Ged Carroll

Category: wireless | 無線 |무선 네트워크 | 無線

This blog came out of the crater of the dot com bust and wireless growth. Wi-Fi was transforming the way we used the internet at home. I used to have my Mac next to my router on top of a cupboard that contained the house fuse panel and the telephone line. Many people had an internet room and used a desktop computer like a Mac Mini or an all-in-one computer like an iMac. Often this would be in the ‘den’ or the ‘man cave’. Going on the internet to email, send instant messages or surf the internet was something you did with intent.

Wi-Fi arrived alongside broadband connections and the dot com boom. Wi-Fi capable computers came in at a relatively low price point with the first Apple iBook. I had the second generation design at the end of 2001 and using the internet changed. Free Wi-Fi became a way to attract people to use a coffee shop, as a freelancer it affected where I did meetings and how I worked.

I was travelling more for work at the time. While I preferred the reliability of an ethernet connection, Wi-Fi would meet my needs just as well. UMTS or 3G wireless data plans were still relatively expensive and slow. I would eventually send low resolution pictures to Flickr and even write a blog post or two. But most of the time I used it to clear my email box, or use Google Maps if I was desperate.

4G wireless services, started to make mobile data a bit more useful, even if the telephony wasn’t great

 

  • Photo hashing & other news

    Apple photo hashing

    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 plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery | Financial Times 

    Apple led the market on encryption, but other players like WhatsApp have made it clear that they won’t follow Apple on photo hashing.

    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?

    Apple Privacy Letter: An Open Letter Against Apple’s Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology – a legion of the great and the good of the technorati from around the world on the photo hashing

    One Bad Apple – The Hacker Factor Blog 

    Even the FT weighed in.

    Business

    The China risk factor continues to reverberate: China’s Corporate Crackdown Is Just Getting Started. Signs Point to More Tumult Ahead. – WSJ

    Chinese music group pulls $1bn Hong Kong IPO after tech crackdown | Financial Times – interesting move, especially given Netease’s exposure to the edutech sector

    ‘If Masa said yes, who am I to object?’: SoftBank deals unleash internal compliance tensions | Financial Times – sounds like desperate measures

    China

    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

    The xenophobic chicken and the propaganda egg: disentangling official and popular nationalism in China – by Kevin Carrico – NSL can’t cancel me – you could not make some of this up. But then, you also couldn’t make up the QAnon community if you tried either.

    ‘Sales funnels’ and high-value men: the rise of strategic dating | Dating | The Guardian – I suspect this is an edge case but its interesting

    Where have all the pre-teens gone? – The Face 

    Design

    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

    Luxury Daily | Have China’s ‘trafific stars’ become toxic for beauty brands? – Chinese versions of K-pop stars are becoming embroiled in scandals that affect their brand partners

    Retailing

    Crocs, Ralph Lauren, LV All Get More Expensive As Apparel Prices Soar – Apparel prices across US retailers rose nearly 5% in June, the biggest leap in a decade.

    Software

    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

    Wireless

    General Dynamics Mission Systems Introduces Badger Software-Defined Radio – Soldier Systems Daily – interesting decline in size, but much slower than would be likely to happen in the commercial space

    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

    Research Alliances Grow to Learn How 6G Will Play Out – EE Times Europe

    Thailand

    Jack “dekfarang” Brown is having a tantrum – by Andrew MacGregor Marshall – Secret Siam – foreign influencers enjoyed by Thais were a thing I didn’t even know about

  • ORAN problems & other news

    ORAN

    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?

    Banking

    US Graduates Are Snubbing Junior Banker Jobs Citing Work-Life Balance – I think that they will be replaced by candidates from China, India and other countries instead

    Consumer behaviour

    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

    In case you didn’t notice, nationalism in China at the moment is a bit cray – by Kevin Carrico – NSL can’t cancel me – TL;DR some Chinese academics believe that the US could have used a ‘Ming the Merciless’ style weather weapon to cause floods in China. A good number of Chinese netizens find this credible. Nationalism and gaslighting is a dangerous combination

    Screen Use Strongly Linked to Failing Eyesight in Children – After over a year spent indoors staring at movies, TV, and video games, scientists say that near-sightedness and other vision problems are skyrocketing among children

    Economics

    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

    Innovation

    China’s CATL unveils sodium-ion battery to diversify from lithium — Quartz – this was going to have to happen sooner rather than later due to the challenge of sourcing lithium. It will be interesting to see how recyclable these batteries are

    Japan

    China and South Korea car makers vying for SE Asia EV market – surprising that Japan isn’t in the mix given their factories in the region? For instance, Toyota has a major plant in China

    Saitama man repeatedly steals food from store by making his phone say “PayPay♫” | SoraNews24 -Japan News- – clever mix of social engineering and mobile payments in Japan

    Legal

    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.”

    2022 Beijing Olympics: Sponsors Grilled on China Human Rights Abuses – Variety – AirBnB, Coca-Cola, Intel, Visa and Procter & Gamble are going to have a bumpy ride in their home market

    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

    Marketing

    Internet backlash against Fila sportswear after Hong Kong badminton player seen drenched in sweat | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – that has screwed Korean owned Fila brand in terms of clothing performance

    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

    Security

    Chinese hacking group APT31 uses mesh of home routers to disguise attacks – The Record by Recorded Future 

    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.”

    Streetwear

    Foot Locker targets Japan and sneakerheads with atmos purchase — Quartz – I can understand why Hidefumi Hommyo would want to sell, but I do wonder if the heat will move on from Atmos now the with the footlocker buy. More related content here.

  • Kyoto Animation & other things this week

    Kyoto Animation

    Kyoto Animation was devastated last year when an anime obsessive set fire to their studio, killing a number of the animators there. Anime artists get paid little anyway. So fans collect donations for them to help them get by. The Kyoto Animation incident made things even more tragic.

    To announce the studio’s comeback Kyoto Animation developed two 30 second television spots. Let’s hope that TV networks, film studios and advertisers respond to their return and the studio goes from strength to strength.

    This first one is called Meji – so roughly Victorian through to Edwardian times. The protagonists then get transferred into the future.

    The second Kyoto Animation video is called Imagination

    More on the studio here.

    Hajime Sorayama x Be@brick x 2G

    Hajime Sorayama has designed a golden Be@rbrick for Japanese retailer 2G. It will be available as a lottery facilitated drop at their Osaka and Tokyo stores. More at Mediacom

    Alumination documentary

    Airstream caravans are a design icon. They were made from aluminium in the post-war period. Aluminium alloy was a wonder material that revolutionised aviation from its previous materials of canvas over wood.

    Alumination tracks the history of the Airstream and the cultural impact that it had on American culture. It redefined freedom for a post-Cowboy age.

    Gravity driven ropeway

    Tom Scott usually comes up with interesting thought provoking invention. In this video he looks at an aerial ropeway that conveys shale to a brickworks near by. It transfers 300 tons of materials each day under the power of gravity and careful timing of full and empty returning buckets.

    Weiden & Kennedy’s 5G Future for Three UK was banned this week following a complaint to the ASA by Vodafone. It is a lovely piece of craft though.

    McDonald’s Japan 50th birthday

    McDonald’s Japan put together an amazing ad to celebrate 50 years of McDonald’s in Japan with its first restaurant in the Ginza area of Tokyo. This was some three years before it opened in the UK.

    https://youtu.be/WmYaiFBDbEU

    The protagonist, actress Yoshiko Miyazaki is digitally altered to look much younger for the 1971 sections of the advertisement. There is even a making of film for the ad here.

    https://youtu.be/I_PlyjIJ38g

    Olympic anime: Tomorrow’s Leaves

    Cultural creations go alone with the olympic games. For the Tokyo olympics there is this short anime film. More Japan related content here.

  • Machine learning powered services + more

    Machine learning powered services

    Intelligent Relations – Matt Muir nails this in his take down of their machine learning powered media relations platform – Vapid, largely-pointless busywork which despite its almost universal lack of import is nonetheless treated by its practitioners as somehow REALLY VITAL and with a reverence normally reserved for stuff that matters rather than with the disregard appropriate for an industry staffed largely by double-figure-IQ morons. Anyway, that’s all by way of preamble to the introduction of Intelligent Relations, a new company which is set to make PR even worse if you can imagine it. Intelligent Relations (it sounds…it sounds like an escort agency for the sort of people who bother applying to Mensa, is what it sounds like) is PR, but with AI! That’s right, AI! The MAGICAL SECRET SAUCE that makes EVERYTHING BETTER and definitely isn’t a sign that someone is attempting to sell you some magic beans! Just listen to this – “GPT-Powered Outreach, 24/7 analysis of all relevant public event data to identify opportunities and pitch your company’s stories faster than the competition…Relentless customized global outreach based on AI-ranked relevancy to your brand. Generate responses that start, nurture, and build personal relationships with media influencers. Put your execs and your company in the heart of the conversation. No agency. You own your relationships – not your PR firm…Precisely worded campaigns, aggressively scaled with technology. Faster than humans, more personal than email blasts.” So, er, you are outsourcing the writing of pitch emails, and followups, to a machine? Have, er, you read any non-tweaked GPT-3 generated copy recently? – All of this stuff about machine learning powered media relations reminded me of the start of my agency career.

    I was working with an agency that was part of the Interpublic Group. We were riding the technology boom of the mid-to-late 1990s. This was a series of booms that were inter-related.

    • Telecoms boom, came from deregulation, the rise of data services, globalisation and the internet
    • Enterprise software boom driven by Moore’s Law, the ability to interconnect systems and exchange data at rates previously unseen. There was a strong incentive to replace old systems due to concerns about the millennium bug
    • Mobile boom as GSM networks and their CDMA equivalent democratised the mobile phone and allowed for nascent data services
    • The dot.com boom as companies built service layers over the top of data networks. Much of the ambition was way ahead of where technology was
    • Hardware boom. Businesses and consumers needed to get online

    Our CEO at the time Larry Weber came over to the office in Covent Garden, met clients and held court. He turns around to the junior staff and tells them how soon they won’t have to worry about manually contacting journalists or compiling status reports. Instead, the contact work will be outsourced to the Philippines (thanks to the telecoms boom). And data that was entered once in the company intranet WeberWorks would through the power of Lotus Notes be diced into the reports that the clients needed.

    WeberWorks in its first iteration was a proof of concept, not a viable product. Though I believe that the successor agency Weber Shandwick stuck with developing the platform.

    22 years later and agency life faces much the same problems, except an algorithm is touted to replace Filipino call centre workers in this scenario. What does machine learning powered media relations have that a Filipino call centre doesn’t? How will the PR profession grow when the on-ramp for people to learn how it works is now taken over by a machine learning powered media relations service instead?

    A lot of PR technology is based on the expectation that (machine learning powered) content will be fed into a media sausage factory and coverage will come out. But relationships are important, as journalists get hundreds of pitches and press releases per day.

    Consumer behaviour

    Phoenix eyes’ on catwalk of mainland academy’s fashion gala draw fire for insulting China ｜Appledaily – Some netizens accused the university of humiliating China after a video of the event on YouTube showed that most of the models either had an eye shape known as phoenix eyes, or were using eyeliner to present the same appearance. The eye shape, which is identified by a slight upward lift at the outer corner of the eye, is considered a desirable facial feature. However, some people regard it as a harmful stereotype reinforced by Western culture and the fashion industry. One influential blogger on Weibo, China’s dominant social media platform, said that because this look conforms with the stereotypes of ethnic Asians it carries a meaning of serious humiliation – this might be what passes for woke in China. The story was originally published in the English version of the Apple Daily Hong Kong on June 21, 2021 three days before the paper closed down. I have linked to to a Wayback Machine archive of the article.

    Political trolling twice as popular as positivity, study suggests – BBC News – unsurprising as taps into system 1 thinking

    Economics

    Competition and concentration | Financial Times – The 1980s financialisation of the US economy created a mindset that manufacturing did not matter — and that it should therefore be shifted to lower-cost labour markets. The high value-added stuff, including R&D, would remain onshore. It didn’t turn out like that. Like any other activity in life, manufacturers learn by doing, which means that the most effective innovation usually takes place alongside production. That’s why so many of America’s most impressive companies, including Intel, shifted a lot of their R&D to China – great take on globalisation here. It also gives a sense of where the FT’s view is on the process

    Private equity ‘raid’ on UK companies sparks furious row in City | Financial Times – best quote in the comments ‘The British should be relieved to have their assets stripped by relatively familiar, relatively transparent organizations. It may be the Chinese next.’

    The Evolution of Corruption in China | Foreign Affairs – corruption comes in distinct flavors, each exerting different social and economic harms. The public is familiar with three main types. The first is petty theft: police officers shaking down people on the street, for example. The second is grand theft: national elites siphoning off massive sums from public treasuries into private accounts overseas. The third is speed money: petty bribes paid to regular officials to bypass red tape and delays and grease the wheels of bureaucracy. All three types are illegal, vociferously condemned, and rampant in poor countries. But corruption comes in another, more elusive variety: access money. In this kind of transaction, capitalists offer high-stakes rewards to powerful officials in exchange not just for speed but also for access to exclusive, lucrative privileges, including cheap credit, land grants, monopoly rights, procurement contracts, tax breaks, and the like. Access money can manifest in illegal forms, such as massive bribes and kickbacks, but it also exists in perfectly legal forms – I was thinking of the favoured firms during the British empire and the chaebols during the Park presidency in South Korea. The chumocracy of UK politics is closer to speed money

    Ideas

    Digital Addiction Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, and Lena Song (NBER.org working paper) – Many have argued that digital technologies such as smartphones and social media are addictive. We develop an economic model of digital addiction and estimate it using a randomized experiment. Temporary incentives to reduce social media use have persistent effects, suggesting social media are habit forming. Allowing people to set limits on their future screen time substantially reduces use, suggesting self-control problems. Additional evidence suggests people are inattentive to habit formation and partially unaware of self-control problems. Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use. – or in other words social media is like big food, the illegal drugs industry, alcohol, tobacco and gambling (PDF)

    Innovation

    Losing sight of the Future – Noahpinion – interesting article but the author forgets about energy density as an issue in their own predictions whilst mentioning it as a flaw in prior ones

    Marketing

    The fashion marketing shake-up: As Instagram, Facebook costs surge, where next? | Vogue Business – marketing inflation is hitting the fashion industry as platform and influencer costs surge, but sales don’t. More online related content here.

    North Face Owner Pulled Xinjiang Criticism, Then Reinstated It – WSJ – VF Brands struggling to navigate divergent Chinese and western markets. Its not been a good week for VF Brands as the Futurelight logo court case with Futura is bring a lot of unwelcome attention to the North Face brand and may blow on to its Supreme brand.

    McDonald’s, Wendy’s Cut Back Value Meals, Focus on Pricier Food – this is partly inflation. But I think that they are working an angle to squeeze premium burger brands: Five Guys, Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK), Byron Burger and similar

    Retailing

    S.Korea retailer E-Mart buys eBay’s S.Korean business for $3 bln | Reuters – purchased by Shinsegae – part of Samsung chaebol

    Technology

    Panasonic defends $7bn Blue Yonder deal after questions over price | Financial Times – interesting that Panasonic bought Blue Yonder. Blue Yonder is a supply chain software provider

    Wireless

    EE to reintroduce Europe roaming charges in January – BBC News – EE, which is part of BT Group, previously said it had no plans to reintroduce roaming charges in Europe. – No plans meant that they didn’t have their act together at that time, typical BT in other words

  • 6G development + more things

    6G development

    Japan teams up with Finland on 6G development – Nikkei Asia the consortium on 6G development features a number of familiar names. On the Japanese side the following organisations are involved:  includes NTT, NTT DOCOMO, KDDI, SoftBank, Rakuten Mobile and the University of Tokyo. I was a bit surprised not to see NEC here as they are Japan’s domestic telecoms equipment manufacturer. From Finland you have the following 6G development partners: University of Oulu and Nokia. (Paywall)

    Culture

    Part one of what is due to be a three part podcast: oral history of The Avalanches – Since I left you 

    Ethics

    The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax — ProPublica – validation of what everyone suspected. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a strategic leak by the Biden administration

    Finance

    China’s bid for digital-yuan sphere raises red flags at G-7 – Nikkei Asia – total information awareness of global markets, surveillance and money that can be invalidated at the push of a key….

    Indian tycoons surpass Chinese tech moguls in global rich list | Financial Times – which says more about the Chinese government clipping the laissez faire approach to its tech entrepreneurs

    Luxury

    Why Shenzhen – not Hong Kong – is luxury’s new golden ticket – only Hong Kong’s property oligarchs will be sad to see this happen

    Marketing

    ‘How the hell have we allowed this to happen?’ Rory Sutherland on creative devaluation | Campaign Live – I think that its down to a wider marketing focus on performance marketing rather than brand building

    Olympics: India drops Chinese kit sponsor ahead of Tokyo Games | Olympics News | Al Jazeera – not great for Li-Ning

    Media

    The underground zines that kept self-expression alive in Mao’s China – The Boston Globe – Despite Beijing’s tight control of the printed word and its dissemination, a new and diffuse network of underground printers — low-tech, affordable, remarkably flexible, and incredibly hard to police — springs up. Equipped with nothing more than Chinese typewriters, mimeograph machines, and stencil duplicators, underground publishers mass-produce an untold quantity of materials for a vast and diverse readership.

    Security

    How to Turn Off Amazon Sidewalk | WIRED – For the Echo family of speakers, open the Alexa mobile app and go to More, Settings, Account Settings, Amazon Sidewalk and choose Disable. In the Ring app, go to the Control Center, Amazon Sidewalk, Disable, Confirm.

    Technology

    iPhone? AirPods? MacBook? You Live in Apple’s World. Here’s What You Are Missing. – WSJ – (paywall) more Apple related content here.

    Web of no web

    Finnish Group Readies Non-cellular Technology for IoT – EE Times Europe