Weekend Thoughts - 5.5.18

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. The Cambridge Analytica drama is finally over—well, almost... the political consulting firm has shut down all of its offices, but in reality it's just rebranded itself as a new company called Emerdata. The new company's Board of Directors includes the daughters of Robert Mercer, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and most of the original company's employees have packed up and moved into the new Emerdata offices already. That was fast! It's not entirely clear what Emerdata is going to be working on, but the company is listed under "data processing, hosting, and related activities." I wouldn't be surprised if Emerdata does something shady and is publicly shamed in the near future, just like what happened with Cambridge Analytica. In other words, even though the original company shut down, it doesn't really solve anything at all.

2. If there's a way to cheat at something, people are usually pretty quick to figure out how to do just that. Well, it turns out that people in China are cheating the system to get discounts on their health insurance by using a "swinging cradle" device to convince health insurance companies that they are getting ten thousand steps per day, even if they're actually sitting around doing nothing. I'm not surprised that this has happened, and I'm interested to see how the health insurance industry will respond to this. The ball is in their court now.

3. Speaking of tracking the state of our health with mobile phones, apps are being developed that attempt to assess your ability to drive. Police officers could use this technology in the future to figure out if someone is fit to operate a motor vehicle, and it would be capable of assessing a wide variety of impairments like whether a person is to drunk or high, too sleepy, or too medicated to drive. In other words, this would be like a universal field sobriety test that runs on mobile phones, taking the police officer's judgment out of the equation. There are already some first-generation apps out there, like Druid and Am I Stoned, that can do this to some extent. It'll be exiting to follow this space and see where it takes us in the near future.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Image by htomek, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Weekend Thoughts - 4.21.18

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Another week, another update on Facebook's latest scandal. You may recall that two weeks ago I sided with John Gruber's opinion that the total number of users that were affected was likely more than 87 million—Facebook second publicly-admitted figure. Well, it turns out we were right. Apparently, far more than 87 million people had their private data harvested out of Facebook by political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Color me not surprised.

2. Earth has a growing problem with pollution, but one group of scientists may have found one solution that may help resolve the issue—a mutant enzyme that eats plastic. The enzyme was found accidentally when the scientists started investigating a bacterium that was found in a Japanese waste dump in 2016. The discovery of this enzyme is important, and putting it to use may prove to be a completely new way of tackling the pollution crisis on our planet.

3. I thought this was pretty neat—a TL;DR for Terms of Service called ToS;DR. It's a crowdsourced database that houses website terms of service that proves a letter grade (from Grades A to E) for each site you visit, based off of things like data-retention and the rights the site can assert regarding your contributions.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Image by SatyaPrem, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Weekend Thoughts - 4.14.18

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Another week, another update on Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress this week, apologizing and claiming that the company made a "big mistake". You can now click this link (while signed into your Facebook account) to see if your data was shared with the political consulting firm.

2. Ride-sharing app Uber purchased Jump, a dockless bike-sharing app. It's good to see that bike-sharing is becoming more and more common, because that means it'll be a whole lot easier to get around without needing to own a car or bike of your own.

3. Earlier this week, Apple announced that it is now powered by 100% renewable energy worldwide. That means the company's retail stores, offices, data centers, and more are powered by clean energy. It took a lot of investments in solar arrays, wind farms, and other energy storage technologies to get to this point, and I feel like Apple should be commended. Let's hope that other companies will follow suit—and soon.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Image by sasint, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Weekend Thoughts - 4.7.18

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Remember two weeks ago when the news about Facebook's latest scandal broke? At that time, we thought there were only 50 million Facebook profiles that were affected. Now the latest update is that Cambridge Analytica actually accessed up to 87 million users' data. I'm with Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber on this one—the actual number is probably a lot more than 87 million, and Facebook will probably announce a larger number in the near future. This is known as the "Drip-Drip-Drip" PR strategy, and it allows the company involved to break the news about a scandal with a low number and then increase it after the buzz has died down. A sneaky tactic to be sure, but effective nonetheless.

2. Fans of the front page of the Internet have something to look forward to, as Reddit is getting a major redesign soon. I'm not sure that this will get me to use the site any more than I did previously (which was essentially no use at all), but it's still welcome news.

3. A rumor started going around this week claiming that Apple is going to quit using Intel processors in its Mac lineup, instead opting to manufacture its own chips in-house. I'm interested to see how that plays out—while Apple has been extremely successful with its homemade mobile processors, the desktop processor game is a totally new and uncharted territory for the company.

4. Probably the biggest news this week was that a YouTuber who was frustrated by the company's censorship practices went and shot up YouTube's headquarters in California. She was a vegan and animal rights activist who had a very strange and disturbing YouTube channel. After shooting a few people in the office, she ended up killing herself. It's a really bizarre and tragic story, but on the bright side—at least no YouTube employees were killed.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Image by troubletrace_ux, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Weekend Thoughts - 3.31.18

Image by DEZALB, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Last week we found out that Facebook provided private data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles to a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica. There has been a lot of stuff in the news about how to deal with this issue, and Wired wrote up an excellent guide about how to download your Facebook data and what to look for once you have it. So if you've still got a Facebook account by now, it's worth taking a look at this guide so that you can strip out anything that you don't want the company to know about you anymore. Bear in mind that Facebook will still have that information—they just won't be able to directly advertise to you with it, or use it to filter your News Feed.

2. I think this next one's pretty interesting. After the Chinese government shut down feminist groups online, women began using coded emoji to express their thoughts and enable communication in the feminist movement. For example, the emoji sequence "Rice Bunny"—where a user would use the bowl of rice emoji followed by the rabbi emoji—is pronounced "mi tu" when it is spoken aloud. This technique of using emoji to cleverly evade detection is innovative and impressive. I just love seeing stuff like this.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.