V-SOFT AND TECHNOLOGY

Autoplay Ads On Facebook, The NSA Is Unconstitutional, Google Zeitgeist 2013 [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, annoying autoplay ads arrive on Facebook, the NSA phone surveillance is branded “unconstitutional,” Google Glass adds a ‘Wink’ command, Samsung announces its Smartphone GamePad, Tomb Raider lands on iOS devices, Wunderlist suggests Christmas gifts, and Google reveals the top searches of 2013.
Facebook has announced that autoplay ads are on the way. A “small number of people” will be unlucky enough to see the first autoplay video ad, for a new film titled Divergent, but we can all expect to see other autoplay video ads in the future.It was only last week that Facebook flicked the switch on autoplay videos on the website, and at the time we predicted this “feature” would one day be utilized for advertisements. And so it has come to pass, though a little sooner than even we expected.These ads will begin playing as soon as they come into view on news feeds across mobile and desktop. They will be silent (which is one small mercy) unless and until someone clicks on them. Autoplay video ads are almost universally hated, so Facebook is playing a dangerous game here.This is another step along the path of making Facebook good for everybody except its users. The problem Facebook faces is that if it annoys its users to the point they up and leave in great numbers, then their whole business vanishes overnight. No autoplay ads are going to save a service which no one uses any more.The collection by the NSA of metadata related to phone calls made by American citizens has been branded “unconstitutional” by Federal District Judge Richard Leon. According to BBC News, Judge Leon branded the surveillance effort an “almost Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States.”This pronouncement was made in a lawsuit brought by Larry Klayman, a conservative activist challenging the collection of this metadata. Judge Leon stated that the plaintiffs had demonstrated “a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of their Fourth Amendment claim,” referring to the section of the U.S. Constitution dealing with unreasonable search and seizure by the authorities.This is strong stuff, but does anyone expect the NSA to listen? No, wait, they already are listening. To everything.