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With New High-Speed Wireless Ventures, Facebook Stakes Claim On Another Corner Of The Internet

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

While the average consumer might just think of Facebook as just a place to post photos, ignore high school friends’ (and distant uncles’) politically charged rants, and catch up on the news, the reality is that Facebook has been quietly building a behind-the-scenes empire that covers everything from advertising to virtual reality to artificial intelligence. And the company’s latest venture makes it clear that Facebook is intent on being a lot more than a social media platform.

It’s been a big week of announcements from Facebook, unveiling new features, like simplified sign-in, in-app ticket-buying and file-sharing through Messenger.

These are all big updates to the social side of Facebook, but it was another, less-heralded announcement — one involving satellites, giant antennas, and functionally city-sized signal-repeaters — that highlights the vast scope of the company’s operations.

These projects are called Terragraph and Project ARIES, and each is designed to solve an internet access problem.

Terragraph is designed for dense urban areas and uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is still unlicensed in many countries (including the U.S.), but supports very high data-transmission speeds — at a very short range.

So Terragraph is basically designed as a series of street-level nodes, fairly close together, that function more-or-less like signal-repeaters that can strengthen and carry wireless communications without being hampered by pesky features of the urban landscape, like “buildings” or “people.”

Where Terragraph is designed for the world’s billions of urban would-be internet users, Project ARIES is for their country cousins.

The idea behind the ARIES antenna array is to significantly boost the capacity of wireless networks serving rural, underserved areas without needing to build out more extensive (expensive) network infrastructure or crowd more spectrum. In short, it basically is able to blast out a lot more signal at once than existing, traditional antennas can do.

Terragraph and ARIES are just the latest in a growing number of internet and tech ventures that Facebook has started or acquired in recent years. Some of these projects have a more direct connection to the Facebook social media platform than others.

Here’s a brief overview of some of the many industries Facebook has a hand in right now:

Advertising: Facebook generates more than $5 billion per quarter in revenue, and this is where more than 96% of it comes from. Facebook not only sells advertising space on their own service(s) to more than 2.5 million businesses, but also through their Atlas service, help businesses use Facebook data to place more effective ads — and track their performance — on other platforms.
Artificial intelligence: Facebook’s banking big on AI. For now they’re trying to harness AI for tasks as comparatively simple as basic chatbots or automated audio captions of photos, for blind and visually impaired Facebook users. However, AI and machine learning are a major cornerstone of the company’s ten-year plan (see top image) at this point.
Commerce and payments: Not only can businesses put a “buy” button on their Facebook posts, but you can send money through Messenger, and now you can buy goods and services directly through the platform, too. There’s money to be made in being the middleman, and in rendering everyone else’s independent apps and website obsolete in the name of simplicity.
Content aggregation: Facebook just announced a “save to Facebook” plugin that works basically just like any other social bookmark or “save for later” tool, like Instapaper or Pocket. Only, y’know, saved to Facebook.
Content hosting: Facebook’s Instant Articles, designed to optimize news links for mobile connections, effectively keeps media organizations’ content hosted inside Facebook for all mobile readers — which is a huge percentage of the audience, these days. Facebook also revamped its ‘Notes’ feature last year to basically make it a modern blogging platform (think more like Medium) so any individual who wants to create, host, and share web content in that way can also do it without having their readers step foot off of Facebook.
Direct communication: WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, Facebook’s two direct communication tools, have roughly one billion users each. One app at a time, Facebook is stepping into basically every kind of personal communication function — text, voice, and video — your phone can do, and integrating them under its own umbrella.
Internet access: Through the non-profit Internet.org and its Free Basicsservice, Facebook provides zero-cost, zero-rated, low-bandwidth data plans to about 25 million users in 37 developing nations. The service, of course, provides all of those users with Facebook access, as well as some other sites and programs that vary locally.
Internet infrastructure: Free Basics works through partnerships with local telecom companies, but Terragraph and Project Aries are all Facebook’s.
Photo and video hosting: The last time Facebook published stats on it, users were uploading more than 350 million new photos daily — but that was two years ago. Meanwhile Instagram users post more than 80 million new photos daily, and Facebook users stream over 100 million hours of video. Again: that’sper day. With live streaming video now available to all users, not just celebrities and media accounts, those numbers are only going to keep skyrocketing.
Social networking: Obviously, this one is the elephant in the room. There are 1.6 billion people, give or take — about 22% of the entire world’s population — on Facebook, sharing photos and status updates and articles and videos and whatever else they want.
Virtual reality: Facebook spent $2 billion to buy Oculus back in 2014, and the product just finally launched at the end of March. Facebook is all in on VR, as their ten-year plan and recent developer conference highlight, although we can’t say yet how quickly consumers will follow along.

[Source:- Consumeris]

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

Why Facebook Just Suspended Another Data Analytics Firm

by Loknath Das July 23, 2018

written by Loknath Das

Why Facebook Just Suspended Another Data Analytics Firm

HIGHLIGHTS

Facebook on Friday suspended Crimson Hexagon
Facebook is under investigation over its work with Cambridge Analytica
The revelations were first reported by the Wall Street Journal

Facebook said Friday it suspended a longtime partner that had used data from Facebook and other social networks to assist governments – including Russia, Turkey, and the US – in monitoring public sentiment, a more cautious approach in the wake of a data privacy scandal.

Facebook said it had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Boston-based company, Crimson Hexagon, but it was curtailing the company’s access to its data while it investigated the matter.

The preemptive move represents a shift for Facebook in the wake of the controversy over political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which Facebook said inappropriately collected the private profiles of more than 80 million Facebook users. The social network is under investigation from three different federal agencies over its work with Cambridge Analytica and, since the crisis erupted, has suspended more than 200 apps which had access to Facebook data.

Crimson Hexagon, which primarily used public, aggregated data from people who made their profiles available for anyone to see, is the largest of this new wave of suspensions.

Crimson Hexagon Chief Technology Officer Chris Bingham said in a statement Friday, “Crimson Hexagon is fully cooperating with Facebook who has publicly stated its investigation to date has found no wrongdoing.”

The revelations were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal cited documents which said that Crimson Hexagon worked with a Russian non-profit, the Civil Society Development Foundation, that had Kremlin ties and used the data to study the Russian people’s opinion of the regime of President Vladimir Putin. The company also used Twitter’s data feed, called a “Firehose,” to assist in a decision to shut down Twitter during pro-democracy protests in 2014.

Facebook has stirred controversy before over whether its data was used to monitor people for undemocratic purposes. In 2016, The Washington Post reported that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, had shared public data with a startup that helped law enforcement agencies track minority protesters in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri. Shortly after, Facebook changed its policies to prohibit its partners from using any data for “surveillance.”

“We don’t allow developers to build surveillance tools using information from Facebook or Instagram,” Facebook said in a statement Friday. “We take these allegations seriously, and have suspended these apps while we investigate.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Twitter and Facebook both sell public data for what’s known as ‘sentiment analysis” or “social listening.” The tech companies aggregate people’s posts, comments, likes, locations, general demographic and other information into anonymous data feeds that many startups purchase in order to analyse and sell to clients, including corporations, brands, and governments. Privacy advocates have raised concerns that sometimes data can be linked to individuals, particularly when it being used to monitor sentiment in real-time events, such as a concert or a protest.

[“Source-gadgets.ndtv”]

July 23, 2018 0 comment

Internet

Can Anything Prevent Another Internet Shutdown in the U.S.?

by Loknath Das November 21, 2017

written by Loknath Das

Can Anything Prevent Another Internet Shutdown in the U.S.?

An internet shutdown in the Northeastern U.S. happened roughly a week ago, and the experts are looking for ways to prevent this attack from ever happening again.

Websites like Twitter and Spotify were inaccessible for thousands of people following the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, a major domain name system (DNS) host. DNS, the technical network that converts web address names into numbers, is essentially the “yellow pages” of online addresses.

The perpetrators likely “hijacked the devices [equipped with internet] by installing the malware and then conscripted them into a ‘botnet,’ which is essentially an army of electronic devices unwittingly controlled by an unauthorized individual or entity,” Jeff Baron, a web pioneer who owned an accredited domain name registrar business, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. (RELATED: Internet Crashes Will Be Hard To Stop After Obama’s Internet Giveaway)

The DDoS attack reportedly infected hundreds of thousands of devices around the globe and than directed those electronics to flood servers with artificial traffic. The compromised devices include anything connected to the internet, which nowadays can be mobile phones, televisions, home security systems, vehicles, refrigerators, and even toasters.

How Can We Prevent Another Internet Shutdown?

But there are ways to combat such attacks.

“One self-help mechanism would be for a ‘good’ hacker to write a virus that finds insecure devices and simply disables them. This would remove insecure devices from the pool of computers that could be used as bots,” Eli Dourado, technology policy director at the Mercatus Center, told TheDCNF. “It would be inconvenient to consumers whose devices suddenly stopped working, but that inconvenience may be necessary to prevent more serious attacks in the future.”

There are also security network services available, like Cloudfare and Akamai, but they can be expensive, said Ryan Hagemann, technology and civil liberties policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. “As with any decision, a company or individual will need to assess whether the benefits of employing such a service outweigh the costs.”

This technology is labeled under the “Internet of Things,” or IoT, which is a system of interrelated computing devices, digital machines, or objects that can transfer data over a network without requiring human help.

“IoT development is only in its infancy, but embedded intelligence and connectivity could have a wide range of benefits, including reduced cost, better product reliability, enhanced personal safety and better use of resources,” William Rinehart, director of technology and innovation policy at American Action Forum, wrote in an email.

Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, wrote a book called Permissionless Innovation, which outlines the number of benefits IoT technology will have, from wearable technologies to recreational and commercial drones.

IoT application is estimated to rake in $11.1 trillion per year by 2025, according to a report conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute.

The comprehensive study demonstrates how IoT will help various industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, retail, urban development and infrastructure, among many others.

“For example, in health care, a dashboard that simply shows a physician a patient’s heart rhythm could be convenient, but a system that can put together a variety of personalized data and determine that the patient’s condition is deteriorating before that danger shows up in an electrocardiogram could be a life saver,” the McKinsey report explains.

But the assessment acknowledges that these benefits will not be automatic and that maintaining or balancing privacy concerns will be important.

“There’s no silver bullet that will provide an easy remedy to this problem,” Hagemann argues. “As such, it is incumbent on users to educate themselves in online security best practices and for industry to take more proactive steps to optimize the security of their devices.”

Thierer agrees, adding, “If policymakers want to foster the growth of the IoT…they will need to resist the temptation to base policy on worst-case thinking about these technologies.”

[“Source-smallbiztrends”]

November 21, 2017 0 comment