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In a press conference, researchers claimed a sarcophagus dating from the 3rd century found in what is now Germany contained the body of a Roman buried alongside perfume, makeup, and a hand mirror. […]
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Today, our friends at TechBargains have assembled an absolutely killer list of deals. Ranging from discounted Apple AirPods to a super cheap MicroSDXC card to awesome VR bargains, there’s something in today’s list […]
The post Geek Deals: Oculus Marvel Powers VR Release Today, 128GB MicroSDXC under $30 appeared first on Geek.com.
Unknown midterm election attackers that Facebook has removed were hosting a political rally next month that they pinned on Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other organizations, according to third-party event websites that scraped the now-removed Facebook events.
Facebook provided an image of the deleted “No Unite The Right 2 – DC” event as part of its announcement today that merely showed its image, title, date, location, and that a Page called “Resisters” was one of the hosts of the propaganda event. But a scraped event description TechCrunch discovered on Rallyist provides deeper insight into the disruptive information operation. Facebook won’t name the source of the election interference but said the attackers shared a connection through a single account to the Russian Internet Research Agency responsible for 2016 presidential election interference on Facebook.
“We are calling all anti-fascists and people of good conscience to participate in international days of action August 10 through August 12 and a mass mobilization in Washington DC” the description reads. “We occupy ICE offices, confront racism, antisemitism, islamaphobia, xenophobia, and white nationalism. We will be in the streets on August 10-12, and we intend to win.”
But what’s especially alarming is how the event description concludes [emphasis mine]. “Signed, Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter D.C., Charlottesville Summer of Resistance Welcoming Committee Agency, Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective, Crushing Colonialism, D.C. Antifascist Collective, Future is Feminists, Holler Network, Hoods4Justice, The International, Capoeira Angola Foundation-DC (FICA-DC), Libertarian Socialist Caucus Of The DSA, March For Racial Justice, Maryland Antifa, One People’s Project, Resist This (Former DisruptJ20), Rising Tide North America, Smash Racism D.C., Showing Up for Racial Justice Charlottesville, Suffolk County DSA, Workers Against Racism, 350 DC.”
It’s unclear if the attackers effectively ‘forged’ the signature of these groups, or duped them into signing off on supporting the rally. The attackers were potentially trying to blame these groups for the rallies in an effort to further sow discord in the political landscape.
Facebook initially provided no comment about the description of the event, but then confirmed that it was originally created by the attackers’ since-deleted Page ‘Resisters’ which then later added several legitimate organizations as co-hosts: Millenials For Revolution, March To Confront White Supremacy – from Charlottesville to DC, Workers Against Racism – WAR, Smash Racism DC, and Tune Out Trump. Strangely, those co-hosts have relaunched a new event with a similar name “Nazis Not Welcome No Unite The Right 2” and similar description including a similar but expanded “Signed by” list, and now include BLM Charlottesville and D.C. as co-hosts.
Meanwhile, Facebook also shared an image of a November 4th, 2017 “Trump Nightmare Must End – NYC” event, also without details of the description. A scraped version on the site AllEvents shows the description as “History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late. There is only one force that can stop this nightmare: we, the people, acting together. On November 4 we’ll take to the streets demanding that Trump regime must go! We meet at Times Square (42 St and Broadway) at 2 PM!”
The co-opting of left-wing messaging and protests is a powerful strategy for the election interferers. It could provide the right-wing with excuses to claim that all left-wing protest against Trump or white supremacy is actually foreign governments or hackers, and that those protests don’t represent the views of real Americans.
Thanks to global warming, we may not need to suffer through arctic office conditions much longer. In the meantime, ThinkGeek is taking the mind-over-matter approach with its Star Trek: The Original Series Phaser-Controlled […]
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The twin stick shooter genre isn’t as prevalent as it used to be but we still see companies keeping it alive with new releases. One such company is Blindflug Studios with its title, […]
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The struggle to understand the earliest stages of life on Earth is real. Scientists have long wondered how the complex process of using genetic code to “translate” DNA-based information into proteins arose billions […]
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Aerial photography was first practiced in the late 1850s. But the technique has really taken off (pun intended) since the commercialization of drones. And it’s not limited to cartography, movie production, or surveillance, […]
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Facebook just confirmed that an unknown group is waging a propaganda war against the US midterm elections. Using images and event invites to rallies in Washington next week, the attackers are attempting to sow discord into the American political landscape. Facebook has not identified whether Russian intelligence organizations were responsible like with their 2016 election attacks, as this operation was more sophisticated than previous strategies Facebook has implemented safeguards to thwart. For now, Facebook has removed 32 pages and accounts associated with the group, including “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters”, some of which shared psychedelic memes in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with receptive users.
Last week I wrote that Facebook had dodged the question of whether it had evidence of attacks on the midterm elections. Now we have the answer: yes.
You can see a sample of the images used in the attacks below. For more info, read our full-story on these attacks on democracy.
In a newsroom post Tuesday, Facebook revealed that it has detected evidence of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” designed to influence U.S. politics on its platform.
According to Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, the company first identified the activity two weeks ago. So far, the activity encompasses eight Facebook Pages, 17 profiles and seven accounts on Instagram. Facebook stated that the activity “violate[s] our ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior” though so far is unable to attribute the activity to Russia or any other entity with an interest in influencing U.S. politics.
Facebook has been in contact with Congress and law enforcement about the discovery, which suggests that social platforms should expect to again detect the kind of coordinated disinformation campaigns targeted the 2016 election around U.S. midterm elections this November. The company stated that more than 290,000 accounts followed one of the Pages it identified. The Pages in question were created starting in March 2017 and most recently in May of 2018.
The most popular Pages displaying this kind of behavior were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.” The other Pages had less than 10 followers each and the Instagram account did not have any followers. That does not necessarily discount other kinds of potential activity like commenting and messaging.
According to Facebook, “They ran about 150 ads for approximately $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in US and Canadian dollars” between April 2017 and June of this year. The Pages also made around 30 Facebook events.
As Gleicher writes in the post, these accounts are operating more cautiously than the infamous Russian disinformation accounts around the 2016 election.
“For example they used VPNs and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort. Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below. But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here.”
When it comes to gaming keyboards, most players prefer the tactile response of a mechanical keyboard. One of the most respected companies making such devices is Logitech. During this year’s E3, I got […]
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In September of 2013, Jason Citron hopped on to the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage to pitch Fates Forever, a multiplayer online battle arena game for the iPad. Now, five years later, Citron is gearing up to join us once again on the Disrupt stage to discuss the stellar growth of Discord.
Though Fates Forever had all the components to be a great mobile game, users simply never took much interest. The company struggled to monetize, and like any good startup, the team began to reassess its own situation.
The conversation turned to communication, where the space contained a few players with lack-luster products.
“Can we make a 10X project?,” said CMO Eros Resmini, relaying the tale of the company’s pivot to TechCrunch. “Low-friction usage, no renting servers, beautiful design we took from mobile.”
That’s how Discord was born. The platform launched in 2016, and has since grown to 90 million registered users, and has raised nearly $80 million in funding.
Coming from the publishing side, the Discord team had a keen awareness of what gamers want and need: a clean, secure communications platform. Since launch, the team has launched features that let game developers integrate Discord chat into their own games, as well as video-chat and screen-sharing.
But the progress has not been without discord. The company shut down several servers associated with the alt-right for violating the terms of service, bringing Discord to the center of the on-going conversation around censorship and political bias.
That said, Discord has seemed to find its stride, forming partnerships with various esports organizations for verified servers.
There is plenty to discuss with Jason Citron at Disrupt SF, and we hope you’ll join us to check out the conversation live.
The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the early-bird rate until August 1 here.
We’ve had 20 years with this guy. That’s right; twenty years. Two zero. Try not feeling old when you read that. Today is also a special day for Harry Potter fans. It’s Harry Potter’s […]
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“When Stars Collide” sounds like the title track of Barry Manilow’s latest album. Unfortunately, Barry hasn’t released a single since 2012. But astronomers did make the first definitive detection of a radioactive molecule […]
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Facebook’s plan to take on Musical.ly may involve more than just its own take on a lip syncing feature. It appears to also be working on something called “Talent Show,” which would allow users to compete by singing popular songs then submitting their audition for review. The feature isn’t live, but was rather uncovered in the Facebook app’s code by researcher Jane Manchun Wong.
Wong has a history of uncovering yet-to-launch features or those still in testing through the use of reverse engineering tactics. She has previously spotted things like Instagram’s first time-well-spent feature, Lyft’s unlaunched bike or scooter program, Instagram’s upgraded two-factor authentication system, new ways of displaying IGTV videos, and more.
In the case of “Talent Show,” Wong has discovered an interface that allow users to pick a song from a list of popular tunes, which is then followed by a way to start recording yourself singing the track in question.
The app’s code also makes references to the feature as “Talent Show” and includes mentions of elements like “audition” and “stage.” The auditions are loaded as videos, Wong notes.
The development would offer Facebook another way to take advantage of its more recently acquired music licensing rights. The company, starting last year, began forging deals with all the record labels – including the majors like Universal, Sony, and Warner, and several others, as well as the indies. The deals mean Facebook won’t have to take down users’ videos with copyrighted music playing in the background, for starters. But the company also said it planned to leverage its rights to develop new “music-based” products going forward.
One of those is Lip Sync Live, an almost direct copy of the popular tween-and-teen lip syncing app Musical.ly, which today has 200+ million registered users and 60 million actives. Like Musical.ly, Lip Sync Live – which is still in testing – a way to broadcast your lip sync recordings to friends.
Talent Show (assuming the code analysis is on point) seems to take a different angle. Instead of lip syncing for fun, people are actually singing and competing. However, Wong notes that the feature may be restricted to Facebook Pages, similar to Facebook’s new trivia game show feature. That is, it may be offered to partners who are building out games on their own pages, and are using Facebook’s platform to do so.
Wong also confirms that Talent Show sources the music via the new Rights Manager, used by the record labels to track copyrighted tracks’ usage on Facebook.
Over the years, Facebook has taken aim at any other social app that gathers a following and then reproduces its own version of the app’s key draw – as it did with Stories, Snapchat’s biggest differentiator. It’s no surprise, then, that it now has Musical.ly in its sights, with regard to lip syncing. And with the Talent Show feature, it could be trying to challenge YouTube as the place where new singing talent can be discovered, too.
If Facebook offers a comment, we’ll update this post.
For decades movie theaters have tried weird gimmicks to stave off rival forms media. Sure in 1950s you could watch stuff at home on your TV, but only True Cinema could offer experiences […]
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Remember that sweet, sweet movie called Avengers: Infinity War? Remember when a superhero movie didn’t just wholly dismantle you in a million pieces? We, at Geek, had a LOT of feeling about Avengers: […]
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Back in the days of geek prehistory, a T-shirt was a signal to the world around you that you cared about your nerdy pursuits enough to fly them like a flag. Companies like […]
The post T-Shirt Tuesday: The Best My Hero Academia Shirts appeared first on Geek.com.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new method of fabricating battery electrodes using 3D printing. In collaboration with the Missouri University of Science and Technology, the team can 3D print a […]
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Everything old is new again—even that 2005 portable karaoke machine gathering dust in the back room of the Goodwill. Self-described “artist” and programmer Brett Neese proved just that by stuffing a Raspberry Pi […]
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It’s a great time to be a Sailor Moon fan. In addition to the amazing re-releases of the new official Sailor Moon series dub, Viz is bringing Sailor Moon SuperS: The Movie to […]
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Iron Fist showed off some footage of Season Two at Comic Con, and it surprised pretty much everyone in attendance. It looked good. The fighting was reportedly fluid and competently choreographed, which is really […]
The post MCU News: Iron Fist Gets a Trailer, Netflix Spinoffs, Original Mjolnir & More appeared first on Geek.com.
We’ve said it time and time again but DC supervillain Black Manta just doesn’t get the respect he deserves. He’s got an awesome look. His racially charged origin story is brimming with potential. And […]
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The Angelville storyline on Preacher hasn’t quite lived up to what it was in the comics. It’s certainly come a long way since the first episode, but it still feels like it’s just running […]
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A meaty first report by the UK parliamentary committee that’s been running an inquiry into online disinformation since fall 2017, including scrutinizing how people’s personal information was harvested from social media services like Facebook and used for voter profiling and the targeting of campaign ads — and whose chair, Damian Collins — is a member of the UK’s governing Conservative Party, contains one curious omission.
Among the many issues the report raises are privacy concerns related to a campaign app developed by a company called uCampaign — which, much like the scandal-hit (and now seemingly defunct) Cambridge Analytica, worked for both the Ted Cruz for President and the Donald J Trump for President campaigns — although in its case it developed apps for campaigns to distribute to supporters to gamify digital campaigning via a tool which makes it easy for them to ‘socialize’ (i.e. share with contacts) campaign messaging and materials.
The committee makes a passing reference to uCampaign in a section of its report which deals with “data targeting” and the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal, specifically — where it writes [emphasis ours]:
There have been data privacy concerns raised about another campaign tool used, but not developed, by AIQ [Aggregate IQ: Aka, a Canadian data firm which worked for Cambridge Analytica and which remains under investigation by privacy watchdogs in the UK, Canada and British Columbia]. A company called uCampaign has a mobile App that employs gamification strategy to political campaigns. Users can win points for campaign activity, like sending text messages and emails to their contacts and friends. The App was used in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and by Vote Leave during the Brexit Referendum.
The developer of the uCampaign app, Vladyslav Seryakov, is an Eastern Ukrainian military veteran who trained in computer programming at two elite Soviet universities in the late 1980s. The main investor in uCampaign is the American hedge fund magnate Sean Fieler, who is a close associate of the billionaire backer of SCL and Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer. An article published by Business Insider on 7 November 2016 states: “If users download the App and agree to share their address books, including phone numbers and emails, the App then shoots the data [to] a third-party vendor, which looks for matches to existing voter file information that could give clues as to what may motivate that specific voter. Thomas Peters, whose company uCampaign created Trump’s app, said the App is “going absolutely granular”, and will—with permission—send different A/B tested messages to users’ contacts based on existing information.”
What’s curious is that Collins’ Conservative Party also has a campaign app built by — you guessed it! — uCampaign, which the party launched in September 2017.
While there is nothing on the iOS and Android app store listings for the Conservative Campaigner app to identify uCampaign as its developer, if you go directly to uCampaign’s website the company lists the UK Conservative Party as one of it’s clients — alongside other rightwing political parties and organizations such as the (pro-gun) National Rife Association; the (anti-abortion) SBA List; and indeed the UK’s Vote Leave (Brexit) campaign, (the latter) as the DCMS report highlights.
uCampaign’s involvement as the developer of the Conservative Campaigner app was also confirmed to us (in June) by the (now former) deputy director & head of digital strategy for The Conservative Party, Anthony Hind, who — according to his LinkedIn profile — also headed up the party’s online marketing, between mid 2015 and, well, the middle of this month.
But while, in his initial response to us, Hind readily confirmed he was personally involved in the procurement of uCampaign as the developer of the Conservative Campaigner app, he failed to respond to any of our subsequent questions — including when we raised specific concerns about the privacy policy that the app had been using, prior to May 23 (just before the EU’s new GDPR data protection framework came into force on May 25 — a time when many apps updated their privacy polices as a compliance precaution related to the new data protection standard).
Since May 23 the privacy policy for the Conservative Campaigner app has pointed to the Conservative Party’s own privacy policy. However prior to May 23 the privacy policy was a literal (branded) copy-paste of uCampaign’s own privacy policy. (We know because we were tipped to it by a source — and verified this for ourselves.)
Here’s a screengrab of the exchange we had with Hind over LinkedIn — including his sole reply:
What looks rather awkward for the Conservative Party — and indeed for Collins, as DCMS committee chair, given the valid “privacy concerns” his report has raised around the use (and misuse/abuse) of data for political targeting — is that uCampaign’s privacy policy has, shall we say, a verrrrry ‘liberal’ attitude to sharing the personal data of app users (and indeed of any of their contacts it would have been able to harvest from their devices).
Here’s a taster of the data-sharing permissions this U.S. company affords itself over its clients’ users’ data [emphasis ours] — according to its own privacy policy:
CAMPAIGNS YOU SUPPORT AND ALIGNED ORGANIZATIONS
We will share your Personal Information with third party campaigns selected by you via the Platform. In addition, we may share your Personal Information with other organizations, groups, causes, campaigns, political organizations, and our clients that we believe have similar viewpoints, principles or objectives as us.
UCAMPAIGN FRIENDS
We may share your Personal Information with other users of the Platform, for example if they connect their address book to our services, or if they invite you to use our services via the Platform.
BUSINESS TRANSFERS
We may share your Personal Information with other entities affiliated with us for internal reasons, primarily for business and operational purposes. uCampaign, or any of its assets, including the Platform, may be sold, or other transactions may occur in which your Personal Information is one of the business assets of the transaction. In such case, your Personal Information may be transferred.
To spell it out, the Conservative Party paid for a campaign app that could, according to the privacy policy it had in place prior to May 23, have shared supporters’ personal data with organizations that uCampaign’s owners — who the DCMS committee states have close links to “the billionaire backer of SCL and Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer” — view as ideologically affiliated with their objectives, whatsoever those entities might be.
Funnily enough, the Conservative Party appears to have tried to scrub out some of its own public links to uCampaign — such as changing link for the developer website on the app listing page for the Conservative Campaigner app to the Conservative Party’s own website (whereas before it linked through to uCampaign’s own website).
As the veteran UK satirical magazine Private Eye might well say — just fancy that!
One of the listed “features” of the Conservative Campaigner app urges Tory supporters to: “Invite your friends to join you on the app!”. If any did, their friends’ data would have been sucked up by uCampaign too to further causes of its choosing.
The version of the Campaigner app listed on Google Play is reported to have 1,000+ installs (iOS does not offer any download ranges for apps) — which, while not in itself a very large number, could represent exponentially larger amounts of personal data should users’ contacts have been synced with the app where they would have been harvested by uCampaign.
We did flag the link between uCampaign and the Conservative Campaigner app directly to the DCMS committee’s press office — ahead of the publication of its report, on June 12, when we wrote:
The matter of concern here is that the Conservative party could itself be an unwitting a source of targeting data for rival political organizations, via an app that appears to offer almost no limits on what can be done with personal data.Prior to the last update of the Conservative Campaigner app the privacy policy was simply the boilerplate uCampaign T&Cs — which allow the developer to share app users personal info (and phone book contacts) with “other organizations, groups, causes, campaigns, political organizations, and our clients that we believe have similar viewpoints, principles or objectives as us”.That’s incredibly wide-ranging.So every user’s phone book contacts (potentially hundreds of individuals per user) could have been passed to multiple unidentified organizations without people’s knowledge or consent. (Other uCampaign apps have been built for the NRA, and for anti-abortion organizations, for example.)uCampaign‘s T&Cs are here: https://ucampaignapp.com/privacy.html Even the current T&Cs allow for sharing with US suppliers.Given the committee’s very public concerns about access to people’s data for political targeting purposes I am keen to know whether Mr Collins has any concerns about the use of uCampaign‘s app infrastructure by the Conservative party?And also whether he is concerned about the lack of a robust data protection policy by his own party to ensure that valuable membership data is not simply passed around to unknown and unconnected entities — perhaps abroad, perhaps not — with zero regard for or accountability to the individuals in question.
Unfortunately this email (and a follow up) to the DCMS committee, asking for a response from Collins to our privacy concerns, went unanswered.
It’s also worth noting that the Conservative Party’s own privacy policy (which it’s now using for its Campaigner app) is pretty generous vis-a-vis the permissions it’s granting itself over sharing supporters’ data — including stating that it shares data with:
The UK’s data watchdog recently found fault with pretty much all of the UK political parties’ when it comes to handling of voter data — saying it had sent warning letters to 11 political parties and also issued notices compelling them to agree to audits of their data protection practices.
Safe to say, it’s not just private companies that have been sticking their hand in the personal data cookie jar in recent years — the political establishment is facing plenty of awkward questions as regulators unpick where and how data has been flowing.
This is also not the only awkward story re: data privacy concerns related to a Tory political app. Earlier this year the then-minister in charge of the digital brief, Matt Hancock, launched a self-promotional, self-branded app intended for his constituents to keep up with news about Matt Hancock MP.
However the developers of the app (Disciple Media) initially uploaded the wrong privacy policy — and were forced to issue an amended version which did not grant the minister such non-specific and oddly toned rights to users’ data — such as that the app “may disclose your personal information to the Publisher, the Publisher’s management company, agent, rights image company, the Publisher’s record label or publisher (as applicable) and any other third parties, for use in conjunction with additional user promotions or offers they may run from time to time or in relation to the sale of other goods and services”.
Of course the Matt Hancock App was a PR initiative of (and funded by) an individual Conservative MP — rather than a formal campaign tool paid for by the Conservative Party and intended for use by hundreds (or even thousands) of Party activists for use during election campaigns.
So while there are two issues of Tory-related privacy concern here, only one loops back to the Conservative Party political organization itself.
They say don’t judge a book by its cover, and honestly that’s a really good policy usually. But when comics have gorgeous covers it’s hard not to imagine the wonderful story that lies within a […]
The post Variant Covers to Grab This Week (8/1/18) appeared first on Geek.com.
Update: the Guardians of the Galaxy cast (Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Karen Gillan, Sean Gunn, Pom Klementieff, and Michael Rooker) has just released this statement. They “fully […]
The post James Gunn Fired from Guardians 3 Over 10-Year-Old Tweets appeared first on Geek.com.
Alas, cloudy skies (and lazy nights) hampered my attempts to spot Friday’s Micro Blood Moon eclipse from my window in Edinburgh. Luckily, folks around the globe (and galaxy) shared snaps of 2018’s second […]
The post See Micro Blood Moon Eclipse Through the Internet’s Eyes appeared first on Geek.com.
After the smash success of last year’s Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, it was only a matter of time before Activision went back to Spyro The Dragon, that other former Sony exclusive PlayStation […]
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Fabric, a personal journaling app that emerged from Y Combinator’s 2016 batch of startups, is relaunching itself as a Facebook alternative. The app is giving itself a makeover in the wake of Facebook’s closure of the Moves location tracker, by offering its own tool to record your activities, photos, memories and other moments shared with friends and family. But unlike on Facebook, everything in Fabric is private by default and data isn’t shared with marketers.
Instead, the startup hopes to build something users will eventually pay for, via premium features or subscriptions.
The idea for the startup came from two people who helped create Facebook’s core features.
Co-founders Arun Vijayvergiya and Nikolay Valtchanov worked for several years at the social network, where Vijayvergiya built the product that would later become Facebook Timeline at an internal hackathon. He also worked on products like Friendship Pages, Year in Review and On This Day, while Valtchanov developed integrations between Facebook and fitness applications.
After leaving Facebook, both were inspired to work on Fabric because of their interest in personal journaling – and that became the key focus for the original version of the Fabric app. But while other journaling apps may offer a blank space for recording thoughts, Fabric automates the process by pulling in photos, posts from elsewhere on social media, places you visited, and more, and put those on its map interface.
The longer-term goal is that Fabric users will be able to look back across their personal history to answer any kind of question about where they had been, what they did, and who they were with – but in a more private environment than what’s available on Facebook.
Facebook could have built something similar, but its focus has been more on how personal profile data could be useful to advertisers.
Despite numerous check-ins, posts where you tagged friends, shared photos and more, there’s still not an easy way to ask Facebook about that great Indian restaurant you tried last March, or who was on that group beach trip with you a few years ago, for example. At best, Facebook offers memory flashbacks through its On This Day feature (now available at any time via the Memories tab), or round-ups and collages that appear at various times throughout the year.
As a search engine for your own memories, it’s not that great.
What’s New
This is where Fabric comes in. It will automatically record your activities, checking you in to places you visit, which you can then choose to add friends to.
While the idea of automatic location gathering may turn a good number of users off, the difference is that Fabric’s data collection is meant for your eyes only, unless you explicitly choose to share something with friends.
Fabric doesn’t use third-party software for its location system – it’s written in-house, so the data is never touched by a third-party. It also uses industry standard encryption for data transfer and storage, and login information is stored in a separate system from the rest of your data as an added precaution.
Notably, Fabric doesn’t plan to generate revenue by selling data or offering it to advertisers for targeting purposes. Instead, the company hopes users will eventually pay for its product – perhaps as a subscription or through premium upgrades. (It’s not doing this yet, however.)
“The whole motivation behind Fabric is that many meaningful parts of your life do not belong in the public sphere,” explains Vijayvergiya. “In order to be able to capture these moments, user trust is essential and is something we have baked into our company culture. Internally, we refer to ourselves as a ‘private-first’ company. Everything on Fabric is private by default. You have to choose to include friends in your moments. We don’t share any data with marketers, and we don’t intend to share personally identifiable information with advertisers,” he says.
Since its 2016 release, Fabric has been downloaded 70,000 times by users across 117 countries, and has seen 112 million automatic check-ins.
The new version of the app has been redesigned to be something users engage with more often, as opposed to the more passive journaling app it was before.
The app now offers an outline of your activities, which it also calls Timeline. Here, you can add people, photos and memorable anecdotes to those automated entries. You can jump back to any day to see your history with any person or place that appears on the Timeline.
You can also turn any moment into one you collaborate on with friends, by allowing others to add photos and comments. That is, instead of broad post to a group of so-called “friends” on Facebook, you share the moment with those who really matter. This isn’t all that different from how people use private messaging apps and group chats today – in order to share things with people that aren’t necessarily meant for everyone to see.
In addition, Fabric allows you to add your friends to the app, so you can be automatically tagged when you both spend time together in the real world. This also simplifies sharing because you won’t have to think about which posts should be shared with which audience.
For instance, Vijayvergiya says, “this means you can add your mom as a friend, and only share with her the moments you spend together in the same place.”
The most compelling feature in the updated app may not be check-ins or sharing, but search.
In Fabric, you can now search for past events in your life similar to how you search the web. That is, you could type in “restaurant rome 2017” or “camila los angeles birthday” and find the matching posts, Vijayvergiya suggests. And because you can import your Facebook, Instagram, and Camera Roll to Fabric, it’s now offering the search engine that Facebook itself forgot to build. (You can import your Facebook Moves history, too, ahead of its shutdown.)
Fabric’s search will also be available on the desktop web, where it’s currently in beta.
Fabric’s real challenger, as it turns out, may not be Facebook, though. It’s Google Photos.
Because of advances in image recognition technology, Google Photos (and some other photo apps) have built advanced search capabilities that let you pull up not places, things, people, and more, using data recognized in the image itself. Users can also share those photos with others, collaborate on albums, and leave notes as comments.
The difference is that Fabric offers import from a variety of sources and encourages journaling. But that may not be enough to attract a large user base, especially when automatic check-ins rely on the app’s use of background location which has some impact on battery life.
Fabric is a free download on iOS.
Move over, graphene: There’s a new two-dimensional wonder material in town. An international team of scientists successfully extracted hematene from ordinary iron ore. A mere three atoms thick, hematene is considered to have […]
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Love is a burning thing and it makes a fiery ring. Black holes, however, do not. New research disproves the so-called “firewall” theory, which suggests the ring of fire around a supernova would […]
The post Scientists Poke Holes in Supernova ‘Firewall’ Theory appeared first on Geek.com.
Twitter is partnering with two groups of academic researchers to figure out how to measure the health of conversations happening on the platform.
It’s all part of the company’s continuing long game for social relevance. Despite the fact that it lost 1 million users, the company also posted $100 million in profit during last week’s earnings. But neither of these numbers seem to change the fact that Twitter needs to make some adjustments to the way people use the social network.
In March, Twitter called for proposals from researchers to see how they might approach the issue of analytics around the types and manner of conversations on Twitter. These proposals were thoroughly reviewed by Twitter employees from a variety of departments at the company, including Engineering, Product, Machine Learning, Data Science, Trust and Safety, Legal and Research. Twitter also says that the review committee was organized to include representatives from diverse groups across the company. (Reminder: less than 10 percent of Twitter employees are diverse, so it was likely a busy few months for those people.)
Well, the review process is now over and Twitter has decided on two research teams, who will focus on two different issues.
The first team, led by scholars from Leiden University, will look at how echo chambers form and their effect, as well as the difference between incivility and intolerance within Twitter conversations. The team — including Dr. Rebekah Tromble, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University, Dr. Michael Meffert at Leiden, Dr. Patricia Rossini and Dr. Jennifer Stromer-Galley at Syracuse University, Dr. Nava Tintarev at Delft University of Technology, and Dr. Dirk Hovy at Bocconi University — has found in past research that echo chambers can cause hostility and promote resentment towards those not having the same conversation.
The first set of metrics this team is focusing on will look at the extent to which people acknowledge and engage with diverse viewpoints on Twitter. The second set of metrics will look at the difference between incivility and intolerance. Past research by this group shows that incivility can serve important functions in political dialogue, though not without spurring its own problems. On the other hand, intolerant speech (hate speech, racism, xenophobia) threatens our democracy. The team plans to develop algorithms that will distinguish between more useful incivility and the very useless intolerance we encounter daily on Twitter.
The second research project will be led by Professor Miles Hewstone and John Gallacher at The University of Oxford, in partnership with Dr. Marc Heerdink at the University of Amsterdam. The work will be an extension of Prof. Hewstone’s long standing work to study intergroup conflict. The current findings from this study show that when conversation contains more positive sentiments, cooperative emotions, and more complex thinking and reasoning from multiple perspectives, prejudice will go down and the quality of the relationships will go up.
“As part of the project, text classifiers for language commonly associated with positive sentiment, cooperative emotionality, and integrative complexity will be adapted to the structure of communication on Twitter,” the Twitter blog says.
Just like any social network, Twitter provides scaffolding. Users, on the other hand, construct buildings made of dialogue. How exactly Twitter will be able to adjust the scaffolding to produce more useful, empathetic conversations is still a mystery. But bringing in the academic community to help is an excellent next step.
The first three episodes of Hulu’s Castle Rock hit the streaming service on Wednesday. Rather than adapt one or even a few Stephen King novels, it’s an original story set in the world of King’s […]
The post What Castle Rock Gets Right, and Not As Right, About Adapting Stephen King appeared first on Geek.com.
Greek mythology isn’t the first place I’d look for inspiration when building a robot. But engineers are increasingly relying on folklore to create the next big thing in automation. Germany’s University of Bonn […]
The post Centaur-Inspired Robots Are Next Generation of Disaster Response appeared first on Geek.com.
A UK parliamentary committee which has been running a multi-month investigation into the impact of online disinformation on political campaigning — and on democracy itself — has published a preliminary report highlighting what it describes as “significant concerns” over the risks to “shared values and the integrity of our democratic institutions”.
It’s calling for “urgent action” from government and regulatory bodies to “build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system”.
“We are faced with a crisis concerning the use of data, the manipulation of our data, and the targeting of pernicious views,” the DCMS committee warns. “In particular, we heard evidence of Russian state-sponsored attempts to influence elections in the US and the UK through social media, of the efforts of private companies to do the same, and of law-breaking by certain Leave campaign groups in the UK’s EU Referendum in their use of social media.”
The inquiry, which was conceived of and begun in the previous UK parliament — before relaunching in fall 2017, after the June General Election — has found itself slap-bang in the middle of one of the major scandals of the modern era, as revelations about the extent of disinformation and social media data misuse and allegations of election fiddling and law bending have piled up thick and fast, especially in recent months (albeit, concerns have been rising steadily, ever since the 2016 US presidential election and revelations about the cottage industry of fake news purveyors spun up to feed US voters, in addition to Kremlin troll farm activity.)
Yet the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse saga (which snowballed into a major global scandal this March) is just one of the strands of the committee’s inquiry. Hence they’ve opted to publish multiple reports — the initial one recommending urgent actions for the government and regulators, which will be followed by another report covering the inquiry’s “wider terms of reference” and including a closer look at the role of advertising. (The latter report is slated to land in the fall.)
For now, the committee is suggesting “principle-based recommendations” designed to be “sufficiently adaptive to deal with fast-moving technological developments”.
Among a very long list of recommendations are:
How the government will respond to the committee’s laundry list of recommendations for cleaning up online political advertising remains to be seen, although the issue of Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns was at least raised publicly by the prime minister last year. Although Theresa May has been rather quieter on revelations about EU referendum-related data misuse and election law breaches.
While the committee uses the term “tech companies” throughout its report to refer to multiple companies, Facebook specifically comes in for some excoriating criticism, with the committee accusing the company of misleading by omission and actively seeking to impede the progress of the inquiry.
It also reiterates its call — for something like the fifth time at this point — for founder Mark Zuckerberg to give evidence. Facebook has provided several witnesses to the committee, including its CTO, but Zuckerberg has declined its requests he appear, even via video link. (And even though he did find time for a couple of hours in front of the EU parliament back in May.)
The committee writes:
We undertook fifteen exchanges of correspondence with Facebook, and two oral evidence sessions, in an attempt to elicit some of the information that they held, including information regarding users’ data, foreign interference and details of the so-called ‘dark ads’ that had reached Facebook users. Facebook consistently responded to questions by giving the minimal amount of information possible, and routinely failed to offer information relevant to the inquiry, unless it had been expressly asked for. It provided witnesses who have been unwilling or unable to give full answers to the Committee’s questions. This is the reason why the Committee has continued to press for Mark Zuckerberg to appear as a witness as, by his own admission, he is the person who decides what happens at Facebook.
…
Tech companies are not passive platforms on which users input content; they reward what is most engaging, because engagement is part of their business model and their growth strategy. They have profited greatly by using this model. This manipulation of the sites by tech companies must be made more transparent. Facebook has all of the information. Those outside of the company have none of it, unless Facebook chooses to release it. Facebook was reluctant to share information with the Committee, which does not bode well for future transparency. We ask, once more, for Mr Zuckerberg to come to the Committee to answer the many outstanding questions to which Facebook has not responded adequately, to date.
The committee suggests that the UK’s Defamation Act 2013 means Facebook and other social media companies have a duty to publish and to follow transparent rules — arguing that the Act has provisions which state that “if a user is defamed on social media, and the offending individual cannot be identified, the liability rests with the platform”.
“We urge the government to examine the effectiveness of these provisions, and to monitor tech companies to ensure they are complying with court orders in the UK and to provide details of the source of disputed content– including advertisements — to ensure that they are operating in accordance with the law, or any future industry Codes of Ethics or Conduct. Tech companies also have a responsibility to ensure full disclosure of the source of any political advertising they carry,” it adds.
The committee is especially damning of Facebook’s actions in Burma (as indeed many others have also been), condemning the company’s failure to prevent its platform from being used to spread hate and fuel violence against the Rohingya ethnic minority — and citing the UN’s similarly damning assessment.
“Facebook has hampered our efforts to get information about their company throughout this inquiry. It is as if it thinks that the problem will go away if it does not share information about the problem, and reacts only when it is pressed. Time and again we heard from Facebook about mistakes being made and then (sometimes) rectified, rather than designing the product ethically from the beginning of the process. Facebook has a ‘Code of Conduct’, which highlights the principles by which Facebook staff carry out their work, and states that employees are expected to “act lawfully, honestly, ethically, and in the best interests of the company while performing duties on behalf of Facebook”. Facebook has fallen well below this standard in Burma,” it argues.
The committee also directly blames Facebook’s actions for undermining the UK’s international aid efforts in the country — writing:
The United Nations has named Facebook as being responsible for inciting hatred against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma, through its ‘Free Basics’ service. It provides people free mobile phone access without data charges, but is also responsible for the spread disinformation and propaganda. The CTO of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer described the situation in Burma as “awful”, yet Facebook cannot show us that it has done anything to stop the spread of disinformation against the Rohingya minority.
The hate speech against the Rohingya—built up on Facebook, much of which is disseminated through fake accounts—and subsequent ethnic cleansing, has potentially resulted in the success of DFID’s [the UK Department for International Development] aid programmes being greatly reduced, based on the qualifications they set for success. The activity of Facebook undermines international aid to Burma, including the UK Government’s work. Facebook is releasing a product that is dangerous to consumers and deeply unethical. We urge the Government to demonstrate how seriously it takes Facebook’s apparent collusion in spreading disinformation in Burma, at the earliest opportunity. This is a further example of Facebook failing to take responsibility for the misuse of its platform.
We reached out to Facebook for a response to the committee’s report, and in an email statement — attributed to Richard Allan, VP policy — the company told us:
The Committee has raised some important issues and we were pleased to be able to contribute to their work.
We share their goal of ensuring that political advertising is fair and transparent and agree that electoral rule changes are needed. We have already made all advertising on Facebook more transparent. We provide more information on the Pages behind any ad and you can now see all the ads any Facebook Page is running, even if they are not targeted at you. We are working on ways to authenticate and label political ads in the UK and create an archive of those ads that anyone can search. We will work closely with the UK Government and Electoral Commission as we develop these new transparency tools.
We’re also investing heavily in both people and technology to keep bad content off our services. We took down 2.5 million pieces of hate speech and disabled 583 million fake accounts globally in the first quarter of 2018 — much of it before anyone needed to report this to Facebook. By using technology like machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision, we can detect more bad content and take action more quickly.
The statement makes no mention of Burma. Nor indeed of the committee’s suggestion that social media firms should be taxed to pay for defending democracy and civil society against the damaging excesses of their tools.
On Thursday, rolling out its latest ads transparency features, Facebook announced that users could now see the ads a Page is running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and its partner network “even if those ads aren’t shown to you”.
To do so, users have to log into Facebook, visit any Page and select “Info and Ads”. “You’ll see ad creative and copy, and you can flag anything suspicious by clicking on ‘Report Ad’,” it added.
It also flagged a ‘more Page information’ feature that users can use to get more details about a Page such as recent name changes and the date it was created.
“The vast majority of ads on Facebook are run by legitimate organizations — whether it’s a small business looking for new customers, an advocacy group raising money for their cause, or a politician running for office. But we’ve seen that bad actors can misuse our products, too,” Facebook wrote, adding that the features being announced “are just the start” of its efforts “to improve” and “root out abuse”.
The committee’s interim report was pushed out at the weekend ahead of the original embargo as a result of yet more Brexiteer-induced drama — after the campaign director of the UK’s official Brexit supporting ‘Vote Leave’ campaign, Dominic Cummings, deliberately broke the embargo by publishing the report on his blog in order to spin his own response before the report had been widely covered by the media.
Last week the Electoral Commission published its own report following a multi-month investigation into Brexit campaign spending. The oversight body concluded that Vote Leave broke UK electoral law by massively overspending via a joint working arrangement with another Brexit supporting campaign (BeLeave) — an arrangement via which an additional almost half a million pound’s worth of targeted Facebook ads were co-ordinated by Vote Leave in the final days of the campaign when it had already reached its spending limit (Facebook finally released some of the 2016 Brexit campaign ads that had been microtargeted at UK voters via its platform to the committee, which published these ads last week. Many of Vote Leave’s (up to that point ‘dark’) adverts show the official Brexit campaign generating fake news of its own with ads that, for example, claim Turkey is on the cusp of joining the EU and flooding the UK with millions of migrants; or spreading the widely debunked claim that the UK would be able to spend £350M more per week on the NHS if it left the EU.
In general, dog whistle racism appears to have been Vote Leave’s preferred ‘persuasion’ tactic of microtargeted ad choice — and thanks to Facebook’s ad platform, no one other than each ad’s chosen recipients would have been likely to see the messages.
Cummings also comes in for a major roasting in the committee’s report after his failure to appear before it to answer questions, despite multiple summons (including an unprecedented House of Commons motion ordering him to appear — which he nonetheless also ignored).
“Mr Cummings’ contemptuous behaviour is unprecedented in the history of this Committee’s inquiries and underlines concerns about the difficulties of enforcing co-operation with Parliamentary scrutiny in the modern age,” it writes, adding: “We will return to this issue in our Report in the autumn, and believe it to be an urgent matter for consideration by the Privileges Committee and by Parliament as a whole.”
On his blog, Cummings claims the committee offered him dates they knew he couldn’t do; slams its investigation as ‘fake news’; moans copiously that the committee is made up of Remain supporting MPs; and argues that the investigation should be under oath — as his major defense seems to be that key campaign whistleblowers are lying (despite ex-Cambridge Analytica employee Chris Wylie and ex-BeLeave treasurer Shahmir Sanni having provided copious amounts of documentary evidence to back up their claims; evidence which both the Electoral Commission and the UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, have found convincing enough to announce some of the largest fines they can issue — in the latter case, the ICO announced its intention to fine Facebook the maximum penalty possible (under the prior UK data protection regime) for failing to protect users’ information. (The data watchdog is continuing to investigate multiple aspects of what is a hugely complex (technically and politically) online ad ops story, and earlier this month commissioner Elizabeth Denham called for an ‘ethical pause’ on the use of online ad platforms for microtargeting voters with political messages, arguing — like the DCMS committee — that there are very real and very stark risks for democratic processes).
There’s much, much more self-piteous whining on Cummings blog for anyone who wants to make themselves queasy reading. But bear in mind the Electoral Commission’s withering criticism of the Vote Leave campaign specifically — for not so much failure to co-operate with its investigation but intentional obstruction.
