The Independent Articles

Facebook has announced that it is updating its hate speech policies to explicitly ban Holocaust denial.The site had previously allowed such content to be posted on the site, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that he found it “deeply offensive” but that his company would continue to host it.“I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong,” he said.The social media giant will now “prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust”.It comes as the company has been criticised for allowing its algorithm to promote Holocaust denial.Read more“We’ve long taken down posts that praise hate crimes or mass murder, including the Holocaust. But with rising antisemitism, we’re expanding our policy to prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust as well. If people search for the Holocaust on Facebook, we’ll start directing you to authoritative sources to get accurate information,” he wrote.“I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimising or denying the horror of the Holocaust. My own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in antisemitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech.“Drawing the right lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech isn’t straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.”Facebook says that it has worked with a number of groups fighting antisemitism, including the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, the Community Security Trust, and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Previously, Facebook had used Holocaust denial as an example of how the company protects free speech.Mr Zuckerberg had said that posts that are false will be downgraded in the algorithm if they are spotted by Facebook’s fact checkers, and users would be banned entirely if they advocated violence against a particular group.“These issues are very challenging but I believe that often the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech,” he said in 2018.As well as now cracking down on Holocaust denial, Facebook had recently removed a network of QAnon accounts.

An advanced artificial intelligence was able to post to Reddit and interact with other users for more than a week before anyone realised it was a bot. The AI posed as a human user under the username ‘thegentlemetre’, posting to Q&A forums AskReddit and AskScience on subjects ranging from suicide to “hot milfs”. Some of the posts received hundreds of upvotes, including one about homeless people living in elevator shafts.In one AskReddit thread that asked users what scared them more than dying, the bot appeared to philosophise on the nature of living.It concluded: “As for what scares me more than dying, I must say that nothing really scares me. I guess I could be scared of the uncertainty of fear itself.”It was only found out when one Reddit user noted the output and length of thegentlemetre’s posts. “How does this user post so many large, deep posts so rapidly,” the user asked. Software engineer Philip Winston investigated the suspicious activity and concluded that the bot used the GPT-3 language model developed by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Elon Musk.Watch moreMr Winston noted that the written content of the posts was convincing, however the frequency at which they were published suggested that it was beyond human capability.“The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago,” the engineer wrote in a blog post detailing his investigation.GPT-3 generates text using an algorithm fed by vast amounts of human-created content, including Wikipedia.

End-to-end encryption lets users use messaging services without the owners of those services being able to access the conversations.Government representatives, including Home Secretary Priti Patel, US Attorney General Bill Barr, and others, said they are concerned that “encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access to content”.The governments say they “support strong encryption, which plays a crucial role in protecting personal data, privacy, intellectual property, trade secrets and cyber security.”However, with regards to certain crimes, such as child exploitation, the government should be allowed access to private channels.This access would:”Embed the safety of the public in system designs, thereby enabling companies to act against illegal content and activity effectively with no reduction to safety, and facilitating the investigation and prosecution of offences and safeguarding the vulnerable;”Enable law enforcement access to content in a readable and usable format where an authorisation is lawfully issued, is necessary and proportionate, and is subject to strong safeguards and oversight; and”Engage in consultation with governments and other stakeholders to facilitate legal access in a way that is substantive and genuinely influences design decisions.”WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal are all end-to-end encrypted, while other platforms like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, and text messages are not.However if end-to-end encryption is ‘broken’, by allowing a backdoor for law enforcement agencies as these governments have suggested, it could allow malicious individuals the ability to access private conversations.Read moreMany large technology companies, advocacy groups, and the general public have criticised the use of backdoors.Earlier this year, when Zoom said that its free video calling service would not be end-to-end encrypted so it could work better with law enforcement, over 19,000 internet users signed a petition from Mozilla and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) to Zoom in protest. Zoom eventually reversed the decision.“We reiterate that data protection, respect for privacy and the importance of encryption as technology changes and global Internet standards are developed remain at the forefront of each state’s legal framework”, the governments’ statement concludes.“However, we challenge the assertion that public safety cannot be protected without compromising privacy or cyber security”.

Apple has removed the “Beats by Dre” page from its website ahead of the upcoming launch of the iPhone 12.However, despite the removal of the page, Apple is still selling Beats products in its online store.It comes as Apple is launching new audio hardware, according to rumours.The smartphone giant had recently removed third-party audio products – from speakers made by Sonos to headphones from Bose – from its store.Read moreApple had previously stopped selling Fitbits through its online store ahead of the launch of the Apple Watch in 2014.Apple is supposedly going to announce an over-ear headphone version of its AirPods as well as a cheaper, smaller version of the HomePod.It has been rumoured to be called something similar to ‘AirPods Studio’.Competing rumours, however, have suggested that Apple could wait until another event in November to reveal at least some of those products.The new handset is set to come with a more rectangular body similar to the iPad Pro and Air, as well as a new A14 Bionic chip, a LiDAR sensor so that it can more accurately estimate depth, and 5G connectivity.Wired headphone wearers can now tweak the sound output on their headphones to increase the midrange so voices are easier to hear or emphasise high frequencies.

The inside of Asteroid Bennu could be less dense than its outer layers – like a chocolate egg filled with cream, Nasa’s OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft has shown.Bennu is a dark “rubble pile” asteroid, held together by gravity. It is thought to have been formed from the collision of a much larger object, and its cratered and chunky surface suggest that it has continued to have an eventful time as it has made its way through the solar system.Nasa’s spacecraft and its engineers are preparing for a daring “touch-and-go” mission in which it will briefly touch down on the asteroid and gather samples, before jumping back off and returning to Earth.As that time approaches, new research has been published that looks at the composition of the asteroid itself, including the colour of its surface and what the conditions might be like underneath.The findings not only help show more about the asteroid itself but could also reveal how such asteroids in the Solar System evolve, and transform over the millions of years their lifetime can last.Watch moreOSIRIS-REx has already revealed unprecedented data on the asteroid, which orbits more than 200 million miles from Earth, since it arrived in late 2018. Bennu is now easily the most studied asteroid in the history of space exploration, giving an insight into the many similar objects that fly around our solar system.But researchers have still been mostly puzzled by the conditions beneath Bennu’s surface. Researchers have studied the outside in detail – but not the inside.Now researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder’s OSIRIS-REx team have published research in the journal Science Advances which aims to give a peek into the inside of the object. They used a range of instruments on board Nasa’s spacecraft to measure how its gravity field changes, and to use that as something like an X-ray machine to look inside.”If you can measure the gravity field with enough precision, that places hard constraints on where the mass is located, even if you can’t see it directly,” said Andrew French, a coauthor of the new study and a former graduate student at CU Boulder, now at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).The research found not only that the core of the asteroid is weaker than its surface – but that its composition could lead to its destruction relatively soon.”You could imagine maybe in a million years or less the whole thing flying apart,” said Daniel Scheeres, one of the professors who led the study.Other research published at the same time found that the materials that make up Bennu are distributed across its surface, meaning that any sample should be relatively representative.”Our recent studies show that organics and minerals associated with the presence of water are scattered broadly around Bennu’s surface, so any sample returned to Earth should contain these compounds and minerals,” said SwRI’s Dr. Vicky Hamilton, a coauthor on three papers published in Science.”We will compare the sample’s relative abundances of organics, carbonates, silicates and other minerals to those in meteorites to help determine the scenarios that best explain Bennu’s surface composition.”Researchers will also be able to compare the materials taken from Bennu with those from Ryugu, another near-Earth asteroid, which was examined by a Japanese spacecraft that will land on Earth with samples of the asteroid in December.

Sony has said that some older games could “exhibit errors or unexpected behavior” when played on the new PlayStation 5.The company has released a new FAQ detailing how backwards compatibility will work on the new console. Though it has been less focused on allowing older games to work than Microsoft, the company has committed to ensuring that backward compatibility is in place for many titles.Sony said the PS5 will be backward compatible with the “overwhelming majority of PS4 games”. Given there are more than 4,000 PS4 games available, that amounts to “thousands” of games that will be backwards compatible, but Sony did not indicate exactly how many will run on the new console.It did warn that with some of those games, “some functionalities that were available on the PS4 console may not be available on PS5 consoles”. What’s more, some of those games could “exhibit errors or unexpected behavior when played on PS5 consoles”, it warned.However, it also said that some of those PS4 games will actually run better on the PS5 than the PlayStation 4. Some games will be able to take advantage of a “Game Boost” tool that will allow the games to harness the extra power of the PS5 to run with a higher or smoother frame rate, Sony said.Watch moreIt did not say how many of the games could run into problems, or how many of them would be compatible with the Game Boost feature.Sony also warned players that they should make sure to load up their PS4 game on their new PS5, so they can check whether the play experience is satisfactory, before buying any add-ons or upgrades for any particular game.The company also warned that a host of games – DWVR, Afro Samurai 2 Revenge of Kuma Volume One, TT Isle of Man – Ride on the Edge 2, Just Deal With It!, Shadow Complex Remastered, Robinson: The Journey, We Sing, Hitman Go: Definitive Edition, Shadwen and Joe’s Diner – will not be able to work at all on the PlayStation 5.PS4 controllers should still work as expected when playing games on the PS5, Sony said, and the same should be true of other accessories such as racing wheels or the PS VR headset.Some games will offer the option to upgrade PS4 games to the PS5 version, it also noted. That will be done either by putting the PS4 disc into the PS5, or navigating to the game’s entry on the store – there should then be the option to upgrade, which might require paying an extra fee.

Twitter is rethinking how the labels it applies to misinformation look and work, its head of site integrity told Reuters in an interview, as the social media company tries to make these interventions more obvious and cut its reaction times.Twitter’s Yoel Roth said the company is exploring changes to the small blue notices that it attaches to certain false or misleading tweets, to make these signals more ‘overt’ and be more ‘direct’ in giving users information. But he did not say whether any new versions would be ready before the US election in the next four weeks, a period that experts say could be rife with false and misleading online content.Mr Roth said the new efforts at Twitter include testing a more visible reddish-magenta colour, and working out whether to flag users who consistently post false information.“We’ve definitely heard the feedback that it would be useful to see if an account is a repeat offender or has been repeatedly labelled, and we’re thinking about the options there,” said Mr Roth.Twitter started labelling manipulated or fabricated media in early 2020, after a public feedback period. It expanded its labels to coronavirus misinformation and then to misleading tweets about elections and civic processes. Twitter says it has now labelled thousands of posts, though most attention has been on the labels applied to tweets by Donald Trump.Watch moreIn September, Twitter announced it would label or remove posts claiming election victory before results were certified.Mr Roth said research undermining the idea that corrections can strengthen people’s beliefs in misinformation – known as the “backfire effect” – had contributed to Twitter rethinking how its labels could be more obvious. The risk is that label “becomes a badge of honour” that users actively pursue for attention, said Mr Roth.Though Twitter’s labels have been praised by some misinformation experts as a long-overdue intervention, their execution has triggered criticisms from researchers as too slow.“Mostly things take off so fast that if you wait 20 or 30 minutes … most of the spread for someone with a big audience has already happened,” said Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington who has been analysing Twitter’s labelling responses.It took Twitter about eight hours to add labels to Mr Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting the first time it labelled him in May, though Ms Starbird said Twitter was getting quicker. Two Trump tweets in September appeared to have been labelled within two hours.Mr Roth said Twitter reduces the reach of all tweets labelled for misinformation, by limiting their visibility and not recommending them in places like search results. The company declined to share any data about the effectiveness of these steps.In August, Election Integrity Partnership researchers said Twitter’s disabling retweets on a Trump tweet that violated its rules had a clear effect on its spread but was “too little, too late”.Mr Roth said Twitter takes into account the number of retweets, engagement and views to prioritise viral content for review to give “the most bang for our buck”. But he said Twitter was exploring how to predict which tweets would go viral and conducting exercises on likely new 2020 election claims to get faster.Multiple researchers told Reuters it was difficult to assess effectiveness of Twitter’s interventions without knowing which actions it was taking and when.The company does not keep public lists of when it has applied labels and has not shared data to allow outsiders to assess how its labels affect a tweet’s spread or how users interact with them.“The platforms need to explain what hypothesis they’re testing, how they’re testing it, what the results are and be transparent,” said Tommy Shane, head of policy and impact at anti-misinformation non-profit First Draft. “Because these are public experiments.”Twitter has labelled or put grey warning overlays over 10 @realDonaldTrump tweets for reasons related to civic integrity rules since it first labelled him in May.Mr Roth said Twitter consults with partners, including election officials, on its labelling. But it has chosen to link to a page of tweets from multiple sources rather than follow Facebook’s lead of paying third-party fact-checkers – including Reuters – to assess content as they could be “easy to dismiss if you disagree with them”.Read moreFacebook Inc, which exempts politicians from its fact-checking programme and faced backlash for not acting on misleading Trump posts, has started adding labels with voting information to all related posts. This strategy has been criticised by researchers for not quickly and obviously differentiating between true and false.Mr Trump’s spokeswoman Samantha Zager said in a statement, without offering specific evidence, that “across social media platforms, it’s clear the Silicon Valley Mafia creates arbitrary rules that do not apply equally to every account and instead are used to silence any views in opposition to those held by the liberal Big Tech coastal elites”:Asked how Twitter is monitoring high-profile users like Mr Trump or his Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden, Mr Roth said Twitter does not “specifically focus in on individual accounts or individual account holders”.

A Tesla launched into space more than two years ago has made its first approach of Mars.SpaceX sent the Tesla Roadster and its mannequin driver ‘Starman’ into space in February 2018 as a dummy payload on the first launch of the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket.Elon Musk, who heads both SpaceX and Tesla, said at the time that the stunt was not simply a demonstration of the rocket’s power.“Life cannot just be about solving one sad problem after another,” he said.“There need to be things that inspire you, that make you glad to wake up in the morning and be part of humanity. That is why we did it.”Watch moreSince leaving Earth, the electric car has been on an elliptical orbit of the Sun that it completes every 557 days.Next month, the vehicle’s journey will see it perform a “drive-by” of Earth, passing within 32 million miles of our planet.“Starman, last seen leaving Earth, made its first close approach with Mars today – within 0.05 astronomical units, or under 5 million miles, of the Red Planet,” SpaceX tweeted.The vehicle has already made 1.75 orbits of the Sun, according to a website tracking the progress of the vehicle, and is currently around 37 million miles from Earth.Travelling at a speed of around 55,000mph, the website notes: “The car has exceeded its 36,000 mile warranty 36,128 times while driving around the Sun.”Orbit modelling suggests the Tesla will eventually burn up in the atmosphere of either Earth or Venus, though this is unlikely to happen within the next 10 million years.

The app sends alerts to people if its systems have been triggered by someone in their network potentially receiving a positive test.But the somewhat confusing notification does not necessarily mean that users have to self-isolate. The notification only means that the system is looking at a possible exposure, not that the system has definitely been triggered.The app’s official Twitter account confirmed that users will be sent a specific notification if they are judged to be at high enough risk to need to self-isolate, and that message will be separate from the one indicating that they have been subject to a possible exposure.Many users of the app – which was released last week – have reported receiving concerning messages on their iPhone or Android phones, which appear to suggest they may be at risk of having been infected with the virus.Read more“Possible Covid-19 exposure,” the notification reads. “Verifying exposure info.“The app has accessed the date, duration and signal strength of this exposure.”Given the concerning title of the notification, which reads “possible covid-19 exposure”, many have been concerned that this could mean the app has judged them to be at risk, and that they should self-isolate.But it is actually the latter part of the message – that the exposure is still being verified – that is important. The notification only means that a potential exposure has been detected, and it is only if a future message arrives that users need to take action.Apple and Google’s contact-tracing APIs allow phones to connect to other devices and take note of any they come into contact with. If the owner of one of those phones indicates that they have had a positive test, anyone whose phones they came into contact with can then be alerted, and that first notification will be sent.But further examination of the data is required before people will be told to self-isolate. That will look at further information to judge precisely how likely it is that someone may have been exposed to the person in question – if they are judged to be at risk, that is when they will be given the instruction to self-isolate, in a separate and more straightforward notification.That second message will include information about what to do when self-isolating, the app’s official Twitter account posted.“The app will send you an alert if you need to self-isolate and how long for, it’ll provide a countdown timer, and when you reach the end of your self-isolation period, you will receive a notification with a link to the latest advice for you,” a representative wrote.

Facebook has removed hundreds of fake accounts tied to right-wing group Turning Point USA, which enlisted a now-banned marketing group to flood comment sections of news stories to attack Joe Biden and Democrats while praising Donald Trump.The social media company announced on Thursday that marketing firm Rally Forge had worked with Turning Point USA to make 200 profiles and 55 pages on the platform and 76 on Instagram, beginning in 2018 and continuing through 2020.Facebook said the accounts violated the company’s polices about “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” that relied “on real people, not automation” to “create the perception of wide-spread support of their narratives by leaving comments on posts by media entities and public figures.”Roughly 373,000 people followed one or more of those pages, and 22,000 people followed on or more of those Instagram accounts.Many accounts consisted of stock profile photos, posing as right-leaning users. The company found that in 2018, some of those accounts had posed as left-leaning users.Read moreThis activity was centered primarily around commenting on news articles posted by news organizations and public figures, rather than posting their own content,” the company said in a statement on its blog. “Its election-focused behavior began in 2018 in the run-up to the midterms, it then went largely dormant until June 2020.”Recent activity involved what the company calls “thinly veiled personas” that “were slight variations of the names of the people behind them and whose sole activity on our platform was associated with this deceptive campaign.”“We assess this shift in tactics is likely due to the majority of this network’s fake accounts getting caught by our automated detection systems,” the company said.At least one account promoted false claims about mail-in ballots, as the president and his allies continue to air unfounded allegations of voter fraud, while voting rights advocates have condemned Republican efforts to suppress votes across the US.Facebook banned Rally Forge from its platforms, while Turning Point USA remains active, with nearly 2 million followers.The organisation’s founder Charlie Kirk was the first speaker at the 2020 Republican National Convention.In June, the president addressed a rally at a megachurch in Phoenix hosted by the group.Facebook latest move follows September reporting from The Washington Post that suggested a “secret campaign” to sow disinformation about 2020 elections was underway through “troll farms” from the conservative Turning Point USA. In response to its reporting, Twitter banned several accounts allegedly involved with similar efforts.On Wednesday, Facebook announced the company will temporarily block US political adverts on its platforms when polls close on Election Day.Facebook also said it would “remove calls for people to engage in poll watching when those calls use militarised language or suggest that the goal is to intimidate, exert control, or display power over election officials or voters,” taking aim at ads the president’s campaign asking for “every able-bodied man and woman to join Army for Trump’s election security operation.”In the event that the president, who commands a massive audience on social media platforms, declares victory before the results are collected, the company said it would send notifications to Facebook and Instagram users on election night with the latest results. The company “will add more specific information in the notifications that counting is still in progress and no winner has been determined,” it said.When polls close, the company will attach labels to candidates’ posts directing people to Facebook’s voting information centre.This week, the company issued a platform-wide ban on QAnon-related groups, pages and profiles, bringing its policy on the conspiracy movement closer to its policies governing “militarised social movements” such as terror groups.