Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Facebook use eroding in US as social media under pressure MAY 28, 2019 Facebook's efforts to crack down on misinformation and sensational content have reduced the time spent at the leading social network eroding, researchers said Tuesday. The average amount of time US adults spent at Facebook dropped by three minutes per day last year and will likely decrease by another minute next year, to a total of 37 minutes daily, according to the research firm eMarketer. The report suggests that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg's efforts to focus on safety and remove divisive and hateful content could be having an  economic impact . "Facebook's continued loss of younger adult users, along with its focus on down-ranking clickbait posts and videos in favor of those that create 'time well spent,' resulted in less daily time spent on the platform in 2018 than we had previously expected," said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. ...

Crackdown on internet 'will put free Press at risk', warns Society of Editors   ·         The new rules are drawn up by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) ·         Internet firms will be forced to introduce strict new age checks on their websites  ·         Critics fear people could end up being forced to demonstrate their age for virtually every website they visit By  KATHERINE RUSHTON  22:31 EDT, 28 May 2019 ·           Draconian new rules designed to make the web safer for children will wreak 'untold harm' on newspapers and websites, the Society of Editors has warned. The proposed code will limit online advertising so severely it will drive regional newspapers to the point of collapse and 'severely damage' national newspapers and broadcasters, the influential industry group said. Under t...

THIS CRAFTY ROBOT CAN WRITE IN LANGUAGES IT’S NEVER SEEN BEFORE MATT SIMON SCIENCE 05.27.19 09:00 AM AMONG THE MANY  things we humans like to lord over the rest of the animal kingdom is our complex language. Sure, other creatures talk to one another, but we’ve got all these wildly complicated written languages with syntax and fun words like  defenestrate . This we can also lord over robots, who, in addition to lacking emotion and the ability to  not fall on their faces , can’t write novels. At least not yet. Researchers at Brown University just got a robot to do something as linguistically improbable as it is beautiful: After training to hand-write Japanese characters, the robot then turned around and started to copy words in a slew of other languages it’d never written before, including Hindi, Greek, and English, just by looking at examples of that handwriting. Not only that, it could do English in print  and cursive. Oh, and then it copied a drawing of th...

Facebook ‘gives global platform to illegal dogfighting’   Social media giant breaks its own rules on violence and animal trading, say campaigners Jamie Doward Sun 26 May 2019  03.00 EDT Facebook has been accused of giving a global platform to dogfighting after an investigation found the site is being used by fight organisers and unscrupulous puppy traders. Lady Freethinker (LFT) , the animal rights organisation, says the social media giant is failing to obey its own policies which prohibit violent content and the sale of animals. In a report called  The Deadly Underground World of Dogfighting on Facebook , shared with the  Observer , it accuses Facebook of becoming “ground zero” for the discussion of particular dogs and breeders involved in the often deadly trade, with much of the debate taking place on closed forums. Between December 2018 and February this year an LFT investigator searched Facebook and found groups, pages and profiles promot...

Police raid on reporter erupts into 1st Amendment debate By JANIE HAR May 23, 2019 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A battle between the press and police is playing out in politically liberal San Francisco after police raided a freelance reporter’s home and office seeking to uncover the source of a leaked police report into the unexpected death of the city’s former elected public defender. Journalist Bryan Carmody did not commit a crime when he acquired and published a police report, said First Amendment expert David Snyder because a police report is “not a confidential, legally protected document” and its disclosure and publication is lawful. Snyder said a journalist who participated in unlawfully acquiring information could be successfully prosecuted for a crime, but that was not the case here. Carmody said he received the report from a source and did not pay for it, though legal experts argue doing so would not have been a crime. Still, San Francisco Police Chief William S...

China's robot censors crank up as Tiananmen anniversary nears Bu Cate Cadell 25, 2019 / 9:27 PM BEIJING (Reuters) - It’s the most sensitive day of the year for China’s internet, the anniversary of the bloody June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square, and with under two weeks to go, China’s robot censors are working overtime. Censors at Chinese internet companies say tools to detect and block content related to the 1989 crackdown have reached unprecedented levels of accuracy, aided by machine learning and voice and image recognition. “We sometimes say that the artificial intelligence is a scalpel, and a human is a machete,” said one content screening employee at Beijing Bytedance Co Ltd, who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to media. Two employees at the firm said censorship of the Tiananmen crackdown, along with other highly sensitive issues including Taiwan and Tibet, is now largely automated. Posts ...

Facebook plans to launch 'GlobalCoin' cryptocurrency in 2020 Mark Zuckerberg met governor of Bank of England last month to discuss decision Mark Sweney Fri 24 May 2019 13.40 EDT Facebook is planning to launch its own cryptocurrency in early 2020, allowing users to make digital payments in a dozen countries. The currency, dubbed GlobalCoin, would enable Facebook’s 2.4 billion monthly users to change dollars and other international currencies into its digital coins. The coins could then be used to buy things on the internet and in shops and other outlets, or to transfer money without needing a bank account. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, last month met the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, to discuss the plans, according to the BBC. Zuckerberg has also discussed the proposal, known as Project Libra, with US Treasury officials and is in talks with money transfer firms, including Western Union, to develop cheap, s...