Linked List: January 21, 2016

Thursday, 21 January 2016

AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale 

New York Times report from August:

The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

This, from the company whose CEO now says “I don’t think it is Silicon Valley’s decision to make about whether encryption is the right thing to do.”

Because of companies like AT&T and craven leaders like Randall Stephenson, it is now very clear that end-to-end strong encryption is of course the “right thing to do”.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson Won’t Join Tim Cook in Fight Against Encryption Backdoors 

Jon Brodkin, writing for Ars Technica:

But tech company leaders aren’t all joining the fight against the deliberate weakening of encryption. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said this week that AT&T, Apple, and other tech companies shouldn’t have any say in the debate.

“I don’t think it is Silicon Valley’s decision to make about whether encryption is the right thing to do,” Stephenson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I understand [Apple CEO] Tim Cook’s decision, but I don’t think it’s his decision to make.”

Actually, given the law as it stands today, it is Apple’s decision to make.

The Paperwork Reduction Act 

Clay Johnson:

Did you know that when this president took office, it was illegal for the President to end a tweet with a question mark without a six month approval process from the economists across the street at the “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.” No seriously — they seriously had to give guidance to the rest of the federal agencies in 2009 that gave them permission to ask questions over the internet. It basically says: Sure, you can ask people questions, as long as you don’t ask for structured feedback (feedback you can do anything with). Thus it became OK to end sentences on twitter with a question mark. I can’t make this stuff up!

The Paperwork Reduction Act is a terrible law. It doesn’t need to be revisited or revamped. It needs to be removed.

As Johnson concludes, repealing this law ought to get bipartisan support.

The Difference Between the PC and Mobile Eras 

Miguel Helft, writing for Forbes on Oracle’s claim that Google has generated only $31 billion in cumulative revenue from Android:

Oh, and the comparisons between Google’s Android business and Apple’s iOS business that are starting to surface (Apple generated $32.2 billion in iPhone sales in the most recent quarter), well, they don’t mean much either. Apple sells mostly hardware. Google sells mostly ads. Those are fundamentally different businesses. Both companies are very successful at what they do.

That’s all true, but it highlights the fundamental difference between the PC and mobile eras. In the PC era, Microsoft generated more revenue and far more profit than any hardware company, including Apple.

Largest Companies by Market Cap Today 

After a strong year for Alphabet’s stock price (+40%) and a weak one for Apple’s (-11%), Alphabet could overtake Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Expect a lot of Sturm und Drang if that happens.

(I’m still having a lot of trouble calling them “Alphabet” instead of “Google”. Feel like it’s going to take a long time for that to stick.)

In Court, Oracle Claims Google’s Android Has Generated $31 Billion in Revenue, $22 Billion in Profit 

Joel Rosenblatt and Jack Clark, reporting for Bloomberg:

Google Inc.’s Android operating system has generated revenue of $31 billion and $22 billion in profit, a lawyer for Oracle Corp. said in court while disclosing figures Google says shouldn’t have been made public.

An analysis of the search engine giant’s tightly held financial information was disclosed Jan. 14 by an Oracle attorney in the database maker’s lawsuit accusing Google of using its Java software without paying for it to develop Android. Google said in a court filing that the lawyer based her statement on information derived from its confidential internal financial documents.

“Look at the extraordinary magnitude of commerciality here,” the Oracle attorney, Annette Hurst, told a federal magistrate judge as she discussed Android revenue and profit, which have never been publicly disclosed.

Android, which was launched in 2008, makes money for Google in two ways: adverts supplied by Google shown on Android phones, and revenue Google takes from its mobile app store, Google Play.

Google urged a San Francisco federal judge on Jan. 20 to redact and seal portions of the public transcript of last week’s hearing, saying the Oracle attorney improperly disclosed “extremely sensitive information” from documents that were marked “Attorney’s Eyes Only.”

There’s a juicy, gossipy angle on this, with regard to Google’s claim that Oracle’s release of this information was a breach of confidentiality. What strikes me, though, is that this just isn’t all that much money, at least by Google’s standards. Company-wide, Google reported $18.7 billion in revenue in their most recent quarter.

Alice Truong, writing for Quartz:

If the numbers are accurate, that would mean Android has generated less revenue over its lifetime than the iPhone did in the quarter ended Sep. 30, the most recently reported quarter. Then, Apple said the iPhone generated $32.2 billion in sales.

Update: Keep in mind too that it’s in Oracle’s interest to inflate these numbers, as they seek damages from Google’s use of Java. If anything, Google has probably made less than this amount from Android.

The Assembled-in-America Mac Pro 

Regarding yesterday’s “Why Apple Assembles in China”, many readers have emailed or tweeted to ask why I didn’t mention the Mac Pro, which in its current incarnation is assembled in Austin Texas.

Two things:

  • The Mac Pro is Apple’s most expensive product. It starts at $3000 and the configurations most people want are thousands of dollars more than that.

  • The Mac Pro is almost certainly Apple’s lowest volume computer, probably by a long shot.

I mention the price not to suggest that the price is high because it is assembled in America. Rather, I think that because the price is high, Apple can afford to assemble it here. The higher the price, the less the cost of labor matters.

A Conversation With Erik Spiekermann 

Interesting interview by Om Malik (and with excellent photographs by Cliff Englert):

Om: If you were to give advice to younger designers, web developers, web app makers, what would you tell them?

Erik: Learn as much about our culture as you possibly can, by reading, by traveling, by involving yourself in things that go on. But don’t become an artist. Don’t think, “I’ll do it intuitively.” You have to learn if not to code at least to appreciate code, to understand code. Because code is what nuts and bolts were a hundred years ago.

If you don’t know anything about mechanics, you can’t survive in this world. If you don’t know anything about how a computer works or code works, as a communicator, which is what a designer is — the interface between machines and man, that’s what we are. We are the interface, we interpret what the machine says into visible language. If you don’t understand how the machine works, you’re going to be laughed out of the room by the engineering guys, because you can’t communicate with them.

When ‘Find My Phone’ Goes Wrong 

Kashmir Hill, reporting for Fusion:

It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together. An angry family came knocking at their door demanding the return of a stolen phone. Two months later, a group of friends came with the same request. One month, it happened four times. The visitors, who show up in the morning, afternoon, and in the middle of the night, sometimes accompanied by police officers, always say the same thing: their phone-tracking apps are telling them that their smartphones are in this house in a suburb of Atlanta. […]

The missing phones don’t seem to have anything in common. Some are iPhones. Some are Androids. They’re on different carriers: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Boost Mobile. Saba and Lee don’t know who can fix it because there’s no obvious guilty party. They filed a complaint with the local police department but that hasn’t helped. They’ve already had two visits in 2016.

What a bizarre story. (Via Alexis Madrigal.)

‘Finally’ of the Week 

Techspot headline: “The $1500 Apple Watch Hermes Edition Will Finally Be Available to Buy Online This Friday”.

(Via Christopher Jorgensen.)

Foxconn in Brazil 

Brad Haynes, reporting for Reuters back in April:

When Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group agreed in April 2011 to make Apple products here, President Dilma Rousseff and her advisers promised that up to $12 billion in investments over six years would transform the Brazilian technology sector, putting it on the cutting edge of touch screen development. A new supply chain would be created, generating high-quality jobs and bringing down prices of the coveted gadgets.

Four years later, none of that has come true.

Foxconn has created only a small fraction of the 100,000 jobs that the government projected, and most of the work is in low-skill assembly. There is little sign that it has catalyzed Brazil’s technology sector or created much of a local supply chain.

The iPhones now rolling off an assembly line near São Paulo, the only ones in the world made outside China, carry a retail price tag of nearly $1,000 for a 32-gigabyte iPhone 5S without a contract - among the highest prices in the world and about twice what they sell for in the U.S.

Brazil heavily taxes both imports and exports. And it isn’t working out well.