FTC secures authority to open antitrust probe into Facebook It also has jurisdiction over Amazon The Federal Trade Commission will be in charge of any antitrust investigations into Facebook, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal Monday. It’s part of an arrangement that permits the Justice Department to investigate Google while handing over Facebook and…
Facebook Releases Another Deep Learning Tool George Leopold Facebook has released to open-source developers a deep learning framework that does double duty for computer vision and language tasks. Built on its PyTorch framework, Facebook is positioning Pythia as supporting “multitasking” for vision and language “multimodal AI models.” Among its capabilities are identifying visual data and automatically generating…
Democratic presidential candidates agree: Big Tech is too powerful Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are the latest to call for action against companies like Facebook By Casey Newton On Monday I noted here a growing consensus among Democratic presidential candidates that Big Tech in general, and Facebook specifically, should perhaps be broken up. Sen. Kamala Harris said…
Facebook reenables ‘View as Public’ feature following 2018 security issue ByChaim Gartenberg Facebook is restoring the option for users to view their profile from the perspective of someone they aren’t friends with, as well as making it easier for users to manage what information does or doesn’t get displayed on the public-facing version of their…
Microsoft Is Building an ID Verification Platform on Bitcoin Microsoft is leveraging blockchain technology to create a trustless digital identity scheme, but its not launching a token or building a private blockchain to do so. Its building on Bitcoin instead. Announced on May 13, 2019, Project ION is an open-source, Layer 2 network built out…
Facebook defends itself against op-ed calling for its breakup ‘Success should not be penalized’ Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge By Andrew Liptak@AndrewLiptak On Thursday, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes wrote an op-ed in The New York Times calling for the company to be broken up, saying that CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “focus on growth led him to sacrifice…
FACEBOOK CHEERS ON CHARMING LOCAL BUSINESS AL-QAEDA’S “GREAT YEAR” DAN ROBITZSKI Poor Taste If you still use Facebook, you’re probably familiar with those algorithmically-produced “year in review” videos that the website churns out, setting a slideshow of your posts to cheerful music. At best, the videos are obnoxious. At worst? They spew violent, hateful content. Researchers…
FACEBOOK’S AI MAY BE HELPING TERRORISTS GET AWAY WITH MURDER KRISTIN HOUSER Lose/Lose Situation In recent years, governments have repeatedly called upon Facebook and other social media platforms to do a better job of removing extremist content — specifically, anything promoting terrorism. Many have turned to artificial intelligence to help them answer that call, but now an investigation by The Atlantic has revealed that these…
Facebook is pivoting But it’s already painfully clear that Facebook wants to do far more. TechCrunch by Jon Evans “The future is private,” said Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook’s roadmap, after conceding “we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly.” But it’s easy to see why he would genuinely…
Facebook Messenger will soon work with WhatsApp and Instagram End-to-end encryption is also coming to the platform By Cal Jeffrey In brief: Facebook has been hard at work on the next iteration of Messenger. The private chat app will soon be receiving end-to-end encryption and compatibility with WhatsApp and Instagram. Back in January, we reported on a leak from Facebook insiders…
