Facebook puts a stop to forced arbitration for its sexual harassment complaints

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Joining the list of tech companies that have put a stop to the practice, Facebook will no longer force its employees to settle sexual harassment claims via private arbitration. According to Facebook’s Vice President of People Lori Goler, they want to be “part of taking the next step” at this “pivotal moment” in the tech industry. The company also updated its policy on dating among employees. Executives are required to disclose any romantic relationships they have with other employees, even if they don’t oversee the work of said employee. At the moment, Facebook isn’t sharing any other changes in its policies when it comes to its internal harassment policies. Companies like Microsoft, Uber, Lyft, and recently Google have all dropped its forced arbitration clauses.

Source: The Verge

Google will help The New York Times digitize over 5 million of its archived photos

The New York Times has a big task ahead for Google. It wants the tech company to help digitize its expansive photo collection in its “morgue” (a.k.a. the basement where it keeps its photo archive). With photos dating back to the 19^th century, the morgue has a collection of between five to seven million images, along with information about when and why these were published. Google’s machine vision and AI technology will not only help them digitize the photos, but also use its object recognition tools to extract information from the images to make these easier to catalog. The tech will help them categorize semantic information that can be lifted from the images and link these to data like locations and dates.

“[It’s] a treasure trove of perishable documents,” says the NYT’s Chief Technology Officer Nick Rockwell. “A priceless chronicle of not just The Times’s history, but of nearly more than a century of global events that have shaped our modern world.”

Source: The Verge

Pinterest redesigns mobile feed, makes it look similar to Instagram’s feed

If you look at Pinterest’s feed on mobile right now, it looks pretty similar to Instagram. Instead of showing a pin board of images, the focus now is on single images shown as a column of posts. There are even horizontal rows of Pinterest-recommended accounts you can follow. Unlike Instagram though, it retains a chronological feed. You can also still save images to your board or tap on the image to redirect to the linked out piece where the image is from. While this moves away from Pinterest’s standard look, it does make sense for users who are trying to look at images on this image-based service. The update is coming to mobile users worldwide

Source: The Verge

Diego Luna reprises role in ‘Star Wars’ spin-off series

Loki isn’t the only one getting his own series on Disney’s upcoming Disney+ streaming service. The company has confirmed it’ll be developing a prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story with Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor taking the lead. The prequel is being described as a “rousing spy thriller” set in the early years of the Rebellion. There is no release date yet for the series but production will start next year. Disney+ is expected to launch later next year as well. 

Source: Polygon