The Ashley Madison hack has generated a media frenzy of sizable proportions and it seems that we will be hearing a lot more about the people who have been exposed as members of the adultery-centered website.

The ethical and moral implications of having a profile on hookup site, even one that requires a paid subscription, are clearly debatable. And whether or not the hackers had any true higher cause for breaching their privacy is extremely difficult to decide it seems.

The hacker group behind this sizable data breach is called the Impact Team and they have leaked the profile data of 36 million users of the Ashley Madison platform, along with the financial information included in the payment plans of the users.

At the moment, there is a website that makes it extremely easy to find out if anyone from your partner or spouse, to you friends, coworkers, public figures to state workers, because all you have to do is introduce their e-mail in a search engine and you can find out whether or not they had a profile on Ashley Madison.com.

However, the best possible way of dealing with this is taking everything with a grain of salt. The fact that a person might have created a profile on a hookup site does not imply that the person actually had an affair, or even that he/she had the intention to do so.

Curiosity is what drives pretty much anybody who has ever used the internet to access websites that have  absolutely nothing to do with their likes or interests.

People usually do this to explore things that they normally would never even talk about publicly, because the internet was initially viewed as anonymous means of accessing information and it created this idea of safety, that gave people the space they needed to explore a wide variety of things.

Considering the extremely tempting advertisement campaign that Ashley Madison has become famous for, joining out of pure curiosity makes quite a lot of sense and it could be a completely innocent experiment.

Furthermore, it was the Impact Team itself that revealed that Ashley Madison included numerous false profiles for women, so that the men would have a reason to join, which essentially means that most of the people included in the leaked profile data actually didn’t have anything close to an affair.

In fact, it is the same type of curiosity driving people to access the leaked data website and this is something worth considering when judging the people revealed to have been members of the Ashley Madison community.

The fact that the leaked data website was actually overrun with visitors, so much so that its server eventually caved due to overuse, should provide some insight into the extent of people’s curiosity online and should change the perspective that Ashley Madison users are regarded from.
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We’re getting more and more intelligent gadgets these days, that can make our lives easier and out activities more efficient. But are these voice recognition-based devices Big Brother’s tools? Could these gadgets be used to constantly monitor our lives?

This was the impression that quite a lot of people got from using the Amazon Echo, which is a cylindrical device that can be set up in a corner of the room and that listens to your demands for small favors, such as wanting to know how the weather will be like or what the score from last night’s game was or just playing a song.

And the small gadget was intended to be a small invisible sidekick that could entertain people and perform these small tasks for them, just so that they can relax and get the attention that each of us wants to get every once in a while. But this cozy experience turned sour for some people who tried out the Amazon Echo because they started feeling tracked by the small device the entire time.

The felt like there was always something listening to their conversations, which could be creepy enough on its own given the right mindset, but the fact that they were also recording the conversation proved to be even more uncomfortable. And so, they started thinking about who actually listens to the conversations that these small devices record.

However, the Amazon Echo and other devices of its kind are just one possible way of conducting a mass surveillance of the population. All internet-connected devices could be used to do this, ranging from smartphones and tablets to high-tech toys or cooking devices. And it all comes down to the privacy settings that most people never actually read before they agree to them.

These include quite a lot of information regarding the use of the collected data, but it is usually coded in extremely ambiguous wording and it extends over overwhelmingly long policies, so that people feed discouraged to actually read it. And since agreeing with the privacy settings of any given app or device is mandatory in order to run it and use it, in the vast majority of cases people will agree to pretty much anything.

A watchdog association called The Electronic Privacy Information Center aims to persuade the Federal Trade Commission to issue stricter guidelines regarding what these internet connected devices are allowed to record and what they are not, because there is a dire need for stricter boundaries for the authority of these devices.

“We think it’s misleading to only present the potential conveniences of this technology without also presenting the huge number of possible drawbacks” pointed out Julia Horwitz, Electronic Privacy Information Center executive.

It remains to be seen what this watchdog group will be able to achieve in regards to the limitation of the authority that internet connected devices have, but until then, people are advised to evaluate the implications that new generation technology could have on their lives.
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Nowadays speed is extremely important, regardless of your line of work, and listening to voicemail when you have a lot of it can prove to be quite a tedious task that takes up a lot of time. This is why Google added a voicemail transcript service to its Google Voice program, so as to enable people to read through their voicemail, all so that they could do it faster.

However useful the feature proved to be to users, the amount of errors that occurred in the voice recognition process was enormous and it led to a lot of awkward situations, when the Google program changed the meaning of the voicemail to absolute gibberish.

This is why Google has decided to fix this problem and it appointed this task to its brightest minds, that have come up with a state of the art solution that is supposed to reduce the error rate by a whopping 49%, thus making Google Voice’s transcript feature a high quality one.

The high-tech technology that the Google experts have come up with is called “long short-term memory deep recurrent neural networks” and it is most likely designed to greatly enhance the program’s ability to remember the words in the voicemail. Considering that the majority of voicemail is only one to several minutes long, the program is designed to record a high number of words for short periods of time, rather than for longer periods of time.

It is essentially concentrating on getting as many words as possible at a high level, that it would otherwise not be able to keep up for long. Then, the program transforms these recordings into written data that it renders to the recipient.

According to Gizmondo, the neural network system deduces the words in the voicemail by identifying the vowels in the word and the sounds that correspond to various vowel combinations. Once it has the words, the program can use certain layers to deduce the phrases and then finally render a fairly accurate written version of the voicemail.

It remains to be seen just how effective the upgraded Google Voice transcript feature will be when faithful users begin to put it in use and if it truly can do a better job than the old annoying version. 49% is a pretty bold improvement quota and Goolge Voice users are curious to find out whether or not the feature can rise to these high stakes it is bragging about.
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According to a recent Pew survey, more Americans are getting their news on Facebook and Twitter nowadays.

Social media giants Facebook and Twitter are now regarded as valid news sources by more and more Americans and this is quite an interesting fact. The Pew Research Center has conducted a research project on the matter and after surveying more than 2,000 people they have revealed that as many as 63% of Americans now rely on social media for their news.

However, these results do not imply that these people only get their news on Facebook and Twitter, but that they simply consider the social media platforms news sources and that they would read news articles posted on them. This year’s results show that the people have more and more trust in social media, as two years back their findings revealed that only about 50% got their news from Facebook and Twitter.

In the last couple of years both social media platforms have increased their quality and their influence levels significantly. Furthermore, both of them have plans to pay more attention to news-related posts in the future. The extent of their implication in the media community has reached impressive proportions nowadays and therefore, all the major news curators can reach their audience through Facebook and Twitter.

To a certain extent, people are probably reading more news piece ever since the rise of social media. Due to the fact that they have feed formats, the users get to scroll down to a wide variety of postings and so, they might find a lot of information that they might not have thought of looking for in the first place. Among such posts are the news related ones.

But what is probably the most important contribution that social media has brought to news curation is providing people with a public space where they can discuss their opinions on the news in a very accessible way.

The Pew survey revealed that Twitter is the people’s preferred platform for posting breaking news and fresh information and this actually fits perfectly in their designed micro-blogging features. Furthermore, 46% of Twitter users have said that they do follow their favorite news publications on the social media.

The study revealed that only 28% of Facebook users follow media outlets though. However, the Social Network seems to be regarded as a more welcoming debate space, as people seem to like to discuss various topics there.

Another important aspect is obviously the age on the users. The Pew research revealed that 67% of social media users under 35 regard these platforms as news sources, only 59% of users over 35 do so. This is most likely explained by the amount of time spent on social media, which is obviously much higher among younger audiences.

The same pattern could be observed in the 2013 results, that revealed that 55% of users under 35 and 47% of those over 35 use social media as news sources.

For the moment, the growth in confidence that social media users express for these platforms in terms of news curation consolidates the role that social media has in our day to day lives even further.
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Instagram has been around for four years and a half now, which is enough to call it “old”, in app years that is. However, Instagram simply refuses to act as a washed up ancient app and so, it is fighting back to keep its users interested by sending them the “Highlights” of their time together, via e-mail.

The explanation for this situation is quite simple. Like the majority of social media apps and websites, Instagram has a reverse chronological news feed and this has proven to be a double edged sword. On one hand, this type of news feed can keep users up to date on the latest things their friends are doing, but this depends a little bit too much on the time they have to spend on the app.

On the other hand, when the user’s presence becomes time sensitive, what he will be experiencing is only the most recent activity, that unfortunately is not always the finest. This is precisely why Instagram decided to send its users an e-mail where they can see the most relevant posts that they might have missed.

Despite the fact that most social media champions, like Instagram’s mother website, Facebook and Twitter, use the e-mail route to get in touch with their users and offer them a new and improved features, Instagram’s e-mail endeavor was not exactly seen in the best light.

Since e-mails were not in the initial settings, most of the users who received the “Highlights” notice, have regarded it as spam. This is something that the app clearly needs to tune up a bit, just so its intentions are not misunderstood.

Among those users who have taken the time to open the email, the “Highlights” also received mixed revues. While the users who were up to date on their news feed regarded it as old info, the ones who hadn’t had the time to check out their Instagram in the last few days or weeks were pleased to get the update.

Even though this was obviously a re-engagement tactic, Instagram is still an extremely relevant social media app, with 300 million new users a month reported lately. After a presence of four and a half years, some readjustments and fine-tuning was bound to become necessary.

Hopefully, Instagram’s future tactics will be less spammy and more inventive and original, so that its users know that it has not reached a mid-life crisis, but rather that it is reinventing some of its features to keep it fresh for users old and new.
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The security questions that have been designed to protect your account are not living up to their name anymore in these modern times, where we actually take the time to devise ways to put up more information about ourselves on the internet, rather than to keep it safe.

According to a report that Google has released recently, security questions are actually the single most insecure way to protect your accounts. Their data came from talking a look at the account recovery process that they have registered in Gmail along the years.

As it turns out, on one hand, some people selected the most obvious questions in the list and actually paired them with the most predictable answers possible, thus making it all too easy for hackers to break their account.

On the other hand, others come up with the oddest answers to the weirdest questions, so as to outsmart anybody who ever tries to get into their account and unfortunately, they got included into this category themselves soon after.

Google concluded that more than 40% of the people who have used these pesky security questions as protection measures for their accounts have forgotten their answers and were proved ineligible to access them.

The single most overused question was “What’s your favorite food?” that somehow almost always gets paired with the answer “Pizza”. Google actually looked deeper into the “favorite food” phenomenon and observed that 74% of people were able to remember the answer they had provided one month after setting it up.

Three months after though, it dropped to 53 % and after one year it plummeted to 47%. Now whether or not the 47% had answered “Pizza” to the question is information that Google was unable to provide, for obvious reasons.

There were some questions though that were actually proven successful, such as “What is your father’s middle name?” that people seemed to remember the answer to in a proportion of 76% or “What was your first phone number?” that 55% of the people who chose it seemed to be able to answer it as well.

“We conclude that it appears next to impossible to find secret questions that are both secure and memorable.”, stated the Google report.

They also pointed out that security questions are still somewhat relevant when they are combined with other protection features such as phone number recovery or an alternative e-mail address.

When used alone, security questions can prove to be quite unsafe, because online times have greatly changed since people have first set their security questions for their long-term e-mail accounts. And now, in the age of social media over-sharing, it can be outrageously simple to find the answer to questions like “What is your hometown?” because they are right there on every user’s profile.

With some hacking skills and the patience of looking through a Facebook profile, even amateurs can figure out the answers to all the easy security questions out there. So, for the safety of your information, take the time to revise the security settings of your account so that at least one alternative option is added to the security questions.
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