Archives for January 2019

The change is part of a strategy by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to knit together its businesses into one overarching network. Last week, The New York Times reported that he planned to integrate the technical infrastructure of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger so that people could talk across the services for the first time. The move, which the company hopes to complete by the end of the year or by early 2020, could provide Facebook opportunities for additional revenue from messaging activity and would increase the utility of all of the apps.

In a call with investors on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg confirmed the report, calling the move an eventual boon for users. People want messaging that is “fast, private and reliable,” he said.

The moves followed a difficult year for Facebook, as questions about the unintended consequences of social media have sharpened. The company has faced scrutiny over improper handling of its users’ data, its largest-ever security breach last year, and the distribution of false content and foreign influence campaigns across its network.

This week, Facebook has been grappling with a report by TechCrunch that it paid people to install an app that would suck in all of their phone and web activity. That has renewed questions about Facebook’s approach to user privacy and prompted criticism from Apple, which oversees iPhone apps.

For its fourth quarter, Facebook’s revenue rose 30 percent from a year earlier to $16.9 billion, while profits jumped 61 percent to $6.9 billion. Seven million advertisers spend money on the platform, the company said, and in a shift, more than two million now buy ads in Facebook’s Stories, one of its newer products.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/technology/facebook-earnings-revenue-profit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

McFarland may be the one in prison for fraud, but the most fascinating thing about Fyre was how deep the scam reached. The festival was marketed by Jerry Media, an online advertising agency that began as a popular Instagram account that cribbed other peoples’ memes without credit. It was aggressively promoted by Instagram influencers — those model/advertiser/guru hybrids whose entire project rests on smoke and mirrors. Even the documentaries on the festival seemed compromised. Hulu paid McFarland for an interview, while Elliot Tebele, the founder of Jerry Media, is an executive producer of the Netflix documentary. It was scams all the way down.

And at the top? The closest-held secret of modern scam artists is how woefully unimaginative they really are. Our oversaturated scam culture seems to have produced something new: utterly unappealing con men and women who could not credibly be referred to as “artists” at all.

Though the Fyre documentaries are stocked with associates who swear to McFarland’s charm, he appears to have all the appeal of a sentient airport lounge. Holmes, built up as a striking female entrepreneur with a heartfelt personal story, is revealed as stilted and vampiric onscreen; “The Inventor” includes a haunting scene in which she celebrates a company win by dancing robotically to MC Hammer. And since her unmasking, Delvey has been dragged on the internet for her tellingly bad hair.

There’s not a lovable scamp or a master chameleon in the bunch. They’re just young people who wanted to make something incredible, failed and couldn’t accept it. In a word, unexceptional. These days, there’s a scammer born every minute.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/arts/fyre-festival-billy-mcfarland-elizabeth-holmes-anna-delvey.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Unknown to Ms. Thompson, there is a healthy market for bugs and the code to weaponize them, which allow governments, defense contractors and cybercriminals to invisibly spy on people’s devices without their knowledge, capturing everything from their locations to information caught on their microphones and cameras. The FaceTime flaw, and other Apple bugs, can fetch tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, from dozens of brokers. Those brokers then sell those bugs for ever higher sums to governments and intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world. On the seedier side of the spectrum are brokers who will sell these tools on the dark web to the highest bidder.

The only catch is that hackers must promise never to disclose the flaw to the vendor for patching, so that buyers can keep their access.

The market for Apple flaws has soared in the post-Edward Snowden era as technology makers include more security, like end-to-end encryption, to thwart would-be spies. This month, Zerodium, a well-known broker and security firm, raised its reward for an Apple iOS bug to $2 million.

In part to compete in that market, and reward those who do right by the company by notifying it of potentially lucrative bugs, Apple announced its own bounty program in 2016 — the last of the Silicon Valley companies to do so.

At a hacker conference that year in Las Vegas, Apple made a surprise announcement: It said it would start paying rewards as high as $200,000 to hackers who responsibly turned over crucial flaws in its products. But the bounty program has been slow going, in part, hackers say, because they can make multiples of that bounty on the black market, and because Apple has taken its time rewarding them for reporting problems.

The FacePalm bug is a particularly egregious case, researchers say, not just because it was discovered by a teenager simply trying to use his phone, but because it allowed full microphone and video access.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/technology/facetime-glitch-apple.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The danger of hateful feedback (in addition to the possibility of actual danger) is that to repel it, you risk numbing yourself to constructive criticism. I try to deal with this by giving myself a little time, after I publish a story, before I look at emails from readers or comments online. With distance, I can process criticism and funnel it into making my work better.

I have a book coming out in April, and I am really going to have to remember this when it comes out.

Outside of work, what tech product are you and your family using a lot?

Pity my children. Five years ago, when they were in elementary school and middle school, I published a book about bullying in which my basic advice to parents about technology was to delay access to it. Especially smartphones.

My sons got flip phones in seventh grade and iPhones in ninth grade (the older one) and eighth grade (the younger one). They would tell you that they missed out on certain social interactions, especially group texting, because their parents were dogmatic. (Also, in my own case, hypocritical — I have trouble unplugging.)

I will say, though, that I still think setting limits is crucial. I like the mantra “People sleep upstairs. Phones sleep downstairs.”

These days, my family bonds more over my tech ineptitude than any tech product. (It would be better if the gender dynamics in this story were reversed, but so it goes.) In particular, I’m mocked for not being able to turn on the television. There are four remote controls, with cryptic prompts for activating four different boxes. I can’t keep it all straight. I get to pick the shows sometimes, though.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/technology/personaltech/skype-voice-recorders-foias.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Mr. Schultz added that Facebook was cautious in removing manually created accounts because it didn’t want to erase authentic profiles. “We don’t want to over-enforce,” he said. “So what we actually focus on is the harmful behavior.”

Yet obvious fake accounts that are engaging in harmful behavior slip through. Last year, I found dozens of fake accounts masquerading as the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to scam Facebook users out of cash. Some had been up for years.

Facebook also said the vast majority of fake accounts it removed were ones that it had spotted, rather than ones that users had reported. Of the 2.8 billion fake accounts it took down in the year that ended Sept. 30, Facebook said, it found 99.3 percent on its own.

Those numbers also contradict my experience. Last year, I easily created 11 Facebook accounts that used the same name, occupation and profile photo as my verified account. They remained live for five days, until I reported them to Facebook. Instagram, which Facebook owns, also left up 10 impostor accounts I had created until I reported them; it took down only five, until I alerted a Facebook spokesman.

If an account appears to be impersonating another user but isn’t “engaged in harmful behavior,” Facebook often leaves it up, Mr. Schultz said. He said such duplicate accounts could be from people who had lost their password or were confused.

Duplicate accounts add to confusion

Duplicate accounts are banned under Facebook’s rules. But they persist anyway, in even greater numbers than fake accounts, according to the company’s estimates, compounding its problem of inauthentic activity.

Facebook’s estimates of duplicates have also seesawed, including nearly doubling in 2017. Take a look at the chart below.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/technology/facebook-fake-accounts.html?partner=rss&emc=rss