Higher ratings are the ‘lifeblood’ of the smartphone app world but what if they are inflated? From a report: Rating an iPhone app takes just a second, maybe two. “Enjoying Skype?” a prompt will ask, and you click on a 1-5 star rating. Millions of people respond to these requests, giving little thought to their fleeting whim. Behind the scenes, though,…
Tag: behind the scenes
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok
Facebook spent more money on lobbying than any single company in the first half of 2020, That’s according to figures cited by the Wall Street Journal from the Center for Responsive Politics. But that’s not all they did. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also began personally delivering a message last fall that TikTok “doesn’t share Facebook’s commitment to freedom of expression, and…
Decades-Old Email Flaws Could Let Attackers Mask Their Identities
At the Black Hat security conference on Thursday, researchers will present “darn subtle” flaws in industry-wide protections used to ensure that emails come from the address they claim to. From a report: The study looked at the big three protocols used in email sender authentication — Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and…
William English, Engineer Behind ‘The Mother of All Demos’, Dies at 91
An anonymous reader quotes The Los Angeles Times:
On Dec. 9, 1968, the then-small world of computer engineering was shaken to its core by a presentation of new technologies projected onto a screen in a San Francisco hall. The attendees at the historic event saw demonstrations of video conferencing, the first public use of a computer mouse, hyperlinking in which clicking a…
Verizon Has Turned To Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI To Automate Phone Calls
Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations. The Register reports: The Contact Center AI technology will, we’re told, use natural-language recognition to transcribe on-the-fly customers as they talk down the line. This speech-to-text output will be fed into Dialogflow, a platform that parses the text and generates responses in real-time….
China Delayed Releasing Coronavirus Info, Frustrating WHO
schwit1 shares a report: Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus “immediately,” and said its work and commitment to transparency were “very impressive, and beyond words.” But behind the scenes, it was a much…
2018 ‘Hacking Attempt’ Claimed By Georgia Was A Security Test They’d Requested Themselves
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
It was a stunning accusation: Two days before the 2018 election for Georgia governor, Republican Brian Kemp used his power as secretary of state to open an investigation into what he called a “failed hacking attempt” of voter registration systems involving the Democratic Party. But newly released case files from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation…
‘Project BioMed’ Fights for the Right to Repair Medical Devices
Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: One of the less-reported stories of this pandemic is the myriad of ways in which COVID has exposed changes to the medical device market and the increasingly draconian software licensing practices that have made servicing and repairing medical devices much more difficult, slow and expensive. In its latest episode, Security Ledger Podcast goes behind the scenes…
Facebook is Quietly Helping To Set Up a New Pro-tech Advocacy Group To Battle Washington
Facebook is working behind the scenes to help launch a new political advocacy group that would combat U.S. lawmakers and regulators trying to rein in the tech industry, escalating Silicon Valley’s war with Washington at a moment when government officials are threatening to break up large companies. From a report: The organization is called American Edge, and it aims through a…
NVidia, AMD Battle To Buy Out TSMC’s Capacity
Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: As NVidia and AMD battle it out with their GPUs in consumer gaming, behind the scenes both manufacturers were competing against each for manufacturing capacity with TSMC’s lines. It appears that early on in the 7nm line, NVidia lost out as it is rumored their strategy was to use Samsung more only to go back to…