Tag: Facebook

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News You Can Use: 10/24/2018

The Source - No Attention Span

  • Facebook Isn’t Sorry — It Just Wants Your Data

    Weeks after the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal broke, Facebook announced at its annual conference that it would soon use its trove of user data to roll out a dating app to help pair users together in “long-term” romantic relationships. Later in the year, while Zuckerberg told Congress “I promise to do better for you” and pledged increased transparency in its handling of users’ data, the company admitted to secretly using a private tool to delete the old messages of its founder. This summer, just days after Zuckerberg assured “we have a responsibility to protect people,” reports surfaced that Facebook asked US banks for granular customer financial data (including card transactions and checking account balances) to use for a banking feature. Even the company’s good faith attempts to secure its platform feel ham-handed and oblivious, like last November when Facebook asked users in Australia to upload their nude photos to Facebook for employee review to combat revenge porn.

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/facebook-isnt-sorry-it-just-wants-your-data

  • How WhatsApp is undermining Facebook’s war on election interference

    The problem, of course, is WhatsApp. As we were admiring the flags, Brazilian newspaper Folha published an investigation showing that media companies are buying large groups of phone numbers and blasting them with anti-leftist propaganda on the encrypted messaging app. While it’s often discussed as a chat app, WhatsApp has message-forwarding mechanics that strip away the identity of the sender and allow messages to spread virally with little accountability.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/19/17997516/facebook-election-war-room-brazil-whatsapp

  • The economics of immigration
  • Open offices have driven Panasonic to make horse blinders for humans

    “As open offices and digital nomads are on the rise, workers are finding it ever more important to have personal space where they can focus,” the company told Dezeen. “Wear Space instantly creates this kind of personal space – it’s as simple as putting on an article of clothing.”

    The device, which debuted as a prototype at SXSW earlier this year, is now the subject of a crowdfunding campaign. Early birds can snag one for around $260, but we’re going to say neigh on this one.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/open-offices-have-driven-panasonic-to-make-horse-blinders-for-humans/

  • Sorry, Goldfish: People’s Attention Spans Aren’t Shrinking, They’re Evolving

    The research, presented in detail in Prezi’s 2018 State of Attention Report, found that well over half — 59 percent — of business professionals feel they can give a piece of content their undivided attention more so today than they could just one year ago. Also, nearly half (49 percent) of respondents said they are more selective about the content they consume now compared to one year ago.

    The State of Attention study also found evidence that attention spans are not only intact across generations, but also expanding in younger generations. That’s important information for businesses: Many organizations struggle to communicate effectively with, and develop engaging content for, all groups in their multigenerational workforce — but that’s especially true with millennials. And millennials, according to Pew Research Center, are the largest generation in the workforce as of 2017.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/321266

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 10/5/2018

California is making headlines for their stance on consumer information protection. They are introducing their own net neutrality laws, they are forcing hardware makers to develop better default passwords, and they are forcing bots to reveal themselves (can’t pass themselves off as humans).

Apple and Amazon are stating they were NOT hacked by China. but Bloomberg thinks differently.

And finally… Elon Musk needs to get off of Twitter with the quickness.

Acquisitions

  • Software Firms Cloudera, Hortonworks to Merge

    The firms expect to generate about $720 million in combined annual revenue and achieve more than $125 million in annual cost savings as a result of the merger.

    Under terms of the deal, Cloudera stockholders will own about 60% of the combined company and Hortonworks stockholders the remaining 40%, the companies said Wednesday.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/software-firms-cloudera-hortonworks-to-merge-1538603060

  • Google acquires AI customer service startup Onward

    Onward’s enterprise chatbot platform leveraged natural language processing to extract meaning from customers’ messages. Drawing on signals like location, login status, and historical activity, it could personalize and contextualize its responses to questions.

    Onward’s visual bot builder, which let clients tailor answers with decision trees, afforded even greater customization. Thanks to integrations with Zendesk, Help Scout, Salesforce, Hubspot, Shopify, Spree, and Solidus, its bots could autonomously track conversations, add leads, and keep tabs on shipments and orders.

    https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/02/google-acquires-onward-an-ai-customer-service-startup/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Can’t spot the bot? In California, automated accounts have to reveal themselves

    a new law that bans automated accounts, more commonly known as bots, from pretending to be real people in pursuit of selling products or influencing elections. Automated accounts can still interact with Californians, according to the law, but they will need to disclose that they are bots.

    The law comes as concerns about social media manipulation remain elevated. With just more than a month to go before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, social media companies have pledged to crack down on foreign interference.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/can-t-spot-bot-california-automated-accounts-have-reveal-themselves-n915556

Cloud

  • There’s a crack at the heart of Facebook’s advertising business

    As the Post illustrates, Facebook remains a critical tool for niche advertisers looking to reach their far-flung audiences. For big brand advertisers, though, Facebook can be a less certain proposition. That was my takeaway from Tim Peterson’s story in Digiday today about ad buyers’ apathy toward so-called premium programming on Watch, Facebook’s nascent video platform.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17934770/facebook-lgbt-ads-watch-policies

Security

  • Apple and Amazon explicitly deny claims that servers were compromised by Chinese chips

    Both Apple and Amazon are vehemently denying claims that their servers were compromised by Chinese spies following an explosive report from Bloomberg on Thursday. The report claims that spies were able to infiltrate some of the country’s biggest tech companies by inserting microchips the size of “a grain of rice” into Chinese-manufactured servers, part of the tech giants’ infrastructure. The report alleges that the companies discovered the chips on their own and notified US authorities, but both Apple and Amazon are refuting that any of the claims cited in the story are actually founded in reality.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17936968/apple-amazon-deny-servers-chinese-spy-chips

  • California Is Making It Illegal for Devices to Have Shitty Default Passwords

    “The lack of basic security features on internet connected devices undermines the privacy and security of California’s consumers, and allows hackers to turn everyday consumer electronics against us,” state senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, who authored the bill, said in a press release. “This bill ensures that technology serves the people of California, and that security is not an afterthought but rather a key component of the design process.”

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbd5m4/california-is-making-it-illegal-for-devices-to-have-shitty-default-passwords

Other

  • Amazon eliminates monthly bonuses and stock grants after minimum wage increase

    Several Amazon warehouse employees have criticized the move, stating they would actually be losing thousands in incentive pay. Currently, warehouse workers get two shares of Amazon stock when they’re hired ($1,952.76 per share as of writing), and an additional stock option each year. After the changes take effect, the RSU program will be phased out for stocks that vest in 2020 and 2021, and it will be replaced with a direct stock purchase plan by the end of next year.

    An Amazon warehouse worker told The Verge via email that the news was devastating to fulfillment employees, many of whom depend on their RSU and VCP (variable compensation pay, a performance-based monthly bonus program) incentives on top of their hourly wages. VCP incentives, which are dependent on good attendance and hitting productivity targets, could get Amazon workers an 8 percent monthly bonus, and a 16 percent bonus during the peak November and December seasons.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/3/17934194/amazon-minimum-wage-raise-stock-options-bonus-warehouse

  • Elon Musk Tweet Mocks the Securities and Exchange Commission

    “Before the sun sets today, the SEC and his lawyers will be on the phone,” said Stephen Crimmins, a former SEC litigator now at Murphy & McGonigle PC. “It definitely jeopardizes the settlement.”

    For the settlement to move forward, the SEC could demand additional constraints on Mr. Musk’s activities, Mr. Crimmins added, since the primary concern of the SEC’s case was about how he had acted as a CEO and how he would behave going forward.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweet-appears-to-mock-the-securities-and-exchange-commission-1538685320?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Photo by Claude Piché on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 9/28/2018

Facebook was hacked (again), exposing 50 million users to potential data breaches. Instagram and WhatsApp accounts could also be affected.

As Intel experiences chip shortages, their plan is to focus on getting the high end chips at the door.

Ohh… Elon Musk is getting sued.

Acquisitions

  • Slack buys Astro and shuts down its email app

    It may seem curious for Slack, the giant chat app with the goal of killing email, to buy an email app — but the pairing makes a good deal of sense. Astro’s focus was on business users, and it built out some smart integrations inside of Slack. With the two teams combined, Slack can use Astro’s experience to build a native solution for dealing with emails right inside the chat app.

    There is some bad news, though: Slack is shutting down Astro’s email app. The app will stop functioning on October 10th. That’s unfortunate, given that good third-party email clients have become increasingly hard to come by, and Astro had some features that really made it stand out.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/24/17897658/slack-astro-acquisition-email-app-shut-down-integration

  • With Sirius behind it, can Pandora now stage a comeback?

    Sirius XM is all about selling subscriptions to listen to Howard Stern and stations based on genres like 70s, 80s and 90s, and for those who want on-demand music, “now Sirius can cross sell a Spotify clone,” he says. “It’s a winning combination.”

    Pandora’s biggest issue has been its double-edged sword. It is under contract to the record labels in paying higher copyright fees than on-demand outlets, and thus, the more listeners it gets, the more money it has to pay out. Pachter says Pandora has lost over $100 million in 2017 and 2016 due to sky high royalty rates.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/09/25/sirius-xm-pandora-comeback/1416707002/

  • DXC Boosts Cloud-First Approach With System Partners Buyout

    System Partners, a provider of customer-centric services like advisory, strategy designing, tailored managed services and the like, boasts more than 100 Salesforce certified consultants in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

    Management at DXC Technology believes that the buyout is a strategic move to support and cater to existing customers more efficiently, and strengthen its position in the cloud market

    https://www.nasdaq.com/article/dxc-boosts-cloud-first-approach-with-system-partners-buyout-cm1029023

Artificial Intelligence

Cloud

  • Rising Cloud Bills May Get a Breather

    It is a big food chain that’s gotten much bigger quickly. Total capital spending by the four aforementioned companies has jumped by an average of 45% on a year-over-year basis for the past six quarters. The four spent a total of $34.7 billion in the first six months of this year—up 59% from the same period last year. But analysts for Morgan Stanley expect that pace to decelerate to growth of 45% for the second half and warned in a note this week that it could slow further to “low double digits” next year.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/rising-cloud-bills-may-get-a-breather-1538128800

  • Microsoft, IBM sign up to cheaper cloud alliance

    GeekWire is reporting that Cloudflare has brought in Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, Automattic and Backblaze under a single banner called the Bandwidth Alliance.

    Scheduled to be announced today, during Cloudflare’s eighth birthday party, the group’s goal is to make sure Cloudflare’s customers using their services pay either significantly cheaper prices, or pay nothing at all, for the traffic that passes through locations where their networks are connected to Cloudflare’s services.

    https://www.itproportal.com/news/microsoft-google-sign-up-to-cheaper-cloud-alliance/

Security

  • France records big jump in privacy complaints since GDPR

    France’s CNIL agency said today that it’s received 3,767 complaints since May 25, when GDPR came into force, up from 2,294 complaints over the same period last year — which it notes was already a record year.

    CNIL says this represents a 64% increase in complaints, which it suggests shows that EU citizens have “seized the GDPR strongly” — attributing public engagement on the issue to media attention on the new regulation and on data protection stories such as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/25/france-records-big-jump-in-privacy-complaints-since-gdpr/

  • Facebook Is Breached by Hackers, Putting 50 Million Users’ Data at Risk

    Three software flaws in Facebook’s systems allowed hackers to break into user accounts, including those of the top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, according to two people familiar with the investigation but not allowed to discuss it publicly. Once in, the attackers could have gained access to apps like Spotify, Instagram and hundreds of others that give users a way to log into their systems through Facebook.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Intel acknowledges supply issues, will prioritize premium chips

    In the short term, Intel plans to prioritize the premium market, including Xeon and Core processors, so it “can serve the high-performance segments of the market.” Beyond that, the company plans to invest $15 billion in capital expenditures this year, including $1 billion going toward the manufacture of 14nm silicon in the U.S., Ireland and Israel.

    These issues have left the broader PC industry in a rough spot. On the face of it, a shortage due to increased demand seems like a good problem to have, but ultimately a lack of processors could create a major issue if the market continues to grow, perhaps ultimately reversing some of that success.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/intel-acknowledges-supply-issues-will-prioritize-premium-chips/

  • Verizon hits 1.45Gbps 4G LTE speeds in New York

    The milestone saw it aggregate six channels of spectrum (both licensed and shared — a first in the US). According to Verizon VP of Technology Planning and Development, Bill Stone, the company is laying a “foundation” for its “evolution into 5G.”

    The trial involved aggregating four carriers of licence-assisted access (LTE-LAA) spectrum with licensed PCS and AWS spectrum, according to ZDNet. It also relied on 256 quadrature amplitude moderation (256 QAM) and 4×4 multiple-input multiple-output (4×4 MIMO) technologies — the latter antenna tech is available in 1,100 locations nationwide. Meanwhile, it’s facing fierce 5G competition from rivals AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/28/verizon-peak-4g-lte-speed-new-york/

Other

  • SEC charges Tesla CEO Elon Musk with fraud

    The SEC complaint alleges that Musk issued “false and misleading” statements and failed to properly notify regulators of material company events. The SEC held a press conference Thursday evening regarding the complaint.

    Among other remedies, the SEC is seeking to bar Musk from serving as an officer or director of a publicly traded company if found guilty.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/tesla-falls-4percent-on-report-elon-musk-sued-by-sec.html

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 9/12/2018

The Source: Avoiding Deadlines

  • 44 Percent of Americans 18-27 Have Deleted the Facebook App This Year, Poll Finds

    According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of Facebook users ages 18 and older have adjusted their privacy settings in the wake of revelations that Facebook repeatedly failed to protect consumer data as it was shared and abused by a myriad of Facebook partners, including political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.

    The study also notes that around 42 percent of Facebook users have chosen to take a break from the social platform of several weeks or more, with a quarter of users choosing to delete the Facebook app from their phones entirely in the last year.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3q5nk/44-percent-of-americans-18-27-have-deleted-the-facebook-app-this-year-poll-finds

  • When should you take a mental health day?

    It is generally not a good idea to take a mental health day spontaneously. That is, if you wake up in the morning and dread going to work, don’t use that feeling as a reason to call in sick. Stress and anxiety are emotional experiences you have when there is something in your world you are trying to avoid. If you call in sick when you feel this way, you are laying down a memory that can start to create a habit to respond to stress and anxiety by actually avoiding work that may need to be done. You don’t want your go-to response to stress to be to run away from it.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90225167/when-is-it-ok-to-take-a-mental-health-day

  • 3 steps to money mastery: Would you rather have freedom or stuff?
  • Confessions of a young ad agency staffer: ‘If you leave for lunch, you get that side-eye’

    In the ad agency world, people who are very young stress themselves until they get sick because they want so badly to be perfect. Everyone I know who is young who works in this business is like, ‘I have to be amazing, I have to get promoted.’ Everyone who is older is so jaded. They just don’t want to work anymore. My boss works from home twice a week and takes calls from home.

    Do you feel like multiple people should be doing your job?

    I handle seven different parts of our client’s business. It’s crazy. I feel like there should be a manager and someone to assist them for every piece of business I work on. They don’t hire enough people. When someone goes on vacation, we have to sit down and train everybody on what we’re doing. It’s very inefficient. I think that to save money they try to cram as many of us onto as many clients and campaigns as possible.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-young-ad-agency-staffer-leave-lunch-get-side-eye/

  • Not all popular YouTubers are raking in cash for their videos

    Marshall says his decision to use “real music” you’d hear on the radio severely cuts into the actual profit turned by his channel. Where the profits for a monetized video that uses music in the public domain would be split between the creator and YouTube, the record labels that own the top-40 tracks take “all of the money, and we are left with zero.” These videos can still be profitable if the YouTuber and the label can reach an agreement; otherwise, monetizing videos with copyrighted music is virtually out of the question. “Out of … 147 videos, we are monetizing 11,” he says in a video explaining his earnings. “That’s 7 percent. We are monetizing 7 percent of the content that we put out.”

    According to Marshall, the only way the team is able to continue making videos is through people buying merch, tickets to their tour (roughly $30 a ticket for general admission, according to a recent sale), or by buying a $4.99 channel membership for special perks. (This model is similar to the one employed by mid-range musicians, who also rely on merch and ticket sales, and independent writers and artists through platforms like Patreon.) “You’re supporting us. Just you buying a shirt, it’s silly … but it’s what allows us to keep doing this,” he explains.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17822822/youtube-youtubers-influencers-video-ad-revenue-subscribers-fitness-marshall

Photo by Chad Peltola on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 9/7/2018

The Source: AWS and a trillion dollars

Amazon became the second company to be valued at one trillion dollars this week. As that news hit the airwaves, workers at Whole Foods (which was purchased by Amazon last year) are starting to organize a union citing Amazon’s poor working culture.

Jeff Bezos is also making news for going after Facebook and Google’s advertising revenues. The company is making a push for digital advertising profits and I personally see them being very successful at it.

Acquisitions

Artificial Intelligence

  • AI robots can develop prejudices, just like us mere mortals

    Over thousands of simulations, the robots learned new strategies by copying each other either within their own groups or by across the entire population. The study found the robots cribbed strategies that gave them a better payoff in the short term, indicating that high cognitive ability isn’t necessarily required to develop prejudices.

    “Our simulations show that prejudice is a powerful force of nature and through evolution, it can easily become incentivized in virtual populations, to the detriment of wider connectivity with others,” wrote Cardiff University’s Professor Roger Whitaker, one of the study’s co-authors. “Protection from prejudicial groups can inadvertently lead to individuals forming further prejudicial groups, resulting in a fractured population. Such widespread prejudice is hard to reverse.”

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/06/robots-prejudice-study-mit-cardiff/

Cloud

  • Google will struggle if it re-enters China, says its former country head

    “People [in China] aren’t looking for a new search engine or an app store, new companies are emerging addressing previously unknown customer needs [and] innovations are coming out,” Lee explained.

    “The new graduates generally prefer to work for Chinese companies and then, lastly, the heads of multinationals are really just professional managers. If they were to compete against local entrepreneurs who are gladiators in this colosseum, I don’t think the American companies will have a high chance of succeeding in this environment,” he added.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/05/google-will-struggle-if-it-re-enters-china/

Security

  • More U.S. Cities Brace for ‘Inevitable’ Hackers

    “Compromise is inevitable,” said Christopher Mitchell, chief information security official, at a Houston City Council hearing last month. His presentation helped persuade local lawmakers they needed a $30 million cybersecurity insurance plan with a $471,400 premium, an example of a burgeoning trend across the country. Policies vary, but insurance can cover hackers’ extortion demands, legal liabilities, computer-forensics expertise and costs for problems like having government services knocked off line.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-cities-brace-for-inevitable-cyberattack-1536053401?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos: Being a CSO can be a ‘crappy job’

    “It’s like being a [chief financial officer] before accounting was invented,” he said.

    “When you decide to take on the [chief security officer] title, you decide that you’re going to run the risk of having decisions made above you or issues created by tens of thousands of people making decisions that will be stapled to your resume,” he said.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/06/alex-stamos-facebook-yahoo-security-officer/

Software/SaaS

  • Commons Clause stops open-source abuse

    Go to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and hover over the Products menu at the top. You will see numerous open-source projects that Amazon did not create, but runs as-a-service. These provide Amazon with billions of dollars of revenue per year.

    For example, Amazon takes Redis (the most loved database in StackOverflow’s developer survey), gives very little back, and runs it as a service, re-branded as AWS Elasticache. Many other popular open-source projects including, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, Docker, Hadoop, Spark and more, have similarly been taken and offered as AWS products.

    To be clear, this is not illegal. But we think it is wrong, and not conducive to sustainable open-source communities.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/commons-clause-stops-open-source-abuse/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • How Alternative DBs are Disrupting the Conventionals in 2018

    There’s no question that Oracle has been a key reason why AWS has ascended to global IT heights in the first place. However, as AWS has scaled out, it now perceives a need for new-gen data storage inside DBs that are easier to manage, not as expensive to maintain, and more flexible in integrating and moving workloads.

    NoSQL technology offers enterprises flexibility because NoSQL data stores can support structured, unstructured and semi-structured data for different types of business applications. Older SQL databases have issues with scripting languages, such as JSON, for example, and are more limited in scope than the newer ones.

    Forrester has cited MongoDB as the most popular NoSQL database for the last couple of years. The open-source database is “popular among developers because it is easy to use, scales to meet the most demanding applications and offers the most comprehensive ecosystem of tools and partners,” the researcher said.

    http://www.eweek.com/database/how-alternative-dbs-are-disrupting-the-conventionals-in-2018

Other

  • Whole Foods workers seek to unionize, says Amazon is ‘exploiting our dedication’

    In a letter addressed to Whole Foods employees, the group — members of Whole Foods’ cross-regional committee — wrote that they are “concerned about the direction” of Whole Foods in an Amazon era. The letter outlines several demands, including a $15 minimum wage for all employees, 401k matching, paid maternity leave, lower health insurance deductibles and more.

    “We cannot let Amazon remake the entire North American retail landscape without embracing the full value of its team members. The success of Amazon and [Whole Foods] should not come at the cost of exploiting our dedication and threatening our economic stability,” they wrote.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/06/whole-foods-workers-seek-to-unionize-says-amazon-is-exploiting-our-dedication/
    A Trillion Dollars!

  • Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Market

    Amazon derives the bulk of its annual revenue, forecast to be $235 billion this year, from its e-commerce business, selling everything from books to lawn furniture. Amazon is also a leader in the cloud computing business, with Amazon Web Services, which accounts for around 11 percent of its revenue but more than half of its operating income. But in the company’s most recent financial results, it was a category labeled “other” that caught the attention of many analysts. It mostly consists of revenue from selling banner, display and keyword search-driven ads known as “sponsored products.” That category surged by about 130 percent to $2.2 billion in the first quarter, compared with the same period in 2017.

    Those numbers are a pittance for Google and Facebook, which make up more than half of the $88 billion digital ad market. But they come with big and troubling implications for those two giants.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/business/media/amazon-digital-ads.html

  • Alibaba’s Jack Ma, China’s Richest Man, to Retire From Company He Co-Founded

    Mr. Ma is retiring as China’s business environment has soured, with Beijing and state-owned enterprises increasingly playing more interventionist roles with companies. Under President Xi Jinping, China’s internet industry has grown and become more important, prompting the government to tighten its leash. The Chinese economy is also facing slowing growth and increasing debt, and the country is embroiled in an escalating trade war with the United States.

    In an interview, Mr. Ma said his retirement is not the end of an era but “the beginning of an era.” He said he would be spending more of his time and fortune focused on education. “I love education,” he said.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/alibaba-jack-ma-retiring.html