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Facebook’s New AI Research Gives Hope For The Future Of Bots

While many expect chat bots to become a huge part of our AI-dominated future, they have been rather underwhelming so far. Behind almost any online bot are drop-down menus, slightly tweaked to appear as questions. This makes the whole experience way too robotic. In order to reach new heights, chatbots need new skills. They need to get cognitive abilities to reason with people. And these abilities might not be as far as you think. Facebook has been a major player in this field for a long time. They already launched their chatbot assistant, simply known as M. Yes, it’s true that it’s still humans who do all the difficult tasks, but it’s a step in the right direction. Facebook also created an open-source tool, designed to teach bots. Read also: Tech Titans Bought 34 AI Startups In Early 2017 Yesterday, the social media giant’s researchers from the FAIR lab showed a…

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Business

How Apple’s Anti-Tracking Policy Will Make Google And Facebook Even Stronger

The Internet is built on targeted advertising. It’s a known fact we rarely bring up, but it’s been like this for many years. These websites that provide free information and other content – they all have tons of tracking systems, or cookies. These systems monitor your activity online to come up with a unique ad that will follow you wherever you go. Companies make money from targeted advertising. It’s a gigantic business that generates billions of dollars every year. Some websites are open about it, some aren’t. The truth is, it pays for almost everything people see on the Internet. The problem with Apple’s new policy At WWDC, Apple announced something that could damage the traditionally accepted system. The next version of Safari – Apple’s web browser – will come with a new anti-tracking tool. It will analyze and ultimately block any third-party ad trackers online. Apple reps call this…

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Business

From a Harvard Bro to The Earth Overlord: The Rise of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in 33 Photos

Facebook is a classic Silicon Valley success story: from a Harvard dorm to the top of the world.It has made Mark Zuckerberg into a legendary figure and turned a hoodie and tennis shoes into the height of tech industry fashion. Mark Zuckerberg.Robert Galbraith/Reuters These days, Facebook is worth $364 billion, with over 1.71 billion people using the site every month. Here’s the story behind Facebook’s insane growth, from February 2004 through today. Spoiler alert: It involves a lot of beer. Facebook got its start at Harvard’s Kirkland House dormitory — the same dorm that Wallace Shawn (who played Vizzini in “The Princess Bride” and the voice of “Toy Story’s” Rex) lived in during his Harvard years. Wikimedia Commons In 2003, Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg would build a program called “Face mash.” It was a Hot or Not-style app using the pictures of his classmates that he hacked from the school…

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Business

5 Tech Giants That Will Dominate The 21st Century

There’s a little parlor game that people in Silicon Valley like to play. Let’s call it, Who’s Losing? There are currently four undisputed rulers of the consumer technology industry: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, now a unit of a parent company called Alphabet. And there’s one more, Microsoft, whose influence once looked on the wane, but which is now rebounding. So which of these five is losing? A year ago, it was Google that looked to be in a tough spot as its ad business appeared more vulnerable to Facebook’s rise. Now, Google is looking up, and it’s Apple, hit by rising worries about a slowdown in iPhone sales, that may be headed for some pain. Over the next couple of weeks, as these companies issue earnings that show how they finished 2015, the state of play may shift once more. But don’t expect it to shift much. Asking “who’s…

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Business

Here’s What Myspace Tom Has Been Up to While You’ve Been Wasting Time on Facebook

It’s easy to lose track of old friends, especially ones from high school, like MySpace Tom.   Forever in this pose, hopefully without a kink in his neck. TWITTER: @MYSPACETOM MySpace Tom, also known as Tom Anderson, sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch’s company for $580 million (FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION DOLLARS!!!) in 2005, and the 46-year-old has been living it up in retirement ever since. The former entrepreneur has picked up photography in his ample free time, and now spends his days traveling and photographic the planet’s most stunning vistas. He’s been in Hawaii. Beautiful spot on Kauai – when the ocean is calmer people swim in the natural baths that form here. A post shared by Tom Anderson (@myspacetom) on May 2, 2017 at 9:38pm PDT And Hawaii. Some people will tell you that Waikiki is too crowded. I won’t. There’s a place for crowds and Waikiki is…

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Social networks

Facebook Adds 3000 Moderators in Wake of a Man Broadcasting Footage of Himself Killing His 11-month-old Daughter

The social network has pledged to add 3,000 more content reviewers and invest in tools to help remove objectionable content more quickly after a man broadcasted footage of himself killing his 11-month-old daughter. Graphic footage of shootings, murders, rapes and assaults has been streamed on Facebook over the last few months. Through the Facebook live feature, the broadcasts have then been viewable as recorded videos by the social network’s users, often for days before being taken down. Similar to Youtube, Facebook does not moderate content before it is uploaded, instead, the platform relies on reporting tools used by the social network’s 1.86 billion users and a team of people at Facebook to review reported posts and content and retroactively remove them from the site. In a recent post, Chief Executive, Mark Zuckerberg said: “Over the next year, we’ll be adding 3,000 people to our community operations team around the world –…

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Business

Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug?

In early January, I went to see Mark Zuckerberg at MPK20, a concrete-and-steel building on the campus of Facebook’s headquarters, which sits across a desolate highway from the marshy salt flats of Menlo Park, Calif. The Frank Gehry-designed building has a pristine nine-acre rooftop garden, yet much of the interior — a meandering open-plan hallway — appears unfinished. There are exposed air ducts and I-beams scribbled with contractors’ marks. Many of the internal walls are unpainted plywood. The space looks less like the headquarters of one of the world’s wealthiest companies and more like a Chipotle with standing desks. It’s an aesthetic meant to reflect — and perhaps also inspire employee allegiance to — one of Facebook’s founding ideologies: that things are never quite finished, that nothing is permanent, that you should always look for a chance to take an ax to your surroundings. The mood in overwhelmingly liberal Silicon…

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Software

Facebook Struggles With Being Responsible

The technology industry is fond of its anodyne language: Customers are “users.” Videos and stories are “content.” Putting other people out of business is “disruption.” But word choices meant to cause the least offense fail to prevent the visceral reaction that occurs after someone posts a video of a killing to Facebook. That is not content. That is a snuff film. On Easter, a man in Cleveland shot and killed another man and posted a video of it to Facebook. The video — and the two hours Facebook took to remove it — provoked intense criticism of the social media giant. Authorities say the man shot himself while fleeing police in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. Facebook is hardly the only social media company struggling to deal with lurid material posted by its users. Twitter and YouTube have struggled to block violent videos and other postings by terrorists. And YouTube has lost…

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Software

Google Combating Fake News with New Feature

Following in the steps of Facebook the search engine giant is trying to battle the spreading of fake news. In a bid to help stop the spread of misinformation, Google is to start displaying fact-checking labels in its search results to highlight news and information that has been vetted and show whether it is considered to be true or false. The new fact-checking tool, which was first introduced to Google News in the UK and US in October, will now be displayed as an information box in general search results as well as news search results globally. Now, when a search query returns a result that has been reviewed, Google will display who made the claim and if a third party organization has found it to be true, false or somewhere in between. The search giant isn’t doing its own fact checking, but rather relying on nonpartisan websites like Politifact…

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Mobile

Chicago Teen Reportedly Gang-raped as 40 People Watched on Facebook Live

A 15-year-old girl in Chicago was reportedly recently sexually assaulted by “five or six men or boys on Facebook Live,” according to the Associated Press. This is the second such reported attack in Chicago that was broadcast on Facebook this year alone. In January, four teens were arrested in connection to a torture video. The Chicago Tribunereported Tuesday that this attack marks “at least the fourth Chicago crime caught on Facebook Live since the end of last October.” Tuesday afternoon, Anthony Guglielmi, a police spokesman, tweeted that the new investigation was moving forward. UPDATE: CPD making good progress identifying persons of interest in 10th Dist assault. Interviews ongoing but no formal suspects named yet — Anthony Guglielmi (@AJGuglielmi) March 21, 2017 Guglielmi told the AP that the department found out about the assault on Monday when a woman approached Superintendent Eddie Johnson as he was leaving a station in the Lawndale…

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