Man Streams Himself Murdering Baby Daughter On Facebook Live, Then Kills Himself

A Thai man broadcast video of himself killing his baby daughter on Facebook Live Monday, the latest in a string of recent live-streamed horrific acts on the social platform. 20-year old Wuttisan Wongtalay hanged his 11-month-old daughter and then himself at an abandoned hotel in Phuket.

The murder video remained live on Facebook for nearly 24 hours, according to Reuters. It's certain to draw further scrutiny to the company's Live product, which has been used to broadcast a number of acts of gruesome violence since its launch in April 2016. This latest Facebook Live murder comes just weeks after Facebook user Steve Stevens killed a stranger in Cleveland and uploaded video of the murder to the social network.

“This is an appalling incident and our hearts go out to the family of the victim,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “There is absolutely no place for acts of this kind on Facebook and the footage has now been removed.”

Wongtalay posted two videos from the crime scene. Both registered over 100,000 views, according to The Guardian, which reported that the videos were uploaded to YouTube by other users too.

Though yesterday’s murder was the first aired on Facebook Live in Thailand, deputy police spokesperson Kissana Phathanacharoen suggested it might have been a copycat act.. “It could be influenced by behavior from abroad, most recently in Cleveland,” he said, referring to the Stevens video.

Policing its emerging live video platform of horrifying acts of violence is proving to be an urgent and difficult problem for Facebook. The company has so far provided little about its efforts to do so, but it's clear the issue is a priority. At the start of his company’s F8 developer conference last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a moment to address the Cleveland murder. “We will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening,” he said.

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Here's The Thing With Free Apps And Services

John Lamb / Getty Images

If there’s only one thing you take away from this article, let it be this: there’s no such thing as free lunch.

The New York Times recently reported that Unroll.me, an email management app that promises to de-clutter your inbox, sold its users’ anonymized Lyft receipt data to Uber. Unroll.me claims that it’s “trusted by millions of happy users” — but it’s likely that those users weren’t aware that they were forking over their personal emails to Slice Intelligence, a digital commerce analytics company. Now, some users are pledging to remove their inbox access from Unroll.me and delete their accounts.

The Unroll.me/Uber fury is a good reminder of the ol’ Internet adage, “if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

But some sites are much more egregious than others. So here are some ways you can assess an app’s trustworthiness and find out if your free faves are problematic.

What does “you’re the product” even mean?

When you sign up for a free online service, you’re most likely giving up something in return: your data. On sites like Facebook and Google, that means the service uses your personal information (like your interests, location, gender, marital status, or age) to show you advertisements they think you’d be interested in. Last year, Facebook made more than $26 billion from advertising.

For many people, this sounds like a good trade off: You get to use something legitimately useful, like Gmail, for free, and the most visible consequence is an advertisement. But other companies go much farther. Unroll.me, for example, didn’t use user data to target ads — it looked at individual emails and sent them to Uber.

And if you found that story about Target knowing a teen girl was pregnant before her father did thanks to extensive customer data collection to be pretty creepy, you should know that that same kind of analytics-based-advertising-influence has probably been exercised on you.

How do I know what companies are doing with my data? Is it safe?

Be very careful about what kind of access you give apps. To do that, closely at what you’re agreeing to when you sign up.

For example, when you sign up for Unroll.me, you’re giving the service the ability to read, send, delete, and manage your email. This is a good time to ask yourself: Does the service really need all of these permissions? Do I trust this service?

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

A good place to start looking for answers is the service’s FAQ page. If there’s a section on security or privacy, it may reveal why it asks for something specifically, like access to your contacts.

And this is something I can’t stress enough: it’s really important to read – or, at the very least, comb through – the terms and conditions when you’re using a *free* app or service, especially when it’s a you’re giving it full access to your inbox.

I know you’re thinking “Who the hell has time for all that legalese?!” You’re right. Terms of service pages are often long, complicated, and vague which is why no one reads them. But there are two great sites that can help you make sense of this consumer contract.

One is Terms of Service; Didn’t Read, which rates and labels policies based on their user-friendliness. For example, when a service warns of allowing access to third-party apps, that gets a thumbs up. If the service says it can make changes to terms without notifying users at any time, that gets a thumbs down.

Another tool is TLDRLegal, which offers a short, plain-language synopsis next to the actual legal text of various company’s terms and conditions. This site is very new, so there aren’t many services on the platform yet, but you can currently look at YouTube’s, Apple’s, Dropbox’s, and Minecraft’s terms of service analyses to start familiarizing yourself with the legal language.

TL;DR Legal

If you’re really concerned about what you discover, contact the app’s support team or send them a tweet to see if there’s room for clarification. Might as well try!

Want to learn how to judge a privacy policy for yourself? Center of Plain Language created a great rubric for determining what makes a policy good and bad.

So, what are some things that I should do right now?

Take this time to review what apps are connected to your email or social accounts. You can easily revoke apps you don’t recognize or haven’t used in a while with access to Twitter, Google, and Facebook.

You should also see what the apps on your phone can access. In iOS, go to Settings > Privacy. Review which apps are using the microphone, location tracking, or your phone’s contacts. Then toggle permissions on and off for an app that, say, doesn’t need access to your photo library. On Android, you can go to Settings > Apps and tap on individual apps, then select where it says Permissions.

As previously mentioned, if you do use apps with access to your Gmail account, be extra vigilant.

Sanebox, a paid email management service similar to Unroll.me, specifically claims that they will never sell user data, “even aggregated information,” to another company. Unsubscriber, on the other hand, will use your personal info to improve advertising by third parties. Boomerang, an add-on that lets you schedule Gmails, says that “no personally-identifiable information will be sold or transferred to unaffiliated third parties” without permission, but isn’t clear about aggregate information, though the CEO did tweet that the company makes money from paid subscriptions, rather than selling data. Mailvelope, an email encryption extension, says that they do not share, sell, or market personal data unless you’ve given explicit consent.

Generally, stay away from free VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks. When you use provided Wi-Fi at a public venue like an airport, be aware that the service provider may sell your information to advertisers or use cookies to track website usage and access (Boingo and Gogo both do this). Additionally, note that some ad blockers like AdBlock Plus accept payment to let some advertisements through.

Consider using paid apps that prioritize user privacy above all else and have strong privacy language on their webpages.

And remember: if a service is free, look into how the company is making money and paying for server costs. If it’s with your data, make sure you know *exactly* what they’re doing with it.

cbc.ca / Via giphy.com

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This App Changed The Name Of A Filter After People Complained It Was Racist, But The Filter's Still The Same

So there's this popular new app called Faceapp.

Take a selfie, and the app will change your face using filters that make you look younger, older, more male, more female, and the like. It's available for iOS and Android, and, after going kinda viral last week, it's currently the #10 free app in Apple's App Store.

But people have noticed something off about it...

The app's "Spark" filter, which was formerly called the "Hot" filter, lightens your face.

The developer, Wireless Lab OOO, responded to some of the criticism in App Store reviews, calling it an "unquestionably serious issue."

They changed the name of the filter from "Hot" to "Spark."

Wireless Lab OOO said in an email to BuzzFeed News that it changed the filter's name from "Hot" to "Spark" and is working on finding solutions to the face-whitening. "It is an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying neural network caused by the training set bias, not intended behavior," the company wrote. (The company didn't elaborate, but this ~may~ mean that even though Faceapp didn't intend to whitewash people, it didn't use enough dark faces while training its artificial intelligence to apply the filters.)

We tried it, and it's true. The "Spark" filter does lighten your face.

It even whitens you if you're already white.

This isn't the first time a selfie app seemed to equate "hot" with "white": A similar thing happened with Meitu, a Chinese app that enlarged people's eyes, reddened their cheeks, and, you guessed it, made them whiter.

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Workers Involved In Union Activities Say Tesla Is Illegally Intimidating Them

Tesla CEO Elon Musk listens as President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with technology industry leaders at Trump Tower in New York, Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Evan Vucci / AP

Tesla is once again facing allegations that it’s working to quash a union drive at its factory in Fremont, CA.

Last week, the United Automobile Workers union filed four separate charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that the company has illegally surveilled and coerced workers attempting to distribute information about the union drive.

The charges, copies of which were obtained by BuzzFeed News, specifically makes reference to an event on February 10, in which Tesla allegedly intimidated three employees who were “passing out literature regarding their union organizing efforts, working conditions, the confidentiality agreement, and their rights under the NLRA.” On March 23, the charge alleges, Tesla broke the law by “instructing employees they were not allowed to pass out any literature unless it was pre-approved by the employer.”

In an emailed statement, Tesla said it is “aware of the filing of unfair labor practice allegations” but “believes the [unfair labor practice] allegations are entirely without merit.” The company said it plans to respond “as part of the NLRB process.”

News of the UAW’s efforts to unionize Tesla’s plant broke in February, when Tesla employee Jose Moran published a blog post on Medium citing long hours, repeated stress injuries and less-than-competitive pay among reasons why Tesla employees should join a union.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk immediately hit back, first accusing Moran of being a union plant, and then writing an email to employees in which he argued that the union would be bad for working conditions, and promised to install both a roller coaster and free frozen yogurt machines throughout the facility.

The union’s charges aren’t the first formal accusation against Tesla for stymying open communication among its employees. In February, a group of California lawmakers warned Tesla that the confidentiality agreement it requires workers to sign is overbroad, a fact which “has resulted in a chilling effect on workers’ ability to engage in protected activity,” they said in a letter.

That agreement, according to a copy obtained by the blog Teslarati, bars workers from sharing information about Tesla products, communicating with the media about Tesla, posting photos or videos taken inside Tesla facilities online, and writing “about your work in any social media, blog, or book.”

More recently, over 60 labor groups signed a letter criticizing the confidentiality agreement, and taking Musk to task for creating a work environment in which some workers feel their right to discuss union activities has been stifled.

“You can’t fix problems if you’re not allowed to talk about them,” said Tesla employee Michael Sanchez in an email forwarded by the communications team representing the union. “The confidentiality agreement we were required to sign went too far. We should have the right to distribute information to our co-workers without intimidation.”

A Tesla spokesperson said the company’s confidentiality agreement is typical of any tech company, and “has nothing to do with the rights of workers to openly discuss organizing efforts.”

In the last six years, Tesla has faced NLRB charges in Palo Alto, Fremont, and Austin, Texas; all of those cases, including one filed by the UAW in 2011, were either withdrawn or dismissed.

Meanwhile, Tesla workers in Germany are threatening to go on strike, with some of them arguing that they are underpaid. The German union representing the workers, IG Metall, said the planned strike could impact Tesla’s ability to begin production of its newest car, the Model 3, in July, on time for its scheduled release in late 2017.

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This Water Copter Looks Very Cool And Very Dangerous

So this is the Kitty Hawk Flyer.

It's a prototype of a jet-ski-helicopter-thing created by Kitty Hawk, a company backed by Google cofounder Larry Page.

So what can you do with it?

Sadly, we're still very far off from commuting to work in our hovering cars. Kitty Hawk says that this version is designed only to fly about 15 feet above the surface of water. But it still looks pretty damn cool. Here's a video of a person in a nice boat getting totally one-upped by her friend on a flying jet ski.

youtube.com

The New York Times writes that the Flyer's eight propellers make it as loud as a speedboat and that the vehicle weighs about 220 pounds.

Named after the site where Orville and Wilbur Wright tested their first airplanes, Kitty Hawk says on its website its mission is "to make the dream of personal flight a reality."

Kitty Hawk also says the flyer is completely electric and legal to fly in "uncongested areas under the Ultralight category of FAA regulations." You won't need a pilot's license to fly one, according to the company, though the guy flying machine in the video is an aerospace engineer, according to the Times.

It's unclear what protects people from a potential crash. What happens when you run out of battery and hit the surface of the water? What happens if you fly over land (you know someone will)? Kitty Hawk declined to comment.

The flyer goes on sale later this year.

The company hasn't announced the exact date of its commercial release. If you're ready to spend your life's savings on a Flyer, keep in mind that the retail version may not look anything like what you saw in the video. Kitty Hawk writes in its FAQ, "The go-to-market Flyer will have a different design than the prototype Flyer that appears in our April 2017 photos and videos."

In the meantime, you can become a three-year Kitty Hawk Member for $100, which will get you $2,000 off the retail price whenever you can buy a Flyer, and access to "our flight simulator, flight demonstrations, and events where a select few will get the chance to ride the Flyer," Kitty Hawk writes on its website.

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How "Last Resort" Became The Internet's New Favorite Joke Song

Pete Ryan for BuzzFeed News

Last month, after Republican leadership failed to bring its Obamacare replacement bill to a House vote, the television writer Justin Halpern spotted an easy opportunity to crack a joke. He doctored the same-day New York Times story, adding a paragraph that (completely inaccurately) described Speaker of the House Paul Ryan leaving "the White House in defeat ... Within moments, the muffled sound of Papa Roach's 'Last Resort' were heard blaring from inside the car as it drove away." And then he tweeted it.

It was a tossed-off prank; Halpern told BuzzFeed News the whole thing might have taken him two minutes.

But, like the 2000 song it references, the joke was a massive hit.

In addition to being retweeted nearly 20,000 times, often by people (including journalists) who believed the screenshot to be authentic, the tweet prompted a spate of piggybacking jokes and, ultimately, a game response from the band itself:

(A spokesperson for Ryan declined to comment about Papa Roach.)

Seventeen years after its biggest song, a band that Spin described at the time as "the latest in midline nu-metal minstrelsy" had landed, mirthfully, at the center of the news cycle. What is it about this song that caused such an intense reaction? And what is so damn funny about Paul Ryan listening to "Last Resort"?

"It's the perfect joke, that song," Halpern told BuzzFeed News. "The punchline hits the moment you press play. It's a comedy writer's dream."

The punchline, of course, is the notoriously melodramatic opening couplet — "CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES / THIS IS MY LAST RESORT" — which singer Jacoby Shaddix screams a capella, in a verge-of-tears staccato.

And though it leads into a song about a very unfunny subject — suicide — the lines, in all of their uncomfortably emotional glory, have recently become a kind of joking social media mantra of exasperation, sadness, and defeat. Used alike by devastated sports fans, cackling Keksters, Obama nostalgists, and rankled cultural commentators, the song serves now as an ironized shorthand for letting something get under your skin, for caring too much, for losing and then getting into your feelings. If, as Amanda Hess wrote recently, none of us are safe from getting "owned," "Last Resort" is the anthem of the owned-but-owning-it, the internet loser's performative cry of pain, the cuck's winking lament.

"Last Resort" is the anthem of the owned-but-owning it, the internet loser's performative cry of pain, the cuck's winking lament.

"Last Resort" is a gift that keeps giving social media new ways to laugh. But to understand why it's been so durable, it's useful to remember just how big a smash "Last Resort" was when it was just a rock song — back when rock songs could be cultural touchstones.

The song started as an idle classical scale plinked on a piano by the band's bassist Tobin Esperance in early 1999, in the Sacramento house where Papa Roach practiced. "I was like, that's fucking sick, let's put that on guitar," Shaddix recalled to BuzzFeed News. They did, and it turned into the song's instantly memorable power metal riff. Inspired, Shaddix wrote the "stream of consciousness" lyrics, about a friend who attempted suicide.

"From the moment we wrote it, we were like, this could be the song that gets us a record deal," Shaddix said.

It did more than that: On the strength of "Last Resort," Infest, the band's major-label debut, sold 7 million copies worldwide. And the "Last Resort" video became a staple on MTV, to the point that the network eventually invited the band on Total Request Live. Indeed, that ubiquitous video, which cuts between overhead fisheye shots of the band and Nan Goldin-esque portraits of sullen teens in their late-’90s suburban bedrooms, may be as responsible as the lyrics for the song being so closely associated with teenage over-emoting. For people listening to popular music at the turn of the millennium, "Last Resort" and its vision of teenage angst were inescapable.

Eventually, the song receded into rock radio afternoon rotation. And by the mid-2000s, rap-rock and nu-metal — two genres with which Papa Roach were closely associated — had become music-world punchlines. That, combined with the infamous opening line and the humorless video, made it a natural target for the Weird Al-style lyrical interpolations that were popular on message boards like 4chan and Something Awful in the late aughts. According to KnowYourMeme, the first "Last Resort" meme to break out of the message boards was the still-popular "Cut my life into pizza / This is my plastic fork." (Others included "Cut my life into peaches / This is my last fruit tart" and "Cut my life into beaches / This is my last resort.")

Shaddix took it in stride. "That shit’s genius," he told BuzzFeed News. "I even came up with one. I almost went through a divorce, so, 'Cut my wife into pieces, this is my last divorce.' Thankfully, we worked it out."

As much internet joke-making moved onto Twitter, users began to post the lyrics next to any old thing: An image of someone famous with their mouth open, a screenshot of Shaquille O'Neal looking distressed, a dog forced to wake up too early. Today, dozens and sometimes hundreds of people tweet "Last Resort" content every day. A quick Twitter search finds "Last Resort" as the punchline to an array of up-to-the-minute memes, from the Meryl Streep shouting meme to the mildly offensive different-ethnicities-pandering-to-each-other-with-music meme. But in 2017, it is used most predominantly to signify ironic despair or alarm over caring too much about something on the internet, as these users of 4chan/pol did when FiveThirtyEight predicted a Hillary Clinton victory:

So what is it about "Last Resort" specifically — why has it hung on as meme fodder for so long, once we account for its datedness and its popularity? Nu-metal produced far more embarrassing songs, and "Last Resort," however dramatic, can't touch the skin-crawling emotiveness of, say, Linkin Park at its treacliest. Well, for one, maybe it's not surprising that a song about teenagers bursting with inexpressible emotions, featuring a video about sad and angry high-schoolers alone in their rooms, has had such a lasting second life on the solipsistic social internet, where obsessive self-presentation is the norm and nobody knows that you're a dog. Or maybe, once you look past the trappings, you're left with a song that is really, actually, gasp, kind of great.

"That guitar riff to open up is super catchy," Halpern said. "We get to enjoy it and make fun of it at the same time — the holy grail for a cynical, snark-filled audience."

But, wait, isn't the song about suicide? Well, yes:

So should it really be a joke? Shaddix, for one, said he was happy people were using his band's song at the expense of Paul Ryan, who was "trying to take this bill that’s helping people and ditch it." And, he added, the song "continues to be an anthem for struggling kids." (Papa Roach is currently touring in support of its forthcoming ninth studio album, Crooked Teeth.)

But also, Shaddix said, funny is funny. "I love having a good laugh and if it's at my expense, whatever. Whether someone’s taking the piss out of it or not, who cares? It’s a straight fucking banger."

"I’ve been cutting life into pieces for 17 years, dog, what's up?" ●

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Waymo: Uber Concealed Secret Self-Driving Technology From The Court

An Uber self-driving Volvo drives in Pittsburgh Friday, March 17, 2017. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Gene J. Puskar / AP

Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous car company, alleged in a court filing on Friday that Uber has been developing a secret, secondary self-driving technology that is a more direct copy of Waymo’s autonomous driving designs — and that the ride-hail giant intentionally concealed this project from the court.

“Uber has taken, copied, and used Waymo's technology. This, along with Uber's subsequent cover up and violations of this court's orders, show the need for an injunction in this case,” read Waymo documents filed today in support of its request for an injunction against Uber. The injunction would temporarily halt Uber’s self-driving car program.

"Uber should be enjoined from continuing to use Levandowski in its driverless car program and from continuing to misappropriate and infringe Waymo’s intellectual property,” Waymo wrote.

The filing is the latest development in the legal battle between Uber and Alphabet-owned Waymo over allegedly stolen self-driving car technology. Specifically, the lawsuit centers around LiDAR, or Light Detection And Ranging technology, which is what helps autonomous vehicles navigate.

In February, Waymo filed a lawsuit against Uber claiming that it had intentionally stolen Waymo’s intellectual property when it made Anthony Levandowski, a former Waymo employee, the head of its self-driving car program. (Levandowski was the co-founder of Otto, an autonomous truck startup, which Uber acquired in August 2016.)

In Friday’s filing, Waymo says that during deposition earlier this week, an Uber engineer “was forced to admit” that the company was working on a second LIDAR technology that more closely resembles technology built by Waymo.

Earlier this month, Uber emphatically denied Waymo’s allegations, saying that “A cursory inspection of Uber’s LiDAR and Waymo’s allegations fall like a house of cards.” Levandowski pled the fifth to avoid testifying. At the time, Uber argued its so-called “Fuji” LiDAR technology was “fundamentally different” in its design from that built by Waymo.

But in the reply filed today, the company says Uber’s claim that the four-lens Fuji LiDAR was its only LiDAR project is “a cover up” and alleges Levandowski himself worked on the second, secret self-driving technology, the name of which is redacted, but which Waymo says it copied from Waymo’s own LiDAR design, the name of which is also redacted. “In its Opposition, Uber misrepresents its LiDAR design efforts to this court,” reads the reply.

In the documents filed today, Waymo also surfaces evidence from a deposition earlier this month which suggests Uber started preparing for possible legal action regarding self-driving car technology before it even acquired Otto and “just two days after Levandowski left Waymo, and probably even before that.”

Uber did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The next hearing regarding the injunction in Waymo v. Uber is scheduled for May 3.

This is a breaking story and will continue to be updated.

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