Two Facebook and Google geniuses are combining search and AI to transform HR

Two former product wizards from Facebook and Google are combining Silicon Valley’s buzziest buzz words –search, artificial intelligence, and big data — into a new technology service aimed at solving nothing less than the problem of how to provide professional meaning in the modern world.

Founded by chief executive Ashutosh Garg, a former search and personalization expert at Google and IBM research, and chief technology officer Varun Kacholia, who led the ranking team at Google and YouTube search and the News Feed team at Facebook, Eightfold.ai boasts an executive team that has a combined eighty patents and over 6,000 citations for their research.

The two men have come together (in perhaps the most Silicon Valley fashion) to bring the analytical rigor that their former employers are famous for to the question of how best to help employees find fulfillment in the workforce.

“Employment is the backbone of society and it is a hard problem,” to match the right person with the right role, says Garg. “People pitch recruiting as a transaction… [but] to build a holistic platform is to build a company that fundamentally solves this problem,” of making work the most meaningful to the most people, he says.

 

It’s a big goal and it’s backed $24 million in funding provided by some big time investors — Lightspeed Ventures and Foundation Capital.

The company’s executives say they want to wring all of the biases out of recruiting, hiring, professional development and advancement by creating a picture of an ideal workforce based on publicly available data collected from around the world. That data can be parsed and analyzed to create an almost Platonic ideal of any business in any industry.

That image of an ideal business is then overlaid on a company’s actual workforce to see how best to advance specific candidates and hire for roles that need to be filled to bring a business closer in line with its ideal.

“We have crawled the web for millions of profiles… including data from wikipedia,” says Garg. “From there we have gotten data round how people have moved in organizations. We use all of this data to see who has performed well in an organization or not. Now what we do… we build models over this data to see who is capable of doing what.”

There are two important functions at play, according to Garg. The first is developing a talent network of a business — “the talent graph of a company”, he calls it. “On top of that we map how people have gone from one function to another in their career.”

Using those tools, Garg says Eightfold.ai’s services can predict the best path for each employee to reach their full potential.

 

The company takes its name from Buddhism’s eightfold path to enlightenment, and while I’m not sure what the Buddha would say about the conflation of professional development with spiritual growth, Garg believes that he’s on the right track.

“Every individual with the right capability and potential placed in the right role is meaningful progress for us,” says Garg. 

Eightfold.ai already counts over 100 customers using its tools across different industries. It’s software has processed over 20 million applications to-date, and increased response rates among its customers by 700 percent compared to the industry average all while reducing screening costs and time by 90 percent, according to a statement.

“Eightfold.ai has an incredible opportunity to help people reach their full potential in their careers while empowering the workforces of the future,” said Peter Nieh, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures in a statement. “Ashutosh and Varun are bringing to talent management the transformative artificial intelligence and data science capability that they brought to Google, YouTube and Facebook.  We backed Ashutosh previously when he co-founded BloomReach and look forward to partnering with him again.”

The application of big data and algorithmically automated decision making to workforce development is a perfect example of how Silicon Valley approaches any number of problems — and with even the best intentions, it’s worth noting that these tools are only as good as the developers who make them.

Indeed, Kacholia and Garg’s previous companies have been accused on relying too heavily on technology to solve what are essentially human problems.

The proliferation of propaganda, politically-minded meddling by foreign governments in domestic campaigns, and the promotion of hate speech online has been abetted in many cases by the faith technology companies like Google and Facebook have placed in the tools they’ve developed to ensure that their information and networking platforms function properly (spoiler alert: they’re not).

And the application of these tools to work — and workforce development — is noble, but should also be met with a degree of skepticism.

As an MIT Technology Review article noted from last year,

Algorithmic bias is shaping up to be a major societal issue at a critical moment in the evolution of machine learning and AI. If the bias lurking inside the algorithms that make ever-more-important decisions goes unrecognized and unchecked, it could have serious negative consequences, especially for poorer communities and minorities. The eventual outcry might also stymie the progress of an incredibly useful technology (see “Inspecting Algorithms for Bias”).

Algorithms that may conceal hidden biases are already routinely used to make vital financial and legal decisions. Proprietary algorithms are used to decide, for instance, who gets a job interview, who gets granted parole, and who gets a loan.

“Many of the biases people have in recruiting stem from the limited data people have seen,” Garg responded to me in an email. “With data intelligence we provide recruiters and hiring managers powerful insights around person-job fit that allows teams to go beyond the few skills or companies they might know of, dramatically increasing their pool of qualified candidates. Our diversity product further allows removal of any potential human bias via blind screening. We are fully compliant with EEOC and do not use age, sex, race, religion, disability, etc in assessing fit of candidates to roles in enterprises.”

Making personnel decisions less personal by removing human bias from the process is laudable, but only if the decision-making systems are, themselves, untainted by those biases. In this day and age, that’s no guarantee.

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Amazon launches a “lite” Android web browser app in India

Amazon has quietly launched an Android web browser app for emerging markets, where access to mobile data and high-speed connectivity is more limited. The browser has the rather generic name of: “Internet: fast, lite and private” on Google Play, and promises to be “lighter than the competition.”

The app first appeared on the Play Store in March, and has fewer than 1,000 downloads, according to data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

It’s only available to users in India for the time being, and is supported on devices running Android 5.0 or higher.

Like most “lite” apps, the new browser is a small download – it’s under 2 MB in size.

The browser’s Google Play description also notes that it’s “private,” as it doesn’t ask for extra permissions or collect private data like other browsers do. This seems to indicate that it’s meant to be something of a competitor to other private mobile browsers, like Firefox, which blocks website trackers.

The browser additionally supports Private tabs, so you can browse without saving visits to your history, plus other features like tab previews, an automatic fullscreen mode, and integrated news reader of sorts.

In fact, the news reading experience is another telling indication that the browser is only meant for Indian users. The app’s description notes the browser homepage is designed to keep you up-to-date with news, cricket, and entertainment from top sources. Yep, cricket – the most popular sport in India.

 

And finally, the “feedback” email on Google Play points to Amazon India, which indicates it was built by that team.

Amazon would not be the first to build lightweight mobile apps for emerging markets, such as India.

Facebook already offers “lite” versions of its apps, like Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite, to reach users with limited connectivity and access to data. Google has also rolled out a suite of lightweight mobile apps under the “Go” branding. Some of these, like Gmail Go, only come pre-installed on select devices. Others, meanwhile, are available through Google Play for anyone to download, like YouTube Go, Files Go, Google Go, Google Maps, and Google Assistant Go.

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It is interesting, however, that Amazon didn’t adopt a similar strategy by offering a “lite” version of its existing Silk browser, but has instead built something new.

And if its goal is to offer an alternative to Silk on the Fire tablets it sells in India, it’s odd that the browser isn’t yet available in the Amazon Appstore in India.

Amazon has not yet returned a request for comment about the new app.

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Snap launches new features for Lens Studio

At the end of last year, Snap introduced Lens Studio, a platform that allows developers to create AR lenses for Snapchat. Today, the company is announcing new features for Lens Studio, including seven brand new templates for the creation of face lenses.

Before now, only World Lens creation was available to everyone within Lens Studio, meaning developers could create 3D AR objects but not overlay AR experiences over faces. Now, developers can create Face Lenses, with seven different templates to choose from.

Here are the new templates for Face Lenses:

• Face Paint: focuses on face substitution, mapping the face to let developers create art tied to facial features like the lips or nose (great for makeup or accessories)
• Photo: much like Face Paint, Photo lets creators overlay lenses onto a single static (head-on) photo
• Distort: lets developers stretch or shrink facial features
• Trigger: with Trigger, developers can create a trigger (blinking, raising eyebrows, open/close mouth) to execute a lens
• 2D Objects: this template works the same way as Snap’s famous dog ears filter, letting developers create 2D objects that can be overlaid on a picture of video
• 3D Objects: Same as 2D Objects, but with 3D objects. This template also includes a helper script to play looping animation on the 3D objects
• Baseball Cap: Revamp a 3D baseball cap to change color, brim style and add an image

Alongside the new templates, Snap is also integrating with Giphy to give Lens Studio developers access to Giphy’s massive library of animated GIF stickers.

With the introduction of these new features, Snap is opening up these third-party lenses to the public with the launch of Community Lens Stories. Each story will include public Snaps submitted on Our Story that highlight a community lens. Folks can swipe up on one of these Snaps to unlock the lens, or browse other Lenses by tapping the ‘i’ button above a Community Lens in the carousel.

This is all in an effort to open up Snap to third-party developers and creators, which is why the company is launching the Official Creator Program. This will allow the Snap team to partner with select creators to offer support, including visibility on the Lens Studio website as well as direct support from the Lens Studio team. Official Creators will also get early access to features and templates.

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Building the Moon without leaving the London area

Hardware isn’t easy — especially if you decline to take advantage of the global manufacturing infrastructure, build everything in a flat in London, and use only local labor and materials. But that’s what the creators of successful Kickstarter project Moon did, and they have no regrets.

Back in 2016, I got a pitch for the Moon, an accurate replica of our satellite around which a set of LEDs rotated, illuminating the face in perfect time with the actual phase. A cool idea, though for some reason or another I didn’t cover it, instead asking Alex du Prees, one of the creators, to hit me back later to talk about the challenges of crowdfunded, home-brewed hardware.

The project was a success, raising £145,393 — well over the £25,000 goal — and Alex and I chatted late last year while the team was wrapping up production and starting on a second run, which in fact they just recently wrapped up as well.

It’s an interesting case study of a crowdfunded hardware project, not least because the Moon team made the unusual choice to keep everything local: from the resin casting of the moon itself to the chassis and electronics.

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“At the time we wanted to make sure that we made them correctly, and that we didn’t spend a lot of our energy and money prototyping with a factory,” du Preez said. “We’ve seen a lot of Kickstarter campaigns go straight to China, to some manufacturing facility, and we were afraid we’d lose a lot of the quality of the product if we did that.”

The chief benefit, in addition to the good feeling they got by sourcing everything from no further than the next town over, was the ability to talk directly to these people and explain or work through problems in person.

“We can just get on a train and go visit them,” du Preez said. “For instance, there’s a bent pipe which is the arm of the device — even that part alone, we worked with a pipe-bending company and went out there like three times to have conversations with the guy.”

Of course, they weren’t helpless themselves; the three people behind the project are designers and engineers that have helped launch crowdfunding campaigns before, though this one was the first they had done on their own.

“I think Oscar [Lhermitte, who led the project] probably worked two and a half or three years on this, from ideation all the way to manufacturing,” said du Preez. “He had this idea and he contacted NASA and asked for this topographical data to make the map. He came to us because he wanted some technical and engineering input.”

The decision to do it all in the UK wasn’t made any easier by the fact that it was a demanding piece of hardware, the team’s standards were high, and despite being a great success, $200,000 or so still isn’t a lot with which to build a unique, high-precision electronic device from scratch.

The whole operation was run out of a small apartment in London, and the team had to improvise quite a bit.

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“We had this tiny little room the size of a kitchen we were producing these things out of,” du Preez recalled. “It wasn’t like a warehouse. And we were on the second floor — we’d get a delivery of like, a ton of metal, and we’d have to spend half a day hauling it up, then boxes would arrive and it would fill up the whole studio.”

They resisted the urge to get something off the shelf or ready-made from Shenzhen, choosing instead to rely on their own ingenuity (and that of nearby, puzzlingly specific artisans) to solve problems.

“One of the trickiest parts was that every single part is made with a different process,” he said. “If you want to make a piece of electronics in a plastic case,” for example a security camera or cheap Android phone, “it’s a lot quicker to develop and execute.”

Obviously the most important part to get right is the globe of the moon itself — and no one had ever made something quite like this before, so they had to figure out how to do it themselves.

“It’s quite large, so we can’t cast it in one solid piece,” du Preez explained. “It would be too heavy to ship. And it sinks — the material moves too much. So what you do is you make a mold, like a negative of the moon, and you pour the liquid inside it. And while the liquid is setting, you rotate it around, to make sure the inner surface is being coated by resin while it’s drying.”

In order to do this for their prototyping stage, they jury-rigged a solution from “wood, bicycle parts, and I think a sewing machine engine,” he said. “We had to put that together on the spot to keep costs down. We kind of replicated what we knew was already out there to test our materials and concepts. We knew if we could make this work, we just had to build or find a better one.”

As luck would have it, they did find someone — right up the tracks.

“We found this guy in Birmingham who basically has an industrial version of this, he makes molds and he has this big metal cage rotating around all day,” du Preez said. “The quality of his work is amazing.” And, of course, it’s just a short train trip away — relative to a trip to Guangzhuo, anyway.

Attention to detail, especially regarding the globe, led to delays in shipping the Moon; they ended up about four months late.

Late arrivals are of course to be expected when it comes to Kickstarter projects, but du Preez said that the response of backers, both friendly and unfriendly, surprised him.

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“It seemed quite binary. We had 541 backers, and I’d say only two were really pissed off about not having their moon, and they were irate. I mean they were fuming,” he said.

“But no one really got publicly angry with us. They’d just check in. Once they email you and you give them a response, they seem to be very understanding. As long as we kept the momentum going, people were okay with it.”

That said, four months late isn’t really that late. There are projects that have raised far more than Moon and were years late or never even shipped (full disclosure, I’ve backed a couple!). Du Preez offered some advice to would-be crowdfunders who want to keep the good will of their backers.

“It’s really important to understand your pricing, who’s going to manufacture it, all the way down to shipping. If you have no game plan for after Kickstarter you’re going to be in a tricky situation,” he said. “We had a bill of materials and priced everything out before we went to Kickstarter. And you need some kind of proof of concept to show that the product works. There are so many great hardware development platforms out there that I think that’s quite easy to do now.”

Their attention to detail and obvious pride in their work has resulted in a lasting business, du Preez told me; the company has attracted attention from Adam Savage, Mark Hamill, and MOMA, while a second run of 250 has just completed and the team is looking into other projects along these lines.

You can track the team’s projects or order your own unit (though you may wish you’d gotten the early bird discount) over at the dedicated Moon website.

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Facebook starts fact-checking fake news in India

Facebook today announced a partnership with a Mumbai-based fact checking organization called Boom, to help the social network fight the spread of fake news in the Indian state of Karnataka ahead of the elections being held there next month. The social network announced the fact-checking pilot program with Boom in a company blog post, where it briefly explained how the fact-checking process on Facebook currently works.

This is not the first time Facebook has partnered with third-party fact checkers – it has similar deals with fact checking groups in the U.S., France, Italy, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the Philippines. However, the launch in India is notable because Facebook, along with others, has been accused of not doing enough to prevent the influence of fake news in India, notes a report from BuzzFeed. India is also a large market for Facebook with over 240 million users.

Like other Facebook fact-checking partners, BOOM is certified through the International Fact-Checking Network, a non-partisan international fact checking network at Poynter. It will be able to review the English-language stories shared on Facebook, and rate their accuracy.

When stories are rated by fact checkers as false, they are shown lower in the News Feeds to limit their distribution. This helps hoax stories from spreading, Facebook says. In addition, those Facebook Pages and domains that repeatedly share fake new will also see their distribution lowered, limiting their ability to monetize and advertise. This is important because some publishers were taking advantage of the fact that clickbait sells – even if the story is completely false. And they were profiting from it.

The company claims these efforts have allowed Facebook to reduce the distribution of fake news by 80 percent.

In addition to limiting fake news’ visibility, Facebook combats fake news by showing the fact checker’s article in a Related Articles widget right below the fake story in the News Feed; and it alerts people and Page admins if they’re trying to share a story or have shared a story that’s been determined to be false.

The program in India is considered a pilot test, Facebook notes.

“We are beginning small and know it is important to learn from this test and listen to our community as we continue to update ways for people to understand what might be false news in their News Feed,” the company says.

 

 

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Twitter is down [UPDATE: It’s back]

Reports of Twitter being down are coming in from across the globe. The homepage and mobile app are currently down. The desktop API still works so users can connect to the service through apps like Tweetdeck and Tweetbot.

According to downdetector.com, users are experiencing an outage across the world. The issue appeared at 9:50 AM EDT.

Twitter has yet to comment on the outage.

Update: As of 10:35 the service appears to be coming back online around the world.

Developing…

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Telegram plays down Russian block — claiming no “significant” impact yet

A court in Russia ordered a block of messaging app Telegram this week but founder Pavel Durov has shrugged off the impact of the ban 24 hours in — claiming the app hasn’t seen “a significant drop in user engagement so far”.

Russia began (trying to) block Telegram yesterday, following a court ruling in Moscow earlier this week. The state communication watchdog had filed a lawsuit to limit access to the service after Telegram refused to hand over encryption keys — and the court granted the block.

In an update posted to his Telegram channel, Durov writes: “For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason is our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.

“Despite the ban, we haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies. We also have been relying on third-party cloud services to remain partly available for our users there.”

Durov goes on to thank Telegram users in Russia for their support — saying the country accounts for about 7% of the app’s user base. (Last month Telegram announced passing 200M monthly active users, which suggests it has about 14M users in Russia.)

He also name-checks four U.S. tech giants — Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft — for, as he puts it, “not taking part in political censorship”.

Telegram moved some of its infrastructure to third-party cloud services to try to make it harder for authorities to block access to its app. But the Russian state responded by blocking millions of IP addresses belonging to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, apparently causing collateral damage to swathes of other digitally delivered services. (Even reportedly to some credit card terminals.)

In an attempt to ban Telegram, Russian ISPs have been required by court order to block
52.58.0.0/15, 18.196.0.0/15, 18.194.0.0/15, 35.156.0.0/14 35.192.0.0/12 – it’s like a million IPs belonging to AWS and Google Cloud. Just tried a Russia VPN, telegram still usually connects

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) April 17, 2018

So how long those other tech companies stand firm remains to be seen.

In some cases direct political pressure —  not just the collateral damage of service disruption — appears to be being being brought to bear on them by the Russian state.

According to the Interfax news agency (via Reuters) the Russian telecoms agency has informed Amazon and Google that a “significant” number of their IP addresses are being blocked on the basis of the court ruling to block Telegram.

We’ve reached out to both to ask whether they will continue to host Telegram on their cloud services.

Reuters also reports that Russia’s state telecommunications regulator has asked Google and Apple to remove the Telegram messenger service from their app stores, citing the Interfax news agency.

We’ve also asked Apple how it intends to respond too. Last year the company bowed to state pressure in China and removed major VPN apps from its App Store — saying it was complying with a local regulation that requires VPN apps to be licensed by the government.

Russian authorities have claimed they need access to Telegram’s encryption for counter-terrorism purposes. However opponents of Vladimir Putin’s regime argue the Russian president uses claims of combating terrorism as an instrument to consolidate his own undemocratic grip on power.

Durov concludes his update about the block saying he intends to give out “millions” of dollars’ worth in Bitcoin grants this year — to “individuals and companies who run socks5 proxies and VPN” — and thus who help to bolster the resilience of Internet infrastructure against state attempts to control access.

“I am happy to donate millions of dollars this year to this cause, and hope that other people will follow. I called this Digital Resistance — a decentralized movement standing for digital freedoms and progress globally,” he adds.

The company is in the midst of a billion dollar ICO, raising money via a token sale to develop a crypto currency and blockchain platform of its own.

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Google Cloud releases Dialogflow Enterprise Edition for building chat apps

Building conversational interfaces is a hot new area for developers. Chatbots can be a way to reduce friction in websites and apps and to give customers quick answers to commonly asked questions in a conversational framework. Today, Google announced it was making Dialogflow Enterprise Edition generally available. It had previously been in Beta.

This technology came to them via the API.AI acquisition in 2016. Google wisely decided to change the name of the tool along the way, giving it a moniker that more closely matched what it actually does. The company reports that hundreds of thousands are developers are using the tool already to build conversational interfaces.

This isn’t just an all-Google tool though. It works across voice interface platforms including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Facebook Messenger, giving developers a tool to develop their chat apps once and use them across several devices without having to change the underlying code in a significant way.

What’s more, with today’s release the company is providing increased functionality and making it easier to transition to the enterprise edition at the same time.

“Starting today, you can combine batch operations that would have required multiple API calls into a single API call, reducing lines of code and shortening development time. Dialogflow API V2 is also now the default for all new agents, integrating with Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, enabling agent management via API, supporting gRPC, and providing an easy transition to Enterprise Edition with no code migration,” Dan Aharon Google’s product manager for Cloud AI wrote in a company blog post announcing the tool.

The company showed off a few new customers using Dialogflow to build chat interfaces for their customers including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Domino’s and Ticketmaster.

The new tool, which is available today, supports over 30 languages and as a generally available enterprise product comes with a support package and service level agreement (SLA).

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Cambridge Analytica’s ex-CEO backs out of giving evidence to UK parliament

Alexander Nix, the former CEO of the political consultancy firm at the center of a storm about mishandled Facebook users data, has backed out of re-appearing in front of the UK parliament for a second time.

Nix had been scheduled to take questions from the DCMS committee that’s probing online misinformation tomorrow afternoon.

In a press notice today, the committee said: “The former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, is now refusing to appear before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee at a public session tomorrow, Wednesday 18^th April, at 2.15pm. He cites the Information Commissioner’s Office’s ongoing investigation as a reason not to appear.”

Nix has already given evidence to the committee — in February — but last month it recalled him, saying it has fresh questions for him in light of revelations that millions of Facebook users had their data passed to CA in violation of Facebook’s policies.

It has also said it’s keen to press him on some of his previous answers, as a result of evidence it has heard since — including detailed testimony from CA whistleblower Chris Wylie late last month.

In a statement today about Nix’s refusal to appear, committee chair Damian Collins said it might issue a formal summons.

“We do not accept Mr Nix’s reason for not appearing in a public session before the Committee. We have taken advice and he is not been charged with any criminal offence and there is no active legal proceedings and we plan to raise this with the Information Commissioner when we meet her this week. There is therefore no legal reason why Mr Nix cannot appear,” he said.

“The Committee is minded to issue a formal summons for him to appear on a named day in the very near future. We’ll make a further statement about this next week.”

When Nix attending the hearing on February 27 he claimed Cambridge Analytica does not “work with Facebook data”, also telling the committee: “We do not have Facebook data”, though he said the company uses the social media platform to advertise, and also “as a means to gather data, adding: “We roll out surveys on Facebook that the public can engage with if they elect to.”

Since then Facebook has said information on as many as 87 million users of its platform could have been passed to CA, via a quiz app that was able to exploit its friends API to pull data on Facebook users’ friends.

The Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has also been asked to give evidence to the committee — but has declined repeat requests to appear.

Today the committee heard from a former CA director, Brittany Kaiser, who suggested CA had in fact been able to obtain information on far more than 87M Facebook users — by the use of a series of additional quiz apps designed to be deployed on Facebook’s platform.

She claimed viral tactics were used to harvest Facebookers’ data, naming two additional survey apps it had deployed on Facebook’s platform as a ‘sex compass’ app and a music quiz app claiming to determine your personality. She said she believed the point of the quizzes was to harvest Facebook user data.

Facebook finally suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform last month — although the company has admitted it was made aware of the allegations linking it with a quiz app that harvested Facebook users data since at least December 2015, when the Guardian published its first article on the story.

Last month the UK’s data protection agency obtained a warrant to enter and search the offices of Cambridge Analytica — as part of an ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes which it kicked off in May 2017.

The information commissioner said the warrant had been necessary as CA failed to meet an earlier deadline to hand over information that it had requested.

Meanwhile Nix himself was suspended as CEO by CA last month, following a Channel 4 News investigation broadcast video footage of Nix talking to an undercover reporter and appearing to suggest the firm uses a range of dubious tactics, including front companies and subcontractors to secretly engage in political campaigns.

In a statement at the time, CA said the secretly recorded comments — and “other allegations” — “do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation”.

It’s since been reported that Julian Wheatland, the chair of the company’s UK counterpart, SCL Group, will be taking over as CA CEO — though this has not yet been publicly confirmed. Though it has said that the acting CEO, Dr Alexander Taylor, who took over from Nix last month has returned to his former role as chief data officer.

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Huawei refocuses on existing markets amid U.S. woes

Huawei is readjusting its approach the the U.S. In an annual meeting in Shenzhen, the company asserted its commitment on existing customers and markets. It’s a shift in focus for a company that has been aggressively targeting new territories, looking to expand its position as the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer.

It’s understandable, of course. There are some opponents not even a behemoth like Huawei is likely to overtake, the United States government chief among them. This year has been a succession of rained on parades for Huawei. At CES in January, the company had a long-awaited carrier deal pulled out from under it, just before taking the stage. That left mobile chief Richard Yu fuming in off-script remarks as the event drew to a close.

Late last month, as the company was planning to announce a new high power flagship, news got out that Best Buy was planning to phase out its Huawei stock. The timing of the two announcements led to some fairly awkward press briefings in both cases. Best Buy and AT&T’s cold feet are understandable, of course, as top U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned against buying the company’s products over spying concerns.

Huawei, for its part, is clearly positioning this as the story of a company that’s caught in the crossfires of escalating tensions between two global superpowers — a point of view that likely contains at least a kernel of truth. As rhetoric ramps up between the U.S. and China through trade tariffs and angry tweets, this whole is likely to get worse before it gets any better.

Eric Xu, who is one a trio of rotating CEOs that make up the company’s unique upper echelons, said in the meeting, “It is beyond myself to clearly explain what is going on between the two countries.”

As The Wall Street Journal notes, Huawei recently laid off five U.S.-based employees, including a senior spokesperson who repeatedly and regularly went to bat for the company. We’ve reached out to Huawei for comment, and will update as soon as we hear back.

For now, it seems like a stark contrast to Yu’s reaffirmation of the company’s commitment to the U.S., when he told the press, “We are committed to the U.S. market and to earning the trust of U.S. consumers by staying focused on delivering world-class products and innovation.”

This latest comment sounds a bit more bleak — understandably so. The U.S. is a tough market to conquer, even when the government isn’t actively working to dissuade people and agencies from buying your product.

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7 Font Book Tips for Managing Your Mac’s Fonts

As a Mac user you should become familiar with some simple macOS routines. Previewing and installing downloaded fonts is one of them, and it’s easy as can be.

Just double-click on a macOS-compatible font in Finder to preview it. Then press the Install Font button in the preview to install it in Font Book.

But is that all you can do with the native font management application on macOS? Not at all. We’re here to show you what else is possible with seven handy tips for managing fonts on Mac.

1. Create Libraries and Collections

If you collect fonts, or plan to, it’s a good idea to have a system in place to organize them. That’s where font libraries and collections come in.

As you can see in the Font Book sidebar, you already have a few default libraries (All Fonts, Computer, and User) to begin with. To create a new library, click on File > New Library. Once it shows up, you can drag and drop fonts to it from the All Fonts library.

To organize your fonts further, you can use font collections. Click on File > New Collection to set one up and drag and drop fonts to it from any of the font libraries.

Think of font collections as theme-based sub-libraries. You can create a collection for, say, rounding up your favorite fonts, or fonts with a professional feel to use in specific types of projects. The default font collections (Fun, Modern, Traditional, etc.) should give you some inspiration.

Unlike libraries, collections are not groups of fonts. Instead, they’re groups of pointers to fonts. While the fonts in a library end up in a dedicated Finder folder, the fonts in a collection stay in place.

In other words, collections only reference fonts that are already in a font library. Hence, you can feel free to include the same font in multiple collections; you won’t create duplicates if you do so.

2. Create Smart Collections

Let’s say you want to isolate OpenType fonts across all libraries. You can do that in a snap with a smart collection. It allows you to filter items based on specific criteria, much like smart group filters do in other Mac apps like Photos, Contacts, and Mail.

In our example, the criterion is OpenType fonts. You can also filter fonts using additional criteria, ending up with monospaced fonts in OpenType format.

To start setting up a smart collection, click on File > New Smart Collection. As with standard collections, you’ll only reference font files, so they won’t move from their original location.

3. Customize Fonts

Font Book gives you formatting options to change the look and feel of fonts. You’ll find these under the Font menu when you right-click within a font’s preview. You can emphasize, outline, and underline characters from this menu.

If you click on the Show Fonts and Show Colors menu items, you’ll get a couple of special panels to make further changes. From these panels, you can switch typefaces, scale character sizes, pick font color, etc. This can help make text easier to read.

You might have noticed the same Font menu within Mac apps like Notes, Mail, and Text Edit. It shows up under the Format menu and functions like the one within the Font Book app.

Can’t preview fonts while switching between them in apps? That means you haven’t enabled the previews in the font panel yet. For that, you’ll need to click on the Show Preview option hidden behind the gear icon at the top left in the toolbar.

Once you do, the preview section appears right below the toolbar.

4. Disable and Remove Fonts

Font Book gives you a couple of options to get fonts you don’t need out of the way. We recommend the first option: disabling fonts. With this option you can take fonts out of action and hide them from the Fonts panel in applications, but keep them on your Mac for future use.

To disable a font, select the font in the Font Book app and click on Edit > Disable. When the confirmation dialog box shows up, click on the Disable button. Once done, you’ll see the label Off next to it in the fonts list.

You can enable the font again, anytime, by clicking on Edit > Enable and confirming your choice. If you select a font collection or one of its families from the sidebar, you can disable either from the Edit menu or the right-click menu.

If you would like to see a font (or a font family) gone for good, you can delete it from the library. All you need to do is select the font from the fonts list and hit the Delete key. You can also take the longer route and select the Remove option from the font’s context menu instead. Of course, you’ll get a confirmation dialog to seal your choice to remove the font.

Keep in mind that if you select a font within a collection and remove it, you’ll see the font disappear only from that collection. It will still show up in the font library and in any other collections it belongs to.

You can delete font collections also. For these, you’ll see a Delete option in menus instead of the Remove option.

5. Remove Duplicate Fonts

If you select a font that has duplicate files on your Mac, you’ll see a warning sign appear in its preview section in the Font Book app. You won’t see the warning if the duplicate version of the font is inactive or disabled.

You’ll get a couple of options to go with the warning: Resolve Automatically and Resolve Manually.

If you choose the Resolve Automatically option, the app disables the the duplicates. Want to send the duplicate font files to the Trash instead of disabling them when you choose to resolve duplicates automatically? You can tell Font Book to do so from its Preferences panel or settings.

If you select Resolve Manually instead, the app lets you review the duplicates yourself. Not sure which font to delete? Hover over each font to see extra information for it. Then delete the font that comes with the label Duplicate typeface.

You can also bring up the above Resolve options via the font’s right-click menu (by clicking on Resolve Duplicates) or the Edit menu (by choosing Look for Enabled Duplicates).

6. Find Bad or Invalid Fonts

Corrupt fonts can result in erratic macOS behavior and even cause applications to crash often. To fix such issues, you can remove the font in question or reinstall it with a fresh file.

If you need to find out whether a particular font is the culprit behind a misbehaving application, you can have Font Book test if the font has gone bad. To do so, select the font in the Font Book app and click on the Validate Font option in its context menu or in the File menu.

The app then tells you if the font is safe to use by displaying a green check mark next to it. Corrupt fonts get a red X. To remove the fonts marked as corrupt, select their checkbox and click on the Remove Checked button at the bottom of the window.

You don’t have to validate fonts one at a time. You can select multiple fonts in a library and validate them all at once.

7. Copy Fonts to Another Mac

You can move fonts, collections, and libraries between Macs by exporting them to a folder first. Select one or more fonts in Font Book on the Mac you want to copy fonts from. Next, use the File > Export Fonts option to send the corresponding files to a folder of your choice.

If you select a library or a collection in the sidebar, the export option in the File menu shows up as Export Collection.

Once you copy the exported folder to the second Mac, open its Font Book app. There, select the library or collection where you want to import the fonts and then click on File > Add Fonts to install the fonts.

There’s More to Font Book Than Installing Fonts

It’s true, some of the best Mac software comes pre-installed. And Font Book definitely falls into that category. Have you always ignored this app or only ever opened it by accident? It might be time to fire up the app now and discover how useful it can be!

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The Beginner’s Guide to YouTube Playlists: All You Need to Know

It’s a question asked often: “What’s the best music streaming service?” My answer is, it depends. It’s Spotify if you are willing to give up some cash for a high-quality audio experience. But if you love free, then it’s YouTube.

Unfortunately, YouTube isn’t only about music, and can be quite annoying to use if all you want is music. To get the most out of it, you’ll need to understand the power of YouTube playlists.

In this YouTube beginner’s guide, we will tell you about the advantages of YouTube playlists and how you can leverage them to learn anything and enjoy everything.

What Is a YouTube Playlist (And Why Use One)?

A playlist on YouTube is a collection of videos. It can be public or private. Once you organize a list of videos, they can be played one after the other. This saves you from the chore of hunting down videos one by one.

It helps to organize the videos on a specific topic or theme. Though you can create a playlist of unrelated videos too. For instance, you can create a playlist of ambient sounds to listen at work. Or you can create a list of random videos you would like to share with friends.

It helps to make your own videos more discoverable. If you upload your own videos, then organizing your videos in playlists is vital if you want to give your viewers a better experience. YouTube indexes playlists and this allows others to find the different video content that you have uploaded.

How to Create a Playlist on Youtube

YouTube has versions for the desktop, mobile browsers, Android, and iOS. For the sake of simplicity, let’s talk about the method to create a playlist on the desktop.

It goes like this: Log into YouTube with your Google ID, search for the first video you would like to include in your playlist, and add it. You can add videos with two methods.

Method 1: Browse the search results. For any video you like, click the three vertical dots > Add to Playlist.

Method 2: Open and watch the video. Then, click the Add to (plus sign) icon that is placed just below the video.

In both cases, a menu is displayed which allows you to add the video to an existing playlist or create a new one. If you click Create new playlist then enter the new playlists name.

Use the dropdown box to select your playlist’s privacy setting. Set it to private if you want it to be for your eyes only.

Lastly, click Create. You can follow the same method now to add new videos to this playlist.

How to Edit a YouTube Playlist

Like any other playlist anywhere, you have complete freedom to change playlist titles, descriptions, reorder videos, or delete videos from a playlist. You can also choose a video to act as the playlist thumbnail.

Click on a playlist from the list under Library, then click the Edit link (with the pencil icon) next to your account name. The Playlist page is displayed. Use the customization options to change the way your playlist appears.

For instance:

1. Hover over the playlist title and click the pencil icon to change the title.
2. Click the Add a description link to open a text box where you can explain what the playlist is about.
3. Hover your mouse over the left edge of the video until you see the grey vertical bar and a four-headed arrow near the video’s thumbnail. Drag and drop the video up or down to reorder the playlist.
4. Hover your mouse over the right edge of the video to display a link that says More. This opens up a few more options to organize your playlist including the ability to add notes and set a specific video as the common thumbnail for the entire playlist.

How to Make a YouTube Playlist Private

You can set YouTube playlists to private and keep them to yourself. Or your carefully curated collection can be enjoyed via a public playlist. Follow the same path as above to reach the page for an individual playlist.

Click the Playlist settings button. In the Playlist privacy dropdown menu, choose the playlist privacy setting, then click Save.

You can choose from the three options available:

• Public videos and playlists can be seen by and shared with anyone.
• Private videos and playlists can only be seen by you and the users you choose.
• Unlisted videos and playlists can be seen and shared by anyone with the link.

We get on YouTube because of the universally shared public playlists. So, don’t keep the videos to yourself as more sharing begets better discoverability. Which brings us to our next point.

How to Share a YouTube Playlist

Tap into the almost hidden social power of YouTube. You can easily share a public YouTube playlist with a click on the Share icon. But if you want to share a private playlist then you’ll have to invite your friends or family to view the videos first.

Let’s see how you can share a playlist you created:

Click on a playlist you want to share and open it on its own page. Click the Edit link (with the pencil icon) next to your account name.

The playlist management screen is displayed. Click the Share button and pick a method to send the playlist link to your friends.

How to Shuffle a YouTube Playlist

There was a time when the YouTube Shuffle button on the desktop was buggy. You had to rely on a third-party site like RandomTube to shuffle and mix your songs or videos.

But it seems the bug has been squashed. It is easy to watch the videos in any order with a click: click on the Shuffle button located above the playlist.

How to Delete a YouTube Playlist

You can remove individual videos from a playlist and also delete a YouTube playlist completely. The changes to YouTube’s interface often confuse users, but deleting an entire playlist is easy.

Log into your YouTube account. Click on the playlist you want to delete from the Library on the left sidebar of your account page. Click the Edit link (with the pencil icon) next to your account name.

The displayed page gives you all the options to manage your playlist. Click the three vertical dots (More) on the extreme right of the playlist name.

Click Delete playlist to remove the playlist from your account. A confirmation box will ask you if you are sure. Click the red Yes, Delete It button.

How to Download a YouTube Playlist

YouTube apps for iOS and Android along with YouTube Go on Android do allow you watch individual videos offline. But there is no way to download an entire playlist yet. For that, you have to fall back on some excellent third-party tools.

We have reviewed some of the best tools and apps for downloading YouTube playlists. Here’s the short list:

• KeepVid
• Gihosoft TubeGet
• 4K Video Downloader
• VLC Media Player

There are also multiple choices available on the web if you don’t want to install anything. Many come with annoying ads. But here are two you can try out:

• DDownr
• CollectYouTube.com

Start Using YouTube Playlists Today

YouTube is also one of the most popular “search engines” on the web. The huge number of videos uploaded every day make it a vortex of information. Carefully planned playlists make it more manageable. We have just scratched the surface in this beginner’s guide and you can be sure there are more YouTube tricks to discover.

So, if you are keyed up, check out these cool YouTube URL tricks to get more out of it right now.

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CA also used ‘sex compass’ and other quiz apps for sucking Facebook data, says former employee

Brittney Kaiser, a former employee for Cambridge Analytica — who left the company in January and is today giving evidence in front of a UK parliament committee that’s investigating online misinformation — has suggested that data on far more Facebook users may have found its way into the consultancy’s hands than the up to 87M people Facebook has so far suggested had personal data compromised as a result of a personality quiz app running on its platform which was developed by an academic working with CA.

Another former CA employee, Chris Wylie, previously told the committee the company worked with professor Aleksandr Kogan to gather Facebook users’ data — via his thisisyourdigitallife quiz app — because Kogan had agreed to work on gathering and processing the data first, instead of negotiating commercial terms up front.

CA’s intent was to use Facebookers’ data for political microtargeting, according to evidence provided by Wylie.

In her written evidence to the committee Kaiser claims:

I should emphasise that the Kogan/GSR datasets and questionnaires were not the only Facebook-connected questionnaires and datasets which Cambridge Analytica used. I am aware in a general sense of a wide range of surveys which were done by CA or its partners, usually with a Facebook login – for example, the “sex compass” quiz. I do not know the specifics of these surveys or how the data was acquired or processed. But I believe it is almost certain that the number of Facebook users whose data was compromised through routes similar to that used by Kogan is much greater than 87 million; and that both Cambridge Analytica and other unconnected companies and campaigns were involved in these activities.

Asked to expand on this point during today’s hearing, Kaiser said Cambridge Analytica’s internal creative, psychology and data science teams worked together to design questionnaires for deploying on Facebook’s platform.

“I am aware now of what the questionnaire was that professor Kogan used, although I didn’t know about it when I joined the company. But I would see questionnaires — for example there was one called the ‘Sex Compass’ to find out what your personal preferences were privately. And then there was another one on your ‘Music Personality’,” she told the committee.

“In my pitches I used to give examples even to clients that if you go on Facebook and you see these viral personality quizzes — not all of them would have been designed by Cambridge Analytica/SCL Group or our affiliates but that these applications were designed specifically to harvest data from individuals, using Facebook as the tool.”

“I know at least of those two examples,” she added. “Therefore it can be inferred or implied that there were many additional individuals as opposed to just the ones, through Aleksandr Kogan’s test, whose data may have been compromised.”

Committee chair Damian Collins asked Kaiser whether the viral app approach to harvesting Facebook data, which CA had developed for work in the U.S., would have been used by the company in other markets too.

“That was the idea — although in Europe it’s quite difficult because of the data protection laws,” responded Kaiser.

“Well if you observe them,” quipped Collins.

“Correct,” said Kaiser.

A little later another committee member returned to the topic, asking Kaiser to confirm whether these survey apps would definitely have been able to pass Facebook data on users if they provided their Facebook login details at the end of the survey process — noting that the committee had been told by former CA CEO, Alexander Nix, that Facebook users’ personal data may not have been accessed by CA via the surveys.

“What you’re saying is that that was not the case — that actually the purpose of the survey was to gather [Facebook] information and by completing it with your Facebook login as well then CA would also get access to your data on Facebook too?”

“I believe that was the point of the quizzes in the first place, yes,” responded Kaiser.

Since the data misuse scandal blew up last month, Facebook has said it is conducting a full audit of any apps which had access to “a large amount” of information before it changed app permissions on its platform in mid 2015 to prevent developers from being able to suck out data on Facebook users’ friends.

We’ve reached out to Facebook to ask whether it can provide an estimate on the total number of users’ data that could have also been compromised by additional quiz apps running on its platform — and will update this story with any response.

Earlier this month the company confirmed that as many as 87 million Facebook users could have had information passed to Cambridge Analytica as a result of just Kogan’s app — which was downloaded around 270,000 times.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the full audit process of third party apps with access to lots of user data will take some time.

Also earlier this month the company revealed that another historical feature — intended to be used for search and account recovery — had been systematically exploited by “malicious actors” to scrape public information from Facebook users’ profiles.

It warned that “most” Facebook users will have had their public info scraped by unknown entities as a result of this security loophole. The company’s platform has more than 2BN active users now, meaning that between 1BN and 2BN people will have had some of their Facebook information taken without their consent.

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How to Create Podcast Playlists That Pull Episodes From Multiple Podcasts

If you’re looking for a way to create a playlist of podcast episodes from multiple podcasts for later listening, there are a couple of ways you can do that in a pretty seamless manner.

How to Build Podcast Playlists Using ListenNotes

Let’s say you’ve spotted an episode of a podcast you know you’ll want to listen to later, you should opt for ListenNotes. This service behaves in the same way that Pocket or Instapaper do for saving articles for later reading, and what’s great about it is that it plugs into whatever podcast app or service you’re already using.

Here’s how to build your podcast playlist in ListenNotes:

1. Once you’re logged into ListenNotes, you’ll find that a few episodes have already been added to your list. You can remove them by clicking the Remove from Listen Later button. 
2. To add new episodes to your playlist, you can search for them directly through ListenLater. If you come across something online, just fire up ListenNotes in your browser and search for the episode title or podcast name.
3. Once you find an episode you want to save, click the Add to playlist button. 

As you build your list, you’re going to want to listen to it in your podcast app of choice. Here’s what you have to do to get it into your app. (You’ll have to use an app or service that allows you to add podcasts by URL):

1. With your playlist open, click the RSS button and copy the RSS link to your phone. (Either open up ListenLater on your phone or just email yourself the link)
2. Open up your podcast app of choice and go through the steps for adding a new podcast. (In Pocket Casts, a great choice for managing your podcasts, just paste the URL into the search bar for new podcasts.)
3. You can now access the list in your app of choice as you would any other podcast.

You can see this process in action using Apple’s podcast app below:

To access your list again, on the ListenNotes site, Tools >Listen Later in the menu in the top right-hand corner.

You can choose your sharing settings by clicking the Settings button. You can choose from Unlisted, Private, or Public. If you want to share your playlist with others, just send them the RSS link.

The one thing lacking in ListenNotes is an extension or button, much like Pocket’s to make saving episodes more seamless.

How to Build Podcast Playlists Using Pocket Casts

Maybe you don’t have any particular episodes in mind, but just want to keep up with all the new episodes from your favorite podcasts. Plenty of apps offer like this capability, such as Pocket Casts:

1. Scroll down to the bottom of the Pocket Casts home screen and tap Create Episode Filter.
2. Choose a name for your filter and an icon of your choice.
3. For playing state, choose Unplayed.
4. For status, choose Downloaded and Not Downloaded
5. For Episode Release Date, choose the timeframe that works for you—either Last 24 hours or Last 3 days is probably best.
6. Under Included Podcasts choose the podcasts you want to include in the playlist.

Now if you need access to the list offline, you can go that particular filter and download all the episodes.

If you prefer to listen at your computer, there are plenty of great browser extensions for listening to podcasts.

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How to Find Out the Model of Your Android Phone

Boost Your LinkedIn Privacy by Limiting Who Can See Your Email Address

Being aware of LinkedIn’s lesser-known features can help you maintain utmost professionalism on the social networking platform, but what about your privacy? An important bit of personal data to keep close to your chest is your email address. Did you know that LinkedIn gives you four ways to control the visibility of your email address?

How to Limit Who Can See Your Email Address on LinkedIn

By default, only your first-degree connections can see your email address. Apart from this, there are three other settings you can choose to increase or decrease your privacy. Let’s see how you can choose who can see the email address on your profile.

1. Log into LinkedIn from your desktop. You can also use the mobile apps.
2. Click on the little down arrow below your profile picture. Then, choose Settings & Privacy.
3. On the Settings & Privacy page, click on the tab for Privacy. The settings here allow you to manage how others see your profile and network information
4. Click on the Change option for Who can see your email address.
   
5. As you can see, four options are offered to you. Select one of the options to control the visibility of your email address.
   
   Only you will hide your email address from everyone.
   1st-degree connections will allow only your direct connections to view your email address (this is the default setting).
   1st and 2nd-degree connections will allow your direct connections, and also their direct connections to see your email address.
   Everyone on LinkedIn allows everyone on LinkedIn to view your email address.
6. All changes are automatically saved.

Remember, beyond this setting, your email address is also visible to people who are your email contacts. So, if you like to maintain some degree of privacy (or open it up for greater networking), then this is one setting you can change immediately.

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Minds aims to decentralize the social network

Decentralization is the buzzword du jour. Everything – from our currencies to our databases – are supposed to exist, immutably, in this strange new world. And Bill Ottman wants to add our social media to the mix.

Ottman, an intense young man with a passion to fix the world, is the founder of Minds.com, a New York-based startup that has been receiving waves of new users as zealots and the the not-so-zealous have been leaving other networks. In fact, Zuckerberg’s bad news is music to Ottman’s ears.

Ottman started Minds in 2011 “with the goal of bringing a free, open source and sustainable social network to the world,” he said. He and his CTO, Mark Harding, have worked in various non-profits including Code To Inspire, a group that teaches Afghani women to code. He said his vision is to get us out from under social media’s thumb.

“We started Minds in my basement after being disillusioned by user abuse on Facebook and other big tech services. We saw spying, data mining, algorithm manipulation, and no revenue sharing,” he said. “To us, it’s inevitable that an open source social network becomes dominant, as was the case with Wikipedia and proprietary encyclopedias.”

His efforts have paid off. The team now has over 1 million registered users and over 105,000 monthly active users. They are working on a number of initiatives, including an ICO, and the site makes money through “boosting” – essentially the ability to pay to have a piece of content float higher in the feed.

The company raised $350K in 2013 and then a little over a million dollars in a Reg CF Equity Crowdfunding raise.

Unlike Facebook, Minds is built on almost radical transparency. The code is entirely open source and it includes encrypted messenger services and optional anonymity for users. The goal, ultimately, is to have the data be decentralized and any user should be able to remove his or her data. It’s also non-partisan, a fact that Ottman emphasized.

“We are not pushing a political agenda, but are more concerned with transparency, Internet freedom and giving control back to the user,” he said. “It’s a sad state of affairs when every network that cares about free speech gets lumped in with extremists.”

He was disappointed, for example, when people read that Reddit’s choice to shut down toxic sub-Reddits was a success. It wasn’t, he said. Instead, those users just flocked to other, more permissive sites. However, he doesn’t think those sites have be cesspools of hate.

“We are a community-owned social network dedicated to transparency, privacy and rewarding people for their contributions. We are called Minds because it’s meant to be a representation of the network itself,” he said. “Our mission is Internet freedom with privacy, transparency, free speech within the law and user control. Additionally, we want to provide our users with revenue opportunity and the ability to truly expand their reach and earn rewards for their contributions to the network.”

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How to Play Minesweeper on Windows 10

Do you remember the classic Windows games from back in the day? Cruel, Freecell, Golf, Pegged, Reversi, SkiFree, and so on? For all the great AAA games that are now available elsewhere, there are only a few that can hold a candle to these nostalgic freebies.

Of course, the one game that rules above all others is Minesweeper. There was something insanely addictive about trying to reveal all the little squares without blowing yourself up.

While the fact Microsoft no longer ships Minesweeper as part of the operating system is a massive shame, it doesn’t mean you can’t play the classic game!

How to Play Minesweeper on Windows 10

To play Minesweeper on Windows 10, you just need to grab the Best Of Windows Entertainment Pack. It’s available for free from archive.org.

It includes 10 classic games: Cruel, Freecell, Golf, Pegged, Reversi, Snake, Solitaire, Taipei, Tictactics, and—most importantly—Minesweeper. The app also includes MS Paint and an old version of Windows calculator. The app will run on any 64-bit Windows system thanks to its 32-bit architecture.

To download Minesweeper, follow the instructions below:

1. Visit archive.org/details/BestOfWindowsEntertainmentPack64Bit.
2. In the panel in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, click on Download.
3. You have two download options: a torrent or individual EXE files.
4. The torrent version includes all the apps in one file, or you can download the EXE files on an app-by-app basis.
5. Once the download has finished, install the Minesweeper app (along with any other games you want.
6. Double-click on the newly created desktop icon to launch the game.

Remember, these old Windows games aren’t the only classic games on Archive.org; you can find lots more freebie classics if you know where to look. Who knows, we might even see one of these games get a sequel one day!

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Someone made a game where you ride the rapidly changing prices of cryptocurrencies

The cryptocurrency world is a strange one, but at least it has a sense of humor. A new game has you riding a little crypto-car along the wildly fluctuating prices of major and minor currencies. It’s quite ridiculous, and it isn’t even a bad game!

It’s called Crypto Rider, predictably, and is very much a spawn of the popular Line Rider type of game, though (hopefully) different enough that there won’t be any cease and desists forthcoming.

You select your car, then pick a chart to ride — most are a ride from a coin’s humble start to its highest value. But there’s a mountain-like “total market cap” track, a “drag race” where you need to clear a valuation gap, and one that must be depressing for BTC holders: a bumpy downhill ride from $20K to $7,850. New tracks should appear in time as well as new cryptocurrencies rise and fall.

The game is cute — there are fun messages along the track, and the exhaust is tiny coins — and you collect coins toward unlocking new cars. I’m pretty sure they’re just aesthetic changes but I’m gunning for a Dogecar anyway. I’ve asked the developer, SuperFly Games, for a few more details.

It’s free, it’s dumb, and it’s a fun way to waste a few minutes while you inadvertently lampoon the hubris of this rushed attempt to overthrow existing financial systems. Sure, we’ll get there eventually. But as the game shows, it’s going to be quite a ride.

You can download Crypto Rider for iOS or Android.

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