Tech News Today for May 3, 2017
Tech News for Wednesday May 3, 2017
Facebook says they'll hire 3,000 people to review reports of people hurting themselves and others, and posting it on Facebook. The community operations team around the world already includes 4,500 reviewers of the millions of reports the company gets every week. CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that they will also work with local communities and law enforcement to remove child exploitation and hate speech, and they'll work to create better tools to automate the process. Yesterday we told you about how the folks behind this work at Google were underappreciated and perhaps underpaid, so we hope that Facebook manages these new workers in a different way. It was unclear from Zuckerberg's post whether the reviewers would be Facebook employees or contract workers. Read more on Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page
Hulu has long been an online service for those looking to cut the cord and have legitimate access to current on-demand content from television networks. And now, Hulu is getting into the Live content game with Hulu Live TV, a new paid service tier that brings 60 live channels for $39.99 per month with 50 hours of cloud DVR, with the option to add premium channels like Showtime for an extra monthly fee of $8.99. An additional monthly fee of $19.99 adds 200 hours of cloud DVR storage, commercial skipping, and unlimited screens when connected at the home. Read more at recode.net.
One key piece of information we left out of our report on the new Windows 10 S operating system is that if you're interested in using another browser, such as Google's Chrome, or if you'd like to make Google your default search engine, you are out of luck. Ars Technica reports that Microsoft's Edge and Bing are the defaults in the new OS that comes bundled with the new $999 Surface Laptop. According to the official FAQ for Windows 10s, you are more than welcome to download another browser that might be available from the Windows Store, but you can never make it your default. So if you click links on websites, they will always open in Edge. Read more at arstechnica.com.
A phishing email is making the rounds today and it has the internet a flutter, in a bad way of course. Recipients are receiving an email that mimics a targeted Google Doc invitation with a link that asks to “continue in Google Docs”. Clicking that link grants the phisher access to your email and address book, so the whole enchilada basically. What’s worse, the destination once the link is clicked isn’t some site with a URL that would be easy to detect and reject. Instead, everything stays within Google’s system making it even more difficult to discern that something is wrong. Read more at theverge.com.
Workplace "productivity" tool Slack just released a new feature that lets you identify the office expert on any topic, or at least the person who talks about that topic the most. Noah Weiss from Slack’s Search Learning & Intelligence group says the tool will search public Slack channels and determine not just when someone mentions a topic, but how often they answer questions about the topic. Slack hopes that as the system searches more data, this feature will be more helpful than a hashtag. Read more at slackhq.com.
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