Month: December 2016

(credit: Steven Depolo)

Last month, a California judge tentatively ruled that he would dismiss charges lodged by California's attorney general against Backpage.com's chief executive and two of its former owners. The tables seemed to turn after a November 16 hearing in which Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman decided against following his tentative ruling. But on Friday, the judge issued a final order that virtually mirrored the earlier one: charges dismissed.

Carl Ferrer

The CEO, Carl Ferrer, 55, was charged with pimping a minor, pimping, and conspiracy to commit pimping in connection to online advertisements posted on the online ads portal.

As we previously reported: California's attorney general and US Senator-elect Kamala Harris alleged that advertisements amounted to solicitation of prostitution. Ferrer and co-defendants were accused of making millions in profits off the backs of women and children forced into sexual servitude. The charges were brought as Harris—who decried the site as "the world's top online brothel"—was running for a US Senate seat, which she won in November.

Enlarge / Trump denies there's any truth intelligence community claims of Russian interference in the election, claiming it could have been anyone. (credit: Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images)

President-elect Donald Trump continues to discount or attempt to discredit reports that the intelligence community has linked the hacking of the DNC, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and related information operations with a Russian effort to prevent Clinton from winning the election—thus assuring Trump's victory. In his latest of a stream of tweets, Trump posted:

Unless you catch "hackers" in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn't this brought up before election?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2016

The hacking was brought up well before the election. And it was monitored as it was happening—by the intelligence and law enforcement communities and by private information security firms.

"CrowdStrike's Falcon endpoint technology did catch the adversaries in the act," said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of Crowdstrike. "When the DNC brought us in to conduct an investigation in May 2016, we deployed this technology on every system within DNC's corporate network and were able to watch everything that the adversaries were doing while we were working on a full remediation plan to remove them from the network."

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has hit a hardware home run that surprised even the people in Redmond. The Surface Hub conference room PC turns out to be selling like hotcakes, surpassing everyone's expectations.

When Microsoft launched its Surface Hub conference room computers about a year and a half ago, we weren't entirely sure what to make of them. On the one hand, they offered a smart mix of video conferencing, digital whiteboarding, and collaborative working with a price that felt surprisingly low—$6,999 for the 55-inch version and $19,999 for the 84-inch version. On the other hand, meeting rooms are where old technology clings on to the bitter end; VGA ports are still abundant, clunky video conferencing systems are the norm, and for many companies a whiteboard is as high-tech as it gets.

There were initial signs of strong demand. Microsoft delayed the release, from September 2015 to January 2016, claiming that higher than expected demand (in particular of the 84-inch version) meant the company needed to change its manufacturing capabilities. The company also hiked the price of both models by $2,000, to $8,999 and $21,999—another move suggesting that demand was healthy.

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With messages flying by at speeds literally too fast for a human to read, manual moderation is an uphill battle on some of the most popular Twitch channels. That situation has led to plenty of instances where popular streamers have been deluged with waves of racist or sexist abuse that even quality human moderators can have trouble stemming.

Twitch is offering a new tool in the fight against chat room trolls today in the form of AutoMod. Rather than relying on humans to flag and take down inappropriate messages after they're posted (and quite possibly after the streamer has already read them), AutoMod tries to detect those messages automatically and preemptively send them to a moderation queue for approval or dismissal. Streamers can choose four different levels of aggression for the AutoMod system to crack down on disagreeable content in four different categories: identity, sexual language, aggressive speech, and profanity.

While trolls will no doubt immediately try to find ways to get around AutoMod's filtering, Twitch claims its tool goes well beyond banned wordlists to "employ machine learning and natural language processing to identify and block inappropriate content from appearing in chat," according to a press release. "Beyond identifying inappropriate words and phrases, AutoMod can detect potentially inappropriate strings of emotes and other characters or symbols that others could use to evade filtering."

Six months after landing on iOS, Gboard has arrived on Android. Gboard is Google's mashup of a keyboard with Google Search, and, on Android, it replaces the default keyboard app, previously called "Google Keyboard." We're also moving from Google Keyboard 5.2 to Gboard 6.0—there's a new rev of the base keyboard software in here with a bunch of nice non-Google features.

The basics of Gboard haven't changed since its debut on iOS. There's now a Google logo on the keyboard that, instead of typing into the text field, lets you type into Google. You can run a quick search from inside any app, and the results replace the letter keys once you run it. From there, you can tap on a result to drop it into your text field. I've found it's mostly handy for quick fact checks or planning out your day with someone. If you're discussing grabbing a late dinner, you can quickly check what time the restaurant closes without leaving your keyboard.