Get ready for 3 hours and 58 seconds of Marvel. Director Joe Russo confirms this one’s gonna be looong.
Source: CNET
On Thursday, Australia lawmakers ushered through what is perhaps the toughest legal measures to hold social media companies accountable for the content they share.
Only a few weeks after the massacre of 50 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Australia’s House of Representatives passed a law requiring social media platforms to “expeditiously” remove content that shows kidnapping, murders, rape, or terrorist attacks. If the platforms fail to get rid of the content in a timely fashion employees could face prison time in Australia and companies could be subject to fines of up to 10% of their annual profit.
“These platforms should not be weaponized for these purposes,” Christan Porter, Australia’s attorney general, was quoted as saying in a New York Times report. “Internet platforms must take the spread of abhorrent violent material online seriously,” he added.
The law puts Australia at the center of a contentious debate around free speech, censorship, and content moderation that’s now raging across the globe.
India has also proposed measures to limit the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, which has given rise to questions about whether the laws are tantamount to censorship of speech that the ruling power might find offensive. And the European Union has said that social media platforms are struggling to comply with the regulations it enacted in 2016 and 2017 to combat hate speech.
Already, the advocacy group that represents Facebook, Google, and other companies is speaking out against the regulations in Australia.
“This law, which was conceived and passed in five days without any meaningful consultation, does nothing to address hate speech, which was the fundamental motivation for the tragic Christchurch terrorist attacks,” Sunita Bose, the managing director of the Digital Industry Group, which represents social media companies told The New York Times .
Social media companies are having enough problems adhering to the standards they set for themselves. Despite pledging to remove posts that advocate for white supremacy or white nationalism, Facebook has not removed content posted just this week that flies in the face of that decision.
Notorious Canadian white supremacist Faith Goldy posted content earlier this week that would seem to qualify as promoting white supremacism — demanding Jews and people of color pay back white European countries that they “invaded”, according to a report in HuffPo (a sister publication own by Verizon Media Group).
In a video entitled “RACE AGAINST TIME”, which Goldy posted after Facebook’s commitment to ban white supremacist content, Goldy said:
“The Great White North is destined to become a majority minority country in less than a generation… Stateside, even with President Trump at the helm, the United States is not being spared from the ongoing relentless process of population replacement. … Whites will be a minority in America in less than a generation.”
YouTube, which has come under fire for its own reluctance and recalcitrance when it comes to removing hate speech, will demonetize content, but allows them to remain circulating on its video platform.
As Bloomberg reported earlier this week, several employees inside the company have raised concerns about the platforms role in spreading lies, propaganda, and hate speech. Many employees, according to the Bloomberg report, even tried to take steps to stop the spread of malicious videos that contained misinformation, hate speech, or questionable content, and at every turn these employees were stymied by executives.
Even the U.S. government is becoming more aware and paying more attention to the problem of white supremacy and the role that social media platforms have in spreading hate speech. In testimony today before the House Appropriations Committee FBI Director Christopher Wray was questioned about the rise of white supremacist content.
“The danger — I think — of white supremacist violent extremism or any other kind of violent extremism is of course significant. We assess that it is a persistent pervasive threat,” said Wray. “In general domestic terrorism in this country has changed in the sense that it’s less structured, less organized, more uncoordinated one-off individuals as opposed to some structured hierarchy….There’s a lot of social media exploitation that comes with it.”
Source: TechCrunch
Google has abandoned an advisory board on ethics in AI after critics questioned the inclusion of Kay Coles James, leader of the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, on the 8-person panel. Google employees and thousands more concerned people called for this mistake to be corrected, and in response the company has apparently chosen to drop the whole thing. Vox first reported the news.
The Advanced Technology External Advisory Council was launched late in March to “consider some of Google’s most complex challenges that arise under our AI Principles, like facial recognition and fairness in machine learning, providing diverse perspectives to inform our work.”
Among the names well known in tech and academia, James stood out; She and the Heritage Foundation harbor, as my colleague put it just two days ago, “vehemently anti-LGBT views and a deep track record of advocating for climate change denialism in the service of the oil and gas industry.”
Although a diversity of backgrounds and political affiliations are surely necessary for an advisory body like this one to be effective, the particular stands James has made on immigration, social issues, and climate change, among others, made her inclusion puzzling for a company that is normally rather progressive on those topics. Including opposing viewpoints is one thing, but James and the Heritage Foundation cross the line into conduct that could be called hateful or disinformation.
A group organized within Google to oppose James’s inclusion, saying that it “elevates and endorses her views, implying that hers is a valid perspective worthy of inclusion in its decision making.” As of today 2,380 employees signed a petition asking her to be removed.
Other panelists were asked by many to justify their choices to work alongside James. Some, like Joanna Bryson and Luciano Floridi, felt they could do more good at the table than away from it (while not condoning James’s views); another, Alessandro Acquisti, ‘declined the invitation’ after being announced as part of the panel.
Ultimately it seems like Google felt the panel was more trouble than it was worth. In a statement added to the original announcement post (less than 10 days old), it wrote:
It’s become clear that in the current environment, ATEAC can’t function as we wanted. So we’re ending the council and going back to the drawing board. We’ll continue to be responsible in our work on the important issues that AI raises, and will find different ways of getting outside opinions on these topics.
This rather ambiguous statement doesn’t do much to clear things up, and Google did not provide any further details in an email to TechCrunch. But going back to the drawing board sounds like a good idea.
Source: TechCrunch
The group, announced just over a week ago, was slammed with controversy from the beginning.
Source: CNET
Order through the app, and a Kiwibot will bring your meal right to you. Only you can open it up and take out the food.
Source: CNET
Let’s take a look at the marvelous DC Extended Universe movie’s two extra scenes.
Source: CNET
It’s a big day for space: launches, tests, orbits, and now a distant probe is going to shoot an asteroid with its space gun and make a new crater to play in. It’s Hayabusa 2, Japan’s ambitious and so far highly successful sample return mission to an object called Ryugu.
Launched in 2014, Hayabusa 2 has been in the region of Ryugu for several months, carrying out a series of investigations. It has four small landers on board, two of which it dropped off late last year, and which have been hopping happily around the asteroid.
In February the craft itself touched down on the surface, stirring up the dust considerably, but nothing like what will happen when they fire a big old bullet into the surface at 4,400 mph using the Small Carry-on Impactor. Here’s a test of the setup firing into a Ryugu-like substrate in a lab here on Earth:
Now imagine that happening to an asteroid with very little gravity — the dust and flecks are going to fly all over the place. In fact, the robots on the surface have all retreated far away from the impact site so they don’t get showered by debris.
Afterwards — in a few weeks, to be precise — the landers and Hayabusa 2 itself will investigate the brand new crater and the strata of dust and rock that have been exposed. After collecting a few samples, the craft will return home late this year.
This “crater generation” operation will take place later tonight, and images should arrive very shortly afterwards — the team has already posted lots of wonderful imagery from Ryugu (as well as some great kids’ art). In fact, you should be able to follow along more or less in real time below, starting at 6 PM Pacific time:
And if you’re curious how the spacecraft is doing at any time, for instance right now, you can always check in to the Haya2NOW web app, which gives all the relevant details as soon as they’re received. How convenient!
Source: TechCrunch
Early adopters, beware.
Source: CNET
As we saw from our recent TechCrunch Battlefield in Africa last year, the continent is producing bigger and bigger tech players, and one can see this in the consolidation in the market.
Today Jiji, one of the largest marketplaces for classifieds in Africa, has acquired their main competitor on the African market, OLX, and their businesses in Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania.
The acquisition means Jiji will now be able to access 300 million people across five markets. This is something of a coup for a company originally from Ukraine, pulling off an acquisition in one of the world’s last huge, relatively untapped regions. The transaction is supported by one of Jiji’s principal investors, Digital Spring Ventures.
Jiji is the highest rated app in Nigerian e-commerce, with more than six million unique active users and 50,000 professional sellers listing more than one million items in a rapidly growing market of 200 million people. It’s now aiming for 10 million users in the next couple of years.
Vladimir Mnogoletniy, co-founder of Jiji, commented: “This partnership is pivotal to Jiji’s future business model and success, as it paves the way for building the continent’s largest Africa-based classified business serving a market with a combined population of over 300 million in some of the world’s fastest-growing economies. We continue to act as a long-term investor in Africa and are excited by the exceptional opportunities this young and dynamic continent has to offer. In the next 2-3 years we aim to be one of the top 10 classifieds businesses in the world by traffic.”
Jiji’s main competitors in Africa are Jumia and Tonaton.
Source: TechCrunch
Amazon reveals new skills for its voice assistant Alexa, a sign of its growing interest in health care.
Source: Wired