Facebook's Plan To Bring Millions Of Indians Online Is Dead Simple: Thousands Of Hotspots

Facebook

Facebook’s plan to bring millions of Indians online won’t involve solar-powered drones, or crazy balloons, or controversial programs like Internet.org. Instead, it involves hotspots. Thousands and thousands of plain old hotspots.

On Friday, the company announced that it is rolling out 700 WiFi hotspots in four of India’s 29 states — Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Meghalaya — followed by 20,000 more in the next few months across the rest of the country in partnership with Indian carrier Airtel.

Unlike the company’s Internet.org program that allowed Indians to access Facebook-approved websites for free — and which was shut down by regulators for violating net neutrality — Facebook’s new plan called Express WiFi, isn’t gratis. Instead, Facebook has partnered with over 500 local retailers, and other commercial establishments in the four states to make these hotspots available to users at affordable prices.

These partners will be able to set their own prices and data packs for Express WiFi, a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

Typical plans, according to Facebook, start out at Rs. 10 for 100 MB of data (about 15 cents) and go up to Rs 300 for 20 GB of data a day (about $5).

“Express Wi-Fi is designed to complement mobile data offerings by providing a low-cost, high bandwidth alternative for getting online and access apps, download and stream content,” said Munish Seth, Facebook’s Head of Connectivity Solutions for Asia Pacific in a statement, but Facebook did not comment on BuzzFeed News’ questions about the speed at which users will be able to access the internet using these hotspots.

Facebook has been testing Express WiFi in India since 2015. It’s the company’s fastest growing market and arguably its most important — 184 million of Facebook’s nearly 2 billion users are from India, and over 200 million Indians use WhatsApp, Facebook’s instant messaging service.

Facebook’s Express WiFi program is similar to what Google has been doing in India for some time now. By the end of 2016, Google installed free, high-speed WiFi at 100 Indian railway stations, and is now expanding the program into cafes, museums, restaurants and more Wi-Fi starved locations across the country.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2pBTZxm
via IFTTT

Facebook’s New Anti-Violence Plan Will Sometimes Leave Up Disturbing Videos To Help Authorities

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Facebook is adding 3,000 workers to fight violence on its platform, and their mandate isn’t simply to remove violent content.

Facebook may not immediately remove all violent live videos, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during his company’s first quarter earnings call Wednesday. The company will also work with law enforcement to prevent violence, he said, even if it means risking airing the footage.

“A lot of what we’re trying to do is not just about taking the content down, but also about helping people when they’re in need on the platform,” Zuckerberg said.

Law enforcement recently prevented someone from killing themselves after Facebook alerted them to a suicidal broadcast, Zuckerberg said. In that case, authorities communicated with the person through the live video itself, and prevented them from going through with the act. For Facebook, a social giant of 1.94 billion users, using its power to simply remove violent content is not enough. It wants to prevent the violence itself.

Facebook’s 3,000 new content moderators, combined with the 4,500 moderators it already has, won’t be fighting violence alone. They will be enlisting Facebook’s artificial intelligence as well. Zuckerberg noted that even with 7,500 people scanning Facebook’s posts for possible violence, “we’ll never be able to look at everything.” Artificial intelligence, he suggested, could fill in the gap, though its presence may not be felt for years.

“Right now there are certain things that AI can do in terms of understanding text and understanding what’s in a photo and what’s in a video,” Zuckerberg said, noting that the technology was likely years away from working effectively. “Over time, for sure, more AI will do this.”

AI, in many cases, is still far from the romanticized treatment it gets in the press and in film. “This is still very far from where we want it to be,” Facebook’s head of AI research Yann LeCun told BuzzFeed News in a recent interview.

The highly-publicized violence on Facebook Live did little to scare Facebook’s advertising customers away in the first quarter of 2017. The company brought in more than $8 billion in revenue, up from $5.3 billion in the same quarter last year.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2p7stVn
via IFTTT

Here Are The Funniest Tweets About The Google Docs Scam

Today, a massive, fake Google Docs phishing scheme spread across the internet.

Giphy

The attack worked by sending people emails that imitated how Google emails look when people share real Google Documents with each other. But in this case, the links were from a replica of Google Docs — and if you clicked on them and granted the app permission to access your account, the attack then spammed everyone on your contact list with requests to share more fake Google Docs.

If you've already clicked on a spam link, go to your Google account permissions and revoke access for "Google Docs." The real Google Docs doesn't appear individually in that permissions list since it's part of Google Drive, so you won't be interfering with any of your real work.

After the initial panic subsided, people came up with some jokes.

If this kind of email hack sounds familiar, may I present to you several jokes at the Democratic National Committee's expense:

And if you've seen that one episode of Black Mirror, this tweet has you shook:

No one's yet claimed responsibility for the hack, but at the end of the day, it's obvious who's really behind it.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qAKAVv
via IFTTT

Google Technology Is Helping Exterminators Kill Bugs Faster

Sergeytoronto / Getty Images

Imagine opening your favorite breakfast cereal, only to find half a dozen feasting weevils inside the box. Panicked, you call an exterminator — but what if instead of a dime-store Ghostbuster, the person that shows up at your house is a smartphone-wielding, AI-using, Google-powered, bug-destroying 21st century pest technician?

If you live in the general vicinity of Reading, PA, that scenario could become a reality sooner than you might think.

Using an app called PestID, exterminators who are part of the pilot program can take photos of bugs, upload them, and — using Google’s Vision API — instantly get information about what kind of insect it is and how to kill it.

Google’s Vision API tells you in words what an image depicts. PestID is trained on proprietary visual data owned by an extermination company called Rentokil, which is currently testing the technology in the field in Pennsylvania. The app, which is the result of a partnership between Google and Accenture, uses machine learning to constantly improve its accuracy.

“If I took a picture of a confused flour beetle, Google’s out of the box capability would be able to tell me it was a beetle,” said Nisha Sharma, an Accenture Mobility executive who worked on PestID. “But with Rentokil, it can actually tell you it’s a confused flour beetle.”

Pest extermination doesn’t exactly scream out as the obvious first workplace use case for advanced artificial intelligence. But apparently, it’s not as easy as you’d think. While most exterminators have plenty of experience and most extermination jobs are fairly routine, says Rentokil’s Keith Chisolm, a hard to recognize pest can really slow a pest technician down.

“If you do come across something that's particularly unusual, what would typically happen is they'd get in touch with a more experienced technician, or ask one of the support team to come and meet them on site,” he said. “ [PestID] helps them to deal with it themselves, and not have to lean on technical teams.”

Chisolm, who first had the idea of using AI to identify bugs when he saw that Facebook was automatically identifying people in photos, said exterminators who have used the app are blown away by how quickly it can identify a bug.

PestID can help Rentokil technicians with the more banal parts of pest extermination, too, like prompting the technician with the right treatment, and auto-populating paperwork; it can even use GPS to guess whether the pests are located inside or outside a facility. “There's a lot of stuff that these guys have to do manually,” said Accenture’s Sharma. “Using this app, we can automate it, and make it quicker.”

Employing faster technicians who can do more jobs in a single day is obviously attractive to a company like Rentokil, but it’s not the only perk of partnering with Accenture and Google. While the big companies own the underlying technology, Rentokil owns the database, which means as the system continues to learn about new bugs, Rentokil will own the most accurate and easy-to-use pest identification system on the market, which it can market directly to consumers.

“If you found an insect in your house, in the larder, munching away on your cereals, and you wanted to know, What is it? Do I need to be worried? What do I do about it? You could use the Rentokil app to identify the pest, we could give you advice, link you to a local pest controller, who could come and help you with that problem,” said Chisolm.

Even in a world where homeowners and companies pay for an app that identifies pests, Chisolm says a professional would still have to come by and actually kill the things. And that may be true, for now — but pest-killing drones and termite-destroying robots already exist.

“Could you replace that with a robot?” Chisolm asked. “I guess you could.”

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qAcG39
via IFTTT

People Broke Into My Starbucks App And Charged Me $100

The timing was perfect on this one.

Last week, just as I finished writing a story about "unauthorized activity" on Chipotle's payment system, I received an email alert from Starbucks. It contained a receipt for reloading $100 onto my Starbucks mobile app, using my saved credit card.

The problem, of course, was I had nothing to do with that transaction. By the time I opened the app to see what was going on, the fraudster had already made three purchases at a Starbucks in San Diego: one for $48.32, one for $49.75, and another for $15.83.

By the time I was on the phone with customer service, my account had been completely emptied.

This is not a new thing — it's called an account takeover, and it's a long-running problem in the Starbucks app. In 2015, customers of the coffee chain reported having their accounts reloaded using their stored credit cards and then emptied, possibly onto gift cards that the scammers then sold at a discount on the black market.

At the time, the company said because many consumers reuse usernames and passwords on multiple sites and apps, criminals were obtaining stolen logins from hacked websites, and trying them out in the Starbucks app.

"We have a team of engineers dedicated to advancing our security and fraud prevention capabilities," the company said in a statement at the time.

But two years later, the Starbucks app still seems vulnerable to exactly the same weakness. Despite the app being linked to people's credit cards, and capable of charging money to them at will, the company confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it does not support two-factor authentication — a widespread security measure that typically involves the user being sent a code via text message or email when attempting to log in from a new device.

It's a notable weakness, given that mobile payment now represents about 25% of all Starbucks transactions. For a chain that brought in $13.2 billion in sales in fiscal 2016 just through company-operated stores in the US, Canada, and Latin America, that means billions of dollars flowing through the app.

"Relying on usernames and passwords is a failure because no matter what you do, there will always be some percentage of users, probably double digits, who will use a password that they used somewhere else," said journalist Brian Krebs, author of KrebsOnSecurity.

"I was surprised that in two years, Starbucks hasn’t gotten more aggressive," said Rob LaMear, CEO of US Cyber Vault. LaMear said his and his wife's Starbucks accounts were both recently compromised. With a global brand, there's "a lot of volume at play here."

A Starbucks spokesperson said in an email to BuzzFeed News "while account takeover (ATO) activity is an industry wide challenge, we see only a tiny fraction of one percent of our account holders impacted."

Meanwhile, a slow trickle of complaints from Starbucks customers continues to emerge on social media.

Like many other big restaurant chains launching their own ordering and payment apps, mobile is a critical part of Starbucks' growth plan. While repeat customers are big fans of the convenience of these apps, the companies also benefit from the reams of highly-detailed data they collect on customer habits.

How serious is Starbucks about getting digital right? It's newly-appointed CEO, Kevin Johnson, was previously the CEO of tech company Juniper Networks, and was a senior executive at Microsoft before that. Last month, Johnson singled out "digital relationships with customers" as one of the company's "most important things for the future."

Asked about rolling out two-factor authentication, Starbucks said, "While we do not share specifics on future security protocol timelines or practices, our security and anti-fraud teams actively continue to develop, and invest in, enhanced protection measures, further strengthening our platforms."

Starbucks customer service said they would cancel the $100 charge with my credit card company and refund the balance that was on my account before it was compromised. The representative had me change my password while I was still on the phone with her.

Was your Starbucks account compromised? To contact the reporter on this story, email venessa.wong@buzzfeed.com, or go to tips.buzzfeed.com to learn how send your tip securely.

Chipotle Says Its Payment System May Have Been Hacked

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2pZqpn0
via IFTTT

If You Just Got An Unexpected Google Doc, Don’t Open It

Have you gotten an email today (or perhaps several), saying that someone from your contacts list shared a Google document with you? Think twice before opening it or clicking the link to access the doc.

A number of people have been victim of an apparent phishing attempt (where hackers try to get you to click on sketchy links) by an unknown organization starting around 11:30 am PT today.

At least some of the emails are addressed to "hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh@mailinator.com" and appear to place the intended target in the BCC field. The subject line reads "[someone in your contacts] just shared a Google Doc with you," imitating the way Google emails appear when people share Google Documents with one another.

If you click on the fraudulent link within the email, it will take you to a real Google page asking for widespread permissions across your Google accounts, which, if granted (don't) would give the attackers access to a vast amount of personal data. For now, it doesn't seem like the hack can access this information unless you give it permission; however, if you open the link, it does seem to forward the email to everyone on your contact list.

The attack hit a number an unknown number of employees within BuzzFeed and seems to also target people outside of the organization, including school districts.

If you search "shared a doc" on Twitter, the results keep piling up.

Here's what to do if you did click the link to the suspicious Google Doc:

• Go to the google security checkup and go through the checklist.
  
• Pay close attention to the Account Permissions section. Check for anything that looks suspicious and revoke access.

Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2pG4Chf
via IFTTT

Waymo Alleges Ex-Employee And Uber Created A Cover-Up Company To Steal Its Self-Driving Tech

Anthony Levandowski, Otto Co-founder and VP of Engineering at Uber

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

In a court hearing on Wednesday, Waymo's lawyers alleged that Anthony Levandowski – its former employee who is at the center of its contentious lawsuit against Uber – started his self-driving truck company Otto as a ruse so Uber could acquire it and steal proprietary information about Google's self-driving car program.

"We've learned that Uber and Levandowski together created a cover-up scheme for what they were doing," Charles Verhoeven, a lawyer for Waymo, said. "They concocted a story for public consumption. The story was that Mr. Levandowski left Waymo for his own company."

Waymo's lawyers pointed to a stock agreement that gave Levandowski more than $5 million shares of vesting stock – an amount Waymo's lawyers said was worth about $250 million – on January 28, 2016, the day after Levandowski left Google.

According to state records, Levandowski’s company Ottomotto LLC was incorporated in Delaware on January 15, 2016. Uber acquired Otto and appointed Levandowski as head of its self-driving car program a few months later, in July 2016.

Uber told reporters outside the courtroom that the stock was granted at the time of the acquisition but the vesting was back-dated to account for Levandowski's time at Otto. The ride-hail giant's lawyers didn't address the vesting agreement in court.

The lawyers also pointed to emails sent in January by Brian McClendon, Uber's former vice president of maps who left the company earlier this year, that referenced a meeting with "Anthony," presumed to be Levandowski.

The hearing on Wednesday is centering around whether US District Judge William Alsup should grant Waymo's request for an injunction to halt Uber's self-driving program pending a trial.

The lawsuit centers around laser technology called LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), which helps self-driving cars see and navigate. Uber says its own technology is “fundamentally different” from Waymo’s designs. Waymo alleges Levandowski downloaded 14,000 company files before leaving the company to start Otto.

This is a developing news story. Check back for updates.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qG93rH
via IFTTT