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Save $50 on a Schlage Connect smart lock

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LG WP50NB40 External Optical Drive

LG

Street price: $83; deal price: $68

Down to $68, this is an excellent drop on this external optical drive, usually over $80. The LG WP50NB40 is a Blu-Ray capable optical drive we praise in our guide for being even faster at Blu-Ray tasks than our top pick (while slower at DVD tasks). If you have a Blu-Ray collection to digitize, it’s a great option at this price.

Our runner-up pick in our guide to the best external optical drives for DVDs and Blu-rays, this drive is a solid choice if you rarely use DVDs. Kevin Purdy and Wirecutter Editor Kimber Streams wrote, “If our top pick drive for Blu-rays is unavailable or its price spikes, we recommend the LG WP50NB40, especially if you rip and burn Blu-rays more often than DVDs or plan to digitize a large Blu-ray collection. In our tests, it was about 30 percent faster—or roughly 15 minutes faster per disc—than the Pioneer at ripping Blu-rays. It was a couple of minutes faster at writing Blu-rays, too. But the LG WP50NB40 was considerably slower at ripping and writing DVDs on Windows—in ripping a DVD, most of the DVD drives we tried were about 85 percent faster.”

Schlage Connect Touchscreen Deadbolt Bundle

Schlage

Street price: $230; deal price: $180

Down to $180 in Satin Nickel, this deal matches the low we’ve seen for a bundle that includes our pick for a smart keypad deadbolt with z-wave connectivity in addition to a 2-piece handleset. Already less expensive than some of our other picks, this deal is a nice opportunity to save if you’ve been looking for a smart lock.

The Schlage Connect Smart Deadbolt is a Z-Wave keypad pick in our guide to the best smart locks. Wirecutter Editor Jon Chase wrote, “If you’re looking for a setup that lets you unlock your door and share access without forcing anyone to download an app, the Schlage Connect Touchscreen Deadbolt, with its built-in keypad, is an excellent option. As with our top pick, once set up using an app from a Z-Wave–compatible hub (see below), it enables remote access to lock and unlock the door, as well as to change and arm its built-in alarm. That alarm—a piercing, shrieking banshee—does its job admirably and can be set to trip based on different scenarios, such as if someone tries to force the lock or if the door is rammed.”

WD Elements External Desktop Hard Drive (4TB)

WD

Street price: $90; deal price: $78

Available again for just under $80, it’s well worth picking up this hard drive if you need storage on a budget. The drop from its street price around $90 may not be dramatic, but it still matches the lowest we’ve seen for the 4 TB capacity of this WD drive the runner-up pick in our guide to the best external hard drive. If you haven’t been backing up your files, now is a great time to jump in and this price makes getting started a bit less painful.

As the runner-up pick in our guide to the best external desktop hard drive, the WD Elements is a solid and dependable option to invest in. Wirecutter Staff Writer Justin Krajeski wrote, “It’s a reliable drive, although it isn’t quite as fast as our top pick. The difference in transfer time wasn’t substantial in any of our tests, though, and it costs about the same as the My Book per terabyte. It has the same software as our top pick too, but its warranty is only two years—one year less than the My Book’s coverage.”

Garmin Vívosmart 4

Garmin

Street price: $120; deal price: $100

Back down to $100 from a typical price of $120, this is a nice drop and one of the few we’re seeing for fitness trackers right now. If you prefer the slim profile or the Garmin app versus our other picks, this is a nice opportunity to save. With all available colors discounted, this deal is accessible to anyone’s personal tastes.

The Garmin Vivosmart 4 is our runner-up pick in our guide to the best fitness trackers. Amy Roberts wrote, “This is one of the slimmest trackers we tested; only our budget pick takes up less space on a wrist, and that one has no screen at all. The Vívosmart 4’s display makes remarkably good use of its limited space. However, the touchscreen ceases to respond when it gets wet, which makes it useless in the pool. Finally, as Garmin’s online community tends to focus more on running and cycling, the informal support network for activity trackers is smaller.”

Because great deals don’t just happen on Thursday, sign up for our daily deals email and we’ll send you the best deals we find every weekday. Also, deals change all the time, and some of these may have expired. To see an updated list of current deals, please go here.

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iHeartRadio shares tunes as Stories in Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat

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Do you really, really want to be sure everyone knows what you’re listening to? iHeartRadio thinks it can help spread your musical message. The company has introduced sharing to Stories in Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat through its mobile app — iHeartRadio claimed to Engadget that it’s the first streaming service to tie into all three. Whether or not that’s true, it’s certainly a time-saver if you want to share to more than one medium.

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Apple promises hostile treatment for sites that break Safari privacy rules

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Cross-site tracking is the practice of monitoring a person’s browsing behavior. Often, it involves sharing data with third parties such as advertisers. If you’ve ever looked at a product on Amazon, and then seen ads for it follow you from website to website, you’ve been a victim of cross-site tracking.

As CNET notes, Apple isn’t the first tech company to announce a crackdown on cross-site tracking. In fact, in the document itself, Apple notes its new policy was inspired by Mozilla’s anti-tracking policy. However, the scale of the company and its cachet with both consumers and within the industry may turn the tide against the practice.

That said, as significant as Apple’s new stance against cross-site tracking is, it’s not even the most important privacy stance Apple has taken this year. At WWDC 2019 in June, the company announced “Sign in with Apple,” a new, privacy-focused login service designed to compete against similar offerings from Google and Facebook. One of the notable features of the service is that it will generate random emails to protect an individual’s primary email. Experts, however, aren’t in agreement whether the feature is a clear win for consumers.

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Social media bots are damaging our democracy

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One need only look at the recently reported suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, who had been implicated in an international child sex-trafficking ring investigation, to see the effects of social media bots. Within moments of the announcement, Twitter flooded with conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein’s suspicious death. Unsourced assertions and hypotheses spread throughout the network faster than the actual news did, thanks in part to prodigious retweeting by automated accounts.

Social bots are algorithmic software programs designed to interact with humans, sometimes to the point of convincing them that the bot is human, or autonomously perform mundane functions such as reminding people to like and subscribe in a video’s comments. Think of them as chatbots but with additional autonomy. In fact, one of the earliest bots was ELIZA, a natural language processing computer developed at MIT in 1966. It was one of the very first systems to even attempt the Turing Test.

As the Internet emerged in the early 1990s and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels came into vogue, so too did bots. They were designed to automate specific actions, be able to respond to commands, and interact with humans in the channel — functions that have since been adapted to modern social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook via APIs. Twitch especially leverages bots in its operations, in part given that it is built off of the same technology as IRC. Their roles now include everything from responding to user queries, automatically moderating discussions and actively playing games. They’ve been put to use outside of social media as well. Google’s web crawler is a bot, as is Wikipedia’s anti-vandalism system.

But on social media, they shine. A modestly sized network of coordinating bot accounts on Twitter can massively expand the size and scope of attention that a tweet receives, influence the course of a thread, and either mitigate or multiply the impact of a media event. An April 2018 study by the Pew Research Center estimates that between nine and 15 percent of all Twitter accounts are automated. What’s more, 66 percent of all tweeted links to popular sites were disseminated by bot accounts, though a staggering 89 percent of links to news aggregation sites were bot sourced.

Compared to humans, these bots are relentless. The same study found that the 500 most active (suspected) bot accounts were responsible for 22 percent of tweeted links to popular news sites while the 500 most active human accounts produced barely six percent of the same linked tweets.

And it’s not as though these bots are particularly subtle about what they’re doing. A separate Pew study from October 2018 found that 66 percent of Americans are aware that these bots exist, while a whopping 80 percent of those folks, believe that bots are primarily used for malicious purposes.

But what American’s can’t seem to do is confidently identify bots when interacting with them. Only 47 percent of respondents of the survey were very or somewhat confident they could recognize a bot account and a mere seven percent were very confident. That’s fewer folks than even the percentage of guys who think they could score a point off Serena Williams.

The fact that Americans are so gullible online does not bode well for us. “One of the big problems for the general public is we mostly believe what we see and what we’re told,” Dr. Frank Waddell, Assistant Professor at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, told Engadget. “And this is kind of amplified on social media where there’s just so much information.”

Increasingly, bot networks are being deployed to spread misinformation, damaging the country financially. We’ve already seen bot activity influence the stock market. The so-called Flash Crash on May 6th, 2010, wherein the Dow dropped 1000 points (nine percent of its value) in minutes was caused by a flurry of automated trades by a single mutual fund’s automated traders. And in 2013, the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the Associated Press Twitter account and ran a false story about then-President Obama being injured in a terrorist attack, causing the market to temporarily crash until the hoax was revealed.

asdfThese bots are even more dangerous to our democracy. “Unfortunately the news is mostly bad, these bots have been very effective in the past at shaping public opinion,” Waddell continued. “They can just do more tweeting and sharing than the average person and they can do that by quite a large magnitude.” By flooding a discussion with their own content, they can shape the nature of public opinion, he explained.

He points to the 2010 election as one of the earliest examples of bots used to influence political discourse. “Some people call it astroturfing, other people call it Twitter bombs,” he said. “The whole purpose of it, from a political perspective, was to smear other candidates. It’s meant to promote one candidate while discrediting another.”

These influence campaigns can be downright insidious, argues Waddell. “Twitter bots are maybe tweeting in a way that supports how users already feel, they might already be inclined to, let’s say, support or oppose gun control. And when you have Twitter bots tweeting consistently inline with [the user’s] beliefs, they may or may not be realized that they’re being sucked into this false consensus being manufactured.” We’ve seen examples of this practice in the discussions surrounding Brexit, Special Counsel Mueller’s report to Congress, and the Saudi government’s ham-fisted coverup attempt after murdering US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It keeps happening because its just so damn effective. Sometimes, it’s even welcomed.

Just as Twitter played an outsized role in the 2012 election and Facebook did in the previous 2008 cycle, Reddit commanded an inordinate amount of influence during the 2016 presidential race — specifically, far-right haven /r/The_Donald. As Dr. Saiph Savage, assistant professor of Computer Science at West Virginia University, and her co-authors found in their 2018 study, Mobilizing the Trump Train, social bots played a critical role in helping to motivate and mobilize the subreddit’s adherents.

They did this by generating slang phrases that would then disseminate out, creating a common dialect within the group as well as by playing communal games with human redditors. For example, the TrumpTrainBot would engage users by having them spout off slang phrases or reply to “accelerate” the Trump Train. After some 54,540 responses, the bot would drop messages like this into the discussion:

WE JUST CAN’T STOP WINNING, FOLKS THE TRUMP TRAIN JUST GOT 10 BILLION MPH FASTER CURRENT SPEED 175,219,385,117,000 MPH. At that rate, it would take approximately 9.209 years to travel to the Andromeda Galaxy (2.5 million light-years)!

Amazingly, despite their influence, bots only constituted around one percent of all T_D users. “We have observed that while the number of bots can be small, they usually create the most content on online forums,” Savage wrote to Engadget. She notes that bots play a similar role on the Twitch platform as well.

“I believe we are seeing on Twitch and Reddit that the number of bots are not large because, on these platforms, developers have to declare these automated accounts,” she continued. “As a consequence, people are likely not openly create bots to have ‘sock puppets’ that can trick others into believing that a large number of people support their particular cause. Rather, bots are used to help humans in particular tasks.”

This effect is not limited to the internet’s various thought silos and echo chambers. A 2016 study out of USC examined nearly 20 million tweets collected between September and October of that year from roughly 2.8 million users. By analyzing the behavior of these accounts, the research team estimated that “about 400,000 bots are engaged in the political discussion about the Presidential election, responsible for roughly 3.8 million tweets, about one-fifth of the entire conversation.”

Given that these bots have, since their inception, been designed to mimic human behavior, they’ve proven incredibly difficult to root out from social media platforms. Efforts to detect and identify bot accounts are already underway. The BotOMeter project, for example, is a free online application that scans a given Twitter account, as well as those associated with it, utilizing more than a thousand criteria to make its decision. It was developed by the Network Science Institute (IUNI) in tandem with the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) at Indiana University.

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Twitter itself has taken a number of proactive steps to curb the influence of bot accounts. Since April the company has used automation to nearly double the amount of actionable abusive content that it proactively uncovers, rather than is reported by users, from 20 to 38 percent of total. It has also reportedly tripled the amount of abusive content it addresses within the first 24 hours.

Bots on Twitter do exhibit some common behaviors through which they might be identified. They may go through bursts of activity after long bouts of dormancy or go on multi-day marathon Like and Retweet binges. They may have a heavily skewed follower/following ratio or are only followed by a bunch of equally sketchy recently created accounts.

In short, if the account was created in March 2019, already has 143,000 posts, its handle is Barbara012490863, and up until 30 minutes ago when it started spouting anti-vaxx slogans had only posted about the NFL, you’re probably arguing with a bot. You might as well be arguing with a stump. Or an Amazon Fulfilment Center Ambassador.



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FCC proposes ‘988’ for quick access to national suicide prevention line

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Those services are already provided by the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, but users must dial a 10-digit number, 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). In 2018, Lifeline counselors answered over 2.2 million calls and 100,000 online chats. But the FCC’s report, which was mandated by the National Suicide Hotline Improvement Act of 2018, found that a 3-digit number “would likely make it easier for Americans in crisis to access potentially life-saving resources.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he plans to move forward with this recommendation. “There is a suicide epidemic in this country, and it is disproportionately affecting at-risk populations, including our veterans and LGBTQ youth,” he said. “Crisis call centers have been shown to save lives.” While many (from Facebook to Canada and universities) have discussed using AI and social media to prevent suicide, a 3-digit hotline number could be another tool.

Anyone in need of suicide prevention can dial 1-800-273-8255 (TALK).

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Netflix’s fifth Dave Chappelle comedy special debuts August 26th

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Netflix has released many stand-up specials over the years with the likes of Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, Adam Sandler, (possibly) Eddie Murphy and dozens of other comics showcasing their talents on the platform. But competition seems to be intensifying among streaming services for comedians.

Amazon Prime released its first original stand-up sets this month, starting with one from Jim Gaffigan (his half-dozen other specials are currently on Netflix). HBO has a long, rich history of stand-up too, and it might well invest more resources there ahead of the HBO Max launch in the spring. Still, few other comics have the star power of Chappelle.



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The best gaming PCs and accessories for students

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Competitive gameplay requires a top-notch headset, but throwing more than $100 at one isn’t an option for most students. For just $80, Razer’s Kraken 2019 edition gives you everything you need, including decent sound quality, extended comfort, PC and console support, and iconic Razer design. Even with the solid metal frame, the Kraken is quite light, and it stays cool and comfortable during hours-long gaming sessions (don’t forget your studies though). Most important, sound quality is decent (and loud), and a recent upgrade delivered 7.1 surround sound. The main drawback is mediocre microphone quality, but otherwise it’s a solid headset for the price.

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Dating app Ship lets friends find your matches

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With Ship, users can invite their friends (as well as parents, siblings and especially wise roommates) to join a “crew”. Members of the user’s crew can swipe on dating profiles on their behalf. A “crew chat” group messaging feature can be used for members to discuss the merits of a potential match in greater detail.

Getting friends to weigh in on potential romantic pursuits on a dating app may be nerve-wracking for some, but for others, it’s a vital part of courtship. The practice of texting friends screenshots of notable profiles is already pretty widespread. An entire subreddit, r/Tinder, is devoted to sharing conversations and reviewing profiles. In recent updates, many dating apps have acknowledged this surge in groupthink mentality. Tinder, Hinge and Bumble all allow users to share profiles with friends.

But an entire, extended swiping session on a friend’s behalf is a step further than merely linking to an attractive profile. The former requires a degree of trust and intimacy that most users likely don’t share with casual acquaintances. On Ship, the practice of “shipping” or swiping for a friend is taking off. A total of 53 percent of the matches made on Ship come from people who are swiping on behalf of their friends, a spokesperson for the app confirmed. With online dating, it may be the case that our friends understand us even better than we do.

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Chevrolet’s Menlo EV is a Bolt-based crossover bound for China

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Chevrolet

As Jalopnik notes, the Menlo EV could be what would be called the Bolt EUV in the US. Just a few months ago, a report came out that Chevy is testing a utility-focused crossover that would be named the Bolt EUV once it hits the streets. Chevrolet will officially launch the vehicle at Chengdu Motor Show next month, where it will likely announce more information about it. Electrek says it’s expected to be available for sale later this year — in China, that is. It’s still unclear when the Bolt EUV will come out in the US and it will have similar specs.

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