The redesigned premium 13.3-inch two-in-one is a bit uninspired, but its battery life and performance don’t disappoint.
Source: CNET
New York will become the first US city to impose fees on driving in busy parts of town to raise money for its ailing subway system. But setting the right price won’t be easy.
Source: Wired
Inside the Democrats’ Plan to Fix Their Crumbling Data Operation
Source: Wired
Turns out that the art of being a venture capitalist means never saying no, even if you rarely say yes.
Source: Wired
This is the stuff to buy if you want to start making your own pickles, kimchis, and sauerkrauts.
Source: Wired
YouTube has placed new restrictions on the channel of a UK far right activist which are intended to make hate speech less easy to discover on its platform.
Restrictions on Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s YouTube channel include removing certain of his videos from recommendations. YouTube is also taking away his ability to livestream to his now close to 390,000 YouTube channel subscribers.
Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name ‘Tommy Robinson’ on social media, was banned from Twitter a year ago.
Buzzfeed first reported the new restrictions. A YouTube spokesperson confirmed the shift in policy, telling us: “After consulting with third party experts, we are applying a tougher treatment to Tommy Robinson’s channel in keeping with our policies on borderline content. The content will be placed behind an interstitial, removed from recommendations, and stripped of key features including livestreaming, comments, suggested videos, and likes.”
Test searches for ‘Tommy Robinson’ on YouTube now return a series of news reports — instead of Yaxley-Lennon’s own channel, as was the case just last month.
YouTube had already demonetized Yaxley-Lennon’s channel back in January for violating its ad policies.
But as we reported last month Google has been under increasing political pressure in the UK to tighten its policies over the far right activist.
The policy shift applies to videos uploaded by Yaxley-Lennon that aren’t illegal or otherwise in breach of YouTube’s community standards (as the company applies them) but which have nonetheless been flagged by users as potential violations of the platform’s policies on hate speech and violent extremism.
In such instances YouTube says it will review the videos and those not in violation of its policies but which nonetheless contain controversial religious or extremist content will be placed behind an interstitial, removed from recommendations, and stripped of key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes.
Such videos will also not be eligible for monetization.
The company says its goal with the stricter approach to Yaxley-Lennon’s content is to strike a balance between upholding free expression and a point of public and historic record, while also keeping hateful content from being spread or recommended to others.
YouTube said it carefully considered Yaxley-Lennon’s case — consulting with external experts and UK academics — before deciding it needed to take tougher treatment.
Affected videos will still remain on YouTube — albeit behind an interstitial. They also won’t be recommended, and will be stripped of the usual social features including comments, suggested videos, and likes.
Of course it remains to be seen how tightly YouTube will apply the new more restrictive policy in this case. And whether Yaxley-Lennon himself will adapt his video strategy to workaround tighter rules on that channel.
The far right is very well versed in using coded language and dog whistle tactics to communicate with its followers and spread racist messages under the mainstream radar.
Yaxley-Lennon has had a presence on multiple social media channels, adapting the content to the different platforms. Though YouTube is the last mainstream channel still available to him after Facebook kicked him off its platform in February. Albeit, he was quickly able to workaround Facebook’s ban simply by using a friend’s Facebook account to livestream himself harassing a journalist at his home late at night.
Police were called out twice in that instance. And in a vlog uploaded to YouTube after the incident Yaxley-Lennon threatened other journalists to “expect a knock at the door”.
Shortly afterwards the deputy leader of the official opposition raised his use of YouTube to livestream harassment in parliament, telling MPs then that: “Every major social media platform other than YouTube has taken down Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s profile because of his hateful conduct.”
The secretary of state for digital, Jeremy Wright, responded by urging YouTube to “reconsider their judgement” — saying: “We all believe in freedom of speech. But we all believe too that that freedom of speech has limits. And we believe that those who seek to intimidate others, to potentially of course break the law… that is unacceptable. That is beyond the reach of the type of freedom of speech that we believe should be protected.”
YouTube claims it removes videos that violate its hate speech and violent content policies. But in previous instances involving Yaxley-Lennon it has told us that specific videos of his — including the livestreamed harassment that was raised in parliament — do not constitute a breach of its standards.
It’s now essentially admitting that those standards are too weak in instances of weaponized hate.
Yaxley-Lennon, a former member of the neo-nazi British National Party and one of the founders of the far right, Islamophobic English Defence League, has used social media to amplify his message of hate while also soliciting donations to fund individual far right ‘activism’ — under the ‘Tommy Robinson’ moniker.
The new YouTube restrictions could reduce his ability to leverage the breadth of Google’s social platform to reach a wider and more mainstream audience than he otherwise would.
Albeit, it remains trivially easy for anyone who already knows the ‘Tommy Robinson’ ‘brand’ to workaround the YouTube restrictions by using another mainstream Google-owned technology. A simple Google search for “Tommy Robinson YouTube channel” returns direct links to his channel and content at the top of search results.
Yaxley-Lennon’s followers will also continue to be able to find and share his YouTube content by sharing direct links to it — including on mainstream social platforms.
Though the livestream ban is a significant restriction — if it’s universally applied to the channel — which will make it harder for Yaxley-Lennon to communicate instantly at a distance with followers in his emotive vlogging medium of choice.
He has used the livestreaming medium skilfully to amplify and whip up hate while presenting himself to his followers as a family man afraid for his wife and children. (For the record: Yaxley-Lennon’s criminal record includes convictions for violence, public order offences, drug possession, financial and immigration frauds, among other convictions.)
If Google is hoping to please everyone by applying a ‘third route’ of tighter restrictions for a hate speech weaponizer yet no total ban it will likely just end up pleasing no one and taking flak from both sides.
The company does point out it removes channels of proscribed groups and any individuals formally linked to such groups. And in this case the related far right groups have not been proscribed by the UK government. So the UK government could certainly do much more to check the rise of domestic far right hate.
But YouTube could also step up and take a leadership position by setting robust policies against individuals who seek to weaponize hate.
Instead it continues to fiddle around the edges — trying to fudge the issue by claiming it’s about ‘balancing’ speech and community safety.
In truth hate speech suppresses the speech of those it targets with harassment. So if social networks really want to maximize free speech across their communities they have to be prepared to weed out bad actors who would shrink the speech of minorities by weaponizing hate against them.
Source: TechCrunch
Mswipe, an Indian fintech company that develops point-of-sale terminals for merchants, has pulled $30 million in new funding as it bids to triple its reach to 1.5 million merchants over the next year.
The company’s previous funding as a Series D in 2017 that ended up at just over $40 million, thanks to a $10 million extension from B Capital — the investment firm set up by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin that’s backed by BCG. This time around, B Capital has provided the funding alongside other returning investors that include Falcon Edge, Epiq Capital and DSG Growth Partners. The deal takes the startup to $95 million raised to date.
We wrote extensively about the company’s strategy back at the time of that 2017 round, and essentially the thesis is that POS devices remain essential despite the proliferation of new fintech like mobile wallets. With that in mind, Mswipe makes its terminals cheaper than the competition while it can also work on more limited internet connections, even 2G, to help merchants and retailers in more remote areas or those on a modest budget.
More critically, Mswipe CEO and founder Manish Patel believes the country is “ripe for disruption” because it has so few terminals. With less than three million terminals in operation across the whole of India, even Turkey, with a significantly smaller population of 80 million, has more.
Right now, Mswipe claims to have reached over 400,000 merchants — up from 290,000 at the end of 2017 — and Patel said today that the aim is to grow that figure to 1.5 million over the next year.
To reach that ambitious target, Mswipe is once again trying to put more than just a terminal inside a terminal.
Beyond offering hardware that simply works and ties into newer types of payment, Mswipe has a vision of additional services for merchants. It is developing a new ‘smart’ POS — Wise POS Plus — that is developed on Android which allows applications like billing, inventory management and logistics to be pulled in, too. Indeed, the second piece to that is its own dedicated app store — MoneyStore — which is in development now and is aimed at housing a suite of productivity apps and related services for smaller retailers.
Mswipe is betting on a new Android-based smart terminal that will give its merchants access to productivity and management apps, too
“WisePOS Plus… powered by a suite of productivity apps, can enable a merchant to save thousands of rupees and hundreds of hours that go into running computer-based billing and inventory solutions with integrated payments. At the same time, we are also creating a huge opportunity for app developers with MoneyStore,” Patel said in a prepated statement.
The second major prong that he believes can bring this growth is the adoption of UPI, the government-backed real-time payments system in India. Mswipe said it is “all set to enable” the system which will allow QR payments at terminals. Mswipe is also working with lending startup Cashe on a co-branded card for consumers following a deal announced in December.
Source: TechCrunch
Sqreen has raised a Series A round of $14 million. Greylock Partners is leading the round, existing investors Y Combinator, Alven and Point Nine are also participating.
The startup wants to improve security when it comes to web applications and cloud infrastructure. Sqreen doesn’t require you to alter your code or put up a firewall. It works a bit like performance management companies, such as New Relic, AppDynamics or DataDog.
“Many strategic tasks are now handled with an engineer-driven approach — performance, deployment, log monitoring, error management… but not security,” co-founder and CEO Pierre Betouin told me.
If you don’t have enough time or money to build a team of security experts, Sqreen can already help you identify and fix many issues in your application. First, you install a library package on your server and add a few lines of code to require the Sqreen module in your application.
This way, Sqreen’s microagents are always running and monitoring your app. You can identify security holes in the Sqreen dashboard. You can also optionally activate real-time protection modules.
And Sqreen has expanded its service and now handles more than weaknesses than before. In addition to its self-protection module against SQL and XSS injections, Sqreen now provides an in-app Web Application Firewall, protections against account takeovers, bad bots, etc.
That’s why Sqreen is calling its platform Application Security Management as you can activate and deactivate modules depending on your needs. Sqreen gives you an overview of your cloud infrastructure so that you stay on top of security.
Sqreen currently works with web applications in Node.JS, Ruby, PHP, Python, Java and Go. There’s a small CPU overhead once you deploy Sqreen. Clients now include Le Monde, Algolia, Y Combinator and Y Combinator.
Source: TechCrunch
It’s $60 to $70 more affordable than Apple’s keyboard, and it’s also lap-friendly.
Source: CNET
Here’s how you make the most of your Galaxy S10 phone.
Source: CNET