Fake news could cost Facebook dearly in Germany
Fake news and hate speech are sadly unavoidable on social media, but that might change soon… in Germany, anyway. Late last week, Thomas Oppermann — chairman of the German Social Democratic Party — proposed a stringent law meant to hold companies like Facebook responsible when fake news makes the rounds. As reported by Der Spiegel (and translated by Deusche Well), Oppermann’s plan would require Facebook to actively combat fake news all day, everyday. Here’s the fascinating bit: if a fake news item pops up and Facebook can’t address it within 24 hours, it would be subject to a €500,000 (or $522,575) for each post left untouched.
Oh, it gets better. Facebook and other “market-dominating platforms” would be required to to have teams in Germany dedicated to fielding reports of fake news and hate-filled posts. Fortunately for Oppermann — and German web users, most likely — the push to penalize companies for letting false, misleading or malicious content run wild has received plenty of support from the other major party in German politics, too. The country’s Christian Democratic Union hates all of that stuff just as much, prompting one senior party member to promise definitive action “at the beginning of next year.” The CDU has also proposed legislation (with backing from Chancellor Angela Merkel, no less) that would make it illegal to post fake news entirely.
For what it’s worth, Facebook has already announced plans to address the rise of fake news in the US. Here, it’s all about self-policing with the help of a handful of media organizations: users will be able to report fake news posts when they pop up in their news feeds, while algorithms work in the background to flag fake stories that could go viral. Then, if third-party (i.e. human) fact-checkers confirm a post is fake, it gets labeled spiked from the flow of news. Is that enough? Is it inherently biased? We’ll have to see.
Anyway, it’s no surprise the German government is considering such decisive moves. The country is set to hold its federal elections next year, where 598 people will assume seats in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. What’s more, Angela Merkel will be running what will probably be her toughest campaign yet for a fourth term as Germany’s chancellor. With the jury’s still out on whether fake news did or didn’t play a role in outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, Germany’s ruling parties are understandably concerned with keeping the electorate well-informed. That said, there is concern (which TechDirt’s Mike Masnick sums up nicely) that giving a company or government power over what people can and can’t say is basically begging for eventual censorship.
One thing seems clear, though. The controversy is too young, and the line between proper oversight and censorship is too blurry for any definitively brilliant answers to have emerged yet.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: Deusche Welle
New York City now lets you pay for parking with your phone
New York City is making good on its promise to have smarter parking meters before 2016 is over. As of December 19th, the first ParkNYC-capable Muni-Meters are live in midtown Manhattan — you can now pay for parking through a smartphone app (or the web, or a call) instead of fishing for cards and coins. While you’ll need to load a virtual wallet, you can extend your parking if you’re in danger of running out. The days of racing to the meter to top it up will soon be over, then, but so are the days of pleading with traffic officers when you’re a little too late.
NYPD officers will check the status of your parking by using handheld devices that check license plates.
The meters will still take conventional payments, and the eventual goal is to upgrade all 85,000 Muni-Meter spots by the end of summer 2017. It’s too soon to say how well ParkNYC will work in practice, as urban tech can occasionally go wrong (just ask NYC about the changes it made to its gigabit internet kiosks). If it does work as promised, though, it should make driving the city’s chaotic streets a little less stressful.
Via: PIX11
Source: NYC.gov
The Nintendo Switch could be twice as powerful while docked
Just how powerful is Nintendo’s next game console? We won’t know for sure until January, but if the latest report from Eurogamer pans out, the answer could be kind of complicated. According to specifications provided to developers, the Nintendo Switch performance changes depending on how you use it: in its docked, TV-mode or as a gaming portable.
Specifically, sources familiar with the system have revealed two different graphic processor specifications for the final Nintendo Switch hardware — an undocked portable profile that clocks the NVIDIA Tegra GPU at 307.2MHz and a docked, TV-based profile that more than doubles it to 768MHz. Doing some rough calculations using the Tegra X1 chip the Switch’s silicon is said to be based off of, we can guess the console can push around 400 gigaflops on FP32 while docked. Yes, that’s a lot of numbers, but don’t worry about the math too much. The long and short of it is that the latest numbers show that the Nintendo Switch will definitely outpace the Wii U — but it’s still a few hundred (or thousand) gigaflops shy of its competitors.
That said, nobody really expected the next Nintendo to keep place with the Xbox One or PlayStation 4. Nintendo dropped out of the race to the top years ago, and hasn’t made a move to be the ‘most powerful’ game console in over a decade. That doesn’t seem to be changing with the Nintendo Switch.
Source: Eurogamer
Nigerian man charged in hacking of 108 LA county employee emails
It might not quite rival last week’s revelation that up to one billion Yahoo accounts had been hacked in 2013, but it’ll be news to anybody who contacted local government officials in Los Angeles. A Nigerian national has been charged with hacking LA county employee accounts that might have exposed personal data of up to 756,000 people. 37-year-old Kelvin Onaghinor has not been arrested and authorities are unsure whether he’s still in the US. They’re also searching for possible accomplices.
The hack resulted from the successful phishing of 108 county employees back in May, who provided names and passwords to their email accounts. The potential victims’ data was contained in messages sent to those workers. Due to their occupational responsibilities, those communications may have included personally-identifiable information from names and dates of birth to Social Security numbers and medical records.
As of last Friday when news broke, there was no evidence that confidential information had been released from the breach. Onaghinor still faces nine charges, including unauthorized computer access and identity theft. If convicted, he could serve 13 years in federal prison.
Source: The Guardian
Tim Cook Says He Met Donald Trump Because ‘You Don’t Change Things by Just Yelling’
Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook attended President-elect Donald Trump’s tech summit at Trump Tower in Manhattan alongside other tech leaders, including Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Since the roundtable meeting, which reportedly focused on topics such as job creation and economic growth, Apple employees have wondered if it was important for Cook to meet with Trump, whose stances on issues such as encryption and immigration reform have been viewed controversially among the tech industry.
To address those questions, Cook issued an internal comment to employees, in which he said he has “never found being on the sideline a successful place to be.” He said “governments can affect our ability to do what we do,” and noted the way to make progress on key issues is to “engage.”
A copy of the question and answer, posted internally, was shared by TechCrunch:
Last week you joined other tech leaders to meet President-elect Donald Trump. How important is it for Apple to engage with governments?
It’s very important. Governments can affect our ability to do what we do. They can affect it in positive ways and they can affect in not so positive ways. What we do is focus on the policies. Some of our key areas of focus are on privacy and security, education. They’re on advocating for human rights for everyone, and expanding the definition of human rights. They’re on the environment and really combating climate change, something we do by running our business on 100 percent renewable energy.
And of course, creating jobs is a key part of what we do by giving people opportunity not only with people that work directly for Apple, but the large number of people that are in our ecosystem. We’re really proud that we’ve created 2 million jobs, just in this country. A great percentage of those are app developers. This gives everyone the power to sell their work to the world, which is an unbelievable invention in and of itself.
We have other things that are more business-centric — like tax reform — and something we’ve long advocated for: a simple system. And we’d like intellectual property reform to try to stop the people suing when they don’t do anything as a company.
There’s a large number of those issues, and the way that you advance them is to engage. Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be. The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena. So whether it’s in this country, or the European Union, or in China or South America, we engage. And we engage when we agree and we engage when we disagree. I think it’s very important to do that because you don’t change things by just yelling. You change things by showing everyone why your way is the best. In many ways, it’s a debate of ideas.
We very much stand up for what we believe in. We think that’s a key part of what Apple is about. And we’ll continue to do so.
Despite any personal misgivings he may have had in the past, Cook reportedly stayed at Trump Tower after the summit was over to meet privately with the President-elect for further discussions.
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Tags: Tim Cook, Donald Trump
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Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘We Have Great Desktops in Our Roadmap’
In a post to an employee message board obtained by TechCrunch, Apple CEO Tim Cook assured employees that the company is still committed to the Mac and that “great desktops” are coming. Apple’s desktop computers haven’t seen an upgrade in at least 433 days.
Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,” Cook wrote. “If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.”
Cook says that the desktop is “very strategic” to Apple because the performance desktops can provide is “really important” to a lot of people and “critical” for some people. He says the current iMac is the best desktop Apple’s ever made and its 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.
In regards to its future roadmap and how Apple employees can help push the company forward, Cook says that “you can rarely see precisely where you want to go from the beginning.” Instead, Cook argues that “pulling strings” to see what’s coming next is one of Apple’s strengths, noting that the creation of Apple Watch led to the creation of ResearchKit, which lead to the creation of CareKit. Cook concludes the post by saying the company doesn’t do things for a return on investment, it explores new things because it’s exciting and might lead somewhere.
The lack of refreshed Mac hardware can be attributed to a combination of Apple waiting on chipmakers and suppliers to ship their new products and the Cupertino Company’s renewed focus on iPad.
Apple’s desktop Macs haven’t seen upgrades in over a year. The iMac’s last update was 433 days ago, the Mac Mini’s last update was 795 days ago and the Mac Pro’s last update was 1,097 days ago.
Related Roundups: iMac, Mac Pro, Mac mini
Tag: Tim Cook
Buyer’s Guide: iMac (Don’t Buy), Mac Pro (Don’t Buy), Mac Mini (Don’t Buy)
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Physicists learn how to measure antimatter
As you might guess, measuring antimatter is rather tricky: it’s destroyed the moment it comes into contact with regular matter, so conventional approaches just aren’t going to cut it. Give credit to CERN, then, as its Alpha group just measured antimatter for the first time. The team stuffed positrons (positively charged electrons) and antiprotons (protons with a negative charge) into a vacuum tube to create antihydrogen, with a “magnetic trap” keeping a small number of the anti-atoms in existence for long enough to measure them. The team then blasted the antimatter with a laser to study its positrons as they shifted energy levels, producing a spectral line.
The results aren’t shocking — surprise, antihydrogen behaves much like regular hydrogen (just with reversed charges). If it didn’t, scientists would have to rethink their understanding of physics. The very act of measuring is important, though. In addition to shedding light on the nature of antimatter, it also tells scientists something about the nature of the universe. In theory, matter and antimatter should have destroyed each other almost immediately. The new findings don’t explain why that didn’t happen, but they suggest that it isn’t due to the inherent nature of those substances.
Via: NPR, Popular Mechanics
Source: CERN, Nature
Apple Offering Free Next Day Shipping for the Holidays
Apple today updated its online website to announce free next-day shipping for all orders placed by 2:00 p.m. by Friday, December 23, giving last minute shoppers a chance to place orders before Christmas.
Orders placed before the December 23 cut off date will arrive in time for Christmas in most cases, but customers will need to confirm delivery times at checkout.
Apple normally limits free next-day delivery to iPhones, with free two-day shipping on most other products, but during the holidays, Apple often offers upgraded shipping. Apple also has an online gift guide for customers who need gift ideas, recommending iPhones, iPads, Macs, and related accessories.
Customers who live near an Apple Store who are looking for last minute gifts can also get items using in-store pickup. Today’s new shipping policy comes just as AirPods have begun shipping out to customers, but in-store sales are the only way to get Apple’s newest accessory as online sales are sold out through January.
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Lenovo Yoga Book: An Android tablet like none other
The innovative display … the gorgeous hinge … the futuristic keyboard … or the crazy cool pen input — there are loads of reasons to love the Lenovo Yoga Book.
I’ve seen lots of Android tablets in my day. Even the odd Android-powered laptop. I’ve seen Android tablets that sort-of try to become laptops. Today, though, we truly have the first one that’s able to both — and then some. That beast, of course, is the Lenovo Yoga Book, which the company sent me to take a look at.
It’s one part tablet. Another part laptop. Another part futuristic sketch pad. And it pulls off all three in a way that you almost don’t expect, given the state of large-form Android devices. But it’s pretty easy to nail down just exactly what Lenovo did to create such a unique product.
See at Lenovo
The hardware and that hinge …
Start with the basics, of course. You’ve got a 10.1-inch tablet that’s impossibly thin, with a gorgeous 1920×1200-resolution display. That’s married to a keyboard unlike any that you’ve ever seen before — because there aren’t any keys at all. Instead you get a flat surface on which the outline of keys will present themselves when it’s time to type. The rest of the time that area is a high-tech sketchpad, using a souped-up pen to instantly digitize anything you write or draw. It’s almost hard to believe how accurate it is, and it turns the worst of scribbles into something that can be stored and manipulated across all kinds of cloud-based ecosystems.
Keeping all that together is the innovative watch-band hinge that Lenovo has made itself famous for. Nothing else looks like that and provides the sort of range of movement. (Never mind that it looks ridiculously cool.) You can easily go from tablet mode to laptop mode to sketchpad mode, with very little effort at all, and without fear of breaking anything in the process. It’s as simple as it is innovative.
There’s plenty to like under the hood as well. The Yoga Book is powered by an Intel Atom processor, sports 4 gigabytes of RAM, and has 64 gigabytes of storage, with the option for a microSD card to add even more. And the 8500 mAh battery keeps everything powered up. All of this runs Android with aplomb, though there is also a Windows 10 version of the Yoga Book if that’s more your thing.
That Real Pen — and that Any Pen …
For as cool as the hinge is, and as futuristic as that keyboard looks, it’s the pen input that’s going to grab a lot of folks’ attention. But it actually goes way beyond that.
The “Real Pen” is the main method of drawing, writing and digitizing. It’s got a more typical stylus nub on it, but you might well want to go with the ballpoint tip so that you can actually put ink to paper while you’re putting pixels to the screen.
But then there’s “Any Pen” — a technology that lets you take any sort of conductive metal to the display and have it serve as a stylus. Only have a spork handy? So long as it’s metal, that half-spoon, half fork will interact with the Yoga Book’s display same as the Real Pen. Or a key. Or a knife. You’ll obviously want to be a little careful about your writing weapon of choice, but the point is you’ve got myriad metal options.
The bottom line …
It’s not too often that you get a product that’s worth more than the sum of its parts. The Lenovo Yoga Book appears to be one of those, however. You can’t overstate the design — just how thin and light and innovative it is. The keyboard has to be seen to be believed. The options for Real Pen and Any Pen add the sort of extras that you won’t find anywhere else.
Or boil it down to this — it’s just cool. It looks cool. The metal body feels cool. You’re going to pull it out of your bag and attract a gaze or two. And you’re also going to get stuff done.
And that’s truly what it’s all about.
See at Lenovo
Driveclub VR review: A full-on adrenaline rush
Sony shows how VR racing can be a truly amazing experience with Driveclub VR.
I love racing games but I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Driveclub. It always felt over-promised and under-delivered to me, especially when you compare to some of the top racers out there.
Development on the game has now ceased, but one final hurrah is its arrival as one of the marquee titles for PlayStation VR. Much is the same, but also much is different, not least that you’re playing this time with something on your head.
But what Sony has done here is give us a tantalizing glimpse at the effect virtual reality can have on racing games for the better.
Read more at VR Heads!
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