Twitter's free speech era is officially over

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has introduced a bill in response to the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules, but supporters of net neutrality aren’t happy with it. The Open Internet Preservation Act would prevent blocking or degrading the quality of legal web traffic, but would also ban the FCC from making any rules that go beyond those two requirements. It would override any state net neutrality laws, like those recently proposed for California and Washington. And it firmly defines broadband as an “information service,” which would mean it couldn’t be regulated more strictly as a Title II service, as it was under the newly repealed Open Internet Order.

If you ask the White House, North Korea’s WannaCry attack was just the tip of the iceberg. Homeland security adviser Tom Bossert reported that Facebook and Microsoft disabled a range of North Korean online threats in the past week. Facebook removed accounts and “stopped the operational execution” of ongoing attacks, while Microsoft patched existing attacks that went beyond WannaCry. Details of just what those attacks were aren’t available.

Facebook has confirmed its role. A spokesman told Reuters that it had deleted accounts associated with the Lazarus Group, the hacking team associated with WannaCry and other campaigns, and had notified users who’d had contact with those accounts. It recommended additional security measures in case they might be victims. 

Half the people in our survey saw no news at all in the first 10 posts — even using an extremely generous definition of “news” (from celebrity gossip to sports scores to history-based explainers, across all mediums; our count included any news shared by the publishers themselves, other pages, or individuals, and sponsored publisher content).

Germany’s top antitrust enforcer opened a new front against big tech firms on Tuesday, saying the way Facebook Inc. harvests user data constitutes an abuse of market dominance.

In what lawyers call a novel use of competition law, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office published preliminary findings that accuse Facebook of using its power as the dominant social network in Germany to strong-arm users into allowing it to collect data about them from third-party sources, such as websites with “like” buttons.

While Tuesday’s findings won’t lead to fines, they pave the way for Germany to order changes in the way Facebook does business when it issues a final decision as early as next summer. If upheld in European Union court, this new line of attack could eventually expand the boundaries of competition law within the bloc to encompass questions of online privacy.

The one common thread that kept popping up in the responses was that people who arrive expecting it to be a replacement for Twitter will be disappointed: Mastodon isn’t conducive to virality or building your personal brand.

For example, Meacham said that a young woman had gotten to the airport two hours early only to discover that her flight was three hours delayed. Then she said, “I gotta find some pizza.”

So, the JetBlue team contacted the airport and told them the story. “The airport got pizza for the whole flight and delivered it to the area,” Meacham said. “The woman ended up tweeting pictures of the pizza being delivered. That was just great.”

Facebook is expanding how it uses facial recognition to find people in photos. From today, the company will notify users when someone uploads a photo with them in it — even if they’re not tagged. The user will then have the option to add their tag to the photo, leave themselves untagged, or report the photo if they think it’s inappropriate. The feature will also work with profile photos, but won’t be available in Canada or the EU, where data laws restrict the use of facial recognition.

According to Facebook, the new tool is designed to empower users by helping them control their image online. “We really thought this as a privacy feature for a long time. If someone posts a photo of you, you might not know about it,” Rob Sherman, Facebook’s head of privacy, told The Verge. “Now, the users can access the photo, and they can communicate to the person who posted it.

Facebook’s VR hangout app Spaces just got cross-platform functionality. Now, in addition to Facebook’s own Oculus Rift headset, you can use the HTC Vive to access all the same features in Spaces, from making Messenger video calls to creating your own avatar and playing games.

Firstly, Facebook is increasing security features that prevent people from creating fake accounts, including now looking at various signals like IP addresses. This should help prevent unwanted contact from people an individual has previously blocked for harassment, so that same person can’t create a new account just to add you again.

Facebook is also adding an ignore feature to mute a conversation without the sender knowing. If someone is being harassed, sometimes it is still useful to be able to access messages from the harasser, in order to see if there is any risk of future danger. 

Twitter’s big news this week is its announcement that it’s now enforcing its new policies around hateful content and abuse, but today the company is rolling out something new for developers, as well: an enterprise-level API providing access to real-time activities like tweets, retweets, likes and follows.

The ethos of startup culture could serve as a blueprint for civilization-destroying AIs. “Move fast and break things” was once Facebook’s motto; they later changed it to “Move fast with stable infrastructure,” but they were talking about preserving what they had built, not what anyone else had. This attitude of treating the rest of the world as eggs to be broken for one’s own omelet could be the prime directive for an AI bringing about the apocalypse. When Uber wanted more drivers with new cars, its solution was to persuade people with bad credit to take out car loans and then deduct payments directly from their earnings. They positioned this as disrupting the auto loan industry, but everyone else recognized it as predatory lending. The whole idea that disruption is something positive instead of negative is a conceit of tech entrepreneurs. If a superintelligent AI were making a funding pitch to an angel investor, converting the surface of the Earth into strawberry fields would be nothing more than a long overdue disruption of global land use policy.

Rotten Tomatoes uses reCAPTCHA, a free API developed by Google that distinguishes humans from bots with a check of a box, to ensure that new signups are humans. But the site also has an option to sign up with Facebook, which bypasses that system. Once logged in, users can rate the movie by marking it “want to see” or “not interested,” scoring it on a scale of 0.5 to 5 stars, and posting a written review with the score. “Down with Disney” wrote on Facebook that it used Facebook accounts to login into Rotten Tomatoes and manipulate the score:

Thanks to friends of mine who taught me a thing or two about Bot Accounts, I used them to create this audience score through Facebook accounts created that subsequently logged into Rotten Tomatoes who rigged this score and still keep it dropping.

While low Rotten Tomatoes scores have contributed to the downfall of other movies this year, like The Mummy and The Dark Tower, The Last Jedi‘s low score had nearly no discernible impact on its box-office performance. It debuted with $220 million in North America, marking the second-largest opening weekend ever, following the The Force Awakens.