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More companies are chipping their workers like pets
The trend of blundering into the void of adopting new tech, damn the consequences, full speed ahead, continues this week. The Telegraph tells us about "a number of UK legal and financial firms" are in talks with a chip company to implant their employees with RFID microchips for security purposes.
Hover 2 foldable drone can look for obstacles as it flies itself
The Hover Camera Passport foldable drone made quite the impression when it first launched a little over two years ago, and then it received a major update in April last year, which added a smartphone-free mode that automatically tracks and records its owner. Save for the rumored Snap acquisition deal (which Zero Zero Robotics still denies today), we had barely heard from the drone maker since then, but today it's back with a surprise announcement: The launch of its second selfie drone, Hover 2.
After Math: They're on the move
With the president's made up migrant caravan crisis having mysteriously vanished now that the midterms are over, it's time to take a look at the other movers and shakers from the industry this week. Volkswagen announced the development of a $23k Tesla rival, China has developed security cameras can now ID people by their gait, and Google's built a computer model to guess which restaurants will give you the runs.
After Math: The best kind of falling star
Gavin McInnes and his gang of Proud Boys, newly minted stars of the Alt-Right, took their first steps back toward irrelevancy this week when they got themselves banned from Facebook. At the same time, we've had to say goodbye to a pair of space-based telescopes (Kepler and Dawn), as they reached the end of their operational lifespans; Roscosmos blamed the recent Soyuz launch failure on a bent sensor pin and Apple announced that it would no longer report the sales numbers for the stars of its product lineup -- iPhones, iPads and Macs -- after it was reported that smartphone sales slumped six percent globally this year.
Dear tech: Stop doing business with Nazis
Kicking Nazis off tech companies' services is so easy, and such a simple thing to do. It is such a basic act of human decency, a trivial task that would stop PayPal, Stripe, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, GoDaddy and many more from being unquestionably complicit in the deadly rise of American Naziism. Stakes climb as we approach next week's elections. And yet.
After Math: Life imitating art imitating life
Between the political theater and unreal earnings reports, this has been a surreal week for the ages. But while you were glued to the news feeds, an AI-generated art piece sold for silly money, NASA fixed the Hubble by jiggling its handle and a band of clever thieves perpetrated a multimillion-download ad scam that would put the Ocean's crew to shame.
With Khashoggi, tech confronts its blood money
In 2015 we laughed at Hacking Team for getting hacked. Their profit-driven facilitation of human rights abuses around the world was somehow barely competent, but notorious. They sold illegal hackware and surveillance tech to brutal regimes and trained them in attacking citizens and journalists. We knew they were evil clowns. We just didn't expect what happened next.
After Math: Paying more for less
The rent is too damn high unless you're living in a van down by the river, medical care routinely puts people into bankruptcy, gas prices are still floating around $3 a gallon nationwide and Senator Ted "Zodiac Killer" Cruz is worried that his six figure salary won't enable him to buy a second house anytime soon. Times are tough for everybody so one has to wonder why the companies below are seemingly trying to make things actively worse.
Uber, Google, Facebook: Your experiments have gone too far
It was 2014, around the time when Travis Kalanick referred to Uber as his chick-magnet "Boober" in a GQ article, that I'd realized congestion in San Francisco had gone insane. Before there was Uber, getting across town took about ten minutes by car and there was nowhere to park, ever. With Boober in play, there was parking in places there never were spaces, but the streets were so jammed with empty, one-person "gig economy" cars circling, sitting in bus zones, mowing down bicyclists whilst fussing with their phones, still endlessly going nowhere, alone, that walking across the city was faster.
After Math: Every robot was parkour fighting
What a week it's been! Between Google's Pixel 3 event, the lucky landing by the Soyuz crew, and Facebook's latest data breach, it feels like we almost didn't have time to talk about Waymo's self-driving cars, Amazon's new line of picker bots and Boston Dynamic's gymnastic droids. But that's where the After Math comes in.
Goodbye Google+, you beautiful, squandered opportunity
When Google+ launched in 2011, people were already fed up with Facebook -- and Google was still cool. After Plus' closed invite garnered significant consumer desire, everyone's hopeful "Facebook killer" nabbed a sweet 300 million active monthly users by 2013 (by comparison, Twitter had 230 million). No one could have predicted that on a random Monday seven years later, the tech giant would hang its head, admit a middling API-access privacy hole and the existence of tumbleweeds on the service, and then announce it was shuttering Plus to the public.
Google's Pixel 3 event by the numbers
Google offered everybody a peak at its fall product lineup during its Made by Google event in New York City on Tuesday. The internet search giant cum hardware purveyor showed off its latest handset, the Pixel 3 (as well as a wireless charging dock for it), a more robust Chromecast, a smart Home Hub, and a snazzy 2-in-1 convertible tablet.
After Math: It's Spooky Season
The air is crisp, the leaves are changing and everywhere you look, you'll find decorative gourds on display. And y'all know what that means: we're just a few weeks from Halloween! Plenty of companies are already getting into the frightful mood. French researchers figured out how to fingerfy a phone, Telltale's staffing levels have been reduced to a shambling corpse, and Toyota once again warned that its Priuses could go all Christine on their drivers.
Facebook’s two-factor ad practices give middle finger to infosec
We've all encountered security questions asking where we went to school, our favorite color or food, our first concert, and the ubiquitous "mother's maiden name." Imagine a world where on one screen you carefully chose Stanford, red, spaghetti and so on, and on the next you were shown ads for Italian restaurants, red shoes, and jobs for Stanford grads. Seems like an insane violation, right? I mean, it stands to reason that we expect that the information we type to secure our online accounts and apps is private and safely guarded.
After Math: Hello Darkness, my old friend
Well, this week lasted years. While we weren't being bludgeoned by the cantankerous Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, we were learning about how 50 million Facebook users had their accounts hacked, that Elon Musk is being sued by the SEC for his Twitter posts (the ones about privatizing Tesla, not the ones wherein he libels a rescue diver), and that Red Dead Redemption 2 will rustle the remainder of your hard drive's free space.
Silicon Valley’s Brett Kavanaugh problem
As we steel ourselves to careen numbly toward whatever new horrors lay in store with Trump, his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, and the conservative politicians willing to help them, it's impossible not to contemplate how deep and depraved the culture of silence actually goes here. USA Today wrote: "When Kavanaugh gave a speech in 2015 at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law and stated, 'What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. That's been a good thing for all of us, I think,' he summed up the culture perfectly (...) It was their job to protect each other from their misdeeds no matter how big or alcohol-fueled. The boys kept each other's secrets."
FCC’s Ajit Pai labels California net neutrality law 'illegal'
FCC head honcho, Ajit Pai, didn't mince words in comments regarding California's recent passing of a tough net neutrality bill. In his keynote speech for neoconservative policy organization Maine Heritage Policy Center, Pai called California's SB 822 "illegal" and said it "poses a risk to the rest of the country." Pai also hinted that he'd be coming for California should SB 822, seen as the toughest net neutrality law in the nation, receive the governor's signature, as it's expected to in the next two weeks.
Why PayPal’s crackdown on ASMR creators should worry you
In June, China banned and excised videos of sound effects while claiming to cleanse its internet of pornography. YouTube had already demonetized the genre in a sex panic; now PayPal is banning people for life and holding individuals' funds, ignorant of the facts and marching lockstep to the tune of 8chan trolls enacting a campaign to punish "whores." The most bitter punchline in all this? A tiny percentage of the entire video genre is even remotely sexual, and those suffering — female creators — aren't even making sex content.
After Math: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
This has been quite the "disruptive" week with TechCrunch's marquee event going on at the San Francisco Moscone Center, and not just for startups. InfoWars was disinvited from yet another social media platform, Walmart is drastically expanding its self-driving Tesla truck order, and the world's largest wind farm just opened for business.
The US government comes for Google, Facebook, and Twitter
Facebook, Twitter, and Google were threatened by lawmakers from three distinct quarters on Wednesday. A leaked email from the largest US telecom lobbying group tells us where this is headed. One threat came during testimony from Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey to Congress when Senator Mark Warner told the pair of executives that "Congress is going to have to take action here. The era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end."