Uber Gives App Makers A Ride Request Button

Martin Ollman / Getty Images

Uber's latest play for ride-hailing dominance is here, and it's not a new on-demand service or another one-off, attention-grabbing promotion. It's something far simpler: a button.

On Wednesday morning, Uber announced the "Uber Ride Request Button," a piece of code and associated software development kit that iOS and Android app developers can use to quickly and easily add Uber support to their offerings. Once integrated into a third-party app, the button deep-links to Uber, adding ride-hailing functionality to the menu of tasks the app already performs. Uber's pitch to developers: "By adding the button next to every address or ‘intent to ride’ in your App, your users will be able to tap to instantly get a ride to the hotel, restaurant, movie theater or any other destination you specify."

For Uber, which has extended its operations to practically every major city and then some, this "ride request button" is a clear move to extend its ride-hail dominion to the mobile app ecosystem.

It’s not hard to understand why developers might consider integrating an Uber button into their apps. Providing a quick and easy way to travel to and from suggested destinations in an app is certainly a nice convenience. And now Uber has minimized the effort and expense required to do that and packaged it all in an easily installed, consistent-experience delivering little button. And if that's not enough of an inducement, Uber is promising U.S. developers who register for the company's affiliate program a $5 bounty for every new rider to sign up through their apps.

Given the promised simplicity of the integration -- just register for the program, grab the SDK, and add a few lines of code to your app -- Uber's ride request button seems a compelling proposition for developers and a smart move for Uber, which can now woo new users via all the usual channels -- and from any third party app willing to implement its button.

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Starting Tomorrow, You Can Browse The Web In Virtual Reality

Samsung

There's a lot you can do with a Samsung Gear VR: Shoot spaceships, look at dinosaurs, solve puzzles, watch Netflix. But none of that is useful — virtual reality is, right now, a medium for entertainment, not productivity.

On Wednesday, Samsung will roll out a full-on web browser for its Oculus-powered headset, thereby adding some new functionality to the device. Called the "Samsung Internet for Gear VR," it'll be the first browser app for a consumer VR device, and according to a press release from Samsung, it "allows users to intuitively browse the web and enjoy content in a more immersive atmosphere." Users can stream video content — 360-degree, 3D, and HTML5 — without having to download it beforehand, which is currently required from the Oculus Store on the device. It'll also allow VR nuts to use it like a regular browser: Type in a URL, and go to a web page. It's the same Facebook or Gmail or Yelp you'd find on a computer, just attached to your face.

Samsung

But the problem with that is, typing in virtual reality is a literal headache. To log into Netflix on the Gear VR, for example, you have to "type" by jerking your head around to point the set at specific letters on a tiny virtual keyboard. While it's not so bad for a one-time login, it's hard to imagine wanting to browse the web for any amount of time without simply resorting to the facile UI of the smartphone locked into the front of the headset. It's also possible to control the browser by voice, but who wants to say what they're looking up on YouTube out loud?

That problem — how to interact with things that aren't games, how to type, how to best use gaze to direct virtual environments — is one of the next big challenges for VR to face, and it's up in the air whether controllers, eye-tracking, or a yet-to-be-invented user interface is how VR will turn from entertainment to something different. Simply porting a browser over to a virtual environment will likely be cumbersome, but it's also a first step towards this technology figuring out how to become something much bigger.

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Not All Of Mark Zuckerberg's Donation To Go To Charity

When Mark Zuckerberg announced he would give away 99% of his Facebook shares — currently worth around $45 billion — the initial impulse from many was to assume the money would all go to charity. Indeed, very many news organizations described the donation as either going to charity, or a charitable trust.

Not so, a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed in an email to BuzzFeed News. The spokeswoman further confirmed the initiative is structured as an LLC, and not as a charitable trust.

While charity will certainly be one of the money's destinations, it will be far from the only one.

The money, according to a Facebook SEC filing, will go to "philanthropic, public advocacy, and other activities for the public good."

One such activity: private investment. A Facebook release this afternoon stated as much. "The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will pursue its mission by funding non-profit organizations, making private investments and participating in policy debates, in each case with the goal of generating positive impact in areas of great need," it said. "Any profits from investments in companies will be used to fund additional work to advance the mission."

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The Twitter Bot That Turns Your Photos Into Art History

The most fascinating thing on Twitter right now is @DeepForger an AI bot that replies to photos you send it with a re-rendering “forgery” in the style of a classic artist. For example, here is the “wtf ????” guy meme in the style of John Singer Sargent, in his circa 1881 style:

I know what you’re thinking: this is the same as those photobooths at Chuck E. Cheese in the ‘90s where you can select if you want your photo in the “Leonardo da Vinci” or “Monet” style. Well, friend, you’re wrong. It’s way more complicated.

The bot is the work of Alex J. Champandard of Vienna, Austria, who is an artificial intelligence consultant and organizer of the nucl.ai Conference for developers in creative industries on artificial intelligenct and machine learning. He previously worked as an AI programmer at Rockstar Games Champandard created the bot as a sort of sandbox to play around with new research in his field. It builds off the work of a Cornell University academic paper called A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style that described how machine learning could analyze artistic visual patterns.

“It looked pretty impressive,” Champanard told BuzzFeed News in an email. “And given how fast things were moving in the field of machine learning, I thought: Someone's going to implement this as described in the paper, how can I take it further? I realized the best would be to help the community explore the space of computational art (as made possible by this algorithm) then finding out what works and what doesn't.”

Just tweet a photo at @DeepForger. You can request a certain artist’s style by adding their last name. To improve your results, you can also add tags like #landscape, #portrait or #people to give it more hints. The bot searches for classic artworks to mimic through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online collection and its Twitter account that tweets out random art images. Then, it implements an algorithm from the research paper to detect patterns like color and style, as well as things like brush strokes or grain textures. Finally, a second process combines the style of the classic painting with the photo you fed it, and voila – a forgery.

Of course, it’s slightly more complicated. Okay, more than slightly.

And it’s getting really popular. As of this writing, the bot has a wait time, because each forgery takes between 3-8 minutes to process, and requires 4GB of memory. (There are ways, however, to speed it up: you can quote-retweet your request, for example).

Some of the earlier forgeries did not turn out so well, like this ghoulish portrait of Marilyn Monroe in Lichtenstein style:

Yet Champandard is encouraged by how the bot has been improving. (Take, for example, the portrait below of BuzzFeed’s Mat Honan.) It’s learning.

“It's hard to understand what the implications of the algorithm are,” he said, “but it could change everything about the way artists interact with their fans. Imagine digital artists being able to provide fully customized paintings of people's cats or dogs in their own style? It's also helping artists discover new possibilities; game developers submitted screenshots of their game to see what came out—as a tool for experimentation and creativity.”

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Mark Zuckerberg Has Baby And Says He Will Give Away 99% Of His Facebook Shares

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two major things today. The most surprising is that he will give away 99% of his Facebook shares — worth $45 billion today — over the course of his lifetime. In more expected news, he also said, in a Facebook post, that his wife, Priscilla Chan, has given birth to a baby girl: Max.

"We are committed to doing our small part to help create this world for all children," Zuckerberg said in the post. "We will give 99% of our Facebook shares -- currently about $45 billion -- during our lives to join many others in improving this world for the next generation."

Though Zuckerberg didn't specify where the money will go, he did point out a number of areas of interest including: "curing disease, personalizing learning, harnessing clean energy, connecting people, building strong communities, reducing poverty, providing equal rights and spreading understanding across nations."

Zuckerberg will maintain a sizable amount of control over where the money goes and how it's used. "Mr. Zuckerberg has established a new entity, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC, and he will control the voting and disposition of any shares held by such entity," Facebook said in an SEC filing.

The filing also said the money will specifically be used for these purposes: "to further the mission of advancing human potential and promoting equality by means of philanthropic, public advocacy, and other activities for the public good."

Facebook, in the filing, also noted that Zuckerberg will not give away more than $1 billion per year over the next three years: "He has informed us that he plans to sell or gift no more than $1 billion of Facebook stock each year for the next three years and that he intends to retain his majority voting position in our stock for the foreseeable future," the filing stated.

He and Chan also wrote a letter to their daughter, welcoming her to the world and laying out the type of change he hopes to see take place during her lifetime:

"Like all parents, we want you to grow up in a world better than ours today," the two wrote.

In the letter, Zuckerberg and Chan discussed a vision of improving the world through technology: "We must build technology to make change," they wrote. "Many institutions invest money in these challenges, but most progress comes from productivity gains through innovation." The two added: "We must back the strongest and most independent leaders in each field."

Chan's pregnancy has been an unusually public one, from the couple's open and frank discussion of miscarriages to Zuckerberg's announcement that he would be taking two months of paternity leave.

It's been a busy few weeks for personal news from the CEO. The news came just a few days after Zuckerberg announced that he was joining with Bill Gates to invest in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a clean energy fund, that "will invest in ideas that have the potential to transform the way we all produce and consume energy." On Nov. 21 he dedicated the new acute care and trauma center of the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

He also posted a pretty boss picture of his dog.

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Judge Slams Crackdown On Backpage.com As "Lawless Government Coercion"

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.

M. Spencer Green / AP

A federal judge has ruled that efforts by the Cook County Sheriff to crack down on adult classifieds site Backpage.com were unconstitutional, ordering the Sheriff to cease pressuring credit card companies to cut their links to the controversial site.

In a strongly worded opinion released on Monday, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Sheriff Thomas Dart was prohibited from using his office to pressure service providers not to work with Backpage.com. In November, the court issued an injunction against Dart.

That injunction was issued again Monday. Dart is also required to notify Visa and MasterCard as well as the Postal Service of the order.

Posner said that Dart's actions, which were part of a long campaign by the Sheriff to vigorously enforce prostitution laws — and go after Backpage specifically — were like "killing a person by cutting off his oxygen supply rather than by shooting him."

In July, Visa and Mastercard confirmed they had cut Backpage from their networks, days after Sheriff Dart sent open letters urging each company to "immediately cease and desist" from working with the site and others like it, which "we have objectively found to promote prostitution and facilitate online sex trafficking."

Backpage has not been convicted of any such crime, in Dart's jurisdiction or any other.

Backpage.com

In a lawsuit filed over the summer, Backpage alleged Dart's letters were a prior restraint on free speech. While Backpage has been a leading destination for advertising escort services since Craigslist got rid of adult personals in 2010 (Craigslist was also pursued by Dart in 2009, unsuccessfully), the site also hosts many legal ads. Posner pointed to "fetishism, phone sex, performances by striptease artists" as content that was still legal on the site.

The decision was hailed by libertarian-leaning legal thinkers from the left and right. Glenn Greenwald wrote that the ruling was "crucial for protecting free speech rights generally" and "highlights how dangerous such extra-judicial pressure campaigns can be, and makes them much more difficult by clearly ruling them to be unconstitutional."

Greenwald said the case had echoes of late 2010, when companies including Amazon, Paypal and Bank of America stopped doing business with Wikileaks after the site's publication of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, amid pressure from politicians including Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer at the libertarian Cato Insitute who co-authored a brief supporting Backpage, said the opinion "shows that courts are aware of this and will not countenance this use of power unless there’s something criminal he's actually going after." If Sheriff Dart "sees actual prostitution being transacted through Backpage he can go after those particular targets," Shapiro told BuzzFeed News.

While the decision only has direct effect in the area covered by the Seventh Circuit, Shapiro said that Posner is a respected judge and his reasoning will likely have "persuasive authority" with other judges. "I think that this will nip this sort of behavior in the bud, it was pretty blatant and pretty blunt."

While Visa issued an affadavit saying it wasn't threatened by Dart, Posner pointed to an emails between Visa employees charactertizing Dart's messages as "the subtle messages they’ve been sending us that could easily be taken for blackmail."

Posner noted Dart's letters to Visa and Mastercard were sent in his capacity as sheriff and pointed to legal statues, including money-laundering laws, which Posner said were "intimating that the credit card companies could be prosecuted for processing payments."

The letters were very effective. Dart told BuzzFeed News in July he was "stunned at how quickly Visa and MasterCard moved to say they weren’t going to be involved in that anymore, they were incredible corporate citizens.”

When Visa cut off Backpage, it issued a statement saying that its rules "prohibit our network from being used for illegal activity. Visa has a long history of working with law enforcement to safeguard the integrity of the payment system."

After Dart sent the letter to Visa, a Dart staffer told the company's legal team that it had scheduled a press conference and that they "would need to know tonight if that is the case so that we can ensure the Sheriff’s messaging celebrates Visa’s change in direction as opposed to pointing out its ties to sex trafficking."

Posner read this exchange as evidence "Visa and MasterCard were victims of government coercion aimed at shutting up or shutting down Backpage’s adult section.

"To say effectively 'you have a nice little website there shame if anything would happen to it,' we can’t let public official get away with that," Shapiro said.

After Backpage made its adult ads free, the Sheriff's office told the press "we were ready for this and not concerned. It’s unsustainable for them to maintain all of their lobbying, legal battles and all the money it takes for their server space without any revenue coming in." This, Posner wrote, showed that the Sheriff's office was trying to "to cause irreparable injury to Backpage."

A Visa spokesperson said today that it had no comment on the ruling "and our position has not changed." Mastercard did not respond to a request for comment. Backpage's attorneys did not respond to requests for comments.

The Cook County Sheriff's Office said in its statement: "While we are not surprised by this opinion, we are nonetheless disappointed and respectfully disagree with its conclusions. We look forward to proceeding with this litigation and to doing all we can to protect victims from the horrors of human trafficking."

The sheriff's office could try to take the case to the Supreme Court but it has not indicated its future plans. Dart has been a long-time very public opponent of prostitution and has gained a national profile for his large scale arrests of johns.

Via Backpage.com

Backpage has soldiered on despite being cut off from credit card networks — the website still allows its users to buy "credits" to purchase ads. The credits can be bought with Bitcoin or cash, check, or money orders sent to a post office box in Texas. Posner said that Backpage got $9 million of its $135 million in annual revenue from adult ads.

Posner's ruling overturned an earlier decision by a judge that rejected Backpage's request for an injunction against the Sheriff.

"Unwittingly the judge was suggesting a formula for permitting unauthorized, unregulated, foolproof, lawless government coercion," Posner said. The rights of internet publishers to host content that may be illegal — or offensive — to politicians and law enforcement are usually protected by the Communication Decency Act which generally protects publishers from responsibility for what users contribute to a website.

But Posner said that if Dart's strategy were held up in court, it would offer a way around the law: "coupling threats with denunciations of the activity that the official wants stamped out." But the threats, Posner said, "were not protected by the First Amendment; they were violations of the First Amendment."

Here is Judge Posner's ruling:

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With Tech’s Blessing, Congress Wants To Protect Emails From Government Search

A Microsoft corporate vice president discusses new software in 2012. Jeff Chiu / AP

Thirty years ago, a law designed to balance the privacy expectations of American citizens and the needs of law enforcement agencies put limits on electronic searches. Called the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA), it was written when few Americans had access to computers let alone mobile phones and email. Since it was was passed in 1986, a new era of connectivity has flourished, producing vast troves of digital records. Failing to envision our world of digitized communication, many believe the law is long overdue for an update.

With virtually unlimited storage and international reach, email has emerged as a legal battleground. Should law enforcement be required to obtain a search warrant to read your digital correspondence? Congress, with Silicon Valley’s eager nod, seems to think so.

ECPA was drafted well before the explosion of the web, and before a vasty array of giant internet companies began collecting our intimate details. For the tech industry, privacy advocates, and over 300 members of Congress, the rush of tech’s advancement has far outpaced the law. With growing bipartisan support, a bill in the House of Representatives, the Email Privacy Act, would update the ECPA and bring novel forms digital communication under the protection of the Fourth Amendment.

“Reforming this decades-old outdated law has been a priority for me as chairman,” said Rep. Robert Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, who leads the House Judiciary Committee, in a hearing Monday.

“We agree that ECPA is outdated and provides unjustifiably inconsistent standards for government access to our stored communication,” said ranking member John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan. “Because of the rapid pace of technological change, this situation will only get worse if we do not act.”

With 304 co-sponsors in Congress, the proposal — which would require law enforcement to show probable cause before compelling internet service providers to disclose a consumer’s email correspondence — is also widely supported by Silicon Valley.

“Users expect, as they should, that the documents they store online have the same Fourth Amendment protections as they do when the government wants to enter the home to seize documents stored in a desk drawer,” said Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security. “There is no compelling policy or legal rationale for there to be different rules.”

Google is joined by a broad coalition of tech companies that have lobbied for an overhaul of the ECPA, including Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo.

While Salgado represented the interests of his company and the tech industry consensus, he faced off against three other expert witnesses called to highlight the concerns of law enforcement and regulatory agencies. They fear that an update to the law may hinder their ability to gather crucial evidence and apprehend criminals and terrorists.

The director of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Andrew J. Ceresney, told the Judiciary Committee that the Email Privacy Act “poses significant risks to the American public.” The proposal, he said, would impede the “ability of the SEC and other civil law enforcement agencies to investigate and uncover financial fraud and other unlawful conduct.” Ceresney wants to alter the bill to allow exemptions and looser restrictions for certain government agencies.

Steven Cook, representing the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys, and Richard Littlehale, a top official with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, both cited crimes involving small children — abduction and sexual assault — in defense of legal exemptions that would allow agents to read a person’s email without a warrant in emergency crime solving.

While lawmakers appeared sympathetic to the arguments put forth by Salgado, Cook, and Littlehale, they also challenged some of their reasoning. “The Fourth Amendment makes us different than any other country on earth,” said Rep. Ted Poe, a Republican from Texas. “I don’t buy the argument ‘Well, we’re in the digital age, you gotta give up some of your constitutional rights so we can have government investigate things.’”

Jim Sensenbrenner, a Democrat from Wisconsin, characterized the laments of law enforcement as an attempt to claim additional powers beyond the limits of current law. “I think this is a slam-dunk for Congress to make a determination,” he said. “We already have something that everybody seems to think is OK except for a few people who would like to expand the dragnet.”

While the debate on ECPA focused on constitutional questions and the right to privacy, Google’s Salgado noted possible economic implications for the tech sector as well. “There’s a perception outside of the United States — in Europe it’s no secret — that data held by U.S. companies is somehow there for the taking by the U.S. government,” he said. “This bill, the Email Privacy Act, is a good step in getting rid of that misperception.”

One major controversy fueling the attitudes Salgado mentioned is a recent decision by the European Union’s highest court, which invalidated a long-standing trade agreement with the United State, known as Safe Harbor. The court found that American surveillance operations involving U.S. tech companies violated the privacy rights of EU citizens. As the tech industry clamors for a new agreement between the U.S. and the EU, European officials expect a deal to be struck by early next year.

Before Congress schedules a vote on the Email Privacy Act, the Judiciary Committee will mark up the bill’s language, possibly addressing the concerns of law enforcement officials. Rep. Goodlatte said he will hold another hearing to discuss similar issues in the realm of cloud computing, where international boundaries complicate the law and pose new challenges to American companies doing business abroad. A federal appeals court is currently grappling with a cloud computing case involving Microsoft and a search warrant for emails stored in Ireland. It’s unclear if Congress will act in time to resolve the legal uncertainty surrounding the Microsoft case and domestic email.

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