Good Monday morning. It’s August 24th. Friday is the “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” march in Washington, D.C., the morning after the close of the Republican National Convention there. The protest is led by Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III on the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington in 1963. Read more.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,316 words, about a 5 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

a. While universities struggle with fall semester scheduling, they’re also coping with continued ransomware attacks. The University of Utah disclosed last week that they paid $457,000 in July to prevent hackers from releasing files including student and employee data stolen during a ransomware attack. This followed news in June that UC San Francisco paid $1.14 million over a similar attack. Bleeping Computer has coverage.

b. November’s presidential election is also a ripe target for malevolent activities, according to a Yahoo News scoop. The Department of Homeland Security has warned election officials that there are dozens of websites online that look like official websites providing voting information. The information on those sites can be changed in minutes to provide inaccurate information and share similar domain names with the official sites.

c.In related news Twitter announced Sunday that it had hidden one of President Donald Trump’s messages behind a warning notice “for violating our Civic Integrity Policy for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting.” The president falsely claimed without evidence that drop boxes used to collect ballots “are not Covid sanitized.” The inaccurate message is accessible to anyone who clicks a link in the warning notice.

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Covid Tracking Project — useful for its annotations
Johns Hopkins Dashboard or Animations — the gold standard
NEW:  COVID-19 Forecast Hub – Collects multiple models

Tech News
14 States Make Contact Tracing Data Public. Here’s What They’re Learning – NPR
A Michigan college is tracking its students with a flawed app – TechCrunch
Apps We’re Not Using Anymore Because of the Pandemic – PC Magazine
Nevada Launches Contact Tracing App – Nevada Independent
Scared of going back to the office? Companies hope these apps will help – CNN

3. Search Engine Optimization News

You may have seen a Google screenshot of searches for “white American doctor” and “white American nurse” showing images of non-Caucasian people.Roger Montti at Search Engine Journal does a nice job deconstructing what happened, but let’s go higher level than that. Here are the images: 

Examining the code behind one image identifies the subject as “African American doctor … isolated on white [background].” As Google’s Danny Sullivan pointed out last year, “As it turns out, when people post images of white couples, they tend to say only “couples” & not provide a race. But when there are mixed couples, then “white” gets mentioned. Our image search depends on heavily words [sic] — so when we don’t get the words, this can happen.”

Mark that clause: “our image search depends [heavily] on words” because it’s important. 

Words and links are how we translate what a page is about for search engines. This should be a key insight that you use to explain to others how search works. That makes items like the alternate attribute on an image critical to a search engine’s understanding of what your page is about. 

Google isn’t broken. The way that we use language to describe things needs an inclusivity overhaul.

Google announced last week that its Chrome browser will begin highlighting webpages that pass its tests for core vital statistics. Chrome will display the words “fast page” in search results. About 85% of website pages do not pass all tests. You’ll need to hurry if you want that designation to show for your website because the option is already in use on the next beta version of the Chrome browser.

Bing also confirmed that Microsoft considers user engagement a ranking signal. Bing execs Fabrice Canal and Christi Olson told Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz that ” … it doesn’t matter the content’s amazing, if users aren’t staying on that site, maybe they’ve put a pop-up in. There’s something going on there, that is a signal that regardless of what content is on the page, the users are saying it does not add value.” 

Google continues to deny that it uses engagement data to rank websites although its Google Analytics product is found on 84% of all websites.

4. Also in the Spotlight — Video Conferencing

Zoom saw Amazon, Google, and Facebook come for it when the pandemic hit and Zoom became a de facto video conferencing standard. The company’s stock has surged more than threefold this year and now has a market cap of $81 billion. That makes it about the size of CVS or Mondelez, makers of Oreos, Ritz, and Cadbury. 

Zoom has been lagging behind bigger tech companies and sought to catch up last week with its announcements that users will soon be able to participate in Zoom conferences while using Amazon Echo, Facebook Portal, and Google Nest video conferencing products. The Verge reports that the Zoom-Facebook Portal solution will be available in September. 

Google, meanwhile, has broadened its competing Meet product to work with its Chromecast to project video to your television. Google has been pushing Meet video conferencing hard, finally giving it space in the Gmail app and announcing education features that allow teachers to create breakout groups, polling, Q & As, and attendance tracking.

Facebook countered Google’s accessibility by adding screen sharing to its Messenger Group rooms and making those rooms very visible in its new user interface. Messenger Rooms also have received the ability to broadcast via Facebook Live. Facebook now reaches three billion people on the planet and is merging its Facebook Messenger chats with Instagram chats, making it an even more formidable video conferencing competitor.

5. Following Up: TikTok & A Weird College Project

We broke down all the hullabaloo about TikTok a couple of weeks ago. The company confirmed this weekend that it will sue the Trump administration over the president’s executive order forbidding it to engage in U.S. commerce and ordering its divestment to a U.S. based company.

We also wrote about OpenAI’s GPT-3 project that was impressing a lot of technologists. UC Berkeley computer science student Liam Porr used GPT-3 to create a completely fake blog using a fake name. The project was fun, MIT Technology Review points out, until one of the AI-authored posts reached the top of Hacker News. Porr’s final post was “What I would do with GPT-3 if I had no ethics.”

6. Debugging: False Plandemic Sequel Released

There is a new sequel to the conspiracy theory “Plandemic” video that is almost universally denounced by scientists and media organizations. The 75 minute video released last week “…offers a more far-reaching conspiratorial take on the pandemic, with an underlying theme that the media can’t be trusted. It suggests without proof that the novel coronavirus was man-made and intentionally released,” writes Annenberg’s FactCheck.org.

Read the rest of their findings here..or send it to that special someone.

7. ProTip: Get Your Gmail Space Back 

We told you above that Google’s Meet product shoehorned its way into the left sidebar of Gmail on Android and iOS, but it doesn’t have to stay there.

Read The Verge on how to “get rid of that irritating Meet tab.”

8. Great Data: Six Degrees is Too Many

Facebook did a lot of number crunching on more than 1.5 billion accounts to learn our level of connectedness.  Good news–we’re getting closer.

These data scientists say 3.57 degrees and slightly less in the U.S.

Screening Room – Cafe Rio Gets Real

10. Coffee Break:  Cake or not a cake?

Good Monday morning. It’s August 10th. Breaking last night from the Wall Street Journal is news that Twitter is reportedly interesting in acquiring TikTok. Expect to hear lots more until this deal is done. Size-wise it’s as if Colgate-Palmolive or Goldman Sachs were being acquired, but the complicated political environment magnifies the transaction even more for this three year old service. Here’s Reuters’ coverage.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,525 words, a bit over a 5 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

a. Walmart has delayed its Amazon Prime competitor again. Walmart+ was supposed to finally launch last month with a $98 annual price tag. Amazon is now valued at three times more than Walmart, and the gap is growing. (Recode-Vox)

b. More retail news ahead of Friday’s retail sales report: Rite Aid deployed facial recognition in two hundred stores located in low income neighborhoods of major cities. A match would alert the store’s loss prevention employees via a smartphone alert. This is a riveting story that Reuters broke about the unregulated use of facial recognition.

c. Ancestry is facing a class action lawsuit over a claim that the company violated California law regarding subscriptions. At least one legal analyst suggests that the company may have mostly complied but not included “the level of clarity required by law.” Remember that if you’re making a social media disclosure, an affiliate program disclosure, or describing your terms and conditions that many laws include requirements regarding font size and placement. (Ad Law Access)

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Covid Tracking Project — useful for its annotations
Johns Hopkins — the gold standard
School Reopening Plan Tracker from Johns Hopkins
College Crisis Initiative (Open or Hybrid) from Davidson College
NEW: Cases by Metro Area – Factbase
NEW: Johns Hopkins Data Animated – JHU

Tech News
Facebook & Twitter remove Trump posts over misinformation – NBC News
Facebook extends work from home policy until July 2021 – Techcrunch
How to Understand COVID-19 Numbers – ProPublica
PayPal will enable contactless payments at 8,000+ CVS Stores – Retail Brew
Virginia Launches COVIDwise App Using Google-Apple System – Slate

3. Search Engine Optimization News

Google purchased nearly seven percent of home alarm company ADT last week. That ordinarily would be for another discussion, but it’s important to note that Google and not parent Alphabet is the investor. The two are on the record talking about smart home appliances and monitoring, but there is also now a remote Google workforce in place. Apple, Amazon, and (once) Microsoft might have stores, but Google will have the ability to load the data from smart home technology to its shopping and search results. 

Google is also cleaning up its advertising categories.  A video ad showing police officers beating, pushing, and tasing protesters over the president speaking about law and order was rejected for violating the company’s prohibitions against graphic violence in ads. Google also banned all ads for stalkerware and remote surveillance equipment and software. Finally, Google banned ads from companies posing as news organizations and any ads mentioning illegally obtained documents such as from Wikileaks.

We’ve been telling you that Google is constantly changing the business profiles it shows in search engine results. One new trend spotted by Search Engine Land is that Google will now specify when a company’s business hours were updated. This allows anyone visiting your business to know whether the information has been updated during the pandemic. 

Finally, Microsoft Bing, rather than Google, has launched a new WordPress plugin that allows webmasters to automate submissions to the search engine. Remember that Bing gets about one billion-with-a-b visitors to its search engine every month.

4. Also in the Spotlight — GPT-3 is Ready to Learn

We last wrote about OPENAI in June. That’s the research lab founded by Elon Musk and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman. They put together an investment group and one billion dollars to advance artificial intelligence. Microsoft kicked in another one billion dollar investment last year.

After first saying in 2018 that they could not in good conscience release their latest machine learning software called GPT-3 that modeled text, the organization started looking for corporate buyers in June. And since what was once theoretical would now be commercial, the industry media got all breathless and fawning.

Neither Altman nor Musk are wallflowers, and Altman tweeted this two weeks ago:

You probably have the right image in mind if you see him collecting grubby dollar bills while standing outside a tent set apart from a local carny decades ago, but there is something inside the tent.

“Did a Person Write this Headline, or a Machine?” poses a recent Wired article that went on to say that the software is “provoking chills across Silicon Valley” before relating the story of one tester writing a sample app to track a to-do list. The tester than uploaded the app to GPT-3 and the system, which has received coding tutorials, returned code for the app. 

But there are plenty of ghosts in this machine, not the least of which are the prejudices of the humans who build it. When prompted with words like “Holocaust” or “woman”, the system has opined with anti-Semitic and misogynistic language. Sometimes the words it creates seem profound, but other times, they are nonsensical. We’ll link below to a free app that lets you generate tweets written by GPT-3 so you experience this dichotomy. 

How do we know this is original? I’ve run a number of samples through Google and Bing, and none were exact matches. In other words, GPT-3 was providing new language, not parroting something that it had scanned.

Computer scientist Kevin Lacker gave GPT-3 a Turing test that is designed to establish if software output can be indistinguishable from a human’s output. Early in the testing process, Lacker writes, “Traditionally, artificial intelligence struggles at “common sense.” But GPT-3 can answer a lot of common sense questions … Ten years ago, if I had this conversation, I would have assumed the entity on the other end was a human.”

The iterative process is important as humans improve the software, but even GPT-3’s earlier version has shown the ability to create new images. The version using graphics instead of words is called iGPT and can create the rest of a graphic image if given the first half of an image. That’s not a big deal for any artist, but it is a very big deal for software.

Smartlinks
Did a Person Write This Headline, or a Machine? — Wired
Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test — Lacker.io
Generate your own GPT-3 tweets — refresh the screen for each new one
GPT-3 Creative Fiction — Gwern
OpenAI’s fiction-spewing AI is learning to generate images — MIT Tech Review

5. Following Up: Twitter Bans

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Twitter seemed to take its first steps towards confronting disinformation on its platform. Remember that misinformation is often a mistake while disinformation is deliberate.

David Duke, who once won 43% of the vote in an election for Louisiana governor, is a white supremacist and former KKK leader. Twitter confirmed that they have joined YouTube in banning him for continued violations of the service’s hate speech rules.

Read more at The Washington Post.

6. Debugging: Yes there is a Google+ Class Action

The emails have been flying about a Google Plus data leak that exposed the information of 500,000 users. This one is real. 

You’ll only get $5-$12, but why not take it?

7. ProTip: The NSA Teaches You to Secure Your Phone

I love this outreach by the spy agency. In just a couple of pages of a free PDF you’ll learn what steps to take to limit your phone’s location data exposure.

There’s more at the PDF link, but remember that Location Services do not equal GPS.

8. Great Data: Online Gaming

This is a series of infographics that can each be shown as one-offs (timelines, revenue, company charts, etc.) but make a great story with very few words.

There are $150 billion in revenues now.

9. Screening Room: DSW Back to School

I’ve been a fan of DSW’s authenticity in recent spots, and their back to school ad featuring a mom and kid shopping while wearing masks is a great example of them leaning in to being real. 

It’s not on YouTube yet, but you can watch it here.

10. Coffee Break: Window Swap

I love this newish site that lets people submit a webcam view from their window. You can’t choose any particular vista, but as you refresh your screen, a new destination pops up. It was breezy in Lucerne, there was a cat sunning itself in Italy, and it was raining in Poland when I last visited.

Open up the windows here.

Good Monday morning. It’s August 3rd. Thursday marks the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear weapon bombing of Hiroshima. I recommend the Hiroshima for Global Peace website as you consider that event.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,438 words, about a 5 minute read.

Didja see what happened last week after we wrote about online political bias?

Mere hours after we sent your copy of Spotlight, the internet exploded with reactions to the misleading “frontline doctors” video that the president and his oldest son recommended. For this week’s trick, well, stay tuned.

1. News to Know Now

a. Facebook Messenger has introduced a new app lock feature for iOS users. When activated, the setting requires you to unlock the app with your fingerprint or face ID. Android devices are next. 

b. Amazon spent just under $7 billion on U.S. advertising in 2019. That’s about 9% more than previous leader Comcast. Those two companies and AT&T are the only three U.S. companies to spend $5 billion or more. (Statista)

c. Ten members of Congress have signed a letter sent to the FTC requesting an investigation of data brokers who may have engaged in “unfair and deceptive” business practices. The letter includes examples of people having their mobile location data captured when they attended Black Lives Matter protests and of religious profiles being created from similar data when people attended houses of worship as early as 2017. (See a PDF of the signed letter)

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Great Trackers
Johns Hopkins — the gold standard
Event Risk Assessment from Georgia Tech
School Reopening Plan Tracker from Johns Hopkins
College Crisis Initiative (Open or Hybrid) from Davidson College
NEW: Covid Tracking Project — useful for its annotations

Tech News
Facebook suspends anti-mask group for spreading misinformation – The Verge
Google Promises Privacy With Virus App, Can Still Collect Location – NY Times
Uber offers COVID-19 contact tracing help amid chaotic U.S. response – Reuters
UK Government admits breaking law with NHS test and trace – The Guardian

An important article that deserves your attention:
How to Understand COVID-19 Numbers – ProPublica

3. Search Engine Optimization News

A new study of Google search results suggests that Google’s strategy of displaying non-text items in search results can siphon off nearly half the clicks when showing users images, maps, or recipes. Even in specific subject areas like news, up to 30% of the clicks won’t be made. This is the effect that we describe when we write about Google’s “zero-click” search results page.

One other extreme example: displaying a knowledge panel of boxed data often found on the right side of a Google results page reduces the click rate of that page 42%.

Website owners complain that the data is often siphoned from their properties and shown in piecemeal fashion while mixed with data from other organizations.

Google often works with data providers to gather this information and has recently announced a new deal with Uber. That deal calls for Uber to pay Google for Maps usage over the next four years. Uber also bought Routematch this month and now owns a platform that has 500 transit agency partners.

Another data deal example on Google Maps: Android users in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago now see traffic light detail on their maps according to Droid LIfe.

Google continues adding structured data functions so that it can show even more information in search results without generating a click. Google is now recommending that businesses offering remote or telecommuting jobs use special codes in their website so that a flag can be shown in search results.

This is all new and continues to worry organizations we speak with that rely on publishing replicable data to attract potential customers.

4. Also in the Spotlight — Just What is TikTok?

We last took you on a deep dive through TikTok in mid-December and suggested then that you think of the app as a YouTube and Snapchat hybrid. Users post videos ranging from 6 to 60 seconds although 15 seconds is the norm. Those videos are then shared with others who can react with likes or comments or even a short video of their own.

There is little time for elaborate setup or exposition in this app that grew to prominence because of its quirky dance and lip syncing memes. The culture is similar to internet meme culture but with a dialect and style of its own. Despite the brief content, users spend about 45 minutes on the site each day, making it one of the most sticky of the social media sites.

Like Facebook and Snapchat before it, TikTok dominates usage among teens and people in their early twenties with about half of its users between the ages of 18 and 24. The site is a global phenomenon with huge user bases in the U.S., India, Brazil, and China. The number of U.S. users nearly doubled between January and April, when it reached 52 million. 

So what happened?

U.S. politicians and corporate interests have long been suspicious of TikTok’s parent company in China. Race-baiting actions by the Trump administration over the COVID-19 pandemic have also vilified the company. For months, a stream of NGOs, corporate offices, and government agencies have prohibited the app on their devices. Wells Fargo, the U.S. military, TSA, and the Biden campaign have all banned the app from phones that they own. Amazon made news in July when it sent its employees an email banning the app and then almost immediately rescinded that directive.

Detractors claim that the video sharing app is a way for China to spy on other countries although waiting for the daily news of which company has had its data breached seems to undercut that argument. The app’s supporters say that an anti-establishment bias makes it an enemy of powerful governments. A rallying cry over the last few days has asked why the U.S. government would ban an entertainment app before it bans extremist hate groups like the KKK.

What’s next: Microsoft might still purchase the entire U.S. operation and run it  operate it domestically alongside versions for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The app has been downloaded more than two billion times worldwide. No news regarding a sale or government action had been reported by late Sunday night.

Here is a cute interactive test about TikTok from the good folks at Emerging Tech Brew. 

Smartlinks

Everything to Know About Social Media Usage in July — TNW
Facebook Readies TikTok Competitor — Dow Jones MarketWatch
How the U.S. Government Could Ban TikTok — CNBC
See the list of Where TikTok is Already Banned — Business Insider
TikTok — Statistics & Facts — Statista
U.S. Consumers Flocking to TikTok -eMarketer (way back in April!)

5. Following Up: That Facebook Ad Boycott

Much has been made of the Stop Hate for Profit Facebook ad boycott we’ve told you about in the past. 

We’ve learned that not all of the one thousand participating organizations stopped advertising on all their brands. We applaud the awareness generated by the program, but also acknowledge that the financial impact was minimal.

Here’s a CNBC report suggesting that Facebook’s YOY July revenue will stay consistent.

5. Following Up: That Facebook Ad Boycott

Much has been made of the Stop Hate for Profit Facebook ad boycott we’ve told you about in the past. 

We’ve learned that not all of the one thousand participating organizations stopped advertising on all their brands. We applaud the awareness generated by the program, but also acknowledge that the financial impact was minimal.

Here’s a CNBC report suggesting that Facebook’s YOY July revenue will stay consistent.

7. ProTip: Dinosaurs in Your House

We could tell you about the Google Easter Egg honoring the Cha Cha Slide, but dinosaurs are way more fun. We’ve seen this type of augmented reality before with animals and rocket launches.

Follow along as Lifehacker shows you how to create dinosaurs in a mobile view of your house.

8. Great Data: Atlas of Surveillance

The privacy stalwarts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have published an interactive map that shows more than 5,300 programs of citizen surveillance operated by law enforcement agencies in the U.S.

Check it out for yourself. It’s why TikTok didn’t seem so scary to us.

Screening Room: Open Like Never Before

10. Coffee Break: Time Warp Trailer

While sipping your hot beverage of choice, enjoy this fan-made trailer for the 1986 Batman movie re-imagined if it was released in 1945. This is so much fun that it deserves your attention a year after it was released. It’s still relatively unknown with under 50,000 views.