Daily Archives: September 4, 2019

More Than Half the Nation’s State Attorneys General Could Sign on to Antitrust Inquiry Against Google

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The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that “more than half of the nation’s state attorneys general” have signed on to and are preparing an antitrust investigation against digital titan Google, with the paper writing the inquiry is “scheduled to be announced next week, marking a major escalation in U.S. regulators’ efforts to probe Silicon Valley’s largest companies.”

Details of the investigation remain hazy, but the Post reported that the effort is “expected” to be bipartisan and could involve over 30 state attorneys general. The states’ investigation is as of yet separate from another antitrust review currently being conducted by the Department of Justice, and it comes as both Democrats on the campaign trail and the Trump administration have amped up the pressure on tech giants (albeit for entirely different reasons). The Post wrote:

A smaller group of these state officials, representing the broader coalition, is expected to unveil the investigation at a Monday news conference in Washington, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss a law enforcement proceeding on the record, cautioning the plans could change.

It is unclear whether some or all of the attorneys general also plan to open or announce additional probes into other tech giants, including Amazon and Facebook, which have faced similar U.S. antitrust scrutiny. The states’ effort is expected to be bipartisan and could include more than 30 attorneys general, one of the people said.

While it’s “unclear” whether any DOJ officials will join the attorneys general during the expected announcement next week, the Post wrote, the agency’s antitrust chief Makan Delrahim did say in August that the DOJ was coordinating with state inquiries into possible violations of antitrust law by tech firms. The feds are currently carrying out multiple such antitrust investigations, including Federal Trade Commission probes of Facebook (separate from the paltry $5 billion fine it levied on the company earlier this year) and Amazon and a DOJ probe of Apple.

As the Post noted, the states have more limited powers at their disposal than the feds, which can break up entire firms on the grounds of anticompetition law. However, states can join with the feds in court, as they did during the antitrust investigation into Microsoft in the 1990s, as well as tangle Google up in years of legal battles. Former Maryland attorney general Doug Gansler told the paper, “If multiple states—and I mean not just Democratic attorneys general but Republican attorneys general as well—are all looking into potential antitrust violations, one of the biggest effects might be to pressure the federal government to do a deeper dive.”

Source: More Than Half the Nation’s State Attorneys General Could Sign on to Antitrust Inquiry Against Google

Do those retail apps increase customer engagement and sales in all channels? In the US: Yes.

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Researchers from Texas A&M University published new research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, which shows that retailers’ branded mobile apps are very effective in increasing customer engagement, increasing sales on multiple levels, not just on the retailer’s website, but also in its stores. At the same time, apps increase the rate of returns, although the increase in sales outweighs the return rates.

The study to be published in the September edition of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science is titled “Mobile App Introduction and Online and Offline Purchases and Product Returns,” and is authored by Unnati Narang and Ventakesh Shankar, both of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University.

The study authors found that retail app users buy 33 percent more frequently, they buy 34 percent more items, and they spend 37 percent more than non-app user customers over 18 months after app launch.

At the same time, app users return products 35 percent more frequently, and they return 35 percent more items at a 41 percent increase in .

All factors considered, the researchers found that app users spend 36 percent more net of returns.

“Overall, we found that retail app users are significantly more engaged at every level of the retail experience, from making purchases to returning items,” said Narang. “Interestingly, we also found that app users tend to a more diverse set of items, including less popular products, than non-app users. This is particular helpful for long-tail products, such as video games and music.”

“For the retailer, the lesson is that having a retail app will likely increase customer engagement and expand the range of products being sold online and in store,” added Shankar. “We also found that some app users who make a purchase within 48 hours of actually using an app, tend to use it when they are physically close to the store of purchase. They are most likely to access the app for loyalty rewards, product details and notifications.”

Source: Do those retail apps increase customer engagement and sales in all channels?

Managers rated as highly emotionally intelligent are more ineffective and unpopular, research shows

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Professor Nikos Bozionelos, of the EMLyon Business School, France, and Dr. Sumona Mukhuty, Manchester Metropolitan University, asked staff in the NHS to assess their managers’ emotional intelligence—defined as their level of empathy and their awareness of their own and others’ emotions.

The 309 managers were also assessed on the amount of effort they put into the job, the staff’s overall satisfaction with their manager, and how well they implemented change within the NHS system.

Professor Bozionelos told the British Academy of Management’s annual conference in Birmingham today [Wednesday 4 September 2019] that beyond a certain point managers rated as having high emotional intelligence were also scored as lower for most of the outcomes.

Those managers rated in the top 15 percent for emotional intelligence were evaluated lower that those who performed in the top 65 percent to 85 percent in the amount of effort they put into the job, and how satisfied their subordinates were with them.

The NHS was undergoing fundamental reorganization at the time of the study, and managers rated as most emotionally intelligent were scored as less effective at implementing this change, but highly for their continuing involvement in the process.

“Increases in emotional intelligence beyond a moderately high level are detrimental rather than beneficial in terms of leader’s effectiveness,” said Professor Bozionelos.

“Managers who were rated beyond a particular threshold are considered less effective, and their staff are less satisfied with them.

“Too much emotional intelligence is associated with too much empathy, which in turn may make a manager hesitant to apply measures that he or she feels will impose excessive burden or discomfort to subordinates.”

The research contradicted the general assumption that the more emotional intelligence in a manager the better, he said, which had led to “an upsurge in investment in emotional intelligence training programs for leaders.”

“Beyond a particular level, emotional intelligence may not add anything to many aspects of manager’s performance, and in fact may become detrimental. Simply considering that the more emotional the manager has the better it is may be an erroneous way of thinking.”

The researchers took into account a host of factors, such as leaders’ age and biological sex, in order to study the effects of in isolation.

Source: Managers rated as highly emotionally intelligent are more ineffective and unpopular, research shows

SpaceX Says a ‘Bug’ Prevented It From Receiving Warning of Possible ESA Satellite Collision. For the first time ESA had to unexpectedly avoid a satellite constellation.

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The European Space Agency was forced to perform a “collision avoidance maneuver” to prevent its Aeolus spacecraft from potentially smashing into one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, in what is quickly becoming an all-too-common occurrence. According to SpaceX, it never received the expected alert that a collision was possible.

ESA pumped out a series of tweets yesterday describing the incident, in which the Aeolus satellite “fired its thrusters, moving it off a collision course with a @SpaceX satellite in their #Starlink constellation” on Monday morning. Launched in August 2018, the Aeolus Earth science satellite monitors the planet’s wind from space, allowing for better weather predictions and climate modeling.

[…]

Experts in the ESA’s Space Debris Team “calculated the risk of collision between these two active satellites,” determining that the safest option for Aeolus was to increase its height and have it pass over the SpaceX satellite, according to an ESA tweet. It marked the first time the ESA had to perform “a collision avoidance manoeuvre’ to protect one of its satellites from colliding with a ‘mega constellation,’” noted the space agency.

[…]

But as the ESA tweeted yesterday, as “the number of satellites in orbit increases, due to ‘mega constellations’ such as #Starlink comprising hundreds or even thousands of satellites, today’s ‘manual’ collision avoidance process will become impossible…”

[…]

An ESA graphic identified the culprit as being Starlink 44. The maneuver was done a half-Earth-orbit before Aeolus’ closest approach to the Starlink satellite. Jeff Foust from SpaceNews provides more insight into the incident:

Holger Krag, director of ESA’s Space Safety Programme Office, said in a Sept. 3 email that the agency’s conjunction assessment team noticed the potential close approach about five days in advance, using data provided by the U.S. Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron. “We have informed SpaceX and they acknowledged,” he said. “Over the days the collision probability exceeded the decision threshold and we started the maneuver preparation and shared our plans with SpaceX. The decision to maneuver was then made the day before.”

The odds of a collision were calculated at 1 in 1,000, which was high enough to warrant the maneuver. ESA scientists assessed the threat using data gathered by the U.S. Air Force, along with the “operators’ own knowledge of spacecraft positions,” according to SpaceNews.

In a statement emailed to Gizmodo, a SpaceX spokesperson said the Starlink team “last exchanged an email with the Aeolus operations team on August 28, when the probability of collision was only in the [1 in 50,000 range], well below the [1 in 10,000] industry standard threshold and 75 times lower than the final estimate.”

Once the U.S. Air Force’s updates showed that the probability had increased to more than 1 in 10,000, “a bug in our on-call paging system prevented the Starlink operator from seeing the follow on correspondence on this probability increase,” according to the spokesperson, who said “SpaceX is still investigating the issue and will implement corrective actions…. had the Starlink operator seen the correspondence, we would have coordinated with ESA to determine best approach with their continuing with their maneuver or our performing a maneuver.”

Yikes. This incident reveals the flimsy and primitive state of space traffic management, in which a failed communication led to ESA having to act unilaterally on the issue.

Source: SpaceX Says a ‘Bug’ Prevented It From Receiving Warning of Possible Satellite Collision

Well done, Elon Musk, incompetence does it again.

Mozilla says Firefox won’t defang ad blockers – unlike Google Chrome, which is steadily removing your privacy from 3rd parties

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On Tuesday, Mozilla said it is not planning to change the ad-and-content blocking capabilities of Firefox to match what Google is doing in Chrome.

Google’s plan to revise its browser extension APIs, known as Manifest v3, follows from the web giant’s recognition that many of its products and services can be abused by unscrupulous developers. The search king refers to its product security and privacy audit as Project Strobe, “a root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to your Google account and Android device data.”

In a Chrome extension, the manifest file (manifest.json) tells the browser which files and capabilities (APIs) will be used. Manifest v3, proposed last year and still being hammered out, will alter and limit the capabilities available to extensions.

Developers who created extensions under Manifest v2 may have to revise their code to keep it working with future versions of Chrome. That may not be practical or possible in all cases, though. The developer of uBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, has said his web-ad-and-content-blocking extension will break under Manifest v3. It’s not yet clear whether uBlock Origin can or will be adapted to the revised API.

The most significant change under Manifest v3 is the deprecation of the blocking webRequest API (except for enterprise users), which lets extensions intercept incoming and outgoing browser data, so that the traffic can be modified, redirected or blocked.

Firefox not following

“In its place, Google has proposed an API called declarativeNetRequest,” explains Caitlin Neiman, community manager for Mozilla Add-ons (extensions), in a blog post.

“This API impacts the capabilities of content blocking extensions by limiting the number of rules, as well as available filters and actions. These limitations negatively impact content blockers because modern content blockers are very sophisticated and employ layers of algorithms to not only detect and block ads, but to hide from the ad networks themselves.”

Mozilla offers Firefox developers the Web Extensions API, which is mostly compatible with the Chrome extensions platform and is supported by Chromium-based browsers Brave, Opera and Vivaldi. Those other three browser makers have said they intend to work around Google’s changes to the blocking webRequest API. Now, Mozilla says as much.

“We have no immediate plans to remove blocking webRequest and are working with add-on developers to gain a better understanding of how they use the APIs in question to help determine how to best support them,” said Neiman.

[…]

Google maintains, “We are not preventing the development of ad blockers or stopping users from blocking ads,” even as it acknowledges “these changes will require developers to update the way in which their extensions operate.”

Yet Google’s related web technology proposal two weeks ago to build a “privacy sandbox,” through a series of new technical specifications that would hinder anti-tracking mechanisms, has been dismissed as disingenuous “privacy gaslighting.”

On Friday, EFF staff technologist Bennett Cyphers, lambasted the ad biz for its self-serving specs. “Google not only doubled down on its commitment to targeted advertising, but also made the laughable claim that blocking third-party cookies – by far the most common tracking technology on the Web, and Google’s tracking method of choice – will hurt user privacy,” he wrote in a blog post.

Source: Mozilla says Firefox won’t defang ad blockers – unlike a certain ad-giant browser • The Register

REVEALED: Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don’t want the government spying on you

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The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.

The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like ‘pork’, ‘cloud’, ‘team’ and ‘Mexico’.

Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats.

The words are included in the department’s 2011 ‘Analyst’s Desktop Binder‘ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

Department chiefs were forced to release the manual following a House hearing over documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which revealed how analysts monitor social networks and media organisations for comments that ‘reflect adversely’ on the government.

However they insisted the practice was aimed not at policing the internet for disparaging remarks about the government and signs of general dissent, but to provide awareness of any potential threats.

As well as terrorism, analysts are instructed to search for evidence of unfolding natural disasters, public health threats and serious crimes such as mall/school shootings, major drug busts, illegal immigrant busts.

The list has been posted online by the Electronic Privacy Information Center – a privacy watchdog group who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act before suing to obtain the release of the documents.

In a letter to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence, the centre described the choice of words as ‘broad, vague and ambiguous’.

Threat detection: Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats

They point out that it includes ‘vast amounts of First Amendment protected speech that is entirely unrelated to the Department of Homeland Security mission to protect the public against terrorism and disasters.’

A senior Homeland Security official told the Huffington Post that the manual ‘is a starting point, not the endgame’ in maintaining situational awareness of natural and man-made threats and denied that the government was monitoring signs of dissent.

However the agency admitted that the language used was vague and in need of updating.

Spokesman Matthew Chandler told website: ‘To ensure clarity, as part of … routine compliance review, DHS will review the language contained in all materials to clearly and accurately convey the parameters and intention of the program.’

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE: THE LIST OF KEYWORDS IN FULL

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Source: REVEALED: Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don’t want the government spying on you | Daily Mail Online

Basically you’re being censored through the use of unnecessary, ubiquitous surveillance – by a democracy.