Bruno Kahl + more news

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Bruno Kahl

German Intelligence Chief Bruno Kahl Interview – SPIEGEL ONLINE – really interesting interview with Bruno Kahl. Mr Kahl is a career civil servant rather than a spook who became management. The insights that Bruno Kahl shares are very interesting:

  • America First didn’t affect intelligence sharing
  • Daesh has fallen into a franchise model
  • Turkey’s aborted military coup was over the concern of being purged, which happened anyway
  • Russia is less of a threat than IS

More related content here.

Business

IBM, Remote-Work Pioneer, is Calling Thousands Of Employees Back To the Office | Slashdot – damning indictment of teleworking and the power of technology

As Uber Woos More Drivers, Taxis Hit Back – NYTimes.com – when will Uber’s cheap capital and toxic culture run out of road and become this decade’s pets.com

Consumer behaviour

Escape to another world | 1843 – changing gender roles, changing expectations of what they can achieve and escapism

China has overtaken Japan in South Koreans’ worst countries list, new survey claims | South China Morning Post – big longer term issue for the Chinese, probably bigger than they realise at the moment

Alienation 101 | 1843 – Chinese student experience in the US

Generation X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials, Report Finds – NYTimes.com – fire the millennials in your social team

Are Teenagers Replacing Drugs With Smartphones? – NYTimes.com – drugs replaced by digital alternatives?

Gadgets

SoftBank Drops $100 Million Investment in iPhone Rival – WSJ – stops investment in Andy Rubin’s next thing (paywall)

Apple announces a new, cheaper iPad in hopes of stopping sales slump – ExtremeTech – interesting that they are prepared to make a thicker product

Handsets at MWC: Same But Different | EE Times – from the perspective of electronics engineers

Innovation

The economic rationale for public R&I funding and its impact – Research policy and organisation – EU Bookshop – good reading material showing the importance of government R&D spurring private enterprise innovation

Legal

Apple invents a Unique Air-Tight Protective Case for Future iPhones with a Smart Communications Component – Why does the notification have to be digital (thinking Sony’s Sport Walkman and Discman designs were secure closure was self evident)

Lawyers and Academics Warn UK Against Criminalizing File-Sharers | Torrent Freak – interesting work by media lobbyists, it will go south when it starts catching casual middle class criminals

South Korea Finds Qualcomm Prevented Samsung From Selling Its Exynos Processors – Slashdot – smoking gun…

A Small Table Maker Takes On Alibaba’s Flood of Fakes – NYTimes.com – Alibaba’s PR pain

Luxury

De Grisogono Offers You a ‘Botler’ | New York Times – interesting Facebook Messenger usage

What’s Gucci? | The Outline – stunned by this social strategy and not in a good way

Nike Sees Online Search Spike from China’s Consumer Rights Day | The Daily | L2 – oh Consumer Rights day – that festival of bashing the west….

Hong Kong jewellers poised for joy as Chinese big spenders return | South China Morning Post – I guess its also about creating portable wealth as capital restrictions continue and change

Media

What Marketers Should Expect from Search in the Future – Think with Google  – reading this makes me think that Jeff Weiner’s direction at Yahoo! Search was right; just the way to achieve it should have relied more on machine learning

Why advertisers are pulling spend from YouTube – Business Insider – interesting mix of motivations

Facebook Goes Full “Black Mirror”: How Facebook Is Making Membership a Prerequisite to Everyday… – In some ways this is worse than Microsoft Passport; that the IT industry and privacy wonks fought off in the early noughties

Aral Balkan — We didn’t lose control – it was stolen – interesting framing of the modern day online media industry

Online

Here Is a Tweet Venture Capitalist Benedict Evans Just Deleted [Updated] | Gizmodo – EPIC

Security

QR code scams rise in China, putting e-payment security in spotlight | South China Morning Post– interesting attack vector

Eeben Barlow’s Military and Security Blog: OVERCOMING THE CRISIS IN COMMAND – interesting essay on how the analogue between business management and military command is causing problems in the military

Technology

Beijing public bathrooms equipped with face scanners in a bid to save toilet paper-Sino-US – there is something wrong about the economics of this, unless the average Chinese person is the pink panther of toilet paper?

Demis Hassabis plays to DeepMind’s strengths by using artificial intelligence for social impact – interesting read. One pout stood out though wasn’t Google X and Google Research supposed to be the kind of medium / long term research DeepMind claims to be. Secondly, there is no ‘general purpose’ AI in DeepMind’s current vision or structure

Telecoms

Mobile data became China Mobile’s biggest revenue driver in 2016 | total telecom – margins on data razor thin by comparison though, WeChat turning China Mobile into a dumb pipe