Alex Stamos says he’s “still fully engaged” with his work at Facebook, though his role has changed. Questions about Stamos come as Facebook deals with a privacy flap linked to Cambridge Analytica.
Source: CNET
Data analytics firm is at the center of a scandal over its misuse of Facebook data during the 2016 US election.
Source: CNET
Google Play Instant is part of a redesign of the Google Play Games app.
Source: CNET
What the flock? This airport security employee had to put his foot down: Floatie birds need to be scanned, even if they’re not flying anywhere.
Source: CNET
Instead of shopping on Amazon, the tech giant wants you to make purchases from partners like Costco, Target and Walmart.
Source: CNET
While it sometimes feels like everyone has a podcast nowadays, the truth is that most Americans still don’t listen to podcasts regularly. The Y Combinator-backed team behind The Podcast App is planning to change that.
And yes, that’s the app’s real name. Co-founder and CEO Martín Siniawski argued that most existing podcast apps were built years ago, “when it was a really different medium.” They’re designed for people who already understand what a podcast is, already know which podcasts they’re looking for and already understand what it means to subscribe.
In contrast, Siniawski said The Podcast App is designed to be “extremely fast, extremely easy and extremely reliable and stable.”
How easy? Well, the website boasts that it’s “so simple even your grandma could use it.”
“We’ve invested heavily on making sure that we can onboard people and take them step-by-step in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them,” Siniawski said.
So when you first open up the app, you’re asked to identify your interests, and then you get a list of podcast recommendations. Once you’re looking at a specific podcast, you can browse all episodes or just the “Best Of” (curated based on The Podcast App’s engagement data), then hit buttons to favorite the show and download individual episodes.
Beyond making the app easy to understand, Siniawski said he’s also focused on helping people find the right podcast for them. Creating good app-wide and podcast-specific search features helps, and so do the Best Of lists, but he said that’s just the beginning.
For one thing, there’s more to be done in search, like indexing the full content of the episodes, not just the titles and descriptions. For another, Siniawski is hoping to take more of a Netflix-style approach to “leverage more and more of that data to provide recommendations.”
The Podcast App has built up a library of 30 million episodes, and includes most of the big names in podcasting. (It also includes TechCrunch podcasts like Original Content and CTRL+T. Just saying.) In the future, Siniawski said he’s hoping to work with podcasters to work on original programming, and to incorporate more types of advertising and subscriptions (the startup currently limits its own monetization to display ads that run in the app).
Oh, and if you’re wondering how Siniawski was able to get such a straightforward (and search-friendly) name for his app, the answer is simple: No one claimed it first.
Source: TechCrunch
Un equipo se ha inspirado en la mítica máquina Wimshurst y la ha convertido en una versión microfluídica que, si se incorporara en una bota, podría generar energía a cada paso a un nivel suficiente como para alimentar pequeñas baterías de móviles y sensores de internet de las cosas
Source: MIT
Kaggle, de Alphabet, premiará con 80.000 euros a los algoritmos de aprendizaje automático que mejores apuestan realicen en la liga universitaria de baloncesto. Pero las máquinas se enfrentan a un problema: el torneo incluye muchos factores que no se pueden medir
Source: MIT
Los archivos secretos de la Santa Sede son tan extensos que ni sus responsables saben con certeza toda la información que contienen. Como transcribirlos a mano sería imposible, un equipo de investigación ha echado mano de la inteligencia artificial para automatizar el proceso
Source: MIT
Facebook’s latest public controversy may have claimed its first major casualty. According to reporting from The New York Times, the social media giant is poised to part ways with its high-profile chief security officer, Alex Stamos. That story suggests that Stamos created friction within Facebook by pushing for an aggressive approach to exploring and disclosing to the public the platform’s role in disseminating Russian state-sponsored disinformation to users. Stamos apparently initiated his exit in December 2017 but was convinced to stay on through August to avoid the hit to public perception, The New York Times reports.
Stamos weighed in over the weekend, arguing that Facebook’s revelations around the Trump campaign-linked data analytics firm did not qualify as a “breach” in the technical sense. That term generally connotes hacking or a technical compromise of some kind, though the Cambridge Analytica situation involves a since-deprecated lax API and a business model that revolves around collecting massive troves of personal data and doling it out in ways often far from transparent to the average user.
Stamos, who joined the company in June 2015 after spending nearly a year-and-a-half wrestling with privacy woes at Yahoo, is generally well-respected within the security community. According to a story from Reuters in 2016, Stamos reportedly left his position as the top security officer at Yahoo after the company complied with a secret U.S. intelligence directive that allowed the government to search Yahoo user emails via purpose-built software.
Stamos’s presence at Facebook — and his at-times candid explanations of the internal workings and reasoning of the often opaque social network — projected the sense that the company was taking user privacy seriously. Depending on what happens next, the security officer’s absence at Facebook is likely to speak volumes, too.
Update: In a tweet, Stamos contradicted reporting that he is on the way out at Facebook, claiming that his role has shifted. TechCrunch has reached out to Facebook for clarification on Stamos’s role.
Source: TechCrunch