27 September 2018

The Infatuation raises $30M from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo to bring Zagat into the digital age


WndrCo, the consumer tech investment and holding company founded by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, has invested $30 million in The Infatuation, a restaurant discovery platform.

The Infatuation made waves earlier this year when it purchased Zagat from Google, which had paid $151 million for the 40-year-old company in 2011. Despite efforts to makeover the Zagat app, the search giant ultimately decided to unload the perennial restaurant review and recommendation service and focus on expanding its database of restaurant recommendations organically.

New York-based The Infatuation was founded by music industry vets Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal in 2009. It has previously raised $3.5 million for its mobile app, events, newsletter and personalized SMS-based recommendation tool.

Stang told TechCrunch this morning that they plan to use a good chunk of the funds to develop the new Zagat platform, which will be kept separate from The Infatuation.

“The first thing we want to do before we build anything is spend a lot of time researching how people have used Zagat in the past, how they want to use it in the future, what a community-driven platform could look like and how to apply community reviews and ratings to the brand,” said Stang, The Infatuation’s chief executive officer. “Zagat’s roots are in user-generated content. … What we are doing now is thinking through what that looks like with new tech applied to it. What it looks like in the digital age. How [we can] take our domain expertise and that legendary brand and make something new with it.”

The Infatuation will also expand to new cities beginning this fall with launches in Boston and Philadelphia. It’s already active in a dozen or so U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco. The startup’s first and only international location is London.

Katzenberg, who began his Hollywood career at Paramount Pictures, began raising up to $2 billion for WndrCo about a year ago. Since then, he’s unveiled WndrCo’s new mobile video startup NewTV, which has raised $1 billion and hired Meg Whitman, the former president and CEO of Hewlett Packard, as CEO.

On top of that, WndrCo has invested in MixcloudAxiosNodeFlowspace, Whistle Sports, TYT Network and others.

Given The Infatuation founders’ experience in the entertainment industry, a partnership with Katzenberg was natural.

“We really felt like between content and technology they had … expertise on both sides,” Stang said. “The Infatuation is at its best when great content intersects with great technology, to find a fund that was perfectly suited to that was exciting.”


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Google Celebrates its 20th Birthday in Style


Google is celebrating its 20th birthday. That’s right, the search, advertising, and everything-else-you-care-to-mention giant has been a part of our lives for two decades. And, as is its style, Google is celebrating in a number of different ways.

A Brief History of Google

Google was born when two PhD students at Stanford called Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new way or ranking for searching for websites. The search engine was originally called BackRub, but quickly morphed into Google (a misspelling of Googol).

Within a couple of years Google started selling keyword advertising, and the money came rolling in. Then Google launched (or acquired) a multitude of different products, including YouTube, Chrome, Android, Google Maps, Gmail, and countless others.

Google Celebrates Turning 20

Now, Google is turning 20, having been founded and incorporated in 1998. And Google is celebrating its 20th birthday in a number of different ways. Starting with this video to mark the occasion, which is also currently a Doodle on the Google homepage.

Beyond that, Google has taken a look back at 20 years of Google Doodles, launched 20years.withgoogle.com, which is full of insights from the last 20 years, and added “Susan’s Garage” where it all started, to Google Maps.

However, the best celebration comes in the form of Easter eggs Google has hidden in Search. When you Google specific terms, Google will ask “It’s 2018! Did you mean?” along with a more modern equivalent of whatever it is you’re searching for.

Search for “MP3 file” and Google will suggest you “stream music”. Search for “watch a DVD” and Google will suggest you pay for a “streaming subscription”. And so on and so forth. TechCrunch has the full list for those who want spoilers.

Here’s to the Next 20 Years

Google is now so big and all-encompassing that the vast majority of us have some dealing with the company. Whether by searching Google for information, using a phone powered by Android, or watching YouTube. And that’s both a blessing and a curse.

The sheer size and scale of Google means the company isn’t going away anytime soon. So, whether you love it, hate it, or merely tolerate it, Google is likely to continue being a part of our lives for another 20 years and beyond.

Read the full article: Google Celebrates its 20th Birthday in Style


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11 Free GIMP Brushes and How to Install Them


gimp-brushes

Brushes are an important part of any serious image editing software. They make it easy to create repeatable textures and patterns, or simplify the process of drawing complex things. They can work for graphic design or photo editing.

And in GIMP, you simply brush them onto the page using the Paintbrush tool.

There are lots of GIMP brushes available to download and install. They’re mostly community made and available through DeviantArt. They’re all free, though you should check the license if you want to use them commercially.

We’ve scoured the web to find the best free GIMP brushes to get you started. But first let’s look at how to install brushes to GIMP:

How to Install GIMP Brushes

In GIMP you install brushes manually by pasting them into the Brushes folder. The location of this folder differs depending on whether you’re using Windows, Linux, or Mac, but there’s an easy way to find it on all three platforms.

where is the gimp brushes folder

In GIMP, go to Preferences > Folders, and click the + icon to expand the Folders section. Now select Brushes. You’ll see two folders. One is a system folder, which you can ignore. The other is the user folder, and this is where you need to place your brushes.

open gimp brushes folder

To quickly open the Brushes folder, highlight it and click the cabinet icon in the top right of the window, labelled Show file location in the file manager. Now paste your brushes in here.

GIMP brushes come in three file formats:

  • GBR: the most common format, used for normal and color brushes
  • GIH: used for animated brushes made from images with multiple layers
  • VBR: vector brushes that can be resized as much as you need

GIMP can also use the best Photoshop brushes, which are in the ABR format.

When you paste your brushes into the folder create a new subfolder to keep them organized. Give this folder a descriptive name, like “GIMP hair brushes” or “texture brushes”.

When you’re done, open the Brush dialog and go to Brushes Menu > Refresh Brushes. You can select your brush from this same dialog box. To change the brush size in GIMP, either use the options box in the bottom right corner or use the square bracket keys ([ and ]) to make it larger or smaller.

Now that we know how to install brushes to GIMP let’s take a look at the best free GIMP brushes available.

1. 37 GIMP Tree Brushes

gimp tree brushes

This brush set of 37 realistic looking, high definition trees will ensure all your foliage needs are covered. There’s at least 16 different types of tree, with duplicates pointing in opposite directions. They include a Christmas tree and some Autumnal colors.

Each one is typically around 1000 pixels wide, so they’re more than big enough to incorporate into even your highest resolution projects.

2. Contact Lenses for GIMP

gimp brush eye color

These contact lens brushes are the easy way to change a model’s eye color. There are nine colors to choose from. By setting the Blend mode to either Overlay or Screen, your brush will combine with the original eye to produce an effect that is surprisingly naturalistic.

3. GIMP Micro Patterns Brushes

gimp brushes micro patterns

If you’re using GIMP for graphic design work then you need this set of micro pattern brushes. They can be a massive time saver.

There are 31 patterns in all: dots, stripes, waves, swirls, zigzags, and plenty more. Whether you need a pattern for the background of your page, or are creating Lichtenstein-style pop-art, this is an essential download.

4. GIMP Water Brushes

gimp water brush

Creating water effects is more difficult than it should be. A quick, and very effective, shortcut comes from the GIMP Water Brushes. What you get are two brushes that enable you to add a “ripple” to a previously flat surface. Build up the effect by adding different size, weight, and color ripples, and you’ll end up with something that looks very realistic.

5. 24 Clouds

gimp brushes clouds

Need to add some interest to the sky in your pictures? These photorealistic clouds will do the trick and no-one will even notice. There are 24 styles of cloud to choose from ranging from the wispy to something potentially more threatening.

They take color, too. So while they work best set to white, you can mix in a few dark gray clouds for a stormier scene, or some orange-tinted ones to work with your sunset shots.

6. GIMP Flying Birds Brushes

gimp brush birds

Another way to make your skies more interesting is to place a few birds in there. There are 22 varieties on offer here, both different types of bird as well as assorted flying positions. They’re in silhouette, so you can change the color and use them in your design work.

But keep them small and dark, and you’ll find they’re of good enough quality to be able to use in photos as well.

7. 20 Fire PS Brushes

gimp brush flame

Fire is a common enough thing to want to include in your graphic design work, but drawing it from scratch is a real pain. This set of 20 fire brushes solves the problem. They each work well enough on their own. But by stacking several brushes with different colors on their own layers, you can generate quite the raging inferno.

These brushes are in the ABR format. They’re originally designed for Photoshop but you can use them in GIMP, too.

8. Light Beam Brushes

gimp brush light beam

This collection of 26 variations on beams of light simplifies the process of adding dramatic lighting effects to your artwork. There’s a shaft of light, a lens flare, a torch or lighthouse, and plenty more. They’re all very high resolution, too, so there won’t be any concerns about quality if you use them in your final projects.

9. Real Pencil Brushes for GIMP

pencil brushes gimp

If you use GIMP for sketching—perhaps using a graphics tablet—you’ll be hard pressed to find a better set of brushes than these.

It’s a simple package, just three pencils of different sizes and weights. Choose the right Force setting and you can perfectly replicate both the look and feel of a real sketchpad and pencil.

10. Digital Oil Brushes

gimp digital oil brush

There’s no better way to unleash your inner Bob Ross (The Joy of Painting being one of the best Netflix shows to watch when you’re stressed) than with this set of digital oil brushes. They’re very high quality and have a real professional feel. The set offers five standard brushes, each with variations to replicate them being loaded with different amounts of paint, and different paint thicknesses. You can even mix paints as you go by combining your foreground and background colors.

11. GIMP-BrushBrush

watercolor gimp brush

If watercolors are more your thing then BrushBrush is for you. It’s just one brush, styled like a real paintbrush using real watercolor paints. In spite of its apparent simplicity, it’s capable of producing some beautiful results.

Next Steps: Kick Your GIMP Skills Up a Level

GIMP does have quite a steep learning curve, so the ability to use brushes should really help you to speed up your workflow.

All the brushes detailed above work in the new GIMP 2.10. If you haven’t upgraded to that version already, you should check it out now.

Your next step is to truly master what GIMP has to offer. So take a look at our guide to photo editing in GIMP to get started.

Read the full article: 11 Free GIMP Brushes and How to Install Them


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Alphabet’s Chronicle launches an enterprise version of VirusTotal


VirusTotal, the virus and malware scanning service own by Alphabet’s Chronicle, launched an enterprise-grade version of its service today. VirusTotal Enterprise offers significantly faster and more customizable malware search, as well as a new feature called Private Graph, which allows enterprises to create their own private visualizations of their infrastructure and malware that affects their machines.

The Private Graph makes it easier for enterprises to create an inventory of their internal infrastructure and users to help security teams investigate incidents (and where they started). In the process of building this graph, VirtusTotal also looks are commonalities between different nodes to be able to detect changes that could signal potential issues.

The company stresses that these graphs are obviously kept private. That’s worth noting because VirusTotal already offered a similar tool for its premium users — the VirusTotal Graph. All of the information there, however, was public.

As for the faster and more advanced search tools, VirusTotal notes that its service benefits from Alphabet’s massive infrastructure and search expertise. This allows VirusTotal Enterprise to offers a 100x speed increase, as well as better search accuracy. Using the advanced search, the company notes, a security team could now extract the icon from a fake application, for example, and then return all malware samples that share the same file.

VirusTotal says that it plans to “continue to leverage the power of Google infrastructure” and expand this enterprise service over time.

Google acquired VirusTotal back in 2012. For the longest time, the service didn’t see too many changes, but earlier this year, Google’s parent company Alphabet moved VirusTotal under the Chronicle brand and the development pace seems to have picked up since.


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Pew: A majority of U.S. teens are bullied online


A majority of U.S. teens have been subject to online abuse, according to a new study from Pew Research Center, out this morning. Specifically, that means they’ve experienced at least one of a half-dozen types of online cyberbullying, including name-calling, being subject to false rumors, receiving explicit images they didn’t ask for, having explicit images of themselves shared without their consent, physical threats, or being constantly asked about their location and activities in a stalker-ish fashion by someone who is not their parents.

Of these, name-calling and being subject to false rumors were the top two categories of abuse teens were subject to, with 42% and 32% of teens reporting it had happened to them.

 

 

 

Pew says that texting and digital messaging has paved the way for these types of interactions, and parents and teens alike are both aware of the dangers and concerned.

Parents, in particular, are worried about teens sending and receiving explicit images, with 57% saying that’s a concern, and a quarter who worry about this “a lot.” And parents of girls worry more. (64% do.)

Meanwhile, a large majority – 90% – of teens now believe that online harassment is a problem and 63% say it’s what they consider a “major” problem.

Pew also found that girls and boys are both harassed online in fairly equal measure, with 60% of girls and 59% of boys reporting having experienced some sort of online abuse. That’s a figure that may surprise some. However, it’s important to clarify that this finding is about whether or not the teen had ever had experienced online abuse – not how often or how much.

Not surprisingly, Pew found that girls are more likely than boys to have experienced two or more types of abuse, and 15% of girls have been the target of at least 4 types of abuse, compared with 6% of boys.

Girls are also more likely to be the recipient of explicit images they didn’t ask for, as 29% of teens girls reported this happened to them, versus 20% of boys.

And as the teen girls got older, they receive even more of these types of images, with 35% of girls ages 15 to 17 saying they received them, compared with only 1 out of 5 boys.

Several factors seem to play no role in how often the teens experience abuse, including race, ethnicity, or parents’ educational attainment, Pew noted. But having money does seem to matter somehow – as 24% of teens whose household income was less than $30K per year said they received online threats, compared with only 12% of those whose household incomes was greater than $75K per year. (Pew’s report doesn’t attempt to explain this finding.)

Beyond that factor, receiving or avoiding abuse is directly tied to how much screen time teens put in.

That is, the more teens go online, the more abuse they’ll receive.

45% of teens say they’re online almost constantly, and they are more likely to be harassed, as a result. 67% of them say they’ve been cyberbullied, compared with 53% who use the internet several times a day or less. And half the constantly online teens have been called offensive names, compared with just about a third (36%) who use the internet less often.

Major tech companies, including Apple, Google, and Facebook, have begun to address the issues around device addiction and screen time with software updates and parental controls.

Apple, in iOS 12, rolled out Screen Time controls that allows Apple device users to measure, monitor and restrict how often they’re on their phones, when, what type of content is blocked, and which apps they can use. In adults, the software can nudge them in the right direction, but parents also have the option of locking down their children’s phones using Screen Time controls. (Of course, savvy kids have already found the loopholes to avoid this, according to new reports.)

Google also introduced time management controls in the new version of Android, and offers parental controls around screen time through its Family Link software.

And both Google and Facebook have begun to introduce screen time reminders and settings for addictive apps like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Teens seem to respect parents’ involvement in their digital lives, the report also found.

A majority – 59% – of U.S. teens say their parents are doing a good job with regard to addressing online harassment. However, 79% say elected officials are failing to protect them through legislation, 66% say social media sites are doing a poor job at stamping down abuse, and 58% of teachers are doing a poor job at handling abuse, as well.

Many of the top media sites were largely built by young people when they were first founded, and those people were often men. The sites were created in an almost naive fashion, with regard to online abuse. Protections – like muting, filters, blocking, and reporting, were generally introduced in a reactive fashion, not as proactive controls.

Instagram, for example – one of teens’ most-used apps – only introduced comment filters, blocklists, and comment blocking in 2016, and just four months ago added account muting. The app was launched in October 2010.

Pew’s findings indicate that parents would do well by their kids by using screen time management and control systems – not simply to stop their teenagers from being bullied and abused as often, but also to help the teens practice how to interact with the web in a less addictive fashion as they grow into adults.

After all, device addiction resulting in increased exposure to online abuse is not a plague that only affects teens.

Pew’s full study involves surveys of 743 teens and 1,058 parents living in the U.S. conducted March 7 to April 10, 2018. It counted “teens” as those ages 13 to 17, and “parents of teens” are those who are the parent or guardian of someone in that age range. The full report is here.


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Facebook poisons the acquisition well


Who should you sell your startup to? Facebook and the founders of its former acquisitions are making a strong case against getting bought by Mark Zuckerberg and Co. After a half-decade of being seen as one of the most respectful and desired acquirers, a series of scandals has destroyed the image of Facebook’s M&A division. That could make it tougher to convince entrepreneurs to sell to Facebook, or force it to pay higher prices and put contractual guarantees of autonomy into the deals.

WhatsApp’s founders left amidst aggressive pushes to monetize. Instagram’s founders left as their independence was threatened. Oculus’ founders were demoted. And over the past few years, Facebook has also shut down acquisitions, including viral teen Q&A app TBH (though its founder says he recommended shutting it down), fitness tracker Moves, video advertising system LiveRail, voice control developer toolkit Wit.ai and still-popular mobile app developer platform Parse.

Facebook’s users might not know or care about much of this. But it could be a sticking point the next time Facebook tries to buy out a burgeoning competitor or complementary service.

Broken promises with WhatsApp

The real trouble started with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton’s departure from Facebook a year ago before he was fully vested from the $22 billion acquisition in 2014. He’d been adamant that Facebook not stick the targeted ads he hated inside WhatsApp, and Zuckerberg conceded not to. Acton even got a clause added to the deal that the co-founders’ remaining stock would vest instantly if Facebook implemented monetization schemes without their consent. Google was also interested in buying WhatsApp, but Facebook’s assurances of independence sealed the deal.

WhatsApp’s other co-founder, Jan Koum, left Facebook in April following tension about how Facebook would monetize his app and the impact of that on privacy. Acton’s departure saw him leave $850 million on the table. Captivity must have been pretty rough for freedom to be worth that much. Today in an interview with Forbes’s Parmy Olson, he detailed how Facebook got him to promise it wouldn’t integrate WhatsApp’s user data to get the deal approved by EU regulators. Facebook then broke that promise, paid the $122 million fine that amounted to a tiny speed bump for the money-printing corporation, and kept on hacking.

When Acton tried to enact the instant-vesting clause upon his departure, Facebook claimed it was still exploring, not “implementing,” monetization. Acton declined a legal fight and walked away, eventually tweeting “Delete Facebook.” Koum stayed to vest a little longer. But soon after they departed, WhatsApp started charging businesses for slow replies, and it will inject ads into the WhatsApp’s Stories product Status next year. With user growth slowing, users shifting to Stories, and News Feed out of ad space, Facebook’s revenue problem became WhatsApp’s monetization mandate.

The message was that Facebook would eventually break its agreements with acquired founders to prioritize its own needs.

Diminished autonomy for Instagram

Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger announced they were resigning this week, which sources tell TechCrunch was because of mounting tensions with Zuckerberg over product direction. Zuckerberg himself negotiated the 2012 acquisition for $1 billion ($715 million when the deal closed with Facebook’s share price down, but later $4 billion as it massively climbed). That price was stipulated on Instagram remaining independent in both brand and product roadmap.

Zuckerberg upheld his end of the bargain for five years, and the Instagram co-founders stayed on past their original vesting dates — uncommon in Silicon Valley. Facebook pointed to Instagram’s autonomy when it was trying to secure the WhatsApp acquisition. And with the help of Facebook’s engineering, sales, recruiting, internationalization and anti-spam teams, Instagram grew into a 1 billion-user juggernaut.

But again, Facebook’s growth and financial woes led to a change of heart for Zuckerberg. Facebook’s popularity amongst teens was plummeting while Instagram remained cool. Facebook pushed to show its alerts and links back to the parent company inside of Instagram’s notifications and settings tabs. Meanwhile, it stripped out the Instagram attribution from cross-posted photos and deleted a shortcut to Instagram from the Facebook bookmarks menu.

Zuckerberg then installed a loyalist, his close friend and former News Feed VP Adam Mosseri, as Instagram’s new VP of Product mid-way through this year. The reorganization also saw Systrom start reporting to Facebook CPO Chris Cox. Previously the Instagram CEO had more direct contact with Zuckerberg despite technically reporting to CTO Mike Schroepfer, and the insertion of a layer of management between them frayed their connection. Six years after being acquired, Facebook started breaking its promises, Instagram felt less autonomous and the founders exited.

The message again was that Facebook expected to be able to exploit its acquisitions regardless of their previous agreements.

Reduced visibility for Oculus

Zuckerberg declared Oculus was the next great computing platform when Facebook acquired the virtual reality company in 2014. Adoption ended up slower than many expected, forcing Oculus to fund VR content creators since it’s still an unsustainable business. Oculus has likely been a major cash sink for Facebook it will have to hope pays off later.

But in the meantime, the co-founders of Oculus have faded into the background. Brendan Iribe and Nate Mitchell have gone from leading the company to focusing on the nerdiest part of its growing product lineup as VPs running the PC VR and Rift hardware teams, respectively. Former Xiaomi hardware leader Hugo Barra was brought in as VP of VR to oversee Oculus, and he reports to former Facebook VP of Ads Andrew “Boz” Bosworth — a longtime Zuckerberg confidant who TA’d one of his classes at Harvard who now runs all of Facebook’s hardware efforts.

Oculus’ original visionary inventor Palmer Luckey left Facebook last year following a schism with the company over him funding anti-Hillary Clinton memes and “sh*tposters.” He was pressed to apologize, saying “I am deeply sorry that my actions are negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.”

Lesser-known co-founder Jack McCauley left Facebook just a year after the acquisition to start his own VR lab. Sadly, Oculus co-founder Andrew Reisse died in 2013 when he was struck by a vehicle in a police chase just two months after the acquisition was announced. The final co-founder Michael Antonov was the chief software architect, but Facebook just confirmed to me he recently left the division to work on artificial intelligence infrastructure at Facebook.

Today for the first time, none of the Oculus co-founders appeared onstage at its annual Connect conference. Obviously the skills needed to scale and monetize a product are different from those needed to create. Still, going from running the company to being stuck in the audience doesn’t send a great signal about how Facebook treats acquired founders.

Course correction

Facebook needs to take action if it wants to reassure prospective acquisitions that it can be a good home for their startups. I think Zuckerberg or Mosseri (likely to be named Instagram’s new leader) should issue a statement that they understand people’s fears about what will happen to Instagram and WhatsApp since they’re such important parts of users’ lives, and establishing core tenets of the product’s identity they don’t want to change. Again, 15-year-old Instagrammers and WhatsAppers probably won’t care, but potential acquisitions would.

So far, Facebook has only managed to further inflame the founders versus Facebook divide. Today former VP of Messenger and now head of Facebook’s blockchain team David Marcus wrote a scathing note criticizing Acton for his Forbes interview and claiming that Zuckerberg tried to protect WhatsApp’s autonomy. “Call me old fashioned. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It’s actually a whole new standard of low-class,” he wrote.

Posted by David Marcus on Wednesday, September 26, 2018

But this was a wasted opportunity for Facebook to discuss all the advantages it brings to its acquisitions. Marcus wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, and as a former lifelong entrepreneur and founder, there’s no other large company I’d work at, and no other leader I’d work for,” and noted the opportunity for impact and the relatively long amount of time acquired founders have stayed in the past. Still, it would have been more productive to focus on why’s it’s where he wants to work, how founders actually get to touch the lives of billions and how other acquirers like Twitter and Google frequently dissolve the companies they buy and often see their founders leave even sooner.

Acquisitions have protected Facebook from disruption. Now that strategy is in danger if it can’t change this narrative. Lots of zeros on a check might not be enough to convince the next great entrepreneur to sell Facebook their startup if they suspect they or their project will be steamrolled.


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How to Watch Amazon Prime Video on Your TV With Chromecast

Yes Facebook is using your 2FA phone number to target you with ads


Facebook has confirmed it does in fact use phone numbers that users provided it for security purposes to also target them with ads.

Specifically a phone number handed over for two factor authentication (2FA) — a security technique that adds a second layer of authentication to help keep accounts secure.

Facebook’s confession follows a story Gizmodo ran a story yesterday, related to research work carried out by academics at two U.S. universities who ran a study in which they say they were able to demonstrate the company uses pieces of personal information that individuals did not explicitly provide it to, nonetheless, target them with ads.

While it’s been — if not clear, then at least evident — for a number of years that Facebook uses contact details of individuals who never personally provided their information for ad targeting purposes (harvesting people’s personal data by other means, such as other users’ mobile phone contact books which the Facebook app uploads), the revelation that numbers provided to Facebook by users in good faith, for the purpose of 2FA, are also, in its view, fair game for ads has not been so explicitly ‘fessed up to before.

Some months ago Facebook did say that users who were getting spammed with Facebook notifications to the number they provided for 2FA was a bug. “The last thing we want is for people to avoid helpful security features because they fear they will receive unrelated notifications,” Facebook then-CSO Alex Stamos wrote in a blog post at the time.

Apparently not thinking to mention the rather pertinent additional side-detail that it’s nonetheless happy to repurpose the same security feature for ad targeting.

Because $$$s, presumably.

We asked Facebook to confirm this is indeed what it’s doing — to make doubly doubly sure. Because, srsly wtaf. And it sent us a statement confirming that it repurposes digits handed to it by people wanting to secure their accounts to target them with marketing.

Here’s the statement, attributed to a Facebook spokesperson: “We use the information people provide to offer a better, more personalized experience on Facebook, including ads. We are clear about how we use the information we collect, including the contact information that people upload or add to their own accounts. You can manage and delete the contact information you’ve uploaded at any time.”

A spokesman also told us that users can opt out of this ad-based repurposing of their security digits by not using phone number based 2FA. (Albeit, the company only added the ability to do non-mobile phone based 2FA back in May, so anyone before then was all outta luck.)

On the ‘shadow profiles’ front — aka Facebook maintaining profiles of non-users based on the data it has been able to scrape about them from users and other data sources — the company has also been less than transparent.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg feigned confusion when questioned about the practice by US lawmakers earlier this year — claiming it only gathers data on non-users for “security purposes”.

Well it seems Facebook is also using the (valid) security concerns of actual users to extend its ability to target individuals with ads — by using numbers provided for 2FA to also carry out ad targeting.

Safe to say criticism of the company has been swift and sharp.

Soon Facebook will also be using behind-the-scenes tech means to target ads at WhatsApp users — despite also providing a robust encrypted security wrapper around their actual messages.

Stamos — now Facebook’s ex-CSO — has also defended its actions on that front.


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How to Create Your Own Command Line Programs in Python With Click


pythod-programming-click

Click is a Python package for writing command line interfaces. It produces beautiful documentation for you and lets you build command line interfaces in as little as one line of code. In short: it’s awesome and can help take your programs to the next level.

Here’s how you can use it to liven up your Python projects.

Writing Command Line Programs Without Click

It’s possible to write command line programs without using Click, but doing so requires more effort and lots more code. You need to parse command line arguments, perform validation, develop logic to handle different arguments, and build a custom help menu. Want to add a new option? You’ll be modifying your help function then.

There’s nothing wrong with writing your own code, and doing so is a great way to learn Python, but Click allows you to follow the “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) principles. Without Click, you’ll write code which is fragile and requires lots of maintenance whenever any changes happen.

Here’s a simple command line interface coded without Click:

import sys
import random

def do_work():
        """ Function to handle command line usage"""
        args = sys.argv
        args = args[1:] # First element of args is the file name

        if len(args) == 0:
                print('You have not passed any commands in!')
        else:
                for a in args:
                        if a == '--help':
                                print('Basic command line program')
                                print('Options:')
                                print('    --help -> show this basic help menu.')
                                print('    --monty -> show a Monty Python quote.')
                                print('    --veg -> show a random vegetable')
                        elif a == '--monty':
                                print('What\'s this, then? "Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house?')
                        elif a == '--veg':
                                print(random.choice(['Carrot', 'Potato', 'Turnip']))
                        else:
                                print('Unrecognised argument.')

if __name__ == '__main__':
        do_work()

Python command line interface example

These 27 lines of Python work well but are very fragile. Any change you make to your program will need lots of other supporting code to change. If you change an argument name you’ll need to update the help information. This code can easily grow out of control.

Here’s the same logic with Click:

import click
import random

@click.command()
@click.option('--monty', default=False, help='Show a Monty Python quote.')
@click.option('--veg', default=False, help='Show a random vegetable.')
def do_work(monty, veg):
        """ Basic Click example will follow your commands"""
        if monty:
                print('What\'s this, then? "Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house?')

        if veg:
                print(random.choice(['Carrot', 'Potato', 'Turnip']))

if __name__ == '__main__':
        do_work()

This Click example implements the same logic in 16 lines of code. The arguments are parsed for you, and the help screen is generated:

Python Click automatically generated help screen

This basic comparison shows how much time and effort you can save by using programs such as Click. While the command line interface may appear the same to the end user, the underlying code is simpler, and you’ll save lots of time coding. Any changes or updates you write in the future will also see significant development time increases.

Getting Started With Click for Python

Before using Click, you may wish to configure a virtual environment. This will stop your Python packages conflicting with your system Python or other projects you may be working on. You could also try Python in your browser if you want to play around with Python and Click.

Finally, make sure you’re running Python version 3. It’s possible to use Click with Python version 2, but these examples are in Python 3. Learn more about the differences between Python 2 and Python 3.

Once ready, install Click from the command line using PIP (how to install PIP for Python):

pip install click

Writing Your First Click Program

In a text editor, start by importing Click:

import click

Once imported, create a method and a main entry point. Our Python OOP guide covers these in greater detail, but they provide a place to store your code, and a way for Python to start running it:

import click
import random

def veg():
    """ Basic method will return a random vegetable"""
        print(random.choice(['Carrot', 'Potato', 'Turnip', 'Parsnip']))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    veg()

This very simple script will output a random vegetable. Your code may look different, but this simple example is perfect to combine with Click.

Save this as click_example.py, and then run it in the command line (after navigating to its location):

python click_example.py

You should see a random vegetable name. Let’s improve things by adding Click. Change your code to include the Click decorators and a for loop:

@click.command()
@click.option('--total', default=3, help='Number of vegetables to output.')
def veg(total):
    """ Basic method will return a random vegetable"""
    for number in range(total):
    print(random.choice(['Carrot', 'Potato', 'Turnip', 'Parsnip']))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    veg()

Upon running, you’ll see a random vegetable displayed three times.

Let’s break down these changes. The @click.command() decorator configures Click to work with the function immediately following the decorator. In this case, this is the veg() function. You’ll need this for every method you’d like to use with Click.

The @click.option decorator configures click to accept parameters from the command line, which it will pass to your method. There are three arguments used here:

  1. –total: This is the command line name for the total argument.
  2. default: If you don’t specify the total argument when using your script, Click will use the value from default.
  3. help: A short sentence explaining how to use your program.

Let’s see Click in action. From the command line, run your script, but pass in the total argument like this:

python click_example.py --total 10

By setting –total 10 from the command line, your script will print ten random vegetables.

If you pass in the –help flag, you’ll see a nice help page, along with the options you can use:

python click_example.py --help

Python Click help

Adding More Commands

It’s possible to use many Click decorators on the same function. Add another click option to the veg function:

@click.option('--gravy', default=False, help='Append "with gravy" to the vegetables.')

Don’t forget to pass this into the method:

def veg(total, gravy):

Now when you run your file, you can pass in the gravy flag:

python click_example.py --gravy y

The help screen has also changed:

Python Click help screen

Here’s the whole code (with some minor refactoring for neatness):

import click
import random

@click.command()
@click.option('--gravy', default=False, help='Append "with gravy" to the vegetables.')
@click.option('--total', default=3, help='Number of vegetables to output.')
def veg(total, gravy):
    """ Basic method will return a random vegetable"""
    for number in range(total):
        choice = random.choice(['Carrot', 'Potato', 'Turnip', 'Parsnip'])

        if gravy:
            print(f'{choice} with gravy')
        else:
            print(choice)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    veg()

Even More Click Options

Once you know the basics, you can begin to look at more complex Click options. In this example, you’ll learn how to pass in several values to a single argument, which Click will convert to a tuple. You can learn more about tuples in our guide to the Python dictionary.

Create a new file called click_example_2.py. Here’s the starter code you need:

import click
import random

@click.command()
def add():
    """ Basic method will add two numbers together."""
    pass

if __name__ == '__main__':
    add()

There’s nothing new here. The previous section explains this code in detail. Add a @click.option called numbers:

@click.option('--numbers', nargs=2, type=int, help='Add two numbers together.')

The only new code here are the nargs=2, and the type=int options. This tells Click to accept two values for the numbers option, and that they must both be of type integers. You can change this to any number or (valid) datatype you like.

Finally, change the add method to accept the numbers argument, and do some processing with them:

def add(numbers):
     """ Basic method will add two numbers together."""
     result = numbers[0] + numbers[1]
     print(f'{numbers[0]} + {numbers[1]} = {result}')

Each value you pass in is accessible through the numbers object. Here’s how to use it in the command line:

python click_example_2.py --numbers 1 2

Python Click nargs result

Click Is the Solution for Python Utilities

As you’ve seen, Click is easy to use but very powerful. While these examples only cover the very basics of Click, there are lots more features you can learn about now that you have a solid grasp of the basics.

If you’re looking for some Python projects to practice your new found skills with, why not learn how to control an Arduino with Python, or how about reading and writing to Google Sheets with Python? Either of these projects would be perfect for converting to Click!

Read the full article: How to Create Your Own Command Line Programs in Python With Click


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India’s new technology infrastructure has created a platform to build domestic tech giants


In the two years since Indian social media app ShareChat raised $4 million in funding from Lightspeed Ventures the converging trends of increasing smartphone use, wireless internet connectivity, and cashless banking have combined to create a new social media juggernaut.

Now Lightspeed has confirmed that the company has raised an additional $100 million in financing at roughly a half billion dollar valuation alongside investment partners including India Quotient, Jesmond Holdings, Morningside, SAIF Partners, Shunwei Ventures, Venture Highway and Xiaomi. 

In the years since that first Lightspeed investment, ShareChat has gone from a company with 1 million monthly active users to 25 million monthly active users — and while the company lags behind the messaging giant WhatsApp (whose app is used by more than 200 million people in India) its growth in India is remarkable.

“ShareChat is really looking to tap into the next billion users in India,” says Ravi Mhatre, a partner at Lightspeed, whose investment dollars helped architect the ShareChat rise.

What’s giving this startup the ability to connect to those next billion users is one strategy of a 9-year-old plan to develop what’s been called the “India Stack” — an entirely new digital infrastructure for a country with a population of 1.32 billion spread across an area of nearly 1.3 million square miles.

The push began in 2009 with the launch of Aadhaar, India’s (recently amended) national biometric recording scheme. Seven years later it took a huge leap forward with the implementation of the nation’s massive demonetization plan and the near-simultaneous rollout of a 4G high speed mobile network across the country.

While the demonetization strategy ate into growth rates across the country, and likely didn’t reduce the amount of money in circulation, according to Indian financial publication LiveMint, the 4G rollout was a huge success.

Since Jio, the telecommunications arm of the giant industrial conglomerate Reliance Group, launched its 4G service in September 2016, adoption rates across the country have skyrocketed.

According to a report from the telecommunications analysis firm, OpenSignal, Jio’s contribution to networking India has been massive.

During the quarter ending June 2017, total data usage stood at over 4.2 million terabytes, out of which 4G data accounted for 3.9 million TBs, according to TRAI. The growth is most visible when checking the numbers from a year ago, when 4G data usage stood at a mere 8,050 TBs; that’s a 500-fold increase… [And] LTE availability in India is remarkable: users were able to connect to an LTE signal over 84% of the time, a rise of over 10 percentage points from a year earlier. This places India ahead of more established countries in the 4G landscape such as Sweden, Taiwan, Switzerland or the U.K.

Disrupt telco Reliance Jio laid the foundation for India’s phone owners to switch to using mobile data packages (Photo by Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

For a startup like ShareChat that means tens of millions of daily active users, according to Mhatre.

Those users are drawn to ShareChat’s broadcast chat feature, which allows users on mobile phones to broadcast conversations and commentary about any topic they wish. “It’s a platform where content that is relevant to you is surfaced to you and you engage with it,” Mhatre says.

The company was founded by three Bangalore-based developers. Farid Ahsan, 26, Ankush Sachdeva, 25, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, also 26 — all graduates from India’s famous IIT Kanpur University — had worked up 17 different prototypes for a product before they finally settled on the version that would become ShareChat.

The company’s founders are also taking a page from the popular Chinese app WeChat and hope to turn their broadcast chat service into a platform for micropayments, education, and other types of entertainment.

What started as a niche site for people to communicate in their local dialects could now become the first true domestic social media giant in India.

There are other Chinese corollaries to ShareChat’s business that may be informative. Toutiao, the news aggregation service owned by Bytedance, is perhaps the closest in kind to ShareChat at the moment, but even that is only accurate to a point.

China’s infrastructure is still somewhat based on personal computers and landlines, whereas India’s is wholly mobile-first. For Mhatre, it’s the first country to make the leap to a digital economy based entirely on mobile computing.

At Lightspeed the opportunity that presents is similar to the mid-90s birth of the Internet in the U.S. and the late 2000 technology boom that created billions of dollars in value for companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.

ShareChat is built to support India’s plethora of local languages, as opposed to English-first services like WhatsApp

What makes this feat even more impressive was that until two or three years ago, it looked like India wouldn’t be living up to the expectations that had been set for it and emerging market countries like Russia and Brazil that comprise three-fourths of the BRICs that were supposed to be the foundational building blocks of the 21st century global economy.

“If you look at China — the GDP in China is $12 to $13 trillion… India is about $2.5 trillion [but] infrastructure got developed there earlier than in India,” Mhatre said. India is at the same inflection point now, where the infrastructure boom is contributing to the development of new business models. 

The constraints of that infrastructure have also informed the business ShareChat has built as well. Because while digital penetration rates in the country are high, the download speeds are exceptionally low (due in part to overwhelming demand).

Again, the OpenSignal report is informative.

While LTE availability saw a meteoric rise, the same cannot be said of 4G speeds. In our latest State of LTE report, India occupied the lowest spot among the 77 countries we examined, with average download speeds of 6.1 Mbps, over 10 Mbps lower than the global average.

ShareChat’s focus on messaging and sharing data light images is a platform that’s suited to the current strengths and limitations of India’s infrastructure. “You have half a billion people with a high speed internet terminal in their hand and they want to do things with it,” Mhatre said. And ShareChat isn’t just localized in its tech stack. The company also is localized by language. 

As the investors at Lightspeed noted in their thoughts on the deal.

The “next billion” users in India speak 22 different languages and are spread out over an area the size of Europe. ShareChat’s founders Ankush, Bhanu and Farid blew us away with their insight into this new user base. Their first brush with this user base came in 2015 when they noticed that sharing of photos, videos, poetry, jokes and even good morning messages was at epidemic levels on WhatsApp. Yet there was no easy one-stop shop for finding this content.  ShareChat was born to solve this problem. As they developed the idea, they also saw that this audience hungered for connection and content about their cities and villages of origin. They noticed emergent behavior around users wanting to “look cool” to their friends by finding the best content, solving for loneliness by finding friends in their own language, and even wanting to drive fame and celebrity in their own geographies.  


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Berkanan is a Bluetooth-powered group messaging app


A new messaging app is looking to give folks a way to communicate in situations with poor or no cellular connectivity.

Berkanan, founded by Zsombor Szabó, is a group messaging app that uses Bluetooth to send and receive messages. This means that Berkanan works in a plane, at a festival, camping, or anywhere else where cellular coverage is disappointing.

Imagine people on a plane asking each other for top movie recommendations from the in-flight entertainment system, or folks at a festival figuring out a rally point to meet up between sets. Public messages auto-delete after 24 hours.

Alongside group messaging, Berkanan also allows private one-to-one messaging, as well as audio calls placed over Bluetooth. The range for these calls and messages is about 50 meters, but if there are people between you and your intended recipient with the app installed, Berkanan can send messages further by going through other users devices.

Berkanan will also show users if they are getting closer or further away from the user they’re messaging with, without ever showing either person’s exact location.

Group chatting with strangers in your location might seem a bit icky at first glance, but group chatting with strangers is essentially the basis of Twitter. With Berkanan, however, a common location replaces the #topic.

Berkanan is entirely bootstrapped, but Szabo has implemented a somewhat unconventional method of generating revenue.

Inspired by games like Fortnite, which make money off of custom skins, dances, and other virtual items, Berkanan will charge users to edit their profile. When a user logs on, their profile will consist of the name they assigned to their iPhone and their profile picture will be their initials, similar to the iOS Contacts interface.

Users can pay to add their own profile picture and add a short bio to their profile.

To be clear, it’s already possible to send SMS via Bluetooth. But Berkanan offers a way to broadcast that message to everyone (with the app) in your location. Of course, user acquisition is critical for the app, which is why Szabó is considering ways for the enterprise to take advantage of the app.


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Bumble responds to Match Group’s patent infringement lawsuit


Bumble is continuing to go on the offensive against Match Group. Earlier this week, the dating app maker said it was serving Match Group with papers (which Match Group said at the time it hadn’t yet received – but it has now). Bumble is taking Match Group to court for fraudulently obtaining trade secrets during acquisition talks. Today, Bumble is also officially responding to Match Group’s suit against it, which claims patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property.

Bumble this morning put out a statement, indicating that it plans to now take the battle to court:

“Bumble has today formally responded to Match’s lawsuit from March 2018 alleging patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. We believe all of the claims are baseless, and are seeking to have several claims dismissed immediately, given their lack of merit.

As stated previously, this was a thinly veiled attempt by Match to interfere with Bumble’s growth, as Bumble continues to take share from Tinder, and to scare potential suitors so Match could acquire Bumble at below market value. It also demonstrates an attempt by Match to monopolize the very practice of making real, meaningful connections. Match did not invent the world of dating; men and especially women everywhere deserve the opportunity to connect with who they want, on their terms, and Bumble will continue to stand up for our users and our values as we take this battle to court.”

The two companies have a history of bad blood between them.

Bumble was founded by CEO Whitney Wolfe, who was also a co-founder at Tinder and had previously sued Tinder for sexual harassment. She then branded Bumble as a more empowering dating app for women, by allowing women to start the chats first.

Like many dating apps on the market today, Bumble uses the double opt-in mechanism of creating matches, as determined by a right swipe on a profile card.

The app has grown to over 40 million users, Wolfe said recently at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, and the company says its revenue run rate has now climbed to $200 million per year.

Match Group has unsuccessfully tried to acquire Bumble twice – once in a deal that would have valued it at over $1 billion.

Bumble says Match Group filed its original lawsuit against it to make it less attractive to other potential acquirers.

The two tried to work out their differences since the lawsuits’ filings in March, but were unsuccessful. Now, they’re headed to court – and to the press.

The claims Match Group makes around patent infringement involve Bumble’s use of a stack of profile cards, mutual opt-in, and its swiped-based gestures – things Tinder popularized for dating apps, but have since become something of an industry standard, similar to how Facebook’s News Feed became a model for other social apps. But whether or not Bumble is illegally infringing on those patents will be left to the courts to decide.

Match Group is very aggressive when it comes to maintaining a dominant position in the dating app market.

The company already owns top brands like Tinder, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid, and others. It also more recently took a majority stake in Hinge. And it often copies the features of rivals it doesn’t own, as it did with Hinge’s media-sharing feedCoffee Meets Bagel’s top picks, Happn’s location-based features, and, as of this week, Bumble’s “ladies first” feature.

We’ve reached out to Match Group for comment, and will update if the company responds.


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Facebook’s ex-CSO, Alex Stamos, defends its decision to inject ads in WhatsApp


Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, who left the company this summer to take up a role in academia, has made a contribution to what’s sometimes couched as a debate about how to monetize (and thus sustain) commercial end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms in order that the privacy benefits they otherwise offer can be as widely spread as possible.

Stamos made the comments via Twitter, where he said he was indirectly responding to the fallout from a Forbes interview with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton — in which Acton hit at out at his former employer for being greedy in its approach to generating revenue off of the famously anti-ads messaging platform.

Both WhatsApp founders’ exits from Facebook has been blamed on disagreements over monetization. (Jan Koum left some months after Acton.)

In the interview, Acton said he suggested Facebook management apply a simple business model atop WhatsApp, such as metered messaging for all users after a set number of free messages. But that management pushed back — with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg telling him they needed a monetization method that generates greater revenue “scale”.

And while Stamos has avoided making critical remarks about Acton (unlike some current Facebook staffers), he clearly wants to lend his weight to the notion that some kind of trade-off is necessary in order for end-to-end encryption to be commercially viable (and thus for the greater good (of messaging privacy) to prevail); and therefore his tacit support to Facebook and its approach to making money off of a robustly encrypted platform.

Stamos’ own departure from the fb mothership was hardly under such acrimonious terms as Acton, though he has had his own disagreements with the leadership team — as set out in a memo he sent earlier this year that was obtained by BuzzFeed. So his support for Facebook combining e2e and ads perhaps counts for something, though isn’t really surprising given the seat he occupied at the company for several years, and his always fierce defence of WhatsApp encryption.

(Another characteristic concern that also surfaces in Stamos’ Twitter thread is the need to keep the technology legal, in the face of government attempts to backdoor encryption, which he says will require “accepting the inevitable downsides of giving people unfettered communications”.)

This summer Facebook confirmed that, from next year, ads will be injected into WhatsApp statuses (aka the app’s Stories clone). So it is indeed bringing ads to the famously anti-ads messaging platform.

For several years the company has also been moving towards positioning WhatsApp as a business messaging platform to connect companies with potential customers — and it says it plans to meter those messages, also from next year.

So there are two strands to its revenue generating playbook atop WhatsApp’s e2e encrypted messaging platform. Both with knock-on impacts on privacy, given Facebook targets ads and marketing content by profiling users by harvesting their personal data.

This means that while WhatsApp’s e2e encryption means Facebook literally cannot read WhatsApp users’ messages, it is ‘circumventing’ the technology (for ad-targeting purposes) by linking accounts across different services it owns — using people’s digital identities across its product portfolio (and beyond) as a sort of ‘trojan horse’ to negate the messaging privacy it affords them on WhatsApp.

Facebook is using different technical methods (including the very low-tech method of phone number matching) to link WhatsApp user and Facebook accounts. Once it’s been able to match a Facebook user to a WhatsApp account it can then connect what’s very likely to be a well fleshed out Facebook profile with a WhatsApp account that nonetheless contains messages it can’t read. So it’s both respecting and eroding user privacy.

This approach means Facebook can carry out its ad targeting activities across both messaging platforms (as it will from next year). And do so without having to literally read messages being sent by WhatsApp users.

As trade offs go, it’s a clearly a big one — and one that’s got Facebook into regulatory trouble in Europe.

It is also, at least in Stamos’ view, a trade off that’s worth it for the ‘greater good’ of message content remaining strongly encrypted and therefore unreadable. Even if Facebook now knows pretty much everything about the sender, and can access any unencrypted messages they sent using its other social products.

In his Twitter thread Stamos argues that “if we want that right to be extended to people around the world, that means that E2E encryption needs to be deployed inside of multi-billion user platforms”, which he says means: “We need to find a sustainable business model for professionally-run E2E encrypted communication platforms.”

On the sustainable business model front he argues that two models “currently fit the bill” — either Apple’s iMessage or Facebook-owned WhatsApp. Though he doesn’t go into any detail on why he believes only those two are sustainable.

He does say he’s discounting the Acton-backed alternative, Signal, which now operates via a not-for-profit (the Signal Foundation) — suggesting that rival messaging app is “unlikely to hit 1B users”.

In passing he also throws it out there that Signal is “subsidized, indirectly, by FB ads” — i.e. because Facebook pays a licensing fee for use of the underlying Signal Protocol used to power WhatsApp’s e2e encryption. (So his slightly shade-throwing subtext is that privacy purists are still benefiting from a Facebook sugardaddy.)

Then he gets to the meat of his argument in defence of Facebook-owned (and monetized) WhatsApp — pointing out that Apple’s sustainable business model does not reach every mobile user, given its hardware is priced at a premium. Whereas WhatsApp running on a cheap Android handset ($50 or, perhaps even $30 in future) can.

Other encrypted messaging apps can also of course run on Android but presumably Stamos would argue they’re not professionally run.

“I think it is easy to underestimate how radical WhatsApp’s decision to deploy E2E was,” he writes. “Acton and Koum, with Zuck’s blessing, jumped off a bridge with the goal of building a monetization parachute on the way down. FB has a lot of money, so it was a very tall bridge, but it is foolish to expect that FB shareholders are going to subsidize a free text/voice/video global communications network forever. Eventually, WhatsApp is going to need to generate revenue.

“This could come from directly charging for the service, it could come from advertising, it could come from a WeChat-like services play. The first is very hard across countries, the latter two are complicated by E2E.”

“I can’t speak to the various options that have been floated around, or the arguments between WA and FB, but those of us who care about privacy shouldn’t see WhatsApp monetization as something evil,” he adds. “In fact, we should want WA to demonstrate that E2E and revenue are compatible. That’s the only way E2E will become a sustainable feature of massive, non-niche technology platforms.”

Stamos is certainly right that Apple’s iMessage cannot reach every mobile user, given the premium cost of Apple hardware.

Though he elides the important role that second hand Apple devices play in helping to reduce the barrier to entry to Apple’s pro-privacy technology — a role Apple is actively encouraging via support for older devices (and by its own services business expansion which extends its model so that support for older versions of iOS (and thus secondhand iPhones) is also commercially sustainable).

Robust encryption only being possible via multi-billion user platforms essentially boils down to a usability argument by Stamos — which is to suggest that mainstream app users will simply not seek encryption out unless it’s plated up for them in a way they don’t even notice it’s there.

The follow on conclusion is then that only a well-resourced giant like Facebook has the resources to maintain and serve this different tech up to the masses.

There’s certainly substance in that point. But the wider question is whether or not the privacy trade offs that Facebook’s monetization methods of WhatsApp entail, by linking Facebook and WhatsApp accounts and also, therefore, looping in various less than transparent data-harvest methods it uses to gather intelligence on web users generally, substantially erodes the value of the e2e encryption that is now being bundled with Facebook’s ad targeting people surveillance. And so used as a selling aid for otherwise privacy eroding practices.

Yes WhatsApp users’ messages will remain private, thanks to Facebook funding the necessary e2e encryption. But the price users are having to pay is very likely still their personal privacy.

And at that point the argument really becomes about how much profit a commercial entity should be able to extract off of a product that’s being marketed as securely encrypted and thus ‘pro-privacy’? How much revenue “scale” is reasonable or unreasonable in that scenario?

Other business models are possible, which was Acton’s point. But likely less profitable. And therein lies the rub where Facebook is concerned.

How much money should any company be required to leave on the table, as Acton did when he left Facebook without the rest of his unvested shares, in order to be able to monetize a technology that’s bound up so tightly with notions of privacy?

Acton wanted Facebook to agree to make as much money as it could without users having to pay it with their privacy. But Facebook’s management team said no. That’s why he’s calling them greedy.

Stamos doesn’t engage with that more nuanced point. He just writes: “It is foolish to expect that FB shareholders are going to subsidize a free text/voice/video global communications network forever. Eventually, WhatsApp is going to need to generate revenue” — thereby collapsing the revenue argument into an all or nothing binary without explaining why it has to be that way.


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How to Disable Access to the Registry Editor in Windows 10


disable-access-windows-registry

Do you have an intelligent, curious child who knows their way around the Windows registry? Or maybe you want to prevent a guest user on your machine from editing the registry. You can prevent users from making changes to the registry by disabling access to it.

Today we’ll show you how to disable access to the Registry Editor in Windows 10 using the Group Policy Editor and a third-party tool. These methods disable access to the Registry Editor for all users, including the current administrator account you’re making the change in.

About the Group Policy Editor

The Group Policy Editor used in a Windows domain environment allows a network administrator to control the settings on all the computers in the network.

If you’re using a personal PC running Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise, you also have access to the Group Policy Editor. But it’s called the Local Group Policy Editor.

The Local Group Policy Editor allows you to tweak some additional Windows settings that aren’t available in the PC Settings app or in the Control Panel. Many settings in the Local Group Policy Editor change registry values for you. So if you’re not comfortable editing the registry directly, use the Local Group Policy Editor instead.

Converting to an Administrator Account

The user account for which you’re blocking access to the registry editor should be a standard account—but you’ll need to temporarily make the account an administrator account to disable access to the registry editor. Then, you should switch it back to a standard account.

You can convert a standard account to an administrator account, or vice versa, at any time. But if you only have one administrator account, you cannot change it to a standard account. You must have at least one administrator account at all times in Windows.

To convert a standard account to an administrator account, open the Start menu and click the Settings icon.

Open PC Settings from the Start menu in Windows 10

On the Windows Settings dialog box, click Accounts.

Click Accounts in Settings in Windows 10

Click Family & other users in the left pane and click the user account you want to change on the right under Other users. Then, click Change account type.

Click Change account type under Other users in Windows 10 Settings

On the Change account type dialog box, select Administrator from the Account type dropdown list and click OK.

Change account type catalog in Windows 10 Settings

The user is labeled as an Administrator.

To make the user a Standard user again, return here, click Change account type, and select Standard user on the Change account type dialog box.

Standard account changed to an Administrator account in Windows 10

Disabling the Registry Editor (Group Policy Editor)

You should back up your data, back up the registry, and make a system restore point before making changes in the Local Group Policy Editor.

To disable access to the Registry Editor, first make sure the account you want to restrict access in is an administrator account. If not, follow the steps in the previous section to convert it to one. Then, log in to that account.

Press Windows key + R to open the Run dialog box. Then, type gpedit.msc and press Enter.

Open the Group Policy Editor in Windows 10

In the Local Group Policy Editor, navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > System in the left pane.

Then, double-click the Prevent access to registry editing tools setting in the right pane.

Double-click the Prevent access to registry editing tools setting in the Local Group Policy Editor

On the Prevent access to registry editing tools dialog box, select Enabled in the upper-left and then click OK.

Close the Local Group Policy Editor and reboot your computer.

Enable the Prevent access to registry editing tools setting in the Local Group Policy Editor

For the user you want to prevent from accessing the registry editor, be sure to convert their account back to a standard account. Standard users cannot make changes in the Local Group Policy Editor. They get an error message when they open it.

Group Policy Error in a standard user account

The Local Group Policy Editor still opens, but there are no settings available to change.

Local Group Policy Editor in a standard account

Once you’ve disabled access to the Registry Editor, any user who tries to access the Registry Editor, will see the User Account Control dialog box. Then, the following error message displays.

Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator message in Windows 10

To re-enable access to the Registry Editor, open the Prevent access to registry editing tools setting again in the Local Group Policy Editor. Select either Not Configured or Disabled on the Prevent access to registry editing tools dialog box.

Disabling the Registry Editor (Policy Plus)

This method is for Windows 10 Home users only.

Windows 10 Home does not include the Local Group Policy Editor. But if you’re using Windows 10 Home, you can use the free, portable, open source program Policy Plus instead.

If you’re using Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise, you have access to the Local Group Policy Editor. You don’t need to use Policy Plus. In fact, you shouldn’t. The Local Group Policy Editor overrides Policy Plus. So it doesn’t make sense to use Policy Plus if you already have the Local Group Policy Editor.

To use Policy Plus, download the EXE file and run it. No installation is needed.

Not all templates are included in Policy Plus by default. To download the latest policy files and add them to Policy Plus, go to Help > Acquire ADMX Files.

Select Acquire ADMX Files in Policy Plus

Accept the default Destination folder and click Begin.

Acquire ADMX Files dialog box in Policy Plus

Click Yes to open and load the ADMX files in Policy Plus.

Click Yes to open and load the ADMX files in Policy Plus

To disable access to the Registry Editor using Policy Plus, select System in the left pane. Then, double-click  the Prevent access to registry editing tools setting in the left pane.

Double-click the Prevent access to registry editing tools setting in Policy Plus

On the Edit Policy Setting dialog box, select Enabled and click OK.

You may have to change this setting and reboot a few times for it to take effect.

Enable the Prevent access to registry editing tools setting in Policy Plus

Policy Plus also allows you to search for settings by unique ID, registry (search by key path or name or value name), and text (find in title, descriptions, and in comments).

That’s it! Now the registry editor should be restricted for the user account. Of course, this isn’t the only way to reduce privileges on Windows. Check out some other ways to restrict access for users by locking down Windows accounts.

Read the full article: How to Disable Access to the Registry Editor in Windows 10


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