Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change. Security mostly refers to protection from hostile forces, but it has a wide range of other senses: for example, as the absence of harm (e.g. freedom from want); as the presence of an essential good (e.g. food security); as resilience against potential damage or harm (e.g. secure foundations); as secrecy (e.g. a secure telephone line); as containment (e.g. a secure room or cell); and as a state of mind (e.g. emotional security).
Back when I started writing this blog, hacking was something that was done against ‘the man’, usually as a political statement. Now breaches are part of organised crime’s day to day operations. The Chinese government so thoroughly hacked Nortel that all its intellectual property was stolen along with commercial secrets like bids and client lists. The result was the firm went bankrupt. Russian ransomware shuts down hospitals across Ireland. North Korean government sanctioned hackers robbed 50 million dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh and laundered it in association with Chinese organised crime.
Now it has spilled into the real world with Chinese covert actions, Russian contractors in the developing world and hybrid warfare being waged across central Europe and the middle east.
Paidy considers listing as ‘buy now, pay later’ catches on in Japan | Financial Times – Japan is a microcosm of what’s happening in terms of buy now, pay later on the web. Japan is notable, because like Germany, historically it has been a heavy cash focused consumer payments market. Mobile payments were mainly used for daily expenses like commuter travel or shopping at the combini. Many consumer e-commerce sites now have Klarna involved. Even Amazon is getting in on the buy now, pay later theme:Amazon Enters the ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Space Through Affirm – All of this looks like a consumer credit iceberg that might catch bankers et al by surprise. The buy now, pay later model itself isn’t new. Its payment by instalments model was used by catalogue businesses to furniture stores. It is lay away for more impulsive times.
Cantopop star Denise Ho flagged by law enforcement agencies: Sing Tao | The Standard – a few things are interesting which are further evidence of the maximalist interpretation of the Hong Kong National Security Law. Going after Ho is an indication that none of the pro-democracy movement will be tolerated, even as a Potemkin village type construct.
Chinese Official Dismisses Wave of Emigration From Hong Kong — Radio Free Asia – “Neither Beijing nor Hong Kong officials are willing to admit that there is a crisis in Hong Kong,” Cheng said. “Hong Kong residents lack confidence in the future and can’t tolerate the current situation, so a considerable number of people are choosing to emigrate.”
“I think the central government must care about that, because it will affect how its policies in Hong Kong are perceived in the international community,” he said. Cheng, who has himself recently emigrated, said the feelings of the people of Hong Kong are no longer being taken into account by Beijing. – I honestly think the Xi administration doesn’t care
I couldn’t avoid doing a post on Afghanistan given what had been going on this week. The Afghanistan conflict posed a number of interesting questions about:
What privacy and security means for the people left behind in Afghanistan in the digital age
Why strategy is seldom a teacher and several countries have made the same mistake in Afghanistan – (Britain did so twice!)
The failure of intelligence in Afghanistan reminded me of the failure of intelligence agencies to realise that the fall of the Berlin Wall would happen. There was also a failure to underhand who the players were and their motivations in Afghanistan
What will Afghanistan mean for Pakistan moving forwards? Once out, the west has the perfect opportunity to shun Pakistan; which will leave the country vulnerable to Chinese predatory practices
The US Is Removing Records of Its War in Afghanistan From the Internet – Lives are on the line here, but helping them may mean destroying—even if temporarily—the memory of the war and all that happened. It’s a horrible problem to face. One potential solution would be for the U.S. and its allies to take as many Afghan refugees as want to flee the country. – it assumes that the Taliban and supporters like the Pakistani ISI intelligence agency haven’t been caching this material themselves over the years. Things got rolled up so fast, they probably have hold of records from Afghanistan government payroll ledgers to intelligence reports
Germany Flew 65,000 Beer Cans Out of Afghanistan, but Just 7 People on an Evacuation Flight – “There was transport capacity for alcohol, but not for the local staff in Afghanistan,” read a piece in Germany’s Bild newspaper, referring to the fact that the German military had earlier flown home 65,000 cans of beer and 340 bottles of wine before it withdrew from its bases in Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul at the end of June. – surely they could have blown up the alcohol and put people on the flights? – this is the kind of thing that fuels future grudges that morph into terrorist attacks. But it also shows the colossal failure in intelligence in a microcosm
SIGAR | Lessons Learned. The Ides of August – a couple of good post-mortem reads on Afghanistan. A few things struck me. Mission creep had been baked in, although much of that was down to the allies partnering with the Northern Alliance and liberal values. The dual nature of Pakistan, which I suspect Pakistan will get punished for in the longer term. The lack of intelligence on the main players involved such as former president of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai
Beauty
Skincare Preferences by Generation | NPD Group – Despite the generational differences in skincare preferences, there are also commonalities. At the end of the day, it seems we’re not so different, after all. Whether they are more like my mother or my cousin, we see from consumers across-the-board that they are open to trying new things, are looking for clean ingredients, and simply want skincare that produces results from a brand they can trust. Regardless of the trends driving the category, the demand for efficacy and transparency is here to stay
Business
Wolfsburg, we have a problem: How Volkswagen stalled in China | Reuters – Last month, though, he said Volkswagen had fixed the problems revealed by the test, that the ructions of the episode had subsided and the carmaker’s Chinese business was recovering. “We have once again clearly one of the safest cars on the market in this segment,” Woellenstein told reporters in July. “We will once again take up the old leadership of the Passat.”But there is quite some ground to regain in the large family car segment. A total of 47,480 Passats were sold in the first six months of this year in China, some way behind the 91,110 Toyota Camrys (7203.T) and 89,157 Honda Accords (7267.T), according to LMC. The figures from the same period of 2019, before the pandemic struck, show how steeply the Volkswagen model has fallen away of late: 91,400 Passats were sold versus 111,968 Accords and 85,396 Camrys. – I am surprised by this, given Volkswagen’s obsession with common platforms
Tata’s rise mirrors the sweep of India’s history | Financial Times – Tata is no longer at India’s entrepreneurial vanguard. The likes of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and Gautam Adani’s eponymous group, with their investments in telecoms and renewable energy, hold stronger claim to be the “nation builders” of today. These tycoons represent a different way of doing business, one that has prompted much consternation. They lack Tata’s ambivalence about the state, aligning themselves unabashedly with Narendra Modi, and share few of the conservative Tatas’ qualms about “wealth creation for its own sake”.
Biden is sandbagging on immigration – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – the new American support for throwing open the country’s gates is more broad than it is deep. There’s a real desire to cleanse the stain of Trump’s human rights abuses and flirtation with white-nationalism — to at least be able to say that America is still the Nation of Immigrants, that we still have compassion for the people of the poor countries of the world. But beyond that idealistic impulse, I’m not so sure that most liberals have a strong, enduring commitment to welcoming in as many refugees, asylum-seekers, and economic migrants as possible.
One reason is that the Democratic party is increasingly the party of the educated, and to most educated Americans, people like refugees and asylum seekers live in a different world. There’s little natural class solidarity or empathy there. And when it comes to skilled immigrants — the people waiting desperately for that backlog of 100,000 green cards to be processed — well, to most educated Americans, that’s the competition. Both for themselves and for their kids in schools.
Beijing’s American Hustle | Foreign Affairs – U.S. institutions, especially in finance and technology, cling to self-destructive habits acquired through decades of “engagement,” an approach to China that led Washington to prioritize economic cooperation and trade above all else.
If U.S. policymakers and legislators find the will, however, there is a way to pull Wall Street and Silicon Valley back onside, convert the United States’ vulnerabilities into strengths, and mitigate the harmful effects of Beijing’s political warfare. That must begin with bolder steps to stem the flow of U.S. capital into China’s so-called military-civil fusion enterprises and to frustrate Beijing’s aspiration for leadership in, and even monopoly control of, high-tech industries—starting with semiconductor manufacturing
How Chinese pressure on covid origins probe shocked WHO — and led Tedros to push back – The Washington Post – When a WHO scientist on a coronavirus origins probe announced in February that the idea that the virus leaked from a lab was “extremely unlikely” and unworthy of further investigation, senior WHO staff in Geneva were shocked. “We fell off our chairs,” one member told the authors. The team in Wuhan appeared to have given in to Chinese pressure to dismiss the idea without a real investigation. Later, when the WHO-China team released a report that again dismissed that scenario, Tedros pushed back, saying that the research was not “extensive enough” and that there had not been “timely and comprehensive data-sharing.” Since then, relations between the WHO and China have nosedived. Chinese officials said in July that they would not accept any further investigation into the origin of the coronavirus in China and accused the United States of pressuring scientists. The WHO last week released a statement that resisted the idea that “the origins study has been politicized, or that WHO has acted due to political pressure.”
China, the WHO and the power grab that fuelled a pandemic | News | The Sunday Times – In 2017 Chan crowned her final year in office by welcoming Xi to Geneva. While he was there, she signed an agreement that committed the WHO to working alongside China on health as part of the country’s Belt and Road initiative. It was the first time any UN agency had signed up to the initiative, which seeks to extend Chinese influence and trade in more than 70 developing countries by financing infrastructure projects. The initiative is highly controversial because its critics argue that China uses it to shackle countries, particularly in Africa, to “unsustainable debt” as a way of gaining access to the continent’s raw materials and buying political favours. “I think health is too special to get into the really seedy politics that Belt and Road is part of, and I wouldn’t want the WHO to be associated with it,” Gostin argues. “The cost in terms of human rights and debt, and other adverse events for Africa, was a bridge too far.”
Hong Kong’s Leader Killed Her City – The Atlantic – Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing lawmaker and member of Lam’s cabinet, told me that simply having the laws on the books would provide a “deterrent effect” to protesters, and that the fears of journalists and activists over the curtailing of freedoms were not “completely misguided.”
How the daigou can help new brands | Vogue Business – The classic image of the daigou is of an entrepreneurial and well-connected individual who buys global luxury brands on behalf of Chinese clients abroad, where prices are lower and hard-to-find products are more accessible. But the new model daigou is also working closer to home, and mixing emerging Chinese designers with foreign brands. The motivation for the evolution of the daigou’s role comes from a wave of young Gen Z Chinese consumers who are seeking more interesting and affordable fashion and don’t care as much about the name on the label. This is good news for new brands in China – and elsewhere. In a fiercely competitive market, any well-designed brand has the potential to catch consumers’ eyes. What’s needed in the early days of a new brand’s development is an effective sales channel. – Building a similar relationship with daigou, that brands currently have with fashion stylists
[Report] Bad News, By Joseph Bernstein | Harper’s Magazine – In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country. Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didn’t read, elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didn’t look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all – give this a read
COVID slows Apple and Google production shift away from China – Nikkei Asia – AirPods — both entry-level and high-end models — were among the earliest products that Apple began making in significant amounts in Vietnam, having moved production there around two years ago during the height of U.S.-China trade tensions. Apple’s plan to bring some MacBook and iPad production to Vietnam has also been put on hold due to a lack of engineering resources, an incomplete notebook computer supply chain and the dynamic COVID situation, one of the people said. Production of smart doorbells, security cameras and smart speakers for Amazon, which recently moved to Vietnam, has also faced delays since May as assembly lines in the northern part of the country coped with a surge in local cases and tougher COVID prevention measures
Opinion | We built a system like Apple’s to flag child sexual abuse material — and concluded the tech was dangerous – The Washington Post – Our research project began two years ago, as an experimental system to identify CSAM in end-to-end-encrypted online services. As security researchers, we know the value of end-to-end encryption, which protects data from third-party access. But we’re also horrified that CSAM is proliferating on encrypted platforms. And we worry online services are reluctant to use encryption without additional tools to combat CSAM. We sought to explore a possible middle ground, where online services could identify harmful content while otherwise preserving end-to-end encryption. The concept was straightforward: If someone shared material that matched a database of known harmful content, the service would be alerted. If a person shared innocent content, the service would learn nothing. People couldn’t read the database or learn whether content matched, since that information could reveal law enforcement methods and help criminals evade detection. Knowledgeable observers argued a system like ours was far from feasible. After many false starts, we built a working prototype. But we encountered a glaring problem.
Our system could be easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship. The design wasn’t restricted to a specific category of content; a service could simply swap in any content-matching database, and the person using that service would be none the wiser. A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That’s no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials. We spotted other shortcomings. The content-matching process could have false positives, and malicious users could game the system to subject innocent users to scrutiny. – Emphasis in bold is mine
Technology
Laptops Shortage Is Easing as Pandemic Demand Wanes – Bloomberg – The waning demand for PCs will likely last for at least several more quarters. Memory prices are dropping precipitously on fears the chip cycle is over. But it’s good news for anyone looking to buy a laptop, printer, webcam or router. Expect them to be much easier to find in stores this fall. – I am hoping that the price of SSDs will fall again
Intel with an old take on big.little for Alder Lake | EE News Europe – Intel’s next-generation desktop chip, code-named Alder Lake, is the company’s first hybrid architecture to integrate two core types – the Performance-core and Efficient-core. This is similar to ARM’s big.little approach which used a small core optimised for low power consumption with lower performance alongside a larger, higher performance core. Both cores could run the same code depending on the context, avoiding the problems of having a scheduler to allocate tasks to multiple cores. This has traditionally been a limiting factor for the system-level performance of multicore chip designs
Epic’s Fortnite lawsuit has become a nightmare for Google – Protocol – Google ‘estimated in 2019 that it risked losing as much as $6 billion per year if app makers and app store operators banded together with Epic and began creating alternative distribution channels. So instead of offering a superior product, the company muscled its way to a market position now being viewed by U.S. regulators as potentially anticompetitive’ – this might feed into a wider FTC case later on given the focus on revenue. More related content here.
Fake reviews on products including Amazon Prime items (image via quote catalog
Shenzhen to support Amazon merchants | Trivium China – 50,000 merchants were banned from Amazon for astroturfing false reviews. The ban was worth up to 100 billion yuan in sales to these merchants. Half of the merchants affected are based in Shenzhen. Now the Chinese government is looking at what it can do to help the merchants practicing false reviews. Yet it wouldn’t tolerate false reviews if it was exposed in in the domestic market. One of the options being looked at is a platform to rival Amazon Marketplace, that would allow fake reviews
Study: Companies Aren’t Living Up To Chinese Consumers’ Expectations – Three in four (75%) informed Chinese consumers (defined as consumers interested or involved in one of 20 industries studied in the research) said CEOs should speak up on issues that “may not have a significant impact on the business but have a significant impact on society,” with particular focus on diversity and diverse representation within a workforce and its leadership. Yet just 35% of respondents in China feel companies in China can do more to make the workplace better. Similarly, 80% agree that CEOs should have a voice on the environmental policy debate, and three quarters (75%) say business leaders should have a role shaping health policy, the research found. Respondents ranked value and innovation as the top two drivers of brand perceptions in China. Only 35% of companies, however, are meeting expectations in those areas – the key term is ‘informed consumers’, I am sure that the Chinese government might not view things in quite the same way
The Hong Kong National Security Law: The Shifted Grundnorm of Hong Kong’s Legal Order and Its Implications by Han Zhu :: SSRN – the application of mainland laws in Hong Kong, the interpretation of the NSL, cross-border criminal jurisdiction, national security institutional infrastructure, and the legal language. To some extent, the enactment of the NSL is like a silent constitutional reform that has reshaped, and will continue to reshape, a wide range of aspects of Hong Kong law as well as the Basic Law. Due to the dualistic nature of the NSL as a national law which applies to both the mainland and Hong Kong, it has also expanded and deepened the interaction and conflict between legal systems in the two regions, highlighting the inherent tension of maintaining the unity of a heterogeneous legal order under one country, two systems
Influencers want to be paid more than ever. Blame the pandemic | Marketing | Campaign Asia – no one is asking the question in this article, are influencers overpriced, or even worth it compared to other “Industry can also factor in, with some influencer niches starting at a higher price point than others,” says Heather Rottner, director of social media at Coyne PR. For instance, she says the firm generally sees higher rates in high-end fashion and beauty, food and DIY. While there is no shortage of influencers looking for brand partnerships in these categories, “many influencers pride themselves on being selective and authentic which means they don’t jump on every partnership offer they receive or use just any product.”
Media
‘Spreading like a virus’: inside the EU’s struggle to debunk Covid lies | World news | The Guardian – Until the pandemic, there was no monitoring of fake stories originating from within EU countries or linked to countries other than Russia. While China Global Television Network (CGTN), an English-language cable news channel controlled by the Chinese Communist party, is considering a Brussels expansion StratCom until recently had just two people working on Chinese disinformation. Several former EU analysts said multiple state-backed disinformation campaigns, not just Russian, had taken advantage of Covid and Richter believed the EU’s limited focus on Russia “affected the legitimacy of the project.”
Security
The threat of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” is a red herring — Quartz – the damage of cyberattacks comes from a series of piecemeal hacks that are often hidden from public view and don’t always lead to immediate, tangible harm. The actual threat looks less like a barrage of bombs and more like a spy slipping a gloved hand into a filing cabinet or a mobster strolling into a shop to collect a “protection” payment
Who is being monitored? Tutanota – interesting data points, I would imagine that other western countries would have a similar split in use of monitoring
Huawei Accused in Suit of Installing Data ‘Back Door’ in Pakistan Project – WSJ – Another day, another dodgy security story involving Huawei – BES, says in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in California district court that Huawei required it to set up a system in China that gives Huawei access to sensitive information about citizens and government officials from a safe-cities surveillance project in Pakistan’s second-largest city of Lahore. Muhammad Kamran Khan, chief operating officer of the Punjab Safe Cities Authority, which oversees the Lahore project, said the authority has begun looking into BES’s allegations.
Report: Apple to announce client-side photo hashing system to detect child abuse images in user’s photos libraries – 9to5Mac – photo hashing its not foolproof. Once the proof of concept exists, Apple won’t be able to withstand the pressure authoritarian government could use it to track other materials. Tencent’s WeChat is already collecting memes that the Chinese government wouldn’t like from foreign WeChat accounts so that it can train its algorithms to locate similar content with domestic users. The risk for Apple’s customers in other markets like Russia, China and the middle east is real. Apple’s development of photo hashing has garnered a lot of coverage
Apple led the market on encryption, but other players like WhatsApp have made it clear that they won’t follow Apple on photo hashing.
I read the information Apple put out yesterday and I'm concerned. I think this is the wrong approach and a setback for people's privacy all over the world.
People have asked if we'll adopt this system for WhatsApp. The answer is no.
Apple has been trying to ignore the voices complaining against its photo hashing initiative. The problem is that those voices are the early adopters and developers who have made Apple what it is today. I think that this could end very badly for Apple in the long term. Particularly when viewed in context of questionable ethical choices despite its progressive positioning on issues in western markets
Apple Discusses “Screeching Voices of the Minority” in Internal Memos – It’s difficult to even write a piece like this, pointing out that a feature ostensibly created for good could have bad implications. Again: What happens when a country like China uses this feature to find people with images critical of the government? Why wouldn’t the industry want to start searching for pirated content on iPhones in a few years?
Is Pax Sinica possible? – China will need to start upholding democratic values and norms, and cultivating peaceful relationships with other countries. Pax Americana has survived for so long, because many countries, including China’s neighbours, rely heavily on the US for trade, finance, technology, and security. They will be reluctant to accept Pax Sinica, unless China offers them something better. And that must begin with pax – I suspect that Premier Xi would be thinking more along the lines of mercantilistic trade relationships and vassal statehood, which would be more in keeping with pre-revolutionary China
Consumer behaviour
Everybody needs to get vaccinated, says Tilman Fertitta – Fertitta’s comments about employees admitting that they had fake vaccines cards is pretty disturbing. It isn’t like vaccines are in short supply in the markets that has restaurants in like New York. The counterfeit vaccine cards must be more about avoiding vaccines all together
Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades | PNAS – Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders. – literally society is sick
ongoing by Tim Bray · Apps Getting Worse – Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted. – This also explains why Skype got designed into irrelevancy
FMCG
Unilever installs a detergent refill machine in Mumbai | Trendwatching – this all feels like things have gone full circle. My Mum and Dad growing up as children in rural Ireland talked about how many dry goods products were sold by weight in the village store. My Granny used to keep spices and flavourings for baking in a bucket sized tin that she’d been gifted decades before by the village store owner. Used packaging was a community asset rather than a liability. The biscuits were sold by the dozen in a paper bag by the shopkeeper. I can just about remember the village store and its long time owner Mrs Paddy Kelly, (Mr Kelly had died decades ago but I have no idea what Mrs Kelly’s name was). By the time I was born, it was more like a modern convenience store, with a farm supplies store attached. Electricity had come to the farm when I was three or four, so we had a fridge and an icebox – ideal for a block of HB vanilla ice cream that came back from the shop wrapped in newsprint to try and keep it cold.
Secondly, by having a vending machine in store; Unilever are still managing to keep control of their brand.
Japan
Japan’s fractured polity exposed by COVID-19 crisis – Nikkei Asia – Whatever the intention, the public sees hypocrisy, inconsistency and incompetence. The vaccination rollout has been a mess. The public was asked to practice “self-restraint” and stay at home for the fourth state of emergency as the country opened its doors to tens of thousands of athletes and officials for the 2020 Olympics.
This dismal state of affairs clashes with the image of competence and professionalism that Japan has enjoyed for decades, and for which it is admired around the world.
Japan looks good in international COVID comparisons, but by its own standards, the situation is perceived as chaotic and a failure of leadership. The public has lost faith. Cynicism has spread as people blame a sclerotic government that does not seem to understand the many recent transformations of Japanese society
Legal
South Africa grants patent to an AI system known as DABUS — Quartz Africa – The patent application listing DABUS as the inventor was filed in patent offices around the world, including the US, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. But only South Africa granted the patent (Australia followed suit a few days later after a court judgment gave the go-ahead). South Africa’s decision has received widespread backlash from intellectual property experts. Some have labelled it a mistake, or an oversight by the patent office. However, as a patent and AI scholar whose PhD aims to address the gaps in patent law created by AI inventorship, I suggest that the decision is supported by the government’s policy environment in recent years. This has aimed to increase innovation, and views technology as a way to achieve this – back when I worked for DSM before I went to college, a lot of of our patented products were developed using software that tested and then gave us optimal formulas – yet the patents went to the doctor who was the nominal head of the lab
Luxury
LVMH’s Deal With Google Is Groundbreaking. Here’s Why. – develop business solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI), it raised many questions about how brands are embracing the use of digital technologies to reshape the luxury experience. Google said they would join forces to empower LVMH’s individual luxury brands to create new, personalised customer experiences that fostered long-term growth, through functions like demand forecasting, inventory optimisation, as well as develop new business use cases at scale and explore co-innovation opportunities by launching a data and AI Academy in Paris
ongoing by Tim Bray · Apps Getting Worse – Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted. – this explains why Skype got designed into irrelevancy
Sports
Why Puma cancelled a $2.7 million deal with Nigeria — Quartz Africa – Nigeria’s current sports administrators are delighted. The athletics federation said Nigeria’s sports minister had successfully stopped athletes from receiving Puma bags containing about 40 items each in Tokyo through the Nigerian embassy. To this set of administrators, the 2019 deal was not properly agreed between Puma and previous leaders of Nigeria’s athletics body
Samsung flagships can no longer compete with the Chinese smartphones – The current flagship Galaxy S21 series has never managed to win worldwide love. Judging by the information from South Korean publications, the flagships, which were supposed to destroy competitors, failed miserably in sales. Based on the report of Counterpoint analysts, it can be concluded that the Galaxy S21 series has not been able to repeat the success of any of its predecessors, starting with the Galaxy S5 – this looks like PC sales when ‘white box manufacturers’ disrupted Winter brands such as IBM and Compaq
O-RAN in uncertain future – Although Europe’s four major telecom operators – Vodafone, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefonica – had signed memorandum of understanding on the implementation of Open RAN (ORAN) based networks in Europe in early 2021, Rakuten Mobile’s ongoing operating losses have put uncertainty to ORAN’s future. Rakuten Mobile is the only major telecom operator to adopt the ORAN architecture for its 5G network, but the financial results of the company for the first quarter of 2021 showed an expansion of 265% on year in its operating losses to JPY97.2 billion (US$880 million), the largest in the past five quarters. The company’s operating margin also reached negative 141.7%, down 77.4% on year. However, Rakuten Mobile’s revenues still grew JPY19.1 billion and 38.5% from a year ago to JPY68.6 billion for the first quarter of 2021. The figures show the company has continued to see its mobile business growing, but the high costs from its operation kept the company suffering losses. – so what are the hidden costs of ORAN? What is different about this ORAN situation conceptually to the use of white boxes in complex enterprise IT systems? Would this question have pointed towards the kind of problems that ORAN has been encountering?
Men are much less likely to read books by women | Canvas8 – male readers are significantly less likely to opt for fiction books written by women. Of the top ten best-selling female authors, including Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, and Danielle Steel, only one of five readers are male, whereas for the top male authors, including Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, 45% of readers are women. Meanwhile, data on Goodreads shows that enjoyment levels are not impacted by sex – on Goodreads, men give an average rating of 3.9 out of 5 to books by women while they give books by men an average of 3.8 – Sieghart’s interpretation of the data misses a key assumption that many women authors write books that don’t appeal to the majority of male readers interests, where as she assumes that they are not accorded as much authority as male ones. Those that do enjoy the kind of content that these women authors write find as much enjoyment in it. Examples of authors that cross the gender popularity gap include Gillian Rubinstein (aka Lian Hearn), Ursula Le Guinn and JK Rowling. TL;DR – sometimes its the product doesn’t float their boat rather than sexism
The young ‘lie flat’ as China’s growth model begins to fray | Financial Times – the money quote in this article for me is “The bulk of China’s population is doing worse in net terms as housing affordability continues to worsen and access to education and health becomes ore and more costly” – sounds like a lot of western developed economies. The key question is what impact this unfairness might have on the relationship between the populous and the communist party of China
Germany
Handel mit China: Braucht Deutschland eine Wende? | Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung – there are more important things than doing good business in China. Germany’s foremost business paper editorial swipe at Angela Merkel and selected big German enterprises (Daimler Benz, Deutsche Bank, T Systems and Volkswagen Audi Group)- short of name checking them with IG Farben I couldn’t see what else FAZ could do
UK’s Draft Online Safety Bill Raises Serious Concerns Around Freedom of Expression | Electronic Frontier Foundation – which attempts to tackle illegal and otherwise harmful content online by placing a duty of care on online platforms to protect their users from such content. The move came as no surprise: over the past several years, UK government officials have expressed concerns that online services have not been doing enough to tackle illegal content, particularly child sexual abuse material (commonly known as CSAM) and unlawful terrorist and extremist content (TVEC), as well as content the government has deemed lawful but “harmful.”
Two arrested over online calls for boycotts, threats against Hong Kong broadcaster TVB | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – continuously and widely disseminated a large amount of messages through social media groups and pages, intending to smear the media organisation, and also to use threatening means to pressure different advertisers into stopping advertising with this media. [Their] goal is to cause reputational and financial damage,” said Superintendent Wilson Tam of the Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau. – sounds like what pro-Beijing politicians have done on several occasions. Angry emojis organised was seen to be criminal damage
FundFemme – I think what the site is trying to do is good. The thing I don’t like about this is the cynical approach of WundermanThompson who are trying to distract and run crisis comms on their unfair dismissal of Chas Bayfield and Dave Jenner. The domain was registered on June 30th via Squarespace
Phantom Warships Are Courting Chaos in Conflict Zones | WIRED – Bergman has found no evidence directly linking the flood of fake AIS tracks to any country, organization, or individual. But they are consistent with Russian tactics, says Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. “While I can’t say for sure who’s doing this, the data fits a pattern of disinformation that our Russian friends are wont to engage in.”
