In This Email

Social media, China, Amazon Ring, ICE, Palantir, Pentagon, Instagram, WordPress, Tumblr, What3Words, Facebook, facial recognition, Calm, Amazon, YouTube, PayPal, Panda cheese

2. News To Know Now

1.  Facebook contractors listened to and transcribed recordings of Facebook Messenger and Chat audio. The company said it used the transcriptions to improve voice recognition services “much like Google and Amazon”. Bloomberg broke the story.

2.  WordPress’ parent company Automattic bought Tumblr from Verizon for $3 million. Tumblr had been purchased by Verizon acquiree Yahoo just six years ago for more than $1 billion.  Yahoo famously turned down buying Google twice and Facebook once. They also turned down a $44 billion offer from Microsoft in 2008 and were acquired by Verizon nine years later for only $4.5 billion.

3. What3Words is a UK-based app whose developers have divided the world into 57 trillion discrete areas measuring 3 square meters. The app was the subject of a glowing BBC story about pinpointing locations for meetups or emergencies and spent the weekend going viral on Facebook. Read the article.

4. ctrl shift face has been wowing people with deep fakes of movie scenes and interviews for months. Their latest is a sequence featuring a Bill Hader interview where he quotes and his face morphs into Tom Cruise and Seth Rogen’s appearances.  Check it out below.

3.  How Police Use Social Media

Law enforcement organizations continue making news by using consumer technology to buttress enforcement and analysis. 

Cozy relationships between Amazon and more than 200 U.S. agencies are under attack. We’ve told you before that Amazon asks for access to live emergency dispatch feeds for the Ring network. We’re also learning via an explosive Vice expose that Amazon has exerted control over online police statements regarding Ring data.

Amazon distributes 46 standardized responses including some in which police officers advocate the purchase of a Ring system according to heavily sourced reporting from Vice regarding police in Topeka and northern New Jersey.

New York City Police, meanwhile, are under fire for uploading mugshots of juveniles as young as eleven years old into facial recognition databases despite facial recognition algorithms not performing as well with younger faces.

Technology companies and law enforcement can also be on opposite sides of an issue. Apple famously refused to cooperate with the FBI in unlocking a mass shooter’s iPhone. And police in Hong Kong are reportedly “prying open protestors’ shut eyes” to unlock their phones according to MIT Technology Review. Experts say that the issue of unlocking phones via biometrics instead of a passcode is not adequately addressed by case law, which makes the exposure of over one million fingerprint records in Europe two weeks ago especially problematic.

Federal agencies are also involved in high tech monitoring. A Mijente study reported by TNW showed that the military, Border Patrol, ICE, and Homeland Security are spending $1.5 billion with Palantir to create vast databases combining local government records like fishing license applications, bank information, and social media.

The FBI is also building a social media database according to a Wall Street Journal story last week. Facebook is obviously an important part of that database which sets up an interesting issue for regulators: how much does the government want to rein in Facebook’s algorithmic probing of people when federal law enforcement wants the data?

The Pentagon is at least planning some unique surveillance. A Guardian story quotes from documents filed with the FCC and claims that the Pentagon launched 25 unmanned balloons traveling at 65,000 feet over the Midwest. The “persistent surveillance” includes tracking radar that can monitor individual vehicles including boats during any time and through any weather. The mesh networking technology linking the balloons is similar to what your home wifi uses.

4.  SearchWeek: News about finding things online

Back-to-school time is in full swing all over the country which means that new upperclassmen are turning their thoughts to colleges. Google announced that it has expanded college search features to include two year schools. The search engine is also using data from the Department of Education to provide grids comparing costs, graduation rates, and similar data between schools.

Beware of Instagram image embedding on websites, said Googler John Mueller  during his weekly SEO chat. The way Instagram images are shared on websites can cause the sites to lose visibility. Don’t just add a plugin and start embedding images without understanding this issue.

5. Debugged: Dorothy Didn’t Tweet from the Fridge.

Sorry, Ferris Bueller fans. The tech world got together to puncture several huge holes in the story of Dorothy, a teen supposedly in trouble with her mother and tweeting from the family’s smart refrigerator.

Sorry, Dorothy, debunked here

6. Also in the Spotlight

YouTube is testing paid online meet-and-greets with its influencers, according to Engadget.

A hacker took $40,000 from a company and was caught after he verified his PayPal account for the money transfer, reports Quartz.

Amazon has prevailed in an appeal by the government over a $1.5 billion tax liability per Reuters.

7. Food for Thought:  Strategic Acquisitions

Yahoo is not the only organization to make multiple poor acquisition decisions although they did manage to make three world changing ones in the space of ten years. 

AOL is also owned now by Verizon and one of its former CEOs spilled to CNBC last week that AOL held talks to buy Facebook and YouTube in 2006 as well as Chinese tech holding company Tencent in 2004.

Read about those potential acquisitions and consider a tech landscape where AOL bought YouTube instead of Google or managed to combine its massive chat rooms with a nascent Facebook.

8. Protip: Free Calm for Teachers

Calm makes a fantastic mindfulness app in a freemium model. They’ve announced a plan to give “every teacher in the world free access to Calm”.  They describe the requirements as having a K-12 classroom.

Their announcement.

9. Great Data: Pain Pills at the Local Drugstore Level

The Washington Post continued its cutting edge data journalism by creating a feature last month show the movement of opioid pain pills to different towns. Now comes an even bigger graphical interface that shows the number of pills dispensed per pharmacy for every pharmacy.

The local data is remarkable. At the shopping center closest to my house, the Giant Food pharmacy received 432,360 narcotic pills. That’s less than 1 pill for the people who live within 5 miles of the pharmacy. But the CVS Pharmacy next to it received 2.9 million pills during the same time. You can even download the individual data for each. 

Pain pill database

10. Coffee Break: Panda Cheese

Egyptian cheese maker Panda came out with a set of unique television spots back in 2010. After law enforcement and pain pill stories today, you need this.

Never say no to Panda.

Good Monday morning. It’s August 12th.  Eid Mubarak to our readers celebrating Eid Al-Adha!

2. News To Know Now

1.  Amazon robots called Scouts are now delivering in Irvine, California, a well-to-do city in Orange County. The program started in suburban Seattle. Testing continues in both places during weekday daylight hours. Amazon’s announcement.

2.  Image recognition by smart programs from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft still mostly lags human identification of images except when the program is 90% or more confident in its response. That’s when Google’s machine learning programs beat even human results. Read Perficent Digital’s study.

3. Biometric technology is now creating accurate maps of a person’s face from a short audio sample. Identifying deep fakes, helping solve crimes, and using voice prints to identify legitimate callers to banks like Chase and HSBC are some legit use cases. Here’s a great ten minute video.

3.  Security Update as Black Hat, Def Con End

The Def Con and Black Hat hacking conferences held each summer in Las Vegas combine a curious mix of hackers (ethical or otherwise), computer security pros, journalists, and law enforcement. The NSA Director has keynoted Def Con, a broadcast journalist tried to conceal a recording device one year, and usually one presentation is scheduled that causes organizations (Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority, Cisco, and ManTech) to file suit to block their information from being shared. That’s apart from the usual antics like Black Hat attendees hacking everything in their hotels including the ATM and hotel TV systems.

Highlights from this year:

• 2019’s model medical village at Def Con was a simulated hospital room with involvement and sometimes ambivalent participation by the FDA and industry manufacturers. Remember that we told you three weeks ago that hackers had to prove to Medtronic that they could take over an insulin pump and administer a lethal dose. 
  
• A now 18-year-old Bill Demirkapi showed attendees that he was able to access millions of records containing grades, passwords, immunizations, and other sensitive data for millions of K-12 students in school districts using Blackboard and Follett software. The companies had worked with him pre-disclosure to plug vulnerabilities. Wired has coverage.
  
• The Voting Village featured a voting booth prototype developed by DARPA, the government agency whose early 1970s “Internetting project” became pretty popular. None of the teams had access until the last day so the results were inconclusive although some teams appear to have made good progress cracking the $10 million prototypes.  Read more at CNET.
  
• A Whatsapp vulnerability disclosed this spring led to a Google security team discovering that they can break into an iPhone by sending a text. For years, we’ve told people that they need to open an attachment or click something to trigger malicious software. But there are increasing instances when a phone can be compromised without the user taking action. Details at Google’s Project Zero blog. Unless you code, the part you care about is that they found ten problems and all have been fixed.

Before the Black Hat and Def Con conferences started we learned from the field that McAfee researchers found that a 10 year old Avaya phone problem had been patched, but not removed. We also heard from Microsoft that Russian GRU initiatives are targeting organizations that have not changed default passwords for devices like printers or VOIP phones. Why Microsoft? They have a unique view of American offices thanks to the number of Windows machines installed.  More at MIT Technology Review.

4.  SearchWeek: News about finding things online

Sue wrote a sweet Mother’s Day column for her movie website years ago about movies to share on Mother’s Day. And Sue’s really good at search engine optimization so her very sweet article brought in scads of sick people who shouldn’t think that way about mothers. 

Terms like lesbian and “school girl” typed into Google had similar problems. Online activism led by @SEO_lesbienne noted that search results for those terms disproportionately featured pronography. Searches for those terms will now yield news and research articles like, I dunno, all the other words you could search. In other words, Google will stop treating the word “lesbian” like a porn term. (The Next Web)

We told you last week that video results will soon play directly in Google search results. Podcasts are also going to receive their own section on search pages based on what Google says is “[our] understanding of what’s being talked about on a podcast, so you can find even more relevant information about a topic in audio form. Soon, you won’t necessarily need the term “podcast” in your search to see episodes, making podcast discovery simpler across Search.”

Google also announced that hotel owners can now edit their services and amenities in a special section of Google My Business. Here is info on how to do that. 

5. Debugged: 3 Misinformation Findings After Mass Shootings

The Poynter Institute is out with three things learned about misinformation after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. 

1. False flag conspiracies are now routine.
2. Misinformation spreads on messaging apps.
3. Classic hoaxes still thrive online.

Their short, thorough analysis.

6. Also in the Spotlight

Google is quietly testing a premium Google Play subscription for mobile apps according to Android Police.

Facebook is doing the same for premium video subscriptions from BBC and CollegeHumor among others according to Variety.

Only 17% of the biographies on Wikipedia are about women and the sciences are especially underrepresented according to TNW.

7. Food for Thought: Internet Language

As I said to the doggo before, “OMG, do you even canine?”

Gretchen McCullough, author of Because Internet, would not be surprised. She’s writing about how online communications are making our language even more dynamic.  That’s great, but remember how you can’t understand some 19th century writing? 

What are you and your organization doing to ensure that your communications are understood by multiple audiences scattered at different points along this language spectrum?  

Here’s a Time review of Because Internet to prime the pump.

8. Protip: AR in Google Maps directions

More Google announcements: “Live View” is a new Google Maps beta that uses Augmented Reality (AR) to superimpose huge honking arrows and street signs over a live view of your surroundings.  It’s going to help walking directions SO much.

Have a look here.

9. Great Data: Impossible Burger Live Tracking

Red Robin and Burger King have made it clear that they are selling plant-based burgers, but Steve in Accounting said BK was out so you’ll stick to your usual. 

Or not if you use the whimsical (and super smart use of free consumer generated data) Burger Stalker from Bloomberg. I know, Bloomberg. That blew me away too.

There’s one only 20 minutes away. Crazy.

10. Coffee Break: Last Chance for the Perseid

The Perseid meteor showers peak today but viewing them can sometimes be difficult because of light pollution. Here is how to stream them via Space.com,

Good Monday morning. It’s August 5th. A national test of the Emergency Broadcast System is scheduled across television and radio on Wednesday at 2:20 Eastern Time. There will not be push notifications on mobile phones, but don’t worry if there is an emergency message on every station.

2. News To Know Now

1.  We told you last week about Amazon sharing your Alexa recordings with consultants and permanently storing them. Now Amazon says that you can opt out by following the prompts in the Alexa App under “Alexa Account / Alexa Privacy”. 

2. The FCC announced that municipalities may not extend their oversight of cable television providers to include broadband connectivity.  

3. Louisiana declared a state of emergency after ransomware began cropping up in school districts. The move allows state security experts to help local school systems protect their networks. 

3.  Google, Facebook Launch More Visuals

Videos shown in Google search results will now play on the same page without redirecting users to YouTube. The move is part of Google’s ongoing initiative to make visual search results a place that answers fact-based queries without requiring the user to go elsewhere. Google also provides whimsical images of some animals in augmented reality (AR) for viewers on mobile phones. 

Google’s other products also bet big on visuals led by the company’s Google Photos service, which has now been downloaded one billion times. Even with unlimited free storage, that’s a lot of users for a company that botched a photo app with its Picasa service. 

New research shows that the way consumers interact with visual search results is influenced by the number of photos shown in a Google My Business Listing. Those with more photos get more clicks, more requests for directions, and more phone calls. Even Google Chrome’s next version is widely expected to be released with video controls in the omnibox where URLs are typed and displayed.

Facebook is making similar moves that include shrinking the size of ads displayed on mobile and rebranding Instagram and WhatsApp to include the Facebook name. Facebook has also approached Disney and Netflix about partnering on Catalina, a TV chat device Facebook plans to launch this year. (The Information-paywall)

Disturbing videos continue to be a problem across the Internet as this weekend’s mass killings showed. Facebook has taken a great step to combating those visuals by making some of its internal software available free so that graphic and other harmful videos can be detected. The two software projects complement an industry-wide effort including a Microsoft program called PhotoDNA and Google software called “Content Safety API”. (NDTV)

4.  Location Data’s Privacy Nightmare

Enterprising crooks used the early craze around “checking in” to places to check out what could be robbed. Posting to the general public about gathering the family for a week at a theme park defeats the purpose of setting timers to automatically turn the lights on and off. 

Foursquare, an app pioneer in this space, continues to be a major player although its focus these days is on brands like Target, Coca-Cola, and Subway instead of consumer users. The company tells clients that it tracks over 100 million devices in the U.S., which means that it may not publicize your vacation plans to the world, but it will sure tell jetBlue.

Your location data is such big business that New York City is considering legislation that would ban the sale of location data to third parties. That addresses aggregators like Foursquare but doesn’t do much for brands like The Weather Channel, which was caught misusing individual location data it said was only for weather reporting.

Another process–a 911 emergency call–may also soon be fodder for location brokers. Amazon has reportedly asked police departments for access to 911 computerized dispatch feeds so that it can curate crime news for its Ring-based app called Neighbors. Gizmodo got their hands on one of the requests, and it’s a doozy that you can read about here.

Who’s in Town is also a new app that uses your Instagram data to tell you about nearby friends, similar to old Facebook functionality.  Like Facebook, this app updates in realtime, but also allows people to easily see a map of all the times and places from which the person posted to Instagram. Read more at Wired.

5. Debugged: Satire vs. Snopes

The Babylon Bee is one of the more recent publishing companies creating satire disguised as news. This is all ground broken years ago by The Onion, even in print form. 

A recent story in the Bee featured a Georgia legislator claiming that she had been told to go back to her country. To do so he used the code phrase “My pleasure”. The joke wasn’t especially funny, but Snopes debunked it as satire anyway. The two organizations began feuding when Snopes questioned the intent of the Christian-based satire site.

The New York Times unpacks the god-awful mess.

6. Also in the Spotlight

Visual sites not named Google or Facebook had a big week. Pinterest is now up to 300 million users, Snapchat reported a new record of 203 million daily active users (DAU), and visual news aggregator SmartBoard closed a financing round that values the company at $1.1 billion. 

7. Food for Thought: Not reading the article

Annie Reneau has been on my mind for days.

She wrote an Upworthy article nearly two weeks ago that got a lot of comments and shares. Last weekend, the article minus all of its words was published again to Facebook with a phrase saying “Don’t Publish This” before the headline.

Anyone clicking the link on Facebook went to an error page. Again, there was no article.

Annie surmises that someone was testing the website and used her article. (Look, Sue, someone else uses Don’t Publish This besides me.)  

So, there was a headline published with an Upworthy logo but no image. There was no article attached to the headline which read, “Don’t Publish This–Most domestic terrorists come from white supremacists, FBI tells lawmakers.”

More than 2,000 people shared the article-that-wasn’t-an-article. And there were comments. Not nice, helpful comments like “Hey, the link is broken.” These were full-on debates, according to Annie.

Read her article and then contemplate the times you’ve liked, commented, or shared an article that you haven’t read.

8. Protip:  Re-open a closed tab

Don’t worry if you’ve accidentally closed a browser tab. We’ve got you covered.

Chrome desktop: Press Ctrl+Shift+T
Chrome Android: Press the 3-dot menu and select “Recent Tabs”

Firefox desktop: Ctrl+H brings up a sidebar
Firefox Android:  Press the 3-dot menu and open your browser history

Safari: Press and hold the “New tab” button until the recent tabs link shows.

9. Great Data: Ad Spending 

Axios has put together a good looking chart that shows the trend line of radio and the painful looking one in print. The chart also shows the growth of Google and other large tech channels.  Click the chart or this link to read more.

The data is great because it shows time, the trend of different mediums, and then breaks out Internet companies on the same scale. There are multiple stories in this excellent chart that makes clever use of subtly changing colors.

10. Coffee Break: Seeing Color in a Black & White Photo

A thin colored grid will make your mind insist that it sees color in a black and white photo. 

See for yourself.