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Communication and Technology news
Facebook reinstates data firm it suspended for alleged misuse, but surveillance questions linger
2018-08-22

Despite policies banning surveillance, it is unclear how effective Facebook and others can be at preventing trusted third-parties from misusing user data. Crimson Hexagon, a Boston data analytics company, raised some eyebrows last week when it announced that its access to the firehose of user data from Facebook and...

Working moms can all relate to NYT’s Sheera Frenkel’s Twitter thread
2018-08-22

Forget about “having it all.” Most working moms are just trying every day to keep their heads above water. Forget about “having it all.” Laugh in the face of “work-life balance.”Read Full Story

This AI designs Balenciaga better than Balenciaga
2018-08-22

It’s really into asymmetry and color-blocking. Right now, designer fashion houses are gearing up for New York Fashion Week in September. But on Twitter, fashion week came early, courtesy of a clever neural network.Read Full Story

What will it take to get gen Z to ditch smartphones for wearable cameras?
2018-08-22

Devices aimed at making wearable or fashionable portable cameras have generally flopped. Can a portable camera change that? Once upon a time, our digital lives were lived in a text-based world, but these days our social personalities are, more often than not, transmitted and mediated by video. This is even truer...

Facebook will remove 5,000 discriminatory ad options this fall
2018-08-22

Facebook has recently come under fire for its discriminatory ad options. Yesterday the social media giant responded with a blog post outlining its plans to remove more than 5,000 ad targeting options in an attempt to prevent advertisers from discriminating against its users, in relation to religion or ethnicity. The...

Google and Lenovo stumbled upon the killer app for Smart Displays
2018-08-22

Lenovo’s Smart Display with Google Assistant is a glorified digital picture frame, and that’s great. It’s unusual to become smitten with a tech product that you barely interact with. For me, however, that’s what happened with Lenovo’s Smart Display.Read Full Story

Not another Yves Béhar profile!
2018-08-22

He helped lead a design revolution in business, but he hasn’t shared in the spoils like his rivals. As the designer himself jokes: “Whatever happened to Yves Béhar?” This article is a preview from Fast Company’s October issue, on newsstands September 18.Read Full Story

Iran’s Facebook and Twitter propaganda targeted hundreds of thousands
2018-08-22

Facebook did not say if the campaign targeted the U.S. midterms, but security firm FireEye said some of the Iranian pages it studied had broader motives. Facebook said on Tuesday it shut down hundreds of pages and accounts operated by Iran- and Russia-backed accounts that concealed their true identities and roped in...

Google is working on yet another podcast app
2018-08-22

Barely two months after Google launched a standalone podcast player for Android, The Verge has discovered that the search giant is already working on another app for spoken-word audio. It’s called Shortwave, and it’s being built at the company’s Area 120 incubator, which helps employees’ ideas bloom into...

Google’s ‘Tell me something good’ might just restore your faith in humanity
2018-08-22

Being perpetually tuned into the news is not fun. Important, perhaps, but usually not particularly good for your outlook on humanity. Google, one of the world’s principal supplier of news, is taking a small step to make things better. Google Assistant is testing a new feature that will only feed you positive...

Report: Increased Facebook use leads to more racial attacks
2018-08-21

A new study shows just how dangerous heightened Facebook use may be. Facebook may not only be engineering your entire digital world, but also having a disturbingly negative impact on the physical one, too. After the small German town of Altena saw a rise in attacks against its refugee population, researchers at the...

Facebook implements trust scoring for all users
2018-08-21

Facebook revealed this week it’s trying to stem the flow of fake news by assigning trust values to users. It insists on keeping its criteria for trustworthiness secret though, in case untrustworthy people try to game the system — and they almost certainly will. Tessa Lyon, Facebook‘s product manager, told The...

Google Fit gets ready to take on the Apple Watch
2018-08-21

The new Google Fit takes cues from the American Heart Association, the World Health Organization, and Apple’s activity rings. Google is revamping its fitness platform ahead of a potential smartwatch push this fall. Instead of counting steps and calories, the new Google Fit divides activity into “Move...

The country’s prisoners are striking to protest inhumane conditions
2018-08-21

The nationwide prisoner strike has developed a list of 10 demands to improve life inside, including raising wages for prison work and giving prisoners the right to vote. From August 21 to September 9, inmates in prisons across at least 17 states, including California and New York, will go on strike. For nearly...

Google Fit teams up with the WHO to help you shed the pounds
2018-08-21

Google has updated its fitness tracking app Google Fit. The latest version contains a radical visual redesign, and an emphasis on helping users achieve their health and fitness goals. For this update, Google says it’s worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Heart Association (AHA), in order...

Android app scams users out of €335 in return for an Ethereum logo
2018-08-21

There is an illegitimate “Ethereum” app that claims to sell you one Ether (the cryptocurrency derived from the Ethereum blockchain). Except it’s a scam – users are being tricked into buying a picture of its logo. A recent Tweet from malware researcher, Lukas Stefanko, has shown an app on the Google Play Store...

The end of ads
2018-08-21

Advertising is obsolete, writes University of Kentucky’s Ramsi Woodcock. Here’s why it’s time to end it. Since it first became clear that Russian agents spent thousands of dollars a month on political advertising on social media in the runup to the 2016 presidential election, Americans...

FreeWeibo is working towards a censorship-free China
2018-08-21

China’s internet has always been heavily censored by its government. The heavy censorship, also know as The Great Firewall, restricts users from searching or sharing certain phrases and words online — like pictures of Winnie the Pooh — to ‘protect’ Chinese citizens, or so the government says....

Google’s Assistant is here to give you a break from the horrible news cycle
2018-08-21

Finally, you can turn on the news without hearing about Donald Trump. These days, you can’t turn on–or scroll through–the news without hearing about horrible things, whether it’s U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest scandal or accounts of children abused in ICE facilities or the...

9 focus-forming habits to lengthen your attention span
2018-08-21

These are small and totally doable actions that, with a little practice, can help you focus and get more done. From the infinite scroll of Facebook and Instagram to the temptation of a perfectly sunny day, there are a lot of distractions that prevent you from zeroing in on your work. But as career expert and cofounder...

The secret weapon that could help decide the messaging wars
2018-08-21

Tactical, data-driven UX is helping upstart Viber build a billion-user base. The messaging app Viber has a billion registered users–but its estimated 260 million active monthly users are concentrated in Eastern Europe. That makes it a small fry in the United States, Asia, and the rest of Europe, where...

China is now the second biggest spender on TV shows
2018-08-21

China spent $10.9 billion producing TV shows, while the U.K. spent $10 billion. The U.S., however, spent $58.3 billion. The country leaped past the U.K., making it second to only the U.S. on the amount of money it spends producing television shows, reports CNBC. In 2017, China spent $10.9 billion producing TV shows,...

WhatsApp will reportedly develop tools to combat fake news in India
2018-08-21

India is WhatsApp’s biggest market with more than 200 million users, but recently the app has come under fire there as fake news propagates amongWhatsApp groups. That’s according to India’s IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who said WhatsApp CEO Chris Daniels gave the assurance that the new tools...

Study says Google is collecting more data about you than you realize
2018-08-21

Google appears to be scooping up information about people who use incognito mode in their browsers. The Vanderbilt University study surveyed Google’s data collection policies across a range of services and found that the search giant is collecting way more information about users than thought, reports AdAge....

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