Tag Archives: programming

Start up: how to properly break the internet, the premium phone boomlet, emoji variation, and more

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Crumbling bridge

Upkeep of infrastructure probably matters more than inventing new things once you reach a certain level of complexity. Photo by BluePrince Architecture on Flickr.

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

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

Internet mapping turned a remote farm into a digital hell » Fusion

Terrific work by Kashmir Hill:

»As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when [IP mapping company] MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.

As a result, for the last 14 years, every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.

Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.

“The first call I got was [in 2011] from Connecticut,” Taylor told me by phone this week. “It was a man who was furious because his business internet was overwhelmed with emails. His customers couldn’t use their email. He said it was the fault of the address at the farm. That’s when I became aware that something was going on.”

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Something indeed was going on. MaxMind says it’s the fault of the users of its database.
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How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code » Quartz

Keith Collins:

»A man in Oakland, California, disrupted web development around the world last week by deleting 11 lines of code.

The story of how 28-year-old Azer Koçulu briefly broke the internet shows how writing software for the web has become dependent on a patchwork of code that itself relies on the benevolence of fellow programmers. When that system breaks down, as it did last week, the consequences can be vast and unpredictable.

“I think I have the right of deleting all my stuff,” Koçulu wrote on March 20 in an email that was later made public.

And then he did it.

Koçulu had been publishing code he wrote to npm, a popular service that’s widely used to find and install open-source software written in JavaScript. It has become an essential tool in web development, invoked billions of times a month, thanks to npm’s ease of use and its enormous library of free code packages contributed by the open-source community.

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Increasingly, very large structures are built on very small foundations whose solidity can’t be taken for granted. Talking of which…
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Innovation is overvalued. Maintenance often matters more » Aeon Essays

Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell, who are professors at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey:

»First, it is crucial to understand that technology is not innovation. Innovation is only a small piece of what happens with technology. This preoccupation with novelty is unfortunate because it fails to account for technologies in widespread use, and it obscures how many of the things around us are quite old. In his book, Shock of the Old (2007), the historian David Edgerton examines technology-in-use. He finds that common objects, like the electric fan and many parts of the automobile, have been virtually unchanged for a century or more. When we take this broader perspective, we can tell different stories with drastically different geographical, chronological, and sociological emphases. The stalest innovation stories focus on well-to-do white guys sitting in garages in a small region of California, but human beings in the Global South live with technologies too. Which ones? Where do they come from? How are they produced, used, repaired? Yes, novel objects preoccupy the privileged, and can generate huge profits. But the most remarkable tales of cunning, effort, and care that people direct toward technologies exist far beyond the same old anecdotes about invention and innovation.

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Terrific and thought-provoking essay: in the light of smart home systems being turned off within 18 months of being released, what price maintenance?
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Premium smartphones are booming » Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan:

»Exhibit A in the case for the high end is Huawei. A strong push for models such as the P8 meant that the average price of the Chinese company’s phones climbed 17% last year, according to IDC. Unit shipments jumped 45%, with the premium segment accounting for a significantly larger proportion of the total.

Apple’s average selling price rose more than 7% in calendar 2015, according to IDC data, with its shipment volume increasing 20%. The other major player to see gains from selling more-expensive phones was ZTE, with a 5.8% markup in price and a 20% jump in volumes. According to Counterpoint Research, the highest tier widened its share of total volume. So too did the bottom end, while the center got squeezed.

Given the gain for the cheapest models, it would be wrong to write off price cuts as a marketing strategy. Still, the price-demand dynamics for smartphones suggest that higher volumes driven by discounts may not translate to increased revenue (and will certainly squeeze profit per device). Whether you’re a Beijing-based startup or a Cupertino-based behemoth, the end-goal ought to be boosting sales and not market share.

The experience last year of Apple, Huawei and ZTE suggests that smartphones may in fact be a Giffen good – a product for which demand increases as prices rise.

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Culpan also says that Samsung has seen a tripled demand for the S7 over the figures for the S6 last year, but I think that’s an error – Counterpoint says it’s up about 30%. What also isn’t revealed is what Huawei’s and ZTE’s ASPs were in 2014 or 2015. They might be up, but are they premium? Or is that effect principally from Apple’s bigger, pricier sales?

It’s certainly counterintuitive if premium really is booming. The graphic accompanying the article suggests it is, but it could just be Apple doing better while the rest sink.

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New and improved “block user” feature in your inbox. : announcements » Reddit

»Believe it or not, we’ve actually had a “block user” feature in a basic form for quite a while, though over time its utility focused to apply to only private messages. We’ve recently updated its behavior to apply more broadly: you can now block users that reply to you in comment replies as well. Simply click the “Block User” button while viewing the reply in your inbox. From that point on, the profile of the blocked user, along with all their comments, posts, and messages, will then be completely removed from your view. You will no longer be alerted if they message you further. As before, the block is completely silent to the blocked user. Blocks can be viewed or removed on your preferences page here.

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It’s a start (and also reinforces my hypothesis that all commenting systems evolve towards the functionality that Usenet already offered in 1996). But it doesn’t stop Reddit being something of a cesspit in other regards, as this New York Times article points out. (Though Usenet was like that too.)
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Investigating the potential for miscommunication using emoji | GroupLens

»To your smartphone, an emoji is just like any other character (e.g., lower-case ‘a’, upper-case ‘B’) and needs to be rendered with a font. Since each smartphone platform (e.g., Apple, Google) has its own emoji font, the same emoji character can look quite different on different smartphone platforms. This is why when a Google Nexus owner sends [smiley emoji]  to a friend with an iPhone, the iPhone owner will actually see [slightly different smiley emoji] . This problem isn’t just limited to iPhones and Nexuses; check out all the different renderings of the single emoji character we’ve been discussing:

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Read the full paper. May include emoji. (I always thought the Apple version of this one was a sort of “forced rictus grin of embarrassment”, so apologies to anyone who saw me use it and thought I was trying to transmit hilarity.)

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How can we trust Google when it lets ads call the shots? » The Guardian

Kenny Jacobs, who is chief marketing officer of Ryanair:

»A friend of mine recently went on a first date and wanted to make a good impression. Having heard about a very reliable French place in central London that might be a romantic venue, he Googled it. At the top of the results page he found the restaurant’s website, clicked through to see pictures of happy looking couples, browsed the sample menu and used a booking form to reserve a table for two.

Date night came and when the taxi arrived at the address, the cabbie asked him which restaurant he was looking for: the one that had been there for years, or the new place across the road? Being sure he’d booked the original, the pair went into the restaurant, only to be told they had no reservation, and that they should have booked by phone.

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Jacobs (and Ryanair) still hate eDreams, which buys AdWords ads against Ryanair searches and then leads those who click through to a site that looks suspiciously like Ryanair’s – except that it charges extra.

Should Ryanair sue eDreams? It already is doing. The problem is that by putting AdWords ads above organic search results, rather than to the side, Google encourages users to click the adverts. That’s in its own interests, but not all users can perceive the difference, which is then to the users’ disadvantage. Shouldn’t the user advantage win in that case? Online ads aren’t necessarily so easy to spot as on TV (where they’re not necessarily easy to spot either).
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This dude’s fitness tracker may have just saved his life » Gizmodo

George Dvorsky:

»A 42-year-old man from New Jersey recently showed up in an emergency ward following a seizure. After looking at the data collected by his Fitbit Charge HR, the doctors decided to reset his heart rate with an electrical cardioversion. It’s the first time in history that a fitness tracker was used in this way.

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Won’t be the last, though. Full text in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
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RUN and RUN / lyrical school 【MV for Smartphone】 on Vimeo

RUN and RUN / lyrical school 【MV for Smartphone】 from RUNandRUN_lyrisch on Vimeo.

This music video has been going quietly viral in the west; it shows what an imaginative director can do by thinking about how a generation encounters music videos now – through the phone, not the TV. (You might want to watch it with the sound turned down low.)
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Birds measure magnetic fields using long-lived quantum coherence » physicsworld.com

Michael Allen:

»Long-lived spin coherence in proteins found in the eyes of migratory birds could explain how the creatures are able to navigate along the Earth’s magnetic field with extraordinary precision. This is the finding of researchers in the UK and Germany, who have created a new realistic model of cryptochrome proteins that is based on advanced simulations of nuclear and electron spins. The team also provides an explanation for how the avian magnetic compass has been optimized by evolution.

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“Spin coherence” is the tight quantum pairing of electron spins. That birds have evolved the ability to lengthen it, and then harness it to navigate makes evolution all the more amazing. If you read it in a science fiction plotline you’d think they were overreaching a bit.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none specified.

Start up: Euler programs, adblocking wars redux, Android M’s security measure,

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At last: HTML5 iPlayer on the desktop. Only a beta for now.. Photo by Julie70 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 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

(No, there aren’t any links about the new Google offerings – two phones and a tablet – because I couldn’t find any useful analysis of them beyond “they’re phones” and “it’s a tablet with a keyboard”. If you do want to know about them, try “The nine most important things from Google’s Nexus event” from The Verge.)

About » Project Euler

What is Project Euler?
Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.

Who are the problems aimed at?
The intended audience include students for whom the basic curriculum is not feeding their hunger to learn, adults whose background was not primarily mathematics but had an interest in things mathematical, and professionals who want to keep their problem solving and mathematics on the cutting edge.

The first problem should feel pretty easy if you’ve done any programming. If not, give yourself a little time to solve it. (A different sort of programmer hacked its database in August.) They’re presently up to problem 527; No.528 is up on October 3.
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IAB enters publicity, engineering war against ad blockers – Special: Advertising Week 2015 » Advertising Age

Nat Ives:

The IAB has come up with code, for example, that it said will help small publishers detect consumers who show up with ad blocking activated. “We believe this script will actually help enable them in their fight just by enabling their ability to detect,” said Scott Cunningham, senior VP at IAB and general manager of the IAB Tech Lab, at a press conference during the annual IAB Mixx conference, which coincides with Advertising Week.
Related Stories

Some publishers that see ad-blocking visitors arrive greet them with dialogue boxes encouraging a change of heart or, failing that, perhaps becoming paid subscribers. But the open architecture of many web pages has allowed ad blockers to hide even those dialogue boxes, Mr. Cunningham said. The IAB is recommending that publishers switch to more secure protocols to prevent that.

Going to war with people because they’re not your customers isn’t the way to persuade them to become your customers.
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Medium: PR Newswire revisited » Business Insider

Biz Carson:

“With this [$57m funding] round we aim to make Medium the dominant pipeline for connecting quality content and conversation,” Andy Doyle wrote. “We don’t focus on page views, unique visitors, or click metrics. We don’t litter the platform with ads that are low-quality, high-clutter.”

That part is true. There are no ugly ads that flash advertising before crashing your browser.

Instead, everyone from San Francisco’s local supervisors to the White House are publishing articles, essays, and press releases, surrounded by the same swaths of white and clean fonts. The bylines are tucked away in the top left corner.

Companies may call this “content.” A lot of it looks like advertising.

And let’s face it: Medium has become a dumping ground for a different generation’s press releases.

Seems harsh, but Carson has a point. Then again, that makes Medium a pretty good “native advertising” supplier; there’s lots of other non-advertising, desirable, readable content in there. I keep finding links to it.
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New HTML5 Player beta trial for BBC iPlayer » BBC Internet Blog

James East, product manager for media playout:

Although we’ve been using HTML5 to deliver video to iOS devices for some time, until recently we felt that the consistent experience and efficient media delivery offered by Flash outweighed the benefit of moving to HTML5 on the desktop. However, we’ve been regularly evaluating the features offered by the most popular web browsers and we’re now confident we can achieve the playback quality you’d expect from the BBC without using a third-party plugin.

To opt in, visit our HTML5 Player beta page. This will allow you to set a cookie in your browser so you can access our HTML5 player on BBC iPlayer. If you clear your cookies or switch browsers, you’ll have to return to this page to re-enter the trial. You can also visit this page if you want to opt out and return to our non-beta player.

At last. Alternatively, do what I do: uninstall Flash and invoke the “developer” option in Safari (Preferences » Advanced » “Show Develop menu in menu bar”), and when you visit the BBC and it wants Flash to play a video, change the user-agent to “iPad”. (Via Stef Pause.)
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Android Marshmallow’s best security measure is a simple date » The Verge

Russell Brandom:

Android security has always faced a daunting challenge — scrambling to get users, manufacturers, and carriers in sync — but the new Marshmallow operating system has a small feature that could make a big difference in that fight. You’ll find it in the Settings menu, a header titled “Android security patch level,” followed by a date. As of that day, your device is protected with all known Android patches.

Championed by Adrian Ludwig, Google’s head of Android security, the date represents a public bet on the industry’s ability to keep Android devices updated. “It should make it really simple for users to understand the state of the device,” Ludwig says, as part of Android’s larger push toward “making sure that security information and patch level information is available to users.”

That’s going to be a good one to watch.
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You can now turn off ads on Techdirt » Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

We’ve even been approached by multiple companies who claim to offer a form of ad blocker blocker, that will either insert new ads even when users have ad blockers, or otherwise pester users with ad blockers turned on.

This seems like the exact wrong approach. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the way the RIAA and MPAA reacted to the internet challenging their business models. Rather than listen, recognize what the public wanted and adapt, they whined, screamed about ethics and went to court. And how’s that worked out for everyone? We’ve always said that those who adapt to these challenges are likely to do better, and part of that means actually listening to your fans and helping them do what they want. So that’s what we’re doing: if you choose to disable ads, you just need to go to your preferences and click a button and that should do it.

Such a smart move. Masnick has built a strong community at Techdirt, and so offering this – while pointing out gently that it costs money to run the site, and there are ways to donate – is a terrific way forward.
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The dark, scammy history of JustFab and Fabletics » BuzzFeed News

Sapna Maheshwari:

while JustFab has revenue streams befitting a unicorn, its predecessor companies were less ethereal beasts. For more than a decade, starting at MySpace’s parent company, [Adam] Goldenberg and [Don] Ressler’s customers have frequently complained of getting tricked into recurring credit card charges and fooled by deceptive advertising and misleading promises — promises the FTC said sounded “like magic pixie dust” in a warning to consumers regarding the diet product Sensa. It made more than $300 million in sales before the federal regulator intervened.

The ugly hallmarks of those past enterprises live on in JustFab: The company and its affiliates, for all their happy customers, have often been accused of deceiving shoppers who think they’re making a single purchase into signing up for a subscription that automatically charges them each month unless they opt out within a five-day window. The sites use terms like “VIP Membership” instead of “subscription,” and JustFab and Fabletics in particular downplay the options for avoiding charges each month; cancellations require lengthy phone calls.

Ugh. Inertia marketing – such a horrible, scummy business model, and doomed to failure once customers get wise. The only question is how long that will take.
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Axel Springer buys Business Insider » Re/code

Peter Kafka:

The deal values Business Insider at $442m — we had previously told you it would peg the site’s value at $560m — but Springer already owned 9% of the company, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had previously put his own money into the company, will leave it in there. When factoring out the cash still on the books, the value comes down to $390 million. Springer will end up writing a check for $343m when the deal closes; it says Business Insider has 76 million readers and 325 employees worldwide.

However you count it, the deal sets a new mark for native digital publisher sales, previously held by the Huffington Post, which AOL acquired for $315m in 2011. While several big digital publishers have taken on financing that values their companies above Business Insider’s sale price, none of them have actually sold at those levels yet.

That’s a big vote of confidence in people carrying on reading content online. 76 million readers is substantial.
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Marissa Mayer’s take on ad blocking: ‘It hurts the Web experience’ » Digiday

Ricardo Bilton:

The Yahoo CEO told an Advertising Week audience that ads, particularly those tied to people’s interest and browsing history, actually improve the experience of using the Web rather than hurt it.

“I think that for anyone that uses their browser’s incognito mode and starts getting untargeted ads or no ads at all, the experience on the Web becomes a lot less rich. I personally think it’s a mistake to install ad blockers,” she said at an IAB event during Advertising Week in New York City on Monday. “If I have friends or family members asking if they should install them, I tell them ‘please don’t because I think that your experience on the Web will get worse’.”

As Bilton then points out, Yahoo was responsible for serving malware to millions of people through its ads for nearly a week in August. Those using adblockers will have been fine.

But, you know, tell people what they want to hear.
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Start up: Ashley Madison’s vanishing women, PC and tablet gloom, taxing sugar, and more

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Swiss watch exports – especially to China – fell in July. Why?

A selection of 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Almost none of the women in the Ashley Madison database ever used the site » Gizmodo

Annalee Newitz:

I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison…

…About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.

Top-class data journalism by Newitz. This is how you do it: get facts and hammer them into the ground. Ashley Madison increasingly looks like a game of three-card monte. CEO Noel Biderman previously trumpeted in the media that Ashley Madison had an overall 70/30 gender split — with a 1:1 male/female ratio among the under-30 set. Seems like he was flat-out lying. (Teddy Wayne, who wrote that linked GQ story, now works for the New Yorker; he clearly did well to get five women who apparently used AM to talk to him in 2013.)

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Swiss watch exports fall in July » Business Insider

Ben Moshinsky:

The Swiss-watch bubble may be about to unravel.

After years of stunning growth, in which exports more than doubled from 2000 to 2014, Swiss watchmakers had a terrible month.

China led the fall, according to export figures from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry.

Overall exports were 9.3% lower than a year earlier, at 1.9 billion Swiss francs (£1.3 billion, $1.97 billion) with the Chinese market segment dropping by more than 39%. Sales to the United Arab Emirates also tanked 29.8%.

Biggest fall? Those costing between CHF200-500 and CHF500-€3,000. (1 CHF = US$1.05.) Anyone know any watch-like products released recently around that price not coming out of Switzerland?
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Google has a secret interview process… and it landed me a job » The Hustle

Max Rosett:

Three months ago, I thought I wasn’t ready to apply for a job at Google. Google disagreed.

I was in the midst of a career transition. I had spent three years working as a management consultant and then at a startup, but I wanted to become a computer engineer. I was earning a Master’s in computer science through Georgia Tech’s online program. I knew that I was slowly developing the skills that I would need in an engineering role, but I still lacked the confidence to apply for a full-time software role.

One morning, while working on a project, I Googled “python lambda function list comprehension.” The familiar blue links appeared, and I started to look for the most relevant one.

But then something unusual happened.

The search results split and folded back to reveal a box that said “You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?”

I would find that intensely scary. I’d worry I’d either been hacked or taken hallucinogenics.
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Worldwide tablet shipments expected to decline -8.0% in 2015 while 2-in-1 devices pick up momentum, growing 86.5% » IDC

According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, tablet shipments, inclusive of 2-in-1 devices, are expected to decline -8.0% in 2015, representing a notable slowdown from IDC’s previous forecast of -3.8%. Shipments are now expected to reach 212 million with the vast majority being pure slate tablets.

The overall trajectory of the tablet market has not changed significantly over the past year and a half, but the 2-in-1 segment, also referred to as detachables, is starting to gain traction. While the 2-in-1 form factor is not new, OEMs are getting more serious about this market and as a result IDC expects the 2-in-1 segment to grow 86.5% year over year in 2015 with 14.7 million units shipped. Although this volume is far below that of the more affordable slate tablet segment, IDC believes these devices appeal to an audience seeking an alternative to pure tablets with smaller screens.

Basically, Windows picks up from interest in 2-in-1 devices. But it remains niche. (Gartner rolls 2-in-1s into its PC category; IDC calls them “tablets”.) IDC expects an “iPad Pro” and that Apple will still be the largest vendor in 2019.
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PC shipments expected to shrink through 2016 as currency devaluations and inventory constraints worsens outlook » IDC

Worldwide PC shipments are expected to fall by -8.7% in 2015 and not stabilize until 2017, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker. The latest forecast has growth declining through 2016 – which will make five years of declining shipments. Growth should resume in 2017, led by the commercial market, while consumer volume continues a small decline through the end of the forecast in 2019.

Although IDC had expected the second quarter of 2015 to be a transition period as vendors prepare for Windows 10 systems in the second half of the year, final results nonetheless shrank even more than expected due to a stubbornly large inventory of notebooks from prior quarters and severe constraints posed by the decline of major currencies relative to the US Dollar.

Hey ho. This is really going to put the squeeze on the smaller players.
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Taxing soda, saving lives » Al Jazeera America

Kate Kilpatrick:

Mexico consumes more soda per capita than any other country, and research links sugary drinks to obesity and diabetes, a leading cause of death in Mexico.

And blindness.

More than 14 million Mexicans have diabetic retinopathy, which impairs vision.

That could explain why Mexico became the first country to impose a national soda tax, which went into effect on the first day of 2014.

“It was a really big deal. A really, really big deal,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of the forthcoming book “Soda Politics: Taking On Big Soda (and Winning).”

“Generally, the taxes are considered the most radical things you can do about obesity,” said obesity expert Kelly Brownell, the dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

The tax is an excise tax (meaning it’s paid at the point of purchase) that tacks on a peso (about 6 cents) per liter to sales of sugar- or syrup-sweetened sodas, juices, energy drinks and bottled tea and coffee. It also applies to drink powders and concentrates but excludes flavored milks, diet sodas and bottled waters.

“Soda” is such an innocuous word for a useless drink whose health effects are entirely negative. Sugar taxes are long overdue. As Chris Mims says: “Soda companies are the new tobacco companies, full stop.” When will the UK and US follow suit?
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AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots: now with advertising injection » Web Policy

Jonathan Mayer found some unexpected – and unwanted – ads while at the airport:

Curious, and waiting on a delayed flight, I started poking through web source. It took little time to spot the culprit: AT&T’s wifi hotspot was tampering with HTTP traffic.

The ad injection platform appears to be a service from RaGaPa, a small startup. Their video pitch features “MONETIZE YOUR NETWORK” over cascading dollar signs. (Seriously.)

When an HTML page loads over HTTP, the hotspot makes three edits. (HTTPS traffic is immune, since it’s end-to-end secure.)

First, the hotspot adds an advertising stylesheet.

Next, it injects a backup advertisement, in case a browser doesn’t support JavaScript. It appears that the hotspot intercepts /ragapa URLs and resolves them to advertising images.

Finally, the hotspot adds a pair of scripts for controlling advertisement loading and display.

Those scripts, in turn, import advertising content from additional third-party providers.

Mayer is the person who spotted Google hacking Safari to add Doubleclick cookies back in 2012 (a case that led to a $22.5m FTC fine for Google, and ongoing court cases in the UK).

Strangely enough, when quizzed about this, AT&T said it was a test that it had just finished. What an amazing coincidence that (a) Mayer tried it, last week, just near the end of the trial (b) AT&T stopped it just after Mayer’s post was published. (Bonus: iOS 9 – coming next month – mandates HTTPS for pretty much all connections. So that’s a benefit.)
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Who are Twitter’s verified users? » Medium

Haje Jan Kamps:

The biggest proportion of Verified users are journalists and assorted media folks (news producers, anchors, TV meteorologists etc) representing almost a quarter of the verified accounts.

They’re followed by sports clubs and athletes with about 18% of the accounts, and actors & entertainers representing another 13%. Given how comprehensively musicians are represented in the top 10 lists, it was surprising to me that only about 12% of the verified accounts were musicians and music industry people.

Not that surprising, really. Also notable: verified journalists tend to have lower follower:following ratio (ie, they discuss, rather than broadcast). HMU!
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