Ihr PC lahmt, die Tastatur klemmt, ihr Notebook wird immer lauter? Dann wirds Zeit für einen kleinen Frühjahrsputz. c't hat Tipps zusammengestellt, wie Sie Rechner, Monitor und Drucker schadlos vom Schmutz befreien können.
Quelle: Heise Tech News
Just after 3:00 A.M. last Friday morning, Huffington Post contributor and progressive advocate Alex Mohajer set to work on a brief investigative project on Twitter. Pulling together red marker-circled articles, graphs, and screenshots from numerous financial websites, he rifled off 16 tweets with prosecutorial zeal and one ambitious goal: to build a compelling case linking Donald Trump to Russia’s $11 Billion sale of its oil giant, Rosneft.
“It’s getting harder to ignore growing evidence that Trump was involved with Russian oil deal,” Mohajer wrote after compling his tweets into a longer Twitter Moments thread. “CONCLUSION? Koch-backed front cos financed climate deniers/alt-right, took control of govt while Trump diverts attn for Exxon, Koch, Rosneft,” he wrote. A minute later he offered a hedge: “ALTERNATIVE CONCLUSION: I am batshit crazy and need some sleep! Good night world. I will be curious to see if others are able to confirm.”
Mohajer wasn’t wrong to assume that others might try to confirm his tweetstorm. Since the election, he’s emerged as one of a number of vigilante investigators dutifully entering evidence into Twitter’s court of public opinion in hope of exposing corruption in Trumpland. Now that Trump is exercising his presidential power, the tweetstorms are intensifying — and growing ever-more conspiratorial. Unlike their more fantastical Infowars analogs, these vigilante investigators steer clear of explicit allegations, hewing instead to grave insinuations. Their evidence is almost exclusively rooted in already-published reporting; They sift through the tea leaves of unconnected media stories, raising questions yet to be answered by the professionals.
Call it the Alex Jonesification of the left or the rise of the Blue Detectives — the pure id of a strand of conspiratorial thought of the left and the anti-Trump movement. It’s intriguing and eyeroll-inspiring all at once, but for the #resistance crowd it’s a mooring force. Most of all, it’s an effective messaging tactic: it’s designed to go viral, to spark outrage — and perhaps even action.
If you spend enough time online, you’ll see Blue Detectives springing up everywhere. Two weeks ago, Google engineer Yonatan Zunger’s wrote a post on Medium that went viral. In it, he laid out a succession of “raw news reports” suggesting that the haphazard rollout and enforcement of Trump’s refugee ban across the country “was the trial balloon for a coup d’etat against the United States.” In the spirit of Silicon Valley A/B testing “it gave them useful information,” he argued. But as some, including Slate, have pointed out, Zunger’s post sometimes elides fact in favor of intrigue; His suggestion that the Department of Homeland Security could become a force loyal to the President alone, for example, does not acknowledge that DHS secretary Kelly was reportedly unaware of the administration's immigration order until just moments before Trump signed it.
On Twitter, especially, the Blue Detectives are increasingly active in theorizing that Trump and his associates are involved in a dizzying multi-dimensional plot — and, crucially, are always ten steps ahead of the American public. Perhaps the most infamous example comes from technology and business strategist Eric Garland’s “game theory” tweetstorm, which suggests a cunning on the part of the Trump administration and Russia to distract, dodge, and outwit the American public while bolstering its coffers and power. That 127-tweet screed plows through the last few decades of U.S. foreign policy ultimately arriving at a patriotic-but-empty conclusion, devoid of any compelling revelations about Russia.
This new online conspiracy culture can’t be fully divorced from an election affected more than usual by an actual conspiracy. Russian interference in favor of Trump was open, on state media, and covert, through hacking, which has been widely and convincingly documented. Intelligence agencies have also begun to confirm the credibility, CNN and BuzzFeed News reported Friday, of some elements of a dossier assembled by a former top British spy — though not the most lurid allegations of Russian blackmail. And the Washington Post recently reported that Trump’s National Security Advisor, Mike Flynn, had made false statements about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
Meanwhile on Twitter, writers with a flair for what could be true and a good sense for their audience have taken those investigations well past the brink of what they know. The most effective of the bunch is Adam Khan, a former marketing consultant and tech guru turned Twitter investigator. Khan, who goes by the handle @khanoisseur, is an indefatigable presence on Twitter. Each day he monomaniacally strings together observations, charts and images into detailed tweetstorms that rack up thousands of retweets. None of them make news, but they raise questions and do attract eyeballs.
The images —mostly screenshots from deeply reported coverage of Russia and the Trump organization — are frequently annotated with red type, arrows and lines that encourage the reader to follow Khan’s logic. Veterans of forums like Reddit will see aesthetic parallels between Khan’s work and some of that site’s more conspiratorial r/findbostonbombers-style threads.
It is a digital updating of Glenn Beck’s famous blackboard, whose eraser was especially effective on the distinction between correlation and causation. But this is a form of vigilante investigation that’s native to the internet; Gawker once described it as “Chart Brut — a digital middle-ground between the string-and-thumbtack cork-board flowcharts favored by premium cable obsessives like Rust Cohle and Carrie Mathison and the meaningless tangles of agency responsibilities beloved by security-apparatus bureaucrats.”
Khan — who wrote an e-book on how to gain followers and influence on Twitter — uses the social network because he sees it as a direct line to journalists and big thinkers. He views his job as building flow charts of publicly available information to raise the big questions. “I’m not manufacturing anything new,” he told BuzzFeed News. “But I’m taking this piece of reporting from this journalist and showing clearly how it aligns with something else out there. And put together, I think it shows there&039;s a bigger story. If nothing else, I hope my work leads to more people doing their own investigative journalism.”
Zunger&039;s doctored State Department org chart from his Medium post, “Trial Balloon For a Coup?”
Just after the election, Khan quit his freelance consulting job to pursue the Trump investigations full-time. He has so far raised nearly $14,000 on GoFundMe in support of this effort. If he raises enough money, he may write a book. When he spoke to BuzzFeed News in late January, Khan said he’d been getting DMs from government sources with potential tips — among them, one from someone claiming to have a line on Trump’s still undisclosed tax returns.
Recently, Khan riled the tech world with a 23-tweet thread musing about possible ties between Russia, Trump senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner and some of the startups in which he’s invested. “The more I dive into Russian-backed/Kushners&039; data collection efforts, the more I&039;m convinced there&039;s a bigger strategy,” Khan tweeted with a link to a different thread on the Kushner brothers’ investments. “Trump potentially has his own shadow NSA,” he further mused. Left unsaid, a crucial caveat: Kushner investments, made via a venture capital company called Thrive do not appear to give the Kushners operational control of the companies in which they invest. The thread checks all the boxes of the viral anti-Trump conspiracy: it’s well-researched, endlessly intriguing, and unsupported by evidence.
The internet has historically been a near perfect incubator for conspiracy theories. Not long after the attacks of 9/11 average citizens flocked to Blogspot accounts dedicated to vigilante investigations of the events leading up to that day. The same happened after Hurricane Katrina, with blogs launching serious amateur analysis of the collapse of New Orleans’ levees. A decade ago, conspiracy-minded bloggers made major contributions to reporting around everything from George W. Bush&039;s national guard service to intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq more.
Once these sorts of efforts were largely confined to obscure message boards, little known blogs, and occasionally AM talk radio. Their prominent voices tended to be volatile fringe figures who’d rarely appear in public. More recently — particularly with the advent of the Trump era — they’ve attained much greater visibility. Today, the work of the Blue Detectives and those on the far right is amplified and extended by same-minded people sharing what they want to believe — a byproduct of the social media echo chambers that birthed “fake news.” Once peddled by anonymous tin foil hat-wearers, even utterly unfounded conspiratorial musings are now disseminated by tech employees, opinion journalists —and even some of the left’s well known voices.
Take former United States Labor secretary Robert Reich — a regular on cable news and a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. Two weeks ago, after a planned visit-turned-riot by Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, Reich penned a blog post about the event titled “A Yiannopoulos, Bannon, Trump Plot to Control American Universities?”
In their coverage of the riot, far right outlets including Breitbart News had suggested the Trump administration pull federal funding for the school. Reich’s response took a conspiratorial page from the far-right, suggesting that “the possibility that Yiannopoulos and Breitbart were in cahoots with the agitators in order to lay the groundwork for a Trump crackdown on universities and their federal funding.” While not a tweetstorm, Reich made his case in a familiar bulleted list. “Hmmm. Connect these dots,” he wrote before rattling off six semi-related points connecting Yiannopoulos to Breitbart and then the Trump administration. “I don’t want to add to the conspiratorial musings of so many about this very conspiratorial administration, but it strikes me there may be something worrying going on here,” he concluded.
The post is a textbook example of a Blue Detective conspiracy musing. It’s a bit ridiculous, but not quite out of the realm of possibility. It attempts to use well reported information to “connect the dots” and raise an ultimately unanswerable question. And it ends, like so many Blue Detective theories, with a self-effacing nod to readers. Yes, I know how crazy this sounds.
In person, Reich is more cautious about shifting the political discourse toward conspiracy theories. “That fringe stuff is out there more and more and that&039;s dangerous,” he told BuzzFeed News last week. “If we become a conspiracy society, we all carry around a degree of paranoia and that&039;s not healthy for democracy. And that&039;s why transparency is so critically important — we now have a responsibility to call a lie a lie.”
This desire for transparency is a key engine of the Blue Detectives. Its emergence is a side-effect of the rise of the Upside Down conservative media, which, along with its “alternative facts,” audience, and interpretation of the truth, has created two opposing political realities. “We’re way beyond having factual disputes now,” Reich said. “What we’re faced with are bald faced lies and it’s important to be extremely clear about what&039;s a lie and what&039;s true.” With basic facts in dispute, efforts by the anti-Trump resistance to monopolize truth have manifested in a peculiar role reversal. While the far right is building a media ecosystem that looks and feels a lot like the mainstream, some on the left are beginning to resemble the more conspiratorial fringes of the far-right. The resemblance is most uncanny when the two universes intersect, like this conspiratorial tweet about Infowars, which feels like it could have been written by Alex Jones himself:
But the emergence of the Blue Detectives is also a pointed critique of the mainstream press. The message: the media isn’t doing its job so we’ll do the legwork for them. Near the end of his Medium post, Zunger admitted as much. “Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.” Adam Khan agrees.
“No question there was a huge failing among the media during this last election,” Khan said. He argued that the press is in “trance mode” when it comes to Trump and his distractions. “There’s so much to be chased down in a Woodward and Bernstein manner and so my job is to ask the questions for others to answer. To ask ‘Why? Why isn&039;t anyone else pursuing this angle?’” Khan believes without the right pressure and grassroots investigations from people like him, Trump will only claim more power. “There’s a need to apply more pressure to the press,” he said. “It’s sad, but if that&039;s what it&039;ll take to get the accountability, we’ll do it.”
In keeping with the tradition of the Blue Detectives, Khan is self-aware and by no means reckless. “You have to be careful because you don&039;t want to get into Alex Jones territory,” he joked. “You can’t run around yelling and making accusations. It’s about recognizing patterns that then require more digging.” Khan for his part is constantly thinking about his tone and how frequently he posts in order not to appear like somebody who’s taken his conspiracy too far. “How you do it divides you from somebody who’s asking the questions our senators and media should’ve asked and somebody who&039;s a conspiracy theorist.”
Members of the Upside Down media are paying attention, too. “It’s even happening to people who have reputations in the media for being pretty normal,” new right blogger and Twitter personality, Mike Cernovich told BuzzFeed News. “I saw this great meme the other day that said if there’s ever a terrorist attack in America under Trump the left is going to go full Infowars. And I think that’s totally true.” For Cernovich, the rise of the left’s conspiracy-theory tendencies is an opportunity to appeal to a broader audience.
“Honestly, that’s why I’ve pivoted with my brand and my trolling today compared to a year ago is mild,” he said. While Cernovich is still waging a Twitter war against the mainstream media and the left, his admitted softening highlights just how much the roles of the duelling media ecosystems of the far left and far right have reversed.
“They’ve adopted that fringe level mentality aggressively,” Cernovich said. “People on left are making themselves look ridiculous and so I see it as an opportunity to look reasonable by comparison.”
Caroline O’Donovan contributed reporting to this story.
Quelle: <a href="Behind The Rise Of The Anti-Trump Twitter Conspiracy Theorists“>BuzzFeed
Vor rund vier Jahren erntete Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel Hohn und Spott für ihren Spruch: "Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland". Doch sie hat Recht, findet c't-Redakteur Christof Windeck.
Quelle: Heise Tech News
On February 10, behind closed doors in San Francisco, national organizers of the Women's March on Washington met with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and other tech executives to discuss the ongoing role of social media in organizing demonstrations over issues like reproductive rights, immigration and civil rights, which some fear could be under threat from Donald Trump&039;s presidency. At a separate meeting earlier in the day, organizers also met Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
“We&039;re here to ask, &039;how can tech be a part of the resistance?&039;” said Reshma Saujani, one of the march&039;s national organizers and CEO of the nonprofit Girls Who Code. “We came to talk about what role will they play as we make sure we’re standing up for undocumented immigrants, those affected by the Muslim ban, and other marginalized communities. We felt like we could find allies in the tech community, and we have.”
Jenna Arnold, one of the march&039;s national organizers, said she was thankful that many social media platforms had “generously fast-tracked a lot of the things we needed.” Arnold said that Sandberg and Dorsey were also eager for feedback from the march organizers on how their platforms were helpful.
From left: Paola Mendoza, Reshma Saujani, Jack Dorsey, Carmen Perez, and Jenna Arnold.
The Women&039;s March began as a Facebook event, and it continues to use social media, primarily Facebook and Twitter, to disseminate information and issue calls to action, though Carmen Perez, one of the four national co-chairs and executive director of the nonprofit Gathering for Justice, stressed that it must be complemented with face-to-face interaction.
“We&039;re hoping that social media can continue to help us move people, policy, and energy, so we came here to discuss how to improve those partnerships,” Paula Mendoza, artistic director for the Women&039;s March, said.
From left: Women&039;s March organizers Reshma Saujani, Jenna Arnold, Carmen Perez, and Paola Mendoza.
Blake Montgomery
The Women&039;s March is in the process of rolling out 10 actions protesters can take during the first 100 days of the Trump administration, some of which will likely involve social media, according to Saujani.
“It would be weird if we weren&039;t using social media to amplify our message, our partners&039; messages, and what everyday women are saying,” Saujani said.
Allison Johnson, Apple&039;s former vice president of worldwide marketing communications, hosted a reception at the chic Presidio offices of her San Francisco marketing agency West along with photographers, painters, filmmakers, and other artists. People at the reception wrote wishes on notecards, dreams on white balloons, and visions of 2020 on long rolls of brown paper. Katie Stanton, former Twitter VP of global media, hosted a luncheon for the organizers and tech industry heads at the same space earlier in the day.
“The Women&039;s March is all about trusted networks,” Johnson said. “I had never met Paola Mendoza before, but when she called last week to say they were coming to San Francisco, I knew we had to host them and that it would be great.”
California Women&039;s March organizers.
Blake Montgomery
At the reception, Mendoza announced that the Women&039;s March would call for protests and vigils at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices in response to recent raids across the country. Perez said her own extended family had been affected by ICE&039;s actions in Los Angeles.
“The Women&039;s March and our continued actions are a reminder that we are powerful,” she said while addressing the crowd. She called on them to protect and support undocumented immigrants.
Sandberg&039;s attendance of President Trump&039;s tech summit and absence from any Women&039;s March has earned her criticism from some women in Silicon Valley. Reshma Saujani, a Women&039;s March national organizer and CEO of the nonprofit Girls Who Code, told BuzzFeed News after their meeting that she believed Sandberg was “an unequivocal advocate for the Women&039;s March. Period.”
According to the organizers, neither the executives they met with nor the companies they lead will be donating money to the Women&039;s March.
“Though we will need money in the future, and it&039;s an easy and obvious ask, we weren&039;t here to ask for that,” Mendoza said. “There are more important things than money at this moment. The Women&039;s March is, after all, only 12 weeks old, and we&039;ve pulled off one of the largest gatherings in human history.”
The reception was a thank you to the city- and state-level organizers of the “sister marches” in California that happened January 21st alongside the titular march on Washington. A number of the California organizers had never been involved in activism before, and several of them met for the first time at the reception, gleefully exchanging differing perspectives on their work together.
The 13 marches across the Golden state boasted roughly 1.1 million protesters, accounting for one in three Americans who participated in the protest , the largest in the nation&039;s history, according to the organizers.
Carolyn Jasik, lead organizer for California, announced at the event that the state&039;s affiliated marches would host a statewide voter registration event on May 13, which would kick off a year&039;s worth of planning and preparation for the 2018 congressional elections.
“It&039;s not enough just to vote in these times,” she said. “You have to be an active voter. That&039;s what we&039;re interested in cultivating.”
As Arnold addressed the crowd and especially the California organizers, she said that their work was a gift because “we don&039;t have a grand solution, though people are looking to us for one.”
When asked what to expect next from the Women&039;s March, Mendoza said that people should look for both short-term planning that reacts to president Trump&039;s executive orders and long-term strategy for actions like the upcoming general strike, date TBD.
“What happened on the 21st didn&039;t stop on the 21st,” Perez said. “It was a catalyst for people to act now.”
Facebook and Twitter have not yet responded to requests for comment.
Quelle: <a href="Women&039;s March Organizers Met With Jack Dorsey And Sheryl Sandberg“>BuzzFeed
Bunte Tüte in c't uplink: Neben verwirrenden USB-C-Seltsamkeiten wird über das Elektroschockarmband Pavlok, Internet im Flugzeug, das Xiaomi Mi Mix, das Honor 6X, Android Wear 2.0 und über Smartwatches diskutiert.
Quelle: Heise Tech News
Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Evan Vucci / AP
Jose Moran, the Tesla employee who’s leading the effort to form a union at the company’s 6,200-person factory in Fremont, CA, said he’s “disappointed” in Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s reaction to his concerns about working conditions and desire to join a union.
In an interview with Gizmodo, Musk called “the attack” on Tesla working conditions to be “morally outrageous” and accused Moran of being a operative hired by the UAW to agitate for a union. Moran categorically denied that he is on the union payroll, saying of Musk, “It goes to show what kind of respect he has for workers’ opinions.”
On the call, Moran, who says he’s worked in Tesla’s facility for over four years, said it’s not uncommon for him and his fellow workers on Tesla's production line — 200 of whom he said are members of a Facebook group where they discuss work-related issues — to work 10 to 12 hour days. Moran said he first reached out to the UAW in 2013, not long after workers were asked to work 12-hour shifts three days in a row. In his comments to Gizmodo, Musk said Tesla is in the process of phasing out the practice known at Tesla as “mandatory overtime.” Moran, who was a union member in the past when he worked for NUMMI, the auto manufacturer that previously operated in the current Tesla facility, said the practice has decreased somewhat since he started working at Tesla.
In addition to long hours, Moran’s grievances with Tesla include what he describes as comparatively low pay and unsafe working conditions, specifically repeated stress that can lead to ergonomic injuries. According to his LinkedIn profile, Moran is an UnderBody team lead in the Body Center at Tesla&039;s factory. In his Medium post, Moran said six of his eight coworkers were recently out of work on medical leave due to injuries that resulted from working long hours on “machinery…often not ergonomically compatible with our bodies.”
Here&039;s Moran discussing his concerns about working conditions at Tesla in a video posted to the union campaign&039;s Facebook page.
Tesla did not immediately respond to request for comment on this story. In his comments to Gizmodo, Musk described his position as “union neutral,” adding that Tesla is “the last car company left in California, because costs are so high.”
Tesla’s has a rocky track record with California’s Department of Occupational Safety and Health. A 2014 electrical explosion at the Fremont facility led to serious injuries for one employee and hefty fines for Tesla. In 2013, three employees were burned by molten aluminum, which CalOSHA found to be the result of training and safety failures. (Musk later visited them at the hospital.) More recently, a Fremont Tesla employee was struck by a forklift in 2015. There were three health and safety inspections at Tesla’s Fremont facility in 2016, two of which are ongoing.
Moran didn’t comment on any past or current OSHA inspections during Friday’s call, but he did say that he felt union representation would make working at Tesla’s factory safer. “I think the union is good because we can work to prevent … injuries,” he said, “and have a more involved safety and health representative.”
In an interview with Marketwatch earlier this week, Fremont’s mayor Lily Mei praised the economic impact the company has had on the city. But not all local elected officials are as enthusiastic. Earlier this year, five lawmakers sent a letter to Tesla, expressing concerns that employees had been denied the right to speak openly about working conditions in the factory.
“While I greatly respect and admire Tesla’s achievements in creating eco-friendly automobiles and green jobs right here in California, I want to ensure worker rights are protected and that they are provided a safe working environment,” wrote Assemblymember Kansen Chu, one of the letter’s signatories, in an email to BuzzFeed News.
This isn’t the first time Tesla has had trouble with unions. A year ago, union construction workers walked off the job at Tesla’s “gigafactory” in Nevada over hiring practices.
Meanwhile, in Fremont, a representative for the Building & Construction Trades Council of Alameda County told BuzzFeed News that his organization, which previously placed contracted union workers at NUMMI, hadn’t succeeded in winning the same deal with Tesla. Earlier this week, the Building & Construction Trades Council of Alameda County wrote an open letter asking Tesla to consider “using skilled Alameda County Building Trades workers on your Fremont plant expansion.”
“The quality of our skilled workers and local residents meets the high standards of Tesla,” the letter reads. “Working together, we can build on the Labor-Tech partnerships other tech leaders such as Apple, Facebook and Google have successfully implemented as the model of innovation moving forward.”
Multiple Tesla employees reached for comment on the union issue by BuzzFeed News declined to discuss the issue. On the conference call, Moran said, to his knowledge, no employees have been fired or otherwise retaliated against for discussing unionization, but he did say that fear of intimidation made him concerned about speaking out. He said his coworkers’ response to the letter was overwhelmingly positive. “I had quite a few people come up to me and congratulate me for speaking up,” he said.
Moran also said management approached him for a one-on-one meeting to discuss safety concerns on Friday; he described the tenor of that meeting as “casual.”
Quelle: <a href="Tesla Employee Who Wants A Union Says He&039;s "Disappointed In" Musk“>BuzzFeed
Note: It&039;s not cool to like your own tweets, Mr J.
Note: It&039;s “you&039;re the disgrace&033;” not “your the disgrace&033;”
Quelle: <a href="This Woman Has The Same Name As Donald Trump&039;s Least Favorite Senator And It&039;s A Nightmare“>BuzzFeed
Google goes after Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Apple’s iPad Pro with its new premium Samsung Chromebook Pro and Plus laptop-tablet hybrids.
It’s a laptop! It’s a tablet&033; It has a stylus&033; You can fold it backwards&033; You can draw on it&033; The Samsung Chromebook Pro and Plus aren’t your kid brother’s classroom Chromebooks. Google is adding new premium options to its low-cost laptop line: two Samsung-branded hybrid computer-tablets (what gadget p33ps call “convertibles”) with styluses built-in.
The devices are clearly aimed at customers who are interested in Microsoft's Surface Pro (between $699-$1,049) or Apple&039;s iPad Pro tablets ($599-$929), but who aren’t keen on those products’ hefty price tags. The Chromebook Pro is now Google’s most high-end Chromebook offering — and it costs just $549, while the Chromebook Plus is priced at $449.
What’s unique about the devices aren’t just that they’re ~fancier~ than Chromebooks past – it’s that the laptops can run Android apps for phones and tablets. All of them. Google is hoping that opening its Chromebooks to the over two million touchscreen-friendly games and mobile apps available in its Play Store will give its lightweight laptops even more of an edge over other devices.
I’ve been letting my MacBook Air collect dust for two weeks while testing out a pre-production version of the new Chromebook Pro, the faster and more powerful of the two. It&039;s available at the end of April with no specific release date set. I found the Pro to be impressively versatile. It was sufficient at most of my work computer tasks (namely messaging my boss, writing reviews like this one, and reading articles). The other bells and whistles, like the stylus and touchscreen, were non-essential, but worked well when I needed them.
Samsung / Buzzfeed News
If you’re already familiar, just jump to the next section.
Chromebooks are breathtakingly cheap computers. I once bought two mascaras and a foundation at Sephora and it was more expensive than the cheapest Chromebook you can get at Best Buy.
But you get what you pay for. They’re simple machines that can handle a lot of things, like responding to email, scrolling through Facebook, watching YouTube videos, streaming Netflix, word processing, and reading articles. Chromebooks need a strong Wi-Fi connection, and, while you can still use Google Docs, watch some Netflix shows, and listen to Spotify offline, there’s isn’t a ton of functionality for people who don’t have access to reliable Internet.
Chromebooks are the conceptual opposite of Android phones, which have, historically, been more appealing to tinkerers and gadget geeks. Chromebooks, on the other hand, are grab-and-go machines designed for people who know how to surf the web, but don’t consider themselves techies.
The laptops are dead simple. To start using one, all you need is a Google account. The devices are less susceptible to malware than others, and benefit from automatic security updates every six weeks. They’re a good fit for a lot of people. Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in 2016, with over half of that market going to the education sector. Over 20 million students now use Chromebooks in classrooms worldwide.
But they’re not for everyone.
Processors typically aren’t very good in Chromebooks. Gamers and extreme multi-taskers will find that the computers become slow and unusable under a heavy load. People who prefer to optimize their digital workspace with apps like F.lux and BetterSnapTool might find the cookie cutter Chrome environment too limiting. Lastly, and most importantly, Chromebooks can’t do most photo and video editing. You can do lightweight stuff (adjust brightness, draw on photos, and add filters, etc.) but Chromebooks can’t run Photoshop CC or Premiere CC.
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
Quelle: <a href="This Fancy Chromebook Has a Touchscreen, Stylus, And A Price You Can Actually Afford“>BuzzFeed
Alle Welt redet von künstlicher Intelligenz. Amazon und Adobe hingegen halten es bei ihrer Werbestrategie eher mit künstlicher Dummheit. Das findet zumindest c't-Redakteur Michael Link
Quelle: Heise Tech News
Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images
Google is finally cracking down on apps in the Play Store that don't do enough to protect users&039; privacy. The company has quietly been warning Android app developers to fix their apps that are in violation of Google&039;s User Data policy. Google is giving them two options, according to its email: link to a valid privacy policy, or remove any requests for users&039; personal information. Developers have until March 15 to comply or will face “limited visibility” in the Google Play store, a punishment that ranges from hiding the app from top and trending lists to removing it entirely from the Play Store.
It&039;s been a common complaint for years that the Play Store is full of “shovelware,” meaning apps full of mediocre content that are cheaply produced en masse. Creators of this category of app, also known as “zombie apps,” may not take the time to craft privacy policies that stand up to Google&039;s test.
Google&039;s User Data policy mandates that an app that handles users&039; personal information must have a working privacy policy that “comprehensively discloses how your app collects, uses and shares user data, including the types of parties with whom it’s shared.” The app must do so “prominently,” according to the User Data policy, meaning that users should be able to see it. Any app handling personal information must also “Handle the user data securely, including transmitting it using modern cryptography (for example, over HTTPS).”
Google told BuzzFeed News, “The update to our privacy policy (in the Google Play Developer Program Policies) was actually made last August and is consistent with industry practices. Since then, we have been sending regular reminders to developers to comply with this change.”
An app that records personal information but gives no discernible privacy policy faces fines or even suspension for deceptive practices. The FTC fined social networking app Path for $800,000 in 2013 for illegally collecting personal information from children under 13 because it did not offer users an obvious opt-out option. Tech companies have varying stances on privacy, which are smart to keep in mind when downloading apps and accepting their permissions requests.
Quelle: <a href="Google Has Sent Android App Developers A Privacy Ultimatum“>BuzzFeed
