Technology and Computing
Some corners of the internet act as bastions of healthy discussion, but out there on the Wild Web, discourse appears worse than ever before. If you’re tired of feeling your blood boil every time you get to the bottom of an article or open up your social media app of choice, it’s time to clean up your internet conversations. Block comments on news sites and blogs Some sites are doing away with comments altogether, but there are plenty that have…
When it comes to computers, convenience and security are often at odds. A simple, easy-to-use system that you can’t lock yourself out of tends to be less secure than something a little less user-friendly. This is often the case with end-to-end encryption (E2EE), a system in which messages, backups, and anything else can only be decrypted by someone with the right key—and not the provider of the service or any other middlemen. While much more secure, it does have some…
US Facebook users can now apply for their share of the settlement from the Cambridge Analytica class action lawsuit. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, settled the suit last December, agreeing to pay $725 million—although it didn’t have to admit any wrongdoing. If you reside stateside and had an active Facebook account any time between May 24th, 2007, and December 22nd, 2022, you are entitled to a part of the multi-million dollar payout even if you have since deleted your account. You…
In a blog post this week, Meta AI announced the release of a new AI tool that can identify which pixels in an image belong to which object. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) performs a task called “segmentation” that’s foundational to computer vision, or the process that computers and robots) employ to “see” and comprehend the world around them. As well as its new AI model, Meta is also making its training dataset available to outside researchers. In his 1994…
The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is bulking up its internal tech team. The agency, which focuses on consumer protection and antitrust issues in the US, announced last week that it would be forming an Office of Technology and hiring more tech experts. Leading the new office is Stephanie Nguyen, the agency’s existing chief technology officer, who recently spoke with PopSci about what the new department will do and what her priorities for it are. “In general, the FTC has…
Misinformation is rampant on social media, and a new study has shed some light on why. Researchers from Yale University and the University of Southern California argue that basically, some people develop a habit for sharing things on social media—whether they’re true or not. Although “individual deficits in critical reasoning and partisan bias” are commonly cited as reasons that people share fake news, the authors wrote in the paper, “the structure of online sharing built into social platforms is more…
With nearly 3 billion daily users to its name, Facebook is buzzing with activity—particularly if several hundred of those people happen to be friends with you. Between wedding photos of friends-of-friends-of-friends, angry articles from your political uncle, and all-caps updates from the girl you haven’t seen since middle school, your News Feed can get cluttered with information you couldn’t care less about. Don’t settle for reading every other post—here’s how to clean up your feed so it will only show…
By design, it’s very easy to publish to social media from just about any location and any device connected to the internet, so there are going to be times you wish you could undo a post. Maybe you wish you hadn’t said what you said, shared a photo without permission, or simply made an embarrassing typo. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook all enable you to go back and edit your posts, or delete them completely. We can’t guarantee that no one…
Meta announced yesterday that it is pursuing legal action against a data scraping-for-hire firm called Voyager Labs for allegedly “improperly” amassing Facebook and Instagram users’ publicly available information, which it then sold to organizations including the Los Angeles Police Department, Meta says. As The Verge and other outlets note, the LAPD then utilized the data trove to compile profiles of potential future criminals. Critics have repeatedly voiced concerns over methodology and algorithms behind this strategy as being reductionist, unethical, and…
This week, Meta was fined €390 million ($410 million) by the European Union for illegally forcing users to accept personalized ads or stop using its services. It now has three months to outline how it will change its practices to comply with EU law. The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) came into force in 2018 and since then, they’ve been a major headache for Meta. Amongst other things, it requires organizations to be transparent about why they are collecting data,…
In 2020, John Mills’ house in Sonoma County, California was in the path of the Walbridge Fire. After evacuating, he began scouring the internet for all the updates he could find about the blaze, only to find himself refreshing the same outdated maps and watching the same soundbites on the news over and over. The lack of information fueled his anxiety over the situation, Mills says, and became a turning point for the way he understood what it means to…
This article was originally featured on Undark. WITHIN DAYS of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, several social media companies took steps to reduce the circulation of Russian state-backed media and anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Meta (formerly Facebook), for example, said it took down about 40 accounts, part of a larger network that had already spread across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and Russian social media. The accounts used fake personas, replete with profile pictures likely generated with artificial intelligence, posing as news editors, engineers, and scientists in Kyiv.…