Zoya Teirstein | The Verge

A filmmaker installed security software on a decoy phone to spy on smartphone thieves

2016-12-19T13:14:12-05:00

Ever reached into your pocket to find your phone had been snatched? Dutch film student and former iPhone owner Anthony van der Meer experienced that awful feeling first-hand while having lunch in Amsterdam. Unsatisfied with the response from the Amsterdam police, who register an average of 300 stolen phones per week, Meer decided to find out what kind of person steals a phone. He downloaded DIY security software on a decoy Android phone, intentionally got the phone stolen, and was able to spy on his thief for weeks. He recorded the ups and downs of his covert investigation and turned it into a 22-minute documentary called Find My Phone.

Meer preloaded the decoy device with an anti-theft application called Cerberus, which allows the owner of the device to access any file on the phone remotely, as well as discretely activate the phone’s camera and microphone. Meer and his friends were able to navigate the technicalities of surveilling the thief with relative ease. They even snapped a close-up of the guy’s face. The hard part, it turns out, was getting the preloaded phone stolen in the first place. It took Meer four days to get his device pilfered in a city with high rates of theft because concerned citizens kept coming to his rescue.

The documentary offers a valuable lesson in cyber security (if not also an ethically gray commentary on surveillance). Our smartphones often contain our most sensitive data, including photographs, emails, and bank information, that can be exploited by thieves in any number of harmful ways. Check out Meer’s entertaining and sometimes disturbing documentary to learn what you can do to protect your information.

Google Maps now shows if a location is wheelchair accessible

2016-12-15T14:16:50-05:00

Google Maps, an app favored by nearly 70 percent of iPhone users, will now list wheelchair accessibility alongside information like traffic and store hours. The new addition makes using the app easier for people with disabilities, as well as parents with strollers and the elderly.

A team of Google employees, led by Google Drive product manager Rio Akasaka, took advantage of a dying company policy to make Google Maps accessible for people with physical disabilities. The famous 20 percent policy, announced by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004, encourages employees to spend up to 20 percent of their working hours concocting personal projects that might benefit the company.

Some of Google’s biggest hits — including Gmail, AdSense, and Google News — are products of this policy. But a new rule requires employees to ask their managers for permission before embarking on a project, and an increasingly small fraction of Googlers take advantage of 20 percent time.

The feature extends access to more people

Akasaka spent the last year working with a team of contributors to develop accessibility guidelines for the app. He collected information on accessibility from users of Google’s “Local Guides,” who contribute information about locations in exchange for access to beta features and free Google Drive storage. The new accessibility feature was only added after Google had collected months of data from users.

Google takes pride in making information “universally accessible and useful,” so why did it take the company so long to make what is arguably one of its most important apps wheelchair friendly? In an interview with Business Insider, Akasaka said accessibility is important at Google, “but it’s often facilitated by whether or not there’s a legal requirement, or some kind of requirement we need to adhere to.”

You can see if a location is wheelchair accessible by clicking on the description and looking under the “amenities” tab. The feature is not available for all locations yet.

The Glass Room turns internet surveillance into art

2016-12-02T12:21:25-05:00

Four inGeniouses surrounding The Alphabet Empire | The Glass Room

If you have ever wondered where your online data goes, The Glass Room, a free pop-up exhibit in Nolita, is a good place to start. Passersby may mistake the gallery for an Apple Store, but the shiny interior, replete with strategically placed iPads and whitewashed walls, houses a lot more than the latest tech.

Free to the public through December 14th, The Glass Room is a collection of artwork, ongoing projects, and sensory experiences that explore life in the internet age. The exhibit is timed to coincide with the end of Cyber Monday and the beginning of the holiday shopping season, a time when shoppers are handing over heaps of personal information at checkout counters. People who wander into The Glass Room in the midst of shopping won’t be able to purchase a holiday gift, but they will come away with a deeper understanding of the way personal data is used for profit.

Curated by Tactical Technology Collective, the show is meant to educate visitors on the myriad ways their data is used. The artifacts on display range from amusing, like an alphabetized collection of 4.6 million leaked LinkedIn passwords, to terrifying, like a remote-controlled fertility chip that might one day be used to control fertility rates in developing countries. At the back of the exhibit, a bar of “inGeniouses,” a play on the Apple Genius Bar, teach visitors how to avoid aspects of 21st century surveillance. You can learn how to encrypt emails, track your own data, and lighten your digital footprint.

The show is not meant to discourage people from using the internet. Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski, the curators of the exhibit, see the pop-up as a place that brings “questions to life about how technology changes social interactions in our society by making them both fun and accessible.” The exhibit is sponsored by Mozilla, which like most browser builders, has its share of security issues.

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The Glass Room contains 54 artifacts arranged in four distinct categories, beginning with personal data collection and ending with government-sanctioned surveillance methods. The examples of surveillance on display grow more disturbing as you walk further in.

The artifact Unfitbit, located toward the beginning of the gallery, is a Fitbit clipped to a metronome. The “product” offers “freedom from the pressure of having to always be active” by creating false fitness data. Your insurance company that gave you a $50 rebate for using a Fitbit would love to know if you skipped the gym this week (or month) so that it can hike up prices later.

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Deeper into the exhibit, two screens play a recreated video feed of the US-Mexico border. This piece of art, called The Interfaced Boarder by Joana Moll, is a response to the rise of e-vigilatism. A company called Texas Virtual BorderWatch gave unlimited access to 200 cameras monitoring the border for criminal activity. In 2008, 200,000 volunteers spent over 1 million hours of their time watching the border for Texas border authorities. After you’ve grappled with the real-world consequences of human beings monitoring each other for illegal activity, check out the enormous Unintended Emissions screen, which shows data transmissions from people passing by the gallery in real time.

The last part of the exhibit lets you look at your own data through the eyes of cellphone and internet providers in the form of short, animated stories. One video, The Scoring Society looks at how “scoring is applied to our lives, from Credit Scoring to Social Media scoring and terrorist Scoring,” and is strangely evocative of that Black Mirror episode where a girl’s life is ruined because of her low personality score.

Visitors may feel discouraged after journeying through the mystifying and often disconcerting world of surveillance — I certainly did. Luckily the Data Detox Bar offers strategies for managing your online presence. You can even take home a “data detox kit,” which is an eight-step process for making your digital life your own again.

This exhibit is based on an original concept presented by Tactical Technology Collective in Berlin in 2016. The curators hope to do more exhibits on this theme in the future.

Google redesigns Play Newsstand and launches it on the web

2016-11-17T15:58:45-05:00

Google Play Newsstand | Google

Google has redesigned its news reading app, improving Google Play Newsstand to better compete with competitors like Apple News and Flipboard. This is the second app Google has overhauled just this week, following Google Play Music. The updated news app has a new design and is generally meant to make it easier to find something to read; it’s also launching on the web for the first time.

Newsstand now has four tabs to make it easier to navigate the news. The main For You tab houses both a personalized briefing and an AI-powered recommendation stream at the bottom of the screen. The app has reworked its interface to combine top stories, major headlines, and suggested articles based on a user’s interests and preferences. This blend of content makes identifying top stories simpler, while allowing for deeper exploration of potentially interesting topics. The Library, Explore, and Read Later tabs contain sites and subjects you’ve picked out, additional stories to browse through, and saved articles, respectively.

This version of the Newsstand, 4.0, also includes full-bleed images, autoplaying videos, and built-in playback controls for podcasts. In the For You tab, each recommended article or source will now be accompanied by a short justification for why Google thinks it might make a good fit, allowing users to adjust their feeds to better reflect their preferences.

Despite a host of improvements to Google’s news app, there are downsides to a feed that is constantly refreshing itself with personalized content. This technique provides readers with news they want to read, which doesn’t always coincide with the news that’s most important. A phenomenon known as the “filter bubble” on Facebook recently received backlash after many users realized they were being exposed to news that mainly reinforced their worldview. Google says its AI recommendation stream “gets better the more you use it,” but that may create its own kind of bubble.

The update is now available on Android and iOS, and a web version has launched as well.

Some of Audi’s gasoline-powered cars may have cheated emissions, too

2016-11-07T15:00:33-05:00

Volkswagen Chairman Hans-Dieter Pötsch. June, 2016 | REUTERS

Volkswagen could face renewed wrath from investors and the public after regulators in California found emissions-cheating software in some of the company’s Audi models. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) found evidence of emissions testing tampering in both diesel and gasoline engines, according to The Wall Street Journal. The software obscured accurate levels of carbon dioxide emissions, an environmentally harmful greenhouse gas.

VW found itself embroiled in a global emissions scandal in 2015 after investigators detected “defeat device” software in millions of the company’s diesel cars that had been marketed to consumers as low-emission “green” vehicles. The software made it look like the engines met emissions standards for nitrogen oxides, a smog-producing greenhouse gas. The German automaker was forced to shell out $14.7 billion in settlements with car owners and states (in addition to a $2.7 billion contribution to an environmental trust) in the US alone, making it the largest civil settlement in automaker history.

CARB’s findings indicate that similar “defeat device” software was installed in an unknown number of Audi cars that run on gasoline and diesel, but instead of masking levels of NOx the software obscured accurate levels of CO2 emissions, which contribute to global warming. CARB technicians demonstrated deviation in emissions standards by conducting tests in lab versus road conditions. The Audi software made it appear as though the cars emitted low levels of CO2 when operating in the lab, but the vehicles actually released amounts of CO2 that were much higher when the vehicles were made to react as though they were driving on the road.

The new discovery has not been publicly confirmed by Volkswagen or American regulators. The company was just nearing the end of its multi-billion dollar settlement and expects to start buying back vehicles from affected owners in mid-November. Volkswagen declined to comment when contacted by The Verge.

Part of Volkswagen’s new official strategy to rebuild trust with the public and investors in wake of last year’s scandal has been a plan to build 30 battery-powered electric cars over the course of the next decade. Volkswagen also invested $300 million in ride-sharing service Gett in June and Audi has been working toward creating self-driving technology for over 10 years. Nevertheless, people might not soon forget the missteps of a company that once made an internal powerpoint presentation on how to cheat emissions tests.

MacBook event touch bar apps photos

2016-10-27T14:30:55-04:00

MacBook Pro announcement photos

2016-10-27T13:34:09-04:00

Sweden places ban on flying camera drones without surveillance permits

2016-10-24T12:51:59-04:00

The Supreme Administrative Court of Sweden just ruled that camera drones qualify as surveillance cameras and require a permit under Sweden’s camera surveillance laws. The ruling requires owners to cough up a sizable fee in order to get their equipment off the ground, and paying to start the process is no guarantee a citizen will be granted the right to fly. County administrators will have to consider whether use of a “surveillance camera” overrides the public’s right to privacy on a case-by-case basis.

Aerial photographers and recreational drone users may have to rely on alternative methods to get their footage. The justices said dash cams and cameras affixed to bicycle handlebars are not in violation of the public’s right to privacy because the devices are within reaching distance of the people who operate them.

The ruling targets recreational and commercial users alike, and makes zero exceptions for journalists. Sweden’s leading drone company Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) said up to 3,000 people may lose their jobs as a result of the court’s decision.

Sweden is one of the first countries to ban camera drones. The US has its own set of regulations governing drone use, but they pale in comparison to Sweden’s stringent blanket-ban on drones. An effort to ban drone use in California last year was shot down by Governor Jerry Brown.

First reported by PetaPixel, Swedish drone users are upset about the court’s decision. Recreational drone users took to a DJI forum to voice their frustration. One user lamented Sweden’s considerable step back in policy “when they otherwise seem to be a very progressive society.” Another user concluded the justices “must have been drunk or something.” In a query that perfectly sums up Swedish bewilderment about the new ban, one user wondered if Sweden was planning on banning “tall people” next.

Led by Stranger Things and Narcos, Netflix reports record revenue

2016-10-17T16:23:18-04:00

Netflix reported its third quarter earnings today. The company took in a record best $2.15 billion in revenue, a jump of 36 percent over last year. It also added 3.6 million new subscribers, easily besting the 2.3 million it had projected. The company attributed its better-than-expected performance to the break-out success of its original content, specifically Stranger Things and the second season of Narcos. Its stock was up nearly 20 percent in after-hours trading.

“Our over-performance against forecast (86.7m total streaming members vs. forecast of 85.5m) was driven primarily by stronger than expected [customer] acquisition due to excitement around Netflix original content,” the company wrote in its letter to investors. “Stranger Things is also notable as it is produced and owned by Netflix, which provides us with more attractive economics and greater business and creative control.” On today’s earnings call, Spotify said that while original content required more cash upfront, it more than paid off over time through licensing and syndication fees.

No plans for price increases

Netflix was one of the best performing stocks of 2015, powered in large part by its stellar subscriber growth. That momentum came to an end last quarter. The company had projected membership would grow by 2.5 million new subscribers, but second quarter earnings revealed slightly under 1.7 million new members signed up. Membership growth in the US, where 58 percent of the company’s paid subscribers live, was particularly weak. This segment grew just 2 percent between June of 2015 and 2016, the lowest rate of subscriber additions in the United States since the company began reporting numbers in 2012. “We are growing, but not as fast as we would like or have been,” the company said in its Q2 letter to investors.

In a letter to investors, Netflix said failure to reach its projected subscriber growth was due to older members leaving the service, or “churn.” To combat subscriber saturation in its domestic market, Netflix has been aggressively pushing into new territories. The company announced expansion into 130 new countries, markets with hundreds of millions of customers that, until recently, had no way to sign up for Netflix. That may help it to bolster subscriber growth, but it won’t boost the bottom line. Executives have warned international markets are not likely to become profitable for several years.

China is off the table for now

When it announced its global expansion, Netflix hinted that it was interested in bringing its service to China, the world’s largest market of internet-connected consumers. But it put that dream to rest, at least for the time being, in today’s investor letter, noting that “the regulatory environment for foreign digital content services in China has become challenging. We now plan to license content to existing online service providers in China rather than operate our own service in China in the near term.”

Netflix is now available in 22 languages, less than half of what YouTube offers. This quarter it localized in Turkey and Poland, making its service available not just in those geographies, but also in local languages. On it’s investor call, CEO Reed Hastings pointed out that while the service is now available in 130 new countries, making it available in a customer’s native tongue drives a second wave of adoption in some of Netflix new territories.

Content has been one factor analysts point to when explaining why Netflix was losing customers to churn. The company has been focusing on producing original television content and its collection of popular movies has suffered as a result. The service has focused on creating original shows instead, and said today it plans to create 1,000 hours of original content in 2017, nearly doubling the 600 hours of new programming it made this year. The strong results it posted this quarter should dampen fears over this strategy, as the company managed to easily outperform expectations by attracting new customers to shows like Stranger Things, which was a cultural phenomenon over the summer. On today’s investor call the executive team made multiple references to The Crown, which premiers next month, as the next tentpole program it has spent heavily on, and which it hopes will drive subscription growth in return.

Netflix's plan for world domination

Duolingo’s new crew of AI tutors will help you learn languages

2016-10-06T17:52:25-04:00

Duolingo, the popular free language-learning platform, launched three language “tutors” in its iOS app today, marketing the AI-powered chatbots as a way of helping users learn a new language without having to pay for expensive lessons. Users can text back and forth to practice a new language, giving learners an eternally patient, nonjudgmental, on-demand instructor.

Chatbots, the services you interact with via a chat interface like Facebook messenger, have been hailed as the next big thing in tech. People are now using messenger apps more than social media networks, which means app developers are increasingly turning to bots to help their users access a wide range of services. Major companies like Facebook and Microsoft are trying to capitalize on that potential by rolling out platforms that make it easer for developers to build chatbots, and Google made a virtual assistant accessible through chatbot the central feature of its new phone.

Despite the hype, chatbots have fallen disappointingly short. Last March, Twitter got Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot “Tay” to come to the dark side in under 24 hours. Tay started the day as a peaceful, human-loving bot and ended up spewing a barrage of racist tweets in a disturbingly short amount of time. Facebook hasn’t had much luck with its bots either, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s mission to build an “AI to answer any question you have.” The Messenger chatbots have been criticized for being terrible conversationalists, prone to long stretches of silence and regurgitating predetermined answers.

Duolingo’s chatbots are Renèe the Driver, Chef Roberto, and Officer Ada, with the promise of more characters coming to the app soon. Learners can use them to practice French, Spanish, and German, and more languages will be added according to demand. The bots add a personal touch to Duolingo’s language programs, and they’re powered by AI, so the more you interact with them the smarter they get. Translation is also a very well-defined domain of expertise, meaning these bots are likely to make fewer mistakes than AI aimed at open-ended conversation.