President Trump Is Shaming Nordstrom On Twitter, Facebook, And Instagram

President Donald Trump, unhappy his daughter Ivanka's fashion line was dropped by Nordstrom, lashed out Wednesday at the retailer on Twitter. And on Facebook. And on Instagram.

The multi-platform targeting of an American department store is new territory as far as US presidents go, but not entirely out of the ordinary for Trump, who has often used his social media accounts to fire away at those he believes wronged him.

“My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by Nordstrom,” the president tweeted. “She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible&033;”

Instagram: @realdonaldtrump

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Facebook: DonaldTrump

After posting the initial tweet on his @realDonaldTrump account, Trump reposted the language to Instagram and Facebook, and retweeted it from the @POTUS account, leading some to question if it was ethical for a sitting president to pressure a family business partner.

Trump has used his Instagram to attack opponents in the past, including Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. While some imagined Trump might change his approach to social media once he took the presidency, there appears to be no change in his early days in the White House.

Instagram: @realdonaldtrump

Instagram: @realdonaldtrump

Trump is bringing a proven political social media strategy to bear on corporations with whom he&039;s displeased. Only now, instead of Jeb and Hillary, it&039;s Nordstrom and others.

Nordstrom, for its part, tweeted that the decision to drop Ivanka Trump&039;s fashion line was due to “business results.”

Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended Trump&039;s attacks at his press briefing today.

Quelle: <a href="President Trump Is Shaming Nordstrom On Twitter, Facebook, And Instagram“>BuzzFeed

Everything You Need To Know About Google's New Smartwatches

Android Wear 2.0, the platform’s first big update since 2014, starts rolling out to supported devices this week.

Whaddya know&#033; Google still makes smartwatches. After nearly three years of incremental software updates to a small fleet of wearable devices, Android Wear 2.0 is finally available on two new watches – the LG Watch Style and LG Watch Sport – designed specifically for the refined software. Existing, supported watches, like the Moto 360 2 and ASUS ZenWatch 2, will be able to download 2.0 in the coming weeks.

You might be wondering: Why is Google continuing to invest resources in wearables, a D-list gadget category that it isn’t doing so hot right now? Operations at Kickstarter darling Pebble shut down in December 2016, and the company folded into Fitbit, which recently cut between 5% to 10% of its workforce after disappointing holiday sales. Intel-owned Basis had to recall its devices when they began overheating and melting their own chargers. Jawbone is reportedly winding down its fitness-focused wearables business. Even the number of smartwatches sold by the industry’s two leading manufacturers, Samsung (with 800,000 watches) and Apple (with 5.2 million), pale in comparison those companies’ smartphone sales (77.5 and 78.3 million, respectively, in the last quarter of 2016 alone). Furthermore, compared to Samsung and Apple, Google has struggled to gain traction in the smartwatch category.

Well, Google, it seems, wants its core suite of software services available in as many form factors as possible, from smart speakers to routers. There are many ways one can “google” something and, if smartwatches are your thing, the wrist is another place where you can do just that. Google&#039;s hardware is merely a vessel for its software – and Android Wear is no different.

The new Android watches designed in partnership with LG were clearly made to prioritize Google’s software, and don’t have some of the more premium hardware features that its competitors do, like the Samsung Gear S3’s multi-day battery life or the Apple Watch Series 2’s swim-proofness. The new update most notably includes access to Google Assistant, the “smart” voice-activated personal assistant that can send messages, set reminders, or make restaurant reservations. It’s also compatible with Android Pay, a mobile tap-and-go payment platform.

In my week of testing the first Android watches slated to ship with 2.0, I found that, while the new update will most likely satisfy longtime Android Wear loyalists, if you’re not sold on smartwatches, the LG Watch Sport and Style aren’t going to be the ones that convince you otherwise. Here are some of my first impressions:

Google / BuzzFeed News

Look at how big this damn thing is.

This is the size of the LG Watch Sport on my wrist. It is Not Good. The watch is 14.2 mm thick, which may not sound like a lot, but it is, especially when you’re trying to jam it through a fitted sweater.

The Sport version of the watch has cellular LTE data, built-in GPS, NFC for mobile payments, a heart rate sensor, and a battery to support all of those energy-draining technologies crammed underneath its 1.38-inch diameter display. It’s water resistant in up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes, which is good for running in the rain, but wouldn’t survive a swim. The device feels heavy too, like a metal paperweight strapped to your wrist, though those with thicker, stronger forearms might disagree. Those 89.4 grams start to feel like a burden after all-day wear.

The slimmer, more lightweight Style is more my speed, but it doesn’t have any of the features I mentioned above. It’s essentially a step counter with a display for apps, notifications, and Google Assistant.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Android Wear has the best tiny typing experience for wearables, period.

You’d think that replying to messages, Slacks, and emails on a watch would be a typo nightmare, but Android’s new on-watch keyboard is anything but. You can swipe your finger over the mini keyboard or peck each letter, and Google will employ machine learning to figure out what you’re trying to say.

There are also a number of “smart” replies, generated by Google based on the contents of your message, that you can choose from. For example, for an email requesting a meeting, the watch suggested “OK, let me get back to you” as an automatic response, along with “I agree,” “Nice,” and the smiley face emoji.

You can also respond purely with emoji, by choosing them from a long list or attempting to draw one. And by draw, I mean, scribble the “Pinterest fail” version of a thumbs up and Google’s algorithms are smart enough to understand what you intended.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

During my briefing with Google, two product managers explained that this feature was introduced so you can easily switch between your “work” watch face and your “home” watch face. But it’s not super clear that, like, anybody wants or needs that??

View Entire List ›

Quelle: <a href="Everything You Need To Know About Google&039;s New Smartwatches“>BuzzFeed

Here's Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

It’s safe to say White House press secretary Sean Spicer is having a bad week. To put the mayo on his turd sandwich, last night, people discovered his account on Venmo and started sending him bogus payment requests with trolling messages.

The wave of trolling was kicked off when the celebrity gossip podcast Who? Weekly tweeted that Spicer could be found on Venmo after a listener tipped them off. This isn’t the first time the podcast has looked for C-list celebs on the payment app – they found Bella Thorne and Tiffany Trump [full disclosure: I am a friend of the hosts and made one of its theme songs]. A few hours after Spicer’s Venmo was trolled, people found Kellyanne Conway’s account and did the same. This is all meant to be relatively harmless fun; only a real killjoy wouldn’t see the appeal of the weirdness of finding celebrities on a highly plebeian money app. It’s funny to find celebrities on Venmo precisely because you wouldn’t expect them to be there, and it’s the kind of app that we use for unglamorous and petty things like splitting cab fare or drinks.

A bunch of extraneous Venmo requests are probably the least of Spicer&#039;s concerns at the moment (BuzzFeed News confirmed the account was his by matching his phone number). However, The ability to use Venmo to harass someone with bogus payment requests should strike you as somewhat alarming.

Here’s why.

1) Venmo is convenient precisely because it’s so easy to find your friends on it, just by phone number, email, or by name. The privacy settings allow you to make the details of your payments private, but there’s no option to keep your account completely hidden from search. If you’re on there, people can find you by just your name.

This level of privacy setting is akin to what other social networks like Facebook or Twitter offer – you can make the details of your account private, but not the fact that you HAVE an account. But on those platforms, you can prevent randos from sending you messages or even trying to add you.

Part of what makes Venmo fun is the fact that it layers elements of a social network on top of a regular payments app: You can look at the feed of your friends’ payments and see who they’re interacting with. If you really want to be weird, you can even comment on their payments. Tilt your head and squint, and Venmo is a social network that happens to do payments. And where there’s a social network, there’s trolls.

2) Venmo sends you a text message and push notification for payments and requests. It’s possible to turn these off deep in the Settings, but it’s likely many people leave these on – I have them left on. This means Sean Spicer’s phone was probably blowing up late into the night while people sent him pennies.

The text message that Venmo sends you for a payment or request contains the message from the transaction. Here’s what this means: Let’s say you want to say “go jump in a lake” to Sean Spicer. You could tweet at him, but let’s be real: At best he’ll probably just quickly glance it while scrolling through his mentions. And in the context of Twitter, it’s nothing. You, the average citizen, don’t have much ability to directly get the attention of one of the people at the tight inner circle to the President. But if you merely search his name on Venmo, you can send a payment request, and blammo&#033; you sent a message via a text directly to his personal cell phone. And while you can block people, you have to do it one by one (according to some reports, Spicer was receiving hundreds of these messages).

3) While you can reject requests for payments, you cannot reject someone sending you money. Which… in the case of a government official like Sean Spicer, is kind of weird. Spicer has no way of stopping me from sending him $100,000 and writing it “Trump payola, per our conversation” in the message. Sure, there’s nothing to stop me from dropping off a bag of cash at his doorstep either, but that might not be public or easy. For non-celebs, it’s not too hard to imagine scenarios in which sending someone money could be a form of harassment – a weapon to be used in a financial grudge between exes, friends, or business people.

4) It works as an ad hoc reverse cellphone lookup. You can’t see a person’s phone number from their profile, but you can match up a phone number to a profile. Let’s say you have an anonymous cell phone number, and you want to find out who it belongs to. You can’t search by the phone number in Venmo, but if you complete a payment or request, it reveals the name attached to the number. Same with matching a name to an email address.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to search for people by email or phone, but that option can be turned off. In Venmo, there’s no option to turn this search off, or make it so that your number can’t be used to find you. Reporters need to match cell phones to names all the time, so this is a great tool for us — or perhaps just for anyone who sees their partner texting a stranger’s number and wants to find out who it is.

5) You can’t make your “friends” list private, which you can do on Facebook. This matters in cases like Spicer’s: For example, one of BuzzFeed’s politics reporters was able to help verify that the account actually belonged to the press secretary by glancing through his friends list and seeing names of Washington insiders.

Here’s where Venmo significantly differs from social networks: being “friends” on Venmo with Spicer doesn’t mean he’s friendly with someone, it means they may have a financial connection. That matters for Sean Spicer; it matters for the rest of us, too.

A spokesperson for Venmo said that privacy for users is one of their highest priorities, and pointed me to a list of customizable privacy settings that control how your transactions will show up to other people. While the tools to make your payments private are there, this doesn’t significantly address what’s happening to Sean Spicer (his payments are all private).

“This doesn’t happen a lot. This is a new thing for Venmo to think about,” a company spokesperson told me. They were indeed very aware of what was happening with Mr. Spicer today from the news, but declined to tell me if any direct actions had been taken, citing user privacy.

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled“>BuzzFeed

Here's Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

It’s safe to say White House press secretary Sean Spicer is having a bad week. To put the mayo on his turd sandwich, last night, people discovered his account on Venmo and started sending him bogus payment requests with trolling messages.

The wave of trolling was kicked off when the celebrity gossip podcast Who? Weekly tweeted that Spicer could be found on Venmo after a listener tipped them off. This isn’t the first time the podcast has looked for C-list celebs on the payment app – they found Bella Thorne and Tiffany Trump [full disclosure: I am a friend of the hosts and made one of its theme songs]. A few hours after Spicer’s Venmo was trolled, people found Kellyanne Conway’s account and did the same. This is all meant to be relatively harmless fun; only a real killjoy wouldn’t see the appeal of the weirdness of finding celebrities on a highly plebeian money app. It’s funny to find celebrities on Venmo precisely because you wouldn’t expect them to be there, and it’s the kind of app that we use for unglamorous and petty things like splitting cab fare or drinks.

A bunch of extraneous Venmo requests are probably the least of Spicer&#039;s concerns at the moment (BuzzFeed News confirmed the account was his by matching his phone number). However, The ability to use Venmo to harass someone with bogus payment requests should strike you as somewhat alarming.

Here’s why.

1) Venmo is convenient precisely because it’s so easy to find your friends on it, just by phone number, email, or by name. The privacy settings allow you to make the details of your payments private, but there’s no option to keep your account completely hidden from search. If you’re on there, people can find you by just your name.

This level of privacy setting is akin to what other social networks like Facebook or Twitter offer – you can make the details of your account private, but not the fact that you HAVE an account. But on those platforms, you can prevent randos from sending you messages or even trying to add you.

Part of what makes Venmo fun is the fact that it layers elements of a social network on top of a regular payments app: You can look at the feed of your friends’ payments and see who they’re interacting with. If you really want to be weird, you can even comment on their payments. Tilt your head and squint, and Venmo is a social network that happens to do payments. And where there’s a social network, there’s trolls.

2) Venmo sends you a text message and push notification for payments and requests. It’s possible to turn these off deep in the Settings, but it’s likely many people leave these on – I have them left on. This means Sean Spicer’s phone was probably blowing up late into the night while people sent him pennies.

The text message that Venmo sends you for a payment or request contains the message from the transaction. Here’s what this means: Let’s say you want to say “go jump in a lake” to Sean Spicer. You could tweet at him, but let’s be real: At best he’ll probably just quickly glance it while scrolling through his mentions. And in the context of Twitter, it’s nothing. You, the average citizen, don’t have much ability to directly get the attention of one of the people at the tight inner circle to the President. But if you merely search his name on Venmo, you can send a payment request, and blammo&#033; you sent a message via a text directly to his personal cell phone. And while you can block people, you have to do it one by one (according to some reports, Spicer was receiving hundreds of these messages).

3) While you can reject requests for payments, you cannot reject someone sending you money. Which… in the case of a government official like Sean Spicer, is kind of weird. Spicer has no way of stopping me from sending him $100,000 and writing it “Trump payola, per our conversation” in the message. Sure, there’s nothing to stop me from dropping off a bag of cash at his doorstep either, but that might not be public or easy. For non-celebs, it’s not too hard to imagine scenarios in which sending someone money could be a form of harassment – a weapon to be used in a financial grudge between exes, friends, or business people.

4) It works as an ad hoc reverse cellphone lookup. You can’t see a person’s phone number from their profile, but you can match up a phone number to a profile. Let’s say you have an anonymous cell phone number, and you want to find out who it belongs to. You can’t search by the phone number in Venmo, but if you complete a payment or request, it reveals the name attached to the number. Same with matching a name to an email address.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to search for people by email or phone, but that option can be turned off. In Venmo, there’s no option to turn this search off, or make it so that your number can’t be used to find you. Reporters need to match cell phones to names all the time, so this is a great tool for us — or perhaps just for anyone who sees their partner texting a stranger’s number and wants to find out who it is.

5) You can’t make your “friends” list private, which you can do on Facebook. This matters in cases like Spicer’s: For example, one of BuzzFeed’s politics reporters was able to help verify that the account actually belonged to the press secretary by glancing through his friends list and seeing names of Washington insiders.

Here’s where Venmo significantly differs from social networks: being “friends” on Venmo with Spicer doesn’t mean he’s friendly with someone, it means they may have a financial connection. That matters for Sean Spicer; it matters for the rest of us, too.

A spokesperson for Venmo said that privacy for users is one of their highest priorities, and pointed me to a list of customizable privacy settings that control how your transactions will show up to other people. While the tools to make your payments private are there, this doesn’t significantly address what’s happening to Sean Spicer (his payments are all private).

“This doesn’t happen a lot. This is a new thing for Venmo to think about,” a company spokesperson told me. They were indeed very aware of what was happening with Mr. Spicer today from the news, but declined to tell me if any direct actions had been taken, citing user privacy.

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s Why Venmo Users Should Care If Sean Spicer Is Being Trolled“>BuzzFeed

Democrats Are Bracing For A Big, Public Fight To Protect Net Neutrality

Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images

Higher monthly internet bills, obnoxious video buffering, and a market where a future Netflix will be smothered by broadband giants are all part of a dark vision of the internet put forward by leading Senate Democrats Tuesday, one they fear may come to pass unless the public stands up for network neutrality.

Flanked by a host of consumer groups and armed with arguments highlighting the impact of a less open internet, Sen. Ed Markey launched a public battle in Washington to shield net neutrality from President Trump and a Republican controlled Congress. Network neutrality requires internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. Established in 2015, the rules were created to protect websites and services from being slowed or blocked by broadband companies.

Markey also called out the new Republican chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, describing him as a pawn for broadband kingpins. And he placed the campaign to safeguard net neutrality alongside other crucial efforts he said promote democratic values but are under assault by the new administration: the Affordable Care Act, the refugee program, and the Paris Climate Accord.

“Net neutrality rules ensure that those with the best ideas, not simply the best funded ideas, have the opportunity to share their content with the world,” Markey said during a press conference. “But now the big broadband barons and their Republican allies want to turn back the clock and make big cable and big cellphone companies the gatekeepers for internet access. And they have a new FCC chairman in Ajit Pai who will do their bidding.”

“Pai&#039;s number one target appears to be taking down net neutrality.”

Sen. Markey was joined by other outspoken Democratic supporters of net neutrality: Sens. Al Franken, Ron Wyden, Patrick Leahy, and Richard Blumenthal.

Franken was also highly critical of Chair Pai. The Minnesota Senator described the the Trump-selected FCC chief as someone who has “repeatedly sided with corporations over consumers.” He added, “Pai&039;s number one target appears to be taking down net neutrality.”

“We all know what the stakes are with the new chairman of the FCC,” said Sen. Wyden, who like Franken and Blumenthal don&039;t seem to expect an olive branch from Pai. “He is prepared to do the bidding of the big cable companies at the expense of consumers.”

According to Franken, the fight over net neutrality boils down to “mega-corporations” like Verizon and Comcast aiming to boost their bottom lines by choosing which content reaches American customers. Without net neutrality regulations, broadband companies will ultimately restrict what information, ideas, and entertainment people have access to, Franken said.

Getting rid of those rules, which prohibit broadband companies from discriminating or privileging certain content would be “completely irresponsible” Franken added.

“I hate buffering video, you hate buffering video.”

“I hate buffering video, you hate buffering video, and I think we can all agree that small businesses deserve the same opportunities as big businesses,” said VHX CEO Jamie Wilkinson. A subsidiary of Vimeo, VHX is a platform for selling TV and film online, a business whose operations depend on an equal playing field for internet upstarts, and one that would be choked off if internet companies can charge for so called “fast lane” tolls to connect services to people&039;s homes, Wilkinson said.

Gene Kimmelman, President and CEO of Public knowledge, a consumer group, said, “It is a fundamental consumer issue and a First Amendment issue when consumers have to pay through the nose for cable service and broadband service.” He continued, “When companies are, or certainly act like monopolies, to give them additional power to discriminate, to pick and choose winners on the internet, it is only going to drive up prices, limit choices, and harm all of us.”

As they underlined the stark consequences of an internet without net neutrality, Sens. Leahy, Wyden, and Blumenthal emphasized the need to rally support to influence Congress and the FCC, noting that nearly four million comments flooded the commission before net neutrality was passed in 2015.

“The millions of comments the FCC has gotten before, we just got to get them again,” said Sen. Leahy.

“This is another one where, early on, it&039;s going to feel like we are really pushing the rock up the hill,” said Sen. Wyden. “But if it comes down to the citizens and the people at the grassroots against the special interests, then we can win that.”

While Chair Pai has declined to say what measures he will take to dismantle or diminish net neutrality, he made his opposition to the open internet rules clear during his first meeting as the agency&039;s chief last week. “My present position is pretty simple: I favor a free and open internet and I oppose Title II,” he said, referring to the classification of broadband companies as akin to utilities, subject to more robust regulation.

In response to the criticism of Chair Pai at the press conference Tuesday, a spokesperson for the FCC told BuzzFeed News: “Consistent with the bipartisan consensus dating back to the Clinton Administration, Chairman Pai supports a free and open Internet but opposes heavy-handed Title II regulation. The Internet was free and open before the 2015 party-line vote imposing these Depression-Era regulations.”

Quelle: <a href="Democrats Are Bracing For A Big, Public Fight To Protect Net Neutrality“>BuzzFeed

Democrats Are Bracing For A Big, Public Fight To Protect Net Neutrality

Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images

Higher monthly internet bills, obnoxious video buffering, and a market where a future Netflix will be smothered by broadband giants are all part of a dark vision of the internet put forward by leading Senate Democrats Tuesday, one they fear may come to pass unless the public stands up for network neutrality.

Flanked by a host of consumer groups and armed with arguments highlighting the impact of a less open internet, Sen. Ed Markey launched a public battle in Washington to shield net neutrality from President Trump and a Republican controlled Congress. Network neutrality requires internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. Established in 2015, the rules were created to protect websites and services from being slowed or blocked by broadband companies.

Markey also called out the new Republican chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, describing him as a pawn for broadband kingpins. And he placed the campaign to safeguard net neutrality alongside other crucial efforts he said promote democratic values but are under assault by the new administration: the Affordable Care Act, the refugee program, and the Paris Climate Accord.

“Net neutrality rules ensure that those with the best ideas, not simply the best funded ideas, have the opportunity to share their content with the world,” Markey said during a press conference. “But now the big broadband barons and their Republican allies want to turn back the clock and make big cable and big cellphone companies the gatekeepers for internet access. And they have a new FCC chairman in Ajit Pai who will do their bidding.”

“Pai&#039;s number one target appears to be taking down net neutrality.”

Sen. Markey was joined by other outspoken Democratic supporters of net neutrality: Sens. Al Franken, Ron Wyden, Patrick Leahy, and Richard Blumenthal.

Franken was also highly critical of Chair Pai. The Minnesota Senator described the the Trump-selected FCC chief as someone who has “repeatedly sided with corporations over consumers.” He added, “Pai&039;s number one target appears to be taking down net neutrality.”

“We all know what the stakes are with the new chairman of the FCC,” said Sen. Wyden, who like Franken and Blumenthal don&039;t seem to expect an olive branch from Pai. “He is prepared to do the bidding of the big cable companies at the expense of consumers.”

According to Franken, the fight over net neutrality boils down to “mega-corporations” like Verizon and Comcast aiming to boost their bottom lines by choosing which content reaches American customers. Without net neutrality regulations, broadband companies will ultimately restrict what information, ideas, and entertainment people have access to, Franken said.

Getting rid of those rules, which prohibit broadband companies from discriminating or privileging certain content would be “completely irresponsible” Franken added.

“I hate buffering video, you hate buffering video.”

“I hate buffering video, you hate buffering video, and I think we can all agree that small businesses deserve the same opportunities as big businesses,” said VHX CEO Jamie Wilkinson. A subsidiary of Vimeo, VHX is a platform for selling TV and film online, a business whose operations depend on an equal playing field for internet upstarts, and one that would be choked off if internet companies can charge for so called “fast lane” tolls to connect services to people&039;s homes, Wilkinson said.

Gene Kimmelman, President and CEO of Public knowledge, a consumer group, said, “It is a fundamental consumer issue and a First Amendment issue when consumers have to pay through the nose for cable service and broadband service.” He continued, “When companies are, or certainly act like monopolies, to give them additional power to discriminate, to pick and choose winners on the internet, it is only going to drive up prices, limit choices, and harm all of us.”

As they underlined the stark consequences of an internet without net neutrality, Sens. Leahy, Wyden, and Blumenthal emphasized the need to rally support to influence Congress and the FCC, noting that nearly four million comments flooded the commission before net neutrality was passed in 2015.

“The millions of comments the FCC has gotten before, we just got to get them again,” said Sen. Leahy.

“This is another one where, early on, it&039;s going to feel like we are really pushing the rock up the hill,” said Sen. Wyden. “But if it comes down to the citizens and the people at the grassroots against the special interests, then we can win that.”

While Chair Pai has declined to say what measures he will take to dismantle or diminish net neutrality, he made his opposition to the open internet rules clear during his first meeting as the agency&039;s chief last week. “My present position is pretty simple: I favor a free and open internet and I oppose Title II,” he said, referring to the classification of broadband companies as akin to utilities, subject to more robust regulation.

In response to the criticism of Chair Pai at the press conference Tuesday, a spokesperson for the FCC told BuzzFeed News: “Consistent with the bipartisan consensus dating back to the Clinton Administration, Chairman Pai supports a free and open Internet but opposes heavy-handed Title II regulation. The Internet was free and open before the 2015 party-line vote imposing these Depression-Era regulations.”

Quelle: <a href="Democrats Are Bracing For A Big, Public Fight To Protect Net Neutrality“>BuzzFeed

Twitter Tackles Trolls With Three New Anti-Harassment Features

Ariel Davis / BuzzFeed News

In November, Twitter introduced a trio of features intended to combat abuse, hate speech, and trolling — a mute filter, muted conversation threads, and new user report infrastructure. Today, the company unveiled three more, making good on its public pledge last week to work more quickly to make its platform a safer place. Twitter introduced new “safe search” results, a timeline change intended to collapse “potentially abusive or low-quality” tweets, and a new effort to crack down on the creation of new abusive accounts from repeat offenders.

On Twitter, shutting down serial harassers requires a time-consuming, inefficient whack-a-mole style of policing because its so easy for trolls to quickly return to the platform with a new identity after they&#039;ve been banned. To stop this, Twitter is implementing a stricter policy that will “identify people who have been permanently suspended and stop them from creating new accounts.” The company didn&039;t say how it plans to enforce this policy.

Twitter is also rolling out new “safe search” results to filter out tweets that “contain potentially sensitive content and Tweets from blocked and muted accounts.” While it&039;s unclear exactly how Twitter defines “potentially sensitive” content — and how effective its filters will be in parsing and weeding out abuse — the change could help people more easily avoid content they don&039;t want to see.

Finally, Twitter is changing its timeline to identify “potentially abusive and low-quality replies”; It&039;s created a mechanism that collapses them. These tweets will still be discoverable, but you&039;ll need to click a “Show less relevant replies” button to see them. According to Twitter, it will look like this:

Like safe search, Twitter&039;s “show less relevant replies” feature is largely cosmetic — it hides abuse instead of fixing it. That said, it could help shield people who&039;ve suffered abuse on Twitter from further unwanted interactions.

These anti-abuse updates come as Twitter finds itself at the center of the political world, a key communication tool of the Trump administration, its supporters and opponents. As such, Twitter is under increasing scrutiny for the harassment that sometimes occurs on its platform, its efforts to police it and how its rules forbidding that kind of behavior might apply to one of the most powerful Twitter accounts around.

Amid the chaos, Twitter is focusing unprecedented attention on its abuse problem. Last week, its VP of engineering Ed Ho tweeted that the company was making harassment a “primary focus” inside the company with an eye toward faster iteration and response to pressing product problems. Shortly after, Twitter announced a small but important tweak by allowing users to report abusers even if the abuser blocked that person (previously a long-standing flaw in abuse reporting made it so that trolls could harass a user and then block them in order to prevent being reported). “We heard your feedback,” Twitter said at the time.

That Twitter finally appears to be listening to users who&039;ve called for better anti-harassment tools is a heartening. But after a decade of inaction, winning back user trust back won&039;t come easily.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Tackles Trolls With Three New Anti-Harassment Features“>BuzzFeed

Hundreds Of Investors, Startups, And VC Firms Say Trump's Travel Ban Will Cause "Irreversible Harm"

Carlos Barria / Reuters

More than 200 tech industry leaders signed a letter to be sent to President Donald Trump on Tuesday opposing the administration&#039;s refugee and travel ban and highlighting what they claim are irreversible harms the immigration order will inflict on the US startup community.

Deep pocketed investors, tech startups, and venture capital firms are among the signatories, which include: Josh Kopelman, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and Shervin Pishevar.

The investors and tech leaders took issue not only with the Trump administration&039;s travel ban — which will face a major legal test in federal court Tuesday evening — but with reports that Trump will seek to limit skilled work-visa programs favored by tech companies.

“We are deeply troubled by the recent Executive Order banning citizens of seven countries and refugees from entering the U.S., as well as the recently leaked draft Executive Order suggesting plans to roll back worker visa and parole programs,” states the letter. “We believe these actions are both morally and economically misguided, and will inflict irreversible harm on the startup community and America’s ability to compete globally.”

The coalition of startups and investors argues that the tech industry depends on skilled workers from abroad to satisfy the high demand for IT professionals. “The fact that so many startups rely on H-1B visas only serves to illustrate this fact, since no sensible, time-constrained startup would opt to rely on a bureaucratically difficult process for hiring foreign-born employees if simply hiring qualified American workers was an option,” states the letter.

Two dozen Democratic lawmakers also made an urgent case for promoting skilled immigrant programs in a letter to President Trump on Monday, and in a separate effort, more than 100 tech companies joined a friend-of the-court brief opposing the immigration order, in part, on economic grounds.

Accel, General Assembly, 500 startups, and the National Venture Capital Association were among the 214 signatories, as were Venmo, Pinterest, and Vimeo.

“While it appears that the White House isn&039;t backing down from the immigration ban, we&039;d like to believe that there is still time to convince the President to scrap the proposed Executive Order that would make it harder for the best and brightest innovators from around the world to come to the U.S. to launch and grow the startups that are responsible for all net job growth in this country,” Engine Executive Director Evan Engstrom told BuzzFeed News.

Quelle: <a href="Hundreds Of Investors, Startups, And VC Firms Say Trump&039;s Travel Ban Will Cause "Irreversible Harm"“>BuzzFeed

Here's How To Prevent Your Vizio TV From Spying On You

Facebook: vizio

If you bought a Vizio smart TV within the last two years, there&#039;s a good chance that TV automatically tracked what you were watching without asking for your permission, according to a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the State of New Jersey. Today, the California-based TV manufacturer agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle the charges and to more prominently disclose when and how it collects user information.

Since February 2014, software installed on the televisions allowed Vizio to continuously collect customer&039;s viewing history through software called “ACR,” or automated content recognition. This software captures a selection of pixels displayed on Vizio smart TV screens and sends that data to the company&039;s servers, where those pixels are compared to a database of different TV shows, movies, and commercials. ACR can also collect information like your Wi-Fi signal strength, nearby Wi-Fi access points, and IP addresses.

The complaint alleges that over 100 billion data points per day (information like what content you&039;re watching and how long you&039;re watching it) from more than 10 million Vizio televisions have been collected, and the company planned to store this data on their servers indefinitely. A stipulated federal court order requires that Vizio delete all data collected before March 1, 2016. An anonymized version of the data that did not include customers&039; name or contact information was sold to third parties for advertising and audience measurement purposes.

In a provided statement, Vizio&039;s general counsel Jerry Huang said, “The ACR program never paired viewing data with personally identifiable information such as name or contact information.” Huang also stated that, “Today, the FTC has made clear that all smart TV makers should get people&039;s consent before collecting and sharing viewing information and Vizio is now leading the way.”

As a part of the settlement, Vizio did not admit or deny the FTC&039;s allegations.

The FTC charged Vizio for violating Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits deceptive and unfair acts affecting consumer privacy. In September, the FTC clarified this section as it relates to smart TVs. New guidelines for smart TV manufacturers include explaining data collection practices up front, requiring consent before collection, and making privacy settings easy to understand.

According to the FTC&039;s complaint, Vizio did not make it clear to customers that they intended to collect their TV viewing history, and the collection was turned on by default, which did not give customers a chance to opt out. A key part of the complaint is that Vizio promised customers recommendations based on the data collected, but never provided them to owners of older Vizio TVs.

In a separate statement, acting FTC Chairperson Maureen Ohlhausen said she agreed Vizio should have been more explicit about its data collection, but is further investigating if those practices are likely to cause “substantial injury.” Ohlhausen tweeted that she intends to start a dialogue about whether TV viewing history should be considered sensitive information, like health care or financial records.

If you own a Vizio TV, you can disable data collection by going to your TV&039;s Menu > Settings > Smart Interactivity, or any option with Automated Content Recognition, and turning it off.

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s How To Prevent Your Vizio TV From Spying On You“>BuzzFeed