facebook

No matter what you think of social media, a new analogy just got served up in Davos, Switzerland by Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff. Facebook is like cigarettes and should be regulated as such. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff offered up an analogy: Treat social media like a health issue, similar to...

Since 2009 Mark Zuckerberg has given himself several challenges per year to overcome. In 2018 he intends to focus on issues like hate speech, errors that Facebook makes enforcing policies and other stuff. The issues I find interesting that he is looking into are the use of encryption and...

Facebook announced that they are going to start fighting engagement bait spam and demote this junk before it gets in your News Feed. Many companies are putting posts out there that ask you to LIKE this post if you are X or want you to share it with a friend for X reason. To stop this kind of...

Facebook released their new Messenger Kids app today that they say is a safe and easy way for kids to video chat and message with their family and friends. This app can be controlled from the parents Facebook account so that should give it the added security that's needed. I like the thought...

Facebook is requiring users to upload a clear photo of their face to make sure they aren't a bot. According to Facebook they will analyze the photo to make sure it's not fake and then immediately delete it after use. How they are verifying it isn't a fake isn't defined. However, you have...

Facebook has rolled out a new AI that scans for suicidal posts across their platform, excluding the EU because of privacy laws. Supposedly this will find something before a person reports a post and will then alert a moderator that will contact first responders. All of this sounds innocent...

Facebook has announced a portal to enable people to find out which Russian troll pages or Instagram accounts they liked or followed between January 2015 and August 2017. Their reason for doing this is to increase transparency and also to appease Congress as they investigate the issues from the...

Facebook made a new version of messenger available yesterday that allows people to send and receive 4K photos. What is supposed to be good about this is that the speed you get the photo is as fast as it was before the upgrade to 4K. However, they do warn that you should be connected to wifi to...

A Facebook executive has denied the social network uses a device's microphone to listen to what users are saying and then send them relevant ads. However, there have been anecdotal accounts of people saying they were recently talking about a particular subject and the next thing they knew...

Popular Science has an interesting article published that discusses how Facebook is surely watching you and how to go about finding out what exactly you are easily exposing. It runs down a fairly big set of instructions of what you can do to check into that exposure. It outlines what to look...

As tech companies hold more and more power over what information is disseminated to the unwashed masses (that's us), the US Government is now pushing behind the scenes to get a look under the hood as to what exactly is going on with how that information is pushed out. I doubt those answers are...

If you were looking to buy your own "Doxagram" domain, you better get after it quickly as it is reported by Graham Cluley that Instagram and Facebook have purchased 280 domains containing "Doxagram." It seems that all of this is happening to head off hackers that recently exploited a...

While Facebook is still busy trying to do "some evil," Bloomberg reports that insiders are saying the company is offering up to pay for the music rights its users upload in their videos. Videos posted on Facebook have gone up considerably, but quite a few are taken down due to infringing...

According to this report, Mark Zuckerberg's profile cannot be blocked and you will be able to see his all his precious life updates. Apparently there is a quirk in how Facebook blocks users when there are multiple requests to block said user in a "short time." Also, Zuckerberg's wife, Priscilla...

Researchers at Brigham Young University have learned that most users of popular messaging apps Facebook Messenger, What’sApp and Viber are leaving themselves exposed to fraud or other hacking because they don’t know about or aren’t using important security options. Even though What’sApp and...

Facebook has a clever way to figure out what apps to build next. The social network reportedly has an internal system that tracks up-and-coming apps to decide what ideas to copy from smaller startups and companies, according to a report in the WSJ. Using technology from Onavo, an Israeli startup...

Professor of psychology Jean M. Twenge, has written an incredible article on how the Smartphone and social media has been shaping a generation, and it does not look good. In it she goes into the sharp swings in characteristics including fleeting desire for independence and dating, as well as...

It was widely reported yesterday that Facebook "had to" shut down its AI chatbot program because the AI started having conversations in their own language, and of course we all know what happens when that happens. It however seems that a lot of folks ran with a story that was not quite on...

In order to attract content creators and combat video piracy, Facebook acquired the content rights management startup Source3. This is one of several acquisitions the company is bringing into its fold to help content creators make money through its rights management technology by fingerprinting...

I have been watching this story out of Lithuania for about a month now and it has come to somewhat of a head. Evaldas Rimasauskas, a Lithuanian man, has been in custody since March of this year at the request of the U.S. Justice Department. He is suspected of swindling companies out of over...

You have to wonder how people can be this stupid, but let's look at the bright side, if you are going to kidnap and rape someone, the rest of us can feel some sort of comfort that these idiots were stupid enough to document their crimes and put those on Facebook Live. That should make the...

While the EU is going whole-hog (not an Angela Merkel reference) on Google, fining it billions of dollars, our Ukrainian comrades to the east...or west, guess it depends how you want to get there, actually use Facebook and Youtube as "backups." During all the ransomware nastiness last week, it...

Aquila, the first functional drone aircraft from Facebook, took on its second successful test flight at a total flight time of 1 hr and 46 minutes. The drone flew above 3,000 feet and successfully landed this time as opposed to the crash after the first test flight. The goal of the drone is to...

We've been joking of skynet becoming sentient for years, we've now entered the time-loop that will eventually lead us there. In a story from The Atlantic, researchers at FAIR lab, short for Facebook AI Research, have discovered a couple of bots have made their own non-human language when...

Adding difficulty in acquiring the popular devices, Facebook has changed the terms of their marketplace to effectively ban sales of streaming media players known for accessing illegal or pirated content. The removal comes on the heels of similar decisions made by eBay and Amazon to block the...

Facebook announced yesterday evening that it will be shutting down it's Oculus Story film studio. This has been a quite surprising move to many in the industry, as the studio has been the recipient of awards, notably an Emmy for it's interactive short-story Henry, about a lonely, prickly...

Facebook, at their yearly developer conference F8, has unveiled new 360 degree video cameras. The model x24 and x6 cameras not only capture video in 360 degrees, but add depth information also. This gives the cameras six degrees of freedom or 6DoF. When viewing the video with a VR headset...

In a move that some say is intended to take on Twitch, Facebook is now allowing live video streams from computers. Previously this feature was limited to mobile users. While this feature has been available to Pages for a while, now it has been opened up to all user accounts. Great, just...

The European Commission is at it again, threatening to fine social media companies over consumer protection regulations. (Caution, link contains a video which plays automatically) This time it is over their slow response time in removing abusive, illegal, threatening or slanderous content...

The Zenimax vs Carmack saga rolls on as John Carmack was denied the right to receive the remaining $22.5 million in cash owed to him for the sale of id Software to Zenimax in 2009 or convert it to Zenimax stock according to a legal challenge filed in Dallas, TX court on March 7, 2017. Zenimax...

So, let me see if I understand what happened here. The BBC was doing a story on how Facebook removes illegal an abusive images from its network. As part of this story, they noticed that some reported images had not been removed, so they reached out to Facebook for comment. Facebook...

Facebook is in talks with Major League Baseball to livestream a game a week. Sporting events are one of the last forms of content that is normally viewed live. Having an audience on at a certain time period will allow Facebook to attract and advertise to fans of the sport. MLB is seeking to...

Google has announced WebVR support for their Google Chrome browser. WebVR allows anyone running the Google Chrome browser to convert their device into a VR platform. There are interactive VR videos that for example allow you to track a bear from being freed from a trap, until being released...

Is Facebook using your Oculus Rift to spy on you? That's the question UploadVR is asking after a University of California, Davis researcher has come forward demonstrating how easy it is to pull image data off of an Oculus. Oculus is adamant that this is not the case, and image data is only...

A lot of really good stuff announced today. Oculus Touch Is $199, Shipping December 6th, Final Design Revealed Three new previously unannounced Touch game Lone Echo from Ready At Dawn Games Robo Recall from Epic Games Arktika 1 from 4A Games A -very- brief look at Oculus Quill How...

OK, it is a slow news afternoon....

Via Reddit: Oculus's services are always on and you should be concerned. • /r/oculus When you install Oculus Home a background service with full permissions is spun up and never spun down. This service is used to detect when the rift is turned on so it can automatically launch the rift, but it...