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Facebook is developing anti-predator measures to protect children

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Davis told Financial Times that Facebook’s goal is to shift its focus to preventative measures — ways to stop predators from contacting their intended victims in the first place — from content flagging and removal.

She said:

“When you find content, the problem with that is the harm has already been done. Ultimately you want to prevent that content from being shared in the first place, or from being created. So the way we are thinking about it is, how can we stop these connections?”

The social network could start keeping a close eye on accounts making a series of chat requests with minors they’re not connected with, or those part of suspicious groups. Facebook could also implement alerts for people with large age gaps talking privately on Messenger and Instagram DM or for accounts trying to contact minors when they’ve been blocked by a lot of other people.

Since grooming could start in the public section of Facebook or Instagram, the company could start scanning photos for comments to find accounts with patterns of bad behavior. David also said that the company is testing how to make reporting more accessible “in the sensitive moments when [users] most need it such as when someone blocks [them] or deletes a thread.”

Whether those measures are enough to protect children remains to be seen. Facebook said it’s working closely with child safety experts before launching end-to-end encryption, but the non-profit group Internet Watch Foundation told FT that the company may have only reached out to just a single organization in the US.

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Pandora now works in Spanish on Alexa and Google Assistant

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The music streaming service added Spanish support during Latinx Heritage Month — it recently added a station called El Detour to highlight artists at the forefront of Latin music. Along with requesting a song, album, artist, genre or station with your voice, you can thumbs up/thumbs down a track and use the typical playback controls.

If the move seems like it was a long time coming, it’s worth noting Amazon only added Spanish language support to Alexa in the US this month.

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Lebanon plans to charge a fee for internet voice calls

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This wouldn’t come without some kind of compensation. Telecom Minister Mohamed Chouchair promised “something in return” to be made public next week.

This isn’t exactly an exorbitant fee. If you feel compelled to make a Facebook Messenger call while you’re in Beirut, you can talk to your heart’s content once the call starts. However, it could deter people from using VoIP regularly. They might resort to sending voice messages or video chats. And when there are only two (government-controlled) carriers in Lebanon, you can’t just use an indie provider to help you skirt around the ban on voice.

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Google Books redesign makes it easier to find background info

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It’s Google Books’ 15th birthday, and the tech giant is celebrating it by giving the service a makeover. The redesigned version makes each title’s most pertinent information easier to access — and it puts details in neat little boxes that make them easier on the eyes. The classic interface already showed you a book’s description, its author’s history and their other works, but the redesigned version will also include options for where you can borrow or purchase the title. There’s also a new section that lists similar titles, as well as one that clearly shows the book’s bibliography where you’ll be able to create citations in APA, MLA, Chicago and other formats.

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California’s Earthquake Early Warning system rolls out statewide

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This system doesn’t predict earthquakes, and after quake’s early this year failed to produce a notification on phones in Los Angeles, the threshold for a warning has been lowered to at least a magnitude 4.5 and Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) of 3, which is similar to a truck driving by outside your house. According to UC Berkeley, tests have shown alerts can reach users of the MyShake app in about 3.7 seconds, while the WEA (like severe weather notifications and Amber Alerts) had an average delivery time of 13 seconds — so probably go ahead and install that app.

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Motorola invite hints at a ‘reinvented’ RAZR

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Motorola invite

Along with embedded GIF of something that looks like a hinged mobile device, it’s not hard to figure out what we’ll see, but the exact details of how it will work are still unclear. A patent filing uncovered earlier this year suggested a thin device that looks a lot like the old-school RAZR phones, while the Wall Street Journal pointed out sources saying a $1,500 device could hit the market as a Verizon exclusive.

Since then, Huawei has delayed its Mate X and while Samsung’s Galaxy Fold is rolling out, it has experienced its own issues. Can Lenovo/Motorola get the flexible device right, and perhaps bring back vertically-oriented smartphones before Essential has the chance to? We’ll apparently find out next month.

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Arca will use AI to soundtrack NYC’s Museum of Modern Art

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If you pay a visit to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in the near future, you’ll be awash in artificial intelligence before you’ve even seen an exhibit. Electronic musician Arca (who has produced for Bjork and FKA Twigs) has announced that a piece she wrote using Bronze’s AI creative tool will provide the soundtrack for MoMA’s lobby for the next two years once it reopens on October 21st. Don’t think that it’ll be just the same tune playing on loop, though. The AI will “never make the music play the same way twice,” Arca said. In that sense, it’s more like one very large piece.



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Get $24 off the Nintendo Switch on Amazon

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If you’ve been waiting to purchase a Nintendo Switch, or want to update your existing unit, Amazon has a decent deal on the console. If you take advantage of an onsite coupon, you can get $24 off the console, making it $275, instead of $299. Note that the discount is applied on checkout, and that the model Amazon is selling is the updated one that features a higher capacity battery that significantly improves battery life.

In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for instance, the new variant can about five-and-a-half hours of playtime instead of three. In all, Nintendo has said the refreshed model can eke out up to nine hours of playtime in portable mode, depending on the game you play.

$24 off the Switch is a modest amount, to be sure, but look at this way: with the cash you save you can buy the excellent Untilted Goose Game and still have money for a coffee. It’s also worth pointing out the Switch rarely goes on sale.

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Supreme’s burner phone is a hypebeast’s dream

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The phone sold out in seconds on Supreme’s site, and even though I had an early morning slot to get into the store, the red model was already gone. So I bought the black one you see here.

Supreme

Before we go any further, I know you’re probably wondering who asked for this? And the answer is simple: no one. But that doesn’t matter to Supreme. After all, the popular streetwear brand has made a literal brick, which features its iconic box logo and can now be found on the resale market for upwards of $150. With a dumb phone, you could at least make the argument that it has a practical use.

As you might expect, though, the Supreme Blu burner phone isn’t here to battle the iPhone 11 or Pixel 4. The candybar-style phone features a 2.4-inch display, a VGA rear camera (no selfie cam, sorry), sluggish 3G connectivity and support for up to 32GB of storage. (Supreme was nice enough to toss in a 16GB card.)

You’ll also find dual SIM slots on the handset, but unfortunately we couldn’t make any phone calls because, well, it’s hard to find a working full-size SIM these days. If you do find some of those old-school SIMs, the phone is unlocked, so it can work with a couple different carriers simultaneously. Considering a “burner phone” is generally associated with conducting shady business (sometimes they’re also called “trap phones”), you can see how having access to dual SIMs can come in handy. That said, the only business hypebeasts who get this phone will probably be conducting is taking a pictures with it and posting them on Instagram.

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Nintendo Switch sales top 15 million in North America alone

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As Nintendo heads into a holiday season with both the OG Switch and Switch Lite on store shelves, the company is celebrating 10 months in a row of being the best selling console in the US, according to NPD numbers. That’s enough to cross the 15 million sales mark in North America, and just a week ago Nintendo announced Switch sales are over 10 million in Europe. In Japan, Famitsu reported earlier this year that despite only being on sale for two years, it’s already sold more units than Sony’s PlayStation 4.

So yes, 2019 is looking like another good year for Nintendo, with sales in the US up 20 percent so far compared to 2018.

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