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In the wake of the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand last month, Australia is putting major pressure on Big Tech to prevent the spread of hateful and violent content on their platforms, with a new law that threatens major fines and imprisonment. The law positions Australia at the extreme end of a growing push…
ABC News aired an exclusive interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this morning on Good Morning America. And instead of asking Zuckerberg tough questions, interviewer George Stephanopoulos lobbed softball after softball so that Zuck could deliver his prepared talking points. “Is the big message from you right now, Facebook gets it, we’re gonna change?” Stephanopoulos…
French and English share the same 26-character alphabet, but additional accents, symbols, and punctuation make it challenging for Francophones to use keyboard layouts designed for English speakers. The solution so far has just been to learn to adapt, but researchers led by Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, developed an algorithm that helped create the first…
Last year, a borked server migration resulted in MySpace losing all of the music uploaded to the website between 2003 and 2015—a loss estimated at more than 50 million tracks from 14 million artists. But now a small fraction has been recovered thanks to an anonymous group of academics and uploaded to the Internet Archive.…
You’ve heard of handsets with pop-up selfie cameras, but what about phones with full-on pop-up second screens? While the whole concept sounds a bit daft, it seems that’s precisely what Chinese phone maker Oppo may be cooking up based on its latest patents. Really, between the Oppo Find X, the rumored Oppo Reno, and this…
The pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 followed proper procedures before the March 10 flight that killed 157 people, according to a preliminary report by the Ethiopian government. “The crew performed all the procedures repeatedly provided by the manufacturer but was not able to control the aircraft,” Dagmawit Moges, Ethiopia’s Transport Minister, said at a…
Facebook is paying British newspaper the Daily Telegraph to run a series of sponsored articles called “Being human in the information age” defending it against claims it is encouraging the spread of misinformation, aiding in the spread of hate speech, violating privacy, and generally ruining society in myriad other ways, Business Insider reported on Wednesday.…
The economic juggernaut we call the internet has thrived principally thanks to a single U.S. law passed more than two decades ago—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It states quite simply that website operators shall not be treated as the publishers of information posted by their users. To wit, Gizmodo cannot be held liable…
Hospitals, like the rest of us, are extremely online. The equipment we use, the data it discovers and the critical medical information it deciphers can all be connected to the internet — and if it’s connected, it needs to be carefully secured. A new report from Kim Zetter outlines the research done by Israeli academics…
France’s attempt to curb fake news backfired on Tuesday when Twitter rejected the French government’s attempt to run its own social media advertising campaign. Oops. The government’s #OuiJeVote, or ‘Yes, I Vote’ campaign was meant to urge voters to register for the upcoming European Parliament elections in a timely manner. To help with that, France’s…
Researchers at the cybersecurity firm UpGuard on Wednesday said they had discovered the existence of two datasets together containing the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users. Both were left publicly accessible. In a blog post, UpGuard connected one of the leaky databases to a Mexico-based media company called Cultura Colectiva. The data…
A 25-year-old middle school teacher in Long Island was fired after a topless selfie she took was nonconsensually obtained by a student at her school. The teacher, Lauren Miranda, is now in the process of suing the school district for gender discrimination. Miranda took the photo herself and says that she only shared it with…
Big companies like to get bigger, and for many big tech companies these days, the clearest path to growth is increasing how much money generates with content services. That’s why Apple launched a whole slew of them last week, and why Google announced a video game platform the week before. Microsoft too has envisioned itself…
One of Apple’s biggest selling points is the general high quality of its products. But after continued problems with the butterfly keyboards on recent MacBooks followed by a new lawsuit regarding the Apple Watch and issues with late-model iPad Pros, Apple’s reputation for making reliable premium devices is starting to feel a bit shaky. In…
Before meeting its end in a planet-circling dust storm, the Opportunity rover traversed nearly 30 miles over the perilous Martian surface. In some ways, we traveled along with Oppy thanks to the thousands of images it sent back to Earth. But what did Oppy’s journey sound like? There weren’t microphones transmitting sounds the sounds of…
A popular DNA-testing company seems to be targeting true crime fans with a new pitch to let them share their genetic information with law enforcement so cops can catch violent criminals. Two months ago, FamilyTreeDNA raised privacy concerns after BuzzFeed revealed the company had partnered with the FBI and given the agency access to the…
It’s been nearly two years since the bloody peak of a social media-fueled genocide in Southeast Asia, but Facebook is still not doing enough to prevent the ongoing promotion of violence and hate in Myanmar on its social network, according to a member of the United Nations team that found the Silicon Valley company for…
Flying is about to get ever so slightly less awful this year as the Transportation Security Administration is rolling out much-needed security checkpoint equipment upgrades at several airports that will drastically speed up the screening process by doing away with the need for passengers to empty the electronics and toiletries from their carry-on luggage. As…
Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno has accused Julian Assange of violating the terms of his asylum and leaking private photos of Moreno’s family and friends online in the latest dust-up between the WikiLeaks founder and his increasingly frustrated hosts. Speaking to the Ecuadorean Radio Broadcasters’ Association yesterday, Moreno suggested that Assange had been intercepting the president’s…
In 2010, Adobe introduced one of Photoshop’s first true ‘smart’ features: a tool called Content-Aware Fill that could intelligently remove and replace objects in a scene. Today, Adobe is now bringing a version of that tool to its compositing software, After Effects, that does essentially the same thing but on moving video clips, which is…
