Facebook and Google both just reached a significant milestone.
Google's Gmail and Facebook's WhatsApp both claim more than 1 billion
monthly active users, the companies announced Monday.
News of both milestones came at nearly the exact same time. Gmail's
milestone was announced during Alphabet's Q4 earnings call, with
WhatsApp's news coming just minutes later.
Though neither update is surprising — both services have been quickly
approaching the 1 billion user mark — that both apps would announce
their new stats almost simultaneously highlights the increasing competition among tech companies to put out what many view as vanity stats.
Billion user products Facebook: WhatsApp, Groups & FB Google: Android, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Play & Search Twitter: Criticizing Twtr
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg praised WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton on Monday, and hinted at plans to grow even more in the near future, noting that few services can claim similar reach.
"Next, we're going to work to connect more people around the world
and make it easier to communicate with businesses," Zuckerberg wrote in a
Facebook post
Monday. "There are only a few services that connect more than a billion
people. This milestone is an important step towards connecting the
entire world."
Facebook's flagship service and Groups each count more than a billion
users as well. Messenger is also getting close to the 1 billion user
milestone as well, Facebook said in last week's earnings call.
Even though Gmail, which launched in 2004, took much longer to hit 1
billion users, Google still has more products counting more than a
billion monthly active users. Android, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Search and
Google Play each have more than a billion monthly actives.
Want to impersonate another person’s email account? It’s shockingly easy to do, as a new Gmailbug reported by independent security researcher Yan Zhu reveals. Speaking with Motherboard, Zhu explains that all you have to do is to change your display name in your settings on the official Gmail app in a way that will conceal your actual email address.
In this instance, Zhu entered in “”security@google.com” as her display name in Gmail. Note that she used two sets of quotation marks at the start of it — apparently, doing this will cover up your actual email address and make it look like the email you’re sending is coming directly from Google’s own security team. Obviously this is something that can be used in phishing attacks by people impersonating different entities and organizations that ask you to send them sensitive information.
OK, so Google must be all over this, right? Sadly, no. Zhu informed Google of this bug late last month and they responded by telling her that they don’t consider this bug to be a security vulnerability.
This is a puzzling attitude. As Motherboardexplains, “it’s always been possible to spoof email envelope addresses, but spoofed emails now usually get caught by spam filters or get displayed with a warning in Gmail… with this bug, a hacker can get around these protections.” And even if Google doesn’t consider this to be a critical security vulnerability, what would be the harm in fixing it?
Ever wished your phone could automatically reply to your email messages?
Well, Google just unveiled technology that’s at least moving in that direction. Using what’s called “deep learning”—a form of artificial intelligence that’s rapidly reinventing a wide range of online services—the company is beefing up its Inbox by Gmail app so that it can analyze the contents of an email and then suggest a few (very brief) responses. The idea is that you can rapidly respond to someone while on the go—without having to manually tap a fresh message into your smartphone keyboard.
“The network will tailor both the tone and content of the responses to the email you’re reading,” says Google product management director Alex Gawley. It gives you three of these responses, and you can then choose the one that best suits what you want to say.
Dubbed Smart Reply, the system learns to generate appropriate replies by analyzing scads of email conversations from across Google’s Gmail service, the world’s most popular internet-based email system. A deep learning service feeds information into what’s called a neural network—a vast network of machines that approximates the web of neurons in the human brain—and this neural network analyzes the information in order to “learn” a particular task. By analyzing thousands of cat photos, for instance, a neural net can learn to identify a cat. By analyzing a database of spoken words, it can learn to recognize the commands you speak into your smartphone. In this case, the system learns to compose email replies by analyzing real-world email conversations.
Google
Experts on deep learning, however, will tell you that such systems have their limitations. “With a finite amounts of data, you can create a rudimentary understanding of the world,” says Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, the Chinese Internet giant that also sits at the forefront of the deep learning movement, “but humans learn about the world in all sorts of ways [we can’t yet duplicate].” Indeed, Gawley acknowledges that Google’s Smart Reply system doesn’t always get things right. But that’s part of the reason the company provides three potential replies to each email—not just one. Plus, it lets you edit these replies and augment them with your own words.
The system uses what’s called a “long short-term-memory,” or LSTM, neural network. Essentially, this is a neural net that exhibits something akin to human memory. It can “remember” the beginning of an email as it’s parsing the end—and that helps it, on some level, understand this natural language. In a research paper published earlier this year, a team of Google researchers showed how this technology could be used to build a “chatbot” that can carry on a decent conversation (in certain situations).
Actually, the Smart Reply system uses two neural networks. After the first one analyzes the email at hand—distilling what is being said—a second takes this information and works to generate the potential responses. This network builds these replies one word at a time, much as you would.
With Smart Reply, Google is rightly keeping the scope of the application as small as possible. The replies it generates are between three and six words long. But Gawley says that within this small scope, the system proves surprisingly nuanced. In some cases, for instance, it can tell when an email includes a joke and suggest the reply “Ha. Very funny.” If someone asks “Do you have your vacation plans set yet? When you do, can you send them along?,” the potential replies might be: “No plans yet,” “I just sent them to you,” and “I’m working on them.”
Other common replies include “Thanks,” “Sounds good,” and “How about tomorrow?” But it’s important to remember that the system isn’t offering a canned catalog of replies. In effect, the AI really is “reading” your email and coming up with what it judges the most appropriate original response in the context of a specific message. According Gawley, the system can generate about 20,000 discreet responses.
Sometimes, Gawley says, the neural network generates multiple replies that aren’t that different from one another—such as “How about tomorrow?” and “Wanna get together tomorrow?” and “I suggest we meet tomorrow.” So, the company has built a separate AI system that can remove such duplication. At times, Smart Reply still steps outside the bounds of what you want. After testing the system, Google found that the reply “I love you” turned up far too often. But as with other neural networks, Google is constantly tuning the system after seeing how it performs.
The company will start sharing the system with the general public on Wednesday, and as time goes on, it will only get better. But let’s hope it doesn’t get too good. Help with rapid-fire replies is one thing. But there is something to be said for, you know, actually writing your own email.
Email — it's great most of the time, but like all things, it can be annoying at other times. One of those times is when someone you don't like keeps emailing you — an annoying distant uncle who is somehow under the impression you've won the lottery, or someone you ticked off in the comments section of a website at some point. Equally annoying are subscription emails you don't remember signing up for and can't seem to unsubscribe from.
Google has taken steps to address both of these issues by adding a “block” feature for banning specific email addresses — it says the feature has now arrived on Gmail on the Web and will be coming some time next week to Gmail on Android. To use it, simply clicking the menu on the email as shown below and select “Block”.
If you decide to unblock that person at some point in the future, you can reverse it within “Settings”. Also addressed are those subscription emails — in a perfect world, clicking “unsubscribe” at the bottom of the message will remove you from the email list.
That's not always the case, though, so you can now click the upper menu above the email and click “unsubscribe”. This feature is coming to Gmail for Android now, though it is still rolling out so you might not see it for a little while still. Anything you unsubscribe from will no longer be showing up within your inbox.
