Facebook is opening up its ‘M’ AI platform as a bot engine for developers

Facebook is opening up its M platform, calling it wit.ai, and letting developers build powerful AI for use as a bot.

Much as Microsoft announced at Build, the M bot platform will allow developers to pre-fab conversations or catchphrases which will return a response. If a user typed “I’m really hungry” to an app for a pizza restaurant, the bot may then ask “your usual, then?” as a static response.

From there, it’s possible to either have a richer conversation with the bot — depending on what the developer has built into M — or just have the pizza delivered straight away.

It’ll take a lot of heavy lifting from developers, as every interaction needs to be granularly built. But, we’re still in early days with our interactions with AI, so there’s likely not a lot of clever things users would ask. Even then, it’s possible to build out a safeguard like Siri’s ‘here’s what I found for you on the Web’ answer.

The platform is open today, so if you’re interested in building your own interactive bot for an app, get crackin’.

Using URL shorteners could expose you to privacy invasions and malware attacks

URL shorteners are great for packaging links that you want to share on blogs, social networks and messaging services. Unfortunately, they can pose grave security risks, as two researchers discovered in a study spanning 18 months (PDF).

Vitaly Shmatikov of Cornell Tech, in collaboration with visiting researcher Martin Georgiev, looked at the URL shortening methods used by Microsoft in its OneDrive cloud storage app, as well Google in its Maps service.

What they found was pretty damn scary. They noted that Microsoft usedBitly’s service to generate short URLs linking to users’ OneDrive files and they had a predictable structure.

This made it easy to look at the full URL for a single file and then discover other files shared by the same user.

And not only did they manage to find files including somecontaining sensitive information, but they also noticed that a small percentage of them were write-enabled. This means that they could inject malware and viruses into those files with ease.

When looking at Google Maps links, Shmatikov and Georgiev said that they were able to scan URLs with five-character tokens and see people’s locations and destinations.

It may seem like they’d only ever come across random information this way, but they were able to uncover things like a user seeking directions from a residence to a planned parenthood facility, along with her full name and age.

Thankfully, both services have amended their link shortening methods after the researchers alerted them about the issues. They said that Google responded immediately and implemented 11-12 character tokens for its Maps links as well defenses to prevent bots from scanning its URLs.

Microsoft didn’t take as kindly to the researchers pointing out the flaw in its service. However, it disabled its link shortening option in OneDrive last month, but maintains that its decision wasn’t related to the issue highlighted by the duo.

Does that mean companies should stop offering URL shortening services? Shmatikov noted that they should explicitly warn users that creating a short link to a file potentially exposes it to unintended third parties.

There are ways to make them safer: using in-house resolvers instead of public services like Bitly, keeping bots from scanning links by using methods like CAPTCHAs, and developing robust APIs that don’t make it easy to uncover all files shared by a user just by finding a single URL.

Apple dropped a big hint that OS X will soon become ‘MacOS’

As if we weren’t expecting it already, there’s a huge new clue Apple is about to rename OS X to MacOS.

In discussing how it concluded product life spans for an Earth Day promotion, Apple writes “years of use, which are based on first owners, are assumed to be four years for MacOS and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices” as determining factors.

It’s not a total surprise; we actually expected Apple to announce this change at last year’s WWDC developers conference. It’s also been subtly altering its ‘iStuff’ naming scheme since introducing watchOS and tvOS.

Oddly, the ‘Mac’ in MacOS is capped-up, which would be a subtle but notable difference from its other platforms.

If Apple does make the change, we’ll expect ‘phoneOS’ to be rumored shortly afterward, and possibly arrive sometime in 2017.

Obama officially backs FCC’s new initiative for cable box competition

In February, the FCC voted in favor of loosening cable’s grip on set-top boxes. Today, President Obama offered a show of support to the initiative that sought to give consumers greater control of how they access their favorite channels.

The “Unlock the Box” initiative sought to encourage competition and promote innovation by giving consumers choice in what box they’d like to use to access cable television.

Currently, cable companies are pocketing an average of $231 per household in lease fees each year on boxes that are “required” to access cable television service.

Under the new plan, consumers could select from a wide variety of third-party options, such as Roku, AppleTV and others, that could offer additional benefits as well as fueling innovation in the space due to increased competition for customers.

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“This will allow for companies to create new, innovative, higher-quality, lower-cost products,” said chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Jason Furman.

“Instead of spending nearly $1,000 over four years to lease a set of behind-the-times boxes, American families will have options to own a device for much less money that will integrate everything they want in one, easier-to-use gadget.”

Obama also issued an executive order today giving federal agencies two months to report on other areas where competition could drive innovation — and it’s not limited to cable TV.

Obama, if you recall was also behind a 2014 law that removed restrictions on carrier swapping for cellphones and he’s been a vocal proponent of net neutrality laws.