Linked List: September 6, 2017

Wednesday, 6 September 2017

LG’s OLED Displays Still Have Quality Issues ★

Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica a few days ago:

Two years later and things don’t seem to be any better. The OLED panel on my pre-production unit still has the same issues as the LG G Flex. In low brightness in a dark room, the screen is grainy and has “dirty” looking horizontal banding all over it. The light level is also woefully uneven, with hotspots blazing out of the left and right corners.

Above, I’ve pitted the LG V30 against the Galaxy S8 in an attempt to capture the issues on camera.

The difference isn’t subtle. It’s night and day. The Samsung display looks uniformly gray. The LG display looks like shit.

NYT: ‘Fake Russian Facebook Accounts Bought $100,000 in Political Ads’ ★

Vindu Goel and Scott Shane, reporting for The New York Times:

Hundreds of fake Facebook accounts and pages apparently operated out of Russia bought $100,000 in political ads on Facebook during the presidential campaign last year, the company disclosed on Wednesday.

The revelations about ads on the social network can only add to the continuing political skirmishing in Washington over Russia’s role in the election. Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and the Senate and House intelligence committees are all investigating the matter, including the possibility that someone with ties to President Trump’s campaign worked with Russia.

Facebook officials said the fake accounts and pages had been connected to a shadowy Russian company called the Internet Research Agency, which is known for using “troll” accounts to post on social media and comment on news websites.

$100,000 (for about 3,000 total ads) is chump change for Facebook. In fact, chump change is probably too strong a word. Facebook reported $9.3 billion in revenue last quarter. There are 86,400 seconds in a day, and about 91 days per fiscal quarter. That means Facebook generates about $1,200 in revenue every second of every day.

$100,000 is literally almost nothing to Facebook — a little over one minute’s worth of revenue in a three-month quarter. I’m not saying this shouldn’t be reported. And I’m definitely not saying that I think Facebook is being completely up front and honest about just how much money they made from Russian disinformation trolls during the election last year. I’m just saying that what they’ve reported today is almost nothing.

Samsung’s OLED Display Monopoly ★

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

In a new research note shared with investors this morning, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says OLED iPhone panel supply is “controlled wholly by Samsung,” with Samsung likely charging Apple $120 to $130 per OLED panel module, which is approximately $75 more than the 5.5-inch LCD module price of $45 to $55 for “Plus” sized iPhones.

It really is quite fascinating that Apple is reliant upon Samsung — their arch-rival in the phone business — for anything at all, let alone for the most essential and expensive components in iPhones. With chip manufacturing, Apple moved from reliance upon Samsung for chips like the A7 to a mixture of Samsung and TSMC for future chips.

As Kuo’s report notes, Apple is moving aggressively to help LG become an OLED supplier for iPhones in 2018 and later. But this year, it sounds like D22’s OLED displays are solely supplied by Samsung. That cannot sit well with Apple. First, it’s never a good position to be reliant on just one company. Second, it’s even worse when that company is your biggest rival in the consumer phone market. And third, there’s a history of bad blood between the two companies. Apple just doesn’t like Samsung.

How the Red Sox Used Tech, Step by Step, to Steal Signs From the Yankees ★

The New York Times has a good illustration explaining how the scheme worked. It’s not about stealing every signal or signaling every pitch to every batter. It was about (1) decoding the Yankees’ signs; (2) relaying the decoded signs to the dugout via messages sent to trainers wearing Apple Watches; and (3) telling the players what the signs are, so that they could decode them while they were on second base.

The Apple Watch only factored into step 2, but that matters because electronic communication devices are strictly prohibited from the dugout. It’s not so much that the Red Sox gained a significant advantage through this scheme, but that they so knowingly and blatantly violated a very simple hard-and-fast rule.

It’s like getting caught using a calculator on a no-calculator math test. It doesn’t matter if you only used it on a small fraction of the questions — it’s a clear violation of the rules.

Apple Developer Site Down, Perhaps Due to Accounts Being Hacked by Russians ★

Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple’s Developer site has been down for a couple of hours now, and while it originally seemed like the outage was related to maintenance, a few reports trickling in from developers suggests there could potentially be another cause.

Several developers are reporting that all of their developer account addresses have been updated with an address in Russia, perhaps indicating some kind of breach or serious internal error. According to multiple developer reports, their accounts list a Russian address instead of their correct address.

John Lanchester on Facebook: ‘The Company’s Ambition, Its Ruthlessness, and Its Lack of a Moral Compass Scare Me’ ★

John Lanchester’s lengthy essay on Facebook for the London Review of Books is well worth your time. Highly engaging:

What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads. I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does — ‘connect’, ‘build communities’ — and the commercial reality. Note that the company’s knowledge about its users isn’t used merely to target ads but to shape the flow of news to them. Since there is so much content posted on the site, the algorithms used to filter and direct that content are the thing that determines what you see: people think their news feed is largely to do with their friends and interests, and it sort of is, with the crucial proviso that it is their friends and interests as mediated by the commercial interests of Facebook. Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.

The Schiller Coastal Studies Center at Bowdoin College ★

Speaking of Phil Schiller:

Bowdoin has received a major gift from Philip Schiller and Kim Gassett-Schiller of Half Moon Bay, California, that will allow the College to substantially expand opportunities for students studying oceans and the environment at its Coastal Studies Center.

Through the support of a $10-million gift from the Schillers, Bowdoin will be able to construct a state-of-the-art dry laboratory connected to the Center’s existing marine laboratory and a convening center. The convening center will include modernized classrooms, housing, and dining facilities for students, faculty, and visiting scholars. It will also serve as a facility for retreats, dialogue, and collaboration among local and national leaders working to address critical issues of coastal and climate concern.

A great cause, and, I suspect, a fast-growing area of interest for students.

Apple, Amazon Join Race for James Bond Film Rights ★

Tatiana Siegel and Borys Kit, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:

The James Bond sweepstakes has taken an unexpected turn. While Warner Bros. remains in the lead to land film distribution rights to the megafranchise — whose deal with Sony expired after 2015’s Spectre — a couple of unlikely suitors have emerged that also are in hot pursuit: Apple and Amazon.

The tech giants are willing to spend in the same ballpark as Warners, if not much more, for the rights, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. MGM has been looking for a deal for more than two years, and Sony, Universal and Fox also had been pursuing the property, with Warners and Sony the most aggressive.

But the emergence of Apple — which is considered such a viable competitor that Warners is now pressing MGM hard to close a deal — and Amazon shows that the digital giants consider Bond one of the last untapped brands (like a Marvel, Pixar or Lucasfilm) that could act as a game-changer in the content space. Apple’s and Amazon’s inclusion in the chase would indicate that more is on the table than film rights, including the future of the franchise if MGM will sell or license out for the right price.

I’ve been saying for years that they should do a spin-off movie starring Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter. Also ripe for spin-offs: the exploits of the other agents in the 00 sector. With Bond, you know he’s going to win in the end. Make some movies or a serious HBO-style limited series about the other agents in the 00 sector and you’d never know who was going to die when. There is a ton of untapped potential in this franchise.

If Apple does win the bidding for these rights, I’m pretty sure we’ve seen the last of Bond using some shitty Sony phone. And, for what it’s worth, Phil Schiller is a huge Bond fan.