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After the remarkable string of weekends it’s been having, it was really just a matter of time before Black Panther wrestled the top spot from his fellow Avengers. As of today, the Ryan Coogler-directed film is North America’s highest grossing superhero film of all-time (not adjusted for inflation, mind).

The news comes via The Hollywood Reporter, which notes that the film has pulled in $624 million on the continent, roaring past 2012’s The Avengers, which made $623.4 million. The film, which cost around $200 million, is now one of only seven movies to make more than $600 million, domestically.

Black Panther has been pulling in money at a steady clip since opening, with a record-setting $218 million opening weekend. Worldwide, it’s pulled in $1.2 billion and is on-track to become the third highest-grossing superhero film internationally, behind the first two Avengers films. The third Avengers film, Infinity War, is due out on April 27.

Even more so than those films, however, Black Panther has become a cultural touchstone for moviegoers, and, hopefully, a wake up call for Hollywood, which has traditionally shied away from diversity in film. Those who still haven’t seen it, can check out Anthony’s review here — or just take my word that it’s awesome. 

YouTube’s plan to combat conspiracy videos with information sourced from Wikipedia got push back from a number of different quarters — including, surprisingly, Wikimedia itself. Seems Google didn’t mention the plan to the foundation before unveiling it at SXSW earlier this month. Whoops.

Wikimedia executive director Katherine Maher responded with an even-keeled statement reiterating that, while the crowd-sourced encyclopedia’s information is, indeed, free to use, well, it might be nice if corporations that used it gave a little back.

“Wikipedia’s content [is] freely licensed for reuse by anyone,” Maher wrote, “and that’s part of our mission: that every single person can share in free knowledge. We want people all over the world to use, share, add to, and remix Wikipedia. At the same time, we encourage companies who use Wikimedia’s content to give back in the spirit of sustainability.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time Google has utilized the work of Wikipedia’s army of devoted contributors and editors — and the company is hardly alone here. In recent years, the site’s vast wealth of peer-edited knowledge has, for better or worse, become the backbone of a number of wildly used services — including, notably, smart assistants. Ask Alexa, Assistant or Siri who the Queen of England is, and they’ll all pull that information from the same place.

In a conversation earlier this week, Wikimedia’s Chief Revenue Office, Lisa Grunwell told TechCrunch that this sort of usage doesn’t constitute any sort of formal relationship. Most companies more or less hook into an API to utilize that breadth of knowledge. It’s handy for sure, and it’s all well within Wikimedia’s fair use rules, but as with Maher’s letter, the CRO expressed some concerns about seemingly one-sided relationships.

“Our content is there to be used,” explained Grunwell. “It’s freely-licensed and it’s freely-licensed for a reason. At the same time, it’s like the environment. It’s there to be used, but it’s not there to be exploited. We do need the people who use the content to give back in some way. That’s what we encourage. There’s no paywall. We don’t charge for data. If you can afford to give, we ask that you give, and if you can’t, you still get use it. That’s kind of the social contract we have with our readers.”

“Exploitation” is, of course, a tricky word when it comes something like Wikipedia. Much like NPR or PBS, it’s a service that’s offered up freely to anyone, but one that relies upon charitable donations to stay afloat. Smart assistants are certainly playing by the applicable rules when it comes to leveraging that information base, but the way it’s presented can ultimately have a siloed effect on Wikipedia.

In the case of a primarily voice-based assistant like Alexa, even when Wikipedia is cited, there isn’t a direct connection to the source material. That means users don’t have immediate view of primary sources (a key part of Wikipedia’s DNA). It also means that Wikimedia’s donation information isn’t front and center.

“I don’t mean to sound like the Lorax here,” said Grunwell. “If you overuse something and you don’t give back to it, you can harm it. In the case of Alexa and Siri, our content gets intermediated. Wikipedia works because people can contribute to it, people can edit it. Also, once a year, when we ask people can donate. When they get their information not from us — but Wikipedia content through something like Siri or something like Alexa — that opportunity to either contribute back as an editor is broken, and that opportunity to contribute, to donate is also broken.”

A majority of the Foundation’s support comes from individual donors, courtesy of six million users who give, on average $10. Support from corporations (excluding foundations) makes up about four-percent of the company’s donations, according to Grunwell. Of course, it’s possible that some of the big anonymous funders have direct ties to these companies, but the list of top corporate donors is actually a bit surprising.

Here are the numbers for the 2017-2018 Fiscal Year:

1. Google (more than $1 million)
2. Humble Bundle ($456,000)
3. Craigslist Foundation ($250,000)
4. Cards Against Humanity ($35,000)

Grunwell told me that, in spite of the recent dust up with YouTube, “of the top five big Internet companies, the big technology companies, our relationship with Google is by far the best, both in terms of what they contribute to the organization and generally working with us. I will say in many instances, they do reach out to us and they do work with us. We do have partnerships with them. I think it’s a good relationship certainly, compared to the others.”

Other big players also contribute, by way of matching donations. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google (again) all contributed around $50,000 by matching employee gifts. Amazon, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found on that list.

In an era when all sides of the political spectrum are shouting “fake news” at one another, source citing and fact-checking are growing increasingly important. Both have long been a fundamental tenant of Wikipedia, as the site attempt to maintain neutrality on even the most hot button of topics.

“Like every platform on the Internet, I think we are concerned and sometimes face bad actors,” said Grunwell. “Those concerns are real. We’ve done a lot of things just in terms of trying to build tools like machine learning tools to detect bad faith contributions. In our community, they’re watching particular pages. They’re certainly doing their part.”

As smart assistants, YouTube and the like grow increasingly a part of our day to day lives, it becomes more and more important that Wikimedia can do its job. And donations don’t grow on trees.

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Denis Pombriant, Doc Searls, Esteban Kolsky, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 23, 2018.

G3: Face the Music — Mary Hodder, Elisa Camehort Page, Denise Howell, Kristie Wells, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 22, 2018.

@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @ekolsky, @DenisPombriant, @fradice

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Liner Notes

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

G3: Face the Music

G3 chat stream

G3 on Facebook

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Denis Pombriant, Doc Searls, Esteban Kolsky, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 23, 2018.

G3: Face the Music — Mary Hodder, Elisa Camehort Page, Denise Howell, Kristie Wells, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 22, 2018.

@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @ekolsky, @DenisPombriant, @fradice

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Liner Notes

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

G3: Face the Music

G3 chat stream

G3 on Facebook

The UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, finally obtained a warrant to enter and search the offices of Cambridge Analytica late Friday — carrying out an evidence gathering sweep of the company into the small hours of Saturday morning.

Cambridge Analytica is at the centre of a data misuse storm that’s wiped billions off the value of Facebook since newspaper revelations late last week revealed the extent of data swiped by the UK political consultancy which intended to use the information for the Trump campaign.

In a statement on its website today, the ICO said:

The warrant to inspect the premises of Cambridge Analytica was executed at 20.00 on 23 March 2018. Our investigators left the premises at about 03.00.

We will now need to assess and consider the evidence before deciding the next steps and coming to any conclusions.

This is one part of a larger investigation by the ICO into the use of personal data and analytics by political campaigns, parties, social media companies and other commercial actors.

ICO commissioner Elizabeth Denham has confirmed previously that complaints related to Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data for political ad targeting form part of that larger, ongoing investigation.

It opened its formal investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes in May 2017.

This week, after saying it had failed to obtain information it had requested from CA, the regulator applied for a warrant to enter and search CA’s offices — in the wake of reports by the New York Times and Observer of London based on interviews with former CA employee, Chris Wylie.

According to Wylie, CA used a survey app created by a Cambridge University academic to suck up data on 50M Facebook users. The intent was to use the information for political targeting purposes for the benefit of the Trump campaign.

Earlier this month Denham told a UK parliamentary committee that’s also running an investigation into fake news that she hoped to publish her review of digital political ad targeting this May. Although that was before the ICO decided it needed to apply for a warrant to raid CA’s offices.

The regulator has now said it will need time to sift through the evidence it gathered overnight — so it remains to be seen whether its wider review of political ad targeting will be delayed as a result.

In an online statement published yesterday, the acting CEO of CA, Alexander Taylor, apologized for Facebook “data and derivatives” having been obtained without consent “from most respondents”.

But he also claimed the company believed it was acting within Facebook’s policies and UK data protection law when it licensed the data from professor Aleksandr Kogan whose survey app was the Trojan horse used to gather 270,000 Facebook users’ data and their friends’ data — resulting in some 50M profiles being harvested in all.

“[CA] believed that the data had been obtained in line with Facebook’s terms of service and data protection laws,” writes Taylor.

He also claims that in October 2015 CA deleted the data from its file server after Facebook asked it to. But he seems less certain whether other copies might not have existed as he says the company “began the process of searching for and removing any of its derivatives in our system”.

“When Facebook sought further assurances a year ago, we carried out an internal audit to make sure that all the data, all derivatives and backups had been deleted, and gave Facebook a certificate to this effect. Please can I be absolutely clear: we did not use any GSR data in the work we did in the 2016 US presidential election,” he further claims.

“We are now undertaking an independent third-party audit to verify that we do not hold any GSR data,” Taylor adds. “We have been in touch with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) since February 2017, when ​we hosted its team in our London office to provide total transparency on the data we hold, how we process it, and the legal basis for us processing it. I want to make sure we remain committed to helping the ICO in their investigations.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked of this year’s China Development Forum in Beijing today with an address that hit on a number of hot button topics, user privacy concerns and a looming U.S./China trade war.

The executive touched on privacy regulations, in the wake of a breech of trust that found Cambridge Analytica harvesting information from 50 million Facebook users.

“I think that this certain situation is so dire and has become so large that probably some well-crafted regulation is necessary,” Cook is quoted as saying, in a report from Bloomberg. “The ability of anyone to know what you’ve been browsing about for years, who your contacts are, who their contacts are, things you like and dislike and every intimate detail of your life — from my own point of view it shouldn’t exist.”

The specter of privacy concerns has, of course, been a hot button topic for Apple over the decades, particularly as devices and apps demand more and more of our personal information. Late last year, for instance, then Senator Al Franken pressed the company over Face ID — a subject to which Apple quickly responded.

Cook’s statement reflects similar comments Steve Jobs made about privacy back in 2010 and an event where Mark Zuckerberg was also speaking.

“Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly,” Jobs said. “I’m an optimist; I believe people are smart, and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.”

In his own address, Cook noted that many of the concerns around what companies might do with all of the personal data “has come true more than once.”

Cook also addressed growing tensions between the U.S. and China, a market that has been increasingly important to Apple’s bottom line — and, of course, a place where much of the company’s manufacturing occurs. 

“My belief is that businesses should be engaged with governments in countries where they are doing business, whether they agree or disagree,” Cook said, according to Reuters.

Tensions between the two countries have only grown more heated in recent days. Just this week, the Trump administration announced plans to place $60 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods, with the burden landing heavily on electronics.

The Looming Tower, a new series on Hulu, approaches the September 11 terrorist attacks from an unusual angle — instead of focusing on the day itself, it tells the story of the FBI and CIA investigations into Al-Qaeda in the late 1990s.

In some ways, the show feels like a police procedural, with Jeff Daniels as the FBI’s John O’Neill and Peter Sarsgaard as Martin Schmidt, his counterpart in the CIA. Except we all know where this investigation is leading.

On this week’s episode of the Original Content podcast, we discuss our initial impressions of the show (new episodes are still airing each week), how it combines fact and fiction, and how it compares to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Lawrence Wright.

We also cover Amy Poehler’s deal to direct and star in a film for Netflix, the controversy over the salary disparity between Claire Foy and Matt Smith on The Crown and the new trailer for a “killer rain” show called, um, The Rain.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly.

The marketing of cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) is currently operating like the Wild West. From Ethereum to Litecoin to Neo, there are over 1,300 offerings in the burgeoning crypto market, and people like James Altucher are here to profit off the confusion.

However, change is afoot. Facebook banned advertising of ICOs and cryptocurrencies, Google just joined suit and even Twitter is attempting to rein in the fraudsters.

We need to establish what regulations must you follow to avoid liability and what ethical guidelines should the industry establish on its own to foster trust and legitimacy.

The Cryptocurrency Regulatory Landscape in Flux

So far, the U.S. is taking a cautionary approach to regulating cryptocurrencies and ICOs, issuing more statements than clear-cut regulations. This Coinbase article on ICO regulation summed up the government’s confusing approach well: “Be careful. ICOs are risky and dangerous. It’s possible that a token, depending on the circumstances, might not be a security, but it probably is. If the token resembles a security, again on a case-by-case basis, then you need to follow existing securities regulation for an ICO.” So, an ICO may be a security and governed by securities laws. Or maybe it isn’t. This lack of clarity poses risks for everyone from investors to entrepreneurs to marketers of running afoul of the law. Moreover, it poses questions of ethical duty: What rules should we follow? Should government put regulations in place?

There are many experts in the crypto industry that bemoan any mention of regulation, as the markets frequently react negatively to them. The anti-regulation sentiment is strong among Bitcoin investors, too. A recent survey by Lendedu showed that nearly 50% believe the government should not play a stronger role in regulating Bitcoin and virtual currencies in 2018.

On the other hand, some experts say that the market is ready and even needs regulation to stabilize and gain the trust of mainstream investors. “I believe we need more regulation. It will hurt in the short term, but I believe it will eventually add a zero to the market cap,” said Protocol Ventures founder Rick Marini in an Q&A with VSC. “There’s a lot of big money—pension funds, endowments, institutional money—that is sitting on the sidelines, waiting for clarification.”Indiegogo Moves to Set a Standard and Self-Regulate

We should be looking to platforms like Indiegogo for inspiration on what a self-regulated crypto market should look like. Previously limited to the crowdfunding space, Indiegogo has chosen to follow all securities regulations in its initial foray into the crypto sphere in order to protect both sellers and investors and make the market more accessible to everyone.

Indiegogo partnered with FINRA-registered broker-dealer MicroVentures when it launched its equity crowdfunding portal last year to “help ensure [its] equity crowdfunding offerings are SEC compliant,” and it will similarly offer SEC-compliant ICOs. This is despite, as Indiegogo readily admits, the fact that many ICOs today are conducted outside of securities laws. For sellers, Indiegogo provides a registered broker-dealer that can facilitate token pre-sales inside current SEC regulations in addition to providing critical investor accreditation validation, know-your-customer (KYC), anti-money-laundering (AML) services.

Additionally, it is not a free-for-all market—the company is carefully curating its selection of vetted token pre-sales to prevent shady ICOs from being offered on the platform.

Currency Ratings are Vital to Self-Regulation

The cryptocurrency industry should also consider creating independent cryptocurrency rating agencies a la S&Ps and Moody’s that rate bonds. While the 2008 market crash proved that these credit-based rating services are not perfect, that’s actually a good thing. The flaws in existing systems give the crypto industry a baseline for best practices and a way to learn from past mistakes.

This could be accomplished via independent analyst teams that interview companies that are planning ICOs, and issue reports on the need for a coin in their stated use case, the financial strength of said company, management team pedigree, venture capital support, and then deliver A-F rating scale on the comfort with such an offering. In keeping with crypto’s purely market-based structure, non-governmental oversight seems more appropriate, especially if the market provides enough incentive for competing analyses.

It is possible that a truly crowdsourced rating prediction system could also be developed to supplement or even supplant the independent analysts. Studies have shown that non-expert “crowds” can be astonishingly effective at predicting outcomes. For example, UC Berkeley’s Good Judgement Project found that it can improve outcome predictions by training ordinary people to make more confident and accurate predictions over time as “superforecasters.”

If applied with appropriate safeguards from manipulation, this crowd prediction model can also be applied to rating cryptocurrencies. Not only may it prove to be more accurate than ratings agencies, it’s very much in line with the decentralized nature of the cryptocurrency world.

I tend to believe clear and nationwide regulation of cryptocurrency will help stabilize the market and make it safer and more appealing to mainstream investors. But government regulation challenges the technical and cultural core of cryptocurrency as a decentralized market and a store of value that’s not tied to any one government-issued currency.

Self-regulation of marketplaces and marketing could be the perfect middle ground. Effective self-regulation, exemplified at Indiegogo, can protect the future of the industry, the viability of cryptocurrencies, and even stem further government regulations. Of course, there is no guarantee this will stop regulation or even that users will want to adopt any rules. But the “good guys”—which is probably the majority of us—have a duty to act ethically and with the best of intentions when dealing with all types of investments, including the new frontier of cryptocurrencies. We can literally have the livelihoods of our friends and neighbors in our hands when doing this kind of work and we should all act accordingly.

Agree? Disagree? Any other ideas on best practices for marketing crypto? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Snapchat’s parent company bought a web-based 3D game engine startup out of the UK this past May, Business Insider (paywalled) reports.

PlayCanvas is a development tool focused on letting people easily design rich 3D environments. Unlike products from companies like Unity and Epic Games, PlayCanvas’s game engine was entirely browser-based and was optimized to run on low-power devices. The focus of the WebGL engine stretches from configuring 3D models to running entire games.

The small London-based company was founded in 2011 and raised just $590,000 in seed funding from investors including the Microsoft Accelerator and DC Thomson Ventures according to Crunchbase. We don’t know how much the deal went for.

While many of Snap’s recent acquisitions have focused on bolstering consumer-facing features, PlayCanvas seems to be focused squarely on developers. The most obvious use of a tool would have been to integrate the technology into Snap’s Lens Studio product where developers can build their own AR Lens effects. Snap has recently been drawing more attention to third-party AR creations, and it’s clear that if the company wants to reach any sort of scale in its augmented reality plans, it’s going to have to hand over the reigns to a developer network.

We have reached out to Snap for confirmation.

Hear that? It’s almost as if thousands of spooks and hackers suddenly cried out at once… The Internet Engineers Task Force has just unanimously approved a security framework that will make encrypted connections on the web faster and more resistant to snooping.

It’s called Transport Layer Security version 1.3, and while it’s not a big flashy event, it very much is the kind of iterative improvement that keeps the web working in the face of malicious actors everywhere. The IETF is a body of engineers from all over the world who collaborate on standards like this — and their approval of TLS 1.3 has been long in coming, more than four years and 28 drafts.

That’s because the internet is a delicate machine and changes to its fundamental parts — such as how a client and server establish a secure, encrypted connection — must be made very, very carefully.

Without going too deep into the technical details (I’d be lost if I tried), TLS 1.3 makes a few prominent changes that should keep you safe.

• The “handshake” between client and server has been streamlined and encryption initiated earlier to minimize the amount of data transmitted in the clear.
• “Forward secrecy,” meaning hackers can’t skim decryption keys from one exchange and use it to decrypt others later.
• “Legacy” encryption algorithms have been removed as options, as these could occasionally be forced into use and their shortcomings leveraged to break the cipher on messages.
• A new “0-RTT,” or zero round-trip time, mode in which the server and client that have established some preliminaries before can get right to sending data without introducing themselves to each other again.

The whole standard is 155 pages long, and really only other engineers will want to dig in. But it’s available here if you’d like to peruse it or go into detail on one of the new features.

It doesn’t magically take effect, of course — but the IETF approval is a big step towards the standard being adopted by big companies, web services, and other, higher-level standards. You probably won’t even notice when it does come into play, but that’s how it’s supposed to happen. Just be sure to thank a network engineer or cryptographer next time you see one.