Featuring Spartans, a plane, and a couple Infinity Swords.
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Unless, of course, you've played any of the Halo games since Halo 3: ODST.
The Tetris section has now been removed from the game, which aims to educate kids about the slave trade.
Serious Games / Via youtube.com
Serious Games / Via store.steampowered.com
Serious Games / Via store.steampowered.com
Serious Games / Via youtube.com
New video shows the global appeal of hoverboards.
A video making the rounds on Facebook today appears to show a man circling the Kaaba in Mecca on a hoverboard — or a "hands-free Segway," as many would like to call it.
The act of moving around the Kaaba, called Tawaf, is a ritual that's part of the Hajj — a pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of Islam — and its truncated version, the Umrah.
I poked fun at these "hoverboards" last week. And for good reason. Many people riding them do so with a completely unmerited sense of superiority that's deserving of the "DoucheScoot" nickname that placed third in our "If This Isn't a Hoverboard, Then What Is It?" poll last week.
But there's another side to these hoverboards that's quickly becoming apparent: They're less bulky and embarrassing versions of the Segway, and may be incredibly useful for people with trouble walking. My colleague Johana Bhuiyan, who spotted this video, said the gizmo would be perfect for her father, who has trouble walking and needs a wheelchair after his first few rotations around the Kaaba. A commenter on another hoverboard story last week expressed similar feelings: "I have issues walking long distance and I think it would be great," she said. "I might actually be able to go to Disney and not be broken in an hour."
We don't know much about the man in the video (I've reached out to the person who posted it and am awaiting a response) but watching him circle is intriguing for a few reasons. First, it demonstrates hoverboards' abilities to open up new avenues of movement to people who are limited in that regard. Second, it shows the boards' global appeal. If they're being used to circle the Kaaba in Mecca, they'll likely soon start showing up in all sorts of unexpected situations around the world. Get ready.
Thanks to a new iOS app from Google.
Google Android Wear director David Singleton announces updates during the Google I/O conference on May 28.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Until now, the line was clearly drawn: Owning an Android Wear watch meant using a smartphone running Google's Android operating system. Owning an iPhone meant using an Apple Watch or another wearable device designed for Apple's iOS operating system.
But as of Monday, Google will offer a new iOS app for Android Wear. So if you have an iPhone running iOS 8.2 and up, you'll soon be able to pair it with newer Android Wear smartwatches for the first time. That means that if you have an iPhone, you have quite a few more smartwatch options than you did previously.
Google says the iOS experience will be very similar to Android. Notifications, voice-enabled searches, and Google apps will all work. There are two notable drawbacks. The first: Third-party Google Play apps won't run on the Android Wear devices paired with iPhones. The second: Google apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Now won't be accessible on Android Wear devices over Wi-Fi — to use them, the wearable must be tethered to the associated iPhone.
Today, Android Wear for iOS works only with the LG Watch Urbane, but forthcoming devices from Huawei, Asus, and Motorola have been designed to support iOS as well.
This integration, which The Verge predicted in April, is a noteworthy shift in the fast-developing wearables landscape. Google is now competing directly against the Apple Watch on Apple's own platform — and Apple, by allowing Google's app into the App Store, is permitting it to do so.
One possible explanation: Apple thinks the two sets of devices are different enough so that Google's app isn't a significant threat. Unlike the Apple Watch, Android Wear devices are open to customization by manufacturers, with different styles, faces, bands, features, and prices. Another, perhaps more likely: Purposefully excluding a broad swath of Android wearables from its wildly popular iOS platform could be viewed as anti-competitive and might have opened Apple up to regulatory scrutiny.
"Since the first Android Wear watches launched just over a year ago, it has been our goal to make Android Wear work for as many users as possible," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "Now, for most people with iOS or Android phones, there will be a broad range of watches that can work for them."
A quick primer on the most famous people you may never have heard of.
MTV's Video Music Awards are tonight, and the network is trying something new. In addition to the Miley Cyrus-curated show, MTV is making a play for a young audience on another platform — Vine. MTV is using the six-second video network for a second screen experience, and Vine's biggest stars are being enlisted to make it happen. Among a certain set, Vine stars are the new Beatles. Or at least, One Direction. Yet for most people, they're completely famous and totally unknown. Here's who you'll see tonight.
A college student and Vine star — Lizzza, or Liza Koshy, has more than 2 million followers. Lizzza has already been taking over the MTV Vine account for the last few days with a bunch of pre-show stunts.
We asked soothsayers to predict what’s coming from Apple on Sept. 9. (We also put a spell on Eddy Cue.)
When Apple sends out invitations to its events, like the one coming up on Sept. 9, the tech press loves to try to "read the tea leaves" in a search for clues as to what will be announced. But what the hell do a bunch of tech bloggers know about divination? In order to find out what's really going to happen at the Sept. 9 Apple event, you need someone who can actually read tea leaves. Professional journalists are useless at this. So I asked professional psychics.
Could occult practices help me get a leg up on well-sourced Apple futurists like 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman, or BuzzFeed News' own Apple seer John Paczkowski? And moreover, could they help me ~influence~ the future? Could they, for example, make Eddy Cue dance again? This wasn't just idle curiosity. With the right incantations, I could become one of the most powerful tech bloggers in all of New York. So I set out on a voyage of discovery.
Enchantments is a narrow shop in the East Village that specializes in making custom candles for customers. It came highly recommended — several trustworthy friends have told me about the special mystical candles made there. Plus BuzzFeed's resident witch Arianna Rebolini said that's where they go for all sorts of mystical advice when doing the Witches' Counsel series. She warned that although they probably wouldn't give any concrete predictions about Apple's event invitation, they could look it over and analyze it from a spiritual level. "Witches are very intuitive," Arianna explained. "And it has a lot of colors — they could analyze the meaning of the colors."
Over the phone, I explained to the friendly sorceress at Enchantments that I had a sort of unusual request. I explained that I wanted an analysis of the invitation — could I come by and show it to them? The witch said that they were VERY BUSY in the store, but she could do a 45-minute reading for $60, but only after 6:30 p.m. I explained that I didn't need a whole 45-minute reading, just a quick glance — could I pop by? The witch told me it was fine, but she'd charge me $30 for a 10-minute lookover. "I'm the one with blonde dreadlocks," the witch Amo told me.
When I arrived, I didn't see anyone with blonde dreadlocks, just three other very thin women with varying confusing haircuts. I browsed the candles as they helped another customer. They had penis-shaped candles AND vagina candles. I asked a woman covered in tattoos with long pink pigtail braids if Amo was around. She told me I was too late, Amo was in the back doing a reading (apparently she does midday readings for other people). Pink hair reiterated that they were really busy. Apparently there were a lot of penis candles to be made; I assured her I'd be quick.
I pulled out the invitation and explained that it was for an event where Apple unveils its new top secret products, and that some people believe there are clues about what those products might be hidden within the invitation. She seemed annoyed. "This is about Apple?" She rolled her eyes.
"Is there anything about this image that you think could mean anything?" I asked. "Like any spiritual intuition?"
"No. This is just…we're really busy here. This doesn't mean anything," she answered.
"What about the colors, do the colors mean anything?"
"I mean, colors mean what they mean. But on this, it's just an invitation. It doesn't mean anything. We're busy. I dunno, it kind of looks like a cat eye."
"Oh, yeah, it's supposed to be the top of the Apple logo. Do you think there's any significance in how it's cropped at the top?"
The witch finally blew her cool. "This isn't a magical symbol," she said matter-of-factly.
"Well," I countered, "It's kinda magical...to some people."
This was more than the witch could handle. She raised her voice: "THIS ISN'T A MAGICAL SYMBOL. THIS IS A WASTE OF TIME. YOU'RE WASTING OUR TIME. WE'RE VERY BUSY." The witch walked away from me without saying goodbye.
Dejected and somewhat frightened at having angered a witch, I skulked out of the shop without buying a penis candle. I'd planned to light one in hopes it might inspire Eddy Cue to dance again at the Sept. 9 event, like he did at the Apple Music announcement. Now I was worried I'd never see Eddy dance again.
The three-judge panel, each writing a separate opinion, all agree that the 2013 trial court decision finding the post-9/11 program likely to be unconstitutional went too far.
Christof Stache / AFP / Getty Images
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Friday reversed a trial court decision that would have barred the government from continuing its post-9/11 bulk data collection program implemented by the National Security Agency.
The decision means that, for now, the NSA program implemented under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act can continue unimpeded.
All three judges from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing the appeal agreed that the 2013 trial court decision finding the program likely violated the Constitution went too far.
The case will now go back to the trial court, as agreed upon by two of the judges hearing the appeal, Judge Janice Rogers Brown and Stephen Williams. Judge David Sentelle, the court announced, "would order the case dismissed."
A key question at the appeals court was whether the plaintiffs, Verizon customers, had shown that the NSA collected their data — evidence that would show they had standing to bring the case, which is a requirement to bring a case in federal court. The government, however, has only acknowledged collection of data from Verizon Business accounts, the court noted.
Brown was the most sympathetic to the claims brought by the plaintiffs challenging the program. Although she disagreed that the plaintiffs had, as U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon decided in 2013, shown a "substantial likelihood" that they would succeed in their case, Brown wrote that "one could reasonably infer from the evidence presented the government collected plaintiffs' own metadata."
Brown noted that, back at the trial court, Leon will need to determine what exchange of evidence is appropriate so that the plaintiffs can show whether the NSA actually collected their data.
In noting that, however, she added, "It is entirely possible that, even if plaintiffs are granted discovery, the government may refuse to provide information (if any exists) that would further plaintiffs' case. Plaintiffs' claims may well founder in that event. But such is the nature of the government's privileged control over certain classes of information."
Williams, while allowing the matter to return to the trial court, was less sympathetic to the plaintiffs' claims, stating outright, "[P]laintiffs lack direct evidence that records involving their calls have actually been collected." Nonetheless, she supported sending the case back to the trial court because of "the possibility that plaintiffs' efforts" to show that their data was collected "may be fruitful."
Finally, Sentelle, the least sympathetic to the plaintiffs' claims, declared that, since the plaintiffs cannot show that they have standing, "we do not have jurisdiction to make any determination in the cause." As such, he wrote, the case should be dismissed.
Sentelle and Williams were appointed to the court by President Reagan, and Brown was appointed by President George W. Bush.
The former Beats CEO is leaving Apple just two months after the launch of Beats 1 radio.
Ian Rogers with Beats co-founder Dr. Dre.
Getty Images
Ian Rogers, the Apple executive often credited with the creation of Beats 1, has left the company. His departure was first reported by the Financial Times.
Formerly the CEO of Beats Music, Rogers oversaw the development of Beats 1, Apple Music's flagship "worldwide, always on" radio service. His resignation comes just two months after its first broadcast.
Apple confirmed Rogers' departure to BuzzFeed News, but declined comment.
Rogers is reportedly leaving Apple to take a new job in Europe in an "unrelated industry," though it's difficult to imagine what that might be. Rogers has been in the music industry since the early '90s, when he built one of the first music sites on the internet — a Beastie Boys fan site. He joined Beats as CEO in 2013.
Rogers departure comes as Apple Music enters the home stretch of its free 90-day trial period. Beats 1 has, so far, been the only uniformly praised feature of the service, and its key differentiator from rivals like Spotify and Rdio. It's a bright spot in Apple Music for its throwback, connective appeal and eclectic sensibilities. According to some, it could be how Apple plans grooms new talent for its own ecosystem.
One month ago, Apple announced that 11 million listeners had signed for to Apple Music. If the company can convert a significant number of them into paying subscribers, it will have become a major player in the online streaming landscape in a very short period of time. Spotify, the current leader in paid subscribers, has around 20 million, although it has 75 million users overall because it includes a free, ad-supported tier that Apple Music does not. Apple currently claims that its retention rate for subscribers is at 79%.
You can find a plumber on Yelp, book a cleaning person on Amazon, hire a handyman on TaskRabbit — or, as of today, do all of the above through Google.
Clogged toilet? No problem — Google's got a solution for that.
Today, after much anticipation, Google is finally launching (the beta version of) its local home services product, which will allow some San Francisco Bay Area residents to request the services of handymen, home cleaners, locksmiths, and other service professionals who have been prescreened and approved by Google. The product is an extension to Google's AdWords Express, a paid app for small business owners, and it is two-pronged. People living in the Bay Area who search for a plumber will see a sponsored widget in their search results, through which they can evaluate and contact said plumber without ever leaving the search results page. For the service providers, who pay for the placement, the product is an extension of the existing Google AdWords app and will allow them to receive service requests, book jobs, and contact clients.
BuzzFeed first reported that Google was working on such a product in April. As Re/code reported in July, some queries that implied the need for a service professional — e.g., "clogged toilet" — were already returning service provider info embedded in the search results. According to the blog post announcing home services, there are millions of such searches every day.
Flickr
The product does more than provide a name and number. By choosing a given service provider and clicking "Send Request," users can actually directly contact a plumber, who can then come deal with the situation. (Or, if they prefer, they can just call them on the phone.) The customer and service provider can then arrange a deal outside of Google (unlike with Amazon, where the financial transaction actually happens on the website, making it harder to negotiate). Providing direct communication between the customer and "Magic Plumbing" or whoever else definitely makes AdWords Express home services more than the typical ad product.
Noel Biderman, who founded the company in 2001, stepped down after a massive hack revealed information about millions of members.
Bobby Yip / Reuters
Noel Biderman, the embattled CEO of Avid Life Media, which owns the hacked cheating site Ashley Madison, has resigned, according to a statement released by the company.
"This change is in the best interest of the company and allows us to continue to provide support to our members and dedicated employees. We are steadfast in our commitment to our customer base," the statement said.
Ashley Madison suffered a massive hack that became public last month, and after Avid Life Media did not concede to demands to take the site down, the hackers released the data last week. The three tranches included information about nearly 40 million users, as well as Biderman's personal email.
Last week, Avid Life Media offered a $500,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest of members of Impact Team, the group behind the hack.
The leak, which has been personally embarrassing for Biderman, has led to panic from users around the world.
According to the release, Avid Life Media's "existing senior management team" will lead the company until the appointment of a new CEO.
As incoming CEO Steve Hoffman begins his second tenure at the helm of Reddit, the spotlight will largely fall on the company’s renewed efforts to rein in its seediest communities without destroying the unique early internet message board culture that defines the site. But for Hoffman and Reddit, a more insidious problem looms over the company's future: mobile. How does Reddit, a site that’s consistently lagged behind even the most delinquent mobile adopters, survive on an internet that’s increasingly accessed on mobile devices?
According to a source familiar with Reddit’s internal figures, the site’s traffic distribution is similar to that of other media destinations, with mobile accounting for somewhere in the range 50 or 60% of the site’s total traffic. In 2014, then-CEO Ellen Pao said that roughly 40% of traffic was coming from mobile devices. Yet Reddit's efforts to cater to its mobile audience have so far been late, weak, or both. Internally, Reddit has failed to produce its own successful comprehensive mobile app, a problem that forced the company to acquire Alien Blue, the site’s most popular third-party iOS app, last October. Since that time, Reddit has largely kept the app and its creator, Jason Morrissey, as an autonomous unit inside it.
Which is not to say that Reddit hasn’t dabbled in the mobile sphere: In 2011, it built a buggy mobile app but quickly discarded it after users complained. Last September, Reddit rolled out another app for its popular Ask Me Anything communities which, according to App Annie, has routinely fallen somewhere between 350 and 1,250 in the US. News App store rankings in 2015. But as of August 2015, Reddit — a site ranked by Alexa as the 10th largest in the United States and the 31st largest in the world — doesn’t yet have an official, mobile-optimized version of its website (the site has had compact and scaled-down phone versions), and reviews of the Android beta version of that site which it rolled out back in April are mixed (“it doesn’t suck”).
Mobile’s overall growth is astounding. In 2008, the black mirrors of our phones accounted for roughly 12% of total internet usage, according to Mary Meeker’s annual internet trends report. In 2015, that figure has climbed to 51%. A 2014 report from comScore suggests that in-app browsing and the mobile web account for 60% of total time spent online. That change is reflected in personal computer sales, which dropped 11.8%, according to the researcher IDC, which doesn’t include tablets in its PC sales figures.
The rise has been so steep and so fast that media companies have bent over backwards trying to figure out how to meet readers on their preferred platform; this summer, the New York Times blocked employee access inside the building to the paper’s website, forcing employees to experience and prioritize the mobile experience, where more than half of their readers access Times content. Here at BuzzFeed, we have mobile-first previews in draft versions of every quiz, list, post, article, and feature story. Reddit competitors Digg and Fark launched comprehensive mobile apps in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
Reddit’s leadership appears acutely aware of the company’s mobile failings. Last December, before rejoining the company as CEO, Hoffman excoriated his former company for its myopic desktop-centric development strategy. “Their mobile sucks and the product hasn't changed since I left in any significant way. So it hasn't aged very well. I think the product ... the mobile strategy could be a lot better," he told The Age. Back in September 2014, Pao hinted at Reddit's laissez-faire mobile strategy, noting, “We’re excited and happy to grow but we’ve never been super proactive about it, it’s always been done organically.”
This July, after Pao’s resignation, Reddit board member Sam Altman explicitly remarked on Reddit’s lack of progress in the space, telling BuzzFeed News that “mobile is critical. The world has gone mobile and Reddit has not yet.” He also went on to hint that it would be a point of focus moving forward. “Mobile is where our users want to be,” said Altman. “It will be a big priority for Steve." Currently there are multiple mobile engineering positions available on Reddit's job boards.
To call mobile a priority may even be an understatement; Reddit’s accessibility problems on smartphones could kneecap the site’s growth among an entire generation of people who experience the internet largely through their phones — not to mention the larger swaths of the globe where mobile acts as the first and only screen.
For a rising generation accustomed to quick-loading, slickly presented, responsive content, Reddit's slow-loading, old-web-feeling mobile design is likely a hurdle, and one that threatens Reddit's self-proclaimed title as Front Page of the Internet. While Reddit might still be a site bookmarked by legions of folks who grew up on PCs, it is likely isn't that for folks coming of age on smartphones and tablets.
In fact, it’s not hard to imagine the following scenario: A younger person as of yet unacquainted with Reddit is flipping through Facebook on her phone when a Reddit link catches her eye. She clicks, views the post, which loads clumsily and slowly. After a moment, she decides to follow another link, a conversation thread, which is difficult to follow in its present form. Lightly confused but mostly just put off, she exits out to return to Facebook without being exposed to Reddit’s money feature: the front page. A blown opportunity to convert a new redditor.
It’s just a hypothetical, but writ large, this potential behavior could have a rather devastating effect on Reddit’s future demographic makeup as well as its content, forgoing new and younger users while catering to an older audience. And as the audience skews older, the cycle perpetuates itself. “The way most people create content for Reddit is very different on desktop than it is on mobile,” a product manager and engineer who has worked closely with Reddit told BuzzFeed News.
“The interesting things on Reddit tend to be longer, paragraph-based text answers, which are just harder to do on mobile," the engineer said. "And if most people creating the content are doing it on desktop, then younger folks on mobile will find this content inaccessible. Plus it’s created by a different generation so it doesn’t really appeal to them. It feels stale."
In other words, it’s not simply that the content is hard to read on mobile, it’s that two distinct groups are developing: the content creators on desktop and the readers on mobile. Without a viable mobile strategy, the gap between the two could widen over time, weakening Reddit's foundations.
And it leaves Reddit vulnerable to imitators. For example, an image-heavy app that culled the best, most mobile-friendly posts from Reddit’s front page could easily cannibalize a great deal of Reddit’s mobile traffic, stealing away younger browsers who come to Reddit when they’re bored, looking for a quick diversion. The prospect isn’t unheard of: Imgur, the photo hosting site created for Redditors because Reddit never built the feature itself, has since surpassed Reddit in monthly unique visitors — an infamous missed opportunity for the site.
To some degree, Reddit owes a lot of its success to that older, now stale-feeling version of the internet. The site is notorious for keeping its minimalist message board style, and its user base has been among the most resistant communities on the internet when it comes to evolving editorial guidelines and design. In many ways, Reddit remains a shrine to the values of the early internet with its utopian idealistic vision of online communities as both nonthreatening and separate from real-life. And so it stands to reason that its most devoted users largely prefer to access the site from desktop. It also means that Reddit’s organizational structure, save for its front page, is increasingly out of sync with the way internet dwellers — especially younger ones — are searching for content. Take Snapchat, for example, an app that exists solely within the mobile ecosystem.
With this in mind, Reddit’s failure to adapt to the mobile web isn't all that surprising. Reddit is one of the last major sites still centered around the early internet’s link culture — much of Reddit’s content involves linking to external sites — which, unlike Facebook’s increasingly insular "we want to be the internet" endless News Feed scroll, doesn’t translate very well to smartphones. But that nostalgia, driven by the same audience that espouses Reddit’s peculiar definitions of free speech — the same audience that believes communities like r/coontown should be allowed on the site, regardless of their proven propensity for harassment — could very well transform the site from a last vestige of the old web into an outdated relic. A Reddit that continually skews older, less innovative, and potentially more unruly isn’t just unattractive to advertisers, it’s an untenable growth strategy.
Reddit did not respond to a request for comment.
And your antitrust demands are “peculiar and problematic.”
Mattel Rock Em Sock Em Robots / Target
Months after filing its antitrust charges against Google, the European Union has finally received a response from the search behemoth, and it's as contrary and (diplomatically) confrontational as they come. Disputing the findings of regulators who believe the company has abused its market power to stifle competition, Google argued that the EU's conclusions "are wrong as a matter of fact, law, and economics." And to the EU's proposed remedy, of forcing Google to show ads ranked by other companies within its advertising space? Google called that solution "peculiar and problematic," adding, "this would harm the quality and relevance of our results."
Through its response to the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, Google has advanced what will likely become an enduring battle: a mighty regulatory body critical of the rising power of online platforms pitted against a massive technology company with ambitions global and grand.
Against the antitrust charges brought by the commission this spring, which focused on the way Google displays its shopping services compared to those of rivals, the company said its search tools actually increase consumer choice. Google argued that the commission didn't properly account for the benefits the company offers to consumers. Pointing to flaws in the commission's analysis, Google said regulators failed to take stock of the the evolving, competitive landscape that counts Amazon and eBay as big players, and misinterpreted Google's impact on other online sellers.
In a statement, Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, said the company has taken seriously the concerns of the European Commission, but he believes those concerns are unfounded. "The response we filed today shows why we believe those allegations are incorrect, and why we believe that Google increases choice for European consumers and offers valuable opportunities for businesses of all sizes."
To buttress its case, Google pointed to "economic data spanning more than a decade, an array of documents, and statements from complainants," which the company claims shows the highly competitive market for searching for products online. "The universe of shopping services has seen an enormous increase in traffic from Google, diverse new players, new investments, and expanding consumer choice," Walker said in a blog post Thursday.
Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, said earlier this year she is concerned that Google has boosted its own shopping presence online, "with the result that consumers may not necessarily see what's most relevant for them, or that competitors may not get the commercial opportunity that their innovative services deserve." (The EU says Google commands 90% of the search market in some countries.) A spokesperson for Vestager said Google's response will be carefully considered before moving forward with any decision.
The new sedan broke Consumer Reports’ ranking system with a 103 out of 100.
Tesla
Based on the magazine's traditional car-rating metrics, the Tesla received a score of 103/100.
Jeff Chiu / AP
Those people might be onto something
One billion people used Facebook in a single day.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted this in a post on his Facebook page today, telling his followers that the service hit the number on Monday. "On Monday, 1 in 7 people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family," he said. "This was the first time we reached this milestone, and it's just the beginning of connecting the whole world."
Okay, we get it.
While this moment will certainly turn into a victory lap for the company -- and the feat is indeed massive and impressive -- it's also a good reminder for the rest of us of Facebook's immense power.
The company's algorithms now shape what one billion people see every day, as noted by University of North Carolina assistant Professor Zeynep Tufekci in a post on Twitter. That's a lot of power to determine what information gets shown to significant portion of the world's population. Something worth keeping in mind.
Check out the full Zuckerberg post, and a video he posted shortly afterward, below:
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Jacquelyn Martin / AP
For years, the ed-tech start up Knewton has been content to stay behind the scenes, lending its adaptive-learning technology to big-name education publishers like Pearson and Houghton Mifflin. But Knewton is stepping out of the shadows with a plan to take its technology to the masses.
Today, the company is launching Knewton.com, a free online tutoring platform that creates personalized lessons for learners out of completely "open" content — videos, readings, and test questions that are uploaded onto the platform by users. Though it is starting with kindergarten through high school, the plan, the company said, is to eventually move into college-level subjects and beyond.
Jose Ferreira, the company's CEO, calls Knewton.com a "robot tutor in the sky."
Knewton, founded in 2008, has made its business out of providing technology to many of the world's largest education companies, allowing them to build curriculum that adapts to individual students. Knewton software collects millions of data points about what students know and how they learn, then translates them into customized lessons, questions and quizzes.
The new platform launching today brings the same technology to teachers, parents and students, formulating custom lessons for students by stitching together the best videos and quizzes from a library of user-created content. Working within a topic like "exponential equations" or "cellular respiration," each student will see a different lesson, with different quiz questions and videos, stitched together based on the student's strengths and weaknesses.
In a classroom, Knewton.com might function as a replacement for a worksheet on a topic like the Pythagorean theorem — rather than giving every student the same questions, teachers can have students working at their ability, with some reviewing the basics of the concept and others solving advanced problems.
For the first time, rather than using a textbook company's curriculum, Knewton has put its software to work on "open educational" resources like Youtube videos and teacher-written lessons. The idea is to use Knewton's technology to pick the best of those resources, then serve them up to thousands of students. Knewton's algorithms test the effectiveness of every piece of content that's uploaded to the platform. Materials that work well will be "floated to the top," with the potential to be shown to thousands of students; if it proves ineffective, it will be sifted out in favor of better curriculum.
"There's so much good stuff out there, and only a small percentage of it is on the web," said David Liu, Knewton's chief operating officer. "So much is trapped on teachers' desktops, so we're really trying to open up great content that would normally only be seen by maybe 30 students."
Knewton said there are no plans to charge users for the platform; its moneymaking business, Liu said, is its back-end work with curriculum companies like Pearson. But the company still has a lot to gain from offering the service.
Knewton's business is built on understanding how students learn. As the platform grows, Knewton will learn more about what makes good content, how students move through subjects, and what teachers want out of tutoring resources. That knowledge will be a boon to Knewton's moneymaking business, too, allowing it to provide better technology to the companies it works with.
Knewton will also amass detailed "learner profiles" of students — profiles that can, ideally, follow students into classrooms and outside of them. These, too, will enhance the quality of the company's technology.
It also won't hurt that the service will give Knewton a foothold in many schools where it doesn't currently have a presence, showing teachers and school districts the value of buying curriculum that uses Knewton technology.
Knewton last raised money in 2013, when it brought in $51 million in Series E round. In 2011, when it raised $33 million, it was reportedly valued at well over $150 million.
For now, the content on Knewton.com is focused around K-12. In this early stage, Knewton is making a big bet on elementary school teachers, relying largely on them to upload the content — and to populate the platform with their students.
There's already a huge demand for content and lesson-sharing among teachers, said Liu, though much of it is decentralized. Knewton hopes to create a place not just to upload that content, but a way to judge whether it works, and for what types of students.
"Every other site is putting out what experts think is best," Liu said. "We're doing something very different. We're finding the content that is shown to be the most effective, at that point in time, for that student."
Many ed-tech companies have had huge success by going directly to teachers to distribute their free products — like Remind, an app that allows teachers to communicate with parents and students that neared the top of the Apple app store last year, or ClassDojo, a behavior-tracking app that has become enormously popular among teachers.
But working directly with teachers to spread its product will be new territory for Knewton, which has so far dealt only with large companies like Pearson. That could prove a challenge for the company. Though it has pre-loaded the site with a stock of educational content, Knewton.com will only thrive if it has users to populate the site and students to learn from.
It’s hip *not* to be square.
The update rolls out around the world, to Instagram's Android and iOS apps today.
No matter what that Apple invite says, don’t bother asking for a hint.
Apple
In the announcement, it suggests that Siri has some information to give.
Apple
Apple
The iOS-only Start is the latest offering from Iodine, a health tech startup that crowdsources reviews of medications for everything from asthma to heartburn.
Anne Borges / BuzzFeed Life / Via buzzfeed.com
Depression isn't an easily quantifiable medical disorder. Defined by moods and emotional states, it's subjective and difficult to measure. And because of that, it's often tough to determine whether or not medications prescribed to treat it are working as intended.
A new smartphone app called Start aims to change that. Developed for people on newly prescribed antidepressants, the app is designed to track and summarize their response to the medication over time so that they can determine whether or not it's working.
Available for download today on Apple's App Store, the iOS-only Start is the latest offering from Iodine, a health tech startup that crowdsources reviews of medications for everything from asthma to heartburn. Since its launch last year, Iodine's founders — one a former executive editor of Wired, the other a former Google engineer who co-developed the company's flu-tracking software — noticed that a significant number of reviews submitted to the site were for antidepressants.
That's hardly surprising. According to surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2005 to 2008, roughly one in 10 Americans take antidepressants, making them the drugs most frequently prescribed to people between the ages of 18 and 44. And since efficacy varies from patient to patient, many people need to try more than one before finding one that works. But not everyone gets to that point: Half of psychiatric and primary care patients stop taking their medications within six months of starting, according to a 2012 study in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience.
"The system isn't very good at matching people to the right medication and then isn't very good about following up and tracking whether the medication is working for that individual," Iodine co-founder Thomas Goetz told BuzzFeed News.
That's where Start is supposed to come in. People tell the app what drug they've been prescribed and how often they're supposed to take it, and the app reminds them to do so and tracks their experiences on it. Users also tell Start what things in life they want to feel better about — like sleep, relationships, work, or family — and the side effects that most concern them. Every few days, the app asks them about those issues and symptoms. It then generates bi-weekly progress reports summing up their responses.
Iodine
Facebook’s M can schedule meetings and do your shopping — but don’t call it “she.”
Facebook Messenger isn't just for getting hit on by people you went to high school with anymore. On Wednesday the company announced an experimental new feature that could someday make Messenger much more useful.
M is something like a combination of TaskRabbit and Google Now: a digital personal assistant that relies on a combination of automated and human labor to help make busy lives easier via digital communication. M can make you a doctor's appointment or tell you where to go hike for the weekend — but it can also book your dinner reservations, order a birthday gift for your dad, or help you plan a party. Simply message M — a faceless, identity-less chat contact — as you would a friend, and voila! Facebook announced the product today but is rolling it out gradually across a select number of Bay Area users, according to Wired.
But unlike similar products, M doesn't evoke a person or a character. Apple has Siri, the feminine-voiced and -named natural language processing feature that comes standard on all devices. Amazon has Alexa, a "cloud-based voice service" that comes installed on Echo devices, which can control anything from the lights in your home to the music on your stereo. And Microsoft named Cortana, its answer to Siri, after a female character in the Halo video game:
Via youtube.com
The fact that the designers and engineers who have built these products across tech companies have so frequently opted to give them feminine characteristics has not gone without notice, in the press and in academia. The popularity of the film Her – in which the protagonist, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with his operating system "Samantha," voiced by Scarlett Johansson — also brought some some attention to the issue of how digital labor is gendered. The first interaction in the film between Phoenix and his soon-to-be paramour involves her offering to sort through his email inbox for him.
A new Brookings Institution report says financial tech is helping to close the economic gender gap and connect marginalized communities that lack access to banks.
Brookings Institution
According to the World Bank, 2 billion people around the world live on the margins of the formal financial system. That's 2 billion people without a secure means of saving their money, 2 billion people without credit cards or any of the new wireless payment systems they enable. In developing economies, the situation is improving. But it still has a long way to go. And with financial access and participation varying wildly across the globe, there's no one-size-fits-all solution.
On Wednesday, the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology and Innovation published a comprehensive report evaluating the state of financial access in 21 developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The study ranks nations across four broad categories: commitment of a nation's government to increase access to financial tools; the regulatory environment; adoption of traditional bank accounts and digital services, like mobile money accounts; and the strength of phone networks.
The main finding? Financial services are taking off in the developing world, and tech-minded African nations are leading the way. Of the top five countries Brookings ranked, only one, Brazil, was outside of the continent. Kenya claimed the top spot, followed by South Africa, Rwanda, and Uganda.
"Mobile money and other digital financial services are enabling enormous progress in access to finance," the report states, "particularly in places — for example, in many sub-Saharan African countries — where there is often a lack of legacy systems and established traditional financial institutions."
The rise of mobile payment technology, the authors hope, will also foster a wider range of services beyond purchases and sending money to family members. They expect, over time, that interest-bearing savings accounts will be offered over mobile and that a wider adoption of government subsidies going directly to citizens' mobile accounts will take hold (limiting corruption, theft, and waste).
While feature phones (the non-smart kind) are prevalent among impoverished nations, John Villasenor, one of the lead researchers of the study, sees enormous financial potential for an app economy based on cheap, off-contract smartphones. "In the developing world, in particular among the people who are unbanked, one of the really interesting transitions we are going to see in the next couple of years is the mass adoption of smartphones," he said.
Villasenor told BuzzFeed News that a country's commitment to bringing disadvantaged people into the financial system is fundamental. In India, for example, where lawmakers launched an initiative to provide 75 million people with bank accounts and debit cards, public subsidies for kerosene, fertilizers, and food are now being paid directly into citizens' accounts to encourage their use. (India claims one-fifth of the world's entire adult population without a bank account.) In Peru, under the leadership of the national bank association, mobile payment technology is being developed that will someday allow anyone with access to it to send and receive money across different mobile platforms.
Financial empowerment can be particularly transformative for women, people living in poverty, and other marginalized groups. "There's a big gender gap in access to financial series with women being disproportionately excluded in some countries," said Villasenor; according to the World Bank, 65% of the world's adult men have accounts with financial institutions, compared to only 58% for women. Brookings authors believe that technology can help close this gap. "Digital financial services such as mobile money give women more control over their financial lives," states the report.
Many observers assume that people on the lower end of the economic spectrum can't afford even low-end smartphones, Villasenor said. "But that's actually not going to be true for very much longer. And the social impact of that transition, not only in financial inclusion but beyond, is going to be truly profound."
While the countries evaluated in the study were pushed to invest in their 3G networks and to allow entities like retailers and post offices to take on the responsibilities and services of formal banks, the U.S. has enormous influence over the landscape too.
Through international banking standards, the U.S. helps shape financial policy around the world, Villasenor explained. A banking regulation known as Know Your Customer (KYC) sets the identification requirements for a person opening a bank account (for example, multiple forms of government-issued ID and proof of stable employment). According to Villasenor, because of the U.S.'s intense focus on preventing terrorist financing and money laundering, strict KYC requirements are common practice abroad, and validating one's identity and employment can be an onerous challenge for economically disadvantaged people.
"The problem is this collateral damage that can be created," Villasenor said. "People who really pose no threat at all, who just want to open an account with $15 in it, might find that they are unable to do so because they are unable to fulfill these very stringent KYC requirements."
Villasenor advocates for KYC requirements that are scaled depending on the size of the account — less rigorous ID verification is used for people with smaller bank accounts and more rigorous ones used for bigger accounts. That way, he says, honest individuals won't be excluded from the financial system abroad.
And for those tech entrepreneurs eyeing the rest of the world from Silicon Valley? Villasenor sees a big opening to develop smartphone technology. "The opportunity here is that it hasn't really happened yet," he said. "It's well understood how to use feature phones for mobile money, but what people haven't done yet is use the capabilities that smartphones provide."
Villasenor pointed to the security features that engineers could implement for consumers in the developing world — using the phone's screen for fingerprints, using the camera for bar code scanning, and voice recognition. He also noted the need to develop apps and interfaces that accommodate the range of reading levels among populations with low literacy rates.
"As smartphones become more common, as you get hundreds and hundreds of millions more people becoming digitally engaged, and some of these people are on the margins of the financial system, what are some of the ways that smartphones can be used to help these people?"
Unwitting distribution channels for violent footage
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope, and their peers have built communications tools that have empowered everyday people to broadcast to millions of others, all around the world, in an instant. Yet that very ability comes with extreme consequences when evil people decide to harness those same tools to increase the notoriety they seek for their own horrible actions. That happened today, in a dramatic fashion.
Not long after gunning down a TV reporter and cameraman in Virginia this morning, the suspected shooter, Vester Lee Flanagan II, took to Twitter to promote his first-person video of the murders: "I filmed the shooting see Facebook," he tweeted. Moments later, he posted the videos on Twitter too.
It didn't take long for both Twitter and Facebook to remove the videos and suspend Flanagan's accounts. But, by the time they had, many people had reported seeing the videos, unwittingly, as they spread through the platforms via their respective sharing mechanisms.
Under every player’s shoulder pad there’s a tiny chip transmitting his location, down to the inch. A look at the tech that could change the game.
NFL
The NFL is rolling out new on-field tracking tools that let it know where its players are, where they're going, how fast they're getting there, and which route they're taking.
That's not surprising. Major league sports aren't just a physical contest — they're a data dump. Statistics fuel bets, fantasy leagues, and armchair coaching; they inform coaching decisions and give fans the opportunity to embed themselves deep into a sport. The NFL, though, has recently introduced an unprecedented level of that data collection.
After testing it last year, as of this season, the upper decks of all 31 NFL stadiums are ringed with sensors, all pointed at the field. They're looking for sensor tags, located under each of the players' shoulder pads, that are capable of live-tracking movements on the field of play. The tracking is extraordinarily accurate — according to Zebra Technologies, which makes the tags, the margin of error is less than six inches. That's a tiny amount, especially when compared to GPS, which is usually only accurate within yards.
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed
The result is a lot of data. The NFL knows where every player on every team is from the moment he walks out of the locker room on game day — when wireless gate technology activates his tags in the doorway. Once he gets on the field, he's tracked for the duration of the game, the sensors measuring movement, speed, and plays. These statistics are processed by Zebra, then passed to the NFL servers before being parceled out to different broadcast networks, box score providers, and — starting with this year's regular season — Xbox One.
According to our poll, 86% of bosses do it.
20th Century Fox / Via giphy.com
Recently, BuzzFeed ran a poll to find out how people use their phones at work which asked questions about what kind of unspoken etiquette goes on. The most surprising finding was the marked difference in how workers use their phones around the bosses and vice versa.
Of course, workplaces vary so much that core things about using your phone may differ – taking personal calls might fly if you have a private office but not if you're working in an open office or a service industry. But one trend seemed to be clear: phone etiquette is linked to where you are on the totem pole of your workplace.
Almost half the respondents said they would NOT look at their phone while talking to their boss. Yet 86% said their boss checks her phone while talking to them.
“I now have proof needed to divorce that loser.” All confessions via Whisper.
But only in Seattle, for now.
Mark Lennihan / AP
You know that moment at a party when you can see that the booze is running out and you know that someone's going to have to go get more but you don't want to be the one to go so you just ignore it and don't point it out and then the party just sort of...ends?
Amazon wants to fix that, and any other alcohol supply problems you might have. Starting today, Amazon Prime Now will bring you damn near anything, including booze, within one or two hours — if you're in the company's home city of Seattle, at least.
The delivery service is already available in London, where it debuted, but Seattle represents its first foray into the United States. Two-hour delivery is free, and one-hour delivery costs $7.99. According to Amazon's announcement, the service offers "beer, wine, and spirits" (in addition to other need-it-in-a-pinch items like paper towels and milk) and runs from 8 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. Couriers will check IDs upon delivery.
There's no word yet on when the one-hour booze barge will swerve out of Seattle. "We haven't yet provided a timeline for delivering alcohol in other U.S. cities," an Amazon spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "Like with any product offering, we will evaluate customer response and if customers love the convenience of having alcohol delivered in under an hour right to their doors then we'll look to expand the offering." (Our guess is that people will love the convenience, Amazon. But we are very thirsty.)
According to an Amazon spokesperson, the beer will be delivered cold.
A “policy” decision three years after the violation began.
Thinkstock
The Twitter policy that led to the global death of Politwoops — the archiving service that, until this past weekend, published the deleted tweets of politicians around the world — actually makes a bit of sense when you think about it in a vacuum. Twitter requires its API partners (companies allowed direct access to its data via an Application Programming Interface) to respect the decisions its users make on Twitter proper. So when a Twitter user deletes a tweet, Twitter's API partners must delete it too.
The idea behind this is logical: Twitter doesn't want to directly enable the preservation of tweets when people delete them. And regardless of its intent, Politwoops was a de facto violator of this policy, something Twitter hinted at in a statement Monday: "We take our commitment to our users seriously and will continue to defend and respect our users' voices in our product and platform," the company said.
Twitter's explanation would be unremarkable if this was the spring of 2012, when Politwoops debuted. But according to the site's U.S. facilitator the Sunlight Foundation, Twitter has been in touch with Politwoops since that time, and largely ignored Politwoops until a few months ago when Twitter abruptly cut off the service in the U.S. "We are truly mystified as to what prompted the change of heart, and it's deeply disappointing to see Twitter kill a project they had supported since 2012," the Sunlight Foundation said at the time.
This past weekend, Twitter dropped the hammer on Politwoops again. It banned Politwoops in the 30 countries it was operating in outside of the U.S. and issued a statement implying that it just determined Politwoops was in violation of its policy. "Recently, we identified several services that used the feature we built to allow for the deletion of tweets to instead archive and highlight them," the company said. "We subsequently informed these services of their noncompliance and suspended their access to our APIs."
Huh?
"In our case, we know it is in fact disingenuous," said Sunlight Foundation President Chris Gates in an interview, referring to Twitter's "recent" characterization. "We were doing it in plain sight with their approval," he said. "These are known public sites and so I think they've been aware for a while."
If Twitter did "support" Politwoops, as Sunlight claims, then it's hard to view the company's decision to shut it down as anything other than a sudden about face. And though that may be a win for Twitter's platform team, which would presumably want politicians to feel comfortable on the service and confident that they can control their image on it, it's likely a loss for everyone else.
While many of us delete tweets when we make typos or tweet broken links, politicians sometimes delete them for another reason: when they don't want to be held accountable for what they say there. Elected representatives in the U.S., for instance, mass deleted tweets celebrating the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl when it became politically inexpedient to support him. In another case, a congressman was caught by Politwoops deleting a tweet that passed along a suggestion that wolves could solve the "homeless problem." Yet another painted an evil caricature of Michelle Obama.
"What politicians say in public should be available to anyone. This is not about typos but it is a unique insight on how messages from elected politicians can change without notice," said Open State Foundation Director Arjan El Fassed, in a statement Monday. The organization was running Politwoops in 30 countries until the project's API access was cut off.
For three years Twitter allowed Politwoops to archive this material. Then, suddenly, it didn't. And now, as we head into election season, a time when the archiving of deleted tweets might add to the public discourse, the resource providing that service is gone.
Announcing what it described as "complete access to every historical public Tweet" earlier this month, Twitter engineer Adam Tornes cited Carl Sagan's famous quote, "You have to know the past to understand the present." A good maxim, and one perhaps worth keeping in mind here.
Twitter declined comment beyond its earlier statement.
Still available: Birchbox for pizza.
Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed
Airbnb for underwear
What could go wrong?
Uber for condiments
You'll never have to speak to your neighbor. Ever. Again.
Airbnb for gamers
Rooms are equipped with Xbox and one of those headset thingies.
Uber for camping
Get s'mores delivered directly to your face.
Tinder for doctors
This could be doctors swiping other doctors — romantically — or swipe for a new primary care physician sort of thing. You decide!
Tinder for kids
Please don't.
Airbnb for beards
AirBnBeards, obviously.
Birchbox for pizza
Now this, THIS could work.
Hampton Creek calls its egg-free mayonnaise Just Mayo. The FDA says that’s just the problem.
Bryan Bedder / Getty Images
Hampton Creek, the San Francisco startup bent on shaking up the food industry, has run into a problem with its egg-free mayonnaise, Just Mayo: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it's not actually mayonnaise at all.
In addition, the FDA contends that Hampton Creek makes misleading claims about how healthy its mayonnaise (or non-mayonnaise, as the case may be) is.
The FDA laid out its charges in an Aug. 12 letter to the company that was made public Tuesday.
Hampton Creek, founded in 2011, portrays itself as a pioneer of sustainability with egg-free foods that use plant proteins instead. It's backed by $120 million in venture funding and sells its products — Just Mayo, Just Cookie Dough, and Just Cookies — in Costco, Safeway, Dollar Tree, Whole Foods, ShopRite, Kroger, Walmart, and Target.
The startup's ascension hasn't always been smooth, however. This month, Business Insider interviewed anonymous ex-employees who said that the products were less than scientifically sound. In November, Unilever — the food conglomerate that owns mayonnaise brand Hellmann's — sued Hampton Creek, saying its white, creamy spread does not meet the FDA's definition of "mayonnaise." That definition, set in 1957, says that a food labeled as such must contain egg yolk. "They have an egg on their package but not in their product — they're just not mayo," Mike Faherty, vice president for foods of Unilever North America, said at the time.
Unilever dropped its charges soon after, saying it would leave Hampton Creek to deal with regulatory agencies directly. At the time, Josh Tetrick, the startup's CEO, told reporters, "Hampton Creek was founded to open our eyes to the problems the world faces. This moment has only validated why."
But the FDA picked up where Unilever left off. In its recent letter to Hampton Creek, the agency said that Just Mayo, including its Sriracha-flavored version, is "misbranded."
"The name 'Just Mayo' and an image of an egg are prominently featured on the labels for these products," the agency wrote. "The term 'mayo' has long been used and understood as shorthand or slang for mayonnaise. The use of the term 'mayo' in the product names and the image of an egg may be misleading to consumers because it may lead them to believe that the products are the standardized food, mayonnaise, which must contain eggs."
The FDA also took issue with Hampton Creek's claim that Just Mayo is cholesterol-free and with company marketing message "Your Heart Matters. When your heart is healthy, well, we're happy. You'll never find cholesterol in our products." If a small dose of food has more than 13 grams of total fat per 50 grams, the FDA says, then the label must disclose that level of fat in addition to any claims about cholesterol. But Just Mayo exceeds that fat-per-gram ratio, and lacks a label saying such, the FDA said.
"While there are authorized health claims about cholesterol and the reduced risk of heart disease, these products do not qualify to make these health claims, in part, due to the amount of fat that they contain," the agency wrote.
The FDA gave Hampton Creek 15 days to respond to its letter at the time it was issued. Hampton Creek has not returned a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.
Josh Tetrick of Hampton Creek.
Steve Jennings / Getty Images
The consumer watchdog’s power to police unfair and deceptive practices extends to data privacy.
Alex Brandon / AP
A U.S. appeals court ruled on Monday that the Federal Trade Commission has the authority to sue corporations for failing to properly secure customer information from data breaches, giving the agency the green light to hold hotel operator Wyndham Worldwide accountable for failing to safeguard consumers' data against three hacks, from 2008 to 2010.
The decision of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upholds the FTC's authority to take enforcement action against a company that has failed to protect consumer data from theft. As Congress has yet to pass a robust data privacy bill amid a barrage of breaches, this ruling bolsters the commission's initiative to protect customers in the marketplace using its law enforcement powers.
Monday's decision could also be good news for weary consumers in light of recent high-profile attacks against companies like Ashley Madison, the dating site for married individuals, whose user information was leaked last week and has been criticized for its lack of robust data security.
In 2012, the FTC sued Wyndham alleging the company misrepresented its pledge to protect the sensitive information of its customers. In its complaint, the agency asserted that over the span of two years Wyndham suffered three unauthorized intrusions that compromised the credit card numbers of 619,000 customers and led to more than $10.6 million in fraudulent charges. The FTC alleged that against Wyndham's stated policy, the hotel chain did not use reasonable means to protect consumer data, including strong passwords, encryption, and firewalls.
At the time the suit was filed, Wyndham challenged the FTC's broad authority to pursue it for "unfair and deceptive practices" in the realm of cybersecurity. Last year, a district court rejected Wyndham's motion to dismiss to the case, and on Monday the appeals court affirmed this decision, siding with the FTC, which has engaged in a sustained campaign to "make sure that companies live up to the promises they make about privacy and data security." The FTC has settled 53 cases in which the agency claims companies failed to maintain reasonable data security — among them, complaints against Snapchat, Twitter, and Credit Karma.
"Today's Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision reaffirms the FTC's authority to hold companies accountable for failing to safeguard consumer data," FTC Chair Edith Ramirez said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. "It is not only appropriate, but critical, that the FTC has the ability to take action on behalf of consumers when companies fail to take reasonable steps to secure sensitive consumer information."
Wyndham, for its part, maintains that the FTC is overreaching. "While we are disappointed by today's opinion, we continue to contend the FTC lacks the authority to pursue this type of case against American businesses, and has failed to publish any regulations that would give such businesses fair notice of any proposed standards for data security," Michael Valentino, a spokesperson for Wyndham Worldwide, told BuzzFeed News.
It's worth noting that the court rejected Wyndham's argument that it did not have fair notice from the FTC in its decision today, dismissing as "alarmist" the company's analogy that allowing the commission to regulate cybersecurity was akin to "[regulating] the locks on hotel room doors."
"It invites the tart retort that, were Wyndham a supermarket, leaving so many banana peels all over the place that 619,000 customers fall hardly suggests it should be immune from liability," the court's opinion reads.
During a June speech in Hong Kong, Ramirez said she would urge Congress to pass comprehensive data security legislation, as the internet of things, data brokers, and targeted advertising usher in a new era of tech-enabled vulnerability.
A new Uber feature called Smart Routes encourages San Francisco riders to request UberPool rides along particular routes for maximum efficiency.
BuzzFeed News
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick often talks about his dream of the perfect Uber trip. "It's the perpetual trip, the trip that never ends," he said at the Digital-Life-Design conference in Europe last October. "The driver picks one passenger up, picks another passenger up, drops off the first passenger, but then picks up passenger number three and drops off passenger number two."
This week in San Francisco, Uber took a first step toward realizing the vision that Kalanick described. The ride-hail company began experimenting with a new ride option called Smart Routes. The idea is drivers will be able to both pick up and drop off passengers along a specific route, which in turn allows them to quickly pick up their next passenger. For now the company is experimenting with only two routes: Fillmore Street between Haight and Bay, and Valencia Street between 15th and 26th.
Uber Smart Routes are similar to traditional bus routes in that they follow a predetermined path between two points, but they differ by allowing passengers to
request rides on demand. The catch, of course, is that customers get themselves to a Smart Route before they can use it. So it's not exactly door-to-door service. For this reason Uber is discounting Smart Route rides by $1 or more.
With this first Smart Route initiative, Uber is clearly laying the groundwork for Kalanick's perpetual rides, which he described at the DLD conference in January as "a private bus-type service, but on demand and hyper-convenient." And profitable. As Kalanick noted at the time, the primary goal of such perpetual rides is to drop the per-person cost of an Uber trip below that of competing transportation options. Specifically, Kalanick wants the cost of transportation to fall far below the cost of owning a car.
"If you can get 10 people trips on this perpetual ride, this UberPool ride, and the driver needs to make 25 euro an hour, you're now looking at a situation where each person-trip costs 2 euro and 50 cents," Kalanick told DLD attendees. "And that's sort of the vision of where Uber wants to go."
One possible downside of Kalanick's cost-cutting approach to transportation is that it might cut into fares collected by Uber drivers. The company, however, argues that Smart Routes will only maximize the efficiency of drivers' time by getting them more passengers per hour.
"This experimental feature, called 'Smart Routes,' aims to simplify pick-ups by encouraging riders to request a ride along specific routes in San Francisco," Uber spokesperson Molly Spaeth told BuzzFeed News. "Smart Routes is part of our ongoing efforts to increase the efficiency of driver-partners' time spent on the road while helping riders save time and money."
Though Uber wouldn't comment directly about whether this new feature was specifically meant to be the foundation of perpetual rides, the company did tell TechCrunch in July that it has been testing several features that would enable the never-ending ride. "We are currently testing methods to make the 'perpetual trip' a reality in San Francisco. We've already seen initial success linking multiple consecutive trips into a single trip for the driver. Creating more efficiency in this way enables us to drive down the price for riders and increase earnings for drivers."
This morning, Troy Hunt published what is the saddest, most emotionally conflicting, and most interesting page on the internet right now. Hunt, a security researcher and proprietor of Have I Been Pwned, a paid site that allows people to check and see if their data has been compromised in major data breaches, got to the Ashley Madison information dump early last Wednesday and quickly made the data searchable for verified HIBP subscribers (unlike other sites, HIBP does not make the Ashley Madison information accessible to the nonpaying general public). In the following days, Hunt’s inbox has been inundated with hundreds of emails — emails that are variously personal, frantic, confused, and contrite — from Ashley Madison users and their spouses looking for guidance in the aftermath of the hack. Hunt replied to some and decided, after redacting certain personal information, to publish snippets of the most compelling correspondence. The result is one of the rawest and broadest portrayals of the devastation wrought by an unprecedented breach.
We’re still far from understanding the scope of the leak. There are some basic, now well-known figures, of course, and they’re staggering — more than 30 million people were reportedly caught up in the breach. Then there are other darker and more morbid numbers: class-action lawsuits, divorces, and, as the BBC reported this morning, suicides resulting from exposed information. But these are only the most obvious and most quantifiable layer of an increasingly intricate story. For every exposed user there are innumerable potential connections — and, thus, victims by way of collateral damage, people whose lives have been irrevocably changed without warning or consent. It’s impossible to tally the emotional fallout that results from curious co-workers, friends, potential lovers, and acquaintances who happen to search the databases, but Hunt’s email collection serves as the best record to date of the havoc, panic, and complexity of the event.
A screengrab of Hunt's site
“The biggest theme from these emails that surprised me is how desperate these people are that they'd disclose such deeply personal details to a complete stranger in the hope I might be able help them even just one little bit,” Hunt told BuzzFeed News. Hunt says that most appear to have contacted him out of “a sense of fear and feeling helpless.” While some of the emails are expectedly guilty or disgruntled missives, others are extraordinary; in one, a spouse confides that she was contacted by her husband’s church after church officials rifled through the database for congregation members’ emails.
So got a call, from our church leaders yesterday, saying my husband's work email was on [redacted], oh my!
Even the expected and more mundane emails are raw and affecting. “Tell your wife and kids you love them tonight. I shall do the same as I really don't know if I will have many more chances to do so,” one Ashley Madison account holder emailed Hunt. In some cases, they reveal unexpected perils from the exposed information, like one user who mentions how his wife was unknowingly a part of his online indiscretions. “What would be impossible to explain away — and what I would most feel guilty about — is the very detailed personal intimate information about my wife shared with strangers during my 'erotic' chats,” he wrote.
Taken together, the emails showcase the varying degree of guilt, culpability, and, perhaps most interestingly, the confusion surrounding the leak. A number of people wrote to Hunt alleging that their name was wrongly included, or that the account is from years ago, during another part of their lives; others were registered for work-related research purposes; others to check a former spouse they assumed was cheating. According to Hunt, many of correspondents wrote in simply confounded by it all. “It reminded me of when you have elderly parents or somebody who looks at a PC and is totally lost. This hack and the response is like that,” Hunt said, noting that many were mystified by the dark web, Tor, and where exactly their information had leaked. A number of the confused emailed Hunt asking him if he could delete their presence from the internet. “There are a lot saying, ‘Name a price and we'll pay it, if you can scrub me off the internet.’ I am thinking, this is not how the internet works and you should probably be spending your money with a marriage counselor,” he said.
Despite the torrent of frantic emails pouring into his inbox, Hunt doesn’t see this as a watershed moment for casual — mainstream — internet dwellers and personal information security, suggesting instead that the passage of time is the only way most humans will think critically about their internet footprint. And while Hunt only sees the frequency of these kinds of attacks increasing, he told BuzzFeed News that the sophistication of the Ashley Madison hack renders it almost impossible for average, non–security industry users to demand better data protections from online companies — mostly because the flaws are difficult, if not impossible, for even the savviest to spot.
“Most consumers just don’t have this kind of technical savvy to push for organization. Just in this hack you see that Ashley Madison stored its passwords extremely well. I’ve never seen an organization breached that had this sort of password storage,” Hunt said. “Seriously, Ashley Madison did a perfect job with password storage, except that didn't matter. Somebody made a big mistake someplace and the whole thing went down. How could any average user have made a good judgment call when there's nuances like this? It’s hard for even security types to make these judgements.”
At the time of the interview, almost a week from the initial data dump, Hunt was still watching emails come in and noted that being on the receiving end of these confessions and pleas has taken at least a slight emotional toll. “Sorting through these messages you realize just how unfathomably bad this is and will be for so many people,” Hunt said. And as much as Hunt has tried to keep his distance from individual users — he has tried only to respond to requests that concern HIBP or to verify certain claims — Hunt’s inbox has helped him come to a deep level of understanding for the scope, magnitude, and sensitivity of the hack. Throughout the past week, Hunt has learned what often only victims of these types of incidents learn: that the high-profile exposure of deeply private information casts an unfathomably wide net of trauma.
“This is so different from almost any hacks before it — even the Sony hack, where so many were unable to feel sympathy for those involved," Hunt said. "This is just so damaging to so many and that's why I wanted to get their personal stories out there. We need to realize that regardless of what they did and didn’t do — and believe me, there’s so many varying degrees of involvement — this hack is clearly destroying all kinds of lives.”
Perhaps what Hunt’s email collection best illustrates is the specifically calamitous nature of the Ashley Madison hacking data. Hacks are, by nature, often intensely personal, but rarely is the information they expose so maddeningly cryptic. As Hunt’s emails show, for most, that the data is a vague almost-confirmation of one’s worst suspicions, but rarely much more than that. Without honest and painful conversations, few of these cases will be straightforward and will only spawn more painful hypotheticals, questions, and distrust. As the emails indicate, the true and baffling tragedy of this hack — and the most terrifying prospect for the future breaches of sites containing deeply private information — may just be that the presence of one’s personal data is, by itself, inconclusive of wrongdoing and yet still potentially life-ruining.
Avid Life Media is likely to face a barrage of class action lawsuits following the disastrous hack of its cheating site Ashley Madison. Here’s why it should be especially concerned about suits filed in Canada.
Alex Indigo/Flickr Creative Commons / Via Flickr: alexindigo
The news today that two Canadian law firms have filed a $578 million-dollar class action lawsuit against Avid Life Media is the strongest evidence yet that blame for the leak of personal information of more than 39 million users will fall to the company behind Ashley Madison, not the hackers who stole their information. (Compare that figure against the bounty Avid has placed on "information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the individual or group of people responsible": $500,000.)
American firms are following suit; last week, Rosen, a New York law firm, announced it had "initiated a class action lawsuit investigation", and the lawyer representing a Missouri woman who sued Ashley Madison in US District Court before the data was published online told ABC News that he has been fielding calls from potential class members.
"We're definitely moving forward," Phillip Kim, a partner at Rosen, told BuzzFeed News. "And we anticipate filing the lawsuit very shortly."
But while a tsunami of American litigation is imminent, it's not clear that any of it will have the desired effect. In fact, a class action suit in Canada has a much higher likelihood of success than one in the States, even though a majority of the site's users hail from the US.
That's for several reasons. A 2013 Supreme Court decision, Clapper v. Amnesty, International found that plaintiffs had to show "certainly impending injury" as a result of a privacy violation to confer legal standing. Canada has no such standard.
In Canada, damages are assessed after trial, long after the certification of the class. According to Ted Charney, the Toronto lawyer whose firm brought the suit in Canada, a judge would simply need to rule on the two points of Canadian law at issue in the suit: 1. Whether Ashley Madison committed a breach of contract for failing to protect the confidentiality of users (including those who paid 19 dollars for the so-called "full delete" option), and 2. Whether Ashley Madison is vicariously liable for "Intrusion Upon Seclusion", a relatively recent privacy tort that would provide for damages based on humiliation and insult to reputation. If Ashley Madison was found liable, individual plaintiffs in the class would each go before an arbitrator to determine individual damages, which may vary widely.
Post-trial damage assessment and the lack of a "certainly impending" standard have created a friendly environment for privacy classes in Canada; according to the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, "Over 20 privacy class actions have been filed in Canadian courts in recent years."
That climate doesn't exist in the US. "It's much more difficult in the States to get these privacy breaches certified," Charney told Buzzfeed News, "because there has to be substantial evidence" of injury.
In addition, in the States, broadly speaking, plaintiffs seeking "individualized" damages cannot be certified as a class; the uniformity of the damages have to be established at the certification stage. In other words, a CEO who lost her job because of the leak could not seek financial compensation as part of the same class as a husband seeking emotional damages after his spouse left him because of the leak, who could not seek seek financial compensation as part of the same class as a movie star who suffered bad publicity; the damages would all be too different.
That doesn't rule out classes that seek certain, limited kinds of damages. Avid Life Media claims that the credit card information contained in the leaks is partial and unactionable. If that turns out to be false, it would be relatively straightforward to calculate compensation based on protecting the affected members from fraud.
"Assuming financial information is out there, everybody would benefit from getting credit monitoring and identify protection services," Joel Bernstein, whose firm, Labaton Sucharow, filed a class action suit on behalf of more than 20 million governments workers over the Office of Personnel Management breach, told BuzzFeed News.
And Rosen's forthcoming suit, according to Kim, is likely to focus on false advertising related to the pay-to-delete function, although it's reasonable to wonder what damages plaintiffs would be entitled to, beyond a refund, and legal fees. Notably, such a class suit would not deal with a privacy tort. And even if such a case wouldn't necessarily result in a huge judgment for the plaintiffs, corporate defendants in privacy cases sometimes settle to avoid the cost of litigation. Kim declined to comment on whether a class action suit would be easier to bring in Canada.
None of this is to say that Americans harmed by the leak won't seek massive damages against Avid Life for violation of privacy and harm sustained because of it. Just that these are much more likely to be brought as individual lawsuits.
