Reddit users unknowingly shared Russian propaganda during US election

While Facebook and Twitter have continued to delve into how Russian groups used their platforms to influence the last US presidential election, we haven’t heard much from Reddit about the issue. However, in a post today, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman shared some findings from the company’s investigation, describing what it has uncovered so far and how it has responded.

First, Huffman says that the company has been pretty quiet about the topic because its investigation is ongoing but that there are some findings he would like to share regarding ads, direct propaganda from Russians and indirect propaganda spread by Reddit users. When it comes to ads, Huffman says that the company hasn’t found many originating from Russia before or after the election and that currently, all ads from Russia are blocked altogether. As for direct propaganda, Reddit’s investigation has uncovered and removed a few hundred accounts. “The vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015–2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally,” Huffman added.

However, indirect propaganda appears to have had the biggest impact across Reddit and stands to be the most difficult issue to address. Huffman uses the Twitter account @TEN_GOP as an example, which is now understood to be run by Russian individuals. “@TEN_GOP’s Tweets were amplified by thousands of Reddit users, and sadly, from everything we can tell, these users are mostly American, and appear to be unwittingly promoting Russian propaganda,” he wrote. “I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.”

That’s just one example and Huffman doesn’t provide any others. Therefore it’s hard to determine just how big of an impact Reddit had in the spread of content pushed by Russian agents and there’s no telling when or if we’ll get more information. But Huffman says the company is still investigating the issue and is working with Congress. “While I know it’s frustrating that we don’t share everything we know publicly,” he says, “I want to reiterate that we take these matters very seriously, and we are cooperating with congressional inquiries.”

Source: Reddit

Amazon’s NFL series returns for a third season April 27th

Amazon’s sports documentary series All or Nothing is coming back next month for a third season and this time it follows the Dallas Cowboys. The eight-episode season starts off on a handful of positive notes — owner Jerry Jones was elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and head coach Jason Garrett is 2016’s NFL Coach of the Year. But it’s not all good news. The league suspends running back Ezekiel Elliott for six games following an investigation into allegations of repeated instances of domestic violence — a decision that was then appealed and put on hold multiple times. And the team is put in the spotlight over its and Jones’ response to NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. Ultimately, the Cowboys’ season, full of ups and downs, ends just short of the playoffs.

All or Nothing, which followed the Arizona Cardinals and the Los Angeles Rams in previous seasons, won a Sports Emmy last year. Like past seasons, All or Nothing: The Dallas Cowboys will be narrated by Jon Hamm. It will be available on Amazon Prime starting April 27th.

Source: Amazon

MoviePass CEO: ‘we watch how you drive from home to the movies’

MoviePass’ approach to gathering viewer data might raise eyebrows. According to Media Play News, CEO Mitch Lowe told those at a business forum that the movie subscription service’s app not only tracks your location, but follows you to and from the theater. “We watch how you drive from home to the movies,” he said, adding that “we watch where you go afterwards.” Not surprisingly, the company is hoping to understand customer habits and “build a night at the movies.” If people tend to have dinner before the movie or to have a drink afterwards, for example, MoviePass could steer customers to restaurants and bars and take a cut of the revenue.

It’s no secret that MoviePass would want to collect at least some data. It can use that to help movie studios gauge how well their shows are really doing, which is particularly important now that MoviePass has a stake in some productions. However, the company doesn’t tell you that it’s actively tracking your location. As TechCrunch explains, the privacy policy only covers a “single request” to help you choose a theater and improve the service. If Lowe is right, the app is not only collecting location info without consent, but creating a huge privacy risk — even if the tracking data is anonymized, someone could theoretically figure out who you are and where you live.

We’ve asked MoviePass for comment. Provided Lowe hasn’t misspoken, though, this would help explain why MoviePass is comfortable charging so little for a month’s worth of theater trips. In theory, the wealth of data would offset whatever losses MoviePass endures. The question is whether or not it’s collecting that data honestly, and it doesn’t look like that’s the case.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Media Play News

Quick Takes: Xiaomi Plans to Enter U.S. Within a Year, Ritual Launches Apple Pay Promotion, and More

In addition to our standalone articles covering the latest Apple news and rumors at MacRumors, this Quick Takes column provides a bite-sized recap of other headlines about Apple and its competitors on weekdays.

Monday, March 5

– Xiaomi plans to enter U.S. market within a year: “We’ve always been considering entering the U.S. market,” Xiaomi Chairman Lei Jun said at the sidelines of China’s annual legislative session in Beijing, according to the WSJ. “We plan to start entering the market by end 2018, or by early 2019.”

Commentary: Xiaomi was the world’s fifth-largest smartphone maker in 2017, with an estimated 92.4 million shipments, according to research firm IDC. To be successful in the United States, where Apple and Samsung reign supreme, the Chinese company will need a sales agreement with a big carrier like AT&T.

– Ritual launches Apple Pay promotion: Today through March 16, any customer who orders with the Ritual app and pays with Apple Pay will have access to exclusive daily deals at 1,300 restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, and Toronto.

Commentary: Ritual is a mobile app for ordering and paying ahead of time at participating restaurants and coffee shops, enabling customers to skip the line and pick up their food instantly upon arrival.

– iPhone X supplier Finisar gives tour of its Texas facility: “We are trying to make this the VCSEL capital of the world,” said Finisar Vice President Curt Barratt, referring to the small town of Sherman, Texas.

Commentary: VCSELs, or vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, are part of the TrueDepth camera system that enables Face ID on the iPhone X. In December, Apple announced it had awarded Finisar $390 million to expand its research and development and production capacity.

– Apple Park: Transcript of 911 calls about injuries from walking into glass: Following reports of some Apple employees walking into glass doors at the company’s new headquarters, The San Francisco Chronicle obtained transcripts of 911 calls about related injuries via a public records request.

Commentary: Many people have accidentally walked into a door or two at some point. Hopefully the employees are okay. Apple is reportedly adding stickers to the glass doors to make them more visible.

For more Apple news and rumors coverage, visit our Front Page, Mac Blog, and iOS Blog. Also visit our forums to join in the discussion.

Tags: Xiaomi, Quick Takes, RItual, Finisar
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Netflix Gaining Expanded Parental Controls, More Prominent Ratings

Netflix today announced a platform-wide update to introduce expanded parental controls that will give parents more granular access to the television shows and movies their children are watching.

A new PIN parental control for individual movies and TV shows is being added, so parents will be able to block access to specific content if so desired.

. We understand that every family is different and that parents have differing perspectives on what they feel is appropriate to watch at different ages. While we already provide PIN protection for all content at a particular maturity level for Netflix accounts, PIN protection for a specific series or film provides families with an additional tool to make decisions they are comfortable with.

Netflix also plans to begin offering more prominent maturity level ratings for a series or a movie once a Netflix user hits play on a title. Ratings are available before starting a movie or a TV show, but Netflix is expanding their availability to make sure memberrs are “fully aware of the maturity level as they begin watching.”

According to Netflix, these parental control changes will be rolling out to Netflix members on all Netflix-compatible devices “in the coming months.”

Tag: Netflix
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Trump will meet with video game industry leaders on March 8th

After a little bit of back and forth, it appears that the White House’s meeting with the video game industry is on. At today’s press briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that a meeting will take place this Thursday, March 8th. Separately, the Entertainment Software Association, which has many of the top software publishers (and all three major console manufacturers) as members, confirmed that it would be participating in the meeting. The ESA’s full statement follows below.

Video games are enjoyed around the world and numerous authorities and reputable scientific studies have found no connection between games and real-life violence. Like all Americans, we are deeply concerned about the level of gun violence in the United States. Video games are plainly not the issue: entertainment is distributed and consumed globally, but the US has an exponentially higher level of gun violence than any other nation. The upcoming meeting at the White House, which ESA will attend, will provide the opportunity to have a fact-based conversation about video game ratings, our industry’s commitment to parents, and the tools we provide to make informed entertainment choices.

In this statement, the ESA points again to the fact that while many video games are distributed worldwide, no other nation has a fraction of the gun violence that is found in the US. That’s not to mention the many studies that have shown no link between violent video games and real-life violent behavior. We’ve reached out to Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony to confirm their participation in the White House meeting.

Everything you need to know about Chrome’s flags

WARNING: EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES AHEAD!

One of the cool things about Chrome is that we’re able to play with experimental features. That means we can install beta or even alpha versions, but we can also try some of the truly experimental things that haven’t been included on even the most alpha of alpha builds through what are called “flags.”

Let’s have a look at what they are and how to get started breaking things.

What are Chrome Flags?

Flags are experimental features as well as features most users will not need that are buried in a place where they won’t be accidentally enabled.

Some are features Google is working on implementing, some are just things being tested to know if it even should work on making a stable feature, and some are there because some obscure use case means there needs to be a way to do a thing.

Experimental things are cool when they are cool, but not so much when they aren’t.

Flags can improve your experience using Chrome or make it worse — that’s how things go with anything still in its experimental phase. They can also let you have access to content that you wouldn’t normally be able to see or use, like VR websites or features in other Google products like YouTube that aren’t quite yet ready for the general public.

They can also change the way Chrome itself runs by changing settings for hardware acceleration or memory management which can lead to problems. These problems can be simple and solved by reverting a setting or significantly worse. I’ve never heard of someone ruining a computer by changing a Flag, but there’s a first time for everything so you need to be careful.

Most people probably aren’t interested in changing any Chrome Flags and that’s probably for the best. But if you’re the type who can’t leave well enough alone, Chrome has you covered.

How to access Chrome’s Flags

To change any Flags, you need to know where they are. They aren’t exactly out in the open, but thankfully they also aren’t hard to uncover. Whether you are using a Chromebook or Chrome on another computer or even Chrome on your phone, you get to them the same way.

• In the Omnibox (Chrome’s address bar) on a blank tab, type the following: chrome://flags/

You’ll be greeted with a message warning you that these can experimental settings, and that things can go horribly wrong. And it’s true — you can make Chrome unusable if you change the wrong thing, and you can do worse things, too. This is more than Google covering themselves in case you break something, and it’s a warning you should pay attention to.

At the top of the page, you’ll see a search box where you can look for a specific Flag that someone or a website might have told you about. Google is pretty good at search.

You’ll also see a list of the Flags themselves. Each entry has a short description of what the setting changes, a button to enable or disable the Flag and a hyperlink so that you can get to that flag through the Omnibox without searching, such as chrome://flags/#WebRtcUseEchoCanceller3 which takes you to the Flag that attempts to cut back on microphone echo during web real-time chat instances. This is a good example of a Flag that won’t harm anything if you want to try it.

There’s always a way to go back unless you change a Flag that takes the reset button away!

To change a Flag, click or tap the button in its listing. you’ll see three choices: Default, Enable and Disable. Enable and Disable are simple enough to understand, but Default may throw you. it simply means that you want the setting to go back to whatever it was before you started changing things. it’s handy because it means you don’t have to remember if you enabled it or disabled it.

The most important button is at the very top of the page next to the search box: Reset all to default. That’s your get out of jail free card and as long as you can still start Chrome and get to it, you’ll be able to go back to where you were before you broke anything.

Should you change any Flags?

Ahh. That’s the meat of it all, isn’t it? These experimental things are right there and we get to try them as we please, knowing the risks involved. And as long as you understand those risks — you could lose browser data or compromise your security or privacy — there’s nothing wrong with trying things.

You’ll see tips about changing Flags online whenever someone finds a good one, but you probably shouldn’t just start jamming on buttons just because you can. An example of a Flag you might have heard about was the QUIC Flag — chrome://flags/#enable-quic. QUIC is Google’s experimental protocol, and it stands for Quick UDP Internet Connection. Its goal is to provide secure web browsing faster than the existing TLS/SSL protocols and in some ways, it’s pretty good. One way that it isn’t so good is that most Mitmproxy servers are unable to filter websites that serve you pages using QUIC. If you need to use a mitmproxy (you would know if you did) you can disable the QUIC Flag so it’s never used and every site serves you using TSL/SSL.

Never change a Flag for something you don’t understand. Trust me because I push buttons before I read them.

Another Flag that you can safely play with is the Fast Tab Unloader, chrome://flags/#enable-fast-unload. It’s Disabled by default on Chrome stable and what it does is allow the browser to run the process that checks, saves any data if needed, then closes the tab in its own thread outside of the user interface. The tab “closes” right away even though it’s still being handled in the background.

Of course, there are a lot of other Flags that can make everything worse, which are the ones you need to look out for. I’m not going to start talking about the ones I’ve tried and made everything worse other than to say Web Assembly Flags will break your browser and NaCI plugin Flags are things you should know what they are before you just press buttons. Trust a person who just pushed buttons and was sorry.

March security patches now available for Pixels and Nexus phones; expect your OTA soon

Security updates and fixes for “functionality issues” are cleared for landing and inbound.

Factory images with the March 2018 patch for the Pixel and Pixel 2 family, the Nexus 6P, and Nexus 5X are available at the Google Developer site and can be manually installed today, and OTA updates are expected to begin shortly.

These are part of the March Security Bulletin and besides patches for the critical vulnerabilities found in Android and hardware partner’s code, some bug fixes and software improvements are inbound for Google’s family of devices. Don;t get excited, though, there’s nothing fun in there.

• Improve screen wake performance with fingerprint unlock (Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL)
• Improve audio performance when recording video (Pixel 2 XL)
• Improve crash reporting (Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL)

I guess better crash reporting could be fun for some of us, though. And if you’ve been unlucky and have been bit by the “fingerprint unlocking slow-down bug” you are probably happy to see some more fine tuning being done.

The usual applies: you can grab the factory images and flash things yourself, or hang tight as Google says to expect an over-the-air update soon, which it encourages you to accept. Fast updates are one of the reasons to buy a phone from Google, but faster updates through a USB cable are an even better reason. Here’s what you need.

• Find the factory images here
• How to manually update your Pixel or Nexus

Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL

• Pixel 2 FAQ: Everything you need to know!
• Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL review: The new standard
• Google Pixel 2 specs
• Google Pixel 2 vs. Pixel 2 XL: What’s the difference?
• Join our Pixel 2 forums

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MoviePass tracks your location before and after you go to the movies

Is your data worth a good deal on movies?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are you’ve heard of MoviePass by now. Being able to pay just $9.95/month to watch as many as one movie per day in theaters is an enticing proposition, but to not much surprise, some people are apprehensive of its too good to be true offer.

During the recent Entertainment Finance Forum, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe might have given some users a reason to cancel their subscription.

The topic of Lowe’s talk was Data is the New Oil: How will MoviePass Monetize It, and during this, he confirmed that MoviePass collects user data — specifically location info — before and after you go to the movies.

At one point, Lowe said:

We get an enormous amount of information. We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards.

Later on in his talk, he made the reassuring comment of “we know all about you.”

There are a lot of apps that track location data, but what Lowe’s saying doesn’t exactly line up with MoviePass’s privacy policy of claiming to make a “single request” for your location when selecting the theater you want to watch a movie at. That’s drastically different from tracking your location before going to the movies and even for a point once the credits have finished rolling, so it’ll be interesting to see how MoviePass responds to these discrepancies.

I was thinking about signing up for MoviePass this summer, and while Lowe’s comments don’t personally deter me from the service, I completely understand current and potential customers being weary of it now.

Best of MWC 2018: What Android Central loved at this year’s show

Facebook expands breaking news label to more publishers

Facebook began testing a “breaking news” label for developing stories back in November, and now the social network is expanding the option to more publishers. Starting this week, the company says 50 more outlets in North America, Latin America, Europe and Australia will be privy to the tag. That’s in addition to the “small group of local and national publishers” that are already using it. If all goes well, Facebook said it may offer the option to even more publishers in the future.

As the image above illustrates, the tag adds a red “breaking” label beside the time and source as an attempt to make those posts more visible in the News Feed. The feature can be applied to Instant Articles, links and Facebook Live videos. Publishers included in the test can use the tool once a day and set a time limit for how long the story is breaking news — up to six hours.

There’s also an option for readers to report if they don’t think a story deserves the tag, feedback Facebook says will help it improve the tool. As you might expect, publishers will also get specific stats on how well the “breaking news” tagged posts perform in the News Feed. So far though, Facebook says the tag is proving effective. The company says clicks, Likes, comments and shares are all up on posts that have been included in the test thus far.

Source: Facebook