The iPhone is reportedly getting 5G in 2020

The first 5G phones are set to start arriving next year. Motorola plans to bring next-gen connectivity via a Mod for the Z3, and companies like LG and OnePlus have promised to deliver the tech baked into handsets at some point in 2019. iPhone users, on the other hand, may have to wait a bit longer.

The technology is, of course, an inevitability for Apple (along with everyone else, really), so it’s just a question of when. A new report from Fast Company (via the Verge) puts the timing around a year and half out.

The “source with knowledge of Apple’s plans” put the 5G iPhone’s arrival at some point in 2020, with Intel supplying the tech this time out. Apparently Apple and Intel are going through a bit of a rough patch of late, courtesy of heat/battery issues with the 8060 5G modem. Of course, things aren’t rough enough for the company to hit up Qualcomm again.

Given the on-going battle between the two companies, that’s probably a bridge too far. Instead, Apple’s holding out for Intel’s 8161 chip. 5G presents a solid opportunity for Intel to regain some of the substantial ground it ceded to Qualcomm in the mobile market the last time out.

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5 Food Apps and Sites to Cook Delicious and Healthy Meals for Beginners

Whether you’re new in the kitchen or a practiced cook, everyone has one regular objective above all else: to cook a delicious and healthy meal. These apps and sites make that easy for anyone, especially beginners.

No matter what age you decide to start cooking, you’ll need a little guidance. You can enroll for free online cooking and baking classes, but the best way to learn is by doing it in your own kitchen with your own tools. And if a few people on the internet can help, then nothing like it, right?

Project Foodie (Web, iOS): Cook Along in Real Time With Chefs

Cooking shows and cookbooks assume that the viewer or reader has a decent set of cooking skills. They rush through things like the amount of time to boil something or the “smoking temperature of oil”, or take shortcuts like showing pre-diced veggies. It never feels like you’re cooking along with the chef.

Project Foodie reimagines this by showing you every single step of the cooking process, which you do at the same time as the chef. When this site says it takes 30 minutes to make a dish, it means you’ll see a 30 minute video where you follow each step with the chef. This “cookalong” is different from anything else you’ll see online.

Project Foodie already has a huge collection of videos on its YouTube channel and website, all of which are made by professional chefs and shot by a professional video crew. No edits, no cuts, and high-quality production make this something you want to cook along with. Try any of the recipes, you’ll be able to follow it like no other recipe before.

The mobile app adds extra features, like ordering groceries online based on the dish you want to make, as well as timers and other tools. It’s not essential though, and you can follow along to the video alone as professional chefs share recipes on YouTube.

Download: Project Foodie for iOS (Free)

The Cook’s Thesaurus (Web): Everything You Need About Any Ingredient

Feel like you have a dumb question about something and don’t want to ask it because it’s embarrassing? Turn to The Cook’s Thesaurus, a single site with everything you’d need to know about an ingredient, including substitutions.

Run a search on the site for what you need to look up, whether it’s a vegetable, fruit, meat, fish, dairy product, grain, liquid, or anything else. You’ll immediately find what it is made of, how it is typically used in recipes online, and tips on how to use it. Most ingredients also have a suggested substitute in case you don’t have the ingredient with you.

You can browse The Cook’s Thesaurus as well, but there seems little need to do that. This website will be most useful when you are looking for information, so the search feature is what matters. Bookmark it; you never know when you may need it in the future.

Only Eats (Web): Trending Recipes With Nutritional Information

You’re always looking for something new and interesting to eat. So what’s trending on the web in terms of recipes, especially on a cooking site for beginners? Only Eats has that ready, along with necessary nutritional information about it.

The site is an aggregator, which means it takes links from other popular recipe sites. The list of recipes shows a picture and a name, along with the option to save it for the future if you create an account. You can always bookmark it at the source site though. And of course, you can filter the recipes based on different criteria, such as healthy, simple, diets, type of meal, and sources.

Each recipe also has an “info” button that shows you its main ingredients as well as nutritional information. Only Eats claims it calculates this nutritional information based on USDA and FDA guidelines. Use this only as a base metric though, not as an accurate reading of what you’re cooking.

Basics With Babish (Web): Learn the Basic Tools and Techniques

If you’re new in the kitchen, you need to know the basic tools and techniques that are often referenced in cookbooks and recipes. To learn those, watch this playlist of YouTube videos.

Host Andrew Rea goes through a series of topics that will have you ready to cook anything that you come across. This includes tools, sauces, steak, pasta, chicken, pantry, eggs, and more. The videos are between five and 12 minutes, and Rea has a remarkable ability to simplify concepts and techniques.

Incidentally, Binging With Babish is one of the best sites to find anything shown in movies and TV shows. Rea looks up dishes talked about on screen and recreates them with the best possible recipe to show you how to make them.

Teeny Recipes (Web): Facebook Recipe Videos, With Full Text

Video recipes are better when you’re starting out, and Facebook is a treasure-trove of them. Some of the top websites share their secrets on the social network, as do bloggers and home chefs. But it’s hard to search on Facebook. So here’s something easier. If a recipe is popular on Facebook, Teeny Recipes will have it.

Teeny Recipes has a simple list of the latest recipes, as well as the most popular posts on the site. You can filter by ingredients as well, or search for something you want. Playlists and channels are two more ways to browse the site.

For a lot of the videos, Teeny Recipes also draws the full text of ingredients and cooking steps. This is vital since as good as a video is to see what you have to do, you still need that information listed somewhere in text.

Best Sites to Simplify Cooking

With these five sites, you should be able to get started with the basics of cooking, from learning techniques to cooking along with a chef so that you don’t mess up any step. But that doesn’t mean you stop at this.

There are sites that tell you the best “average” recipe based on the web’s most popular recipes for a dish. Others will help you collect recipes in one place, or mix and match multiple recipes to create your own. It’s all here in the best recipe sites and apps to simplify cooking.

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Palm Is Back With a Tiny Phone That’ll Keep You Off Your Phone

Before smartphones were in the pockets of just about everyone, many people used Palm devices to keep on track of their to-do list, calculations, and other day-to-day tasks. With the rise of iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and all the other always-connected devices, Palm faded into obscurity.

But now it’s back, at least in name. A new device sporting Palm branding, though actually made by TCL (the company that purchased the Palm name last year), is available right now for $349.99 exclusively through Verizon.

It’s not your traditional smartphone, and we’d even go as far as to say it’s quite weird.

What Is the New Palm Phone?

What’s interesting is that this isn’t a standalone phone designed to replace your current device. Instead, would-be buyers will need to add it to an existing line. Once activated, this would be the phone used when one wants to avoid the distractions offered by their larger, more feature-rich smartphones.

But it’s more confusing than that, because the phone isn’t limited in any major way other than its smaller size. It comes with Android 8.1 installed with full access to the Google Play Store and all the apps that live within.

To put it simply, it’s a little phone designed to prevent you from being distracted by your full-sized phone. It’s weird, but also quite an interesting concept.

If you’re still unsure about where this phone fits into our phone-loving world, you’re not alone. Here’s the quick pitch from Verizon:

“Ultra-portable and packed with premium features, it goes places your smartphone can’t.”

New Palm Specs

• 7.5 hrs usage time (800mAh battery)
• 12 MP camera
• 720 x 1280 pixels display
• 3.8 x 1.99 inches
• 3 GB RAM
• MSM8940, Octa-core 4 x 1.4GHz + 4 x 1.1GHz processor

How Do You Get One?

The Palm is available exclusively from Verizon for $349.99 (or $299.99 with a new 2-year contract). It’s out now in gold and titanium colors, and buyers can choose to have it shipped or they can pick it up from a local Verizon store.

As mentioned, it’s considered a companion phone, which means it’ll use your existing number and can’t be activated on a new line.

Smartphone addition is a very real thing, and it’s something many of suffer from. However, there are ways to curb your smartphone addiction (if you actually want to)!

Image Credit: Verizon

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6 Steps to Fix Your Windows 10 Taskbar Issues

Microsoft definitely gave the humble Taskbar some new tricks in Windows 10. But along with useful functionality, this introduced frustrating errors into the fold.

Below we’ll discuss what’s changed about the Taskbar with the advent of Windows 10, as well as offer some fixes for the most common issues that plague the Taskbar.

With these tips in tow, you should be well on your way to having a fully functional Taskbar once more.

What’s New With the Windows 10 Taskbar?

Like much of the operating system, the Taskbar was given an aesthetic and functional makeover when Windows 10 launched in 2015.

The biggest change is the addition of the search box, which doubles as a method of interacting with Microsoft’s personal assistant, Cortana. If you don’t like this bar, right-click the Taskbar and choose Cortana > Show Cortana Icon for a much less invasive icon, or Hidden to remove it entirely.

To the immediate right of the search bar is the Task View icon. This powerful functionality allows you to see all the windows you currently have open at a glance. It also offers an easy way to create virtual desktops.

Virtual desktops allow you to separate different windows and applications into individual instances. For instance, you might want to create a work desktop separate from the one you use to browse the web and listen to music on your lunch break.

Task View also lets you access Windows 10’s Timeline feature. This provides a history of everything you’ve done recently so you can easily jump back into a previous task.

Windows 10 offers a great level of control over the new Taskbar. We’re going to focus on fixing issues below, so check out our complete guide to Taskbar customization if that’s what you’re looking for.

1. Restart Windows Explorer

A quick first step when you have any Taskbar issue is to restart the explorer.exe process. This controls the Windows shell, which includes the File Explorer app as well as the Taskbar and Start Menu. Restarting it can thus clear up any minor hiccups.

To restart this process, press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to launch the Task Manager. Click More details at the bottom if you only see the simple window. Then on the Processes tab, locate Windows Explorer. Right-click it and choose Restart.

You’ll notice your Taskbar goes away for a minute, then comes back. This is normal, and when it returns, it will hopefully be back to normal.

If this doesn’t work, you can also try signing out and back in of your user account. Don’t forget that restarting your PC is always a good idea if you haven’t done so in a while.

2. Windows 10 Taskbar Not Hiding

When you’ve enabled the auto-hide functionality of the Taskbar, it’s annoying if it doesn’t work properly. If restarting the Explorer process doesn’t work or the issue happens frequently, you can try some other fixes.

First, make sure you actually have auto-hide enabled. Head to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar and make sure Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode is enabled. It’s worth disabling and re-enabling this while you’re here, too.

One of the most common causes for the Taskbar failing to retract automatically is an app requiring your attention. While this often comes accompanied with a glowing app icon, it’s not always obvious when this is the case.

Cycle through the apps that you have open and make sure that there are no error messages or other alerts waiting for you. Your browser can switch to this “attention” state if a website displays a notification, for example, or WhatsApp might have just received a new message.

If checking your open apps doesn’t fix this, take a look at the apps in your System Tray. One of them, running in the background, may be calling for attention.

Should you run into this problem on a regular basis, try adjusting notifications for the app that keeps getting stuck—open Settings > System > Notifications & actions or check inside the app’s own settings. Failing that, reinstalling the app may fix the problem.

3. Windows 10 Taskbar Icons Missing

If your Taskbar is missing its icons and the System Tray at the bottom-right doesn’t show the clock and other functions, you might have to dip into the command line to remedy your issue. Fortunately, this isn’t as intimidating as it might sound.

First, use the Windows + X shortcut (or right-click the Start button) to open the Power User menu. From here, you can launch a Command Prompt (Admin) or Windows PowerShell (Admin) window. From either of these, you can access a few tools that can perform the fix.

In the resulting prompt, you should first try an SFC command, which runs the System File Checker utility to patch up Windows issues. Use this command to do so, then reboot once it’s complete:

sfc /scannow

If this doesn’t fix the issue, you can try another utility. Enter the following command to invoke Disk Image Servicing and Management (DISM), and you should find that your Taskbar returns to its normal state after a reboot:

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

4. Windows 10 Taskbar Frozen

If your Taskbar is present, but you can’t click on any of the icons, you can try a few PowerShell fixes.

There is a relatively easy process that should clear up this predicament with a non-invasive command. Type PowerShell into the Start menu, then right-click its entry and choose Run as administrator.

Enter the following command to re-register all apps:

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

After this, navigate to C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Local. Find the TileDataLayer folder and delete it. Hopefully, after a moment, this will fix your Taskbar up.

There is a second, more invasive fix. Unfortunately, this one comes at a cost as it will also remove all Windows 10 apps, including the Store, from your system.

To try it, open PowerShell with admin credentials as demonstrated above. Then input this command:

Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -online

Afterwards, restart your system and hopefully, you’ll have everything fixed. Follow Winaero’s guide if you decide that you want the Windows Store back.

5. Check for Driver and Windows Updates

This is broad advice that’s applicable to many PC problems, but it’s solved Taskbar strife for some. Outdated drivers, especially display drivers, can cause all sorts of issues. Thus, updating them is worth a look if you’re still at a loss as to what’s affecting your system.

There’s a chance that Windows 10 could have caused your driver dispute. Its rollout of automatic updates carries over to drivers, but the implementation of this feature isn’t perfect. We’ve shown how to get control of your driver updates back if you’re concerned.

Of course, you’ll then need to make sure your drivers actually get updated. Follow our guide to updating Windows drivers safely and see if this clears up your issue.

While you’re at it, make sure you’ve installed all Windows updates at Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update. Sometimes the latest Windows patches can clear up issues like this.

6. Try System Restore or Create a New User Account

Tried everything above and still can’t manage to make your Taskbar behave as it should? You can try a System Restore point, if you have one, to go back in time before the issue started.

Failing this, you can create a new Windows user account to clear up the problem. Though this is fairly inconvenient, of course.

To create a new user account, open up the Settings app (Windows + I) and navigate to Accounts > Family & other Users. Under the Other Users section, select Add someone else to this PC.

You can then work your way through the account creation process. If you’re replacing your own user account, you should choose the I don’t have this person’s sign-in information, then Add a user without a Microsoft account to avoid any confusion with your original login.

Long Live the Windows 10 Taskbar

Hopefully, you’ll never run into issues with your Windows 10 Taskbar (again). We hope one of these tips helped you fix any annoying problems.

For more, check out the best free tools to fix any Windows 10 problem.

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Top 5 Unbiased World News Websites Free From Censorship

This is a world where money seems to have such control over journalistic integrity. Is there no place for the reader to turn for unbiased news? The short answer is an emphatic yes.

There’s still hope.

When it comes to “censorship”, news can be censored either by the over-reach of government entities or by a corporate stranglehold on the editorial processes of news organizations.

What Is Unbiased News?

It could be an angle placed on news stories about state organizations or policies that are financed by state leadership themselves. There is no better example of this than the Xinhua News Agency, the mouthpiece of the Peoples Republic of China. Or Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), the news agency owned by the Russian government.

However, the US isn’t innocent either. In the US, those controlling the journalists’ pens are corporate leaders rather than government leaders.

In the US, there are six corporate media giants that own 90 percent of the US media market—GE, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS.

It would be naive of anyone to believe that the people writing the paychecks for those reporting the news don’t hold some sway over what news gets reported, and how it gets reported.

This is especially apparent during every US Presidential election. Media corporate owners contribute significant campaign contributions to their favored candidates on one hand. On the other hand, they published news stories with a positive spin for their own favored candidate. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The New Yorker, and The Blaze are just a few examples.

So are there still any unbiased news sources? Thankfully, there are.

1. The Associated Press

The Associated Press was founded in 1846 and remains a renowned global news organization with 52 Pulitzer Prizes under its belt. It is and has always been the epitome of clear and unbiased news journalism and reporting. It is actually where most journalists seek out their own news stories to report on.

John Daniszewski for the AP wrote a piece about fake news on social media titled “Getting the facts right.” He cited a memo sent out to AP staff by Social Media Editor Eric Carvin where Eric wrote:

“The language we use: Whenever possible, we want to emphasize specifics rather than generalizations or labels. Let’s say what we know to be true and what is false, based on our reporting.”

This is the very definition of unbiased news.

The AP doesn’t only paint rainbows for one side on any story while drawing storm clouds for the other. The language used in each report is neutral, and the focus is only on reporting the news.

2. Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal is well known for reporting the news as it is. It serves a healthy dose of reality from both sides of the political spectrum.

It isn’t likely you’ll see a Wall Street Journal White House correspondent trading blows with the President in the Press Room.

The reason for this isn’t because WSJ loves our current president. It’s because you won’t often find antagonistic stories on the front page that are lambasting either side.

They explain what’s happening, who’s doing it and why, without excessive editorializing or using emotion-ridden writing.

WSJ journalists tell it like it is, without letting their own biases (or the biases of the corporate ownership) filter down into the story.

This isn’t an easy thing to accomplish with any news organization.

A contrast to this can be made with Fox News, the bastion of Conservative news reporting.

This isn’t just political bias in the media. Other sites that lack journalistic integrity like this are usually overtly nationalistic (overly pro-American — posting negative news headlines about other countries), or blatantly anti-American (like British news sources that produce a fresh batch of anti-gun editorials in response to every major shooting event that happens in the US—the Guardian is guilty of this quite often).

If you become a reader of the Wall Street Journal, you’ll find yourself more often better-informed, and less often offended or annoyed by the journalist’s choice of words.

3. Google News

Google News isn’t so much a news organization as it is a collection of news sources generated at least partially by a news-gathering algorithm, similar to how Google runs its flagship search engine.

It is partially managed by human editors as well, but the reason Google News is listed here not because the headlines are especially unbiased. It’s listed because of how little human intervention there is in developing front page headlines.

This usually results in a listing of headlines that may not be entirely free from left or right leaning headlines. But you’ll at least discover a healthy mix of each side.

If you believe that no single news organization can be completely free of intrinsic bias, then Google News gives you a place where you can at least see the news reported from the entire spectrum. That’s a great way to get the whole picture, no matter what the news event may be.

4. BBC

If you want to know what’s going on in the world, the BBC is the place to go. You will find better information than the same stories at a US news site.

It may seem ironic that US news organizations appear far more censored and filled with pro-government propaganda than British news organizations.

These days, US foreign policy includes so much government cooperation with corporate US news media. So, the only alternative for Americans (or anyone for that matter), is to turn to foreign news sources for the whole story.

Maybe (hopefully) this will change for the better, but for now this is the only option many Americans have.

5. Reuters

The news organization Reuters deserves honorable mention on this list for the same reasons as the BBC and more. News events on this site are written with some of the most straightforward reporting seen anywhere.

World stories on controversial hot-topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Brexit, or various government elections, don’t appear to take one side or another. Headlines cover insights from every end of the spectrum.

This is especially refreshing at a time when this kind of journalistic, unbiased news reporting is so rare.

If you want to bookmark only one news website, you should bookmark this one. You will get a fair and balanced perspective on all important matters in the world today.

Other Unbiased News Sources Worth Mentioning

There are a few additional news organizations in the world today that deserve mention. They were not included in the list above because sometimes these sites occasionally let their author’s biases get published.

C-Span and Pew Research aren’t specifically news organizations. But they deserve mention as fantastic resources to learn the deeper truth behind today’s news stories.

• Al Jazeera: Al Jazeera is based out of Qatar. Qatar is quite different from America, where “freedom of the press” is sacrosanct. However, Al Jazeera remains impartial and fact-based regardless. It’s surprising that many Americans prefer an Arabic news source above American ones. That’s the reality of the world today.
• C-Span: Watch government hearings and other events on your own, instead of relying on second-hand reporting. Keep your TV tuned to C-Span. You’ll actually be shocked to discover just how much those second-hand journalists twist what was actually said at those hearings. So why depend on those faulty reports when you can see for yourself?
• NPR: NPR would have landed in the primary list of unbiased news sources above, but its coverage sometimes leans a little too far to the left. However, in the majority of cases, NPR reporting is about as impartial and factual as you could ask for from a US-based news organization.
• Christian Science Monitor: Despite a name that would make you expect it to be a bastion of Conservative news reporting like The Blaze, CSMonitor is actually a refreshingly honest and impartial news source. You’ll find stories here that attack or support government policies from both sides of the aisle.
• Pew Research: Interested in the facts, and only the facts? You can’t go wrong bookmarking Pew Research. Even during heated election years, you’ll find the polls, surveys, and research conducted by this organization to be accurate and truthful. It is self-described as a “nonpartisan fact tank”, and that’s exactly what it is. Don’t get your facts from Facebook. Look to Pew Research to get accurate facts before you make up your mind.

What Bias Really Means

These days, you’ll find anyone who disagrees with a news story angle calling it “biased.” Conservatives hate CNN and MSNBC. Liberals hate Fox News and The Blaze. Everyone in the middle hates them all. So how can you really call any news organization “unbiased”, when so often bias itself is subjective?

Every journalist is aware of the nine principles of journalism. The first says that a journalist’s first obligation is to the truth.

“This ‘journalistic truth’ is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation.”

The ability to set aside one’s own prejudices in order to be “neutral” is not a part of those principles. However, “the source of their credibility is still their accuracy, intellectual fairness, and ability to inform.” When journalists let personal biases hinder their objectivity, it puts the entire media organization at risk. Thankfully there are still enough media outlets left that uphold these principles.

If you’re into tech news, there are some great tech news sources to check out as well.

Read the full article: Top 5 Unbiased World News Websites Free From Censorship

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Twitter removes thousands of accounts that tried to dissuade Democrats from voting

Twitter has deleted thousands of automated accounts posting messages that tried to discourage and dissuade voters from casting their ballot in the upcoming election next week.

Some 10,000 accounts were removed across late September and early October after they were first flagged by staff at the Democratic Party, the company has confirmed.

“We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion – a violation of our policies,” said a Twitter spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch. “We stopped this quickly and at its source.” But the company did not provide examples of the kinds of accounts it removed, or say who or what might have been behind the activity.

The accounts posed as Democrats and try to convince key demographics to stay at home and not vote, likely as an attempt to sway the results in key election battlegrounds, according to Reuters, which first reported the news.

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee did not return a request for comment outside its business hours.

The removals are a drop in the ocean to the wider threats that Twitter faces. Earlier this year, the social networking giant deleted 1.2 million accounts for sharing and promoting terrorist content. In May alone, the company deleted just shy of 10 million accounts each week for sending malicious, automated messages.

Twitter had 335 million monthly active users as of its latest earnings report in July.

But the company has faced criticism from lawmakers for not doing more to proactively remove content that violate its rules or spread disinformation and false news. With just days before Americans are set to vote in the U.S. midterms, this latest batch of takedowns is likely to spark further concern that Twitter did not automatically detect the malicious accounts.

Following the publication of Reuters’ report, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, said in a tweet thread that public research identifying bots is often “deeply flawed” and that many are identifying bots “based on probability, not certainty,” since “nobody other than Twitter can see non-public, internal account data.”

Twitter does not have a strict policy on the spread of disinformation in the run-up to election season, unlike Facebook, which recently banned content that tried to suppress voters with false and misleading information. Instead, Twitter said last year that its “open and real-time nature” is a “powerful antidote to the spreading of all types of false information.” But researchers have been critical of that approach. Research published last month found that over 700,000 accounts that were active during the 2016 presidential election are still active to this day — pushing a million tweets each day.

A Twitter spokesperson added that for the election this year, the company has “established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, Homeland Security, and campaign organizations from both major parties to help us enforce our policies vigorously and protect conversational health on our service.

Thousands of Twitter accounts that spread fake news during the 2016 election are still active today, say researchers

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Apple, Amazon, Google and others sign letter opposing Trump’s attempt to redefine gender

A list of 50-plus companies, including some of tech’s top names, joined forces this week to pen a letter calling out the Trump administration over a reported plan to narrow gender definitions.

Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and more drafted the letter (full text below) in response to a recent New York Times story about a planned federal rollback of Obama-era civil rights protections for transgender and gender non-conforming citizens. The move by the Trump administration set off a spate of protests around the world in support of transgender rights, and the response from the tech industry soon followed.  

“We oppose any administrative and legislative efforts to erase transgender protections through reinterpretation of existing laws and regulations,” the note reads. “We also fundamentally oppose any policy or regulation that violates the privacy rights of those that identify as transgender, gender nonbinary, or intersex.”

Rights groups and activists are mobilizing against a reported Trump administration plan to narrowly define gender, a move that could dramatically reduce federal protections for and recognition of transgender people on October 28th, 2018 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In Amsterdam people gathered Sunday night during a rally which was a call-to-action to all to members and allies of the trans, LGBQIA, black and brown resistance, immigrant and social justice movements to stand side by side with trans men, trans women and non-binary & intersex people, and to send a message of resistance and strengthen around the world. (Photo by Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The initial Times report stems from a memo proposing that the gender of individuals be solely based on their biological traits at birth.

“Proposed Definition: Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the memo reads. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

This isn’t the first time a Trump administration LGBTQ policy has united some of the industry’s biggest competitors. In February of last year, Apple and Google among others spoke out against the administration’s plans to roll back Obama-era guidelines surrounding transgender bathroom use in public schools.

Here is the full text of the letter:

We, the undersigned businesses, stand with the millions of people in America who identify as transgender, gender nonbinary or intersex, and call for all such people to be treated with the respect and dignity everyone deserves.

We oppose any administrative and legislative efforts to erase transgender protections through reinterpretation of existing laws and regulations. We also fundamentally oppose any policy or regulation that violates the privacy rights of those that identify as transgender, gender nonbinary, or intersex.

In the last two decades, dozens of federal courts have affirmed the rights and identities of transgender people. Cognizant of growing medical and scientific consensus, courts have recognized that policies that force people into a binary gender definition determined by birth anatomy fail to reflect the complex realities of gender identity and human biology.

Recognizing that diversity and inclusion are good for business, and that discrimination imposes enormous productivity costs (and exerts undue burdens), hundreds of companies, including the undersigned, have continued to expand inclusion for transgender people across corporate America.

Currently more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 have clear gender identity protections; two-thirds have transgender-inclusive health care coverage; hundreds have LGBTQ+ and Allies business resource groups and internal training efforts.

Transgender people are our beloved family members and friends, and our valued team members. What harms transgender people harms our companies.

We call for respect and transparency in policymaking, and for equality under the law for transgender people.

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Twitter hires God-is Rivera as global director of culture and community

Twitter has brought on its first-ever global director of culture and community, God-is Rivera. As global director of culture and community, Rivera will report to Global Head of Culture, Engagement and Experiential Nola Weinstein. Rivera previously led internal diversity and inclusion efforts at VMLY&R, a digital and creative agency.

“As a black woman who has worked in industries in which I have been underrepresented, I feel a great responsibility to amplify and support diverse communities, and they exist in full force on Twitter,” Rivera said in a statement. “The team has shown a passion to serve and spotlight their most active users and I am honored to step into this new role as a part of that commitment.”

For context, 26 percent of U.S. adults who identify as black use Twitter, while 24 percent of white-identified adults and 20 percent of Latinx-identified adults in the U.S. use Twitter, according to a March 2018 survey from Pew Research Center.

At Twitter, the plan is for Rivera to “better serve and engage communities” on Twitter through the company’s brand marketing, campaigns, events and other experiences. Internally, Rivera will be tasked with ensuring Twitter’s campaigns and programs are inclusive and “reflective of the communities we serve,” according to Twitter’s press release. Externally, Rivera will be responsible for developing relationships and programs with content creators, community leaders, brands and more — similar to the one with HBO’s Insecure.

Here’s the internal note Weinstein sent to Twitter employees earlier today:

Team,

I am so excited to welcome @GodisRivera to the team as Twitter’s new Global Director of Culture & Community. She captivated us at #OneTeam with her enlightening presentation on #BlackTwitter and we are thrilled that she will now be bringing her passion and perspective inside.

In this newly created role, God-is will help lead our efforts to better serve and engage the powerful voices and global communities who take to Twitter to share, discover and discuss what matters to them. This will come to life through Twitter’s brand efforts, campaigns, events and experiences. She will help ensure that our programs are connective, inclusive and reflective of the communities we serve. You can imagine more efforts that engage and excite our communities like #HereWeAre, #NBATwitter, thoughtful tweetups, etc.

God-is’ deep expertise in marketing and social strategy, cultural understanding and ability to elevate and connect communities makes for a rare and incredibly powerful combination. She was previously Director, Inclusion and Cultural Resonance at VMLY&R, where she led internal diversity efforts to fuse the importance of internal culture and representation to creative work outputs. In 2018, God-is was named an Ad Age “Woman to Watch” and Adweek “Disruptor” for continuing to fight for representation and equity in the advertising industry. She currently resides in New York, NY with her husband and daughter.

On a personal note, I have had the pleasure of spending time with God-is at #HereWeAre, #Influence, and #OneTeam and her energy, passion and positivity are infectious. I know her presence will make a difference and am excited by all that the culture & experiential team will create together.

God-is will start on November 12th and will be based in NYC reporting to me.

Please join me in welcoming her to the flock!

Thrilled to welcome @GodisRivera to the team as Twitter's new Global Director of Culture & Community. Her deep marketing, cultural, and social expertise makes for a rare and powerful combination that will help us to enhance our connection to the voices and communities we serve. pic.twitter.com/QrffBrnPJh

— Nola Weinstein (@NolaBeth) November 2, 2018

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Open Sourcing BERT: State-of-the-Art Pre-training for Natural Language Processing

Posted by Jacob Devlin and Ming-Wei Chang, Research Scientists, Google AI Language

One of the biggest challenges in natural language processing (NLP) is the shortage of training data. Because NLP is a diversified field with many distinct tasks, most task-specific datasets contain only a few thousand or a few hundred thousand human-labeled training examples. However, modern deep learning-based NLP models see benefits from much larger amounts of data, improving when trained on millions, or billions, of annotated training examples. To help close this gap in data, researchers have developed a variety of techniques for training general purpose language representation models using the enormous amount of unannotated text on the web (known as pre-training). The pre-trained model can then be fine-tuned on small-data NLP tasks like question answering and sentiment analysis, resulting in substantial accuracy improvements compared to training on these datasets from scratch.

Today, we are open sourcing a new technique for NLP pre-training called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or BERT. With this release, anyone in the world can train their own state-of-the-art question answering system (or a variety of other models) in about 30 minutes on a single Cloud TPU, or in a few hours using a single GPU. The release includes source code built on top of TensorFlow and a number of pre-trained language representation models. In our associated paper, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results on 11 NLP tasks, including the very competitive Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD v1.1).

What Makes BERT Different?
BERT builds upon recent work in pre-training contextual representations — including Semi-supervised Sequence Learning, Generative Pre-Training, ELMo, and ULMFit. However, unlike these previous models, BERT is the first deeply bidirectional, unsupervised language representation, pre-trained using only a plain text corpus (in this case, Wikipedia).

Why does this matter? Pre-trained representations can either be context-free or contextual, and contextual representations can further be unidirectional or bidirectional. Context-free models such as word2vec or GloVe generate a single word embedding representation for each word in the vocabulary. For example, the word “bank” would have the same context-free representation in “bank account” and “bank of the river.” Contextual models instead generate a representation of each word that is based on the other words in the sentence. For example, in the sentence “I accessed the bank account,” a unidirectional contextual model would represent “bank” based on “I accessed the” but not “account.” However, BERT represents “bank” using both its previous and next context — “I accessed the ... account” — starting from the very bottom of a deep neural network, making it deeply bidirectional.

A visualization of BERT’s neural network architecture compared to previous state-of-the-art contextual pre-training methods is shown below. The arrows indicate the information flow from one layer to the next. The green boxes at the top indicate the final contextualized representation of each input word:

BERT is deeply bidirectional, OpenAI GPT is unidirectional, and ELMo is shallowly bidirectional.

The Strength of Bidirectionality
If bidirectionality is so powerful, why hasn’t it been done before? To understand why, consider that unidirectional models are efficiently trained by predicting each word conditioned on the previous words in the sentence. However, it is not possible to train bidirectional models by simply conditioning each word on its previous and next words, since this would allow the word that’s being predicted to indirectly “see itself” in a multi-layer model.

To solve this problem, we use the straightforward technique of masking out some of the words in the input and then condition each word bidirectionally to predict the masked words. For example:

While this idea has been around for a very long time, BERT is the first time it was successfully used to pre-train a deep neural network.

BERT also learns to model relationships between sentences by pre-training on a very simple task that can be generated from any text corpus: Given two sentences A and B, is B the actual next sentence that comes after A in the corpus, or just a random sentence? For example:

Training with Cloud TPUs
Everything that we’ve described so far might seem fairly straightforward, so what’s the missing piece that made it work so well? Cloud TPUs. Cloud TPUs gave us the freedom to quickly experiment, debug, and tweak our models, which was critical in allowing us to move beyond existing pre-training techniques. The Transformer model architecture, developed by researchers at Google in 2017, also gave us the foundation we needed to make BERT successful. The Transformer is implemented in our open source release, as well as the tensor2tensor library.

Results with BERT
To evaluate performance, we compared BERT to other state-of-the-art NLP systems. Importantly, BERT achieved all of its results with almost no task-specific changes to the neural network architecture. On SQuAD v1.1, BERT achieves 93.2% F1 score (a measure of accuracy), surpassing the previous state-of-the-art score of 91.6% and human-level score of 91.2%:

BERT also improves the state-of-the-art by 7.6% absolute on the very challenging GLUE benchmark, a set of 9 diverse Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. The amount of human-labeled training data in these tasks ranges from 2,500 examples to 400,000 examples, and BERT substantially improves upon the state-of-the-art accuracy on all of them:

Making BERT Work for You
The models that we are releasing can be fine-tuned on a wide variety of NLP tasks in a few hours or less. The open source release also includes code to run pre-training, although we believe the majority of NLP researchers who use BERT will never need to pre-train their own models from scratch. The BERT models that we are releasing today are English-only, but we hope to release models which have been pre-trained on a variety of languages in the near future.

The open source TensorFlow implementation and pointers to pre-trained BERT models can be found at http://goo.gl/language/bert. Alternatively, you can get started using BERT through Colab with the notebook “BERT FineTuning with Cloud TPUs.”

You can also read our paper "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding" for more details.

Google finally adds consumer customer support with Google One

You may recall my tale of woe from last year when I recounted how I was locked out of my Google account for a month. It was a tough time, made all the more frustrating because there wasn’t any customer support to contact. That is changing for Google One users though, and it’s about time.

I received an email this week from Google informing me that my paid Google storage had been upgraded to Google One, Google’s freshly designed storage options announced last May. It comes with twice the storage, giving me two terabytes for the same $9.99 per month I was paying for one. It allows me to share my generous storage allotment with my family members, but the thing that really caught my eye was actual customer support.

With Google One, which is available for as little as $1.99 per month for 100 gigs of storage, everyone has access to actual customer support where they can talk to someone, who can (presumably) help them with issues like password recovery.

Brandon Badger, who is Google One product manager, says this is a critical component of the new storage package. “Support is important to us, we want people using our products to have a great experience and get questions or issues addressed in a timely manner,” Badger told TechCrunch. He added that users with paid storage plans often use many other Google products and services and this provides a way for customers to get answers to problems they have across the Google cloud ecosystem.

Photo: Google

Obviously, this long overdue and something that G Suite customers, the business side of Google’s tools, have had for some time. This ability to contact a customer service organization shows a maturation of consumer cloud products that had been missing previously.

As a journalist, when I got locked out I was forced to use my contacts at Google PR to give me that help. After many attempts was able to get my account credentials back, but I have received dozens of emails since I wrote that article from other unfortunate souls who faced the same predicament as I did, but lacked the connections I had. Unfortunately, as much as I could empathize with their plight (how could I not?), there wasn’t much I could do other than refer them to Google. I wrote about my level of frustration in my post:

Once you have gone through the recovery protocol, what is a person supposed to do to get Google’s attention? They don’t have customer service, yet I’m paying for storage. They don’t have a reasonable system for navigating this kind of problem and they don’t have a sensible appeals process.

While I hope I never get locked out of my Google account again, I’m happy to know that if I do, that I and so many others like me, at least have someone to contact about it now. That’s no guarantee that our problems will be resolved, of course, but it’s at least a path to getting something done that hadn’t previously existed.

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Match says Bumble is dropping its $400M lawsuit, but this battle isn’t over

Bumble and Match’s ongoing legal battles are continuing today. According to a statement released by Match Group this morning, Bumble is dropping its $400 million lawsuit against Match, which had claimed Match fraudulently obtained trade secrets during acquisition talks. However, Bumble is preparing to refile its suit at the state level, we’re hearing.

If you haven’t been following, the two companies have been doing battle in the court system for some time after Match Group failed to acquire Bumble twice — once in a deal that would have valued it at over $1 billion.

Bumble claimed Match then filed a lawsuit against it to make Bumble appear less attractive to other potential acquirers. Match’s suit claims Bumble infringed on patents around things like its use of a stack of profile cards, mutual opt-in and its swiped-based gestures — things Tinder had popularized in dating apps.

Bumble subsequently filed its own lawsuit in March 2018, this one claiming that Match used acquisition talks to fraudulently obtaining trade secrets. It says this is not a countersuit, but its own separate suit. (This is the one being discussed today by the companies.)

Match says it wasn’t served papers for Bumble’s suit. But Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe had said they delayed serving papers to give Match a chance to settle.

After a failure to settle, Bumble announced on September 24, 2018 that it would be serving Match, and shared news of its IPO plans. The $400 million suit claims Match had asked for “confidential and trade secret information” in order to make a higher acquisition offer for Bumble, but that no subsequent offer came as result.

Match says Bumble asked the courts to drop its lawsuit just a few weeks after this announcement, and believes the whole thing is just a PR stunt around Bumble’s IPO.

Match today says it’s not opposed to the lawsuit being dropped. But it is now seeking declaratory judgements that will force these issues to be litigated in the right forums, it says.

It points out that Bumble had filed its state petition in Dallas County, rather than respond with counterclaims to Match’s suit in the Western District of Texas — “less than 100 miles from Bumble’s Austin headquarters.”

It asked the case to be transferred to federal courts in the Western District, where its IP case is pending.

Now, Match says that Bumble is asking the courts to drop its claims against Tinder’s parent company.

“We’re not opposing their request to dismiss their own claims, but we’re seeking declaratory judgements that will force these issues to be litigated in the right forums,” says a Match spokesperson. “As we say in section 132 of the amended counterclaim: ‘Match will not simply wait until Bumble decides whether or not it wants to pursue these claims – likely in connection with Bumble’s next media blitz. Match intends to litigate these baseless allegations now, and Match intends to conclusively disprove them.'”

Bumble responded this morning by saying it plans to continue to defend its business against Match.

“Match’s latest litigation filings are part of its ongoing campaign to slow down Bumble’s momentum in the market. Having tried and failed to acquire Bumble, Match now seems bent on trying to impair the very business it was so desperate to buy,” a Bumble spokesperson says. “Bumble is not intimidated and will continue to defend its business and users against Match’s misguided claims.”

It declined to comment on how, but we understand that the change from a state court system to federal courts is in play here. Bumble wanted to litigate at the state level, which means it has to dismiss its claims in the federal courts. Match could then accurately say Bumble’s lawsuit is being dropped, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Bumble’s plans have changed.

We understand that Bumble is now preparing to refile its case in the state court system, but it hasn’t done so yet.

View this document on Scribd

View this document on Scribd

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Match says Bumble is dropping its $400M lawsuit, but this battle isn’t over

Bumble and Match’s ongoing legal battles are continuing today. According to a statement released by Match Group this morning, Bumble is dropping its $400 million lawsuit against Match, which had claimed Match fraudulently obtained trade secrets during acquisition talks. However, Bumble is preparing to refile its suit at the state level, we’re hearing.

If you haven’t been following, the two companies have been doing battle in the court system for some time after Match Group failed to acquire Bumble twice – once in a deal that would have valued it at over $1 billion.

Bumble claimed Match then filed a lawsuit against it to make Bumble appear less attractive to other potential acquirers. Match’s suit claims Bumble infringed on patents around things like its use of a stack of profile cards, mutual opt-in, and its swiped-based gestures – things Tinder had popularized in dating apps.

Bumble subsequently filed its own lawsuit in March 2018, this one claiming that Match used acquisition talks to fraudulently obtaining trade secrets. It says this is not a countersuit, but its own separate suit. (This is the one being discussed today by the companies.)

Match says it wasn’t served papers for Bumble’s suit. But Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe had said they delayed serving papers to give Match a chance to settle.

After a failure to settle, Bumble announced on September 24, 2018 that it would be serving Match, and shared news of its IPO plans. The $400 million suit claims Match had asked for “confidential and trade secret information” in order to make a higher acquisition offer for Bumble, but that no subsequent offer came as result.

Match says Bumble asked the courts to drop its lawsuit just a few weeks after this announcement, and believes the whole thing is just a PR stunt around Bumble’s IPO.

Match today says it’s not opposed to the lawsuit being dropped. But it is now seeking declaratory judgements that will force these issues to be litigated in the right forums, it says.

It points out that Bumble had filed its state petition in Dallas County, rather than respond with counterclaims to Match’s suit in the Western District of Texas – “less than 100 miles from Bumble’s Austin headquarters.”

It asked the case to be transferred to federal courts in the Western District, where its IP case is pending.

Now, Match says that Bumble is asking the courts to drop its claims against Tinder’s parent company.

“We’re not opposing their request to dismiss their own claims, but we’re seeking declaratory judgements that will force these issues to be litigated in the right forums,” says a Match spokesperson. “As we say in section 132 of the amended counterclaim: ‘Match will not simply wait until Bumble decides whether or not it wants to pursue these claims – likely in connection with Bumble’s next media blitz. Match intends to litigate these baseless allegations now, and Match intends to conclusively disprove them.'”

Bumble responded this morning, by saying it plans to continue to defend its business against Match.

“Match’s latest litigation filings are part of its ongoing campaign to slow down Bumble’s momentum in the market. Having tried and failed to acquire Bumble, Match now seems bent on trying to impair the very business it was so desperate to buy,” a Bumble spokesperson says. “Bumble is not intimidated and will continue to defend its business and users against Match’s misguided claims.”

It declined to comment on how, but we understand that the change from a state court system to federal courts is in play here. Bumble wanted to litigate at the state level, which means it has to dismiss its claims in the federal courts. Match could then accurately say Bumble’s lawsuit is being dropped, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Bumble’s plans have changed.

We understand that Bumble is now preparing to refile its case in the state court system, but it hasn’t done so yet.

View this document on Scribd

View this document on Scribd

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Vince Staples has fun with Google Maps in new video

Vince Staples’ latest record FM! drops today on Def Jam records — that’s some very good news from one of the best and brightest rappers in the game today. Staples is celebrating the release by giving us a glimpse into his home of North Long Beach, California (Norfy, as it were) the same way we all experience the world these days: Google Maps.

The video for the single “Fun” — which also features Oakland hip-hop mainstay E-40 — captures the idiosyncrasies of Google’s Street View right down to the blurry transitions. The novel execution aside, things captured by the fictional Street View car are tellingly not always as positive as the track’s three-word title implies. The shots culminate with arrest of three youths on bicycles and retaliation against the camera that brings to mind a recent Douglas Rushkoff title.

It’s a well-executed video for a great track from one of the most dynamic voices in hip-hop today. Just maybe don’t listen with the sound on at work.

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‘World of Warcraft: Classic’ demo limited to 60 minutes of playtime

Put away the Jolt, Blizzard is limiting the time gamers will be able to play the World of Warcraft: Classic demo. Basically, after playing for an hour, players will be logged off and will have to wait 60 minutes before resuming for another hour. The goal is to ensure a mass of players do not crash the servers, which, honestly, if the services crashed randomly, would be the most classic thing Blizzard could do to recreate the original WoW experience.

In a forum posting Blizzard says it hopes to lift the session limits as soon as possible.

Here’s some examples Blizzard provided to illustrate the session limits.

• If you play for 30 minutes and then log off for 60 minutes, when you come back you’ll have a fresh 60 minutes.
• If you play for 60 minutes, you’ll be disconnected and then have to wait 30 minutes before you can play again.
• If you play for 20 minutes, log off for 20 minutes, then play 40 more minutes, you’ll be logged off and wait 10 more minutes.

Blizzard previously stated the demo players would start out at level 15. The goal is to provide players ample time to feel out the different classes and the best way to do that is with a character with an established skill tree. However, characters are capped at level 19 and will not roll over to the full game once the demo is complete so enjoy it while it lasts.

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Apple News will launch a real-time election results hub on November 6

Apple is preparing to launch a new way for its customers to track election results. The company, on 8 PM ET on November 6, will swap out the existing Midterm Elections section in the Apple News app, and replace it with a new Election Night section instead. This section will also replace Apple News’ Digest tab at the bottom-center of the app, in order to lead users directly to the special section where they’ll be able to track the live results, updates on key races, latest developments and more.

The company is partnering with the Associated Press for its real-time election results, as do many news organizations thanks to AP’s history and experience with verifying results.

Here, Apple will use that AP data to inform a number of dynamic infographics as well as offer a complete list of federal election results in every state, including House and Senate seats.

These results will update every minute, or you can just “refresh” the page manually to force the update at any time.

If the balance of power in either the House or the Senate is determined by way of the incoming results, Apple News will publish a special alert at the top of the feed and a pop up notification, as well.

The Key Races section, meanwhile, offers another set of live updating infographics, showing the live results from the most interesting House, Senate or Gubernatorial races.

Another section will focus on the latest developments – meaning breaking news headlines and stories related to election night coverage. This will feature news from a variety of sources including Axios, Politico, The Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, CBS, and others.

CBS News, CNN, and Fox News will also contribute video clips to the Election Night hub, while ABC will offer a live video feed. Another live video feed from NBC News will appear in a widget alongside the Live Results infographic.

Apple says users won’t have to authenticate with their TV provider on election night to watch the videos in the hub.

A diversity of news sources was important to Apple, which wanted to have a range of options for people to read, as well as a way to present the news so people could see how it’s being processed across the ideological spectrum.

More importantly, all the news coverage in the hub isn’t being driven by algorithms. For Apple News’ team, Election Night is an all-hands-on-deck type of situation involving real human editors. In fact, human editorial oversight is a key difference between Apple’s approach to news aggregation and curation, compared with competitors like Google, Twitter and Facebook – all of which have come under fire for their outsized roles in the spread of information, and, at times, disinformation.

Apple has been taking the opposite approach, by staffing up an editorial team of former journalists, insteading of leaving news curation to technology.

Apple News is available across iPhone, iPad, and as of this year, Mac devices.

 

 

 

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