默默新聞08

2020年6月5日星期五

June 5, 2020

An S.O.S. for listening at home

Maria Chimishkyan

By Shira Ovide

I called in professional help to upgrade my home audio.

I’ve been listening to podcasts and audiobooks on my phone, but this feels pathetic now that I’m indoors most of the time. I chatted with Lauren Dragan, a senior staff writer at the Wirecutter, The New York Times’s product recommendation site, for help buying a home speaker.

I hope our conversation helps you, too.

Shira: I want your advice. I think I want to carry a speaker from room to room, and I don’t want a creepy “smart” speaker. Sorry, Alexa! Suggestions?

Lauren: First, companies are still listening even if you don’t have a smart speaker. You’ll still be tracked by apps on your phone and any voice-activated service.

My Wirecutter colleague Thorin Klosowski has fantastic tips for Android and iPhone users on how to limit the creepiness from your phone.

For speakers, the non-smart ones connect to your phone by Bluetooth. Some are best for using around the house. Some are made for carrying around, and others are best for outdoor gatherings. Remember those?

Shira: I’ve been cooped up in a New York City apartment. What is this “outside?”

But, yes, I’ll use the speaker mostly at home.

Lauren: OK! Think about the size of the room in which you’re listening. In a small bedroom or dorm room, you won’t need a super powerful speaker. But for larger open spaces — or if you have noisy kids or pets — a small speaker won’t cut it. That’s also worth considering if you plan to take the speaker outdoors.

Shira: I live alone in a one-bedroom. There’s no ballroom.

Lauren: Sounds like you need a medium-sized speaker that emphasizes sound quality and ease of use, rather than water and impact resistance.

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I think you’d do well with the JBL model in Brent Butterworth’s write-up of portable Bluetooth speakers. It sounds fantastic, the controls are simple, and you can use it for phone calls. The JBL works on battery power or plugged in. It’s a bummer when something doesn’t work while it’s charging.

It’s also waterproof enough if you spill something or want to listen in the bathroom. (Don’t shower with it, please. You’d be shocked how many people break their headphones by showering with them.)

The other path is Bluetooth bookshelf speakers. But they’re hard to move from room to room and don’t work unless they’re plugged in.

Shira: Should I look at a second option for portable speakers, so I can feel empowered in this decision? (Although I’m happy for you to tell me what to do.) Why not the Wonderboom one mentioned in Brent’s write-up?

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Lauren: The JBL’s battery life is much longer, and the Wonderboom requires a USB outlet to charge, which makes the JBL more useful at home.

One thing I should mention: Some of these speakers have apps for updating their software or accessing special features. They can be harmless, but you hand over data to the company if you play music through those apps or give them access to your phone’s location settings. Consider how much you trust the company with your information.

Shira: Thank you! My stuck-at-home life is going to be a little more tolerable.

(Read more: My colleague Brian X. Chen offers tips for those who want to use smart assistants but have privacy concerns.)

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Using tech as a tool at protests

Antigovernment demonstrations that have engulfed Hong Kong for much of the past year have featured a constant tug of war between protesters and the authorities who are using technology to surveil or stop them.

At least as far as the public can tell, the use of law enforcement technology hasn’t been as front-and-center in the U.S. protests against police brutality — although there are signs that might be changing.

In Hong Kong, protesters used umbrellas and wore face masks to try to shield themselves from cameras they feared the authorities were using to identify them in video footage. Hong Kong authorities have also tracked protesters in the digital spaces where they organized, and demonstrators had used an app that identified the movements of police.

In the United States, smartphone cameras are everywhere, and they have caught both peaceful actions by police and demonstrators, and moments of violence. It was a video of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis that was the catalyst for these protests.

The technology cat-and-mouse tactics seen in Hong Kong have been less apparent in the United States, but digital tactics might be growing more overt.

Signal, a secure messaging app, and apps that transmit the chatter over police scanners are seeing a dramatic increase in downloads in the United States. Not everyone is using these apps for protest activity, of course, but Signal said that many of the groups organizing protests are using its app.

The company also added a feature tailored to protesters that lets people blur the faces of people before they share photos, as a way to protect people’s identity. Privacy advocates have warned that police could use video footage to surveil protesters, or deploy devices that capture digital data from all smartphones in a given area.

U.S. federal law enforcement and some states also have asked people to send videos or photos that might identify people who were provoking violence or otherwise breaking the law at protests.

The Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society, in collaboration with The Times, is hosting live conversations to explore how women are leading through crisis and laying the groundwork for a stronger world.

I’m leading a virtual discussion on Monday, June 8, at 1 p.m. Eastern with Timnit Gebru, the colead of Google’s ethical artificial intelligence team. We’ll talk about facial recognition technology used by law enforcement, and how artificial intelligence can be used for good. Join us! Ask questions! It’s free, but you need to register here.

Before we go …

Online attacks don’t stop: Security researchers at Google said they believed that Chinese hackers were targeting the personal email accounts of staffers working for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign — but there was no evidence yet that they were successful, my colleagues David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth reported. Google also confirmed previous reports that Iranian hackers targeted the Trump campaign. The disclosures are a reminder that the Russian-government hackers from the 2016 election cycle now have company.
A glimpse at how the U.S. government might change Google: European authorities forced Google to give people an option to choose a search engine other than Google on its new phones and tablets, and The Times reported that U.S. Justice Department lawyers are looking at whether this should be required in the United States, too. This could be a path for government lawyers, who are considering suing Google for breaking antitrust laws, to force more competition in web search, my colleagues Dai Wakabayashi and David McCabe report.
The home shopping channel with a twist: Bloomberg News writes about Huang Wei, known as Viya, who hosts one of China’s live shopping webcasts that is part online QVC and part variety entertainment show. In an evening, she sells millions of dollars of merchandise, including cosmetics, clothing and even houses and cars. U.S. companies are trying to adapt elements of livestream shopping, just as they’re trying to copy from other popular online trends in China.

Hugs to this

If you don’t follow the Bodega Cats account on Twitter, you are seriously missing out. Here is a sleepy feline hanging out on a convenience store shelf.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech@nytimes.com.

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2020年6月4日星期四

On Tech: Tech is global. Right?

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June 4, 2020

Tech is global. Right?

Aaron Lowell Denton

By Shira Ovide

We’ve gotten used to thinking of the internet as a unified language across the world. Whether we live in Mumbai or Miami, we have Facebook and YouTube in common. Spotify, Netflix, TikTok and Uber are popular in many countries.

But as the internet morphs from a nice-to-have luxury into an essential service for billions of people, it’s becoming less like an online Esperanto and more like the cacophony of languages in the real world.

As the already popular (and mostly American or Chinese) digital powers like Google and Alibaba try to expand their reach to nearly every corner of the globe, they’re competing more and more — particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America — with powerful local or regional companies.

That competition boils down to a question: Will the internet be one world, or will it have borders?

Having totally different online hangouts in different countries could be messy. Will the world become more fractured if we don’t even share a love of the same app?

But no matter the challenges, we should all be excited if local companies succeed and help make our online lives more dynamic.

You can see the tussle of global versus local perhaps most starkly in India. There, Amazon is trying to grab the devotion of hundreds of millions of Indians coming online for the first time, and it’s competing with companies like Flipkart and Jio that originated in India and likewise want to reshape how people shop.

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In India, the music streaming service Gaana is more popular than Spotify. Uber has been fighting it out there with Ola. Paytm and Flipkart’s PhonePe want consumers to use their apps to pay for stuff instead of using cash. So do Google and Facebook.

I’m jealous of Indians who have so many companies competing for their online attention and dollars. New ideas are springing up faster, better and more tailored to Indians’ needs than they would be without both international and local companies battling for dominance.

Even for those of us who live elsewhere, these skirmishes matter. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter refashioned their apps to use less data on cellphones in India and other countries where the price of smartphone internet connections can be prohibitively expensive. Those companies took what they learned in India and made their apps more efficient on my phone, too.

If you loved watching “The Mechanism” or “Dark,” thank Netflix’s ambitions to get bigger in Brazil and Germany.

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I don’t want to oversimplify what’s happening. Homegrown digital powers, like the KakaoTalk chat app in Korea and the Argentine online shopping giant Mercado Libre, are not a new phenomenon. China, which has more people online than any other country, is largely a digital planet separate from the rest of the world.

And international powers sometimes team up with or outright buy regional tech powers. It’s not clear if that dilutes what makes those local companies great in the first place, or strengthens them.

Still, what’s happening now is the next evolution of the internet from a relatively homogeneous blob moving from rich countries to the rest of the world, into something that more closely resembles the diversity of the world. It’s a mess, and it’s wonderful.

Your take

How are we being shaped by the machines?

After I wrote in Wednesday’s newsletter about the flourishing of expression on TikTok, a reader named Bob emailed me to say that he was concerned about the app using its computer systems to determine which videos to feed people.

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I’m with Bob. This computerized feed is both a great element of TikTok, and the most concerning. I don’t know how to reconcile my feelings about this.

Like Facebook and YouTube, TikTok trains its computer systems to suggest videos that we might like. If you linger on a lot of TikTok videos about hamsters, you might see a bunch more adorable animal videos.

This kind of automated sorting or suggesting is a central feature of the internet as we know it, and it can be useful. It’s why we can open TikTok and see silly dances without having to think twice, and Netflix can help us select a movie we might like.

But as The Times technology columnist Kevin Roose has explained about YouTube, computer systems designed to recommend more of what we like can push people to ever darker and more fringe views. In a column on Wednesday, Gillian Tett of the Financial Times wrote that she was worried that her teenage daughter was missing out on different views and voices by hanging out online in what was often a bubble of people who are like her, or think like her.

So, Bob, I’m worried, too — particularly because we usually aren’t aware of how the computer systems influence what we think, buy and do. (Read Kevin again on exactly this point.)

This might feel like the work of some neutral robots, but it’s not. TikTok, Facebook and YouTube program the computers, based on a secret set of factors typically with the goal of grabbing our attention. They tweak those programs constantly, and we’re usually not aware of what they’re doing or how they’re influencing us.

Before we go …

The essential dilemma of online expression: Snap said on Wednesday that it had stopped promoting the Snapchat account of President Trump, although anyone could still find it in the app, my Times colleagues Cecilia Kang and Kate Conger wrote. Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat have been debating how to handle inflammatory posts and messages from Mr. Trump and other officials. (Read more from The Interface newsletter about freedom of speech versus “freedom of reach.”)
Trying to identify the roots of online harassment: People in Brazil who criticize President Jair Bolsonaro regularly find themselves targeted by overwhelming and often vile online smears. The Washington Post reported that investigators and prominent politicians believe that at least some of the disinformation is generated by people close to the president — even his children. He and his sons have denied the allegations, which they say are politically motivated, according to The Post.
What’s the line between health care innovation and exploitation? To generate insights that could improve people’s health, the Mayo Clinic has arrangements with 16 companies to provide patient data stripped of individuals’ identification, Stat News reported. Ethics experts worry that patients weren’t notified about the use of their data, and personal information could still be misused, according to Stat News. This debate is going to continue as health care increasingly leans on technology to analyze information and find better treatments.