Category: Interesting
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Surprise! The News Reporter Is AI
Surprise reveal at the end of UK Channel 4’s documentary Will AI Take My Job? The news reports (presenter) was…actually AI. “AI is going to touch everybody’s lives in the next few years. And for some, it will take their jobs. Call centre workers? Customer service agents? Maybe even TV…
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Google’s Top Searches in 2020
Google says people asked “Why” in searches more than ever before. They also asked “What day is it?” a lot. Overall, here are the top five searches in 2020 in the US. Election results Coronavirus Kobe Bryant Coronavirus update Coronavirus symptoms Globally, results were similar: Coronavirus Election results Kobe Bryant…
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Two-Thirds of Links on Twitter are Done by Bots
Call it the attack of the bots. The majority of tweets linking to the most popular websites are not handled by human beings, but bots that post content without human involvement. That’s the findings of a Pew Research Center random sampling of 1.2 million tweets last year to answer this…
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Data Privacy: What Defines “Personal Information”
Weeks before new privacy rules go into effect, California AG is asking for significant changes to CCPA California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra has proposed revisions to the regulations implementing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The law itself went into effect on January 1, 2020 with an enforcement deadline of July…
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Report: Fake Accounts and Bots are Proliferating Online; Social Media Companies Aren’t Stopping Them
Let’s say you were able to positively identify more than 15,000 fake social media accounts. You reported a significant number of them to social media platforms as fake. Nearly a month later, who many do you think would still be on the platform? If you said 95% of the fake…
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A Game-Changer for Internet Privacy
You’ve probably never heard of it, but a new protocol called DOH could be a game-changer for online privacy. DOH stands for DNS-over-HTTPS. It would encrypt DNS traffic within your browser and hide requests and responses. When you enter a website’s URL into a web browser, it’s sent to the…
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For Online Reviews, Recency Matters
Online reviews matter. 92% of consumers say they look at reviews. 68% say positive reviews increase their trust. In addition to looking for positive reviews, we now know that consumers also value recent reviews in far greater numbers. 85% of those surveyed say that reviews dated more than three months…
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How Much of the Internet is Fake?
Seriously. If you haven’t read Max Reed’s article “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually” yet, stop what you’re doing and do it right now. Here are just a few of the gems Reed lays out: How much of the internet is fake?…
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Turning 2D Photos into 3D Videos with a One Button Push
We know that artificial intelligence will change the way we do things in the future. It’s already being used in products you use every day, but we’re just beginning to see the multitude of ways AI might make an impact. For designers and animators, Adobe recently showed off a very…
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Five of the Biggest Cause Marketing Fails
Cause Marketing has been a buzzword (or is it a buzz-phrase?) for years in advertising circles. Tie your brand or product to a popular cause and hope that some of the good will rubs off. It sounds good, but it doesn’t always work out the way you want. Even some…
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Publishers could be required to get permission and pay to link to copyright material
Now that GDPR is the law in the European Union, lawmakers have their sights on copyright reform, which could have significant impact on the way websites work. They want to bring digital copyright laws across Europe into a unified code. According to the proposed legislation, it “provides for measures aiming at…
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Google Proposes New Standards to Speed Up Mobile Page Load Times
On the mobile web, and really everywhere, there’s a real need for speed. The average person clicks away from mobile content if it doesn’t load quickly. Yet the average page loads s-l-o-w-l-y. Something’s got to give. How bad is it? Google’s 2017 study showed the average mobile landing page takes…
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Five of the Biggest Cause Marketing Fails
Cause Marketing has been a buzzword (or is it a buzz-phrase?) for years in advertising circles. Tie your brand or product to a popular cause and hope that some of the good will rubs off. It sounds good, but it doesn’t always work out the way you want. Even some…
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Popular websites record every keystroke you make and put personal information at risk
It’s got a stuffy kind of title: “No boundaries: Exfiltration of personal data by session-replay scripts.” That’s the title of a paper written by researchers at Princeton University. What underlies that title is a potential invasion of privacy and gathering of data without permission on some 480 popular websites. The…
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Amazon moves causes Best Buy to lose $1 billion in market cap overnight
Recode reports that Amazon has been hiring folks to provide in-home installations for electronics and smart home devices. The operation is up and running in 7 markets so far. Smart home gadgets are selling, but Amazon reports higher than normal return rates, in part because they can be tough to…
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News organizations ask Congress for authority to collectively bargain with Google, Facebook
The New Media Alliance represent almost 2,000 news organizations, primarily newspapers. This week, the organization starting asking Congress for some help in taking on the big internet companies. Call it a pre-emptive strike for collective bargaining with Google and Facebook. It’s no secret that Goo-book dominates digital advertising. In the…
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Insights: Analyzing 105,000 Facebook pages for emoji’s
Facebook places weight on reactions – those love, sad, angry, lol emoji’s – when determining what to put in your news feed. It values them more than likes. “Over the past year we’ve found that if people leave a Reaction on a post, it is an even stronger signal that they’d…
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Man fined $4,000 for clicking the Like button of defamatory Facebook posts
Here’s a twist. A Swiss man has been fined roughly $4,000 bucks for clicking the Like button on Facebook. Yup, you read that right. Fortune reports that the man (not named in court) clicked the Like button on what a judge termed defamatory comments on Facebook. By clicking the Like…
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New study links social media use to less gray matter in your brain
Too much Facebook = less brain cells, according to a study in the medical journal Behavioral Brain Research. The researchers did MRI scans of active 85 Facebook users. “Higher daily frequency of checking Facebook on the smartphone was robustly linked with smaller gray matter volumes of the nucleus accumbens,” the…
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FTC cracks down on Zombie Cookies that track your online behavior even after you opt-out
The Federal Trade Commission has finalized a settlement with Turn over its use of Supercookies (also called Zombie Cookies). The FTC has accused Turn of deception by tracking consumers for ads even after people tried to opt out. While not admitting any wrongdoing, the settlement will prohibit Turn from misrepresenting…
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Would you rather pay for content or put up with advertising?
85% say give us ads. 75% say they would drastically reduce their online activities if they had to pay. In fact, Americans assigned a value of nearly $1,200 per year to the array of free, ad-supported services and content currently available to them on computers and mobile devices, according to…
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Facebook’s 10-year road map includes typing with your brain, listening with your skin, and no more smart phones
Mark Zuckerberg laid out his 10-year road map at the F8 Facebook developers conference and hinted at some of the projects in the works at the social media company. It’s either genius or madness.
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Two Huntsville, AL area companies team up to do world’s first 360-degree LIVE VIDEO of a rocket launch
This could be really cool. NASA’s doing a 360-degree video stream of a rocket launch. NASA teamed up with two Alabama companies (United Launch Alliance (ULA) from Decatur, AL and Orbital ATK from Huntsville, AL) to broadcast the world’s first live 360-degree stream of a rocket launch. You can watch…
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A bad idea: Congress looks at taxing advertising
The Trump administration has put tax reform on the table for debate. There are very few people that would argue what we have right now is working fine. One of the things under discussion, however, is eliminating the business deduction for advertising. Businesses are able to deduct the cost of…
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Morning inspiration: 19 quick quotes on being happy
Here are 19 quick quotes to help you remember, happiness begins by looking inward:
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Virtual advertising on windshields aimed at the driver?
I’ve started to wonder if we’re putting too much tech in front of drivers. As they navigate down the road, there are an awful lot of things that can add to your distracted driving. My new car has a screen that shows current radar and weather forecasts. I’ve found the…
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Now ransomware is showing up on a Smart TV?
Wow. Just wow. Darrn Cauthon is a software developer. On Christmas day, he says, a family member was using their Smart TV and downloaded an app to watch a movie. The TV set froze up. When it rebooted, this notice appeared claiming to be from FBI Director James Comey. Full…
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At what point does new technology become mainstream?
Commercial mobile telephones were actually invented in 1949 by AT&T, but it wasn’t until the early 70’s that phones were truly mobile – not tethered to vehicles. I remember when neighbor kids would want to ride in my car so they could call Mom at home and tell her where…
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Four times people were threatened or sued for leaving bad reviews on Yelp… and won
Put a bad review on line and you risk not just making the business mad, but maybe lawsuits and fines. You may not even know you’re doing something that could get you in trouble, but buried in the TOS (term of service agreements) you never read, or buried in some…
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Cord cutters are cutting cable AND broadband internet at home
First it was cutting landline phones for mobile. Next, cord cutters dropped cable TV and opted for streaming devices. Now, in what Ovum researchers call “triple cord cutting,” we’re seeing people start to trim their broadband connections at home and use cell phones to do their online viewing. “Cord-cutting started…
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Talking cars could help make roads safer, help the environment
If you’ve bought a new car lately, you know there’s an incredible amount of tech going on that has nothing to do with driving. My new car has weather radar maps, sports scores, movie times, and even Open Table available on the touchscreen. But a proposed rule from NHTSA (National…
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The dirty little secret of digital ad networks
In the rush to move to digital advertising, there’s been an awful lot of ad dollars wasted because people didn’t really know what they were buying. Remember the early days of the world wide web? People reported “hits” – which we then learned equated to server calls and could be…
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A symbol of the Civil Rights Movement, group charges copyright fees to use “We Shall Overcome”
Should the song be Public Domain? The same law firm that succeeded in getting “Happy Birthday” into the public domain is now trying to get “We Shall Overcome” released from copyright. This week, a federal court ruled to let the case move forward. The song became a galvanizing force in the…
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Media, Pollsters get failing grades
There’s no question it was a nasty election season. The losers? According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, just about everyone. The press got blasted… even more than the candidates themselves.
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Were the Presidential polls really wrong – or was it just the way they were interpreted?
Pollsters have gotten a lot of grief over getting the election results wrong. There’s reason to criticize, but I think some people are placing blame when it’s not as clear cut as they might think. First, it appears that although Trump won the electoral college, Clinton won the popular vote. …
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Are newspaper endorsement irrelevant in today’s world?
USA Today is the most-circulated newspaper in the country and until this election year, had never taken sides in a Presidential election. In 2016, it asked readers not to vote for Donald Trump. The Arizona Republic supported Hillary Clinton, the first time it had endorsed a Democrat in 126 years.…
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Should internet providers be held liable when its users illegally download content?
“In this copyright action, the putative owners of more than 1,400 musical composition copyrights seek to hold Cox Communications, Inc. and Cox Com, LLC (collectively, “Cox”) contributorily and vicariously liable for alleged copyright infringement taking place over its high-speed internet service.” With those words, the court’s opinion in the case…
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How a cracked fish tank created a chain reaction
My fish tank leaked. Forget about the dead fish for a minute, but this cracked glass case caused a chain reaction in our house. Sure, the tank was easy enough to replace, and dead fish aside, so were the occupants. But the carpet was stained (and you don’t want to know about…
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When did we become an opt-out world?
We all know that nobody reads Terms of Service on anybody’s website, or User Agreements when downloading an app. We have just come to accept that there’s probably bad stuff in there that we won’t want but it’s the price we have to pay. I say enough! It’s time to…
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What’s on your ballot? Easy way to find out before going to the polls
OK, so you know who’s running for President and maybe the local school board (maybe). Do you know what statewide initiatives are on the ballot and what the language means? It might help to look at the info ahead of time so you’re not trying to decipher legalize in the…
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The incredible number of people making $100,000 or more a year that have nothing in the bank
40% of Americans earning $100,000-$149,000 a year say they have less than $1,000 in savings! 18% say they have NOTHING saved. How much money do you have in the bank right now? If you answered more than $1,000, you’re in the minority. That’s both crazy and sad. It’s true though,…
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Olympic rule 40 prohibits athletes from marketing themselves during the Olympics
Yet many Olympic athletes live below the poverty line Despite the TV glory, a surprising number of Olympic athletes live below the poverty line. They typically self-fund their training and efforts, scraping together an income from limited prize money, part-time jobs, and sponsor contracts. Selling sausages to train for the Olympics…
Paul Dughi.com 