“Swear #Grindr goes down more times than I do”
Via Twitter: @JMPoff
Frisco gives us the ~feels~!
It its defense, it is a dog.
Facebook is planning to announce that the network will no longer allow its user to conduct private firearms sales through pages and groups, according to a Reuters report.
While Facebook confirmed that "Licensed retailers will still be able to advertise firearms on Facebook that lead to transactions outside of Facebook's platform," sales from private citizens will be subject to crackdown from the site.
Previously, Facebook's terms of service stipulated that, "Ads and Sponsored Stories may not promote firearms, ammunition, paintball guns, bb guns, fireworks, explosives, pepper spray, knives, tasers, or weapons of any kind, including those used for self-defense. Ads and Sponsored Stories may not directly or indirectly link to landing pages where users can purchase any of these products." It did not mention private groups, pages, or private messages, leaving room for pages such as this:
Facebook / Via Facebook: 882482471810753
As of now, it's unclear whether this affects just Facebook's site or its other companies as well, including What'sApp and Instagram.
Facebook has not yet responded to request for comment.
A rival game company’s lawsuit claims Kim Kardashian: Hollywood was based on these images.
Kung Fu Mobile claims in a lawsuit that they met with Kris Jenner in 2011 to discuss a potential Kardashian themed video game – and showed her mockups of what the game would look like. Jenner didn't go with Kung Fu, and instead partnered with competitor Glu Mobile instead. Glu subsequently came out with the smash hit Kim Kardashian: Hollywood in 2014.
The lawsuit claims Glu based its game off the mockups and pitch that Kung Fu had made for Jenner, and is suing for copyright infringement and breach of contract.
Kris Jenner and Glu are fighting the claims and asking for a dismissal. A hearing for the motion to dismiss will be held February 29th.
Thierry Ehrmann / Flickr / Via flic.kr
This week, the startup incubator Y Combinator put up a job listing for a researcher to study basic income, a policy where the government would, as described by Y Combinator boss Sam Altman, give all citizens "enough money to live on with no strings attached."
There are other ways to describe the UBI ("universal basic income"), the cutest being "mincome" (short for minimum income), but the general parameters include just that: all citizens get a base amount of money, unconditional on employment status or other factors.
"If you give people freedom — and you free them from the worry and stress of paying for food — some people will do nothing," Altman told BuzzFeed News in an interview. "And some people will create incredible new wealth."
It's an idea that has united Marxists and libertarians, making unlikely comrades of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Some proponents argue the policy would raise the standard of living, return a degree of labor market power to working people, and compensate unwaged work by women. Others believe direct cash payments are a more efficient way for the government to distribute money than the current welfare system.
To these pluses, Altman adds the promise of a "truer" meritocracy.
"Fifty years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people," Altman wrote. "I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income."
The notion of paying people for nothing, which has been gaining popularity in recent months, last had traction at the level of government in the 1960s and 70s, when both conservatives and liberals voiced support for versions of the policy. Free-market champion Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon each favored variations of basic income, as well as Democratic politicians such as George McGovern.
'Pepper', humanoid robots, are displayed at a smartphone stall to illustrate their applications for corporate use.
Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP / Getty Images
The idea in, its new tech context, is a kind of Soylent for economics, a synthetic miracle cure-all for poverty, manufactured by the same method and minds that tackled hunger by making a hipper, nerdier version of nutritional shakes.
After all, basic income is not such a far cry from unemployment benefits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, social security, or a souped-up take on Obama's recently proposed "wage insurance." But when techno-utopian VC firms get involved, a semi-radical social safety net study becomes a futuristic moonshot to sketch a blueprint for a society in which robots will have eliminated most kinds of work.
"I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale," Altman wrote.
Given that a number of studies have looked at basic income in the past, what's behind the decision to fund more research now?
I think those past studies are not super relevant to the world in 2016. It’s such a different time in the world. Technology in 2016 enables people to accomplish much more, with much less, than at any time in history.
Which technology in particular do you have in mind?
I don't think it's any one technology. I think it's where we are on the general exponential curve of technology. We are not so far away from a society where we have enough for everyone.
Also, in the world today, many people can create new innovations. However, with the fear of poverty that so many people face, it's very difficult to take the risks to do that. I don't think we can have equality of opportunity without something like a basic income.
Do you think favor for basic income has reached a high level of saturation in Silicon Valley?
I think there are still a lot of people who think it’s a really horrible idea. And there are a lot of people who look at how quickly everything’s changing and see this as something on the scale of the industrial revolution or cultural revolution in terms of changing the potential of what people can accomplish when you take away the fear of not being able to pay rent or for food.
If you give people freedom — and you free them from the worry and stress of paying for food — some people will do nothing. And some people will create incredible new wealth. We see this all the time at Y Combinator with people who wouldn’t be able to start up without support from us.
People dress as robots for Halloween in West Hollywood.
David Mcnew / AFP / Getty Images
You mentioned you've been interested in basic income for a long time. Did you come to it via conservative thinkers like Milton Friedman, liberal theorists, or some combination?
I honestly can't point to the time I became interested in this. [It's been] sort of a gradual process over the past 10 years. As you point out, it comes from a lot of places — it's one of the few ideas that I've heard staunch support for from liberals, conservatives, libertarians, authoritarians, etc.
What do you think it is about basic income that appeals so much to some in the tech community, rather than proposals such like welfare, unemployment benefits, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, or wage insurance?
I'm not entirely sure. Speaking for myself, it seems fair, it seems simple, and it seems like it could be good for society.
Mannequin robots perform different poses during a demonstration at the annual International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo.
Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP / Getty Images
There seem to be good indicators that on-demand economy workers can't all count on making minimum wage. Might a basic income help underwrite gig economy startups, by raising the floor for contingent workers? Or could you see basic income undercutting the model?
I'm not sure. It would certainly give the workers much more power [and] flexibility.
One of the questions you mention trying to answer is, "Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things?” To push against that — would it be so bad if people do both — if a basic income enables more play?Of course it'd be okay. I personally love playing video games. On a more serious note, I don't think hard work for its own sake is valuable (only if it actually creates new value). I think we are heading towards a world where we don't need everyone to work. If some people are happy and fulfilled playing video games, more power to them.
(Edited and condensed for clarity and length.)
When a Twitter flame war between Wendy's and Burger King last week ended with Wendy's saying it would respond to its rival's antics by serving "edible food," the spat became national news. And like many such silly and shareable stories, it made its way to Facebook's Trending List, which happily named the brands involved, but not the platform on which they sparred.
To Facebook, the Wendy's vs. Burger King Twitter fight happened not on Twitter, but in an otherworld called "Social Media."
Evidently, the word "Twitter" is something of a stumbling block for Facebook, which seems to abstain from using it, particularly in its Trending column where Twitter-related stories are often described as "Social Media" ones. And this has caused enough consternation over at Twitter that some executives are finally calling bullshit. Twitter COO Adam Bain, for example, has clearly lost patience with the euphemism, repeatedly calling it: Facebook's "Code for Twitter."
And, to be fair, Facebook has given Bain and Twitter plenty of reason to protest this week. That epic Kanye West vs. Wiz Khalifa Twitter fight? Facebook said it happened on "Social Media." The Twitter debate between B.O.B and Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Earth's shape? Yup, also "Social Media."
All this during a week in which Facebook poached Twitter product head Kevin Weil to work for Instagram, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg began referring to Facebook as the new "town hall" — a phrase that sounds an awful lot like Twitter's description of itself as the "global town square."
In fairness, Facebook does occasionally refer to its own posts as occurring on "social media," and the company has no policy forbidding the use of Twitter's name.
Asked why the Trending column often refers to Twitter as "Social Media," a Facebook spokesperson sent the following response in an email: "Trending topic descriptions and summaries are written with the goal of making sure that the topic is clear and well-summarized, so that people get an accurate summary of the news event quickly.”
Ted Cruz has a new nickname for Republican rival Donald Trump: Ducking Donald. And he's propagating it on Snapchat.
The nickname is a reference to Trump's decision to withdraw from tonight's Republican debate, and Cruz's campaign used it in a sponsored Snapchat filter that also included a cartoon rubber duck sporting Trump's trademark hairdo.
In an email, a Snapchat spokesperson confirmed the filter's authenticity and said that it will run today in Iowa only.
Snapchat isn't exactly a part of the political-advertising mainstream, but it's picking up some steam. The campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and John Kasich — as well as some Super PACs — have all run ads on the platform this election season.
Cruz used the same "Ducking Donald" attack in a post included in Snapchat's Live Story from the debate. "I'm looking forward to being on the debate stage tonight in Iowa," he said. "The only question is: Where will Donald be?"
Matt King / Getty Images
The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday agreed to release its 2016 Broadband Progress Report to the public at the end of this week. And when it’s published it will be as shocking and dismal as the one that preceded it.
Conducted over 2015, the FCC’s review found that broadband internet is “not being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to all Americans,” a finding that prompted the agency to “take immediate action” to accelerate connectivity. Worse: The U.S. ranks just 16th out of 34 developed nations in broadband speed and access.
34 million Americans currently lack access to broadband internet, according to the FCC. Rural communities are especially deprived, with 39 percent of the rural population lacking access, compared to just 4 percent in urban areas. The commission found that 41 percent of American schools have failed to meet the agency’s short-term goal of 100 Mb speeds. These schools educate nearly half of the nation’s children.
FCC officials described the disparity in web access as a significant barrier to economic and social life. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn challenged those who have access to connected computers and mobile devices to “forgo either for a week” to see “how challenging it is to keep up with the daily demands of work, school, home, health, commerce, sanity, just about everything.”
But even as the majority of FCC commissioners support efforts to close the gap — providing broadband subsidies for poor households, offering government grants to schools and rural communities, spurring industry investments in network infrastructure — commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Ajit Pai registered their displeasure.
“The [Obama] administration’s policies have failed,” said Pai, who along with O’Rielly, the other Republican commissioner, often voices dissenting opinions within the FCC. “You might think that for all the money the Administration has spent, there would be real progress. But the FCC doesn’t think so. And in many ways, I agree."
O’Reilly characterised the broadband report as politically motivated, designed to invite additional government regulation into the broadband market. “I strongly oppose the notion that broadband is not being deployed in a timely fashion,” he said. “Apparently, no amount of progress will ever be good enough for a commission that is bent on regulating broadband at any cost.”
To be fair, the FCC’s report indicates that the country’s glaring internet gap seems to be closing, with the percentage of Americans without access at 20 percent in 2012, 17 percent in 2013 , and 10 percent in 2014. That said, five years ago, in its 2011 Broadband Progress Report, the agency also concluded that "broadband is not being reasonably and timely deployed and is not available to all Americans,” a conclusion the agency has come to pretty much every year since.
Yes, profit.
David Ryder / Getty Images
Amazon
Amazon stock had soared in the lead-up to what many expected would be a positive earnings report. It was up up almost 9% on Thursday, and its share price more than doubled in the past year.
But investors sold off the stock in after-hours trading following the earnings report, and the stock was down almost 13%. Amazon reported a $482 million profit for the quarter, which was more than double the $214 million profit in the same period in the previous year, but well below what analysts expected. It was also the largest quarterly profit Amazon has ever reported.
This is a huge shift for Amazon, which in recent years has worried investors with its large spending and seeming indifference to profits. In early 2013, Slate described Amazon as "a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers." The company was coming off a $39 million loss in 2012.
In 2013, it would earn $274 million, and in 2014, the company lost $214 million. In all of 2015, however, profit soared $482 million. The gyrations in income came with massive investments by Amazon in faster delivery, free delivery for Amazon Prime members, and the expansion of its media offerings, including original content, for Prime members.
But revenue didn't grow as much as people expected in the last three months. Amazon had $35.7 billion worth of sales, up 22% from $29.3 billion a year ago but slightly below what analysts had expected.
Investors have flocked to Amazon because of the belief that it will continually hoover up more and more of the brick-and-mortar retail business, along with having the most profitable cloud computing business in the world. That's why Amazon trumpets metrics besides profits like revenue, to show how quickly its e-commerce footprint overall is growing, and different measures of cash flow, which generally track money coming into the company and the money it takes to run the business in a given period.
One bright spot was Amazon web services, the company's cloud computing business. It reported $2.4 billion in revenue, just above what analysts expected, and $687 million in operating profit — a huge number given that all of Amazon made about $1.1 billion in operating profit for the quarter.
Apple
Today in power cord plug wall-adapter news, Apple is announcing a sizable voluntary recall of AC wall plug adapters designed for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Continental Europe, New Zealand and South Korea. The recall covers certain adapters sold and shipped with Mac and certain iOS devices between 2003 and 2015. It also includes plug adapters sold in the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit, so you might want to check if yours are affected on Apple's site, here.
The recall comes after incidents where, according to the company, "affected Apple two-prong wall plug adapters may break and create a risk of electrical shock if touched." Apple did not elaborate but insists that the incidents are "very rare." The company said in a statement that it is aware of 12 incidents worldwide, none of which took place in the United States. The recall does not affect Apple UBS power adapters or Apple plug adapters designed for Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, the United Kingdom, or the United States.
In an official statement, Apple gives some instructions on how to identify a recall-worthy adapter, but they're pretty confusing: "An affected two-prong plug adapter has either four or five characters or no characters on the inside slot where it attaches to the main Apple power adapter." So you might be best off checking with the company if you have any concerns or suspicions you might be affected.
Given the small number of incidents, the voluntary recall is out of an abundance of caution but given the wide scope of the recall, a large number of people will be eligible for an adapter exchange. To find out how to make the exchange, you can visit Apple's adapter recall page.
Ingram Publishing / Getty Images
Matthew Panks takes five pills a day to keep his blood pressure low. But sometimes he forgets or runs out, so he listened with interest last month when his physician proposed trying a new kind of pill: one that, when swallowed, wirelessly alerts an app to its ingestion. And if Panks doesn’t take his meds? The app reminds him, and notifies his doctor — and his wife — if he misses a dose.
“I’m human,” the 58-year-old from South Lake Tahoe, California, told BuzzFeed News. Sometimes “I forget to take it and it does remind you. It’s a nice thing to have around.”
This futuristic-sounding setup was invented by Proteus Digital Health, a startup that wants to usher in an era of so-called wireless medicine — where your health is continually monitored even when you’re out of your doctor’s sight.
Though privacy advocates worry that digestible sensors might herald unparalleled new forms of surveillance, Proteus’s executives say they’re out to fix a long-standing and often fatal problem: Up to half of patients in developed countries don’t follow prescribed treatments for chronic illnesses, leading to additional health complications and costs, according to the World Health Organization. By one estimate, medication nonadherence causes 125,000 deaths annually in the United States alone.
Since 2001, Proteus has been working on a high-tech solution to that problem and last year the FDA cleared it for human use. It makes a pill coated in digestible metals — copper and magnesium — which react with stomach acid to send a tiny electrical signal through your body. This charge zaps a Band-Aid-like patch on your skin, which sends a signal via Bluetooth to an iOS app that notes you’ve taken the pill. The skin patch, worn for days at a time, also transmits physiological data like step count and time spent being active versus resting.
Last month, Proteus began for the first time to give pills and patches to patients outside of its FDA clinical trials. The company teamed up with Barton Health System in the Lake Tahoe area and outfitted 100 patients with high blood pressure with its system.
Proteus' technology: the app, patch, and pill.
Proteus Digital Health
Those patients include Panks, who works for the U.S. Forest Service and, until the pilot program, had never worn so much as a Fitbit. Panks takes one pill in the morning and four in the evening — he keeps them by the coffeemaker so as not to forget — and some of them contain Proteus’s ingestible sensor (Proteus has altered only a certain few medications). So far, Panks enjoys getting reminders, learning about his biometrics and, for example, pushing himself to walk more steps a day.
Barton CEO Clint Purvance said Proteus’s technology addresses one of health care’s most frustrating problems. “We look at the data: Do we need to change the medicine or is this the right dose?” he told BuzzFeed News. “Now we know they’re taking it regularly, we can make appropriate decisions on how to adjust that medicine instead of going into another medicine or changing dose.”
Right now at Barton, a compounding pharmacy combines Proteus’s sensors with eight generic medications for hypertension. Proteus says academics at University of California, San Francisco, the University of Washington, and UC San Diego are also experimenting with whether the sensors can monitor more complicated conditions like tuberculosis and hepatitis C. Big pharma is eyeing the company’s technology as well: Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. of Japan wants to build Proteus’s sensors into its antipsychotic medicine Abilify, and the FDA agreed to consider it for review in September.
Michelle De Mooy, deputy director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, worries about the privacy implications of digestible sensors like the ones Proteus has developed. She wonders, for example, what might happen if a patient’s medication-taking patterns were to be shared with employers, insurers or anyone who has a financial stake in keeping health care costs low.
“Quantifying health and electronic medical records can facilitate people really taking control of their health care,” De Mooy said. “But when it’s something that almost feels like surveillance of the body, that concerns me. ... What happens when a patient doesn’t do what they’re supposed to do?”
Proteus Digital Health
It may be too early to answer those questions about Proteus, but they are important to keep in mind as wireless medicine advances. Proteus isn’t the only company developing medical sensors for the body: Startup MC10 is developing a tattoo-like BioStamp that can monitor temperature, heart rate, and movement; various insulin makers are working on an “artificial pancreas” that would automatically detect glucose levels and administer insulin to diabetics without needing manual interference. Proteus has the added advantage of more than $350 million in funding and a $1.1 billion valuation.
Dr. George Savage, Proteus’s chief medical officer, said that the company values patients’ privacy; he stressed the ease of opting out of medication tracking. “This all relies on wearing a Band-Aid and pairing it with your phone and taking medicine with a digital chip inside,” he told BuzzFeed News. “If a patient doesn’t want to do this, they only have to take the Band-Aid off.” He added that patients working with Proteus typically appear “hungry for help.” “Right now, if you think about it, we’re expecting people to learn how to manage a chronic illness based on a few minutes with a doctor and a piece of paper that’s very complicated.”
Savage noted that Proteus takes several steps to protect patients’ information — it encrypts the smartphone and cloud databases in which it’s stored in accordance with federal privacy laws. Patients are also able to choose who accesses Proteus’s cloud-based app.
Panks, for his part, doesn’t mind being held accountable. “It keeps me pretty much on the level,” he said.
Claudioventrella / Getty Images
On Oct. 10, 2012, 11-year-old Colman Chadam was pulled out of class at his public middle school in Palo Alto, California, and asked if he wanted to say goodbye to his friends. According to Chadam’s parents, the teacher told him it was his last day at the school. Officials allegedly told the Chadams that the reason for their son's dismissal involved his DNA: Colman had genetic markers associated with the rare disease cystic fibrosis — even though, James and Jennifer Chadam say, he is healthy and has never had the actual disease.
The Chadams say that a teacher revealed this confidential information to other parents, who then complained that Colman posed a health risk to their children, inciting the Palo Alto Unified School District to force Colman to transfer schools, according to their complaint.
So they sued, alleging that the district violated the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and their son’s First Amendment rights to the privacy of his medical information. Their 2013 lawsuit, which sought to recoup legal fees and damages, was thrown out by a federal court that said there wasn’t enough evidence that the district denied Colman access to a service because it considered him disabled. But this month, the Chadams appealed to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — and attorneys for the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education are voicing support for the family.
As DNA testing proliferates, this case raises broader issues about how genetic information should be protected and shared — not just in schools but also in workplaces and insurance companies.
“The family would like a definitive and unequivocal statement from the Ninth Circuit that you can’t just do this to people based on genetic markers alone,” Stephen Jaffe, the family’s attorney, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “The more people that get genetic testing done, either for medical reasons or recreationally, the more possibility this stuff gets out. … It’s not a great leap to be concerned about what happens to this information.”
A spokesperson for the Palo Alto Unified School District did not immediately return a request for comment.
Colman’s DNA was analyzed as part of a treatment he underwent after having emergency surgery to correct a heart defect at birth in 2000. From a DNA test, Colman’s parents learned he had genetic markers linked with cystic fibrosis — an inherited disease that creates thick, sticky mucus in the lungs and digestive system. Yet Colman has been monitored ever since and has never developed the illness, his parents alleged in court documents filed Jan. 14.
Based on the complaint, Colman’s genes appear to contain a mutation or mutations that have been identified in people with — but are not necessarily proven to lead to — cystic fibrosis, Dr. Dennis Nielson, director of UC San Francisco’s Cystic Fibrosis Center, told BuzzFeed News. Out of 2,000 associated mutations, “there are 160 or more we know cause disease,” said Nielson, who does not have direct knowledge of the case. “There will be a bunch more that cause disease that we don’t know that much about. There are a whole bunch of genetic variations that cause minor problems that don’t ever lead to the kinds of problems we really define as cystic fibrosis.”
Colman’s genetic makeup wasn’t an issue until summer 2012, the Chadams say, when they moved to Palo Alto. To enroll Colman at Jordan Middle School, Jennifer Chadam filled out district-requested paperwork with private medical information about him, according to the lawsuit. That September, one of Colman’s teachers told another set of parents that Colman “had the disease of cystic fibrosis,” according to the complaint.
A boy (not Colman Chadam) sneezing.
Mermusta / Getty Images
These parents, whom the lawsuit refers to as “Mr. and Mrs. X,” appeared to be alarmed by the news because their children had active cystic fibrosis. People with cystic fibrosis can cross-infect each other and spread germs that lead to lung infections, according to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. (The organization recommends that such people keep at least 6 feet apart and use separate facilities.)
School administrators told the Chadams that these other parents had “discovered” Colman’s condition, according to the lawsuit. Mr. and Mrs. X then allegedly asked the district to remove Colman from school, citing concerns about their children’s health — even though the Chadams explained that Colman was healthy. The Chadams’ doctor also defended Colman in a letter, saying that he wasn’t a health risk, according to the lawsuit.
To diagnose cystic fibrosis, doctors look for not only genetic mutations, but also a positive sweat test (a high amount of salt in sweat) and a clear symptom like a lung infection. Only then does someone have cystic fibrosis, said Nielson of UCSF. “If he really doesn’t have clinical cystic fibrosis,” he said of Colman, “then he’s not a risk to anybody else.”
Jordan Middle School.
In 2012, when Colman was told he would be transferred to another school, his family obtained an injunctive relief that ultimately kept him in school. The Chadams later sued in federal court; the district successfully sought to dismiss the lawsuit. The trial court ruled in 2014 that the district had reasonably believed, based on medical advice it had received, that Colman did pose a health risk, and therefore hadn’t violated the ADA. The Chadams didn’t show evidence that the district had denied Colman access to a service, program, or activity because it considered him disabled, the trial court ruled. It also ruled that under the First Amendment, the Chadams could sue only individual employees in the school district, not the school district as a whole.
The district cited a letter from a Stanford University doctor recommending that the school remove Colman for the safety of Mr. and Mrs. X’s children, according to court documents. But the Chadams say in court filings they did not know who the doctor was, despite asking the district.
Jaffe, the Chadams’ attorney, argued in the appeal that the trial court order suggests that “a school district’s real or imagined concern over potential safety issues overrides ... an individual’s First Amendment rights to the privacy of his medical and other information. That is a dangerous holding against which a strong public policy exists.” He cited a 1987 case in which the Supreme Court ruled against discrimination based on the contagious effects of a physical impairment.
And he argued that the Chadams' case could have broad implications. “Affirming the district court’s ruling in this case will open a wide gap in the wall of privacy protection the law presently affords personal genetic information,” Jaffe continued. “It will implicitly permit unqualified non-medical persons such as school districts, insurance companies and employers to base life-altering decisions on private genetic information. It will cause the public to hesitate or refuse to get genetically screened when to do so may be in their best interests or would assist medical research.”
“If he really doesn’t have clinical cystic fibrosis, then he’s not a risk to anybody else.”
He described one hypothetical scenario to BuzzFeed News: “An employer sees some of his employees has a genetic marker … and says ‘I’m going to fire you because you’re a danger to my other employees and I don’t want them getting sick.’ That’s not a great leap.”
The Chadams now also have support from attorneys from the Departments of Justice and Education. In an amicus curiae brief filed this week, they argued that the trial court hadn’t had the legal grounds to throw out the case — so it should be revisited.
“In view of these straightforward allegations,” they wrote, “the complaint cannot reasonably be construed to allege anything other than that defendant intentionally removed (Colman) from his school, and therefore denied him the benefit of attending his neighborhood school, because of his perceived disability.”
Starry
Internet.
But through the air.
Chet Kanojia is not the first person to have this idea, but his new startup, Starry, promises to revolutionize how the internet gets delivered to people's homes — instead of using cables, it plans to use the air. If it can pull it off, Starry will bring some much-needed competition to the broadband market, where cable companies often have a local monopoly. But that's a giant "if."
Kanojia's last company, Aereo, also had grand visions of disrupting the airwaves, through tiny antennas that sucked up free-to-air TV signals and streamed them to viewers over the internet. It looked promising, until the Supreme Court ruled it was violating copyright laws, in a decision that effectively killed the company.
The secret sauce this time around is the use of high-frequency radio spectrum, which has been used for point-to-point communications in the military and in scientific research, but is still a fairly novel proposition for use by an internet service provider.
Using this spectrum means you can transmit huge amounts of data quickly, but it comes with drawbacks — in particular, it only works over short distances. To get around this, Starry requires a series of devices: Rooftop antennae every couple of kilometers, connecting to receivers on household windows that broadcast into the home.
Starry claims this setup can provide internet at faster speeds, with no data caps and at a lower cost than cable companies. The big savings come, Kanojia said, from the much lower cost of building out the infrastructure for the service. No digging trenches along roads and sidewalks, no mile after mile of cable and the maintenance crews that come with it.
"It's frankly amazing technology," Kanojia said. He estimated that the per-home cost of building out the service would be $25, not the $2,500 he said traditional fixed-wire broadband costs. But rolling out those huge networks of rooftop devices won't be easy.
And the details are still limited: Starry and its representatives declined to comment on where the service would launch outside of Boston (where it will have a trial this summer), how much it would cost, how much money the company had raised, or its valuation.
“Plug it in, set it up, and in a few minutes like magic, you have faster than broadband internet, through the air,” a slick promotional video said.
The company has about 50 employees, including several senior executives from Aereo. It has big name investors like Tiger Global, the private equity firm KKR, and Aereo backer IAC. While Kanojia's last venture flamed out after its defeat at the Supreme Court, he earned many fans in the tech industry for his hard-charging approach to shaking up an old, cushy set of incumbents.
And this time, he doesn't expect lawsuits to be his biggest headache — instead, the challenge will simply be delivering on the promise of a "magical" alternative to rolling out a cable network. "I don't see a legal problem," Kanojia told reporters. "It's a huge execution problem."
For more than half of Facebook's 1.59 billion monthly active users, the platform's desktop version might as well not exist.
823 million of those 1.59 billion access Facebook only via their mobile devices.
Reporting fourth quarter earnings after market close Wednesday, Facebook released a slew of new metrics showcasing its strength in mobile. Among the most impressive stats: A whopping 1.44 billion of Facebook's 1.59 billion monthly active users access it on mobile devices in some way. It seems Facebook is largely a mobile company, with few holdouts using its service on the desktop.
Mobile user growth helped Facebook turn in impressive results for the quarter. The company reported revenue of $5.67 billion, beating analyst estimates of $5.37 billion. Of that, $4.5 billion came from mobile devices, up 81% from last year.
Facebook possesses some of the best advertising data in the world, thanks to its many members, which tell it everything from their full names to what type of pets they have — this in addition to logging on to the service, giving Facebook the ability to target them with ads whether they're on their phones in a public library or using a friend's computer.
This combination of user numbers and data is why Facebook is predicted to capture more than 30% of total display ad spending in the U.S. this year, according to eMarketer.
Caroline O'Donovan / BuzzFeed News
East San Jose, in Santa Clara County, California, is a town of pickup trucks, strip malls, and single-family homes just a short drive from the mythical campuses of billion-dollar companies like Facebook and Google. And it’s where workers and organizers gathered to meet with Department of Labor Secretary Tom Perez at the Mexican Heritage Plaza, across the street from a row of abandoned storefronts, on Tuesday afternoon.
The group discussed what has become a popular, if not exactly pleasant, topic in the Silicon Valley region: the widening inequality gap between white-collar tech workers and the janitors, drivers, cooks, and landscapers Perez came 3,000 miles to meet. The mood was hopeful.
The event was hosted by a coalition of labor groups calling itself Silicon Valley Rising, which this week proposed a ballot initiative in San Jose that would require employers to give more hours to the people who already work for them, rather than hiring additional part-time workers. Perez was there because President Obama, in his last 357 days of office, has decided to make economic security for American workers a priority — and he’s starting with Silicon Valley.
“We work in a very important part of the country, where there are very important companies,” said Inmar Liborio, a janitor with the SEIU who spoke through a translator.“But the reality for janitors and their families,” he went on to say, “is that we can’t live here. Sometimes we have to commute up to two hours just to come to work.”
BuzzFeed News/ Caroline O'Donovan
This week, a lot happened in Washington that could impact people like Liborio. On Monday the Department of Labor announced that, for the first time in 10 years, it (along with the Bureau of Labor Statistics) will try to make an accurate count of how many people are sustaining themselves and their families on part-time, gig, and contract work. And on Tuesday, the administration announced a $100 million pilot grant for an idea that has already built some momentum in Silicon Valley: portable benefits, essentially a pooled fund for things like workers' comp and paid time off that follows a worker between jobs.
Throughout the week, Secretary Perez will be talking to tech companies about exactly who would pay into such a fund. He told BuzzFeed News that he feels “employers need to have skin in the game.”
“I hear people say, 'The only way we can innovate is if we have unfettered discretion as employers to do whatever we want,'” Perez told BuzzFeed News. “I don’t agree with that.”
One of the people watching Secretary Perez speak about the White House’s plan for “inclusive innovation” was a cafeteria worker who serves daily meals to employees on Intel’s campus, not 10 minutes from the Mexican Heritage Plaza.
Wednesday, she joined 79 of her colleagues at Guckenheimer Corporate Dining in petitioning for a “fair right to organize.” A spokesperson for the union told BuzzFeed News that cafeteria workers bring in around $22,000 a year, a sum that simply can’t cover the cost of living in San Jose, where he said at least one Intel cafeteria worker is living five to a bedroom.
Venmo
Venmo, the popular payments app, is finally reaching beyond peer-to-peer payments. On Wednesday afternoon, the service introduced a feature that will allow people to use their Venmo accounts to make payments inside third-party apps. In doing so, the Paypal-owned company is shifting to a service that facilitates retail purchases.
At launch these new merchant payments will be limited to two apps: Munchery, an on-demand food startup, and Gametime, a sports ticket vendor. Venmo, according to a statement from general manager Michael Vaughan, intends to support additional apps in the future. Merchant payments will be limited to Venmo's iOS app at launch, but the company says an Android build is on the way.
For Venmo users, merchant payments will streamline purchases previously made with credit cards. Payment information is stored securely in Venmo. The app's sharing option, which pulls all money transfers made on it into an activity feed, will become a second, optional step when making payments in a third party app.
According to a report in Quartz, Venmo plans to extend the new feature to all PayPal merchants. The company will presumably charge a service fee for every payment capitalizing on the additional dollars flowing through it as it supports more merchants.
If you have a Venmo account, you'll get an email when the feature is available.
Columbia Pictures
Should consumers who pay for cable or satellite TV have an array of set-top options from which to choose? The head of the Federal Communications Commission thinks so. But he’ll be working against the current market, where consumers generally rent equipment from their TV providers at what many believe are unfair prices, absent real competition.
FCC Chair Tom Wheeler proposed an alternative vision for cable boxes Wednesday, one in which consumers personally select the set-top device they use to watch TV shows or internet video. In an essay published by Re/code, Wheeler argued that his proposal would enhance telecom innovation, increase consumer choice, and lower costs.
“It’s time to unlock the set-top box market — let’s let innovators create, and then let consumers choose,” he said, comparing the forced rental of set-top boxes to decades past, when households had to lease their telephones from operators.
According to the FCC, 99 percent of pay-TV customers rent set-top boxes from their providers. And unlike computers, TVs, and mobile phones, the cost of cable boxes to consumers has increased, averaging $231 every year. Wheeler’s proposal wouldn’t set a government standard for delivering TV and internet programming; instead it would set rules forcing providers to pass along channel line-ups and the content itself to the creators of competing devices and software.
Without this overhaul, Wheeler believes consumers end up leasing pricey, inferior products — devices that fail to connect well with the proliferation of online streaming content.
While third-party box providers like Roku, Apple, Google and Tivo stand to gain from a more open arrangement, cable companies face the prospect of lost revenue from fewer set-top box rentals, and potentially the forfeiture of crucial consumer data — who is watching what and when — information that tech companies can use to calibrate advertising and other services.
Wheeler said he will share the details of his proposal with his fellow commissioners this week.
Wei-hua / Getty Images
The board game Go has a deceptively simple premise: Defeat your opponent by using white or black stones to claim the most territory on a 19-by-19 grid. But people have been wrestling with it for millennia — and the game has confounded some of the most advanced artificial intelligence around. While “supercomputers” like IBM’s Deep Blue and Watson have trounced humans at chess, checkers, backgammon, and even Jeopardy!. Go, with its relative multitude of possible moves, was unbeatable.
Until now. Google researchers said Wednesday that their Go software has defeated a pro player — European champion Fan Hui — at the full version of the game. The researchers said their work, described in a new Nature study, appears to be a major artificial intelligence milestone. Beyond cracking the ancient game, it could also improve the intuitive feel and accuracy of Google’s current and future products. It’s a big win for machines.
“It was one of the big open problems that people didn’t really know how to solve,” Stefano Ermon, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, told BuzzFeed News. (Ermon was not involved with the project.) “I don’t think anybody was expecting to see it solved so soon. It’s really a major step forward.”
Zhengzaishuru / Getty Images
The program, known as AlphaGo, was developed by DeepMinds Technologies, a British artificial intelligence company that Google acquired in 2014 and renamed DeepMind. Go presents a particularly difficult challenge for artificial intelligence, the researchers explained, because every position comes with an average of 200 possible moves — compared to 20 possible moves in chess. Chess pieces with assigned values, like queens and pawns, add another layer of structure to gameplay. There is no equivalent in Go.
In 1997, an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue beat the world chess champion. That machine relies on knowledge inputted in a structured way that can quickly be searched and retrieved, Google’s DeepMind researchers said. In contrast, AlphaGo “learns” on its own, through algorithms derived from two types of computer neural networks: one that identifies possible moves that are most likely to lead to a win, and another that evaluates the favorability of each position that lies ahead. “This approach makes AlphaGo’s search much more human-like than previous approaches,” DeepMind engineer David Silver said in a conference call with reporters.
The researchers trained AlphaGo to predict human moves by running it against 30 million moves from games played by humans, then had it play millions of simulated games against itself and gradually improve through trial-and-error. Finally, AlphaGo faced off against other Go programs and won all but one of 500 games — even when opponents were given a head-start. Against Fan Hui, it enjoyed a clean sweep in a five-game match, the first time that a Go professional has lost such a match.
"I don’t think anybody was expecting to see it solved so soon. It’s really a major step forward."
The progress AlphaGo has made in a relatively short amount of time is certain to surprise Go devotees, even though DeepMind researchers hinted that a big announcement was coming back in November. In 2014, when another piece of software called Crazy Stone beat Go grandmaster Norimoto Yoda, it had a four-stone head-start. When Wired asked its programmer when a machine would win without a handicap, he guessed “maybe ten years.” Facebook was also vying to crack Go — but Google appears to have won that race.
In a statement about the newest study, British Go Association President Jon Diamond said, “Before this match, the best computer programs were not as good as the top amateur players, and I was still expecting that it would be at least five to 10 years before a program would be able to beat the top human players. Now it looks like this may be imminent.”
AlphaGo will next face off against the top Go player in the world, Lee Se Dol of South Korea. But it may well have a wider impact on Google’s services. The researchers said the deep learning that powers AlphaGo could be used to improve Google services already familiar to millions — improving web or smartphone search recommendations. Soon, it could also be used to analyze X-rays and help doctors make diagnoses. And in the long term?
“My dream is to use these learning systems to help with science,” said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind co-founder. “You can think of the system we built for Go as applicable to any problem that fits the description where you have a large amount of data that you have to find the insights in and find structure in automatically, and then you want to be able to make long-term plans with it and decisions about what to do next to reach some kind of goal.”
Georges Gobet / AFP / Getty Images
Hearing about AlphaGo may make it sound like it won’t be long before robots take over our minds and jobs, a fear shared by the likes of Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates — but the DeepMind scientists were quick to dispel that notion. Although these systems can learn how to perform tasks themselves, they still require human direction. The company set up an internal ethics board when it joined Google to oversee how the technology is deployed, and the researchers said that they share Google’s promise to never use artificial intelligence for military purposes.
“Undoubtedly there will be huge benefits to society,” Hassabis said, “but we’ve got to make sure they’re evenly distributed.”
If you watched TV in Bolivia or read a newspaper in Ghana or listened to the radio in Panama in the last year or so, there’s a chance you saw an ad for something called Free Basics by Facebook.
Free Basics is available via app or mobile website, through which the Facebook-led organization Internet.org provides free access to some content, like Wikipedia, the weather, and of course Facebook itself. In an op-ed published by the Times of India, CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes that Free Basics is about helping people to “start using the Internet” and claims that its launch worldwide has brought 15 million people online.
But a BuzzFeed News survey of mobile operators around the globe — the companies that actually implement Free Basics — found that in several markets local telecoms largely see Free Basics as a way to give themselves an edge over competitors. While the grand idea might be an initiative to get people online for the first time, these telecoms view and market Free Basics as an alluring offering for digitally savvy but cash-strapped consumers.
Exact figures about who uses Free Basics, and for what, aren’t readily available. BuzzFeed News requested data from Facebook regarding how many people are using Free Basics internationally and how many of those go on to purchase data plans, but the company did not release any additional information about who uses the program. The local telecoms said that such data is either not collected, or not immediately available.
According to Facebook, there are 37 other countries in addition to India where Free Basics is available to consumers — 20 in Africa, 11 in Asia and the Middle East, and 6 in Latin America. Two of those countries were added to the program within the last month. Facebook works with at least one mobile carrier in each country.
To get a better understanding of how Free Basics is actually used, and how people around the world are getting online, BuzzFeed News contacted each of these carriers with questions about who’s signing up for Free Basics, how it’s being marketed, what content they’re accessing, and whether these users also pay for data. Of the companies contacted, only half a dozen responded with information about how the Free Basics program was launched, and none were willing to share data with BuzzFeed News on how their customers were using Free Basics.
A motorist rides past a billboard displaying Facebook's Free Basics initiative in Mumbai, India.
Danish Siddiqui / Reuters
While Facebook is often said to be giving away “free internet” via Free Basics, it’s actually the mobile operators in various nations providing the data subsidy, according to multiple carriers BuzzFeed News contacted. “Virgin Mobile Mexico pays to cover the cost of data,” a representative said. Yuyo Nachali-Kambikambi, a spokesperson for Airtel in Zambia, where nearly a quarter million people are accessing Free Basics every month, also confirmed that the local carrier, not Facebook, covers the cost of the data.
There’s a straightforward reason carriers are willing to foot the bill for a free, albeit stripped down, version of the internet: It’s a winning customer acquisition strategy. Interestingly, several mobile carriers told BuzzFeed News that customers aren’t using Free Basics to access the internet for the first time. A series of interviews with the employees of local mobile carriers in markets where Facebook offers Free Basics suggests that many users of the program already pay for cellular data and essentially use Free Basics as a way to reduce costs. Thus it might be viewed not as a way to go online, but rather as a way to remain online.
For example, in Panama, where 30% of Digicel subscribers use Free Basics, it seems to be used at least partially as a fallback option. “The majority of those customers also used paid data the month they used Free Basics,” wrote Antonia Graham, Digicel’s head of group public relations, in an email to BuzzFeed News. “They use Free Basics when they have no credit.” Graham said when paying accounts run out of data, Digicel automatically pushes them to the Free Basics webpage.
Individuals responding to direct messages on Airtel Ghana and and Airtel Uganda’s verified Twitter accounts both said that most customers already have internet access. An online sales associate named Gemma who works for Viva in Bolivia said customers there turn to Free Basics “when they run out of credit” on their paid data plans.
In Iraq, a manager at the Korek telecommunications company said that almost all of the customers who come in asking about Free Basics are already online. Out of the hundreds of customers he helps each week, he could only think of one or two who use Free Basics without a normal data plan.
“They want Free Basics as an addition to plans they already have,” he said. “These are people who are already online. I would say that I have had no customers who are new to the internet who come in asking me about Free Basics.”
Part of that, he added, might be because Korek only advertises Free Basics on their website, and in web-only videos. He asked to remain anonymous, as the corporate offices of Korek refused to answer questions from BuzzFeed about the program. “If you ask me, ‘Is this program for people who don’t have the internet?’ my answer is no.”
In his op-ed, Zuckerberg argues that Free Basics is a “bridge to,” and not a replacement for, “the full internet.” As evidence of this fact, he says that “half the people who use Free Basics to go online for the first time pay to access the full internet within 30 days.”
None of the mobile carriers BuzzFeed News spoke with could confirm this figure. But it is clear that these local telecoms view Free Basics as a way to attract new customers — in some cases by stealing them from rivals. Graham said that in Panama, Digicel advertises Free Basics to users “on the competitors’ network.” In an email, a spokesperson for Tigo, which partners with Facebook in a number of countries, including Colombia, Guatemala, Tanzania, the DRC, and Senegal, described Free Basics as a “promotional offer that Facebook and Tigo created together.”
Joel Kades, Virgin Mobile Latin America’s chief marketing officer, made a similar case. Virgin announced in December that it would partner with Facebook to offer Free Basics to around 3 million customers in Mexico. “The local teams want to see if it’s being used, which we hope it is,” he told BuzzFeed News, “and then if those people are turning into more valuable customers over time.” The way Kades sees it, Free Basics has both a social mission and a business purpose. So far, over half of those 3 million subscribers — most of whom are young city dwellers on their first job — are using Free Basics.
In Egypt, where Free Basics abruptly stopped working roughly two months after it was first launched, a local representative for the Etisalat company told BuzzFeed News that few customers had complained about the sudden end of the program.
“Nobody came into stores asking about it, as far as I know. People used it as a free service when it was on their phone and went back to buying data when it was gone,” said the representative, who would not speak on record, as he said Etisalat was still in talks to restart the service in Egypt. “People were more angry and vocal when we changed our marketing logo.”
Yet while Free Basics is free, it is not without controversy. At least one telecom BuzzFeed News contacted in Peru said that, because of ongoing policy debates at the national level, it was not possible to share information about how Free Basics is marketed and how widely it’s used. Miguel Cassinelli, manager of institutional relations and sustainability for Entel, Facebook’s partner in Peru, said the issue of whether Free Basics complies with Peruvian net neutrality regulations would be discussed by the nation’s regulatory body in the coming months. Osiptel spokesperson Lenka Zajec Yelusic said the agency was unable to comment because the matter is “still under evaluation.” Free Facebook is still being advertised by Entel in Peru.
Peru isn’t the only Latin American country to have concerns about Free Basics and net neutrality. Chile’s government banned zero-rating in 2014, and as a result, Free Basics is not offered there at all.
William Alden / Via BuzzFeed News
Two years ago, Uber faced a problem that could have been financially ruinous. Sure, the ride-hailing company has fought with regulators and incumbents over virtually everything — from the way it classifies drivers to the amount it charges for rides — but this problem was particularly big: Insurance companies didn't want to cover its drivers.
Waging this fight would require mighty powers of persuasion and even the ability to help create a new type of auto insurance. To do it, Uber hired a young executive with exactly zero experience in the insurance business.
Gus Fuldner, Uber's 33-year-old head of insurance, doesn't look or act like the archetype of the Silicon Valley disruptor. He's no Travis Kalanick, Uber's pugnacious, outspoken CEO. In square-toed shoes, with a stooped posture, and blond hair parted down the middle, Fuldner comes off more like a junior economics professor. His idea of fun is obsessing over Bitcoin, credit card networks, or the ownership structure of the Green Bay Packers — all topics he has discussed in his more than 200 answers on the question-and-answer site Quora.
Fuldner's style was on display in early 2015, when in little-noticed testimony before a government commission in South Carolina, he challenged a longtime insurance lawyer on a technical point. The totality of Fuldner's insurance experience at that time was one year at a startup that many insurers viewed with suspicion. The lawyer, Thom Salane, several decades Fuldner's senior, noted that he had been representing insurance companies for 35 years.
With all the restraint of a graduate student who has just devoured every book on a particular topic, Fuldner said the lawyer didn't know what he was talking about.
"Mr. Salane’s reference to an 'aggregate limit' suggests he is confusing an auto liability policy with a general liability policy, which covers non-auto risks such as slips and falls in an office," Fuldner said. "General liability insurance generally contains an aggregate limit, but auto insurance does not."
Setting aside the particulars of this argument — Salane, in an email to BuzzFeed News, said Fuldner's comment was "technically correct but essentially missed the point" — the exchange showed a methodical strategy that Fuldner would deploy countless times in 2014 and early 2015, in a quest to legitimize the weird and potentially risky new business of letting everyday people charge strangers for rides in their cars. His lobbying efforts led major insurance companies to drop their animosity toward Uber and, in many cases, offer new insurance options that catered to Uber drivers. Statehouses around the country have since enshrined Uber's preferred insurance model in laws defining the rules for the nascent on-demand car industry.
"Had Gus not singlehandedly gone around the country, Uber would potentially be out of business. I mean, the regulatory landscape would be vastly different," said Andrew Boron, the former director of the Illinois Department of Insurance. "Gus engaged. He was all over the place, talking to everybody."
Auto insurance may not be the flashiest issue Uber has ever encountered, but it posed a major challenge for the company and its rivals. The non-professional, part-time drivers powering its popular UberX service in most cities — not quite taxi or limo drivers, and not quite personal-use drivers, either — defied categorization by insurers. Feeling that drivers were abusing their personal insurance policies by carrying fares, some insurance companies would simply cancel those policies. Many in the insurance world, like Salane, argued that Uber or its drivers should buy taxi-like commercial insurance — policies that would be prohibitively expensive given UberX's low rates.
The problem centered on a curious window of time known as "period 1." Drivers enter period 1 when they turn on the Uber app, searching for fares, and they leave it when the app connects them with a passenger — at which point Uber's own insurance policy kicks in. What made period 1 so radioactive was that it was a type of commercial activity that personal auto insurers hadn't previously considered (there's no "period 1" when you hail a taxi or call a limo). Personal insurance contracts expressly excluded coverage if drivers were to "carry persons or property" for money, but the contracts had no clauses excluding period 1.
Uber, for its part, was reluctant to extend its own insurance policy to cover period 1, even though drivers were ostensibly working for Uber during that time. The company says it feared that drivers might abuse the coverage by keeping the app on without any intention of picking anyone up, or by turning the app on after getting into an accident.
Even as this dispute simmered, Uber continued to expand its UberX service, alarming insurance companies, which take a conservative approach to new risks. To an insurer, a taxi, which is driven around the clock, is a much bigger risk than a personal car, which might be driven a couple hours a day. An UberX car looked terrifyingly like a taxi-level risk, paying personal-level insurance premiums.
"Our policies were never designed to handle ridesharing activity because the industry didn't exist," said Mariel Devesa, the head of innovation at Farmers Insurance. "Whenever you have a new technology and a new industry that comes up, the first response is to be protective."
Into this mess came Fuldner, a Stanford MBA who had studied economics and computer science at Yale. Though he had never worked in insurance, he had a tolerance for fine print and a knack for deciphering structured language. Insurance regulations are a patchwork, with different laws in different states, and insurance contracts are full of technical jargon. Fuldner started reading.
"He has this tremendous ability to grab a 35-page document, consume it very, very quickly, and then retain the majority of the knowledge out of it," said Bill Gurley, an Uber board member and a partner at the venture capital firm Benchmark, which was an early investor in Uber. "The ability to synthesize vast amounts of information — in this case, 50 states and all the data that you need — that's something that's very hard for one human to be able to do. There's too many variables, too many permutations, too many things to hold in your brain at one point in time. I've never met anyone on that dimension that's stronger than Gus, in my life."
Via quora.com
Fuldner had been hired by Benchmark in 2011, out of Stanford's business school, and was tasked with searching for investments in consumer internet and financial technology companies. His specialty was payments, having worked on financial services projects at McKinsey & Company after college. As a teenager in Milwaukee, Fuldner started a one-man computer consulting business, and he was part of a team that won the national Fed Challenge high school economics contest (the prize included a scholarship and a Federal Reserve messenger bag). At Yale, he was among the first employees of Higher One, an education finance startup that is now traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Fuldner's initial work for Uber, while still at Benchmark, was to help the company with payments in France, he says. He started spending more time at the Benchmark portfolio company, until being hired in late 2013 to run insurance.
"It was, in Travis's mind, 'Oh, insurance is financial services,'" Fuldner told BuzzFeed News, referring to the Uber CEO. "In reality, there's not a huge connection between the two. It's not really the same companies or the same regulators. But I got the connection."
"One of the advantages of playing in the insurance space is that the product is the contract," Fuldner continued. "An insurance company sells a contract, and everything about that product should be written in that contract."
While Uber has become infamous for bending local rules, Fuldner became a living, breathing rulebook, able to cite obscure insurance provisions and explain how they worked. In emotionally charged debates, even some of Fuldner's opponents appreciated his measured approach.
"Insurance is so complicated that, within 30 seconds, if you're talking to an elected official, their eyes glaze over," said Boron, the former Illinois insurance regulator, who was subjected to Fuldner's persuasive powers. "He was able to, in a clear, concise, interesting way, explain the issue."
Fuldner and his team crisscrossed the country on a campaign to win over lawmakers and insurers. They traveled so much that Fuldner memorized airline flight patterns and booking rules, allowing him to string together flights in unexpected ways to make last-minute meetings. By observing flight attendants, he even figured out how to fix United Airlines' in-flight wifi — making him the techie equivalent of the doctor on board who rings his call button to help a passenger.
"Gus studied what they would do to fix it," said Curtis Scott, the senior insurance lawyer at Uber, who traveled with Fuldner last year as United rolled out a new wifi system that was prone to breakdowns. "On flights where the wifi was broken, he would ask the flight attendant to come over, and then nicely explain a process that they could do to get the wifi to work." (The trick, essentially, was to shut the system down and turn it on again.)
Via dms.psc.sc.gov
Colorado was the first state to pass a law to regulate Uber and its rivals; today, 29 states, including California, Illinois, and Texas, as well as the District of Columbia, have passed similar legislation. Among insurance companies, 11 now offer some form of insurance for UberX drivers; in the beginning of 2015, none did. The detente was capped by a remarkable press release in March 2015, from Uber and a collection of insurance companies, which had teamed up to persuade politicians to turn their compromise into law.
The solution they came up with is a little convoluted and, perhaps unsurprisingly, seems to benefit Uber and the insurance companies while requiring drivers to pay up for full coverage.
Under the compromise, period 1 — that tricky stretch when drivers have the app on, searching for fares — officially became a thing in the insurance world. Uber agreed to let auto insurers exclude coverage for personal-use drivers during period 1; a number of insurance companies actually rewrote their contracts to reflect this. Excluding period 1 from normal insurance policies had the somewhat counterintuitive effect of allowing UberX drivers to keep using those policies.
But it also meant drivers' policies wouldn't cover them during that period. Uber, during period 1, provides drivers with liability coverage with relatively low limits, and it doesn't provide any protection for the driver's car. (The insurance that kicks in when drivers accept a fare, which Uber buys from the specialty insurer James River, is much richer, with up to $1 million in liability coverage.)
This is where the new insurance products come in. In California and other states, for example, Farmers Insurance now sells drivers a "ridesharing" add-on to extend their normal insurance policies into period 1. Such options cost extra — the Farmers add-on in California charges premiums that are 8% higher than normal — creating an additional burden for drivers.
Harry Campbell, the creator of the Rideshare Guy blog and podcast, said he felt it wasn't fair that Uber didn't provide collision coverage to protect a driver's car during period 1.
"For a company like Uber, I think in certain situations they should be going above and beyond what's legally required," he said.
Fuldner, for his part, is now helping Uber expand overseas, with a particular focus on China, a huge but troublesome market. He spent three years in Hong Kong while at McKinsey and can speak limited Mandarin, he said. Last year, he negotiated a deal with China Taiping, a Chinese state-owned insurance company, to provide insurance for Uber passengers there.
Uber's challenges in China are much bigger than insurance: Its business is threatened by a powerful Chinese rival and, according to media reports, has recorded sizable losses. Fuldner, too, faces a steep learning curve in China, though he doesn't seem to be bothered by that reality. For international work, he said, he tends to ask local law firms or insurance brokers for help understanding the rules.
Besides, this wouldn't be the first time he's learned his job on the fly. Kate Sampson, the former head of insurance at Lyft, Uber's only real American rival, said Fuldner's lack of insurance experience in this country turned out to be an asset.
"I wouldn't call Gus naive, but I would say not having that insurance background really helped," said Sampson, who is now the head of the San Francisco office of Marsh, an insurance broker. "Not coming from insurance, he has no preconceived notions about what an insurance company might do or not do."
William Alden / Via BuzzFeed News
Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images
Apple has fixed the bug that caused the Safari browser to crash on iPhones, iPads, and Macs around the world, BuzzFeed News has learned.
Sources say the issue impacted only people whose Safari suggestions cache updated during early AM hours, Pacific Time. The immediately cause of the crash was typing into the address bar.
Employees of BuzzFeed News confirmed the bug.
Hollaback, a non-profit organization that targets street harassment, has a new target: online abuse. Hollaback is launching a site, Heartmob, that aims to be a refuge and resource for women experiencing the condition known loosely as “being female on the internet.”
“There is a false dichotomy between online and offline harassment," Emily May, founder of Hollaback told BuzzFeed News. "Both have the same root causes: sexism, racism, and homophobia -- and both have the similar effects: they silence victims and cause depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Heartmob’s work is twofold: it acts both as a support network, and as a place to document harassment. According to the site, a woman (or anyone) can ask for help from other people on the site for support, to help document the abuse, or to intervene. It’s unclear exactly what intervening would look like, or how fellow bystanders can do it safely without putting themselves at risk. The site launches today, and will also have resources for survivors of harassment who are seeking information about legal options or how get help from other organizations.
Twitter is one of the platforms where harassment against women, or anyone who tweets about feminism or race – the two topics that act as a irresistible mating call to trolls – is undergoing its own reckoning of how to deal with harassment. Former CEO Dick Costolo admitted last year that Twitter “sucks” at dealing with abuse. New measures that make it slightly easier to report people for impersonation or harassment were rolled out, although I’d wager if you asked anyone who has been a victim of abuse on Twitter if the new reporting function was working well, they’d laugh in your face. Recently, a confusing new tactic they’ve employed is to un-verify serial harassers – a weird light slap on the wrist by removing the fake candy checkmark they invented in the first place.
Whether an outside site for harassment victims to turn to as a safe haven is better than say, improving policies and reporting, is unclear to me. The type of online harassment that people experience varies in a lot of ways, more than just what those of us glued to Twitter all day might think of. Women who have a large megaphone for their ideas attract more attention from trolls than most normal internet users. While some research shows a huge percent of people have witness or been a victim of online harassment, this isn’t necessarily what we’re imagining when we think of a feminist writer getting death threats on Twitter. This includes things like arguing with someone you know about politics on Facebook, or someone commenting that your dog should lose weight on your Instagram (this regularly happens to a friend of mine whose dog is normal weight, by the way). Those comments about her dog really irritate and upset her, but it’s not apples-to-apples with someone writing violent rape threats to Anita Sarkeesian. I’m not denying by any means that both types of harassment are real, and that women are especially targeted. But the nuances are so varied its difficult to see how they could fit side by side on a site like Heartmob.
Also unclear is how the site won’t just attract tons of trolls itself – you can almost imagine what 4chan would look like when it discovers the site. According to Heartmob’s press release, it will be moderated, but the site’s founders did not respond to questions about how it will be troll-proofed by publishing time.
While I don’t have extremely high expectations for Heartmob to make a dent in ending harassment or the causes, that can’t be the only goal. Doctors don’t just try to find cures for cancer, they also treat patients who have it. At its best, Heartmob may be useful palliative care for the victims of harassment, something that has yet to really exist anywhere else on the internet.
Rich Polk / Getty Images
As of 2013 — when a group of MIT researchers pulled the data — the identities of the two human beings who had dedicated Wikipedia pages in the most languages were not surprising: Jesus Christ (214 languages) and Barack Obama (200).
Neither was No. 4, Confucius, or No. 5, Isaac Newton, or really any of the people who rounded out the top 20: Hitler, Einstein, Aristotle, Muhammad, Marx.
No. 3, you might not be able to guess. No. 3, if you don't pay rigorous attention to pop culture, you might not even know at all.
No. 3 was Corbin Bleu. Who? Corbin Bleu! That's right: A supporting cast member of Disney's High School Musical series was (and may still be), by this one measure, better represented globally than da Vinci, Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, and Michael Jackson. The researchers found Corbin Bleu pages in Spanish and German and French, but also Romanian and Serbian and Magyar and Vietnamese and Swahili. And 185 more.
The data was collected by Pantheon, a project of the MIT Media Lab "working collaboratively to quantify, analyze, measure and visualize global culture." Here's what the rankings look like:
Pantheon / Via pantheon.media.mit.edu
So, there's only one question: What the hell?
Sure, Bleu is a celebrity, but not a huge one. He has 989,000 Twitter followers, which is a lot, but well outside the top 1,000 (No. 999 in Twitter followers, a Turkish singer named Hande Yener, has more than 3 million). And while Bleu was No. 3 in number of Wikipedia language editions, in terms of page views, he wasn't even in the top 100 — way behind celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Rihanna, and Miley Cyrus. But when it comes to Wikipedia language editions, no contemporary celebrities really compared to Bleu. The next-highest living celebrity was Lady Gaga, who, at 133 pages, comes in 45th place.
So maybe it's a quirk of his fame: High School Musical is very popular, of course, and has a dedicated fanbase. The first movie in the series made a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office. But it also featured actors, including Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, who have become much, much more famous than Bleu. And in 2013 Efron had Wikipedia pages in a mere 66 languages — barely a third as many as Bleu — while Hudgens lagged behind with 59.
Neither does Bleu's standing appear to be the work of one Corbin-mad, linguistically dedicated Wikipedia fiend. A random search of the Bleu Wikipedia page edit histories revealed no common names or IP addresses associated with page edits or creations. Nor were the pages all created at once; they appeared at what seemed to be a fairly random pace over the past 10 years, ever since the English page was created on Jan. 2, 2006, by a user named Damionbak.
TK GRAF FROM PANTHEON
Among the baffled: Corbin Bleu himself. "What?" Bleu said when BuzzFeed News informed him of his place between the leader of the free world and one of the most important philosophers in the history of human civilization. "Holy shit! Really? I wonder why that is! Are that many people looking me up? What the hell! That's amazing. That's ridiculous, actually. That is unnecessary, but I will definitely put that on my resume."
So here we find ourselves, with a somewhat famous man and an abiding mystery.
So why is Corbin Bleu so huge on Wikipedia??? Help us figure it out!
Drivers suing Lyft as part of a class action lawsuit in California settled their complaint outside of court on Tuesday.
The $12.25 million settlement does not reclassify the more than 100,000 Lyft drivers in the class as employees, which the attorney in the case, Shannon Liss-Riordan, said she had "hoped for" in her statement. The drivers will continue to be classified as independent contractors, without access to the same benefits and protections of Lyft employees.
The Boston-based attorney Liss-Riordan has become well-known for her crusade to reclassify contract workers in the on-demand economy as employees. In a statement, she called the settlement a "good resolution," and said, because of an arbitration clause in the Lyft drivers' contracts, it was unlikely her firm would have won the case.
"It would have been very difficult if not impossible to achieve global changes at Lyft other than through a settlement agreement," she said.
In a separate statement, Lyft's general counsel Kristin Sverchek said the company is "pleased," and committed to building a social safety net for its drivers.
Lyft drivers will see some benefits from the settlement going forward. These changes include an update to the company's Terms of Service that will, in theory, make it harder for drivers to get kicked off the platform.
"Lyft will only be able to deactivate drivers for one of a list of enumerated reasons, and drivers who are at risk of deactivation will be given notice of this risk and opportunity to cure the shortcoming before deactivation," the statement reads. Drivers who feel they have been wrongfully terminated or unfairly compensated will be able to take those claims to a "neutral arbitrator" — a process that Lyft will have to pay for.
This outcome does not impact the status of the class action suit led by Liss-Riordan against Uber, which is still slated to be tried on June 20 of this year.
Andrew Burton / Getty Images
Apple reported an $18 billion profit for the final three months of 2015, beating analysts expectations, but warned its revenues could decline in the coming quarter — a drop that would be the first such quarterly year-on-year decline in 13 years.
Apple shares have fallen 11.5% in the last year going into Tuesday's earnings report, with several of Apple's suppliers warning of soft demand for new iPhones. Apple's stock has fallen further than the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which is down 4% in the same period, and the S&P 500, which has fallen 7%.
iPhone sales peak each year in the holiday season, and they were flat in the last quarter of 2015 relative to the same period a year prior. For the coming quarter, Apple projected revenues between $50 billion and $53 billion, down from the $58 billion it made in the first three months of 2015.
Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images
Via Apple/BuzzFeed
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