Curt Long

Curt Long

Google Duplex Gets a Second, More Subdued, Demo

by

When Google first demonstrated its AI phone-calling technology Duplex back in May, the pre-recorded demo struck many observers as eerie. Piped through the speakers on stage at the Google I/O developer conference while a video capture of an Android phone played on screen, we heard an artificial voice call both a hair salon and a restaurant to book reservations on behalf of a human.

Right away, many in the tech community cited two big problems. First, the people on the receiving end of the call were unaware that the voice speaking into the phone was a machine, meaning Duplex was essentially fooling unsuspecting humans. Second, the bot in the demo never indicated it was recording the phone call, raising the eyebrows of privacy advocates and prompting follow-up questions from journalists (including writers at WIRED).

On Tuesday, Google gave multiple demonstrations of its Duplex technology in action. This time, there were some obvious differences.

Now, just a couple weeks ahead of Duplex’s rollout among a small set of users and businesses, Google is trying to give its phone-calling robot a do-over. The company is attempting to prove it has addressed some of the concerns about Duplex. And its latest pitch around transparency is coming at a time when some of its more critical use cases for AI are being seriously questioned—just recently, the company released a set of AI principles prohibiting Googlers from using AI in technologies that could violate human rights or cause “overall harm.”

On Tuesday, at a hummus shop in Mountain View, California just down the road from Google’s headquarters, the company gave multiple demonstrations of its Duplex technology in action. This time, there were some obvious differences. “Hi, I’m calling to make a reservation,” the bot said, which Google patched through speakers in the shop so the assembled reporters could hear it. “I’m Google’s automated booking service, so I’ll record the call. Can I book a table for Thursday?”

Google executives Nick Fox and Scott Huffman, along with product manager Valerie Nygaard, were on-hand to answer questions from reporters. Nygaard even had reporters rotate through the host’s stand at the front of the shop and take turns answering the phone, so we could interact with the Duplex-powered virtual assistant calling the restaurant. Each of the Duplex calls were being initiated by a Google Assistant request off of a laptop, just feet away in the restaurant.

I’ll admit that when I answered the phone at Oren’s Hummus Shop, I tried hard to trip up the Duplex bot. A female-sounding voice called and asked for a reservation Monday the 2nd. After determining that “she” meant the 2nd of July, I asked for the number of people in her party and for the desired time. “At 9pm,” she replied. I told the bot that the shop closes at 9:30 pm—making it up as we went along—so she might want to book for an earlier time. 7:30pm, the bot suggested? “We have something at 7:45, actually,” I said.

I then asked whether there were any allergies in the group. “OK, so, 7:30,” the bot said. “No, I can fit you in at 7:45,” I said. The bot was confused. “7:30,” it said again. I also asked whether they would need a high chair for any small children. Another voice eventually interjected, and completed the reservation.

I hung up the phone feeling somewhat triumphant; my stint in college as a host at a brew house had paid off, and I had asked a series of questions that a bot, even a good one, couldn’t answer. It was a win for humans. “In that case, the operator that completed the call—that wasn’t a human, right?” I asked Nygaard. No, she said. That was a human who took over the call. I was stunned; in the end, I was still a human who couldn’t differentiate between a voice powered by silicon and one born of flesh and blood.

Talking Back

I asked Huffman and Fox whether Google regretted showing off a carefully-produced Duplex demo back in May that offered little in terms of transparency or exposition. Fox didn’t say directly whether he regretted it. “We thought of the demo at I/O as much more of a technology demo, whereas what you see here is much more of the product side of the technology,” Fox said. “It was more of a pure technology demo. But we always knew we needed disclosure and it was the right thing to do.” Fox added that Google found all of the feedback from people “useful.”

While Google has addressed the stickiest stuff in that demo—adding a statement identifying the caller as a bot and disclosing the recording of the phone call—one big unanswered question about Duplex is one of agency: Who is responsible when a bot calls a business but then a human flakes?

“The agency question to me is the most complex, and will probably take the longest for us to work out as a society,” says Roman Kalantari, senior design director of creative technology at the design consultancy Fjord. “Will people feel less pressure to show up to an appointment their bot made because they never spoke to a person? This is already a huge problem at restaurants, for example, and this will likely get worse when it is easier, and the user has even less emotional attachment to the interaction or guilt about cancelling or not showing up.”

Bot Beginnings

During Tuesday’s demo, Huffman gave the group some background on the development of Duplex—its earliest phone calls, the human operators who back it up, and why Google sees Duplex’s tech evolving with use the same way self-driving car systems do. Huffman said it only took “a couple months” for the initial version of Duplex to get set up, but its earliest demos were incredibly rudimentary, with the speaker of a wired telephone being placed next to a Mac laptop’s speakers while the Duplex technology ran on the machine.

Huffman played one of the first Duplex phone calls ever made, when the bot tried to reserve a table at a restaurant. It was awkward. There was some confusion when the human being on the phone asked about the reservation time, and again when the human asked for the first name of the reserving party. The Duplex-powered bot was clearly flustered. “It wasn’t super good,” Huffman admitted, “but we could tell it had potential.”

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Artificial Intelligence

Google began to employ human moderators who would annotate the earliest Duplex calls. This team would take those notes and feed them into the system, allowing the AI to learn and adjust. Those human moderators are still working on Duplex—in fact, some of them are operators who will save a Duplex call when things go sideways—but Huffman and Fox declined to say how many people they’ve hired for the Duplex team. Google has also been studying speech disfluencies, and how they relate to Duplex, Huffman said. How should a bot deal with uncertainty in a polite way? How frequently should it offer conversational acknowledgement—the “Mmhmm”s we all say when someone’s been rambling for awhile—over the phone?

One way Google is trying to position Duplex is in the same realm as a self-driving car—an analogy that might be more welcome right now than an association with Google’s controversial military AI program. There’s a manual mode, in which the human’s hands grip the wheel, or, in this case, when a human makes the phone call. Then there’s a supervised mode, and then, “maybe the system is good enough where you can sit back and let the car drive itself,” Huffman said. “Four out of five of the calls we work on can be automated completely.”

Your Call

Google still hasn’t said when it will officially roll out Duplex to a wide user base, just that public tests of it are going to start in the next couple of weeks, with a “limited set of trusted testers and select businesses.” It also won’t say how many testers or businesses there are, to start. Duplex will work as part of Google Assistant, the company’s virtual assistant for phones and smart speakers. Initially, it will respond to requests around holiday hours for businesses; over the next few months, it will expand to include restaurant reservations and hair salon appointments.

Much of Google’s focus during Tuesday’s Duplex demo was around how it could help businesses. According to Google’s own internal research, 60 percent of small businesses that take reservations don’t have an online booking system. Huffman says telling people to pick up the phone and call some place is a barrier in an age when so many tasks like booking appointments and placing orders can be done online. Google thinks it can fix this resistance to making phone calls and help those businesses that still do things the old fashioned way.

Huffman said there was an interpretation after the demo at Google I/O back in May that Google’s AI could be used to take over any conversation. “This is trained for specific tasks,” he said. “I really want to make clear that the reason why it works is that we’ve chosen very specific tasks … it’s not a general purpose AI, but it’s very good at doing these narrow and specific things.”

Huffman makes a good point, but it may not be the “specific things” that continue to raise questions about Duplex. Rather, it may be the “very good” part.

More Great WIRED Stories

Sonos Beam Review: Support for Alexa in a Great Soundbar

by

There are two distinct ways of looking at the new Sonos Beam soundbar: from the perspective of a person who already owns Sonos speakers, or as a person who does not have any Sonos speakers.

The former, the speaker-rich among us—that’s Sonos’s sweet spot. The company says nearly 40 percent of Sonos purchases within the past year were made by people who already own a Sonos speaker, and that once people buy a Sonos product, they use it for years.

In that context, the Sonos Beam isn’t just a TV soundbar, but a WiFi-connected, fabric-wrapped hypnosis machine. You will think you are listening to Beyonce or Childish Gambino or “Chill Hits” on Spotify. But what you’re really hearing is “Buy more Sonos.” You will wake up with no recollection of having bought the thing, and you may have some explaining to do.

However, if you’ve never owned a Sonos speaker and you happen to be looking for a TV soundbar that lets you use Amazon’s Alexa to control the experience, then the Beam is worth considering. At $400, it’s much less expensive and smaller than Sonos’s previous home entertainment speakers. But it’s still an impressive compact soundbar for your TV. And of course, when you’re not using it to enhance onscreen visuals, it makes a good all-around living room speaker that sits comfortably on its own, or as part of a multi-room system.

Shape of Sound

Notably, the Beam was designed to support a trio of voice assistants—Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Apple’s Siri—all on the same device. That’s no small feat; each company’s voice service has its own rules of engagement for smart-home hardware. If the whole speaker thing doesn’t work out, Sonos’s executives may very well have futures in diplomatic relations.

While support for all three services is the promise, the reality is that the Sonos Beam doesn’t actually work with all of those virtual assistants at the time of this review. Its shrunken size also means Sonos has made some sacrifices in the sound department. But we should talk about its design first, since the Beam is something that you’ll probably be looking at a whole lot after you place it under your television.

This is the third Sonos speaker meant to serve as a companion to your TV, and the smallest. If the Sonos Playbase and Playbar (both $700) are, respectively, a truck and a mid-sized sedan, the $400 Sonos Beam is a coupe. It measures 26 inches across and 2.7 inches tall, and weighs around six pounds. That’s heavier and longer than something like the Polk Audio MagniFi Mini, but that soundbar is also taller and, like a lot of soundbars, is visually uninspiring. The Sonos Beam is a delight to behold, a perfectly baked breadstick complementing an endless buffet of video and audio content. It ships in black and white, and it can be mounted on the wall if that’s where your TV lives.

The body of the Beam is wrapped in a single piece of knitted polyester. The speaker’s guts include a single center tweeter, three passive radiators, four custom-designed full-range woofers, and a five-microphone array for voice control. On top are some capacitive touch controls: a play/pause button, volume up and down, and a microphone icon, to turn the voice assistants on and off.

In back, you’ll find three ports: power, Ethernet, and HDMI-ARC. If your TV doesn’t support HDMI-ARC (my old Sony Bravia TV does not), there’s an HDMI-to-optical adapter you can use. But you definitely lose some of the magic of Sonos’s promised content control when you have to revert to optical. The “ARC” in HDMI-ARC stands for Audio Return Channel, and it means that audio signals can be sent from the TV to an external audio device using a single HDMI cable. And if you’re using HDMI, that means the Sonos Beam is also tapping into CEC, or Consumer Electronics Control, to let you control the TV’s volume or toggle the power through the Beam.

Ear Candy

The latest speaker from Sonos plays music and works as a soundbar for your TV. It also lets you control your smart home with your voice.
Beth Holzer for Wired

Sonos is positioning the Beam as “Not Just a TV Soundbar,” but still, its primary function is supplying the audio for movies and shows. And as a soundbar, it performs well. It lacks some of the deep, heavy bass of its larger competitors. But it does enhance dialogue, effects, and soundtracks to enrich the whole entertainment experience. It strikes me as something that won’t bowl over audiophiles, but will add value for casual listeners—and at the very least, even audiophiles might appreciate what Sonos has done with the Beam’s physical constraints.

As part of my testing I watched John Wick, an extremely family-friendly movie about a man who’s sad about the death of his dog and befriends his Russian neighbors. The action movie genre is the one my TV’s built-in speakers struggle with the most, with most low-toned speech drowned out by dramatic scores, club beats, violent action, or dudes doing donuts in cars.

The Sonos Beam eliminated the need for me to hold a remote in my hand to adjust the volume 27 times throughout such a movie, with dialogue coming through crisp and clear. It evens out all the sounds really well and, like other Sonos speakers, adjusts its output to best suit the room. (Though you still have to go through Sonos’s mildly awkward, 45-second TruePlay setup to establish this.)

Like the previous Sonos soundbars, there’s a Speech Enhancement feature you can toggle on and off in the Sonos app. There’s also a Night Mode feature, which clarifies dialogue and other quieter sounds while toning down the kind of high-octane effects that would normally keep your neighbors up. I used both of these features liberally, although, even with Speech Enhancement on, dialogue can sound a little flat and lacking in resonance.

To get a sense of the speaker’s abilities for music, I listened to Gregory Alan Isakov’s concert with the Colorado Symphony from 2016, among other playlists. The Beam’s didn’t give me any kind of illusion that the symphony was playing behind me, or that it was comparable to seeing Isakov in concert with an orchestra (which I have seen). But it still filled the room, and its spatial sound abilities made it possible to envision where members of the ensemble were on stage when it was recorded. Also: This soundbar gets loud.

All Talk

Since the Sonos Beam natively supports Amazon’s voice services, you can ask the soundbar the same things you’d ask an Echo, whether that’s “Alexa, play Spotify workout playlist” or “Alexa, tell me a joke” (“How do you win over a chocolate lover? Keep some Twix up your sleeve.”) You can search for and download skills, Amazon’s term for voice apps, and set timers, something that accounts for approximately 90 percent of my Alexa requests on my Echo speaker.

The draw of having Alexa in the Sonos Beam soundbar, though, is that you can control your TV with your voice. Using voice commands to control certain aspects of your TV experience has been an option on various home entertainment devices for a few years now, but it has almost always required that you push a physical button on a remote to initiate the voice functions. The latest push in TV voice control is toward devices that rely instead on a simple wake word. That’s Sonos’s strategy here—you can just shout “Alexa” at your Beam and ask it to turn the TV on and off or to raise the volume.

If you have an Amazon Fire TV Stick, too, you can link your Fire TV Stick to the Beam and ask Alexa to pause the program you’re watching by speaking to the AI through the Beam. This workaround is a little convoluted, though, as it requires you to first connect the two devices in a sub-menu of the Alexa app (not the Sonos app), and even after that you have to be specific: “Alexa, pause Fire TV,” not just “Alexa, pause.”

Unfortunately, my TV doesn’t support HDMI-ARC. That meant I wasn’t able to use an HDMI cable to connect the Beam to my TV, and instead I was forced to rely on the optical audio connection. This kept me from utilizing the CEC functionality, the feature of HDMI that lets a soundbar or other speaker send commands to the television set. As a result, I wasn’t able to turn the TV on or off with my voice using my current home setup.

I recently tested another product that lets you toggle your TV power with your voice: the Amazon Fire TV Cube. But in addition to the HDMI option, the Cube also comes with little infrared blasters you can use to send commands to older televisions that lack support for HDMI-ARC. While I didn’t love the Cube, I did like that it gave me the option to use my voice to control my older TV. So while CEC is a useful feature for the Sonos Beam to support, those with lesser TVs won’t be able to take advantage of it.

Speaking Up

Sonos’s voice strategy doesn’t stop with Alexa. The company has some competition in that space, like Polk Audio’s upcoming $300 Command Bar, a voice-controlled soundbar that also has Alexa built in (and which we haven’t reviewed yet). So to get ahead, Sonos has been working on support for Apple’s AirPlay 2, which will also give Siri some limited control over the Sonos Beam. Sonos has also said Google Assistant support will arrive on its newest speaker models sometime this year. This is supposed to allow for a “continuity of control”—in theory, you’ll be able to start music with one voice assistant, then ask another voice assistant to identify the song, or to pause or stop the music.

The problem, though, is that AirPlay 2 support wasn’t ready by the time I wrote this review. Nor was Google Assistant. This means Sonos has effectively asked the media to review a product that doesn’t yet do everything it’s promised to do. (Sonos has also asked us to hold off on publishing our impressions of the AirPlay 2 experience on the Beam, even though AirPlay 2 software is technically available now, which seems excessive.) By promising these features in the future, Sonos is asking consumers who don’t want Alexa to take a chance by pre-ordering the Beam before it works with their voice assistant of choice.

It’s also worth noting that you can get some of this same voice-controlled Sonos experience with the Sonos One, a $199 smart speaker that works with Alexa—and will also be upgraded in the future to work with AirPlay 2 and Google Assistant. Of course, it’s not a TV soundbar, so it won’t work the exact same way the Beam does. However, if you’re not actually that interested in a soundbar but are still very interested in a Sonos speaker with voice control, the One is a quality gateway drug. That speaker competes more directly with products like Apple’s $349 HomePod and the $400 Google Home Max—although Sonos’s argument has always been that its speakers let you play whatever audio you want without pushing you into one music service or voice assistant over another.

Present Tense

Sonos is relying partially on the goodwill it’s developed with customers over the past several years in order to sell the new Sonos Beam. Trust us, the company is saying; AirPlay 2 and Google Assistant are coming soon, and it will all be great. Normally, in that scenario, I would say hold off.

But even without the full assortment of voice assistant capabilities, the Sonos Beam is a and impressive and thoughtfully designed soundbar. In under two weeks, it’s improved my own TV watching, podcast listening, and music playing experience in a real way. Having Alexa in a soundbar has been useful too, even if that’s the sole virtual assistant for now. The Beam has also become something of a sound centerpiece to the Sonos speakers I already have at home. Which probably sounds like music to any Sonos lover’s ears.

Tech Companies Deflect Blame for Opioid Crisis Ahead of FDA Summit

by

Representatives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, and roughly a dozen other tech companies will gather with academics, lobbyists, and government officials Wednesday for a summit hosted by the Food and Drug Administration. The goal of the summit, according to the FDA, is to get tech leaders to “discuss ways to collaboratively take stronger action” against the spread of illicit opioids online. But the gathering was mired in controversy before it even began, as the tech and pharmaceutical industries wrestled over the question of who bears more responsibility for a crisis that kills more than 115 Americans every day.

According to an invitation to the summit, which was sent to attendees by FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb in May, the FDA initially planned on asking tech companies to sign a “Pledge to Reduce the Availability of Illicit Opioids Online,” which it would publish 30 days after the event. “The purpose of this pledge is to allow Internet stakeholders to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to help address the terrible impact of the opioid crisis by taking concrete steps to reduce the availability of illicit opioids online,” the invitation read.

But after consulting with tech companies, the FDA says it put that plan on hold. “We will consolidate the feedback and ideas discussed at the summit and turn it into an actionable plan – not just for those in the room but for all internet stakeholders to join,” an FDA spokesperson said.

The shift left some attendees wondering whether tech companies objected to the pledge and got their way. “They’ve successfully changed the dynamics of the meeting,” says Tim Mackey, an associate adjunct professor at University of California, San Diego, who is also presenting at the summit.

‘If all drug sales happening on the internet were on the dark web, I’d throw a party.’

Libby Baney, the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies

The tech industry’s involvement in the opioid crisis has become the subject of harsh scrutiny in Washington over the last few months. In April, Commissioner Gottlieb told attendees at the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit that tech companies “haven’t been proactive enough” in eliminating illicit drugs on their platforms.

“We find offers to purchase opioids all over social media and the Internet, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Google, Yahoo, and Bing,” Gottlieb said. Days later, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the House Intelligence Committee, members of Congress pressed him on Facebook’s handling of ads for illegal online pharmacies. And in early June, the FDA sent warning letters to nine companies that operate 53 online pharmacy websites, ordering them to stop marketing opioids or risk legal repercussions.

In the days leading up to the summit, tech companies and the lobbying group that represents them worked to deflect blame for the crisis and tout their early efforts to combat a problem they say the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry created. On Tuesday, the Internet Association, which represents several summit attendees including Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon, and eBay, held a call with reporters previewing the event.

“The opioid epidemic is, in a majority of cases, primarily an offline problem,” a representative of the Association said, pointing to research by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration that showed the vast majority of people misusing opioids acquire them from a drug dealer, doctor, or a friend.

And on Monday, the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies, which is backed by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and a slew of credit card companies, released a report suggesting that the bulk of illicit drug sales that do take place online are happening on the dark web, as opposed to the open web, and are being paid for with cryptocurrency. The report also found that the majority of the sites on the open web that purport to sell opioids are actually so-called “non-delivery schemes” that steal people’s personal information, but never actually sell them drugs.

“They’ll be websites that say, ‘Buy oxy here,’ and you go onto the website, and there’s no oxy for sale. It’s clickbait,” says Marjorie Clifton, executive director of CSIP. “People say, ‘Look at all the stuff the internet’s selling.’ But no one’s going through the purchasing process.”

That may be. But lobbyists working to crack down on illegal online pharmacies on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry say that the tech industry’s blame-shifting is unhelpful. “If all drug sales happening on the internet were on the dark web, I’d throw a party. Then the vast majority of Americans would be safe,” says Libby Baney, an advisor to the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, who is appearing on a panel at the summit. The CSIP’s own study found dozens of sites purporting to sell opioids through simple organic searches, and spotted posts marketing opioids on sites like Twitter, Reddit, and even LinkedIn. But it’s hard to tell from a distance which advertisements are scams and which are the real deal.

Mackey and other researchers at UC San Diego have developed algorithms that hunt for opioid sales on Twitter. They’ve found that often those tweets link to illicit goods that have been sourced on the dark web. “What’s happening on the dark web is a lot of business-to-business sales,” Mackey says. “The digital drug dealers are sourcing from the dark web and using social media to sell directly to consumers.”

It’s not that tech companies have ignored this problem completely. Recently, they’ve taken several steps toward curbing opioid sales on their platforms. In April, Google Search’s homepage promoted an initiative by the Drug Enforcement Agency called Take Back Day, which encourages people to take their unused medications to safe collection sites. According to the Internet Association, over 50,000 people used the tool, contributing to a record-setting 1 million pounds of prescription drugs being collected on that day. And last week, Facebook announced it would begin to redirect users attempting to purchase opioids or seeking treatment to a federal crisis helpline. That move follows Instagram’s crackdown on opioid-related hashtags like #oxycontin. The companies involved in CSIP, meanwhile, collectively blocked 117 million ads that tried to appear on their platforms last year alone.

For Baney, all of that is a promising start, but it will be wasted if businesses on both sides don’t own up to the roles they’ve played in perpetuating a national tragedy. “This is a historic opportunity to do more with what we already know is true,” she says. “If it ends up being us versus them and there’s pointing fingers and a lot of ‘We’re already doing this or that,’ that’s an old-school way of thinking that isn’t responsive to the public health need.”

More Great WIRED Stories

Here’s One Way to Reform an Internet Conspiracy Theorist

by

Before a storm, the calm; after the storm, a hail of conspiracy theories. The urge to seek truth among unconnected dots is nothing new, but social media has supercharged that urge, ratcheting up the speed and spread of the resulting theories. As soon as a scrap of news hits Twitter, thousands upon thousands of users across multiple platforms swarm to synthesize it with other, unrelated scraps—even if fusing them into a coherent narrative requires logical backflips and manufacturing some data points of their own. And once the conspiracy has been constructed, no amount of well-intentioned debunkings can shake these truthers’ faith.

But who are these conspiracy-minded internet sleuths spreading misinformation? Where do they come from? Where do they go once the furor around a crisis has cooled? And more importantly, how can the rational citizens of the internet help snap them back to a reality devoid of lizard people and shadowy baby-stealing organizations? Those are the questions Virginia Tech researchers Mattia Samory and Tanushree Mitra, who study deviant behavior in online discussions, tried to answer by analyzing a decade’s worth of Reddit conspiracy talk.

In a new study being presented today, Samory and Mitra share their findings after watching chatter on r/conspiracy and related subreddits. What they found, though, is that not all Reddit conspiracy theorists are alike—and in fact, the most fervent among them might be the easiest to deradicalize.

Samory and Mitra’s study honed in on the conspiracy theories around four different major crises: the Boston bombing, the Sandy Hook and Aurora shootings, and the disappearance of Malaysian Air flight MH17. They found that not only do crises reinforce and increase the numbers of conspiracy communities—the combination of emotions running high and scant verifiable information seems to send many hunting for answers—but also that the approximately six million users posting conspiracy content during these crises tended to fall into three categories. First, there were the veterans, the long-term, single-minded r/conspiracy users. Then there were the converts: folks who were already active elsewhere on Reddit, but poked their heads into conspiracy subreddits once the crisis arose. And then there joiners, who only became Reddit users in the wake of the crisis and posted almost exclusively on conspiracy subreddits.

The researchers found that, while all three categories may be active at once, they demonstrate significantly different online behavior. Despite often being prolific Redditors, converts sink the least effort into conspiracy theorizing, often repeating the same small point over and over. They also tend to express more skepticism over time, and tend not to become long-term conspiracy subreddit users. (Knowing Reddit, it seems plausible that a portion of these converts may be indulging in ironic trolling.) Joiners and veterans are the ones who move conspiracies theories forward—offering the most verbose and least repetitive responses and demonstrating the highest levels of engagement with the conspiracy within (and, for veterans, outside) r/conspiracy.

Of the three category profiles, it’s the joiners who surprised the researchers most—and are likely to prove most important. “We expected them to be mostly skeptical people testing the waters,” Samory says. “But they actually had the most continuous involvement in the community and had increasing involvement in other conspiracy theories.” Joiners, it turns out, are also the most likely to become veterans, likely for the same reason that veterans return for crisis after crisis. If you self-select to only be exposed to a small subset of viewpoints and information, you’re putting yourself in the position to be radicalized. That’s less likely to happen to converts, who generally were engaged in multiple different subreddits.

This is by no means a complete picture of the dynamics of online conspiracy theories, but the study does suggest a possible course of action for deradicalizing some participants. “A good course of action to mitigate the problem is to catch new conspiracy theorists early,” Samory says. “They’re the fastest to radicalize, they’re the ones that remain the most engaged, but they also have the highest amount of distrust during the crisis.” In other words, debunking efforts should focus on these newbie joiners.

That’s especially urgent when, as in these circles, an appetizer tends to lead to an all-you-can-eat binge. “Once we start believing in one conspiracy theory, it’s easy to believe in multiple [theories],” Samory says. “And that leads to the rejection of attacks on any conspiracy theory, and the belief that those correction attempts are part of the conspiracy.” It’s a short walk from false flags to “crisis actors”—and from there, Pizzagate and full-on Alex Jones-ville aren’t far behind.

More Great WIRED Stories

9 Killer Tech Deals on the Bitdefender Box, SNES Classic, and More

by

The 4th of July is coming up, and though we haven’t seen an onslaught of deals yet, we have collected nine solid discounts that you should check out this week. We’ve got a deal for WIRED readers on the Bitdefender Box, which is a router with built-in security features, and several more picks that we found with a little help from the team at TechBargains.

Bitdefender Box for $200 (Was $250)

This deal for WIRED readers makes the Bitdefender Box a bit more affordable. The Box is a wireless router that also keeps your devices secure with built-in antivirus, a firewall, and other software. The key is that it protects all devices attached to your Wi-Fi network, which that includes smarthome devices and anything that may not be able to run malware protection. Is your baby monitor actually secure? Chances are, probably not, but the Box serves as additional protection.

The box has an app and software that will warn you when weird things are happening, and even protect you while browsing. It’s also a pretty good router, with 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands up to AC speeds with a range that should cover many homes. The box also has some parental control features built into it and comes with a year of Bitdefender Total Security for an unlimited number of connected devices.

SNES Classic is Actually Available for $80

The NES Classic is coming back, and its super sibling appears to be hitting digital shelves again, too! The SNES Classic comes with two controllers and 21 games, including the unreleased Star Fox 2. It’s been tough to find for months, but now’s your chance to finally grab one.

As of publishing, Amazon has it in stock, as does GameStop.

More Great Deals

There are a few other good tech deals happening this week, which we found thanks to our friends at TechBargains, so we’ve listed them below.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.

LG C8 OLED 4K TV: The Best-Looking TV of 2018

by

Shopping for a 4K TV is like trying to find a single wave in the ocean. Most TVs are indistinguishable from each other at a glance—unless your eyes happen to lock onto an OLED. When you look at an OLED TV, you tend to keep looking. You may not even know why at first, but it looks better. Even next to the best LCD TVs, an OLED, with its vivid colors and inky blacks will entrance you.

It’s simple actually: OLED TVs don’t need a backlight. All other TV screens have a panel of pixels and a light source of some kind—either a big grid of small Christmas Tree-like LED backlights, or lights on the edges that shines through the LCD panel. TV makers have gotten real skilled at improving backlit and edge-lit TVs. But, no matter—OLED bests even the most advanced LCD-based TVs in just about every metric.

That’s because every dot in the 4K (3,840 x 2,160) grid of pixels lights up individually. That means that every single pixel can turn itself completely off if a scene is dark, and that the colors in every pixel are extra vivid because the red, green, and blue subpixels can shoot their colors at your retinas without assistance.

LG made a good bet with its OLED screen tech. It’s currently the only company that makes OLED TV screens (it also supplies them to companies like Sony and Panasonic), and it’s had an iron grip on the tech since 2013. That’s the main reason why, for yet another year, LG’s many OLED TV series—B8, C8, E8, G8—are the best-looking TVs in the world. For about a month, I’ve watched all my TV shows and movies on the 55-inch C8 (OLED55C8PUA), a good representative of the whole lineup, and I don’t want to go back.

Thanks to OLED, the C8 is the only 4K TV I’ve used that makes absolutely everything I watch look noticeably better, even upscaled HD content or YouTube videos.

Science fiction shows, like The Expanse or any Star Trek look especially stunning with the deep blacks, but honestly, I also love that when a program is letterboxed, the top and bottom borders simply vanish. Even the drearily-lit palaces in The Crown have more depth and beauty thanks to the contrast on the C8.

As a gamer, I also appreciate the low 21ms latency in LG’s Game Mode. Games of Fortnite look colorful and punchy on it, and I may have gasped the first time I booted up Nintendo’s vibrant, bubbly fun Super Mario Odyssey.

Not a Perfect TV

I can wax poetic about the beauty of OLED for hours, but that doesn’t mean LG’s C8 or its peers are perfect TVs. The C8 was so thin at the top (less than a quarter inch) that I thought I might accidentally bend it when I laid it down on my couch to screw on the pedestal stand after I unboxed it. Luckily, it has a small amount of junk in its trunk toward the bottom (it’s about 2 inches thick), making it easy to pick up.

My extended family was visiting when I first set up the C8, and they got a bad first impression. For some reason, voice menus were on by default, so the TV loudly announced every menu movement I made, and when I tried to turn it off, the voice actually doubled in speed, sounding kind of like Alvin and the Chipmunks. I finally silenced the voices, but was annoyed that the TV assumed I was a cable subscriber, and put up a static snow screen with volume on high. Most modern TVs mute the static, at the very least, but LG’s TV menus are rough around the edges.

If you expect modern conveniences like the C8 automatically recognizing what devices you’ve plugged in, think again. My Roku is HDMI 3 to LG, and that’s all it may ever be. (There are 4 HDMI ports on this model, along with 3 USB, 1 optical, 1 cable, and most other ports you’d expect.)

LG

The Wii-like motion control remote control works well enough with LG’s webOS interface, and I like that holding the mic button down lets you talk to Google Assistant on the TV. But the remote is still a little busy, full of unneeded buttons. The TV settings menus also have clear backgrounds by default, which makes them difficult to read if you’re watching something reasonably bright. Changing menu transparency means digging deep into the picture settings, which aren’t intuitive.

Things really went off the rails when we tried to watch The Incredibles but had to fiddle with those picture settings to fix up the color and motion—something you’ll want to do, as well. The default settings had LG’s version of the annoying soap opera effect, called TruMotion, set to ON, and was too dimly lit for my tastes thanks to an energy-saving mode. So I tinkered with it, turned TruMotion OFF, and tweaked some other settings easily enough.

I thought I had it all dialed in until I switched inputs from my PS4 to my Roku and discovered the TV has no universal picture settings. Even if you alter your picture settings and hit “Apply to All Inputs,” you’ll still have to fix the advanced picture settings for every device you hook up. This is dumb, and makes an already complex picture setup process three or four times more frustrating.

It took me about an hour to understand what was going on and get it all set up. My family grew impatient as movie time was significantly delayed. They told me they’d never have the patience or troubleshooting knowledge to be able to dig in and tinker as much as I did. We even had some audio sync issues with the 4K Amazon Fire TV, too, though all my other devices worked perfectly.

Over the next few days, family members began to compliment the quality of the picture, and my wife is now a believer, but LG really needs to modernize and improve its settings and setup.

Even the webOS app interface, which is admittedly better than what other smart TVs have, could be easier to use. Apps don’t auto update. You’re instead taken through a labyrinth of menus just to tell the TV, yes, you’d like to update so you can use the app again. After telling it to download an update, there’s no easy way back either, so you have to reopen the apps menu entirely. Despite LG’s best efforts, I still recommend buying one of these TV streaming devices to watch Netflix and content from other services.

The C8 does have relatively good downward firing speakers for a TV, and is technically Dolby Atmos capable. As much as I didn’t mind its sound, there is no substitute for a good soundbar.

The only elephant in the room? Screen burn-in. It’s a kind of a shadow or ghost outline that you can see after a graphic is gone. It can happen with OLED TVs if you watch a lot of the same channels or play games with persistent on-screen elements (think CNN or QVC, or the heads up display of Fortnite). As someone who’s owned a Plasma TV for 7 years, I can say you probably won’t encounter permanent burn-in unless you have some very specific viewing habits, or disable the LG’s built-in tools. If the idea of a rare display flaw plaguing your expensive TV irks you, you’ll likely be waiting for a while—either LG will finally cure OLED’s Achilles’ Heel or something better will come along.

Still the Best

You’re going to have to spend some time tinkering (and a little annoyed) with all of LG’s 2018 OLED TVs, but the picture quality is worth it. So if you’re price-averse, take it from me: the $2,000+ price of the 55-Inch C8 melts away once you get used to the sweet picture quality you’ll have on-tap.

If it’s out of your budget, make sure to check prices on every LG OLED model, especially last year’s models. They may be a little older, but they’re identical to what you get this year in the ways that count, and prices can drop as low as $1,300. You can also try waiting until Thanksgiving weekend. That’s usually when TVs start getting big holiday discounts, though don’t expect the 2018 models to get cheaper than $1,500 even this winter.

If you truly want the best-looking TV, this is it. LG’s setup and menus may leave something to be desired, but its screen is so stunning that you’ll forgive it. In 2018, LG’s OLED TV lineup is the best you can buy.

The Digital Privacy Wins Keep Coming

by

On Monday, police in Florida abandoned a pilot program that had put Amazon’s facial recognition powers at their disposal. On Wednesday, representatives from the country’s most powerful technology companies will gather in San Francisco to take a hard look at the industry’s approach to privacy. And on Thursday, the California legislature will vote on a bill that would grant internet users more power over their data than ever before in the United States. Any of these alone would mark a good week for privacy. Together, and combined with even more major advancements from earlier this month, they represent a tectonic shift.

Progress can be difficult to measure; it often comes in drips and drops, or not at all for long stretches of time. But in recent weeks, privacy advocates have seen torrential gains, at a rate perhaps not matched since Edward Snowden revealed how the National Security Agency spied on millions of US citizens in 2013. A confluence of factors—generational, judicial, societal—have created momentum where previously there was none. The trick now is to sustain it.

Awake and Alert

If the US really has found itself in the middle of a digital privacy awakening, you can of course credit the recent spate of headline-grabbing scandals as the kick-starter. Cambridge Analytica illicitly took the personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users and turned it into psychographically targeted political ads. Equifax let slip the sensitive details—including Social Security numbers—of 148 million Americans because it couldn’t be bothered to patch a known vulnerability. And just a few short weeks ago, many learned for the first time that mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T have for years sold their location data to shadowy third-party companies—including some that don’t carefully vet who can access it.

“All of these high-profile stories over the last year or so have really put consideration into overdrive,” says Michelle Richardson, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Freedom, Security, and Technology Project. “Things like Facebook or Equifax, the location data, it’s all hitting at once, and people are losing patience with companies who are promising to change but aren’t doing it.”

Facebook, to its credit, pledged to cut ties with data brokers in March. But otherwise the company has spent its time ducking questions from both Congress and the media about how its core business proposition clashes with prioritizing data privacy. It has also taken some of the heat off of companies like Google, which grabs as much or more data, without a fiasco to shine a spotlight on its everyday practices.

‘People are losing patience with companies who are promising to change but aren’t doing it.’

Michelle Richardson, CDT

But there are signs that the fallout from Cambridge Analytica has still had a wide impact. After The New York Times broke the story of carriers sharing location data with third parties—and the abuse of that system—in May, it took just five weeks for Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint to curtail the practice. They did so in part at the urging of senator Ron Wyden (D – Oregon), but also to avoid the sustained public opprobrium Facebook and Equifax endured. What had for so long felt like shouts into a void ultimately echoed throughout the industry.

You can see those reverberations in the Wednesday summit organized by the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group that represents Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and dozens of other major tech companies. First reported by Axios, the meeting will focus not on standards or tariffs, but on a topic that has often seemed anathema in Silicon Valley.

“Protecting consumers’ privacy is a top concern for our industry. As technologies evolve, we continually examine our approach to privacy,” says ICIT spokesman Jose Castaneda. “This week’s convening will continue an important conversation that examines how our users’ and customers’ privacy is protected while also ensuring our ability to meet their demands for innovative products and services.”

Part of that conversation will surely involve Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect this spring, tightening the ways in which companies handle user data. But it also reflects a newfound urgency stateside.

“I sometimes joke that’s how you know something is serious, when the trades get involved,” Richardson says. “That’s when they pull out the big guns.”

Law and Orders

The companies’ voluntary actions have been buttressed by the legislative and judicial branches. Last week, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Carpenter v. United States that will generally require the government to get a warrant before it accesses cell site location information. But the decision has even broader implications for how courts will view digital privacy going forward.

‘There’s an expansion of concerns across the ideological spectrum.’

Shahid Buttar, EFF

“At its core, Carpenter is a recognition that there are fundamental changes we’ve witnessed over the last two or three decades in the technologies that we use every day for communications and connecting with others, and that these technologies have implications for individual rights,” says Alan Butler, senior counsel at the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center. “That’s a point at which we’re on the other side of a sea change.”

The judicial breakthrough dovetails with a political shift, as well. Privacy has crossed party lines of late; House Republicans found themselves opposed to some forms of surveillance after President Trump claimed to have been victimized by it. And there’s nothing partisan about Equifax leaking your Social Security number.

“There’s an expansion of concerns across the ideological spectrum,” says Shahid Buttar, who leads grassroots efforts for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “People very far to the conservative right and very far to the liberal left agree on surveillance principles.”

That will play out soon in California, where on Thursday the State Senate and Assembly will vote on AB 375, a bill that would enact the strictest privacy laws in the US. That bill, too, exists largely because of public pressure.

“The events involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica certainly highlight the need for this legislation and its provisions and created public demand for a solution,” said state senator Robert Hertzberg, one of the authors of the bill, in a statement to WIRED.

And if the bill doesn’t pass this week, in November Californians will be able to vote for themselves on even more robust privacy protections in the form of a ballot initiative, the California Consumer Privacy Act, that advocates have spent the last two years pushing.

Remember, all of this is happening in the span of about two weeks. It’s a remarkable amount of progress, and there’s reason enough to believe it has momentum to continue.

Keep the Plates Spinning

The thing about public enthusiasm is that it fades in time, be it for privacy protections or C&C Music Factory. Outrage is difficult to sustain, especially when so many corners invite it. But privacy advocates are hopeful that this time things could be different.

There’s the bipartisan push, first of all. But there’s a generational one, too. People who have grown up online seem more aware of the implications of what they share, and more eager to protect it. “Young people are decidedly not OK with state surveillance or corporate-sponsored surveillance,” Buttar says. “You can see that reflected even in their choice of platforms. Young people increasingly are migrating away from platforms that pursue an advertising-driven surveillance model, like Facebook.”

The latest privacy missteps have also felt more tangible to more people than they may have in the past. You likely have a Facebook account; it’s distressing to confront what it knows about you and how it uses that information. If you’d like to freak out about Google and location services, check out your Google Maps timeline. And on and on.

Meanwhile, GDPR and Carpenter should provide scaffolding to hold up privacy protections even if public interest does wane—despite Silicon Valley lobbying hard against bills like the one in California. “Maybe there won’t be some omnibus privacy case against Facebook that solves all the problems,” Butler says. “But across the board, the pressure’s going to get turned up.”

And realistically, the next animating privacy meltdown will never be too far away. “I think there will always be another Cambridge Analytica,” says CDT’s Richardson. Now, privacy advocates are better positioned than ever to push back, and to win.

More Great WIRED Stories

These Beating Mini-Hearts Could Save Big Bucks—And Maybe Lives

by

Crack open the door of the incubator at Novoheart’s Hong Kong headquarters and you’ll find about a dozen pea-shaped, pulsating blobs submerged in a warm, salty-sweet broth. They’re 3-D human heart organoids—a simplified, shrunk-down version of the real thing—the first ever to contain a hollow chamber, like one of the four that’s beating inside your chest right now. And they’re the future of drug testing.

Pharmaceutical companies typically spend billions of dollars and a decade to successfully bring a new medicine to market. Drugs are often felled by harmful side effects that don’t get detected until costly human trials—and the heart is the number one place where things can go wrong. So drugmakers have been looking for ways to identify cardiac issues sooner rather than later.

Novoheart

Miniature hearts respond to treatments a lot like real tissues do; they speed up or slow down, get weaker or stronger. The companies that make them can measure those changes and send that data back to drugmakers so they can flag potential problems before any real humans get involved (or hurt)—companies like Novoheart and New York-based Tara Biosystems, which makes a flat, petri-dish version of live human heart tissue. In the last few years they’ve racked up contracts with top pharma firms to create an early-warning system of sorts.

The idea of using tiny, artificial organs to test drugs isn’t new. But getting the biology to actually work is a recent development. The main problem is that heart cells in culture just don’t want to grow up—to work, they have to mature into all the different kinds of cells that make up an adult human heart. Without that differentiation, they lack many of the proteins where drugs could dock.

When Kevin Costa, Novoheart’s co-founder and director of cardiovascular cell and tissue engineering at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, first started working on mini-hearts, scientists could only grow cells in single layer on a dish. There they could wriggle in place, but they couldn’t contract against a load—which is the thing a real heart does approximately 70 times every minute. To do that, scientists had to bring the cells into the third dimension. They nudged them into free-floating clumps, or spheroids, where unencumbered by flat surfaces they began to develop into some of the different cell types found in natural heart tissue.

Video by Novoheart

But they still weren’t functioning like heart tissue. So next they began organizing those cell types into sheets. Heart muscle is kind of like plywood; it’s made up of layers of distinct cells aligned in different directions, which together allow the tissue to contract with force in response to electrical pulses. Yet even after all that, the engineered tissue strips were still missing some key functions. Costa wondered if just being in the shape of a ventricle could give them many more of the properties found in natural heart muscle.

Getting these layered structures to form a hollow heart sphere, however, took some real creativity.

Novoheart’s scientists placed millions of heart cells genetically reprogrammed from stem cells into a mold along with some secret sauce: a dose of dermal fibroblasts, the cells that help your skin repair itself. That created a mix of cell types that better mimicked natural tissues. Like Jell-O, they glommed onto each other in the shape of an empty globe. Costa says the 3-D tissues are still more like baby hearts than adult hearts, but they respond more realistically than the strip-shaped version. “We don’t fully understand why the hollow sphere responds more like the real thing,” says Costa. “Is it something about fluid slushing around inside it? Do shear stresses impact cell development? It’s not clear to us yet, but there’s definitely something unique about being in that shape. It acts like a heart, so it is a heart.”

Of course, it’s not really a heart. But it is good enough for a bunch of pharma companies to be interested in using it to test for drug toxicity. And Novoheart is also using their mini-hearts to understand diseases better. It just completed a study in partnership with Pfizer to develop a mini-heart model for Friedreich’s ataxia, a rare but deadly hereditary neuromuscular disorder that currently has no FDA-approved treatments. Using cells with the genetic mutations associated with the disease, Novoheart was able to reproduce similar electrical and mechanical malfunctions. Costa hopes it’s just a first step toward creating a whole library of diseased mini-heart models to aid in discovering new medicines, particularly for disorders that lack credible animal models.

Novoheart

Tara Biosystems is also working toward that goal with its tissue strips. And beyond that, it has plans to one day become a platform for personalized drug testing—seeing how heart cells with different genetic backgrounds respond to treatments. But for now, it’s focused on generating 200 new cultures each week to satisfy the growing demands of its 10 pharma clients.

From a regulatory standpoint, their timing couldn’t be better. The FDA is currently considering a new safety screening approach for detecting life-threatening cardiovascular side effects in new drugs. The system would use both computer simulations and tests on the same kinds of cells that make up Tara’s tissue strips and Novoheart’s cardiac chambers.

“The FDA itself has recognized that the assays that are currently universally used are not great, and it’s looking for alternatives,” says Nate Huebsch, a bioengineer at Washington University who’s working with Bay Area startup Organos to develop miniature tissues for drug testing. Even though he’s technically a competitor, he’s impressed by the work coming out of Tara and Novoheart. “Both these companies are helmed by big-time leaders in this field doing cutting edge science,” he says. He also stresses a dose of reality. Mini-hearts aren’t going to fully replace animal models anytime soon. But they could still stop dangerous drugs before they stop a real heart for good.

More Great WIRED Stories

Trump’s Trade War Won’t Hurt China. It Could Hurt US Tech

by

In the latest installment of the simmering trade war, the Trump administration reportedly plans to impose restrictions on Chinese investments in US technology companies and American technology exports to China. If implemented as rumored, any company with more than 25 percent Chinese ownership would be barred from investing in US companies that produce “industrially significant technology.” Exports of US-made technology deemed important to national security, ranging from chips to robotics to cryptography, would face restrictions as well.

WIRED Opinion

About

Zachary Karabell is a WIRED Contributor. Karabell is the head of Global Strategies Envestnet and the president of River Twice Research.

The news grabbed headlines and roiled financial markets, but like most things Trump, the noise is much greater than the substance. Within hours, White House aides offered conflicting interpretations, leaving little but confusion. There’s no doubt, however, that new restrictions are being planned, and that these moves would mark a continuation of the confrontational trade policies of the past months.

The cascade of picayune tariffs and aggressive trade rhetoric directed indiscriminately against allies and competitors alike could inflict lasting damage on US companies’ ability to compete globally. For now, though, the effect on day-to-day commerce remains miniscule, with a few notable exceptions—including Harley-Davidson’s plan to relocate some motorcycle production overseas in response to EU tariffs retaliating against Trump tariffs on steel.

The argument for restricting investment by China is that it has been stealing intellectual property unchallenged for decades, and new technologies could give China sizable economic and military benefits. The problem is that little of that activity involved China buying or appropriating the intellectual property of US startups, or sending products made in America to China. If the concerns over IP have some merit, the moves being considered do almost nothing to address them.

For starters, China’s tech investments in the US are remarkably small. The value of China tech investments was $9.9 in billion 2015. That rose by some estimates to more than $15 billion in 2016, and then dipped to $13 billion in 2017; last year’s number would have been much smaller without an $8 billion investment in Uber by Tencent in conjunction with Japan’s Softbank. The number of deals has fallen as well, to 165 last year, from 188 in 2015, and has plunged in 2018 so far. The biggest reasons: The Chinese government has clamped down on easy credit that fueled these deals, and Chinese companies have grown wary of investing in industries that might come under the Washington spotlight.

Compare that with more than more than $70 billion in venture funding for US tech startups last year, plus another $150 billion in private equity funding for technology companies. And that doesn’t include many billions in angel investments, nor tens of billions in R&D spent by the likes of Google, Microsoft, and others.

Much as with immigration, the Trump administration is touting aggressive policies on an issue where the trends have already reversed course. Chinese direct investment is, in relative terms, small; limiting it will have minimal impact on US startups and growth companies (though it’s possible that one of those companies would have become a unicorn of the 2020s). Limiting such investment will also have minimal impact on the domestic Chinese economy. It will, however, cast an even greater pall over future economic ties, further propelling China to seek investments elsewhere.

As for restrictions on US technology exports to China, those too are a pinprick. First, the US government has been selectively trying to contain exports of technology it sees as vital or sensitive for many years. Under Obama, chip makers such as Intel and Nvidia were not allowed to sell certain types of chips with military, supercomputer, or security applications. More to the point, US technology companies don’t export that much to China. Even by a generous definition of technology that includes aircraft parts, US technology exports to China amounted to less than $30 billion in 2017, out of total trade with China in goods and services in excess of $700 billion.

Most of what US tech companies sell to China does not show up as US exports because the products aren’t made in the United States. Hence an iPhone, which is nominally an American product that sells well in China, isn’t actually an American export to China because the phones are mostly assembled in … China.

As a result, restricting what American tech companies can sell to China doesn’t ultimately prevent many of those companies from selling to China, because of their global supply chains. And there’s a good chance the restrictions would lead to unintended consequences: Faced with uncertain crackdowns on their exports from the US, American tech companies could shift more production overseas, rather than risk restrictions on their outbound American-made goods.

And so, here as elsewhere, we have what appears to be forceful action designed to punish China and “restore” American competitiveness. The actual dollar amounts, however, are tiny, and the number of companies that will be meaningfully impacted is small. China is spending heavily on AI research, as well as on cybersecurity and robotics. Preventing Chinese companies from investing a few million here and there on American startups might make it harder for said start-ups to raise money but it changes the competitive balance going forward hardly at all.

As symbols, though, these moves send a message that the United States increasingly is not open for business. They signal to companies around the world that they would be best off looking for alliances and arrangements not subject to unpredictable American tariffs or investment restrictions. Denying foreign companies and countries access to US capital and US markets 20, 30, or 40 years ago would have represented a nearly insurmountable challenge. Faced with such measures, most countries and companies would have and did accommodate American demands. That is not the world we inhabit today.

With limited tools and unlimited words, the Trump administration cannot significantly alter US-China trade today. But it can, and has, soured the climate for future economic bonds. In the short term, the economic harm could be quite limited. It’s the longer-term challenges that should be of greater concern. If Trump’s policies make the US a less desirable place to invest, if they channel ever more global activity away from America, the damage will accrue steadily. Like the frog as the water gets hotter and hotter, it may not feel like much year by year, and when the damage finally hits home, it may be too late. We have time, but it’s not infinite.

More Great WIRED Stories

Distracted Driving Is Out of Control, and There’s No Single Cure

by

Driving isn’t supposed to be miserable. Open road, your fave tunes, a navigation app to take away the uncertainty. But a new, small study released today by AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety suggests that those infotainment systems built into vehicles’ consoles make driving a bit more dangerous, by demanding too much of those who are supposed to be watching the road.

This study isn’t the first to come to such a conclusion. A bunch of new of research, from scientists and from public companies, indicates that all the gizmos that enterprising capitalists have built to surprise and delight consumers continue to surprise and delight them as they sit behind the wheel.

And distract them, sometimes to dangerous ends. The US Department of Transportation estimates 37,150 people died on American roads in 2017, a slight 0.8 percent decline over 2016—but a leap of more than 10 percent since 2014. Detailed research takes time, and public health officials haven’t definitively traced that jump to smartphones or to distracted driving. But many think it’s at least one likely culprit.

In this latest study, the University of Utah researchers commissioned to run the AAA analysis recruited 64 participants to drive in five different vehicles. At some points during the experiment, they used the manufacturer’s infotainment systems. At others, they ran Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, which use the car’s built-in interface but run software off the user’s smartphone.

Overall, the researchers concluded, the Apple and Android systems do a better job managing their users’ cognitive loads—that is, leaving room in drivers’ brains to actually pay attention to driving. The built-in systems in the five models tested (a 2017 Honda Ridgeline RTL-E, a 2017 Ford Mustang GT, a 2018 Chevrolet Silverado LT, a 2018 Kia Optima, and a 2018 Ram 1500 Laramie) all demanded high or very high levels of attention from drivers as they made phone calls, sent text messages, fiddled with the audio, and entered and followed navigation directions.

The Apple and Android platforms aren’t perfect. CarPlay, for example, demanded more from drivers than Android Auto when it came to entering a destination; the reverse was true for sending text messages. “Both incurred moderately high levels of demand, thus providing opportunities to improve the user experience,” the researchers wrote in their conclusion. Translation: Everyone needs to do better.

Because distraction has real, awful consequences. The startup Nauto equips fleet vehicles with smart cameras built to prevent collisions, and is constantly collecting data on road incidents. It found that, in one four-month period, 67 percent of severe collisions in fleets insured by the company Atlas Insurance Holdings were caused by distracted driving.

Still, researchers (like Utah’s) are working to understand how to manage drivers’ attention. Mobile tech might be making the problem worse, but so too might new automotive technologies. “As you introduce more automation, it’s just going to get worse,” says Jeff Blecher, the chief strategy officer of the company Agero, which provides vehicle safety and roadside assistance systems, and just ran its own study on automation and driver attention. Agero’s data suggests that younger drivers are much more likely to manipulate their phones while driving—that, in fact, drivers 17 to 22 are fiddling with their phones for a full 12 percent of time they’re behind the wheel. ?.

For decades, automation in the aviation industry has proven that humans are really very bad about snapping back to attention once it has been stolen away by a message, a fun app, a funny-looking cloud.

Now that semi-autonomous technology is making its way into consumer vehicles, car companies and the scientists who work at them will need to get savvier about building systems that hold their drivers’ attention. To that end, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are currently in the midst of a multi-year study seeking to understand how drivers use features like Tesla’s Autopilot, rigging up Teslas, Cadillacs, Volvos, and Land Rovers with sensors and cameras to peer inside cars’ inner sanctums.

“This is about human-centered development: leveraging the human element and integrating it with advances in automation,” says Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at MIT who is working on the study. “We should be doing everything from defining how often that driver should be looking at the road and under what conditions, to their ability to detect threats out there.”

Which means, when it comes to cracking how humans interact with exciting, rogue bits of code, there’s plenty of work to do. And it’s going to require serious focus.

Alex Davies contributed reporting.

More Great WIRED Stories

Researchers Gather for the International Workshop on Emoji Understanding

by

Two years ago, Sanjaya Wijeratne—a computer science PhD student at Wright State University—noticed something odd in his research. He was studying the communication of gang members on Twitter. Among the grandstanding about drugs and money, he found gang members repeatedly dropping the ⛽ emoji in their tweets.

Wijeratne had been working on separate research relating to word-sense disambiguation, a field of computational linguistics that looks at how words take on multiple meanings. The use of ⛽ jumped out as a brand new problem. “They were using the gas pump emoji to refer to marijuana,” says Wijeratne. “As soon as I saw this new meaning associated with the emoji, I thought, what about emoji-sense disambiguation?”

That moment caused Wijeratne to redirected his PhD research toward emoji. This week, he put together the first interdisciplinary academic conference on emoji in research.

At Stanford University this week, a collection of linguists, data scientists, computer researchers, and emoji enthusiasts gathered for the International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media, itself a smaller piece of the AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. They brought with them research on how emoji are changing the way we communicate online, how gender and political affiliation are reproduced online through emoji, and the challenges emoji pose for natural-language processing in computers. The assembled academics also debated basic questions about the nature of emoji: Like, if emoji is something akin to a language, why can’t anyone agree on what individual emoji mean?

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Emoji

Emoji, which have grown from an original set of 176 characters to a collection of over 3,000 unique icons, present both opportunities and challenges to the academics who study them. Most agree that the icons are not quite a language—the emoji vocabulary is made up almost entirely of nouns, and there’s no real grammar or syntax to govern their use—but their influence on internet communication is massive. By 2015, half of all comments on Instagram included an emoji. On Messenger, Facebook’s messaging app, over 5 billion emoji are sent and received every day. From an academic point of view, that presents a wealth of data to understand communication, behavior, and language online.

But the academic research on emoji has, until recently, been limited. Earlier gatherings like EmojiCon, now in its third year, have brought emoji conversations to the mainstream. But that event—a “celebration of all things emoji”—courts a popular audience, and feels less like a formal conference and more like a party made for Instagram. This week’s Workshop on Emoji Understanding, on the other hand, brought the focus squarely back into academia. The day-long event included a series of paper presentations that privileged data sets and citations over emoji-shaped balloons, and asked more questions than it could answer.

Papers presented at the conference highlighted emoji as markers of solidarity during crisis (think: “Je suis Paris ???”) or as ways to understand differences across gender or political ideologies (women use emoji more than men, but conservative men use way fewer emoji than liberal men). Others discussed the potential to decode emoji with machine learning, and the difficulties in teaching computers to recognize the multiple meanings of emoji in natural-language processing. A panel discussion raised questions about the way the emoji lexicon is developed, as well as the ways emoji can be misinterpreted across cultures. (The ? does not mean the same thing in English as it does in American Sign Language, nor does it mean the same thing to white supremacists.)

Tyler Schnoebelen, who gave the keynote speech on Monday, says conversations about emoji have been too often painted with a broad brush. There’s the utopian vision: emoji as a “universal language,” the great democratizer and harbinger of communication across class, culture, and geography. And then there’s the doomsday vision: emoji as the destruction of language, a political tool, a new way to send violent threats. The nuance often gets lost in between. We have hardly any research to tell us who uses emoji, when, why, and how that use has changed over time. We know even less about what emoji can reveal in disaster scenarios, campaigns, or educational settings; even linguists, who have looked at emoticons and other internet-born languages for decades, don’t have a consensus on what emoji mean for the future of language.

Now, researchers are beginning to turn more seriously toward those research questions. On Monday, linguist Gretchen Mcculloch presented a theory of emoji as beat gestures—the equivalent of gesticulating to add emphasis—rather than a language in themselves. “Letters let us write words, emoji let us write gestures,” she says. Eric Goldman, a legal scholar at Santa Clara University’s School of Law, discussed a forthcoming paper on emoji and the law, which highlights the potential for emoji to create misunderstanding in legal contexts—including high profile cases, like the Silk Road case.

Other scholars are looking for ways to incorporate emoji into preexisting research. “We do a lot of social media research: depression on social media, harassment on social media, the opioid crisis on social media,” says Amit Sheth, a computer scientist at Wright State University and co-organizer of the conference. “In all of those problems, we also see significant use of emoji. If you were to only study the text, you’d be missing out on a lot of information.”

As the conference wrapped up, researchers from institutions in the United States, Spain, India, and Germany shook hands and traded email addresses. That, Wijeratne says, is the point of the event: not to answer questions about the role of emoji in our world, but to connect researchers from around the world and spark ideas for future studies.

More Great WIRED Stories

Sneaky Dogs Leave ‘Apology’ For Mail Carrier After Stealing Her Lunch

by

Ever since Carol Jordan adopted Bear and Bull six years ago, the black Lab mixes have had a knack for getting into trouble.

Partners in crime since the womb, the two rescue dog brothers delight in wreaking havoc around the house — pulling down drain pipes, chewing up doorjambs and destroying not one, not two, but three lawn mowers.

They could practically have a degree in landscaping after all the holes they’ve dug around their home in Smithfield, Virginia. But no matter what they do, their mom is always quick to forgive their antics.

“They just can’t help themselves,” Jordan told The Dodo. “We never catch them in the act, we just see the destruction afterward.”

These Former Pets Were Just Saved From The Worst Fate

by

Since 2009, the Yulin Dog Meat Festival has taken place each June in Yulin, China, to promote the eating of dog meat, which only a minority of Chinese people eat on a regular basis. While dogs are killed for their meat throughout the year in China, thousands more are killed just for the festival.

In many ways, this year has been no different, although Wendy Higgins, director of international media at the Humane Society International (HSI), told The Dodo that this year’s festival seems to be a “more muted affair.”

This Country Just Killed A Super Endangered Whale

by

Kristján Loftsson, CEO of Hvalur, has also said that he hopes to use whale meat, blubber and bones to make gelatin, as well as nutritional supplements and other medicinal products — and this news has animal welfare advocates particularly concerned.

“If he does plan on doing that, that will take us back to the battle days of commercial whaling, because previously, meat was not really the main driver of the whaling industry — it was all … the oils, fertilizers and cosmetics that were made out of whale products,” O’Connell said. “That was the kind of thing that kept the whale industry going, and if Mr Loftsson is successful in doing what he claims he is starting to do, it is a very bad sign for the future of whaling.”

Couple Didn’t Neuter Their Two Dogs — Four Years Later, Police Find This

by

“The officers asked us for help with around 30 dogs but I was busy dealing with another emergency elsewhere,” Herchy Boal, an inspector with the RSPCA, said in a press release. “When they called me again a few hours later, they were extremely concerned about the conditions they had found the dogs in, claiming they believed there were actually in excess of 40 small-breeds.”

As it turned out, there were actually 82 dogs inside the home. It tooks hours to find them all and transfer them into the care of the RSPCA. Every time it seemed as if they’d all been found, more would pop up from the most unexpected places.

A Microguide to Microdosing Psychedelic Drugs

by

Adderall, shmaderall. Certain biohackers prefer taking teeny-tiny amounts of psychedelicdrugs to boost focus. But what exactly is a microdose, anyway? Here’s our semi-scientific guide. Hint: If you feel the trees breathing, you’re doing it wrong.

Acid

Microdose (5–10 mcg): Users claim that a microhit of LSD clears mental locks and helps with depression. It’s often taken first thing in the morning with distilled water—chlorine can kill key compounds.

Overdose: Visions, cosmic oneness, epiphanies about epiphanies.

Mushrooms

Microdose (0.1 g): A taste of psilocybin (or its synthetic version, which is often used in clinical trials) brings on a low-key wave of zenlike happiness. So they say.

Overdose: Warps in spacetime.

Ibogaine Hydrochlorid

Microdose (2 mg): This drug, extracted from iboga roots, can produce a calm focus that, unlike Adderall, also acts as a mild ­aphrodisiac. (Its main use is for detox, often for opiate addicts.)

Overdose: Psychedelia, vomiting, skin numbness.

DMT

Microdose (6 mg, but modes of delivery vary): The main ingredient in ayahuasca tea, DMT might change your perspective—but even small amounts could get you high.

Overdose: Deep vibrations, projectile vomiting, self-transcendence.

This article appears in the June issue. Subscribe now.

12 reasons to upgrade to iOS 12 for iPhone, iPad if you just can't wait

by

CLOSE

USA TODAY tech columnist Edward C. Baig looks at three ways your experience with your iPhone may change. USA TODAY

CONNECTTWEETLINKEDIN 2 COMMENTEMAILMORE

The future of your iPhone or iPad is here now. Well, sort of.

Apple on Monday released the public beta of iOS 12, the software that will be running at the core of the next iPhone and iPad, and, more than likely, the Apple phone and tablet you already own.

Since this is still an early prerelease beta, trying out iOS 12 now carries some risks, especially if you plan on installing the software on the Apple devices you use every day.

For starters, not all the apps you currently use may work with the public beta. You might experience bugs. Nor are all the features Apple is promising with iOS 12 available yet or fully finished. For example, the Shortcuts app that you might use to set up multistep workflows with Siri is not part of this initial public beta.

If you’re feeling brave and not willing to wait until iOS 12’s official release come fall, head to beta.apple.com to fetch iOS 12 for free.

But first, back up your iOS device before installing the public beta. If you run into a major issue, you can always restore your device to that iOS 11 backup.

I’ve been checking out iOS 12 on a loaner iPhone X. Here are some of the features there now and some that are coming later.

Screen Time

This is the tool many of us have been waiting for, especially if you have kids who are addicted to their phones. But even we elders spend way too much time on our devices. Screen Time lets you apply downtime limits that prevents all but those apps you choose and phone calls to come through. Once an app limit has been reached you’ll have to grant permission to bypass that limit.

You can also surface reports that reveal your device usage, cluing you in on how often you pick up your phone, including when you pick it up during downtime. And you’ll be able to get the usage breakout by games, social networking and other app categories.

Because iOS 12 is in beta, I wasn’t able yet able to apply Family Sharing limits on my kids’ devices since they’re not yet running the latest software.

Those of you who have trouble sleeping might appreciate a new Do Not Disturb during Bedtime feature that dims the display and holds notifications until your set wake-up time.

Group FaceTime

Apple has expanded FaceTime so that you can go beyond one-on-one video calls and use FaceTime with up to 32 people simultaneously. Since iOS 12 is in beta, you’ll have to wait to try this with other people who have loaded iOS 12, or MacOS Mojave, which is also in beta.

Improved multitasking gesture for iPhone X

When Apple removed the physical Home button on the iPhone X – as many people expect they’ll do on future models as well – those of us with Apple’s top-of-the-line handset had to learn a few new navigational gestures.

Though some gestures such as swiping up from the bottom of the screen to return to a Home screen were simple, I couldn’t say the same for the hoops you had to go through on the X to dismiss a running app. First, you had to summon the app switcher or multitasking screen by swiping up and pausing for a second or so. But before you could shut down an app, you had to press down for a moment on a card until a circled red dash appears on the upper left corner. Only then could you swipe up to dismiss that app and any others. With iOS 12, Apple no longer requires you to pause. To which I say, “thank you.”

Set up a second Face ID

As of now anyway, the iPhone X is also the only iPhone to let you take advantage of Face ID facial recognition, but you can only unlock your phone with one person’s mug. Through iOS 12 you can set up what Apple refers to as an “alternate appearance,” perhaps letting you share your device with your significant other. I gave it to a colleague, and he was able to set up his face, giving us both access to the loaner iPhone X.

Improved Safari privacy

Privacy and security have always been of the upmost concern, and it’s not always easy to tell how companies address those issues. Among the measures Apple is taking as part of iOS 12: By default, the Safari browser will prevent you from getting tracked without your permission when you tap a “Like,”or “Share” social media button or a comment widget at a site.

More: Apple will let you know when Facebook is snooping on you

Using AirPods as a hearing aid

If you have trouble hearing another person in a crowded restaurant or bar or can’t hear the professor when you sit in the rear of a lecture hall this new feature could come in handy, assuming you have Apple’s wireless $159 AirPods. In iOS 12 you can now exploit a “Live Listen” assistive hearing app feature that previously was available only with compatible, third-party devices such as hearing aids or implants.

To turn it on, make sure your AirPods are paired per usual through Bluetooth on your iOS 12 device. Then, in Settings go to Control Center, tap Customize Controls and then Hearing. After placing the AirPods in your ears, bring up Control Center on your phone, tap Hearing and then tap Live Listen.

By using the iPhone’s microphone as a directional mic, you’ll hear the amplified sound through the AirPods. Just make sure to place the phone next to the person you want to hear for optimal results, lest you hear unwanted noises.

Calling 911

This is a feature you hopefully won’t have to take advantage of. In iOS 12, people who call 911 using an iPhone would have their location automatically shared with first responders, potentially reducing the time for the victim of an accident, crime, fire or health emergency to get help in a life-saving situation.

More: Calling 911? Apple’s iPhone can tell a first responder where you are

Voice Memos improvements

As a journalist I sometimes record interviews using the built-in Voice Memos app. You can now sync recordings across all your iOS devices. And Apple has added a couple of useful playback features: buttons that let you skip ahead or retreat by 15 seconds. Voice Memos is also available for the first time on the iPad. I still wish Apple would add one more missing feature: the ability to play back recordings at faster (or slower) speeds.

Measure app

Using augmented reality, you can measure objects by drawing virtual lines in free space inside this new Measure app. It’s based on ARKit, which requires an iPhone as old as the SE or 6s models, or a fifth-generation or iPad Pro models. The app also includes the level which was previously in the Compass app on older iOS versions.

Memojis

You had to figure that Apple would build upon the roster of animated emojis or Animojis that it introduced with the iPhone X. And yes,there are now ghost, koala, tiger and T. rex Animojis.

But the real fun – or depending on your point of view, waste of time – starts or ends with Memojis, the Animojis you create that look just like an animated you.

You can add freckles, facial hair, various hairstyles, eyewear and other touches in designing your cartoonish alter ego, making sure to make a face or stick out your tongue for the final, um, flourish. You can then share Memojis in an iMessage or use them in a FaceTime video call from your iPhone X.

Stocks

Apple has dressed up the built-in Stocks app in iOS 12 with more interactive charts, color-coded sparklines and an overall design that better reveals how your portfolio is performing.

Performance

You may not immediately notice in the beta, but Apple is promising an overall zippier performance once iOS 12 is on your phone. Apple claims apps will launch up to 40 percent faster, the keyboard up to 50 percent faster and the camera up to 70 percent faster. Since Apple got into a pickle late last year after it admitted to slowing down older iPhones with suspect batteries, performance is something all of us will be closely watching once the software is released in the fall.

Good news for iPhone fans with older devices: Anyone with iOS 11 (or an iPhone 5s or later) will be able to download iOS 12. Just keep in mind that some of the features arriving with the latest software will require or work better on more recent models.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter

CONNECTTWEETLINKEDIN 2 COMMENTEMAILMORE
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2KhlU13

Apple News Tries to Avoid Facebook’s Mistakes With Midterm Elections Section

by

Apple waded knee-deep into the muck of political news delivery Monday with the announcement of a special section in Apple News devoted to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, which will determine whether Republicans hold onto their majorities in Congress.

From now until November, you will see a little Midterm Elections 2018 banner above the curated Top Stories section of the app. Whether you normally check Apple News just for celebrity gossip and sports doesn’t matter—the app is pushing this module to all US users. Clicking it will take you to a list of stories Apple News editors have deemed trustworthy, well-sourced, uninflammatory, and relevant. It is this human curation that Apple hopes will save it from the misinformation campaigns that have bedeviled other tech companies and online social networks.

“We won’t shy away from controversial topics, but our goal is to illuminate, not enrage. And we’ll always steer clear of rumor and propaganda,” Apple News Editor-in-Chief Lauren Kern wrote in a letter to readers in the app.

That language is a cheeky reference to Facebook, which has faced intense criticism ever since false news spread like wildfire on its platform during the 2016 presidential election. Apple News is not a social media site, and so can avoid some of the network effects that help misinformation spiral out of control. Instead of stories surfaced by an algorithm, the election coverage, like the app’s Top News module, will consist of hand-picked articles, each one scrutinized by a professional.

They have put their trust in Apple’s judgement.

“I applaud Apple for taking on the task of trying to figure out if information is coming from trustworthy sources or not, and I think they are doing it in a pretty responsible way,” said David Chavern, CEO of News Media Alliance, a nonprofit trade group representing 2,000 news organizations in the US.

Chavern and others contrasted this approach to Facebook’s, particularly in the past few years.

Facebook used to have real, live human beings curate news stories, as part of the Trending Topics module launched in 2014. The company fired them all, though, in the summer of 2016, after one former worker told the website Gizmodo that the Trending Topics team habitually passed over stories from conservative news sites. Despite Facebook’s own internal investigation concluding that the bias allegations were largely false, according to WIRED’s reporting, the incident prompted a overcorrection as executives rushed to court conservatives and assure them that Facebook valued a plurality of opinions. They failed to notice the fake news crisis as it unfolded—and the role Trending Topics, whose algorithm amplified fake news and conspiracy theories alongside stories from trusted media outlets, played in it.

After the election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged his company’s misinformation problem in a post. “We’re a new kind of platform for public discourse – and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a space where people can be informed,” he wrote that December. And yet, he added in the next sentence, “With any changes we make, we must fight to give all people a voice and resist the path of becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

Facebook has since taken additional steps to address false news. It has tweaked the algorithm to emphasize personal posts and connections rather than news. It added third-party fact checkers, a political ad database for transparency, an ad campaign to educate the public about fake news, and a method to identify “trusted news sources.” But Facebook’s way of defining a trusted source was just to ask users, “Who do you trust?” That had the glaring problem of perpetuating political silos, where conservatives and liberals alike highly rate outlets that reflect to their world views and downvote anything opposed. Though this preference for ideologically conforming information is not new, Facebook’s role as the town hall or water cooler of the internet multiplies its effect.

Apple takes a different approach, the one thing Facebook has so far refused to do: giving the reins to journalists. Apple won’t say exactly how many journalists it employs as Apple News editors, but a representative says it in the dozens. The company’s announcement of its elections section and Kern’s letter to readers both emphasized the promise of delivering trustworthy, accurate stories vetted by experienced editors.

Apple’s press release also makes glancing reference to local news, which has been particularly hollowed out in the digital era. A special feature called “On the Ground” will highlight local news, though whether that will come from local organizations or national outlets is unclear.

While Apple News may be largely insulated from the social media network effects of its Silicon Valley peers, it is not immune to allegations of bias—the other critique that has dogged Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Apple highlighted Fox News, Vox, Axios, the Washington Post, and Politico as among the publications it will feature at launch, representing a wide spectrum of US political coverage. But some questioned the inclusion of Fox, which has recently come under fire for its coverage of the Trump administration, among other controversies.

“The upcoming Apple News election product strikes all the right notes on design (human-edited, well-structured) but the very first news source they mention is Fox News, indicating they have the same fear of right-wing liars as all the other tech platforms,” technologist Anil Dash wrote on Twitter.

“Whether or not you like Fox, the fact of the matter is they hire and pay reporters, they hire and pay editors, and you know where to send your complaints,” Chavern says. In other words, Fox is a legitimate journalistic outfit. It’s not a Macedonian fake-news farm.

Dash wasn’t alone in finding the Fox News shoutout jarring, though. “Apple has always been a control freak. That applies to news. Here’s a new press release in which the company says, essentially, that it’s going to pick the winners among journalism organizations based on quality. Note, however, that Fox ‘News’ is included,” tweeted media expert and journalist Dan Gillmor, co-creator of News Co/Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Gillmor’s larger point—that Apple is appointing itself the arbiter of quality news—is exactly the kind of critique Facebook tries to avoid by insisting it’s neutral. But just because an algorithm is deciding instead of a human doesn’t make a platform neutral. “Too often a lot of the big tech companies have hidden behind the idea that they need to be neutral when it comes to content and what that has really meant is that there’s a huge emphasis on garbage and fake news that crowds out the responsible sources,” Chavern says. Neutral is just another way of saying not-liable. With its new midterms section, Apple is accepting responsibility as mediators for the most controversial news of all, the political.

But the question remains how Apple will react when, inevitably, people take issue with the decisions its editors make.

More Great WIRED Stories

Seriously, save money on gas, hotels and shopping with these 8 apps

by

CLOSE

Columnist Marc Saltzman reviews his favorite apps that find you deals and get you money back on hotels, shopping and gas. Marc Saltzman, USA TODAY

CONNECTTWEETLINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMORE

You don’t need to be cash-strapped to appreciate saving money.

In other words, why pay more than you need to?

Both the App Store (for iPhone and iPad) and Google Play (for Android devices) are packed with apps tied to shopping deals, accessing free content, booking affordable travel and accommodations, as well as managing your money and time.

But with so many downloads available, finding a few that truly work could be an overwhelming endeavor.

The following are a handful of my favorites, and why.

More: 10 must-have apps for your phone

More: Apps that made me say wow in 2017

Before you shop online or at retail, consider these free apps.

Ebates

There are a few “cash back” apps available, but one I’ve used for years is Ebates, mostly because of how many online stores and marketplaces are supported – now more than 2,500 – including Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Macy’s, Target, Kohl’s, Best Buy, American Eagle, and Groupon, to name a few.

The premise is simple: open the app before you start shopping (or if you’re a desktop shopper, download the browser plug-in) and once you make a purchase at a supported store, you’ll get a percentage of your purchase credited to your account. It’s typically between 2 and 6 percent, depending on the store, but it can be as high as 40 percent over the holiday season (stores pay Ebates a commission for sending you there, and so they share it with you). Quarterly, you’ll get a check or PayPal deposit.

The app will also notify you of sales and special offers, plus there’s in-store coupons and promo codes, too. As added incentive for signing up for a free account, you’ll get a $10 bonus when you make your first purchase.

More: Score a new iPhone? Download these 12 apps

More: This smartphone trick lets you do more in less time

Flipp

Another “must have” mobile companion, especially for retail shopping, is Flipp.

Essentially, this one app delivers local store ads to your phone, tablet or computer – rather than you having to make a mess of your kitchen (and hands) by going through the paper circulars you get each week. Better yet, Flipp makes it easy to search for the best deals on the items you want, rather than merely digitizing the pages.

Just type in your zip code the first time and then it lets you browse or search for deals at stores near you — whether you’re shopping for groceries, household goods, fashion items, or consumer electronics – plus you can find and use coupons for popular brands, too.

Tap and hold to learn more about a product or tap quickly to virtually clip it into your shopping list. In fact, one of my favorite things about the shopping list is that you can add all the items you want to buy – such as chicken breasts for a family barbeque — and the app will show you all of the nearby stores that have it on sale.

The app also holds your loyalty cards, so you don’t have to carry a pocket- (or purse)-full of physical cards with you.

Load up some apps to save money, time and aggravation, while traveling this summer.

Hotels.com

There’s no shortage of apps to save on hotels, but when it comes to discounted rooms and rewards, one of the oldest is still one of the best. Now more than a quarter of a century old (when they were a phone service), Hotels.com enjoys a clean and easy-to-use interface, huge selection of properties to choose from, maps and Uber integration, and support for smartwatches.

More importantly, perhaps, is a “secret price” feature for members, which shows deals on boutique hotels and chains, along with a great loyalty and rewards program (“stay 10 nights and get the next one free”). As for its price guarantee, I recently booked a room in New York City that dropped its rate by $91, and so the app notified me about the change.

To reduce the likelihood of fake reviews, all customers who rate or review a hotel must have stayed there.

Also consider apps like Airbnb for staying in people’s homes.

More:These are the best apps to save money on last minute travel

More:Saving receipts can mean big money in 2018

More:12 incredibly useful travel apps you didn’t know about until now

GasBuddy

Planning a road trip this summer? As the name suggests, GasBuddy helps sniff out deals on gasoline and diesel in the U.S. and Canada. Using GPS, the app shows you which nearby stations have the lowest prices – for regular, midgrade and premium fuel — and provides maps if you don’t know the area. View gas stations by distance, price, company, or amenities (like car washes, restaurants, and washrooms).

Obviously, this app is more useful when you’re in a big city – as it doesn’t pay to drive a few miles just to save, say, $2 on a fill up – but it does really add up. The app says you can save $340 a year by telling you exactly where and when to buy gas.

Other features include a GasBuddy Trips feature (using your phone’s sensors, the app can show you events that are costing you fuel economy and dollars); price hike alerts so you can fill up before the increase; deals offered by local convenience stores; and an optional GasBuddy points program (and daily prize draw) to save even more.

It’s not just shopping apps that can save you money, but ones that help you manage your purchases and expenses.

Mint

As with the website it’s based upon, Intuit’s Mint.com Personal Finance app helps you set budgets, track expenses and reach financial goals.

After you link up your bank and credit cards, this handy money management tool lets you see what you’re spending (and saving) through color-coded lists, charts and graphs, plus you can track your bank account and credit card balances in real-time, follow investments (including retirement contributions and balances), and even break out your expenditures by category.

As an opt-in feature, receive alerts when it’s time to pay a bill or if you’ve exceeded your budget or face possible late fees (notified via email or text message). A related feature is a weekly summary email of your money, along with a tab that shows the history of your spending, income, and net worth over time.

As with most other personal finance apps, Mint is password-protected, therefore your data is safe even if your device is lost or stolen.

Office Lens

Microsoft’s Office Lens is like having a flatbed scanner in your pocket: snap a pic of a document, whiteboard, receipt or business card, and it’ll be immediately digitized onto your device.

You can trim each document once imported, plus printed and handwritten text will be automatically recognized (using OCR technology), so you can search for words in images and then copy and edit them, and if desired, imported into Office apps (Word, PowerPoint, OneNote), saved to OneDrive or other cloud storage, or converted into PDF.

With receipts, this is ideal for those who need to submit expenses after business travel. Also consider the ExpenseIt app from Concur.

And if you’re looking to avoid long-distance fees while traveling, consider making calls (or video calls) through apps like Skype, Google Duo, WhatsApp, or FaceTime.

Finally, a couple of suggestions for consuming media at no charge.

Libby

Of course, you’re aware you can buy ebooks and audiobooks for your smartphone or tablet. But did you know you can also borrow them from your local library? Yes, for free, and with no late fees.

So long as you have your library card and the Libby app installed on your device, there are tens of thousands of supported libraries worldwide. It’s not just old classics, but many of the newer New York Times bestsellers, too.

Libby also boasts an impressive built-in ebook reader, graphic novel viewer, and audiobook player.

Spotify

Rather than paying for a monthly subscription service or buying music by track, those who are tight on cash might consider the free version of Spotify — a stellar digital music, podcast, and video streaming service — that gives you instant access to millions of songs, and other content.

For use on smartphones, tablets and computers, simply type in the name of the artist, song, genre or playlist you like. Or browse by Charts, Moods, New Releases, Discover, and other sections.

Upgrading to Spotify Premium gives you access to high-quality streaming of more than 35 million tracks, no ads, support for offline play, and more.

Also consider the free TuneIn Radio and iHeartRadio apps.

Surf Report readers, what money-saving apps do you rely on? Feel free to spread the word by sharing your favorites in the Comments section.

Follow Marc on Twitter: @marc_saltzman. E-mail him at tech@marcsaltzman.com

CONNECTTWEETLINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMORE
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2tGd4iX