Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
Dan Bilefsky / New York Times:
A profile of AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, a co-recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, who says he supports regulating AI, including a ban on “killer robots” — MONTREAL — Yoshua Bengio is worried that innovations in artificial intelligence that he helped pioneer could lead to a dark future …
Which Planet Has Only Orbited The Sun Once Since It Was Discovered? |
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Think you know the answer? |
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Anna Hensel / Digiday:
A look at Pinterest's efforts to position itself as the platform at the top of the purchasing funnel, challenges with the “buy button”, ads, and visual search — Pinterest's imminent IPO raises new questions about how big of a role the platform will play in the future of social commerce.
Gavin De Becker / The Daily Beast:
Jeff Bezos' security chief says his investigation concluded with high confidence that Saudi Arabia “had access to Bezos' phone, and gained private information” — The National Enquirer's lawyer tried to get me to say there was no hacking. — For 40 years, I've advised …
Kana Inagaki / Financial Times:
Line names founder Shin Jungho as co-CEO to drive the Asian chat app's expansion from ads into payments, banking, and other fintech businesses — Mark Zuckerberg recently outlined a strategy that would see the future of Facebook in private messaging. Shin Jungho, the reclusive founder …
Spotify has launched a new subscription plan called Premium Duo. As the name suggests, Premium Duo is designed for two people who live at the same address. That obviously applies to couples, but friends who live together could also make use of Premium Duo.
Spotify has a range of plans to suit all budgets and needs. There’s Spotify Free for those who listen at home and don’t mind the occasional ad. And then there’s a range of Premium offerings, including Premium for Family and Premium for Students.
Premium for Family allows up to six people to use Spotify Premium for a fraction of the price of individual subscriptions. However, Spotify insists that everyone needs to live at the same address. And Premium Duo offers the same deal for two people.
Premium Duo gives all of the benefits of Spotify Premium, but at a discounted rate. So, two people can play any track at home or mobile, listen offline, and remove the ads for €12.49/month. An individual Spotify Premium subscription costs €9.99/month.
Both Premium Duo subscribers get their own account, which means Spotify will recommend music to each person individually. However, Premium Duo subscribers will gain access to Duo Mix, a playlist which combines both individuals’ tastes in music.
The reason the pricing is in euros rather than dollars is because Premium Duo is currently only available in a handful of countries. These being Colombia, Chile, Denmark, Ireland, and Poland. It isn’t yet clear whether Spotify will launch Premium Duo elsewhere.
Spotify Premium Duo is an interesting proposition. It shows that Spotify is trying to cater to as wide a range of people as possible, including cohabiting couples. But it remains to be seen whether couples will opt for Premium Duo over sharing the same account.
If you’re new to Spotify, you should probably check out our unofficial guide to Spotify. It will help Spotify beginners get to grips with the basics, including browsing and searching for music, creating playlists, and downloading music to listen to offline.
Read the full article: Spotify Launches Premium Duo for Couples
When you’ve been doing this job long enough, you start to develop strange interests (though some might compellingly argue that strange interests are a prerequisite). Lately for me it’s been power banks. Quite possibly the least sexy product in all of consumer electronics outside of the ever-ubiquitous dongle.
I don’t know what to tell you. Blame the fact that I’m traveling every other week for this job. There are also all of the liveblogs from years’ past that got cut off in the last few minutes as my poor ancient MacBook put itself to sleep during those last precious battery percentages. Low batteries give me anxiety. I’m the guy who’s the first to notice when your phone’s screenshot is below 10 percent.
So the power bank has become constant accessory in my life, both home and on the road. Until last year, I used to carry a massive one that was just north of 20,000mAh. The peace of mind to back pain ration seemed sensible enough, but I learned the hard way that, not only do Chinese airports have a limit on battery size, they chuck yours in the trash without a second thought if you go over. It’s a quick way to lose $150.
The good news, however, is that between USB-C, wireless charging and the magic of crowdfunding, it seems we might be living through the golden age of the power bank. I know, right? What a time to be alive.
Point is, there are a lot of choices out there. Anker and Amazon’s house brand RAVPower both offer some good options on a budget. There’s also mainstay Mophie for those who don’t mind paying a bit of a premium for design.
Fuse Chicken was actually a brand that was new to me when they hit me up to try out their latest product. It’s a name I definitely would have remembered — because, honestly, it’s pretty terrible. Memorable, but terrible. Maybe that’s why the company went with such a mundane name for what’s a really interesting charger.
My dad ones told me that he gave my sister and I boring first names because we had such an unusual surname. I have no idea if this is true, but it’s an interesting story and could well apply here.
The Universal is a good example of making the most of out a form factor. It manages to jam a lot of features in without creating a Frankenstein’s Monster worthy of the name Fuse Chicken. On its face, the product looks like a black and white version of Amazon’s default power bricks. It serves that purpose, of course, coupled with a trio of swappable international wall adapters (bonus points for travelers).
But the brick also sports a 6,700mAh battery inside, so you can continue charging gadgets while unplugged. That’s ideal for a phone — you can keep a laptop alive for a bit as well, but you’re going to burn through that pretty quickly. There’s also a wireless charging pad up top, so you can power up another phone or, say, a new set of AirPods at the same time. The side of the device features a small display showing off how much juice is left.
It’s great having a bank that’s also a plug, though like Apple’s brick, it’s much too massive to plug into many vertical outlets. I learned this lesson the hard way on a recent coast to coast flight. Thankfully, though, it’s compatible with Apple’s extension cable.
OmniCharge, meanwhile, is a company I’ve been following since their earliest Kickstarter days. Matter of fact, the aforementioned power bank that’s currently sitting in a Chinese garbage dump is one of their products. R.I.P. noble battery pack.
The Omni Mobile 12,800 mAh is a much more basic product that the company’s earliest offerings. There’s no display for power information here — instead you have to rely on four lights to let you know how much juice is left.
As with most of the company’s products, I do quite like the design language. It’s subtle and unobtrusive and fits nicely inside a backpack. It’s definitely too big for carrying around in a pocket, however. Thanks the wonders of USB it will charge a laptop, as well, though once again, you’re going to run through that 12,800 mAh pretty quickly, if you do.
The Fuse Chicken and OmniCharge run $85 and $99, respectively. They’ve both served me well as travel companions these last few weeks. Here’s to long flights and avoiding life’s landfill.
It’s been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site’s silence around the Christchurch massacre, and now Mark Zuckerberg is calling on governments and other bodies to increase regulation around the sorts of data Facebook traffics in. He’s hoping to get out in front of heavy-handed regulation and get a seat at the table shaping it.
The founder published a letter simultaneously on his own page and The Washington Post, the latter of which is an ideal way to get your sentiments on every desk inside the beltway. In the wake a couple of years that have come with black eyes and growing pains, Zuckerberg notes that if he had it to do over again, he’d ask for increased external scrutiny in four key areas:
The story of why the letter breaks down each doubles as kind of recent history of the social network. Struggles and missteps have defined much of Facebook’s last few years, with several controversies often swirling around the social network at once. Not every CEO gets asked to testify in front of Congress. Facebook houses and controls an incredible collection of data, playing a key role in everything from ad targeting and interpersonal relationships to news cycles and elections.
“Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree,” Zuckerberg writes, three days after issuing a blanket ban on “white nationalism” and “white separatism.” He goes on to describe the company’s work with various governments, along with its development of independent oversight committee, before anyone can accuse the company of completely passing the buck.
“One idea is for third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and to measure companies against those standards,” Zuckerberg writes, “Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.”
Zuckerberg goes on to encourage increased legislation around election tampering and political advertisements. Notably, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development hit Facebook earlier this week with charges that its targeted ads violate the Fair Housing Act.
The op-ed rings somewhat hollow, though, because there’s plenty that Facebook could do to improve in these four areas without help from the government.
Facebook’s harmful content policies have long been confusing, inconsistent, and isolated. For example, Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was removed from Facebook but not from Instagram. Meanwhile, bad actors can just hop between social networks to spread problematic posts. Facebook should apply enforcement of its policies across its whole family of apps, publicly work through its logic for why it does or doesn’t remove things instead of having those discussions leak, and cooperate better with fellow social networks to coordinate blanket takedowns of the worst offenders.
As for election integrity, Facebook made a big advance this week by placing all active and old inactive political ad campaigns into keyword-searchable Ad Library. But after pressure from news publishers who didn’t want their ads promoting politicized articles to be included beside traditional campaign ads, Facebook exempted them. Those ads can still influence the electorate, and while they should be classified separately, they should still be archived for research.
On privacy, well, there’s a ton to be done. One major area where it could improve is allowing people to more completely opt out of search, including by their phone number, to avoid stalkers. And better controls should be available for how Facebook uses your contact info when uploaded in the address books of other users.
Finally, with data portability, Facebook has been dragging its feet. A year ago, we published a deep dive into how Facebook only lets you export your social graph as a list of friends’ names which can’t be easily used to find them on other social networks. Facebook must make its social graph truely interoperable so users don’t lose their community if they switch apps. That would coerce Facebook to treat users better since leaving would actually be a viable option.
Taking these steps would show regulators that Zuckerberg isn’t just paying lip service in hopes of getting a more lenient sentence. It would demonstrate he’s ready to make change that serves society.
On our final day in Pittsburgh, we find ourself in a decommissioned coal mine. Just northeast of the city proper, Tour-Ed’s owners run field trips and tours during the warmer months, despite the fact that the mine’s innards run a constant 50 degrees or so, year round.
With snow still melted just beyond the entrance, a team of students from Carnegie Mellon and Oregon State University are getting a pair of robots ready for an upcoming competition. The small team is one of a dozen or so currently competing in DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge.
The multi-year SUbT competition is designed to “explore new approaches to rapidly map, navigate, search, and exploit complex underground environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks.” In particular, teams are tasked with search and rescue missions in underground structures, ranging from mines to caves to subway stations.
The goal of the $2 million challenge is design a system capable of navigating complex underground terrains, in case of cave-ins or other disasters. The robots are created to go where human rescuers can’t — or, at very least, shouldn’t.
The CMU team’s solution features multiple robots, with a foul-wheeled rover and a small, hobbyist style drone taking center state. “Our system consists of ground robots that will be able to track and follow the terrain,” says CMU’s Steve Willits, who serves as an adviser on the project. “We also have an unmanned aerial vehicle consisting of a hexacopter. It’s equipped with all of instrumentation that it will need to explore various area of the mine.”
The rover uses a combination of 3D cameras and LIDAR to navigate and map the environment, while looking for humans amid the rubble. Should it find itself unable to move, due to debris, small passage ways or a manmade obstacle like stairs, the drone is designed to lift off from the rear and continue the search.
All the while, the rover drops ultra rugged WIFI repeaters off its rear like a breadcrumb trail, extending its signal in the process. Most of this is still early stages. While the team was able to demonstrate the rover and drone in action, it still hasn’t mastered a method for getting them to work in tandem.
Testing the robots will begin in September, with the Tunnel Circuit That’s followed in March 2020 by the manmade Urban Circuit and then a Cave Circuit that September. A final event will be held in September 2012.
Mark Zuckerberg / Washington Post:
Mark Zuckerberg calls for global regulations in four areas: policing harmful content, election integrity, a GDPR-like privacy framework, and data portability — Mark Zuckerberg is founder and chief executive of Facebook. — Technology is a major part of our lives, and companies such as Facebook have immense responsibilities.
Welcome back to this week’s transcribed edition of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast that unpacks the numbers behind the headlines. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts the words of our wildly popular venture capital podcast, Equity, in your eyes instead of your ears.
This week, Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm recorded an emergency episode to discuss Lyft’s IPO, which debuted Friday. The crew has been talking about the ridesharing company for a long time and this week, it closed its first day of trading up 9% after a 21% opening pop. So if you don’t like podcasts but still want the goodness that is Equity, you can have a read of this week’s episode below. It’s been edited for clarity.
For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
Kate Clark: Hello and welcome to Equity. I’m tech crunches, Kate Clark and I’m joined today by Alex Wilhelm of Crunchbase news.
Alex Wilhelm: Hey everybody.
Kate Clark: How’s it going?
Alex Wilhelm: We’ve been doing a lot of Equity lately. I almost feel bad, but also all the IPOs we’ve been waiting for are finally here, so I’m kind of excited and glad.
Kate Clark: I mean, yeah. A couple extra episodes is the least we can do given that one of the most highly anticipated IPOs ever was just completed today. But I think we’re all a little bit relieved that the Lyft extravaganza has sort of come to a, well, I guess it’s not over now we just get to report on their earnings.
Alex Wilhelm: Yeah. But I mean at least this portion of the story is complete. Like we’ve been talking about them eventually going public for quarters and quarters now. Now it’s just Lyft had a good or bad quarter, it’s a two minute story and we can move on.
So it’s nice to have gotten here. But can we go back to the beginning and there’s not a lot of steps Kate, that though you and I have been tracking very almost religiously, but for a lot of people probably not as close. So I was thinking we could kind of go back to the beginning of Lyft’s public journey and quickly walk everyone through the numbers, if that makes sense.
Will Oremus / Slate:
How a 119-word local crime brief amassed more than 800K Facebook shares, nearly twice as many as any other piece of English-language content this year so far — A tale of accidental virality in the age of algorithms. — On an otherwise ordinary Sunday in late January …
In an open letter published by the New Zealand Herald, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg finally addressed the shocking mass shootings that left 50 dead at two Christchurch mosques. The first of part of the deadliest mass shooting in modern new Zealand history was live-streamed on Facebook by the attacker.
But while the site’s technology was used the broadcast the horrific attacks, Facebook has largely stayed silent on the matter in the intervening two weeks. Sandberg broke that silence in her letter, which addressed grieving families and a shaken nation. The note addresses aspects that the site could have handled better, but the company still appears to be at something of a loss for how to handle such an event.
“Many of you have also rightly questioned how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the attack,” Sandberg writes. “We are committed to reviewing what happened and have been working closely with the New Zealand Police to support their response.”
The executive adds that the company is working on technologies to identity re-upload. The letter stops short of offering specific answers or a blueprint for its policy, going forward.
“We have heard feedback that we must do more – and we agree,” Sandberg says. “In the wake of the terror attack, we are taking three steps: strengthening the rules for using Facebook Live, taking further steps to address hate on our platforms, and supporting the New Zealand community. First, we are exploring restrictions on who can go Live depending on factors such as prior Community Standard violations.”
Both Facebook and YouTube have been subject to widespread criticism over the roles their platforms have played in propagating the images from these horrific attacks. YouTube was quick to issue a statement, noting that it would “work cooperatively with the authorities.”
