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Eye Worms, Octopuses on MDMA, and More: The Strangest Science Stories of 2018 https://ift.tt/2rA69Y4 Truly, 2018 has been a year filled with news that made us look blankly ahead and utter ‘wat’ into the void, frozen in confusion, every day. But there were a few stories that were cream of the crop when it came to their sheer weirdness. And that’s especially true within the world of science and health. Take a look back at some of the strangest science-related stories of this year, featuring everything from alleged meme-sparked poisonings to ludicrous medical quacks to unsettling parasitic infestations. Oh, so many parasites. Please enjoy/cringe. Tide PodsKicking off 2018, troll-y memes about the deliciousness of Tide Pods began sprouting up across social media, and some adults actually began to worry about a widespread epidemic of laundry detergent poisonings. Some blamed millennials, seeming to forget that millennials are mostly in their 30s right about now. The American Association of Poison Control Centers even went so far to issue a strong warning about the “recent trend among teenagers,” citing its own data showing that there were 39 reports of intentional laundry pod poisonings among people between the ages of 13 to 19 in the first half of January—a toll about as high as the number of cases reported in 2016 alone. Advertisement Public health experts really have been worried about laundry pods since they became widely available in 2012. But that worry has mostly been focused on toddlers, who account for the vast majority of pod poisonings because they can mistake the colorfully designed products for candy. In fact, the total number of reported pod poisonings seems to have declined in recent years. So while there were a few scattered reports (and YouTube videos) of teens purposefully eating Tide Pods for the views, it’s safe to say that many more were, shock of all shocks, just joking about their culinary love of the detergent (a joke that the Onion had already made back in 2015). Not that any of this stopped media outlets from running credulous stories about grocery stores keeping pods under lock-and-key, or politicians from drafting bills that would make companies redesign their pods. A spaceship that (probably) wasn’tLet’s be honest: We all want aliens to be real. So it’s understandable why a story about Harvard scientists claiming that the celestial object ‘Oumuamua could be an alien space probe got so many eyeballs this fall. Advertisement The researchers, hailing from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, made their case in a paper released (though not published in a peer-reviewed journal) this November. ‘Oumuamua had entered the Solar System in October 2017, briefly passing by Earth before skedaddling back out into the emptiness of space. The researchers argued that the trajectory of ‘Oumuamua as it made its way through our Solar System simply couldn’t have happened if ‘Oumuamua was a typical comet or other space rock, given what we understand about gravity. Ergo, it just might be a solar radiation-propelled alien spaceship sent from another star system. The cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua definitely is weird, being the first known object to have ever traveled within the Solar System but originate from somewhere else in the cosmos. And it’s true: We can’t completely explain right now why it behaved the way it did during its short visit. But like so many times before, it’s almost certain that scientists have not found proof of aliens. Yet. The dog rabies whispererMedical quacks and charlatans are sadly a dime a dozen. So it ought to take a brazen ploy to earn a spot on this list. And boy howdy, did Canadian naturopath Anke Zimmermann deliver. Advertisement In April, Zimmermann gained a bit of notoriety for writing on her blog about a particularly wild case she had treated. According to her account, a 4-year-old boy named “Jonah” had been dealing with behavioral and sleep problems, even going so far as to hide underneath tables and growl at people. The boy also had a profound fear of the dark, werewolves, ghosts, and zombies. After interviewing the family, Zimmerman came to the astute conclusion that the boy was made sick by a bite he had once gotten from a dog that had been vaccinated against the rabies virus, seemingly infecting the boy with the “rabies miasma.” Her cure? A homeopathic preparation supposedly made from the saliva of a rabid dog. Zimmerman’s story quickly earned criticism from scientists and doctors once it was shared widely on social media. And even British Columbia’s senior health officer, Bonnie Henry, felt inclined to weigh in and express “grave concern” about rabid dog saliva being used in any medical capacity in Canada. Homeopathy, as we’ve covered before, is probably the silliest form of alternative medicine to enjoy any popularity. Its proponents claim you can dilute a substance in water to the point of it literally not existing anymore, but also that this dilution can still somehow affect the body, helping treat the same symptoms the original substance causes. Zimmerman relied on this theory to defend her actions, claiming she couldn’t have hurt the boy since there was no actual rabies in the treatment she gave him, but also that she did really treat his serious condition of being a 4-year-old boy who sometimes acts out and is scared of things. Advertisement As Jen Gunter, a well-known gynecologist and medical debunker, explained to Gizmodo at the time, there’s a glaring flaw in that logic. “You can’t say your treatment has a dilute amount of rabies but also poses no risk,” she said. “It’s either rabies free, meaning water, or it’s not and hence unsafe. It is clearly water/a sugar pill and hence a scam.” Zimmerman eventually edited her post, deleting the original account and instead focusing on the real victim of all this. Advertisement “The only person in any danger here is me,” she wrote. “If you read my obituary, it will say: Died for the truth, bludgeoned to death by a man gone stark, raving mad from reading manipulative headlines produced by media and health officials, pun intended.” The deadly, brain-destroying squirrelIt’s a point we here at Gizmodo have made often: Prions—nearly indestructible, infectious rogue proteins that effectively devour the brain from the inside out—are one of the scariest and most mysterious things that can kill us. But a case study published in October added yet another bizarre, bushy-tailed wrinkle to the prion saga. Advertisement Doctors in Rochester, New York came across an unsettling case while looking through the medical records of their hospital: A 61-year-old man who tragically spent the last few months of his life saddled with dementia and schizophrenia-like symptoms. His death in 2015 was attributed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the most common, if still incredibly rare, prion disorder in humans. But the man likely didn’t have the classic form of CJD, which can happen spontaneously for no reason. Instead, he seemed to have a form of CJD only known to be spread by eating the meat of cattle infected with a prion disease (a condition nicknamed mad cow disease). There have been four other suspected cases of this form of CJD, known as variant CJD, reported in the U.S. over the years. But these other victims had caught it years or decades ago while living elsewhere. And so far at least, there’s no indication that prion-contaminated beef has ever entered the U.S. food supply. But interviews with the man’s family did reveal another possible culprit: The man was an avid game hunter who often ate the wild squirrels he caught in his crosshairs. Advertisement The authors are still trying to confirm that the man did indeed have vCJD, though even if they do, we might never be completely sure that he caught it from a tainted squirrel. But the case is worrying because public health experts have wondered for decades if game animals popular to eat in the U.S., such as deer and moose, can spread prions to humans. Studies have gone back and forth on the question, with no clear answer as of yet. High-as-a-kite octopusesAnyhow, let’s transition from cute-looking-animals-being-terrifying to terrifying-looking-animals-being-cute. Advertisement Scientists in September published a study about a fascinating experiment in which they dosed seven octopuses with the drug MDMA to see how they would respond. Much like humans who take MDMA, the normally solitary octopuses became more social, willing to spend time with another nearby octopus and sometimes reaching out to touch them in a friendly manner. They even seemed to dance, lifting their tentacles in strange motions. What made the results astonishing is that octopuses are very different from humans, especially evolutionarily speaking. On the tree of life, you’d have to go back some 500 million years to find our common ancestor. Octopuses and other forms of invertebrate marine life have developed vastly different brains from mammals like us—so different that you wouldn’t think MDMA would influence them in remotely the same way. “An octopus doesn’t have a cortex, and doesn’t have a reward circuit,” lead author Gül Dölen, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, told Gizmodo at the time. “And yet it’s able to respond to MDMA and produce the same effects, in an animal with a totally different brain organization. To me, that means we really need to appreciate that the business end of these things is at the level of the molecule.” Advertisement The results of the study should be taken with some skepticism—a sample of seven is small whether you’re talking people or cephalopod—but this sort of research gets us closer to understanding why psychedelic drugs like MDMA affect the brain the way they do. And that’s especially important because MDMA and other so-called party drugs are steadily being accepted as legitimate treatments for certain mental health problems like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. CreepshowsThere’s something so grossly alluring about stories of body-invading parasites, whether they happen in real life or in science fiction. And 2018 didn’t disappoint us. Advertisement In February, CDC scientists published the harrowing tale of an Oregon woman who returned home from a ranch trip in 2015 and discovered that her eyeball was infected with not one—not two—but a whopping 14 cattle eye worms, all of which had to be extracted manually. The poor woman thankfully made it out okay, earning the dubious distinction of being the first person ever known to be infected with this particular species of eye worm. And in June, doctors published a case study of another woman with a parasitic, luckily infertile roundworm that had lodged itself into her face, at times causing her lips and eyes to balloon out like a Looney Tunes cartoon. The woman even kept track of the worm’s movements with some well-lit selfies until it was safely removed. Humans aren’t the only ones who have to deal with parasites. And the smaller the animal you are, the more likely you have to worry about some truly horrific parasites capable of taking over your mind and making you do their bidding. There’s an expanding list of these parasites, including a fungus that make ants commit suicide and a wasp that drives around cockroaches like little Volkswagen Beetles. Advertisement But just this November,scientists in British Columbia detailed their discovery of a new parasitic wasp species belonging to the Zatypota genus found in the Amazon forest, one that get especially high marks for its creepiness factor. According to the scientists, the wasp buries its larva in the abdomen of a certain species of social spider, called Anelosimus eximius. Once the larva hatches, it begins feeding on the spider’s blood, steadily growing bigger. Eventually, it zombifies the spider, likely manipulating its will with the help of hormones. The infected social spider then leaves its colony and builds a cocoon web nest for the larva. As a reward for the spider’s hard work, the larva consumes the arachnid completely, before resting in its new home, ready to emerge as a fully grown wasp nine to 11 days later and start the cycle anew. And you thought human babysitting could be a chore. The restOf course, even these stories only barely scratch the surface of just how outlandish 2018 really was. There were creepy crawling robot babies! Histamine-pooping bed bugs! Worms supposedly resurrected after being buried in the Siberian ice for 40,000 years! Scientists who decided to see how many thousands of living mosquitoes you could cram into a syringe and ship via overnight mail! Vaping viagra that just might turn your eyesight permanently red! The list goes on. So here’s looking at you, 2019. What have you got in store for us? Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com December 12, 2018 at 10:03AM
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AI-powered knowledge sharing platform Guru raises $25 million Series B https://ift.tt/2SD7cBY Guru, the enterprise-focused information sharing platform, has today announced the close of a $25 million Series B funding led by Thrive Capital, with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, FirstMark Capital, Slack Fund, and Michael Dell’s MSD Capital. Guru came on to the scene in 2013 with the premise that organizations are not so great at building out informational databases, nor are they very good at using them. So Guru built a Chrome extension that simply sits as a layer on employees’ computers and surfaces the right information whenever asked. Specifically, this comes in handy for customer service agents and sales people who need to answer questions from people outside of the organization quickly and accurately. This summer, Guru revamped the platform to incorporate a new feature set called AI Suggest. The feature simply auto-surfaces relevant information as the employee goes about their business, with no searches or inquiries necessary. The company also unveiled two different versions of the feature, text and voice, so that it is still useful when employees are on the phone. Companies that are sensitive about their information being shared with Guru can customize the level of access given to Guru, including or excluding certain third-party integrations etc., as well as how long information is stored on Guru. No personally identifying information about end-customers is ever stored on the Guru platform. Over the past couple years, Guru has brought on big-name clients including BuzzFeed, Glossier, Intercom and Thumbtack. Guru has signed on 200 new clients since the launch of AI Suggest in July, with a total of around 800 companies on the platform, representing thousands of users. For now, the company is hyper focused on growth. “We are not profitable yet,” said cofounder and CEO Rick Nucci.” But we’re intentionally focused on growth. What prompted us to raise this round right now is to continue to execute on the momentum of the business.” Guru has now raised a total of $27.5 million. Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com December 12, 2018 at 10:02AM
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Amazon's DVR for Over-the-Air TV Is Surprisingly Great https://ift.tt/2Lb5TYk The Amazon Fire TV Recast is a wacky gadget. It’s not wacky in that it looks weird. (It’s just a simple black box.) It’s also not wacky because it does wacky stuff. (It’s a DVR for over-the-air TV.) The Recast is wacky because it does this one hyper-specific thing really well. I’m not sure why Amazon even wanted to make it, but serious cord cutters will be glad the company did. I should emphasize how incredibly focused this thing is. No Netflix or Hulu. No cable. The Recast plugs directly into a TV antenna and can record broadcast TV. There’s a 500-gigabyte model ($230) that has two tuners and can record two programs at a time. There’s also a 1-terabyte model ($280) with four tuners that does four programs at once. For now, you cannot record cable TV content. But if you’re a serious cord cutter, why would you want to? For someone who spends a lot of time with set-top boxes, the Recast sort of felt like a new toy that could do things my old toys can’t. Amazon sent me the larger 1TB model as well as an Amazon Basics antenna with 50 miles of range, and that meant that I could tune in to 36 channels from my Brooklyn apartment and record up to 150 hours of content through a simple interface on my Fire TV. (A Fire TV device or an Amazon Show is also required to use the Recast which is a little bit annoying, if you don’t already own one.) Once I set up the Recast, a new DVR tab popped up on the Fire TV home screen, and I was recording “The Price Is Right” in no time. What immediately struck me was how dang easy it is to use the Recast. The intuitive live channel layout looks a lot like the regular Fire TV interface, so I could browse through the live programming in much the same way I’d hunt for a show on Prime Video. However, in addition to the option to watch the program, I could record it. Recorded shows appeared in a library that I could not only access on my TV but also through the Fire TV app on a phone or tablet. It’s kind of silly to be able to watch last night’s local news on the subway, but now I can. The downsides to the Recast are both varied and convoluted, although I can’t say there’s an obvious dealbreaker. It’s ugly—an ominous black box about the size of two Mac Minis stacked on top of each other. Though it only needs to be plugged in to power and an antenna, so you can easily stash the Recast out of sight. Then, there’s the fact that you’ll need a Fire TV or an Amazon Show to use the DVR. Yet, at $40, a Fire TV Stick is hardly an expensive accessory, especially considering that all of the live TV you’ll be recording is free. The biggest downside, I guess, is the simple fact that you can only record over-the-air TV. That means your choice of DVR-able content is pretty limited. I should also point out that the Recast isn’t the only device that can record over-the-air television. It might be the slickest one, though. Plex is a popular media server that you can hack to record live TV using a tuner made by HDHomeRun. This system is solid you get it set up with the tuner and an external hard drive, but the experience isn’t as simple as the Recast. The HDHomeRun tuner also offers its own DVR service, and a Premium TV feature that lets you record content from dozens more channels, but it costs $35 a month, which defies the free TV mission. TiVo, likewise, charges a big fee upfront for the box itself, and then there’s a monthly fee. After you buy the equipment, using the Recast to record content from your antenna is just easy and free, forever. So perhaps the biggest question about the Recast is simply whether or not you want it. If you long, for instance, to watch The Late Show With Stephen Colbert but can never stay up late enough, this is the gadget for you. If you already pay for a service like YouTube TV but find yourself only watching live TV on the major networks, the Recast could save you $40 a month. If you already own a TiVO but are sick of paying the monthly service fee, this new Amazon DVR might be the ticket, and if the hassle of building your own DVR using a HDHomerun is just too great, then this is a dead simple alternative. But remember the limitations. The Recast cannot record cable TV or streaming content, so if you don’t like what your antenna picks up, you won’t have much use for a device that exclusively records that stuff. The Recast isn’t for everybody, and it’s not pretending to be. It is, however, an appealing proposition for some people. If you love free TV, there’s perhaps no other easier way to stockpile dozens of hours of it for on-demand consumption. Yes, it will take some tinkering with an antenna and a Fire TV, but for around $200, the Recast could make your hyper specific cord cutting dream come true. README
Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com December 12, 2018 at 09:51AM
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New York Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize https://ift.tt/2ROn0Si Workers in a recently opened Staten Island Amazon warehouse have announced their intention to unionize. The news comes at a less than ideal time for the retail giant, which is in the midst of opening one of two “HQ2” locations in nearby Long Island City, Queens. The push also arrives as Amazon has faced increased scrutiny over the treatment of employees in its fulfillment centers. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders applied pressure against Bezos, finally convincing the company to raise its minimum minimum wage to $15 an hour. In an interview with Bloomberg, employees complained about working conditions and compared their treatment to robots. The employees are hoping to leverage the massive incentives the city dangled in an attempt to woo the company during its prolonged competition for a second headquarters. All told, incentives total around $3 billion, a fact that has caused consternation among citizens and local officials who were uninvolved in the decision making process. “There’s never been greater leverage — if taxpayers are giving Amazon $3 billion, then taxpayers have the right to demand that Amazon stop being a union-busting company,” the president of Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union told the site. “It’s incumbent upon the governor and the mayor to make sure that nothing happens to these workers who are standing up for their rights. If Amazon continues its union-busting activities in New York, they should call off the deal.” The Staten Island warehouse has only been open for a few months, but is a key part in the company’s push to make a second home in the greater New York City area. It’s one that is expected to eventually include $2.5 billion in spending and 25,000 hires. Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com December 12, 2018 at 09:46AM
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Procter & Gamble acquires Walker & Company, Tristan Walker will remain as CEO https://ift.tt/2GdRoEu Walker & Company Brands, a startup making health and beauty products for people of color, has been acquired by consumer giant Procter & Gamble. The company was founded five years ago by Tristan Walker, who previously led business development for Foursquare, and who aimed to create products that would better serve the needs of people of color with coarse or curly hair. Walker & Co. started out with its Bevel shaving products for men, then launched Form, a collection of hair products for women. P&G says the acquisition will help it “better serve consumers of color around the world.” Walker & Co. will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the larger organization, with Walker continuing to serve as CEO, and the entire 15-person team moving to Atlanta. “When I started Walker & Company Brands, I set out to build a company that would meet the health and beauty needs of people of color on a global scale,” Walker said in the announcement. “Having access to P&G’s outstanding technology, capabilities and expertise helps us to further realize that vision, giving us the power to scale and bring new products to people of color, while staying true to our mission and continuing to nurture the loyal community we’ve worked hard to build.” The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Walker & Co. had raised more than $33.3 million in funding, most recently in a Series B three years ago. Investors include Institutional Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Upfront Ventures, Daher Capital, Collaborative Fund, Google Ventures, Felicis Ventures and Melo7 Tech Partners. “We have tremendous respect for the work Tristan Walker has accomplished and we are excited to welcome Walker & Company to the P&G family,” said P&G Beauty CEO Alex Keith in a statement. “The combination of Walker & Company’s deep consumer understanding, authentic connection to its community and unique, highly customized products and P&G’s highly-skilled and experienced people, resources, technical capabilities and global scale will allow us to further improve the lives of the world’s multicultural consumers.” Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com December 12, 2018 at 09:43AM
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The Case for Viral ‘Call-Out’ Culture https://ift.tt/2Eeafwi Every few weeks, a racist ranter intersects with a horrified smartphone owner and an ill-fated internet star is born. The latest viral racist is a white Columbia student spewing about the superiority of his race to an unwilling audience of students and dining hall staff—more than a few of whom were people of color. It’s a familiar sort of college campus nightmare: The rant began after the student, who has been identified by the Columbia Daily Spectator as sophomore Julian von Abele, grabbed a passing female student and she pulled away; he followed her and her friends into a dining hall, where he jumped up and down screaming things like “We’re white men. We did everything.” The video showcases just the kind of furious entitlement and everyday racism progressives on the internet have been calling out all year: This student is just the college campus version of the people screaming at Spanish speakers in restaurants and grocery stores, or the many, many, many people who have called the police on black people doing things like mowing lawns, being in Starbucks, or doing community service. The most famous of these moments have become important enough touchstones for online progressives that they’re now memes, like BBQ Becky (who called the cops on people having a barbecue in a park), Permit Patty (who threatened to call the police on an 8-year-old selling water bottles), and Cornerstore Caroline (who called the police to accuse a 9-year-old child of sexual assault after he accidentally brushed against her). This is "callout culture": taking something awful and blasting it onto the internet where it can be shared and its wrongdoers shamed. Critics of callout culture contest that it ruins the life of the person being called out, subjecting them to waves of online harassment that may wash into their offline life, solidifying their misguided feelings of persecution. Which is a valid concern, full stop.
But the impact of these videos stretches beyond the ranter being shamed or even the people they’re ranting at. Documenting the everyday horrors of racism was a crucial part of the civil rights movement, and is key to the activism of Black Lives Matter and other groups documenting police brutality and other forms of violence against minorities. These videos demonstrate the pervasiveness of that racism’s nonviolent cousin. By circulating examples of people of color’s lived experiences—for a wider audience than has ever been possible—these videos are remaking the image of the American racist. Turning racist rants into joke fodder isn’t idle frivolity (or a spout of nihilist laughter as the world burns): It’s revealing that racism and racists are not only real and everywhere, but also that they aren’t so scary after all. These videos and memes laugh in the face of bigotry, and invite others to join. Of course, these jokes are at the racist ranters’ expense, and that may be damaging. The internet in general (and the viral video in particular) doesn’t show a life in context; the snippets it chooses are frozen in carbonite forever. That can be a brutal lesson, especially for people like this Columbia student. College students today are living what’s likely to be the most chaotic and ill-considered times of their lives in front of the world, forever. Those other ranters, the concern goes, could also be drunk or mentally unstable or having the worst day of their lives. “We may end up losing an opportunity to rehabilitate somebody because they’ll forever have ‘bigot’ on their forehead,” says Brian Levin, director of CSU San Bernardino's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “It could also be used to further advance tribalism.” It’s true. These videos certainly aren’t unifying. And activists certainly aren’t looking to add ammunition to the extreme right’s case that liberals are trying to shame white men for having pride in their identity. Nevertheless, while you might expect the alt-right and other white nationalists would to rally around these videos, they don’t, according to Phyllis Gerstenfeld, who studies online hate and criminology at Cal State Stanislaus. These videos show a reality the far-right doesn’t want you to see: “A lot of the other visions we see of racism are these scary, aggressive extremists like skinheads,” Gerstenfeld says. “But that’s not who’s really out there. It takes away the mystique.” These videos reveal that the average American racist isn’t a terrifying, hulking figure who might knife you in an alley if you’re really unlucky—it’s a middle-aged white woman in a store or a drunk bro at a bar. That sends a crucial message to citizens (and institutions) who are inclined to think that everyday grocery store racism is a thing of the past. And it demonstrates a new way to respond to the everyday racists we encounter: Not only are they not particularly scary, they’re so vehemently incoherent that’s it’s a little bit funny. They’re sort of 2018’s version of Superman vs the KKK, and every memer recording and lampooning these bigots is a digital age Stetson Kennedy.
Still, no blooper reel of bigotry will end racism in America on its own. “Documenting the horrible violence against elderly voters in Selma, Alabama helped bring about the Voting Rights Act, but so did Martin Luther King’s speeches putting that violence into context,” says Levin. “If these videos become shock-value entertainment, we’re losing the opportunity to connect them to an ideal.” In other words, it’s introspection—not the knee-jerk laughter—that will bring about change. And encouragingly, that seems to be what were are doing. A regrettable rant on Columbia’s campus has turned into a discussion about how universities handle issues of race and bigotry, and whether the school’s university’s core curriculum is reinforcing the student’s (wrongheaded, ahistorical) notion that white men “did everything.” Not bad for a viral video. More Great WIRED StoriesDigital Trends via Wired https://ift.tt/2uc60ci December 12, 2018 at 09:42AM
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Algoriddim updates djay for iOS with subscription model https://ift.tt/2QMxYdH If you’ve been browsing the App Store for long enough, chances are you’ve seen djay at some point. Algoriddim, the company behind djay, currently has eight different apps in the App Store. Today, the company is releasing a brand new version that is going to replace all previous apps at once. The reason why this new app is going to take center stage is because Algoriddim is switching to a freemium model. You can download the app for free on your iPhone and iPad, and you can buy a subscription to unlock all features on both platforms. In other words, djay is following the subscription trend of the App Store. Previous independent apps, such as Ulysses, Bear and Carrot Weather have switched to subscriptions. The app truly shines on the new iPad Pro. You can plug a display using a USB-C cable and project video loops on the display. You can also plug a supported MIDI controller directly to your iPad using USB-C. Just like in the previous version, Spotify Premium users can access their Spotify library from the app. This turns your iPad into a comfortable device to set up cue points. You can load a song, scroll, find the right moment and put a cue point. Everything is synchronized with the Mac version of djay. Subscriptions provide many advantages. Developers can expect predictable revenue and can release new updates more regularly — there’s no need to wait for 12 new features in order to package them all in a paid update. Users can access apps on multiple platforms with a single subscription. They also always get the most recent version of the apps as they don’t have to consider upgrading to the next major version or keeping the previous version. This model works quite well for very active users. For instance, I use Ulysses every day so it makes sense that I’d pay a few dollars per month for it. But some people may only use djay a few times a year. So you’ll have to consider whether subscribing is worth it for you. Let’s look at this new version of djay more specifically. After a free trial of the pro version, you can access basic features for free forever. Those features include access to your iTunes and Spotify libraries, the basic two-deck screen, Automix AI and limited hardware controller support. The pro version includes smart playlists, two-deck and four-deck screens, the ability to set cues, video mixing, better hardware support as well as a new looper feature. Interestingly, you can now download and play with all samples and loops in the integrated store — there’s no need to pay for additional content. Existing apps are going to be unlisted from the store. Algoriddim will still release updates for the time being, but it’s clear that the new version represents the future of djay. Pro subscriptions cost $40 per year. Existing djay users will pay $10 for the first year. Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com December 12, 2018 at 09:28AM
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Fuck Yeah: Amazon Warehouse Workers in Staten Island Go Public With Unionizing Push https://ift.tt/2SLNNil Employees at a newly-opened Amazon warehouse in Staten Island went public with a campaign to unionize last night, saying that the company should improve working conditions before focusing on its new HQ2 expansion across the city in Queens, according to Bloomberg News. In the face of the companyâs hyper-aggressive, global anti-union campaign, the new push is a pretty huge development for workers in other parts of the countryâand other Amazon-owned companies like Whole Foods. The Staten Island employeesâ complaints are familiarâmainly, that Amazon treats them like shit for not enough money. According to Bloomberg News, which broke the story Tuesday night (emphasis mine):
The workers want to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, which also backed an organizing push at Whole Foods that went public in September. Per Bloomberg, RWDSU wants to use the massive incentives New York offered Amazon to bring its second corporate headquarters to Long Island City in Queens to put pressure on the company:
Applebaum, who my colleague Hamilton Nolan interviewed last year, has been running the RWDSU for the better part of two decades, and has won representation for employees in multiple major box store and retail chains like Macyâs and Duane Reade, as well as for poultry and factory workers across the country. He declined to tell Bloomberg the specifics of where the union campaign goes from here, other than urging the company to âsit down with workers and their representativesâ to discuss their concerns, but the aforementioned press conference at City Hall on Wednesday could provide more information. The NYC City Council is meeting on Wednesday for the first of several public hearings to discuss Amazonâs HQ2 expansion. CBS reported this morning that some city officials are concerned the deal to bring Amazon to NYC was made behind closed doors and potentially by skirting the City Councilâs land review process. The fight to unionize Amazon as a whole will be a herculean undertaking. But with hundreds of thousands of people reliant on the company for survival and subject to the whims of one man, this is a vital first step to making it happen as soon as possible. Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com December 12, 2018 at 09:27AM
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How Facebook Schemed Against Its Users https://ift.tt/2QHjQmf Last year, I was trying to solve a mystery. Facebook’s “People You May Know” tool was outing sex workers’ real identities to their clients, and vice versa, and I was trying to figure out how. A sex worker using the pseudonym Leila told me she had gone to great lengths to hide her identity from clients by using an alternate name, alternate email address, and burner phone number—contact information she didn’t provide to Facebook—yet Facebook was still inextricably linking her with her clients, suggesting them to her real-name account as people she might want to friend. Facebook expressed concern about this happening, but its spokespeople purported to be as mystified as I was as to how it happened. “We take privacy seriously and of course want to make sure people have a safe and positive experience on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told me at the time. “We test a variety of signals for People You May Know and suggestions are always based on multiple signals.” That latter sentence says everything and nothing at the same time, but earlier this year, a possible “signal” that could have caused this came to light. Five months after I published the story about Leila, a Facebook user who had Facebook Messenger on his Android phone downloaded his Facebook file and discovered that it contained a history of all his calls with his “partner’s mum,” including the missed ones, and how long they lasted. That led Facebook to disclose that, yes, its Facebook Lite and Messenger apps on Android collect “call and SMS history” and had been doing so since 2015. It was never rolled out, according to Facebook, in the main Facebook app. Facebook included this permissions screen in its post, saying that it had popped up for users of Facebook Messenger, with the request for “call and text history” in tiny grey font, before the app would start sucking up that data. I think it’s fair to say that would have been easy to miss on a small phone screen. Then last week,an internal Facebook email from 2015 came to light in which Facebook employees discussed the decision to add the “call and SMS history” permission on Android, saying the “growth team [would use it] for improving things like PYMK,” Facebook’s shorthand for “People You May Know.” One of the Facebookers, a product manager not on the growth team, said this was a “pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective” and could lead to headlines about Facebook trying to “pry into your private life in even more terrifying ways.” Regardless, Facebook decided to go ahead with those permission requests and apparently no one noticed… that is until a user saw his call history with his potential mother-in-law in his Facebook folder. The internal email from 2015 documents something pretty disturbing: a scheme by Facebook to make the data grab less noticeable. Yul Kwon, who was Facebook’s lead privacy sherpa (and—fun fact—also a Survivor winner), said the growth team was testing an update that wouldn’t trigger Android’s permissions request screen, meaning users wouldn’t get the alert they might expect. Despite being Facebook’s lead privacy sherpa, Kwon did not object to this. There should have been someone in the room at Facebook saying, “Hey, maybe we should notify users both in the Android permissions and in big print within the app that we’re planning to track everyone they call and text because that’s a pretty invasive thing to do without their explicit and informed consent!” But no one in this 2015 discussion raised that concern, at least not in the released emails, including the person specifically tasked with making sure Facebook’s products are privacy-compliant. Facebook apparently hoped it would only have to notify users what it was doing when it asked them to sync their contacts within the Messenger and Lite apps, in that place where it can use the tiny grey font. A Facebook spokesperson told me that employees at the time were spooked by thepublic hysteria that resulted in 2014 when users on Android were asked to give the Facebook app access to their microphones. Or as the employee put it in the 2015 email, a “screenshot of the scary Android permissions screen becomes a meme,” which would clue “enterprising journalists into exactly what the new update is requesting.” It’s unclear whether the scheme not to trigger Android permissions actually worked. Technologist Ashkan Soltani and I ran a test where we downloaded the versions of Facebook Lite from this time period to an Android with an operating system that was also from this time period. (I have a surprising number of old Androids around my house!) When I upgraded to the Facebook Lite Android app that wanted to suck up data about who I call and text, it triggered a permissions request to “read call log.” And then when I signed into Facebook in the Lite app, it asked me to add my contacts with this screen: This was not a rigorous or definitive test. It’s entirely possible that a Facebook user’s experience could have been different in 2015. Regardless of how Android users were notified, this would help explain why People You May Know recommendations are so creepily accurate for Android users. And why Facebook would be able to link a sex worker with her clients if she had Messenger or Lite on her Android: The app would potentially be collecting information about everyone she called and texted regardless of whether she added them as a contact and regardless of whether she was using a “burner number” that she’d never given to Facebook. But Facebook, as always, says it’s more complicated than that. A spokesperson says this was one team talking about what another team was doing and that it does not accurately capture what was happening with People You May Know. “When we made it possible for people to sync their call/SMS logs in Messenger in May 2015 we did not use it to inform PYMK,” said a Facebook spokesperson by email. “We ran tests to understand whether the call/SMS log information people uploaded could improve suggestions in People You May Know. We didn’t launch the feature, so I would not characterize it as playing a ‘key role.’” In other words, Facebook only ran “tests” with an unknown number of users to see whether this was a good way to figure out who they knew and were close to IRL. According to the spokesperson, the history of who people had called and texted wasn’t incorporated into PYMK for all users. The spokesperson could not tell me how many users were part of the tests, when the tests were run, or whether the tests continue. So Leila could have been part of the tests or she may not have been. Who knows????? Apparently not this Facebook spokesperson. He did say Facebook could still decide to make this a feature in PYMK one day. As usual, Facebook’s machinations are shrouded in mystery to the detriment of its vulnerable users. If Facebook would be more forthcoming about the information it’s collecting about its users and how it uses that data, whether for advertising or for People You May Know, then users like Leila could protect themselves. But Facebook prefers to be vague, whether because it’s “proprietary information” or information that would disturb its users enough to abandon the platform altogether. Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com December 12, 2018 at 09:21AM
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Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com December 12, 2018 at 09:21AM |
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