Posts

The FTC filed an antitrust complaint on Thursday that alleges Facebook used an illegal buy-or-bury scheme to maintain its market dominance. The US competition regulator argues that Facebook repeatedly failed to develop meaningful innovations on its mobile app. Instead, it acquired competitors, including Instagram and WhatsApp, with features that had succeeded where Facebook’s own attempts had failed. The FTC further alleges that Facebook lured app developers to the platform and buried them when they became competitive threats....

The company said identifying smell is a multi-label classification problem, meaning a substance can have multiple smell characteristics. For instance, Vanillin, a substance often used to create an artificial vanilla flavor, has multiple smell descriptors such as sweet, vanilla, and chocolate, with some characteristics stronger than others. So, to identify the smell profile of a molecule researchers used a graph neural networks (GNNs), a deep learning model that takes graphs as inputs....

Since the protests, both Google employees have been fired, as well as two others involved. In response, the fired Googlers, the ‘thanksgiving four,’ filed labor charges against the tech giant accusing the company of letting them go for engaging in protected labor organizing, and the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has officially started a new investigation into the company’s labor practices. As first reported by CNBC yesterday, the investigation, which will take approximately three months, will decide whether Google violated labor laws when it recently fired four employees....

This is the kind of news that makes me want to jump up and do a happy dance. These scientists may have produced an entirely new phase of matter. I’m going to do my best to explain what that means and why I personally believe this is the most important scientific breakthrough in our lifetimes. However, for the sake of clarity, there’s two points I need to make first:...

According to a report from Wired, the company is considering launching this ethics consultancy service by the end of the year. Reporter Tom Simonite writes: The article’s language makes it seem like Google’s planning to deploy bias checks against specific algorithms. In one example, it mentions how Google could potentially check lending algorithms to ensure they aren’t biased against “certain demographic groups.” Quick take: You know that GIF of the guy in the green shirt laughing his butt off?...

David Feinberg, the recently appointed head of its Google Health initiative, outlined plans to make it easier for doctors to search medical records, and improve the quality of health-focused search results across Google and YouTube. “Imagine a search bar on top of your EHR (electronic health record) that needs no training,” Feinberg said at the HLTH health care conference in Las Vegas last week. According to Feinberg, the search bar will supposedly allow doctors to type into it, with the system automatically displaying appropriate responses to the queries....

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) May 12, 2020 The version of Hamilton we’ll be seeing was filmed in 2016: to be clear, it’s not a film adaptation, but a special recording of the show onstage. According to Disney, the show was filmed in such a way that viewers will feel as though they’re there: “The film is a leap forward in the art of ‘live capture’ which transports its audience into the world of the Broadway show in a uniquely intimate way....

I spoke to Frank Mong, Helium’s COO to find out more about the company, their tech, and their latest partnership. How does it all work? What underpins Helium is a series of Hotspots retailing for $495USD. These create an open-sourced P2P long-range wireless network. You could consider each hotspot a node or gateway. Hotspots enable internet connectivity for low-power devices like those embedded with sensors to measure temperature, humidity, pressure or location, without needing Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity....

His Space X sponsored The Hyperloop Pod Competition spawning many ideas for the hyperloop technology in development today, with some teams scaling to become fully functional startups with significant funding. However, there is yet to be a commercially available hyperloop, and numerous companies are working on proprietary designs, mainly in stealth mode. Every so often, they announce a partnership, release a video, or publish a feasibility study or research paper....

It’s important to note that all these models will have 5G connectivity where networks are available. Plus, we’ll get to know about RAM and battery capacity when these phones are out. We’ll update our post at that time. iPhone 12 Mini Screen: 5.4-inch Super Retina XDR display with the ceramic shield Resolution: 2340 x 1080 at 476 ppi (pixel per inch) Processor: Apple A14 Bionic Rear camera: 12-megapixel wide camera with f/1....

We all love our Apple Watches. But what we don’t love is trying to determine whether they’re charging or not. With the Magsafe magnetic chargers, it’s often tough to tell if you’ve got a good connection and your watch is actually juicing up. Meanwhile, many Apple Watch charging stands take up an inordinate amount of desktop space, while others simply look…well, bad. All most users want is a stand that keeps their watch fully charged and doesn’t look like an eyesore....

Sound familiar? You can spend all the time you want on product development, but without a well-defined brand, you’ll struggle to catch the eye of customers and investors, or stand out against competitors. The question is, where do you start? You need more than a business card to get started in the big wide business world. Think: a logo, website, and popping social media presence. Are you panicking because you don’t have a full time designer yet?...

Your Nintendo account is what allows you to buy games on your Switch, and it’s likely linked to some form of payment. So you really don’t want it to be compromised. Luckily, Nintendo offers two-factor authentication (2FA), though you’ll need to have an authenticator app. Recently, we’ve heard several reports that Nintendo accounts were being hacked — to buy Fortnite V-bucks, of all things. Considering most of us are in the position where the Switch is one of our most important entertainment tools, this is not a time when you want to be dealing with a compromised account....

Ahhh… Facebook, a place to share “what’s on your mind” and stay up to date with your racist Grandma’s statuses. The social networking platform has approximately 2.1 billion daily active users, so inevitably, it can sometimes feel like a pit of negative and offensive comments — but thankfully, there’s a way to prevent these from appearing on your feed. Instead of deleting or deactivating your Facebook account, the tech giant allows you to control what comments you see by giving you the ability to delete, hide, or report them....

Traditional personalization uses basic customer data, limiting itself to simple tactics like addressing customers with their first name in the subject line. Meanwhile, hyper-personalization goes a step further by using real-time data to deliver more relevant communications to consumers. This more advanced personalization uses data focused on consumer browsing, purchasing, and behavior. For instance, personalization may consist of advertising exercise apparel to customers who purchased similar items online the previous year....

There’s nothing like completing a UX project. It takes an incredible amount of time, effort, and skill to travel from design problem to solution. Crossing the finish line is a great feeling, but seasoned UX designers know that there’s always more to be done… A C-level executive calls with a question. “Now that the project is over, how do we track the results we’re trying to achieve?” It’s a fair concern — one that leads to a bigger topic....

It’s disconcerting when the sites we rely on suddenly become inaccessible, and even more so when it happens on such a vast scale. This outage saw seemingly unrelated sites go dark, including the BBC, Pinterest, the Financial Times, Reddit and even The Conversation. How can so many sites, from so many different organisations, all be affected by the same incident? To understand the answer, you need to know what a CDN (content delivery network) is and how crucial they are to the smooth running of the internet....

The global take-up of electric vehicles, for example, is estimated to have prevented 50 million tonnes of CO₂ so far. That’s less than half of bitcoin’s emissions for a single year. And the problem’s getting worse. The growth of bitcoin “mining” powered by fossil fuels is outpacing greener alternatives, causing bitcoin’s carbon footprint to swell five-fold in just two years. But, according to campaign groups Greenpeace and the Environmental Working Group, all this can be easily fixed with a simple update to bitcoin’s software....

The online ad ecosystem is largely built around “programmatic advertising,” a system for placing advertisements from millions of advertisers on millions of websites. The system uses computers to automate bidding by advertisers on available ad spaces, often with transactions occurring faster than would be possible manually. Programmatic advertising is a powerful tool that allows advertisers to target and reach people on a huge range of websites. As a doctoral student in computer science, I study how malicious online advertisers take advantage of this system and use online ads to spread scams or malware to millions of people....

Here are 9 signs that prove the time has come for you to change jobs. [Read: COVID-19 canceled doctors’ office visits — these startups are bringing the doctor to you] Dreading work The ‘Sunday night dread’ is a good litmus test. Does the thought of going to work fill you with dread or anxiety on a Sunday evening? If so, it’s definitely time for a change. This is essentially your body’s way of telling you that it isn’t happy about Monday fast-approaching....