Tech

Find out why Zuckerberg is always wearing a gray t-shirt, and why he wants Facebook to be like water

About eight years ago, Facebook’s employees—so few then that they could easily sit together in a circle—started a practice of holding employee town hall-style Q&As with CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. On Thursday, the public was allowed in on this tradition for the first time, as Zuckerberg and other execs fielded questions posted on the event’s Facebook page and from a live audience.

Here are the most important, surprising and funny takeaways:

“My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person”

Facebook might be “losing its charm,” as one audience member said, but that’s only because Zuckerberg wants the central aspect of Facebook—the facilitation of communication and connections—to be something as regular, expected and uneventful as switching on a lightbulb or turning on a water faucet. Those aren’t necessarily “cool,” Zuckerberg explained, but rather are things “people can rely on.”

Facebook has plans for solar-powered drones that’ll beam down Internet access

It’s a futuristic pursuit, but Zuckerberg believes it’s Facebook’s responsibility as the world’s most popular Internet service—one-sixth of the world is on Facebook—to spread Internet to the 4-to-4.5 billion people who aren’t connected. The project, called Internet.org, is a partnership with other tech giants to bring affordable Internet access to the world.

COO Sheryl Sandberg let the audience in on one of her “major” contributions to Facebook

“One of the major things I contributed was I went around telling people Mark actually has more than one of that t-shirt, which people found to be very reassuring,” Sandberg said, referring to how Zuckerberg is frequently seen wearing his signature gray t-shirt.

There’s a reason why Zuckerberg is always wearing that one shirt

“I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than 1 billion people, and I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things [like deciding what to wear],” Zuckerberg said. “Even though it kind of sounds silly that that’s my reason for wearing a gray t-shirt every day, it also is true.”

The average user sees less than 10% of his/her Facebook stories via the NewsFeed.

Zuckerberg said the average Facebook user only sees about 100 of their 1500 stories per day on their NewsFeed. The curated NewsFeed—Zuckerberg hopes it’ll be “the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world”—is part of the reason why businesses are complaining their free Facebook Pages are reaching fewer and fewer people.

Zuckerberg found The Social Network to be “hurtful”

Unlike what the Oscar-winning film suggested, attracting women was wasn’t one of the reasons Zuckerberg started Facebook. In fact, he said was dating Priscilla Chan, now his wife, at the time. It’s a portrayal Zuckerberg finds “hurtful,” as he said Facebook’s mission was first and foremost to help people stay connected to their loved ones.

Zuckerberg doesn’t want you to think of only him when you think of Facebook

“One of the things I think the media gets wrong about companies or inventions [is] they try to make it seem like one person did it,”Zuckerberg said. He pointed to his colleagues who were also involved in the Q&A as a testament to Facebook’s multi-person leadership, and told students in the audience that one of his keys to success was surrounding himself with supportive people.

They also stole information from 56 million credit cards

The Home Depot hack was even worse than authorities originally thought, according to a new report. Along with compromising 56 million credit card accounts, the hackers also exposed 53 million customer email addresses.

Two months ago, the hackers accessed the retailer’s system through usernames and passwords they stole from a refrigeration contractor’s electronic billing account. Target and other companies have been infiltrated in a similar fashion. Authorities who investigated the Home Depot incident revealed the full scope of the hack to the Wall Street Journal Thursday.

The Home Depot hackers took aim at 7,500 of the company’s self-checkout lanes. The software hid itself for five months, collecting data and transmitting it to an outside system.

[WSJ]

Cheerio, Aereo

Aereo, the embattled television streaming company that sought to make it easier for its users cut ties with cable, announced Thursday that it is laying off staff in New York City and Boston.

“In an effort to reduce costs, we made the difficult decision to lay off some of our staff in Boston and New York,” said Aereo spokesperson Virginia Lam. “We are continuing to conserve resources while we chart our path forward. We are grateful to our employees for their loyalty, hard work and dedication. This was a difficult, but necessary step in order to preserve the company.”

Aereo has been fighting to stay alive after the Supreme Court ruled over the summer that the company’s live-TV-on-the-web services violated copyright law. In July, Aereo sought to pose a new legal argument that it is itself a cable company, but a recent court injunction required it to stop transmitting live television.

In a letter to the Massachusetts Division of Career Services published by Beta Boston, Aereo said it was shutting down its business operations in Boston “and conducting permanent layoffs at its Boston office” of 43 employees, effective November 12.

Aereo charged subscribers $8 a month for access to broadcast content on their web browsers, tablets and phones. The technology captured broadcasters’ over-the-air transmissions and stored them in a remote DVR for customers who were already in range of the free television signals.

Fingerprint scans are more secure, except when it comes to the Fifth Amendment

Cellphone fingerprint passcodes weren’t on James Madison’s mind when he authored the Fifth Amendment, a constitutional protection with roots in preventing torture by barring self-incriminating testimonials in court cases.

Yet those tiny skin ridges we all share were at the heart of a Virginia court case last week in which a judge ruled that police, who suspected there was incriminating evidence on a suspect’s smartphone, could legally force the man to unlock his device with its fingerprint scanner. While the Fifth Amendment protects defendants from revealing their numeric passcodes, which would be considered a self-incriminating testimonial, biometrics like fingerprint scans fall outside the law’s scope.

“If you are being forced to divulge something that you know, that’s not okay,” said Marcia Hofmann, an attorney and special counsel to digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If the government is able through other means to collect evidence that just exists, then they certainly can do that without stepping on the toes of the constitutional protection.”

“The important thing is,” Hofmann said, “is it something you know, or something you have?”

The Virginia ruling was perhaps the most clear-cut decision among similar cases whose outcomes have varied significantly by circumstance. In United States v. Fricosu (2012), a court ruled because it was “a foregone conclusion” that the defendant’s password-locked data was incriminating, the Fifth Amendment didn’t apply. In United States v. John Doe (2011), the defendant, who had a hard drive protected by encryption, at first didn’t receive Fifth Amendment protection, but that decision was reversed by an appellate court that ruled that if Doe provided his decryption password, then it would “lead the Government to evidence that would incriminate him.” Last week’s Virginia ruling is a fresh example of what can happen when a 225-year-old law is applied to a field as rapidly changing as digital security.

“I think the courts are struggling with this, because a fingerprint in and of itself is not testimony,” said Hayes Hunt, a criminal defense and government investigations lawyer at Cozen O’Connor. “The concern is, once we put a password on something or in ourselves, we have a certain privacy interest.”

Judges across the country will only have to make more decisions about biometrics, as their use by everyday consumers is on the rise. Today, our data is protected by everything from iris scans at airports to heartbeat measurements and ear-print smartphone locks. “This whole area is in such a state of flux,” said Jody Goodman, a counsel at Crowell & Moring. “It seems like every week there are new things happening.”

Apple in particular is one of the most widely-recognized consumer technology companies that have adopted biometrics, though it wasn’t the first. Its latest flagship iPhones and iPads come with Touch ID, which lets users unlock their devices or make payments by scanning their thumbprints instead of inputting a numeric passcode. But while Apple and other companies with fingerprint scanners on their devices say the feature provides more protection from data theft, the Virginia ruling means that data protected only by an old-school passcode is afforded stronger legal protection under the Fifth Amendment.

The solution for those seeking more legal cover for their data, though, is surprisingly simple. If a defendant’s data is protected by both a thumbprint and a passcode, he or she could invoke the Fifth for the thumbprint, thereby blocking access to the data — at least according to the precedent set by the Virginia case. But for now, iPhones at least lack this option, probably because it’s not being demanded by consumers.

“I think Apple will respond to what the market demands,” said Goodman. “Most people don’t want to be bothered [by additional security]. That’s why the fingerprint technology was created in the first place.”

A Taiwanese news site reports that Apple is considering using 3D technology in the next iPhone

Apple may be gearing up to introduce a glasses-free 3D display on its next iPhone.

The Taiwanese media website Economic Daily News reported that the screen would be “naked eye 3D,” meaning that it would be a glasses-free setup. It couldn’t be built using the current embedded touch technology Apple has used in the past, but the site says Apple would again solicit touch screen manufacturer TPK to develop the next-gen phone.

The report is highly speculative, but Apple has dipped its toes in 3D devices for years, according to MacRumors. Apple applied for a patent six years ago for 3D stereoscopic displays, and applied for a patent for 3D Hyper Reality displays that would change the perspective of objects on a screen in relation to where the user moves their head. Amazon’s Fire Phone also uses what’s called “dynamic perspective” to produce a 3D-like experience.

Apple’s iOS already uses a parallax feature which gives a 3D-style effect to the iPhone screen—try rotating your screen and notice how icons move in relation to the background, giving the phone a feeling of depth.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection is out next week

Revamped Google Maps app works with Uber, OpenTable

Google’s popular Google Maps app got a slick new redesign Wednesday.

The retooled app sports bolder colors and a greater emphasis on using photos to highlight specific locations on the maps. The app also features tighter integration with other services like OpenTable, which allows you to now book dinner reservations within Google Maps, and Uber, which will allow users to see estimated prices and pickup times within Google’s app. The updated Google Maps also places a greater emphasis on the new “Explore” tab, which lets users see a curated list of popular attractions in the vicinity.

Check out some photos of the redesign above.

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