Technology

AT-Tover-the-top streaming service for cord cutters, DirecTV Now, is finally beginning to roll out its cloud DVR feature & a year and a half after its launch. The DVR has been in testing since last year, with AT-T in seemingly no hurry to push out the feature thatsince become a baseline for live TV services, including YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV and others. In fact, AT-TDVR remains in beta today, the company says. But it is now broadly available iOS and tvOS users, along with the launch of several other features, including support foradditional streams, an expanded on-demand library, and more access to local channels when traveling.

The DVR & which AT-T calls the &True Cloud DVR& & will offer users 20 hours of free recording, support for fast forward and rewind, and the ability to store shows for up to 30 days. This is far less storage than what beta testers had & they could save up to 100 hours of recordings. As it turns out, AT-T will make expanded storage a paid upgrade. Later this summer, users can opt to pay $10 per month more to save 100 hours of shows for up to 90 days, the company says.

The larger DVR isn&t the only paid upgrade becoming available. Users can also now choose to pay for an additional, third stream for $5 per month.

In addition, DirecTV Now is introducing a new look and feel for its app across platforms. The redesign prioritizes users& most-watched shows and favorites, and allows you to watch your current stream while browsing for other things to watch.

This new look is rolling out today to iOS and tvOS users, plus supported web browsers, and will hit Android, Fire TV and Roku devices in the weeks ahead.

The revamped app also includes more on-demand content, with over 25,000 titles now available for on-demand viewing, and new episodes on some channels becoming available on-demand right after airing, AT-T says. And users will be able to access their local channels, like ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC, when they&re away from their home market.

The changes to DirecTV Now are critical for AT-T to remain competitive, as they come at a time when the companyvideo business is shrinking, in terms of revenue.

But the losses on AT-Ttraditional TV front are currently being offset by the DirecTV Now net new customers. In the past quarter, the service added 312,000 more customers to reach 1.46 million total subscribers. Rival Dish, meanwhile, didn&t offset its pay TV losses this past earnings, with its 91,000 Sling TV adds &though that service is ahead of AT-Tin total subscribers. Hulu and YouTube TV don&t break out their live TV numbers, but are reportedly angling for third place.

Sometimes, you just need more RAM. Thatespecially true when you want to run memory-hungry enterprise applications like SAPHANA database or high-performance computing workloads. Until now, if you wanted the Google Compute Engine to run applications like that, your options topped out at 624GB of memory. Starting today, though, the company is going beyond that by introducing three new tiers on top of this that top outat 3844GB and 160 virtual compute cores.

These three new machine types, dubbed &n1-ultramem,& joinGoogle existing &n1-megamem& machines. Unsurprisingly, this kind of performance comes at a price. Running the &low-end& machine with 40 cores and 938GB of RAM for a month will set you back just over $3,221. The high-end machine, with 160 cores and 3844GB of RAM, is yours for $12,885.1716 per month.

You can see the hourly prices below:

With these new machines, Google now matches the top-end memory-optimized options on the AWS platform, though Google offers slightly more compute power thanks to a higher number of cores and newer processors.

Unsurprisingly, Google notes that the canonical use casefor this kind of machine is running SAP HANA. &If you&ve delayed moving to the cloud because you have not been able to find big enough instances for your SAP HANA implementation, take a look at Compute Engine,& the company writes today. &Now you don&t need to keep your database on-premises while your apps move to cloud.&

The new ultramemmachines are now available in three Google Cloud regions (us-central1, us-east1 and europe-west1), with more to follow.

Facebook has once again eschewed a direct request from the UK parliament for its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify to a committee investigating online disinformation — without rustling up so much as a fig-leaf-sized excuse to explain why the founder of one of the worldmost used technology platforms can&t squeeze a video call into his busy schedule and spare UK politicians& blushes.

Which tells you pretty much all you need to know about where the balance of power lies in the global game of (essentially unregulated) U.S. tech platforms giants vs (essentially powerless) foreign political jurisdictions.

At the end of an 18-pageletter sent to the DCMS committee yesterday — in which FacebookUK head of public policy, Rebecca Stimson, provides a point-by-point response to the almost 40 questions thecommittee said had not been adequately addressed by CTOMike Schroepferin a prior hearing last month — Facebook professes itself disappointed that the CTOgrilling was not deemed sufficient by the committee.

&While Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to meet with the Committee or travel to the UK at the present time, we fully recognize the seriousness of these issues and remain committed to providing any additional information required for their enquiry into fake news,& she adds.

So, in other words, Facebook has served up another big fat ‘no& to the renewed request for Zuckerberg to testify — afteralso denying a request for him to appear before it in March, when it instead sent Schroepfer to claim to be unable to answer MPs& questions.

At the start of this month committee chair Damian Collins wrote to Facebook saying he hoped Zuckerberg would voluntarily agree to answer questions. But the MP also took the unprecedented step of warning that if the Facebook founder did not do so the committee would issue a formal summons for him to appear the next time Zuckerberg steps foot in the UK.

Hence, presumably, that addendum line in Stimsonletter — saying the Facebook CEO has no plans to travel to the UK &at the present time&.

The committee of course has zero powers to comply testimony from a non-UK national who is resident outside the UK — even though the platform he controls does plenty of business within the UK.

Last month Schroepfer faced five hours of close and at times angry questions from the committee, with members accusing his employer of lacking integrity and displaying a pattern of intentionally deceptive behavior.

The committee has been specifically asking Facebook to provide it with information related to the UK2016 EU referendum for months — and complaining the company has narrowly interpreted its requests to sidestep a thorough investigation.

More recently research carried out by the Tow Center unearthed Russian-bought UK targeted immigration ads relevant to the Brexit referendum among a cache Facebook had provided to Congress — which the company had not disclosed to the UK committee.

At the end of the CTOevidence session last month the committee expressed immediate dissatisfaction — claiming there were almost 40 outstanding questions the CTO had failed to answer, and calling again for Zuckerberg to testify.

It possibly overplayed its hand slightly, though, giving Facebook the chance to serve up a detailed (if not entirely comprehensive) point-by-point reply now — and use that to sidestep the latest request for its CEO to testify.

Still,Collins expressed fresh dissatisfaction today, saying Facebookanswers &do not fully answer each point with sufficient detail or data evidence&, and adding the committee would be writing to the company in the coming days to ask it to address &significant gaps& in its answers. So this game of political question and self-serving answer is set to continue.

In a statement, Collins also criticized Facebookresponse at length, writing:

It is disappointing that a company with the resources of Facebook chooses not to provide a sufficient level of detail and transparency on various points including on Cambridge Analytica, dark ads, Facebook Connect, the amount spent by Russia on UK ads on the platform, data collection across the web, budgets for investigations, and that shows general discrepancies between Schroepfer and Zuckerbergrespective testimonies. Given that these were follow up questions to questions Mr Schroepfer previously failed to answer, we expected both detail and data, and in a number of cases got excuses.

If Mark Zuckerberg truly recognises the ‘seriousness& of these issues as they say they do, we would expect that he would want to appear in front of the Committee and answer questions that are of concern not only to Parliament, but Facebooktens of millions of users in this country. Although Facebook says Mr Zuckerberg has no plans to travel to the UK, we would also be open to taking his evidence by video link, if that would be the only way to do this during the period of our inquiry.

For too long these companies have gone unchallenged in their business practices, and only under public pressure from this Committee and others have they begun to fully cooperate with our requests. We plan to write to Facebook in the coming days with further follow up questions.

In terms of the answers Facebook provides to the committee in its letter (plus some supporting documents related to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal) therecertainly plenty of padding on show.And deploying self-serving PR to fuzz the signal is a strategy Facebook has mastered in recent more challenging political times (just look at its ‘Hard Questions& series to see this tactic at work).

At times Facebookresponse to political attacks certainly looks like an attempt to drown out critical points by deploying self-serving but selective data points — so, for instance, it talks at length in the letter about the work itdoing in Myanmar, where its platform has been accused by the UN of accelerating ethnic violence as a result of systematic content moderation failures, but declines to state how many fake accounts itidentified and removed in the market; nor will it disclose how much revenue it generates from the market.

Asked by the committee what the average time to respond to content flagged for review in the region, Facebook also responds in the letter with the vaguest of generalized global data points — saying: &The vast majority of the content reported to us is reviewed within 24 hours.&Nor does it specify if that global average refers to human review — or just an AI parsing the content.

Another of the committeequestions is: ‘Who was the person at Facebook responsible for the decision not to tell users affected in 2015 by the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal& On this Facebook provides three full paragraphs of response but does not provide a direct answer specifying who decided not to tell users at that point — so either the company is concealing the identity of the person responsible or there simply was no one in charge of that kind of consideration at that time because user privacy was so low a priority for the company that it had no responsibility structures in place to enforce it.

Another question — ‘who at Facebook heads up the investigation into Cambridge Analytica& — does get a straight and short response, with Facebook saying its legal team, led by general counsel Colin Stretch, is the lead there.

It also claims that Zuckerberg himself only become aware of the allegations that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted Facebook user data in March 2018 following press reports.

Asked what data it holds on dark ads, Facebook provides some information but italso being a bit vague here too — saying: &In general, Facebook maintains for paid advertisers data such as name, address and banking details&, and: &We also maintain information about advertiseraccounts on the Facebook platform and information about their ad campaigns (most advertising content, run dates, spend, etc).&

It does also confirms it can retain the aforementioned data even if a page has been deleted — responding to another of the committeequestions about how the company would be able to audit advertisers who set up to target political ads during a campaign and immediately deleted their presence once the election was over.

Though, given itsaid it only generally retains data, we must assume there are instances where it might not retain data and the purveyors of dark ads are essentially untraceable via its platform — unless it puts in place a more robust and comprehensive advertiser audit framework.

The committee also asked FacebookCTO whether it retains money from fraudulent ads running on its platform, such as the ads at the center of a defamation lawsuit by consumer finance personality Martin Lewis. On this Facebook says it does not &generally& return money to an advertiser when it discovers a policy violation — claiming this &would seem perverse& given the attempt to deceive users. Instead it says it makes &investments in areas to improve security on Facebook and beyond&.

Asked by the committee for copies of the Brexit ads that a Cambridge Analytica linked data company, AIQ, ran on its platform, Facebook says itin the process of compiling the content and notifying the advertisers that the committee wants to see the content.

Though it does break out AIQ ad spending related to different vote leave campaigns, and says the individual campaigns would have had to grant the Canadian company admin access to their pages in order for AIQ to run ads on their behalf.

The full letter containing all Facebookresponses can be read here.