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December 1, 2020
Secretive audio startup Syng has a plan to take on smart speaker giants like Apple, Google, Amazon and Sonos: It's building immersive audio speaker technology that's meant to replace your 5.1 living room setup, make you feel like you're on stage with the band, and one day supply the soundtrack for apps running on your AR glasses.
Word of Syng's existence first surfaced in May, when the Financial Times reported that the company was helmed by longtime Apple designer Christopher Stringer as well as key 凯发k8官网下载手机版homePod engineer Afrooz Family. Now, a newly filed patent application reveals not only how Syng's technology works but also shows detailed renders of what may well be Syng's still-unannounced first product.
The application, filed in late November, explains how Syng wants to use spatial audio tech to replace physical devices with virtual speakers, how it may use AR platforms like Apple's ARKit to map out a room, and how it could recreate immersive 3D soundscapes. It also shows off Syng's deep roots in Cupertino: At least a dozen of the 18 credited co-inventors previously worked at Apple.
Syng did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Syng has been in stealth mode since its founding in 2018, with a website that includes little more than the company's minimalistic three-dotted logo. "We are committed to reimagining the world of audio by focusing on the future-state of sound as a gateway to the senses and a catalyst for new experiences," the company's LinkedIn page nebulously proclaims, while revealing little else about its technology. The Financial Times was equally vague in May, reporting that Syng's speakers would create "revolutionary sound" that was "indistinguishable from reality."
Syng's newly filed patent application fills in most of the blanks. It includes detailed renders and descriptions of a spherically shaped speaker that packs two woofers facing upward and downward, as well as three pairs of mid-frequency drivers and tweeters arranged in a ring for 360-degree beam-forming. The speakers, dubbed "cells" by the company, can be placed on a special stand, wall mount or hung from the ceiling.
It's worth noting that companies regularly attempt to patent products and technologies that don't ultimately make it to market, and that images in patent filings can be deceiving. However, the renders in the Syng patents are notable for their level of detail, down to the circuitry and the locking mechanism for a stand, suggesting a fairly advanced development stage.
The filing also offers some clues about how the company intends to market the product: A setup of Syng cells is meant to be modular and expandable, with the patent application noting that it "can be constructed using only a single cell and enhanced (potentially due to the acquisition over time) with additional cells."
Each cell setup is controlled by a master speaker that knows how many speakers are in the room, as well as other data about its environment. That master cell then renders incoming audio for spatial playback, and pipes it to the other speakers in the room, which is where the immersive audio magic comes in. For instance, if someone was watching a movie with 5.1 surround sound, Syng cells would be able to render the audio in a way that makes it sound like the listener was surrounded by multiple virtual speakers in addition to the physical cells.
"Given the spatial control of the audio, any number of different conventional surround sound speaker layouts (or indeed any arbitrary speaker layout) can be rendered using a number of cells that is significantly smaller than the number of conventional speakers that would be required to produce a similar sound field using conventional spatial audio rendering," the patent application reads.
In other words: Syng cells are meant to re-create 5.1 or 7.1 sound with just two or three physical speakers.
The speakers shown in the filing include microphones used for both voice control as well as to map the sonic environment. A mobile app meant to control the speakers could also be used to aid spatial mapping, with one screenshot showing a mobile AR interface to facilitate 3D scanning of a room. Apps will also allow consumers to change the arrangement of audio in the room and place individual instruments within a space.
The functionality of Syng goes beyond music: The patent application also mentions ambient sound spaces, including audio re-creations of a jungle, complete with birds and monkeys. In addition to just providing these sound spaces as background audio, Syng envisions more utilitarian applications, including "functional directional alerts or beacons for guidance" for 凯发k8官网下载手机版home safety and similar use cases.
Even more intriguing is the combination of Syng cells with AR and VR. Syng's filing mentions the ability to connect spatial audio with AR visuals. This could include cover art or more abstract sound visualizations.
Syng also envisions its technology to take cues from sensors in AR and VR wearables to reproduce audio in true 3D, thanks to an additional cell suspended from the ceiling for Z-axis coverage. "Audio can be rendered in a manner that tracks the head pose of a user wearing a virtual reality, mixed reality, or augmented reality headset," the filing reads. Immersive audio without the need to wear headphones could be especially useful for lightweight AR glasses.
To pull all this off, Syng is relying on an impressive talent roster. A third of the company's employees on LinkedIn indicate that they previously worked at Apple; other former employers include Harman, Bowers & Wilkins, Nest and ROLI. In addition to Family and Stringer, notable members of the team also include longtime Apple user interface designer Bas Ording and Chris Kyriakakis, a USC professor who has been teaching audio signal processing for more than two decades. Nest founder Matthew Rogers is a board member, and former Vevo CEO and Magic Leap CCO Rio Caraeff recently began advising the company.
It's still unclear when Syng will release its first product. The Financial Times reported in May that the company was targeting Q4 of this year, but that the pandemic may lead to delays. Still, there are some signs that Syng may be gearing up for a product launch: The company registered a trademark for "Cell Alpha" in August.
From Your Site Articles
- New patent filing offers a first look at Sonos headphones - Protocol ›
- Smart speakers get smarter about sound - Protocol ›
- With the 凯发k8官网下载手机版homePod Mini, Apple is playing catch-up in the smart ... ›
- The Cell speaker made by ex-凯发k8官网下载手机版homePod designers will cost a whopping $1,500 and will ship in early 2021 - Protocol ›
Janko Roettgers
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
People
How a social app you’ve never heard of became a haven for Gen Z
More than 40 million teens are using Yubo, a place for them to connect with strangers who share similar interests. Could this be a path toward healthier online habits?
Yubo rejects almost everything about traditional social media and instead draws heavily on the culture and structure of gaming platforms.
Image: Yubo
March 19, 2021
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
March 19, 2021
If you were to do a Google search of the social media app Yubo, you'd mostly find news articles warning parents about child predators.
Here's a brief selection: "Yubo is not safe for young users." "Parents, here's a new app your kids might be using." "Parents growing concerned over the Yubo app."
<p>This apparently dangerous, child-oriented social media app has been having a moment among the kids these days, albeit a quiet one. Engagement on the app — its users are mostly teens ages 13 to 25, based in the U.S., Canada and Australia — increased nearly 400% in the last year, and while the founders won't provide daily usage statistics, they've collected at least 45 million users.</p><p>At its core, Yubo turns the idea of "stranger-danger" on its head. The app very openly wants young people to make new friends with strangers on the internet. If that makes you afraid for your own children, or for the future as a whole, you're not alone. And, in the eyes of Yubo CEO and co-founder Sacha Lazimi, you're also very wrong.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"There is no difference for this generation between online and offline," he said. "Older generations don't understand this. When you don't understand something, you are scared right away. This is normal, for them to be scared."</p><p>Yubo doesn't aim to facilitate relationships with child predators, or introduce preteens to twenty-somethings; in fact, those kinds of things would get you banned from the platform. Studies show that young people are lonelier than ever before, and that's where Lazimi sees an opportunity: He built a social media company that helps teens make friends with others their own age. He wants his users to be able to safely meet and befriend new people online, all while living in a virtual world that operates with the exact same rules as the physical one. </p><p>According to Ariel Fox Johnson, a senior counsel for global policy at Common Sense Media (which advocates for a better and safer internet for children and teens), social media poses some special risks for kids: It can exacerbate mental illness and loneliness, introduce children to potentially predatory strangers and adults, expose their personal information to private companies and governments and preserve what they say online for an unforgiving future. Everything Yubo is trying to create sits right at the tangle of this web of problems — and the app's founders say they are trying to solve them. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><h3>The birth of Yubo</h3><p>What eventually became Yubo was once just a Snapchat discovery tool. Lazimi, Jérémie Aouate and Arthur Patora, friends at an engineering school in Paris, wanted to build a simple tool where people could find new friends on Snapchat. They had noticed an increasingly odd phenomenon, where Snapchat users were posting their usernames on Facebook, on websites, anywhere they could find, all so they could get new people to add them on Snapchat. </p><p>So Lazimi and his friends built what was essentially Tinder for Snapchat friends. You could swipe left or right on someone to decide if you wanted to add them to your Snap. And tens of thousands of people started using the tool, eventually prompting them to ask: Why? </p><p>They landed on loneliness. All of the people using their tool were teenagers. They just wanted new friends online. "At this point, we understood that they were mainly looking to have meaningful interaction with other people, and there is a strong need for socializing online," Lazimi said.</p><p>But taking a basic dating app for Snapchat and turning it into a massively successful social platform is not something that just happens. Especially when you are trying to build a self-sufficient app that not only rejects the traditional revenue models for social but also creates productive friendships for perhaps the most difficult audience. </p><p>So Lazimi and his friends got their start with $20,000 from a group of investors. They had to find a way to make the money last for a year in London, split three ways, so they rented a house and then sublet one of the bedrooms to another renter for extra cash. With one person sleeping in the living room, they spent almost an entire year building the first version of Yubo, almost never leaving, hardly sleeping. If there's a stereotype for the early life of a startup, they were living it.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>It worked, sort of. They eventually ended up in an accelerator in Paris, and now, five years and three funding rounds later, they've made about $20 million in one year of revenue and feel confident they could be profitable if they wanted. (They currently reinvest their profits into marketing for the app.) Because they rely on in-app purchases rather than advertising for monetization, they feel more comfortable about their long-term financial future. Their last funding round, in November 2020, raised $47.5 million. </p><p>But Lazimi isn't interested in the traditional startup model of long-term dependence on VCs. Raising money has been difficult, at times, and the investors don't always understand Yubo's goals. "The investors said, 'You don't make friends online, you make friends offline,'" Lazimi explained. He gets the sense that they invested mainly because they believe in the team and the company structure, not the product itself.</p><p>"We are much more independent in this model. It's a healthy model. We think it's the future of any social platform if you want to monetize today, because if you monetize through ads then you compete with the big players that have lots of users," Lazimi said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><h3>A fresh take on social media</h3><p>Researchers have found for years that younger generations are lonelier than their parents, and many studies blame traditional social media for that divide. "Young people with moderate to severe depressive symptoms are nearly twice as likely as those without depression to say they use social media almost constantly (34% vs. 18%)," <a href="https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/uploads/research/2021-coping-with-covid19-full-report.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to a report from Common Sense Media released Wednesday.</a> </p><p>Most of Generation Z spends their free time on "traditional" social networks like Instagram, which are designed to reward content performance, Lazimi explained. "The teens have lots of followers, but very poor interactions. Likes, views and comments are not meaningful, and that's why they feel very lonely. They can't discover other groups of people like you would on a gaming platform or in real life," he said.</p><p>Yubo rejects almost everything about traditional social media (there are no ads, no likes, no algorithmically-driven content discovery) and instead draws heavily on the culture and structure of gaming platforms. Gaming worlds like Fortnite and Minecraft are among the few virtual places where children reliably make friends with people they don't know (and these platforms are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/07/us/video-games-child-sex-abuse.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=EC99A08F0AA61B3E5F09CA469579C4F7&gwt=pay&assetType=PAYWALL" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">equally rife with allegations of child predation)</a>. So Yubo built small rooms where people can video chat, livestream and play games together, get invited in and out of the conversation, and even buy "add-ons" to improve the group experience. It's Fortnite, but for actual life.</p><p>Which brings us back to where this story literally and metaphorically began. All of these new and different ideas about social media sound wonderful, but can Yubo really keep people safe? Content moderation is still a difficult problem to solve. And according to Fox Johnson, when 13-year-olds use social media, there will always be a few adults who would lie about their age for the chance to talk to them. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Marc-Antoine Durand, Yubo's chief operating officer, told Protocol that he thinks the company's age verification programs, including a contract with age-verifying company Yoti, actually work. Yubo requires everyone to verify their identity, and if the app later thinks you may have fooled its system, it will require even more methods of verification. Fox Johnson noted that it is important for companies to delete the data they collect for these kinds of verification programs, which can include sensitive documents; Yubo's privacy policy says it does this. </p><p>Yubo uses the age data to sort people into rooms restricted by age, so everyone interacts with people within their own age group. And then the app educates users about its safety policies relentlessly. "We really try to prevent things from happening, rather than just moderating," Durand said. "One example: If you're trying to send private information about yourself, we send a warning pop-up to tell you that it could be dangerous to do that. And it usually works." </p><p>The company takes a very involved approach to content moderation; text and photos posted to profile pages are approved before they go live, and the app's content moderation systems will stop or interfere with livestreams or conversations whenever behavior might violate user policies. It's a much more heavy-handed approach than what someone might usually experience on Facebook or YouTube, albeit at a much smaller scale.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>The internet's fundamental problem might be that people feel free to ignore normal social expectations online. It's cyberbullying 101: Anonymity lets you be a jerk. Lazimi rejects that paradigm for his app. "We want our users to behave as they behave in a public space, as they behave in a university. If this is something you can do in real life in a public space, then you can do it on Yubo. It's that simple," he said.</p><p>"We've seen that some of the more damaging parts of social media for teens' mental well-being are algorithmic amplification of content that can keep them hooked, and the very public visualizations of popularity. So I don't think getting rid of those is a bad idea," Fox Johnson said of Yubo's premise. "Obviously we see that teens are getting some positive benefits from social media, in particular during the pandemic. So it has to be possible to create a space where teens communicate with friends in a safe and positive way." </p>
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
Sponsored Content
Everyone's moving to the cloud – here's how to keep your data secure while it's there
March 15, 2021
James Daly has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, including understanding various audiences and targeting messaging accordingly. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, particularly in launching new ventures and building passionate audiences. Daly has led teams large and small to multiple awards and quantifiable success through a strategy built on teamwork, passion, fact-checking, intelligence, analytics, and audience growth while meeting budget goals and production deadlines in fast-paced environments. Daly is the Editorial Director of 2030 Media and a contributor at Wired.
February 16, 2021
For corporate IT managers, there are many motivations to move dynamic workloads to the cloud. It provides an irresistible trifecta of flexibility, scalability, and costs savings for those managing varying workloads.
The past year of widespread shutdowns caused by COVID-19 have increased this demand. That's one reason the global cloud computing market size is expected to grow from $371.4 billion in 2020 to $832.1 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.5%, according to Research and Markets.
<p>While cloud deployments benefit CISOs and security administrators in many ways, they often don't suppress a critical attack vector — protecting data in use. Data exists <em>at rest</em> when it's stored, <em>in transit</em> when moving through the network, and <em>in use</em> as it's being processed. Data is often encrypted in the first two states, but not while processed. </p><p class="pull-quote">"Security is an evolving journey and an evolving conversation, but confidential computing is going to be a big part of that future." -Vikas Bhatia, Head of Product for Azure Confidential Computing at Microsoft</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>That's where the confidential computing approach offered by <a href="https://aka.ms/azure-sql-enclaves" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Always Encrypted with secure enclaves</a> in Azure SQL comes in, plugging that final "in use" security gap. It does this by isolating computations to a hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE), which provides a protected container by securing a portion of the processor and memory. Users run software inside the protected environment to shield portions of code and data from view, preventing modification outside the TEE.</p><p>Always Encrypted is a client-side technology that ensures that sensitive data stored in specific database columns (for example, credit card numbers, national identification numbers) are never revealed to the SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, or Azure SQL Database, a managed cloud database. This defense includes protection against database administrators or other privileged users, including cloud providers, who are ized to access the database to perform management tasks but have no business need to access the information in the encrypted columns. </p><p>"You have a hardware-backed guarantee that your data will not be exposed to any of the attack vectors such as your own database administrator, bugs in the guest or host operating system, or even the hypervisor that your workload is running on," said Vikas Bhatia Head of Product for Azure Confidential Computing at Microsoft.. "Your data is safe and completely within your control."<a href="#_msocom_1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a></p><p><strong>The power of secure enclaves</strong></p><p>Always Encrypted enables the Database Engine to process some queries on encrypted data while preserving the confidentiality of the data at a column granularity. The data is decrypted from encrypted database columns only for processing by client applications with access to the encryption key. While current database systems provide sophisticated access control mechanisms and encryption support for data-at-rest, they do not protect the data against attackers with administrative privileges on the database or on the server that hosts the database. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Always Encrypted works using <em>secure enclaves, </em>a protected region of memory within the Database Engine process that can contain plaintext data. The secure enclave appears as an opaque box to the rest of the Database Engine and other processes on the hosting machine. There is no way to view any data or code inside the enclave from the outside, even with a debugger. These properties make the secure enclave a <em>trusted execution environment</em> that can safely access cryptographic keys and sensitive data in plaintext, without compromising data confidentiality. </p><p><a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a><a rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a>Always Encrypted used by a wide variety of <a href="https://aka.ms/AlwaysEncryptedEnclavesAzureSQLDBBlog" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">customers</a> requiring confidentiality and governmental rules compliance, from financial institutions (such as Royal Bank of Canada, Financial Fabric) to insurance companies and health care organizations. These customers use Always Encrypted mostly for online transactional processing applications and encrypt only personally identifiable identifier (PII) columns such as social security numbers, names, email addresses, and credit card numbers. </p><p>That's an essential advantage. "With these businesses, their entire infrastructure is built on trust," Bhatia noted. "So security must not just be part of their technical foundation but part of their essence. Always Encrypted allows them to do that." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Azure confidential computing can also be scaled horizontally, meaning that it offers the ability to increase capacity by connecting multiple hardware or software entities so that they work as a single logical unit. Conversely, vertical scaling means that you scale by adding more power (CPU, RAM) to an existing machine.</p><p>"Security is an evolving journey and an evolving conversation," Bhatia said. "But confidential computing is going to be a big part of that future."</p>
Keep Reading
Show less
James Daly has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, including understanding various audiences and targeting messaging accordingly. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, particularly in launching new ventures and building passionate audiences. Daly has led teams large and small to multiple awards and quantifiable success through a strategy built on teamwork, passion, fact-checking, intelligence, analytics, and audience growth while meeting budget goals and production deadlines in fast-paced environments. Daly is the Editorial Director of 2030 Media and a contributor at Wired.
Power
Google wants to help you get a life
Digital car windows, curved AR glasses, automatic presentations and other patents from Big Tech.
A new patent from Google offers a few suggestions.
Image: USPTO
February 28, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 28, 2021
Another week has come to pass, meaning it's time again for Big Tech patents! You've hopefully been busy reading all the new Manual Series stories that have come out this week and are now looking forward to hearing what comes after what comes next. Google wants to get rid of your double-chin selfie videos and find things for you as you sit bored at 凯发k8官网下载手机版home; Apple wants to bring translucent displays to car windows; and Microsoft is exploring how much you can stress out a virtual assistant.
And remember: The big tech companies file all kinds of crazy patents for things, and though most never amount to anything, some end up defining the future.
<h3>Alphabet</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929982&IDKey=D2992D61B62A%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D13%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Making selfies look better</strong></a></p><p>Perhaps even before our lives were dominated by video calls, you might've noticed when someone just couldn't figure out where to place their camera. Generally, anything below eye height is going to lead to some unflattering angles, but if you're also on a phone, holding your device up that long can get tiring. Google is apparently trying to solve this with AR: According to this patent, it's looking into using the depth sensors found on the front of many smartphones to re-create your face in video calls at a more flattering angle, to reduce what the pattern calls "the big nose effect." I'm here for this concept, but also Google's depiction of what it's trying to eliminate:</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/lYYEYZ52NjuL8M2BnrKVI80huN6UBNYEl1sFEScg5s5MdKrv8n2pBlI3tqXw3ooNJh8h2fWLTeTQaI4TrETMRu-E8ld49QGy3U783TOD8k8WMIR0lPZBAlCih9p3NU4U2sOEqtuI"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929885&IDKey=AFA7541891BF%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D16%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" target="_blank"><strong>Jamming more ads into Maps</strong></a></p><p>Google Maps has become increasingly beset with ads in recent years, with promoted pins and locations on various instances of Maps. But this patent, which determines how Google goes about valuing ads in Google Maps — it, shockingly, has a lot to do with location — shows that the company might be looking at turning every part of the world into a digital version of Times Square, by displaying ads in-between the streets on a map. Hopefully it doesn't feel the need to run ads in <em>all</em> these potential slots at once, as that might make it rather difficult to navigate: </p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/JcWTDCLxLAIEnhwl__JCNqeGm5ivedVoZVx_t83zGUntlZdU2H3CeQm9L3RC7QEZ_Cbb1n8B-bq_B-UJoATR2JiehxRwlA_O9GgO2BcEsph9C2cMPihvsdIWJlG9iJfvo4hTmLG9"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929486&IDKey=8946337F7961%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D23%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" target="_blank"><strong>Outsourcing having a life to AI</strong></a></p><p>It's tough to do things, I know. Many days, even before the pandemic, I was content to just sit on the couch all day watching TV and ordering takeout. But Google is apparently looking into outsourcing to a virtual assistant the task of making sure you actually get your butt off the sofa. The patent outlines an assistant that could suggest things to do, as well as where and when to do them, based on the user's preferences. It could also suggest things to do that your friends or other users have enjoyed doing. Some of the suggestions aren't exactly things I'd consider a hobby, though: choosing "fight off a cold" as an activity is a really odd way to want to pass the time. <img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/uHktu_DhtqRY9P68bJLJeoFceXUWTrtEeTN7xB6hiBFWxiCY5FDqrZW0zGkqlssZ481nmrNba9nGYXrsdfEk0eTsG64QXV37qaAfQ51BYGhs5DlwKuNJiA2WI5uGtQaLcOS_INsS"></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><h3>Amazon</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=27&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=amazon.ASNM.&OS=AN/amazon&RS=AN/amazon" target="_blank"><strong>Searching using loyalty programs</strong></a></p><p>When you search for things online, you're generally only shown the prices for things that everyone sees. But if you're a member of a loyalty program, you might often get discounts or other benefits that could make some products cheaper or more attractive. Amazon's patent outlines a search engine that can store which loyalty programs you're a part of, and show any deals associated with that membership that businesses might be running. This could be useful for finding deals at partners of loyalty programs that you might not be aware of, but if you're already loyal to one hotel or airline brand, you're probably going to search them first before doing a general search. </p><p><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/XSeV507IoB60vuP-AKADzUQH3OCfoDarf4Ahdgo0kNH-YxVe6qj-MRv9dfGECwElzPftQ3dJfMBeJq5fEEaqcAR6cyprVeBF99cienf2ipJGV35gR5LrTL8RVSOqAHqtqKrMX6Et"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929810&IDKey=0F7C251F2619%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D23%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Damazon.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Famazon%2526RS%3DAN%2Famazon" target="_blank"><strong>Indoor drones</strong></a></p><p>Amazon has been making waves for years about using autonomous drones for delivering orders, but to date, it hasn't gotten much traction. It seems, according to this patent, to be turning its attention at least partly to a less-regulated bit of airspace: indoors. The patent explains how autonomous drones, fitted with cameras and sensors, could be used to inspect inventory stored in the bins in the company's massive, high-ceilinged warehouses. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><h3>Apple</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10928697&IDKey=B939F26801A6%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D51%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3D%252522apple%252Binc%252522.ASNM.%2526p%3D2%2526OS%3DAN%2F%252522apple%252Binc%252522%2526RS%3DAN%2F%252522apple%252Binc%252522" target="_blank"><strong>Smart tinted windows</strong></a></p><p>This feels like a concept you'd see in sci-fi films set in a future where people have time to kill in the back of a self-driving car. Instead of staring at their phones, the sunroof and windows tint black, and news programs or views of scenic landscapes would replace whatever dystopian cityscape the car is driving through. It seems that Apple is looking into turning this into a reality, by creating see-through glass panes embedded with LEDs and other light sources that could change the color of the glass and allow information to be displayed on it. Pair that with the AR maps it was working on from <a href="/alphabet-eat-balloons" target="_self">last week</a>, and you could have a whole new way of looking at driving on your hands. </p><h3>Facebook</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=29&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=facebook.ASNM.&OS=AN/facebook&RS=AN/facebook" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Curved-lens AR glasses</strong></a></p><p>This feels a little bit like the walking-around version to Apple's patent above. Most AR headsets use cameras to portray information on flat surfaces in front of your eyes. If you're like me and wear giant glasses that make you look like an owl, that might be fine, as your entire field of view is covered by lenses, but this patent explores adding AR to the periphery as well. The glasses in the patent have lenses that curve around the side of the frames so that they can overlay information on your peripheral view, which could make the experience of augmenting reality feel a little less jarring. That said, you would have to go out in public wearing something that looks like this: </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/YQudRSE9rpgmW6sFYiOU7-fK_tijuGQMxUhPKBq9cQWjmapgqPuV-K2FKAb-C_mlGqBmzOeFisYN3K2JLXqjzmvJzsHuEwfPo-_-CiIodnZg-alfFF1wsw74xVkb5nNaTx-pU71_"></p><h3>Microsoft</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=36&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=microsoft.ASNM.&OS=AN/microsoft&RS=AN/microsoft" target="_blank"><strong>Automatic presentation controls</strong></a></p><p>If you've ever watched a presentation from a major tech company and wondered how they nailed the timing on slide changes so well … it's probably because they've rehearsed it a thousand times and have someone whose job it is just to press forward on the slide at the right time. But if you don't have that luxury at your disposal, you might find the ideas in this patent helpful. Microsoft is exploring presentation software that would be able to listen for cues in your speech to detect that you've gotten to the end of one slide, and move you automatically on to the next. It also suggests doing a training run, where the user runs through their presentation, manually clicking where they want to change slides, and the system would record that and do it automatically when they go to present. I'm not sure about having to have something listen to me at all times to get this to work, but it'd make presentations a lot less awkward than the "please can you click to the next slide, no, not the last slide, the next one" that often happens. </p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10931607&IDKey=7B2CDAAF4E95%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D19%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dmicrosoft.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft%2526RS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Getting angry at virtual assistants to get results</strong></a></p><p>Stressing other people out when you're in charge is a very easy, albeit not very amenable, way to get stuff done. If you're having a conversation with someone and they stress to you, "I <em>need</em> you to get this back to me by end of day," and you know that they are ultimately the person who could end your employment, you're very likely going to get it back to them soon, unless you don't want to work there anymore. It's a lot harder to convey emotion and stress like that to a digital assistant, but this patent is exploring being able to understand human intonation and emotion in requests, such as a user stressing that they need to get a meeting scheduled with someone by the end of the week, which the AI would interpret as it being an urgent meeting when looking for time to schedule. Hopefully when the robot uprising comes, they'll not be too annoyed at us taking them for granted as digital PAs. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Protocol | Policy
Tech spent years fighting foreign terrorists. Then came the Capitol riot.
"Nobody's going to have a hearing if a platform takes down 1,000 ISIS accounts. But they might have a hearing if you take down 1,000 QAnon accounts."
Photo: Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images
March 12, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
March 8, 2021
On a Friday in August 2017 — years before a mob of armed and very-online extremists took over the U.S. Capitol — a young Black woman who worked at Facebook walked up to the microphone to ask Mark Zuckerberg a question during a weekly companywide question-and-answer session.
Zuckerberg had just finished speaking to the staff about the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the weekend before — and what a difficult week it had been for the world. He was answering questions on a range of topics, but the employee wanted to know: Why had he waited so long to say something?
<p>The so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville had been planned in plain sight for the better part of a month on Facebook. Facebook took the event down only a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removed-unite-the-right-charlottesville-rally-event-page-one-day-before-2017-8" target="_blank">day before</a> it began, citing its ties to hate groups and the threat of physical harm. That turned out to be more than a threat. The extremist violence in Charlottesville left three people dead and dozens more injured. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions later <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-08-14/jeff-sessions-calls-charlottesville-attack-domestic-terrorism" target="_blank">called</a> it an act of "domestic terrorism." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Zuckerberg had already posted a contrite, cautious <a href="https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103969849282011?pnref=story" target="_blank">message</a> about the rally on Facebook earlier that week, saying the company would monitor for any further threats of violence. But his in-person response to the employee's question that day struck some on the staff as dismissive. "He said in front of the entire company, both in person and watching virtually, that things happen all over the world: Is he supposed to comment on everything?" one former employee recalled.</p><p>"It was something like: He can't be giving an opinion on everything that happens in the world every Friday," another former employee remembered.</p><p>Facebook's chief operating officer and resident tactician, Sheryl Sandberg, quickly swooped in, thanking the employee for her question and rerouting the conversation to talk about Facebook's charitable donations and how Sandberg herself thinks about what to comment on publicly. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the details of this account, but said it lacked context, including that Zuckerberg did admit he should have said something sooner. </p><p>Still, to the people who spoke with Protocol, Zuckerberg's unscripted remarks that day underscored something some employees already feared: that the company had yet to take the threat posed by domestic extremists in the U.S. as seriously as it was taking the threat from foreign extremists linked to ISIS and al-Qaeda. "There wasn't a patent condemnation such that we would have expected had this been a foreign extremist group," a third former employee said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>At the time, tech giants were already hard at work figuring out how to crack down on the global terrorist networks that filled their sites with beheading videos and used social media to openly recruit new adherents. Just a few months before Charlottesville, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft had <a href="https://gifct.org/about/story/#june-26--2017---formation-of-gifct" target="_blank">announced</a> a novel plan to share intel on known terrorist content so they could automatically remove posts that had appeared elsewhere on the web. </p><p>Despite the heavy-handed approach to international jihadism, tech giants have applied a notably lighter touch to the same sort of xenophobic, racist, conspiratorial ideologies that are 凯发k8官网下载手机版homegrown in the U.S. and held largely by white Westerners. Instead, they've drawn drifting lines in the sand, banning explicit calls for violence, but often waiting to address the deranged beliefs underlying that violence until something has gone terribly wrong. </p><p>But the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 and the spiraling conspiracies that led to it have forced a reckoning many years in the making on how both Big Tech and the U.S. government approach domestic extremists and their growing power. In the weeks since the riot, the Department of 凯发k8官网下载手机版homeland Security has issued a <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-january-27-2021" target="_blank">terrorism advisory</a> bulletin, warning of the increased threat of "domestic violent extremists" who "may be emboldened" by the riot. The head of the intelligence community has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/us/politics/avril-haines-domestic-terror-qanon.html" target="_blank">promised</a> to track domestic extremist groups like QAnon. And attorney general nominee Merrick Garland, who prosecuted the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing case, <a href="https://time.com/5941907/merrick-garland-domestic-terrorism/" target="_blank">said</a> during his recent confirmation hearing that investigating domestic terrorism will be his "first priority."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Tech companies have followed suit, cracking down in ways they never have before on the people and organizations that worked to motivate and glorify that extremist behavior, including former President Donald Trump himself. </p><p>But the question now is the same as it was when that employee confronted Zuckerberg three years ago: What took so long? </p><p>Interviews with more than a dozen people who have worked on these issues at Facebook, Twitter and Google or inside the government shed light on how tech giants' defenses against violent extremism have evolved over the last decade and why their work on domestic threats lagged behind their work on foreign ones. </p><p>Some of it has to do with the War on Terror sociopolitical dynamics that have prioritized violent Islamism above all else. </p><p>Some of it has to do with the technical advancements that have been made in just the last four years. </p><p>And yes, some of it has to do with Trump.</p><h2>The room full of lawyers
</h2><p>Nearly a decade before Q was a glimmer in some 4channer's eye, the tech industry was facing a different scourge – the proliferation of child sexual abuse material. In 2008, Microsoft called a Dartmouth computer science professor named Hany Farid to help the company figure out a way to do something about it. Farid, now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, traveled to Washington to meet with representatives from the tech industry to discuss a possible solution.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"I go down to D.C. to talk to them, and it's exactly what you think it is: a room full of lawyers, not engineers, from the tech industry, talking about how they can't solve the problem," Farid recalled. </p><p>To Farid, the fact that he was one of the only computer scientists at the meeting sent a message about how the industry thought about the problem, and still thinks about other content moderation problems — not as a technical challenge that rewarded speed and innovation, but as a legal liability that had to be handled cautiously.</p><p>At the time, tech companies were already attaching unique fingerprints to copyrighted material so they could remove anything that risked violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Farid didn't see any reason why companies couldn't apply the same technology to automatically remove child abuse material that had been previously reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's tipline. That might not catch every piece of child abuse imagery on the internet, but it would make a dent. In partnership with Microsoft, he spent the next year developing a tool called PhotoDNA that Microsoft <a href="https://news.microsoft.com/2009/12/15/new-technology-fights-child-porn-by-tracking-its-photodna/" target="_blank">deployed</a> across its products in 2009.<br></p><p>But social networks dragged their feet. Facebook became the first company outside of Microsoft to announce it had adopted PhotoDNA in <a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2011/05/19/facebook-to-use-microsofts-photodna-technology-to-combat-child-exploitation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2011</a>. Twitter took it up in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/22/twitter-photodna-child-abuse" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2013</a>. (Google had begun using its own <a href="https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-org/our-continued-commitment-to-combating/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hashing system</a> in 2008.) "Everybody came to this reluctantly," Farid said. "They knew if you came for [child sexual abuse material], you're now going to come for the other stuff."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>That turned out to be the right assumption. By 2014, that "other stuff" included a string of ghastly beheading videos, slickly filmed and distributed by ISIS's loud and proud propaganda arm. One of those videos in particular, which documented the beheading of journalist James Foley, horrified Americans as it filled their Twitter feeds and multiplied on YouTube. "It was the first instance of an execution video going really viral," said Nu Wexler, who was working on Twitter's policy communications team at the time. "It was one of the early turning points where the platforms realized they needed to work together."</p><p>As the Foley video made the rounds, Twitter and YouTube scrambled to form an informal alliance, where each platform swapped links on the videos it was finding and taking down. But at the time, that work was happening through user reports and manual searches. "A running theme for a number of services was that we had a very manual, very reactive response to the threat that ISIS posed to our services, coupled with the speed of ISIS' territorial organizational expansion and at the same time the response from industry and from government being relatively siloed," said Nick Pickles, Twitter's senior director of public policy strategy.</p><p>The Foley video and several other videos that appeared on the platform in quick succession only underscored how insufficient that approach was. "The way that content was distributed by ISIS online represented a manifestation of their online and physical threat in a way which led to a far more focused policy conversation and urgency to address their exploitation of digital services," Pickles said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>But there was also trepidation among some in the industry. "I heard a tech executive say to me, and I wanted to punch him in the face: 'One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter,'" Farid remembered. "I'm like, there's a fucking video of a guy getting his head cut off and then run over. Do you want to talk about that being a 'freedom fighter'?"</p><p>To Farid, the choice for tech companies was simple: automatically filter out the mass quantities of obviously abhorrent content using hashing technology like PhotoDNA and worry about the gray areas later.</p><p class="pull-quote">There's a fucking video of a guy getting his head cut off and then run over. Do you want to talk about that being a 'freedom fighter'?</p><p>Inside YouTube, one former employee who has worked on policy issues for a number of tech giants said people were beginning to discuss doing just that. But questions about the slippery slope slowed them down. "You start doing it for this, then everybody's going to ask you to do it for everything else. Where do you draw the line there? What is OK and what's not?" the former employee said, recalling those discussions. "A lot of these conversations were happening very robustly internally."</p><p>Those conversations were also happening with the U.S. government at a time when tech giants were very much trying to <a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/03/facebook-security/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">distance</a> themselves from the feds in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures. "At first when we were meeting with social media companies to address the ISIS threat, there was some reluctance to feel like tech companies were part of the solution," said Ryan Greer, who worked on violent extremism issues in both the State Department and the Department of 凯发k8官网下载手机版homeland Security under President Obama. "It had to be a little bit shamed out of them."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><h2>The Madison Valleywood Project
</h2><p>Then, in 2015, ISIS-inspired attackers shot up a theater in Paris and an office in San Bernardino. The next year, they carried out a series of bombings in Brussels and drove cargo trucks through crowds in Berlin and Nice. The rash of terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Europe changed the stakes for the tech industry. Suddenly, governments in those countries began forcefully pushing tech companies to prevent their platforms from becoming instruments of radicalization. </p><p>"You had multiple Western governments speaking with one voice and linking arms on this to put pressure to bear on these companies," said the former YouTube employee.</p><p>In the U.S., the Obama administration gave this pressure campaign a codename: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/technology/tech-and-media-firms-called-to-white-house-for-terrorism-meeting.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Madison Valleywood Project</a>, which was designed to get Madison Avenue advertisers, Silicon Valley technologists and Hollywood filmmakers to work with the government in the fight against ISIS. In February 2016, Obama invited representatives from all of those industries – Google, Facebook and Twitter among them – to a day-long summit at the White House that was laser-focused on ISIS. The day's opening speaker, former Assistant Attorney General John Carlin, applauded Facebook, Twitter and YouTube's nascent counterterrorism efforts but urged them to do more. "We anticipate — and indeed hope — that after today you will continue to meet without the government, to continue to develop on your own efforts, building on the connections you make today," Carlin said, according to a copy of the <a href="https://epic.org/foia/MadisonValleywood_2.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">speech</a> obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>"The ISIS threat really captivated both U.S. and international media at the time," said Greer, who now works as national security director for the Anti-Defamation League. "There was a constant drumbeat of questions: What are you doing about ISIS? What are you doing about ISIS?"</p><p>The mounting pressure seemed to have an impact. Just weeks before the White House summit, Twitter became the first tech company to <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2016/combating-violent-extremism.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">publicly</a> enumerate the terrorist accounts it had removed in 2016. The communications team opted to publish the blog post laying out the stats without attaching the 's name, Wexler said, because they were fearful of directing more death threats to executives who were already being bombarded with them.</p><p>Over the course of the next year and a half, tech executives continued to hold meetings with the U.K.'s 凯发k8官网下载手机版home secretary, the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate and the EU Internet Forum.</p><p><br></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/from-left-to-right-uk-凯发k8官网下载手机版home-secretary-amber-rudd-head-of-public-policy-picture-id865330526?b=1&k=6&m=865330526&s=170x170&h=_H9lHNEtUrY1xP4Xr75Pj4F0BvKbUzR9M64Rp2dRaQo=" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTc0NzQyNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY0NDQ5OTE1OH0.HluxS3UkzhEHVK7AjUGUmSMIjhcYdArHYvQbEdGG1GM/image.jpg?width=980" id="99b98" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b78df8d5dcf6965b6363ea9429b987bd" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Twitter's Nick Pickles (second from left) and Facebook's Brian Fishman (third from left) attend the G7 Interior Ministerial Meeting in Ischia, Italy in October of 2017. </small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Vincenzo Rando/Getty Images</small>
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</div></p><p><br></p><p>By June 2017, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Twitter <a href="https://gifct.org/about/story/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">emerged with</a> a plan to share hashed terrorist images and videos through a new group called the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, or GIFCT. That group has since grown to include smaller companies, including Snap, Pinterest, Mailchimp and Discord, and is led by Obama's former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nick Rasmussen.</p><p>Meanwhile, Google's internal idea lab, Jigsaw, which had been studying radicalization online for years, began running a novel <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/09/googles-clever-plan-stop-aspiring-isis-recruits/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">pilot</a> designed to stop people from getting pulled in by ISIS through search. Working with outside groups, Jigsaw began sponsoring Google search ads in 2016 that would run whenever users searched for terms that risked sending them down an ISIS rabbit hole. Those search ads, inspired by Jigsaw's interviews with actual ISIS defectors, would link to Arabic and English-language YouTube videos that aimed to counter ISIS propaganda. In 2017, even as Google and YouTube worked on ways to remove ISIS content algorithmically, YouTube <a href="https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/bringing-new-redirect-method-features" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">deployed</a> the Redirect Method to searches inside its own platform to help counter propaganda its automated filters had not yet found. </p><p>Facebook, meanwhile, hired an expert on jihadi terrorism, Brian Fishman, to head up Facebook's work on counterterrorism and dangerous organizations in April 2016. At the time, the list of dangerous organizations consisted mainly of foreign terrorist organizations, as well as well-known hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi group Blood & Honour. These organizations were banned from the platform, as was any praise of those groups. But Fishman's hiring was a clear signal that cracking down on ISIS and al-Qaeda had become a priority for Facebook.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="10">
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</div></p><p class="pull-quote">There was a constant drumbeat of questions: What are you doing about ISIS? What are you doing about ISIS?</p><p>After Fishman began, Facebook started using an approach similar to what the intelligence community would use to go after ISIS, relying not just on user reports and automated takedowns of known terrorist content, but using artificial intelligence as well as off-platform information to chase down whole networks of accounts.</p><p>ISIS's overt and corporate branding gave tech platforms a clear focal point to start with. "Some groups like the ISISes of the world and the al-Qaedas of the world are very focused on protecting their brand," Fishman said. "They retain tight control over the release of information." ISIS had media outlets, television stations, slogans and soundtracks. That meant platforms could begin sniffing out accounts that used that common branding without having to look exclusively at the content itself. </p><p>"I look back on that threat, and I recognize now in hindsight there were attributes of it that made it easier to go after than the types of domestic terrorism and extremism we're grappling with today," said Yasmin Green, director of research and development at Google's Jigsaw. "There was one organization, basically, and you had to make public your allegiance to it. Obviously, all of those things made it possible for law enforcement and the platforms to model and pursue it."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="11">
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<a href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/yasmin-green-director-of-research-and-development-jigsaw-speaks-the-picture-id1210644850?b=1&k=6&m=1210644850&s=170x170&h=5xo3EZLexgMsab0xvC7TRT-pyfxqqtWDSityLtoUvx8=" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTc0ODU4Ny9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2NjkxOTA0NH0.YNluKT1h_v-6kpS9FJexwgvFs1Q77ikBXzV4MndqhNo/image.jpg?width=980" id="99442" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9448e621190bd34309d2730d21d23cdf" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Jigsaw's Yasmin Green has recently focused her violent extremism research on white supremacists and conspiracy theorists.</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Craig Barritt/Getty Images</small>
</p><p><br></p><p>Around that time, Twitter also began investing in monitoring what Pickles calls "behavioral signals," not just tweets. "If you focus on behavioral signals, you can take action before they distribute content," Pickles said. "The switch to behavior meant that we could take action much faster at a much greater scale, rather than waiting."</p><p>The development of automated filters across the industry was almost stunningly successful. Within a year, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube went from manually removing foreign terrorist content that had been reported by users to automatically taking down the vast majority of foreign terrorists' posts before anyone flags them. Today, according to Facebook's transparency reports, 99.8% of terrorist content is <a href="https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforcement#dangerous-organizations" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">removed</a> before a single person has even reported it.</p><p>"If you actually look a bit farther back, you understand just how much has moved in this arena," Green said. "That always makes me feel a little bit optimistic." </p><h2>The domestic dilemma
</h2><p>It didn't hurt that both the United States and the United Nations keep lists of designated international terrorist organizations. To the "rooms full of lawyers" that help make these decisions, that kept things clean; use those lists as a guide and level a hammer on any organizations on them, and tech executives could be fairly confident they wouldn't face much second-guessing from the powers that be. "If a terrorist group is put on a watch list or terrorist list or viewed by the international community, by the UN, as a terrorist group, then that gives Facebook everything they need to have a very strong policy," said Yael Eisenstat, a former CIA officer who led election integrity efforts for Facebook's political ads in 2018. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="11">
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</div></p><p>The same can't be said for domestic extremists. In the United States, there's not an analogous list of domestic terrorist organizations for companies to work from. That doesn't mean acts of domestic terrorism go unpunished. It just means that people are prosecuted for the underlying crimes they commit, not for being part of a domestic terrorist organization. That also means that individual extremists who commit the crimes are the ones who face the punishment, not the groups they represent. "You have to have a violent crime committed in pursuit of an ideology," former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe said in a recent <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/dhs-warning-domestic-violent-extremists/id498897343?i=1000507279942" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">podcast</a>. "We hesitate to call domestic terrorists 'terrorists' until after something has happened." </p><p class="pull-quote">Nobody's going to have a hearing if a platform takes down 1,000 ISIS accounts. But they might have a hearing if you take down 1,000 QAnon accounts.</p><p>This gap in the legal system means tech companies write their own rules around what sorts of objectionable ideologies and groups ought to be forbidden on their platforms and often only take action once the risk of violence is imminent. "If something was illegal it was going to be handled. If something was not, then it became a political conversation," Eisenstat said of her time at Facebook.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="11">
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</div></p><p>Even in the best of times, it's an uncomfortable balancing act for companies that purport to prioritize free speech above all else. But it's particularly fraught when the person condoning or even espousing extremist views is the president of the United States. "Nobody's going to have a hearing if a platform takes down 1,000 ISIS accounts. But they might have a hearing if you take down 1,000 QAnon accounts," said Wexler, who worked in policy communications for Facebook, Google and Twitter during the Trump administration.</p><p>There never was a Madison Valleywood moment in the U.S. related to the <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/hate-crimes-under-trump-surged-nearly-20-percent-says-fbi-report-1547870" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">rising hate crimes</a> and domestic extremist events that marked the Trump presidency. Not after Charlottesville. Not after Pittsburgh. Not after El Paso. The former president <em>did</em> have what might be construed as the opposite of a Madison Valleywood moment when he held an event at the White House in 2019 where <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/who-was-who-trumps-social-media-summit/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">far-right conspiracy theorists and provocateurs</a> discussed social media censorship. But this time, Facebook, Google and Twitter weren't invited.</p><p><br></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/poster-with-a-tweet-is-seen-as-president-donald-j-trump-participates-picture-id1155382518?b=1&k=6&m=1155382518&s=170x170&h=rssm82D_89TYJJFr8l77T0pLrAOoN70cMvhW2p3Eqoo=" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTc0NzQ0MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzMzkyMzA5OX0.WyLHy4C-a0IV0S0HwMaQ75yknPytWxqbU1wG7ZR9Ygs/image.jpg?width=980" id="b9709" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="aea6abb03061310945c5554c829dada0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">President Trump's Social Media Summit in 2019 focused on alleged social media censorship of conservatives. </small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Jabin Botsford/Getty Images</small>
</p><p><br></p><p>"Platforms write their own rules, but governments signal which types of content they find objectionable, creating a permission structure for the companies to step up enforcement," Wexler said. "President Trump's comments after Charlottesville and his tacit support of the Proud Boys sent a deliberate message to tech companies: If you crack down on white nationalists' accounts, we'll accuse you of political bias and make your CEOs testify before Congress."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="11">
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</div></p><p>During the Trump years, tech companies repeatedly courted favor with the president and his party. In 2019, Google CEO Sundar Pichai met <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/trump-met-with-google-ceo-sundar-pichai-on-political-fairness-china.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">directly</a> with Trump to discuss what Trump later characterized as "political fairness." Internally, Google employees <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/current-ex-employees-allege-google-drastically-rolled-back-diversity-inclusion-n1206181" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">told</a> NBC News that the company had rolled back diversity training programs because the company "doesn't want to be seen as anti-conservative." (Google denied the accusation to NBC.) On Election Day in 2020, YouTube allowed the Trump campaign to book an ad on its <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-2020-campaign-spends-big-on-youtube-biden-facebook-2020-11?amp" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">凯发k8官网下载手机版homepage</a> for the entire day, and it was the only <a href="https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-Report-v2.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">one of the top three social platforms</a> that had no explicit policy regarding attempts to delegitimize the election results. After the election, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/4/21550180/youtube-oann-video-election-trump-misinformation-voting-final-results-facebook-twitter" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">videos</a> claiming Trump won went viral, but YouTube only began <a href="https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/supporting-the-2020-us-election/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">removing</a> widespread allegations of fraud and errors on Dec. 9.</p><p>Google and YouTube declined to make any executives available for comment. In a statement, YouTube spokesperson Farshad Shadloo said: "Our Community Guidelines prohibit hate speech, gratuitous violence, incitement to violence, and other forms of intimidation. Content that promotes terrorism or violent extremism does not have a 凯发k8官网下载手机版home on YouTube." Shadloo said YouTube's policies focus on content violations and not speakers or groups, unless those speakers or groups are included on a government foreign terrorist organization list.</p><p>At times, tech giants bent their own policies or adopted entirely new ones to accommodate President Trump and his most conspiratorial supporters on the far right. In January 2018, Twitter, for one, published its "world leaders <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/world-leaders-and-twitter.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">policy</a>" for the first time, seemingly seeking to explain why President Trump wasn't punished for threatening violence when he tweeted that his nuclear button was "much bigger & more powerful" than Kim Jong Un's. Later that year, after Facebook, Apple and YouTube all <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/6/17655658/alex-jones-facebook-youtube-conspiracy-theories" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">shut down</a> accounts and pages linked to Infowars' Alex Jones, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey booked an interview with conservative kingmaker Sean Hannity, where he <a href="https://time.com/5361874/twitter-jack-dorsey-alex-jones-sean-hannity/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">defended</a> Twitter's decision not to do the same. Just a few weeks later, the company would <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-bans-alex-jones-infowars/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reverse course</a> after Jones livestreamed a tirade against a CNN reporter on Twitter — while standing outside of Dorsey's own congressional hearing. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="11">
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<a href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/alex-jones-of-infowars-background-attends-a-senate-intelligence-in-picture-id1027224386?b=1&k=6&m=1027224386&s=170x170&h=1IyYVN-U74jheta0t0kJbu0S6ik1HK0i2o6F2l_FBW8=" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTc0NzQ2MS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MDE2MzI2M30.Fn3bmuFCgNa8RHs9FbhpYRL79TFy0csfebnUMhCdv4E/image.jpg?width=980" id="03c68" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2713b8f837f7dd9f37a2f330f1cb7184" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Twitter defended its decision not to remove accounts tied to InfoWars Alex Jones. Weeks later, Twitter reversed that decision, following CEO Jack Dorsey's testimony before Congress in September of 2018.</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call</small>
</p><p><br></p><p>Jones was a lightning rod for Facebook, too. As BuzzFeed recently <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/mark-zuckerberg-joel-kaplan-facebook-alex-jones?ref=bfnsplash&utm_term=4ldqpho" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reported</a>, Facebook decided in 2019 to do more than just ban Jones' pages. The company wanted to designate him as a dangerous individual, a label that also ordinarily forbids other Facebook users from praising or expressing support for those individuals. But according to BuzzFeed, Facebook altered its own rules at Zuckerberg's behest, creating a third lane for Jones that would allow his supporters' accounts to go untouched. And when President Trump threatened to shoot looters in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing, Facebook staffers <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/28/facebook-zuckerberg-trump-hate/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reportedly</a> called the White House themselves, urging the president to delete or tweak his post. When he didn't, Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/6/3/21279434/mark-zuckerberg-meeting-facebook-employees-transcript-trump-looting-shooting-post" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">told</a> his staff the post didn't violate Facebook's policies against incitement to violence anyway.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="12">
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</div></p><p>"I would argue the looter-shooter post was more violating than [the post] on Jan. 6," Eisenstat said, referring to the Facebook video that ended up getting the former president kicked off of Facebook indefinitely in his last weeks in office. In the video, Trump told the Capitol rioters he loved them and that they were very special, while repeating baseless claims of election fraud. </p><p>For Facebook at least, this instinct to accommodate the party in power wasn't unique to the U.S., said tech entrepreneur Shahed Amanullah, who worked with Facebook on a series of global hackathons through his company, Affinis Labs. The goal of the hackathons, Amanullah said, was to fight all forms of hate and extremism online, and the events had been successful in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. But when he brought the program to India, Amanullah said he received pressure from Facebook India's policy team to focus the event specifically on terrorism coming out of the majority-Muslim region of Kashmir. </p><p>The woman leading Facebook India's policy team at the time, Ankhi Das, was a vocal supporter of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according</a> to The Wall Street Journal, had a pattern of allowing anti-Muslim hate speech to go unchecked on the platform. "I said there's no way I'm ever going to accept a directive like that," Amanullah recalled. </p><p>Though he was supposed to run seven more hackathons in the country, Amanullah cut ties. "That was the last time we ever worked with Facebook," he said. </p><p>A Facebook spokesperson told Protocol, "We've found nothing to suggest this is true. We've looked into it on our end, spoken to people who were present at the hackathon and have no reason to believe that anyone was pressured to shift the focus of the hack." Das did not respond to Protocol's request for comment.</p><p>To Amanullah, the experience working with Facebook in India signaled that the company was giving in to the Indian government and giving Islamist extremism an inordinate amount of attention compared to other threats. "If you want to talk about hate," he said, "you have to talk about all kinds of hate."</p><h2>The reckoning
</h2><p>Looking back in the wake of the Capitol riot, it's easy to view Charlottesville as a warning shot that went unheard, or at least insufficiently answered, by tech giants. And in many ways it was. But inside, things were also changing, albeit far more slowly than almost anyone believes they should have.</p><p>For Fishman, who had focused almost entirely on jihadism on Facebook until that point, the Unite the Right rally was a turning point. "Charlottesville was a moment when extremist groups on the American far right clearly were trying to overcome the historical fractioning of that movement and express themselves in more powerful ways," he said. "It absolutely was something we tracked and realized we needed to invest more resources into."</p><p><br></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/neo-nazis-altright-and-white-supremacists-take-part-a-the-night-the-picture-id830696202?b=1&k=6&m=830696202&s=170x170&h=kiBAUb9a6_lE_STxphpsjj0HB7qMFyB3Iay26r5ShpA=" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTc0ODM3MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY3Mjg2OTAwMH0.uoccdzJpkOcTc1C4mEWPtfwkCRre2qhqmxF5q-2w01o/image.jpg?width=980" id="cc7be" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b6f571c0d913a60ee8ccb11d9b0eb1f3" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which had been planned on Facebook, left three dead and dozens injured.</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Zach D Roberts/Getty Images</small>
</p><p><br></p><p>Immediately after the rally, Facebook <a href="https://twitter.com/Kantrowitz/status/897525520178397185?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">banned</a> eight far-right and white nationalist pages associated with it. That's in addition to hate groups like the National Socialist Movement, the KKK, The Daily Stormer and Identity Evropa, which were already designated as dangerous organizations and forbidden from the platform long before the rally. A few months later, in 2018, Fishman's team changed names, from the counterterrorism team to the dangerous organizations team, a signal that the company would double down on enforcement against hate groups, too. The team working primarily on violent extremism of all stripes at Facebook eventually grew to 350 people.</p><p>In late 2017, Twitter broadened its policy on violent extremism to prohibit all violent extremist groups, not just designated foreign terrorist organizations. And in 2019, YouTube <a href="https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/continuing-our-work-to-improve" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">promised</a> it would limit the spread of misinformation by keeping conspiracy theory videos out of recommendations, a promise it's had some <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/02/technology/youtube-conspiracy-theory.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">success</a> in keeping.</p><p>Even so, these companies repeatedly bungled the definition of what constitutes hate and violent extremism. It was, after all, a year after Charlottesville when Zuckerberg boldly <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">defended</a> Facebook's policy of allowing Holocaust denial in an interview with Recode. It wasn't until 2020 that Zuckerberg changed his mind about that, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10112455086578451" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">citing</a> "data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence." His post never fully acknowledged the role Facebook's earlier policies might have played in stoking that violence.</p><p>There were also legitimate reasons why identifying and removing domestic hate groups in the U.S. was harder than taking down networks of accounts tied to ISIS and al-Qaeda. For one thing, domestic groups and the people associated with them have traditionally been far more diffuse, making it tougher to draw neat lines around them or use clues in their branding to find and remove whole networks. "Groups that are less organized and less structured and don't put out official propaganda in the same sort of way, you have to use a different tool kit in order to get at those kinds of entities," Fishman said. "Chasing the networks becomes even more important than chasing known pieces of content that you can gather using vendors."</p><p>Then, there's the fact that tech companies defined hate in limited ways. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all introduced hate speech policies that generally prohibit direct attacks on the basis of specific categories like race or sexual orientation. But what to do with a new conspiracy theory like QAnon that hinges on some imagined belief in a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democratic pedophiles? Or a group of self-proclaimed "Western chauvinists" like the Proud Boys cloaking themselves in the illusion that white pride doesn't necessarily require racial animus? Or the #StoptheSteal groups, which were based on a lie, propagated by the former president of the United States, that the election had been stolen? These movements were shot through with hate and violence, but initially, they didn't fit neatly into any of the companies' definitions. And those companies, operating in a fraught political environment, were in turn slow to admit, at least publicly, that their definitions needed to change. </p><p>It's also true that it's philosophically trickier for American companies to ban people who are not faraway terrorists, but other Americans, whom the U.S. government couldn't punish for their beliefs even if it wanted to. For all of the bad-faith concerns about censorship, it's also possible to argue with a straight face that platforms shouldn't have even more power to police speech than Congress has. "I find that to be kind of troubling at a time when so many people are talking about tech platforms having too much power, we look to them to do what governments would be unable to do," said Matt Perault, director of Duke University's Center on Science & Technology Policy and Facebook's former director of public policy. </p><p>All of those considerations complicated tech companies' efforts to respond to domestic threats that could be harmful but haven't yet caused harm. "One of the biggest challenges around designing a policy and enforcement framework in these areas is when you have domestic [actors] who are part of this conversation, who are not promoting violence," Pickles said, after recently <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/twitter-conspiracy-theory-donald-trump-b1790200.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">admitting</a> that Twitter was too slow to act on QAnon. It wasn't until after the Capitol attack that Twitter began <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/protecting--the-conversation-following-the-riots-in-washington--.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">permanently banning</a> accounts for primarily sharing QAnon content.</p><p>It's not always easy to predict which extreme beliefs will turn violent either, said Green, who has spent the last few years focusing on both violent <a href="https://jigsaw.google.com/the-current/white-supremacy/countermeasures/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">white supremacists</a> and conspiracy theorists at Jigsaw. In late 2019, Green traveled to Tennessee and Alabama to meet with people who believe in a range of conspiracy theories, from flat earthers to Sandy Hook deniers. "I went into the field with a strong hypothesis that I know which conspiracy theories are violent and which aren't," Green said. But the research surprised her, as some conspiracy theorists she believed to be innocuous, like flat earthers, were far more militant followers than the ones she considered violent, like people who believed in white genocide. </p><p>"We spoke to flat earthers who could tell you which NASA scientists are propagating a world view and what they would do to them if they could," Green said.</p><p>Even more challenging: Of the 77 conspiracy theorists Green's team interviewed, there wasn't a single person who believed in only one conspiracy. That makes mapping out the scope of the threat much more complex than fixating on a single group.</p><p>The runup to the 2020 election did accelerate some of this work, in part because the real-world threat was accelerating, too. After extremists associated with the far right, anti-government boogaloo movement <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-17/far-right-boogaloo-boys-linked-to-killing-of-california-lawmen-other-violence" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">carried</a> out a series of killings in 2020, Facebook <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/banning-a-violent-network-in-the-us/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">designated</a> the boogaloos as a dangerous organization in June. "We saw something that we thought looked like a real network, a real entity, not just a bunch of guys using shared imagery in order to project frustration at the government," Fishman said.</p><p class="pull-quote">The reason we put policies [in place] like those we built over 2020 was because of concern about something like Jan. 6.</p><p>As the blurred lines between militia groups and conspiracy theorists became obvious throughout summer 2020, Facebook also <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/addressing-movements-and-organizations-tied-to-violence/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">barred</a> hundreds of militarized groups like the Oath Keepers. And, after initially attempting to merely limit the spread of QAnon, it wound up banning all accounts, pages and groups "representing QAnon" in October and launching its own version of the Redirect Method to point people searching QAnon-related terms toward more credible sources. Meanwhile, Facebook's automated filters against hate speech also made significant strides, with the company <a href="/covid-facebook-content-moderation" target="_self">removing</a> more than double the amount of hate speech in the second quarter of 2020 as it did in the first.</p><p>YouTube <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/15/youtube-qanon-crackdown/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">cracked down</a> on QAnon too, prohibiting "content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence." And it kicked out white supremacists like <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/29/youtube-ban-stefan-molyneux-david-duke-white-nationalism/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Duke and Richard Spencer</a>, who had managed to evade the company's hate speech policies for years. Twitter, in addition to banning the <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-bans-far-right-militia-group-the-oath-keepers" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Oath Keepers</a>, began aggressively labeling President Trump's tweets over the summer for glorifying violence and, after the election, for spreading misinformation about voter fraud. Twitter also launched a new policy prohibiting "<a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/coordinated-harmful-activity" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">coordinated harmful activity</a>," in June 2020, a policy that was meant to rope in dangerous mass movements and conspiracy theorists who weren't always explicitly violent. </p><p>Dorsey and Zuckerberg, at least, paid for these decisions in hours spent flagellating themselves before incensed Republicans in Congress. (YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has, for the most part, avoided their ire.) But to anyone who was watching closely, it was clear from the frequent announcements and policy changes coming from tech companies that these global behemoths were preparing for an election like they'd seen other countries — countries where there is no such thing as a peaceful transfer of power. "The reason we put policies [in place] like those we built over 2020 was because of concern about something like Jan. 6," Fishman said. </p><h2>What comes next?</h2><p>Then came Jan. 6, and none of those policies were enough. Like the string of ISIS attacks before it, the raid inside the U.S. Capitol showed just how permeable both the country's digital and physical defenses still were against the evolving threat of domestic extremists. "It's not just organizations," Fishman said. "It's not just structured ideologies, even. It includes folks that are haphazard adherents to various conspiracy theories. It extends from people engaged primarily in the political process to folks that are explicitly rejecting political resolution of disputes, and all of that was represented on the mall on Jan. 6."</p><p>Indeed, a recent George Washington University <a href="https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/This-Is-Our-House.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">study</a> found that the majority of rioters who have been charged so far for their involvement had no known ties to domestic violent extremist organizations. They were, instead, what the researchers call "inspired believers."</p><p>"The challenge is now to figure out what you do with all of those different pieces," Fishman said.</p><p class="media-headline"><br></p><p><br></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/trump-supporters-clash-with-police-and-security-forces-as-they-push-picture-id1230455457?b=1&k=6&m=1230455457&s=170x170&h=aXZUKUHmyCSOiRdkxTX3TiTj6f1iS5rjCKoaEKYrVgU=" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTc0ODkzOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzOTgxMTA5Mn0.8mtmhIl18Qhp6Km4e7Rgx6H4hmSCymxFYW4Rb86Ytcw/image.jpg?width=980" id="94878" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4ce12a6cc893405f9c93e51429408922" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">The Jan. 6 right inside the U.S. Capitol forced a reckoning on Big Tech's approach to domestic extremists.</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images</small>
</p><p><br></p><p>It's no coincidence that tech companies' increased willingness to crack down on far-right fringe movements comes as Democrats have taken <a href="/facebook-ban-trump-democrats-power" target="_self">control</a> of both the White House and Congress. The same political pragmatism that stalled efforts to address domestic extremism during the Trump years will undoubtedly animate efforts to fight domestic extremism in the Biden years. But having government officials in place who actually recognize domestic extremism as a threat and prioritize it could help Big Tech's efforts, too. "Insight from government about what's happening off of Twitter is a really important part of making sure our policies keep pace with what's happening," Pickles said.<br></p><p>That doesn't mean tech companies will march in lockstep with the Biden administration when it comes to identifying domestic extremists — or that they should. After all, the United States has a long and checkered history of casting civil rights leaders as domestic extremists and using that to justify all manner of surveillance and violence. Just last year, President Trump traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and <a href="https://apnews.com/article/4a58a15c9955bb6312c1fbe42215110d" target="_blank">accused</a> Black Lives Matter protesters of being domestic terrorists, too.</p><p>"I think the government has a really important role in helping educate civil society, including industry. And there are things the government can do and validate that we don't know," Fishman said. "But there are reasons Facebook designates organizations under our dangerous organizations policy ourselves."</p><p>As the Department of 凯发k8官网下载手机版homeland Security and other agencies issue warnings about domestic violent extremism, Fishman said it will be critical for those agencies to share more context about those threats so platforms can make informed decisions. "Show us the footnotes," he said. "This is going to be one of the things that I think the government needs to do more of."</p><p>Of course, there's a lot the industry could do more of too. For one thing, critics like Farid say it needs to acknowledge and take responsibility for the way its algorithms often amplify violent extremism through recommendations. "Why are they so good at targeting you with content that's consistent with your prior engagement, but somehow when it comes to harm, they become bumbling idiots?" asked Farid, who remains dubious of Big Tech's efforts to control violent extremists. "You can't have it both ways."</p><p>Facebook, for one, recently <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knew-calls-for-violence-plagued-groups-now-plans-overhaul-11612131374" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">said</a> it would stop recommending political and civic groups to its users, after reportedly <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knew-calls-for-violence-plagued-groups-now-plans-overhaul-11612131374" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">finding</a> that the vast majority of them included hate, misinformation or calls to violence leading up to the 2020 election. Facebook is also now experimenting with <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2021/02/reducing-political-content-in-news-feed/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">limiting</a> the amount of political content in some users' news feeds.</p><p>"I do think things are trending up," said Greer, whose work at the Anti-Defamation League involves pushing companies on issues of violent extremism. "There are a lot of people working to solve these challenges. We are making some headway."</p><p>But more cross-industry collaboration on this front is crucial, particularly as violent extremists move from the big three platforms to smaller sites with less formidable defenses. Today, the GIFCT database includes roughly 300,000 unique hashed images and videos that all of its members can tap into. But the majority of those images and videos are tied to organizations on the United Nations' designated entities list, which includes almost entirely Islamist extremists. </p><p>Last month, the organization's executive director, Nick Rasmussen, acknowledged this shortcoming in a letter to the GIFCT community, asking for concrete proposals for expanding the hash database. "While GIFCT member companies are able to tag or 'hash' content associated with U.N.-designated terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, GIFCT does not currently have a framework in place for responding to terrorist and violent extremist content from all parts of the ideological spectrum, representing a critical gap in our collective efforts to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms," Rasmussen wrote. The organization recently brought on Erin Saltman, a leading expert in far-right extremism and Facebook's former head of the dangerous organizations team in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, to be its director of programming.</p><p>Tackling this problem will require tech companies to take a broader view of what constitutes harm, looking not just at violent threats, but other common language that links violent movements. In her research on conspiracy theorists, Green said one commonality she's found that separates passive adherents to violent ones is their sense of urgency. She cited the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter's final post, which <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/pittsburgh-synagogue-alleged-mass-shooter-told-swat-officers/story?id=58803485" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">read</a>, "Screw the optics. I'm going in," as evidence. "He felt that it was so urgent," Green said. "Same with Pizzagate. Same with QAnon. Same with Stop the Steal. That's why that conspiracy theory turned violent. It wasn't just the very large scale threat of an election being stolen, but also that you have to go now and take back your rights."</p><p>On March 25, Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Pichai will testify before Congress for the first time since the Capitol attack. The three men will undoubtedly come armed with talking points about how their policies have evolved and how they're committed to doing better. But that conversation will likely only be the first of many as the threat from violent extremists here in the U.S. continues to grow.</p><p>"This isn't over," Fishman said of the aftermath of Jan. 6. "This is going to be with us for a long time."</p>
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Google wants to connect everything you own to the internet
Surveilling older adults, connected helmets, wearables talking to doctors and other patents from Big Tech.
Make all the things smart!
Image: Google/USPTO
February 7, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 7, 2021
Hello and welcome back to the world of zany patents from Big Tech! While 2020 is still dragging on (I know it's 2021, but you can't tell me 2020 is over until I can go anywhere other than the grocery store), at least there are still great new patents to uncover. And there's some fascinating ones this week, including Facebook wanting to make clothes like real in games, Microsoft trying to make sports more inclusive and Google wanting to make it easier to spy on your parents. If that's something you want to do.
And remember: The big tech companies file all kinds of crazy patents for things, and though most never amount to anything, some end up defining the future.
<h3>Alphabet</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10909832&IDKey=E2C372F869B5%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D12%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u><strong>Surveilling older adults</strong></u></a></p><p>People who have aging parents might find themselves checking in frequently to make sure Mom and Dad are OK, or even buying gadgets or products that make it a little easier to be self-sufficient. Google's solution, according to this patent, is a way to keep tabs on them remotely. Using smart sensors placed around the house, a system like Google 凯发k8官网下载手机版home could be set up to alert a third party about what's happening in the house. For example, the system can send an alert if it notices that nobody is moving around at specific times, and you can then decide whether to call or text to check in. Just be sure to ask your parents' permission first before you turn their 凯发k8官网下载手机版home into a personal panopticon. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/aqPPk6Zx9eptCvcoH0C6gk9ttWQhaCtpeE8pxZjwGeI54BMZD60ZX3tMkzoTmRS-EOc3adg_0hEeJvy-guXvom7KGhlpLwEbPYmeEX-qZliYUB-9NJD8_XoFwbimneKW_yfHCK3s"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10908732&IDKey=C0EE25D3B384%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D29%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" target="_blank"><u><strong>Making analog products digital</strong></u></a></p><p>A few years ago, Google introduced Jacquard, its project for interweaving electronic sensors into fabrics. It's been used to add phone controls to denim jackets, bags and even shoes. It's a neat idea, but it requires you to buy new products that you might not actually want. With this patent, Google envisions bringing that same concept to any product you already own and making it smart. That could be things like touch sensors or tracking movement — perhaps you could just slap one of these on your parents instead of putting sensors all over their house. </p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/bPwslTHzq2PFvILbefC4P8rID9ot4DROmm2HpREy8a2hT8N4nqoaNG7hsRUon0EUvTMIkEZx_GifA72qfM1vmVXE9iGIgqh0x-cIcz9QyoElPVewsZs-pEblxhUivDKSQwMLUR4S"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10905328&IDKey=542E633FED99%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D6%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dverily.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fverily%2526RS%3DAN%2Fverily" target="_blank"><u><strong>Keeping your doctor in the loop</strong></u></a></p><p>Alphabet's health research arm, Verily, is thinking about a future — which we <a href="/manuals/health-care-revolution/future-of-health-care-wearables" target="_self"><u>might currently be living through</u></a> — where people don't need to get to the doctor to be diagnosed. This patent envisions a wearable that can constantly track your heart (it's unclear how much of a drain this would be on a small wearable battery), and identify any potential issues by consulting databases online, like if your data suggests that you might be having an arrhythmia. While there's a few wearables on the market that can do something like this right now, this patent imagines automatically sharing that data with your doctor, presumably so they could review the data, or potentially algorithmically warn you and your doctor that an emergency situation is underway. Hopefully it doesn't call your doctor <a href="https://twitter.com/mcwm/status/1170321867342843911" target="_blank"><u>if you suck at golf</u></a>, though. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/3avW8eqXPzgADxX3aAz9mt2_hYL9X0arzL_hrZD_E1U4WGceRmfAFtmOGRey5plQfwTeXvvk3RHdyzisWEDKdhuIZ1zVRrLCevaqO2XYPOvZ5CbJ-P-iezh6KzhLgGnttY98eXmY"></p><h3>Amazon</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=64&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&s1=amazon.ASNM.&p=2&OS=AN/amazon&RS=AN/amazon" target="_blank"><u><strong>Autonomous avoiding</strong></u></a></p><p>This one is conceptually quite straightforward, but important nonetheless when you're thinking about a phalanx of delivery drones flying around on their own. The patent outlines a laser range-finding system mounted on drone rotors that can help the drones "see" what's around them so they could shift their routes to avoid it. But for many in the drone industry, it's not really the tech that's holding back autonomous deliveries — <a href="/alphabet-wing-drone-delivery-coronavirus" target="_self"><u>it's humans</u></a>. </p><p><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/BgpsJjJm62FynXbwVvwCY8gnA45ypo1HTs_SxBcZNfB1BuB0L824xC6ygkphev8sJPT55WEX-og5fNIzx3hvudtULw5pmx2HbaG_2S3Wmsifvq3TPtFVkZu074w4Fx10AuXeYnAX"></p><h3>Apple</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10909389&IDKey=A422DE8D3462%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D49%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3D%252522apple%252Binc%252522.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2F%252522apple%252Binc%252522%2526RS%3DAN%2F%252522apple%252Binc%252522" target="_blank"><u><strong>Detecting traffic wardens</strong></u></a></p><p>Rather like with autonomous delivery drones, it's good to know that Apple is thinking about what obstacles its autonomous vehicles might encounter. In this patent, it's specifically thinking about what to do when a car sees something that appears to be someone guiding traffic, and how to react to various hand signals they might make. This makes me think about a future where I could just carry a stop sign around with me and become the king of robot cars, directing them to follow my every whim. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/F6JQSxHys3DyDSpjetpIH9o_dffTSLDiU8OT5QBVw8-0Z41DPwI7d42RJAsJsbgoPG3f-iBMzo3vQiCCUWKxNlRPa1Vohgg2N_uLz51F_W0s9wA5Fm55k7DvbUax6hwYos5JlBIl"></p><h3>Facebook</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10909744&IDKey=EF191432D67E%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D15%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dfacebook.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Ffacebook%2526RS%3DAN%2Ffacebook" target="_blank"><u><strong>Simulating clothing</strong></u></a></p><p>If you've ever played a video game where someone is wearing clothes (which is … most of them??), you've probably noticed that they don't exactly fall like the ones you wear IRL. I think my favorite example is uniforms in sports games; the systems usually recognize now that cloth stretches as people move, but then instead of just stretching the fabric, they'll stretch out the letters in players' names, making it look like the jerseys are made of elastic. Facebook's patent outlines a system that uses a machine learning-based "cloth simulator" to more realistically mimic how physics affects the wrinkles in simulated clothes. With Facebook's deep push into VR, this could be one of the things that helps the platform feel less like an awkward immersive video game and more like real life, represented in a headset. </p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/hAYzpzP66pKPcM_kiwQSij5lS8BQNYz7uW0DU6jajuUZQU3lbxqzaZxmtsDrRaXBXRnua8ff8nanf1i0MMn_5AVlFuPRiQelhfpcNr2r_PbbT2qVV6lwcBukYMyv_c_UuoiM5-oF"></p><h3>Microsoft</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10909321&IDKey=1CE7985A9F2E%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D52%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dmicrosoft.ASNM.%2526p%3D2%2526OS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft%2526RS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft" target="_blank"><u><strong>An automatic travel diary</strong></u></a></p><p>When I was growing up, my mom used to make me write a diary anytime we went on vacation. It was a noble endeavor, but amazingly, my child brain was more interested in actually being on vacation than writing about it later. Regardless of what that might have meant from my chosen career, my adult brain is still a fan of this idea. The patent suggests a system that can auto-generate a travel diary based on your calls, texts, photos, location and other data from your phone. You could then share your digital diary with anyone you might want to make jealous — though you should probably consider whether giving over that much data to a system like this is worth the hate-likes. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/tV2JViV9zkMwQcQMg5nGU6-f9ijXqfIz79L47LV-utpG7-DY3Ll9-vovsj3Kp1piNzrFWq5vpka9NWGwbDoALamukQfBXOOZInqoCD5RWIN9wAHcmPmFhWDdOn-upm8_AYbgbo4B"></p><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=50&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=microsoft.ASNM.&OS=AN/microsoft&RS=AN/microsoft" target="_blank"><u><strong>Bringing sports to visually-impaired people</strong></u></a><br></p><p>If this could work, this could be a really neat way to make sports somewhat more inclusive. This patent envisions using sensors to help visually impaired people play sports. The example it gives includes something that looks a lot like an Xbox Kinect sensor built into a batting helmet. In the example, the helmet could provide a signal to the wearer that a pitch is incoming and it's time to swing. Alerts could be vibrations, sounds or other sensory flags. And although it might look odd to wear a batting helmet outside of the baseball diamond, the patent also envisions a system for other aspects of daily life, such as alerting the wearer when it's safe to cross the road. </p><p><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/mSxnCEL4X0Dm0lMpQ44R8ywUtfIYKOH5TA2rIOjAQa4rHmVDmenCuCTC6JuvEkxMrAFOPAo4ZWqqxtTb0HILAC_ZV3Y9dfbL8XIjNGjwRgibcmZWaOZ1P79j3obf2AgrRQNvoa4o"></p><p><br><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10909639&IDKey=8EBE02881232%0D%0A&凯发k8官网下载手机版homeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D42%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dmicrosoft.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft%2526RS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft" target="_blank"><u><strong>Icebreakers on social media</strong></u></a><br></p><p>If you've had to do any team-building exercises over Zoom during this pandemic, you've probably come across a few sessions of icebreaker questions. Maybe you've had to share what you'd take from your house in a fire, or what brands you unquestionably love. It's a sure-fire way to get people chatting. In this patent, Microsoft is envisioning bringing that energy into the rest of your life, whether on conversations you're having on social media, or even phone calls you're receiving. Pertinent information about friends, colleagues or new connections could be displayed next to their names on social media or when they're calling you, offering something to talk about other than work or the weather, like which marathons they've run or which '90s rock band they're still seeing live. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
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