By Nadia Zaifulizan
Apple’s Long Game
Apple will broaden the target for professional apps across Apple’s platforms by including both the iPad app with the Mac app in the Mac, via the Catalyst. It will allow developers to write Mac apps with a familiar set of tools and have access to an entirely new platform. Catalyst will bring the apps into Mac. Next, Apple will be creating a new unified development approach to all Apple’s devices based in Swift and SwiftUI, so iOS and Mac developers can integrate everything through Catalyst, experiment and build using SwiftUI, and the endgame would lead to eventual creation solely using SwiftUI. And that is Apple’s ‘slow and steady pace of iterative, continuous improvement’.
Instagram Shook
Instagram was out of service for just over an hour on June 13 and people took to Twitter to trend #instagramdown. This is only one of the few series of outage in the past months when both Instagram and Facebook were down back in April. Instagram engagements has been back to normal since then.
Meanwhile, Instagram was also shook by new updates about one of its viral accounts. It turns out that the construction worker father turned influencer who went viral on Instagram was actually really ‘influencing’ through a coffee brand’s marketing strategy. Instagrammers were heart-eyed when photos of Omar @justaconstructionguy first surfaced, appearing as a normal construction dad who just loves coffee. After a while the coffee brand’s owner revealed that although Omar is really a construction dad, he didn’t actually own or post on the account, and that the photos were part of the coffee brand’s marketing ad.
Fake Accounts and Deepfake Media
AP reported that foreign spies routinely use fake social media profiles to target or recruit important people, and zoomed in on an allegedly fake account on Linked In. The user ‘Katie Jones’ was allegedly a fake profile with photo which was allegedly artificially generated. ‘Katie Jones’ connected with a moderately sized connections of 52 accounts, but these are accounts which have enough influence that they give credibility to Katie Jones’ invites towards other accounts.d
Fake accounts are becoming more common on social media for reasons such as espionage or even political intelligence. Issues of online security, privacy, political manipulation and national security, have been a concern for advocators. Among the discourse of fake profiles and actions, matters in relation with ‘Deepfake’ media has also been raised. While some are simply for satirical purposes, others were done with malicious intent.f Deepfakes can be put together by utilizing actual media (photos, video, audio) and using video dialogue replacement technology or other AI tech to create a fake media. Facebook and Instagram’s current stand is to allow fact-checker to label the Deepfake content as false and filter it out of Instagram’s recommendations, but still allow the Deepfake media posts to remain on the platform.g Authorities are currently grappling with the effort to regulate Deepfakes online.i We will look forward to how these regulations will progress next.
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