Tag Archives: privacy

Start up: TSMC/Samsung chip intrigue, emoticon overcharging, is that William Shatner?, going broke with encryption

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Alternate Perspectives: photo by Randy Scott Slavin. Source: Dezeen

A selection of 10 links for you. Keep away from children. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Alternate perspectives by Randy Scott Slavin » Dezeen

New York photographer Randy Scott Slavin has joined hundreds of photographs to create distorted views of American cities and landscapes (+ slideshow).

Named Alternate Perspectives, the images present a series of panoramic views that curve around to form impossible circles.

Places depicted include the Empire State Building and Battery Park in New York, as well the region of Big Sur and the Redwood National Park in California.

As I wrongly retweeted (since deleted) a claim that one of these photographs was “a panorama produced by rolling down a hill”, it seems worth linking to this amazing set. Fabulous imagination required just to create them. (An example at the top of this post.)

What my hearing aid taught me about the future of wearables » The Atlantic

Ryan Budish:

despite initial appearances, both medical and consumer wearables share a few important goals.

Broadly speaking, both types of wearables aim to fill gaps in human capacity. As Sara Hendren aptly put it, “all technology is assistive technology.” While medical devices fill gaps created by disability or illness, consumer wearables fill gaps created by being human. For example, evolution hasn’t given us brain wi-fi, yet.

Both kinds of wearables also need to justify being attached to our bodies. This seems pretty obvious for hearing aids, but it is just as true for consumer devices. A wearable that serves as only a slightly more convenient screen for your phone is hardly reason for the average person to spend hundreds of dollars. Instead, wearables need to offer a feature that works best when in close contact with your body, like measuring heart rate or offering haptic feedback.

Also, both types of wearables need to embed themselves seamlessly into our experiences. If a wearable obstructs your experience of the real world, or is a distraction, it’s likely to end up on a shelf instead of your wrist.

There are other lessons too.

Did chip espionage, IP theft give Samsung its 14nm manufacturing lead? » ExtremeTech

TSMC argues that a former employee, Liang Mong-song, gave Samsung critical information to help it leapfrog TSMC in making its 14/16 nanometre gate process, breaking a non-compete agreement. In 2011 Liang had already been found guilty of breaching that condition:

The judge in Liang’s case clearly felt that the engineer had engaged in a bad-faith breach of his non-compete agreement given that he was forbidden to work for Samsung for an additional period of months, but the punishment was a slap on the wrist compared to the potential damage to TSMC’s core business. According to Maybank’s Kim Eng:

When comparing to a full-node migration, ie 20nm to 14nm at Samsung and Intel, TSMC’s half-node approach 16nm underperformed in cost reduction (by as much as 25% if not higher), power consumption and performance. In a very rare case, intel infamously highlighted the potential risks of TSMC’s 16nm undertaking during its Nov-13 investors’ day. After the initial round of evaluation, many customers “strongly encouraged” TSMC to enhance its 16nm technology offering.

In other words, not only did Liang possibly tap his knowledge of TSMC’s cutting-edge implementations inappropriately, he may have done so at the worst possible time (from TSMC’s perspective). Samsung has come out of nowhere to lead in foundry manufacturing, at least in the short term. Maybank’s latest report on TSMC cut the company from “Hold” to “Sell” on the strength of Samsung’s 14nm ramp. According to Liang himself, he left TSMC after he was passed over for promotion and felt his work was under-appreciated by his former employer.

Emoticons in texts can rack up huge bills » BBC News

Jane Wakefield:

The issue revolves around how the handset interprets the icons, known as emoticons or emojis.

In some cases, especially on older handsets, the emoticons are converted into MMS (multi-media service) messages, which can cost up to 40p each depending on the network.

MoneySavingExpert also found that, in some cases, users creating their own icons from full-stops, commas and brackets found they were converted into emoticons, running up the same charges.

“We have seen many complaints from our users who have racked up huge bills for sending what they thought were text messages,” Guy Anker, managing editor, told the BBC.

Paula Cochrane told the Daily Record that she had no idea that the emoticons were being charged as picture messages.

She complained to her provider EE and also plans to take her case to the Scottish ombudsman, an independent organisation that settles consumer complaints.

Amazing. But it’s the way that the carriers continue to rake in money; people on my Twitter feed have suffered this quite recently.

William Shatner: my problem with Twitter’s verified accounts » Mashable

Fantastic reporting by Lance Ulanoff, who actually took the trouble to try to contact Shatner, who had been grumbling on Twitter after Engadget’s social media manager got verified:

By the time I spoke to Shatner late Monday, he was upset that media outlets were misrepresenting his words. I offered to interview him to set the record straight. He agreed to answer questions sent via a Google Doc. What follows is unexpurgated Shatner on the controversy, Twitter, verification, TVTag, and how he uses social media.

Mashable: You’re one of the more digitally savvy celebrities/actors of your generation. What draws you to a medium like Twitter?

WS: I’m from the old studio system where there were departments of people that spoke on your behalf, giving the studio’s version of what I liked, what I do, what I like to eat, etc. So Twitter and social media is liberating for someone like me. I can speak my mind, my thoughts, my ideas and usually they don’t get filtered.

That may be a good thing or a bad thing! 😉

Shatner emerges from this as someone who has really thought deeply about what “verification” can and should mean, understands what social media is about, and is a charming and, especially, smart person. Read it and reflect.

Samsung: watch what you say in front of our TVs, they’re sending your words to third parties » Boing Boing

Part of the Samsung Smart TV EULA: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”

This is part of their speech-recognition tech, which uses third parties (whose privacy policies Samsung doesn’t make any representations about) to turn your words into text.

I dunno. It’s lovely for those who want to believe that we’re living in a world of telescreens (and indeed for the NSA, GCHQ etc this might fit) but it’s not really the “privacy” aspect that’s a concern. It’s the potential for hackers to turn on your microphone and/or camera and record it that I’d find concerning.

What you can learn from Oakland’s raw ALPR data » Electronic Frontier Foundation

The EFF got the data about where and when the Oakland police department collected licence plate data (in a sort of passive surveillance; police cars capture the data using their cameras and the time and location is fed back). So what’s done with it?

We also filed a California Public Records Act request to obtain the Oakland Police Department’s crime data for the same period. Each white dot here indicates a recorded crime. It’s not much of a shocker that ALPR use doesn’t correlate very well with crime. For example, OPD did not use ALPR surveillance in the southeast part of Oakland nearly as much as in the north, west, and central parts of Oakland, even though there seems to be just as much crime.

To see if perhaps OPD was just focusing its ALPR use in areas with high incidents of automobile-related crime, we decided to map only the auto-related crime:

The result is the same—ALPRs are clearly not being used to deter automobile-related crimes.

The conclusion? A great big shrug. It seems like data being collected in order to collect data.

Could the HoloLens be Microsoft’s iMoment? » Gigaom

Ross Rubin:

The HoloLens, unlike the iPod, is an independent device, albeit one that extends Microsoft’s Windows franchise.

So, perhaps the HoloLens is more akin to the iPhone, which shrunk down the capabilities of not the user interface of the PC. Indeed, Microsoft has positioned the HoloLens as “the next PC” although the smartphone has already claimed that mantle and Windows 8 showed that the company can get a little overzealous in labelling things “PCs.”

Nope.

My first and last time at the Crunchies » Medium

Katie Jacobs Stanton:

At the Crunchies, comedian T.J. Miller, a star of the show “Silicon Valley” (which I watch and love), threw out a bunch of playful zingers in his opening act. But then at one point, he engaged with a woman (Gabi Holzwarth) a few rows in front of me by calling her a “bitch”. She responded increduously, “Did you just call me a bitch?” He then said, “Bitch, Asians aren’t supposed to be this entitled in the U.S. … Is this bitch from Palo Alto?” The audience laughed nervously. I was so uncomfortable I wanted to leave, but of course I couldn’t given that our award was coming up.

What a mess. Plenty of women didn’t enjoy it. Then again, it’s an awards ceremony at which Uber – you know, with a billion dollars in VC backing – won the award for “best startup”. And best hardware startup award winner was… GoPro, founded in 2002, which went public earlier this year.

Sure, it’s a networking event for Silicon Valley. But couldn’t they make it less embarrassing somehow?

The world’s email encryption software relies on one guy, who is going broke » Huffington Post

Julia Angwin:

The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.

Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.

“I’m too idealistic,” he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in Germany in December. “In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up and take a straight job.” But then the Snowden news broke, and “I realized this was not the time to cancel.”

He’s earned about $25k per year since 2001. That’s not a lot.

Start up: Apple Pay in the UK?, 10m Chromecasts, the hacker whose cat betrayed him, and more

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

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

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

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

Will Hernandez:

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Hoff:

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

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

Davenport has done some weird, weird stuff there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Wagner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google sold 10 million Chromecasts last year » Korea Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start up: Apple v Samsung, Microsoft + Cyanogen, how three bits can end your privacy, and more

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You think you’re anonymous, but with three points of data you’re probably not. Photo by mripp on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Available in other colours. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Microsoft to invest in rogue Android startup Cyanogen » WSJ

Rolfe Winkler and Shira Ovide say it’s going to be a minority investor in a $70m round:

Google has frustrated manufacturers in recent years by requiring them to feature Google apps and set Google search as the default for users, in exchange for access to the search engine, YouTube, or the millions of apps in its Play Store.

Such restrictions make it harder for apps that compete with Google’s to win distribution on Android devices. For Microsoft, that means less exposure for its Bing search engine, which is up against Google search. It also could limit growth of other Microsoft software products.

Cyanogen offers an alternate version of the Android mobile operating system free of such restrictions. The 80-person company claims to have a volunteer army of 9,000 software developers working on its own version of Android.

“We’re going to take Android away from Google,” said Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s chief executive, in a brief interview last week. The next day, at an industry event sponsored by tech news service The Information, McMaster said Cyanogen had raised $100 million to date. Previously the company had disclosed that it raised $30 million of funding. The company spokeswoman declined to make McMaster available for this story.

McMaster said more than 50 million people use a version of the Cyanogen Android operating system, most of whom have installed it in place of their phone’s initial operating system.

Nokia X didn’t do it; might Cyanogen be the route for Microsoft to get its services onto AOSP?

Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata » Science

Science magazine has a special this week on data and privacy. Here, it looks at how many data points are needed to identify someone uniquely:

To provide a quantitative assessment of the likelihood of identification from financial data, we used a data set D of 3 months of credit card transactions for 1.1 million users in 10,000 shops in an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development country (Fig. 1). The data set was simply anonymized, which means that it did not contain any names, account numbers, or obvious identifiers. Each transaction was time-stamped with a resolution of 1 day and associated with one shop. Shops are distributed throughout the country, and the number of shops in a district scales with population density (r2 = 0.51, P < 0.001) (fig. S1).

How many data points for identification? Three.

In a near tie, Apple closes the gap on Samsung in the fourth quarter as worldwide smartphone shipments top 1.3bn for 2014 » IDC

Ryan Reith:

“First, at a time when average selling prices (ASPs) for smartphone are rapidly declining, Apple managed to increase its reported ASPs in the fourth quarter due to higher-cost new models. Second, the growth of iPhone sales in both the U.S., which is considered a saturated market, and China, which presents the dual challenges of strong local competitors and serious price sensitivity, were remarkable. Sustaining this growth and higher ASPs a year from now could prove challenging, but right now there is no question that Apple is leading the way.”

In 2013 IDC talked about the smartphone industry topping the 1 billion unit milestone, and while year-over-year growth did slow from 40.5% in 2013 to 27.6% in 2014, the market clearly still has legs. This past year volumes surpassed 1.3 billion units and the vendor scenario has witnessed continued shakeups. Growth is forecast to decline to the mid-teens in 2015, but opportunity exists as much of the world’s population is either not a wireless subscriber or has yet to move to a smartphone.

“That the worldwide smartphone market grew by 27.6% in 2014 is noteworthy, but it also represents a significant slowdown compared to 2013,” said Ramon Llamas, Research Manager with IDC’s Mobile Phone team. “Mature markets have become increasingly dependent on replacement purchases rather than first-time buyers, which has contributed to slower growth. In emerging markets, first-time buyers continue to provide a lot of market momentum, but the focus has shifted toward low-cost devices, creating a different dynamic for both global and local vendors.

IDC reckons Apple was 0.6m behind Samsung. Strategy Analytics reckons Samsung was ahead. Counterpoint reckons Apple was ahead. Samsung, in its results call, said it sold (maybe “shipped”) 95m handsets (including featurephones) in Q4, of which “71m to 76m” were smartphones.

You have to love the intentional inaccuracy in Samsung’s statement. It knows how many it shipped.

Samsung’s mobile profits plunge 64.2% after Apple’s iPhone 6 devastates premium Galaxy sales » Apple Insider

Yeah yeah, but this is one of the more interesting points:

Apple’s overall operating profits for the quarter were $24.2bn, up 36.9% over the year-ago quarter. That means Samsung Mobile is now earning less than 7.5% of Apple’s profits while still shipping more phone units.

Apple’s net (after tax) profits were $18bn for the quarter, provisioning $6.4 billion for tax payments. Samsung reported just $230m in income taxes, an effective tax rate of 4.5%.

Apple’s effective tax rate is 26.4%.

Strange, especially given Apple’s tax shenanigans (profits earned abroad sit in an American company offshore in Ireland: the US won’t tax them because they’re offshore, the Irish won’t tax them because they’re American) that Samsung is able to go so much lower.

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job » Medium

Andy Baio:

Two months ago, Larry Page said the company’s outgrown its 14-year-old mission statement. Its ambitions have grown, and its priorities have shifted.

Google in 2015 is focused on the present and future. Its social and mobile efforts, experiments with robotics and artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles and fiberoptics.

As it turns out, organizing the world’s information isn’t always profitable. Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren’t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn’t seem to care.

The desire to preserve the past died along with 20% time, Google Labs, and the spirit of haphazard experimentation.

Google may have dropped the ball on the past, but fortunately, someone was there to pick it up.

The Internet Archive stands at least alongside Wikipedia (and perhaps ahead of it?) as one of the great efforts of the internet.

Visa Europe to spend €200m on digital payment technologies » Finextra

Nicolas Huss, chief executive officer of Visa Europe, bills 2015 as a defining year for digital payments.

“We will further eat away at the 70% of transactions that are still settled in cash in Europe,” he says. “We will make use of the abundance of digital technology that now surrounds us to enable new digital payment solutions. And, most importantly, we will deliver an even better quality of service to retailers and consumers alike by making payment simpler, smarter and more secure than ever before.”

One could interpret that to mean that Visa is going to be a partner with Apple in introducing ApplePay in Europe in 2015.

Huawei to focus on higher-end smartphones » WSJ

“If we sold more low-end phones, we could even double our shipments…but in the low-end market there is no margin,” said Richard Yu, who heads Huawei’s consumer business group, at a briefing at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen Tuesday.

Huawei expects more than 30% of its consumer devices shipped this year will be priced above 2,000 yuan ($320), up from 18% last year.

Competition in the global smartphone market is intensifying and while Apple Inc. dominates the high-end segment globally, most vendors selling smartphones that use Google Inc.’s Android operating system are struggling to set themselves apart from rivals.

Mr. Yu said most low-cost vendors from China will likely disappear in three to five years because their business models aren’t sustainable. “There are too many brands in this industry,” he said.

Huawei is developing a habit of telling it like it is. Recall that it said there was no money to be made selling Windows Phone either.

Qualcomm falls 9% on China competition, implies lost Samsung business » Barrons.com

Qualcomm implied its chip has, indeed, missed the initial shipments of Samsung’s “Galaxy S6” flagship phone, expected out next month, which has been rumored in the last couple of weeks, without Qualcomm actually mentioning Samsung:

A shift in share among OEMs at the premium tier, which has reduced our near-term opportunity for sales of our integrated Snapdragon™ processors and has skewed our product mix towards more modem chipsets in this tier; Expectations that our Snapdragon 810 processor will not be in the upcoming design cycle of a large customer’s flagship device; and Heightened competition in China.

It feels – taken together with Samsung’s results – as though Samsung is aiming to use its own Exynos processors, in order to get the maximum use (and so profit) from its chip factories; if LG can get the 810 into a phone without trouble, as seems to be the case, Samsung probably can.

The other Chinese competition is principally from TSMC and Mediatek.

At least 30% of China-based white-box tablet vendors exit market, says report » Digitimes

As the average gross margin for China-based white-box tablet vendors/makers dropped below 5% in 2014, at least 30% of them have withdrawn from the market and shifted production to mobile power supplies, driving recorders and mobile device accessories, according to China-based National Business Daily (NBD).

White-box tablet production is concentrated in Shenzhen, southern China, and retail prices for such tablets mostly range from CNY299 (US$48.4) to CNY399, NBD said.

That’s pretty thin pickings, but suggests the low end of the market is getting cleared out.

One week of harassment on Twitter » Feminist Frequency

Anita Sarkeesian:

Ever since I began my Tropes vs Women in Video Games project, two and a half years ago, I’ve been harassed on a daily basis by irate gamers angry at my critiques of sexism in video games. It can sometimes be difficult to effectively communicate just how bad this sustained intimidation campaign really is. So I’ve taken the liberty of collecting a week’s worth of hateful messages sent to me on Twitter. The following tweets were directed at my @femfreq account between 1/20/15 and 1/26/15.

I’d really like to see an analysis that looks at when the abusive accounts were created, and what sort of use they are put to if they aren’t being abusive. There are two competing hypotheses: one, that it’s the work of a small and super-determined coterie who create abusive accounts; two, that it’s a large group of real people who are all just jerks. Hard to figure out which would be worse.