Group items tagged

Verizon Communications Inc. wants to attract teens and millennials who are more used to watching videos on their mobile phones than on a TV in a living room. Yahoo! Inc., which is spinning out its main Web business, has been investing heavily in online-video content.

So it’s probably not a coincidence that executives at the largest U.S. wireless carrier were chattier than usual this week when asked the question: Would Verizon be interested in buying Yahoo’s Internet assets?

Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam and Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo, using similar language, both said within the past two days that Verizon would look at a Yahoo deal "if it made sense," instead of declining to comment. 

there are now only two types of companies left in the United States: those that have been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked.

an annual Verizon report, which counted 621 confirmed data breaches last year, and more than 47,000 reported “security incidents.”

the report shows that no matter the size of the organization — large, small, government agencies, banks, restaurants, retailers — people are stealing data from a range of different organizations and it’s a problem everyone has to deal with.”

May's Jobs Report: Very Disappointing

. Economists were expecting a modest 158,000 jobs to be added last month, meaning that May’s disappointing jobs report will almost surely be read as a sign of a slowing economy. It is the smallest number of jobs added in a monthly jobs report since 2010.

oughly 35,000 Verizon workers were on strike in the month of May, but they returned to work this week after an agreement between Verizon and its union was reached

new Internet tools are allowing very ordinary people to defeat some of the most powerful corporate and political interests around — by threatening the titans with the online equivalent of a tarring and feathering.

Skepticism is warranted, but so far Change.org petitions have seen some remarkable successes. Ecuador, for example, used to run a network of “clinics” where lesbians were sometimes abused in the guise of being made heterosexual. A petition denouncing this practice gathered more than 100,000 signatures, leading Ecuador to close the clinics, announce a national advertising campaign against homophobia, and appoint a gay-rights activist as health minister.

Take Molly Katchpole. Last fall, as a 22-year-old nanny living in Washington, D.C., she was peeved by a new $5-a-month fee for debit cards announced by Bank of America, with other banks expected to follow. She took an hour to write a petition, her first. “After a month it had 306,000 signatures,” Katchpole told me. “That’s when the banks backed down.” Bank of America and other financial institutions withdrew plans for the fee. Soon afterward, she started a second petition, protesting a $2 charge imposed by Verizon for paying certain bills online. In 48 hours it had attracted more than 160,000 signatures — and Verizon withdrew the fee.

The Huffington Post sits at the center of a phenomenon that some describe as the birth of a new media establishment: Several digital start-ups, including BuzzFeed and Vice, are trying to upend news presentation the way cable channels encroached on broadcast television in the 1980s. By that measure, some in the industry say, $1 billion is a reasonable valuation for a site with more than 200 million unique visitors a month, and acquiring it is a smart play for Verizon as it follows other communications companies, like Comcast, in owning its own content.

Others see, instead, a frothy market that has led to overly high valuations for media companies, based largely on branding and a relentless focus on audience development techniques. Photo

According to a document published in 2013 by the website The Smoking Gun, The Huffington Post was expected to generate $60 million in revenue in 2011, when AOL bought it, with $10 million in Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) growing to $165 million in revenue and $58 million in Ebitda by 2013. People with knowledge of its current finances said that its annual revenue is now in the hundreds of millions, and that its profitability depends on how generously its recent investments in a global expansion and video are assessed.

Former Vice President Al Gore on Wednesday night leveled some rare and harsh criticism at the Obama administration, attacking its reported collection of phone records for millions of Americans.

the National Security Agency has used a secret court order issued in April to collect the records of all phone calls made on the Verizon network.

The 2000 Democratic presidential nominee took to Twitter to call the monitoring “obscenely outrageous.”

Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.

What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.

The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days

The Content Cycle, a phrase I did not just come up with right now, describes how content arises from the internet, is absorbed into cable television, and then gets redistributed back into the internet for the cycle to begin anew.

Like the water cycle, the Content Cycle provides sustenance and habitation to a multitude of organisms, and in many ways it exists independently of human thought

Stage One: Raw Content. The content cycle almost always begins with content that is freely distributed on a large social network.

President Trump asked the Pentagon “to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation” for America’s military, so we might be seeing the first national military parade since 1991. Will it cost millions? Probably. Will there be counter-demonstrations? Sure. Is there a risk of terrorist attacks? Of course. Should it happen? Absolutely, and here’s why.

What about the cost? Americans love parades—and advertisers do too. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade attracts 3.5 million attendees, and almost 50 million television viewers. The TV advertising revenue alone was worth more than $41 million in 2016. The Rose Bowl parade has a much smaller crowd, but nearly the same number of television viewers. CNBC says that participation in that parade “comes with a hefty price tag, but corporate sponsors say the chance to get their company's message out to millions is worth the expense.”

Unfortunately, military service never even occurs to many of America’s best and brightest. Since retiring from the military in 2010, I’ve run across quite a few people—young and old, but especially young—who have never personally seen, let alone spoken with, an active duty member of the armed forces (or even any veterans—who now comprise just 7.3% of the population).   

Because net neutrality shelters start-ups — which can’t easily pay for fast-line access — from internet giants that can pay, the rules are just about the last bulwark against the complete corporate takeover of much of online life.

When the rules go, the internet will still work, but it will look like and feel like something else altogether — a network in which business development deals, rather than innovation, determine what you experience, a network that feels much more like cable TV than the technological Wild West that gave you Napster and Netflix.

The five most valuable American companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — control much of the online infrastructure, from app stores to operating systems to cloud storage to nearly all of the online ad business. A handful of broadband companies — AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon, many of which are also aiming to become content companies, because why not — provide virtually all the internet connections to American homes and smartphones.

Apparently, at a network that specializes in spreading lies, there was a price to pay for getting it right.

In recent days, Fox has taken a sharp turn toward a more extreme approach as it confronts a post-Trump ratings dip — the result of some of its farthest-right viewers moving to outlets such as Newsmax and One America News and some middle-of-the-roaders apparently finding CNN or MSNBC more to their liking.

the network has decided to add an hour of opinion programming to its prime-time offerings. The 7 p.m. hour will no longer be nominally news but straight-up outrage production.

Facebook’s decision to refrain from policing the claims of political ads is not unreasonable. But the company’s officers have been incompetent at explaining and defending this decision.

If Facebook’s leaders were willing to level with us, they would stop defending themselves by appealing to lofty values like free speech

They would focus instead on more practical realities: Facebook is incapable of vetting political ads effectively and consistently at the global scale. And political ads are essential to maintaining the company’s presence in countries around the world.

Louisiana voters passed a ballot measure in Tuesday’s election that enshrines anti-abortion language in the state’s constitution, The Associated Press projected. 

Amendment 1 adds language to the Louisiana Constitution stating that nothing in it “shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”

state courts would not be able to declare that abortion restrictions violate the Louisiana Constitution. Any restrictions would be fair game, from limits on when a woman can have the procedure to an outright ban.