Linked List: January 5, 2016

Tuesday, 5 January 2016

Google Is Tracking Students’ Computer Usage ★

John Moltz, on a report in the Washington Post about Google tracking student usage of Google Apps in schools:

Google says its apps comply with the law which I have no reason to doubt. Assuming that’s true, this is then a cost that should be figured into the schools’ purchasing decisions. A hard-to-quantify cost that budget-conscious administrators will ignore.

My son’s school does everything through Google Docs, and I hate it.

Twitter to Expand Tweet’s 140-Character Limit to 10,000 ★

Yoree Koh, reporting for the WSJ:

One of Twitter’s most beloved features is set to change: The company is planning to extend its 140-character limit to as many as 10,000, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In a tweet on Tuesday after the news spilled out, co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted a screenshot of text — 1,317 characters with spaces — explaining his thinking behind the expansion. “We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it,” Mr. Dorsey wrote. “Instead, what if that text… was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.” Despite the change, Mr. Dorsey said Twitter will “never lose that feeling” of speed, creativity and brevity.

This sounds like what I’ve been hoping they’d do: treat longer-than-140-character posts as an attachment type, like quoted tweets, images, etc.

‘Significant Contribution’ ★

Horace Dediu applies his “Cook Doctrine” to the idea of an Apple car:

So what does being significant in the car business mean? Does it mean becoming the next Tesla? The next BYD or the next VW? How quickly?

Fortunately, we have something to compare an Apple entry to. Apple has made a “significant” market entry in phones and others have made entries in cars. If we contrast the rate of growth of Tesla, EVs, and Hybrids to the rate of growth of iPhones in their respective US markets, we obtain a test of significance. […]

Within a similar time frame, the range for entrant company share capture spanned between 0.15% (Tesla as percent of US car market) and 35% (Apple iPhone percent of US phone market).

The differences are thus measured with two orders of magnitude (>100×). Put another way, if Tesla’s car entry was equivalent to Apple’s iPhone entry they would have delivered about 5.5 million cars rather than the 50.5k they delivered in 2015.

Speaking of Apple making cars, did anyone notice the doors on the prototype Apple retail store that Charlie Rose toured with Angela Ahrendts on 60 Minutes?

Update: Those new-style wide doors are already in place at Apple’s brand-new store at the Mall of the Emirates.

Dell Customer Database Is in the Hands of Scammers ★

10 Zen Monkeys:

Scammers pretending to be from Dell computers phoned me in November — but these scammers knew things about me. They identified the model number for both my Dell computers, and knew every problem that I’d ever called Dell about. None of this information was ever posted online, so it’s not available anywhere except Dell’s own customer service records. (Even my e-mail account is secured with “two-step verification”…)

I called the (real) Dell, and spoke to a customer support representative named Mark, who tried to explain how the scammers knew my account history.

“Dell has detected hackers,” he said. “They’re hacking our web site.”

Weird.

Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro S ★

Pete Pachal, reporting for Mashable from CES:

The Galaxy Tab Pro S is a Surface Pro clone in that it’s a Windows 10 tablet that sorta, kinda “converts” into a laptop when it’s attached to a keyboard case. The keyboard even connects to the tablet via a magnetic connector, just like the Surface.

Samsung’s take has some important distinctions, however. First, Samsung is using one of its Super AMOLED screens for the display, so it’s thin and power-efficient. It measures 12 inches diagonal and has a resolution of 2,160 × 1,440.

Interesting choice to go with Windows instead of Android.

Former Employees Claim Microsoft Failed to Warn Victims of Chinese Email Hack ★

Joseph Menn, reporting last week for Reuters:

Microsoft Corp experts concluded several years ago that Chinese authorities had hacked into more than a thousand Hotmail email accounts, targeting international leaders of China’s Tibetan and Uighur minorities in particular — but it decided not to tell the victims, allowing the hackers to continue their campaign, according to former employees of the company. […]

After a vigorous internal debate in 2011 that reached Microsoft’s top security official, Scott Charney, and its then-general counsel and now president, Brad Smith, the company decided not to alert the users clearly that anything was amiss, the former employees said. Instead, it simply forced users to pick new passwords without disclosing the reason.

The employees said it was likely the hackers by then had footholds in some of the victims’ machines and therefore saw those new passwords being entered.

One of the reasons Microsoft executives gave internally in 2011 for not issuing explicit warnings was their fear of angering the Chinese government, two people familiar with the discussions said.