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Is it time to remove Zuckerberg from (his) office? – TechCrunch

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A colleague, who shall remain nameless (because privacy is not dead ), gave a thumbs down to a recent column in the NYT. The complaint was that the writer had attacked tech companies (mostly but not exclusively Facebook) without offering any solutions for these all-powerful techbro CEOs’ orchestral failures to grasp the messy complexities of humanity at a worldwide scale. Challenge accepted. Here’s the thought experiment: Fixing Facebook  We’ll start with Facebook because, while it’s by no means the only tech company whose platform contains a bottomless cesspit of problems, it is the most used social platform in the West; the de facto global monopoly outside China. And, well, even Zuckerberg’ thinks it needs fixing. Or at least that its PR needs fixing — given he made “Fixing Facebook” his  ‘personal challenge’ of the year this year  — proof, if any more were needed, of his incredible capacity for sounding tone-deaf. For a little more context on these annual personal challenges,
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Duo Security researchers’ Twitter ‘bot or not’ study unearths crypto botnet – TechCrunch

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A team of researchers at Duo Security has unearthed a sophisticated botnet operating on Twitter — and being used to spread a cryptocurrency scam. The botnet was discovered during the course of a wider research project to create and publish a methodology for identifying Twitter account automation — to help support further research into bots and how they operate. The team used Twitter’s API and some standard data enrichment techniques to create a large data set of 88 million public Twitter accounts, comprising more than half a billion tweets. (Although they say they focused on the last 200 tweets per account for the study.) They then used classic machine learning methods to train a bot classifier, and later applied other tried and tested data science techniques to map and analyze the structure of botnets they’d uncovered. They’re open sourcing their documentation and data collection system in the hopes that other researchers will pick up the baton and run with it — such as, say, to
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Andreessen-funded dYdX plans “short Ethereum” token for haters – TechCrunch

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Crypto skeptics rejoice! A new way to short the cryptocurrency market is coming from dYdX , a decentralized financial derivatives startup. In two months it will launch its protocol for creating short and leverage positions for Ethereum and other ERC20 tokens that allow investors to amp up their bets for or against these currencies. To get the startup there, Dydx recently closed a $2 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain, and joined by Kindred and Abstract plus angels including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and serial investor Elad Gil. “The main use for crypotocurrency so far has been trading and speculation — buying and holding. That’s not how sophisticated financial institutions trade” says Dydx founder Antonio Juliano. “The derivatives market is usually an order of magnitude bigger than the spot trading or buy/sell market. The cryptocurrency market is probably on the order of $5 billion to $10 billion in volume, so you’d expect the
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The Vietnam War Deserters Who Sought Asylum in Sweden

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The tumultuous events of 1968, the so-called “year that rocked the world,” have been very much in the news in 2018, their 50th anniversary. Though overlooked in many histories of the period, Japan, too, was the scene of massive New Left-inspired protests and university occupations throughout that famous year. An obscure but significant part of that history is about Japanese radicals assisting U.S. soldiers who deserted the military in protest of an unjust war. I just had to write about them. My novel Sweden , which is based on true characters and events, traces the paths of American soldiers who, while stationed in Japan during the Vietnam War, went AWOL and the anti-war Japanese activists who made their escape possible. The soldiers’ ultimate destination was Sweden, which at the time granted asylum to American servicemen who abandoned the military in protest of the war in Vietnam. More U.S. military personnel deserted during the Vietnam War than in any other war in modern American
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The Man Who Put Premature Babies in Carnival Sideshows

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New York, 1917 The men had shipped out to fight in the Great War. Some of Martin Couney’s earliest patients were among them; one would earn the Croix de Guerre. Back home, however, the littlest citizens were in “no-man’s land.” It wasn’t just that the country was focused on the war. The entire approach to birth was in transition. With obstetrics becoming a more sophisticated specialty, middle class American women were increasingly giving birth in hospitals instead of staying home. But obstetricians didn’t have much time or inclination to fuss over “weaklings,” as preemies were called, and the nascent field of pediatrics hadn’t quite gotten to them. They fell between the cracks, where they died. * Article continues after advertisement All the world loves a baby! On Coney Island and in Atlantic City, Martin’s patients thrived and so did his business. Women, in particular, kept coming back for a feel-good dose of clinical-grade cuteness. One woman would end up visiting the Coney I
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Starbucks drops major hint at plans to accept Bitcoin – TechCrunch

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Back in May, reports surfaced that New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) was developing a Bitcoin trading platform. This morning, it officially announced the creation of Bakkt, a new company that will help trade and convert the best known cryptocurrency to fiat money — government-backed legal tender. As one might expect from a new company with close ties to the NYSE, Bakkt has enlisted some big names already, including backing from Microsoft, Starbucks and BCG. Microsoft, for its part, will provide cloud infrastructure for the service. Even more compelling, however, is the involvement of Starbucks. After all, the coffee giant has played an outsized role in helping mainstream mobile payments among the U.S. population, it has worked with Square ( which accepts Bitcoin ) and it just announced a deal with Alibaba in China for coffee deliveries .  The chain isn’t always the first to adopt payment solutions, but its involvement goes a long ways toward legitimizin
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Google Maps’ location sharing will now share your phone’s battery status, too – TechCrunch

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Early in 2017, Google added a feature to Google Maps that lets you opt to share your location in (near) real time with your close friends and family. Now they’re fleshing out that info with another important little detail: your phone’s remaining battery charge. It looks like this: Wondering why anyone might care about the status of your battery? If you try to ping someone’s location and their phone is dead, there’s not much an app can do. Most location sharing apps will just sit there and spin while they wait for some sort of response, leaving you to worry about all the reasons their phone might not be responding with a current location. Did they lose signal? Did someone steal their phone? By clueing you in on whether someone’s phone is just about to die, you’ve at least got a better idea as to what’s going on when the updates go silent. The folks over at AndroidPolice spotted this in a Google Maps APK tear down back in February, so we knew it was on the way. A few people have
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