Internet & Websites - Page 12

While YouTube is certainly no stranger to controversy, the CEO of the platform, Susan Wojcicki has explained why sometimes the company allows for video's to stay online that are inherently offensive or controversial.

In Wojcicki's quarterly letters, she explains that YouTube is in a continuous struggle with users' content being uploaded to the platform being labeled as 'controversial or even offensive'. She says that sometimes is good for the platform to leave some controversial content online, as it proves that YouTube is and open platform that wants to learn from a range of different perspectives.

Wojcicki says that YouTube's "commitment to openness is not easy" and that "hearing a broad range of perspectives ultimately makes us a stronger and more informed society." Despite the backlash on certain pieces of content being flagged for take down, Wojcicki says that these 'problematic' videos make up "a fraction of one percent" of the content uploaded to YouTube. Therefore, the vast majority of the content on the platform outweighs the potential harmful impact of these purportedly 'controversial' videos.

Australia has announced their fight against online platforms distributing 'extremism' content through blocking domains that are found to be holding and publishing explicit content.

Australia's Prime Minister, Scott Morison has announced that the country will be moving forward with their efforts to not allow for crises attacks to distributed on online platforms in their country. An example of this was the recent Christchurch massacre that occured in New Zealand, or the recent manifesto that was published on 8Chan.

The nations's eSafety Commissioner will be the one determining what content can be viewed and what cannot through and yet-to-be-established internet framework. These efforts for internet content blockage are to simply not allow for terrorists of any kind to glorify their conquests through social status, Australia is currently contemplating legislation that will force internet companies to improve their safety measures for users.

Most people on the internet are ashamed of their porn searchers, and don't really want that information disclosed to the public. Well, Luscious users should be worried because their user data, searchers, email address and everything else that would be considered personal information was free to grab.

According to the team at vpnMentor, Luscious' account holders had their usernames, email address, activity logs, locational data and much more free for the taking for all 1.195 million users. vpnMentor does say that the data hasn't been stolen as of yet but it was completely accessible, here is what they said "Our team was able to access this database because it was completely unsecured and unencrypted".

vpnMentor also says that they were able to access user accounts 'uploads' section meaning that people could possibly connect their already exposed email addresses, usernames with whatever videos the account has uploaded. This could result in a connection between the account holders real-life name and the video seen on the website, throw into the mix location data and we have a worrisome combination.

Instagram has announced a new program called "Data Abuse Bounty" that will put a price on the head of third-party apps who are found to be abusing user data.

Instagram and their parent company, Facebook has issued out a new program that will encourage researchers to track down third-party apps who are found to be abusing user data. An Instagram security engineer, Dan Gurfinkel wrote in a blog post, saying "Our goal is to help protect the information people share on Instagram and encourage security researchers to report potential abuse to us so we can quickly take action."

Instagram hasn't set a flat payment for researchers who discover nefarious third-party apps abusing data, instead they said that will pay researchers based on the impact the violent has caused against their company. The head of Instagram's engineering department, Nam Nguyen has said that "Expanding and building on the Facebook bug bounty program is a key development in our ongoing security efforts, and we are grateful to the wider security community for all they do to help keep our platforms safe."

Using a VPN is the best way for internet users to protect their privacy online. But did you know that a VPN also has benefits for gamers? Gamers might opt to use a VPN for several reasons. With a VPN, players can access games that aren't available in their area, conceal their IP address, and protect their data from vulnerabilities in gaming servers. That said, not all VPNs on the market are right for gamers. There are a few things you should pay special attention to when choosing a VPN for gaming, which we'll tell you all about in this article.

When it comes to selecting a gaming VPN, the number of options is overwhelming. To make this process simpler, we've listed some of the essential features to consider before deciding on a VPN. Here are the things to keep in mind when choosing a VPN for gaming.

A secure VPN will slow down your speeds to an extent. But some VPNs are faster than others, especially if they have lots of high-bandwidth servers. Since tons of data passes between your device and the gaming server each second, a fast connection is essential. You'll want to consider bandwidth and Mbps speeds when making your choice. Opt for a VPN with speeds that are as close as possible to the speed you get with your ISP.

Twitter is currently in the midst of testing a bunch of new features for users to enjoy, one of these features is a search option for direct-messages.

According to Engadget, Twitter is currently right in the middle of testing new features that will allow for a more utility across the app. One of these features is a search option for users' direct-messages, which will allow for Twitter users to simply search their direct-messages instead of tediously scrolling.

Other things that Twitter are reportedly working on are Live Photo support which is extremely similar to that of GIF's, and the ability to reorder photos from inside the app. According to Mashable's Karissa Bell, "Twitter says it is "re-energizing" investment in DMs". It is unclear when these features will roll out to widespread users, but when they do I'm sure that Twitter will have a full list of the newly added features and changes. If you didn't know, Twitter is also working on a snooze notification option, more on that here.

Google is in for a world of hurt tomorrow with Project Veritas set to put another crack into Pandora's Box with another exclusive -- a Google insider who has provided 950 pages of documents, and a laptop, to the Department of Justice's Antitrust division on Friday.

Download the 1000+ pieces of insider info from Google right here, and have your own sift through all of the information leaked.

This proof highlights the fact Google "created algorithms to hide its political bias within artificial intelligence platforms - in effect targeting particular words, phrases and contexts to promote, alter, reference or manipulate perceptions of Internet content" reports Sara A. Carter.

Remember Tumblr? Well, a recent acquisition has been announced for the once extremely popular microblogging website. The acquisition comes from WordPress' parent company Automattic.

In May of this year, Tumblr owner Verizon announced that they are looking to sell off the microblogging website, after they acquired it from Yahoo in 2017 for $350 million. Verizon has extremely good reason to look for a buyer as Tumblr is undoubtedly on a downwards spiral of return-of-interest. Luckily, Verizon has sold off Tumblr to WordPress' parent company Automattic and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg told the Wall Street Journal that this is his companies biggest purchase in terms of "price and head count."

While we don't know how much the acquisition was actually worth, Axios says that the "price tag is well bellow $20 million". If that assumption is correct, Tumblr's value has dropped astronomically as back in 2013 Yahoo purchased it for a staggering $1.1 billion. WordPress's parent company purchasing Tumblr does make sense as they could somehow implant Tumblr's social foundations into their already well established WordPress platform.

A handful of UK-based dark web drug dealers have been busted selling cocaine (or a Class A drug) on the dark web, dealing with Bitcoin. The group sold the drugs on the dark web under the brand 'Project4'.

Thames Valley Police said that Colin McCabe, 39, Toby Woods and Robert Price, both 36 made over £1 million ($1.2 million) selling Class A drugs on the dark web. The FBI discovered the trio, who were using Bitcoin to hide from authorities and selling drugs as far away as Australia.

McCabe was the leader of the dark web gang, jailed for 12 years after he admitted conspiracy to supply drugs that included cocaine, cannabis, and ketamine. Price was jailed for 9 years and 9 months after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply drugs, while Woods was sentenced to 14 months after confessing to entering into, or being concerned in the acquisition or control of criminal property.

A new feature could be coming to Twitter and that new feature will allow for users to choose to whether or not they want to snooze their push notifications.

Above we have Jane Manchun Wong, she has screenshotted her Twitter feed showcasing the "snooze notifications" options. From the screenshot we can see that Twitter is testing out this feature by allowing users to snooze their notifications for 1, 3 and 12 hours. The snooze option can be found in the top right and corner of the app, under the bell option.

Wong came across this new feature while going through the Twitter background code on her Android device, she has gone into further detail in her blog post which can be found here. It is unclear whether or not this option will be here to stay or Twitter is just monitoring its usage, but hopefully it does stay because I think this feature is very needed as other social media platforms allow for users to mute their notifications.

Most people might not be aware but 8chan was taken down in the last 48 hours, with it being removed from its host Cloudflare, moved to BitMitigate (but then THEY were shut down) and now Jim Watkins -- the owner of 8chan, has responded:

Watkins goes into detail in a new video on YouTube addressing the world about the El Paso mass shooter, who allegedly posted a manifesto to 8chan (but this hasn't been proven by the mainstream media or authorities). Watkins however, says that it was first published to Instagram and not 8chan (yet why isn't Instagram being taken down).

He said:

I can't believe it has taken until the end of 2019 to get here, but we're nearly here -- in a world where YouTube allows video downloads at 1080p, at least with YouTube Premium.

Android Police were the ones to first spot the update, with multiple sources then confirming that the 1080p video download feature will be coming out to "most Premium markets" soon, as well as more features in the near future.

The limitation has been at 720p for a while, but the uprgade to 1080p is a big one (and hopefully 4K doesn't take this long). You'll need to have a YouTube Premium subscription in order to get 1080p downloads, but it should be enough... right? Or do you think it should be all resolutions, right now?

Userbenchmark has been a quite long-standing way for novice users to find which hardware would be the best by placing a direct comparison between models in their integrated benchmark database. Some of you may not know anything about Userbenchmark, but it is wise to get to know them. This is because while many experienced users pay them no mind, Userbenchmark has made themselves a huge SEO trap for novice users who are simply seeking a quick way to tell which hardware is the best.

Here we see the crux of the problem when sorting based on the CPU's 'speed rank'. You can see that the top 5 spots are dominated by Intel products. This in itself is not really the whole story as we have to go a bit deeper to understand what actually happened. Some good reporting from the team over at WCCFTECH shows how the rules have changed on how CPUs are represented in their speed rank calculation.

Here you see that the previous rating was split with 60% of the score being tests of quad-core level performance, while the single-core comes in at 30% and higher than quad-core labeled 'multi-core' being 10%. Now we move right and find that the scoring has been adjusted as follows. Quad-core level performance drops to 58%, single-core jumps to 40%, while the multi-core falls to a mere 2%. This would make sense several years ago when frequencies were still growing, but now that it is increasingly more difficult to increase frequencies, scaling in cores has been having over the past 3+ years. I guess you could say that since Ryzen came onto the scene it has started the shift to many more cores on consumer-level CPUs.

A new free speech platform has been announced by Dr. Jordan Peterson, an advocate for freedom of speech on social media platforms.

Dr. Jordan Peterson is a tenure professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson is widely known for his stance against the censorship of freedom of speech, and has decided to announce his own social media platform that will allow for users to freely express themselves without the worry of being removed or banned from the platform.

The platform is called Thinkspot and is a subscription based "anti-censorship" platform that will encourage people to express themselves intellectually and engage in meaningful discourse. One of the ways Peterson has devised Thinkspot to naturally encourage this level of discourse is to have a minimum word count for posts. Posts will have to be more than 50 words, "If minimum comment length is 50 words, you're gonna have to put a little thought into it. Even if you're being a troll, you'll be a quasi-witty troll." Peterson said.

YouTube has certainly been through its ups and downs these past couple of years with algorithm changes and other tweaks here and there. Google will now be introducing a new change that everyone will be able to notice.

According to a new blog post on the official support page for Google, YouTube's subscriber count on everyone's channel will soon become abbreviated. The changes will be applied to anyone who has their subscriber count on public, and will effect channels that have over 1,000 subscribers.

The changes will be as follows; if a channel has 1,000 subscribers, instead of the figure appearing as '1,000' it will appear as '1K'. An example of this would be if a channel has 133,017 subscribers, it will now appear as 133K subscribers. This decision was made to "create more consistency everywhere that we publicly display subscriber counts, starting in August 2019, we'll begin showing the abbreviated subscriber number across all public YouTube surfaces."

While Facebook is currently on a full frontal assault against hate speech, explicit content and fake accounts, there is another category that it will be taking responsibility for removing. Revenge porn.

According to an announcement from Facebook 's Global Head of Safety, Antigone Davis, Facebook will soon be implementing a new form of AI. This new AI will be targeting "non-consensual intimate images" or "revenge porn" of people to protect them against public shame and online abuse.

The move from Facebook to stop "revenge porn" is to minimilze the amount of online abuse its userbase is currently experiencing. A survey that consisted of a sample size of 1606 people had "61% of respondents said they had taken a nude photos/videos of themselves and shared it with someone else" and that "23% of respondents were victims of revenge porn." The survey also details that "93%" of the victims suffered "significant emotional distress" and "42% sought out psychological services." Facebook has created a new hub called "Not without my consent" for victims to report their images/video, a link to that can be found here.

Internet privacy has become a big concern for people all around the world. Big companies, ISPs, hackers, the government track users' activity on the Net. Each of them pursues his own goal. However, one cannot but agree that revealing sensitive data on the Internet doesn't seem right. Especially for American and Canadian nations, that have strong feelings towards privacy rights and freedom of speech. In this regard, a VPN for Canada has come to the rescue for the most prudent Internet users. VPN technology has become the number one privacy tool for the US residents as well.

It's not a surprise why VPN technology has established itself as one of the most reliable ways to protect sensitive data on the Internet. The most advanced providers use 256-bit encryption and robust protocols to shield customers' data. A VPN creates a hidden tunnel between two servers, making information that is transferred between them, invisible. But how to know if a VPN service trustworthy or not?

Being a protective measure a VPN provider should guard a user against uncontrolled interference. It means a service should provide customers with cutting-edge protocols such as OpenVPN, L2TP/IPSec, IKEv2 and military-grade encryption.

We are living in a simulation just like Elon Musk thinks we are, and once Neo breaks us out of our minds we'll be truly free, right? Well, everything is fake according to Reddit's former CEO, and that's going to take some getting used to.

A few days ago New York Magazine published a piece that said most of the internet traffic metrics are complete and utter BS, with some of the largest companies in the industry fluffing numbers and publishers and others doing the same. This is when Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit started tweeting, where she said: "It's all true: Everything is fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics".

The article is real and not some hit piece on a particular company, but it is explosive. Pao had her interest piqued when Aram Zucker-Schariff of The Washington Post tweeted out the article. The writer of the piece 'How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually' is Max Read, who had some interesting things to say (to say the least) in the article.

In my morning scour for news to write today I came across a story about Fortnite being the 15th most searched for term on Pornhub, which led me into Pornhub's own '2018 Year In Review' insights which were actually really interesting.

Pornhub has an absolutely astonishing 33.5 billion visits to the site in 2018 (and it's not even over yet) which equates to 92 million daily average visits, which the site points out is the population of Australia, Canada and Poland visiting Pornhub each and everyday. They have had over 30 billion searches in 2018 so far, which works out to 962 searches per second.

There were over 4.79 million videos uploaded this year so far, which works out to 1 million hours of video or 115 years of video. Pornhub breaks it down so well, stating that "if you started watching 2018's videos after the Wright brother's first flight, you would still be watching today. Remember that the Wright brothers first flight was back in 1903, 115 years ago.

We all remember the hour or so that YouTube went down a couple of days ago now, but did you know that Pornhub traffic rose to the occasion? The porn site teased the news on Twitter, and now there are some statistics to share from Pornhub that definitely shed some light on their claims.

Pornhub posted some traffic data that shows a large rise in traffic on Tuesday night, where at 9PM ET it was 12% above normal while an hour later at 10PM it was up 21%. The YouTube outage took place between 9:30PM and 10:45PM ET, with lots of people being at home at that time and unable to use YouTube it seems they slid on over to Pornhub for a quick flick.

There's a large drop in traffic towards midnight when YouTube came back up, with Pornhub noting it was "a significant increase by millions of additional viewers during Pornhub's peak evening hours".