Sam Biddle, reporting for The Intercept: Nearly 1,500 miles from the Menlo Park headquarters of Facebook, at a company outpost in Austin, Texas, moderators toil around the clock to screen and scrub some the most gruesome, hateful, and heinous posts that make their way onto the social network and its photo-sharing subsidiary, Instagram. They are required to view as many as…
Tag: Silicon Valley
Bedbugs Are Giving Airbnb Users Headaches
Waking up with bedbug bites can be a nightmare. It’s also a costly and traumatic problem for Airbnb guests and hosts. CNET: CNET spoke to eight people who dealt with bedbugs in Airbnb rentals within the last three years. All of them said Airbnb, which was founded in 2008, doesn’t seem to have a systematic procedure in place for handling outbreaks….
Chernobyl and Why Some TV Shows Should Be Unbingeable
An anonymous reader shares a column [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled]: Few television shows in recent years have been as compelling, yet as difficult to watch, as Chernobyl. The story of the hours and days following the 1986 nuclear reactor meltdown, and the many awful ways that radiation can kill, was expertly told. But it was the antithesis of…
NYT Publishes Anti-Google Rant, Doesn’t Mention Author Is Facebook Board Member
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The New York Times published an anti-Google screed by billionaire Peter Thiel last night but failed to mention a fun fact that readers might find relevant: Thiel sits on the board of Facebook, one of Google’s largest competitors. Thiel first blasted Google as “treasonous” last month, saying that the FBI and CIA should…
Facebook’s Ex-Security Chief Details His ‘Observatory’ for Internet Abuse
Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired: When Alex Stamos describes the challenge of studying the worst problems of mass-scale bad behavior on the internet, he compares it to astronomy. To chart the cosmos, astronomers don’t build their own Hubble telescopes or Arecibo observatories. They concentrate their resources in a few well-situated places and share time on expensive hardware. But when it comes…
NSO Spyware ‘Targets Big Tech Cloud Services’
The Israeli company whose spyware hacked WhatsApp has told buyers its technology can surreptitiously scrape all of an individual’s data from the servers of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, Financial Times reported on Friday. [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] From the report: NSO Group’s flagship smartphone malware, nicknamed Pegasus, has for years been used by spy…
Steve Wozniak Warns People To Get Off of Facebook Due To Privacy Concerns
TMZ accosted 68-year-old Steve Wozniak at an airport, according to an article shared by Slashdot reader Iwastheone. TMZ asked Wozniak for his thoughts on whether our devices are listening to us — and if we’re trying to have private conversations, should we be worried? “I’m worried about everything,” Wozniak replied. “I don’t think we can stop it, though.” But, everything about…
Would You Pay $30 a Month To Check Your Email?
The year is 2019, and the brainy engineers of Silicon Valley are hunkered down, working on transformative, next-generation technologies like self-driving cars, digital currencies and quantum computing. Meanwhile, the buzziest start-up in San Francisco is … an expensive email app? From a report: A few months ago, I started hearing about something called Superhuman. It’s an invitation-only service that costs $30…
Today in science: Tunguska explosion
We celebrate Asteroid Day on June 30 because it’s the anniversary of a 1908 explosion over Siberia that killed reindeer and flattened trees. Here’s the latest on what we know. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-tunguska-explosion…
Trump White House Reportedly Debating Encryption Policy Behind Closed Doors
According to a report in Politico, the Trump administration held a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday that weighed the challenges and benefits of encryption. “One of Politico’s sources said that the meeting was split into two camps: Decide, create and publicize the administration’s position on encryption or go so far as to ask Congress for legislation to ban end-to-end encryption,”…