Zone’s Ross Basham handpicks and shares the five best new stories on digital trends, experiences and technologies…
1. Hackers steal $600m in cryptocurrency heist
Hackers have stolen $600m in what is likely to be the largest cryptocurrency heist in its fairly short history. The huge amount of crypto was stolen from the protocol PolyNetwork, which is known for letting users swap crypto coins across a variety of blockchains. $33m of the bounty has been frozen but the attackers are still unknown.
One of the advantages of crypto is that it uses encryption whenever a transaction needs to be verified. But this doesn’t mean that any cryptocurrency is safe from hackers. There have been numerous heists over the years, and all of them involved a huge amount of money being stolen — just last year hackers made off with $200m.
2. Twitter algorithm prefers light-skinned faces
A Twitter image-cropping algorithm prefers to show faces that are slimmer, younger and with lighter skin, a researcher has found. Bogdan Kulynyc won $3,500 in a Twitter-organised contest to find biases in its cropping algorithm. Twitter said his discovery showed beauty filters could be used to game the algorithm.
Earlier this year, Twitter’s research found the algorithm had a bias towards cropping out black faces. The ‘saliency algorithm’ appeared to favour white faces in preview mode, hiding black faces until users clicked through. As a result the company revised how images were handled, saying cropping was best done by people.
3. Google to restrict ad targeting of children
Google will no longer allow ad targeting of children based on their age, gender or interests as part of a new series of measures designed to protect under-18s. Other changes include an option for kids to have their images removed from Google’s image results, while kids’ YouTube uploads will default to the most private setting.
Google says it’s introducing its changes based on new regulations being introduced in some countries, and it wants to offer “consistent product experiences and user controls” globally. Requesting an image’s removal from Google’s image search won’t remove it from the web entirely, but should give users more control over its spread.
4. China cracks down on online celeb culture
Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter) is to remove an online celebrity list following criticism by state media of celebrity culture on social media. State-owned newspaper People’s Daily criticised platforms that make stars out of “unworthy individuals”. It didn’t name any companies but the article comes amid a wider crackdown on online firms.
The article in the People’s Daily argued that teenagers were hugely influenced by social media and often chose the celebrities they followed based on their popularity on online platforms. The Chinese government wants to ensure that young people are getting a healthy message online from “wholesome” role models.
5. How advertising is being written by robots
It would make Don Draper choke on his whisky, but more and more advertising copywriting is being written by artificial intelligence. When Dixons Carphone wanted to push shoppers towards its Black Friday sale, the company turned to AI software and got the winning line “The time is now”.
Human copywriters had produced dozens of potentially successful sentences but they all mentioned Black Friday. It was technology that broke this chain of thought. The software in question is from Phrasee, which uses Deep Learning to bounce a slogan around, ranking its impact against raw data gleaned from many sources.
