Women were some of the earliest programmers – here with a decryption system for the US Army. CC-licensed photo by brewbooks on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Happy Valentine’s day, keep on with the love. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The secret history of women in coding • The New York Times

Clive Thompson:

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[Mary Allen] Wilkes remembered her junior high school teacher’s suggestion [from her geography teacher, who in 1950 said she should be a computer programmer]. In college, she heard that computers were supposed to be the key to the future. She knew that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a few of them. So on the day of her graduation, she had her parents drive her over to M.I.T. and marched into the school’s employment office. “Do you have any jobs for computer programmers?” she asked. They did, and they hired her.

It might seem strange now that they were happy to take on a random applicant with absolutely no experience in computer programming. But in those days, almost nobody had any experience writing code. The discipline did not yet really exist; there were vanishingly few college courses in it, and no majors. (Stanford, for example, didn’t create a computer-science department until 1965.) So instead, institutions that needed programmers just used aptitude tests to evaluate applicants’ ability to think logically. Wilkes happened to have some intellectual preparation: As a philosophy major, she had studied symbolic logic, which can involve creating arguments and inferences by stringing together and/or statements in a way that resembles coding.

Wilkes quickly became a programming whiz. She first worked on the IBM 704, which required her to write in an abstruse “assembly language.” (A typical command might be something like “LXA A, K,” telling the computer to take the number in Location A of its memory and load it into to the “Index Register” K.) Even getting the program into the IBM 704 was a laborious affair. There were no keyboards or screens; Wilkes had to write a program on paper and give it to a typist, who translated each command into holes on a punch card. She would carry boxes of commands to an “operator,” who then fed a stack of such cards into a reader. The computer executed the program and produced results, typed out on a printer.

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To me, the remarkable person in this is the geography teacher in 1950. Why did they think of a woman being a computer programmer – a discipline that didn’t exist? The word “computer” mean “person who computes” at that time. Think about it too long, and you could start thinking it’s a meddling time traveller.
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Apple invites Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon to video launch • Bloomberg

Anousha Sakoui and Mark Gurman:

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The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is planning a March 25 event to announce both services, according to people familiar with the plan. The iPhone maker invited Hollywood stars, including Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Garner and director JJ Abrams, to attend, one of the people said.

The video service is similar to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video and Netflix Inc. products, and will include TV shows and movies either acquired or funded by Apple. The company has created dozens of original programs so far, but hasn’t wrapped them in a subscription yet. The paid service will launch by the summer, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private plans.

The company’s premium news service will be integrated into the Apple News app, letting consumers subscribe to a bundle of titles for a monthly fee. Some publishing executives are wary of taking part, Bloomberg News reported in December.

Final details are still being worked out, and Apple’s plans could change…

The magazine subscription service, which has been in testing with Apple employees for months, will launch as part of an iOS 12.2 update scheduled for release this spring. The updated Apple News app will include a Magazines tab similar to the app Texture, which Apple acquired last year.

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Apple, Google in crosshairs for carrying app that lets Saudi men track wives • NPR

Laura Sydell:

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In Saudi Arabia, women’s lives are highly restricted. For example, according to Human Rights Watch, women have always needed permission from a male guardian, usually a father or husband, to leave the country. In the past, paper forms were required prior to travel.

The Absher app makes the process a lot more convenient for Saudi men. And it’s drawing criticism, especially from human rights advocacy groups…

…This week, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent a letter to both companies asking them to remove the app. “Saudi men can also reportedly use Absher to receive real-time text message alerts every time these women enter or leave the country or to prevent these women from leaving the country,” he wrote.

In an interview with NPR on Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked about Absher. “I haven’t heard about it,” he said. “But obviously we’ll take a look at it if that’s the case.”

NPR also reached out to Google, but the company has not responded…

Ironically, Absher has also been helpful to a few women trying to escape the repressive Saudi regime. [HRW senior researcher Rothna] Begum says some women have managed to secretly change the settings in the app on their male guardian’s phone so that it allows them to travel.

However, she says, Google and Apple need to push back against the Saudi government and either disable the app entirely or disable the features that enable men to track women in their families. “By not saying anything,” she says, “they’ve allowed the government to facilitate the abuse.”

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How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t do it • Recode

Kurt Wagner:

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher agreed to conduct an interview Tuesday on Twitter, and it had all the makings of a great read: the CEO of one of the most influential and controversial tech platforms in the world taking questions from one of the industry’s most ferocious reporters.

The only problem? No one could follow along.

Despite the public interview and a dedicated hashtag (#karajack) for the event, it didn’t take long before the dozens of tweets between the two started to get confusing. They were listed out of order, other users started chiming in, and there was no way to properly follow the conversation thread.

Swisher’s questions about Twitter’s complex abuse policies and Dorsey’s subsequent responses were floating around my timeline along with the regular tech news and opinions I always look at. If you wanted to find a permanent thread of the chat, you had to visit one of either Kara or Jack’s pages and continually refresh. It made for a difficult and confusing experience.

Dorsey even admitted so himself.

“I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a “chaotic hellpit”),” Swisher tweeted, referencing Recode’s other co-founder, the now-retired Walt Mossberg.

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I think this is a misunderstanding. Twitter isn’t a real-time service in that way. This is trying to use a hammer as a saw.
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Tracking sanctions-busting ships on the high seas • BBC News

Chris Baraniuk:

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For a long time, being out at sea meant being out of sight and out of reach. And all kinds of shenanigans went on as a result – countries secretly selling oil and other goods to countries they’re not supposed to under international sanctions rules, for example, not to mention piracy and kidnapping.

The problem is that captains can easily switch off the current way of tracking ships, called the Automatic Identification System (AIS), hiding their location.

But now thousands of surveillance satellites have been launched into space, and artificial intelligence (AI) is being applied to the images they take. There’s no longer anywhere for such ships to hide.

Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, says his firm’s satellite imagery analysis has identified Iranian tankers moving in and out of port, despite US sanctions restricting much of the country’s oil exports. He’s watched North Korea – which is limited by international rules to 500,000 barrels of refined oil every year – taking delivery of fuel via ship-to-ship transfers on the open ocean.

Turning off the AIS transponders that broadcast a ship’s position, course and speed, is no longer a guarantee of anonymity.

His firm can even ascertain what cargo a ship is carrying – and how much – just by looking at its shadow on the water, says Mr Madani.

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Tankertrackers is pretty cheap if you were into analysis of oil supply lines – $299 per year.
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Dimensions.Guide: a database of dimensioned drawings

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Dimensions.Guide is a comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.Guide is a free platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.

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Wow. It looks like a sort of Wikipedia of design elements – potentially, a fabulous resource.
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Huawei accuses US of ‘political’ campaign against telecoms group • Financial Times

Yuan Yang:

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[Huawei chairman] Eric Xu questioned the US’s motives on Wednesday, pointing to Washington’s extensive surveillance programmes.

“Is [the US] truly thinking about cyber security and protecting the privacy of other countries’ citizens, or do they have other motives?” he said.

“Some say that because these countries are using Huawei equipment, it makes it harder for US agencies to obtain these countries’ data,” he added.

Mr Xu also revealed that Huawei would spend more than $2bn to restructure the code used in its telecoms services worldwide after a series of “confrontational” meetings with Britain’s cyber security agency over the issue.

The company is likely to face further criticism from the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, the UK watchdog that reviews the company’s security systems, which last year noted the “repeated discovery of critical shortfalls” in the group’s technical processes. Last week, Huawei told the UK government it would take up to five years to address the concerns.

According to Mr Xu, the watchdog had demanded that Huawei rewrite the code it uses in telecoms products to be clearer and more readable, including legacy code written decades ago…

…Mr Xu also dismissed concerns about Huawei being blocked in Australia and New Zealand, saying: “The Australian market isn’t as big as [the Chinese city of] Guangzhou, and the New Zealand market isn’t as big as my hometown.”

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IBM AI fails to beat human debating champion • Engadget

Saqib Shah:

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Champion debater Harish Natarajan triumphed in a live showdown against IBM’s Miss Debater AI at the company’s Think Conference in San Francisco on Monday. The 2012 European Debate winner and IBM’s black monolith exchanged quick retorts on pre-school subsidies for 25 minutes before the crowd hailed Natarajan the victor.

Each side was given 15 minutes to prep for the clash, after which they presented a four-minute opening statement, a four-minute rebuttal, and a two-minute summary. The 700-strong audience, meanwhile, was comprised of top debaters from Bay Area schools and more than a hundred journalists.

Miss Debater (formerly known as Project Debater) pulled arguments from its database of 10 billion sentences taken from newspapers and academic journals. A female voice emanating from the human-sized black box spouted its answers, while three blue balls floated around its display.

The face-off was the latest event in IBM’s “grand challenge” series pitting humans against its intelligent machines. In 1996, its computer system beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, though the Russian later accused the IBM team of cheating, something that the company denies to this day – he later retracted some of his allegations. Then, in 2011, its Watson supercomputer trounced two record-winning Jeopardy! contestants.

In the lead-up to Monday’s bout, Natarajan suggested that debating may prove a harder battleground for AI than Go and video games. “Debating is…more complicated for a machine than any of those…” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

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Well I’d hope that debating was tougher than just stringing sentences together. Though I doubt Natarajan has any real idea of how hard Go or Dota 2 are for a machine or a human at the very top level.
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How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters) • UX Design

Christie Lenneville and Patrick Deuley:

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The protagonist is a well-intentioned UX Designer at a large high-tech company who was given a new project: Redesign an internal control panel that was ugly, hard to learn, and stuffed full of content on every screen (so much data). Everyone agreed it needed modernization—it looked like it was from the early 2000s, after all!

So this designer set out to solve the problem, taking cues from modern consumer apps.

The new design simplified every screen. It broke apart huge pages into smaller, more focused ones. It used progressive disclosure to hide presumably insignificant information. And since today’s users don’t mind scrolling (ahem), the design incorporated white space in all of the usual places—around headers, content blocks, and in table rows. The breathing room was glorious.

It lasted one month before the company was forced to retire it.

Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center and were rated on productivity metrics. They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking.

In their eyes, this new system wasn’t an upgrade, it was a boondoggle. It wasn’t just a little frustrating—it made them mad.

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But, as it explains, you can do better design for those awful enterprise apps.
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Indian smartphone market grows 10% in 2018 • Canalys Newsroom

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India remained one of the bright spots in an otherwise declining global smartphone market in 2018. Smartphone shipments in the country were up by more than 12m at 137m, the best growth of any market in absolute volume terms. India now accounts more than 10% of the world’s smartphone market, up from 6% five years ago. It is one of six markets in the top 20 that posted positive full-year growth, with its performance outshone by Indonesia (17.1%), Russia (14.1%) and Italy (10.0%). Of these four markets, India is the only one that has seen consecutive growth for the past three years.

In terms of vendors, Xiaomi took pole position for the first time in 2018, shipping 41.0m units to take 30% of the total Indian smartphone market. Despite being knocked off first place, Samsung still grew shipments by 20% and took a 26% share of the market. Vivo, Oppo and Micromax held third, fourth and fifth place respectively.

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Notice the squeeze on “others” there.
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UK smartphone shipments fell 14% in Q4 2018 • Strategy Analytics

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Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Apple shipped 3.0 million smartphones and captured a dominant 41% marketshare in the UK during Q4 2018. Apple has a prestigious brand and extensive retail presence across the UK market. Despite a slight decline from a year ago, Apple’s grip on the UK smartphone market remains fairly tight and the iPhone has two times more marketshare than closest rival Samsung.”

Woody Oh, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Samsung clung on to second place with 19% smartphone marketshare in the UK during Q4 2018, down from 21% a year ago. Samsung’s UK smartphone marketshare has more than halved during the past six years. Samsung is facing intense competitive pressure from Huawei, who is targeting Samsung’s core segments in the midrange and premium-tier with popular models such as the P20. Huawei’s UK smartphone marketshare has leapt from 8% in Q4 2017 to 12% in Q4 2018. Huawei is growing fast in the UK, due to heavy co-marketing of its models with major carriers like EE.”

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One other thing: Q4 is the biggest sales quarter of the year. Huawei is clearly eating Samsung’s breakfast, lunch and tea.
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Dollar sales of smartwatches in the US are up 51%, totalling nearly $5bn • NPD

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While Apple is the clear market leader, the new Smartwatch Total Market Report reveals that the top three brands (Apple, Samsung, and Fitbit) made up 88% of smartwatch unit sales during the timeframe. However, traditional watch manufacturers, like Fossil, and fitness-focused brands, like Garmin, are working to grow their share of the market, as they continue to expand into the smartwatch category.

“Over the last 18 months smartwatch sales gained strong momentum, proving the naysayers, who didn’t think the category could achieve mainstream acceptance, had potentially judged too soon,” said Weston Henderek, director, industry analyst for NPD Connected Intelligence. “The ability to be truly connected via built-in LTE without the need to have a smartphone nearby proved to be a tipping point for consumers, as they now recognize the value in being able to complete a wide range of tasks on the device including receiving notifications, messaging, accessing smart home controls, and more.”

Sixteen% of US adults now own a smartwatch, which is up from 12% in December of 2017, based on NPD’s Consumers and Wearables Report. The younger 18-34 age demographic is currently carrying the overall growth in the smartwatch market with 23% penetration.

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Android/Wear OS has, at best, 12% on that basis (Samsung has its own GearOS). The modular approach just doesn’t work for smartwatches at this stage of the platform – if it ever will.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Your gut bacteria can affect how prone you are to depression. CC-licensed photo by Tony Webster on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Jumpers for goalposts. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

More than 26 million people have taken an at-home ancestry test • MIT Technology Review

Antonio Regalado:

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As many people purchased consumer DNA tests in 2018 as in all previous years combined, MIT Technology Review has found.

Surging public interest in ancestry and health—propelled by heavy TV and online marketing—was behind a record year for sales of the tests, which entice consumers to spit in a tube or swab their cheeks and ship the sample back to have their genomes analyzed.

By the start of 2019, more than 26 million consumers had added their DNA to four leading commercial ancestry and health databases, according to our estimates. If the pace continues, the gene troves could hold data on the genetic makeup of more than 100 million people within 24 months.

The testing frenzy is creating two superpowers—Ancestry of Lehi, Utah, and 23andMe of Menlo Park, California. These privately held companies now have the world’s largest collections of human DNA.

For consumers, the tests—which cost as little as $59—offer entertainment, clues to ancestry, and a chance of discovering family secrets, such as siblings you didn’t know about. But the consequences for privacy go well beyond that.

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Individually, people care about their privacy. Collectively, they don’t, or can’t.
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Publishers chafe at Apple’s terms for subscription news service • WSJ

Benjamin Mullin, Lukas Alpert and Tripp Mickle:

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Apple’s plan to create a subscription service for news is running into resistance from major publishers over the tech giant’s proposed financial terms, according to people familiar with the situation, complicating an initiative that is part of the company’s efforts to offset slowing iPhone sales.

In its pitch to some news organizations, the Cupertino, Calif., company has said it would keep about half of the subscription revenue from the service, the people said. The service, described by industry executives as a “Netflix for news,” would allow users to read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee. It is expected to launch later this year as a paid tier of the Apple News app, the people said.

The rest of the revenue would go into a pool that would be divided among publishers according to the amount of time users spend engaged with their articles, the people said. Representatives from Apple have told publishers that the subscription service could be priced at about $10 a month, similar to Apple’s streaming music service, but the final price could change, some of the people said.

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The story’s clearly coming from the news orgs, but they’re not very clear about what Apple’s offering and not offering. Doesn’t sound too attractive for them; they’d do better through the App Store (max 30% payout, then 15%), but even better getting the subscriptions directly. Hard to think why Apple thinks it has any leverage here; conversions are sure to be low from the News app, because there’s always another news source offered free. (Also: “offset slowing iPhone sales”? Please. The take on few million subscriptions would barely be a rounding error for any of Apple’s divisions.)
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Links between gut microbes and depression strengthened • Nature

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The authors used DNA sequencing to analyse microbiota in the faeces of more than 1,000 people enrolled in Belgium’s Flemish Gut Flora Project. The team then correlated different microbial taxa with the participants’ quality of life and incidence of depression, using self-reported and physician-supplied diagnoses. The researchers validated the findings in an independent cohort of 1,063 individuals in the Netherlands’ LifeLines DEEP project. Finally, they mined the data to generate a catalogue describing the microbiota’s capacity to produce or degrade molecules that can interact with the human nervous system.

The researchers found that two groups of bacteria, Coprococcus and Dialister, were reduced in people with depression. And they saw a positive correlation between quality of life and the potential ability of the gut microbiome to synthesize a breakdown product of the neurotransmitter dopamine, called 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid. The results are some of the strongest yet to show that a person’s microbiota can influence their mental health.

These are still correlations, not causes. Researchers know that the gut microbiota can produce or stimulate the production of neurotransmitters and neuroactive compounds, such as serotonin, GABA and dopamine, and that these compounds can modulate bacterial growth. The challenge now is to find out whether, and how, these microbe-derived molecules can interact with the human central nervous system, and whether that alters a person’s behaviour or risk of disease. At least now, answering these questions is a wise pursuit, not a wild one.

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We’re only just starting to understand our inner space. Our understanding of our microbiota (microbes in our gut and body) has only really begun this century.
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Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI ‘toolbox’ built on top of TensorFlow • VentureBeat

Kyle Wiggers:

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Want to dive earnestly into artificial intelligence (AI) development, but find the programming piece of it intimidating? Not to worry — Uber has your back. The ride-hailing giant has debuted Ludwig, an open source “toolbox” built on top of Google’s TensorFlow framework that allows users to train and test AI models without having to write code.

Uber says Ludwig is the culmination of two years’ worth of work to streamline the deployment of AI systems in applied projects and says it has been tapping the tool suite internally for tasks like extracting information from driver licenses, identifying points of interest during conversations between driver-partners and riders, predicting food delivery times, and more.

“Ludwig is unique in its ability to help make deep learning easier to understand for non-experts and enable faster model improvement iteration cycles for experienced machine learning developers and researchers alike,” Uber wrote in a blog post. “By using Ludwig, experts and researchers can simplify the prototyping process and streamline data processing so that they can focus on developing deep learning architectures rather than data wrangling.”

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You have to want to dive earnestly, because it’s not just “here’s some pictures, this is what they are, off you go”.
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‘Link to the rest’: the 12-year journey to 1,000 days of @TheOverspill links • Medium

I wrote about this.. can I call it a journey?

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When I first started at a national newspaper in 1995, the aim was to write one well-sourced and researched story in a day. This was entirely for print, in a world before people had dialup internet on their desk, let alone high-speed broadband in their pocket. (At least they had mobile phones. You have no idea how difficult it used to be to get hold of people before mobile phones.)

Within five years, everyone had broadband on their desk, and now there was a lot more information coming in, and a lot more places to look. One of the moments I recall was managing to find the patent filings for the Segway just a few minutes before the deadline for delivering the piece at 5pm, which could then be used to illustrate it. That was January 2001. (Weirdly, that piece isn’t on The Independent’s own site, but is on its Irish sibling paper’s.)

Then everyone had web sites, and there were web sites which simply pulled together lists of things that were on other web sites. Everything became connected.

That also meant that the number of stories you could potentially write in a day — check and research for yourself, write, publish — went up dramatically. From picking one story a day for print, suddenly you could write three per day, having picked from 10 potential ones, because the checking process was easier.

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Councils given new powers to block phone boxes being built • Daily Telegraph

Katie Morley:

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Councils will be able to block the building of new phone boxes following a landmark ruling from the High Court.

Westminster council was yesterday granted new powers to stop its pavements becoming swamped with hundreds of phone boxes, which it claims are being used for “nefarious purposes” like drug dealing and prostitution.

Until now installing phone boxes has not required planning permission, but now that will change giving council bosses the ability to stop them being built.

Judges agreed that phone boxes primary function is now not for people making phone calls, but companies beaming out adverts day and night.  

Westminster City Council cabinet member for place shaping and planning, Richard Beddoe said: “”Many phone boxes are in a state of disrepair and we suspect are being used for nefarious purposes. Most people haven’t used a phone box in the last twenty years. We don’t need them any more.”

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So much for the BT/InLink plan, which was for sort-of internet phone boxes, which were instead used by drug dealers.

(I rewrote the intro/lede, which originally read: “New phone boxes will be blocked from being built by councils for first time, following a landmark ruling from the High Court.” The sentence is backward; it implies the councils build the phone boxes (they don’t, they give them permits), it’s passive (“will be blocked by”) rather than active (“councils can block”), and a landmark ruling implies it’s the first time, so that phrase is surplus.)
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💃😂✊: how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat everyone at Twitter in nine tweets • The Guardian

Max Benwell:

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When it comes to Twitter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress last November, beats every other US politician hands, nose and elbows down. She has built one of the most engaged followings on Capitol Hill in just eight months and was even appointed to teach social media lessons to her colleagues upon her arrival.

How does she do it? I spend my days analyzing data for the Guardian and helping run our social media accounts, so I’m used to digging into numbers and figuring out what gets people going. And more often than not, it’s the less obvious things that reveal what’s really happening.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter account (@AOC) has more than 3.1 million followers. It has gained more than 2.6 million of these in the last eight months. Before she won her primary in June, beating a powerful 10-term Democratic incumbent, she only had 446,000 followers.

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“Only”? That’s an amazing number. But as this piece goes on to point out, in this medium she’s like a fish swimming in water and makes everyone else look like a lumbering landlubber. It actually helps that her policies aren’t centrist, because the (often faux) outrage about them travels far faster and wider than dull tweaked-version-of-previous policies.
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Your smart light can tell Amazon and Google when you go to bed • Bloomberg

Matt Day:

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For several years, Amazon and Google have collected data every time someone used a smart speaker to turn on a light or lock a door. Now they’re asking smart-home gadget makers such as Logitech and Hunter Fan Co. to send a continuous stream of information.

In other words, after you connect a light fixture to Alexa, Amazon wants to know every time the light is turned on or off, regardless of whether you asked Alexa to toggle the switch. Televisions must report the channel they’re set to. Smart locks must keep the company apprised whether or not the front door bolt is engaged.

This information may seem mundane compared with smartphone geolocation software that follows you around or the trove of personal data Facebook Inc. vacuums up based on your activity. But even gadgets as simple as light bulbs could enable tech companies to fill in blanks about their customers and use the data for marketing purposes. Having already amassed a digital record of activity in public spaces, critics say, tech companies are now bent on establishing a beachhead in the home.

“You can learn the behaviors of a household based on their patterns,” says Brad Russell, who tracks smart home products for researcher Parks Associates Inc. “One of the most foundational things is occupancy. There’s a lot they could do with that.”

Some device makers are pushing back, saying automatic device updates don’t give users enough control over what data they share, or how it can be used. Public guidelines published by Amazon and Google don’t appear to set limits on what the companies can do with the information they glean about how people use appliances.

Amazon and Google say they collect the data to make it easier for people to manage their home electronics…

…When smart speakers first hit the market, using them to command another device worked like this. After receiving the command “Alexa, turn on the light,” the software would ask the light bulb maker’s servers for the current status of the bulb. After a reply came back confirming the switch was off, Alexa would instruct the light to turn on.

Now, in a push that accelerated last year, Amazon and Google are recommending—and, in some cases, requiring—that smart home makers tweak their code to reverse that relationship. Instead, the light bulb must report in to the hub with its status at all times.

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That could quickly get messy if your home has lots of devices, and it feels eminently hackable. Also: were you wondering why Amazon might want to buy a company that routes all your home data? Now you know.
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Apple fails to block porn and gambling “enterprise” apps • Techcrunch

Josh Constine:

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Developers simply have to fill out an online form and pay $299 to Apple, as detailed in this guide from Calvium. The form merely asks developers to pledge they’re building an Enterprise Certificate app for internal employee-only use, that they have the legal authority to register the business, provide a D-U-N-S business ID number, and have an up to date Mac. You can easily Google a business’ address details and look up their D-U-N-S ID number with a tool Apple provides. After setting up an Apple ID and agreeing to its terms of service, businesses wait one to four weeks for a phone call from Apple asking them to reconfirm they’ll only distribute apps internally and are authorized to represent their business.

With just a few lies on the phone and web plus some Googleable public information, sketchy developers can get approved for an Apple Enterprise Certificate.

Given the number of policy-violating apps that are being distributed to non-employees using registrations for businesses unrelated to their apps, it’s clear that Apple needs to tighten the oversight on the Enterprise Certificate program. TechCrunch found thousands of sites offering downloads of “sideloaded” Enterprise apps, and investigating just a sample uncovered numerous abuses.  Using a standard un-jailbroken iPhone. TechCrunch was able to download and verify 12 pornography and 12 real-money gambling apps over the past week that were abusing Apple’s Enterprise Certificate system to offer apps prohibited from the App Store. These apps either offered streaming or pay-per-view hardcore pornography, or allowed users to deposit, win, and withdraw real money — all of which would be prohibited if the apps were distributed through the App Store.

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Terrific journalism. Apple suddenly finds it has an Augean stable.
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Announcing Extra Crunch • Techcrunch

Matthew Panzarino,
Danny Crichton and
Eric Eldon:

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I won’t bury the lede. TechCrunch is launching a subscription product called, appropriately and deliciously, Extra Crunch.

Extra Crunch, as it says on the tin, is an additional layer of content, coverage, product and events-based offerings for our most regular and engaged readers. This will consist of articles that go more in-depth on topics in the entrepreneurship and startup universe, of course.

In addition to cutting closer to the bone on the topics we already cover on a daily basis, we’ll be tackling a lot of the practical nuts and bolts issues that confront founders, entrepreneurs, analysts and tech workers — from issues like inclusion and diversity to navigating hiring, legal and product decisions to mental health and wellness in high-performance environments. We want to gather the expertise and knowledge of the founders that have come before and those that are in the thick of it now.

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$15 per month or $150 per year. (So a 17% discount if you buy annually.) The challenge is always going to be: how do you decide what to put inside the pay perimeter, and what outside? That juicy news story – shouldn’t it be inside, so people pony up to read? Or outside, to get traffic and maybe get business at the margin?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Mm, tasty! Must be why Amazon snapped up mesh startup eero. CC-licensed photo by Alan Levine on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Really millennium bug-proof, eh? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon buys mesh WiFi startup Eero to connect smart homes • Engadget

Jon Fingas:

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Amazon is still busy snapping up companies to bolster its smart home business. This time it’s acquiring Eero, the startup that has developed a solid reputation for its mesh WiFi routers. There’s no mystery as to why it’s making the move — it likes the thought of an easy-setup WiFi system that can connect all the smart devices in your household, even in remote corners.

“We are incredibly impressed with the eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work,” Amazon’s Dave Limp said.

The company hasn’t said how much it will pay for the deal or when it will close.

While it’s too soon to say exactly what Amazon has planned for Eero, it’s easy to see how the acquisition could help its bottom line. There’s now a vast range of Alexa-aware devices that need reliable internet connections to work properly. Ring’s doorbells and sensors could also benefit, as could Amazon’s streaming services and Fire TV devices. With Eero, Amazon could become a one-stop shop that supplies both smart home gadgets and the routers you need to get them online.

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Wonder if this makes it more or less likely that eero will come to the UK. Also, one reader tells me that Ring-branded equipment is being sold off in corporate auctions: maybe there’s an Amazon rebrand (Echo Video?) on the way. I wonder if eero will also get rebranded.

Also: a missed opportunity for Apple.
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Mars One is dead • Engadget

Daniel Cooper:

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The company that aimed to put humanity on the red planet has met an unfortunate, but wholly-expected end. Mars One Ventures, the for-profit arm of the Mars One mission was declared bankrupt back in January, but wasn’t reported until a keen-eyed Redditor found the listing. It was the brainchild of Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, previously the founder of green energy company Ampyx Power. Lansdorp’s aim was to start a company that could colonize one of our nearest neighbors.

Mars One was split into two ventures, the non-profit Mars One Foundation and the for-profit Mars One Ventures. The Swiss-based Ventures AG was declared bankrupt by a Basel court on January 15th and was, at the time, valued at almost $100 million. Mars One Ventures PLC, the UK-registered branch, is listed as a dormant company with less than £20,000 in its accounts.

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Oh well, have to make do tidying up here rather than messing up there.
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Google Docs gets an API for task automation | TechCrunch

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Google today announced the general availability of a new API for Google Docs that will allow developers to automate many of the tasks that users typically do manually in the company’s online office suite. The API has been in developer preview since last April’s Google Cloud Next 2018 and is now available to all developers.

As Google notes, the REST API was designed to help developers build workflow automation services for their users, build content management services and create documents in bulk.

Using the API, developers can also set up processes that manipulate documents after the fact to update them, and the API also features the ability to insert, delete, move, merge and format text, insert inline images and work with lists, among other things.

The canonical use case here is invoicing, where you need to regularly create similar documents with ever-changing order numbers and line items based on information from third-party systems (or maybe even just a Google Sheet). Google also notes that the API’s import/export abilities allow you to use Docs for internal content management systems.

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That has been a long time coming. It’s quite Javascript-y, and needs a special download and so has to be run from a specific machine (including servers).
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China’s demographic danger grows as births fall far below forecast • WSJ

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Chinese leaders in 2016 scrapped the decades-old one-child policy after economists warned it was creating a demographic time bomb for China, contributing to a shrinking workforce and a rapidly aging population.

New data show the reversal isn’t having the anticipated impact. The number of newborns in China dropped to 15.23 million in 2018, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That’s two million less than 2017 and 30% below the median official forecast of more than 21 million.

It was also the lowest level of births since 1961, when millions were struggling to survive during China’s Great Famine. Newborns eventually become workers, making them essential to economic growth in the long run.

“The demographic outlook does appear to be deteriorating faster than officials had expected,” analysts at Capital Economics wrote in a recent research note.

That’s making it harder for officials to lower taxes much to stimulate growth, since doing so could make it tougher to shore up underfunded pension programs. It’s also making it harder to encourage consumers to boost spending, as more people worry over health and retirement costs.

The demographic outlook is fueling fears China could grow old before it gets rich, leaving it with too few workers to cover the cost of its aging population. That could stoke economic troubles that far outlast turbulence from trade battles this year.

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China’s median age is about to cross over the US’s (at 38 years old) and start catching up with Japan’s 48 years old. The proportion over 65 compared to those of working age is forecast to pass the US in 2040, though still be behind Japan.
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Apple iPhone sales in China fell by a fifth in fourth quarter, says IDC • Reuters

Brenda Goh, Sonam Rai and Sankalp Phartiyal:

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Apple no longer breaks out detailed numbers on iPhone shipments in its quarterly results, meaning that surveys and channel checks by the likes of IDC are often the clearest indicator of shifts in sales.

The figures in the report showed a 19.9% fall in Apple’s smartphone shipments in the final quarter of 2018, while Huawei’s grew 23.3%. That reduced Apple’s market share to 11.5% from 12.9% a year earlier, the report said.

“Besides regular performance upgrades in 2018 and small changes to the exterior, there has not been any major innovation that supports users to continue to change their phones at the greatly increased price,” the report said.

“The severe macro environment in China and the assault of domestic brands’ innovative products have also been reasons for Apple’s continued decline.”

A separate report from another common industry source, Hong Kong-based Counterpoint, earlier this month confirmed a similar sharp fall in sales in India – another big emerging market where Apple is struggling.

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YouTube attempts to tame self-created conspiracy monster • NY Mag

Madison Malone Kircher:

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David Hogg… survived the Parkland school shooting that left 17 of his classmates and teachers dead, only to have to endure viral videos peddling a conspiracy that he was not a high schooler, but rather a paid crisis actor. Following the shooting, the video of Hogg spiked to the No. 1 trending spot on YouTube before the platform finally took it down. A different video from the same user purporting to show Hogg “forgetting his lines” was left up even after the other video was removed by YouTube. (It has since also been deleted.) This week, Valentine’s Day will mark one year since the Parkland shooting.

[Former YouTube engineer Guillaume] Chaslot wrote [on Twitter] that YouTube has two options when it comes to curbing conspiracy-theory videos: that “people spend more time on round earth videos” or that the company “change the AI.” “YouTube’s economic incentive is for solution 1,” he continued. “After 13 years, YouTube made the historic choice to go towards 2.”

It feels like we’re giving YouTube way too much credit here [for downplaying conspiracy videos]. YouTube didn’t have to give Alex Jones, a man who claims the shooting at Sandy Hook didn’t happen, a platform for as long as it did. (YouTube finally banned Jones in August 2018.) Just like (before January) it didn’t have to let people continue posting scientifically debunked schlock about how vaccines cause autism just because those videos technically weren’t violating the rules. The company isn’t going with option two at great cost to its bottom line. The company is going with option two because the cost of people calling it out for going with option one for so long is becoming untenable.

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Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks women • INSIDER

Bill Bostock:

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Apple and Google have been accused of helping to “enforce gender apartheid” in Saudi Arabia, by offering a sinister app which allows men to track women and stop them leaving the country.

Both Google Play and iTunes host Absher, a government web service which allows men to specify when and how women can cross Saudi borders, and to get close to real-time SMS updates when they travel.

Absher also has benign functions — like paying parking fines — but its travel features have been identified by activists and refugees as a major factor in the continued difficulty women have leaving Saudi Arabia.

Neither Apple nor Google responded to repeated requests for comment from INSIDER over several days prior to publication.

INSIDER reported on the existence of Absher last week, along with the story of Shahad al-Mohaimeed, a Saudi teen refugee who evaded the system to claim asylum in Sweden.

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Bets on whether this will be removed? It’s a bit like Find My Friends (which we call Stalk My Family), but with added patriarchy: insert woman’s passport number, number of journeys she can make, and a place where they can cancel her permission to travel. It’s had more than a million downloads.

But what app store rule(s) does it break?
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The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy • Quartz

Tim O’Reilly:

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Hoffman recalls his own success with the “blitzscaling” philosophy during the early days of Paypal. Back in 2000, the company was growing 5% per day, letting people settle their charges using credit cards while using the service for free. This left the company to absorb, ruinously, the 3% credit card charge on each transaction. He writes:

“I remember telling my old college friend and Paypal co-founder/CEO Peter Thiel, ‘Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.’”

But it worked out. Paypal built an enormous user base quickly, giving the company enough market power to charge businesses to accept Paypal payments. They also persuaded most customers to make those payments via direct bank transfers, which have much lower fees than credit cards. If they’d waited to figure out the business model, someone else might have beat them to the customer that made them a success: eBay, which went on to buy Paypal for $1.5 billion (which everyone thought was a lot of money in those days), launching Thiel and Hoffman on their storied careers as serial entrepreneurs and investors.

Of course, for every company like Paypal that pulled off that feat of hypergrowth without knowing where the money would come from, there is a dotcom graveyard of hundreds or thousands of companies that never figured it out. That’s the “risks potentially disastrous defeat” part of the strategy that Hoffman and Yeh talk about. A strong case can be made that blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy.

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Apple ‘black site’ gives contractors few perks, little security • Bloomberg

Joshua Brustein:

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Apex is one tiny part of a sprawling global network of staffing firms working with Apple; it is not even the only firm staffing the facility at Hammerwood Avenue. For Apple Maps alone, workers are spread across several locations in Silicon Valley, as well as in Austin, Texas; London; the Czech Republic; and India, according to people who worked on the project. The operation involves thousands of contractors. At Hammerwood, the population has exceeded 250 at times, although the number fluctuates and Apple declined to give a current count.

Places like Hammerwood undermine the mythology of Silicon Valley as a kind of industrial utopia where talented people work themselves to the bone in exchange for outsize salaries and stock options. A common perception in the Bay Area is that its only serious tech-labor issue is the high cost of living driven by the industry’s obscene salaries. But many of those poorer residents work in tech, too. For decades, contractors and other contingent workers have served meals, driven buses, and cleaned toilets at tech campuses. They’ve also built circuit boards and written and tested software, all in exchange for hourly wages and little or no job security.

In different forms, temporary labor as an alternative to full-time employment has grown across the U.S. economy. Companies in many industries now use staffing firms to handle work once done by full-time workers. The technology industry offers one of the starkest examples of how the groups’ fortunes have diverged. While companies aren’t required to disclose the sizes of their contingent workforces, there’s ample evidence that tech companies use large numbers of contractors and temps. Last year, Bloomberg News reported that direct employees at Alphabet Inc.’s Google accounted for less than half its workforce. 

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Back in 2012, Alexis Madrigal was let inside one of the places where Google updates Google Maps. “It has all the free food, ping pong, and Google Maps-inspired Christoph Niemann cartoons that you’d expect, but it’s still a low-slung office building just off the 101 in Mountain View in the burbs,” he wrote. Wonder if he just didn’t see the bits where they queued for the toilets, and so on. Clever PR.
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Yeah, Apple is probably building a modem • DIGITS to DOLLARS

Jay Goldberg:

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the fact that the modem team is just now moving likely means that their modem effort is still fairly nascent. There is a lot of work to be done here, especially in building out support for older wireless standards. Any modem today has to support all the existing cellular standards going back to 2G GSM/GPRS/EDGE. That is a time-consuming process. Moreover, to be competitive, Apple’s modem will have to build 5G capabilities. If they are starting from scratch, it is hard to see them finishing all of that in less than a year, even at an incredible sprint. Admittedly, Apple is always full of surprises, so they probably have some clever shortcut that escapes us mere mortals, but even still, it is pretty unlikely that next year’s (2020) iPhone would have an Apple modem.

Second, this is bad news for Intel who is currently the sole source supplier for iPhone modems. Apple has been long rumored to be working on its own laptop CPU to replace Intel, and now it seems Apple is also designing out the Intel modem. We suspect that Intel will still provide something to Apple’s modem, perhaps some form of IP license or sale of software libraries to speed up the development. There is also an outside chance that Apple just buys Intel’s modem team. We have no idea if this is happening, but it would certainly speed up the hiring for Apple’s modem team.

Third, there is a possibility that this is an Apple head fake of some sort. Why did this story leak now and who leaked it? Reuters only cites “two people familiar with the move”. This does not sound like an Apple employee. The author, Stephen Nellis, covers Apple and Qualcomm, and seems to have a pretty broad contact network. So one scenario is that Apple directly leaked this story, probably as a way of ratcheting up the pressure on Qualcomm, any means necessary for World War Patents. Another scenario is that Apple’s modem team has gotten big enough that keeping it secret is just not possible anymore.

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Airpods 2 with grip coating, and AirPower, said to launch this spring • Macrumors

Tim Hardwick:

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Rumor site MySmartPrice said one of its “trusted sources” claims the AirPods 2, tipped for release this year, will offer better bass response thanks to improved internals, and both the earbuds and case will include a special matte coating to enhance grip, similar to a coating used on the glass back of Google’s Pixel 3 phone.

The report also repeats previous rumors suggesting Apple’s second-generation AirPods will feature health monitoring features, including heart-rate monitoring, and claims that battery life is likely to be more or less similar to the current model.

In addition, the site believes the new AirPods 2 earphones will be available in black and white colors and cost around $200, a $40 increase on the current price, although whether this detail comes from the same source or just speculation is unclear.

The site’s source offers no concrete launch window for the AirPods 2, however in a separate report this morning, DigiTimes reiterated previous rumors from its supply chain sources that Apple will release new-generation AirPods in the first half of this year. Apple supplier Inventec is a major assembler of AirPods and expects its shipments to grow further as a result of the launch, which has also been tipped for early 2019 by well-connected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Meanwhile, MySmartPrice claims Apple’s AirPower wireless charging pad will be thicker than originally planned due to an internal 8-7-7 coil configuration, and will finally be released in Spring this year, “alongside the wireless charging case for the first-generation AirPods.” Apple is expected to release a standalone AirPods case that can be purchased as an upgrade for existing AirPods to enable wireless charging.

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If correct, that separates heartrate monitoring from the Watch, which would imply Apple foresees broader benefits from the health space. Even in the UK, the number of people you see wearing them is surprising: it’s a bit like when the iPod became a sleeper hit almost overnight in 2003.
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Exclusive: undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many • Associated Press

Raphael Satter on attempts by the mysterious NSO Group, whose software was used to hack activists’ phones in Mexico, to entrap those suing it:

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Who hired the undercover agents remains unclear, but their operational and digital fingerprints suggest they are linked.

The six operatives all began approaching their targets around the same time with individually tailored pitches. Their bogus websites followed the same patterns; all of them were hosted on Namecheap and many were bought at auction from GoDaddy and used the Israeli web design platform Wix. The formatting of the websites was similar; in at least two instances — MGP and Lyndon Partners — it was identical. Even the operatives’ email signatures were the same — consisting of three neatly packed, colorful lines consisting of a phone number, web address and email.

The operatives’ LinkedIn pages were similar, too, featuring men in sunglasses shot from a distance, facing away from the camera, or at unusual angles — a tactic sometimes use to frustrate facial recognition algorithms.

Despite the indications that the undercover agents are all linked, there is no conclusive evidence who they might work for. An Israeli television channel, Channel 12, broadcast a report on Saturday claiming that an Israeli private investigation firm, Black Cube, had been investigating issues around the lawsuits against NSO. The TV channel showed secretly shot footage of the Cypriot lawyer, Markou, and the London journalist, Hamid, which matched the pair’s description of their encounters with undercover agents.

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Lying to people about who you’re working for is much harder now if they intend to check you. Does the company exist? How long has the website existed? Why are the photos odd? All this has changed spycraft dramatically.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Yes, we have done 999 previously. Thanks Euan Williamson for the GIF.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Survived my personal Millennium Bug, but will the bugs? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’ • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: “The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.

“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write.

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Intensive agriculture and pesticides mainly blamed. But climate change too.

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Young people who play video games have higher moral reasoning skills • inews.co.uk

Rhiannon Williams:

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Researchers from Bournemouth University asked 166 adolescents aged between 11 and 18-years old about their video game habits and questions designed to measure their moral development – the thought process behind determining what is right or wrong.

The children and teenagers who said they played more video games from a wide variety of genres had increased moral reasoning scores, including titles containing violent content.

Violent games were found to have a positive relationship with moral reasoning while mature content was more likely to produce a negative one, the report published in published in journal Frontiers in Psychology found.

The Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty franchises were highlighted as examples of titles related to lower moral scores, alongside variables including the length of time spent playing games, how many years they’ve been playing games, the level of engagement and m0ral narrative within a game.

Male participants displayed significantly higher moral reasoning scores than their female counterparts, which contradicted previous findings, the researchers claimed. Girls also experienced higher levels of stress while playing…

…The study suggested several explanations for the higher moral scores, including that developed moral reasoning could be supported by higher proficiency at morally disengaging with the subject, e.g. the ability to view the game as ‘just a game’.

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Fact-checking Facebook was like playing a doomed game of whack-a-mole • Buzzfeed News

Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of the Snopes.com fact-checking site:

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It was clear from the start that that this list was generated via algorithm. It contained headlines and URLs, and a graph showing their popularity and how much time they had been on the site. There were puzzling aspects to it, though. We would often get the same story over and over again from different sites, which is to be expected to a certain degree because many of the most lingering stories have been recycled again and again. This is what Facebook likes to call “engagement.”

But no matter how many times we marked them “false,” stories would keep resurfacing with nothing more than a word or two changed. This happened often enough to make it clear that our efforts weren’t really helping, and that we were being directed toward a certain type of story — and, we presumed, away from others.

What were the algorithmic criteria that generated the lists of articles for us to check? We never knew, and no one ever told us.

There was a pattern to these repeat stories though: they were almost all “junk” news, not the highly corrosive stuff that should have taken priority. We’d be asked to check if a story about a woman who was arrested for leaving her children in the car for hours while she ate at a buffet was true; meanwhile a flood of anti-semitic false George Soros stories never showed up on the list. I could never figure it out why, but perhaps it was a feature, not a bug.

And here we are today, with Snopes and the Associated Press pulling out of their partnerships within days of each other. It doesn’t surprise me to see this falling apart, because it was never a sufficient solution to a crisis that still poses a real threat to our world.

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Not only that: Binkowski spotted the Myanmar disinformation scheme being spread on Facebook long before it hit the broader news, took it to Facebook… nothing. Perversely, she felt responsible for that failure. Now, if you’re wondering how people fall for conspiracy stuff…
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SOtM sNH-10G Network Switch Review – Reviews • Audiophile Style

“KenRW” is reviewing a network switch – an Ethernet switch – aimed at audiophiles, and has a Q+A with the manufacturer:

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Q : When was the development started and completed?
A : It was started at the end of 2017 and completed around Sep of  2018.
 
Q : How was it invented? Even though there are many routers and switches already available?
A : Because we’ve experienced sound quality differences by the different network devices but there was nothing to fulfill the quality of sound, so we started development for audio equipment. 
 
Q : What is the benefit of using sNH-10G into the system?
A : As for the audio equipment, the most important factor is sound quality. Also it has the optical ports and LED on/off feature.
 
Q :What is the technical background of sNH-10G?
A : All SOtM products have their own unique technical points. The sNH-10G is for the network audio device, every LAN port has filtering technology, which improves sound quality dramatically and this filtering technology has also been applied to the iSO-CAT6. 

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$800 for an 8-port switch. With a “specially designed Ethernet noise filter”. Oh lord. Google can filter out conspiracy videos, but this is a whole different genre altogether: the irredeemably gullible. (Via Adewale Adetugbo; see the thread by Wesley George.)
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Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds panic myth: the infamous radio broadcast did not cause nationwide hysteria • Slate

Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow:

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How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove … that it is competent to perform the news job.”

The contrast between how newspaper journalists experienced the supposed panic, and what they reported, could be stark. In 1954, Ben Gross, the New York Daily News’ radio editor, published a memoir in which he recalled the streets of Manhattan being deserted as his taxi sped to CBS headquarters just as War of the Worlds was ending. Yet that observation failed to stop the Daily News from splashing the panic story across a legendary cover a few hours later.

From these initial newspaper items on Oct. 31, 1938, the apocryphal apocalypse only grew in the retelling. A curious (but predictable) phenomenon occurred: As the show receded in time and became more infamous, more and more people claimed to have heard it. As weeks, months, and years passed, the audience’s size swelled to such an extent that you might actually believe most of America was tuned to CBS that night. But that was hardly the case.

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See also: the number of people at the Sex Pistols’ first gig, and the number when Bob Dylan went electric and someone shouted “Judas!”
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I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple • Gizmodo

Kashmir Hill:

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I am using a Linux laptop made by a company named Purism and a Nokia feature phone on which I am relearning the lost art of T9 texting…

…in preparation for the week, I export all my contacts from Google, which amounts to a shocking 8,000 people. I have also whittled down the over 1,500 contacts in my iPhone to 143 people for my Nokia, or the number of people I actually talk to on a regular basis, which is incredibly close to Dunbar’s number.

I wind up placing a lot of phone calls this week, because texting is so annoying on the Nokia’s numbers-based keyboard. I find people often pick up on the first ring out of concern; they’re not used to getting calls from me.

I don’t think I could have done this cold turkey.
On the first day of the block, I drive to work in silence because my rented Ford Fusion’s “SYNC” entertainment system is powered by Microsoft. Background noise in general disappears this week because YouTube, Apple Music, and our Echo are all banned—as are Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu, because they rely on AWS and the Google Cloud to get their content to users.

The silence causes my mind to wander more than usual. Sometimes this leads to ideas for my half-finished zombie novel or inspires a new question for investigation. But more often than not, I dwell on things I need to do.

Many of these things are a lot more challenging as a result of the experiment, such as when I record an interview with Alex Goldman of the podcast Reply All about Facebook and its privacy problems.

I live in California, and Alex is in New York; we would normally use Skype, but that’s owned by Microsoft, so instead we talk by phone and I record my end with a handheld Zoom recorder. That works fine, but when it comes time to send the 386 MB audio file to Alex, I realize I have no idea how to send a huge file over the internet.

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So essentially like living in 1995. Take it from a survivor: we managed. (OK, there weren’t Linux laptops. But Windows and MacOS at the time were pretty much the same as Linux is now.)
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Let there be light switches • Reading Design

Dan Hill:

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A light switch can stick around for decades, as with the doorhandle. When you touch the switch, you are subconsciously sensing the presence of others who have done so before you, and all those yet to do so. You are also directly touching infrastructure, the network of cables twisting out from our houses, from the writhing wires under our fingertips to the thicker fibres of cables, like limbs wrapped around each other, out into the countryside, into the National Grid.

If we always replace touch with voice activation, or simply by our presence entering a room, we are barely thinking or understanding, placing things out of mind. While data about those interactions exist, it is elsewhere, perceptible only to the eyes of the algorithm. We lose another element of our physicality, leaving no mark, literally. No sense of patina develops, except in invisible lines of code, datapoints feeding imperceptible learning systems of unknown provenance. As is often the case with unthinking smart systems, it is a highly individualising interface, revealing no trace of others.

In his book Being Ecological, it’s telling that Timothy Morton selects the light switch to explain Heidegger’s notions of vorhanden and zuhanden. He relates the condition of being jetlagged in a Norwegian hotel room, when “the light switch seems a little closer than normal, a little differently placed on the wall”…

The light switch when jetlagged is vorhanden — suddenly present-at-hand, “oppressively obvious” —where usually its everyday resilience means it is zuhanden, simply ready-at-hand, normalised, routine. When “stumbling around”, he notes that we don’t pay attention to the object itself — here, the irreducible thing that is the light switch —and so nor do we stand any chance of paying attention to the broader systems of living, of infrastructure, that it is connected to, and part of – and, for Morton, our understanding of mass extinction due to climate change.

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Bet you didn’t expect to arrive there when you started that extract.
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Apple tells app developers to disclose or remove screen recording code • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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In an email, an Apple spokesperson said: “Protecting user privacy is paramount in the Apple ecosystem. Our App Store Review Guidelines require that apps request explicit user consent and provide a clear visual indication when recording, logging, or otherwise making a record of user activity.”

“We have notified the developers that are in violation of these strict privacy terms and guidelines, and will take immediate action if necessary,” the spokesperson added.

It follows an investigation by TechCrunch that revealed major companies, like Expedia, Hollister and Hotels.com, were using a third-party analytics tool to record every tap and swipe inside the app. We found that none of the apps we tested asked the user for permission, and none of the companies said in their privacy policies that they were recording a user’s app activity.

Even though sensitive data is supposed to be masked, some data — like passport numbers and credit card numbers — was leaking.

Glassbox is a cross-platform analytics tool that specializes in session replay technology. It allows companies to integrate its screen recording technology into their apps to replay how a user interacts with the apps. Glassbox says it provides the technology, among many reasons, to help reduce app error rates. But the company “doesn’t enforce its customers” to mention that they use Glassbox’s screen recording tools in their privacy policies.

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Whittaker has been on a tear with these stories.
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The exercise “recovery” industry is largely bogus • Vox

Julia Belluz:

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When health journalist Christie Aschwanden was traveling the world as a competitive ski racer in the 1990s and 2000s, recovery between training sessions basically meant doing nothing — taking a day to sleep in or lie around with a good book.

About a decade ago, she noticed something had changed: recovery became a thing athletes actively performed — with foam rollers, cryotherapy, or cupping — as part of their training routines. These recovery tools were heavily marketed to athletes, including amateur ones, as a means to boost performance and bust muscle aches.

In a new book, Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery, Aschwanden walks through all the biggest recovery fads of the past decade — and exposes the shoddy science backing most of them.

It’s an intelligent and entertaining tour of fitness research for anyone who exercises, with clear advice on what actually works to aid recovery. I won’t give away all the juicy details in the book, but I did ask Aschwanden to walk me through three of the most dubious recovery methods she uncovered. Here’s what she told me.

«

Hydration overhyped, cold post-exercise bad, cupping nonsense. Relaxing baths good.
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Sprint sues AT&T over its fake 5G branding • Engadget

Richard Lawler:

»

In its claim, Sprint said it commissioned a survey that found 54% of consumers believed the “5GE” networks were the same as or better than 5G, and that 43% think if they buy an AT&T phone today it will be 5G capable, even though neither of those things are true. Sprint’s argument is that what AT&T is doing is damaging the reputation of 5G, while it works to build out what it calls a ” legitimate early entry into the 5G network space.”

Following the announcement of Sprint’s lawsuit, AT&T provided us with the following statement: “We understand why our competitors don’t like what we are doing, but our customers love it. We introduced 5G Evolution more than two years ago, clearly defining it as an evolutionary step to standards-based 5G…”

«

A number of Android phones, and Apple in its betas, are showing “5GE” in the menu bar for AT+T on this. I’ve seen suggestions on Twitter that Apple doesn’t have a choice in what it displays; that it comes in the form of an image file from the network. Good for Sprint suing, though – which was the obvious move: none of the handset manufacturers is going to. Totally not in their interest.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: a link to a story about VPNs ascribed to Tech In Asia actually came from Abacus News. You should read it. (It’s not about abacuses.)

The US has a lot of crumbling infrastructure. (This was a Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007.) CC-licensed photo by Tony Webster on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam. And then you’ll start at No.1,000.

A selection of 11 links for you. Which service do you require? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The infrastructural humiliation of America • TechCrunch

Jon Evans:

»

The USA is nine times wealthier than Thailand, per capita, but I’d far rather ride Bangkok’s SkyTrain than deal with NYC’s subway nowadays. I’d much prefer to fly into Don Muang, Bangkok’s ancient second-tier airport — which was actually closed for years, before being reopened to handle domestic flights and low-cost airlines — than the hostile nightmare that is LAX. And those are America’s two primary gateway cities!

So imagine what it’s like coming to America from wealthy Asian nations, and their gleaming, polished, metronomically reliable subways, trains, and airports. I don’t think Americans understand just how that comparison has become a quiet ongoing national humiliation. If they did, sheer national (and civic) pride would make them want to do something about it. Instead there’s a learned helplessness about most American infrastructure nowadays, a wrong but certain belief that it’s unrealistic to dream of anything better.

It’s not just those two cities. Compare Boston’s T to, say, Taipei, or San Francisco’s mishmash of messed-up systems — Muni, where I have waited 45 minutes for a T-Third; CalTrain, which only runs every 90 minutes on weekends; BART, which squandered millions on its useless white-elephant Millbrae station — to Shenzhen. And it’s not just age; Paris’s metro was inaugurated in 1900, but its well-maintained system continues to run excellently and expand continuously.

«

Can’t he just get a ride on the tax cuts?
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Germany blocks Facebook from pooling user data without consent • Financial Times

Olaf Storbeck, Madhumita Murgia and Rochelle Toplensky:

»

Germany’s antitrust watchdog on Thursday blocked Facebook from pooling data collected from Instagram, its other subsidiaries and third-party websites without user consent in a landmark decision on internet privacy rights and competition.

The Federal Cartel Office said it was tackling what it described as the Silicon Valley company’s “practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data” to user accounts.

In a press conference in Bonn, the German authorities said that Facebook needed the “voluntary consent” of users to pool data from other services with its own Facebook user data.

The FCO also said that Facebook needed consent to collect data from third-party websites outside its own ecosystem. “If consent is not given . . . Facebook will have to substantially restrict its collection and combination of data,” the cartel office said.

«

Note that it’s the antitrust office, not the privacy commissioner doing this. Though one suspects that Facebook will get round it with a dialog box.
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Over 40 smartphone brands exit India market owing to hyper-competition • ET Telecom

Tina Gurnaney:

»

As many as 41 smartphone brands exited the India smartphone market in 2018 owing to hyper-competition, while 15 brands entered the market eyeing growth prospects that India has to offer, according to data shared by Cybermedia Research.

Mirroring the same pattern, more exits than entry of smartphone players is expected in 2019 as major brands like Xiaomi, Samsung, Vivo, Oppo continue to consolidate their share by eating into those of the smaller brands, analysts say. Counterpoint Research predicts the exit of 15 smartphone players in 2019 versus entry of five players. CMR sees nine new entrants versus 10 exits in 2019.

As per CMR estimates, India currently has around 200 smartphone players operating in the market. At its peak in 2014-15, the mobile phone market had over 300 smartphone players.

«

That was the peak? Yet it’s still the fastest growing (big) market.
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Why so many Super Bowl ads were about robots • Slate

Will Oremus:

»

It’s possible that Madison Avenue is just out of touch. But if the ads they cooked up for companies ranging from Michelin to TurboTax to Sprint provide a window into America’s anxieties, it sure seems like we’re struggling to figure out our place alongside machine intelligence. And we’re already resorting to gallows humor in the face of our own obsolescence.

The robot reckoning began with an ad from SimpliSafe, called “Fear Is Everywhere,” that played tech’s dark side for some wry chuckles. “In five years, robots will be able to do your job, your job, and your job” a man tells his friends at a ballgame. The camera pans up to show a robot in a baseball cap on the top bleacher eating a hot dog, who gives a slightly menacing dude-nod. Cut to an electronics store where a woman asks her phone-distracted husband if he’s listening. The reply comes instead from an Amazon Echo–like device on the store shelf: “Always, Denise.”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_rnrEQBieIQ

The spot works because it cloaks real fears in satire. It’s at once a sendup of the “scare people into buying a security system” genre and an exemplar of it.

That spooky-funny duality may help to explain why robots are fast becoming a trope in TV advertising. Humor is a way of dealing with topics that make us uncomfortable while maintaining some emotional distance from them. A.I. taking our jobs and listening in on our conversations really is frightening, but it isn’t quite so frightening that we can’t joke about it—like, say, climate change or terrorism. At least, not yet.

«

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Twitter finally shared how big its daily user base is — and it’s a lot smaller than Snapchat’s • Recode

Kurt Wagner:

»

How big is Twitter’s daily user base? A lot smaller than Snapchat’s, it turns out.

For years, Twitter has been asking investors to judge the company by looking at user growth for its daily active users. But Twitter never shared how many daily active users it actually had, which made the year-over-year growth hard to appreciate.

That changed on Thursday when Twitter shared its daily user total for the first time: Twitter has 126 million daily users, which is 60 million fewer users than Snapchat (and a lot fewer users than the core apps owned by Facebook). That means roughly 39% of Twitter’s monthly active users are on the app every day.

The new metric matters to Twitter because it paints a picture that Twitter is growing. Twitter’s monthly active user base — the user metric it has shared quarterly since its IPO in 2013 — is shrinking, and has been for some time. So focusing on DAU instead of MAU lets Twitter show that it’s growing, which is a much happier story to tell. In fact, Twitter said it will stop sharing the MAU total altogether beginning this year.

The DAU metric also helps put Twitter’s user growth, which it’s been touting for years, into perspective. And it helps us compare Twitter’s audience to competitors like Snapchat, which it competes with for advertising dollars.

«

Facebook just ticking over on 1,520 million DAUs. And yet: none of the three looks likely to go away.
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What I learned from the hacker who spied on me • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

We’re putting cameras in more and more places, yet more and more people are putting tape over their computer webcams because they fear who may be looking.

How secure are these tiny eyes into our private lives? The bad news is, it was possible for Mr. Heid to get into my Windows 10 laptop’s webcam and, from there, my entire home network. He also eventually cracked my MacBook Air. The good news is that both operating systems were initially able to thwart the hacker. It took me performing some intentionally careless things for him to “succeed.”

If you’re on guard and aware that people are out there trying to trick you to let down your defenses, and you follow some basic practices, you can make it much more difficult for the bad guys to get to you…

…When connected to the Windows laptop, Mr. Heid was able to scan for other devices on my home Wi-Fi network. He quickly found two cameras: a Nest Camera and a Wansview 1080p connected baby monitor that I bought for this column along with the laptops.

From this point on, getting into the baby monitor didn’t even require hacking. He went to its IP address, searched Google for the default username and password and typed it in to the camera’s web portal. He had a nice stream of my son’s playroom—my son included.

«

Windows 10: hard-ish to hack. MacBook Air: harder to hack. Android: harder to hack. iPhone: don’t bother. (Yeah yeah FaceTime. Isn’t the same.) Random webcams: cinch, especially if you don’t change the default password – and lots of people don’t.
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Another demonstration of CRS/GDS insecurity • The Practical Nomad blog

Edward Hasbrouck:

»

Zack Whittaker had a report yesterday for Techcrunch on the latest rediscovery of a continuing vulnerability affecting sensitive personal data in airline reservations that I first reported, both publicly and to the responsible companies, more than 15 years ago: computerized reservations systems and systems that rely on them for data storage and retrieval, including airline check-in Web sites, use a short, insecure, unchangeable, system-assigned, and fundamentally insecure “record locator” as though it were a secure password to control access to passenger name record (PNR) data.

I wrote about these vulnerabilities and reported them to each of the major CRS/GDS companies in 2001, 2002, and 2003, specifically noting their applicability to airline check-in Web sites (among many other Web services). I pointed these vulnerabilities out in a submission to the US Federal Trade Commission in 2009 which was co-signed by several consumer and privacy organizations, in my 2013 testimony as an invited expert witness before the Advisory Committee on Aviation Consumer Protection of the U.S. Department of Transportation, in a complaint which was which finally accepted and docketed by the European Commission in 2017, and in my comments to the European Commission in December 2018 with respect to its current review of the European Union’s regulations governing protection of personal data by CRSs.

«

Ah, so it’s not a new thing by any means. That makes it a lot worse. (Thanks, Wendy Grossman.)

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The proposed Green New Deal

Put forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others; its aims aren’t modest:

»

National mobilization of our economy through 14 infrastructure and industrial projects. Every project strives to remove greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from every sector of our economy:

o Build infrastructure to create resiliency against climate change-related disasters
o Repair and upgrade U.S. infrastructure. ASCE estimates this is $4.6 trillion at minimum.
o Meet 100% of power demand through clean and renewable energy sources
o Build energy-efficient, distributed smart grids and ensure affordable access to electricity
o Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency
o Massively expand clean manufacturing (like solar panel factories, wind turbine factories, battery and storage manufacturing, energy efficient manufacturing components) and remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing
o Work with farmers and ranchers to create a sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas free, food system that ensures universal access to healthy food and expands independent family farming
o Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle
o Mitigate long-term health effects of climate change and pollution
o Remove greenhouse gases from our atmosphere and pollution through afforestation, preservation, and other methods of restoring our natural ecosystems
o Restore all our damaged and threatened ecosystems
o Clean up all the existing hazardous waste sites and abandoned sites o Identify new emission sources and create solutions to eliminate those emissions
o Make the US the leader in addressing climate change and share our technology, expertise and products with the rest of the world to bring about a global Green New Deal

«

Yes, that does say “Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency”. It’s a ten-year plan “to mobilise every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2.” No exaggeration, that.
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Apple SVPs • All this

Dr Drang:

»

Putting the App Store under Phil Schiller [rather than Eddy Cue], which on paper makes no sense for the SVP of marketing, was the solution, for which both Schiller and Tim Cook deserve credit.

I would argue that broadening Jony Ive’s design oversight to include software in addition to hardware was a mistake as big as putting Cue in charge of the App Store. The software side of Apple’s user interfaces—especially on iOS, which isn’t as hardened by long tradition as on the Mac—has become steadily more cryptic under Ive’s control. Some of this is due to Apple’s need to squeeze more functionality into the OS, but Ive hasn’t been up to the task of melding the new functions into the UI in a consistent and discoverable way.

To me, [Angela] Ahrendts’s five years in charge of Retail has been similar to Ive’s time as Chief Design Officer. The Apple Stores look better than ever, but they don’t work as well as they used to. No one I know looks forward to going to an Apple Store, even when it’s for the fun task of buying a new toy. No doubt a lot of this is due to Apple’s success and the mobs of people milling about, but Ahrendts didn’t solve the problem of efficiently handling the increased customer load.

I hope [Ahrendt’s replacement, Deirdre] O’Brien’s background in operations will lead to improvements in the flow of people through the Stores.

«

I hadn’t thought about Ive and software; that happened before the release of iOS 7, which he really influenced, and whose minimalism has been dialled back towards, if not maximalism, then sufficientism, over the intervening six years.
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Attacking a paywall that hides public court filings • The New York Times

Adam Liptak:

»

By one estimate, the actual cost of retrieving court documents, including secure storage, is about one half of one ten-thousandth of a penny per page. But the federal judiciary charges a dime a page to use its service, called Pacer (for Public Access to Court Electronic Records).

The National Veterans Legal Services Program and two other nonprofit groups filed a class action in 2016 seeking to recover what they said were systemic overcharges. “Excessive Pacer fees inhibit public understanding of the courts and thwart equal access to justice, erecting a financial barrier that many ordinary citizens are unable to clear,” they wrote.

The suit accuses the judicial system of using the fees it charges as a kind of slush fund, spending the money to buy flat-screen televisions for jurors, to finance a study of the Mississippi court system and to send notices in bankruptcy proceedings.

A 2002 law allows — but does not require — the judicial system to charge for access to the records, but “only to the extent necessary” to pay for “services rendered.” The judicial system says the law allows it to charge the current fees and to spend the proceeds on a variety of programs. People seeking free access, the judicial system’s brief said, can visit the courthouse.

Last year, Judge Ellen S. Huvelle of the Federal District Court in Washington accepted the challengers’ basic theory and said the judicial system had misused some of the money.

«

There’s a samizdat effort to put any Pacer documents acquired into cloud services such as DocumentCloud so that people don’t have to re-pay to view them. In February 2017, the Internet Archive offered to host the data as Congress’s subcommittee on courts and IP met to discuss Pacer, for the first time in a decade. The US’s behaviour here is out of line with its normal approach to data held by governments, which are paid by the people.
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Amazing illustrations that use negative space brilliantly • Digital Synopsis

»

In art, negative space is the background space around the main object of an image. In a two-tone image (eg. black and white), the object is usually depicted in a darker color (black) than the background (white), thereby forming a silhouette. Sometimes, the tones are reversed and white is used to fill the silhouette (refer Coke examples below). When an artist carves out a shape in the silhouette, in a way that the background creates a visual of its own, that’s when the magic happens.

«

Very Mad Men, but that doesn’t mean they’re not magical.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A melting glacier: indicative of global warming. It’s getting worse. CC-licensed photo by Len Radin on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not assigned any particular place in hell. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

It’s official: 2018 was the fourth warmest year on record • The New York Times

John Schwartz and Nadja Popovich:

»

NASA scientists announced Wednesday that the Earth’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest in nearly 140 years of record-keeping and a continuation of an unmistakable warming trend.

The data means that the five warmest years in recorded history have been the last five, and that 18 of the 19 warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 2001. The quickly rising temperatures over the past two decades cap a much longer warming trend documented by researchers and correspond with the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by human activity.

“We’re no longer talking about a situation where global warming is something in the future,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA group that conducted the analysis. “It’s here. It’s now.”

While this planet has seen hotter days in prehistoric times, and colder ones in the modern era, what sets recent warming apart in the sweep of geologic time is the relative suddenness of the rise in temperatures and its clear correlation with increasing levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane produced by human activity over the same period.

«

The other day I was reading a depressing article about plastics being all through the marine food chain, and thought: this is the dinosaurs’ revenge. They got turned into oil, and now we burn them and wreck our ecosystem. A slow-motion meteor.
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A hole opens up under Antarctic glacier — big enough to fit two-thirds of Manhattan

Denise Chow:

»

The discovery is described in a paper published Jan. 30 in the journal Science Advances. The researchers expected to see significant loss of ice, but the scale of the void came as a shock.

“The size of the cavity is surprising, and as it melts, it’s causing the glacier to retreat,” said Pietro Milillo, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the paper’s lead author. He said the ice shelf encompassing the Florida-sized glacier is retreating at a rate in excess of 650 feet per year, and that most of the melting that led to the void occurred during the past three years.

Sinking areas at Thwaites Glacier are shown here in red and rising areas in blue. The growing cavity (red mass, center) caused the greatest sinking. Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Previous research showed that meltwater from Thwaites accounts for about 4% of the global sea level rise, said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved with the new study.

If the loss of ice becomes so severe that the glacier collapses — something computer models predict could happen in 50 to 100 years — sea levels would rise by two feet. That’s enough to inundate coastal cities across the globe.

«

Worth declaring a state of emergency for the crisis on the US’s south-eastern sea border?
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Instacart changes tip policy after worker backlash • CNN

Sara Ashley O’Brien:

»

After mounting criticism from workers over its payment practices, Instacart has agreed to make some changes.

In a blog post on Wednesday, CEO Apoorva Mehta said the on-demand grocery delivery startup will no longer decrease the amount it contributes to worker base pay based on the size of their tips. He also said the company will reimburse workers who have been impacted by that practice.

“While our intention was to increase the guaranteed payment for small orders, we understand that the inclusion of tips as a part of this guarantee was misguided. We apologize for taking this approach,” said Mehta.

Instacart, along with rival DoorDash, has been under fire in recent weeks from workers who say the tips added by customers on orders are being used to subsidize a minimum pay rate, instead of being used as bonuses.

«

Meet the new boss class, same as the old boss class.
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Spotify is spending up to $500m on podcast startups including Gimlet, Anchor • Recode

Peter Kafka:

»

Not only has Spotify acquired Gimlet Media, a podcast producer and network, for around $230m — a deal Recode told you about last week — but it has also bought Anchor, a startup that makes it easier for people to record and distribute their own podcasts.

The company says it isn’t done — it says it has other podcast acquisitions in mind and that it expects to spend up to $500m on deals this year. Reminder: with these deals, Spotify is now fully in the content creation business, a move it has yet to make with music.

In a blog post up this morning, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says he didn’t plan on getting into podcasting when he founded the company 11 years ago, but he’s in it now. He says Spotify is now the world’s second-biggest podcast platform (behind Apple), and that podcast listening will eventually make up 20% of Spotify’s usage.

«

Here’s why. Spotify struggles to be profitable because when playing licensed music, it has to pay a fixed amount per track. Two hours of music listening costs it twice as much, and the subscriber has only paid once. For ad-funded listening, Spotify can play twice as many ads, but they don’t monetise as well as a subscription.

However: if someone listens to one hour, two hours of podcast – there’s no payout. The more time people spend listening to podcasts instead of music, the better Spotify’s margins get. Ideally, people would spend 100% of their time listening to lovely non-royalty-bearing podcasts. So buying podcast companies is an initially expensive method of aligning yourself with “listening” while improving your profitability, long-term.
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Brits will face immediate return of mobile phone roaming charges under No-Deal Brexit, government reveals • HuffPost UK

Paul Waugh:

»

A little-noticed government regulation laid before parliament on Tuesday confirms that the UK will revoke the current legislation that allows holidaymakers and business people to use their smartphones in the EU at no extra cost.

The draft ‘statutory instrument’, which has been tabled as part of a raft of no-deal preparations, means that from March 29 phone users will be liable for surcharges when they travel on the continent.

In a note accompanying the secondary legislation – the Mobile Roaming (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 – government admits that consumer groups lobbied hard for a new scheme to maintain the current arrangements.

But “after careful consideration, the government decided not to adopt this proposal”, it states.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) justified its stance by saying that if the current system continued after Brexit, UK phone firms would face “increased costs” from EU carriers that they might then pass on to customers.

«

For American readers: charges for UK visitors to the continent used to be a ripoff. Then the EU forced carriers to zero-rate them across the EU. Now the UK’s going to repeal it (probably).
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Advancing research on fake audio detection • Google Blog

Daisy STanton is a software engineer at Google AI:

»

we’re keenly aware of the risks this [speech generation] technology can pose if used with the intent to cause harm. Malicious actors may synthesize speech to try to fool voice authentication systems, or they may create forged audio recordings to defame public figures. Perhaps equally concerning, public awareness of “deep fakes” (audio or video clips generated by deep learning models) can be exploited to manipulate trust in media: as it becomes harder to distinguish real from tampered content, bad actors can more credibly claim that authentic data is fake.

We’re taking action. When we launched the Google News Initiative last March, we committed to releasing datasets that would help advance state-of-the-art research on fake audio detection.  Today, we’re delivering on that promise: Google AI and Google News Initiative have partnered to create a body of synthetic speech containing thousands of phrases spoken by our deep learning TTS models. These phrases are drawn from English newspaper articles, and are spoken by 68 synthetic “voices” covering a variety of regional accents.  

We’re making this dataset available to all participants in the independent, externally-run 2019 ASVspoof challenge. This open challenge invites researchers all over the globe to submit countermeasures against fake (or “spoofed”) speech, with the goal of making automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems more secure. By training models on both real and computer-generated speech, ASVspoof participants can develop systems that learn to distinguish between the two. The results will be announced in September at the 2019 Interspeech conference in Graz, Austria.

«

Another arms race, or maybe speech (voice?) race.
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Inside Wisconsin’s disastrous $4.5bn deal with Foxconn • Bloomberg

Austin Carr:

»

[Foxconn chief Terry] Gou deputized his special assistant, Woo, and another lieutenant, Alan Yeung, Foxconn’s director of US strategic initiatives, to handle the details. They aggressively pursued cash subsidies, calling and texting at all hours. At one point, according to state records released to the public, Woo texted Neitzel at 1:17 a.m., “Give us 200m upfront then it is a done deal.” (Neitzel declined.)

As a bidding war heated up among a handful of states, including Michigan and Ohio, Wisconsin upped its offer. Foxconn demanded subsidies that would make US operations as cheap as in China, and Hogan says Foxconn estimated a 30% cost difference. He acknowledges the subsidy numbers grew “staggering” but says Foxconn won’t get those incentives without delivering the promised numbers of jobs.

Wisconsin’s final bid, written on a single piece of paper, offered as much as $150m in sales tax exemptions and $2.9bn in refundable tax credits on the condition that Foxconn meet certain hiring and capital investment thresholds. Other public costs, including $764m in local incentives from Mount Pleasant and its home county of Racine, made up the other third of the package. When the team slid the paper to Woo in July, Hogan recalls, he folded it up and said, “Terry wants to do business with Governor Walker.”

Even before Foxconn signed the contract in November 2017, Walker’s win began to morph into a political liability. As details of the mostly closed-door negotiations came to light, the narrative soured. At a time when Trump was stoking economic nationalism and ripping on companies that shipped jobs to China, many saw the subsidies as a desperate giveaway to a foreign company with close ties to Beijing…

…“There’s no way this will ever pay itself off,” says Tim Bartik, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. He says Foxconn’s incentives are more than 10 times greater than typical government aid packages of its stripe.

«

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E-ticketing system exposes airline passengers’ personal information via email • Cyberscoop

Jeff Stone:

»

At least eight airlines, including Southwest, use e-ticketing systems that could allow hackers to access sensitive information about travelers merely by intercepting emails, according to research published Wednesday by the mobile security company Wandera.

The systems fail to secure customers’ personally identifiable information, including names, boarding passes, passport numbers and flight numbers, Wandera said.

The email vulnerabilities still exist, Wandera found, even though researchers notified affected companies weeks ago, and despite growing corporate awareness about the risks associated with sacrificing security for convenience.

The weakness is a check-in link that is emailed to customers, Wandera researchers found. Customer information is embedded in the links, allowing travelers to travel from their email to a website where they check in for a flight without needing to enter their username and password. However the links are unencrypted and re-usable, presenting a tempting target for hackers, according to Michael Covington, vice president of product at Wandera.

«

“Weeks” isn’t enough time to change a system that will be deeply embedded, and airlines aren’t known for having the fastest-moving approach to changing their systems. I’m sure some readers would have more knowledge of this.
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Apple paid its retail head $170M to transform its stores. Did she do it? • Euronews

»

Apple’s sleek, minimalist, glass-enshrined stores have long been holy places for Apple diehards, and expanded to 506 retail locations on five continents during Ahrendt’s tenure.

As the former chief executive of Burberry, Ahrendts was expected to be the face of Apple, but instead quietly worked in the background, carefully choosing her media appearances and staying out of the spotlight most of the time at the company’s semi-annual press events.

Ahrendts made her first on-stage appearance at Apple’s annual iPhone event in September 2017, where she called retail Apple’s “largest product” and shared how she envisioned the stores becoming “town squares” with plenty of green space, where people come together to hang out, learn new skills and, oh, buy the new $1,000 iPhone.

In an effort to get people to think of Apple products as part of a lifestyle, Ahrendts also spearheaded free “Today at Apple” courses, which launched in 2017. Apple continues to launch new sessions, including coding classes, software lessons and walking tours, where people can learn how to use the Apple Watch for fitness or how to shoot cinematic photos. Apple said it has held more than 18,000 free sessions since the launch and has reached millions of people.

During her tenure, Ahrendts also introduced more practical shopping functions that customers have come to expect from retailers, including the option to buy online and pick up in-store; and text message alerts, so people don’t have to linger waiting for an appointment at the Genius Bar.

«

Hm. The stores were already well-liked (despite former Dixons chief John Browett’s brief, unlamented, efforts). It’s really hard to get any feel for what impact Ahrendts had. If anything, the stores now feel too sparse to me when I look inside them: where is the excitement about new products? The big excited posters? The tables crammed with other extras to buy? They feel more like service centres than shopping destinations, and I don’t think that’s positive.

Her departure feels like she didn’t think she could make further impact. I couldn’t find any better analysis; nobody with contacts at this level will share the insights.
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Hands up who reuses the same password everywhere, even with your Nest. Keep your hand up if you like being spied on by hackers • The Register

Kieren McCarthy:

»

Nest has urged its customers to not reuse passwords between their smart home gizmos and other websites and services.

This comes after miscreants were spotted taking usernames and passwords leaked or stolen from other websites, and using them to attempt to log into Nest accounts and hijack the internet-connected home gadgets, a type of attack known as credential stuffing.

Rishi Chandra, general manager of the Google-owned smart home outfit, sent an email to all Nest customers on Wednesday noting that the manufacturer had “heard from people experiencing issues with their Nest devices” before running through some security tips to secure their accounts…

…according to Nest, the likelihood is that dirtbags are trying out usernames and passwords dumped online from unrelated website security breaches, to access Nest accounts where credentials have been reused.

“Even though Nest was not breached, customers may be vulnerable because their email addresses and passwords are freely available on the internet,” Chandra’s email warned. “If a website is compromised, it’s possible for someone to gain access to user email addresses and passwords, and from there, gain access to any accounts that use the same login credentials.”

Nest claims to proactively look out for passwords being spilled online, “and when compromised accounts are found, we alert you and temporarily disable access. We also prevent the use of passwords that appear on known compromised lists.”

«

As we have said before, Nest allows two-factor authentication, though presently only via SMS (which is weaker than TOTP – timed one-time password – systems such as Authy or Google Authenticator). Odd that a company which is part of Google shouldn’t have TOTP.
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Can Big Tech save its soul? • UnHerd

I wrote a piece over at Unherd:

»

As corporate mottos go, “Don’t be evil” is hard to beat. If your company’s ambitions are to change the world, having those little three words in the back of every employee’s mind is sure to lead to good outcomes – isn’t it? That’s why Google adopted it after a meeting about corporate values in 2000 or 2001 (the history is hazy), where it was suggested by Paul Buchheit, who also went on to create Gmail. “Don’t be evil!” Seriously, how hard can that be to follow?

Yet, as the novelist Stephen King points out, nobody considers themselves the “bad guy”. People start with good intentions and then, somehow, bad things happen. That’s what has happened to the lofty goals of the big Silicon Valley companies. They started with a raw-ingredient mix of idealism, social networks, mobile phones and software. And we cooked it into a stew of partisanship, hate, abuse and even murder.

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Of course, you may well ask whether Big Tech had a soul in the first place.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Onion! From 2007, yet it feels as though it could be from right now. And it can teach machines about satire. CC-licensed photo by Jonathan Harford on Flickr.

What’s been among your favourite Overspill links? Seems for quite a few people in November 2015 was how hypothermia takes you. (You don’t shiver towards the end; you might even tear off your clothes.) There’s also “I wish mum’s phone was never invented” (May 2018). What’s yours?

A selection of 11 links for you. No, it’s referenda. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Tech is splitting the US workforce in two • The New York Times

Eduardo Porter:

»

Automation is splitting the American labor force into two worlds. There is a small island of highly educated professionals making good wages at corporations like Intel or Boeing, which reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee. That island sits in the middle of a sea of less educated workers who are stuck at businesses like hotels, restaurants and nursing homes that generate much smaller profits per employee and stay viable primarily by keeping wages low.

Even economists are reassessing their belief that technological progress lifts all boats, and are beginning to worry about the new configuration of work.

Recent research has concluded that robots are reducing the demand for workers and weighing down wages, which have been rising more slowly than the productivity of workers. Some economists have concluded that the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades.

Because it pushes workers to the less productive parts of the economy, automation also helps explain one of the economy’s thorniest paradoxes: despite the spread of information technology, robots and artificial intelligence breakthroughs, overall productivity growth remains sluggish.

“The view that we should not worry about any of these things and follow technology to wherever it will go is insane,” said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Semiconductor companies like Intel or NXP are among the most successful in the Phoenix area. From 2010 to 2017, the productivity of workers in such firms — a measure of the dollar value of their production — grew by about 2.1% per year, according to an analysis by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution. Pay is great: $2,790 a week, on average, according to government statistics.

But the industry doesn’t generate that many jobs. In 2017, the semiconductor and related devices industry employed 16,600 people in the Phoenix area, about 10,000 fewer than three decades ago.

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The Onion headlines could teach AI what makes satire funny • Science News

»

The researchers compiled a dataset of satirical and serious headlines using the online game Unfun.me, where players edit humorous headlines from the satirical publication The Onion as little as possible to make them serious. These tweaks “put a finger onto the exact switch that induces the humor,” says Robert West, a computer scientist École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He and coauthor Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., amassed about 2,800 serious versions of nearly 1,200 headlines.

Most of the joke headlines followed a common logical structure, which West and Horvitz call “false analogy.” Words switched between spoof and serious headlines share a crucial similarity, as well as a fundamental difference.

Consider the humorless headline “BP ready to resume oil drilling” and its comedic counterpart “BP ready to resume oil spilling.” Subbing spilling for drilling works because both share the critical commonality of being activities famously associated with BP, but with one being intended and the other accidental. West and Horvitz identified several types of oppositions between words in serious and satirical headlines, such as modern versus outdated, human versus animal and obscene versus not.

These findings could help programmers create AI systems that better understand and have more natural interactions with humans, says Dan Goldwasser, an AI and natural language processing researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., not involved in the analysis.

«

The Onion team works by making up headlines, and then writing the stories for it. They also keep a list of headlines that don’t quite make the cut. My favourite of those is “Man knifed with spork”.
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MPs, step away from the social media. Twitter is not your friend • The Guardian

Political journalist Martha Gill:

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Almost all MPs have an account now and some tweet more than 60 times a day. But Twitter is not there to help them. It is there to trip them up. First it lulls them into a false sense of security – rewarding chit chat about their pets or their constituency, welcoming them into an environment where other people (not MPs) are free to tweet unguarded thoughts and opinions – and then, at some unspecified but certain point, it brutally shames them in front of the whole world. Twitter has nothing to lose, and they do.

In the last few days Twitter has claimed the dignity of no fewer than four Conservative MPs…

…Why do MPs go on Twitter at all? Why bother to control your public image – media advisers, training, care in interviews with journalists – and then risk it all by joining this lawless public message board? They can’t really claim it helps them with their jobs: only a narrow demographic slice of their constituents will be on the platform, and in any case few seem to use it for the purposes of engagement – an average 23% of tweets by MPs are direct replies (fewer for cabinet members). Some do seem to be good at it, such as the Labour MP Jess Phillips, but I’m not sure this bolsters their image either: shouldn’t elected representatives have better things to do?

«

The details of how the Conservative MPs screwed up is hilarious, though. I have to agree with the first comment below the piece:

»

It gives twitter users a chance to see how fatuous and bigoted and ignorant some of these politicians are. In the case of [Tory MP Nadine] Dorries, her twitter feed is an absolute delight. She is almost a parody of herself. In this day and age of course, it matters little that our elected representatives are dim or ill informed.

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Apple agrees to pay back-taxes to French authorities • Reuters

Simon Carraud:

»

Apple’s French division said it had reached a deal with France to pay an undeclared amount of back-dated tax, which French media estimated at around 500 million euros (£441 million).

Apple’s French division confirmed the tax payment agreement, but did not disclose how much it had agreed to pay.

“As a multinational company, Apple is regularly audited by fiscal authorities around the world,” Apple France said in a statement.

“The French tax administration recently concluded a multi-year audit on the company’s French accounts, and those details will be published in our public accounts,” it said.
French business magazine L’Express/L’Expansion, which reported the tax payment figure, said the deal was reached in December after several months of negotiations between tax authorities and the company.

France is pushing for a European Union-wide tax on the world’s top digital and software companies such as Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, Amazon , Facebook and Apple that use complex intra-group arrangements to pay low single-digit tax rates on profits derived from European customers. The arrangements are not illegal.

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I cut Apple out of my life. It was devastating • Gizmodo

Kashmir Hill, continuing her series of blocking the big tech giants from her life in order; she’s given up her iPhone and has got a Nokia featurephone:

»

Typing on the device is excruciating. It has 15 buttons: 0-9, *, #, left, right, and enter. If you want to type “c”, you have to press 1 three times. (Or you can turn on T9 predictive text, which I do, so that I can press 1-1-8 and have it guess that I mean “act,” “cat,” “bat,” or “abu,” in that order.)

It is basic as hell, but incredibly you can access the internet on it, very slowly, via a browser from Opera.

As I leave T-Mobile, I send my husband, Trevor, a text; his is the only number I have memorized, and the new phone doesn’t have my contacts. “Hello from my new phone” is exhausting to compose, and I have to stand still while I write the message. I can’t believe people actually wanted to text rather than call when texting was this hard to do.

Trevor doesn’t text me back. Rude.

I try to explore the phone while walking home, but it’s so hard to do without a touch screen that I almost turn my ankle twice on the sidewalk before I give up.

When I get home, I find out why I haven’t gotten a text from Trevor: There are two iMessages from him on the notification screen of my (now banned) iPhone. Apple still has iMessaging turned on for me and is automatically routing text messages from people with iPhones to its own messaging service.

Apple still has iMessaging turned on for me and is automatically routing text messages from people with iPhones to its own messaging service.

Still using my damn MacBook Air, I Google “how to turn off iMessaging.” I turn it off, but it causes problems for the rest of the experiment; some people’s texts just don’t get to me, particularly if they are sent to group threads in which all the people have iPhones except me. It’s harder to get out of Apple’s ecosystem than Google’s.

«

The rest of the series is here. Two more weeks to go.
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Facebook paid people $20 monthly for access to their digital activity. Why did they sign up? • Slate

Shannon Palus:

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One user, who identified themselves as 32 years old and reported that they had netted $30 in gift cards with the app, told me via email, “I’m not too worried about that data because I’m almost certain these companies collect that stuff anyway,” and that, “Google and Amazon know a lot already.” The user explained they do a lot of little paid tasks to earn money, like downloading apps or completing surveys. It isn’t significant, they said, but acts as a little bonus to their household income, which they told me is $60,000 a year. “Lately most of my earnings have gone to simple things (groceries, MetroCards, date night),” they wrote.

Others on Reddit expressed similar sentiments. “I have been enjoying the small amount of money. It helps me buy frivolous things like new games which I may not get as often,” wrote another user, who said they were perplexed as to why reporters like me were “asking about why I would give up so much data.” They wrote they thought the program was upfront in “clearly stat[ing] they farm data for money.” (Perhaps fittingly, when I messaged this person for more information, they offered to answer for $25—a deal which journalistic ethics compelled me to decline.)

Not everyone seemed as unquestioningly enthusiastic about the trade. One user, who said they were 40 (which put them over the age that Facebook was recruiting for), posted that the VPN was “quite obviously some shady shit,” and said they had purposefully installed it on an old junk phone they didn’t use anymore.

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Their bigger worry was that the program would get shut down. And guess what!
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Apple restores Google’s internal iOS apps after certificate misuse punishment • TechCrunch

Just for completeness. It did the same for Facebook after a short period in the sin bin.
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Marshmello just played a live set to 10m people in video game Fortnite – and that wasn’t even the most interesting move he made this weekend • Music Business Worldwide

Tim Ingham:

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We’ve been intrigued by the fact that Tencent – yes, that Tencent – acquired 40% of Fortnite maker Epic Games for a mere $330m in 2013. And we’ve marveled at the game’s huge audience, which stood at a total of over 200m players in November last year… roughly the same volume as Spotify’s monthly active user count at the close of 2018.

Now, following on from loose tie-ins with the likes of Drake and record label Astralwerks (via Twitch star Ninja), Fortnite has formed yet another significant link to the music industry.

Yesterday (February 2), DJ star Marshmello played an exclusive in-game concert in Fornite at 2pm ET. Fortnite players could watch the virtual show for free, so long as they made sure their avatar was available at the concert’s location (Pleasant Park).

The numbers are now coming in on the event’s audience, and they’re mighty impressive: according to reliable sources, over 10 million concurrent users witnessed Marshmello’s virtual concert. These people’s in-game avatars were all able to hit the virtual dancefloor in front of Marshmello’s own avatar and show off their moves.

Fans now can, and no doubt will, buy official Marshmello X Fortnite merch – with a hooded sweatshirt setting you back no less than $55.

«

Second Life did it first, but Fortnite has probably done it best.
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EU orders recall of children’s smartwatch over severe privacy concerns • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

For the first time, EU authorities have announced plans to recall a product from the European market because of a data privacy issue.

The product is Safe-KID-One, a children’s smartwatch produced by German electronics vendor ENOX.

According to the company’s website, the watch comes with a trove of features, such as a built-in GPS tracker, built-in microphone and speaker, a calling and SMS text function, and a companion Android mobile app that parents can use to keep track and contact their children.

The product is what most parents regularly look in a modern smartwatch but in a RAPEX (Rapid Alert System for Non-Food Products) alert published last week and spotted by Dutch news site Tweakers, European authorities ordered a mass recall of all smartwatches from end users citing severe privacy lapses.

“The mobile application accompanying the watch has unencrypted communications with its backend server and the server enables unauthenticated access to data,” said authorities in the RAPEX alert. “As a consequence, the data such as location history, phone numbers, serial number can easily be retrieved and changed.”

On top of this, authorities also said that “a malicious user can send commands to any watch making it call another number of his choosing, can communicate with the child wearing the device or locate the child through GPS.”

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But it gets worse: the Android app is owned not by Enox, but by a Chinese developer, so the data loops through Chinese servers.
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Web design test • Can’t Unsee

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Select the design that is most correct

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Very simple at first, then harder: pick which of two onscreen designs (dialog boxes, profile pictures, auction site listings) better conforms to good web design rules. Engaging.
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Apple Watch ‘fall detection’ feature credited with saving man’s life • BGR

Yoni Heisler:

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According to a report from NRK, a 67-year old from Norway named Toralv Østvang credits his Apple Watch Series 4 with saving his life. The story is that Østvang experienced a serious fall in his bathroom whereupon his Apple Watch automatically contacted rescue personnel. Recall, the Apple Watch, upon detecting a fall, will send a message to local emergency services — along with information regarding your location —  if it detects that a user has been immobile for a full minute following a fall.

About a half hour after the fall, rescue workers arrived on the scene and found Østvang lying on his bathroom floor, unconscious and bloody. In the midst of the fall, Østvang also sustained three fractures to his face.

The fall detection feature on the Apple Watch is obviously geared towards older folks and, as a result, is off by default unless a user is 65 or older.

«

All else it needs is to contact the news agencies and you’ve got the perfect self-marketing device. As with the stories about the Watch identifying unusual heart activity and ECG patterns, this is technology that you’re only indifferent to if you’re indifferent to living – which makes the sale just that bit easier.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

Afraid so: the machines are now able to beat us at this game too. CC-licensed photo by Chris on Flickr.

Ahead of No. 1,000, send in your three favourite links – leave a comment, email or DM me. Popular so far: Why drowning doesn’t look like drowning (May 2018); why I hope we don’t find extraterrestrial life (Aug 2016); the heroes of the cave dive rescue (Jan 2019). What do you remember best?

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Borderless. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mark Zuckerberg – Fifteen years ago today, I launched the… • Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg on his oldest baby, now 15:

»

We’re now taking steps that wouldn’t have been possible even just a few years ago – for example, this year we plan to spend more on safety and security than our whole revenue at the time of our IPO, and the artificial intelligence required to help manage content at scale didn’t exist until recently. But as people use these networks to shape society, it’s critical we continue making progress on these questions.

At the same time, there is another force at play as well. As networks of people replace traditional hierarchies and reshape many institutions in our society – from government to business to media to communities and more – there is a tendency of some people to lament this change, to overly emphasize the negative, and in some cases to go so far as saying the shift to empowering people in the ways the internet and these networks do is mostly harmful to society and democracy.

To the contrary, while any rapid social change creates uncertainty, I believe what we’re seeing is people having more power, and a long term trend reshaping society to be more open and accountable over time. We’re still in the early stages of this transformation and in many ways it is just getting started. But if the last 15 years were about people building these new networks and starting to see their impact, then the next 15 years will be about people using their power to remake society in ways that have the potential to be profoundly positive for decades to come.

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I have a question: are those people going to be unaccountable Russians working in low-rise buildings and pretending to be African-Americans based in Chicago protesting against police brutality in order to stir up division? Just so we’re clear on meaning, you understand.
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Facebook’s research app isn’t the only VPN to mine user data • Abacus News

Karen Chiu:

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VPNs are supposed to help you protect your data. But the Facebook flap shows that there’s one party that has full access to everything you’re doing: the VPN provider itself. And it’s a concern with several Chinese-owned VPNs, which reportedly send data back to China.

Recently, Top10VPN – a review site for VPN services – looked into the world’s 30 most downloaded free VPN apps. Among them, VPN Master, Turbo VPN, and Snap VPN claim the right to gather private information like IP addresses, time zones, and IMEIs (the unique number that identifies your phone). They also state that they may route personal data to China.

Another Chinese-owned app, VPN 360, notes that they may log and share an individual’s usage data with government authorities and law enforcement when required by law.

Unlike Facebook’s semi-secret “market research” app, these VPN services are readily available for everyone to download from Google Play and the iOS App Store.

And it means that while Facebook has said it will shut down its controversial market research app, other questionable VPN services are still being downloaded every day, with little transparency on where the data they collect will go.

«

Why, it’s as if VPNs aren’t a panacea to put you on the golden path to privacy at all, but instead might just mine your data. I guess you could ask the malicious hackers who have been busted via their VPN activity what they think for a second opinion.
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Bitcoin’s ‘Five-Year Bet’ now has an official winner between Ben Horowitz and Felix Salmon • Bitcoinexchangeguide

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Horowitz and Salmon both agreed to meet after five years and assess the state of the market during their 2014 appearance on NPR’s podcast. They also agreed on an official bet, the conditions for which are as follows:

“If 10% of Americans or more said they’d bought something with Bitcoin in the past month, Ben would win. If the number was lower, Felix would win.”

Before declaring the winner of the bet on episode #891, Planet Money published a poll on their website in an effort to gauge whether or not BTC (or any other major altcoin) had really been able to break into the financial mainstream.

Not only that, even Ipsos recently conducted a poll that took into consideration the opinions of 900 Americans who were asked the simple question:

“Have you purchased anything using Bitcoin as your payment within the past month?” In response, only a meager 3% of the respondents replied in the affirmative.

«

The transcript of the podcast makes for fun reading. That 3% is definitely a ceiling; in quite a few of the cases, people saying yes were using it to but other cryptocoins, and in some cases they claimed to have used it in places which don’t exchange bitcoin.

Salmon’s prediction – that bitcoin’s deflationary tendencies (forcing its price up) would kill its use as currency – turned out to be correct.
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Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult • The Verge

Josh Dzieza:

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Recently there have been efforts to develop game-like CAPTCHAs, tests that require users to rotate objects to certain angles or move puzzle pieces into position, with instructions given not in text but in symbols or implied by the context of the game board. The hope is that humans would understand the puzzle’s logic but computers, lacking clear instructions, would be stumped. Other researchers have tried to exploit the fact that humans have bodies, using device cameras or augmented reality for interactive proof of humanity.

The problem with many of these tests isn’t necessarily that bots are too clever — it’s that humans suck at them. And it’s not that humans are dumb; it’s that humans are wildly diverse in language, culture, and experience. Once you get rid of all that stuff to make a test that any human can pass, without prior training or much thought, you’re left with brute tasks like image processing, exactly the thing a tailor-made AI is going to be good at.

“The tests are limited by human capabilities,” Polakis says. “It’s not only our physical capabilities, you need something that [can] cross cultural, cross language. You need some type of challenge that works with someone from Greece, someone from Chicago, someone from South Africa, Iran, and Australia at the same time. And it has to be independent from cultural intricacies and differences. You need something that’s easy for an average human, it shouldn’t be bound to a specific subgroup of people, and it should be hard for computers at the same time. That’s very limiting in what you can actually do. And it has to be something that a human can do fast, and isn’t too annoying.”

Figuring out how to fix those blurry image quizzes quickly takes you into philosophical territory: what is the universal human quality that can be demonstrated to a machine, but that no machine can mimic? What is it to be human?

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Really it comes down to our tendency to dither when we don’t know. Or else be too certain when we don’t know. Unfortunately, machines can copy that too.
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The lifespan of news stories • Newslifespan

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The shapes of the plots can tells us more about the nature of attention to the topic. The duration of news events is dependent on the speed at which an event develops, and whether or not its outcome was expected. The North Korea summit, for example, was in the news in the lead up to the event, and continued to be reported on afterwards, producing a symmetrical interest plot. An event like July’s blood moon, by contrast, was rarely mentioned after the fact, resulting in a leftward skew in the plot. An unexpected event, on the other hand, like the death of Anthony Bourdain, can yield a rightward skew in the plot as the public continues to process unanticipated information. Lastly, some events can even produce multiple peaks, like the government shutdown of January 2018 that was followed by the threat of a second shutdown in early February, resulting in a bimodal search interest plot.

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As a journalist, the question one always wanted to be able to answer was: how important will this story appear to readers? Is this just a short hit or does it tug at something deeper? After a while you’d get a feel for that, but could still be surprised by things. This tries to offer a clearer view. (Via @Sophiewarnes’s Fair Warning newsletter.)
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Huawei sting offers rare glimpse of US targeting Chinese giant • Bloomberg

Erik Schatzker:

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Like all inventors, Khan was paranoid about knockoffs. Even so, he was caught by surprise when Huawei, a potential customer, began to behave suspiciously after receiving the meticulously packed sample [of a screen coated on one side with artificial diamond]. Khan was more surprised when the US Federal Bureau of Investigation drafted him and Akhan’s chief operations officer, Carl Shurboff, as participants in its investigation of Huawei. The FBI asked them to travel to Las Vegas and conduct a meeting with Huawei representatives at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. Shurboff was outfitted with surveillance devices and recorded the conversation while a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter watched from safe distance.

This investigation, which hasn’t previously been made public, is separate from the recently announced grand jury indictments against Huawei. On Jan. 28, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged the company and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, with multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. In a separate case, prosecutors in Seattle charged Huawei with theft of trade secrets, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, claiming that one of its employees stole a part from a robot, known as Tappy, at a T-Mobile US Inc. facility in Bellevue, Wash. “These charges lay bare Huawei’s alleged blatant disregard for the laws of our country and standard global business practices,” Christopher Wray, the FBI director, said in a press release accompanying the Jan. 28 indictments. “Today should serve as a warning that we will not tolerate businesses that violate our laws, obstruct justice, or jeopardize national and economic well-being.” Huawei has denied the charges…

The first sign of trouble came two months later, in May, when Huawei missed the deadline to return the sample. Shurboff says his emails to Han requesting its immediate return were ignored. The following month, Han wrote that Huawei had been performing “standard” tests on the sample and included a photo showing a big scratch on its surface. Finally, a package from Huawei showed up at Gurnee on Aug. 2.

Shurboff remembers opening it. It looked just like the package Akhan had sent months earlier. Inside the cardboard box was the usual protective packaging—air bags, plastic case, gel insert, and wax paper. But he could tell something was wrong when he picked up the case. It rattled. The unscratchable Miraj sample wasn’t just scratched; it was broken in two, and three shards of diamond glass were missing.

Shurboff says he knew there was no way the sample could have been damaged in shipping—all the pieces would still be there in the case.

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Shouldn’t we all have seamless micropayments by now? • WIRED

Zeynep Tufekci:

»

I don’t really want a flying car, but I do want to be able to shed pennies (and fractions of pennies) as I browse news or read fiction online. I want to easily support artists and writers without having to set up an account, create a password, fork over my credit card details, and commit to an ongoing relationship that involves receiving a new piece of spammish email at least once a week.

What would such a system look like? It would be as seamless as browsing itself. It could have an automatic mode (a news subscription consortium, for instance, could silently disperse payments to individual publications as I read articles from members) or a one-click mode. (Stumble across a nice poem on some unfamiliar site? A small green button on your browser lights up, and you can make a one-time contribution.) And, much as Apple Pay already does now, vendors wouldn’t necessarily get your account information, just a cryptographic payment token that’s good for exchange or verification.

Of course, we already make payments online all the time, but under current conditions, frankly, it sucks to do so. If you buy things directly from small vendors, you’re stuck entering your credit card information, your email, and your billing address on site after site—sinking ever deeper into the surveillance economy as each digital form puts your personal details into someone else’s database, while also giving hackers ever more opportunities to filch your data.

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Zeynep is usually reliably wonderful, but this is one area where she’s got a blindness to the subtle combination of economics and internet behaviour that would result. I used to have a running bet with Jakob Nielsen: he said we would soon have micropayments, I said we wouldn’t. We gave up after I’d been correct four, or possibly five, years in a row; that was about 2003.

I wrote about why this won’t ever happen a week short of ten years ago. Not a single thing about the dynamic has changed since, despite the invention of bitcoin. Micropayments have too many perverse incentives to ever happen.
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Robots have already mastered games like chess and Go. Now they’re coming for Jenga • The Washington Post

Peter Holley:

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AI long ago mastered chess, the Chinese board game Go and even the Rubik’s cube, which it managed to solve in just 0.38 seconds.

Now machines have a new game that will allow them to humiliate humans: Jenga, the popular game —— and source of melodramatic 1980s commercials —— in which players strategically remove pieces from an increasingly unstable tower of 54 blocks, placing each one on top until the entire structure collapses.

A newly released video from MIT shows a robot developed by the school’s engineers playing the game with surprising precision. The machine is quipped with a soft-pronged gripper, a force-sensing wrist cuff and an external camera, allowing the robot to perceive the tower’s vulnerabilities the way a human might, according to Alberto Rodriguez, the Walter Henry Gale career development assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

“Unlike in more purely cognitive tasks or games such as chess or Go, playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing, and aligning pieces,” Rodriguez said in a statement released by the school. “It requires interactive perception and manipulation, where you have to go and touch the tower to learn how and when to move blocks.”

“This is very difficult to simulate, so the robot has to learn in the real world, by interacting with the real Jenga tower,” he added.

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These things are really ruining party games.
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Analysis: why the UK’s CO2 emissions have fallen 38% since 1990 • Carbon Brief

Zeke Hausfather:

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UK emissions have declined from around 600m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) in 1990 to 367MtCO2 in 2017. If underlying factors driving emissions had not changed, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that a growing population and a constant electricity generation mix would have led to emissions increasing by around 25% compared to 1990 levels.

Instead, emissions actually fell by 38% to 367MtCO2, as shown in the black area in the figure below. Each coloured wedge in the figure shows one factor contributing to this decline.

As the chart shows, no single factor was responsible for more than around a third of the total reduction in the UK’s CO2. Overall, emissions in 2017 were 51% lower than they would have been without these changes.

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The surprising data point: UK CO2 emissions peaked in 1973, because we were burning so much coal.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

SimCity: based on ideas about city development that didn’t include humans. CC-licensed photo by leomarasciulo on Flickr.

We’re nearly at 1,000 – just a week to go. Want to contribute, specifically? Suggest the three links that you’ve found most interesting since you began reading. Email or Twitter.

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A selection of 14 links for you. Go on, go on. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Model metropolism • Logic Mag

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In a paper serialized in two early issues of Reason, the libertarian magazine founded in 1968, [Jay] Forrester [author of the book whose equations were used as the basis for SimCity] argued that for most of human history, people have only needed to understand basic cause-and-effect relationships, but that our social systems are governed by complex processes that unfold over long periods of time. He claimed that our “mental models,” the cognitive maps we have of the world, are ill-suited to help us navigate the web of  interrelationships that make up the structure of our society.

For him, this complexity meant that policy interventions could, and usually would, have very different social effects than those imagined by policymakers. This led him to make the stark assertion that “the intuitive solutions to the problems of complex social systems” are “wrong most of the time.” In essence, anything we do to try to improve society will backfire and make things even worse.

In this respect, Forrester’s approach to the problems of American cities mirrored the “benign neglect” outlook of influential Nixon adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the rest of the administration. Indeed, Moynihan was an enthusiastic proponent of Forrester’s work and recommended Urban Dynamics to his fellow White House officials. Forrester’s arguments enabled the Nixon Administration to claim that its plans to slash programs created to help the urban poor and people of color would actually, counterintuitively, help these people.

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SimCity came out in 1989. Still influencing how people think about cities.
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Biohackers encoded malware in a strand of DNA • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer. While that attack is far from practical for any real spy or criminal, it’s one the researchers argue could become more likely over time, as DNA sequencing becomes more commonplace, powerful, and performed by third-party services on sensitive computer systems. And, perhaps more to the point for the cybersecurity community, it also represents an impressive, sci-fi feat of sheer hacker ingenuity.

“We know that if an adversary has control over the data a computer is processing, it can potentially take over that computer,” says Tadayoshi Kohno, the University of Washington computer science professor who led the project, comparing the technique to traditional hacker attacks that package malicious code in web pages or an email attachment. “That means when you’re looking at the security of computational biology systems, you’re not only thinking about the network connectivity and the USB drive and the user at the keyboard but also the information stored in the DNA they’re sequencing. It’s about considering a different class of threat.”

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That is fabulously clever. (Thanks to the many people who sent this; Paul Guinnessy was first, I believe.) It’s obvious when you think about it: a Turing machine reading an instruction set.
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One of the biggest at-home DNA testing companies is working with the FBI • Buzzfeed News

Salvador Hernandez:

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Family Tree DNA, one of the largest private genetic testing companies whose home-testing kits enable people to trace their ancestry and locate relatives, is working with the FBI and allowing agents to search its vast genealogy database in an effort to solve violent crime cases, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Federal and local law enforcement have used public genealogy databases for more than two years to solve cold cases, including the landmark capture of the suspected Golden State Killer, but the cooperation with Family Tree DNA and the FBI marks the first time a private firm has agreed to voluntarily allow law enforcement access to its database.

While the FBI does not have the ability to freely browse genetic profiles in the library, the move is sure to raise privacy concerns about law enforcement gaining the ability to look for DNA matches, or more likely, relatives linked by uploaded user data.

For law enforcement officials, the access could be the key to unlocking murders and rapes that have gone cold for years, opening up what many argue is the greatest investigative tactic since the advent of DNA identification. For privacy advocates, the FBI’s new ability to match the genetic profiles from a private company could set a dangerous precedent in a world where DNA test kits have become as common as a Christmas stocking stuffer…

…In December 2018, the company changed its terms of service to allow law enforcement to use the database to identify suspects of “a violent crime,” such as homicide or sexual assault, and to identify the remains of a victim.

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Ah, good old TOS. And yet: the FBI doesn’t hold this; it gets to access it just like a normal user, and to get more has to provide a court order or search warrant. This isn’t actually the gigantic intrusion it might look like.

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How machine learning could keep dangerous DNA out of terrorists’ hands • Nature

Sara Reardon:

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Biologists the world over routinely pay companies to synthesize snippets of DNA for use in the laboratory or clinic. But intelligence experts and scientists alike have worried for years that bioterrorists could hijack such services to build dangerous viruses and toxins — perhaps by making small changes in a genetic sequence to evade security screening without changing the DNA’s function.

Now, the US government is backing efforts that use machine learning to detect whether a DNA sequence encodes part of a dangerous pathogen. Researchers are beginning to make progress towards designing artificial-intelligence-based screening tools, and several groups are presenting early results at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Biothreats meeting in Arlington, Virginia, on 31 January. Their findings could lead to a better understanding of how pathogens harm the body, as well as new ways for scientists to link DNA sequences to specific biological functions.

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At LAST someone has put together terrorism, DNA and machine learning.
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Google talent advantage erodes as more workers doubt CEO vision • Bloomberg

Ellen Huet and Mark Bergen:

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Alphabet Inc.’s Google became the most-profitable internet company by recruiting talented technologists and inspiring them enough to keep them around. That advantage may be slipping as some workers increasingly doubt the leadership and vision of Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, according to recent results from an employee survey.

The annual internal poll, known as Googlegeist, asked workers whether Pichai’s vision of what the company can achieve inspires them. In response, 78% indicated yes, down 10 percentage points from the previous year.

Another question asked if employees have confidence in Pichai and his management team to effectively lead Google in the future. Positive responses represented 74% of the total, an 18 point decline from a year earlier.

There were similar declines for questions about Pichai’s decisions and strategies, his commitment to diversity and inclusion, and the compensation the company pays, according the results, which were viewed by Bloomberg News. Google shares the results with all employees to make sure concerns are heard. This time, 89% of workers took the survey.

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It would be close to a miracle if a company expanded as fast as Google is doing and its employees were as happy as at the start when everyone had a concise shared vision. But those are big drops: clearly the rows over sexual harassment and payoffs, the proposal to do censored search in China, and whether to do work with the military have all hurt morale.
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The layoffs at BuzzFeed and the case of the teenaged quizmaker • The New Yorker

Charles Bethea:

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the company laid off some two hundred members of its staff, including its director of quizzes, Matthew Perpetua, who shared the news in a blog post, on Monday, titled “How Laid Off Are You?” Perpetua came to BuzzFeed in 2012, after he was laid off by Rolling Stone; he became the company’s first quiz master editor three years later. During his tenure, a quiz that asked “What state should you live in?” was viewed fifty million times.

Perpetua’s blog post noted that “a LOT” of BuzzFeed’s traffic came from quizzes, and that “a VERY large portion of that traffic comes from a constant flow of amateur quizzes made by community users.” He went on, “In the recent past the second highest traffic driver worldwide has been a community user in Michigan who is a teenager in college who, for some reason, makes dozens of quizzes every week.” A reporter at the Los Angeles Times tweeted a screenshot of that passage, and the tweet went semi-viral. Eventually, the Michigan teenager, whom Perpetua had not named, chimed in. “Okay… so I kinda feel horrible,” she tweeted. “If my hobby is partial cause for these layoffs, especially with those in the ‘quiz section’, I never intended to do so. I make the quizzes for fun, I didn’t know it would turn bad.”

The teenager in question, Rachel McMahon, is a sophomore at Grand Valley State University, outside of Grand Rapids. Her quizzes drew a hundred and thirty million views in 2018, making her, according to BuzzFeed, the fifth-highest traffic driver worldwide last year. (She did climb as high as No. 2 in some months.)

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And she didn’t get paid – apart from a few items of schwag. But Perpetua’s blogpost, and the subsequent blizzard of interviews, has had a good effect: she might now get a job straight out of college. Or earlier. What’s the betting that it’s never as visible as the things she did while in college?
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QuadrigaCX chain analysis report (pt. 1): bitcoin wallets • Medium

»

Brief Summary of Findings
Below are the findings made by the author of this report:

1: It appears that there are no identifiable cold wallet reserves for QuadrigaCX.
2: It appears that QuadrigaCX was using deposits from their customers to pay other customers once they requested their withdrawal.
3: It does not appear that QuadrigaCX has lost access to their Bitcoin holdings.
4: It appears the number of bitcoins in QuadrigaCX’s possession are substantially less than what was reported in Jennifer Robertson’s (wife of allegedly deceased CEO and Owner Gerry Cotten) affidavit, submitted to the Canadian courts on January 31st, 2019.
5: At least some of the delays in delivering crypto withdrawals to customers were due to the fact that QuadrigaCX simply did not have the funds on hand at the time. In some cases, QuadrigaCX was forced to wait for enough customer deposits to be made on the exchange before processing crypto withdrawal requests by their customers.
6: After completing the analysis, it is the author’s opinion that QuadrigaCX has not been truthful with regards to their inability to access the funds needed to honor customer withdrawal requests. In fact, it is almost impossible to believe that this is the case in lieu of the empirical evidence provided by the blockchain.

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Just in case you hadn’t heard: the CEO of Quadriga, a cryptocurrency exchange, is claimed to have died – of Crohn’s Disease – while in India, according to a notarised bit of paper presented in a Canadian court. (Yes, that’s two 🤔 right away: Crohn’s Disease by itself isn’t fatal.) The exchange allegedly had its $190m of crypto held in “cold” (offline) wallets for which only the CEO knew the passphrase.

If any of those claims above is correct, Cotten is going to find out what a crowdsourced manhunt looks like, and it’ll make the John Darwin case look like a bit of a laugh. (Then again, Darwin only collected £25,000. Lightweight.)
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Google Play apps with more than 4.3 million downloads stole pics and pushed porn ads • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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A blog post published by security firm Trend Micro listed 29 camera- or photo-related apps, with the top 11 of them fetching 100,000 to 1 million downloads each. One crop of apps caused browsers to display full-screen ads when users unlocked their devices. Clicking the pop-up ads in some cases caused a paid online pornography player to be downloaded, although it was incapable of playing content. The apps were carefully designed to conceal their malicious capabilities.

“None of these apps give any indication that they are the ones behind the ads, thus users might find it difficult to determine where they’re coming from,” Trend Micro Mobile Threats Analyst Lorin Wu wrote. “Some of these apps redirect to phishing websites that ask the user for personal information, such as addresses and phone numbers.”

The apps also hid their icons from the Android app list. That made it hard for users to uninstall the apps, since there was no icon to drag and delete. The apps also used compression archives known as packers to make it harder for researchers—or presumably, tools Google might use to weed out malicious apps—from analyzing the wares.

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Adblocking in the UK 2018 • eMarketer Trends, Forecasts & Statistics

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How many people in the UK are using ad blockers?

Rates of ad blocking in the UK remain relatively low compared with other Western countries tracked by eMarketer. We estimate that 12.2 million people in the UK will use an ad blocker at least monthly in 2018, representing 22.0% of internet users, compared with 28.7% in France, 32.0% in Germany and 25.2% in the US. Growth in user numbers will slow to single digits for the first time.

How prevalent is ad blocking among 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK?

As is so often the case when it comes to digital trends, behaviors are more pronounced among certain younger age groups. In the millennial cohort, for example, ad blocking user rates are much higher than in other age brackets. We expect 43.0% of UK internet users ages 18 to 24 will use an ad blocker this year.

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Since you’re wondering, 38% of them are doing that on smartphones – up from 16.3% in 2014.
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Donald Trump rejects intelligence briefing facts • Time

John Walcott:

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the disconnect between Trump and his intelligence briefers is no joke, the officials say. Several pointed to concerns regarding Trump’s assessment of the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. After Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un last summer, the North claimed to have destroyed its major underground nuclear testing facility at Punggye-ri, and Trump has gone out of his way to credit the claim.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA), which oversees the spy satellites that map and photograph key areas, had tried to impress upon Trump the size and complexity of the North Korean site. In preparing one briefing for the President on the issue early in his administration, the NGIA built a model of the facility with a removable roof, according to two officials. To help Trump grasp the size of the facility, the NGIA briefers built a miniature version New York’s Statue of Liberty to scale and put it inside the model.

Intelligence officials from multiple agencies later warned Trump that entrances at the facility that had been closed after the summit could still be reopened. But the president has ignored the agencies’ warnings and has exaggerated the steps North Korea has taken to shutter the facility, those officials and two others say. That is a particular concern now, ahead of a possible second summit with the Kim Jong-Un later this month.

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The headline didn’t need “intelligence briefing”, but the detail about building a model – and still not being listened to – is quite something. You’d begin asking yourself: what the hell do we have to do?
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The problem with throwing away a smart device • Hackster Blog

Alasdair Allan:

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Last week a teardown of the LiFX Mini white was published on the Limited Results site, and it shows that this smart lightbulb is anything but smart.

In a very short space of time the teardown established that if you’ve connected the bulb to your Wi-Fi network then your network password will be stored in plain text on the bulb, and can be easily recovered just by downloading the firmware and inspecting it using a hex editor.
In other words, throwing this lightbulb in the trash is effectively the same as taping a note to your front door with your wireless SSID and password written on it. This probably isn’t something you should be comfortable doing.

Worse yet both the root certificate and RSA private key for the bulb are also present in the firmware in plain text, and the devices is completely open—no secure boot, no flash encryption, and with the debug interface fully enabled.

It turns out that this particular LiFX bulb is built around an Espressif ESP32 which, as we know, has a sprawling and fairly mature open source ecosystem. But that also means that the security implemented by LiFX for the bulb was inexplicably poor. Because while the recovery of the password and keys was aided by the mature state of the development environment, the ESP32 also supports both secure boot and flash encryption, and the later would have provided “at-rest” data encryption, and stopped the this sort of attack dead in its tracks.

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Lowe’s is killing off and bricking its Iris smart home products at the end of March • TechCrunch

Greg Kumparak:

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If you’ve got any gear from Lowe’s Iris line of smart home products, it’s time to start looking for alternatives.

Lowe’s has announced that the line is toast, with plans to flip the switch on “the platform and related services” at the end of March. In other words: much of this once smart connected gear is about to get bricked.

On the upside, Lowe’s is committing to refund customers for “eligible, connected Iris devices” — with the caveat that you’ve got to go through its redemption portal. “PLEASE DO NOT BRING YOUR CONNECTED IRIS DEVICES BACK TO A LOWE’S STORE,” they note repeatedly. They don’t want it either.

Refunds will be issued in the form of a prepaid Visa card. They also note that some — but definitely not all — Iris-compatible devices work with alternatives like Samsung’s SmartThings platform.

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So anyway, don’t throw them away.
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Foxconn again shifts Wisconsin plan after Trump intervenes • Washington Post

Scott Bauer:

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on Friday, in yet another twist, Foxconn said after discussions with the White House and a personal conversation between Trump and Foxconn chairman Terry Gou, it plans to proceed with the smaller manufacturing facility.

“Great news on Foxconn in Wisconsin after my conversation with Terry Gou!” Trump tweeted.

The Foxconn statement did not say whether the commitment to this size factory would affect the type of workers who would be employed in Wisconsin. Foxconn executive Louis Woo told Reuters earlier this week that about three-quarters of workers in Wisconsin would be in research and development-type jobs, not manufacturing. Woo said the Wisconsin project would be more of a research hub, rather than having a manufacturing focus.

A Foxconn spokeswoman had no immediate comment about what its plans to build the “Gen 6” factory would mean for the makeup of the workforce. The difference between a “Gen 10” and “Gen 6” plant rests with the size of the original glass used to make the screens. The larger plant, which had been part of Foxconn’s initial plans, would have used glass more than three-times as large as what the smaller facility will use. The “Gen 6” plant can make screens ranging in size from a smart phone to a 75in television, while the larger plant would have allowed for devices as large as 9½ft by 11ft.

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics company, said Friday the campus will house both an advanced manufacturing facility and a center of “technology innovation for the region.”

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Can they treat whiplash? (It won’t matter; Trump will be gone by the time the plant goes live.) Also: are TVs and smartphones the only place where imperial measures still rule?
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Smartphone woes continue with worldwide shipments down 4.9% in Q4 2018 • IDC

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smartphone vendors shipped a total of 375.4m units during the fourth quarter of 2018 (4Q18), down 4.9% year over year and the fifth consecutive quarter of decline. The challenging holiday quarter closes out the worst year ever for smartphone shipments with global smartphone volumes declining 4.1% in 2018 with a total of 1.4bn units shipped for the full year. With challenging market conditions continuing into the first quarter of 2019, the likelihood of a declining market this year becomes more of a reality.

“Globally the smartphone market is a mess right now,” said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. “Outside of a handful of high-growth markets like India, Indonesia, Korea, and Vietnam, we did not see a lot of positive activity in 2018. We believe several factors are at play here, including lengthening replacement cycles, increasing penetration levels in many large markets, political and economic uncertainty, and growing consumer frustration around continuously rising price points.”

…China, which accounts for roughly 30% of the world’s smartphone consumption, had an even worse 2018 than the previous year with volumes down just over 10%. High inventory continues to be a challenge across the market as is consumer spending on devices, which has been down overall. At the same time the top 4 brands, all of which are Chinese – Huawei, OPPO, vivo, and Xiaomi – grew their share of the China market to roughly 78%, up from 66% in 2017.

On a worldwide basis, the top 5 smartphone companies continue to get stronger and now account for 69% of smartphone volume, up from 63% a year ago. If vivo is included, which is currently number six and has been in and out of the top 5 in recent quarters, the share of the top companies is 75% and growing.

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OK, but I’m not sure you can call a year that saw the second-highest number of shipments recorded the “worst ever”. Counterpoint Research puts the total shipped at 1.498bn, and says the market was down 4% on 2017. Lenovo looks to be in real trouble, down 23% year-on-year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

“I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.” What are the ethics of video doorbells? CC-licensed photo by Dave Taylor on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Double helpings for email! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Death of the private self: how fifteen years of Facebook changed the human condition •The Guardian

John Harris:

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the Facebook age marks a break from traditional human behaviour in key aspect. In the past, we could regularly take a break from acting, and revert to some sense of our private, authentic selves. Now, as we constantly prod at our smartphones and feel the pull of their addictive apps, when does the performing ever stop?

Along with Russian interference in elections, fake news, Facebook’s approach to hate speech and its insatiable appetite for personal data, this is surely one of the most malign ways in which its presence in our lives is playing out.

What its innovations have done to the divide between our social and private lives highlights a mess of stuff to do with the true meanings of intimacy and privacy, and something that goes even closer to the heart of what it is to be human: who we really are beyond the attention and judgments of others, and whether we even know any more.

This demise of the barrier between our public and private selves is particularly relevant to people going through that stage of life when the very idea of “self” is still in flux: the often difficult period from the stirrings of adolescence to the mid-20s (and, if you’re unlucky, even older). At that point, sensitivity to your peer group is at its height and an obsession with what some people call “social comparison” tends to run deep. We all know the basics: you desperately want to meet all the requirements of whichever code of cool is holding sway, and avoid mockery at all costs. Looks are at their peak of importance. So are clothes.

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“It gives you the freedom to be violent to other people”: what has the alt account become? • New Statesman

Sarah Manavis:

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On 28 December 2018, a tweet concerning presenter, food critic, and insanely inappropriate joke-maker Giles Coren went viral. It posited that the Times columnist had been using an alternative, anonymous Twitter account to respond to criticism of him. The subsequent thread noted that this alt-account was named after a character in one of Coren’s books, only ever tweeted about Coren or his wife, was followed by some of Coren’s famous friends such as Richard Bacon, and was linked to an email address that looked suspiciously like Coren’s Times’ account (g********n@t******s.co.uk). The account claimed to be a Polish plumber, and had a bio written in broken English; but the avatar was a picture from the cover of Coren’s book.

After receiving thousands of likes and retweets, Coren came clean to owning the account, and changed its arguably racist bio. At time of writing, he has ceased tweeting from it.

Coren was unusual in getting caught, but having an alternative account is now far from unusual. Once a behaviour reserved for “weirdos” on Reddit and Tumblr, it’s become a staple for internet users on essentially every platform. On Twitter it’s your “anon”; on Instagram it’s your “finsta” (fake-Insta); on multiple platforms it’s you and your friends’ “flop”, or simply your “alt”. Even allusions to an alternative account now serve as a meme. HOTM –“horny on the main” – Is a long-standing Tumblr joke, mocking those who post porn, half-naked selfies, and sexts on their main account, rather than restricting such behaviour to their alt.

Today, the alt account is often seen as an online necessity, something many people deem key to staying sane on the internet. But while the alt-account may now be normal, the reasons for having one are diverse. For some, they are positive and relieving; for others, they’re a tool for dangerous harm. In 2019, what has the alt-account become?

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It’s become a tool for dangerous harm, and it often stresses the owner of the alt because they know they have to keep the link secret. Next, please.
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Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Apple has now shut down Google’s ability to distribute its internal iOS apps, following a similar shutdown that was issued to Facebook earlier this week. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Google Maps, Hangouts, Gmail, and other pre-release beta apps have stopped working today, alongside employee-only apps like a Gbus app for transportation and Google’s internal cafe app.

“We’re working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be resolved soon,” says a Google spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. Apple has not yet commented on the situation.

Apple’s move to block Google’s developer certificate comes just a day after Google disabled its Screenwise Meter app following press coverage. Google’s private app was designed to monitor how people use their iPhones, similar to Facebook’s research app. Google’s app also relied on Apple’s enterprise program, which enables the distribution of internal apps within a company.

In an earlier statement over Facebook’s certificate removal, Apple did warn that “any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked.”

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Hell of a scoop. Ben Thompson raised the question in his daily newsletter of why Google’s certificate hadn’t been revoked when Facebook’s had; here’s the answer.

Sure, this might get Facebook and Google working to shift their apps into being Progressive Web Apps. I won’t hold my breath. (Facebook had its certificate restored on Thursday afternoon, Pacific time.)
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Apple is a hypocrite on data privacy • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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[In revoking Facebook’s enterprise developer certificate,] Apple didn’t take a position on Facebook’s creation of a paid “research” program to extract data from users. It enforced the terms of a licensing agreement; appearing to fight for user privacy is just a side effect. Apple is flexing its contract-law muscle, not its privacy muscle, and gaining a publicity win in the process. Crucially, Apple didn’t ban Facebook from the App Store or the iPhone platform: You can still download and use Messenger.

Facebook, for its part, maintains that the data-collection activity its Research app undertook was above board and not at all duplicitous. Unlike previous controversies about how Facebook shared user data with developers like Cambridge Analytica or foreign governments, little about the research program was hidden…

…Safari, the web browser that comes with every iPhone, is set up by default to route web searches through Google. For this privilege, Google reportedly paid Apple $9bn in 2018, and as much as $12bn this year. All those searches help funnel out enormous volumes of data on Apple’s users, from which Google extracts huge profits. Apple might not be directly responsible for the questionable use of that data by Google, but it facilitates the activity by making Google its default search engine, enriching itself substantially in the process.

The same could be said for the apps Apple distributes. Companies like Google and Facebook get access to iPhone users by offering their apps—Messenger, Gmail, Google Maps, and so on—for download from the Apple App Store. Most cost consumers nothing, because they exist to trade software services, like email or mapping, for data. That business model helped stimulate the data-privacy dystopia we now occupy.

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Occasionally I include an article that I disagree with, and I disagree with this one. Bogost is holding Apple to an impossible standard here. It couldn’t know what Facebook was doing with the Enterprise Certificate or the app – to monitor that really *would* be an invasion of privacy, both Facebook’s and the users’. That was a contractual violation, and Facebook was punished for it. Setting Google as the Safari default is a commercial decision, but you don’t have to use it; and Google obeys privacy rules, as far as we can tell. The “privacy dystopia” is our own fault, but you can actually avoid it by not using Facebook or Google (as much as you can).

For Apple to ban Facebook and Google would open up the huge question: what form of “privacy” is sufficient? If people consent to something, what locus does Apple have to deny that? It’s providing a platform. You can give people electricity; some will use it for light, and others will electrocute themselves.
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Criminals are tapping into the phone network backbone to empty bank accounts • Motherboard

Joseph Cox:

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Sophisticated hackers have long exploited flaws in SS7, a protocol used by telecom companies to coordinate how they route texts and calls around the world. Those who exploit SS7 can potentially track phones across the other side of the planet, and intercept text messages and phone calls without hacking the phone itself.

This activity was typically only within reach of intelligence agencies or surveillance contractors, but now Motherboard has confirmed that this capability is much more widely available in the hands of financially-driven cybercriminal groups, who are using it to empty bank accounts. So-called SS7 attacks against banks are, although still relatively rare, much more prevalent than previously reported. Motherboard has identified a specific bank—the UK’s Metro Bank—that fell victim to such an attack.

The news highlights the gaping holes in the world’s telecommunications infrastructure that the telco industry has known about for years despite ongoing attacks from criminals. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the defensive arm of the UK’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ, confirmed that SS7 is being used to intercept codes used for banking.

“We are aware of a known telecommunications vulnerability being exploited to target bank accounts by intercepting SMS text messages used as 2-Factor Authentication (2FA),” the NCSC told Motherboard in a statement.

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The bank will deny it and blame the customer. You don’t even have to know which bank it is to know that is how this will pan out.
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How colonization’s death toll may have affected Earth’s climate • HISTORY

Sarah Pruitt:

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As the 15th century drew to a close, some 60 million people lived across the Americas, sustaining themselves with the bounty of the vast lands they inhabited.

But with the arrival of the first European settlers, waves of new diseases, along with warfare, slavery and other brutality would kill off around 56 million people, or around 90% of the indigenous population.

Now, scientists from the University College London (United Kingdom) argue in a new study that this “Great Dying” that followed European colonization of the Americas may have actually affected Earth’s climate.

Their version of events, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, goes like this: After so many indigenous people died, no one was left to tend many of their fields, and trees and other vegetation quickly reclaimed huge expanses of land previously used for agriculture. As a result, enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) was removed from the atmosphere to actually cool down the planet, contributing to the coldest part of the mysterious period that historians have called the Little Ice Age.

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So that’s twice that Americans will have been major contributors to climate change – once to cool, once to warm. A bit Thanos, though.
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The next privacy worry is Ring doorbells and Nest security cameras • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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We’re on a slippery slope. You’ve got a legal right to film in public places, including your entryway. There’s little agreement whether private cameras slash crime rates, yet police are setting up voluntary registries for private cameras in dozens of communities. Cities such as Washington have begun paying up to $500 for cameras on private property. Detroit is going further: its mayor wants to mandate security cameras at businesses open late, with a live feed going straight to police.

Meanwhile, Ring’s owner Amazon filed an eerily specific patent to put its controversial Rekognition facial-identification software into doorbells. The purpose: to automatically flag “suspicious” people. (Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post, but I review all tech with the same critical eye.)

We should recognize this pattern: tech that seems like an obvious good can develop darker dimensions as capabilities improve and data shifts into new hands. A terms-of-service update, a face-recognition upgrade or a hack could turn your doorbell into a privacy invasion you didn’t see coming…

In the future, what if your doorbell misidentified someone as a crime suspect? What if it logs a “dreamer” — an undocumented immigrant brought to the United States as a child — visiting, or living in, your house? Your family and friends are the ones whom this tech surveils the most.

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That latter point is the most cogent. Bonus points to Fowler for the phrase “Big Doorbell” in the piece.
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Foxconn’s $20bn projects in US and China hit by growth fears • Nikkei Asian Review

Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang:

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Foxconn will postpone most of the production planned in a 61bn yuan ($9bn) display panel project in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou for at least six months, according to internal documents obtained by the Nikkei Asian Review. In the US, a $10 billion investment in display production in the state of Wisconsin has been suspended and scaled back as a result of negotiations with new Gov. Tony Evers, a Foxconn document obtained by Nikkei shows.

Foxconn’s decision to delay work on the two factories throws into doubt the promise of fresh investment and employment at a sensitive time for both economies. China’s economic growth has slowed to a 28-year low, while in the US, President Donald Trump continues to seek wins on his vow to bring manufacturing jobs back to America.

“Foxconn decided to slow the investment pace and scale back a bit at the moment because of weakening macroeconomic conditions and the uncertainties brought by the trade war,” a person with knowledge of Foxconn’s decision told Nikkei.

“If Foxconn expands as planned regardless of the rapidly changing market dynamics, it could eventually hurt the company’s business. It’s much safer to wait and carefully reconsider the next step,” the person added.

Foxconn’s moves to hold up planned investments come after the company took cost-cutting steps that included shedding 100,000 workers by the end of 2018.

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So not just Wisconsin. (Thanks to Pete Kleinschmidt for the pointer.)
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Want to get away with posting fake news on Facebook? Just change your website domain • Poynter

Daniel Funke:

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Sinclair Treadway, who runs the [fake news purveyor] YourNewsWire site from Southern California with his husband Sean Adl-Tabatabai, told Bloomberg in November that the move to rebrand was a direct result of declining revenue due to Facebook’s fact-checking program. Once a fact-checking outlet like Snopes rates a link, image or video as false, its future reach decreases in the News Feed. (Disclosure: Being a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles is a necessary condition for joining the project.)

YourNewsWire initially resorted to deleting debunked articles. Alternatively, it turned to changing headlines on debunked stories and requesting fact-checkers like (Poynter-owned) PolitiFact revoke their original flag.

Seemingly unsatisfied with these approaches, YourNewsWire decided to pull the plug on its website altogether and move everything to a new URL.

So far, it seems like its strategy is succeeding.

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Samsung breaks 19-quarter tablet decline to post 7% growth in recovering global market • Strategy Analytics

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Windows [tablet] shipments fell 4% year-on-year to 7.1m units in Q4 2018 from 7.3m in Q4 2017. Microsoft shipments increased 25% from the previous quarter on high seasonality and as a result, it has retaken its leadership position in Windows Detachable 2-in-1s with the release of the lower cost Surface Go and a refreshed Surface Pro all in the last half of 2018. This is the fourth straight quarter of year-on-year shipment and revenue gains for Microsoft.

Eric Smith continued, “Apple iOS shipments grew 10% year-on-year to 14.5m units in Q4 2018, pushing its worldwide market share to 26% of the tablet market. By growing double digits, Apple added 2 percentage points to its market share year-over-year. Apple is attempting to remake the computing market with more mobile iPad Pros for productivity while offering lower priced iPad slates for entertainment. The product mix tilted toward iPad Pro due to the launch of its newest products in that line and boosted ASPs to $463 this quarter from $445 in 2017.

“Meanwhile, Android shipments fell to 32.9m units worldwide in Q4 2018, down 6% from 34.9m a year earlier and up 35% sequentially. Market share fell 3 percentage points year-on-year to 60% as many branded Android vendors find it very difficult to compete on price in the wake of Apple lowering its iPad prices. The slate market is particularly sensitive to price and the Android segment is dominated by Slate models.”

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The market shrank overall, by 1%. That’s not “recovering”; that’s “stabilising”. Tablets don’t seem to be going away, but neither are they taking everything over.

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Ultraviolet shuts down: cloud locker closes this summer • Variety

Janko Roettgers:

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The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the industry consortium that has been tasked with running Ultraviolet, will shut down the service on July 31.

DECE will start to inform its users of the wind-down this Thursday, and is advising users to not delete their Ultraviolet movie libraries. Users should instead make sure that their libraries are connected to the service of at least one retailer, which they can then use to access their movies and TV shows going forward, according to an FAQ document that is slated to be published on Ultraviolet’s website on Thursday morning.

DECE president Wendy Aylsworth told Variety in an exclusive interview this week that the decision to discontinue Ultraviolet was a response to the evolution of the market for online entertainment. “The marketplace for collecting entertainment content was very small when Ultraviolet started,” she said. “It was siloed into walled gardens at the time.”

Since then, services had become more comprehensive, giving fans of movies and TV shows more options to access and collect their titles. Aylsworth acknowledged that there has also been a move toward subscription services, but said ownership of movie and TV show collections would continue to play a significant role for the industry going forward. “It’s very clear to us that it is on very sound footing,” she said.

Ultraviolet launched in 2011 with support from all of the major Hollywood studios except Disney. The service also had buy-in from Lionsgate and other independent studios, and struck partnerships with online retailers, including Walmart’s Vudu service, FandangoNow, and some of the online services run by studios like Sony Pictures.

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Inevitable. Never saw why one would go with that when services like iTunes and Netflix were available.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified