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Reddit app update brings more of the website to mobile
Reddit launched its mobile app last year and today it's getting a major update. The iOS and Android versions are getting a bunch of new features for both users and moderators that will more closely align the app's functionality with that of the web version.
Microsoft unveils improved AI-powered search features for Bing
Microsoft unveiled a handful of new intelligent search features for Bing at an event held in San Francisco today. Powered by AI, the search updates are meant to provide more thorough answers and allow for more conversational or general search queries.
Mirai botnet creators plead guilty to charges over 2016 attack
The individuals behind the Mirai botnet that caused nationwide internet outages in October of last year have pleaded guilty to federal charges, ZDNet reports. Paras Jha, Josiah White and Dalton Norman were indicted by a court in Alaska earlier this month and have pleaded guilty to charges that carry a sentence of up to five years in prison.
Twitter and others warn FCC of 'disastrous' net neutrality reversal
Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and Airbnb were among 200 firms that signed a letter warning FCC Chairman Ajit Pai not to roll back net neutrality, according to Broadcasting & Cable. Dated on Cyber Monday (November 27th), the letter notes that record Black Friday sales are "a testament to the power of the free and open internet to encourage entrepreneurship, drive innovation, make our lives easier, and to support a healthy economy."
What to expect from the FCC's net neutrality proposal
Today, senior FCC officials outlined the net neutrality draft proposal that will be released by the commission tomorrow. As has been discussed for months, if the new proposal is accepted by the FCC, broadband internet service will cease being subjected to Title II regulations and will return to an information service classification rather than a telecommunications one. Additionally, the order would fully repeal the FCC regulations allowed by the internet conduct standard put in place in 2015, which let the commission investigate practices like zero-rating schemes -- AT&T's Sponsored Data and Verizon's FreeBee Data 360 setups, for example -- and would get rid of the bright-line rules that prevented internet service providers (ISP) from blocking, throttling or fast-laning certain content.
Recommended Reading: The church of AI
Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence Mark Harris, Wired You may know Anthony Levandowski from being at the center of Waymo's lawsuit against Uber, but he's also the "Dean" or leader of a new religion of artificial intelligence. Wired takes a look at Way of the Future's doctrine, Levandowski's role and the quest to create the divine AI.
Reddit bans misogynist community as part of anti-violence crackdown
Reddit's crackdown on hate-filled, violent communities isn't just limited to banning racists: the social site has banned r/Incels, the misogynistic "involuntary celibates" subreddit. While the company isn't diving into specific posts that prompted the ban, a spokeswoman pointed us to the October 25th policy change that forbids content which "encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm." And given Incels' history, it's easy to see why the subreddit ran afoul of these limits.
Reddit's stricter stance on violence bans more racist communities
Reddit has previously had success cleaning up its act by banning hate communities, and now it's expanding those crackdowns. The social site has widened its policies on violent content to forbid material that "encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence," and has used that to ban numerous subreddits that have celebrated racist violence. Some of them were very small, but others had as many as 7,000 subscribers or weren't exactly hiding their violent ideology, including /pol (an offshoot of 4chan's notorious board), /Nazi and /far_right.
Safety is Elon Musk's chief concern for new SpaceX rocket
Over the weekend, Elon Musk hosted a Reddit AMA as a follow-up to his presentation at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress. During that speech, Musk unveiled quite a few different ideas that will revolutionize space travel, from a new rocket called "BFR" (for "big fucking rocket") to a moon base and a trip to Mars by 2024. He took to r/space to answer questions about these many new ideas, and we've rounded up some of the most interesting answers from the AMA.
Pepe the Frog creator battles the 'alt-right' through copyright law
Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie has long been unhappy with how the "alt-right" hijacked his friendly amphibian for hateful memes, going so far as to declare their uses "illegal" and to kill off the character in a symbolic gesture. And now, he's fulfilling that promise to fight back. Furie has sent cease-and-desist notices to multiple "alt-right" personalities (including racist Richard Spencer, conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich and Reddit's r/the_Donald community), and he's issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests to pull infringing content from sites like Amazon, Google, Reddit and Twitter.
Reddit has become less toxic after banning hate groups
Reddit got a lot of flack when it banned hate communities like /r/coontown and /r/fatpeoplehate -- a lot of people called the move a censorship and criticized the website's administrators. According to a study by researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and other institutions, though, that move worked well for what the platform was trying to accomplish. The social network has effectively reduced the prevalence of hate speech on its website by killing those subreddits, as well as the copycats that pop up before they even gain traction.
Reddit turns off access to its main source code
Reddit has made its website source code available since 2008 in a bid to keep the community alive no matter what, but it's having a change of heart now that it's older and larger. The company has announced that it's turning off access to a monolithic source code for its site and mobile apps, and will instead offer "many" smaller code bases. This is partly because the team hasn't done a great job of keeping this centralized code up to date, Reddit says, but it's also due to competitive reasons. It's difficult to develop features like video uploading in open source code without telegraphing your plans to your competitors, according to Reddit.
Neo-Nazi site Stormfront has been temporarily taken down
The post-Charlottesville removal of neo-Nazi content from various web sources continues to power on as the long-standing website Stormfront has, for now, been taken down. A Whois search shows that Web.com domain provider Network Solutions LLC has put a hold on the website and as the Knoxville News Sentinel reports, the hold prohibits the site from being updated, transferred or deleted. If the domain provider decides to delete Stormfront, any subsequent version hosted elsewhere would have to be recreated from scratch.
Options for neo-Nazis on the internet are starting to shrink
If you're an American who's ever wondered what it would be like to have had the internet and today's technology during the time of Nazi ascension in Germany, take a look around. You're soaking in it. While a whole lot of us have been aware of this since at least last year's election, it's only now starting to sink in for companies who control the internet. Bitterly, only after the literal killing of people in the streets by white supremacists. Who, until this week, enjoyed using online services for their organizing, sharing, harassing, business needs and getting hateful shit done.
Spotify removes ‘hate bands’ from its streaming library
You can add Spotify to the growing list of companies taking a stand against hateful, racist content. In the last few days we've seen Google and GoDaddy cancel a white supremacist website domain, Facebook and Reddit ban hate groups, Discord shut down racist accounts and GoFundMe remove a campaign in support of the man accused of driving a car into protesters this weekend in Charlottesville. Now Billboard reports that Spotify is removing "hate bands" from its streaming service.
Facebook and Reddit ban hate groups in wake of Charlottesville
It's not just domain registrars and game chat services that are cracking down on neo-Nazis in the wake of the racism-fuelled violence in Charlottesville. Facebook and Reddit have both confirmed that they've shut down numerous hate groups in the wake of the attacks. Reddit tells CNET that it shut down the /r/Physical_Removal subreddit for content that "incites violence" and thus violates its content policy. Users in the group hoped that people in anti-hate subreddits and at CNN would be killed, supported concentration camps and even wrote poems about killing.
Spotify may finally make the leap to Xbox One this fall (updated)
Sony and Spotify have been pretty cozy for the past few years on PlayStation, but it looks like the streaming service is going to show Xbox fans some love soon too. Reddit's unblinking eyes spotted Xbox's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb using the app on Xbox Live. The Verge independently confirmed with its off the record sources that an app for the Swedish music service was being tested internally, with a wide roll-out planned before the Xbox One X's launch November 7th. Now to speculate whether Microsoft will abandon Groove Music for Spotify the way that Sony did its Music Unlimited service.
Reddit might look a lot more like Facebook’s News Feed soon
Reddit has been talking about some serious design changes for a while now (getting rid of CSS styling, for one), and now we have more information on what it might look like. In an interview with Recode, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman unveiled an early version of a new design that takes its cues from Facebook's News Feed.
Galaxy S8 Active ditches the curved display in leaked images
Samsung has been putting out Active versions of its S line since the S4 and this weekend, some images and specs of the upcoming Galaxy S8 Active leaked on Reddit. The leaker supposedly got ahold of the phone from a pal who works for Samsung. Internally, the phone is pretty similar to the standard S8 and has a Snapdragon 835 CPU, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The phone also has a 12-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera. However, the S8 Active has a 4,000mAh battery, larger than the 3,000mAh and 3,500mAh batteries of the S8 and S8 Plus, respectively.
CNN will expose Reddit user if he ever trolls again
Over the weekend, Trump tweeted out a gif (that his staff found on Reddit) depicting an archive clip of him wrestling with WWE CEO Vince McMahon, whose face was overlaid with the CNN logo. The stunt quickly drew condemnation from both sides of the aisle and also instigated CNN to track down the person who initially posted the gif that Trump lifted without attribution, one HanAssholeSolo (or HAS). While the reasoning behind why he didn't call himself "HanAssholo" and save a syllable remain unresolved, we now know exactly why he's not going to be doing anymore trolling: it's because, if he does, CNN will tell the world exactly who he is.
