Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Sweet Mother's Day Ad Shows 'Why Moms Matter'

With Mother's Day quickly approaching, the internet is filling with heartwarming ads about moms and their special role in their families.

One such video is "Why Do Moms Matter?" from the photo book creation app, Chatbooks. In the ad, a group of kids, ranging in age from toddlers to teens, describe the wonderful things their moms do for them on a daily basis. Their examples include things like providing Band-Aids, having "Frozen" and Adele-themed sing-alongs and making their kids feel safe, protected and loved.

As one boy succinctly puts it, "She's just different and special from all the other moms because she's my mom."

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A Surprising Fact About People Who Are Loudest About Charity On Social Media

That Facebook friend of yours who’s the first to share a campaign to help people in need might be the least likely to actually follow through on donating, a new study found.

To find out how public declarations of support translate into funding dollars, researchers analyzed 3,500 pledges made via HelpAttack -- an app that facilitates donations and shares donors' activities with their contacts on Facebook and Twitter.

The study, published in the March issue of "Sociological Science," found that those who had broadcasted their commitments on a social media platform were most likely to delete pledges.

The pledges were made to a number of major organizations including, the American Red Cross, Best Friends Animal Society and Homes for Our Troops.

Of the commitments made, 64 percent were fulfilled, 13 percent were partially fulfilled and 16 percent were deleted.

In a related experiment, the researchers encouraged Facebook users to donate to Heifer International, a group that works to fight hunger and poverty. The campaign reached 6.4 million users. It generated a number of “likes” and “shares,” but resulted in just 30 donations.

The report comes at a time when Facebook is actually making it even easier for users to donate directly through its site.

Last August, Facebook opened up its “Donate” button to all nonprofits. The feature appears prominently on an organization’s page and takes users directly to the nonprofit’s website where they can give money.

The researchers concluded that users, for the most part, don’t feel obligated to part with money when it comes to the way they interact with social media platforms.

"What our findings indicate is that many people may regard online social networks as basically free platforms for personal exchange and much less as vehicles for an activity that comes at some cost to them, whether that cost is of money or time,” Angelo Melee, co-author of the study, wrote in a statement. “In more traditional forms of activism, participants make a tangible contribution. Online platforms, in contrast, provide opportunities for activism that may consist of nearly costless actions."

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Microsoft Wants To Let You Know When The Feds Are Snooping In Your Email

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) has sued the U.S. government for the right to tell its customers when a federal agency is looking at their emails, the latest in a series of clashes over privacy between the technology industry and Washington.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court in the Western District of Washington, argues that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution by preventing Microsoft from notifying thousands of customers about government requests for their emails and other documents.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

The government’s actions contravene the Fourth Amendment, which establishes the right for people and businesses to know if the government searches or seizes their property, the suit argues, and the First Amendment right to free speech.

Microsoft’s suit focuses on the storage of data on remote servers, rather than locally on people's computers, which Microsoft says has provided a new opening for the government to access electronic data.

Using the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the government is increasingly directing investigations at the parties that store data in the so-called cloud, Microsoft says. The 30-year-old law has long drawn scrutiny from technology companies and privacy advocates who say it was written before the rise of the commercial Internet and is therefore outdated.

“People do not give up their rights when they move their private information from physical storage to the cloud,” Microsoft says in the lawsuit, a copy of which was seen by Reuters. It adds that the government “has exploited the transition to cloud computing as a means of expanding its power to conduct secret investigations.”

The lawsuit represents the newest front in the battle between technology companies and the U.S. government over how much private businesses should assist government surveillance.

By filing the suit, Microsoft is taking a more prominent role in that battle, dominated by Apple Inc (AAPL.O) in recent months due to the government’s efforts to get the company to write software to unlock an iPhone used by one of the shooters in a December massacre in San Bernardino, California. Apple, backed by big technology companies including Microsoft, had complained that cooperating would turn businesses into arms of the state.

In its complaint, Microsoft says over the past 18 months it has received 5,624 legal orders under the ECPA, of which 2,576 prevented Microsoft from disclosing that the government is seeking customer data through warrants, subpoenas and other requests. Most of the ECPA requests apply to individuals, not companies, and provide no fixed end date to the secrecy provision, Microsoft said.

Microsoft and other companies won the right two years ago to disclose the number of government demands for data they receive. This case goes farther, requesting that it be allowed to notify individual businesses and people that the government is seeking information about them.

Increasingly, U.S. companies are under pressure to prove they are helping protect consumer privacy. The campaign gained momentum in the wake of revelations by former government contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 that the government routinely conducted extensive phone and Internet surveillance to a much greater degree than believed.

Microsoft’s lawsuit comes a day after a U.S. congressional panel voted unanimously to advance a package of reforms to the ECPA.

Last-minute changes to the legislation removed an obligation for the government to notify a targeted user whose communications are being sought. Instead, the bill would require disclosure of a warrant only to a service provider, which retains the right to voluntarily notify users, unless a court grants a gag order.

Republican leadership said it will bring the bill to a full vote in the House of Representatives in two weeks. After its expected passage, the bill will await Senate consideration.

Separately, Microsoft is fighting a U.S. government warrant to turn over data held in a server in Ireland, which the government argues is lawful under another part of the ECPA. Microsoft argues the government needs to go through a procedure outlined in a legal assistance treaty between the U.S. and Ireland.

(Reporting by Sarah McBride in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Dustin Volz in Washington; Editing by Bill Rigby)

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'Why Is This Trending?' Game Show Nails Our Social Media Anxieties

If you could sum up the silliness of Twitter trends and memes in a game show, it might look like this CollegeHumor parody.

On "Oh No, Why Is THIS Trending?" contestants try to guess what makes social media tick.

Good luck with that. And thanks for playing.

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AMC Is Considering Letting People Text During Movies

Many devout moviegoers are going to lose their popcorn over this: The biggest American cinema chain is open to allowing texting in some theaters.

AMC Entertainment CEO and President Adam Aron told Variety that it's a definite possibility.

"When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow," Aron told the trade publication in a story published Wednesday. "You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cell phone. That’s not how they live their life."

"At the same time, though, we’re going to have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t disturb today’s audiences," he said of in-theater texting.

Aron added that a separate section for texting was possible but that entire auditoriums set aside for mobile phone use was more likely.

In a series of tweets Thursday, Aron elaborated on his comments.

Press reported we considering a test allowing texts in a VERY FEW screens. We know vast majority of audience wants no texting (1 of 2)
— Adam Aron (@CEOAdam) April 14, 2016

IF ever, we ONLY would pursue in a way we'd be TOTALLY confident ALL our guests will fully enjoy movie going experience at AMC (2 of 2)
— Adam Aron (@CEOAdam) April 14, 2016

AMC, with hundreds of theaters, surpassed Regal as the country's largest chain when it bought Carmike Cinemas earlier this year, USA Today reported.

In a 2014 Today.com poll of 28,000 respondents, 97 percent said cell phone use during a film should "never be allowed -- watch the movie instead!"

When the subject of allowing texting was debated by cinema executives in 2012, Tim League of the Alamo Drafthouse chain responded: "Over my dead body will I introduce texting into the movie theater. ... That is the scourge of our industry."

Hear hear.

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WATCH: 5 Top Tech Minds Reveal Hopes and Fears About AI

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The Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center recently brought a diverse group of neuroscientists and philosophers together with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and programmers to answer a question posed by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: As developments in artificial intelligence extend or surpass human intelligence, do they challenge the traditional definition of what it means to be human?

In the following videos, five of Silicon Valley's top minds -- Reid Hoffman, Scott Phoenix, Elad Gil, Bo Shao and Bill Joy -- respond to this question and address the promises and perils of AI in the near future and long term.

Utopia or Dystopia? -- Reid Hoffman

Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, explains how AI may help us find utopian solutions to existent and emerging human problems. But there is the possibility that AI will become our awful robot overlords that only benefit the few if we don't cultivate social change in tandem. "The real risks involve what AI does in the hands of human beings," he says.

Solutions for Everything -- Scott Phoenix

Phoenix, co-founder of Vicarious, argues that human innovation is limited by biology -- the number of people, the years we live and how we think. A superintelligent AI, he says, could help us achieve what mortality obstructs, leading us to better and longer lives.

An Algorithm for Love -- Elad Gil

Gil, co-founder of Color Genomics, says your future happiness may be found through the computations of your local AI matchmaking robot. It may know you better than you think.

The Rising Species -- Elad Gil

Gil also says the evolution of AI is the evolution of an independent species that will demand we rethink the ethics and power relations between man and machine.

AI Will Never Be Human -- Bo Shao

Shao, founding managing partner of Matrix Partners China, cautions us to hold tight to the embodied sense of purpose that makes us human. What distinguishes human from machine is our lived experience, he says. We are more than goal-oriented machines moving from task to task.

Calculating Better Medicine -- Bill Joy

Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems and co-author of "The Java Language Specification," says if we embrace artificial intelligence, it may literally save our lives. AI may be the future of medicine, he says, helping humanity live longer through better diagnostics and information enabled by big data computing power.

CRISPR: The Danger in Future Tech -- Bill Joy

Joy's real worries though concern the capacity of gene editing technology to wipe out genetic diversity.

Also on WorldPost:

Where Robots Are Taking Over

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The End Of Maternity Leave As We Know It?

Another big company just effectively got rid of “maternity leave," making its parental leave policy the same for men and women.

Consulting firm Ernst & Young announced this week that starting July 1, mothers and fathers would both be eligible for 16 weeks paid time off after the arrival of a child through birth, adoption, surrogacy, foster care or legal guardianship.

EY’s current leave policy is already fairly generous -- but it privileges birth mothers, who get 12 weeks leave or twice as much time off as adoptive parents and dads. The company said that about 1,200 employees take parental leave each year, about half men.

By essentially eliminating the distinction between maternity and paternity leave, EY is perfectly on trend -- at least among a certain group of elite employers desperately fighting to attract talent. Several tech companies have recently gender-neutralized parental leave, including Facebook (four months for moms and dads), Etsy (26 weeks), Spotify (six months) and Netflix (one year).

Public policy on parental leave -- what little exists -- also makes no distinction between maternity and paternity leave. New York State recently passed a new, gender-neutral paid leave law, for example. And the national Federal Medical Leave Act, currently the only nationwide parental leave policy, gives workers 12 unpaid weeks off to take care of a child or tend to a sick relative, regardless of gender.

Yet, giving women or so-called “primary caretakers” more leave is still the norm among the few employers that provide parental leave. This probably isn’t doing women any long-term good at work or at home. Indeed, it might help give men an edge as more desirable employees -- who won’t take much time away from work. It also puts more of a burden on women at home, where it's assumed they'll take on more caregiving.

“The idea of giving women more parental leave than men is based on a sex stereotype that women should be home and men at work,” Peter Romer-Friedman, deputy director of litigation at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, told The Huffington Post recently.

It is unlawful to give women more leave to take care of their children, he said, citing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The only disparity in leave that can be justified, Romer-Friedman said, is the amount of time it takes a woman to recover from childbirth -- generally six weeks.

In a press release, EY said it’s the first in the consulting industry to “equalize parental leave benefits,” a claim that Fortune fact-checked on Wednesday and seems likely true.

The other consulting outfits also offer generous packages, but typically birth mothers get more time off.

At Accenture, birth moms get 16 weeks and all other primary caregivers get eight, according to Fortune. At IBM, birth moms get 14 weeks paid leave, fathers and adoptive parents get six weeks. Many of the consulting firms make a distinction between "primary" and "secondary" caregivers that seems anachronistic in 2016, when most couples are dual-income and responsibilities are shared relatively equally at home.

“Companies that view parental leave as something solely for mothers are becoming extinct, as more modern and enlightened companies are realizing that many people, especially millennials, are even more interested in co-parenting given most are part of dual career couples,” said Karyn Twaronite, EY global diversity and inclusiveness officer.

This post has been updated with a statement from Ernst & Young.

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Why The FBI Won't Tell Apple How It Cracked The iPhone

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The company that helped the FBI unlock a San Bernardino shooter's iPhone to get data has sole legal ownership of the method, making it highly unlikely the technique will be disclosed by the government to Apple or any other entity, Obama administration sources said this week.

The White House has a procedure for reviewing technology security flaws and deciding which ones should be made public. But it is not set up to handle or reveal flaws that are discovered and owned by private companies, the sources said, raising questions about the effectiveness of the so-called Vulnerabilities Equities Process.

The secretive process was created to let various government interests debate about what should be done with a given technology flaw, rather than leaving it to agencies like the National Security Agency, which generally prefers to keep vulnerabilities secret so they can use them.

The government's efforts to force Apple <AAPL.O> to help it unlock the San Bernardino iPhone have reignited a national debate about encryption, security and privacy that continues to rage two weeks after the Justice Department said it broke into the phone without Apple's help.

The sources said the technology used to get into the phone was supplied by a non-U.S. company that they declined to identify.

Without cooperation from the company, the FBI would not be able to submit the method to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process even if it wanted to, the sources said on condition they not be named.

The FBI itself probably does not know the details of the technique - just enough to determine that it worked, according to government sources and Rob Knake, who managed the White House process before leaving last year.

The FBI said in February that it was unable to get into the iPhone 5c used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook without help from Apple, and it won a court order compelling the Silicon Valley icon to break into the device. Apple, backed by much of the tech industry, complained that the order would in effect make businesses arms of the state.

The Justice Department dropped the matter the day before a crucial court hearing, saying it had found a way to get into the phone.

At the time, Apple said it hoped the maneuver would be disclosed so that it could fix the flaw before it is discovered and exploited by criminals.

In a separate New York case, the Justice Department is trying to force Apple’s help in extracting data from a drug dealer’s iPhone 5s. For technical reasons, that would be easier for Apple to do, though it would be much harder for the FBI or a contractor, said phone security expert Dan Guido.

The two battles spotlight a long-running but seldom aired conflict over whether information about software security lapses should be kept secret by law enforcement or intelligence agencies, who want the knowledge to snoop, or disclosed to the technology companies so they can patch the holes.

After questions were raised about the Vulnerabilities Equities Process in 2013, White House cybersecurity policy coordinator Michael Daniel said it was "reinvigorated," though information as basic as which departments are involved remained undisclosed.

Daniel has written that the factors to be weighed include how easy a flaw would be for outsiders to find and how much danger would be posed to society.

But Knake said the procedure had been created in 2010 to handle situations like an FBI technologist in a lab inventing a method for circumventing security.

“It was not set up for a world of commoditized exploitation,” where major defense contractors buy and sell flaws for millions of dollars.

“There is no way the government could force companies to share the methods that they are trying to sell, or any way to stop government agencies from buying from those companies,” he said.

Knake said the process could be improved if it were revamped again to deal with the reality of the exploit marketplace.

The White House referred questions to the FBI, which did not respond to emails seeking comment.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Mark Hosenball in Washington. Additional reporting by Dustin Volz. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Bernard Orr)

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Media Violence and Desensitization Part 2: A Case Study in How News Media Can Get It Wrong

Recently I discussed the common belief that media violence desensitizes viewers to violence and suffering in the real world. As I noted, increasing evidence suggests that this kind of desensitization does not, in fact, happen...at least not the way people often think. Further, there are sound theoretical reasons why fictional media should not desensitize us to real-life suffering. Namely, evidence suggests our brains treat fictional stories and real-life exposure to things differently, and it's uncommon to see learning occur in one context (relaxing at home with friends and family consuming media) generalize easily to other contexts (potentially hostile situations in the real world.)

Soon after this blog was posted I was contacted by another scholar, Matthew Grizzard at SUNY-Buffalo. In a bit of synchronicity, Dr. Grizzard had recently published an article on desensitization and it was getting a little news coverage just as my blog was released. Dr. Grizzard expressed concerns that news media were misrepresenting the meaning of his article. Let's have a look at Dr. Grizzard's study and what happened with it.

A couple of years back, Dr. Grizzard published a different study suggesting that playing violent action games could actually lead players to consider moral issues more deeply. Rather than violent games creating antisocial monsters, being exposed to dubious moral situations in games seemed to relate to greater moral reflection.

In his new study, Dr. Grizzard wanted to examine how this effect played out over longer periods of time. He and his colleagues had students play the same action game over the course of four days, sometimes as a moral good-guy, sometimes as an immoral bad-guy. On the fifth day they had participants play a different video game, this time also as an immoral bad guy. They found that repetitively playing as an immoral character in an action game led to a reduction in the moral reflection response seen in Dr. Grizzard's earlier paper. In other words, the more you play a game, the less you worry about the morality of the game. Even picking up a new, but similar game, you might reflect on morality less than if you were tossed into immoral actions in games for the first time ever.

So these findings are pretty straightforward. The more you are exposed to the same thing over and over, the less emotional response it evokes over time. This is how desensitization really works. It's context specific. Playing action games desensitizes you to other action games. What does this mean for real-world emotional callousness to suffering of others? Well as Grizzard and colleagues expressed in the original manuscript "...it is important to note that there is no evidence of video game-induced desensitization generalizing to real-world behaviors."

Despite this important warning, some of the news articles that picked up this study inferred exactly what Grizzard and colleagues told them not to...that this study could indicate playing action games desensitizes people to real-life violence. One article headlined "Violent Video Games Can Trigger Emotional Desensitization" and continued "repeated play of violent video games desensitizes gamers to feeling of guilt." But...this was not what Dr. Grizzard and colleagues found. The article invites readers to infer that these effects generalize to real-life guilt and decreased emotional responses. As Dr. Grizzard expressed to me in an email conversation "We claimed in the study that video games lose their ability to elicit guilt with repeated play; a lot of news outlets (not all, but a fair number) are claiming that gamers...lose their ability to feel guilt with repeated play. These are different claims, and while I would argue that our data support our claim, our data do not even address the second claim (i.e., whether gamers lose their ability to feel guilt)."

Why do news media mangle these issues in sensationalist ways? For one thing, I suspect they didn't bother to read the actual article. But again, I also think it does harken to the emotionally-laden yet nebulous way desensitization is used and misused in the general public (and, unfortunately, among many scholars.) Dr. Grizzard expressed to me "I think one reason this interpretation is so 'obvious' may be due to implicit and explicit biases against video gaming and violent media entertainment in general." I agree with this assessment. It seems some people are so eager to find any information to make video games, or violent movies look bad, they're willing to try to jam square pieces of data through round theoretical holes.

Also, as I noted in my previous blog post, I think scholars have failed to adequately communicate what desensitization is, leading people to believe it is an entirely negative process. But in reality, emotional desensitization is typically normal and even adaptive. As Dr. Grizzard told me "research in cognitive psychology suggests that emotions can cloud our rational judgment processes (e.g., this is why people are more afraid of sharks than getting diabetes; by the way, since 1958 there been around 1,100 shark attacks in the US and there are around 21 million people in the US today who have been diagnosed with diabetes), so being more in control of our emotions through desensitization processes might allow us to make better decisions and respond more rationally." Thus, even if media violence really did result in emotional desensitization to real-life suffering (which, as I've noted, the research evidence does not support), this doesn't mean we'd become more violent, or help others less. Simply using rational cognitive responses rather than emotional ones, we may be more helpful rather than less. Assuming otherwise, particularly in the absence of data is problematic.

Ultimately, while it's clear that news media often leap to faulty assumptions, I'm reluctant to let scholars entirely off the hook. One need look no further than the awful, misleading press release for the American Psychological Association's dead-on-arrival task force report on video game violence for an example of how not to do a responsible press release. The APA misinformed rather than informed the public with that release. But Dr. Grizzard deserves great credit for taking steps to correct the record for his own study. If only more scholars did the same.

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From Connected Cows to Wearables for Seniors -- Here's Where We Are With Internet of Things Post-#IoTDay2016

What do connected cows and wearables for seniors have in common? They are just two new innovative solutions in the world of #Iot 2016.

The business and consumer promise of the Internet of Things is well known -- even Goldman Sachs predicts a $2 trillion dollar market by 2020. And as awareness grows, so does opportunity.

The IoT industry has not been without hiccups, however. A tiny perception that there is not enough WOW-factor in Internet of Things applications lingers. Recently, Google's Nest has come under scrutiny for connectivity issues, and a recent survey from Accenture highlights demand for IoT devices is slower than initially hoped.

In fact, IoT applications are more innovative today than many may realize. Take Fujitsu's Connected Cow, for instance. I had the opportunity to catch up with Bhusan Chand, Vice President, Head of Practice, Technology and Systems Integration, Fujitsu North America to learn more about a truly market-driven application in ag-tech.

Fujitsu is helping dairy farmers in Japan optimize and increase cattle production by collecting and analyzing data from individual cows. This has helped produce a measurable increase in successful artificial insemination rates which directly translates to increased revenue.

The future in #IoT and ag-tech could be bright as other applications such as livestock disease detection and customized crop production come online.

In the world of wearables for seniors, I spoke with AT&T to learn more about their partnerships with device manufacturers in developing revolutionary discreet watches for seniors.

These wearables help monitor falls, provide medication-reminders, and offer much-needed peace of mind for the 'sandwich generation' as they are able to remotely monitor their aging parents movement and well-being.

Yes, consumers have high expectations that connectivity via their smartphones and the rest of their world is readily available. And businesses want to optimize the data they produce and collect to drive better business results and help increase revenue.

The state of Internet of Things in 2016 is that digital transformation is well underway. Market-driven solutions resonate best and gain the most traction and #IoT2016 shows great potential and innovation.

Beverly Macy is author of The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing. She speaks on Digital Transformation and Internet of Things and teaches at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

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Hennessey Venom GT Spyder Becomes World's Fastest Convertible

That speed tops the previous record, held by the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport Vitesse, by more than 11 mph. However, as Autoblog noted, neither the old record nor the new one were recognized by Guinness World Records, which requires two runs in opposite directions.

Powered by a twin-turbo 7.0L V8 engine producing 1,451bhp@7,200 rpm, the Spyder can go from 0 to 60 mph in less than 2.4 seconds, and hit 200 mph in 13 seconds, the company said.

To celebrate the record, as well as the company's 25th anniversary, Hennessey will make three "World Record Edition" Spyders at a cost of $1.3 million each.

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HuffPost Is Live On Snapchat Discover

We have exciting news to share with you. Today -- and today only! -- HuffPost is live on Snapchat Discover with a guide to help you sleep well, feel great and perform better.

Open the channel here to discover ...

4 incredibly simple hacks to boost your energy.
What your brain is actually doing when you're asleep (it's not what you think).
A miracle beauty product that is entirely, 100% free.
Is operating while drunk really worse than being tired? You'd be surprised.
Unbelievably easy moves to your morning routine for instant good vibes.

... and so much more. The channel is live today only, so don't miss out!

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Wednesday, April 13, 2016

New Documents Show Oil Industry Even More Evil Than We Thought

Mary-Kate And Ashley Olsen Just Blessed Us With Their 'First Public Selfie'

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen posted their first public selfie on Wednesday and even if you think you don't care, you do.

The twins snapped the photo for Sephora as part of an Instagram takeover supporting their fashion line, Elizabeth and James. Sporting sunglasses and their signature red carpet pout, we're sure they're also wearing trendy outfits (that we can't see) or at least smizing beneath their shades.

"First public selfie ever," reads the caption, obviously worded that way lest we ever discover their private Instagram accounts by some miracle.

Apparently it originally read, "Rise and shine. First public selfie ever," before it was edited by a PR person the twins.

Mary-Kate and Ashley announced their Sephora takeover by posting a photo (NOT a selfie) of themselves on their own Elizabeth and James account. It is also in black and white. We're sensing a pattern here.

The twins turned the camera away from themselves for the rest of the takeover, posting photos of their upcoming Fall 2016 collection, two salads, some handbag materials and a picture of a guy captioned "Hey man."

Right on, Olsen twins.

We can only pray that this experience is liberating for them and that they eventually return to Instagram with their own personal accounts. But let's get real. The chances of that happening are just as low as the twins doing a guest appearance on "Fuller House."

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Journalist Matthew Keys Sentenced To 2 Years In Anonymous Hack On LA Times

WASHINGTON — Matthew Keys, a journalist who previously worked for Reuters, was sentenced to two years in prison by a federal judge in Sacramento on Wednesday following his conviction in a hacking case, according to reporter Sarah Jeong.

Keys will go into federal custody on June 15, Jeong reported.

Federal prosecutors charged the 29-year-old in early 2013 over an incident that took place in 2010 involving the hacking group Anonymous, shortly after Keys was fired from his job at a Tribune Publishing Co.-owned station in Sacramento. The feds accused him of distributing login details and encouraging hackers to "fuck some shit up" during the attack on the LA Times website, which the Tribune Publishing Co. also owns.

By the time Keys was indicted, he was working as a social media editor at Reuters, which suspended him soon after. His lawyer claimed his client was working as an undercover journalist.

He continues to deny wrongdoing in the case.

Keys wrote in a post ahead of his sentencing on Wednesday that the past three years "have been exceptionally challenging" personally and professionally. "The direction of the rest of my life rests with a single person and is almost completely beyond my control," he said.

The journalist told Ars Technica that he turned down three plea deals because he did not want to admit to a crime he says he didn't commit.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has said that Keys' crime essentially amounts to vandalism, and shows that reform of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- the same statute prosecutors were using against the late internet activist Aaron Swartz -- is long overdue.

"The government certainly seems to be making an example out of Matthew Keys—as it did in the tragic case of Aaron Swartz," Amul Kalia wrote in a post for EFF. "Meanwhile, the government hasn’t even gone after the individual who actually made the changes to the LA Times article."

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What Anita Hill Thinks Feminists Can Learn From Angry Men

When you are a woman who writes online -- be it for a big publication like The Huffington Post or in 140 characters on Twitter -- the conventional wisdom is, "Don't read the comments." Anita Hill, a woman who is no stranger to public vitriol, has the opposite suggestion.

In an interview with Broadly, the attorney and professor, who is also the subject of HBO's upcoming film "Confirmation," said that she would tell female writers and bloggers "to read as much of [the hate mail] as you can stand," for one very important reason:

I think the mail is quite revealing. It's revealing of a certain kind of anger towards women, and it's revealing of a fear of equality -- a misunderstanding, a myth of what gender equality means, as some sort of unwarranted threat to men. To some extent, it's healthy to read them.

I've held on to all of my negative [letters]... I do have them, and I do read them. I keep them for a purpose, to learn something.

Writers who aren't straight, white men tend to bear the brunt of online harassment. The Guardian recently did an analysis of their own comments and found that the 10 writers who faced the highest levels of abuse were eight women (four women of color, four white women), and two black men.

As one of those women writers/bloggers/editors, for whom online vitriol has become a near-daily part of my job, Hill's words ring true. After tweeting a (fairly innocuous) explainer about why the wage gap is not a myth yesterday, my mentions quickly filled up with vicious commentary from men who needed to tell me just how wrong I was.

The most charming of the rebuttals looked like this:

The vitriol Hill faced is far worse than anything I've experienced. After all, she came forward with allegations of sexual harassment against a very powerful political figure (soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), during a time when the term "sexual harassment" had yet to be embedded in the public consciousness the way it is now. But the idea that there could be some sort of revelation -- albeit a depressing one -- in the muck of hateful comments is somewhat uplifting.

Of course, if reading the comments -- or tweets or Facebook posts -- is going to harm your mental health, it's best to just... not. ("Read only as much as you can," said Hill.) But sometimes by reading people's hateful words, you can learn just how little substance there is behind them. It's more about generalized ignorance and anger than about YOU.

"I think some ways it might be helpful to see where [the detractors] are coming from," said Hill. "To say, 'well, I guess it's not even about me personally.'"

Head over to Broadly to read their full interview with Hill.

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Here Is How You'll Share Pics On Facebook When We All Live In Computers

One day, we will vacation in virtual reality and take snapshots with virtual selfie sticks. Or so Facebook would have you believe.

As part of its F8 Developers Conference, the company on Wednesday showcased a "Social VR" experience illustrating how people might get together after the technological singularity renders our weak flesh obsolete in virtual reality.

The video, which you can watch above, shows two friends hanging out in a virtual recreation of London. They're represented by ghostly white 3D-rendered hands and faces rather than full bodies. One of them pulls out a virtual selfie stick to take a picture of the scene.

Then, they take a couple of pictures. The two lifeless apparitions virtual people interact with one another to choose a shot they like, and they upload it to their Facebook News Feeds via a blue box.

The overall idea is that Facebook hopes to one day connect the world through virtual spaces. It owns Oculus, perhaps the world's best-known virtual reality company, and its intent is to use the technology to break down barriers separating people from one another. (You know, things like space and time and oceans.) In the not-too-distant future, you and a friend could don virtual reality glasses, create avatars of yourselves and meet up in digital environments to play games or just hang out and chat.

Lo-fi versions of this basically exist already. For example, Gear VR headsets let you watch videos alongside other people and have basic conversations while doing so.

Think about it: Soon, you could get all of your socializing done from your computer chair with a headset strapped to your face. No more embarrassment over shirt stains or halitosis: Your virtual avatar can basically be perfect.

Sounds good, right?

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3 Ways Blockchain is Fundamentally Changing The Power Industry

I attended a TED style energy conference about a week ago and the consensus was that the future utility is here regardless of how reluctant the industry is. With impending delivery of Tesla Powerwalls and continued reduction in solar panel prices (with science now able to facilitate solar power generation even in rainy conditions [PDF]) fundamental change is not just imminent, it is here.

I wrote a future utility post a year ago and in it I suggested a scenario where

'Sam is considered as a 'node' on the future power grid (with a card and app to manage energy use)... Sam's home is powered by a rooftop solar panel and she has a neighbor, Jo (with his own + or -), who doesn't drive, doesn't own a solar panel and trades stocks for a living. Jo uses a lot more electricity than Sam by running servers at home. Some days Jo (conceptually) 'gets' electricity from Sam's 'home battery' or Walgreens or wind farm depending on whether Jo 'wants' renewable energy. Jo is another node on the grid'.

That scenario is closer than I projected all because of Blockchain. As I share in my ebook Managing Technological Change In The Utility Industry I see 3 areas of fundamental change

Consumer data management: The ledger function that the Blockchain provides will allow 3rd party technology and service providers to safely interact with the end consumer in a relationship that up until now didn't exist; the utility acted as the gatekeeper of consumer data preventing access to the services that we now take for granted in other industries for example the ability to get contracts based on your customized usage profile.
Retail trading between consumers: the contract between you and the utility is for the utility to generate and deliver electricity to your home. This is about to change. Smart contracts, enabled by blockchain, will enable a solar panel plus Powerwall owner to sell electricity to their neighbors, effectively cutting out the utility. It's already being piloted in NY and will be an area of huge impact. Yes, the future is now.
Utility security: data transmission, and consequently data security, at the scale the utility has never known is currently at the top of industry concerns. Secure data transmission, using the blockchain and its public/private key cryptography and cryptographic signatures (amongst other cryptographic techniques), takes away the pain of the utility CIO.

The industry is not prepared for these changes and in some cases is actively resisting it. Blockchain as an infrastructure platform is not a fad, even if Bitcoin may be, and Goldman Sachs is spending heavily to disrupt itself [PDF]. As Nobel prize winning physicist Max Planck suggested 'a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents finally die'.

Time for the industry to wake up.

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This Hydrogen-Powered Car Could Be The Future Of Sustainable Mobility

A new hydrogen-powered car called the Rasa, created by U.K.-based manufacturer Riversimple, could be the future of sustainable mobility. In the video above, HuffPost Business Editor Alex Kaufman discusses the car and what makes it "cool and sexy and innovative."

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Has Facebook Achieved What AOL Could Have a Generation Ago?

Yesterday, Facebook opened up Instant Articles to all publishers. If you don't know, Instant Articles are Facebook's new way to natively load articles within the app using an adapted RSS feed. These native articles, which have a lightning bolt in the top right corner, load in half a second -- 10x faster than if user was to click out to a website. From what I've seen so far, they really do load instantaneously and have a great layout and user experience. And if you're paying attention, you'll understand that this is their third push for native media consumption: first photos, then videos, and now written content.

Mark Zuckerberg announced native Instant Articles as a feature update about a year ago and Facebook has been slowly rolling out and improving the product ever since. Facebook started with the biggest publishers in the game: BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, New York Times, Washington Post. BuzzFeed has seen their Instant Articles engage more people than any of their standard link posts and Gawker's founder tweeted that instant articles boosted daily uniques to their website.

However, as of today, Instant Articles become available to anybody with a Facebook page and a blog. This is a key opportunity for small blogs and publications to get ahead of the game and really understand how best to use the new product. For example, not only can publishers create and distribute mobile-friendly content, but it also allows the ability for publishers to monetize the ad space within each article. Publishers will be able to directly sell their own display ads and keep 100% of the revenue and utilize Facebook's Audience Network, their programmatic ad network (which considering the user-data Facebook has, is killer). Of course, just like any other update, there will be winners and losers depending on how you play the game. It's up to you to test and figure out what works best for you.

But when I really look at Instant Articles, and the other new updates I'm sure that they'll announce today at their F8 conference, I'm asking myself one question: Has Facebook been able to achieve what AOL could have a generation ago? By that I mean: Has Facebook become a layer on top of the Internet itself?

Let me explain. If you think about our behavior on AOL in the early to mid 90's, people never really left AOL to go on the world-wide-web. After they logged in with dial-up, not only did they have email and instant messaging, but they were also on a page that provided them with (slightly curated) news, weather, videos, images, games, and articles. Users had no reason to leave the AOL hub to explore the Internet on their own. Sound familiar?

If Facebook is able to pull off this move from a media standpoint, they will be the layer of medium consumption above the Internet itself. Think about it: now instead of going to Time, Inc., or Sports Illustrated, you're consuming through and in Facebook's native environment. There's no reason to leave Facebook's app at all.

Having an all-native interface that's overlaid on top of the world-wide-web is the ultimate ambition for an internet company. It's an ambition that nobody thought was going to be possible after AOL lost its foothold in the last decade. Facebook is dangerously close to being able to pull it off. If Zucks was able to acquire Snapchat 18 months ago like he wanted to, and if they were to developed an OTT (over-the-top) network that competed with Netflix, Facebook would basically be the anointed winner of the entire Internet.

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