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Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
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Tundra, a new zero-commission wholesale marketplace, announces $12M Series A; Tundra generates revenue via premium checkout options like faster shipping — Tundra, a new zero-commission wholesale marketplace, has today announced the close of $12 million in Series A funding.
Japan’s trade ministry said today that it will restrict the export of some tech materials to South Korea, including polyimides used in flexible displays made by companies like Samsung Electronics. The new rules come as the two countries argue over compensation for South Koreans forced to work in Japanese factories during World War II.
The list of restricted supplies, expected to go into effect on July 4, includes polyimides used in smartphone and flexible organic LED displays, and etching gas and resist used to make semiconductors. That means Japanese suppliers who wish to sell those materials to South Korean tech companies such as Samsung, LG and SK Hynix will need to submit each contract for approval.
Japan’s government may also remove South Korea from its list of countries that have fewer restrictions on trading technology that might have national security implications, reports Nikkei Asian Review.
Earlier this year, South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled several Japanese companies, including Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, that had used forced labor during World War II must pay compensation and began seizing assets for liquidation. But Japan’s government claims the issue was settled in 1965 as part of a treaty that restored basic diplomatic relations between the two countries and is asking South Korea to put the matter before an international arbitration panel instead.
Facebook’s second progress report pertaining to the civil rights audit conducted by former ACLU Washington Director Laura Murphy is here. Over the last six months, Facebook has made changes around enforcing against hate, fighting discrimination in ads and protecting against misinformation and suppression in the upcoming U.S. presidential election and 2020 Census, according to the progress report.
While Facebook has made changes in some of these areas — Facebook banned white supremacy in March — auditors say Facebook’s policy is still “too narrow.” That’s because it solely prohibits explicit praise, support or representation of the terms “white nationalism” or “white separatism,” but does not technically prohibit references to those terms and ideologies.
“The narrow scope of the policy leaves up content that expressly espouses white nationalist ideology without using the term ‘white nationalist,'” the report states. “As a result, content that would cause the same harm is permitted to remain on the platform.”
Therefore, the audit team recommends Facebook expand its policy to prohibit content that “expressly praises, supports, or represents white nationalist ideology” even if the content does not explicitly use the terms “white nationalism” or “white separatism.”
In Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s note today, she acknowledges the recommendation.
“We’re addressing this by identifying hate slogans and symbols connected to white nationalism and white separatism to better enforce our policy,” she wrote.
Sandberg also noted how Facebook recently updated its policies to ensure people don’t use Facebook to organize events intended to intimidate or harass people.
“Getting our policies right is just one part of the solution,” Sandberg said. “We also need to get better at enforcement — both in taking down and leaving up the right content.”
Sandberg is referring to the fact that Facebook has sometimes wrongfully taken down content meant to draw attention to racism and discrimination.
As Murphy noted in her report, “the definition and policing of hate speech and harassment on the platform has long been an area of concern. The civil rights community also claims that a lack of civil rights expertise informing content decisions leads to vastly different outcomes for users from marginalized communities.”
Facebook now says it’s taking steps to address this. One step, Sandberg says, is to have some content reviewers focus just on hate speech.
“We believe allowing reviewers to specialize only in hate speech could help them further build the expertise that may lead to increased accuracy over time,” Sandberg wrote.
Additionally, Sandberg has formalized a civil rights task force at Facebook. This task force will live on beyond the audit in order to continue building more awareness around civil rights issues on Facebook.
And ahead of the upcoming presidential election, Facebook says it is working on new protections against voter interference and is adding a policy that prohibits “don’t vote” ads. That policy is expected to go into effect before the 2019 gubernatorial election. On the census side, Facebook is working on an interference policy that it expects to launch this fall.
In March of this year, Facebook settled with the ACLU and others pertaining to discriminatory job ads. Just days later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said Facebook was in violation of the Fair Housing Act through its ad-targeting tools. This case is still pending.
In the meantime, Facebook has since begun working on a new system so that advertisers running US housing, employment and credit ads will no longer be able to target by age, gender, race, religion or zip code.
When this system launches, there will be a limited number of options by which to target. Additionally, Facebook won’t make any new terms available without first running it by the ACLU and the other plaintiffs from the March 2019 settlement.
In order to implement this new system, Facebook will ask advertisers to explicitly note if the ad involves housing, employment or credit opportunities. If it does, advertisers will be directed to the new system. Facebook is also putting tools in place to identify ads that advertisers failed to flag.
Additionally, Facebook is working on a tool that will let users search active housing ads by the advertiser and by location, whether or not they are in the target audience. This is expected to be available by the end of this year. Down the road, Facebook plans to make similar tools available for employment and credit opportunities.
“Given how critical access to housing, employment and credit opportunities are, this could have a significant impact on people’s lives,” Murphy wrote in her progress report.
This audit began in May 2018 following one scandal after the other pertaining to misinformation, and Facebook’s policies and people of color on its platform. The first six months entailed Murphy conducting interviews with civil rights organizations to determine their concerns. This last six months largely focused on content moderation and enforcement. The civil rights audit is far from over, and Facebook says we can expect to see the next update early next year.
How journalists, researchers, and civil rights groups are using big data, which put gerrymandering on steroids, to easily and cheaply track redistricting — THE SUPREME COURT'S conservative justices ruled Thursday that the highest court doesn't have the power to address partisan gerrymandering …
Japan will tighten restrictions on export of materials used in smartphone displays and chips to South Korea from July 4, over a dispute about war-time labor — TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will tighten restrictions on the export of high-tech materials used in smartphone displays and chips …
CoinMarketCap acquihires the team of Hashtag Capital, which started as a crypto trading fund, to improve the easily faked volume-weighted crypto price estimates — As its bid to improve its crypto data offering continues, CoinMarketCap is snapping up a firm building technology said to provide a “true price” for cryptocurrencies.
Bleckwen, a cybersecurity company developing AI-based fraud detection and prevention systems for banks and others, emerges from stealth, raises $10M Series A — Bleckwen, a cybersecurity firm developing fraud detection and prevention systems for banks and financial technology companies …
Nielsen Music Mid-Year Report: on-demand audio streams in the US grew 31.6% YoY to 507.7B in the first half of 2019 — Music streaming services have already delivered a new high of half a trillion (507.7 billion) on-demand streams in the first half of 2019, according to Nielsen's mid-year Music Report released this week.
TaTaTu, after raising $575M from royals and celebs in a private 2018 ICO for its blockchain-based Netflix-like service, now says it is not a blockchain business — What started as a $575 million token sale is now a rewards program for watching videos. — TaTaTu's initial coin offering …
Facebook says it will treat 2020 US Census like an election and will have “people, policies and technology in place to protect against census interference” — Civil rights are the foundation of a free and just society — and something we care deeply about as a company.
Profile of Jay Carney, formerly Obama's press secretary, who is now a member of Jeff Bezos' elite S-team, in charge of PR and policy at Amazon — KEY POINTS — Jay Carney is running public relations and policy at Amazon, which is the target of an increasing number of political attacks.
China-based robotic process automation startup Laiye, whose product UiBot gained 6,000 enterprise users after launching in January, raises $35M Series B — For many years, the boom and bust of China's tech landscape have centered around consumer-facing products.
Profile of 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan, who sold the site in 2015, and says he has soured not just on 8chan, but on the whole idea it represented — How a childhood of anger led the founder of 8chan to create one of the darkest corners of the internet — On 27 April, before he burst …
How TikTok users are supplanting the traditional functions of record labels, like talent scouting and publicity, for new artists — Lil Nas X's ‘Old Town Road’ is both a chart-topping phenomenon and a turning point for the music business. Here's what happens when a social media platform becomes a label.
Iran's Energy Ministry says that power consumption jumped 7% in June, largely due to Bitcoin mining, making the power grid unstable, seizes 1,000 Bitcoin miners — Iran has blamed an “unusual” spike in electricity consumption in the country on cryptocurrency miners, while warning …
Google launches Fuchsia OS developer website with official documentation about developing for its open source operating system — As was repeatedly made plain to see during this year's Google I/O, developers are eager to learn more about Google's Fuchsia OS.
“How Will The Movies Survive The Next Ten Years?” demands the New York Times, in a series of interviews with 24 major Hollywood figures. Good question! I’ve been asking it myself, here, for six years now. Very unlike music, television, books, and home video, the theatrical movie experience has proved remarkably resistant to online disruption…
…so far.
I’ve argued before that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have many parallels: VCs are like studios, angel investors are like individual producers, founders are like directors, etcetera. However, they also have some striking differences. For most of the last 25 years, the cost to launch a groundbreaking, potentially world-shaking startup has decreased — though that may well be changing — whereas the total cost to make, market, and distribute a theatrical release has decidedly not.
Furthermore, movie theaters, built around repeat screening of 90-to-180-minute self-contained films, face new direct-to-streaming-services competition with far more range, from bingewatching 22-episode series to short clips on YouTube. Even in the arena of “movies” as we know them, this competition seems exponentially more intense every year — there’s no way “Bright” and “Bird Box” would have been direct-to-Netflix as little as five years ago — and will hit a whole new fervor with the launch of the Disney Plus launch date later this year.
We can analogize that, maybe, to some extent, to downloadable software vs. software-as-a-service. There can be only one winner, right? Right? And note that, despite the runaway successes of Avengers: Endgame and Captain Marvel, 2019’s US box office is still tracking a full 10% behind last year‘s. There may be a trend here.
It seems that Hollywood is finally aware of the change. Some striking quotes from that NYT piece: “This is the biggest shift in the content business in the history of Hollywood” — Jason Blum. “For a long time, people have been saying the business is changing, but that’s undeniable now” — JJ Abrams. “I don’t feel particularly optimistic about the traditional theatrical experience” — Jordan Horowitz, producer of La La Land. “There’s a lot more work, but it’s a lot harder to make money on anything.” — Elizabeth Banks.
…But with risk comes opportunity, especially for people who haven’t had much before.
“I’ve seen a lot of female filmmakers get opportunities at Netflix and Amazon that they haven’t gotten through the studio system. So I’m very, very happy about the new shape our industry is taking” — Jessica Chastain. ‘A really huge studio told us, “Hey, a woman of color should be the lead of this movie.” And we went, “Great!” I don’t think we would have heard that five years ago from a major studio’ — Kumail Nanjiani
Perhaps “Hollywood,” as the maker and purveyor of huge-budget, huge-footprint, in-theaters-everywhere entertainment, is indeed a dinosaur finally starting to diminish … but if streaming services are allowing more and more people to create scripted entertainment of every kind, on every budget, then their success is no bad thing. I don’t think movies are going to die. I think there will long be people like me, who so prefer the immersive experience of a theater to the in-passing one of streaming at home that we’re willing to pay for it.
But I can envision a future in which a Hollywood Movie is no longer the alpha king of cultural experiences — where, instead, shared worlds spread across many entertainment form-factors, including lower-cost ones, made by a diverse crowd of contributors, take prime position in our collective mindshare. In that future, theatrical releases become a relatively niche market compared to streaming.
In such future the theatrical business model will change, too, and rightly so. I’m still baffled why I couldn’t see the last season of Game of Thrones in any nearby theater, for instance. But there will be far more kinds of entertainment to choose from, undercutting the century-long dominance of “three acts in two hours,” from far more kinds of people. Even to a hardcore cinemaphile like me, the more I think about such a future, the more it seems better to me than the status quo.
Interview with Google's MatÃas Duarte on his smartphone notification designs while at Danger between 2000-2005 and what can be done to make notifications better — NOTIFICATIONS ARE, AT the most basic level, a method of alerting people to some piece of information, often with some element of urgency.
