Rumors about a Pixel Watch have abounded for years. Such a device would certainly make sense as Google attempts to prove the viability of its struggling wearable operating system, Wear OS. Seems the company is finally getting serious about the prospect. Today Fossil announced plans to sell its smartwatch IP to the software giant for for $40 million.
Sounds like Google will be getting a nice head start here as well. The deal pertains to “a smartwatch technology currently under development” and involves the transfer of a number of Fossil employees to team Google.
“Wearables, built for wellness, simplicity, personalization and helpfulness, have the opportunity to improve lives by bringing users the information and insights they need quickly, at a glance,” Wear OS VP Stacey Burr said in a statement. “The addition of Fossil Group’s technology and team to Google demonstrates our commitment to the wearables industry by enabling a diverse portfolio of smartwatches and supporting the ever-evolving needs of the vitality-seeking, on-the-go consumer.”
Spotify is making it easier to use its streaming app in the car, when the phone is connected to the vehicle over Bluetooth. The company today confirmed the launch of a new feature called “Car View,” which is a simplified version of the service’s Now Playing screen that includes larger fonts, bigger buttons, and no distractions from album art. In Car View, you’re only shown the track title and artist, so you can read the screen with just a glance.
The site 9to5Google was the first to spot the feature’s appearance in Spotify’s settings. However, some users have had the option for weeks in what had appeared to be a slow rollout or possibly a test, pre-launch.
While Spotify already offers several in-car experiences through integrations with other apps like Google Maps, Waze, as well as through Android Auto, using the music app while behind the wheel has been very distracting and difficult.
I’ve personally found Spotify so dangerous to navigate while in the car, that I just won’t use it unless I set it up to stream before I drive. Or, in some cases, I’ll hand the phone to a passenger to control instead.
Given the difficulty with Spotify in the car, Car View’s lack of support for those who use the app over an AUX cable is a little disappointing.There’s no good reason why users should not be allowed to manually enable Car View from the Settings, if they choose. After all, it’s just a change to the user interface of a single view – and it’s been built!
Of course, manually toggling Car View on might not feel as seamless as the Bluetooth experience, but a feature like this could prevent accidents caused by people fiddling with their phone in the car. Hopefully, Spotify will make Car View more broadly accessible in time.
According to Spotify, once Car View is enabled, you can access your Library, tap to Browse, or use Search. While listening, you can use the seek bar to skip to another part of the song.
In the case that a passenger is controlling the music on your phone, they can temporarily disable Car View by way of the three dots menu. And if, for some reason, you don’t want to use Car View, the feature can be disabled in the Settings. (But keep it on, OK?)
Spotify also noted Car View supports landscape view, and will arrive on iOS in the future. It didn’t offer a time frame.
Car View officially launched on Android this week, and is now rolling out globally to all users.
Meet the Orcam MyMe, a tiny device that you clip on your T-shirt to help you remember faces. The OrCam MyMe features a small smartphone-like camera and a proprietary facial-recognition algorithm so that you can associate names with faces. It can be a useful device at business conferences, or to learn more about how you spend a typical day.
This isn’t OrCam’s first device. The company has been selling the MyEye for a few years. It’s a wearable device for visually impaired people that you clip to your glasses. Thanks to its camera and speaker, you can point your finger at some text and get some audio version of the test near your ear. It can also tell you if there’s somebody familiar in front of you.
OrCam is expanding beyond this market with a mass market product. It features the same technological foundation, but with a different use case. OrCam’s secret sauce is that it can handle face recognition and optical character recognition on a tiny device with a small battery — images are not processed in the cloud.
It’s also important to note that the OrCam MyMe doesn’t record video or audio. When the device detects a face, it creates a signature and tries to match it with existing signatures. While it’s not a spy camera, it still feels a bit awkward when you realize that there’s a camera pointed at you.
When there’s someone in front of you, the device sends a notification to your phone and smart watch. You can then enter the name of this person on your phone so that the next notification shows the name of the person you’re talking with.
If somebody gives you a business card, you can also hold it in front of you. The device then automatically matches the face with the information on the business card.
After that, you can tag people in different categories. For instance, you can create a tag for family members, another one for colleagues and another one for friends.
The app shows you insightful graphs representing your work-life balance over the past few weeks and months. If you want to quantify everything in your life, this could be an effective way of knowing that you should spend more time with your family for instance.
While the device isn’t available just yet, the company already sold hundreds of early units on Kickstarter. Eventually, OrCam wants to create a community of enthusiasts and figure out new use cases.
I saw the device at CES last week and it’s much smaller than you’d think based on photos. You don’t notice it unless you’re looking for the device. It’s not as intrusive as Google Glass for instance. You can optionally use a magnet if the clip doesn’t work with what you’re wearing.
OrCam expects to ship the MyMe in January 2020 for $399. It’s an impressive little device, but the company also faces one challenge — I’m not sure everyone feels comfortable about always-on facial recognition just yet.
Squad could be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of punctuating video chat might make it the teen girl “third place” like Fortnite is for adolescent boys.
With Squad, you fire up a video chat with up to six people, but at any time you can screenshare what you’re seeing on your phone instead of showing your face. You can browse memes together, trash talk about DMs or private profiles, brainstorm a status update, co-work on a project or get consensus on your Tinder swipe. It’s deceptively simple, but remarkably alluring. And it couldn’t have happened until now.
How Squad screensharing looks
Squad takes advantage of Apple’s ReplayKit for screensharing. While it was announced in 2015, it wasn’t until June 2018’s iOS 12 that ReplayKit became stable and easy enough to be built into a consumer app for teens. Meanwhile, plus-size screens and speedy LTE and upcoming 5G networks make screensharing watchable. And with Instagram aging and Snapchat shrinking, there’s demand for a more intimately connected social network.
Squad only launched its app last week, but droves of Facebook and Snap employees have signed up to spy on and likely copy the startup, co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford tells me. Screensharing would fit well in group video chat startup Houseparty too. To fuel its head start, Squad has the $2.2 million it raised before it pivoted away from Molly, the team’s previous App where people can make FAQs about themselves. That cash came from betaworks, Y Combinator, #BUILTBYGIRLS, Basis Set Ventures, Jesse Draper, Gary Vaynerchuk, Niv Dror, and [Disclosure: former TechCrunch editor] Alexia Bonatsos. Next, Squad wants to let people tune in to screenshares via URL to unlock a new era of Live broadcasting, and equip other apps with the capability through a Squad SDK.
“People under 24 do video chat way different than people 25 and above” says Crawford. Adding screensharing is “an excuse for hanging out.”
Serious ideas are preludes to toys
Screensharing has long been common in enterprise communication apps like Webex, Zoom and Slack. I even called a collaborative browsing and desktop screensharing app my favorite project from Facebook’s 2011 college hackathon. But we don’t just use our screens for work any more. Teens and young adults live on the digital plane, navigating complex webs of friendships, entertainment and academia through their phones. Squad makes those experiences social — including the “social” networks we often scroll through in isolation. Charles and Ray Eames said “Toys are preludes to serious ideas,” but this time, it is happening in reverse.
Squad co-founders from left: Ethan Sutin, Esther Crawford
“The idea came from a combination of things — a pain we were experiencing as a team,” Crawford recalls. My development team is constantly sending each other screenshots and screen recordings. It seemed ridiculous that I can’t just show you what’s on my screen. It was a business use case internally.” But then came the wisdom of a 13-year-old. “My daughter over the summer was bugging me. ‘Why can’t I just show what’s on my screen with my friends?’ I said I think it’s not technically possible.” That’s when Crawford discovered advances in ReplayKit meant it suddenly was possible.
Crawford had already seen this cycle of tool to toy before, as she was an early YouTuber. Back in the mid-2000s, people thought of YouTube as a place to host videos about eBay listings, professional presentations or dating profile supplements. “They couldn’t imagine that if you let people just reliably and easily upload video content, there’d be all these creative enterprises.”
Use cases for Squad
After stints in product marketing at Coach.com and Stride Labs, she built Estherbot — a chatbot version of herself that let people learn about her. Indeed, 50,000 people ended up trying it, convincing her people needed new ways to reveal themselves to friends. She met Ethan Sutin through the project and together they co-founded FAQ app Molly before it fizzled out and was shut down. “Molly wasn’t working; it had high initial engagement sessions, but then they would drop off. Maybe it’s not the right time for the augmented version of you,” noted Crawford.
Crawford and Sutin pivoted Molly into Squad to keep exploring new formats for vulnerability. “What excited Ethan and I was this mission to help people feel less lonely.”
Alone, together
Squad recommends apps to screenshare
Squad worked, thanks to a slick way to activate screensharing. The app launches to the selfie camera similar to Snapchat, but with a + button for inviting friends to a video call. Tap the screenshare button at the bottom, select Squad and start the broadcast. To guide users toward the best screensharing experiences, a menu of apps emerges encouraging users to open Instagram, TikTok, Bumble, their camera roll and others.
People can bounce back and forth between screensharing and video chat, and tap a friend’s window to view it full-screen. And when they want another friend to see what they’re seeing, Squad goes viral. One concern is that Squad breaks privacy controls. You could have friends show you someone’s Instagram profile you’re blocked by or aren’t allowed to see. But the same goes for hanging out in person, and this is one reason Squad doesn’t let you download videos of your chats and is considering screenshot warnings.
What’s so special about Squad is that it lacks the intensity of traditional video chat, where you constantly feel pressured to perform. You can fire up a chat room, and then go back to phoning as you please with your screen displayed instead of your blank face (though the Android version in beta offers picture-in-picture so you can show your mug and the screen).
“There’s no picture-in-picture on iOS, but younger users don’t even really care. I can point it at the bed and you can tell me when there’s something to look at,” Crawford tells me. A few people, alone in their houses, video chatting without looking at each other, still feel a sense of togetherness.
The future of Squad could grant that feeling to a massive audience of a celebrity or influencer. The startup is working on shareable URLs that creators could post on other social networks like Twitter or Facebook that their fans could click to watch. Tagging along as Kylie Jenner or Ninja play around on their phone could bring people closer to their heroes while serving as a massive growth opportunity for Squad. Similarly, colonizing other apps with an SDK for screensharing could allow Squad to recruit their users.
Squad makes starting a screenshare easy
The startup will face stiff technical challenges. Lag or low video quality destroy the feeling of delight it delivers, Crawford admits, so the team is focused on making sure the app works well even in rural areas like middle America where many early users live. But the real test will be whether it can build a new social graph upon the screensharing idea if already popular apps build competing features. Gaming tools like Discord and Twitch already offer web screensharing, and I suggested Facebook should bring the feature to Messenger when in late-2017 it launched in its Workplace office collaboration app.
Helping a friend choose when to swipe right on Tinder via Squad
In June I wrote that Instagram and Snapchat would try to steal the voice-activated visual effects at the center of an app called Panda. Snapchat started testing those just two months later. Instagram’s whole Stories feature was cloned from Snapchat, and it also cribbed Q&A Stories from Polly. Overshadowed, Panda and Polly have faded from the spotlight. With Facebook and Snap already sniffing around Squad, it’s quite possible they’ll try to copy it. Squad will have to hope first-mover advantage and focus can defeat a screensharing feature bolted on to apps with hundreds of millions or even billions of users.
But regardless of who delivers this next phase of sharing, it’s coming. “Everyone knows that the content flooding our feeds is a filtered version of reality. The real and interesting stuff goes down in DMs because people are more authentic when they’re 1:1 or in small group conversations,” Crawford wrote.
Perhaps there’s no better antidote to the poison of social media success theater that revealing that beyond the Instagram highlights, we’re often just playing around on our phones. Squad might not be glamorous, but it’s authentic and a lot more fun.
Squad could be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of punctuating video chat might make it the teen girl “third place” like Fortnite is for adolescent boys.
With Squad, you fire up a video chat with up to six people, but at any time you can screenshare what you’re seeing on your phone instead of showing your face. You can browse memes together, trash talk about DMs or private profiles, brainstorm a status update, co-work on a project or get consensus on your Tinder swipe. It’s deceptively simple, but remarkably alluring. And it couldn’t have happened until now.
How Squad screensharing looks
Squad takes advantage of Apple’s ReplayKit for screensharing. While it was announced in 2015, it wasn’t until June 2018’s iOS 12 that ReplayKit became stable and easy enough to be built into a consumer app for teens. Meanwhile, plus-size screens and speedy LTE and upcoming 5G networks make screensharing watchable. And with Instagram aging and Snapchat shrinking, there’s demand for a more intimately connected social network.
Squad only launched its app last week, but droves of Facebook and Snap employees have signed up to spy on and likely copy the startup, co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford tells me. Screensharing would fit well in group video chat startup Houseparty too. To fuel its head start, Squad has the $2.2 million it raised before it pivoted away from Molly, the team’s previous App where people can make FAQs about themselves. That cash came from betaworks, Y Combinator, #BUILTBYGIRLS, Basis Set Ventures, Jesse Draper, Gary Vaynerchuk, Niv Dror, and [Disclosure: former TechCrunch editor] Alexia Bonatsos. Next, Squad wants to let people tune in to screenshares via URL to unlock a new era of Live broadcasting, and equip other apps with the capability through a Squad SDK.
“People under 24 do video chat way different than people 25 and above” says Crawford. Adding screensharing is “an excuse for hanging out.”
Serious ideas are preludes to toys
Screensharing has long been common in enterprise communication apps like Webex, Zoom and Slack. I even called a collaborative browsing and desktop screensharing app my favorite project from Facebook’s 2011 college hackathon. But we don’t just use our screens for work any more. Teens and young adults live on the digital plane, navigating complex webs of friendships, entertainment and academia through their phones. Squad makes those experiences social — including the “social” networks we often scroll through in isolation. Charles and Ray Eames said “Toys are preludes to serious ideas,” but this time, it is happening in reverse.
Squad co-founders from left: Ethan Sutin, Esther Crawford
“The idea came from a combination of things — a pain we were experiencing as a team,” Crawford recalls. My development team is constantly sending each other screenshots and screen recordings. It seemed ridiculous that I can’t just show you what’s on my screen. It was a business use case internally.” But then came the wisdom of a 13-year-old. “My daughter over the summer was bugging me. ‘Why can’t I just show what’s on my screen with my friends?’ I said I think it’s not technically possible.” That’s when Crawford discovered advances in ReplayKit meant it suddenly was possible.
Crawford had already seen this cycle of tool to toy before, as she was an early YouTuber. Back in the mid-2000s, people thought of YouTube as a place to host videos about eBay listings, professional presentations or dating profile supplements. “They couldn’t imagine that if you let people just reliably and easily upload video content, there’d be all these creative enterprises.”
Use cases for Squad
After stints in product marketing at Coach.com and Stride Labs, she built Estherbot — a chatbot version of herself that let people learn about her. Indeed, 50,000 people ended up trying it, convincing her people needed new ways to reveal themselves to friends. She met Ethan Sutin through the project and together they co-founded FAQ app Molly before it fizzled out and was shut down. “Molly wasn’t working; it had high initial engagement sessions, but then they would drop off. Maybe it’s not the right time for the augmented version of you,” noted Crawford.
Crawford and Sutin pivoted Molly into Squad to keep exploring new formats for vulnerability. “What excited Ethan and I was this mission to help people feel less lonely.”
Alone, together
Squad recommends apps to screenshare
Squad worked, thanks to a slick way to activate screensharing. The app launches to the selfie camera similar to Snapchat, but with a + button for inviting friends to a video call. Tap the screenshare button at the bottom, select Squad and start the broadcast. To guide users toward the best screensharing experiences, a menu of apps emerges encouraging users to open Instagram, TikTok, Bumble, their camera roll and others.
People can bounce back and forth between screensharing and video chat, and tap a friend’s window to view it full-screen. And when they want another friend to see what they’re seeing, Squad goes viral. One concern is that Squad breaks privacy controls. You could have friends show you someone’s Instagram profile you’re blocked by or aren’t allowed to see. But the same goes for hanging out in person, and this is one reason Squad doesn’t let you download videos of your chats and is considering screenshot warnings.
What’s so special about Squad is that it lacks the intensity of traditional video chat, where you constantly feel pressured to perform. You can fire up a chat room, and then go back to phoning as you please with your screen displayed instead of your blank face (though the Android version in beta offers picture-in-picture so you can show your mug and the screen).
“There’s no picture-in-picture on iOS, but younger users don’t even really care. I can point it at the bed and you can tell me when there’s something to look at,” Crawford tells me. A few people, alone in their houses, video chatting without looking at each other, still feel a sense of togetherness.
The future of Squad could grant that feeling to a massive audience of a celebrity or influencer. The startup is working on shareable URLs that creators could post on other social networks like Twitter or Facebook that their fans could click to watch. Tagging along as Kylie Jenner or Ninja play around on their phone could bring people closer to their heroes while serving as a massive growth opportunity for Squad. Similarly, colonizing other apps with an SDK for screensharing could allow Squad to recruit their users.
Squad makes starting a screenshare easy
The startup will face stiff technical challenges. Lag or low video quality destroy the feeling of delight it delivers, Crawford admits, so the team is focused on making sure the app works well even in rural areas like middle America where many early users live. But the real test will be whether it can build a new social graph upon the screensharing idea if already popular apps build competing features. Gaming tools like Discord and Twitch already offer web screensharing, and I suggested Facebook should bring the feature to Messenger when in late-2017 it launched in its Workplace office collaboration app.
Helping a friend choose when to swipe right on Tinder via Squad
In June I wrote that Instagram and Snapchat would try to steal the voice-activated visual effects at the center of an app called Panda. Snapchat started testing those just two months later. Instagram’s whole Stories feature was cloned from Snapchat, and it also cribbed Q&A Stories from Polly. Overshadowed, Panda and Polly have faded from the spotlight. With Facebook and Snap already sniffing around Squad, it’s quite possible they’ll try to copy it. Squad will have to hope first-mover advantage and focus can defeat a screensharing feature bolted on to apps with hundreds of millions or even billions of users.
But regardless of who delivers this next phase of sharing, it’s coming. “Everyone knows that the content flooding our feeds is a filtered version of reality. The real and interesting stuff goes down in DMs because people are more authentic when they’re 1:1 or in small group conversations,” Crawford wrote.
Perhaps there’s no better antidote to the poison of social media success theater that revealing that beyond the Instagram highlights, we’re often just playing around on our phones. Squad might not be glamorous, but it’s authentic and a lot more fun.
Word about the next member of the Pixel family started leaking out just after Christmas. Now the rumored Pixel 3 Lite is getting some more time to shine, courtesy of a three minute YouTube video that highlights what appears to be a budget addition to Google’s flagship hardware line.
Perhaps most interesting here (aside from the mere existence of a third Pixel 3 model) is the apparent return of the headphone jack. After making a stink about including the port on the first Pixel, the company quickly reversed course for its predecessor.
The addition of a mid-range handset would, however, be the ideal reason to bring back the port (likely for a limited time). After all, while bluetooth headset have become far more accessible in recent years, specialized headphone are still a big ask for folks looking to save a few (or few hundred) bucks.
There are some cost cutting measures throughout, including a Snapdragon 670, plastic body and no second selfie-camera. In all, the device is a bit like Google’s take on the iPhone XR, though it notably appears to have roughly the same rear-facing camera configuration as its more expensive siblings. That could well owe to the fact that AI — not hardware — is doing most of the heavy imaging lifting on the new handsets.
Notably, Pixel devices are generally already lower cost than flagships from Apple and Samsung, but a new addition could be a nice opportunity for Google to show how Android can shine on lower cost devices.
Word about the next member of the Pixel family started leaking out just after Christmas. Now the rumored Pixel 3 Lite is getting some more time to shine, courtesy of a three minute YouTube video that highlights what appears to be a budget addition to Google’s flagship hardware line.
Perhaps most interesting here (aside from the mere existence of a third Pixel 3 model) is the apparent return of the headphone jack. After making a stink about including the port on the first Pixel, the company quickly reversed course for its predecessor.
The addition of a mid-range handset would, however, be the ideal reason to bring back the port (likely for a limited time). After all, while bluetooth headset have become far more accessible in recent years, specialized headphone are still a big ask for folks looking to save a few (or few hundred) bucks.
There are some cost cutting measures throughout, including a Snapdragon 670, plastic body and no second selfie-camera. In all, the device is a bit like Google’s take on the iPhone XR, though it notably appears to have roughly the same rear-facing camera configuration as its more expensive siblings. That could well owe to the fact that AI — not hardware — is doing most of the heavy imaging lifting on the new handsets.
Notably, Pixel devices are generally already lower cost than flagships from Apple and Samsung, but a new addition could be a nice opportunity for Google to show how Android can shine on lower cost devices.
In 2016, Serkan Piantino packed up his desk at Facebook with hopes to move on to something new. The former Director of Engineering for Faceboook AI Research had every intention to keep working on AI, but quickly realized a huge issue.
Unless you’re under the umbrella of one of these big tech companies like Facebook, it can be very difficult and incredibly expensive to get your hands on the hardware necessary to run machine learning experiments.
So he built Spell, which today received $15 million in Series A funding led by Eclipse Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures.
Spell is a collaborative platform that lets anyone run machine learning experiments. The company connects clients with the best, newest hardware hosted by Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure and gives them the software interface they need to run, collaborate, and build with AI.
“We spent decades getting to a laptop powerful enough to develop a mobile app or a website, but we’re struggling with things we develop in AI that we haven’t struggled with since the 70s,” said Piantino. “Before PCs existed, the computers filled the whole room at a university or NASA and people used terminals to log into a single main frame. It’s why Unix was invented, and that’s kind of what AI needs right now.”
In a meeting with Piantino this week, TechCrunch got a peek at the product. First, Piantino pulled out his MacBook and opened up Terminal. He began to run his own code against MNIST, which is a database of handwritten digits commonly used to train image detection algorithms.
He started the program and then moved over to the Spell platform. While the original program was just getting started, Spell’s cloud computing platform had completed the test in under a minute.
The advantage here is obvious. Engineers who want to work on AI, either on their own or for a company, have a huge task in front of them. They essentially have to build their own computer, complete with the high-powered GPUs necessary to run their tests.
With Spell, the newest GPUs from NVIDIA and Google are virtually available for anyone to run their test.
Individual users can get on for free, specify the type of GPU they need to compute their experiment, and simply let it run. Corporate users, on the other hand, are able to view the runs taking place on Spell and compare experiments, allowing users to collaborate on their projects from within the platform.
Enterprise clients can set up their own cluster, and keep all of their programs private on the Spell platform, rather than running tests on the public cluster.
Spell also offers enterprise customers a ‘spell hyper’ command that offers built-in support for hyperparameter optimization. Folks can track their models and results and deploy them to Kubernetes/Kubeflow in a single click.
But, perhaps most importantly, Spell allows an organization to instantly transform their model into an API that can be used more broadly throughout the organization, or or used directly within an app or website.
The implications here are huge. Small companies and startups looking to get into AI now have a much lower barrier to entry, whereas large traditional companies can build out their own proprietary machine learning algorithms for use within the organization without an outrageous upfront investment.
Individual users can get on the platform for free, whereas enterprise clients can get started for $99/month per host you use over the course of a month. Piantino explains that Spell charges based on concurrent usage, so if the customer has 10 concurrent things running, the company considers that the ‘size’ of the Spell cluster and charges based on that.
Piantino sees Spell’s model as the key to defensibility. Whereas many cloud platforms try to lock customers in to their entire suite of products, Spell works with any language framework and lets users plug and play on the platforms of their choice by simply commodifying the hardware. In fact, Spell doesn’t even share with clients which cloud cluster (Microsoft Azure, Google, or AWS) they’re on.
So, on the one hand the speed of the tests themselves goes up based on access to new hardware, but, because Spell is an agnostic platform, there is also a huge advantage in how quickly one can get set up and start working.
The company plans to use the funding to further grow the team and the product, and Piantino says he has his eye out for top-tier engineering talent as well as a designer.
Two years on from the U.S. presidential election, Facebook continues to have a major problem with Russian disinformation being megaphoned via its social tools.
In a blog post today the company reveals another tranche of Kremlin-linked fake activity — saying it’s removed a total of 471 Facebook pages and accounts, as well as 41 Instagram accounts, which were being used to spread propaganda in regions where Putin’s regime has sharp geopolitical interests.
In its latest reveal of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” — aka the euphemism Facebook uses for disinformation campaigns that rely on its tools to generate a veneer of authenticity and plausibility in order to pump out masses of sharable political propaganda — the company says it identified two operations, both originating in Russia, and both using similar tactics without any apparent direct links between the two networks.
One operation was targeting Ukraine specifically, while the other was active in a number of countries in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern Europe.
“We’re taking down these Pages and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they post,” writes Facebook’s Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy. “In these cases, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.”
Sputnik link
Discussing the Russian disinformation op targeting multiple countries, Gleicher says Facebook found what looked like innocuous or general interest pages to be linked to employees of Kremlin propaganda outlet Sputnik, with some of the pages encouraging protest movements and pushing other Putin lines.
“The Page administrators and account owners primarily represented themselves as independent news Pages or general interest Pages on topics like weather, travel, sports, economics, or politicians in Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan,” he writes. “Despite their misrepresentations of their identities, we found that these Pages and accounts were linked to employees of Sputnik, a news agency based in Moscow, and that some of the Pages frequently posted about topics like anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements, and anti-corruption.”
Facebook has included some sample posts from the removed accounts in the blog which show a mixture of imagery being deployed — from a photo of a rock concert, to shots of historic buildings and a snowy scene, to obviously militaristic and political protest imagery.
In all Facebook says it removed 289 Pages and 75 Facebook accounts associated with this Russian disop; adding that around 790,000 accounts followed one or more of the removed Pages.
It also reveals that it received around $135,000 for ads run by the Russian operators (specifying this was paid for in euros, rubles, and U.S. dollars).
“The first ad ran in October 2013, and the most recent ad ran in January 2019,” it notes, adding: “We have not completed a review of the organic content coming from these accounts.”
These Kremlin-linked Pages also hosted around 190 events — with the first scheduled for August 2015, according to Facebook, and the most recent scheduled for January 2019. “Up to 1,200 people expressed interest in at least one of these events. We cannot confirm whether any of these events actually occurred,” it further notes.
Facebook adds that open source reporting and work by partners which investigate disinformation helped identify the network.
It also says it has shared information about the investigation with U.S. law enforcement, the U.S. Congress, other technology companies, and policymakers in impacted countries.
Ukraine tip-off
In the case of the Ukraine-targeted Russian disop, Facebook says it removed a total of 107 Facebook Pages, Groups, and accounts, and 41 Instagram accounts, specifying that it was acting on an initial tip off from U.S. law enforcement.
In all it says around 180,000 Facebook accounts were following one or more of the removed pages. While the fake Instagram accounts were being followed by more than 55,000 accounts.
Again Facebook received money from the disinformation purveyors, saying it took in around $25,000 in ad spending on Facebook and Instagram in this case — all paid for in rubles this time — with the first ad running in January 2018, and the most recent in December 2018. (Again it says it has not completed a review of content the accounts were generating.)
“The individuals behind these accounts primarily represented themselves as Ukrainian, and they operated a variety of fake accounts while sharing local Ukrainian news stories on a variety of topics, such as weather, protests, NATO, and health conditions at schools,” writes Gleicher. “We identified some technical overlap with Russia-based activity we saw prior to the US midterm elections, including behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency (IRA) activity.”
In the Ukraine case it says it found no Events being hosted by the pages.
“Our security efforts are ongoing to help us stay a step ahead and uncover this kind of abuse, particularly in light of important political moments and elections in Europe this year,” adds Gleicher. “We are committed to making improvements and building stronger partnerships around the world to more effectively detect and stop this activity.”
A month ago Facebook also revealed it had removed another batch of politically motivated fake accounts. In that case the network behind the pages had been working to spread misinformation in Bangladesh 10 days before the country’s general elections.
This week it also emerged the company is extending some of its nascent election security measures by bringing in requirements for political advertisers to more international markets ahead of major elections in the coming months, such as checks that a political advertiser is located in the country.
However in other countries which also have big votes looming this year Facebook has yet to announced any measures to combat politically charged fakes.
Today the company took the wraps off Ola Money Postpaid, a service that builds on Ola’s existing payment service — which can be used to pay rides and also third-party services — but offering a credit facility without additional charges. Essentially, the postpaid service lets passengers accumulate rides on Ola and then pay for 15-days of charges in one go, in the same way that we pay for electricity or a phone bill once a month.
Ola said it has trialed the service with 10 percent of its 150 million users and seen a 90 percent repeat rate from those guinea pigs. Testing over, it plans to roll the service out to all users over “the coming months.” While doing that, it said it will increase the billing cycle to 30-days — so you pay for a month of Ola — and bring support for the postpaid service to third-parties.
The latter makes sense as it may boost Ola Money, Ola’s payment service that was given a standalone app in 2015 with a view to being used to pay bills, food and more. Ola hasn’t said much about the service, and we don’t know how well it fairs against competitors like Paytm, Flipkart’s PhonePe or Google Pay, formerly known as Tez.
More broadly, Ola Money Postpaid looks to be an effort to wean users off of cash payments. Cash is still a popular medium in India — to the point that Uber, the great advocate of seamless paying, added it a few years ago — and Ola Money has helped get some users into cashless, but not all have done. The postpaid service, then, appears to be a halfway house between the two.
The key quote from Ola is this one from Nitin Gupta, who is CEO of Ola Financial Services:
“Ola is dedicated to supporting the Government’s vision of a cashless economy and we are committed to being a major force in India’s rapidly growing digital payments market. We will continue to invest in innovative solutions that promote the digital economy across India while extending the benefits of this first of its kind Postpaid offering to more Indians,” he said.
Ola is the midst of a raising a new round that’s likely to be in excess of $1 billion, sources have told TechCrunch, and already investors are contributing. Last week, regulatory filings showed that existing investor Steadview Capital injected $75 million towards the round in a deal that values Ola at around $6 billion. SoftBank, Temasek and others are expected to join.
Academics at the universities of Oxford and Stanford think Facebook should give users greater transparency and control over the content they see on its platform.
They also believe the social networking giant should radically reform its governance structures and processes to throw more light on content decisions, including by looping in more external experts to steer policy.
Such changes are needed to address widespread concerns about Facebook’s impact on democracy and on free speech, they argue in a report published today, which includes a series of recommendations for reforming Facebook (entitled: Glasnost! Nine Ways Facebook Can Make Itself a Better Forum for Free Speech and Democracy.)
“There is a great deal that a platform like Facebook can do right now to address widespread public concerns, and to do more to honour its public interest responsibilities as well as international human rights norms,” writes lead author TimothyGarton Ash.
“Executive decisions made by Facebook have major political, social, and cultural consequences around the world. A single small change to the News Feed algorithm, or to content policy, can have an impact that is both faster and wider than that of any single piece of national (or even EU-wide) legislation.”
Here’s a rundown of the report’s nine recommendations:
Tighten Community Standards wording on hate speech — the academics argue that Facebook’s current wording on key areas is “overbroad, leading to erratic, inconsistent and often context-insensitive takedowns;” and also generating “a high proportion of contested cases.” Clear and tighter wording could make consistent implementation easier, they believe.
Hire more and contextually expert content reviewers — “the issue is quality as well as quantity,” the report points out, pressing Facebook to hire more human content reviewers plus a layer of senior reviewers with “relevant cultural and political expertise;” and also to engage more with trusted external sources such as NGOs. “It remains clear that AI will not resolve the issues with the deeply context-dependent judgements that need to be made in determining when, for example, hate speech becomes dangerous speech,” they write.
Increase “decisional transparency” — Facebook still does not offer adequate transparency around content moderation policies and practices, they suggest, arguing it needs to publish more detail on its procedures, including specifically calling for the company to “post and widely publicize case studies” to provide users with more guidance and to provide potential grounds for appeals.
Expand and improve the appeals process — also on appeals, the report recommends Facebook gives reviewers much more context around disputed pieces of content, and also provide appeals statistics data to analysts and users. “Under the current regime, the initial internal reviewer has very limited information about the individual who posted a piece of content, despite the importance of context for adjudicating appeals,” they write. “A Holocaust image has a very different significance when posted by a Holocaust survivor or by a Neo-Nazi.” They also suggest Facebook should work on developing “a more functional and usable for the average user” appeals due process, in dialogue with users — such as with the help of a content policy advisory group.
Provide meaningful News Feed controls for users — the report suggests Facebook users should have more meaningful controls over what they see in the News Feed, with the authors dubbing current controls as “altogether inadequate,” and advocating for far more. Such as the ability to switch off the algorithmic feed entirely (without the chronological view being defaulted back to algorithm when the user reloads, as is the case now for anyone who switches away from the AI-controlled view). The report also suggests adding a News Feed analytics feature, to give users a breakdown of sources they’re seeing and how that compares with control groups of other users. Facebook could also offer a button to let users adopt a different perspective by exposing them to content they don’t usually see, they suggest.
Expand context and fact-checking facilities — the report pushes for “significant” resources to be ploughed into identifying “the best, most authoritative, and trusted sources” of contextual information for each country, region and culture — to help feed Facebook’s existing (but still inadequate and not universally distributed) fact-checking efforts.
Establish regular auditing mechanisms — there have been some civil rights audits of Facebook’s processes (such as this one, which suggested Facebook formalizes a human rights strategy), but the report urges the company to open itself up to more of these, suggesting the model of meaningful audits should be replicated and extended to other areas of public concern, including privacy, algorithmic fairness and bias, diversity and more.
Create an external content policy advisory group — key content stakeholders from civil society, academia and journalism should be enlisted by Facebook for an expert policy advisory group to provide ongoing feedback on its content standards and implementation; as well as also to review its appeals record. “Creating a body that has credibility with the extraordinarily wide geographical, cultural, and political range of Facebook users would be a major challenge, but a carefully chosen, formalized, expert advisory group would be a first step,” they write, noting that Facebook has begun moving in this direction but adding: “These efforts should be formalized and expanded in a transparent manner.”
Establish an external appeals body — the report also urges “independent, external” ultimate control of Facebook’s content policy, via an appeals body that sits outside the mothership and includes representation from civil society and digital rights advocacy groups. The authors note Facebook is already flirting with this idea, citing comments made by Mark Zuckerberg last November, but also warn this needs to be done properly if power is to be “meaningfully” devolved. “Facebook should strive to make this appeals body as transparent as possible… and allow it to influence broad areas of content policy… not just rule on specific content takedowns,” they warn.
In conclusion, the report notes that the content issues it’s focused on are not only attached to Facebook’s business but apply widely across various internet platforms — hence growing interest in some form of “industry-wide self-regulatory body.” Though it suggests that achieving that kind of overarching regulation will be “a long and complex task.”
In the meanwhile, the academics remain convinced there is “a great deal that a platform like Facebook can do right now to address widespread public concerns, and to do more to honour its public interest responsibilities, as well as international human rights norms” — with the company front and center of the frame given its massive size (2.2 billion+ active users).
“We recognize that Facebook employees are making difficult, complex, contextual judgements every day, balancing competing interests, and not all those decisions will benefit from full transparency. But all would be better for more regular, active interchange with the worlds of academic research, investigative journalism, and civil society advocacy,” they add.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on their recommendations.
The report was prepared by the Free Speech Debate project of the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in partnership with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, the Project on Democracy and the Internet, Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Last year we offered a few of our own ideas for fixing Facebook — including suggesting the company hire orders of magnitude more expert content reviewers, as well as providing greater transparency into key decisions and processes.
If you’re still using Windows 7 then you need to be aware that free support ends in less than a year. Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 7 for free on January 14, 2020, and at that point this popular operating system will become increasingly unsafe to use.
All versions of Windows have a limited shelf life. And while they don’t disappear, a lack of new features and security updates leave them woefully outdated. As the last version of Windows, Windows 10 may be the exception to the rule, but Windows 7’s time is up.
The End of Windows 7 Is Nigh
On January 14, 2020, Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 7. Mainstream supported ended in 2015, but Windows 7 has carried on receiving security updates thanks to extended support. When that ends in 2020, Windows 7 will remain as it is.
Businesses will be able to pay Microsoft for continued Windows 7 support. However, this option isn’t available to consumers. Which means you’ll have to choose between using an unsupported operating system, upgrading to Windows 10, or switching OSes.
Provide the most secure experience for users and IT as Windows 7 and Office 2010 reach end of support starting Jan 14, 2020. Shift to a modern desktop by upgrading to #Microsoft365. Explore now: https://t.co/Z14tra6oSq
With less than a year to go there are still millions of people using Windows 7. Just as millions of people carried on using Windows XP beyond its prime. Microsoft is hoping those individuals will upgrade to Windows 10, but there’s no guarantee that will happen.
While many will upgrade, others will carry on using Windows 7 regardless. And that isn’t advisable over the longterm when with each passing month Windows 7 is likely to get more insecure and more buggy, with no updates being released to fix it.
Start Looking Beyond Windows 7
There’s no need to panic. Windows 7 is still good for a year, and it won’t suddenly become unusable on January 15, 2020. However, Windows 7 users need to at least start thinking about their options, as Windows 7 will soon be old, outdated, and off Microsoft’s radar.
It should be noted that Windows 10 isn’t perfect, which is why a lot of people have delayed upgrading. However, time is running out, so you should consider upgrading to Windows 10. And if you hate Windows 10, why not consider buying a Chromebook instead.
You just overclocked your GPU or installed a new hardware component in your PC. Is it working? Benchmarking is a great way to take a snapshot of your PC’s performance, and the best benchmarking software is often free to use.
Whether you want to assess how poorly, or how well, your PC is performing, everyone can benefit from a good benchmark. Don’t wait until someone else has to benchmark your PC for you in order to troubleshoot an issue!
General Performance
Benchmarking software typically allows for overclocking or fan speed settings changes. These options allow users to configure hardware changes through software. Keep in mind, benchmarking your PC is a bit more complex than simply running software.
Head to our article on how to benchmark like a pro to get a rundown of how to accurately benchmark your components.
CPU-Z will provide users with a complete rundown of your PC’s hardware specifications, particularly concerning your CPU.
It also provides specifications for your motherboard, RAM, and graphics card, making it a great all-around program to visualize hardware makes and models. You can even save a TXT file of the information via the Tools option.
HWMonitor not only visualizes the make and model of hardware components in your PC, but it also displays certain parameters live.
These parameters include power consumption, fan speeds, utilization percentage, clock speeds, and temperature. This can be crucial, as issues like an overheating component in your PC can lead to frequent PC shutdowns.
HWMonitor’s simple interface also makes all values easy to view and understand. Of course, you can also save this information for further troubleshooting via the File option.
SiSoftware Sandra Lite is a fully-featured benchmark suite which is aimed at users who are very well informed about the inner workings of their computers, and for businesses which need to perform a detailed analysis on multiple computers.
Want to test your computer’s memory bandwidth? No problem. Want to benchmark network performance? Sure. Want to benchmark your computer’s power efficiency? Yes, Sandra does that as well.
Another useful feature of SiSoftware Sandra Lite is its online reference database. SiSoft Sandra will benchmark your component or online connection and then compare your performance with other similar processors to give you a better idea of how an upgrade may or may not help you.
Piriform’s Speccy, from the creators of CCleaner, is a favorite among the gaming community for its simple layout of a PC’s hardware configuration.
Once it’s open, Speccy will provide a thorough rundown of every component, and most drivers, currently available on your PC.
If you click on the individual parameters on the left-hand side of the window, you’ll get even more information concerning your specific hardware including temperature, voltage, fan speeds, and more.
Fraps is the de facto FPS benchmarking tool in every gamers arsenal. Easy to use and configure, Fraps will allow users to view and save their FPS ratings over time.
While Fraps is largely used to show FPS ratings over time, which is very useful for testing new hardware or overclocking your PC, it can also be used to screenshot and record gameplay as well.
CPU Benchmarking
CPU benchmarks not only provide users with data concerning clock speeds and temperatures, but they also compare your CPU’s performance with the performance of others.
Keep in mind, it’s difficult to separate pure CPU benchmarks from pure GPU benchmarks; both typically drive a PC’s overall performance. A PC’s motherboard also largely influences the performance of the CPU, and a cheap or older motherboard may even throttle your CPU’s performance.
CineBench provides one of the most thorough and trusted CPU benchmarks available. It renders an image—rendering being a task largely undertaken by the CPU—and compares it to other real-world tests in order to gauge your CPU’s performance.
It’s as real-world as it gets: while other benchmarks will test your overall PC performance or a combination of your CPU and GPU, CineBench specifically tests all available processor cores of your CPU. After the test is run, your processor will be graded in points: the higher your points, the stronger your CPU’s performance output.
RealBench is another example of real-world CPU benchmarking. It uses four tests, all involving rendering in some capacity: Image Editing, H.264 Video Encoding, OpenCL, and Heavy Multitasking.
You can upload your finding to the RealBench website to compare where you stand with other benchmarked hardware configurations. Possibly the best aspect of RealBench is that it simulates a regular course load; no stress testing to push your CPU to the max in order to gauge its performance. Although, of course, stress testing is also an available feature in RealBench.
GPU Benchmarking
GPU benchmarks are much like CPU benchmark: they will update the user on the clock speeds, bus speeds, temperatures, and fan speeds of your GPU.
Not exclusive to MSI graphics cards, MSI Afterburner is the best live monitoring GPU tool around. Afterburner allows users to overclock and monitor their software in one program.
It tracks every parameter you need to chart graphics card parameters: clock speed, temperature, RAM usage, fan speed, and CPU usage (by core). You can also save and activate overclock profiles at startup, so you’ll always be overclocked at the outset.
The Unigine suite has been the go-to benchmarking software for graphics cards for years. If, for example, an overindulgent overclock has the possibility to damage your GPU over the long run, Unigine engines will make sure they benchmark and stress-test the GPU to ensure maximum performance and stability. It also allows users to test varying degrees of detail, so any GPU—budget or otherwise—can be tested using the software.
Similar to the Unigine suite, FutureMark provides high quality benchmarking software for your GPU. Downloadable through Steam, you can use a free demo version of 3DMark’s paid software.
The 3DMark Basic Edition, equipped with the DirectX 12 benchmark Time Spy, should more than meet your needs. 3DMark scores are also some of the best indicators of GPU performance around.
Benchmark Your PC the Right Way
There are plenty of system benchmark software available online, most of which do a poor job of truly revealing your component’s performance. The list above is comprised of tested and trustworthy benchmarking programs which IT professionals and casual users can both use to gather information concerning a PC’s hardware configuration.
