My view: If you are on the Internet, then you provide your data at your own expense. I run my own websites this way and it is working out just fine for me.
How much data do your websites have, and approximate number of people and other entities who might be interested in downloading it? Setting aside the point that you don't distinguish between public vs private data, or the method of consumption (web surfing vs scraping to sell to others); just try to calculate the bandwidth requirements if LinkedIn or any highly popular site were to actually do this.
> They're left without internet for days until this is fixed.
These are days which they will spend complaining about service, and some will be shopping around for other providers. If a significant fraction jump ship, the ISP is going to get a sudden motivation boost to start reading up on basic security practices that are essential in a highly connected world.
This is the first time I'm hearing of BrickerBot, but did the author release any news that this is a clever strike against the diabolical surveillance capabilities of intelligence agencies? It seems like a response by someone tired of armies of DDOS bots crowding the internet and a lack of action by popular ISPs to secure their own devices.
Sure, in future (or even at present) many governments will classify this as 'terrorism', as punishments are much easier to sell to public under terrorism laws regardless of actual intent or magnitude of the crime. But even so, it will remain far easier for black hats to actually effect positive change in getting rid of botnets - white hats who actually report bugs are quite likely to be just ignored, with a small chance of actually getting charged for intrusion instead. Think of the recent story of the 'hacker' who used Firebug to get cheaper train fare or something in Belarus or w/e... the company just ended up calling the cops on him! Having such actions subject to stronger anti-terrorism laws, and as usual without proper exemptions for responsible reporting, will only end up with responsible white hat types having a harder time in fixing or reporting major issues that they come across.
India has enough population to fill most jobs:) But yes there is immigration for work in India too, from its neighbours - Nepalis for e.g. are commonly employed as guards in societies, they have a much better reputation for not sleeping on the job haha. IIRC there is significant illegal immigration from Bangladesh too, but not sure in which sectors.
> You can't train intelligence though. I'm sure India has an equivalent IQ to European populations but they have many "engineers" that really aren't suited to that field as well.
I'll disagree here to some extent. If someone grows up studying in an education system that encourages memorization and rote learning over critical thinking (a major failing imho in Indian education syllabus) then it will certainly have a stunting effect on his intelligence and reasoning capacity. A majority of those 'engineers' are basically human machines that would be good for repetitive tasks, but not as useful for comprehending complex systems and enhancing them.
There are of course many Indian engineers who are actually good, but most of them end up outside of the country to find better work. And then they get drowned out statistically by the hordes who don't really care or take initiatives to develop their skills, but are in it for the money and have suffered thru rote learning way too much as said above.
Well, its a general failing of most democratic countries that the less educated and lower earning groups reproduce more, get a larger voting share and then end up using a lot of social benefits. No politicians are going to discuss such issues and risk upsetting their vote banks, unless somehow they're lucky enough to have highly qualified demographics in their constituency.
Female infanticide is illegal in India btw, though it seems to go on in remote villages etc. Every now & then there are stories about gender based abortions in some village. Its not as common in metros, but I guess there should still be incidents but rarely reported - maybe city people are more circumspect about flouting laws and hence its harder for media to find out.
Even in a large metropolis like Mumbai, many colleges (think grad schools for B.S. equivalent) have a hard time attracting good or even decent teaching staff for technical positions. I'm not up to date with their current state, but they even had people just hired to fill in positions so there was a teacher present for the subject - people who would just 'explain' stuff from textbooks, and do a worse job than students just reading from it! Naturally this also means that most practical assignments (coding, EE circuits or w/e) aren't properly assessed, and many of them are exact copies of those given to previous class years. Which led to rampant copying of the previous year's journals with the majority not bothering to even try and understand the material:(
I actually think that teaching situation should change for the better with a slump in the job market. Previously, many qualified teachers left academia due to rise of IT as the pittance of a salary they were getting wasn't enough to retain them. By now, salaries in the better institutions have improved quite a bit (I hope actually, not sure lol) and there will be several decent candidates unable to get a job who may consider teaching as a career.
> amid growing fears that electronic devices can pose as homemade bombs.
Shouldn't TSA care more about homemade bombs that masquerade as electronics. If an electronic gadget wants to play make-believe, shouldn't that be covered by AI rights in future... TSA trying to get in laws ahead of time?
Politicians love their vote banks, and will never promote good technologies or any progress that can lead to job loss in the short term. Nobody really tries to think beyond the timeframe that they will be up for re-election, so having a benefit in the medium / long term is simply irrelevant.
Unlike China which aims to be an AI superpower in next couple of decades, India will happily plod along trying to maximize unskilled jobs to make for nice employment statistics. Its very frustrating to see how much inefficiency exists in all areas that could be easily solved by automation or just better processes. Gas station attendants just to pump gas, crappy websites for most services so you end up having to visit physical offices, broken transportation system which guarantees lots of chauffeur employment as no one actually wants to drive if possible,.... and sadly, all parties are populists to some degree or other so there is no chance of things changing for the better due to policy. Most of the economic progress in India happens despite the administration rather than because of it:(
Over the past few years, traffic in India has actually become worse instead of improving, exacerbated by all the construction without corresponding commute improvements in cities like Mumbai.
However a robot is probably better suited to always looking in all 4 directions and tailgating 1m behind the vehicle in front continuously to avoid someone squeezing in line - so maybe AI drivers would be far more useful on Indian roads, where driving is otherwise an exhausting ordeal:( Programming it would be quite a task, and you probably want to have 360 deg camera coverage to guard against spurious accident claims, but on the plus side - it probably won't have to deal with speeds above 50 km/h within the city, as most roads are perpetually congested.
Well, for now its just a show - will be interesting if they actually attempt this when they're in power, since the 2 parties do keep on alternating at the reins quite often.
Hopefully Comcast gets split into 3 or more parts that compete in the same markets, and don't insist on TV connections to get deals that are better than standalone internet plans.
It used to have higher quality discussions a LONG time back - before Digg became popular and/. at the time started going downhill, losing even more good members.
That's what I used to assume, that lack of DirectX support and having to port to OpenGL etc. made it much harder for games developers to support Linux etc. But nowadays so many games support OS X which is also not using DX (and is a *nix variant), but same games still have no support for *nix - so obviously there are other reasons that just porting difficulties:(
I was surprised to read this as I had no idea what is the relation between upgrading to Ryzen and having Windows 7,prompting me to do some research on it. Now I have to rethink about my thoughts to upgrade desktop to Ryzen soon:-( , thanks for the heads-up.
It turns out that AMD doesn't support Win 7 on Ryzen processors, which can cause a lot of problems with installation. There is a detailed guide on getting them working together that I skimmed thru - http://www.anandtech.com/show/11182/how-to-get-ryzen-working-on-windows-7-x64 . Although it seems doable and I have also played around with nLite to make custom OS install images in the past (with newer drivers & integrating patches etc.), it definitely doesn't seem like a good idea to jump through so many hoops just for an OS installation.
Most probably I'll just switch to Linux finally, though I will miss the ability to install any random old PC game when I feel like it. Luckily most of my gaming is limited to few titles like LoL and ESO which afaik do work well on Linux/Wine.
Having to tweak settings to get things 'just right' is vastly different from having to tweak a lot to get back to a usable state - which you would get from start with an earlier version of the same product. Not to mention, you can only do all this customization on your own system and not when you're doing tech support for friends/family:(
Webkit can probably count all the mobile users who use the default browser as part of its user count. Similarly, maybe Firefox is the browser being used on ATM screens on mall info terminals, that would add a lot of 'users' who are actually clueless as to which browser is underlying their UX.
The biggest issue that is the terminal and inputs are both visible to the public. Maybe future ATMs can just have a VR headset that will only display the screen to the user, and have a virtual keyboard or other randomized unlock mechanism. One problem is making a non-contact headset as it has to be used by multiple people, and dealing with lice issues etc.
So, the article claims that 'number of crashes due to muted sirens (because of sound insulation) is on the rise'. That's a claim with no numbers behind it, what is this increase in accidents per year - 10? or 10,000? In the latter case, I can see a justification for this research with the (unfortunately not too safe) assumption that people do use their radios often. However it just as likely to be the first case of trivial increase, which might as well be due to higher traffic!, but is used to justify an expensive study for some PhDs.
If these realistic robots come in the market, they are going to be expensive and thus end up reducing reproduction for the segment of population that can actually afford children... leaving the poorer have-nots to expand to a greater percentage of the population and need more social support. Since most countries are democracies (i.e., majority wins) - this will end up with people voting for state support to have the 'right' to own/rent such robots for cheap:)
> the researchers carried out robustness tests with various variables including the strength of IP enforcement, political factors, and economic development.
So they did take into account some factors like economic development, which makes this more interesting. However, why not analyze w.r.t. to the education levels of the area as well, since that would also affect the region's 'collective IQ' and probably indicate how many people are too poor to afford education, not to mention buying software. I searched the paper and 'education' as a search term only appeared twice, both times in references (so, its never mentioned in the actual text).
The researchers probably didn't consider the prevailing views of property rights or agreement with international treaties either. In some countries, its just more culturally acceptable to share software which makes it easier to average people to do so without feeling guilty. Other countries might have low income groups that are forced to buy licenses because their leadership got some incentives for IP treaties and are eager to show their enforcement to attract more FDI. Also, often countries with limited software exposure don't even know about good alternatives so its basically, either pirate or buy what everyone else uses.
The idea of having a mandatory requirement of using online ids and removing anonymity from the Internet isn't too bright, and also opens up a gigantic single point of failure with the government login / authentication systems.
However, I'm more interested in whether any government at all allows third parties to use their ids for third party authentication, maybe something like having an OpenId server support like how Google, Facebook etc. logins can be used as the primary login on some other sites. This would potentially allow for someone who cares about 'fake reviews' so much, to allow people to authenticate using their presumably properly vetted govt id. Then, it would be up to that individual site to choose whether it should also allow other account types, whether using free email or their own site based solution etc. This makes it feasible to mark reviews that are from 'trusted sources' (trust as in, person has a verifiable identity and he can't just discard it for a new one easily) while allowing other reviews or even disabling that if desired.
I could see this as being actually very useful for certain scenarios, specifically thinking of the constant and currently-insoluble problem of trolls in online games. Say that Blizzard as a new MMO with Server A only allowing logins using trusted credentials. A user with govt id makes an account, chooses a nickname and starts playing as usual. But if he is banned for cheating or trolling, he can't just make a new account, as governments don't exactly let you have a different DL # or passport # without a really good reason. Those who don't want to or are unable to use a trusted id, would instead get to play on Server B which would not be used for official tournaments etc.
This kind of approach would see governments leverage their existing identity verification as a supporting mechanism to enable opt-in usage by commercial entities. Which also means that it will only be used when it makes sense and not just a new mechanism to track everyone's actions online. Sure, if Amazon.eu decides that fake reviews are a grave issue and only verified users can post them, that's fine - people can still leave anonymous comments elsewhere, and others will use whichever has more useful information. Certainly, besides the 'fake' comments there may be honest commenters who simply don't want to get sued for strong language or w/e.
So, back to my question - are there OpenId or similar authentication endpoints that EU or any of its member states make available currently?
Copyright is completely insane anyway, and this has desensitized many people from breaking it at will when they can. We no longer have sane terms like 14 years after first publication (which iirc was the original term in US before all the extensions to make it a multi-generational cash cow). If that was still the case, then piracy would perhaps have not taken off in such a big way in the first place, because the public would be more supportive of creators getting reimbursed for their content.
However, with the current BS terms, it is 'illegal' to watch ancient movies or cartoons (hello Disney!) or listen to decades-old songs (Sonny Bono act) without paying for the privilege. Even most individual countries cannot set terms as they wish thanks to the Berne convention which imposes a *minimum* of 50 years. So, the public starts to pirate due to this perceived unfairness; which is their only response since the politicians are bought & paid for by the entertainment industry.
As for 'ripping off GoT episodes', those are fairly recent and shouldn't be as justified - but the problem is that when everyone is accustomed to piracy due to eternal copyrights; then people no longer distinguish carefully about newer or older works.
How is it fair to compare advertising to selling physical goods, considering that it is so much easier to plug in an ad api for any developer who thinks he could make a few bucks off his hobbyist app?
I'm not at all surprised that a far lower percentage of the ad-supported devs make good money, a vast majority are probably those who saw some niche need and created a small app, maybe for themselves - then added in some advertising to get an easily acquired income stream. By contrast, those who actually have warehouses or tie-ups with stores to sell physical products have put in far more effort in creating their product, and probably would not do so without the expectation of a good RoI.
The article also talks of how IoT isn't very lucrative, not too surprising since its not even standardized across vendors (afaik) and needs more public awareness.
Slashdot Mirror
My view: If you are on the Internet, then you provide your data at your own expense. I run my own websites this way and it is working out just fine for me.
How much data do your websites have, and approximate number of people and other entities who might be interested in downloading it? Setting aside the point that you don't distinguish between public vs private data, or the method of consumption (web surfing vs scraping to sell to others); just try to calculate the bandwidth requirements if LinkedIn or any highly popular site were to actually do this.
> They're left without internet for days until this is fixed.
These are days which they will spend complaining about service, and some will be shopping around for other providers. If a significant fraction jump ship, the ISP is going to get a sudden motivation boost to start reading up on basic security practices that are essential in a highly connected world.
This is the first time I'm hearing of BrickerBot, but did the author release any news that this is a clever strike against the diabolical surveillance capabilities of intelligence agencies? It seems like a response by someone tired of armies of DDOS bots crowding the internet and a lack of action by popular ISPs to secure their own devices.
Sure, in future (or even at present) many governments will classify this as 'terrorism', as punishments are much easier to sell to public under terrorism laws regardless of actual intent or magnitude of the crime. But even so, it will remain far easier for black hats to actually effect positive change in getting rid of botnets - white hats who actually report bugs are quite likely to be just ignored, with a small chance of actually getting charged for intrusion instead. Think of the recent story of the 'hacker' who used Firebug to get cheaper train fare or something in Belarus or w/e ... the company just ended up calling the cops on him! Having such actions subject to stronger anti-terrorism laws, and as usual without proper exemptions for responsible reporting, will only end up with responsible white hat types having a harder time in fixing or reporting major issues that they come across.
India has enough population to fill most jobs :) But yes there is immigration for work in India too, from its neighbours - Nepalis for e.g. are commonly employed as guards in societies, they have a much better reputation for not sleeping on the job haha. IIRC there is significant illegal immigration from Bangladesh too, but not sure in which sectors.
> You can't train intelligence though. I'm sure India has an equivalent IQ to European populations but they have many "engineers" that really aren't suited to that field as well.
I'll disagree here to some extent. If someone grows up studying in an education system that encourages memorization and rote learning over critical thinking (a major failing imho in Indian education syllabus) then it will certainly have a stunting effect on his intelligence and reasoning capacity. A majority of those 'engineers' are basically human machines that would be good for repetitive tasks, but not as useful for comprehending complex systems and enhancing them.
There are of course many Indian engineers who are actually good, but most of them end up outside of the country to find better work. And then they get drowned out statistically by the hordes who don't really care or take initiatives to develop their skills, but are in it for the money and have suffered thru rote learning way too much as said above.
Well, its a general failing of most democratic countries that the less educated and lower earning groups reproduce more, get a larger voting share and then end up using a lot of social benefits. No politicians are going to discuss such issues and risk upsetting their vote banks, unless somehow they're lucky enough to have highly qualified demographics in their constituency.
Female infanticide is illegal in India btw, though it seems to go on in remote villages etc. Every now & then there are stories about gender based abortions in some village. Its not as common in metros, but I guess there should still be incidents but rarely reported - maybe city people are more circumspect about flouting laws and hence its harder for media to find out.
Even in a large metropolis like Mumbai, many colleges (think grad schools for B.S. equivalent) have a hard time attracting good or even decent teaching staff for technical positions. I'm not up to date with their current state, but they even had people just hired to fill in positions so there was a teacher present for the subject - people who would just 'explain' stuff from textbooks, and do a worse job than students just reading from it! Naturally this also means that most practical assignments (coding, EE circuits or w/e) aren't properly assessed, and many of them are exact copies of those given to previous class years. Which led to rampant copying of the previous year's journals with the majority not bothering to even try and understand the material :(
I actually think that teaching situation should change for the better with a slump in the job market. Previously, many qualified teachers left academia due to rise of IT as the pittance of a salary they were getting wasn't enough to retain them. By now, salaries in the better institutions have improved quite a bit (I hope actually, not sure lol) and there will be several decent candidates unable to get a job who may consider teaching as a career.
> amid growing fears that electronic devices can pose as homemade bombs.
Shouldn't TSA care more about homemade bombs that masquerade as electronics. If an electronic gadget wants to play make-believe, shouldn't that be covered by AI rights in future ... TSA trying to get in laws ahead of time?
Politicians love their vote banks, and will never promote good technologies or any progress that can lead to job loss in the short term. Nobody really tries to think beyond the timeframe that they will be up for re-election, so having a benefit in the medium / long term is simply irrelevant.
Unlike China which aims to be an AI superpower in next couple of decades, India will happily plod along trying to maximize unskilled jobs to make for nice employment statistics. Its very frustrating to see how much inefficiency exists in all areas that could be easily solved by automation or just better processes. Gas station attendants just to pump gas, crappy websites for most services so you end up having to visit physical offices, broken transportation system which guarantees lots of chauffeur employment as no one actually wants to drive if possible, .... and sadly, all parties are populists to some degree or other so there is no chance of things changing for the better due to policy. Most of the economic progress in India happens despite the administration rather than because of it :(
Over the past few years, traffic in India has actually become worse instead of improving, exacerbated by all the construction without corresponding commute improvements in cities like Mumbai.
However a robot is probably better suited to always looking in all 4 directions and tailgating 1m behind the vehicle in front continuously to avoid someone squeezing in line - so maybe AI drivers would be far more useful on Indian roads, where driving is otherwise an exhausting ordeal :( Programming it would be quite a task, and you probably want to have 360 deg camera coverage to guard against spurious accident claims, but on the plus side - it probably won't have to deal with speeds above 50 km/h within the city, as most roads are perpetually congested.
Well, for now its just a show - will be interesting if they actually attempt this when they're in power, since the 2 parties do keep on alternating at the reins quite often.
Hopefully Comcast gets split into 3 or more parts that compete in the same markets, and don't insist on TV connections to get deals that are better than standalone internet plans.
> Slashdot has never been good
It used to have higher quality discussions a LONG time back - before Digg became popular and /. at the time started going downhill, losing even more good members.
That's what I used to assume, that lack of DirectX support and having to port to OpenGL etc. made it much harder for games developers to support Linux etc. But nowadays so many games support OS X which is also not using DX (and is a *nix variant), but same games still have no support for *nix - so obviously there are other reasons that just porting difficulties :(
I was surprised to read this as I had no idea what is the relation between upgrading to Ryzen and having Windows 7,prompting me to do some research on it. Now I have to rethink about my thoughts to upgrade desktop to Ryzen soon :-( , thanks for the heads-up.
It turns out that AMD doesn't support Win 7 on Ryzen processors, which can cause a lot of problems with installation. There is a detailed guide on getting them working together that I skimmed thru - http://www.anandtech.com/show/11182/how-to-get-ryzen-working-on-windows-7-x64 . Although it seems doable and I have also played around with nLite to make custom OS install images in the past (with newer drivers & integrating patches etc.), it definitely doesn't seem like a good idea to jump through so many hoops just for an OS installation.
Most probably I'll just switch to Linux finally, though I will miss the ability to install any random old PC game when I feel like it. Luckily most of my gaming is limited to few titles like LoL and ESO which afaik do work well on Linux/Wine.
Having to tweak settings to get things 'just right' is vastly different from having to tweak a lot to get back to a usable state - which you would get from start with an earlier version of the same product. Not to mention, you can only do all this customization on your own system and not when you're doing tech support for friends/family :(
So you think LG needs a competitor to the Note 7 to grab the public spotlight?
Webkit can probably count all the mobile users who use the default browser as part of its user count. Similarly, maybe Firefox is the browser being used on ATM screens on mall info terminals, that would add a lot of 'users' who are actually clueless as to which browser is underlying their UX.
The biggest issue that is the terminal and inputs are both visible to the public. Maybe future ATMs can just have a VR headset that will only display the screen to the user, and have a virtual keyboard or other randomized unlock mechanism. One problem is making a non-contact headset as it has to be used by multiple people, and dealing with lice issues etc.
So, the article claims that 'number of crashes due to muted sirens (because of sound insulation) is on the rise'. That's a claim with no numbers behind it, what is this increase in accidents per year - 10? or 10,000? In the latter case, I can see a justification for this research with the (unfortunately not too safe) assumption that people do use their radios often. However it just as likely to be the first case of trivial increase, which might as well be due to higher traffic!, but is used to justify an expensive study for some PhDs.
If these realistic robots come in the market, they are going to be expensive and thus end up reducing reproduction for the segment of population that can actually afford children ... leaving the poorer have-nots to expand to a greater percentage of the population and need more social support. Since most countries are democracies (i.e., majority wins) - this will end up with people voting for state support to have the 'right' to own/rent such robots for cheap :)
> the researchers carried out robustness tests with various variables including the strength of IP enforcement, political factors, and economic development.
So they did take into account some factors like economic development, which makes this more interesting. However, why not analyze w.r.t. to the education levels of the area as well, since that would also affect the region's 'collective IQ' and probably indicate how many people are too poor to afford education, not to mention buying software. I searched the paper and 'education' as a search term only appeared twice, both times in references (so, its never mentioned in the actual text).
The researchers probably didn't consider the prevailing views of property rights or agreement with international treaties either. In some countries, its just more culturally acceptable to share software which makes it easier to average people to do so without feeling guilty. Other countries might have low income groups that are forced to buy licenses because their leadership got some incentives for IP treaties and are eager to show their enforcement to attract more FDI. Also, often countries with limited software exposure don't even know about good alternatives so its basically, either pirate or buy what everyone else uses.
That's when they actually want to implement something. This could be just a diversion while they erode rights in some other area :-)
The idea of having a mandatory requirement of using online ids and removing anonymity from the Internet isn't too bright, and also opens up a gigantic single point of failure with the government login / authentication systems.
However, I'm more interested in whether any government at all allows third parties to use their ids for third party authentication, maybe something like having an OpenId server support like how Google, Facebook etc. logins can be used as the primary login on some other sites. This would potentially allow for someone who cares about 'fake reviews' so much, to allow people to authenticate using their presumably properly vetted govt id. Then, it would be up to that individual site to choose whether it should also allow other account types, whether using free email or their own site based solution etc. This makes it feasible to mark reviews that are from 'trusted sources' (trust as in, person has a verifiable identity and he can't just discard it for a new one easily) while allowing other reviews or even disabling that if desired.
I could see this as being actually very useful for certain scenarios, specifically thinking of the constant and currently-insoluble problem of trolls in online games. Say that Blizzard as a new MMO with Server A only allowing logins using trusted credentials. A user with govt id makes an account, chooses a nickname and starts playing as usual. But if he is banned for cheating or trolling, he can't just make a new account, as governments don't exactly let you have a different DL # or passport # without a really good reason. Those who don't want to or are unable to use a trusted id, would instead get to play on Server B which would not be used for official tournaments etc.
This kind of approach would see governments leverage their existing identity verification as a supporting mechanism to enable opt-in usage by commercial entities. Which also means that it will only be used when it makes sense and not just a new mechanism to track everyone's actions online. Sure, if Amazon.eu decides that fake reviews are a grave issue and only verified users can post them, that's fine - people can still leave anonymous comments elsewhere, and others will use whichever has more useful information. Certainly, besides the 'fake' comments there may be honest commenters who simply don't want to get sued for strong language or w/e.
So, back to my question - are there OpenId or similar authentication endpoints that EU or any of its member states make available currently?
Copyright is completely insane anyway, and this has desensitized many people from breaking it at will when they can. We no longer have sane terms like 14 years after first publication (which iirc was the original term in US before all the extensions to make it a multi-generational cash cow). If that was still the case, then piracy would perhaps have not taken off in such a big way in the first place, because the public would be more supportive of creators getting reimbursed for their content.
However, with the current BS terms, it is 'illegal' to watch ancient movies or cartoons (hello Disney!) or listen to decades-old songs (Sonny Bono act) without paying for the privilege. Even most individual countries cannot set terms as they wish thanks to the Berne convention which imposes a *minimum* of 50 years. So, the public starts to pirate due to this perceived unfairness; which is their only response since the politicians are bought & paid for by the entertainment industry.
As for 'ripping off GoT episodes', those are fairly recent and shouldn't be as justified - but the problem is that when everyone is accustomed to piracy due to eternal copyrights; then people no longer distinguish carefully about newer or older works.
How is it fair to compare advertising to selling physical goods, considering that it is so much easier to plug in an ad api for any developer who thinks he could make a few bucks off his hobbyist app?
I'm not at all surprised that a far lower percentage of the ad-supported devs make good money, a vast majority are probably those who saw some niche need and created a small app, maybe for themselves - then added in some advertising to get an easily acquired income stream. By contrast, those who actually have warehouses or tie-ups with stores to sell physical products have put in far more effort in creating their product, and probably would not do so without the expectation of a good RoI.
The article also talks of how IoT isn't very lucrative, not too surprising since its not even standardized across vendors (afaik) and needs more public awareness.