Sunday, September 20, 2020
Open source: Why governments need to go further
Companies can track your phone’s movements to target ads
Enlarge (credit: Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images)
Google and Apple have taken steps this year they say will help users shield themselves from hundreds of companies that compile profiles based on online behavior. Meanwhile, other companies are devising new ways to probe more deeply into other aspects of our lives.
In January, Google said it would phase out third-party cookies on its Chrome browser, making it harder for advertisers to track our browsing habits. Publishers and advertisers use cookies to compile our shopping, browsing, and search data into extensive user profiles. These profiles reflect our political interests, health, shopping behavior, race, gender, and more. Tellingly, Google will still collect data from its own search engine, plus sites like YouTube or Gmail.
Apple, meanwhile, says it will require apps in a forthcoming version of iOS to ask users before tracking them across services, though it delayed the effective date until next year after complaints from Facebook. A poll from June showed as many as 80 percent of respondents would not opt in to such tracking.
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Open source: Why governments need to go further
Facebook and Twitter fail to differentiate "coordinated behavior" from standard political campaign practices, leading to unclear and inconsistent moderation (Shannon McGregor/Wired)
Facebook and Twitter fail to differentiate “coordinated behavior” from standard political campaign practices, leading to unclear and inconsistent moderation — No one knows, not even the policy writers or enforcers. And the ambiguity is exacerbating threats to our electoral process.
Samsung Brings Its Flagship Camera Innovation to Galaxy A Series - GalaxyA71 & A51, to Make Your Social Profile Awesome
A look at teen TikTok stars like "Mooptopia", who achieved sudden viral fame and found it hard to contend with the devotion and nonstop attention of fans (Kaitlyn Tiffany/The Atlantic)
A look at teen TikTok stars like “Mooptopia”, who achieved sudden viral fame and found it hard to contend with the devotion and nonstop attention of fans — Teens are making it big overnight, but that kind of fame can be a mixed bag. — A girl sits alone on an ugly couch …
Saturday, September 19, 2020
YouTube taught its recommendation system how to recognize and demote conspiratorial videos, but organic link-sharing and bot promotion are thwarting its efforts (Clive Thompson/Wired)
YouTube taught its recommendation system how to recognize and demote conspiratorial videos, but organic link-sharing and bot promotion are thwarting its efforts — From flat-earthers to QAnon to Covid quackery, the video giant is awash in misinformation. Can AI keep the lunatic fringe from going viral?
Camera Traps and Motion Sensors Show the Wacky Side of Wildlife
Starting Oct. 1, all new source code repositories on GitHub will be named "main" instead of "master" as part the company's effort to abandon non-inclusive terms (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
Starting Oct. 1, all new source code repositories on GitHub will be named “main” instead of “master” as part the company's effort to abandon non-inclusive terms — All new Git repositories on GitHub will be named “main” instead of “master” starting October 1, 2020.
At Snowflake's IPO price, Sutter Hill Ventures' stake was worth $5.9B, Altimeter Capital's ~$4.4B, ICONIQ Capital's $4B+, Redpoint's $2.6B, and Sequoia's ~$2.5B (Sophia Kunthara/Crunchbase News)
At Snowflake's IPO price, Sutter Hill Ventures' stake was worth $5.9B, Altimeter Capital's ~$4.4B, ICONIQ Capital's $4B+, Redpoint's $2.6B, and Sequoia's ~$2.5B — Data warehousing company Snowflake went public on Wednesday in the largest software IPO ever, raising nearly $3.4 billion and valuing the company at $33.2 billion.
ByteDance Gets Trump Nod to Avoid TikTok Shutdown in the US
French startup Antaios raises $11M for developing SOT-MRAM that can potentially replace embedded non-volatile memory and SRAM cache in microprocessors and SoCs (Peter Clarke/eeNews Europe)
French startup Antaios raises $11M for developing SOT-MRAM that can potentially replace embedded non-volatile memory and SRAM cache in microprocessors and SoCs — Antaios SA (Grenoble, France), a 2017 startup working on spin-orbit-torque (SOT) MRAM has secured US$11 million in funding.
Swedish digital health company Joint Health raises $23M Series B for its app that connects patients with chronic hip and knee pain with physical therapists (Tammy Lovell/MobiHealthNews)
Swedish digital health company Joint Health raises $23M Series B for its app that connects patients with chronic hip and knee pain with physical therapists — Funding will enable the company to expand its app for chronic joint pain to the US and further across Europe.
ByteDance says that it is not aware of the news that TikTok is setting up a $5B education fund in the US as part of a deal to continue operating in the US (Reuters)
ByteDance says that it is not aware of the news that TikTok is setting up a $5B education fund in the US as part of a deal to continue operating in the US — NINGBO, China (Reuters) - TikTok owner Bytedance said in a social media post on Sunday that it was the first time it had heard …
Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of "culturally neutered" companies that have sought to distance themselves from "masculine energy" (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)
Riley Griffin / Bloomberg : Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of “culturally neutered” companies that have sought to distance themselves ...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
