You give Facebook all of your data in exchange for using their service—an exchange that seems increasingly out of whack.
Source: Wired
The U.S. executive branch issued an executive order prohibiting the use or purchase of Venezuela’s Petro cryptocurrency, claiming it was issued unlawfully in an effort to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Venezuela.
The post First U.S. cryptocurrency ban outlaws Venezuela’s ‘Petro’ coin appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
It was no secret that Cambridge Analytica was manipulating people with big data. But it took a former employee’s reckoning to provoke outrage.
Source: Wired
This morning, HTC announced the pricing details for it’s new VR headset, the Vive Pro. The upgraded headset will cost $800 when it ships on April 5, with pre-orders starting today. Before you can even get excited, though, we have to ask: Is that way too expensive?
The post Is the HTC Vive Pro too expensive, or the right price for the right hardware? appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
The first deadly crash raises questions about how quickly autonomous driving technology is progressing—and who’s in charge of keeping everybody safe.
Source: Wired
IBM is hard at work on the problem of ubiquitous computing, and its approach, understandably enough, is to make a computer small enough that you might mistake it for a grain of sand. Eventually these omnipresent tiny computers could help authenticate products, track medications, and more.
Look closely at the image above and you’ll see the device both on that pile of salt, and on the person’s finger. No, not that big one. Look closer:
It’s an evolution of IBM’s “crypto anchor” program, which uses a variety of methods to create what amounts to high-tech watermarks for products that verify they’re, for example, from the factory the distributor claims they are, and not counterfeits mixed in with genuine items.
The “world’s smallest computer,” as IBM continually refers to it, is meant to bring blockchain capability into this; the security advantages of blockchain-based logistics and tracking could be brought to something as benign as a bottle of wine or box of cereal.
A schematic shows the parts (you’ll want to view full size).
In addition to getting the computers extra-tiny, IBM intends to make them extra-cheap, perhaps ten cents apiece. So there’s not much of a lower limit on what types of products could be equipped with the tech.
Not only that, but the usual promises of ubiquitous computing also apply: this smart dust could be all over the place, doing little calculations, sensing conditions, connecting with other motes and the internet to allow… well, use your imagination.
It’s small (about 1mm x 1mm), but it still has the power of a complete computer, albeit not a hot new one. With a few hundred thousand transistors, a bit of RAM, a solar cell and a communications module, it has about the power of a chip from 1990. And we got a lot done on those, right?
Of course at this point it’s very much still a research project in IBM’s labs, not quite a reality; the project is being promoted as part of the company’s “five in five” predictions of turns technology will take in the next five years.
Source: TechCrunch
Instagram’s next big Stories feature could let you compliment or trash talk other people’s feed posts, or embed a “see post” button to promote your own. A TechCrunch reader sent us these screenshots of the new feature, which Instagram confirmed to us is appearing to a small subset of users. “We’re always testing ways to make it easier to share any moment with friends on Instagram” a spokesperson wrote. Now those moments can include dunking on people.
Instagram has never had a true “regram” feature with the feed, just slews of unofficial and sometimes scammy apps, but this is perhaps the closest thing. Users often screenshot feed posts and share them in Stories with overlaid commentary, but this limited the cropping and commentary options. Making an official “reshare could unlock all sorts of new user behaviors, from meme curation to burn book shade throwing to social stars teasing their feed posts in their Stories. Brands might love it for using their Stories to cross-promote a big ad campaign. Employing Stories to drive extra Likes and comments to permanent posts could help them gain more visibility in Instagram’s feed ranking algorithm.
Here’s how the feed post to Instagram Stories sharing feature works. You pick any public, permanent Instagram post and tap a button to embed it in your Story. You can tap to change the design to highlight or downplay the post’s author, move and resize it within your Story post, and add commentary or imagery using Instagram’s creative tools. When people view the story, they can tap on the post embed to bring up a “see post” button which opens the permanent feed post.
Users who don’t want their posts to be “quote-Storied” can turn off the option in their settings, and only public posts can be reshared. Facebook says it doesn’t have details about a wider potential rollout beyond the small percentage of users currently with access. But given the popularity of apps like Repost For Instagram, I expect the feature to be popular and eventually open to everyone.
Quote-Storying could help keep the feed relevant as more users spend their time sharing to the little bubbles that sit above it. And it offers a powerful viral discover mechanism for creators who can now ask fans to quickly reshare their post rather than having to awkwardly screenshot and upload them.
While both Instagram and Snapchat have let people privately send other people’s posts to friends as private messages, Snapchat lacks a way to embed other Stories or Discover content in your Story. Snapchat may have pioneered the Stories format, but Instagram has been rapidly iterating with features like Super Zoom and Highlights to extend its user count lead over the app it cloned.
The move by Instagram further ties together the three parts of its app: the permanent feed, ephemeral Stories, and private Direct messaging. You can imagine someone finding a post in the feed, resharing it their story, then joking about it with friends over Direct. It’s this multi-modal social media usage that turns casual users into loyal, ad revenue-generating ‘Grammers.
Source: TechCrunch
IBM kicked off its Think 2018 conference today with a bombshell announcement: It has made the world’s smallest computer, and it’s designed from the ground up to work with the blockchain to protect you from fraud.
The post IBM’s latest computer is a blockchain-ready CPU smaller than a grain of salt appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
In undercover videos filmed by Britain’s Channel 4 news, Cambridge Analytica executives appear to offer up various unsavory tactics to influence campaigns.
Source: Wired
The HTC Vive VR system is finally getting affordable as the new Vive Pro goes up for preorder.
Source: Wired
