Tag Archives: samsung

Start up: yet another UK broadband pledge, what is mobile?, hacking Samsung’s theft protection, and more

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A Huawei-made Nexus 6P: no breakage of the camera visor panel here. Photo by TechStage on Flickr.

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

Fast broadband for all by 2020 pledged by David Cameron » BBC News

All UK homes and businesses will have access to “fast broadband” [of at least 10 megabits per second] by 2020, David Cameron has pledged.

The PM is to introduce a “universal service obligation” (USO) for broadband, giving the public a legal right to request an “affordable” connection.

It would put broadband on a similar footing to other basic services such as water and electricity.
In 2010, the coalition government promised the UK would have the best superfast broadband in Europe by 2015.

Then, in 2012, a pledge was made by then-Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt that the UK would have “the fastest broadband of any major European country” by 2015.

He defined high-speed broadband as offering a download speed of greater than 24 megabits per second (Mbps). Communications regulator Ofcom defines it as 30Mbps.

That final sentence completely shows how weak this “pledge” really is: from 30Mpbs down to 24 down to 10. I suspect BT, as the dominant operator which also now owns a 4G network, will aim to fulfil this revised USO via 4G.
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Some Nexus 6P owners are reporting spontaneously broken rear glass panels » Android Police

Michael Crider:

The early reaction to the Nexus 6P from both critics and owners has been mostly positive, but a few new owners seem to be encountering serious problems. Specifically, the glass panel on the rear of the phone, which covers the camera, LED flash, and laser autofocus module, is reportedly cracking and breaking on its own. A user on the Android subreddit reported the rear panel cracking, and at least two others have reported similar results, with the panel splitting into multiple cracks with no particular rough handling or impact.

That subreddit is getting pretty big, and there isn’t a lot of joy for the 6P. One person has had two in a row go wrong. Problem for Huawei?
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How uBeam transmits energy wirelessly using ultrasound » uBeam

Meredith Perry, uBeam’s founder, has a big explainer about how it works, because people have been saying that either it doesn’t work, or it’s dangerous:

The uBeam system is composed of two parts: a transmitter that emits energy, and a receiver that receives energy. The transmitter is like a sound speaker, but instead of emitting audible sound, uBeam’s transmitter emits high frequency sound. This sound can’t be heard by humans or dogs; it’s called ultrasound. The receiver, like a microphone, picks up the sound and converts it into usable energy. Sound, like light and wind, is a form of energy that can be converted into electrical energy with our proprietary energy harvesting technology. The receiver then sends this electrical power to charge or power an electronic device.

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Mobile, ecosystems and the death of PCs » Benedict Evans

Evans wrestles with the question of “what is ‘mobile’?” in the face of competing devices like the SurfaceBook, the Surface Pro, iPad Pro and so on:

Each generation of technology goes through an S-curve of development – slow improvement of an impractical product, then explosively fast improvement once fundamental barriers are solved, and then slowing iteration and refinement as you solve every last issue and the curve flattens out. PCs are on that flattening part of the curve, just as the [fastest ever piston-powered aircraft developed at the end of WW2, soon surpassed by jets, the Republic] Rainbow was.

They get perfect because you’re debugging the big things you invented in the past, and now your innovation is in the extra little things (such as the Rainbow using exhaust for extra thrust), and there are no big new innovations to debug. But meanwhile, the new ecosystem is catching up, and the curve of development and innovation for that generation will flatten out way out of reach. The new curve is crossing the old one. This is why they look simliar – this is why a Surface Pro and an iPad Pro look similar. They both exist right at the point that those development curves cross. The iPad might still be a little below, but its curve is heading up.

That is, the point that you can start to do old ecosystem things on what look like new ecosystem devices is also the point that the new ecosystem can do those things too – but the new ecosystem has 10x the scale, and the new ecosystem is just starting down the innovation track where the old one is at its end.

The really tricky part is knowing where on the S-curve something is, and whether there’s still money to be made from it. As Evans points out,

No-one is going to found a new company to make Win32 applications (though enterprise Windows apps will be worked on for a long time, just as mainframe apps were [after the IBM PC arrived]).

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It’s incredibly easy to bypass Factory Reset Protection on a Samsung phone [with video] » 9to5 Google

Stephen Hall:

Factory Reset Protection was introduced with Android Lollipop, and, like Apple’s iCloud Activation Lock, it’s supposed to make it really hard to resell a stolen Android phone. The gist is that when you use Android recovery menu to reset a phone to factory settings, the phone will require upon reboot that you sign in using a Google account you previously used on the device before resetting it. If someone steals your phone and wipes it, they need your Google account for it to be anything but a brick.

Well, it appears that a flaw in Samsung’s phones lets potential thieves around this security measure, and it looks like the workaround takes just about five minutes to pull off…
Obviously a thief wouldn’t be able to get around a password-secured phone, so a factory reset would require going to Android’s recovery menu after a reboot (as opposed to going into the Settings app and doing a factory reset from there).

But since Samsung’s phones automatically pull up a file manager when you plug in an external storage device (even in the set up process), all you have to do is load an app file that lets you open up the stock Settings app. Press a couple buttons to do what the phone thinks is a legitimate/authorized reset, and the phone reboots without tripping Factory Reset Protection.

D’oh.
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Google annual search Statistics » Statistic Brain

The number of annual searches conducted by Google, according to ComScore and the “Statistic Brain Research Institute” (sounds grand).

Compare the numbers in the top two lines of the table. It suggests that in 2014 the total number of Google searches fell, for the first time ever. Even within margins of error, that suggests search growth has stopped.
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XcodeGhost S: a new breed hits the US » FireEye Threat Research

Yong Kang, Zhaofeng Chen, and Raymond Wei:

Through continuous monitoring of our customers’ networks, FireEye researchers have found that, despite the quick response, the threat of XcodeGhost has maintained persistence and been modified.

More specifically, we found that:

• XcodeGhost has entered into U.S. enterprises and is a persistent security risk
• Its botnet is still partially active
• A variant we call XcodeGhost S reveals more advanced samples went undetected

After monitoring XcodeGhost related activity for four weeks, we observed 210 enterprises with XcodeGhost-infected applications running inside their networks, generating more than 28,000 attempts to connect to the XcodeGhost Command and Control (CnC) servers – which, while not under attacker control, are vulnerable to hijacking by threat actors.

Pretty dramatic. And it can affect apps via third-party frameworks, as Possible Mobile discovered. Meanwhile, on Android…
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Lookout discovers new trojanized adware; 20K popular apps caught in the crossfire » Lookout Blog

Michael Bentley of the anti-malware company:

Auto-rooting adware is a worrying development in the Android ecosystem in which malware roots the device automatically after the user installs it, embeds itself as a system application, and becomes nearly impossible to remove. Adware, which has traditionally been used to aggressively push ads, is now becoming trojanized and sophisticated. This is a new trend for adware and an alarming one at that.

Lookout has detected over 20,000 samples of this type of trojanized adware masquerading as legitimate top applications, including Candy Crush, Facebook, GoogleNow, NYTimes, Okta, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp, and many others.

Malicious actors behind these families repackage and inject malicious code into thousands of popular applications found in Google Play, and then later publish them to third-party app stores. Indeed, we believe many of these apps are actually fully-functional, providing their usual services, in addition to the malicious code that roots the device.

Oh, and also: if you get infected you probably won’t be able to uninstall it; you’ll either need a pro or a trip to buy a new one. (Factory reset won’t do it.)
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BlackBerry Priv review: good, but probably only for keyboard junkies » Android Police

David Ruddock is befuddled by those little things with letters on:

But time for some real talk about those keys, in respect to my particular tapping of them. I am awful at these tiny little keyboards. Like, your grandpa trying to use an ATM when 6 other people are in line behind him and all of them are clearly in a rush awful. It’s just not my thing, it never has been, and it never will be. To me, this is mind-bendingly unintuitive and would take me months to master in anything approaching a respectable way. I’m not going to be using the Priv for months. I cannot give you a good evaluation of the keyboard on the merits. Sorry. I can show you what it looks like, though! Also, it’s backlit.

My thoughts without getting into the related software bits are as follows: the keys are really small. They depress and feel clicky. They are keys. Again, I am sorry. I really, really, can’t get into this keyboard-for-ants thing, even as I have forced myself to use it on the Priv.

This is the reason why anyone who began using a smartphone after 2010 is going to find the Priv completely weird. It’s like introducing typewriters to schools that have used iPads.
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HTC One A9 review » AndroidAuthority

Joshua Vergara:

Remember the Sensor Suite originally announced in the HTC One M8? It allowed for the phone to go straight into specific areas with taps and swipes after the phone knew it was brought up for usage. Now, because the fingerprint reader is there, it is the wall that prevents all of these extra unlocking methods from being used. That also doesn’t include the fact that it can be a home button, without any capacitive keys accompanying it. Soft keys are still used, so using the reader as a home button takes some getting used to – and fiddling between the two, we’ve found to be really common.

Of course, there is also the omission of BoomSound speakers due to the addition of the fingerprint reader. This is a pretty bold move for the company, as one of its most-recognized features isn’t here anymore. Sound, thus, gets a big downgrade with the bottom-mounted unit. It certainly doesn’t get very loud at all, and it’s safe to say that we miss the stereo audio found in past One devices.

Storage options with the A9 are pretty standard, with the option to choose between 16 or 32GB variants. It should be noted that the 16GB model comes with just 2GB of RAM, while the 32GB variant comes with 3GB. We’ve been testing the 32GB model with 3GB of RAM, and we’ve noticed that it gets a little slow at times.

Jeepers – it’s sometimes slow with 3GB of RAM? None of this is really a vote of confidence.
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HTC pushes US One A9 pre-order shipments back by up to several weeks, delays Verizon compatibility indefinitely » Android Police

David Ruddock:

While the A9 is indeed a pretty good phone, there’s no doubt HTC’s bungled the launch of the device a bit. First, the whole promotional pricing thing (and the 2GB/16GB variant abroad being so damn expensive), and now? A pre-order shipment delay for those who did choose to buy one. We’re hearing from US readers that HTC has sent out the following email, pushing back shipment of the initially available colors until next Tuesday, November 10th, at the earliest. Some customers, though, will be waiting much longer than that – especially if you ordered a Sprint variant.

In addition, HTC has now delayed Verizon network compatibility for the One A9 indefinitely. They had promised compatibility shortly after the November launch, then in December, and now have no ETA for the feature.

And it gets worse; certain colour variants are going to take weeks and weeks to ship. Dead on non-arrival?
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Who the f*** is that advertiser? » Medium

Rob Leathern on the problem of validating who is advertising (which amounts to “running random Javascript on your system); the Interactive Advertising Bureau wants to charge $10,000 per company for this. Leathern laughs:

Google Adwords probably has over 2.5 million advertisers by this estimate. The top 100 to 1,000 advertisers (likely to be cost-insensitive enough to sign up for a program like this) aren’t the problem for online and mobile advertisers. The problem area is distinguishing between tens of thousands of large but legitimate advertisers, and those with money who are not legitimate or who are fronts for malware, botnets, and schlocky affiliate offers.

The goal shouldn’t be to register the top few thousands advertisers, but make the barriers low enough that we can validate every single advertiser consistently, and then do the kinds of auditing, checks and follow-up necessary to stop problem advertisers from being banned and then popping back up right away under another name or identity. Once you can accurately identify advertisers and have every part of the value chain understand this information, both publishers and consumers should be able to decide what kinds of advertisers they want to block.

If I had to guess, it’s a $10/year fee (ten dollars) and not $10,000, that will be a better incentive to get companies to participate and to create the infrastructure needed to validate this information at enormous scale.

Even at that level, it wouldn’t happen. And malware generators would still find ways to get around it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. But the week is still young.

Start up: the Watch drop, Tango slows, Samsung’s bug bonanza, kids and tablets, and more

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Guess how much this ad cost. OK, if it were actually inside the TV. Photo by wonderferret on Flickr.

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

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

Popular Apple blogger stops wearing his Apple Watch every day » Fortune

Philip Elmer-DeWitt quoting John Gruber, speaking to developer Guy English on his own Talk Show podcast:

“I’ve been intrigued. And I do wear mine, but I don’t wear it every day. I foresee a bright future for it. But I just don’t think I was ever squarely in the market for it. It’s just not the sort of thing that speaks to me.”

[Here Guy English jokes about Gruber’s lack of interest in fitness — fitness tracking being one of the device’s key selling points.]

“Yeah. Right. Once I stopped wearing it every day… there is this weird motivating thing where you want to keep filling these circles everyday. And you get this streak going and you keep going. And I’m sure people are more fit. But then once you stop wearing it every day you definitely by definition have days where you didn’t fill all the circles. [It] just ruins it. It means you don’t care anymore. I don’t know. It just doesn’t excite me that much.”

Personally, still wearing mine each day; does so many things I need (such as, on Thursday evening while driving, starting navigation home via Siri because my normal route was blocked. Would have been tough and distracting with the phone).
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Google is cutting the cost of its Project Tango depth-sensing tablets in half » VentureBeat

Harrison Weber:

The deal, effective “in the coming weeks,” Google said, follows the company’s $20,000 contest that tasked developers with creating “unique augmented reality (AR) experiences” for Tango devices. The winning submissions require a Project Tango device to work, but you can get a taste of the ideas here (and here).

Google told us it doesn’t have a set duration for the discount, but the company apparently has “a limited, but sizable number of promotional codes. We haven’t finalized the exact number yet,” a spokesperson told us…

…Project Tango’s future remains unclear: Google originally aimed to launch a “consumer-scale” Project Tango device with LG in 2015. Then in January, the company spun Tango out of its Advanced Technology and Projects group without sharing much information on the initiative’s next steps.

When asked if the discount was designed to get rid of developer units ahead of a new release, a spokesperson replied, “This is very much to get kits in the hands of developers and shore up the ecosystem. We still don’t have a timetable on consumer-ready units.”

Suggested headline tweak: “Google is halving the cost of…”
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Can I annoy you for a penny a minute? » Medium

Rob Leathern:

US TV advertising revenue is expected to reach $78.8bn this year. The average person over 2 years of age in the United States still watches an amazing 29 hours and 47 minutes of TV per week. Which means, when you work it out, that’s just $0.18 in ad revenue per hour of TV watched.

TV Networks are even speeding up their programming in order to fit in more ads as prices fall and viewership dwindles. The average hour of cable television now has 15.8 minutes of ads compared with 14.5 minutes five years ago. The Wall Street Journal reported that “TBS used compression technology to speed up [movies and TV shows]”  —  this video on YouTube shows an example of this tactic with a Seinfeld rerun. For reruns and movies especially, cable networks have long rolled credits very quickly or cut TV opening sequences out entirely.

I find Leathern a must-follow: he has so much inside knowledge of the online ad business, both good and bad. Meanwhile, I find TV in the US unwatchable because of the volume (in both senses) of ads.
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Open Data Institute summit 2015: Matt Hancock speech » GOV.UK

Hancock is an MP and the Paymaster General (a role within the Treasury):

One local authority is using this [LIDAR] data to make the case for new flood defences. Council staff 3D printed the local area and fashioned blocks to show where the flood defences might go. Then they poured water on the model, to show local residents exactly which areas would flood, depending on where they put the defences.

Nor is it just local engagement. Precision farming, archaeological digs, urban planning, even uploading England to the game Minecraft: these are just some of the applications we’ve heard about since the data was published.

Let’s take another example. Two years ago Land Registry released the Price Paid Dataset (PPD), tracking residential property sales in England and Wales. The PPD is used by sites like RightMove and Zoopla to bring up-to-date sales data to an audience of millions.

Now we’re enriching it. As of last week, this dataset will also include sales through repossession, those purchased by companies and by-to-lets. It will also allow users to see the sales of non-residential property for the first time.

The applications include developing valuation software, improving planning policy, building apps that analyse market trends, and for academic research.

And the point is this. No minister, even armed with the best policy advice, could possibly conceive of all the things that government data can do.

The only way to find out is to open it up.

Great to see a Treasury minister advocating free government data – which is exactly what the Free Our Data campaign was about, almost ten years ago. Less heartening to see Hancock not pushing for the same from the Freedom of Information Commission.
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Hack the Galaxy: hunting bugs in the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge » Project Zero blog

Natalie Silvanovich, of Google’s Project Zero team, which tries to find bugs in all sorts of software, on a sustained effort to see what weaknesses Samsung’s TouchWiz and other customisations brought to Android:

A week of investigation showed that there are a number of weak points in the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. Over the course of a week, we found a total of 11 issues with a serious security impact. Several issues were found in device drivers and image processing, and there were also some logic issues in the device that were high impact and easy-to-exploit.

The majority of these issues were fixed on the device we tested via an OTA [over the air] update within 90 days, though three lower-severity issues remain unfixed. It is promising that the highest severity issues were fixed and updated on-device in a reasonable time frame.

So only a few hundred other devices to work through then. How different are the other Samsung devices? And then there’s the LG, Sony, and everyone else..
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Toddlers are already pros with tablets and smartphones, study finds » NBC News

Maggie Fox:

Toddlers and preschoolers are often left to their own mobile devices, with half enjoying their very own TV by the tender age of 4 and more than three-quarters regularly using their own mobile devices, researchers said Monday.

Most are starting before they are even a year old — and by age 3, they’re using the devices all by themselves, the team reports in the journal Pediatrics.

The survey was done in a single urban pediatric clinic in Philadelphia, and the researchers note that the findings do not necessarily extend to the whole country.

But they paint a troubling picture of populations of low-income and minority babies, and toddlers being kept quiet with televisions or tablet devices streaming cartoons.

I’m much more worried about the idea of sitting the children in front of US TV, which spews up to 20 minutes of ads per hour at them, than of them using tablets – where at least they might have some agency. (Could we wish for better software for kids though?)
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Apple and sapphire supplier reach new accord on $439m loan » WSJ

Peg Brickley:

GT Advanced Technologies Inc. has reached an accord with Apple that will get it out from under $439m in debt it picked up in a failed effort to qualify as a supplier of smartphone-screen material.

The settlement provides for an auction by Nov. 23 of equipment that GT provided in the effort, the proceeds of which will be divided, GT said in papers filed on Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New Hampshire. While GT intends to hang on to some of the equipment—as many as 600 sapphire-making furnaces—it is prepared to auction what it can and abandon what it can’t cart off, court papers say.

Anything not sold will be handed over to Apple, which has agreed to scrap the equipment and extinguish the loan it made to transform GT from an equipment manufacturer into a supplier of smartphone-screen material.

End to a long saga. I wrote about it a year ago.
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The No.1 mistake people I interview [for jobs] are making these days » Business Insider

Jessica Liebman is managing editor of Business Insider:

Lately, the majority of people I interview have one thing in common.

They’re all messing up on something that I think is very important when trying to get a job: the Thank You Email.

Did not know this was A Thing.
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FBI official: It’s America’s choice whether we want to be spied on » Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

While technology companies have resisted government attempts to access customer data, [FBI general counsel James] Baker said [at the Advanced Cyber Security Center conference] law enforcement has more success with some companies than others.

In some cases, a company will tell law enforcement that it can only provide metadata or a “snapshot of the account once a day” instead of the real-time surveillance authorities want, he said.

The FBI has an easier time getting data from companies whose business models depend on viewing customer data, he said.

Some companies “want to monetize the analysis of communications of their customers, for example those companies that actually look at e-mail and analyze it and send you targeted ads,” Baker said.

Baker didn’t mention any specific companies, but this is a practice in place at Google.

“None of that is encrypted, so we can go there and get the order and have the order be effective, and that’s good,” Baker said.

Well, good-ish. (Thanks @papanic for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: After yesterday’s item on GPS errors compared to a marathon: they measure marathons (PDF) using “a calibrated bicycle fitted with a Jones counter” which is “the only approved method of measuring road race courses” (which includes marathons).

Start up: the convertible laptop dream, Pagefair’s malvertising hack, Samsung’s bulging bottom, and more

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Keeping your personal information out of other sites is hard too. Photo by xiaming on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Count them if you like. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Laptop is a state of mind | Karma

Paul Miller:

There’s no such thing as “best of both worlds” in computers. Choices matter. Hybrids like the Surface Book are great for people who perfectly straddle the tablet and laptop use cases — who constantly switch between keyboard and pen, desk and walk-and-talks, angry memos and Angry Birds. Everyone else’s perfect “laptop” will probably be a lot more boring, and a good deal cheaper.

But.

You know what would be cool? A world where we actually needed Surface Books. What if our lives were like Microsoft Surface commercials? We’d flit effortlessly between different roles. An architect for one moment, consulting with a professional on your home remodel. Then you’re drawing up a clever football play for Russell Wilson. Then you’re playing Madden, streamed from your Xbox. Then you’re answering work emails and flicking away distractions with your finger. And then you’re in some big song-and-dance number, and you can’t even remember where you put your Surface Book because your life is amazing and who even cares anymore you’re going to die happy, loved by your family and respected by your peers.

The Surface Book is not an inferior product because its hardware is too ambitious. It’s an inferior product because its hardware is more ambitious than the digital lives we’ve thus far concocted.

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CryptoWall 3.0 cost victims $325m – report » Infosecurity Magazine

Phil Muncaster:

The report noted:

“It was discovered that a number of primary [bitcoin] wallets were shared between campaigns, further supporting the notion that all of the campaigns, regardless of the campaign ID, are being operated by the same entity.”

Unfortunately for those unlucky enough to get infected by CryptoWall 3.0, the report paints the picture of a highly efficient operation running solid encryption, meaning victims usually do have to pay up to get their files back.

Even an FBI Special Agent was quoted as saying last week that it might be better for infected businesses to just pay the ransom.

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Who knows what about me? A survey of apps’ behind-the-scenes personal data sharing to third parties » Technology Science

Jinyan Zang, Krysta Dummit, James Graves, Paul Lisker, and Latanya Sweeney:

We found that the average Android app sends potentially sensitive data to 3.1 third-party domains, and the average iOS app connects to 2.6 third-party domains. Android apps are more likely than iOS apps to share with a third party personally identifying information such as name (73% of Android apps vs. 16% of iOS apps) and email address (73% vs. 16%).

For location data, including geo-coordinates, more iOS apps (47%) than Android apps (33%) share that data with a third party. In terms of potentially sensitive behavioral data, we found that 3 out of the 30 Medical and Health & Fitness category apps in the sample share medically-related search terms and user inputs with a third party.

Finally, the third-party domains that receive sensitive data from the most apps are Google.com (36% of apps), Googleapis.com (18%), Apple.com (17%), and Facebook.com (14%). 93% of Android apps tested connected to a mysterious domain, safemovedm.com, likely due to a background process of the Android phone. Our results show that many mobile apps share potentially sensitive user data with third parties, and that they do not need visible permission requests to access the data.

Hardly seems a source of complaint if they’re sharing with Google and Apple, if it’s with permission. As for safemovedm.com, it seems to exist – since February 2008 – but not actually be active in any way; that makes it sound like an Android function.
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Chrome OS is here to stay » Google Chrome Blog

Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP Android, ChromeOS and Chromecast:

Over the last few days, there’s been some confusion about the future of Chrome OS and Chromebooks based on speculation that Chrome OS will be folded into Android. While we’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there’s no plan to phase out Chrome OS.

With the launch of Chrome OS six years ago, we set out to make computers better—faster, simpler and more secure—for everyone. We’ve since seen that vision come to life in classrooms, offices and homes around the world. In fact, every school day, 30,000 new Chromebooks are activated in U.S. classrooms—that’s more than all other education devices combined. And more than 2 million teachers and students in more than 150 countries have the Share to Classroom Chrome extension, which launched in September and gets students onto the same webpage, instantly. Meanwhile, companies such as Netflix, Sanmina, Starbucks and of course Google, are using Chromebooks given the ease of deployment, the ability to easily integrate with existing technologies, and a security model that protects users at all levels, from hardware to user data. (Chromebooks are so secure you don’t need antivirus software!)

“Working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems” implies that the two are coming together somehow – you wouldn’t have a third OS. Android isn’t going away. So Lockheimer hasn’t explained how ChromeOS is here to stay; instead, by avoiding the question while also acknowledging that something is happening, he’s making it more mysterious.
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The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus review » Anandtech

Ryan Smith and Joshua Ho:

The only real issues I can think of are that the iPhone 6s doesn’t have OIS and that the base SKU is still 16GB of storage. To be fair, the 16GB SKU can become a noticeable user experience issue if you’re constantly dealing with the limits of this storage, and the jump from 16 to 64 GB feels like it’s simply designed to encourage buying a more expensive SKU. There are arguments that users that don’t really take a ton of photos or videos and stream all their media will be fine, but it’s still a user experience problem in this day and age. However, despite these issues I would argue that the iPhone 6s’ are the best phones you can buy today.

Of course, this sounds like a rather hollow recommendation to those that have followed our reviews for the past year. This year, more than ever it feels like Android smartphones at the high end have stood still, as if smartphone improvements have become a zero sum game. To make the best phone this year is therefore a pretty low bar to clear.

The benchmarks, especially for storage, are remarkable: the new iPhones seem to knock everything aside in the raw processing power space. They stumble only a little in the battery life area, and even there it’s not a huge difference. (Thanks @papanic for the link.)
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Samsung sells more phones — but for less money » WSJ Digits blog

Jonathan Cheng:

Samsung has been selling more cheaper smartphones, and fewer high-end premium devices, than it did even compared to Samsung’s rocky 2014, according to numbers from data firm Counterpoint Technology Market Research.

Samsung doesn’t separately disclose smartphone sales numbers.

Samsung shipped 84m smartphones in the third quarter of 2015, 6.3% more than during the same stretch last year and more than the No. 2 and No. 3 players, Apple and Huawei Technologies, combined, according to Counterpoint.

But while 55% of its smartphones were priced at $301 per unit or more at this time last year, that high-end segment has fallen to just 40% of Samsung’s overall smartphone sales, Counterpoint said.

Phones priced $200 or below now account for 38% of total units shipped at Samsung, versus 30% this time last year.

So while Samsung is indeed shipping more smartphones, it isn’t charging as much for them — or making as much money from them as it may have during the salad days of 2012 and 2013.

But the numbers also suggest that Samsung is willing and able to take the fight to the low-cost Chinese competitors that emerged in 2013 and 2014, eating away at its market share and profits.

If you calculate the numbers (I did) this means that Samsung sold 10m fewer phones in the $300+ bracket than last year – effectively ceding that chunk of the market to Apple – and sold 8m more than last year in the sub-$200 bracket.
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Brazilian smartphone users quicker to adopt new Android OS than Indian users » Jana Blog

Globally, 93% of Android users are using versions of either the Lollipop, KitKat, or Jelly Bean operating systems on their devices. When we looked at the market share of each Android OS in India and Brazil among mCent users, we saw a similar theme. 98% of mCent users in India and 97% of users in Brazil are using either Lollipop, KitKat, or Jelly Bean. KitKat is the most popular OS among mCent users in both countries…

…In the case of Samsung, the top device brand in India and Brazil, older versions of the Galaxy and the Note will never get the new Marshmallow OS update. So while some users may want to upgrade, they simply may not be able to depending on which device and carrier they have…

…When looking across the three popular Android OS, Lollipop, KitKat, and Jelly Bean, Brazilian users are currently pretty evenly spread out across the three. But when we look at India, the majority of users—52%— are on KitKat. As users in Brazil move to new operating systems, users in India are staying on older OS versions much longer.

This is hardly amazing; Jelly Bean was released in late 2012. You’d be more surprised if newcomers to the smartphone market were on much older OSs.
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What do recruiters look for in a resumé at first glance? »Quora

Abra Benjamin responded:

Our world is a lot simpler than you think. “Does this candidate seem like they stand a chance of being a good match for this role? If yes, proceed to next step. If no, reject.” Each recruiter is different, so there’s no one way to answer this question. But I’ll highlight briefly (actually, not so briefly) how I personally absorb a resume.  I should preface this by saying that currently I primarily recruit for senior-level software engineers.

It’s definitely useful if you’re looking around for jobs, especially the stuff about education not mattering much, nor formatting (duh), nor “uncomfortably personal details”, nor cover letters.
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Halloween Security Breach » Inside PageFair

Pagefair being, of course, the company which is complaining about the cost of adblocking to publishers, and which offers analytics to them:

If you are a publisher using our free analytics service, you have good reason to be very angry and disappointed with us right now. For 83 minutes last night, the PageFair analytics service was compromised by hackers, who succeeded in getting malicious javascript to execute on websites via our service, which prompted some visitors to these websites to download an executable file. I am very sorry that this occurred and would like to assure you that it is no longer happening.

The attack was sophisticated and specifically targeted against PageFair, but it is unacceptable that the hackers could gain access to any of our systems. We identified the breach immediately, but it still took over 80 minutes to fully shut it down.  During this time, visitors to websites owned by the publishers who have placed their trust in us were targeted by these hackers.

The damage was mitigated by our standard security practices, but the attackers still gained access.  I want to take some time here to describe exactly what happened, how it may have affected some of your visitors, and what we are doing to prevent this from ever happening again.

Spearphish email to take over account on CDN (Content Distribution Network) which offered a fake Adobe Flash advert which would install a bitcoin mining trojan. The breach was spotted within 5 minutes – but it took another 80 to regain control. Among the sites infected was Anandtech.

Once more, episodes like this make people who use adblockers utterly certain that they’ve made the right decision, while making those who haven’t wonder if they should. It’s a ratchet.
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Apple indoor positioning app ‘Indoor Survey’ spotted on iOS App Store » Apple Insider

Mikey Campbell:

According to Indoor Survey’s iOS App Store page, spotted by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, the Apple-branded software enables indoor positioning within a venue by using radio frequency signals and an iPhone’s onboard sensors.

“By dropping ‘points’ on a map within the Survey App, you indicate your position within the venue as you walk through,” reads the app description. “As you do so, the indoor Survey App measures the radio frequency (RF) signal data and combines it with an iPhone’s sensor data. The end result is indoor positioning without the need to install special hardware.”

While not an exact match, the described system smacks of technology pioneered by indoor positioning startup WiFiSLAM, a Silicon Valley firm Apple snapped up for $20m in 2013.

Google has been doing something similar since 2012 for museums and a SLAM (simultaneous location and mapping) system since September 2014.
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Start up: Surface Book v MacBook Pro, Microsoft’s cloud boost, HP’s cloudburst, BlackBerry’s last stand?, and more

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Facebook has noticed that your battery is dying and thinks it might be its fault. Photo by Poster Boy NYC on Flickr.

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Surface Book vs. MacBook Pro: It isn’t twice as fast. It’s three times as fast » PCWorld

Gordon Mah Ung:

Rather than rely on a synthetic game benchmark, I also decided to throw a real game at it. Square Enix’s Tomb Raider is available on Steam on both platforms. It’s a fairly recent game and came out for PC and consoles in 2013. Feral Interactive ported the game to OSX the same year.

One caveat here: As a port there’s clearly a lot of things that could be different between the PC version and the Mac version. For my test, I ran it at 1400×900, which was the default resolution on the Mac, and selected the “Normal” quality setting on both. I also poked around the game’s graphics settings to see if there was any variance between them that got lost in translation.

The result is a bone-crushing blow for the MacBook Pro 13: Tomb Raider ran at a pathetic sub-24 fps, while the Surface Book whizzes along at 74 fps.

If Microsoft based its marketing statements on this test alone, it could have safely said “triple the performance of a MacBook Pro.”

To be fair, if you’ve read this far, you know the Surface Book isn’t  twice as fast or three times as fast as the MacBook Pro 13 in all things.

Benchmarks – especially skewed ones like this (is the game optimised for Windows? Bet it is) – really bore me. They capture nothing of the general experience of using a device. But hey, there’s the headline that will be used.
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Facebook app: we recently heard reports of some people… » Ari Grant on Facebook

Grant is a Facebook developer:

We recently heard reports of some people experiencing battery issues with the Facebook iOS app and have been looking into the causes of these problems. We found a few key issues and have identified additional improvements, some of which are in the version of the app that was released today.

The first issue we found was a “CPU spin” in our network code. A CPU spin is like a child in a car asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”with the question not resulting in any progress to reaching the destination. This repeated processing causes our app to use more battery than intended. The version released today has some improvements that should start making this better.

The second issue is with how we manage audio sessions. If you leave the Facebook app after watching a video, the audio session sometimes stays open as if the app was playing audio silently. This is similar to when you close a music app and want to keep listening to the music while you do other things, except in this case it was unintentional and nothing kept playing.

Still ain’t going to reinstall. Note that it’s not *all* of the identified improvements in the new app.
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Microsoft quarterly revenue beats as cloud demand rises » Reuters

The company said Office 365, another key cloud-based offering, had about 18.2m consumer subscribers at the end of its first quarter, an increase of about 3m from the end of the preceding quarter.

Microsoft launched Windows 10, its first new operating system in almost three years, in July. The system, seen as critical for the company, won positive reviews for its user-friendly and feature-packed interface.

The company launched a number of new devices earlier this month, including its first ever laptop and a new Surface Pro tablet, all running on Windows 10.

Revenue in the company’s “More Personal Computing” business, which includes the Windows operating system, fell 17% to $9.4bn.

Excluding the impact of the strong dollar, revenue in the business fell 13%.

Sharp observation by Stefan Constantine: there are more people paying for Spotify than for Office 365. That’s likely to be reversed in a couple of quarters, though.

Phone revenue dropped 54%.
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HP shutting down HP Helion public cloud » Business Insider

Matt Weiberger:

Cloud computing is a hot market, letting customers swipe a credit card and get access to essentially unlimited supercomputing power. Developers at startups and large enterpries alike love it because it gives them the ability to get really big, really quickly. 

But while Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all found great success in the public cloud market, simply buying and maintaining all the servers required to get up to the massive economies of scale necessary to compete in this kind of low-margin business is really hard.

That’s something HP has found out the hard way, with the HP Helion public cloud [which will be shut down from January] constantly coming under fire for being too small and too unfocused on the market to seriously make a dent. 

And so, HP is going to shut down the HP Helion public cloud to stick with what its good at: Helping customers run their own data centers with hardware, software, and services to run at cloud levels of efficiency.

HP’s blogpost announcing this move is a masterful piece of corporate doublespeak: it makes it sound as though everything’s going so well they just have to shut down the public cloud offering.
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Force Touch patent: will pressure input be possible in Samsung’s Galaxy S7? » BusinessKorea

Marie Kim:

Samsung Electro-Mechanics filed a patent application with the Korea Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) for Force Touch, which is virtually the same as 3D Touch used in the iPhone 6S. This technology offers different types of functions based on the strength of a push on the screen.

According to the patent information retrieval system of KIPO on Oct. 20, Samsung Electro-Mechanics filed a patent named “touch input equipment and electronics device with touch input” with KIPO on April 9, 2014. Considering that the Korean company supplies core components for Samsung Electronics’ smartphones, the patent is likely to be used in the Galaxy S7.

Would be surprised if it wasn’t. But Samsung’s problem is that pretty much every third-party developer will ignore it; it will have to wait for Google to implement it in Android. Will Apple trouble to sue, though? (At a guess, not.)
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The dominance of Alphabet » Global Web Index

Felim McGrath:

With Alphabet set to post healthy financial results later today and  hot on the heels of the announcement of YouTube Red, Thursday’s Chart of the Day looks at just how important this company has become.

Among the hundreds of websites tracked by GlobalWebIndex, Alphabet has the two most popular properties among online adults outside of China. Close to 9 in 10 visit Google each month, while 82% visit YouTube. These figures place Alphabet’s sites above Facebook – which three quarters visited last month – and give it a healthy lead over rival search giant Yahoo (half visit this site monthly). 

This vast user base underlines just how central Alphabet remains to internet users’ online activities despite the ongoing shift to mobile.

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Dell may sell assets to pay for EMC deal » Re/code

Arik Hesseldahl from a Q+A with Marius Haas, chief commercial officer of Dell:

Q: It looks like after the close Dell will essentially absorb the EMC federation, but will adapt that structure for its own purposes by making it bigger with pieces like Secureworks, Virtustream and Pivotal. Is that how we should think about it? And if so, how does that complicate or enhance your mission here?

If you dissect what has already been published, you will see there is a strong commitment to de-leveraging or paying down the debt very quickly. There are different angles and different levers we can pull to do that. This is why we have such high confidence in what we’re doing.

Q: That implies that paying down the debt won’t just come by way of cash from operations. Does that mean you might consider selling some assets? Is there anything within Dell that doesn’t stay?

We’re not prepared to talk about that yet, but it’s probably not a bad train of thought.

What’s it going to sell, though? The PC business?
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BlackBerry might have leaked the Priv’s specs and release date (update: confirmed) » Engadget

Daniel Cooper:

we know that the Priv is packing a fair bit of power beneath the hood, but has a listed price of $749. There’s no indication if that figure is for the US or Canada — but the page does reference the (GSM) handset not working on American CDMA networks like Verizon and Sprint. You’ll also spot that the device is marked for release on November 16th, so we won’t have long to find out if all of this is true or not.

Performance-wise, the Priv is packing a 1.8Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 with 3GB RAM, 32GB storage and a microSD card slot that’ll take up to 2TB. Much was made of the Priv’s curved screen, and we know that it’s a 5.4-inch plastic AMOLED with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution (540 DPI) that can handle styluses and gloves. The physical keyboard measures 37mm high by 77.2mm wide, and there’s a 3,410mAh battery that’s rated for 22.5 hours of use tucked inside.

Price in the UK: £580, against £539 for an iPhone 6S with 16GB and £450 for a Samsung Galaxy S6. At that price, BlackBerry will have positive gross margins on the device (it’s not selling it for less than it costs to make), but so few will sell that you can start the timer now on how soon John Chen announces that the hardware division just isn’t making money because of the costs involved in R+D, distribution, marketing and administration – which feed through to operating profit, or loss. Remember, last financial quarter BB sold 0.8m phones, and made an operating loss on those.
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Start up: Tor for iOS 9?, Google wins book appeal, HTC’s new (i)Phone, DNA suspects, and more

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A crucial part of some fake Amazon reviews. Photo by Joe Shlabotnik on Flickr.

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New Tor apps for iOS 9 headed to iPhone, iPad » Daily Dot

Patrick Howell O’Neill:

The new iOS offering will come from a group led by Chris Ballinger, founder of ChatSecure and including Frederic Jacobs of Open Whisper Systems; Mike Tigas, who wrote Onion Browser; and Conrad Kramer, a former device jailbreaker. 

That group is working on iCepa, a system-wide iOS Tor client that can change the way every app on iOS connects to the Internet by routing traffic from each app through the Tor network.

Older versions of iOS lacked key capabilities that would allow for an effective Tor app, Freitas said. But certain changes implemented in iOS 9 — specifically the ability to incorporate Tor into multiple apps simultaneously — make the mobile operating system far more attractive for Tor developers.

“iOS has some new capabilities in it,” Freitas said. “You can create a device-wide [virtual private network], and it can be a Tor-based VPN. So we can create an Orbot-like service on iOS 9, which is exciting.”

Orbot empowers other Android apps to use Tor. It’s an anonymity amplifier that’s been impossible on iOS up until now because Tor could only run in a single app at a time.

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Dear reader, we’re closing comments » IOL Beta

Adrian Ephraim, managing editor of the South Africa Independent:

Dear IOL reader, we need to talk …

I thought you should be the first to know that Independent Online (IOL) will be closing comments on its online articles with immediate effect.

It is a difficult but necessary decision to make and we arrived at it after careful consideration of all the factors at play.

The freedom of expression guaranteed by our Constitution was never meant to override the personal freedoms and human rights of our fellow citizens.

Let me be clear that commenting on an article is not a right, but a courtesy afforded to you by IOL as a reader.

If you are prone to being racist or sexist in your thinking, by all means express yourself on other platforms that may find such behaviour acceptable, but not on IOL.

We are of the view that instances of abuse in our comments section have become untenable.

..And another one. Just keeping tabs, really.
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HTC One A9 photos leak: It’s an iPhone » BGR

Zach Epstein:

We’ve seen a number of leaked images of the upcoming HTC One A9 in the past, but the clearest pictures yet were just accidentally published by European wireless carrier Orange. HTC is already in deep trouble following its One M9 flop, but this phone may very well get the struggling smartphone maker sued into oblivion.

It really does look amazingly like an iPhone 6 (or 6S). Then again, so did the Galaxy S6. Hard to see it making any difference to HTC’s gradual demise.
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Getting LEAN with Digital Ad UX » IAB

Scott Cunningham , svp of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech and Ad operations, begins this post “We messed up”. But the mea culpa also has a nostrum explicatum:

We engineered not just the technical, but also the social and economic foundation that users around the world came to lean on for access to real time information. And users came to expect this information whenever and wherever they needed it. And more often than not, for anybody with a connected device, it was free.

This was choice—powered by digital advertising—and premised on user experience.

But we messed up.

Through our pursuit of further automation and maximization of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimize publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty.

Loose translation: “We did so much good that we made things worse.” Now the IAB is suggesting ads should be “light; encrypted; ad choice supported; non-invasive”. Nice idea. Not sure “encrypted” is necessary; is that to stop people like AdBlock Plus?
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After undercover sting, Amazon files suit against 1,000 Fiverr users over fake product reviews » GeekWire

Jacob Demmitt:

Fiverr is an online marketplace that lets people sell simple services to strangers, like transcribing audio, converting photos or editing video. Amazon simply had to contact Fiverr users who advertised their review-writing services and set up the transaction.

The company said most people offered the undercover Amazon investigators 5-star reviews for $5 each.

One Fiverr.com user that went by bess98 offered to write the reviews from multiple computers, so as to deceive Amazon. Another user, Verifiedboss, unwittingly told the investigators, “You know the your [sic] product better than me. So please provide your product review, it will be better.”

As in the previous lawsuit, Amazon alleges that these reviewers often arranged to have empty boxes shipped to them in order to make it look like they had purchased the products.

Amazon is not suing Fiverr. The company noted in the court filing that these kinds of services are banned by Fiverr’s terms and conditions and Fiverr has tried to cut down on the practice.

Would love to know which products these people reviewed.
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Appeals court gives Google a clear and total fair use win on book scanning » Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

The Authors Guild’s never-ending lawsuit against Google for its book scanning project has been hit with yet another blow. The 2nd Circuit appeals court has told the Authors Guild (once again) that Google’s book scanning is transformative fair use. This is not a surprise. Though this case has gone through many twists and turns, a few years ago it was also before the 2nd Circuit on a separate issue (over the appropriateness of it being a class action lawsuit) and the 2nd Circuit panel ignored that question, saying that it shouldn’t even matter because it seemed like this was fair use. Thus it was sent back to the district court, where Judge Danny Chin correctly said that the scanning was fair use. That ruling was appealed, and the AG trotted out some truly nutty legal theories (arguing that it wasn’t fair use because someone like Aaron Swartz might hack into Google’s computers and free the books).

These arguments did not work. The 2nd Circuit has affirmed the lower court ruling and given another nice appellate ruling establishing the importance of fair use — and a reminder that, yes, commercial uses can still be fair use:

Google’s making of a digital copy to provide a search function is a transformative use, which augments public knowledge by making available information about Plaintiffs’ books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the Plaintiffs’ copyright interests in the original works or derivatives of them.

Pretty convincing win for Google.
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Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect » WIRED

Brendan Koerner:

In [Michael] Usry’s case the crime scene DNA [from an unsolved killing in 1969] bore numerous similarities to that of Usry’s father, who years earlier had donated a DNA sample to a genealogy project through his Mormon church in Mississippi. That project’s database was later purchased by Ancestry, which made it publicly searchable—a decision that didn’t take into account the possibility that cops might someday use it to hunt for genetic leads.

Usry, whose story was first reported in The New Orleans Advocate, was finally cleared after a nerve-racking 33-day wait—the DNA extracted from his cheek cells didn’t match that of Dodge’s killer, whom detectives still seek. But the fact that he fell under suspicion in the first place is the latest sign that it’s time to set ground rules for familial DNA searching, before misuse of the imperfect technology starts ruining lives.

Mitch Morrissey, Denver’s district attorney and one of the nation’s leading advocates for familial DNA searching, stresses that the technology is “an innovative approach to investigating challenging cases, particularly cold cases where the victims are women or children and traditional investigative tactics fail to yield a solid suspect.”

Not sure if UK police would be able to demand access in the same way. Previously they didn’t need to – there was a national DNA database which included completely innocent people.
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Apple’s iPhone finds more fans on Samsung’s home turf » MarketWatch

Jennifer Booton notes that the iPhone has hit a 14% sales share in South Korea over the summer:

Samsung was able to recoup some of the losses incurred from Apple by going after the smaller manufacturers, such as LG Electronics and Pantech. LG’s share slid to 22% from 29%, while Pantech’s nose-dived from 4% to 1%, according to the Counterpoint research. Apple’s influence is having an effect, though.

“Samsung still has a loyal following in Korea,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager at industry tracker IDC. “But Apple is certainly making a run.”

Apple’s share in South Korea, where users have long been accustomed to the Samsung Galaxy Note phablets and other larger-screen Galaxy phones, has been gaining ever since the launch of the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, Apple’s first large-screen iPhone, Kang said. Its share gain was most prominent right after the iPhone 6 Plus launched, growing sevenfold in the fourth quarter of 2014.

While the growth rate has since slowed, Kang said he believes there’s still room for Apple to grow there as the “iPhone ecosystem effect” — the idea that Apple’s interconnected operating systems and devices keep users within the Apple brand — begins to take hold.

“Mature smartphone users (mostly Android) have started to upgrade to Apple iPhones,” he said.

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Soul of a virtual machine » Medium

Jerry Chen:

In 2005, as the product manager for VMware’s enterprise desktop business, I made the pilgrimage down to Round Rock, Texas to meet the executives running Dell’s PC business. This was a year before I created VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and VMware was still the small but fast growing, and recently acquired division of EMC. For almost an hour I pitched Dell on the virtues of desktop virtualization. The Dell executives smiled, nodded politely, and at the end of the meeting they asked me, “You understand that we sell PCs here? Why would we ever want to commoditize our differentiation with virtualization?”

I collected my things and flew back to Palo Alto.

2015: Dell buys EMC, including VMWare, for $67bn, as its PC business keeps struggling. Now, VMWare didn’t kill off the PC business directly, but it certainly helped the move to the cloud that has forced Dell into this catchup acquisition.

Note how similar the Dell execs’ question is to Jerry Yang at Yahoo, who in 1997 told two guys with a new search algorithm “but we want people to click multiple search pages, because we can show them ads.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t come back. Yahoo isn’t dead, but it’s a zombie.
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Start up: a cure for ageing?, smartphone slowdown, how many Surface Books?, Playboy’s China link, and more

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Probably not the A7 CPU, but it’s the principle that counts. Photo by tsukacyi on Flickr.

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Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of BioViva, claims to undergo anti-aging therapy » MIT Technology Review

Antonio Regalado:

Elizabeth Parrish, the 44-year-old CEO of a biotechnology startup called BioViva, says she underwent a gene therapy at an undisclosed location overseas last month, a first step in what she says is a plan to develop treatments for ravages of old age like Alzheimer’s and muscle loss. “I am patient zero,” she declared during a Q&A on the website Reddit on Sunday. “I have aging as a disease.”

Since last week, MIT Technology Review has attempted to independently verify the accuracy of Parrish’s claims, particularly how she obtained the genetic therapy. While many key details could not be confirmed, people involved with her company said the medical procedure took place September 15 in Colombia.

The experiment seems likely to be remembered as either a new low in medical quackery or, perhaps, the unlikely start of an era in which people receive genetic modifications not just to treat disease, but to reverse aging. It also raises ethical questions about how quickly such treatments should be tested in people and whether they ought to be developed outside the scrutiny of regulators. The field of anti-aging research is known for attracting a mix of serious scientists, vitamin entrepreneurs, futurists, and cranks peddling various paths to immortality, including brain freezing.

When I covered science as well as technology at The Independent (daily national in the UK), I literally lost count of the number of people who sincerely told me that they had finally got gene therapy/cloning/stem cell therapy/Alzheimers licked this time. None of them ever actually did – and the most high-profile announcements always receded fastest once challenged.
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SanDisk in merger talks with rivals » FT.com

James Fontanella-Khan and Leslie Hook:

A wave of consolidation has swept across the chip industry since the beginning of the year, as once high-growth companies come to terms with a maturing industry and higher costs. Merger and acquisition activity in the tech sector has reached the highest level since the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, hitting about $370bn in value, according to Thomson Reuters.

This year Singapore’s Avago acquired US rival Broadcom for $37bn, the biggest acquisition in the semiconductor sector. In March, NXP Semiconductors, the Dutch chipmaker, took over Freescale in an $11.8bn deal, and in June Intel bought Altera, a maker of programmable processors, for $16.7bn.
Meanwhile, Unisplendour, a Chinese state-controlled technology group, acquired a 15 per cent stake in Western Digital for $3.8bn this month.

Global chipmakers are combining rapidly as hardware makers such as Apple and Samsung squeeze them, forcing component makers to reach for greater scale to survive.

Intel’s chief financial officer Stacy Smith told the Financial Times that consolidation among chipmakers could continue. “One factor is that the scale that you need to afford your own factories has got so large, that there are only a couple of companies that have the scale to build their own factory.”

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Seeing stars again: US Naval Academy reinstates celestial navigation » Capital Gazette

Tim Prudente:

“We went away from celestial navigation because computers are great,” said Lt. Cmdr. Ryan Rogers, the deputy chairman of the academy’s Department of Seamanship and Navigation. “The problem is,” he added, “there’s no backup.”

Among the fleet, the Navy ended all training in celestial navigation in 2006, said Lt. Cmdr. Kate Meadows, a Navy spokeswoman. Then officers’ training returned in 2011 for ship navigators, she said. And officials are now rebuilding the program for enlisted ranks; it’s expected to begin next fall.

“There’s about 10 years when the Navy didn’t teach to celestial,” said Rogers, the Naval Academy instructor. “New lieutenants, they don’t have that instruction.”

As Prudente observes, “you can’t hack a sextant” – and if GPS shut down, how would you navigate? (How would tons of planes that would be in the air navigate? I’m reliably told they don’t rely only on GPS. Phew.)
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Third-quarter global smartphone shipments grew 9.1% to 332m; Huawei succeeds in its target of 10m shipped » Trendforce

Samsung retained its title as the top smartphone brand by contributing up to 25% of the global shipments in the third quarter, but the projected shipments of Galaxy S6 and S series devices for 2015 have been reduced to 40m units [from the 2Q estimate of 45m]. Also, approximately 10m units of the newly launched flagship device, Note 5, will be shipped by the end of this year. Samsung has lost much of its shares in the low-end to mid-range markets to Chinese competitors. TrendForce therefore anticipates that the vendor will see its first ever decline of annual smartphone shipments in 2015, with a 1% year-on-year drop and around 323.5m units shipped.

Apple iPhone 6s, which was released on schedule in September, has captivated consumers with its 3D Touch technology and rose gold exterior. Nonetheless, to surpass the incredible overall shipment result of iPhone 6 will be quite challenging for iPhone 6s as there is not much that sets apart the two devices appearance-wise. Wu noted that the main contributors to this year’s iPhone shipments are the large-size models that Apple introduced for the first time. Based on TrendForce’s analysis, iPhone’s annual shipment growth for this year will reach 16% with about 223.7m units shipped.

Trendforce’s total shipment figures tend to be about 10% lower than those from IDC and Gartner – in the second quarter it put them at 304m, against IDC’s 337m.

The Samsung prediction isn’t surprising; the company has already had four quarters of negative shipment growth, starting in 3Q 2014, and is being torn apart in China and India.
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Funding request for Our World In Data » Max Roser

Roser has run the site for a year, but funding will end in December unless someone steps in:

It is easy to be cynical about the world and to maintain that nothing is ever getting better. But fortunately the empirical evidence contradicts this view. I believe it is partly due to a lack of relevant and understandable information that a negative view on how the world is changing is so very common. It is not possible to understand how the world is changing by following the daily news – disasters are happening in an instant, but progress is a slow process that does not make the headlines.

I believe it is important to communicate to a large audience that technical, academic, entrepreneurial, political, and social efforts have in fact a very positive impact. OurWorldInData shows both: It highlights the challenges that lie ahead and it shows visually that we are successfully making the world a better place.

It would be wonderful if someone could fund this. If you know someone who could make that happen, please point them to Roser’s page; it’s a wonderful resource.
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China — not online porn — is why Playboy is dumping nude photographs » Quartz

Josh Horwitz:

Dumping the brand’s association with nudity, however mild compared to online porn standards, gives it a better image in countries where government policies towards pornographers can be highly critical—which just happen to be the two most populous countries in the world. Attempts to open Playboy-branded clubs in India were swatted by authorities twice. China, meanwhile, has repeatedly announced anti-porn campaigns in recent years.

Even with the government’s tough attitude to pornography, Playboy earns 40% of its revenues from China, according to the New York Times.

Across the country, it’s not uncommon to see men and women wearing t-shirts or carrying handbags donning the Playboy Bunny. Playboy-branded retailers take up space in high-end department stores and dingy street shops alike. Earlier this year the company made a further push in the Middle Kingdom, signing a 10-year licensing agreement with Handong United the oversee manufacturing and distribution of Playboy-branded items, and to increase its retail presence to 3,500 locations.

It’s remarkable how often the answer to “why is [X] doing this?” actually turns out to be “Because China.” So why didn’t Playboy say this was the reason? Perhaps because it doesn’t want its western audience to think it’s pandering to China’s morality.
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Apple found in infringement of University of Wisconsin CPU patent, faces $862M in damages » Apple Insider

Mikey Campbell:

The IP in question, U.S. Patent No. 5,781,752 for a “Table based data speculation circuit for parallel processing computer,” was granted to a University of Wisconsin team led by Dr. Gurindar Sohi in 1998. According to WARF and original patent claims, the ‘752 patent focuses on improving power efficiency and overall performance in modern computer processor designs by utilizing “data speculation” circuit, also known as a branch predictor.

It was argued that Apple willfully infringed on the ‘752 patent, as it cited the property in its own patent filings. Further, the lawsuit claims Apple refused WARF’s requests to license the IP.

The initial complaint named A7 and all the products it powered at the time, a list that included iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and iPad Mini with Retina display. Apple subsequently incorporated the chip into iPad mini 3 models. The A8 and A8X SoCs were later added to the suit and affect iPhone 6, 6 Plus and multiple iPad versions.

WARF leveraged the same patent against Intel’s Core 2 Duo CPU in 2008, a case settled out of court in 2009 for an undisclosed sum, according to a 2014 report from The Register.

Branch prediction is essential for multi-core processors – and WARF sued Intel over the Core2Duo (first dual-core Intel processor) and A7 (first multi-core Apple processor). Pretty egregious of Apple to think it could cite a patent and yet not license it. (It will have to license it for all forthcoming Ax chips too.) Raises the question of who else is licensing this patent, of course: Samsung and Qualcomm make multi-core ARM processors, so they must too. Wisconsin’s alumni research foundation must be coining it.
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Here’s how many Surface Books Microsoft could sell » Business Insider

Max Slater-Robins goes to the trouble of, shock, asking someone the question:

Microsoft’s latest product, the Surface Book, could see sales of between 50,000 and 100,000 units in the fourth quarter of 2015, research firm Gartner told Business Insider. 

The laptop, which was unveiled at an event on October 6, can be used with a keyboard dock or in a “clipboard” mode that is similar to a tablet computer. While the Surface Pro competes with the MacBook Air, the Book is designed to go head-to-head with the MacBook Pro. 

Annette Jump, a research director for Gartner, told Business Insider that Microsoft “probably won’t sell millions and millions of Surface Books but it could cause PC vendors to re-look at their current offerings and future offerings.” 

Gartner reckons Apple sold 5.4m MacBook Airs and 2m MacBook Pros in the first six months of the year, out of a total of 9.3m Macs total – so that’s less than 2m desktop machines (iMacs and Mac Pros) sold in the same period. That’s another reason why I don’t think Microsoft will do a “Surface iMac”.
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Guaranteeing the integrity of a register » Government Digital Service

Philip Potter:

There are a number of ways of achieving this but one we have been exploring is based around Google’s Certificate Transparency project. At its heart, Certificate Transparency depends on the creation of a digitally signed append-only log. The entries in the log are hashed together in a Merkle tree and the tree is signed. The registrar can append to the log by issuing a new signature. Consumers can request proof that a single entry appears in a particular log. Consumers can also request proof that the registrar has not rewritten history which the registrar can easily provide.

At this point knowledgeable readers will be saying “BLOCKCHAIN! IT’S A BLOCKCHAIN!” And indeed it is. The British government is looking at the feasibility of using blockchain technology for things like registries for everything from restaurant inspections upwards and outwards.
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By The Numbers » Daily Mail Online

This is real: it’s the Mail Online’s actual stats page, showing heatmap of where readership is, which commenters are most liked and most reviled, who’s busiest, and so on. A fascinating little insight into the busiest newspaper site in the world. And its readers. (Via Dan Catt.)
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Start up: Facebook’s dwindling teens, Safe Harbour or balkanisation?, the privacy tsunami, and more

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No, really, no difference. Move along there and find another story. Photo by Bob Jouy on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Soluble in alcohol. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook is big, but big networks can fall » Bloomberg View

Megan McArdle:

Looking at the most recent Pew study on Internet usage among young people,  I see that 71% of teens use Facebook, with the median user having slightly less than 150 friends; 41% of them report that they use Facebook most often. But when I look at a similar Pew study from 2013, it looks to me as if 76 percent of teens were using Facebook, with a median number of 300 friends, and 81% of social media users reported that they used Facebook most often. If I were Facebook, those numbers would keep me awake at night – not because Facebook can’t survive with only 70% of the market, but because a network that is getting smaller and less valuable to its users is a network that is very vulnerable to disruption.

What’s actually astonishing is just how evanescent such strategic advantages have proven. Fifteen years ago, people worried that Microsoft’s network-effect advantages made it unstoppable; now it’s an also-ran in everything new-market except gaming consoles. The rotting corpses of old social media sites litter the landscape. And of course, finding a place to send Aunt Maisie that birthday telegram is getting darned hard.

She also makes a point about network effects: the thing about “all your photos are in Facebook” isn’t a network effect, but a switching cost – a quite different thing.
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Apple says battery performance of new iPhone’s A9 chips vary only 2-3% » TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino:

In a statement to TechCrunch, Apple said that its own testing and data gathered from its customers after a few weeks with the device show that the actual battery life of both devices varies just 2-3%. That’s far, far too low to be noticeable in real-world usage.

With the Apple-designed A9 chip in your iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, you are getting the most advanced smartphone chip in the world. Every chip we ship meets Apple’s highest standards for providing incredible performance and deliver great battery life, regardless of iPhone 6s capacity, color, or model.

Certain manufactured lab tests which run the processors with a continuous heavy workload until the battery depletes are not representative of real-world usage, since they spend an unrealistic amount of time at the highest CPU performance state. It’s a misleading way to measure real-world battery life. Our testing and customer data show the actual battery life of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, even taking into account variable component differences, vary within just 2-3% of each other.

Though there have been a bunch of articles and videos about how much power one chip or the other uses, the tests have largely been what Apple calls ‘manufactured’. Basically, they are unrealistic machine-driven tests that do not and can not reflect real-world usage.

So this year’s iPhonegate lasted slightly less than 24 hours. Apple is even managing to balance supply and demand here too.
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EU Safe Harbour ruling a ‘nightmare’: Wikipedia founder » CNBC

Arjun Kharpal:

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said the regulatory issues that could come with this might be a problem for some businesses.

“You want your data to be secure, you don’t really care or you shouldn’t have to care where it sits,” Wales told CNBC in an interview at IP EXPO Europe in London.

“If I’m in Europe I hope they are near me on a server in Europe, but other than that I want them to provide the best technical experience for me. And if they suddenly have all those requirements and have to keep certain pictures in certain places, it just sounds like a nightmare, so I like the idea of uniformity in the law so that we can all not worry about it.”

Wales added in a separate session with reporters that the ECJ ruling could lead to a “balkanized era where data has to be secure very specifically across many many different jurisdictions”.

Great point. So does this mean he’ll be lobbying the US to implement strong data protection rules that match those of Europe? I do hope so. I mean, that’s the best way to protect everyone’s interests, isn’t it, Mr Wales?
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Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy? » The Guardian

Cory Doctorow:

The only way to be sure you don’t leak data is to not collect or retain it, and Big Data’s hype and the cheapness of hard drives has turned every pipsqueak tech company into a Big Data packrat with a mountain of potentially toxic personal info on millions of people, all protected by a password that’s simple enough for a CEO to remember it.

Every week or two, from now on, will see new privacy disasters, each worse than the last. Every week or two, from now on, will see millions of people who suddenly wish there was more they could do to protect their privacy.

For privacy advocates in 2015, the job is clear: have a plan in your drawer. A plan: how to safeguard your privacy, how to understand your privacy, how to understand the breach. A plan that explains that your lack of security isn’t a fact of nature, it’s the result of conscious decisions made by people who were either hostile or indifferent to your wellbeing, who saved or made money through those decisions. A plan that shows you what you can do to keep you and yours safe – and whose head your should be demanding on a pike.

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Get AMP’d: Here’s what publishers need to know about Google’s new plan to speed up your website » Nieman Lab

Joshua Benton:

What’s it all mean for publishers?

As I said, AMP [Accelerated Mobile Pages] is full of terrific ideas. It really does speed up load times.

But that success comes with tradeoffs. For most publishers, you’re being asked to set up two parallel versions of your stories. (Unless you really think you won’t need to ever do anything outside what AMP allows on any page, which is unrealistic for most.) That takes significant time and resources. You’re being asked to set aside most or all of the ad tech and analytics that you use. You’re trading in open web standards for something built by Google engineers who, despite what I don’t doubt are the best of intentions, have incentives that don’t line up perfectly with yours. And you’re becoming an disempowered actor in a larger Silicon Valley battle over ad tech. (Google advocating something that blocks enormous slices of contemporary ad tech can’t be viewed in isolation from the fact Google is the dominant force in online advertising, and as interested as any company is in extending its power.)

And it’s yet another case of a technology company coming along to promise a better experience for users that takes one more bit of power away from publishers.

The fact that publishers’ interests aren’t exactly aligned with Google’s shouldn’t be overlooked. And Google’s interests aren’t aligned with third-party ad networks at all, except that they all want to serve up ads. (Meanwhile, iOS 9 content blockers still block ads on the AMP demo.)
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This is why Android Pay is asking you for a ‘Google Payments PIN’ when making purchases » Android Central

Andrew Martonik:

when you have a card from one of these supported banks (check the latest list from Google here) in Android Pay, it’s amazingly seamless to make payments. Just unlock your phone, tap the terminal and you just paid.

Confusingly, though, Android Pay actually lets you add unsupported cards to the app as well.

This is a hold over from the old days of Google Wallet, which had an entirely different system that worked without the cooperation of the banks. With Google Wallet, every time you made a transaction it actually made that purchase with a virtual prepaid debit card from “Bancorp Bank” and then that same amount was subsequently charged to your own bank. It was clunky, less secure and downright confusing to everyone involved — and the most annoying user-facing part of this system is the need for an extra PIN code to make a payment.

As Google Wallet hands the reigns over to Android Pay in this transition of mobile payments, this legacy system of using an unsupported card is actually still baked into Android Pay — though Google isn’t exactly promoting it as such. This is partially due to the fact that you can bring previously-used debit and credit cards from Google Wallet into Android Pay, and partially because Android Pay just doesn’t support that many banks yet — just 10 at the time of writing.

My first reaction was that this is a poor user experience; why make people who are new to Android Pay have to use a PIN? Then I realised that most Americans aren’t used to PINs for purchasing, and are just adjusting to chip-and-sign. So this might be faster. (The fact that you might have two cards, and one will require a PIN and one won’t, seems like bad design though.)
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Former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys found guilty of three counts of hacking » Motherboard

Sarah Jeong:

In 2010, Keys posted login credentials to the [his then former employer] Tribune Company content management system (CMS) to a chatroom run by Anonymous, resulting in the defacement of an LA Times article online. The defacement was reversed in 40 minutes, but the government argued the attack caused nearly a million dollars in damage…

…”This is not the crime of the century,” Segal said, adding that nonetheless Keys should not get away with his acts. At minimum, he may receive probation. Sentencing is scheduled for January 20, 2016.

Keys said he was disappointed with the verdict, and worried about the sentence affecting his ability to work. However, he also expressed his intention to appeal the conviction, and was optimistic it would be overturned.

Keys added that a few months after his first story about Anonymous, he was approached by the FBI, but Keys refused to allow them to scan his computer. He was indicted a couple of years later.

In order to be convicted under the CFAA, the damage had to exceed $5,000. The government claimed that Keys caused $929,977.00 worth of damage. During the trial, the defense tried to cast doubt on the total damages, claiming that the expenditures in response to the hack were not reasonable, and Tribune employees had grossly inflated the hours spent on incident response.

Lesson 1: change passwords ex-employees had access to. Lesson 2: don’t post passwords of companies that you used to work for on Anonymous chatboards.
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Will digital books ever replace print? » Aeon

Craig Mod used to read only ebooks (on Kindle) but now finds he has fallen out of love with it in favour of the physical form again:

Take for example the multistep process of opening a well-made physical edition. The Conference of the Birds (2009), designed by Farah Behbehani and published by Thames and Hudson, is a masterclass in welcoming the reader into the text.

The object – a dense, felled tree, wrapped in royal blue cloth – requires two hands to hold. The inner volume swooshes from its slipcase. And then the thing opens like some blessed walking path into intricate endpages, heavystock half-titles, and multi-page die-cuts, shepherding you towards the table of contents. Behbehani utilitises all the qualities of print to create a procession. By the time you arrive at chapter one, you are entranced.

Contrast this with opening a Kindle book – there is no procession, and often no cover. You are sometimes thrown into the first chapter, sometimes into the middle of the front matter. Wherein every step of opening The Conference of the Birds fills one with delight – delight at what one is seeing and what one anticipates to come – opening a Kindle book frustrates. Often, you have to swipe or tap back a dozen pages to be sure you haven’t missed anything.

Because the Kindle ecosystem makes buying books one-click effortless, it can be easy to forget about your purchases. Unfortunately, Kindle’s interface makes it difficult to keep tabs on those expanding digital libraries: at best, we can see a dozen titles at a time, all as inscrutably small book covers. Titles that fall off the first-page listing on a Kindle cease to exist. Compare that with standing in front of a physical bookshelf: the eye takes in hundreds of spines or covers at once, all equally at arm’s length. I’ve found that it’s much more effortless to dip back into my physical library – for inspiration or reference – than my digital library. The books are there. They’re obvious. They welcome me back.

The pile of unread books we have on our bedside tables is often referred to as a graveyard of good intentions. The list of unread books on our Kindles is more of a black hole of fleeting intentions.

The comparison of a bookshelf to the limited real estate on a screen is so important in many contexts: when we got into a supermarket or bookshop we can scan hundreds of items at once. How many on a screen when you don’t know what you’re searching for?
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Sony buys Belgian image sensor technology firm » Reuters

Ritsuko Ando:

Japan’s Sony Corp said it bought Belgian image sensor technology company Softkinetic Systems for an undisclosed sum, stepping up investment in an area that has become one of its strongest amid weak sales of its TVs and smartphones.

Softkinetic specializes in a type of technology that helps measure “time of flight”, or the time it takes for light to reflect off an object and return to an image sensor, Sony said.

Put like that, it sounds like “you’re measuring light round trips? Those are nanoseconds, right?”. Judging from the site, though, it’s more about location in 3D and general position sensing and mapping in domestic environments. So does this mean we’ll go to 3D photos next?
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Start up: can Google accelerate publishers?, DuckDuckGo profitable, 3D Touch coming to Android?, and more

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Antennagate, Bendgate, and now – Transistorgate? It’s the regular iPhone two-weeks-after-launch news cycle. Photo by khaiphotoart on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Not legal in Delaware. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google speeds up news article downloads on mobile devices » BBC News

Leo Kelion:

Dozens of leading news organisations, including the BBC, are taking part in a scheme that will allow their web-based articles to load more quickly on smartphones and tablets.

Leaders of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative promise that the stripped-back versions of the pages will be “lightning fast” to load.

The move has been led by Google, which is providing use of its servers.

Participants believe it may discourage the use of ad-blocking plug-ins.

AMP works by simplifying the technical underpinnings of the pages involved.

Much of the Javascript code used on normal webpages is absent, meaning articles should not only appear faster but use less battery power.

Publishers can continue to tap into the same ad networks as before, but they will not be able to display some types of adverts including pop-ups and “sticky” images that move as users scroll down a page.

Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and WordPress have said they also intend to make use of the technology.

Facebook is a notable exception. The social network recently launched an alternative programme called Instant Articles, which speeds up the delivery of third-party content by hosting it on its own platform.

Less Javascript, eh? Notable that “participants” (in the test) think it will discourage adblocking. I don’t see why they think that. It might forestall some people from using them. But people who visit pages that aren’t on AMP will get the same dire experience; they won’t know if they’re on AMP pages or not, will they? And then they search for “adblocker”…
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Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages – a quick reaction (no js) » Kevin Marks

Marks has long open source experience. He’s not that impressed by Google’s new offering with publishers:

Specifically, they replace img, audio, video with their own versions implemented as custom elements and so requiring javascript to appear. They ban loaded style sheets, requiring inline styles, but oddly allow font-face, one of the slowest things on the mobile web. They also replace the Twitter embed fallback markup with a custom type made up by themselves, which combined with the iframe ban means that you need their blessing to extend the web.

This means that if javascript is not loaded, images will disappear.

They also require a lot of arbitrary weird markup (like emoji in the html element, which violates content encoding), a weird style incantation that makes the page opaque, and require the proprietary schema.org markup.

Now, my site is not very complex; indeed it loads very fast on mobile already, but it does use a few javascript enhancements: fragmention to let you link to a phrase; webmention injection for comments as seen below, and the twitter embed enhancement javascript. Without these, the page still renders and makes sense, and it is parseable as microformats. This is known as progressive enhancement; AMP looks more like graceless degradation.

Ow.
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Does your iPhone have a good or bad A9 CPU? » Engadget

Abdul Dremali:

There’s a little drama brewing less than two weeks after Apple released it’s brand new line of iPhones. As reported by Anandtech, the A9 processor of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus were dual sourced from Samsung and a company called TSMC. The differences between these chips was not evident for some time as fans assumed the smaller 96mm² by Samsung would be the superior chip. Users are conducting tests and reporting the results via forums on Reddit and Mac Rumors which have resulted in the conclusion that the TSMC A9 has approximately 2 hours better battery performance than the Samsung.

It recommends an app you can download to check which make you have. Can we call this Transistorgate? (It’s going to be quite a thing if there really is that big a difference. Though when Apple introduced the retina MacBook Pro, it sourced screens from Samsung and LG; the LG ones were worse. It’s a coin flip..)
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Thank HN: for helping me get traction with DuckDuckGo and Traction book – AMA » Hacker News

Gabriel Weinberg, who set up the DuckDuckGo search engine, took the slightly unusual step of doing an AMA (ask me anything) on Hacker News, rather than Reddit, because he credits HN with getting it all off the ground. He also has a book about how his startup(s) got traction to sell. And this nugget:

DuckDuckGo is actually profitable! It is a myth you need to track people to make money in Web search. Most of the money is still made without tracking people by showing you ads based on your keyword, i.e. type in car and get a car ad. These ads are lucrative because people have buying intent. All that tracking is for the rest of the Internet without this search intent, and that’s why you’re tracked across the Internet with those same ads.

(Disclosure: I use DDG as my default. I like it. You can copy a link from the results without it being stuffed with Google obfuscation.)
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I used an Android watch with my iPhone — and I hate it » Business Insider

Matt Weinberger:

Now, after more than a week wearing a Huawei Watch provided by Google,  I can say that I don’t care for it very much. It doesn’t actually fulfill the mission of helping me look at my phone less.

It’s not really Huawei’s fault. Not entirely. Apple is notoriously protective of the iPhone’s ecosystem, and it’s a minor miracle that an Android watch can sync with an iPhone at all.

But as it stands, the only real superpower that using an Android Wear watch has going for it is that it pushes your phone’s notifications straight to your wrist with a little buzz. If you actually want to do anything about those notifications, you have to take your phone out of your pocket anyway.

But it was good for telling the time. There was that. Looks like the expectation that Android Wear being able to link to iOS would bring a boom in competition (and sales) was overblown.
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Sony may consider options for smartphone unit if no profit next year » Reuters

Reiji Murai:

Sony Corp’s chief executive flagged next year as a make-or-break year for its struggling smartphones, saying it could consider other options for the unit if it failed to turn profitable.

After years of losses, Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai has engineered a successful restructuring drive at Sony, with recent results showing improvement thanks to cost cuts, an exit from weak businesses such as PCs, as well as strong sales of image sensors and videogames. But its smartphone business has been slow to turn around.

“We will continue with the business as long as we are on track with the scenario of breaking even next year onwards,” Hirai told a group of reporters on Wednesday. “Otherwise, we haven’t eliminated the consideration of alternative options.”

Told you: trying to go upmarket in Android is not a smart move, but that’s the strategy Sony tied itself to without having any clear differentiation.
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Press release: Synaptics announces ClearForce technology for smartphones » Synaptics

Synaptics, the leading developer of human interface solutions, today announced broad sampling of its ClearPad® ClearForce™ force-sensing solutions. ClearForce enables OEMs to differentiate smartphones by providing customers with new dimensions in user interfaces such as speed scrolling, zoom, gaming, and text or photo editing by applying variable force with a finger or stylus. Synaptics® has been working closely with leading global OEMs and LCMs to deliver this new dimension in touch with force-enabled smartphones expected to ship in early 2016.

With a rich history in force technology dating back to 1996, including over 60 granted and pending patents worldwide, Synaptics’ third-generation force-sensing solution, ClearForce, enables global OEMs and LCMs to differentiate smartphones — with tablet, wearables, and automotive manufacturers to follow. Variable force creates numerous opportunities to invent new user interface capabilities and increases productivity for touchscreen applications.

“ClearForce”. Unlike, say, Force Touch or 3D Touch. What’s the betting that Samsung’s Galaxy S7 includes this? Question is, will it only be for Samsung apps, or will other app developers (even Google?) take advantage of it?
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Twitter’s Moment » Stratechery

Ben Thompson is excited about the fact and the potential of Twitter’s new Moments service:

When you first tap the Moments tab at the bottom of the Twitter app you’re dropped into the ‘Today’ view that lists a mishmash of stories that, well, happened today.

• Touch any of the stories to get a curated list of tweets that tell the story in question through videos, images, and sometimes just text. It’s a really great experience, and I found the sports stories with their combination of highlights and tweeted reactions particularly enjoyable

• For any Moment in progress, you can tap a button to add tweets about that Moment to your main timeline. Crucially, though, those tweets only persist for the duration of the event in question; the ‘Unfollow’, which is the most essential action when it comes to building a Twitter feed you actually read, is done for you

• Finally, in what was probably the biggest surprise in the product, there is a carousel at the top leading to more focused categories:

Each of these categories includes not only ‘News’ or ‘Entertainment’ Moments that just happened, but also more timeless content, particularly in ‘Fun.’ Look carefully at those category titles, though — they sure look familiar:

That’s right, Twitter just reinvented the newspaper. It’s not just any newspaper though — it has the potential to be the best newspaper in the world.

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Japan’s Murata sees slowdown in global smartphone market growth » Reuters

Makiko Yamazaki and Reiji Murai:

Global demand for smartphones is likely to slow in the next fiscal year due to weaker demand from the world’s biggest market China, the head of Japanese smartphone component maker Murata Manufacturing Co told Reuters on Wednesday.

Chief Executive Tsuneo Murata said growth for the fiscal year starting April 2016 would be in the high, single digits, below the 12 percent growth forecast by the company for fiscal 2015/16.

Murata, however, said this slowdown was unlikely to hurt the company’s business because demand for the high-end phones it provides parts for is expected to remain robust.

“Everyone seems to be worried about the future of the smartphone market, but there should be no change to growth in demand for high-speed and high-performance handsets,” said Murata, one of the sons of the Kyoto-based company’s founder.

“Such high-end handsets need to use more of our products.”

IDC is forecasting overall growth at about 10% for this year compared to 2014; Murata sees that slowing after January.
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iOS hits twelve-month low in US ahead of iPhone launch » Kantar Worldpanel

“Across Europe’s ‘big five,’ Android continues to struggle, with only the heavily prepaid markets of Italy and Spain registering a year-over-year share growth,” said Dominic Sunnebo, business unit director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Europe. “In Great Britain, Samsung, the undisputed Android leader, dropped market share both period-over-period and year-over-year, while Sony and LG were the only two Android vendors able to grow share over the last year and over the three months ending in July 2015.”

Europe’s “big five” markets are Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.

“In the US, Samsung’s Galaxy S6 grew its share of smartphone sales but did not threaten the iPhone 6 leadership position,” [research director Carolina] Milanesi added. “In April through August 2015 – the months following the launch of the new flagships – only 29% of the Samsung smartphone installed base were upgraded to new devices. Among those who upgraded, 23% changed to a Galaxy S5, 4% to a Galaxy S6, and 1% to a Galaxy S6 Edge.”

Android is hardly “struggling” in Europe; in some countries such as Spain it has nearly 90% sales share. On that last point – this means that of the total US Samsung smartphone installed base (52m according to separate data from ComScore), 29% (15.1m) upgraded; of those 23% (3.4m) got last year’s S5, 4% (0.6m) got an S6 and 1% (150,000) got an Edge. That’s a pretty dramatic preference for the S5; does price alone explain it?
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Verizon’s zombie cookie gets new life » ProPublica

Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson:

Verizon is giving a new mission to its controversial hidden identifier that tracks users of mobile devices. Verizon said in a little-noticed announcement that it will soon begin sharing the profiles with AOL’s ad network, which in turn monitors users across a large swath of the internet.

That means AOL’s ad network will be able to match millions of internet users to their real-world details gathered by Verizon, including — “your gender, age range and interests.” AOL’s network is on 40% of websites, including on ProPublica.

AOL will also be able to use data from Verizon’s identifier to track the apps that mobile users open, what sites they visit, and for how long. Verizon purchased AOL earlier this year.

The decision came after a ProPublica article revealed that an online advertiser, Turn, was exploiting the Verizon identifier to respawn tracking cookies that users had deleted. Read the story.

Privacy advocates say that Verizon and AOL’s use of the identifier is problematic for two reasons: Not only is the invasive tracking enabled by default, but it also sends the information unencrypted, so that it can easily be intercepted.

Or you can opt out (and hope it sticks).
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Start up: the Nexus puzzle, Stagefright 2.0 (bigger!), T-Mobile US data hack, Fiorina’s iPod miss and more

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How do you make cakes sell better if they make people feel guilty? Photo by ricardogz10 on Flickr.

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Google’s Nexus phones are just ads » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

new Nexus phones are also profitless love letters to fans, designed to induce goodwill for the Google brand. How can a company that depends on making money from each unit of hardware sold hope to compete with that?

Motorola went all-out with the Moto X Pure this year, seeking to deliver the cleanest possible Android experience, best possible specs, and lowest possible price, all while operating independently of carrier interference. That’s as close to Google’s Nexus ideal as any Android manufacturer has ever come. So if Google’s Nexus motivation was truly to set a template of good practices to follow, to define a user experience benchmark, and to seed the development of a better Android ecosystem, it would have stopped and applauded Motorola for its efforts this year.

Instead, Google is undercutting the $399 Moto X Pure with the $379 Nexus 5X, which has the added benefit of a fingerprint sensor and matches the Moto X with a highly rated camera capable of 4K video. I don’t know whether to describe this as a knife in the back or an arrow to the knee, but Google’s actions are certainly doing violence to its Android partners’ best-laid plans.

Lenovo/Motorola’s mobile division loses money. So it’s pretty certain that if the Nexus phones undercut them, they lose money. That makes them deflationary to the Android ecosystem; it’s as though Microsoft were selling $150 full-spec PCs under its own brand. Savov hits the nail on the head (once more): the Nexus program just doesn’t make sense in a wider view.
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Stagefright 2.0: MP3 and MP4 can hack billion Android phones » Fortune

Robert Hackett:

It’s time to evacuate the Android dance floor—lest you be infected by the sound.

Two new critical vulnerabilities in Google’s mobile operating system announced by security researchers on Thursday put more than a billion Android devices at risk of being hacked. That means “almost every Android device” is affected, ranging from Android version 1.0 to the latest version 5.0, also known as “Lollipop,” the researcher said.

Attackers can exploit these computer bugs by tricking users into visiting websites that host malicious MP3 or MP4 files. Once a victim previews one of these infected multimedia files, which commonly package music or video, that person’s machine can swiftly be compromised. The issue involves how Android processes these files’ metadata through a media playback engine named Stagefright.

Yes, it’s Stagefright, and it’s back; it can once more access data, cameras, microphone and photos. But on pretty much any Android phone ever. It’s incredibly unlikely to be exploited by any but state-level hackers.

Still, Google was told on 15 August, and sent updates to OEMs and carriers on September 10. Have they rolled out? Find out by using Zimperium’s Stagefright detector app. (You have to love the reviews complaining that it shows “false positives”.)
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Amazon to ban sale of Apple, Google video-streaming devices » Bloomberg Business

Spencer Soper:

Amazon.com is flexing its e-commerce muscles to gain an edge on competitors in the video-streaming market by ending the sale of devices from Google and Apple that aren’t easily compatible with Amazon’s video service.

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Amazon’s streaming service, called Prime Video, doesn’t run easily on its rival’s hardware.

Filed under “strategy tax”. Possibly the profits on the Apple TV and Chromecast weren’t very high, but Amazon still sells smart TVs that don’t play Prime Video.
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CEO responds to Experian data breach » T-Mobile

John Legere:

We have been notified by Experian, a vendor that processes our credit applications, that they have experienced a data breach. The investigation is ongoing, but what we know right now is that the hacker acquired the records of approximately 15 million people, including new applicants requiring a credit check for service or device financing from September 1, 2013 through September 16, 2015. These records include information such as name, address and birthdate as well as encrypted fields with Social Security number and ID number (such as driver’s license or passport number), and additional information used in T-Mobile’s own credit assessment. Experian has determined that this encryption may have been compromised. We are working with Experian to take protective steps for all of these consumers as quickly as possible.

Obviously I am incredibly angry about this data breach and we will institute a thorough review of our relationship with Experian, but right now my top concern and first focus is assisting any and all consumers affected. I take our customer and prospective customer privacy VERY seriously.

Sure, you take it seriously, Mr Legere (and I mean that seriously) but there’s a single point of failure in the way that you trusted a third party with your customers’ data. That’s poor system design, which means that actually customer privacy wasn’t taken that seriously. Wonder if a class action will follow.
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Xiaomi confronts an unnerving time » WSJ

Li Yuan speaks to Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun:

How Xiaomi responds [to new challengers] could offer a clue to how well China’s booming tech industry transitions to its next stage. Riding a wave of growing mobile Internet adoption, China’s technology sector has churned out significant global companies and minted fortunes. But growth is slowing across the board, presenting challenges to a new generation of entrepreneurs who must learn how to manage in tougher times.

Mr. Lei sees a five-year lull in smartphone innovation that will make “wow” moments harder to come by, and will require competitors to focus on user experience to differentiate and tap consumer niches. The key, he says, is to provide value.

“We’re doing what Uniqlo, Muji and Ikea have been doing,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to make good but cheap things.”

That five-year lull is quite a thing to contemplate.
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The cost of mobile ads on 50 news websites » The New York Times

Gregor Aisch, Wilson Andrews and Josh Keller:

Ad blockers, which Apple first allowed on the iPhone in September, promise to conserve data and make websites load faster. But how much of your mobile data comes from advertising? We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers.

It’s a hell of a graphic. The “cost to load” data is eye-opening: it’s pretty much always far, far bigger than that of the editorial. (Why? I mean, one comes for the editorial, including pictures; why are ads so much bigger?) The Guardian comes a long way down the list – as in, it has a very low ad load – which might be, I suspect, because the US version of the site doesn’t yet have that many ads.

There’s an accompanying article by Brian X Chen, which also appeared in print.

Note too that articles like this fulfils one of my expectations ahead of the launch of iOS 9: it spreads the word of the existence of this facility on iOS, which will lead to Android users wanting to know how they can get it too.
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A creativity lesson from Betty Crocker » Psychology Today

Drew Boyd:

In the 1950s, General Mills launched a line of cake mixes under the famous Betty Crocker brand. The cake mixes included all the dry ingredients in the package, plus milk and eggs in powdered form. All you needed was to add water, mix it all together, and stick the pan in the oven. For busy homemakers, it saved time and effort, and the recipe was virtually error free. General Mills had a sure winner on its hands.

Or so it thought. Despite the many benefits of the new product, it did not sell well. Even the iconic and trusted Betty Crocker brand could not convince homemakers to adopt the new product.

General Mills brought in a team of psychologists. Something unusual was going on. The company needed to make its next move very carefully if it was going to get this product off the ground.

Why were consumers resisting it? The short answer: guilt. The psychologists concluded that average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product.

Now think carefully: what’s your next step? (Scrapping the line is not an option.) I wonder if there are any lessons for smartphone makers in this.
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How Steve Jobs fleeced Carly Fiorina » Medium

Steven Levy utterly destroys any claims to negotiating competence that would-be Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina might have, pointing to the many ways that Jobs steamrollered her (from the colour of the iPod to the pre-installation of iTunes on HP PCs). But this is the coup de grace:

The ultimate irony is that if Fiorina had been familiar with the assets of the company she ran, she might have had much more leverage to cut a better deal with Jobs. When she made her disastrous 2002 acquisition of Compaq, HP took possession of its patents, including those generated by the research division of the Digital Equipment Corporation, the iconic minicomputer company that Compaq itself bought in 1998. It turns out that researchers in DEC’s Palo Alto lab had created a hard-disk MP3 player — essentially inventing key parts of the iPod several years before Apple did. The project never got any love, though a clunky version of it had actually been announced at CES in 2000. Still, among the patents DEC secured were some very broad ones regarding the way music was drawn from the disk drive while conserving battery power. Had Fiorina known this, she might had been able to get a much better deal with Apple  —  because she could have credibly claimed that the iPod infringed on HP’s intellectual property.

Based on this, you’d have to (holds nose) vote for Trump. At least he has actually succeeded in negotiations, and created rather than destroyed shareholder value. If, that is, you think those are things that matter in presidential candidates. Which isn’t self-evident.
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EMV’s reality: more online fraud » PaymentsSource

Rurik Bradbury:

Only 22% of small to mid-sized retailers reported that they are prepared to meet the [October 1] deadline [when retailers have to make customers use EMV-compliant payment terminals]. And, according to a recent SoftwareAdvice.com study, 23% believe upgrading to EMV is unnecessary.

Additional data from a large research firm suggests that almost 50% of U.S. retailers will not be EMV-compliant by the end of 2015. These merchants, just under half of all U.S. retailers, will be in for a rude awakening when they start receiving chargeback bills for fraudulent transactions.

The shift to EMV should significantly reduce in-store fraud for retailers that upgrade their payments processing systems, as the new cards will have an embedded chip that generates a unique token for each transaction, making them extremely difficult or nearly impossible to counterfeit. However, fraudsters will not just throw in the towel and get day jobs, they will simply change their tactics to exploit less secure payment channels.

In many ways, criminal fraud is like running water, when one area is firmly sealed off, it simply flows to the next open gap, which in this case is e-commerce. In the digital world, only the card digits and Card Verification Value (CVV) are used, and chip technology cannot help, which will make digital payments an easier, more lucrative target for fraudsters to target. According to a study by the Aite Group, in Australia, online or card not present (CNP), fraud increased from $72.6 million AU in 2008 to $198.1 million AU in 2011 – a 100 percent increase in CNP fraud in three years following the EMV upgrade. A similar spike occurred in Canada and the UK after each country migrated to EMV terminals.

The same, or worse is expected to happen in the U.S.

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Apple’s software king Eddy Cue on streaming battles, the iPhone 6s and getting rid of roaming charges » London Evening Standard

Jimi Famurewa got some time just ahead of the iPhone launch. Most of the interview is straightforward, but for this snippet at the end:

[Cue] taps his phone and makes an offhand comment about “trying not to get roaming charges” while in London which, I note, proves how insanely expensive phone calls and data can be abroad. “It’s sad, it’s another problem,” says Cue. “We’re trying to fix it and we’re making a little bit of progress but you’ve got to convince a lot of people.” It sounds like an impossible task. But that, you would imagine, is where the famous flair will come in.

“We’re trying to fix it”? That throwaway remark is going to fuel a lot of “OMG Apple roaming MVNO” talk. But it’s certainly not an accident.
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The new Apple Maps vs. Google Maps: which is right for you? » Howto Geek

Chris Stobing:

If you’ve been using Google Maps for a number of years and your account already has all your contacts saved – great, go for Google. If you prefer to use Siri to launch your Maps application or want to be able to see where you’re going without having to unlock the phone, Apple Maps is on the job. There may have been a point in time when Google Maps held the crown as the best (and for awhile; only) real map app out there, but now Apple Maps lives alongside its legacy with just as much functionality and flexibility as the rest.

“Apple Maps in ‘no longer as bad as on first day'” shocker. (Plus “Google Maps unable to improve beyond where it was three years ago”.) The biggest gap is in public transport; while apps can close that, it’s still unsatisfying when your only offerings are cars or Shanks’s pony.
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Samsung TVs appear less energy efficient in real life than in tests » The Guardian

Arthur Nelsen:

The lab studies found that Samsung’s ‘motion lighting’ feature reduced the TV sets’ brightness – and power consumption – under international electrotechnical commission (IEC) test conditions. These involve the playback of fast sequences of varied material, such as recorded TV shows, DVDs and live broadcasts.

But under real-world viewing conditions, no reductions in power consumption were registered, making the sets’ power consumption, fuel bills and carbon emissions correspondingly higher.

After tests in February, a ComplianTV report, which did not name Samsung, said: “The laboratories observed different TV behaviours during the measurements and this raised the possibility of the TV’s detecting a test procedure and adapting their power consumption accordingly. Such phenomenon was not proven within the ComplianTV tests, but some tested TVs gave the impression that they detected a test situation.”

“Samsung is meeting the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law,” Rudolf Heinz, the project manager of ComplianTV’s product lab, told the Guardian.

Oh, come on, Samsung would never.. oh.
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Start up: Microsoft and Google make up, the social network paradox, adblocking v disability, and more

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Samsung Pay in action. Photo by TheBetterDay on Flickr.

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

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

Google, Microsoft resolve global patent fight over phones, Xbox » Bloomberg Business

Susan Decker and Dina Bass:

Google and Microsoft have agreed to end their long-running patent feud over smartphones and video game systems, dropping about 20 lawsuits in the U.S. and Germany.

The two companies, which didn’t disclose financial terms, have been litigating over technology innovations for five years. Google’s former Motorola Mobility unit had been demanding royalties on the Xbox video-gaming system, and Microsoft had sought to block Motorola mobile phones from using certain features.

The companies pledged in a statement to work together in other ways related to intellectual property, including development of a royalty-free, video-compression technology to speed downloads, in an initiative that also involves Amazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. They will also lobby for specific rules on a unified patent system throughout Europe.

So all the patent wars of the past five years are pretty much done – aside from Samsung-Apple, which is limited now to the US but still putters along.
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The social network illusion that tricks your mind » MIT Technology Review

Network scientists have known about the paradoxical nature of social networks for some time. The most famous example is the friendship paradox: on average your friends will have more friends than you do.

This comes about because the distribution of friends on social networks follows a power law. So while most people will have a small number of friends, a few individuals have huge numbers of friends. And these people skew the average.

Here’s an analogy. If you measure the height of all your male friends. you’ll find that the average is about 170 centimeters. If you are male, on average, your friends will be about the same height as you are. Indeed, the mathematical notion of “average” is a good way to capture the nature of this data.

But imagine that one of your friends was much taller than you—say, one kilometer or 10 kilometers tall. This person would dramatically skew the average, which would make your friends taller than you, on average. In this case, the “average” is a poor way to capture this data set.

Exactly this situation occurs in social networks, and not just for numbers of friends. On average, your coauthors will be cited more often than you, and the people you follow on Twitter will post more frequently than you, and so on.

Basically, it can mean that minority views espoused by those with many followers can be accepted easily as “widely true”. Which of course it isn’t. Sure you can think of many examples.
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How ad-blocking software could revolutionise disabled people’s lives » The Guardian

Anna Bawden:

For people with photosensitive epilepsy, frequently flashing or flickering images could trigger or increase the risk of a seizure, while automatic advertising can be distressing for those with learning disabilities because it hinders concentration and therefore comprehension of the content they are trying to consume.

Blind and visually impaired people can also have problems. “If you are blind or visually impaired and using text to speech software on your device, autoplaying animations or video that includes music or audio makes some web pages all but impossible to access,” says Robin Christopherson, head of digital inclusion at charity AbilityNet, in his latest blog. “The audio that automatically starts playing completely obscures the speech of the screen reader. This means that blind people can’t hear the screen reader and therefore they can’t navigate to the ‘stop’ button to stop the noise.”

Shall we call them disability unblockers?
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Digicel first mobile group to block ads in battle against Google » FT.com

Robert Cookson:

Mobile operator Digicel has started blocking advertisements on its networks in the Caribbean as part of a plan to force internet companies including Google, Yahoo and Facebook to pay to access its customers.

The company is controlled by Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s richest man, and is the first mobile operator to deploy the blocking technology against big Silicon Valley groups that rely on advertising.

Digicel suggested that if those companies want to unblock their ads, they should contribute to the costs of the mobile telecoms infrastructure required to deliver them.

“Companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook talk a great game and take a lot of credit when it comes to pushing the idea of broadband for all — but they put no money in,” said Mr O’Brien. “Instead they unashamedly trade off the efforts and investments of network operators like Digicel to make money for themselves.”

This feels wrong – if the countries where it’s done have any sort of view on net neutrality, they would have to intervene over this.
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Review: Samsung pays where Apple can’t » WSJ

Geoffrey Fowler:

Samsung Pay is just as easy to use as Apple Pay and Android Pay—you don’t have to dig deep into your phone or type any long passwords. To launch it, even when your phone screen is dark, flick up from the bottom and place your finger on the fingerprint reader.

But Samsung Pay faces an unusual hurdle: awkwardness. Attempting to use it for the past few weeks, I got the stink-eye from many merchants, as if I were some kind of con artist or hacker. Here’s a typical encounter at a downtown San Francisco bakery:

Me: “I’m going to pay with my phone.”

Clerk: “Sorry, we don’t have Apple Pay.”

Me: “This isn’t Apple Pay. It’s like a credit card on my phone.”

Clerk: “We don’t have that.”

Me: “It’s something new called Samsung Pay. It will work.”

Clerk: “No, it won’t.”

It did, but the US is still stuck somewhere in the 20th century when it comes to banks, cards and payments. (Among other things.) Samsung’s hybrid solution, which works with terribly insecure swipe card readers, but securely as Apple or Android Pay, is a good in-between. The US is meant to be implementing chip/sign (it was too cowardly to do chip/PIN) from October; let’s see how that goes.
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The state of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is… poor » Discourse Meta

Jeff Atwood:

In a nutshell, the fastest known Android device available today – and there are millions of Android devices much slower than that out there – performs 5× slower than a new iPhone 6s, and a little worse than a 2012 era iPhone 5 in Ember. How depressing.

We’ve done enough research to know this issue is not really specific to Ember, but also affects Angular and most other heavy/complex JavaScript on Android. Why?

Part of it is indeed Chrome/V8 JavaScript optimization issues on Android as you can see from this AnandTech Galaxy S6 review. Note the browser used:


It’s also partly because single core performance on Android is falling way, way behind iOS. Notice that the flagship Android device barely has the single core grunt of an old iPad Mini based on the old A7 core. Compare single core Android GeekBench versus single core iOS GeekBench:


It seems the Android manufacturers are more interested in slapping n slow CPU cores on a die than they are in producing very fast CPU cores. And this is quite punishing when it comes to JavaScript.

This is becoming more and more of a systemic problem in the Android ecosystem, one that will not go away in the next few years, and it may affect the future of Discourse, since we bet heavily on near-desktop JavaScript performance on mobile devices. That is clearly happening on iOS but it is quite disastrously the opposite on Android.

I am no longer optimistic this will change in the next two years, and there are untold millions of slow Android devices out there, so we need to start considering alternatives for the Discourse project.

Attwood’s suggestions include just focussing on iOS users. A native Android app is too time-consuming/expensive, and the problem he’s seeing with Discourse-based sites running slowly comes despite sending only half as much page content to Android phones compared to iOS.

Lots of frustration expressed by others in the comments too. Though as one says, if you’ve never tried the other OS, you’ll never know (or care) what you’re missing – good or bad.
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Apple Watch India launch delayed due to lack of interest » India Today

Sahil Mohan Gupta:

Sources in the supply chain have revealed to IndiaToday.in that the delay is more to due to lack of interest in Apple’s channel partners in India. They aren’t convinced about the product and no one is willing to take on a massive inventory for a product, which belongs to a category that’s not yet developed in India.

As per the IDC, Apple has shipped 3.6m units of the Apple Watch in the last quarter trailing only FitBit which shipped 4.4m units. IDC estimates that the Cupertino-based company will ship around 22 million units of the product in the calendar.  

Apple is tailed by Chinese start-up Xiaomi, which shipped 3.1m units of its Mi Band. The wearable market is expected to be the next growth category for technology companies. 72.2m wearables will be shipped in 2015, estimates IDC, which will be massive 173% jump over 26.4m units in 2014.

Apple faces stiff competition from Android Wear based wearables which after a recent update also work with the iPhone.

In India, the wearable market hasn’t taken off.

So that’s stiff competition from products in a market that hasn’t taken off?
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What it means to be great » Asymco

Horace Dediu:

Looking at new features like 3D Touch, Live Photos, and better cameras, one can observe how easily acceptable and desirable they are to those who first see them. As were Siri, FaceTime, Touch ID and iCloud, making something meaningfully better is a sign of sustaining innovation which does not over-serve.

Paradoxically, the improvements are not usually things that users ask for. Surveys always show that consumers want “better battery life” or a “bigger screen” but delivering something else entirely which nevertheless leads to mass adoption shows an uncanny insight into what really matters. Indeed, those who deliver only what customers ask for end up marginalized and bereft of profit.

To see improvements which lead to ever-increasing success in the marketplace year after year proves that this is not a transient event. This is no flash-in-the pan. This is not a stroke of genius. This is a process, a factory, a machine. The consistency and relentlessness of success is evidence of something at work that is more permanent.

There are lots of OEMs which offer better battery life than the iPhone (Apple rolled the potential into the iOS 9 software update) and have offered bigger screens for longer than Apple has. And there are OEMs which have offered new functions, yet not integrated into an overarching view of how the device will function now and in the future.
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In schools, Google’s laptops will soon outnumber all other devices combined » BuzzFeed News

Molly Hensley-Clancy and Matthew Zeitlin:

There will be more Google Chromebooks in American classrooms by the end of the year than all other devices combined, Google said today at a company event in San Francisco.

The figure is a striking indication of how quickly, and thoroughly, Google has come to dominate the massive education technology market. In 2012, Chromebooks made up just 1% of devices in American schools; iPads had a more than 50% market share. But by 2014, according to market research firm IDC, Chromebooks were outselling iPads in education.

About 30,000 Chromebooks have been activated every day since the beginning of the school year this September, mostly in schools, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the event. In schools, “by the end of this year, there will be more Chromebooks than every other device combined,” Pichai said.

Chromebooks were able to overtake iPads in education because they’re far cheaper — sometimes under $200 — have keyboards, and don’t require additional software because they only run Google’s Chrome browser.

If Pichai is correct (note: don’t rely on Google to give correct information in public statements) then a hell of a lot of Windows PCs must have been junked, along with a ton of iPads and Macs.

I’m dubious. In 2008, there were 15.4m PCs in schools, rising by about 1m every year. In August, the NYT Bits blog said 13.2m systems were shipped in 2014, up 33% on 2013, with Chromebooks making up about a third of them.

On that basis, unless every school is dumping their Windows PCs and iPads for Chromebooks since August, I don’t see how Chromebooks will make up more than 50% of the installed base by January. They might be over 50% of the ongoing sales, though.

That’s not to say they aren’t perfect for schools; only that installed base and sales (market) share are two very different things.
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