Technology - Google News

Curbing user privacy and policy violation: Facebook suspends Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group
Fortnite brings out the ten-year-old fort builder in all of us
Making The Grade: Making sense of Apple's current MacBook line for education

Curbing user privacy and policy violation: Facebook suspends Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group

Posted: 17 Mar 2018 03:07 AM PDT

The 21st century is marked by the overflow of information across the pool of social networking platforms and the apps billed in on them by developers, thereby often rendering the privacy of personal user information vulnerable to unwanted exposure.

Caught in a similar situation of policy violation impinging on the privacy rights of its user information, Facebook has done away with Cambridge Analytica, the data firm used by the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, citing policy violations as the cause of the suspension.

Paul Grewal, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Facebook stated in a post on Friday night that the decision was taken after reports of the data firm was not completely deleted, given to them by a University of Cambridge professor surfaced, which was totally in violation of Facebook policies.

Adding to this, Grewal said that Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, the Psychology Professor at University of Cambridge had wrongly passed data to Strategic Communication Laboratories (that houses Cambridge Analytica) from his app, using Facebook Login, thereby violating Facebook's Platform policies. Kogan could gain access to information on those using his app, such as the city they were living in then, the pages/content they liked, and so on, as the app provided personality prediction. It was billed on Facebook as "a research app used by psychologists." Consequently, as many as about 270,000 people fell for it and downloaded the app, by and large, unsuspectingly giving their consent to Kogan to access their personal information filled in on the app, intruding upon their information privacy. This further allowed Kogan to pass on data to Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, Inc.

Although Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, he did not subsequently abide by our rules. By passing information on to a third party, including SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policie. – Paul Grewal, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Facebook

Following the information of the violation that was received in 2015, The popular social networking site asked Cambridge Analytica to certify that they had destroyed the data they received and that the company had really done so.

Several days ago, we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data were deleted. We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims. – Grewal's statement

Following up on the certification, and on finding inconsistency between word and action, Facebook decided to take the matter into their hands and effect strict punitive action. To put in Regan's statement from the post on this, it goes: "If true, this is another unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments they made. We are suspending SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and Kogan from Facebook, pending further information."

Facebook is committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens. We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behaviour. – Paul Grewal, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Facebook

Following this mess up, Cambridge Analytica has now been kept under scrutiny regarding the probe into its alleged interference in the Russian election.

Also, Special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly requested that all emails from the firm's employees who worked with the Trump campaign, and Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, were interviewed with the House Intelligence Committee.

The final section of Grewal's post has enumerated measures to improve the profile experience and account the safety of all the Facebook users. To this end, all apps asking for detailed user information shall have to pass through the scrutiny of Facebook's App Review process, where the developers won't be permitted to even ask for information from any Facebook user before convincingly justifying the nature and exact purpose of the data they want to collect to Facebook.

Not only this, after getting feedback from the Facebook community, Facebook decided to hand the leash of personal information outlay and friend list of exclusively to the users so that they can "control their experience" themselves, as stated on the post. For this, before, the users can "review the permissions the developer is requesting and choose which information to share" before deciding to download an app. Additionally, the users can also "manage or revoke" those permissions any time if they deem it fit. Facebook does many things manual and automated checks such as random audits of the currently existing along with systematic, responsive and timely monitoring of the fastest growing apps to keep a tab on its policy compliance and a positive and fulfilling user experience.

Accordingly, policy enforcement is ensured in many ways, such as suspending unlawful developers, working with developers to address problems and so on.

With its suspension of policy violators and its steady protective measures to uphold the safety of user experience on its platform, Facebook proves why it continues to be a favorite among the social network users.

Source: Facebook Newsroom

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Fortnite brings out the ten-year-old fort builder in all of us

Posted: 17 Mar 2018 06:02 AM PDT

Fortnite: Battle Royale hasn't quite grabbed me. While the game is at least accurately named, the gunplay—originally designed to let players mow down hordes of mostly mindless AI bots—isn't as suited for culling other human players in a Battle Royale mode. Developer Epic Games seems to know this and is tirelessly tuning the overnight smash hit's bullet burping. And while 3.4 million concurrent players (as of February) don't seem dissuaded by this continued fine-tuning, I still feel like the gameplay isn't quite up to snuff.

Yet I still can't stop thinking about the game. That's partly because it's seemingly the biggest game on the planet—hot on the heels of the extremely similar, previously biggest game on the planet, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. But it's not just that. Fortnite appeals to me, personally, because it does more than remind me of my past. It gives me glimpses into an alternate present.

An engineer deferred

There was a time, long before I even cared about video games (much less wrote about them), when I seemed fated to become some kind of engineer. That was how my parents saw my future, anyway; the two farmers-turned-bankers didn't have many positive things to say about career prospects that didn't involve a lot of math. So my creative endeavors (mostly drawing, back then) always led to a response like, "Yeah, that would make a good hobby."

I didn't particularly mind this narrow career ideal at the time. I liked building things. Between soccer and speech classes, I filled sketchbooks with impractical structures and robots. Two of my uncles, both engineers themselves, humored me by helping with mock-up Battle Bot "schematics" that never left the page.

A bit of that old obsession has resurfaced in Fortnite: Battle Royale. The shooting may not meet my gameplay standards, but racing to build the most efficient fortresses sure does. And that's just how most of Fortnite's pitched battles end—in spastic competitions to raise zig-zagging siege towers, each player looking to gain high ground over (and cover from) the other.

Fortnite really takes me back to those days of Battle Bots and uncles, and the scads of tree forts that arose from that same obsession with making something out of nothing. My brother, friends, and cousins built those forts in the woods near a park and in the shelterbelts overlooking the creek behind my grandmother's place. We even set up a sort of wall-less headquarters (reinforced with snow during the winter) between three pine trees which, I would later find out, belonged to our mayor.

Nobody ever kicked us out, though. Well, nobody else ever kicked us out. We attacked each other all the time—either for the snowball fight fun of it, or because of "very serious" fallings-out. For me, that fort-building was a chance to show off something I felt trained to be good at in the childhood turf wars that would have happened anyway.

I like to watch

These days, I'm not good enough at Fortnite to see the closing moments of most matches firsthand. That, plus my natural disinclination to the gunplay, has pushed me towards watching matches on Mixer's never-ending, mildly brilliant "HypeZone" channel. The streaming service cycles between players who have reached the top 10 of their respective matches. It's Fortnite at its most geographically and dramatically condensed. And it's exactly the kind of junk-food viewing I need to fill the Junkyard Wars-shaped hole in my life.

In this phase of the game, rocket launcher duels dissolve into cooperative races against the clock as panicky combatants rush to escape the all-destroying storm that pushes them closer together over the course of a match. The few competitors at this stage will build improbable bridges under their very feet and sprout brick citadels with arrow slits for snipers to see through. Often, winners are victorious not with bullets but with pickaxes—toppling towers to introduce their foes above to aggressive fall damage below.

Building in games might always appeal to me in a creative context, but these competitive building scenarios also tickle the math-loving sectors my parents drilled into my brain—the ones that have made me obsess over efficient character builds in EVE Online, Darkest Dungeon, and Dota 2 ever since. The winner in Fortnite: Battle Royale isn't just determined by who shoots better or faster; it's about who can master the space they're in.

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Making The Grade: Making sense of Apple's current MacBook line for education

Posted: 17 Mar 2018 06:01 AM PDT

Making The Grade is a new weekly series from Bradley Chambers covering Apple in education. Bradley has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple's products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.

There's been a lot of discussion in the Apple community lately about MacBook Pro vs. MacBook Air vs. MacBook. Each laptop has its pros and cons, but I want to consider which one makes the most sense in education.

I had to do this process two years ago when I was planning our technology refresh at our school. I came up with a list of guidelines that I considered to be important, and then let those guidelines help me determine what laptop was best for us.

Compatibility with existing hardware (projectors, TVs, etc.)
The maturity of hardware (for reliability)
Price vs. function

While that may seem like a straightforward list, it contains some critical decisions that can impact the overall price significantly. When buying more than a couple of laptops, small equipment decisions can add tens of thousands of dollars to your quote.

Compatibility with existing hardware

One of the most significant differences between Apple's laptop lineup is the ports they include. The MacBook and MacBook Pro rely heavily on USB-C where the MacBook Air still uses the MagSafe power adaptor and USB-A.

As a forward-thinking technology fan, I love the promise of USB-C. It's "one cable to rule them all", and the hope of it is incredible. The downside of USB-C is that we still have tons of USB-A needs. Desktop printers still use USB-A. iPads and iPhone even ship with USB-A cables. If I deploy laptops that use USB-C, I am going to have to provide at least one USB-A adaptor ($19). If I am buying 100 laptops, this will add $1,900 in cost to that price.

Another device I must consider is projectors/TVs. We have plenty of teachers who rely on these devices every single day. Like I mentioned earlier, the MacBook and MacBook Pro use USB-C for their only ports, and this means that I have to buy the USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter for HDMI at $69. While these would negate the need for the $19 USB-A adaptor, it would add $6,900 in cost to an order of 100 laptops. I have plenty of teachers who also use VGA projectors. So I would have to consider purchasing the USB-C VGA Multiport Adapter at $69.

If I wanted to provide teachers and staff members with each the HDMI and VGA adaptor, it would cost $13,800. The MacBook Air uses Thunderbolt 2, and I can buy a VGA adaptor for $29. While Amazon sells multiple versions of all of these cables for less, I usually buy directly from Apple on our initial orders so I can have everything inside my lease.

Maturity of hardware

There is an old saying among those who buy Apple hardware to avoid the first generation of any product. While the MacBook and MacBook Pro models aren't new, they do suffer from issues relating to keyboard reliability. There is even an Apple Support document show how to clean the keyboard using compressed air.

When thinking about deploying a fleet of these, I struggle to recommend them when I know some of them will have keyboard problems in the future. I need reliability. Yes, the MacBook Air screen is old. Yes, it lacks a modern processor. However, it's the most mature hardware in Apple's laptop lineup.

There are no "gotchas" for IT Managers to work around. It contains reliable components that have been tested over many years in multiple variations. It might not be the best-looking computer, but it's the one that will last the longest.

Price vs. function

If I am buying myself a new laptop today, I am probably going with a MacBook Pro. I personally love the Retina screen, and I love the power it provides. If I am buying 100 laptops, however, I just can't justify the extra expense of the MacBook Pro or MacBook over the MacBook Air. At $849/$1049 (US education pricing), Apple's MacBook Air is still a great value when deploying in mass. Both of the low-end MacBook and MacBook Pros are $1249 for schools.

Going back to our 100 laptop deployment model, the low-end MacBook Air would be $84,900. The low-end MacBook would be $124,900 (this is before any bulk discounts or accessory orders). Could you justify Retina screens and a slimmer profile at a $40,000 premium? I know that I couldn't.

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