Endangered species? Apple outsold the entire Swiss watch industry in 2019, analysts say. CC-licensed photo by kitchener.lord 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Clearview AI: Google and YouTube send cease-and-desist letter to facial recognition app • CBS News

Gisela Perez and Hilary Cook:

»

Google and YouTube have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, a facial recognition app that scrapes images from websites and social media platforms, CBS News has learned. The tech companies join Twitter, which sent a similar letter in January, in trying to block the app from taking pictures from their platforms.

Clearview AI can identify a person by comparing their picture to its database of three billion images from the internet, and the results are 99.6% accurate, CEO Hoan Ton-That told CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett. The app is only available to law enforcement to be used to identify criminals, Ton-That said.

“You have to remember that this is only used for investigations after the fact. This is not a 24/7 surveillance system,” he said. 

But YouTube, which is owned by Google, and Twitter say the company is violating their policies.  

“YouTube’s Terms of Service explicitly forbid collecting data that can be used to identify a person. Clearview has publicly admitted to doing exactly that, and in response we sent them a cease and desist letter,” YouTube Spokesperson Alex Joseph said in a statement to CBS News.

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As with Twitter, my question is: how are they going to identify which ones are their images? See the next link for one way that Facebook might do, but I think this is a stable door slamming on empty space.
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Using ‘radioactive data’ to detect if a data set was used for training • Facebook AI

Alexandre Sablayrolles, Matthijs Douze and Hervé Jégou:

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We have developed a new technique to mark the images in a data set so that researchers can determine whether a particular machine learning model has been trained using those images. This can help researchers and engineers to keep track of which data set was used to train a model so they can better understand how various data sets affect the performance of different neural networks.

We call this new verification method “radioactive” data because it is analogous to the use of radioactive markers in medicine: Drugs such as barium sulphate allow doctors to see certain conditions more clearly on computerized tomography (CT) scans or other X-ray exams. We introduce unique marks that are harmless and have no impact on the classification accuracy of models, but remain present through the learning process and are detectable with high confidence in a neural network. Our method provides a level of confidence (p-value) that a radioactive data set was used to train a particular model.

Radioactive data differs from previous approaches that aim at “poisoning” training sets in an imperceptible way such that trained models will generalize poorly.

«

Fairly sure this is a reaction to Clearview AI – and a warning to it to stay off the lawns.
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The mysterious disappearance of Google’s click metric • ZDNet

Tom Foremski:

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Take a look at this chart: As long as Google can keep growing the blue line –– growth of paid clicks –– faster than the red line –– its ad click deflation –– then it is golden. 

Every three months Google has to find faster ways of expanding the total number of paid clicks by as much as 66%. How is this a sustainable business model? 

There is an upper limit to how much more expansion in paid links can be found especially with the shift to mobile platforms and the constraints of the display.  

And what does this say about the effectiveness of Google’s ads? They aren’t very good and their value is declining at an astounding and unstoppable pace. 

To survive, Google must find ways of showing even more ads. This is the future with Google — more ads in more places. Or rather, more ineffective ads in more places. This is an unsustainable business model. 

«

But, as Foremski points out, as of this latest quarter Google has stopped reporting both the CPC and the growth of paid clicks. There can’t really be a justification for that; it’s not as if the CEO of Alphabet (who is also the CEO of Google) doesn’t see those numbers and rely on them to understand the business, which was the SEC’s rationale for wanting to see YouTube revenues (at least).

Ben Thompson may have been correct about Peak Google; just slightly early.
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A mile wide, an inch deep: online news and media use in the 2019 UK General Election • Reuters Institute Digital News Report

Richard Fletcher, Nic Newman and Anne Schulz:

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This report presents the most detailed and comprehensive analysis to date of news use during the 2019 UK General Election. It is based on a unique tracking study of the online news consumption of 1,711 people aged 18-65 across mobile and desktop devices throughout the campaign (spanning six weeks), combined with surveys with a subset of 752 panellists fielded before and after the vote, asking them about the relative importance of offline and online news and their attitudes to the media and politics more widely.

We show that online news sources (including news websites/apps and social media) are more widely used than any other source among those with internet access. Online news use during the election had wide reach, but limited engagement.

«

Among the findings:

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Almost three-quarters (72%) visited a news site to read a news story during the campaign. BBC News was by far the most widely used online source for election news. It was accessed by more than four in ten of our sample (44%) during the course of the election and was the main destination for election results.

Only 3% of all internet time was spent with news. On average, people spent 16 minutes per week with news and made around 22 news visits each week across web and mobile during the campaign. While election news made up around half (51%) of the most viewed stories in the first week, the proportion declined to just 24% later in the campaign.

«

And:

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Much of this news consumption came from websites committed to impartial coverage and those that made no party endorsement (33%). Just under one third (31%) came from outlets that endorsed the Conservative Party and one in eight (12%) from outlets that endorsed the Labour Party. Alternative brands such as the Canary, Novara Media on the left and Breitbart on the right – along with foreign sites like Russia Today and Sputnik – played a relatively small part with just 1% share of the time spent with news, about 0.02% of the time people spent online during the election.

«

More analysis by Adam Tinworth; he’s not reassured by it.
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Chrome ad blocker to target three annoying video ads • 9to5Google

Abner Li:

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Last year, Google made Chrome’s standards-backed ad blocker fully available around the world. The Better Ads Standards today announced a “new set of standards for ads that show during video content,” with changes in Chrome set to be applied later this year.

These video ad standards are based on research from 45,000 consumers worldwide, and identified three experiences that “people find to be particularly disruptive on video content that is less than 8 minutes long.” This guidance for short-form video applies to desktop, mobile web, and apps.

Long, non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video and that cannot be skipped within the first 5 seconds.

Mid-roll ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video, interrupting the user’s experience.
Image or text ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or cover more than 20% of the video content.

The Coalition for Better Ads group has mandated that websites stop showing these ads over the next four months, or risk losing advertising completely. Chrome enforcement begins August 5, 2020, and will see the browser “stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these disruptive ads.”

«

So here’s an antitrust question. Google gets to decide what ad formats Chrome will display. Google provides ads in specific formats. Chrome dominates the browser market. Google is using the dominance of Chrome to prevent rival advertisers from making ads they want to, raising the cost of ads. Antitrust breach, surely. Change my mind if you can.
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No handshakes at Mobile World Congress as virus spreads • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman and Thomas Seal:

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Two smartphone makers canceled events at the world’s biggest mobile technology showcase in response to the coronavirus outbreak, and organizers reinforced hygiene protocol for people still planning to attend.

Delegates were warned to avoid handshakes, and microphones will be changed for different conference speakers in an effort to avoid infections at MWC Barcelona, an annual event that’s set to draw around 100,000 people from around the world to the Spanish city from Feb. 24 to 27.

This year’s conference is supposed to be a launch pad for a renewed push on 5G devices. However, South Korea’s LG Electronics said it’s withdrawing from exhibiting at the conference because most health experts advised against “needlessly” exposing hundreds of employees to international travel.

Shenzhen, China-based ZTE Corp., which makes smartphones and wireless networking equipment, cited difficulties in traveling out of China while virus-containment restrictions are in place, and so it’s canceling its MWC press conference, though it will still send a delegation.

The two companies usually occupy two of the largest, most central exhibition zones at the Fira Gran Via venue, and both were expected to contribute to an industrywide push to make the newest generation of networking and devices mainstream this year.

ZTE plans to roll out “a wide variety of new 5G devices” and will keep its usual exhibition spot. LG, keen to match compatriot arch rival Samsung Electronics Co., maintains an outsize presence at the show even when it doesn’t launch any major new products, and so its absence this year will be obvious to attendees.

«

Is the suggestion that holding a press conference brings lots of potentially unhealthy people together in one place? I don’t get it – if that’s the rationale, you don’t go to MWC at all.

(Also: Bloomberg’s headline called it “global wireless conference”. The whole mobile world knows it’s MWC, and knows it as MWC. If you don’t know what it is, “global wireless conference” won’t explain it.)
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The Nevada caucuses won’t use the Shadow app, per the state Democratic Party • Vox

Cameron Peters:

»

Party officials are scrambling to avoid a similar fate in the Nevada caucuses, the third early-state contest scheduled for February 22.

Previously, multiple news outlets reported that the Nevada caucuses would also rely on the faulty app developed by Shadow Inc., which markets itself as a progressive “tech infrastructure” company supporting the Democratic Party. The state is also operating under the same rule changes — adding in a few more complexities.

In a statement released Tuesday, the Nevada Democratic Party was quick to clarify that it plans to have things go differently.

“NV Dems can confidently say that what happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada,” state Democratic Party Chair William McCurdy II said.

Exactly how they’ll turn that promise into a reality — beyond vowing not to use the same app — remains unclear.

«

Maybe they could call an organisation which sells an appropriate technology?

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Apple Watch outsells the entire Swiss Watch industry in 2019 • Strategy Analytics

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According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, Apple Watch outsold the entire Swiss watch industry by a huge margin in 2019. Apple Watch shipped 31 million units worldwide in 2019, compared with 21 million for all Swiss watch brands combined. Swiss companies, like Swatch, are losing the smartwatch wars.

Steven Waltzer, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, “We estimate Apple Watch shipped 30.7 million units worldwide in 2019, growing a healthy 36% from 22.5 million in 2018. A blend of attractive design, user-friendly tech and sticky apps makes the Apple Watch wildly popular in North America, Western Europe and Asia.”

Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “We estimate the entire Swiss watch industry together shipped 21.1 million units worldwide in 2019, falling 13% from 24.2 million in 2018. Analog wristwatches remain popular among older consumers, but younger buyers are tipping toward smartwatches and computerized wristwear.”

«

Plus the replacement rate for Apple Watches is going to be way higher than for Swiss watches. They’re facing the classic high-end disruption problem that Nokia and others faced when the iPhone arrived in 2017: they’re OK at the hardware, but the software utterly eludes them. This time, though, there isn’t a more-than-good-enough Android to save them. (Not that it saved Nokia or BlackBerry either.)
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💭🦠 Six ways coronavirus will change our world • Exponential View

Azeem Azhar:

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The pandemic virus, 2019-nCoV, is testing many of the assumptions of a highly interconnected, modern, globalised world. This 120nm virus, small to us, large by viral standards, is shining a light on many of our ways of living. It is a clash between traditional lifestyles, civets and bats in a ‘wet market’, and a technocratic, intraconnected China of high-speed rail, WeChat, drones and more.

The epidemic has had a mild personal impact. A trip to Hong Kong cancelled, replaced by early morning video conference calls. Cathay Pacific and Marriott are the losers of this adaptation. 

More strikingly, the outbreak has showed the strengths and weakness of our interconnected world. It’s making me wonder, are we resilient enough?

«

The six ways – open-source scientific collaboration, quarantines enabled by digital systems, more on genomics, “remote everything”, more self-sufficiency, and (unfortunately) more populism – make a lot of sense. Worth reading in much more detail though.
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Presentation: Standing on the shoulders of giants • Benedict Evans

»

Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ looks at what it means that 4bn people have a smartphone; we connected everyone, and now we wonder what the Next Big Thing is, but meanwhile, connecting everyone means we connected all the problems. Tech is becoming a regulated industry, but we don’t really know what that will mean.

«

The video might be useful, but you get the idea. And there’s a video of the post-presentation Q+A.
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Navigating online controversy in an age of unrelenting, exhausting, ubiquitous bullshit: the American Dirt story (updated) • Singal-Minded

Jesse Singal:

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There were certain problems with how American Dirt, the novel by Jeanine Cummins that is currently one of the hottest-selling titles on Amazon, and which was chosen by Oprah for her super-famous book club, was written and publicized. 

But how severe were those problems? And which of them were actual, you know, problems, rather than the inevitable outrage-overgrowth that instantly sprouts, kudzulike, during any sort of online pileon, suffocating reasoned conversation?

If you read most journalistic coverage of this controversy, you will not be informed. If anything, you will end up more misinformed than you were when you started. And that’s a useful problem to explore given where journalism is right now. I haven’t read American Dirt, so I can’t speak directly to the plot. But the book itself isn’t actually the point I’m interested in: Rather, I want to talk about the nature of how this controversy — and seemingly every controversy, these days — is being covered by mainstream media outlets.

«

Mainstream-ish outlets, but his takedown resonates: as he says, it degenerates into rightside norms versus accuracy norms.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Iowa, this was good enough for caucus voting, but not enough for reporting their results CC-licensed photo by Phil Roeder 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 9 links for you. Tell us how you feel about it, Howard Dean. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How a bad app—not the Russians—plunged Iowa into chaos • The Atlantic

Zeynep Tufekci:

»

why bother hacking the system? Anything developed this rapidly that has not been properly stress-tested—and is being used in the wild by thousands of people at the same time—is likely to crash the first time it is deployed. This has happened before, to Orca, Mitt Romney’s Election Day app, which was supposed to help volunteers get voters to the polls, but instead was overwhelmed by traffic and stopped working, leaving thousands of fuming voters without rides. It happened in 2008 to Barack Obama’s app, dubbed Houdini, which also crashed on Election Day. It happened to HealthCare.gov—the website that was launched to help people find coverage under the Affordable Care Act, but that failed so badly, it took a team of people from Silicon Valley who quickly and voluntarily left their much cushier jobs and worked seven-day weeks for months to fix it.

Immediately after it became clear that the Iowa Democratic Party was unable to produce results and, worse, was talking about “inconsistencies” in results, Donald Trump surrogates started talking up how this must have been a fix perpetrated by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), perhaps in hopes of riling up supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders who were already suspicious of the party establishment. Some Sanders supporters, wary after a last-minute poll widely expected to show a Sanders surge was scrapped due to errors, needed no such encouragement, and suspected that this was designed to trip up the momentum their candidate expected from his anticipated win. (To which I can only say: The DNC isn’t competent enough to pull off such a plot.)

«

Also worth reading on this: Vice’s investigation, which found that the two-factor authentication was screwed up on the app, which the DNC spent the grand total of $60,000 to build. It didn’t work on a number of phones (expectations are high it’s just a web app with some OS-friendly clothes).

The DNC really is incompetent on computing, which is quite the miss given its importance in the 21st century.
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Apple patents foldable device with movable flaps to prevent display from creasing • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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Apple this week has been granted a patent for a foldable device with a unique hinge mechanism that utilizes movable flaps to help prevent the display from being creased or damaged when folded.

Published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today, the patent explains that the hinge mechanism would ensure adequate separation between the first and second portions of the display. When the device is unfolded, movable flaps would extend to cover the gap, and then retract when the device is folded.

Early foldable smartphones like Samsung’s Galaxy Fold and Huawei’s Mate X have noticeable creases along the bending portion of the display. Motorola’s new foldable Razr avoids this issue with a unique hinge design, but early reviews indicate the device makes creaking sounds when opened or closed.

«

Clever (and a useful illustration). Still don’t see the point, but this may be saying “we’ve looked at this and we’re staking out this part of the ground, so don’t go there”.
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US pushing effort to develop 5G alternative to Huawei • WSJ

Bob Davis and Drew FitzGerald:

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the White House is working with U.S. technology companies to create advanced software for next-generation 5G telecommunications networks.

The plan would build on efforts by some U.S. telecom and technology companies to agree on common engineering standards that would allow 5G software developers to run code atop machines that come from nearly any hardware manufacturer. That would reduce, if not eliminate, reliance on Huawei equipment.

Companies including Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. and AT&T are part of the effort, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said.

“The big-picture concept is to have all of the U.S. 5G architecture and infrastructure done by American firms, principally,” Mr. Kudlow said in an interview. “That also could include Nokia and Ericsson because they have big U.S. presences.”

The U.S. contends Huawei has strong links to the Chinese military, making use of its equipment a national-security risk. Huawei has denied such links and says it operates independently.

Mr. Kudlow said Dell founder Michael Dell was a strong backer of the project, noting that software is becoming more important as 5G develops.

“Dell and Microsoft are now moving very rapidly to develop software and cloud capabilities that will, in fact, replace a lot of the equipment,” he said. “To quote Michael Dell, ‘Software is eating the hardware in 5G’,” Mr. Kudlow said.

«

I bet Dell would love to get any part of that money it can. Also: this will be a money spigot, with little benefit, apart maybe to Nikia and Ericsson.
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Amid coronavirus fears, a mask shortage could spread globally • WIRED

Maryn McKenna:

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for people who anticipate a pandemic—an expanding epidemic that rapidly crosses borders—the [face] masks blanketing China have an unsettling second meaning. They are a reminder that Chinese manufacturing is the source of most of the world’s masks and respirators. Now that the vast country is using more masks than it ever has before, fewer of them will likely be available to the countries that have been China’s regular customers.

That includes the United States. According to data compiled by the US Department of Health and Human Services, 95% of the surgical masks used in the US and 70% of the respirators—thicker, tight-fitting masks that offer better protection against viruses—are made overseas. That leaves the mask supply vulnerable to labor disruption if a pandemic sickens manufacturing workers, as well as to flat-out diversion if a government decides to keep its own stock at home.

“This is 100% a vulnerability,” says Saskia Popescu, a biosecurity expert who is the senior infection-prevention epidemiologist in an Arizona hospital system. “Personal protective equipment is always going to be a problem when there is an outbreak of something novel, because public health guidance will be unclear at first and there will be a run on supplies. Masks being made offshore is one more stress on the system.”

Demand for masks is enormous in China. Manufacturing has ramped up rapidly, according to the state-affiliated China Global Television Network, with factories churning out 20 million masks a day. Yet on Monday morning, the Chinese foreign ministry said masks and safety goggles that protect doctors’ eyes were running out within the country, and it issued an international appeal for more.

«

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Parents more concerned about their children online • Ofcom

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More parents than ever feel children’s online use now carries more risks than benefits, according to Ofcom’s latest research into children’s media and online lives.

Our Children’s Media Use and Attitudes report 2019 is based on around 3,500 interviews with children and parents. Children’s Media Lives is a qualitative report looking at how children aged eight to 18 think about and use digital media.

Parents and carers are becoming more likely to trust their children with greater digital independence at a younger age. But far fewer believe the benefits of their child being online outweigh the risks than five years ago. And around two million parents now feel the internet does their children more harm than good.

This comes as children are now more likely to see hateful content online. Half of 12-15s who go online had seen hateful content in the last year, up from a third in 2016.

Parents are increasingly concerned about their child seeing something online which might encourage them to harm themselves. Similarly, two gaming-related problems are increasingly concerning parents: the pressure on their child to make in-game purchases of things like ‘loot boxes’, a virtual item containing rewards; and the possibility of their child being bullied via online games.

«

Plus three trends: “the ‘Greta effect'”, “the vlogger next door”, and “girl gamers”. Plus children using phones and WhatsApp from very early ages.
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Instagram said to generate more than a quarter of Facebook sales • Bloomberg

Sarah Frier and Nico Grant:

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Instagram, the photo-sharing app Facebook Inc. acquired for $715m in 2012, generated more than a quarter of the social-media company’s revenue last year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The app brought in about $20bn in advertising revenue in 2019, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because the figures aren’t public. That beats Google video unit YouTube, which recorded $15.1bn in ad sales – a number parent company Alphabet Inc. revealed Monday for the first time. Facebook declined to comment.

Instagram has become increasingly central to Facebook’s future, with users and advertisers flocking to the app even as sales growth slows at the main social network. Still, Facebook doesn’t disclose revenue for Instagram separately in earnings reports, instead preferring to highlight the integration of its properties, branding them as a “family of apps.” The team in charge of direct messaging on Instagram, for example, now reports to the Facebook Messenger team, and the company is changing Instagram’s branding to “Instagram from Facebook.” Instagram has more than 1 billion users, a figure Facebook hasn’t updated since 2018.

«

That makes Instagram a gazillion times more profitable than YouTube, which has to give back a sizeable chunk of money to creators. Instagram? Not a penny. And its costs are lower: it’s serving photos, not videos – less storage, less bandwidth.

Plus Facebook waited for Google to be forced to announce YouTube’s revenues, and then decided whether to leak this. Quite the poke in the eye.
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In secret deal with drugmaker, health-records tool pushed opioids • Los Angeles Times

Emma Court:

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To doctors opening patients’ electronic records across the U.S., the alert would have looked innocuous enough.

A pop-up would appear, asking about a patient’s level of pain. Then, a drop-down menu would list treatments ranging from a referral to a pain specialist to a prescription for an opioid painkiller.

Click a button, and the program would create a treatment plan. From 2016 to spring 2019, the alert went off about 230 million times.

The tool existed thanks to a secret deal. Its maker, a software company called Practice Fusion, was paid by a major opioid manufacturer to design it in an effort to boost prescriptions for addictive pain pills — even though overdose deaths had almost tripled during the previous 15 years, creating a public-health disaster. The software was used by tens of thousands of doctors’ offices.

Its existence was revealed this week thanks to a government investigation. Practice Fusion agreed to pay $145m to resolve civil and criminal cases, according to documents filed in a federal court in Vermont. Practice Fusion admitted to the scheme. The opioid maker was not named, though the details of the government case closely match a public research partnership between Practice Fusion and Purdue Pharma Inc., which makes OxyContin.

Representatives for Purdue Pharma and the Vermont U.S. attorney declined to comment.

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I bet they declined. This is the darkest of dark patterns. The Vantablack of dark patterns.
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Twitter says an attacker used its API to match usernames to phone numbers • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

Twitter said the attack took place on December 24, 2019, and the attacker used a large network of fake accounts to exploit its API.

“We are disclosing this out of an abundance of caution and as a matter of principle,” Twitter said.

The company said it “immediately suspended these accounts” and continued to investigate the incident, which it finally disclosed today, as it learned more about what happened.

“While we identified accounts located in a wide range of countries engaging in these behaviors, we observed a particularly high volume of requests coming from individual IP addresses located within Iran, Israel, and Malaysia,” the company added.

Twitter said that some of these IP addresses may have ties with a state-sponsored actor, a term used to described either government intelligence agencies, or third-party hacking groups that benefit from a government’s backing.

According to Twitter, the attackers used an API endpoint that allows new account holders to find people they know on Twitter. The API endpoint allows users to submit phone numbers and matches them to known Twitter accounts – but only if Twitter users enabled an option in their settings section to allow phone number-based matching.

“People who did not have this setting enabled or do not have a phone number associated with their account were not exposed by this vulnerability,” Twitter said.

«

The choice of date is instructive: attack when people are likely to be less than attentive, and where if it is noticed, the next-day followup will be lacking. It’s the cyber-equivalent of drilling into a bank vault on the Thursday night of Easter.

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Gymshark influencers and branded fitness plans: a new world of training • Mel Magazine

Hussein Kesvani:

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There’s a small thumb drive in my desk that contains the secrets of how to attain the body of a Greek god (or Mark Wahlberg). On it, there are comprehensive workout plans, diets, supplement recommendations and tools to calculate the precise amount of macronutrients necessary for me to get shredded. It’s the kind of information that celebrity fitness trainers protect as highly guarded secrets, leaving Reddit’s fitness enthusiasts to speculate and obsess over it. Some people would pay good money for what’s on this thumb drive.

In fact, Marco, a pseudonymous 18-year-old from Austin, Texas, tells me that he’s made close to $300 selling such fitness plans to his Instagram followers. The thing is, Marco didn’t write any of them. If anything, he prefers playing soccer to hitting the gym and loathes the taste of protein shakes. Rather, he obtained 10 gigs’ worth of this intel from an anonymous Reddit user who had leaked dozens of exclusive, subscriber-only workout and diet plans created by the internet’s most notable fitness influencers, many of whom are associated with the sports lifestyle brand Gymshark. 

In modern gym culture, the “fitness plan” is more than just a routine to help newbies — it serves as a bespoke piece of branding, too.

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And it isn’t! The joy of “influencers”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Imagine if you started with a blank slate: is this how you would lay out the buttons on a phone? That was Bell’s problem 70 years ago. CC-licensed photo by Chris Campbell 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. You say corona, I say bologna. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Here are the most common Airbnb scams worldwide • VICE

Anna Merlan, following on from fellow Vice writer Allie Conti getting scammed on the site:

»

Hoping to get a better sense of the issue, we asked readers to tell us about their own experiences using Airbnb. In response, we got nearly 1,000 emails, many of them outlining similar tales of deception.

The stories quickly started to fall into easily discernible categories. Scammers all over the world, it seems, have figured how best to game the Airbnb platform: by engaging in bait and switches; charging guests for fake damages; persuading people to pay outside the Airbnb app; and, when all else fails, engaging in clumsy or threatening demands for five-star reviews to hide the evidence of what they’ve done. (Or, in some cases, a combination of several of these scams.)

In the aggregate, these emails paint a portrait of a platform whose creators are fundamentally unable to track what goes on within it, and point to easily exploitable loopholes that scammers have steamed their way through by the truckload. After Conti’s story, Airbnb promised to “verify” all 7 million listings on the site by December 2020. Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO and co-founder, said at the DealBook conference that the verification process is part of a dawning realisation that, as he put it, “we have to take more responsibility for stuff on our platform.”

“I think many of us in this industry … are going from a hands-off model, where the Internet’s an immune system, to realising that’s not really enough, that we have to take more responsibility for the stuff on our platform,” he said. “And I think this has been a gradual, maybe too gradual, transition for our industry.”

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Oh, now you’re realising, Brian. Meanwhile, a load of people get scammed.
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Censorship claims emerge as TikTok gets political in India • BBC News

Nilesh Christopher:

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In one of the videos, Mr Barman is dressed as a Muslim man wearing a white prayer cap who is being carried by a Hindu man as harmonious music plays in the background. In another popular skit, he is dressed as a Muslim writer from Pakistan who is in India to research a book and is greeted and hosted by two gleeful Hindu strangers.

The fact that a young Hindu man from the Indian city of Bhopal was uploading videos promoting brotherhood and peace between Hindus and Muslims captured significant attention, earning him the moniker of top “humanity” content creator.

But over the past four months, TikTok India has been restricting the reach of his account to stay away from such “risky” content, he says, adding that he has lost some 25,000 followers since the end of October.

In particular, his videos were no longer suggested on the front page, where TikTok gives tailored recommendations of creators and hashtags for users to discover.

“My videos used to get an average of 200,000 views but it’s now down to 8,000 views. None of my videos show up on the ‘For You’ page,” Mr Barman says.

He says his account started losing prominence last year, around the time a backlash began against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) – a controversial law which offers Indian citizenship to non-Muslims fleeing religious persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

The law sparked fears it would marginalise India’s Muslim minority, triggering protests. In the past few months, many of TikTok’s 200 million Indian users have posted skits and songs on the app to voice their own opposition.

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If TikTok really thought that (a) it wouldn’t get teens being political (b) people wouldn’t notice when it downrated them, it really didn’t think it through.
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YouTube is a $15 billion-a-year business, Google reveals for the first time • The Verge

Nick Statt:

»

YouTube generated nearly $5bn in ad revenue in the three months to the end of December, Google revealed today as part of parent company Alphabet’s fourth quarter earnings report. This is the first report under newly instated Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who took over as the chief executive of the entire company late last year after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back from day-to-day duties and promoted Pichai, formerly Google CEO, to the top spot.

The announcement marks the first time in YouTube’s nearly 15 years as a Google-owned platform, since Google bought the website in 2006 for $1.65 billion, that the company has revealed how much money YouTube-hosted ads contribute to the search giant’s bottom line.

On an annual basis, Google says YouTube generated $15bn last year and contributed roughly 10% to all Google revenue. Those figures make YouTube’s ad business nearly one-fifth the size of Facebook’s, and more than six times larger than all of Amazon-owned Twitch.

Separately, Google says YouTube has more than 20 million subscribers across its Premium (ad-free YouTube) and Music Premium offerings, as well as more than 2 million subscribers to its paid TV service.

«

The suspicion is that it did this to help mask an $800m on forecast revenue, but revealing revenue is long-term; it wouldn’t make sense to break it out just for a single revenue miss.

What would be really telling – if it’s possible – would be knowing whether YouTube is profitable. I’d guess it’s a pretty close-run thing: it must have to give away a sizeable chunk of that revenue, and video servers aren’t cheap to run. Plus the moderation cost is wayyyy higher for YouTube than for Google itself. (You can look at the financial statement and try to tease it out.)
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Addressable TV: the pros and cons of ads made just for you • Raconteur

Alex Brownsell:

»

A new era is underway in which media companies can show different ads to different households while they are watching the same programme. More than half of UK households have connected their TV sets to the internet, according to Ofcom figures. Where TV ads have traditionally been traded against a limited number of pre-determined audience segments, addressability enables advertisers to target based on a multitude of location, demographic and behavioural criteria.

In some instances, as was the case with McDonald’s, the advertiser’s motivation is simply practical: the fast food chain was introducing a new menu to selected branches and wanted to minimise the number of people left disappointed if the latest burgers were not available at their local restaurant.

Addressable TV also opens the possibility for brands to target individual households with messages relevant to that viewer and their place in the purchase journey. For instance, if occupants have been scrolling through social media content relating to new cars, an automotive brand can run an ad suggesting a test drive at their local dealership.

Perhaps most significantly, advancements in dynamic ad insertion have paved the way for marketers to address specific audiences with assets tailored to their tastes and preferences, calling into question the very future of the traditional TV ad as we know it.

«

Which is why you shouldn’t connect your TV to the internet, in my view.
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Why I’m joining 6CVentures • Medium

Sameer Singh:

»

Today, I’m joining 6CVentures, a new early stage venture capital firm, as Partner and Head of Research. Long story short, we’re a sector-agnostic fund investing at the Pre-Seed and Seed stage (so if you’re an entrepreneur at this stage, reach out). I will be spending a lot of time in the coming months talking about our investment thesis on 6CV Perspective, but I wanted to start on a personal note.

About 18 months ago, I began thinking of moving back to venture capital. I have been a visible technology commentator in the past and was a seed-stage investor in India before moving to the UK. At least to me, venture capital seemed like a natural fit. But reaching out to VC firms was more challenging than I expected. I quickly learnt that personal introductions/references were the most effective way to reach a VC. I had only been in the country for a few years, so that was clearly a problem for me. It took me the better part of 18 months to build some semblance of a network in the space, through angel investing and working through the contacts I did have.

This experience was eye-opening for me, because I clearly come from a privileged background. If it was this hard for me to get introductions, how much harder would it be for founders who don’t have the advantages I have?

«

Sameer has always been an insightful analyst of technology; it will be really interesting to see what he thinks is worth funding.
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The 17 designs that Bell almost used for the layout of telephone buttons • The Atlantic

Megan Garber:

»

This layout is so standardized that we think about it as almost inevitable. But the layout was, in the 1950s, the result of a good deal of strategizing and testing on the part of the people of Bell Labs. And Numberphile has dug up an amazing paper — published in the July 1960 issue of “The Bell System Technical Journal” — that details the various alternative designs the Bell engineers considered for the layout. Among them: “the staircase” (II-B in the image above), “the ten-pin” (III-B, reminiscent of bowling-pin configurations), “the rainbow” (II-C), and various other versions that mimicked the circular logic of the existing dialing technology: the rotary. 

Everything was on the table for the layout of the ten buttons; the researchers’ only objective was to find the configuration that would be as user-friendly, and efficient, as possible. So they ran tests. They experimented. They sought input. They briefly considered a layout that mimicked a cross.

«

They really, really didn’t limit themselves. It’s quite wild in parts.
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Is Siri a spy? Why my Apple iPad changed after hearing Spanish at home • USA Today

Jennifer Jolly:

»

I watch most TV shows and movies on my iPad these days, and something strange happened recently. My iPad – or rather apps such as Hulu and Bravo linked via Apple TV on my iPad – started showing me commercials in Spanish. 

That was interesting, since I hadn’t touched the language settings, watched any shows in Spanish, or done any kind of internet activity in another language. But even more curious, was what had changed when the new commercials popped up.

We had just moved to a more Spanish-speaking area of Oakland, California. While I don’t speak Spanish (very well at least), my husband does and was doing so daily with contractors in our new house within “earshot” of my iPad. 

Could this timing and sudden sprinkling of Spanish commercials for insurance, seatbelt safety, and affordable college degrees be mere coincidence? Or was it a clear sign of location-based tracking? With Siri voice-assistance active, is my gadget, or the TV apps on it, specifically working to better predict my wants and needs – and providing Spanish speaking commercials – to be more “helpful?”

…“The simple answer is no, your (gadget) is not likely actively listening to your conversations,” Northeastern Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science David Choffnes told me over the phone. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t (enabling the collection of) millions of data points to know who you are, where you live, what stores you shop at, where your kids go to school, and just about everything else.”

Choffnes also explained that some of the most basic tracking for advertising uses our IP address and that since I had just moved, “maybe you got someone else’s address,” he surmised. “I don’t know that for sure, but it’s not uncommon.”

Sure enough, when I deleted and then reinstalled both the Bravo and Hulu apps now that we have our router all set-up in our new home, I didn’t get any more commercials in other languages.

«

Which is quite creepy. But wouldn’t the download have come from the same IP address? (Thanks Nic for the link.)
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Trump’s titanic gift to China’s solar panel makers • Bloomberg

Brian Eckhouse:

»

For most of the past year, there’s been a big hole in President Trump’s China tariffs—one in the shape of a solar panel. Companies that build America’s major solar farms spent 2018 and early 2019 begging the administration to exempt jumbo versions of two-sided “bifacial” panels used to create vast, utility-scale solar farms. Relatively few bifacials are made domestically. For some reason, when the administration finally agreed to issue an exemption, it was much broader than the industry had suggested. So broad, in fact, that it reshaped the market and left Chinese panel makers as dominant as ever.

Since June, all bifacial panels have been tariff-free, and Chinese panel makers are turning the once-niche design into a cornerstone of their U.S.-aimed product lines. A trade court has temporarily blocked the White House’s efforts to kill the exemption. Trump is expected to decide as soon as next month, as part of a scheduled review, whether to make the otherwise-harsh solar tariffs even harsher.

Trade adviser Peter Navarro has said “the loophole for bifacial solar panels China is currently exploiting needs to be slammed shut.” The White House declined to comment.

Solar power is one of America’s cheapest sources of electricity, and installing it is one of its fastest-growing occupations. Chinese companies’ cheap panels are a big reason: “They’ve lowered the price of solar for the whole world,” says Noah Kaufman, a Columbia economist with a focus on global energy policy. They also crowded out domestic U.S. manufacturing, meaning the White House could satisfy ailing homegrown panel makers as well as its favored fossil fuel industries by making the Chinese models less competitive.

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The Trump admin is so adept at shooting itself in the foot; it’s the only thing it is good at. I often tell myself that it might be a good thing they’re in power now rather than, say, during the Cuban Missile Crisis or in 2001.
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Huge success in business is largely based on luck, says new research • The Conversation

Chengwei Liu is an associate professor of strategy and behavioural science at Warwick Business School:

»

Bestselling business books promise to teach you the winning formula and reveal the secrets of success. But the inconvenient truth is that exceptional successes in business are largely based on luck. No rule exists for achieving exceptional performance because it usually requires doing something different or novel and there can be no recipe for such innovation.

My new research provides systematic evidence that luck plays a critical role in such performance, not only in business but also in music, movies, science and professional sports. A key finding is that more can be gained by paying more attention to “second best”.

Let’s look at the music industry. If a new band or musician has a top 20 hit, should a music label immediately try to sign them? My analysis of 8,297 acts in the US Billboard 100 from 1980 to 2008 would suggest not. Music label bosses should instead be looking to sign up those reaching positions between 22 and 30, the “second best” in the charts.

A common feature of many artists charting in the top ranks is that they enjoyed a “runaway success”. A classic example is Gangnam Style by Korean artist PSY. The music video went viral beyond anyone’s foresight. Since such an outcome involved exceptional luck, PSY’s success is unsustainable. In fact, artists charting in the top 20 will likely see their next single achieve between 40 and 45 on average, regressing disproportionally more to the mean than their lower performing counterparts.

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Oh come on, we all know PSY’s followup single, er.. you hum it, I’ll do the words.. Not so sure how this works for sports. Always pick the runner-up? Or just that it’s luck, which I’d certainly agree with – except when it’s sustained over years.
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Google Maps hacks • SIMON WECKERT

Weckert is an artist based in Berlin:

»

99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic. ” #googlemapshacks

«

The associated paper (in English) is worth reading too, particularly for the phrase “every human being is a wandering hyperlink”. Certainly to Google they are.

So the logic of this is that if you want to have an open road behind you, fill the back seat with phones. Or, better, get someone to go on the route you want to take with their back seat full of phones so that they look like a moving jam. Except they have to move slowly enough that Google thinks it’s a jam and begins routing around it. Tricky, this hacking stuff.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This is essentially what privacy policies are, but not printed on paper. CC-licensed photo by txmx 2 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 a palindrome. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google Ads Customer Match and the future of doxxing • OneZero

Patrick Berlinquette:

»

The experiments I ran — even in the rare instances that I could be sure I was serving an ad to one person — only gave me one chance at the data. If I’m targeting a mass shooter in America with an ad (another niche group I’ve served ads to), and they search for the keywords “I am going to shoot up the school,” but they don’t click the ad and never make that search again, I lose.

But there is a way to target one person with an ad, and follow them around with ads indefinitely, all the while collecting their data. And it’s untraceable.

It is done through Google’s Customer Match feature.

Customer Match allows anyone to spy on one person for any length of time — not just within Google Search, but across all Google channels — Gmail, YouTube, apps, and websites within Google’s Display Network.

Potential applications of this:
• Plotting someone’s day-to-day movements over time
• Doxxing someone based on their search or browsing history
• Viewing the login portals someone accesses.

With Customer Match, you upload a list of emails to Google. Google then targets ads only to those emails.

Here are the steps to achieve one-to-one targeting via Customer Match:
1. Upload emails of people that live in, say, California.
2. Upload the email of “the target.”
3. Exclude Californians from seeing ads.
As long as the target is physically located outside of the excluded region, they will be the sole recipient of the ad.

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Isn’t this potentially more invasive than facial recognition? Yet in the hands of just one company.
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Why we should ban facial recognition technology • NY Mag

Max Read:

»

as the last decade has shown us, after-the-fact regulation or punishment is an ineffective method of confronting rapid, complex technological change. Time and time again, we’ve seen that the full negative implications of a given technology — say, the Facebook News Feed — are rarely felt, let alone understood, until the technology is sufficiently powerful and entrenched, at which point the company responsible for it has probably already pivoted into some complex new change.

Which is why we should ban facial-recognition technology. Or, at least, enact a moratorium on the use of facial-recognition software by law enforcement until the issue has been sufficiently studied and debated. For the same reason, we should impose heavy restrictions on the use of face data and facial-recognition tech within private companies as well. After all, it’s much harder to move fast and break things when you’re not allowed to move at all.

This position — that we should not widely deploy a new technology until its effects are understood and its uses deliberated, and potentially never deploy it at all — runs against the current of the last two decades, but it’s gaining some acceptance and momentum. As unsettling as the details of Clearview AI’s business were, the response to their disclosure from legislators and law enforcement has been heartening.

«

An outright ban is excessive. Does it have positive uses? Certainly the police will tell you so. Is it good for identifying pictures of yourself on social networks? Isn’t that useful, but not invasive? I think it needs better definition of what is too much, and I’m not sure we’ve heard that.
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The truth about “dramatic action” • China Media Project

Da Shiji:

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According to a report in Health News (健康报), the official publication of China’s National Health Commission, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center (上海市公共卫生临床中心) had isolated a new strain of coronavirus by January 5, within just 10 days of its receiving samples from patients in Wuhan on December 26, and scientists at the center had obtained the entire genome sequence.

On January 11, on the basis of the latest research developments in Beijing and Shanghai, China officially confirmed that this new coronavirus was the pathogen causing the Wuhan pneumonia epidemic, and it shared the new coronavirus gene sequence information with the WHO.

But while the Chinese authorities informed the World Health Organization about these developments at the earliest opportunity, they did not inform their own people, but instead maintained strict secrecy. This meant no progress was made on prevention and control.

As the researcher Meng Xin put it: “The ace card [provided by scientists] was still played very poorly, because at the first opportunity politics came into play and directed strict confidentiality requirements – this can’t be talked about, that can’t be talked about, we must maintain stability, and so on. So the test reports were locked into the safety deposit box.”

«

Fascinating insight from a Wuhan resident. The effects of this on the Chinese government’s approach to social media is going to be very, very interesting. Meanwhile, via the lovely Sophie Warnes’s Fair Warning stats’n’graphics newsletter, a Reuters graphic comparing the Coronavirus with SARS and MERS. Short version: more infectious, less fatal.
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Worldwide tablet shipments continue to decline in Q4 2019 • IDC

»

The worldwide tablet market declined 0.6% year over year during the fourth quarter of 2019 (4Q19) as global shipments fell to 43.5 million units, according to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. For the full year 2019, the tablet market shrank 1.5% year over year as global shipments totaled 144 million units.

Apple maintained its lead in the holiday quarter, growing 22.7% year over year. The new iPad launched last quarter accounted for nearly 65% of their shipments and helped the company gain share to 36.5% compared to 29.6% last year. As the company’s product portfolio is moving more towards detachables, slate tablet shipments have been at an all-time low with a 79.3% decline.

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Fourth quarter is 30% of the year; Christmas is big. Notable is that Amazon slipped by nearly a third; the market for Amazon Fire tablets must be completely saturated. And it’s still Apple twice as big as Samsung, which is twice as big (nearly) as Huawei and Amazon and Lenovo. Beyond that, there’s a few “others” who have 25% of the market (and probably near-zero profit), about the same as in the PC market.
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FCC confirms carriers ‘apparently’ broke the law by selling customer location data • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

The controversy originated with a Motherboard report that made clear just how negligent carriers including T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T had gotten with selling the real-time location of their wireless subscribers. That information could trickle down to bounty hunters and complete strangers for a worryingly small amount of money — without the wireless customers ever having a clue.

Carriers tried to ease the resulting blowback by saying either they would stop their location sales practices or had already done so. AT&T even went so far as to argue it wasn’t violating any laws. But US lawmakers still wanted a better understanding of how such sensitive data was getting around so freely, which led Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) to summon Pai to an “emergency briefing” that the FCC chairman ended up skipping.

Now, after what Pai says was an “extensive investigation,” the question turns to just how severely the FCC will penalize the mobile providers involved. Will it be something substantial or merely a wrist slap that leaves no lasting reminder for the companies that gave away some of the most sensitive data your phone can produce?

«

Let’s see if Pai is going to do anything material, or if he’s just in place to Do Things That Are The Opposite Of What Obama Did. It seems to me that location data is more valuable than facial recognition systems.
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The Guardian helpfully provides Privacy Policies for the 577 Companies with whom they may share your data • CyberCrime & Doing Time

Gary Warner:

»

I thought this was a policy between me and The Guardian. Who are those “Third Party” folks you refer to?  Oh!  There they are, under “Vendors” … let’s see how many there are … so I began to count.

1, 2, 3, … 10, 20, 30, 150, good God!  How many are there?

I switched from my iPad to my desktop and exported the HTML code to get a better feel for it.

There are 577 Vendors to whom this policy applies.

And guess what, each of them helpfully has a Privacy Policy of their own!  If you would like to see what each of THEM are going to do with your data, you need to read an additional 577 Privacy Policies.

If your lawyers are anything like my lawyers, I’m sure you will want to spend the next 120 business hours reading each of these privacy policies in detail to find out what you are agreeing to.  Its several thousand pages of reading, so be sure to make a nice pot of tea before you start.

Many of these cookie providers have an Opt-Out policy of their own.  Here is the VERY IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER though.  Let’s say you were take the next two months of your life and opt-out of all 577 of these tracking cookies — perhaps especially the ones that say they provide “Precise Geographic Location Data” (Remember the NYTimes article from December 2018, “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night” — they know because you gave them PERMISSION to know!)

Now consider this … the next time you cheerfully click the “OK” button on “I accept all of your cookie policies” — you are EXPLICITLY GRANTING PERMISSION to the company that you previously opted out from TO RESTART THE COLLECTION OF YOUR INFORMATION!  One click undoes whatever privacy you think you gained for yourself.

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As he also says, it’s not as if The Guardian is the worst offender by any means. But it also means that the GDPR is ineffective in the face of adtech, which is the worst sort of hydra.
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We’re finally talking about what Apple’s Jony Ive got wrong • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

»

The only reason the Mac Pro’s form factor and overall design weren’t instantly slagged was that analysts and journalists both assumed Apple’s own software and hardware development priorities were reflected in its hardware choices. When Apple announced it would offer custom dual AMD GPUs and tie virtually all expansion to Thunderbolt, the expectation was that the company would be shifting resources to prioritize GPGPU computing and OpenCL. Apple did develop Metal and its own mobile GPU, but it didn’t pour money into building an ecosystem around AMD GPUs and their compute capabilities. The Mac Pro launched and sat, unrefreshed, until Apple replaced it last year.

One tidbit that’s emerged since Ive left Apple is that the Apple Watch Edition — a $10,000 wearable with a 2-3 year lifespan — was his own pet project. I genuinely have no idea why.

Apple’s laptop products had problems of their own. Apple is far from the first company to introduce a first-generation product with a flaw that only became apparent later. What sets Apple’s keyboard woes apart from most of these other situations is that the company proved incapable of fixing the problem. After three subsequent generations of butterfly keyboards, Apple has re-adopted the scissor design it used in 2015.

Furthermore, both the screens and the keyboards of these laptops shared a common flaw: Repairing even simple damage required extremely expensive hardware replacement. Apple later acknowledged and created a program to fix its keyboards for free, but both issues were examples of how the company’s relentless pursuit of thinness and integration had resulted in an inferior user experience.

That’s the common thread that connects these issues and separates them from some of the other controversial decisions Apple has made. In the early part of the decade, Apple was lauded for the way its minimalism made devices easier to use. From 2013 forward, its minimalistic designs began to limit or harm what users could do with its hardware.

«

There’s an excellent discussion of the extent to which Apple’s “functional” corporate structure can function (ha) without a high-level “editor” in the Steve Jobs mode on this Exponent podcast from November, with Ben Thompson and James Allworth. Ive was meant to be that editor after Jobs died, but his vision was too blinkered when it came to usability.

And by the way, some of us have been talking about what Ive got wrong for some time.
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Study of YouTube comments finds evidence of radicalization effect • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

A March 2018 New York Times article by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci set out the now widely reported thesis that YouTube is a radicalization engine. Followup reporting by journalist Kevin Roose told a compelling tale of the personal experience of an individual, Caleb Cain, who described falling down an “alt right rabbit hole” on YouTube. But researcher Manoel Horta Ribeiro, who was presenting the paper today, said the team wanted to see if they could find auditable evidence to support such anecdotes.

Their paper, called “Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube”, details a large-scale study of YouTube looking for traces of evidence — in likes, comments and views — that certain right-leaning YouTube communities are acting as gateways to fringe far-right ideologies.

Per the paper, they analyzed 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels — broadly classifying the videos into four types: Media, the Alt-lite, the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) and the Alt-right — and using user comments as a “good enough” proxy for radicalization (their data set included 72 million comments).

The findings suggest a pipeline effect over a number of years where users who started out commenting on alt-lite/IDW YouTube content shifted to commenting on extreme far-right content on the platform over time.

The rate of overlap between consumers of Media content and the Alt-right was found to be far lower.

“A significant amount of commenting users systematically migrates from commenting exclusively on milder content to commenting on more extreme content,” they write in the paper.

«

Which is why YouTube’s oft-used defence that “it’s only a tiny proportion of content that’s the problem” is foolish – perhaps knowingly so. If lots of people watch that content, it’s the relative proportion of time spent watching it that matters.
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Huawei is done with Google for good • BGR

Chris Smith:

»

Huawei’s country manager for Austria, Fred Wangfei, revealed that there is no going back to Google. That’s because Huawei doesn’t want to be in a position to have to deal with a similar ban in the future, should it ever arrive.

While Huawei has been operating a Google-less Android environment in China for years, as Google doesn’t have an official presence on Android phones there, it’ll be more challenging to replicate that in Europe and other Western markets where Android users are reliant on Google’s Play Store and the other Google apps.

However, Huawei is ready to invest $3bn this year to incentivize more than 4,000 developers to improve the HMS system. Another billion is reserved for marketing purposes.

Huawei is apparently very aware of the challenging task at hand in Europe and other regions where Android users expect Google services on their phones. One issue is getting popular US apps like Facebook and WhatsApp. Huawei plans to use the same Android OS as Google to make it as easy as possible for developers to port their apps. As for Facebook and other US developers, Huawei plans to use a local Europe-based intermediary to bring these apps to its App Gallery store, although it’s unclear whether the effort will work.

The company is apparently ready to lose some market share in the process, as 2020 will be the first year when it won’t have a new device with Google apps on board. Huawei is still able to sell products made before the ban, which allows it to preload those phones with the Google apps you’d expect to find on a new Android phone.

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I think there’s going to be a lot of those “products made before the ban” being sold this year. Fortunate really that the market is essentially stagnant, so it will make little difference (Huawei can just cut the price to reach newer parts of the market). The non-Google Apps products won’t sell outside China.
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LG mobile sees $858 m in losses in 2019 • Android Authority

C. Scott Brown:

»

In late 2018, LG brought in a so-called “turnaround expert” to lead its struggling mobile division. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn’t appear to be working too well, as LG mobile just reported massive losses on its 2019 revenue report.

According to the report, LG Mobile lost 1.01trn Korean won (~$858.34m) in 2019 based on 5.97trn Korean won (~$5.07bn) in revenue. Ouch.

LG is quick to blame a few things for the $858m loss. It says “sluggish sales of mass-tier smartphones in overseas markets” are partially to blame, while also saying “increased marketing expenses to support flagship devices” exacerbated the situation further.

What is the LG mobile division’s plan to stop the bleeding? The only commitment it makes in the report is “the introduction of new mid to premium 5G smartphones and continued cost-efficiency efforts.” What does that mean? To us, it says, “business as usual, but outsourcing more production.”

«

More recently: in the fourth quarter, it lost $285m on revenues of $1.13bn. It says it’s going to make a profit by the end of next year. At least it’s the sort of horizon where most people will have forgotten it – or else LG will just withdraw from selling mobile phones outside Asia, or perhaps South Korea.
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Homework assignment • Birchtree

Matt Birchler:

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If you work somewhere with people on computers much of the day, tomorrow take note of how many people use more than one window on screen at a time. Note that this is a per monitor thing, so no credit if they have one app on each screen. If they have one app on screen but it’s not taking up the full page, I’d count that the same, but use your discretion there on how you count it.

Let me know on Twitter what the proportion is of full screeners verses tiled windows folks.

Context: I want to hear how people around you use their computers. There has been a hubbub this week about multitasking and in my experience, almost no one uses multiple windows on screen at a time. Even very smart developers who are keenly aware of how computers work will slam any app they’re using into full screen immediately after opening it.

This is true of my wife, my friends, and my co-workers at my three most recent jobs. I’ve been the weirdo who has four apps up across two monitors!

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Personally: tons of windows. Gazillions of tabs in Safari. Multiple apps.

(I think the reason he’s asking is because of discussion about iPad multitasking, but could be wrong.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Do you really need one of these to protect yourself against “public Wi-Fi”? The EFF implies not. CC-licensed photo by Richard Patterson 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why public Wi-Fi is a lot safer than you think • Electronic Frontier Foundation

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews:

»

If you follow security on the Internet, you may have seen articles warning you to “beware of public Wi-Fi networks” in cafes, airports, hotels, and other public places. But now, due to the widespread deployment of HTTPS encryption on most popular websites, advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date and applicable to a lot fewer people than it once was.

The advice stems from the early days of the Internet, when most communication was not encrypted. At that time, if someone could snoop on your network communications—for instance by sniffing packets from unencrypted Wi-Fi or by being the NSA—they could read your email. They could also steal your passwords or your login cookies and impersonate you on your favorite sites. This was widely accepted as a risk of using the Internet. Sites that used HTTPS on all pages were safe, but such sites were vanishingly rare.

However, starting in 2010 that all changed. Eric Butler released Firesheep, an easy-to-use demonstration of “sniffing” insecure HTTP to take over people’s accounts. Site owners started to take note and realized they needed to implement HTTPS (the more secure, encrypted version of HTTP) for every page on their site…

…What about the risk of governments scooping up signals from “open” public Wi-Fi that has no password? Governments that surveill people on the Internet often do it by listening in on upstream data, at the core routers of broadband providers and mobile phone companies. If that’s the case, it means the same information is commonly visible to the government whether they sniff it from the air or from the wires.

In general, using public Wi-Fi is a lot safer than it was in the early days of the Internet. With the widespread adoption of HTTPS, most major websites will be protected by the same encryption regardless of how you connect to them.

There are plenty of things in life to worry about. You can cross “public Wi-Fi” off your list.

«

This is why every time I’m listening to a podcast and hear an advert for a VPN which talks about “risks” and “credit cards” and “public Wi-Fi” I grind my teeth. As the EFF says, it’s nonsense (though they cleverly don’t mention VPNs or their advertising; but I think the reason for their writing this message now is clear). You’re not going to have your credit card details eavesdropped on public Wi-Fi. The only reasons I can think of to use a VPN are a) you need to connect to a work network which demands point-to-point security or b) you’re in a country where you really don’t trust the government or c) you want to evade geoblocking to access some content.

But VPNs are the new antivirus – a great way for third-party suppliers to coin it. And so much more profitable than antivirus, which actually needs updates. VPNs, you just rent some fibre and bang, job done.
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Facebook to pay $550m to settle facial recognition suit • The New York Times

Natasha Singer and Mike Isaac:

»

Facebook said on Wednesday that it had agreed to pay $550m to settle a class-action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology in Illinois, giving privacy groups a major victory that again raised questions about the social network’s data-mining practices.

The case stemmed from Facebook’s photo-labeling service, Tag Suggestions, which uses face-matching software to suggest the names of people in users’ photos. The suit said the Silicon Valley company violated an Illinois biometric privacy law by harvesting facial data for Tag Suggestions from the photos of millions of users in the state without their permission and without telling them how long the data would be kept. Facebook has said the allegations have no merit.

Under the agreement, Facebook will pay $550m to eligible Illinois users and for the plaintiffs’ legal fees. The sum dwarfs the $380.5m that the Equifax credit reporting agency agreed this month to pay to settle a class-action case over a 2017 consumer data breach.

Facebook disclosed the settlement as part of its quarterly financial results, in which it took a charge on the case. The sum amounted to a rounding error for Facebook, which reported that revenue rose 25% to $21bn in the fourth quarter, compared with a year earlier, while profit increased 7% to $7.3bn.

«

I’m willing to bet that absolutely nobody in Illinois knew how long Facebook would keep the data. (Knew, not “was prepared to make a guess at”.) I’m willing to bet that Facebook didn’t know how long it would keep the data either; is “forever” too broad?
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Scientists find record warm water in Antarctica, pointing to cause behind troubling glacier melt • Phys.org

:

»

“Warm waters in this part of the world, as remote as they may seem, should serve as a warning to all of us about the potential dire changes to the planet brought about by climate change,” explains David Holland, director of New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NYU Abu Dhabi’s Center for Global Sea Level Change, which conducted the research. “If these waters are causing glacier melt in Antarctica, resulting changes in sea level would be felt in more inhabited parts of the world.”

The recorded warm waters—more than two degrees above freezing—flow beneath the Thwaites Glacier, which is part of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. The discovery was made at the glacier’s grounding zone—the place at which the ice transitions between resting fully on bedrock and floating on the ocean as an ice shelf and which is key to the overall rate of retreat of a glacier.

Thwaites’ demise alone could have significant impact globally.

It would drain a mass of water that is roughly the size of Great Britain or the state of Florida and currently accounts for approximately 4% of global sea-level rise. Some scientists see Thwaites as the most vulnerable and most significant glacier in the world in terms of future global sea-level rise—its collapse would raise global sea levels by nearly one meter, perhaps overwhelming existing populated areas.

While the glacier’s recession has been observed over the past decade, the causes behind this change had previously not been determined.

«

I often wonder whether if climate change were an asteroid heading towards earth which was going to have the same long-term effects, and we knew it was going to take time to prepare our response, we would take more immediate action.
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Huawei overtakes Apple in annual race to Samsung’s smartphone crown • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

Huawei overtook Apple to become the world’s second best selling smartphone manufacturer in 2019, according to reports from Strategy Analytics, Counterpoint Research, and Canalys. Over the course of the year, the Chinese manufacturer reportedly shipped around 240 million phones, compared to just under 200 million for Apple. Samsung retained its comfortable lead in first place, shipping just shy of 300 million devices. Xiaomi and Oppo rounded out the list of the top five manufacturers.

The jump is especially surprising given Huawei’s continued presence on the USA’s entity list, which prevents the company from installing Google’s apps and services on its new devices, limiting their appeal outside of China. As a result, Huawei’s main strength was in its home country. Counterpoint Research says China accounted for 60% of its sales, allowing its shipments worldwide to increase by 17% between 2018 and 2019 — though not in Q4 specifically.

However, tensions with the US still had an effect. Canalys notes that 2019 could have been the year that Huawei challenged Samsung for the number one smartphone spot, but ultimately this challenge never materialized. It’s unclear when the situation could change in the future.

«

As ever, it’s the squeeze on “Others” which tells us most about the market. There’s less and less room for smaller players, and most of them are in China – which is decelerating faster than pretty much anywhere. Expect more consolidation.
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Kuo: Apple to launch AirTags, small charging mat, new iPads and Macs, high-end headphones, and more in first half of 2020 • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol on the latest forecast by well-connected forecaster Ming-Chi Kuo:

»

Our insight on these products:
• 4.7in iPhone: Apple is widely rumoured to be planning to release a new low-cost iPhone with a similar design as the iPhone 8, including a 4.7in LCD display and a Touch ID home button, but with a faster A13 chip and 3GB of RAM. The device is expected to launch by the end of March, with pricing predicted to start at around $399 in the United States.

• iPad Pro refresh: New models with a triple-lens rear camera system that supports 3D sensing for augmented reality are expected to be unveiled as early as March.

• MacBook Pro/Air refresh: It is unclear if Kuo is referring to the possibility of either a new MacBook Pro or MacBook Air or both, but previous rumours suggest that a 13in MacBook Pro with a scissor switch-based Magic Keyboard will launch in the first half of 2020, following in the footsteps of the 16in MacBook Pro last October. Apple last refreshed the MacBook Air in July 2019 with a True Tone display and a lower $1,099 starting price.

• Ultra Wideband tags: Last year, MacRumors uncovered evidence of Apple working on Tile-like item tracking tags in iOS 13 code, including a potential “AirTags” name. As with iPhone 11 models, Kuo believes the tags will support Ultra Wideband, which would likely make it possible to locate the tags with much greater accuracy than Bluetooth LE and Wi-Fi.

• High-end headphones: Kuo did not provide any details about these headphones beyond claiming that they will support Bluetooth. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple-branded over-ear headphones were under development, but it is unclear if they were canceled, became the Beats Solo Pro, or otherwise. MacRumors has also uncovered evidence of Apple developing new Powerbeats4 headphones, but the existing Powerbeats3 are not considered high end.

• Small wireless charging mat: No further details were shared. Apple canceled its much-anticipated AirPower charging mat last year due to quality concerns. That mat would have been able to charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods case simultaneously, regardless of where each device was positioned on the mat and with deep iOS integration.

«

If the MacBook Air gets scissor switches, Apple’s going to be happy. It sells like crazy, and with a retina screen and new keyboard would be a terrific purchase.
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Huawei and 5G: UK had little choice but say yes to Chinese – here’s why

Greig Paul is the lead mobile networks and security engineer at the University of Strathclyde:

»

many 5G core functions may take place in the radio network, making it increasingly harder to define Huawei’s permitted area. And with base stations inherently connected to the network core, there is a limit to the isolation which can be put in place anyway.

Overall, however, the government seems to have been caught between a rock and a hard place: faced with wounding the UK network operators and slowing the 5G roll-out, it has sought a compromise.

To some extent, this is the consequences of deciding too slowly. Had the UK banned Huawei in 2018 like the US and Australia, the mobile operators’ 5G roll-out plans would have been at an earlier stage. The US also compensated some of its networks for the costs of equipment removal.

The UK government is instead looking to the future. Nicky Morgan, the culture secretary, told the House of Lords on January 28 that the government wants to attract established equipment vendors to the UK who are not already present, to support new disruptive entrants, and reduce barriers to market entry.

On established vendors, she may be referring to companies that make radio network equipment but don’t compete aggressively in this space: Samsung, for example. As for new entrants, there may be a hope of enticing players who supply different types of networks, such as Cisco or Juniper. There is also significant potential to innovate in 5G networks. The UK’s Testbeds and Trials programme is enabling this and will continue to do so.

For the time being, the government can hardly be enjoying the fallout from its decision.

«

So it turns out that kicking the can down the road in 2018 didn’t actually put off the decision; it cemented the decision that would have to be made. Paul calls the outcome “far from ideal”.
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Avast Antivirus is shutting down its data collection arm, effective immediately • VICE

Jason Koebler:

»

[Motherboard/PC Mag’s] investigation found that Avast, through a subsidiary called Jumpshot, made millions of dollars following its users around the internet. Jumpshot told its clients, which include Microsoft, Google, McKinsey, Pepsi, Home Depot, Yelp, and many others that it could track “every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.”

Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek wrote in a public letter Thursday morning that he and the company’s board of directors have decided to “terminate the Jumpshot data collection and wind down Jumpshot’s operations, with immediate effect.”

Earlier Thursday, the company announced that it had agreed to buy back a 35% stake in Jumpshot that it sold to the data analytics and marketing company Ascential last year. In July, Avast said that the 35% stake in Jumpshot was worth $60.76m.

Vlcek, who became CEO of Avast seven months ago, said he has spent the first few months of his job “re-evaluating every portion of our business,” and that the Jumpshot revelations had eroded trust in the company: “I feel personally responsible and I would like to apologize to all concerned.”

“I came to the conclusion that the data collection business is not in line with our privacy priorities as a company in 2020 and beyond,” he wrote. “It is key to me that Avast’s sole purpose is to make the world a safer place, and I knew that ultimately, everything in the company would have to become aligned with that North Star of ours.”

Vlcek said that the decision to shut down Jumpshot “will regrettably impact hundreds of loyal Jumpshot employees and dozens of its customer [but] it is absolutely the right thing to do.”

«

They had hundreds of people working on Jumpshot? I’m guessing not a huge number of them were engineers.
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Google developing new ‘unified’ communications app for businesses • The Information

Kevin McLaughlin:

»

Google is working on a mobile application for businesses that brings together the functions of several standalone apps the company already offers, including Gmail and its online storage service Drive. The move could help it compete more effectively with application suites from Microsoft and others, according to two people who have used the application and three people briefed about it.

The new mobile app, which is currently being tested internally at Google, also includes Hangouts Meet, Google’s video conferencing app and Hangouts Chat, a real-time message app, according to the people. Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google’s cloud unit, discussed the new app at a conference held in mid-January for the unit’s salespeople and business partners, according to two of the people. The new app is expected to be part of G Suite, the collection of online productivity software that is overseen by the cloud unit, known as Google Cloud.

«

Some readers may not have heard of Google Wave, which is no surprise; Google launched it as a “collaboration and real-time communication” product in September 2009, and gave up on it in August 2010, making it the shortest-lived Google communications product ever, while also being as comprehensible as the Voynich manuscript.

Now it seems to be trying to reinvent it, or Lotus Notes, another appalling portmanteau comms offering. Did we mention that the new Google app will also be able to open your Calendar? Start your betting on how long this one will last.
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How Amazon escapes liability for the riskiest products on its site • The Verge

Colin Lecher:

»

what happened next was the best-case scenario for [Wendy]Weintraub [whose house burned down after a hairdryer she bought from Amazon developed a fault]. While she had to leave her house, the insurance company paid for the reconstruction costs and for a rental house while contractors handled the repairs. She’s since been able to move back in. The insurance company, however, has sued both the hair dryer manufacturer and Amazon to recover the money, asking a court to order reimbursement of more than $850,000.

The suit has been tied up in court and may raise the question of what, exactly, Amazon is. For years, the online retail company has argued that many of its customers are simply passing through to use its platform — that the buyer and seller of the product are connecting, and Amazon is merely a passing intermediary.

The argument has given Amazon a crucial legal defense, allowing it to completely sidestep the liability that conventional retailers face. For the most part, courts have been satisfied by the claim, and Amazon has been able to expand its third-party seller business into hundreds of billions of dollars in sales.

Recently, though, that wall has shown signs of fracturing. Some courts and scholars have questioned exactly how far those protections should go, and whether Amazon is truly as hands-off a player as it would like to seem.

“They’re taking affirmative steps to lure the consumer into buying their products or their manufacturer’s products,” says Dennis Crawford, the attorney who is representing Weintraub’s insurance company in its case against Amazon.

The question is: who’s really at fault?

«

Key question as Amazon in particular becomes a larger and larger part of retail. Does that mean that decades of retail law simply gets thrown away? Even asking the question makes it clear how Amazon, and its Marketplace, is undermining consumer safety.
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Congress urges Google to act against climate misinformation on YouTube • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

Congressmembers are calling for Google to take action against climate disinformation.

The U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis wrote a letter addressed to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, requesting the company take action against climate disinformation — specifically on its video platform, YouTube.

“YouTube has been driving millions of viewers to climate misinformation videos every day, a shocking revelation that runs contrary to Google’s important missions of fighting misinformation and promoting climate action,” wrote Kathy Castor, chair of the committee.′ “Last September, you proudly declared that ‘sustainability has become one of Google’s core values from our earliest days,’ and announced ‘the biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history.’”

Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The letter comes as YouTube, which is one of Google’s largest businesses, faces scrutiny over the spread of hateful content and misinformation on its platform. In recent months, Google has updated policies to try and stem that – especially as the 2020 presidential elections near. The company delayed its reaction to curbing misinformation among political ads following backlash late last year.

«

I think Google might take issue with the idea that its missions including fighting misinformation. Even though they should.
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With two weeks to go, Samsung’s Unpacked is already dead on arrival • SamMobile

“Danny D”:

»

Even if Samsung can ensure that nothing gets out from its facilities or that its employees don’t say a word about an unreleased device, it can do little to control what leaks from its suppliers’ factories, or what carrier executives who are briefed on new devices choose to reveal anonymously.

What it can do is control what multimedia content is sent to partners ahead of a flagship launch. If that were the case, we wouldn’t get to see high-resolution press renders of new devices weeks before they’re supposed to be unveiled at Unpacked. The consequence of this is that the element of surprise is taken away from Samsung. Anything that it shows off for the “first time” during its press event evokes a solid meh from the crowd and those watching at home because they’ve already seen it. This is the age of information. People consume more content online than ever before. Even those who don’t read news blogs will end up seeing a clickbaity YouTube video that rehashes the same stuff in a more entertaining format.

There used to be a time when people were actually excited about these product launch events. You would get to see products that you had only heard conflicting rumors about and hear all of their details straight from the company that made them. That has no longer been the case over the past few years. Not only high-resolution renders, but even entire spec sheets of new flagships have also leaked online weeks before launch…

…I have attended all Unpacked events ever since I started SamMobile, partly because of work and largely because as a fan it gave me great pleasure to see new devices being unveiled up close. Despite making all travel arrangements weeks in advance, I have now decided to skip the February 11 Unpacked, because with a full two weeks to go the event is already dead on arrival.

«

As Apple still knows: the element of surprise still has value, even in this saturated media world.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US DoJ is trying to stop these guys calling by suing US VOIP services CC-licensed photo by Jeremy Brooks 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 9 links for you. Plenty more where that came from. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook cuts back on original programming for Watch Video • The Information

Tom Dotan and Jessica Toonkel:

»

Facebook is refining the programming strategy for its Facebook Watch video service, pulling back on expensive original shows and sports rights.

Facebook continues to increase its programming budget for Watch—it will rise to around $1.4bn this year, from the company’s initial $1bn budget in 2017, according to a person familiar with the matter. But within that amount, it is spending less on costly originals and more on talk shows and licensing clips from TV networks and sports leagues. Meantime, it has pulled back from bidding for rights to stream major live sports, the person said, at least for the moment.

That strategy sharpens the contrast between Facebook and big-spending subscription video-streaming services like Netflix, Disney and Apple. Netflix, one of the biggest spenders, laid out more than $13bn on programming last year, while Disney and Apple are reportedly spending several billion dollars a year on their new streaming services.

Clearly Facebook is looking to compete against YouTube, which offers lots of mostly short content for free, supported by ads. More broadly, Facebook sees Watch as a way to improve engagement in the flagship app, giving people more to do on the app, and to try to lure in TV advertising dollars. 

«

Not even Facebook can manage a pivot to video. It’s going to get killed by YouTube. And it could really improve so much else about its network by spending a billion dollars on things other than video.
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One year inside Trump’s monumental Facebook campaign • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong:

»

Over the course of 2019, the Trump campaign spent nearly $20m on more than 218,000 different Facebook ads, a new Guardian analysis shows. Among the ads were some of the images and videos that made front-page news for their xenophobic, fear-mongering, vitriolic and outright false rhetoric.

But the campaign also ran a decidedly mundane social media campaign featuring classic marketing ploys designed to harvest user data. Considering the fact that the campaign has run these ads – which are largely substance-free and appear designed to maximize engagement with simple requests – over and over again, they were probably very effective.

Trump’s prowess on Facebook has struck fear in the hearts of Democrats. The architect of his 2016 digital campaign, Brad Parscale, boasted of the sophistication of his Facebook operation, and was promoted to campaign manager for 2020. “The campaign is all about data collection,” Parscale told the Guardian. “If we touch you digitally, we want to know who you are and how you think and get you into our databases so that we can model off it and relearn and understand what’s happening.”

In order to understand how Trump is communicating with Americans on Facebook in the 2020 election cycle, the Guardian built a database of all 218,100 campaign ads launched by the Trump campaign in 2019, using the Facebook political ad archive application programming interface, or API. The analysis is the most comprehensive of the Trump re-election campaign’s Facebook advertising to date.

«

Sad puppies and bizarre polls figure heavily. But it’s mostly about harvesting phone numbers and emails. That’s sophistication? But it’s a terrific piece of work.
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US files lawsuits against handful of robocalling companies for targeting the ‘elderly and vulnerable’ • Android Piolice

Taylor Kerns:

»

The US Justice Department has filed lawsuits against a handful of companies and individuals, accusing them of facilitating hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls. The suits accuse the companies of causing “elderly and vulnerable victims” serious financial harm.

According to the suits, most of the calls originated in India and were placed using VoIP systems. The calls use threats of disruptions to social security benefits or arrest for supposed tax fraud, among other tactics, to extort money from victims. The Justice Department wants to crack down on what it calls “US-based enablers” of these scams, and says it’s warned those enablers repeatedly about carrying such calls on their networks. One company, TollFreeDeals.com, is alleged to have carried 720 million calls in one 23-day period, most of which ended in under a second — a clear sign of spam calls. The government is seeking temporary restraining orders on the companies against which it has filed suit to prevent robocalls.

«

So, another attempt to shut down the spammers. Going after the VOIP companies makes a lot of sense: they’re within reach of the DoJ, and it can fine them out of existence, while also terrifying all of the others into refusing such business. Perhaps the UK government could take a hint and do the same.
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Samsung Galaxy Fold review: the future is an ugly disappointment • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo is a long, long way from gruntled:

»

that brings us to today—the Ars review. This one is going to be a little different, since I don’t think the Galaxy Fold has any viability as a serious device anyone should consider purchasing. Should you buy a Galaxy Fold? NO! God no. Are you crazy? The sky-high price, durability issues, nascent form factor, and new screen technology should rule the phone out for just about everyone. (Save your bendy tech dreams for Westworld season three.) Rather than a viable product, right now the Fold feels more like a publicly available prototype device that demonstrates an experimental new form factor.

So while you shouldn’t buy the Galaxy Fold, that still doesn’t answer the question, “Is this form factor a good idea?” Let’s put aside the sky-high price—which will, of course, come down over time—and the durability issues—which will hopefully be fixed in the future with the wild concept of “flexible glass” that Corning is hard at work on. Is Samsung’s current vision of a foldable phone a useful improvement? Unfortunately, the answer here is also a firm “no.” During the initial announcement of the phone, Samsung said the device would be “a powerful smartphone and a revolutionary tablet,” and the Fold is remarkably terrible at being either of those things. Samsung may have delayed the phone to put Band-Aids on the show-stopping design problems, but the overall product still shows a lack of thought and consideration for how actual people will want to use a device like this.

The launch of the Galaxy Fold was a disaster, and while Samsung fought through and got to market, that doesn’t mean the disaster is over. I’m still enthusiastic about the idea of a phone that converts into a tablet, but the Galaxy Fold puts on a master class of how not to do it.

«

He justifies all his points. And he has many.
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Exclusive: controversial Nike Vaporflys to escape ban but running shoe rules will tighten • The Guardian

Sean Ingle:

»

the shoes, which were introduced in 2016, have deeply divided the athletics community, with some supporting the technological arms race as part of an inevitable evolution of the sport – and others warning that it is deeply unfair to athletes who are not sponsored by Nike.

Kipchoge has denied that, saying: “They are fair. I trained hard. Technology is growing and we can’t deny it – we must go with technology.” But the small number of studies conducted on the Vaporflys suggest that, depending on the model and athlete, they can typically improve a person’s running economy by 4-5% – which translates to at least a minute- to 90-second advantage for an elite male runner over 26.2 miles and even more in an average club athlete.

Where that leaves the Nike AlphaFly, the next generation prototype shoes worn by Eliud Kipchoge when he ran the first sub-two hour marathon in October in an unofficial event is unclear. It is understood that these shoes – which are said to contain three carbon plates and improve running economy by 8% – have not yet been submitted to World Athletics experts for inspection.

Even if the AlphaFlys are banned at elite level there will be no restrictions on ordinary athletes buying and wearing them in races when they are released in the shops by Nike.

However the World Athletics working group is understood be stressing there needs to be far more detailed research into the performance benefits of the new wave of shoes – versions of which have also been recently introduced by New Balance, Hoka and Saucony. In particular it wants to establish how the height of the foam stack, the make of foam used, and the angle of the carbon plates can change speed and performance.

«

About 25 years ago, javelin aerodynamics were altered to restrict their flight – the best throws were endangering competitors on the far side of the track. Not sure shoes are quite the same.
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Microsoft’s Surface Pro X is the world’s most extravagant Chromebook • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

»

I’ve been revisiting the Microsoft Surface Pro X ever since the Chromium version of Edge became official — though what I’ve been using is the still-in-Beta version of the browser that runs natively on the Pro X’s ARM chip. My opinion hasn’t changed since November’s review: it’s still an overpriced machine that is nice to look at but frustrating to use because there aren’t enough apps that run natively on its chip.

I just want to make that very clear at the top — that this is not a machine I recommend — before going any further. That’s because what I’m about to say could be misconstrued into buying advice. It is not. Here goes.

The Surface Pro X is the best, most extravagant Chromebook I’ve ever used — except for the pesky facts that it doesn’t run Chrome OS, and I’m not using Chrome on it; I’m using Edge.

What I mean is that I’ve been using the Surface Pro X like I use a Chromebook. I’ve been using web apps for the vast majority of my computing tasks, but every now and then, I’m using a Windows app when I need it. That’s how I use Chrome OS: web for nearly everything, Android in a pinch.

«

As long as he doesn’t run the emulator (for x86 apps), things are rosy and it chugs along for hours. But costs $1,700. We’re all sure Apple will shift to ARM; the key metric will be how quickly third-party apps are natively in ARM. (Is that an Xcode/App Store thing?)
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Why The Guardian will no longer accept fossil fuel advertising • The Guardian

Anna Bateson and Hamish Nicklin:

»

We have decided that we will no longer accept advertising from fossil fuel extractive companies on any of the Guardian’s websites and apps, nor in the Guardian, Observer and Guardian Weekly in print. Our decision is based on the decades-long efforts by many in that industry to prevent meaningful climate action by governments around the world.

Of course we know some readers would like us to go further, banning ads for any product with a significant carbon footprint, such as cars or holidays. Stopping those ads would be a severe financial blow, and might force us to make significant cuts to Guardian and Observer journalism around the world.

More importantly, fossil fuel extractors are qualitatively different. The intent – and extent – of their lobbying efforts has explicitly harmed the environmental cause over the course of many years – as our own reporting has shown and environmental campaigners have powerfully argued. Many environmental experts have called out the difference between fossil fuel extractors and their foundational role in the carbon economy, and other sectors with high emissions.

Advertising has always been a vital part of how we support Guardian journalism – it made up roughly 40% of our revenues last year – and we hope to continue working with advertisers to keep our journalism open to all.

«

Love to know how much advertising that is. Anyhow: your move, Facebook, Google, Microsoft (on Bing), etc.
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Exclusive: the cyber attack the UN tried to keep under wraps • The New Humanitarian

Ben Parker:

»

Dozens of UN servers – including systems at its human rights offices, as well as its human resources department – were compromised and some administrator accounts breached, according to a confidential UN report obtained by The New Humanitarian. The breach is one of the largest ever known to have affected the world body.

The cyber attack – unreported until TNH’s investigation – started mid-July, according to the report. Dated 20 September, the report flags vulnerabilities, describes containment efforts, and includes a section titled: “Still counting our casualties”.

The incident amounted to a “major meltdown”, according to a senior UN IT official familiar with the fallout, who spoke to TNH on condition of anonymity. This official provided TNH with the August 2019 alert above and several other alerts related to the breach.

In response to questions from TNH, the UN confirmed it had kept the breach quiet.

“The attack resulted in a compromise of core infrastructure components,” said UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, who classified it as “serious”. “As the exact nature and scope of the incident could not be determined, [the UN offices in Geneva and Vienna] decided not to publicly disclose the breach.”

Staff were asked to change their passwords, but were not told of the large breach or that some of their personal data may have been compromised. The “core infrastructure” affected included systems for user and password management, system controls, and security firewalls.

«

China first in the queue for suspicion. Russia next, I guess. Who’s particularly concerned about the UN’s offices?
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Ring doorbell app packed with third-party trackers • Electronic Frontier Foundation

Bill Budington:

»

An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers.

The danger in sending even small bits of information is that analytics and tracking companies are able to combine these bits together to form a unique picture of the user’s device…

…Ring has exhibited a pattern of behavior that attempts to mitigate exposure to criticism and scrutiny while benefiting from the wide array of customer data available to them…

…Our testing, using Ring for Android version 3.21.1, revealed PII delivery to branch.io, mixpanel.com, appsflyer.com and facebook.com. Facebook, via its Graph API, is alerted when the app is opened and upon device actions such as app deactivation after screen lock due to inactivity. Information delivered to Facebook (even if you don’t have a Facebook account) includes time zone, device model, language preferences, screen resolution, and a unique identifier (anon_id), which persists even when you reset the OS-level advertiser ID.

Branch, which describes itself as a “deep linking” platform, receives a number of unique identifiers (device_fingerprint_id, hardware_id, identity_id) as well as your device’s local IP address, model, screen resolution, and DPI…

…Ring gives MixPanel the most information by far. Users’ full names, email addresses, device information such as OS version and model, whether bluetooth is enabled, and app settings such as the number of locations a user has Ring devices installed in, are all collected and reported to MixPanel.

«

unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Green roofs – or solar-panelled ones – are now obligatory in New York on new buildings. CC-licensed photo by Andrew 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 8 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook’s ‘Clear History’ tool doesn’t clear worth a damn • Gizmodo

Shoshana Wodinsky:

»

“To help shed more light on these practices that are common yet not always well understood, today we’re introducing a new way to view and control your off-Facebook activity,” Zuckerberg said in the post. “Off-Facebook Activity lets you see a summary of the apps and websites that send us information about your activity, and clear this information from your account if you want to.”

Zuck’s use of the phrases “control your off-Facebook activity” and “clear this information from your account” is kinda misleading—you’re not really controlling or clearing much of anything. By using this tool, you’re just telling Facebook to put the data it has on you into two separate buckets that are otherwise mixed together. Put another way, Facebook is offering a one-stop-shop to opt-out of any ties between the sites and services you peruse daily that have some sort of Facebook software installed and your own-platform activity on Facebook or Instagram.

The only thing you’re clearing is a connection Facebook made between its data and the data it gets from third parties, not the data itself.

As an ad-tech reporter, my bread and butter involves downloading shit that does god-knows-what with your data, which is why I shouldn’t’ve been surprised that Facebook hoovered data from more 520 partners across the internet—either sites I’d visited or apps I’d downloaded. For Gizmodo alone, Facebook tracked “252 interactions” drawn from the handful of plug-ins our blog has installed. (To be clear, you’re going to run into these kinds of trackers e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e.—not just on our site.)

«

It shows six months’ data, though it’s not clear whether that’s all it keeps. Mine has three: a company website I ordered pet food from, a small news site, and a small crowdfunding site. I certainly didn’t consent to any of them handing data to Facebook.

However, it says “this list doesn’t show all of the activity that we’ve received. Activity that is not shown includes information that we’ve received when you’re not logged in to Facebook, or when we can’t confirm that you’ve previously used Facebook on that device.” Surely the very thing we want to know is what it sees when we’re not logged in. Clearing your history isn’t much help either: “We’ll continue to receive your activity from the businesses and organisations that you visit in the future.”

Useless, Facebook. Useless.
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Britain defies Trump plea to ban Huawei from 5G network • The New York Times

Adam Satariano:

»

Despite more than a year of intense lobbying by the Trump administration, which has accused Huawei of having ties to China’s Communist Party that pose a national security threat, the British government announced it would allow the company to provide equipment in some portions of a next-generation network to be built in the coming years.

The British decision was crucial in a broader fight for tech supremacy between the United States and China. Britain, a key American ally, is the most important country so far to reject White House warnings that Huawei is an instrument of Beijing. Britain’s membership in the “five eyes” intelligence-sharing group of countries, which also includes Australia, Canada and New Zealand, gave the outcome an added significance.

Many countries have been caught between the United States and China in their tech cold war. American officials have threatened to withhold intelligence if countries do not ban Huawei, while Chinese representatives have warned of economic retaliation if they do.

“This is a U.K.-specific solution for U.K.-specific reasons and the decision deals with the challenges we face right now,” said Nicky Morgan, the secretary for digital, culture, media and sport, the government agency that oversaw the decision.

“It not only paves the way for secure and resilient networks, with our sovereignty over data protected, but it also builds on our strategy to develop a diversity of suppliers,” she said.

«

I don’t think it was a Trump “plea”. It was a demand. The only plea you’ll hear from Trump is when he’s arraigned after leaving office (unless he goes out feet first; all things are possible in the multiverse). Huawei gets up to 35% of the network, and can’t be used near military bases. A neat enough swerve by the UK government.
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The iPad awkwardly turns 10 • Daring Fireball

John Gruber:

»

Software is where the iPad has gotten lost. iPadOS’s “multitasking” model is far more capable than the iPhone’s, yes, but somehow Apple has painted it into a corner in which it is far less consistent and coherent than the Mac’s, while also being far less capable. iPad multitasking: more complex, less powerful. That’s quite a combination.

Consider the basic task of putting two apps on screen at the same time, the basic definition of “multitasking” in the UI sense. To launch the first app, you tap its icon on the homescreen, just like on the iPhone, and just like on the iPad before split-screen multitasking. Tapping an icon to open an app is natural and intuitive.

But to get a second app on the same screen, you cannot tap its icon. You must first slide up from the bottom of the screen to reveal the Dock. Then you must tap and hold on an app icon in the Dock. Then you drag the app icon out of the Dock to launch it in a way that it will become the second app splitting the display. But isn’t dragging an icon out of the Dock the way that you remove apps from the Dock? Yes, it is — when you do it from the homescreen. So the way you launch an app in the Dock for split-screen mode is identical to the way you remove that app from the Dock. Oh, and apps that aren’t in the Dock can’t become the second app in split screen mode. What sense does that limitation make?

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He’s absolutely right on this – and his point that multitasking on the Mac is simple and consistent to invoke (start another app by double-clicking its icon, or navigate to it via Spotlight, [OKAY or ask Siri to open it]) is a killer. It’s a terrific analysis because it documents so precisely what’s missing and what’s inconsistent.

How Apple can clean it up, well, that’s a lot harder to answer.
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American Herald Tribune pays Americans to write ‘news’ articles. Signs indicate it originates in Iran • CNN

Donie O’Sullivan:

»

American Herald Tribune bills itself as a “genuinely independent online media outlet.” Set up in 2015, it publishes in English and pays Americans to write articles. But multiple investigations by American tech companies, details of which have not previously been reported, point to the site originating in Iran.

A Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business that company staff who looked into the website’s Facebook page say it was linked to Iranian state media. Facebook removed the page in 2018. FireEye, a top cybersecurity company, says it assessed with “moderate confidence” that the website originates in Iran and is part of a much larger influence operation.

The new details about alleged Iranian ties to the American Herald Tribune shed light on how the country has attempted to run a years-long covert online influence campaign targeting the United States. As Russia did around the 2016 election, Iran appears to have co-opted and in this case paid a small number of unwitting Americans to lend legitimacy to its operations…

…The articles posted to American Herald Tribune are largely in line with the views of Iran’s ruling establishment. It publishes stories criticizing American foreign policy and attacking President Donald Trump and Israel. Often the criticism is not unlike viewpoints expressed on authentic US-based independent websites, especially ones with an anti-establishment perspective.

«

So what’s the problem, exactly? There are shady right-wing American sites which don’t disclose their funding. Is the problem shadiness, or Iranian-ness?
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Why the UK is banning default passwords in IoT devices • New Statesman

Matt Warman is the minister for digital and broadband:

»

Our aim is to make the UK the world’s leading digital economy. But if we are to achieve this ambition we need to make sure people trust technology.

I believe we can do this through pro-innovation regulation. So today I’ve announced we are developing new legislation to hold firms manufacturing and stocking internet-connected devices to account to stop hackers threatening people’s privacy and safety.

These new laws will mean consumers are protected from devices which do not adhere to the three rigorous security requirements we’ve developed alongside a code of conduct.

These measures will mean all the passwords pre-programmed in internet-connected devices must be unique and not resettable to any universal factory setting.

«

Only a brief lifetime ago, Matt was a technology correspondent at the Daily Telegraph, so he understands this a bit. “Pro-innovation regulation” is a strange phrase; what does it really mean? How do you spot pro-innovation regulation from, um, the other kind?

More to the point: having unique passwords coded in is mostly a good idea – until you lose the little piece of paper that came in the box, or the sticker it was on rubs off. So a crouching ovation on that one. (There’s more about security update guarantees, which are also good.)

The bigger question: how will the government enforce this on the junk sold on Amazon? Will it be Amazon’s responsibility, or the manufacturer’s, and who gets penalised? (Anyone know: do Huawei routers have unique passwords?)
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US media polarization and the 2020 election: a nation divided • Pew Research Center

»

evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years. A comparison to a similar study by the Center of web-using U.S. adults in 2014 finds that Republicans have grown increasingly alienated from most of the more established sources, while Democrats’ confidence in them remains stable, and in some cases, has strengthened.

The study asked about use of, trust in, and distrust of 30 different news sources for political and election news. While it is impossible to represent the entire crowded media space, the outlets, which range from network television news to Rush Limbaugh to the New York Times to the Washington Examiner to HuffPost, were selected to represent popular media brands across a range of platforms.

Greater portions of Republicans express distrust than express trust of 20 of the 30 sources asked about. Only seven outlets generate more trust than distrust among Republicans – including Fox News and the talk radio programs of hosts Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

For Democrats, the numbers are almost reversed. Greater portions of Democrats express trust than express distrust in 22 of the 30 sources asked about. Only eight generate more distrust than trust – including Fox News, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

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Oh, America.
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MGM leads 2020 media acquisition targets • CNBC

Alex Sherman:

»

Two major shifts in the past year have made scale — the concept of being as big as possible — more important than ever for media companies. The first is the transition from linear cable TV to streaming services, which are expensive to build out and run and require premium content to stand out.

The second is major consolidation — Disney buying Fox, Comcast acquiring Sky, AT&T purchasing Time Warner and Viacom merging with CBS — that has put media companies with enterprise valuations under $50bn at a severe disadvantage to their peers.

The result leaves a handful of companies, including AMC Networks (enterprise value: $5.2bn), Discovery (~$40bn), Lions Gate (~$6bn), MGM (private), Sony Pictures (part of larger company, Sony), and even the merged ViacomCBS (~$25bn), in positions of relative weakness.

On the other side, Netflix (~$160bn), Amazon (~$965bn), Comcast (~$320bn), AT&T (~$487bn), Disney (~$315bn) and Apple (~$1.4trn) have all put their flags in the ground in what the media calls The Streaming Wars, an evolution from bundled cable TV to a world of a la carte services that can be watched anywhere on any device. If Comcast, Charter/Time Warner Cable, Dish and DirecTV were the Big 4 of the media distribution world for the past decade, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Comcast, Disney and Netflix look like the Big 6 of the streaming era.

MGM, in particular, seems like a logical candidate to sell this year. Its owners include Anchorage Capital, Highland Capital and Solus Alternative Asset Management, hedge funds that acquired the company out of bankruptcy in 2010…

…MGM has held preliminary talks with a number of companies, including Apple and Netflix, to gauge their interest in an acquisition, two of the people said. MGM owns the James Bond catalog and its studio has made several current hit shows including “The Handmaid’s Tale,”…

«

Apple owning MGM would be a hell of a thing. Unlikely; but maybe at arm’s length, as Pixar wasn’t owned by Apple but was run by Steve Jobs? The corollary to yesterday’s article about film sequels v streaming services.
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NYC’s roofs are getting a sustainable makeover, but is green or solar better? • Utility Dive

Cailley LaPara:

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As of Nov. 15, 2019, Local Laws 92 and 94 are in effect to target a vast, often overlooked and underutilized resource in New York: roofs.

The laws, known informally as the Sustainable Roof Laws, require most new buildings and buildings undergoing major roof reconstruction to include a sustainable roofing zone on 100% of the available roof space.

Sustainable roofing zones are defined as “areas of a roof assembly where a solar photovoltaic electricity generating system, a green roof system, or a combination thereof, is installed.” In other words, the roofs must have a solar panel array, green roof or both.

“When you fly into New York City, you see an amazing amount of unproductive roof space,” Jonce Walker, senior associate at Thornton Tomasetti, told Smart Cities Dive. Walker and others in the sustainable design community hope Local Laws 92 and 94 are going to change that.

«

But the question is: green roof or solar? The conditions that are best for each tend to be opposite (shadowed space? Green. On a slope? Solar), though there can be edge cases where it’s tricky to decide. Maintenance of green roofs could be interesting, though, compared to solar.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ten years ago, Apple freaked Microsoft out by doing what Microsoft had done. But better. CC-licensed photo by Mark Botham 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. Catch it, kill it, bin it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

As virus spreads, anger floods Chinese social media • The New York Times

Raymond Zhong:

»

Recently, someone following the coronavirus crisis through China’s official news media would see lots of footage, often set to stirring music, praising the heroism and sacrifice of health workers marching off to stricken places.

But someone following the crisis through social media would see something else entirely: vitriolic comments and mocking memes about government officials, harrowing descriptions of untreated family members and images of hospital corridors loaded with patients, some of whom appear to be dead.

The contrast is almost never so stark in China. The government usually keeps a tight grip on what is said, seen and heard about it. But the sheer amount of criticism — and the often clever ways in which critics dodge censors, such as by referring to Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, as “Trump” or by comparing the outbreak to the Chernobyl catastrophe — have made it difficult for Beijing to control the message.

In recent days, critics have pounced when officials in the city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, wore their protective masks incorrectly. They have heaped scorn upon stumbling pronouncements. When Wuhan’s mayor spoke to official media on Monday, one commenter responded, “If the virus is fair, then please don’t spare this useless person.”…

…“Chinese social media are full of anger, not because there was no censorship on this topic, but despite strong censorship,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times, a website that monitors Chinese internet controls. “It is still possible that the censorship will suddenly increase again, as part of an effort to control the narrative.”

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This is going to be quite the challenge for the Chinese government.
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Coronavirus 2019-nCoV • ArcGIS

You wanted a live map of confirmed coronavirus cases, with a dashboard for different countries and a map too? At your command. (Depending on how much we trust the Chinese figures.)
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The iPad at 10: a new product category defined by apps • MacStories

John Voorhees:

»

According to an Engadget story published the day before the iPad was revealed, tablet rumours stretched back to at least the early 2000s.

It wasn’t until the iPhone was released in 2007 that the rumors really picked up in earnest, though. At the time, a small army of bloggers covering Apple competed for scoops by combing through patent filings, domain registrations, and any other scrap they could get their hands on, looking for evidence of a tablet. It was the waning days of the ‘golden age’ of Apple rumors, before Apple ‘doubled down on secrecy.’ The same competition that fuelled the rumour mill led to a cottage industry in device mockups that sometimes got passed off as ‘spy shots’ of real hardware.

It was an environment that fed on itself, spawning crazy speculation. The rumors and mockups may seem like unimportant historical relics now, but they’re still instructive in understanding the expectations going into the iPad’s launch and a lot of fun to revisit. Here is a collection of some of my favourites: [images on site].

Looking back at these mockups, what strikes me is how many imagined a tablet that would run OS X. Over and over, the mockups envisioned a windowed environment with a Mac-like UI. Even though the iPhone had been out for over two years, surprisingly few mockups approached the design with the iPhone as their starting point. Instead, it was assumed that a tablet with a screen closer to the size of a Mac would naturally inherit the Mac’s OS too. Surely a device with room for windows would run something more than just iPhone OS.

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Ten years of the iPad. Steve Sinofsky, who was in charge of Windows at the time, wrote about it too.
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Hollywood ‘sequelitis’ and why pay-TV follows a different script • Financial Times

Chris Campbell and Patrick Mathurin:

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The decades-long trend of “sequelitis” is striking a chord globally. Of the top ten grossing films of 2019, all were either franchise entries, sequels, remakes or spin-offs. Avengers: Endgame, one of the year’s three instalments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero franchise, scored a record-breaking $1bn opening weekend and generated worldwide box-office receipts of nearly $2.8bn. At about seven times its production budget, this makes it one of the most successful films ever.

“The reason that the studios rely so heavily on the sequel is because generally the odds are with you, if you are creating a franchise,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst at ComScore, a data analytics company. “There’s a wellspring of potential box office takings coming from every movie that’s part of that universe.”

The successes of these franchises — and the changing pattern of cinema attendance — have spurred the studios to focus their output.

In the 1950s, large crowds would go to the cinema on a weekly basis; today audiences are going less frequently. Greater competition for cinema goers’ leisure time, the rise of on-demand entertainment without the constraints of a static broadcasting schedule, and fewer local screens mean that viewers may not risk paying for something unfamiliar.

“Cinema is now where you go to play safe,” says Peter Miskell, professor of international business and media history at Henley Business School. “You want to be fairly assured that you’re going to be getting content that you’re going to enjoy. Whereas you can take a bit more risk with TV and streaming services and that’s where a bit more innovation is happening.”

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Completely makes sense, as long as the streaming service can keep ahead of its debt.
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Leaked documents expose the secretive market for your web browsing data • VICE

Joseph Cox (VICE) and Michael Kan (PC Mag):

»

An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world’s biggest companies, a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag has found. Our report relies on leaked user data, contracts, and other company documents that show the sale of this data is both highly sensitive and is in many cases supposed to remain confidential between the company selling the data and the clients purchasing it.

The documents, from a subsidiary of the antivirus giant Avast called Jumpshot, shine new light on the secretive sale and supply chain of peoples’ internet browsing histories. They show that the Avast antivirus program installed on a person’s computer collects data, and that Jumpshot repackages it into various different products that are then sold to many of the largest companies in the world. Some past, present, and potential clients include Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Sephora, Home Depot, Condé Nast, Intuit, and many others. Some clients paid millions of dollars for products that include a so-called “All Clicks Feed,” which can track user behavior, clicks, and movement across websites in highly precise detail.

Avast claims to have more than 435 million active users per month, and Jumpshot says it has data from 100 million devices. Avast collects data from users that opt-in and then provides that to Jumpshot, but multiple Avast users told Motherboard they were not aware Avast sold browsing data, raising questions about how informed that consent is.

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I’ll go with.. not very informed? Antivirus: the only thing worse is viruses.
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IoT trouble: the Sonos example — and more • Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassée:

»

Today, grafting a microprocessor and a Wi-Fi radio onto a power plug is child’s play (and a dollar) for the engineers of an appliance maker. Smartplugs that work with Alexa or Google Assistant are plentiful and inexpensive on Amazon, going for as low as $19.98 for a two pack. What will happen when these plugs need updates for bugs and security patches, or when the manufacturer wants to force us to buy a newer, more capable model? This will happen to smart bulbs, locks, cameras, thermostats, dishwashers…

And this is just the beginning of the Consumer IoT fun. The ongoing adoption of 5G technology will bring improvements and another layer of disorganization.

I’m hardly hostile to technology, to the contrary. My professional life in the tech world — more than 50 years — has been enormously fun, I’ve met remarkable individuals and have seen unimaginable advances such as supercomputers in our pockets. But I now wonder. It was one thing to fight a cranky operating system or application on one’s laptop. It created a culture, a folklore. Managing the dozens of devices in a smarthome is a set of tasks for which we are ill-prepared, it’s not more of the same.

Nor are we prepared for what happens to our privacy when the IoT devices that share information about our activities become “required” by market forces or, worse, mandated by new laws and regulations.

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As he says: the complexity now has grown geometrically. That’s a problem – yours, mine, everyone’s.
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Google halts paid-for Chrome extension updates amid fraud surge: Web Store in lockdown ‘due to the scale of abuse’ • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

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Developers began reporting that they’d received “Spam and Placement in the Store” warnings on January 19, and more reports followed over the next few days.

In an email to The Register, Jeff Johnson, who runs Lapcat Software, which makes macOS and iOS audio apps and a privacy extension for Chrome and Safari called StopTheMadness, said that existing extensions remain accessible in the Chrome Web Store, but updates and new extensions are being rejected.

“I submitted a minor bug fix update on January 19, and I received an email on January 22 from Chrome Web Store Developer Support titled ‘Chrome Web Store: Removal notification for StopTheMadness,'” he explained, noting that the extension was not removed but the update was rejected.

“There have been many complaints in Google’s Chromium Extensions forum in the past few weeks, but Google provided no useful information until now.”

Johnson said that he has a Safari app extension in the Mac App Store and while developer support isn’t great, the Chrome Web Store is worse and feels understaffed – a charge other software makers have made.

“The Mac App Store usually reviews my updates within 24 hours, and if something goes wrong, I can contact support and get a response within a reasonable amount of time,” he said. “With the Chrome Web Store, however, my updates can take up to a week to get reviewed, and if something goes wrong, you’re almost hopelessly lost.”

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Seems to be a followup to this Register story from two weeks ago.
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DNA collection at the border threatens the privacy of all Americans • The New York Times

Daniel I. Morales, Natalie Ram and Jessica L. Roberts:

»

How we treat the people that cross our borders speaks to our identity as a nation. Immigrants are Americans of the future and the criteria we use to select or bar immigrants reflect our aspirations for the society we wish to become. The new DNA collection program may yet revive darker, eugenic impulses in immigration history. Modern, quota-based immigration law was born of a desire to improve the “quality” of America’s racial stock by drastically limiting immigration from peoples “scientifically” believed to be less intelligent than other groups. Italians and other southern European immigrants, for example, were granted fewer visas based on this false science.

It is a small leap from requiring immigrants to submit their DNA to verify familial relationships, or to mitigate future criminal risk (the pretexts the government has cited to justify its recent policy change) to requiring DNA screening of immigrants for health, disability, intelligence or disease. These screens for “fitness”— likely based on questionable science — could ultimately be used to deny entry into the United States or, if discovered later, as a basis for expulsion. Regardless of reliability we would not support genetic screening for fitness. Courts have usually failed to protect immigrants from such impulses, so it is up to citizens to learn from this history and decide that building a society this way is unacceptable.

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The point that DNA could be used to deny entry, and then might be expanded to the general population, is a good one. If you think that it couldn’t possibly happen, look at the utter inability of the American system to rein in Trump (or his mini-me, Stephen Miller), and cast that forward a few years.
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Monopolies cost Americans $300 a month. We’re no longer the land of free markets • The Guardian

Thomas Philippon is a professor of finance at New York University:

»

The polarization of the political debate is partly the result of ignorance. The American left sees Europe as an El Dorado of free healthcare, free education and workers’ rights. The American right sees it as a socialistic nightmare with no growth and no innovation. They’re both wrong, and the result is misguided policies and time wasted tilting at windmills.

But we are also witnessing a justified backlash against the corruption of American free markets. A powerful system of lobbying and campaign finance contributions is largely responsible for the growing monopolization of the US economy.

Implementing a pro-competition policy in America will be no easy task. Incumbent companies maintain their power with an array of unfair tactics to exclude rivals – acquisitions of nascent competitors, heavy lobbying of regulators, and lavish expenditures on campaign donations. To be successful in today’s economy, a pro-competition policy would need to tackle the new monopolies as well as the old ones – the Googles and Facebooks and the pharmaceutical and telecom companies alike.

The payoffs would be large, however. Based on my research, I estimate that monopolies cost the median American household about $300 a month. Taking into account all the other inefficiencies monopolies entail, I estimate that the lack of competition deprives American workers of about $1.25tn of labor income every year. No wonder, then, that American workers are angry.

There is also another ironic lesson for Europe. The quality of existing European institutions is partly due to the beneficial influence of the UK. Historically France and Germany did not have a tradition of strong and independent regulators able to stand up to lobbyists and resist short term political pressures. The European Central Bank and the EU Directorate General for Competition (DG Comp) have demonstrated that they can. These institutions, while imperfect, are a public good that benefits all European citizens.

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$300 a month. And that’s before you get to sensible healthcare. (Philippon has a whole book where he shows that the cost to the US economy is around a trillion dollars annually.)
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Here’s why I think the refresh rate wars are dumb • Android Authority

Suzana Dalul:

»

the culprits were the OnePlus 7 Pro and the Pixel 4, both featuring 90Hz displays. Many manufacturers have followed their example, with a number of Android devices now featuring the faster and smoother screens. But the race to have the highest refresh rate looks like yet another manufacturer tactic to have the best specs on paper.

It is easy to argue that high refresh rates are not necessary for the average consumer. My colleague Ryan’s video certainly demonstrated that most people cannot tell the difference between 60Hz and 90Hz at a glance. But many smartphone features aren’t terribly practical — they exist because people want to buy phones that have them. Many people don’t take advantage of the variety of lenses many smartphone cameras come with, for example, but they are a selling point regardless. So, we will move on to better and more compelling arguments against the refresh rate wars.

First, we can’t deny that a higher refresh rate improves the overall visual experience. Anyone who has made the switch from a 60Hz PC monitor to 144Hz or higher can attest that there is no going back. Once you get acclimated to the smoother visuals the new monitor offers, everything else feels sluggish. Movement is less blurry and you get a competitive edge when playing games too. Yet, on a smartphone, which unlike a monitor isn’t constantly plugged in, there are many more drawbacks.

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Never underestimate OEMs’ desire to have a bigger number – any number, no matter how meaningless – for the spec sheet, though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Nike’s Vaporfly will make you run faster over significant distances. So should they be banned? CC-licensed photo by beast120815 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 13 links for you. Ready or not. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

23andMe lays off 100 people: CEO Anne Wojcicki explains why • CNBC

Christina Farr:

»

Home DNA-testing company 23andMe is laying off about 100 people, or 14% of its staff, on Thursday, in the wake of declining sales.

The layoffs include the operations teams, which were focused on the company’s growth and scaling efforts, as well as other teams. In the coming months, the company plans to tighten its focus on the direct-to-consumer business and its therapeutics arm while scaling back its clinical studies arm.

CEO Anne Wojcicki told CNBC she’s been “surprised” to see the market starting to turn.

Wojcicki has theories, but she doesn’t have clear proof for why consumers are shying away from getting tests that reveal their percentage of Irish heritage, propensity for a favorite ice cream flavor, or whether they have a limited set of variants that are associated with breast cancer. Either way, she notes, she’s downsizing because it’s “what the market is ready for.”

“This has been slow and painful for us,” she said.

«

The reality is she doesn’t know why it’s slowing down; maybe privacy, maybe economic concerns. Or maybe once you get past the early adopters, people don’t care about their genetic ancestry, and don’t really want to know their genetic future. That puts a very definite ceiling on sales.
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Why the Jeff Bezos phone hack is a wake-up call for the powerful • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

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Three things come together to make the case an object lesson in the exploitation of digital vulnerability. The first involves social engineering. Attacks like this play on weaknesses in the human operating system that can’t easily be patched. At senior levels of business and government, ego, opportunity and responsibility jostle to shape how personal networks operate. Trust is a requisite, and electronic channels of communication unavoidable.

Even friends spy on each other. Angela Merkel’s phone calls were monitored by the US National Security Agency, according to leaks by Edward Snowden — though German prosecutors dropped their investigation after failing to come up with hard evidence.

For anyone aspiring to power and influence in the world, this prompts deeply uncomfortable questions. For instance, which is worse: that a future head of state hasn’t been sending you internet memes over WhatsApp, or that he has? It’s a safe bet that the crown prince has many fewer WhatsApp contacts today than he started the week with.

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I think that point is the really important one. People will be a lot more careful to quarantine their personal phone from their business phone. It might be a pain, but it will become necessary again. Not that it wasn’t before, but the Bezos case is now always going to be the “um, remember when…?”
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Motorola on the Razr’s folding screen: ‘bumps and lumps are normal’ • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

»

Motorola has posted a series of videos on its YouTube channel that are somewhere between brief ads and how-tos for the folding phone. And as you might have guessed from the headline, “Caring for razr” caught our eye.

In it, Motorola runs through the basics of what you need to know if you have a phone with a plastic folding screen. We thought we knew most of them already based on our experience with the Galaxy Fold, but Motorola’s video has one more thing to think about: “Screen is made to bend; bumps and lumps are normal.”

With the Galaxy Fold, “bumps and lumps” ended up being the first harbingers of a catastrophic screen failure on our review unit. Apparently that’s not going to be the case with the Razr. There are lots of ways to build a hinge for a folding plastic screen, and Motorola apparently opted for a design that allows for a little more flex than the original Fold design did. It’s also able to close completely flat.

Because of that plastic material, the screen is likely to have some kind of crease — though we weren’t really able to see much of one in our original hands-on. We’ll obviously need to review the phone in full before we can say ourselves whether the screen has a notable crease, bumps, or lumps.

«

They’re normal, but only if you pay $1500 first.
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Can Bernie (really) save America? • Eudaimonia and Co

umair haque:

»

America made a socioeconomic choice — a fatal one. It wasn’t going to be like any other society. No — it was exceptional, and always had been: a promised land. Here, people would learn to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps — and along the way, they’d learn the virtues of industry, hard work, and decency. They’d become better people — and everyone would grow rich. All it would take was a little punishment, a little selfishness, a little bit of hard-heartedness. Or maybe a lot. “Tough love” is what American pop culture calls all that.

The problem, of course, is that America’s economic exceptionalism didn’t work. Making Americans beg each other for dollars to pay for healthcare online didn’t make anyone better off — it just made people dead. Turning the middle class into the new, desperate poor didn’t lead to some kind of mass movement of generous and beautiful people — it just led to neofascism, as they sought even more powerless people to hate. Making working class Americans work around the clock and never take vacations didn’t add to more industry — in fact, it only led to abusive monopolies, and mega-billionaires that corrode democracy.

American ideas have failed in every possible way — and hence, as a result, America’s having something very much like a Soviet collapse…

…Europeans live not just the world’s longest, happiest, richest, healthiest, sanest lives — by a very, very long way — but history’s. Moreover, they’ve accomplished that in just one human lifetime — from the ashes of war. The magnitude and triumph of such a thing isn’t taught in America, but it should be. It might just be humanity’s greatest accomplishment, ever. The European miracle should be taught to every child in preschool, so that they really understand what human prosperity is made of, where it comes from.

«

Haque’s complaint that Sanders is only incremental, not revolutionary, misses the point to me: Americans simply wouldn’t vote for someone who offered real revolution like that. (Thanks Adewale Adetugbo.)
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Google is backtracking on its controversial desktop search results redesign • The Verge

Nick Statt:

»

Google is backtracking on a controversial search engine redesign, announcing that it will experiment with some elements of the new look in response to user feedback.

Google made one of the biggest changes to how it displays search results in the company’s history earlier this month, with the changes taking effect over the course of the last week. It involved a visual overhaul that makes it more difficult to differentiate between advertising and organic search results with the removal of color overlays and the introduction of small branded iconography, known on the web as favicons, next to non-ad results.

The company’s stated intention was to align desktop search results with the way they’re presented on mobile, but it became clear this also had the effect of making it harder to distinguish between paid results and non-paid ones. The only difference between an ad and an organic result in the new design is the small lettering or icon next to a link, meaning ads and organic results now look more similar than ever before.

«

I wonder if people inside Google tested this and suggested that it wouldn’t be good. I bet some did. And that they weren’t listened to.
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Vaporfly shoes will help me reach my marathon dream. Should I use them? • The Guardian

Jamie Doward:

»

When they first went on sale, the Vaporfly 4% – the first iteration of the shoe [used by Eliud Kipchoge to run his sub-two hour marathon] – sold out so quickly that pairs were going for more than £1,000 on the resale market.

Struggling to justify that price to myself, I bagged a pair of the 4%’s cheaper cousin, the Zoom Fly 2 Flyknit, which, at £140 (at the time) were still a good £50 more than I’d ever spent on a pair of running shoes.

But, like the Vaporfly, they had a carbon plate [in the sole], and the difference this made was immediately apparent. I ran the Pisa marathon in three hours 17 seconds, shaving more than seven minutes off my personal best.

To be clear: there were many factors at play on that day and I’m not suggesting the shoes benefit everyone. Many runners claim that the shoes reward more efficient, faster runners who have spent several years chasing personal bests. Reviews suggest they are not great for regular training at a slower pace. But it’s clear they gave me a significant boost.

Too significant, apparently.

The world athletics ruling body is preparing to tighten regulations governing shoe technology, according to two sources who spoke to Reuters. World Athletics is expected to make the announcement when it unveils the findings of a review at the end of the month.

“World Athletics definitely agrees that there needs to be greater clarity on what is permissible in elite sport and in our competitions,” it said in a statement to Reuters, adding that any change would need to be ratified by its council.

«

In that case, shouldn’t everyone run in bare feet? How and where do you draw the line on this technology?
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Article 13: UK will not implement EU copyright law • BBC News

»

Universities and Science Minister Chris Skidmore has said that the UK will not implement the EU Copyright Directive after the country leaves the EU.

Several companies have criticised the law, which would hold them accountable for not removing copyrighted content uploaded by users, if it is passed. EU member states have until 7 June 2021 to implement the new reforms, but the UK will have left the EU by then.

The UK was among 19 nations that initially supported the law. That was in its final European Council vote in April 2019…

…Critics claimed Article 13 would make it nearly impossible to upload even the tiniest part of a copyrighted work to Facebook, YouTube, or any other site.

However, specific tweaks to the law in 2019 made memes safe “for purposes of quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody and pastiche”.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson criticised the law in March, claiming that it was “terrible for the internet”. Google had campaigned fiercely against the changes, arguing they would “harm Europe’s creative and digital industries” and “change the web as we know it”.

«

It’s never seemed likely that this would be used to go after folk posting memes; only those who are doing really egregious infringement.

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Sonos’ frantic flailing illustrates the stupidity of smart tech • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

»

My Advents [mid-market hi-fi loudspeakers] are 45-50 years old. Even when new, they didn’t qualify as “the best” speakers — they were designed to be very good, midrange, affordable speakers. I have no doubt that some of you own audio systems that utterly outclass my own, though I have a vague plan to build a 7.1 sound solution using them as the front pair, then adding a subwoofer underneath it, just for fun.

My Advent Loudspeakers are the best speakers for one and only one reason: my father gave them to me.

I thought of all this when I read [The Verge’s] summary of Sonos’ position. According to Sonos, a speaker they built just 10 years ago has reached its “technological limits.” It made me think about the way we’ve allowed companies to arbitrarily define what “technological limits” are, and what they look like, and how easily that phrase gets tossed about by companies to justify bricking hardware, removing features, or preventing customers from repairing their own equipment. It’s an issue that’s much bigger than Sonos or any single company. It even impacts the US military.

If Sonos had existed in the mid-to-late 1970s and my father had chosen to buy a speaker from it, there would have been nothing to pass on in the first place.

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Unauthorized Bread • Ars Technica

A novella by Cory Doctorow which is a finalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s national book award, and more; the whole thing is at the link, and this is how it starts:

»

The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.

Brrt.

Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”

There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.

«

For all those who have been having fun with printers lately.
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A letter from our CEO • Sonos Blog

Patrick Spence:

»

rest assured that come May, when we end new software updates for our legacy products, they will continue to work as they do today. We are not bricking them, we are not forcing them into obsolescence, and we are not taking anything away. Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honor that investment for as long as possible. While legacy Sonos products won’t get new software features, we pledge to keep them updated with bug fixes and security patches for as long as possible. If we run into something core to the experience that can’t be addressed, we’ll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you’ll see in your experience.

Secondly, we heard you on the issue of legacy products and modern products not being able to coexist in your home. We are working on a way to split your system so that modern products work together and get the latest features, while legacy products work together and remain in their current state. We’re finalizing details on this plan and will share more in the coming weeks.
While we have a lot of great products and features in the pipeline, we want our customers to upgrade to our latest and greatest products when they’re excited by what the new products offer, not because they feel forced to do so.

«

This is a good move, essentially clarifying what had been said already, but imperfectly reported. However I – and plenty of others, I’d suspect – still feel that the way the trade-in program bricks devices is bad. The problem comes in the way that the app keeps being updated, and eventually will leave some devices behind (or that’s the way it feels). But culturally, we’re completely unused to the idea that a piece of hi-fi (or Bluetooth speaker) will stop responding to its controls.
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Why Xylo had to die • Pioneer Square Labs

Peter Denton is in charge of marketing at PSL, which is a VC fund and incubator:

»

At PSL, we kill nine out of ten ideas that we test. We haven’t talked much about these publicly before, but we wanted to share what it looks like when we make a “kill” decision. Our goal in publishing this is to help other founders think about how to do early validation the way that we do inside the studio.

The idea we tested was Xylo, which solved a problem that millions of parents in the U.S. experience: finding great teachers for music lessons. Our proposed solution was an online platform to connect these teachers with students for remote (or in-person) lessons with a great user experience. Sounds like a great idea, right? Let’s dive in!

«

The detail in the numbers is remarkable. Turns out Xylo would just about keep one person clothed, but certainly not housed (in San Francisco).
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Guessing names based on what they start with • FlowingData

Nathan Yau:

»

I’m really bad at names. A lot of the time when I meet someone new, the name goes in one ear and out the other. If I manage to remember the name short-term, remembering long-term is still a toss-up in favor of forgetting.

But sometimes I can remember the first letter and then I can cycle the alphabet on the second letter to jog my memory.

I wonder: If I can remember the first letter or two, can I use name data from the Social Security Administration to make an educated guess about the full name?

Put in your sex, the decade you were born, and start entering your name below. I’ll try to guess your full name before you’re done.

«

I’m not American, but it got mine from the first letter. (X is always Xavier. Z apparently includes Zoltan, which is fun if you remember Big. OK, so that was Zoltar, but anyway.)

Power of big data, as ever.
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Apple pushes back against EU common charger, warns of innovation risks • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

iPhone maker Apple on Thursday pushed back against EU lawmakers’ call for a common charger, warning the move could hamper innovation, create a mountain of electronic waste and irk consumers.

Apple’s comments came a week after lawmakers at the European Parliament called for a common charger for all mobile phones and amended a draft law to say the ability to work with common chargers would be an essential requirement for radio equipment in the bloc.

A move to a common charger would affect Apple more than any other companies as its iPhones and most of its products are powered by its Lightning cable, whereas Android devices are powered by USB-C connectors.

“We believe regulation that forces conformity across the type of connector built into all smartphones stifles innovation rather than encouraging it, and would harm consumers in Europe and the economy as a whole,” Apple said in a statement.

It said regulation was not needed as the industry is already moving to USB-C through a connector or cable assembly.

“We hope the (European) Commission will continue to seek a solution that does not restrict the industry’s ability to innovate,” Apple said.

A study by Copenhagen Economics commissioned by Apple showed that consumer harm from a regulatory-mandated move to a common charger would cost at least €1.5bn, outweighing the €13m in associated environmental benefits.

«

OK, well I’m confused: I’d call the thing that goes into the phone a “connector”, not a charger. Separated by a common bureaucratic language, as ever.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Bristol Pound’s looming collapse seems to prove.. that we should have a world currency? CC-licensed photo by alister 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 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

TikTok memes like WW3, impeachment, and Australian fires prove the platform is political • Vox

Rebecca Jennings:

»

TikTok was never supposed to be political. The app was expressly designed to discourage news-sharing — its home feed is non-chronological, and there are no visible timestamps for when a video is posted, making it nearly impossible to understand what happened when. Political advertisements are not allowed, and until recently, TikTok had vague content guidelines that reportedly encouraged moderators to censor content sensitive to local governments. Its slogan is “Make your day,” presumably by distracting you from *gestures widely at everything*.

TikTok was never supposed to be political, but of course it was always going to be. During 2019’s widespread climate strikes, TikTokers used jokes about e-girls to spread awareness about e-missions. When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was revealed to have worn brownface, TikTok had fun brutally roasting him. In November, a New Jersey teen posted a viral TikTok discussing the Chinese mass internment of Muslims (and was subsequently locked out of her account). Another teen used the app to organize a strike in solidarity with her school district’s teachers. When adults on TikTok mocked teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, there was a flood of comments with just one phrase, sparking one of the year’s biggest memes: “ok boomer.” US Democratic presidential candidates are on TikTok. Police officers, soldiers, and the Israel Defense Forces are on TikTok. Nazis and terrorists are, too…

…“Conversations are difficult to have on Twitter or Instagram because of how reactive everybody is on those apps,” [TikToker Gem] Nwanne says. “Comments on a video about the Australian fires were like, folks asking questions and people answering them. On Twitter or Instagram they’d be like, ‘How dare you ask the question?’ The community’s a lot chiller, and I do think it’s because they’re younger, and so they don’t know to be pretentious douchebags yet.”

«

Hmm. I’m not sure that demonstrating that people make short videos about political topics does actually demonstrate that it can wield political weight. Facebook has proven that. Twitter has. Instagram, Snapchat – they haven’t.
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Help! I’m trapped inside TikTok and I can’t get out • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

TikTok doesn’t divulge how its algorithms work but various experts explained that the artificial intelligence powering the For You page uses lots of factors to determine what you like to watch, including how long you watch and how fast you swipe away.

Everyone I spoke with pointed to the app’s full-screen video design. Instead of giving you lots of thumbnails to choose from, like YouTube or Instagram, TikTok watches you flick away stuff you don’t like, gathering helpful negative signals. It also learns what you do want to watch—even if you don’t “heart” anything.

“You can also get a lot more behavioral data when someone watches lots and lots of short videos,” says Jason Davis, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Singapore campus of the Insead Business School, who has studied TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance Inc.

How quickly TikTok figures you out is bananas. Within minutes, the app knew I’d enjoy videos of millennials making fun of themselves, odd iPhone pranks and dogs. (OK, fine, even serial killers like dogs.)

“As soon as I wake up—it used to be Instagram or YouTube—now I head straight to the For You page and I’m just laughing,” says Dominic Toliver, a 26-year-old TikTok-famous creator with 8.7 million followers. “I’m just laughing and it’s my motivation for the day. I have my ideas and I’m set and ready to go.”

«

What you do and don’t like on TikTok can be incredibly telling. I bet the difference in swipe time is measured in single milliseconds to distinguish between likes. I loved this.
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About us • Parlia

Parlia:

»

Parlia is an encyclopedia of opinion.

We’re building a definitive collection of all the opinions in the world*. A wikipedia of opinion.

We hope Parlia will:

• help us understand the world a little faster and little better

• stop us having to go over the same arguments over and over

• help us better hear the opinions on all sides of a question.

We need you to sign up and help us build it.

«

An encyclopedia of opinion? I’ll go for “ambitious”. But Wikipedia looked wildly ambitious when it began. Now it’s part of the background hum. Though what I would say is that presently Parlia offers too much distraction on its front page; less there might encourage people to seek out an opinion.
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App games about plague and disaster go viral in China • Quartz

Jane Li:

»

Strategy games about epidemics and war are going viral in China, just as it’s facing a real-life challenge of grappling with a fast-spreading new virus that has led to hundreds of infections and nine deaths.

Plague Inc. and Rebel Inc., both developed by British game studio Ndemic Creations, have seen a surge in downloads since Monday (Jan. 20), the day China announced that a new pneumonia-like illness had spread to cities outside Wuhan, the Chinese city where the outbreak began.

Plague Inc, which lets players evolve a pathogen to wipe out humanity, jumped from the fifth spot on Monday to top the charts among paid games on China’s iOS store as of Wednesday (Jan. 22), according to data provider Sensor Tower. Meanwhile, Rebel Inc., which requires users to stabilize a war-torn country and “win the hearts and minds of the people” while also trying to prevent a deadly insurgency from taking power, jumped from the 27th spot on Monday to fifth on Wednesday.

The popularity of the doomsday simulation games comes as worries have increased about the new coronavirus, a type of virus that can cause colds but also more serious respiratory illnesses, as it spread to more cities in China and more countries this week.

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Is “going viral” really the phrase you were reaching for here, Jane?
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2016 WSJ story on Apple’s plans for E2E encryption for iCloud data • Daring Fireball

John Gruber found a 2016 WSJ story by Daisuke Wakabayashi, which said this:

»

Apple is working to bolster its encryption so that it won’t be able to decode user information stored in iCloud, according to people familiar with the matter.

But Apple executives are wrestling with how to strengthen iCloud encryption without inconveniencing users. Apple prides itself on creating intuitive, easy-to-use software, and some in the company worry about adding complexity.

If a user forgets a password, for example, and Apple doesn’t have the keys, the user might lose access to photos and other important data. If Apple keeps a copy of the key, the copy be “can be compromised or the service can be compelled to turn it over,” said Window Snyder, a former Apple security and privacy manager who is now chief security officer at Fastly, a content-delivery network.

«

Of which Gruber remarks:

»

Given that this was four years ago, something clearly interrupted this plan. I’ve heard from a few additional sources at Apple (or very recently at Apple), and all believe that Apple’s reluctance to use end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups is about the frequency of customers who don’t know their password but need to access their backup. My idea is to make it optional, but every additional option makes a feature more complicated. No one expects to forget their password — even if this were only an option, some number of iCloud users would turn it on because it’s more secure, forget their password, and be forever locked out of their backup.

«

Bear in mind that iCloud backups include photos. You lose your phone, you need to recover from the backup. But – oops! You can’t remember the password. All those photos are lost forever. You can encrypt local backups, using iTunes. I’ve done that and forgotten the password before. It’s certainly a very difficult balance.
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Google’s ads just look like search results now • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

In the past, Google’s Sundeep Jain justified simplifying the company’s ad designs by saying that a simpler design “makes it easier for users to digest information,” according to Search Engine Land. He added that the company was trying to reduce the number of different colours used on a page in order to bring a little more “harmony” to the layout.

It’s hard not to get the feeling that this “harmony” is less about offering a better user experience, and more about helping Google’s ad revenue. As Digiday reports, there’s data to suggest that’s actually the case. According to one digital marketing agency, click-through rates have already increased for some search ads on desktop, and mobile click-through rates for some of its clients increased last year from 17 to 18% after similar changes to Google’s mobile search layout.

Google is fundamentally an ad business. In the third quarter of 2019, Google’s parent company Alphabet made nearly $34bn from Google advertising, out of a total revenue of $40bn for Alphabet as a whole. At that sort of scale, small changes in ad click-through rates could end up having a huge effect on Alphabet’s bottom line, even if it means tricking users for cheap clicks.

«

I’ve heard claims from some people that when Google used to have a differently coloured background for ads, people used to think those were “special” results and click them; and that labelling its ads as “Ads” made that much clearer.

So, shouldn’t the organic search ads have the coloured background now? You’d discover how far down you have to scroll to find them too – on mobile, past the first screen.
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The demise of the Bristol Pound shows the folly of local currencies • CapX

Christopher Snowdon:

»

The Bristol Pound is on its last legs. The idea of creating a local currency for the city emerged ‘around a table in a pub in early 2009’ but will soon come to an end unless its directors can find £100,000 to cover its running costs. Printing money is not an option this time.

Bristol’s experiment is not the first local currency to hit the buffers. The Exeter Pound ceased operations in 2018. The Totnes Pound came to an end last September. The Stroud Pound, which was launched by Molly Scott-Cato in 2009, has been defunct since 2013. The Lake District Pound will go out of circulation next month. If the Bristol Pound goes under, the only remaining local currencies will be in Brixton and Lewes.

The Bristol Pound was intended to encourage people to spend their money with local businesses rather than with their competitors in Bath, Gloucester or – God forbid – a foreign country. The logic, such as it is, rests on an economic fallacy that was debunked in the eighteenth century. Under mercantilism, it was assumed that the route to prosperity lay in circulating money in the domestic economy, rather than gainfully exchanging it for goods from abroad. Fear of wealth ‘leaking out’ of the country led to an obsession with the balance of trade, of which the philosopher-economist Adam Smith said ‘nothing could be more absurd’.

The fallacy is in confusing wealth with money. Money is a token of exchange. It is a form of wealth, but so are the products it buys. If you spend £500 on a diamond ring you will have less money, not less wealth.

A nation which chooses to buy expensive, inferior goods at home when there are cheaper, better options abroad will make itself poorer. The same principle equally applies to villages, cities and counties. One only has to imagine what would happen if every town in Britain decided to trade exclusively with local firms to see how inefficient a ‘circular economy’ would be.

«

Excellent points. So… logically… shouldn’t we have just one single currency for the country, the continent, the world?
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Twitter tells facial recognition trailblazer to stop using site’s photos • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

»

Twitter sent a letter this week to the small start-up company, Clearview AI, demanding that it stop taking photos and any other data from the social media website “for any reason” and delete any data that it previously collected, a Twitter spokeswoman said. The cease-and-desist letter, sent on Tuesday, accused Clearview of violating Twitter’s policies…

…Tor Ekeland, a lawyer for Clearview, confirmed that it had received Twitter’s letter and said the company “will respond appropriately.” He declined to comment further.

The Times article set off angry protests from Democratic lawmakers and privacy watchdogs, who said it was paving the way for universal facial recognition technology that would effectively end people’s ability to remain anonymous while in public.

On Wednesday, Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, also sent a letter to Clearview, addressed to its co-founder and chief executive, Hoan Ton-That. “Widespread use of your technology could facilitate dangerous behavior and could effectively destroy individuals’ ability to go about their daily lives anonymously,” Mr. Markey wrote.

«

Essentially, this is the latest Google (the potential for FR is that big, I’d say), and its attitude to people telling it to stop stealing their content is just the same as Google’s was. Maybe Clearview will reply by asking Twitter to come to their offices and review each photo in turn.
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Instagram says it’s removing posts supporting Soleimani to comply with US sanctions • CNN

Donie O’Sullivan and Artemis Moshtaghian:

»

Instagram and its parent company Facebook are removing posts that voice support for slain Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani to comply with US sanctions, a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to CNN Business Friday.

The Iranian government has called for nationwide legal action against Instagram in protest, even creating a portal on a government website for the app’s users to submit examples of posts the company removed, Iranian state media reported.

Instagram is one of the few western social media platforms that is not blocked in Iran. Facebook and Twitter are blocked but some Iranians access those sites using VPNs.

Twitter is not removing posts that support Soleimani, a company spokesperson confirmed to CNN Business on Monday. It said as long as Twitter users abide by company rules, their posts will not be removed…

…Instagram shut down Soleimani’s own account on the platform last April after the US government designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a foreign terrorist organization. Soleimani was an IRGC commander.

“We operate under US sanctions laws, including those related to the US government’s designation of the IRGC and its leadership,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

Iranian soccer player Alireza Jahanbakhsh, who has a verified Instagram account, posted a photo of Soleimani after his death. Jahanbakhsh said Instagram had removed that post.

«

No doubt Facebook/Instagram will say it was a “mistake” and restore it, now attention has been brought. Removing posts by Soleimani and other members of the IRGC makes sense. Beyond that, though?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified