Social Items



Twitter blocked the search for the word “bisexual” in photos and news earlier, which angered quite not so few people, but the company responded that the removal of the search results for certain terms were “an error.”

While Twitter claimed it was due to an error, some users aren’t quite convinced as to the rationale behind such an incidence.

As the removal could be seen as a form of discrimination and purposely disallowing people to search for items such as images and news articles of the term labeling one’s sexuality.

According to Twitter, the teams are working quickly to resolve it:



Twitter, though maintains that they don’t know how this happened, even as the removal only seems to affect the label of sexuality.

The company still have other seriously derogatory terms like “Hitler,” or “Nazi” which were not removed; neither the Russian bot problem, seemingly taking ages to fix.

Twitter's removal of “bisexual” in search for photos and news



Apple's revolutionary new feature on iPhone X, Face ID allow you to unlock your phone by looking at it, but just how much facial biometric can reveal about the bearer is quite huge.

The new front-facing sensor module within the ‘notch’ enables the smartphone to sense and map in-depth facial features, which inevitably, communicates a lot about its owner without them necessarily realizing it.

Now, this dexterous piece of software called the TrueDepth camera system, is to power a new authentication mechanism based on a facial biometric, Face ID, which iPhone X owners are required to register their facial biometric by tilting their face in front of the camera.

The Face ID also replaces Touch ID for Apple Pay and other apps that uses it to authenticate users, like banking apps.

Albeit, Apple claims it does not have access to the depth-mapped facial blueprints that users enroll with when they register for Face ID. As the mathematical model of the iPhone X user’s face is encrypted and stored locally on the device in a Secure Enclave.

But Face ID learns over time, the additional mathematical representations of the user’s face may also be created and stored in the Secure Enclave after successful unlocks — if the system deems them useful to “augment future matching”.

While developers trying to incorporate Face ID authentication into their iOS apps does not have access to the Secure Enclave; the authentication is via a dedicated API which returns only a positive or negative response after comparing the input signal with the Face ID data.

Apple’s engineering and security systems behind Face ID’s architecture should given you confidence that the core encrypted facial blueprint to unlock your device and authenticate your identity with all sorts of apps is never shared with anyone.

Does Apple's Face ID facial biometric raise privacy concerns?



Facebook have been an unconventional breaking news source, as the leading social platform may be gearing up for a new “breaking news” tag feature that will enable publishers to bring their news posts to the right audience.

The company which is constantly testing new products, is working on a "breaking news" feature, though no official statement has been made about it.

First spotted by Matt Navarra, director of social media at The Next Web, the “breaking news” tag for publishers, could serve to push relevant news stories higher into users’ feeds, or at least make them more visually appealing.

Matt, who has become a notorious leaker of unreleased Facebook products and features which he usually find in Facebook’s code or through other means, also shared screenshots on a purported payment system called "red envelop" on Twitter.





The red envelope feature is especially interesting, as red envelopes are typically used for gifting in Chinese New Year holidays, though its ability to send money on Facebook would mean an actual peer-to-peer payments system.

Albeit, the company already have payments system in place on its Messenger, but its not supported on Facebook’s main app or on the Web.

Facebook's wooing of sellers on its Marketplace, which advertisers are not allowed to buy ads specifically for the Marketplace section, may therefore mean making people to actually pay for a purchase on Facebook would be the monetization scheme.

Facebook “Red envelope” and “Breaking news” features coming soon



Kotlin, the newly endorsed language for Android app development, has hit version 1.2 and offers an experimental feature enabling reuse of code across platforms, as well as compatibility with the Java 9 module system.

The experimental multiplatform projects capability will allow developers reuse code between target platforms: starting with JVM and JavaScript, and native support, coming later.

While code compilation is produced for both the common and platform-specific parts, and placement can be either in a common module; or platform-dependent parts placed in platform-specific modules.

And developers can express dependencies of common code on platform-specific parts via expected and actual declarations.

The declaration specifies an API, with an actual declaration either platform-specific to the API or a type alias that refers to an existing implementation of the API in an external library. While the standard library features the kotlin.math package for performing mathematical operations in cross-platform code.

Kotlin.math package also offers better precision for math polyfills for JavaScript, with the standard library compatible with newly introduced Java 9 module system, which forbids split packages (multiple .jar files declaring classes in the same package).

In version 1.2, the kotlin-stdlib-jdk7 and kotlin-stdlib-jdk8 artifacts replace the old kotlin-stdlib-jre7 and kotlin-stdlib-jre8.

It eliminates the deprecated declarations in the kotlin.reflect package from the kotlin-reflect library to make support for Java 9 possible.

Other improvements in Kotlin 1.2 include the option to treat all warnings as errors; and enabling the compiler to use information from type casts in type inference. This is especially relevant for Android app development, for the compiler to correctly analyze findViewById calls in Android API Level 26.

The Kotlin version 1.2 release candidate is now available for download on GitHub.

Kotlin 1.2 Release Candidate now out; with support for Java 9



Following Thursday's saga in the U.S. president's personal Twitter account deactivation, Twitter said it has “implemented safeguards" to prevent this sort of mishap from happening again.

While Trump’s Twitter handle has been a subject of mixed reactions, not only because the U.S. president makes the most controversial tweets, but because he has tweeted more than 36,000 times.

As such, the attempt at halting the controversial tweets were cheered by many; but others were worried concerning the lack of employee culture at Twitter.

The company in a tweet on Friday, confirmed the new safeguards, thus:



Though, it's understandable that Twitter gave some employees the rights to suspend the accounts of bots, and those who engage in violation of its rules; but wouldn’t it have at least required extra check on the deactivation of such a public figure?

Twitter has been grappling with increasing issues of trolling and abuse, whilst the social media company has had the most difficult time tweaking its rules to protect the experience and safety of its users.

The company, for the first time, has made public how they communicate with people who violate their rules, and how the enforcement processes work.

Twitter implement "safeguards" on Trump Account to Prevent Deactivation



YouTube Kids is the kid-friendly version of YouTube which avails youngsters a safer way to browse YouTube instead of giving them full access to the main app. While that more filtered version of YouTube was first introduced in 2015, it was criticized in the past for not fully locking down the YouTube experience.

Now, the updated app has added several new features designed to reflect the app’s aging user base, with customizable profiles based on the kid’s date of birth, as well as more controls for parents and kids as regards privacy and security.

It spots a new streamlined design, and curated selections of kid-appropriate content from publishers like DreamWorks TV, National Geographic Kids, Reading Rainbow and Thomas the Tank Engine, among others.

The new parental control feature eases access for parents, instead of the toggle off the app’s search to set private passcode or using the default setting, which spells out numbers as words for parents to enter; they can now sign in with their Google account in order to create customizable profiles for their kids.

YouTube Kids app changing of its looks based on the kid’s age, is especially useful for parents with multiple kids.

And because YouTube Kids itself, by default, looked like an app that was designed more or less for preschoolers than the school-age crowd. Overall, it’s safer for kids to browse YouTube Kids compared with giving them access to the main app.

YouTube Kids now give Youngsters own profiles, and more controls

Adobe Digital Insights (ADI) team, as part of its annual “Holiday Predictions” report, analyzed 1 trillion visits to over 4,500 retail websites, 55 million SKUs, and 12 million social mentions. While the results aren't quite surprising, ADI predicts online holiday sales will reach $107.4 billion, which is a 13.8% increase from the same period last year.

According to ADI, online growth will continue to outpace overall retail growth during the holidays — 13.8% online vs. 3.8% overall.

They also conducted companion survey research with 1,100 U.S. consumers, to bring you the following predictions about consumer online purchase habits this holiday season. From this aggregated and anonymized data, 31% of shoppers reported that they are planning to spend more online this year than last year.

With more than half of those visits to shopping sites coming from smartphones and tablets, which will surpass desktop computers for the first time.



It means if you visit a U.S. retailer’s website this holiday season, you’re most likely to do so on a mobile device, with mobile having a bigger share of the predicted $107.4 billion in online holiday spending this year, up from $94.4 billion last year.

Albeit, there’s still a disparity between mobile retail website visits and revenue, but the move toward mobile shopping is inevitable.

While desktop purchases still account for two-thirds of revenue year-round, mobile is often the starting point for many shoppers.

The key is to make the mobile experience helpful to the customer, wherever they are in their shopping journey. And the retailers that deliver the best experience are the ones that will close the deal.

Adobe's Predictions for the Holiday Shopping pitches mobile over the desktop



The U.S. president's personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump disappeared from the social network Thursday afternoon, but contrary to any rule violation, Twitter attributed the deactivation to human error by its employee.

While visitors to Trump's page were greeted with a rather unexpected message that the page didn't exist. Albeit, the account's deactivation didn't last quite long, as the page was promptly restored with its usual appearance.

Twitter, however responded via its @TwitterGov handle, with the message that Trump's account "was inadvertently deactivated due to human error" before later placing the blame on an employee spending their last day with the company.



Twitter, though had earlier acknowledged that Trump's tweet had caused an uproar but maintains it was allowed to stay because of its "newsworthiness."

The company's rules forbid using the service to make violent threats, either directly or indirectly. As any account violating that rule may be subject to a temporary or permanent suspension, Twitter warns.

But many observers have wondered why some of Trump's tweets cum account weren't deleted by the social media platform, despite their apparent violation of its rules.

Twitter attributes human error in deactivation of Trump's account



Snap unveiled a dancing burger AR filter, which follows last month rolled out of the new product called Lenses, as a troll on Google and Apple, which row erupted over the weekend about the order in which the ingredients are stacked in both Apple and Google's burger emoji.

Snapchat burger is actually superior to that of Google and Apple, as most burger-munching peeps prefer their burgers stacked from top-to-bottom in this order: lettuce, cheese, and then the meat.

Apple's emoji has the cheese firmly planted on top, with the lettuce underneath the burger.  While Google's burger emoji has the cheese placed underneath the burger patty, with the lettuce leaf atop all other ingredients.

Snap's dancing burger lens has one obvious edge over that of Apple and Google: the two burger patties.

Albeit, Snapchat opted for this order: lettuce, cheese, and burger, which might be completely wrong too. Twitter users battled it out over the weekend and into early this week, with one user reaching this verdict:



Indeed, there's something about Snapchat's burger dance moves that screams "trolling"!

Most obviously, Snapchat is taunting Google and Apple. Though, it does not have its own emoji, but it does have AR lenses. And a good sense of humour, too.

What's not so crunchy about Snap's dancing AR burger



Apple just pulled a fast one, with its recently launched digital wallet and payments service, Apple Pay, as it nabs 90 percent of all mobile contactless transactions everywhere the service is active.

With Apple Pay now in 20 markets worldwide, which represents a whole 70 percent of the world’s card transaction volume, underscores Apple's approach to moving first to markets where the mobile money has kicked off.

Apple Pay allow instant payment by just tapping the terminal with your credit card instead of swiping and waiting for payment to the mobile device.

While Apple Pay has admittedly had fair share of bumpy roads, and bound to encounter more as it continues roll out around the world, mobile contactless payments has been a favored payments method by a wide margin.

The Apple advantage points to using phones as a proxy for a card or cash, and there is some anecdotal evidence that it’s working.

And the fact that merchants and others who have partnered with Apple say that Apple Pay is accounting for 90 percent of all mobile contactless transactions globally in markets where it’s available.

Apple also announced plans to launch the service in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the UAE in the next few days, which brings the total number of countries where it is operated to 20. And there are now 4,000 credit and debit card issuers whose cards can be uploaded and used with Apple Pay.

Apple Pay hits 90 percent of Global Mobile contactless transactions

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)