Month: March 2017

JetSmarter Tried to Extort the Verge for Positive Coverage ⇥ theverge.com

T.C. Sottek, the Verge:

We’ve seen plenty of aggressive requests from companies that want positive coverage, but perhaps none as absurd as what we just got from JetSmarter — a startup that’s been called the “Uber for private jets.” In exchange for a demonstration of the service (a round-trip flight in the US), JetSmarter sent us an agreement that demands an uncritical puff piece.

The rub? JetSmarter wanted the credit card number of a Verge reporter, so that it could charge them $2,000 if they didn’t publish a positive story “within 5 business days.”

It’s almost as though one can’t create an on-demand luxury services startup without falling into massive ethical quandaries.

Uber Used Secret Greyball Tool to Deceive Authorities ⇥ nytimes.com

As Yahoo is to stories of insecure user data, Uber is to stories of grotesque violations of privacy and regulation. But this is really something else. Mike Isaac has the scoop for the New York Times:

Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been outright banned.

The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities such as Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China, Italy and South Korea.

Greyball was part of a broader program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The VTOS program, including the Greyball tool, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.

I get the no-holds-barred “disruption” strategy engrained into so many tech startups, but the extent of their cavalier disregard for basic regulations is, frankly, unnecessary. And, it should be said, dangerous.

I’ll give you one example: when Uber wanted to begin testing its self-driving cars, it started in Pittsburgh with some onerous demands from the city. When they expanded to San Francisco later in the year, they couldn’t be bothered to apply for a permit. Then, late last year, a self-driving Uber ran a red light in San Francisco. The company claimed that a human driver was in control at the time and made an error, but it was revealed last week that the car was, indeed, in autonomous mode at the time. A permit likely wouldn’t have prevented the incident, but it would have allowed the city some authority to regulate the use of Uber’s autonomous vehicles.

Uber is now, at last, applying for a permit, but that’s only after they endangered the public and caused considerable damage to their reputation.

The Economist’s Internet Affordability Rankings ⇥ theinclusiveinternet.eiu.com

I have no idea what the Economist’s Intelligence Unit was drinking when they put together their ranking of internet service affordability worldwide, but I’m sure it was something strong. The biggest tell that this list is completely upside down? Canada, of all places, ranks number one, well above nations like Korea, Japan, and Singapore that are known for having ubiquitous low-cost high-speed internet connections.

Peter Nowak:

Without a definitive explanation from the horse’s mouth, it’s hard to know exactly why the EIU chose to differ so vastly from other findings in competitive environments.

One possibility is that the organization simply counted the total number of wired and wireless providers in Canada without accounting for their limited regional scope.

Rather than three national wireless providers, for example, Canada could thus be considered to have at least eight if Eastlink, Videotron, Freedom, MTS and Sasktel are counted. Taken at face value, that looks like a very competitive market. Of course, any Canadian knows better.

I pay $78 Canadian per month for my 60 Mbps connection. For comparison, Japan’s Softbank offers a 100 Mbps plan for the equivalent of about $43. A 50 Mbps DSL connection is available from Germany’s O2 provider for the equivalent of less than $50 per month.

This study is ludicrous. Internet access in Canada is many things, but “affordable” it is not.

Starbucks Stores Overwhelmed By Mobile Orders ⇥ uk.reuters.com

Earlier today, after writing about the discomfort and guilt I feel when using push-button service apps, I remembered this article from the end of January. Lisa Baertlein, Reuters:

Starbucks’ coffee shops are suffering from a feared consequence of the mobile revolution: the digital world can dump an avalanche of orders in a short period of time, creating delays and lines that scare away customers.

Starbucks Corp is an early adopter of mobile order and payment technology that the U.S. restaurant industry hopes will boost sales while reducing the burden of rising labor costs.

But baristas at the company’s busiest cafes had difficulty keeping up with mobile orders in the latest quarter, creating bottlenecks at drink delivery stations and leading some walk-in customers to walk out.

Reuters being a business-oriented publication, this article mostly focuses on Starbucks’ lost potential customers. But can you imagine what it’s like to be a barista facing an onslaught of mobile orders?

If you’ve ever worked in a coffee shop, you’ll be familiar with the rhythm you can develop between the person at the till and the person making drinks. As a person making drinks, you’re counting on the banter at the cash register as a time buffer. Without that, employees are reduced to the frantic and robotic movements that are required to churn drinks out.

I don’t think anyone who places a mobile order from the Starbucks app is necessarily cognizant of this. They’re probably thrilled with the convenience, and rightly so. But the ease of a mobile order comes with a hidden human cost, and we ought to be more understanding of that.

After Five Years of Security Breaches, Yahoo Fires Its Top Lawyer, for Some Reason ⇥ recode.net

Kara Swisher reports for Recode that Marissa Mayer is getting a pay cut for that really big security breach they had. No, the other one. No, the other other one:

But, said an independent committee, Mayer did not mean to run such a loose security ship, noting, it “did not conclude that there was an intentional suppression of relevant information.”

Still, Yahoo’s head lawyer, Ron Bell, got bounced for not doing his job, said the company, which noted that the “Committee found that the relevant legal team had sufficient information to warrant substantial further inquiry in 2014, and they did not sufficiently pursue it.”

So when is the lawyer the one who gets dinged for hacking screw-ups? Never. Let’s be clear, most people inside Yahoo think Mayer and the board should have shouldered the bulk of the blame for the breach.

Meanwhile, Yahoo announced today that that the most recently-disclosed security breach, this one involving forged cookies, affected 32 million accounts. Not too long ago, that would have been considered a large breach; now, it’s just par for the course for Yahoo.

Ming-Chi Kuo Says All 2017 iPhones Will Have Lightning Connectors With USB-C Fast Charging ⇥ macrumors.com

Kuo’s investor note, as republished by Joe Rossignol of MacRumors:

We believe all three new iPhones launching in 2H17 will support fast charging by the adoption of Type-C Power Delivery technology (while still retaining the Lightning port). A key technical challenge lies with ensuring product safety and stable data transmission during a fast charge. In order to achieve that goal, we think Apple will adopt TI’s power management and Cypress’s Power Delivery chip solutions for the new iPhone models. We note the OLED version may have a faster charging speed thanks to a 2-cell L shaped battery pack design.

One of the great things about the Lightning connector is how it’s able to abstract all of this under-the-hood stuff and make it really consumer-friendly. I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets confused between the five different USB-C modes, and occasionally mixes up USB-C and USB 3.0. Lightning is just Lightning, even when it isn’t; the only thing consumers will notice about the new iPhones will be how much faster they charge.

Tech Service Guilt ⇥ bloomberg.com

Matt Levine, Bloomberg:

Elsewhere in Uber bashing, here is Timothy B. Lee on how Uber solves all its problems with money, which is not a long-term sustainable approach. As a consumer, I kind of hate this approach. Uber “attracts customers by offering them below-cost taxi rides,” Lee writes, but that’s not how it attracted me. It attracted me with convenience and certainty and the ability to get a car anywhere. I would pay more for that than I would for a regular taxi. Instead I have to pay less, and make up for it with intense feelings of shame and guilt. This seems like a general problem with the current generation of tech companies. They’ll give you an incredibly valuable service for cheap or free, but they’ll make you feel terrible about it. (Hi, Twitter!) I feel like there is a market niche for more expensive products without the baggage, but perhaps that doesn’t scale.

Whenever I order dinner using an app instead of over the phone, I get the same feeling. In the case of Uber and food delivery, I think that guilty feeling arises — for me, at least — from the knowledge that there is a real person on the receiving end of the order, but the app allows us to treat them like a push-button servant, of sorts. This sort of privilege was previously the domain of those in the rarefied atmosphere of upper floors and private jets; now, it’s available to those of us who, in many cases, would also be on the receiving end of similar commands.

Activity Tracking and Airplanes ⇥ openradar.appspot.com

Craig Hockenberry filed a bug report regarding the handling of activity streaks across the International Date Line:

Expected Results:

My move streak (379 days) should be intact. I should also see accurate results for my activity.

You’re measuring my body, not some arbitrary position and point in time.

Actual Results:

There is no way to meet your goals for the day you missed. And that breaks streaks.

I also experienced this when I went westward over the date line. And, in a similar vein, I typically register 1–3 hours towards my stand goal before my early morning bedtime. That doesn’t seem right to me — in my head, those hours should be applied to the prior day’s activity tracking.

Computer-centric units ought to be converted to human-perceived elements wherever possible. Siri already helps resolve this in some ways: in the wee hours of the morning, when you ask it to remind you of something “tomorrow”, it clarifies whether you meant later in that date or the next day.

But instant messaging software and email clients, for example, tend to resolve threads from one contact as separate conversations if they involve multiple phone numbers or email addresses. In a contact card, a phone number still requires country code to dial from outside that country, even when the contact’s address is present. In all cases, we’re just trying to contact people, not numbers or addresses.

And it’s a similar kind of thing in Hockenberry’s bug report: my devices know that I’m in a different time zone with a different date, and they also know the amount of time that has elapsed. There ought to be a way to resolve this for the units we perceive, not the units that are hard-coded.