Group items tagged

"Major Wall Street institutions were cracked wide open by a phishing scam from FIN4, a hacker group that, unlike its competition, can write convincingly and employs some basic smarts about why people open attachments."

"To demonstrate how reality may differ for different Facebook users, The Wall Street Journal created two feeds, one "blue" and the other "red." If a source appears in the red feed, a majority of the articles shared from the source were classified as "very conservatively aligned" in a large 2015 Facebook study. For the blue feed, a majority of each source's articles aligned "very liberal." These aren't intended to resemble actual individual news feeds. Instead, they are rare side-by-side looks at real conversations from different perspectives. "

"Dye told the Wall Street Journal that hackers increasingly use novel methods and bugs in the software of computers to perform attacks, resulting in about 55% cyberattacks going unnoticed by commercial antivirus software."

"It's been said that software is "eating the world." More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal's website crashed; and Seattle's 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack"

"Humming does not sit easily with the way we imagine technology, but it highlights a crucial truth about how humans navigate the world of work, in offices, online or anywhere else: even if we think we are rational, logical creatures, we make decisions in social groups by absorbing a wide range of signals. And perhaps the best way to understand this is to employ an idea popularised by anthropologists working at companies such as Xerox during the late 20th century, and since used by Beunza and others on Wall Street: "Sense-making"."

"Robinhood's free-trading revolution helped pave the way to the recent Reddit mayhem on Wall Street. The rise of Robinhood means that the ability to buy stocks, on a whim, is now at everyone's fingertips. Robinhood has opened investing up to the masses. Rival online brokerages were forced to mimic Robinhood's zero-commission business model, and some joined forces just to survive. "

"What the apps have done, instead of competing to serve customers and restaurants, is use Wall Street money to accumulate market power, raise barriers to entry, and then merge with each other and set up regional monopolies.The people who have invested tens of billions of dollars in the four dominant delivery apps tolerate huge short-term losses purely because they see the likelihood of monopoly power"

"What wasn't publicly known until now is that Facebook actually ran experiments to see how the changes would affect publishers-and when it found that some of them would have a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing "junk sites," as a former employee with knowledge of the conversations puts it, the engineers were sent back to lessen those impacts. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, they came back in January 2018 with a second iteration that dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead."

""We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," said a slide from one internal presentation in 2019, seen by the Wall Street Journal. "Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," a subsequent presentation reported in March 2020."

"As adolescents and young adults fled Facebook for platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook knew its long-term survival depended on winning over that demographic. But the savvy business move had a different, less public price tag. Caught up in recommendations from a powerful algorithm designed to keep them engaged, some teen girls found Instagram worsened their body image, according to a new Wall Street Journal investigation. Users even pinned feelings of increased depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking on the app."

" This is wholly unacceptable behavior. Our books are copyrighted material, not free fodder for wealthy companies to use as they see fit, without permission or compensation. Many, many hours of serious research, creative angst and plain old hard work go into writing and publishing a book, and few writers are compensated like professional athletes, Hollywood actors or Wall Street investment bankers. Stealing our intellectual property hurts. Well, sure, Mr Cohan, but I have to point out: there are humans out there reading your books and getting ideas from them. Or at least, one sure hopes there are, because otherwise all those many hours of serious research etc have really gone to waste. As writers, if we don't influence what people think, what's the point? Furthermore, if we get a chance to influence what robots write, shouldn't we leap at it?"

"Teatreneu's administrators found an ingenious solution: partnering with the advertising agency Cyranos McCann, they fitted the back of every seat with fancy tablets that can analyse facial expressions. Under the new model, visitors enter the club for free but have to pay 30 cents for every laugh recognised by the tablet - with a cap of €24 (or 80 laughs) per show. A mobile app makes it easier to complete the payment; the overall ticket prices have reportedly gone up by €6. As a bonus, you can also share your smiling selfie with friends: the path from funny to viral has never been shorter."