purposes of identity theft.

The messages all used a cunning piece of social engineering – posing as a notice from Apple that their Apple ID was due to expire that very day – to get unsuspecting users to click on a link to a phishing website.

The SMS messages were even more convincing because they referred to recipients by name, most likely fooling some into believing that there was a genuine reason to act upon the alert and visit the site pointed to by the criminals.

Although the site the criminals were initially using – appleexpired.co.uk – was quickly blocked by the major web browsers and taken down, that didn’t take the wind out of the criminals’s sails.

In the days since it has become clear that the identity thieves have registered a series of other domains – all claiming to be related to Apple or Apple ID. Examples have included icloudauth.co.uk, mobileicloud.uk, and icloudmobile.co.uk.

«

There was a big run of these over the weekend; my wife received two, which used her name. They do come via SMS; it seems that once someone’s address book is hacked, messages are then sent out to people in the address book. Standard phishing attack, jumping from one victim to the potential next.

Apple needs to be proactive and set up a way for people to forward these to its security team. And make two-factor authentication easier to implement. (Too late for those who have been hit.)
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Microsoft Android patent-licensing revenue falling » Business Insider

Matt Rosoff:

»Microsoft missed earnings expectations by a couple of cents per share on Thursday afternoon because of an unexpected tax adjustment that skimmed $0.04 off its earnings per share.

In the release, Microsoft noted that its patent-licensing revenue was down 26% from a year ago. And it’s because of Android.

Android phones are still selling just fine, but the market is dominated by cheap handsets being sold in developing countries like China and India.

“The mix of devices in that market has shifted to the low end,” said Chris Suh, Microsoft’s head of investor relations.

Microsoft’s cut is also sinking. Suh also noted that not every Android manufacturer has a licensing deal with Microsoft. He didn’t name names, but Chinese phone makers typically take a very loose approach toward licensing American intellectual property, and as those inexpensive phones take over the world, Microsoft doesn’t benefit as much.

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Well, OK, but there may be another part to the drop. Read on..
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April 2015: Microsoft reportedly cutting patent fees in exchange for pre-installed apps » AndroidAuthority

Rob Triggs, in April 2015:

»Last month, Microsoft announced a global partnership with Samsung and other hardware manufacturers to bring its mobile productivity services, such as its Office suite, to consumers and business users. But there may be more to it than simply offering customers compelling services, DigiTimes Research suggests that Microsoft is tempting Android manufacturers to pre-install its software in exchange for discounts on its licensing fees.

Android hardware manufacturers have all signed a patent licensing agreement with Microsoft for various essential technologies developed by the company. However, according to findings from Taiwan’s and China’s smartphone/tablet upstream supply chain, Microsoft is offering discounts to those who pre-install Office programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, as well as OneDrive and Skype onto their Android devices. So far, 11 hardware partners are signed up to the deal.

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As search changes, Google changes » Search Engine Land

Adam Dorfman:

»Recently, a company known as MindMeld, which provides voice search technologies, surveyed US smartphone users and found that 60% had started using voice search within the past year. You can also see a rise in search queries that are clearly voice commands when you look at Google Trends for phrases such as “call mom,” which are highly unlikely to be typed into a search box.

Voice search is no longer coming. It’s here.

These changes do not bode well for Google’s traditional revenue model, which relies on serving up ads while you search on Google.com. The user interface of talking to your mobile phone or wearable device to order a pizza does not leave any room for a paid search ad. So it’s not surprising that display advertising spend is overtaking search ad spend, and the gap between the two will widen over the next few years.

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But, as Dorfman points out, Google is adapting. That graph of “call mom” is definitely one which would merit playing around with using a few other search terms. Here’s “Call home” against “call Mom” against “call Dad” and “call John” and “call Mary” (also at top of page).
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Amazon unintentionally paying scammers to hand you 1000 pages of crap you don’t read » Consumerist

Kate Cox on a scam related to Kindle Unlimited:

»if you read 75 pages on your Kindle today, then turn the WiFi on and sync it, Amazon will mark you at page 75. If you never pick up the book again, that’s your furthest synced point. If it’s a 300 page book and you finish it, page 300 is your furthest synced point.

But e-books don’t have to be linear. You might, for example, open up a new Kindle book and find it has a link on the first page, to take you to a later chapter or a table of contents or another language. Tapping that link could put you hundreds of pages into the book — which means that the author of that file is now making money off you, even if you haven’t read a word… or even if there’s not a single real word there to be read.

And that is exactly what’s happening. Scammers are basically uploading “books” that are nothing but files full of nonsense with some link on page 1 that puts readers on page 300 or 3000 (the maximum page length for which Amazon will pay out) almost instantly. In between there’s nothing but nonsense, but the scammer can use click farms to drive up the ranking of their book and so people download it anyway.

The user hasn’t paid for this book directly, because they have an unlimited subscription, so they just close the file, forget about it, and move on to the next. But if dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of readers get tricked into the same maneuver, that “author” has just made a decent amount of money for something like 15 minutes’ worth of total work.

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Bangladesh Bank exposed to hackers by cheap switches, no firewall: police » Reuters

Serajul Quadir:

»Bangladesh’s central bank was vulnerable to hackers because it did not have a firewall and used second-hand, $10 switches to network computers connected to the SWIFT global payment network, an investigator into one of the world’s biggest cyber heists said.

The shortcomings made it easier for hackers to break into the Bangladesh Bank system earlier this year and attempt to siphon off nearly $1 billion using the bank’s SWIFT credentials, said Mohammad Shah Alam, head of the Forensic Training Institute of the Bangladesh police’s criminal investigation department.

“It could be difficult to hack if there was a firewall,” Alam said in an interview.

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The Internet of Astonishingly Insecure Things.
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Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps » Dan Grover

Grover points out the nonsense of people thinking AI-driven chatbots will take over from touch-and-choose visual interfaces:

»It shouldn’t require any detailed analysis, then, to point out the patent inanity of these other recent examples of bots and conversational UI proffered by companies on the vanguard of the trend:

This notion of a bot handling the above sorts of tasks is a curious kind of skeumorphism. In the same way that a contact book app (before the flat UI fashion began) may have presented contacts as little cards with drop shadows and ring holes to suggest a Rolodex, conversational UI, too, has applied an analog metaphor to a digital task and brought along details that, in this form, no longer serve any purpose. Things like the small pleasantries in the above exchange like “please” and “thank you”, to asking for various pizza-related choices sequentially and separately (rather than all at once). These vestiges of human conversation no longer provide utility (if anything, they impede the task). I am no more really holding a conversation than my contact book app really is a l’il Rolodex. At the end, a single call to some ordering interface will be made.

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Earlier Grover points out that the “quick and easy way to order pizza with your chatbot” takes 73 precise clicks (of virtual keys), whereas doing it through the visual menu interface on the Pizza Hut app takes 16 fat-fingered ones.

Case closed.
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Four fresh presentations, four key charts » Creative Strategies, Inc

Ben Bajarin looks at why people who have a PC aren’t upgrading, what people like about wearables, who wants virtual reality, and also whether people in India are interested in PCs:

»My gut told me there was an interesting opportunity brewing in India. I decided to commission a study, in collaboration with local researchers, to see if India was ready to move beyond the smartphone. We focused on the regions in India where PCs, smartphones, and tablets have the highest penetration — Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai. We did a mix of online studies, focus groups, and 1:1 interviews of 525 Indian consumers in this market.

The theory was simple. As consumers in India mature and have owned more than a few smartphones, they will look to more traditional PC form factors to use for work, school, and more. But with Windows PC penetration in India at less than 10% of the total population and Windows largely being an enterprise/workplace requirement in India, our theory was Android would be more popular as an operating system. As it turns out, it was for the overwhelming majority of consumers looking to buy their first PC in India. Which is encouragingly high for a market that began their journey on the internet on a smartphone.

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Microsoft, Google end regulatory disputes » WSJ

Stephen Fidler and Sam Schechner:

»According to a person familiar with the matter, the two companies have agreed to talk to each other first in the future before taking any problems to regulators.

The change reflects the shift in approach that followed Microsoft’s 2014 appointment of Satya Nadella as its new chief executive. Mr. Nadella has taken a less combative stance than his predecessor Steve Ballmer, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“The relationship between the two companies has changed,” the person said, adding that “Nadella has made most of the difference.”

Microsoft’s business priorities also have changed, among other things, with the growth of cloud computing.

The relationship between the two companies began publicly to thaw last year as they worked together to settle their long-running patent war involving roughly 20 pending lawsuits, said a person close to Google.

Microsoft also resigned from FairSearch, a group of digital companies—including Nokia Corp. and Oracle Corp.—that are prominent Google complainants. In addition, the software maker has discouraged ICOMP, another lobby group of which it was a member, from pursuing Google.

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Wow. Going to be interesting to see whether Icomp and Fairsearch can continue without funding from Microsoft.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Spotify hits 30m, Google’s Syria wish, Apple’s iPhone aim, the truth behind Powa, and more

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Is it really a good idea to do a charity parachute jump? Photo by puritani35 on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Spotify hits 30 million subscribers » The Verge

Micah Singleton:

»Spotify has 30 million paid subscribers, CEO Daniel Ek announced today in a tweet. This is the first subscriber update Spotify has given out since it announced it had 20m subscribers days before Apple Music hit the market last June, and shows the increased competition has had little to no effect on Spotify’s growth.

In the nine months that Apple Music has been available, the service has picked up 11 million subscribers. Spotify has added 10m paid subscribers in the same time.

The Swedish streaming service is now adding an average of 10m paid customers a year — it only had 10m subscribers total in 2014— a growth rate it will need to maintain as it goes up against Apple Music and its substantial marketing war chest.

What’s also notable is the flood of exclusive content put out by Apple Music and Tidal over the past few months seemingly hasn’t harmed Spotify’s user retention.

«

It was going so well until that last sentence. Singleton has no idea what has happened to Spotify’s user retention; it might be seeing colossal churn (people joining while others leave) or be rock steady. The raw numbers don’t tell you. It’s a reasonable guess, but that’s all it is – a guess.

That might seem like nitpicking, but it matters: it’s key to knowing whether Spotify really does have loyal users, or just fly-by-nights. And it’s also a bad idea to state things as fact that you don’t know directly.
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Apple: the mother of all iPhone installed base models, via Stifel » Barrons.com

Tiernan Ray:

»After combining the installed base numbers, churn, new sales, upgrade rates, and such, Rakers arrives at a “guesstimate model” for how the Apple installed base may expand, and how that trickles down to potential iPhone sales.

That results in numbers that would be above his own estimates. For example, Rakers figures if Apple’s installed base total 625m units in 2015, if Apple maintains an 18.8% share of the global smartphone market this year, which is projected to be 3.958bn units, and it if gets 19.6% of the expansion of that total smartphone market, it would bring Apple’s installed base to 744m units.

Rakers then backs out of that an “implied gross change” of 144m units, backs out of that refurbished sales of 95 million, and comes up with 49 million “implied net new iPhone installed base shipments.” He then combines that with “new iPhone shipments into prior year installed base,” and comes up with a potential sales level of 239m iPhones this year.

That’s above Rakers’s own estimate for 217.4m units, and above what he deems Street consensus of 208m units. It would also be growth from last year, versus the decline everyone’s expecting this year.

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The pricing for the new iPhone SE, lower than any new iPhone, could make a difference there.
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US top court agrees to hear Samsung-Apple patent fight » Reuters

Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung:

»The US Supreme Court on Monday stepped into the high-profile patent fight between the world’s two fiercest smartphone rivals, Apple and Samsung, agreeing to hear Samsung’s appeal of what it contends were excessive penalties for copying the patented designs of the iPhone.

Samsung Electronics paid Apple more than $548m in December related to a jury verdict from 2012. It is seeking to pare back the $399m of that amount that was awarded for infringing on the designs of the iPhone’s rounded-corner front face, bezel and colorful grid of icons, saying they contributed only marginally to a complex device.

Apple sued in 2011, claiming the South Korean electronics company stole its technology and ripped off the look of the iPhone.

«

The Jarndyce and Jarndyce of the digital world. But it also matters (notes Neil Cybart) because it affects how one values design. Google and Facebook wanted the Supreme Court to hear it; Apple didn’t, he says.
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Trump supporters aren’t stupid » Medium

Emma Lindsay with a terrific insight:

»Normally, when liberals talk about racism, they use “racist” as an end point. “Trump is racist” is, by itself, a reason not to vote for him, and “being racist” is an indicator of a person who is morally deficient.

But, if you don’t take this as an end point — if you instead ask “what do people get out of being racist?” — you’ll start to unravel the emotional motivations behind it. One of the best unpacking of this I have read is Matt Bruenig’s piece Last Place Avoidance and Poor White Racism. To summarize, no one wants to occupy the “last” place in society. No one wants to be the most despised. As long as racism remains intact, poor white people are guaranteed not to be “the worst.” If racism is ever truly dismantled, then poor white people will occupy the lowest rung of society, and the shame of occupying this position is very painful. This shame is so painful, that the people at risk of feeling it will vote on it above all other issues.

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And as she also points out, “America is terrible at giving its citizens dignity and meaning.” This should be required reading in many places.
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Parachuting for charity: is it worth the money? » PubMed

»All parachute injuries from two local parachute centres over a 5-year period were analysed. Of 174 patients with injuries of varying severity, 94% were first-time charity-parachutists. The injury rate in charity-parachutists was 11% at an average cost of 3751 Pounds per casualty. 63% of casualties who were charity-parachutists required hospital admission, representing a serious injury rate of 7%, at an average cost of £5,781 per patient. The amount raised per person for charity was £30. Each pound raised for charity cost the NHS £13.75 in return.

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Caveat: it’s from 1999. Even so, you can’t be too careful. (You can read the paper in full for $31.50. Perhaps raise the money through a sponsored parachu..? OK then.)
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Why we should fear a cashless world » The Guardian

Dominic Frisby:

»We already live in a world that is, as far as the distribution of wealth is concerned, about as unequal as it gets. It may even be as unequal as it’s ever been. My worry is that a cashless society may exacerbate inequality even further.

It will hand yet more power to the financial sector in that banks and related fintech companies will oversee all transactions. The crash of 2008 showed that, when push comes to shove, banks have already been exempted from the very effective regulation that is bankruptcy – one by which the rest of us must all operate. Do we want this sector to have yet more power and influence?

In a world without cash, every payment you make will be traceable. Do you want governments (which are not always benevolent), banks or payment processors to have potential access to that information? The power this would hand them is enormous and the potential scope for Orwellian levels of surveillance is terrifying.

Cash, on the other hand, empowers its users. It enables them to buy and sell, and store their wealth, without being dependent on anyone else. They can stay outside the financial system, if so desired.

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The two opposing viewpoints are: in a world where corporations try to avoid tax and there might be a dwindling workforce, it’s important to have visibility of every transaction so that the taxable ones are visible. Alternatively, as Frisby argues, the ability to spend shouldn’t depend on access to technology which can be denied, or surveilled at will.
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Clinton email reveals: Google sought overthrow of Syria’s Assad » Washington Examiner

Rudy Takala:

»Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week.

Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s team and one of the company’s executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool … that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company’s “Google Ideas” division, wrote in a July 2012 email to several top Clinton officials.

“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen said, adding that the plan was for Google to surreptitiously give the tool to Middle Eastern media.

«

The headline is overwritten: Google wasn’t seeking Assad’s overthrow. It was seeking to provide help to those inside Syria who wondered how many were really defecting. As the story points out, though, the anti-Assad movement helped create the conditions for ISIS to become strong.

And it’s really not good for Google to be visible as having tried to influence the internal affairs of a Middle Eastern state – even in this roundabout way. Now one begins to wonder where else it might have tried to be “helpful”.
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Powa: The start-up that fell to earth » BBC News

Rory Cellan-Jones spoke to multiple people who had worked for Powa, a British company run by Dan Wagner which once claimed a $2.7bn valuation but collapsed into administration in February:

»What those people have told me is that Powa was an almost textbook case of how not to run a company – no clear strategy, directionless management, overblown claims about the technology and a reckless attitude to money.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been receiving emails from Powa’s PR agency urging me to cover the company’s ground breaking technology the PowaTag which “allows users to purchase anytime, anywhere in just three seconds by simply scanning an item or advertisement with their smartphone”.

Eventually, the company claimed that it had 1,200 businesses signed up to use the PowaTag.

I was not particularly impressed. I saw little evidence that the technology was being used, but one investor did bite. A Boston-based firm Wellington Management invested a sizeable sum in Mr Wagner’s venture. Eventually they along with other investors poured more than $200m into Powa.

It seems likely they were told the same story that was peddled to journalists – that the PowaTag was going to be used by some of the world’s leading brands including L’Oreal and Carrefour.

But what’s emerged since the collapse of the business is that none of those companies had signed contracts, merely “letters of intent”, which did not commit them to anything. One senior figure in the company told me that young inexperienced sales staff were rewarded with a £2,000 bonus every time one of these letters was signed “so they weren’t particularly concerned about the quality of the deal”.

«

Textbook piece of investigative journalism where you talk to people and gather facts and talk to more people. (The headline is also clever – read all the way to the article’s end to find out why.) I bet there’s plenty more that Cellan-Jones couldn’t include because the BBC’s lawyers wouldn’t let it past. (Notably, FT Alphaville puts Powa’s real value at $106m, based on court documents filed in the US.) None of it looks good for Dan Wagner. Speaking of whom..
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Talk:Dan Wagner » Wikipedia

From the Talk (discussion about editing/content) page relating to Wagner:

»Wikipedia definition of Vandalism = Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content, in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. [[2]]

The amends I made that Techtrek has reverted as being “vandalism” were externally sourced, and links provided. I ask Techtrek to explain on what basis they consider them to be vandalism? It has been requested that any changes are raised and can be discussed on here so that we can get consensus.

It is my belief that by reverting any negative and independantly verified and sourced updates Techtrek is responsible for vandalism as they are deliberately attempting to compromise Wikipedias integrity. They have made a number of unsourced claims to the re-write and repeatedly used language that is not in keeping with Wikipedias guidelines [3]. It has been claimed on User talk:Techtrektalk page the they are Flame PR [[4]] if so then this must be disclosed. I ask Techtrek to please respond otherwise I will revert the change. Ol king col (talk) 09:26, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

«

That’s a busy PR company if it’s burnishing a client’s personal Wikipedia page. Wonder how much of the VC money went to Flame PR? Though the fact that the Wikipedia user only edits Wagner’s page is… notable.
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An iCloud scam that may be worse than ransomware » Malwarebytes Labs

Thomas Reed was contacted by a woman who said her iMac was hit by “ransomware”:

»From the screenshots she sent me, it soon became clear what had happened. The hacker had somehow gotten access to Ericka’s iCloud account.

Using this, he was able to remotely lock her computer using iCloud’s Find My Mac feature, with a ransom message displayed on the screen. (For some reason, the iPhone did not actually end up locked, but displayed the same message.)

The message read: “Contact me: hblackhat(at)mail.ru All your conversation sms+mail, bank, computer files, contacts, photos. I will public + send to your contacts.”

She also received an e-mail message, in similarly broken English, from her own iCloud address. The message said he had access to all her bank accounts, personal information, etc, and would publish it if she didn’t respond within 24 hours.

This is a pretty serious threat, and quite different from the typical Windows malware. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. Apple designed Find My Mac/iPhone as an anti-theft feature. It is intended to allow you to take a number of actions on a lost or stolen device, including displaying a message, locking it, locating it physically and even remotely erasing it.

«

As Reed points out, the same happened previously in Australia in 2014. Perils of the connected world: do you want to be able to find your machine if it’s stolen? But then, how secure is your cloud account?
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What Americans don’t understand about Nordic countries » Business Insider

Anu Partanen moved to the US seven years ago:

»Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets.

But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government. I suspect that despite Hillary Clinton’s efforts to distance herself from Sanders, she probably knows this. After all, Clinton is also endorsing policies that sound an awful lot like what the Nordics have done: paid family leave, better public schools, and affordable day care, health care and college for all.

The United States is its own country, and no one expects it to become a Nordic utopia. But Nordic countries aren’t utopias either. What they’ve done has little to do with culture, size, or homogeneity, and everything to do with figuring out how to flourish and compete in the 21st century.

«

The article originally appeared at The Atlantic, but the comments at BusinessInsider show how incredibly difficult Americans find it to grasp the idea of everyone benefiting from everyone paying more general taxes. While they defend their terrible healthcare system. And overlook the products that the Nordics have produced, such as Ikea and Lego and Linux.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Facebook’s real origin, Apple’s political underspend, Samsung’s unbranding, the electric oil crisis, and more

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Nintendo’s 3DS: not propping up sales so well as in the past. Photo by Ian Muttoo on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Cratering portable sales can’t prop up Nintendo’s business anymore » Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»A new revision to Nintendo’s projected earnings, released [on Friday], sees Nintendo reducing its expectations of Nintendo 3DS sales for the full fiscal year, which ends in March. Nintendo now expects to sell 6.6m 3DS units during the 12-month period, a 13% drop from previous projections and a 24% decline from the year before. That drop (and the accompanying drop in 3DS software sales projections) is a big reason why Nintendo is now also saying that its annual profits will be 50% lower than it had projected, though the company blames some of that decline on the weakening Japanese yen.

You might think this kind of decline is natural for a system like the 3DS, which is, after all, approaching its fifth birthday. But previous Nintendo handhelds have looked much more robust at this point in their lifecycles. The Nintendo DS was still near the peak of its hardware sales dominance in its fifth and sixth years, selling a whopping 31.18m units in the 2009 fiscal year (and a healthy 27.11m the next year). Game Boy Advance sales were still near a steady peak in the 2005-2006 period, bouncing up and down in the 15m to 18m annual sales range, thanks in part to the successful Game Boy Advance SP hardware refresh.

The 3DS, on the other hand, seems to have peaked earlier and lower than other Nintendo handhelds.

«

In short, Nintendo is predicting that its revenues in FY2016 will be lower than its profits in FY09. It’s taken a while, but smartphones are beginning to undermine it. (Might it be that those who had a Nintendo handheld in 2009 are now updating with a smartphone?)
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The true story of how Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook » Business Insider

Biz Carson:

»In the Hollywood-stylized version, a Harvard student needed a tool to date girls.

The real version couldn’t be further from the truth, Mark Zuckerberg told Mathias Döpfner in an interview with “Die Welt am Sonntag.”

At the time, he already had a girlfriend — Priscilla Chan, now his wife — and he was obsessed with the internet. Google was great for searching for news and Wikipedia was great for searching for reference material, but there was a gap.

“There was no tool where you could go and learn about other people. I didn’t know how to build that so instead I started building little tools,” Zuckerberg told Döpfner.

He built a small tool called Coursematch where people could list what classes they were taking. He did build the Facematch tool, as seen in “The Social Network,” but that was just a prank, he says.

«

Rewrite of an interview with Die Welt am Sonntag (The World On Sunday).
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Here’s how electric cars will cause the next oil crisis » Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Tom Randall:

»In the next few years, Tesla, Chevy, and Nissan plan to start selling long-range electric cars in the $30,000 range. Other carmakers and tech companies are investing billions on dozens of new models. By 2020, some of these will cost less and perform better than their gasoline counterparts. The aim would be to match the success of Tesla’s Model S, which now outsells its competitors in the large luxury class in the U.S. The question then is how much oil demand will these cars displace? And when will the reduced demand be enough to tip the scales and cause the next oil crisis?

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A crisis in the form of a glut.
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When the “Apple Encryption Issue” reached Piers Morgan » mobilephonesecurity

David Rogers does mobile phone forensics and teachers a mobile systems security course. Piers Morgan (who used to edit the Daily Mirror, which has apologised to some people for phone hacking) did however claim that he could take the FBI/Farook iPhone “to Tottenham Court Road [an electronics mecca in London) and they’d get into it” – suggesting that he might have confused carrier unlocking with PIN unlocking. Here’s Rogers on the tricky rapids to be navigated in deciding if we can force companies to unlock encrypted devices:

»Remember, someone who has actually committed a crime is probably going to say they didn’t do it. The phone data itself is usually more reliable than witnesses and defendant testimony in telling the story of what actually happened and criminals know that. I’ve been involved with digital forensics for mobile devices in the past and have seen first-hand the conviction of criminals who continually denied having committed a serious crime, despite their phone data stating otherwise. This has brought redress to their victim’s families and brought justice for someone who can no longer speak.

On the other side of course, we’re carrying these objects around with us every day and the information can be intensely private. We don’t want criminals or strangers to steal that information. The counter-argument is that the mechanisms and methods to facilitate access to encrypted material would fall into the hands of the bad guys. And this is the challenge we face – there is absolutely no easy answer to this. People are also worried that authoritarian regimes will use the same tools to help further oppress their citizens and make it easier for the state to set people up. Sadly I think that is going to happen anyway in some of those places, with or without this issue being in play…

…This is the same battle that my colleagues in the mobile world fight on a daily basis – a hole is found and exploited and we fix it; a continual technological arms race to see who can do the better job. Piers Morgan has a point, just badly put – given enough time, effort and money the San Bernadino device and encryption could be broken into – it will just be a hell of a lot. It won’t be broken by a guy in a shop on Tottenham Court Road (see my talk on the history of mobile phone hacking to understand this a bit more).

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Apple’s $120M jury verdict against Samsung destroyed on appeal » Ars Technica

Joe Mullin:

»Apple’s second high-profile patent win against Samsung was appealed, just as the first was. And in an opinion (PDF) published today, a panel of appeals judges entirely wiped out Apple’s victory and its $120 million verdict.

The new decision found that out of three different patents Apple became famous for winning with, one wasn’t infringed and two of them are invalid.

The ‘647 patent described how to turn phone numbers and other software “structures” into links, allowing users to take actions like calling a number with one “click” rather than copying and pasting. The jury awarded Apple $98.7 million based on that patent, but the appeals judges today held that the patent wasn’t infringed at all. They held that “Apple failed to prove, as a matter of law, that the accused Samsung products use an ‘analyzer server’ as we have previously construed that term.”

Appeals judges also invalidated one of Apple’s most consistently ridiculed patents, the ‘721 “slide to unlock” patent. Jurors awarded $3 million based on infringement of that patent, but the appeals panel said the patent is invalid because of prior art.

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This whole patent thing ends up as Bobby in the shower. “Patent trials? What patent trials?”
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Six Hot Media Startups to Watch in 2016 » Al Jazeera America

Sadly this piece by @ProfJeffJarvis (in reality Rurik Bradbury) was deleted by Al Jazeera, which either didn’t recognise its satirical slant ahead of publication, or did and then got cold feet. But it’s still here at the Internet Archive, with gems like this:

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The New Republic

The oldest startup here, it went through a significant reboot with its March 2012 purchase by Chris Hughes, tech mogul and co-founder of Facebook. It has since innovated so quickly that it is about to be re-rebooting under even newer ownership (name TBD), a great example of the rapid iteration that is characteristic of the best startups.

Instead of the old questions about subjective, qualitative measures, Chris Hughes brought in Yahoo! wartime consigliere Guy Vidra to ask fresh questions, such as: How well did this piece travel? And does this meme even lift our metrics?

I’m excited to see the New New The New Republic, and hope they re-embrace Walter Lippmann’s original mission of nextifying the bewildered herd using hot takes.

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Nextify your thinkfluencing.
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(UPDATE: China, too!) Korean Galaxy S7 to go without Samsung branding on front » AndroidAuthority

Matthew Benson:

»Carrier branding is arguably the bread-and-butter of free promotion: crudely referred to by some as a so-called “tramp stamp” these images tend to irritate customers who would prefer their devices to be free of all superfluous clutter. Even so, manufacturer branding tends to crop up most everywhere, be it the infamous HTC “black bezel bar” or the ever-visible under-the-earpiece location that companies like Samsung opt for.

Strange then, that Samsung’s South Korean website has pictures of its new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge…devoid of such a front-facing claim to fame. Take a look:

The front Samsung logo is clearly missing from the image. In fact, it’s missing from all the renders pictured, yet the rear logo is clearly present, as can be seen above.

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Subtle messaging: Samsung really does seem to be getting rid of the visible “Samsung” name on the front of the device in China, Japan and Korea. In the first two, it has struggled recently to keep sales up in the face of competition. But why Korea? And is this an evolution of its branding (more confident) or is it concern?
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Invisible porn-clicking trojans invade Android’s Google Play store » Tripwire

Graham Cluley:

»many bogus versions of a wide range of apps (ranging from Toy Truck Rally to Subway Surfers 2 to GTA San Andreas and Tinder) have been distributed by fraudsters who wish to use your bandwidth to earn themselves affiliate income by clicking on adverts for pornographic websites.

Of course, if the apps popped up a copy of the Chrome browser to click on the X-rated ads then chances are that you would notice something unusual was afoot. Criminals have learnt from experience that announcing their presence so obviously only hinders their money-making plans.

So, in the case of “Porn Clicker”, the apps spin up an invisible browser window – meaning that any ad-clicking is invisible to the naked eye. And then, a minute or so later, it clicks again.

The money soon begins to earn cash for the criminals – which is a truth especially evident when you consider that some of the bogus apps have been downloaded thousands of times.

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Android is following exactly the same malware growth path as Windows did on the desktop.
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Android phones are easier for police to crack than iPhones » CNN

Jose Pagliery:

»A Google spokesman said that encryption is now required for all “high-performing devices” – like the Galaxy S7 – running the latest version of Android, Marshmallow. But only 1.2% of Android phones even have that version, according to Google.

By comparison, most Apple products are uniformly secure: 94% of iPhones run iOS 8 or 9, which encrypt all data. Apple makes its devices, designs the software, and retains full control of the phone’s operating system.

“If a person walks into a Best Buy and walks out with an iPhone, it’s encrypted by default. If they walk out with an Android phone, it’s largely vulnerable to to surveillance,” said Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.

New York City’s top prosecutor, Cyrus Vance, has noted that Android phones have been easier to crack in the past, especially because Google can reset passcodes on older models.

Android is running on 105 million Americans’ smartphones — slightly more than the number of iPhones in the United States, according to industry trackers at comScore.

But there are ways in which an Android phone could actually be made more secure than an iPhone.

Android software can be tweaked to add all sorts of security features, like a password for a particular messaging app.

Google’s operating system also starts up only after the phone’s owner enters a passcode. That’s not true for the iPhone, which starts up as soon as you hit the power button. That’s an important detail: When confronted with a locked iPhone, police can take it to a trusted Wi-Fi connection and potentially copy the phone’s contents to iCloud on Apple’s computer servers, where investigators can then comb through the data.

Android phones won’t back up to the cloud until they’re unlocked.

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Has Apple been neglecting politics? » tofias dot net

Michael Tofias:

»To understand Apple’s efforts at persuading legislators of various issues, I compiled a measure of political footprint which combines a company’s own federally registered lobbying expenditures from 2015 with the campaign contributions they made during the 2013-14 election cycle from their corporate PAC as well as any employees who made campaign campaign contributions (and listed their employer). This data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics.

In 2015, Apple spent $4.48m on lobbying efforts and while they don’t maintain a PAC for campaign contributions, Apple employees gave a combined $130,579 in FEC-regulated campaign contributions. This adds up to a $4.61m political footprint.

In contrast, Apple’s main rival in the market for smartphones, Google, spent $16.7m on lobbying in 2015, gave $1.65m in campaign contributions via its PAC, and another $2.25m via employees during the 2013–14 election cycle for a combined $20.5m political footprint – over four times the size of Apple’s.

Apple’s political footprint is also on the small side when compared to other large companies (as measured by market capitalization on on December 31, 2015 as reported by YCharts).

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Platforms, postcodes and pushing services live: a year in the life of our platforms team » UK Ministry of Justice Digital

»Many of our services need info about postcodes, such as what addresses they cover, where they are on the map and what admin areas they fall under.

A year ago each team had used a different commercial solution, with different charging models, so our first platform was a postcode lookup service.

This combines Ordnance Survey and government data to provide one authoritative way for our applications to look up information for any postcode.

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Astonishing. This already exists in the outside world, with APIs so you don’t have to laboriously enter things by hand. And this was thought a good use of anyone’s time?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none specified.

Start up: debunking 2015’s fake pics, wearables grow, Apple’s 800 camera people, and more

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The Internet of Things might help warn about this. Photo by freefotouk 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.

76 viral images from 2015 that were totally fake » Gizmodo

Matt Novak:

We debunked dozens of fake photos this year, covering everything from Charles Manson’s baby photos to John Lennon’s skateboarding skills, and everything in between. It was another busy year for anyone spreading fake images on the internet.

Below, we have 76 photos that you may have seen floating around the internet in 2015. Some are deliberate photoshops created by people who want to deceive. Others are just images that got mixed up in this big, weird game of Telephone we call the internet.

76! That’s more than one a week. Actually, there’s only one fake a week?
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US probes Theranos complaints » WSJ

John Carreyrou:

U.S. health regulators are investigating complaints about laboratory and research practices at Theranos Inc. by two former employees of the blood-testing startup company, according to people familiar with the inquiries.

A complaint filed in September by a former Theranos lab employee to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services alleged that management instructed lab employees to keep testing patients with the company’s blood-analysis devices despite indications of “major stability, precision and accuracy” problems with those devices.

The second complaint was sent to the Food and Drug Administration earlier this month by another ex-employee, who alleged that the study submitted by Theranos last year to win the agency’s approval for a herpes test was tainted by breaches in research protocol.

Really not going well for Theranos. All been going downhill since the WSJ article in October.

Worldwide shipments of wearables to surpass 200m in 2019, driven by strong smartwatch growth » IDC

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC ) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker , the worldwide wearable device market will reach a total of 111.1m units shipped in 2016, up a strong 44.4% from the 80m units expected to ship shipped in 2015. By 2019, the final year of the forecast, total shipments will reach 214.6m units, resulting in a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28%.

“The most common type of wearables today are fairly basic, like fitness trackers, but over the next few years we expect a proliferation of form factors and device types,” said Jitesh Ubrani , Senior Research Analyst for IDC Mobile Device Trackers. “Smarter clothing, eyewear, and even hearables (ear-worn devices) are all in their early stages of mass adoption. Though at present these may not be significantly smarter than their analog counterparts, the next generation of wearables are on track to offer vastly improved experiences and perhaps even augment human abilities.”

One of the most popular types of wearables will be smartwatches, reaching a total of 34.3m units shipped in 2016, up from the 21.3m units expected to ship in 2015. By 2019, the final year of the forecast, total shipments will reach 88.3m units, resulting in a five-year CAGR of 42.8%.

“In a short amount of time, smartwatches have evolved from being extensions of the smartphone to wearable computers capable of communications, notifications, applications, and numerous other functionalities,” noted Ramon Llamas , Research Manager for IDC’s Wearables team. “The smartwatch we have today will look nothing like the smartwatch we will see in the future. Cellular connectivity, health sensors, not to mention the explosive third-party application market all stand to change the game and will raise both the appeal and value of the market going forward.

Apple Watch forecast to continue dominating through to 2019, though Android Wear coming up strongly. Tizen not going anywhere.
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‘Internet of Things’ technology powers an interactive flood map and sensor network » Nominet

Nominet, in association with the Flood Network, is today launching an interactive, online map which visualises river and stream levels around Oxford. The map, showing how technology can be a part of flood defence systems anywhere, has been developed following a successful pilot project with the Oxford Flood Network. The project has been focused on exploring the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an extensive, localised, early-warning system for flood-prone areas for the first time in the UK.

The Flood Network is powered by two pieces of innovative technology developed by Nominet:

• A set of IoT tools to help innovators build and scale IoT applications in real environments. The tools utilise existing internet standards, such as DNS, to provide proven scalable solutions with an existing support eco-system.

•The use of TV white space to connect a number of hard-to-reach devices in the network. Nominet’s recently qualified TV white space (TVWS) database performs complex calculations that informs devices what frequencies they can use in which area, at what power and for how long.

The map, an application built on top of the tools, is being released as a beta version today to gather feedback from local residents and encourage further community engagement.

First use I’ve seen of TV white space (analogue frequencies left over by the switch to digital TV). And, finally, the Environment Agency providing data from its sensors at river locks – after years when the EA resolutely refused to release its data to public use.

Also: an IoT application that really makes sense.
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‘Unauthorized code’ that decrypts VPNs found in Juniper’s ScreenOS » The Register

Simon Sharwood:

Juniper Networks has admitted that “unauthorized code” has been found in ScreenOS, the operating system for its NetScreen firewalls.

The code “could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen devices and to decrypt VPN connections.”

And on The Register’s reading of the situation, the unauthorised code may have been present since 2008, an assertion we make because Juniper’s notice about the problem says it impacts ScreenOS 6.2.0r15 through 6.2.0r18 and 6.3.0r12 through 6.3.0r20. ScreenOS 6.2 was released in 2008. Screen OS 6.3 came out in 2009.

We’ve asked Juniper if it has any theories about the origin of the code and have been told the company has nothing to say on the matter beyond the post we’ve linked to above and canned statements from its PR team.

Just what happened is therefore obscure for now, but the obvious scenarios aren’t good news for Juniper.

Or, indeed, its customers. Two views on this: (1) shows terrible effects of having backdoors because it means those “knowledgeable attackers” can read everything; (2) what effects has it had, exactly?
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The iPhone’s camera is so good because 800 people are working on it » The Verge

Chris Welch writes up the CBS 60 Minutes interview with Apple, which mostly revealed nothing the tech world hasn’t obsessed over for years, but for this:

the episode did reveal one semi-interesting new detail: Apple now says there are 800 people solely dedicated to working on the iPhone’s camera. That team of “engineers and other specialists” is led by Graham Townsend, who took Rose on a tour of the camera testing lab.

“There’s over 200 separate individual parts” in the iPhone’s camera module, Townsend said. Then he demonstrated how Apple simulates various conditions to test out the camera’s performance, from sunsets to lousy indoor lighting. “We can simulate all those here,” Townsend said. Apple’s competitors certainly conduct many of those same tests, but the sheer size of Apple’s camera team shows you how high up on the priority list it’s risen. Apple has built entire ad campaigns around the iPhone’s camera, and always makes it a point to highlight improvements with each new iPhone revision.

Generally, the interview lacked anything else noteworthy.

Love to know how that 800 breaks down between software and hardware. And beyond a certain minimum, is it just sheer numbers of people beavering away that makes good? How many do Samsung and LG have on this?
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Toshiba Revitalization Action Plan and FY2015 forecast (PDF) » Toshiba

Following its accounting scandal, the company is cutting thousands of jobs and selling off its TV business, and reorganising its PC business:

The Personal & Client Solutions Company will be split off from Toshiba Corporation and merged with a BtoB PC sales company in Japan.

• Headcount reduction of 1,300, about 30% of its global total, within FY2015.
• Close and sell Ome Complex, the Japanese development base of PC and visual products.
• A 60.0bn yen [US$490m] cost for structural reform is forecast for FY2015.
• Reduce total fixed costs by more than 30.0bn yen [US$245m] in FY2016 against FY2015.
• Downsize global sales scale to 3 million units a year, and make the business profitable.

The split will happen in January, and be effective from April. A separate PDF of the reorganisation for the PC business alone suggests that it had sales in the year to March 2015 of 97.3bn yen (US$800m) and operating profit of 209m yen (US$1.7m) – which, on 3m PCs sold, would be an average price per PC of $266 and operating profit of $0.56 each.

Toshiba was the first company to produce a mass-market laptop, in 1985. Lots can happen in 30 years.
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How the online hate mob set its sights on me » The Guardian

Jon Ronson:

A train crashed in Philadelphia [in May 2015]. Passenger cars were ripped apart. Eight people died and 200 more were hospitalised. A survivor emerged from the wreckage and tweeted: “Thanks a lot for derailing my train. Can I please get my violin back from the 2nd car of the train?”

In the early days, Twitter was a place of curiosity and empathy. Back then, people might have responded to this woman: “Are you OK?” or “What was it like?” But that’s not how Twitter and Facebook responded in 2015. Instead, it was: “Some spoiled asshole is whining about her violin being on that Amtrak that derailed. People died on that train” and |“I hope the violin is crushed” and “I hope someone picks it up and smacks it against the train” and…

And worse. Much worse. But as Ronson asks, why are hate mobs so much quicker to form? Why are people being unpaid shaming interns for Twitter and Google too?
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Ericsson and Apple sign patent deal, settle litigation | Reuters

Olof Swahnberg:

Ericsson did not specify how much it would earn from the deal but estimated overall revenue from intellectual property rights in 2015 would hit 13 to 14 billion crowns ($1.52-$1.64 billion), including positive effects from the settlement with Apple, up from 9.9 billion crowns in 2014.

Investment bank ABG Sundal Collier said in a note to clients it believed the deal meant Apple would be charged around 0.5 percent of its revenue on iPads and iPhones by Ericsson.

Ericsson Chief Intellectual Property Officer Kasim Alfalahi said the agreement was broad, covering the latest 4G-LTE generation of mobile technology, as well as the earlier 2G and 3G technologies.

Quick settlement for a patent row: case was filed in January 2015.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: in yesterday’s links it said that Linux was vulnerable to the 28-backspace hack for passwords. That should be GRUB.

Start up: Radiohead v Prince, the ad crunch, Surface Pro review, and more

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Yahoo took the net away from its programmers. Guess what happened. Photo by dotanuki on Flickr.

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TouchArcade needs your help, please support our Patreon » TouchArcade

Eli Hodapp, editor-in-chief of the site (which set up in 2008 to report on iOS gaming:

The continued shift to user acquisition as the main method of promoting a title has had a dramatic impact on the iOS gaming ecosystem. Aside from mid-sized developers being squeezed out, with advertising revenues reaching non-existent levels, iOS enthusiast sites have been forced to make difficult decisions. Without financial support from developers buying advertising, some sites have closed. The few that remain have significantly downsized, drastically reduced their content output, shifted to writing about more general topics in hopes of attracting more search traffic, and/or changed focus to becoming an events companies. TouchArcade, being the largest site, is the farthest up the proverbial river, but the drought has reached us too and even our continued existence is in question.

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Why are we still putting up with scam ads and fake news stories? » Medium

Rob Leathern:

Today, on the front page of Yahoo, a fake news article ad ran using Robert Downey, Jr.’s likeness (red box below), and pointed to a fake version of the Discovery Channel website (“discoverymagltd.com”). The site then also included fake endorsements from Roger Federer, Tom Cruise and Daniel Craig.

Recently, I saw a fake news story “ad” on Facebook using the likeness of The Rock, and a fake version of the TMZ website, that I pointed out to him. He correctly pointed out:

@robleathern @facebook @TMZ Unreal how far people will go to scam others. We’re on it and thank you bud for bringing it to our attention

These scammers hide behind anonymous domains and half-witted affiliates, but honestly, any somewhat-skeptical ad operations person should be able to immediately see and shut down something like this very quickly before it ever sees millions of users. And yet it persists. Click rates for these fake stories are incredibly high.

The online ad industry’s incentives are totally screwed up, and it leads to the kinds of deceptive dreck that profilerates everywhere today.

Leathern is working on a solution, at least.
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90:9:1 – the odd ratio that technology keeps creating » The Guardian

I wrote about something I’ve observed:

What do operating systems, browsers and search engines all have in common? It seems to be a ratio of 90:9:1 between the key players. One player dominates; then others get a minimal share.

Take mobile OSs: This week the Mozilla Foundation pulled the plug on Firefox OS – the mobile OS which could have replaced native apps with HTML-based apps – a final death throe in the mobile OS wars. There are now three main platforms – Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone – for which worldwide shipments are currently running in a ratio of about 85:14:1 respectively.

Now look at desktop OS sales: the ratio stands in the most recent quarter at about 91:8:1 between Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s Mac OSX, and “self-build” machines which probably get Linux.

It’s oddly reminiscent of the “1% rule” – a rule of thumb observed as far back as 2006, which states that if you have a group of 100 people interacting online, then one will generate some content, nine will provide feedback, and 90 will simply consume it. (Studies have broadly confirmed that principle.)

I’m not saying this is a hard and fast rule – I cite two large-scale exceptions in the piece – but I feel there’s something behind it, perhaps based on network effects and power laws.
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Why the internet of things favours dominance » The Guardian

Julia Powles and Jat Singh, in July 2015:

For the moment, all these approaches tend towards centralisation – whether towards operators of closed systems, controllers of particular ecosystems, or systems integrators for “open” systems. Data flows too, tend to be centralised, even when they needn’t be. So it seems that concerns about dominance, power, and control in the internet of things are based on solid ground – the end-user’s controls are left to whoever controls the centralised environment.

So, is there a way out? Perhaps, given the internet of things is still evolving. But the path to countering the strong forces favouring dominance is far from easy.

I hadn’t thought of this piece when I wrote about 90:9:1, but it suggests that IoT will see a similar trend.
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Yahoo’s engineers move to coding without a net » IEEE Spectrum

Tekla Perry:

What happens when you take away the quality assurance team in a software development operation? Fewer, not more errors, along with a vastly quicker development cycle.

That, at least, has been the experience at Yahoo, according to Amotz Maimon, the company’s chief architect, and Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of science and technology. After some small changes in development processes in 2013, and a larger push from mid-2014 to the first quarter of 2015, software engineering at Yahoo underwent a sea change. The effort was part of a program Yahoo calls Warp Drive: a shift from batch releases of code to a system of continuous delivery. Software engineers at Yahoo are no longer permitted to hand off their completed code to another team for cross checking. Instead, the code goes live as-is; if it has problems, it will fail and shut down systems, directly affecting Yahoo’s customers.

“Doing that,” Rossiter told me, “caused a paradigm shift in how engineers thought about problems.”

It has also, he said, forced engineers to develop tools to automate the kinds of checks previously handled by teams of humans. An engineer might go through an arduous process of checking code once—but then would start building tools to automate that process.  

This is really counterintuitive; you’d expect it would cause all manner of problems. But of course it shifts responsibility down to the programmers. Yahoo has been running like this for a year (insert “who would notice?” joke) and the benefits seem clear.
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The Microsoft Surface Pro 4 » The Brooks Review

Ben Brooks tried out Microsoft’s offering to see if it would trump his iPad Pro. It didn’t:

It’s not that this device is bad — [though] the battery life and [third-party] apps are — but it’s that the device is disappointing. Using it, you can see how great it truly could be, but it doesn’t even come close to living up to that.

It’s not a tablet in any sense, which is fine, but it’s also not a great laptop either. I can’t see recommending the Surface Pro 4 to anyone. You are better off buying a full laptop, one which can hopefully handle simple Google Hangouts. You are better off with an iPad too. That will likely incite a great many fans of the device, but as it stands right now there is too much missing, which can be had for the same or less cost than you can get with the Surface Pro 4.

The iPad Pro will cost you the same, but you will get an App Store full of amazing software and a battery that can actually last through a full day of work.

He liked the hardware, a lot, but found the software sub-par and RAM-hungry.
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“Creep” – Prince at Coachella 2008 (Uploaded via Permission from Radiohead) » YouTube

Miles Hartl finally appealed to Radiohead (because it’s their song, so they own the copyright, including performance copyright) to get this song unblocked on YouTube. It got a million views in 48 hours:

Watching live footage of Prince is what let the joy of performing music into my life. Buying his albums can not and will not convey the contagious, jaw dropping, astonishing, spontaneous aura of awesome that oozes from every pour of this man’s being on stage. Some of you vehemently disagree, and that’s fine…free speech all the way. But for me, this was the fountainhead. Every time I watch Prince play guitar I get the urge to practice for hours. The 22-second sustained note on the Coachella performance of “Shhh” that you’ll never see…yeah, that changed the way I looked at my instrument and what is was capable of. The transcendent wonder that is the “Just My Imagination” solo from Small Club…that taught me the difference between playing and singing. The Digitech Whammy work on “3 Chains ‘O Gold”…eight years on and I still can’t make it sound like that. Every solo ever taken on “The Ride,” “Purple Rain,” “Redhead Stepchild,” “She’s Always in My Hair,” “Peach,” “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute),” “Joy in Repetition”…I can’t tell you the joy they’ve brought me, nor convey the lessons they’ve taught that I wouldn’t have found by looking in a different direction.

And if Prince had his way, I never would have been able to learn from any of it. Because it would either be posted and deleted within days (at best), streamed once at four a.m. and never seen or heard again, or would be locked in a dungeon at Paisley Park until the 22nd Century.

So here it is.


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Is Apple’s Smart Battery Case so goofy because it was designed around Mophie’s patents? | The Verge

Former patent lawyer Nilay Patel:

Mophie has tons of patents on the design and functionality of these things. Reading through a few, it’s hard not to see Apple’s case as being deliberately designed around Mophie’s patents — including that unsightly bulge.

Here, for example, is Mophie’s patent #9,172,070, which was just granted on October 15th. The first claim lays out, well, a Mophie battery case — and any other case that has all of these (paraphrased) elements would infringe on Mophie’s patent:

1. A lower case that contains a battery and sides that extend along a mobile device, with internal and external power connectors, and an on / off switch.

2. A removable upper case.

So really any case where a phone slides into the bottom case and there’s a cap on top infringes this one. You will note the Apple case is just a single piece, with a top portion that flops back instead of coming off. More elegant, in some ways, but perhaps more importantly, also outside the claims of this patent.

Patel’s is the most sensible analysis I’ve read around this entire topic. (Apple wouldn’t comment when he asked if this was why.)
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How fast is the iPad Pro? » DISPLAYBLOG

Jin Kim:

I recently started capturing videos of our church’s sermons. I’ve been using my iPhone 4s with an olloclip telephoto lens that gives me a 2x optical zoom. In 720p mode a 50-minute video takes up about 4-5 GBs. Capturing the video is no problem, even for an old iPhone 4s. (Capturing 50-minute long 720p videos on a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 on the other hand is a pain — I couldn’t do it because of file size limitations. I’m sure there is a solution out there, but I think regular users who just want to record long videos will give up.) What takes a lot of computing time is adding title pages, transitions, and then exporting it.

On a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (mid-2009) with 4GB RAM and a 5400RPM 1TB hard drive using the GeForce 9400M GPU the exporting part takes about 3 hours. This is using Final Cut Pro X…

…On a whim, I decided to try editing on iMovie on my iPhone 6s. I don’t require a lot of editing — just adding a couple of title pages, some transitions, and a bit of zooming in — and iMovie, after watching a few YouTube tutorials, was sufficient for my needs. What was surprising was how quickly iMovie exported. I’d say it took about 10 minutes.

Quite possibly anomalous, but makes you think: where devices are optimised for particular formats, you can see a big delta in time taken.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Dropbox dumps Mailbox, what mobile adblocking?, life after viral fame, and more

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Ridge Racer: maybe blame it for all that waiting around for games to load. Photo by Peter π on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. They really are. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Dropbox is shutting down its Mailbox and Carousel apps » The Verge

Chris Welch:

Dropbox is doing away with Mailbox, the email app it acquired in March 2013, and Carousel, the company’s attempt at a standalone photo management app. The company says that it’s making this decision now to focus more directly on the primary Dropbox app and the collaborative features it’s known for. “The Carousel and Mailbox teams have built products that are loved by many people and their work will continue to have an impact,” wrote Dropbox’s founder/CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi in a blog post. “We’ll be taking key features from Carousel back to the place where your photos live — in the Dropbox app. We’ll also be using what we’ve learned from Mailbox to build new ways to communicate and collaborate on Dropbox.”

The Verge’s usual incisive reporting which simply repeats available facts, and doesn’t try to widen the discussion, or bring in expert views, or put it into context. So I’ll try: Mailbox shutting suggests it’s either a bust (not enough users), or a money-loser – same thing, really, and Dropbox needs to focus on how it is going to stop just being a feature that any OS offers for free (Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud Drive) because if that’s the case, it hasn’t got a business in the long term.
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The ‘Loading Screen Game Patent’ finally expires » Electronic Frontier Foundation

Elliot Harmon:

The first Sony PlayStation was introduced in 1994. Its graphical capabilities blew predecessors like the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo out of the water, but it had one big disadvantage. It replaced the game cartridges of the previous generation with CD-ROMs. When you booted up a PlayStation game, you had to wait for the console to load game data from the disc into its own memory. And that. Took. For. Ever. Watching a loading screen was boring, especially when you were used to the instant gratification of cartridge games.

Namco’s Ridge Racer addressed the problem by including a second game, the 80s classic Galaxian. It took no time at all for a PlayStation to load Galaxian. Suddenly, the player wasn’t thinking about how boring it was to wait for a game to load; she could have fun playing Galaxian while the console took its time loading Ridge Racer. If she beat Galaxian before Ridge Racer was done loading, she’d be rewarded in Ridge Racer with access to some in-game bonuses.

What’s the big deal? Namco thought of loading screen games first, so they earned the patent, right? Well, let’s look at how U.S. law defines a patentable invention.

According to the law, a person isn’t entitled to a patent if the claimed invention already existed when the application was filed or would have been obvious to someone skilled in the relevant technology area. The idea of playing a small game while the larger one loads has been around for a very long time. In 1987, many years before Namco filed its patent application, Richard Aplin created Invade-a-Load, a utility for developers who wrote games for the Commodore 64 computer.

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X marks the spot that makes online ads so maddening » The New York Times

Sydney Ember:

Annoying ads have become problematic for Anthony Martin, a 32-year-old consultant for a project management firm who sat in Bryant Park on a recent Monday afternoon, iPhone 6 in hand. He had moved to New York not long ago, he said, and was using a smartphone app to determine the best subway routes. But as soon as the app loads, ads take over his screen — first a banner ad on the bottom, then a full-screen ad. No amount of desperate jabbing does the trick.

“Sometimes I miss a stop,” he said. “Especially with fat fingers.”

Industry executives say it is quite likely that publishers and mobile developers are deliberately building ads that are hard to escape or shut down.

“The ones that are incredibly invasive are designed to be that way,” said Brian Gleason, the global chief executive of Xaxis, a media and technology company owned by the advertising giant WPP.

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The mobile adblocking apocalypse hasn’t arrived (at least not yet) » Nieman Journalism Lab

Madeline Welsh, Joseph Lichterman and Shan Wang:

Even sites with unusually high desktop blocking rates — think German sites, or technology sites — aren’t seeing huge numbers on mobile. About a quarter of all Internet users in Germany use an adblocker, but the percentage is even higher for some sites like Golem, a German-language tech site that’s seen an outright majority of its users blocking.

“As far as I can remember, it’s always been an issue for us,” said the site’s editor-in-chief, Benjamin Sterbenz. “As soon as adblock software was available, our readers installed the software and experimented with it. I’m sure that a lot of our readers also contributed to the development of adblocking software.”

But compared to adblocking on desktop, Golem readers using adblocking technology on mobile is in the single digits. Though it saw a little bump in September with the release of iOS 9, it’s otherwise remained constant, which Sterbenz said surprised him.

At Ars Technica, the Condè Nast-owned tech site, about 6% of mobile users block ads, “which is just a bit higher than what it was previously,” Ken Fisher, the site’s founder and editor-in-chief said in an email. On desktop, about 30% of users block ads, he said.

Odd, in light of the preceding.
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Virtual reality studio Baobab raises 6 million to be Pixar of VR – Business Insider

Jillian D’Onfro:

After leaving Zynga, [CEO of startup Baobab, Maureen] Fan spent the next year using her free time to learn as much as possible about virtual reality. She finally left her job in March to cofound Baobab Studios with Eric Darnell, who directed DreamWorks movies “Antz” and the “Madagascar” franchise.  

With big ambitions, the duo started attracting top talent from the likes of Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Twitch. The team’s combo of hardcore technologists working with top-tier storytellers convinced investors to put $6 million behind the studio’s cause last week. The Series A round came in part from million from HTC and Samsung Ventures, both of which have their own virtual reality devices, the Vive and Gear VR. 

Fan tells Business Insider that the studio plans to release its first short films made specifically for virtual reality early next year.

“We’re inventing a new cinematic language,” she says. For example, she explains, in VR you can’t cut-away from the action — the whole story has to flow together without switching perspectives — and need to find ways to guide the viewer to look where you want them to, since it will be possible to look around at a whole virtual world. 

VR is going to get really interesting in the next couple of years, and the content producers v content platforms issue is going to be highlighted again.
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Tencent blocks Uber on WeChat, so what ‘fair play’ can we expect in China? » South China Morning Post

George Chen:

Global car-hailing app Uber and its local rival in China, Didi Kuaidi, are de facto in a business war, after Tencent, a key investor of Didi, decided to remove Uber from one of the most powerful online marketing platforms in the world’s No 1 internet market.

What’s the key takeaway of the story here for other foreign businesses if they are considering doing or expanding business in China? It’s getting more difficult to make money in China, especially when you have to compete with local monopoly players.

The news that all Uber’s WeChat accounts had been removed by Tencent, the parent and owner of WeChat, China’s most popular real-time messaging app, where many businesses have set up accounts to promote products and services and engage with customers, shocked the technology world over the weekend. Tencent said it blocked Uber on WeChat, affecting Uber’s online services in at least 16 Chinese cities, because of “malicious marketing”, something Uber denied.

The power of the default messaging platform.
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10 viral sensations on life after internet fame » NY Mag

Clint Rainey:

Internet fame comes on like an earthquake, with little warning. In a matter of hours, a video can go viral and be viewed 50 million times. Then it (usually) recedes into a very long, thin afterlife. Here, nine YouTube sensations whose lives were upended briefly in the past decade (plus one from the prehistoric web era, before YouTube made its debut in 2005) speak about this odd, relatively new kind of fame. Most embraced the experience, seeing where it would take them. Some ended up in dark places. A couple have made it their living and found themselves with new careers. Others stepped away, opting out of the flame wars. Pay attention: Someday, the accidental celebrity could be you.

Terrific idea, and choices; the child from “Charlie bit my finger” may be the most predictable yet peculiar of all.
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Microsoft will not fix power management issues with new Surface devices until next year » Thurrott.com

Paul Thurrott is mad as hell and he’s.. well, he has to take it:

As I’ve said on the podcasts several times now, and wrote in the review excerpt below, Surface Book (and apparently Surface Pro 4) just don’t go to sleep properly.

Well, here’s the really bad news. Microsoft won’t fix this problem … until sometime next year.

“The ‘standby’ battery life is an issue we are working on and have been working on,” a Microsoft Surface Engineering Team program manager identified only as “Joe” explains in the company’s support forums. “We can put the processor into a deeper sleep state than it is currently set to. We couldn’t do it at RTM for a variety of reasons, power management is a very hard computer science problem to solve especially with new silicon. Currently it is not in the deepest ‘sleep’ that it can be so there are wake events that would not otherwise wake it. We will have an update for this issue sometime soon in the new year.”

I don’t mean to rip on an individual, as I usually save my ire for faceless corporations, but … “a very hard computer science problem to solve”? Seriously?

My advice to Microsoft is to not ship products for which you have not yet fixed “a very hard computer science problem.”

There is a workaround, though, involving making it always Hibernate rather than Sleep. Not ideal though. (Thanks @Avro105 for the link.)
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New software watches for licence plates, turning you into Little Brother » Ars Technica

Cyrus Farivar on open-source tech for automatic licence plate reading (ALPR) – known in the UK as ANPR (N for numberplate):

For the last six months, the two-man team behind OpenALPR has built this software and given it away for free, largely as a way to draw attention to their other paid services: a cloud-based $50 per camera per month solution that includes “high-speed processing” and “priority tech support.” The company also offers a $1,000 per camera per month “on-premises” version that integrates with an existing (usually government) network that has qualms about outsourcing data storage.

OpenALPR notes its software “will work with any camera that supports MJPEG streams. This includes visible-light and infrared cameras. The camera and optics should be configured such that the license plates are clearly legible in the video stream.”

Matt Hill, OpenALPR’s founder, told Ars that this is a good way to level the playing field and mitigate the need for long-term retention.

“I’m a big privacy advocate as well — now you’ve got LPR just in the hands of the government, which isn’t a good thing. This brings costs down,” he said.

On the government side, there have been incidents where police-owned LPR misread and led to dangerous confrontations. Some cities have mounted such cameras at their city borders, monitoring who comes in and out (case in point: the wealthy city of Piedmont, California, which is totally surrounded by Oakland). And again, the data associated with LPRs (plate, date, time, location) is often retained for months or years.

This feels a little like the total constant surveillance of Dave Eggers’s “The Circle”.
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HP exits low-cost tablet market in product shakeup » PCWorld

Agam Shah:

If you’re looking for a low-priced tablet from HP, you soon will not be able to find one.

HP is exiting the low-end tablet market amid declining prices and slowing demand. Instead, the company will focus on detachables, hybrids and business tablets at the higher end of the market.

“We are going to focus where there is profitability and growth and will not chase the low-end tablet market. We are focusing on business mobility to deliver tablets built for field service, education, retail and healthcare,” said Ron Coughlin, president for personal systems at HP.

HP has already stopped listing many low-end Android tablets on its website. The remaining lower-end products — the US$99 HP 7 G2 tablet and $149 HP 8 G2 tablet — have been out of stock for months, and it’s likely they won’t be available again. They are however still available through some online retailers at cut-rate prices.

The least expensive tablet on HP’s site is now the $329.99 HP Envy 8 Note tablet with Windows 10. HP has Windows on most tablets now, with only a handful running Android.

Wonder if this will become a trend. Obviously it will for enterprise sales – but might it also be the way to lure back disaffected Windows PC customers?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: China’s Uber ripoff, Microsoft’s maps and ads exit, Google v Oracle redux, and more

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Low power, but still pretty powerful. Photo licensed from Apple, I guess, on Flickr.

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

One driver explains how he is helping to rip off Uber in China » Bloomberg Business

To create a fake trip, an Uber driver has essentially two options, according to drivers interviewed by Bloomberg, who asked not to be named discussing information that may get them barred by the company.

The first is a do-it-yourself option where the driver buys a hacked smartphone that can operate with multiple phone numbers and therefore multiple Uber accounts. Drivers use one number to act as a rider and request a lift, and then accept the trip as a driver with another phone number.

A driver like Li, for example, may know that he has a legitimate fare waiting for him at the airport, but he doesn’t want to make the trip there without getting paid. He could then request a trip as a rider, let the booking show up on Uber’s GPS tracking software as his car heads to the airport and then get paid by Uber for taking a “customer” on the route.

The second option involves working with other scammers over the Internet. If a driver doesn’t have a hacked phone, he can go into one of several invitation-only online forums and request a fake fare from professional ride-bookers. These bookers are referred to as “nurses” because they use specially tailored software to put an “injection,” or location-specific ride request near the driver.

Uber acquires part of Bing’s mapping assets, will absorb around 100 Microsoft employees » TechCrunch

Alex Wilhelm:

Uber will acquire assets from Microsoft Bing, including roughly 100 employees focused on the product’s image collection activities. In short, Uber is absorbing data-collection engineers from Microsoft to bolster its own mapping work.

The companies confirmed the transaction with TechCrunch, but each declined to name the terms of the agreement. Microsoft handing Uber part of its operating expenses is minor, given the financial scale of the firms. The technology transfer is far more interesting.

Uber’s app is essentially a map with add-ons, so that it would want to pick up engineers — currently the hottest Silicon Valley commodity1 — isn’t surprising. And that Microsoft might want to shed some talent that isn’t precisely core to its larger platforms and productivity efforts doesn’t shock.

So that’s one cost centre gone (and a nice win for Uber). One shoe drops..

Microsoft said to exit display ad business, cut 1,200 jobs » Bloomberg Business

Dina Bass:

Microsoft Corp. is shutting down its Web display advertising business and handing operations over to AOL Inc. and AppNexus Inc., a person with knowledge of the matter said.

About 1,200 jobs at Microsoft will be impacted, with some positions to be moved to AOL and AppNexus, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deal hasn’t yet been announced. Some people will be offered other positions at Microsoft, while other jobs will be cut, the person said.

The software maker is shedding the business as Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella works to sharpen focus on three key areas: personal computing, cloud platforms and business productivity.

And now we wait for the other other shoe to drop. Note how these disposals have come just ahead of the end of the fiscal quarter; Nadella is cleaning house.

CVE-2015-3113 (Flash up to 18.0.0.160) and Exploit Kits » Malware don’t need Coffee

Patched four days ago (2015-06-23) with Flash 18.0.0.194, the CVE-2015-3113 has been spotted as a 0day by FireEye, exploited in limited targeted attacks.  It’s now making its path to Exploit Kits

In other words, if there’s a Flash installation on your network that hasn’t been patched in the past four days, it’s vulnerable. (In this case, to malware aiming to exploit IE11 on Windows 7.)

If you haven’t removed Flash from your computer.. why not? YouTube will work fine (it goes to HTML5).

Reddit is an incubator of hate » BuzzFeed News

Charlie Warzel, pulling no punches:

At the core of the problem is Reddit’s newfound vow to police hate only when it manifests into real-world harassment — that is, to create a distinction between ideas and behavior that doesn’t actually exist. Ideas inform and incite behavior; we see this both in the physical world and on Reddit, where the ideals and discussions of its thousands of communities are reflected in the actions — both good (raising money for a Kenyan orphanage as well as a terminally ill cancer patient) and bad (Violentacrez, r/creepshots, and The Fappening) — of its members.

What’s more, there’s credible research to suggest that right-wing extremist online communities are frequently linked to hate crimes. An April 2014 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center found that more than 100 murders have been linked to Stormfront.org, a white nationalist website and forum that first emerged in 1995. The author of the report, Heidi Beirich, told The Guardian that her research showed that online hate forums helped nurture and strengthen already formed prejudices and, in the case of Stormfront, transform them into real-world violence

Benchmarks show iPhone performance difference when iOS 9’s Low Power mode is activated » Mac Rumors

Juli Clover:

Without Low Power mode activated, an iPhone 6 Plus scored 1606 on the single-core processor test and 2891 on the multi-core processor test. When Low Power mode was turned on, the same iPhone 6 Plus scored 1019 on the single-core test and 1751 on the multi-core test, suggesting there’s a significant performance reduction when Low Power mode is enabled to save as much battery as possible.

Results were similar on an iPhone 5s, with performance reduced by about 40%. We saw single/multi-core scores of 1386/2511 without Low Power mode and scores of 816/1405 with Low Power mode turned on.

Low Power mode activates when an iPhone is at 10% or 20% battery level, providing a popup that lets users toggle it on quickly. It can also be turned on via the new Battery section of the Settings app. When it’s turned on, in addition to lowering CPU speeds, Low Power mode also disables Mail Fetch, Background App Refresh, motion effects, and animated wallpapers.

At a guess, most people won’t notice the difference in processing power of engaging Low Power, but will like the battery life difference. And iOS 9 (in my own early testing) has remarkable battery life if you don’t have the phone baseband running, ie on non-LTE iPads and phones with Airplane mode engaged but Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on (so mobile calls and data aren’t on). And it’s still only beta 2.

The secret to groovy drumming may be math » Science/AAAS

Kerry Klein:

Holger Hennig, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, and colleagues decided to analyze the technique of prolific drummer Jeff Porcaro, one of the more famous musicians most people have never heard of. For more than a decade he drummed for the band Toto, and as a session musician he kept time for an extensive list of musical icons including Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Michael Jackson, and Madonna. Porcaro died of a heart attack in 1992. Hennig and his colleagues chose to study Porcaro’s technique because the paper’s lead author, physicist Esa Räsänen of the Tampere University of Technology in Finland, is himself a drummer and admires Porcaro’s work.

As a representative sample of Porcaro’s timekeeping skills, the research team focused on the studio recording of the 1982 hit “I Keep Forgettin’ ” by singer Michael McDonald. The rapid, high-pitched tink-tink-tink-tink keeping the beat is the hi-hat, a clamshell arrangement of two small cymbals that a drummer opens and closes with a foot pedal and simultaneously strikes with a drumstick. With one hand, Porcaro hit the hi-hat four times on every beat, in subbeats known as sixteenth notes, and motored out almost 400 of them in every minute of the song.

It turns out that fractals are lurking. (Though when did he drum for Pink Floyd, exactly? I thought that was Nick Mason’s job.)

Hacker News » Premii

If you ever read Hacker News, you’ll have been frustrated by the way you have to click away to read the article, then click back (or to another tab) to read the comments on the story.

No more: now it’s in a convenient interface on Premii.

Do you trust Google to be the gatekeeper of your kids’ content? » Digital Content Next

Chris Pedigo (who is SVP of government affairs at DCN):

Google’s YouTube for Kids service is getting some attention recently from regulators and policymakers in Washington, DC. The FTC and now Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) are asking questions about how content is selected for YouTube for Kids and how Google helps young viewers understand the difference between content and advertising. It has been alleged that some content is not appropriate for children and that some advertising in or around the content may not be labeled clearly enough for children and their parents.

While Google has a history of innovation, upending old business models and creating new opportunities and experiences via the internet, their “developer mentality” of breaking things to create even better new things may not work the same when it comes to products targeted to kids.

YouTube is great if you’re an adult, a disaster area (from a parent’s point of view) if you’re a child. Dividing the world into “over 18/under 18” really doesn’t work.

Oracle v. Google Android-Java copyright case goes back to San Fran: Supreme Court denies Google petition » FOSS Patents

Florian Müller (who has followed the ins and outs of this case over the years):

Now that the Supreme Court has denied Google’s petition and appellate attorney Joshua Rosenkranz (of Orrick Herrington Sutcliffe) has once again shown why he was dubbed the “Defibrillator” (for bringing cases back to life that appeared to have been lost), the sizable litigation caravan that had gone from California to Washington DC for the appellate proceedings–where an amazing reversal of fortunes occurred, with Oracle now having the upper hand–can finally head back all the way to the West. There, “fair use” will be the topic du jour. And, provided that Oracle wins (which I’ve always believed it will), remedies. This means injunctive relief more than anything else. The strategic implications are not described accurately by portraying this as a billion-dollar case.

On this occasion I do wish to say a few things about fair use. About a year ago I explained why I ultimately concluded that Google Books probably should fall under the “fair use” exception, but Android should not. What is really the idea of “fair use”? At a philosophical level, it’s all about whether, on balance, an unauthorized use of copyrighted material does more good than harm.

It’s difficult to get a handle on this case, but Müller is fairly sure that Google is going to have to pay something – perhaps quite a large something – to Oracle. (Note: Müller acts as a consultant to Oracle, and others. But his line on this case has been consistent since before Oracle hired him.)

Sky reveals evidence of Openreach service failure and calls for market investigation » Sky

In the submission, Sky sets out details of the standard of service delivered to consumers by BT’s Openreach division, which operates and maintains the UK’s national telecoms network. The evidence highlights how a history of under-investment has led to range of service quality problems including an excessive number of network faults, failure to meet targets for repairing faults, long waits to have new lines installed, appointments that are missed and jobs that are not completed. 

Key findings from Sky’s submission include:

More than 90% of new line installations, which require an Openreach engineer to attend, take 10 calendar days or longer. Almost one in ten installations takes longer than 30 days.
• Openreach changes the agreed installation date for Sky customers on average around 36,000 times a month.
• Openreach misses over 5002 appointments each month to install new lines for Sky customers and fails to complete a further 4,000 jobs per month.
• Fault rates across Openreach’s network increased by 50% between 2009 and 2012, the last year for which reliable data is publicly available.
• Openreach’s performance in fixing faults is consistently below the targets set out in agreements with service providers.

BT Openreach is such an anomaly. The electricity grid is owned separately from power generators; the railway lines aren’t owned by the train operators. So why does the dominant landline provider get to own the company doing landline upkeep and determine its budgets?

Galaxy S6 sales to reach 45 mln units in 2015: report » Yonhap News

“Samsung continues to struggle at the low-to-mid end, while the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge combined look on course to reach a respectable 45m units this year,” EE Times said, citing a report released by Deutsche Bank.

If the sales estimate is accomplished, the Galaxy S6 will manage to catch up with the Galaxy S4, which holds the current annual sales record at 45m units.

The latest estimate, however, falls behind expectations made earlier by other market analysts.

Industry tracker DRAMeXchange had earlier estimated combined sales of 55m units for the new lineup, while Hong Kong-based researcher Counterpoint had offered a 50m sales figure for this year.

Start up: P&G’s disruptive nature, duck searching, Watch reviews, Google’s new ad chief, and more

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Disrupt this before Proctor & Gamble does. Photo by Premshree Pillai on Flickr.

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

Why Procter & Gamble is more disruptive than you » Medium

Kavin Stewart:

So how does a company of this size [>$80bn in annual revenue] stay so disruptive? P&G is dealing with constantly changing consumer needs across many product lines (many of which are customized for local markets). Instead of relying on the personal experiences of their employees, P&G borrows a page from the playbook of anthropologists — they find relevant cultural groups to study and embed their employees where they live for a period of time, participating in their day to day lives to gather holistic data:

Soon after they’re hired, new employees of P&G undergo special cultural training. “They spend a week in a low-income neighbourhood, working in a bodega, a little shop,” [Jim] Stengel [global marketing officer of P&G] says. “He [the executive] puts an apron on. He works there. He talks to the shop owner. He talks to the people who come in. He becomes part of life.”

Product managers pay a lot of lip service to knowing the customer. But how many of them would spend a week living in Mexico and working at a bodega?

You can read a longer piece about Stengel at the FT. But the lesson that big companies can self-disrupt shouldn’t be ignored.

Apple sides with Microsoft in closely watched patent dispute with Google » GeekWire

Todd Bishop:

The case has already created some unusual alliances. Apple and T-Mobile are among the companies siding with Microsoft in the case, while Nokia and Qualcomm are seeking to overturn a lower court’s ruling that found in Microsoft’s favor.

After a 2013 trial in Seattle, Microsoft won a $14.5m jury verdict against Motorola based on a finding that Motorola breached its obligation to offer its standard-essential patents for video and wireless technologies on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, known in legal circles as “RAND” or “FRAND.”

The case is notable in part because U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle took the unusual step of setting a process for establishing royalties for standard essential patents.

Based on his process, Robart ruled in April 2013 that the Microsoft owed less than $1.8m a year for its use of Motorola’s patented video and wireless technologies in Windows, Xbox and other products. Motorola had originally sought a rate amounting to more than $4bn a year, plus $20bn in back payments.

Slightly more complex than it seems, because it could debase the idea of SEPs if they’re too low-priced. But Motorola was really trying too hard. (It tried the same against Apple and was rebuffed.)

Apple releases iOS 8.3 with emoji updates, wireless CarPlay, space bar UI fix » Mac Rumors

Ton of bugs squashed, apparently. Space bar very slightly elongated. Apple Watch icon/app can now be hidden/removed, apparently. And those all-important emoji fixes.

The ascension of Google’s Sridhar Ramaswamy » The Information

Amir Efrati has a real in-depth piece about Ramaswamy (who doesn’t seem to have cooperated with it) pointing to tensions with Susan Wojicki, head of YouTube ads):

Mr. Ramaswamy viewed himself as a protector of the search-history data. In the past, he and Mr. Page and others had stated their fear that it might feel creepy if people saw banner ads on non-Google sites based on things they had searched for on Google.com. Ms. Wojcicki had long pushed Google to stay current with ad-tech industry trends, pushing the boundaries of what people like Mr. Ramaswamy were comfortable with.

In the 2013 meetings, Mr. Ramaswamy also expressed hesitation about Google search data being used to target ads to people visiting YouTube, where the DoubleClick cookie was used, because it might be visible or “leak” to advertisers that used the cookie, which might lower its value. And he feared that Ms. Wojcicki and her team would use the search data to try to improve the ad quality of non-Google sites that are part of the display-advertising “network,” which also includes YouTube.

“Tell me what you really want to do,” Mr. Ramaswamy asked Ms. Wojcicki at one meeting, looking visibly annoyed, according to one participant. “You want to use search data on the network,” including non-Google sites. “Just say it.”

Battery life: Apple’s solving for x » Six Colors

Jason Snell:

Over the years I’ve said numerous times that when it comes to battery life on iOS devices, Apple appears to have a target battery life in mind and builds its hardware—a balance of power-saving software, hardware efficiency, and battery capacity—to hit that number.

It’s an observation born out of reading spec sheet after spec sheet over the years while writing reviews of new iPhones and iPads. Every year, people who are frustrated with their iPhones running out of juice before the end of the day hold out hope that the next iPhone will ameliorate the issue. In general, those people have not been satisfied.

And here’s the graph that proves his point – though note the pop at the end:

Samsung execs briefed over user experience » Korea Times

Kim Yoo-chul:

Yonsei University Professor Cho Kwang-soo was the speaker for this week’s session. The professor said the mantra of “one person, one device” has passed.

“Today, ‘one person, multi device’ has become the main trend, meaning that one person is now being connected to multiple devices. Without understanding about human nature, you can’t develop products that can meet consumer expectations,” Cho was quoted as saying.

Samsung needs to invest more for the development of wireless charging and new mobile operating systems that allow multiple devices to activate, the professor said.

In a briefing to local reporters, chief Samsung communications officer Lee Joon said the Apple iPhone was presented as the right device that has shown remarkable advancements in user-experience design.

Not the S6?

Surface tablet shipments expected to exceed 4 million units in 2015 » Digitimes

Aaron Lee and Joseph Tsai:

Microsoft is expected to have a chance to ship over four million Surface tablets in 2015, up from two million units in 2014, because of its new Surface 3 and Surface Pro series products, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Microsoft is reportedly planning to unveil its next-generation Surface Pro 4 tablet during the upcoming Build developer conference in April. The new Surface Pro tablet is estimated to enter mass production in June and will be released along with Windows 10 in the second half of 2015, the sources said.

Apple Watch reviews are in: an ‘elegant’, overpriced gadget ‘you don’t need’ » The Guardian

Sam Thielman:

The upshot seems to be that the battery life is good, unless you’re using it as a glorified FitBit (which it kind of is), that the application loading times are very long (which Apple has promised to fix in subsequent versions) and that it’s a lovely little device, unless of course you disagree, but it’s slow, not particularly intuitive and it’s probably worth waiting for the inevitable upgrade.

There’s also a fundamentalist split between the haute horologie posse and the tech world: in the former, consumers expect a flawless device for an unspeakable amount of money. In the latter, where inconveniences and flaws are ironed out by simply iterating the product again, a new chunk of tech is often praised for the novelty of what it aspires to do. “Unlike the Cartier I got for college graduation, the original Apple Watch’s beauty will soon fade,” [Joanna] Stern [at the WSJ] observes.

The ducks are always greener » Marco.org

Marco Arment:

My principles are only diverging further from Google’s over time, and I feel a bit defeated whenever I turn to them for anything anymore, so I attacked my primary dependence head-on: web search.

In my experience so far, DuckDuckGo’s search is good enough the vast majority of the time. Sometimes, its results are even better than Google’s, and they’re rarely much worse.

The number of people moving to DuckDuckGo is growing, very slowly; they’re finding that search is a commodity.

Start up: Nintendo’s mobile money, Nest misses summer, the non-voice phone, why Tidal will fail, and more

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Carphone Warehouse: not the place to look for an Apple Watch. Photo by morebyless on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. None is a leftover April Fool’s. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

DeNA, in Nintendo pact, aims for games bringing in over $25m/month » Reuters

Japanese online game maker DeNA Co Ltd on Wednesday said it wants its new partnership with gaming giant Nintendo Co Ltd to yield titles that bring in over 3bn yen ($25.02m) a month.

The alliance, announced on March 17, will bring Nintendo characters such as Super Mario and Donkey Kong to smartphones, and see their jointly developed games available through phones and tablets as well as Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS consoles.

DeNA Chief Executive Isao Moriyasu said the partners would release their first game later this year, but was coy on which character from Nintendo’s trove of intellectual property (IP) would be featured.

“We want to create games that will be played by hundreds of millions of people,” Moriyasu told Reuters in an interview. “We want to create multiple hit games rather than aiming to succeed with just one powerful IP element.”

Ambitious, but should be feasible. Nintendo takes in roughly 25bn yen per month in software sales at present.

With the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, Samsung tries to regain its footing » NYTimes.com

Farhad Manjoo:

In the international market for phones, Samsung’s Galaxys are relatively expensive. They sell for about the same price as Apple’s latest devices, $199 and up with a two-year contract, or more than $650 without a contract. But powerful phones made by low-priced Chinese sellers, like the OnePlus One, often sell for less than half the price of high-end Samsung and Apple devices.

If you pay the premium price to Apple, you get a phone with a well-designed operating system, no overlapping preloaded apps, and a host of services that often work very well, like iMessage, Apple Pay and expanding compatibilities with Apple’s personal computers and devices like the Apple TV and, soon, the Apple Watch. You can criticize Apple’s sticky ecosystem as a form of consumer lock-in, but Apple sure has built a luxurious prison, and customers are willing to pay extra for it.

If you pay that premium to Samsung, you don’t get a whole lot more than you can get on, say, a phone made by Xiaomi, OnePlus or any of a dozen smaller players.

That, indeed, is the problem.

Voice out of vogue for UK mobile phone users » eMarketer

In December 2014 polling from multichannel solutions provider Oxygen8 Group, voice didn’t even make the top 10 list of mobile services used by mobile phone users. Communication needs are more likely being met by other data-led services. For example, according to the survey, the most popular service was messaging, cited by 90.0% of respondents. Email and social media, with respective response rates of 83.0% and 77.6%, also fared well.

Energy companies around the world infected by newly discovered malware » Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

The United Arab Emirates was the country most targeted by the attackers, followed by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Kuwait.

Computers are initially infected with Laziok through spam e-mails coming from the moneytrans[.]eu domain. The e-mails contain a malicious attachment that exploits a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that was patched in 2012. The same vulnerability has been exploited in other attack espionage campaigns, including one that used the Red October malware platform to infect diplomatic, governmental, and scientific organizations in at least 39 countries. The Laziok exploit typically came in the form of an Excel file.

Patched in 2012, but not patched. The state of security today.

Tidal and the future of music » stratechery

Ben Thompson:

even if Jay-Z and company were truly independent, they would be heavily incentivized to avoid exclusivity as well: remember that music has high fixed costs but (especially on the Internet) zero marginal costs. That means the best way to make money is to sell as many units as possible in order to spread out those fixed costs. That, by extension, means the optimal strategy for whoever owns the music is making it available in as many places as possible – the exact opposite of an exclusive.

This ultimately is why Tidal will fail: it’s nice that Jay-Z and company would prefer to garner Spotify’s (minuscule) share of streaming revenue, but there is zero reason to expect Tidal to win in the market. Tidal doesn’t have Spotify’s head-start or free tier, it doesn’t have Apple’s distribution might and bank account, and it doesn’t have any meaningful exclusives3 — and to be successful, you need a lot of exclusives; it’s too easy and guilt-free to pirate (or simply skip) one or two songs.

And now stay tuned…

Apple’s music strategy looks increasingly risky » Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

Apple’s strategy with music streaming continues to be a work in progress, but from what we know, curation and discovery will be two main tenets of a service that uses music exclusives as a carrot to entice users. In what could be a major negative, Jimmy Iovine reportedly was unable to get the cost for this music streaming service down to $5/month, with record labels demanding Apple remain steady at the “me-too” $9.99/month price. The primary problem with this chain of events is that music executives are hardly in a position to be dictating pricing and business strategy in an industry that may be fundamentally broken, yet again, by technology.

Music streaming is split into free and paid and there is risk that without a free offering, Apple may not reach enough scale to force consolidation among streaming services. A $5/monthly price was thought to alleviate some of this risk, but with Apple possibly needing to ship at $9.99/month, one has to wonder if management is pleased with how the product is shaping up.

One theme that permeates this discussion is Apple’s forced hand. With iTunes Radio, a seemingly “me-too” product compared to Pandora, Apple has seen moderate levels of success, but nothing that would jump out to an observer as ground-breaking. Apple risks a very similar fate with a paid music streaming service: garnering enough success to warrant respect with the endeavor (mostly because the bar is set so low), yet unable to capture the music industry like it was 2005 again. In essence, Apple would be stuck in catch-up mode.

Without a $5-per-month tier, the music industry is never going to break YouTube’s grip – which is essentially ad-supported streaming where the labels don’t get the same cut as they would from a paid service.

Nest confused by BST » Nest Community

Britain switched to “summer time” (equivalent to US’s Daylight Savings) at the weekend, going an hour ahead of GMT. Seems that Nest didn’t get the message:

The switch to BST seems to have confused my Nest! I have a manual schedule setup, auto schedule is disabled and the Nest didn’t come on at the new time this morning!

Only UK affected, said Nest. (Well, duh.) Puny humans and their clock-changing. (Apple was caught out for years by DST changes, which its alarms didn’t keep up with.)

IEEE waves through controversial FRAND patent policy » EE Times

John Walko, in February:

IEEE’s new standard on patents that lowers royalty fees is making some members angry.

The IEEE’s decision to approve a bitterly contested change to its patent policy, has, perhaps unsurprisingly, caused bitter divisions among its members. The revised rules would see the royalty fees large vendors have to pay reduced significantly, particularly in the wireless sector.

Compensation for a company’s IPR would now be based on a percentage of component price rather than the whole device, as is generally the norm.

Another consequence of the revised approach to royalties is a more realistic definition of what represents Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) when it comes to valuing a company’s standards-essential patents (SEP) such that the inventors get a fair return on sometimes huge investments into developing innovations, while at the same time not building barriers to entry for new products and new suppliers.

I missed this at the time; but it’s pretty dramatic. Lots of lawsuits have previously involved demands for royalties on finished products, which – if you think about it – is daft: if an essential patent only affects some tiny part of the operation of a device (eg Wi-Fi on the Xbox 360, as an example) why should Microsoft have to pay a proportion of the finished price?

This doesn’t have “non-practising entities”, aka patent trolls, pleased. Here’s Bill Merritt of Interdigital (an NPE) fulminating about it – and saying it won’t play ball.

Seems minimal, but this could have big long-term effects.

Sony Mobile aims to ship 38 million smartphones in FY2015, say sources » Digitimes

Daniel Shen and Steve Shen:

Sony Mobile Communications aims to ship 38m smartphones in fiscal 2015 (April 2015-March 2016), down slightly from 39.2m units shipped in the previous fiscal year, according to sources at Taiwan’s handset supply chain.

The lower shipment target comes as the Japan-based vendor is still overhauling its handset business and has also shifted its focus to the mid-range to high-end segment, said the sources.

Despite the absence of new orders from Sony Mobile since the fourth quarter of 2014, Taiwan’s ODMs have begun shipping some new models to the Japan-based vendor recently, including the Xperia E4 from Arima Communications, Xperia E4g from Compal Electronics and Xperia M4 Aqua from Foxconn/FIH Mobile.

Sony seems to be keeping focus on waterproofing, removable batteries and SD cards – unlike Samsung. How’s this going to play out?

Carphone Warehouse cut off from Apple Watch launch » Telegraph

Chris Williams:

Carphone’s UK chief executive, Graham Stapleton, said that the 800-strong high street chain will not be part of the launch next month.

He added: “We would love to be able to stock the Apple Watch. I’ve got to be careful what I say but I think they are just going another way with it. We have not been given the opportunity.”
Instead of selling its smartwatch thorough the same channels as the iPhone, Apple will court high-end fashion shoppers in more exclusive locations, as it charges prices as high as £13,500 for the top-of-the-range model. Window displays at Selfridges’ flagship Oxford Street store, for instance, were concealed behind Apple-branded hoardings on Tuesday in preparation for the launch.

Colour me totally unsurprised that Apple isn’t selling the Watch through CPW – which, for American readers, is like Best Buy for phones.

Start up: Zane Lowe joins Apple, Windows Phone five years on, Google closing Helpouts, and more

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Oh yeah? Well I would say it’s a terrible rating. Photo by rynsms on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Yes, I’ve tweaked the CSS for blockquote. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Zane Lowe to leave BBC Radio 1 for Apple » The Guardian

Vanessa Thorpe:

Zane Lowe, the BBC Radio 1 DJ , is leaving the network for Apple’s new iTunes radio service.

New Zealander Lowe, credited with helping to make the name of British music stars such as Arctic Monkeys, Adele and Ed Sheeran, is moving to America with his wife and two sons to work at Apple.

His final show in the prestigious evening slot will go out on 5 March. Lowe, who joined the station from XFM in 2003, said: “I want to thank everyone at Radio 1 for their support and friendship.

“The station has allowed me to share incredible music with the country’s best music fans – I’ve loved every minute of it. Exciting times lie ahead.”

This is fascinating. US readers probably won’t have any idea how influential Lowe is, but those few famous names are just an indicator – and he has continued his enthusiasm for decades. (I was listening to him when he was on London’s XFM 15 years ago, when he presented a nightly chart of new music.) Obviously, he’s going to be something to do with Beats Music as it gets rebranded.

That Apple is hiring him suggests it’s getting really serious about music content; and I hear it’s getting serious about expanding its public presence in other forms of content too.

Five years later, a full-on retreat from what made Windows Phone special » Thurrott.com

Paul Thurrott:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress on February 15, 2010. “This is really about the phones and how the consumer will react to these devices,” he said during his introductory speech, setting the stage for the first big change: Microsoft was focusing Windows Phone 7 Series on the same high-end consumer smart phone market as the iPhone, and not on the traditional business market.

“We design for life maximizers,” a Microsoft representative told me at the time. “Windows Phone 7 Series is not about information workers.”

What’s a life maximizer, you ask?

“They’re 38 years old, 76 percent of them are employed, and 73 percent are in partnered relationships,” I was told. “They do care about work email. But what’s important to this audience is not feeling overwhelmed, balancing priorities, growing personally and professionally, and living life to the fullest.”

Yes. Really. And to spare Microsoft further embarrassment, I won’t get into the “personas” they created to show how Windows Phone was going to make everyone’s life better.

An object lesson in how you should not design your product to a tightly imagined demographic. It’s a fascinating article, full of reminders of things Windows Phone used to do but has now largely given up on. I still wonder what Microsoft gets out of Windows Phone, the platform, since it’s effectively the only company making handsets for it.

Privacy error “Your connection is not private” Google chrome » YouTube

Unintentionally (on the part of the video maker) hilarious, but also depressing: he’s being told by Google Chrome that OKCupid’s SSL certificate isn’t entirely valid, and it blocks him from going there. So what does he do? He sees the problem as “my browser is mispelling it ‘https’ instead of ‘http'”, and why won’t it let him to go the site when Firefox will?

Point to bear in mind: it’s not the user who’s stupid here, it’s the people writing the error messages and associated jargon. (Though you can also make a separate determination about the user based on his videos.)

MIT uses patent from 1997 to sue Apple over chips » Gigaom

Jeff John Roberts:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a patent lawsuit against Apple and its suppliers this week, claiming that semiconductor wafers found in the company’s computers and mobile devices infringe on a patent obtained by two academics more than 15 years ago.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Boston federal court, claims that Idaho-based Micron Technology knew about a laser-cutting method described in the patent, but used it all the same when supplying DRAM semiconductor devices for products like iPhones, iPads and MacBook Airs.

The patent itself was issued to Joseph Bernstein, who is now an engineering professor in Israel, and a co-inventor, Zhihui Duan. MIT claims it controls the right to the patent, which has a 1997 filing date and was issued in 2000. The school says it’s entitled to damages and to royalties on all Apple products that contain chips using the laser method in question.

Seems that this is a lawsuit for Micron, not Apple, though MIT claims Apple commits contributory infringement by importing and selling equipment containing specific Micron products.

Apple’s Titan Car Project to Challenge Tesla » WSJ

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Mike Ramsey, following up on the FT report by Tim Bradshaw and Andy Sharman:

Apple may decide not to proceed with a car. In addition, many technologies used in an electric car, such as advanced batteries and in-car electronics, would be useful to other Apple products, including the iPhone and iPad. Apple often investigates technologies and potential products, going as far as building multiple prototypes for some things that it won’t ever sell. Any product would take several years to complete and obtain safety certifications.

But the size of the project team and some of the people assigned to it indicate that the company is serious, these people said. Apple executives have flown to Austria to meet with contract manufacturers for high-end cars including the Magna Steyr unit of Canadian auto supplier Magna International Inc.

What needs to be improved in cars? What can be improved in cars? This sets up a fascinating scenario, given Google’s semi-position in this game.

How Apple keeps the competition whipped » Tech.pinions

Steve Wildstrom (who is, happily, recovered from brain surgery):

Apple has an interest in autos, but that certainly is for developing systems for cars–support for the iPhone is already common and is likely to be expanded–but not designing or building cars. Although cars are increasingly wheeled computers, everything about their manufacture — their regulation, their sales, their ownership — is dramatically different from anything Apple knows.

The car business also violates Apple’s core move that new products should quickly be profitable. Tesla is in its fifth year and its losses are growing at about the same rate as its sales. CEO Elon Musk admits profits are still quite a distance away. Apple could afford to buy Tesla in the extremely unlikely chance Musk was interested in selling it but it simply does not fit its approach to business. Starting a new car company would be even more complex, more expensive, and less practical.

Even with the report over the weekend of Apple hiring a team with car expertise, his point about buying Tesla is an excellent one. Apple doesn’t buy lossmaking established businesses – with one exception: NeXT Computer in 1996.

Google is shutting down Google Helpouts, its expert video chat service » TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

The idea with Helpouts has been to leverage Google’s identity tools, payment technologies and online video service in order to provide web users with both free and paid advice and support sessions covering a range of topics. Today, the Helpouts website continues to work, offering sessions on topics like Photography, Parenting, Fashion and Beauty, Cooking and much more. Unfortunately for Google, much of this sort of advice is already available for free on its other video site, YouTube. While YouTube videos may not connect you with a live person in real-time, they can often give you the answers you’re looking for, and YouTube’s advertisements help the videos’ creators generate additional income.

Google’s Helpouts service has not been without its challenges on the monetization front, either. A couple of months ago, Google had to shut down paid Helpouts in the EU thanks to changing tax laws. Today, the website advises providers from the U.K. and Ireland that they may only offer free Helpouts, and EU customers may only take free Helpouts. That’s likely been a blow to the service’s ability to attract providers and consumers in these markets.

Survival: 531 days. “It hasn’t grown at the pace we expected,” Google says. Note also the first comment on Hacker News from when it launched.

October 2014: Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything » Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo in a piece from October 2014 that is very relevant in that light:

Judging by Google’s messy and often-confusing product line, it’s something the company takes to heart. Google likes to have multiple, competing products that go after the same user base. That way, if one product doesn’t work out, hopefully the other one will.

The most extreme case of this has been Google’s instant messaging solutions. At one point there were four different ways to send a text message on Android: Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, Messaging (Android’s SMS app), and Google Voice. Google Hangouts came along and eventually merged everything into a single instant messaging platform.

Mercifully, Google has a single, unified instant messaging program now, and all further IM efforts will be poured into this, right? Wrong. A report from The Economic Times of India says that Google is working on a fifth instant messaging program. This one reportedly won’t require a Google account and will be aimed at Whatsapp. In KitKat Google removed the stock SMS app and used Hangouts for SMSes, but in Lollipop it is adding back an SMS client, so soon we could potentially be back up to three texting clients. The unified Hangouts update also added a second dialer app to Android, so now there is the main Google Dialer that was introduced in KitKat and a new Hangouts Dialer that makes VOIP calls. Users went from needing IM unity, having it, then chaotically clamoring for dialer unity.

At the price of annoying and/or confusing the users, of course. Notable that it has never felt the need to A/B its front search page.

Samsung’s Microsoft deal and Cyanogen » Beyond Devices

After the rumours of that Microsoft-Samsung app deal, Jan Dawson comments:

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if at least some flavor of Cyanogen devices in future come with Microsoft apps and services where the Google ones would normally be. We won’t see Microsoft launching another Android-based line of devices, but rather an Android-based line of devices that puts Microsoft’s services and apps front and center. That, after all, is the real goal here: getting Microsoft’s services in front of as many customers as possible, integrated into the platform in a way that makes them the default options for key tasks, and which provides benefits across the platform. Windows Phone has been the only platform where that’s been true, but Cyanogen could easily become a second. Quite what Cyanogen’s current customer base would make of that is unclear, but then Cyanogen’s future depends on broadening its appeal way beyond the hackers and tinkerers who flash alternative ROMs on their Android devices, and Microsoft could be a great fit there.

Yes. Absolutely. This is a terrific solution for both Cyanogen and for Microsoft – but a looming problem for Google if Microsoft can begin to impose its services on millions of phones.

Steam Review Watch » Tumblr

” Just don’t,don’t even,just please no…DON’T BUY IT ! 🙂 ” – 999.8 hours played.

” *****DONT LET MY HOURS FOOL YOU!!**** This is probably the most terrible game of all time. ” – 239.7 hours played.

And many more reviews from the toughest (and most entitled?) audience ever. (Via @daveverwer of iOS Dev Weekly.)