The government has signalled it is set to take a tougher line against Chinese telecoms equipment-maker Huawei.
A review is under way into how forthcoming US sanctions would affect the UK's continued use of its products.
"Given that these sanctions... are extensive, it is likely to have an impact on the viability of Huawei as a provider for the 5G network," said Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden.
He added he wanted Samsung and NEC to become 5G network kit providers.
They would help make the UK's mobile networks become less dependent on the other two suppliers: Ericsson and Nokia. Mr Dowden said the current situation represented a "market failure".
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace added that the sanctions - which are set to come into effect in September - had specifically been designed to force the UK into a rethink.
"It is a better set of sanctions than the earlier set, and it's specifically clearly designed in a smarter way to put countries that have high-risk vendors - specifically Huawei - under greater pressure."
The sanctions forbid Huawei and the third parties that manufacture its chips from using "US technology and software to design and manufacture" its products.
The US cites national security concerns as the cause for its intervention. American politicians have suggested that Beijing might exploit Huawei to spy on or even sabotage communications.
And this Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission also designated Huawei a national security risk, blocking local telecom companies from drawing on the agency's funds to buy the Chinese firm's equipment.
Huawei denies claims that it would help the Chinese government compromise its clients or otherwise deliberately harm them.
"We are investing billions to make the Prime Minister's vision of a 'connected Kingdom' a reality so that British families and businesses have access to fast, reliable mobile and broadband networks wherever they live," said the firm's UK chief Victor Zhang following the hearing.
"We have been in the UK for 20 years and remain focused on working with our customers and the government."
Feeling 'cagey'
The two cabinet ministers were giving testimony to the House of Commons Defence sub-committee.
Mr Dowden noted that it was already the government's ambition to remove Huawei from the UK network "over time".
However, under plans announced in January, current plans are limited to excluding the company from the most sensitive parts of the network - the so-called core - and capping Huawei's market share of base stations and other equipment at the "edge" to 35% by 2023.
Image copyrightParliament TVImage captionIt is unusual for two cabinet ministers to give evidence at the same committee hearing
Mr Dowden said this might now change.
"We won't hesitate in taking decisions that will impose additional costs on mobile network operators, the primary consideration is national security," he said.
But he added he was "a little cagey" about providing further detail as final "decisions haven't been made" and "any changes in policy would be exceedingly market sensitive".
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is still studying what impact excluding Huawei altogether or other new restrictions might have.
Backbench threat
The DCMS has also asked GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre to advise it on the security implications of the US sanctions.
NCSC has previously raised concerns about the "shoddy quality" of Huawei's hardware and the potential for vulnerabilities this creates. But it currently manages the risk by carrying out checks on the products.
One concern is that if Huawei were forced to start relying on components sourced from other vendors, NCSC would not longer believe the risks involved to be manageable.
NCSC's chief Ciaran Martin told MPs that "the bulk of the analysis" was now done, but that further discussions with DCMS were required before a recommendation could be made to the prime minister.
Committee member Labour MP Kevan Jones raised concerns that the government was being "bullied into doing what the Americans want".
But Mr Wallace responded: "The Americans can do what they like with their own IP [intellectual property]... it's not an attack on us, it's just a fact that if Huawei doesn't work any more because it can't use a certain type of chip or whatever... we'd have to get something else."
Conservative MP Mark Francois also noted that the government faces a backbench revolt over its Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill if it does not commit to a ban.
"The bill is already as dead as a dodo unless it effectively excludes Huawei," the MP said.
"Wouldn't it just save everybody a lot of time if you came to the House tomorrow and put your hand up?"
Mr Dowden responded that he was "mindful" of the threatened rebellion but added: "You just have to wait and see," as to what the government's decision would be.
Ministers made clear the ambition is to not have any "high-risk vendors" like Huawei in the UK's 5G network.
But the crucial question is whether we are about to see a firm commitment to achieve that "ambition" and within a specific time frame.
The review of the impact of US sanctions looks set to take the UK in that direction.
While there may be technical reasons for the shift, it would also prove politically convenient amid continued pressure from Washington and backbench Conservatives, as well as deteriorating relations with China.
But it still remains to be seen exactly how far and fast the government will move.
June 30, 2020 at 11:41PM
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Huawei: Ministers signal switch in policy over 5G policy - BBC News
In a rare twist to Washington's long-standing restrictions on the Chinese tech giant Huawei, the Commerce Department recently reversed its ban preventing U.S. firms from working with Huawei on developing new technical standards.
The move was seen by many in China as an admission by President Donald Trump’s administration that it cannot ignore Huawei’s influential role in developing the technical standards critical for future technologies.
“America finally bowed its head" read a headline by Chinese network Phoenix TV.
The new rule, announced by the Commerce Department on June 15, amends the Huawei “entity listing,” to allow American companies to collaborate with Huawei on setting standards that will determine the technical rules of the road for 5G and other emerging technologies.
“This action is meant to ensure Huawei’s placement on the entity list in May 2019 does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei’s pervasive participation in standards-development organizations,” the department said.
The situation with Huawei is no accident. For years, Beijing has focused on joining international standard-setting bodies, such as 3GPP and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which are little-known among the public, but make some of the most consequential decisions in modern telecommunications.
3GPP and the future of your smartphone
Nestled in a quiet industrial park in southern France, a technology consortium with esoteric name, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, or 3GPP, sets the technical standards behind the world’s communication platforms, the fundamental building blocks for product development. As the primary global standard setting organization for the last 20 years, 3GPP helped create technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth as well as today’s 5G high-speed networks.
“Standards are not very sexy but extremely important,” Andrew Polk, partner at Beijing-based research and consultancy firm Trivium China, told VOA. “And it takes sustained long-term effort and attention. While western companies try to set standards, China has a long-term coordinated game plan to influence standards," he said.
FILE - A staff member holds a Huawei 'Mate20 X 5G' smartphone at the IFA 2019 tech fair in Berlin, Germany, Sept. 5, 2019.
China’s leaders have long seen technology as a key to the country’s economic and military might, and have financially backed companies such as Huawei to become powerful global competitors that will help the country’s political and military goals. Critics say Beijing takes the same approach to setting technical standards.
"Beijing views standards as foundational to its goals to reshaping global governance and expand geostrategic power," said Dr. J. Ray Bowen, analyst of Pointe Bello, a Washington, D.C.-based strategic intelligence firm.
Even though U.S. companies remain world leaders in most areas of technology, observers such as Dustin Daugherty, head of North America Business Development at Dezan Shira & Associates, a pan-Asia business consulting firm, say China’s strategy means “in the future the U.S. could fall behind a coordinated government effort in standard setting (such as from China).”
China’s long-term plan
As of May, Chinese firms and government research institutes have accounted for the largest number of chairs or vice chairs in 3GPP, holding 16 of the 45 available leadership positions, according to VOA's count based on the data release by 3GPP. By comparison, U.S. companies hold nine such leadership positions.
That’s up from a year ago, when 3GPP sent VOA a file showing that representatives from Chinese and U.S. companies each held 12 chair and vice chair positions.
While the 3GPP is the primary global group setting 5G standards, another major global organization, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), is now led by a formal Chinese government official Zhao Houlin.
Zhao, who began his career in China’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, was first elected as the secretary-general of ITU in 2014. He was reinstated in November 2018 for another four-year term.
Established in 1865, ITU is one of the oldest international organizations in the world and has historically avoided politics. However, Zhao publicly criticized Washington in its dispute with Huawei, the Chinese communications giant that U.S. officials say has deep links to the military. “I would encourage Huawei to be given equal opportunities to bid for business," Zhao told reporters in Geneva earlier this year. “But if we don’t have anything then to put them on the blacklist – I think this is not fair.”
FILE - Zhao Houlin, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), attends a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, May 28, 2018.
Under Zhao's leadership, another Chinese national, Richard Li, serves as the chairman of a critical group with the ITU called Focus Group Technologies for Network 2030. Li, according to his LinkedIn Page, is still currently employed by Huawei as Chief Scientist and Vice-President of Network Technologies, is in charge of examining the world's emerging technologies and 5G.
Doug Barry, the spokesperson for The US-China Business Council (USCBC), a private organization with the mission of promoting trade between the two countries, said there are companies that are concerned about the abuse of leadership positions by China, but so far he has not heard any examples of this happening in practice.
"Most international standards setting bodies have strong due process which makes it difficult for stakeholders to abuse leadership positions to force proposals through or block proposals," said Barry.
Daugherty said because Chinese companies are among the most important international players in a variety of industries, including telecommunications, their presence in industry groups and standard setting bodies is logical. But he said there is an important difference between them and their counterparts from democratic countries.
"Chinese companies (and by extension possibly their individual representatives on such bodies) may ultimately need to answer to Beijing's priorities for strategically important issues," said Daugherty.
In an interview with VOA, he said the politicization of such international bodies could conceivably lead to a decrease in legitimacy in international standard setting. "The damage could be immense," he said.
Flooded with proposals
Holding leadership positions is one part of Beijing’s strategy. Another part involves massive investments in submitting technical proposals to the international groups.
In a rare disclosure last September, Huawei said for one particular technical area alone, the company submitted 18,000 5G New Radio proposals. "If printed on A4 paper and piled up high, would stand a staggering 10 meters tall," it said proudly on its official twitter account.
FILE - A 5G logo is displayed on a screen outside the showroom at Huawei campus in Shenzhen city, in China's Guangdong province, March 6, 2019.
The U.S.-China Business Council said last February this is an issue of concern. "Some companies and experts complained that Chinese stakeholders submit large numbers of proposals that are low-quality or irrelevant to market needs in some industries, including for products that China does not actually produce."
The report titled "China in International Standards Setting" said this takes valuable time and resources away from considering serious proposals.
China also sends more people to attend international meetings that discuss, vote and make decisions on standards.
According to a report release last November by German intellectual property research firm Iplytics, Huawei dispatched over 3,000 engineers to participate in the 5G standard-setting process. American chipmaker Qualcomm sent 1,701 engineers to attend 3GPP meetings.
Dr. Melanie Hart, director for China Policy Center for American Progress, said the Chinese government is channeling state financial support to help Huawei and other Chinese firms send personnel to attend 3GPP meetings and flood the process with Chinese technical contributions.
"It is difficult for private companies from other nations to match that level of activity because sending engineers overseas to participate in 3GPP meetings and devoting R&D resources to develop 3GPP technical contributions are costly activities," she testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission last March.
July 01, 2020 at 06:03AM
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In Rare Move, US Clears Limited Cooperation Between US Firms, Huawei - VOA Asia
Mounting pressure on Huawei has handed NEC and its new partner NTT a “final chance” to compete in the global race to supply 5G equipment as the Japanese alliance eyes a land grab in the US and UK, according to NEC’s chief executive.
Takashi Niino said Japan Inc has an opportunity to revive its fading presence on the back of a rise in protectionism and Washington’s pressure on countries including Britain to cut Chinese supplier Huawei out of their telecoms networks.
NEC has significant ambitions, aiming to boost its share of the global market for base stations from 0.7 per cent now to 20 per cent by 2030.
Outside of Japan, NEC’s primary target is the US. But the supplier of wireless telecommunication equipment also hopes to regain its footing in the UK, which has placed a 35 per cent cap on the use of Huawei equipment on national security grounds and is reviewing that limit in light of new sanctions.
On Tuesday the US designated Huawei a national security threat, citing its close ties to China’s military and ruling Communist party.
“In the wake of the Huawei issue, governments worldwide are considering what options are out there,” Mr Niino told the Financial Times. “There is a chance for NEC to be part of those options, a possibility that hardly existed in the past.”
Mr Niino said the UK government had recently reached out as part of a strategy to consider alternatives to Huawei equipment as Britain’s four mobile groups roll out 5G networks.
Last week NEC sealed a capital tie-up with Japan’s largest telecoms operator NTT — an unusual move, as carriers rarely invest in equipment suppliers beyond the start-up phase.
Rakuten, Japan’s fourth-largest carrier, in June chose NEC as a partner for its 5G network, providing the supplier a significant contract to prove its mettle.
The partnership with NTT, which paid ¥64.5bn ($598m) for a 4.8 per cent stake, has offered NEC a route back into the market. It was wiped out in the 4G era, when Huawei, Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia grew to dominance, controlling 80 per cent of the global market, according to research group Omdia.
Japanese manufacturers including NEC, Fujitsu and Sony have a long history in telecoms equipment but have struggled to compete against Huawei, which has built a vertically integrated supply chain giving it an edge in pricing and range of goods.
NEC and NTT aim to challenge Huawei’s pricing advantage by promoting an open source network, which would allow providers to supply hardware to carriers that can use standardised software from smaller suppliers.
Rakuten has tested a 5G network using equipment from NEC and Altiostar, for example, while Dish, the US satellite company making a push into mobile, signed a deal this week to use Fujitsu radio units.
Carriers have largely backed the push towards open-source radio equipment, and Mr Niino was confident that the move to an open system would erode the advantage of the largest player in the market over time.
“It is true that Huawei offers pricing that is 20 per cent lower than other manufacturers,” he said, but added: “The cost structure will change and we . . . will need to offer competitive pricing.”
However, Mr Niino acknowledged that the group faces an uphill battle to compete globally: “Whether we can win now that [non-Huawei] options have widened is unknown.”
July 01, 2020 at 11:26AM
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NEC sees Huawei’s woes as chance to crack 5G market - Financial Times
Comcast is scheduled to reinstate its home-Internet data cap tomorrow, July 1, after more than three months in which customers were provided unlimited data to help them through the coronavirus pandemic.
AT&T, by contrast, announced today that it is "continuing to waive home-Internet data overage charges for AT&T Internet customers through September 30." There is a big caveat with AT&T, though: the company's announcement said the extended data-cap waiver does not apply to DSL and fixed wireless. Customers of AT&T fiber and the copper/fiber hybrid service formerly called U-verse will have unlimited data for another three months, but other AT&T home-broadband customers will face data caps and overage fees starting tomorrow.
Comcast and AT&T suspended their data caps and overage fees in mid-March, initially promising two months of unlimited data. The companies later extended that pledge to June 30, but Comcast hasn't granted any further extensions. We contacted Comcast yesterday but didn't receive answers to questions about its data cap, and Comcast's website still says the data-cap waiver only goes through June 30. While Comcast didn't answer the data-cap questions, a spokesperson pointed out that the cable company extended other pandemic offers for college students and people with low incomes beyond June 30, and it is keeping its Wi-Fi hotspots open to the public for free for the rest of 2020.
Many US states are taking steps toward reopening their economies, which might reduce the usage of home-broadband networks. But the pandemic is far from over, as the CDC reported over 40,000 new daily cases in the United States each day from June 25 to June 28, including the highest-ever daily count of 44,703 on June 27.
The Federal Communications Commission's "Keep Americans Connected" Pledge—in which about 800 home and mobile telecom providers promised to waive late fees and not disconnect customers who can't pay bills because of the pandemic—is also expiring after today. The FCC pledge didn't include anything about suspending data caps, but Comcast set its data-cap holiday to expire on the same day as Keep Americans Connected. ISPs say they will move customers to payment plans instead of disconnecting them right away.
Comcast imposes cap in 27 states
Comcast and AT&T are the two largest home-Internet providers that impose data caps. Combined, the two companies have over 44 million households subscribing to their home-Internet services. Comcast imposes a 1TB monthly cap and charges $10 for each additional block of 50GB, or $50 extra a month for unlimited data. Comcast imposes the cap and overage fees in 27 states but not in the Northeast US—that's where it faces strong competition from Verizon's un-capped fiber-to-the-home FiOS service.
AT&T imposes monthly data caps of 150GB on DSL, 250GB on fixed wireless, and 1TB on most of its faster wireline services. AT&T overage charges are also $10 per 50GB, with an option to get unlimited data by paying an extra $30 a month or by subscribing to gigabit broadband or by purchasing an Internet-and-TV bundle from AT&T. Again, AT&T won't be enforcing its cap on fiber customers until at least October 1.
US ISPs and their trade associations have boasted that broadband networks performed well under the strain of more people staying home. As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told Ars in March, the pandemic made it clear that "data caps weren't necessary to manage network loads" and that "even after the COVID-19 emergency passes, ISPs should do away with unnecessary data caps."
Data caps clearly aren't going away entirely, but AT&T's additional three-month waiver isn't the only good news. Cox, a cable company with about 5.2 million broadband subscribers, is apparently re-implementing data caps tomorrow but told Ars today that it is "raising data allowances across the board by 25 percent to 1.25TB."
Mediacom said it is extending its data-cap waiver through July and August and that, for the rest of 2020, it "will provide up to 100GB of additional data to any broadband customer that exceeds their monthly data allowance for free."
Mobile-data offers expire, too
T-Mobile's offers of unlimited smartphone data to all customers and an extra 10GB a month of hotspot data are also scheduled to end tomorrow. T-Mobile didn't answer our questions about whether it will keep the unlimited-data and hotspot offers going after today.
T-Mobile already offered unlimited data as part of its standard plans, and it doesn't charge automatic overage fees when customers exceed caps on plans that have monthly limits. On plans with limits, customers are either disconnected from the Internet or slowed to "up to 2G speeds" for the rest of the month after exceeding the allotment, but they have the option of purchasing extra high-speed data.
AT&T gave its mobile customers an extra 15GB of hotspot data per month and promised to waive mobile-data overage fees when customers suffer pandemic-related financial troubles and contact AT&T to request a waiver. That's coming to an end tomorrow. "Our wireless offers formally expire after today but we are encouraging impacted customers to call us to discuss options," an AT&T spokesperson told Ars.
Verizon provided an extra 15GB of mobile data for customers on limited plans and an extra 15GB of hotspot data a month for customers on unlimited-data plans. The company also promised to waive mobile-data overage fees if customers suffering financial hardship contact the company. The ability to get overage charges waived is apparently already over, as it no longer appears on this Verizon COVID-response FAQ, and Verizon didn't answer our question on the topic. Verizon's offer of extra hotspot data ran out on May 31.
July 01, 2020 at 02:31AM
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Comcast’s data cap and overage fees return tomorrow after 3-month break - Ars Technica
After a 2-1 win on April 13, 2000, then-Mets manager Bobby Valentine answered the routine postgame questions at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia.
As the rest of the writers filed out of Valentine’s road office, a beat reporter for the Bergen Record named T.J. Quinn hung around to ask Valentine about alleged incendiary comments he made during a speech at Penn’s Wharton School of Business a day earlier.
During the talk, Valentine supposedly questioned some Mets players and general manager Steve Phillips’ decision-making, according to an internet message board.
A poster by the handle of “Brad34” shared what he thought he heard with other fans on Mets.com. It was not intended for the world to know, but Quinn had received a tip from someone within the Mets.
The way Valentine remembers it, as part of Quinn’s questioning, the reporter asked the manager, “Do you know Brad34?”
“No, who the f–k is Brad34?” Valentine said.
Brad34 — aka Brad Rosenberg, a graduate student at Wharton — innocently provided the match that ignited what became known as Whartongate, which may have been the first major sports media controversy that was launched by the power of the internet. At the least, it is believed to be the initial one on the New York sports landscape.
What now, 20 years later, is part of the sports media culture — the internet fueling controversies with its viral capacity to share all moments in time — was novel then. Indeed, Whartongate was the leadoff hitter for a generation of stories aided and abetted by the worldwide web and, in more recent years, social media.
That 2000 season ended up with Valentine leading an undermanned Mets team to the Subway World Series, but thanks to the Wharton comments that added to the tumultuous relationship between Valentine and Phillips, he nearly didn’t make it there.
In the aftermath of Brad34’s chat room post, Valentine remembers distinctively that Phillips told him, “If you said the things in the speech, I’m firing you.”
Steve Philips (l) and Bobby Valentine in 2000.AFP via Getty Images
The Race to the Tape
To understand how the alleged comments Valentine made to a group of students became such a big deal, you have to remember the dysfunctional, though ultimately successful, relationship between Valentine and Phillips.
“It was strained,” said Jim Duquette, then a Mets assistant GM.
In 1999, Phillips fired Valentine’s coaches during the season then forbade Valentine from attending the 1999 winter meetings, the only manager in baseball who wasn’t invited by his team.
Duquette would secretly call Valentine from those meetings to keep him abreast of what was going on.
“At that point, you are trying to do what is best for the organization, but at times you had to pick a side,” Duquette said. “It wasn’t very healthy.”
Valentine was outspoken. He had been a star athlete for years before an outfield wall robbed him of what might’ve been an even more successful major league career as a player. The injury that deformed his shin did not diminish his ability to incessantly be the center of attention.
In 1999, on the way to an NLCS appearance, Valentine was quoted in Sports Illustrated saying he had “five losers” on his team. Management wanted Valentine to simmer down.
Valentine didn’t have a contract beyond 2000. During spring training that season, co-owner Fred Wilpon said Valentine would be judged on his actions and his words.
Phillips, whose contract was also due to expire after 2000, handled the media differently. The GM would choose his words as if he were hiding a secret, even with trivial information. He had a controlling personality. The two needed a marriage counselor.
This background was important as to why Brad34’s claims had weight. It was a make-or-break season, and the edict to Valentine was to shut his mouth.
Just 10 games into the 2000 season, Valentine was asked by friends to give a morning speech to 100 students at the Wharton School. He was honored to do so and said he made prepared remarks, something he seldom did. The Penn student paper wrote a little story, and no one thought or really knew anything of it.
But Brad34 posted in the chat room that Valentine had criticized the Mets. Brad34 wrote:
Valentine thought the Mets didn’t need to sign Todd Zeile for three years and $18 million to play first base.
The front office wouldn’t let Valentine sit $5 million outfielder Derek Bell.
Valentine wanted to sign reliever Kaz Sasaki and he “ignores” Rickey Henderson.
Todd ZeileAP
With Wilpon’s public warning about Valentine curtailing his outspokenness, there was a story here and Quinn was tipped off.
“I’m not saying what level or anything, but someone in the organization said, ‘Mets.com’ and I said, ‘What?’ ” said Quinn, who is now an ESPN reporter. “The person repeated, ‘Mets.com.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ The person said, ‘That’s it.’ I just went on the website and figured it had to be something from the message board.
“And I just started combing through everything that I could and finally found this post by Brad34 that said, ‘Bobby V spoke at my school today’ or something like that. I read it and it became pretty obvious that this must be what the person is talking about.”
Then Quinn was told, “Steve was aware and he was pissed.”
In the Veterans Stadium road clubhouse, after the rest of the beat reporters exited, Quinn approached Valentine with his exclusive. An agape Valentine said he thought it was off the record, according to Quinn. Valentine asked Quinn if he had to write it. Quinn did.
“Steve was aware and he was pissed.”
But one thing was not totally clear: Was what Brad34 said accurate? There was one way to find out.
“It was a race to the tape,” Valentine said over lunch earlier this year at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., where he is the athletic director. “I remember the race to the tape.”
Penn Relays
Binyamin Appelbaum was then the 21-year-old managing editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian, the college’s student newspaper. Quinn’s story broke on a Thursday.
It would end up back page news and the lead on WFAN. Valentine’s job was on the line as the Mets headed next to play the Pirates.
“I had people in the organization who said that Steve flew out to Pittsburgh with the intention of firing him,” Quinn said.
On Friday, Appelbaum had New York reporters contact him by phone and in person at the college paper’s office.
“The first I knew of it was when all these New York reporters were descending upon us on the theory that we had a more clear account of the speech,” said Appelbaum, now an editorial writer for the New York Times.
The Daily Pennsylvanian had sent a young writer to cover the Valentine speech. The reporter wrote a “perfectly innocent little story,” Appelbaum said.
She had taped half the speech, but her recorder stopped working for the second half of it. Now, the dysfunction of the Mets was knocking on the college student’s door.
“She was terrified,” Appelbaum said. “She had holed up in her room. She had a recording of half the speech and notes on the other half. Bobby Valentine called her and asked her not to release it. You can just imagine she was completely overwhelmed by all of this. She was literally refusing to come out of her dorm room.”
Meanwhile, Phillips was tracking down Brad34, the chat room poster.
Bobby Valentine in 2016.(Credit too long, see caption)
“I think I did,” Phillips said. “We were hearing bits and pieces, and I just wanted to see if there was a way to hear everything and if there was any type of documentation. As I recall, there wasn’t. If they had one, it had been destroyed or erased. I don’t know exactly. There had been some taping of it, but it wasn’t available anymore. I don’t know exactly what had unfolded.”
Though Phillips and Duquette had heard rumors that Valentine had a videotape destroyed, there is no actual evidence that happened. It was, though, never released.
Meanwhile, Appelbaum had his reporter’s audio tape.
“This whole thing was essentially intermediated by the New York media, who would call and tell us what the Mets had said,” Appelbaum said. “Everyone wanted a complete account of the speech.”
The college paper eventually released the transcript, which Appelbaum described as underwhelming. Valentine did not mention Zeile but did express admiration for Sasaki. He did say Benny Agbayani would be more productive than the expensive Bell. He also made an old joke about the “worldly” Henderson asking for the Wall Street Journal sports section, which did not exist then.
“He actually started a sentence by saying, ‘This would get me in a lot of trouble with my owner …’ which I think was an accurate assessment,” Appelbaum said.
Bobby V’s Alibi
Valentine also said in the Wharton speech, “It’s an interesting situation sometimes. The reaction fuels the fire and allows the one-day issue to become a five-day issue.”
And as it turned out, Phillips’ decision to fly to the next Mets’ destination of Pittsburgh to confront Valentine in person added days to the story.
When Phillips talked to reporters in Pittsburgh, he would not say Valentine’s job was safe. Phillips now says it was already decided Valentine would remain as manager.
Either way, Valentine has an alibi that has never been revealed before of what he says actually happened that fateful week.
When confronted by Phillips and reporters, Valentine said he just referred to his comments “in the speech.” But what Valentine claims occurred is that after the speech and Q&A at Wharton he spoke to a few Mets fans as he walked to grab a cab.
“The backstory is, for whatever it is worth, Steve came and said, ‘Did you say these things in your speech?’ ” Valentine said. “I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ He said, ‘We’re going to get the tape and, if you said those things, you are fired.’
“So what happened, now my head is spinning. I want to know what I said. Then a couple of things that Brad34 wrote, I said, ‘Ohhh, I said those things.’
“I was always absolutely honest. If I were asked the right question, I would’ve been honest also. But everyone asked, ‘… in the speech.’
“The speech is over. I’m walking down the hallway at Wharton School. Now, there are four kids in Mets hats and Mets jerseys who start walking with me. They are just walking and talking, ‘Bobby, we love what you do. Who is starting tonight? Who is going to do this and that?’
“They started asking me questions and I was answering them sarcastically at times.
“Whatever it was they asked, I answered all their questions. One was about Derek Bell. ‘Why the hell did we sign Derek Bell?’ I said something like, ‘Because Benny is a better player and we don’t want him to play.’ ‘How in the world can we give Rey Ordonez a three-year contract?’ I said, ‘We wanted to reward the guy with the lowest on-base and slugging percentage in the history of baseball.’ They were thorns in my side. Derek Bell being signed was a thorn in my side.”
Derek BellNew York Post
The Moral of the Story
By Sunday, five days after the speech, Rosenberg, Brad34, backed away from his post, releasing a statement that read: “If I were to know that the [original] post would end up in the hands of the vast media, I never would have made such a post. Most of the information included in the [original] post was not factual.”
It was an innocent message in a chat room, after all. Brad34 really did nothing wrong, except maybe picking the Mets as his favorite team. It must have been tough to be thrust into the middle of the circus.
Two decades later, Rosenberg, through his wife, declined to comment for this story.
Then, now and forever, everything was different because of the internet. Before the worldwide web, Rosenberg would’ve told a couple of friends and it would’ve faded.
Instead it was the first sports story of its kind — at least in New York. A few words typed onto a message board caused such a chain reaction and put Valentine’s job in jeopardy. Two decades later, there is a lesson.
“The moral of the story is that, that was the beginning of not being able to say things ever,” Valentine said. “It is called the internet.”
July 01, 2020 at 08:24AM
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'Who the f--k is Brad34?': How Mets were rocked by sports world's first internet scandal - New York Post
Dfinityappeared in 2018, amid the flurry of investments in the blockchain space. It raised $102 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation in a round jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, along with other investors, including KR1. I must admit that at the time it appeared for all intents and purposes as if it would be yet another attempt to replace Ethereum. Or at least something similar. But then something odd happened. It started behaving like an actual software company.
In January this year it didn’t talk about blockchain at all, but instead demonstrated an open social network called “LinkedUp,” sort of open version of LinkedIn. The demonstration didn’t go live, and technically speaking it was under-whelming — until you realized it wasn’t running on any server, and performed faster than a native mobile app. Dfinity, it turned out, wasn’t a traditional blockchain startup, but was taking a leaf out of that world’s championing of the move toward decentralization.
In fact, it was building its so-called “Internet Computer”: a decentralized and non-proprietary network to run the next generation of “mega-applications.”
Today it announced that the “Internet Computer” is now open to third-party developers and entrepreneurs to build that next generation. The vision is to “reboot” the internet in a way that destroys the ability to create virtual monopolies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and WhatsApp.
As its next technical demonstration, it launched “CanCan”, a TikTok-like app that will run in a browser (though it is not publicly available as such) and which is not owned by a company. The idea is that anyone could build their own TikTok.
The tantalizing part of Dfinity’s ideas is that because of the nature of the architecture, apps like CanCan can be built with less than 1,000 lines of code. Facebook, to take an example, contains more than 62 million lines of code.
To achieve this, Dfinity is drawing on the work of Andreas Rossberg, co-creator of WebAssembly, who has now created Motoko, a new programming language optimized for Dfinity’s Internet Computer.
The Internet Computer’s serverless architecture allows the internet to natively host software and services, eliminating — claims Dfinity — the need for proprietary cloud services. Without web servers, databases and firewalls, developers can create powerful software much more quickly, and that software then runs far faster than normal.
Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist at Dfinity, said in a statement: “One of the biggest problems emerging in technology is the monopolization of the internet by Big Tech — companies that have consolidated near-total control over our technologies. They collect vast amounts of information about us that they sell for profit and leverage to amass greater market share, and acquire or bulldoze rivals at an alarming rate… The Internet Computer provides a means to reboot the internet — creating a public alternative to proprietary cloud infrastructure. It will empower the next-generation of developers and entrepreneurs to take on Big Tech with open internet services. It aims to bring the internet back to its free and open roots — not dominated by a handful of corporations.”
This “Tungsten” release of the Internet Computer means third-party developers and entrepreneurs will be able to start kicking the tyres on this platform and start spitting out web apps and even smartphone apps.
Projects currently being built include a decentralized payment application and a “pan-industry platform for luxury goods,” whatever that is. Successful and promising applications may also benefit from Beacon Fund, an ecosystem fund stewarded by the Dfinity Foundation and Polychain Capital that aims to support ‘DeFi’ apps and open internet services built on the Internet Computer.
Interested developers and enterprises can submit an application to access the Internet Computer starting July 1, 2020, via dfinity.org.
July 01, 2020 at 05:00AM
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Dfinity demonstrates its TikTok clone, opens up its ‘Internet Computer’ to outside developers - TechCrunch
Turing Award Winner and Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has announced his exit from popular social networking platform Twitter after getting involved in a long and often acrimonious dispute regarding racial biases in AI.
Unlike most other artificial intelligence researchers, LeCun has often aired his political views on social media platforms, and has previously engaged in public feuds with colleagues such as Gary Marcus. This time however LeCun’s penchant for debate saw him run afoul of what he termed “the linguistic codes of modern social justice.”
It all started on June 20 with a tweet regarding the new Duke University PULSE AI photo recreation model that had depixelated a low-resolution input image of Barack Obama into a photo of a white male. Penn State University Associate Professor Brad Wyble tweeted “This image speaks volumes about the dangers of bias in AI.” LeCun responded, “ML systems are biased when data is biased. This face upsampling system makes everyone look white because the network was pretrained on FlickFaceHQ, which mainly contains white people pics. Train the *exact* same system on a dataset from Senegal, and everyone will look African.“
Research scientist, co-founder of the “Black in AI” group, and technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google Timnit Gebru tweeted in response, “I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias.” She added, “Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen. And learn from scholars like @ruha9 [Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University]. We even brought her to your house, your conference.” (This was a reference to ICLR 2020, where LeCun served as president and Benjamin presented the talk 2020 Vision: Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society.)
Known for her work on racial and gender bias in facial recognition systems and other AI algorithms, Gebru has been advocating for fairness and ethics in AI for years. The Gender Shades project that she leads with MIT Media Lab Computer Scientist Joy Buolamwini revealed that commercial facial recognition software was more likely to misclassified and was less accurate with darker-skinned females compared to lighter-skinned men.
Gebru’s CVPR 2020 talk Computer vision in practice: who is benefiting and who is being harmed? again addressed the role of bias in AI, “I think that now a lot of people have understood that we need to have more diverse datasets, but unfortunately I felt like that’s kind of where the understanding has stopped. It’s like ‘let’s diversify our datasets. And that’s kind of ethics and fairness, right?’ But you can’t ignore social and structural problems.“
LeCun replied that his comment was targeting the particular case of the Duke model and dataset. “The consequences of bias are considerably more dire in a deployed product than in an academic paper,” continued LeCun in a lengthy thread of tweets suggesting it’s not ML researchers that need to be more careful selecting data but engineers.
“Again. UNBELIEVABLE. What does it take? If tutorials at your own conference, books and books and talks and talks from experts coming to YOU, to your own house, feeding it to you, Emily and I even cover issues with how the research community approaches data. Nope. Doesn’t matter.” Gebru replied. “This is not even people outside the community, which we say people like him should follow, read, learn from. This is us trying to educate people in our own community. Its a depressing time to be sure. Depressing.”
Others from the AI and activist communities joined the fray, with far too many simply attacking either LeCun or Gebru. On June 25 LeCun offered an olive branch: “I very much admire your work on AI ethics and fairness. I care deeply about about working to make sure biases don’t get amplified by AI and I’m sorry that the way I communicated here became the story.” Gebru replied, “We’re often told things like ‘I’m sorry that’s how it made you feel.’ That doesn’t really own up to the actual thing. I hope you understand *why* *how* you communicated became the story. It became the story because its a pattern of marginalization.”
Perhaps you can try to understand why that interaction was wrong and tell your fanboys to stop trolling me. Do you think its is appropriate, on top of everything we’re going through right now, for me to deal with that? (7/N)
The week-long back-and-forth between LeCun and Gebru attracted thousands of likes, comments, and retweets, with a number of high-profile AI researchers expressing dissatisfaction with LeCun’s explanations. Google Research scientist David Ha commented, “I respectfully disagree w/Yann here. As long as progress is benchmarked on biased data, such biases will also be reflected in the inductive biases of ML systems Advancing ML with biased benchmarks and asking engineers to simply ‘retrain models with unbiased data’ is not helpful.” Canada CIFAR AI chair Nicolas Le Roux tweeted, “Yann, I know you mean well. I saw many people act like you just did in good faith, and get defensive when people pointed that this was not the proper response, until one day they stopped to listen and reflect and ultimately change their behaviour.”
Amid the heated debate, the Duke PULSE research team updated their paper, adding: “Overall, it seems that sampling from StyleGAN yields white faces much more frequently than faces of people of color.” The researchers referenced an April 2020 paper on demographic bias in artificially generated facial pictures by Salminen et al.: “Results indicate a racial bias among the generated pictures, with close to three-[fourths] (72.6%) of the pictures representing White people. Asian (13.8%) and Black (10.1%) are considerably less frequent, while Indians represent only a minor fraction of the pictures (3.4%).”
The team also added a “model card” to their study. Gebru was part of a team that introduced the model card framework in 2019 to “provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains.”
Slides from Gebru’s CVPR 2020 tutorial Computer vision in practice: who is benefiting and who is being harmed?
The artificial intelligence community has made a number of moves in recent years to encourage diversity and inclusivity, such as the “AI for All” initiative launched by Gebru’s Stanford supervisor Fei-Fei Li, and scheduling the major AI conference ICLR 2020 in Ethiopia (the conference went virtual due COVID-19). This year, NeurIPS, the world’s most prestigious AI conference, required authors to include a statement of the potential broader impact of their submitted papers, “including its ethical aspects and future societal consequences. Authors should take care to discuss both positive and negative outcomes.”
Journalist: Fangyu Cai | Editor: Michael Sarazen
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July 01, 2020 at 07:29AM
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Yann LeCun Quits Twitter Amid Acrimonious Exchanges on AI Bias - Synced
Researchers from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, EPFL (Lausanne) and Sciteb Ltd have found a mathematical means of helping regulators and business manage and police Artificial Intelligence systems' biases towards making unethical, and potentially very costly and damaging commercial choices—an ethical eye on AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly deployed in commercial situations. Consider for example using AI to set prices of insurance products to be sold to a particular customer. There are legitimate reasons for setting different prices for different people, but it may also be profitable to 'game' their psychology or willingness to shop around.
The AI has a vast number of potential strategies to choose from, but some are unethical and will incur not just moral cost but a significant potential economic penalty as stakeholders will apply some penalty if they find that such a strategy has been used—regulators may levy significant fines of billions of Dollars, Pounds or Euros and customers may boycott you—or both.
So in an environment in which decisions are increasingly made without human intervention, there is therefore a very strong incentive to know under what circumstances AI systems might adopt an unethical strategy and reduce that risk or eliminate entirely if possible.
Mathematicians and statisticians from University of Warwick, Imperial, EPFL and Sciteb Ltd have come together to help business and regulators creating a new "Unethical Optimization Principle" and provide a simple formula to estimate its impact. They have laid out the full details in a paper bearing the name "An unethical optimization principle", published in Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday 1st July 2020.
The four authors of the paper are Nicholas Beale of Sciteb Ltd; Heather Battey of the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London; Anthony C. Davison of the Institute of Mathematics, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; and Professor Robert MacKay of the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick.
Professor Robert MacKay of the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick said:
"Our suggested 'Unethical Optimization Principle' can be used to help regulators, compliance staff and others to find problematic strategies that might be hidden in a large strategy space. Optimisation can be expected to choose disproportionately many unethical strategies, inspection of which should show where problems are likely to arise and thus suggest how the AI search algorithm should be modified to avoid them in future.
"The Principle also suggests that it may be necessary to re-think the way AI operates in very large strategy spaces, so that unethical outcomes are explicitly rejected in the optimization/learning process."
Citation: New mathematical idea reins in AI bias towards making unethical and costly commercial choices (2020, June 30) retrieved 30 June 2020 from https://ift.tt/3dL2Kva
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July 01, 2020 at 06:16AM
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New mathematical idea reins in AI bias towards making unethical and costly commercial choices - Phys.org
The world’s largest association of computing professionals is calling for an “immediate suspension” of both the private and the governmental use of facial recognition technologies for “technical and ethical reasons.”
The Association for Computing Machinery, which says it has almost 100,000 student and professional members, said in a statement Tuesday that the surveillance technology was often biased and could not be reliably used in a way that wouldn’t adversely affect vulnerable populations.
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“The technology too often produces results demonstrating clear bias based on ethnic, racial, gender, and other human characteristics recognizable by computer systems,” the group’s U.S. Technology Policy Committee said in a statement. “Such bias and its effects are scientifically and socially unacceptable.”
The association acknowledged that facial recognition technology can be “benign or beneficial” but said that its use has “often compromised fundamental human and legal rights of individuals to privacy, employment, justice and personal liberty.”
June 26, 202006:14
It called on policymakers to support the suspension until legal standards for accuracy, fairness and accountability have been developed.
The announcement comes amid ongoing protests across the United States against police violence and racial profiling. The protests galvanized researchers and civil liberties groups who have been calling for more public scrutiny and strict controls of surveillance technologies including facial recognition, which critics say exacerbates human biases and infringes on people’s constitutional freedoms.
At the end of 2019, researchers for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency with the U.S. Department of Commerce, found that facial recognition algorithms falsely identified African American and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more than Caucasian faces — a flaw that was illustrated with the wrongful arrest of Robert Williams, a Michigan man, earlier this year.
The Association for Computing Machinery follows a string of organizations and companies to issue warnings or bans on the technology.
On Tuesday, long-time Apple-focused mobile device and enterprise hardware management software company Jamf filed for an initial public offering, worth $100 million.
In a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday, Minneapolis-based company listed an offer size of $100 million. That offer size is a placeholder amount and is likely to change. The company was aiming to be valued at $3 billion in the listing.
Jamf, founded in 2002, makes MDM platforms that lets enterprise users manage fleets of Apple devices — including iPhones, Macs and iPads. Apple itself has a client of Jamf since 2010, through it comprised less than 1% of the company's total revenue in 2019.
Jamf's IPO filing on Tuesday, spotted by Bloomberg indicated an $8.3 million net loss on $60 million in sales in the first quarter of 2020. The same period in 2019, Jamf reported $9 million in losses on $40 million in revenue.
Apple has long relied on third-party MDM platforms to offer fleet capabilities to enterprise customers. Earlier in June, however, Apple acquired Fleetsmith — an MDM solutions firm and Jamf competitor.
June 30, 2020 at 11:45PM
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Apple device management firm Jamf files for $100 million IPO - AppleInsider
Facebook has shown off a new proof-of-concept virtual reality headset, and it has a completely different design than most other VR devices on the market today. Instead of a bulky contraption that covers up the top half of your face and has to be strapped to your head, this proof-of-concept headset looks kind of like a pair of large sunglasses that can sit comfortably on your ears.
Yet Facebook is billing this new device as not a pair of augmented reality glasses, as common conceptions of AR devices go, but a legitimate VR product. They’re very thin, with a display thickness of less than 9mm, and Facebook claims they have a field of view that’s “comparable to today’s consumer VR products.” Here’s a top-down view:
Image: Facebook
The proof-of-concept glasses aren’t just thin for looks, though — they also apparently beam images to your eyes in a way that’s different than standard VR headsets on the market today. I’ll let Facebook’s research team explain one of those techniques, called “holographic optics:”
Most VR displays share a common viewing optic: a simple refractive lens composed of a thick, curved piece or glass or plastic. We propose replacing this bulky element with holographic optics. You may be familiar with holographic images seen at a science museum or on your credit card, which appear to be three-dimensional with realistic depth in or out of the page. Like these holographic images, our holographic optics are a recording of the interaction of laser light with objects, but in this case the object is a lens rather than a 3D scene. The result is a dramatic reduction in thickness and weight: The holographic optic bends light like a lens but looks like a thin, transparent sticker.
The proof-of-concept headset also uses a technique Facebook calls “polarization-based optical folding” to help reduce the amount of space between the actual display and the lens that focuses the image. With polarization-based optical folding, “light can be controlled to move both forward and backward within the lens so that this empty space can be traversed multiple times, collapsing it to a fraction of the original volume.”
This GIF from Facebook helps visualize how both techniques work together:
These glasses are just a proof-of-concept, though, so it’s unclear if they’ll ever come to market. “While it points toward the future development of lightweight, comfortable, and high-performance AR/VR technology, at present our work is purely research,” Facebook’s research team writes in its blog post.
Many companies are circling around the idea of glasses-like AR/VR headsets that combine the best of both technologies into a single device, but it usually ends up as a bulkier VR-centric headset that uses outward-facing cameras to also perform light AR. Intel and Microsoft, both of which use the phrase mixed reality to describe devices like the HoloLens, have been investing in this idea for some time.
But more companies are now working behind-the-scenes to make a smaller, truly hybrid device a reality. Apple has reportedly been working on something like this for years, and Google just today bought AR glasses company North, an acquisition that may allow the company to revive its dream of a consumer Google Glass-style heads-up display.
While we can’t be sure if any of the tech giants will release combination AR/VR glasses, the proof-of-concept Facebook is showing off could offer a glimpse at what such a device might look like at some point in the future.
Check out this whitepaper from Andrew Maimone and Junren Wang on the Facebook Reality Labs team if you want to learn more about Facebook’s proof-of-concept.
July 01, 2020 at 06:13AM
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Facebook’s newest proof-of-concept VR headset looks like a pair of sunglasses - The Verge
Google today confirmed in a blog post that it’s acquired North, the Canada-based smartglasses maker behind Focals. The acquisition price wasn’t disclosed, however early reports suggested it was around $180 million.
Founded in 2012, North (ex-Thalmic Labs) first set out to create Myo, a gesture-based armband. Pivoting from Myo and rebranding to North in 2018, the company then released Focals, which focused on creating a stylish, unobtrusive pair of prescription-compatible smartglasses.
“Over the last while, it became clear that aligning with Google would significantly advance our shared vision,” North said in a news brief.
The company says that it will be winding down support for its 2018 Focals smartglasses, and that Focals 2.0 is effectively cancelled.
North seems to be making a clean break with its legacy product, Focals 1.0. Starting July 31st, 2020, users won’t able to connect or use Focals or access their North accounts. The Focals app itself is also going to be removed from both Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
Refunds are being offered, as the company says in an FAQ that “[f]ull refunds will be given for all paid Focals orders starting June 30th, 2020 using the original payment method.”
The acquisition seems to have been a fairly quick deal, as North was talking up Focals 2.0 up until March 2020, advertising its prospective 2020 ship date.
This, you might conclude, may mean that Google is getting ready to completely integrate the IP somehow into its own Google Glass project, which has reemerged to serve the enterprise sector. It may equally as well rebrand Focals 2.0 as a Google device targeted at fashion-conscious consumers.
Is Google heading back into consumer smartglasses territory with its latest acquisition? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
June 30, 2020 at 11:54PM
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Google Acquires North, the Startup Behind ‘Focals’ Smartglasses - Road to VR
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