Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, August 18

Uber’s Popularity in India Has Led to a Mini Vehicle Boom: Uber has posed a threat to auto sales by enticing car owners to ditch their keys. In India, its popularity has sparked a vehicle boom instead. Maruti Suzuki has seen a surge in demand for its DZire Tour sedan because of the rising popularity of car-booking apps, said R.S. Kalsi, executive director at India’s largest carmaker. Toyota Motor is offering special deals to woo drivers and fleet operators that are boosting orders for its Etios sedan, which starts at 611,000 rupees ($9,400). Uber and other booking apps have announced plans to expand to smaller cities in India, where public transportation is often inadequate. The services have created a boom in demand from for-hire car companies expanding their fleets and from individual operators buying new cars to drive for the apps. “The plans of all these companies are big,” said N. Raja, director and senior vice president for sales and marketing at Toyota’s India unit. “We’re happy to see them talking about expanding the number of cars in the next 12 months.” In the four months through July, Maruti Suzuki’s DZire Tour, sold only as a taxi, surged 152 percent while Toyota’s Etios compact sedan gained 28 percent. Industrywide passenger-vehicle sales expanded 7.5 percent in the same period. The surge in demand for these cheaper models is helping to drive a recovery in vehicle sales in India. Automakers like Maruti Suzuki get about a third of their sales volume from rural areas, where incomes are correlated to rainfall during the monsoon season and a good harvest.

A Gushing Review for Windows 10: "I used to doubt Microsoft. Then I installed Windows 10": I don’t know if I broke a law of computing or committed heresy. But I installed Windows 10 on my Macbook Pro. I had feared that this would condemn me to purgatory in the gates of computing hell. But it has been an incredibly positive experience: my favorite Microsoft Office applications — Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint — work faster than ever before, and I can still use Apple peripherals — a Thunderbolt Display and Thunderbolt external hard drives. The best part is Windows 10 itself: it is a beautifully designed operating system that gives me the best of the past and present — maintaining the usability and familiarity of the old Windows operating system, and letting me download slick apps designed for tablets. Another Microsoft product that I had written off years ago is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The jury is still out, but Microsoft’s new browser, Edge, seems faster than Google’s Chrome. I may end up switching browsers as well. What is clear is that Microsoft is back — in full force. This is a good thing; Apple and Google desperately need the competition that Microsoft will once again provide.

Android Has a New Name, ‘Marshmallow,’ but the Same Old Security Problem: Android’s latest version now has its own culinary sobriquet: Marshmallow. But the release of the operating system, announced in May and arriving this fall, doesn’t address one of the biggest issues facing Android — its security model. Last month, a security researcher discovered a software bug, called Stagefright, that could potentially threaten millions of Android devices. Google acknowledge the bug and sent out a patch to manufacturers and carriers to fix. Then last week, a different security firm found another vulnerability; this one was in Google’s patch. Google said it has since released a fix for that hole, which affects Nexus devices. Still, both findings underscore the nagging headache Google has built with an OS so reliant on hardware partners, many of whom are struggling to maintain profits. And it shows that Google will continue to wrestle with the issues as Android moves onto other devices, like cars, wearables and home automation. “The whole Android ecosystem is a mess,” said Aaron Portnoy, vice president of Exodus Intelligence, the firm that spotted the second hole. The primary issue is that Google is not fully in control of its own destiny, with updates typically needing the okay of device makers and carriers before making their way to consumers, who also have to update their devices. Contrast that with Apple, which is largely able to push updates on its own. The security issues facing Google are reminiscent of those that faced Windows back in the day. The operating system, dominant in the PC world, found itself the increasing center of attacks. Adding to the issue was the fact that businesses were reticent to update their servers and PCs without doing independent testing.

4 Major Publishers Can Now Put Ads in Their Online Comment Sections: It was only a matter of time before marketers started squeezing native ads into every nook of a publisher's site, and now Condé Nast, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News can sell promos that pop up in story comments. Today, Livefyre—a tech company that powers online discussions—is unveiling sponsored comments for big-name media brands like the ones mentioned above. While the idea of in-feed ads isn't new (competitor Disqus launched similar promos last year), Livefyre's ads are sold directly by publishers, opening up a potentially interesting revenue stream for them. "You can distribute more ads into the page, especially if there are 100 comments on the page," said Jordan Kretchmer, Livefyre's founder and CEO. "Typically, by the time the user is down there reading the comments, there's no ads around it—all the ads are up above the fold." In addition to selling the ads, publishers will also control how often they pop up. For example, a media company may only want to serve a promo in one out of every six comments. Of course, plugging ads right next to trolls and negative discussions is a risky move for brands. To control the environment as much as possible, Kretchmer said the majority of his company's clients already use automated moderation tools that weed out spammy posts such as those from rogue e-commerce marketers. "The risk is far less today than it would have been a couple of years ago," he said. Kretchmer also explained the ads are targeted based on editorial content. For example, Nike can set up a campaign that only runs on sports articles. "Users who are reading and leaving comments are the most engaged users on a site," Kretchmer explained. "With customers who have a good, active community, comments are where they spend most of their time, and in a lot of times, [they spend] more time reading the comments than the article itself."

Amazon’s $5 Dash Button Already Hacked To Do Other Stuff Beyond Giving Amazon Money: Need something to spark a bit of creativity this week? How about a super clever hack for Amazon’s $5, single-purpose Dash buttons? The Dash buttons were originally meant to serve as a quick way to reorder household goods you order often (Order a lot of laundry detergent? Stick a Dash button on your washing machine, press it when you’re running low. Bam. Ordered.), but Cloudstitch CTO Ted Benson has found a way to make them do pretty much anything he wants. You can read Benson’s full breakdown right over here, but here’s the gist: Benson noticed that the Dash sends out a unique signal each and every time it’s pressed. Rather than opening up the Dash and modifying the hardware itself (which would probably require all sorts of painful/tedious chip flashing), Benson sniffs the network for that signal. When it’s detected, he can fire a script to do just about whatever he wants. In his demo use case, he’s using it to record when his baby’s diaper gets changed into a Google Spreadsheet, while a second button records when his baby wakes from a nap. To keep the Dash from ordering any products when you press it, you just… don’t configure it to order a product during the inital setup. If you never enter a SKU, it won’t have anything to order. One catch: whereas the factory Dash can act on its own, a modified Dash will need something — a computer, generally — awake and running on your network to sniff out the button presses and respond accordingly. It complicates the equation a bit, but it’s still a fun hack.

Jeff Bezos responds to New York Times article on Amazon's Culture: Amabots and Amholes; employees sobbing at their desks; colleagues spamming the internal employee-review tool in an attempt to eject their managers from the company; cancer survivors returning to work, only to be put on “performance improvement plans.” These and other rich anecdotes made the New York Times broadside against Amazon an entertaining and brutal read, which drew a rebuke from the company’s top dog. Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos wrote a memo to his employees last night contesting the Times article and asking anyone who witnesses such displays of corporate callousness to report it to human resources or e-mail the CEO. “I don’t recognize this Amazon, and I very much hope you don’t, either,” Bezos wrote. “I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company.” But there’s now plenty of fodder to support the narrative that the secretive beast is not always a pleasant place to work. While 82 percent of respondents on the job-search site Glassdoor say they approve of the CEO, only 62 percent would recommend a job there to a friend. That’s much lower than Amazon’s peers.