nothing
Facebook was stealth testing a new ‘Find Friends Nearby’ feature over the weekend that would show the Facebook users who were around you—think Find My Friends on iOS or Where You At? on Boost Mobile—but has now pulled the feature completely.
The service was admittedly half-baked, there was no official announcement about the Find Friends Nearby and when we tried playing around with it on our phones, we found nobody near us. Facebook told Wired that Find Friends Nearby wasn’t actually intended to launch. Specifically Facebook said:
“This wasn’t a formal release—this was just something that a few engineers were testing. With all tests, some get released as full products, others don’t. Nothing more to say on this for now, but we’ll communicate to everyone when there is something to say.”
Looks like we’ll have to wait a little bit longer to creep on Facebook users in our vicinity. [Wired]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5889060/k+cups-not-only-make-bad-coffee-they-make-bad-environments
I’m drinking coffee made by a K-Cup machine right now and it sucks. A lot. But alas, I’m too lazy to get a much better cup at the cafe around the corner. That said, after learning that all of those K-Cups are piling up in landfills—and not being recycled—I may have to reconsider.
According to CNBC, the way K-Cups are constructed, they can’t be recycled. Paper and foil are strongly adhered to the plastic capsule making so that sorting facilities can’t separate the materials. So those cups are destined for a single use and nothing more.
So yeah, maybe you hate yourself (like I do), and don’t care what you consume. But maybe you shouldn’t hate the planet more than you hate yourself? [CNBC via Discovery via Treehugger]
Image via Michael Dorausch
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5885321/how-iphone-apps-steal-your-contact-data-and-why-you-cant-stop-it
The internet is starting to realize something unsettling: our iPhones send information about the people we know to private servers, often without our permission. Some offending apps are fixing themselves. Some aren’t. But the underlying problem is much bigger.
Apple allows any app to access your address book at any time—it’s built into the iPhone’s core software. The idea is to make using these apps more seamless and magical, in that you won’t have dialog boxes popping up in your face all the time, the way Apple zealously guards your location permissions at an OS level—because fewer clicks mean a more graceful experience, right? Maybe, but the consequence is privacy shivved and consent nullified. Your phone makes decisions about what’s okay to share with a company, whose motivation is, ultimately, making money, without consulting you first.
Once you peel back that pretty skin of your phone and observe the software at work—we used a proxy application called Charles—watching the data that jumps between your phone and a remote server is plain. A little too plain. What can we see?
As Paul Haddad, the developer behind the popular Twitter client TapBot pointed out to me, some of App Store’s shiniest celebrities are among those that beam away your contact list in order to make hooking up with other friends who use the app smoother. From Haddad’s own findings:
Foursquare (Email, Phone Numbers no warning)
Path (Pretty much everything after warning)
Instagram (Email, Phone Numbers, First, Last warning)
Facebook (Email, Phone Numbers, First, Last warning)
Twitter for iOS (Email, Phone Numbers, warning)
Voxer (Email, First, Last, Phone numbers, warning)
Foursquare and Instagram have both recently updated to provide a much clearer warning of what you’re about to share. Which every single app should follow, providing clear warnings before they touch your contacts. But plenty of apps aren’t so generous. “A lot of other popular social networking apps send some data,” says Haddad, “mostly names, emails, phone numbers.” Instapaper, for example, transmits your address book’s email listings when you ask it to “search contacts” to connect with other friends using the app. The app never makes it clear that my data (shown up top) is leaving the phone—and once it’s out of your hands and in Instagram’s, all you can do is trust that it’ll be handled responsibly. You know, like not be stored permanently without your knowledge.
Trust is all we’ve got, and that’s not good. “Once the data is out of your device there’s no way to tell what happens to it,” explains Haddad. Companies might do the decent thing and delete your data immediately. Like Foursquare, which says it doesn’t store your data at all after matching your friends, and never has. Twitter keeps your address book data for 18 months “to make it easy for you and your contacts to discover each other on Twitter after you’ve signed up,” but can delete the data at any time with a link at the bottom of this page. Or a company might do the Path thing, storing that information indefinitely until they’re publicly shamed into doing otherwise. Or worse.
We need a solution, and goodwill on the part of app devs is going to cut it. All the ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS? dialog boxes in the world won’t absolve Apple’s decision to hand out our address books on a pearly platter. iOS is the biggest threat to iOS—and nothing short of a major revision to the way Apple allows apps to run through your contacts should be acceptable. But is that even enough? Maybe not.
Jay Freeman, developer behind the massively popular jailbroken-iPhone program Cydia, doesn’t think Apple’s hand is enough to definitively state who gets your address book, and when:
“Neither Apple nor the application developer is in a good position to decide that ahead of time, and due to this neither Apple’s model of ‘any app can access the address book, no app can access your recent calls’, nor Google’s method of ‘developer claims they need X, take it or leave it’ is sufficient.”
Freeman’s solution? Cydia’s “one-off modifications to the underlying operating system” that we deal in, nicely transfers this control back to the user.” In other words, we can’t trust Apple or the people that make apps—so let’s just trust ourselves to control how iOS works.
Freeman left us with one, final, disquieting note. Shrewd devs and others with the knowhow have been able to dig through app traffic to find out of they’re shoveling around your address book. But there’s no easy way to do this—and if a dev really wants to sneak your data through the door, there’s technically nothing we can do to stop him: “There are tons of complex tricks that can be used to smuggle both information in network traffic and computation itself.” It’s a problem fundamental to computer science—once the data’s in a dev’s hands, he can conjure it away, too small to be noticed by App Store oversight in churning sea of other apps.
Unless Apple keeps him from getting that information in the first place by letting us all make informed decisions with our phone and the private life poured into it. Your move, iOS.
Photo: Motorolka/Shutterstock
I Read 21 Books About The Financial Crisis And They Explained Nothing
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-lo-21-books-financial-crisis-2012-2
Ever thought you would have to read 21 books to get to the bottom of what caused the financial crisis?
Andrew Lo, an economist at MIT, has some bad news: it’s going to take at least 22.
Lo, a leading expert on hedge funds and financial engineering, has written a paper (h/t NPR) for the Journal of Economic Literature describing his experience reading 21 books on the crisis — nine by journalists, 11 by academics and one by a former Treasury Secretary.
His conclusion: In a field that prides itself on its scientific rigor (however dismal), the books reveal that alarmingly few facts about the crisis have been agreed upon. Was there too little or too much regulation? How much of a factor were low interest rates? No one’s been able to say conclusively.
“After each book, I felt like I knew less,” Lo told NPR’s Planet Money.
Economics, he says, has fallen well short of that standard when it comes to understanding the crisis:
“Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.”
Read Andrew Lo’s Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review >
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You Probably Can’t Tell the Difference Between This and a Theater Projector [Video]
Sony’s 4K projector was first announced last year, but they have the thing on display at CES this year. After getting to zone out in a pitch black room where the projector blasted the new Spider Man trailer at full resolution on a 182-inch screen, I’m sold on the idea.
What makes 4K exciting for the home is that it provides a sharp image for large display sizes. 1080p video is great on a 60-inch TV, but it’s not quite as amazing when you try to project a 100-inch image on a wall. But 4K is made for screens exceeding 100 inches. So how did it look? While watching the trailer, I swore I had just paid $75 for a movie ticket and a small popcorn.
Colors were rich and bright. Nothing was washed out. Small details, like wrinkles on people’s faces or textures on a building were sharply defined. I go watch movies because I love the large screen experience. If I had one of these things, I probably wouldn’t go to the movies anymore.
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These Time Magazine Covers Explain Why Americans Know Nothing About The World
It’s not news that Time magazines uses different covers for its different regional editions, but it’s only when you gather them all together — so you can see what Europe and Asia read in Time compared to what Americans read in Time — that it becomes clear how insular the U.S. edition of Time is.
If you live abroad, the current edition of time features a dramatic picture of an Arab rebel wearing a gas mask under the headline “Revolution Redux.” In America, we got “Why anxiety is good for you”:
Hmm.
Publishing ain’t easy, of course. Editors need to pick what sells (and what sells advertising). There are good reasons why the U.S. audience won’t be as interested in Tintin as Europe’s would be, which explains why Tintin dominated the foreign Time covers on Oct. 31. In the U.S., to Time’s credit, that edition featured “The China Bubble,” a piece about whether economic growth in the East is sustainable.
That laudable example aside, however, this collection of recent Time covers does make us Americans look like we’re just not that interested in the rest of the world.
While the rest of the world gets a thoughtful piece about Islam, the U.S. gets … chores!
Cold Turkey
Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may be the key democratically elected Muslim leader who stands at the crossroads between East and West, but hey! What about these inventions?!
Mom liked them best …
The Nov. 14 editions were soft features in all regions, but American exceptionalism was alive and well.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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See Also:
- Everyone Hates Jennifer Lopez’s Fiat Ads (And She Didn’t Even Go To The Bronx To Film Them)
- This Anti-Semitic Vodka Billboard Will Be Removed From Manhattan’s West Side Any Second Now …
- How Much Is a Facebook Fan Worth? $10. Or Possibly 2 Cents.
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Facebook’s Oversized Economy Visualized
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5578544/facebooks-oversized-economy-visualized
What if Facebook were a country, and all its apps and fan pages were its fiefdoms? It would look a little something like this. Oh, and it would be filthy, filthy rich.
Because Facebook’s a private company, it’s impossible to know how much the site itself makes. But the value of fan pages alone is staggering, to say nothing of app giants like Zynga and CrowdStar.
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