Start up: the Nexus puzzle, Stagefright 2.0 (bigger!), T-Mobile US data hack, Fiorina’s iPod miss and more

Posted on October 2, 2015 by charlesarthur

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

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

Google’s Nexus phones are just ads » The Verge

Vlad Savov:

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

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

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

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

Robert Hackett:

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

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

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

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

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

Spencer Soper:

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

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

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

John Legere:

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

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

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

Li Yuan speaks to Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun:

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

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

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

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

Gregor Aisch, Wilson Andrews and Josh Keller:

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

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

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

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

Drew Boyd:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rurik Bradbury:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Stobing:

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

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

Arthur Nelsen:

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

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

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

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

Oh, come on, Samsung would never.. oh.
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Start up: Seattle v the Quake, Nadella on phones, Apple Pay in UK, Google’s giant ad and more

Posted on July 15, 2015 by charlesarthur

Forgotten. But by who? Photo by theen… on Flickr.

A selection of 11 links for you. Follow The Overspill on Twitter (this isn’t optional). I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: CEO Nadella talks Microsoft’s mobile ambitions, Windows 10 strategy, HoloLens and more » ZDNet

Nadella tells Mary Jo Foley:

If anything, one big mistake we made in our past was to think of the PC as the hub for everything for all time to come. And today, of course, the high volume device is the six-inch phone. I acknowledge that. But to think that that’s what the future is for all time to come would be to make the same mistake we made in the past without even having the share position of the past. So that would be madness.

Therefore, we have to be on the hunt for what’s the next bend in the curve. That’s what, quite frankly, anyone has to do to be relevant in the future. In our case, we are doing that. We’re doing that with our innovation in Windows. We’re doing that with features like Continuum. Even the phone, I just don’t want to build another phone, a copycat phone operating system, even.

So when I think about our Windows Phone, I want it to stand for something like Continuum [which lets you plug a phone into a suitable dock/keyboard and have it render PC-sized screens]. When I say, wow, that’s an interesting approach where you can have a phone and that same phone, because of our universal platform with Continuum, and can, in fact, be a desktop. That is not something any other phone operating system or device can do. And that’s what I want our devices and device innovation to stand for.

Last week’s announcement was not about any change to our vision and strategy, but for sure it was a change to our operating approach.

That last bit puzzles me. What is your “operating approach”, if it isn’t the embodiment of your vision and strategy?
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Sixty-five THOUSAND Range Rovers recalled over DOOR software glitch » The Register

John Leyden:

Jaguar Land Rover is recalling no less than 65,000 of its SUVs due to a software problem that caused the cars’ doors to unlock themselves – potentially while in motion.

The issue, which potentially creates a heightened theft-by-hijack risk, affects Range Rover and Range Rover Sport vehicles sold in the UK over the last two years, the BBC reports. The flaw means that doors can remain unlatched even when in the “closed” position so that they can open while the car is in motion, Automotive News explains.

The recall follows recent reports that car thieves were targeting Range Rovers and BMW X5s using readily obtainable black box kit that made it straightforward to unlock and start cars that relied on keyless ignition systems.

On the plus side, they sold 65,000? Should have said “oh, man, we have to recall TWO MILLION. Yes, very successful year, so sorry, got to go.”
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UK launch of Apple Pay heralds start of something big » CCS Insight

Ben Wood of the analysis company:

UK consumers and retailers, unlike their US counterparts, are familiar with the concept of “tap and pay”; it’s not an unfamiliar mechanism that they need to be educated to adopt.

Add to that the huge number of iPhone users in the UK and it’s clear Great Britain is something of a “golden isle” for Apple. Our research suggests that more than half of active users on some mobile networks have an iPhone; even though many won’t have a model that works with Apple Pay, the fierce brand loyalty that Apple inspires could prompt many to upgrade to a compatible iPhone.

The allure of the Apple brand also means everyone wants to work with the company, or is pushed to do so. Barclays bank initially refused to support Apple Pay, instead favouring its own bPay service. Early this morning, on the launch day for Apple Pay and in the face of considerable customer pressure, Barclays tweeted to say that it would support Apple Pay in the future.

Further evidence of Apple’s clout and determination is getting Apple Pay to work with the complexities of the London Transport network and the body that runs it, TFL. Although Apple isn’t the first company to offer such support, its scale means that millions of people travelling around London now can pay for their travel using an Apple device.

That “more than half of active users on some networks have an iPhone” stat is one worth considering. Generally, iOS has about 30-35% of the smartphone install base in the UK. Another stat to record: UK contactless stats show that in December 2014

“£380.8m was spent in the UK in December using a contactless card. This is an increase of 25.8% on the previous month and 330.8% over the year.”

Let’s see how that changes.
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Apple Pay » Transport for London

Note this part:

Always use the same device

If you use Apple Pay on more than one device, for instance when the same payment card is linked to both an iPhone and an Apple Watch, make sure to choose one device and use it every time you travel, so you:

• Avoid incomplete journeys
• Benefit from daily and weekly capping
Please be aware that you might receive payment notifications on all your devices, regardless of which one was used for touching in or out.

Seems to imply that a different token is created when you put the same card onto the phone and the watch. Which, in the longer term, would mean the watch could be completely independent of the phone (once you figure out how to embed the card..)
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Why buying ‘death of PC’ hype is dangerous » Laptop Mag

Avram Piltch:

Even though people won’t stop using (or buying) computers any time soon, the widespread but incorrect belief that computers are on the way out has serious implications. Corporate executives, investors and developers read the same news stories as everyone else and change their plans accordingly. While the PC space needs more innovation and better apps, many companies that make software and publish Web tools will transition even more of their resources to mobile. Websites that today offer more content on the page for desktop could end up getting stripped down for all users, on the belief that phone screens are the only ones that matter.

“The challenge the PC has is that it isn’t attracting much in the way of apps that exploit its capabilities and resonate with a broad audience,” said Ross Rubin of Recticle Research.

News of the form factor’s demise certainly won’t help.

As investors jump on the anti-PC bandwagon, companies that make computer hardware will be under increased pressure to produce fewer and lower-quality products. Consumers will see fewer innovations like the Microsoft Surface and Lenovo Yoga, and more commodity laptops in their place.

Hate to break it to you, Avram, but customers aren’t generally buying the Surface and the Yoga. They’re already buying, as they have been for years, the commodity products – where NPD says (in the article) that the average desktop sells for $482, and laptop for $442.

Set the rapid improvements in mobile (cameras, processors, form factors, sensors) against the dead-end nature of most PC tasks, and you can see why developer resources in hardware and software are going into mobile. There’s a lot of uncharted territory to explore.
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The earthquake that will devastate Seattle » The New Yorker

Kathryn Schulz:

Under pressure from [tectonic plate] Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater.

• Last earthquake involving Juan de Fuca: 315 years ago.
• Usual frequency of earthquakes involving Juan de Fuca: every 243 years.
• Variance of quake timing: not given (but known by someone at Oregon State University).
• Value of real estate in Seattle and Oregon: probably falling by the time you read this.
• To put the tech lens on this, consider that Microsoft and Amazon are both headquartered in Seattle. Now wipe them off the map. Pause.
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Google accidentally reveals data on ‘right to be forgotten’ requests » The Guardian

Sylvia Tippman and Julia Powles:

Less than 5% of nearly 220,000 individual requests made to Google to selectively remove links to online information concern criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures, the Guardian has learned, with more than 95% of requests coming from everyday members of the public.

The Guardian has discovered new data hidden in source code on Google’s own transparency report that indicates the scale and flavour of the types of requests being dealt with by Google – information it has always refused to make public. The data covers more than three-quarters of all requests to date.

Previously, more emphasis has been placed on selective information concerning more sensational examples of so-called right to be forgotten requests released by Google and reported by some of the media, which have largely ignored the majority of requests made by citizens concerned with protecting their personal privacy.

These include a woman whose name appeared in prominent news articles after her husband died, another seeking removal of her address, and an individual who contracted HIV a decade ago.

In other words, the “Right to be forgotten” is overwhelmingly about ordinary people who don’t want to be indexed. This is so telling about the PR spin that has gone on around this (“the ruling has already been criticised after early indications that around 12% of applications were related to paedophilia. A further 30% concern fraud and 20% were about people’s arrests or convictions… many other applications have come from corrupt public figures and criminals desperate to hide their past.
An actor who had an affair with a teenager, a celebrity’s child who was convicted of criminal offices and a man who tried to kill members of his family were among the first requests.” Where do you think the Daily Mail got those details?).

And guess what happened when they queried Google about it?

“The underlying source code has since been updated to remove these details.”

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Google’s largest shopping ad EVER spotted on the SERPs » Wordstream

Margot da Cunha:

the new ad format takes up just about the entire right side of the page. But, don’t get too excited, if you look closely you’ll see that this isn’t just one ad for one advertiser, but rather a price comparison between different e-commerce sites and stores. So no, one advertiser cannot pay to completely dominate the right side of the page, but rather can be included in the product comparison sponsored ad on the right side. It looks like regular, non-sponsored Knowledge Graph results, but it’s definitely sponsored. Google started experimenting with adding ads to the bottom of Knowledge Graph results early back in 2014, but most of the info there was still organic.

“The way Google lists the pricing in these makes it much more obvious which options are the less expensive ones, so advertisers will probably have to ensure they have the least expensive option if they take advantage of this new format,” says Slegg.

Clever: advertisers will have to bid more to get placement, yet price lower to be chosen, thus eroding their margins. The only winning strategy long-term is to not need to be found through search. (SERPS in the headline, if you don’t know, is “Search Engine Results Page[s]”.)
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Xiaomi success inspires every man and his dog to make smartphones in China » Reuters

Yimou Lee and Paul Carsten:

The call of the world’s biggest smartphone market is proving irresistible for entrepreneurs in China, where even purveyors of concrete mixers, refrigerators and rock music are mimicking local trailblazer Xiaomi with their own handsets.

But the market shrank in early 2015 for the first time in six years and sales have fallen at one-time leader Xiaomi. That sudden about-turn raises questions over whether there is any chance for the likes of construction machinery maker SANY Group Co Ltd, Gree Electric Appliances Inc of Zhuhai and veteran rockstar Cui Jian.

The slowdown may be too much for all but the largest handset makers, much less a plethora of me-toos, some analysts say. In a crowded market plagued by price wars, entrants will have to convince buyers to abandon established brands with phones that surpass even premium models, US research firm Gartner said.

“It’s not that easy to go bankrupt making phones, but it’s also not easy to be profitable,” said Taiwan-based Gartner analyst CK Lu, who covers the mainland smartphone market. “If you don’t have good differentiation, you’re putting yourself in a saturated market.”

China had 155 smartphone brands selling over 1,000 handsets a month as at end-March, from 110 two years ago, said analyst Neil Shah of Counterpoint Research. In neighbouring India, there were 103 brands, over half of which are Chinese.

There will be a shakeout, but quite when is a separate question.
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Kuwait announces mandatory DNA database for its citizens » DNAForce

The recent suicide bombing that slain 26 innocent people during Friday prayers on the 26th of June has finally reached its ultimatum as the Kuwaiti legislature has now implemented a law that calls for a mandatory DNA testing on every single Kuwaiti citizen including its foreign residents.

The law states that security agencies must help the government to create a database on all 1.3 million Kuwaiti citizens and 2.9 million foreign residents in order to make faster arrests when it comes to criminal cases.

It is also stated that for those who refuse to give out their sample will be sent to jail for a year. It will also come with a fine of $33,000 or €29,700. If a citizen is proven guilty of faking their sample, they are entitled to be imprisoned for seven years.

Note how the foreign residents greatly outnumber the nationals. Will it apply to visitors too? This is a really slippery slope, and Kuwait has put itself halfway down it straight away.
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The real threat posed by powerful computers » The New York Times

Quentin Hardy:

the real worry, specialists in the field say, is a computer program rapidly overdoing a single task, with no context. A machine that makes paper clips proceeds unfettered, one example goes, and becomes so proficient that overnight we are drowning in paper clips.

In other words, something really dumb happens, at a global scale. As for those “Terminator” robots you tend to see on scary news stories about an A.I. apocalypse, forget it.

“What you should fear is a computer that is competent in one very narrow area, to a bad degree,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute, a group dedicated to limiting the risks from A.I.

In late June, when a worker in Germany was killed by an assembly line robot, Mr. Tegmark said, “it was an example of a machine being stupid, not doing something mean but treating a person like a piece of metal.”

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Start up: Google v FTC (and Europe), Tim Cook on Apple’s culture, Xiaomi on Microsoft, and more

Posted on March 20, 2015 by charlesarthur

Shopping! Flights! Things that rivals offered which Google does now! Photograph by keso on Flickr.

A selection of 7 links for you. It’s a bit Google/Apple/Microsofty today. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

EU said to ask Google’s foes to share evidence in probe » Bloomberg Business

Aoife White:

Google’s antitrust foes were asked to allow the search-engine giant to see secret evidence they gave to European Union regulators, two people familiar with the case said.

The EU request for complainants to declassify some of their documents may be a sign that officials are preparing to escalate their four-year-long antitrust investigation, according to the people who asked not to be identified because details of the probe aren’t public.

“If the commission is contacting the parties to declassify stuff, it is a smoke sign that a statement of objections may be underway,” said Nicolas Petit, a law professor at the University of Liege. “As soon as a statement is out” the company “will request access to the file to see what’s in the commission’s hand.”

Margrethe Vestager, the new EC antitrust chief, seems more inclined to go for the aggressive Statement of Objections than her predecessor.

Inside the US antitrust probe of Google » WSJ

Typically crap US newspaper headline; the subhead, “Key FTC staff wanted to sue internet giant after finding ‘real harm to consumers and to innovation'” was used in its email alert, and a version of that would have made an arresting headline.

Anyhow, the WSJ got hold of a copy of the internal FTC staff report that was sent to the five commissioners in 2012; the staff wanted to sue for antitrust. (FTC staff I was speaking to in 2012 for my book were saying this – which I also mentioned in stories.) Then the FTC commissioners decided not to fight it.

This seems a key element from the story by Brody Mullins, Rolfe Winkler and Brent Kendall:

The staff report said Google’s conduct “helped it to maintain, preserve and enhance Google’s monopoly position in the markets for search and search advertising” in violation of the law. Google’s behavior “will have lasting negative effects on consumer welfare,” the report said.

Google has long disputed any characterization that it is a monopoly, saying that competition is “just a click away.”

In discussing one of the issues the FTC staff wanted to sue over, the report said the company illegally took content from rival websites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor Inc. and Amazon to improve its own websites. It cited one instance when Google copied Amazon’s sales rankings to rank its own items. It also copied Amazon’s reviews and ratings, the report found. A TripAdvisor spokesman declined to comment.

When competitors asked Google to stop taking their content, Google threatened to remove them from its search engine.

“It is clear that Google’s threat was intended to produce, and did produce, the desired effect,” the report said, “which was to coerce Yelp and TripAdvisor into backing down.”

Brings a new meaning to “just a click away”. I do hope the WSJ will publish the full document.

The New York Times and fear mongering about the Apple Watch and wearable tech » Scienceblogs

“Orac” (aka David Gorski) on an article by Nick Bilton for the New York Times that seems to have people very worked up, because it asks whether there might be any cancer risk from wearables.

This week, the NYT Style section has printed pseudoscience.

I’m referring to an article by Nick Bilton entitled The Health Concerns in Wearable Tech. It’s an article that’s so obviously designed to take advantage of the high level of media interest in the Apple Watch since Tim Cook announced it two weeks ago. I’d say it was click bait, except that, this being the Gray Lady and all, at least the editor resisted the temptation to slap too obvious a clickbait headline on it, but the article starts out in a way that makes its author’s intentions quite clear.

The only cancer risk from a wearable would be from some material leaching into your skin, but Bilton doesn’t seem to have looked at that – it’s just about “will phones give you cancer?”, 20 years on. The first time I wrote a story about that was 20 years ago. Since then phones emit less EMR, are usually held further away from the face, and we’ve had 20 years of extra data. Result: no link to cancer found. It looks as safe as a thing can be.

Oh, and the NYT public editor has responded on the same day saying “The column clearly needed much more vetting”. Er, yuh.

Upgrading to Windows 10 on pirated versions won’t get you a valid license » Neowin

Vlad Dudau:

Yesterday Microsoft announced plans to allow pirated versions of Windows to upgrade to Windows 10 once the new operating system launches. Now the company has clarified some of its statements and the picture is a bit less rosy.

Yesterday’s good news may have been a bit too good to be true. Microsoft’s Terry Myerson announced that the upcoming free upgrade to Windows 10 would be available to pirates as well, in an effort to bolsters adoption numbers and “re-engage” the hundreds of millions of users that are running non-genuine software.

Unfortunately, the company had scaled back a bit on its plans saying that the free upgrade, though available, won’t actually change the license state of a user’s OS. In plain speak this means that if you were running a pirated copy of Windows, you’ll still be running a pirated copy even after upgrading to Windows 10.

Microsoft hurried this “clarifying” statement out after Reuters correctly quoted what was said at a Microsoft press conference (which then spread ALL OVER THE INTERWEBS).

The problem is with Microsoft’s language. It’s chronically incapable of expressing an idea simply; this is multiplied 10-fold when it comes to anything about licensing. It confused people about what it meant on upgrades by not being clear (and it’s still being unclear about what happens a year after release). Now it’s trying to herd the cats of blogging back into line. Good luck with that.

Clarifying Microsoft’s announcement re Windows 10 build for Xiaomi Mi4 » Hugo Barra

We received many questions from Mi fans about an announcement made by Microsoft yesterday regarding Windows 10 Technical Preview for Mi 4 users in China. We’d like to clarify a few points.

– This is an experimental program led by Microsoft, working directly with the Mi fan community in China.

– Microsoft is working on a build of Windows 10 specifically for Mi 4 devices. This Windows 10 build will not be running on top of Android nor be available as a dual-boot option. A small number of Mi 4 power users from the Xiaomi Forum in China who choose to take part in this experimental program will have to manually re-flash their Mi 4 devices with this Windows 10 ROM, in the same way they would re-flash other Android ROMs.

Also, “Xiaomi continues to fully embrace the Android ecosystem”. This is a Microsoft initiative through and through.

Google’s self-driving cars hit regulatory traffic » WSJ

Alistair Barr:

Bryan Salesky, technical program manager for Google’s self-driving car program, told the Jan. 27 workshop that most of Google’s experts have been working on the technology for more than a decade. To think outsiders could develop enough expertise in a few months for their scrutiny to reach a “definitive conclusion” for state officials would be “naive,” he said.

“There’s this open question about the appropriate way to certify the safety of autonomous vehicles,” said Steven Shladover, a transportation expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who is advising the state’s DMV on the technology.

In September, the California DMV introduced rules for testing autonomous vehicles on public roads, and issued permits to companies including Google, Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz unit and Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit, which have started testing. But the agency is struggling to devise a way to assess the safety of the self-driving systems for full public use.

Should have thought the sensible move would be to look at what happens with certifying fly-by-wire aircraft and autopilots.

Tim Cook on Apple’s Future: everything can change except values » Fast Company

Long exclusive interview, with many bits worth picking out, but this one stood out for me:

Rick Tetzeli: You talked about the sense of limitlessness that Steve created. Part of that was the insistence on insane standards of excellence. He seemed to personally enforce that. Do you now play that same role, or is that kind of quality control more spread out?

Tim Cook: The truth is that it has always been spread out. Steve couldn’t touch everything in the company when he was here, and the company is now three times as large as it was in 2010. So do I touch everything? No, absolutely not. It’s the sum of many people in the company. It’s the culture that does that.

Steve was almost viewed from the exterior as the micromanager checking to make sure that every i was dotted, and every t was crossed, that every circuit was correct, that every color was exactly right. And yes, he made a lot of decisions. His capacity was unbelievable. But he was just one person—and he knew that.

It was his selection of people that helped propel the culture. You hear these stories of him walking down a hallway and going crazy over something he sees, and yeah, those things happened. But extending that story to imagine that he did everything at Apple is selling him way short. What he did more than anything was build a culture and pick a great team, that would then pick another great team, that would then pick another team, and so on.

He’s not given credit as a teacher. But he’s the best teacher I ever had by far. There was nothing traditional about him as a teacher. But he was the best. He was the absolute best.

Definitely one to read and ponder. The culture of a company, and how it’s transmitted downwards and upwards, determines its arc.

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

Posted on March 9, 2015 by charlesarthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s only the start of it.

Ghacks is dying and needs your help » gHacks Tech News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Catalano:

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

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

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

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

Why do we care about Xiaomi? » Benedict Evans

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

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

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

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

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

Mikey Campbell:

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

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

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

Technology helps visually impaired navigate the Tube » BBC News

Hugh Pym (the health editor):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Williams:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popular Xiaomi phone could put data at risk » Bluebox Security

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

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

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

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

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

The Apple Watch is time, saved » TechCrunch

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

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

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

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

And this is a key point:

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

Start up: Google eases Project Zero, Xiaomi’s patent woe, Microsoft’s big Office vision, driving helium, and more

Posted on February 18, 2015 by charlesarthur

“Flash, I love you – but we only have 90 days excluding public holidays and weekends to issue a fix for CVE-2013-6629!” Photo via Tom Simpson on Flickr

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

Google amends bug disclosure policy following Apple and Microsoft scuffle » V3

Project Zero courted controversy when it publicly disclosed flaws in Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 and Apple’s Mac OS X operating systems.

Google moved to address these concerns, arguing that it may have applied the policy too rigorously but that public disclosure is effective.

“For example, the Adobe Flash team probably has the largest install base and number of build combinations of any of the products we’ve researched so far,” read the [Google] blog post.

“To date, they have fixed 37 Project Zero vulnerabilities (or 100 percent) within the 90-day deadline. More generally, of 154 Project Zero bugs fixed so far, 85% were fixed within 90 days.

“Furthermore, recent well-discussed deadline misses were typically fixed very quickly after 90 days. Looking ahead, we’re not going to have any deadline misses for at least the rest of February.

I fixed all of my Adobe Flash vulnerabilities in five minutes by removing Flash from my computer. However, Google’s position of playing private security guard to the internet remains discomforting, and I can’t help feeling that it’s going to prove embarrassing in some horrible way – a sort of schadenfreude-in-waiting.

Qualcomm deal sparks China smartphone patent skirmishes » Reuters

From last Friday (I didn’t link to it then), but as Ben Thompson points out, this element of the deal could have big implications – given that Xiaomi became China’s biggest smartphone vendor in 2014:

The settlement has allowed wireless patent holders like ZTE and Huawei Technologies to seek royalties, while introducing a new risk of litigation to China’s younger handset industry at a time when domestic patent law is gaining traction.

“For the first time, the settlement is forcing domestic manufacturers to recognize the value of IP (intellectual property) and consider how to use it strategically, which companies do in the West,” said Wang Yanhui, secretary general of the Mobile China Alliance, an industry consortium. “That’s the real significance of the (Qualcomm) settlement.”

The competitive dynamics are particularly complex in China, the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturer and consumer, as large Chinese telecom equipment makers that hold many essential patents for wireless technology also compete in the phone market against younger, nimbler manufacturers.

The settlement could prove tricky for companies like Xiaomi Inc, a four-year-old Beijing-based smartphone maker whose weak patent position has proved a major vulnerability. In December, a court in India temporarily halted its shipments there after Swedish telecom firm Ericsson complained Xiaomi had not been paying its royalties.

Although Xiaomi has been reported by Chinese media to be one of the handset makers now targeted by ZTE’s lawyers, both companies declined to discuss the issue.

But in response to questions from Reuters, Bin Lin, Xiaomi’s president, said he expects Xiaomi to only attract more patent threats and litigation from rivals in the future, as does any young firm that enjoys explosive growth.

Rembrandt Technologies wins $15.7m jury verdict in patent infringement case against Samsung » PRNewswire

A Texas federal jury has awarded $15.7 million to Rembrandt Wireless Technologies LP after finding that Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. infringed on two Rembrandt patents covering Bluetooth technology.

Jurors deliberated only one hour before issuing the Feb. 13 verdict. The five-day trial focused on two Rembrandt patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 8,023,580 and 8,457,228. In addition to the $15.7 million award, Rembrandt also will receive royalty payments on all Samsung Bluetooth sales for the life of the patents.

Rembrandt, a Pennsylvania-based business technology company, sued Samsung and Blackberry Ltd. in 2013. Blackberry settled before the trial. Rembrandt argued that its patents for Bluetooth “enhanced data rate” inventions were infringed by Samsung in its Galaxy S phones.

That’s a brief deliberation, and a brief trial.

New cloud storage integration for Office » Microsoft Office Blogs

Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate VP of Office:

We want Office to be the preferred way to work with documents no matter where they’re stored. In November we announced a special partnership with Dropbox to make it easy to access, edit and share Dropbox files from the Office apps. And today, in addition to the existing Dropbox integrations, we’re pleased to announce two new integration features for an even broader set of cloud services: First, file picker integration for the iPad and iPhone; and second, Office Online integration for viewing and editing. While these may seem like small enhancements, these new features represent a big step forward for Office integration into the apps and services that are important to our customers.

This is huge. It’s actually all in that first sentence, which is all you need: “We want Office to be the preferred way to work with documents no matter where they’re stored.” Microsoft wants Office – its most lucrative monopoly – to endure. This is part of how it does that.

May 2012: once deemed evil, Google now embraces “paid inclusion”

Danny Sullivan, in May 2012, noting changes in how Google represented and collated its Flight Search, Hotel Search and Shopping categories so that they became pay-to-play for companies to appear – a reversal of Google’s previous stance:

paid inclusion isn’t necessarily bad, especially if it’s used to solve an otherwise difficult challenge in search, rather than being an excuse to generate revenue. However, it it still feels odd watching Google, having previously attacked the objectivity of its competitors over the practice, quietly adopt paid inclusion now that it’s the search market leader. That doesn’t sit right. At the very least, I kind of want someone at Google to acknowledge that it was wrong those years ago.

Postscript (7:30pm ET): Google, after seeing this article, sent along this statement about paid inclusion:

Paid inclusion has historically been used to describe results that the website owner paid to place, but which were not labelled differently from organic search results. We are making it very clear to users that there is a difference between these results for which Google may be compensated by the providers, and our organic search results.

I have to disagree.

The reason I’m linking to this now is that it’s pertinent to all the antitrust discussion that’s reopening in Europe over Google and particularly vertical search. Google presents its results as untouched by human hand, but there’s a whole lotta touching really going on. (One point on the headline: Sullivan means that paid inclusion used to be deemed evil, not Google.)

November 2013: Western Digital adds helium to enterprise hard drives » AllThingsD

Arik Hesseldahl:

It turns out that the insides of hard drives are pretty violent places. There’s a lot of high-speed motion, what with the disk platters spinning at several thousand rotations per minute, and the head moving back and forth across its surface. If you’ve ever held your arm out the window of a fast-moving car, you get some sense of the problem…

…The secret sauce to all this is that the drives are built to be hermetically sealed, which means they’re both perfectly airtight and leakproof. While the science behind doing all this has been well understood for a while, Cordan says that Western Digital is the first to figure how to do it in a repeatable manufacturing process. It adds an extra step or two to the manufacturing process, and thus some cost.

It gets more interesting: Hermetically sealed drives don’t let the helium out, but they also don’t let anything else in, including liquid. That makes them good for use in immersion-cooled data centers. These are small, dense collections of IT gear packed into a box the size of a shipping container and filled to the top with nonconductive liquid that keeps everything running at a constant temperature. (If you didn’t know that this was a thing, you’re not alone, because I didn’t, either.)

This came (via @jearle) after I happened across a Digitimes report about helium-filled drives. Presumably vacuum is next, since if a drive can survive being immersed then it must have tough joints.

Intel reportedly to delay launch of 14nm Skylake desktop CPUs » Digitimes

Monica Chen:

Intel reportedly has informed its motherboard partners that it will delay the release of its 14nm Skylake desktop CPUs and corresponding 100-series chipsets to the end of August, compared to its original schedule set for the second quarter of 2015, according to sources in Taiwan’s motherboard industry.

The delay will affect PC makers’ production and shipment plans for Haswell Refresh and Broadwell-U series products and may also delay the development of Broadwell models with a TDP of 65W, the sources noted.

PC makers will also not be able to unveil Skylake-based models during the upcoming Computex 2015 to be held in June in Taipei, thereby affecting PC sales in the second haft of 2015, said motherboard makers.

Intel is saying that it always planned to release Skylake in the second half of the year. For reference, the Pentium 4, introduced in 2000, had transistor sizes of 0.18 micron – or 180nm.

$1.75m in bitcoin stolen from Chinese exchange Bter » The Next Web

Abhimanyu Ghoshal:

Even as Bitcoin is starting to shake things up in the US, all is not well in the cryptocurrency world. China-based Bitcoin exchange Bter was hacked on Valentine’s Day and $1.75m worth of Bitcoin was stolen.

The company hasn’t revealed much about the breach, except that 7,170 BTC was taken from its cold (offline) wallet on February 14 via a single transaction (link) and that the platform is suspending operations until further notice.

I feel like we’re getting so used to this that $1.75m is like “yeah, sure”.

Start up: Apple Pay in the UK?, 10m Chromecasts, the hacker whose cat betrayed him, and more

Posted on February 6, 2015 by charlesarthur

OK, definitely seen harder than that. Photo by health_bar on Flickr.

A selection of 9 links for you. Do not plant in acidic soil. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Due to me screwing up, the headline yesterday about finding Waldo referred to an article that’s in today’s list. Hope you didn’t spend too long looking for it.

Is there a battle looming in the UK between Apple Pay and Zapp? » Mobile Payments Today

Will Hernandez:

While Apple has yet to reveal a hard date for Apple Pay’s launch in the UK, pundits speculate that it could happen in April. This also happens to be about the same time Zapp is supposed to make its debut in the U.K.

Zapp relies on banks building it into their mobile apps, although as those banks own Zapp’s parent company, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. The system is intended to provide real-time payments between consumers and merchants — both online and at the point of sale — without the need for a digital wallet. Zapp will generate digital tokens that will hide customer bank account details from merchants, and it is intended to work with different technologies such as NFC, Bluetooth, QR codes and PIN-entry point-of-sale terminals.

Zapp, however, has faced launch delays since at least the third quarter of 2014. Meantime, it announced in October retail partnerships that will go into effect this year. Asda, Sainsbury’s, House of Fraser and Shop Direct are among some of the major High Street retailers that will support Zapp. Earlier in the year, HSBC, first direct, Nationwide, Santander and Metro Bank announced their support for the system.

I’d never heard of Zapp either. Apparently it’s “a mobile payments system from Vocalink, which created the Faster Payments Service and is owned by all the major UK banks.”

Zapp has lots of benefits (cost, data sharing with retailers) and so could have a UK advantage – this is a good article for getting an idea of the competitive landscape in the UK as Apple prepares to land.

Android Wear’s newest trick, playing a full-length movie » Android Community

John Hoff:

Apparently, your Android Wear smartwatch can be taught to do cooler tricks – cooler than, say, playing Minecraft or Doom, or even running Windows 95. Once again, smart hacker Corbin Davenport has shown us that there’s a lot of stuff – not necessarily important world-changing stuff – just a lot of stuff that can be done to your Android Wear smartwatch when you have a lot of time on your hands.

“You haven’t watched a movie—until you’ve watched it on your watch,” Davenport proudly proclaims of his newest wild idea, which he shows via YouTube. The demo shows Davenport playing Star Trek: Into Darkness on his Android Wear, which is probably a delightful coincidence as he shows us that Android Wear devices can really go where no smartwatch has gone before (excuse the pun, we couldn’t help it).

Davenport has done some weird, weird stuff there.

Big three mobile phone markets beyond China » Counterpoint Technology Market Research

According to the latest research from [the] Market Monitor program for Q4 2014 (Oct-Dec), total mobile phone shipments for India, Indonesia and Bangladesh stood at 89m as smartphone demand skyrocketed and the total smartphone shipments contributed to more than a third of all mobile phones shipped during the quarter. These three markets combined offers an opportunity for mobile phone industry players looking to grow beyond the saturating China mobile phone market.

“Smartphone growth in these regions touches almost all the price segments with regional brands being prominent in the entry level smartphone segment. Apart from this we have seen Chinese vendors entering these geographies for the first time in CY 2014 and enjoyed a significant success rate. However it will be important to keep an eye on Online only players on how they capture the smartphone growth in rural areas in these regions” says Tina Lu Sr. Consultant at Counterpoint research

Mobile phones, not just smartphones – note. By comparison, Japan bought about 25.7m smartphones in 2014 and that is expected to rise to 27m in 2015. (About half of that total would be iPhones, judging by Kantar’s figure.)

The utterly crazy story of the death threat hacker » We Live Security

Graham Cluley on a Japanese hacker who caused lots of problems via trojan-infected PCs in Japan in 2012:

the police arrested four separate people, and allegedly managed to “extract” confessions from some of those whose computers had posted death threats to a popular messageboard.

However, the confessions were clearly unreliable (one wonders how the confessors were “encouraged” to make them), as the suspects had in fact had their computers infected by the hacker’s malware, which had posted the death threats without their knowing.

It became clear to the police that they had made a colossal blunder, when the hacker – who went by the alias Oni Koroshi (Demon Killer) – continued to send taunting emails to the police force and local newspapers.

You can just imagine how embarrassing that must have been for the Japanese police, in what was becoming a high profile case.

Er.. yeah. But then it gets utterly weird, when the hacker sends a series of clues to the police, and it all ends up with a showdown involving a cat, an island and a sikrit chip worn on the cat. If Ian Fleming were alive today and writing this stuff you’d call it too far-fetched.

(Also, stupid hacker. Should have stopped when the people confessed.)

License plate scanners also taking photos of drivers and passengers » American Civil Liberties Union

The Drug Enforcement Agency is using its license plate reader program not only to track drivers’ locations, but also to photograph these drivers and their passengers, according to newly disclosed records obtained by the ACLU via a Freedom of Information Act request.

One internal 2009 DEA communication stated clearly that the license plate program can provide “the requester” with images that “may include vehicle license plate numbers (front and/or rear), photos of visible vehicle occupants [redacted] and a front and rear overall view of the vehicle.” Clearly showing that occupant photos are not an occasional, accidental byproduct of the technology, but one that is intentionally being cultivated, a 2011 email states that the DEA’s system has the ability to store “up to 10 photos per vehicle transaction including 4 occupant photos.”…

…Some law enforcement agencies that employ ALPRs recognize that the technology should not be used to capture photos of vehicle occupants. We obtained an ALPR policy from Tiburon, California that speaks to our privacy concerns. The policy states that “cameras will be directed only to capture the rear of vehicles and not into any place where a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ might exist.”

Tricky argument. You can see that it would be useful for law enforcement to know who’s driving a car. And do you have “a reasonable expectation of privacy” when you’re driving a car on a public road where people can take pictures of you and your car – as happens here?

(By the way, in the UK we call it an “Automatic Number Plate Reader”. Even though it now has letters and numbers.)

Twitter cuts off employee access to its metrics » Re/code

Kurt Wagner:

There’s no metric more important to the social network than the number of people that use the service — more specifically, its monthly active users, or MAUs. Recent events inside the company show how sensitive Twitter’s top brass can be about this number, which also partly explains the company’s push to use other metrics to showcase Twitter’s reach.

The company used to grant all employees access to its MAU figure through an internal intranet, but that access was revoked a few weeks ago, according to multiple sources familiar with change. Now, the MAU metric is only available on a need-to-know basis.

There has been so much noise ahead of Twitter’s results (which came out after I added this) that one has to feel there’s something weird going on there. A culture clash? Internal political struggle? Whatever, this will be the year it plays out.

Xiaomi has a San Francisco press event scheduled for 12 February… but it’s still not entering the US market » Android Police

Any tech journalist worth his silicon would probably assume that Xiaomi intends to finally push into the US market to take on the likes of Apple and Samsung, possibly even with new mobile hardware. But apparently that’s not the case. We specifically asked Xiaomi’s PR representative about the possibility of a North American expansion, and this is the response that we were given:

We can also confirm that Xiaomi will not be launching in the US or entering the US market this time, but this is an opportunity to get to know the company and leadership a bit more.

Any tech journalist worth her or his silicon would know that Xiaomi would face insuperable IP issues in trying to enter the US market, and also that it’s simply the wrong sort of market to try to get in to just now for Xiaomi.

At least they called Xiaomi to have their castles in the air shot down.

Google sold 10 million Chromecasts last year » Korea Times

Google has sold about 10 million Chromecast, a streaming-media dongle for high-definition (HD) TVs, globally in 2014, Google Korea said Wednesday.

Chromecast, which made its debut in July 2013, now supports more than 350 apps and services, including YouTube, Tving and Hoppin in Korea.

It started selling the device in Korea in May 2014, the first marketing debut in the Asian market.

This number sounds entirely feasible; it also sounds like the sort of thing that Google Korea might blurt out, when its corporate headquarters has only ever said “millions”.

Ten million is pretty impressive. Now, of course, we can divide all the numbers it has put out to get average use, such as its “used for one billion ‘casts’” stat in the January earnings call: that works out to an average of about 100 “casts” per device over the whole of 2014 (but of course not all were in use all through 2014).

So probably double that 100 figure (or even treble it) for those bought early in the year; halve it, or one-third, for those bought later. Sound good?

Here’s Waldo: computing the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo » Randal S. Olson

I decided to approach this problem as a traveling salesman problem: We need to check every possible location that Waldo could be at while taking as little time as possible. That means we need to cover as much ground as possible without any backtracking.

In computer terms, that means we’re making a list of all 68 points that Waldo could be at, then sorting them based on the order that we’re going to visit them. So now we just need to try every possible arrangement of the points and find the one with the shortest distance traveled. Easy, right? Wrong.

Those 68 points can be arranged in ~2.48 x 1096 possible ways. To provide some context, that’s more possible arrangements than the number of atoms in the universe. That’s so many possible arrangements that even if finding Waldo became an international priority and the world banded together to dedicate the 8.25 million computing cores from the world’s 10 largest supercomputers to the job, it would still take ~9.53 x 1077 years — about 6.35 x 1067x longer than the universe has existed — to exhaustively evaluate all possible combinations. (Generously assuming that each core could perform 10,000 evaluations per second.) In other words: if we don’t have a smarter solution, Waldo is as gone as Carmen Sandiego.

I admit I was disappointed that he didn’t do it by image recognition. And anyhow, his solution (probable regions) doesn’t help you at all with Wizard Whitebeard, Wenda, Wilma, Odlaw, Woof or the Waldo Watchers.

Start up: Google buying Softcard?, examining Uber’s numbers, why Windows 10 can’t fix Windows Phone, examining Samsung’s loss in China, and more

Posted on January 20, 2015 by charlesarthur

Does more Uber mean less of this? Photo of Toyota manufacturing in the UK by Toyota UK on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Tested on humans for irritancy. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google is in talks with mobile payments company Softcard » TechCrunch

The price may be under $100m, according to our sources. That is either a huge bargain or a testament to Softcard’s difficulties as an enterprise: sources tell us that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile — the three carriers that started Isis in 2010 — have collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the joint venture.

Softcard earlier this month laid off about 60 employees and has been in a consolidation phase.

Softcard says it has 200,000 merchants in the US able to use its app, which isn’t available on iOS (but is on Android and Windows Phone). Sounds like morale there has been rock-bottom. But Apple Pay has brought it all back to life. At least, it ought to.

Gabe Rivera on tech media: ‘A lot of intellectual dishonesty’ » Digiday

Gabe Rivera is in charge of Techmeme, and so looks at lots and lots of sites’ stories:

On the down side are a lot of things you’ve heard already. Like the pervasiveness of churnalism, and how writers at news publications aren’t nearly as knowledgeable as they should be to cover their beat. These are real problems, but hard to counter given the tight supply of good writers. Another problem: lying by omission, hyperbole and other forms of intellectual dishonesty are creeping into more tech reporting.

Q: Is that a digital media problem or a tech reporting problem?
A: Intellectual dishonesty has plagued media even in the decades and centuries before digital, but I think it’s seen a big increase in tech reporting in just the last couple of years. As more reporters and commentators turn their attention to the flourishing tech industry, an increasing number are relying on bogus arguments to cut through the din.

Estimating G+ User Activity » Ello

From #Dredmorbius:

This is an analysis which estimates active G+ users, defined as those who’ve made a post to G+, not simply commented on a YouTube video, in the month of January, 2015. It’s based on pulling Google’s on Profile sitemaps and sampling profile pages based on them. You should be able to replicate the process yourself (or with a hackishly-minded assistant) using the methods described.

Summary of findings:
• There are about 2.2 billion G+ profiles total.
• Of these, about 9% have any publicly-posted content.
• Of those, about 37% have as their most recent activity a YouTube comment, another 8% profile photo changes (45% of all “active” profiles).
• Only 6% of profiles which have ever been publicly active have any post activity in 2015 (18 days so far).
• Only around half of those, 3% of active profiles, are not YouTube comments.

That is, 0.3% of all G+ profiles, about 6.6 million users, have made public G+ post in 2015. That’s ~367,000 users posting daily if each posts only once (the actual post frequency will vary somewhat).

This doesn’t include non-public posts or comments, or lurkers, but it’s a pretty clear indication of the level of publicly visible activity on G+.

One wag asks in the comments how this compares to Ello. More to the point, though, you could work through this data pretty easily given a suitably large system. A big data problem, but not a hard one.

Uber’s claim to be a Euro jobs-creator is full of Volkswagen-sized holes » PandoDaily

Michael Carney:

According to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (EAMA), the auto industry employs 12.9 million people across the continent, representing 5.3% of the total workforce. What’s more, the industry’s high-skilled manufacturing jobs represent a full 10% of such jobs in the EU. The auto industry also represents 6.9% of the EU GDP. So the question is, what would happen if Uber eliminated the need for 400,000 of these vehicles?

It’s a complicated question that belies a straightforward answer. But if we make the admittedly simplistic assumption that a one percentage point reduction in autos demand equates to an equal one percentage point reduction in employment within the sector, the impact of Uber’s expansion begins to look much less positive.

Those 400,000 vehicles eliminated represent approximately 2.4% of the 16.2m vehicles (cars, vans, trucks and buses) produced per year in the EU. Applying this percentage to the employment within the sector and we get approximately 320,000 jobs. So, while Uber is making headlines with promises of creating 50,000 new jobs – low-skill, low-stability “jobs” at that – behind the scenes, the company is threatening more than six-times as many jobs in one of Europe’s most critical industries.

No love lost between Pando and Uber. But the logic here is pretty straightforward. I’m dubious about the benefits of privatising taxi regulation to a single private company which can dismiss people (and ban would-be riders) at its own whim, with no recourse.

Samsung loses connection with Chinese consumers in 2014 » Caixin

Lots of data about percentage share (and some shade, as they say, thrown on Samsung’s TouchWiz), but this is the key part:

Chinese smartphone makers grabbed market share from Samsung by improving the design and quality of their products, the industry analyst said. Many devices sell for less than 1,000 yuan. For 1,500 yuan a consumer could get a Xiaomi model called the Mi 3 that has similar specifications as the Samsung Galaxy S5, which costs about 3,000 yuan.

Chinese smartphone makers, such as Xiaomi, were also trying to improve the Android operating system and provide more apps so users had a better experience, improvements Samsung was not making, the analyst said.

Samsung usually set the prices of its phone high, then brings them down, one of its dealers said. He mentioned the Galaxy Note 3, whose price was slashed by 500 yuan within a week of it launch, something that would annoy people who bought the device early.

Chinese smartphone makers took a different approach. They start out with low prices, and months later unveil upgraded versions of the phones for the same price, a strategy that seems to agree with Chinese consumers.

(500 yuan = £50 or so.)

Why Windows 10 can’t fix Windows Phone » Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson has a bucket of ice water for those who think the opposite:

First, the theory: in Windows 10, Microsoft is creating a single operating system which will run across different form factors, with much of the underlying code shared and the rest tweaked by device type and size. This will allow developers to create apps which run 90% of the same code, with just some customizations for different device types and sizes. This, in turn, will allow Microsoft to tap into the vast number of Windows PC developers, who will now be able to port their apps to Windows Phone will very little additional work, which will drive a large number of new apps to the mobile platform, reducing the app gap relative to iOS and Android.

However, there’s a fundamental flaw in this argument, which is that the apps Windows Phone is missing simply don’t exist as desktop apps on Windows. Just think about it for a moment, and you’ll realize it’s empirically obvious.

But he goes beyond the thought experiment, and actually examines what’s available on the app stores, and on Windows. Not just empirically obvious, but empirically demonstrated.

And now look at this next link.

February 2011: How can Nokia get enough app developers to work on Windows 7 Phone versions of their products? » Quora

The question is from February 2011, and Horace Dediu offered this answer – which remains true, and can be expanded to other “ecosystem” questions (cough *wearables* cough):

There’s a persistent assumption that ecosystems are based on economic logic. That’s analogous to suggesting that acting talent is attracted to Hollywood because every aspiring actor calculates their expected income based on odds of success minus the cost of living there and the cost of learning to act.

This logic also implies that alternative film-making hubs may try to re-create the attraction of Hollywood by subsidizing actors, providing acting classes and offering discount agencies.

These methods are unlikely to work. They only signal to actors that the film industry in that hub is ineffective.

Talent is attracted to a platform because of that platform’s potential to solve the job that the talent is seeking to hire it for. They want to be stars. A platform needs to offer the opportunity for stardom. That’s not something money can buy.

As we now know the answer to this one (it couldn’t), the answer becomes illuminating. The other responses are worth reading too – especially one by Mark Dagon Hughes, who writes for iOS.

Ambiq Micro has made a chip that consumes 10 times less energy » Tech News and Analysis

Stacey Higginbotham:

Ambiq manages these lower wattages by never going above a certain voltages when sending power through the chip. Most chips send their signalling information, which determines if it is sending zeros or ones, at between 1 and 1.8 volts, but the Ambiq chip sends its information 0.5 volts. That means it uses much less energy overall. Ambiq has built out this technology on about $30 million in funding.

It does this without requiring fancy changes in manufacturing or a new way of writing software, which means it can be designed into existing products easily. Ambiq CEO Mike Salas says he expects to see Ambiq microcontrollers in shipping products by the middle of the year. Its microcontrollers will compete with those already on the market from Atmel, ST Microelectronics and other large chipmakers.

Here’s the press release from Ambiq explaining how it does it:

“Ambiq Micro’s SPOT platform operates transistors at subthreshold voltages (less than 0.5V), rather than using transistors that are turned all the way “on” at 1.8V. It uses the leakage current of “off” transistors to compute in both digital and analog domains.”

Intrigued about how it runs transistors on leakage current, which is something that designers generally try to reduce.

This is how Xiaomi keeps the cost of its smartphones so low » TechCrunch

Jon Russell spoke to Hugo Barra, who explained:

“A product that stays on the shelf for 18-24 months — which is most of our products — goes through three or four price cuts. The Mi2 and Mi2s are essentially the same device, for example,” Barra explained. “The Mi2/Mi2s were on sale for 26 months. The Redmi 1 was first launched in September 2013, and we just announced the Redmi 2 this month, that’s 16 months later.”

That’s important because the longer runway for devices gives Xiaomi leverage to secure better component deals with its suppliers.

“The reason we do these price cuts is because we’ve managed to negotiate component cost decreases [with our suppliers] over time, which ends up leaving us with a bigger margin than we’d like to have, so we do a price cut,” Barra added.

Ben Thompson did a similar (and I’d say better) interview with Barra, which is on Stratechery; subscriptions are cheap and recommended.

In Thompson’s interview, he ranges over the problems for rivals of channel conflict, what Apple has done with Android’s ideas, and handset profitability. I’d say Thompson’s interview is better than Russell’s – in part because it doesn’t use the grandstanding tone that so many ~~trade papers~~ tech blogs do; Thompson assumes intelligence in his readers. Thus:

Barra: Component prices, like if you look at a chipset today, if you want to buy the same chipset a year from now, the price would have dropped much more than 50%, sometimes the price will have dropped 90% for that same component. So the bill of materials for a product will fall dramatically over time.

Thompson: How much? What percentage?

HB: Well, the Mi 2 S started selling at ¥1999, and the last time we were selling it before we had to take it off the market because we could no longer source components otherwise we would have kept making it, was ¥1299. So the price dropped substantially, what are we talking about here, 40%. The [bill of materials] dropped a lot more than that.

BT: Ballpark?

HB: I don’t know.

BT: But at ¥1299 it was more profitable than at ¥1999.

HB: Yes, certainly, at least ¥1999 at the beginning.

Bought our Samsung Smart TV two months ago, now… » Tumblr de Chartier

David Chartier:

Bought our Samsung Smart TV two months ago, now it’s showing popup ads for apps and services. To clarify: what you see is my Apple TV in the ‘background’ (running a photo screensaver) and a Samsung ad for Yahoo Broadcast Interactivity popping up on top of my Apple TV.

A POPUP AD ON MY TV.

Under no circumstances, scenarios, case studies, fictional situations, or boardroom fantasies is this acceptable. None. No, if you think you have an argument or a circumstance under which these ads are acceptable, you are wrong and there’s a great chance you are not a very good person.

Best part so far: I couldn’t use Samsung’s clunky touchpad remote to uncheck the “prompt me for interactive features” option, and now I can’t find the “SyncPlus App” in the Smart Hub to shut them off. I could be missing it, but so far it’s just not there, and these options aren’t anywhere in Settings.

Solution turns out to be easy: search the Samsung Smart TV App Store for SyncPlus and install that and turn off the ads. Voilá! Or perhaps just don’t connect the smart TV to the internet? That works for me. (UK readers say they haven’t seen this. Yet.)

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

Posted on January 5, 2015 by charlesarthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, this sort of thing:

How my mom got hacked >> NYTimes.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He took pictures and everything:

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

18 months doesn’t seem like a long time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

46 times Vox totally fucked up a story >> Deadspin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tick, tock…

Start up: Do Not Track dying, Android’s lost money, EU’s VAT problem, AdBlocking? surprise!, Xiaomi laptop = fake, and more

Posted on December 31, 2014 by charlesarthur

Moving from Do Not Track to “ah, just track it then”. Photo by Rh+ on Flickr.
++
Hey, it’s the last one of the year. See you in 2015.
++

A selection of 12 links for you. Wash repeatedly. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Android hardware profits tanked in 2014 >> Re/code

Down by half from 2013, according to mobile analyst Chetan Sharma:

A lot of that is due to the big drop in profits at Samsung, the largest player in the Android market. China’s Xiaomi gained significant market share, but is only modestly profitable thanks to its slim margins. Meanwhile, other players like Sony and Motorola lost money in their Android-based mobile businesses.

That’s obviously of concern to the hardware companies, but it should also be worrisome for Google.

“It is important for Google that the ecosystem stays healthy and balanced,” Sharma told Re/code. “Without profitability, some of these players will eventually disappear and it will primarily become a Samsung + Chinese OEMs ecosystem, which is probably not what Google wants.”

Not sure Google is too worried, as long as lots of people use Android, or Google apps on iOS.

Ebooks Direct and new EU digital sales rules: what now? >> Out of Ambit

Diane Duane:

If you’re a large company with accountants this is one of those things you just shrug and deal with, since you’re already registered for VAT and you’ll just fold this extra paperwork and bureaucracy-management into all the other paperwork your accountants already deal with. However, if you’re (for example) someone on disability who’s keeping themselves afloat by selling digital comics, or a stay-at-home mom running a small electronic travel-publication business from her kitchen table—or for that matter, if you’re a pair of science fiction and fantasy writers running a small ebook publishing business from a tiny cottage at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains—then the extra bureaucracy and paperwork burden is not at all welcome. For some of our colleagues, this increased burden of regulations and bureaucracy simply means they’ll have to shut down. They can’t afford the cost of VAT registry or an accountant, or they won’t be able to procure the necessary IDs and proofs of location from their customers, much less store them for a decade.

This situation is even more onerous in places where, until now, businesses this small were spared having to register for VAT at all. But the EU law regarding sale of digital goods has no such eligibility threshold—no equivalent level above which you’re expected to afford accountancy services and so forth, since you’re making enough money to make it worthwhile registering for VAT in the first place.

The regulations seem onerous – if you sell anything at all electronically, you have to register for VAT. Regulations like this make a subversion via Bitcoin much more attractive and hence likely, which could have a serious (negative) effect on government revenues.

Here’s proof the Xiaomi MacBook Air clone story is fake

Steven Millward:

A reverse Google image search on the fake Xiaomi laptop reveals that the closest image source seems to be an undated clone, with the splendid name Kaka i5 (pictured below), that already has an orange power button. So the Xiaomi laptop hoaxers simply had to Photoshop on an orange Xiaomi logo.

The dubious story first appeared in English on GizmoChina, a site we’ve never heard of before, and then was picked up without further investigation by well-known sites such as 9to5Mac and BusinessInsider (update: story screenshots here and here, respectively). Not so much Pulitzer prize for journalism as Wurlitzer prize for churnalism.

Round of applause for that last phrase, sir. Chapeau.

AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage >> Nicholas Nethercote

Nicholas Nethercote, with what could also be titled “AdBlockPlus actually makes your browser and computer run slower”:

we recently learned that ABP can greatly increase the amount of memory used by Firefox.

First, there’s a constant overhead just from enabling ABP of something like 60–70 MiB. (This is on 64-bit builds; on 32-bit builds the number is probably a bit smaller.) This appears to be mostly due to additional JavaScript memory usage, though there’s also some due to extra layout memory.

Second, there’s an overhead of about 4 MiB per iframe, which is mostly due to ABP injecting a giant stylesheet into every iframe. Many pages have multiple iframes, so this can add up quickly. For example, if I load TechCrunch and roll over the social buttons on every story (thus triggering the loading of lots of extra JS code), without ABP, Firefox uses about 194 MiB of physical memory. With ABP, that number more than doubles, to 417 MiB. This is despite the fact that ABP prevents some page elements (ads!) from being loaded.

An even more extreme example is this page, which contains over 400 iframes. Without ABP, Firefox uses about 370 MiB. With ABP, that number jumps to 1960 MiB. Unsurprisingly, the page also loads more slowly with ABP enabled.

AdBlock Plus has about 19m users. That’s a lot of people penalising their computing experience in order not to penalise their visual experience (and penalise the sites they use).

Fake “The Interview” app is really an Android banking trojan >> Graham Cluley

Researchers at McAfee – in a joint investigation with the Technische Universität Darmstadt and the Centre for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED), has identified that a threat campaign has been active in South Korea in the last few days, attempting to exploit the media frenzy surrounding “The Interview”‘s release.

McAfee security expert Irfan Asrar tells me that a torrent making the rounds in South Korea, poses as an Android app to download the movie to mobile devices.

However, in truth, it contains an Android Trojan detected by McAfee products as Android/Badaccents.

Android/Badaccents claims to download a copy of “The Interview” but instead installs a two-stage banking Trojan onto victims’ devices.

Amazon-hosted files, sending data back to a site in China, which checks for whether the devices are made in North Korea – though the latter is likely not an important detail.

The slow death of ‘Do Not Track’ >> NYTimes.com

Fred Campbell, who is executive director of the “Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology”, and also a former chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireless Telecomms Bureau:

The idea, known as “Do Not Track,” and modeled on the popular “Do Not Call” rule that protects consumers from unwanted telemarketing calls, is simple. But the details are anything but.

Although many digital advertising companies agreed to the idea in principle, the debate over the definition, scope and application of “Do Not Track” has been raging for several years.

Now, finally, an industry working group is expected to propose detailed rules governing how the privacy switch should work. The group includes experts but is dominated by Internet giants like Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo. It is poised to recommend a carve-out that would effectively free them from honoring “Do Not Track” requests.

If regulators go along, the rules would allow the largest Internet giants to continue scooping up data about users on their own sites and on other sites that include their plug-ins, such as Facebook’s “Like” button or an embedded YouTube video. This giant loophole would make “Do Not Track” meaningless.

Essentially because, the article points out, collecting user data has become the raison d’etre for so many companies, and the money hose that affords “free” maps, email, and so on. But the US Federal Trade Commission, which is meant to protect consumers, has given up on the task.

How to completely remove Birthdays from Google Calendar >> Medium

Let Brendan Mulligan be your helpful source of future apologies.

How not to run an A/B test >> Evan Miller

Suppose your conversion rate is 50% and you want to test to see if a new logo gives you a conversion rate of more than 50% (or less). You stop the experiment as soon as there is 5% significance, or you call off the experiment after 150 observations. Now suppose your new logo actually does nothing. What percent of the time will your experiment wrongly find a significant result? No more than five percent, right? Maybe six percent, in light of the preceding analysis?

Try 26.1% – more than five times what you probably thought the significance level was.

The “equal sampling” point is often missed in trying to extract significant difference. Terrific piece. Also includes a “Sample size calculator” to help you.

Government secures landmark deal for UK mobile phone users >> GOV.UK

From the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (via Culture minister Savid Javid):

Under the agreement all four of the mobile networks have collectively agreed to:

• a guaranteed £5bn investment programme to improve mobile infrastructure by 2017;
• guaranteed voice and text coverage from each operator across 90% of the UK geographic area by 2017, halving the areas currently blighted by patchy coverage as a result of partial ‘not-spots’;
• full coverage from all four mobile operators will increase from 69% to 85% of geographic areas by 2017;
• provide reliable signal strength for voice for each type of mobile service (whether 2G/3G/4G) – currently many consumers frequently lose signal or cannot get signal long enough to make a call; and
• make the deal legally binding by accepting amended licence conditions to reflect the agreement – it will be enforceable by Ofcom.

What’s odd about this is that the detail of the agreement hasn’t been published, and the problem of coverage tends to be on trains – these requirements could be fulfilled by sticking some mobile masts on the Scottish highlands, but wouldn’t solve many peoples’ problems.

Also, why is a culture minister prodding carriers? Shouldn’t it be the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills?

BlackBerry Classic review: the best BlackBerry ever made >> WSJ

Joanna Stern was a confirmed BlackBerry lover back in the day, and delights in the physical keyboard, trackpad, battery life, call quality, and email-to-calendar features. But:

while I’d love for all those great BlackBerry features to make a comeback, others simply feel out of date.

Calendar and email aside, other preloaded apps are slow and poorly designed. A Rand McNally map from the gas station is likely more up-to-date—and speedier—than BlackBerry’s own maps app. Not only did it struggle to help me find the closest Starbucks in New York City, but it lacks typical features like transit directions and 3-D map options.

BlackBerry recommends dissatisfied users try third-party apps, like Waze or Navfree. But while BlackBerrys can run Android apps, the industry-leader Google Maps isn’t available for the platform.

That brings me to the terrible and confusing app situation. There are now two app stores preloaded on the Classic: Amazon’s App Store and BlackBerry World, which sounds like an amusement park I would have loved in 2008. While you can download Android apps from Amazon’s App Store, many big ones are missing—not just the Google family of apps, but also Uber and Instagram.

You can ignore BlackBerry’s warnings and load other Android apps manually, but it takes work.

So in that sense, it’s still like BlackBerrys from a few years ago – and the app gap is still one that is going to put the standard consumer off.

Highly recommended: Dieter Bohn’s great piece of review writing (which is actual writing as entertainment as well as information): BlackBerry Classic review at The Verge.

Infography: iPhone vs. Android shows north vs. south split (and in real time) >> TomSoft

The results are quite interesting: it shows that the split android/iPhone happens more at a country/continent level than at a user level. USA, England, Japan are in their vast majority « iPhone users », while South America, Spain, Indonesia are much more Android focused. France is one of the few balanced countries.

In other words, seems another north vs. south split, or rich vs. poor (it seems for instance that some Brazilian big cities are iPhone users while the rest of the country is much more Android).

Dubious about this; Android has the majority smartphone installed base in pretty much every country. And geolocated tweets are a tiny part of the total; hard to tell if they’re represented proportionally.

Start up: Coolpad’s built-in malware backdoor, LG v Samsung, Rockstar’s patent fizzle, Google’s PR spin game, and more

Posted on December 24, 2014 by charlesarthur

A Coolpad smartphone. Back door not shown.

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This is the last collection of Overspill links until next week (at least). Have a great Christmas – and thanks to the hundreds of people who are coming to read every day. You’re always welcome.
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A selection of 11 links for you. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

SuperBeam Pro: easy & fast WiFi direct file sharing >> iTunes App Store

Works by Wi-Fi Direct (aka p2p sharing). Seems to be superfast, but one also wonders if Apple is going to be entirely happy about this. (Found via Producthunt.)

Rockstar consortium to sell 4,000 patents to RPX Corp. for $900m >> WSJ

Starting late last year, Rockstar sued several companies for allegedly infringing their patents, including Google and Cisco. Last month, Rockstar settled its suits against Google and Cisco. Financial details weren’t disclosed, but Cisco told investors in early November that it had recorded a pretax charge of $188 million to settle the Rockstar litigation.

As part of the deal with RPX, Rockstar will drop the remainder of its suits, which include claims against Samsung Electronics, LG, HTC and Huawei.

The settlements follow others in the long-running smartphone patent wars.

For instance, in May, Apple and Google agreed to drop all lawsuits between the two companies, and in August, Apple and Samsung agreed to end all litigation between the two companies outside the U.S. Apple and Samsung are still battling in federal court in California, where Apple has won two jury verdicts finding that Samsung infringed its designs for the iPhone.

Whether the Rockstar companies recouped its $4.5bn investment is an open question. In the minds of some experts, the $4.5bn figure reflected the high point of a frothy market that developed for patents in the earlier days of the smartphone industry.

The Rockstar companies squeezed more than three years of use out of the 4,000 patents, and will keep licenses going forward. The 2,000 patents they held back from Rockstar—and aren’t part of the sale to RPX—were among some of the most valuable in the Nortel portfolio.

Turns out that smartphone patents were just a sideline which led both Google and its rivals to drop huge amounts. (Google rather more than the others, through Motorola’s continued losses until it could sell it off. But nobody won.)

CoolReaper revealed: a backdoor in Coolpad Android devices >> Palo Alto Networks Blog

Claud Xiao and Ryan Olson:

Coolpad is the sixth largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world, and the third largest in China. We recently discovered that the software installed on many of Coolpad’s high-end Android phones includes a backdoor which was installed and operated by Coolpad itself. Today we released a new report detailing the backdoor, which we’ve named “CoolReaper.”
After reviewing Coolpad complaints on message boards about suspicious activities on Coolpad devices, we downloaded multiple copies of the stock ROMs used by Coolpad phones sold in China. We found the majority of the ROMs contained the CoolReaper backdoor.

CoolReaper can perform the following tasks:
• Download, install, or activate any Android application without user consent or notification
• Clear user data, uninstall existing applications, or disable system applications
• Notify users of a fake over-the-air (OTA) update that doesn’t update the device, but installs unwanted applications
• Send or insert arbitrary SMS or MMS messages into the phone.
• Dial arbitrary phone numbers
• Upload information about device, its location, application usage, calling and SMS history to a Coolpad server.

Fabulous! All that extra software for no charge! (Coolpad is on sale in the west, by the way.)

They say it’s specifically tailored to hide what it does, and that Coolpad has ignored customer complaints about unwanted app installs. Their conclusion:

CoolReaper is the first malware we have seen that was built and operated by an Android manufacturer. The changes Coolpad made to the Android OS to hide the backdoor from users and antivirus programs are unique and should make people think twice about the integrity of their mobile devices.

Google adds song lyrics to search results but it feels like a cheap cash grab >> PCWorld

Ian Paul:

Google has figured out a way to deliver more instant answers in search results and boost music sales on Google Play simultaneously: song lyrics. Following Bing’s lead from October, Google is now surfacing lyrics for a limited number of songs when you search for “[song title] lyrics.”

Unlike Bing, however, you won’t see the full list of song lyrics in your search results. To see the complete lyrics you have to click a link to Google Play. There you’ll also have options to buy the track or subscribe to Google Play’s All Access subscription service.

If Bing’s song lyrics roll out convinced you to switch to Microsoft’s search engine, however, don’t bother switching back. Google’s song lyric catalog is extremely limited compared to its competitor. In fact, the new feature seems like more of a ploy to push people to Google Play than a truly helpful search function.

I hadn’t noted that Bing was already doing song lyrics. Google says it has licensed the lyrics it displays. But – as this article notes, and Techcrunch points out – it’s another annexation by Google of a content business.

LG boss may miss CES due to washing machine fiasco >> CNET

Cho Mu-Hyun:

South Korean prosecutors have imposed a travel ban on Jo Seong-jin, head of LG’s Home Appliance and Air Solution Company, who had been slated to represent LG at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show 2015 in Las Vegas.

Samsung earlier this year filed a lawsuit for property damages and defamation against Jo and four other LG Electronics executives after the IFA tradeshow in Berlin, Germany, claiming that the LG execs intentionally sabotaged the door hinges of one of its washing machines at an electronics store there. Samsung provided as evidence the damaged washing machine and CCTV footage allegedly showing Jo “willfully” damaging the appliance.

Who knew bathos could be so hilarious.

Xiaomi may adopt sapphire for covers of 5.7in smartphone >> Digitimes

China-based smartphone vendor Xiaomi Technology is likely to adopt sapphire for protective covers of Xiaomi 5, its 5.7-inch flagship model that will be showcased at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, Taiwan-based supply chain makers cited industry sources in China as indicating.

Japan-based Kyocera in early 2014 launched smartphones with protective covers made from internally-produced sapphire in the US market through cooperation with Verizon Wireless, while China-based Vivo and Huawei Device also launched smartphones with sapphire covers, the sources said.

If Xiaomi decides to adopt sapphire, existing sapphire production capacity is not sufficient to meet the demand, according to sources with Taiwan-based sapphire wafer makers.

Even with Xiaomi’s smartphone volumes, this probably isn’t possible. Maybe a high-end model?

Why Sony’s breach matters >> Learning by Shipping

Steve Sinofsky, who (of course) used to be at Microsoft:

in late 1996, seemingly all at once everyone started opening Word documents to a mysterious alert like the one below.

This annoying but benign development was actually a virus. The Word Concept virus (technically a worm, which at the time was a big debate) was spreading wildly. It attached itself to an incredibly useful feature of Word called the AutoOpen macro. Basically Word had a snazzy macro language that could do anything automatically that you could do in Word just sitting in front typing (more on this later). AutoOpen allowed these macros to run as soon as you opened a document. You’d receive a document with Concept code in AutoOpen and upon opening the document it would infect the default (and incredibly useful) template Normal.dot and then from then on every document you opened or created was subsequently infected. When you mailed a document or placed it on a file server, everyone opening that document would become infected the same way. This mechanism would become very useful for future viruses.

Looking at this on the team we were rather consternated. Here was a core business use case. For example, AutoOpen would trigger all sorts of business processes such as creating a standard document with the right formats and metadata or checking for certain conditions in a document management system. These capabilities were key to Word winning in the marketplace. Yet clearly something had to be done.

And that was just the start of a long run of malware. But he thinks we’re better off now.

Google just had to spin the Sony hack >> The Illusion of More

David Newhoff on Google’s PR spin around the “Goliath” emails uncovered by the Sony hack, which he calls a Pavlovian bell-ringing for its meme of “internet freedom”:

It’s no secret that motion picture producers and Google have an ongoing dispute with regard to piracy of filmed entertainment, and I think it’s a safe bet both parties regularly consult with counsel regarding their own interests. As such, I personally think one of the more serious results of this leak is the rather dramatic breach of attorney/client privilege. I don’t think we want a society in which hackers can arbitrarily violate this fundamental right in our legal system. Apparently, though, Google’s Sr VP and General Counsel, Kent Walker, was unfazed by this implication — perhaps Google is hacker proof — when he was quoted in Variety saying, “We are deeply concerned about recent reports that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) led a secret, coordinated campaign to revive the failed SOPA legislation through other means.” And as of this week, Google has launched a campaign it calls Zombie SOPA. Ding-a-ling!

Walker is not speaking as an attorney, but rather as a PR guy, when he plays the word secret like that in order to imply a conspiracy, knowing full well that communications between clients and attorneys are almost always secret. But near the end of the article, he is also quoted plaintively wondering why champions of the First Amendment like the MPAA would “want to censor the Internet.” Hear them ring! Of course any discussion about legal remedies to mitigate piracy are tantamount to censorship, right?

Why Samsung is losing out to low cost rivals >> Jana Mobile

Samsung’s flagship Galaxy series is extremely popular among the emerging market smartphone users that make up mCent’s user base (eight of the top ten devices used to access the mCent app in November 2014 came from the Samsung Galaxy series). However, the Galaxy is likely to become less popular as lower-priced competitors enter the market. This is partly due to the total price of components and assembly for Galaxy devices, which have steadily risen in the face of prevailing market trends. If the current trend is sustained, manufacturing and component costs for a Samsung Galaxy [from 2010] will be higher than the global average selling price for a smartphone in 2015…

…In November 2014, Samsung accounted for 40% of sessions on the mCent app for Android. It has been the most popular smartphone brand among users in our markets since the launch of the mCent app in June 2014, yet its popularity has been waning. In the key markets of Brazil, Indonesia, and India, Motorola, Smartfren, and Micromax have become noticeably more popular. We expect this trend to continue into 2015.

With the caveat, however, that they’re talking about the flagship Galaxy phones, not the cheapo phones that it sells at rock-bottom prices.

Though this is becoming a story that everyone is telling: Samsung losing out to the low-cost rivals. Its earnings guidance for the fourth quarter will come out in early January.

Mathematicians have finally figured out how to tell correlation from causation >> Quartz

Zach Wener-Fligner:

determining causal relationships is really hard. But techniques outlined in a new paper promise to do just that. The basic intuition behind the method demonstrated by Prof. Joris Mooij of the University of Amsterdam and his co-authors is surprisingly simple: if one event influences another, then the random noise in the causing event will be reflected in the affected event.

For example, suppose we are trying to determine the relationship between the the amount of highway traffic, and the time it takes John to drive to work. Both John’s commute time and traffic on the highway will fluctuate somewhat randomly: sometimes John will hit the red light just around the corner, and lose five extra minutes; sometimes icy weather will slow down the roads.

But the key insight is that random fluctuation in traffic will affect John’s commute time, whereas random fluctuation in John’s commute time won’t affect the traffic.

Smart – watch for this to filter through into all sorts of everyday algorithms in the next few years.

Did North Korea really attack Sony? >> The Atlantic

Bruce Schneier:

Allan Friedman, a research scientist at George Washington University’s Cyber Security Policy Research Institute, told me that from a diplomatic perspective, it’s a smart strategy for the U.S. to be overconfident in assigning blame for the cyberattacks. Beyond the politics of this particular attack, the long-term U.S. interest is to discourage other nations from engaging in similar behavior. If the North Korean government continues denying its involvement no matter what the truth is, and the real attackers have gone underground, then the U.S. decision to claim omnipotent powers of attribution serves as a warning to others that they will get caught if they try something like this.

Sony also has a vested interest in the hack being the work of North Korea. The company is going to be on the receiving end of a dozen or more lawsuits—from employees, ex-employees, investors, partners, and so on. Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain opined that having this attack characterized as an act of terrorism or war, or the work of a foreign power, might earn the company some degree of immunity from these lawsuits.

I worry that this case echoes the “we have evidence — trust us” story that the Bush administration told in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

Schneier is very sceptical of the US explanation. It’s noticeable how few security experts are on board with the US’s claims over this.