Thursday Morning, Late: Like a Sucker Punch

It’s true
That it kicks you in the teeth when you are least expecting
Bad news
Oh it beats you black and blue before you see it coming

— excerpt, Bad News by Bastille

This little ditty seemed appropos for today. I’m surprised it was just a B-side.

Spin Factory
BAD DOG, REUTERS — When a big event happens, news media jump all over it and churn out reporting. But in the age of social media and the failure of traditional business models, crap is published and too often blown off. Like this tweet:
Looks innocuous, right? But it’s not — this is the replacement for a tweet that preceded it. Same story, but with a frigging picture of Donald Trump attached. I’d post that original tweet here but they deleted it before I could snag it.

Initial reaction too often is “It’s just a tweet, it’s just Twitter.” No. Hell, no. If Reuters can’t get something as simple as a photo on a tweet correct, what else are they getting wrong with slap dash coverage?

Reuters isn’t just any news outlet; businesses pay its parent corporation, Thompson Reuters for their information products. What are businesses getting in purchased real-time feeds? Some of these businesses are broadcasters. Are erroneous feeds shaping broadcasters’ perceptions before they even reproduce news content? It’s rather important today when some news outlets sought whacko tweets and quotes from Trump before attempting to get a reaction from the White House.

Reuters’ alleged bias has already been controversial; a contributor left in 2013 claiming editorial bias for climate skepticism demanding false balance made reporting on climate change difficult. Reuters denied the claim.

ON THE MEDIA — Rather than allow media churn to burn us with bad (as in poorly executed and unethical) news, best to consult On The Media‘s Breaking News Consumer’s Guide — Airplane Edition.

FIFTY CENT PARTY — You’ve probably seen a news story about this research. Cut out the middlemen and read it at this link:

King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument. 2016. http://ift.tt/1XAD7S6.

RIP MORLEY SAFER — And more bad (as in sad) news: former CBS reporter and correspondent Morley Safer has died at age 84. The three-time Peabody Award winner retired from CBS only last week. We need more journalists like Safer, who began his career with reporting from the Vietnam War that galled then-President Lyndon Johnson for its honesty.

Busy day here, can’t spend any more time at the keyboard. See you here tomorrow morning!

Friday Morning: This Thing Called Life

It’s Friday, when we usually cover a different jazz genre. But we’re playing these sorry cards we’ve been dealt this week and observing the passing of a great artist.

We’ll probably all be sick of seeing this same video, but it is one of the very few of Prince available for embedding with appropriate intellectual property rights preserved. It’s a result of Prince’s tenacious control over his artistic product that we won’t have ready access to his past performances, but this same tenacity taught many artists how to protect their interests.

It’s worth the hour and a quarter to watch the documentary Prince in the 1980s; the enormity of his talent can’t be understood without reactions by professionals to his abilities.

The way his voice slides easily into high registers at 05:44, his guitar playing beginning at 06:53, offer us just the smallest glimpses of his spectacular gifts.

Good night, sweet Prince, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Great Google-y moogley

• European Community’s Antitrust Commission issued a Statement of Objections regarding perceived breaches of antitrust laws by Google’s Android operating system (European Commission press release) — The EU has a problem with Android’s ~90% market share in some member states. They may have a tough time with their case as the EU did very little to preserve the Nokia Symbian OS when Microsoft bought Nokia phone business. Their point about lack of application interoperability and portability between mobile devices is also weak as they did not make that case with Windows-based applications on personal computers. Further, Google has been aggressive to the point of annoyance in its efforts to segregate Android and Google apps — I can attest to this, having a handful of Android devices which have required irritating application upgrades to facilitate this shift over the last year and a half. This will be an interesting case to watch.
• The second annual Android Security Report was released on Google’s blog this week (Google Blog) — Some interesting numbers in this report, including Google’s revelation that it scans 400 million devices a day. Gee, a figure intelligence agencies must envy.
• Roughly 29% of Android devices can’t be accessed to issue monthly security patches (Naked Security) — Sophos has a bit of an attitude about the back-of-the-envelope number it scratched out, calculating a little more than 400 million Android devices may not be running modern Android versions Google can patch, or may not be accessible to scanning for patching. You’d think a cybersecurity vendor would revel in this opportunity to sell product. Or that an otherwise intelligent and successful security firm would recognize the numbers reflect Android’s continued dominance in the marketplace with more than 1.4 billion active devices. The risk is big, but how much of that risk is due to the success of the devices themselves — still highly usable if aging, with insufficient memory for upgrades? Sounds so familiar (*cough* Windows XP)…
• Google passed a benchmark with mobile version of Chrome browser on more than 1 billion devices (Business Insider) — Here’s another opportunity to screw up interpretation of data: mobile Chrome works on BOTH Android and iOS devices. I know for a fact the latest mobile Chrome will NOT work on some older Android devices.

Under Not-Google: Opera browser now has free built-in VPN
A lesser-known browser with only 2% of current market share, Opera is a nice alternative to Chrome and Firefox. Its new built-in free VPN could help boost its market share by offering additional privacy protection. It’s not clear this new feature will protect users against censorship tools, though — and this could be extremely important since this Norwegian software company may yet be acquired by a Chinese company which placed a bid on the firm a couple of months ago.

Definitely Not-Google: Apple cracker cost FBI more than $1 million
Can’t swing an iPad without hitting a report on FBI director James Comey’s admission at the Aspen Security Forum this week in Londn that cracking the San Bernardino shooter’s work iPhone cost “more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is 7 years and 4 months,” or more than $1 million dollars. Speaking of exorbitant expenses, why was Comey at this forum in London? Oh, Comey was the headliner for the event? Isn’t that interesting…wonder if that speaking gig came with speaker’s fee?

That’s it for this week’s morning roundups. Hope you have a nice weekend planned ahead of you!

Wednesday Morning: Whip It Good

When a problem comes along you must whip it
Before the cream sits out too long you must whip it
When something’s going wrong you must whip it

— excerpt, Whip It by Devo

Can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of this song in the last couple of days.

Panama Papers fallout
Still not as much reporting showing up in global media as one might expect from a collaborative effort the size of that mustered by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and German news outlet Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) around the leaked Panama Papers. But there is a slowly building debris field accumulating in the leak’s wake.

• Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned after ~7.5% of the population showed up at a protest rally (Channel NewsAsia) — But you probably know this much already, right? Icelanders don’t mess around with even so much as the appearance of conflict. Hope somebody will tell us if bananas are a thing at protests in addition to eggs, yogurt, and tissue paper. (see photo).
• Chair of Transparency International’s Chile chapter resigned (Transparency.org) — Oops. But kudos to Transparency for the prompt and direct reaction after the leak revealed the Chilean chair had been involved with
• China squelched reporting ties to leadership and revelations in Panama Papers (SCMP) — The suppression includes redirecting search engine queries to stories about sports figures involved in the scandal.
• Amazon’s cloud now home to the Panama Papers source documents (Forbes) — And tiny Australian software firm Nuix has been helping with sifting through the documents.

What will today bring?

Related? Pfizer and Allergan nix their merger
Proposed changes to Treasury Department rules are blamed for the breakup of this corporate marriage, in which Pfizer would have moved its headquarters to Allergan’s location in Ireland to avoid U.S. tax rates. Public sentiment about offshoring after the Panama Papers leak may have clinched this split.

Miscellany

• Heat pump technology could reduce energy use in clothing dryers by 40% (Phys.org) — Now this is a great use of our tax dollars, this research by U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Dryers are the largest consumer of electricity in households equipped with them. As much of U.S. energy is produced by fossil fuel, this could have a dramatic impact on CO2 output. Let’s hope Congress encourages more of this kind of research as well as tax credits for related corporate R&D and consumer purchases.
• Orbeus, a photo-recognition software company, has been acquired by Amazon (Business Insider) — Imagine the next time you upload your personal photo’s to your Amazon Prime Photo account getting this message: “People who purchased your spouse’s belt on Amazon also purchased this underwear/lubricant/sex toy.” Just, no.
• STARZ premium cable channel will now offer a direct streaming service for cord cutters (Ars Technica) — The offering will work much like HBO Direct. But will ISPs that offer STARZ (like Comcast and Charter) attempt to throttle this service as it cuts into their bundled sales? Net neutrality is going to get a work out as more cable channels offer their content straight to consumers.