You might be wondering how the Surface Pro X stands up against Apple’s iPad Pro. In this guide, we’ll compare design, performance, and portability, and help you choose the right one for you.
Source: Digital trends
Ensuring politicians in the 2020 election stay truthful is hard work, so Facebook has decided it’s going to sit this one out.
Joe Biden’s campaign team sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and global elections policy chief Katie Harbath that essentially called on the company to take down a Trump campaign ad that made debunked claims regarding the Biden family’s relationship with Ukraine. Facebook responded to that letter today with their own letter to Biden saying that the company’s policies prevented it from making judgment calls on the veracity of speech in political advertisements. The New York Times has a full run-down of the situation.
Facebook isn’t alone in this manner; Fox News is remaining fair and balanced on the issue as well. CNN refused to run the ad.
Political campaigns are messy, so America’s largest content company — with more content moderators than any publication in the country — is leaving it to the free press to debunk what it’s getting paid to broadcast. But it’s not that Facebook wants to keep raking in stupid amounts of advertising dollars, no, it’s that the company is grounded in a “fundamental belief in free expression,” they say.
Here’s a quote from the company’s letter to Biden’s team: “Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is.”
I’m sorry, what? Facebook’s “respect for the democratic process” should raise eyebrows given how its products have been used in some highly publicized scenarios, but how does a platform that’s been abused so much to the detriment of democratic processes feel like it deserves to rattle that phrase off as another PR talking point?
Here’s the rest of the letter:
If Facebook just wants to allow politicians to spout mistruths and conspiracy theories without fact checks on its platforms as status updates from their personal pages, then some of these claims could be taken more seriously, but Facebook is getting paid to push these messages to its users. It’s algorithmically deciding where these messages go based on parameters set by the campaigns via a system it designed.
Before you sound off, yeah, political advertising isn’t anything new. I am well aware that TV channels and newspapers have carried messy attack ads and hauled in the advertising revenues for decades, but Facebook is a platform designed around scale. Scale has allowed the company to tap massive revenue streams, but it’s also opened up the company to critiques. The company has learned to respect this scale after sizable amounts of external pressure were applied, but they’ve always defaulted to dated comparisons when it’s profitable to them.
Newspaper and TV political ads are painted with a wider brush and are subject to more stringent laws, but there’s a responsibility in Facebook’s precise ad-targeting that the company still doesn’t seem to respect. The company has the tools to push out judgment calls on content, and it could still do so on a case-by-case basis. Some truths are buried in more nuance than others, but by painting all political claims in its same bath of indifference to truth, Facebook is abusing its scale and creating a platform where a politician’s speech is exempt, as if political leaders aren’t the ultimate primary sources on politically contentious matters.
Political advertising legislation is going to take far too long to catch up to the current landscape of technology platforms — it would be nice if we could trust Facebook to stay at a moral forefront that isn’t legally mandated. Twitter and YouTube aren’t immune to this same criticism either, but Facebook is operating in broad daylight, believing that they can reverse engineer a free expression mission statement to prevent responsibility-free revenues from leaking out.
Source: TechCrunch
Opinion: The Tech Spotlight will highlight products, initiatives, and policies that protect the public good and shape a more responsible future.
Source: Wired
The Richard Branson-backed small satellite launch operation Virgin Orbit wants to be the first to dedicate a mission to bringing commercial CubeSats to the “Red Planet,” the company announced today. Working with Polish satellite company SatRevolution, Virgin Orbit has established a consortium along with a group of Polish academic institutions to jointly work on at least one, and as many as three, small satellite launches to Mars, with the first expected to happen as soon as three years from now.
The consortium is working to follow in the footsteps of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s MarCO mission from 2018, which saw two smaller satellites successfully launched to Mars. The group’s early studies have suggested that even satellites as small as 50 kg (around 110 lbs), or potentially even smaller, can provide meaningful and useful research, including imagery collection, from both Mars and its orbiting body, Phobos. These satellites could provide key info about the atmospheric composition of Mars, or even scouting for underground water, Virgin Orbit says.
Warsaw-based SatRevolution has experience in the commercial space industry, and in April this year sent Poland’s first commercial nano satellite into orbit. The universities involved, which include the AGH University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology and many others, all have experience in space industry research, as well. The plan is to launch the spacecraft developed by the universities and SatRevolution aboard Virgin’s LauncherOne rocket, which takes off from a converted 747-400 Virgin has retrofitted for the process.
Virgin Orbit is aiming to have its first orbital rocket launch later this year, and is currently going through the final round of testing before that happens. The company ran a successful drop test earlier this year, during which it let a non-functional rocket fall from the wing of the 747 launcher aircraft in a key test, and it has been signing contracts to launch from the U.K. as early as next year.
Source: TechCrunch
Pinterest is the latest tech company to introduce a “Lite” version of its mobile application to meet the needs of users in emerging markets. With Pinterest Lite, launched on Monday, users will benefit from a faster download and an app that takes up less storage space on their mobile device, the company says.
Pinterest previously offered a Pinterest Lite app on Google Play, but this app was pulled a year ago, according to data from App Annie.
The new Pinterest Lite app is actually Pinterest’s Progressive Web App (PWA) that’s been made available to Google Play users as a download, the company tells TechCrunch.
This is a project that’s been underway for some time, according to a post last year on Pinterest’s Engineering blog. There, the company acknowledged that its mobile web experience had been “terrible” and in need of an update.
In July 2017, Pinterest formed a team to rewrite the mobile web app from scratch as a PWA. It said this would offer a better experience for people in low-bandwidth environments and on limited data plans.
The Pinterest Lite mobile app is available today to Android users in Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Mexico, and clocks in at a tiny 1.4 MB. The main Pinterest app’s size varies by device on Android, but is significantly larger. On iOS, it’s 143.1 MB, for comparison’s sake.
“The goal is to bring Pinterest to everyone around the world so they can discover inspiration related to their interests wherever they might be,” a Pinterest spokesperson said, when reached for comment about the Pinterest Lite launch.
Pinterest is now one of many top publishers who offer a “Lite” version of their flagship apps.
Google has a full suite of lightweight “Go�-branded apps, like Google Go, Gmail Go, Files Go, YouTube Go, Google Maps Go and Google Assistant Go. There’s also Facebook Lite, Instagram Lite, Messenger Lite, Twitter Lite, Uber Lite, Spotify Lite, TikTok Lite, Skype Lite and LINE Lite, to name a few others. Tinder had also said earlier this year it was working on a Tinder Lite app to better serve the Indian market. That app quietly launched over the summer.
Offering a Lite app is a baseline requirement these days for competing in emerging markets.
Pinterest, in particular, has been working to expand its global footprint, and recently reported international revenue was up 199%, to $24 million in Q2, and international monthly users were up 38% to 215 million, out of a total of 300 million users. However, the U.S. continues to drive the majority of Pinterest’s revenue, contributing $153 million of the total $261 million reported in Q2.
Image credit: PinterestÂ
Source: TechCrunch
Twitter used phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication to target ads—just like Facebook did before.
Source: Wired
When the government offered to buy up houses in flood zones, wealthier homeowners took advantage while poorer residents stayed put or fled.
Source: Wired
Dell’s Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1 Black Edition is aimed directly at laptop buyers who would love an XPS 13 2-in-1 but don’t have the budget. Can it offer XPS quality and performance at a lower cost?
Source: Digital trends
The Your Phone app in Windows 10 is getting a new ability to answer and make phone calls. It has always been a great way to send and receive text messages on your PC, or even mirror your Android apps.
Source: Digital trends
You don’t need any expensive equipment to spot the ISS, just this app, an alarm and a quick eye.
Source: CNET