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Friday 21 March 2014

Facebook Disputes Claims That They Were Aware Of NSA Data Collection Outside Of FISA Orders

The Guardian newspaper made headlines yesterday for a story claiming the tech companies were not entirely truthful about their knowledge of National Security Agency spying. News outlets quickly picked up the accusations from NSA General Counsel Rajesh De that tech companies had “full knowledge” of the controversial surveillance of their users.

From the beginning of the NSA scandal last summer, tech companies have furiously denied that the NSA had direct access to their data. They have also denied knowing anything about the program that apparently allows the NSA to forcibly demand user data, known as PRISM. Moreover, they have publicly lobbied the U.S. Government to permit them to disclose the number of users that have been surveilled by the NSA, authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

Companies suing the government for the ability to be more transparent eventually won that case, and have since disclosed — within still harsh restrictive bounds — more information on government data requests.

Thus, Facebook quickly denied the new accusations. In a statement, the company told TechCrunch:

“Before it was reported in the news, we had never heard of ‘PRISM’ or any program in which Internet companies, voluntarily or otherwise, gave the government direct access to servers or in any way facilitated the bulk collection of user data. At the same time, we never suggested that we were not aware of our obligations under FISA, which was the topic of today’s hearing. In fact, we have been fighting for more transparency around the lawful national security-related requests from the U.S. Government that we may receive under this statute. The suggestion that we were misleading the public is frustrating and untrue.”

Soon after we received this statement, The Guardian issued a major “amendment” to their story.

“This article was amended on 20 March 2014 to remove statements in the original that the testimony by Rajesh De contradicted denials by technology companies about their knowledge of NSA data collection. It was also updated to clarify that the companies challenged the secrecy surrounding Section 702 orders. Other minor clarifications were also made.”

Section 702 refers to a law that permits some of the more controversial intelligence agency surveillance programs

When asked whether The Guardian still stands by their original interpretation of the story, spokesman Gennady Kolker wrote back, “The article was amended to clarify and correct our reporting, in line with the Guardian’s policy and practices.”

In the original piece, The Guardian wrote the following:

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting month of angry denials from the firms.

…

The NSA’s Wednesday comments contradicting the tech companies about the firms’ knowledge of Prism risk entrenching tensions with the firms NSA relies on for an effort that Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, told the board was “one of the most valuable collection tools that we have.

Now the passages read as follows:

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.

…

De and his administration colleagues were quick to answer the board that companies were aware of the government’s collection of data under 702, which Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, told the board was “one of the most valuable collection tools that we have.

Note that these sections have now been stripped of anything about De’s statements “contradicting” the companies’ insistence that they have not participated. The piece still asserts that the companies were aware of the governments collection under Section 702 — the FISA Amendments Act — with De replying yes to a question about whether the data collection occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained.”

The amendments to the article scaling back De’s statements reflect the difficulty in covering a story that has been shrouded in secrecy–a secrecy that has frustrated by citizens and tech companies alike. President Obama has proposed several changes to Intelligence Agency surveillance, but any major transparency reforms will have to wait until congress takes up the issue later this year.

Google did not respond to a request for comment, and Yahoo and Microsoft had no comment.

Thursday 20 March 2014

Facebook Creates Software That Matches Faces Almost as Well as You Do

Facebook’s new AI research group reports a major improvement in face-processing software.

Questioned no matter if a couple of not really acquainted images connected with people demonstrate the identical man or women, a people are certain to get it proper ninety seven. 53 % of times. Completely new application manufactured by scientists from Facebook can easily report ninety seven. 25 percent about the same difficult task, no matter versions with lighting effects or even whether or not the man or women from the image is specifically dealing with this digital camera.

That’s an important move forward over past face-matching application, and it illustrates the energy of your completely new way of artificial cleverness known as heavy understanding, which Facebook as well as opposition possess bet intensely with in the past season (see “Deep Learning”). This subject of AI entails application which employs cpa networks connected with simulated neurons to master to acknowledge styles with copious amounts connected with data.

“You typically don’t make sure type of advancement, ” says Yaniv Taigman, part connected with Facebook’s AI crew, an investigation class designed recently to be able to examine the way heavy understanding may also help the corporation (see “Facebook Launches Sophisticated AI Effort”). “We strongly tactic man effectiveness, ” says Taigman of the completely new application. He / she information that this malfunction pace may be reduced by means of more than a 1 fourth relative to sooner application that may consider about the same task.

Go convert: DeepFace uses a 3-D design to be able to turn people, essentially, to experience this digital camera. Image (a) indicates the original graphic, and also (g) indicates the ultimate, repaired version.

Facebook’s completely new application, known as DeepFace, does what scientists call face confirmation (it recognizes which a couple of pictures demonstrate the identical face), not necessarily face acknowledgement (putting a name to a face). Yet some of the actual strategies could possibly be placed on which dilemma, says Taigman, and also may as a result enhance Facebook’s reliability from hinting that with whom end users should tag within a recently submitted picture.

However, DeepFace is always simply an investigation task for the moment. Facebook unveiled an investigation document on the task yesterday, as well as the scientists will present the project with the IEEE Convention with Laptop or computer Imaginative and prescient vision and also Structure Identification with August. “We are generally posting our results to acquire feedback through the exploration neighborhood, ” says Taigman, that formulated DeepFace in addition to Facebook friends Ming Yang and also Marc’Aurelio Ranzato and also Tel Aviv School mentor Lior Hair.

DeepFace procedures pictures connected with people with a couple of steps. Primary it corrects this angle of your experience so that the man or women from the image people ahead, employing a 3-D style of an “average” forward-looking experience. Then a heavy understanding also comes in being a simulated sensory network breaks down to a numerical account of the reoriented experience. In the event DeepFace pops up along with similar enough information through a couple of distinct pictures, it makes a decision they should demonstrate the identical experience.

The actual effectiveness of the last application ended up being tried in opposition to a normal data fixed which scientists make use of to be able to benchmark face-processing application, which has been employed to determine the way individuals cost from corresponding people.

Neeraj Kumar, a examiner with the School connected with California that has done experience confirmation and also acknowledgement, says which Facebook’s final results demonstrate the way acquiring enough data to be able to supply right into a big sensory network allows pertaining to significant changes with machine-learning application. “I’d bet large amounts of this acquire the following arises from what heavy understanding generally offers: to be able to leveraging a large amount connected with outdoors data within a much higher-capacity understanding design, ” this individual says.

The actual deep-learning section of DeepFace consists of seven cellular levels connected with easy simulated neurons, with an increase of than 120 zillion internet connections among these people. To train which network, Facebook’s scientists drawn on a smaller slice connected with data from other company’s hoard connected with individual images—four zillion images connected with people belonging to virtually some, 000 men and women. “Since that they get access to a lot of data on this style, they are able to successfully prepare a high-capacity design, ” says Kumar.

Wednesday 5 March 2014

Can Facebook make you sad?

Not so long ago a new form of communication swept the world, transforming life in ways unimagined just a few years before. One commentator heralded it as “the greatest means of communication ever developed by the mind of man” while others pointed to its potential to revolutionise news, entertainment and education. But the poet and playwright TS Eliot had a different take. “It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome,” he wrote.

Eliot and the others were writing about television in the early 1960s. But fast forward 50 years and you could be forgiven for thinking that their comments apply equally well to the internet, and online social networks.

Chief among these is Facebook, the social network that celebrates its 10th birthday this week. Its statistics are astounding. In just one decade, it has signed up some 1.3 billion people, half of whom log in on any given day and spend an average of 18 minutes per visit. Facebook connects families across continents, friends across the years and people around the world.

And yet Facebook’s effects on its users may not be entirely benign. Some researchers suggest that the ability to connect does not necessarily make people any happier, and it could in fact reduce the satisfaction they feel about their life. Can it really be possible that Facebook makes you sad?

Until recently, few had studied this question and the little evidence that did exist actually hinted that the social network has a beneficial effect. In 2009, Sebastian Valenzuela and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin measured how life satisfaction varied among over 2,500 students who used Facebook, and they found a small positive correlation.

Yet last summer, a team of psychologists from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the University of Leuven in Belgium decided to drill a bit deeper by evaluating how life satisfaction changes over time with Facebook use. Ethan Kross and colleagues questioned a group of people five times a day over two weeks about their emotional state. They asked questions such as “how do you feel right now?”, “how lonely do you feel right now?”, “how much have you used Facebook since we last asked?” and so on. This gave them a snapshot of each individual’s well-being and Facebook usage throughout the day.

The team found that Facebook use correlated with a low sense of well-being. “The more people used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time,” they said. “Rather than enhancing well-being… these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.”

Popularity contest

There are several possible explanations for the finding. It could be that people feeling down were more likely to visit Facebook, but the team were able to rule this out because their data would have revealed if people felt low before visiting the site.

As Kross and colleagues pointed out, Facebook is an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social contact. But they suspect that the kind of contact Facebook provides does not make people feel better over time. The opposite was true of face-to-face contact, according to their data. Perhaps there is something different about digital social interactions, they suggest.

One possibility might be simple jealousy. After all, it can be deflating to see cousins and former school-friends routinely boasting about their career successes, holidays or new children. Some researchers have referred to this effect as “friendly world syndrome”, where it seems like everybody is having a better time than you. The syndrome comes from an effect identified by sociologists in the 1970s called “mean world syndrome”, where people who watched a lot of violent TV thought the world was more violent than it actually is. Your friends on Facebook may be more likely to trumpet their successes than failures, which can give a skewed picture of what life is really like.

Another similar phenomenon that has emerged in recent years might also explain this dissatisfaction – your friends are, on average, more popular than you. Back in 1991, the sociologist Scott Feld uncovered a surprise while studying the nature of social networks in the pre-internet age. The data came from asking children at several schools who their friends were, whether these friendships were reciprocated and then drawing up the resulting network by hand.

Feld counted the number of friends each individual had, and compared that to the number of friends the friends had. To everyone’s great surprise, he discovered that a child’s friends almost always had more friends than they did, on average.

Who's better, who's best

Since then, other researchers have discovered that this “friendship paradox” is a general feature of social networks and applies to other properties too. Not only will your friends have more friends than you do, they probably have more sexual partners too.

Although highly counterintuitive, there is a straightforward mathematical reason for this. People with lots of friends are more likely to number among your friends in the first place. And when they do, they significantly raise the average number of friends that your friends have. People have more friends than you do simply because the average is skewed.

The rise of online social networks has confirmed all of this, not least because researchers suddenly have access to a level of detail that was unheard of before the internet era. According to Nathan Hodas and colleagues at the University of Southern California, the friendship paradox holds true for more than 98% of Twitter users too.

Why might that make you feel glum? Unlike physical world friendships, on Facebook you can see exactly how popular your more popular friends are.

Saturday 1 March 2014

Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites

Sunday 23 February 2014

Facebook : The 10 year Journey (Infographics)

WhatsApp Is Offline In Many Countries!

This has got to be one of the worst times to go down. WhatsApp has been down for the last hour or so for many countries around the world. Check out the details regarding WhatsAppbeing offline in many countries below.

If you have tried to use WhatsApp in the last hour or so you would have noticed that your smartphone keeps trying to connect to WhatsApp servers but it fails. The “connecting” word keeps appearing to no avail. If you are seeing this problem then you are not alone, a huge portion of WhatsApp users are facing this issue right now.

WhatsApp has issued so statement regarding why it is down, or none from Facebook – the parent company of WhatsApp.

WhatsApp was recently acquired by Facebook for a staggering $19 billion, one of the largest tech acquisitions of recent times. Facebook is going to pay $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in stocks. Another $3 billion is going to go to the employees of WhatsApp.

This has got to be one of the worst timings for being offline, as many people are questioning the huge amount Facebook has paid for buying WhatsApp.

Thursday 20 February 2014

Facebook buys WhatsApp messaging service for $19bn

Facebook has bought WhatsApp for approximately £11.4bn or $19bn making it one of the largest acquisitions in tech history. To give you some idea it's over double the amount spent by Microsoft buying Nokia last year.

The app, which is available for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 8 has over 450m users and counting. If the deal goes ahead Facebook will be buying one of the largest independent messaging services in the world, beating the likes of ChatOn and Line both of whom have also been seeing steady growth.

In a statement made last night Mark Zuckerberg said, "WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people. The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable, I've known Jan for a long time and I'm excited to partner with him and his team to make the world more open and connected."

For those of you wondering if WhatsApp will become integrated into Facebook's own messaging service fear not. According to the company it'll be employing the same approach it took with Instagram, leaving the company to remain separate whilst sharing expertise across the brands.

Wednesday 19 February 2014

6 new facts about Facebook

Facebook turns 10 tomorrow and reaches that milestone as the dominant social networking platform, used by 57% of all American adults and 73% of all those ages 12-17. Adult Facebook use is intensifying: 64% of Facebook users visit the site on a daily basis, up from 51% of users who were daily users in 2010. Among teens, the total number of users remains high, according to Pew Research Center surveys, and they are not abandoning the site. But focus group interviews suggest that teens’ relationship with Facebook is complicated and may be evolving.
New Pew Research Center survey findings show how people are using Facebook and what they like and dislike about the site.
1Some users dislike certain aspects of Facebook, but fear of missing out on social activities (or “FOMO”) isn’t one of them.
FT_Facebook-user-dislikes

Their dislikes start with oversharing by friends and people posting one’s personal information (such as photos) without first asking permission are among the most common. Parents are especially protective of images of their children, as 57% of Facebook users with children under the age of 18 say that people posting pictures of their children without asking permission first is something they strongly dislike about using Facebook.
On the other hand, the “fear of missing out” phenomenon resonates with only a small proportion of the Facebook population. Just 5% of Facebook users strongly dislike the fact that Facebook allows them to see others taking part in social activities that they themselves were not included in—and 84% of users say that this aspect of Facebook life doesn’t bother them at all.
FT_Facebook-use-reasons

2Women and men often have varying reasons for why they use Facebook – but everything starts with sharing and laughs.
Users say they especially appreciate photos and videos from friends (47% say that’s a major reason they use the site), the ability to share with many people at once (46% cite that as a major reason), updates from others (39% cite that), and humorous content (39%). Other aspects of Facebook—such as keeping up with news, or receiving support from the people in one’s network—appeal to a more modest audience of users. Men and women sometimes vary in their reasons for using the site.
3Half of all adult Facebook users have more than 200 friends in their network.
FT_Facebook-friend-counts

Facebook users differ greatly when it comes to the number of friends in their networks:

39% of adult Facebook users have between 1 and 100 Facebook friends
23% have 101-250 friends
20% have 251-500 friends
15% have more than 500 friends

Among adult Facebook users, the average (mean) number of friends is 338, and the median (midpoint) number of friends is 200. In other words, half of all Facebook users have more than 200 friends, and half have less than 200.
Younger users tend to have significantly larger friend networks than older users: 27% of 18-29 year old Facebook users have more than 500 friends in their network, while 72% of users age 65+ have 100 friends or fewer.
412% of Facebook users say that someone has asked them to “unfriend” a person in their network.
Younger users are more likely to have experienced this than older users: 19% of 18-29 year old Facebook users have had someone ask them to remove a friend from their network (compared with 10% of 30-49 year olds, 7% of 50-64 year olds, and 5% of those 65 and older).
These “friend removal” requests tend to come primarily from other friends (35%), or from current (23%) or former (12%) spouses or romantic partners. Some 38% of those who received this type of request say that they were asked to remove a friend from their Facebook network, while 22% were asked to unfriend a former romantic partner.
5Facebook users “like” their friends’ content and comment on photos relatively frequently, but most don’t change their own status that often.
When asked about the frequency with which they engage in certain behaviors on the site, Facebook users tend to point towards “liking” content that others have posted and commenting on photos as the activities they engage in most often. On the other hand, most users change or update their own status only occasionally:

44% of Facebook users “like” content posted by their friends at least once a day, with 29% doing so several times per day.
31% comment on other people’s photos on a daily basis, with 15% doing so several times per day.
19% send private Facebook messages to their friends on a daily basis, with 10% sending these messages multiple times per day.
10% change or update their own status on Facebook on a daily basis, with 4% updating their status several times per day. Some 25% of Facebook users say that they never change or update their own Facebook status.

6Half of internet users who do not use Facebook themselves live with someone who does.
Many non-Facebook users still have some familiarity with the site through family members. Among internet users who do not use Facebook themselves, 52% say that someone else in their household has a Facebook account. In many instances, these may be parents who do not use Facebook but live with a child who does. Fully 66% of parents with a child living at home who do not use Facebook themselves say that someone in their household has a Facebook account.
In addition, some 24% of Facebook non-adopters who live with an account holder say that they look at photos or posts on that person’s account

Monday 17 February 2014

Use Facebook Paper for social news or stick with Flipboard?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote during a Facebook f8 Developer Conference. (Kimihiro Hoshino, Getty Images file)

With a new app called Paper, Facebook is hoping to make it easier for users to find more than just their long-lost friends.

Recently released for the iPhone, the app represents a wholesale rethinking of how users interact with the social network. Instead of focusing on a single "news feed" filled with posts from other users, the app is designed to be more like a newspaper, with sections that focus on particular news topics or interests, such as technology, sports or food. Users can choose to see content from up to 10 sections at a time from among 20 choices.

In each section, the top half of the screen is devoted to a "centerpiece" area that highlights a handful of stories, cycling through pictures related to each one. In the bottom half of the screen, users will find numerous headline cards representing individual stories. Users can either select a particular story to read by tapping on it or scan through the cards by swiping left or right.

Facebook's new Paper app. Provided by Facebook

If your primary exposure to Facebook is viewing your friends' status updates, you might be surprised at just how much real news you can find on the site. Paper does an excellent job of highlighting that content.

Although you'll find many stories from major news sources in Paper, you'll also find content from less prominent ones. Michael Reckhow, Paper's product manager, said the app was meant to highlight not only major publishers but lesser-known artists and content producers. The stories you'll find in each section have all been posted somewhere on Facebook and selected by a combination of human editors and algorithms.

Facebook designed Paper to be a much more immersive experience than Facebook's website or its primary mobile application. Unlike those venues, Paper has no "chrome," which is the borders around an application that typically include buttons, search boxes and other interface elements.

As a result, Paper is able to use the phone's entire screen to display pictures, videos and stories. The effect is often quite beautiful and makes the main Facebook app look clunky and outdated by comparison.

Because Paper has few buttons, users have to rely on gestures to navigate the app. To zoom in on a story card, users swipe up or reverse pinch. To return to the story card or a section page, users swipe down from near the top of the screen or pinch.

Facebook offers new users hints at how to use these gestures, but they can take some getting used to. The first several times I used the app, I kept going back to a story card from an article page when I wanted to just scroll through the article itself.

Although Paper focuses on news and story content, it can be used to do many of the things you might do with the primary Facebook app. The first section in Paper is your Facebook news feed.

You can view your Facebook alerts inside the app, and you can carry on conversations with your Facebook friends in much the same way that you would in the main app.

You also can view reformatted versions of your friends' Facebook pages, search across the social network for other users and post new status updates.

Despite its capabilities and fresh design, the app is very much a work-in-progress and suffers from some notable limitations. The biggest is that, for now, it's available only for the iPhone and Apple's iPod touch; Facebook isn't offering a Paper app for the iPad or for any Android devices.

But it has other shortcomings. Ten sections may seem like a lot, especially compared to what you'll find in a real newspaper today, but one of those sections is dedicated to your Facebook news feed, so you really have only nine choices. If you have a broader range of interests than that, you're out of luck — 10 sections is the limit of what you can see.

Although users can choose which sections they want in their Paper, they have no control over what news sources or types of stories they view in those sections. In your news feed, you can't choose to see only the most recent posts, as you can on Facebook's website.

And unlike Flipboard, a news reading app that looks and works similar to Paper, you can't focus sections on stories on particular topics or from individual news sources. Instead, you have to rely entirely on Facebook to decide which stories you'll see.

Unfortunately, for now, Facebook isn't personalizing sections in Paper for each user. Instead, everyone who chooses to see the "technology" section, say, will see the same stories from the same sources.

What's more, Paper is a new way of interacting with Facebook — not with the wider Web.

So you can't use it to see what's happening on Twitter or LinkedIn. And if a particular story hasn't been posted to Facebook, it won't show up in Paper either.

Saturday 15 February 2014

Facebook Provides 56 New Gender Identity Options

You no longer have to identify as "male" or "female" on Facebook. Beginning today, you can choose from 50 56 different gender identities including asexual, androgynous, transgender, genderqueer, and more.

According to the

company's official announcement, Facebook worked with its "Network of Support, a group of leading LGBT advocacy organizations" in order to select the 50 new gender identity options. Aside from identity, you can now also choose the pronouns Facebook uses when referring to you—male, female or neutral (they/their).

Here are the 56 we've identified so far—they're only accessible via an autocomplete drop-down menu within Facebook, so please let us know if we've missed any:

Agender
Androgyne
Androgynous
Bigender
Cis
Cis Female
Cis Male
Cis Man
Cis Woman
Cisgender
Cisgender Female
Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man
Cisgender Woman
Female to Male
FTM
Gender Fluid
Gender Nonconforming
Gender Questioning
Gender Variant
Genderqueer
Intersex
Male to Female
MTF
Neither
Neutrois
Non-binary
Other
Pangender
Trans
Trans Female
Trans Male
Trans Man
Trans Person
Trans Woman
Trans*
Trans* Female
Trans* Male
Trans* Man
Trans* Person
Trans* Woman
Transfeminine
Transgender
Transgender Female
Transgender Male
Transgender Man
Transgender Person
Transgender Woman
Transmasculine
Transsexual
Transsexual Female
Transsexual Male
Transsexual Man
Transsexual Person
Transsexual Woman
Two-spirit

Facebook Knows When You're About to Update Your Relationship Status

Facebook released new findings on Friday — Valentine's Day — that hints when two people are about to change their status to "in a relationship."

In the three months (or about 100 days) before a couple updates their status to make their relationship Facebook official, the social network sees a steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the two. In fact, posting to each other's pages will peak (1.67 posts) at 12 days before the relationships begin and when the update is officially made ("day 0") posts typically start to decline.

Facebook only looked at couples who declared an anniversary date — and not just changed their relationship status — between 04/11/2010 and 10/21/2013 and remained "single" 100 days before and "in a relationship" 100 days after that date. The findings are a part of a larger six-part series that looks at love.

A look at interactions before a couple gets into a relationship.

"Presumably, couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off, and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world," the company said in an official blog post.

Less interaction isn't a bad thing, and posts shared tend to get sweeter and more positive following a relationship status update. To determine this, Facebook looked at words expressing positive emotions — such as "love", "nice" and "happy" — compared to ones with negative connotation ("hate", "hurt" and "bad"). Check out the graph below to note the increase.

Interactions on Facebook become sweeter after a couple updates their status to "in a relationship."

Twitter also revealed which countries and U.S. regions tweet about being in love the most. Users in Israel say "I love you" most, followed by those in Sweden, Norway, Spain and Hungary. In the U.S., people in New York, Michigan and Nevada say those three words most on the site, while some of the least sentimental states are Montana, Idaho, Nebraska and New Hampshire.

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