Insights

Communication and Technology news
Google follows Apple with its own anti-tracking policy for Chromium-based browsers
2019-08-23

Google has announced a new initiative that aims to “fundamentally enhance privacy on the web.” The proposal — dubbed “Privacy Sandbox” — is a stab at preventing extensive tracking of users on the web through cookies and other methods like tracking pixels and browser and device fingerprinting. In creating a...

Howard Johnson has the sweetest, most Instagrammable hotel room this side of Candy Land
2019-08-22

Introducing New York’s first-ever All-Candy Hotel Room. Howard Johnson has created a hotel room that makes the Museum of Ice Cream look like a health food store.Read Full Story

See a real-time map of all the fires burning down the Amazon
2019-08-22

Monitor the unfolding disaster from your computer screen. The Amazon is burning. Since the beginning of the year, when Jair Bolsonaro took office—after saying that protecting forests was blocking economic growth—there have been 74,155 fires in the country, most in the Brazilian Amazon, according to the...

Mark Ronson’s interactive Instagram Story might just be the future of music videos
2019-08-21

Someone needs to pick up where MTV and YouTube left off. If you happen to follow Mark Ronson on Instagram, you may have noticed that he dropped a new music video for “Pieces of Us” on his Instagram Story. This wasn’t just a snippet or a highlight reel—it was the entire video for the...

Why this Google product manager left to work on criminal justice reform
2019-08-16

Recidiviz, the only nonprofit in the current cohort at the tech accelerator Y Combinator, is using data analytics to determine the best strategies to reduce incarceration. As a product manager at Google working on Google Maps, Clementine Jacoby started thinking about how the analytics tools she used to build products...

The humble shipping container home gets a luxurious upgrade
2019-08-15

Designed by Brazilian architect Marilia Pellegrini, the 194-square-foot minimalist home was inspired by the famous Japanese designer Kenya Hara. Shipping containers have been used to create emergency housing, dorms, breweries, and even a Taco Bell. But rarely do these adaptive reuse projects look so beautiful that...

These are the funniest passport photos we’ve ever seen
2019-08-15

Passports are designed to be mundane. This photographer fixed that. For our safety, passport photos have highly stringent requirements. You must be facing the camera head-on. The background needs to be clear, without shadow. You can’t have anything in your hair. Glasses must be removed. Your head must take up...

Project Veritas releases ‘internal documents’ from Google and alleges anti-conservative bias
2019-08-15

A former Google employee has released nearly 1,000 documents which he says is evidence of the search giant’s anti-conservative bias on the platform. Zachary Vorhies, the employee in question, shared the documents with Project Veritas — a right-leaning investigative journalism non-profit founded by James O’Keefe...

WhatsApp played a big role in the Nigerian election — not all of it was bad
2019-08-15

There is growing concern about the potential for the message and media sharing platform WhatsApp to undermine democracy in a number of countries across the world including Brazil and India. Because WhatsApp is encrypted – and so offers users far greater protection from prosecution than Twitter or Facebook – it has...

Huawei is building its own Google Maps (and Yandex and Booking.com are already on board)
2019-08-15

Huawei is gearing up to take on Google Maps. The Chinese giant is developing its own mapping service called Map Kit, state-owned outlet China Daily reports. There’s a catch, though: the service is not exactly meant for consumers. Instead, the idea is to give developers tools to build new applications based on its...

Nintendo seems to be striking its music off YouTube, and that sucks
2019-08-15

After apparently resolving its troubled relationship with YouTubers, Nintendo‘s now coming down on those who upload music from its games. At least two popular channels have been hit, and if this starts a trend, there aren’t a lot of alternatives for listening to this music. The channels GilvaSunner...

Exclusive: See 300 items Target is rereleasing from its designer collaborations
2019-08-15

Remember that Lily Pulitzer or Rodarte dress you missed out on at Target? Or the Michael Graves vase? You might get to snag it this time around. I remember when the Lily Pulitzer x Target dropped in 2015. I showed up on Friday morning a few minutes before the store opened to see if I could pick up a colorful summer...

These are the 4 surprising lessons I learned when I started managing people for the first time
2019-08-15

You’ll probably realize that you have more empathy for managers, and you might not realize what it was like not to have explicit power. When I first moved into team management from product management, I quickly learned that managing people is very different than managing a product. As it turns out, people are...

This spooky Monero-mining malware waits to be controlled remotely
2019-08-14

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a mysterious new strain of cryptocurrency mining (cryptomining) malware that employs powerful techniques to avoid detection and analysis. Software firm Varonis determined the malware is based on Monero mining software XMRig, which is open source and hosted on GitHub. Hard Fork...

Facebook’s group privacy settings actually make sense now
2019-08-14

Until today, Facebook has given you three options for creating a user group: Open, closed, or ‘secret.’ While the first is pretty obvious, the other two were occasional sources of confusion – an admin might set a group to ‘closed’ without realizing it was still searchable, for instance. Instead there are now...

Stock photos of hackers are hilariously bad. OpenIdeo wants you to redesign them
2019-08-14

Cybersecurity needs a rebrand. Do a quick Google image search for “hacker,” and you’ll find a hilarious (and hilariously inaccurate) collection of stock photos. In one example, a man in a black windbreaker is chipping away at a keyboard with a hammer and comically large nail. In another, the...

Take a tour of Google Earth with speakers of 50 different indigenous languages
2019-08-14

Hear Cherokee, Rarotongan, Fulfulde, and more thanks to Google Earth. “It is a human right to be able to speak your own language,” says Tania Haerekiterā Tapueluelu Wolfgramm, a Māori and Tongan person who works as an educator and activist. “You don’t have a culture without the...

Stock photos of hackers are hilariously bad. Ideo wants you to redesign them
2019-08-14

Cybersecurity needs a rebrand. Do a quick Google image search for “hacker,” and you’ll find a hilarious (and hilariously inaccurate) collection of stock photos. In one example, a man in a black windbreaker is chipping away at a keyboard with a hammer and comically large nail. In another, the...

These are the most surprising apps for professional networking
2019-08-14

Forget LinkedIn or Twitter. What about TikTok or Goodreads for finding that new job? You might use Hinge to look for a special someone or Fitbit to track your health goals, but have you ever thought of using the apps for career building? Platforms that are meant for social connection could also help your...

This is the computer you’ll wear on your face in 10 years
2019-08-14

Snap’s new Spectacles 3 camera glasses are an important step toward the augmented reality glasses that could one day replace the smartphone as our go-to computing device. Snap’s new Spectacles 3 don’t look that different from their predecessors. They consist of a metal designer frame with a couple...

Why developers shouldn’t fear Friday code deployments
2019-08-14

I’ve seen the advice of not deploying products on Fridays over and over in my Twitter feed and internet memes. I even stumbled upon a job offer that mentions ‘no Friday deployments’ policy as one of their perks. Most of the industry is now sold on the idea that pushing code to production on a Friday is a bad...

Over 50% of Google searches result in no clicks, data shows
2019-08-14

Google is hungry for your clicks. But it turns out that more than half of all Google Search queries now result in no clicks. As of June 2019, 50.3 percent of Google searches received zero clicks. By contrast, searches with organic clicks to non-Google websites now make up only 45 percent of all traffic. That...

Teen finds way around parents’ tech confiscation: Tweeting from the smart fridge
2019-08-14

You hear the word “innovation” a lot in tech, and half the time, it’s never really that impressive or even innovative. But last week, for the first time, I was bewildered by the tech that is a LG Smart Refrigerator and the innovation of one Ariana Grande twitter fan account, @thankunext327. For today’s teens,...

Twitter’s trying really hard to make itself a news app
2019-08-14

New experiments at Twitter show it’s trying to further establish itself as the go-to news app for its users around the world. Today, the company announced its testing a way for you to follow specific interests, such as sports teams and celebrities. Once you choose these topics, Twitter’s machine learning algorithm...

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