Former CEO of Theranos’ Trial Delayed

Internet of Things (IoT)

Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of formerly multi-billion dollar valued corporation Theranos, has been awaiting trial since June 2018 over charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Theranos aimed to develop medical technology providing blood analyses and diagnoses outside of a hospital setting. The trial has been delayed until August 2020, granting the defense’s request to further review evidence. The nature of the fraud and the confidence it inspired in investors are important in considering the status of internet-connected medical devices. Maybe we should all review the evidence.

Vision / Reality + Investment / Fraud

As an undergraduate, Holmes imagined a wearable patch that would provide doctors with real-time changes in patients’ blood. This notion of patient data being collectable and analyzable (by patients, doctors, insurance companies, advertisers) inspires most internet-integrated personal medical devices. Refining the patch into a station that could quickly analyze small blood samples, Holmes left school and founded Theranos, securing deals from Safeway and Walgreens to begin implementing these stations at their stores. The product development story doesn’t progress much further than that. After repeated missed deadlines and inconclusive results, both companies cancelled their contracts in 2015 and 2016. Walgreens filed suit and receieved $30 million in damages. 

At the same time, investment and valuation were skyrocketing. Within four years, the company had raised over $40 million. Ten years later, it was up to $400 million, and the company was valued at $9 billion. Over $100 million each was invested by: Rupert Murdoch, Betsy DeVos, Cox Media Group, and the Walton family. Obviously, there was a lot of media coverage during this time, which certainly fueled further investment, despite the concomitant failures of the device itself.

For health or money?

Things that have been energetically invested and promoted that end up failing (Fyre ) are easy routes into the hopes of investors, consumers, and the culture that shapes them. The dream of a pocket doctor is for patients not just to be able to record their medical data from outside of a clinic—like a FitBit might—but also to offer algorithmically-produced diagnoses. Devices such as these would, and do, create huge data troves revealing unseen information about users (‘patients’ seems less applicable at this point). That such a large amount of investment in Theranos devices came from retail and media moguls gives good reason to look for other (read: commercial) uses of such a depersonalized (replacing both the doctor and patient with figures) collection and analysis of medical information. The market for internet-connected healthcare devices was estimated two years ago to reach over $130 billion by 2021.

Summer of Scooters

Start Ups

Op-ed sections in most major United States newspapers have published at least one article in the last few months lamenting or berating this summer’s most visible change in urban transportation—the mobile-hailed, electrically powered scooter. 

Resistance

The gripes are generally the same from city to city: they litter the sidewalks, interfere with pedestrian and vehicle traffic, people can use them under the influence of drugs or alcohol, there is no experience requirement, helmets are not required or provided, and some anecdote about someone tripping on a discarded scooter.

These are legitimate complaints, some more so than others, but they should not be taken as condemning personally rentable, electric transit vehicles in general.

Ride-hailing is not a viable alternative

Car-ride hailing companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Grab infiltrate a city’s market by pricing their services in competition with public transportation (not to mention traditional taxi services). Rather than reducing the amount of cars on the road, (which Uber actually claimed as its goal), they disincentivize busses and trains in cities attempting to bring them into more regular use. 

Same companies, different models

Scooters are designed (albeit by a lot of the same companies that offer ride-hailing services) in conjunction with public transportation systems, and in opposition to the private automobile cityscape that has emerged in American cities over the last 50 years. A collection of them at a transit hub enables one to take a mass transit line as close to your destination as possible, after which everyone branches off on foot or by rented scooter or bicycle. it almost sounds natural. compared to the tradition of sitting in rush hour traffic for two hours while checking your car’s embedded GPS for alternate routes, its certified organic.

The clientele of scooter-users is easy to misjudge as well; if you’re in an affluent, downtown area it might seem like they are mostly used by wealthy under 35’s hopping between cafes and boutique restaurants. But records show the average income of a scooter rider to be under $50,000 per year, and not exclusively in gentrified/gentrifying neighborhoods. Implemented correctly, scooters could actually resist and change the urban landscape away from prioritizing enclosed, time-consuming, and environmentally destructive private vehicles.

5G network infrastructure on the rise, projected to rake in $4.2 billion in 2020

Digital Systems Technology, General, Networking

International research firm Gartner estimates that the global 5G network infrastructure market is expected to raise $4.2 billion in revenue in 2020. That would mark an 89 percent rise in revenue from 2019 ($2.2 billion). Moreover, the company anticipates that investments in 5G new radio (NR) infrastructure will make up 6 percent of communications service providers’ total wireless infrastructure revenue this year; in 2020, Gartner says, that figure will double to 12 percent.

According to Sylvain Fabre, senior research director at Gartner:

“5G wireless network infrastructure revenue will nearly double between 2019 and 2020. For 5G deployments in 2019, CSPs are using non-stand-alone technology. This enables them to introduce 5G services that run more quickly, as 5G New Radio (NR) equipment can be rolled out alongside existing 4G core network infrastructure.”

5G trials are currently being run in the United States, South Korea, the United Kingdom and other countries. These are expected to expand into larger projects as technology develops. For instance, companies in Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Spain, Sweden, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have stated that they intend to make 5G services more widely available in 2020. Gartner suggests that 7 percent of communications service providers are already employing 5G technology.

There remains a lot of work to be done, however. “National 5G coverage will not occur as quickly as with past generations of wireless infrastructure,” Fabre explained, according to InformationAge. “To maintain average performance standards as 5G is built out, CSPs will need to undertake targeted strategic improvements to their 4G legacy layer, by upgrading 4G infrastructure around 5G areas of coverage.

“A less robust 4G legacy layer adjoining 5G cells could lead to real or perceived performance issues as users move from 5G to 4G/LTE Advanced Pro. This issue will be most pronounced from 2019 through 2021, a period when 5G coverage will be focused on hot spots and areas of high population density.”

Twitter, Facebook suspend accounts allegedly tied to Chinese government effort to undercut Hong Kong protests

Big Data, General, Social Media

Twitter has gone on another account suspension spree, this time targeting nearly 1,000 accounts it claims are agents of a Beijing-devised conspiracy to influence the world’s perception of political events in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Facebook has banned seven pages, three groups and five accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour as part of a small network that originated in China and focused on Hong Kong.”

“Inauthentic behavior” is Facebook’s latest catch-all term for content that runs counter to its own Western-oriented ideology. (Facebook has partnered with organizations with ties to Western governments in its efforts to root out “fake news” and “disinformation.” One such organization is the Atlantic Council, funded in part by the US State Department and NATO.)

A total of 936 accounts have been unplugged by Twitter, all allegedly based in China, all allegedly in violation of Twitter’s “platform manipulation policies.” The South China Morning Post reports:

“The social media activity of the suspended accounts, which posted in both English and Chinese, were part of efforts to undermine the ‘legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground,’ the company said.”

Of the accounts suspended, 326 had over 10,000 followers, some with close to 300,000. But Twitter assures us that “intensive investigations [found] reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation.”

Speaking of coordination, Facebook confirmed that its own China-backed users were shut down thanks to a “tip” from Twitter. Partners in censorship?

Of course, it’s safe to assume that China is doing what it can to undermine the legitimacy of the Hong Kong protests, but it’s equally safe to assume that the US government is doing what it can in the opposite direction. At the time of writing, neither Twitter nor Facebook has suspended any accounts for being part of a US-led campaign to drum up support for political unrest in Hong Kong.

Facebook admits it collects users’ audio data and has it reviewed

Data Management & Networks, General, Mobile Security, Networking, Social Media

Facebook pays hundreds of contractors to transcribe bits of audio taken from its users, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Disturbing enough, but get this: the people contracted by Facebook to do this … shady work have no idea what the purpose of such work is. These contractors, who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity lest they face some kind of disciplinary action, have no information about where the recordings come from, how they were collected, nor why Facebook wants them transcribed. They are simply given audio of Facebook users’ conversations and told to write it down.

After hearing of the practice, the Irish Data Protection Commission announced that it would be performing an investigation to see whether Facebook is in violation of the European Union’s privacy laws.

Caught red-handed (like Apple was in recent weeks), Facebook said it has already stopped the activity. Surprise, surprise. “Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago,” the tech giant said, the operative word being “human.” In another surprise (not), Facebook claims its users consented to having their audio recorded and transcribed. I’m sure they did so freely, voluntarily and knowingly, and not because they didn’t understand the implications of such a policy.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg was grilled about this, and many other things, during his testimony to the US Congress in 2018. He didn’t have answers of the lawmakers then, but his company submitted a few after the fact. With regard to the audio collection, Facebook said it “only accesses users’ microphone if the user have given our app permission and if they are actively using a specific feature that requires audio.”

Here’s a question for Facebook: if this is such an innocuous thing, to which users are voluntarily submitting, why discontinue it? Maybe because, as Bloomberg reports, “Facebook hasn’t disclosed to users that third parties may review their audio.”

It’s high time people initiated a mass boycott of Facebook. The company needs us far more than we need it.

MoviePass left thousands of user card numbers exposed in unprotected database

Data Management & Networks, Digital Systems Technology, General, Mobile Security

MoviePass, a subscription-only move ticket service, exposed tens of thousands of its users’ credit card information due to insufficient security of a server, TechCrunch reports. The exposed database, discovered by cybersecurity company SpiderSilk, reportedly contained 161 million records, many of which included credit card numbers and other private information. TechCrunch explains:

“These MoviePass customer cards are like normal debit cards: they’re issued by Mastercard and store a cash balance, which users who sign up to the subscription service can use to pay to watch a catalog of movies. For a monthly subscription fee, MoviePass uses the debit card to load the full cost of the movie, which the customer then uses to pay for the movie at the cinema.”

The tech publication examined a sample of 1,000 of the aforementioned records and found that more than half showed MoviePass debit card numbers, expiration dates, account balances and the time of activation. Also contained in the records were personal credit card numbers, including expiration date and billing information (names and addresses).

MoviePass has since closed the database, which was accessible for months. TechCruch says it reached out to MoviePass with a number of specific questions but that the company’s only response was the following generic statement:

“MoviePass recently discovered a security vulnerability that may have exposed customer records. After discovering the vulnerability, we immediately secured our systems to prevent further exposure and to mitigate the potential impact of this incident. MoviePass takes this incident seriously and is dedicated to protecting our customers’ information. We are working diligently to investigate the scope of this incident and its potential impact on our customers. Once we gain a full understanding of the incident, we will promptly notify any affected subscribers and the appropriate regulators or law enforcement.”

SpiderSilk’s Mossab Hussein, the researcher who first discovered the vulnerable database, told TechCrunch that there is no excuse for MoviePass’ negligence in this scenario, which is one we keep seeing played out over and over again across the digital world.

“We keep on seeing companies of all sizes using dangerous methods to maintain and process private user data,” he said. “In the case of MoviePass, we are questioning the reason why would internal technical teams ever be allowed to see such critical data in plaintext—let alone the fact that the data set was exposed for public access by anyone.”

Eminem sues Spotify

Big Data, Digital Systems Technology, General

Rapper Eminem has filed a lawsuit against Spotify through his publishing company, Eight Mile Style. The suit, filed Wednesday, alleges that the popular audio streaming platform engaged in copyright infringement by streaming more than 200 of the rapper’s songs, including “Lose Yourself.”

The suit moreover accuses Spotify of violating the Music Modernization Act (MMA), a federal law put in place recently to address issues arising from streaming services and copryright infringement. Eight Mile Style also takes aim at the law itself.

The Hollywood Reporter obtained a copy of the document, which reportedly argues that Spotify does not have a license to reproduce Eminem’s music. Here’s a direct quote from the complaint: “Spotify has not accounted to Eight Mile or paid Eight Mile for these streams but instead remitted random payments of some sort, which only purport to account for a fraction of those streams.”

Further, Spotify has allegedly put “Lose Yourself” into its “Copyright Control” category (songs in this category have no known owner). “Eight Mile attacks the ‘absurd’ notion that it can’t be identified as the owner of such an iconic song, which was the centerpiece of the 2002 film 8 Mile, hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won an Oscar for best original song,” The Hollywood Reporter writes. “According to chart data, Eminem is among the most followed artists on Spotify with monthly listens on par with Bruno Mars, Coldplay and Taylor Swift.”

As for the MMA, which was signed into law by Donald Trump and which is supposed to simplify the task of identifying and remunerating owners of songs being streamed, Eight Mile Style alleges that Spotify is working around the new rules.

Here’s another quote from the lawsuit: “First, by its terms, the MMA liability limitation section only applies to compositions for which the copyright owner was not known, and to previously unmatched works (compositions not previously matched with sound recordings), and not to ‘matched’ works for which the DMP [Digital Music Provider] knew who the copyright owner was and just committed copyright infringement.”

The charge here is that Spotify pretended not to know who owned the rights to Eminem’s songs, thereby reducing its own liability and creating a situation in which it did not have to pay the artist as much as he legally should have been.

At any rate, the suit claims, Spotify “did not engage in the required commercially reasonable efforts to match sound recordings with the Eight Mile Compositions as required by the MMA.”

It will be interesting to see how the corporation responds.

NEW NAME FOR MCT

Communications

15 November 2004 by Richard Chirgwin

But Macquarie Telco’s Big News is in Services

Last Thursday (November 11) Macquarie Corporate Telecommunications unveiled a new identity – as Macquarie Telecom – and also lifted the lid on plans for a new range of services based on its own access network.

Faced with every telco’s problem – how to protect margin in a world where access to the customer is governed by Telstra’s access network – MT is to start creating services based on an Ethernet access network.

MT’s CEO David Tudehope said the company has spent 12 months planning its own metropolitan access network.

In corporate services, he said, “The critical success factor is the quality of the network”, and by creating an access network, “We create a real opportunity for business and corporate clients.”

The MT access network will embrace all of its existing offerings, but where possible, the access network will embrace a planned fibre rollout to customer premises. This, according to (title) Glen Noble, will depend on the economics.

Those economics, however, are helped by MT’s existing customer base. Noble told CommsWorld that instead of having to build a network and then recruit customers, MT can migrate an existing customer base to the access network. All-MT network rollout will chiefly focus on fibre loops in CBD areas, Noble said.

An Ethernet-based fibre rollout means MT will be able to support converged customer connections, with voice, data and video on a single QoS-enabled high speed customer tail. Noble also said the company will consider expanding the definition of “on-network” traffic; for example, allowing corporates using the MT access network for VoIP traffic to make on-network calls between each other.

FREE TRADE UNDER CORPORATE MONOPOLY

Business

22 November 2004 by

Richard Chirgwin

More on the Aus-US FTA as Letters Change Hands

Here’s a reference out of the dim dark past: in December 1997 (oh so long ago!), Australian Communications published a US price survey which found that country’s network kit vendors set prices (inclusive of exchange rate variations) as much as 84% higher in this country than back home.

Before anyone gives me some bromide about transport costs, I should make this clear: then, as now, most of the stuff was made in Asia, and delivered from Asia. It had nothing to do with transport: it had to do with price-fixing. Since that’s illegal, vendors had to use their control of the channel to achieve it: anoint just one importer, give it just one price, and leave the rest to the need for profit. The same survey found that countries with the most import channels also had the least “export mark-up”.

The reason I mention this is because over the years, the ACCC has worked hard on the issue of import monopolies, with some success. Sure, US vendors will still sprout the most outrageous humbug about “grey marketing”, pretending there’s something illegal or immoral about it. But parallel importation is a legal activity.

Not for long, and that’s my gripe against the time-serving circle-jerking slackers of the Canberra gallery.

In all the hundreds of thousands of words written about the Australia-US free trade agreement, you will find nearly nothing highlighting this paragraph:

“ Each Party shall provide that the exclusive right of the patent owner to prevent importation of a patented product, or a product that results from a patented process, without the consent of the patent owner shall not be limited by the sale or distribution of that product outside its territory, at least where the patentee has placed restrictions on importation by contract or other means.”

(Article 17.9, paragraph 4).

To boil it down to its effect: this paragraph commits the Australian government to make “grey marketing” illegal, and this paragraph has passed by the entire Canberra press gallery and (with the sole exception of Ross Gittins) every single commentator who has written about the FTA.

It’s easier to make egregiously stupid statements, like SBS’s Peter Martin who told the world that Banjo Patterson’s works will return to copyright under the FTA, than to break out of the mindset which follows the bum of the sheep in front.

Why would parallel import rules be “out of scope” for nearly every commentator on the FTA? The right of US companies of all kinds to engage in price-fixing in Australia through controlled imports reaches into every single household in the country.

Moreover: it’s open to exploitation in a modern, multinational world. The right to impose import monopolies is held by the patent owner: if patents are held by an American company, then that company sets the import rules to Australia.

In other words, an Ethernet switch vendor whose engineering is in Singapore, whose call centre is in the Philippines, and whose manufacturing plant is in Korea can still take advantage of the FTA, by setting up an office in Delaware and assigning all patents over its products to the American company. It’s an unlikely scenario for anyone whose competitive edge is low price – but in the long term, you can bet that if something is able to be exploited, it will be.

Of course, my focus has been on what such a provision would do to network equipment. But it’s not just Ethernet that could suffer from a patent migration scam: there is precious little, in the modern world, which doesn’t fit the bill of being “patented” or “the result of a patented process”.

Now, you can understand why there would be a deathly silence in any News-controlled outlet over such a point. News owns music labels and movie studios, and likes import monopolies. The business advocates of the FTA were never going to kick. They like import monopolies; it lets them blame higher price on someone upstream, while passing on those prices (with a little extra markup) to consumers.

But someone should have noticed that everything from sandshoes to ink-jet refills is swept up in the import monopoly rules.

Why do I return to the issue, given that I wrote about it to deafening silence back in August? Because this week, the group-think has been at work again. Australia and America exchanged “diplomatic notes” in which, among other things, our government made commitments to “address” America’s concerns about our FTA implementation legislation.

The group-thinkers used the occasion to justify rehashing what they’d already said about the FTA. But they didn’t go so far as to ask for the text of the letters exchanged between us and America. The same time-serving, circle-jerking slackers who didn’t read the full text of the FTA at the beginning of this year stay true to form right up to the end of the year: “he said” is more important than the text.

Richard Chirgwin

CLUE-FREE REPORTING AT ITS BEST

Government

 22 November 2004 by Richard Chirgwin

Here is a hilarious coincidence.

This morning (Sunday, November 21 at 8.15am), Centrelink’s home page is down.

In the next Mozilla tab, I have a list of headlines detailing the history of Centrelink. Apart from the string of leaks to the computer press designed to get it some favourable press – stories like its commitment to open source software – we also get the darker side. I’ll get to that in a minute.

The third Mozilla tab has the most ludicrously unsceptical report I’ve seen in the IT press this year, from Federal Computer Weekly in America. FCW – the story is at www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/1115/web-aussie-11-16-04.asp – is telling us how wonderful is Centrelink, as demonstrated by an address given by its CIO, Jane Treadwell, to a conference in America.

FCW got the quotes right, and pretty much nothing else.

It described Centrelink as an e-government project, rather than a government agency which has an e-government project (in the usual self-congratulatory terms, Centrelink ‘serves Australians on the ground and online’). It’s described as having ‘customers’ when in fact it’s mostly in charge of delivering various kinds of welfare (hint: you don’t buy welfare; calling the unemployed ‘customers of Centrelink’ is double-speak). And its main role, in the blinkered faraway world of the US press, is … well, I’ll let the words of FCW speak for themselves: ‘One of Centrelink’s top services provides Australians the ability to change their addresses’.

But what’s stunning is the gap between the glowing media it gets as a conference presenter, and the kinds of headlines I find in Australia. Headlines like ‘ Planning flaws put Centrelink system at risk’ (AFR, October 27 2003), ‘ Glitch causes Centrelink scar e Millions of mistakes by Centrelink’ (The Australian, February 14, 2004), ‘ Office porn purge at Centrelink’ (Herald Sun, January 21, 2004), ‘ Computers block fix on errors’ (The Australian, February 16, 2004), ‘ Centrelink’s $5.3m website’ (The Australian, March 16, 2004), ‘IT failures that hit the public purse’ (AFR, April 20, 2004), ‘ Centrelink changes may cut back technical help’ (AFR, April 28, 2004), ‘ Centrelink web lost in the past’ (The Australian, July 23, 2004), ‘Glitch hits agency’s debt recovery’ (The Australian, August 3, 2004), and ‘ Privacy concern at data sharing’ (The Australian, August 27, 2004) .

And, proving that Americans haven’t stopped patronising this country, some dude from Washington seriously and with a straight face told FCW that Australia would have gone broke without Centrelink.

Centrelink’s $5.3 million Website returned to life some time this afternoon.