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Erica Portnoy / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
A technical critique on why even a well-intentioned effort to build a client-side scanning system for messaging will break key promises of end-to-end encryption — Recent attacks on encryption have diverged. On the one hand, we've seen Attorney General William Barr call for “lawful access” …
FinSMEs:
Investment data management provider Confluence Technologies has acquired StatPro, a supplier of cloud-based portfolio analytics to asset managers, for $207M+ — Confluence Technologies, a Pittsburgh, PA-based provider of investment data management automation for regulatory …
Alaric DeArment / MedCity News:
St. Louis-based PierianDx, which provides a genomics SaaS platform for clinical labs to build personalized medicine programs, raises $27M Series B — The startup describes its software as providing clinical labs with more streamlined and accurate analysis, interpretation and reporting for accelerating personalized medicine programs.
Gaurav Shukla / NDTV Gadgets 360:
Global smartphone shipments in Q3 grew 2% YoY according to Strategy Analytics, while Canalys estimates 1% increase, bucking a two-year downward trend — Samsung grabbed the top spot with over 78 million smartphone shipments in Q3 2019. — HIGHLIGHTS — Global smartphone shipments bucked …
Siva Vaidhyanathan / New York Times:
Vetting political ads effectively and consistently at global scale is impossible; Congress should restrict ad targeting to the level of an electoral district — It's not about free speech. — Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.
Sometimes it feels as if Internet platforms are turning everything upside down, from politics to publishing, culture to commerce, and of course swapping truth for lies.
This week’s bizarro reversal was the vista of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a tech CEO famed for being entirely behind the moral curve of understanding what his product is platforming (i.e. nazis), providing an impromptu ‘tweet storm’ in political speech ethics.
Actually he was schooling Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — another techbro renowned for his special disconnect with the real world, despite running a massive free propaganda empire with vast power to influence other people’s lives — in taking a stand for the good of democracy and society.
So not exactly a full reverse then.
In short, Twitter has said it will no longer accept political ads, period.
A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.
— jack
(@jack) October 30, 2019
Whereas Facebook recently announced it will no longer fact-check political ads. Aka: Lies are fine, so long as you’re paying Facebook to spread them.
You could argue there’s a certain surface clarity to Facebook’s position — i.e. it sums to ‘when it comes to politics we just won’t have any ethics’. Presumably with the hoped for sequitur being ‘so you can’t accuse us of bias’.
Though that’s actually a non sequitur; by not applying any ethical standards around political campaigns Facebook is providing succour to those with the least ethics and the basest standards. So its position does actually favor the ‘truth-lite’, to put it politely. (You can decide which political side that might advantage.)
Twitter’s position also has surface clarity: A total ban! Political and issue ads both into the delete bin. But as my colleague Devin Coldewey quickly pointed out it’s likely to get rather more fuzzy around the edges as the company comes to defining exactly what is (and isn’t) a ‘political ad’ — and what its few “exceptions” might be.
Indeed, Twitter’s definitions are already raising eyebrows. For example it has apparently decided climate change is a ‘political issue’ — and will therefore be banning ads about science. While, presumably, remaining open to taking money from big oil to promote their climate-polluting brands… So yeah, messy.
There will clearly be attempts to stress test and circumvent the lines Twitter is setting. The policy may sound simple but it involves all sorts of judgements that expose the company’s political calculations and leave it open to charges of bias and/or moral failure.
Still, setting rules is — or should be — the easy and adult thing to do when it comes to content standards; enforcement is the real sweating toil for these platforms.
Which is also, presumably, why Facebook has decided to experiment with not having any rules around political ads — in the (forlorn) hope of avoiding being forced into the role of political speech policeman.
If that’s the strategy it’s already looking spectacularly dumb and self-defeating. The company has just set itself up for an ongoing PR nightmare where it is indeed forced to police intentionally policy-provoking ads from its own back-foot — having put itself in the position of ‘wilfully corrupt cop’. Slow hand claps all round.
Albeit, it can at least console itself it’s monetizing its own ethics bypass.
Twitter’s opposing policy on political ads also isn’t immune from criticism, as we’ve noted.
Indeed, it’s already facing accusations that a total ban is biased against new candidates who start with a lower public profile. Even if the energy of that argument would be better spent advocating for wide-ranging reform of campaign financing, including hard limits on election spending. If you really want to reboot politics by levelling the playing field between candidates that’s how to do it.
Also essential: Regulations capable of enforcing controls on dark money to protect democracies from being bought and cooked from the inside via the invisible seeding of propaganda that misappropriates the reach and data of Internet platforms to pass off lies as populist truth, cloaking them in the shape-shifting blur of microtargeted hyperconnectivity.
Sketchy interests buying cheap influence from data-rich billionaires, free from accountability or democratic scrutiny, is our new warped ‘normal’. But it shouldn’t be.
There’s another issue being papered over here, too. Twitter banning political ads is really a distracting detail when you consider that it’s not a major platform for running political ads anyway.
During the 2018 US midterms the category generated less than $3M for the company.
And, secondly, anything posted organically as a tweet to Twitter can act as a political call to arms.
It’s these outrageous ‘organic’ tweets where the real political action is on Twitter’s platform. (Hi Trump.)
Including inauthentically ‘organic’ tweets which aren’t a person’s genuinely held opinion but a planted (and often paid for) fake. Call it ‘going native’ advertising; faux tweets intended to pass off lies as truth, inflated and amplified by bot armies (fake accounts) operating in plain sight (often gaming Twitter’s trending topics) as a parallel ‘unofficial’ advertising infrastructure whose mission is to generate attention-grabbing pantomimes of public opinion to try and sway the real thing.
In short: Propaganda.
Who needs to pay to run a political ad on Twitter when you can get a bot network to do the boosterism for you?
Let’s not forget Dorsey is also the tech CEO famed for not applying his platform’s rules of conduct to the tweets of certain high profile politicians. (Er, Trump again, basically.)
So by saying Twitter is banning political ads yet continuing to apply a double standard to world leaders’ tweets — most obviously by allowing the US president to bully, abuse and threaten at will in order to further his populist rightwing political agenda — the company is trying to have its cake and eat it.
More recently Twitter has evolved its policy slightly, saying it will apply some limits on the reach of rule-breaking world leader tweets. But it continues to run two sets of rules.
To Dorsey’s credit he does foreground this tension in his tweet storm — where he writes [emphasis ours]:
Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.
These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.
This is good stuff from Dorsey. Surprisingly good, given his and Twitter’s long years of free speech fundamentalism — when the company gained a reputation for being wilfully blind and deaf to the fact that for free expression to flourish online it needs a protective shield of civic limits. Otherwise ‘freedom to amplify any awful thing’ becomes a speech chiller that disproportionately harms minorities.
Aka freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach, as Dorsey now notes.
Even with Twitter making some disappointing choices in how it defines political issues, for the purposes of this ad ban, the contrast with Facebook and Zuckerberg — still twisting and spinning in the same hot air; trying to justify incoherent platform policies that sell out democracy for a binary ideology which his own company can’t even stick to — looks stark.
The timing of Dorsey’s tweet-storm, during Facebook’s earnings call, was clearly intended to make that point.
“Zuckerberg wants us to believe that one must be for or against free speech with no nuance, complexity or cultural specificity, despite running a company that’s drowning in complexity,” writes cultural historian, Siva Vaidhyanathan, confronting Facebook’s moral vacuousness in a recent Guardian article responding to another Zuckerberg ‘manifesto’ on free speech. “He wants our discussions to be as abstract and idealistic as possible. He wants us not to look too closely at Facebook itself.”
Facebook’s position on speech does only stand up in the abstract. Just as its ad-targeting business can only run free of moral outrage in unregulated obscurity, where the baked in biases — algorithmic and user generated — are safely hidden from view so people can’t joins the dots on how they’re being damaged.
We shouldn’t be surprised at how quickly the scandal-prone company is now being called on its ideological BS. We have a savvier political class as a result of the platform-scale disinformation and global data scandals of the past few years. People who have have seen and experienced what Facebook’s policies translate to in real world practice. Like compromised elections and community violence.
With lawmakers like these turning their attention on platform giants there is a genuine possibility of meaningful regulation coming down the pipe for the antisocial media business.
Not least because Facebook’s self regulation has always been another piece of crisis PR, designed to preempt and steer off the real thing. It’s a cynical attempt to maintain its profitable grip on our attention. The company has never been committed to making the kind of systemic change necessary to fix its toxic speech issues.
The problem is, ultimately, toxicity and division drives engagement, captures attention and makes Facebook a lot of money.
Twitter can claim a little distance from that business model not only because it’s considerably less successful than Facebook at generating money by monopolizing attention, but also because it provides greater leeway for its users to build and follow their own interest networks, free from algorithmic interference (though it does do algorithms too).
It has also been on a self-proclaimed reform path for some time. Most recently saying it wants to be responsible for promoting “conversational health on its platform. No one would say it’s there yet but perhaps we’re finally getting to see some action. Even if banning political ads is mostly a quick PR win for Twitter.
The really hard work continues, though. Namely rooting out bot armies before their malicious propaganda can pollute the public sphere. Twitter hasn’t said it’s close to being able to fix that.
Facebook is also still failing to stem the tide of ‘organic’ politicized fake content on its platform. Fakes that profit at our democratic expense by spreading hate and lies.
For this type of content Facebook offers no searchable archive (as it now does for paid ads which it defines as political) — thereby providing ongoing cover for dark money to do its manipulative hack-job on democracy by free-posting via groups and pages.
Plus, even where Facebook claims to be transparently raising the curtain on paid political influence it’s abjectly failing to do so. Its political ads API is still being blasted by research academics as not fit for purpose. Even as the company policy cranks up pressure on external fact-checkers by giving politicians the green light to run ads that lie.
It has also been accused of applying a biased standard when it comes to weeding out “coordinated inauthentic behavior”, as Facebook euphemistically calls the networks of fake accounts set up to amplify and juice reach — when the propaganda in question is coming from within the US and leans toward the political right.
Just thinking about how 4,000 advertisers stopped paying Breitbart but then Facebook started paying Breitbart.
— Siva Vaidhyanathan
(@sivavaid) October 26, 2019
Facebook denies this, claiming for example that a network of pages on its platform reported to be exclusively boosting content from US conservative news site, The Daily Wire, are “real pages run by real people in the U.S., and they don’t violate our policies“. (It didn’t offer us any detail on how it reached that conclusion.)
A company spokesperson also said: “We’re working on more transparency so that in the future people have more information about Pages like these on Facebook.”
So it’s still promising ‘more transparency’ — rather than actually being transparent. And it remains the sole judge interpreting and applying policies that aren’t at all legally binding; so sham regulation then.
Moreover, while Facebook has at times issued bans on toxic content from certain domestic hate speech preachers’, such as banning some of InfoWars’ Alex Jones’ pages, it’s failed to stop the self-same hate respawning via new pages. Or indeed the same hateful individuals maintaining other accounts on different Facebook-owned social properties. Inconsistency of policy enforcement is Facebook’s DNA.
Set against all that Dorsey’s decision to take a stance against political ads looks positively statesmanlike.
It is also, at a fundamental level, obviously just the right thing to do. Buying a greater share of attention than you’ve earned politically is regressive because it favors those with the deepest pockets. Though of course Twitter’s stance won’t fix the rest of a broken system where money continues to pour in and pollute politics.
We also don’t know the fine-grained detail of how Twitter’s algorithms amplify political speech when it’s packaged in organic tweet form. So whether its algorithmic levers are more likely to be triggered into boosting political tweets that inflame and incite, or those that inform and seek to unite.
As I say, the whole of Twitter’s platform can sum to political advertising. And the company does apply algorithms to surface or suppress tweets based on its proprietary (and commercial) determination of ‘engagement quality’. So its entire business is involved in shaping how visible (or otherwise) tweeted speech is.
That very obviously includes plenty of political speech. Not for nothing is Twitter Trump’s platform of choice.
Nothing about its ban on political ads changes all that. So, as ever, where social media self-regulation is concerned, what we are being given is — at best — just fiddling around the edges.
A cynical eye might say Twitter’s ban is intended to distract attention from more structural problems baked into these attention-harvesting Internet platforms.
The toxic political discourse problem that democracies and societies around the world are being forced to grapple with is as a consequence of how Internet platforms distribute content and shape public discussion. So what’s really key is how these companies use our information to program what we each get to see.
The fact that we’re talking about Twitter’s political ad ban risks distracting from the “root problems” Dorsey referenced in passing. (Though he would probably offer a different definition of their cause. In the tweet storm he just talks about “working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info”.)
Facebook’s public diagnosis of the same problem is always extremely basic and blame-shifting. It just says some humans are bad, ergo some bad stuff will be platformed by Facebook — reflecting the issue back at humanity.
Here’s an alternative take: The core issue underpinning all these problems around how Internet platforms spread toxic propaganda is the underlying fact of taking people’s data in order to manipulate our attention.
This business of microtargeting — or behavioral advertising, as it’s also called — turns everyone into a target for some piece of propaganda or other.
It’s a practice that sucks regardless of whether it’s being done to you by Donald Trump or by Disney. Because it’s asymmetrical. It’s disproportionate. It’s exploitative. And it’s inherently anti-democratic.
It also incentivizes a pervasive, industrial-scale stockpiling of personal data that’s naturally hostile to privacy, terrible for security and gobbles huge amounts of energy and computing resource. So it sucks from an environmental perspective too.
And it does it all for the very basest of purposes. This is platforms selling you out so others can sell you stuff. Be it soap or political opinions.
Zuckerberg’s label of choice for this process — “relevant ads” — is just the slick lie told by a billionaire to grease the pipes that suck out the data required to sell our attention down the river.
Microtargeting is both awful for the individual (meaning creepy ads; loss of privacy; risk of bias and data misuse) and terrible for society for all the same reasons — as well as grave, society-level risks, such as election interference and the undermining of hard-won democratic institutions by hostile forces.
Individual privacy is a common good, akin to public health. Inoculation — against disease or indeed disinformation — helps protect the whole of us from damaging contagion.
To be clear, microtargeting is also not only something that happens when platforms are paid money to target ads. Platforms are doing this all the time; applying a weaponizing layer to customize everything they handle.
It’s how they distribute and program the masses of information users freely upload, creating maximally engaging order out of the daily human chaos they’ve tasked themselves with turning into a compelling and personalized narrative — without paying a massive army of human editors to do the job.
Facebook’s News Feed relies on the same data-driven principles as behavioral ads do to grab and hold attention. As does Twitter’s ‘Top Tweets’ algorithmically ranked view.
This is programmed attention-manipulation at vast scale, repackaged as a ‘social’ service. One which uses what the platforms learn by spying on Internet users as divisive glue to bind our individual attention, even if it means setting some of us against each another.
That’s why you can publish a Facebook post that mentions a particular political issue and — literally within seconds — attract a violently expressed opposing view from a Facebook ‘friend’ you haven’t spoken to in years. The platform can deliver that content ‘gut punch’ because it has a god-like view of everyone via the prism of their data. Data that powers its algorithms to plug content into “relevant” eyeballs, ranked by highest potential for engagement sparks to fly.
It goes without saying that if a real friendship group contained such a game-playing stalker — who had bugged everyone’s phones to snoop and keep tabs on them, and used what they learnt to play friends off against each other — no one would imagine it bringing the group closer together. Yet that’s how Facebook treats its captive eyeballs.
That awkward silence you could hear as certain hard-hitting questions struck Zuckerberg during his most recent turn in the House might just be the penny dropping.
It finally feels as if lawmakers are getting close to an understanding of the real “root problem” embedded in these content-for-data sociotechnical platforms.
Platforms that invite us to gaze into them in order that they can get intimate with us forever — using what they learn from spying to pry further and exploit faster.
So while banning political ads sounds nice it’s just a distraction. What we really need to shatter the black mirror platforms are holding against society, in which they get to view us from all angles while preventing us from seeing what they’re doing, is to bring down a comprehensive privacy screen. No targeting against personal data.
Let them show us content and ads, sure. They can target this stuff contextually based on a few generic pieces of information. They can even ask us to specify if we’d like to see ads about housing today or consumer packaged goods? We can negotiate the rules. Everything else — what we do on or off the platform, who we talk to, what we look at, where we go, what we say — must remain strictly off limits.
What makes the Bullet Journal method of note-taking so popular? It’s the magic combination of speed, structure, and flexibility!
Once you understand how to set up your bullet journal and personalize it, you can capture any aspect of your day, work, and life in a streamlined manner. If you’re new to this method and find it daunting or if you just need a refresher on its essentials once in a while, our cheat sheet below can help.
Refer to the cheat sheet for quick descriptions of key Bullet Journal terms and symbols, and for a walkthrough of the logging process. You’ll also find ideas for Bullet Journal Collections and signifiers in the list.
FREE DOWNLOAD: This cheat sheet is available as a downloadable PDF from our distribution partner, TradePub. You will have to complete a short form to access it for the first time only. Download The Bullet Journal Cheat Sheet for Quick Note-Taking.
| Item | Description/Note |
|---|---|
| Terms to Know About | |
| Rapid Logging | Adding journal entries as bulleted lists |
| Collection | Basic journal module to organize related information |
| ¹Index | Content locator (Sample entry: Collection_Name: 1-2, 6-8, 15) |
| ¹The Future Log | For dated entries outside current month |
| ¹The Monthly Log | |
| a. The Calendar Page | To record/schedule events and tasks |
| b. The Task Page | Monthly inventory of time, upcoming tasks, priorities, migrated tasks, etc. |
| ¹The Daily Log | For capturing tasks, events, and notes daily with Rapid Logging |
| Topic | Descriptive title for journal page |
| Bullet | Short sentence paired with symbol for Rapid Logging |
| Signifier | Special symbol to add extra context to journal entries |
| Stack | Set of active Collections |
| Tags | Hashtags for sharing Stacks in social media posts |
| Subcollections | Subsets of Collection created for easier management of large projects |
| Dedicated Index | Index dedicated to one subject only |
| Threading | Stitching Collection together by connecting its page numbers |
| Migration | Moving entries between Logs to update journal |
| Bullet Symbols | |
| ● Task_Name | To-do list item / task incomplete |
 ︎ Task_Name |
Task complete |
| > Task_Name | Task migrated to collection |
| < Task_Name | Task scheduled in Future Log |
| ● Task_Name | Task irrelevant |
| - Note_Name | Item to be remembered |
| ○ Event_Name | Noteworthy moment |
| ○ Event_Name
- Note 1 - Note 2 - Note 3 |
Nested bullets |
| Signifier Ideas | |
| ²* | Priority |
| ²! | Inspiration |
² |
Explore further |
| i | Special information: coupon code, flight number, receipt number, etc. |
 ︎ |
Favorite/liked |
| ★ | Important |
 |
Recurring |
| ? | Research/verify/reconsider |
| $ | Money related |
| </> | Tech related |
| @ | Name, email address, or social media handle |
| # | Phone number |
| ▼ | Address, location |
| ∞ | Website |
| ⧗ | Deadline |
| ▲ | Appointment |
| :) | Vacation |
| ∀ | Holiday/weekend |
| !? | Idea |
| ❝ | Quote |
| ℞ | Medical information |
| [ ] | Book/movie/video |
| ♫ | Song/album |
| :) | Mood |
| ❐ | Wishlist item (Check box after purchase) |
| Starter Tags | |
| #BulletJournal | |
| #BulletJournalKey | |
| #BulletJournalIndex | |
| #BulletJournalCollection | |
| #BulletJournalFutureLog | |
| #BulletJournalMonthlyLog | |
| #BulletJournalWeeklyLog | |
| #BulletJournalDailyLog | |
| #BulletJournalFoodLog | |
| #BulletJournalMoodLog | |
| #BulletJournalGratitudeLog | |
| #BulletJournalTracker | |
| Steps to Log Information | |
| 1. Set up Index. | |
| 2. Set up Future Log after Index. | |
| 3. Update Monthly Log. | a. Set up Monthly Log at start of month. |
| b. Add list of dates to Calendar page. | |
| c. Migrate tasks from previous month or Future Log. | |
| d.Schedule/record events and tasks on Calendar page. | |
| e. Record notes and extra information on Task Page. | |
| 4. Create Daily Log for next day. | a. Add Topic at top of page and page number at bottom. |
| b. Use Daily Log for rapid logging day’s tasks, events, and notes. | |
| c. Add Topic and corresponding page number(s) to Index. | |
| Custom Collection Ideas | |
| Work/Productivity | Project manager |
| Workflow tracker | |
| Homework tracker | |
| Meeting log | |
| Time tracker | |
| Exam prep tracker | |
| Deadline tracker | |
| Learning log | |
| Career goals tracker | |
| Job search tracker | |
| Household | Shopping list |
| Meal planner | |
| Recipe book | |
| Birthday calendar | |
| Event planner | |
| Errand tracker | |
| Medical information tracker | |
| Home improvement tracker | |
| Trip planner | |
| Recurring tasks tracker | |
| Health | Diet planner |
| Food diary | |
| Workout tracker | |
| Running log | |
| Sleep tracker | |
| Period tracker | |
| Self care ideas list | |
| Checkup tracker | |
| Healthy foods list | |
| Mood tracker | |
| Finances | Budget tracker |
| Bill payment tracker | |
| Expense tracker | |
| Debt tracker | |
| Money goals tracker | |
| Income tracker | |
| Savings tracker | |
| Investment tracker | |
| Subscription tracker | |
| Money to-do list | |
| Life | Personal diary |
| Gratitude journal | |
| Life goals tracker | |
| Quotes and affirmations list | |
| Bucket list | |
| Gift ideas tracker | |
| Hobby tracker | |
| Habit tracker | |
| Reading list | |
| Movie list | |
| ¹Core Collection: Foundational Collection part of every Bullet Journal. ²Suggested in the official Bullet Journal system. |
|
Your bullet journal can be a planner, calendar, memoir, or all of these and more rolled into one. And you’ll find plenty of stunning journal spreads online to use as inspiration for your own. What’s more, you can go digital with your bullet journal in creative ways. For example, you can repurpose Evernote as a bullet journal.
If you plan to go the digital route, we recommend using one of these apps to make bullet journaling effortless.
Image Credit: Estée Janssens on Unsplash
Read the full article: The Bullet Journal Cheat Sheet for Quick Note-Taking
Ed Niedermeyer / TechCrunch:
A look at the hidden complexities of an autonomous taxi service, after taking a fully driverless ride, now being tested as part of Waymo One service in Phoenix — After more than a decade, Waymo's driverless ride-hailing service is open to customers — Ed Niedermeyer is an author, columnist and co-host of The Autonocast.
Caroline Haskins / BuzzFeed News:
How student surveillance service Gaggle monitors online activities of about 5M US students for “suspicious or harmful content” using AI and human moderators — Gaggle monitors the work and communications of almost 5 million students in the US, and schools are paying big money for its services.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps — the easiest way to keep up with everything that happened in the world of apps over the past week — from the breaking news to the trends and all the other information an industry watcher needs to know.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with 194 billion downloads in 2018 and more than $100 billion in consumer spending. People spend 90% of their mobile time in apps and more time using their mobile devices than watching TV. In other words, apps aren’t just a way to waste idle hours — they’re big business, and one that often seems to change overnight.
In this Extra Crunch series, we help you to keep up with the latest news from the world of apps.
This week, we’re looking at that one iOS 13 bug everyone is complaining about, App Store Q3 trends, plus the latest revenue numbers announced by Apple and Google during quarterly earnings. We’ve also found a new product for figuring out what may have caused spikes or changes in an app’s history, and we’re tracking new information about Microsoft’s Xbox Console to mobile streaming service as well as Google’s Motion Sense.
And more!
To get this information, subscribe to Extra Crunch.
Apple released iOS 13.2 with Deep Fusion this week. The release also included new emoji, Siri recording opt-out, bug fixes and security improvements. But it didn’t solve the background app bug.
As a result, developers are angry and users are frustrated. A number of iOS 13 users are complaining about iOS 13’s aggressiveness in killing background apps and tasks, which is attributed to poor RAM management. This particularly affects apps like Safari, YouTube, Overcast and others. Users have lost Safari tabs, emails they were composing, or the video they were watching just after switching away for a minute.
The complaints are all over Twitter, Reddit, and Apple’s own forums. A MacRumors post about this has over 400 comments.
This has been a problem since the betas, but people were hoping they’d be addressed by the public releases. Apple hasn’t clarified what’s at fault here, but there’s speculation about the impact of the memory-intensive camera system.
As TechCrunch editor Matthew Panzarino put it, it “feels like I’m back on iOS 3.”
Developer Nick Heer of Pixel Envy says the bug isn’t catastrophic, but “it absolutely should be the highest of priorities to fix it. It’s embarrassing that all of the hard work put into making animations and app launching feel smooth is squandered by mismanaged multitasking,” he says.
Radar filed.
Outside of mobile games, entertainment and streaming apps are also pulling in the big money. But there’s another category benefiting from the shift to the subscription model: photo and video apps. In this category, you’ll find apps that promise to touch up photos, add filters that can make or break Instagram careers, as well as the video giants like YouTube and TikTok.
In Q3, the category grossed more than $500 million, up a whopping 75% year-over-year, says Sensor Tower. It’s also seeing an annual growth rate of 101% since 2016. Much of this is attributable to YouTube, which alone was responsible for 30% of the category’s revenue in Q3. (Just wait until TikTok takes in-app monetization seriously, though.)
But now, it’s not just the top apps that are growing. In Q3, 22 apps exceeded $3 million in gross user spend, compared to just 2 in Q3 2016. And 7 apps had more than $10 million in revenue, including TikTok, VSCO, Facetune 2, FaceApp, and PicsArt.
CNN:
Facebook says it will not fact-check ads by UK political parties and candidates running in December election, but will fact-check political groups like Leave.EU — Facebook's political ad policy under pressure — London and New York (CNN Business)A controversial policy allowing politicians …
Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about how SoftBank is screwing up. Before that, I noted All Raise’s expansion, Uber the TV show and the unicorn from down under.
Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.
Uber Head of Payments Peter Hazlehurst addresses the audience during an Uber products launch event in San Francisco, California, on September 26, 2019. (Photo by Philip Pacheco / AFP) (Photo credit should read PHILIP PACHECO/AFP/Getty Images)
The sheer number of startup players moving into banking services is staggering,” writes my Crunchbase News friends in a piece titled “Why Is Every Startup A Bank These Days.”
I’ve been asking myself the same question this year, as financial services business like Brex, Chime, Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment and more raise big rounds to build upstart digital banks. North of $13 billion venture capital dollars have been invested in U.S. fintech companies so far in 2019, up from $12 billion invested in 2018.
This week, one of the largest companies to ever emerge from the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem, Uber, introduced its team focused on developing new financial products and technologies. In a vacuum, a multibillion-dollar public company with more than 22,000 employees launching one new team is not big news. Considering investment and innovation in fintech this year, Uber’s now well-documented struggles to reach profitability and the company’s hiring efforts in New York, a hotbed for financial aficionados, the “Uber Money” team could indicate much larger fintech ambitions for the ride-hailing giant.
As it stands, the Uber Money team will be focused on developing real-time earnings for drivers accessed through the Uber debit account and debit card, which will itself see new features, like 3% or more cash back on gas. Uber Wallet, a digital wallet where drivers can more easily track their earnings, will launch in the coming weeks too, writes Peter Hazlehurst, the head of Uber Money.
This is hardly Uber’s first major foray into financial services. The company’s greatest feature has always been its frictionless payments capabilities that encourage riders and eaters to make purchases without thinking. Uber’s even launched its own consumer credit card to get riders cash back on rides. It’s no secret the company has larger goals in the fintech sphere, and with 100 million “monthly active platform consumers” via Uber, Uber Eats and more, a dedicated path toward new and better financial products may not only lead to happier, more loyal drivers but a company that’s actually, one day, able to post a profit.
The TechCrunch team is heading to Berlin again this year for our annual event, TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, which brings together entrepreneurs and investors from across the globe. We announced the agenda this week, with leading founders including Away’s Jen Rubio and UiPath’s Daniel Dines. Take a look at the full agenda.
I will be there to interview a bunch of venture capitalists, who will give tips on how to raise your first euros. Buy tickets to the event here.
This week on Equity, I was in studio while Alex was remote. We talked about a number of companies and deals, including a new startup taking on Slack, Wag’s woes and a small upstart disrupting the $8 billion nail services industry. Listen to the episode here.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on iTunes, Overcast and all the casts.
Will Oremus / OneZero:
Twitter's ban on political and issue ads will let companies advertise things like fossil fuel-based products but ban ads from activists advocating against them — The company's feel-good decision is already a mess. — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Wednesday that the company …
Grandparents may be able to bake a pie that’s out of this world, but it’s no secret the older generation sometimes struggles with technology. With photos moving digital, how can you share them with relatives? Here are some suggestions.
If you’re feeling like an extra sweet grandchild, you can buy your grandma or grandpa what ReviewGeek has dubbed 2018’s product of the year—the Google Nest Hub (previously called the Google Home Hub).
Jason Fitzpatrick, Founding Editor of Review Geek, loved this product so much he called its Ambient Mode the “Best Picture Frame Ever.”
The nice thing about the Nest Hub is it’s not just a digital photo frame—it’s a device that could add a little extra functionality into your grandparent’s life (with a little learning curve, of course).
When the Nest Hub isn’t actively being used, it can be set to display photographs. What’s even nicer is you can sync it with your Google Photos albums, allowing you to add or remove photos for your grandma or grandpa from anywhere in the world.
RELATED: How to Use Your Google Home Hub as a Digital Photo Frame
On another note, this method works only for relatives who have an internet connection. If they don’t, then you might want to look at other options, such as a digital photo frame.
If you’re looking for just a digital photo frame without all of the additional functionality the Google Nest Hub has to offer, then you’re in luck. Although most digital photo frames aren’t internet-connected, most include a USB port or SD card slot. You can use these ports to add or remove photos whenever you go for a visit.
With so many digital photo frames out there, it might be hard to determine which one you’d like to get for your family members. Luckily, we’ve done the work of sifting through the different digital frames on the market, so be sure to check out the best digital picture frames currently available.
