My Software Architecture class is designing an App
to replace physical ATMs. This article could be useful.
No-fees
mobile bank Chime raises $70M Series C, valuing its business at $500M
… The startup is one of several challenger
banks gaining popularity with a younger, millennial audience who sees
no need for a bank with physical branches, and who are sick of being
penalized by hefty fees for things like overdrafts or dropping below
a minimum balance – fees that take advantage of consumers at their
most vulnerable points in their financial lives.
Perhaps I will create an App to capture your soul.
The market should be HUGE!
Ancestry
wants your spit, your DNA and your trust. Should you give them all
three?
… In the age of Facebook and Google, consumers
seem comfortable surrendering their personal information to
corporations that aggregate it and monetize it. But Ancestry and
other DNA testing companies have added an audacious tweak: Consumers
are now paying to hand over their genetic code, their most
sensitive individual identifier, to companies that could monetize it
far into the future.
Ancestry officials say they have state-of-the-art
systems to prevent hacking and security breaches. So far the company
has sidestepped privacy scandals that tripped up companies like
Facebook, which allowed a political data firm, Cambridge Analytica,
to access data from 50 million customers, or government agencies like
the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which a few years ago
exposed more than a million personnel records and security clearance
data to hackers.
But a three-month review by McClatchy, including
visits to Ancestry’s headquarters and a main testing lab, reveals a
pattern of breached promises to customers, security concerns and
inflated marketing pledges that could give consumers some pause:
Would this work in the US?
WhatsApp is
a black box for fake news. Verificado 2018 is making real progress
fixing that.
Fact-checking the Mexican election on WhatsApp.
Fake news on WhatsApp is a really hard problem to solve. News is
spread in closed exchanges and messages are encrypted, making it
impossible to know how what’s being spread or how many people are
seeing it. False information doesn’t just come as text, but as
images and memes. WhatsApp is also by far the most popular social
platform in many countries — including Mexico, which holds its
general election July 1 (with more than 10,000 candidates running for
general and local office).
Verificado 2018,
a collaborative election reporting and fact-checking initiative led
by Animal Político,
AJ+ Español,
and Pop-Up Newsroom, is trying to
intervene in the spread of fake news on WhatsApp — and having some
success. Verificado’s mission is broad; it launched in March and
has partners in 28 of Mexico’s 32 states. It’s fact-checking and
producing content across multiple social platforms, not just WhatsApp
— but I was particularly intrigued by what it’s doing there.
Clearly, Microsoft thought Githum was worth more
than the $2 Billion being kicked around yesterday.
Microsoft
to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion
Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced it has reached
an agreement to acquire GitHub, the world’s leading software
development platform where more than 28 million developers learn,
share and collaborate to create the future. Together, the two
companies will empower developers to achieve more at every stage of
the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and
bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
… GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos
and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all
developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to
use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their
choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their
code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.
Interesting answer.
Can social
media have a positive effect on democracy?
Columbia
Journalism Review: “Given the seemingly never-ending litany of
transgressions we find all around us on social-media
platforms—whether it’s Facebook giving
up data to Cambridge Analytica and being manipulated by Russian
trolls, or Twitter’s complicity in racism and online
harassment—it’s difficult to imagine a case being made that
social media in general is anything but a looming danger to society
and democracy. Despite this, however, Ethan Zuckerman—who runs the
Center for Civic Media at MIT and teaches at MIT’s Media Lab—did
his best to put together a list of the ways in which social media can
or should help democracy and society, in a
post he published Wednesday on his blog and at
Medium. Whether his argument ultimately succeeds or not is hard
to say, but it’s a worthwhile question. As Zuckerman puts it:
I’m interested in what social media should do for us as citizens in a democracy. We talk about social media as a digital public sphere, invoking Habermas and coffeehouses frequented by the bourgeoisie. Before we ask whether the internet succeeds as a public sphere, we ought to ask whether that’s actually what we want it to be.
Zuckerman uses as his template an
essay that Columbia journalism professor (and CJR board member)
Michael Schudson wrote as part of his 2008 book Why Democracies
Need an Unlovable Press, in which he argues that good journalism
can accomplish a number of things that are worthwhile for
society—including informing the public, investigating important
issues, analyzing complex topics and serving as a tool for social
empathy…”
Always worth following up on Amit’s ideas.
(Some I want to try)
The 101
Most Useful Websites on the Internet
Here are the most useful websites on the Internet
that will make you smarter, increase productivity and help you learn
new skills. These incredibly useful websites solve
at least one problem really well.
pdfescape.com
– lets you quickly edit
PDF in the browser without Acrobat.
history.google.com
— see all your past Google searches, also among most important
Google URLs
powtoon.com
— create engaging whiteboard videos and presentations with your own
voiceovers. Also see videoscribe.co.
mockaroo.com
— download mock data to fill the rows in your Excel spreadsheet.
thunkable.com
— build your own apps for Android and iOS by dragging blocks
instead of writing code. Also see: glitch.com.
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