Everyone breaks a phone every once in a while. But if you break your new HTC One it’s a little less soul-crushing. HTC says it will fix your cracked display for free in the first six months, even if it’s your fault. Read more…
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HTC Will Fix Your Busted Screen For Free in the First Six Months
Two recently restored statues of Amenhotep III were recently unveiled in Luxor, Egypt, along with a carved alabaster head from another Amenhotep III statue. Chunks of these artifacts had lain about for centuries, but they’ve finally been restored to give us a sense of their former glory. Read more…
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These Absolutely Huge Pharaoh Statues Were Just Unveiled In Egypt
Facebook continues to tighten the screws on the businesses that use the service to market to their customers. Independent research shows that new updates from businesses reach about six percent of the people who follow those businesses. It is rumored that Facebook intends to reduce this number to “between one and two percent” over time. Businesses that want to reach the people who follow them at higher rates will have to pay Facebook to reach them through paid advertisements. If you’re building your business’s marketing and customer relations strategy atop Facebook, take note — and remember that if you have a real website, all your readers see your posts, even if you don’t pay Facebook! Facebook declined to comment on the percentage of fans that see posts from a typical Facebook page (the last publicly disclosed figure was 16 percent in the summer of 2012), but the company admitted in December that posts from Pages are reaching less users. Facebook attributes this change to increased competition as more people and companies join its service. The typical user is inundated with 1,500 posts per day from friends and Pages, and Facebook picks 300 to present in the News Feed. Getting squeezed out are both posts from Pages and meme photos as Facebook shifts its focus to what it deems “high quality” content. The solution for brands with declining engagement, according to Facebook, is to buy ads. “Like many mediums, if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. The Free Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook [Victor Luckerson/Time] ( Image: flaming LIKE , a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from zaigee’s photostream )
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Unless companies pay, their Facebook updates reach 6 percent of followers
Facebook has been working on facial recognition for years to auto-tag photographs, but has now reached a point where its technology is ‘ closely approaching human-level performance .’ In fact, in some ways it might even be better. Read more…
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Facebook’s Facial Recognition ‘Approaching Human-Level Performance’
The words ‘organization chart’ are usually enough to make anyone’s eyes glaze over—but this, the first modern example of such a visualization , is actually incredibly pretty. Read more…
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This Was the First Modern Organization Chart
The day after a Snowden leak revealed that the NSA builds fake versions of Facebook and uses them to seed malicious software in attacks intended to hijack “millions” of computers, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg telephoned President Obama to complain about the NSA’s undermining of the Internet’s integrity. As many have pointed out, it would have been nice to hear Zuckerberg taking the Internet’s side before his own stock portfolio was directly affected, but better late than never. Zuckerberg’s post on his conversation excoriates the US government for its Internet sabotage campaign, and calls on the USG to “be the champion for the internet, not a threat.” Curiously, Zuckerberg calls for “transparency” into the NSA’s attacks on the Internet, but stops short of calling for an end to government-sponsored attacks against the net. In the end, though, Zuckerberg calls on companies to do a better job of securing themselves and their users against intrusive spying. It’s not clear how that will work for Facebook, though: its business model is predicated on tricking, cajoling, and siphoning personal data out of its users and warehousing it forever in a neat package that governments are unlikely to ignore. I’m told that 90% of US divorce proceedings today include Facebook data; this is a microcosm of the wider reality when you make it your business to stockpile the evidentiary chain of every human being’s actions. The internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world. This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government. The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst. I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform. So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I’m committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part. As the world becomes more complex and governments everywhere struggle, trust in the internet is more important today than ever. ( Image: Mark Zuckerberg Facebook SXSWi 2008 Keynote , a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from deneyterrio’s photostream )
The CIA’s Inspector General has asked the Justice Department to consider criminally charging CIA agents who spied on a senate committee that was engaged in writing a report that was highly critical of the CIA’s use of torture. Senator Mark Udall, who sits on a CIA oversight committee and whose staff was spied on by the CIA alleges that the CIA surveilled overseeing senators and their staff with Obama’s knowledge and consent. In a recent hearing, Senator Ron Wyden asked the CIA director repeatedly whether the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America’s major anti-hacking statute, applied to the CIA, and whether the CIA spied domestically. CIA director John Brennan replied “yes” and “no,” respectively. If Udall’s allegations are correct, this means that Brennan lied to Congress (in the second instance) and committed a felony (in the first instance). The report that caused some CIA agents to spy on their bosses was about how the CIA was wasting time, getting nowhere and doing something illegal and cruel when it kidnapped terror suspects and tortured the shit out of them. McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings. Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles. “As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday. Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims [Spencer Ackerman/The Guardian]
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CIA spied on Senate committee writing damning torture report and Obama knew about it
The Delhi police lost the password for a portal that hosted complaints that had been passed on by the Central Vigilance Commission after an initial vetting. 667 complaints had been judged serious enough to be passed onto the police since the password was lost in 2006, but none have been acted upon, because no one had the password. Now they have the password. Presumably, the 667 unserved complainants believed the police to be either too slow or incompetent to have gotten back to them. Each Delhi government department under the CVC, including the MCD, DDA and several investigating agencies, have a chief vigilance officer to look into complaints. If a complaint reaches the CVC, either it tackles it independently or it sends it to the concerned department. In 2006, a portal monitored by the CVC was created, putting the complaints it sent to departments online. Each department could access the portal with a password. Complaints regarding the Delhi Police were also sent to the portal. Every year, the CVC holds meetings with government departments to take stock of the complaints with them. Sources said that since 2006, the CVC had got no feedback on complaints pending with the police. Vigilance complaints pile up as Delhi Police doesn’t know password [Shalini Narayan/Indian Express] ( via BBC News )
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Delhi police lost password for complaints portal in 2006, haven’t checked it since
To clarify, the @HSCIC story that’s coming is, I believe, infinitely worse than patient hospital records being uploaded to Google BigQuery — ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) March 3, 2014 PA Consulting, a management consulting firm, obtained the entire English and Welsh hospital episode statistics database and uploaded it to Google’s Bigquery service . The stats filled 27 DVDs and took “a couple of weeks” to transfer to Google’s service, which is hosted in non-EU data centres. This is spectacularly illegal. The NHS dataset includes each patient’s NHS number, post code, address, date of birth and gender, as well as all their inpatient, outpatient and emergency hospital records. Google’s Bigquery service allows for full data-set sharing with one click. The news of the breach comes after the collapse of a scheme under which the NHS would sell patient records to pharma companies, insurers and others (there was no easy way to opt out of the scheme, until members of the public created the independent Fax Your GP service ). According to researcher and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre, this story is just the beginning: there’s an “infinitely worse” story that is coming shortly. Sarah Wollaston, who is also a family doctor and Conservative backbencher, tweeted: “So HES [hospital episode statistics] data uploaded to ‘google’s immense army of servers’, who consented to that?” The patient information had been obtained by PA Consulting, which claimed to have secured the “entire start-to-finish HES dataset across all three areas of collection – inpatient, outpatient and A&E”. The data set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload. The management consultants said: “Within two weeks of starting to use the Google tools we were able to produce interactive maps directly from HES queries in seconds.” The revelations alarmed campaigners and privacy experts, who queried how Google maps could have been used unless some location data had been provided in the patient information files. NHS England patient data ‘uploaded to Google servers’, Tory MP says [Randeep Ramesh/The Guardian] ( via Charlie Stross )
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Full NHS hospital records uploaded to Google servers, "infinitely worse" story to come
Two thousand ago, the Thomas Edison of the ancient world lived in Alexandria, Egypt where he tinkered, built and wrote about some of the most amazing and whimsical machines the pre-industrial world had ever seen. Read more…
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The Amazing Ancient Machines of Hero of Alexandria