This is Samsung’s foldable smartphone | The Verge

Also see Samsung's Folding Smartphone Concept Bends All the Rules | Wired

"Samsung isn’t the only phone maker working on foldable devices, though. Huawei reportedly plans to release a foldable handset next year. Lenovo and Xiaomi have also started teased their own prototypes, and LG is also working on flexible OLED displays and TVs that roll up into a box.

Microsoft is even working on a multiscreen device, which could be a modern take on the old Courier concept. Microsoft Surface chief Panos Panay previously revealed that a pocketable Surface device is “absolutely my baby.” Phone makers you’ve probably never heard of are also experimenting with tablet-like devices that fold into a phone form factor, so expect to see a lot more of these handsets in 2019."

This is Samsung’s foldable smartphone | The Verge

Facebook Had a Good Election Day. But It Can’t Let Up Now. | NYT

From a timely Facebook reality check

"It’s worth asking, over the long term, why a single American company is in the position of protecting free and fair elections all over the world. But that is the case now, and we now know that Facebook’s action or inaction can spell the difference between elections going smoothly and democracies straining under a siege of misinformation and propaganda.

To Facebook’s credit, it has become more responsive in recent months, including cracking down on domestic disinformation networks, banning particularly bad actors such as Alex Jones of Infowars, and hiring more people to deal with emerging threats.

But Facebook would not have done this on its own. It took sustained pressure from lawmakers, regulators, researchers, journalists, employees, investors and users to force the company to pay more attention to misinformation and threats of election interference."

Facebook Had a Good Election Day. But It Can’t Let Up Now. | NYT

Apple walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip | Ars Technica

From a detailed review

"Apple has come to dominate in mobile SoCs. In a lot of ways, though, Qualcomm has been an easy dragon to slay. Should Apple choose to go custom silicon route on the Mac platform, Intel will not be quite as easy to beat. But the rapid iteration that has led to the iPad Pro's A12X makes a compelling case that it's possible.

Apple won't talk about its future plans, of course. You could say that's all in the future, but when you have a 7nm tablet chip that rivals the CPU and graphics performance of most laptops and beats two out of five of the modern gaming consoles on the market with no fan at barely over a pound and less than a quarter-inch thick... it feels a bit like at least some particular future is now."

Apple walks Ars through the iPad Pro’s A12X system on a chip | Ars Technica

You Already Email Like a Robot — Why Not Automate It? | NYT

Tbd when Cortana-powered Clippy++ will appear... (Or maybe not; see Goodbye, Cortana: Microsoft's Javier Soltero leaves, putting the digital assistant's future in doubt | PCWorld)

"Depending on what your current inbox looks like, this might not require much imagination at all. A study conducted in 2016 by researchers at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business in Canada tried to understand the role email had come to play in the modern office. They surveyed “highly educated baby boomer or Gen X” subjects who were mostly “managers or professionals” working in office jobs and found that they spend on average a full third of their workweeks “processing” email. Whatever their titles, they are — like many office workers — to a large extent professional emailers. Even if their roles are otherwise highly specialized, in this significant way they are not. They are their own assistants.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote that, thanks to new efficiencies, workers of the future could expect “three-hour shifts or a 15-hour week.” He guessed that this would happen within a century. Automation and the abundance it produced has indeed led to countless economic changes, but it did not negate or replace the entire order. Asked for evidence of the success of this newest tool, Google says that Smart Compose is already “saving people a billion characters of typing each week.” This statistic supports one half of what Keynes might have predicted at the dawn of automated communication — the abundance and the glut — but is tellingly silent on the other half, the same half he couldn’t quite see the first time. Self-automation can free us only to the extent that it actually belongs to us. We can be sure of only one thing that will result from automating email: It will create more of it."

You Already Email Like a Robot — Why Not Automate It? | NYT

Blockchain-based elections would be a disaster for democracy | Ars Technica

Another timely blockchain reality check

"An important property for an election is finality: you want a well-understood process that makes people confident in the result. The paper-based process used in most states today isn't perfect, but it's pretty good on this score. Each vote is recorded on a paper ballot that's available for anyone to look at. Everyone understands how paper ballots work. People can observe the vote-counting process to verify that no ballots were altered. So not only does the process usually lead to an accurate count of peoples' votes, it also builds public confidence in the integrity of the result.

Blockchain voting would be much, much worse. Hardly anyone understands how a blockchain works, and even experts don't have a good way to observe the online voting process for irregularities the way an election observer does in a traditional paper election. A voter might be able to use her private key to verify how her vote was recorded after the fact. But if her vote wasn't counted the way she expected (or wasn't counted at all) she'd have no good way to prove that she tried to vote a different way."

Blockchain-based elections would be a disaster for democracy | Ars Technica

Tim Berners-Lee unveils 'contract' to protect and strengthen the web | CNET

See this page for the core principles

"The same spirit of collaboration will be used to shape and negotiate the contract as a document using the guiding principles the Web Foundation has laid out. Berners-Lee envisages working groups and discussions that will allow people across the whole spectrum of internet users to have a say on subjects from openness and accessibility to anonymity and hate speech.

"It's all about everybody talking together," he said. The contract should be finalized and ready to sign by May 2019.

Facebook, Google and the French government are three of around 60 early backers of the contract -- a list that includes tech companies, political figures, and non-governmental and digital rights organizations."

Tim Berners-Lee unveils 'contract' to protect and strengthen the web | CNET

Did You Vote? Now Your Friends May Know (and Nag You) | NYT

Tbd when there will be a new app store category for shaming apps

"I know these details not because the dentist, the bookseller and the accountant volunteered to share their voting histories with me. I found out from VoteWithMe and OutVote, two new political apps that are trying to use peer pressure to get people to vote Tuesday.

The apps are to elections what Zillow is to real estate — services that pull public information from government records, repackage it for consumer viewing and make it available at the touch of a smartphone button. But instead of giving you a peek at house prices, VoteWithMe and OutVote let you snoop on which of your friends voted in past elections and their party affiliations — and then prod them to go to the polls by sending them scripted messages like “You gonna vote?”"

Did You Vote? Now Your Friends May Know (and Nag You) | NYT

Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 in Two Locations | NYT

 HQ2/2

"After conducting a yearlong search for a second home, Amazon has switched gears and is now finalizing plans to have a total of 50,000 employees in two locations, according to people familiar with the decision-making process.

The company is nearing a deal to move to the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. Amazon is also close to a deal to move to the Crystal City area of Arlington, Va., a Washington suburb, one of the people said. Amazon already has more employees in those two areas than anywhere else outside of Seattle, its home base, and the Bay Area."

Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 in Two Locations | NYT

Chinese Web giant Tencent rolls out toughest gaming restrictions amid crackdown on industry | Washington Post

From a gaming market dynamics reality check

"While China has taken a notably drastic approach, video game addiction has garnered international attention and criticism lately for players of all ages. In June, the World Health Organization added video game addiction to its International Classification of Diseases. But the designation specifies that “gaming disorders” — where gaming eclipses all other desires for a period of more than a year — are very rare, affecting at most 3 percent of gamers. The American Psychiatric Association identified Internet Gaming Disorder as an area for further study in the 2013 version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the central resource for identifying and diagnosing disorders in the United States. It has yet to be officially added.

The online game Fortnite, which hosts tens of millions of players and generates more than $1 billion in revenue, has been at the heart of the gaming addiction debate in the United States. As parents struggle to manage their children’s playing time, professional sports coaches are facing a similar battle with their players, worrying that time spent playing video games is eroding the pro athletes' practice and sleep regimens."

Chinese Web giant Tencent rolls out toughest gaming restrictions amid crackdown on industry | Washington Post

The Supreme Court won’t take up net neutrality | Washington Post

Getting a bit deeply nested...

"But even as the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the appeal, the FCC under Republican chairman Ajit Pai moved to rescind those very rules. The new FCC in 2017 voted to reject much of its authority over Internet providers, and handed much of the responsibility for net neutrality to a sister agency, the Federal Trade Commission. The repeal went into effect this summer.

The GOP-led effort to repeal the FCC’s net neutrality rules set off a separate round of litigation, as tech companies and consumer groups sued to block the deregulation. That suit, which is also pending before the D.C. Circuit, is quickly becoming the center of the legal battle over net neutrality now, with the Supreme Court deciding not to hear its net neutrality case. The Justice Department has also agreed to suspend its recent suit against California over the state’s new net neutrality law, at least until the case before the D.C. Circuit is resolved."

The Supreme Court won’t take up net neutrality | Washington Post

The Pen(cil) is Mightier Than the Mouse | Tech.pinions

For some mouse-fan perspectives, see Apple iPad Pro Review 2018: The Fastest iPad is Still an iPad | The Verge and Nope, Apple’s new iPad Pro still isn’t a laptop | Washington Post

"While in it’s early stages, I contrast this with Microsoft’s Windows Pen/Ink support. With Windows a mouse is still available to use as a precision pointer, meaning most people will still choose this method by default. The presence of a mouse/trackpad enables the user to stay in their comofort level rather than embrace a new paradigm. The implication is the pen is likely only used for pen use cases and not in a position to become the new mouse. The lack of a traditional mouse pointer/trackpad is precisely the reason Apple has the potential to innovate and encourage software to be built around new precision input paradigms instead of old ones.

It will be very interesting to see how Apple continues to develop the gestures feature on Pencil and what developers do with it. I’d love to see Microsoft run with this idea and explore new Office experiences focusing on the pen as a new type of precision input that can go beyond just ink/drawing.

From a use case standpoint, when you need a precision input tool, there is not that much different in motion than taking your hand off the keyboard and using a trackpad then picking up the pencil. And, I’d argue that what can be enabled by pencil, gestures, and software, will take precision input to a level not possible with a trackpad/mouse."

The Pen(cil) is Mightier Than the Mouse | Tech.pinions

Apple’s Social Network | Stratechery

From a wide-ranging Apple reality check

"“Engaged” is an interesting choice of words, as engagement is an objective normally associated with social networks like Facebook. The reasoning is obvious: the more engaged users are, the more they use a social network, which means the more ads they can be shown. Social networks accomplish this by aggregating content from suppliers as well as users themselves, and continually tweaking algorithms in an attempt to keep you swiping and tapping, and coming back to swipe and tap some more.

This is a world that has always been foreign to Apple: its past attempts at facilitating social interaction on its platforms are memorable only as the butt of jokes (iTunes Ping anyone?). This isn’t a surprise: Apple’s culture and approach to products is antithetical to the culture and approach necessary to create and grow a traditional social network. Apple wants total control and to release as perfect a product it can; a social network requires an iterative approach that is designed to deal with constant variability and edge cases.

This, though, is why Today at Apple is compelling, particular Ahrendts’ reference to bringing people together in a “real social way” — and she could not have emphasized the word “real” more strongly. Apple is in effect trying to build a social network in the real world, facilitated and controlled by Apple, and betting that customers will continue to pay to gain access."

Apple’s Social Network | Stratechery

Facebook Tamped Down on Hoax Sites, But Polarization Thrives | Bloomberg

Apparently Facebook hasn't fixed all human cognitive biases in time for the midterms...

"Facebook built a system that specifically addresses hoax news websites and pages. But that shifted some of the fake news activity to posts and images that go viral in Facebook groups, in which old photos are often doctored or retitled to apply to current news events.

If hoax publishers aren’t as much of a problem in the U.S., polarization still is. Publishers on the far right or far left -- who don’t publish fake news so much as news in a skewed context, meant to alarm readers -- still thrive on Facebook. The social network has been asking users to rate publishers by trustworthiness, and baking the scores into its algorithm to address the issue. Still, hyperpartisan news thrives."

 On a related note, from The Real Lesson of My Debate With Steve Bannon | The Atlantic:

"The story ends, then, in a great irony. Integral to the liberal project, again in the broad sense of the word liberal, is confidence in the power of reason. Words and arguments can overbear ignorance and prejudice. Over the long term, words and arguments can even overcome oppression and violence. That’s why liberals in the broad sense are so uniquely horrified by official lying: How can reason prevail unless words connect to reality? How can we argue against people who will spread fictions, if serviceable to them, without a qualm?

Illiberals and anti-liberals, on the other hand, appreciate the dark energy of human irrationality—not merely as a fact of our nature to be negotiated, but as a potent political resource. People do not think; they feel. They do not believe what is true; they regard as true that which they wish to believe. A lie that affirms us will gain more credence than a truth that challenges us. That’s the foundational insight on which Trump built his business career. It’s the insight on which Trump’s supporters built first their campaign for president and now their presidency itself." 

Facebook Tamped Down on Hoax Sites, But Polarization Thrives | Bloomberg

Tencent to Check All Gamers' IDs by 2019 in Unprecedented Move | Bloomberg

Relationship with China's social credit system tbd...

"The Chinese social media and entertainment titan intends to check all gamers’ identities against police databases by 2019, extending a procedure it pioneered for the mobile phenomenon Honour of Kings. It will kick things off with its 10 of its most popular games before expanding that system to its entire library, the company said in a post on its official WeChat account on Monday. That enormous undertaking -- covering scores of titles -- should help surface under-aged users who’re subject to curbs on playing time.

While China’s 700 million-plus internet and social media users are growing accustomed to constant policing of their activities, Tencent’s initiative widens the net to include hundreds of millions of children and casual players. The company has come under fire for fomenting game addiction, particularly via the self-developed Honour of Kings. While it’s already put a raft of measures in place -- such as limiting play-time for kids -- the company remains hobbled by regulators who’ve effectively shut down its once vibrant pipeline of new titles."

Tencent to Check All Gamers' IDs by 2019 in Unprecedented Move | Bloomberg

Apple’s new MacBook Air faces strong Windows and iPad competition | The Verge

Also see The Apple iPad Pro 12.9 is a Glorious Creation Machine (Lance Ulanoff)

"Apple is now going to make it difficult to see how people are making that choice. Apple has traditionally been surprisingly transparent with its Mac and iPad sales numbers, reporting them every quarter unlike the rest of the industry. That’s all about to change, though, as Apple’s price hike strategy shows early signs of paying off. Apple will no longer report sales numbers for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, so it will make it more difficult to see just how well the MacBook Air and iPad Pro compete against traditional PC laptops.

The debate over tablet vs. laptop will rage on for many years, but it’s clear that Apple’s new MacBook Air now faces stronger competition than it has ever faced before. The PC industry has changed for the better, thanks to both the MacBook Air and the iPad, but it’s the iPad that will now shape its future and not the new MacBook Air."

Apple’s new MacBook Air faces strong Windows and iPad competition | The Verge

Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan | NYT

See the full article for a timely case study; also see Far-Right Internet Groups Listen for Trump’s Approval, and Often Hear It | NYT

"Since President Trump’s election, his loyalists online have provided him with a steady stream of provocative posts and shareable memes, often filtered up from platforms like Reddit through media channels like Fox News. In return, Mr. Trump has championed many of their messages as his own, amplifying them back to his larger base.

This feedback loop is how #JobsNotMobs came to be. In less than two weeks, the three-word phrase expanded from corners of the right-wing internet onto some of the most prominent political stages in the country, days before the midterm elections."

Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan | NYT

Apple warns on holiday sales, sending value below $1 trillion | Reuters

This just in: apparently Apple doesn't completely control the global economy after all...

"Apple Inc on Thursday warned that sales for the crucial holiday quarter would likely miss Wall Street expectations, which Chief Executive Tim Cook blamed on weakness in emerging markets and foreign exchange costs.

The disappointing forecast by the world’s most valuable technology company helped send shares down as much as 7 percent, taking roughly $70 billion off Apple’s market value and forcing that value below $1 trillion. The forecast could also deepen concerns for technology companies that saw a sell-off after misses by Amazon.com Inc and Google parent Alphabet Inc."

Apple warns on holiday sales, sending value below $1 trillion | Reuters

Elon Musk: The Recode interview | Recode

Check the source for the podcast and this page for a full transcript

"On Halloween night, we sat down at Tesla HQ in Palo Alto for an 80-minute conversation about how those companies are faring, why he was working 120-hour weeks, his public animosity for the press, Donald Trump’s Space Force, accepting money from Saudi Arabia and more.

Also on the menu: Musk’s rabid fans on Twitter, dying on Mars, a Tesla pickup truck that will look like something out of “Blade Runner” and talk of an electric bike and VTOL plane — but not a Tesla scooter because those “lack dignity,” apparently."

Elon Musk: The Recode interview | Recode

I ditched the Mac for the iPad, and I’ll never go back | Fast Company

Final paragraphs from a long-term Apple perspective:

"The new iPad furthers the case for tablets to be full desktop or laptop replacements. The new hardware design is gorgeous, with rounded corners, small bezels, and square edges. More importantly, it is a true processing powerhouse. Apple claims that it can match the graphics performance of the Xbox One S–which is Microsoft’s top game console, a monster capable of moving a gazillion 3D polygons at UltraHD 4K resolution. That’s incredible for a product that is 94% smaller than that game console–and runs on batteries. During its introduction, Apple also said that the new iPad Pro is faster than 92% of all laptops sold last month.

All while keeping the simplicity of the “information appliance” and modal computing. The new machine will run full Photoshop as fast as most laptops and desktops. And the new Apple Pencil–with its magnetic latch, gesture controls, and wireless charging–is icing on the cake for those who draw for a living, or for anyone who needs to annotate documents or create presentations.

So yes, iPad is the future. And for me, as cliché as it sounds, the future is now."

I ditched the Mac for the iPad, and I’ll never go back | Fast Company

Geekbench scores for new iPad Pro surface, rivals 2018 MacBook Pro performance | 9to5Mac

The Apple product line architectural singularity approaches...

"At least in single-core, Apple only sells a single configuration of portable Mac that is decidedly faster than the iPad Pro — the Core i9 MacBook Pro. Reminder: Apple sells the A12X-equipped iPad Pro from $799. The i9 MacBook Pro sells for more than $3000. Going beyond portables, the iPad Pro matches or beats almost all 2017 iMac configurations, and rivals the iMac Pro on single-core prowess."

Geekbench scores for new iPad Pro surface, rivals 2018 MacBook Pro performance | 9to5Mac