Instagram snags Kevin Weil after Twitter departure
The last few days have been tumultuous for Twitter after news broke that several executives were leaving the social platform’s management team. At least one of them appears to be headed to a competitor as multiple sources are reporting that Kevin Weil, the former vice president of product at Twitter, is on his way to Instagram as the Head of Product.
Weil’s move comes on the heels of Instagram’s former head of product, Peter Deng, moving over to the Oculus portion of the Facebook collective earlier this month. According to sources, Instagram has actually been courting Weil for several months now and Deng’s move helped things fall into place. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey may have gotten wind of that development as reports indicate Weil’s responsibilities at Twitter had been scaled back after a round of layoffs last October. Weil is slated to to officially stay on as a Twitter employee until January 29th, so no official word from Instagram is likely to be released until after that date.
Along with Weil, Twitter also lost their VP of Engineering Alex Roetter, their VP of Global Media Katie Stanton and VP of Human Resources Skip Schipper. Despite some initial reports, all of the executives left of their own accord rather than being let go by Twitter. Some sources indicated that Roetter alerted Dorsey to his imminent departure late in 2015 after a reorg. No word has surfaced yet on where these individuals may be heading.
source: Re/code
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Instagram adds small improvements to its Boomerang app
An update is starting to roll out to Instagram’s standalone Boomerang app. This update brings with it a few small little tweaks to make the app a little smoother.
The app no longer automatically saves the videos you take to your phones camera roll allowing you to pick and choose which videos you want to save. In addition to this, sharing your work is made easier with faster and smoother Instagram sharing.
Unfortunately for us Android users, it looks like our iOS counterparts will get a little extra functionality in this update. On top of the features above, Boomerang for iOS will now work with an iOS device’s flash for video capture in the dark, and also allow users to control the length of Boomerang videos for up to 20 frames.
The update should hit your phone soon, but if you don’t have Boomerang and would like to try it out hit the link below.
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Recommended Reading: The harsh realities of internet fame
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology and more in print and on the web. Some weeks, you’ll also find short reviews of books that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read.
Get Rich or Die Vlogging: The Sad Economics of Internet Fame
Gaby Dunn, Fusion
Just because you’re famous on the internet, doesn’t mean you’re rolling in the dough. This piece takes a look at the harsh realities of being famous on the web and trying to survive in the real world. As it turns out, YouTube fame, for some, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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“Best of” lists are a dime a dozen this time of year, but NPR’s 2015 music roundup is definitely worth a look. |
The Art of Escape Would it be so bad if inmates had access to video games while serving out their sentences? |
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The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage George Hotz is well-known for prying into the iPhone’s inner workings, and now he’s looking to take on Google and Tesla with his Acura ILX. |
The Nine Lives of Leonardo DiCaprio Wired sat down with Leonardo DiCaprio to chat about his new film Revenant, malfunctioning parachutes, climate change and more. |
[Image credit: Kris Connor/ Getty Images]
Facebook accuses bug hunter of unethical behavior
A security researcher who uncovered a major Instagram hole has gotten into a tiff with Facebook and opened up a can of worms about the boundaries of “bug bounty” programs. Wesley Wineberg is a well-known bug hunter, having received $24,000 from Microsoft for stopping a nasty Outlook worm. He then turned to Instagram (via Facebook’s bug bounty program), after receiving a tip about a potential vulnerability on an exposed Amazon server. After confirming the bug, he decided to dig a bit deeper, and that’s where things went wrong.
Wineberg eventually struck gold via a hole that could allow hackers to run code remotely, and submitted a ticket to the bug bounty team. Probing further, he managed to crack some weak employee passwords, including “changeme” and “instagram,” and submitted another report. Using that info, he obtained a key that allowed him to access server files.
To demonstrate the extent of the vulnerability, he downloaded several “buckets” of non-user data from Instagram’s Amazon servers. The data, he discovered, gave him access to source code and secret authentication codes — the so-called keys to the kingdom. “To say that I had gained access to basically all of Instagram’s secret key material would probably be a fair statement,” he said in a blog post. Furthermore, he told Forbes he had access to the servers for over a month before the bug was patched. “My concern is that someone else has gained access to [the data]. What are the chances someone else has found this?”
To say that I had gained access to basically all of Instagram’s secret key material would probably be a fair statement
Having paid Wineberg $2,500 for discovering the earlier bug, Facebook was far from grateful for the escalation, however. It declined to pay him for the later bug submissions, saying he had violated the terms of its bug bounty program. In a Facebook post, CSO Alex Stamos wrote that, “intentional exfiltration of data is not authorized by our bug bounty program, is not useful in understanding and addressing the core issue, and was not ethical behavior by Wes.” (Facebook added that “this bug has been fixed, the affected keys have been rotated, and we have no evidence that Wes or anybody else accessed any user data.”)
Stamos went on to accuse Wineberg of being ungrateful for the initial reward, expressed surprise that he planned to write about it, and most severely, contacted his employer, Synack. “It was reasonable to believe that Wes was operating on behalf Synack … [because] he has interacted with us using a synack.com email address and he has written blog posts that are used by Synack for marketing purposes,” Stamos said. (Wineberg says all his correspondence with Facebook was via his personal email until after Facebook contacted Synack.)
We couldn’t allow Wes to set a precedent that anybody can exfiltrate unnecessary amounts of data and call it a part of legitimate bug research.
According to Stamos’ article, he told Synack’s CEO that “we couldn’t allow Wes to set a precedent that anybody can exfiltrate unnecessary amounts of data and call it a part of legitimate bug research, and that I wanted to keep this out of the hands of the lawyers on both sides.” He added that he didn’t threaten legal action or ask for Wineberg to be fired, but “I did say that Wes’s behavior reflected poorly on him and Synack.”
For his part, Wineberg said that he was acting on his own behalf and that Synack, which employs him on a contract-only basis, had approved his private bug bounty work. He believed that Facebook’s terms-of-service for its white hat bounty program didn’t specifically exclude his actions, and that some companies, like Tumblr, are more likely to pay for bugs if researchers dig deeper to show “impact.” On the other hand, Microsoft, for one, doesn’t want companies to move beyond the basic proof-of-concept, but spells that out clearly in its rules.
In his blog, Wineberg provided a transcript of his email conversations with Facebook, which differ from Facebook’s account — he asked for permission to write about the bugs and didn’t complain about the payout, for instance. He added that “without contacting me at all, Facebook had gone directly for my employer … if the company was not as understanding of security research, I could have easily lost my job over this.” While he agreed that Facebook didn’t threaten legal action directly, he called Facebook’s mention of lawyers “intimidation.”
Facebook CSO Alex Stamos at Web Summit
Facebook’s Stamos — who has a sterling reputation as a pioneer in the security community — says he’s “proud that we run one of the most successful bug bounty programs” and that Facebook has paid out over $4.3 million so far. According to Forbes, he previously tweeted that “I will never spend budget on a security vendor who threatens researchers.” He admitted that “I don’t think we triaged the reports on this issue quickly enough,” and said “we will also look at making our policies more explicit and will be working to make sure we are clearer about what we consider ethical behavior.”
Many Reddit commenters said that Wineberg overstepped his bounds, since weak employee passwords are not code bugs and a lack of clear rules doesn’t give researchers carte blanche to hack sites. Furthermore, many security researchers believe that actually dumping data, even if it’s not sensitive user data, is a huge no-no.
However, others think that Wineberg was right to highlight the potential severity of the hole and that Stamos’ response was overly harsh. AVG security specialist Tony Anscombe told Engadget that his company also runs a bug bounty program with similar rules to Facebook. “If somebody came to us and said, ‘I found something outside the scope of [your rules],’ would we get upset? As long as they’ve done it in a responsible fashion, by disclosing it to us and not publishing the vulnerability, then of course we would talk to them. And I’d like to think we’d be friendly with them.” He added that the bounty programs are there for a reason. “They’re there to protect end-users.”
Via: Forbes
Source: Wesley Wineberg, Alex Stamos (Facebook)
Why Facebook is scared of Android
A series of discussions between Google and Facebook took place over the course of this summer, and Facebook walked away from them a little shaky. Their concern? All it would require is one completely reasonable move by Google to take a serious financial bite out of the social giant. It’s something Facebook can’t defend against, and you can’t help but sense that they feel a little bit at the mercy of Google just now.
The Threat
This issue has to do with API calls. Every time you view Google Maps information in your Facebook app, the app must make an API call through Google’s server. Every time you’ve received a Facebook notification on your phone – if you use an Android device – Google must again handle an API call. These cost Google money, but so far they haven’t been charging developers for it.
Facebook owns four of the most popular Android apps in the world: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger… all of which rely heavily on Google-handled API calls.
However, they totally could charge for it. Imagine if a greedier company were in the same position. I don’t want to step on any toes, so I’m just going to invent some hypothetical company that has a cynical corporate policy to ruthlessly take advantage of any lack of options on the part of the consumer. Let’s just make up a name and call them “Comcast” or something. So imagine if “Comcast” were in Google’s boots. Even if they didn’t jack the prices up to actually profit from the API calls, we would expect such a company to at least charge enough to break even on their cost.
See also: Facebook’s offline news feed lets you continue your obsession even in the subway
This amount would be miniscule for smaller app developers – especially for apps that don’t reach for other Google services like Google Maps – but for Facebook, the bottom line would be staggering. You see, most Facebook users own Android devices. And Facebook owns four of the most popular Android apps in the world: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger… all of which rely heavily on Google-handled API calls.
How real is the threat of Google charging for this? Pretty damn real. Google started charging websites for using things like Google Maps years ago, so even though the company has remained mute on this issue, Facebook’s concerns are legitimate.
Currently, it’s totally feasible to use a method of delivery other than Google Cloud Messaging (the service that handles these API calls). So prior to this summer, Facebook may have had hopes of developing their own system and decoupling themselves from Google. But just like the final scenes of Ghostbusters, despair arrived in the form of something soft and white and round.
Escalation
Marshmallow, Android’s newest version, introduced a number of changes to the way the Android operating system handles notifications. These changes make it much more difficult for developers to use anything but Google Cloud Messaging to ferry notifications to their apps.
It makes sense that Google would want to make sure that apps use their proprietary system to vet app notifications before sending them out to Android devices. In terms of both security and consistent user experience, this is a no-brainer. But now Facebook is staring down the barrel of an Android future in which there will no longer be any option but to lean on Google’s API support.
These changes to notifications have some other ramifications as well. See, one of the main goals in Marshmallow’s development was to improve battery life across the board. Google realized that the best way to do this would be to let devices ‘doze’ for longer intervals and handle notifications in batches. Marshmallow introduced a caste system that allows devs to categorize pushed content as “low priority” and “high priority.” Low priority notifications get bundled up by Google Cloud Messaging and sent to devices over intervals. High priority notifications that may require immediate interaction – like Facebook notifications – are sent right away, waking up the device.
This concept is another reason why Google wants to consolidate all notifications in their Cloud Messaging system. It gives them the capacity to string out non-essential notifications over a longer period of time, vastly increasing battery life.
This is a problem for Facebook, because all of their Android apps use a lot of high priority notifications. Why is this a problem?
See also: Android 6.0 Marshmallow – New features explained
A Battle of Batteries and Perception
Although Marshmallow has made some changes to improve battery life, many of these changes simply don’t apply to Facebook’s apps. Their reliance on high priority notifications means that their app will get shuffled right to the top of the battery consumption list on Android phones. Facebook doesn’t like the idea that their app will be associated with battery drain going forward. They also believe that this system of notification segregation is the first step down a path that will lead to decreased user engagement.
Their reliance on high priority notifications means that their app will get shuffled right to the top of the battery consumption list on Android phones. Facebook doesn’t like the idea that their app will be associated with battery drain going forward.
Their theory is this. Notifications increase engagement with an app. By creating this division, Google is essentially encouraging developers to make every notification a high priority notification. If devs ever do this, then this battery-saving method will be a bust. To salvage it, Google may start trying to decide what notifications constitute the High Priority label. They’ve done it before with Gmail, after all. Those “Promotions” and “Social” tabs are the result of a very similar process, and if all Facebook notifications get the same level of priority that Gmail treats them with (i.e. very little), Facebook worries they will see a drop in user engagement and, ergo, a drop in profit.
The Theater of Cold War
The strategic options Facebook has in this scenario are extremely limited. Not so long ago, Facebook began plans for developing an entire ‘Google Replacement Suite’ that would allow their app to exist without interacting with Google at all. This would have involved creating replacements for Google Maps, Youtube, Google Search, and the Google Play Store. The plan was for Facebook to encourage Android device manufacturers to preload their apps on smartphones instead of Google’s.
The idea was abandoned for multiple reasons. Primary among these was the sheer scope of the endeavor. Secondly, to make such a bold move would be an open act of aggression against Google, and both companies are far too profitable to each other to want that. The fact that Facebook was even considering such an extreme measure is a testament to how uncomfortable they are eating at Google’s table.
Although they remain rivals and competitors, the only company that makes more money off Android than Facebook is Google. With over 1 billion app users on the operating system, it makes sense that Facebook would want to play nice with their host. Nevertheless, the situation is incredibly tricky.
Leaning on the Enemy
The concept of ‘platforms’ has made the technological business landscape a strange one. It’s a place rife with stiff alliances, stalemates, and standoffs. Once you start using someone else’s service as your platform, you become subject to their rules and changes. If you become rivals, this gives the hosting party a massive upper hand. The only way to completely escape this dynamic is to create a competitive analogue platform of your own.
The concept of ‘platforms’ has made the technological business landscape a strange one. It’s a place rife with stiff alliances, stalemates, and standoffs. Once you start using someone else’s service as your platform, you become subject to their rules and changes.
Google was in this same situation not too long ago. With most of their searches coming from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the company scrambled for a way to ensure that they weren’t dependent on Microsoft as a platform. To get there, they had to do what Internet Explorer was already doing and do it better. Chrome is the result of Google trying to escape the same situation that Facebook now finds itself in. And they were successful.
However, Facebook is staring at a much steeper slope than Google was looking at. Google services are now ubiquitous. If the social media company wants to escape their predicament, they would have to do more than just create a successful browser. They would also need to recreate better versions of all the services mentioned above, and they would need to be competitive enough with Google to coax over a viable userbase. Replacing YouTube alone is a herculean task that, frankly, Facebook just isn’t up to.
So for now, Facebook remains reliant on Google’s services. The best they can do right now is hope that Google doesn’t decide to cash in on their reliance.
What do you think about the strange relationship between Facebook and Android? Let us know in the comments!
Next: 10 best new Android apps
Lumsing and AndroidGuys are giving away 10 four-port intelligent wall chargers
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From the team at AndroidGuys.com and Lumsing, we want to wish you a happy holiday season!
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Lumsing Grand A1 accessory review
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Comedic video highlights the woes of being an ‘Instagram Husband’
We live in an age where a growing number of people spend more time texting, taking pics, and sharing on social media than they do actually talking to real life human beings. I’m sure we all know at least a few people like that in our lives (or perhaps you happen to be one?). We all know the type: always checking in on social networks, sharing pics of their food, sharing pics of random signs of places they are going to, and just doing their damned best to clog up our social feeds with useless junk.
A new comedic video by The Mystery Hour comedy group highlights this type of behavior by talking about the struggles of “Instagram husbands”, the men behind the women who are addicted to Instagram. The video is obviously a parody, though they do a great job of making it seem like a legitimate call for support, complete with its own website.
At the very start of the video you are greeted with: “My name’s Jeff, and I’m an Instagram husband,” it begins. “Behind every cute girl on Instagram is a guy like me. And a brick wall.” From there the video discusses the problem and how difficult it is to be an Instagram Husband.
We certainly recommend checking out the website, in addition to watching the video. We imagine just about all of us can relate to this on some level, perhaps you have (or had) a girlfriend, spouse, or even just friend or family member that was addicted to a level that seemed almost comedic.
What do you think of the video? Know someone addicted to social media, Instagram or otherwise? Share your thoughts down in the comments.
Instagram brings 3D Touch-style feature to Android
The ability to detect pressure in touch screens and turn it into functionality: whether you see it as a gimmick or not, we can’t deny we do need more layers of interaction to make smartphones flow better. We love our long presses and and right clicks, but these are input methods we haven’t bee exploiting to their fullest in the mobile universe. Sure, you can move apps around and pull up menus, but that can’t be it… right?
See also: Apple iPhone 6S Impressions… from an Android user
The good news is it’s not so hard to replicate this feature, even if Android’s ability to recognize force and do something with it is not evolved yet. It can still be imitated with a long press. That is exactly what Instagram did with the Android version of the app (7.13.0).
In Apple’s implementation, Instagram is able to show a preview of an image when pressing harder on photo icons within the Search section. It works similarly in the newest version of the Instagram Android app, but you don’t have to press harder…. just press longer.
See also: 15 best Android apps of 2015
The feature seems to work like a charm, but as it goes with these updates, they roll out periodically. You could either wait a around for the Google Play Store to push it to your device or you could opt to manually install this APK file.
What do you guys think of this added functionality, though? I feel like it still needs to evolve and become more adopted by the community. At this point it seems people are a bit confused by it. But that is why I am not too upset that Apple is making it mainstream first. Keep in mind the iPhone maker is not good at introducing new technology, but they certainly have a talent for making it popular.
Instagram brings ‘3D Touch’-like functionality to Android
When Apple rolled out its latest handsets, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, the company took great pains to highlight a snazzy feature called “3D Touch“. With the help of a pressure sensitive screen, users can more efficiently access the phone’s various menus and options. Turns out, Instagram is working on a very similar feature for its Android app, no pressure sensitive screen required.
Honestly, it’s really just a glorified long-press menu. When looking at another user’s image grid, you can press and hold on a thumbnail to pull up a near full-size preview image. Conversely, drag your finger to the edge of the screen to shrink it back down. Hold and swipe down towards the Share and Like buttons to activate them — all without lifting the finger. This feature is currently in beta but is expected to migrate to the official app within a few update cycles.
Source: Android Police
[APK Download] Instagram preparing new ‘3D Touch’ feature for Android app
One of Apple’s selling points in the most recent update to their line of smartphones is something they call “3D Touch.” The screen is supposed to detect differing levels of pressure applied by a user to display different menus or action items. As many have realized, the feature is basically the equivalent of using a long press that just substitutes force for length of time. One company has reached the same conclusion as Instagram is preparing to roll out an update to their app that effectively brings access to “3D Touch” in the form of a long press to the Android app.
In the new version of the app, version 7.13.0 which is currently available through APK Mirror, Instagram has enabled a long press option when users are viewing a page full of thumbnail images. The long press will cause the image to open up in its own window with buttons for liking or sharing it. Users can just drag their finger down to one of those options to trigger that action. Otherwise, users can just move their finger away from the center of the zoomed in image to return to the thumbnail page. Instagram does provide some haptic feedback when the feature is in action. Users will have to do a little muscle training with their fingers to make sure they keep their finger on-screen.
If you want to give this new feature from Instagram a try before it officially rolls out to the Play Store, you can download and install the APK using the link below.
via: APK Download
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