Fitbit extends Pebble support through June 2018

Current Pebble owners can also get a $50 discount on the Fitbit Ionic.

In early December of 2016, Pebble was shut down after being acquired by Fitbit. Fitbit originally said that it’d continue to support the Pebble ecosystem until 2018, but the company has now extended that support for six more months.

The Pebble 2

The announcement came via Fitbit’s developer blog, and now Pebblers will be able to keep using their wearables like as they’ve been through June 30, 2018. However, after June 30, voice recognition features, SMS and email replies, timeline pins with third-party apps, the Pebble app store, forum, and CloudPebble development tool will all stop working.

As a former Pebbler, the Fitbit Ionic is a great smartwatch that’s worthy of your attention.

Although it’s sad to think that Pebble will actually be laid to rest this year, Fitbit really is going out of its way with this extension seeing as how it didn’t acquire any of Pebble’s hardware with the acquisition.

If you’re still rocking your Pebble but want to be sensible and admit that the end is nigh, Fitbit’s offering all current Pebble owners a $50 discount on the Fitbit Ionic. Anyone that purchased a Pebble prior to December 7, 2016, and chose to receive promotional info from Fitbit will receive an email about how to redeem this offer, but you can also fill out the form here.

As a former owner of the Pebble, Pebble Steel, Pebble Time, and Pebble Time Round, I sympathize with those of you that are still rocking a Pebble in early 2018. With that said, the Fitbit Ionic is a darn good smartwatch and absolutely worth checking out. Developer support for apps and watch faces is already quite strong, and the fitness tracking package is one of the best you’ll find on a wearable right now. Also, unlike most other smartwatches, the 4-5 days of battery life will make you feel right at home.

Samsung Gear Sport vs. Fitbit Ionic: Fitness smartwatch showdown

New York governor signs executive order to protect net neutrality

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order today requiring any internet service provider with a state contract to honor the principles of net neutrality. In a statement the governor said, “With this executive order, we reaffirm our commitment to freedom and democracy and help ensure that the internet remains free and open to all.”

The FCC’s dangerous ruling goes against the core values of our democracy, and New York will do everything in our power to protect net neutrality and the free exchange of ideas.

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) January 24, 2018

According to the order, starting March 1st, any internet service provider entering or renewing a government contract will be required to sign a binding agreement ensuring that it will uphold the ideals of net neutrality and will not block, throttle or prioritize internet content. If they don’t, the companies will not be granted a state contract.

Montana Governor Steve Bullock signed a very similar order earlier this week and was the first to do so. The FCC’s net neutrality protection repeal specifically stated that states couldn’t override the FCC’s regulations with their own legislation and both states could see legal pushback from the agency. However, because these orders aren’t exactly laws requiring ISPs to adhere to net neutrality principles and are instead regulations that block ISPs from government contracts if the do decide to block or throttle traffic, these orders may actually exists within a legal loophole.

Other efforts to circumvent the FCC’s decision include a lawsuit brought forth by 22 state attorneys general and proposed legislation that would restore the 2015 protections repealed by the FCC.

Via: The Verge

Source: Governor Cuomo

Facebook, Google lobbyists push for diversity in response to Congress

Silicon valley has a diversity problem. Sexism and racism are everywhere in the technology sector, and it’s time to put an end to it. The Internet Association, a lobbying group for some of the biggest names in tech (think Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, Google and Twitter) has promised to hire a new person to focus on these issues. According to Recode, the new push comes in response to the threat of regulation from the Congressional Black Caucus.

Two members of Congress wrote to the Association last November. In it, Emanuel Cleaver, II, and Bonnie Watson Coleman asked for more transparency and better policies to ensure the diversity of hires in the technology industry, ending with a bit of a threat. “If these issues go unchecked Congress will be left with few options and will demand increased regulations to address these issues,” they wrote.

The Internet Association’s leader Michael Beckerman responded to this missive with a letter of his own (it was obtained by Recode) on January 23rd. “It is important that the diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints among internet users is represented in the industry generally and our policy engagement specifically,” he wrote. Beckerman also promised a commitment to revealing more accurate data on who’s employed by its member companies.

Congressman Cleaver said that he was cautiously optimistic about the new hiring announcement. “The Internet Association has responded in a very serious and proactive manner to our concerns that there was no one guarding the guardians when it comes to the internet and its potentially negative effects on racial and gender bias,” he told Recode. “It is critical that this position be given a high level of authority and respect such that any perceived racial and gender biases can be immediately identified and addressed.”

Source: Recode

Logan Paul returns to YouTube with suicide prevention video

It has been a little over three weeks since YouTuber Logan Paul posted his now infamous Aokigahara forest video and aside from an apology, Paul has been largely silent on his channel. But today, Paul posted a new video, one that’s quite different from his usual content.

In the video, which isn’t monetized, Paul says the public backlash caused him to rethink the reach he has and made him want to learn about suicide, the resources available to those who are thinking about it and how others can help. He talks to Bob Forrest, founder of Alo House Recovery Centers, John Draper, director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Kevin Hines, a suicide attempt survivor and activist. He shares fives ways people can help those in their lives that might be considering suicide and also pledges to donate $1 million to suicide prevention organizations. While the video takes a much more serious tone than his previous daily vlogs, only time will tell if Paul has really learned a lesson or if this step in self-education “is just the beginning” like Paul promises in the video.

Though YouTube was slow to officially respond to Paul’s controversial video, it eventually decided to pull Logan’s Preferred status and put his original projects with the platform on hold. YouTube also announced that it would start manually vetting videos before adding them to its Preferred program.

If you or a loved one is considering suicide or would like emotional support, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a free and confidential resource available to you. You can call the Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or for Spanish speakers at 1-888-628-9454. The deaf and hard of hearing can call 1-800-799-4889.

Via: Polygon

Source: Logan Paul

YouTube invests $5 million in ‘positive’ video following backlash

YouTube has faced some serious backlash against awful content, lately, from exploitative childrens’ videos to Logan Paul’s ill-advised video of a corpse. YouTube needs to up its positivity, and it may be doing so with a $5 million additional investment in its socially-aware Creators for Change program, which premiered at the Tribeca TV festival last year.

YouTube notes that people around the world spent hundreds of thousands of hours watching Creators for Change videos tens of millions of times. The company says that it’s taught more than 15,000 young people in over 200 locations with workshops and school programs. Students surveyed in Germany and the UK, said Google, were able to feel more confident in identifying and countering hate speech, for example.

Source: YouTube

Facebook feigns accountability with ‘trusted’ news survey

When Facebook announced it was rolling out a major overhaul to its News Feed earlier this month, it did so with the intention of prioritizing interactions between people over content from publishers. It was a notable shift in strategy for the company, which for the past couple of years had been working closely with news outlets to on heavily promote their articles and videos. But, Facebook discovered that people just weren’t happy on the site — likely due to the vast amount of political flame-throwing they’ve been exposed to since the 2016 US Presidential election. So in order to alleviate this problem, it decided it was best if users saw more posts from friends and family, instead of news that could have a negative effect on their emotions. Because keeping people both happy and informed is, apparently, hard.

Unfortunately, Facebook’s solution to this problem doesn’t seem to be the best one. Last week, it said its plan is to only put front and center links from outlets that users deem to be “trustworthy.” Which just proves that Facebook would rather put the responsibility for policing misinformation on the community instead of itself. This is concerning because Facebook is, essentially, letting people’s biases dictate how outlets are perceived by its algorithms.

The full Facebook news trustworthiness survey.

It its entirety. https://t.co/bd0qkkXGgN pic.twitter.com/oUvTZLNiyB

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) January 23, 2018

As reported by BuzzFeed News, Facebook has a “trusted” news source survey that consists of two simple questions: “Do you recognize the following websites?” and “How much do you trust each of these domains?” For the first one, the answers you can provide are a simple “yes” or “no,” while the latter gives you the options to reply with “entirely,” “a lot,” “somewhat,” “barely” or “not at all.” That doesn’t seem like the best or most thorough way to judge editorial integrity. Not only that, but the survey doesn’t take into account personal biases, leaving the system wide open to abuse. This is only going to encourage people to continue to live in a bubble of their own creation, where there’s no room for information or opinions that challenge their worldview.

Facebook seems to think the benefit to its survey is that it’s simple and straightforward, though that’s actually why it’s so misguided. There’s no room for nuance or additional context. How many people will say they don’t trust the New York Times or CNN simply because President Donald Trump calls them “Fake News” any chance he gets? Sure, those particular outlets shouldn’t have any problem being recognized as legit, but even labeling them as such doesn’t seem like it’s a responsibility Facebook’s willing to take on. A Facebook spokesperson said to Engadget that Facebook is a platform for people to “gain access to an ideologically diverse set of views,” adding the following:

We surveyed a vast, broadly representative range of people (which helps — among other measures — to prevent the gaming-of-the-system or abuse issue you noted) within our Facebook community to develop the roadmap to these changes — changes that are not intended to directly impact any specific groups of publishers based on their size or ideological leanings.

Instead, we are making a change so that people can have more from their favorite sources and more from trusted sources. I’d also add that this is one of many signals that go into News Feed ranking. We do not plan to release individual publishers’ trust scores because they represent an incomplete picture of how each story’s position in each person’s feed is determined.

“There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Zuckerberg said in Facebook post announcing the News Feed changes. “Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them. That’s why it’s important that News Feed promotes high quality news that helps build a sense of common ground.”

The problem is that, by letting its users control how the system works, Facebook may actually end up amplifying the fake news bubble it helped create. Facebook users were instrumental in the spreading of misinformation and Russian propaganda during the 2016 US Presidential election. According to its own data over 125 million Americans had been exposed to Kremlin-sponsored pages on Facebook.

“The hard question we’ve struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted in a world with so much division,” Zuckerberg added. He said that Facebook could try to make that decision itself, but that “that’s not something we’re comfortable with.”

There was also the thought of asking outside experts to help with the issue, Zuckerberg said, but apparently he wasn’t okay with that either because it would take the decisions out of Facebook’s hands and “would likely not solve the objectivity problem.” Instead, Facebook chose to rely on the community’s feedback to rank publishers — you know the same community that was responsible for sharing phony headlines like “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide.”

Facebook told Engadget that this isn’t designed to be a voting system, and that people can’t volunteer to weigh in on how trustworthy a news outlet is. The idea is that a random sample of people will be surveyed and Facebook is going to ensure there’s diversity among those who participate — meaning the answers will come from Democrats, Republicans or users without party affiliation. And even if there are some people who respond based on their political ideology, Facebook said it won’t affect the ranking of any given publisher because no one group can.

The company suggested that labeling publications appropriately won’t be an issue, because it only determines their value if many different groups of people agree that a certain one is trusted or distrusted. Still, it’s hard to imagine just how exactly this is going to work as Facebook hopes, especially in a country that’s obviously so politically divided.

Either way, Facebook clearly seems to be having an identity crisis. And it begs the question: Why can’t a company worth billions of dollars, and with so much influence, seem to come up with a better solution? Yes, Zuckerberg said that Facebook didn’t feel comfortable leaving the objectivity decisions up to outside experts, but how is it any better to let users be the judge? Surely there’s a third option in which Facebook takes some responsibility (perhaps with third-party help), and builds something more robust than a useless survey.

Images: Reuters (All)

Alphabet enters the cybersecurity business with Chronicle

Google parent company Alphabet has a new business and it’s all about cybersecurity. Chronicle is an independent business under the Alphabet umbrella and it’s aimed at helping companies find, track and stop cyber attacks. With two branches — a cybersecurity and analytics platform as well as a malware intelligence service called VirusTotal — Chronicle will use its massive processing power and data storage capabilities to both assist businesses in searching for and retrieving information much more quickly than they can on their own as well as spot patterns that may become more apparent when years of data are able to be analyzed. “Add in some machine learning and better search capabilities, and we think we’ll be able to help organizations see their full security picture in much higher fidelity than they currently can,” said Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillett in a blog post.

Gillett says that because companies are often hit with thousands of security alerts per day, it’s almost impossible to assess all of them thoroughly. “As a result, it’s pretty common for hackers to go undetected for months, or for it to take a team months to fully understand what’s going on once they’ve detected an issue,” he writes. “All this adds up to more data breaches, more damage, and higher security costs.”

Inadequate cybersecurity has never been a more apparent problem than it is today. Last year we saw reports of data breaches affecting government agencies like the US Army and the NSA, companies like Equifax, Forever 21 and Accenture as well as data exposures impacting voting machines, political strategists and Verizon customers. There were also multiple widespread ransomware attacks.

Chronicle says a few Fortune 500 companies are already testing a preview of its cybersecurity intelligence platform. “None of us have to settle for cyber crime being a fact of life, or for a reactive, expensive existence of cleanup and damage control,” it says. “We’re looking forward to working with many organizations in the coming years to give good the advantage again.”

Source: Chronicle

Drake breaks Taylor Swift’s Spotify record for most streams in a day

Poor Tay Tay. The queen of pop music has just been deposed on the streaming service she fought with most by none other than Drake himself. According to Pitchfork, the artist’s latest song, “God’s Plan” now holds the title for the most streams in a single day ever.

When reached for comment, Spotify confirmed the news with Engadget. “We can confirm ‘God’s Plan’ by Drake now holds the US record as the most streamed track in a single day on Spotify,” a spokesperson told us in an email. “The song has overtaken previous record holder Taylor Swift with ‘Look What You Made Me Do.’” Pitchfork notes that Drake was the most streamed artist back in 2016 and also set the record for Spotify’s most-streamed song of all time, “One Dance.” Now, of course, Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” holds that title. Drake was also the most popular artist in 2015, making this new victory over TSwift even sweeter.

Via: Pitchfork

Scientists clone monkeys for the first time

Ever since cloning produced Dolly the sheep, scientists have copied a slew of mammals ranging from dogs to ponies. Primates, however, have been elusive — until now. Chinese researchers have successfully cloned a macaque monkey fetus twice, producing sister monkeys Hua Hua and Zhong Zhong using the same basic method used to create Dolly. The team removed the nucleus from monkey eggs and replaced it with DNA from the fetus, implanting the resulting eggs in female monkeys for them to give birth.

The process wasn’t easy. It took 127 eggs and 79 embryos to get these results, and it still required a fetus to work (Dolly was cloned from an adult). Still, it reflects progress in cloning science. The team managed the feat by injecting both a form of mRNA and an inhibitor, the combination of which improved the development of blastocysts (the structures that form the embryo) and the pregnancy rate for transplanted embryos.

Both baby macaques are healthy, the researchers said, and genetic tests confirm they really are duplicates. There could be success with cloning based on adults, too, as the team is still waiting on results from multiple pregnancies.

In theory, this makes human cloning more realistic given the genetic similarities between monkeys and our own species. However, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon, if at all. There are numerous ethical objections, and not just because it would involve creating exact copies of people. Whether or not you mind cloning based on fetuses, the process currently requires many failures to get to the intended results. There’s also the question of what happens with those clones that do survive into adulthood — they may face pressure to live up to the original.

As such, monkey cloning may be limited to medical research, where having more than one monkey with the same genes could help scientists compare the results of treatments or test under specific conditions. That still won’t please everyone, but it’ll at least represent an ethical line in the sand that science is unwilling to cross.

Via: AP News

Source: Cell

macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 Displays Warnings When Opening 32-Bit Apps as Part of Apple’s Phase Out Plan

Starting with macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, Apple is commencing with its plan to begin phasing out 32-bit apps on Macs. Apple has promised that macOS High Sierra will be the “last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromises.”

After installing macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, which is now available in a beta testing capacity, when you open up an app that’s a 32-bit app, you’ll get a warning about its future incompatibility with the macOS operating system.

This is the first of many warnings Apple plans to provide as it works to put an end to 32-bit Mac apps, and this initial warning will only be shown one time for each app.

Apple’s efforts to phase out 32-bit apps on Macs mirror the path it took when ending 32-bit app support on iOS devices. In iOS 10, Apple provided increasingly more insistent warnings to let users know that their apps wouldn’t work with future versions of iOS before phasing out 32-bit support entirely in iOS 11.

As of January 2018, all new apps submitted to the Mac App Store must be 64-bit, and all apps and app updates submitted must be 64-bit by June of 2018. The next version of macOS after High Sierra will include “aggressive” warnings about 32-bit apps before they are phased out entirely.

Once 32-bit apps are phased out on Macs, they won’t be able to be used at all, so users will need to find replacements for older 32-bit apps that aren’t likely to be updated to 64-bit.

Related Roundup: macOS High Sierra
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