New anti-harassment AI program has 90% success rate

Yahoo has developed an AI algorithm that it says can correctly detect up to 90 percent of abusive comments online, making it outperform other "state-of-the-art" deep-learning-based algorithms, according to a report by the algorithm's developers.

"While automatically detecting abusive language online is an important topic and task, the prior [abuse detection] has not been very unified, thus slowing progress ... [abuse] can have a profound impact on the civility of a community or a user’s experience," the developers wrote.

The algorithm used a mix of machine learning and crowdsourced abuse detection to scan the comment sections of Yahoo News and Finance. 

Currently, most abusive language detectors are keyword-based systems. The problem is that abusers might avoid certain words to avoid the filters or come up with new slang. Additionally, these systems are bad at reading for context or sarcasm. 

Yahoo, on the other hand, went a little deeper and was able to track responses by the length of comments and words, the number of punctuations, URLS and capitalized letters. It also tracked usage of "politeness words," modal verbs (like "could," "would" or "should," which can indicate either hedging or a confident speaker) and "insult and hate blacklist words." All in all, the algorithm outperformed Yahoo's old detectors by about 10 percent.

Specially trained Yahoo employees also looked at the same comments and rated them as abusive or not, which helped to train the algorithm to look for implicit abuse. (The annotated database of what was marked as abusive will soon be available online on Yahoo Webscope.) 

Yahoo crowdsourced abuse ratings from Amazon'sMechanical Turk as well, which allows anyone to sign up and filter through images or language. Participants received $0.02 for every comment they tried to categorize as abusive or not. These people, however, had not been trained in abuse detection like Yahoo's employees, and were found to be much worse at it. So even with the AI, human judgement is still vital to the operation. 

Ultimately, the program might be severely limited as abuse is still defined by Yahoo itself and not the user — unlike Instagram's new anti-harassment measures, which allow users to filter out comments with certain words. The program also may not be able find fake accounts or filter through abusive pictures or videos tweeted at a user, which happened to Leslie Jones on Twitter. 

Some websites also have double standards when it comes to their community guidelines. On Facebook, Australian journalist and feminist activist Clementine Ford pointed out that she'd been blocked for telling a man to "fuck off" while someone who called her a "diseased whore" hadn't been flagged. That post was ultimately removed but the situation is a good example of how nuanced determining what is offensive and what isn't can be. 

For instance, critics argue that women's bodies are often policed unnecessarily, censoring images with womens' nipples or period stains. 

Still, the team at Yahoo remains optimistic. 

"As the amount of online user generated content quickly grows, it is necessary to use accurate, automated methods to flag abusive language," they wrote. "In our work we take a major step forward."

The Most Popular ‘Lord of the Rings’ Fanfiction You’ve Never Heard of

When I was 12 years of age, I got to be fixated on an epic scholarly arrangement. It was more than twice the length War and Peace or Infinite Jest; longer than the whole Harry Potter arrangement, and more than two times the length of The Lord of the Rings, the arrangement on which it was based. 

Believe it or not—this 1.2 million word epic is a Lord of the Rings fanfiction arrangement. It's known as the Mellon Chronicles. 

Taking its name from the Elvish word for "companion," the Mellon Chronicles takes after the misfortunes of a youthful Aragorn and Legolas. Like romance books, Westerns, and Sherlock Holmes, the Mellon Chronicles take after an equation: a large portion of the 36 stories start with Aragorn and/or Legolas voyaging some place; then one of them gets caught and normally tormented; and after that the other one salvages him. While this depiction won't not seem like it, the Mellon Chronicles were altogether nonsexual—"no slice, no muck," as the maxim went.

At its peak around 2004, the Mellon Chronicles had an active Yahoo Groups list large enough that it was mentioned as one of the biggest fan communities in a book about Tolkien scholarship.

The Aragorn/Legolas friendship was a popular fanfiction genre when the three Peter Jackson-directed movies were coming out in the early 2000s—probably largely thanks to the fact that Aragorn and Legolas were played by the extremely attractive Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom—and the Mellon Chronicles, written by the mysterious Cassia and Siobhan, or Sio, were the most popular of all. At its peak around 2004, the Mellon Chronicles had an active Yahoo Groups list large enough that it was mentioned as one of the biggest fan communities in a book about Tolkien scholarship; fan-made audiobook readings, Photoshopped story art, and YouTube videos; their own fanfiction awards; and a fanlisting. They set Lord of the Ringsfanfiction tropes that other fanfic writers faithfully followed.

Recently, I found Cassia and Sio’s old AOL and Hotmail email addresses linked on a late ‘90s fanfiction website, valarguild.org, and found that one still worked—Sio’s. She looped in Cassia, and the three of us had a long email interview about the Mellon Chronicles and the early days of Lord of the Rings online fandom.

The story of the Mellon Chronicles begins in another fandom. Cassia and Sio—both pen names—connected while writing Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice fanfiction around 1999. This was Cassia’s first online fandom, which she joined at around 18, and Sio’s second, after the TV show The Sentinel.

“She had written this super cool Star Wars story and I contacted her about it,” Sio said. “I was totally in awe of her, which we still laugh about now. But that led to us co-writing our first story, which was actually a Star Wars fic called ‘The Hunted.’”

When the first Lord of the Rings movie came out in late 2001, both Cassia and Sio wrote their own fanfiction—separately. First, in 2002, Cassia wrote a dark short story called “Captive of Darkness,” about a very young Legolas getting captured and tortured (including an implied rape) by evil humans before being rescued by Elrond. Then, Sio wrote a short story about Aragorn and Legolas’ first encounter called “First Meetings,” giving Legolas the history that Cassia wrote for him. After that, Cassia and Sio began collaborating on a story taking place immediately after “First Meetings.”

“It was a wonderful and humbling feeling to see it take on a life of its own like that.”

“I don’t think it was until we were halfway through writing the story that came after that, ‘Exile,’ that we realized this was going to be a series, since by then we realized that ‘Exile’ was going to have to end with something pretty drastic happening, that would then need to be fixed in the following story, ‘Return.’ Even then, we had no idea how long the series would become. Basically, we just kept going as long as the inspiration held,” Cassia said.

Inspiration held for three years, from 2002 until 2005. Cassia and Sio wrote collaboratively, coming up with ideas and outlines in “a flurry of emails back and forth,” and then each writer would choose sections to work on. Stories took from a few months to over a year to complete—and were a considerable amount of work. “I could easily spend between four to eight hours a day writing,” Cassia said. Sio added, “I was actually a horrible employee while we had the MC. I spent half the day writing in between work duties and keeping up with the [Yahoo Groups] List.

”Cassia and Sio started the Yahoo Groups list completely by accident. Cassia set up the website to host the stories so they had an archive. They didn’t realize that Yahoo had an automatic Group Mailing List set up with the website, so when they started getting emails about stories they were totally surprised.

“We decided to let it go, thinking we’d only get like a couple of people actually reading,” Sio said.

A couple of people soon turned into a couple hundred, then a couple thousand—and many loved the Mellon Chronicles so much that they wanted to write stories for it as well.

“I think the first time I realized how much others were enjoying the world we'd created was when people started requesting to use our original characters and sometimes the backdrop of the MC world as a whole in their own stories,” Cassia says. “It was a wonderful and humbling feeling to see it take on a life of its own like that.”

The group members were so close that Cassia and Sio sent them Christmas presents each year—once, it was homemade bookmarks; another time, it was keychains. “One Christmas there was something like 13 different countries we sent Christmas gifts to,” Sio says. When the Mellon Chronicles ended in 2005, Cassia and Sio mailed a CD with the text of the entire series on it to every reader who wanted one.

Yahoo 'Aware' Hacker Is Advertising 200 Million Supposed Accounts on Dark Web

An infamous cybercriminal is promoting 200 million of affirmed Yahoo client certifications on the dim web, and the organization has said it is "mindful" of the programmer's cases, yet has not affirmed nor prevented the authenticity from securing the information.

On Monday, the programmer known as Peace, who has already sold dumps of Myspace and LinkedIn, recorded gathered qualifications of Yahoo clients on The Real Deal commercial center. Peace told Motherboard that he has been exchanging the information secretly for quite a while, however just now chose to offer it transparently.

"We know about a case," a Yahoo representative told Motherboard in an email, before the information was made open. The organization did not deny that the client points of interest were Yahoo clients, regardless of being inquired as to whether it related to the organization's own records.

"We are focused on ensuring the security of our clients' data and we consider any such claim important. Our security group is attempting to decide the truths. Yippee strives to keep our clients safe, and we generally urge our clients to make solid passwords, or surrender passwords by and large by utilizing Yahoo Account Key, and utilize distinctive passwords for various stages."


As indicated by an example of the information, it contains usernames, hashed passwords (made with md5 calculation), dates of birth, and sometimes move down email addresses. The information is being sold for 3 bitcoins, or around $1,860, and apparently contains 200 million records from "2012 in all probability," as indicated by Peace. Until Yahoo affirms a rupture, notwithstanding, or the full dataset is discharged for check, it is conceivable that the information is ordered and repackaged from other significant information spills.

Peace told Motherboard, "well fuck them they dont need to affirm well better for me they dont do secret word reset." Many organizations issue watchword resets to accounts influenced by information breaks, or even preemptively for a situation like this in which the provenance of spilled information is not so much clear.

Motherboard got a little example of the information—just 5000 records—before it was freely recorded, and found that a large portion of the two dozen Yahoo usernames tried by Motherboard corresponded to real records on the administration. (This was finished by heading off to the login segment of Yahoo, entering the email address, and clicking next; when the email location wasn't remembered, it was impractical to proceed.)

Be that as it may, when Motherboard endeavored to contact more than 100 of the locations in the specimen set, numerous returned as undeliverable. "This record has been debilitated or ceased," read one autoresponse to a considerable lot of the messages that neglected to convey legitimately, while others read "This client doesn't have a yahoo.com account."

Weekly Roundup: Verizon buys Yahoo, WikiLeaks publishes DNC emails and Skully crashes

Yahoo finally found a buyer, Mobileye and Tesla broke up, and some of the largest tech companies reported quarterly earnings. These are the biggest tech stories of the week. You can now get the Weekly Roundup sent straight to your inbox, delivered Saturday mornings.

1. Verizon (which owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch) announced it is acquiring Yahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion in cash. This includes Yahoo’s advertising, content, search and mobile activities. It’s crazy to think that in 2000, Yahoo was worth a whopping $125 billion. If you won the last computing platform and are on the cusp of the next one you’re not built for, you might want to sell your company. It’s easier to pivot than make a comeback, after all.

2. Major tech companies reported earnings this week, and the highlights are as follows.Facebook smashed its Q2 earnings, hitting 1.7 billion users and a record share price. Apple’s stock jumped 7% after the company reported solid earnings. Verizon missed on declining sales of $30.5 billion. Twitter stock dove after a mixed report, and poor user growth continued. GoPro sales beat investor expectations but are still in steep decline. Alphabet beat expectations, boosting its shares by 5%. Amazon shattered expectations with $30.4 billion in revenue.

3. Once promising AR motorcycle helmet startup Skully is no longer. We discovered that the company’s shutdown will leave several vendors and Skully’s manufacturer Flextronics with unpaid bills and at least 50 full-time employees out of a job. It’s unclear if any of the vendors will be paid.

4. Oracle made a $9.3 billion acquisition of cloud services company NetSuite. It’s clear now that Oracle is serious about growing cloud computing revenue, but this wasn’t always the case.

5. WikiLeaks published a searchable database of 19,252 DNC-related emails packed with personal and financial information. Following the leak, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she will be stepping down from her role as the head of the Democratic National Committee after the end of the event.

6. Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump participated in a Reddit AMA, managing to answer 13 questions on topics ranging from NASA to media bias. In a separate facepalm-inducing moment, Trump invited Russia (yes, the entire country of Russia) to hack into Hillary Clinton’s inbox and release “the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.” Yikes.

7. During their earnings call, MobileEye announced that it will no longer provide Tesla with its self-driving automotive tech beyond EyeQ3, the processor currently used in Tesla vehicles. It is unclear whether Tesla or Mobileye ended the relationship, but Mobileye investors aren’t happy about the split.

8. Upthere, a new company from Apple and Oracle vets, came out of beta with $77 million in funding. The company believes that cloud storage should be your primary storage and not just a place for keeping backups. It’s now generally available for OS X/MacOS, Android and iOS.

9. Xiaomi announced its first laptop, and it sure does look familiar. The Mi Notebook Air comes in two sizes — 13.3-inch and 12.5-inch — running Windows with a full-HD display, full-metal body and type-C USB charging and two USB slots. The Macbook Air rival will come as cheap as $540.

10. Amazon debuted a dedicated shop for Kickstarter projects. Amazon is now hosting 300 successful Kickstarter products across a variety of categories, now all available for purchase.

11. Uber cofounder and CEO of Expa Studios Garrett Camp unveiled Expa’s latest project, Haus. Haus is a real estate play that focuses on digitizing the discovery, buying and selling of residential property.

Did Yahoo ever have a chance?

On this week’s episode of MashTalk, Lance, Pete and I discuss everything happening in the world of tech. 

After a brief update on Pokémon Go tactics (1:02), we discuss Apple (3:30) and its latest earnings. The company made less money than it did last year, but it still managed to sell its billionth iPhone, which is pretty incredible. 

There is some discussion about whether or not we will see new Macs from Apple in September (14:30). Lance thinks not, but Pete and I are more optimistic. 

The Apple talk dovetails into a long discussion about Yahoo’s sale to Verizon (20:30). We spend some time discussing the last four years under Marissa Mayer and discuss whether this conclusion was really just an inevitability. 

After Yahoo, the discussion turns to a company that tried to buy it eight years ago, Microsoft. Microsoft has a new iOS camera app this week, Microsoft Pix (37:00). Lance talks about the app. It seems really cool, but does the world really need another camera app? 

Speaking of stuff the world needs, Lance tries to convince Pete and Christina whyDyson’s $1,000 360 Eye robot vacuum is something worth buying. 

Listen to the episode on iTunes or on Stitcher. You can also subscribe to MashTalk on iTunes by clicking the button below to get our latest episodes, instantly. If you like MashTalk, please fill out our audience survey.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone relaunches Jelly as a human-powered search engine

Calling it an “un-pivot,” Biz Stone is bringing back Jelly, the Q&A app he created in 2013. Launching today, the new and improved Jelly remains close to its roots, but with an added twist. This time, everything is anonymous so you can ask what you really want to know.

Referring to the new Jelly an “on-demand search engine,” Stone said that one lesson he learned from the original Jelly was that people didn’t necessarily want to ask questions to their social network. “Would you want your Googles to be your tweets?”

Some might draw similarities to Quora or Yahoo Answers, but Stone is hoping that this Jelly will be an alternative to Google.

“We think the future of search engines is just ask a question, get the answer,” he added. It’s “ten or 15 minutes you didn’t have to spend looking around on links.”

Users can sign up to answer questions on Jelly. People can rate whether responses were helpful. If someone receives a lot of positive feedback on a certain topic, they are more likely to be selected to answer future similar questions.

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Biz Stone "Unpivots" To Revive Q&A App JellyBiz Stone's Jelly Launches Super So You Can Express Your Best, Craziest, Sexiest Opinions

The new Jelly is optimized for mobile, but will also be available for desktop searches.

Jelly was founded by both Biz Stone and Ben Finkel in 2013. Backers included Spark Capital, Greylock, Jack Dorsey and Bono.

Says Stone of the change of plans. “We made a rookie mistake. We got talked into pivoting” Jelly into anopinion-sharing app called Super. So the Jelly co-founders decided to go back to “our original dream, our original vision.”

Hero prankster puts Yahoo up for sale on Craigslist

Things just keep getting worse for Yahoo.

In case Yahoo's short-term outlook wasn't bleak enough, the company has now been listed in for sale ad on Craigslist.Though hilarious, the fake ad — posted to Craigslist Thursday — will likely hit a little too close to home for some. 

For one, the ad lists the embattled Internet giant for $8 billion OBO (or best offer) — a figure that has been widely reported to be at the top of the range of what the company could fetch on the open market.  

"A rare find, this one-of-a-kind Internet original is now available to the public for a limited time," the ad reads.

"A beautiful piece in good-to-fair condition, showing some signs of wear but easily restored in the hands of the right person. Sadly, the original owners can no longer maintain it."

And did we mention it was listed in the antiques section of Craigslist? Better still though, is what the ad says comes included in the deal:

• 1 billion users, more or less
• Web email system (now 62% spam free!)
• Bottomless archive of Kim Kardashian photos
• Flickr & Tumblr
•  Fully equipped Nautilus gym
•  A really nice cafeteria
• The Yahoo Weather app
• Several warehouses filled with Kind bars
• Katie Couric

Ouch.