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High Heels, Invented For The Male Gaze, Get A Feminist Makeover
2018-04-13

Male designers invented the high heel without considering comfort or walkability. These tech-savvy women are reinventing the iconic shoe for the modern woman. Is the high heel a tool of empowerment or a tool of the patriarchy designed to slow a woman down?Read Full Story

Trump creates U.S. Post Office task force after attacking Amazon
2018-04-13

President Trump on Thursday ordered the creation of the task force, which will look into the business practices at the United States Postal Service, including its pricing and policies, reports Bloomberg. Announcing the order, Trump said, “The USPS is on an unsustainable financial path and must be restructured...

What Eric Garcetti, José Andrés, And Twitter Have In Common
2018-04-13

In the 2018 World-Changing Ideas issue of Fast Company: What Los Angeles’s mayor is doing to fix affordable housing, how a gadfly chef is pairing his restaurant empire with a social justice mission, and why the social media darling is still struggling to tame its very serious troll problem. Faced with a housing...

U.S. judge: UberBlack drivers are not employees
2018-04-13

A U.S. judge in Philadelphia ruled this week that driver’s of Uber’s upscale service UberBlack are not employees of the company’s under federal law as Uber does not exert enough control over them to be considered their employer, reports CNBC. This is because the drivers work when they want to and...

Poll shows many believe Facebook is having a negative impact on the world
2018-04-13

Almost 32% of people in America believe that Facebook is having a negative impact on the world, according to a poll by Mark Zuckerberg’s former personal pollster, Tavis McGinn, reports Recode. McGinn used to work for Zuckerberg polling how people saw him and COO Sheryl Sandberg, but left after only six months...

Russian court orders ban on secure messaging app Telegram
2018-04-13

The court ordered the ban of Telegram on Friday, reports Reuters. The ban comes a week after Russia’s state communication watchdog filed a lawsuit to limit access to the app after the company refused to turn over its encryption keys. But the ban on Telegram in the country won’t just cause alarm with...

Facebook isn’t worried about the impact of its privacy scandal on its bottom line
2018-04-13

In the immediate aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, Facebook’s stock price plummeted, dropping as much as 18.3% and losing many tens of billions of dollars in market cap. But maybe all the media coverage and Wall Street reaction and #DeleteFacebook energy isn’t actually impacting the...

Show Me a Self-Regulating Facebook And I’ll Show You A Fish Riding A Bike
2018-04-13

Self-regulation runs counter to every impulse of the company’s “Hacker Way.” When you think about it, asking Facebook to regulate itself is a ridiculous idea. During his two days of testimony in front of Congress, Mark Zuckerberg was asked repeatedly if he thought his company should be regulated....

This is what the new Gmail will look like
2018-04-12

Yesterday, Google confirmed a major redesign for Gmail was on the way. We’d seen drafts of a redesign dating back nearly a year ago and heard some descriptions of the new look, but after yesterday’s news, several sources shared images of the new design itself – including some new features. Other than the...

It’s surprisingly easy to make government records public on Google Books
2018-04-12

While working on a recent story about hate speech spread by telephone in the ’60s and ’70s, I came across an interesting book that had been digitized by Google Books. Unfortunately, while it was a transcript of a Congressional hearing, and therefore should be in the public domain and not subject to...

Four Times Companies Botched Crises As Badly As Facebook
2018-04-12

From the BP oil spill to Uber’s very bad 2017, how these companies did or didn’t recover could give hints to Facebook’s future. For the past several weeks Facebook has been living the worst-case scenario most CEOs dread: a company scandal on a scale so large it leads to the chief executive being...

Now Facebook is being accused of profiting off of the illegal wildlife trade
2018-04-12

As if things weren’t bad enough for Facebook, now it’s being accused of profiting from the illegal sales of animal parts and animal trafficking. The law firm of Kohn, Kohn and Colapinto—aka the whistleblower law firm—filed a complaint this week on behalf of an anonymous...

Four Questions For Facebook That We Still Need Answers To
2018-04-12

DuckDuckGo’s CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg says that the Cambridge Analytica scandal is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Facebook’s problems. Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress this week. While many questions explored how Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal data Facebook kept...

Heineken still hasn’t recovered from Chance the Rapper calling its ad racist
2018-04-12

If you’ve ever doubted the needle-moving power of Twitter influencers, pour one out for Heineken. The Dutch beer brewer suffered a significant dip in consumer sentiment after one of its commercials was called racist by Chance the Rapper, and more than two weeks after it pulled the ad out of rotation, the...

How to fix the big tech backlash? Build companies with purpose
2018-04-12

Tech companies have an image problem. Apple is attempting to fight a rear-guard action from its own investors about the addictiveness of its iPhones. Facebook is desperately trying to convince society that its social network is still a force for good, even though it recently became clear Cambridge Analytica accessed...

Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony by the numbers
2018-04-12

Mark Zuckerberg’s two days of testimony in Congress left most viewers with a strange feeling: The more he talked, the less we understood about Facebook. The social network’s CEO and founder dodged and feinted when confronted about its misdeeds and asked about its future plans. He also tossed out plenty...

Twitter replaces handgun emoji with a water gun
2018-04-12

[Image: Twitter/Emojipedia] While gun control in real life may be a pipe dream, the same isn’t true for the world of emojis. Now Twitter has followed Apple, Samsung, and WhatsApp and is ditching the handgun emoji for a water gun, reports Emojipedia. The replacement of Twitter’s gun emoji with a water gun...

Back up the money truck! Japan just found tons of rare-earth metals
2018-04-12

Matter of fact, the country found so many rare-earth metals that researchers say it now has enough to supply the world on a “semi-infinite basis,” reports CNBC. The hoard of rare-earth metals was found in Japanese waters in the Pacific Ocean in a 965-square-mile seabed near Minami-Tori-shima Island. In...

Apple sucks at selling HomePods
2018-04-12

Less than half a year since it became available, sales of Apple’s HomePod are already slowing to a crawl. Bloomberg reports that the company has canceled orders with one of the manufacturers of its $350 smart speaker owing to low interest in the product. Just how bad are its sales, you ask? According to market...

Gmail is getting a major redesign
2018-04-12

Users of Google’s Gmail platform will be excited to hear the email service is about to get a major new redesign. Now Android Authority has posted screenshots of Gmail’s new UI. The revamped Gmail will take its design cues from the company’s Material Design as well as its new bubble design. Besides...

Instagram will soon let you download your data, just like Facebook
2018-04-12

Following Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional hearing over how the company handles users’ data and how the Cambridge Analytica privacy gaffe occurred in the first place, the social network’s sister concern, Instagram, will soon let you download the content you’ve shared on the platform. A spokesperson...

Zuckerberg Just Proved Once Again That Congress Doesn’t Understand The Internet
2018-04-12

Today’s jumbled Facebook hearing left little faith that Congress could ever draft a useful data-protection bill, much less agree on one. “You will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during opening remarks in his congressional hearing Wednesday....

Opinion: It’s time for Google to retire Chromecast for Android TV
2018-04-11

The Chromecast is one of the best products Google has ever made. It’s low price, small size, and reliability help make streaming video to your TV commonplace, rather than a party trick for the techies with money. But it’s also time for the Chromecast to be retired, at least in its current form. If Google wants me...

This May Be The Most Important Zuckerberg-Congress Exchange Yet
2018-04-11

In a heated back and forth, Congressman Ben Junán, a Democrat of New Mexico, got to the heart of Facebook’s data practice as it relates to non-users. For the last two days, Mark Zuckerberg has been facing questions by congressional lawmakers over Facebook’s data-collection practices and whether...

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