Technology

Facebook is working on a new app that it hopes could win back the attention of teens while capitalizing on its recently-attained major label music licenses. Facebook is building a standalone product where users can record and share videos of themselves lip syncing or dancing to popular songs, according to information from current and former Facebook employees.

The app is designed to be a standalone competitor to Musically, which was a hit with teens and even pre-teens before the 60 million monthly user product was acquired by Chinese tech giant ByteDancefor around $1 billion and rolled into the companyTikTok app.

&Itbasically TikTok/Musically . Itfull-screen, built for teens, fun and funny, and focused on creation& one source told me. &A lot ofwhat they&re doing is just trying to be cool and ment for this report.

The product is being built by members of Facebookvideo and Watch team under leadership from Facebookprincipal lead product designer Brady Voss, a source says.

One of the leaders of the Facebook video music app team is Brady Voss, who built this feature Montage as part of a Facebook hackathon in 2016

Voss previously worked on FacebookTV app as well as the recently shut down Hello standalone app. For a 2016 hackathon project he presented to Mark Zuckerberg, Voss made a technology called Montage that would stitch together photos of say a snowboarder doing a trick into a single image like a still timelapse. Now heback at making creative expression simpler with Lasso. &Brady is great with fun new camera and video things& a source said.

Facebook has been investigating the teen music app space since 2016, when a source says the company spun up a research project to look into Musically. There were suspicions that Musically might not be as popular as it touted, and Facebook eased off.

Then earlier this year, Facebookmusic efforts were reinvigorated when it secured licensing deals with all the major record labels. At first, this just kept users& videos, including Musically-style lip syncing clips, from being taken down for copyright infringement.

But soon it launched music stickers on Instagram that let you add soundtracks to your Stories, and that feature rolled out on Facebook today. The company also began experimenting with a Lip Sync Live feature for livestreaming karaoke, and today Facebook opened it for Pages and began showing some songs& lyrics on screen. It plans to soon allow users to pin their favorite songs to their profile so friends can listen to a segment in what feels like a throwback to MySpace Music.

Meanwhile, TikTok is on the rise. The app has climbed from the #32 overall iPhone app in the US three months ago to reach #5 today, according to App Annie.

Now just 5 percent of US teens cite Facebook as their favorite social platform, according to a Piper Jaffray survey. The percentage who use it monthly has dropped from 60 percent to 36 percent since Spring 2016. Facebook needs new ways to engage teens beyond Instagram and WhatsApp, and a standalone music app potentially devoid of its own branding could be a better approach than cramming teen features like Lip Sync Live into its uncool main app.

Facebook already tried and failed to win back the youth with standalone apps like Poke, Slingshot, Bolt, Flash, and other variations on Snapchat. But with US giants like Snap and YouTube neglecting to build proper tools for video music creation, Facebook has a shot to challenge ChinaByteDance . Most people aren&t interesting on camera, especially awkward teens. But with the right soundtrack, a stupid selfie video can become epic, or at least silly enough to watch.

President Trump has three iPhones — two of them are &secure& and his third is a regular personal device. But whenever the commander-in-chief takes a call, his adversaries are said to be listening.

Thataccording to a new report by The New York Times, which put a spotlight on the presidentarray of devices — and how he uses them.

Trump reluctantly gave up his old and outdated Android-powered Samsung Galaxy phone when he took office in 2016 and was transitioned to Apple devices. iPhones have historically been seen as more secure than their Android counterparts. Although one of his devices is a regular iPhone that he can use to store his contacts, the two other iPhones for official business have been modified and locked down by the National Security Agency to prevent eavesdropping.

Except — even when you&re in the White House, you can&t escape the aging, ailing and insecure cell network that blankets the capital and the vast majority of the U.S.

A crucial cell network system that helps broker and pass information between networks — known as Signaling System No. 7 (or just SS7) — have made it easier in recent years for hackers to intercept phone calls and text messages. SS7 is the protocol that cell networks use to establish and route calls and texts, but SS7 so broken that codes used for two-factor authentication have been intercepted and used to break into and drain bank accounts.

Those largely unfixed flaws make it far easier for governments — and anyone else — to tap into calls as they&re being made. That includes China, Russia — and any reasonably knowledgable attacker with the resources to pull off a successful intercept.

Trumpreliance on three iPhones may seem cumbersome, but ita step up from what his predecessor got.

President Obama once likened his government-issued iPhone — given to him during his second term — to a &play phone [that] your 3-year-old has.& It was modified so that it could receive email but couldn&t make calls, and didn&t have a camera or microphone that foreign adversaries could use to glean any knowledge that the president was working on. He wasn&t even allowed to text — not necessarily for technical reasons, but to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which requires high-ranking government officials to store their official communications.

As much as Trump has been given more leniency than Obama, the president is still supposed to receive new, clean devices every month to cut off any hidden persistent malware that could be lurking within. But that policy isn&t enforced as closely as it should be, the report says, because of the inconvenience of having to manually port over the old data to the new phone without accidentally transferring any lingering malware — if any.

Although flaws in SS7 remain an issue for the average person, they&re apparently no match for the presidentown terrible &opsec& — or operational security, an awareness of the threats that he faces and the effort to mitigate them. Even if the Chinese or the Russians aren&t listening to his calls, they could always try their luck by hanging around one of his golf courses — where the president sent staff into a scramble afterlosing one of his phones in a golf cart.

And this is someone we trust with the nuclear codes.

&Hold the Dark& tells the story of Russell Core (played by Jeffrey Wright), a wolf expert who arrives in the Alaskan village of Keelut to investigate the disappearance of a young boy.

At least, thathow the Netflix Original movie begins. On this weekepisode of the Original Content podcast, your regular hosts are joined by Devin Coldewey to try to untangle what actually happens in the movie.

Without spoiling anything, itprobably safe to say that &Hold the Dark& goes in some surprising directions — it starts weird and gets weirder (and much more violent), as you can see from our iMessage correspondence below.

Therea talented team at work here — the movie was directed by Jeremy Saulnier (&Green Room&), and in addition to Wright, it stars Alexander Skarsgård, James Badge Dale and Riley Keough. Thereno denying that ita gorgeous film, filled with stunning images of the Alaskan wilderness. In the end, though, we weren&t convinced that the wolf-y symbolism and copious bloodshed added up to much of a story.

Also, instead of recapping the latest streaming headlines like the usual, Jordan takes a few minutes at the start of the episode to express her admiration for &I Love You, America,& the Sarah Silverman-hosted talk show that recently began its second season on Hulu.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcastsor find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)