July 2021

American actor Ashton Kutcher told reporters that his wife Mila Kunis talked him out of space flight. The most powerful argument, according to Kutcher, was the presence of young children – Ashton and Mila have a six-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son.

Earlier it became known that Ashton Kutcher became the five hundredth person who purchased a ticket for space travel on the ship of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.

Despite the fact that Kutcher succumbed to the persuasion of his wife, he believes that the dream of flying into space will not remain unrealizable for him – he will just have to wait until the children grow up, reports OK.

Virgin Galactic completed a successful commercial space flight on July 11. The founder of the company, 70-year-old Richard Branson, became the first billionaire to leave the Earth.

The Unity rocket plane, launched from the America spaceport in New Mexico, lifted Branson and the ship's crew to an altitude of just over 80 km and for 4 minutes the people on board were in zero gravity.

Then, according to the plan, Unity began its descent and landed safely at the same spaceport from which it started.

According to the definition of the International Aeronautical Federation, space begins at an altitude of 100 km above sea level – conventionally, the so-called Karman line is adopted beyond the border between the atmosphere and space itself, passing precisely at this height.

Despite the fact that Unity did not reach the Karman Line, NASA and the US Air Force said that a person who rose to an altitude of 80 km above the Earth could rightfully consider himself an astronaut.

Samsung will soon be hosting a major event, Unpacked, featuring several new smartphones, headphones, and smartwatches. It was expected that the presentation will debut a cheaper version of the flagship S21 – Galaxy S21 FE. But, according to the source, this will not happen.

According to LetsGoDigital, the Galaxy S21 FE will not be shown at the Unpacked event in August. The whistleblower has seen an official document from Samsung that confirms this.

This information echoes the June rumors. It seems that the new Galaxy S21 FE should not be expected until October.

According to early reports, the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE will receive a 6.4-inch FullHD + Super AMOLED screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate. The smartphone will be powered by a Snapdragon 888 or Exynos 2100 processor. The device will be released in gray, white, purple and green colors.

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On August 11, the Samsung Unpacked presentation will take place, at which the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Z Flip 3 will be presented. We already learned the characteristics of these smartphones.

The “star of the evening” should be the Galaxy Z Fold 3. Its main “chips” will be support for the S Pen and a sub-screen selfie camera. However, the latter, according to the leak, may turn out to be a disappointment. It will use almost the same technology as the ZTE Axon 20 5G, the first smartphone with a sub-screen camera. Practice has shown that this technology leaves much to be desired.

Otherwise, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 will receive a Snapdragon 888 processor, up to 12 GB of RAM, a main 7.6-inch display and an additional 6.2-inch (both with a refresh rate of 120 Hz), a triple main camera with a 12 megapixel main sensor, telephoto and ultra-wide, external 10MP camera, 4400mAh battery and IPX8 certification.

The Galaxy Z Flip 3 will feature an internal 6.7-inch 120Hz screen, a 1.9-inch external display, a dual main camera with 12MP sensors, a 10MP selfie camera and a 3300mAh battery.

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How TikTok's secret algorithm learns and subdues every user

The Wall Street Journal recruited IT professionals and an army of bots to figure out exactly how the TikTok algorithm works. The experiment showed that the neural networks of the service only need to track one indicator in order to know what the user wants and what should be shown to him on the screen so that he does not want to exit the application.

Launched in 2016 in China, the short video service TikTok has become almost the main social network in the world in five years. Last week, it surpassed 3 billion downloads in the App Store and Google Play, second only to Facebook in terms of this indicator. Last year, it became the most downloaded mobile application in history, and now it is actively used by more than 800 million people around the world.

TikTok is an endless feed of short videos that are offered to the user by the algorithm of the service. For a long time, the developer of the ByteDance application kept secret all the details of the operation of his algorithm, until in the middle of last year he disclosed some general information: the company's neural network selects content for the user based on the information that he discloses about himself in the application, as well as on the basis of his likes. shares, subscriptions and comments under the video. True, all this is relevant for any other social network that has a recommendation mechanism, so ByteDance did not reveal anything personal. Therefore, the journalists of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) conducted their own investigation to find out what exactly is behind the overwhelming success of the Chinese service and how it manages not only to attract new users, but also to retain an audience of all ages.

To this end, a team of journalists created more than a hundred bot accounts on TikTok, which “viewed” hundreds of thousands of videos. In addition, the newspaper contacted current and former TikTok executives.

And, contrary to the company's stories about likes, shares and comments, the journalists found out that the TikTok algorithm is important and needs only one criterion to understand the user, namely the time he spends watching each video.

By creating bot accounts, the journalists of the publication attributed certain areas of interest to each of them, but did not mention them in the TikTok application when filling out the questionnaire. Only account name, age and geolocation. And in order to check how the service algorithm actually works, bots were forbidden to leave marks “like” under the video or repost them. No reactions or channel subscriptions – just viewing. At the same time, the bot could watch videos “interesting” to it two or more times, and also pause them. Thus, the newspaper weeded out those criteria that were mentioned by ByteDance itself as determining for the algorithm.

For every new TikTok user created by the WSJ, the initial video selection looked pretty much the same: these were the most popular videos on the service, handpicked by the TikTok admin team. The average number of views for such videos is 6.3 million. But the more views a user (in this case, a bot) makes, the more videos he gets with a small number of views, but more that are suitable for his area of interest.

And it took the algorithm less than two hours to fully understand what the user wants.

In some cases, the TikTok algorithm was able to unravel the bot's desires even in the first 40 minutes of using the application.

“The TikTok algorithm is much more powerful and can recognize your weaknesses much faster” of its competitors in the market, said Guillaume Chazlot, a former Google engineer who worked on algorithms for YouTube. “On YouTube, 70% of what people watch is algorithm recommendations. This is already a lot. But on TikTok, everything is much worse: here, probably, 90–95% of what the user sees is offered to him by the algorithm, ”says Mr. Shazlo.

During the experiment, it turned out that the artificial intelligence of TikTok, which is responsible for compiling videos for users, always first starts showing a person (in this case, a bot) videos on general topics, trying to understand what exactly suits a particular user. This, for example, dancing to music, animals, nature or some kind of challenges. One of the WSJ bots was programmed to be interested in sad videos and videos about depression. And he got the first such video already in the third minute of using TikTok. The bot stopped at this video and watched it twice, thus making it clear to the algorithm that this topic is interesting.

The algorithm itself is guided in its database by hashtags, channel authors, music tracks and text descriptions for videos.

After another 23 videos – it took only four minutes – the algorithm gave the bot a second video on a sad topic. At the same time, between them, the algorithm continues to insert popular videos on other topics, as well as videos from other users from the same region as a particular bot. But a couple of dozen videos later, the algorithm produced another sad video – about a break in relations.

After 80 watched videos and 15 minutes of using the application, the user is invited to watch videos on related topics – about friendship, relationships and love. But the bot starts to mark them as uninteresting. He is only interested in videos about failed relationships, breakups, emotional trauma and psychological disorders. And TikTok gives it to him. Just half an hour after starting to use the application, the bot's feed begins to turn into an endless stream of depressed videos – after 278 videos watched, the share of depressed videos has reached 93%.

A service representative assured WSJ journalists that the remaining 7% are videos on other topics, which should help the user not only find other interesting topics, but also not get too deep in the rabbit hole. But the experiment showed a completely different picture. For the depressed bot, the remaining 7% were advertisements.

At the same time, the company noted that the experiment cannot reflect the real state of affairs, since people, unlike WSJ bots, usually have several areas of interest. But the newspaper also had such bots – all of them were drawn into an endless stream of videos of the same type, meeting the user's specific needs as closely as possible. At the same time, in many cases, the algorithm turned bots with fairly general and popular areas of interest into niche content. “What we see here is very similar to YouTube's algorithm. The algorithm learns that depression can be used as a tool for engagement, and begins to promote it, says Mr. Chazlo. As a result, the algorithm provides the user with more and more extreme content in order to make the person spend more and more time in the application. For example, those interested in politics ended up showing videos about conspiracy theories, and those interested in relationships – about suicide or leaving the family. TikTok administrators simply do not physically have time to watch these videos, relying on the fact that someone from the users will track them and mark them as content that violates the rules of the application.

“Be it YouTube, Facebook, TikTok – we interact with algorithms everywhere … We train them, and they train us. So we must learn to understand their work better and not let them go so far as to harm our society or certain groups of people, ”summed up Mr. Shazlo.

Kirill Sarkhanyants

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TikTok has a dangerous challenge. It has killed at least three children in the United States this year. Another victim has recently become known.

The dangerous trend is called the Blackout Challenge. For the sake of the challenge, users must strangle themselves until they pass out.

On Monday, Oklahoma police found a 12-year-old boy in his apartment. He did not breathe, law enforcement officers saw marks on his neck. The boy was sent to the hospital, but, unfortunately, the doctors could not save him.

The police believe that the boy participated in the TikTok challenge. Earlier, because of him, other children died, the youngest of them was 9 years old. A police spokesman said that now more than ever, because of the quarantine, children are bored and they want to take their time, and social networks have a huge impact on a child's life. Therefore, parents should closely monitor their children.

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For digital photographs, the EXIF standard is used, which allows additional information to be added to images. This data can fall into the hands of intruders, and the director of IT-Reserve Pavel Myasoedov told how to avoid this.

“It must be remembered that when you upload a photo to a social network, send it by e-mail or via a messenger, you inevitably make part of your personal data available to third parties,” the expert noted. Many online services, however, automatically compress and clean images from unnecessary information. But even the very fact of sending it carries certain risks. The time and place of sending the snapshot may be visible to the cybercriminal.

The expert advised to manually clear the “properties” section of the image on the computer or download a special program for this. In addition, when using photo applications on a smartphone, it is worth turning off the display of geolocation. It will not hurt to use VPN programs as well.

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In “Citylink” from July 19 to August 1, there is a promotion, in which the store promises discounts of up to 50%. There are many items in the sale.

If the product is labeled “Super price”, then you do not need to enter the promotional code. Otherwise, you need to enter “ZHARA” when placing an order.

For example, you can buy a 128 GB Xiaomi Poco X3 smartphone for a thousand rubles cheaper. There are also many laptops on sale. Lenovo IdeaPad with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card can be bought for 5699 rubles cheaper. Also participating in the sale is the MSI Optix MAG27C gaming monitor with a diagonal of 27 inches – it costs 19,990 rubles instead of almost 25 thousand.

The rest of the products can be viewed at this link.

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NASA has selected SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, as the launch operator for the mission to Jupiter's moon Europe. There, scientists hope to find signs of life.

This will be the first such mission in history. It is slated for October 2024. The Falcon Heavy rocket will be launched into space from Florida. The total amount of the contract was about $ 178 million.

During the mission, the moon of Jupiter will be studied in detail. Scientists intend to apply a complex set of scientific instruments to find out if the icy moon has conditions for life. The mission's key objectives are to create high-resolution images of Europa's surface, determine its composition, find signs of recent or ongoing geological activity, measure ice thickness, find subsurface lakes, and determine the depth of the subglacial ocean.

Europe is of particular interest to scientists precisely because there may be a hidden ocean on it, and water is one of the main conditions for the emergence of life.

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