Online misinformation works, or so it would seem. One of the more interesting statistics from the 2019 UK general election was that 88% of advertisements posted on social media by the Conservative Party pushed figures that had already been deemed misleading by the UK’s leading fact-checking organisation, Full Fact. And, of course, the Conservatives won […]
Read More
Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana recognize only a narrow slice of the world’s most widely spoken languages. It wasn’t until fall 2018 that Samsung’s Bixby gained support for German, French, Italian, and Spanish — languages spoken by over 600 million people worldwide. And it took years for Cortana to become fluent […]
Read More
(Reuters) — Facebook recommended rules on Tuesday for how its independent oversight board will work and said a former human rights group director will lead the board’s administrative staff. The content appeals board, which will grow to about 40 members and will be able to overrule Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, is one of the company’s […]
Read More
Last week Netflix released fourth quarter earnings that beat both the top and bottom-line expectations analysts had set for the streaming giant. Its stock gained nearly 10% in the following trading sessions, equivalent to adding more than $10 billion to its market capitalization. Although the company also missed growth expectations in the US and gave […]
Read More
Roughly a year ago, Google open-sourced MediaPipe, a framework for building cross-platform AI pipelines consisting of fast inference and media processing (like video decoding). Basically, it’s a quick and dirty way to perform object detection, face detection, hand tracking, multi-hand tracking, hair segmentation, and other such tasks in a modular fashion, with popular machine learning […]
Read More
In 2015, a nonprofit called the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation created an annual prize to honor the legacy of the late Christopher Hitchens. As described by the foundation’s website, the Hitchens Prize, worth $50,000, is awarded to journalists or authors who demonstrate through their work a “commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range […]
Read More
Atari was once the biggest name in gaming, but it has died multiple times since it reached its zenith in the early 1980s. But nothing from that era stays dead — not if someone can mine it and resell it as notsalgia. And Atari is taking that business model to another level with an Atari […]
Read More
Photo: Ethan Miller (Getty Images) If you were a Kobe fan as much as I was, then you know that both he and Michael Jordan often repeated the now-famous Phil Jackson quote that characterized their superstar careers: “Let the game come to you.” As a perennial basketball benchwarmer, I never knew what that phrase meant […]
Read More
SHANGHAI — Recently, someone following the coronavirus crisis through China’s official news media would see lots of footage, often set to stirring music, praising the heroism and sacrifice of health workers marching off to stricken places. But someone following the crisis through social media would see something else entirely: vitriolic comments and mocking memes about […]
Read More
As awareness grows around the dangers the internet poses to children, more companies have entered the fray with solutions to combat the various threats. One of those companies is SuperAwesome, which has developed an extensive platform to help brands deliver “safe” content to children. The London-based startup claims some big-name clients, including Mattel, LEGO, NBC […]
Read More
To coordinate coverage of President Trump’s trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the White House provided press credentials to the usual mix of American news organizations, including Fox News, Reuters and The New York Times. One media outlet stood out: TruNews, a website aimed at conservative Christians whose founder, a pastor named […]
Read More
Regardless of the discipline, few kids dream of glory as the 53rd man on an NFL roster, a career minor leaguer, or two-way professional basketball player splitting time between the NBA and G-League. Any aspirational, sports crazed adolescent daydreams about dominating the highest level of sports. Of course, around the same time we learn about […]
Read More
Big tech’s role in the spread of misinformation and “fake news” is well documented, and as we enter a U.S. presidential election year you might expect the issue to be a burning priority. In the face of public scrutiny, tech giants have begun targeting various credibility issues over the past year, with Facebook introducing measures […]
Read More
StreamElements has partnered with Magic: The Gathering maker Wizards of the Coast to launch SE.CAP, an integrated influencer marketing platform that helps brands monitor content creators and motivate them with rewards. For brands, the platform helps grow and manage creator communities and programs while streamlining the process of creating measurable and scalable reward-based activations with […]
Read More
Pornhub, the porn site with more than 10 million members, has launched a Tor mirror site that gives users extra protections for their online activity. Now you can view porn in peace. Tor is a privacy-focused browser that makes it more difficult to monitor users’ online activity. The BBC, Facebook, and the New York Times […]
Read More
After nearly two years of development, Japanese wireless carrier NTT Docomo announced that it will launch an 8K VR event streaming service in March, showcasing the bandwidth and latency capabilities of 5G cellular technology. The 8KVR Live service will offer users pay-per-view access to live venues, enabling users of 5G smartphones and VR headsets to […]
Read More
Lauren Groff’s review of American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’s new novel about a mother and son fleeing cartel violence in Mexico, is one of the odder articles that The New York Times Book Review has published in recent memory. It is less a work of criticism than a lengthy self-examination, with Groff, who is white, agonizing […]
Read More
(Reuters) — Netflix missed Wall Street subscriber forecasts for the first quarter Tuesday, amid pressure from lower-cost services from Walt Disney and Apple in the streaming video wars. The streaming giant added more paying subscribers than Wall Street expected in the fourth quarter, beating international subscriber estimates but missing estimates for U.S. subscriber growth. Netflix […]
Read More
When the first in-house newsletter of Bernie Sanders’s campaign landed in inboxes last August, its chief antagonist was neither President Trump nor a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, but rather The Washington Post and, as the email said, “the Washington pundits who are paid by the corporations and billionaires who own the media.” Campaigning […]
Read More
YouTube TV today made its debut on the PlayStation 4. It takes the place of PlayStation Vue, which Sony is rather reluctantly winding down at the end of this month, as the platform’s sole live TV service. Consider this your new TV remote: 🎮 YouTube TV is now available on PS4: https://t.co/nxzEx8AVpV pic.twitter.com/Goodsm3Df4 — YouTube TV […]
Read More
It looks like the New York Times is reining in the Opinion section—or at least wants to be seen as doing so. Today, following a series of embarrassing incidents, Times brass announced in an email to the company that the Opinion section will be subject to some level of counsel from the paper’s well-regarded standards […]
Read More
The Brazilian government has long tried to shut up Glenn Greenwald for committing acts of journalism, like an investigation last summer that implicated high-ranking government officials in corruption. But prosecutors in the country took their efforts to a new level on Tuesday with hacking charges. Press freedom groups fear the allegations are an attempt to […]
Read More
In the two weeks since Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, it’s both true enough and obviously, howlingly inaccurate to say that things have returned to “normal.” That just cannot possibly be the right word for the government’s ongoing state of clammy resting breakdown—and yet, as the situation seems to have […]
Read More