Wait and see.
Cops Are
Confident iPhone Hackers Have Found a Workaround to Apple’s New
Security Feature
“Grayshift has
gone to great lengths to future proof their technology and stated
that they have already defeated this security feature in the beta
build.”
Something for my Business Continuity/Disaster
Recovery students to ponder. Inadequate redundancy? No deals with
the other airlines in Charlotte?
FLIGHTS
CANCELED: Chaos at Charlotte airport as thousands stranded
Thousands of passengers remain stranded Friday
morning after all PSA flights were canceled at Charlotte-Douglas
International Airport Thursday night due to a technical issue,
airline officials said.
There were roughly 275 flights canceled, with
about 120 of them in Charlotte. The airport tweeted around 8 a.m.
Friday that PSA plans to resume operations at noon though Channel 9
learned overnight that those flights would not resume until 6 p.m.
… On Thursday night a spokeswoman for American
Airlines said there was no timeline for when the issue will be
resolved.
Another tool my students need.
… It was all part of the European Union’s
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) policy which forced
companies to give their customers much more control over the personal
data they have collected.
As part of the reforms, Spotify introduced a new
privacy tool. It allows you to download and view all the data that
Spotify holds on you. Let’s look at how it works.
Ethical AI, an oxymoron?
European
Commission names 52 experts to its AI advisory board
The European Commission today named
52 experts to its High Level Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI
HLG), an advisory body tasked with drafting AI ethics guidelines,
anticipating challenges and opportunities in AI, and steering the
course of Europe’s machine learning investments.
The 52 new members — 30 men and 22 women —
were selected from an applicant pool of 500 and come from titans of
industry like Bosch, BMW, Bayer, and AXA, in addition to AI research
leaders that include Google, IBM, Nokia Bell Labs,
STMicroelectronics, Telenor, Zalando, Element AI, Orange, SAP,
Sigfox, and Santander.
… As part of that engagement effort, the
Alliance today launched a public online
platform of discussion forums, blogs, documents, and events meant
to foster conversations about AI. A list of planned AI HLG and AI
Alliance meetings, workshops, and consultations will be made
available online via the Commission’s Register
of Expert Groups.
… Today’s announcement comes just over a
month after the White House set up a
task force dedicated to U.S. artificial intelligence efforts.
Was it always this easy to do?
Facebook
Claims 99% of Extremist Content Removed Without Users' Help
At
this week's International Homeland Security Forum (IHSF) hosted in
Jerusalem by Israel’s minister of public security, Gilad Erdan,
Facebook claimed growing success in its battle to remove extremist
content from the network.
Dr.
Erin Marie Saltman, Facebook counterterrorism policy lead for EMEA,
said, "On Terrorism content, 99% of terrorist content from ISIS
and al-Qaida we take down ourselves, without a single user flagging
it to us. In the first quarter of 2018 we took down 1.9 million
pieces of this type of terrorist content."
This
was achieved by a combination of Facebook staff and machine learning
algorithms.
… However,
the implication that Facebook is winning the war against extremism is
countered by a report ('Spiders of the Caliphate: Mapping the Islamic
Stateís Global Support Network on Facebook' PDF)
published in May 2018 by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).
Learn how Google (and the world?) looks at your
online actions?
Google, seemingly aware that people are unnerved
by just how much ad networks know about us, today said
it’s refining how it lets you control what ads you see. The
company has updated its ad personalization settings page, and in the
process, has kindly reminded us that it’s easy to turn off
personalized ads altogether.
If you currently have the ad personalization
feature turned on, Google’s refreshed Ad
Settings page should include a list of topics and categories that
Google is potentially using to serve you ads.
… Google is also updating its Why
This Ad? links, product manager Philippe de Lurand Pierre-Paul
wrote
in a blog post on June 14: “We’ve now significantly expanded
coverage of this feature; starting today, you’ll see Why this ad?
notices on all our services that show Google Ads ...
… Google’s update today is a good reminder
to turn off targeted ads if you’d rather not have companies
targeting you as precisely as Google allows. You can view
your current settings here. If you have multiple Google
accounts, you’ll need to adjust each one.
This is news.
After years
of growth, the use of social media for news is falling across the
world
NiemanLab:
“…People are becoming disenchanted with Facebook for news. The
“Trump bump” appears to be sustaining itself. And younger people
are more likely to donate money to a news organization than older
people. These are some of the findings from a big new report out
Thursday from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism. The Reuters Institute’s Digital
News Report for 2018 surveyed more than 74,000 people in 37
countries about their digital news consumption. (Included in the
report for the first time this year: Bulgaria.) The research is
based on online YouGov surveys earlier this year, followed by
face-to-face focus groups in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Brazil on
the topics of social media and messaging apps. The report includes a
number of findings on fake news, misinformation, and trust in the
media; for more on those topics, see this
piece by the report’s authors, and I’ll also include some
more info in Friday’s
fake news column…”
Are you counting?
Facebook is
building a big new $750 million data center in Alabama
On Thursday, the social networking giant announced
it was building a new 970,000 square foot facility in Huntsville, a
city in the northern part of the US state.
… The
company now builds and open-sources its own data center hardware
through the Open Compute Project, an initiative to make data
center designs freely available to engineers — and underming the
traditional server industry in the process.
Perspective.
Bird is the
fastest startup ever to reach a $1 billion valuation
… People familiar with the deal told Quartz
that at least three investors involved in that round—Sequoia,
Accel, and Tusk Ventures—have already signed documents and wired
money to Bird.
Bird is now raising additional funds in the series
C round, seeking a total of $300 million, which would value it around
$2 billion, sources familiar with the deal said. “People have
definitely given them cash at the $2 billion valuation,” one of the
people told Quartz.
… Bird is still remarkable for how quickly it
achieved unicorn status. Founded
in September 2017, Bird hit the $1 billion marker in well
under a year, the fastest ever.
(Related) Is this a not-so-subtle bubble warning?
Unicorns
Are Worth Twice As Much As Last Month
If SoftBank keeps
throwing cash at startups like WeWork, the numbers will start to lose
their meaning.
… “When the ducks are quacking, feed them,”
capital markets bankers will tell you, and Bird took that lesson to
its avian heart.
In other totally normal unicorn rapid
valuation-doubling news:
SoftBank Group Corp. is in discussions to invest another giant slug of capital in WeWork Cos., with a deal that would value the shared-office company at $35 billion to $40 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
Such an investment would roughly double WeWork’s $20 billion valuation, set last August when SoftBank invested $4.4 billion in the company.
I have to say, if SoftBank is going to become the
entire market for hot private technology startups, then every
valuation is going to be marked-to-SoftBank, and the numbers will
start to lose their meaning.
Free money? It’s a bit more complicated than
that.
If You’re
A Facebook User, You’re Also a Research Subject
The professor was incredulous. David Craig had
been studying the rise of entertainment on social media for several
years when a Facebook Inc. employee he didn’t know emailed him last
December, asking about his research. “I thought I was being
pumped,” Craig said. The company flew him to Menlo Park and
offered him $25,000 to fund his ongoing projects, with no obligation
to do anything in return.
… The free gifts are just one of the
little-known and complicated ways Facebook works with academic
researchers. For scholars, the scale of Facebook’s 2.2 billion
users provides an irresistible way to investigate how human nature
may play out on, and be shaped by, the social network. For Facebook,
the motivations to work with outside academics are far thornier, and
it’s Facebook that decides who gets access to its data to examine
its impact on society.
… More than a hundred Ph.D.-level researchers
work on Facebook’s in-house core data science team, and employees
say the information that points to growth has had more of an impact
on the company's direction than Chief Executive Officer Mark
Zuckerberg’s ideas.
Facebook is far more hesitant to work with
outsiders; it risks unflattering findings, leaks of proprietary
information, and privacy breaches. But Facebook likes it when
external research proves that Facebook is great. And in the fierce
talent wars of Silicon Valley, working with professors can make it
easier to recruit their students.
… The company has stopped short of pursuing
deeper research on potentially negative fallout of its power.
According to its public database of published research, Facebook’s
written more
than 180 public papers about artificial intelligence but just one
study about elections, based on an experiment Facebook ran on 61
million users to mobilize voters in the Congressional midterms back
in 2010.
BB-8 in Colorado.
Sphero
raises $12M as it focuses on education
This year has been a rough one for Sphero. The
Colorado-based toy robotics startup kicked off the year with dozens
of layoffs, a result of tepid interest in its line of
Disney-branded consumer products.
Here’s a little good news, however. The company
has raised another $12 million, bringing its total up to around $119
million, according
to Crunchbase. The latest round will go into helping shape the
BB-8 maker into an education-first company.
Most are words I’ve never heard of…
New words
list June 2018
Oxford English Dictionary
Now there’s an App for making an App for that!
App Maker,
Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of
beta
It’s been a year and a half since Google
announced App Maker, its online tool for quickly building and
deploying business apps on the web. The company has mostly remained
quiet about App Maker ever since and kept it in a private preview
mode, but today, it announced
that the service is now generally available and open to all
developers who want to give it a try.
Access to App Maker comes with any G Suite
Business and Enterprise subscription, as well as the G
Suite for Education edition. The overall idea here is to
help virtually anybody in an organization — including those with
little to no coding experience — to build their own
line-of-business apps based on data that’s already stored in G
Suite, Google’s Cloud SQL database or any other database that
supports JDBC
or that offers a REST API (that that’s obviously a bit more of an
advanced operation).
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