Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has launched a new venture called Wikitribune to help fight fake news:
Wikitribune is a news platform that brings journalists and a community of volunteers together.
We want to make sure that you read fact-based articles that have a real impact in both local and global events. And that stories can be easily verified and improved.
Unroll.me CEO, Jojo Hedaya, has responded to the controversy arising from revelations in The New York Times that the company does things like sell your “anonymized” receipts to third parties:
Our users are the heart of our company and service. So it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service.
And while we try our best to be open about our business model, recent customer feedback tells me we weren’t explicit enough.
What a load of horse shit.
Steve Ballmer has unveiled USAFacts. Here’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, writing for The New York Times:
On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.
Want to know how many police officers are employed in various parts of the country and compare that against crime rates? Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets and the cost to collect? Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed depression and how much the government spends on it? That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.
Adrianne Jeffries, writing for The Outline:
In February 2016, Google started displaying a Featured Snippet for each of the 25,000 celebrities in the CelebrityNetWorth database, Warner said. He knew this because he added a few fake listings for friends who were not celebrities to see if they would pop up as featured answers, and they did.
“Our traffic immediately crumbled,” Warner said. “Comparing January 2016 (a full month where they had not yet scraped our content) to January 2017, our traffic is down 65 percent.” Warner said he had to lay off half his staff. (Google declined to answer specific questions for this story, including whether it was shooting itself in the foot by destroying its best sources of information.)
When Google’s priorities were about sending searchers to the best website online that had the information someone was looking for, it was great. This new era of competing against the websites themselves seems like it’s going to backfire. What incentive does a website have to exist, and how can it continue to exist, if it is cannibalized by Google once it gets popular?
Beth Elderkin, writing for Gizmodo:
LiveJournal, a blog community that’s hosted a lot of science fiction authors and fans (including George RR Martin), has officially banned “political solicitation”— which can mean anything that criticizes the Russian government, as well as pro-LGBTQ discussions. There are also concerns users can be subject to Russian spying.
Walt Mossberg, one of the great tech writers, will be retiring in June.
Over my career, I’ve reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars, and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.
And, in the best professional decision of my life, I converted myself into a tech columnist in 1991. As a result, I got to bear witness to a historic parade of exciting, revolutionary innovation — from slow, clumsy, ancient PCs to sleek, speedy smartphones; from CompuServe and early AOL to the mobile web, apps, and social media. My column has run weekly in a variety of places over the years, most recently on The Verge and Recode under the Vox Media umbrella, where I’ve been quite happy and have added a podcast of which I’m proud.
Apple has released their new Clips video app. MacStories has a nice rundown of the features:
Overall, Clips is well-polished, packed with tools, and it does well what it’s designed for. The recent onslaught of ephemeral, short-form video content on services like Snapchat and Instagram was clearly a strong influence on Clips’ creation. And while I haven’t gotten into the ‘Stories’ craze myself, I’m still expecting to be a somewhat-regular Clips user. Whereas I find something like Instagram Stories intimidating because I don’t like the pressure of shooting and immediately sharing something. Clips allows those who want to move that fast to do so, while people like me can take their time – I can record something, save it to the Photos app, maybe share it with my wife or a friend, and if I end up really liking it, I can later share to social media.
The new digital media devision of Verizon that will include Yahoo, AOL, and The Huffington Post will be called Oath, The New York Times reports:
The brand will apply to the digital media division of Verizon after it buys Yahoo’s internet assets for $4.48 billion, a deal that is expected to close by the end of June. But do not count the legacy brands out just yet: Yahoo, AOL and The Huffington Post will continue to exist and operate with their own names — under the Oath umbrella.
Sort of a who’s who of internet companies from two decades ago. Maybe they should buy MySpace too?
Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge:
Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon published blog posts this morning responding to the backlash they’ve been receiving since Congress voted to revoke a strong set of internet privacy rules that would have prevented internet providers from using or sharing their customers’ web browsing history without permission. The companies take different approaches when responding, but the takeaway from all three is that they think customers should stop worrying.
Ah, yes, trust the giant company, what could go wrong?
Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica:
The proof-of-concept exploit uses a low-cost transmitter to embed malicious commands into a rogue TV signal. That signal is then broadcast to nearby devices. It worked against two fully updated TV models made by Samsung. By exploiting two known security flaws in the Web browsers running in the background, the attack was able to gain highly privileged root access to the TVs. By revising the attack to target similar browser bugs found in other sets, the technique would likely work on a much wider range of TVs.
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
The MLB.com At Bat and NHL iOS applications have been updated today to take advantage of one of the new, but still under-the-radar features available in the just-launched version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 10.3: personalized home screen icons. That’s right — you now can replace either of these apps’ default icon with one featuring your favorite team’s logo instead.
Clever.
The House has now passed the resolution that will allow ISPs to sell your browsing history without your permission:
As most had expected, the House of Representatives today voted 215 to 205 to kill privacy rules protecting US broadband subscribers. If you’re interested in a little thing called public accountability, you can find a breakdown of which Representatives voted for the measure here.
Ars Technica has a good break down on what this all means:
The rules issued by the FCC last year would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers’ opt-in consent before selling or sharing Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information with advertisers and other companies. But lawmakers used their authority under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to pass a joint resolution ensuring that the rules “shall have no force or effect” and that the FCC cannot issue similar regulations in the future.
Now’s probably a good time to recommend looking into a VPN and making sure the websites you use are all using HTTPS (this one is). The two dead simple VPNs I’ve used in the past and heard good things about are Cloak and TunnelBear. I personally use Private Internet Access, but it’s a little more fiddly to set up and use.
Maureen Dowd, writing for Vanity Fair:
You’d think that anytime Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are all raising the same warning about A.I.—as all of them are—it would be a 10-alarm fire. But, for a long time, the fog of fatalism over the Bay Area was thick. Musk’s crusade was viewed as Sisyphean at best and Luddite at worst. The paradox is this: Many tech oligarchs see everything they are doing to help us, and all their benevolent manifestos, as streetlamps on the road to a future where, as Steve Wozniak says, humans are the family pets.
But Musk is not going gently.
Apple has acquired one of my favorite apps: Workflow. Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch got the scoop:
Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak.
I hope this means we’ll see even more integration and automation advances in iOS in the near future.
Harry McCracken, writing for Fast Company:
“A big change happened when we decided to go non-square,” says Systrom, who, with his close-cropped beard, chocolate-colored quilted blazer, and wooden water bottle, has a sense of style befitting the cocreator of a tool for sharing beautiful photography. The decision not only gave the company more confidence to change its app, but also inspired it to go much further in evolving the service. Systrom realized that if the company waited until there were signs that the app was in dire need of revamping, it would likely be too late.