Charlotte Henry

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social network could put deepfakes into a “completely different category.” His comments at the Aspen Ideas Festival came in the wake of altered video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which was widely shared on Facebook. Axios had a good summary of all his comments.

Zuckerberg has been getting clobbered by politicians and the media for two years for everything from election manipulation to fake news unfolding on his platform. He knows the pummeling may only intensify with 2020 heating up. Zuckerberg also said Facebook is rethinking its handling of deepfake videos, and said it might make sense to treat them differently from other “false news,” as Facebook calls fake news. Zuckerberg said it’s worth asking whether deepfakes are a “completely different category,” and said developing a policy on these videos is “really important” as AI grows more sophisticated.

Can anywhere in the U.S. challenge Silicon Valley, and San Franciso in particular, to become America’s next tech hub? Economist Tyler Cowen thinks he has the answer. He puts the case for LA in his latest Bloomberg column.

First, consider the virtues of the Los Angeles area. It has splendid weather — warmer and sunnier than San Francisco — and a deep pool of talent. It is America’s second-largest city, with many nice neighborhoods to choose from (some of them, to the east, even affordable). It even has a subway, albeit an underdeveloped one. I would argue it has much better food, and of course a much larger and more diverse entertainment scene. You might reasonably conclude that top talent might prefer to live in or near Los Angeles rather than the Bay Area.

Savings bank Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken will become another German institution supporting Apple Pay. The move will happen sometime by the end of 2019, AppleInsider reported. The Euro-Cheque card is not expected to be supported at launch. That will follow at a later date.

Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken, a branch of German savings banks and cooperative banks, will support Apple Pay in 2019. While there is no specific date mentioned, the service should start “later this year,” said Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of internet services. Other German banks have already begun to adopt Apple Pay. “The ink is dry,” the Federal Association of German Banks wrote on Twitter, “The Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken will offer their customers Apple Pay later this year.” According to an article at Heise Online, the EC card, or Euro-Cheque card, will not be supported at launch. Girocard, the producers and managers of EC cards, will need to do some work on their end before integration can happen.

The NSA has been found to have improperly collected the phone records of U.S. citizens. Again. The Wall Street journal reported on documents obtained by the ACLU. It said that the collection took place in October but it was unknown how many records were involved. The name of the telecoms firm involved was redacted.

The previously undisclosed error, which took place last October, occurred several months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of metadata records it had amassed since 2015 due to a separate overcollection episode. Metadata include the numbers and time stamps of a call or text message but not the contents of the conversation. The American Civil Liberties Union obtained the documents, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit involving the surveillance program. They are heavily redacted internal NSA memos that discuss oversight of intelligence-collection activities.

Well thought-of advertising exec Nick Law is joining Apple, according to AdAge. He will join from Publicis Groupe in September. It is not known what role he will take at Apple

Following yesterday’s Ad Age report that Publicis Groupe Chief Creative Officer Nick Law would be leaving the company to take a post at Apple, CEO Arthur Sadoun and Law confirmed the departure today in letters to the staff. In the letters (reprinted in full below), Sadoun notes that Law will be leaving the company in September to join Apple, a “once in a lifetime opportunity” for him. “But of course, we would have loved to have Nick with us forever,” he writes. He goes on to acknowledge Law’s contributions, which included helping to bolster the company’s creative and strategic bench and for giving the Publicis Groupe community a “vision and ambition for modern creativity.”

A new patent, discovered by 9to5Mac, suggested a way the Apple Watch could be used as a camera. It proposes a flexible section in the band. The section could also be adapted and used for FaceTime.

Apple’s proposed solution is to integrate the camera into part of the band, rather than the Watch itself. You’d be able to pull out a section of the band, which would be flexible so you can angle it as desired. The lens itself would rotate on the end of the band for complete flexibility. “A potential barrier to smartwatch adoption is their minimal image-capturing ability. Some embodiments described herein include a smartwatch with the functionality of a camera that is independently positionable relative to a watch body.”

Elon Musk is no stranger to Twitter controversy. Today he committed another social media faux-pas, The Independent reported. The Tesla and Space X founder tweeted a picture with the slogan Occupy Mars on it…accompanied by a picture of the Moon. As you might imagine, nobody on Twitter pointed out the error…

Elon Musk has amused his Twitter followers by tweeting the words “Occupy Mars” alongside a picture of the moon instead of the Red Planet. Users on the social media site were quick to point out the error. “Hey Super Space Genius, that’s the moon in a total lunar eclipse,” said Upulie Divisekera, an Australian scientist, in reply to the post. The SpaceX founder appeared to admit the mistake in subsequent tweets joking about the faux pas. “Moon too,” Mr Musk said, using laughing emojis in a separate reply.

We expect most places to get hacked now. However, I’d always rather hoped NASA would be able to keep itself safe. Turns out, it can’t. ZDNet reported the space agency was hacked via an unauthorized Raspberry Pi, which connected to the network. In total, 500 MB of data related to Mars missions was stolen.

The point of entry was a Raspberry Pi device that was connected to the IT network of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) without authorization or going through the proper security review… The hackers used this network gateway to pivot inside JPL’s infrastructure, and gained access to the network that was storing information about NASA JPL-managed Mars missions, from where he exfiltrated information. The OIG report said the hackers used “a compromised external user system” to access the JPL missions network. “The attacker exfiltrated approximately 500 megabytes of data from 23 files, 2 of which contained International Traffic in Arms Regulations information related to the Mars Science Laboratory mission,” the NASA OIG said.

Pixar was determined that Toy Story 4 would feature the voice of Don Rickles. The actor played Mr. Potato Head in previous Tory Story films but passed away in 2017 aged 90. The LA Times spoke with director Josh Cooley, who described how Pixar included late actor’s voice in the new film.

“Toy Story 4” director Josh Cooley was overjoyed. “I can only see Mr. Potato Head as Don Rickles doing that voice. I can’t imagine anyone else.” It was a painstaking process to include archival sound of Rickles’ voice. Bit by bit, an editorial team mined more than two decades’ worth of Rickles’ voice sessions and outtakes recorded for movies, shorts, theme parks, toys and other projects. They “logged every word, every cough, every hum, just so we’d know what we had,” Cooley recalled. The 39-year-old director collaborated with screenwriters Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom to write general lines for Mr. Potato Head, and then they searched the archival database for the best fit.

In her latest New York Times column, Kara Swisher reflects on last week’s Code conference. She says tech leaders had not taken on-board Tim Cook’s call that they take responsibility for the chaos their products cause.

Consider a wide-ranging interview I did during the Code conference last week with Andy Jassy, the sharp chief executive of Amazon Web Services, who defended his company’s facial recognition software. The program is called Rekognition — perhaps one of the creepiest names you could give surveillance software — and can match photos and videos with databases. It has been sold to businesses and law enforcement agencies, and its capabilities scare many, given questions of how and where it is deployed. Some critics, for example, are concerned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement may be using Rekognition to help deport immigrants, but Mr. Jassy would not comment on whether that agency uses the program or not.

Remember when Apple and Qualcomm were at each other’s throats? Well, they aren’t anymore, but their legal battle has ongoing ramifications. 9to5 Mac reported that the chipmaker used internal Apple documents in its current case with the Federal Trade Commission.

Included in those documents were slides from an internal Apple presentation in which Apple outlined ways to pressure and “hurt” Qualcomm… Qualcomm had originally used the documents during its Apple legal battle with Apple earlier this year. Apple and Qualcomm came to a surprise settlement in that case, but the chipmaker continues to fight the antitrust ruling handed down by Judge Koh last month.