Critical NSA Reform Bill Fails in the Senate

The U.S. Capitol Building is reflected in the Senate reflecting pool while undergoing repairs in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2014. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Senate lawmakers working to reform NSA surveillance were struck a fatal blow tonight when a critical bill that would have curbed some of the spy agency’s controversial activity failed to obtain enough votes.

In one of their last acts before the year sunsets, pro-reform Senators attempted to advance the USA FREEDOM Act but failed by just two votes to obtain the 60 votes needed to move the bill forward.

Democrats, who maintain the majority in the Senate, were eager to push the bill through during the end-of-year session before Republicans assume the majority position next year. Civil liberties groups, which support reforms currently laid out in the bill, considered tonight’s vote the last-gasp chance for the bill to move forward before some of its staunchest supporters hand over seats lost in the November elections.

The bill would have put an end to the government’s controversial bulk collection of phone records from U.S. telecoms—a program first uncovered by USA Today in 2006 but re-exposed in 2013 in leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The bill would instead have kept records in the hands of telecoms and forced the NSA to obtain court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to gain access to them. It would also have required the agency to use specific search terms to narrow its access to only relevant records.

Additionally, the bill would have allowed service providers more transparency in disclosing to the public the number and types of requests they receive from the government for customer data. The government in turn would have had to be more transparent about the number of Americans caught up in its data searches. The NSA has said in the past that it has no idea how many Americans are caught up in national security collection efforts that target foreign suspects.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) J. Scott Applewhite/AP

A bipartisan coalition urged lawmakers to move the bill forward. Senator Patrick Leahy (D – Vermont), the bill’s main sponsor, led a vigorous effort to obtain enough votes to get the bill onto the Senate floor but lost with 58 yes votes and 42 no votes, two votes shy of the 60 yes votes needed. A favorable vote today would have allowed the bill to advance to the next stage—that is, move to the Senate floor where lawmakers could have proposed changes to it.

But lawmakers unhappy with the bill feared letting it get even that far, saying the USA FREEDOM Act would handicap the NSA and allow terrorist groups to prosper. Former NSA and CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey called it the kind of “NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love,” referring to the militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria that has terrorized parts of the Middle East.

The White House, however, supported the bill, saying it balanced the need for surveillance while still preserving the constitutional protections of Americans. Attorney General Eric Holder and even the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper both have expressed support for it.

The bulk-records collection program still faces problems next summer when Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act are scheduled to expire. The government has used Section 215 to authorize collection of the records, and reformers in the Senate and House have vowed to fight re-authorization of this and other sections of the Act next year and let them expire. They had hoped, however, in passing USA FREEDOM Act, to put an end to some of those powers now.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D – California), a supporter of the bulk-records collection program, initially opposed the USA FREEDOM Act but changed her mind out of fear that if the Senate didn’t pass this bill allowing a revised version of collection program to continue the program was at risk of being cancelled entirely next year if Section 215 is allowed to expire next year. She viewed the compromise offered under the USA FREEDOM Act preferable to the alternative.

“I do not want to end the program,” she told her fellow lawmakers today. “I’m prepared to make the compromise, which is that the metadata will be kept by the telecoms.”

Not One to Be Left Out, IBM Unveils Its Own Rethinking of Email

Verse, IBM’s new email service. Screenshot: IBM

IBM will soon launch a new online email service called Verse, and it puts a new spin on this very old idea.

Set to go live next week, Verse overturns the way emails are viewed and prioritized. It zeroes in on who sent them rather than when they were sent. The online client—pictured above—uses images of your most frequent contacts to provide a rather visual representation of where emails are coming from and where they’re going.

For Catherine Gillespie, an IBM product manager who helps oversee the service, Verse is an answer to a long-running problem. “Email clients have been around since the ’70s and they haven’t changed much,” she says. “You get a flat list of emails that you have to triage, with no sense of where you need to focus.”

But the tool is just the latest in a long, long line of new ideas that aim to right the wrongs of that ancient thing called email. Some companies are trying to replace it with newer tools, including everyone from Evernote to Asana and Slack. And many others are hoping to improve email itself, including not only IBM but also companies such as Acompli, Baydin, and one of the biggest names on the net: Google.

With its tool, Inbox, Google focuses on automatically sorting your email into different categories based on what type of message it is. Newsletters from retailers go in “promotions,” flight conformations go under “travel,” and so on. With Verse, IBM is also hoping to rejig the old organizational structures. But it takes a different approach.

Picture Your Contacts

A bar at the top of the Verse service includes a picture of each of your most important contacts. When you have a new message from one of them, a little red dot appears on their icon. You can then click their face to see their latest messages.

It feels a bit like an instant message app. Who sent a message is what’s important, not the date or subject line. Verse tries to algorithmically determine who the most important contacts are based on your correspondence history, but you can also add them manually.

IBM is banking that this more people-centric approach to email organization will help it stand out from the pack—though it still provides a flat list of messages, for those who want a more traditional email experience—and it aims to turn the service into more than just an email tool. Unlike other new email clients, IBM wants Verse to be a kind of collaboration platform that solves many of the same problems that companies like Asana and other “email killers” are trying to solve.

More Than Email

To that end, IBM has also included a file sharing service. Much like Box or Dropbox, you can upload your files to the service and then share links to the files instead of sending attachments. And as with would-be email killers, you can also add notes to the files from within Verse to eliminate a lot of e-mail back-and-forth.

What’s more, Verse includes a calendar and task management system. Like so many newer apps and older clients such as Microsoft Outlook, it aims to merge email with a vast range of tools that help you juggle your online life. The question is whether it’s too late for IBM to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft, who now dominates the marker for internet email. But there just might be room for Big Blue. After all, email is an enormous problem.

Behind the Scenes of Xbox’s New Documentary on the Rise and Fall of Atari

​

Earlier this year, WIRED accompanied filmmaker Zak Penn into the New Mexico desert. The aim: Excavate a buried treasure trove of Atari videogame cartridges that were buried when the pioneering company’s fortunes went sour in 1983.

The results, and the story behind the making of the infamous Atari version of E.T., are documented in a new film from Xbox, Atari: Game Over. It will premiere via the Xbox Live service, free to all members, on November 20.

We brought you the first video documenting the dig, back in April. Now here’s a more in-depth behind-the-scenes look at the making of the movie.

Whose Privacy Will Uber Violate Next? Why Its Latest Bad Behavior Matters

The heatmap of Uber rides in Washington, D.C. Uber

Update at 7:30 p.m. 11/18/2014: Uber just posted a new privacy policy to its blog in the wake of this controversy.

Passengers in the sharing economy need to know what kind of ride they’re buying.

Last night, Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith published an explosive story, reporting on a dinner in New York City where Uber executive Emil Michael floated the idea of hiring opposition researchers to dig up dirt on journalists who had been critical of the startup. Michael, who has since repeatedly apologized, asserted that neither “me nor my company would ever engage in such activities.” Uber spokesperson Nairi Hourdajian tweeted that “We have not, do not and will not investigate journalists. Those remarks have no basis in the reality of our approach.”

Alexander B. Howard

Alexander B. Howard is a DC-based writer focused on the intersections of technology, government, politics and media. Previously, he was a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the Ash Center at Harvard University, the Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, and an associate editor at SearchCompliance.com and WhatIs.com.

If so, Uber would differ from Hewlett Packard, Wal-Mart, Deutche Telekom, Fox News and other tech companies that have investigated and monitored journalists reporting on them. Regardless of the truth of whether this famously aggressive company has or will gather such “dirt files,” one item in Smith’s report deserves special notice, as Jay Yarrow picked up this morning. Smith reported that Uber demonstrated how it could spy on journalists, writing:

In fact, the general manager of Uber NYC accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed News reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, to make points in the course of a discussion of Uber policies. At no point in the email exchanges did she give him permission to do so.

The profile in question is Bhuiyan’s personal Uber profile, which carries with it her travel log and payment information. Uber told Smith that “Any such activity would be clear violations of our privacy and data access policies. Access to and use of data is permitted only for legitimate business purposes. These policies apply to all employees. We regularly monitor and audit that access.”

According to Ellen Cushing, a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine, that policy doesn’t look watertight.

Cushing explained more in a followup post about the warning she received, writing “as far as I know, the company hasn’t looked into my logs,” but adding:

But when I contacted a former employee last night about the news, this person told me that “it’s not very hard to access the travel log information they’re talking about. I have no idea who is ‘auditing’ this log or access information. At least when I was there, any employee could access rider rating information, as I was able to do it. How much deeper you could go with regular access, I’m not sure, as I didn’t try.” A second former employee told me something similar, saying “I never heard anything about execs digging into reporters’ travel logs, though it would be easy for them to do so.”

Step back a bit and think through the potential issues of Uber knowing who its riders are, when, and where, and what they are likely to have been doing. Such associations can be powerful. Strong conclusions can be drawn from the details of an Uber travel log, as Uber has itself noted when discussing what it calls a “Ride of Glory,” defined as “anyone who took a ride between 10pm and 4am on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep)”. Or consider for a moment that Uber uses detailed information to see how prostitution rates in a given neighborhood correlate with the need for Uber rides.

In a post titled How Prostitution and Alcohol Make Uber Better, Uber staff wrote, “Areas of San Francisco with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary also have the most Uber rides. ” Uber

With great data comes great power, and therefore responsibility. That means culture and ethics matter. The reason Michael was angry at Sarah Lacy appears to be because of her excoriating post about Uber’s culture.

Now, imagine if powerful members of Congress decide that they don’t like Uber’s labor practices, or surge pricing, or its approach to flaunting regulatory strictures, or the way it lobbies city governments not to be subject to reporting on compliance with accessibility laws. What then? Will the same executives who have shown a limited “God View” at launch parties choose not to use more powerful internal analytics to track who is going where and when? What policies and code would stop them from looking at the profiles of Senators and Representatives and drawing conclusions about where and when they go? Or for that matter, my profile, or yours?

I know this is all hypothetical, but multiple reports of executives accessing user profiles mean we need keep our eyes open and ears clear, particularly given the relationships we can see forming between powerful politicians and tech companies, and the stories we already know meta data can tell about our lives.

The co-founder and CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, is a driven entrepreneur relentlessly focused on building a great product that seamlessly connects demand to capacity in a brilliant mobile app, leaving payment and logistics in the background. When I sat across from him at the launch party for Uber in DC, I found him to be funny and quick-witted, with a natural salesman’s charisma.

This morning, I wrote that Uber users, including me, needed to hear more from him next and not about future profit projections, plans for future expansion or more partnerships.

As he has in the past, Kalanick used a “tweetstorm” to go direct to the public, tweeting out a statement that included assurances and an apology to Sarah Lacy. “We are up to the challenge to show that Uber is and will continue to be a positive member of the community,” tweeted Kalanick, “And furthermore, I will do everything in my power towards the goal of earning that trust.”

I’m still left with unresolved questions. We need to know that we can trust him and his company with our locations and our safety. We want to know that they won’t ever use the data generated by our movements or pickups against us or the people who represent us. We want the company to willingly disclose data about how it provides accessible transit options to our neighbors and embrace transparency about its interactions with customers, regulators and our communities. We want to know that the people we’re trusting with data about our lives aren’t “morally bankrupt.”

I hope Uber is up to the challenge. The stakes are too high to blindly trust without verifying.

This post first appeared on the author’s personal blog Digiphile.

Critical NSA Reform Bill Fails in the Senate

The U.S. Capitol Building is reflected in the Senate reflecting pool while undergoing repairs in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2014. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Senate lawmakers working to reform NSA surveillance were struck a fatal blow tonight when a critical bill that would have curbed some of the spy agency’s controversial activity failed to obtain enough votes.

In one of their last acts before the year sunsets, pro-reform Senators attempted to advance the USA FREEDOM Act but failed by just two votes to obtain the 60 votes needed to move the bill forward.

Democrats, who maintain the majority in the Senate, were eager to push the bill through during the end-of-year session before Republicans assume the majority position next year. Civil liberties groups, which support reforms currently laid out in the bill, considered tonight’s vote the last-gasp chance for the bill to move forward before some of its staunchest supporters hand over seats lost in the November elections.

The bill would have put an end to the government’s controversial bulk collection of phone records from U.S. telecoms—a program first uncovered by USA Today in 2006 but re-exposed in 2013 in leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The bill would instead have kept records in the hands of telecoms and forced the NSA to obtain court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to gain access to them. It would also have required the agency to use specific search terms to narrow its access to only relevant records.

Additionally, the bill would have allowed service providers more transparency in disclosing to the public the number and types of requests they receive from the government for customer data. The government in turn would have had to be more transparent about the number of Americans caught up in its data searches. The NSA has said in the past that it has no idea how many Americans are caught up in national security collection efforts that target foreign suspects.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) J. Scott Applewhite/AP

A bipartisan coalition urged lawmakers to move the bill forward. Senator Patrick Leahy (D – Vermont), the bill’s main sponsor, led a vigorous effort to obtain enough votes to get the bill onto the Senate floor but lost by a vote of 58 to 42. A favorable vote today would have allowed the bill to advance to the next stage—that is, move to the Senate floor where lawmakers could have proposed changes to it.

But lawmakers unhappy with the bill feared letting it get even that far, saying the USA FREEDOM Act would handicap the NSA and allow terrorist groups to prosper. Former NSA and CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey called it the kind of “NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love,” referring to the militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria that has terrorized parts of the Middle East.

The White House, however, supported the bill, saying it balanced the need for surveillance while still preserving the constitutional protections of Americans. Attorney General Eric Holder and even the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper both have expressed support for it.

The bulk-records collection program still faces problems next summer when Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act are scheduled to expire. The government has used Section 215 to authorize collection of the records, and reformers in the Senate and House have vowed to fight re-authorization of this and other sections of the Act next year and let them expire. They had hoped, however, in passing USA FREEDOM Act, to put an end to some of those powers now.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D – California), a supporter of the bulk-records collection program, initially opposed the USA FREEDOM Act but changed her mind out of fear that if the Senate didn’t pass this bill allowing a revised version of collection program to continue the program was at risk of being cancelled entirely next year if Section 215 is allowed to expire next year. She viewed the compromise offered under the USA FREEDOM Act preferable to the alternative.

“I do not want to end the program,” she told her fellow lawmakers today. “I’m prepared to make the compromise, which is that the metadata will be kept by the telecoms.”

Not One to Be Left Out, IBM Unveils Its Own Rethinking of Email

Verse, IBM’s new email service. Screenshot: IBM

IBM will soon launch a new online email service called Verse, and it puts a new spin on this very old idea.

Set to go live next week, Verse overturns the way emails are viewed and prioritized. It zeroes in on who sent them rather than when they were sent. The online client—pictured above—uses images of your most frequent contacts to provide a rather visual representation of where emails are coming from and where they’re going.

For Catherine Gillespie, an IBM product manager who helps oversee the service, Verse is an answer to a long-running problem. “Email clients have been around since the ’70s and they haven’t changed much,” she says. “You get a flat list of emails that you have to triage, with no sense of where you need to focus.”

But the tool is just the latest in a long, long line of new ideas that aim to right the wrongs of that ancient thing called email. Some companies are trying to replace it with newer tools, including everyone from Evernote to Asana and Slack. And many others are hoping to improve email itself, including not only IBM but also companies such as Acompli, Baydin, and one of the biggest names on the net: Google.

With its tool, Inbox, Google focuses on automatically sorting your email into different categories based on what type of message it is. Newsletters from retailers go in “promotions,” flight conformations go under “travel,” and so on. With Verse, IBM is also hoping to rejig the old organizational structures. But it takes a different approach.

Picture Your Contacts

A bar at the top of the Verse service includes a picture of each of your most important contacts. When you have a new message from one of them, a little red dot appears on their icon. You can then click their face to see their latest messages.

It feels a bit like an instant message app. Who sent a message is what’s important, not the date or subject line. Verse tries to algorithmically determine who the most important contacts are based on your correspondence history, but you can also add them manually.

IBM is banking that this more people-centric approach to email organization will help it stand out from the pack—though it still provides a flat list of messages, for those who want a more traditional email experience—and it aims to turn the service into more than just an email tool. Unlike other new email clients, IBM wants Verse to be a kind of collaboration platform that solves many of the same problems that companies like Asana and other “email killers” are trying to solve.

More Than Email

To that end, IBM has also included a file sharing service. Much like Box or Dropbox, you can upload your files to the service and then share links to the files instead of sending attachments. And as with would-be email killers, you can also add notes to the files from within Verse to eliminate a lot of e-mail back-and-forth.

What’s more, Verse includes a calendar and task management system. Like so many newer apps and older clients such as Microsoft Outlook, it aims to merge email with a vast range of tools that help you juggle your online life. The question is whether it’s too late for IBM to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft, who now dominates the marker for internet email. But there just might be room for Big Blue. After all, email is an enormous problem.

Behind the Scenes of Xbox’s New Atari Documentary

​

Earlier this year, WIRED accompanied filmmaker Zak Penn into the New Mexico desert. The aim: Excavate a buried treasure trove of Atari videogame cartridges that were buried when the pioneering company’s fortunes went sour in 1983.

The results, and the story behind the making of the infamous Atari version of E.T., are documented in a new film from Xbox, Atari: Game Over. It will premiere via the Xbox Live service, free to all members, on November 20.

We brought you the first video documenting the dig, back in April. Now here’s a more in-depth behind-the-scenes look at the making of the movie.

Whose Privacy Will Uber Violate Next? Why Its Latest Bad Behavior Matters

The heatmap of Uber rides in Washington, D.C. Uber

Passengers in the sharing economy need to know what kind of ride they’re buying.

Last night, Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith published an explosive story, reporting on a dinner in New York City where Uber executive Emil Michael floated the idea of hiring opposition researchers to dig up dirt on journalists who had been critical of the startup. Michael, who has since repeatedly apologized, asserted that neither “me nor my company would ever engage in such activities.” Uber spokesperson Nairi Hourdajian tweeted that “We have not, do not and will not investigate journalists. Those remarks have no basis in the reality of our approach.”

Alexander B. Howard

Alexander B. Howard is a DC-based writer focused on the intersections of technology, government, politics and media. Previously, he was a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the Ash Center at Harvard University, the Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, and an associate editor at SearchCompliance.com and WhatIs.com.

If so, Uber would differ from Hewlett Packard, Wal-Mart, Deutche Telekom, Fox News and other tech companies that have investigated and monitored journalists reporting on them. Regardless of the truth of whether this famously aggressive company has or will gather such “dirt files,” one item in Smith’s report deserves special notice, as Jay Yarrow picked up this morning. Smith reported that Uber demonstrated how it could spy on journalists, writing:

In fact, the general manager of Uber NYC accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed News reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, to make points in the course of a discussion of Uber policies. At no point in the email exchanges did she give him permission to do so.

The profile in question is Bhuiyan’s personal Uber profile, which carries with it her travel log and payment information. Uber told Smith that “Any such activity would be clear violations of our privacy and data access policies. Access to and use of data is permitted only for legitimate business purposes. These policies apply to all employees. We regularly monitor and audit that access.”

According to Ellen Cushing, a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine, that policy doesn’t look watertight.

Cushing explained more in a followup post about the warning she received, writing “as far as I know, the company hasn’t looked into my logs,” but adding:

But when I contacted a former employee last night about the news, this person told me that “it’s not very hard to access the travel log information they’re talking about. I have no idea who is ‘auditing’ this log or access information. At least when I was there, any employee could access rider rating information, as I was able to do it. How much deeper you could go with regular access, I’m not sure, as I didn’t try.” A second former employee told me something similar, saying “I never heard anything about execs digging into reporters’ travel logs, though it would be easy for them to do so.”

Step back a bit and think through the potential issues of Uber knowing who its riders are, when, and where, and what they are likely to have been doing. Such associations can be powerful. Strong conclusions can be drawn from the details of an Uber travel log, as Uber has itself noted when discussing what it calls a “Ride of Glory,” defined as “anyone who took a ride between 10pm and 4am on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep)”. Or consider for a moment that Uber uses detailed information to see how prostitution rates in a given neighborhood correlate with the need for Uber rides.

In a post titled How Prostitution and Alcohol Make Uber Better, Uber staff wrote, “Areas of San Francisco with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary also have the most Uber rides. ” Uber

With great data comes great power, and therefore responsibility. That means culture and ethics matter. The reason Michael was angry at Sarah Lacy appears to be because of her excoriating post about Uber’s culture.

Now, imagine if powerful members of Congress decide that they don’t like Uber’s labor practices, or surge pricing, or its approach to flaunting regulatory strictures, or the way it lobbies city governments not to be subject to reporting on compliance with accessibility laws. What then? Will the same executives who have shown a limited “God View” at launch parties choose not to use more powerful internal analytics to track who is going where and when? What policies and code would stop them from looking at the profiles of Senators and Representatives and drawing conclusions about where and when they go? Or for that matter, my profile, or yours?

I know this is all hypothetical, but multiple reports of executives accessing user profiles mean we need keep our eyes open and ears clear, particularly given the relationships we can see forming between powerful politicians and tech companies, and the stories we already know meta data can tell about our lives.

The co-founder and CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, is a driven entrepreneur relentlessly focused on building a great product that seamlessly connects demand to capacity in a brilliant mobile app, leaving payment and logistics in the background. When I sat across from him at the launch party for Uber in DC, I found him to be funny and quick-witted, with a natural salesman’s charisma.

This morning, I wrote that Uber users, including me, needed to hear more from him next and not about future profit projections, plans for future expansion or more partnerships.

As he has in the past, Kalanick used a “tweetstorm” to go direct to the public, tweeting out a statement that included assurances and an apology to Sarah Lacy. “We are up to the challenge to show that Uber is and will continue to be a positive member of the community,” tweeted Kalanick, “And furthermore, I will do everything in my power towards the goal of earning that trust.”

I’m still left with unresolved questions. We need to know that we can trust him and his company with our locations and our safety. We want to know that they won’t ever use the data generated by our movements or pickups against us or the people who represent us. We want the company to willingly disclose data about how it provides accessible transit options to our neighbors and embrace transparency about its interactions with customers, regulators and our communities. We want to know that the people we’re trusting with data about our lives aren’t “morally bankrupt.”

I hope Uber is up to the challenge. The stakes are too high to blindly trust without verifying.

This post first appeared on the author’s personal blog Digiphile.

Shift in gut bacteria observed in fiber supplement study may offer good news for weight loss

Most Americans don't get the daily recommended amount of fiber in their diet, though research has shown that dietary fiber can cause a shift in the gut toward beneficial bacteria, reducing the risk of colon cancer, type 2 diabetes, and other diseases. A new study from the University of Illinois shows that two specific functional fibers may also have the potential to assist in weight loss when made part of a long-term, daily diet.

Kelly Swanson, a U of I professor of nutrition, and his team had previously been able to see a "snapshot" of what bacteria were present in the gut after a diet had been supplemented with polydextrose and soluble corn fiber. Using the samples from the same trial, Swanson and his lab used whole-genome sequencing to explore the full range of bacterial genomic information in the gut after fiber supplementation.

The new information is helping the researchers to understand more about the functional capabilities of the bacteria in the gut when these fibers are consumed as part of a regular diet.

"In the gut, bacteria have the capacity to do a lot of different things, such as fermenting proteins, carbohydrates, or other substrates," Swanson said. "We have already been able to identify what bacteria are there and the changes that occur with diet, and now we are asking if we can change the machinery or the capacity of what functions the bacteria have. Knowing what bacteria are there may matter, but it may not matter as much as identifying their function."

Hannah Holscher, a U of I postdoctoral researcher and registered dietitian in animal sciences, said what was most surprising and novel in the recent study was a shift in the Bacteroidetes:Firmicutes ratio toward more Bacteroidetes, something the researchers had not seen previously.

"This was of particular interest to us because other research has shown that having more Bacteroidetes may be beneficial because the higher that proportion is, the individual tends to be leaner. With higher Firmicutes, that individual tends to be more obese," Holscher said. "We don't know if there is any causality for weight loss, but studies have shown that having a higher fiber diet is protective against obesity. It's an exciting shift and helps to drive researchers to study these fibers as part of a weight loss diet."

Holscher added that the whole-genome sequencing data also revealed shifts in the functional capacity of the microbiome including modifications in nutrient metabolism. "We saw that there was a decrease in genes associated with protein metabolism, which correlated with the reduced protein fermentation that occurred in the study participants' guts when they consumed the fibers," she said "The information from this study, in combination with the results from the previous study, has allowed us to put together a more complete picture of what the bacteria in our gut are doing."

The samples sequenced for bacteria genomic information were part of a study Swanson and his lab conducted in 2012. In that study, 20 healthy men with an average fiber intake of 14 grams a day were given snack bars to supplement their diet. The control group received bars that contained no fiber; a second group ate bars that contained 21 grams of polydextrose, which is a common fiber food additive; and a third group received bars with 21 grams of soluble corn fiber.

Fecal samples were collected from the participants, and DNA was then subjected to 454 pyrosequencing, which provided a snapshot of all the bacterial types present. The previous study examined only one gene used for identification purposes, while the current study used whole-genome shotgun 454 pyrosequencing to examine the full range of bacterial genetic information in the fecal microbiome.

Holscher stressed that though there were significant shifts in the gut bacterial populations with fiber supplements, when the supplements were stopped populations seemed to go back to where they were before. "The take-home is if people want to make changes to their diet and have a healthier gut they need to be everyday changes.

"We need more fiber in our diets from lots of different sources," Holscher said. "These two fibers look like they could be beneficial when included in a balanced diet along with whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes."

Holscher added that only 10 percent of Americans meet their daily fiber needs of 25 to 38 grams per day, with most only eating 12 to 14 grams per day.

Polydextrose and soluble corn fiber are often ingredients used in prepared foods such as cereals, cereal bars, baking mixes, and drinks. Holscher said food companies are interested in these fibers as ingredients in products because they are lower in calories and do not negatively affect the taste or texture of the product.

"These fibers also tend to be better tolerated, causing less gas, bloating, and discomfort. They can be provided at higher levels than other types of fiber, such as inulin," she added.

The researchers hope to continue studying these fibers for their potential use in disease prevention and weight loss.

"We're hoping this study helps people realize that diet--what you eat every day--does affect the bacteria in your gut. We saw these dramatic shifts in bacterial populations with fiber supplementation, but then those shifts went away when people stopped using the supplements," Holscher said.

"It's an important concept because we are not at the point of giving someone a single pill to change the microbiome; it's not like using an antibiotic to treat an infection. We want to make sure that diet stays in the conversation because there is a significant impact," she added.

Pinball and Role-Playing Games, Together at Last

Atlus

Rollers of the Realm is a brilliant idea: a mashup of pinball and RPG. And it almost works.

I’ve always wanted to enjoy videogame pinball a little more than I actually do. Pinball is fun. Playing pinball without having to spend quarters is more fun. But after I play a few games of videogame pinball, there’s nothing keeping me going, no meta-game. It’s like playing World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. over and over trying to get the highest score. Some people devote their lives to this sort of perfectionist tendency; I get bored and want to go play World 1-2.

Rollers of the Realm , released this week on Steam (reviewed), PlayStation 4, and PS Vita, solves this problem. (It runs into new ones along the way, but we’ll get to that.) The best actual physical pinball games have a fun metaphor overlaid on top of the ball-and-flippers mechanical parts. Being trapped in a carnival fun house, e.g. In the case of Rollers, you’re a rogue on a quest to fight evil villains and restore harmony to the kingdom, aided by a drunken knight, a wizened old crone, and generally the sort of people you’d find in an RPG party.

Instead of high scores, you rack up gold, experience and mana. The balls representing your characters have different attributes, which you can level up. The Knight’s ball is physically larger, but less agile (he responds less to tilting, that is). He can do massive damage to physical objects, so he can smash through a wooden wall (gaining access to new parts of the playfield) more handily than other characters. The Ranger has bows and arrows, so he can do damage to enemies even if you can’t quite knock the ball directly into them. Etc.

You progress through a variety of boards representing towns, sewers, dungeons, mines, crypts, and the like. These start simple but eventually have some more complicated designs, hiding keys and treasure chests that you have to access by performing specific skill shots. As you collect gold, you can buy new upgrades for each character that affect their damage output, effectiveness of their special attacks, and more.

In general, I had a lot of fun playing Rollers and would recommend it to anyone who begins salivating involuntarily at the phrase “pinball RPG.” The pinball mechanics are fun, chasing down treasure and navigating the clever boards adds another layer of depth, and progressing into more and more complicated levels is better on its face than just playing the same board over and over again.

Atlus

That said, it’s got some issues, particularly in the end game, where the ball goes off the rails (metaphorically speaking.)

If I ever used a special move, it was by accident. Your mana bar is used for two distinct purposes: Activating special moves like multiball or enhanced damage, and reviving downed characters. (When you drain a ball, that character is dead and you have to revive them.) Unless you are a pinball wizard of the kind told about in ancient song, you’re gonna lose balls. Having an extra ball in your pocket is so significantly more valuable than activating multiball that I simply didn’t even use one of the game’s more complex design features—except accidentally, because the A button is used for both shooting the ball off the plunger and activating the specials.

Getting extra levels is a grind. You can go back and replay other playfields for more gold and experience, but they don’t add any new challenges or bonuses—actually, if you’ve already opened the treasure chests, they’re empty now. So you just have to replay a less-rewarding version of the level, and you only get the rewards if you finish the whole thing. Gaining more experience and gold is a slow-going affair.

Going back and leveling up doesn’t really help with tricky challenges. Rollers starts out easy, but some of the levels get brutal. This isn’t bad per se, but some of the toughest ones come during a moment in the game where, for storyline reasons, it locks you away from being able to revisit old levels and grind. So just when you begin to think that you’d like to level up and maybe buy some more characters, you can’t.

The final stage of the game, I can’t even clear at this point. The last board seems set up deliberately to make the balls go down the drain as often as possible, and only one of your characters (again, for a storyline reason) can do any considerable damage against the final enemies. So if she goes down, it really doesn’t matter how powerful everyone else is. Again, I patiently went back and leveled up my crew, but raising them up just a single level was ridiculously grindy and had de minimis effect. Learning the ins and outs of the board was more important (but what I assume is the final board is locked behind two other challenges, so learning the final board is expensive, time-wise).

The description of the Monk character says that he is skilled in “Marital Arts.” I’m not sad this is in there, I’m sad they’ll probably patch it out after reading this.

Combining two disparate game genres is a difficult task, so it’s not shocking that Rollers of the Realm‘s pieces had to be jammed together a little imprecisely. But the idea is still solid, and the issues I bring up are only apparent if you’re already really into the game on some level.

I’d love to see a sequel that takes all this into account; pinball and RPG could be a match made in heaven but they might need to go to marriage counseling.

Pinball and Role-Playing Games, Together at Last

Atlus

Rollers of the Realm is a brilliant idea: a mashup of pinball and RPG. And it almost works.

I’ve always wanted to enjoy videogame pinball a little more than I actually do. Pinball is fun. Playing pinball without having to spend quarters is more fun. But after I play a few games of videogame pinball, there’s nothing keeping me going, no meta-game. It’s like playing World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. over and over trying to get the highest score. Some people devote their lives to this sort of perfectionist tendency; I get bored and want to go play World 1-2.

Rollers of the Realm , released this week on Steam (reviewed), PlayStation 4, and PS Vita, solves this problem. (It runs into new ones along the way, but we’ll get to that.) The best actual physical pinball games have a fun metaphor overlaid on top of the ball-and-flippers mechanical parts. Being trapped in a carnival fun house, e.g. In the case of Rollers, you’re a rogue on a quest to fight evil villains and restore harmony to the kingdom, aided by a drunken knight, a wizened old crone, and generally the sort of people you’d find in an RPG party.

Instead of high scores, you rack up gold, experience and mana. The balls representing your characters have different attributes, which you can level up. The Knight’s ball is physically larger, but less agile (he responds less to tilting, that is). He can do massive damage to physical objects, so he can smash through a wooden wall (gaining access to new parts of the playfield) more handily than other characters. The Ranger has bows and arrows, so he can do damage to enemies even if you can’t quite knock the ball directly into them. Etc.

You progress through a variety of boards representing towns, sewers, dungeons, mines, crypts, and the like. These start simple but eventually have some more complicated designs, hiding keys and treasure chests that you have to access by performing specific skill shots. As you collect gold, you can buy new upgrades for each character that affect their damage output, effectiveness of their special attacks, and more.

In general, I had a lot of fun playing Rollers and would recommend it to anyone who begins salivating involuntarily at the phrase “pinball RPG.” The pinball mechanics are fun, chasing down treasure and navigating the clever boards adds another layer of depth, and progressing into more and more complicated levels is better on its face than just playing the same board over and over again.

Atlus

That said, it’s got some issues, particularly in the end game, where the ball goes off the rails (metaphorically speaking.)

If I ever used a special move, it was by accident. Your mana bar is used for two distinct purposes: Activating special moves like multiball or enhanced damage, and reviving downed characters. (When you drain a ball, that character is dead and you have to revive them.) Unless you are a pinball wizard of the kind told about in ancient song, you’re gonna lose balls. Having an extra ball in your pocket is so significantly more valuable than activating multiball that I simply didn’t even use one of the game’s more complex design features—except accidentally, because the A button is used for both shooting the ball off the plunger and activating the specials.

Getting extra levels is a grind. You can go back and replay other playfields for more gold and experience, but they don’t add any new challenges or bonuses—actually, if you’ve already opened the treasure chests, they’re empty now. So you just have to replay a less-rewarding version of the level, and you only get the rewards if you finish the whole thing. Gaining more experience and gold is a slow-going affair.

Going back and leveling up doesn’t really help with tricky challenges. Rollers starts out easy, but some of the levels get brutal. This isn’t bad per se, but some of the toughest ones come during a moment in the game where, for storyline reasons, it locks you away from being able to revisit old levels and grind. So just when you begin to think that you’d like to level up and maybe buy some more characters, you can’t.

The final stage of the game, I can’t even clear at this point. The last board seems set up deliberately to make the balls go down the drain as often as possible, and only one of your characters (again, for a storyline reason) can do any considerable damage against the final enemies. So if she goes down, it really doesn’t matter how powerful everyone else is. Again, I patiently went back and leveled up my crew, but raising them up just a single level was ridiculously grindy and had de minimis effect. Learning the ins and outs of the board was more important (but what I assume is the final board is locked behind two other challenges, so learning the final board is expensive, time-wise).

The description of the Monk character says that he is skilled in “Marital Arts.” I’m not sad this is in there, I’m sad they’ll probably patch it out after reading this.

Combining two disparate game genres is a difficult task, so it’s not shocking that Rollers of the Realm‘s pieces had to be jammed together a little imprecisely. But the idea is still solid, and the issues I bring up are only apparent if you’re already really into the game on some level.

I’d love to see a sequel that takes all this into account; pinball and RPG could be a match made in heaven but they might need to go to marriage counseling.

‘Viber’ Messaging App Now Lets You Peek in on Celebrity Chatter

Screenshot: courtesy Viber

Nowadays, we’re all a bit voyeuristic. We’re addicted to reality television, tabloids, and celebrity Twitter feeds.

Talmon Marco, founder and CEO of the messaging and voice call app Viber, knows this all too well, and that’s why his company is introducing what it calls Public Chats, a new Viber feature that makes it easier to see what our favorite celebrities and public personalities are chatting about. It aims to feed the inner eavesdropper in all of us.

Gossip blogger Perez Hilton, for instance, might use the tool to talk with other bloggers and celebrities. Models from the agency Next Model Management might use it to share selfies with each other. Members of a comedy troupe could use the app to document their stoned Amsterdam escapades (that actually happened). And we can watch it all.

It’s not altogether different from what celebrities are already doing on sites like Twitter and Facebook, but Marco believes that because Viber lets the average user in on actual conversations, the content will feel a lot more real. More importantly, however, it’s something Marco hopes will help differentiate Viber from other companies like WhatsApp, Kik, and WeChat, which are all jockeying for the lead in the growing messaging app market.

Over the last few years, the messaging app space has grown crowded, and the competitors in the space have grown more and more alike. Now, it seems, the main thing that distinguishes them is the number of users they have. That’s no small thing for a messaging platform, which is only useful to people when most of their contacts are using it too.

By this measure, WhatsApp is by far the most successful, with some 600 million monthly active users worldwide. Viber, by contrast, has 210 million. Which is why Marco, who sold the company to Japanese internet company Rakuten for $900 million earlier this year, is constantly on the lookout for features that will encourage more users to switch platforms. Original content, he believes, could do just that.

“We don’t necessarily envision making money directly out of public chats,” he says. “But this is something for our users to do , and at the same time, we think it will bring additional users and show them what Viber can be used for.”

According to Forrester analyst Julie Ask, this is a natural progression for Viber and, indeed, any messaging app. “This one of those things a platform like Viber needs to do, even though they’ve been acquired,” she says. “They’re still a young company, and they’re trying to do more to get people to spend more time in the app.”

Ask believes celebrities may also gravitate to Viber’s international audience. “There could be geographies that lets say Taylor Swift doesn’t have a big following in,” she says. “That’s a great opportunity to engage wtih fans and drive buzz.”

All that said, Ask adds that Viber certainly isn’t the first to the celebrity route. China’s WeChat, for one, lets users follow celebrities for a monthly fee. Plus, she says, there’s already plenty to appease fans on celebrity Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. To compete with WhatsApp, never mind these other gargantuan platforms, Viber will need a lot more than even the most salacious celebrity gossip.

‘Facebook at Work’? There’s Certainly Some Work to Be Done

Jon Snyder/Wired.com

This year, Facebook celebrated its 10th birthday and in a blog back in February I discussed the huge impact that the social networking site had made on enterprise technology. Now, according to reports, Facebook is planning its own foray into the enterprise and has a team of engineers busily working away on its workplace-friendly site “Facebook at Work”. The product will apparently allow you to chat with your colleagues, collaborate on documents and connect with professional contacts.

While Facebook has had a positive impact on enterprise technology as a whole, driving it to become more user-friendly and bring together content, conversations and people, is the workplace ready for “Facebook at Work”? I’d certainly say “no” and there are a number of reasons why.

Firstly, while Facebook is clearly a productivity killer for the 23 per cent of people surveyed by Salary.com, the social networking site has been banned by banking, government, and other organizations worldwide for exactly this reason. Facebook first and foremost a personal tool used to chat and share photos and videos with your network of friends and families. The last thing employers want is their workforce spending office hours catching up with their long lost friends and how would organization’s monitor whether staff were using their personal or professional profile when at work?

Secondly, even with a compelling professional offering, linking colleagues, documents and relevant discussions, Facebook would then have to convince IT departments globally that its security measures met their stringent requirements. The way in which Facebook stores, shares and handles consumer data has been thrown into the limelight on numerous occasions. Incidents such as its mood manipulation study, as well as ongoing conversations around how it uses customer data for advertising, are unlikely to win over the hearts and minds of enterprises.

Lastly, there are already a number of services in the market that enable teams across and within organizations to work together on content and have relevant business discussions focused on files. Such services have been built with enterprise and government organizations in mind, adhere to strict security requirements and focus all conversations on the task in hand – working on documents and projects together. These services integrate into current enterprise ICT strategies, systems and workflows, rather than facing the challenge of being unblocked by IT.

Yes, Facebook may have gained the love of consumers globally and dragged enterprise technology out of the dark ages, but gaining the trust of enterprises and government organizations worldwide is its biggest hurdle. And it’s certainly something that won’t be achieved overnight.

Alastair Mitchell is co-founder and CEO of Huddle.com.

Facebook’s Breaks Out ‘Groups’ as Its Latest Standalone App

Facebook

Facebook’s mobile app used to encapsulate all the features of its website. But in an effort to reduce complexity, the company has slowly been turning individual features into their own apps. Examples so far include the Facebook Messenger app and Paper, a Flipboard-esque viewer for stories shared in your Facebook feed. Now, Facebook is giving Groups the standalone treatment.

The new Groups app, available on iOS and Android, offers a convenient place to do just one thing: Interact with your Facebook Groups. For the 700 million people who use Facebook Groups each month, this could make navigation and other interactions more straightforward.

In the main Facebook app, you get to Groups by tapping the More tab and then scrolling down to your groups and tapping again to open a full list of your member Groups. By comparison, the Groups app opens to a clean grid of circular Group icons. The ones you interact with most are positioned at the top of the screen. Once you enter a group, posts and images take up the full width of the screen for a more enjoyable viewing experience. As before, the option to write a post or share a photo sit at the top of the Group page.

The app offers more granular in-app notification controls, so you can select what updates you want to be notified about. And if news in a Facebook Group is super important, you can choose to get push notifications whenever someone posts. The interface also makes it easier to see what groups have new content to check out. Facebook included a Discover button in the app too, so you can peruse suggested groups based on where live, Groups your friends are in, and pages you’ve liked.

If you’re only a casual Groups user, you’re not being forced to download another app: Facebook is not removing Groups from the main app—at least for now. But with Messenger and now Groups broken out, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a Facebook Events app in the not-too-distant future.

Going against the flow: Targeting bacterial motility to combat disease

The ability to move enables many bacteria to reach a specific niche or to leave hostile environments. The bacterium Mycoplasma gallisepticum is a poultry pathogen that is capable of gliding over solid surfaces. Scientists at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna have now identified the proteins responsible for this gliding mechanism. Interrupting the gliding mechanism could be a way to make the bacteria less virulent, but it could also help in the development of vaccines against the pathogen. The results were published in the journal Veterinary Research.

Mycoplasma gallisepticum causes chronic respiratory disease in birds. The illness particularly affects domestic chicken and turkey flocks. The bacteria are especially life-threatening for the animals when they occur in combination with other infections. In order to control the spread of the disease, poultry farms in the EU must be proven free from Mycoplasma gallisepticum or face being closed.

Mycoplasma gallisepticum is related to the human pathogen Mycoplasma pneumoniae, the causative agent of human bronchitis and pneumonia. Mycoplasmas are among the world's smallest microorganisms. Scientists even speak of degenerative bacteria. Over the course of evolution, mycoplasmas have thrown most of their genetic material over board, resulting in one of the smallest bacterial genomes. This is what makes them such efficiently adapted pathogens in humans and animals.

At least three proteins responsible for the gliding mechanism

The gliding motility of M. gallisepticum was first observed in the 1960s. However, it has so far been unclear how exactly the gliding mechanism works and which proteins make gliding possible. First author Ivana Indikova and study director Michael Szostak of the Institute of Microbiology at the Vetmeduni Vienna have now found that gliding requires the proteins GapA, CrmA and Mgc2. "If the bacteria are missing one of these three proteins, they are no longer able to move. We want to know if non-motile mycoplasmas are less infectious. If that were the case, we could target the motility genes to turn them off and so render the bacteria harmless," Szostak explains.

Gliding motility could even contribute to the ability of mycoplasmas to invade and traverse body cells. This could allow them to safely evade the body's immune system and the infection could spread efficiently through the host body.

The experts can also imagine the development of a vaccine. "Non-motile and non-pathogenic bacteria could form the basis for a new vaccine which the immune system could recognize and fight without causing any illness in the organism," explains Szostak.

Do gliding mycoplasmas go against the flow?

The ability to move thus gives the pathogens certain advantages. It remains unknown, however, which stimuli M. gallisepticum responds to when gliding. Szostak suspects: "Most mycoplasmas cannot glide. Gliding species have so far been found only in the respiratory and genital tracts -- places in which there is a directional mucus flow. We believe that the gliding bacteria possibly move against this flow in order to reach deeper-lying regions of the body. We are currently planning further experiments to attempt to answer this question."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Unexpected cross-species contamination in genome sequencing projects

As genome sequencing has gotten faster and cheaper, the pace of whole-genome sequencing has accelerated, dramatically increasing the number of genomes deposited in public archives. Although these genomes are a valuable resource, problems can arise when researchers misapply computational methods to assemble them, or accidentally introduce unnoticed contaminations during sequencing.

The first complete bacterial genome, Haemophilus influenzae, appeared in 1995, and today the public GenBank database contains over 27,000 prokaryotic and 1,600 eukaryotic genomes. The vast majority of these are draft genomes that contain gaps in their sequences, and researchers often use these draft sequences for future analyses.

Each genome sequencing project begins with a DNA source, which varies depending on the species. For animals, blood is a common source, while for smaller organisms such as insects the entire organism or a population of organisms may be required to yield enough DNA for sequencing. Throughout the process of DNA isolation and sequencing, contamination remains a possibility. Computational filters applied to the raw sequencing reads are usually effective at removing common laboratory contaminants such as E. coli, but other contaminants may be more difficult to identify.

In a new study in PeerJ, authors from Johns Hopkins University discovered contaminating bacterial and viral sequences in "draft" assemblies of animal and plant genomes that had been deposited in GenBank. These may cause particular problems for the rapidly growing field of microbiome analysis, when sequences labeled as animal in origin actually turn out to be microbial.

In an even more surprising finding, the authors discovered the presence of cow and sheep DNA in the supposedly finished genome of a pathogenic bacterium, Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Although deposited in GenBank as a finished genome, the bacterium apparently was a draft genome that was submitted as complete, with erroneous DNA inserted in five places. If taken at face value, this data would appear to be a startling case of lateral gene transfer, but the correct explanation appears to be more mundane.

These findings highlight the importance of careful screening of DNA sequence data both at the time of release and, in some cases, for many years after publication.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by PeerJ . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Messaging App Launches ‘Public Chats,’ Lets You Peak in on Celebrity Chatter

Screenshot: courtesy Viber

Nowadays, we’re all a bit voyeuristic. We’re addicted to reality television, tabloids, and celebrity Twitter feeds.

Talmon Marco, founder and CEO of the messaging and voice call app Viber, knows this all too well, and that’s why his company is introducing what it calls Public Chats, a new Viber feature that makes it easier to see what our favorite celebrities and public personalities are chatting about. It aims to feed the inner eavesdropper in all of us.

Gossip blogger Perez Hilton, for instance, might use the tool to talk with other bloggers and celebrities. Models from the agency Next Model Management might use it to share selfies with each other. Members of a comedy troupe could use the app to document their stoned Amsterdam escapades (that actually happened). And we can watch it all.

It’s not altogether different from what celebrities are already doing on sites like Twitter and Facebook, but Marco believes that because Viber lets the average user in on actual conversations, the content will feel a lot more real. More importantly, however, it’s something Marco hopes will help differentiate Viber from other companies like WhatsApp, Kik, and WeChat, which are all jockeying for the lead in the growing messaging app market.

Over the last few years, the messaging app space has grown crowded, and the competitors in the space have grown more and more alike. Now, it seems, the main thing that distinguishes them is the number of users they have. That’s no small thing for a messaging platform, which is only useful to people when most of their contacts are using it too.

By this measure, WhatsApp is by far the most successful, with some 600 million monthly active users worldwide. Viber, by contrast, has 210 million. Which is why Marco, who sold the company to Japanese internet company Rakuten for $900 million earlier this year, is constantly on the lookout for features that will encourage more users to switch platforms. Original content, he believes, could do just that.

“We don’t necessarily envision making money directly out of public chats,” he says. “But this is something for our users to do , and at the same time, we think it will bring additional users and show them what Viber can be used for.”

According to Forrester analyst Julie Ask, this is a natural progression for Viber and, indeed, any messaging app. “This one of those things a platform like Viber needs to do, even though they’ve been acquired,” she says. “They’re still a young company, and they’re trying to do more to get people to spend more time in the app.”

Ask believes celebrities may also gravitate to Viber’s international audience. “There could be geographies that lets say Taylor Swift doesn’t have a big following in,” she says. “That’s a great opportunity to engage wtih fans and drive buzz.”

All that said, Ask adds that Viber certainly isn’t the first to the celebrity route. China’s WeChat, for one, lets users follow celebrities for a monthly fee. Plus, she says, there’s already plenty to appease fans on celebrity Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. To compete with WhatsApp, never mind these other gargantuan platforms, Viber will need a lot more than even the most salacious celebrity gossip.