Ged Carroll

Category: software | 軟件 | 소프트웨어 | ソフトウェア

Soon after I started writing this blog, web services came up as a serious challenger to software. The thing that swung the tide in software’s favour was the rise of the mobile app ecosystems.

Originally mobile apps solved a gnarly problem for smartphone companies. Web services took time to download and were awkward compared to native software.

Now we tend to have a hybrid model where the web holds authentication functionality and the underlying database for many applications to work. If you pick up a Nokia N900 today, while you can appreciate its beautiful design, the device is little more than a glowing brick. Such is the current symbiosis between between software apps and the web services that support them.

That symbiosis is very important, while on the one hand it makes my Yahoo! Finance and Accuweather apps very useful, it also presents security risks. Some of the trouble that dating app Grindr had with regards security was down to the programmers building on third party APIs and not understanding every part of the functionality.

This means that sometimes things that I have categorised as online services might fall into software and vice versa. In that respect what I put in this category takes on a largely arbitrary view of what is software.

The second thing about software is the individual choices as a decision making user, say a lot about us. I love to use Newsblur as an RSS reader as it fits my personal workflow. I know a lot of other people who prefer other readers that do largely the same job in a different way.

  • Apple ID + more news

    Apple ID

    Apple: Terrorist’s Apple ID Password Changed In Government Custody, Blocking Access – BuzzFeed News – The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists was changed less than 24 hours after the government took possession of the device, senior Apple executives said Friday. If that hadn’t happened, Apple said, a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible – so why don’t the FBI track down the government employee who changed the Apple ID password and Gitmo their butt to get it? In theory, it could be a conspiracy inside the San Bernardino local government to aid and abet terrorism I suspect this about covering up a FUBAR on the government side – Feds versus state. If I were more cynical it looks like it was deliberately done to exploit San Bernardino by government looking to crack encryption. I suspect that its an opportunistic plan by the government to break the US tech sector, making lemonade out of the lemons handed to them by the blocker to break Apple ID

    Business

    Uber losing $1 billion a year to compete in China | Reuters – this is a bit spun in terms of the story

    Consumer behaviour

    Marketers: It’s Time to Rethink the Millennial Mom | AdAge – this hits so many points, there are no clear takeaways. And don’t even get me started on the fallacies that ‘generational’ thinking in marketers can throw up.

    Finance

    Apple of the East, Xiaomi, working on an Apple Pay competitor? | Gizchina – not terribly surprising, UnionPay will have learned from working with Apple and find it easier to onboard other device manufacturers

    Gadgets

    Cat S60 thermal camera phone: Specs, price and release date | BGR – surprisingly nice looking for a rugged phone. Pity they didn’t build in a pipe/metal detector for construction workers

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s popular, lucrative horror movie about Beijing has disappeared from theaters – this looks a bit suspicious

    Hong Kong has probably lost HSBC’s headquarters for good—and Beijing is to blame – Quartz – There is an argument that could be put up that HSBC’s sole responsibility is to maximise shareholder value. Could the board be sued over the decision? If the Chinese government really wanted them to stay they’d squeeze them like an anaconda, until HSBC came to the right decision.

    How to

    Sina microblogging Short URL Builder Weibo short URL data analysis tools – really handy tools, think bit.ly or goo.gl but for China

    Legal

    Is WeChat headed for regulatory trouble? – Tech in Asia – WeChat hasn’t been looking like a real international contender for a good while. Its international marketing efforts were lacklustre and sporadic. But in China its ubiquity and usefulness attracted the attention of the government in an unsavoury way. Given the tight linkage between Party and media, these comments from People’s Daily look like a statement of intent towards WeChat “malicious rights-infringement, excessive marketing, coercive sharing, deliberate swindling, and chaos.” I am sure WeChat headed towards taking remedial action forthwith.

    Feeble Noise Pollution — Medium – interesting insights on the FBI’s use of San Bernardino as a crow bar to break the US tech sector

    Luxury

    Why I’m Over Susie Bubble – Racked – that’s where bloggers like Lau and Bryanboy fall flat to me, why I think we’ve outgrown them. It’s not just that these former outsiders have been subsumed by the mainstream fashion industry, or that Google Reader’s demise in 2013 took Style Bubble out of my daily reading rotation. Rather, it’s because it’s time for Asian bloggers and style stars who don’t just dress distinctively but are also comfortable in their own skin and with the features on their face – quite a takedown

    Media

    RA News: Beatport registers $5.5 million loss in 2015 – not terribly surprising

    Beijing is banning all foreign media from publishing online in China – Quartz – this is interesting as it would impact entertainment media, gaming companies, book publishers and news media. In addition to western brands it would also hurt Chinese brands like Tencent who has South African company Naspers as a shareholder

    I have seen the future of media, and it’s in China | Fusion – the power of WeChat

    CNN brings its digital war room to London | Digiday – the digital war room is big with American brands like Gatorade and can be useful for reputation management monitoring. But the idea of having a team doing real time marketing a la Oreos makes no sense compared to the sunk costs of the digital war room and ongoing investment. For a brand like CNN however, it allows the channel to jump on stories that are breaking online. During the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, The Guardian managed to do timely coverage by seeing the first reports breaking on Twitter. Back in 2005, when I was at Yahoo!, the first we know of the July 7 bombings was when engineers told us of the increase in picture uploads to flickr.

    Homer Simpson Will Take Your Questions on a Live-Animated Segment of The Simpsons – I guess its meeting audience requirements of immediacy and interaction a la social media

    Online

    Whatever Happened to Klout? | Motherboard – it still seems to be a thing for some people

    “Problematic Internet use” can hurt relationships, study finds. – Slate – yet another internet addiction post

    Security

    You, Apple, Terrorism and Law Enforcement – Defense One

    Why you should side with Apple, not the FBI, in the San Bernardino iPhone case – The Washington Post – either everyone gets security or no one does

    Walled Garden | Kieran Healy – the walled garden is about keeping your data safely inside without others being able to get at it

    U.S. Hacked Into Iran’s Critical Civilian Infrastructure For Massive Cyberattack, New Film Claims – BuzzFeed News

    Customer Letter ‘The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers’ – Apple

    Software

    Kakao diversifies after winning war with telcos | Telecom Asia

  • PrivaTegrity: the flawed model of distributed keys

    Dave Chaum’s PrivaTegrity – an idea to to try and balance between state actors demand for internet sovereignty and the defacto end of citizen privacy. Whilst also addressing the need to deal with emotive causes such as terrorism, paedophile rings and organised crime got a lot of attention from Wired magazine.

    Backdoors are considered problematic by privacy advocates and seem to be a panacea for governments who all want unrestricted access.
    Yesterday evening on a bus stop in Bow
    The principle behind PrivaTegrity is that there would be a backdoor, but the back door could only be opened with a nine-part key. The parts would be distributed internationally to try and reduce the ability of a single state actor to force access.

    However it has a number of flaws to it:

    • It assumes that bad people will use a  cryptographic system with a known backdoor. They won’t they will look elsewhere for the technology
    • It has a known backdoor, there is no guarantee that it can’t be opened in a way that the developers hadn’t thought of
    • Nine people will decide what’s evil
    • If you’re a state actor or a coalition of state actors, you know that you have nine targets to go after in order to obtain access by hook-or-by-crook. It was only Edward Snowden who showed us how extraordinarily powerful companies where bent to the will of the US government. The UK government is about to grant itself extra-territorial legal powers to compel access. There is no reason why a form of extra-ordinary rendition couldn’t be used to compel access, rather like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings bending the ring bearers to his will. Think of it as Operation Neptune Spear meets a Dungeons & Dragon quest held at a black site. Even if the US wouldn’t consider it a viable option, who is to say that other countries with capability wouldn’t do it. That group of countries with sufficient capability would likely include: UK, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation, France, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel. All that these countries would need is intent

    More information
    The Father of Online Anonymity Has a Plan to End the Crypto War | WIRED
    Privategrity

    More privacy related content here.

  • Scratching + more things

    History of scratching

    A brief history of scratching | FACT magazine – a great piece on scratching but skips over many of the greats prior to Q-Bert et al such as Mr Mixx, Cash Money, DJ Supreme and DJ Pogo. Scratching went through massive changes from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s. Q-Bert et al were standing on the shoulders of other scratching innovators

    Consumer behaviour

    Researchers reveal millennials will take a 25,000 photos of themselves in their lifetime | Daily Mail Online – lifeblogging or qualitative ‘quantified self’?

    Bill Drummond (of The KLF) fame did this really good talk about how the iPod (and you could add smartphones) have changed our relationship with music

    Marketing

    Tic-Tac have put together a great tie-in with local Hong Kong independent musicians and music festival Clockenflap (Hong Kong’s answer to Glastonbury). Budding artists can submit their own video with a chance to play at Clockenflap.

    FutureDeluxe did this great bit of CGI work for the adidas X Primeknit football boot.

    Media

    Cross Device Tracking Creates New Privacy Concerns, FTC Says | Advertising Age – “They do this under the veil of anonymous identifiers and hashed P.I.I. [personally-identifiable information], but these identifiers are still persistent and can provide a strong link to the same individual online and offline,” Ms. Ramirez said, in language that challenges the typical rhetoric from companies that track consumers.”Not only can these profiles be used to draw sensitive inferences about consumers, there is also a risk of unexpected and unwelcome use of data generated from cross device tracking” (paywall) – interesting that cross device tracking is seen as a ‘new privacy concern’ rather than an established one. This delay between regulatory attention and development is why cross device tracking companies have such an advantage over governments and consumers

    TBS is giving eSports its mainstream moment with new weekly program – Digiday – interesting move, US media following normal practice in Korea

    Retailing

    Here’s where teens shop as old favorite stores go extinct | Fusion – Malls still are super important to teen culture as physical spaces you can go to hangout without parents

    Security

    From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities | The Intercept – basically you have no privacy, presumably this would allow them to zoom in on Tor users at some point?

    Software

    Google faces new US antitrust scrutiny, this time over smartphones – CNET – the US antitrust scrutiny could turn to action that would  fragment Android distributions quite dramatically… More Google related content here.

  • WeChat Life Report

    Chinese consumers literally live a WeChat life as shown by this great  collection of consumer behaviour data on WeChat. Over the past year WeChat has expanded the services that it provides to include Skype like conference calls, which changes and expands the behaviour in this report. (Presentation on Slideshare)

     

    Key takeouts

    • The ubiquity of WeChat can’t be over stated with over 93% usage in tier one cities. It will grow over time in lower tier cities for a couple of reasons. There will be a network effect that will reach out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers and countryside. Secondly, WeChat services will start to permeate out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers. You will then have a virtual cycle due to network effects and ever-increasing ubiquity
    • Call and message data shows how it binds the diaspora back to friends and loved ones in China. The Chinese talk about ‘near and far networks’. But WeChat closes the gap, meals can be shared with photos and videos. Voice messages popular with older users also helps with asynchronous communications over difficult time zones
    • Chinese people tend to exercise during the week, rather than at the weekend according to WeChat fitness data. The idea being for rest is an insight and an opportunity for fitness and sports apparel companies
    • Male shoppers spending 30% more than female shoppers  was an interesting statistic emblematic of WeChat life. Generally men are not as enthusiastic a shopper as women are. They have to save for a home, a car and marriage. My take was that women offer WeChat a growth opportunity in payments; if it can address the underlying cause of this disparity
    • The average social circle on WeChat at 128 is very close to the Dunbar number

    More on WeChat here.

  • Learning machines discussion

    Why learning machines? Simply because I don’t want to get into an argument of what an AI actually is, so hence the title change – but interesting watching.

    The Churchill Club manage to get top drawer panelists for this session on learning machines

    • Yoshua Bengio, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Universite de Montreal
    • John E. Kelly, Senior Vice President, Solutions Portfolio and Research, IBM

    The panel was moderated by long time New York Times technology journalist  John Markoff.

    Key takeouts for me were:

    Cycle since the 1950s of over-promising and under delivering that drove nuclear winters and booms. Current cycle goes back to the DARPA autonomous vehicle competitions of the past decade. Neural networks weren’t seen as ‘AI’, they went out of research fashion in the 1990s and research picked back up in 2005. Deep learning is basically layers of neural network – more layers = ‘deeper’. Deep nets are now the standard for learning machines. Object recognition improved in 2012 and both industrial and media interest took off.

    Performance has been helped by improved hardware, which has driven the breakthroughs.

    Learning machines still need a lot of human guidance, unsupervised learning isn’t doing as well. It probably explains why IBM has so many people working on Watson projects. This also explains why Watson is externally seen primarily as a ‘marketing concept’.

    Rate of change in semiconductors. Moore’s Law is likely to top out at 5nm. Carbon nanotube devices will be the new silicon in semiconductors. Quantum computing will drive performance in certain types of calculations by a factor of 20. Graphene is better for analogue devices, nanotubes are better for switching. The cost of transistors has stopped falling, which has an implication for new disruptive industries.

    We’ll get performance and density, the cost of which is more uncertain. Computing power is important for learning machine technologies. Power consumption (computing power per watt) is tremendously important. IBM Watson on Jeopardy used 85,000 watts to beat two 20 watt humans.

    Back propagation allows the use of lower power processors. Speech and vision are areas of a big push, but the most exciting area is language recognition and understanding with recurrent networks – implications for conversational interfaces and services.

    IBM think cognitive computing is a wider area than ‘machine learning’. Cognitive computing is what IBM think will transform ‘digital transformation’ through learning machines.

    AI has a definition problem due to fashion and academic quarrels.

    Watson was originally designed to deal with massive unstructured data rather than building an AI. Data was growing faster than IBM could develop for. Watson had a data centric focus. It sounds rather like the vision I once heard articulated for both Autonomy and Palantir.

    Consumers will see Watson as ‘insights’. Watson as a learning machine focuses on comparing and contrast to try and find patterns.

    Interesting that IBM went in so hard on healthcare as an example, given how they eventually retreated from the sector after scandals over unsafe diagnosis.

    UPDATE: October 6, 2020 – report on AI progress here.

    More technology related content here.