Items tagged with Mark-Zuckerberg
If you’re a frequent user of Facebook services, you’re probably having some withdrawal pains now. It’s widely reported worldwide that Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are down at the moment. Besides the avalanche of panicking users reporting their problems on Twitter, we can confirm that the Facebook website is entirely inaccessible, and the DNS is not resolving. In addition, the mobile app is non-functional. The same is true for web and mobile versions of Instagram. A quick trip to Downdetector shows that the first reports starting coming in at around 11:20 am ET. Earlier this morning, we reported on a damning 60 Minutes interview with Frances Haugen, who served as a data...
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In what could be a dealbreaker for some VR gamers that own Oculus devices, Facebook announced today that beginning in October, it will remove provisions that allow users to have separate Oculus and Facebook accounts. Instead, first-time Oculus device users will be required to login with a Facebook account. Facebook acquired Oculus back in 2014, and has slowly been making moves over the years to align its VR business with its mainline social networking platform. However, it's likely that people that want absolutely nothing to do with Facebook or its tendency to get its feelers into every aspect of our online life will be happy about this change. If you're already an existing Oculus hardware user...
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Facebook just can’t seem to keep its nose clean with respect to security and user privacy. The latest blunder was first reported on by KrebsonSecurity, which discovered that the social networking giant was storing user account passwords in plain text instead of hashing them. What’s more troubling about this discovery is that the passwords were readably accessible by Facebook employees, affecting accounts dating back to 2012. In total, over 20,000 Facebook employees had searchable access to the passwords, and the plain text folly affected between 200 million to 600 million users in total. Brian Krebs also dropped this interesting nugget in his blog post on the latest...
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Facebook had an incredibly rough 2018. The company was rocked by the Cambridge Analytica scanda lthat it initially tried to suppress, but eventually made its way to the light of day. Cambridge Analytica was able to access personal details on nearly 90 million of Facebook customers without their permission. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg CEO Mark Zuckerberg was eventually dragged to Capitol Hill to sit before a congressional firing squad to explain what went wrong, but by all accounts was able to dodge any serious wounds from the well-publicized hearing. Since that time, representatives for Facebook have been meeting with officials from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to agree...
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Have you ever sent a message that you instantly regretted? Facebook Messenger now allows you to unsend your typo-ridden, impulsive messages. The catch? You will only have ten minutes to remove the message. Users will need to open the Facebook Messenger app on their desktop, laptop, or smart device and open the conversation with the desired message. They will need to press and hold the message if they are using a smartphone or select the three dots icon if they are on a desktop or laptop. Users must then select “remove” or “remove for everyone” next to the message. The “remove for everyone” feature will guarantee that the message will be deleted from the inbox...
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Facebook currently fosters three popular platforms that are [for the most part] distinct from its eponymous social network: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. All three platforms feature their own respective messaging component; Instagram users, for instance, can't use the app to contact users on WhatsApp. That will all change in the future, as Facebook is reportedly in the process of rebuilding its software infrastructure to allow cross-platform messaging from any of its standalone properties to another. According to reporting by the New York Times, the software rewrite is currently in its infancy and might not be made public until late 2019 or early 2020. By tying its various...
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Mark Zuckerberg is about to get “Zucc’d”. White-hat hackers usually help to plug security holes, but one hacker has promised to thrust Facebook into chaos. Taiwanese bug bounty hunter Chang Chi-yuan recently announced that he will livestream an attempt to hack into Zuckerberg's Facebook account. The 24 year-old hacker announced to his 26,000 Facebook followers that he will broadcast “the deletion of FB founder Zuck’s account”. The deletion is scheduled for Sunday, September 30th at 6pm NST (6am EST). Chang will stream the event on his own Facebook page. Chang is a minor celebrity in Taiwan and has appeared on a number of talk shows. He was recently sued by...
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Facebook has been facing significant user backlash over the last few months mostly due to the Cambridge Analytica fiasco that saw data on millions of Facebook users stolen. That issue will see Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress. More recently, Facebook is facing another backlash after it deleted messages sent by Zuckerberg from users' inboxes. Facebook has now announced that the Unsend feature will be rolled out to all Facebook users. Some see this as a sort of cover-up where Facebook can say it was testing a feature and that it will now be given to all users. The social network has promised to not unsend any more of Zuckerberg's messages until the feature is available...
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Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been working hard to make some big changes to the way the social network operates. Facebook has promised to rethink the news feed users see and prioritize interactions with friends and family over news. Facebook has also made changes that will allow users to choose what news sources they trust, while ones that are untrustworthy will be purged. Zuckerberg has taken to the social network once again to talk about the next step in the revamping of the site. The new change will be to promote news from local sources. Zuckerberg wrote, "People consistently tell us they want to see more local news on Facebook. Local news helps us understand the issues that...
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Facebook made an announcement about a week ago noting it was ready to make some big changes in how it handles the News Feed. These changes were welcome by most users, but the social network isn't stopping there. Facebook is now calling on users to help it ensure that the news you see in your feed is from quality sources. This is what Facebook says is the second major update it will embark on this year to ensure that you consume high-quality content. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, "Last week I announced a major change to encourage meaningful social interactions with family and friends over passive consumption. As a result, you'll see less public content, including news, video, and posts from...
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Facebook is looking to address some of the issues that people complain about with the network, namely that the social network is making people feel worse about themselves and that the social giant is generally bad for people. Back in December, a former Facebook executive said that the social network was destroying our modern society, something that Facebook flatly denies. Despite not feeling as if it is destroying society, Facebook is looking to ensure that the time people spend on the network in 2018 is "time well spent." Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg has made a post on the social network talking about one of the big focus areas for 2018. Zuckerberg says that research shows that strengthening...
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Are you looking for new reading material to keep you busy this weekend? If so, you might consider a 5,700-word manifesto written by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It's titled "Building Global Community" and it covers a range of topics on what is needed to build a better, more supportive and civically-engaged community. Though it's a relatively long read (compared to most of Zuckerberg's posts), it's actually shorter than an earlier version that appeared online. The earlier version included Zuckerberg's belief that artificial intelligence could eventually be used to monitor private messages by terrorists who are planning an attack. That bit was ultimately redacted, though the final...
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In early January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his plans to build his own Jarvis personal AI assistant as an homage to the AI “butler” of the same name in the Iron Man movies. "My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," said Zuckerberg at the time. "I'm going to start by exploring what technology is already out there. Then I'll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home -- music, lights, temperature and so on." Nearly a year later, Zuckerberg is back with an update on how things are going. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg has come a long way with coding,...
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There’s no question that Facebook’s Trending Stories has a credibility issue. Trending Stories came under fire earlier this year when it was alleged that Facebook was purposefully suppressing politically conservative news stories. The blowback from the outrage surrounding the scandal led Facebook to fire the editorial team responsible for curating those stories. However, in the absence of human handlers, its Trending Stories section has apparently “gone rogue”, spreading false stories that some gullible individuals take as fact and share, further exacerbating the problem. According to Pew Research, 62 percent of U.S. residents get news from social media. So it shouldn’t be too surprising to see...
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Ahmed Mohamed has had a whirlwind week. The teen brought a “homemade” clock to school to impress his teachers, but eventually was arrested when one teacher inquired about a beeping sound. When Ahmed revealed the clock, which was enclosed in a pencil case, he was sent to the principal’s office and later arrested over concerns that he had built a device that looked like a bomb. The picture of Ahmed in handcuffs is the catalyst for what launched Ahmed’s quick rise to fame and a media firestorm.I expect they will have more to say tomorrow, but Ahmed's sister asked me to share this photo. A NASA shirt! pic.twitter.com/nR4gt992gB— Anil Dash (@anildash) September 16, 2015 Not long after his arrest...
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Will they or won’t they? It’s been a topic of discussion surrounding Facebook for years — will the company introduce a “Dislike” button to go alongside the inescapable “Like” button? When we last visited the topic in late December, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the idea outright, citing its negative connotation. “You know, some people have asked for a Dislike button because they want to be able to say ‘That thing isn’t good’,” said Zuckerberg in a public Q&A. “And that’s not something that we think is good for the world. So we’re not going to build that.” Well, it appears that Zuckerberg and company have had a change of heart over the past nine months. In another Facebook Q&A...
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Facebook’s efforts to spread Internet connectivity to nearly every person on the globe will get off the ground this summer. A new report from The Wall Street Journal indicates that Facebook’s prototype drone, dubbed Aquila, will be much larger than the one-tenth-scale drone that the company tested in early March. The full-size model will have the wingspan of a Boeing 737 (117 feet), but will only weigh as much as a small car (we’re assuming something that weighs less than 3,000 pounds). “Depending on how this test flight goes, we’ll see what happens,” says Jay Parikh, Facebook’s VP of Engineering. “This is a big plane, this is a big project and it’s never been done before.” The drones are capable...
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In mid-September, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted an open letter outlining his company’s commitment to privacy. Cook explained that his company makes customer privacy a high priority and that collecting vast amounts of user data simply isn’t a priority for Apple. “We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers,” explained Cook. “We don’t 'monetize' the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.” Cook went on to admit that Apple does rely on advertising to a small...
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Today is a momentous occasion in the life of one the tech world’s greatest wunderkinds: Mark Zuckerberg turns 30. It’s an even more notable birthday for the Facebook founder than the average joe because of an off-the-cuff comment he made about younger people being smarter than older people back in 2007 when he was, most definitely, a young man. “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” Zuckerberg told a crowd at Y Combinator back in 2007, according to VentureBeat. “Young people are just smarter,” he continued. “Why are most chess masters under 30? I don’t know.” Age 30, it seemed to 22-year-old Zuck, is a year in which...
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We’d bet that when Mark Zuckerberg drunkenly dashed off the original Facebook precursor in his dorm room, he never imagined that within a decade he’d be actively trying to connect two-thirds of the world to the Internet and working with NASA to do so, but that is indeed what has transpired. Zuckerberg announced that Internet.org, the organization comprising Facebook and many other Internet companies, is “working on ways to beam internet to people from the sky” by building drones, satellites, and lasers in the new Facebook Connectivity Lab. Different population densities require different solutions. For example, in low population densities, the team is looking to satellites....
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Facebook is snapping up Oculus VR, maker of the hotly-anticipated Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming headset. For those immediately worried that Facebook will ruin Oculus Rift, fear not: Mark Zuckerberg assured the world in a post that not only will Facebook be accelerating the Oculus Rift gaming platform, it will be leveraging Oculus VR’s technology into other spaces, as well. Zuckerberg calls Oculus VR a communication platform, and he sees the technology expanding in powerful new ways. “After games, we're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or...
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Setting aside for a moment how jarring it is to see Ashton Kutcher’s name associated with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the trio are among investors in a startup called Vicarious FPC that has lofty goals for artificial intelligence technology. Specifically, Vicarious wants to essentially replicate the human brain’s neocortex, which is the area that involves thought and language, spatial senses, body movements, and more. That’s of course the great dream of all AI--if you can accomplish all of that you basically have a human--but Vicarious thinks it can pull it off with its Recursive Cortical Network. This image is in the public domain This is the company, incidentally, that...
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