Bol News

As Facebook battles a report accusing it of suppressing conservative news, CEO says he plans to ‘invite leading conservatives ... to share their point of view’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he plans to invite “leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” to talk with him about accusations of political bias at the social media company. Zuckerberg made the announcement Thursday evening in a Facebook post that continued to deny the allegations of bias and the claim that the Facebook trending topics team suppresses conservative news. “We have found no evidence that this report is true,” he wrote. “If we find anything against our principles, you have my commitment that we will take additional steps to address it.” On Monday, Gizmodo reported that contracted workers at Facebook “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers” and artificially “inject” stories into the trending topics section, citing anonymous former “news...

Photo sharing app unveils new sunset-coloured logo and a sleeker in-app look, but opinion is mixed Instagram, the photo sharing app owned by Facebook, responsible for such cultural highlights as hot-dog legs, The Fat Jewish memes and Rich Kids of, well, Instagram, has debuted a new logo. The previous one, a retro-looking camera, and one of the most recognisable tech logos out there, has been replaced by a background swirl of sunset colours (orange, yellow, pink, purple) and a white outline of a camera. As if the camera was murdered, and chalk was drawn around its body. Murdered at sundown. Here it is: The new logo was announced via a blog post, a longer post on Medium from head of design, Ian Spalter, and also a short introductory film. The kind that is usually intensely annoying, but actually this one is quite cute (warning though: the end has a lot of flashing and intense colours). Continue reading... Published By - Theguardian.com- Tech News, Politics news, UK and world politic...

In April, Zuckerberg talked of ‘fearful voices building walls’ – but Facebook insists that sponsorship of Republican convention is not an endorsement Facebook will sponsor the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer providing “financial and other support” – despite pressure from progressive organizations and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own veiled criticisms of presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric. “This support allows Facebook to facilitate an open dialogue among voters, candidates and elected officials during the conventions, just as it has during other critical moments in the US elections and in elections around the world,” Erin Egan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement. Facebook maintains that its sponsorship of the GOP convention, which will reportedly include a “lounge”, does not constitute an endorsement, but the announcement has angered a coalition of organizations that have launched campaigns urgi...

The future of apps is chatbots, and it’s going to be terrible Have you heard? Apps are dead: chatbots are the new apps. And they will soon be doing everything, from taking your pizza orders to scheduling your meetings. This is the future and it’s going to be terrible. The rise of the chatbot has been foretold for some time but only in the past few weeks with Facebook’s Messenger bots, chat app Kik’s bot store and the rise of subversive artbots have they really hit the public consciousness. So how did we get here? In many ways, it’s the perfect convergence of almost every tech trend of the past five years. Trend one: the hybrid command line Remember Peach? Probably not. At this stage, four months after launch, it seems unlikely that even Peach’s developers remember Peach. The app, a social network from the co-founder of Vine, tried to live somewhere between a Twitter-style social network and a WhatsApp-style messaging platform. It was fun for about three days, and then it died a qu...

Social network went from digital directory for college kids to communications behemoth – and it’s planning for prosperity with its global takeover It’s late afternoon on a blustery spring day on the waterfront at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former military base that’s now hired out for corporate functions. Vast warehouses, once used to store army supplies, are awash with sleek signs, shimmering lights and endless snacks. Behind them is an Instagram-ready view of Alcatraz island. In front, a fleet of Uber and Lyft cars lines up in the car park, while inside one of the warehouses Scottish synthpop band Chvrches take the stage. For the first few songs there’s only a small group of hardcore vocal fans at the front of the stage, flanked by a subdued mix of backpack-wearing dad types politely bobbing their heads, drinking cocktails out of plastic cups. The shindig has been put on by Facebook for the benefit of delegates attending its F8 conference. The event, which has run most years s...

Online abuse pollutes the water in which we all swim. As the Guardian’s first female editor, it is important to me that we tackle it Last year, a few weeks before I started as the new editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I read a review in the New York Times of Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The book looks at the emergence of public humiliations on social media, and the review ended by saying that “the actual problem is that none of the men running those bazillion-dollar internet companies can think of one single thing to do about all the men who send women death threats”. Since I was about to become the first woman to run the Guardian (not, sad to say, a bazillion-dollar internet company), I decided that I had a responsibility to try to do something about it. That’s why, over the past two weeks, the Guardian has published a series of articles looking at online abuse, with more to follow in the coming months. You might have read our interview with Monica Lewinsky in whic...

In the first half of 2015, £2.5bn was spent in the UK using contactless cards. I’ve lost mine, and I’m now living life in the slow lane Here is my problem. I have lost my debit card. This might seem like a minor hindrance. I haven’t, say, lost a limb. But I have lost the means to go about my everyday life as I usually would. I rely on my contactless debit card as if it were a chip in my wrist. (And I don’t have a credit card, because I was always taught never to have credit cards.) I use my contactless debit card for everything. When I encounter people who do not have contactless, I reel in horror. It’s almost as if they don’t have mobile phones. Or faces. I get wildly irritated by shops and pubs that do not accept card payments, because it’s 2016. In supermarkets, if I have to use chip and pin, I can barely contain my fury. In a world in which being five minutes late to a tweet is considered embarrassingly tardy, it takes an awfully long time to use a chip and pin machine. It ha...

Another algorithm change has been announced by the social network, focused on enhancing reading time Facebook is changing its algorithm yet again, and this time it wants to show you more things that you’ll actually spend time reading or watching. The social network looks at a wealth of data when deciding which posts you actually see on News Feed, but until now it hasn’t cared too much about what you actually do when you click away from Facebook. It says that’s going to change. “We’re learning that the time people choose to spend reading or watching content they clicked on from News Feed is an important signal that the story was interesting to them,” said software engineer Moshe Blank and research scientist Jie Xu in a post on the company’s website . As a result, the site will now attempt to pick links which have a higher reading time. But don’t think that you’ll have a News Feed filled with 30,000 word New Yorker epics. “We will also be looking at the time spent within a threshol...

Twitter was scrabbling to defend the appointment of a Chinese head with government ties, yet US tech has a busy revolving door with its own government What’s worse for a Silicon Valley executive: ties to the Chinese military or friends in the US Defense Department?  Twitter found itself confronting that question this week after it hired Kathy Chen, a former engineer for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to head up ad sales and business development in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Internet freedom activists and Chinese dissidents, who have to skirt Beijing’s digital censors to use Twitter, said it was a betrayal. The spat illustrates the delicate balancing act technology companies face as they are forced to expand overseas to grow. In the US, Silicon Valley, like any industry, has embraced and relied on close relationships with former government officials both for technical talent and to help grease the wheels as they confront regulatory issues. Alphabet’s executive chairman, ...

Early adopters facing teething issues with doors, sensors, screens, brakes and quality control, as electric SUV continues to roll off the production line Early models of Tesla’s electric SUV, the Model X, are facing teething issues, plaguing users with glitches that lock them out of their cars and bang their falcon-wing doors into things. Weeks after the recall of 2,700 Model Xs , which at the time was nearly the entire fleet, over a safety issue with the rear seats, reports from buyers have painted a picture of Tesla struggling to meet demand and quality control. One venture capitalist from San Francisco, Byron Deeter, has seen so many problems with his Model X, which was one of the first off the production line, that he’s had to stop using it for his daily commute. Published By -Theguardian.com - LifeStyle News, Politics news, UK and world political commentand analysis: Thursday 21 April 2016 11.38 BST

Apple has hired ex-Tesla engineer and opened R&D base in Germany, but reports suggest first versions of long-rumoured vehicle won’t be self-driving Apple’s not-so-secret project to build an electric car is heating up, according to media reports, with the company poaching an expert from rivals Tesla. It has also opened an R&D office in Germany, home to some of the world’s most important luxury car manufacturers. Industry site Electrek reports that Chris Porritt, a British car designer who worked at Aston Martin until he left in 2013 to become the vice-president of vehicle engineering at Tesla Motors, has been hired by Apple to work on the company’s Project Titan – just a few months after the executive believed to have been running the project, Steve Zadesky, left the company . While Porritt, who quit Tesla in September 2015, is one of many former Tesla engineers employed in Cupertino, he’s one of the only senior managers to have made the jump. The timing of his departure co...

Weaknesses within mobile phone network interconnection system allows criminals or governments to remotely snoop on anyone with a phone. Hackers have again demonstrated that no matter how many security precautions someone takes, all a hacker needs to track their location and snoop on their phone calls and texts is their phone number. The hack, first demonstrated by German security researcher Karsten Nohl in 2014 at a hacker convention in Hamburg, has been shown to still be active by Nohl over a year later for CBS’s 60 Minutes. The hack uses the network interchange service called Signalling System No. 7 (SS7), also known as C7 in the UK or CCSS7 in the US, which acts as a broker between mobile phone networks. When calls or text messages are made across networks SS7 handles details such as number translation, SMS transfer, billing and other back-end duties that connect one network or caller to another. Published By - Theguardian.com - LifeStyle News, Tech news, UK and world political comm...

Apple Watch expected to last only three years too, while Mac computers should last four, plus Apple slip-up points to OS X rebranding as MacOS, Apple has said that it expects so-called first owners of £500 iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches to replace them after only three years of use, and Mac computers only four. As part of the company’s new environmental push, which includes its new Apps for Earth campaign with the WWF, Apple has listed how long it expects its products to last for their “first owners” and therefore how much they contribute to the greenhouse gas lifecycle. Continue.... Published By - Theguardian.com - Tech News, Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis: Friday 15 April 2016 10.34

Labour MP, who was a target of online abuse, says authorities and web companies need to use their resources to tackle issue Trolling is still not being taken seriously enough by police and technology companies who already have the tools to take action against internet abusers, the Labour MP Stella Creasy has said.Creasy, who was targeted three years ago by one of the most high-profile Twitter trolls to be jailed, said the key to dealing with online abuse was challenging the underlying inequality, misogyny and prejudice that fuels the problem. Continue ....... Published By - Theguardian.com - Tech news, Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis - Friday 15 April 2016 14.31

Western companies  The Western companies need to end their hypocrisy over free speech in China, and start helping to end censorship in the country. The co-founders of GreatFire, an organisation dedicated to fighting the so-called Great Firewall of China.  So the technological heart of state censorship in the country, said it hurts to see companies such as Apple citing Chinese censorship in their battles with western governments, while co-operating with authoritarian state in order to earn money from its burgeoning middle classes and take advantage of its enormous manufacturing base. But technology firms, including Apple, often cite China when arguing with western states about repressive internet restrictions. So instead working hand-in-glove with the Chinese state o profit from the country’s vast internal market. He also praised Google for their decision in 2010 to stop censoring search results and pull out of mainland China. Censorship The Google was tempered with caution, ho...

Taiwanese manufacturer expects latest flagship Android Smartphone is going to solve the problems of the user, and switch on again the competition with Samsung and Apple The HTC, manufacturer of the first Android phone, is betting on speed, the duration of the battery and the first optically stabilized self-portrait camera in the world with its new flagship of HTC phone 10 hoping to relaunch the company. So the latest in his long line of high-end smartphones Android seems the best of the rest with a body completely of metal, glass front, HD Quad 5.2in, 0, 2-second release of the fingerprint scanner, the latest high-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and USB-C. HTC’s manufacturer build-quality and premium materials have always been top flight, but recent flagship phones have been uninspiring, failing to attract buyers, something the company must address. So the Celebrating a decade of making smartphones, Head of product marketing for HTC said: (We appreciate that in recent years we ha...

The top tech companies are talking to grassroots organisations across the globe to organise a fightback on their platforms against online abuse, hate speech, misogyny and stalking. The famous social networks Facebook, Twitter and Google are reaching out to women’s groups, NGOs and communities in Africa, America, Europe and the Middle East as the scale of abuse online continues to increase. So these attempts to foster a (counter-speech) movement to challenge the violent misogyny, racism, threats, intimidation and abuse that flood social media platforms have prompted some of the communities they are trying to empower to question whether they are ducking their own responsibilities. A fomous actor said, of the End Violence against Women coalition,  ( Any moves by social media companies to support, encourage and empower individuals and groups to resist and counter abuse is very welcome ). So the facebook’s US-based head of global safety, Antigone Davis, has recently overseen a series...

Do you know what's great about the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge? Almost everything. Samsung took Galaxy style S6 S5 with the essence of the Galaxy. But 24 hours after the start they have two ugly (and potentially deal breaking) was found. Nasty surprise  1 One of the most touted features of the new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge is the return of microSD expandable memory. Its omission from the Galaxy S6 was derided by many, and Samsung has been praised by law this time for listening to customers and making a turnover. What's more, that Galaxy S7 comes with Android Marshmallow which is the ideal companion to the microSD card. The reason is that the Marshmallow can treat expandable storage, as well as the internal memory. For example, if your 32 GB Galaxy S7 200 GB of microSD card adds the Marshmallow will report you now 232GB space to install applications, storing photos and videos-whatever you want to. But here comes the unpleasant surprise: Samsung has not implemented it...

Volvo simply reported a move that ought to come as welcome news to the individuals who periodically lose their auto keys. That is on the grounds that it needs to be the main automaker to shun physical keys and/or a remote key coxcomb out and out, maybe as right on time as 2017. In their place the organization would offer new-vehicle proprietors access to their automobiles by means of a cell phone application and Bluetooth remote innovation; they'd additionally have the capacity to open the storage compartment and begin the auto remotely also. Utilizing an application to open one's auto is not precisely another thought, but rather different automakers utilize it as an auxiliary, and not essential boulevard for access. For technophobes and others wedded to the present state of affairs, Volvo says it will keep on offering a physical key coxcomb to clients who demand it. Besides, automaker imagines the innovation will help venturesome proprietors empower ride sharing to benefit as ...