Month: May 2018

A uniquely 21st-century constitutional question received a satisfying answer today from a federal judge: President Trump cannot block people on Twitter, as it constitutes a violation of their First Amendment rights. The court also ruled he must unblock all previously blocked users. “No government official is above the law,” the judge concluded.

The question was brought as part of a suit brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute, which alleged that the official presidential Twitter feed amounts to a public forum, and that the government barring individuals from participating in it amounted to limiting their right to free speech.

After consideration, New York Southern District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald determined that this is indeed the case:

We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account — the “interactive space” where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the President’s tweets — are properly analyzed under the “public forum” doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court, that such space is a designated public forum, and that the blocking of the plaintiffs based on their political speech constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.

The president’s side argued that Trump has his own rights, and that in this case the choice not to engage with certain people on Twitter is among them. These are both true, Judge Buchwald found, but that doesn’t mean blocking is okay.

There is nothing wrong with a government official exercising their First Amendment rights by ignoring someone. And indeed that is what the “mute” function on Twitter is equivalent to. No harm is done to either party by the president choosing not to respond, and so he is free to do so.

But to block someone both prevents that person from seeing tweets and from responding to them, preventing them from even accessing a public forum. As the decision puts it:

We reject the defendants’ contentions that the First Amendment does not apply in this case and that the President’s personal First Amendment interests supersede those of plaintiffs…

While we must recognize, and are sensitive to, the President’s personal First Amendment rights, he cannot exercise those rights in a way that infringes the corresponding First Amendment rights of those who have criticized him.

The court also examined the evidence and found that despite the Executive’s arguments that his Twitter accounts are, for various reasons, in part private and not subject to rules limiting government spaces, the president’s Twitter is definitively a public forum, meeting the criteria set out some time back by the Supreme Court.

At this point in time President Trump has by definition performed unconstitutional acts, but the court was not convinced that any serious legal remedy needs to be applied. And not because the Executive side of the case said it was monstrous of the Judicial to dare to tell it what to do:

While we find entirely unpersuasive the Government’s parade of horribles regarding the judicial interference in executive affairs presented by an injunction directing the President to comply with constitutional restrictions… declaratory relief is likely to achieve the same purpose.

By this the judge means that while the court would be legally in the clear if it issued an official order binding the Executive, but that there’s no reason to do so. Instead, merely declaring that the president has violated the rules of the Constitution should be more than enough to compel his team to take the appropriate action.

Specifically, Trump and (it is implied but not stated specifically) all public officials are to unblock any blocked users on Twitter and never hit that block button again:

No government official is above the law and because all government officials are presumed to follow the law once the judiciary has said what the law is, we must assume that the President and Scavino will remedy the blocking we have held to be unconstitutional.

No timeline is set but it’s clear that the Executive is on warning. You can read the full decision here.

“We’re pleased with the court’s decision, which reflects a careful application of core First Amendment principles to government censorship on a new communications platform,” said executive director of the Knight Institute, Jameel Jaffer, in a press release.

This also sets an interesting precedent as regarding other social networks; in fact, the Institute is currently representing a user in a similar complaint involving Facebook, but it is too early to draw any conclusions. The repercussions of this decision are likewise impossible to predict at this time, including whether and how other officials, such as senators and governors, are also bound by these rules. Legal scholars and political agents will almost certainly weigh in on the issue heavily over the coming weeks.

Source: Tech Crunch

On the same day that Spotify’s class-action settlement with musicians gets final approval, the company is making a big push to encourage artists to participate on its streaming service – in this case, by offering them a host of educational material to help them get started. The streaming service today is launching its own video series dubbed The Game Plan, which instructs artists on how to get started using “Spotify for Artists,” and the other steps they have to take to make their music available for streaming.

The series includes short videos like: Getting Your Music Up; What Is Spotify for Artists?; Releasing Music; Building Your Artist Profile; Understanding Your Audience; How to Read Your Data; Engaging Your Audience; The Follow Button, Promoting Your Work, and Building Your Team.

In the videos, Spotify attempts to demystify the world of streaming with tips about things like when is the best time to release music, how and why to use listening data, how to upload your music, when to hire a lawyer (irony alert), and more.

The series will also feature interviews with experts, including Spotify staff, industry vets, and artists themselves, including Rick Ross, Little Dragon, Mike Posner, and Vérité.

The idea is that, by sharing this knowledge with the wider community, Spotify will be able to help artists build their careers, the company explains. Naturally, it wants them to build those careers and invest in learning Spotify’s tools – not those from its rivals.

“From successful musicians, to employees who are industry experts, the Spotify community has a wealth of music industry knowledge,” said Charlie Hellman, Head of Creator Marketplace, Spotify, in a statement about the launch. “We want to equip artists at all stages of their career with that powerful knowledge, and make it as accessible as possible.”

The video series’ debut comes at a time when there’s increased competition for Spotify, including from the just now launched YouTube Music streaming service, which takes direct aim at Spotify with a similar price point and the addition of music videos, including harder-to-find performances that are often just on YouTube. Plus, Apple’s new Netflix-like streaming service is rumored to be launching next year as a bundle with Apple Music.

The Game Plan begins as a 10-part video series, but Spotify says there’s more to come in the future.

Source: Tech Crunch

Uber, which had already pulled its autonomous cars off the road following a fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, is officially calling it quits in the state of Arizona, The Wall Street Journal first reported, citing an internal memo from Uber Advanced Technologies Group lead Eric Meyhofer.

As part of the wind-down, Uber has let go 300 of its test drivers. This comes after the state of Arizona in March officially barred Uber from testing its autonomous vehicles on public roads.

“We’re committed to self-driving technology, and we look forward to returning to public roads in the near future,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. “In the meantime, we remain focused on our top-to-bottom safety review, having brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture.”

Uber is hoping to have its self-driving cars performing tests on public roads again within the next few months, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at an Uber conference earlier this month. Once the National Transportation Safety Board completes its investigation of the Tempe crash, Uber plans to continue testing in San Francisco, Toronto and Pittsburgh. But if Uber wants to continue its tests in California, it will need to apply for a new permit, as well as “address any follow-up analysis or investigations from the recent crash in Arizona,” DMV Deputy Director/Chief Counsel Brian Soublet wrote in a letter to Uber in March. Uber may also need to set up a meeting with the DMV.

Source: Tech Crunch

As digital assistants improve, we’re learning new things to expect from them, but the tasks that a real-life assistant may have handled before can still be a bit of a challenge to home assistants.

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is gaining functionality to help it get smarter about working with your calendar. The new abilities will let users move appointments around and schedule meetings based on other people’s availability.

If you’ve been shared on someone’s calendar availability, Alexa will be able to suggest times that work for both of you. Just say, “Alexa schedule a meeting with [name]” and Amazon’s assistant will search through your schedule for a good time, suggesting up to two time slots that could work.

On a more basic feature level, Alexa won’t make you cancel appointments and reschedule them if a meeting time changes. You’ll be able to just ask Alexa to move an existing meeting, something that should have probably been supported from the beginning, but hey, better late than never.

Both of these features are available to U.S. users today.

Source: Tech Crunch

Mark Zuckerberg got to cherry-pick the questions he wanted to answer from EU Parliament after it spent an hour taking turns rattling off queries in bulk before leaving just a half-hour for his batched responses. Zuckerberg immediately trotted out his dorm room story of not expecting Facebook’s current duty to safety and democracy, and repeated his pledge to broaden the company’s responsibility. While he’s vowed to have his team follow-up with point-by-point replies, he managed to escape the televised testimony without any newsworthy gaffes.

The public will have to wait for canned, written responses to the toughest questions about why Facebook didn’t disclose the Cambridge Analytica issue immediately, how it uses shadow profiles and what he thinks about Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp being broken up. If Zuckerberg played it safe during his U.S. congressional testimony by being boring, he dodged scandal here by using the abbreviated format to bend the testimony toward his most defensible positions.

Future testimonies by technology industry executives will be much more productive for the public if officials keep questions succinct and only ask the hard ones, executives are given ample time to answer them all and they use a question-answer format. No more of this question-question-question-question-answer-answer-goodbye.

Zuckerberg initially resisted the Brussels meeting with Parliament (technically not a “testimony”). Then it was slated to be private before public outcry led to the livestreaming of the session. While the questions were more pointed than those asked by U.S. congress, the overall feel with Zuckerberg seated next to Parliament members rather than in the hotseat before them gave the meeting a less consequential tone.

The Facebook CEO used his short answer period to explain that he feels like there’s plenty of new competition for Facebook, and that it actually aids competition by offering tools to enable small businesses to challenge big brands online. He cited that “dozens of percents” of European users have gone through Facebook’s GDPR settings, rolling them early so they’re dismissible until the May 25th deadline because, “The last thing we want is for people to go through the flows quicker than they need to and just hit OK.” That ignores the dark pattern designs built into that GDPR privacy flow, that while temporarily dismissible, does coerce users to consent by visually downplaying the buttons to opt out of giving Facebook data.

Zuckerberg laid out his thoughts about the future of regulation for social networks, noting that “Some sort of regulation is important and inevitable, and the important thing is to get this right.” He said that regulations would need to “allow for innovation, don’t inadvertently prevent new technologies like AI from being able to develop, and of course to make sure that new startups — the next student sitting in a college dorm room like I was — doesn’t have an undue burden in being able to build the next great product.” That’s positive, since blunt regulation could create a moat for Facebook.

But when Zuckerberg concluded his testimony, noting “I want to be sensitive to time because we are 15 minutes over” the scheduled 75-minute session length, several EU officials spoke up, angry that they felt their questions had been ignored. “Will you allow users to escape targeted advertising? I asked you six yes-or-no questions and got not a single answer, and of course, well, you asked for this format for a reason,” stated one member of Parliament. “I’ll make sure we follow up and get you answers to those,” Zuckerberg coldly responded. “We’re going to have someone come to do a full hearing soon to answer more of the technical questions as well.”

The combative atmosphere at the conclusion of the testimony means Facebook could encounter soured regulators in the future who might be emboldened by their disappointment in his appearance. Zuckerberg might have avoided losing the minds of the EU by dodging damning topics, but he sure didn’t win the hearts of Europe’s lawmakers.

Source: Tech Crunch

Baidu, the Chinese search giant, is spinning out its business unit responsible for utility apps and its mobile ad business to sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence.

As part of the spin-out, Baidu is selling a large chunk of its equity in the ‘Global DU’ business to as-yet-undisclosed investors. The plan is to sell “a majority equity stake” in order to take Global DU independent. Once the deal is completed — it is targeted at a Q3 2018 timeframe — Baidu’s share of the business will drop to around 34 percent. Further, the business is likely to raise additional capital for growth.

Spinning out business units is commonplace among Chinese tech companies, Baidu itself recently did so with its financial services business.

Herman Yu, Baidu CFO, said this latest spin-out will give Global Du “autonomy and agility in its operation.”

It will also allow Baidu to focus more keenly on artificial intelligence. The firm said it will set up a new global business unit around its AI-powered services, including recommendation engine PopIn, keyboard app Simeji and other services in the U.S. and Southeast Asia. The plan is to allow these services to work more closely with Baidu’s AI labs, which include locations in Silicon Valley and Seattle.

Already, that push has helped Baidu’s earnings, which had been set back when the Chinese government invested internet advertising focused on medical services.

Despite the AI push, Baidu has suffered as key personnel departed over the past year.

Last week, Qi Lu, Baidu’s president and COO who is also its highest-ranking AI specialist, departed the company due to personal reasons. The exit was unexpected, particularly since the former Microsoft executive only took the role less than two years ago.

Prior to Lu’s departure, Baidu lost Andrew Ng — a globally recognized AI pioneer who set up its U.S.-based research labs — back in March 2017. Later in the year, the head of its Silicon Valley lab exited, too.

Source: Tech Crunch

Update: First stage complete, main engine cutoff good, fairing separation good. Second engine ignition and cutoff successful, and GRACE-FO deployment complete (we won’t know if they’re in a good orbit until NASA confirms).

Today’s the day for SpaceX’s launch of Iridium’s NEXT communications satellites and a pair of twin birds from NASA that will monitor the fresh water on the surface of the Earth. You can watch the launch right here:

Liftoff is scheduled for 12:47 PM Pacific Time, so SpaceX’s live stream should fire up about 15 minutes ahead of that; NASA will also have its own updates, since it has skin in the game.

This is an unusual launch — the rocket will be making some complicated maneuvers 300 miles up to make sure NASA’s satellites are deployed correctly, then it travels the rest of the way to the targeted orbit for the communication satellites.

A few minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 first stage (incidentally, the one that launched the lost Zuma satellite in January) will detach and burn up. This will be its last mission — it’s not one of the “Block 5” rockets with all the durability improvements, so it would take a lot of money and time to fly again, and the risk of failure would grow considerably every time. So this its swan song. Rocket, we salute you.

The fairing, however, which covers the payload, may be recovered after ejection by Mr Steven, a boat with a huge net on top.

The second stage will take the payload to about 300 miles up, at which point it will cut off, and about 11 minutes after liftoff the rocket will dip its nose and spin a bit to get the GRACE-FO satellites into position. About 45 minutes after they deploy, it will make a second burn and take itself up to nearly 500 miles altitude (this will take about half an hour), where Iridium’s satellites will be let out, ending the mission.

If for some reason things are delayed, the next launch opportunity is tomorrow at the same time.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Kata Containers project, the first non-OpenStack project hosted by the OpenStack Foundation, today launched version 1.0 of its system for running isolated container workloads. The idea behind Kata Containers, which is the result of the merger of two similar projects previously run by Intel and Hyper, is to offer developers a container-like experience with the same security and isolation features of a more traditional virtual machine.

To do this, Kata Containers implements a very lightweight virtual machine (VM) for every container. That means every container gets the same kind of hardware isolation that you would expect from a VM, but without the large overhead. But even though Kata Containers don’t fit the standard definition of a software container, they are still compatible with the Open Container Initiative specs and the container runtime interface of Kubernetes. While it’s hosted by the OpenStack Foundation, Kata Containers is meant to be platform- and architecture-agnostic.

Intel, Canonical and Red Hat have announced they are putting some financial support behind the project, and a large number of cloud vendors have announced additional support, too, including 99cloud, Google, Huawei, Mirantis, NetApp and SUSE.

With this version 1.0 release, the Kata community is signaling that the merger of the Intel and Hyper technology is complete and that the software is ready for production use.

Source: Tech Crunch