The unbearable slowness of Samsung’s updates

Samsung controls the fate of updates for millions of Android users around the world. So why is it still so slow?

Every year around this time, as I prepare for another onslaught of Samsung leaks, rumors, and eventual reveals and reviews, I try to take a look back at the company’s update track record — and I’m always disappointed.

Just this week, Samsung announced that its extended and relatively exclusive Oreo beta is ending, which means that an update to Android 8.0 is imminent for devices like the Galaxy S8, S8+, and Note 8. Great. But I’ve been using Oreo since August on devices like the original Pixel, and a good chunk of the phones on my office desk, including some that shipped with the latest version, have been enjoying Oreo since well before Thanksgiving.

Year after year, the world’s biggest phone manufacturer fails to deliver on its promise for timely software updates, and in doing so significantly depresses the overall tally in the process. Google can push updates to its Nexus and Pixel lineup as quickly as it wants (and it does), and companies like Sony, HTC, OnePlus and others can help make a dent, but it’s not until Samsung begins its lumbering annual rollout that the tectonic shift begins anew. With Oreo still on under 1% of devices, that massive endeavor can’t come quickly enough.

It’s not like Samsung is new to this game. Articles like this have been proffered since at least 2012, and the company has indeed improved the quality of its software output, but the stakes are just so much higher these days. But Samsung increasingly owns the Android market, and its dominance puts the Android team at Google — separate from the Pixel hardware team — in a tenuous position. As we’ve seen from previews of Android 8.0 Oreo on the Galaxy S8, through the beta program, this particular update isn’t nearly as significant an aesthetic or feature overhaul as last year’s jump to Nougat was, and yet we’re coming up on a year since Samsung began rolling that out. It didn’t hit carriers in the U.S. until late February.

What’s your biggest annoyance with Android right now?

— Android Central (@androidcentral) January 19, 2018

Earlier this month, we asked people what their biggest frustrations are with Android right now. The number one response by a wide margin? Lack of updates.

With the Galaxy S9 being announced on February 25th, and an expected release date just three weeks later, on March 16th, it’s clear that Samsung is using the availability of the latest version of Android as a selling feature. Forget the Galaxy S8 for a moment — most people updating to the S9 will be coming from an S6 or S7, which, in the case of the S6 series, won’t receive Oreo at all, or receive it later this year, as promised to the S7 line. A jump to Android 8.0 out of the box, with all its performance improvements and additional features, is leverage that Samsung hopes to use to sell a few more phones.

Whenever I take this indignant stance towards Samsung’s languid approach to software updates, I risk not taking the other side into account: with great power comes great responsibility. Given that Samsung has the world’s largest fleet of phones waiting for updates, it must ensure that the experience is largely bug-free, with UI elements and software features adapted to its numerous regional partners. I don’t envy the teams in charge of such quality assurance.

No Android manufacturer is good at updates, but Samsung’s prolonged cycles impact the most people at once.

At the same time, Google released the first Android O developer preview on March 21 last year. Oreo was first publicly available on August 21, and the Sony Xperia XZ1, the first phone to arrive with Oreo out of the box, came a month later.

With the Galaxy S9 series inevitably shipping with Oreo out of the box, it’s possible Samsung will support Treble, a system that could potentially speed up software updates in years to come. According to Google, “Project Treble will make it easier, faster and less costly for device maker partners when these devices are updated in the future.”

But that, nor any other Google tool or incentivization, will provide solace to millions of Android users, whether they know it or not, waiting for the latest version. It’s not just about new features, either: every update helps developers improve their apps, and makes it easier for IT managers to troubleshoot problems. It’s a virtuous cycle that Samsung can perpetuate, but like in years past, customers continue to be placed second.

Here’s what else is on my mind this week.

• We took a few weeks off from the podcast over new years, but we’ve released three in the past two weeks and they’re very good. The gaming-focused one, in particular, is a lot of fun if you haven’t listened to it already.
• That Samsung is focusing on camera improvements for the Galaxy S9 is understandable. What’s struck me after picking up the Note 8 again in recent days is just how far it needs to come to compete with the Pixel 2 on imaging.
• Andrew is right on the money here. Android, as occasionally frustrating as it is for new and veteran users alike, no longer needs to be rooted (it arguably never did) to save it from its poor decisions. I haven’t rooted a phone in nearly five years.
• Jerry wrote some smart things about limits on government surveillance, especially in light of the extension to Section 702 of FISA. Worth the read.
• Three weeks ago, I wrote about smartphone addiction. Three weeks ago, I decided to make a concerted effort to use my phone less. I’ve deleted Twitter from my smartphones (limiting use to my laptop) which has helped, but the next step is to set timers for the amount of time I spend on the phone in general. Small but important steps to taking back control of my digital life.
• Peace.

-Daniel

Trump team considers a government-run 5G network

How would you protect the US against Chinese cyberattacks? Would you push for stricter security standards, or new encryption technology? The Trump administration’s national security team has another idea: a government-controlled 5G network. Axios has obtained documents showing that the team is pushing for a centralized, secure 5G network within 3 years. This would create a secure communications avenue for self-driving cars, AI, VR and other budding technologies. Just how it would be built is another story, however.

The officials are currently split between either having the government build the network itself or let telecoms build it as part of a consortium. The document claims it would be the modern equivalent to Eisenhower’s National Highway System and create a “new paradigm” for the wireless industry by the end of Trump’s term. At the same time, it notes that the private consortium would cause “less commercial disruption.” The private option might take longer and cost more, however.

This is far from guaranteed to happen. Reuters has learned that the proposal is circulating at a “low level” of the administration, and might take 6 to 8 months before Trump would have to consider it.

A government wireless network would be unprecedented in the US, and would stand at odds with an administration that has been adamant about deregulation and privatization. There’s also the question of whether or not it would really be faster when first 5G mobile networks should go live in the US as soon as this year, with national coverage by 2020. We’d add that a lot of the security depends on the network equipment, not who’s running it. Still, this hasn’t been tried before in the US — it’s difficult to know how well the feds would handle a 5G rollout.

Source: Axios, Reuters

Intel told Chinese firms of Meltdown flaws before the US government

Intel may have been working with many tech industry players to address the Meltdown and Spectre flaws, but who it contacted and when might have been problematic. Wall Street Journal sources have claimed that Intel initially told a handful of customers about the processor vulnerabilities, including Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Lenovo, but not the US government. While the chip giant does have to talk to those companies to coordinate fixes, the Chinese government routinely monitors conversations like this — it could have theoretically exploited the holes to intercept data before patches were available.

An Intel spokesman wouldn’t detail who the company had informed, but said that the company couldn’t notify everyone (including US officials) in time because Meltdown and Spectre had been revealed early. Lenovo said the information was protected by a non-disclosure agreement. Alibaba has suggested that any accusasions of sharing info with the Chinese government was “speculative and baseless,” but this doesn’t rule out officials intercepting details without Alibaba’s knowledge.

There’s no immediate evidence to suggest that China has taken advantage of the flaws, but that’s not the point — it’s that the US government could have helped coordinate disclosures to ensure that enough companies had fixes in place. Big names like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft were ready relatively quickly, but most everyone else was left racing to fix or mitigate the flaws. That could have led to attacks on vendors that weren’t in the early list, but were still running critical systems.

Intel is between a rock and a hard place in situations like this. There’s no question that it has to notify partners, but it also has to limit those notifications to minimize leaks before patches are ready. The issue, as you might guess, is that the company didn’t appear to have accounted for the cyberwarfare implications of who it notified first.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Elton John announces his retirement tour with an amazing kaleidoscopic VR video

Rock legend Elton John announced his final concert tour in spectacular fashion with a virtual reality showcase revealing the upcoming “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour, a three-year 300-date whirlwind leading up to his retirement.

Ad Week has the details on the event held at Gotham Hall in New York City, where more than 100 journalists decked out with Samsung Gear headsets joined a worldwide streaming audience to embark on a VR journey through his decades-long career. The event ended with a short live performance by Elton John.

You can watch the six-minute VR video here via YouTube. It can be viewed in Google Cardboard or Google Daydream, as well as in regular 2D video. You can also watch a full 34-minute stream featuring live performances and interviews in VR here.

The video features John’s first U.S. show from 1970 at the Troubadour in New York, as well as his legendary Dodgers Stadium concert from 1975. There were no VR cameras around to capture those events, of course, so John turned to the special effects wizards at Spinifex to recreate it.

Using a combination of motion capture and CGI, Spinifex recreated John’s entire career, using a body double for his younger self. “It was one of the most amazing parts of the process, because we’d done the green screen shoot, and we shot the Troubadour on August 25th last year, and his opening show was just two blocks down the road,” said Spinifex CEO Ben Casey. “47 years ago to the day when we shot.”

The team authentically recreated all of the iconic singer’s outfits and the evolution of his distinctive eyewear through the ages, down to the last sequin. John himself even donned a motion-capture rig to play 10 songs on the piano.

“This isn’t just tech for tech’s sake, the digital assets we are capturing and creating will extend Elton’s magic for generations to come,” said Casey. “Great songs endure the test of time and we believe bringing them to life in this way will enable people 50 years from now to discover and experience the full impact of Elton’s music.”

Casey’s team made their pitch to John at an Oscar party in Los Angeles. Memorializing his career in VR certainly wasn’t John’s idea, but he’s amazed with the result. “I’m a Luddite,” he said in a CNN interview after the New York presentation. “I’ve never downloaded anything in my life. Even porn.”

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Win a Mercedes-AMG C 43 Coupe on Super Bowl Sunday with your finger and a phone

Do you remember those contests where people place their hands on a car and after some time, the last one remaining won the car? It’s a test of endurance above all else, and Mercedes-Benz is putting a modern spin on the challenge. Starting at 6:30 p.m. ET on Super Bowl Sunday (February 4), U.S. residents 18 and over can compete in a contest to win a 2018 Mercedes-AMG C 43 Coupe. The key feature to “Last Fan Standing” is that you can participate from anywhere.

“The country will be obsessed with one game,” the announcement video states, clearly not in reference to the Super Bowl. And to hammer the point home, the Mercedes game begins at the same time as the big game. So you’re going to have to take your eyes off the big screen and focus on the little screen in your hand.

Registration starts on Sunday, February 4 at 12:01 a.m. ET and ends at 6:25 p.m. (5 minutes before the game starts), and the game will run until there’s one contestant left. In the case of a “deadlock,” where the game runs too long and it appears that nobody will win in a reasonably amount of time, the sponsor will select a winner at random from those remaining. The game must run for a minimum of 20 minutes.

To enter, your smartphone needs a internet connection and, and you can register at LastFanStanding.mbusa.com. You can also register through Facebook. Once you’re signed up, you can play a demo to practice. You can share a Twitter post inviting others to participate in the game. If you do so, you earn one timeout break of up to five minutes.

During the game, you must keep your finger on the vehicle at all times. It won’t be standing still, however — you think they’d make it easy to win a car with a $63,140 MSRP? The luxury coupe will be moving around the screen, and there will be other distractions as well. As the game goes on, the difficulty ramps up.

If you lose power, you’re out. If your phone drops the signal, you’re out. So make sure you’re plugged in and connected to a reliable network.

We drove a 2017 C 43 Coupe and found it to be a nice upscale entry in the C-Class. Its 3.0-liter, twin-turbocharged V6 churns out 362 horsepower and 384 pound-feet of torque. This power, combined with comfortable and supportive seats, make the C 43 a solid and enjoyable grand tourer.

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Facebook is coming closer to humanizing its chatbots

Over the past several years, Facebook has devoted a considerable amount of its resources towards developing chatbots. It has made several advancements in this area, but is now focusing its efforts on improving conversational abilities.

Despite their label, chatbots aren’t very good at making small talk. In a recent report, Facebook’s researchers pointed to several key areas in which they need improvement. The first problem is that these A.I.s do not have any consistent personality. They don’t stick to the same set of facts about themselves throughout a conversation, which can make the experience feel unnatural.

Perhaps more frustrating is the fact that the A.I. can’t remember its own past responses or those of the person it is talking to, resulting in conversations that can easily go off the rails. Finally, when asked a question they don’t have an answer to, these bots will often make use of canned pre-programmed responses.

Many modern chatbots are trained with lines taking from movies. This, predictably, has some issues since even the best-written scripts are not natural conversations. Everything is written with the intent of informing the viewer about the film’s characters, world, or narrative. This can often result in strange or nonsensical responses.

In order to help remedy this problem, Facebook engineers have constructed their own datasets to help train the A.I. These datasets are taken from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace and consist of more than 160,000 lines of dialogue.

The interesting thing about this data is that it isn’t entirely random. The Verge reports that in an effort to create consistent personalities for their chatbots, Amazon’s team was instructed to create a short biography for their chatbots. For example, one of the chatbots is based on the following statements: “I am an artist. I have four children. I recently got a cat. I enjoy walking for exercise. I love watching Game of Thrones.”

It’s hardly an award-winning novel, but it does serve to provide a bit of structure and consistency to the chatbots’ conversations, though it does have some downsides. While these bots did score well on fluency and maintain a consistent personality, users found them less interesting than A.I. based on movie scripts.

For now, these chatbots have a long way to go before they can truly imitate human speech, but they are improving.

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‘Monster Hunter: World’ welcomes veteran street fighters Ryu and Sakura

Capcom is no stranger to bonus characters, and the epic action-RPG Monster Hunter: World is no exception. Just days after its console release, the Capcom blog announced that Street Fighter favorites Ryu and Sakura would soon be joining the action.

Each character comes with new armor sets, which can’t be mixed with other armor pieces. The full sets can be equipped by either male or female characters, however, and their voices can be changed to match the individual Street Fighter.

The armor sets must be unlocked by completing special quests. For PlayStation 4 owners who have a Street Fighter V save file on their console, a special quest will appear shortly, called “Down the Dark Muddy Path.” Completing the quest will reward you with some tickets that the smithy will exchange for the new armor.

Monster hunters on Xbox One and PS4 without the necessary save file will have a bit longer to wait. A new Event Quest will premiere sometime soon, opening up the opportunity for everyone to acquire the bonus items.

Some special chat stamps and iconic gestures (Hadouken and Shoryuken) are also on the way. These items will soon be available in the Xbox Marketplace and PlayStation Store:

• Guild Card: Bonus Stage (Free)
• Achievements: Rival, Destined, Living Legend and Bandana Girl (Free)
• Pose: Shoryuken & Hadoken (Free)
• Gesture: Street Fighter V Hadoken ($4)
• Gesture: Street Fighter V Shoryuken ($4)
• Stamp Set: Street Fighter V Set ($2)

This won’t be the end of crossover characters either, as Capcom previously announced that Mega Man will be joining the game as a Palico, a sidekick companion to help complete quests. The Blue Bomber will come equipped with his own set of weapons accompanied by a classic Mega Man soundtrack.

In our review, we found Monster Hunter: World to be an epic update of the cult classic franchise that’s surprisingly accessible to newcomers. We’ve also got a monster-hunting beginner’s guide to help you get started and provide some help with those elder dragon and wyvern battles.

Monster Hunter: World is presently only available on consoles, although a PC version (a first for the series) is currently being optimized and is planned for a fall 2018 release.

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• ‘Monster Hunter: World’ costumes will be up for grabs in ‘Street Fighter V’
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Strava’s fitness tracking map reveals sensitive information about U.S. troops and foreign bases

The company’s Global Heat Map called a ‘clear security threat’ for inadvertently showing troop activities overseas.

The Pentagon has been interested in fitness trackers since it distributed Fitbits to U.S. troops in 2013. Unfortunately, now they will have a different concern as online fitness tracking has created a global map filled with potentially damaging and sensitive information about U.S. installations abroad. What started as a tool to help users get fit and stay fit has become a matter of national security.

At least that’s what international security analyst and expert Tobias Schneider thinks. The Washington Post reports that Strava’s Global Heatmap, an aggregate worldwide map of where and how we use our fitness trackers, includes information from U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East in sensitive installations.

The Global Heatmap was published in 2017, but the security oversight was only recently noticed. Now that it’s come to light (pardon the pun) people are zooming in to see if they can pinpoint places the Pentagon freely admits exist, but aren’t anything it likes to publicize. Especially when it comes to the exact location.

Many people wear their fitness trackers all day long to measure their total step counts, and soldiers appear to be no exception, meaning the maps reveal far more than just their exercise habits.

Lines of activity extending out of bases and back may indicate patrol routes. The map of Afghanistan appears as a spider web of lines connecting bases, showing supply routes, as does northeast Syria, where the United States maintains a network of mostly unpublicized bases. Concentrations of light inside a base may indicate where troops live, eat or work, suggesting possible targets for enemies.

Strava, a popular app for runners and cyclers alike, is available for many fitness devices, including Fitbit, Android Wear, and Samsung’s Galaxy Gear. The 2017 map doesn’t show any live data, but the information available provides what would normally be classified data for anyone too see. Including the site of a U.S. base that is yet to be announced.

At a site in northern Syria near a dam, where analysts have suspected the U.S. military is building a base, the map shows a small blob of activity accompanied by an intense line along the nearby dam, suggesting that the personnel at the site jog regularly along the dam

Not only U.S. sites have been exposed through the map, as suspected Russian and Syrian bases are visible, too. Interestingly enough, no Iranian bases are seen. Security experts say this suggests they “either don’t use fitness trackers or prudently turn them off.” This is an important minor detail — users are told about how their activity is tracked and given an easy option to shut down any sending of fitness data. Enough users to give a clear picture of sites the Pentagon would rather not be publicized aren’t doing it. I imagine that has come to a sudden halt.

Read the fine print on every app you download and install, folks.

Strava fitness tracking data reveals details of secret bases

Location data in fitness apps is frequently a good thing, since it helps you remember and optimize your routes. However, it’s also producing an unexpected security risk: it’s revealing details of secret military bases. UCA analyst Nathan Ruser has discovered that Strava’s publicly available activity map includes the fitness routes of soldiers and agents in sensitive locations, including American bases in Afghanistan and Syria, the UK’s Mount Pleasant airbase in the Falkland Islands, a suspected CIA base in Somalia and even Area 51. It’s mostly American and British troops who show up, but Russian bases have also been outlined by the Strava data.

While many of these locations are well known, they may give away info that governments might not want public, such as the likely location of living quarters and the most frequently-trafficked paths. In Afghanistan, the activity data extends beyond bases and hint at patrol or supply routes.

Strava has reminded users that they could turn off location sharing, and that the map doesn’t include private activities or areas deemed private. Many people aren’t aware of what the app shares, however, and might not understand the implications of publicly sharing that data from sensitive locations. And of course, not every fitness-minded app has a public activity map that makes searches easy. It’s doubtful that Strava could have considered every possible effect in advance, but this is a reminder that open data can sometimes include more than some would be comfortable with. Likewise, this might prompt militaries to limit smartphone use or educate soldiers on the importance of privacy.

Source: Guardian, Washington Post

Facebook tries giving chatbots a consistent personality

Dig into the personalities of chat bots and you’ll find that they’re about as shallow as they were in the days of Eliza or Dr. Sbaitso. They respond with canned phrases and tend to be blithely unaware of what you’ve said. Facebook wants to fix that. Its research team has tested a new approach that gives bots more consistent personalities and more natural responses. Facebook taught its AI to look for patterns in a special 164,000-utterance data set, Persona-Chat, that included a handful of facts about a given bot’s persona. An AI trying to mimic a real person would have five biographical statements to work with, such as its family and hobbies, with each of them revised to say the same things in a different way. Train existing chat bots from that and you get AI that ‘knows’ what it likes, but still maintains the context of a conversation and speaks relatively fluently.

The emphasis, of course, is on “relatively.” Sample conversations from Facebook’s study showed that the bots were much more consistent and fluent than bots trained on movie phrases, but they definitely wouldn’t pass a Turing test. Testers added that the bots weren’t as engaging, although The Verge speculates that this may have stemmed from the limited number of factoids. Real people often have much more than five things to say about themselves, so the well of conversation may have run dry much earlier with the bots than it does with humans.

This is a research project, so it’s not certain if or when the lessons learned here will apply to real-world chatbots or other conversational AI systems. However, it’s hard to imagine Facebook ignoring what it learned here. Many AI helpers, whether they’re bots or voice assistants, tend to have either no personality at all or one defined only by cute stock phrases. This would at least flesh them out and give them more to talk about than the weather or your latest purchase.

Via: The Verge

Source: ArXiv.org (PDF)