Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
I got a phone call last week inquiring about a car accident I’d been in. Don’t worry—it was a wrong number. But I almost stayed on the line just to chat with the […]
The post The Line Between Man and Machine Continues to Blur appeared first on Geek.com.
Twitter has announced a range of actions intended to bolster efforts to fight spam and “malicious automation” (aka bad bots) on its platform — including increased security measures around account verification and sign-up; running a historical audit to catch spammers who signed up when its systems were more lax; and taking a more proactive approach to identifying spam activity to reduce its ability to make an impact.
It says the new steps build on previously announced measures to fight abuse and trolls, and new policies on hateful conduct and violent extremism.
The company has also recently been publicly seeking new technology and staff to fight spam and abuse.
All of which is attempting to turn around Twitter’s reputation for being awful at tackling abuse.
“Our focus is increasingly on proactively identifying problematic accounts and behavior rather than waiting until we receive a report,” Twitter’s Yoel Roth and Del Harvey write in the latest blog update. “We focus on developing machine learning tools that identify and take action on networks of spammy or automated accounts automatically. This lets us tackle attempts to manipulate conversations on Twitter at scale, across languages and time zones, without relying on reactive reports.”
“Platform manipulation and spam are challenges we continue to face and which continue to evolve, and we’re striving to be more transparent with you about our work,” they add, after giving a progress update on the performance of its anti-spambot systems, saying they picked up more than 9.9M “potentially spammy or automated accounts” per week in May, up from 6.4M in December 2017 and 3.2M in September.
Among the welcome — if VERY long overdue — changes is an incoming requirement for new accounts to confirm either an email address or phone number when they sign up, in order to make it harder for people to register spam accounts.
“This is an important change to defend against people who try to take advantage of our openness,” they write. “We will be working closely with our Trust & Safety Council and other expert NGOs to ensure this change does not hurt someone in a high-risk environment where anonymity is important. Look for this to roll out later this year.”
The company has also been wading into its own inglorious legacy of spam failure by conducting historical audits of some legacy sign-up systems to try to clear bad actors off the platform.
Well, better late than never as they say.
Twitter says it’s already identified “a large number” of suspected spam accounts as a result of investigating misuse of an old part of its signup flow — saying these are “primarily follow spammers”, i.e. spambots who automatically or bulk followed verified or other high-profile accounts at the point of sign up.
And it says it will be challenging these accounts to prove its ‘spammer’ classification wrong.
As a result of this it warns that some users may see a drop in their follow counts.
“When we challenge an account, follows originating from that account are hidden until the account owner passes that challenge. This does not mean accounts appearing to lose followers did anything wrong; they were the targets of spam that we are now cleaning up,” it writes. “We’ve recently been taking more steps to clean up spam and automated activity and close the loopholes they’d exploited, and are working to be more transparent about these kinds of actions.”
“Our goal is to ensure that every account created on Twitter has passed some simple, automatic security checks designed to prevent automated signups. The new protections we’ve developed as a result of this audit have already helped us prevent more than 50,000 spammy signups per day,” it adds.
As part of this shift in approach to reduce the visibility and power of spambots by impacting their ability to bogusly influence genuine users, Twitter has also tweaked how it displays follower and like counts across its platform — saying it’s now updating account metrics in “near-real time”.
So it warns users they may notice their accounts metrics changing more regularly.
“But we think this is an important shift in how we display Tweet and account information to ensure that malicious actors aren’t able to artificially boost an account’s credibility permanently by inflating metrics like the number of followers,” it adds — noting also that it’s taking additional steps to reduce spammer visibility which it will have more to say about “in the coming weeks”.
Another change Twitter is flagging up now is an expansion of its malicious behavior detection systems. On this it says it’s automating some processes where it sees suspicious account activity — such as “exceptionally high-volume tweeting with the same hashtag, or using the same @handle without a reply from the account you’re mentioning”.
And while that’s clearly great news for anyone who hates high volume spam — and the damage spamming can very evidently do — it’s also a crying shame it’s taken Twitter this long to take these kinds of obvious problems seriously.
Better late than never is pretty cold comfort when you consider the ugly social divisions that malicious entities have fueled by being so freely able to misappropriate the amplification power of social media. Because tech CEOs were essentially asleep at the wheel — and deaf to the warnings being sounded about their tools for years.
There’s clearly a human cost to platforms prioritizing growth at the expense of wider societal responsibilities, as Facebook has also been realizing of late.
And while both these companies may be trying to clean house now they have no quick fixes for mending rips in the social fabric which were exacerbated as a consequence of the at-scale spreading of fake news and worse enabled by their own platforms.
Though, in March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey put out a call for ideas to help it capture, measure and evaluate healthy interactions on its platform and the health of public conversations generally — saying: “Ultimately we want to have a measurement of how it affects the broader society and public health, but also individual health, as well.”
So a differently stripped, more civically minded Twitter is seeking to emerge from the bushes.
Twitter users who fall foul of its new automated malicious behavior checks can expect to have to pass some sort of ‘no, actually I am human’ test — which it says will “vary in intensity”, giving examples such as a simple reCAPTCHA process, at the lowest friction end, or a slightly more arduous password reset request.
“More complex cases are automatically passed to our team for review,” it adds.
There’s also an appeals process for users who believe they have been incorrectly IDed by one of the automated spam detection systems — letting them request a case review.
Another welcome if tardy addition: Twitter has added support for stronger two-factor authentication as Twitter users will now be able to use a USB security key (using the U2F open authentication standard) for login verification when signing into Twitter.
It urges users to enable 2FA if they haven’t already, and regularly review third party apps attached to their account to revoke access they no longer wish to grant.
The company finishes by saying it will continue to invest “across the board” to try to tackle spam and malicious automated activity, including by “leveraging machine learning technology and partnerships with third parties” — saying: “These issues are felt around the world, from elections to emergency events and high-profile public conversations. As we have stated in recent announcements, the public health of the conversation on Twitter is a critical metric by which we will measure our success in these areas.”
The results of a Request for Proposals for public health metrics research which Twitter called for earlier this year will be announced soon, it adds.
Researchers have long been looking for clues about one of our closest evolutionary relatives — Neanderthals. Our now-extinct kin has shifted from a presumed earlier form, to a close cousin, to… well still […]
The post Scientists Successfully Grow Neanderthal “Minibrains” in Petri Dish appeared first on Geek.com.
Instagram’s latest assault on Snapchat, FaceTime, and Houseparty launches today. TechCrunch scooped back in March that Instagram would launch video calling, and the feature was officially announced in at F8 in May. Now it’s actually rolling out to everyone on iOS and Android, allowing up to four friends to group video call together through Instagram Direct.
With the feed, Stories, messaging, Live, IGTV, and now video calling, Instagram is hoping to become a one-stop-shop for its 1 billion users’ social needs. This massive expansion in functionality over the past two years is paying off according to SimilarWeb, which estimates that the average US user has gone from spending 29 minutes per day on the app in September 2017 to 55 minutes today. More time spent means more potential ad views and revenue for the Facebook subsidiary that a Bloomberg analyst just valued at $100 billion after it was bought for less than $1 billion in 2012.
One cool feature of Instagram Video Calling is that you can minimize the window and bounce around the rest of Instagram without ending the call. That opens new opportunities for co-browsing with friends as if you were hanging out together. More friends can join an Instagram call in progress, though you can mute them if you don’t want to get more call invites. You’re allowed to call anyone you can Direct message by hitting the video button in a chat, and blocked people can’t call you.
Here’s how Instagram’s group video calling stacks up to the alternatives:
Instagram is also rolling out two more features promised at F8. The Explore page will now be segmented to show a variety of topic channels that reveal associated content below. Previously, Explore’s 200 million daily users just saw a random mish-mash of popular content related to their interests, with just a single “Videos You Might Like” section separated.
Now users will see a horizontal tray of channels atop Explore, including an algorithmically personalized For You collection, plus ones like Art, Beauty, Sports, and Fashion depending on what content you regularly interact with. Users can swipe between the categories to browse, and then scroll up to view more posts from any they enjoy. A list of sub-hashtags appears when you open a category, like #MoGraph (motion graphics) or #Typeface when you open art. And if you’re sick of seeing a category, you can mute it. Strangely, Instagram has stripped Stories out of Explore entirely, but when asked, the team told us it plans to bring Stories back in the near future.
The enhanced Explore page could make it easier for people to discover new creators. Growing the audience of these content makers is critical to Instagram as it strives to be their favorite app amongst competition. Snapchat lacks a dedicated Explore section or other fan base-growing opportunities, which has alienated some creators, while the new Instagram topic channels is reminiscent of YouTube’s mobile Trending page.
Instagram’s new Explore Channels (left) vs YouTube’s Trending page (right)
Finally, Instagram is rolling out Camera Effects design by partners, starting with Ariana Grande, BuzzFeed, Liz Koshy, Baby Ariel, and the NBA. If you’re following these accounts, you’ll see their effect in the Stories camera, and you can hit Try It On if you spot a friend using one you like. This opens the door to accounts all offering their own augmented reality and 2D filters without the Stories camera becoming overstuffed with lenses you don’t care about.
Instagram’s new partner-made camera effects
What’s peculiar is that all of these features are designed to boost the amount of time you spend on Instagram just as it’s preparing to launch a Usage Insights dashboard for tracking if you’re becoming addicted to the app. At least the video calling and camera effects promote active usage, but Explore definitely encourages passive consumption that research shows can be unhealthy.
Therein lies the rub of Instagram’s mission and business model with its commitment to user wellbeing. Despite CEO Kevin Systrom’s stated intention that “any time [spent on his app] should be positive and intentional“ and that he wants Instagram to “be part of the solution”, the company earns more by keeping people glued to the screen rather than present in their lives.
Facial recognition, especially when combined with machine learning, has been one of the creepier developments in modern tech. And there’s no wonder why. Being able to simply walking around in society without machines […]
The post Face Recognition CEO Warns of Police Abuse appeared first on Geek.com.
After centuries of economic failure and environmental destruction, humans are working to rebuild our planet (or planning their escape to foreign ones). But are we so blinded by hope for the future that […]
The post Can Studying Alien Civilizations Predict Earth’s Future? appeared first on Geek.com.
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 Pixar Shirts appeared first on Geek.com.
