Technology

The genetic analysis and family tree website MyHeritage was breached last year by unknown actors, who exfiltrated the emails and hashed passwords of all 92 million registered users of the site. No credit card info, nor (what would be more disturbing) genetic data appears to have been collected.

The company announced the breach on its blog, explaining that an unnamed security researcher contacted them to warn them of a file he had encountered &on a private server,& tellingly entitled &myheritage.& Inside it were the millions of emails and hashed passwords.

Hashing passwords is a one-way encryption process allowing sensitive data to be stored easily, and although there are theoretically ways to reverse hashing, they involve immense amounts of computing power and quite a bit of luck. So the passwords are probably safe, but MyHeritage has advised all its users to change theirs regardless, and they should.

The emails are not fundamentally revealing data; billions have been exposed over the years through the likes of the Equifax and Yahoo breaches. They&re mainly damaging in connection with other data. For instance, the hackers could put 2 and 2 together by cross-referencing this list of 92 million with a list of emails whose corresponding passwords were known via some other breach. Thatwhy itgood to use a password manager and have unique passwords for every site.

MyHeritageconfidence that other data was not accessed appears to be for a good reason:

Credit card information is not stored on MyHeritage to begin with, but only on trusted third-party billing providers (e.g. BlueSnap, PayPal) utilized by MyHeritage. Other types of sensitive data such as family trees and DNA data are stored by MyHeritage on segregated systems, separate from those that store the email addresses, and they include added layers of security. We have no reason to believe those systems have been compromised.

Of course, until recently the company had no reason to believe the other system had been compromised, either. Thatone of those tricky things about cybersecurity. But we can do the company the credit of understanding from this statement that it has looked closely at its more sensitive servers and systems since the breach and found nothing.

Two-factor authentication was already in development, but the team is &expediting& its rollout, so if you&re a user, be sure to set that up as soon as itavailable.

A full report will likely take a while; the company is planning to hire an external security firm to look into the breach, and is working on notifying relevant authorities under U.S. laws and GDPR, among others.

I&ve asked MyHeritage for further comment and clarification on a few things and will update this post if I hear back.

Facebook users will no longer have their uploaded videos with copyrighted background music taken down thanks to a slew of deals with all the major record labels plus many indies.

Facebook is also starting to test a feature designed to steal users from teen sensation app Musically. Facebooknew Lip Sync Live lets users pick a popular song to pretend to sing on a Facebook Live broadcast. Hundreds of songs will be available to start, including &Havana& by Camila Cabello, &Welcome to The Jungle& by Guns N Roses, and &GodPlan& by Drake.

When users upload videos with music with the new rules in effect, they&ll be quickly notified if that song is allowed via the deals and fine to share, or if their video will be muted unless they submit a dispute to the copyright holder who then okays it through FacebookRights Manager tool. Facebook will compensate artists and labels whose music is used, but it wouldn&t disclose the rates or whether they&re calculated by upload or video view.

The launch is separate from the Sound Collection feature Facebook announced in December that only lets users add sound effects or no-name music to their videos. Facebook won&t be offering a tool, at least not yet, that lets users select popular copyrighted music to add to their videos — a feature TechCrunch has been calling for and that was recently prototyped for Instagram.

Thatunfortunate, as most users don&t have the editing tools to add music before uploading a video, especially not from their phones. But at least if therea song playing on a stereo in the background, users won&t get their videos blocked like before. Luckily, Facebook says in the coming months it plans to &start testing options for adding the music you love to Facebook Stories.& That could use the same design as the Instagram feature we reported.

Instagramunlaunched music stickers prototype lets users add popular songs to their Stories.

Todayannouncement is a big step in right direction for Facebook as it seeks ways to encourage original sharing. A shaky, off-the-cuff video from a friend can be tough to watch in the feed, particularly if itlonger than the 15 second clips people now add to their Stories. But with the right soundtrack, a boring clip becomes epic, or a nice one becomes truly sentimental. Music-equipped videos could boost watch time and engagement on Facebook without relying on viral pap the company has demoted in service of users& mental well-being.

Facebook vs. Musical.ly

Facebook has had a tough time keeping teens on its social network, as evidenced by declines in popularity amongst the demographic according Pewsurvey data. Though teens trying to look cool might say they use Facebook less than they actually do, the responses reveal a downward trend for the app amongst the youth.

One app thathad no problem recruiting them is lip syncing app Musical.ly . Itrife with concerning, possibly Child Online Protection Act-violating videos of tween girls dancing to risqué pop songs. But the opportunity to perform without necessarily having singing talent and the easy to grasp content prompts have grown the app to 200 million registered and 60 million monthly active users.

Facebook wants to hook those kids as soon as they&re 13 so they become lucrative lifetime users. So Facebook is now testing Lip Sync Live in several markets. Users first go to broadcast Live, select the Lip Sync Live option, select a song, mouth the words while adding filters and effects during the stream, and then can permanently share the resulting video. The Live With feature for co-streaming with a friend lets people duet on their favorite jam. Viewers can tap on titling for the song and artist to follow that musician on Facebook, though I think there should be a way to tap through to hear the song on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music.

Itgoing to be tough for Facebook to suddenly become cool enough for kids to enthusiastically lip sync, especially since it requires going Live which notifies their friends. That plea for attention could make some users too shy to strut their stuff on camera. Lip syncing might work better for static videos where people can be sure they looked good enough before sharing, or within Stories that friends have to actively go watch.

Music is one of the most core ways human share and connect. Itactually surprising Facebook has stayed at arm&s-length from the record industry for so long.

iLikemusic streaming app was one of the most popular on v1 of Facebookplatform, but the tech giant moved in a different direction. It also shut down landing tabs in 2012 that bands used to stream music from their Pages with apps like BandPage. And though Spotify got its big break in America through viral distribution in Facebooknow defunct desktop sidebar ticker, Facebook never made a move to invest in or acquire the startup thatsince gone public.

At least, itgood to see Facebook concentrating on the social side of music now that it has label deals in place rather than trying to build a Spotify competitor of its own. If it can legally build a way for anyone to add soundtracks to their videos, we might watch a lot more of them. Not only would that acclimate us to more video ads, but it could let friends express a different side of themselves with the emotional power of pop music.

Back at CES 2018, AMD only teased the future of Radeon RX Vega graphics but at Computex 2018, the chipmaker further detailed what we can expect from its next generation of GPUs.

While you might be hoping for some mainstream GPU news, AMD actually showed off its next-generation 7nm Radeon Instinct chip meant for deep-learning applications. That