While social games foster collaboration and competition, they have also been home to hostile communities, where harassment and uncivil behavior can run rampant and make headlines. Some online multiplayer games have become so ridden with profanity that many players disable chat functions.
Yet games are an enduring medium; more than 90 percent of teens play video games, according to a 2018 Pew survey. And some educators and researchers are optimistic that, with the right guidance and oversight, kids can pick up healthy habits even as they engross themselves in yet another Fortnite battle royale.
Apple CEO Tim Cook today commented on the opportunities Apple sees in the video market, though he declined to provide details on the company’s specific plans.
Cook said that Apple sees “huge changes” taking place in customer behavior, which the company expects to “accelerate as the year goes by.” Specifically, Cook said that Apple is expecting an acceleration of the breakdown of the cable bundle. “I think it’ll likely take place at a much faster pace this year,” he said.
Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits.
Encoding biases into machine learning models, and in general into the constructs we refer to as AI, is nearly inescapable — but we can sure do better than we have in past years. IBM is hoping that a new database of a million faces more reflective of those in the real world will help.
Copyright and publishing law is complex enough, but once remixed enter into the equation, the amount of gray area can often double. Here Chris Robley details some of the complications that exist, and what steps you should take to make sure a remixer is compensated appropriately.
TV ad buying is unlikely to follow the real-time bidding (RTB) model that became popular with digital advertising.
However, many advertising tasks, including reporting, creative placement and measurement, are likely to become more automated, according to Nicolle Pangis, CEO of NCC Media.
Ours is the data-driven age. Arguments and claims made in the media and in the academy are backed up with harvested “empirical” information drawn from data collection technologies that make dystopian cybernetic dreams seem like relics from the ancient past. Data sets control what we see on our internet searches, social media feeds, and television screens, yet that process of selection remains deliberately obscured. Data as a methodology percolates through every area of the university, and new appointments (even in the so-called “arts”) reward scholars who apply data analytics software to understand everything from gender to poetry. Mobile apps manage everything from eating habits to menstrual cycles using data-formatted algorithms, while “smart condoms” collect sexual movements into large aggregated sets which set a new blueprint for the sexual future.
They Slacked. They messaged on Signal. They circulated pledges on Google Docs. They talked on the phone. They spoke quietly to one another in the cafeteria and spoke up at company-wide meetings. Whether it was protesting projects with ICE and the Chinese government or walking out to demand better treatment of women, political activism has entered tech with a force that the industry has never experienced.
We were once responsible for describing our own tastes, which meant we sometimes lied about them. At the very least, we had strategically selective memories.
But streaming services have put an end to that. Each year-end now brings massive number dumps from the likes of Spotify and Netflix, as if to remind us exactly how much personal information they can hoover up through users’ relationship to entertainment. Perversely enough — and to a strange acclaim in the world of creative marketing — these two digital giants have used their extensive findings to roast their outlying customers.
The iPhone has simply been too good of a business. And it’s hard to see what tops it. Certainly in the near term. If Services is to carry Apple in the future, it will likely be only after years of relatively stagnant iPhone revenue growth mixed with a rising overall market. In other words, time and the broader world will have to catch up. And then Apple can have their “Microsoft Moment” — a services-based resurrection of growth.
With 5G networks about to remake the internet, the Trump administration fears decisions made in the next six months on China’s role will resonate for decades.
The strange saga of a fake female gamer and her encounter with the misogynistic world of e-sports. Women who compete professionally in e-sports face heckling from teammates and fans, and are sometimes accused of serving as fronts for male players. At the same time, team owners with an eye toward reaching a potentially gigantic untapped market of young female viewers remain eager to diversify their rosters to provide an entry point for girls who might never have thought of video
MARK WROTE: “Facebook turns 15 next month. When I started Facebook, I wasn’t trying to build a global company. I realized you could find almost anything on the internet — music, books, information — except the thing that matters most: people. So I built a service people could use to connect and learn about each other. Over the years, billions have found this useful, and we’ve built more services that people around the world love and use every day. Recently I’ve heard many questions about our business model, so I want to explain the principles of how we operate.”
KARA TRANSLATES: We old now. We big now. It came from my one really good idea: AOL sucked and I could do better and I did. Now the noise has reached me up on Billionaire Mountain, so I am going to have to pretend that I care.
