Tag Archives: wikipedia

Start up: Hubspot culture, bad citations, Wikipedia for piracy, how Tay was pre-broken, and more

Posted on by
1

Who’d have guessed that letting a browser page vibrate your phone could be abused by scammers? Photo by queenkv on Flickr.

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

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

My year in startup hell at Hubspot » Fortune

Dan Lyons got dumped by Newsweek, having been a journalist for decades, and then as a 50-something joined a Boston startup whose pitch is basically spam people (but never call it spam), created by a co-founder who is only ever referred to by his first name:

»Dharmesh’s culture code incorporates elements of HubSpeak. For example, it instructs that when someone quits or gets fired, the event will be referred to as “graduation.” In my first month at HubSpot I’ve witnessed several graduations, just in the marketing department. We’ll get an email from Cranium saying, “Team, just letting you know that Derek has graduated from HubSpot, and we’re excited to see how he uses his superpowers in his next big adventure!” Only then do you notice that Derek is gone, that his desk has been cleared out. Somehow Derek’s boss will have arranged his disappearance without anyone knowing about it. People just go up in smoke, like Spinal Tap drummers.

Nobody ever talks about the people who graduate, and nobody ever mentions how weird it is to call it “graduation.” For that matter I never hear anyone laugh about HEART or make jokes about the culture code. Everyone acts as if all of these things are perfectly normal.

«

Some people hate Lyons, but he’s never less than incisive to the point of sulphuric.
link to this extract

 

January 2014: potential malicious use of the HTML5 Vibrate API » Terence Eden’s Blog

This was Eden writing just over two years ago:

»There is a new API in town! HTML5 will (soon) let you make the user’s device vibrate. What fun! Obviously, it’s useful for triggering alerts, improved immersivness during gameplay, and all sorts of other fun things like sending Morse Code messages via vibration.

At the moment, Chrome (and other Android browsers) ask for permission before accessing features such as geo-location, camera, address book etc. This is a security measure to prevent your private information leaving your hands without your knowledge.

At the moment, accessing the HTML5 Vibrate API doesn’t trigger an on-screen warning. Its use is seen as pretty innocuous. Because, realistically, the worst it can do is prematurely drain your battery. Right?

I’m not so sure.

«

He was right not to be sure. Comments from this year show that this is indeed being used by scammy ads. (It’s supported on Chrome for desktop and mobile, not on Safari for desktop or mobile; you can check your browser’s capability.
link to this extract

 

Citation, appropriation, and fair use: News Genius picks up again where failures left off » Glenn Fleishman’s Glog

Fleishman points to previous attempts to let people write content on top of other peoples’ work:

»As with many Internet tools created without any forethought about abuse, opting out, and reporting and resolving issues, [News] Genius [which lets people put commentary onto web pages without the consent of the author] seems malicious in absence rather than in intention. As Ella [Dawson] wrote:

»

You can hate-read my content all you want—I know that is a risk of being a person who says things on the Internet. But when you create a tool that pastes commentary directly on top of my work without letting me opt-in and without providing a way for people to turn off the annotation on their pages, you are being irresponsible. You are ignoring the potential your tool has to be abused, and you are not anticipating the real harm your tool can do.

«

Contrast this with Medium’s approach to annotation on Medium’s site. Essay authors can receive public or private notes, and choose which to make public and which to remain private or delete. Commentary on a post, called “responses,” is presented at the end like comments, but each response is a full-fledged Medium post.  (Last year, Medium added the ability for everyone, instead of certain outlets or requiring email, to disable responses to appear linked; they can still be made, they just don’t appear at the end of the referenced post.)

«

Past experience suggests News Genius will die a death; it’s just a question of how long it will take, and how many people will have lousy experiences like Dawson.
link to this extract

 

Wikipedia doesn’t realize it’s the developing world’s internet gatekeeper » Motherboard

Jason Koebler:

»If you’re just catching up, Angolans are using free access to Wikipedia and Facebook to trade copyrighted movies, music, and television shows, a development that is decidedly against Wikipedia’s rules. The product is called Wikipedia Zero, which “zero rates” all data going to and from Wikipedia websites from mobile phone users in 64 developing countries, meaning the customer doesn’t pay any money for it. In Angola, 50mb of mobile data normally costs $2.50; the median annual salary is $720.

At first glance, giving people in developing nations unlimited access to Wikipedia or Facebook’s Free Basics program seems like a no-brainer. Some access is better than no access, the thinking goes, and Wikimedia, as a nonprofit corporation focused on spreading knowledge, has gotten less public flak than Facebook has for Free Basics, which critics say serves only to indoctrinate the developing world into Facebook’s ecosystem. But the situation in Angola shows that there are problems with zero-rating that Wikimedia’s nonprofit status and knowledge-sharing mission can’t solve.

«

link to this extract

 

Land Registry faces privatisation » The Guardian

Heather Stewart, Hilary Osborne and Rowena Mason:

»The Land Registry is being put for up for sale less than two years after the Liberal Democrats blocked previous plans for a £1bn-plus privatisation.

Sajid Javid, the business secretary, faced immediate criticism for announcing the selloff of the 150-year-old agency – which maintains records on the ownership of land and property across England and Wales – just as the Easter break was about to begin.

Union leaders criticised what they called the “cynical” timing. Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union, said: “Homebuyers and owners rely on the Land Registry to provide an impartial professional service and it must remain under public control, free from any profit motive and conflict of interest.

«

In the UK, sales of properties and land must be registered with Land Registry. Privatising it would create a private monopoly with the force of law. This would create a company that could raise fees on any product and which would not be answerable to Freedom of Information requests.

This is an unbelievably stupid idea. I’m thus not surprised that Savid Javid is backing it.
link to this extract

 

Fly-eye phones are coming » Kevin Marks

Written in January, and increasingly relevant:

»the cameras built into phones have reached the limits of useful resolution, and the differences in responsiveness have been competed away too. The next step will be multiple cameras on each side of the phone. I expect we’ll first see 2 cameras at opposite ends of the phone, so you can take stereoscopic images and videos with natural eye spacing.

However, having simultaneous spaced images means you can extract 3d information from the photo – Google’s camera app has done this for a while but you need to pan up and down. This means you can change depth of field synthetically to give nicer images by blurring unwanted foreground or background details out. This also means you can more easily compensate for lens distortion, making faces less spherical looking in close-ups.You can even reconstruct 3d objects, scanning smaller ones, or panning around a room to derive a more accurate 3d model.

Once you have an accurate 3d model of the room, doing Augmented Reality becomes much more practical – you can place elements on the walls or floors, and have them pass behind and in front of object in a more realistic fashion. Think of the gratuitous effects Snapchat can do with that – 3d halos, birds flying around your head.

«

Look what Snapchat can already do with face recognition (Face Swap) and you get an inkling.
link to this extract

 

TayAndYou – toxic before human contact » Smerity.com:

Stephen Merity argues, very convincingly, that Microsoft’s Tay going haywire wasn’t shocking, surprising or unpredictable at all:

»The entire situation was made worse by a few factors:

• TayAndYou would repeat phrases uttered to it, a trivial attack vector
• The facial recognition on images included a small number of utterances, another trivial attack vector that could be gamed for negative results
• TayAndYou produced over 96,000 tweets in a single day, meaning little to no quality oversight would be in place – if there were any potentially insulting responses they were near guaranteed to be found

Was implementing a filter for swearing out of scope..? To be fair, the bot would still find something insulting to say but I’m certain the majority of worst cases would be flagged.

Even if filtering on the generation end was considered too much, the training data shouldn’t have been toxic. Maybe at least filter the training data for anything discussing Hitler. If a PR department wouldn’t want their humans tweeting about Hitler, I’ve no clue why you’d want a bot to.

«

Meanwhile, Microsoft is ever so ever so sorry.

If you’re working in AI/deep learning, Merity’s blog is worth rummaging through.
link to this extract

 

Donald Trump will win in a landslide. *The mind behind ‘Dilbert’ explains why. » The Washington Post

Michael Cavna:

»[Scott] Adams, in other words, believes that Trump himself has turned the campaign game around. On the stump, the real-estate mogul is not running on the knowledge of his numbers or the dissection of the data. He is running on our emotions, Adams says, and sly appeals to our own human irrationality. Since last August, in fact, when many were calling Trump’s entry a clown candidacy, the “Dilbert” cartoonist was already declaring The Donald a master in the powers of persuasion who would undoubtedly rise in the polls. And last week, Adams began blogging about how Trump can rhetorically dismantle Clinton’s candidacy next.

Adams, mind you, is not endorsing Trump or supporting his politics. (“I don’t think my political views align with anybody,” he tells The Post’s Comic Riffs, “not even another human being.”) And he is not saying that Trump would be the best president. What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques. And The Donald, he says, is playing his competitors like a fiddle — before beating them like a drum.

«

It’s about irrationality. And people are irrational, no matter what they might think. (I’m very much hoping this is wrong.)
link to this extract

 

The readers’ editor on closing comments below the line » The Observer

Stephen Pritchard is the readers’ editor of The Observer, the Sunday sibling to The Guardian:

»While there is a general desire to open comments on as many subjects as possible, moderators are made aware in advance of opinion pieces that are likely to need careful handling.

Last weekend, after consultation, comments were delayed on several Observer articles, including Nick Cohen on becoming a Jew, Victoria Coren Mitchell on the Adam Johnson underage sex case and Barbara Ellen on Jamie Oliver’s advocacy of breastfeeding.

Comments opened once moderators were in place, but within minutes antisemites and Holocaust deniers were hounding Cohen, apologists for sex with teenagers were appearing in the Coren Mitchell thread and misogynists were busy insulting Ellen. It had to stop.

The Telegraph is in the process of ending commentary on its site. That’s not being proposed here, but editors need to think harder about when it would be wise to switch off the ability to comment if a subject is likely to attract so much rage that a mature conversation becomes impossible. It devalues our journalism and offends our readers.

«

Fewer open comment threads also means less moderation, which saves money. But I think this is a broader trend: general news sites will have fewer and fewer open comment threads. It’s just not worth the trouble. Speaking of which…
link to this extract

 

Public Access: we’re shutting down our comments … see you next week » Engadget

Here’s Amber Bouman at tech site Engadget:

»The thing is, we like having a comments section. It gives our readers a place to share their experiences, point out mistakes we’ve made, offer up different perspectives and provide more information. Our comments section can be an incredible place to visit, and we value that our readers take the time out of their day (often repeatedly) to participate. But we can’t take pride in a comment system that isn’t offering you the features you need to participate; that runs amok with racist, sexist or homophobic slurs and threats; or that takes joy in in-fighting and provoking fights.

A quality comments section should make it easy for users to contribute. A good comments section has users who feel a sense of duty and kinship, who act as a community. An exceptional comments section informs its readers, corrects authors and provides worthwhile insights in a polite and constructive manner.

«

It can be done; I think you make people pay to be commenters, and revoke that – without refund – if they cross the line.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none specified.

Start up: Android root attacks, Silicon Valley doesn’t click ads, Wikimedia tries search, videogames v culture, and more

Posted on by
4

Is Twitter a polluted pool? Stephen Fry thinks so. Photo by Dee West 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 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Android malware spread via porn websites to generate fake ad revenue » Grahamcluley.com

David Bisson:

»Researchers have spotted a new type of mobile malware that roots Android devices with the purpose of generating fraudulent ad revenue for its operator.

Earlier this month, Andrey Polkovnichenko and Oren Koriat, two members of the Check Point Research Team, wrote in a blog post about how they detected the malware, which they have named “HummingBad,” as part of a drive-by download attack served by porn websites against two customers’ Android devices.

Curious, they decided to dig into the malware and figure out what makes it tick.

As it turns out, HummingBad is a complex rootkit whose components are encrypted, in an attempt to avoid being flagged by security solutions as malicious.«

link to this extract

 

Knowledge Engine: Wikimedia Foundation takes aim at Google with $3.5m search project » ABC News

»Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is preparing to tackle Google’s dominance of internet search with the launch of a $3.5 million program to build a “Search Engine by Wikipedia”.

Wikipedia’s parent organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, had in September been awarded a $US250,000 ($A350,000) grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, but only publicised the grant in the past week.

The grant is to be used “To advance new models for finding information by supporting stage one development of the Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia,” the Knight Foundation’s grant letter to the Wikimedia Foundation read.«

Table stakes for a search engine back in 2003 were $100m (that’s what Microsoft put into it), though maybe they’ve come down a little since then.

Come back in a year or two and see the wreckage.
link to this extract

 

Too many people have peed in the pool » Stephen Fry

Fry made a sarcastic quip at the Baftas about someone (who turned out to be a friend of his); he then got hell on Twitter; he then deleted his account:

»let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined. It doesn’t matter whether they think they’re defending women, men, transgender people, Muslims, humanists … the ghastliness is absolutely the same. It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view. I’ve heard people shriek their secularism in such a way as to make me want instantly to become an evangelical Christian.

But Stephen, these foul people are a minority! Indeed they are. But I would contend that just one turd in a reservoir is enough to persuade one not to drink from it. 99.9% of the water may be excrement free, but that doesn’t help. With Twitter, for me at least, the tipping point has been reached and the pollution of the service is now just too much.

But you’ve let the trolls and nasties win! If everyone did what you did, Stephen, the slab-faced dictators of tone and humour would have the place to themselves. Well, yes and they’re welcome to it. Perhaps then they’ll have nothing to smell but their own smell.«

link to this extract

 

People in Silicon Valley don’t click on ads » Medium

Rob Leathern:

»Using Facebook’s Audience Insights tool (free to anyone who buys Facebook ads), I compared people from San Francisco and Palo Alto/Mountain View to those in New York City, Boulder/Denver and the nation as a whole.
In short, San Francisco / Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads…

San Francisco, California Activity Profile (Source: Facebook)

The average user in the United States has a value of 12 for “Ads Clicked” whereas a San Francisco user has only clicked 1 ad. Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently as the median national user. The story is very similar for the Mountain View / Palo Alto audience.«

This is like those people who work at junk food companies who would never eat their own output – they know what goes into it. (Leathern is working on a new approach to web advertising at optimal.com.)
link to this extract

 

Take video games seriously! Yes, they’re fun, but they matter culturally too » The Guardian

Naomi Alderman:

»Why do video games receive so little coverage in mainstream cultural media? It’s a question that’s troubled me for years – I even made a programme about it for Radio 4. Games are the largest entertainment medium in the world. And yet newspaper culture pages tend not to cover them (pace Observer Tech Monthly). Cultural programmes on TV and radio do a fun segment about games once a quarter at best while reserving discussion and analysis for interpretive dance or experimental opera.

It’s very weird for me: my novels, which sell tens of thousands of copies, are shortlisted for prizes that appear on the news. My games, which have sold millions of copies, don’t make the news. Film and TV Baftas are a news story. Games Baftas are an industry event.

I think this is a shame. It affects the way people think about the medium.«

OK, I’ll bite: a reason games aren’t treated as mattering culturally is because they have very little to tell us about our culture. Take a film like The Big Short or The Revenant or The Martian (the latter perhaps closest, in plot, to a video game).

Besides the mechanics of plot, each takes us into another person’s, or other peoples’, experiences: Steve Carrell’s character in Big Short is consumed by loathing of the vile business, yet unable to withstand the desire to profit from the dumb money. Leonardo Di Caprio’s holds onto life to avenge a death; Matt Damon’s goes through the emotions of loss, resignation, elation, and near-resignation. And like life, each film surprises us but tells us about the human experience.

And where’s the game that could evoke the same emotional reaction as ET – made in 1982 (that’s 34 years ago)?

Just because games sell in large numbers and generate lots of money doesn’t mean they have equivalent status as cultural artefacts as films. Fishing is the most popular (as in “has the most participants”) sport in the UK. Yet you don’t see it reported in newspapers (Fishing Times apart), whereas tennis is.
link to this extract

 

Why Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei can’t compete with Apple » Tech in Asia

Charlie Custer:

»Chinese handset makers did quite well in 2015. But can they climb that cliff? Could they actually beat out Apple?

No. At least not in the sense of eating into Apple’s specific chunk of the market.

Why? For one, they don’t share a clear target market with Apple. Say what you will about Apple – and I’ve said some bad things in the very recent past – but it knows its market. And so do you, probably. Quick, picture an iPhone user. You’re probably picturing somebody young-ish, urban. Somebody who likes a simple user experience that doesn’t change much from model to model. Somebody who admires good industrial design, and who has the money to fit a $600-$800 phone into their budget.

Now, picture a Huawei user. It’s much harder because they’re all over the place. The prices range quite a bit, and the company offers dozens of different handset models. Lenovo is pretty similar. Even once-simple Xiaomi now offers three different major product lines with a confusing assortment of models in each line (do I want the Mi 4 or the Mi 4i or the Mi 4c?).

That’s not to say that none of these devices have clear target markets, of course, but none of them really overlap with the iPhone market. All three companies offer lower-priced devices, and because of their split focus they really can’t hope to compete with Apple’s single-minded focus when it comes to the iPhone market. They may be able to boost their numbers by picking up more users in developing regions, but none of the three is likely poaching any of Apple’s market anytime soon.

Plus, they’re not competing in the same ecosystem. Technologically speaking, there’s nothing on the iPhone that you can’t get on a dozen Android handsets except for one thing: iOS. And while I’ve argued that a lot of the native iOS apps are getting worse, there’s still no doubt that once a user buys into an ecosystem, it’s difficult to get them out of it.«

link to this extract

 

2017 to be the year of dual-lens cameras, says Sony » Android Authority

John Dye, noting that Sony has started a separate platform to support dual-lens cameras on phones:

»This seems to line up with some recent rumors trickling through the grapevine that the iPhone 7 Plus will be using a dual-lens camera module. However, Sony was quick to point out that they don’t believe this new form of camera will be anything close to mainstream for at least a year. The high-end smartphone market is slowing down globally. As a result, the demand for smartphone components is slackening, so Sony is banking on this new technology getting a start a little later than we may prefer. Chief financial officer Kenichiro Yoshida put it this way:

»Well, for next year, our so-called dual lens – dual camera platform will be launched by, we believe, from major smartphone players. However, as I said previously, recently, our smartphone market is growing and particularly, our high-end smartphone market is now slowing down. So, that may impact the demand or production schedule of dual camera smartphones by the major smartphone manufacturers. So, we believe the real start, the takeoff of smartphone with dual lens camera will be in the year of 2017.«

«

I read that “takeoff” as meaning “phones that aren’t iPhones”. Fingerprint sensors weren’t mainstream in 2013, but the iPhone 5S had one. And so on. (Though ZTE has a dual-lens camera on its top-end Axon phone, released last year.)
link to this extract

 

Verizon will now let users kill previously indestructible tracking code » ProPublica

Julia Angwin:

»Verizon says it will soon offer customers a way to opt out from having their smartphone and tablet browsing tracked via a hidden un-killable tracking identifier.

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.

Two days after the article appeared, Turn said it would suspend the practice of creating so-called “zombie cookies” that couldn’t be deleted. But Verizon couldn’t assure users that other companies might not also exploit the number – which was transmitted automatically to any website or app a user visited from a Verizon-enabled device – to build dossiers about people’s behavior on their mobile devices.

Verizon subsequently updated its website to note Turn’s decision and declared that it would “work with other partners to ensure that their use of [the undeletable tracking number] is consistent with the purposes we intended.” Previously, its website had stated: “It is unlikely that sites and ad entities will attempt to build customer profiles.”«

Not quite a commitment not to track the hell out of you, though.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none supplied.

Start up: weather-forecasting phones, MPs v BT, Google’s UK tax row, Apple Street View?, and more

Posted on by
1


Smartphones are transforming life in Myanmar. Photo by Timothy Neesam on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Not sure if they’re viral or bacterial. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Facebook-loving farmers of Myanmar » The Atlantic

Craig Mod:

For six weeks last October and November, just before Myanmar [formerly Burma] held its landmark elections, I joined a team of design ethnographers in the countryside interviewing forty farmers about smartphones. A design ethnographer is someone who studies how culture and technology interact. A common mistake in building products is to base them on assumptions around how a technology might be adopted. The goal of in-field interviewing in design ethnography is to undermine these assumptions, to be able to design tools and products aligned with actual observed use cases and needs.

Myanmar is especially fertile ground for this kind of work. Until recently the military junta had imposed artificial caps on access to smartphones and SIM cards. Many of the farmers we spoke with had never owned a smartphone before. The villages were often without running water or electricity, but they buzzed with newly minted cell towers and strong 3G signals. For them, everything networked was new.

Fascinating points: brands, how the price of data has dived, apps, and how mobile shops have become pivotal.
link to this extract

Clever app turns everyone into a roving weather reporter » WIRED

Tim Moynihan:

With a free app for iOS, Sunshine wants to be the gold standard for weather accuracy. It hopes to achieve this ambitious goal by using altogether different meteorological instruments: People, iPhones, algorithms, and the draw of community and gamification. The app needs your location to work correctly, but the tradeoff is receiving hyper-local weather reports—Sunshine calls them “Nowcasts”—and becoming part of the data-aggregation process.

Using crowdsourced reporting, readings from the barometric pressure sensor in the iPhone 6 and latest iDevices, and predictive algorithms that overlay all that information on a map to deliver 18-hour forecasts, Sunshine generates what Stroponiati calls “weather forecasting at the street level.”

“It’s a weighted scheme of a user’s experience, community appreciation [you can upvote other users], and how much activity,” Stroponiati says. “Users that update often but also get a lot of upvotes get more weight. There is a whole gaming scheme behind it with local leaderboards and titles … As you get more points, you change titles and climb higher on the leaderboards.”

Was liking it until the gamification stuff. (Perhaps that’s necessary?) When she was still at Google in July 2009 I interviewed Marissa Mayer, who put forward exactly this sort of idea as what smartphones would enable.
link to this extract

Can DCMS safely ignore over 120 MPs protesting over constituency broadba[n]d » Computer Weekly

Philip Virgo:

The British Infrastructure Group report publicised in the Daily Telegraph today uses available data (assembled by the House of Commons Library) but puts on it a rather different interpretation to that recently used by BDUK to boast of its achievements to date and thsoe in the pipeline. The consequent call for action is backed by 120 MPs. Whether the break up of BT is the right action is another matter. If it were to be the right “answer” that raises the more interesting questions of whether “merely” separating out Openreach would achieve the objective of stimulating BT to invest in infrastructure (back haul as well as local loop) as opposed to content (alias subsidising premier league football) and whether that would be enough.

Can BT afford the scale and nature of investment necessary to build the communications infrastructure needed to underpin a “smart society”? A ‘smart society” is one in which everything is interconnected: from smart phones, TVs, toys and consumer goods, through smart meters, cars, buildings, telecare and telemedicine to smart grids and cities. It is also one in which those dependent on on-line medical devices (for example) may die when networks go down.

It is not just that BT has not maintained its previous rate of investment in recent years – it does not appear to have plans to increase it in the future and may find it hard to do so.

The BIG report, and others that have come out over the weekend, do make it seem like Openreach is very unloved, not just by customers but also by legislators.
link to this extract

How to save Wikipedia: Start paying editors … or write for machines » The Register

Andrew Orlowski:

Imagine that one giant manufacturer dominated the car market. The cars it made weren’t very good, but they were much cheaper and easier to buy than cars from anyone else, so the car company had ended up dominating the market.

These cars would often break down, spew noxious gasses, and a lot of the time, didn’t go where you wanted them to go.

Car travel was unreliable and sometimes even dangerous. People kept using them hoping that the crashes would happen to somebody else, and the health consequences of the pollution wouldn’t hit them for years.

For us, it isn’t difficult to imagine a better world, a world of reliable and safe cars.

Wikipedia at 15 is the monopoly car company of digital knowledge.

link to this extract

Apple Maps vehicles » Apple

Apple is driving vehicles around the world to collect data which will be used to improve Apple Maps. Some of this data will be published in future Apple Maps updates.

We are committed to protecting your privacy while collecting this data. For example, we will blur faces and license plates on collected images prior to publication.

As Benedict Evans points out, the blurring and publication mentions immediately point to a Street View competitor. (Microsoft also has a Street View product, as I recall, which even came before Google’s.)
link to this extract

Keeping up with Tim Cook’s Apple » Delusions Of Grandeur

Rob Rhyne:

Apple is moving at a blistering pace. Everywhere you look, a bearded neck slams Apple’s software quality. I agree that Apple has shipped some terrible bugs the past few years, but what did you expect? Apple is shipping software at an absurd rate.

When you consider the amount of technology they’re putting out to support new hardware and the number of people who use their software, it’s a mathematical reality that bugs will get out. Some of them can be nasty.

Those assailing Apple’s software quality fail to recognize the particulars of what Apple has shipped and how they have to ship it. If you take time to understand the problems facing a platform vendor and consider Apple’s scale, you might wonder how more bugs haven’t slipped out.

What Apple has accomplished in the past few years is astonishing, but you need to understand the details of how software frameworks are developed and shipped before you can truly appreciate it.

What we need is a graphic of how the hardware and software frameworks have expanded over the past few years. There really isn’t a company that is doing this much on so many fronts at such scale.
link to this extract

How Larry Page’s obsessions became Google’s business » NYTimes.com

Conor Dougherty:

Many former Google employees who have worked directly with Mr. Page said his managerial modus operandi was to take new technologies or product ideas and generalize them to as many areas as possible. Why can’t Google Now, Google’s predictive search tool, be used to predict everything about a person’s life? Why create a portal to shop for insurance when you can create a portal to shop for every product in the world?

But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.

Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.

It will also rid his office of the kind of dull-but-necessary annoyances of running a major corporation. Several recently departed Google staff members said that as chief executive of Google, Mr. Page had found himself in the middle of various turf wars, like how to integrate Google Plus, the company’s struggling social media effort, with other products like YouTube, or where to put Google Now, which resided in the Android team but was moved to the search group.

Observation by Above Avalon’s Neil Cybart (former Wall Street analyst): “The continued lack of focus is noteworthy.”
link to this extract

Yes, Google’s UK back-tax payment is derisory. Here are the numbers that show it. » The Overspill

I used the public data to do some calculations:

The UK is the only region besides the US for which Google breaks out revenue in its quarterly earnings, because – for whatever reason – the UK represents 10% or more of Google’s total revenue. (Public companies are generally obliged to cite countries or regions which generate more than 10% of revenue in their results.)

Google doesn’t, however, break out profits for any region; it just gives a single figure for operating and net profit.

But what if we were to try to estimate how much profit Google has made in the UK, and then compare that to the tax it has paid, and the tax that it recently paid in a settlement with the UK’s tax authorities, HM Revenue & Customs?

This article from The Register is good background too.

link to this extract

Google’s 2.5% UK tax rate » ITV News

Robert Peston:

Google and HMRC would of course argue that for taxable purposes my calculation of its UK profits is wrong.

They would say that there is a global convention that the profits in the UK should be measured as a margin or increment on top of what it would cost Google to operate here if all its operations were subcontracted to a third party.

Those notional taxable profits would appear to be a bit more than a couple of hundred million quid for for the 18 months to the middle of last year.

And the British taxman would want credit for increasing that margin or increment in its latest negotiations with Google, to capture (in a way that I freely admit I don’t understand) a new assessment of the maturity of its UK business and the low risk of operating here.

They would argue that it would be wholly inappropriate to tax Google on profits measured as I suggested, because most of the costs and business risks of developing Google were taken in the US – and therefore it is only fair that the bulk of the taxable profit of this global giant should be attributable to the US.

In other words, the British taxman and Google would both insist that the Chancellor and the Exchequer are getting quite as much tax as they deserve – perhaps even more – given that multinationals conventionally pay most tax in their homeland (or America in this case).

Here is the punchline. George Osborne, who is struggling to reduce the government’s deficit and needs every penny of tax he can lay his hands on, would seem to concur that he is not being short-changed by mighty Google.

Peston’s calculations are the same as mine.
link to this extract

Google paid Apple $1bn to keep search bar on iPhone » Bloomberg Business

Joel Rosenblatt:

The revenue-sharing agreement reveals the lengths Google must go to keep people using its search tool on mobile devices. It also shows how Apple benefits financially from Google’s advertising-based business model that Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has criticized as an intrusion of privacy.

Oracle has been fighting Google since 2010 over claims that the search engine company used its Java software without paying for it to develop Android. The showdown has returned to U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco after a pit stop at the U.S. Supreme Court, where Google lost a bid to derail the case. The damages Oracle now seeks may exceed $1 billion since it expanded its claims to cover newer Android versions.

Annette Hurst, the Oracle attorney who disclosed details of the Google-Apple agreement at last week’s court hearing, said a Google witness questioned during pretrial information said that “at one point in time the revenue share was 34 percent.” It wasn’t clear from the transcript whether that percentage is the amount of revenue kept by Google or paid to Apple.

It’s a good point: if Apple is so critical of Google’s business model, why is it happy to take money to let it run that business model on iOS? True, Safari blocks third-party cookies (including DoubleClick, the ad network Google owns) – until you sign in to Google. But still a point of contradiction, rather like iAds.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none noted (though tax manoeuvres are notoriously complicated, so I’m expecting feedback on that).

Start up: the tech productivity gap, adtech fraud to pass $7bn, the stacked chart delusion, and more

Posted on by
1


Sexual harassment is a problem even in large tech companies. Photo by ghedo on Flickr.

Why read it on a web page when you could sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email? You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

The future is here. It just needs a big push » WSJ

Christopher Mims:

Past technological revolutions—the steam engine, electricity, the automobile, the telephone—have brought gains in welfare to all corners of the world. Continued sharp declines in poverty in Asia and Africa can be traced to the belated adoption of these old technologies.

But if the automobile, to take one revolution, helped make possible one of the greatest sustained economic booms in U.S. history, one that led to unprecedented prosperity for the middle class, why isn’t the more recent tech revolution doing the same?

Economists and economic historians think they have an answer. To put it bluntly, they say, the problem with the current technological revolution is that, despite multiple Internet booms, we have yet to figure out how to allocate enough capital to information technology and all it enables.

I was ready to say “but everyone has smartphones, even those fleeing countries”; however Mims’s argument is much more subtle: see the graphic below. Productivity isn’t rising. Why not, given all this technology?

Year-over-year change in U.S. labor productivity (output per hour), five-year moving average


link to this extract

 

Ad fraud to cost brands $7.2bn this year » FT.com

Shannon Bond:

The advertising industry’s rapid shift to digital formats is providing a boon to fraudsters, who will cost brands $7.2bn this year, up from $6.3bn in 2015, according to new research.

Marketers are losing money to fraudulent viewing by “bots”, or automated computer programs, that mimic human behaviour. Advertisers pay for those views even though they are not seen by the real people campaigns are intended to reach.

The study by the US’s Association of National Advertisers, whose members collectively spend more than $250bn a year on marketing, and White Ops, an online ad fraud investigator, attributed the rise in projected losses to an expected 15 per cent rise in digital ad spending this year.

Comparatively small survey, but big advertisers – and they all saw “bot traffic” getting worse. One ad-tech exec was upset at yesterday’s link on this topic, but ad fraud matters: this might appear to represent only 3% of spend, but it’s a huge amount of money, and this is only the loss you’re sure about.
link to this extract

 

What I learnt from being sexually harassed at Google » Gadgette

Julia Chou:

A recent study reported that 60% of women in Silicon Valley have been sexually harassed. Of those, 65% have received advances directly from a superior. These statistics caught me by surprise, though they probably shouldn’t have — I am one of them.

While at Google — a company well-known for its “Do no evil” culture — one of my managers sexually harassed me and made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. In the span of a week, I went from feeling excited and motivated about my job to feeling lethargic, anxious, and unenthused. As the youngest member of my team and the only woman, I felt stupid and naïve.

In that week, I was kissed on the cheek, asked to sit on my manager’s lap, told about my manager’s sex life and virility, and told that “all men go through an Asian fetish at some time,” among other wildly discomfiting, work-inappropriate things. Then I was asked to dinner alone. After a week of feeling confused and disrespected, my fight or flight reaction kicked in, and I immediately took the next shuttle home…

…During the HR investigation that ensued, I remember being shamed by a female colleague who thought I was blowing the situation out of proportion. She thought I was being overly sensitive, and that it was wrong of me to report my manager. That hurt. I thought she would’ve naturally supported me.

Concerning story. As a side note, Gadgette is clearly trying to shift subtly away from the conventional “here’s what a company announced in a blogpost today” output of the overwhelming majority of (male-targeting) tech sites.
link to this extract

 

Hypocrisy and why Mike Hearn will not be missed by Bitcoin » Pond Politics

John Hardy:

Another complaint [Hearn, who left the bitcoin community after his proposal to increase block size was rejected – whether by fair means or foul including DDOS attacks] makes is that Chinese miners have a majority of network power, and consequently do not want to increase the block size because it will make it harder for them to compete. This to me is either naive or wilfully misleading. If an increased block size struggled to pass through the firewall, the side of the firewall with the greatest hashing power would benefit most (the Chinese side), as the other size would end up producing more orphan nodes. Nobody wants this, including Chinese miners, because it will damage the integrity of Bitcoin and people are willing to wait and try other solutions first.

Hearn: Even if a new team was built to replace Bitcoin Core, the problem of mining power being concentrated behind the Great Firewall would remain. Bitcoin has no future whilst it’s controlled by fewer than 10 people. And there’s no solution in sight for this problem: nobody even has any suggestions. For a community that has always worried about the block chain being taken over by an oppressive government, it is a rich irony.

The rich irony here, is that increasing the block size through XT would actually exacerbate the problem, and that Mike seems oblivious to this.

Ultimately, having lost in the battle of consensus, Mike Hearn has taken his ball and gone home. Bitcoin XT could not gain consensus because enough people believe in the Core team’s vision for a more graceful and innovative solution for scaling Bitcoin, rather than clunkily just bumping up a number and hoping for the best.

Yes, its fine to be sceptical of Core’s vision, but the beauty of Bitcoin is that if SegWit and LN do not deliver on their promises, consensus will soon form around an alternative. In the mean time, if transactions slow down and the network fails, consensus may form sooner. Bitcoin is not dead, people recognise it is in an experimental phase and will be prepared to be patient. One day Mike may well regret not having a little more of it himself.

There are reasonable criticisms on both sides of the block size debate, the censorship and DDOS has been concerning, but so has the wilful misinformation coming from the other side.

I’ve linked to Hardy’s post rather than Greg Slepak’s point-by-point rebuttal because Hardy seems to offer a broader overview that deals directly with the issues.

I’m still unconvinced that Hearn is wrong. Hardy’s point that Chinese miners wouldn’t want to have their capacity locked behind the Great Firewall, and the fact that there was a DDOS campaign to block Hearn’s Bitcoin XT proposal (miners running XT were hit with DDOS attacks) suggests there is money, not just principle, behind the status quo.

link to this extract

 

It’s Wikipedia mythbuster time: 8 of the best on your 15th birthday » The Register

An excellent list from Andreas Kolbe, which ends with this one:

But Wikipedia needs money, doesn’t it?

That depends on your definition of “need”. Wikipedia’s article writers work for free. The Foundation’s employees, however, don’t. Their number has ballooned from eleven in 2007 to almost 300 today (17 in Fundraising alone). Internet hosting, once Wikipedia’s main expense, cost less than $2m last year; at the same time, the Foundation reported net assets of $78m, including $35m in “cash and cash equivalents” and $29m in “short-term investments”.

But the Foundation has long planned to set up an endowment; these plans are now going ahead. Secondly, with alternative knowledge delivery systems like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Knowledge Graph on the rise, some feel the days of the encyclopedia are numbered. Resources are being invested in Wikidata and a new “Discovery” or “Knowledge Engine” project said to have been a contributory factor in the current dust-up between the volunteer community and the Wikimedia board.

The question of what happens as usage shifts more to mobile is probably the biggest for Wikipedia’s next 15 years. (Via Seth Finkelstein.)
link to this extract

 

Microsoft shares new details on HoloLens: up to 5.5hr battery life, device link and more » Petri

Brad Sams:

At an event in Tel Aviv, Bruce Harris, a Microsoft Technical Evangelist, shared new details about the company’s upcoming Hololens. The highly anticipated device will start shipping to developers this quarter but the company has not announced yet when the device will generally available to consumer or enterprise clients.

Bruce notes that any universal application that can currently run on Windows 10, will run natively, out of the box, on Hololens and the device is “totally wireless” and uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for communication. In fact, there will not be a wired option for this device.

Battery life, while it depends on your usage, can run up to 5.5 hours and under heavy load is closer to 2.5 hours when pushing the device to its limits; anything can connect to the device, as long as it supports Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Field of view is similar to a 15in monitor about two feet away from your face and the reason for this size on the field of view is because of cost and battery life. Harris notes that as manufacturing improves, the company intends to expand the field of view once it makes sense from a pricing perspective.

Harris also says that they are manufacturing the device themselves but it is not being made in the US like the Surface Hub.

I think five and a half hours would be more than enough time to be wearing a device like this. I’d like to know what optometrists think of the potential long-term effects. (One writeup said the 5.5hr life would be “when working on Word documents.” If you’re using a Hololens to work on Word, could I suggest you’re doing it wrong?)
link to this extract

 

iOS code shows Apple experimenting with ultra fast, light-based Li-Fi wireless data for future iPhones » Apple Insider

Sam Oliver:

Beginning with iOS 9.1, the operating system’s library cache file makes mention of “LiFiCapability” alongside other hardware and software capability declarations. The change was spotted by Twitter user Chase Fromm and independently confirmed by AppleInsider.

Li-Fi works in a way not entirely unlike a traditional infrared remote control. Data is transmitted by rapidly modulating a light source, and received with a light sensor before being reassembled into an electronic signal.

Unlike your television remote, Li-Fi uses visible light and the modulation happens in a manner imperceptible to the human eye: that means the same bulb that lights your hallway can act as a data access point. It’s also much faster, with theoretical throughput capacity of up to 224 gigabits per second.

Indoor use only, obvs.
link to this extract

 

After Dark in CSS » Bryan Braun

Classic Mac screensavers, rendered in CSS. Which I’m afraid means you can’t use them as screensavers, unless you put your browser into full screen. Code available on Github for the CSS-inclined.
link to this extract

 

I hate stacked area charts » All this

Dr Drang:

I keep seeing stacked area charts in my travels around the ’net. Horace Dediu at Asymco, for example, seems particularly fond of them. It’s easy to see why. They have big blocks of color to attract the eye, and they don’t look as stodgy as their sibling, the stacked column chart. But I find them often misleading, even when their creator doesn’t intend them to be.

Here’s a fictitious example to show what I’m talking about. It’s a timeline of the change in market share, in percent, of three companies that are the only manufacturers of a particular device. We’ll call the companies Orange, Green, and Blue and use those colors in our charts. Let’s look at this chart.

Obviously, Orange started out dominating the market, but Blue expanded rapidly and took over. But here’s the harder question: How did Green do over this period?

Answer first, then read. Strong argument. You can, as he says, move them around so Green is on the bottom, but what if you have a four-way split and you’re trying to get them to represent correctly?
link to this extract

 

HTC reportedly to set up independent VR company » Digitimes

HTC plans to spin off its virtual reality (VR) business unit to form an independent company in a bid boost its VR business operations, according to a Taipei-based Central News Agency (CNA) report.

HTC and its chairperson Cher Wang will hold a 100% stake in the planned VR company initially, the report said. HTC did not comment or confirm the report.

Wang said earlier on the sidelines of CES 2016 that HTC will set up an independent business unit to develop and operate VR platform products with the possibility that the unit may operate outside HTC.

Remember when HTC bought a chunk of Beats and then sold it – making an overall profit of $80m? Maybe this could be like that.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: writing clickbait, search v the law, IAB disses AdBlock Plus, Android’s future in 2010, and more

Posted on by
Reply

Bitcoin: a failed experiment, or still going strong? Photo by portalgda 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 12 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment » Medium

Mike Hearn:

Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.

Hearn’s article – in which he describes how he has gone from being an enthusiast and believer who left a safe job at Google to work on bitcoin – points to a looming problem: Chinese miners control over 50% of mining capability (the level where fakery becomes possible) and new proposals on fee payments could lead to transaction reversals.

I haven’t seen any adequate rebuttals of Hearn’s post (there are lots of ad hominem “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” responses, or others saying “everything’s GREAT, shuddup”), though this by “Bit Credit” makes a vague attempt. It also contains this passage:

from an economic interest it makes no sense to undermine bitcoin by fracturing it. And so surprise, suprise, bitcoin participants are making rational economic decisions. Bitcoin is not a democracy where 51% rules. In fact that is Bitcoin in a state of attack.

Bitcoin isn’t a democracy, in that its rules are determined by the core developers. But it is a democracy in that if 51% of miners start mucking about, bad things happen. And “attack”? Odd choice of word.
link to this extract

 

How Peach onboards new users » User Onboarding

Peach is the darling of the app world right now, and their onboarding has been heralded as one of the best ever from a newcomer. Care to see why?

Without further ado, here is…

How Peach Onboards New Users

Well, it has sort of fallen out of “darling” status, but any app designer will learn from this – especially the “what is this? What does that word mean? Am I saying this to the whole world? HELLPPP!” It is 120 slides, but easy to click through.
link to this extract

 

‘Shocking celebrity nip slips’: secrets I learned writing clickbait journalism » Broadly

Kate Lloyd:

Laura, another celebrity journalist who has worked online for popular tabloids, explains there are other times when she has had to sex up stories about celebrity women who weren’t even trying to be especially provocative. “You could do a red carpet round-up of ‘all these women look great in these dresses’ but you’d change it to ‘plunging necklines’ or ‘high splits,'” she explains. “Marriage announcements would be sexed up with ‘cleavage enhancing’ or ‘revealing’ outfit descriptions. You’d add in words like ‘nip slip’ even if nipples are nowhere near having a slip because that’s what people are searching for. It was literally just for SEO, and it was soul destroying.”

One journalist told me she worked on a site where every picture of a female celebrity — including those in full coverage outfits — was tagged with the word ‘panties.’

While you’re groaning at clickbait “shows her ex what he’s missing in tiny bikini” headlines, there’s a whole new level of trickery that lurks behind them. For example, a female celebrity recently posed for a tasteful set of nude photos with a glossy magazine, who published the story with an empowering, “you go girl!” headline. The page’s URL, however, was a chain of sexy keywords that simply ended with “nude-photos.” Things get especially murky once you delve even deeper into the behind-the-scenes sorcery. One tabloid journalist told me she worked on a site where every picture of a female celebrity—including those in full coverage outfits—was tagged with the word “panties.” I’ll also admit to using the phrase “nearly-naked” in headlines just to hit the search term “naked”.

And just when you’re wondering what the world would look like if women were in charge of search engine algorithms:

…Tabloid journalist Laura explains that while the amount of sexualized content about women isn’t decreasing, she’s starting to produce more sexualized content about men.

link to this extract

 

A few keystrokes could solve the crime. Would you press enter? » Just Security

Jonathan Zittrain:

Suppose a laptop were found at the apartment of one of the perpetrators of last year’s Paris attacks. It’s searched by the authorities pursuant to a warrant, and they find a file on the laptop that’s a set of instructions for carrying out the attacks.

The discovery would surely help in the prosecution of the laptop’s owner, tying him to the crime. But a junior prosecutor has a further idea. The private document was likely shared among other conspirators, some of whom are still on the run or unknown entirely. Surely Google has the ability to run a search of all Gmail inboxes, outboxes, and message drafts folders, plus Google Drive cloud storage, to see if any of its 900 million users are currently in possession of that exact document. If Google could be persuaded or ordered to run the search, it could generate a list of only those Google accounts possessing the precise file — and all other Google users would remain undisturbed, except for the briefest of computerized “touches” on their accounts to see if the file reposed there.

A list of users with the document would spark further investigation of those accounts to help identify whether their owners had a role in the attacks — all according to the law, with a round of warrants obtained from the probable cause arising from possessing the suspect document.

So, if you’re the person receiving the search request at Google, should you run it? Zittrain takes you around the back-and-forth, which is subtle.
link to this extract

 

The Long Goodbye » Anne Wheaton dot Com

Anne Wheaton:

I chose to be on Twitter. I am not a celebrity. I am a middle-aged woman who’s a retired hairdresser who now runs a non-profit, is on the Board of Directors at Pasadena Humane Society, has a house FULL of rescue animals, and has two wonderful boys. I do not have a job I need to promote, nor am I looking for a job to take on. I have a full life with an amazing husband and family, wonderful friends, and a successful business I run. If something I choose to do on the side isn’t fun, I need to walk away from it because my free time is pretty scarce. Twitter used to be the fun thing I did on the side, and for the most part, it just isn’t fun anymore, so I need to walk away from it and that’s okay.

I deleted my Twitter account last night and immediately felt relieved.

She’s married to Wil Wheaton, who has been anti-Gamergate, on the basis that reasonable people don’t abuse women and other people pointlessly and unceasingly. Increasingly, Gamergate strikes me as Twitter’s id; untrammelled raging male idiocy, which is never reined in by any form of superego (such as “is this really a good idea?”). And the concern is that that superego will never arrive. (Another thought is that with American politics becoming increasingly polarised, Gamergate backers are more aligned with the extreme Republican line of thinking, and certainly with its refusal to engage with any other viewpoint.)

Read her post from April on how quickly just “being a woman on Twitter” turned into “being someone at whom people post random, vicious, worrying things for no other reason than to be vicious and worrying.”
link to this extract

 

Web-based OAuth is a security nightmare for apps » Terence Eden’s Blog

You know those apps where you go in and it asks you to authorise it using Twitter or whatever? Eden doesn’t like them:

In Periscope’s case, the user has to trust that the app hasn’t just ripped-off the Twitter website. There’s absolutely no way to verify that it is a genuine and secure login page.

Even if you have 2-Factor Authentication (where Twitter texts you a login code) you’re not safe. Why? Because if the app is intercepting your username and password, it can also intercept your 2FA code. Sure, it can only use it for a minute or so (with some restrictions) – but that’s enough time to completely take over your account.

As software developers, we have to stop encouraging this anti-pattern. Periscope is teaching users that it’s OK to type their password into any box which looks like it’s authentic.

link to this extract

 

IAB dis-invites us, disses compromise and buries dissent » Adblock Plus

Ben Willians:

Adblock Plus has some very good relationships within the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), which is the trade organization that represents advertisers and publishers. We coach many IAB members about our Acceptable Ads guidelines for reasonable, nonintrusive ads, and we have spoken on some IAB panel discussions (especially in the UK).

Unfortunately, the top brass at the US IAB don’t want us coming to their Leadership Summit next week in Palm Desert, California. We attended last year, and we signed up again for their 2016 meeting … including paying the hefty entrance fee. We were fully confirmed and they even listed us on their website as a participant.

Then this week we got one of those sudden emails that land in your inbox innocently, then floor you with something weird, unbelievable or ridiculous when you click on them. This one came from an unfamiliar IAB address, and it informed us that our registration for the summit was canceled and our fee refunded.

The IAB hasn’t said anything about why, as of the time of this post. Apart from a statement which said that “The IAB Annual Leadership Meeting is for serious conversation among important digital industry stakeholders.” Does it think adblocking isn’t serious, or isn’t important?
link to this extract

 

There are no secure smartphones » Devever

Hugo Landau:

There are no secure smartphones.

This is a simple fact which is overlooked remarkably often.

Modern smartphones have a CPU chip, and a baseband chip which handles radio network communications (GSM/UMTS/LTE/etc.) This chip is connected to the CPU via DMA. Thus, unless an IOMMU [input-output memory management unit] is used, the baseband has full access to main memory, and can compromise it arbitrarily.

It can be safely assumed that this baseband is highly insecure. It is closed source and probably not audited at all. My understanding is that the genesis of modern baseband firmware is a development effort for GSM basebands dating back to the 1990s during which the importance of secure software development practices were not apparent. In other words, and my understanding is that this is borne out by research, this firmware tends to be extremely insecure and probably has numerous remote code execution vulnerabilities.

Thus, no smartphone can be considered secure against an adversary capable of compromising the radio link (called the Um link). This includes any entity capable of deploying Stingray-like devices, or any entity capable of obtaining control of a base station, whether by hacking or legal or other coercion.

It would, in my view, be abject insanity not to assume that half a dozen or more nation-states (or their associated contractors) have code execution exploits against popular basebands in stock.

Question then is how far up the stack you can get from the baseband.
link to this extract

 

August 2010: Android’s pursuit of the biggest losers » Asymco

Horace Dediu, writing back in the days when Nokia and Sony Ericsson made handsets, and BlackBerry was big, noting that LG and Motorola and Sony Ericsson had lost money, though Samsung was doing OK:

how likely are these disrupted ex-giants to recover and take Android forward? My bet: slim to none. Android does not offer more than a lifeline. It is not a foundation for long-term profitability as it presumes the profits accrue to the network and possibly to Google. Profit evaporation out of devices to Google may be a possibility at some time in the future, but only if the devices don’t need too much attention to remain competitive. But because they’re still not good enough (and they won’t be for years to come), it’s certain that attention to detail is what will be most important to stay abreast of Apple.

So here we have the real challenge to Android:  partnership with defeated incumbents whose ability to build profitable and differentiated products is hamstrung by the licensing model and whose incentives to move up the steep trajectory of necessary improvements are limited.

In other words, Android’s licensees won’t have the profits or the motivation to spend on R&D so as to make exceptionally competitive products at a time when being competitive is what matters most.

He also points out that Windows Mobile had the same problem, seven years earlier.

Five years later, the point about long-term profitability and R+D is being borne out. Only Samsung has managed to stay profitable – because of its components businesses.
link to this extract

 

Xiaomi finally releases 2015 sales stats » Tech in Asia

Erik Crouch:

The case of the missing phone statistics has finally been solved – today, Xiaomi revealed that it sold 70m smartphones in 2015, a number below even their most modest predictions.

It’s been apparent for a while that something went wrong for Xiaomi in 2015. In 2014, the company predicted that they would sell 100m phones in the coming year – an estimate that was promptly bumped down to 80m last March.

When late 2015 rolled around, and China’s techies eagerly awaited the company’s sales report, they were met with silence. CEO Lei Jun talked in December about how the company “does not emphasize goals such as smartphone sales anymore,” which certainly didn’t build anyone’s confidence that the company had met its targets.

As Crouch notes, 2016 could be make or break. With China’s smartphone market slowing down, it really needs to find something fresh.
link to this extract

 

Delicious changes » The Official Delicious Blog

Delicious was the original bookmarking service (admit it, you thought it had just vanished):

My name is Tony Aly, and I’m the CEO of Delicious Media, a new company formed in alliance between my company, Domainersuite, and Science, the company that has managed Delicious since 2013. Science has transitioned control of Delicious to our new entity so that my team and I can dedicate ourselves to the long-term success and stability of this wonderful, useful, trailblazing site.

As part of this transition, over the next few weeks, we will be a making a few fairly prominent changes to the site.

The first big change you’ll notice is our transition from the javascript front-end framework that has been powering the content at https://www.delicious.com. The engineers who crafted this version of the site are incredibly talented, and their code is amazing. It’s beautiful and powerful, but it has posed several significant challenges for us. For example, the search engines have a real problem reading our content, hindering users’ efforts to use Google or Bing to find what they’re looking for on Delicious.

Translation: “damn engineers.” Except what’s the point of search engines indexing a bookmarking site? Delicious has been through so many changes of ownership – bought by Yahoo in 2005, then sold to YouTube’s founders, then sold on and on. Never quite manages to regain momentum. I use Pinboard – reliable, cheap, doesn’t mess about. And has a terrific Twitter feed.

For what might have been, read Bobbie Johnson’s article from 2005 about Yahoo buying Delicious.
link to this extract

 

Wikipedia: an old-fashioned corner of truth on the internet » Telegraph

I wrote about Wikipedia’s 15th birthday (on Friday), and largely I have nothing but applause for its approach that anyone could write or edit, and its pursuit of the “neutral point of view”, and (especially) its ad-free ethos. Though:

That’s not to say it’s without faults. There are plenty, some deeply ingrained. Most of its editors are male, meaning topics relevant to women are underrepresented. As the site (and each editor) ages, it becomes harder to attract new editors as the existing clique becomes embedded. With no overall editor determining its direction or content, the topics and content can vary enormously. The world probably doesn’t need zillions of explanatory articles about the Japanese video game franchise Pokemon – but perhaps could do with some of the articles about less-simple concepts being rewritten to a more novice-friendly standard. That’s what the Encyclopaedia Britannica had that Wikipedia doesn’t: consistency.

But that’s also the web revealing our real character. Those who can be bothered to create are more interested in Pokemon than explaining maths or science. We peer into Wikipedia, and see ourselves peering back.

link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none noted.

Start up: Gravity’s mystery CEO, Android audio latency, Engadget v Wikipedia v AI, and more

Posted on by
Reply


The Pill – so well-known and powerful it only needs the noun to describe it. Photo by Beppie K on Flickr.

Haven’t you heard? You can receive each day’s Start Up post by email. None of this “web” nonsense. (You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.)

A selection of 10 links for you. Aren’t they pretty. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The CEO paying everyone $70,000 salaries has something to hide » Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Karen Weise does a wonderful job of just checking the damn facts about Dan Price, the guy who cut his own salary and raised his staff’s to $70,000 on 13 April:

In a follow-up interview in mid-November, I pressed Price about the inconsistency. How could what he told me about being served two weeks after announcing the raise be true when the court records indicated otherwise?

“Umm, I’m not, I have to look,” he said. The court document, I said, definitely says March 16. “I am only aware of the suit being initiated after the raise,” he replied.

“The court record shows you being served on March 16 … at 1:25 p.m.,” I said. “And actually, your answer to it was dated April 3,” also before the pay hike.

“I am only aware of the suit being initiated after the raise,” he repeated. I asked again how that could be, saying the declaration of service shows Price was served with the complaint, the summons, and other documents, “that you are a male, who is white, age 30, 5-feet-8-inches, medium height, dark hair.”

He paused for 20 seconds. “Are you there?” he asked, then twice repeated his statement that he was only aware of the suit being initiated in late April. “I’d be happy to answer any other questions you may have,” he added.

That’s not the end of it either. There’s deeper stuff to come.
link to this extract

Android audio latency in depth: it’s getting better, especially with the Nexus 5X and 6P » Android Police

Martim Lobao:

In a study published by the Audio Engineering Society, researchers attempted to determine the lowest latency detectable by different kinds of musicians…

What they found was a set of values below which absolutely no kind of delay or artifact was detected at all. With an 80% confidence level, this value was at least 28 ms for keyboards, whereas for drums, guitars, and bass, it was 9 ms, 5 ms, and 5 ms, respectively. Predictably, the lowest value found was for vocals, where singers only began to notice some slight artifacts at around 2 ms.

Using this data, we drew up another chart to compare these values with several Nexus devices running different versions of Android, as well as the iPhone 6, the iPad Air 2, and human reaction times to various kinds of stimuli. The red and green dashed lines represent the typical thresholds for detecting audio lags and for perceiving audio artifacts, respectively.

While it’s clear that OS updates play a large role (perhaps even the most important one), not everything can be attributed to software alone. Devices with older hardware like the 2013 Nexus 7 still have a latency of 55 ms, compared to the 15 ms on the Nexus 9 — and yet both are running Android 6.0. On the other hand, the Note 5 is roughly on par with the Nexus 5, even though the former runs Lollipop and the latter runs Marshmallow.

Audio latency is a perennial “it’ll get better next time, honest” challenge for Android. What the graph clearly shows is that every iOS device runs under the “detectable lag” threshold, and that every tested Android device runs above that same threshold. (Lobao calls this “unfortunate” and “an unfair advantage”, as though iOS were somehow cheating.)

Lobao pulls out some excellent examples of what the real-world effect of different delays sound like, such as this from SoundCloud.
link to this extract

Doing real design work on an iPad » Subtraction.com

Khoi Vinh (who works at Adobe):

Some folks may have little tolerance for hoop jumping at all when OS X is so powerful and precise, and many people I talk to find my desire to go all iPad all the time to be somewhat pointless. But it’s more than an academic exercise to me; I genuinely enjoy using my iPad more than my MacBook. It’s lightness and portability is a joy, and its nimbleness—I can use it in portrait or landscape, with or without a Bluetooth keyboard, seated, standing or even walking—makes it right for almost every usage scenario. I also like its ability to run iOS apps because that’s what I’m thinking about in my day-to-day work more than anything; it’s invaluable to me to be embedded in the native environment and mostly free from accessing desktop apps.

I’ve already written a column about the “real work” conundrum for next Sunday’s Tech Monthly in The Guardian. Notable how articles like this are cropping up more and more.
link to this extract

Samsung pulls out of cameras in the UK, cites decline in interest » Pocket-lint

Rik Henderson:

Samsung has confirmed to Pocket-lint that it will phase out the sale and marketing of digital cameras, camcorders and related accessories in the UK.

The company had been rumoured to be considering such a move on a global scale, with some suggesting that it would make a formal announcement during the CES trade show in Las Vegas in January. However, in response to such speculation in September, Samsung replied that it would be continuing with production of cameras and lenses.

It just won’t be selling them in the UK anymore, it seems.

First PCs, now this. Hard to think anyone is buying digital cameras or camcorders in appreciable numbers any more.
link to this extract

I taught a computer to write like Engadget » Engadget

Aaron Souppouris:

Building on this, you can seed Engadgetbot with an idea by adding some “primetext” that it’ll build a sentence or paragraph from. A few examples, with the primetext in italics:

A display with 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, for all it’s worth, is an excellent companion at $200.

The problem with Android is one that affects the search to find a standard chipset for Android.

The problem with iPhone is products of the same section and everything is closer than one of the plungentications.

Some of those sentences are more prescient than others, and I don’t know where it learned “plungentications” from, but structurally all of these sentences are perfect. An RNN certainly can’t replace an Engadget writer, but an RNN can definitely form sentences like an Engadget writer.

Definitely. I can see it getting its own blog pretty soon.
link to this extract

Despite privacy scare, Adele smashes secondary ticketing » MusicAlly

Stuart Dredge:

Coldplay’s six UK dates had 17,631 tickets available across the three secondary sites; Rihanna’s six UK gigs had 9,290 tickets available; and Adele’s 12-concert run had 649 tickets for secondary sale.

Or to put it another way, the average number of secondary tickets per Coldplay gig was 2,939, compared to 1,548 for Rihanna and just 54 for Adele:


Sources: Seatwave, GetMeIn, StubHub – evening of 1 December 2015

Even with caveats – Adele is playing arenas while Coldplay and Rihanna are playing stadiums, and StubHub had no Adele tickets available at all – those figures are startling.

The promise by Adele’s management that “the resale of tickets will not be tolerated” appears to have been followed through with action that hugely restricted the secondary market for the most-anticipated tour in years – Songkick said more than 500,000 people registered on Adele’s website for the pre-sale.

What action? “Songkick provided the opportunity to allow fans to register, and to use its proprietary technology to identify touts, reduce their ability to purchase tickets when advance sales commenced on December 1 and to cancel as many tickets appearing on secondary ticketing sites as possible,” claimed that company’s statement.

No further details have been given, but we suspect there’s a bigger story in that “proprietary technology to identify touts”.

Adele’s manager later said that 18,000 “known or likely touts” had been deregistered before presales, and more than 100 tickets cancelled after appearing on secondary sites. Chalk another one up to Adele and her management.

Wonder if they’ll share the “known or likely” list with other sites and/or artists?
link to this extract

The Pill versus the Bomb: what digital technologists need to know about power » Medium

Tom Steinberg:

The oral contraceptive pill doesn’t, at first glance, appear to have the same visceral connection to power as a bomb or an engine. And yet as a technology that shifts power around it is perhaps unmatched.

This is because the Pill allowed women from the late 1960s onwards to control their own fertility, which allowed them to postpone marriage, postpone the birth of their first child, and turn these advantages into more education and greater involvement in the employment markets. Put together this gave women with access to the pill relatively greater power than they had before, both through greater earnings and through greater ability to choose how to live their own lives.

But what is most interesting to me about the nature of this technological power shift is that it did not dissipate as the technology became ubiquitous.

…Like a diode, the power of the Pill only flows one way.

(Emphasis in original.) Steinberg, who set up MySociety, and was a technology adviser to the 2010-2015 coalition in the UK, is now looking for people who’ve got comparable power-spreading technologies.
link to this extract

Nokia’s Ozo VR camera marks a rebirth for the phone giant » WIRED

Maurizio Pesce:

The Ozo is set to be unveiled on November 30 in Los Angeles, and expected to cost around $50,000. That’s about three times the price tag of the GoPro Odyssey. However, while the GoPro’s footage must still be assembled in laborious post-production processes, the Ozo can generate a full 360-degree stereoscopic video in real time. Thanks to HD-SDI connections on the body, the camera can stream 1.5 Gbps of compressed RAW footage to store data from the streams from the eight lens, broadcast full 360-degree panoramic video, and also stream a low-res feed for monitoring. The camera is Wi-Fi enabled, too, allowing filmmakers to control the system remotely in real time while shooting.

Nokia’s bold move into virtual reality is a clear statement that the Finns are still alive, and that they’re more interested in the projected $150bn dollar VR industry than they are in the mobile handset industry.

It’s less a “rebirth” – Nokia’s network business has been doing OK – than a new direction, but the point about the VR industry compared to the handset business is a good one. And this is clearly aimed at content producers, a smart move.

So… when does Apple update Final Cut Pro to handle VR? Or will it introduce something entirely new?
link to this extract

Wikipedia deploys AI to expand its ranks of human editors » WIRED

Cade Metz:

With his new AI project — dubbed the Objective Revision Evaluation Service, or ORES — [senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, Aaron] Halfaker aims to boost participation by making Wikipedia more friendly to newbie editors. Using a set of open source machine learning algorithms known as SciKit Learn—code freely available to the world at large—the service seeks to automatically identify blatant vandalism and separate it from well-intentioned changes. With a more nuanced view of new edits, the thinking goes, these algorithms can continue cracking down on vandals without chasing away legitimate participants. It’s not that Wikipedia needs to do away with automated tools to attract more human editors. It’s that Wikipedia needs better automated tools.

“We don’t have to flag good-faith edits the same way we flag bad-faith damaging edits,” says Halfaker, who used Wikipedia as basis for his PhD work in the computer science department at the University of Minnesota.

In the grand scheme of things, the new AI algorithms are rather simple examples of machine learning. But they can be effective. They work by identifying certain words, variants of certain words, or particular keyboard patterns. For instance, they can spot unusually large blocks of characters. “Vandals tend to mash the keyboard and not put spaces in between their characters,” Halfaker says.

I CAN TYPING confirmed as fact. Next step: get the AI to write the Wikipedia articles. (Step after that: humans stop bothering to read Wikipedia?)
link to this extract

The Surface Phone you’ve always wanted is happening » Windows Central

Daniel Rubino:

Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans have revealed that the rumored Intel-powered Windows 10 phone slated for May 2016 has been cancelled. Instead, an all-new flagship phone lead by Panos Panay and the team of engineers that built the Microsoft Surface and Surface Book has been given the green light. Slated for a release in the second half of 2016 this may be the long-wished-for Surface phone. Here is what we know and what we don’t.

What we know:
1) it’s about five years too late.
2) that’s all, really. It doesn’t matter if it’s a super-amazing premium flagship able to cure cancer while landing on the moon. Nobody (to a sufficiently good approximation) will buy it.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: Wikipedia’s blackmail ban, Ashley Madison redux, Google OnHub meta-reviewed, and more

Posted on by
1


“Adblocking? Yeah, I heard about it on the radio.” Photo by Skyco on Flickr.

A selection of 12 links for you. Contains nothing about logo changes, so keep moving along. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hundreds of Wikipedia editors got banned for secretly promoting brands » Motherboard

Jordan Pearson:

Wikipedia has 381 fewer editors today, after hundreds of accounts were banned for taking undisclosed pay to create and edit “promotional articles.”

According to a post on Wikipedia’s administrator board, Wikipedia’s CheckUser team investigated for months to uncover the accounts clogging the site with bogus articles for cash. The 381 banned accounts were active between April and August, but the “nature and quality” of the edits suggests that the scam had been carrying on for some time, the post states.

The “sock puppet” accounts, as they’re called, were essentially extorting their customers. First, they would create a draft article and populate it with promotional links. Next, they contacted their victim, often posing as more established Wikipedians, and requested a fee to publish the article. To keep the page from being edited or taken down, the accounts charged their victims $30 per month, in some cases.

This story is the front-page lead (“splash”) in Wednesday’s Independent newspaper in the UK, where it is branded an “exclusive”. Clearly a new use of the word.
link to this extract

Mobile-friendly web pages using app banners » Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Daniel Bathgate, Google Search software engineer:

sometimes a user may tap on a search result on a mobile device and see an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content and prompts the user to install an app. Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page.

Starting today, we’ll be updating the Mobile-Friendly Test to indicate that sites should avoid showing app install interstitials that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page. The Mobile Usability report in Search Console will show webmasters the number of pages across their site that have this issue.

After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly.

Note what Google is actually saying here. It isn’t saying it will penalise all interstitials; only those which are a call to install an app and which cover a lot of the page. So page-covering interstitials that aren’t for app installs are OK. Remember that it’s bad for Google if people install apps: they then tend not to use Google search so much on mobile. This is exactly what Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman predicted only last week after that slightly flakey Google study about app install interstitials. Now the other shoe drops.

One thing I wonder about: how will Google detect these? Won’t sites just hide those app interstitials from the Googlebot, and then use them for normal users? It’s what I would do.
link to this extract

Encryption, lock mechanism vulnerabilities plague lock app AppLock » Threatpost

Chris Brook:

A researcher is claiming that the app, which is supposed to securely store photos, videos and other apps, doesn’t really use encryption to do so, it simply hides the files elsewhere on the phone, where an attacker could theoretically read them.

The app also suffers from what Noam Rathaus, a researcher who blogs about vulnerabilities for the portal SecuriTeam, dubs a weak PIN reset mechanism and a weak lock mechanism. Rathaus, who is also the Chief Technology Officer for Beyond Security, published technical details on the vulnerabilities, along with step by step methods to exploit them on Monday.

Rathaus claims that when users save files on AppLock, they’re actually stored in the read/write partition of the filesystem and not in the one assigned to the application. This means that an attacker would only have to install a file manager application and guide themselves to a certain SQLite database, then a PATH, to find the images.

100 million users can’t be wrong.. can they?
link to this extract

Alliance for Open Media Established to Deliver Next-Generation Open Media Formats

Seven leading Internet companies today announced formation of the Alliance for Open Media – an open-source project that will develop next-generation media formats, codecs and technologies in the public interest. The Alliance’s founding members are Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix.

John Paczkowski’s tweet-headline for this is absolutely perfect: “Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Partner On Next Failed Open-Video Format”.

Don’t believe me/him? The press release tacitly acknowledges that Google’s WebM project has run into the sand:

“Google launched the WebM Project in 2010 in the belief that web video innovation was too slow and too closed, and that broad collaboration — in the open — would fix both problems. The Alliance for Open Media is a big leap forward for these core philosophies, and we’re gratified that our AOMedia partners share this vision. Our combined strength, resources and expertise will drive the next generation of web media experiences much further and faster than WebM can do alone,” said Matt Frost, Head of Strategy and Partnerships, Chrome Media.

Let’s circle back and reach out in a couple of years, eh?
link to this extract

Fluid Coupling » Asymco

Horace Dediu on the question of “when exactly did enterprises become late adopters of technology” – given that they were (relatively) early ones for high-priced products such as the first computers:

companies have procedures for accepting technologies (capital expenditures) which require high degrees of interaction and decision making. In order to step though these procedures, the vendors need to have sales people who need to invest lots of their time and therefore need to be compensated with large commissions. If those commissions are a percent of sale then the total sales price needs to be large enough “to make it worth while to all parties”. As a result, paradoxically, an enterprise technology must be sufficiently slow and expensive to be adopted.

Mobility was disruptive to enterprise because the new computing paradigm was both too fast and too cheap to be implementable.

This implies that the problem with enterprises is not the stupidity of its buyers. They are no less smart than the average person – in fact, they are as smart with their personal choices for computing as anybody. The problem is that enterprises have a capital use and allocation model which is obsolete. This capital decision process assumes that capital goods are expensive, needing depreciation, and therefore should be regulated, governed and carefully chosen. The processes built for capital goods are extended to ephemera like devices, software and networking.

It does not help that these new capital goods are used to manage what became the most important asset of the company: information. We thus have a perfect storm of increasingly inappropriate allocation of resources to resolving firms’ increasingly important processes. The result is loss of productivity, increasingly bizarre regulation and prohibition of the most desirable tools.

link to this extract

Ashley Madison code shows more women, and more bots » Gizmodo

Annalee Newitz, who must feel like it’s Christmas every single day as she wades through the data and code dumps:

Once the man struck up a conversation, the bot would say things like this:

Hmmmm, when I was younger I used to sleep with my friend’s boyfriends. I guess old habits die hard although I could never sleep with their husbands.

I’m sexy, discreet, and always up for kinky chat. Would also meet up in person if we get to know each other and think there might be a good connection. Does this sound intriguing?”

It’s unclear what else the engager would say—either the bots really are this simple, or further chat phrases weren’t in the code. Most likely, based on what I saw from other bot code, the bot would urge the man to pay credits to talk further.

Mr. Falcon pointed out that there’s actually a special bot service, called “RunChatBotXmppGuarentee.service.php,” apparently designed just for interactions with customers who paid the premium $250 for a “guaranteed affair.” When I checked the code, I found Mr. Falcon was right. It appears that this bot would chat up the man, urge him to pay credits, and then pass him along to what’s called an “affiliate.” Likely the affiliate is a third party that provides a real person for the man to chat with. It might also be connecting him to an escort service…

…Ashley Madison aspired to be a global network of people breaking the bonds of monogamy in the name of YOLO. Instead, it was mostly a collection straight men talking to extremely busy bots who bombarded them with messages asking for money.

Plus: it was popular with (real) women who were looking for women for a fling. The data don’t lie.

I do hope Newitz will collect all this into a book. This deserves to be a huge story that’s read and re-read. And it puts every other dating site under just that little extra bit of suspicion.

link to this extract

Amazon curtails development of consumer devices » WSJ

Greg Bensinger:

Fallout from the Fire phone flop has hurt morale at Lab126, according to current and former employees, and raises questions about Amazon’s ability to develop compelling consumer devices. The $180 Echo virtual assistant, a voice-activated speaker, has developed something of a cult following, if not yet mass appeal.

Some workers say Lab126’s shifting and, at times, enigmatic priorities, including a planned high-end computer for the kitchen, have contributed to a frenetic workplace and ill-defined roles. That has led a number of workers to take jobs at other tech firms, the people said.

Amazon established Lab126—the 1 and 26 stand for the letters A and Z—in 2004 under former Palm Computing Vice President Gregg Zehr to develop what became the popular Kindle e-reader in 2007. Located in Sunnyvale, Calif., some 800 miles from Seattle, the division has since rolled out more than a dozen products, including several versions of the Kindle and the generally well-received Fire tablet.

Last year, Lab126 released a flurry of 10 devices, including a television set-top box, the Echo and a wand for scanning bar codes at home.

“What Amazon makes are devices that are not too flashy, but they are inexpensive and they are simple to use,” said Tom Mainelli, an IDC analyst. “Mostly they are another way to serve up content that Amazon can sell you.”

I’m not sure that it’s really “consumer devices” that Amazon is curtailing, but consumer devices that don’t fit into that latter description from Mainelli. The Fire Phone was a bad idea; the Kindle a great one. The Dash button (press it and it orders [item] from Amazon) is a really smart idea; the Echo, unproven.
link to this extract

Quick Thoughts: Google’s OnHub router » Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson has the meta-analysis:

To my mind, the OnHub router is also a symbol of Google’s disjointed approach to so many of its projects, and I worry that the Alphabet reorg will only make things worse. Google already has a home automation business, Nest, which not only makes its own products but has been the vehicle for both making further home automation acquisitions (Dropcam) and for acting as a hub for other home automation gear (the Works with Nest strategy). And yet, this product isn’t branded Nest, nor does it apparently sit under Tony Fadell’s hardware group, which also includes Google Glass.

In fact, Mark Bergen of Recode and Amir Efrati of The Information have both suggested that this product actually came out of the Google Fiber team. I’ve written previously about how disconnected from the rest of Google the Fiber project has seemed, and it’s ironic to now see Google proper appropriate this technology just as Fiber is being hived off into a separate Alphabet company. The good thing about Google is that people throughout the organization feel free to experiment with various things, some of which eventually become products. The bad thing is that this means you could have several separate teams working on similar things in isolation, and in some cases you end up with several products apparently chasing the same use case (e.g. the Nexus Q, Chromecast, and Google TV/Android TV).

Meanwhile, on the performance, Glenn Fleishman’s review of the reviews is the one to read.
link to this extract

Howard Stern just sent adblocking mainstream » Medium

Howard Stern (for non-US readers: he’s a widely-listened to broadcaster in the US) discovered on-air that he can install an “ad blocker”, with a predictably vociferous reaction. Ian Schafer picks up on the likely fallout:

as Richard Blakely suggested on Twitter, we’ll all probably be installing ad blocking extensions on our parents’ browsers this Thanksgiving.

As more consumers learn to (and are able to) pay for ad-free versions of their favorite content, they are beginning to prefer media choices that give them that option. “Premium” versions of ad-supported media are becoming the norm.

So why would people want to see ads (hint: they don’t)? And what does that spell for the future of ad-supported media?

If you’re a brand, you should be dedicating efforts to figuring out how to get your message in front of consumers without running “ad units”. This could be in the form of “content”, “utility”, or anything else that provides some sort of value. But you should be allocating resources to figuring this out now so you can have a competitive advantage.

If you’re a creative agency, you need to figure out what you’re going to be making or doing in a world where consumers are ad avoidant. Core advertising services are destined to change, and innovation should be happening as much on the business and operations end as it is on the creative and technology side of the business.

If you’re a media agency, you should be figuring out what side of history you want to be on, and whether you want to evolve beyond the current state of affairs, or go down with the ship.

link to this extract

Content blockers on iOS 9 will be 64-bit device only » Twitter

Benjamin Poulain (of Apple’s Safari team) tweeted thus:

Content Blockers do work on 32 bits, but the App Store policies restrict them to 64 bits devices as @reneritchie said.

The extensions already work on 32-bit devices (I’m testing three on an iPhone 5C), but Poulain then says the reason for the limitation is because of the performance of the compiler on the largest extensions. (The blockers are compiled on the fly, as I understand it.)

Cynics will say this is Apple trying to get people to upgrade from 32-bit devices to 64-bit ones. (And other extensions do work on 32-bit..) Depends how compelling you think content blocking is, of course.
link to this extract

Encounter with the Google car today… » Cycling Forums

“Oxtox”:

a Google self-driving Lexus has been in my neighborhood for the last couple of weeks doing some road testing.

Near the end of my ride today, we both stopped at an intersection with 4-way stop signs.

The car got to the stop line a fraction of a second before I did, so it had the ROW. I did a track-stand and waited for it to continue on through.

It apparently detected my presence (it’s covered in Go-Pros) and stayed stationary for several seconds. it finally began to proceed, but as it did, I rolled forward an inch while still standing. the car immediately stopped…

I continued to stand, it continued to stay stopped. then as it began to move again, I had to rock the bike to maintain balance. it stopped abruptly.

We repeated this little dance for about 2 full minutes and the car never made it past the middle of the intersection. the two guys inside were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop, I guess trying to modify some code to ‘teach’ the car something about how to deal with the situation.

Lots of little situations like this will make the difference between self-driving cars other road users like and which they really don’t. (Can an SDC be “rude”?)
link to this extract

Google’s driverless cars run into problem: cars with drivers » The New York Times

Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty:

Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.

It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book.

“The real problem is that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who studies autonomous vehicles. “They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”

If it’s about the culture, might be a while before we see them in France or (especially) Italy. Or [insert country where you gaped at the driving].
link to this extract

Start up: virtual reality gets real, our AI friends, Oracle’s junk bundle, Google’s Wiki love, games with molten lead, and more

Posted on by
Reply

A selection of 8 links for you. Do not try the first at home. Or anywhere. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Dr. Jearl Walker sticks his hand into molten lead » YouTube

Yes. Honestly. He’s demonstrating the Leidenfrost effect. DO NOT TRY THIS.

The dangerous stuff happens at about 4 minutes in when he does it the first time. Then he keeps on doing it.

If you want to read about the Leidenfrost effect, Walker explains it in full (PDF).

Forget Oculus Rift, the incredible HTC Vive experience will blow your mind (hands-on) » Pocket-lint

Chris Hall tried it, and he’s sold:

HTC Vive has been born out of HTC’s partnership with Valve. Announced at Mobile World Congress, HTC Vive and Steam VR is taking virtual reality from a static seated or standing experience where you wiggle your head, to one that plays out like Star Trek’s Holodeck, or virtual worlds imagined in The Matrix or Tron.

The lasers mounted on the walls transect the whole space. The Vive headset and controllers are covered with detection points, so they know exactly where they are within that space. That sort of 3D motion mapping isn’t a new technology – it’s similar to how Hollywood captures movement that then underpins CGI models in blockbuster movies.

But here it’s used to let you roam in Vive’s Full Room Scale virtual reality, meaning you have more freedoms than before. You can sit, stand, kneel, walk, jump, duck, dive, bob, weave, punch, skip, spin and probably stand on your head, and Vive knows what you’re doing and where you’re doing it.

Moore’s Law means VR is rapidly hitting the point where it’s going to work fantastically well. Games are the obvious first use; but selling travel experiences seems like a promising one too. Could VR be the saviour of the high street travel agent?

Promising for HTC as well if it can get this right.

Google, Wal-Mart part ways over local shopping ads » WSJ

Alistair Barr and Rolfe Winkler:

The relationship between Google, the world’s largest Internet search provider, and Wal-Mart Stores, the biggest retailer, has frayed over the data used to lure shoppers into stores.

Last summer, Wal-Mart signed up for a Google advertising service that shows shoppers where specific products are available at nearby stores. Less than a month later, the retailer pulled out over concerns about sharing store inventory and pricing data with Google, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Google requires retailers using its Local Inventory Ads to share prices and product availability by location; it recommends they specify inventory levels. Wal-Mart has about 5,000 U.S. stores, most housing more than 100,000 products, so the company was sending Google more than one billion lines of data daily, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Wal-Mart was particularly worried about exposing prices, which can vary from store to store, another person familiar with the matter said.

Frankly, I’m amazed Wal-Mart ever shared that information. Google will have vacuumed it up and stored and analysed it in so many ways.

Teen clothing retail trumped by gadgets and food as status symbol » IB Times

Nadine DeNinno:

Clothes may make the man, but an iPhone makes a teenager.

Apparel brands like Aeropostale, American Eagle Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch have fallen out of favour with teens. The mall-based retailers are reporting low earnings for the first quarter. But the problem goes deeper than a harsh winter that hurt retail sales across the board: Young shoppers simply don’t care about clothes as much as they used to…

…When they do shop, young consumers are looking for gadgets rather than clothes. “Fashion apparel for the teenager is not the first considered purchase,” [Piper Jaffray senior research analyst Stephanie] Wissink said. Teens see electronics as “popularity devices, not utilities.”

Would you buy a ‘smart band’ for an Apple Watch? » TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino, with a great scoop:

the Apple Watch has a port that the company has yet to show off. It’s being used for diagnostics and direct access to the Watch operating system, but it’s feasible that could be used to connect accessories in the future.

The port has a 6-dot brass contact array inside the groove for the ‘bottom’ strap connector slot. Several sources have confirmed its existence and placement to me. It is very similar to the connector for the Lightning connector in iPhones, as that connector currently only uses 6 of its 8 available pins. Apple recently began opening up the Lightning port for use by third parties. A source says that this port is currently for diagnostic purposes only — but that there is nothing preventing it from being a connection port for future accessories.

Let’s get this out of the way: As far as I know, smart bands will not be a part of the first Apple Watch version.

Will A.I. destroy us? » Medium

Prener Gupta and Parag Chordia, founders of Telepathic (“a company that uses AI to enhance human creativity”):

we believe superhuman machine intelligence is our best chance of long-term survival as a species.

It’s not that artificial intelligence won’t someday become superhuman. It almost certainly will.

But we think the doomsday predictions about A.I. wiping out our species, thought-provoking as they are, fall into the same trap that renders most futurist predictions wrong: they assume everything else will remain constant.

Unconvinced. At least, bt this argument.

Oracle extends its adware bundling to include Java for Macs » ZDNet

Ed Bott commits journalism:

For several years, Oracle has been bundling the Ask toolbar with its Java software for Windows PCs, often using deceptive methods to convince customers to install the unwanted add-on.

With the latest release of Java for the Mac, Oracle has begun bundling the Ask adware with default installations as well, changing homepages in the process.

The unwelcome Ask extension shows up as part of the installer if a Mac user downloads Java 8 Update 40 for the Mac. In my tests on a Mac running that latest release of OS X, the installer added an app to the current browser, Chrome version 41. (In a separate test, I installed Java using the latest version of Safari, where it behaved in a similar fashion.)

As with its Windows counterpart, the Java installer selects the option to install the Ask app by default. A casual Mac user who simply clicks through the dialog boxes to complete the installation will find the app installed and enabled in their browser, with the New Tab page changed to one with an Ask search box.

Do tactics like this belong to companies from a particular generation (my initial feeling)? Then again, the number of hijacks on mobile pages is growing, so perhaps not. It’s just scummy behaviour, which seems to afflict lots of companies.

Google and Wikipedia: Best Friends Forever » Newslines

Mark Devlin points out something important:

The Knowledge Graph is just the most obvious part of the co-dependent relationship between Google and Wikipedia. The relationship most obviously benefits Wikipedia by giving it traffic. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, said in 2010 that the site received 60-70% of its traffic from Google. Wikipedia is almost always in Google’s top three results, and more often than not it’s the top result. The top result is clicked 36.4% of the time and one of the top three results is clicked 58.4% of the time. I pointed out in my last article that there is practically no need for the second page of results as 94% of readers click on a link on the first page of results.

This means that Google is giving Wikipedia around one third of its traffic. But how is this good for Google? Surely Google would rather keep people in Google than let them go to Wikipedia? Well firstly, the Knowledge Graph does keep people in Google longer. For example, instead of going to IMDb for movie data, owned by competitor Amazon, the Wikipedia snippet is right there on the page as well as the list of movie roles. The searcher stays in Google’s system.

A more important reason is that the Wikipedia link keeps Google’s competitors off of the top result. For example, the fight between IMDb and Wikipedia for the top spot for movies benefits Google immensely. If Google can shift IMDb from first to second place then IMDb gets 66% less clickthroughs, an enormous number of potential customers lost. Google can then defend itself by saying that Wikipedia has a “better” ranking, but that’s self-serving.

Excellent post, and one to think about.

Start up: Siri’s smart sibling, testing Magic Leap, more Superfish flaws, Cook the CEO, reviving Wallet, and more

Posted on by
1


The 2014-15 Louisville Leopard Percussionists rehearsing Kashmir, The Ocean, and Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin.
The Louisville Leopard Percussionists began in 1993. They are a performing ensemble of approximately 55 student musicians, ages 7-12, living in and around Louisville, Kentucky. (Or watch it on YouTube.)

A selection of 10 links for you. If you love them, set them free. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Viv, built by Siri’s creators, scores $12.5m for an AI technology that can teach itself » TechCrunch

Broadly, the same idea as what Google-purchased Deep Mind is working on – a system that can learn (Deep Mind’s learning applies to games). This was an interesting data point though:

Siri investor Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, who also invested personally in Viv Labs’ new round, agrees.

“Now 500 million people globally have access to Siri,” he says. “More than 200 million people use it monthly, and more than 100 million people use it every day. By my count, that’s the fastest uptake of any technology in history – faster than DVD, faster than smartphones – it’s just amazing,” Morgenthaler adds.

As for Viv, it

can parse natural language and complex queries, linking different third-party sources of information together in order to answer the query at hand. And it does so quickly, and in a way that will make it an ideal user interface for the coming Internet of Things — that is, the networked, everyday objects that we’ll interact with using voice commands.

Wonder if Apple will add this to its shopping list.

What it’s like to try Magic Leap’s take on virtual reality » MIT Technology Review

Rachel Metz certainly sounds impressed, and this is the first description of how this method works that I’ve seen:

while Oculus wants to transport you to a virtual world for fun and games, Magic Leap wants to bring the fun and games to the world you’re already in. And in order for its fantasy monsters to appear on your desk alongside real pencils, Magic Leap had to come up with an alternative to stereoscopic 3-D—something that doesn’t disrupt the way you normally see things. Essentially, it has developed an itty-bitty projector that shines light into your eyes—light that blends in extremely well with the light you’re receiving from the real world.

As I see crisply rendered images of monsters, robots, and cadaver heads in Magic Leap’s offices, I can envision someday having a video chat with faraway family members who look as if they’re actually sitting in my living room while, on their end, I appear to be sitting in theirs. Or walking around New York City with a virtual tour guide, the sides of buildings overlaid with images that reveal how the structures looked in the past. Or watching movies where the characters appear to be right in front of me, letting me follow them around as the plot unfolds. But no one really knows what Magic Leap might be best for. If the company can make its technology not only cool but comfortable and easy to use, people will surely dream up amazing applications.

Superfish vulnerability traced to other apps, too » PCWorld

Lucian Constantin:

it gets worse. It turns out Superfish relied on a third-party component for the HTTPS interception functionality: an SDK (software development kit) called the SSL Decoder/Digestor made by an Israeli company called Komodia.

Researchers have now found that the same SDK is integrated into other software programs, including parental control software from Komodia itself and other companies. And as expected, those programs intercept HTTPS traffic in the same way, using a root certificate whose private key can easily be extracted from their memory or code.

Some users have started compiling lists with the affected software programs, their certificates and their private keys. Those affected products include Keep My Family Secure, Qustodio and Kurupira WebFilter.

“I think that at this point it is safe to assume that any SSL interception product sold by Komodia or based on the Komodia SDK is going to be using the same method,” said Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at CloudFlare, in a post on his personal blog.

Rogers says:

this means that those dodgy certificates aren’t limited to Lenovo laptops sold over a specific date range. It means that anyone who has come into contact with a Komodia product, or who has had some sort of Parental Control software installed on their computer should probably check to see if they are affected.

This problem is MUCH bigger than we thought it was.

Tim Cook and contradicting the founder-CEO » The Information

Jessica Lessin:

Since Cook first took over in August 2011, I have been asking Apple employees about how he has been leading the company. I often expect anecdotes revealing a numbers-driven management style, reinforced in profile after profile discussing how he climbed Apple’s ranks by squeezing pennies from its suppliers.

But employees consistently paint a different picture. In meetings over topics like how to fix Apple Maps or which features to include in the first Apple Watch, he takes the approach of asking the bigger questions like “Is this the Apple Way? Is this how we do things? Is this a product we can be proud of?”

That sounds to me like someone who sees his role as trying to provide some spiritual leadership at the company.

(Subscription required. I do wish The Information wrote better headlines.)

Wikipedia and the oligarchy of ignorance » Uncomputing

Remember that guy who went through Wikipedia editing out any occurrence of “comprised of” on the grounds that it was ungrammatical? He was wrong. David Golumbia widens the search:

Henderson’s work connects to the well-known disdain of many core Wikipedia editors for actual experts on specific topics, and even more so for their stubborn resistance (speaking generally; of course there are exceptions) to the input of such experts, when one would expect exactly the opposite should be the case. (As a writer in Wired put it almost a decade ago, “The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: ‘Experts are scum.’”)

Can any connection be drawn between Wikipedia’s general approach and the hostility of Jimmy Wales (from whom a fair bit of Wikipedia culture derives) to the ECJ ruling on the right to be delisted?

Texas Hold’em odds visualization » Chris Beaumont

You can think of the full dataset of probabilities as a 4D hypercube (one dimension for each of the four cards dealt between two players). The panel above is a 2D slice through this 4D cube; it is a detailed view of the strength of one particular hand.

Amazing visualisation of the possibilities in the 1.3 trillion hands of heads-up Texas Hold’em.

App developers bailing on Fire Phone, in new challenge for Amazon » GeekWire

Tricia Duryee:

It’s no secret that Amazon’s first smartphone was a flop with consumers, but behind the scenes, the Fire Phone is also struggling with another key group: app developers.

Several developers who made apps for the first Fire Phone — investing significant time and money to support its unique features, without a major payoff in revenue or customer adoption — tell GeekWire that they aren’t planning to build apps for future versions of the device.

This creates an additional challenge for Amazon as the company tries to recover from the Fire Phone’s lackluster debut, because apps remain a key driver of consumer interest in smartphones.

It’s really, really, really dead, Jeff. (And yes, I was the first person to point out how poorly Fire Phones were selling, and put a number on it.)

To revive Wallet, Google tries to wrangle unruly partners » WSJ

Alisair Barr:

Persuading Android partners and financial-service companies to support its payment service requires Google to “herd the many cats involved,” wrote Tim Sloane, a payments analyst at Mercator Advisory Group, in a January research report. “It’s a mess,” he added in an interview.

Still, Google has to aim for success, because Apple Pay could become a draw for people to buy iPhones, instead of Android phones. Mr. Cook said last month that Apple Pay accounted for $2 of every $3 spent using contact-less payments on the largest payment networks.

Apple Pay “has changed the dynamics” of mobile payments, said Marc Freed-Finnegan, a former Google Wallet executive who is chief executive of retail-technology startup Index Inc. “If payments become a standard feature of phones, Google has to have a service on a par with Apple or better.”

Carriers in the US (and perhaps elsewhere) are more willing to listen to Google, because Apple doesn’t give them anything in Apple Pay, but any concessions Google makes to them means it gets even less than zero. And Samsung’s move acquiring Loop is a definite “no thanks” to Wallet.

The CD was dying, and Starbucks just killed it » Fusion

If you’re a person born after 1995 who’s gone to Starbucks lately, you may have seen some strange objects for sale near the cash register. Thin, rectangular, with pictures on the front and shiny circles inside. Believe it or not, these things weren’t decorative coasters for your flat white—they were some of the last surviving specimens of a music distribution technology known as the “compact disc,” or CD.

Now, you’ll no longer be confused by these odd items, because Starbucks is quitting the CD business. According to Billboard:

Starbucks, the coffee giant with over 21,000 retail stores throughout the world, will stop stocking and selling physical compact discs, Billboard has confirmed, with the CD clean-out due to start next month.

“We will stop selling physical CDs in our stores at the end of March,” a rep for the Seattle-based company tells Billboard, adding: “Starbucks continually seeks to redefine the experience in our retail stores to meet the evolving needs of our customers.”

CD sales are hitting an all-time low, and it’s hard to see them ever rising again. This is a tipping point, again.

Android malware hijacks power button, empties wallet while you sleep » The Register

Iain Thomson:

“After pressing the power button, you will see the real shutdown animation, and the phone appears off. Although the screen is black, it is still on,” said AVG’s mobile security team in an advisory.

“While the phone is in this state, the malware can make outgoing calls, take pictures and perform many other tasks without notifying the user.”

Once the malware is installed by the user – it’s typically bundled within an innocent-looking app, but AVG isn’t naming names – it asks for root-level permissions and injects code into the operating system’s system server. Specifically, it hijacks the mWindowManagerFuncs interface so it can display a fake shutdown dialog box when the power button is pressed – and display a fake shutdown animation too. It then blanks the screen and to make the mobe look like it’s switched off.

The malware is then free to send lots of premium-rate text messages and make calls to expensive overseas numbers. The code shown by AVG appears to contact Chinese services.

Another day, another system-level hijack; but as with the vast majority, this is limited to China so far.