Tag Archives: ransomware

Start up: Google kills payday ads, software kills satellite, Uber v Hollywood, Swiss watches unwind, and more

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Open data has stopped parking tickets being wrongfully handed out in New York. Photo by Instant Vantage 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.

Why aspiring Leonardo DiCaprios are now driving Ubers instead of Waiting tables • Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton:

»

My Uber driver was pulling onto the freeway, in Los Angeles, when he looked into the rearview mirror and told me he was going to let me in on a little secret.

Sitting in the backseat, I was in full-on reporter mode, asking him the rudimentary questions that have become second nature: What else did he do for a living? (Tattoo artist.) Did he drive for Lyft too? (Yes.) Then I asked him about the longest drive he had ever taken for a ride-sharing service.

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said, before detailing a multi-hour journey to another city in California.

“Wow,” I replied, stunned that anyone would hire an Uber to take them that far.

“Yep,” he said with a smirk, which led my driver to share his secret. The reason for the long trip, he explained, was that his passenger was transporting a black duffel bag full of cocaine. When I asked how he knew about this transaction, my driver explained that this particular passenger was quite forthcoming. The dealer said that he used to do the drive himself, but now Uber and Lyft had become his new method of choice for transporting narcotics. “If he was driving his own car, he could get pulled over for any number of reasons; not stopping at a light; not using a blinker; speeding,” my driver explained to me. “But if I get pulled over, the cops aren’t going to search him and I’m certainly not going to get into any trouble.”

He then told me that these ride-sharing services have inadvertently facilitated a lot of illegal behavior in Los Angeles—some of which is depicted in the driver forum Uberpeople.net. “I pick up hookers and drug dealers all the time,” my driver continued nonchalantly. “In New York City or San Francisco, a dealer can ride a bike, but in L.A., you need a car. It’s much safer to use Uber to deliver a big bag of coke.” (Spokespeople for Uber and Lyft responded by pointing me to their respective terms of service, both of which prohibit passengers from violating local laws and statutes.)

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Sure they do. This is a great read.
link to this extract

Congress warned about cybersecurity after attempted ransomware attack on House • TechCrunch

Kate Conger:

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Congressional gridlock can usually be blamed on stubborn representatives and senators. But a new string of ransomware attacks on the House of Representatives could stall legislation more effectively than party infighting or a filibuster.

In an email provided to TechCrunch, the House technology service desk warned representatives of increased ransomware attacks on the House network. The email warns that attackers are focusing their efforts on third-party email apps, like YahooMail and Gmail, and tells representatives that access to YahooMail will be blocked on House networks.

“When a user clicks on the link in the attack e-mail, the malware encrypts all files on that computer, including shared files, making them unusable until a ‘ransom’ is paid. The recent attacks have focused on using .js files attached as zip files to e-mail that appear to come from known senders,” the email notes.

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Better to attack legislators than the actual government. This is going to happen.
link to this extract

Where does America’s e-waste end up? GPS tracker tells all • PBS NewsHour

Katie Campbell and Ken Christensen:

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[Jim] Puckett’s organization [Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based e-waste watchdog], partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put 200 geolocating tracking devices inside old computers, TVs and printers. They dropped them off nationwide at donation centers, recyclers and electronic take-back programs — enterprises that advertise themselves as “green,” “sustainable,” “earth friendly” and “environmentally responsible.”

“The trackers are like miniature cell phones,” he said. “The little devices went out and spoke to us, called home regularly, saying ‘this is where I am.’”

About a third of the tracked electronics went overseas — some as far as 12,000 miles. That includes six of the 14 tracker-equipped electronics that Puckett’s group dropped off to be recycled in Washington and Oregon.

The tracked electronics ended up in Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, Canada and Kenya. Most often, they traveled across the Pacific to rural Hong Kong…

…A worker shouts from beyond the fence and Su tells him the group is shopping for used electronics. She says they want to fill a shipping container with printers to refurbish and sell in Pakistan. The door opens.

Inside, workers are dismantling LCD TVs. The ground at their feet is littered with broken white tubes. These fluorescent lamps were made to light up flat-screens. When they break they release invisible mercury vapor. Even a minuscule amount of mercury can be a neurotoxin.

The workers aren’t wearing protective face masks. One worker says he isn’t aware of the risks.

“He had no idea,” Su says, after speaking with him in Mandarin.

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link to this extract

Software update destroys $286m Japanese satellite • Hackaday

Rud Merriam:

»

The Japanese X-ray telescope Hitomi has been declared lost after it disintegrated in orbit, torn apart when spinning out of control. The cause is still under investigation but early analysis points to bad data in a software package pushed shortly after an instrument probe was extended from the rear of the satellite. JAXA, the Japanese space agency, lost $286m, three years of planned observations, and a possible additional 10 years of science research.

Hitomi, also known as ASTRO-H, successfully launched on February 17, 2016 but on March 26th catastrophe struck, leaving only pieces floating in space. JAXA, desperately worked to recover the satellite not knowing the extent of the failure. On April 28th they discontinued their efforts and are now working to determine the reasons for the failure, although a few weeks ago they did provide an analysis of the failure sequence at a press conference.

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Soon to be a plotline in a disaster movie.
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The NYPD was systematically ticketing legally parked cars for millions of dollars a year; open data just put an end to it • I Quant NY

Ben Wellington:

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New York City is a complex place to drive.  And when it comes to parking, there are plenty of rules and regulations to follow.  It’s no wonder that sometimes people get confused and end up getting their cars ticketed or towed. 

But in all of these rules, there is one thing that very few drivers seem to know. As of late 2008, in NYC you can park in front of a sidewalk pedestrian ramp, as long as it’s not connected to a crosswalk.  It’s all written up in the NYC Traffic Rules, and for more detail, take a look at this article. The local legislation making these parking spots legal was proposed by Council Member Gentile, and adopted by the Department of Transportation before it ever made it for a vote.  Though few people seem to know about the change.

Is it a problem that drivers don’t realize that there are some extra parking spots they are now allowed to park in?  Not so much.  But, I’ve got a pedestrian ramp leading to nowhere particular in the middle of my block in Brooklyn, and on occasion I have parked there.  Despite the fact that it is legal, I’ve been ticketed for parking there.  Though I get the tickets dismissed, it’s a waste of everybody’s time. And that got me wondering- How common is it for the police to give tickets to cars legally parked in front of pedestrian ramps?  It couldn’t be just me…

In the past, there was not much you could do to stop something like this. Complaining to your local precinct would at best only solve the problem locally. But thanks to NYC’s Open Data portal, I was able to look at the most common parking spots in the City where cars were ticketed for blocking pedestrian ramps.

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It wasn’t. This is the best sort of open data story. Note to London’s new mayor: no parking ticket data yet.
link to this extract

An update to our AdWords policy on lending products • Google Public Policy Blog

David Graff, director of global product policy:

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We have an extensive set of policies to keep bad ads out of our systems – in fact in 2015 alone, we disabled more than 780 million ads for reasons ranging from counterfeiting to phishing. Ads for financial services are a particular area of vigilance given how core they are to people’s livelihood and well being.

In that vein, today we’re sharing an update that will go into effect on July 13, 2016: we’re banning ads for payday loans and some related products from our ads systems. We will no longer allow ads for loans where repayment is due within 60 days of the date of issue. In the U.S., we are also banning ads for loans with an APR of 36% or higher. When reviewing our policies, research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that.

This change is designed to protect our users from deceptive or harmful financial products and will not affect companies offering loans such as Mortgages, Car Loans, Student Loans, Commercial loans, Revolving Lines of Credit (e.g. Credit Cards).

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Will this be extended to the UK? And how do you think the payday loan companies will find their way around it? Or will they just appear in organic search? (The only comment when I wrote this was from someone from “Ace Cash Express” expressing great annoyance.)
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Swiss watchmaking in March 2016: steep decline • Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry

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The deterioration in the trend of Swiss watch exports observed since July 2015 gathered pace in March. With a decline of 16.1% compared to last year their value totalled only 1.5bn francs (US$1.55bn), making these the lowest March figures since 2011. The scale of the downturn is also unusual, since we must go back to the crisis of 2009 to find rates of variation of this order.

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Gosh, that’s surprising. Wonder what could have caused that?
link to this extract

Apple Watch review, chapter 3: one year after • aBlogtoWatch

Ariel Adams:

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in my opinion, a pivotal change we have to look forward to is an always-on screen for the Apple Watch. TAG Heuer offered a low-power always-on state for their Connected watch, and while simple, the result was brilliant. The biggest weakness that the Apple Watch has is the fact that the screen is blank most of the time. Of course, there are very real and very unfixable reasons for this right now (battery life), but it prevents the “head” of the Apple Watch from having a face.

In the past, I have likened the face of a watch to a human face. Imagine looking at someone and seeing their face missing key elements like eyes, nose, and mouth. That is where all the personality and soul is conveyed, and a watch case without a face lacks a similar type of soul. The Apple Watch soul shines when the screen is activated, but I want more. I want the watch screen to be on all the time in some state, and I think that is at the heart of how to give the Apple Watch (and other smartwatches, for that matter) more personality. This is important not only for the wearer, but also other people seeing the watch on the wrist of the wearer. Above in this article, I talked about how I had a solution for giving the Apple Watch more personality. Well, it is this: not only offering an always-on state for the screen, but also allowing people to customize what you see on that screen. That is where a smartwatch can offer serious communicative value.

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Totally agree: this is what it really needs.
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Conservatives accuse Facebook of political bias • NYTimes.com

John Herrman and Mike Isaac:

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The trending feature is curated by a team of contract employees, according to two former Facebook employees who worked on it and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements. They said they considered themselves members of a newsroom-like operation, where editorial discretion was not novel but was an integral part of the process.

Any “suppression,” the former employees said, was based on perceived credibility — any articles judged by curators to be unreliable or poorly sourced, whether left-leaning or right-leaning, were avoided, though this was a personal judgment call.

The perception of Facebook as a more conventional news operation opens it to a more familiar line of criticism, which has been mounted against news organizations left and right, large and small, for decades. According to a report last year by Pew, only 17% surveyed said that technology companies had a negative influence on the country. For the news media, that number was 65% — and rising.

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One senses a little schadenfreude at the NYT (and other publications) as Facebook endures exactly the same criticism they have done for years.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: deeper inside Nest, slower smartphone sales, smaller Yahoo, ransomware spreads further, and more

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Fight!

Just another meeting between Nest and Dropcam. Creative Commons-licensed photo by Steve Liddle on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email (though you won’t see any instalments for a week, because I’ll be away). You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. There are no April Fools in this, thank God. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Please note: next week The Overspill will be on a spring break.

Service resumes on 11 April.

 

Nest revenue around $340m last year, but budget troubles ahead » Re/code

Mark Bergen with a remarkable scoop:

»Nest generated about $340m in sales last year, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. That’s an impressive figure for a company in the very nascent market of Internet-connected devices.

But it’s below the initial expectations Google had set for Nest when it bought the startup in 2014 for a whopping $3.2bn. The company’s sales performance may face even deeper scrutiny inside Google’s new parent company, Alphabet, where Nest now sits, as the hardware maker faces its most critical year ever.

Nest’s plight is a far cry from two years ago, when it was brought on as one of Google’s biggest acquisitions as a vehicle to compete with Apple in the growing smart-home market. Google also brought on CEO Tony Fadell, a former Apple exec, to inject Google with Apple’s hardware sensibility. But now its future is up in the air, as it’s clearly fallen short of those lofty expectations…

…To keep employees from leaving after the acquisition, Google created a vesting schedule that prevents Nest’s executives from cashing out their shares before a certain date — that date could come as soon as this year. In addition, according to sources, as part of the acquisition, Nest and Google agreed on a sales target for the company: $300m annually.

Two years later, Nest still could not hit that target alone — it did it only after adding sales from Dropcam, which Nest acquired for $555m six months after joining Google.

«

It’s pretty clear from the past week, starting with Reed Albergotti’s amazing piece for The Information, that there’s almost open warfare between Nest and Dropcam. The last detail, about Dropcam making up the sales number, could only have come from a senior Dropcam source who knows the revenues in some detail.

The question now is, what will Larry Page – chief executive of Alphabet, and so Nest – do?

link to this extract

 

Gartner says global smartphone sales to only grow 7 per cent in 2016

»Gartner, Inc. said global smartphone sales will for the first time exhibit single-digit growth in 2016. Global smartphone sales are estimated to reach 1.5bn units in 2016, a 7% growth from 2015. The total mobile phone market is forecast to reach 1.9bn units in 2016.

Worldwide combined shipments for devices (PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones) are expected to reach 2.4bn units in 2016, a 0.6% increase from 2015. End-user spending in constant US dollars is estimated to decline by 1.6% year on year…

…”The double-digit growth era for the global smartphone market has come to an end,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. “Historically, worsening economic conditions had negligible impact on smartphone sales and spend, but this is no longer the case. China and North America smartphone sales are on pace to be flat in 2016, exhibiting a 0.7% and 0.4% growth respectively.”

While smartphone sales will continue to grow in emerging markets, the growth will slow down. Gartner predicts that, through 2019, 150 million users will delay upgrades to smartphones in emerging Asia/Pacific, until the functionality and price combination of a low-cost smartphone becomes more desirable.

“Prices did not decline enough to drive upgrades from low-end feature phones to low-end smartphones,” said Annette Zimmermann, research director at Gartner. “Vendors were not able to reduce the price of a ‘good enough to use’ smartphone lower than $50.”

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So $50 seems to be the baseline price that smartphones can’t go below. Still, they’ll make up 79% of sales; that only leaves 400m featurephones to be sold.
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3 in 10 would consider buying an iPhone » Global Web Index

Jason Mander:

»With many seeing Apple’s more affordable iPhone SE handset as an attempt to win new customers in fast-growth markets, today we look at where the iPhone name resonates the most strongly.

Globally, it’s almost 3 in 10 internet users who say they would consider purchasing an iPhone – putting Apple at the top of the table, just ahead of Samsung on 24%.

But split this by country and it’s clear that the iPhone has its biggest appeal in emerging markets. Although as many as 25% in places like the UK and USA as well as 20% in Japan would consider getting one, fast-growth markets occupy 14 of the top 15 slots (including China and India, which are particularly key given their booming numbers of internet users).

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“Would consider” is a long way from “will buy” which is some distance from “bought”. But it shows Apple’s power as an aspirational brand that it’s emerging markets where people want it.
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Security researchers warn of server-attacking ransomware » Computer Weekly

Warwick Ashford:

»As a growing number of US hospitals report ransomware attacks, researchers are warning of a new strain of ransomware targeting the healthcare sector that attacks servers in order to lock up entire networks.

Unlike most other malware that encrypts data and demands ransom for its release, the Samas strain of ransomware does not rely on user-focused attack vectors such as phishing emails.

Instead, Samas – also known as Samsam and MSIL.B/C – is distributed by compromising servers and using them to move laterally through networks to encrypt and hold multiple data sets to ransom.

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Interesting evolution of this malware: clearly it has staying power.
link to this extract

 

Web scraping to create open data » The Scrapinghub Blog

Lluis Esquerda:

»When I started this project, I sought to make a difference in Barcelona. Now you can find tons of bike sharing apps that use our API on all major platforms. It doesn’t matter that these are not our own apps. They are solving the same problem we were trying to fix, so their success is our success.

Besides popular apps like Moovit or CityMapper, there are many neat projects out there, some of which are published under free software licenses. Ideally, a city council could create a customization of any of these apps for their own use.

Most official applications for bike sharing systems have terrible ratings. The core business of transportation companies is running a service, so they have no real motivation to create an engaging UI or innovate further. In some cases, the city council does not even own the rights to the data, being completely at the mercy of the company providing the transportation service.

When providing public services, city councils and companies often get lost in what they should offer as an aid to the service. They focus on a nice map or a flashy application, rather than providing the data behind these service aids. Maps, apps, and websites have a limited focus and usually serve a single purpose. On the other hand, data is malleable and the purest form of representation. While you can’t create something new from looking and playing with a static map (except, of course, if you scrape it), data can be used to create countless different iterations, help with research. It can even provide a bridge that will allow anyone to participate, improve and build on top of these aids to public services.

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link to this extract

 

Report: Yahoo’s ad revenue to drop 14 percent this year » Digiday

Jordan Valinsky:

»Yahoo’s ad revenues are forecasted to drop 14% this year while its competitors, including Google and Facebook, are expected to grow.

According to a new eMarketer report on ad spending, Yahoo’s global ad revenues will dip to $2.8 billion this year, down from $3.3bn last year. Its overall share of the ad market will shrink from 2.1% to 1.5%.

That’s more bad news for the Marissa Mayer-led company. In an attempt to cut $400m, Yahoo announced last month that it’s in the process of shuttering offices, slashing 15% of its workforce and is backing away from its once-ambitious content efforts by closing down a number of its verticals, like Travel and Autos. All of this is happening while rumors swirl that Yahoo is considering selling itself.

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Yahoo is the BlackBerry of the online ad business.
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Why I got rid of Adblock Plus » David Hewson

Hewson is a novelist and journalist:

»Ad blockers take away important revenue streams from companies that need them. Only last week the Independent, where I worked during its launch thirty years ago, shut up shop as a print title. I don’t suggest for one moment it would have survived if ad blockers didn’t exist. But it might have done a little better. The Guardian now, like more and more titles, nags you to turn off its ad blocker these days. Given the phenomenal losses it’s incurring — £53m last year — who can blame it? If things don’t turn round it could be the next to go — and what a loss that would be.

So turning off the ad blocker pays a little towards the news I read for free and I’m happy to go along with that idea. But something else changed my mind too, and it was, oddly enough, a speech by the Culture Secretary, John Whittingdale, in which he described ad-blocking as ‘a modern-day protection racket’. Nor is he the only one to think this.

«

Whittingdale’s ire was actually aimed at Eyeo (purveyor of Adblock Plus); there are however other adblocking solutions which don’t use Eyeo’s systems. The problems at The Guardian and The Independent aren’t caused by adblocking, though.
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Where’s the lane? Self-driving cars confused by shabby U.S. roadways » Reuters

Alexandria Sage:

»Volvo’s North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker’s semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

“It can’t find the lane markings!” Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. “You need to paint the bloody roads here!”

Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the mundane issue of faded lane markings “crazy,” complaining they confused his semi-autonomous cars.

An estimated 65% of U.S. roads are in poor condition, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, with the transportation infrastructure system rated 12th in the World Economic Forum’s 2014-2015 global competitiveness report.

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Make America Navigable By Autonomous Cars Agai.. um, For The First Time.
link to this extract

 

Citymapper launches seamless routing between cabs and public transit » TechCrunch

Mike Butcher:

»Citymapper is making a significant change to its routing app with the news that it has added what it is calling a “SuperRouter” capability. This effectively combines public transit with cabs to create completely new integrated routes. In simple terms, it means you could ask Citymapper’s app to come up with a route, and it would give you options both a cab service like Uber and a train or tram in a fully integrated route, with all the timetables. That could be transformational for people in cities, and something no other platform has tried to date, as far as we know. The change will apply to every city Citymapper is launched in right now, which includes New York, San Francisco, LA, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Tokyo and many other global cities.

In normal circumstances it’s basically impossible to plan a journey across public and private car transport. That leads to what you might call unfair discrimination between these transport modes. But in the 21st century, where private cars can be tracked on a map, there is simply no reason for this separation to exist.

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None at all! Except that it’s difficult.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Oracle’s $9.3bn Android, FOI v Land Registry, have a robot bin!, longer smartphone life, and more

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Thrill to the arrival of Oculus Rift and the brave new possibilities it enables! Photo by Mike Cogh 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.

Oracle v Google: Big Red wants $9.3bn in Java copyright damages » The Register

Chris Williams:

»Last year, Oracle successfully argued that it can copyright software interfaces – not just the software itself, the way it interfaces with other code, too. However, the trial jury deadlocked on whether or not Android’s infringement of Oracle’s copyright constituted “fair use.”

The case is heading back to trial in May to effectively work out how much money Google owes Oracle. In the meantime, the pair have been squaring up to each other in San Francisco’s federal court. In January, Oracle revealed that Google has made $31bn in sales and $22bn in profit from Android since it launched in 2008 – figures Google fought fiercely to keep secret.

Now one of Oracle’s expert witnesses, James Malackowski, has produced an analysis [PDF] that concludes that Big Red is owed $475m in damages and up to $8.89bn in recovered Android profits. Malackowski is chief exec of Ocean Tomo, which does intellectual property valuations among other things.

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That’s a lot of money. (Surprise! Google says the analysis is wrong.)
link to this extract

 

Unable to open links in Safari, Mail or Messages on IOS 9.3 » Ben Collier

Collier was using booking.com’s app, which turned out to have screwed up in a big way:

»A lot of users (including myself and a few friends) are experiencing links in Mail and Messages not working, and some links in Safari, like Google Search results, not opening. A long press on a broken link causes the app you’re in to crash, otherwise a standard tap highlights the link but nothing happens.. It looks like there’s a bug in iOS that completely breaks the Universal Links if it gets served an app association file that’s too large.

Benjamin Mayo of 9to5mac.com reported installing the Booking.com app consistently broke their test devices – which led Steve Troughton-Smith (who else…) to take a peep at their association file, and tweet:

“Wow http://booking.com literally put every URL they had into their site association file. 2.3MB download ”

It seems that the large size of their file, due to it having every URL from their website inside it breaks the iOS database on the device. Apple allows you to have pattern based matching, so instead of having to include every hotel’s URL in the association file, Booking.com could just put /hotel/* to match all the hotels on their site.

Whilst Booking.com aren’t following the recommended approach, it’s not their fault that a third-party can break a fundamental system feature like web browsing. Apple should be handling these edges graciously.

The worst part – deleting the app doesn’t clear the Universal Link association. Because the OS process that handles the Universal Links has crashed, it appears unable to remove the corrupt database.

«

You can just about fix it via lots of subtle rebooting and deleting. Quite a screwup.
link to this extract

 

Oculus Rift review: a clunky portal to a promising virtual reality » The New York Times

Brian Chen:

»“People who try it say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post when he announced the Oculus acquisition. “But this is just the start. Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”

Over the past week, I tested the Rift and many pieces of content for the system to see how true Mr. Zuckerberg’s words might ring. I can report that while the Rift is a well-built hardware system brimming with potential, the first wave of apps and games available for it narrows the device’s likely users to hard-core gamers. It is also rougher to set up and get accustomed to than products like smartphones and tablets.

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Long setup, big downloads which can’t be done simultaneously with device use, and games where the VR benefits are unclear. Early days yet.
link to this extract

 

A quick look at the Private Eye FOI’d “Offshore Landowners” data from the Land Registry » OUseful.Info

Tony Hirst:

»A few days ago, Private Eye popped up a link to the (not open) data they’d FOId from the Land Registry around land registry applications made by offshore companies: Selling England (and Wales) by the pound.

I thought have have a quick look at the data to see what sorts of thing it contained. I’ve popped a quick introductory conversation with it here: Private Eye – UK Land Ownership By Offshore Companies.

One of the things I learned was that solar panel installation companies can often get a hold on you…

«

This is precisely the sort of analysis, driven partly through FOIA, that would become impossible if the Land Registry were to be privatised.
link to this extract

 

What does your reaction to a robotic trash can say about you? » Atlas Obscura

Cara Giamo:

»Imagine you’re in a cafeteria, finishing up a bag of chips and chatting with some friends. You’re beginning to think about getting up to throw away your wrapper, when—suddenly—the nearest trash barrel approaches you instead. It rolls back and forth, and wiggles briefly. It is, it seems, at your service.

How do you respond?

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Like this:

»

The trash barrel has delivered some particularly unique insights. First of all, Sirkin and Ju say, it highlights how good people are at subtly refusing to acknowledge interactions they don’t want or need—a behavior the team has dubbed “unteracting.” If the trash barrel approaches a table of people, and they have no trash to give it, they generally won’t shoo it off. They’ll just steadfastly ignore it until it rolls away again. “They’re using their gaze as a tool for deciding when they’re engaging or not,” says Ju. (You can see this about halfway through the video, when a man on a cell phone refuses to look at the barrel until it backs off.)

On the other hand, people who did make use of the barrel felt miffed when it didn’t respond more. “People kind of expected it to thank them,” says Sirkin. “They’ll say ‘I fed the robot, and it didn’t thank me, and that was insulting.’” Some would also whistle for it, or dangle trash in front of it enticingly.

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link to this extract

 

Alphabet: the thriving cult of greed and evaluation » Medium

Jake Hamby:

»In Google, employees are evaluated every year according to an opaque “perf” system that generates numeric scores that the employee is not allowed to see or to challenge. If an employee’s perf isn’t improving, they face “Performance Expectation Plans” and “Performance Improvement Plans” of increasing severity, which the employee is told are designed to bring them back into the fold, but which are actually designed to create a paper trail for HR in order to terminate the individual’s employment if management determines they are no longer worth the amount it costs the company to continue to employ them.

The problem with companies like Google is that they’re losing engineers at every level of the company because it’s simply no longer fun to work there, or at least that was my experience. I was punished by my manager for lower “perf” than he expected from me, due to my complete loss of interest in the real overarching goals of Android (to provide a minimal platform for Google’s closed-source, proprietary apps) as opposed to the goals presented to the public and Google’s partners (to provide an exceptional platform for Google’s partners to make great smartphones), and to my depression over the recent loss of my father after his multi-year battle with dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

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Hamby left Google in 2014.
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What you should (and shouldn’t) do to extend your phone’s battery life » The Wirecutter

Dan Frakes, Nick Guy and Kevin Purdy:

»One of the biggest complaints people have about their smartphone is that the battery doesn’t last long enough. For many people, just making it through the day can be a challenge, which is why you see so many “How to make your phone’s battery last longer!” articles in your friends’ Facebook feeds. But many of the claims in those articles are specious at best, and some of the tricks they suggest could actually shorten your battery life. So which ones should you try?

We partnered with The New York Times to find the answer by testing, on both Android and iPhone smartphones, a slew of procedures that people, publications, and — in some cases — smartphone manufacturers suggest for getting more use time out of your phone.

«

Some of these are really surprising – like not bothering to turn off Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to save battery.
link to this extract

 

“Internet Connection Records”: answering the wrong question? » Paul Bernal’s Blog

On the topic of the UK government’s proposed Investigatory Powers Bill, which wants to introduce an “internet connection record” that could be queried for any person:

»The real problem is a deep one – but it is mostly about asking the wrong question. Internet Connection Records seem to be an attempt to answer the question ‘how can we recreate that really useful thing, the itemised phone bill, for the internet age’? And, from most accounts, it seems clear that the real experts, the people who work in the internet industry, weren’t really consulted until very late in the day, and then were only asked that question. It’s the wrong question. If you ask the wrong question, even if the answer is ‘right’, it’s still wrong. That’s why we have the mess that is the Internet Connection Record system: an intrusive, expensive, technically difficult and likely to be supremely ineffective idea.

The question that should have been asked is really the one that the Minister asked right at the start: how can we find all these terrorists and paedophiles when they’re using all this high tech stuff? It’s a question that should have been asked of the industry, of computer scientists, of academics, of civil society, of hackers and more. It should have been asked openly, consulted upon widely, and given the time and energy that it deserved. It is a very difficult question – I certainly don’t have an answer – but rather than try to shoe-horn an old idea into a new situation, it needs to be asked.

«

link to this extract

 

AI’s biggest mystery is the ethics board Google set up after buying DeepMind » Business Insider

Sam Shead:

»DeepMind CEO and cofounder Demis Hassabis has confirmed at a number of conferences that Google’s AI ethics board exists. But neither Hassabis nor Google have ever disclosed the individuals on the board or gone into any great detail on what the board does.

Azeem Azhar, a tech entrepreneur, startup advisor, and author of the Exponential View newsletter, told Business Insider: “It’s super important [to talk about ethics in AI]. ”

Media and academics have called on DeepMind and Google to reveal who sits on Google’s AI ethics board so the debate about where the technology they’re developing can be carried out in the open, but so far Google and DeepMind’s cofounders have refused.

It’s generally accepted that Google’s AI ethics board can only be a good thing but ethicists like Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, have questioned whether Google should be more transparent about who is on the board and what they’re doing.

«

link to this extract

 

Ransomware’s aftermath can be more costly than ransom » TechNewsWorld

John Mello:

»Downtime caused by a ransomware attack can cost a company more than paying a ransom to recover data encrypted by the malware, according to a report released last week by Intermedia.

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of companies infected with ransomware could not access their data for at least two days because of the incident, and 32% couldn’t access their data for five days or more, according to the report, which was based on a survey of some 300 IT consultants.

“If you’ve got a large number of users and downtime runs into multiple days, then the cost of that downtime adds up pretty quickly to the kind of ransom amounts that cybercriminals are demanding potentially,” said Richard Walters, senior vice president of security products at Intermedia.

Those losses occur even if a company has taken precautions to back up its data. “You have to contain the infected systems, then wipe them completely and then restore them,” he told TechNewsWorld. “That process in more than half these cases took longer than two days.”

Companies faced with the decision between paying a ransom or restoring their systems from backups could find that it would cost them less to pay the ransom.

«

You can see how a pricing mechanism would take hold if the ransom was too high or too low. In which case, there must be an optimum ransom at which income is maximised, even though it’s too high for some companies. A case study for an academic somewhere, surely.
link to this extract

 

Certified Ethical Hacker website caught spreading crypto ransomware » Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»EC-Council, the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based professional organization that administers the Certified Ethical Hacker program, started spreading the scourge on Monday. Shortly afterward, researchers from security firm Fox IT notified EC-Council officials that one of their subdomains—which just happens to provide online training for computer security students—had come under the spell of Angler, a toolkit sold online that provides powerful Web drive-by exploits. On Thursday, after receiving no reply and still detecting that the site was infected, Fox IT published this blog post, apparently under the reasonable belief that when attempts to privately inform the company fail, it’s reasonable to go public.

Like so many drive-by attack campaigns, the one hitting the EC-Council is designed to be vexingly hard for researchers to replicate. It targets only visitors using Internet Explorer and then only when they come to the site from Google, Bing, or another search engine. Even when these conditions are met, people from certain IP addresses—say those in certain geographic locales—are also spared. The EC-Council pages of those who aren’t spared then receive embedded code that redirects the browser to a chain of malicious domains that host the Angler exploits.

«

link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: the ad deception, why your Wi-Fi is lousy, will Android OEMs follow the iPhone SE?, and more

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Maybe this is the way that you crack an iPhone passcode. Graphic by inju on Flickr.

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My take on FBI’s “alternative” method » Zdziarski’s Blog of Things

Jonathan Zdziarski:

»Many firms have outright denied that they are the one, however there are at least a few firms that are not denying it, or not talking at all. The one that is the most tight lipped is, of course, the one people are paying the most attention to. I’m not at liberty to specify who, but you can count on reporters to be banging on doors in the middle of the night for this kind of information.

Speaking of middle-of-the-night, the brief was dated for Sunday, suggesting perhaps it was put together Sunday night. No forensics companies in the US are likely up and working at that hour, which seems to at least hint that it’s possible this company may be based overseas, where it would’ve been Monday morning. This is speculation, however worth investigating as a number of such DOJ contractors are based overseas.

We also know, based on the submitted court brief today, that FBI believes two weeks will be sufficient time for them to test and verify the soundness of this alternative technique. This tells us two things: 1. Whatever technique is being used likely isn’t highly experimental (or it’d take more time), and 2. Chances are the technique has been developed over the past several weeks that this case has been going on.

So what technology could be developed and reliably tested within say, roughly a month?

«

Quite a complicated but potentially effective one, it turns out.
link to this extract

 

How Spotify solved for the ‘paradox of choice’ » Medium

John McDermott:

»Discover Weekly creates playlists by analyzing a user’s listening behavior and comparing it to that of other like-minded users. Let’s say you’ve been listening to lots of Gary Clark, Jr. lately, for instance. Discover will find other Gary Clark, Jr. fans and identify the songs and artists they’ve recently added to their personal playlists (e.g. The Black Keys, “Them Shoes,” Heartless Bastards). Discover filters out the artists you’ve already heard, reducing the list to 30 songs (about two hours worth of music).

Perhaps the biggest key to Discover Weekly’s success has been this limited selection. “[30 songs] felt like a very digestible amount of music and that really made a difference,” Ogle says. “We also decided that it should feel special — kind of like a gift someone made for you.”

Discover is in stark contrast to Pandora’s exhaustive taxonomy process (known as the Music Genome Project): Each song is ascribed up to 450 distinct musical characteristics — such as “electric rock instrumentation,” “punk influences” and “minor key tonality” — and Pandora recommends songs that share characteristics. But Spotify’s relies on the hivemind of its users rather than a thorough dissection of each song’s elements.

«

I thought that Apple would take this approach in Apple Music; it has so much data already from the Genius system.
link to this extract

 

PC World’s cloudy backup failed when exposed to ransomware » The Register

John Leyden:

»The shortcomings of consumer-grade backup services in protecting against the scourge of ransomware have been exposed by the experiences of a UK businesswoman.

Amy W, who runs a small business in the Newbury, Berkshire area, was convinced that the KnowHow cloud was the only backup technology she’d ever need1 when she bought a laptop from PC World.

Eight months later, however, in the aftermath of a ransomware infection, Amy discovered that the KnowHow cloud backed up all her newly encrypted files and didn’t keep any revisions, leaving her unable to restore files from a historic clean backup.

PC World told El Reg that 30 days of historic backups should have been available through KnowHow cloud but this is contradicted by the victim herself, who said only two backup points, each from the same day she was infected with the CryptoWall ransomware, were available.

«

Oops.
link to this extract

 

This is Android N’s freeform window mode » Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»We’ll get to the instructions, but first let’s talk about what’s actually here. Freeform window mode is just what we imagined. It’s a dead ringer for Remix OS—multiple Android apps floating around inside windows—and it might be the beginnings of a desktop operating system. It works on Android N phones and tablets, and once the mode is enabled, you’ll see an extra button on thumbnails in the Recent Apps screen. To the left of the “X” button that pops up after a second or two, there will be a square shape—the same ugly placeholder art Google used for the split screen mode in the Android M Developer Preview.

Press the square symbol for an app and you’ll be whisked away to a screen showing that app in a floating window that sits on top of your home screen wallpaper. The windows aren’t floating above the Android desktop; the background is just a blank wallpaper without any of your icons or widgets. The floating apps all have title bars like in Recent Apps. You can drag the apps around by the title bars or use the “close” and “maximize” buttons. Apps can be resized exactly how you would expect—press or hold on the edge and move your finger, and you’ll see the app change shape.

«

The picture accompanying this article perfectly fits ex-Microsoft manager (and now Microsoft analyst) Wes Miller’s description: “Every mobile operating system evolves to the point that it looks like Windows 3.1”.
link to this extract

 

Deception funds your online news » Medium

Rob Leathern:

»The aforementioned [junk] ad I saw was distributed by a company called Revcontent, on the news website International Business Times (ibtimes.com). You’d never fall for this clearly-fake site. But someone would, and does, otherwise this tactic wouldn’t still be showing up, 9+ months later after (presumably) someone else got shut down trying it. This deception increases conversion rates on these offers, and helps companies like Revcontent pay publishers “between $3 and $40 RPMs” (Revenue per thousand impressions). Sad to say, these numbers are a good return for websites’ online advertising in today’s climate. Buying online ads is far too easy, it seems.

I wouldn’t fall for it, so why should I care?

The most vulnerable among us are falling for these offers. They’re the ones spending hours on the phone in endless phone trees or with credit card companies trying to reverse a ‘free-trial’ that became an $87-a-month recurring charge.

In essence, these people are paying for the free news and content you consume. Every time you don’t become the victim of one of these fraudulent ads, you’re benefiting from someone else who isn’t as lucky. Lucky? I mean smart — they’re just not as smart as you knowing to avoid these things, right? Hmmmm. As a society, we should care.

«

link to this extract

 

Why your home Wi-Fi is lousy » WSJ

Christopher Mims notes that home Wi-Fi networks increasingly have to struggle with the “noise” from others, and growing demands from streaming and more devices:

»One solution would be to add more antennas, or nodes, throughout your home. Unfortunately, Eero’s units currently cost $200 a pop.

A new competitor announcing itself on Monday, called Plume, has gathered wireless-industry veterans to create what it claims is a new kind of Wi-Fi, protected by 14 patents. The company calls it “adaptive Wi-Fi.”

Fahri Diner, CEO of Plume and a veteran executive of Siemens and Qtera, says Plume’s system will consist of many cheap, “dumb” antennas, enough for every room of a house, for a total cost of about $100.

If Plume can do that, it would be enough to make a wireless-networking geek swoon. But we won’t know for a while, because the company doesn’t plan to unveil its product or partners until the third quarter of this year.

Essentially, Plume and most of its rivals aim to take the technology behind expensive, enterprise-grade Wi-Fi systems for offices and make it cheap enough to use in your home.

«

link to this extract

 

The absolute horror of WiFi light switches » Terence Eden’s Blog

Eden bought a cheap Wi-Fi light switch originating in China which runs, of course, on Android and has an Android app which, let’s see, wants to take pictures, directly call phone numbers, read your contacts, record audio, read your texts, read your USB storage..

»Those are some ridiculously scary permissions! I can understand wanting microphone access (voice control) and maybe GPS (turn lights on when I get home) – but why does this want to send SMS or place calls? Why does it need my contacts and the ability to take photos?

A quick virus scan showed nothing overtly malicious – but I decided to offer up a sacrificial tablet to run the app on. No way am I risking my main device with this software!

The software is of the usual sub-standard quality I’ve come to expect from cheap electronics. No set-up wizard, just dumped into a complicated screen.

«

Oh, did we mention that it also connects to a fixed IP in China and sends the light switch’s ID number to it, listening for.. something? Eden concludes:

»I’m guessing, with a small amount of effort, you could toggle strangers’ lights to your heart’s content.

«

This probably reminds you of those Android hotel light switches from last week.
link to this extract

 

August 1997: how UK TV covered the death of Diana, Princess of Wales » MHP Redux

“VM_Phil“:

»As most of the world now knows, Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car crash in Paris in the early hours of Sunday, 31st August 1997. This page shows highlights of how the British television and radio services covered the immediate news that Sunday, with particular emphasis on the BBC TV news coverage.

«

What makes this worth looking at, on the day after the Brussels killings, is the way that TV and radio were effectively the only way for this news to spread. And it was for the most part really accurate.

Now imagine what it would be like today: all over social media, photos from the crash, all manner of craziness. I was working on The Independent at the time; everyone who could came in on the Sunday to work on a special. (I used the search engine AltaVista to find an expert in survivability of car crashes if you are and are not wearing a seatbelt in the back; there was no Google then. He lived in the US. I was the first to tell him the news.)

Now wonder how 9/11 would have been covered if today’s social media and connectivity were available. Different, yes, but better? Worse?
link to this extract

 

Editorial: The iPhone SE is the good small phone that could finally create good small Android phones » Android Police

David Ruddock:

»When it comes to Android smartphones, you don’t have much shopping around to do if you even want a device under 5″ at the moment. In the US, I can think of a single Android phone under 5″ that is officially distributed here that I’d want – the Moto E is a bit old at this point, and the Idol 3 is stuck on Android 5.0, probably forever. Samsung’s A-series isn’t sold here, and so Sony’s Z5 Compact ($429.99 on Amazon at the moment!) is literally the only viable option I’d have.

And along comes the iPhone SE. There had been some suspicion this would just be a slightly upgraded iPhone 5S – things would be changed where necessary to keep the device modern. Nope. It’s basically an iPhone 6s stuffed into a 5S chassis. Which is exactly what so many people on the internet seem to be absolutely screaming for Android OEMs to make: a flagship phone, downsized. Dramatically. The iPhone SE has the same processor as the 6s, the same camera (downgraded FFC, though), Touch ID, Apple Pay, the same sensors, and Apple even estimates it gets substantially better battery life than the standard 6s, likely owed to a reduced display resolution (granted, no 3D touch and reduced contrast ratio are trade-offs). For $399, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal. And the iPhone SE really has no direct analogs in current Android phones, just phones that are sold at a similar price.

«

Sony tried, but simply didn’t get the uptake for its 4″ phones. I doubt whether anyone but Apple can make it work, and even Apple is going to struggle to make this an expanding market – the number of 4″ phones sold shrank in the past year.
link to this extract

 

Apple in “advanced talks” to acquire Imagination Technologies for PowerVR GPU » Ars Technica UK

Sebastian Anthony:

»Apple is in “advanced talks” to acquire British chip design company Imagination Technologies, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions. When Ars sought comment, Imagination Technologies refused to deny any such planned takeover.

«

Apple, however, did say later in the day that it was not planning to buy Imagination “at this time”. (Imagination’s customers for its PowerVR chips include Samsung and Intel, both key suppliers to Apple.)
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: the iCloud celeb hack, a Chinese ransom?, the real terrorist phone, Trump as Berlusconi, and more

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“Hey, Miss Lawrence! My name’s iCloud! What’s your password?” Photo by YourWay Magazine on Flickr.

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The disturbingly simple way dozens of celebrities had their nude photos stolen » Fusion

Kashmir Hill:

»According to court documents, Collins gained access to the intimate images of nude celebrities via a disturbingly simple technique: phishing.

Though many people assumed that the hacker took advantage of an iCloud vulnerability to brute-force his way into the celebrities’ accounts, the government makes no mention of that. Instead, it says that Collins hacked over 100 people by sending emails that looked like they came from Apple and Google, such as “e-mail.protection318@icloud.com,” “noreply_helpdesk0118@outlook.com,” and “secure.helpdesk0019@gmail.com.” According to the government, Collins asked for his victims’ iCloud or Gmail usernames and passwords and “because of the victims’ belief that the email had come from their [Internet Service Providers], numerous victims responded by giving [them].”

Celebrities really need better computer security advisers. If a dedicated enough attacker comes at you, it’s hard to avoid being compromised, but it helps immensely to turn on two-factor authentication for your online accounts. That way a person needs not just your password but a code sent to your phone to get into your account.

Once Collins had their credentials, says the government, he went through their email accounts looking for nude photos and videos. The government says that Collins got into approximately 50 iCloud accounts and 72 Gmail accounts this way, most of them belonging to celebrities. He “accessed full Apple iCloud backups belonging to numerous victims, including at least 18 celebrities” and “used a software program to download those full Apple iCloud backups.”

Ironically, that program was likely one that’s used by law enforcement to get evidence from phones.

«

The idea that someone had used a cutting-edge brute-force attack to break into the passwords always seemed like vapour trails to me. Social engineering is the Occam’s Razor explanation (and also the Hanlon’s Razor explanation) to stuff like this.
link to this extract

 

Exclusive: Chinese hackers behind U.S. ransomware attacks – security firms » Reuters

Joseph Menn:

»executives of the security firms have seen a level of sophistication in at least a half dozen cases over the last three months akin to those used in state-sponsored attacks, including techniques to gain entry and move around the networks, as well as the software used to manage intrusions.

“It is obviously a group of skilled of operators that have some amount of experience conducting intrusions,” said Phil Burdette, who heads an incident response team at Dell SecureWorks.

Burdette said his team was called in on three cases in as many months where hackers spread ransomware after exploiting known vulnerabilities in application servers. From there, the hackers tricked more than 100 computers in each of the companies into installing the malicious programs.

The victims included a transportation company and a technology firm that had 30 percent of its machines captured.

Security firms Attack Research, InGuardians and G-C Partners, said they had separately investigated three other similar ransomware attacks since December.

Although they cannot be positive, the companies concluded that all were the work of a known advanced threat group from China, Attack Research Chief Executive Val Smith told Reuters.

«

link to this extract

 

Reformed LulzSec hacktivist joins payments firm » The Register

John Leyden:

»A payments firm has hired reformed LulzSec hactivist Mustafa Al-Bassam (formerly known as tFlow) for a new blockchain research project.

London-based payments group Secure Trading has taken on Al-Bassam to help develop a platform that applies the verification benefits of blockchain technology in order to improve the visibility and security of online payments. Codenamed “Trustery”, the project aims to create a commercial platform.

Secure Trading approached Al-Bassam, who agreed to work for the firm part time while continuing his computer science degree at King’s College London.

«

Smart move: al-Bassam is a clever guy.
link to this extract

 

Crypto-ransomware spreads via poisoned ads on major websites » Tripwire

Graham Cluley:

»Some of the world’s most popular news and entertainment websites have been spreading poisoned adverts to potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors, putting innocent readers at risk of having their computers hit by threats such as ransomware.

Famous sites which displayed the malicious ads and endangered visiting computers include MSN, bbc.com, the New York Times, AOL and Newsweek.

As a result, researchers at Malwarebytes say that they saw a “huge spike in malicious activity” over the weekend.

Security analysts at TrendLabs and Malwarebytes report that the attack is one of the largest ransomware campaigns seen in years, taking advantage of a recently-updated version of the notorious Angler Exploit Kit to spread malware.

Just last month the Angler Exploit Kit was found to be targeting PCs and Macs after it was updated to take advantage of a known vulnerability in Microsoft Silverlight…

…It seems glaringly apparent to me that there is so much malicious advertising on the internet that anytime you surf even legitimate sites without an ad blocker in place, you are putting your computer’s data at risk.

«

link to this extract

 

Why is the Nokia 105 cellphone a favourite among ISIS fighters? » NBC News

Alexander Smith:

»The must-have cellphone for ISIS fighters in Iraq doesn’t have apps or a camera, and ships for less than $30.

The small and simple Nokia model is frequently used as a trigger device to set off ISIS’ improvised explosive devices, known as IEDs, according to a Conflict Armament Research report released last month.

As part of a study looking at civilian components in ISIS bombs, CAR documented 10 of the phones captured from members of the terror group in Iraq in December 2014.

The research showed the terror group “consistently” used the Nokia 105 above all others “in the manufacture of a specific type of remote controlled IED.”

Two phones are used in the bomb-making process: one to call the other, which then sends a signal to a circuit board and sparks the explosion.

There are plenty of other cheap, durable phones with long battery life that ISIS fighters could use — and yet this particular model, also branded as the Microsoft Mobile 105 after the tech giant bought Nokia in 2014, shows up again and again.

«

I’m sure there’ll be widespread condemnation of Microsoft for aiding terrorists any moment now.
link to this extract

 

Why Sony will win first in VR » Jon Peddie Research

The aforenamed Mr Peddie:

»Now that Oculus has revealed its consumer version of the Rift HMD, consumers can start planning how they might engage with VR, and they have a choice—a DIY rig with a PC and Rift, or a turn-key system with Sony.

Sony’s HMD will be about 30% less expensive than the Oculus HDM. And Sony buyers probably already have a PS4, and possibly PS4 accessory controllers. Most importantly, Sony also has content.

«

So, first couple of rounds to Sony.
link to this extract

 

The best things in Android are free — with in-app purchases » Medium

The iA team:

»A year ago, iA Writer for Android entered the Play Store. So far, we have sold a little more than 6’000 apps. At a price of 1 to 5 Dollars, this doesn’t cover much more than one month of app development. So we decided to go free and add in app purchases later.

We are not sure why apps sell in the Apple universe but not in the Android world. It just seems to be a hard cold fact:


Worldwide App Downloads by Store vs Worldwide App Revenue by Store

Looking at the sales numbers of paid Android apps it becomes apparent that plain paid offerings just do not get traction on Android. Why? We are not sure. Here is what we have learned.

«

There’s a point in there about price elasticity which is remarkable. But also that stuff with an upfront price tag does not sell.
link to this extract

 

Windows 10 Store will continue to support bitcoin » Softpedia

Bogdan Popa:

»while there was a lot of speculation online regarding the removal of Bitcoin support for new deposits in the Windows Store – some people said it’s because of the limited adoption of Bitcoin – it appears that the change made to the FAQ page was just “a mistake.”

In other words, Microsoft will continue to support Bitcoin in the Windows Store, so you can keep on using the digital currency for new deposits. A statement we received from a Microsoft spokesperson a few minutes ago provides us with some details on this:

“We continue to support Bitcoin for adding money to your Microsoft Account which can be used for purchasing content in the Windows and Xbox stores. We apologize for inaccurate information that was inadvertently posted to a Microsoft site, which is currently being corrected.”

«

Would love to know what volume of transactions they see.
link to this extract

 

Top NFL official acknowledges link between football-related head trauma and CTE for first time » ESPN

Steve Fainaru:

»The NFL’s top health and safety officer acknowledged Monday there is a link between football-related head trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the first time a senior league official has conceded football’s connection to the devastating brain disease.

The admission came during a roundtable discussion on concussions convened by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce. Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety, was asked by Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., if the link between football and neurodegenerative diseases such as CTE has been established.

“The answer to that question is certainly yes,” Miller said.

«

A bit like boxing: does it mean people will be put off the potentially fabulous riches? But equally: will parents be less likely to put their children into it? The public admission is important.
link to this extract

 

Teenager wins $250,000 in biggest drone race yet » The Verge

Rich McCormick:

»The sport has already attracted investment from the likes of NFL team owners, but it still has some way to go before it breaks into the mainstream. Particularly difficult is the question of how to actually observe the races. Drone pilots fly their racing craft in first-person, using special headsets to see as the drone sees, but for observers the footage can feel — and sound — like being strapped to the front of a particularly excitable wasp. A second camera following the action might help human brains contextualize the movements in space, but some of the nascent racing leagues set their courses inside buildings, making a chase camera’s operation difficult. Still, though, the speed of the craft and the deftness of his control make watching [15-year-old winner] Luke [Bannister]’s victory from Dubai an exhilarating — if slightly nauseating — experience.

«

Dubai, of course.
link to this extract

 

Music streaming has a nearly undetectable fraud problem » Quartz

Amy X Wang:

»For an in-depth look into how click fraud works, there’s Sharky Laguana’s thorough explanation here. Laguana—a music industry veteran who now owns a rental company—tells Quartz it certainly wouldn’t be hard to run the “perfect” scheme to con Spotify. First, set up a couple hundred fake artists. Next, upload some auto-generated tunes—mediocre dance music is particularly easy to “produce” online—and just make sure your bots click on an array of songs both real and fake, so no one gets suspicious. (He uses Spotify as an example because of its size, but the scheme could theoretically work for any music subscription service.)

“If it’s done properly, it’s nearly impossible to detect,” says Laguana. “There’s no way to know why somebody chose to click on something.”

«

Should we just turn off the internet?
link to this extract

 

Donald Trump, America’s own Silvio Berlusconi » The Intercept

Alexander Stille:

»Neither Trump nor Berlusconi has a real political program; what they are selling is themselves. Berlusconi used to say that what Italy needs is more Berlusconi. I recall a very telling moment in his first election campaign: During a TV debate, his opponent, the economist Luigi Spaventa, was pointing out the holes and inconsistencies in Berlusconi’s economic program, and Berlusconi stopped him mid-sentence and pointed to the victories of his soccer club, AC Milan: “Before trying to compete with me, try, at least, winning a couple of national championships!” The remark had the air of unassailable truth — however irrelevant it might be to Berlusconi’s fitness to govern. Similarly, when asked how he is going to get Mexico to pay for a giant wall between its country and ours, Trump simply responds, “Don’t worry, they’ll pay!”

Yet there is another element — a systemic one — that helps explain why Italy and the U.S. are the only major democracies in which a billionaire circus has raised its tent: the almost total deregulation of broadcast media.

«

The latter matters, as Stille explains. (Via @papanic.)
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Microsoft apps on Galaxy S6?, ransomware’s reward, the absent smartwatches, and more

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A boy with measles in 1974; forty years later it’s avoidable, but some aren’t taking the right action. Photo by pni on Flickr.

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There is no smartwatch market » Tech-Thoughts

Sameer Singh:

It is clear to me that smartwatch technology has improved significantly over the past year. But the fact that this has had no impact on consumer adoption should be worrying. It is becoming increasingly clear that the use cases targeted by smartwatches (at least today) are primarily valued by a niche segment of technology enthusiasts. The list of questions about wearables, seems to be getting longer, but we are no closer to finding answers.

Also worth reading: Jan Dawson’s study from August 2014 on what people wanted (and didn’t) from wearables, including smartwatches; and his take on the experience of using Android Wear. And don’t forget my analysis of precisely how many Android Wear devices have been activated – though that’s not the same as “active”.

Apple’s inability to monitor standards lets Pegatron pay low wages, NGO says » Reuters

Michael Gold:

A labor rights group said Apple Inc is unable to effectively monitor standards along some of its supply chain, allowing companies such as Taiwanese assembler Pegatron Corp to keep base wages below local living expenses.

Low costs helped Pegatron win business from Apple, who moved some orders from Foxconn after an increase in labor costs aimed at addressing a spate of worker suicides in 2010, China Labor Watch (CLW) said in a report released on Thursday.

CLW, which based its findings on 96 pay stubs submitted by an unknown number of employees, said low pay compels workers to put in more hours. Its report came on the same day Apple published its 2015 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, which showed a decline in compliance related to working hours.

“Apple constantly claims that it is monitoring suppliers’ compliance with Apple labor standards,” New York-based CLW said. “Apple consistently suppresses labor costs by shifting production to the cheapest manufacturer.”

Fitbit advises rash sufferers to take a break from wearable » Re/code

Lauren Goode:

“We continue to be aware of a very limited percentage of users reporting skin irritation among our users,” a Fitbit spokeswoman said in a statement to Re/code, adding that the skin reactions are not uncommon with jewellery or other wearable devices that are pressed against the skin for long periods of time.

“According to our consulting dermatologists, they are likely from wearing the band too tight; sweat, water, or soap being held against the skin under the device; or from pressure or friction against the skin.” The irritation “should resolve quickly when users take a break from the device, usually within hours or days.”

A fitness tracker that you can’t wear to track your fitness? Seems like a problem.

CTB Locker AMA : Malware » Reddit

hello. I use CTB locker and im bored now so i decided to make this ama [Ask Me Anything]. In case you didn’t know CTB locker is a form of ransomware, probably the 2nd most wide spread after cryptowall.

Assuming this person is truthful, they claim that the percentage of affected users in “tier 1” countries who pay is 5-7%, and “0.5% on crap like India… the poorer the country the lower the rate”. Quite big income (which he then launders) but also some sizeable expenses – $2k-$10k on supporting technologies.

The sickeningly low vaccination rates at Silicon Valley day cares » WIRED

Joanna Pearlstein:

The scientists, technologists, and engineers who populate Silicon Valley and the California Bay Area deserve their reputation as innovators, building entire new economies on the strength of brains and imagination. But some of these people don’t seem to be vaccinating their children.

A WIRED investigation shows that some children attending day care facilities affiliated with prominent Silicon Valley companies have not been completely vaccinated against preventable infectious diseases.

6 of 12 had vaccination levels below the 92% needed for herd immunity. And there’s an amazing stat at one of the Google daycares – though Google says that that’s due to outdated records. Unnerving, even so.

Exclusive: Galaxy S6 software will bring some amazing changes » SamMobile

Today, we have new info on the software side of things of the Galaxy S6, thanks to one of our insiders. There are some really interesting things Samsung is doing if our info is correct, and perhaps the biggest change the S6 will bring is the removal of all pre-installed Samsung apps, or at least that’s how our insider put it.

It’s unclear just what kind of apps Samsung has removed. It’s possible that things like S Voice, S Health, S Note or Scrapbook will not be pre-loaded anymore and will instead be offered on the Galaxy Apps store. What’s interesting is that Samsung has apparently pre-installed quite a few Microsoft apps, possibly as a result of the deal the two companies made recently in relation to the patent royalty case they were embroiled in.

The Galaxy S6 will come with apps like Microsoft OneNote, OneDrive, Office Mobile (with a free Office 365 subscription), and Skype. With Windows Phone failing to make a dent on the smartphone market, Microsoft has recently shifted focus to its software services, and having them pre-installed on one of the bestselling Android smartphone lineups might just give the Redmond giant the exposure it needs to court consumers into switching from Google’s massively more popular services that come preloaded on all Android devices.

This would make sense from all parties’ point of view. Wonder what Google would make of it, though.

What are they afraid of: will Schmidt take the Fifth again in @agjimhood’s Mississippi investigation? » MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY

Chris Castle:

During Eric Schmidt’s Senate antitrust subcommittee hearing in 2011, a strange thing happened–Eric Schmidt refused to answer under oath on the advice of counsel when Senator John Cornyn–formerly of the Texas Supreme Court–asked questions about Google’s then-recent non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice.  While he didn’t give the usual catechism of “taking the 5th” around the answer, he definitely refused to answer on the advice of counsel.  And when you’re testifying before the US Senate, invoking your right to refuse to answer on the advice of counsel pretty much has one meaning.

So it’s not surprising that Google is now trying to block Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s investigation into the self same “plea bargain” that Google struck with the Criminal Division of the US Department of Justice for which Google paid $500,000,000.

There’s something about that agreement that Google really, really, really doesn’t want to discuss.

This is related to Google paying $500m for having advertised prescription drugs from Canada to US users, which broke the law. Now the Mississippi attorney-general is after them, and this article points out how there’s some very strange goings-on.

Start up: fooling image algorithms, Xiaomi’s big year, how AMOLED screens degrade, and more

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A thing of beauty – and an endangered species? Image by bozontee on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. I’m not at CES, but if anything amazing happens there I might link to it through the week. (This doesn’t feel like an “amazing” year though. The last one to fit that description was probably 2011, when the Motorola Xoom and BlackBerry PlayBook made their first appearances. Ah, memories.)

I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Optical illusions that fool Google-style image recognition algorithms >> MIT Technology Review

A technique called deep learning has enabled Google and other companies to make breakthroughs  in getting computers to understand the content of photos. Now researchers at Cornell University and the University of Wyoming have shown how to make images that fool such software into seeing things that aren’t there.

The researchers can create images that appear to a human as scrambled nonsense or simple geometric patterns, but are identified by the software as an everyday object such as a school bus. The trick images offer new insight into the differences between how real brains and the simple simulated neurons used in deep learning process images.

In other words, this sort of thing:

How my mom got hacked >> NYTimes.com

Alina Simone’s mother had her computer encrypted by Cryptowall (essentially uncrackable), ransomed to $500 payable in Bitcoin – which wasn’t easy to sort:

it appeared her payment had arrived too late as well: By the time I got home from Greenpoint, her CryptoWall ransom had been raised to $1,000, and the $500 in Bitcoins she had deposited had vanished. In a panic, she wrote to Mike Hoats asking for advice. What he told her sounded crazy to me. Use the CryptoWall message interface to tell the criminals exactly what happened. Be honest, in other words.

So she did. She explained that the virus had struck the same week that a major snowstorm hit Massachusetts and the Thanksgiving holiday shut down the banks. She told them about the unexpected Bitcoin shortfall and about dispatching her daughter to the Coin Cafe A.T.M. at the 11th hour. She swore she had really, really tried not to miss their deadline. And then a weird thing happened: Her decryption key arrived.

When I shared the news with Mr. Hoats, he was jubilant. “That is great news, truly!” he wrote. “Whoever these yahoos are, they have some little shred of humanity.”

But Mr. Wisniewski had a more pragmatic take. “From what we can tell, they almost always honor what they say because they want word to get around that they’re trustworthy criminals who’ll give you your files back.”

Netflix cracks down on VPN and proxy “pirates” >> TorrentFreak

Netflix is starting to block subscribers who access its service using VPN services and other tools that bypass geolocation restrictions. The changes, which may also affect legitimate users, have been requested by the movie studios who want full control over what people can see in their respective countries.

Do AMOLED phone screens degrade over time? Yes, proof time, but… >> All About Windows Phone

Steve Litchfield wanted to find out whether the colour in AMOLED screens “washes out”:

I happen to have ended up with two Lumia 1020s – one is the workhorse that I’ve used almost every day for eighteen months, while the other is an AT&T model that doesn’t work on UK frequencies and so had hardly been used at all – just the odd test here and there. So, why not try looking at the same screens of content on both the ‘old’ 1020 and the ‘as new’ 1020? Would I be able to tell any difference?

Helping me were my family, who each voted on which screen looked clearer and crisper, without being told of the reason for the test or what they should be looking for. Each phone was set up with the same app, the same content and the same ‘Automatic’ brightness setting. Minor concerns were that the ‘old’ 1020 was on the Developer Preview programme and thus had a slightly newer version of the OS.

He took pictures and everything:

the very pentile nature of the 1020’s screen (and remember the same will be true for devices like the 925) means that a lot of the detail is being handled by the alternating red and blue sub-pixels, effectively edging the smartphone screen down from 768p to a very humble 384p.

18 months doesn’t seem like a long time.

Xiaomi confirms it sold 61m phones in 2014, has plans to expand to more countries >> TechCrunch

Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker that raised $1.1bn last month, has confirmed that it sold 61.12m phones last year, bringing in an apparent revenues of 74.3bn CNY (US$12bn) in the process.

The new figures were released by CEO Lei Jun on Weibo and are right in line with the company’s expectation for the year. Xiaomi sold 18.7m devices in 2013, and 7.2m in 2012, so the four-year-old company is continuing to grow its business at a rapid rate — its recent funding round valued it at $45bn and it is now the world’s third largest smartphone maker.

Great! Although note that those numbers mean it sold fewer in calendar Q4 than Q3 (Ben Bajarin charted it here – from 18.1m to 17.1m. Why? No explanation given, but (you’d hope) the venture capitalist investors must have known when they piled in. Bajarin reckons (and it seems very likely) that they fell out of the world’s top five smartphone makers in Q4.

So where’s Xiaomi going? Into multiple smart devices – phones will quickly get played out – but I don’t see any chance of them coming to the US or Europe with a phone in 2015. They’d get fried over the intellectual property issues relating to smartphone patents, where they’ve already been burnt in India.

Mourn the death of the wallet – it holds memories as well as money >> The Guardian

Jess Carter-Morley (who is The Guardian’s fashion editor):

the wallet, that great talisman of adult life, is heading for extinction. As a day-to-day essential, it will die off with the generation who read print newspapers. Most of us, as children, played shops with Fisher Price tills, counting out the plastic coins and swapping them for plastic tomatoes. And we have grown up, and continued to do real shopping, in almost exactly the same way. But that kind of shopping – where you hand over notes and count out change in return – now happens only in the most minor of our retail encounters. Buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk, from a cornershop or a train station kiosk. At the shops where you spend any real money, that money is increasingly abstracted. And this is more and more true, the higher up the scale you go. At the most cutting-edge retail flagships – Victoria Beckham on Dover Street, say, or Burberry on Regent Street – you don’t go and stand at any kind of till, when you decide to pay. The staff are equipped with iPads which they can whip out and use to take your payment while you relax on a sofa.

She has a very good point. Also, what will kids do shop-play with in a generation’s time? Will they wave their plastic phones over their plastic readers to say they’ve bought something?

46 times Vox totally fucked up a story >> Deadspin

The Gawker site takes the “we’ll explain the news to you and make it fun!” site to task, pointing out that it’s pretty hard to have people who are really experts in every field they write about. These ones particularly caught my eye (but there are 44 others):

9. Article Headline: Ignore age—define generations by the tech they use

Correction: This post originally gave incorrect dates for the introduction of radio and television technology and the invention of the cell phone. It also mis-labeled the web as the internet. We regret these errors.

10. Headline: The man who escaped both doomed Malaysian Airlines flights

Correction: Many of the key elements of Maarten de Jonge’s story have been disproven by subsequent reporting (particularly by Slate). There is no evidence that De Jonge actually booked a ticket on either flight. We’re sorry for repeating unverified claims.

Getting hoaxed is so dangerously easy for journalists online now. But some bring it on themselves. Now read on..

Peeling an onion: Phony iPhone 6 doom starts a chain reaction >> Macworld

2014 is over, but the Macalope is still cleaning up the mess from the crappiest New Year’s Eve party ever. Because as 2014 wound down, tech sites got wound up about some survey results.

“Here’s Proof That Samsung Owners Are Happier With Their Phones Than iPhone Owners” (indirect link and tip o’ the antlers to mylestaylor)

Business Insider‘s Julie Bort knows the score: It’s Samsung a billion and Apple zero. Or, well, 81 to 79, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

The Macalope is great at this sort of riffing, but there’s a serious point here. As gets pointed out, Business Insider sourced this from Engadget, which sourced it from BGR, and yet none of them looked to see quite when the survey was carried out by ACSI. Turns out it was in May (you can see the unchanged scores – Samsung 81, Apple 79 – that are quoted).

There’s huge amounts of guesswork rolled into the BI piece and another at Hot Hardware (“#bendgate may have affected the scores”). All based on a survey from seven months ago.

And people wonder why “tech sites” didn’t get the Snowden leaks.

Two ‘Lizard Squad’ hackers arrested after Christmas DDoS attacks >> Hacker News

Vinnie Omari, an alleged member of Lizard Squad, arrested by the police investigating PayPal thefts and cyber-fraud offences occurred in 2013-14 while raiding his London home. Law enforcement officials reportedly seized phones, laptops and an Xbox from his home.

“The arrest is in connection with an ongoing investigation into cyber-fraud offences which took place between 2013 and August 2014 during which victims reported funds being stolen from their PayPal accounts,” Thames Valley police said in a press release.
Omari, who is a student of network security and ethical hacking, provided a copy of the search warrant to the Daily Dot, but the details have not been confirmed with local police yet. The press release from the Thames Valley Police Department confirms that Omari was arrested “on suspicion of fraud by false representation and Computer Misuse Act offences [sic].”

“They took everything… Xbox One, phones, laptops, computer USBs, etc.,” Omari said in an email to the Daily Dot, who broke the story.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is also reportedly investigating another Lizard Squad member named Julius “Ryan” Kivimaki a 17-year-old teenager, for his connection to the alleged DDoS attacks against Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. He was arrested by Finnish authorities later this week.

Tick, tock…