Review: The Nightcrawler team’s satire starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo is more of a sketch than a major work.
Source: CNET
This year’s production will feature some groundbreaking 8K and augmented-reality tech.
Source: CNET
Jackson, a star of both football and baseball, wants you to know Sprint gives you the best of both worlds.
Source: CNET
The man who has headed up Siri at Apple since 2012 is no longer at the helm, according to The Information. Bill Stasior remains at the company in a different role, the report states.
We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.
Stasior joined Apple to take over Siri in 2012 after being poached from Amazon’s A9 retail search team. At this in time, most of the original Siri co-founders had already left Apple and Stasior was tasked with taking on the mantle of deciding where the digital assistant should move next.
Siri has had a troubled history at Apple. Though the voice assistant arrived with a big splash, the company’s inability to iterate the product quickly left its competitors ample opportunity to leapfrog its capabilities. Something that both Amazon and Google clearly have with their Alexa and Google Assistant platforms.
This past April, Apple hired Google’s John Giannandrea to lead AI and machine learning efforts at the company, a division that includes Siri and CoreML. Giannandrea is expected to be leading the search for a new leader for the Siri team, the report says.
Source: TechCrunch
Apple temporarily booted Facebook (and Google!) from its enterprise app program this week. You weren’t really surprised, were you? Plus: Details on Tesla’s new Model Y.
Source: Wired
Two of Facebook’s four fact-checking partners in the U.S. have left the program as of the beginning of this year: Snopes, which recently rebuffed reports that its relationship with Facebook was strained, and the Associated Press. Both confirmed they are leaving the program, but left the possibility of future collaboration open.
Snopes joined Facebook’s group of third-party fact checkers in 2016, at first volunteering its services and the next year accepting a lump $100,000 payment for their work. But the company said in a statement that it’s rethinking providing services like this at all.
At this time we are evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services, and we want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff.
Mikkelson added in a statement to TechCrunch that “we felt that the Facebook fact check partnership wasn’t working well for us as an organization.” I’ve asked Facebook for comment.
The news comes hot on the heels of a recent article in the Guardian by former Snopes employees who described the partnership as being “in disarray.”
But Snopes founder David Mikkelson strongly disagreed with that characterization, and the suggestion that Facebook had been interfering with or otherwise unduly influencing the fact-checking program. He described the work as “literally just data entry,” and said that Facebook never told them what they should check, with a handful of exceptions like bringing high-profile hoaxes to checkers’ attention during the 2018 election.
In fact Mikkelson said that the main problem was a lack of engagement from Facebook. The tools, he said, were rudimentary, and checkers were limited in the number of articles they could evaluate. Meanwhile the effect of the fact-checking program was poorly communicated both to partners and users. Was it working? How well? In what way? What changes are being made, if any, to the algorithms and systems involved?
In comments to Poynter, Snopes VP of operations Danny Green said the process needed to be improved:
With a manual system and a closed system — it’s impossible to keep on top of that stuff… It doesn’t seem like we’re striving to make third-party fact checking more practical for publishers — it seems like we’re striving to make it easier for Facebook. At some point, we need to put our foot down and say, ‘No. You need to build an API.’
This surely formed at least part of the reason why Snopes declined to renew its yearly contract with Facebook. It seems to be a coincidence that the announcement came shortly after yet another bad week for the latter; the contracts seem to be for calendar years so the decision not to rejoin would have been made some time ago.
It’s not the only U.S. fact checker leaving the partnership. The Associated Press confirmed to TechCrunch that it too is “not currently doing fact-checking work for Facebook.” In a statement, the news organization said that it “constantly evaluates how to best deploy its fact-checking resources, and that includes ongoing conversations with Facebook about opportunities to do important fact-checking work on its platform.”
The AP representative did not elaborate on the reasons for its decision.
Politifact confirmed it is staying with the program; I’ve also asked Factcheck.org (the fourth U.S. fact-checker) and the AFP, which is a partner in multiple countries. I’ll update this post if I hear back.
Source: TechCrunch
This one doesn’t fold, but still looks pretty slick.
Source: CNET
Ray Romano performs in his first comedy special in 23 years, Won’t You Be My Neighbor premieres on HBO Now, and a whole lot more is going online.
Source: CNET
Internet companies and state attorneys general are taking on the FCC and Ajit Pai.
Source: CNET
CNET’s Maggie Reardon helps break down the latest saga in the fight for net neutrality. The fate of the law may lie in technical arguments made in front of a three-judge panel at a Court of Appeals.
Source: CNET