Thursday, June 20, 2019
ETtech Top 5: Druva is now a unicorn, H-1B Visa Curbs & more
Researchers find Airbnb likely removed 31K homes from Canada's rental market in 2018, or 1.5% of residences built for the rental market (Globe and Mail)
Researchers find Airbnb likely removed 31K homes from Canada's rental market in 2018, or 1.5% of residences built for the rental market — Short-term rental sites are ‘having rather large impacts on our housing markets,’ McGill researchers say in groundbreaking paper
Google responds to a WSJ report that concluded there are millions of fake business listings on Maps
After a Wall Street Journal investigation concluded that there are millions of fake business listings on Google Maps, the company has issued a response detailing the measures it takes to combat the problem.
According to estimates from online advertising experts surveyed by the WSJ, there are “roughly 11 million falsely listed businesses on any given day,” with hundreds of thousands more fake listings appearing every month. Many are placed by businesses that specialized creating fake listings for clients that want to boost their information above competitors in search results.
According to a search expert interviewed by the WSJ, a 2017 academic study paid for by Google that found only 0.5% of local searches researchers examined were fake was skewed by limited data.
In the company’s response, Google Maps product director Ethan Russell wrote that of the more than 200 million listings added to Google Maps over the years, only a “small percentage” are fake. He said that last year Google took down more than 3 million fake business profiles, including more than 90% that were removed before users could see them. Google’s systems identified 85% of the listings removed, while 250,000 were reported by users. The company also disabled 150,000 user accounts found to be abusive, a 50% increase from 2017.
Russell wrote that the company is “continually working on new and better ways to fight these scams using a variety of ever-evolving manual and automated systems,” but can’t share more details about them because otherwise scammers might find a way to get around them.
The WSJ report comes as another Google-owned service, YouTube, is under scrutiny for how it fights abuse at scale. YouTube released its first anti-abuse report last year, but problematic content, including hate speech, continues to be a major problem and the platform’s critics say it haphazardly enforces its own policies.
Along with Apple, Amazon and Facebook, Google’s parent company Alphabet is currently facing antitrust investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department, and its search business is expected to go under scrutiny.
Cryptocurrency startups seek regulators' stance as Libra skips India
Rise of Stories: How Internet businesses are rethinking user experiences with this video format
AI courses a bigger draw for experienced techies
Bengaluru's drone companies get first DGCA certification
IIHS: car makers including Tesla cause confusion by choosing names like Autopilot for automated systems, resulting in drivers overestimating cars' capabilities (Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica)
IIHS: car makers including Tesla cause confusion by choosing names like Autopilot for automated systems, resulting in drivers overestimating cars' capabilities — Does the name “Autopilot” cause people to overestimate the abilities of Tesla's driver-assistance technology?
Realme C2 to Go on Sale in India Again Today via Flipkart, Realme.com
Report: Facebook plans to make employees of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus transition to @fb.com email addresses, further integrating its family of apps (Mikael Thalen/The Daily Dot)
Report: Facebook plans to make employees of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus transition to @fb.com email addresses, further integrating its family of apps — Facebook is attempting to unify its brand by making employees of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus adopt new emails using the Facebook domain, Business Insider reports.
Desjardins, Canada's largest credit union, says a now-fired employee leaked personal data of ~2.9M members without authorization, including full names (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
Desjardins, Canada's largest credit union, says a now-fired employee leaked personal data of ~2.9M members without authorization, including full names — Data for 2.9 million bank members was taken from the bank's system by a now-fired employee. — Today, Desjardins, Canada's largest credit union …
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
A Florida city council votes to pay $600K ransom to hackers who, over three weeks ago, encrypted city records, disabled its email system, and more (Terry Spencer/Associated Press)
A Florida city council votes to pay $600K ransom to hackers who, over three weeks ago, encrypted city records, disabled its email system, and more — FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida city agreed to pay $600,000 in ransom to hackers who took over its computer system …
Oracle publishes out-of-band update to patch a zero-day code-execution vulnerability in WebLogic Server that is being actively exploited, per researchers (Jim Salter/Ars Technica)
Oracle publishes out-of-band update to patch a zero-day code-execution vulnerability in WebLogic Server that is being actively exploited, per researchers — Oracle's WebLogic Java appserver hit with the third in a series of exploited RCEs. — Oracle on Tuesday published an out-of-band update patching …
MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's, as the mobile chip designer bets on AI demand for growth (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia : MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's...
-
Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
-
The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
