Android Central 321: U, Mi and Huawei

This week, Jerry, Russell and Daniel catch up on everything that happened after CES 2017 (plus a bit that happened during CES), including the HTC U Ultra and U Play announcements, the Huawei Mate 9, Daydream, and the NVIDIA Shield update!

Plus, Nintendo! How does the Switch fit into a mobile-first gaming world? And does Nintendo’s next Android game, Fire Emblem Heroes, hold the same influence as Super Mario Run?

Show notes

• Huawei Mate 9 review
• HTC U Ultra & U Play preview
• All about Daydream
• NVIDIA Shield Android TV review
• All about Nintendo Switch!

Podcast MP3 URL: http://traffic.libsyn.com/androidcentral/androidcentral321.mp3

Here’s a neat Chrome + multi-window trick you probably didn’t know about

It’s easy to open links in the opposite window, or juggle Chrome tabs between both viewports.

Android 7.0’s multi-window feature is great, letting you split your display between two full screen apps. But it comes with a few caveats, including the fact that you generally can’t run different instances of the same app in both windows.

Google Chrome, however, is smart enough to juggle tabs between windows, letting you view different pages in each half of the screen. It’s a neat trick that you might not be aware of, so here’s how you do it.

Creating two Chrome windows

Open Chrome
Long-press the recent apps key to open multi-window mode.
Tap the overflow menu (three dots) in the top right corner
Tap Move to other window

That’s it! Your Chrome tab will pop into the lower half of the screen. And you can use this feature to juggle tabs between the lower and upper half’s of the screen at will.

Opening a link in a new window

First, you’ll need to have Chrome open in multi-window mode.
Long-press the link and tap open in other window

That’s it! The link will pop into the lower window and you’ll be good to go, with the original page up top and the new one down below.

It’s worth remembering that you can open links from the lower window in the upper one using this trick – it doesn’t matter which window you’re starting from.

Happy multitasking!

Android Nougat

• Android 7.0 Nougat: Everything you need to know
• Will my phone get Android Nougat?
• Google Pixel + Pixel XL review
• All Android Nougat news
• How to manually update your Nexus or Pixel
• Join the Discussion

Sonos is planning a new speaker with built-in Alexa voice control

Sonos will one day launch a speaker you can control with your voice via Amazon Alexa… and maybe even Google Assistant.

It seems like every company is making an Amazon Echo-like speaker, but Sonos isn’t your average company. It makes premium speakers and has been consistently innovative on how it allows customers to control those speakers, either individually or all synced up, among other things. Just last August, for instance, it even announced that it would add Alexa Echo support to its existing speakers.

• Sonos: What is it and what are the alternatives?
• Sonos tips and tricks: Get the most out of your multi-room
• What is Sonos Trueplay and how does it work?

Sonos told Variety on Friday it is now testing the feature, which allow anyone with an Amazon Echo or Dot to control their Sonos systems. Furthermore, it is planning a Sonos speaker with microphones and built-in Alexa. When asked it a Sonos speaker with Alexa is in the works, CEO Patrick Spence said: “Yes, there will be.” He’s magined a future where Sonos customers can use multiple voice systems.

So, instead of just Alexa, you could use any voice assistant to control your Sonos speakers. he compared the idea to how Sonos already offers support for a multitude of competing music services. Sonos is even open to supporting Google Home, which offers the Google Assistant.

It’s unclear if Google or Amazon would even allow such a thing to happen. Spence wouldn’t elaborate on demands from the partners, but he argued that exclusive deals for voice control aren’t “gonna work in the home”, especially since people use different phones and platforms.

NVIDIA’s new Shield TV is more of the same, with a better gamepad

We expected NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang to introduce a revamped Shield TV at CES; what we didn’t expect was for the new device to practically be a carbon copy of the original. Sure, it’s a lot smaller, but inside it’s running all of the same hardware we saw in 2015. And yet, NVIDIA claims it’s still much more powerful than any other set-top box. That’s a testament to how robust the company’s X1 chip is, but it’s disappointment new for anyone who was hoping for something fresh. On the bright side, the new $200 Shield comes with a new controller that’s light years ahead of the last one. It’s not revolutionary, but you can think of it as a refined spin on NVIDIA’s original set-top box concept.

Hardware

It’s a smaller Shield TV — that’s pretty much it! Of course, though, there are some advantages to a more compact footprint. Now you can easily hide the set-top box in your entertainment center; it doesn’t need to take up any prime territory. Style-wise, the new Shield keeps the sharp, angular design from the original, which is still pretty fetching. It’s certainly has character, which feels refreshing when set-top boxes otherwise tend to look boring.

On the back of the box, you have two USB 3.0 ports, an Ethernet jack and the usual HDMI and power connections. There’s no microSD card slot this time around, but you can expand the Shield’s paltry 16GB of storage with USB flash drives. Under the hood, there’s the aforementioned X1 chip along with 3GB of RAM. One nice bonus: The Shield’s slim remote is now included in the box; previously, you had to buy it separately for an extra $50. The new one drops the rechargeable batteries and headphone jack as well, and sports a matte finish instead of brushed metal, but it otherwise still looks like an enlarged Apple TV remote.

If you’re looking for sweeping, dramatic changes, you’ll find them in the new Shield controller. It’s slimmer, sleeker and far easier to hold than its bulky predecessor, which was simply a first-gen mess. Honestly, it would have been hard for NVIDIA to make things worse. The new controller sports an attractive polygonal design, which makes it look like it actually belongs with the Shield. Remember that the original model was repurposed from the Shield tablet, and it had all the ergonomics of a cheap third-party PC gamepad.

Most importantly, everything about the new controller feels good: Every button is more responsive and the analog sticks are much more fluid. The directional pad is a bit stiff, but even that still feels improved.

Current Shield TV owners can also pick up the new controller for $60 on its own. And, to the company’s credit, the older device will also get access to all of the big software upgrades coming to Shield this year. (More on those below.)

Software

The new Shield runs Android 7.0 Nougat, but it doesn’t look any different than the Android TV interface that the last model launched with. On the home page, there’s a row of highlighted content up top, along with apps you can hop into below. The overall interface is pretty basic, but it still feels more modern than what we’ve seen from Roku’s recent streamers. One useful upgrade: You can finally switch between your recent apps easily by double-tapping on the play button. (A command Apple TV owners already know well.)

NVIDIA also laid out an ambitious smart home strategy for the Shield with extensive integration with the Google Assistant. Unfortunately, I couldn’t test out that feature during my review, and it won’t be available until later this year. It certainly looks promising, especially when used together with NVIDIA’s Spot, which will let you shout commands at the Google Assistant from any room in your house. I can’t imagine many people would actually make the Shield the centerpiece of their connected home, but it’s an intriguing strategy nonetheless.

For now, the new Shield offers all the same basic voice commands as the last model. You can tap the microphone button to ask simple questions about the weather or recent sports games, and the Shield will respond quickly with a Google Now-esque card on your TV screen. And of course, you can also use the microphone button to perform voice searches for apps and things to watch.

As a streaming media player

You can watch Netflix, Hulu and most of the major streaming video services on the Shield TV. No surprises there. What’s unique, at least among Android TV devices, is that Shield actually features an Amazon Video app. Remember that Amazon is still at war with both Google and Apple; its apps don’t work with the Chromecast, and, for whatever reason, there’s still no way to stream Amazon’s videos on the Apple TV. The app itself is nothing special, but its mere existence is notable.

The new Shield had no trouble streaming 4K and HDR content from both Netflix and Amazon, not that I expected it to struggle. That’s something Roku’s far less powerful devices can do these days, so something as powerful as the Shield shouldn’t break a sweat.

As a gaming device

One big change this year for all of NVIDIA’s Shield devices is its revamped GeForce Now service. It’s now powered by GeForce 10-series GPUs, which should be able to handle high-end games easily. NVIDIA says it’s also made various upgrades to the service that should help it run more smoothly and with less latency than before. That’s pretty important when you’re trying to play games that are being rendered remotely and streamed to you over the internet.

I was able to load up The Witcher 3 in about the same time it takes to launch on my gaming rig. At 1080p/60 fps and ultra graphic settings (the highest GeForce Now can current support), it simply looked great. I had to look very hard to find compression artifacts, and the only truly noticeable issue I encountered was some occasional audio drop-out. Most importantly, I didn’t feel any lag while running and jumping, and I had no trouble getting into the rhythm of the game’s combat.

Similarly, I had a blast with Shadow Warrior 2, a fast-paced shooter where you’d really notice input lag. It suffered from more compression artifacts than The Witcher 3, but it was still impressive. My brain had a lot of trouble reconciling the fact that a modern PC game was being rendered on a server somewhere and piped to my TV through a tiny box.

Naturally, the quality of your GeForce Now experience will come down to your networking internet setup. It was fine when connected wirelessly on my 802.11AC network on a Netgear Nighthawk router, which is backed by a fairly reliable 100Mbps cable connection. But if any part of your internet connection is flaky, you can expect to encounter plenty of issues. I’m sure it would perform even better when connected over Ethernet, but personally that’s something I’m trying to avoid in 2017. (Though I’d recommend it if you want the best overall experience.) The streaming service will also cost you: It’s $7.99 a month for access to a select library of games, and you’ll have to buy new titles at full price.

If you just want to stream games from your PC, there’s NVIDIA’s Gamestream feature. It basically renders games on your computer and pipes that over to your TV; much like GeForce Now, but on your home network. It’s only available to GeForce video card owners, but given that they’re the primary audience for the Shield, that’s not a very harsh restriction.

It was a cinch using Gamestream to stream Gears of War 4 on my TV with a 1440p (2K) resolution, ‘ultra’ quality settings and 5.1 surround sound. There wasn’t any lag or compression artifacts; it looked like I just strung a long HDMI cable to my TV from my computer. And I would know: That’s how I usually play PC games in my living room. Of course, Gamestream’s performance is dependent on both your network setup and the hardware in your computer. (I have a decent gaming rig powered by an NVIDIA GTX 1080 GPU, so I didn’t really need more power.)

Some titles, like Forza Horizon 3 and Dishonored 2 exhibited some strange texture issues when played over Gamestream, but those also look like problems that some driver and software updates could fix. When it worked properly, though, it was hard not to be impressed by the feature.

Being an Android TV device and all, the Shield can also play actual Android games. And I’m not just talking crummy little mobile games; there are older, big name titles like Resident Evil 5 and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance available. But while it was nice to have the option to play those games, they were mostly disappointing. Resident Evil 5, for example, was a stuttering mess that crashed almost every time I loaded it. To be honest, I’d rather spend time playing GeForce Now and Gamestream titles, as opposed to suffering through bad versions of older games.

The competition

There are countless cheaper video streaming options out there, like the $150 Apple TV and all of Roku’s devices (which can also handle 4K/HDR videos starting at $100). Even in the gaming arena, the Shield is going up going against Valve’s $50 Steam Link, which can also bring PC games to any TV in your home. That device also works with a variety of controllers, like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4’s, as well as Valve’s $50 Steam controller.

If you’re intrigued by the Shield and need more built-in storage, there’s also the $300 Shield Pro. That’s basically the older Shield box with a 500GB hard drive. On top of that, you’ll also get the microSD card slot and micro-USB port (for a direct PC connection) that were left off of the smaller box.

If you’re considering shelling out $200 for the Shield, it’s also hard not to consider an actual gaming console. Both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One S start at around $300 today, and you can often find deals and bundles that drop the price significantly. If all you care about is games, it makes a lot more sense to invest in boxes that can actually power them all without the need for a streaming subscription.

Wrap-up

The new Shield is a lot like the old Shield: a niche streaming device for gamers with money to burn. While it would have been nice to see some major upgrades this time around, the fact that it can still perform fairly well with aging hardware is a sign that it’s conceptually sound. And, at the very least, it proves that NVIDIA finally learned how to make a decent game controller.

Still photos by Shivani Khattar.

Is Tidal being honest about its subscriber numbers?

It’s no secret that Tidal is well behind the likes of Spotify and Apple Music when it comes to subscriber numbers. A report today from Dagens Næringsliv indicates that the Jay Z-led streaming service is even further behind than it’s admitting. The Norwegian newspaper says it reviewed internal documents, including reports on payments to record labels, that show a big discrepancy between what the company was publicizing and the actual subscriber totals.

When Jay Z tweeted that Tidal had hit 1 million subscribers in September 2015, payments to record labels show the actual number was around 350,000. In March 2016, the company revealed it had hit the 3 million mark, but Dagens Næringsliv reports payments to labels a month later show that sum was 850,000. According to the newspaper, Tidal internally reported the total at that time to be 1.2 million subscribers. Earlier that month, Tidal parted ways with its then CFO and COO, reportedly over a dispute concerning the release of — you guessed it — subscriber numbers.

Tidal has admitted an issue with its accounting in the past. As The Verge notes, the company filed a lawsuit against its former owners after it discovered the actual subscriber number at the time Jay Z took over to be well short of the 540,000 total it was given. Of course, that revelation placed the blame squarely on those who were in charge before Mr. Carter paid $56 million for the service.

We reached out to Tidal for a comment on the matter but have yet to hear back.

Source: Dagens Næringsliv (Norwegian)

Trump’s White House website deletes climate change, LGBT pages

As Donald Trump takes over the White House today, a number of folks on Twitter have been pointing out that many crucial pages on WhiteHouse.gov have disappeared, including those relating to climate change and the LGBTQ community. While certainly troubling to the many millions of Americans worried about how the incoming administration will handle such topics, what’s happening on the White House website is little more than a transition — every page that was up on the site under the Obama administration has been removed, not just ones relating to topics that the new president doesn’t care about.

Climate change and LGBT pages both removed from Whitehouse website. At this point I have to force myself to be surprised

— Eric Hoyer (@HalfCourt_Hoyer) January 20, 2017

Just as the @POTUS Twitter account transitioned to the Trump administration today at noon, everything that was previously on the White House website has been removed and replaced by new pages. All of the old content from President Obama’s administration can still be found at the Obama White House archive. Similarly, all tweets from the Obama administration that were previously on @POTUS are now located at @POTUS44.

That’s not to say that this change isn’t worth being concerned about. Trump has made it very clear that he thinks climate change is a hoax, and his wretched plan for “energy independence” places the environment at the end of his list of concerns. It’s depressing that the new White House site doesn’t have any information about climate change and how the country will combat it, but it’s not at all surprising when you consider Trump’s priorities. And with VP Mike Pence’s track record of homophobia, it’s also not a shock to see the LGBT page disappear from the White House. Depressing, but not surprising — sums up the first day of the administration pretty well so far.

The Meitu selfie app unlocks your anime beauty and personal data

There’s a price for the beauty that comes from the Chinese selfie app that’s been flooding Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with glowing (with a twist of anime) renditions of your friends: It’s data.

The free Meitu app for iOS and Android asks for (and apparently was granted by users thirsty for glowing-skin likes) far more permission on Google’s operating system (access to the calendar, contacts, SMS messages, location, auto launches at startup, external storage, and IMEI number) than a normal camera application.

Let me get this straight…
All of you just installed a photo app from China that requires these permissions? Let me know how it works out. pic.twitter.com/wGDUYbRdSA

— Greg Linares (@Laughing_Mantis) January 19, 2017

The iOS version checks to see if your phone is jailbroken (probably to see if it can used the compromised OS to send more data back to the developer in China), which carrier you’re using and can probably figure out your iPhone’s unique ID. Yeah, not great.

One security researcher noted that the app is sending Android IMIE information to several servers in China.

Now all of this data could be a goldmine if the company sells it to third parties. But according to a statement the developer sent to CNET, the company is not peddling your data to the highest bidder.

Meitu says the reason for all the data collecting is because it’s headquartered in China where the tracking services offered by Apple and Google are blocked. It’s workaround is a combination of in-house and third-party information tracking. The developer says that all that data is “is sent securely, using multi-layer encryption to servers equipped with advanced firewall, IDS and IPS protection to block external attacks.” It also insisted that its iOS code shenanigans only asks for permissions allowed by Apple’s developer guidelines.

The developer might in fact only be using the data it collects for tracking right now, but more than a few companies have changed their business practices and terms of service when cash starts to run low. Suddenly all that personal information that was supposed to be used internally is a great way to make a quick buck.

Plus the hype around the app has already passed at this point so you might as well delete the app and enjoy those photos. They may have taken your data, but they’ll never take away your selfies.

Via: CNET, Ars Technica

Amazon will help train veterans for tech jobs

Last week, Amazon said it would bring 100,000 full-time jobs to the US by 2018. This week, the online retailer announced a registered apprenticeship program with the US Department of Labor that will offer training to veterans. The initiative follows CEO Jeff Bezos’ pledge to hire 25,000 veterans and their spouses over the course of five years. That goal was announced back in May.

This new apprenticeship program will train veterans for “in-demand technical careers” at Amazon. In a press release announcing the initiative, the US Department of Labor said that the first participants will be trained for an AWS Cloud Support Associate position. The Labor Department also explained that over 200 companies, colleges and labor organizations have signed on to participate in the larger ApprenticeshipUSA program. As TechCrunch notes, Amazon and Tesla Motors are the only two big name tech companies listed that offer registered apprenticeships.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: US Department of Labor

Net neutrality foe Ajit Pai tapped to take over the FCC

FCC commissioner and outspoken critic of net neutrality Ajit Pai will reportedly be promoted to the agency’s top post when Chairman Tom Wheeler steps down today. Pai, who was nominated by President Obama and served as the senior Republican commissioner, would not require Senate approval and his new position could be announced as early as Friday afternoon, Politico reports.

Pai’s promotion won’t come as a surprise, but his new role should worry any supporters of a fair and open internet. Last month Pai and the FCC’s other Republican commissioner Michael O’Rielly sent a letter to telecoms and carrier lobbying groups promising to “revisit” the net neutrality rules laid out in 2015 that protect consumers from practices like pay-for-priority access, blocking and throttling. According to Pai and O’Rielly, these rules for carrier transparency and traffic fairness create “unjustified burdens” for service providers and the pair intend to “undo” them.

Net neutrality won’t disappear overnight, however. As Ars Technica noted last month, any rules change would still require months of procedure and public comment. Net neutrality aside, Pai also laid out a Digital Empowerment Agenda in September that he claims will help close the digital divide between the country’s rich and the poor by reducing broadband deployment regulations and encourage mobile broadband adoption. Prior to joining the FCC, Pai also worked as an attorney for Verizon other telecoms clients. Politico also notes that his term technically ended last year, but according to the FCC’s rules he can stay on until the end of 2017. After that, he’ll need to be reconfirmed by the Senate.

Source: Politico

How artificial intelligence can be corrupted to repress free speech

The internet was supposed to become an overwhelming democratizing force against illiberal administrations. It didn’t. It was supposed to open repressed citizens eyes, expose them to new democratic ideals and help them rise up against their authoritarian governments in declaring their basic human rights. It hasn’t. It was supposed to be inherently resistant to centralized control. It isn’t.

In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI — the technology at the heart of services like Google’s Allo and Jigsaw or Intel’s Hack Harassment initiative — these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens.

Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India and Uganda have all shut off internet access when politically beneficial to their ruling parties. Nations like Singapore, Russia and China all exert outsized control over the structure and function of their national networks, often relying on a mix of political, technical and social schemes to control the flow of information within their digital borders.

The effects of these policies are self-evident. According to a 2016 report from internet liberty watchdog, Freedom House, two-thirds of all internet users reside in countries where criticism of the ruling administration is censored — 27 percent of them live in nations where posting, sharing or supporting unpopular opinions on social media can get you arrested.

Take China for example. An anonymous source within Facebook last November claimed to the NYT that the company had developed an automated censorship tool for the CPC — a token of loyalty that CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes will open the Chinese market to the Western social network. While Facebook likely won’t censor user-generated content directly, the effect will be the same if the tool is utilized by a third-party company located in China.

If Facebook is willing to do that in China, what’s to stop the company from doing the same here in America at the behest of a Trump administration? What’s to keep Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat (which is owned by FB) from following suit? Twitter, Facebook and Intel all declined to comment for this story. However, Dr. Toby Walsh, a leading researcher of AI and current guest Professor at TU Berlin, believes such an outcome is plausible. “When we think of 1984-like scenarios, AI is definitely an enabling technology,” he said.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Alibaba’s Jack Ma speak at the China Development Forum 2016 — VCG via Getty Images

While the country has slowly warmed to capitalist markets and a more open economy, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has long maintained a tight grip on digital culture. A quarter of the world’s population — nearly 700 million people — are online in China. 90 percent of web users in that nation access the web from a mobile device and, in 2015 alone, more than 40 million new users signed on for the first time.

And yet, some of the biggest cultural stories in China’s modern history simply don’t exist within its borders. All references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown have been so thoroughly scrubbed from the Chinese national internet that, in 2015, financial institutions were reportedly unable to accept monetary transfers that included a 4 or 6 because those digits refer to the protests’ June 4th anniversary. Of course, there is no such thing as perfect security. “People are creative in how they work around such systems,” Jason I. Hong, Associate Professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote to Engadget. “In China, people sometimes refer to Tiananmen Square protests as May 35 (June 4), which evaded censors for a while.”

What’s more, according to GreatFire.org, around 3,000 websites had been blocked by the country’s government as of 2015. Those include Google, Facebook, Twitter and the New York Times. This ubiquitous censorship is a testament to China’s top-down design for its national network.

Essentially, Chinese censorship halts the flow of dissenting ideas before they can even start by continually keeping an eye on you. Unlike in the US, Chinese ISPs and websites are legally liable for what their users post which has forced them into becoming unofficial editors for the state. So much as linking to political opinions critical of the CPC’s conduct is a prosecutable offense. By keeping ISPs and websites under threat of closure, the government is able to leverage that additional labor force to help monitor a larger population than it would otherwise be able to. A conversational AI system would be able to accomplish the same effect more efficiently and at an even larger scale.

State censorship even extends to social media. This past July, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the administration in charge of online censorship, issued new rules to websites and service providers which enabled the government to punish any outlet that publishes “directly as news reports unverified content found on online platforms such as social media.” That is, if a news organization gets a tip from a reader via Weibo, that organization is going to be fined or shuttered.

“It means political control of the media to ensure regime stability,” David Bandurski of the University of Tokyo told the New York Times. “There is nothing at all ambiguous about the language, and it means we have to understand that ‘fake news’ will be stopped on political grounds, even if it is patently true and professionally verifiable.”

It’s not that bad here in America, yet. Over the past 20 years, “self expression has proliferated exponentially. And the Supreme Court, especially the Roberts Court, has been, on the main, a strong defender of free expression,” Danielle Keats Citron, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, wrote to Engadget.

Historically, the court has upheld specific forms of speech like snuff films, video game violence and falsified military service claims because they don’t meet the intentionally narrow threshold for unprotected speech — like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. “At the same time,” Keats Citron continued. “Much expression occurs on third party platforms whose speech decisions are not regulated by the First Amendment.”

A sizeable portion of this expression takes the form of online harassment — just look at the Gamergate, Pizzagate, Lizard Squad and Sad/Rabid Puppies debacles, or the cowardly attacks on Leslie Jones for her role in the GhostBusters reboot. Heck, even Donald Trump, the newly-installed President of the United States, has leveraged his Twitter feed and followers to attack those critical of his policies.

“The thing to remember about these platforms is that the thing that makes them so powerful — that so many people are on them — is also what makes them so uniquely threatening to freedom of speech,” Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law said.

All of this hate and vitriol has a stifling effect on speech. When constantly inundated with this abuse, many rational people prefer to remain silent or log off entirely, as Ms. Jones did. Either way, the effect is the same: The harassment acts as a form of peer censorship. However, a number of the biggest names in technology are currently working to leverage machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to combat this online scourge. And why not? It certainly worked in League of Legends. The popular game managed to reduce toxic language and the abuse of other players by 11 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively, after LoL’s developer, RiotGames, instituted an automated notification system that reminded players not to be jerks at various points throughout each match.

Intel CEO Brian M. Krzanich speaking at the 2016 Intel AI Day in San Francisco — YouTube

Intel’s Hack Harassment initiative, for another example, is “a cooperative effort with the mission of reducing the prevalence and severity of online harassment,” according to Intel PR. Intel is developing an AI tool in conjunction with Vox Media and the Born This Way Foundation that actively “detects and deters” online harassment with the goal of eventually creating and releasing an open API.

Ina Fried, Senior Editor at ReCode, spoke with Intel’s Lori Smith-DeYoung about the program at the 2016 Intel AI Day in San Francisco last November. “Online harassment is a problem that technology created so it’s actually kind of important that we as an industry help solve it,” Fried explained. ReCode’s role is “really just talking about the issue, amplifying it and bringing voices to the issue showing the problem.” The group has already built a demo app that looks at tweets and identifies content that constitutes harassment. It can warn users about their actions before they hit send or the system could, in theory, be built “into online communities and help monitor [harassment] and prevent some of it from being seen, or at least be seen as prevalently.”

Google has undertaken a similar effort with recently-acquired subsidiary, Jigsaw. The team’s Conversation AI system operates on the same fundamentals as Hack Harassment. It leverages machine learning to autonomously spot abusive language. “I want to use the best technology we have at our disposal to begin to take on trolling and other nefarious tactics that give hostile voices disproportionate weight,” Jigsaw president, Jared Cohen, told Wired. “To do everything we can to level the playing field.”

One major hurdle for these systems is sarcasm — something even people have trouble discerning in online writing without the help of additional contextual clues like emoji. “Context is crucial to many free speech questions like whether a threat amounts to a true threat and whether a person is a limited purpose public figure,” Professor Keats Citron told Engadget. “Yet often the full context of a threat or a person’s public figure status depends upon a wide array of circumstances–not just what happens on Twitter or Facebook but the whole picture of the interaction.”

In Conversation AI’s case, Jigsaw’s engineers educated the machine learning system by inundating it with roughly 17 million flagged comments from the New York Times website. It was also exposed to 130,000 bits of text from Wikipedia discussions. All of the Wiki snippets were also viewed by a crowdsourced 10-person panel that independently determined if each one constituted a “personal attack” or harassment.

After providing the system all of these examples, Conversation AI can recognize harassment a startling 92 percent of the time with only a 10 percent false positive rate compared to a 10-member human panel. The results are so impressive that the NYT now employs the system to auto-block abusive comments before they can be vetted by a human moderator. The team hopes to further improve the system’s accuracy by expanding its scope to look at long-term trends like the number of posts a certain account has made over a set period of time.

Both of these programs are pursuing a noble goal, however it’s one that could set a dangerous precedent. As Fried said during a subsequent AI Day panel discussion, “An unpopular opinion isn’t necessarily harassment.” But that decision is often left to those in power. And under authoritarian regimes, you can safely bet that it won’t be the will of the people.

“I’m really surprised there hasn’t been more of a discussion of this post-Snowden,” Dr. Toby Walsh, a leading researcher of AI and current guest Professor at TU Berlin, told Engadget. “I’m surprised that people were surprised that our emails are being read. Email is the easiest thing to read, it’s already machine readable text. You’ve got to assume that any email being read is not private.”

Professor Keats Citron made a similar point. “As private actors, intermediaries like Facebook, Twitter, and Google has free reign to decide what content appears online,” she said. “Whereas government cannot censor offensive, hateful, annoying, or disturbing expression, intermediaries can do as they please. For that reason, I’ve urged platforms to adopt clear rules about what speech is prohibited on their sites and some form of due process when speech is removed or accounts suspended on the grounds of a ToS violation.”

These are not small issues and they are not inconsequential, especially given the authoritarian tenor struck by the incoming presidential administration. “What I find most troubling from over the past few weeks is that you have Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich go on the news and say ‘Look, the rules are the president can order someone to do something terrible and then pardon,’” Professor Pasquale noted. He further explained that Trump’s current actions are not wholly unprecedented, but rather a “logical extension of the Unitary Executive Theory…which would effectively put the executive branch above the law.”

As mentioned above, even the threat of oversight from a government is enough to curtail free speech both online and off. “Even though there are many rights, either under the first amendment or subsequent statutes passed after J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program,” Professor Pasquale said. “You barely ever see someone taking advantage of that statute to, say, win monetary damages or otherwise deter the [government’s] activity.”

However, the industry itself is beginning to wake up to the dangers of misusing AI systems. “There’s increasing awareness within the AI community of the risks — both intentional and unintentional — so there are a number of initiatives now to promote best practices to think about some of these ethical questions,” Professor Walsh said. “I’ve been involved with initiatives from IEEE, the largest professional organization within the space, to draw up ethical guidelines for people building AI systems.”

Should our government implement an automated censorship system akin to the one Facebook developed, even if it had only a fraction of the capability of Jigsaw’s Conversation AI, the threat to civil liberties and the First Amendment would be immediate and overwhelming.

“I think Snowden did America and the world a service by revealing the extent of the wiretapping that was going on and the fact that it was not just external parties but citizens of the United States,” Professor Walsh concluded. “I don’t think we’ve seen enough of [the discussion Snowden was attempting to instigate], people are not fully aware of quite how much the intelligence services must already be reading and the technologies that they’re able to bring to bear.”

Lead image: Getty Creative