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Microsoft joins OpenAI board as Sam Altman returns as CEO
With Sam Altman's return to OpenAI as CEO, Microsoft joins the board as a non-voting observer.
Quora breach leaks data on over 100 million users
Today's big data breach has been announced by Q&A site Quora, affecting over 100 million registered users. What did the "unauthorized third party" get? According to CEO Adam D'Angelo: Account information, e.g. name, email address, encrypted (hashed) password, data imported from linked networks when authorized by users Public content and actions, e.g. questions, answers, comments, upvotes Non-public content and actions, e.g. answer requests, downvotes, direct messages (note that a low percentage of Quora users have sent or received such messages) Quora found the breach on November 30th and said it is still investigating. It has logged all users out, and forcing all accounts with a password to reset that password. It also said that the password data was salted and hashed to prevent attackers from using it, but to be cautious, users should also reset passwords on their other accounts if they shared the same one. There are emails going out notifying users of the breach, but right now all of the information available is organized in this FAQ.
Disney Research taught AI how to judge short stories
Disney researchers have been coming up with some striking new technology lately, including a method for real-time speech animation, shared augmented reality and some creepy face-projection tech for live performances. Now, researchers at Disney and the University of Massachusetts Boston have been working on neural networks that can evaluate short stories. While these AIs don't (yet) analyze story like a professional literary critic, the software tries to predict which stories will be most popular. "Our neural networks had some success in predicting the popularity of stories," said Disney Research scientist Boyang "Albert" Li in a statement. "You can't yet use them to pick out winners for your local writing competition, but they can be used to guide future research."
Clinton and Kaine will answer your questions on Quora
Donald Trump's Reddit AMA was a bizarre affair, as the Republican candidate answered just a dozen questions while mods banned some 2,000 accounts. Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Tim Kaine, will go in a completely different direction with a group Q&A on Quora, the hive mind site that answers any question, however idiotic. The session is now open, and the top question so far is "how will [Hillary Clinton] address Trump supporters' major concerns?"
Status update: The rise of the social-media extortionist
If you've read recent headlines about high-profile tech CEOs getting hacked, you probably felt a stab of dark amusement at the thought of internet fat cats finally getting a taste of what the rest of us have had to drink. A single group, called OurMine, has managed to catch Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, AOL's Steve Case and, most recently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey with their password pants down. And it's nothing more than a sleazy PR stunt.
Google's Sundar Pichai latest target of social media hackers (updated)
Hacking group OurMine is continuing to make some of the tech industry's elite look more than a little silly. After a string of high-profile hacks, including recent takeovers of social media accounts belonging to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, the team appears to have successfully targeted Google CEO Sundar Pichai. A now-deleted string of tweets seems to confirm a breach of his Quora profile, which then allowed OurMine to post to Pichai's Twitter feed thanks to the two accounts being linked.
Ashton Kutcher explains to Quora how he prepared for Steve Jobs role
Over on Quora, actor Ashton Kutcher recently left a detailed answer for a user who asked the question "How did Ashton Kutcher prepare for his role as Steve Jobs in the new movie Jobs?" His answer on the site (in which Kutcher is an investor) was actually quite revealing, not only about how an actor prepares for a role, but also pointing out some personality quirks of Steve Jobs. Kutcher started his preparation by reading the script, watching documentaries and interviews, collecting YouTube content and listening to SoundCloud files of Jobs: I then started to dissect the nuances of his behavior, the walk, the fact that he has an almost imperceptible lisp, his accent that was a combination of northern California and Wisconsin, the way he paused before answer, and nodded in understanding, the way he bowed in namaste when receiving praise, and stared with contempt when in conflict. Other Jobs details and mannerisms were pointed out by Kutcher: "How he counted with his fingers (pinky finger first), how he used the word 'aaaaand' and 'noooow' to think about what he was going to say next." Kutcher went on to say that he even read many of the books that influenced Jobs throughout his life, ate foods that Jobs fixated on (carrot juice, grapes, popcorn), researched his favorite artists and studied the entrepreneurs that Jobs admired the most, before meeting with many of the friends and colleagues of Jobs. The jury is still out on how well Kutcher portrays Jobs in the soon-to-be-released movie, but his final words seem to show an amazing amount of respect for the late Apple CEO: But in the end one of the greatest tells of the man were his creations. They were elegant, intelligent, thoughtful, precise, artistic, bold, visionary, complicated, efficient, fun, entertaining, powerful, imperfect and beautiful on the inside and out.... Just like Steve. Jobs opens nationwide on August 16.
Employees dish on what it takes to keep Apple's big secrets
As a former Apple employee, I know just how seriously Apple takes its secrets. Even today, years after my NDA has expired, I'm reluctant to talk about things that Apple flagged as confidential. One reason for that reluctance is because of the respect I have for the company and my friends who still work there, but of course another part of it is I don't want to make anybody there angry. But not all past employees are like me. And over at Quora there's a very interesting thread where past Apple employees talk about what it takes to keep the company's secrets. Interested readers should check out the thread in its entirety, but here's one of my favorites (this from an anonymous Apple employee): All prototypes are laser marked with serial numbers and tracked by a central tracking system (called iTrack). Physical security is also highly prioritized, with prototypes required to be locked up when not in use. Access to prototypes is also restricted, and the default assumption within the company is that your coworkers do not know what you're working on. Physical access to the areas of certain groups (product design, industrial design and reliability) is highly restricted by badge access. The most sensitive areas, such as the Industrial Design Studio, have receptionists, external cameras to screen guests, and require an escort to vouch for you. Within these areas and groups, knowledge of the product pipeline and access to prototypes is widespread, but that knowledge doesn't leave the group. And here's a rather humorous story that puts Apple's secrecy in perspective. This is from Adam Banks, editor of MacUser UK in the late 1990s: I was editing MacUser (UK) in 1998 when rumours surfaced that Apple was working on a completely new kind of Mac. By a series of flukes, we became the first magazine to print what turned out to be a pretty accurate description of the machine a couple of months ahead of its launch as the iMac. We got the details from someone who worked at a third-party site where Apple had seeded a test unit. Probably safe by now to mention what the site was. It was the Pentagon. Compared to the real secrets they were keeping, when it came to some plastic PC they'd been asked not to talk about, I suspect nobody gave a shit.
Quora iPhone app puts answers to every question at your fingertips
Quora, the popular Q&A social networking site, has released their first iPhone app. Quora for iPhone allows users to ask and answer questions on the go. The iPhone app has kept the core of what makes Quora popular and easy to use, plus it has added some unique features. The iPhone app offers a new feature called "Nearby." It's essentially location-based questions. You can browse questions based on areas from an embedded Google Map within the app. Nearby hones in on your current location, but if you want you can jump to another city our country and see specific questions for any area in the world. Another welcome addition to the iPhone app: Push notifications, so when you ask a question you don't need to sit around and constantly check the app to see if it's been answered. Quora has also integrated its Shuffle feature into the iPhone app, allowing you to discover new content you might not normally seek out. Quora for iPhone is available now in the App Store. It's a free download.
Why Apple.com hosts movie trailers
Here's a pretty interesting story about why Apple.com, of all places, hosts movie trailers. It all goes back to that first Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer back around 1998 (which I watched hundreds of times, before I saw the actual, less exciting movie). Over on Quora, a former Apple employee named Chad Little says that "Lucasfilm had posted a rather crappy trailer on their site, and the team at Apple was appalled." So Apple allegedly went back and looked up DNS records to contact the Lucas team, and it had the movie encoded with QuickTime rather than the RealVideo that was being used. At the time, Apple hosted the trailer with a little company called Akamai, which has since grown into one of the world's biggest providers of web hosting. The deal worked so well that Apple ended up hosting other movie trailers, and in recent years those trailers have served as great demos for iTunes and the Apple TV service as well. Little claims that Apple doesn't actually pay for content rights, but movie companies get to share their trailers in a common space, and Apple gets great branding and display content for its QuickTime video specs. [via Slashfilm]
