Category: Tech news

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As part of Twitter’s attempted crackdown on abusive behavior across its network, the company announced on Friday afternoon a new policy facing those who repeatedly harass, threaten or otherwise make abusive comments during a Periscope broadcaster’s live stream. According to Twitter, the company will begin to more aggressively enforce its Periscope Community Guidelines by reviewing and suspending accounts of habitual offenders.

The plans were announced via a Periscope blog post and tweet that said everyone should be able to feel safe watching live video.

Currently, Periscope’s comment moderation policy involves group moderation.

That is, when one viewer reports a comment as “abuse,” “spam” or selects “other reason,” Periscope’s software will then randomly select a few other viewers to take a look and decide if the comment is abuse, spam or if it looks okay. The randomness factor here prevents a person (or persons) from using the reporting feature to shut down conversations. Only if a majority of the randomly selected voters agree the comment is spam or abuse does the commenter get suspended.

However, this suspension would only disable their ability to chat during the broadcast itself — it didn’t prevent them from continuing to watch other live broadcasts and make further abusive remarks in the comments. Though they would risk the temporary ban by doing so, they could still disrupt the conversation, and make the video creator — and their community — feel threatened or otherwise harassed.

Twitter says that accounts that repeatedly get suspended for violating its guidelines will soon be reviewed and suspended. This enhanced enforcement begins on August 10, and is one of several other changes Twitter is making to its product across Periscope and Twitter focused on user safety.

To what extent those changes have been working is questionable. Twitter may have policies in place around online harassment and abuse, but its enforcement has been hit-or-miss. But ridding its platform of unwanted accounts — including spam, despite the impact to monthly active user numbers — is something the company must do for its long-term health. The fact that so much hate and abuse is seemingly tolerated or overlooked on Twitter has been an issue for some time, and the problem continues today. And it could be one of the factors in Twitter’s stagnant user growth. After all, who willingly signs up for harassment?

The company is at least attempting to address the problem, most recently by acquiring the anti-abuse technology provider Smyte. Its transition to Twitter didn’t go so well, but the technology it offers the company could help Twitter address abuse at a greater scale in the future.

The first look at the ride-hail company’s newest line of business, courtesy of the ‘gram.

Back at Google I/O, Google announced two new features for Google Assistant: custom routines and schedules — both focusing on automating things you do regularly, but in different ways.

The first lets you trigger multiple commands with a single custom phrase — like saying “Hey Google, I’m awake” to unsilence your phone, turn on the lights and read the news. Schedules, meanwhile, could trigger a series of commands at a specific time on specific days, without you needing to say a thing.

While custom routines launched almost immediately after I/O, scheduling has been curiously absent. It’s starting to roll out today.

As first noticed by DroidLife, it looks like scheduling has started rolling out to users by way of the Google Home app.

To make a schedule:

• Open the Google Home app
• Go to Settings>Routines
• Create a new routine with the + button
• Scroll to the “Set a time and day” option to schedule things ahead of time

If you don’t see the “time and day” option yet, check back in a day or two. Google is rolling it out over the next few days (generally done in case there’s some bug it missed), so it might pop up without much fanfare.

Want your bedroom lights to turn on every morning at 7 am on workdays? You can do that. Want that song from the Six Flags commercials to play every day at noon to get you over the hump and/or drive your roommates up a wall? Sure! Want to double-check the door lock, dim the downstairs lights and make sure your entertainment center is off at 2 am? If you’ve got all the smart home hardware required, it should be able to handle it.

While a lot of things you might use Google Assistant for can already be scheduled through their respective third-party apps (most smart lights, for example, have apps with built-in scheduling options), this moves to bring everything under one roof while letting you fire off more complicated sequences all at once. And if something breaks? You’ll know where to look.

Broadband providers! They love to make noise about how dedicated they are to improving your service, rolling out new features and generally adhering to both the law and their own code of ethics. So how can it be that Charter has so badly failed the terms imposed on its purchase of Time-Warner Cable in 2016 that the state of New York is showing them (specifically their subsidiary Spectrum) the door? Could all these promises be only so many words? Say it ain’t so!

Yes, to the surprise of no one but to the continued detriment of New York’s broadband customers, Charter has failed to meet various obligations, lied about compliance and performance and apparently has even been operating unsafely out in the field.

New York’s Public Service Commission approved the merger at the state level in 2016 on condition that the company expand broadband offerings in both quality and quantity; at a national level the FCC set its own conditions.

Unfortunately, Charter has failed repeatedly and publicly to meet the NY PSC’s requirements. The latter wrote in a press release (PDF):

Charter, doing business as Spectrum, has — through word and deed — made clear that it has no intention of providing the public benefits upon which the Commission’s earlier approval was conditioned.

These recurring failures led the Commission to the broader conclusion that the company was not interested in being a good corporate citizen and that the Commission could no longer in good faith and conscience allow it to operate in New York.

Charter is the largest cable provider in the state, serving some 2 million people in a variety of urban communities, so this isn’t a matter of swapping out a couple of neighborhoods. The company has 60 days to provide a plan for “an orderly transition to a successor provider(s).” Difficulty level: “Charter must ensure no interruption in service is experienced by customers.”

The PSC has clearly had it with the company and gladly recounts its sins:

By its own admission, Charter has failed to meet its commitment to expand its service network that was specifically called for as part of the Commission’s decision to approve the merger between Charter and Time Warner Cable. Its failure to meet its June 18, 2018 target by more than 40 percent is only the most recent example. Rather than accept responsibility Charter has tried to pass the blame for its failure on other companies, such as utility pole owners, which have processed tens of thousands of pole applications submitted by Charter.

Despite missing every network expansion target since the merger was approved in 2016, Charter has falsely claimed in advertisements it is exceeding its commitments to the State and is on track to deliver its network expansion. This led to the Commission’s general counsel referring a false advertising claim to the Attorney General’s office for enforcement.

Not only has Charter’s performance been wholly deficient and its behavior before the Commission contrary to the laws of New York State and regulations of the Commission, but it has also repeatedly claimed not to be bound by the terms of the Commission’s approval. Such egregious conduct cannot be condoned and the only reasonable remedy that remains is for the Commission to revoke the 2016 merger approval…

…and its subsequent removal from the state. It has also been ordered to pay $3 million in fines.

The company would not be able to operate in New York, but it could continue to do business in other states. That said, a string of failures this prominent is sure to draw federal attention; the FCC requirements included some broadband deployment ones, and Charter’s negligence in such a major market will not go unnoticed.

Charter told Ars Technica that it will fight the PSC’s order, and in a statement said that election season had caused the “rhetoric” to become “politically charged,” and that it had expanded to 86,000 new homes since 2016.

(Disclosure: Verizon, another ISP that serves New York, owns Oath, which owns TechCrunch. This doesn’t affect our coverage.)