Curt Long 
CNMN Collection
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Since it was acquired by Facebook in 2012, Instagram has grown to more than five times the size of Snapchat. Now, it’s coming after YouTube.
At a food-and-influencer-filled event in San Francisco on Wednesday, the company announced a new app for long-form video called IGTV, which will also exist as a tab within Instagram’s existing app. Underscoring just how many people are obsessively spending time on Instagram these days, co-founder Kevin Systrom also revealed that the app now has more than 1 billion monthly active users.
Instagram’s push into longer videos was widely expected, and had been reported before by TechCrunch. And the company scooped itself Wednesday when it pushed out the IGTV announcement before the event, which was delayed by an hour, had even kicked off.
On IGTV, long-form vertical videos can go as long as ten minutes (previously, Instagram videos were limited to one minute). Instagram is making some exceptions for creators with massive audiences: They can post up to 60 minutes of video. IGTV videos will all be prerecorded, not live, although Instagram product manager Ashley Yuki indicated that live video is something the company will be looking at in the future.
Unlike the main Instagram app, which shows video “Stories” as bubbles at the top of the page and displays uploaded videos as part of the regular feed, IGTV videos will appear as a series of rectangular thumbnails at the bottom of a creator’s page. Once you tap on one, the video goes full screen. On the lower left-hand corner of each video are the same three icons you see now on Instagram: a heart, a comment bubble, and a share tool. Tap on those for the same functionality as on the main Instagram app.
Instagram’s approach to IGTV mimics what it did with Boomerang, its standalone app for creating one-second video loops, which also exists within Instagram. For now, IGTV will exist both as its own app and as a feature within the main Instagram app. The decision is also reflective of an overall Facebook strategy; the social network split off its Messenger service from its core app in 2014.
But that two-app strategy could change if long-form video takes off, particularly with teens. Throughout the event, Instagram made clear what was driving its decision to support long-form video: It’s trying to appeal to a younger generation of consumers who are increasingly consuming video on mobile devices. Systrom and Yuki both cited data that show teenagers are watching 40 percent less TV than they did just five years ago.
“The tools we watch video on are old and out of date,” Systrom said onstage at the event. “Think about it—we still watch videos formatted for TV, on a vertical screen.”
Systrom’s death knell for any video that isn’t vertical may be premature. But there’s no doubt smartphones and vertical video have captured a massive segment of the video-watching population. Even subscription services like Netflix now offer vertical video for mobile devices.
‘The tools we watch video on are old and out of date. Think about it—we still watch videos formatted for TV, on a vertical screen.’
Kevin Systrom, Instagram CEO
From both a consumption and a content-creation perspective, IGTV is going directly up against YouTube, which just announced it has more than 1.9 billion monthly logged-in users, and is already well established as a place for creators to distribute long form video. Instagram hopes the platform will be used by already-popular creators, like former Vine star Lele Pons, who has more than 25 million Instagram followers and who also appeared on stage at Wednesday’s event. The app is launching with a group of pre-selected video stars, including publishers like National Geographic, which has more than 88 million followers on Instagram, and brands like Benefit cosmetics. But it will be open to anyone who uses Instagram over the coming weeks.
On Wednesday, IGTV was being sold as a place to watch entertainment, rather than share life updates with a group of close friends. While there won’t be ads on IGTV to start, they’re coming.
“Right now we’re focused on building engagement, and there are no ads in IGTV in day one,” Systrom said to a group of reporters after the event. “But that is a very reasonable place to end up. There will obviously be a way for creators to make a living since they spend their lives doing this.” Ads already run on some creators’ videos on Facebook, and yesterday, the company announced a host of new tools designed to help them make money.
Ads aside, there are still some key differences between IGTV and YouTube as products, the biggest being their approaches to formatting. Due in part to its horizontal formatting, YouTube has successfully become the premiere online destination not for only digital-first creators but also for mainstream music and television content. Its horizontal videos make natural sense for say, music videos, or late-night talk show clips.
YouTube can also provide a personal viewing experience as well as a social one, in that you can watch it on your phone but also cast videos onto a television, or play them on a computer for a group of huddled friends. The same could be said for Twitch, Amazon’s hugely popular live-streaming service for gamers. It’s hard to gather around a phone to watch a vertical video and even more awkward to cast one onto a TV.
Even if Instagram is onto something with long-form vertical video, IGTV will likely face many of the same challenges that YouTube has in the past. While Systrom has indicated he wants creators to make a living off of this, that’s often easier said than done, and the company will still have to figure out how to compensate creators when ads arrive. (Instagram influencers primarily earn an income by partnering with brands.)
Also, crafting and editing a long form video is arguably more labor-intensive than snapping a photo, and creators may want to be compensated directly by Instagram for that work. Over the past year, YouTube has struggled to balance creators’ concerns over diminished advertising income with brands’ unease about their ads running alongside controversial content.
Instagram will also need to carefully decide how it plans to moderate IGTV. So far, the social network has sidestepped many of the concerns over fake news and objectionable content that have plagued its parent company since the 2016 presidential election. (Though Russian propaganda was found to have spread on Instagram as well.)
As YouTube has found, it’s incredibly difficult to effectively moderate longform video. A moderator typically only has several seconds to look at a photo before deciding whether it violates a site’s community guidelines; it’s often impossible to make the same sort snap judgement about a video that’s up to an hour long.
When asked about moderation, Systrom replied that his company is already tasked with handling the user-generated content of over 1 billion people and that it won’t be a huge lift to additionally monitor longform video. He also said that Instagram is hiring more moderators, though he declined to say exactly how many.
If IGTV does become as popular as Instagram bets it will be, then the company may very well have to consider what happens when people use the app not just for cooking tutorials and cats, but for much more controversial content. And if it has any question about how that works, it could look to YouTube. Or, even its own parent company, Facebook.
Testing workout earbuds requires an entirely different set of metrics than regular in-ear headphones. More than anything else, workout earbuds need to stay put. Running is hard enough without constantly flibberting with something in your ear canal.
Other factors that might be big pluses when you’re sitting at your desk are not so great when you’re in motion. Excellent noise filtering is less attractive when you might get mowed down by a cyclist. And mediocre sound quality can be forgivable in this case, too. While I enjoy a wide variety in my music while cooking, cleaning, or working, my exercise playlists tend to resemble a frat party circa 2005.
All of these conflicting design needs mean that fitness-focused headphones can be hard to get right. Take, for instance, the Sennheiser CX Sport headphones, the latest addition to the company’s acclaimed CX line. They feature Sennheiser’s top-notch sound in a tough, lightweight, splash-proof package, and they’re not bad at all. But in my opinion, if you’re looking for headphones that are exclusively for working out, you might find better ones for the price.
Inside the box, you get three sets of ear fins, four sets of ear adapters, a pocket-sized neoprene storage pouch, a cable clip, and a USB cable. The headphones themselves are what you might call a wired wireless set, with a cable that runs around the back of your neck and a small volume control set on the wire leading to the right bud.
Most workout headphones have some variation of this ear fin design. They don’t catch the wind like a loop does, and it’s easier to wear hats and sunglasses when you don’t have over-ear buds taking up already-limited real estate. Finding the right set of fins and tips took some experimentation, but after two or three tries, I eventually found the right combo.
To fit the buds, I pushed the tips in my ear canal and then twisted to lock the rubber fins into my ear folds. Over two weeks, I wore them while running, hiking, walking my dogs, and climbing at the gym. You could say they were rock-solid (ha!). Once I had the fit figured out, nothing I did could shake them.
They weigh only a little over 15 grams, so they were barely noticeable in terms of weight. And the foam tips did an incredible job at filtering out ambient noise. I ran past a pavilion filled with people barbecuing, partying, and playing music, and didn’t hear a thing. Cyclists almost nailed me, but luckily, I just stuck the buds back in my ears and didn’t hear whatever vulgarities they said as they were passing.
The headphones feature Bluetooth 4.2, Qualcomm apt-X, and apt-X Low Latency, all of which purport to deliver high-quality audio over a stellar wireless connection. The connection was excellent. My rock gym has a 60-foot climbing ramp, and I was able to leave my phone at the base of the ramp and do circuits while listening to podcasts without it cutting out.
Sennheiser states that the CX Sports have a six-hour run time, and with an hour or two of working out and walking the dogs every day, I needed to recharge them every three to four days. This isn’t as long a runtime as other headphones I’ve tested, but I could also pop them into the charger for ten minutes or so to get enough power to last through a 30-40-minute run.
Their waterproofing is rated at IPX4, which offers splash protection for five minutes. I briefly contemplated, then decided against wearing them in the shower to give the seals a rigorous test. But I did wear them in my sweaty ears and against my sweaty neck, and I did get caught in a brief, whirlwind summer rainstorm. The headphones kept right on trucking.
I also really liked the included neoprene pouch, which is much nicer than many other pouches you might get for free with headphones.
I listened to podcasts and everything from Missy Elliott to George Strait, Queen, Pearl Jam, and electronic music like CHVRCHES. The sound quality is excellent, especially in the upper registers. Violins and the ringing of strings strumming sound crisp and clear. I did find the bass presence to be lacking, as compared to two other sets of workout buds that I’m currently testing. But if your workout playlist contains 80 to 100 percent less Lil Jon than mine does, then you might not notice.
The CX Sports have the capacity to connect to two devices simultaneously, which sounds like a convenience but usually worked against me. They connect automatically to any device with Bluetooth capabilities when you turn them on. Both video chats on my computer and calls on my iPhone dropped out when I had both devices connected simultaneously.
I also forgot they were connected to my laptop on Every. Single. Run. I walked out my front door, ready to crank it to the dulcet tones of My Favorite Murder, the headphones urgently and repeatedly notified me that they’d lost connection until I stopped to turn them off and restart them out of range.
All in all, the CX Sport do a very decent job of pulling double duty as workout headphones and everyday ones, if you can remember which device is connected. They filter out noise well and stay put, and if you forget to recharge them, you can get enough of a charge for a decent run while you’re finding and tying your shoes.
But, if you’re looking for dedicated workout headphones and you, too, crib your workout playlists from DJs at Miami nightclubs, you can find others at this price that might serve you better. These are very good headphones that succeed in the areas where fitness-focused models need to excel, but they’re just not for me.
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In many US cities, ride-sharing is a commodity. Both drivers and riders pull up Uber and Lyft interchangeably on their phones, weighing which to use based on price and wait time.
That’s a problem for ride-sharing companies. In an industry where new apps like Via, Juno, and Gett are coming online regularly, riders have myriad choices. Uber and Lyft can’t keep undercutting each other and everyone else to win riders forever; eventually, they’ll have to charge enough to retain drivers and also turn a profit, competing on the strength of their products and their brands. Both companies wish to be the one app we open every time we need to go anywhere. Lyft and Uber are attempting to compete for this alpha slot by improving their technology, boosting the quality of the service, and providing the most competitive prices.
But to become the one platform that people trust with their transportation needs, these companies will need to lock their riders in. That’s why Lyft’s new subscription service is so interesting.
Lyft has been testing versions of the plan since December, and last month it began rolling out the tests more broadly. “You’ll subscribe to a Lyft plan like you would subscribe to Netflix or a Spotify Premium plan,” president and cofounder John Zimmer explained when I visited the company’s San Francisco headquarters recently. He didn’t say how many people were enrolled in the program but pointed out that it was now being tested in every market.
The subscription program is still in the early stages, but it’s easy to see how Lyft would benefit. Indeed, many startups have adopted the subscription model to form a durable bond with sporadic users. “Spotify, Amazon, and others have employed ‘land grab’ strategies like this to change behavior and build new habits, as a means of forging loyalty in a moment of disruptive change,” says Robbie Kellman Baxter, consultant and author of The Membership Economy, a book that addresses subscription businesses.
Many startups, like Netflix and Spotify, have adopted the subscription modelto form a durable bond with sporadic users.
Subscription business models are very popular among investors, and that could be important as Lyft prepares for an initial public offering. “Wall Street loves them,” says Daniel Ives, the head of technology research for GBH Insights. He calls this approach a “golden business model” because it locks in repeat customers over time. “This is something that, as the company goes from private to public, would be looked on very favorably,” he says.
In recent years, digital startups have launched subscriptions in nearly every industry. You can get monthly razor deliveries and weekly dinner supplies. For $10 a month, cinephiles can watch a movie every day with MoviePass. You can listen to music with Spotify, get free delivery (and just about everything else) with Amazon Prime, and take fitness classes with ClassPass.
But ride-sharing subscription businesses have challenges that other industries, like software, do not. “Up until recently, most of the subscription-oriented businesses were for digital offerings—where variable costs were negligible,” Kellman Baxter says. “But with rides, there is a real cost for each ride.” Drivers must be paid enough to make it worth their while, regardless of the cost to riders. “The biggest concern is going to be coming up with pricing that doesn’t bankrupt them but is still compelling,” she says.
Since 2016, Lyftand Uber have experimented with membership passes—testing similar, simple programs. A rider pays an up-front fee and then gets reduced-cost rides for a month. (Prices and services vary according to the individual market.) But two years in, these passes remain experimental and hard to search out. Riders discover they are eligible through the app, and they can only try it for one month.
While Uber has no immediate plans to move the program out of its testing phase, Lyft’s subscription program takes the concept much farther. Right now, riders have two options. They can subscribe to the “All-Access Plan” for $299 per month and get 30 rides of up to $15. If a ride costs more than $15, a rider will be charged the difference. Or, they can subscribe to the “Commute Plan” and pay $3.99 month in exchange for 45 Lyft rides between work and home, set at one personalized price.
One early tester, a Chicago rider named Rachel Morrison who is a competitive intelligence analyst for the company Arity, blogged about her experience. “The deal was no joke,” she wrote. She payed a $135 monthly subscription fee for 30 ride using Lyft Line, the carpooling service, that cost up to $10 each.
In Morrison’s case, at least, the subscription had the intended loyalty-generating side effects. Morrison blogged that after signing up, she buried her Uber app in a folder on her iPhone’s last screen and moved her Lyft app to a prominent place on the opening screen so she’d remember to check it first every time. She also reported that she’d begun to use the service more, and had opted for taking a Lyft Line over public transportation to commute to work more often.
A subscription business also sets Lyft up for a future where its riders use more forms of transportation, like renting bikes and scooters, and turn to the Lyft app to figure out when to use a car and when to take the bus. Zimmer plans to expand this even further in a bid to be a full replacement for car ownership. “If we have a rental car program now that has tens of thousands of vehicles for drivers, we could potentially offer that to passengers,” Zimmer told me.
A subscription business also sets Lyft up for a future where itsriders use more forms of transportation, like renting bikes andscooters
Ride-share loyalty could help these other revenue streams thrive: If riders are opening the app nearly every day to call the Lyft Line, for example, they’re more likely to discover and experiment with these new services. But changing behavior is hard. When it comes to ride-sharing, most people are looking for the best price, and it will take a lot to train them to stop searching for something better.
I checked in with Morrison, the woman who’d blogged about her experience with Lyft’s membership, to see if she was still using the service. She loved it the first month, she told me. But rather like a gym membership, she didn’t use it as much the second month, and so she let her subscription lapse.
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, last week, 125 mostly white, mostly male, business-card-bearing attendees crowded into a brightly lit ballroom to consider “mobility.” That’s the buzzword for a hazy vision of how tech in all forms—including smartphones, credit cards, and autonomous vehicles— will combine with the remains of traditional public transit to get urbanites where they need to go.
There was a fizz in the air at the Meeting of the Minds session, advertised as a summit to prepare cities for the “autonomous revolution.” In the US, most automotive research happens within an hour of that ballroom, and attendees knew that development of “level 4” autonomous vehicles—designed to operate in limited locations, but without a human driver intervening—is accelerating.
Susan Crawford (@scrawford) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.
The session raised profound questions for American cities. Namely, how to follow the money to ensure that autonomous vehicles don’t drive cities to financial ruin. The advent of driverless cars will likely mean that municipalities will have to make do with much, much less. Driverless cars, left to their own devices, will be fundamentally predatory: taking a lot, giving little, and shifting burdens to beleaguered local governments. It would be a good idea to slam on the brakes while cities work through their priorities. Otherwise, we risk creating municipalities that are utterly incapable of assisting almost anyone with anything—a series of sprawling relics where American cities used to be.
The problem, as speaker Nico Larco, director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, explained, is that many cities balance their budgets using money brought in by cars: gas taxes, vehicle registration fees, traffic tickets, and billions of dollars in parking revenue. But driverless cars don’t need these things: Many will be electric, will never get a ticket, and can circle the block endlessly rather than park. Because these sources account for somewhere between 15 and 50 percent of city transportation revenue in America, as autonomous vehicles become more common, huge deficits are ahead.
Driverless cars, left to their own devices, will be fundamentallypredatory: taking a lot, giving little, and shifting burdens tobeleaguered local governments.
Cities know this: They’re beginning to look at fees that could be charged for accessing pickup and dropoff zones, taxes for empty seats, fees for parking fleets of cars, and other creative assessments that might make up the difference.
But many states, urged on by auto manufacturers, won’t let cities take these steps. Several have already acted to block local policies regulating self-driving cars. Michigan, for example, does not allow Detroit, a short drive away from that Ann Arbor ballroom, to make any rules about driverless cars.
This loss of city revenue comes at a harrowing time. Thousands of local public entities are already struggling financially following the Great Recession. Dozens are stuck with enormous debt loads—usually pension overhangs—that force them to devote unsustainable portions of their incoming revenue to servicing debt. Cities serve as the front lines of every pressing social problem the country is battling: homelessness, illiteracy, inadequate health care, you name it. They don’t have any resources to lose.
The rise of autonomous vehicles will put struggling sections of cities at a particular disadvantage. Unemployment may be low as a national matter, but it is far higher in isolated, majority-minority parts of cities. In those sharply-segregated areas, where educational and health outcomes are routinely far worse than in majority white areas, the main barrier to employment is access to transport. Social mobility depends on being able to get from point A to point B at a low cost.
Take Detroit, a city where auto insurance is prohibitively expensive and transit has been cut back, making it hard for many people to get around. “The bus is just not coming,” Mark de la Vergne, Detroit’s Chief of Mobility Innovation, told the gathering last week, adding that most people in the City of Detroit make less than $57,000 a year and can’t afford a car. De la Vergne told the group in the Ann Arbor ballroom about a low-income Detroit resident who wanted a job but couldn’t even get to the interview without assistance in the form of a very expensive Lyft ride.
That story is, in a nutshell, the problem for America. We have systematically underinvested in public transit: less than 1 percent of our GDP goes to transit. Private services are marketed as complements to public ways of getting around, but in reality these services are competitive. Although economic growth is usually accompanied by an uptick in public transit use, ridership is down in San Francisco, where half the residents use Uber or Lyft. Where ridership goes down, already-low levels of investment in public transit will inevitably get even lower.
Although economic growth is usually accompanied by an uptick in publictransit use, ridership is down in San Francisco, where half theresidents use Uber or Lyft.
When driverless cars take the place of Uber or Lyft, cities will be asked to take on the burden of paying for low-income residents to travel, with whatever quarters they can find lying around in city couches. Result: Cities will be even less able to serve all their residents with public spaces and high-quality services. Even rich people won’t like that.
It will take great power and great leadership to head off this grim future. Here’s an idea, from France: There, the government charges 3 percent on the total gross salaries of all employees of companies with more than 11 employees, and the proceeds fund a local transport authority. (The tax is levied on the employer not the employee, and in return, employees receive subsidized or free travel on public transport.)
At the Ann Arbor meeting, Andreas Mai, vice president of market development at Keolis, said that the Bordeaux transit authority charges a flat fee of about $50 per month for unlimited access to all forms of transit (trams, trains, buses, bikes, ferries, park and ride). The hard-boiled US crowd listening to him audibly gasped at that figure. Ridership is way up, the authority has brought many more buses into service, and it is recovering far more of its expenditures than any comparable US entity. Mai said it required a very strong leader to pull together 28 separate transit systems and convince them to hand over their budgets to the local authority. But it happened.
It’s all just money. We have it; we just need to allocate it better. That will mean viewing public transit as a crucial element of well-being in America. And, in the meantime, we need to press Pause on aggressive plans to deploy driverless cars in cities across the United States.
The AT&T and Time Warner merger could mean plenty — or nothing — to consumers, depending on a federal judge’s decision. USA TODAY
The board of Twenty-First Century Fox is expected Wednesday to consider Comcast’s $65 billion bid for a collection of Fox entertainment assets the media company is looking to sell.
That proposal surpasses one made in December by The Walt Disney Co., which offered $52.4 billion in stock and cash for the assets, including Fox’s TV and movie studios. But Comcast made its own offer, about a 20 percent premium to Disney’s, last week after a federal judge approved AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner.
The decision sent a signal that regulators may look favorably on consolidation of film and TV content by media companies also in the business of distributing content and providing broadband connections.
Last week, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled Fox said it would “carefully review and consider the Comcast proposal” and it is expected to be one of the topics Wednesday at a previously scheduled board meeting. The Fox board, which includes Murdoch and his sons Lachlan and James, agreed to Disney’s offer last year. It could decide to approve Comcast’s bid. That would give Disney five days to up its own offer.
More: NBC-owner Comcast offers $65 billion to buy the Fox studios, setting up fight with Disney
More: AT&T can proceed with $85 billion bid for Time Warner, judge rules, paving way for landmark deal
More: Expect these Netflix rivals thanks to the AT&T-Time Warner merger
Wall Street analysts expect a heated bidding war between Comcast and Disney for Fox’s assets, which also include Fox’s 30 percent share of streaming service Hulu and a 39 percent stake in U.K.-based pay-TV and broadband provider Sky.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts has stated interest in the Fox studios’ content and its international assets, which also include Mumbai-headquartered media company Star India Star.
“We believe our proposed acquisition of Fox would not only enhance our domestic positions in distribution and content but would take us to global reach and additional growth in these businesses,” he said last week.
Fox’s movies and TV content — films such as Avatar and series such as The Simpsons — are vital to Disney, too. CEO Robert Iger has said they would enhance its planned subscription video service, expected to begin streaming in 2019.
“Disney can still prioritize direct-to-consumer initiatives without Fox, but its propositions to consumers and creators of content would be stronger with Fox but weaker without those businesses,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, in a note to investors this week. He downgraded Disney shares from a Hold to Sell. “For this reason, the absence of a Fox transaction would be subjectively negative for Disney.”
The Comcast-Disney bidding war for Fox is just one of a wave of deals expected in the wake of the AT&T-Time Warner merger approval as longtime media and entertainment companies seek to strengthen their own positions countering newer, tech-savvy players such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and Google.
These machinations will mean a lot for consumers as media companies bolster their content collections for even better streaming services. “All of these deals are still just the beginning. They are the ones on the table now,” said Jim Nail, principal analyst for research firm Forrester. “I fully expect to see a whole lot more happening before the end of the year.”
Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.
IBM shows off an artificial intelligence that can debate a human and it does it surprisingly well. USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO – IBM computers famously won at “Jeopardy!” and beat world-class chess masters. Now, they’re taking on human debaters.
At a media gathering here Monday afternoon, a black, artificial intelligence-infused IBM computer with a screen for a face more than held its own debating seasoned human debaters.
In one debate faceoff, IBM’s “Project Debater” AI computer made the case in favor of the government subsidizing space exploration against Israeli debate champion Noa Ovadia, who took the opposite position.
Ovadia was judged the winner by the crowd of journalists in “delivering” the argument – the computer’s attempts at humor didn’t measure up to the personality of a human – but IBM outscored Ovadia handily on the question of “knowledge enrichment.”
IBM’s computer fared better in a second debate persuading the crowd that telemedicine is worth pursuing against another human debater, Dan Zafrir. Again, the human prevailed on delivery, but this time only by a slim margin, and the computer was a big winner in knowledge enrichment. And at least nine audience members’ minds on the topic changed to the point of view of the computer.
The debaters, both human and computer, were not made aware of the topics in advance. Each side had four minutes to make an opening statement, followed by a four-minute rebuttal and a two-minute closing summary. The computer went first each time.
The San Francisco event was the first time anyone outside of the company was able to witness a live IBM debate between a human and its AI system. But IBM researchers have been conducting debates in the lab for awhile, on such topics as “Should income taxes exist?”, “Will autonomous cars help safety?” and “Should antibiotics be used in our food supply?”
Through the IBM Cloud, the computer scanned billions of sentences to generate a coherent and persuasive position on the various topics. The machine then listens to its opponent’s speech and generates what IBM claims is a spontaneous compelling rebuttal, exhibiting a type of argumentation that until recently was simply out of reach for the machines.
“We believe that mastering language is a fundamental frontier that AI has to cross,” IBM Research Director Arvind Krishna says. “There’s aspects like speech recognition, speech to text that AI already does and does quite well. But that is not the same as listening comprehension or constructing a speech that can either be spoken or written or understanding the nuances of claims, meaning what supports a proposition or what may be against a proposition.”
Tech’s biggest companies – IBM, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook – are among those engaged in a high stakes race for AI supremacy.
But the ability for a computer to not only persuasively compete in a debate against a live person, but to actually win the argument, is only likely to feed into fears expressed by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking that artificial intelligence could spell doom for human civilization.
Giving a physical shape to those fears, researchers at MIT used AI to create a psychopathic persona named Norman, named for the creepy character in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller “Psycho,” using disturbing image captions found on Reddit.
“I take it in a different way,” Krishna says of AI. “The sheer rate and pace of technology today has made a huge amount of information thrown at us from all kinds of sources. … Is there something that I trust that can give me both sides of a position? … Here are the five pros, well-written, and here are the five cons, well-written. It lets me form my own opinion.”
Krishna says the computer debater has made great progress the last couple of years. Two years ago, debating points were all over the map, with the computer able to make one or two really brilliant statements and five or 10 inane statements. By the end of last year, the computer began to hold its own, he says.
One key factor is not just the persuasive arguments the machine may make, but how those points are delivered. IBM used a New York actress as the voice of the computer.
“Just like in real debates, humor has to also play a role, not just a well-crafted logical argument,” Krishna says. The computer “will never do so well as when the human debater can bring in a personal anecdote or personal experience. It doesn’t know how to react to that today.”
Project Debater’s idea of a joke: My blood would boil if I had blood.
So what are possible real-life use cases for computers that can debate? Krishna mentions legislators who might be debating critical issues, or lawyers preparing a brief. And students or business executives might also make use of AI debating to help inform an opinion.
Project Debater earned a fan in debater Ovadia. “I’m blown away,” she said. “The technology is so impressive in terms of how many really human cognitive capabilities it’s able to do simultaneously.”
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
Facebook is meeting with GOP leaders to discuss alleged news bias. Elizabeth Keatinge has more. Buzz60
WASHINGTON — Facebook is sending a signal to Capitol Hill that it’s taking the integrity of its social network seriously during the U.S. primary election season.
The social networking giant hosted 250 or so media, civil servants and Facebook community members at an event here Tuesday, less than one mile from the White House and a mile and a half from Congress.
The location is more than symbolic as Facebook finds itself trying to appease lawmakers threatening stiffer regulations after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which as many as 87 million users’ data was sold to a political ad targeting firm during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Also riling lawmakers: the ability of Russian operatives to use online ads during and after the 2016 presidential election to amplify existing divisions in the country, and recent reports that Facebook shared data with third parties including device makers such as Apple and Samsung.
More: Tech companies feel pressure to ‘gobble up’ more of our data for ads, app developer warns
More: Facebook now thinks 87 million had data shared with Cambridge Analytica
One of the main messages aimed to be delivered to Capitol Hill: Facebook is taking serious steps to protect its network, flush with 2.2 billion users, from misinformation and other political ploys on the platform.
“In retrospect, we were too slow to anticipate and build teams and tools around each of the forms of misuse,” said Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, who said he is here for a three-day itinerary of meetings with lawmakers and others to talk about the company’s progress.
He called 2018 “an incredibly important year for the company for social media for the internet and democracy.”
Facebook plans to double the number of people working on safety and security to 20,000 by the end of the year, a goal the company announced late last year as the revelations of divisive political ads placed by fake accounts emerged.
Last month, Facebook launched an online ad archive aimed at preventing bad actors from interfering in the midterm elections. Advertisers must now verify their identity and location before buying ads for political candidates or about political issues, and Facebook and Instagram users can see these political ads in an online archive.
But these steps, which Facebook has vowed will help it counter interference in the U.S. midterm elections, have been dogged by complaints.
Some candidates have found themselves unable to place legitimate ads on Facebook as they await the verification of their identities. A Democratic candidate for a U.S. House seat in California found herself the target of a negative Facebook ad campaign with none of the expected archive disclosures. News organizations, including USA TODAY, objected to the rules, which would also apply political messaging labels on sponsored posts that news organizations bought to amplify the reach of an article or video.
Scrutiny over Facebook policies that allowed outside companies to access user information haven’t abated in the wake of the Zuckerberg’s lengthy Congressional hearings on the Cambridge Analytica leak. Lawmakers recently raised more questions about recent reports the company shared, without explicit consent, access to data of Facebook users’ friends with device makers such as Apple, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung.
On Tuesday, as Facebook executives made their case, two of the key players in the Cambridge Analytica scandal — whistleblower Christopher Wylie and University of Cambridge researcher Aleksandr Kogan — spoke to two separate groups in Washington.
Executives have tried to assure lawmakers they’re focused keeping the platform safe from political manipulation, while keeping open the possibility that they’ll fail.
Facebook’s goal is to try to prevent what bad actors did in 2016 “from happening again on our platform, but also try to stay one step ahead of what new tactics they may be trying to use in 2018,” said Katie Harbath, the company’s director for global politics and government outreach.
“There is never going to be a point in time where I think we are going to be able to say we have stopped all the bad activity,” Harbath said.
More: Facebook launches disclosures for political ads and online ad archive
More: What Facebook told Congress: It even knows when you need to charge your phone
More: Facebook denies abuse of user privacy after report it shared info without consent
More: Thousands of Facebook ads bought by Russians to fool U.S. voters released by Congress
Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.
Chicago-based child psychologist Dr. Louis Kraus says the ongoing separation of immigrant children from their parents along the US-Mexican border could have serious and long-standing medical effects on the children. (June 18) AP
SAN FRANCISCO – In the largest single fundraiser ever on Facebook, a Silicon Valley couple has drummed up millions of dollars from tens of thousands of people to reunite immigrant parents with their children.
As of Tuesday evening, more than 145,000 people had contributed $6 million to a Facebook fundraiser set up four days ago by Charlotte and Dave Willner, whose efforts to aid families separated at the border struck a nerve with the American public.
Now, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is urging people to contribute even more money to organizations on the front lines in the escalating border crisis.
In a Facebook post Tuesday, Zuckerberg took aim at the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, calling for donations to organizations such as the Texas Civil Rights Project and RAICES, a Texas nonprofit that helps families with legal advice and translation services.
“I’ve donated to them and I encourage you to as well,” wrote Zuckerberg, who launched a personal fundraiser for the Texas Civil Rights Project. Zuckerberg and Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg also donated to the Willners’ campaign.
“We need to stop this policy right now,” Zuckerberg wrote, his comments coming as a defiant Trump insisted Congress come up with comprehensive immigration legislation and Senate Republicans pledged to pass a bill ending child separations at the border.
The Facebook CEO has squared off with Trump before on building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that shields from deportation nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
All of the proceeds from the Willners’ Facebook campaign “reunite an immigrant parent with their child” and benefits RAICES. Facebook, which launched fundraisers in 2017, waived fees last fall for nonprofit fundraisers.
“It’s clearly resonating with a lot of people, and we’re just glad we could help,” Charlotte Willner told USA TODAY.
Around the time on Monday night when the fundraiser sailed past $3 million, the couple calculated that $4,000 was rolling in every minute. It now has a target of raising $6 million.
Reached Monday night, Jenny Hixon of RAICES said the outpouring of support and money have “absolutely blown us away.”
“Our fundraising infrastructure is spartan. We have one development person on staff, which is me … and I’m also responsible for overseeing our shelter, volunteer operations, media, community outreach and refugee resettlement,” she said. “We’re very much a boots on the ground kind of organization.”
RAICES will share its plans for the funds and let people know how they can get involved on Wednesday, said Hixon, who is the organization’s director of outreach, education and development.
“We’ve rapidly reached out to other organizations doing complimentary work in Texas to set up a network to cover all the federal courts, develop a database with all separated families and a pro bono referral network to ensure representation for every family,” she said. “This feels outrageously ambitious, but we kind of feel like this is the moment to do the big things.”
Progressive nonprofits have seen a surge of activism that’s been breaking records in activists engaged and money raised since Trump’s election, says Brian Young, executive director of Action Network, which provides digital tools to these nonprofits, including the Women’s March and RAICES.
“But what has happened over the last few days has been more than anything we’ve seen so far,” Young said. “This has broken through in an extraordinary way and will have reverberations for a long time to come.”
Americans, who were searching for ways to speak up about the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, seized on the fundraiser because “this is something that feels very tangible that people can do,” says Elizabeth Dale, assistant professor of nonprofit leadership at Seattle University.
It’s part of a new pattern of “rage giving,” among progressives who, after the election, began flooding nonprofits with donations, particularly on women’s issues, climate change and immigration, Dale said.
Facebook has found its sweet spot giving Americans easy ways to channel their giving, particularly in times of national or international crisis. And the viral nature of the giant social network has fueled successful mega fundraising campaigns such as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
“What you have here is a salient issue, you have a platform that makes it easy to give and you have amplification through social media networks often from people to other people who think like them, so you get a lot of people signing on very quickly,” Dale said of the Willners’ campaign.
Charlotte and Dave Willner were early Facebook employees who now work at Pinterest and Airbnb. Alarmed by reports that more than 2,000 children had been separated from their parents, Willner set up the fundraiser Saturday morning.
The initial goal was to raise $1,500 to cover the bond fees for one parent so the parent could retrieve his or her child from government custody while waiting for court. But then the fundraiser went viral and private donors began matching funds raised.
“Regardless of political party, so many of us are distraught over children being separated from their parents at the border,” the Willners said in a statement. “We can’t all be on the frontlines to help these families, but by supporting RAICES, we’re able to do something that just takes less than a minute, and collectively have an impact.”
Late last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that nearly 2,000 children had been separated from their parents in a six-week period as part of its “zero tolerance” policy. The Trump administration is cracking down on adult immigrants who cross the border illegally by criminally prosecuting them. Children can’t be held in criminal detention, so they are being separated from their parents.
A seven-minute tape obtained by ProPublica, in which children separated from their parents and held at a detention center wail and call for “Mami” or “Papi,” fueled the public outcry Monday.
Former first lady Laura Bush and America’s other first ladies joined that outcry.
“Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” Melania Trump’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, told CNN Sunday. “She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws but also a country that governs with heart.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defended the Trump administration’s policy Monday. “We have to do our job. We will not apologize for doing our job,” she said. “This administration has a simple message – If you cross the border illegally, we will prosecute you.”
Some of the comments on the Facebook fundraiser were supportive of the administration policy.
“Perhaps it’s time for the parents of these innocent children (to) do the right thing by not putting themselves in this situation,” one person wrote.
Hixon sees the situation very differently.
“The funding we are receiving will save lives. It will keep people from being deported to unsafe countries,” she said. “It speaks to the outrage the cruel policies at the border have provoked. It honestly gives us hope in what has felt like a very dark time.”
More: Does the Trump administration have a policy of separating families at the border?
More: Detention crisis: Trump defends ‘zero-tolerance’ immigration
More: Amid outrage, Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen ‘will not apologize’ for separating families
More: Fact check: Viral image of child in a cage was not detained by ICE
Newspapers and magazines do this thing that drives Detroiters crazy. Doesn’t matter the headline. Maybe Detroit is coming back, maybe crime is falling, maybe a few neighborhoods are seeing a resurgence, maybe it’s all a bit more complicated than a few statistics make it seem. But editors generally use a particular photo to symbolize the city: the gorgeous but abandoned and ill-used Central Depot.
The station feels like a symbol because it is. When it opened in 1913, the grand 18-story office tower, its cavernous waiting room fronted by looming Corinthian columns, was the tallest rail station in the world. Two hundred trains left each day, bound for New York City and Boston and Chicago and West Virginia and Canada. In the station’s heyday, from the 1920s to the ’50s, Detroit was the fourth-most populous city in the US, fed by influxes of immigrants who came to work for the mighty auto industry that called the city home.
Eventually, that industry helped put a stake in the primacy of American rail travel, and thus in the beaux-arts station. By 1967, the owners of the depot had closed its restaurant, main entrance, and large parts of its main waiting room—revenue couldn’t support the maintenance costs. The last Amtrak train pulled away in 1988. That and the general decay of Detroit, which, through years of intense segregation and job loss, saw its population shrink by more than 60 percent between the mid-20th century and the early aughts. Squatters have stripped the abandoned structure of everything worthwhile, graffiti and broken glass litter the floors, and Central Station has become a central figure in the slideshow of Detroit ruin porn.
For locals who have watched businesses slowly up their investments in the city, this feels unfair. “In Detroit, because there’s been some progress, and because part of Detroit’s problem is that it’s a belligerent place, there’s this almost revulsion over this building,” says Erik Gordon, who studies the automotive industry at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “It’s the picture you keep seeing and Detroiters say, ‘Oh, no, no, show a photo of this incubator. Show a photo of our airport—there’s a great airport here. Or show a photo of our new basketball or hockey arenas.’”
Detroiters might soon grow more enthusiastic about photos of Michigan Central. Today Ford officially announced it would purchase and restore the station, transforming it into the centerpiece of a new 2,500-employee autonomous and electric vehicle testing and research center by 2022. (About 2,500 more employees will be added later.)
This is a savvy PR move, sure, but it’s also a major investment with a big message. Sayeth Ford: We’re not Midwestern fuddy-duddies anymore. We’re a forward-thinking, get-around-anyhow-anyway sort of transportation network, in competition with another big Detroit automaker, sure, but also with Uber and Waymo and all the Silicon Valley tech giants.
“Palo Alto is about moving bits. We’re about moving people,” said Jim Hackett, the company’s CEO said during a Tuesday morning press conference, in front of the station’s stained edifice now draped with blue Ford banners. “This can be our Sand Hill Road.”
The purchase and restoration is symbolic on a few levels. It says, first, that Ford is here for Detroit. The 115-year-old company is actually based in Dearborn, up the road, but this will be an important incursion into the revitalizing downtown Corktown area. The purchase feels momentous for long-time (and long-frustrated) Detroit residents.
Should Ford realize its vision, the office will be a big deal. For one thing, the updated station will be the centerpiece of a big, $1 billion Ford Detroit campus. (Some expect the redevelopment of the depot to add mightily to that price tag.) In the past year, the carmaker has also purchased a few more acres of vacant land and empty factories nearby, the bones of what it says will be a 1.2-million-square-foot center, with 300,000 square feet already pledged as community and retail space.
Ford hopes this move will attract high-caliber young employees enthusiastic about living in an up and coming city. Plus, it plans to move workers currently working on urban mobility issues, including autonomous and electric vehicles, to Detroit, which officials say will give them new perspectives.
The move also signals that Ford is here for cities in general. In the last year, the company has launched a series of technology products aimed at city governments that promote big data, and the ‘cloud and mobile solutions that help collect and process all the information into something useful. This approach, says Ford, could fix the ills of modern urban places. (It has also struggled to generate a profit).
Just this month, the company launched what it’s calling “City of Tomorrow Challenges in Miami and Pittsburgh. The goal of these community competitions is to find new solutions and business opportunities within urban transportation networks. New sorts of bus stops, pavement, bike lanes—the company (and its partner cities) say they want to hear it all.
And the purchase says, yes, Ford is willing to invest money in the future of transportation—particularly autonomous vehicles. The automaker has been viewed as a laggard, with little visible public road testing or major engineering talent hirings, even as rivals GM, Tesla, Uber, and Waymo racked up testing miles. But in early 2017, Ford sunk $1 billion in the Pittsburgh-based company Argo AI, a startup stocked with robotics experts that’s working to develop an entire “virtual system” for an eventual Ford self-driving car.
Since it dropped all that dough on Argo, the company has committed to a “slow-er but steady” approach to self-driving cars. As General Motors ramps up for a 2019 deployment of autonomous vehicles, Ford has targeted 2021. The AV train left the station a few years ago, but Ford seems to believe it has found a new way to get onboard.
WASHINGTON — Aleksandr Kogan — developer of the app that allowed Cambridge Analytica to collect the data of millions of Facebook users — warned Tuesday that tech companies are under pressure to “gobble up” more personal information on consumers.
“They are under enormous financial pressure to gobble up more and more of our data so they can deliver better and better personalized ads,” Kogan told a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee.
“And the dirty secret in the industry is that these ads right now are just not that effective,” Kogan said. “Not useless, but not as effective as we’d want. So companies want more, not less, data, so they can do better.”
Kogan has been blamed by Facebook for inappropriately sharing user data with Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm. Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by the Trump campaign, used the information to target ads to Facebook users during the 2016 presidential election. Kogan has said that he didn’t do anything different from other app developers in collecting data from Facebook users.
Kogan, a social psychologist and lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, paid Facebook users in the U.S. to take an online survey. They agreed to download his app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” which collected personal data from about 270,000 of the app users and millions of their unknowing friends. Facebook has estimated that about 87 million of its users were affected.
Kogan said he now understands why people are angry, though he added that some of their concerns about how their data was used are “science fiction.”
“People may feel angry and violated if they think their data may have been used as part of a mind control effort — that somehow Cambridge Analytica had figured out their inner demons, weaponized the Internet and used this ability to dupe them into voting in a particular way when otherwise they would not have,” he said. “This is science fiction.”
Kogan said the data collected by his app “is entirely ineffective for micro-targeting” an ad to try to influence individual people.
“There is value to the data if you’re trying to understand the general trends over big groups of people,” he said. “But for any one person, it simply doesn’t work.”
However, “people may still feel angry and violated by the fact that their data could have been and was accessed by others,” Kogan said.
“I think this emotional reaction is entirely understandable and begs the question of how do we tackle the broader issue of data privacy,” he said.
Kogan said tech companies need to give consumers clearer, more detailed information about how their data will be used so that people can decide whether to allow their information to be shared.
“People need to know and appreciate both the benefits and dangers of sharing their data with the Facebooks and Googles of the world,” Kogan testified.
He apologized for his part in the privacy breach scandal that has tarnished Facebook’s reputation and sparked a data privacy debate stretching from Silicon Valley to the U.S. Capitol. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified about the privacy breach before congressional committees in the House and Senate in April.
“What is clear to me now is that i made a mistake in not appreciating how people would feel about us using their data and, for that, I’m deeply sorry,” Kogan said.
Google is preparing to plug a potential privacy leak with its Google Home smart speakers and Chromecast television devices that could reveal your location.
The vulnerability was discovered by the Tripwire security firm. Researcher Craig Young blogged that the problem stems from fundamental design choices that he says are prevalent among Internet of Things devices.
One such issue, Young writes, is that such “devices rarely require authentication for connections received on a local network.”
Although the Home app you use to configure Google Home and Chromecast performs most actions using Google’s cloud, Young says that some tasks are carried out using a local HTTP server. And that’s where a remote intruder or scammer might be able to break through.
Google said it’s fixing the vulnerability, which security researcher Brian Krebs first reported on. In a statement emailed to USA TODAY, Google said that, “Security is an ongoing focus for our teams. We’re aware of the report and will be rolling out a fix in the coming weeks.”
For your location to get compromised, you would have to visit a specific website on your computer at home and stay on that website for a minute or so, possibly several minutes. If the victim opens a link while connected to the same Wi-Fi or wired network as a Chromecast or Home device, the hacker could access the user’s location, said Young.
Young wrote that in his own tests, “I was not only able to hijack the screen attached to my Chromecast but I was actually able to use data extracted from the devices to determine their physical location with astonishing accuracy.“
In other words, until Google’s fix is in place that is too close for comfort, and you should be extra mindful if something looks fishy.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
YouTube’s revamped music subscription service bases its recommendations on your viewing history. How does it perform? Jefferson Graham reviews for Talking Tech. USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — YouTube Music, which soft launched in May, is now available nationally and in 17 countries.
This is the latest attempt by the Google-owned video network to take on Spotify and Apple Music with a premium service based on the huge music library of YouTube, which beyond the hits and library cuts, also has live concerts, TV appearances, international songs and artist uploads.
YouTube charges $9.99 monthly for the premium version, which will eventually replace Google Play Music. YouTube execs haven’t given a firm data on when it will close Google Play Music. For now, Google Play Music subscribers also get YouTube Music at no additional charge.
YouTube currently is the No. 1 home for online music, but most of the 1.5 billion monthly visitors use it to listen for free, via music videos. Ad-supported YouTube also has deals with the major record labels to run complete albums and has a larger catalog of music than rivals, with more live, independent and band-uploaded material.
More: Spotify vs. Apple Music vs. YouTube Music: Which is best for your hard-earned cash?
More: Review: new YouTube Music touts personalized music. Over 100 playlists later, here’s what I found.
But YouTube and Google have lagged in attracting paying subscribers. Spotify is the No. 1 paid music subscription service with 75 million subscribers, followed by Apple’s 50 million.
Where YouTube Music is different from the other services: Google’s pitch is that since it knows where you go every day, when your next flight is and what websites you visit when you’re at home, the Google Assistant could then suggest more music you like.
But the current version hasn’t gotten there yet. Playlist suggestions, like on Spotify, offer “Groove Party,” and “Endless Summer,” playlists of hits and old favorites, it makes suggestions of other artists, based on ones you’ve listened to, there’s a collection of new releases, music videos and live performances.
YouTube Music, like Spotify’s “Discover Weekly,” which offers personalized playlists based on your history, offers “Your Mixtape,” and “endless personalized music.” The playlists can be updated instantly, but even a few weeks after launch, they’re still spotty.
When we did our First Look at YouTube Music, the instant playlists had a nasty habit of putting songs by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in-between seemingly every other song.
A quick test Tuesday showed little has changed. One playlist of 26 songs had four from jazz guitarist Pat Metheny; another had five from 1970s rockers Electric Light Orchestra. Still another included four from R&B singer Chaka Khan and three from soul superstar Al Green—including two Christmas songs, playing in June.
Which just goes to show that the computer doesn’t always know how to program music.
Pro tip: if you like a specific artist or song, YouTube will make instant playlists on the spot of them as well, with more specificity. Hit play after searching for pop stars Bruno Mars and Jason Mraz and you get non-stop songs by the artists. Search for the song “All About That Bass,” by Meghan Trainor, and it plays the tune, followed by similar sounding artists Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Maroon 5.
Download the YouTube Music app at the Apple or Google play stores, or visit music.youtube.com
Follow USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
Troubling news for Fortnite-obsessives: The World Health Organization this week included “gaming disorder” as a new mental health condition in the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases. The WHO previously added the disorder in the draft for the ICD-11 earlier this year. Now it’s official.
The revision comes at a time when public concern over technology abuse is high and rising. Spurred by the burgeoning digital wellness movement, Apple and Google both unveiled tools in recent weeks designed to help users monitor and manage the time they spend staring at screens, including parental controls that restrict the time kids spend playing games.
But while experts generally lauded Google and Apple’s new tools as a step in the right direction, many of them have reservations about gaming disorder’s inclusion in the ICD.
“I don’t want there to be people classified with a mental disorder when they don’t really have one,” says University of Connecticut psychologist Nancy Petry, who in 2013 chaired the American Psychiatric Association subcommittee that considered adding “internet gaming disorder” to the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. At the time, her group concluded there was too little evidence to list gaming addiction as a formal disorder, adding it instead to a section titled “Conditions for Further Study.”
Today Petry, who is leading the first NIH-funded study on gaming addiction, believes the evidence is still insufficient. That puts mental health experts in something of a pickle. Truth be told, the most salient question isn’t so much whether some people develop an unhealthy relationship with gaming. (Most experts agree that concerns over the allure of videogames are justified, that the subject deserves further study, and even that a small percentage of people may develop clinically problematic gaming habits.) It’s whether the existing research is solid enough to warrant official classification from the WHO. Unlike the DSM, the ICD-11 has no provisional categories, no appendix in which to list potential disorders as requiring more research. It’s all-or-nothing: A condition either goes in the ICD-11 or it doesn’t. As such, critics argue, the burden of evidence for a disorder’s inclusion, characterization, and treatment should be very high.
And at least right now, critics contend, that evidence doesn’t exist for gaming disorders. Many existing studies on the subject are of surprisingly low quality. A large number of them are statistically underpowered, relying on small sample sizes, and do little do clarify whether videogames cause psychological problems or are merely associated with them.
“Some of these gaming habits are likely coping strategies to deal with other underlying psychological challenges,” says Lennart Nacke, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Games Group at the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute.
These shortcomings are compounded by a lack of consistency across studies, not only in what they’re measuring but how they measure it. “There’s well over 50 different self-report scales used to study gaming disorders,” Petry says. In a very real sense, many gaming disorder researchers aren’t even speaking the same language.
As a result, estimates of the extent of gaming disorders vary considerably. But studies that rely on the DSM’s provisional criteria, which Petry helped develop, suggest that gaming disorder might affect between 0.3 and 1 percent of the population.
In absolute terms, that could translate to millions of people. (For reference: The National Institutes of Mental Health estimates the prevalence of schizophrenia and related psychiatric disorders to range between 0.25 and 0.64 percent in the US.) In other words: People with gaming disorders could very well constitute a clinically significant proportion of the population—a fact that only underscores the need for clear diagnostic criteria.
Consider the problem posed by the abundance of scales for assessing gaming disorders, many of which put too much weight on the amount of time spent gaming. Of course, someone who plays at all hours of the day, seven days a week, is more likely to have issues than someone who rarely puts finger to D-pad—but many people game 10, 15, 20-hours-plus per week and still live happy, productive, socially active lives. In the absence of clear diagnostic guidelines, critics say, the WHO risks stigmatizing healthy relationships with gaming. Conditions, experts fear, are ripe for overdiagnosis. “The rush to pathologize a behavior that might otherwise be healthy—it’s risky,” Nacke says. If, in identifying that one person in a hundred with a serious gaming disorder, you misdiagnose 10 others, that’s a serious problem.
“After you come up with diagnostic criteria, then you can come up with tests,” Petry says. “But in the field of gaming-addiction research, we’re going about everything backwards. Most of the scales we use aren’t good scales to begin with, and they provide no cutoff point for diagnosis.”
The WHO, for its part, thinks mental health professionals are equipped to identify that cutoff point for themselves, in patients whose gaming habits have carried severe repercussions in their personal lives for more than a year. Perhaps they are. But whether they’re equipped to avoid misdiagnoses remains to be seen.
Every new Jurassic film brings a raft of new questions: Was Tyrannosaurus rex really that visually impaired? Could a Pteranodon really pick up a human with its feet? Why is Bryce Dallas Howard running in heels? One question fans might not have thought to ask, though, was whether or not the velociraptors were the correct size. Turns out, they’re not.
“In real life, velociraptor was a much smaller animal, probably about the size of a really big turkey,” says Nathan Smith, associate curator of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles County.
Velociraptors were, Smith says, close relatives to birds and were also probably partially covered in feathers—something scientists didn’t even discover until years after Jurassic Park was first released in 1993.
What about the other dinosaurs in the franchise? In the video above, Smith goes through each of the 22 creatures featured in the Jurassic films, including the ones in this weekend’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. How well do they score? Pretty high, actually.
“Jurassic Park and Jurassic World sometimes take a lot of flack from scientists for inaccuracies, like any films do when they’re trying to portray natural history,” Smith says. “But in reality, they’ve actually done a really great job of trying to focus on getting the anatomy of the animals right, getting inferences about their behavior, their vocalizations, and other things correct.”
We’ve got some simple tips you can take to keep Amazon’s Alexa from eavesdropping into your conversations and potentially sharing them. USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — Alexa, what time is checkout?
This summer, guests staying in some Marriott International hotel rooms will have access to a new virtual concierge. Amazon announced Tuesday the release of Alexa for Hospitality, a new version of the Amazon Echo smart speaker with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant, specifically designed for hotels and other hospitality locations.
Each Alexa for Hospitality assistant is personalized for its specific location, so guests can ask Alexa to call the front desk, order room service, request a housekeeping visit or adjust in-room devices like lights, thermostats, blinds and TVs. Regular Alexa features will also be available. The Echo will automatically delete guests’ recording daily.
Marriott International is introducing the Alexa for Hospitality at select properties in Marriott Hotels, Westin Hotels & Resorts, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts, Aloft Hotels and Autograph Collection Hotels. Amazon is also distributing Alexa for Hospitality to RedAwning, a vacation rental company, and boutique lifestyle properties within the Two Roads Hospitality portfolio.
Alexa for Hospitality won’t be as personalized as your own Echo quite yet. Guests won’t be able to connect their personal Amazon accounts until a later date.
When they can, Amazon says, hotel guests will be able to link their Amazon account directly with the Echo in their room so they’ll be able to play their own music playlists or listen to books through Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook service.
Amazon says once guests can link their Amazon accounts to their hotel room’s Echo, when they check out, so will their Amazon account. That way, the next guest in your room won’t be able to order groceries on your account after you leave.
The voice assistant is designed to only start recording snippets of conversations after it hears a wake word, usually “Alexa,” after which it sends those commands or queries to servers where an answer or response is crafted. But some users have been surprised by what Alexa has recorded when they don’t expect it, such as the Portland family whose conversation was sent to a family in their contact list. Putting an Echo in a shared public space may exacerbate those privacy worries.
More: 6 ways to keep Alexa from eavesdropping on you
Alexa for Hospitality will be available by invitation for hotels, vacation rentals and other hospitality locations, starting Tuesday.
Guests of Charlotte Marriott City Center and Marriott Irvine Spectrum will be some of the first to try out a curated list of the Alexa for Hospitality features.
In March, artist and programmer Brannon Dorsey became interested in a retro web attack called DNS rebinding, teaching himself how to illicitly access controls and data by exploiting known browser weaknesses. It’s a vulnerability that researchers have poked at on and off for years—which is one reason Dorsey couldn’t believe what he found.
Sitting in his Chicago apartment, two blocks from Lake Michigan, Dorsey did what anyone with a newfound hacking skill would: He tried to attack devices he owned. Instead of being blocked at every turn, though, Dorsey quickly discovered that the media streaming and smart home gadgets he used every day were vulnerable to varying degrees to DNS rebinding attacks. He could gather all sorts of data from them that he never would have expected.
“I’m technical, but I’m not an information security professional,” Dorsey says. “I didn’t reverse any binaries or do any intense digging. I just followed my curiosities and suddenly I found some sketchy shit. I was just sitting there thinking ‘I cannot be the only person in the world who is seeing this.'”
Between his own gadgets and borrowing others from friends, Dorsey found DNS rebinding vulnerabilities in virtually every model of Google Home, Chromecast, Sonos Wi-Fi speakers, Roku streaming devices, and some smart thermostats. Dorsey’s experimental attacks, which he outlined in research published Tuesday, didn’t give him full keys to the kingdom, but in each case he could gain more control and extract more data than he should have been able to.
‘I just followed my curiosities and suddenly I found some sketchy shit.’
Brannon Dorsey
For example, on Roku devices running Roku OS 8.0 or lower, Dorsey found that an attacker could use the streamer’s External Control API to control buttons and key presses on the device, access the inputs for device sensors like the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, search content on the device, and even launch apps. On Sonos Wi-Fi speakers, an attacker could access extensive information about the Wi-Fi network a speaker is connected to, useful for mapping out network attributes and broader recon. And by attacking the public API in Google’s connected devices, an hacker could trigger Google Home and Chromecast restarts at will. That result in essentially a denial of service attack, keeping users from being able to interact with their device, or sending it offline at strategic times. Attackers could also get Google Home and Chromecast to cough up information about the Wi-Fi network they are connected to, and triangulate it with the list of nearby Wi-Fi networks to accurately geolocate the devices.
In a DNS rebinding attack, a hacker capitalizes on weaknesses in how browsers implement web protocols. They craft malicious websites that can game the trust protections meant to block unauthorized communication between web services. From there, an attacker uses methods like phishing or malvertising to trick victims into clicking a link to their site, and then moves to illicitly access whatever controls and data are exposed on their device or network. One wrong click or tap and and attacker could take over your smart device.
Though DNS rebinding stems from some fundamental issues with how browsers mediate trust relationships online, sites and services can also limit their exposures using relatively simple mechanisms like authentication protections or HTTPS encrypted connections. This may be why this class of attacks hasn’t generated sustained interest or concern among security professionals.
But over past seven months, there has been a growing understanding in the security community that DNS rebinding bugs may represent a much larger group of vulnerabilities than people have previously acknowledged. Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy recently found DNS rebinding vulnerabilities in the Transmission BitTorrent client and the update mechanism for Blizzard video games, and researchers have also discovered the bugs in various Ethereum wallets—potentially exposing people’s cryptocurrency.
DNS rebinding bugs have a “history of being dismissed by developers, and many times it is left as an unaddressed issue,” Ariel Zelivansky, a researcher at the security firm Twistlock, wrote in a prescient February warning about the rise of DNS rebinding vulnerabilities.
In the months that Dorsey was looking into the topic, another researcher from the security firm Tripwire, Craig Young, also discovered the bug in Google Home and Chromecast, and published his findings on Monday.
‘This reflects an issue in a fundamental feature of the internet as it’s been designed.’
Joseph Pantoga, Red Balloon
One root cause of these vulnerabilities is that devices on the same Wi-Fi network generally trust each other, since they’ve all been admitted to the same club. But this assumption can lead to accidental exposures. Communication channels meant for use by other devices on a network can potentially also be maliciously accessed by remote websites with just a small amount of manipulation. Many of the bugs Dorsey found could be solved by adding basic authentication mechanisms to device APIs.
“This reflects an issue in a fundamental feature of the internet as it’s been designed,” says Joseph Pantoga, a research scientist at the internet of things security firm Red Balloon. “DNS rebinding attacks have been brought up many times in the past, but new features in Internet of Things devices including geolocation and collection of personal data make it something people should really be aware of. The problem is exacerbated by IoT devices having APIs intended for communication with other, unauthenticated devices on the network.”
Google, Roku, and Sonos have all patched or are in the process of patching their device operating systems to plug the vulnerabilities Dorsey described. “After recently becoming aware of the DNS Rebinding issue, we created a software patch which is now rolling out to customers,” a Roku spokesperson told WIRED. Sonos similarly added that, “Upon learning about the DNS Rebinding Attack, we immediately began work on a fix that will roll out in a July software update.” Google said in a statement that, “We’re aware of the report and will be rolling out a fix in the coming weeks.”
Despite the positive response, experts note that lack of awareness about avoiding these bugs in the first place has led to a situation in which millions and millions of devices are known to be vulnerable to some degree, with millions more likely vulnerable as well. Dorsey says that he hopes his research raises awareness about the ubiquity of the problem. “DNS rebinding has become the elephant in the room,” he says. “A ton of things are vulnerable to it and it’s become a systemic problem. So ultimately approaching vendors one at a time isn’t going to solve it. The whole industry needs to know to check for this and fix it.”
Verizon and AT&T have pledged to stop providing information on phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy.
The data has apparently allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known California-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly — LocationSmart and Zumigo
Verizon became the first major carrier to declare it would end sales of such data to brokers that then provide it to others. It did so in a June 15 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been probing the phone location-tracking market. AT&T followed suit Tuesday after The Associated Press reported the Verizon move.
Neither company said they are getting out of the business of selling location data. Verizon and AT&T are the two largest U.S. mobile carriers in terms of subscribers.
Chief privacy officer Karen Zacharia said Verizon would be careful not to disrupt “beneficial services” such as fraud prevention and emergency roadside assistance. In an email to the AP, AT&T spokesman Jim Greer cited similar reasons for cutting off the intermediaries “as soon as practical.”
Last month, Wyden revealed abuses in the lucrative but loosely regulated field involving Securus Technologies and its affiliate 3C Interactive. Verizon says their contract was approved only for the location tracking of outside mobile phones called by prison inmates.
Verizon notified LocationSmart and Zumigo, both privately held, that it intends to “terminate their ability to access and use our customers’ location data as soon as possible,” Zacharia wrote.
Location data from Verizon and other carriers makes it possible to identify the whereabouts of nearly any phone in the U.S. within seconds. Popular commercial uses for the information include keeping tabs on packages, vehicles and employees; bank fraud prevention; and targeted marketing offers.
The cutoff won’t affect users’ ability to share locations directly with apps and other services. Rather, it deals with the practice of providing data to third parties with which users have no direct contact.
Spell check was an early convenience for computers. Now there are millions of small utilities to make life easier. Here are Kim Komando’s top 5. Kim Komando, Special for USA Today
Starting your own business takes a whole lot of guts, optimism, and passion. Not to mention a ton of hard work and the need to pinch pennies anywhere you can. The Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that supports education and entrepreneurship in Kansas City, says it also takes a healthy dose of cash: The new average investment needed to get a company off the ground is around $30,000.
Thankfully, there are a few genius tech hacks that can save money, time, and sanity.
Just about everyone needs a fast computer these days, but arming employees with the latest models can be a real budget breaker. While the newest ones are too expensive, second-hand or older notebooks can be painfully glitchy and slow. One inexpensive hack for this is a USB flash drive called Xtra-PC (prices start at $35) that plugs into — and speeds up — aged PCs or Macs.
“I’ve been a consultant for 13 years, and a big mistake a lot of (small and medium-sized businesses) make is to replace perfectly good computers. Not only is this unnecessary, but it also creates a lot of e-waste,” said Ron Forseth, CEO of Forseth Development, Inc. in Colorado Springs. “Most companies need their machines to run at maximum speed and efficiency, and Xtra-PC can prolong the life of a computer by about five years.”
Another option is to call-in quick help nearby. Aaron Watkins, founder of the Sacramento-based STEMtrunk toy subscription rental service, discovered a quick tech fix recently when his team needed a bevy of iPhone battery-replacements. “As an entrepreneur, your phone is your life. I called a service called Puls to fix our phones. These guys came to me within 24 hrs of me needing it, replaced my phone screen and battery in under an hour, and cost less than the Apple recommended vendors (who had appointments days out and wanted to keep my phone overnight),” Watkins said.
Outsourcing quick tech help isn’t the only way to save money. Whether you’re getting a small business off the ground or sustaining a decades-old family enterprise, hiring staff has to be done very, very carefully. If you’re trying to minimize costs, the “gig economy” might just save you a bundle on everything from developers, designers, and finance experts — to people who write blog posts, translate, and even run errands for you.
Some of the top picks include; Upwork, Toptal and Guru for helping find people with the skills many small businesses need. For fast and cheap help with just about everything else, there’s Fiverr, and for more specialized branding and design, several people recommend 99Designs.
“99designs connected us with a terrific designer who was a perfect fit for our needs and nailed our brand aesthetic in a fraction of the time. Using 99designs was a big time and money saver,” Dave Pributsky, founder of 2920 Sleep, wrote in an email.
The days of a business owner yelling out of the office door to tell the secretary to schedule an appointment went out with bell bottoms, and today it’s just as easy to use Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to handle it.
No matter what platform you favor, these digital helpers can schedule reminders, keep lists, and look up phone numbers or other information as soon as you ask for it. Even if you don’t find these assistants all that helpful in your personal life, you’ll be surprised at how much they can help streamline day-to-day small business tasks. Schedule this, delete that, search my email for whatever — it’s a dream come true for a scatterbrained business owner just trying to keep it all together.
Gmail deserves a special nod here. “The new Gmail is amazing,” said Nick Desai, co-founder of health startup Heal. “It integrates calendar and email on the same page in a powerful way and makes search better. That power eliminates the need for someone to do my scheduling.”
Several small business owners also rave about advertising and selling on social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram and other apps give you a direct line to your customers, as long as you know how to reach them.
Facebook Business lets you build a social hub for your company for free. You can set your hours, post updates and tell your followers about sales and promotions. Customers can review your business and help bring in new business with word-of-mouth advertising. Similarly, Instagram Business works a lot like its Facebook sibling, letting you create a social presence for your company within the app. You can also post stories and photos to build a conversation about your products or services, and give potential customers a behind-the-scenes look at how your company is growing.
How much does this all matter? Quite a bit, actually. “With one click, our audience can learn more about our products and go directly to our site,” said Shari Lott, Founder & CEO of spearmintLOVE. “Reducing search time and clicks improve conversion and revenue. When we launched Instagram Shopping, we experienced a 25% increase in traffic and an 8% increase in revenue attributable to Instagram Shopping.”
“Technology is the equalizer for small businesses on a budget to contend in the marketplace, said Natasha D. Oates, Founder of UpRetreats.com therapy and life-coaching in North Carolina.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY’s digital video show TECH NOW. E-mail her at jj@techish.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JenniferJolly.