Facebook will create a board of up to 40 experts on digital content, privacy, free expression, human rights, journalism, civil rights, safety and other areas to consult on content moderation, it said Monday. The company will decide over the next six months board size, term length and how content cases are selected, said Vice President-Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg. The draft suggests three-year terms, “automatically” renewable once. Workshops will be in Singapore, Delhi, Nairobi, Berlin, New York, Mexico City and elsewhere.
The ICANN committee working on EU general data protection regulation expects to deliver its final report early next month. The Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) Team on a temporary specification for global top-level domain registration data got 42 unique comments, including from nine ICANN community groups, and from companies and other organizations. "From the outset of this EPDP, we knew the work before us would be challenging and require patience, flexibility, and hard work," blogged Generic Names Supporting Organization Council Liaison to EPDP Team Rafik Dammak Thursday. ICANN says it "has consulted with contracted parties, European data protection authorities, legal experts, and interested governments and other stakeholders to understand the potential impact of the GDPR to Personal Data that is Processed by certain participants in the gTLD domain name ecosystem (including Registry Operators and Registrars)."
Amazon disputed study results about its Rekognition system in a Friday report that MIT Media Lab found the technology had much more difficulty telling the gender of female faces and darker-skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. It misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft's technology mistook darker-skinned women for men 1.5 percent of the time. The results published were based on facial analysis “and not facial recognition,” an Amazon spokesperson emailed, quoting Matt Wood, a member of Amazon Web Services’ machine learning team. “Analysis can spot faces in videos or images and assign generic attributes such as wearing glasses; recognition is a different technique by which an individual face is matched to faces in videos and images.” It's impossible to draw a conclusion on the accuracy of facial recognition for any use based on results obtained using facial analysis, said Wood, noting the study didn’t use the latest version of Rekognition and results didn’t represent how a customer would use the service today. Using an updated version with similar data, “we found exactly zero false positive matches with the recommended 99% confidence threshold,” he said. Amazon continues to improve the technology.
Silicon Labs is sampling Wi-Fi modules and transceivers it says use half the power of competitors, have built-in security and superior RF blocking performance. Production quantities are due in Q2, it said Wednesday.
Denying Microsoft the ability to use existing software interfaces to build computer programs under copyright law would severely limit computer industry innovation, Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker blogged Thursday. Microsoft asks the Supreme Court to review its ongoing fair use dispute with Oracle (see 1705300064). Upholding past rulings against Microsoft would be “akin to saying that keyboard shortcuts can work with only one type of computer,” Walker wrote. Oracle didn’t comment immediately.
Addressing state and nonstate actors engaged in malicious cyber activities is the fourth in a list of seven mission objectives Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats outlined Tuesday in the administration's national intelligence strategy. The objective calls for understanding adversarial leadership plans, intentions, capabilities and operations. It includes expansion of “tailored production and appropriate dissemination and release of actionable cyber threat intelligence” and expanding abilities to “enable diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement plans and operations” to deter and counter bad actors.
The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to hear a case in which the California Supreme Court ruled Yelp can’t be forced to remove negative third-party reviews from its site (see 1807030023). Engine Org Executive Director Evan Engstrom applauded the high court's certiorari denial of Hassell v. Yelp, saying Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ensures startups don’t face “ruinous liability for the speech of their users.”
“Nest was not breached,” a spokesperson emailed us, after reports by a customer in Orinda, California, that a Nest security camera blasted a warning claiming to be from Civil Defense of ballistic missiles headed to three U.S. cities. The third-party hack was the result of a compromised password exposed through “breaches on other websites,” the Google spokeswoman said. In December, a Houston family reportedly heard a stranger’s voice over a baby monitor saying sexual expletives through a Nest security camera and then threatening to kidnap the child. “In nearly all cases, two-factor verification eliminates this type of security risk,” the spokeswoman said: Google takes security in the home “extremely serious and we’re actively introducing features that will reject compromised passwords, allow customers to monitor access to their accounts and track external entities that abuse credentials.”
Social media users shouldn’t be paid for their data, and even if large shares of company profits were shared, they would be minimal, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said Tuesday. Some have suggested Facebook could pay its users about $15 per year for their data, the ITIF report said. Google and Facebook earned about $28 billion in combined profits in 2017 and have some 4.6 billion users globally, ITIF said: “If the payments to users were equal to half their profits, then each user would get just of $3 per year.”
Disney’s streaming and overseas business operations, newly broken out publicly into a “recast” Direct-to-Consumer and International (DCTI) financial-reporting “segment,” incurred a $738 million operating loss in the year ended Sept. 29, a $454 million increase from a year earlier, said an 8-K SEC filing Friday. Disney previously reported the results of its DCTI operations under three other business segments, it said. Disney blamed the higher DCTI loss on the consolidation of financial results from BAMTech, in which it upped its stake to 75 percent in September 2017 (see 1709200034), plus higher than expected losses from Hulu, of which it would become 60 percent owner at the closing of the Fox acquisition. DTCI revenue jumped 11 percent for the year to $3.4 billion, including $1.4 billion in affiliate fees, $1.3 billion in ad proceeds and the rest from subscription fees, it said. Acquiring majority control of BAMTech enabled Disney “to enter the DTC space quickly and effectively, as demonstrated by the success" of the ESPN Plus launch, said CEO Bob Iger. ESPN Plus topped a million subscribers in its first five months and “continues to grow as it expands its content mix, all of which bodes well” for the debut this year of the Disney Plus DTC service, he said. The “robust slate” of Disney Plus original content will include the first live-action Star Wars series, and other “high-profile projects” currently in production or development, he said. Disney will disclose “greater detail” at its April 11 Investor Day conference, he said, including a first look at the original content Disney’s TV and film studios are creating “exclusively for the new streaming service.”