Start up: self-driving car wars, trying Hololens, Google’s targeted ads on Kansas TV, Glass undead, and more

Posted on March 24, 2015 by charlesarthur

Beware if attached to a car with a GPS device built in. Photo by Omar Omar on Flickr.

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

Miss a payment? Good luck moving that car » NYTimes.com

Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg:

The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start.

The cause was not a mechanical problem — it was her lender.

Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March.

“I felt absolutely helpless,” said Ms. Bolender, a single mother who stopped working to care for her daughter.

At present, this story has 983 comments. People feel strongly about this topic.

Delphi self-driving car begins world’s first 3500-mile cross-country trip » Tech Times

Christian de Looper:

The car is an Audi SQ5 outfitted with Delphi’s tech, and has been tested on shorter drives in California and Nevada. Delphi believes the drive across the country will help it collect more insight and expects to collect a total of 2.3 terabytes of data during the trip.

News surrounding autonomous cars seems to be making headlines ever day. Tesla recently announced the next update to the Tesla Model S will allow the car to drive itself, despite the fact it is still unclear as to whether or not this type of technology is legal.

The Delphi car’s “brain” was developed in partnership with Ottomatika, which takes the data from the sensors during test drives and created a virtual environment for the car, which it uses to apply driving behaviors.

The trip itself will take eight days, and the car will not drive for more than eight hours per day. This will allow the car to complete the tip in daylight, stick to the speed limit, and keep the human passengers, who will make sure that everything runs smoothly, comfortable.

It’s important to note the car will only operate autonomously on highways, with human drivers taking the wheel once the car gets into a city.

It’s not Google’s software; from another article:

The software that interprets the data drawn from those systems and the algorithms that help the car make driving decisions were developed jointly by Delphi and Ottomatika – a company started by Carnegie Mellon University.

The frustrating thing is that Delphi’s own site which is meant to follow this – delphidrive.com – doesn’t have any useful information.

Delphi’s autonomous car is remarkably…unremarkable » Fast Company

Harry McCracken tried it before it set off on its possibly unlicensed jaunt:

I’ve already spent enough time being driven around by autonomous vehicles (always with a human behind the wheel just in case) that at least some of the novelty has worn off. The fact that Delphi’s car drove itself pretty much like a human would have—stopping at safe distances at stop lights, switching lanes when necessary, and not doing anything which felt particularly robotic—didn’t startle me. But I was surprised by how normal the vehicle looked.

Unlike the Google car I’d rode in, there was no giant spinning lidar sensor atop the vehicle to tip off other motorists that this particular Audi SUV was anything unusual. It was well equipped with lidar, radar, and cameras, but they were unobtrusive—some of the gadgetry was even concealed behind the bumpers and license plate. The data collected by those sensors was displayed on the ordinary in-dash infotainment system rather than on specially rigged-up LCD screens. And the tech didn’t take up an out-of-the-ordinary amount of space, which I didn’t realize until after the trip was over and we popped the trunk, which was empty…

…Delphi isn’t working on self-driving as an exercise in futurism. It’s doing it because the car companies of the world are going to expect it to have competence in this field over the next few years. Delphi will need to be able to supply the necessary components, at a price and level of integration which makes sense for production vehicles.

There would be a strange irony if Google were to get outpaced in self-driving cars by all the other manufacturers.

Google isn’t giving up on Glass, Eric Schmidt says » WSJ Digits blog

Alistair Barr:

Google stopped selling the first version of Glass and shut its Explorer program in January, moving the project out of its Google X research lab into a standalone unit. Ivy Ross remained head of the Glass team but Tony Fadell, head of Google’s Nest connected home division, now oversees strategy for the project.

The changes sparked speculation that Google will abandon Glass. However, Schmidt told The Wall Street Journal that it has been put under Fadell’s watch “to make it ready for users.”

“It is a big and very fundamental platform for Google,” Schmidt said. “We ended the Explorer program and the press conflated this into us canceling the whole project, which isn’t true. Google is about taking risks and there’s nothing about adjusting Glass that suggests we’re ending it.”

He said Glass, like Google’s self-driving car, is a long-term project. “That’s like saying the self-driving car is a disappointment because it’s not driving me around now,” he said. “These things take time.”

Which users, though? Consumer users? I don’t see it. Glass didn’t get consumer approval; instead it met direct and continued rejection. Industrial users, sure. There’s a use case there. But Google will quickly find itself competing with rivals – as the above link shows for self-driving cars.

HTC One M9 review » CNET

Andrew Hoyle tried it out, and it’s the camera and battery where most of his complaints come. (For the rest, it’s a phone like many other metal-cased phones.) I noted this:

We don’t miss the M8’s duo-lens, which is no longer seen on the back of the M9. This extra sensor was designed to create unusual images with 3D effects. Sure, they were a bit of fun, but they were definitely a novelty and one that quickly wore off. We do miss a few other things, though. Despite incorporating the latest version of Android, it doesn’t incorporate all the new camera features, most notably raw support. It could also really use optical image stabilisation (OIS), which helps physically smooth bumpy shots; not only does OIS help at slow shutter speeds, but when you’re steadier there are fewer low-light artifacts (noise processing exacerbates the effect of camera shake).

The video looks acceptable, though you’ll really notice the jitter in bright light, when it chooses a fast shutter speed. Without image stabilisation, the combination makes the rolling shutter (that ugly wobble) look even worse. In low light, it suffers from the same lack of tonal range that’s in the photos.

HTC suggested last year that the duo-lens made sliced bread look a bit declassé. Now it’s dropped it. Ditto Samsung, with tons of features removed from the S6 compared to the S5. If you’re so sure a hardware feature matters for your flagship, why drop it after a year?

Google Fiber will sell ads in Kansas City tied to TV viewing habits » The Kansas City Star The Kansas City Star

Scott Canon:

your neighbor might see a different commercial than you while watching the same basketball game. And your kids, watching that game in another room, might see yet a different spot.

That super-narrow targeting represents something nearing a holy grail for television advertisers, even as it raises privacy issues about a company selling TV service tracking what its customers watch.

On a post to its online product forum on Friday, Google Fiber said the targeting “allows you to see ads for nearby businesses — like the car dealership downtown or the neighborhood flower shop.” It says it will start “a small trial” in early April. Kansas City will be the first market where the technology will be deployed — by Google or any cable company.

The practice won’t mean Google Fiber customers will see any more ads. Rather, like most cable companies, it will sell targeted spots replacing some national advertising.

Customers who don’t want those targeted ads, the company says, can change the settings on their TV boxes to opt out. But those who do nothing will see ads aimed at them based on their viewing behaviour…

…[Roger] Entner [who monitors the TV industry for Recon Analytics] speculated that the targeted ads might ultimately draw attention from federal regulators over privacy concerns. Think of someone who has friends over to watch TV. The targeted ads that appear during a show might give visitors insight to what that person watches when no one else is around.

“It can very quickly get to that creepy part of the equation,” he said.

Hilton Honors flaw exposed all accounts » Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

The vulnerability was uncovered by Brandon Potter and JB Snyder, technical security consultant and founder, respectively, at security consulting and testing firm Bancsec. The two found that once they’d logged into a Hilton Honors account, they could hijack any other account just by knowing its account number. All it took was a small amount of changing the site’s HTML content and then reloading the page.

After that, they could see and do everything available to the legitimate holder of that account, such as changing the account password; viewing past and upcoming travel; redeeming Hilton Honors points for travel or hotel reservations worldwide; or having the points sent as cash to prepaid credit cards or transferred to other Hilton Honors accounts. The vulnerability also exposed the customer’s email address, physical address and the last four digits of any credit card on file.

Terrible, terrible testing.

Magic Leap and HoloLens demos show augmented reality challenges » MIT Technology Review

Rachel Metz has previously tried Magic Leap’s AR system; now she’s trying Microsoft’s Hololens in its prototype stage:

I was not blown away by what I saw in Redmond. The holograms looked great in a couple of instances, such as when I peered at the underside of a rock on a reconstruction of the surface of Mars, created with data from the Curiosity rover. More often, though, images appeared distractingly transparent and not nearly as crisp as the creatures Magic Leap showed me some months before. What’s more, the relatively narrow viewing area in front of my face meant the 3-D imagery seen through HoloLens was often interrupted by glimpses of the unenhanced world on the periphery. The headset also wasn’t closed off to the world around me, so I still had my natural peripheral vision of the unenhanced room. This was okay when looking at smaller or farther-away 3-D images, like an underwater scene I was shown during my first demo, or while moving around to inspect images close-up from different angles. The illusion got screwed up, though, when it came to looking at something larger than my field of view.+

Microsoft is also still working on packing everything into the HoloLens form it has promised. Unlike the untethered headset that the company demonstrated in January, the device I tried was unwieldy and unfinished: it had see-through lenses attached to a heavy mass of electronics and plastic straps, tethered to a softly whirring rectangular box (Microsoft’s holographic processing unit) that I had to wear around my neck and to a nearby computer.

Start up: Google checks apps, Nintendo’s app strategy?, Galaxy S6 review, why 4Chan is for sale, and more

Posted on March 18, 2015 by charlesarthur

Google will check your app now. Photo by nateOne on Flickr.

A selection of 8 links for you. Contains nuts. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Gacha: explaining Japan’s top money-making social game mechanism » Kantan Games

Serkan Toto outlines a tactic that just might be the one Nintendo uses when it releases its mobile games:

Pricing varies depending on the title: some games charge 100 Yen [about $1] per turn, others 300 yen. The more expensive gacha contain particularly rare cards, but the element of luck is always there.

A lot of makers offer playing gacha once per day for free in order to a) get users “addicted” and b) to boost retention/the number of log-ins. Makers also offer discounts (for example during a special sales campaign), or limited-edition items (for example during seasonal events like Christmas or Halloween).

And gacha work well – extremely well: from some makers, I am hearing that up to 50% of their overall sales come from these machines. People just can’t stop paying money (in the form of paid virtual coins or tokens) to be able to go for another round.

Google X boss says company should have curbed Glass hype » Yahoo Finance

Alexei Oreskovic:

The Internet company did not do enough to make clear that the $1,500 computer that mounts to a pair of eyeglasses was merely a prototype and not a finished product, Google’s Astro Teller said during a talk at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin.

“We allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention for the programme,” said Teller, whose official title at Google is Captain of Moonshots, during a talk that focused on how his group has learned from some of its failures.

Uh-huh. And now recall this, from February 2013 (in Nick Bilton’s story that was probably the first to source Apple working on the Watch):

While Apple continues its experiments with wearables, its biggest competitor, Google, is pressing ahead with plans to make wearable computers mainstream.

According to a Google executive who spoke on the condition that he not be named, the company hopes its wearable glasses, with a display that sits above the eye, will account for 3% of revenue by 2015.

Oh, Nick. Name that executive. Go on go on go on.

The inside story of how Apple’s new medical research platform was born » Fusion

Kashmir Hill has the exclusive:

A few months earlier, Apple had poached [Michael] O’Reilly from Masimo, a Bay Area-based sensor company that developed portable iPhone-compatible health trackers. Now, [as the new VP for medical technologies at Apple] he was interested in building something else, something that had the potential to implement Friend’s vision of a patient-centered, medical research utopia and radically change the way clinical studies were done.

After[Dr Stephen] Friend’s talk, O’Reilly approached the doctor, and, in typical tight-lipped Apple fashion, said: “I can’t tell you where I work, and I can’t tell you what I do, but I need to talk to you,” Friend recalls. Friend was intrigued, and agreed to meet for coffee.

Gotta love that introduction. It’s either the CIA or Apple, basically.

Samsung Galaxy S6 review: in depth » Recombu

Chris Barraclough got his hands on one. I found this section surprising:

The Galaxy S6 rocks Samsung’s own Exynos chipset, an octa-core processor comprised of two quad-core chips running at 1.5GHz and 2.1GHz. For everyday use, this provides solid all-round performance. I saw only the occasional tiny judder when multitasking with apps, while the latest games ran perfectly and HD movies streamed without stutter. The phone also admirably handles some intense camera use, including 4k and Full HD 60fps video recording.

The Galaxy S6 (and the Edge) does get a little toasty at times, if you’re doing a lot of downloading or shooting video. However, it never reaches alarming or uncomfortable levels and I never saw any adverse effects like the phone shutting down or spurting errors.

Battery life is actually pretty good too, considering that bright, super-crisp power-sucking screen. If you mess around shooting high-def video and generally thrashing the Galaxy S6, it won’t last anywhere near a full day. However, if you’re more conservative and limit yourself to occasional web browsing, email checks and piddling around with apps, you should easily make it to bed before the S6 dies.

Occasional judder? Toasty?

And:

The camera interface is a little cluttered, especially after slick, clean efforts like the LG G3’s, but anyone who likes fiddling with manual controls will enjoy.

When will UX designers learn that people don’t want to mess around with manual controls? Though the camera seems pretty good. However, there’s no comparison with any other phone here, apart from via benchmarking. That’s a poor service to readers.

How Bluebox fell for a counterfeit Xiaomi Mi 4 to claim it came with pre-installed malware » BGR India

Rajat Agrawal:

Over the past few days, a little known but well funded mobile security firm, Bluebox, published a report claiming Xiaomi was pre-installing malware on its Mi 4 smartphone. The report also claimed that Xiaomi was shipping the Mi 4 with a rooted ROM and came pre-installed with tampered versions of popular benchmarking apps. It also claimed that Xiaomi’s own identifier app showed that the phone was a legitimate Xiaomi product, raising questions on the security of products made by one of the fastest rising smartphone brand in South East Asia. However, as it turns out, the smartphone Bluebox had acquired through an unofficial source in China was nothing more than a sophisticated counterfeit. But how did a startup, with $27.5 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Tenaya Capital, and Andreas Bechtolsheim fall for a counterfeit product?

Because it was fake, and they didn’t twig it.

Creating better user experiences on Google Play » Android Developers Blog

Eunice Kim, product manager for Google Play:

Several months ago, we began reviewing apps before they are published on Google Play to better protect the community and improve the app catalog. This new process involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle. We value the rapid innovation and iteration that is unique to Google Play, and will continue to help developers get their products to market within a matter of hours after submission, rather than days or weeks. In fact, there has been no noticeable change for developers during the rollout.

To assist in this effort and provide more transparency to developers, we’ve also rolled out improvements to the way we handle publishing status. Developers now have more insight into why apps are rejected or suspended, and they can easily fix and resubmit their apps for minor policy violations.

Let’s be clear: this is a good move which can only benefit users. It’s only going to be uncomfortable for those who insisted that Google Play is somehow superior to Apple’s App Store because it didn’t have any checking.

This is largely being automated; Google admits to TechCrunch that its system may not be “as robust” as “rivals”. Assume 100 new apps per day, and it probably takes, what, 20 people working flat out? You could easily triple or quadruple that without Google noticing the cost. And follow the discussion on Android Developers on G+. Plus Russell Ivanovic is not enamoured: “file under things I never thought I’d see in my lifetime”.

Considering all of which, why does it take Apple so long to approve an app?

4chan’s overlord Christopher Poole reveals why he walked away » Rolling Stone

David Kushner on Chris Poole’s decision to put the site up for sale:

last year, he undertook what he calls “the summer of Chris.” He went to Europe and Asia, reread The Little Prince, and took classes in cooking and ballroom dancing. He began to unplug — leaving behind his laptop and weaning himself off social media. “Why am I so concerned about what’s going on back in New York?” he thought at one point while in a cafe overseas. “It’s taking me out of this really great moment, this new experience.”

But the good times didn’t last. On the evening of August 31st, Poole was thumbing through his phone in bed when a CNN report caught his eye. Hackers leaked nude photos of dozens of celebrities, including Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence. One of the main hubs for the pictures was 4chan. Poole complied with takedown notices from Hollywood lawyers, which 4channers expected. But then he went further. In the wake of the leaks, he decided to post the Digital Millennium Copyright Act policy on his site for the first time — something he’d never gotten around to doing before. Some 4channers cried sellout. “Is this the end of everything?” one posted.

The same week news of the Fappening broke, so did Gamergate.

Gamergate turned out to be the final straw. Now 4chan is up for sale. Question is, who would want it?

How will Apple Watch teach people to love watches? » aBlogtoWatch

Ariel Adams points out that Apple has put a lot more, well, love into its watches than Android Wear rivals:

While the Samsung Gear models have some traditional looking watch dials, they clearly didn’t put the effort or apply the same type of understanding to the watch world as Apple did in their hardware. With that said, is passion and a love of watches by some key Apple employees why the Apple Watch is so much like a traditional watch? I think there are more practical reasons than that, and here is where Apple confuses so many of the journalists who traditionally cover the brand. Things people wear are part of fashion, a category that tech writers tend to not cover too much. Fashion is what gets people to wear something, and technology is what gets people to use something.

Start up: cracking iPhone passcodes, why .sucks sucks, Superfish away!, Lyft and Uber face key court case

Posted on March 17, 2015 by charlesarthur

Superfish! Photo by noodlepie on Flickr.

A selection of 13 links for you. Helps you work, rest and play. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The SSD endurance experiment: they’re all dead » The Tech Report

Geoff Gasior:

I never thought this whole tech journalism gig would turn me into a mass murderer. Yet here I am, with the blood of six SSDs on my hands, and that’s not even the half of it. You see, these were not crimes of passion or rage, nor were they products of accident. More than 18 months ago, I vowed to push all six drives to their bitter ends. I didn’t do so in the name of god or country or even self-defense, either. I did it just to watch them die.

Technically, I’m also a torturer—or at least an enhanced interrogator. Instead of offering a quick and painless death, I slowly squeezed out every last drop of life with a relentless stream of writes far more demanding than anything the SSDs would face in a typical PC. To make matters worse, I exploited their suffering by chronicling the entire process online.

Brilliant idea for an article, spread over nearly two years, which also provides truly useful info. Those things really last ages.

Uber, Lyft cases could help clarify drivers’ legal status » WSJ

Rachel Emma Silverman:

Two San Francisco judges separately ruled last week that suits filed by drivers of the ride-sharing services should go before juries. At issue in both cases is whether drivers, who are employed as independent contractors, should be considered employees of those firms, and thus entitled to the protections afforded most full-time workers.

A verdict that required Lyft or Uber to reclassify their drivers as employees would throw a wrench in business models that have commanded large investments and valuations. Last week, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten led a $530m round of funding for Lyft, helping to boost its valuation to more than $2.5bn. Uber, which is much larger, has raised more than $5bn in funding and is valued at more than $41bn.

Should the cases proceed to trial, the resulting verdicts could also set a legal precedent about how many workers should be classified in the so-called on-demand economy. That could come as welcome news for employment lawyers and others charged with figuring out whether the workers who fulfill Instacart orders, drive UberX passengers, clean homes for Handy clients and perform other tasks assigned by apps should be considered independent contractors or actual employees.

Watch these ones. Though whichever way the verdicts go they probably won’t be the last.

A new, simple way to log in » Yahoo

Chris Stoner is director of product management at Yahoo:

We’ve made the steps easy to follow – check them out below.

1)    Sign in to your Yahoo.com account.
2)    Click on your name at the top right corner to go to your account information page.
3)    Select “Account Security” in the left bar.
4)    Click on the slider for “On-demand passwords” to opt-in.
5)    Enter your phone number and Yahoo will send you a verification code.
6)    Enter the code and voila!

And the next time you sign-in, we’ll send a password to your phone when you need it to log in. On-demand passwords is now available for U.S. users. Try it out today!

What if I lose my phone? Or I’m abroad? Do normal passwords not work any more? Not clear and not answered anywhere I can find.

Apple will offer Android switchers gift cards to trade-in rival smartphones for iPhones » 9to5Mac

Mark Gurman:

Apple is preparing to launch another program to boost iPhone sales in its stores, a stated goal of CEO Tim Cook.

According to sources, Apple will soon introduce a new recycling and trade-in program that will accept non-Apple smartphones, notably including Android devices, in exchange for gift cards to be used toward the purchase of new iPhones. In continuing to court Android switchers, Apple will use a similar system to the one it uses to repurchase iPhones, whereby Apple Retail Store employees determine trade-in values for devices by considering their cosmetic and functional condition.

The new program will begin in the coming weeks, following extensive training programs for retail store employees that will begin later this week. Apple employees will be able to transfer address book contacts from the rival smartphones to the iPhones, but other data will have to be moved by customers.

Two points: 1) we’ve pretty much arrived at “in Gurman we trust”, right? 2) trying to grab rival platforms’ users is the mark of a saturated market – which the US smartphone market increasingly resembles.

People who use Firefox or Chrome are better employees » The Atlantic

Joe Pinsker:

in the world of Big Data, everything means something. Cornerstone OnDemand, a company that sells software that helps employers recruit and retain workers, analyzed data on about 50,000 people who took its 45-minute online job assessment (which is like a thorough personality test) and then were successfully hired at a firm using its software. These candidates ended up working customer-service and sales jobs for companies in industries such as telecommunications, retail, and hospitality.

Cornerstone’s researchers found that people who took the test on a non-default browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, ended up staying at their jobs about 15 percent longer than those who stuck with Safari or Internet Explorer. They performed better on the job as well. (These statistics were roughly the same for both Mac and PC users.)

Why? Perhaps, the company hazards, because it means they’re “non-default”, and so are an “informed consumer”. (Other datum: “people who use “boozy” or “sexy” in their email addresses make for worse employees.”)

Joint effort guts Superfish » Computerworld

In a blog post announcing the addition of another Superfish clean-up tool, Microsoft’s security team said that the number of infected PCs detected by its software peaked at around 60,000 on Feb. 21, slumped slightly over the next two days before falling precipitously. By Feb. 25, the daily number of infected PCs encountered by Microsoft’s tools had dropped to around 3,000, sliding further over the next several days to what appeared to be less than 1,000 each day.

All told, Microsoft implied that about a quarter of a million Lenovo PCs were cleansed of Superfish between Feb. 20 and March 4.

Useful to know how many “consumer” PCs Lenovo sold over the course of three months or so, which this in effect is.

Apple iOS hardware assisted screenlock bruteforce crack » MDSec blog

Dominic Chell:

We recently became aware of a device known as an IP Box that was being used in the phone repair markets to bruteforce the iOS screenlock. This obviously has huge security implications and naturally it was something we wanted to investigate and validate. For as little as £200 we were able to acquire one of these devices and put it to work.

Although we’re still analyzing the device it appears to be relatively simple in that it simulates the PIN entry over the USB connection and sequentially bruteforces every possible PIN combination. That in itself is not unsurprising and has been known for some time. What is surprising however is that this still works even with the “Erase data after 10 attempts” configuration setting enabled.

Our initial analysis indicates that the IP Box is able to bypass this restriction by connecting directly to the iPhone’s power source and aggressively cutting the power after each failed PIN attempt, but before the attempt has been synchronized to flash memory. As such, each PIN entry takes approximately 40 seconds, meaning that it would take up to ~111 hours to bruteforce a 4 digit PIN.

Multiply by 10 for each extra digit on your PIN; use a password instead. (Clever, cutting the power before the write-to-memory.)

“.sucks” registrations begin soon — at up to $2,500 per domain » Ars Technica

Lee Hutchinson:

The number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) available for use has climbed into the hundreds, and “.sucks” will soon be added to the list. However, angry customers eager to get their hands on brand-specific domains like “bestbuy.sucks” or “comcast.sucks” shouldn’t get their hopes up; according to MarketingLand, the domains will cost far more than most consumers will want to pay.

The pricing situation around .sucks domain names is complicated. Companies with registered trademarks will have to pay an astounding $2,499 to register their trademarked names in .sucks. Registration of non-trademarked names during the “sunrise” period (March 30 until June 1) before .sucks goes live will cost at least $199 per name, while the standard registration fee after June 1 rises to $249 per name.

Companies are typically hyper-sensitive about brand usage, and few will want their .sucks domains under someone else’s control. The .sucks pricing scheme has led to outrage from many quarters, with MarketingLand’s writeup quoting several industry figures who use words like “extortion” and “predatory.”

The words of Seth Finkelstein from 2007 on the topic of “.xxx” remain just as relevant: these TLDs are just money-making schemes for registrars (and for Icann).

In a world with any more than zero working search engines, TLDs are next to pointless, and the exotic ones like .sucks amount to nothing more than legitimised extortion schemes against companies worried about attacks on their brand.

Samsung to beat forecast on S6 » Korea Times

Kim Yoo-chul:

Bernstein Research and Deutsche Bank expect [the] S6 to boost the company’s bottom line.

“For our thesis on Samsung Electronics, the S6 does not need to be a mega-success; even a further decline to 27% market share in the premium segment would be more than enough,” Mark Newman at Bernstein Research said.

“We believe the unveiled phone is sufficient to deliver and has the potential to beat that modest expectation. Furthermore, we think the components side of the S6 is more positive for Samsung’s earnings direction with the processor moving internal (saving potentially $28 per phone), significantly more memory (DRAM and particularly NAND) and the display showing off their technology lead in flexible OLED.”

Han Seung-hoon at Deutsche Bank said Samsung’s strategies for diversified pricing on the S6 according to memory storage capacity like Apple will help its semiconductor division see a big divisional increase.

Apple seems to be having a strong quarter – analyst expectations are for well over 50m sales (compared to 43.7 in Q1 2014). Last year Samsung shipped 85m smartphones.

June 2007: Apple iPhone debut to flop, product to crash in flames » Suckbusters

David Platt in June 2007:

the iPhone is going to fail because its design is fundamentally flawed. The designers and technophiles who encouraged development of the iPhone have fallen into the trap of all overreaching hardware and software designers; thinking that their users are like themselves. As I expound in great detail in my book Why Software Sucks (Addison-Wesley, 2006, http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com) your user is not you. The iPhone’s designers have forgotten this fundamental law of the universe. The market will severely punish them for doing so.

I have three specific reasons why the iPhone’s design will cause it to crash in flames the way Apple’s late and unlamented Newton did, only much more loudly and publicly because of all the hype it’s gotten.

None of them is its price. Platt seems to have a line writing for Microsoft’s Developer Network magazine and admitted his mistake in 2012.

Microsoft X-box and a family problem » Medium

Jeremy Hillman’s son ran up thousands of dollars on Xbox Live buying “players” for FIFA at a hundred dollars a pop:

So these are my questions to Microsoft on behalf of the thousands and thousands of parents who have fallen into this same situation (you can see online that this isn’t a rare occurrence and Microsoft employs its many escalation analysts for a reason).

With all the brilliance of your engineers and sophisticated systems to protect data how hard could it be to put a realistic ceiling on what can be spent on in-app purchases before the credit card details and security code need to be re-entered? Most Apple iTunes purchases need a password to be re-entered for each new purchase.

How many users legitimately spend thousands of dollars on in-app purchases and just how much usage would it actually take for you to flag this as unusual behaviour and require confirmation that the purchase is legitimate? Banks and credit card companies regularly do this — there can’t be many reasons you don’t.

Might just want to check your credit card statement, parents.

Behind Apple’s openness is desire for data centre help » The Information

Steve Nellis and Amir Efrati:

Both Google and Amazon long have designed their own racks, servers and switches in their data centers, contracting with Asian manufacturers for production. They see their hardware designs as a competitive advantage, keeping them under wraps. Neither are in the Open Compute Project [which Apple has joined].

Facebook also designs its own data center equipment but started much later than Amazon and Google. By helping found the Open Compute Project, it has a chance to catch up. In the group, Facebook released its designs for servers and switches publicly and invited others to do the same. Microsoft, Intel, IBM and others eventually joined. The idea was that lots of companies working together can build better data centers cheaper.

“There’s this industry pattern I’ve come to observe: Open when you’re behind, closed when you’re ahead,” said Christopher Nguyen, CEO of Adatao and former engineering director of Google Apps.

That last point is so insightful, and worth bearing in mind. The article meanwhile confirms that Apple outsources some of iCloud’s services to Microsoft (Azure) and Amazon (S3).

New YouTube interface rolling out to some users ditches the hamburger menu » Android Police

Liam Spradin:

Just in case you were getting comfortable with the YouTube app’s latest design, it looks like there may be more changes in store. It seems a number of users are encountering a new YouTube interface, apparently triggered server-side without an app update.

The change sees YouTube’s hamburger menu flipping right out of the interface, going the way of Google+ in discarding the left-side navigation drawer. Instead, users are given four primary tabs – Home, Trending, Subscriptions, and your profile. Interestingly, a couple of these tabs seem to have bars underneath to switch from, say, all videos to music on the home tab, or from uploads to channels on the subscription tab. Besides these changes, things are ostensibly working just like before.

Apple doesn’t like hamburger menus (those three lines at the top left or right of a screen where “other options” are available): here’s a summary of a WWDC 2014 talk about it – from which they key extract is

Remember, the three key things about an intuitive navigation system is that they tell you where you are, and they show you where else you can go.

Hamburger menus are terrible at both of those things, because the menu is not on the screen. It’s not visible. Only the button to display the menu is. And in practice, talking to developers, they found this out themselves.

Samsung tablets made spy-proof by BlackBerry using IBM software » Bloomberg Business

Cornelius Rahn:

BlackBerry introduced a modified Samsung Electronics Co. tablet computer that lets government and corporate users access consumer applications such as YouTube and WhatsApp while keeping confidential work-related information away from spies and crooks.

The €2,250 ($2,360) SecuTABLET will be available by the third quarter, Hans-Christoph Quelle, head of BlackBerry’s Secusmart unit, said in an interview Sunday. More than 10,000 units will be shipped annually in Germany alone by next year, with a higher number sold by IBM, which is handling sales to companies worldwide, he said.

The SecuTABLET combines Samsung Electronics’s Tab S 10.5 with Secusmart’s microSD card and IBM software to wrap applications that hold sensitive data into a virtual container where they can’t be harmed by malware. Germany’s computer-security watchdog is evaluating the device for classified government communication and will probably give its approval before the end of the year, Quelle said.

I’m not sure in what sense BlackBerry “introduced” this. Its tieup with Samsung seems to be as an MDM (mobile device management) vendor. Samsung makes the hardware, IBM does the virtualisation, BlackBerry does the..?

Start up: making the Apple Watch, Tinder with an AI, web v apps again, what’s the real mobile search?, and more

Posted on March 16, 2015 by charlesarthur

Uvas reservoir, California, in February 2014. Photo by ian_photos on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Can be hung on string to deter tigers. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Tinder users at SXSW are falling for this woman, but she’s not what she appears » Adweek

Tinder users at the SXSW festival on Saturday were encountering an attractive 25-year-old woman named Ava on the dating app. A friend of ours made a match with her, and soon they were have a conversation over text message.

But when he opened up Ava’s Instagram, it became clear something was amiss. There was one photo and one video, both promoting Ex Machina, a sci-fi film that just happened to be premiering Saturday night here in Austin. The link in her bio went to the film’s website. And it turns out the woman in the photos is Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who plays an artificial intelligence in the movie.

The conversation is rather clever, in the context of the film. I liked this as a promotional idea. (Other people didn’t. I’d say, abandon hope all ye who go on Tinder, and you won’t be disappointed.)

How Apple makes the Watch » Atomic Delights

This link has been shared all over the place, but you might have chosen to avoid it. That’s a mistake; you can discover so much just about manufacturing from reading it. Here’s just a tiny piece of Greg Koenig’s writeup, based solely on the Apple Watch manufacturing video:

Apple chooses to not show what is likely the most unique and important step in the production of the Watch; cold forging. In production forging, a blank of metal is placed between two extraordinarily hard steel dies that have the bottom and top halves formed into open faced molds. The hammer – a piece of capital equipment roughly the size of a house laid on it’s end – slams the dies closed with force measured in tens of thousands of tonnes. Under such pressure, the metal reaches a state called “plastic deformation” and literally bends, compresses and flows into the shaped cavities of the die. For complex, or high-precision forging, multiple dies with successively deeper cavities are used to gradually tease the material into the desired shape.

Forging produces what’s called a “net shape” part; the process is unable to create precision holes, pockets, threads and other features that will require a trip to the CNC mills. What forging does do is create parts of exceptional strength.

A hammer the size of a house. Consider that for a moment. Koenig merits your attention.

Can the mobile Web win back developers from iOS, Android? » CNET

Stephen Shankland speaks to Dominique Hazaël-Massieux of the W3C:

Web allies are working to make up for lost time. The Application Foundations effort, announced in October 2014, adds new heft to existing work to improve standards. It emphasizes a collection of priorities like video chat, cryptography, typography, responsiveness and streaming media.

“There are challenges around performance, around making apps work offline and outside the browser,” Hazaël-Massieux said. One big part of the fixes is a standard called Service Workers that dramatically remakes Web apps’ deeper workings. Service Workers are programs that run in the background, letting Web apps work even if there’s no network connection and enabling things like push notifications. With Service Workers, those notifications could come through even if a person is using another app.

“A component provided by the browser registers itself with the operating system. When the OS receives a notification, it knows it should wake up the browser, and the browser wakes up the Web application,” Hazaël-Massieux said. “Service Workers are about getting the Web to live also outside the browser. That opens up interesting opportunities.”

Another feature he’s excited about is payments provided with an interface that would take Apple and Google out of the loop, letting the programmer choose what payment mechanisms to offer.

In general, the answer has to be “no”, though. Simply because (as Matt Gemmell has pointed out) a web app is “an app running on an app running on the system”, where an app is “an app running on the system”. It’s a bit like interpreted v compiled code.

I’ve seen the new face of Search, and it ain’t Google » Alex Iskold

The “ten blue links” aren’t optimum on mobile (Google already knows this, of course);

imagine, that instead of Google text field or browser bar, you get a familiar Text Messaging interface and you can ask questions. Here is what happens next:

1. You will ask questions in the natural form, like you do in real life.

2. Your questions will be naturally compact, because you are used to compact form of text messaging, but they won’t be one word or one phrase like we type into Google. You still can have typos, and missing punctuation.

3. This format naturally lends itself onto the conversation. That is, you don’t expect 10 links, you expect a human response. And you expect to respond in response to this response, and so on – that is, you expect a conversation.

4. ‘The answer’ will be things / objects / places, and links will become secondary. The answer will be 1 or 2 or 3 things but not 10 things. The choice will be naturally added via a conversation and iteration, not by pushing 10 links on the user upfront.

5. You won’t be able to tell the difference between a person or machine replying to you. This is where all the amazing AI stuff (looking at you, Amy) is going to come handy and will really shine.

6. You won’t think of this as search anymore, but as your command and control for all things you need – tasks, purchases and of course good old search. It will be like Siri, except it will be based on text, and have a lot more capabilities. And it will actually work great. (No offense Siri, but you have ways to go).

Sounds a bit like the (failed) Jelly, but he suggests Magic, Sensay and Cloe as possible implementations. This feels like it’s heading in the right direction. Search shouldn’t really be might-be-right links on mobile.

California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now? » LA Times

Jay Famigliette:

As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

I wonder what this means for all the technology companies in that region.

Connected audio products to grow at a CAGR of 88% from 2010-2018, says IHS » Digitimes

Annual shipments of connected audio products, including wireless speakers, wireless soundbars, and connected AV receivers, are expected to grow at a CAGR of 88%, from 1.5m units in 2010 to nearly 66m units in 2018, according to IHS.

The popularity of mobile devices and changing consumer habits in media consumption are not only increasing demand for wirelessly connected audio devices, but also rapidly altering the home audio landscape.

Within this composite group of products, connected soundbars and wireless speakers are expected to provide noteworthy growth, not just within home audio, but also within the overall consumer electronics market. Combined shipments are forecast to grow at a CAGR of 94% over the same period.

That’s some pretty dramatic growth, driven by people listening to audio at home from their mobile.

Samsung seals big SSD chip deal with Apple » Korea Times

The latest agreement is calling for Samsung Electronics to sell its latest solid state drive (SSD) storage devices using its V-NAND technology to Apple’s new range of ultra-slim and high-end notebook models, two people directly involved with the deal told The Korea Times, Friday.

“Samsung Electronics recently agreed with Apple to provide SSDs using its latest three-dimensional (3D) V-NAND tech. The deal is estimated to be worth a “few billion dollars,” said one of the people.

Samsung’s chip factory in Xian, China, will handle the production.

Still best of frenemies.

What Is Android 5.1’s anti-theft “Device Protection” feature and how do I use it? » Android Police

David Ruddock wrestles with this feature, which is basically the same as Apple’s iCloud lock (introduced in 2013) and Samsung’s similar feature:

With Android 5.1, Google revealed that it was releasing a new feature for handsets called Device Protection. This anti-theft feature makes it basically impossible for a thief to use your phone in the event it is stolen and wiped. First things first, though: how do you get this feature?

Right now (as in, at the time of this article), there is a single device with the feature currently enabled: the Nexus 6. The Nexus 9 will get device protection as well, but its Android 5.1 update has not yet rolled out. Nexus 4, 5, 7 (2012 and 2013), and 10 will not receive the factory reset Device Protection feature. Allegedly, no phone or tablet that did not ship with Android 5.1 or higher out of the box will receive the factory reset protection feature (again, except Nexus 6 and Nexus 9), at least according to Google at this time.

However, Google’s support site says the info applies to devices that have 5.0 or higher preinstalled (as in shipped with), though, so it’s not clear if devices that shipped with 5.0 and then later upgrade to 5.1 (or higher) will then get it. Google didn’t provide a satisfactory response to this question, unfortunately.

I get the faint feeling with Lollipop that Google is struggling to keep everything from falling off the table. First the rollback on encryption, now this. (Some commenters claim to see it on their Nexus 5, but Ruddock says it’s “simply a leftover that Google forgot to remove from the ROMs of unsupported 5.1 devices.”)

MWC: not all 4G LTE modems are created equal according to tests with Qualcomm and Samsung » Moor Insights & Strategy

Even though many modems and networks may currently only be capable of Category 4 LTE speeds (150 Mbps downlink), there are still some differences in how much those modems perform given the exact same conditions. In some cases, our testing at 20 MHz band width showed that the performance differences between Qualcomm’s and Samsung’s modems can be as big as 20%, meaning that one user can get their files 20% faster than someone else with a competitor’s phone and they are also saving power by getting that file faster and shutting down the data connection quicker.

Also finds differences in power consumption – Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 is 5-10% better there too. But Samsung benefits by buying its own modems, of course.

Start up: harassment claims against Google, android dog funerals, self-destructing handset makers? and more

Posted on March 10, 2015 by charlesarthur

A Dropcam watches the snow fall, pretending to ignore you. Photo by Scott Beale on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Contains minimal Watch content. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Dropcam’s slow slide into Nest — and therefore Google — begins » PandoDaily

Nathaniel Mott:

Dropcam users are being asked to create Nest accounts — regardless of whether or not they own a Nest product — so they can use “new features and improvements” to their cameras.

The Verge reports that the new accounts will be used to support some of the integrations Nest promised when it acquired Dropcam for around $555 million in cash June 2014. It will also ensure that Dropcam customers have agreed to Nest’s updated terms of service.

Anyone who wasn’t worried before about Google acquiring these companies (it acquired Nest in January 2014; Nest then acquired Dropcam in June) before should be worried now.

But of course, you’ve already got a Dropcam (which looks pretty useful). So setting up an account, well..

Google hit with sexual harassment complaint from ex-employee » Betanews

Mark Wilson on Kelly Ellis’s allegations – which are serious, and go up as far as behaviour by Vic Gundotra – made over the weekend:

Google would much prefer to be seen encouraging women into technology but Ellis – who worked on the Google+ team – dismisses this as nothing more than “PR bullshit”. She also says that she was let down by co-workers who failed to back her up.

Ellis spent a good deal of time on Saturday tweeting a series of snippets about her time at Google where she worked from 2010 to 2014. The tweets started with a very blunt statement: “At Google I was sexually harassed by someone who was later promoted to director”. Dozens of tweets then followed giving more details about what had happened.

Now working as a software engineer at Medium, Ellis says that the harassment was the main reason she left the company back in July. She says “I don’t care if people believe me or not”, but, we have to refer to what she says as allegations. She says that Roderick Chavez, another Google engineer, harassed her:

Google hasn’t responded to the allegations at the time of this being collated.

The privacy and security questions we must ask about the Apple Watch » Fusion

Kashmir Hill:

Apple wants to be your iDoctor. Even if its devices aren’t actually FDA-approved, the apps it makes available that could offer up diagnoses and treatment will be.

Now that our iDevices are going to be collecting even more information from us, what privacy and security concerns do we need to be freaking out about?

“Freaking out about”? Asking about, perhaps. It seems there’s nothing to freak out about.

Imaginary ISIS attack on Louisiana and the twitterbots who loved it » Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow:

On September 11, 2014, [Gilad] Lotan, a data scientist, started researching a massive, coordinated, and failed hoax to create panic over an imaginary ISIS attack on a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana. The hoax included Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia identities (some apparently human piloted, others clearly automated) that had painstakingly established themselves over more than a month. Also included: fake news stories, an imaginary media outlet called “Louisiana News,” and some fascinating hashtag trickery whereby a generic hashtag was built up in Russian Twitter by one set of bots, then, once trending, was handed over to a different set of English-language bots that used it to promote the hoax.

More interesting is the fact that the hoax failed. Lotan shows that Facebook’s Edgerank proved to be resistant to gaming using the process employed by the hoax’s creator(s); that Twitter clusters can be trumped by real news sources; and that Wikipedia’s vigilance was adequate to catching fakesters who create hoax pages.

One feels it’s important to add the proviso: “this time”. There’s more from John Borthwick on Medium. And speaking of Twitter bots…

This is what a graph of 8,000 fake Twitter accounts looks like » Terence Eden’s Blog

Like this:

Eden spent a weekend digging into the nests of fake accounts:

There appears to be several “loops” – that is bots which are in an almost closed network with each other. I see at least half a dozen circles – the rest appear to be following other fake accounts at random.

The centre of those circles appear to be real people. I can’t say why they have lots of fake followers – it’s possible that they – or someone else – has just bought them to make it look like they’re more popular than they really are. There’s no suggestion that they control the fake accounts.

One of the central nodes has 650,000 followers. It’s not possible to know quite how many of those are fake – I’m guessing the majority are.

It seems that there’s a nasty nest of these bots. In the last few weeks I’ve reported a dozen or so for spam – but with literately tens of thousands in the network it’s impossible for any individual to make a meaningful impact.

Avoidable Contact: the watery Big Bang, the 32-step power steering fluid check, disposable faux-ury » The Truth About Cars

Jack Baruth starts with racing cars, then veers into watches…

Hublot and other watchmakers are busy CAD-creating their own “manufacture movements” to replace the generic ETA/Sellita/Valjoux movements found in their products. In this, the Cretaceous period of watch enthusiasm, the ability to engineer and manufacture one’s own mechanical watch movement is essential for “credibility”. Not that the genuine prestige watchmakers all used their own movements anyways, but there’s a certain amount of Cadillac-at-the-Nurburgring idiocy going on: Rolex makes their own movements, and they are a respected brand, so we need to have our own movements as well, even more complicated and feature-packed, and then we will be more respected than Rolex.

There’s just one little problem with that strategy. The proliferation of quick-bake “manufacture” movements is creating an entire generation of hugely expensive, amazingly complicated, completely “bespoke” watches which will be impossible to fix.

…and then he comes out the other side and goes into Porsches, and 993s v Boxsters, but it’s really about durability and inheritability. Very appropriate in light of you-know-what.

Chart: Samsung leads the smartwatch market » Statista

Who are the main players in the smartwatch market? Like the smartphone market, Samsung is going to be Apple’s main competitor. The South Korean technology behemoth sold approximately 1.2 million units in 2014, ahead of second placed Pebble with 700,000. The top three was rounded off by Fitbit who sold 600,000 smartwatches.

Fitbit does a smartwatch? Also, Motorola seems to have been subsumed into Lenovo, so that the Moto 360 looks like it did 500,000 units.

My one problem with these numbers is that they don’t fit with the number of Android Wear devices sold and activated, which we know is 720,000 (give or take a few).

The global handset industry is set for self-destruct » Digits To Dollars

Jay Goldberg isn’t happy:

Let’s say you make a product, and you have a lot of competitors, dozens, hundreds. Prices are falling. More people are piling into the market. Now it is time for you to design a new product. Do you experiment with a radically new form factor? Let a single designer attempt to craft a finely honed product that stands out for its quality? Or do you come out with a product that is just a modest upgrade of last year’s product, with no distinguishing design or features?

Well, when you put it like that…..

Really, I am kinda dumbfounded. That handset OEMs seem to be on a path of self-destruction. I visited every major OEM’s booth and dozens of smaller vendors. I am sure I missed one or two interesting devices with some novel feature, but at some point, I can only stare at identical black, plastic slabs for so long. There is nothing new or differentiated out there, and this cannot last.

I have to admit, at one point, I almost lost my temper. A couple times actually. The industry seems to be in some very complicated form of denial. And there seem to be a couple common threads to their excuses.

His idea of a QWERTY Android phone to sweep up the disenfranchised BlackBerry users is one that keeps being put forward, but nobody is brave enough to do. Point is it would have to be enormously tall, and what happens when you turn the phone sideways? Should it be a slide-phone like the G1?

If an algorithm wrote this, how would you even know? » NYTimes.com

Shelley Podolny (well, perhaps):

The multitude of digital avenues now available to us demand content with an appetite that human effort can no longer satisfy. This demand, paired with ever more sophisticated technology, is spawning an industry of “automated narrative generation.”

Companies in this business aim to relieve humans from the burden of the writing process by using algorithms and natural language generators to create written content. Feed their platforms some data — financial earnings statistics, let’s say — and poof! In seconds, out comes a narrative that tells whatever story needs to be told.

These robo-writers don’t just regurgitate data, either; they create human-sounding stories in whatever voice — from staid to sassy — befits the intended audience. Or different audiences. They’re that smart. And when you read the output, you’d never guess the writer doesn’t have a heartbeat.

Consider the opening sentences of these two sports pieces:

“Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.”

“The University of Michigan baseball team used a four-run fifth inning to salvage the final game in its three-game weekend series with Iowa, winning 7-5 on Saturday afternoon (April 24) at the Wilpon Baseball Complex, home of historic Ray Fisher Stadium.”

If you can’t tell which was written by a human, you’re not alone.

Cue observation about how many US news reports have read like they’re written by machines for years anyway.

Japan’s robot dogs get funerals as Sony looks away » Newsweek

Lauren Walker:

“I can’t imagine how quiet our living room would have been if Ai-chan wasn’t here,” Sumie Maekawa, a longtime Aibo owner, told The Wall Street Journal, using an honorific suffix applied to girls’ names.

Tatsuo Matsui, who owns two digital dogs with his wife, added, “I can’t risk my precious dogs because they are important members of our family.”

Despite the loyal fanbase, Sony decided to discontinue the bot in 2006, after selling around 150,000 units.

“Our core businesses are electronics, games and entertainment, but the focus is going to be on profitability and strategic growth,” a Sony spokeswoman said at the time. “In light of that, we’ve decided to cancel the Aibo line.”

For years following the announcement, Sony would repair Aibos that experienced technical difficulties. But in July 2014, those repairs stopped and owners were left to look elsewhere for help.

Do androids dream of electric dog funerals?

Start up: SLR death throes, why fusion won’t change things, Apple’s waterproof phone?, Samsung’s big spend, and more

Posted on March 9, 2015 by charlesarthur

What are those funny phones they’re holding, dad? Photo by w|©kedf|lm on Flickr

A selection of 10 links for you. Slather over the body when nobody is looking. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Prediction: the age of the standalone still camera is coming to an end for all but pros » Vincent Laforet’s Blog

who wants to stick a CF/SD card in a computer, import, edit, tone, export, share / publish a website anymore – when you can do the same thing in 1-3 clicks of your thumb on a smartphone?

The battle is over… the smartphones and iOSs have won. The quality is good enough on a smartphone/iPhone today, that when combined with software the need for a dedicated still camera can appear to be a burden to the majority of people out there: unless they have a specific technical need that only a DSLR or speciality lenses can offer.

With platforms like Twitter, FB, Storehouse, Instagram, 500 pixels, Tumblr etc etc – it’s too late to go back to the clunky way of doing things unless you are TRULY a big time hobbyist who loves the process. And I do! But not that often… and truth is: we’re in the vast minority…

The technological trends and shift towards digital and now smartphones that are connected to the web are undeniably the most important factors at play here: we’re all gotten used to having a $300-$900 mini computer on us at ALL times, and you can’t compete with a tool that is glued to your end-user… no camera company can compete with that, and they simply haven’t even tried to put editing/social media software into their cameras, which is a potentially devastating oversight long term.

It’s not that dramatic a prediction, but it’s the relentlessness that’s so imposing.

If Lockheed’s recent announcement on nuclear fusion energy is true, how would it change the world? » Quora

Ryan Carlyle, who says he’s a BSChE (chemical engineer?) and subsea hydraulics engineer, is here to rain on the parade:

Real-world fusion reactors aren’t going to be like “Mr Fusion” style reactors from Back To The Future. I mean, seriously -it ran on garbage and powered a flying car. That almost makes the time travel plot seem realistic in comparison. But that’s what people seem to think when they hear “miniature fusion plant.”

Pro tip: the physics of fusion power do not support the concept of automobile-scale fusion. Seriously, this isn’t Tony Stark’s Arc Reactor; it’s just a thermoelectric power plant with a slightly smaller heat source. You need a giant steam turbine and ridiculously giant cooling system to generate serious electricity from a fusion reactor. Even if you miniaturize the reaction chamber, the support equipment required for electricity generation will still be extremely large.

Here’s a small nuclear power plant. I have helpfully indicated the size of the actual fission reactor inside the containment structure:

And here’s my detailed conceptual rendering of a “miniature” fusion reactor power plant with the same power output:

And that’s only the start of it.

Ghacks is dying and needs your help » gHacks Tech News

Martin Brinkmann, who started the site in 2005 and was able to make it his full-time job, now faces the chasm:

In addition to [Google downranking the site in 2011 with its Penguin search update], ad blockers and script blockers became increasingly popular. Since advertisement is what keeps this site alive, a yearly increase between 5 and 10% in ad-block usage is not something that you can endure for long especially if it goes hand in hand with a decline in traffic.

Currently, between 42% and 44% of all users use blockers when they visit the site and if the trend continues, more than 50% might before the end of the year.

If you take these two factors together, it is only a matter of time before ad revenue won’t be sufficient to pay for the site’s upkeep anymore.

Advertising is dying in its current form. While I could make a quick buck throwing popups, auto-playing videos or other nasty stuff at you, I’d never do that.

Heck, those are the things that make people use ad-blockers in the first place and as much as I like this site to survive, I like to protect the integrity of this site and you from these diabolical monetization methods even more.

Advertisements won’t be sufficient to keep this site up and there is not really much out there that I could implement or try instead to make sure this site is not taken off the Internet in the next year.

He’s going to try Patreon. Presently the pledges aren’t enough to cover the server costs – $280 per month?! I wish him luck, but I’m not optimistic. (I’ll return to see how things are in a few months.)

I think Brinkmann’s business problems are probably echoed all over the web by small sites which were once able to make money from ads, but are now finding them sucked up by Facebook, or Twitter, or the effect of Google invisibility.

US DOJ accuses three men in largest email breach ‘in the history of the Internet’ » GeekWire

Frank Catalano:

The indictments against two Vietnamese citizens and a Canadian citizen — operating from Vietnam, the Netherlands, and Canada — alleges the trio were involved in hacking at least eight U.S. email service providers, spamming tens of millions of email recipients, getting money from affiliate relationships for spammed products, and laundering the proceeds.

“The defendants allegedly made millions of dollars by stealing over a billion email addresses from email service providers,” U.S. Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said in a statement. “This case again demonstrates the resolve of the Department of Justice to bring accused cyber hackers from overseas to face justice in the United States.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) estimates the accused allegedly took in approximately $2 million through the affiliate marketing sales linked to spam. One of the three is said to have already pleaded guilty.

Brian Krebs suggests it was a breach of the email marketing company Epsilon in 2011 – whose servers were then hijacked to send the spam. A reminder that spam is still big, big business.

Why do we care about Xiaomi? » Benedict Evans

Evans (who works at VC company a16z) thinks we care (or should) because of what it implies for the “next stage” of Android:

Historically, Google’s lock on Android outside China has therefore been based on three things:

• You can’t experiment outside very tight constraints: making even one forked device means Google won’t allow you to sell a single phone running Google services. And all the OEMs have too much to lose to risk experimenting
• There’s a widespread belief that an Android device without Google services (really, this means Maps and the app store) is unsaleable outside China (I’m not entirely sure about this, as I wrote here)
• No OEM managed to build a compelling set of services or tools of its own that might offer alternatives to Google, because, well, that was impossible (see above)

These new trends place all of those in question. The growth of smaller operators pursuing different models, with no existing base of sales and hence nothing to fear from Google ban, may mean more experiments with forks. Xiaomi and its imitators point to a new potential model to differentiate (and note that Xiaomi is not a fork), and Cyanogen (an a16z portfolio company) offers the tools to do it. Smaller OEMs are less powerful than Samsung as a counterpart to Google, but also harder collectively to impose upon – Google can’t shout at them all.

Apple researching device waterproofing via vapor deposition, silicone seals » Apple Insider

Mikey Campbell:

As published by the US Patent and Trademark Office, Apple’s filing for “Methods for shielding electronic components from moisture” outlines a process for coating sensitive device components using advanced vapor deposition technology and protecting solder leads with silicone seals.

Instead of sealing off the entire device housing like a common wristwatch, Apple proposes coating integral components, like the printed circuit board (PCB), with a hydrophobic coating. Depositing the coating via plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition (PACVD) would create an acceptable insulating layer to protect against short circuits that occur when high voltage parts are exposed to liquid.

I’ve thought for some time that Apple would add waterproofing (well, water resistance) to its phones in due course, but that it sees no rush while it’s not completely commonplace elsewhere. (Look at how Samsung has taken it out of the Galaxy S6.) This would also require factory equipment, so might be something for 2016’s range.

Technology helps visually impaired navigate the Tube » BBC News

Hugh Pym (the health editor):

Members of the Youth Forum of the Royal London Society for Blind People (RLSB) said they wanted to navigate the tube system independently.

Currently most have to rely on friends to help them get used to familiar routes or phone ahead to request assistance from London Underground staff. Many do not feel confident about using the whole network. They group teamed up with a digital products designer, ustwo, which then devised a system which was effective below ground.

The Bluetooth beacons transmit signals which can be picked up by smartphones and other mobile devices. Audible directions are provided to users via “bone conduction” earphones which allow them to hear sounds around them as well.

The directions warn users when they are approaching escalators and ticket barriers and which platforms they may be approaching. It’s the first such trial of a technology which can guide blind and partially sighted people underground or in areas with limited mobile phone reception.

Developers say it could be used in other subway networks like those in Newcastle and Glasgow or in other busy public transport hubs

That’s ustwo, as in Monument Valley. Many strings to their bow. Wonderfully clever application.

Samsung breaks records with £45m push behind Galaxy S6 » Daily Telegraph

Chris Williams:

Samsung is launching a record-breaking £45m marketing barrage to support its new Galaxy S6 smartphone and regain ground lost to Apple.

The figure, disclosed by industry sources, is the largest ever for a mobile phone launch and is believed to be the largest for any single product in the UK.

Samsung is spending heavily across all traditional and new media marketing channels, but is understood to be especially targeting the mass audiences provided by television and high-profile outdoor advertising sites.

The Galaxy S6 is already being heavily promoted on the digital billboards on the London Underground network, for instance.

Samsung also paid for a special advert based on the Galaxy S6 launch event last week in Barcelona. It aired three hours later in the UK on Sunday evening during ITV’s primetime drama Mr Selfridge.

Samsung has long been among the world’s biggest marketing spenders, devoting a larger proportion of its annual sales to promoting its products than any other top 20 global company.

Reading the comments under Apple articles always reveals two trains of thought, often following each other: (1) Apple is only popular because it spends so much on marketing (2) [when it’s pointed out that Samsung spends more] Apple is only popular because “the media” pushes it.

On the basis of (1), the S6 is going to be the most humungous hit, surely?

Popular Xiaomi phone could put data at risk » Bluebox Security

There’s a big asterisk on this one, but first read what Andrew Blaich found:

We ran several of the top malware and antivirus scanners on the Mi 4 to determine if any questionable apps came pre-loaded on the device. We used several scanners to compile a comprehensive list as some scanners returned nothing and others flagged different apps. Ultimately, we found six suspicious apps that can be considered malware, spyware or adware; a few were more notable than others.

One particularly nefarious app was Yt Service. Yt Service embeds an adware service called DarthPusher that delivers ads to the device among other things[2]. This was an interesting find because, though the app was named Yt Service, the developer package was named com.google.hfapservice (note this app is NOT from Google). Yt Service is highly suspicious because it disguised its package to look as if it came from Google; something an Android user would expect to find on their device. In other words, it tricks users into believing it’s a “safe” app vetted by Google.

Other risky apps of note included PhoneGuardService (com.egame.tonyCore.feicheng) classified as a Trojan, AppStats classified (org.zxl.appstats) as riskware and SMSreg classified as malware[3]

However, Xiaomi says that the device “appears to have been tampered [with] in the distribution/retail process by an unknown third party”. But as Blaich points out, if it’s that easy to mess with, that raises other questions too. Selling smartphones isn’t as simple as just choosing a spec list.

The Apple Watch is time, saved » TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino does that thing where, you know, you talk to sources to find stuff out, which he then collects in this fascinating article:

Here’s a tidbit you might not know — in order to receive notifications from apps, the Watch must be on your wrist and locked. The Watch requires contact with your skin to receive notifications. There will be no in-app dropdown notifications or constant pinging while it’s off your wrist. Push notifications also cease when the battery reaches 10%. Those decisions speak to the care with which Apple is handling notifications.

The notifications are also different at an elemental level than the ones on your phone — both on the developer and user side of things. These are seen right away rather than at some point. You act on them quickly and they don’t stack up like they do on the phone.

There is that added bit of context because you know exactly when they got it, which means that time-sensitive notifications like those that recommend a precise establishment or ping you during a live event become much more germane.

And this is a key point:

the only resource we all have exactly in common is time. Kings don’t have more of it than peasants. Not everyone will be able to afford an Apple Watch (or even an iPhone), but if they’re in an economic situation where that’s feasible then they’re also in the situation where they are probably willing to trade money for time.

Start up: Samsung’s future?, Lollipop drops mandatory crypto, the DDOS lightbulb, Microsoft and keyboards, and more

Posted on March 4, 2015 by charlesarthur

Samsung, in a few years? Photo by French Tart on Flickr.

A selection of 13 links for you. (Too many? Too much news.) I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s great encryption backtrack » Motherboard

Jason Koebler:

In late October, Google announced that Lollipop, its newest version of Android, would have “encryption by default.” Monday, it was a curious reporter, not Google, reporting that would no longer be the case.

Instead of requiring every file on an Android system to be encrypted by default, the choice will be left up to manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, and Motorola as to whether to turn that feature on out of the box, Ars Technica discovered.

“Google has made statements that are no longer true, and it’s Google’s obligation to publicly correct that statement,” Amie Stepanovich, US policy manager for the digital rights group Access, told me.

Google won’t say why it’s backtracking, but it’s pretty evident the reason is device performance – encryption slows them down. User security takes second place to performance – the story that has killed BlackBerry down the years.

Cybercriminals phish iCloud credentials from victims of iPhone, iPad theft » Symantec Connect Community

Cybercriminals have recently created multiple phishing sites in order to trick iOS device owners into providing login credentials for their iCloud accounts. The attackers appear to be focusing on users whose iPads and iPhones have been lost or stolen. It’s possible that the attackers are running this phishing operation as part of a service for iOS device thieves on underground forums.

In one particular case, a victim of iPad theft received an unsolicited message, informing him that his tablet had been found. The message then instructed him to click on a link to discover the location of his iPad.

Surprise! It’s a phishing site to get the iCloud credentials and unlock the stolen phone for resale.

This guy’s light bulb DDoSed his entire smart house — Fusion

Kashmir Hill on Raul Rojas, a computer science professor who made his whole house into a smart home (apart from the locks – he worried about the locks):

About two years ago, Rojas’s house froze up, and stopped responding to his commands. “Nothing worked. I couldn’t turn the lights on or off. It got stuck,” he says. It was like when the beach ball of death begins spinning on your computer—except it was his entire home.

…when he investigated, it turned out that the culprit was a single, connected light bulb.

“I connected my laptop to the network and looked at the traffic and saw that one unit was sending packets continuously,” said Rojas. He realized that his light fixture had burned out, and was trying to tell the hub that it needed attention. To do so, it was sending continuous requests that had overloaded the network and caused it to freeze. “It was a classic denial of service attack,” says Rojas. The light was performing a DDoS attack on the smart home to say, ‘Change me.’”

Take a look at his home hub. That’s not some little router.

BlackBerry CEO: I’m open to creating a tablet again » CNET

Roger Cheng:

BlackBerry may take another run at the tablet market.

That’s if CEO John Chen thinks the opportunity is right. “It’s not in the works, but it’s on my mind,” Chen said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress conference here.

A BlackBerry tablet could satisfy the needs of a small but fiercely loyal group of productivity-focused customers who have stuck with the struggling smartphone maker and its operating system, potentially giving it a new revenue stream. But there aren’t enough BlackBerry faithful to sustain such a business, especially given the tablet category saw its first year-over-year decline in shipments in the fourth quarter.

“History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce,” to quote Marx (not Groucho).

Does anybody understand these baffling MWC slogans? » Pocket-lint

Rik Henderson:

One of the things we always notice when trudging trade show floors is that companies feel the need to explain what they do, or what they are showing in a three or four word slogan. However, most of them are claptrap of the highest order.

Wonderful (and classically British) insistence on taking words at their face value, and asking the important questions that other sites (and certainly not the boring American ones) will, such as: “what actually does ‘unleash the future’ mean, Mozilla?”

Google reportedly preparing Android Wear for iPhone and iPad » Mac Rumors

Joe Rossignol:

Google is reportedly preparing to release an Android Wear app on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, according to French technology website 01net [Google Translate] (via iPhon.fr).

The report claims Android Wear with extended iOS support could be announced at Google’s I/O developer conference in late May, although Google may push the agenda depending on sales of the Apple Watch.

Google may be interested in capitalizing on iPhone and iPad users that are not planning to purchase an Apple Watch when the wrist-worn device is released in April, the report adds.

Essentially unsourced, but it would make sense: Google wants its services used as widely as possible, and not having Android Wear on iOS leaves tens of millions of potential customers unserved.

However, are there many iPhone users who would opt for Android Wear over an Apple Watch, except over the question of price? At the bottom end, the price delta is pretty low – and if that really matters, you’d get a Pebble, since it has been iOS-compatible from day one. So I believe this report, but don’t think Android Wear will benefit from it as much as Google (and AW makers) might want.

Cyanogen CEO Kirt McMaster on Android, Samsung, and more » Business Insider

Lisa Eadicicco, with a smart interview with McMaster, who says:

On the global platform, we see Xiaomi becoming the No. 3 OEM. Micromax is now No. 10. These guys are basically creating really cheap handsets that have really awesome performance. This is made possible because of Qualcomm’s turnkey solution as well as Mediatek’s.

One of the things Cyanogen does really well is optimizations at the low level, at the kernel level. Which means we can get performance out of these chipsets coming out of turnkey that make the device for all intents and purposes feel like a $600 iPhone.

The tier one OEMs like Samsung are going to be the next generation Nokias in the next five years. They’re going to be slaughtered. We think long term Apple itself will have problems because they’re just not good at competing at the low end.

Q: So you think Samsung will be toast in five years?

It could get pretty bad pretty damn quick. This is often the case.

Swedish speed camera pays drivers to slow down » WIRED

Is it possible to make road-safety fun? Yes, it turns out. Kevin’s Richardson’s idea is both smart and simple. As well as ticketing you when you run through a speed-radar too fast, Kevin’s “Speed Camera Lottery” also notices you when you come in at or under the speed-limit. It then automatically enters you in a lottery. And here’s the really smart part: the prizes come from the fines paid by speeders.

This would probably never work in the U.S, where speeding fines and red-light cameras exist as revenue streams for the police rather than as deterrents to bad driving, but the Swedish National Society for Road Safety, which worked with Kevin, has found it to be a success.

Neat idea (there’s the video) but of course it relies on tying your speed to your licence plate, ad so your address, and so you. Sweden is open enough that that is accessible. But other countries?

Even so, the idea of changing behaviour through “fun” is a subtle – yet powerful – one.

3D-printing with living organisms “could transform the food industry” » Dezeen

No content. Just consider
• use of “could” in the headline. As Paul Haine points out, you can extend Betteridge’s Law (“any headline posed as a question can be fully answered and the story implications understood with ‘No'”) to headlines which use “could”
• “3D printing with living organisms” is also known as “growing, preparing and cooking stuff”. No 3D printer required.

Zuckerberg: carriers will connect the world, not sci-fi – CNET

It’s regular carriers and regular technology that will bring Internet access to the billions of people who lack it today, not sci-fi ideas like Google’s Project Loon balloons or Project Titan drones, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg thinks.

“People like talking about that stuff because it’s sexy,” Zuckerberg said of such departures from networks delivered by plain old cell phone towers and fiber-optic lines. “That’s at the fringe of the real work that’s going on. Ninety percent of the people in the world already live within range of the network.”

Well that’s putting a pin in the balloon so laboriously pumped up by various blogs of how Loon is going to totally, utterly, y’know, transform how everyone stays connected.

Microsoft’s keyboard obsession » TechCrunch

Ron Miller:

this morning at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft announced a new version of Office 365. I gotta be honest. It looked like it was trying to take full-blown Office and squeeze it into a 5 or 6 inch screen. Sure, they tuned it a bit to make it mobile friendly, but it was still Office in all its glory in a smaller footprint.

So what did Microsoft do? You got it. It developed a keyboard.

It’s a small bluetooth variety engineered by the Microsoft hardware group. It folds up into a fairly small footprint to fit neatly in brief case or purse, but it’s another part of their total keyboard obsession. Instead of making Office fit the phone touch screen, it invented a keyboard to make it work better on a phone.

Next it will probably build a small wireless mouse to complete its whole vision of mobile device as a PC in a small package.

This is such an elegantly short yet well-observed piece. And captures it all. The commenters are furious because obviously he typed it. I wonder how much real typing they do. Perhaps too much. Journalists typically type at least a thousand words a day; I wonder how much the average Office user types. Any data out there?

Mobile consumers have the answer » Kantar Worldpanel

Carolina Milanesi asked the Kantar panel of consumers for their views:

We know that tablet sales are stagnant and that 79% of American panelists without a tablet have said that the reason they are not planning to buy a tablet in the next 12 month is because their PC is “good enough” for them. When we asked consumers who own a PC if they are planning to replace that PC in 2015, 85% of the panelists interviewed said they are not. 11.3% said they indeed are planning to replace their current PC with another, and1.7% said they will replace that PC with a tablet. Finally, 1.9% plan to replace their PC with a convertible.

Consumers in the 25 to 34 year bracket are the most favorable to tablets, with 2.9% planning to purchase one as a replacement for their PC. Consumers 16 to 24, are the most open to convertibles (3.5%) most likely because they’re still in their school years,

Also asked about virtual reality, to sniffy answers. But you could have asked people if they wanted to surf the web and get email on the move in 2006 and got similar uninterested answers. Asking consumers about future technologies isn’t always meaningful without clear use cases.

Galaxy S6 sales to outperform its predecessors, says Samsung Taiwan executive » Digitimes

Samsung Electronics will begin to market its newly released flagship smartphone the Galaxy S6 starting April 10 and expects sales to outperform the Galaxy S4, the vendor’s best-selling model so far, according to Andy Tu, general manager of Samsung’s mobile communication business in Taiwan.

Samsung has responded to criticism of the Galaxy S5 with great changes in terms of design and materials, expecting the new design to bring in significant replacement demand for the Galaxy family products, Tu said on the sidelines of a pre-MWC 2015 event.

Samsung will focus on promoting two flagship models, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note 4, plus mid-range A- and E-series Galaxy models from the second quarter of 2015, Tu revealed.

In all the oceans of electrons splurged over the Samsung S6+Edge, I didn’t see a single one where a Samsung executive was asked whether it expected these to sell more, the same or fewer.

If Digitimes is doing better journalism than the people at MWC..

Start up: Google+ dies, fingerprint better, being watch-y, it’s the robots!, Yahoo’s odd numbers, and more

Posted on March 3, 2015 by charlesarthur

How best to read it? Photo by kevin dooley on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Free! Like beer! Except not liquid! I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google, proving it still hasn’t figured out social, will strip Google+ for parts » Quartz

Mike Murphy:

Google+ is a social graveyard. It’s reported to have more than 2 billion profiles, but fewer than 6 million active users. While Google isn’t yet admitting defeat, it will be carving out the most popular parts of Google+ into separate services—as sure a sign as any that the comprehensive approach to social media isn’t working out.

Bradley Horowitz, a seven-year veteran of Google products, including Google+, announced on the social network this morning that he will be heading up two new products, “Photos” and “Streams.” He didn’t mention Google+ by name, but at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier today, Android head Sundar Pichai put Horowitz’s announcement in context:

For us, Google+ was always two things, a stream and a social layer. The stream has a passionate community of users, but the second goal was larger for us. We’re at a point where things like photos and communications are very important, we’re reorganizing around that. Hangouts will still exist.

Google’s list of failed social networks is amazing. Orkut; Buzz; and now this. It’s been quite the year for giving up: Glass and now this.

Spam uses default passwords to hack routers » Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

In case you needed yet another reason to change the default username and password on your wired or wireless Internet router: Phishers are sending out links that, when clicked, quietly alter the settings on vulnerable routers to harvest online banking credentials and other sensitive data from victims.

John Lanchester reviews ‘The Second Machine Age’ by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and ‘Average Is Over’ by Tyler Cowen » London Review of Books

One should always read anything Lanchester writes:

This has been a joke or riff for so long – such and such ‘reads like it was written by a computer’ – that it’s difficult to get one’s head around the fact that computer-generated news has become a reality. A company called Automated Insights owns the software which wrote that AP story. Automated Insights specialises in generating automatic reports on company earnings: it takes the raw data and turns them into a news piece. The prose is not Updikean, but it’s better than E.L. James, and it gets the job done, since that job is very narrowly defined: to tell readers what Apple’s results are. The thing is, though, that quite a few traditionally white-collar jobs are in essence just as mechanical and formulaic as writing a news story about a company earnings report. We are used to the thought that the kind of work done by assembly-line workers in a factory will be automated. We’re less used to the thought that the kinds of work done by clerks, or lawyers, or financial analysts, or journalists, or librarians, can be automated.

AVG Android App Performance Report Q4 2014 » Slideshare

Fascinating insight into what’s going on inside Android phones. And all enabled through an antivirus app.

Ways to think about market size » Benedict Evans

What happens when you’re trying to estimate the size of a market for a completely new product?

The same problem [of estimating the potential size of the market] applied to mobile phones. [In their early days] You could do a bottom-up analysis that counted business travellers, taxi-drivers, fleet dispatch and so on, and get to maybe 10-15% of the population. Lots of people did that in the 1990s. They were all wrong. For phones, as for PCs, you had to make an imaginative leap into the unknown. You had to say ‘I believe’ that this experience will be transformative, and everyone on earth who has the money will get one. Moore’s Law takes care of ‘having the money’ meaning 4-5bn people, but it’s the imagination that gets you to teenage girls living in text messages. You could predict that phones might get really cheap, but not what that might mean.

In that light it’s worth comparing these two mobile phone ads from the early days of the industry in the UK. The first, perfectly rationally, starts from the mentality ‘how many people will need this?’ This is the ’10-15%’ argument. The second, from Orange, assumes that everyone will want one and it’s our job to get it to them, because we’re changing the world. Phones don’t have specific use cases – they’re a universal product. Hence, the CEO at the time, Hans Snook, went around saying that the UK would go to 150% penetration and most people thought he was mad (note that the Cellnet ad was made two years later).

The ads are priceless.

gotofail and a defence of purists » Lockstep

Remember the “gotofail” bug in Apple’s iOS 7? Stephen Wilson wrote this at the time, considering his history writing software for implantable defibrillators:

I want to suggest that all software is tragically fragile. It takes just one line of silly code to bring security to its knees. The sheer non-linearity of software – the ability for one line of software anywhere in a hundred million lines to have unbounded impact on the rest of the system – is what separates development from conventional engineering practice. Software doesn’t obey the laws of physics. No non-trivial software can ever be fully tested, and we have gone too far for the software we live with to be comprehensively proof read. We have yet to build the sorts of software tools and best practice and habits that would merit the title “engineering”.

I’d like to close with a philosophical musing that might have appealed to my old mentors at Telectronics. Post-modernists today can rejoice that the real world has come to pivot precariously on pure text. It is weird and wonderful that technicians are arguing about the layout of source code – as if they are poetry critics.

We have come to depend daily on great obscure texts, drafted not by people we can truthfully call “engineers” but by a largely anarchic community we would be better off calling playwrights.

Fingerprint sensor revealed by Qualcomm at MWC » BBC News –

Qualcomm said that its sensor works by using sound waves to penetrate the outer layers of the user’s finger.

The information gathered is then used to create a surface map of the person’s skin including the ridges of their fingerprints and sweat pores.

By contrast, Apple and others use capacitive sensors – which make use of the human body’s electrical properties – to take high-resolution scans of sub-epidermal skin below the outer layer of a user’s finger.

Qualcomm suggests its method is superior because it scans through both contaminants and smartphone covers.

“Snapdragon Sense ID 3D Fingerprint Technology’s unique use of ultrasonic technology revolutionises biometrics from 2D to 3D, allowing for greater accuracy, privacy and stronger authentication,” said Raj Talluri, a Qualcomm executive.

One security expert agreed there were merits to the approach.

“The Qualcomm offering is a good idea, as it appears to deal with some of the issues around ‘lifting’ of prints from other surfaces,” said Ken Munro from Pen Test Partners.

Yahoo’s incredible shrinking profitability in its core business » Forbes

Eric Jackson, in a long and deep dive into Yahoo’s numbers:

Yahoo’s actual EBITDA which it’s getting from search and advertising related to their core properties is actually far below this estimated $1.1 billion. Over the years – and this started before Mayer arrived on the scene but has accelerated under her watch in the last 2 years especially – Yahoo has struck deals with partners to help get temporary high-margin revenue which it has been including in its adjusted EBITDA numbers even these are coming from effectively one-time or at least temporary gains.

Most people, when judging the health of a business and its future profitability potential, try to strip out any temporary gains or revenue streams which are not going to around for the long-haul. Then, they can really see how profitable the core business is and judge it on those merits.

In the case of Yahoo, over the years, it has struck a number of IP-related sales with Alibaba and Yahoo Japan which it has been recognizing as high margin adjusted EBITDA over time to supplement the EBITDA it’s getting from its core business. If you actually removed these gains away from that adjusted EBITDA, the profitability of the core business is far less. And if you took out the stock-based compensation expenses on top of that, there’s virtually no EBITDA left.

Android, the anti-productivity OS » Hal’s (Im)Perfect Vision

Hal Berenson is giving up and going back to Windows Phone:

Android just never worked for me. Want me to say something good about it? It has the apps. If they actually work on your device. I admit I’m sorry I went for the LG G3 over a Samsung Galaxy S5 for three reasons. One is that the S5 has fewer app compatibility issues owing to its popularity (aka, the G3 suffers from Android’s fragmentation problem). Another is that the G3 has been unreliable, requiring pulling the battery about every other week to deal with a system hang. But mostly because if used with a non-LG charger the G3 will beep every minute once it is 100% charged. This is not good for sleep. There is no reliable way to eliminate this beeping, except perhaps by rooting the device. That is BS.

My biggest issue with Android itself is how poorly it supports the Microsoft ecosystems, both the business (i.e., Exchange) and consumer (i.e., outlook.com) based ecosystems.

Berenson used to work at Microsoft; now he’s at Amazon.

The most hated design trend is back » FastCo.Design

John Brownlee on how smartwatches are trying to be “watch-y”, with good reason:

this new wave of skeuomorphism isn’t just limited to their digital interfaces. The industrial design of smartwatches themselves are inherently skeuomorphic. After all, a smartwatch is a computer that you wear on your wrist. It aspires to be the same kind of connected portal of information that your smartphone, your TV, and your laptop are. It can be any shape, any size, but the reason it looks like a watch is simply for the sake of familiarity: to ease you into something new. This goes double for the Apple Watch and its primary interactive element, the digital crown, which repurposes the age-old watch component as a new way to zoom in and out of digital interfaces.

You don’t check your pulse, or remotely control your phone camera, or control Netflix, or pay for a cup of coffee with a traditional watch, but you will do all those things with the Apple Watch. Just like the iPhone was a sci-fi device come to life, the Apple Watch is a Dick Tracy communicator, and its very existence raises all sorts of questions: What is this thing? What’s it for? How are we supposed to interact with it?

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

Posted on March 2, 2015 by charlesarthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that Superfish shenanigans:

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

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

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

Mark Mulligan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes to the Dress? » Medium

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

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

Great!

This is not said as an endorsement of BuzzFeed.

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

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

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

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

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

Why is the internet overrun with clickbait? » The Makegood

Tom Hespos:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Futures of text » Whoops

Jonathan Libov:

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

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

Great piece looking at developments in messaging.

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

Sean Gallagher:

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

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

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

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

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

Killian Bell:

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

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

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

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

Also, most expensive? Has nobody bought .sex?

Samsung’s rise and fall » Business Insider

Terrific, detailed piece by Steve Kovach:

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

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

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

Jawdropping.

Start up: thin those CDs!, U2’s many listeners, IT price hikes coming?, YouTube’s zero profit, and more

Posted on February 27, 2015 by charlesarthur

These guys just get everywhere. Photo by Dunechaser on Flickr.

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

Kantar data on free U2 album consumption by Apple device users » Kantar

Annoyed as some Apple customers may have been over being “force-fed” U2’s new album last fall, the impact of the free release is still visible five months later: 23% of all music users on Apple’s operating system listened to at least one U2 track in January-more than twice the percentage who listened to the second-placing artist, Taylor Swift (11%).

Quite a few of those who complained to me about the U2 album weren’t iTunes users at all. This seems to back up the suspicion that a lot of this noise was just commentariat chatter. (Link via Neil Cybart.)

MELTDOWN: Samsung, Sony not-so-smart TVs go titsup for TWO days » The Register

Shaun Nichols:

Samsung smart TVs have been turned into dumb goggle boxes for the past two days – after the devices have been unable use the internet. Coincidently, Sony smart TVs are also having troubles using the web.

A Samsung spokesperson told The Register it is investigating reports that some of its web-connected tellies and Blu-Ray players are unable to stream video from YouTube, iPlayer, Netflix and other sites. The issue appears to affect Samsung D and E series TVs worldwide.

The televisions’ Smart Hub software, which helps people find stuff to watch and apps to use, is refusing to work – in fact, any software on the sets that tries to use the internet just simply won’t work, Reg readers have told us.

Problem seems to be DNS-related – the IP address at the far end has moved and the TVs can’t figure out how to find it. A dress rehearsal for the Internet Of Broken Things.

EFF unearths evidence of possible Superfish-style attacks in the wild » Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

It’s starting to look like Superfish and other software containing the same HTTPS-breaking code library may have posed more than a merely theoretical danger to Internet users. For the first time, researchers have uncovered evidence suggesting the critical weakness may have been exploited against real people visiting real sites, including Gmail, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, and Gpg4Win.org, to name just a few.

I wonder how much feverish activity there is in other PC OEM headquarters as they check all their third-party install apps and contracts.

YouTube: 1 billion viewers, no profit » WSJ

Rolfe Winkler, with one of the tightest, hardest-hitting intros [ledes, for American readers] you’ll see this week:

Google nurtured YouTube into a cultural phenomenon, attracting more than one billion users each month. Still, YouTube hasn’t become a profitable business.

The online-video unit posted revenue of about $4bn in 2014, up from $3bn a year earlier, according to two people familiar with its financials, as advertiser-friendly moves enticed some big brands to spend more. But while YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google’s overall sales last year, it didn’t contribute to earnings. After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTube’s bottom line is “roughly break-even,” according to a person with knowledge of the figure.

By comparison, Facebook Inc. generated more than $12bn in revenue, and nearly $3bn in profit, from its 1.3 billion users last year.

Google would like people to turn to YouTube as though it were TV. To which an analyst retorts that “there’s a lot of junk” and that it needs investment to get TV ad budgets. That’s been tried before, though.

Also, just 9% of viewers account for 85% of page views. It’s the “whale” model used by games like Candy Clash – not the “many watching a bit all the time” of TV.

Why I’m saying goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft » Medium

Dan Gillmor has renounced Those Three and is using Linux and a phone running CyanogenMod:

The tools I use now are, to the extent possible, based on community values, not corporate ones.

I’m not acting on some paranoid fantasies here. I’m emulating, in the tech sphere, some of the principles that have led so many people to adopt “slow food” or vegetarian lifestyles, or to minimize their carbon footprint, or to do business only with socially responsible companies.

Nor do I intend to preach. But if I can persuade even a few of you to join me, even in some small ways, I’ll be thrilled.

I know and like Dan, though one has to pause a bit: the PC is a Lenovo (made in China, home of a not-at-all oppressive government). He doesn’t specify who made the handset. I fear his quest is quixotic; even Taiwan-owned companies manufacture in China. So is China’s government better or worse than Google, Microsoft or Apple?

Exclusive: Sundar Pichai on Google’s vision, mobile revenue, Apple and China » Forbes

Miguel Helft tries hard, but this is largely a snoozer because people like Pichai provide answers that are so vague and distant – and won’t give a hard statistic for anything. This seems a relevant point, though:

Q: Messaging outside of email has become huge, as proven by things like WhatsApp, Snapchat and Facebook Messenger. Does Google need a play there to be competitive?

A: We think about it at two levels. We build platforms. We don’t expect Google as a first party service to provide all the answers. Part of the reason a platform is successful is because there are very very important things from other companies and other developers on top of the platform. Things like WhatsApp are a great example of success that others have had on Android, which we see as welcome innovation on the platform. It’s great for users, it’s great for our platform and I think it’s a virtuous cycle. In the aggregate, we also care about building great services for people. At that level, we view communications as an important area. But that doesn’t mean the answer is always a vertical service. We do have products like Hangouts which we will invest in and evolve. But we also care about the platform in these areas, how we evolve the platform so we support others to do these innovations as well. It’s a more nuanced answer. It’s a more complicated approach. I think we are comfortable with where we are.

Also covers Google+, Android, and China. Doesn’t have a truly interesting insight on any of them; you have to work it out from what isn’t said (he doesn’t emote about Android at Home; won’t talk about how enterprise is going).

Of course various blogs have filleted it for comments about Apple, but that’s a snooze too.

Weak euro puts pressure on hardware pricing » InCONTEXT

Marie-Christine Pygott is senior analyst at the research company:

Towards the end of January, the euro hit a new low against the US dollar. Having lost 11% of its value between July and the end of December last year, the Eurozone currency was down by another 6.8% against the US dollar in January after the new year opened with a series of events that led to increased pressure on the currency.

For the large, non-European IT manufacturers, this has been bad news; where components are sourced in US dollars and revenues generated in euros, the devaluation has meant a significant increase in production costs and a strain on margins. Our distributor pricing data shows a 7% rise in the euro cost of components in the few months between July and December last year, despite a small decline in dollar terms. While prices did not go up to the same extent in real life, it is only a question of time before pricing shifts will show in our Channel data.

And show, it will. It is clear that IT vendors cannot just simply absorb the recent rise in costs.

List prices are already rising for PCs, it seems. That’s going to be a problem. Will smartphones be affected too?

High End Produkte und feinmechanische Geräte » Audiodesksysteme Gläß

The tuning of a CD with the CD Sound Improver is incredibly easy and takes barely a minute. The tungsten carbide blade is automatically set at the right angle during manufacture of the unit. A test CD is included in the delivery package. All following CDs are bevelled under exactly the same conditions. Shavings are removed via the vacuum cleaner link.

Shavings! It’s trimming your CD!

Starting out on Android » iA Writer team

iA Writer (it’s a writing app) has been ported to Android, which was a learning experience for the team who’d previously written for iOS:

The core APIs offered by the Android SDK have proven to be very stable. Lollipop is at its core a completely new OS with a new VM philosophy, but when we updated our first device, the app just continued to work. That’s an amazing feat. Whenever the iOS people took a break from laughing at the stack of test devices, they were toiling away updating their app to work with one iOS upgrade after the other.

Whatever madness has flown into the Android core APIs, it’s there to stay. That can be seen as the reverse side of the coin. Hanging indents are not rendered correctly? Yep, since 2011 — it’s a feature by now. Want to handle a text larger than a few 1000 characters? Sorry, the guy who wrote the SpannableString Builder class is now enjoying early retirement in Malibu. The Android APIs are stable, but sometimes we’d have wished them to be less stubborn.

Via Russell Ivanovic, who cites this as evidence that (in his words) 2015 will be the year of Android. However, this doesn’t show anyone going Android-first; quite the opposite. It’s more that, having wrung the market pretty much dry on iOS and the Mac, they’re now targeting the Android market, which must have a high end who will want to use this.

It’ll be interesting to follow up with iA and see how sales/installs/piracy goes on Android and compares to iOS.