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31 Aralık 2015 Perşembe
11 Italian Phrases We Said Out Loud While Looking At Pictures Of Jack Dorsey's Beard In 2015
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People Tried Really Hard To Figure Out What's Going On With Airbnb In 2015
Here’s what — if anything — we learned.
Tumblr / Via giphy.com
2015 was a huge year for Airbnb. It earned a $25 billion valuation. It was used to book over 1 million stays per night. It launched its services in Cuba.
But 2015 was not a year without obstacles for the tech startup that, for many, has — until this year — represented the softer side of the so-called "sharing economy." Facing regulatory pressure in big cities like New York, L.A., and San Francisco, Airbnb spent much of the year — and its marketing budget — trying to convince the world that the platform is good for cities, good for middle-class families, and good for people in general.
But it's been hard — maybe harder than it should be — to prove that that's true. And meanwhile, Airbnb's opponents have argued that not only is the company not good for regular old middle-income city dwellers, but that its short-term rentals are actually causing a decline in affordable housing in certain cities and neighborhoods.
There's no doubt that some people do rely on Airbnb revenue to stay in homes that, what with rising costs of living, they couldn't otherwise afford. But it's also true that, in certain cases, unchecked short-term renting can have an adverse impact on rent.
Over the course of the last year, city governments, news outlets, and nonprofit organizations of all stripes have strived to figure out whether the net effect of Airbnb is positive or negative. But because Airbnb has been reluctant to share much information about where and how much the platform has been used, they've have had to cobble together a picture of the company's impact by scraping publicly available information from its website. They've been able to draw some conclusions from analyzing that data, many of which Airbnb has actively contested. The company, in turn, has released data reports of its own — reports that, unsurprisingly, tend to confirm that the platform is helping, not hurting, regular Americans.
With all the reports and counter-reports on Airbnb that have emerged this year, what have we actually learned? Given the efforts of housing advocates, attorneys general, data journalists and, to an extent, the company itself, are we actually any closer to understanding the impact of Airbnb?
The easiest way to spot rule-breaking on Airbnb is to count the number of hosts who list multiple properties on the site, since those people are likely not renting out a room in their home, but operating as a small business.
* In New Orleans, 46% of hosts listed multiple properties.
* In Vancouver, 35% of hosts listed multiple properties.
* In Boston, 15% of hosts listed multiple properties.
Murray Cox is the amateur data scientist behind Inside Airbnb. In 2015, he made it his mission to scrape and analyze as much data about short-term renting on the site as possible — from 50 cities globally. He found that, in most cities, hosts with more than one property listed accounted for a third of the overall listings in that city.
In fairness, Airbnb has taken steps to shut down users running such operations.
* Before April 2014, there were nearly 100 hosts with more than 10 properties listed on Airbnb in New York City. After April 2014, when the company cracked down on these "bad actors," there were less than 10 such hosts. But by early 2015, there were 22 hosts with more than 10 properties listed, according to a report by travel site Skift.
Despite Airbnb's attempts, the problem persists. As of early 2015, 29% of Airbnb listings in New York City belonged to hosts who had listed two or more properties, according to The Verge. And as of mid-November, at least 46 hosts were listing six or more entire-home properties in NYC, according to Airbnb's own data.
Those numbers might seem small, but multi-property hosts actually account for a lot of Airbnb's revenues.
* During a recent 12-month period, hosts with more than one entire-home listing in New York City accounted for more than 30% of all New York revenue. (And that includes share-home and shared-room listings.)
* And hosts with at least three entire-home listings accounted for more than 18% of all New York City revenue.
Airbnb seems fairly committed to getting the major offenders off the site, a development that happened in the last year. But the so-called "bad actors" that remain are still making a solid chunk of change off the site.
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30 Aralık 2015 Çarşamba
Microsoft Wants You To Take Pretty Selfies -- With Your iPhone
Microsoft Selfie promises to tweak your pics for age, gender, skin tone and lighting.
Remember when Microsoft released that age-guessing tool?
Microsoft
Well, the company is once again bringing its machine learning techniques and algorithms to bear on our photos, but this time it's using them to do something that's actually useful: making selfies look better.
"Microsoft Selfie" is an iOS app that promises to subtly optimize selfies, calibrating them for things like "age, gender, skin tone and lighting." It's not exactly a novel concept — Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi offers a similar feature. But it is another example of Microsoft extending its reach beyond Windows as it course corrects for our increasingly mobile world.
This isn't Microsoft's first selfie app. Indeed, Microsoft Selfie appears to be a stripped down version of the Windows Phone app Lumia Selfie rejiggered for iOS. That said, with Microsoft's share of the mobile market at a piddling 1.7%, the company has a far better shot of getting some traction for its new selfie app on the iPhone than it does on devices running its own mobile OS.
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Take A Look At The Future Of Facebook
Jason Stein
While on vacation in Aruba yesterday, Jason Stein, CEO of social media advertising agency Laundry Service, tweeted two screenshots from a new Facebook test that showed up on his wife’s phone. The test inserted a number of different content feeds next to Facebook’s traditional News Feed, with Travel, Style and Headline channels visible in the pictures.
Stein described these specialized content feeds as a “a newspaper made up of all the world's newspapers.” The vision is one previously articulated by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who once said he hoped his platform would be a “perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.” Text, photos and outside links are still the dominant form of content shared on Facebook. And the importance of links to outside media, for example, drove the company to build Instant Articles, a product that hosts outside publisher content within Facebook in order to get stories to render as fast as possible (BuzzFeed is a partner). Scrolling through specialized content feeds, each replete with Instant Articles could potentially be a great experience.
It’s All About The Movies
But the test gets especially interesting when you consider video. As far back as 2014, Facebook proclaimed that video would be its dominant content format within five years. This shift made sense given that costs of producing and publishing video are falling while the bandwidth availability is increasing.
But Facebook gave little indication of how it could present all this video content in a coherent, enjoyable way. It could, perhaps, turn the News Feed into a big video feed. But jumping from a CNN segment, to a clip of your friend’s baby, to a traditional goofy internet video sounds a bit jarring. Facebook’s recently-rolled-out dedicated video experience, while still new, is subject to this problem.
These specialized feeds, though, might provide an answer. At the very least, they’re an attempt by Facebook to figure out how to make the content people consume on its platform more coherent than the sometimes scattershot News Feed. It paves the way for a better video experience.
If people do want to consume video within these feeds, still an open question, then Facebook can puts its most powerful tool into play: its algorithm. For years now, Facebook has been trying to figure out the exact pieces of content to show us based on what we’ve interacted with in the past, what our networks are interested in, and a handful of other factors. The algorithm powers the News Feed which while far from perfect, is effective at displaying relevant content. Put Facebook’s algorithm to use within a Style or Sports vertical and one day it could display a stream of videos catered to each user’s specific interests.
Stein believes Facebook’s algorithm can help organize web videos in a way that might make sense out of the overabundance of them. “When when you sit down to watch video, especially longer form, you’re in the mood for a specific genre, be it sports, comedy, music, drama, news, documentary, and so on,” he told BuzzFeed News. “Algorithmically organizing videos within genres is critical to the future of video. This new Facebook UI is likely the backbone for its video and TV apps.”
Stein then provided screenshots revealing the existence of far more content feeds available outside the three displayed in his initial screenshots. Among them: Food, Entertainment, Health & Fitness, Animals & Pets, Sports, Games, Science & Tech. Not only that, each vertical is customizable. So someone interested in the Style channel, for instance, can decide whether they want to see women's fashion or men's or whether they're interested in beauty tips, jewelry, accessories, or some combination of the above. This is the foundation of even more personalized channels.
For Facebook, the business implications are clear. It already has the best audience data in the world, since we, its users, have effectively helped it build it the dream catalogue for advertisers by telling it everything about ourselves. But advertisers understand that while a well-targeted ads may be good, a well-targeted ad in context can be great. In other words, when a beer manufacturer knows you’re a beer drinker, they’re better served showing you an ad while you’re watching sports highlights as opposed to a video of your nephew’s first steps. The ad served next to the baby video still hits its target, but it won’t be as effective.
Many questions remain — most notably whether Facebook will see this new format through. But also it remains to be seen if content creators will produce the volume of quality video needed to help Facebook live up to its five year promise. But assuming Zuckerberg and Co’s assumptions play out, what we’re looking at today may very well be the next big step for a company determined to seize even more control over the distribution of information and entertainment as we move deeper into the social age.
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'Tis The Season For Online Dating
If you've been sitting on your parents’ couch this holiday season glumly contemplating failed relationships past and your inevitable partnerless future, do not despair. There is hope for you yet. Because when the clock strikes midnight Thursday, not only will you be making out with some random stranger, you’ll be entering the hottest month of the year for online daters.
That's right: January sees far more matches and dating-related messages than any other month, according to data from dating apps Coffee Meets Bagel and Hinge. So hit pause on Netflix, take a shower maybe, and get ready to meet the person of your dreams via a match notification pushed to your phone's homescreen.
"Without fail, January is our biggest month each year," Karen Fein, VP of marketing at the dating app Hinge, told BuzzFeed News. Same goes for dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, which saw a 44% growth in matches last January over the previous month, and a 56% bump in messages exchanged on its platform.
The uptick may be due to an unscientific phenomenon called cuffing season, during which people look to form relationships to get them through the colder months.
"We think there is an uptick in matching and messaging post-Christmas because people are seeking a flame to warm the winter/post-Holiday chill," Coffee Meets Bagel spokesperson Liina Potter explained. "You could say 'cuffing season' is in full effect. In the New Year, people also seek the seed to create new beginnings, which includes new relationships."
If you mess up in January, you should still be OK. The next two months or so are still prime time for online dating, according to Hinge's Fein. "Men on Hinge are 15% more likely to want a relationship in the winter than they are in other seasons," she said. "Women are 5% more likely."
If all else fails, pray for snow. According to Fein, snowstorms also tend to cause big increases in activity on Hinge.
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Facebook's Free Basics Shuts Down In Egypt, Continuing Troubled Run
Facebook's Free Basics program, which provides free internet access to a select group of apps and websites, has been shut down in Egypt, according to an Associated Press report.
In a statement provided to the AP, Facebook said it hoped to ""resolve this situation soon."
"We're disappointed that Free Basics will no longer be available in Egypt," the statement said. "More than 1 million people who were previously unconnected had been using the Internet because of these efforts."
It's still unclear why the service was halted in Egypt, but the shutdown marks another setback for the program, which has been the subject of a regulatory battle in India. Detractors there have derided the initiative for favoring some apps and sources of information over others, something they say goes against the principles of Net Neutrality. Free Basics is still live in over 30 countries.
Facebook — and social media in general — played a prominent role in Egypt's Tahrir Square uprising in 2011. The platform was a key organizing tool for demonstrators who eventually overthrew the government. There have since been several attempts to block it.
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A Redditor Made Some Hilarious Honest Ads For Free Basics
“Join your ignorant friends by showing support for what is misleadingly called a ‘Digital India’.”
The Times of India
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12 Times People In Tech Apologized In 2015
#Sorry.
Reddit had a rocky year, to say the least, and its problems boiled over during the July 4th weekend when moderators closed off prominent subreddits to the public. The blackout protested Reddit's dismissal of community moderator and employee Victoria Taylor, whom Reddit moderators had seen as an ally who championed the popular "Ask Me Anything" feature. The crisis prompted then-interim CEO Ellen Pao to post a 335-word apology for Reddit's "long history of mistakes" and pledge to give moderators new tools and more support. "I know these are just words, and it may be hard for you to believe us," Pao wrote. "I don't have all the answers, and it will take time for us to deliver concrete results." But Redditors weren't interested in waiting. Pao resigned a week later.
Ellen Pao
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
The Shade Room is a celebrity gossip site that publishes straight to social media, earning it more than 2.5 million followers and the nickname "Instagram's TMZ." In May, Instagram shut it down, apparently mistakenly. The account was later back online.
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29 Aralık 2015 Salı
Priest Reportedly Suspended For Riding A Hoverboard During Mass
“He will be out of the parish and will spend some time to reflect on this past event,” the diocese of a Philippine church said.
A priest in the Philippines is in trouble after a video showing him singing a Christmas song while riding a hoverboard during Mass has gone viral.
Several parishioners are seen cheering and clapping in the video as the priest rolls around the nave like a pro.
But the Diocese of San Pablo, Laguna, condemned the priest's actions on Tuesday, saying, "That was wrong," according to a report by Rappler, a Philippines-based news website.
According to a statement from the diocese, the priest, who has not been identified, sang a Christmas song while riding the hoverboard around the church as a way of greeting his parishioners during the Christmas Eve Mass.
"[The Mass] is the Church's highest form of worship," the diocese said. "Consequently, it is not a personal celebration where one can capriciously introduce something to get the attention of the people."
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Sidecar Is Shutting Down Its Ride-Hailing Service
Sidecar, a ride-sharing and delivery service that never quite caught on like Lyft or Uber, is calling it quits. The company said Tuesday that it will cease operations at 2pm Pacific time on December 31 -- just before the New Year's Eve rush.
Founded in 2012, Sidecar came early to the on-demand ride-sharing market, but struggled to compete with more well-funded rivals like Uber and Lyft. Despite some valiant attempts at differentiation with medical marijuana deliveries and a feature that allowed passengers to choose the gender of their driver, the company -- which had raised about $35 million from a handful of investors -- found it was unable to continue on as a ride-hailing and delivery business.
"Today is a turning point for Sidecar as we prepare to end our ride and delivery service so we can work on strategic alternatives and lay the groundwork for the next big thing," Co-founders Sunil Paul and Jahan Khanna wrote in a post to Medium. "... This is the end of the road for the Sidecar ride and delivery service, but it’s by no means the end of the journey for the company."
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Camper Van Beethoven Singer Sues Spotify For $150 Million
Camper Van Beethoven
Spotify has taken some flak over the years for paying too little in royalty fees to the musicians and songwriters whose music it distributes. Now the streaming music service has been slapped with a lawsuit claiming it sometimes doesn't pay any royalties at all.
On Monday, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery filed a class-action lawsuit against Spotify alleging that the company knowingly streamed songs to its more than 75 million users without obtaining the proper licenses to do so. First reported by Billboard, the suit seeks some $150 million damages for a proposed class expected to exceed 100 members.
At the crux of the suit is Lowery's claim that Spotify has created a "$17 to $25 million reserve" to pay royalties to artists whose work it has streamed without licensing, but it hasn't bothered to find those artists to make payment.
"Our argument is, we're not that hard to track down," Victor Krummenacher, a member of Camper Van Beethoven eligible to participate in the suit, told BuzzFeed News. "If [BuzzFeed] can track me down — and I'm not a principal in the suit — Spotify should be able to track us down to license our songs."
But it hasn't, Krummenacher said. Instead, Spotify is holding on to the money, waiting for artists to hit it up for payment. "They black box the money," he said.
This isn't the first time Spotify has run into trouble over copyright and royalty issues; The company is currently involved in settlement negotiations with the National Music Publishers Association. In the past, Spotify has argued that the byzantine music licensing structure, which requires payments for both recording and publishing rights, is too complex to manage for a catalog of over 30 million songs.
“We are committed to paying songwriters and publishers every penny,” Spotify said in a statement. “Unfortunately, especially in the United States, the data necessary to confirm the appropriate rights holders is often missing, wrong or incomplete.”
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The Year We Almost Lived In The Future
Apple
This past September, near the end of one of its marathon keynote events, Apple dimmed the lights to wrap up its presentation with a one-minute ad spot for the iPhone 6S. It’s vintage Apple: breezy, cross-cultural, feel-good, and trying just hard enough, with a couple of quick celebrity cameos from the likes of Bill Hader and Selena Gomez. “This is the iPhone 6S,” it begins, “not much has changed...except...” The next 50 or so seconds feature a remarkably well-lit and masterfully written gadget specs and features summary, ultimately concluding with the iPhone’s new tagline: “The only thing that’s changed is everything.”
It was savvy branding for one of Apple's iPhone S product cycles, where the company is touting a phone that, while outfitted with some new guts and a few bells and whistles, is pretty much visually identical to last year’s model. “The only thing that’s changed is everything” suggests a paradigm shift or a pivotal moment of some kind. It’s a little glib; a bit overblown. And maybe, despite best efforts, it still manages to leave you longing for next year's model. But above all it's a decent way to try to think broadly about the year that was in technology.
2015 was, like most years in tech, mostly iterative. Only it wasn't sold that way at all. The past 12 months felt like a constant barrage of The Next Big Thing, punctuated by occasional scandals, crises, and chan-fueled internet tire fires.
Yet with few exceptions, what we were excited or terrified about wasn't what we had, it was what we were just about to get. It was a year when the blueprint for the next decade seemed to come into focus, with long-promised stuff arriving in forms we could actually touch and feel and use (self-driving Teslas! VR newspapers! Hoverboards!). And yet the things that did arrive seemed like stopgaps — placeholders for the real future. We were living in the year of the Rio, waiting on the arrival of the iPod. We have become conditioned to have ridiculously high expectations for the transformative power of Silicon Valley — borne of desktop computing, and the World Wide Web, and the iPod, and iPhones, and Uber, and, Wi-Fi, (Wi-Fi!), and, Christ, you ungrateful git, Christ, even Google search. Do you remember being amazed by Google search? It was amazing. Once.
And yet all of that has led to this point where tech companies are boxed into making (or at least framing) promises that they can’t yet deliver.
The Apple ad and its catchphrase “The only thing that’s changed is everything” were a direct response to preposterously high expectations. It’s a reminder that, Even if you missed it, don’t worry, we can confirm that we wowed you with all this exciting newness! It’s blunt confirmation that you tuned into this keynote for a glimpse at the future and Apple, as usual, delivered. It’s all kind of silly, but it belies a bigger truth: To promise anything small in 2015 is certain failure. And, if you can’t deliver anything at all, make sure whatever it will eventually be appears jaw-dropping — show us a whale breaching in the middle of a basketball court.
Technology is always marching steadily toward this promise of the future, but recent years have seen the pressure for companies to ratchet up expectations enormously — in part due to the equally enormous valuations and market capitalizations based on those expectations. Moonshots aren't ludicrous ambitions for tech's major players, they're table stakes. (Literally — in the past few weeks both Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have successfully launched and landed reusable rockets!) Innovation is increasingly measured by the changes one company can make in the physical world, often by attacking and upending centuries-old industries like transportation, agriculture, and housing. The bar for building something new has been raised so high that companies must reveal something transformative or be dismissed as a disappointment. Iteration is tolerated, but only for so long.
And so, 2015 feels like the year where the future almost arrived. (Google made prototype pants that act like touchscreens!) We got whiffs of truly transformative technology only to be told it wasn't quite ready for us yet. (Or in some cases, that it may have been something of a sham all along. See: Theranos.)
Google's smart fabric project.
Google / Via google.com
In March we were treated to a preview of the future of our wrists, courtesy of Apple. The promise was many-fold: freedom from the tyranny of our phones and their dizzying array of notifications, creating a seamless layer between our bodies and our devices, and elevating wearable technology from a luxury to a commodity. Android, Pebble, and others had already been there, of course. Words like Fitbit Killer were bandied about. Nobody knew anything, but certainty abounded. The Apple Watch would fail or succeed spectacularly. The only thing that would change was everything.
More than six months later and very little has changed. Apple has said it wouldn’t reveal sales numbers, leaving analysts to make semi-educated guesses. One firm suggests sales since launch have increased from 3.6 million to 3.9 million in the most recent quarter. That same firm estimates that competitor Fitbit shipped an estimated 4.7 million devices in the third quarter. Further analyst numbers suggest the cheaper Fitbit alternative has consistently outsold the pricey-to-extremely-pricey Apple Watch. And all this makes sense, given that the true potential of the Apple Watch is still unclear. The potential contours of a transformative wrist-bound computing future are visible, but the particulars have yet to take form.
This year we watched as one-time hardware Moonshots rolled closer into our view from the future’s horizon. Earlier this month I strapped Microsoft’s $3,000 Hololens to my face and found myself immersed in a fantastic world overlaid with robot bugs and three-dimensional models of the solar system. But that moment was fleeting — a brief tease of an augmented future yet to come. When Microsoft unveiled Hololens last January, the company dubbed it the “next step” of computing, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that could be the case — someday. But right now, that next step is just a tightly controlled demo shown off to reporters in a faux living room.
Similarly, 2015 was the year that virtual reality took its most significant strides to date. After decades of disappointment, VR proved, in no uncertain terms, that it is hopping off its treadmill to nowhere and coming for us. Soon. But, much like the Hololens, so much of the virtual reality we saw this year smacked of proof of concept and novelty. Go to a VR event/press conference and you’ll hear VR’s rallying cry: "If you think that’s cool, just wait until you see what we’re going to be able to do in a few years!" Of course that future is easy to envision. Late this year, the New York Times dropped over one million virtual reality boxes on its subscribers’ doorsteps, delivering a small and novel preview of what may soon feel commonplace. But if 2016 is the year that virtual reality arrives, it will do so unevenly. Fully realized experiences like Oculus will be immersive, but their high price will make them exclusive. Meanwhile, more accessible VR experiences like the NYT-distributed Google Cardboard models will still largely feel unsatisfactory — a tease of what’s to come.
The same goes for artificial intelligence, which draws perennial chatter from industry observers. Consider M, Facebook’s attempt at AI butlery. Powered by some slick algorithms and a trove of data, M appeared to demonstrate almost sentient behaviors; M helped book flights, prank friends — it even lowered cable bills.
But we only had part of the story. While M was indeed backed by some ambitious AI, the bulk of the requests submitted to it were handled by real human beings — contract workers doing things that artificial intelligence cannot.
Google, via Aleksandr Milewski
If you were one of a privileged few to ride in a self-driving car this year, you discovered that any vehicle strapped to the gills with LIDAR sensors and connected to Google’s cloud is arguably a better, more experienced driver than you’ll ever be. The rest of us were similarly wowed throughout the year with stats like: “Google’s cars have driven a total of 1.2 million miles on the road." In 2015 the once-ludicrous idea of autonomous vehicles suddenly seemed an inevitability. Any conversation about the promise of technology in 2015 probably, at some point, at least briefly mentioned self-driving cars as a yardstick by which to measure the industry. It’s perhaps the most tangible evidence of the future having arrived.
But aside from carefully rehearsed demos and admirable road test stats, autonomous vehicles have monumental hurdles to clear before they’re incorporated into our commutes. Difficult questions need to be asked — How is liability determined when an accident occurs? How will we keep them from getting hacked? Will they be fully autonomous or allow driver intervention? What happens to normal cars? — and dizzying logistics have to be dealt with. And if 2015 showed us the self-driving car’s potential, it also showed us how far we — the passengers — have to go to be trusted with the technology.
We’re aiming for a transportation revolution, but what we’ve got now are Tesla owners filming themselves while putting their vehicles on autopilot and climbing fully out of the driver’s seat.
Perhaps this all sounds depressing or short-sighted, but it really shouldn’t be. Bubbling underneath the frustration of a future just out of reach is a lot of hope and excitement for what’s next — maybe even light feelings of progress! It does however say everything about how breathless we’ve become in our insatiable request for the Next Big Thing. If you’ve trained your eye on the big, flashy, transformative breakthrough, then consumer tech in 2015 probably looked a lot like one of Apple’s S years: plenty to talk about and plenty new, but difficult from a bird’s-eye view to see how everything changed.
The last 12 months were less a year of undelivered promises or technological shortcomings than they were a year where our expectations and hype and optimism for something better down the line sometimes failed to align with reality. 2015 was a year in which we saw the future more clearly than ever, but still couldn't quite get to it. Sure, we finally have hoverboards* — but they still have training wheels.
*Author’s Note: Publicly remarking that hoverboards don’t actually hover will be punishable by law in 2016. Crazy, I know, but those are the rules.
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Meet The Benedictine Monk Of Silicon Valley
William Alden / Via BuzzFeed News
Like many techies, Brother Eckhart Camden wears a hooded garment to work. But his uniform is not a hoodie, strictly speaking. Instead, Brother Eckhart wears a black tunic and scapular — reflecting his status as probably the only Benedictine monk working at a Silicon Valley software company.
"That's for the remembrance of death — the reason why the Benedictines wear black," Brother Eckhart told BuzzFeed News in an interview in the Palo Alto garden where he prays daily. "One of the things that's to help you keep humble is to remember that you are mortal."
Brother Eckhart, 56, with an unruly beard and long gray hair, has worked in technology for more than 30 years, though he moved to California's Bay Area only in 2013, to join a software startup. Until recently, he was known as Chip Camden, and his hair was buzzed short. (A photo that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 2013 shows his previous incarnation.) But a series of spiritual experiences in recent years, he says, helped him rediscover his Christian faith and put him on a path that culminated in a ceremony in November, when he took Benedictine vows.
Since ancient times, monks of the Order of Saint Benedict have adhered to a tradition of chastity, asceticism, and prayer. Brother Eckhart's group, the Community of St. John Cassian, is a small and relatively new Benedictine organization within the Episcopal Church, founded only last year in Berkeley. Unlike other Benedictine communities, it doesn’t have a monastery, though it is hoping to be able to afford one soon. For now, its members live alone, in conventional society, and are expected to support themselves financially.
In a role seemingly befitting a monk, Brother Eckhart oversees quality at his software startup, which is now a division of one of the region's biggest tech companies. (His employer asked not to be named in this article; in the charitable spirit embraced by Brother Eckhart, we assented.) He spends four hours a day in prayer, including Bible study and meditation, in several sessions starting when he arises at 5 a.m. This practice, he says, has helped him improve his focus and made him calmer at work — useful traits for ensuring that software development be held to a high standard.
"I do see that quality benefits from that centeredness," Brother Eckhart said. "It's often about discipline, and awareness, and paying attention to the moment, and not getting too far ahead of yourself."
At the same time, life in Silicon Valley these days can be full of potential pitfalls for anyone trying to free themselves from material things. Tech companies of all sizes offer catered meals and abundant snacks while showering their employees with perks. Brother Eckhart gave up drinking long before taking his monastic vows (he makes an exception for communion wine), although he once accidentally took a sip of white wine at a company party. "I asked for water and they gave me wine, thinking I was joking," he said.
But despite the abundant temptations on offer in the current Silicon Valley gold rush, he has been able to maintain his monastic discipline. He gave up his car when he moved to Palo Alto and lives in a one-bedroom apartment with few possessions. His youngest son has a severe mental disability, he said, and he directs a large part of his earnings toward his son's care.
"The free lunches are great," Brother Eckhart said. "But as far as the rest of the lifestyle, I try not to be too acquisitive."
Though he came to the Benedictine order later in life, Chip Camden studied the Bible as a student at Oral Roberts University in the late 1970s and planned to become a minister. He discovered computer programming almost by accident, working a part-time job in the university's data processing department.
Soon he taught himself programming languages like COBOL and DG Eclipse Assembler, while also studying Hebrew and Greek. His first wife, whom he married while in college, noticed those four languages seemingly melding in his brain.
"One night, my wife woke me up and described for me the things I was saying," Brother Eckhart recalled. "And I was actually talking in all four at the same time."
"Programming languages are actually human languages. They're not machine languages," he added. "They're just extremely well specified."
After that marriage and a second one fell apart, and after many years working as an independent software consultant, Brother Eckhart came back to Christianity. Studying the Bible in college had shown him inconsistencies in scripture and turned him into an atheist, he said. But while listening to Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4, on a CD recovered from his estranged second wife, he broke down in tears upon discovering an unexpectedly beautiful passage in the music.
Later, he believed he received a divine message after praying for strength in anticipation of a heart surgery. An eagle he had seen months earlier appeared on a branch before him, seeming to represent strength, and he noticed a biblical passage, Isaiah 40:31, inscribed on plaques on nearby benches. "But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength," it reads. "They will soar on wings like eagles."
He found the Benedictine community through an Episcopal church in Palo Alto. Adhering to a chaste life, he said, was not hard.
"After my second wife and I split, my therapist recommended that I not start another relationship for 18 months," Brother Eckhart said. "I decided to give it a try. And I suddenly found such freedom in not having to relate to people that way."
Benedictine monks are not common in the United States today, even in spiritually diverse Northern California. Brother Brendan E. Williams, the founder and prior of the Community of St. John Cassian, said he knew of just one other Benedictine community in the Bay Area, the Camaldolese monks at Incarnation Monastery in the Berkeley Hills, who are Catholic.
Still, the Bay Area is a stronghold of contemplative tradition, particularly the Buddhist variety. The Buddhist monk Shunryu Suzuki, who established the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 1960s, inspired countless Westerners to meditate, and mindfulness gurus have since infiltrated corporate offices. In the HBO show Silicon Valley, the CEO of the fictional tech giant Hooli often turns to his spiritual guru for counsel.
"It's a little trendier to be Buddhist, I think, than it is to be Christian," Brother Eckhart said. "Perhaps in Western culture we're a little too close to the seedy underbelly of Christianity's history."
Noting the similarities between his tradition and Buddhism, Brother Eckhart said he enjoys talking to a work colleague who is Buddhist.
"We have wonderful discussions about contemplative technique, and the kinds of experiences that we have in trying to find that place to be, or place to non-be, if you will," he said. “I find that I have more in common with him than I have with many Christians, who aren't familiar with the contemplative tradition of Christianity."
In preparation for his vows ceremony in November, Brother Eckhart sent messages to colleagues informing them of his plans, including that he would be wearing a monk's habit to the office. "They've all been very supportive," he said.
His outfit — all black, down to his high-top Chuck Taylors — follows the precepts outlined by St. Benedict. He wears a traditional medal on a necklace, a black belt, and a hood, for warmth, which "gives me a Gandalf look."
And then there's that scraggly beard, which, in today's tech scene — with executives like Jack Dorsey of Twitter sporting mighty facial growth — doesn't seem very unusual at all.
"It is kind of trendy, unfortunately," Brother Eckhart said. "But I quit trimming it about a year and a half ago, and just kind of let it grow. I don't know why, exactly. I guess I like it."
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11 Apps Your Parents Ruined In 2015
Holiday present idea for your parents: flip phones.
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28 Aralık 2015 Pazartesi
A Bunch Of People Got Hurt On Christmas Riding Their New Hoverboards
‘Tis the season for broken bones.
Hoverboards were the hottest gift under the Christmas tree this year, and many people spent Friday learning how to use their new toys — with painful results.
It was, shall we say, a steep learning curve.
Instagram: @yongdawsonphotography
People had little falls...
...and people had big falls.
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2015 Was The Year Work Stopped Working
When the debate over how on-demand workers should be classified — whether as employees or independent contractors — first erupted, the folks at TaskRabbit thought it was none of their business. The problem, COO Stacy Brown-Philpot told BuzzFeed News, seemed to be Uber’s — that company was the one attracting attention, and the one being sued. “We really felt like, our marketplace is different, and this is a battle that they are fighting,” she said.
But the question of whether gig workers should be provided the same benefits and protections as employees didn’t stay Uber’s problem for long. Fast-forward a few months, and TaskRabbit executives, like so many other on-demand economy leaders, were taking trips to Washington and meetings with senators in the hopes of having their agenda incorporated into the rapidly advancing national conversation on labor regulation. “What we’re trying to do,” Brown-Philpot said this December, “is educate the federal government about how our Taskers are working.”
In 2015, a lot of people had the same realization. Uber, TaskRabbit, and many of their peers in the on-demand economy have been predicated on cheap contract labor since their inception — and have been insisting that the law needs to catch up to the technology they’ve invented, rather than vice versa, for nearly as long. As any legal expert will tell you, plenty of companies that existed years before the term “sharing economy” even existed have wrestled with the choice between expensive, trainable employees and cheap, independent contractors. “If you think about FedEx drivers and Microsoft workers, these questions have been with us for a long time,” Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs told BuzzFeed News. “Uber has gotten everyone’s attention, and so has focused us on a question that courts and academics have been thinking about for a long time.”
But this was the year that the widespread popularity of apps like Uber and the massive amounts of cash in Silicon Valley made worker classification a major topic of national interest. The conversation has largely been driven by the class-action lawsuit brought against Uber in late 2014 by Boston-based labor attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who has made the on-demand economy something of a personal speciality. By January, federal Judge Edward M. Chen weighed in on the issue during a court hearing, saying that “the idea that Uber is simply a software platform” is not a “very persuasive argument.” Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich took up the cause in February, penning a number of articles about how tech companies like Uber will lead to a rise of misclassification.
But it wasn’t until March when momentum took hold. That’s when Judge Chen decided to try the case by a jury, saying that the drivers may indeed be employees. A week later, a very similar case was brought against Instacart, which, at the time, hired independent contractors both to shop in grocery stores and to deliver groceries to customers’ homes. Handy, Homejoy, Postmates, Try Caviar, and others were also sued by workers.
Once June rolled around, the issue started to reach a fever pitch. In California, a judge found a single Uber driver — separate from the larger class-action suit — to have been misclassified as a contractor, ruling that she was owed around $4,000 in expenses. In Silicon Valley, venture capitalists started promoting the idea of creating a new class of worker, a middle road between contractor and employee, an idea that had actually been floated back in January in the Wall Street Journal. As BuzzFeed News wrote in June, that new contractor classification would solve a major problem for the on-demand economy, potentially allowing companies to train workers and tell them what to do and where to be without having to pay for the benefits that employees get.
The idea took off.
What followed was a hectic summer. There were more lawsuits, this time against Washio, Postmates, and Shyp. Shyp reacted in a novel way — by changing the business model. Following the example Instacart had set just a few weeks prior, Shyp announced that it would begin transitioning its contractor-based workforce to full employees. Other companies would soon do the same, including Shift, which decided in October to make the workers who handle buying and selling used cars on the platform employees of the company. CEO George Arison said it’s a choice the company could not have made before the lawsuits. “If I had walked into that room in July of 2013, they would have said, 'You should under no circumstance go W-2 and definitely keep 1099.'"
Meanwhile, the issue of worker classification was making its way to the national stage. The Department of Labor weighed in, softly reminding the nation that the 1099 classification is only used in rare cases and that the vast majority of Americans should be classified as employees. But the cannonball-sized splash came when presidential candidate Jeb Bush made a point in July of coming out as pro-Uber; the former governor of Florida gave a talk on the benefits of the gig economy at Thumbtack’s headquarters, before getting picked up in an Uber and driving off. When Hillary Clinton suggested that there might be some problems with the innovations of the gig economy, she was roundly attacked for being anti-tech. Later that summer, Clinton held “secret meetings” in San Francisco, in which she talked with executives from on-demand companies about the needs of the industry.
By fall, the showboating was over, and things started to get serious. In October, President Obama hosted a summit on “worker voice” at the White House during which he expressed concern that a third worker classification might be, in practice, no more than “a watered-down version” of existing employee protections. After that, real policy proposals started to surface. In November, a coalition of tech companies and labor organizers announced their mutual support for portable benefits — a plan to build a system that will allow workers to collect prorated benefits from multiple companies simultaneously, potentially a serious step toward reimagining the social safety net. In December, a formal proposal was put forth by the Hamilton Project laying out what a third worker classification could actually look like. And finally, app-based drivers in Seattle won the right to organize and collectively bargain.
Via Flickr: er0l
So what’s next?
2016 is a presidential election year, a fact that has already begun to impact discussions of national policy. There’s a chance that campaign season will serve as a distraction, as topics like immigration and ISIS bowl over the issue of worker classification. But there’s also a chance, says TaskRabbit’s Brown-Philpot, that gig economy regulation will again become a part of the electoral debates in the same way it did this summer. “Hillary had a 12-person meeting on the sharing economy. Jeb orchestrated an Uber ride. Rubio has been spending time with Handy,” she said. “I don’t think they’re gathering that information for their health.”
After all, the worker classification question gets at one of the deciding issues for American voters: jobs. Because the issue at hand is partially about the benefits employees receive, it’s also connected to health care, which is guaranteed to play a part in the election.
If the gig economy does become an issue in the presidential contest, Democrats and Republicans will find a way to divide themselves on either side of it — a near eventuality that Sen. Mark Warner alluded to it an essay on Medium he co-wrote with Gov. Mitch Daniels, in which he declared his support for coming up with federal policy that defines, among other things, a new class of worker. “Thankfully,” it reads, “on these issues, battle lines have yet to harden and shared progress is still possible.”
In addition to potentially facing regulation in Washington next year, on-demand companies will also face challenges in the motherland. Venture capital is simply no longer as readily available to entrepreneurs as it was six months ago. It's a problem that will hit on-demand companies especially hard, given that many of them have relied on the artificial injection of venture cash rather than charging customers full price for services in order to scale their platforms. Charles Moldow of Foundation Capital has written about the economics of on-demand startups in the past; he says luxury services startups like Luxe and Zirx, both on-demand valet apps, aren’t long for this world. “People may love your service, but if you're unable to raise prices and charge rates that make you a legitimate business, you're not going to be able to raise money, and you're going to be in trouble,” he said.
In fact, six months ago, venture capitalists were already questioning whether the on-demand space wasn’t growing overcrowded. In the beginning, “it was land grab mode,” said Semil Shah, a venture capitalist who backs DoorDash and Instacart, among others. “We’re starting to see only a few will really kind of survive into something.” As less available funding contributes to the demise of some companies and the acquisition of others, those with ongoing legal problems and costly labor issues are more likely to be gone for good.
Sarah Horowitz of the Freelancers Union said that throughout labor history, new industries arise, and the nature of American capitalism is that government tries to serve and encourage them. But as industry becomes more powerful, workers will begin to question what they’re getting in return for their labor, and protections will have to be put in place. Phase one was the hiring of Washington, D.C., big guns like David Plouffe and Chris Lehane to run policy teams for these companies, drastically inflating their lobbying budgets. The second phase, in which laborers return fire, began this year with the Uber lawsuit, and will continue to unfold in 2016.
Class-action lawsuits, especially ones with a class as large as Uber’s (more than 100,000 drivers as of early December) are a major cost no company wants. Further, pending litigation can make a company significantly less attractive to a potential acquirer. There’s no doubt that the situation we now find ourselves in — in which there is a congressional Sharing Economy Caucus falling over itself to regulate a relatively small, nascent industry — has been driven by lawsuits. As Sen. Warner has repeatedly said, the multibillion-dollar valuations some of these companies tout also draws attention.
But beyond size and scale, these cases have captured national attention because there was always something a little too good to be true about the idea that merely owning a cell phone afforded everyone the ability to have clean underwear or ice cream or weed brought to them instantaneously. Revealing the underclass of drivers who power each app as potentially maltreated is satisfying because it seems to confirm with fact what was formerly just a feeling — that we’ve become too lazy, too indulgent, too carried away by convenience.
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Lyft Billboard Hit With Anti-Gentrification Message In San Francisco
Alex Kantrowitz
The ride hailing app Lyft is running an outdoor ad campaign positioning itself as an alternative to public transportation — or at least a fallback option for when it stops working. But the campaign's message isn't resonating in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood, where a vandal defaced one billboard from Lyft with a message likely meant for the city's tech community at large.
The vandal, in a markup that took some effort, changed the above sign's message from "STOPS THAT JUST WON'T STOP" (an apparent reference to city's beleaguered, frequently broken public transport system) to SHOPS THAT JUST WON'T STOP GENTRIFYING." And in the bottom right-hand corner, the Lyft logo was altered to read "Lyfe in S.F."
As tech money and workers continue to flood into San Francisco, many within the city are feeling the impact by way of rising real estate prices and a changing cityscape. For the past few years, that transformation has also led to some vocal anti-tech actions. Lyft happens to be the victim this time.
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23 Life-Changing Apps We Downloaded This Year
The app-iest place on Earth.
Amy Sefton for BuzzFeed
Tab (free, iOS and Android) makes complicated bill splitting *super* easy.
I've successfully convinced most of my friends to download Tab because it is just that good.
First, you take a picture of the bill. Then, Tab analyzes the text and adds each item, in digital form, to the app. Anyone with Tab can join the bill and each person can tap their item. If multiple people split a communal dish, like fries, Tab can take that into account too.
Tab
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Mark Zuckerberg On Free Basics: "Who Could Possibly Be Against This?"
Free Basics in action
In an op-ed published in today's Times of India, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a plea on behalf of Free Basics, his company's program that offers unlimited, free access to a limited set of apps and websites in India and a number of other countries.
The program is under popular attack in India, criticized for offering access to a skewed, Facebook-ified version of the internet instead of the entire thing, and faces an existential risk from regulators who are considering whether it's fair for a company to shape the type of internet its citizens have access to.
"If we accept that everyone deserves access to the internet, then we must surely support free basic internet services. That’s why more than 30 countries have recognized Free Basics as a program consistent with net neutrality and good for consumers," Zuckerberg wrote. "Who could possibly be against this?"
Zuckerberg's op-ed is the latest move in an aggressive effort by Facebook to shore up support for the program in India, where the tide of popular opinion seems headed in the other direction. The company took the unusual step of deploying its notifications tab last week to promote a petition addressed to India's Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in support of Free Basics. It also took out a two page ad spread in the Times of India over the weekend arguing on behalf of the program.
Protests against Free Basics' model by net neutrality advocates, who argue that Facebook is a self-interested gatekeeper providing its own version of the internet, have grown so loud that the TRAI has asked Reliance Communications, which works with Facebook to provide the service, to put it on hold.
Linked at the bottom of Zuckerberg's Times Of India op-ed was a counterpoint written by Nikhil Pahwa, co-founder of Savetheinternet.in, which advocates for internet rights in India. In his piece, Pahwa outlined the main critique against Free Basics, arguing that it goes against the principles of Net Neutrality.
"Net Neutrality is about the ISPs (and telecom operators) not giving a competitive advantage to any particular website or application," Pahwa wrote "Today, Facebook, in partnership with Reliance Communications, reserves the right to reject applications from websites and apps for Free Basics, and forces them to conform to its technical guidelines."
Instead of pursuing the current Free Basics model, which offers unlimited access to a select group of apps and websites, Pahwa asks why Facebook is not providing limited access to the entire internet. This setup would not privilege one service, such as Facebook's, over another.
Oddly, for a company required to maximize value for its shareholders, Facebook continues to insist that its Free Basics program is not about making money. "This isn’t about Facebook’s commercial interests – there aren’t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics," Zuckerberg wrote in his op-ed.
But of course, Facebook stands to gain if Free Basics helps it secure a beachhead with the millions of people it brings online. If Facebook is one of the first apps people have access to and connect with, then it will likely enjoy a similar network effect that has made it seemingly irreplaceable in countries like the U.S., where it has been adopted en masse. And while the company is not running ads to Free Basics users right now, it could of course eventually do so in the future.
In the two page ad spread appearing in Sunday's Times Of India, Facebook, addressing the revenue question, declared: "We are doing this to connect India, and the benefits to do so are clear." That statement may be fair, but only if one acknowledges that the clear benefits exist not only for those coming online via Free Basics, but for the company providing that access as well.
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13 Times Washington Tried To Sell Encryption Workarounds In 2015
The White House has abandoned efforts to pass a law limiting the use of end-to-end encryption, but U.S. officials continue to call for Silicon Valley to work with law enforcement to fight terrorism.
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) James Comey. Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images
In the fall of last year, FBI Director James Comey described what he saw as an imminent collision of values: law enforcement's ability to investigate crime and defend national security; and the public's expectation of privacy, free of government intrusion. Encrypted communication, Comey said, was at the center of this brewing storm. Following the decisions of tech companies like Apple and Google to offer encryption on their consumer devices by default, Comey saw his law enforcement capabilities diminish.
"We call it 'Going Dark,' and what it means is this: Those charged with protecting our people aren't always able to access the evidence we need to prosecute crime and prevent terrorism even with lawful authority," Comey said during a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
For Comey, encryption isn't just a benevolent technology that prevents malicious hackers and foreign spies from seeing what they shouldn't, it also keeps law enforcement out — even with a warrant. With end-to-end encryption, sometimes not even the internet companies running messaging services can unscramble encrypted correspondence. "We have the legal authority to intercept and access communications and information pursuant to court order, but we often lack the technical ability to do so," he said. "Sophisticated criminals will come to count on these means of evading detection."
While technologists and privacy activists insist that so-called government "backdoors" and other special access into encrypted devices would necessarily introduce security vulnerabilities, as well as economic and political dilemmas, Comey asked Silicon Valley to "take a step back" and "consider changing course."
"We also need a regulatory or legislative fix," he said, igniting a debate in Washington that has settled, resettled and raged again throughout 2015, as terrorist attacks renew fears of "going dark."
Kara Swisher of Re/code interviews President Barack Obama. Re/code
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24 Aralık 2015 Perşembe
In 2015, The Dark Forces Of The Internet Became A Counterculture
If you were going to draw up a short list of places on the internet that should be excited about the first good Star Wars movie in more than three decades, you would have to include 4chan and 8chan. The infamous, anonymous image boards are nerd culture sanctum sanctorum, places with dauntingly high cultural literacy in science fiction, fantasy, and Japanese animation. You’d imagine posters there would be beside themselves with joy.
Instead, a lot of them just seem pissed off about John Boyega.
Boyega is a black actor with a lead role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. By all accounts, he turns in a charming and sympathetic performance as Finn, a Stormtrooper with a conscience. But a lot of chan posters don’t seem interested in that. Rather, they’re angry he’s in the movie at all. In the story told through the jokes and jeremiads of dozens of chan posts, Boyega got the job not because of his qualifications as an actor, but because of a nefarious outside force located somewhere between affirmative action and liberal conspiracy, a foreign hand unnaturally pushing cultural diversity into the natural state of pop culture. His presence is seen as an invasion.
Yet if you're surprised by the reaction to Boyega, you haven't been paying attention.
In 2015 it became clear, obvious even, that various reactionary forces have coalesced into a larger, coherent counterculture — let’s call it the Chanterculture — that exists not just in opposition to racial diversity in politics and culture, but in order to advance its own agenda, which across a variety of fronts seeks to preserve and promote the cultural and political preeminence of white guys. This new movement, and it is a movement, combines age-old racist and sexist rhetoric with bleeding-edge meme culture and technology. It unites two equally irrepressible camps behind an ironclad belief in the duty to say hideous things: the threatened white men of the internet and the "I have no soul" lulzsters.
Perhaps the most obvious example where these things came together was in the rise of #cuckservative — a racist epithet as hashtag, born of online porn, illustrated with memes. But there are plenty of other cases. Chan posters harassing the internet sleuths who discovered Charleston shooter Dylann Roof’s manifesto. 8chan trolls posting to Twitter as “black looters” during the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore. A legion of horribles chasing Ellen Pao from Reddit for trying to make it marginally less hateful. A shock tactics internet comedy troupe threatening the life of a female game developer for lulz. “Black Hermione.” It goes on.
This racist, reactionary, offense-embracing, meme-savvy internet is not simply a disparate collection of ravings from immature and bitter young men with too much time on their hands. Rather it is a flourishing protest culture, indeed a coherent counterculture, created in response to the growing ethnic and gender diversity of contemporary media and pop culture and to the incursion of identity groups into previously homogenous digital spaces. Chanterculture thrives on poorly governed image boards and hard-to-find Blogger sites and free-for-all chat apps. And that is precisely because the major media platforms of our time — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Netflix, YouTube — have ushered in this diversity, with original programming featuring people of color and content partnerships with media companies that do the same, as much as with the enforcement of anti-hate-speech Terms of Service.
When we think of countercultures, we typically think of left-leaning ones: hippies, beats, radical punks, even the dreaded hipsters, whatever they were. But as mainstream culture has evolved in the way it treats women, people of color, gay marriage, and the rights of the LGBT community, and as mainstream internet media has gravitated towards identity content, it is not completely surprising that a reactionary culture would arise to oppose it. And like any counterculture, this one has developed its own social norms, accepted truths, sense of humor, methods of communications, and even terminology.
You can see it being built as we speak. Simply navigate to 4chan, or dozens of “politically incorrect” subreddits, and see them reject: Black Lives Matter protests as “#chimpouts,” Jeb Bush for calling immigration “an act of love,” the hated “MSM” for its “social-justice-warrior” reporting on the FDA’s decision to lift the ban on blood donations from gay men, etc., etc., forever. It’s something new every day.
Like any nascent counterculture, Chanterculture produces or adopts heroes who reject the values of what it holds to be the dominant culture. That may be the protagonist of a web comic (about which, more later), or a journalist, like Milo Yiannopoulos, or a politician, like Donald Trump. (This counterculture is equally adept at creating or adopting villains: J.J. Abrams, Barack Obama, Emma Sulkowicz, Brianna Wu, and so on.) It’s telling that both Trump and Yiannopoulos are often described as “characters.” In this culture, they fulfill important roles.
Yiannopoulos, who rode the angry gusts of GamerGate to become the inaugural technology editor of the far-right Breitbart.com, has sensed the potential of the Chanterculture better than anyone. He gives it a champion in the professional media. In an extraordinary November post called “Why I’m Winning,” he attributed his sudden rise in popularity to his willingness to go against the grain of a reflexively liberal internet media in thrall to the chilling forces of political correctness. And then he made a telling appeal to his audience:
“If you have ever felt bullied, or victimised, or harassed, or marginalised – not by bullshit imaginary concepts like the 'patriarchy' but by people who want to stop you expressing yourself and who call you a loser, a manbaby, a shitlord, a privileged cishet white male – then Milo Yiannopoulos is for you.”
Think for a moment about the demographic Yiannopoulos is appealing to as victims: young English-speaking white men, perhaps the least victimized group of people in the world, to whom popular and consumer culture have long catered and who are now angry because they are not doing so quite so much as they were, gosh, a year ago. This kind of reverse victimization politics feels more like the rhetoric you’d hear on the campaign trail (“Milo Yiannopoulos is for you”) than in the tech media. Now it’s everywhere.
So pulses the strange tension at the heart of Chanterculture: It represents and is aligned with the interests of a dominant group, a subset of which has become absolutely convinced it is threatened. It was a tension first revealed by GamerGate, which demonstrated that under the modern internet’s surface layer of samey platforms and feel-good cultural consensus, burbled, in chans and subreddits and forums and anonymous networks and IRC, a reservoir of opposition to its values.
But this year Chanterculture found its true hero, who makes it plain that what we’re seeing is a genuine movement: the current master of American resentment, Donald Trump. Everywhere you look on “politically incorrect” subforums and random chans, he looms. Beneath literally every page on 8chan lurks Trump’s face, which, as Elspeth Reeve put it wonderfully, is “very good to look at.” It is the avatar of Chanterculture. A feverish industry of meme-making has grown up around its contours. It has even, at times, subsumed Pepe.
Trump performs for the Chanterculture a very similar function to the one he does for his political supporters: giving loud public voice to culturally unsafe (racist, xenophobic, hateful, choose your adjective) sentiments. He serves less as a real politician with policies and strategy than as the protagonist in a counter-narrative of American culture that sees the forces of modern identity-based liberalism on the verge of genuine acceptance and, it fears, domination. The difference on the internet is, Trump doesn’t need to say anything at all — the creators of the new Chanterculture will say it for him.
In a private group called “Can’t Stump Trump” on the mobile chat service Kik, you’ll find teenagers — between trading weightlifting tips, preferences in female body type, and racist memes — heaping praise on the frontrunner in the Republican presidential race. They claim to support him because he is against “immigration from culturally incompatible ethnic groups,” because “he doesn’t support political correctness,” because “[h]e's not a good candidate for people who care about others, which I don't. No lives matter."
No lives matter! The new counterculture can be, at times, so over the top and so ridiculous that it reads as an elaborate performance. Certainly the sincerity of Yiannopoulos, and the sketch comedians, and Trump, can and should be questioned. And in its own specific way, taken on its own terms, much of this counterculture can be read as satire: morally indignant storytelling that uses exaggeration and humor for shock value to ridicule contemporary culture. So, for example, take the meme-comics starring Le American Bear, the Finnish meme of an obese and easily led American idiot, manipulated by Jews and the media, that has been adopted by the white supremacist internet as a symbol of “blue-pill” white Americans. The Chanterculture, after all, comes in part from the most intensely ironic places on the internet.
Still, for the media platforms through which most of us experience the internet, this kind of speech is bad for business (and shocks the conscience, goes against what we believe in as a society, etc.) whether it is sincere or not. So you end up with a group of people (mostly white, male, young) aligned with dominant interests who feel that their perspective has no place in the increasingly dominant new media, which bills itself as participatory and inclusive. That is how the strange dynamics of victimization come into play.
The logical next step for Chanterculture, so angry with the infiltration of popular culture by others, is to make its own entertainment. (Ironically, this makes it like many of the identity groups to which it objects.) And in its incessant meme-making and conspiracy theorizing about current events, it has already begun to do so.
On a far-flung Blogger, an artist began this year to draw The Adventures of Christ Chan, a manga that tells the story of a young woman warrior and her besieged town, New Bethlehem. In dozens of meme-laden chapters with names like “Holy Steel” and “Hardened Keratin,” Christ Chan battles to keep New Bethlehem free of blacks, gays, atheists, and the fearsome Jew King. Her weapon is a katana; her insignia, the swastika.
You won’t find it on Facebook or here on BuzzFeed, but The Adventures of Christ Chan is shared daily on the chans.
It’s not quite Star Wars, but it’s a start.
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The 13 Best Yule Log Videos To Watch During The Holidays
The yule log video is a cultural phenomenon. (There are nearly 100,000 on YouTube alone.) Here are 13 internet alternatives to building a dirty, smokey fire. Just turn on your laptop and crank the volume for some warm, crackling goodness to keep you merry and bright.
A classic, long-running yule log fire. Well-centered, with good crackle. The quintessential Christmas video.
youtube.com / Via youtube.com
Your standard yule log video, but with Christmas music and digital snow.
This one takes some creative liberties, featuring an entire Christmas tableaux instead of the traditional fireplace-only shot. The flashing lights will appeal to those who like their yule log with a little flair.
Another full-room shot, but this time we get a Bing Crosby radio Christmas special for the troops. Listen, and pretend it's 1944!
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23 Aralık 2015 Çarşamba
Am I A Robot? Because I Have No Idea What This CAPTCHA Says
Warner Bros / Via HBOGO
You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and have to solve a CAPTCHA.
The ubiquitous authentication method is meant to distinguish real live humans from bots trying to overload a form on a website. It is always annoying, but never in my experience has it been genuinely baffling. Until today.
I got eyeglasses to deal with myopia two years and since then I fear that my overall eyesight has only gotten worse. Today at work I had to authenticate myself to send a message to a company when I saw this.
Even though my initial thought was that the image showed "exe11i," I wasn't at all sure. I asked my coworkers. While they couldn't agree with each other, they all thought I was wrong.
One suggested "xevui, " while two others put forward "xevnr" and "exvur" respectively. At best, this showed we all had varying degrees of poor vision that was no match for a nasty CAPTCHA, at worst it confirmed that the majority of us were not human.
Instead we are like Rachael in Blade Runner, human-seeming androids who had been able to pass simple tests but end up revealing our artificial natures under closer examination.
We reached no definitive conclusion about the CAPTCHA, but instead were left with a nagging feeling that our apprehension of reality is deficient.
The consensus was it said "xevur" — I entered that and was rejected. A new CAPTCHA appeared, the old one disappeared forever and we'll never know what the right answer was.
For what it's worth, even my attempt at the subsequent image failed.
Finally after a third try, I passed. But that might have just been one machine taking pity on another.
Warner Bros / Via giphy.com
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There's A Dating App That Lets You Review Your Dates
Anyone who’s been on an online date knows surprises come with the territory. The people you meet don't always resemble their photos. Witty texters can be dull. Single people can be married.
A year-old dating app called The Grade is trying to eliminate surprises and keep people honest. The company, in the hopes of accomplishing this goal, recently introduced “peer review,” a feature encouraging people to rate their matches as “quality person” or not, and then add more detail from there. The Grade includes this information in a public rating of each profile.
“We really do believe this is now the holy grail in dating,” Cliff Lerner, The Grade’s CEO, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “What is more frustrating than meeting someone on a dating site and finding out they're in a relationship? Or finding out they lied about their age? There's nothing you've ever been able to do about that up until this point.”
Lerner cited a number of statistics -- based on The Grade’s own research -- meant to support his claim. He said 71% of The Grade’s users believe peer review will help the app eliminate “creeps." Eighty-four percent of women, he added, said they feel safer on The Grade because of peer review. And 78% of women said they were more likely to “like” someone if they have a positive peer review. Eighty-eight percent of women said they wouldn't like a guy if he had a negative peer review.
Of men who had previously texted their business to a woman they met online, 90% said they would not do so knowing they could get peer reviewed, according to Lerner.
The Grade, using peer review and other factors, has kicked off 1,500 people for falling below its standards. To get kicked off, one needs to get Fs across the board, but it’s possible to get booted after sending a message that is reported by its recipient as abusive or picked up by The Grade’s technology and after human review, is found egregious.
The app has been downloaded 100,000 times in about a year of operation, according to Lerner.
The Grade stamps every profile with an actual letter grade, something I saw firsthand while using the app for the past few weeks. The letter grade takes into account everything from peer reviews, to how many people like your photo, to your spelling and grammar and how often you respond to messages. My grade is currently a B, but it’s been as high as an A-, and as low as an F. When The Grade kicks users off, it gives them a chance to appeal (thankfully, I didn’t get that far). New year’s resolution: respond to messages in a more timely fashion.
The Grade does sound somewhat similar to Peeple, the much-derided, still-unlaunched app pitching itself as a place to post Yelp-style reviews of, yes, people. But there’s one key difference, according to Lerner: There are no free-form reviews on The Grade. In other words, you can’t pen a screed about someone that everyone else on the app will see. Peer review grades, he added, only post if a number of people have rated you. That said, you can submit a peer review without even matching with someone, and most of the grades on The Grade follow a familiar pattern: people perceived as good-looking get the As, folks perceived as unattractive get Fs, and the people in between get Bs and Cs. This isn’t the case with every profile, but swipe around long enough on The Grade and you’ll see the pattern emerge.
One of the nicest things about The Grade is it gives you stats about how often you are liked when each profile picture is displayed. It then compares that against the average likes for people of your age and gender, so you know how you’re doing against the competition. This allows you to keep testing new profile pictures until one finally (hopefully) works, shortening the head-scratching period that accompanies almost every other dating app.
The Grade
“The profile grade is simply based on how much of your profile you've filled out and also how often you're getting liked,” Lerner said, before citing some common problems people run into. “They either have pictures that don't tell anything about their personality,” he said. “... And they don't write anything interesting about themselves.”
Competing against established players like Tinder and Hinge, it’s hard to tell if The Grade’s approach will be enough to give it an entry into the competitive online dating space. But if it can eliminate an unsolicited dick pic, or two, it will at the very least make the world a slightly better place.
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The Beatles' Music Can Now Be Streamed Worldwide
The Fab Four’s music will be available on nine streaming services starting Dec. 24.
The services have the rights to stream 224 songs from the original 13 studio albums as well as "essential" collections including Past Masters, the BBC reported.
The deal doesn't involve exclusive rights to any one service. Their catalogue will be available on both the free and premium versions of subscription services, which means non-paying users will also have access to their music.
The Beatles, the biggest-selling group of all time, waited more than seven years before coming to iTunes in 2010. Until now, the group was one of most high-profile artists not available to stream, the Guardian reported.
Some contemporary artists, like Taylor Swift, have chosen not to make their music available on free versions of subscription services such as Spotify, while Adele decided against putting her latest album, 25, on any streaming service.
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22 Aralık 2015 Salı
Lyft Becomes First Ride-Hailing Service Allowed At LAX
Los Angeles International Airport has long banned pickups by basic ride-hailing services, allowing Lyft to get a leg up on a major competitor.
A police car is seen at LAX.
Reed Saxon / AP
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Tuesday that the app-based ride hailing service will begin picking passengers up at one of the world's busiest airports at 8 a.m. Wednesday.
Previously, only premium level ride-hailing services with specially licensed drivers — such as Uber Black — were allowed to pick up passengers.
Basic, inexpensive riding hailing services including UberX and Lyft — which are popular and widely used in the Los Angeles region — had previously been banned from picking people up at LAX, though they have been able to make drop-offs.
The ban on pick-ups, however, prompted numerous work arounds, with many travelers taking free hotel shuttles off of airport property, then hailing Uber and Lyft from there.
Under the new agreement, Lyft will pick passengers up on the LAX's upper level, and the airport will collect $4 per trip.
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Google Reported To Launch A New, Smarter Messaging Service
Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
In the past few years, messaging has become the biggest new battleground for tech companies. Facebook, WeChat, and Slack have all elevated quick missives into bonafide platforms by including extensions, payments, and virtual assistants into chat windows. Google has been largely left behind in the race to turn messaging into its own operating system — Hangouts, its flagship messaging product, is still used largely for text and video chats, and often begrudgingly at that.
According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Google plans to launch a new messaging service that will lean heavily on artificial intelligence to leapfrog the competition. Google's new messaging application will likely include chatbots that automatically respond to queries in the app itself. You ask a question, it shoots back a response immediately; like texting your search engine. Google Now — the context-based personal assistant in Google searches and smartphones — is already very good at pulling the information you need, when you need it, and that seems to be what Google is going to be drawing from when it adds functionality to chats.
While messaging apps account for billions of users, Google will be wading into a crowded space. Facebook, in particular, has been aggressively building its Messenger app to become much more than just a way to chat with Facebook friends. Since transitioning into a fully-fledged platform earlier this year, the app has gained new features at a rapid clip. In just the past few months, it incorporated M, a virtual personal assistant that can take care of just about anything you can think of by utilizing a mix of humans and artificial intelligence, and made paying for things in the real world by just sending a message — most recently, you can use Messenger to order an Uber — easier than ever.
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Weight Watchers Is Struggling To Survive In The Digital Age
Oprah Winfrey bought a 10% stake in Weight Watchers in October.
Scott Barbour / Getty Images
Craig Gapter has belonged to Weight Watchers on and off for 16 years — “starting from when everything was pen and paper” — and credits it with having helped him shed 30 pounds. This fall, the 45-year-old Coloradan signed up for the online-only version of the food- and fitness-tracking program for the same reason so many others have done the same: Life is busy, and they’re already online all the time anyway.
But starting on Thanksgiving, the most food-crazed holiday of the year, an app upgrade caused a rash of glitches that prevented Gapter and many other paying customers from using it. Hundreds have taken to Weight Watchers' Facebook page to complain. “This is a large company that has a huge number of followers or members, and I just think that they just did not think this through,” Gapter told BuzzFeed News. “That’s been my biggest disappointment. I just feel like they were like, ‘You do what you want, you go on your way.’”
When Weight Watchers was founded in 1963, it was a pioneer. Today, it's a $1.3 billion global empire with nothing less than Oprah’s seal of approval. But its Thanksgiving stumble may be the latest indicator that the brand is struggling to hang on to consumers in a sea of slick, free food-and fitness-tracking apps.
The app upgrade was a prelude to a brand-new points system that Weight Watchers unveiled this month, designed to shift the program’s focus away from weight loss alone and help users take a more comprehensive approach to eating, exercising, and living healthfully. Executives hope the new program will provide a much-needed boost after a few years of declining revenue.
But not all customers immediately loved the new system. Some criticized the company for not explaining it well, and others were still experiencing glitches as of this week. Their discontent reflects a broader dissatisfaction with Weight Watchers’ digital presence: Online subscriptions fell more than 20% between the beginning of 2013 and early October 2015, from 1.87 million to 1.47 million.
Katherine Melvin, a 37-year-old self-proclaimed “serial dieter” in Charlotte, North Carolina, goes back and forth between Weight Watchers and MyFitnessPal — but the problems since Thanksgiving have dampened her loyalty to the former. “They need to hire people from MyFitnessPal because I don’t know if they’re just incompetent, or what their deal is,” she told BuzzFeed News. “It’s a big problem for them.”
In 1961, a Queens housewife named Jean Nidetch — 214 pounds with a 44-inch waist — ran into a neighbor who said, according to the New York Times, “Oh, Jean, you look so good! When are you due?” That inspired Nidetch to drop 72 pounds and try to turn dieting from a lonely, frustrating activity into an organized business. In 1979, then-CEO and chair Albert Lippert told the Times, “I don’t think we will ever run out of a market because people are becoming more affluent, and the economies of many countries lead some of them to eat some of these foods that are fattening.”
It was a prescient prediction. Weight Watchers has since expanded beyond meetings with weigh-ins and inspirational talks. Its empire now encompasses cookbooks, magazines, weight-loss camps, a line of packaged food, and food and restaurant guides. It has enlisted celebrity spokespeople including Jessica Simpson, Charles Barkley, and, now, Oprah, who bought a 10% stake in the company in October. In an April review of 32 major commercial weight-loss programs, independent researchers found that only Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig helped their clients maintain weight loss for at least year. That long-standing brand recognition draws a worldwide following of 2.6 million, a figure made up of subscribers who are both online-only ($19.95 a month) and online and in-person ($44.95 a month).
Gapter loved the convenience of the app and website, and his wife signed up with him. “It just fits in better with running kids around and sports and everything you’ve got to do as a family,” he said.
When Amanda Goldberg, 26, downgraded to just the online option in February because it was cheaper, she was happy to find the same level of camaraderie that she had previously enjoyed in the meetings. “It has such a big community,” said the Columbus, Ohio, graphic designer. “You can find people who are your age or in the same phase of life as you and talk about the problems or struggles you have, the ways to work the program.”
A 2004 Applebee's menu with Weight Watchers items.
Tim Boyle / Getty Images
But Weight Watchers hasn’t adopted new technology as fast as it admits it should have. “We have struggled to attract members in recent years,” CEO and president James Chambers told investors on a recent earnings call. “Why? What has changed? Over the last few years, as the world app-ified and activity monitors experienced significant increases in penetration, our competitive frame shifted dramatically and we were competing for consumer attention with new competitors in new ways.”
Indeed, R.J. Hottovy, a Morningstar consumer equity analyst, told BuzzFeed News, “with so many other calorie-counting apps or fitness monitors or any number of things out there, it’s really hard for consumers to distinguish why they should pay for Weight Watchers when there’s a lot of other technologies that in their mind do exactly the same thing.”
Among the rivals is MyFitnessPal, which offers free and premium tiers and is nearing 100 million members, according to spokesperson Rebecca Silliman. Founded in 2005 and acquired by athletic-gear maker Under Armour for $475 million in February, MyFitnessPal users log workouts, manually or by way of wearable devices, as well as recipes and meals. They can also seek support from other users through forums. What consumers want, Silliman said, is a balanced approach to health that is broader than just weight loss.
“If we have a food-grading system, people won’t use it because it makes them feel bad,” she said. “What they really love about MyFitnessPal is they can log chocolate cake — and as long as they exercise and make other healthy choices, they can still manage to stay within their goals and make positive changes.”
Tim Gunn and Weight Watchers member Abby Dale.
Larry Busacca / Getty Images for Weight Watchers
Only in September 2014 did Weight Watchers begin allowing U.S. members to sync activities from their Fitbit and Jawbone devices to its app, a move that Chambers admitted happened “belatedly.” And the Thanksgiving glitches — a result of migrating some members to a new database — weren’t the only times the app and website have crashed over the last few years. According to App Annie, an app analysis firm, Weight Watchers has held steady among the country’s 50 most downloaded iOS health apps this year, but its overall U.S. ranking has slipped from No. 650 to out of the top 1,500 over the same period.
Weight Watchers’ new point system, SmartPoints, which is fueled by a series of fitness startups acquired over the last year and a half, reflects some of the ethos of its competitors.
The system has always translated nutritional information about food into points to be spent or saved, with the goal of staying within a weekly budget. Now, weekly point allotments differ based on metabolic rate, height, and weight. The new algorithm also reflects more up-to-date nutritional research: It prioritizes lean protein, fruits, and vegetables, while steering dieters away from saturated fat, for example, and separately calculating sugar from carbohydrates. For example, an apple is 0 points and a cheesy chicken, broccoli, and rice casserole is 9. (Under the new system, weekly ranges can be as little as 14 and as high as 42, according to Weight Watchers.)
What’s more, Weight Watchers also rolled out an app, FitBreak, that suggests exercises that can be done in as few as one or five minutes. Available to both Weight Watchers members and nonmembers, it is an attempt to restore the company’s reach to what it once was — this time with a more contemporary approach to health.
“It’s not just ‘my worth is some number on the scale,’” Chief Scientific Officer Gary Foster told BuzzFeed News. “It’s about me feeling better.”
But Gapter, the Colorado customer, doesn’t feel better about Weight Watchers now. In fact, even when he was finally able to log on to the app after days of trying, he felt baffled by the new SmartPoints program, which in his mind was launched without warning and adequate explanation.
So he’s left Weight Watchers, probably for good this time, and is awaiting a refund. In the meantime, he’s found a great new app that costs just $4: ProTracker. “This is my second full week on it and it’s actually pretty awesome,” he said, “way better than the original Weight Watchers app was.”
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