Internet providers in the U.S. are throttling streaming services, Google fights the ‘right to be forgotten,’ and Facebook wants to crack down on offensive memes.
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It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Wednesday September 12, and I’m your host, Alex Coop.
First up, on Reddit – Remember when everyone was worried about net neutrality laws being slashed in the U.S.? Well, new research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is slowing, or throttling, people’s data on purpose, now that those regulations are gone. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted more than half a million data traffic tests across 161 countries and discovered that internet service providers are giving a fixed amount of bandwidth to video traffic, but not on other network traffic. The results also show that throttling isn’t happening when the network is overloaded. It happens 24/7, and in every region where the tests were being conducted.
Next, also on Reddit – Google clashed with Europe’s top judges Tuesday arguing it feared for people’s freedom of speech if the EU’s right to be forgotten policy was adopted worldwide. The two sides are battlined over a 2014 decision that imposed a right for an individual to have references to them scrubbed from search engine results. Google says it’s already scrubbing people’s information when necessary. Lawyers arguing for the new policy to spread worldwide, disagreed, and suggested it’s the only way to ensure European rights are upheld. A chamber of 15 judges at the European Court of Justice will decide on the matter Dec. 11.
And lastly, on Flipboard – Facebook is making AI that can identify offensive memes. In a blog post, Facebook described the new system it’s built called Rosetta, as an AI assistant that uses machine learning to spot text in images and videos and transcribes them into something that’s machine readable. A pretty useful tool when it comes to transcribing text on memes, a pain point for many Facebook users. Rosetta is said to be live now, extracting text from 1 billion images and video frames per day across both Facebook and Instagram. It’s unclear what Facebook is doing with that data, but the social media company made it clear that Rosetta’s role is going to grow as the technology is perfected and video content continues to explode.
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