Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, August 16

• Xiaomi Phone Shipments Fall 38% in China as Huawei Takes Lead; Apple Falls Behind: Xiaomi Corp., the once-hot Chinese smartphone maker, saw shipments tumble 38 percent in China in the second quarter as Huawei Technologies Co. took over the top spot in the world’s largest market. Xiaomi shipped 10.5 million smartphones in the quarter, down from 17.1 million in the same period a year earlier, according to research from International Data Corp. That made the company the fourth-largest competitor in the market behind Huawei, OPPO and Vivo. Xiaomi was once valued at $46 billion, according to CB Insights. The Chinese market has grown increasingly competitive as domestic manufacturers have improved their quality, design and marketing, putting pressure on global leaders Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Apple saw shipments in China drop 32 percent in the second quarter and the iPhone maker fell to fifth in the market, according to IDC. The research firm said that Huawei and OPPO gained ground by concentrating on one or two key attributes in their marketing messages. Huawei emphasized the Leica lens now available on its phones, while OPPO pitched fast-charging technology. Apple’s global shipments are set to decline in 2016 as it continues to lose ground in its largest overseas market, Canalys said in a separate report. “The iPhones lack features such as waterproofing and wireless charging. Apple needs to catch up with the competition if it wants to compete,” Canalys research analyst Jessie Ding wrote.

• Microsoft’s HoloLens Technology Adopted by Israeli Military: If Pokemon Go achieved one thing, it was showing the world that augmented realitytechnologies are ready for the mainstream. Israel’s military thinks AR is ready for another use: battlefield training. The Israeli army’s C2 Systems Department recently purchased two HoloLens glasses from Microsoft Corp. The commander of the head programming department, Major Rotem Bashi, intends to develop the technology to improve battlefield strategy and train field personnel. And quickly: He intends for HoloLens to be used on active duty within months. At the army base outside Tel Aviv, a handful of developers in Bashi’s team created a software program in less than a month that allows commanders to manipulate military terrain models and intelligence data to monitor troop positioning from enemy vantage points. Battlefield maps are superimposed on top of the real terrain, streamed in via satellite, to create a blend that can be interacted with via sight, voice and hand gestures. The unit is now finding ways to allow HoloLens-wearing medics to operate on wounded with simultaneous instruction from trained surgeons, and combat soldiers to fix equipment malfunctions. It’s far removed from hurling Pokeballs at Pidgeys and Rattatas in Pokemon Go, but based on similar principles. Besides adapting the HoloLens to military life, Bashi’s unit is working on a product that will give headquarters an online report about a combatant’s physiological state in the field.

• LinkedIn sues anonymous data scrapers: LinkedIn is trying to lock down its exclusive relationship with its users. The professional networking company filed suit against 100 unnamed individuals last week for using bots to harvest user profiles from its website. The lawsuit is a preliminary step to revealing the identities of the scrapers — LinkedIn intends to ask the court to reveal the true identities behind the scrapers’ IP addresses — and a way to maintain its exclusive hold on users’ resumes. But LinkedIn’s lawsuit also raises questions about how to police bot use. The company, which was recently snapped up by Microsoft for $26.2 billion, has invoked the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in its suit against the unidentified scrapers, claiming that collecting user profiles from the site amounts to hacking. LinkedIn’s case accuses the anonymous scrapers of building a massive botnet and circumventing the restrictions LinkedIn uses to prevent profile collection by undesirable third parties. The lawsuit details several of LinkedIn’s automated tools that prevent data harvesting. Dubbed FUSE, Quicksand and Sentinel, these tools monitor the web traffic of LinkedIn users and limit how many other profiles a user can view, and how quickly a user can view those profiles. This tracking is intended to prevent scrapers from signing up for fake LinkedIn profiles and then vacuuming up vast amounts of data. The company also uses a tool called Org Block to block IP addresses it suspects of scraping and uses Member and Guest Request Scoring to track page requests. But paradoxically, LinkedIn doesn’t want to prohibit scraping altogether. Search engines like Google use bots to index websites and turn up relevant results — and LinkedIn wants to allow this type of scraping to occur. “LinkedIn ‘whitelists’ a number of popular and reputable service providers, search engines, and other platforms so as to permit them to query and index the LinkedIn website, without being subject to all of LinkedIn’s security measures,” the company explains in its suit. The scrapers targeted in the lawsuit circumvented LinkedIn’s bot-blocking tools by sending their requests through one of these ‘whitelisted’ entities, a third-party cloud service provider.

• Peter Thiel says journalism will be just fine, since he’ll decide what’s good journalism: Peter Thiel is a billionaire who decided he didn’t like Gawker Media after it outed him as gay. So he funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the company, and they won. Now Gawker is selling itself in a bankruptcy auction. Today, the same day that bids for Gawker are due, Thiel published an op-ed in the New York Timesas a sort of victory lap, but also to muster votes for a bill currently wending its way through Congress, the Intimate Privacy Protection Act. It's more commonly known as the revenge-porn bill, which would make it illegal to transmit private images and messages, but Thiel has co-opted it for his own purposes, referring to it by a lesser-known nickname, the Gawker Bill. But the most interesting part of Thiel’s editorial is what he says about the need for a free press: It’s telling that despite the fact he felt Gawker had invaded his privacy, Thiel himself never filed a lawsuit — he’s fighting via proxies. In trying to determine what should and shouldn’t qualify as journalism, Thiel is exercising the classic Silicon Valley pretension to attempt to own the definition, to write its own narrative, devoid of context or skepticism. But smart publishers will react to Thiel’s call to arms in a similar vein to the closing words of his editorial: He can’t do it, if we don’t let him.