Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. When Barack Obama was vacationing recently with Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey aboard a $300 million yacht in Tahiti, one wonders if he ever hummed Springsteen’s “All Or Nothin’ At All.” At the moment, it seems like he […]
The FCC has made its initial proposal as to how it intends to do away with net neutrality — and despite what leadership there has said, that’s definitely how the document reads. You are free to make your thoughts known on the notice of proposed rulemaking, as it’s called, and here’s how to do it. Because millions of commenters nearly crashed the entire system when net neutrality […]
Over the years, we’ve seen technologies push the envelope on reality. When the Iranians shot off a bunch of missiles in 2008, for example, it was quickly discovered that they fired only one missile and just Photoshopped the rest in. More recently, on social media, it can be difficult to know fact from fiction. Now we have Lyrebird, a Montreal-based startup that says it can […]
An estimated 2 million Android users have now fallen victim to malware mistakenly downloaded from Google Play, which was initially reported to have affected approximately 600,000 users. The malware, dubbed FalseGuide, was hidden in more than 40 guide apps for games, the oldest of which was uploaded to Google Play as early as November last year, security researchers from Check Point said. “Since April 24, when the […]
Google on Tuesday announced changes to how it delivers and ranks internet searches, the latest effort by the tech giant to weed out “fake news” and offensive content. The new initiative includes tweaks to the algorithm used by Google to deliver search results, while offering users more options to flag inappropriate content, including for “autocomplete,” or the suggestions Google makes while someone is typing a search query. […]
Late last year, Google tweaked its search algorithm to fix a pesky problem: Users who asked the search engine whether the Holocaust occurred were served a post from the White supremacist site Stormfront denying its existence as a top result. Similar problems occasionally arise with Google’s featured “snippets,” the prominently displayed boxes that highlight highly-cited answers from around the web. For instance, at the time of publication […]
Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity, Candidate Trump: “I Love Wikileaks.” President Trump: “Arrest Assange!” “I love Wikileaks,” candidate Donald Trump said on October 10th on the campaign trail. He praised the organization for reporting on the darker side of the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was information likely leaked by a whistleblower from within the Clinton campaign to Wikileaks. […]
BEIJING China will intensify a crack down on the use of recycled “gutter oil”, strengthening controls on oil origins and monitoring processing, according to a document released by the State Council on Monday. China has cracked down on food safety in recent years after a series of scandals, including the use of recycled gutter oil – cooking oil that has been recycled from sources such as restaurant […]
A Virginia Tech College of Science economics researcher says the popular social media website Facebook — and its open sharing of information — is a vital and often a significant tool against government corruption in countries where press freedom is curbed or banned. In new research recently published in the journal Information Economics and Policy, Sudipta Sarangi of the Virginia Tech Department of Economics said his cross-country […]
French voters are going to the polls in the first step of a nail-biting two-round process to elect France’s next president. The election, which will choose a leader with some of the greatest executive powers among western democracies, has turned into a four-way cliffhanger after months of campaigning marked by embezzlement scandals, terror attacks, the collapse of old mainstream parties and the rise of candidates from the […]
Julien Pain was tired of preaching to the choir. After spending several years debunking viral fakes for France 24’s Les Observateurs, Pain was on the lookout for a format that would expand the reach of his fact-checking. “I realized I was only reaching people who agreed with me,” says Pain. “And people who didn’t check their information wouldn’t be reading my fact-checking.” Since September, he has taken […]
By Ingrid Melander | PARIS PARIS France goes to the polls on Sunday for the first round of a bitterly fought presidential election, crucial to the future of Europe and a closely-watched test of voters’ anger with the political establishment. Nearly 47 million voters will decide, under tight security, whether to back a pro-EU centrist newcomer, a scandal-ridden veteran conservative who wants to slash public spending, a […]
The Power of Networks: Six Principles that Connect Our Lives • By Christopher G. Brinton and Mung Chiang • Princeton University Press • 310 pages • ISBN: 978-0-691-17071-8 • £27.95 We don’t normally think of our lives this way, but each of us is enmeshed in myriad networks — the real-life one of people, social media like Twitter and Facebook, and technical networks (internet, cellular). According to […]
Theranos, the embattled blood-testing start-up, set up a secret company to buy off-the-shelf machines, allowing it to hide the fact that it was generating patient results using commercial equipment rather than its own flawed devices, according to an investor lawsuit. Partner Fund Management, which invested $96.1m in Theranos in 2014, alleges the company created a wholly owned subsidiary, Protegic Procurement, to “secretly” buy the commercially available analysers, […]
Good morning. Program changes are same old The swashbuckling Murdochs now look as milquetoast as old media rivals whom they upended and disdain. With the belated firing of Bill O’Reilly, the monarchical lords of 21st Century Fox turned 1990s with their initial programming decisions. Yes, you can easily make dumb decisions when you’re king of any media hill and a financial juggernaut. But the initial post-O’Reilly programming […]
PARIS French centrist Emmanuel Macron is set to come out on top in the first round of France’s presidential election on Sunday as far right leader Marine Le Pen fell further behind him in an Elabe poll published on Friday. However, neither is totally assured a spot in the May 7 runoff round as both conservative Francois Fillon and hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon were seen narrowing Macron […]
By Mark Hosenball and Joseph Menn French voters are being deluged with false stories on social media ahead of the country’s presidential election, though the onslaught of “junk news” is not as severe as that during last year’s U.S. presidential campaign, according to a study by Oxford University researchers. The study to be published Friday and another published on Wednesday add evidence to complaints by officials in […]
(Image: Mastercard) Swipe-to-pay, then chip-and-PIN. What next, credit cards with fingerprint sensors? Turns out that’s Mastercard’s latest invention, a new credit card with an integrated fingerprint sensor, which aims to fight in-store fraud. The card, currently under trial in South Africa, includes sensor is embedded in plastic of the credit card, allowing customers to authorize a payment with a fingerprint, rather than a PIN code or a […]
WASHINGTON A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters. They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort […]
MOSCOW The Russian Defence Ministry on Wednesday dismissed as false a Reuters report which said Russia had understated the number of its servicemen and private contractors killed during a period of intense fighting to retake the city of Palmyra. Reuters reported on Tuesday that the death toll over the period from late January until late March was 21, more than four times higher than the official toll […]
ANKARA Turkey’s ruling AK Party set out plans on Wednesday for President Tayyip Erdogan to gradually take back the party reins, in a sign it would begin implementing changes approved in Sunday’s referendum despite opposition attempts to annul it. Prime Minister and AKP leader Binali Yildirim said Erdogan can rejoin the party he founded in 2001 once official results of the plebiscite, granting him sweeping powers, are […]
The Washington Post is out with a few more leaks today, this time purporting that Trump is set to impose two liberal wet dreams on the people, VAT and carbon taxes. Washpo said the administration is trying to find ways to raise revenues, in order to provide the people with the tax cuts they promised. Moreover, they painted this in a light that Trump and his team […]
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has finally reached his maximum willingness to throw taxpayer dollars at the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) system and has pulled is support for a bill that, if it passes, will undoubtedly prove to be yet another futile effort to save the system from insolvency. Despite support for the original legislation introduced by Dan Flynn, chair of the pensions committee in the […]
That big hug was just what Mr. Sisi’s government sought, said Eric Trager, a scholar on Egypt at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It wants to see the White House legitimate it, and set it on a new course.” Continue reading the main story The scene provided a powerful counterpoint to Mr. Sisi’s many critics, in Egypt and abroad, for whom he is known as […]
