The Bangladesh Today (21-01-2018)
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SCIENCE & TECH<br />
5<br />
suNDAY, JANuArY <strong>21</strong>, 2<strong>01</strong>8<br />
Fixing Facebook is Mark’s New Year’s resolution<br />
JuLIA CArrIe WoNg<br />
Amid unceasing criticism<br />
of Facebook's<br />
immense power and<br />
pernicious impact on<br />
society, its CEO, Mark<br />
Zuckerberg, announced<br />
Thursday that his "personal<br />
challenge" for<br />
2<strong>01</strong>8 will be "to focus<br />
on fixing these important<br />
issues".<br />
Zuckerberg's new<br />
year's resolution - a<br />
tradition for the executive<br />
who in previous<br />
years has pledged to<br />
learn Mandarin, run<br />
365 miles, and read a<br />
book each week - is a<br />
remarkable acknowledgment<br />
of the terrible<br />
year Facebook has had.<br />
"Facebook has a lot of<br />
work to do whether it's<br />
protecting our community<br />
from abuse and<br />
hate, defending against<br />
interference by nation<br />
states, or making sure<br />
that time spent on<br />
Facebook is time well<br />
spent," Zuckerberg<br />
wrote on his Facebook<br />
page. "We won't prevent<br />
all mistakes or<br />
abuse, but we currently<br />
make too many errors<br />
enforcing our policies<br />
and preventing misuse<br />
of our tools."<br />
At the beginning of<br />
2<strong>01</strong>7, as many liberals<br />
were grappling with<br />
Donald Trump's election<br />
and the widening<br />
divisions in American<br />
society, Zuckerberg<br />
embarked on a series of<br />
trips to meet regular<br />
Americans in all 50<br />
states. But while<br />
Zuckerberg was donning<br />
hard hats and riding<br />
tractors, an increasing<br />
number of critics<br />
both inside and outside<br />
of the tech industry<br />
were identifying Facebook<br />
as a key driver of<br />
many of society's current<br />
ills.<br />
<strong>The</strong> past year has<br />
seen the social media<br />
company try and largely<br />
fail to get a handle<br />
on the proliferation of<br />
misinformation on its<br />
platform; acknowledge<br />
that it enabled a Russian<br />
influence operation<br />
to influence the US<br />
presidential election;<br />
and concede that its<br />
products can damage<br />
users' mental health.<br />
By attempting to take<br />
on these complex problems<br />
as his annual personal<br />
challenge,<br />
Zuckerberg is, for the<br />
first time, setting himself<br />
a task that he is<br />
unlikely to achieve.<br />
With 2 billion users<br />
and a presence in<br />
almost every country,<br />
Mark Zuckerberg sets a personal challenge each year.<br />
Photo: Noah Berger<br />
the company's challenges<br />
are no longer<br />
bugs that can be<br />
addressed by engineering<br />
code.<br />
Facebook, like other<br />
tech giants, has long<br />
maintained that it is<br />
essentially politically<br />
neutral - the company<br />
has "community standards"<br />
but no clearly<br />
articulated political<br />
orientation. While in<br />
past years, that neutrality<br />
has enabled<br />
Facebook to grow at<br />
great speed without<br />
assuming responsibility<br />
for how individuals<br />
or governments used<br />
its tools, the political<br />
tumult of recent years<br />
has made such a stance<br />
increasingly untenable.<br />
<strong>The</strong> difficulty of Facebook's<br />
task is illustrated<br />
in the company's<br />
current conundrum<br />
over enforcing of US<br />
sanctions against some<br />
world leaders but not<br />
others, leaving<br />
observers to wonder<br />
what rules, if any, Facebook<br />
is actually playing<br />
by. Zuckerberg<br />
acknowledged that the<br />
problems facing a platform<br />
with 2 billion<br />
users "touch on questions<br />
of history, civics,<br />
political philosophy,<br />
media, government,<br />
and of course technology"<br />
and said that he<br />
planned to consult with<br />
experts in those fields.<br />
But the second half of<br />
Zuckerberg's post, in<br />
which he discusses centralization<br />
and decentralization<br />
of power in<br />
technology, reveal<br />
Zuckerberg's general<br />
approach: proposing<br />
technological solutions<br />
to political problems. If<br />
Zuckerberg is interested<br />
in decentralization<br />
of power, he might<br />
wish to address his<br />
company's pattern of<br />
aggressively acquiring<br />
its competitors - or<br />
simply copying their<br />
features.<br />
Instead, the executive<br />
introduced a non<br />
sequitur about encryption<br />
and cryptocurrency,<br />
neither of which will<br />
do anything to address<br />
Facebook's role in, for<br />
example, stoking anti-<br />
Rohingya hatred in<br />
Myanmar. If Zuckerberg<br />
truly intends to<br />
spend a year trying to<br />
figure out how the<br />
blockchain can solve<br />
intractable geopolitical<br />
problems, he would be<br />
better off just doing<br />
Whole30.<br />
How YouTube places ads<br />
on popular videos<br />
An investment is something that has intrinsic value, not speculative value.<br />
Photo: getty Images<br />
Don’t think about investing in bitcoin<br />
TeCHNoLogY Desk<br />
I've been watching this bitcoin situation<br />
for a few years, assuming it would just<br />
blow over. But a collective insanity has<br />
sprouted around the new field of "cryptocurrencies",<br />
causing an irrational<br />
gold rush worldwide. It has gotten to<br />
the point where a large number of<br />
financial stories - and questions in my<br />
inbox - ask whether or not to "invest" in<br />
BitCoin.<br />
Let's start with the answer: no. You<br />
should not invest in Bitcoin. <strong>The</strong> reason<br />
why is that it's not an investment; just<br />
as gold, tulip bulbs, Beanie Babies, and<br />
rare baseball cards are also not investments.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se are all things that people have<br />
bought in the past, driving them to<br />
absurd prices, not because they did<br />
anything useful or produced money or<br />
had social value, but solely because<br />
people thought they could sell them on<br />
to someone else for more money in the<br />
future.<br />
When you make this kind of purchase<br />
- which you should never do - you are<br />
speculating. This is not a useful activity.<br />
You're playing a psychological, win-lose<br />
battle against other humans with money<br />
as the sole objective. Even if you win<br />
money through dumb luck, you have<br />
lost time and energy, which means you<br />
have lost.<br />
Investing means buying an asset that<br />
actually creates products, services or<br />
cashflow, such as a profitable business<br />
or a rentable piece of real estate, for an<br />
extended period of time. An investment<br />
is something that has intrinsic value -<br />
that is, it would be worth owning from<br />
a financial perspective, even if you<br />
could never sell it.<br />
To answer why bitcoin has become<br />
so big, we need to separate the usefulness<br />
of the underlying technology<br />
called "blockchain" from the mania of<br />
people turning bitcoin into a big dumb<br />
lottery. Blockchain is simply a nifty<br />
software invention which is opensource<br />
and free for anyone to use,<br />
whereas bitcoin is just one well-known<br />
way to use it.<br />
Blockchain is a computer protocol<br />
that allows two people (or machines) to<br />
do transactions (sometimes anonymously)<br />
even if they don't trust each<br />
other or the network between them. It<br />
can have monetary applications or in<br />
sharing files, but it's not some instant<br />
trillionaire magic.<br />
As a real-world comparison for<br />
blockchain and bitcoin, take this example<br />
from the blogger <strong>The</strong> Unassuming<br />
Banker. Imagine that someone had<br />
found a cure for cancer and posted the<br />
step-by-step instructions on how to<br />
make it online, freely available for anyone<br />
to use. Now imagine that the same<br />
person also created a product called<br />
Cancer-Pill using their own instructions,<br />
trade marked it, and started selling<br />
it to the highest bidders. I think we<br />
can all agree a cure for cancer is<br />
immensely valuable to society<br />
(blockchain may or may not be, we still<br />
have to see), however, how much is a<br />
Cancer-Pill worth?<br />
Our banker goes on to explain that<br />
the first Cancer-Pill (bitcoin) might initially<br />
see some great sales. Prices would<br />
rise, especially if supply was limited<br />
(just as an artificial supply limit is built<br />
into the bitcoin algorithm).<br />
But since the formula is open and<br />
free, other companies quickly come out<br />
with their own cancer pills. Cancer-<br />
Away, CancerBgone, CancEthereum,<br />
and any other number of competitors<br />
would spring up. Anybody can make a<br />
pill, and it costs only a few cents per<br />
dose. Yet imagine everybody starts bidding<br />
up Cancer-Pills to the point that<br />
they cost $17,000 each and fluctuate<br />
widely in price, seemingly for no reason.<br />
Newspapers start reporting on<br />
prices daily, triggering so many tales of<br />
instant riches that even your barber<br />
and your massage therapist are offering<br />
tips on how to invest in this new "asset<br />
class".<br />
Instead of seeing how ridiculous this<br />
is, more people start bidding up every<br />
new variety of pill (cryptocurrencies),<br />
until they are some of the most "valuable"<br />
things on the planet. That is<br />
what's happening with bitcoin. This<br />
screenshot from coinmarketcap.com<br />
illustrates this real-life human herd<br />
behavior:<br />
You've got bitcoin with a market value<br />
of $238bn, then Ethereum at<br />
$124bn, and so on. <strong>The</strong> imaginary value<br />
of these valueless bits of computer<br />
data represents enough money to<br />
change the course of the human race,<br />
for example, eliminating poverty or<br />
replacing the world's 800 gigawatts of<br />
coal power plants with solar generation.<br />
Bitcoin (AKA Cancer-Pills) has<br />
become an investment bubble, with the<br />
complementary forces of human herd<br />
behavior, greed, fear of missing out,<br />
and a lack of understanding of past<br />
financial bubbles amplifying it.<br />
To better understand this mania, we<br />
need to look at why bitcoin was invented<br />
in the first place. As the legend goes,<br />
in 2008 an anonymous developer published<br />
a white paper under the fake<br />
name Satoshi Nakamoto. <strong>The</strong> author<br />
was evidently a software and math person.<br />
But the paper also has some inbuilt<br />
ideology: the assumption that giving<br />
national governments the ability to<br />
monitor flows of money in the financial<br />
system and use it as a form of law<br />
enforcement is wrong.<br />
This financial libertarian streak is at<br />
the core of bitcoin. You'll hear echoes of<br />
that sentiment in all the pro-crypto<br />
blogs and podcasts. <strong>The</strong> sensiblesounding<br />
ones will say: "Sure the G20<br />
nations all have stable financial systems,<br />
but bitcoin is a lifesaver in places<br />
like Venezuela where the government<br />
can vaporize your wealth when you<br />
sleep."<br />
<strong>The</strong> harder-core pundits say: "Even<br />
the US Federal Reserve is a bunch 'a'<br />
crooks, stealing your money via inflation,<br />
and that nasty fiat currency they<br />
issue is nothing but toilet paper!" It's all<br />
the same stuff that people say about<br />
gold - another waste of human investment<br />
energy. Government-issued currencies<br />
have value because they represent<br />
human trust and cooperation.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is no wealth and no trade without<br />
these two things, so you might as well<br />
go all in and trust people.<br />
<strong>The</strong> other argument for bitcoin's "value"<br />
is that there will only ever be <strong>21</strong>m of<br />
them, and they will eventually replace<br />
all other world currencies, or at least<br />
become the "new gold", so the fundamental<br />
value is either the entire world's<br />
GDP or at least the total value of all<br />
gold, divided by <strong>21</strong>m.<br />
Can an app help to beat<br />
smartphone addiction<br />
YouTube hopes to allay advertiser unease following scandals such as Logal Paul's video of a dead<br />
body.<br />
Photo: AFP<br />
ALex HerN<br />
Videos from YouTube's most popular channels are to be subject<br />
to human review, as the Google platform attempts to use<br />
advertising money to reign in content producers following a<br />
series of scandals.<br />
For the first time, the company will be pre-emptively<br />
reviewing large swaths of its content to ensure it meets "adfriendly<br />
guidelines", raising the bar for video creators who<br />
wish to run adverts on their content, while hoping to allay<br />
advertiser unease about the video-sharing website following<br />
scandals such as Logal Paul's video of a dead body.<br />
Advertisers can choose to focus adverts on channels verified<br />
as "Google Preferred". It is those channels, the company<br />
says, that "will be manually reviewed and ads will only run on<br />
videos that have been verified to meet our ad-friendly guidelines".<br />
"We expect to complete manual reviews of Google Preferred<br />
channels and videos by mid-February in the US and by<br />
the end of March in all other markets where Google Preferred<br />
is offered," the company said.<br />
For creators, changes will hit the YouTube Partner Program<br />
(YPP), which recruits popular creators and gives them<br />
better tools for promoting their work and engaging with fans,<br />
as well as the option of receiving a cut of the advertising revenue<br />
earned from their videos on the site.<br />
Previously, creators could join YPP if they had more than<br />
10,000 views over the lifetime of their activity on the site.<br />
Now, however, they will need 1,000 subscribers to their<br />
channel, and a total of 4,000 hours of video viewed over the<br />
previous 12 months.<br />
<strong>The</strong> move means some creators face losing a valuable<br />
source of income, but YouTube says that the majority of<br />
those affected by the stricter rules were making little money<br />
from adverts in the first place.<br />
In a blogpost written by two YouTube executives, chief<br />
product officer Neal Mohan and chief business officer Robert<br />
Kyncl, the company said that "99% of those affected were<br />
making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90%<br />
earning less than $2.50 in the last month".<br />
YouTube has been facing advertiser unease because of a<br />
series of negative stories over the past few months noting the<br />
disturbing quality of many videos aimed at children, linking<br />
the site to child endangerment, and highlighting the questionable<br />
media ethics of some of the largest creators on the<br />
platform.<br />
Logan Paul, a celebrity video blogger with 15 million followers,<br />
prompted YouTube to pare back its commercial relationship<br />
with him after he drew public outrage for showing a<br />
suicide victim in a clip.<br />
PoPPY Noor<br />
It's March 2<strong>01</strong>2, the middle<br />
of exam term and my friend<br />
is in despair. Why? She can't<br />
access her Facebook. Nordic<br />
app Hold is hoping to combat<br />
such examples of student<br />
smartphone addiction. It<br />
rewards users for not looking<br />
at their phones on campus<br />
- a task so difficult for<br />
my zombified-friend that<br />
she resorted to using a website<br />
that locks her out of all<br />
social media accounts.<br />
In Norway, 40% of students<br />
use Hold. One in eight<br />
people are addicted to their<br />
phones and, at university,<br />
this can be toxic. Using Hold<br />
requires self-restraint: press<br />
a button and the app will<br />
time how long you refrain<br />
from using your phone, but<br />
there are no punishments if<br />
you do. If you don't, however,<br />
you will be rewarded with<br />
points that can be redeemed<br />
at partner businesses - you<br />
can cash in for cinema tickets,<br />
for example.<br />
Since I'm still a student, I<br />
decided to put the app to the<br />
test. It's harder than I imagine<br />
I am the sort of person, it<br />
turns out, who just needs to<br />
look at this email right now<br />
A screengrab of the Hold app.<br />
And this WhatsApp. And my<br />
Instagram. And, Candy<br />
Crush. Why doesn't the app<br />
just block me from distractions,<br />
so I'm not tempted by<br />
them? "We are trying to<br />
change long-term habits, not<br />
force people," says creator<br />
Maths Mathiesen. "We want<br />
their relationship to their<br />
phones to change."<br />
By the end of the week, the<br />
app hadn't changed my<br />
phone-checking habits, but<br />
it did make me seriously<br />
question my phone usage.<br />
Resisting my phone for 20<br />
minutes (the threshold at<br />
which you can start earning<br />
points for rewards) proved<br />
excruciating - but it also<br />
highlighted how much looking<br />
at my phone for a second<br />
disrupts my concentration<br />
span. Hold is still building<br />
up its network of sponsors<br />
in the UK, with beta versions<br />
being rolled out across<br />
universities in London over<br />
the next month. <strong>The</strong><br />
rewards on offer are currently<br />
quite limited one of<br />
Photo: Collected<br />
them is pencils although I'm<br />
told that Nordic students<br />
have won trips around the<br />
world. But I suppose the<br />
real reward is not spending<br />
£50,000 on a degree, only<br />
to end up with a bad grade<br />
thanks to your need to compulsively<br />
refresh, scroll and<br />
repeat.