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The United States and Russia were among a small number of countries that blocked the U.N. from moving toward talks on whether to ban so-called killer robots. As per Politico, a week of UN meetings in Geneva, concluded in the early hours of Saturday. During the meetings a group at the United Nations' Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) discussed whether to take negotiations on fully autonomous weapons powered by artificial intelligence to a formal level that could lead to a treaty banning them. However, a list of non-binding recommendations that participating countries agreed on, dodged the question of whether to move on to formal negotiations. Mary Wareham, coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, said that Russia, the U.S., South Korea, Israel and Australia were the main countries to oppose this call. "It's a disappointment, of course, that a small minority of large military powers can hold back the will of the majority," she said. Mary Wareham’s group represents 75 non-governmental organizations in 32 countries fighting for a ban on weapons that use AI technology to choose their targets. It says 26 countries endorse a full ban on the weapons. Throughout the meeting, many of those countries reiterated their call for strong regulation, pushing for the U.N. to start formal negotiations at least by next year. Doing so will be the next step toward binding international rules but opponents of the ban stood firm. The document issued at the end of the meeting recommends that non-binding talks should continue. Russian censorship board threatens to block search giant Yandex due to pirated content The New AI Cold War Between China and the USA Microsoft claims it halted Russian spearphishing cyberattacks

Yesterday Open Democracy reported on how Investigate Europe has revealed, that the EU’s instruments against disinformation remained largely ineffective. A day before the European elections, tech giants, Facebook and Google have been alleged to sabotage the designing of EU regulation for fake news and disinformation. According to a new testimony which Investigate Europe collected from insiders, Google and Facebook pressured and “arm-wrestled” a group of experts to soften European guidelines on online disinformation and fake news. The EU’s expert group met last year as a response to the spread of fake news and disinformation seen in the Brexit referendum and in the US election of President Donald Trump in 2016. The task for the experts was to help prevent the spread of disinformation, particularly at the time of European parliamentary elections now. It was in March last year that the expert group’s report was published and then the same year in September the  EU Code of Practice on Disinformation was announced where the platforms had agreed to self-regulate following common standards. The European Union pushed platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter to sign a voluntary Code of Practice. The tech companies did commit themselves to name their  advertising clients and to act against fake accounts, ie false identities on their platforms. They had also agreed to investigate spread of disinformation and fake news on the platforms. In addition, representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter had also agreed to submit monthly reports to the EU Commissioners. "It's the first time in the world that companies have voluntarily agreed to self-regulatory measures to combat misinformation," the commission proclaimed. The expert group confirmed to Investigate Europe that Facebook and Google representatives undermined the work and opposed the proposals to be more transparent about their business models. During the group’s third meeting in March 2018, "There was heavy arm-wrestling in the corridors from the platforms to conditionalise the other experts", says a member of the group, under the condition of anonymity. Another member Monique Goyens – director-general of BEUC, says, "We were blackmailed,". Goyens further added that, “We wanted to know whether the platforms were abusing their market power,". In response to this Facebook’s chief lobbyist, Richard Allan said to her: "We are happy to make our contribution, but if you go in that direction, we will be controversial." He also threatened the expert group members saying that if they did not stop talking about competition tools, Facebook would stop its support for journalistic and academic projects. Google influenced and bribed the expert group members Goyens added that the Google did not have to fight too hard as they had influenced the group member in other ways too. She added that 10 organisations with representatives in the expert group received money from Google. One of them was Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, at the University of Oxford. By 2020, the institute will have received almost €10m from Google to pay for its annual Digital News Report. A number of other organisations represented on the group did also receive funding from the Google Digital News Initiative, including the Poynter Institute and First Draft News. Ska Keller, the German MEP said, “It's been known for some time that Google, Facebook and other tech companies give money to academics and journalists. There is a problem because they can use the threat of stopping this funding if these academics or journalists criticise them in any reporting they do." Code of practice was not delivered as strongly as it was laid down A year later, the code of conduct with the platforms is no more than voluntary. The platforms agreed to take stronger action against fake accounts, to give preference to trustworthy sources and to make it transparent to their users but the progress has been limited. The results of code of practice criticism came from a ‘Sounding Board’ that was convened by the European Commission to track the proposals drawn up in response to the expert group’s report. The Sounding Board, which included representatives from media, civil society and academia, said that the code of practice “contains no common approach, no clear and meaningful commitments, no measurable objectives or KPIs, hence no possibility to monitor process, and no compliance or enforcement tool. “It is by no means self-regulation, and therefore the platforms, despite their efforts, have not delivered a code of practice. More systematic information is needed for the Commission to assess the efforts deployed by the online platforms to scrutinise the placement of ads and to better understand the effectiveness of the actions taken against bots and fake accounts,” four commissioners said in a statement issued in March. Goyens concluded saying, “The code of conduct was total crap. It was just a fig leaf. The whole thing was a rotten exercise. It was just taking more time, extending more time.” However there are reactions on Twitter about the story that it might be a disinformation in itself. A twitter user said that Facebook and Google opposed sharing their algorithms for ranking content, and how this would help EU in fighting disinformation is unknown. https://twitter.com/Je5usaurus_Rex/status/1130757849926197249 While discussions on Hacker News revolve around the context of fake news with the history of propaganda and censorship, one of the user commented, “The thing that makes me very concerned is the lack of context in these discussions of fake news of the history and continuing use of government propaganda. I hope young people who are familiar with "fake news" but not necessarily as familiar with the history of propaganda and censorship will study that history. The big issue is there is enthusiasm for censorship, and the problem with censorship is who gets to decide what is real information and what is fake. The interests with the most power will have more control over information as censorship increases. Because the same power that is supposedly only used to suppress propaganda from some other country is used to suppress internal dissent or criticism. This is actually very dangerous for multiple reasons. One big reason is that propaganda (internal to the country, i.e. by the same people who will be deciding what is fake news) is usually critical in terms of jump-starting and maintaining enthusiasm for wars.” Facebook again, caught tracking Stack Overflow user activity and data Facebook bans six toxic extremist accounts and a conspiracy theory organization As US-China tech cold war escalates, Google revokes Huawei’s Android support, allows only those covered under open source licensing

This ICLR 2018 accepted paper, Deep Mean Field Games for Learning Optimal Behavior Policy of Large Populations, deals with inference in models of collective behavior, specifically at how to infer the parameters of a mean field game (MFG) representation of collective behavior. This paper is authored by Jiachen Yang, Xiaojing Ye, Rakshit Trivedi, Huan Xu, and Hongyuan Zha. The 6th annual ICLR conference is scheduled to happen between April 30 - May 03, 2018. Mean field game theory is the study of decision making in very large populations of small interacting agents. This theory understands the behavior of multiple agents each individually trying to optimize their position in space and time, but with their preferences being partly determined by the choices of all the other agents. Estimating the optimal behavior policy of large populations with Deep Mean Field Games What problem is the paper attempting to solve? The paper considers the problem of representing and learning the behavior of a large population of agents, to construct an effective predictive model of the behavior. For example, a population’s behavior directly affects the ranking of a set of trending topics on social media, represented by the global population distribution over topics. Each user’s observation of this global state influences their choice of the next topic in which to participate, thereby contributing to future population behavior. Classical predictive methods such as time series analysis are also used to build predictive models from data. However, these models do not consider the behavior as the result of optimization of a reward function and so may not provide insight into the motivations that produce a population’s behavior policy. Alternatively, methods that employ the underlying population network structure assume that nodes are only influenced by a local neighborhood and do not include a representation of a global state. Hence, they face difficulty in explaining events as the result of uncontrolled implicit optimization. MFG (mean field games) overcomes the limitations of alternative predictive methods by determining how a system naturally behaves according to its underlying optimal control policy. The paper proposes a novel approach for estimating the parameters of MFG. The main contribution of the paper is in relating the theories of MFG and Reinforcement Learning within the classic context of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). The method suggested uses inverse RL to learn both the reward function and the forward dynamics of the MFG from data. Paper summary The paper covers the problem in three sections-- theory, algorithm, and experiment.  The theoretical contribution begins by transforming a continuous time MFG formulation to a discrete time formulation and then relates the MFG to an associated MDP problem. In the algorithm phase, an RL solution is suggested to the MFG problem. The authors relate solving an optimization problem on an MDP of a single agent with solving the inference problem of the (population-level) MFG. This leads to learning a reward function from demonstrations using a maximum likelihood approach, where the reward is represented using a deep neural network. The policy is learned through an actor-critic algorithm, based on gradient descent with respect to the policy parameters. The algorithm is then compared with previous approaches on toy problems with artificially created reward functions. The authors then demonstrate the algorithm on real-world social data with the aim of recovering the reward function and predicting the future trajectory. Key Takeaways This paper describes a data-driven method to solve a mean field game model of population evolution, by proving a connection between Mean Field Games with Markov Decision Process and building on methods in reinforcement learning. This method is scalable to arbitrarily large populations because the Mean Field Games framework represents population density rather than individual agents. With experiments on real data, Mean Field Games emerges as a powerful framework for learning a reward and policy that can predict trajectories of a real-world population more accurately than alternatives. Reviewer feedback summary Overall Score: 26/30 Average Score: 8.66 The reviewers are unanimous in finding the work in this paper highly novel and significant. According to the reviewers, there is still minimal work at the intersection of machine learning and collective behavior, and this paper could help to stimulate the growth of that intersection. On the flip side, surprisingly, the paper was criticized with the statement “scientific content of the work has critical conceptual flaws”. However, the author refutations persuaded the reviewers that the concerns were largely addressed.

Uber’s AI research team introduced Go-Explore, a new family of algorithms, capable of achieving scores over 2,000,000 on Atari game Montezuma’s Revenge and an average score of over 21,000 on Atari 2600 game Pitfall, earlier this week. This is the first time when any learning algorithm has managed to score above 0 in Pitfall. Go-explore outshines the other state of the art algorithms on Montezuma’s revenge and Pitfall by two orders of magnitude and 21,000 points. Go-Explore uses the human domain knowledge but isn’t entirely dependent on it. This highlights the ability of Go-Explore to score well despite very little prior knowledge. For instance, Go-Explore managed to score over 35,000 points on Montezuma’s Revenge, with zero domain knowledge. As per the Uber team, “Go-Explore differs radically from other deep RL algorithms and could enable rapid progress in a variety of important, challenging problems, especially robotics. We, therefore, expect it to help teams at Uber and elsewhere increasingly harness the benefits of artificial intelligence”. A common challenge One of the most challenging and common problems associated with Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall is that of a “sparse reward” faced during the game exploration phase. Sparse reward refers to few reliable reward signals or feedback that could help the player complete the stage and advance within the game quickly. To make things even more complicated, any rewards that are offered during the game are usually “deceptive”, meaning that it misleads the AI agents to maximize rewards in a short period of time, instead of focusing on something that could make them jump the game level (eg; hitting an enemy nonstop, instead of working towards getting to the exit). Now, usually, to tackle such a problem, researchers add “intrinsic motivation” (IM) to agents, meaning that they get rewarded on reaching new states within the game. Adding IM has helped the researchers successfully tackle the sparse reward problems in many games, but they still haven’t been able to do so in the case of Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall. Uber’s Solution: Exploration and Robustification According to the Uber team, “a major weakness of current IM algorithms is detachment, wherein the algorithms forget about promising areas they have visited, meaning they do not return to them to see if they lead to new states. This problem would be remedied if the agent returned to previously discovered promising areas for exploration”. Uber researchers have come out with a method that separates the learning in Agents into two steps: exploration and robustification.                                             Exploration and Robustification Exploration Go-Explore builds up an archive of multiple different game states called “cells” along with paths leading to these states. It selects a particular cell from the archive, goes back to that cell, and then explores from that cell. For all cells that have been visited (including new cells), if the new trajectory is better (e.g. higher score), then its chosen to reach that cell. This helps GoExplore remember and return to promising areas for exploration (unlike intrinsic motivation), avoid over-exploring, and also makes them less susceptible to “deceptive” rewards as it tries to cover all the reachable states. Results of the Exploration phase Montezuma’s Revenge: During the exploration phase of the algorithm, Go-Explore reaches an average of 37 rooms and solves level 1 (comprising 24 rooms, not all of which need to be visited) 65 percent of the time in Montezuma’s Revenge. The previous state of the art algorithms could explore only 22 rooms on average. Pitfall: Pitfall requires significant exploration and is much harder than Montezuma’s Revenge since it offers only 32 positive rewards that are scattered over 255 rooms. The complexity of this game is so high, that no RL algorithm has been able to collect even a single positive reward in this game. During the exploration phase of the algorithm, Go explore is able to visit all 255 rooms and manages to collect over 60,000 points. With zero domain knowledge, Go-Explore finds an impressive 22 rooms but does not find any reward. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_E3w_gHBOY&feature=youtu.be Uber AI Labs Robustification If the solutions found via exploration are not robust to noise, you can robustify them, meaning add in domain knowledge using a deep neural network with an imitation learning algorithm, a type of algorithm that can learn a robust model-free policy via demonstrations. Uber researchers chose Salimans & Chen’s “backward” algorithm to get started with, although any imitation learning algorithm would do. “We found it somewhat unreliable in learning from a single demonstration. However, because Go-Explore can produce plenty of demonstrations, we modified the backward algorithm to simultaneously learn from multiple demonstrations ” writes the Uber team. Results of robustification Montezuma’s Revenge: Robustifying the trajectories that are discovered with the domain knowledge version of Go-Explore, it manages to solve the first 3 levels of Montezuma’s Revenge. Now, since,  all levels beyond level 3 in this game are nearly identical, Go-Explore has solved the entire game. “In fact, our agents generalize beyond their initial trajectories, on average solving 29 levels and achieving a score of 469,209! This shatters the state of the art on Montezuma’s Revenge both for traditional RL algorithms and imitation learning algorithms that were given the solution in the form of a human demonstration,” mentions the Uber team. Pitfall: Once the trajectories had been collected in the exploration phase, researchers managed to reliably robustify the trajectories that collect more than 21,000 points. This led to Go-explore outperforming both the state of the art algorithms as well as average human performances, setting an AI record on Pitfall for scoring more than 21,000 points on Pitfall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mERr8xkPOAE&feature=youtu.be Uber AI Labs “Some might object that, while the methods already work in the high-dimensional domain of Atari-from-pixels, it cannot scale to truly high-dimensional domains like simulations of the real world. We believe the methods could work there, but it will have to marry a more intelligent cell representation of interestingly different states (e.g. learned, compressed representations of the world) with intelligent (instead of random) exploration”, writes the Uber team. For more information, check out the official blog post. Uber becomes a Gold member of the Linux Foundation Uber announces the 2019 Uber AI Residency Uber posted a billion dollar loss this quarter. Can Uber Eats revitalize the Uber growth story?

Microsoft plans to introduce two new webcams next year. One feature is designed to extend Windows Hello facial recognition to all the Windows 10 PCs. The other feature will work with the Xbox One, bringing back the Kinect feature that let users automatically sign in by moving in front of the camera. These webcams will be working with multiple accounts and family members. Microsoft is also planning to launch its Surface Hub 2S in 2019, an interactive, digital smart board for the modern workplace that features a USB-C port and upgradeable processor cartridges. PC users have relied on alternatives from Creative, Logitech, and Razer to bring facial recognition to desktop PCs. The planned webcams will be linked to the USB-C webcams that would ship with the Surface Hub 2, whichwill be launched next year. Though the Surface Hub 2X is expected in 2020. In an interview with The Verge in October, Microsoft Surface Chief, Panos Panay suggested that Microsoft could release USB-C webcam soon. “Look at the camera on Surface Hub 2, note it’s a USB-C-based camera, and the idea that we can bring a high fidelity camera to an experience, you can probably guess that’s going to happen,” hinted Panos in October. A camera could possibly be used to extend experience beyond its own Surface devices. The camera for Windows 10, for the first time, will bring facial recognition to all Windows 10 PCs. Currently, Windows Hello facial recognition is restricted to the built-in webcams just like the ones on Microsoft's Surface devices. According to  Windows watcher Paul Thurrott, Microsoft is making the new 4K cameras for Windows 10 PCs and its gaming console Xbox One. The webcam will return a Kinect-like feature to the Xbox One which will allow users to authenticate by putting their face in front of the camera. With the recent Windows 10 update, Microsoft enabled WebAuthn-based authentication, that helps in signing into its sites such as Office 365 with Windows Hello and security keys. The Windows Hello-compatible webcams and FIDO2, a password-less sign in with Windows Hello at the core, will be launched together next year. It would be interesting to see how the new year turns out to be for Microsoft and its users with the major releases. Microsoft urgently releases Out-of-Band patch for an active Internet Explorer remote code execution zero-day vulnerability NYT says Facebook has been disclosing personal data to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants; Facebook denies claims with obfuscating press release Microsoft open sources Trill, a streaming engine that employs algorithms to process “a trillion events per day”

Pinterest filed a new IPO paperwork on Friday, in preparation for an initial public offering, expected in April. Pinterest will go public on NYSE with the ticker symbol $PINS. S-1 IPO framework offers a comprehensive look at Pinterest’s business including the revenue generated, salary’s given to CXOs and other details. Pinterest Financials Pinterest has consistently reported revenue growth and falling losses. The company, says it earned more than $750 million in revenue last year, and it’s cut its losses from nearly $200 million in 2016 down to just under $75 million annually. Pinterest says it was, in fact, profitable in the fourth quarter of 2018. Pinterest grew 58.2 percent from 2016 to 2017, and 60.0 percent from 2017 to 2018. In total, Pinterest has posted $1.525 billion in revenue since 2016. Source:  Page 69 of S-1 Pinterest counted 265 million monthly active users, bringing in some $700 million in ad revenue in 2018, per reports, a 50 percent increase year-over-year. Source:  Page 67 of S-1 The company’s global average revenue per user (ARPU) in the year ended December 31, 2018, was $3.14, up 25 percent YoY. Its U.S. ARPU, meanwhile, sat at $9.04, a 47 percent increase from the previous estimation. Source:  Page 70 of S-1 Pinterest closed calendar 2018 with nearly $628 million in cash and equivalents. The company’s operating cash flow improved from -$102.9 million in 2017 to -$60.4 million in 2018, and the firm went from negative investing cash flow to positive last year. In the S-1 filing, “the company says that it will be well-set for future growth after the offering, presuming that it doesn’t manage to reach positive operating cash flow in short order.” The S1-filing also showed the salaries earned by CXOs. Co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann earned a salary of $197,100. However, CFO Todd Morgenfeld earned a base salary of $360,500 with stock awards worth $22,028,696. The company did not break down its stock ownership so it’s not clear what would be the salaries of the execs, once Pinterest goes public.  The company will offer two classes of stock. Class A shares will receive one vote per share, while Class B shares will receive 20 votes per share. Pinterest raised a total of almost $1.5 billion from its investors. The company’s biggest funding round was a $186 million Series G in May 2015, led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, SV Angel, and Wellington Management. The company went on to raised $150 million in June 2017 from Sinai Ventures. Associated Risk factors Pinterest said “eight out of 10 moms” are on its platform, adding that “are often the primary decision-makers when it comes to buying products and services for their household.” In its S-1 filing, Pinterest acknowledges this as a risk and notes that they would now have to penetrate new demographics. The company noted that its reliance on other third-party platforms and services could be a risk factor for the business. In 2018, Facebook changed its login authentication systems, which negatively impacted Pinterest’s user growth in the second quarter of 2018. “If Facebook or Google discontinue single sign-on or experience an outage, then we may lose and be unable to recover users previously using this function, and our user growth or engagement could decline” noted the company in the filing. Pinterest also acknowledged ad-blocking tools as one of its risk factors which may, in the future, harm its profitability. “Existing ad blocking technologies that have not been effective on our service may become effective as we make certain product changes, and new ad blocking technologies may be developed,” the company writes in the filing. US and EU regulations based on privacy and sensitive content policies may also hold Pinterest accountable for failure to comply with possible content removal requirements in the future. This was also identified as one of the risks in the S-1 filing. Pinterest took steps to reduce the spread of misinformation about vaccines on its platform last month when it suspended search results including pins and boards, for the terms related to vaccinations, whether in favor or against them. The company notes, “We are in the early stages of our monetization efforts and are still growing and scaling our revenue model. Our growth strategy depends on, among other things, attracting more advertisers (including serving more mid-market and unmanaged advertisers and expanding our sales efforts to reach advertisers in additional international markets), scaling our business with existing advertisers and expanding our advertising product offerings, such as self-serve tools. There is no assurance that this revenue model will continue to be successful or that we will generate increased revenue.” Pinterest’s public offering joins the list of highly-valued technology firms going public this year including Lyft, Zoom and soon Uber and Slack. Here’s what the Twitterati had to say. https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1109190664439414784 https://twitter.com/GavinSBaker/status/1109838015764090882 https://twitter.com/DanaWollman/status/1109192413963304960 https://twitter.com/joeloskarr/status/1109553172400562176 Facebook and Google pressurized to work against ‘Anti-Vaccine’ trends after Pinterest blocks anti-vaccination content from its pinboards Slack confidentially files to go public SUSE is now an independent company after being acquired by EQT for $2.5 billion

Facebook is facing seven separate data protection investigations in Ireland, as reported by Bloomberg. Facebook’s investigations are a part of 16 cases which major tech companies like Twitter, Apple, LinkedIn, and also Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram, are facing. The main aim of these probes is to scale up the level of fines that regulator’s issue under GDPR. Currently, GDPR allows penalties as large as 4 percent of a company’s annual revenue. According to Ireland’s data protection commissioner, Helen Dixon, “These data protection probes are centered on the activities of very big internet companies with tens and hundreds of millions of users.” The first EU probe against Facebook was opened by Ireland following a security breach that compromised 50M accounts in October last year. This security breach has not only affected user’s Facebook accounts but also impacted other accounts linked to Facebook. This means that a hacker could have accessed any account of yours that you log into using Facebook. That second probe was initiated by Dixon’s office in December when a photo API bug affected people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos. This bug gave outside developers broader access to users’ photos affecting up to 6.8 million users and up to 1,500 apps built by 876 developers. Per Dixon, “Other breach notifications received in my office since May 25 are related to coding errors, which leads to posts being made public that should have been private, or in a major breach. No company seems to be immune from this.” Dixon mentions that the deciding cases are not trivial “We’re at various concrete stages in all of them, but they’re all substantially advanced,” she said. “The soonest I am going to see an investigation report on my desk, which is when my role kicks in” The final decisions on these sanctions are likely to be made in June or July. Last week, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria overruled Facebook’s argument that it cannot be sued for letting third parties access users’ private data because no “real world” harm has resulted from the conduct. Last month, Russia’s popular watchdog, Roskomnadzor said that it opened a civil case against Twitter and Facebook for failing to explain how they plan to comply with local data laws. At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials also planned to impose a fine of over $22.5 billion on Facebook post a year of data breaches and revelations of illegal data sharing.  A U.S. Senator also introduced a bill titled ‘American Data Dissemination (ADD) Act’ for creating federal standards of privacy protection for big companies like Facebook. “Companies are lawyering up and we’re typically dealing with more litigators and lawyers on the side of any inquiry that we conduct,” Dixon said. “It does show the power that they have in terms of the size. But we have all the cards in terms of the powers to investigate, to compel and ultimately to conclude and make findings.” Apple revoked Facebook developer certificates due to misuse of Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program. Stanford experiment results on how deactivating Facebook affects social welfare measures Facebook has blocked 3rd party ad monitoring plugin tools from the likes of ProPublica and Mozilla that let users see how they’re being targeted by advertisers

Automated calls are annoying. There is rarely a day when you aren’t greeted with an unanticipated call from an unrecognized number.  And to make matters worse, Robocalls are expected to surge in number in the coming times. This gets even worse during the tax season. The online site AllAreaCodes.com looked at the number of complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and found that that phone scams increase by 20 percent in March and April as the tax filing deadline approaches. According to a report by the Washington Post, financial corporations and retailers are trying to persuade the current US administration to make it easier to send robocalls and texts to the masses. If the government approves of this request, industries would soon be permitted to send unlimited texts and calls, without the consumer having a say in the matter. Robocalls are fine as long as they come from legitimate businesses. For instance, alerts from a drugstore for a person to pick up their prescription, or an automated voice call from your bank, alerting your credit card bill due date, are useful. The sanctity of robocalls is maintained as long as telemarketing calls and alerts from companies are genuine and consented. Per the Post, almost three-quarters of more than four billion robocalls placed in June, according to data published by YouMail, came from companies the customers had a genuine relationship with. However, some of these calls are actually from scammers who abuse automated systems. According to the Post, Adrian Abramovich was fined $120 million for placing 96 million unsought calls offering fake travel deals in just three months. Businesses are equally guilty. Navient, a financial service company, is highly active in voicing its opinion on loosening restrictions on robocalls. Multiple lawsuits have hit Navient, as reported by the Post, for harassing consumers with automated calls. Last year consumer groups had requested the Federal Communications Commission to look into the company’s practices. The task of regulating these robocalls lie in the hands of the Federal Communications Commission. Per the Post, the FCC along with its sister organization Federal Trade Commission is figuring on out how to rethink the robocall rules, while focusing on combating fraud and abuse. The last time the FCC tried to implement laws to cut down robocalls, they were throttled by the trade association of debt collectors. This time as well, the Post says, businesses led by the US Chamber of Commerce have opposed the idea of adding any federal laws that would restrict how businesses communicate with their customers. "We are at serious risk of seeing the existing robocall problem, which is already serious, get far, far worse,” said Margot Saunders, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. YouTube has a $25 million plan to counter fake news and misinformation Microsoft’s Brad Smith calls for facial recognition technology to be regulated Too weird for Wall Street: Broadcom’s value drops after purchasing CA Technologies

The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018, passed on December 6, 2018, has been put into action recently by the Australian intelligence and law enforcement agencies. However, a few industry groups, academics and civil liberties campaigners opposed by saying that the AA legislation makes Australians less safe by stripping away foundational concepts of privacy and may have a significantly detrimental impact on Australian tech companies. In spite of this opposition, the legislation is not only active but the intelligence agencies actively using its provisions and several notices too have been issued under this new law. With the AA act, the legislation’s aim is to allow intelligence agencies and some law enforcement to pry open encrypted messages in particular cases, especially where it concerned national security. The government has consistently argued the legislation makes Australians safer. “The legislation is being actively used by law enforcement and security agencies in a number of investigations to keep Australia safe”, a government spokesperson reported. “The legislation in no way compromises the security of any Australians’ digital communications”, he added. The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) is currently reviewing the provisions of the legislation and the report for the same will be released in April. According to InnovationAus, “A collective of academics and industry groups, including the Communications Alliance, the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), and the Information Technology Professionals Association (ITPA), have recently made a joint submission to the PJCIS recommending a raft of changes.” This group has criticized how the powers under the Act are unnecessarily broad and vague and have called for the need to introduce greater judicial oversight, particularly around the issuing of notices by agencies. Vanessa Teague, an associate professor in cryptography at the University of Melbourne, said, “Without that specific [technical] proposal, we just can’t have a rational and grounded discussion about what those unintended consequences is going to be because they depend on what the proposal is.” During the same panel discussion, Suelette Dreyfus, executive director of Blueprint for Free Speech described the introduction of the Act as a “zero-sum game between the privacy of individuals and the powers of the state”. Dreyfus said, “This coalition has been built and is being fortified and strengthened. It’s not only civil society within Australia or technical experts in Australia, it’s internationally as well with international academic experts and leading NGOs in the technical and legal space in places like Washington and London.” “[These people are] are liaising with us and working with us because they are very concerned that what happens in Australia will spread like a bad case of the measles to the digital privacy rights overseas”, she added. To know more about the AA Act in detail, visit the Australian government’s official website. Australia’s Assistance and Access (A&A) bill, popularly known as the anti-encryption law, opposed by many including the tech community Australia passes a rushed anti-encryption bill “to make Australians safe”; experts find “dangerous loopholes” that compromise online privacy and safety Australia’s ACCC publishes a preliminary report recommending Google Facebook be regulated and monitored for discriminatory and anti-competitive behavior  

Redis Labs, a California-based computer software startup, announced yesterday that it has raised $60 million in Series E financing round led by a new and leading private equity firm, Francisco Partners. Redis Labs has now raised $146 million overall in funding, including $44 million funding round back in August 2017. “This financing enables us to accelerate our strategy to deliver the fastest and most efficient database to the world and enable instant experiences for any modern application”, said Ofer Bengal, co-founder and CEO at Redis Labs. Other existing investors of Redis Labs such as Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital also participated in the funding round. With the new funds, the company now aims to accelerate global go-to-market execution and invest further in the Redis community. Also, it wants to continue its leadership to deliver the highest performing and most efficient database platform for modern applications. Other than that, Francisco Partners’ CIO, David Golob, will be joining the Redis Labs Board of Directors, along with operating partner Eran Gorev who will be joining the team as a board observer, as a part of the new investment. Redis Labs was found in 2011 by Ofer Bengal (CEO) and Yiftach Shoolman (CTO) and is the home of Redis, the world’s most popular in-memory database. Bengal and Schoolman built a NoSQL database platform using native data structures that could serve app requests directly from the memory. Later in 2015, Salvatore Sanfilippo, the original developer of Redis, joined Redis Labs in 2015 to lead its open source development. Redis Labs is also a commercial provider of Redis Enterprise i.e. the world’s fastest database that makes use of the modern in-memory technologies like NVMe (non-volatile memory express) and Persistent Memory. This enables it to offer cost-effective deployment over multiple public clouds and on-premise data centers.  Other than that, Redis Enterprise also comes with a variety of data modeling techniques including Streams, Graph, Document and Machine Learning, with a real-time search engine. Redis Labs has been ranked as a leader in top analyst reports on NoSQL, in-memory databases, operational databases, and database-as-a-service, and is trusted by seven Fortune 10 companies. Moreover, it has also been voted as the most loved database and is rated the most popular database container. “We are thrilled to be partnering with Redis Labs’ team as the company scales up globally to meet the needs of the Internet economy”, said Matt Spetzler, partner and co-Head of Europe at Francisco Partners. Redis 5 is now out RedisGraph v1.0 released, benchmarking proves its 6-600 times faster than existing graph databases Redis Cluster Features Overview

The whole world of social media has had a meltdown this week. After a major outage on Facebook, and it’s family of apps, Apple’s iCloud service was also down for most of yesterday. Users reported trouble signing into iCloud and accessing their accounts. Other Apple services like Photos, Mail, Backup, Find My Friends, Contacts, Calendars, also witnessed downtime. Apple Stores are also reportedly affected by the outage and not currently able to process transactions. Apple’s system status page noted the downtime across various iCloud services. https://twitter.com/wildrustic/status/1146820719277477890 https://twitter.com/TomSchmitz/status/1146815544391114752 https://twitter.com/SBenovitz/status/1146831989657542659 Apple Pay and Apple Cash: Apple Pay card holders were unable to add, suspend, delete, or use existing cards in Apple Pay. Some users were also not be able to set up Apple Cash, send and receive money, or transfer to bank with Apple Cash. Find my friend: Users were unable to find the location of their friends or devices, list registered devices, play a sound on their device, remotely wipe a device, or put the device in lost mode. Find my iPhone: Users may have been unable to find the location of their friends or devices, list registered devices, play a sound on their device, remotely wipe a device, or put the device in lost mode. iCloud: Issues were found in Account & Sign In, iWork, iCloud Backup, Bookmarks & Tabs, Calendar, Contacts, Drive, Keychain, Mail, Notes, Reminders, and Storage Upgrades Developer tools and third-party apps were also affected. According to 9to5Mac, a user who was trying to get her iPhone fixed at an Apple Store was told that the outage is nationwide (She was from the U.S). However down detector, an outage tracking website reported that issues were also observed in some parts of Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. Source: downdetector All services have since been resolved. Source: Apple What is surprising is that Apple has not informed or warned its users about the outage. There was no tweet or update released. Only the status page was updated. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp suffered a major outage yesterday; people had trouble uploading and sending media files. Cloudflare suffers 2nd major internet outage in a week. This time due to globally deploying a rogue regex rule. Why did Slack suffer an outage on Friday?

The U.S. Justice Department is opening a broad antitrust review into whether dominant technology firms are unlawfully stifling competition, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, which includes Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, according to the report. The move is the strongest by DOJ so far towards big tech, which faces increased scrutiny from both political parties because of the expanded market power the companies have and the tremendous amount of consumer data they control. The review is designed to go above and beyond recent plans for scrutinizing the tech sector that were crafted by the Justice department and the FTC. DOJ will examine big tech’s growth in size and reach The Justice Department will examine issues including how the most dominant tech firms have grown in size and expanded their reach into additional businesses. They are also interested in how these tech companies have leveraged the powers that come with having very large networks of users, the department said. There is no defined end-goal yet for the review than to understand whether there are antitrust problems that need addressing, the officials said. The inquiry could eventually lead to more focused investigations of specific company conduct, they said. The review also presents risks for the companies beyond whether antitrust issues are identified. The department won’t ignore other company practices that may raise concerns about compliance with other laws, officials said. “Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands,” Justice Department antitrust chief Makan Delrahim said in a statement. “The department’s antitrust review will explore these important issues.” At a broader level, the division will work in close coordination with Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, the officials said. DoJ hosted a meeting with critics of social media giants WSJ further mentioned that the department had recently hosted a private presentation where officials heard from critics of Facebook, who walked through their concerns about the social-media giant and advocated for its breakup. Tech and antitrust observers believed issues related to Facebook’s dominance were to be handled by the FTC. Both the FTC and the Justice Department have made clear that they view tech-sector competition issues as a priority. Under agreements brokered in recent months between Mr. Delrahim and FTC Chairman Joseph Simons, the Justice Department obtained clearance to proceed with a probe of whether Google has engaged in illegal monopolization tactics, as well as jurisdiction over Apple for similar issues. FTC has already undertaken a lengthy consumer-protection investigation of Facebook’s privacy practices, and imposed a $5 billion fine to Facebook for which the company was already prepared. Justice Department officials said those agreements weren’t meant to be open-ended or all-encompassing. But in any case the department isn’t trying to pre-empt the FTC’s work, they said, and suggested the two agencies might explore different tech practices by the same company, as well as different legal theories for possible cases. Apart from the Justice Department and FTC scrutiny, a House antitrust subcommittee also is taking a broad look at potential anticompetitive conduct in the tech sector. Executives from Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon all testified before the panel last week. “I don’t think big is necessarily bad, but I think a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers,” Mr. Barr told senators. “You can win that place in the marketplace without violating the antitrust laws, but I want to find out more about that dynamic.” The market and community reactions Hours after this news on Tuesday, shares for the four companies were down. Apple was down by about 0.4%, Amazon by about 1.13%, Alphabet by about 0.96%, and Facebook by about 1.65% according to CNBC report. On this news, Professor at NYUStern, Rob Seamans put forth his views and proposes a few ideas on how the law makers can regulate the big tech. He says  lawmakers should break big tech in a horizontal way, which means that the big tech firm is divided into two smaller, but similar-looking firms. Another idea of break up can be vertical in nature, which means that the big tech firm’s platform remains the same, but it has to spin off anything that uses the platform. For example, Google’s search platform would no longer be able to provide its own maps or other “edge services.” https://twitter.com/robseamans/status/1153849902629314562 On Hacker News, this development has gained significant attention and discussions revolve around the question of whether scientifically the tech companies have made any progress. One of the user comments reads, “I just finished the Eric Weinstein/Peter Thiel podcast, and came away mostly agreeing with their assessment that we’ve really stagnated when it comes to progressing scientifically. I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at the end of the day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple).   If anything, I would hope any outcome against big tech would level the playing field when it comes to attracting talent, and create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky.” Democratic presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren have  been calling for the breakup of companies like Google and Facebook since the start of the year. And a few Republicans have voiced concerns about whether tech companies disfavor conservative voices on their platform. Last month the US regulators had already planned to probe Google on anti-trust issues; Facebook, Amazon & Apple were also under legal scrutiny. This month the EU Commission opened an antitrust case against Amazon on the grounds of violating the EU competition rules under Article 101. EU Commission opens an antitrust case against Amazon on grounds of violating EU competition rules US regulators plan to probe Google on anti-trust issues; Facebook, Amazon & Apple also under legal scrutiny Facebook sets aside $5 billion in anticipation of an FTC penalty for its user data practices

Australia’s email provider, FastMail, recently reported that they are losing their customers following Australia’s Assistance and Access (A&A) bill. They have also received requests to shift their email operations outside Australia. Australia’s bill faced a lot of opposition from the tech community when it was first passed during the end of last year. FastMail CEO Bron Gondwana said, “The way in which [the laws] were introduced, debated, and ultimately passed ... creates a perception that Australia has changed - that we are no longer a country which respects the right to privacy.” “We have seen existing customers leave, and potential customers go elsewhere, citing this bill as the reason for their choice. We are [also] regularly being asked by customers if we plan to move”, Gondwana said in an email. Gondwana mentions that the problems caused by this bill revolve around perception and trust. His email states, “Our staff are curious and capable - if our system is behaving unexpectedly, they will attempt to understand why. This is a key part of bug discovery and keeping our systems secure.” The email further states, “Technology is a tinkerer’s arena. Tools exist to monitor network data, system calls and give computer users more observability than ever before. Secret data exfiltration code may be discovered by tinkerers or even anti-virus firms looking at unexpected behaviour.” “Additionally, as code is refactored and products change over time, ensuring that a technical capability isn’t lost means that everybody working on the design and implementation needs to know that the technical capability exists and take it into account.” To know more about this news in detail, read the complete email. Three major Australian political parties hacked by ‘sophisticated state actor’ ahead of election Australian intelligence and law enforcement agencies already issued notices under the ‘Assistance and Access’ Act despite opposition from industry groups Australia’s ACCC publishes a preliminary report recommending Google Facebook be regulated and monitored for discriminatory and anti-competitive behavior  

Yesterday, Alibaba’s Singles Day sale racked up $30 billion just in a span of 24 hours. Alibaba recorded about $1billion in 85 seconds and then $10 billion sales in the first hour past midnight. Singles' Day, also known as Double 11, is the world's biggest online sales event which managed to outpace the sales of U.S. shopping holidays Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The idea behind this event comes from the Singles Day, which is an informal holiday celebrated in China by the people who are not in relationships. The date November 11 is observed as Singles Day in China. In 2009, Alibaba started offering Singles Day discounts and since then has turned the day into a 24-hour bonanza of online shopping in China. Alibaba’s Southeast Asia subsidiary Lazada also offers Singles Day discounts in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. This year the top three products in the early sale were Apple, Dyson and Xiaomi. In the first hour, the countries selling to China were Japan, US and South Korea. A glimpse of consumer sentiment was seen because of the tensions between US and China. Daniel Zhang, Alibaba CEO told reporters in Shanghai, “We can feel that merchants are fully embracing the internet and helping with consumption upgrade.” The China-US trade war likely to hamper Alibaba growth story China's economy is getting affected because of its trade war with the United States getting worse. According to BBC news, the US has imposed three rounds of tariffs on Chinese products this year, totaling $250 billion worth of goods. This war is going beyond and in future, if the US decides to work on the idea of import taxes, then all the China's exports to the US would be subject to duties. This year, China’s quarterly growth was the weakest marking just 6.5%. It’s already indicating a downfall. CNN reported in September 2018 that Jack Ma, the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, said "It's going to last long, it's going to be a mess. The US-China trade war will last not for 20 months or 20 days, but "maybe 20 years." Despite the booming record, the annual sales growth rate fell from 39 percent to 27 percent in a year . It was the smallest in the event's 10-year history. It would be interesting to see Alibaba’s next move. To have a look at the highlights from the Singles Day, check out the official video. And to know more about this news, check CNN’s official website. Alibaba launches an AI chip company named ‘Ping-Tou-Ge’ to boost China’s semiconductor industry OpenSky is now a part of the Alibaba family Alibaba introduces AI copywriter

Facebook has removed several ads placed by 2020 presidential hopeful, Senator Elizabeth Warren, that called for the breakup of Facebook and other tech giants. Last week, Warren announced that if elected president in 2020, her administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition by breaking up competition killing big mergers. The ads being deleted from Facebook was first revealed by Politico. The advertisements read, “Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy. Facebook, Amazon, and Google. We all use them. But in their rise to power, they’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor.” Source: Politico The ads were taken down and a message was displayed stating, “This ad was taken down because it goes against Facebook's advertising policies.” However, later a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Politico that the company is in the process of restoring them. “We removed the ads because they violated our policies against the use of our corporate logo," the spokesperson said. "In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.” Elizabeth Warren also tweeted about this development, stating that she wants a social media marketplace that isn't dominated by a single censor. https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1105256905058979841 This news sparked a massive discussion on Hacker News. People called it a win-win situation for Warren. A comment on Hacker News reads, “This is smart politics. Rather than simply telling people FB is a monopoly, she runs a limited experiment that had it been left alone, would have limited effect since the budget was so small ($100). Now, this puts FB in a bind. If they really are a middleman for content, then these ads don't violate any laws and shouldn't be blocked. However, FB as a company with a product should block it just like a coffee shop wouldn't allow a banner on the wall saying "better coffee down the street". Another user appreciated Warren for her smart move. “It’s very smart, her ad campaign people must have known misusing the Facebook logo would get them denied, but now she gets press for being the victim. You or I couldn’t run those ads, this is special treatment for her”, the comment states. A user also condemned Facebook for its dumb move. “I would say this is ordinary politics, an obviously calculated provocation we see every day. What is surprising is a such dumb FB reaction. Why such intelligent people make such dumb moves? Are they really that arrogant? Maybe that arrogance is caused by revenue increases after all these scandals. Maybe they treated politicians, in the same way, many times, but in other countries.” It looks like Warren has won the golden ticket to US presidential elections 2020 as comments like ‘Slay Queen!’ and ‘My Cherokee Princess’ dominated Twitter. Warren’s plan is by far one of the biggest tech regulation plan proposed so far in the 2020 presidential cycle. Other Democrats running for the 2020 presidential bid include senator Kamala Harris, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, governor Jay Inslee, and Senator Bernie Sanders. Most of them are also keen on tech regulation. Andrew Yang described Warren's anti-monopoly position as "unimaginative" and "retrograde," yet he does believe in taxing tech. Yang says because artificial intelligence is destroying jobs, the tech industry should pay for a universal basic income. However, Klobuchar and Yang's messages didn't excite people as much as Warren's bold move did. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up tech giants like Amazon, Google Facebook, and Apple and build strong antitrust laws UK lawmakers publish a report after 18-month long investigation condemning Facebook’s disinformation and fake news practices. Facebook and Google pressurized to work against ‘Anti-Vaccine’ trends after Pinterest blocks anti-vaccination content from its pinboards.