Tag: Facebook

Article

Facebook videos can be directed to that Apple TV or Chromecast device

Now you can stream Facebook video on your TV | Mashable

My Comments

You are flicking through what your friends have posted up on Facebook and have come across that interesting video one of them put up from their trip or family event. But you would like to give it the “big screen” treatment by showing it on the large TV in the lounge so everyone can watch.

Now you will be able to with the Facebook native apps for the iOS and Android mobile platforms. Here, you can “throw” the video to a TV that is connected to an Apple TV or Chromecast / Google Cast device on the same home network as your mobile device. This will apply to videos offered by your Friends and Pages that you follow including any of the Facebook Live content that is made available.

A frame from a Facebook video that could be given the big-screen treatment

Here, when you see the Facebook video on the latest iteration of your Facebook native client, you will see a TV icon beside the transport controls for the video. When you tap that icon, you will see a list of the Apple TV or Chromecast devices on your network that you can “throw” the video to. Once you select the device you want to stream the video to, then it will appear on the TV.

Facebook also values the idea of you being able to continue browsing the social network while the video plays, something that can be useful for following comments left regarding that videoclip.

One of these devices could take Facebook on your iPhone further

The article also reckoned that Facebook exploiting Google Cast and Apple AirPlay rather than creating native apps for the Android TV and Apple TV platforms is a cheaper option. But I also see it as an advantage because you don’t need to support multiple sign-ons which both platforms would require thanks to the large-screen TV being used by many people.

A good question to raise is whether you could do this same activity with photos that have been uploaded to Facebook. This is because, from my experience with Facebook, people who are travelling tend to press their presence on this social network and Instagram, its stablemate, in to service as an always-updated travelogue during the journey by uploading some impressive images from their travels. Here, you may want to show these images from these collections on that big screen in a manner that does them justice.

At least Facebook are making efforts to exploit the big screen in the lounge by using Apple TV and Google Cast technology as a way to throw videos and Facebook Live activity to it.

Article

Advertising of predatory financial services

Google Will Start Banning All Ads From Payday Lenders | Mashable

Advertising of online tech-support scams

Bing brings in blanket ban on online tech support ads | Naked Security

My Comments

Google clamps down on advertising of predatory financial services

An issue that has caused a lot of concern with the Global Financial Crisis is the existence of predatory sub-prime financing services like payday and other short-term loans. This issue has been raised as a civil rights issue as well as a consumer-protection issue because predatory lending occurs more with disadvantaged communities and the kind of loan products charge exorbitant amounts of interest.

Google has attacked this issue by prohibiting payday and similar lenders from advertising through their Adwords search-advertising platform. As far as I know, it doesn’t affect any of Google’s display advertising services like Adsense or Admob. This follows similar action that Facebook had taken concerning their online advertising platform, with both these companies being the biggest online advertising platforms encompassing both their own properties and the ad networks that serve other publishers and mobile app developers. It is part of Silicon Valley’s reaction to contemporary issues of concern like civil rights.

This will effect the advertising of loan products that are due within 60 days or have an interest rate of 36% or more in the USA. But the issue that may surface is whether Google will apply this rule to their display advertising networks and if other online advertising services will follow suit and apply it across their products.

Bing clamping down on online tech-support scams

I have given a fair bit of airtime on HomeNetworking01.info about the online tech-support scams due to hearing from people in my community who have had near misses with these scams.

This typically manifested in the form of the phone calls that people received from someone pretending to be the tech-support team associated with a respected IT or telecommunications name, stating that the user’s computer has a virus or something else is wrong with the user’s computer hardware or software.  But they lead you to establish a remote-access path to your computer so they can “fix” the perceived “problem” or “threat” for a fee, with these scammers making off with a large sum of money or installing software of questionable provenance and relevance on your computer.

Most of us have become aware of these scams through the various customer-education efforts by the IT community and consumer-protection organisations, encouraging us to seek IT support from people whom you know and have met in person like your business’s IT department or the IT experts in your household, family or community.

This has led to computer users not answering these calls or simply hanging up when they receive those calls. Now the scammers’ MO has changed towards cost-per-click Web ads or popups that flash up warning messages saying that your computer has problems and instructing you to call a toll-free number. This plays on the fact that you are seeking a problem to be rectified by placing that phone call.

Bing Ads, which is part of Microsoft’s Bing search platform, have banned the advertisement of third-party tech-support services because of the quality issues that are affecting end-users’ data safety. There has been an unintended consequence from this ruling which has made it hard for honest IT-support providers to advertise their services on that platform.

Conclusion

I see it as one of many efforts by the online advertising industry to clean up its act and gain the same level of respect as traditional advertising but there could be a more uniform approach to the problem of questionable online and mobile advertising.

The only way I see this coming about is for the industry to adopt a code of practice with conformance being indicated to end-users, publishers, content-filter software and others through distinct trademarks and symbols. This could address issues like advertising that is allowed, the kinds of ad contracts offered including the tenure of these contracts and the kind of payment received, due-diligence requirements, and liaison with law enforcement, customer protection and other authorities.

Article

The rise of the ‘GranTechie’: closing the generational gap | NBN Press Releases

My Comments

Skype for Android – one of the popular videoconferencing clients

It is now being identified that older people are finding computers and the Internet as valuable communications tools.

One technology that has allowed for this is videocalling that has been facilitated by Skype and Facetime. Both these popular IP videocalling applications have been engineered for simplified operation such as not needing any setup or configuration as far as the network is concerned. As well, Apple baked Facetime in to newer versions of the iOS mobile platform and made sure it had hooks to the user’s contacts directory on their iPhone as well as providing integrated behaviours for this solution. Similarly, Skype is being written to take advantage of application-programming interfaces that the various platforms offer as regards with directory management and other things are concerned. As well, there are smart-TVs and video peripherals that can work as Skype videophones once you add a camera / microphone accessory. These have made the process of making and taking videocalls more simplified and task-focused.

The Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 tablet – good for Skyping to relatives

As the article has said, the main driver with this is for people and families to communicate with relatives and friends who are separated by distance. An example of this that I have seen for myself was seeing a friend of mine in an armchair at home using their iPhone to engage in a long Facetime videocall conversation with another interstate friend who had a young child. Here, she talked to that friend’s child as though she and the child were in the same room. Similarly, an Italian who is my barber and whose computer I regularly support also makes use of Skype to keep in touch with his family in Italy.

A video call at the dining table

Other technologies that were being embraced were Facebook and email as ways to share messages and photos. They were also raising the issue of the Internet being used to allow this kind of connection on a highly-frequent basis such as every week. The article also highlighted the smartphone and tablet as an enabling form factor due to their highly-portable nature – they can use these devices from where they are highly comfortable as I have cited before. In some cases, it has become possible to show the distant relative around the house simply by carrying one of these devices around during the videocall.

A technique worth investigating and showing to older people and their families is the use of Dropbox and similar services as a way to distribute high-resolution photos and video footage in a manner that allows the relatives to “take it further” like creating high-resolution prints. I highlighted this in an article about making Dropbox and similar services work with a DLNA-capable NAS highlighting the applications like printing, showing on a DLNA-capable TV, or maintaining occasion-based photo/video content pools consisting of images contributed by many people.

What has been shown in the article is that a killer application has been identified for personal-computing and Internet technology amongst a certain class of users. This killer application is for older people to use this technology to maintain contact with distant relatives and friends in an improved manner.

Spotify login screen with option to login using Facebook

A trend that is being associated with online services or applications is to provide “social sign-on” for new and existing users of these services. This is based around the concept of single sign-on where you use one set of credentials verified by one service to authenticate with one or more other services. This time, the credential pool that is used for authenticating users is your membership with a social network like Facebook or Twitter. The expression is sometimes extended to cover other authentication-data pools like Microsoft’s authentication services associated with Outlook.com/Hotmail, Windows 8 or XBox; or Google’s authentication services used for GMail and YouTube.

TripAdvisor webpage with social sign-on and personalisation from Facebook

In a social sign-on arrangement, your credentials are held and tested at the social-network’s servers and both the online service and the social network create a unique “token” or “key” to link and authenticate your presence on these services. The common methods that these services use are based around the OAuth or OpenID protocols used for single sign-on across multiple services.

Social sign-on concept diagram – relationship between the social network and online service

As well, your social attributes (name, birthdate, etc) that you have stored on the social network’s servers would be copied in to your account on the online service when this account is being provisioned. You will know about this when your social network pops up a screen asking you whether to allow the online service to gain access to your details held at the social network.

Advantages

There are some key advantages with using a social sign-on setup.

One is to benefit from a simplified provisioning process for your online service. This is without the need to key in the same data across multiple services. It also includes use of a pre-authenticated email address which is considered of high value with forums, commenting facilities and the like because most social networks especially Facebook, Google and Microsoft implement strong measures to combat fraudulent identities.

We also benefit because there are fewer sets of credentials to remember. As well, if a social network implements improved user-security measures like multifactor authentication or “trusted-device” operation, this flows on to the online service we use.

Some of the online services also can provide a personalised experience such as granting you birthday wishes on your birthday, including making those “special birthdays” such as the “big zeros” or the 21sts highly special.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages that can occur include weak links in the authentication protocols and a total dependence on access to and the security of a particular social-network account.

This also encompasses situations where a workplace or school may implement measures to shut out access to social networks in the name of productivity or an oppressive regime may shut out access to the popular social networks to curtail free speech. This can limit access to the online service because of its dependence on the social network.

How can it be operated properly

To assure users of their privacy, a social sign-on setup needs to identify any attributes that it is obtaining from a social network and give the user consent to obtain the attributes. As well, the login procedure should allow for one to create a login that is independent of a social network whether in conjunction with a social-network presence or not.

Similarly, the concept of social sign-on could be exploited by social networks and other authentication services to support simple-but-secure login for living-room applications. This is, from my experience, something that needs to be worked on because such devices require a lot of “pick-and-choose” data entry using a remote control’s D-pad to enter user credentials for online services. As well, many different users are likely to use the same living-room device.

Article

How to kill a troll | Naked Security (Sophos)

My Comments

Anyone who has a personal Internet presence on a message board, social network or similar environment or operates such a presence for their company or other organisation can end up facing the worst side of the Internet.

This is typically in the form of the “Internet trolls” who exist on message boards, social networks, blog comment trails and online chat rooms just to cause trouble. This has manifested in online harassment which is mainly in the form of schoolyard-grade activity like foul names or targeted embarrassment attempts. But there have been acts like physical threats against person, animal and property; stalking, sustained harassment and sexual harassment with young women being the main victims.

It included a situation that I faced regarding a café I regularly visited where their Facebook presence was tarnished with foul comments because the business didn’t permit a protest group to put some flyers about their campaign by their cash register. Here, I was defending the café in their stance regarding what had happened.

But what can you do? You could block the accounts where the behaviour is coming and implement technological measures that do this for you. Here, such measures work on logic like blocking relatively young accounts that mention you, accounts with very few followers that mention you or accounts that generate replies containing certain keywords.

On the other hand, you could embarrass the source of the comments. This plays on various analogies associated with social taboos like in-workplace sexual harassment where a person isn’t just hauled up before law courts but the court of public opinion doesn’t look favourably on them. This would be hard to implement in the online world due to the ease in which one can create an anonymous online presence such as with the use of multiple disposable emails or pseudonyms.

Some countries like the UK have given their online-harassment laws more teeth such as legislating for longer prison terms. To the same extent, we should be encouraged to use all of the civil and criminal laws available to us as a tool to deal with Internet trolls, but a key problem is working with the problem from a cross-jurisdictional angle. This is where you identify that the activity is appearing from another state within the same country in the case of countries like Germany, Australia and USA, or another country; such as someone residing in the UK being harassed by someone using a computer located in New York State in the USA.

As well, there have been various PR activities to pillory the trolls such as Mary Beard’s activity after being victimised by schoolyard-grade online behaviour. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind on British TV and had her friends and supporters work together to “fight back” against the troublemakers. Businesses and organisations who have been “got at” by trolls can use their loyal support base who have an active online presence such as their regular customers to work together for this same goal. 

Let’s not forget that the channels that exist to report trouble on a social network, bulletin board, chat forum or the like do exist for you to report this kind of trouble.

Personally, I would encourage any campaign to crack down on Internet trolling to be done as a group of many people. They can pool resources and use their contacts to work together to defend the people who are being affected or make life hard for the troublemakers. This can manifest in using technological tools to limit their effect on the affected forums, using civil and criminal legal action against the troublemakers or use online and offline public-relations efforts with a view to pillory them.

Sometimes some disturbing situations that happen with social networking, Internet forums, instant messaging and the like may require you to simply ignore or block trouble on the Internet but others may require you to work actively against it.

Facebook Safety Check notification on iPhone

Articles

SAFETY CHECK: Facebook Tool Simplifies Users’ Communication During Disasters, Crisis Situations | AllFacebook

Facebook’s new Safety Check lets you tell friends you’re safe when disaster strikes | NakedSecurity (Sophos)

From the horse’s mouth

Facebook

Introducing Safety Check (Press Release)

Feature Description

My Comments

Facebook has just released a system which works during natural disasters or other civil emergencies to allow people to be sure that those friends of theirs who are in the affected areas are OK. This system, known as Safety Check, was born out of a “notice board that Facebook built in to their system during the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. It would still complement other methods like phoning or texting those you know in the affected areas.

If an emergency happens, this would affect a known geographical area and Facebook would determine if you or your friends are in that area or not. Typically, this would be brought on by emergency services and the media advising Facebook of these situations. This would be based on the City data in your Profile or rough-gauging where you are interacting with it from. It would also use the Last Location details if you opt in to and implement the “Nearby Friends” app as another metric.

Facebook Safety Check dashboard- regular and mobile (handheld) views

Here, you will have a notification that will pop up if you are in the affected area and you mark this as “I’m Safe” if you are OK and safe, or mark as being “Out Of Area” if Facebook miscalculates your location and determines that you are in that area when you are are not in that area. The latter situation can happen for people who are in a large metropolitan area or conurbation and the disaster or crisis situation only affects a small part of that area.

This status will show up to your Friends as a Notification and in their News Feed to reassure them.This is augmented by a special “dashboard” page created for the emergency that shows a filtered list of your friends who are in the area affected by the crisis so you cab know who has “called in” to say they are OK,

This same setup also benefits those of us who are outside the affected areas and want to simply be sure that none of our friends have been affected by that crisis. Here, we receive the News Feeds and Notifications about our Friends who have “checked in” as being safe or out of the affected area and can also see this on that same “dashboard” page.

As for the privacy issue, these updates are only visible to those people who are currently your Facebook Friends when it comes to “coarse” coverage and to those of us who have reciprocally enabled the “Nearby Friends” functionality on Facebook for each other.

Although Facebook is the dominant consumer-facing social network and is able to achieve this goal, various other messaging and social-network services could learn form this setup to allow “at-a-glance” notification of our loved ones’ welfare during natural disasters and other crises.

Those of you who like using your Sony VAIO Tap 20, HP x2 Series, Sony VAIO Duo 11 or other Window 8 touch laptop to stalk on Facebook can now do so using a Facebook client that is written to be part of the operating system’s Modern user interface.

Here, you have a 3-pane dashboard with a presence list of the friends you interact with on the right-hand side, the News Feed in the centre of your screen and the grey “selection” menu on the left. The right hand top corner has a one-touch access point for status updates, pending friend requests and conversations that are taking place. There is the same ease in which you can browse what is available, including photos whether as a screen show or as a tiled arrangement.

I have even browsed through various photo albums in a “slide-show” view and the viewing experience comes across very smoothly. For example, when a photo initially appears, you see it looking soft and less detailed but it arrives with more detail coming through. There is the ability to zoom in on an image as well as flick through the slideshows.

Even mouse users, which covers most desktop users, are cared for because you can still use your rodent to scroll up and down using its thumbwheel. The thumbwheel works properly with scrolling the various columns for the News Feeds, the chat you are having, the presence list and the like independently – it depends on what you are actually hovering over. If you flip through photos in someone’s album, you can use the thumbwheel to “speed” through them. Using the SHIFT key with the thumbwheel allows you to detail in and out of the photos.

Its behaviour through a conversation is as expected but I would like to see a “typing” indicator so I can know if they are typing a reply at a particular moment.

This is certainly an application that appears to be mature from the start rather than one that is bug-ridden and failing too frequently. Give this a go on your Windows 8 laptop as something to work the Modern UI with.