‘The Spy’ is Netflix’s chronicle of Israeli secret agent Eli Cohen

Netflix’s latest original series is a true-life spy story. The Spy chronicles Eli Cohen, who lived in Damascus and was spying for Israel in the ’60s, according to Deadline. Cohen’s cover was blown and he was publicly hanged in 1965. Writing and directing duties are being handled by Gideon Raff, who created the program that Showtime’s Homeland series was based upon. As for who’s in front of the camera, Sacha Baron Cohen will play the lead role.

If you’re worried that this will be another series that Netflix will run into the ground, well past its logical conclusion point, don’t fret. Deadline reports that The Spy is a limited event, with six episodes total. There isn’t a specific release date, but Netflix promised to offer 700 new original shows and movies in 2018. So, maybe we’ll see it sooner rather than later.

Source: Deadline

FOSTA-SESTA’s real aim is to silence sex workers online

The US’ latest attempt to silence sex workers and people working in the adult-entertainment industry has been a huge success. Just weeks after FOSTA-SESTA was passed, the bill has begun to chill free speech across the internet. A number of websites have had to either shut down or actively distance themselves from the notion that they support sex work. And the problem is only going to get worse as time goes on.

If you’re unfamiliar, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act were two bills welded together on Capitol Hill. The legislation passed the House on March 21st and was signed into law by President Donald Trump today. Its job is to neuter the safe-harbor provisions contained in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 with regards to sex.

Historically, if you owned a platform, then you weren’t responsible for the behavior of your users. An ISP couldn’t be held liable if one of its customers sent threatening messages to someone else, because it would be too onerous to police. Subsequent case law enshrined its principles, with courts finding that companies like Google and Backpage.com were not liable for the actions of its users.

Intentionally or not, the bill makes no distinction between human trafficking and legitimate, consensual sex work. As such, FOSTA-SESTA essentially makes platform holders liable for talk about sex on their platforms. As my colleague Violet Blue wrote, “Lawmakers did not fact-check the bill’s claims, research the religious neocons behind it, nor did they listen to constituents.” That’s not to mention that FOSTA-SESTA contravenes the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.

The fallout has been dramatic, with the website Survivors Against SESTA documenting the litany of changes that have taken place. This includes the closure of sex-work directories like CityVibe and NightShift as well as the personals sections of websites like Craigslist. FetLife’s kink-friendly social network is currently consulting with its users to determine its future plans. The FBI’s seizure of Backpage.com has, again, helped blunt a useful avenue for sex workers to find work.

It’s not just the realm of adults-only websites and platforms that are now having to crack down on discussions of sex. Microsoft and Google have moved to alter their terms of service to prohibit offensive or inappropriate content and language. Not even private discussions are safe, with Microsoft reportedly claiming the right to examine your content to investigate complaints.

More troubling is the fact that according to Motherboard, Google is purging adult content from private Drive accounts. Performers who sell clips of explicit material to users have lost videos and received complaints from customers. Even videos with relatively anodyne names have been wiped or left in place but made unable to play, a troubling infringement of personal rights.

Even before the legislation was passed, however, the technology industry had begun to wage a war on sex workers. Last year, Patreon flip-flopped on moves to prohibit sex workers from earning money through the site. That wound up potentially harming a number of sex workers who were economically vulnerable and relied on the site for income. Similarly, Nook, Barnes & Noble’s e-book publishing platform, began terminating the accounts of erotica writers without warning last summer. A common thread with many of these moves is to strip an often-marginalized group of its ability to make money.

Twitter, meanwhile, stands accused of shadowbanning users who are engaged in sex work or the wider adult-entertainment industry. The practice essentially restricts people’s messages and profile from being surfaced beyond their own network — for instance, making sure their tweets cannot be seen in hashtags and preventing new people from discovering their account. Twitter vehemently denies engaging in the practice, and there is no concrete evidence that it does so.

There is clearly something going on, however, as various adult performers have found their accounts censored. One of the more high-profile adult performers to believe that they have been shadowbanned is Stormy Daniels. On April 6th, she tweeted that it was now impossible to find her account even when searching for her username. There are tools, such as Nice Brains’ Shadowban Checker, that purport to determine if an account has been shadowbanned.

But even if Twitter isn’t shadowbanning users, it is still doing its part to silence women within the sex industry. Accounts can either be marked by the users themselves or moderators as containing “sensitive content.” Like the effects of a shadowban, these accounts won’t appear in hashtags or searches, even if you look for their specific username. This sensitive-content filter is also activated by default, thereby erasing and silencing these individuals without having to give them an official ban.

Firstly: change your settings. In ‘privacy and safety’, scroll down to safety and untick ‘hide sensitive content’, tick others you’d like. pic.twitter.com/ilMPFH0TJT

— Girl on the Net (@girlonthenet) Oct. 27th, 2017

Some sex workers are attempting to protect themselves against the bill by building platforms beyond the reach of American authorities. One such outfit is Red Umbrella Hosting, an Iceland-based web hosting service founded by Melissa Mariposa. The company was founded in response to FOSTA-SESTA and offers judgment-free, anonymous and sex-worker-friendly hosting.

Then there is Switter (Sex Work Twitter), a Mastodon service created by Assembly Four — a collective of sex workers and technologists based in Australia. Switter was similarly launched in response to FOSTA-SESTA and Twitter’s alleged shadowbanning practices. In a few short weeks, it has already acquired nearly 23,000 followers and is likely to become even more prominent in the future. And then there is Share Our Shit Saturdays, a project whereby sex workers, content creators and activists can provide signal boosts to others.

The current efforts of sex workers to build alternative platforms are a good first step but not the end-all. While their ability to find work and receive payment remains in the hands of third parties, sex workers will always be vulnerable. A simple policy change at Patreon was enough to risk the livelihoods of thousands of individuals engaged in sex work. That’s not to mention the uncertainties inherent in a shifting, increasingly right-wing political landscape where crackdowns can happen on a whim. Perhaps the sex-work community will need to build its own social media, advertising and payment platforms in order to truly control its own destiny.

Steam’s revamped privacy features put an end to Steam Spy

Given how much the tech industry is being pressured to protect user privacy, it makes sense that gaming companies would get roped in, too. The pre-eminent platform Steam just overhauled its privacy settings with more detailed descriptions of what information is being shared. Players can now control how the public views their information, like achievements and playtime. But it also made their libraries hidden by default. Unfortunately, this means industry-tracking services like Steam Spy have essentially been locked out of crucial data they need to exist.

Valve just made a change to their privacy settings, making games owned by Steam users hidden by default.

Steam Spy relied on this information being visible by default and won’t be able to operate anymore.https://t.co/0ejZgRQ6Kd

— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) April 11, 2018

Steam Spy operated by scanning public accounts and listing playtime and ownership for certain games, effectively providing the some of the only metrics on sales and performance to the public. The company’s CEO Sergey Galyonkin suggested to Eurogamer that updating Steam’s privacy features might be an effort to pre-emptively comply with the GDPR laws that will go into effect in Europe in May, but wasn’t sure of Valve’s particular motivation.

Valve has this data too, but doesn’t share it, leaving the PC community without reliably complete and current data to gauge popularity and playerbases. This will make it harder to see how struggling games are doing, as happened with the decline of Evolve and Lawbreakers.

Steam is also working on an ‘invisible’ mode to couple with the existing ‘online,’ ‘away’ and ‘offline’ presence options. Given that chat services like AIM had this decades ago, it makes sense to add, if only to sneak in more playtime after you’ve told your friends you’ve gone to bed. It’s worth pointing out that these privacy features haven’t come out of nowhere; According to Steam’s blog post, they came “directly from user feedback.” If you disagree, the platform is waiting to hear from you at the Steam Discussions forum.

Via: RockPaperShotgun

Source: Steam

Apple Music celebrates 40 million subscribers with a new boss

Apple Music has been reported as growing faster than Spotify in the US, adding five percent to its subscriber base each month, as compared to Spotify’s two percent growth. Now Apple’s streaming service has hit a new milestone: 40 million subscribers, according to a report at Variety (which was also hinted at by a European Apple Music employee last week). The company also announced the that long-time Apple executive Oliver Schusser will take over as vice president of Apple Music and International Content. He’ll report directly to Eddy Cue, who hired Schusser 14 years ago.

According to Variety‘s sources, Schusser will move from London to California for the new role and split his time between Apple’s offices in Cupertino and Culver City. Schusser previously worked on projects like the App Store, iTunes movies and TV, iBooks, Apple Podcasts and more, notes Variety. Tracey Hannelly will apparently take on Schusser’s old position leading Apple Music International. The new promotions will have no impact on Jimmy Iovine’s standing at the company, says a Variety source. Iovine already planned to step back from daily operations at Apple Music.

Source: Variety

LinkedIn Messenger gets GIFs for… job searching?

LinkedIn Messenger is the latest communication platform to decide it needs GIFs, too. It’s adding a search function, which you’ll recognize from casual chat services you don’t use to network professionally. LinkedIn Messenger’s new feature is powered by tech from a company Google bought weeks ago: Tenor. If that company sounds familiar, its engine runs the GIF searches in Gboard and Facebook Messenger.

LinkedIn Messenger will roll out GIFs to all users in the coming weeks, but make sure you use them wisely. As the company reminds in its blog post, “think about your company’s culture, your professional relationship with the person, and the industry you work in to decide if it makes sense to send a GIF.” Keep your jokes professional.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: LinkedIn

Instagram will let users download all their data

As data protection and privacy becomes a big issue around the world, social networking companies like Instagram need to appropriately take care of the information we share. One of the provisions of the UK’s upcoming Data Protection Bill would require companies to allow its users to easily move their data from one service to another. To that end, Facebook-owned Instagram just confirmed to TechCrunch that it is building a new data portability tool so users can download a copy of everything they’ve put on the service, including photos, videos and messages.

Such a tool would make it easier for people to move to competing photo social networks, much like Facebook’s own Download Your Information tool, which has been touted as a way to #DeleteFacebook. While such a tool would help Instagram comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it could also help us all protect our precious memories with a locally-stored backup of our Instagram feeds, especially if it’s in a high enough resolution. TechCrunch says that details of how the Instagram data will arrive on your hard drive and at what level of verisimilitude should come from Instagram closer to when the company actually launches its new tool.

Via: The Verge

Source: TechCrunch

Netflix won’t be going to Cannes after all

Netflix won’t be screening anything at Cannes this year, either in or out of competition. Despite debuting two titles last year, the first streaming provider to do so at the prestigious film festival, the backlash has been significant. The new rule banning any movie from competition that didn’t have a theatrical run was a clear message: Streaming content creators weren’t welcome.

“We want our films to be on fair ground with every other filmmaker,” Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos told Variety. “There’s a risk in us going in this way and having our films and filmmakers treated disrespectfully at the festival. They’ve set the tone. I don’t think it would be good for us to be there.”

Last year, Netflix screened two films in competition at Cannes, Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories. French cinema owners and unions revolted, leading the festival’s head Theirry Fremaux to introduce a ban on any movie that hadn’t debuted in the country’s theaters first. Netflix reportedly offered to screen its films theatrically to comply, but French law dictates that films in cinemas can’t be shown on streaming services for three years thereafter. Fremaux isn’t alone in dismissing Netflix’s content, either: Steven Spielberg feels the ‘television format’ should disqualify the company’s films from Academy Award consideration.

In any case, the streaming company decided not to bend to that rule, and won’t show any of its films at this year’s festival, even to debut them non-competitively. Sarandos doesn’t see a point: “I don’t think there would be any reason to go out of competition. The rule was implicitly about Netflix, and Thierry made it explicitly about Netflix when he announced the rule,” he told Variety.

Source: Variety

FDA approves AI-powered software to detect diabetic retinopathy

30.3 million Americans have diabetes according to a 2015 CDC study. An additional 84.1 million have prediabetes, which often leads to the full disease within five years. It’s important to detect diabetes early to avoid health complications like heart disease, stroke, amputation of extremities and vision loss. Technology increasingly plays an important role in early detection, too. In that vein, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved an AI-powered device that can be used by non-specialists to detect diabetic retinopathy in adults with diabetes.

Diabetic retinopathy occurs when the high levels of blood sugar in the bloodstream cause damage to your retina’s blood vessels. It’s the most common cause of vision loss, according to the FDA. The approval comes for a device called IDx-DR, a software program that uses an AI algorithm to analyze images of the eye that can be taken in a regular doctor’s office with a special camera, the Topcon NW400.

The photos are then uploaded to a server that runs IDx-DR, which can then tell the doctor if there is a more than mild level of diabetic retinopathy present. If not, it will advise a re-screen in 12 months. The device and software can be used by health care providers who don’t normally provide eye care services. The FDA warns that you shouldn’t be screened with the device if you have had laser treatment, eye surgery or injections, as well as those with other conditions, like persistent vision loss, blurred vision, floaters, previously diagnosed macular edema and more.

Via: The Verge

Source: FDA

‘Hidden Figures’ will be made into a TV series

Hidden Figures did a lot to highlight the unheralded black female mathematicians who played a key role in the early NASA space program, and it proved a commercial success to boot. So much of a success, in fact, that it could soon extend to TV. Variety has learned that National Geographic is developing a series “inspired by” the Hidden Figures movie, which in turn was based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book. The show is still very in development and isn’t guaranteed to get a commitment, but it’s executive produced by Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping, both of whom handled the movie.

It’s not an unusual move for National Geographic. The company’s cable network has been gradually branching out into scripted yet historically-based TV productions like Genius, which covers the lives of legendary figures like Albert Einstein. This would just represent a logical extension of the strategy, even if it is capitalizing on a blockbuster movie.

Whether or not Hidden Figures makes it to the network, it’ll be part of a small but sustained trend of movies and shows celebrating influential mathematicians and scientists who, however famous they already were, hadn’t received cinematic treatments. The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything are notable recent examples beyond Hidden Figures, while Amazon’s Marie Curie movie illustrates what you can expect in the future. Mathematicians and scientists have become popular subjects, and it only makes sense for a TV network to bank on this success when there’s a lot of pent-up interest.

Source: Variety

The Zuckerberg hearings were a wasted opportunity

Over the past two days, members of Congress have peppered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with questions about how the platform manages users’ privacy, what went wrong with Cambridge Analytica and what it’s doing to strengthen protections going forward. These two hearings lasted a combined 10-plus hours, during which dozens of senators and representatives had a chance to ask questions in five- and four-minute allotments, respectively. Until this week, Congress had tried for years to get Zuckerberg to personally appear on Capitol Hill, instead of, say, dispatching another company executive. It’s a shame, then, that the lawmakers ultimately squandered the time they had with him this week.

Throughout the hearings, Congressional leaders repeated questions that had already been asked. We heard them ask again and again whether the company would work with Congress on legislation that would impose regulations on social networks like Facebook and others. We also heard many leaders ask when exactly Facebook learned that Cambridge Analytica had improperly obtained user data. This repetition continued with questions about changes to policy, Facebook’s dense terms of service and whether users have been notified if their data were purchased by Cambridge Analytica. If time was so precious to these individuals — and it should be, four minutes flies by and this is an important topic — wouldn’t they try to avoid repeating the same questions ad nauseam?

Similarly, much of these questions were addressed in reports and updates already released by Facebook. Rehashing them (often repeatedly) is a poor use of time.

Even worse, some lawmakers spent their time soapboxing, not asking any questions at all. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) mostly used his few minutes to focus on a tool the Obama campaign used to collect data on Facebook users. He made sure to say that Zuckerberg should be equally outraged at that as he is with Cambridge Analytica’s purchase of Facebook data and kept saying that Facebook needed to reexamine the chronology of the history of this sort of data acquisition. But he didn’t ask a single question of Zuckerberg except one about how large the regulatory affairs division was when Zuckerberg was launching the platform in his Harvard dorm room — a question that was largely facetious.

There were also some questions asked that Zuckerberg should have been able to answer but couldn’t. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-RI) question about whether Aleksandr Kogan can have or does have another personal account on Facebook is one example. Zuckerberg should also have been able to answer Senator Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) question about whether any Facebook employees worked with Cambridge Analytica while CA worked with the Trump campaign. He couldn’t answer Senator Dean Heller’s (R-NV) and Senator Cory Gardner’s (R-CO) about how long it takes Facebook to get rid of users’ data after they delete their Facebook or Instagram accounts. And Zuckerberg should have been able to answer Senator Tammy Baldwin’s (D-WI) question about what firms Aleksandr Kogan sold his data to other than Cambridge Analytica. Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI) actually called out Zuckerberg during her questioning today on everything he couldn’t answer. “As CEO, you didn’t know some key facts,” she said.

Then again, some of the questions were unreasonable. For example, Senator Heller (R-NV) asked how many Nevada residents were included in the 87 million individuals whose data were obtained by Cambridge Analytica. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) brought up specific Facebook Pages during his questioning and asked Zuckerberg if they were Russian-created groups. Additionally, a number of representatives asked Zuckerberg about specific instances when particular groups were shut down, their ads were rejected or were in some way blocked from posting content on Facebook — somehow expecting Zuckerberg to have knowledge of every time a reviewer determined content was inappropriate. In these cases, Zuckerberg should be forgiven for having to say “my team will get back to you.”

On top of all this, some senators and representatives didn’t seem to fully understand how social media and other ad-supported services work. Obviously, the lawmakers weighing regulation on platforms like Facebook need to understand how these platforms work. But is the CEO of Facebook really the person that should be explaining that? And do those conversations need to happen during a public hearing when officials have such a limited time to ask questions? Put their young staffers to work and have them brief their powerful bosses beforehand.

These questions about how social networks work (and how they make money) bring to light a larger issue with Congress. And it’s that many of these individuals, who have the power to enact impactful legislation regarding citizens’ privacy, don’t have a basic understanding of what these companies are or what they do or how they do it. And that’s a problem. These hearings aren’t the only time we’ve seen questions like these — they were frequent during last year’s hearings on Russian use of social media to influence US elections — and it’s clear that some of these lawmakers haven’t made enough of an attempt to understand these powerful companies outside of these occasional public hearings.

There were also questions that these leaders should have asked Zuckerberg and didn’t. The CEO wasn’t pressed about Joseph Chancellor, Aleksandr Kogan’s business partner who helped start Global Science Research and now works for Facebook. And though many asked if Zuckerberg was open to regulation, none followed up his answers to the affirmative with questions about his thoughts on state efforts to enact stricter privacy laws. Additionally, while Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) perused an interesting line of questioning about whether Facebook is a monopoly (and therefore not to be trusted with regulating itself), no one floated the idea of breaking it up, even if it were determined to be.

Further, the unwillingness of lawmakers to focus on a single topic meant they had little time for follow-up questions. Because of that, Zuckerberg wasn’t aggressively pushed to answer questions about Facebook’s response to Cambridge Analytica in 2015. He also mostly skirted questions about how Facebook tracks its users’ data.

While this questioning went on for more than 10 hours over two days, they still weren’t as exhaustive as other public hearings. Zuckerberg wasn’t subjected to a double round of questioning at each hearing, which is a typical practice, and he probably got off relatively easy only having to testify before one House committee and two Senate committees. And that makes the last two days especially bad. These lawmakers had limited time to grill Zuckerberg and they wasted it.

To be clear, Mark Zuckerberg deserved to be in front of those committees. And they should have pressed him for more information about how his company protects its users’ data. But Congress should have done a better job. Too many lawmakers could have made more of its short time with Zuckerberg. Yes, there are exceptions: Zuckerberg clarified how Facebook will implement Europe’s new GDPR privacy standards worldwide. Many lawmakers pressed Zuckerberg on whether it has removed groups using tactics similar to Cambridge Analytica’s — as they should have. Zuckerberg also said he was open to working with Congress on potential legislation. (What kind of legislation, exactly? That, too, would have been a good follow-up question.)

But when you subtract the repetitions, the grandstanding, the basic info that everyone should have known, and the pedantic “gotcha” queries that Zuckerberg couldn’t possibly be expected to answer on the spot, we emerged from those 10 hours of questioning with little new information. If anything, we learned more about how ill-equipped Congress is to weigh nuanced questions surrounding technology, data and privacy.

Images: Bloomberg, The Washington Post and Tom Williams via Getty Images