Robots can develop prejudices just like humans

In a fascinating study by researchers at Cardiff University and MIT, we learn that robots can develop prejudices when working together. The robots, which ran inside a teamwork simulator, expressed prejudice against other robots not on their team. In short, write the researchers, “groups of autonomous machines could demonstrate prejudice by simply identifying, copying and learning this behavior from one another.”

To test the theory, researchers ran a simple game in a simulator. The game involved donating to parties outside or inside the robot’s personal group based on reputation as well as donation strategy. They were able to measure the level of prejudice against outsiders. As the simulation ran, they saw a rise in prejudice against outsiders over time.

The researchers found the prejudice was easy to grow in the simulator, a fact that should give us pause as we give robots more autonomy.

“Our simulations show that prejudice is a powerful force of nature and through evolution, it can easily become incentivised in virtual populations, to the detriment of wider connectivity with others. Protection from prejudicial groups can inadvertently lead to individuals forming further prejudicial groups, resulting in a fractured population. Such widespread prejudice is hard to reverse,” said Cardiff University Professor Roger Whitaker. “It is feasible that autonomous machines with the ability to identify with discrimination and copy others could in future be susceptible to prejudicial phenomena that we see in the human population.”

Interestingly, prejudice fell when there were “more distinct subpopulations being present within a population,” an important consideration in human prejudice as well.

“With a greater number of subpopulations, alliances of non-prejudicial groups can cooperate without being exploited. This also diminishes their status as a minority, reducing the susceptibility to prejudice taking hold. However, this also requires circumstances where agents have a higher disposition towards interacting outside of their group,” Professor Whitaker said.

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The 3 Best Affordable Noise-Cancelling Headphones for Students

Instagram launches parent portal to teach internet safety

For parents who grew-up with dial-up connections and tape players, the high-speed, digital social lives of their teens can be a mystery. Today, both the good and destructive aspects of social interactions are taking place behind screens on apps like Instagram.

To help parents navigate these online environments Instagram released Thursday a parents guide to the app on its Well Being site.

The PSA covers a basic introduction to the photo and video sharing app and introduces parents to the safety features that they — and perhaps their child — may not be aware of. These bullet points cover privacy features like private vs. public profiles, and a timer system the app released earlier this summer that helps teens and their parents keep track of how long they’ve stayed on the app and prompts them to take breath if they’ve exceeded a pre-set limit.

In addition to walking parents through these more technical aspects of the app, the portal also works as a basic introduction to the unique intersection of personal identity and technology that is inherent to how teens are finding their place in an increasingly noisy web.

The app also encourages parents to ask their teens about their mental well being as a result of online comments, how well (if at all) they know their followers and how they decide what to post on various accounts (e.g. ‘finstas’ vs. ‘instas’.)

The list is, without a doubt, a little cringey at times. But so are many conversations that have to bridge both generation and maturity gaps between parents and children.

As teens’ lives become more secluded online, the ability for parents to offer an educated and empathetic ear to the personal issues these social apps might create can mean the difference between a child voicing them at all or struggling through on their own.

 

 

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Bumble launches Snooze button to pause dating for a digital detox

Bumble doesn’t want you to delete your account when you get into a relationship, go on vacation, or just need a break from your phone. So today it’s launching a Snooze button that lets you stop showing up to people swiping through potential matches for a day, three, a week, or indefinitely. You’ll also get to select an away message like “I’m traveling”, “I’m on a digital detox”, “I’m focusing on work”, or “I’m prioritizing myself” that will show up with existing matches you’re chatting with.

The feature could ensure that Bumble’s 40 million registered users aren’t flirting with an empty vacuum if their match goes AWOL from Bumble temporarily. And for users who turn it on, Snooze could reduce their FOMO about potentially missing out on a match or looking like they ignored someone’s message.

“The impact of social media, especially on young women, has the potential to be very harmful and we have a responsibility to give our users the power to disconnect on their own terms whenever they see fit” writes Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd. “We know Snooze will allow them to come back to us feeling refreshed and more open to new connections.”

Tinder has its own Pause button, but it’s bundled alongside the account deletion button and has less intention and flexibility behind it. You can merely turn it on or off. Without the proper away messages, matches could think you’re just trying to ghost them.

When Bumble and non-Bumble users were recently surveyed, over 60 percent of women ages 18 to 24 said they felt overwhelmed by social media. 60 percent of women surveyd also spend over two hours a day on social media. Bumble’s in-house sociologist Dr. Jessica Carbino writes that “On social media, young women can develop unrealistic perceptions of what they should be or how others see them. These unrealistic expectations may ultimately have negative consequences for their physical and emotional well-being.”

Dating apps are subject to high churn rates as people find long-time partners or age out of different apps. They must do everything they can to keep people on the app to both maximize the potential match pool and their chances of selling premium services to their users. Snooze feels as much like a retention trick as a benevolent offering, but if it means people can take a break from their phones in peace, it’s nice to have.

For more on Snooze and Bumble, check out its CEO’s talk today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

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Introducing the Inclusive Images Competition

Posted by Tulsee Doshi, Product Manager, Google AI

The release of large, publicly available image datasets, such as ImageNet, Open Images and Conceptual Captions, has been one of the factors driving the tremendous progress in the field of computer vision. While these datasets are a necessary and critical part of developing useful machine learning (ML) models, some open source data sets have been found to be geographically skewed based on how they were collected. Because the shape of a dataset informs what an ML model learns, such skew may cause the research community to inadvertently develop models that may perform less well on images drawn from geographical regions under-represented in those data sets. For example, the images below show one standard open-source image classifier trained on the Open Images dataset that does not properly apply “wedding” related labels to images of wedding traditions from different parts of the world.

Wedding photographs (donated by Googlers), labeled by a classifier trained on the Open Images dataset. The classifier’s label predictions are recorded below each image.

While Google is focusing on building even more representative datasets, we also want to encourage additional research in the field around ways that machine learning methods can be more robust and inclusive when learning from imperfect data sources. This is an important research challenge, and one that pushes the boundaries of ways that machine learning models are currently created. Good solutions will help ensure that even when some data sources aren’t fully inclusive, the models developed with them can be.

In support of this effort and to spur further progress in developing inclusive ML models, we are happy to announce the Inclusive Images Competition on Kaggle. Developed in partnership with the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Competition Track, this competition challenges you to use Open Images, a large, multilabel, publicly-available image classification dataset that is majority-sampled from North America and Europe, to train a model that will be evaluated on images collected from a different set of geographic regions across the globe.

The three geographical distributions of data in this competition. Competitors will train their models on Open Images, a widely used publicly available benchmark dataset for image classification which happens to be drawn mostly from North America and Western Europe. Models are then evaluated first on Challenge Stage 1 and finally on Challenge Stage 2, each with different un-revealed geographical distributions. In this way, models are stress-tested for their ability to operate inclusively beyond their training data.

For model evaluation, we have created two Challenge datasets via our Crowdsource project, where we asked our volunteers from across the globe to participate in contributing photos of their surroundings. We hope that these datasets, built by donations from Google’s global community, will provide a challenging geographically-based stress test for this competition. We also plan to release a larger set of images at the end of the competition to further encourage inclusive development, with more inclusive data.

Examples of labeled images from the challenge dataset. Clockwise from top left, image donation by Peter Tester, Mukesh Kumhar, HeeYoung Moon, Sudipta Pramanik, jaturan amnatbuddee, Tomi Familoni and Anu Subhi

The Inclusive Images Competition officially started September 5th with the available training data & first stage Challenge data set. The deadline for submitting your results will be Monday, November 5th, and the test set will be released on Tuesday, November 6th. For more details and timelines, please visit the Inclusive Images Competition website.

The results of the competition will be presented at the 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, and we will provide top-ranking competitors with travel grants to attend the conference (see this page for full details). We look forward to being part of the community's development of more inclusive, global image classification algorithms!

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following individuals for making the Inclusive Image Competition and dataset possible: James Atwood, Pallavi Baljekar, Parker Barnes, Anurag Batra, Eric Breck, Peggy Chi, Tulsee Doshi, Julia Elliott, Gursheesh Kaur, Akshay Gaur, Yoni Halpern, Henry Jicha, Matthew Long, Jigyasa Saxena, and D. Sculley.

Learn How to Write Your Own Android Apps With React Native

How to Play Almost Any Windows Game on Linux with Steam Play

PC gamers wanting to switch to Linux have a problem: the library just isn’t big enough. While some AAA titles see release on Linux, they’re usually limited to Steam, and typically arrive after the Windows and macOS launch.

But what if we told you that Linux can now access almost the entire library of Windows games on Steam?

Here’s how to play Windows games on Linux with a beta version of Steam Play.

Windows Games on Linux: The Current Situation

Over the past few years, the scene has steadily improved for Linux gamers. The platform’s popularity has slowly increased, enough for some major new titles to release directly to Linux.

But for other titles, how can you run Windows games on Linux?

• Wine/PlayOnLinux: Using the Wine compatibility layer and PlayOnLinux front end, Linux gamers can run Windows titles to varying degrees of success.
• CodeWeavers Crossover: The proprietary version of Wine, whose improvements were added to Wine later on. It is intended mainly for running Windows applications on macOS and Linux, rather than games.
• Virtual machine: You can create a Windows VM in Linux and run many Windows games.
• Steam Play: First released in 2010, this makes it possible for many Windows PC games to run in Linux.

While OS compatibility has gotten better better since Valve’s Gabe Newell expressed disdain for Windows, performance and compatibility issues have hampered gaming on Linux.

That could change soon with the release of the new Steam Play beta program.

The New Steam Play Beta

August 2018 saw the release of Steam Play beta, a new version of the software that enables Windows games to run on Linux. After two years of collaboration with CodeWeavers and other parties, this includes a modified version of Wine, known as Proton, and support for the Vulkan cross-platform 3D graphics API.

The initial release supports 27 titles, but you can suggest others. Furthermore, other titles will also function if they’ve worked with Wine in the past.

Proton differs to Wine in several ways, most notably the implementation of vkd3d Direct3D 12, OpenVR and Steamworks API bridges, fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11, improved game controller and full screen support. Also important is esync (short for “eventfd-based synchonization”) patchset, which brings performance improvements for multi-threading.

Good performance overall is expected for Vulkan titles, although where API translation is required, a more traditional Wine experience is more likely. Regardless, this is a great step forward for Linux gaming.

Better still, anyone can install the Steam Play beta. Here’s how!

Opt-In to Steam Play Beta

You’ll need the Steam client running on your Linux machine. You can either install it as an app, or it might have come preinstalled with your gaming-centric Linux distro (e.g. the SteamOS distro).

To get started, open Steam and sign in. Find the Steam > Settings menu, then go to the Account tab.

Here, find the Beta Participation section and click Change. Select Steam Beta Update in the dropdown list, then OK to confirm.

Steam will then prompt you to restart the app. Upon restarting, a new version needs to install, so prepare yourself for a short wait while 150MB of data downloads.

If you’re using Big Picture mode in Steam, the instructions are slightly different. Open Settings > System and check Participate in client beta. Restart Steam when prompted.

Install Updated Graphics Drivers

To proceed, you’ll need to upgrade the graphics drivers on your Linux device. If you’re running SteamOS, an update will have already done this.

The following steps are for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS devices running Nvidia, AMD, or Intel graphics.

Nvidia

You need to install the latest proprietary drivers to play games in Steam Play beta. Open a terminal and add Canonical’s third party driver’s PPA with these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa

sudo apt-get update sudo apt install nvidia-driver-396

Once the driver downloads, reboot your Linux system.

AMD/Intel

For AMD or Intel graphics, you’ll need to install the recent Mesa and LLVM drivers:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/mesa

sudo apt-get update sudo apt dist-upgrade sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386

Remember to reboot your system once the drivers have installed. VR gamers can also take advantage of AMD support for their devices using these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kisak/steamvr4pk

sudo apt-get update sudo apt dist-upgrade sudo apt install linux-generic-steamvr-18.04

With these drivers installed, your Linux PC will be ready (assuming it has suitable graphics hardware) to play almost any Windows game via Steam. Check the Steam support forums for help installing the drivers on other distros.

Install a Windows Game on Linux in Steam

By default, you can only install Linux-compatible games in Steam. Even after joining the beta program, there’s no way within the Steam user interface to install the games. Right-clicking and selecting Install from the menu will result in an instant error message.

Why can’t you install? Well, you need to enable Steam Play for the titles in your library.

In Steam, head to Steam > Settings > Steam Play and ensure that both Enable Steam Play for supported titles and Enable Steam Play for all titles are checked.

(There is also the option to switch between Proton versions, which will come in handy for troubleshooting)

Click OK to confirm, and follow the instruction to restart Steam. You’ll then be able to choose any title, right-click, and select Install. Beware, however: titles that have not run under Wine previously are unlikely to suddenly work.

Running a game will prompt a message informing you that it will be launched with Steam Play. Click OK to proceed, and play!

How Steam Play Can Improve Linux Gaming

Gaming on Linux has already improved tenfold with the release of Steam Play beta. But it can become even more awesome thanks to Valve making it easy for developers to get involved.

Vulkan support is a major part of this strategy, with Valve imploring developers who don’t currently release to Linux :

“[T]arget Vulkan natively in order to offer the best possible performance on all platforms, or at least offer it as an option if possible. It’s also a good idea to avoid any invasive third-party DRM middleware, as they sometimes prevent compatibility features from working as intended.”

This is excellent news going forward!

Play Your Favorite Windows Games on Steam Today

No more messing about with Wine configurations, and no more frustration. Valve has revitalized Linux gaming at just the right time, and everyone can get involved.

To summarize, you can install Windows games in Linux via Steam as follows:

• Use the Steam Client beta opt-in
• Download the beta client
• Install updated graphics drivers
• Enable Steam Play in Steam

Now, you might run into problems getting the graphics drivers right (I did), but you’ll find support online to help here. Once you’ve overcome this potential issue, however, your Linux device will be ready to install almost any Windows game in Steam.

Maybe now it’s finally time to quit Windows!

Read the full article: How to Play Almost Any Windows Game on Linux with Steam Play

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How to Schedule Email Messages in Gmail for Sending Later

Have you ever wanted to write an email message in Gmail now but send it later? Maybe you are sending birthday wishes and would like to delay the delivery of the email message until the actual day. Or you have written an email but would like to schedule delivery in the recipient’s time zone when the message is more likely to get read.

Microsoft Outlook has a built-in email scheduler but you do not have a ‘native’ option to delay the delivery of email messages inside Gmail or Google Inbox. That’s where Email Studio’s Gmail Scheduler can help.

Email Studio is a Gmail add-on that will not only help you schedule email messages inside Gmail but you can also send recurring emails. For instance, if you would like to send an email reminder to your tenant on the last Friday of every month, you can do it with the Gmail scheduler in a few easy steps.

Unlike email scheduler extensions like Boomerang or Sidekick that are browser specific, Email Studio is available right inside the Gmail website and thus works across all desktop browsers. You can even schedule email messages inside the Gmail app for Android without installing any app.

Schedule Emails in Gmail and Send Later

You can schedule email messages with Email Studio’s Gmail Scheduler in few easy steps. The basic idea is that you first compose all the emails that you would like to be delivered later in Gmail, let these unsent messages stay inside the drafts folder and then specify the exact delivery date and time for these messages in Email Studio.

Watch the video tutorial (download) to get started.

How to Setup Gmail Scheduler

1. Open the Gmail website, compose an email, add the message body and specify the recipients in the To, Cc or Bcc fields. After you are done writing an email, do not hit the send button but let these messages stay as drafts instead.
2. Go to the Gmail add-on store and click the blue “Install” button to add Email Studio to your own Gmail account.
3. After the Email Studio add-on is installed, go to your Gmail mailbox and open any message in the inbox. Please note that you need to open a message inside the Inbox folder and not the drafts folder as Gmail add-ons aren’t currently visible inside drafts.
4. You’ll now see the Email Studio icon in the right sidebar. Click the icon to open the addon and grant the necessary authorization. This is necessary since all the emails will go out from your own Gmail account.
5. You’ll see a list of services available inside the Email Studio sidebar. Click the Email Scheduler service and then choose Add New Schedule to schedule the draft message that you have composed in the previous step.

Schedule Email Messages in Gmail

The email scheduler window presents a list of all your Gmail draft message in the drop-down. Select any message and then specify the preferred date and time when that message should be delivered.

The emails are scheduled in the timezone of your browser but you can also change the timezone per email message. Internally, the email scheduler sets up a cron job with Google Scripts and the emails will be sent within +/- 15 minutes of the specified time.

The add-on runs in the background on Google servers and will automatically deliver the message at the time chosen by you even if your computer is switched off.

If you would like to edit the schedule of a previously scheduled message, or if you would like to unschedule an email, go to your Gmail and open the Email Studio add-on. Here, choose the Email Scheduler service and you’ll have to option to remove or edit the schedule of previously scheduled emails.

Email Scheduler for Gmail – Premium Features

Email Studio is free but you can go premium and unlock new features.

Features	Free	Premium
Support Gmail, GSuite and Google Inbox	Yes	Yes
Number of Email messages you can schedule at once	2	No limit
Schedule Recurring Emails	Yes	Yes
Remove Email Studio branding	No	Yes
Send emails from another email alias	Yes	Yes
Technical Support	None	Email
Simple Pricing	Email Studio is $29 per year. Click here to buy

The premium edition lets you schedule more emails, send repetitive emails that are sent on a recurring schedule (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly), and you can are also entitled to technical support.

The daily email sending limit is based on the type of your Google account. Gmail users can send up to 400 email recipients per day while GSuite for Work customers can email 1500 recipients per day.

If you have trouble using the Gmail Scheduler add-on, please ensure that Gmail & Drive SDK are enabled for your Google domain.

The post How to Schedule Email Messages in Gmail for Sending Later appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

Fido Alliance adds a biometrics certification program to help fight spoofing

In a move aimed at upping standards across biometric user verification systems, the industry consortium, Fido Alliance, has launched a certification program for biometrics systems.

“The goal of the Biometric Certification Component Program is to provide a framework for the certification of biometric subsystems that can in turn be integrated into FIDO Certified authenticators,” it writes on its website.

While biometric verification systems such as fingerprint readers have been pretty widely adopted in the mobile space already — with Apple introducing its fingerprint biometric, Touch ID, to the iPhone a full five years ago; followed, last fall, by the introduction of a facial recognition biometric (Face ID) for its high end iPhone X — the Alliance says that, up to now, there hasn’t been a standardized way to validate the accuracy and reliability of biometric recognition systems in the commercial marketplace. Which is where it’s intending the new certification program to come in.

While few would doubt the robustness of Apple’s biometrics components (and testing regime), the sprawlingly diverse Android marketplace hosts all sorts of OEM players — which inevitably raises the risk of some lesser quality components (and/or processes) slipping in.

And in recent years there have been plenty of examples of poorly implemented biometrics, especially in the mobile space — with hackers easily able to crack into various Android devices that were using facial or iris recognition technology in trivially bypassable ways.

In 2017, for example, Chaos Computer Club members used a print out of an eye combined with a contact lens to fox iris scanners on the Samsung Galaxy S8. And that was one of the most sophisticated biometric hacks. Others have just required a selfie of the person to be held up in front of a ‘face unlock’ system to get an easy open sesame.

Where the not-for-profit Alliance comes in — a group whose board includes security exec reps from the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, among others — is it’s on a mission to reduce reliance on passwords for digital security because they inject friction into the online experience.

And biometrics do tend to be convenient, given they are attached to each person. Which is why they have been increasingly finding their way into smartphones and all sorts of other consumer electronics — from wearables to car tech, helped by component costs shrinking as biometrics adoption grows.

But it’s no good trying to speed up ID verification if the alternatives being reached for are badly implemented — and end up actively damaging security.

It certainly doesn’t have to be that way.

Apple’s biometrics are not so easily mocked. And while Touch ID is vulnerable to spoofing, like pretty much any fingerprint reader, its depth-mapping Face ID tech is by far the most sophisticated biometric implementation in the consumer electronics space to date. And hasn’t been meaningfully hacked (well, barring attacks by identical twins/strikingly similar looking family members).

So there’s clearly a world of difference (and, well, cost) between a well architected biometric recognition system which puts security considerations front and center, vs the awful sloppy stuff we’ve seen in recent years — where OEMs were just rushing to compete.

Biometrics has certainly often been treated more as a convenience gimmicky for device marketing purposes, rather than viewed as a route to evolve (and even potentially enhance) device security.

The Alliance’s certification program is using accredited independent labs to test that biometric subcomponents meet what it dubs “globally recognized performance standards for biometric recognition performance and Presentation Attack Detection (PAD)” — and thus that they are “fit for commercial use”.

PAD refers to various methods that can be used to try to attack and circumvent biometric systems, such as using silicon or gelatine fingerprints, or deploying harvested facial or video imagery of the device owner.

So it looks like the Alliance’s hope for the program is to ‘upskill’ biometric implementations — or at least weed out the really stupid stuff.

“For customers, such as regulated online service providers, OEMs and enterprises, it provides a standardized way to trust that the biometric systems they are relying upon for fingerprint, iris, face and/or voice recognition can reliably identify users and detect presentation attacks,” it writes.

Speed is another goal too, as it says prior to this certification program due diligence was carried out by enterprise customers (or at least by those “who had the capacity to conduct such reviews”) — which required biometric vendors to repeatedly prove performance for each customer.

Whereas going forward vendors can use the program to test and certify just once to validate their system’s performance and re-use that third-party validation across the market — gaining what the Alliance bills as” substantial time and cost savings”.

Commenting in a statement, Brett McDowell, executive director of the Alliance, said: “While border control and law enforcement markets have mature assessment programs for their biometric systems, we were surprised that no such program existed for this rapidly growing consumer market.”

“With biometrics being a popular option for mobile and web applications implementing Fido Authentication, there is a growing need for those service providers to appropriately assess the risk of fraud from lost or stolen devices,” he added.

Currently only one lab has been accredited to perform components testing for the program.

The lab, iBeta, is located in the U.S. but a spokeswoman for the Fido Alliance told us: “The Alliance is actively working to bring in additional labs.”

She added that the Alliance will update this list as more are added.

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5 Simple macOS Tweaks to Help You Stay Focused

Activating Do Not Disturb mode is not the only tweak that can save you from distractions while working on your Mac. You can make a few other changes to help yourself focus on the task at hand if single-tasking is your goal.

We recommend starting off with the five tweaks outlined below. Feel free to pick the ones that will work for you and don’t worry about the rest.

1. Enable Single Application Mode

Going full-screen or maximizing the active window will hide the distracting apps behind it. Instead of doing that, you can hide all apps except the current one with the keyboard shortcut Option + Cmd + H. If you want to minimize all windows of the active app, try the shortcut Option + Cmd + M.

But wouldn’t it be painless if you could minimize all but the current app window automatically? You can do that, too, with the single application mode built into macOS.

To enable this mode, open the Terminal app, paste in the following bit of code, and hit Enter:

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true; killall Dock

(To reverse the change, use the same code above, but replace true with false in the snippet.)

Now try switching apps. You’ll see that the app you switch to is the only app visible.

To try fading out the windows in the background instead of hiding them, try a dimmer app like HazeOver ($4). Install Hocus Focus (Free) if you want to hide only inactive app windows.

Speaking of hiding, you can hide pretty much anything on your Mac (not just apps and windows) for a cleaner, less distracting interface.

2. Switch to Grayscale Mode

Overlaying your screen with a blanket of gray can take all the fun out of using your Mac, unless you actually like the new retro look.

Dampening the impact of all the colorful elements on the screen might be just what you need to keep your focus completely on your work. You can achieve this with a switch to your Mac’s grayscale mode via System Preferences > Accessibility > Display. There, all you need to do is select the Use grayscale checkbox.

3. Enable Parental Controls

You don’t have to be a parent to take advantage of your Mac’s Parental Controls feature. It can help you filter out distracting websites like Facebook, limit screen time, and restrict access to non-work apps.

To enable Parental Controls, first visit System Preferences > Parental Controls. Next, select the user account you want to restrict and click on the Enable Parental Controls button that appears on the right.

You’ll then see a bunch of tabs with various settings to control macOS behavior for the selected account. The settings are easy to understand and you’ll have no trouble tweaking them to set up the perfect work environment.

Parental Controls work only with a non-administrative user account. We recommend creating a dedicated Standard account that you can switch to for work.

Don’t want to fiddle with Parental Controls? You can still block websites and desktop apps from your primary account with Focus ($20), which comes with a free trial. The app sits in the menu bar and lets you trigger app and website blocking with a couple of clicks. Focus also includes a Pomodoro timer and inspiring quotes, among other features.

4. Use Safari Reader Everywhere

Safari’s Reader view is a quick way to hide all the shiny buttons, links, and toolbars that distract you from the primary content of web pages. You can bring up this view by clicking on View > Show Reader or on the Show Reader View button in the address bar. But it’s much faster with a shortcut. You can program one under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.

Better yet, enable the Reader view to show up automatically for all websites as soon as you load them. To do this, open Safari > Preferences (Cmd + Comma) and switch to the Websites tab.

Next, select Reader from the sidebar and set the When visiting other websites dropdown menu to On. (You’ll find this menu below the right-hand panel.)

This tweak excludes the websites that are currently open. You’ll have to enable Reader on them using their respective dropdown menu from the same settings section as above.

5. Create a “Panic Button” App to Quit All Apps at Once

Remember those extensions that let you hide all your browser tabs in a single click? It would be nice to have a similar panic button to get rid of everything on your Mac’s screen and start from scratch. Thankfully, you can create one yourself with Automator.

Open the Automator app and click on the New Document button within the Finder dialog that shows up. Now, select Application as your document type.

Next, from the Actions library in the sidebar, click on Utilities. From the corresponding list of actions, drag Quit All Applications to the blank right-hand panel, which is the workflow editor.

Here, you’ll see a Do not quit option where you can list specific applications that you want your new app to leave alone. Use the Add button to add them one by one.

(When you use Automator in future, you’ll get a prompt to save changes in apps where you might lose unsaved work. The Ask to save changes checkbox in the workflow editor takes care of this.)

Click on File > Save to save the app to a location of your choice. Once you have saved the app, drag its icon out to the Dock. Click on the icon whenever you want to sit down to work and start with a clean screen.

Tune Out the Noise

Self-discipline is the best productivity hack there is and no amount of device hacking can replace it. But the latter can certainly keep digital temptations out of your way. Discover it for yourself with the macOS tweaks that we have listed above.

And while you’re at it, how about setting up your Mac for a minimalist experience to reduce distractions further?

Read the full article: 5 Simple macOS Tweaks to Help You Stay Focused

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Shipt vs. Instacart vs. Peapod: Which Personal Shopping Service Is the Best?

Facebook is opening its first data center in Asia

Facebook is opening its first data center in Asia. The company announced today that it is planning an 11-story building in Singapore that will help its services run faster and more efficiently. The development will cost SG$1.4 billion, or around US$1 billion, the company confirmed.

The social networking firm said that it anticipates that the building will be powered 100 percent by renewable energy. It said also that it will utilize a new ‘StatePoint Liquid Cooling’ system technology, which the firm claims minimizes the consumption of water and power.

Facebook said that the project will create hundreds of jobs and “form part of our growing presence in Singapore and across Asia.”

A render of what Facebook anticipates that its data center in Singapore will look like

Asia Pacific accounts for 894 million monthly users, that’s 40 percent of the total user base and it makes it the highest region based on users. However, when it comes to actually making money, the region is lagging. Asia Pacific brought in total sales of $2.3 billion in Facebook’s most recent quarter of business, that’s just 18 percent of total revenue and less than half of the revenue made from the U.S. during the same period. Enabling more efficient services is one step to helping to close that revenue gap.

Facebook isn’t the only global tech firm that’s investing in data centers in Asia lately. Google recently revealed that it plans to develop a third data center in Singapore. The firm also has data centers for Asia that are located in Taiwan.

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Become a Certified IT Professional with 200 Hours of Training for $39

From cybersecurity to tech support, there are many great IT careers you can jump into without a college degree. However, it definitely helps to have a few certifications on your résumé. The Ultimate IT Certification Training Bundle helps you gain technical skills and prove your knowledge, with over 200 hours of video training. Right now, the bundle is just $39 at MakeUseOf Deals.

IT Knowhow

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You don’t need any technical expertise to get started, as the video begins with the basics. Through hands-on tutorials, you discover how to install each major operating system and fix common problems. You also take a deep dive into PC hardware and mobile platforms.

With the basics in place, the courses help you explore networking, cloud computing and cybersecurity. The bundle even includes a course on project management. These are some of the most highly valued skills in tech right now.

Just as importantly, all the courses work towards globally-recognized certifications. You get full prep for 11 exams, including CompTIA, Cisco and Microsoft.

The bundle includes over 1300 video lessons in total, and you get lifetime access to all the content.

11 Courses for $39

This training is worth $3,289, but you can grab the bundle now for just $39 to start learning.

Read the full article: Become a Certified IT Professional with 200 Hours of Training for $39

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Nutrigene wants to personalize your vitamins using your genetic code

Vitamins are proving to be a lucrative industry in the United States. Just last year vitamin sales pulled in roughly $37 billion for the U.S. economy. That’s up from $28 billion in 2010. To cash in on this growing market, several startups have popped up in the last few years — including Nutrigene, a startup combining the vitamin business with another lucrative avenue of revenue in consumer DNA analysis.

Nutrigene believes your genes may hold the secret to what you might be missing in your diet. The company will send you tailor-made liquid vitamin supplements based on a lifestyle quiz and your DNA. You get your analysis by filling out an assessment on the startup’s website, choosing a recommended package such as “essentials,” “improve performance” or “optimize gut health.” After that you can also choose to upload your DNA profile from 23andMe, then Nutrigene will send you liquid supplements built just for you.

Founder Min FitzGerald launched the startup out of Singularity and later accepted a Google fellowship for the idea. Nutrigene then went on to Y Combinator’s winter 2018 class. FitzGerald’s co-founder and CTO Van Duesterberg comes from a biotech and epigenetics background and holds a PhD from Stanford.

PhDs and impressive resumes aside, the vitamin and genetics industries are not without controversy. For every study showing that those who eat a balanced diet don’t benefit from supplements, there are just as many highlighting the benefits of taking your vitamins. Also, coupling vitamin therapy with your DNA seems at a glance dubious. However, Dawn Barry, former VP at Illumina and now president of Luna DNA, a biotech company powered by the blockchain, says it could have some scientific underpinnings. But, she cautioned, nutrigenetics is still an early science.

Amir Trabelsi, founder of genetic analysis platform Genoox, agrees. We interviewed both Trabelsi and Barry previously when Nutrigene first came on our radar. Trabelsi pointed out these types of companies don’t need to provide any proof.

“That doesn’t mean it’s completely wrong,” he told TechCrunch. “But we don’t know enough to say this person should use Vitamin A, for example… There needs to be more trials and observation.”

Nutrigene acknowledges the best supplementation for performance goes beyond just a genetic profile. Our lifestyles, where we live, what we do and what we put in our bodies (or don’t) all can contribute to a deficiency. For better nutritional accuracy, Nutrigene will send you a blood test kit in the mail to test for things like Vitamin D deficiency (a common deficiency in Silicon Valley, according to my doctor). You also can choose to go to a blood testing center to find out what sort of nutritional supplements you’ll need for optimal performance.

One other twist — Nutrigene’s vitamins come in liquid form for what FitzGerald says is the optimum delivery method.

I tried out the program for myself earlier this year, though not for more than a few days as I was pregnant at the time and wanted to stick with the prenatal vitamins I’d been taking. Nothing I saw on the packaging from Nutrigene was dangerous for pregnant women, just run-of-the-mill stuff like vitamin B12, which my genetic analysis said I was prone to be deficient in. But I had already been taking some pretty good prenatal vitamins from New Chapter and a DHA supplement from Nordic Naturals for a year leading up to getting pregnant. I had a very healthy, nearly 9.5 pound baby boy in March. My own doctor, who tested my nutritional levels at the beginning of my pregnancy through a blood sample, did not tell me I had any deficiencies.

That’s not to say it wouldn’t be great for someone else looking for optimal nutrition and wanting a boost through supplementation. It’s also a great industry to get into if you know how to market your products. Though crowded, there’s plenty of room to grow and billions of dollars in the vitamin industry for those who can make their products stand out. DNA analysis and liquid supplementation might just be the thing.

FitzGerald tells TechCrunch that Nutrigene has already shipped 8,500 personalized dosages to customers since launching earlier this year.

For those interested in trying out Nutrigene, you can do so by ordering on the website. Package pricing varies and depends on nutritional needs, but starts at around $85 per month.

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Google will struggle if it re-enters China, says its former country head

The odds are stacked against Google if the reports are true and the company is trying to bring its services back to China, according to the former head of Google China.

News reports last month uncovered details of internal plans to introduce a search product and a news app in China, moves that would mark a re-entry to the consumer market which Google left in 2010. The plans, which follow a noticeable increase in activity in China from Google, were widely criticized by activists and also raised concern internally from Google employees.

Kaifu Lee left the search giant nine years following a four-year stint, and today he’s best-known as one of the world’s leading thinkers on AI and the founding partner of Chinese VC Sinovation Ventures. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco this week, he shared his belief that China’s tech ecosystem is rapidly catching the U.S. on AI — that also spills over into more general tech, and the kind of competitors that Google would face were it to return to China.

“I think re-entry is always difficult,” Lee said. But “the bigger issue really is can an American multinational succeed in China now that China has bifurcated into this parallel universe.”

Lee helmed Google’s China business in its battle against domestic search firm Baidu. He said that Google’s market share jumped from nine percent to 24 percent during his tenure, while total revenue was “approaching” $1 billion, but now the outlook in China is less rosy in 2018.

While he admitted that Google “should have a higher chance than any other company” at succeeding in China, he isn’t optimistic that it — or indeed any U.S. firm — can.

“People [in China] aren’t looking for a new search engine or an app store, new companies are emerging addressing previously unknown customer needs [and] innovations are coming out,” Lee explained.

“The new graduates generally prefer to work for Chinese companies and then, lastly, the heads of multinationals are really just professional managers. If they were to compete against local entrepreneurs who are gladiators in this colosseum, I don’t think the American companies will have a high chance of succeeding in this environment,” he added.

Kai-Fu Lee gives his prediction for Google's future success in China #TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/TpuOPGAP5A

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 5, 2018

Google isn’t the only U.S. firm looking at China, of course.

Facebook briefly received approval for a China-based subsidiary — it was later withdrawn following media reports — while it has tested local products in the past and engaged in dialogue with regulators. Uber was more successful, but it famously spent more than $1 billion per year to compete in China before being sold to local rival Didi. The only companies that could be credited with not failing in China are LinkedIn, Evernote and Airbnb, and, in each case, the actual impact is debatable. Certainly, each has strong/stronger local rivals that remain active.

“I think any American company would have a hard time in China now, Apple being the single exception,” Lee said.” And I think that’s because [Apple is] mostly a hardware product and the product has become a fashion symbol… so that’s different.”

In the case of Google, the challenge is far different. Even local social media companies struggle to adhere to adequately police online content according to the whim of authorities. New media firm Toutiao, for example, had numerous apps temporarily suspended from local app stores, while it massively strengthened its content checking teams and made a public apology. Tencent, Alibaba and others also employ in-house teams to police the content and users on their platforms.

That’s a huge challenge without even thinking about finding the right product-market fit or engaging an audience.

China is beating the US on AI, says noted investor Kai-Fu Lee

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Justice Department’s threat to social media giants is wrong

Never has it been so clear that the attorneys charged with enforcing the laws of the country have a complete disregard for the very laws they’re meant to enforce.

As executives of Twitter and Facebook took to the floor of the Senate to testify about their companies’ response to international meddling into U.S. elections and addressed the problem of propagandists and polemicists using their platforms to spread misinformation, the legal geniuses at the Justice Department were focused on a free speech debate that isn’t just unprecedented, but also potentially illegal.

Justice Dept. says social media giants may be ‘intentionally stifling’ free speech

These attorneys general convened to confabulate on the “growing concern” that social media companies are stifling expression and hurting competition. What’s really at issue is a conservative canard and talking point that tries to make a case that private companies have a First Amendment obligation to allow any kind of speech on their platforms.

The simple fact is that they do not. Let me repeat that. They simply do not.

What the government’s lawyers are trying to do is foist a responsibility that they have to uphold the First Amendment onto private companies that are under no such obligation. Why are these legal eagles so up in arms? The simple answer is the decision made by many platforms to silence voices that violate the expressed policies of the platforms they’re using.

Chief among these is Alex Jones — who has claimed that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax and accused victims of the Parkland school shooting of being crisis actors.

Last month a number of those social media platforms that distributed Jones finally decided that enough was enough.

Here are the platforms that have banned Infowars so far

The decision to boot Jones is their prerogative as private companies. While Jones has the right to shout whatever he wants from a soapbox in free speech alley (or a back alley, or into a tin can) — and while he can’t be prosecuted for anything that he says (no matter how offensive, absurd or insane) — he doesn’t have the right to have his opinions automatically amplified by every social media platform.

Almost all of the big networking platforms have come to that conclusion.

The technology-lobbying body has already issued a statement excoriating the Department of Justice for its ham-handed approach.

[The] U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today released a statement saying that it was convening state attorneys general to discuss its concerns that these companies were “hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas.” Social media platforms have the right to determine what types of legal speech they will permit on their platforms. It is inappropriate for the federal government to use the threat of law enforcement to limit companies from exercising this right. In particular, law enforcement should not threaten social media companies with unwarranted investigations for their efforts to rid their platforms of extremists who incite hate and violence.

While the Justice Department’s approach muddies the waters and makes it more difficult for legitimate criticism and reasoned regulation of the social media platforms to take hold, there are legitimate issues that legislators need to address.

Indeed, many of them were raised in a white paper from Senator Mark Warner, which was released in the dog days of summer.

Or the Justice Department could focus on the issue that Senator Ron Wyden emphasized in the hours after the hearing:

Personal data is now the weapon of choice for political influence campaigns and we must NOT make it easier for foreign adversaries to seize these weapons. Beefing up protections and controls on personal privacy needs to be a national security priority. pic.twitter.com/FmlcK7fRWF

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) September 5, 2018

Instead of focusing on privacy or security, attorneys general for the government are waging a Pyrrhic war against censorship that doesn’t exist and ignoring the real cold war for platform security.

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People Are Deleting Facebook After All

It looks like Facebook’s recent issues have affected the way people use the social network. This is according to a report by the Pew Research Center, which recently polled people in the United States to determine how people’s attitudes are changing.

Facebook hasn’t had the best of years. There are claims Facebook was used as a tool in the 2016 Presidential Election, plus the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw people’s personal information leaked. All of which led to the #DeleteFacebook campaign.

But did anyone actually delete Facebook as a result?

People’s Changing Relationship With Facebook

According to the Pew Research Center, yes they did. Pew interviewed 4,594 U.S. adults between May 29 and June 11, and the results suggest that recent controversies have had a significant influence on people’s relationship with Facebook.

Pew found that over the past 12 months, 54 percent have “adjusted their privacy settings,” 42 percent have “taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more,” and 26 percent have “deleted the Facebook app” altogether.

In all, 74 percent of Facebook users have taken at least one of these actions.

44% of U.S. Facebook users ages 18 to 29 say they have deleted the app from their phone in the past year https://t.co/F7xwUl698Z pic.twitter.com/B60lIB0OnD

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) September 5, 2018

Pew determined that people’s political persuasion wasn’t a determining factor in all of this. In fact, “nearly identical shares of Democrats and Republicans use Facebook”, and neither was more likely to have deleted the app over the past 12 months.

However, age is a deciding factor, with the younger generations more likely to have taken affirmative action. An astounding 44 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds claim to have deleted the Facebook app, compared to just 12 percent of users aged 65 and above.

Facebook’s Somewhat Stained Reputation

These numbers should, of course, be taken with a pinch of salt. Facebook now boasts around 2.2 billion users, so Pew’s sample size of a few thousand is insignificant. Still, the results of this poll suggest Facebook’s reputation has been somewhat stained.

Having read how people have reacted to Facebook’s recent troubles you should discover why Facebook is a security nightmare. And then have Facebook’s new privacy settings explained to you. Or perhaps you need persuading not to delete Facebook instead.

Read the full article: People Are Deleting Facebook After All

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China is beating the US on AI, says noted investor Kaifu Lee

America may have created AI, but China is taking the ball and running when it comes to one of the world’s most pivotal technology innovations.

That’s according to Kaifu Lee, a world-renowned AI expert who founded Sinovation, a China-U.S. fund that raised its fourth fund worth $1 billion earlier this year.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Lee — who led Google in China before it left the country — said any lead America’s tech industry may have enjoyed is rapidly being eroded by hungry Chinese entrepreneurs who have oodles more data at their disposal to build, train and deploy AI systems.

“People assume that because the U.S. is so strong in AI research, that the U.S. should dominate,” Lee said. “But actually, China is catching up really first.”

Sinovation already has five AI companies in its portfolio that are valued at over $1 billion — that might be a record for any VC firm worldwide — and he explained China’s “magical ascent” in AI has taken just two years.

“Coming from way behind, now [China] is actually ahead of the U.S. in AI implementation,” Lee said. “AI we should think of it as electricity. Thomas Edison [the inventor of electricity] — and also the AI deep learning inventors who were American — they invented this stuff and then they generously shared it.

“Now, China, as the largest marketplace with the largest amount of data, is really using AI to find every way to add value to traditional businesses, to internet, to all kinds of spaces. The Chinese entrepreneurial ecosystem is huge so today the most valuable AI companies in computer vision, speech recognition, drones are all Chinese companies,” Lee added.

Sinovation Chairman & CEO Kai-FU Lee says China has surpassed the U.S. in terms of AI capabilities #TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/r71HlXgDDd

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 5, 2018

But it isn’t just progress in the eyes of investors — who create valuations through their investment — Lee said that Chinese AI firms generate more sales, too, while China accounts for nearly half of all VC investments and 43 percent of all AI startups.

“These are companies that were founded between two and four years ago,” Lee explained. “This is really how fast it’s been, you have to be there to see the excitement and the pace.”

In the case of Sinovation, their billion-dollar AI companies include crypto firm Bitmain, image recognition company Megvii (known as Face++), fintech-focused 4th Paradigm, autonomous driving AI company Momenta, and chip outfit Horizon Robotics.

Much of the reporting around how China is using artificial intelligence centers around ways that the government is using facial recognition for surveillance purposes. While that has included crime fighting, with facial recognition successfully used to identify and capture suspects, there are also concerns around more sinister applications, such as the surveillance of Chinese minority Uighur Muslims. China is reported to have detained as many as one million Uighur in camps, and facial recognition technology is believed to be one key part of surveillance strategy.

Lee, however, brushed off concern around the darker applications of AI in China, pointing out that the technology has the capacity to be abused anywhere in the world. He said China is also using the technology to develop new kinds of retail, manage busy urban traffic, build new kinds of educational services, and more.

Indeed, Sinovation’s takes an unusual route to develop technologies and startups. As well as investing, it also develops technology in-house using a team of 200 people in its ‘institute.’ Not only does that team work with portfolio companies and on a consultancy basis, but it develops its own services where it sees gaps in the market.

Indeed, the firm recently span out its first venture from that tech team, which helps traditional retailers develop online-to-offline capabilities, which essentially marry the benefits of online commerce with more traditional brick and mortar retail. That’s a strategy that Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com have invested heavily in.

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PoLTE lets you track devices using LTE signal

Meet PoLTE, a Dallas-based startup that wants to make location-tracking more efficient. Thanks to PoLTE’s software solution, logistics and shipment companies can much more easily track packages and goods. The startup is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF.

If you want to use a connected device to track a package, you currently need a couple of things — a way to determine the location of the package, and a way to transmit this information over the air. The most straightforward way of doing it is by using a GPS chipset combined with a cellular chipset.

Systems-on-chip have made this easier as they usually integrate multiple modules. You can get a GPS signal and wireless capabilities in the same chip. While GPS is insanely accurate, it also requires a ton of battery just to position a device on a map. That’s why devices often triangulate your position using Wi-Fi combined with a database of Wi-Fi networks and their positions.

And yet, using GPS or Wi-Fi as well as an LTE modem doesn’t work if you want to track a container over multiple weeks or months. At some point, your device will run out of battery. Or you’ll have to spend a small fortune to buy a ton of trackers with big batteries.

PoLTE has developed a software solution that lets you turn data from the cell modem into location information. It works with existing modems and only requires a software update. The company has been working with Riot Micro for instance.

[gallery ids="1705634,1705625,1705622,1705621,1705619"]

Behind the scene PoLTE’s magic happens on their servers. IoT devices don’t need to do any of the computing. They just need to send a tiny sample of LTE signals and PoLTE can figure out the location from their servers. Customers can then get this data using an API.

It only takes 300 bytes of data to get location information with precision of less than a few meters. You don’t need a powerful CPU, Wi-Fi, GPS or Bluetooth.

“We offer 80 percent cost reduction on IoT devices together with longer battery life,” CEO Ed Chao told me.

On the business side, PoLTE is using a software-as-a-service model. You can get started for free if you don’t need a lot of API calls. You then start paying depending on the size of your fleet of devices and the number of location requests.

It doesn’t really matter if the company finds a good business opportunity. PoLTE is a low-level technology company at heart. Its solution is interesting by itself and could help bigger companies that are looking for an efficient location-tracking solution.

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Stealthy wants to become the WeChat of blockchain apps

Meet Stealthy a new messaging app that leverages Blockstack’s decentralized application platform to build a messaging app. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF and launching its app on iOS and Android today.

On the surface, Stealthy works like many messaging apps out there. But it gets interesting once you start digging to understand the protocol behind it. Stealthy is a decentralized platform with privacy in mind. It could become the glue that makes various decentralized applications stick together.

“We started Stealthy because Blockstack had a global hackathon in December of last year,” co-founder Prabhaav Bhardwaj told me. “We won that hackathon in February.” After that, the #deletefacebook movement combined with the overall decentralization trend motivated Bhardwaj and Alex Carreira to ship the app.

Blockstack manages your identity. You get an ID and a 12-word passphrase to recover your account. Blockstack creates a blockchain record for each new user. You use your Blockstack ID to connect to Stealthy.

Stealthy users then choose how they want to store their messages. You can connect your account with Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.

Every time you message someone, the message is first encrypted on your device and sent to your recipient’s cloud provider. Your recipient can then open the Stealthy app and decrypt the message from their storage system.

All of this is seamless for the end user. It works like an iMessage conversation, which means that Microsoft or Amazon can’t open and read your messages without your private key. You remain in control of your data. Stealthy plans to open source their protocol and mobile product so that anybody can audit their code.

Some features require a certain level of centralization. For instance, Stealthy relies on Firebase for push notifications. If you’re uncomfortable with that, you can disable that feature.

The company also wants to become your central hub for all sorts of decentralized apps (or dapps for short). For instance, you can launch Graphite Docs or Blockusign from Stealty. Those dapps are built on top of Blockstack as well, but Stealthy plans to integrate with other dapps that don’t work on Blockstack.

“We have dapp integrations in place right now and we want to make it easier to add dapp integrations. If somebody wants to come in and start selling messaging stickers, you could do that. If you want to come in and implement a payment system to pay bloggers, you could do that,” Bhardwaj said. “Eventually, what we want to be is to make it as easy as submitting an app in the App Store.”

When you build a digital product, chances are you’ll end up adding a messaging feature at some point. You can chat in Google Docs, Airbnb, Venmo, YouTube… And the same is likely to be true with dapps. Stealthy believes that many developers could benefit from a solid communication infrastructure — this way, other companies can focus on their core products and let Stealthy handle the communication layer.

Stealthy is an ambitious company. In many ways, the startup is trying to build a decentralized WeChat with the encryption features of Signal. It’s a messaging app, but it’s also a platform for many other use cases.

A handful of messaging apps have become so powerful that they’ve become a weakness. Governments can block them or leverage them to create a social ranking. Authorities can get a warrant to ask tech companies to hand them data. And of course, the top tech companies have become too powerful. More decentralization is always a good thing.

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Stealthy wants to become the WeChat of blockchain apps

Meet Stealthy a new messaging app that leverages Blockstack’s decentralized application platform to build a messaging app. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF and launching its app on iOS and Android today.

On the surface, Stealthy works like many messaging apps out there. But it gets interesting once you start digging to understand the protocol behind it. Stealthy is a decentralized platform with privacy in mind. It could become the glue that makes various decentralized applications stick together.

“We started Stealthy because Blockstack had a global hackathon in December of last year,” co-founder Prabhaav Bhardwaj told me. “We won that hackathon in February.” After that, the #deletefacebook movement combined with the overall decentralization trend motivated Bhardwaj and Alex Carreira to ship the app.

Blockstack manages your identity. You get an ID and a 12-word passphrase to recover your account. Blockstack creates a blockchain record for each new user. You use your Blockstack ID to connect to Stealthy.

Stealthy users then choose how they want to store their messages. You can connect your account with Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.

Every time you message someone, the message is first encrypted on your device and sent to your recipient’s cloud provider. Your recipient can then open the Stealthy app and decrypt the message from their storage system.

All of this is seamless for the end user. It works like an iMessage conversation, which means that Microsoft or Amazon can’t open and read your messages without your private key. You remain in control of your data. Stealthy plans to open source their protocol and mobile product so that anybody can audit their code.

Some features require a certain level of centralization. For instance, Stealthy relies on Firebase for push notifications. If you’re uncomfortable with that, you can disable that feature.

The company also wants to become your central hub for all sorts of decentralized apps (or dapps for short). For instance, you can launch Graphite Docs or Blockusign from Stealty. Those dapps are built on top of Blockstack as well, but Stealthy plans to integrate with other dapps that don’t work on Blockstack.

“We have dapp integrations in place right now and we want to make it easier to add dapp integrations. If somebody wants to come in and start selling messaging stickers, you could do that. If you want to come in and implement a payment system to pay bloggers, you could do that,” Bhardwaj said. “Eventually, what we want to be is to make it as easy as submitting an app in the App Store.”

When you build a digital product, chances are you’ll end up adding a messaging feature at some point. You can chat in Google Docs, Airbnb, Venmo, YouTube… And the same is likely to be true with dapps. Stealthy believes that many developers could benefit from a solid communication infrastructure — this way, other companies can focus on their core products and let Stealthy handle the communication layer.

Stealthy is an ambitious company. In many ways, the startup is trying to build a decentralized WeChat with the encryption features of Signal. It’s a messaging app, but it’s also a platform for many other use cases.

A handful of messaging apps have become so powerful that they’ve become a weakness. Governments can block them or leverage them to create a social ranking. Authorities can get a warrant to ask tech companies to hand them data. And of course, the top tech companies have become too powerful. More decentralization is always a good thing.

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10 Tech Terms Added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Merriam-Webster has added hundreds of words to the dictionary. Among them are a selection of technology terms most of us will be familiar with, even if we don’t use them on a daily basis. This article is totally bingeable and worthy of a retweet.

Our Language Is Evolving

All dictionaries have to move with the times, because language is forever evolving. Words come in and out of fashion, and even the way we talk changes over time. Which is why you’d struggle to understand someone speaking English 500 years ago.

In its latest update, Merriam-Webster has added 840 words to its dictionary. And some of them come from the technology sector. What follows are 10 of the tech terms Merriam-Webster thinks deserve a place in the dictionary…

Folks, it's that time again.

?? We just added more than 800 new words to the dictionary! ?? https://t.co/NiCeFa8EZ9

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) September 4, 2018

Airplane Mode is the mode smartphones should be put in while you’re on a plane.

Bingeable refers to a TV show with episodes you can watch in quick succession.

Biohacking refers to biological experimentation on living organisms such as humans.

Fintech is a portmanteau of “financial” and “technology” and is self-explanatory.

Force Quit is what you do when you want to quit an app that has become unresponsive.

Haptics are elements of physical feedback such as resistance when pressing a key.

Instagramming is the act of being on Instagram. Which, just like Google, is now a verb.

Retweet comes from Twitter, and means to repost someone else’s tweet.

TL;DR which stand for Too Long; Didn’t Read, and means just that.

Unfollow is used on social networks to indicate you’ve stopped following someone.

Tech Terminology to Learn

You may not agree with the inclusion of some of these words, but that’s the beauty of language. For a word to deserve a place in the dictionary, it doesn’t need to be used by everyone every day, just a percentage of the population occasionally.

Either way, in our quest to help people understand technology, we have previously explained essential internet terms, basic encryption terms, common Instagram terms for beginners, essential terms for Photoshop beginners, and common gaming terms.

Image Credit: Chris Dlugosz/Flickr

Read the full article: 10 Tech Terms Added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary

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