Linked List: October 3, 2019

Thursday, 3 October 2019

Samsung Ends Mobile Phone Production in China ★

Ju-min Park, reporting for Reuters:

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd has ended mobile telephone production in China, it said on Wednesday, hurt by intensifying competition from domestic rivals in the world’s biggest smartphone market.

The shutdown of Samsung’s last China phone factory comes after it cut production at the plant in the southern city of Huizhou in June and suspended another factory late last year, underscoring stiff competition in the country. […]

Samsung’s share of the Chinese market shrank to 1% in the first quarter from around 15% in mid-2013, as it lost out to fast-growing homegrown brands such as Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi Corp, according to market research firm Counterpoint.

“In China, people buy low-priced smartphones from domestic brands and high-end phones from Apple or Huawei. Samsung has little hope there to revive its share,” said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment & Securities.

A drop from 15 percent to nearly zero in just 6 years in the world’s most populous country is a precipitous collapse, but there’s a huge upside to Samsung in this: they’re completely out from under the thumb of an oppressive communist regime.

Apple’s dependence upon China for manufacturing nearly all its major products, along with its reliance upon the Chinese market as its second largest, puts the company at risk economically (subjecting them to the whims of a dictatorship in China and wannabe dictatorship domestically — the latter proving to be far more erratic) and ethically (best exemplified by China’s escalating crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong).

Facebook Changes Policy to Allow Trump to Lie in His Facebook Ads ★

Judd Legum, writing for his excellent Popular Information newsletter:

Prior to last week, Facebook had a rule against running any ads with “false and misleading” content: “Ads, landing pages, and business practices must not contain deceptive, false, or misleading content, including deceptive claims, offers, or methods.”

But today, category 13 of prohibited content has been narrowed significantly. Now, Facebook only “prohibits ads that include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers or, in certain circumstances, claims debunked by organizations with particular expertise.”

The old rules prohibited all ads that contained “false” and “misleading” content and made no mention of the fact-checking program. The new rules are limited to claims that are “debunked by third-party fact checkers.”

Moreover, Facebook says “political figures” are exempt from even that narrow restriction.

And, just like that, I’m back on team “Fuck you, Facebook.” This company is a legitimate menace to liberal democracy.

Attorney General Bill Barr Will Ask Facebook to Halt Plans for End-to-End Encryption Across Facebook’s Apps ★

BuzzFeed News has an advance copy of an open letter from U.S. Attorney General William Barr, along with officials from the United Kingdom and Australia, to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

We therefore call on Facebook and other companies to take the following steps:

· Embed the safety of the public in system designs, thereby enabling you to continue to act against illegal content effectively with no reduction to safety, and facilitating the prosecution of offenders and safeguarding of victims;

· Enable law enforcement to obtain lawful access to content in a readable and usable format;

· Engage in consultation with governments to facilitate this in a way that is substantive and genuinely influences your design decisions;

They don’t use the word “backdoor” but that’s what they’re asking for. End-to-end encryption doesn’t allow for backdoors. So what they’re really asking is for Facebook not to use end-to-end encryption. And the only truly secure, truly private encryption for personal communication is end-to-end encryption. So, when you boil it all down and ignore the emotional pleas that would have you believe this is all about protecting children, what they’re really asking is for Facebook not to safeguard the security and privacy of the messaging of billions of people around the world.

For once, count me on the side of Facebook.

Taboola and Outbrain, Dueling Slumlords of the ‘Content Recommendation’ Shitbox Advertising Cesspool, to Merge ★

Is there anything more embarrassing than seeing an otherwise reputable site with Taboola or Outbrain links at the bottom?

Whistleblower: Boeing Rejected 737 Max Safety Upgrades Before Fatal Crashes ★

Dominic Gates, Steve Miletich, and Lewis Kamb, reporting for The Seattle Times:

The ethics charge, filed by 33-year-old engineer Curtis Ewbank, whose job involved studying past crashes and using that information to make new planes safer, describes how around 2014 his group presented to managers and senior executives a proposal to add various safety upgrades to the MAX.

The complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by The Seattle Times, suggests that one of the proposed systems could have potentially prevented the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people. Three of Ewbank’s former colleagues interviewed for this story concurred. […]

Managers twice rejected adding the new system on the basis of “cost and potential (pilot) training impact,” the complaint states. It was then raised a third time in a meeting with 737 MAX chief project engineer, Michael Teal, who cited the same objections as he killed the proposal.

Just devastating allegations — which ring very true.

This piece by Matt Stoller back in July documents the downfall of Boeing. Boeing was once one of the greatest companies in the world, with an engineering- and design-driven internal culture that served the company well financially. Make great airplanes and airlines will buy them. But then they acquired McDonnell-Douglas, primarily a military contractor, and McDonnell-Douglas executives wound up in charge of the combined company. They destroyed Boeing’s engineering-first culture, culminating in the literally disastrous 737 Max.

Surface Earbuds ★

$250 and they look like Apple Watch chargers stuck in your ear. And people argued that AirPods were too expensive and looked funny.

Lauren Goode on Microsoft’s Surface Duo and Neo ★

Lauren Goode, writing for Wired:

One gets the sense that the new Surface Neo tablet and Surface Duo, the un-phone, are now-or-never projects. These are throwbacks to the rumored Courier booklet and the more recent Andromeda fever dreams of Panos Panay come to life. But they’re also mini Surfaces designed to catapult Microsoft back into mobile. Even so, they’re not expected to ship until the holiday season of 2020. […]

In fact, the most recent version of the Duo doesn’t have a rear-facing camera. The way it’s currently designed, taking a picture would require the person using it to open the Duo, unlock the Duo, and flip its front-facing camera to the back of the device. I question this, more than once. Panay says it’s still early days, that the camera may change, that he’s nervous to reveal this so far in advance because it exposes the design to competitors.

“These are our efforts for the past two and a half years, so there’s a balance to the number of details I can give, even with regards to the camera,” he tells me. […]

Panay says he didn’t think about making a single-screened phone, and that this dual-screened phone is the antithesis of a single-screened phone in many ways, because of how much more productive you can be on it. It is so obvious that he loves this thing. That he’s been restraining himself from talking about it publicly for one, two, nearly three years now. That he feels more productive with it, though it remains to be seen whether there’s a market for dual-screened, cellular-equipped, Android devices running optimized Windows apps.

There’s certainly some original thinking here in both these devices. The various ways the hardware keyboard can attach to the larger one, the Neo, is pretty clever. But in very typical Microsoft fashion, the Neo and Duo are both just prototypes. They’re over a year from shipping according to the company, the software is so early days that the media weren’t allowed to play with them, there’s no word on pricing, and Panay admits they haven’t even decided fundamental aspects like how many cameras they’ll have.

And in the meantime, they’ve completely overshadowed the real products Microsoft actually announced yesterday.

Microsoft started yesterday’s event by banging the drum that they never have and never will compromise on the quality of their laptop keyboards — a clear and completely fair competitive dig at Apple. That’s the message they should have left the world with — that they, not Apple — now make the best laptop hardware in the world. Instead, they left everyone talking about two products that won’t be out for another year.