Category Archives: Ministry of Innovation

Ministry of Innovation, torquing group, zano

Most-funded European Kickstarter project ever still hasn’t shipped yet

Torquing Group, the British drone startup that raked in £2.3 million ($3.4 million) in under two months earlier this year, becoming the most crowdfunded European project ever, has been beset by further inexplicable delays.

On Monday, CEO Ivan Reedman told Ars that the company would begin shipping to its United Kingdom-based backers, however as of Friday, none have actually been sent out.

The handheld drone was originally scheduled to ship in June 2015, a deadline that the company obviously missed. When Ars visited Torquing Group’s offices in Pembroke Dock, Wales in April 2015, Reedman said that the Zano, its handheld drone, would be shipping in early July.

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AT&T, Comcast, Ministry of Innovation, verizon, video, Watchable, Xfinity, YouTube

Comcast will launch short-form video platform in coming weeks

Comcast has long been rumored to be developing a short-form video platform, but now it appears the platform has a name and a time frame. Apparently, the platform could be called “Watchable”—although the name is not set in stone yet—and it will be launching in the next few weeks.

Business Insider reports that Comcast’s platform will host videos produced by Vox and Buzzfeed, which are backed by Comcast, in addition to videos made by “lifestyle and comedy sites like AwesomenessTV, Refinery29, and The Onion, news sites like Mic and Vice, as well as legacy brands like NBC Sports.” The video producers have agreed to let Watchable stream any unlicensed, original videos, which will be curated for Comcast customers that have an Xfinity X1 set top box, so the Web videos would appear alongside more traditional TV.

Video producers might be interested in distributing to Comcast’s new platform because of its advertising muscle. A source speaking to Business Insider said that the company wouldn’t pay its short-form video producers any licensing fees, but they would a portion of any advertising revenue. Also, the deals will be non-exclusive, so producers will be able to post the video in multiple places.

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Etsy, irish, Law & Disorder, Ministry of Innovation, overseas, tax

Despite transparency claims, Etsy ups secrecy and shifts profits overseas

Turns out that messing around with legal (but questionable) Irish tax laws isn’t just for the big corporate types anymore: it even applies to hand-crafted, crunchy-granola online retailers like Etsy.

In a little-noticed change to the company’s Terms of Use that took effect last month, the online craft retailer has now restructured itself such that it now has an Irish subsidiary, Etsy Ireland, an unlimited liability corporation. The move allows Etsy to now take advantage of a tool that has become all-too-common among major tech companies, including Apple, Google, IBM, and others, as a way to both conceal financial disclosures and drastically reduce global tax obligations. (Bloomberg was the first to report on this change.)

Etsy’s move is particularly eyebrow-raising given that it has a “B Lab certification,” under which it agrees to use business “as a force for good,” and “be the change we seek in the world.” That designation means while Etsy remains a for-profit company as organized under Delaware state law, it is supposed to adhere to certain self-imposed ethical principles.

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diversity, Intel, McAfee, Ministry of Innovation

Intel, Apple report “doubled” diversity hiring in 2015

In January, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich addressed the well-publicized issue of hiring diversity within major tech companies by saying that his company would broaden its hiring practices. His announcement largely hinged on a campaign to invest $300 million over the next five years to broaden the applicant pool—particularly by donating at the university level, where the money would go toward teaching and empowering a new generation of minority engineers and tech workers.

A “diversity in technology fund” may very well pay off in future years, but it can only go so far in changing short-term hiring numbers—which makes this week’s diversity reports from both Intel and Apple all the more interesting. According to Intel’s lengthy report, based on first-half 2015 stats, Intel is “tracking” to having 43.3 percent of its 2015 hires comprising women and “underrepresented minorities,” meaning African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

In a USA Today interview, Krzanich confirmed an additional detail not included in the company’s own diversity report—namely, that such hiring numbers double Intel’s underrepresented hiring from 2014, which amounted to roughly 20 percent of its hires last year. That news was followed by Apple’s 2015 diversity report, which claimed that so far this year, Apple had hired “more than double” the number of women, Hispanics, and African Americans hired last year.

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Comcast, data caps, Ministry of Innovation

Comcast VP: 300GB data cap is “business policy,” not technical necessity

Why does Comcast Internet service have a 300GB monthly data cap?

When asked that question today, Comcast’s vice president of Internet services, Jason Livingood, said that he doesn’t know, because setting the monthly data limit is a business decision, not one driven by technical necessity.

“Cable Cares,” a parody account on Twitter, asked Livingood, “Serious question, why are Comcast’s caps set so low compared to the speeds they’re being sold at? 100mbps can hit 300GB in 6hr~.”

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Ministry of Innovation, Risk Assessment

Report claims Kaspersky faked malware to trip up competitors’ products

Two former employees of Kaspersky Lab have accused the malware protection software company of seeding competitors’ products with fake malware signatures intended to make them erroneously label benign files on customers’ computers as malicious. The allegations, made in a report published by Reuters Friday morning, have been strongly denied by a Kaspersky Lab spokesperson.

According to Reuters, the “junk” files were tailored to have the same signature as legitimate files, based on the fingerprinting mechanisms of competitors’ products. To do this, the two former employees alleged, Kaspersky assigned employees to reverse-engineer competitors’ products to see how they identified malware and then tailored samples that would match the signatures of common, harmless files.

The report does not include many specifics about the alleged faked signatures, such as which files were targeted for identification as false positives.

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chip cards, credit card fraud, EMV, fraud, Ministry of Innovation, Square, Twitter

Square will absorb its customers’ liability for fraud during EMV shift

On October 1, 2015, US commerce will undergo a considerable change—a variety of big credit card companies, financial groups, and issuers will require that merchants upgrade their point-of-sale (POS) terminals to accept chip-based cards as well as (and eventually, instead of) magnetic stripe cards. You may have already received chip-based replacements for your magnetic stripe cards in the mail.

The plan to transition to the new payment standard—called EMV for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, (the developers of the standard)—was agreed upon in 2012, but a MasterCard press release circulated today cited a survey that said that 28 percent of small and medium business owners still aren’t aware of the new payment standard. That’s particularly troubling, because in the event of magnetic stripe card fraud at a store’s POS, the store will be liable for that faulty transaction if they don’t have up-to-date hardware that can accept chip cards. (Website-based transactions, commonly considered “card-not-present transactions,” are not part of the EMV transition and are treated separately.)

Today, payments processing company Square, founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, said it wants to try to speed that adoption rate up in the next month or two, and hopefully convert some businesses to Square’s platform.

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Ministry of Innovation

Facebook user gets away with nearly a full day of trolling Target commenters

Mike Melgaard

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While Facebook facilitates plenty of interaction between big companies and their customers, its interface doesn’t scale incredibly well once company-page comments creep into the hundreds (or more) per day. In particular, “comments by users” on a company page are relegated to a sidebar that is pretty hard to parse. On Sunday, one intrepid Facebook user took advantage of that to sneak onto a company page and mess with commenters before the company could get wise to it—and lucky for us, he screencapped the whole thing.

This week’s case came from American retailer Target, whose Facebook feed began to blow up with unhappy comments over the weekend after the company announced plans to remove gender-specific signs in departments such as Toys and Entertainment. The retailer didn’t get around to individually responding to commenters, but that didn’t stop a user from creating a new account on Sunday, giving it a Target-styled bullseye icon and pretending to be an official company spokesperson.

That user, Scottsdale, Arizona, resident Mike Melgaard, went on to respond to at least 52 negative comments left on Target’s official Facebook page with an account named “Ask ForHelp,” but rarely were his responses helpful. Melgaard heaped on sarcastic smiley faces, grammatical criticisms, and jokes about doing away with all gender-specific labels at the store (including bathrooms and changing rooms). It’s hard to pick a favorite among the jokes—we’ve posted a few of its safe-for-work screencaps above—but our favorite might be when he got into a multiple-comment conversation with one complainer, which he ended with a phony exclamation that it was his “first day, and this is just really frustrating dealing with all of this!”

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Ministry of Innovation, Technology Lab, throttling, unlimited data, verizon wireless

Verizon stopped throttling 3G data when net neutrality rules took effect

A year ago, Verizon Wireless announced that it would begin throttling 4G LTE service for users on unlimited data plans, using the same policy it already applied to its slower 3G network. Verizon caved after criticism from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, so the 4G throttling never went into effect. However, Verizon kept right on throttling its 3G customers.

That finally changed two months ago, though we didn’t notice it at the time.”Beginning in 2011, to optimize our network, we managed data connection speeds for a small subset of customers—those who are in the top five percent of data users and have 3G devices on unlimited data plans—and only in places and at times when the network was experiencing high demand. We discontinued this practice in June 2015,” Verizon now says on its website. A reader pointed out the updated language to us yesterday, and RCRWireless News reported the change today.

The change in June occurred in the same month that the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules against throttling took effect. Though carriers could argue that some throttling is allowable under an exception for “reasonable network management,” Sprint stopped throttling its heaviest users just in case.

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