Insights

Communication and Technology news
This is what Facebook’s rumored Aloha AI assistant looks like
2018-08-21

Facebook is reportedly working on an Amazon Echo and Google Home killer, codenamed Aloha, which would pair a video chat service with an AI assistant. Now, thanks to some clever reverse engineering, we’ve got a sense for what this will look like. Jane Manchun Wong, a prodigous reverse engineer who has uncovered...

Gmail now lets you Undo sent messages on Android – but you only get 10 seconds
2018-08-21

The Undo Send feature in Gmail is a godsend for the keyboard clutzes among us who fire off emails too early. I can’t count the number of times I’ve used it to bring back messages that I hadn’t finished composing or attaching files to. Now, Android Police has spotted the feature in Gmail’s Android app. It’s...

Facebook faces backlash over discriminatory ad tools it promised to fix
2018-08-20

Facebook was hit, over the weekend, with a complaint by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The HUD claims Facebook’s allowing advertisers to discriminate against users searching for property with tools the company said it’d eliminated back in 2016. The HUD alleges that Facebook’s ad...

Librarian blew $89k in city money on free mobile game
2018-08-17

I’m consistently amazed by the lengths people will go to for their free-to-play mobile games. In this case, a librarian in Utah managed to blow thousands of dollars on Game of War. According to the Herald Journal, the former librarian, Adam Winger, used city credit cards to fund his digital addiction. He was put...

Here’s an insanely huge library of every political ad on Google
2018-08-16

After increased public scrutiny, Google has released a searchable library of its political ads. A few months back, after public scrutiny over the opacity of its ad program, Google promised to be more transparent about how political ads work on its platform. And today, the company launched a new website that keeps...

I don’t want to stream with Ninja, either
2018-08-16

A super-popular Twitch streamer has been accused of discriminating against women by refusing to stream with them. As a woman, I think I’m with the streamer on this one. It started with an interview in Polygon in which writer Allegra Frank interviewed Tyler “Ninja” Blevins — currently the most popular...

‘Enhance’: Browser game mocks Hollywood hacking tropes
2018-08-15

You know those evidence-gathering scenes in 90s and 00s tv shows and movies that treat looking at photographs like a particularly shouty spectator sport? Where stern-looking people tap magical “enhance” button or tell the computer they intend to zoom in and “clean up” the image? You know, that old chestnut?...

Is your website or app missing ‘the spark’? This training should help light that fire
2018-08-15

Knowing how to please a user is why talented UX designers are (and will remain) in high demand. Now, you can learn the lessons from those coding pros with the UX Design for Beginners training. And best of all, it’s less than the price of a standard movie ticket -- just $9.99 from TNW Deals.

This Google manager shares his secrets for building an effective team
2018-08-15

Matt Sakaguchi is a site reliability manager at Google. Learn why he believes that a team of all stars doesn’t always lead to an all-star team. Massey Morris: In the early stages of your career, you worked on a SWAT team. How did this experience build a foundation for your understanding of effective...

Design is never neutral
2018-08-15

Designers can’t simply make digital products easier to use. They have to think about what’s in the best interests of the user, writes Adobe’s Khoi Vinh. To their own detriment, designers prefer to think about “how” much more than “why.” Here’s a good...

South Korean women protest against growing epidemic of spycam porn
2018-08-15

On August 4, a 35-degree Saturday, 70,000 women gathered in the streets of Seoul wearing masks. Many were holding signs declaring “My life is not your porn”. The South Korean women were speaking out in a fight against the country’s growing epidemic of spycam porn. This creepy porn genre — filming women without...

SEC ruling suggests cryptocurrency airdrops violate securities law
2018-08-15

Airdrops are totally all the rage. Blockchain companies have been resorting to token giveaways and marketing bounty programs as a way of circumventing the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) ban on initial coin offerings (ICOs) – but this is probably going to change very soon. In an announcement on its...

What American inequality looks like from above
2018-08-15

Homeless encampments, glassy offices, RVs, and tech buses. The story of inequality in the United States is written in its streets. In Silicon Valley, it looks like a homeless encampment carved out of a scruffy patch of land that’s separated from Facebook and Instagram headquarters by the expressway...

The inside story of how McDonald’s innovated the Quarter Pounder
2018-08-15

In a change that has been as seismic for McDonald’s as the drive-through window in 1975, McDonald’s has reintroduced its signature burger with fresh—never frozen—beef. And that’s just the start. A cryptic missive went out Last spring to all 3.6 million people who follow...

Twitter finally suspends Alex Jones–but only for one week
2018-08-15

Twitter suspended Jones’s account because of a video in which he said, “Now is time to act on the enemy before they do a false flag.” Twitter has finally followed other giants like Facebook and Apple by pulling the conspiracy theorist from its platform–but only for a week. News of the...

Nearly 50k people have blocked Twitter’s biggest advertisers over the Alex Jones debacle (and you can too)
2018-08-15

iteAlex Jones can’t win these days. As the unofficial mascot of conspiracy theorists everywhere, Jones — the man who answers the question: What happens when you turn human skin inside-out and continue to wear it? — has seen his beloved InfoWars brand blocked on every major platform that isn’t a microblogging...

How ten-year-old Evernote evolved for the current app market
2018-08-14

Evernote today rolled out a redesign, in which it swapped out its familiar colors for a refreshed look. It appears to be a relatively simple look, but when the Evernote team pulled back the curtain for us, it was anything but. Specifically, Mads — Evernote‘s elephant mascot — has morphed from a grey symbol on...

Why Spotify could be bigger than Pandora in the U.S. in less than 5 years
2018-08-14

The battlelines have been drawn in your ears. It might be a good time to buy some Spotify stock. eMarketer thinks the streaming music giant will have more U.S. users than that other streaming music giant, Pandora, by 2022.Read Full Story

Google tracks unsuspecting users, and now lawmakers are demanding action
2018-08-14

After a report about location tracking, Google may be its next target of regulators and lawmakers. Yesterday, the Associated Press published a report about Google products that track users’ location even if they tried to stop it in their privacy settings. Essentially, even with location tracking turned off, the...

Thousands of Silicon Valley security guards get first union contract
2018-08-14

Agencies supplying officers to Facebook, Google, and other tech companies agreed to increase wages, health coverage, and paid time off. It’s well known that many employees at tech companies don’t share in much of the vast wealth created in the sector. Many of the blue-collar workers, such as janitorial...

Square now lets all US CashApp users buy and sell Bitcoin
2018-08-14

Square is expanding its cryptocurrency services across the the US. Its subsidiary CashApp announced that American users can now use the application to buy and sell Bitcoin in all 50 states. The company revealed the news in a post on Twitter (spotted by CCN). It is worth pointing out that CashApp first announced...

Twitter is now recommending users follow cryptocurrency scambots
2018-08-14

Despite constant pressure to ban them, it appears Twitter is actively contributing to the cryptocurrency scam epidemic on its platform and encouraging users to follow obvious scambot accounts. The social media giant was caught recommending a suspicious account impersonating Tesla CEO Elon Musk, as spotted by security...

Facebook wins rights to show top-flight Spanish league soccer in India
2018-08-14

Under the three-year agreement, Facebook will have the right to carry Spain’s La Liga games in eight countries including India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The agreement is the first direct deal with a major soccer league for Facebook, reports Bloomberg. Under the three-year agreement, Facebook will have the right...

DeepMind says its AI can detect eye diseases as well as human doctors
2018-08-14

Over the past two years, DeepMind, the AI firm spun off from Google, has been working on a new way to spot eye diseases that could rob people of their sight. The company says it’s now ready to show off its work, as it says its system can detect more than 50 different diseases as accurately as experienced doctors....

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