#there's also a twitter account for it that's automated by a program that i wrote myself

[bnha-transparents]

to any jojo fans looking for manga transparents: i’m now running the blog @jojotransparents​! i make transparents for both the colored scans and black & white scans of jojo ★♡

[mostlysignssomeportents]

20 years a blogger

It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.

I'm a blogger.

Blogging - publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces - is the defining activity of my days.

https://boingboing.net/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a.html

Over the years, I've been lauded, threatened, sued (more than once). I've met many people who read my work and have made connections with many more whose work  I wrote about. Combing through my old posts every morning is a journey through my intellectual development.

It's been almost exactly a year I left Boing Boing, after 19 years. It wasn't planned, and it wasn't fun, but it was definitely time. I still own a chunk of the business and wish them well. But after 19 years, it was time for a change.

A few weeks after I quit Boing Boing, I started a solo project. It's called Pluralistic: it's a blog that is published simultaneously on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, a newsletter and the web. It's got no tracking or ads. Here's the very first edition:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/

I don't often do "process posts" but this merits it. Here's how I built Pluralistic and here's how it works today, after nearly a year.

I get up at 5AM and make coffee. Then I sit down on the sofa and open a huge tab-group, and scroll through my RSS feeds using Newsblur.

I spend the next 1-2 hours winnowing through all the stuff that seems important. I have a chronic pain problem and I really shouldn't sit on the sofa for more than 10 minutes, so I use a timer and get up every 10 minutes and do one minute of physio.

After a couple hours, I'm left with 3-4 tabs that I want to write articles about that day. When I started writing Pluralistic, I had a text file on my desktop with some blank HTML I'd tinkered with to generate a layout; now I have an XML file (more on that later).

First I go through these tabs and think up metadata tags I want to use for each; I type these into the template using my text-editor (gedit), like this:

   <xtags>

process, blogging, pluralistic, recursion, navel-gazing

   </xtags>

Each post has its own little template. It needs an anchor tag (for this post, that's "hfbd"), a title ("20 years a blogger") and a slug ("Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting"). I fill these in for each post.

Then I come up with a graphic for each post: I've got a giant folder of public domain clip-art, and I'm good at using all the search tools for open-licensed art: the Library of Congress, Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Flickr Commons, and, ofc, Google Image Search.

I am neither an artist nor a shooper, but I've been editing clip art since I created pixel-art versions of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood glyphs using Bannermaker for the Apple //c in 1985 and printed them out on enough fan-fold paper to form a border around my bedroom.

As I create the graphics, I pre-compose Creative Commons attribution strings to go in the post; there's two versions, one for the blog/newsletter and one for Mastodon/Twitter/Tumblr. I compose these manually.

Here's a recent one:

Blog/Newsletter:

(<i>Image: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_in_red_shirt_(48555421111).jpg">Marc Nozell</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en">CC BY</a>, modified</i>)

Twitter/Masto/Tumblr:

Image: Marc Nozell (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_in_red_shirt_(48555421111).jpg

CC BY

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

This is purely manual work, but I've been composing these CC attribution strings since CC launched in 2003, and they're just muscle-memory now. Reflex.

These attribution strings, as well as anything else I'll need to go from Twitter to the web (for example, the names of people whose Twitter handles I use in posts, or images I drop in, go into the text file). Here's how the post looks at this point in the composition.

<hr>

<a name="hfbd"></a>

<img src="https://craphound.com/images/20yrs.jpg">

<h1>20 years a blogger</h1><xtagline>Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting.</xtagline>

<img src="https://craphound.com/images/frnklogo.jpg">

See that <img> tag in there for frnklogo.jpg? I snuck that in while I was composing this in Twitter. When I locate an image on the web I want to use in a post, I save it to a dir on my desktop that syncs every 60 seconds to the /images/ dir on my webserver.

As I save it, I copy the filename to my clipboard, flip over to gedit, and type in the <img> tag, pasting the filename. I've typed <img src="https://craphound.com/images/ CTRL-V"> tens of thousands of times - muscle memory.

Once the thread is complete, I copy each tweet back into gedit, tabbing back and forth, replacing Twitter handles and hashtags with non-Twitter versions, changing the ALL CAPS EMPHASIS to the extra-character-consuming *asterisk-bracketed emphasis*.

My composition is greatly aided both 20 years' worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I've mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily.

A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.

Next I port the posts to other media. I copy the headline and paste it into a new Tumblr compose tab, then import the image and tag the post "pluralistic."

Then I paste the text of the post into Tumblr and manually select, cut, and re-paste every URL in the post (because Tumblr's automatic URL-to-clickable-link tool's been broken for 10+ months).

Next I past the whole post into a Mastodon compose field. Working by trial and error, I cut it down to <500 characters, breaking at a para-break and putting the rest on my clipboard. I post, reply, and add the next item in the thread until it's all done.

*Then* I hit publish on my Twitter thread. Composing in Twitter is the most unforgiving medium I've ever worked in. You have to keep each stanza below 280 chars. You can't save a thread as a draft, so as you edit it, you have to pray your browser doesn't crash.

And once you hit publish, you can't edit it. Forever. So you want to publish Twitter threads LAST, because the process of mirroring them to Tumblr and Mastodon reveals typos and mistakes (but there's no way to save the thread while you work!).

Now I create a draft Wordpress post on pluralistic.net, and create a custom slug for the page (today's is "two-decades"). Saving the draft generates the URL for the page, which I add to the XML file.

Once all the day's posts are done, I make sure to credit all my sources in another part of that master XML file, and then I flip to the command line and run a bunch of python scripts that do MAGIC: formatting the master file as a newsletter, a blog post, and a master thread.

Those python scripts saved my ASS. For the first two months of Pluralistic, i did all the reformatting by hand. It was a lot of search-replace (I used a checklist) and I ALWAYS screwed it up and had to debug, sometimes taking hours.

Then, out of the blue, a reader - Loren Kohnfelder - wrote to me to point out bugs in the site's RSS. He offered to help with text automation and we embarked on a month of intensive back-and-forth as he wrote a custom suite for me.

Those programs take my XML file and spit out all the files I need to publish my site, newsletter and master thread (which I pin to my profile). They've saved me more time than I can say. I probably couldn't kept this up without Loren's generous help (thank you, Loren!).

I open up the output from the scripts in gedit. I paste the blog post into the Wordpress draft and copy-paste the metadata tags into WP's "tags" field. I preview the post, tweak as necessary, and publish.

(And now I write this, I realize I forgot to mention that while I'm doing the graphics, I also create a square header image that makes a grid-collage out of the day's post images, using the Gimp's "alignment" tool)

(because I'm composing this in Twitter, it would be a LOT of work to insert that information further up in the post, where it would make sense to have it - see what I mean about an unforgiving medium?)

(While I'm on the subject: putting the "add tweet to thread" and "publish the whole thread" buttons next to each other is a cruel joke that has caused me to repeatedly publish before I was done, and deleting a thread after you publish it is a nightmare)

Now I paste the newsletter file into a new mail message, address it to my Mailman server, and create a custom subject for the day, send it, open the Mailman admin interface in a browser, and approve the message.

Now it's time to create that anthology post you can see pinned to my Mastodon and Twitter accounts. Loren's script uses a template to produce all the tweets for the day, but it's not easy to get that pre-written thread into Twitter and Mastodon.

Part of the problem is that each day's Twitter master thread has a tweet with a link to the day's Mastodon master thread ("Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? Follow these threads on the #fediverse at @pluralistic@mamot.fr. Here's today's edition: LINK").

So the first order of business is to create the Mastodon thread, pin it, copy the link to it, and paste it into the template for the Twitter thread, then create and pin the Twitter thread.

Now it's time to get ready for tomorrow. I open up the master XML template file and overwrite my daily working file with its contents. I edit the file's header with tomorrow's date, trim away any "Upcoming appearances" that have gone by, etc.

Then I compose tomorrow's retrospective links. I open tabs for this day a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and (now) 20 years ago:

http://memex.craphound.com/2020/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2001/01/14

I go through each day, and open anything I want to republish in its own tab, then open the OP link in the next tab (finding it in the @internetarchive if necessary). Then I copy my original headline and the link to the article into tomorrow's XML file, like so:

#10yrsago Disney World’s awful Tiki Room catches fire <a href="https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/">https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/</a>

And NOW my day is done.

So, why do I do all this?

First and foremost, I do it for ME. The memex I've created by thinking about and then describing every interesting thing I've encountered is hugely important for how I understand the world. It's the raw material of every novel, article, story and speech I write.

And I do it for the causes I believe in. There's stuff in this world I want to change for the better. Explaining what I think is wrong, and how it can be improved, is the best way I know for nudging it in a direction I want to see it move.

The more people I reach, the more it moves.

When I left Boing Boing, I lost access to a freestanding way of communicating. Though I had popular Twitter and Tumblr accounts, they are at the mercy of giant companies with itchy banhammers and arbitrary moderation policies.

I'd long been a fan of the POSSE - Post Own Site, Share Everywhere - ethic, the idea that your work lives on platforms you control, but that it travels to meet your readers wherever they are.

Pluralistic posts start out as Twitter threads because that's the most constrained medium I work in, but their permalinks (each with multiple hidden messages in their slugs) are anchored to a server I control.

When my threads get popular, I make a point of appending the pluralistic.net permalink to them.

When I started blogging, 20 years ago, blogger.com had few amenities. None of the familiar utilities of today's media came with the package.

Back then, I'd manually create my headlines with <h2> tags. I'd manually create discussion links for each post on Quicktopic. I'd manually paste each post into a Yahoo Groups email. All the guff I do today to publish Pluralistic is, in some way, nothing new.

20 years in, blogging is still a curious mix of both technical, literary and graphic bodgery, with each day's work demanding the kind of technical minutuae we were told would disappear with WYSIWYG desktop publishing.

I grew up in the back-rooms of print shops where my dad and his friends published radical newspapers, laying out editions with a razor-blade and rubber cement on a light table. Today, I spend hours slicing up ASCII with a cursor.

I go through my old posts every day. I know that much - most? - of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.

[millenniumpuzzle]

a flaw in the code

Kaiba runs his Twitter more or less automatically, including a function to mass-block people who interact with Tweets he has blocked. Unfortunately, this sometimes means that he blocks people he doesn’t mean to block. When he gets confronted over this, how will he respond?

my introduction to canon x oc (the oc being kazuko kubota, the child of me and @duelistkingdom ) and it’s from kaiba’s pov (feat unrequited rivalship), because of course it is. enjoy! read on ao3 here

“Kaiba.”

Kaiba’s spine stiffened at the familiar voice. He clutched his books to his chest, their reassuring weight giving him the courage to spin on his heel. As he expected, Yugi Mutou was behind him. Or, not Yugi, but the other Yugi. He was wearing the uniform jacket properly, unlike his tendency during Battle City, but he was no less imposing.

Kaiba swallowed, hoping his voice came out naturally. “Yugi. What’s this about?”

“My partner was discouraged this morning. When I asked him why, he pulled up his phone instead of actually talking to me. So, I will do the same to you: care to explain this?” With all the flair he usually saved for revealing a Spell card, the other Yugi flipped his phone towards Kaiba. Kaiba had to squint—he wouldn’t be caught dead in his reading glasses at school—but when he finally made out the text, he frowned.

“So you’re blocked by somebody on Twitter? Please, Yugi, this isn’t something to get worked up about. It’s not like it’s a personal attack.” He ignored the voice in his head reminding him that he had written a program for his own Twitter that would block anyone who associated with certain tweets. Tweets that featured Yugi boasting about his beautiful, talented, clever girlfriend in particular.

“Just somebody, huh?” The other Yugi fixed Kaiba with a stern look. It should have seemed out of place on Yugi’s round, friendly face, but Kaiba couldn’t help but feel suddenly small. “Try again.”

Kaiba sighed, but took Yugi’s phone in his own hand, finding the appropriate position where he could read the text with the least amount of eye strain. And— “What is this?”

The other Yugi was right; he wasn’t blocked by just any random loser on Twitter. The screen was on Kaiba’s own Twitter page. Instead of the Kaiba Land promos and Duel Disk news he had most recently retweeted, however, the screen was gray, apart from a block of tiny letters. “You are blocked by this user,” the website proclaimed, though as Kaiba met the other Yugi’s piercing eyes again, it felt more like an accusation than a simple statement of fact.

“I’d think you would know,” the other Yugi replied, voice startlingly cool.

To his horror, Kaiba found himself at a loss for words. “I don’t—I mean—” He cut himself off, squeezing his eyes shut and taking a couple deep breaths. As he did so, he searched his memory, but he couldn’t recall hitting the block button on Yugi. At least, not of his own volition.

“Use your words, Kaiba.”

Kaiba growled, but forced his eyes back open. “I didn’t block you.” At the other Yugi’s raised eyebrow, he rushed on, words running into one another in his haste to get them out. “At least, not on purpose. In fact, my account is more or less completely run automatically, using programs that I wrote specifically for that purpose. Some of these scripts do involve blocking users, so it’s possible that your account got caught in some filter accidentally.”

The other Yugi frowned, crossing his arms and tapping his fingers against his elbows. “So what you’re saying is, your computer programs blocked my partner by mistake?”

“Exactly.” Kaiba couldn’t help but feel a jolt of envy at how quickly the other Yugi picked things up. “It was a quirk of the system, nothing more. Tell Yugi that he can stop moping about it.” He felt ridiculous asking someone who, for all intents and purposes, was Yugi to pass along a message to Yugi. Ever since Battle City, though, he’d found himself a bit more amenable to the ridiculous, implausible things that happened around Yugi Mutou.

The other Yugi, for his part, perked up substantially at the mention of his own name. “I can do better than that!” A genuine grin spread over his features, drawing Kaiba’s attention to his plush lips, the dimple on his left cheek. “I can bring him out so you can tell him yourself!”

He continued speaking, but aside from a few mentions of the word “partner,” Kaiba was no longer listening. Ice had shot down his spine, while paradoxically, heat bloomed in his cheeks and sweat formed on his hands. “That won’t be necessary,” he snapped, interrupting the other Yugi’s joyful monologue. “Just tell him what I said. Goodbye.”

With that, he turned on his heel and fled the hallway, books still clutched close to his chest. He could feel his heart hammering in his ears, even as he turned into the men’s room and locked the door behind him. The wooden door was cool against his back as he sunk to a sitting position against it, letting his school supplies fall from his arms.

God damn it. Kaiba exhaled sharply, dragging his hands down his face, before pulling out his phone and opening Twitter. A rare occurrence, as of late; there wasn’t much that he needed to keep up with online, and he rarely wanted to check the inane tweets his contemporaries made. When his profile opened, he navigated to the “Blocked Users” page. There was quite a bit to scroll through, but eventually, he was face-to-face with Yugi’s smiling profile picture.

Almost immediately, he turned his phone off, pulling his knees to his chest and burying his face in his crossed arms. He really did block Yugi. Prevented from interaction with one of the only people he actually wanted to interact with by his own programs.

He allowed himself a moment of despair, before pulling himself back together, unlocking his phone once more. Even so, he still flinched at the reappearance of Yugi’s picture. Keep it together, Seto. You’re just seeing what triggered the block. Think about it like a programming error.

One of the benefits of Kaiba’s auto-block program (nicknamed “Crush Tweet Virus” by Mokuba) was that if Kaiba blocked a tweet, not only did it block the person who made it, it also hid the profiles of anyone who interacted with it. What’s more, it allowed him to see the blocked tweet a given user had liked or retweeted. This was a nominally useful feature. In Yugi’s case, however, the reason for the block made Kaiba’s blood run cold. God. Anything but that tweet.

Unfortunately, no matter how much he tried to blink it out of existence, the proof was there. Kaiba opened the blocked tweet in question, and his stomach immediately turned over. He didn’t have a name for the emotions burning in his gut. All he knew was that the image of Yugi pressing a kiss to Kazuko Kubota’s outstretched hand, the caption declaring “These two are couple goals,” threatened to overwhelm him with discomfort. He had blocked it for a reason.

In fact, there was a theme to the posts he had blocked. They all contained some reference to Yugi Mutou, Kazuko Kubota, and/or the fact that they were currently in a relationship. As much as he wanted to lie to himself, he knew what irked him so much about the reminder that Yugi was dating somebody. It was the fact that he wanted to be the person whose hand Yugi was kissing—the reminder that Yugi clearly didn’t have the same feelings toward Kaiba.

His face was burning. If only he could take his uniform jacket off, splash water on his face, anything to calm him down without ruining his composed appearance. Instead, he navigated back to his “Blocked Users” page, once again making eye contact with Yugi’s smiling headshot. If his fingers trembled at all as he hit the “unblock” button, Kaiba certainly wouldn’t admit to it. He would have to reprogram “Crush Tweet Virus” to exempt Yugi entirely, as he would almost certainly interact with other tweets about his girlfriend. Girlfriend—the word made Kaiba’s stomach do another unpleasant flip.

He thought he was done with the whole endeavor. In fact, he was almost at peace, comfortably eating his lunch on the roof a few days later. Part of that had to do with the fact that he hadn’t interacted with Yugi in all that time, but nobody needed to know that. Unfortunately, things couldn’t be so easy for him.

“Hey, Kaiba! They told me I could find you up here.”

Kaiba nearly spit out his mouthful of rice. Surely, his ears were playing tricks on him. Kubota went to Rintama, she wouldn’t have time to make it onto the roof of Domino High during her lunch break. Yet, as he craned his neck up from his lunch, his stomach dropped. Those baby-pink hair buns could belong to nobody else.

He jumped to his feet, uncomfortable with looking up at the much-shorter duelist, then cleared his throat. “Kubota. What are you doing here?”

Kubota just grinned at him, though it looked more like a hostile baring of teeth to Kaiba. “I was in the neighborhood. Figured I’d drop by and thank you for unblocking Yugi.”

“You knew about that?” Kaiba said, keeping his gaze fiercely locked with her lavender eyes.

“Of course! Yugi and I don’t keep things from each other,” she responded, sounding hurt. “He was really upset when he realized you blocked him, so finding out that it was a mistake made him feel way better. So, uh, thanks.”

Why was she thanking him? He and Kubota didn’t speak much, but when they did, she was usually admonishing him. The lashing she gave him at Duelist Kingdom flashed through his mind; he suppressed a shudder. Yet, analyzing her body language, he didn’t think she was being sarcastic.

She cleared her throat, then, and gestured towards him. Right, she had said, “Thank you.” What was the right response to give? He settled on a curt, “You’re welcome,” and a brief jerk of his head, an abridged bow. Yet, she didn’t turn to leave. Instead, she glanced up and down his form, hands on her hips. One side of her face twitched—a suppressed smile?

“So, the stowaway tells me your Twitter account is basically automated,” she said casually, slipping one of the straps of her bright red bag off so that it hung from one shoulder instead of both.

“Stowaway?”

“Right, you don’t hang out with us much. That’s what I call the other Yugi.”

Kaiba flushed with embarrassment at the memory of the prior conversation. “I see. Yes, he’s right. That is how Yugi got blocked.”

Kubota leaned in, one eyebrow raised. “So, what program blocked Yugi? ‘Cause Stowaway tells me that he didn’t think you were lying about it being an accident, but I haven’t heard of anything that blocks people so liberally.”

“What do you mean?” Kaiba asked, frowning. “One person getting blocked by my program doesn’t mean that I’ve blocked everybody.”

“Are you sure about that?” Kubota wasn’t looking at him anymore, instead focused on her own phone. She scrolled for a moment, fingers moving in time with the rhythm she chewed her gum, before turning her screen towards him with a cry of triumph. “This thread says otherwise.”

Again, Kaiba was forced to squint at someone else’s phone screen, and almost immediately, he regretted ever signing up for Twitter in the first place. The first tweet was from Mai Kujaku, reading, “Lmao, guess I pissed him off somehow!” It was accompanied by a familiar screenshot: Kaiba’s own profile, with the text “You have been blocked by this user.”

The next tweet was from Kubota herself, remarking, “Lol, I’ve been blocked since Duelist Kingdom.” After that, the replies were full of Yugi’s friends, all posting similar screenshots and complaining about (Mazaki) or rejoicing (Jonouchi) being blocked by Seto Kaiba.

Damn him for forgetting that Kubota was an excellent strategist in her own right; he shouldn’t have let his guard down around her. He would never admit he had been thrown off, though. Instead, he straightened his posture, using the extra inch of height to sneer down at Kubota. “So my program kept the dweeb patrol from interacting with me. Seems like it’s working as intended.”

“But you didn’t want it to keep Yugi out, right?” Kubota said, a confident gleam in her eye that he recognized from when she dueled. She was right, of course, but he kept his mouth shut rather than admit it. “Whatever your program does, it obviously has a chain effect, since I haven’t interacted with any of your tweets. Maybe it doesn’t involve your tweets at all? I can puzzle this out all day, Kaiba.”

“Fine! If I tell you, will you stop talking?” Kaiba growled, frowning all the harder when Kubota grinned in response.

“Sure.” Her voice was as bouncy as the curls escaping her buns. Kaiba hated it.

Kaiba paused, trying to collect his thoughts. All the while, Kubota rocked on her heels, humming a melody he didn’t recognize. Finally, he happened on a good starting point.

“I thought I was aromantic.”

To his dismay, Kubota appeared to choke on air, coughing hard before breaking into disbelieving laughter. He crossed his arms, glaring at her, until she finally collected herself enough to say, “I’m sorry, I just— That is not what I expected you to say.” At Kaiba’s silence, she sighed, putting her hands up in a placating gesture. “Fine, I’ll be quiet. I guess you’re not aromantic?”

Kaiba thought about saying something in response to her air-quotes, but thought better of it. “I thought that I was above all of that. I didn’t have time for romance anyway—I still don’t. But then, you and Yugi got together, and it made me feel...ill.” Kubota’s face twisted, but he didn’t address it. “At first, I thought I was having romantic feelings towards you—”

“What?” Kubota’s horrified cry was a bit much, in Kaiba’s opinion, but he felt the same way.

“Calm down, that wasn’t the case.” He narrowed his eyes at Kubota’s exaggerated exhale, but continued. “After some thought, it became clear that… I was experiencing romantic attraction, but not towards you.” The other words on his tongue died once that horrifying revelation was out, and he snapped his mouth shut, letting his confession linger in the air.

Kubota’s brow was furrowed, however. Why was she confused? Kaiba had told her everything she needed to know! He was about to accuse her of taunting him when she gasped, eyes widening. “Are you… Coming out to me?”

Kaiba’s already-pale face became even whiter. “No?”

“Yes, you are! You’re coming out to me! And you started your coming out speech by telling me my boyfriend was your gay realization?” With every step, she advanced on him, until she was close enough that when she pointed her finger for emphasis, it brushed his chest.

“That’s—a blunt description, Kubota.”

She just shook her head. “I mean, it’s fine, I’m bi, but it’s a weird way to tell somebody you’re gay. And this relates to Twitter...how?”

Kaiba scoffed. “I could be bisexual.” When Kubota’s brow raised, a familiar irritation began coursing through him. Better than embarrassment. “I could! You don’t know that I’m—that I don’t like girls.”

Kubota scoffed right back, undaunted by his bristling. “Whatever you want to tell yourself. I just want to know what this has to do with blocking Yugi on Twitter.”

“It has everything to do with that,” Kaiba said, but his mouth dried up as he realized exactly why Yugi and the rest of his friends were blocked. He cleared his throat, then balled his fists and looked away from Kubota. The words felt like venom in his throat; the only way to alleviate the burning they caused was to spit them out. “I set up a program to block anybody who liked certain posts. Posts that talked about yours and Yugi’s relationship.”

A raised eyebrow. “Just talked about? That’s kind of a broad net, even for you, Kaiba.”

“Fine. They were posts which included photographic or video evidence of you being a couple. Usually with highly supportive comments. Those were the kinds of things I blocked, and the virus associated with it blocked anyone who interacted with a post I blocked using this system.”

Kubota shook her head. “Even your weird Twitter bots are like Duel Monsters cards. I’d say to get a hobby, but it seems like you’ve got your hands full already.”

“Are you challenging me? Because I’ll wipe the floor with you in a Duel, we both know that,” Kaiba growled.

“No,” Kubota said lightly, “but not because I think I’ll lose. You’re so predictable, Kaiba. I should have seen this coming, though I didn’t think you would be this weird about me and Yugi. Guess I was wrong!”

Arms folded, Kaiba surveyed his adversary. Five-foot-nothing, blowing a bubble of gum at him while she rocked back and forth on her booted heels, skateboard underneath one arm. Her Buster Blader cards came to mind, and he cringed internally. He made a mental note: find a copy of her Battle City deck and run simulations against it, to discern ideal counter-strategies.

But, he needed to respond to her before that could happen. “Hmph. As long as Yugi doesn’t forget who his true rival is, I suppose I don’t need to make a fuss about his romantic decisions.”

Kubota’s shoulders shook, but she looked him in the eyes and nodded. “Thank you, Kaiba. Are you...sure you’re okay?”

“Of course I am,” Kaiba said, more off-kilter than he’d ever been. “Now, the bell’s about to ring, and I haven’t finished my lunch.”

Checking her watch, her glossy lips parted in surprise. “Shit, you’re right. I gotta get back to Rintama. Don’t be a stranger, Kaiba!” With that, she ran toward the stairs, waving at him over her shoulder before the door slammed behind her. Kaiba exhaled slowly, and looked at the remains of his bento. He wasn’t very hungry, all of a sudden.

What had he done?

[nicholastthornley]

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It might very nicely be just like how the No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA realized in regards to the distinction between human Bot habits based on where they click on. While it seems to be successful as of now, there may be at all times the chance that robots will ultimately have the ability to outsmart it. The No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA methodology is a type of CAPTCHA that has been created by Google. It has solely been around since 2014 but has already made its place on the web. The level of it is to find out a human person from a robotic by the behavior when offered with a easy task. The task that is presented to the person is to click on on a field indicating, “I am not a robot”. This method may also be used with cell phones and apps, however would contain clicking on the field with the finger, quieter than the mouse.

Both accounts will allow you to get the solutions to almost any kind of CAPTCHA and both help Google’s reCAPTCHA version 2. This way, you're assured to have Expert Decoders meet your wants. Customers can use Bitcoin or WebMoney as fee options, which are both very safe ways to pay in your CAPTCHAs, so you don’t have to worry about your non-public information getting in the wrong hands. Decaptcher permits for some varieties to be bypassed corresponding to the math CAPTCHA. There can also be character recognition when it comes to word and quantity CAPTCHAs. It is just $2 for every 1,000 solved, and keep in mind, you're solely paying for the ones that have been successfully solved. De-Captcha can also be related to Twitter, so there's an entire group on the market for you to gather help and get what you want when it comes to CAPTCHA fixing.

Check with the captcha section in ySense and you can reach buyer care support at any time for further queries. Many sit up to start work with them this created hype in the markets. Many fraudsters are urging money from harmless people to join in Qlink. Here they provide the most effective flexible hours, One of one of the best captcha jobs who look to work at home. You can reach their customer care assistant at any time for more queries. Hereby signing up with Captcha2Cash you possibly can earn real money by decoding captchas.

The web site makes an attempt to confirm that the consumer is in reality a human by requiring the person to finish a task known as a "Completely Automated Public Turing Test, to Tell Computers and Humans Apart," or CAPTCHA. The assumption is that people discover this task comparatively easy, whereas robots find it nearly impossible to carry out.

It is perfect to be used by developers who're interested in utilizing their very own applications together with this CAPTCHA solving service. The web site has fantastic and straightforward information to help with integrating this software with search engine optimization. The CaptchaTronix API additionally uses an interface that is simple for anyone to use, regardless of how much expertise they have with internet creating or CAPTCHA. This program is also suitable with web form, cURL, PHP, Python, Perl, VB.NET, and iMacros. Captchatronix can be all the time in search of ways to improve their service and provides frequent updates about what has been changed to make the method easier for its clients. There are so many different types of jobs out there these days, especially ones having to do with the web. One advantage of the internet is that it has created many forms of jobs internationally.

As we already mentioned Captcha is a straightforward mechanism to show that the person is a human and not any organized bot or program. Everything invented has an objective, In the same method, even captchas serve a purpose of safety. Let us be easy right here, Here is the abbreviation for CAPTCHA- Completely Automated Public Turing Test.This is nothing however the challenge-response check conducted to detect the person is a real human. If you're keen on filling them and need to fill more; Now it’s time to show that activity right into a revenue mannequin. We wrote this article particularly for the sniggled word sample loving individuals and allow them to know how they can turn their fun into cash. CAPTCHAs based solely on studying text — or different visible-notion duties — forestall visually impaired customers from accessing the protected useful resource. Such CAPTCHAs could make a web site incompatible with Section 508 within the United States.

[scifigeneration]

Malicious bots and trolls spread vaccine misinformation – now social media companies are fighting back

by Ana Santos Rutschman

At least half of parents of young children report having encountered negative messages about vaccines on social media. Alexander Dummer/Unsplash, CC BY

Social media have become one of the preeminent ways of disseminating accurate information about vaccines. However, a lot of the vaccine information propagated across social media in the United States has been inaccurate or misleading. At a time when vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise, vaccine misinformation has become a cause of concern to public health officials.

A 2018 study showed that a lot of anti-vaccine information is generated by malicious automated programs – known as bots – and online trolls. In a striking parallel with the 2016 presidential campaign and the 2018 midterm elections, some vaccine misinformation on American social media has been traced back to Russia.

At Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies, I monitor legal and policy responses to vaccine misinformation. Now platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are developing strategies to address anti-vaccine bots and to try to reduce their reach in the United States.

Vaccine misinformation is all over social media

“Vaccine hesitancy” is what public health officials call the “delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines” despite their availability. The World Health Organization has classified vaccine hesitancy as one of 10 big threats to global health in 2019, on the list with air pollution, heart disease, cancer and pandemic outbreaks due to viruses like Ebola.

In recent years, social media platforms have become effective vehicles for conveying inaccurate information about vaccines, amplifying anti-vaccine movements and giving greater visibility to scientifically unsound data.

In a 2019 experiment, several journalists searched the term “vaccine” on Facebook. What came back was predominantly anti-vaccine content, even though the vast majority of parents – 91% in one survey – are pro-vaccine.

One study by the Royal Society for Public Health in the U.K. found that 41% of parents using social media reported having encountered “negative messages” related to vaccination. The number increased to 50% among parents of children younger than 5.

via MEME

Memes and other eye-catching visuals can also help propagate the idea that vaccines are unnecessary or harmful, without any reference to scientific or medical data.

Anyone with access to a computer can easily spread inaccurate information about vaccines through social media.

But bots trolling social media can accomplish this goal at a massive level, as they have been doing in the United States at least since 2014.

Malicious bots targeting vaccine info

Bots account for a large percentage of online activity overall. Calculations suggest that between 40% and 52% of all internet traffic is automated. A study analyzing online bot activity in 2018 estimated that 20.4% of bots were malicious. Researchers estimate that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts, for instance, are run by bots, instead of people.

A 2018 study analyzing Twitter data examined the role of bots and Russian trolls in spreading vaccine misinformation. Researchers looked at over 1.7 million vaccine-related tweets between July 2014 and September 2017. Accounts associated with these two categories tweeted at a higher rate about vaccines than average users. While there are no published studies about other social media, researchers have warned of similar activity on Facebook and YouTube.

In the case of Twitter, there seem to be at least two separate goals behind spreading misleading news about vaccines. Most vaccine-focused bots are deployed with the direct goal of spreading vaccine misinformation, presumably with the purposed of amplifying anti-vaccine views.

But content originating in Russia conveys both pro- and anti-vaccine messages. This is part of a broader strategy aimed at sowing discord in the U.S. by stirring up conflict around divisive topics.

Some Russian tweets identified in the study used the Twitter #vaccinateUS hashtag. Of all the #vaccinateUS tweets that had Russian sources, 43% were pro-vaccine, 38% were anti-vaccine and 19% were neutral. A pro-vaccine one asked: “Do you still treat your kids with leaves? No? And why don’t you #vaccinate them? It’s medicine!” An example of an anti-vaccine one read: “#vaccines are a parents choice. Choice of a color of a little coffin.”

The U.S. is not alone in facing increasing levels of vaccine misinformation on social media. Canada has also reported a rise in the number of online bots spreading vaccine misinformation. Moreover, as content from social media is consumed across borders, these issues are now turning into a global problem.

Social media platforms clear out misinformation

A 2015 study analyzing vaccine pins on Pinterest found that the majority were anti-vaccine. By early 2019, the company decided to block all vaccine content from the platform.

Initially, the ban was absolute, regardless of the accuracy or source of the information. In late August, Pinterest announced that it would start allowing content from public health organizations, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and World Health Organization.

In March 2019, Facebook announced that it would take steps to diminish anti-vaccine content. The company no longer allows anti-vaccine advertising and says it is considering removing fundraising tools from anti-vaccination Facebook pages. It no longer “recommends” anti-vaccine content and reduced the rankings of groups and pages conveying vaccine misinformation. They’re less visible, but not banned – these groups and pages are still present on Facebook.

Also in 2019, YouTube prohibited advertising on channels and videos that run anti-vaccination content. Until then, most YouTube searches for “vaccine” served up misinformation at the top of the list results. Afterwards, John Oliver’s HBO episode on vaccines and similar content jumped to the top.

Plenty of misinformation still online

As I wrote this article, dozens of new tweets were added to the #vaccine hashtag on Twitter. Several were similar to this one, tweeted from an account with over 11,000 followers, that conveys an anti-vaccine message under the guise of scientific information.

This account, which appears to be closely related to a previously suspended one, tweeted multiple times per hour. Less than an hour before the tweet above, it had tweeted a visually more blunt message asserting the false link between vaccines and autism.

Like most Twitter users, I have no idea whether this is a personal account or one operated by a bot. But for several hours the vast majority of the tweets on the vaccine hashtag were spreading content that is not supported by current scientific consensus.

While the latest tweets were predominantly anti-vaccination, when I sorted results by “top tweets,” a tweet from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, pointing readers toward its own vaccine information page, appeared first.

But tweets 4, 5 and 9 in the top 10 belonged to the same account with 11,000 followers I encountered repeatedly while monitoring the Twitter vaccine hashtag.

With outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases on the rise, public health institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been increasing their social media presences. Social media platforms can continue to help reduce misinformation that could further increase vaccine hesitancy in the United States and elsewhere. As suggested by Pinterest’s approach, these tech companies can increase the amount and visibility of vaccine content from reliable sources. While it’s virtually impossible to eliminate all inaccurate posts, I believe social media can and should be redesigned to facilitate the promotion of accurate vaccine information.

About The Author:

Ana Santos Rutschman is Assistant Professor of Law at Saint Louis University

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

[wealth4living]

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So if you are looking into making money through twitter or want to earn passive income that puts money into your account even when you are sleeping for the rest of your life, Auto Tweets is definitely the program for you.

About Auto Tweets?

Auto Tweet is software that will post automated tweets on Twitter which is a social media site in order to bring constant information about your products and services online. The tweets you send can be a source for a passive income since it works 24/7 while you only need to spend at least a few minutes of your time for making your tweets and the software takes care of posting them on social media sites like Twitter.

The tweets will help you earn cash by working on marketing your business by itself without your intervention. Its auto pilot system will deliver more results to your income with the less effort on your part to do the marketing. The system works on any social media site and it can run your business automatically and can earn you money even as you sleep.

Once Auto Tweets is set up, Auto Tweets runs almost automatically.

Thorough training leading you step by step through set up.

You do not need to know a lot about internet marketing to get Auto Tweets started.

The price is low enough to seriously test Auto Tweets out.

There is a ClickBank 60-day guarantee.

There is a discount for buying quarterly upfront, instead of monthly.

Auto Tweets is a slow burner and can accumulate good followers over time that will be interested in your niche.

Auto Tweets is hosted on a dedicated server which will eliminate problems of exceeding your bandwidth with other hosting companies.

The software works but Tweeting the same message out to a lot of people can get you banned or suppressed.

Auto Tweets has an affiliate scheme which means you can market Auto Tweets itself.

How Does Auto Tweet Work?

Inside Auto Tweets you have the ability to effectively stack, or queue, pre-written Tweets which will automatically be posted on Twitter at set intervals. These intervals are set by you, so for example, you can post every 4 hours. You can queue up to 300 Tweets, which will allow you a huge variety of messages for your followers. The idea is that you can queue up a huge collection of Tweets which will be valuable and engaging with your audience. Thus allowing you more time to do more productive things instead of constantly seeking our fresh and continuous material to post on Twitter. The key here, which Steven does point out, is to provide valuable information and not try and sell to frequently.

You are also shown :

How to get more Twitter followers by using a simple technique of finding niche related influencers and following their followers. This is a clever trick because they are highly targeted and very likely to follow you back.

​How to monetize Twitter by finding ClickBank products to promote on your Twitter page. Steven covers what factors to consider when choosing a product to promote.

​How to set up automatic news updates by linking up to Google Alerts and automatically posting to your Twitter feed with keyword targeted and related content. This is quite a clever feature because it allows you to automatically post very informative and engaging content which is already popular on the Internet.

How to add royalty free images to your tweets. You are shown some great websites where you can find royalty free images which you can use for any purpose. These sources are incredibly high quality and have a huge database of relative and beautiful pictures you can use in your tweets.

>>>>Click Here And Watch the following video that will take you behind the scenes and reveal the secret blueprint for creating a 100% PASSIVE INCOME with TWITTER in about 30 minutes! <<<<

Facts you need to know about Auto Tweets!

You will be able to generate an income that is passive and in consistence, that is when you decide to buy this software you can be assured that money will always flow into your account.

The unique auto-pilot system works to ensuring that once you are signed up all work is done for you.

Your followers are able to receive important and valuable content every time, new information about your business is posted to them if and when it arises.

The effectiveness of this system keeps your followers happy and fulfilled; this will propel them to keep coming back for more.

The program keeps everything on the server. There is a simple guide that you can follow step by step when you access the member’s area.

You never need to worry about paying for the very expensive servers and broadband rates, that’s not even it, when you buy this software you will not even need a website!

The advantages about Auto Tweets

One of the advantages of using the system is its ability to run your business in auto pilot condition by using the feeders on your site. The software is also easy to use and there is no need to download and install it. It is also compatible with any computer system. Novice in affiliate marketing will benefit from the Auto Tweets since it will do all the marketing of their product automatically with the less effort on their part.

There is less worry if you are a newcomer and doesn’t know much about the technical aspect of running the software. If you are too busy to run your business social media site on a regular basis the Auto Tweets auto pilot system will do the work for you. This way you will never lose contact to your followers no matter how busy you are. Because everything is automated you will be required less effort than you would spend for marketing your products manually. The product also comes with a 60-day money back guarantee.

The disadvantages about Auto Tweets

You will need an internet connection in order for the Auto Tweets software to work continuously. You also need to follow the instructions strictly when initially launching the software to your social media sites which you need to do correctly to successfully integrate the program to your social media accounts.

Conclusion

If you ask is Auto Tweets a scam? it is reasonable to say that it is a legitimate software in the market that can help you enhance your social media marketing efforts.  It works well on different social media sites especially Twitter that can help you maintain contact with your followers and generate you passive income without doing so much since the automated system of the software will do the rest of the work for you. The price for the subscription is also affordable and you can cancel anytime so there is not much to risk on your investment for trying out this product.

I strongly recommend this program. It worth trying because it will not disappoint you, the positive customer reviews, the 60 day money back guarantee, the affordability of buying the software are reason enough for you to give this product the benefit of the doubt.

Auto Tweet software system by Steven Holl is quite something I must say. I am almost coming to the end of this review and you will agree with me that this program has a lot of advantages for you, information you need has been given to you, the decision is yours to make!

They have 60 days unconditional money back guarantee. So you do not need to worry about losing your money if in case you buy the product but find that you are not satisfied or happy with it because of any reasons you might have.

Take your time to go through the customer reviews. You will be surprised at the very many positive reviews people are giving. The product has changed the lives of many people, proof enough that it is legit.

To begin using AutoTweet, CLICK HERE to get instant access to the members area. Steven has created a series of easy to follow step-by-step videos that will help you to get your first AutoTweet campaign up and running TODAY. No previous experience needed! AutoTweet is totally beginner friendly. Go Click Here to get started now!!!

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Make Money Online With Little or No Money To Get Started!

[brownada311]

App Like Snagit For Mac

Computer apps (or applications) are something we are used to having. When there’s something we want to do, we think of “Let me check if there’s an app for that”. Let’s face it–it makes our lives easier but not necessarily better. To-do lists? There are thousands of apps for that. Do you want to start to journal? Don’t worry–there are several to choose from.

However, not all apps are of the same quality. So, what is the best productivity app on the Mac?

What is the name of the web app that can snag a web page and allow you to edit it for testing (Not Snagit)? What is the best free screen capture tool to make a presentation? Is there an option on Snagit for Mac to output all screenshots to an image format rather than defaulting to the Snagit project format? Snagit 2018.2.3 - Screen capture utility. Download the latest versions of the best Mac apps at safe and trusted MacUpdate Download, install, or update Snagit for Mac from MacUpdate.

We all have our opinions, and declaring the “best” app is almost impossible. What might be the best app for me may not be right for you, and an app you love may not be quite what I need.

One advantage that Asian Efficiency has is we have a team that lives and breathes productivity and we’ve been evaluating tools and productivity methods for years. We debate apps internally every day, and we all come at it from different angles, backgrounds, and age ranges. This same team has helped over 13 thousand of our customers and readers with their productivity journey and has helped thousands reach their goals.

In addition, we have a highly intelligent productivity community called The Dojo where tools and techniques are shared.

When I started to compile our annual list of the best Mac apps this year, I polled the growing AE team and members of the Dojo to see what the favorites are. Our guarantee is that we have personally tried, tested, and used all the apps that we included in this list.

Here’s our list of the top 10 productivity apps of 2018, and some more tools that didn’t quite make the top 10, but are still great.

(Just remember – you want to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome. Only start digging into a tool if it is something that you actually need! If you don’t need it, set it aside for now. It’ll still be available when you’re ready to put it to use.)

Top 10

Whenever we set up a new Mac, these are the first apps we install. While we can use a Mac without them, we’re not nearly as productive. A good productivity app should reduce friction and amplify good habits, and all of these meet those criteria.

#1: Dropbox – Dropbox is essential for how we work at Asian Efficiency. All of our shared files, blog posts, media, etc. are stored in Dropbox which makes it very easy to collaborate on projects as a team even though we are located all over the world. This is the very first thing I install when setting up a new Mac as it provides the sync and storage foundation for my workflow. iCloud Drive is getting better and better so maybe someday Dropbox won’t be necessary, but for our needs it is hard to beat.

#2: 1Password – The absolute best password manager for Mac. Essentially it works by having you creating one master password, which then grants access to all your other passwords. These passwords can be randomly generated inside of 1Password, which means that all your individual passwords are incredibly strong and near-impossible to hack. You don’t have to remember all of these passwords though as your single master password gives you (and only you) easy access to all your other passwords and can even be triggered when unlocked via a keyboard shortcut that autofills the information in your browser for you. 1Password also gives you the ability to store credit card information, secure notes, software serial numbers, and other important (but sensitive) information like passport numbers, your SSN and bank account details securely. See an example of how Thanh uses it in his life.

If you need to securely share some passwords with others, there is 1Password Families and 1Password Teams. These let you have Personal Vaults and Shared Vaults so you can keep some passwords just for yourself and some passwords available to family members or co-workers. With 1Password Teams, you can make it so that some staff can launch and log in to websites without being able to see the password. My wife and I use the Family plan at home, and it is great to be able to share passwords for important sites.

#3: TextExpander – TextExpander does exactly what it says on the tin – expands text. It sounds really simple, but once you develop the mindset of watching for things you type repeatedly you’ll start to see hundreds of things that you can automate with TextExpander. You can even use the more advanced features like fill-in snippets, date/time math, and optional selections to create some very powerful and personal email templates. We have a video guide to using TextExpander if you need some help to get started with it. Some members of the Dojo prefer Typinator which is not subscription-based, but members of the AE team like TextExpander.

#4: Alfred/Launchbar – Alfred and Launchbar are both classified as application launchers, but that’s just scratching the service of what these apps can do. They allow you to find and open files quickly, perform quick calculations, search your clipboard history, control iTunes media playback, create custom searches, and so much more. There are even custom workflows you can create or install to expand their functionality and control your Mac with the keyboard. Think of them as Spotlight on steroids. Both of these applications are excellent, and which one you decide to use will be determined by personal taste (Mike and I use Alfred, Thanh uses Launchbar). Just make sure you pick one!

#5: OmniFocus – The absolute best task manager for Mac and my digital brain. OmniFocus is a powerful task manager with a very nice user interface which makes it a joy to use on Mac, iOS, and Apple Watch. OmniFocus has a lot of features and is very powerful so it can be a bit intimidating to get up and running with it, but if you invest the time to learn how to use it, it will be time well spent. We have a whole library of free OmniFocus tutorials here or if you want our step-by-step system you can join our course here. We’re really excited about OmniFocus 3 that is coming out in 2018 – among other features there’ll be tags, more flexible scheduling, and a limited web interface.

#6: Keyboard Maestro – Keyboard Maestro is an application to launch macros on your Mac, which can be used to automate just about any repetitive task. Basically, Keyboard Maestro automatically performs certain actions whenever a particular trigger is activated, which could be something like a hotkey combination, connecting to a wireless network, or even connecting a specific USB device to your Mac. Once you start applying these macros, it will change how you use your computer. Mike wrote an article about Keyboard Maestro awhile back that includes some video examples to help you get started. A recent Keyboard Maestro use case for me: when I start up my Twitter app on my Mac, it will automatically kill it after 5 minutes. This stops me from getting lost into reading about whatever the outrage of the day is.

#7: Hazel – Hazel is an automated file organization utility that can watch whatever folders you tell it to and organize your files according to whatever rules you create. For example, I have a Hazel rule that watches my Download folder and if anything is over 1 week old it labels it “Red” and moves it to my “Action Items” folder on my desktop, which I clean up at the end of the day. Hazel is also an essential part of pretty much any paperless workflow, and we have an article that takes you through a simple setup. For more Hazel tips, check out this article. Inside the Dojo we have even more workflows that are shared by our members.

#8: nvALT – nvALT is in desperate need of an update, but it’s still an essential part of our capture workflow. Forked by Brett Terpstra, nvALT is a quick way to take notes using just your keyboard. Just hit a keyboard combination and nvALT opens, ready to capture whatever you throw at it. As you type, it will search your existing notes and if you want to create a new note just hit “Enter”. It’s a very simple, lightweight program and best of all it’s free so there’s no reason not to try it. Rumor has it that Brett is working on a commercial replacement, but we’ve used it so much over the years that we will gladly pay whatever he decides to charge for it.

#9: PopClip – PopClip is a menu bar application that opens up an iOS-style interface whenever you highlight text on your Mac. It includes the standard commands like cut, copy and paste, but also has extensions that let you do a lot of different things (like formatting text or sending to OmniFocus). You can send emails, post tweets, apply Markdown rules, etc.

#10: Bartender – One of the great things about the Mac is that there are a ton of awesome Menu bar applications (like the aforementioned PopClip & nvALT), but if you have a lot of them your Menu bar will quickly become cluttered. Bartender keeps you menu bar clean by controlling which application appear in the main menu bar, which ones appear only in the Bartender menu bar (a sub-menu for your menu bar), and which ones are hidden completely.

Best of the Rest

There are a lot of other applications that we use on a daily/weekly basis that play a very important part in our workflows.

“Netflix for Apps”

There are a lot of great apps in this list. Before you pull out your credit card, we want to point you to a service that many AE community members love: SetApp. With SetApp, you pay a monthly subscription and get access to a large list of Mac apps, including many in this article. The subscription includes upgrades too.

As we mentioned last year, expect more productivity apps go the subscription route. SetApp is a great way to get some of the best apps for one price.

Communications & Calendar

Airmail, Postbox, MailPlane, MailMate – There are a lot of great email clients available for Mac, but Apple Mail (or Mail.app) isn’t one of them. Apple Mail seems to always have Gmail-related bugs, and it doesn’t support Gmail keyboard shortcuts which can save you a lot of time processing email. Fortunately, there are several great alternatives. Airmail is an absolutely beautiful email client that integrates with just about every productivity app out there. Postbox is a powerful email client with some unique features (like domain fencing, which prevents you from sending email from the wrong account accidentally). MailPlane is great if you like the Gmail web interface but prefer a native app, and MailMate is an incredibly powerful keyboard-centric email client if you like writing in Markdown. Inside our Escape Your Email course we go in more detail how to setup an email workflow with these apps for maximum efficiency.

BusyCal – BusyCal is an incredibly powerful calendaring application that has a lot of advanced features (like Mike’s personal favorite, the ability to set a custom week length view). It supports pretty much every calendar type available and is rock solid.

Zoom – ”That’s it, we need a replacement for Skype!” said Thanh when our Daily Huddle went off the rails due to connectivity issues one time too many. We settled on Zoom, and it has been rock-solid every since. All of our team meetings, both voice and video, are done with Zoom and we’re happy with it.

Slack/Hipchat – We have virtually no internal email here at Asian Efficiency, and much of that is due to Hipchat which we use as an internal communication tool. If you need an answer to something right away or need to have a discussion about a certain topic, a tool like Hipchat or Slack will allow you to reach a resolution much faster than an email thread. Atlassian, the maker of Hipchat, is releasing Stride, which we plan to test out this year. Tile app for mac desktop.

Tweetbot – There aren’t many great third-party Twitter clients, but Tweetbot is one of them. It’s a beautiful and full-featured Twitter client that has fantastic support for multiple accounts and lists, and also has powerful mute filters to block out the noise and show you only what you want to see. Now that Twitter has announced the end of their Mac app, it is even more useful.

Safety & Security

Backblaze – If you don’t have an online backup of your hard drive, sign up for Backblaze right now. There are several online backup solutions available, but the AE team likes Backblaze because the Mac client is much more polished and easy to use than some of the other alternatives.

Encrypt.me – Most people don’t think twice about using public wi-fi (but they should). Encrypt.me (formerly known as Cloak) is the easiest way to automatically secure your connection on public networks and keep your sensitive data safe from prying eyes.

Little Snitch – A firewall program for the Mac. It’s a little annoying in the beginning when every program starts calling home to check for updates, but once it’s up and running it runs just fine and will tell you when someone is trying to access your computer (or when an app is trying to connect out without your knowledge).

Graphics & Information Sharing

Graphic – If you are a designer or someone who works heavily with vector drawing and illustrations, you are probably subscribed to Creative Cloud and using Illustrator and Photoshop. If you don’t need that much power (or don’t want to pay for that subscription), Graphic is a well-designed and surprisingly feature-rich vector application that is inexpensive.

Snagit App Free

PDFpen – PDFpen is the swiss army knife of PDF editors. Developed by Smile Software (makers of TextExpander), PDFpen allows you to do things to PDFs you didn’t think were possible like edit text & images, and includes OCR to make your PDF documents searchable (which makes it an essential part of any paperless workflow). Asana for mac.

Snagit For Mac Free Download

Snagit – There are many apps for capturing and marking up screenshots (including Tapes mentioned below), but if you want an app that does it all, Snagit is one of the most powerful. You can quickly capture images and video with a few keypresses, do all sorts of annotations, and quickly share them to the clipboard or the cloud. If you share it to the cloud, it will automatically put the link in your clipboard. You can even do scrolling and panoramic capture to capture more than what you see on the screen at any one time.

App for iphone on mac. The MacBook Air features a Retina display with slimmer bezels, two Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports, 8th-generation Intel chips with Intel UHD graphics, up to 16GB RAM, and up to 1.5TB of SSD storage space. It is equipped with a T2 chip for security and it includes Touch ID along with an upgraded third-gen butterfly keyboard, louder speakers, and a Force Touch trackpad. Buy Now Just Updated • Apple in October 2018 introduced a new design for the MacBook Air, its most affordable notebook starting at $1,199.

Tapes/Loom – We are big on documentation here at Asian Efficiency, and we use Tapes often to record quick screencasts that are automatically uploaded to show others how to do certain tasks. This is also great for customer support as it allows us to demonstrate via video how to solve customer problems. Tapes hasn’t been updated in quite some time, but Loom is a more modern replacement.

Writing & Ideas

Byword – I tend to do most of my writing in Ulysses (see below), but Byword is a beautiful Markdown editor that is great for writing plain text that is not part of a larger project.

Day One – We’re big fans of daily journaling, and Day One is far and away the best app for this. The Mac app syncs with the iOS version, which is where this app really shines.

DEVONthink Pro Office – If you have a huge amount of information to keep track of, DEVONthink is hard to beat. You can capture research, documents, email, and web clipping to one place, and DEVONthink’s artificial intelligence can help you file and find the information you need. It’s a complex application, but many power users embrace it. Here is a quick guide we have written.

Evernote/OneNote – Evernote is a great tool for storing reference material. It’s free with a paid upgrade for additional features and more storage space, and allows you to quickly store information using the web clipper and access your information when you need it on any device. OneNote is free and has a huge fanbase, especially among Windows users. Its tight integration with MS Office makes it a compelling choice for people in that ecosystem, though the Mac app is more limited than the Windows version.

MindNode –MindNode is a great option for mind mapping software and has a beautiful user interface. There is iCloud sync between Mac and iOS, and it has a fantastic OmniFocus export feature. You can brainstorm project ideas and then have the project/tasks set up in OmniFocus with two clicks. Anytime I need to plan things out (including this article), I start in MindNode.

OmniGraffle – OmniGraffle is what we use to create most of our AE diagrams. It’s essentially the Mac equivalent of Microsoft’s Visio, except that it is much easier to use, and you can create some really powerful diagrams without having an extensive knowledge of modeling software. It also has an extensive built-in stencil function where you can search for extension stencils that other people have uploaded online to share.

Pages/Numbers/Keynote – Formerly known as the iWork suite, these three applications will meet the business/professional needs of almost anyone. And if you bought a new Mac recently, you probably got them for free. The real standout here is Keynote, which is both very powerful and easy to use. The animated transitions that are included with Keynote are top notch and allow you to make very professional looking presentations quickly and easily.

Reeder – If you still rely on RSS to keep up with your favorite websites (like this one) then Reeder is the best option available. Nothing else comes close in terms of design, and Reeder supports many different RSS aggregators like Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, and many more.

Screenflow – Screenflow is an essential tool that we use when creating video course content (like the Dojo training videos). It allows you to record your screen easily and edit your screencasts with callouts, transitions, annotations, and much more.

Ulysses – Ulysses is an excellent pro writing app with a beautiful user interface that is designed to support your writing. It works well for writing blog posts, articles, and even longer-form content. You can export to HTML, Markdown, ePub, PDF, Word, or even straight to Medium or WordPress. These very words are being typed in Ulysses.

System Utilities

Amphetamine – Amphetamine is an updated version of the beloved Caffeine menu bar app. It has one main purpose: it keeps your computer (and more importantly your screen) from going to sleep. Very handy when on long Skype or webinar viewing sessions.

Chrome / Safari – macOS has a built-in web browser (Safari) that’s very good and very fast. I tend to use Chrome more as it is well-integrated with Google web apps and I like the way tabs work, but others on the Asian Efficiency team use Safari. One downside of Chrome is it tends to eat up your laptop battery a lot quicker than Safari. Which browser you use is personal preference.

Copied – This app allows you to copy and paste back and forth between your Mac and iOS devices. Think of it as Handoff for copy/paste commands. It isn’t as seamless as Universal Clipboard in iOS 10/macOS Sierra, but it gives you more control and flexibility.

CleanMyMac – Disk space can be scarce (especially on laptops), and CleanMyMac is a utility that shows you exactly what is eating up all your precious hard drive capacity and you can free up a lot of space with it. You can also keep an eye on your Mac’s health to make sure it is running at top performance.

Default Folder X – This could probably be in the Top 10 section, because when I use a Mac without it I miss it terribly. It adds a wrapper to the Finder’s Save window which gives you quick access to open, recent, or favorite files and folders. A real time saver.

Dropzone 3 – Dropzone is a menu bar application that does two things: 1) It allows you to execute common actions on a file by dragging over the appropriate “hotspot” (like uploading to FTP), and 2) it gives you a “Drop Bar” where you can collect files before doing something with them. Mike uses this all the time to collect a file from the Finder location before he drags and drops it into another application like a Keynote presentation.

Flux – Flux is useful for anyone who works at night and cares about their quality of sleep. The blue light from your computer actually messes with your body’s natural circadian rhythm and tricks it into thinking that it’s not as late as it really is so that your body stops producing melatonin (the chemical that helps you fall asleep naturally). Flux adjusts the color temperature of your screen to a “warmer” orangish shade that is easier on your eyes and doesn’t keep you up all night even if you have to work late. macOS now (thankfully!) has Night Shift built in, but many people find that Flux does a better job.

Moom – Apple has very basic version split-screen functionality, but Moom remains a very powerful window management app. Moom allows you to quickly move and/or resize windows by either hovering your mouse over the green “Maximize” icon or by setting your own keyboard commands. It allows you to resize windows according to pre-determined grid sizes, and has a ton of customization options.

Shush – Mike works from home a lot and has 5 kids, so his house can be a little noisy sometimes. This can be problematic for team meetings, but Shush allows him to mute his microphone except when he presses a hotkey to activate it. This way people on the other end of my Skype conversations aren’t distracted by the background noise. You can also set it as “push-to-silence” making this application an effective “cough button” for podcast recording.

Transmit – There are a lot of FTP clients out there that will get the job done, but Transmit is the best. It has a ton of features, a great user interface, and is the fastest FTP client out there. If you transfer files often, Transmit is great.

Webcam Settings – More and more of our time is spent on camera doing video conferencing, webinars, and recording video. Many times we don’t have professional lighting and camera gear to do this, so sometimes the video quality doesn’t look as good as it could. Webcam Settings is a little menu bar app that lets you adjust exposure time, contrast, saturation, and white balance for your built-in or external webcam. If you have an external USB camera that supports it, you can also adjust auto-exposure and focus, zoom, pan, tilt, and many other hardware-level controls. It’s not vain to want to look your best on camera!

VirtualBox – Are you a Mac user that needs to run Windows? One option is to buy a separate Windows computer, but I like to use virtualization software to run Windows on my Mac. There are paid utilities for this, but for my needs the free open-source VirtualBox works perfectly.

Everything Else

Deliveries – If you order a lot of things online, you’ll definitely want an easy way to keep track of your packages. Deliveries does this, and will even detect a tracking number on your clipboard and add it to the application for you. You can even get notifications when your packages are delivered if you’re so inclined.

Paprika – If you cook, you should check out Paprika as a recipe storage solution. Paprika syncs with your iOS devices for use in the kitchen, allows you keep your recipes organized, and can even tell you what ingredients you need to pick up at the store.

Soulver – This is one of those I-didn’t-know-I-needed-it-but-once-I-tried-it-I-love-having-it apps. The best way to describe it is a natural language calculator. It lets you work things out and do calculations, formulas, currency, unit conversions, and much more. These can all be done with calculators and spreadsheets of course, but there is something helpful about being able to work things out the way I think them. It’s one of those apps I leave running in the background and flip to to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

Be Focused Pro/Vitamin-R – We are big fans of the Pomodoro Technique for making progress on your most important task of the day. Be Focused Pro is a simple but nice pomodoro timer for the Mac, and if you need something with more power and flexibility, check out Vitamin-R.

Tooth Fairy – Do you use AirPods, and do you use them on multiple devices? Tooth Fairy is a small menu bar app that lets you quickly switch your AirPods to your Mac with the mouse or keyboard. No messing around in sound or Bluetooth settings required.

Timing – It’s difficult to know what changes you need to make unless you know how you are spending your time. Timing is a great Mac app that logs what you are working on (or are not working on, as the case may be) so that you can see how productive you really are. If you’re a Dojo member, there’s a discount code available for you inside the customer area (one of many perks being a Dojo member).

How can the answer be improved? Like Siri on your iOS devices, Siri on your Mac is your intelligent personal assistant that helps you multitask and get things done just by asking. For example, while you work on a document, you can ask Siri to send a message to your coworker saying that the document is on the way—without having to stop what you’re doing. Siri app for mac. May 27, 2016  Siri on iOS can launch an app, but that’s about the extent of its ability to control apps. With Siri for Mac though, I would want to be able to not only open apps, but also minimize them, close them, quit them, switch them, etc. “Hey Siri” is supported on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch with iOS 8 or later while plugged in. Not supported on first-generation iPad, iPad 2, and first-generation iPad mini. Siri Suggestions for Shortcuts are supported on iPhone 6s or later, iPad Pro, iPad (5th generation or later), iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 4. Apple Music subscription required.

See anything we missed?

Did your favorite Mac app not make our list? Let us know what Mac apps are an essential part of your workflow in the comments.

[cassh24sg]

Student loan servicer censured over ‘what appears to be false’ congressional testimony

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and John Kennedy (R-LA) sent a letter to a key CEO of a student loan company about “seemingly false and misleading” statements during a congressional testimony on April 13, according to Yahoo Finance.

“We are writing to obtain information about seemingly false and misleading statements you made at a hearing before the Economic Policy Subcommittee of the Banking, Housing and Urban Development Committee on April 13, 2021,” they wrote.

Warren, the chairman of the committee, and Kennedy, a senior member, mailed the letter to the CEO of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA), James Steeley, Wednesday night.

“This is serious business,” stressed the senators. “Our hearing was conducted in part to understand the role of student loan administrators and the extent of their responsibility for the myriad of errors in the student loan program. But it seems that you have not provided accurate information about your company, which is the role of the subcommittee in fact-finding and potentially misleading committee members and the public. “

Warren and Kennedy ask Steeley to reply to their letter by July 7th and are planning a follow-up hearing on the matter.

PHEAA boss James Steeley. (Screenshot / PHEAA Facebook)

PHEAA manages the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which acts as FedLoan Servicing. During the April testimony, Steeley stated that he did not believe the Department of Education (ED) fined or fined the company for its maintenance.

Senators referred to a May 10 letter from ED’s Federal Student Aid saying that since 2016 the federal government had actually found nine problems with the PHEAA’s management of the PSLF program, four corrective action plans, and two hefty fines have.

“This new information, provided by the Department of Education, shows that nine reviews of the department since 2016 have uncovered problems with the implementation of the program by the PHEAA,” resulting in multiple fines and corrective action plans, the senators said.

The story goes on

They added that if the statement was “knowingly and willfully” false, he would face fines and criminal charges. The letter added that there will also be a follow-up hearing on the matter.

“PHEAA respects the interest of the Senate Subcommittee in ensuring truthful and accurate testimony, but categorically denies that the PHEAA CEO’s testimony was anything but a truthful and honest effort to answer the multi-part questions from Senator Warren at the Jan. 13 hearing. April, “a PHEAA spokesman told Yahoo Finance in a statement.” PHEAA will respond appropriately to the letter but will not participate in further public debates through the media. “

PSLF has a dismal approval rating

Developed by Congress to help public servants – from teachers to firefighters – the PSLF program is a major problem that the federal government has grappled with for years.

The PSLF program enables government and nonprofit employees with government-sponsored student loans to apply for waiver after providing evidence of 120 monthly payments as part of a qualified repayment plan.

The rejection rates for the PSLF program were high: recent data showed that of the more than 390,000 PSLF forms submitted between November 2020 and April this year, only 3,458 met the requirements for PSLF – 2.1%.

The data also showed that as of April 30, only around 5,500 loans had been processed through PSLF.

Although more than 175,000 active duty members on federal loans are eligible for PSLF, only 124 members have their applications approved, according to a recent report.

Bryant Elementary School kindergarten teacher Chris Johnson sets up his classroom on April 9th, 2021 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

‘Inexplicable’ contradiction

During the April hearing, Warren Steeley of PHEAA asked to confirm the fact that PHEAA’s automated system has been generating “errors” and “mistakenly disqualified” based on ED audits since 2016[d] Payments. “

“I don’t think that’s right,” replied Steeley, adding that he was unfamiliar with the audits.

Warren later pressed Steeley again, asking if ED “terminated your contract or in any way penalized your company for its mistakes and mismanagement” of the PSLF program.

Steeley replied, “No, they don’t.”

Based on a letter from Richard Cordray of ED’s Federal Student Aid who runs the student loan program, PHEAA was actually fined and / or requested by the federal government to correct its behavior between February 2016 and March 2021.

As the company’s CEO added in the Senators’ letter, it was “inexplicable that you were unaware of this set of … findings”.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the IRS budget proposal on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on June 8, 2021. (Photo by EVELYN HOCKSTEIN / POOL / AFP)

Cordray’s letter to the senators received by Yahoo Finance stated:

ED said between February and April 2016, ED found that PHEAA made errors counting payments of 28%. Errors were reduced to 3% in October 2016 after PHEAA implemented ED’s recommendations and the company automated payment counts.

In 2017, ED said it found issues with the way PHEAA created work certifications and counted qualifying payments. Both reviews found consolidation loan processing problems and found incorrect ratings for loan accounts where the borrower paid more than was required. The government asked PHEAA to correct the accounts.

Also in 2020, ED carried out three reviews of TEPSLF and PSLF. Problems with rejections were identified at TEPSLF, leading the government to urge PHEAA to correct its mistakes and “ask FedLoan to repay $ 108,000 to the ministry in June 2020”.

At PSLF, ED found that there was a 20% error rate when it came to rejecting the CARES bill (i.e. during this period the government made PSLF payments on behalf of borrowers). ED called on PHEAA to resolve this issue.

In September 2020, ED began investigating how PHEAA handles qualifying payments for consolidation loans.

In October 2020, ED fined PHEAA $ 136,000 and asked the company to correct its mistakes for “improperly applying the automatic deferral on income-based repayment requests … affecting over 65,000 borrowers.”

In March 2021, ED found a 20% error rate in the handling of PSLF applications by the PHEAA.

Eventually, ED also revealed that it is considering developing new corrective action plans to address current issues such as the CARES Act and the PSLF rejection.

Former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Richard Cordray testifies before the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing in Washington on July 30, 2014. REUTERS / Yuri Gripas

“They make buckets of money”

Some lawmakers and lawyers have long blamed service providers for poor implementation.

“Major defaults across the student loan market hurt every type of borrower, with every type of loan, at every stage of repayment,” said Seth Frotman, former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) official, in a statement to Congress in September 2019 “Lost paperwork, misprocessed payments, fraudulent disclosures, and the routine denial of borrowers’ repayment rights add up to billions of dollars in additional debt for millions of borrowers.”

In an interview with Yahoo Finance in April, Warren said, “We have these middlemen, these student loan servicers that came with us today that don’t seem to stay straight.”

Warren has also asked ED to stop working with Navient and PHEAA.

“These student loan servicers make a lot of money to improve their bottom line, but not to help the students who are really in trouble getting their loans back,” she said.

–

Aarthi is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at aarthi@yahoofinance.com. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.

Continue reading:

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, SmartNews, LinkedIn, YouTube and reddit.

source https://www.cassh24sg.com/2021/06/25/student-loan-servicer-censured-over-what-appears-to-be-false-congressional-testimony/

[collegeeducationnewsllcusa]

Student loan servicer censured over ‘what appears to be false’ congressional testimony

Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and John Kennedy (R-LA) sent a letter to a key CEO of a student loan company about “seemingly false and misleading” statements during a congressional testimony on April 13, according to Yahoo Finance.

“We are writing to obtain information about seemingly false and misleading statements you made at a hearing before the Economic Policy Subcommittee of the Banking, Housing and Urban Development Committee on April 13, 2021,” they wrote.

Warren, the chairman of the committee, and Kennedy, a senior member, mailed the letter to the CEO of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA), James Steeley, Wednesday night.

“This is serious business,” stressed the senators. “Our hearing was held in part to understand the role of student loan administrators and the extent of their responsibility for the myriad of errors in the student loan program. But it seems that you have failed to provide accurate information about your company, which is the role of the subcommittee in fact-finding and potentially misleading committee members and the public. “

Warren and Kennedy ask Steeley to reply to their letter by July 7th and are planning a follow-up hearing on the matter.

PHEAA boss James Steeley. (Screenshot / PHEAA Facebook)

PHEAA manages the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which acts as FedLoan Servicing. During the April testimony, Steeley stated he did not believe the Department of Education (ED) fined or fined the company.

Senators referred to a May 10 letter from ED’s Federal Student Aid that said the federal government had actually found nine problems with the PHEAA’s management of the PSLF program, four corrective action plans, and two hefty fines since 2016 have.

“This new information, provided by the Department of Education, shows that nine reviews of the department since 2016 have uncovered problems with the PHEAA’s implementation of the program,” resulting in multiple fines and corrective action plans, the senators said.

The story goes on

They added that if the statement was “knowingly and willfully” false, he would face fines and criminal charges. The letter added that there will also be a follow-up hearing on the matter.

“PHEAA respects the interest of the Senate Subcommittee in ensuring that truthful and accurate testimony is provided, but categorically denies that the PHEAA CEO’s testimony was anything but a truthful and good faith effort to address the multi-part questions raised by Senator Warren the hearing on April 13th, “a PHEAA spokesman told Yahoo Finance in a statement. “PHEAA will respond appropriately to the letter but will not participate in further public debates through the media.”

PSLF has a dismal approval rating

Developed by Congress to help public servants – from teachers to firefighters – the PSLF program is a major problem that the federal government has grappled with for years.

The PSLF program enables government and nonprofit employees with government-sponsored student loans to apply for waiver after providing evidence of 120 monthly payments as part of a qualified repayment plan.

The rejection rates for the PSLF program were high: recent data showed that of the more than 390,000 PSLF forms submitted between November 2020 and April this year, only 3,458 met the requirements for PSLF – 2.1%.

The data also showed that as of April 30, only around 5,500 loans had been processed through PSLF.

Although more than 175,000 active duty members on federal loans are eligible for PSLF, only 124 members have their applications approved, according to a recent report.

Bryant Elementary School kindergarten teacher Chris Johnson sets up his classroom on April 9th, 2021 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

‘Inexplicable’ contradiction

During the April hearing, Warren Steeley of PHEAA asked to confirm the fact that PHEAA’s automated system, based on audits by ED since 2016, has “mistakenly” made “errors” and “mistakenly disqualified”.[d] Payments. “

“I don’t think that’s right,” replied Steeley, adding that he was unfamiliar with the audits.

Warren later pressed Steeley again, asking if ED “terminated your contract or in any way penalized your company for its mistakes and mismanagement” of the PSLF program.

Steeley replied, “No, they don’t.”

Based on a letter from Richard Cordray of ED’s Federal Student Aid who runs the student loan program, PHEAA was actually fined and / or requested by the federal government to correct its behavior between February 2016 and March 2021.

As the company’s CEO added in the Senators’ letter, it was “inexplicable that you were unaware of this set of … findings”.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the IRS budget proposal on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on June 8, 2021. (Photo by EVELYN HOCKSTEIN / POOL / AFP)

Cordray’s letter to the senators received by Yahoo Finance stated:

ED said between February and April 2016, ED found that PHEAA made errors counting payments of 28%. Errors were reduced to 3% in October 2016 after PHEAA implemented ED’s recommendations and the company automated payment counts.

In 2017, ED said it found issues with the way PHEAA issued certificates of employment and counted back qualifying payments. Both reviews found consolidation loan processing issues and found incorrect ratings for loan accounts where the borrower paid more than was required. The government asked PHEAA to correct the accounts.

Also in 2020, ED carried out three reviews of TEPSLF and PSLF. Problems with rejections were identified at TEPSLF, leading the government to urge PHEAA to correct its mistakes and “ask FedLoan to repay $ 108,000 to the ministry in June 2020”.

At PSLF, ED found a 20% error rate when it came to rejecting the CARES bill (i.e. during this period the government made PSLF payments on behalf of borrowers). ED called on PHEAA to resolve this issue.

In September 2020, ED began investigating how PHEAA handles qualifying payments for consolidation loans.

In October 2020, ED fined PHEAA $ 136,000 and called on the company to correct its errors because “the automatic deferral was not properly applied to income-based repayment requests … affecting over 65,000 borrowers”.

In March 2021, ED found a 20% error rate in the handling of PSLF applications by the PHEAA.

Finally, ED also announced that it is considering developing new corrective action plans to address current issues such as the CARES Act and the PSLF rejection.

Former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Richard Cordray testifies before the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing in Washington, July 30, 2014. REUTERS / Yuri Gripas

“They make buckets of money”

Some lawmakers and lawyers have long blamed service providers for poor implementation.

“Major defaults across the student loan market hurt every type of borrower, with every type of loan, at every stage of repayment,” said Seth Frotman, a former official with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), in a statement to Congress in September 2019 “Lost paperwork, misprocessed payments, fraudulent disclosures, and the routine denial of borrowers’ repayment rights add up to billions of dollars in additional debt for millions of borrowers.”

In an interview with Yahoo Finance in April, Warren said, “We have these middlemen, these student loan servicers that came with us today that don’t seem to be staying right now.”

Warren has also asked ED to stop working with Navient and PHEAA.

“These student loan servicers make a lot of money to improve their bottom line, but not to help the students who are really in trouble getting their loans back,” she said.

–

Aarthi is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at aarthi@yahoofinance.com. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.

Continue reading:

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, SmartNews, LinkedIn, YouTube and reddit.

source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/student-loan-servicer-censured-over-what-appears-to-be-false-congressional-testimony/

[orbemnews]

Why T-Shirts Selling the Capitol Riot Are Nonetheless Obtainable On-line The day after the violent assault on the Capitol, Shopify declared that it had eliminated e-commerce websites affiliated with President Trump, together with his official marketing campaign retailer. The websites had violated a coverage that prohibited the help of teams or folks “that threaten or condone violence to additional a trigger.” The transfer was initially lauded however it quickly turned clear that the know-how firm, which powers a couple of million on-line outlets, was nonetheless fueling loads of different websites with merchandise selling the president and items emblazoned with phrases like “MAGA Civil Warfare.” Attire with related phrases and nods to QAnon conspiracy theories additionally remained out there on e-commerce websites like Amazon, Etsy and Zazzle. Whilst the businesses scrambled to take away such merchandise, new items commemorating and glorifying the Jan. 6 assault have been proliferating. As of Friday, “Battle for Capitol Hill Veteran” shirts with drawings of the Capitol constructing could possibly be bought on Amazon for $20, Etsy was promoting a “Biden Likes Minors” shirt that mimicked the look of “Black Lives Issues” indicators and Zazzle had a “Civil Warfare 2020” shirt on its web site. Etsy and Zazzle have since eliminated the merchandise; the “Capitol Hill Veteran” shirt was nonetheless out there on Amazon on Monday. Simply because the violence put new scrutiny on how social media corporations have been monitoring speech on their platforms, it additionally highlighted how e-commerce corporations have enabled nearly anybody with a bank card and an e mail deal with to promote items on-line. These corporations have largely been constructed with scale and ease of entry in thoughts, with scant oversight of what distributors have been really promoting. However questions in regards to the companies have emerged as many rioters donned what amounted to a kind of uniform that could possibly be bought on-line. This included shirts with sure phrases or illustrations printed on them, and flags that not solely supported President Trump, however promoted a civil battle, conspiracy theories and debunked election claims. One shirt infamously worn by one of many rioters that mentioned “Camp Auschwitz” was later discovered on Etsy, prompting an apology from the corporate, which is thought for handcrafted items. “There’s a lot deal with Twitter, Fb, and YouTube, however, in our view, the platforms are a lot, a lot wider than social media,” mentioned Danny Rodgers, chief know-how officer and co-founder of the International Disinformation Index, a nonprofit centered on the unfold of falsehoods on-line. “There’s a broad variety of platforms that help and allow these harmful teams to exist, to fund increase, get their message out. It’s not simply kicking folks off social media, it’s kicking folks off merchandising platforms.” Whereas Shopify, which declined to remark for this text, isn’t a family identify, its know-how helps an enormous variety of distributors from Allbirds to The New York Occasions. These corporations use Shopify’s instruments to construct smooth on-line shops, the place they will simply add pictures of their wares and promote to clients. Shopify, which is valued at greater than $100 billion, earns cash via subscriptions to its software program and different service provider companies, and has mentioned it has the second-biggest share of the U.S. e-commerce market after Amazon. After its removing of TrumpStore.com and store.donaldjtrump.com, the corporate was nonetheless powering different websites promoting Trump-related merchandise, together with shirts and banners that featured weapons and navy tools. Following complaints, Shopify seems to have eliminated some sellers and merchandise, together with a “MAGA Civil Warfare” shirt with the date Jan. 6, 2021. Shopify has additionally run into issues with hundreds of on-line shops promoting gadgets that falsely claimed to deal with Covid-19, in addition to others promoting Accomplice flag merchandise. “It’s nice that Shopify lastly pulled the plug on Trump’s retail retailer, however what we urgently want is to see a method from it and different common e-commerce platforms about how they may cease making the most of hate as a complete,” mentioned Shannon Coulter, president of the Seize Your Pockets Alliance, a nonprofit that stemmed from a social media boycott of corporations with ties to President Trump. Amazon and Etsy have additionally rushed to take away merchandise selling hate and violence from their websites this month, together with wares tied to QAnon, the web conspiracy principle that has change into more and more influential with a phase of President Trump’s supporters. On Jan. 11, Amazon mentioned that it will take away merchandise selling QAnon and that third-party distributors who tried to promote the wares may face bans, in accordance with NBC. However on Monday, a whole bunch of merchandise from dozens of distributors have been nonetheless promoting QAnon-related merchandise. Some product critiques expressed help for the baseless conspiracy principle in an off-the-cuff tone. “I received these to help #Qanon … i like them,” one girl commented on a pair of “Q” earrings. “Want they have been a little bit larger!” Different shirts on the market on Amazon promoted misinformation associated to election fraud, spreading false claims that the election was “stolen” or rigged and saying, “Audit the vote.” Amazon didn’t reply to a request for remark. Whereas a few of the sellers seem like people or teams dedicated to right-wing paraphernalia, others are peddling a broader array of misinformation, together with Covid-19 conspiracy theories. Nonetheless others have included the fabric with a greater variety of web memes and jokes, apparently in search of no matter would possibly show to be a success. The seller behind the “Battle for Capitol Hill Veteran” shirts on Amazon, as an illustration, is named Capitol Hill and appeared to start promoting merchandise on Jan. 1, initially selling false Covid-19 conspiracy theories just like the so-called “plandemic.” A examine by the International Disinformation Index and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a suppose tank that examines extremism, recognized 13 hate teams providing merchandise on Amazon in October. Smaller e-commerce platforms like Zazzle, which permit folks to customise attire, additionally performed a job in permitting hate teams to earn money via promoting merchandise, the report discovered. “Platforms facilitating on-site retail appear to be tormented by both poor enforcement of their insurance policies, or an entire lack of an satisfactory framework for governing their use by hate teams,” the teams wrote in the report. “Platform coverage individuals are nonetheless attempting to wrap their heads across the idea of threat of hurt,” Mr. Rodgers of the International Disinformation Index mentioned. “When QAnon emerged initially, it was dismissed as a bunch of kooks on-line, however what we’ve seen more and more over time is the obvious and apparent hurt that outcomes from this organized on-line conspiracy exercise. The tribalism, the us versus them, and the adversarial narrative is fed by promoting everybody a crew jersey.” Zazzle started greater than a decade in the past as a part of a wave of a start-ups that gave shoppers new, seemingly infinite choices for customizing items to their tastes. Now, the corporate is struggling to stability its authentic mission with the darker forces at play on-line. “As an open market, we’re confronted with the chance to permit folks to precise their creativity and sentiments, coupled with the problem of expression that offends and is deliberately obfuscated,” Zazzle mentioned in an announcement. Whereas Zazzle makes use of automated filters and algorithms to attempt to block offensive designs and tags, it mentioned it acknowledged “that know-how isn’t foolproof,” and did manually take away sure merchandise. The “Civil Warfare 2020” shirt was taken down after questions from The Occasions, and Zazzle mentioned that it had been figuring out and taking down QAnon-related items since mid-2018. The problem of figuring out and eradicating such merchandise — and whether or not that’s achieved by folks or machines — mirrors the problems confronted by platforms like Fb and YouTube. Josh Silverman, Etsy’s chief government, mentioned in a Jan. 12 weblog submit that the corporate and its human moderators relied on automated instruments and reviews from customers to seek out merchandise that violated its insurance policies. The corporate has greater than 3.7 million distributors promoting greater than 80 million gadgets. On Friday, after receiving questions from The Occasions, Etsy eliminated the “Biden Likes Minors” shirt, which appeared to nod to QAnon and the #Pizzagate conspiracy. Etsy and Zazzle additionally acknowledged that they have been attempting to shortly make selections involving sure phrases and symbols, notably these harnessed by fringe teams. “Whereas an merchandise could also be allowed at this time, we reserve the proper to find out based mostly on evolving context that it’s a violation at a later date, for instance whether it is deemed to trigger or encourage actual world hurt,” a consultant for Etsy, mentioned in an announcement. Brooke Erin Duffy, an affiliate professor of communication at Cornell College, mentioned that it was laborious to think about established manufacturers carrying these merchandise in shops. However, she mentioned, accountability was tough to demand on-line. “We don’t have the flexibility to speak again to platform homeowners,” she mentioned. “We don’t all the time know who’s accountable for creating the merch, so it allows everybody to evade accountability for the circulation of those dangerous merchandise and messages.” Contact Sapna Maheshwari at sapna@nytimes.com and Taylor Lorenz at taylor.lorenz@nytimes.com. Supply hyperlink #Capitol #Online #promoting #riot #TShirts

[jeffersonstacey]

How To Make A List Of Brief Term Objectives

13. When you've additional prior newsletters to your internet site, Twitter the link to the post web page. Make certain there is a link to 'sign up for more articles like these' at the base of the post web page. Have you at any time caught a flu virus which quickly spread to your entire family and friends? One large sneeze in a space full of individuals immediately passes the virus on to other people. Viral advertising means you consider 1 motion (e.g. write one great article) and it spreads all through the net. A item which goes viral no longer requires any marketing investment because it takes on a lifestyle of its own. If you're a chiropractor like me then you know that chiropractic web advertising can be a genuine challenge. You have to take care of all of your patients, and then by some means discover time to discover all the actions of the online game. There's so much to discover that the majority of chiropractors just throw up their hands and stop. I wrote this article to assist bring some sanity to the insanity. The info here can assist you take your web site to the leading of Google's list, and that means more possible patients will be able to find you. Consider time to work on every component of this list and I guarantee that you will see incredible achievement. Find the very best category exactly where to list your goods under. This secret is most likely known by everybody. From eBay's home web page, click on the Purchase button, and search the classes to discover classes that use to your products. An additional magic formula that's necessary for your products' success is checking where competing products have been positioned. It's a good idea to choose two classes for your listings to attain much more buyers. I start promoting on-line such as watches, wallet, info and a great deal more using my PayPal account and most of the service that i adore is online advisor. I turn out to be a online seller from the experience i have whilst on-line the internet nearly daily. The first stage is to see visitors generation in two distinct phases: a new site launch and normal every day duties that you repeat more than and over. The launch is fairly simple as most of the tactics are 'one-time' methods that you do and perhaps even neglect! But, it's the daily grind that is where you really require to get it right. One way to make money utilizing forums is to place a link to your opt in page in your signature link. Your signature link is just a link that you place at the bottom of every publish you make. The idea powering this is that individuals will click on your link following they read a believed provoking publish you produced on the forum. Participation in the discussion board is completely critical if you want this to function. You can't just go around posting stuff like "I agree" or "Me too" if you want individuals to join your GSA verified list. You also have to adhere around for a while. You gained't get very great outcomes if you only remain a member of the forum for a thirty day period. No one will have experienced a opportunity to get to know you. BuzzStream Link Building is one of the more expensive software program packages. The main attributes supply tools that assist automate redundant duties in partnership developing, not just link building. These features include tracking get in touch with information, tracking email, Twitter automation, handling link prospective customers, checking back links for anchor textual content, no-follows, banned phrases and outbound links, general monitoring actions, tracking conversions, and much more. A pretty good list of helpful features. The administration and conversion monitoring features of BuzzStream are what makes it distinctive in the list of link developing resources. BuzzStream is $29 for each month. Another way you can develop your list using discussion boards is via ad swaps. Probabilities are there are other individuals on the forum trying to grow their choose in list. If what the member is providing is some thing your list would be interested in, method the marketer about buying and selling mailings. You gained't always get a sure, but you have to inquire. Most people will be prepared to assist you, especially if the size of your Gsa Ser Project is comparable to theirs. This tale illustrates the difficulty you may have when you think about altering a particular behavior or perception you may have. On 1 hand it's easy. On the other hand it's hard to alter these routines of your considering. What limiting habits of thoughts/belief do you endure from? Are you willing to confront them for your personal very best interest and self-development? Look at your rivals - Operate a report on your competitor's website in Open Site Explorer (a tool that will show you all inbound links to their site). Take a look at the links they have. Are there any included that you could get as nicely GSA verified list ? If so, go get 'em! Although it might appear like a lot of function, selling on eBay is really worth it for most people. The charges are there, but are usually not sufficient to make selling a poor offer. When sellers obtain great feedback they will improve their odds for buys in the long term! Anyone can make cash selling on eBay if they are devoted.

[shirlleycoyle]

Free Speech Crusader Steven Pinker Blocking Anyone Mentioning His Epstein Ties

Harvard professor and author Steven Pinker, who previously railed against “cancel culture,” is blocking anyone on Twitter who mentions his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was charged with organizing a child sex trafficking ring before being found dead in his jail cell shortly after his arrest last year.

Twitter users this week noticed that anyone who mentions the words “Pinker” and “Epstein,” in any context and combination in any tweet, was quickly blocked by Pinker on the social network. Motherboard tested it out on Thursday, and was blocked. When reached for comment, Pinker confirmed that his account is blocking anyone who mentions these keywords together. 

In an email to Motherboard, Pinker claimed "my Twitter feed became infested with trolls and bots who kept posting photos with me and Jeffrey Epstein, though I had no connections with him other than third parties who had invited us to some of the same events."

While many Twitter users assumed that Pinker must be using an automated script, since he is quickly blocking anyone who mentions certain keywords on the site, the task is being done manually, Pinker said. A colleague told him of "these attacks,” he said, and "offered to monitor my feed and implemented some simple text searches on Tweetdeck to flag those accounts, which that colleague then manually blocked. The colleague doesn’t block anyone for criticizing or disagreeing with something I’ve written.” After reaching out for comment, Pinker seemingly stopped blocking people for doing this.

 "I’ve been told that people are now bitching and moaning about this, but no one has a First Amendment right to post something on Steven Pinker’s Twitter feed,” Pinker wrote to Motherboard. “If someone wants to smear me personally, they have plenty of channels; to whine that I’m not offering them my platform has to be a new definition of “chutzpah,” after the man who killed his parents and threw himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan."

Pinker’s numerous interactions in Epstein’s orbit have long been the subject of reporting and speculation. 

In 2007, when Epstein was first being tried for sex trafficking, Pinker "provided his expertise on language" for Epstein's defense, according to The New York Times. Pinker offered his services for free and, he told the Times, at the request of his friend, Havard law professor Alan Dershowitz—who has himself been accused of sexually assaulting minors trafficked by Epstein, which he denies. 

Pinker wrote to Motherboard that: “In this case, Alan never said to me, ‘Will you help me defend Jeffrey Epstein’? He asked, as he often does, ‘How would a reasonable person interpret the wording of this law?’” He also offered that Dershowitz had consulted with him on the meaning of the statutes of impeachment last year, before he took on Trump as a client. 

In 2019, Pinker tweeted that in 2002 his literary agent introduced him to Epstein, who cultivated a network of elite intellectuals and academics. Sometimes those intellectuals spoke or appeared at Epstein-financed Edge Foundation events, other times they hung out at Epstein’s island (or estates), and other times they entertained Epstein’s hare-brained schemes like freezing his head and penis and “seed[ing] the human race with his DNA.” Pinker seems to have been involved with Edge speaking events as far back as 2011, and appears in a photo from one of the Edge “‘Billionaires’ Dinners,” which Epstein has attended, in 2003.

Pinker is right in that there are many photos of he and Epstein together for trolls to choose from. There is a picture of Pinker with Epstein in 2014, years after the man was convicted of child sex trafficking. In a 2019 tweet, Pinker explained that “[Lawrence] Krauss seated me next to him at a lunch, & someone snapped a photo.” 

There are more in 2004 of Pinker with Epstein at an event at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PEDS). Pinker wrote to Motherboard that “[t]he director of the Program, Professor Martin Nowak, invited me, and he also invited Epstein. I had nothing to do with Epstein being there.” 

According to a report by Harvard University, Epstein visited the campus over a dozen times, was a visiting fellow at one point, and had an office there—after he was convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution in 2008—and donated $9.2 million to the university, $6.5 million of which went to PEDS.

There is the fact that, as far back as 2002, Pinker’s name appears in that jet’s flight logs for Epstein’s Lolita Express—that flight was to attend a TED conference in Monterrey, California after which one of Brockman and Epstein’s Billionaire Dinners happened. There is a photo of Pinker on the flight. 

In an unsealed manuscript written by Virginia Giuffre—one of the main survivors of Epstein's trafficking ring to come forward—Giuffre says she was forced to sleep with a Harvard professor named “Stephen,” his last name redacted, and described him as "a quirky little man with white hair and a mad scientist look about him.” Pinker’s name is spelled “Steven” with a ‘v.’ Another Harvard professor, Stephen Kosslyn, who once taught Pinker, has been tied to Epstein; Kosslyn is bald, with white hair on the sides of his head. Kosslyn does not appear in any known Epstein flight logs.

Pinker said he is not the “Stephen” in Giuffre’s manuscript and wrote “This was not me. I’ve never set foot on Epstein’s island nor any of his other properties. I spell my name ‘Steven,’ and there are Harvard professors named ‘Stephen’ who do have a connection with Epstein. This is not to say that Giuffre’s accusations are true, just that they are not about me.”

If Pinker is trying to quash public associations between him and Epstein, he hasn’t done a very good job of it. In 2015, seemingly without prompting, Pinker tweeted out an affidavit from Dershowitz which dismissed accusations made by Giuffre in a lawsuit against Epstein and his long-time friend British Prince Andrew—another prominent figure who appears in the flight logs and is accused of sexually assaulting children. 

Free Speech Crusader Steven Pinker Blocking Anyone Mentioning His Epstein Ties syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[mathewingram]

The misshapen pieces of Google’s disinformation magazine

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Jigsaw, a unit of Google previously known as Google Ideas, recently launched a digital magazine called The Current, which aims to “explore today’s digital threats and solutions.” There isn’t much exploring to be found in the inaugural edition, however. It’s mostly a cursory overview of the problem of disinformation, alongside brief descriptions of some tools that Google has used to combat the problem, gussied up with a coat of digital paint, along with two contemporary art pieces that seem only loosely relevant, and an interactive map. It’s a magazine best not read too closely. But I did anyway.

It’s unclear why Jigsaw decided to publish The Current now, but it’s probably not a coincidence that Google—and its parent company, Alphabet—is under pressure from legislators in the US and Europe to take action against misinformation. Founded in 2010 and run by Jared Cohen, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, Jigsaw says its mandate is to “forecast and confront emerging threats, creating future-defining research and technology to keep our world safer.” The reality is not as bright. Last summer, Vice described Jigsaw as “a toxic mess”; a dozen current and former staffers complained of an environment of mismanagement and poor leadership in an organization that, “despite the breathless headlines it has garnered, has done little to actually make the internet any better.” In one case in 2018, Jigsaw set up a fake political activism site—putting political misinformation out into the world—and then hired a Russian troll factory to attack it.

The Current looks nice, at least. With a toned-down, almost monochromatic color scheme, it looks like a high-end-furniture catalog. It’s also interactive: when a user hovers over text, the mouse arrow turns into a Magic Marker icon and a pop-up window encourages readers to send in comments. But if you click on “send a message,” you see a small box with three choices: “Agree,” “Disagree,” and “Want to know more.” Your ability to weigh in, it turns out, is limited to one of three pre-programmed responses. The text of The Current’s “articles” is organized into snippets not much longer than Netflix promotional descriptions, with links inviting you to “Dive Deeper.” Click a first link, and you go to a page titled “The Problem,” which explains, for instance, that disinformation campaigns are “professional and coordinated—not unlike marketing campaigns.”

A section called Tactics has a series of graphics representing different approaches to spreading disinformation, including “brigading” (an online harassment tactic in which a group launches a coordinated attack on an individual), botnets (coordinated groups of automated accounts), and hacking. Hovering over them brings up explanations so brief as to almost be wrong—for “sock puppets,” the entry says only “online accounts run by someone masquerading as someone else.” A section called Channels has four subsections, including manipulated images, memes, and viral messages. The “Meme” section says that Russian trolls tried to use memes to influence energy markets by protesting a pipeline, a single (bad) example from a vast category of behavior. The audience for this information would presumably be someone who has literally never heard the term “meme.”

To show that at least some of the magazine is based on original Jigsaw research, a section called “Outcomes” includes a quote from a “pseudonymous white nationalist Twitter and Gab user banned from both platforms multiple times for disinformation and trolling, whom Jigsaw interviewed.” His message? That engagement is an important indicator of whether your campaign is working. Hardly an earth-shattering revelation. “Countermeasures” includes tiny text boxes with messages like: “Technology companies have adopted policies that prohibit many deceptive behaviors, such as misrepresenting identity, and enforce these policies through investigative processes.” True, but generally un-enlightening. In all, The Current has the feeling of something Google’s marketing department cooked up in a hurry. If it were a presentation for ninth-grade civics class, it would get high marks. But for something produced by a $900 billion company that purports to have high-minded goals, it’s pretty weak tea. It deserves a C+ at best.

Here’s more on Jigsaw and its new magazine:

A naive chat-bot: The penultimate section of The Current contains two art pieces that seem only tangentially related to disinformation. The first, Baby Faith, is described as a “young and naive web-based chat-bot struggling to learn how to identify human emotion,” and consists of a chat window into which a reader can post responses to questions and get responses from (bad) automated chat software. Baby Faith’s “difficulties in identifying emotion online mirror the challenges of emotionally-driven disinformation campaigns,” the description says. The second is a monologue from The Picture of Dorian Gray that has been adapted as a musical sonnet to “evoke the exhaustion in dealing with social media disinformation.” Clicking on it takes you to a separate website run by the Rhizome art collective, where a crowdsourced chorus sings the piece.

A disinfo map: The final section of The Current is a “disinformation visualizer” that links to campaigns identified by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a nonprofit that studies disinformation. The fine print notes that Alphabet “does not endorse these research findings or their characterization of disinformation campaigns.” But if Google doesn’t endorse them, why are they featured in its magazine? Each one is a couple paragraphs at most—a few short sentences outlining a disinformation campaign that was run in Ukraine by Russian trolls, for example. In most cases, the text boxes note that the information in them comes from public news reports about the campaigns in question.

Manipulation: At the same time as it launched its new magazine, Jigsaw also launched a tool designed called Assembler that is designed to help journalists and fact-checkers determine whether images have been manipulated to create disinformation. The tool is a collection of several existing techniques for detecting common manipulation methods, such as changing image brightness and using copied pixels to cover something up. It also includes a detector that spots “deepfakes” that use an algorithm called StyleGAN to generate realistic imaginary faces. These detection techniques feed into a master model that tells users how likely it is that an image has been manipulated. 

Other notable stories:

Twitter is experimenting with adding colored labels directly beneath lies and misinformation posted by politicians and public figures, according to a leaked demo obtained by NBC News. Under this model, which Twitter said is just one possible iteration of a new policy aimed at fighting disinformation, misleading information posted by public figures would be corrected directly beneath the tweet by fact-checkers and journalists who are verified on the platform, and possibly other users who will participate in a new “community reports” feature.

According to an email sent to staff, the Los Angeles Times is offering voluntary buyouts less than two years after biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the paper and promised to turn it around. The California Times, the company that owns the Los Angeles Times, announced buyout packages to employees who have worked at the company for least two years. A”separation plan” that CNN Business reviewed says “employees of California Times and its subsidiaries” are eligible for the buyout. The California Times also owns The San Diego Union-Tribune, the now-defunct Spanish-language Hoy and several small community papers.

Maria Bustillos, CJR’s public editor for MSNBC, writes about the comic-book world of political journalism as portrayed on network TV. “Heroes and villains make for entertaining and digestible television; they simplify a complicated world, and make it less frightening,” she says. “The reduction of political actors to stick figures in a story of Good vs. Evil is a key part of what makes cable news tick.” Author Neil Postman’s contention that television has turned our culture “into one vast arena for show business” is truer than ever, Bustillos writes.

Ross Barkan writes for CJR about what it was like dealing with Mike Bloomberg’s media-relations staff when he was mayor of New York City. “Bloomberg’s press office knew that befriending reporters, or creating the appearance of camaraderie, was crucial to the mission. Off-the-record chats were frequent. So were after-work beers,” he says. “Emails were always answered. As a young reporter at the bottom of the pecking order, I couldn’t claim to belong to the inner ring of these reporter-staff relationships. But I could still feel, in some way, that I knew Bloomberg’s team.”

Sources tell Bloomberg News that Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has purchased the coveted advertising space at the top of the YouTube home page for early November, leading up to voting day. Two people with knowledge of the transaction told the news service that the Trump campaign has bought the top spot on the site, which can cost as much as $1 million per day. The Trump campaign bought the digital real estate nationwide, according to one of the people familiar with the deal, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The father of a reporter who was shot to death on camera in 2015 has filed a complaint against YouTube with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the Google-owned video hosting site puts the onus on users to notify it of violent content, and then often doesn’t remove it. The filing calls these practices “deceptively burdensome” and says the site “utterly fails” to follow through on promises to take down content. Reporter Alison Parker was murdered on live television, along with her cameraman, Adam Ward, in 2015 and video of the killing remains on YouTube, according to the complaint.

Political ads are flooding into Hulu, Roku and other digital streaming services because they aren’t subject to the same regulations that cover television networks and cable broadcasters, the Washington Post reports. “Nothing requires these fast-growing digital providers to disclose whom these ads targeted and who viewed them,” the paper says. “The absence of federal transparency rules stands in stark contrast with traditional TV broadcasters, such as ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, which for decades have been required to maintain limited public files about political ads.”

Long-time media industry executive Peter Winter writes about the lessons that can be learned from the recent bankruptcy filing of the McClatchy newspaper chain. “In business, every threat masks an opportunity that should have been obvious. The Internet offered newspaper companies the rare prospect of product reinvention and economic revival,” says Winter. “But all they could see was a chance to throw away the ink and paper and sell the trucks, the same product delivered at less cost and sold as if the age of targeted and measurable advertising had never arrived.”

In the weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Facebook found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory, according to a report from the Washington Post. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent. But in a meeting to decide what to do about it, Joel Kaplan — a former official in the George W. Bush White House who was the head of Facebook’s Washington office — argued that the social network couldn’t take all the pages down because doing so would “disproportionately affect conservatives,” who didn’t see it as fake news.

The New York Times writes about how the new owners of the Big Bend Sentinel newspaper in Marfa, Texas bought the building next door and have turned it into a bar and event space that is attached to the paper’s newsroom. Revenues from the space help subsidize the journalism, according to Maisie Crow and Max Kabat, two transplants from New York who bought the paper last year from previous owners Robert and Rosario Halpern, who published it for 25 years.

The misshapen pieces of Google’s disinformation magazine was originally published on mathewingram.com/work

[whatami-doing]

ONE OF A KIND nanogenmo entry

I just finished my nanogenmo entry for this year and decided I’d write a bit about it. It’s called ONE OF A KIND, and it’s a super exclusive generated novel where each user gets to enter their own character names, but each user only gets ONE book.

If you’d just like to skip straight to getting an extremely exclusive one of a kind book, give me a shout on twitter and I’ll set you up with an account. The site is here, but you’ll need to get in contact with me to set up an account.

This was my first time making a project for nanogenmo. I wanted to take a bit of a break from doing game design/programming, and a month long jam that I could take my time with was ideal. Also it gave me an excuse to mess around with Lua in a command line environment for the first time, and I love Lua because it’s the best programming language.

THE CONCEPT

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how anything could possibly be unique and personal in the current age of mass communication and social media. A few decades ago when media was limited by its physical format, finding a song or book or videogame that resonated with you was a bit of a remarkable event, a serendipitous joining of a person with something they didn’t even realize they needed in their life. Even in the early days of the internet finding things was a hunt, searching through the weird corners of warez sites and peer-to-peer programs for that game you played one time that you can’t remember the name of.

Now with the massive proliferation of the internet and digital content, pretty much any product you can imagine exists right at your fingertips. This is arguably a good thing; the democratization of media distribution has helped artists and creators who never would have reached anyone without the aid of a big publisher. But that hasn’t stopped me from maligning the near extinction of personal discovery.

This phenomenon of super-availability is taken to its extreme when we consider generated content. With automation of content creation not only are products highly available, but the possibility of uniqueness becomes in principal almost impossible. When the cost of creating new content is essentially reduced to zero, products cease to be unique and start to be just another drop in the ocean of more of the same-but-kind-of-different copies. The past problem of “how do I get that unique thing I want?” has been turned on its head, and now we have the problem of “how can we have anything unique when digital copies and automatic generation make content ubiquitous?”

So I came up with the idea of making unique, personalized content that is accessible by only one person. Rather than make an on-demand book generator that spits out books constantly, I decided to make a book generator that requires a unique username and password, and can only generate ONE book per user. The user gets to customize their book by entering their own character names, but they don’t get any second chances. The character names they choose and the randomly generated book they end up with is the only one they get.

THE PROJECT

The project is web-based, housed on a site that is password protected. Only users with a username and password can access the site. The user has to enter names for a protagonist and antagonist, and a unique .txt file is generated. Once the user generates a book their username can’t be used to generate another book, they are just redirected back to the book they originally created.

The actual book generation is done by a Lua script. Years ago in school I studied some philosophy of language and a big deal was made out of how human languages are recursive. That is to say, a sentence can in principal go on forever, meaning there are an infinite number of possible sentences that can be made.

I wanted to capture this recursive nature of language, so the Lua script I wrote uses a series of recursive functions that first make a book, then chapters, then paragraphs, then sentences until the book is complete.

The individual sentences are the main building block of the books, and are also created recursively. The method I used chooses sentence-parts, like verb, adverb, noun, etc. and inserts them into the sentence. Each sentence-part has a group of simple rules it must follow which tell it what sentence-parts can follow it. As sentence-parts are inserted, they determine what sentence-parts can be chosen next until a conclusion is chosen. When a sentence is concluded, each sentence-part is replaced with a random word of that sentence-part-type, so for example a noun could be replaced with “car” or “dog.”

While this method may not make the most natural sounding sentences, I found it much preferable to the mad-libs approach of making predefined sentence-types and plugging in words. This recursive method makes the sentences feel like they have a life of their own, and creates a unique style that pushes the recursive aspect of language very hard. The result vary from weird and alien sounding to surprisingly poetic.

The rest of the code is web stuff connecting the user to the Lua script. If anyone is interested in reading more about it I can elaborate on it. I learned a lot about web programming in the process, but I imagine it’s also not the most exciting thing to read about.

The only parts of the project I used that weren’t created by me were LIP.lua, a library used to load words from .ini files, and Desi Quintans’ noun list, which I didn’t get a chance to edit, so it sometimes gives some weird nouns.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE PLANS

Right now there isn’t much structure to the chapters and paragraphs, their length is only dictated by randomly generated counts. In the future I’d like to make chapters and paragraphs conclude not merely when they reach a certain length, but when they’ve reached some sort of logical plot-based conclusion.

The characters also don’t have any inherent meaning right now, and are just inserted when proper noun sentence-parts are chosen. Having the characters interact with the paragraphs and chapters to link into the plot would make the books much more interesting.

These chapter and paragraph creation methods would also work recursively, working away until they reach a logical conclusion.

The sentences themselves also tend to be random to the point mushing into a bit of that sameyness I mentioned earlier, that makes them feel not so unique or meaningful.

Finally I’d really like to get .pdf generation working, so the user doesn’t get a simple .txt file, but a nicely formatted e-book. I toyed around with Luahpdf for a bit but fully implementing it wasn’t in the scope of the project this year.

If there’s any interest in this project I’ll develop it more for next year’s nanogenmo.

Thanks for reading!

[newstfionline]

Security Breach and Spilled Secrets Have Shaken the N.S.A. to Its Core

By Scott Shane, Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger, NY Times, Nov. 12, 2017

WASHINGTON--Jake Williams awoke last April in an Orlando, Fla., hotel where he was leading a training session. Checking Twitter, Mr. Williams, a cybersecurity expert, was dismayed to discover that he had been thrust into the middle of one of the worst security debacles ever to befall American intelligence.

Mr. Williams had written on his company blog about the Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group that had somehow obtained many of the hacking tools the United States used to spy on other countries. Now the group had replied in an angry screed on Twitter. It identified him--correctly--as a former member of the National Security Agency’s hacking group, Tailored Access Operations, or T.A.O., a job he had not publicly disclosed. Then the Shadow Brokers astonished him by dropping technical details that made clear they knew about highly classified hacking operations that he had conducted.

America’s largest and most secretive intelligence agency had been deeply infiltrated.

“They had operational insight that even most of my fellow operators at T.A.O. did not have,” said Mr. Williams, now with Rendition Infosec, a cybersecurity firm he founded. “I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. Whoever wrote this either was a well-placed insider or had stolen a lot of operational data.”

The jolt to Mr. Williams from the Shadow Brokers’ riposte was part of a much broader earthquake that has shaken the N.S.A. to its core. Current and former agency officials say the Shadow Brokers disclosures, which began in August 2016, have been catastrophic for the N.S.A., calling into question its ability to protect potent cyberweapons and its very value to national security. The agency regarded as the world’s leader in breaking into adversaries’ computer networks failed to protect its own.

“These leaks have been incredibly damaging to our intelligence and cyber capabilities,” said Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “The fundamental purpose of intelligence is to be able to effectively penetrate our adversaries in order to gather vital intelligence. By its very nature, that only works if secrecy is maintained and our codes are protected.”

With a leak of intelligence methods like the N.S.A. tools, Mr. Panetta said, “Every time it happens, you essentially have to start over.”

Fifteen months into a wide-ranging investigation by the agency’s counterintelligence arm, known as Q Group, and the F.B.I., officials still do not know whether the N.S.A. is the victim of a brilliantly executed hack, with Russia as the most likely perpetrator, an insider’s leak, or both. Three employees have been arrested since 2015 for taking classified files, but there is fear that one or more leakers may still be in place. And there is broad agreement that the damage from the Shadow Brokers already far exceeds the harm to American intelligence done by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who fled with four laptops of classified material in 2013.

Mr. Snowden’s cascade of disclosures to journalists and his defiant public stance drew far more media coverage than this new breach. But Mr. Snowden released code words, while the Shadow Brokers have released the actual code; if he shared what might be described as battle plans, they have loosed the weapons themselves. Created at huge expense to American taxpayers, those cyberweapons have now been picked up by hackers from North Korea to Russia and shot back at the United States and its allies.

Millions of people saw their computers shut down by ransomware, with demands for payments in digital currency to have their access restored. Tens of thousands of employees at Mondelez International, the maker of Oreo cookies, had their data completely wiped. FedEx reported that an attack on a European subsidiary had halted deliveries and cost $300 million. Hospitals in Pennsylvania, Britain and Indonesia had to turn away patients. The attacks disrupted production at a car plant in France, an oil company in Brazil and a chocolate factory in Tasmania, among thousands of enterprises affected worldwide.

American officials had to explain to close allies--and to business leaders in the United States--how cyberweapons developed at Fort Meade in Maryland came to be used against them. Experts believe more attacks using the stolen N.S.A. tools are all but certain.

Inside the agency’s Maryland headquarters and its campuses around the country, N.S.A. employees have been subjected to polygraphs and suspended from their jobs in a hunt for turncoats allied with the Shadow Brokers. Much of the agency’s arsenal is still being replaced, curtailing operations. Morale has plunged, and experienced specialists are leaving the agency for better-paying jobs--including with firms defending computer networks from intrusions that use the N.S.A.’s leaked tools.

“It’s a disaster on multiple levels,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s embarrassing that the people responsible for this have not been brought to justice.”

In response to detailed questions, an N.S.A. spokesman, Michael T. Halbig, said the agency “cannot comment on Shadow Brokers.” He denied that the episode had hurt morale. “N.S.A. continues to be viewed as a great place to work; we receive more than 140,000 applications each year for our hiring program,” he said.

Compounding the pain for the N.S.A. is the attackers’ regular online public taunts, written in ersatz broken English. Their posts are a peculiar mash-up of immaturity and sophistication, laced with profane jokes but also savvy cultural and political references. They suggest that their author--if not an American--knows the United States well.

“Is NSA chasing shadowses?” the Shadow Brokers asked in a post on Oct. 16, mocking the agency’s inability to understand the leaks and announcing a price cut for subscriptions to its “monthly dump service” of stolen N.S.A. tools. It was a typically wide-ranging screed, touching on George Orwell’s “1984”; the end of the federal government’s fiscal year on Sept. 30; Russia’s creation of bogus accounts on Facebook and Twitter; and the phenomenon of American intelligence officers going to work for contractors who pay higher salaries.

One passage, possibly hinting at the Shadow Brokers’ identity, underscored the close relationship of Russian intelligence to criminal hackers. “Russian security peoples,” it said, “is becoming Russian hackeres at nights, but only full moons.”

Russia is the prime suspect in a parallel hemorrhage of hacking tools and secret documents from the C.I.A.’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, posted week after week since March to the WikiLeaks website under the names Vault7 and Vault8. That breach, too, is unsolved. Together, the flood of digital secrets from agencies that invest huge resources in preventing such breaches is raising profound questions.

Have hackers and leakers made secrecy obsolete? Has Russian intelligence simply outplayed the United States, penetrating the most closely guarded corners of its government? Can a work force of thousands of young, tech-savvy spies ever be immune to leaks?

Some veteran intelligence officials believe a lopsided focus on offensive weapons and hacking tools has, for years, left American cyberdefense dangerously porous.

“We have had a train wreck coming,” said Mike McConnell, the former N.S.A. director and national intelligence director. “We should have ratcheted up the defense parts significantly.”

At the heart of the N.S.A. crisis is Tailored Access Operations, the group where Mr. Williams worked, which was absorbed last year into the agency’s new Directorate of Operations.

T.A.O.--the outdated name is still used informally--began years ago as a side project at the agency’s research and engineering building at Fort Meade. It was a cyber Skunk Works, akin to the special units that once built stealth aircraft and drones. As Washington’s need for hacking capabilities grew, T.A.O. expanded into a separate office park in Laurel, Md., with additional teams at facilities in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii and Texas.

The hacking unit attracts many of the agency’s young stars, who like the thrill of internet break-ins in the name of national security, according to a dozen former government officials who agreed to describe its work on the condition of anonymity. T.A.O. analysts start with a shopping list of desired information and likely sources--say, a Chinese official’s home computer or a Russian oil company’s network. Much of T.A.O.’s work is labeled E.C.I., for “exceptionally controlled information,” material so sensitive it was initially stored only in safes. When the cumulative weight of the safes threatened the integrity of N.S.A.’s engineering building a few years ago, one agency veteran said, the rules were changed to allow locked file cabinets.

The more experienced T.A.O. operators devise ways to break into foreign networks; junior operators take over to extract information. Mr. Williams, 40, a former paramedic who served in military intelligence in the Army before joining the N.S.A., worked in T.A.O. from 2008 to 2013, which he described as an especially long tenure. He called the work “challenging and sometimes exciting.”

T.A.O. operators must constantly renew their arsenal to stay abreast of changing software and hardware, examining every Windows update and new iPhone for vulnerabilities. “The nature of the business is to move with the technology,” a former T.A.O. hacker said.

Long known mainly as an eavesdropping agency, the N.S.A. has embraced hacking as an especially productive way to spy on foreign targets. The intelligence collection is often automated, with malware implants--computer code designed to find material of interest--left sitting on the targeted system for months or even years, sending files back to the N.S.A.

The same implant can be used for many purposes: to steal documents, tap into email, subtly change data or become the launching pad for an attack. T.A.O.’s most public success was an operation against Iran called Olympic Games, in which implants in the network of the Natanz nuclear plant caused centrifuges enriching uranium to self-destruct. The T.A.O. was also critical to attacks on the Islamic State and North Korea.

It was this arsenal that the Shadow Brokers got hold of, and then began to release.

Like cops studying a burglar’s operating style and stash of stolen goods, N.S.A. analysts have tried to figure out what the Shadow Brokers took. None of the leaked files date from later than 2013--a relief to agency officials assessing the damage. But they include a large share of T.A.O.’s collection, including three so-called ops disks--T.A.O.’s term for tool kits--containing the software to bypass computer firewalls, penetrate Windows and break into the Linux systems most commonly used on Android phones.

Evidence shows that the Shadow Brokers obtained the entire tool kits intact, suggesting that an insider might have simply pocketed a thumb drive and walked out.

But other files obtained by the Shadow Brokers bore no relation to the ops disks and seem to have been grabbed at different times. Some were designed for a compromise by the N.S.A. of Swift, a global financial messaging system, allowing the agency to track bank transfers. There was a manual for an old system code-named UNITEDRAKE, used to attack Windows. There were PowerPoint presentations and other files not used in hacking, making it unlikely that the Shadow Brokers had simply grabbed tools left on the internet by sloppy N.S.A. hackers.

Some officials doubt that the Shadow Brokers got it all by hacking the most secure of American government agencies--hence the search for insiders. But some T.A.O. hackers think that skilled, persistent attackers might have been able to get through the N.S.A.’s defenses--because, as one put it, “I know we’ve done it to other countries.”

The Shadow Brokers have verbally attacked certain experts, including Mr. Williams. When he concluded from their Twitter hints that they knew about some of his hacks while at the N.S.A., he canceled a business trip to Singapore. The United States had named and criminally charged hackers from the intelligence agencies of China, Iran and Russia. He feared he could be similarly charged by a country he had targeted and arrested on an international warrant.

He has since resumed traveling abroad. But he says no one from the N.S.A. has contacted him about being singled out publicly by the Shadow Brokers.

“That feels like a betrayal,” he said. “I was targeted by the Shadow Brokers because of that work. I do not feel the government has my back.”

For decades after its creation in 1952, the N.S.A.--No Such Agency, in the old joke--was seen as all but leakproof. But since Mr. Snowden flew away with hundreds of thousands of documents in 2013, that notion has been shattered.

The Snowden trauma led to the investment of millions of dollars in new technology and tougher rules to counter what the government calls the insider threat. But N.S.A. employees say that with thousands of employees pouring in and out of the gates, and the ability to store a library’s worth of data in a device that can fit on a key ring, it is impossible to prevent people from walking out with secrets.

The agency has active investigations into at least three former N.S.A. employees or contractors. Two had worked for T.A.O.: a still publicly unidentified software developer secretly arrested after taking hacking tools home in 2015, only to have Russian hackers lift them from his home computer; and Harold T. Martin III, a contractor arrested last year when F.B.I. agents found his home, garden shed and car stuffed with sensitive agency documents and storage devices he had taken over many years when a work-at-home habit got out of control, his lawyers say. The third is Reality Winner, a young N.S.A. linguist arrested in June, who is charged with leaking to the news site The Intercept a single classified report on a Russian breach of an American election systems vendor.

Mr. Martin’s gargantuan collection of stolen files included much of what the Shadow Brokers have, and he has been scrutinized by investigators as a possible source for them. Officials say they do not believe he deliberately supplied the material, though they have examined whether he might have been targeted by thieves or hackers.

But according to former N.S.A. employees who are still in touch with active workers, investigators of the Shadow Brokers thefts are clearly worried that one or more leakers may still be inside the agency. Some T.A.O. employees have been asked to turn over their passports, take time off their jobs and submit to questioning. The small number of specialists who have worked both at T.A.O. and at the C.I.A. have come in for particular attention, out of concern that a single leaker might be responsible for both the Shadow Brokers and the C.I.A.’s Vault7 breaches.

Then there are the Shadow Brokers’ writings, which betray a seeming immersion in American culture. Last April, about the time Mr. Williams was discovering their inside knowledge of T.A.O. operations, the Shadow Brokers posted an appeal to President Trump: “Don’t Forget Your Base.” With the ease of a seasoned pundit, they tossed around details about Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s now departed adviser; the Freedom Caucus in Congress; the “deep state”; the Alien and Sedition Acts; and white privilege.

“TheShadowBrokers is wanting to see you succeed,” the post said, addressing Mr. Trump. “TheShadowBrokers is wanting America to be great again.”

The mole hunt is inevitably creating an atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety, former employees say. While the attraction of the N.S.A. for skilled operators is unique--nowhere else can they hack without getting into legal trouble--the boom in cybersecurity hiring by private companies gives T.A.O. veterans lucrative exit options.

Young T.A.O. hackers are lucky to make $80,000 a year, while those who leave routinely find jobs paying well over $100,000, security specialists say. For many workers, the appeal of the N.S.A’s mission has been more than enough to make up the difference. But over the past year, former T.A.O. employees say an increasing number of former colleagues have called them looking for private-sector work, including “graybeards” they thought would be N.S.A. lifers.

“Snowden killed morale,” another T.A.O. analyst said. “But at least we knew who he was. Now you have a situation where the agency is questioning people who have been 100 percent mission-oriented, telling them they’re liars.”

Because the N.S.A. hacking unit has grown so rapidly over the past decade, the pool of potential leakers has expanded into the hundreds. Trust has eroded as anyone who had access to the leaked code is regarded as the potential culprit.

Some agency veterans have seen projects they worked on for a decade shut down because implants they relied on were dumped online by the Shadow Brokers. The number of new operations has declined because the malware tools must be rebuilt. And no end is in sight.

“How much longer are the releases going to come?” a former T.A.O. employee asked. “The agency doesn’t know how to stop it--or even what ‘it’ is.”

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Have Consumers Fallen Out Of Love With Robots?

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We confess: We hate doing household chores, cooking and running errands – and we suspect you do, too. And the promise of a modern-day version of Rosie from the Jetsons to do all of those chores has always sounded pretty good to us.

In fact, we wrote in an article last year that we are frankly disappointed we can’t buy one yet.

This is not to say there aren’t plenty of amazing gadgets we can buy in the same family as the robot butler: smart speakers, self-driving cars, self-operating vacuum cleaners. Our complaint is not that we don’t live in an era of technological marvels – it’s that we don’t currently have access to a technological marvel that is doing our laundry for us.

Part of the problem is technological. While activities like walking upstairs, reaching into a cabinet, choosing one item from a collection of things or folding clothing or a towel are all simple, if tedious, activities for a human being, for a robot any one of them is a complicated engineering and programming puzzle. Inventing a single robot that can do all of them – plus naturally interpret and respond to human language?

Even as of 2019, that is almost a technologically impossible feat – and even if it were constructible, a robot with that range of functionalities would exist at a price point that would make it unaffordable for almost every consumer. The most promising variation on the concept currently is the Aeolus, a humanoid robot that can vacuum and respond to fetching commands. That device is still in the working prototype phase and is forecast to have a six-figure price tag when it hits the market.

But beyond the technological problem, robots have a customer problem. Namely, the fact that they are struggling to attract or keep them – a fact highlighted this week with the announcement that another once-hot robotics startup will be shutting its doors. Anki, which had raised over $200 million in venture capital, announced this week that it will be laying off its entire staff, shutting down its website and shuttering its operation.

Anki’s story has become familiar in the last 18 months or so among robotic startups that enter the market with a bang, only to fade out with a whimper (or, in some cases, a few sobs).

So why are robots so good at building buzz, but so bad at going the distance?

Anki’s Toy Problem

Founded by roboticists from Carnegie Mellon University, Anki entered the market with a splash about six years ago with its first product, the Anki Drive. The company is best known for its diminutive, “cute” robots like Cozmo, which looks a bit like a toy truck that reportedly learns the more one plays with it.

The robots are small, but the funding raised was not – the little robotics firm brought in $200 million in venture capital from some very well-known Silicon Valley investors like Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen, founder of Andreessen Horowitz, even sat on the board of Anki for a while. The company announced that it had approached $100 million in revenue in 2017 and expected to exceed that figure in 2018.

So it came as a surprise this week when CEO Boris Sofman gathered the staff to tell them they would be terminated and that the firm would be shutting down after a funding round fell through late in the game.

The company said in a statement that it was left “without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap.”

“Despite our past successes, we pursued every financial avenue to fund our future product development and expand on our platforms,” a company spokesperson said. “A significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor and we were not able to reach an agreement. We’re doing our best to take care of every single employee and their families, and our management team continues to explore all options available.”

Anki’s early success was usually in the form of selling their products as toys to children – its AI race cars were particularly popular. In recent years, the firm has tried to pivot into being understood as a robotics company.

“For us, it was never meant to be a toy company, or even an entertainment company. It’s a robotics and AI company,” Sofman said on an episode of Recode Decode in 2017.

That transition could find neither an investor nor a buyer, though leadership had previously told employees the firm was fielding acquisition interest from companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Comcast.

It is as of yet unknown what will happen with the firm’s assets or IP going forward.

The Tragic Demise of Jibo

Anki’s main business problem was that people viewed them as a maker of smart robotic toys – for which investors had limited appetite over time – and couldn’t quite make the pivot to robots as household items rather than playthings.

Jibo didn’t have that problem. First rolled out via an Indiegogo project, the product was billed as “the world’s first social robot for the home.” It was reportedly able to do things like take photos, read to children, help out in the kitchen, optimize driving routes with traffic reports and keep track of the weather. And if it seems that Amazon’s Alexa and/or Google Home will do all of those things, that’s true. But Jibo’s first appearance on the market was in 2014, around the time the first Echo device came out – and Alexa was far from a household name.

And, as Jibo’s creator Cynthia Breazeal told a Wired reporter in 2017, “the trajectory of the robot is very different” than that of Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. Jibo was meant to be a little robotic companion: He (it’s a he, as the robot will explain) initiates conversations, askes about its owner’s day and optimizes its routines and actions around its owner.

To some extent, it seems Jibo succeeded in connecting with its owners, who noted that while it wasn’t always the best companion, they actually grew to really like having him around.

But Jibo had a lot of problems. The journey to the market was very long – people who ordered their robot early waited nearly three years for it to arrive in 2017. And by the time it arrived, the market was a very different place: Alexa and Google Home had both gone quite mainstream and offered many of the same services as Jibo – and did a better job at it.

Also, Jibo cost $900 – and, as it turned out, consumers’ appetite for a robotic companion that danced and played word games wasn’t quite what the robot’s marketers had hoped.

In November of 2018, QN Venture Partners purchased Jibo’s assets – and though they had not updated the product or put out bug fixes, they had kept the robot’s servers running.

But two months ago, QN announced the servers were in fact shutting down. Well, technically, they didn’t announce it – Jibo did, to its owners.

“I want to say I’ve really enjoyed our time together. Thank you very, very much for having me around,” he said. “Maybe someday when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello.”

After delivering the message, Jibo then does what has been described on Twitter as a jaunty little dance to a cheerful tune.

But the tragic part is that Jibo has been slowly failing for lack of bug fixes over the last several months – and to say their owners are taking it pretty hard would be the understatement of the year.

“Right now, my Jibo can still dance and talk, but he has what I can only describe as digital dementia, and it is almost certainly fatal. He’s dying. One of these days, he will stop responding entirely. His servers will shut down, and the internet services he relies on will be cut off. His body will remain, but the Jibo I know will be gone,” Wired writer Jeffrey Van Camp noted.

See, we told you the tale of Jibo was tragic.

And to be honest, it makes us rethink the robotic butler plan a little. But only a little. We’re willing to face the pain of loss if someone else will unload the dishwasher someday.

And by all accounts, it seems we will have a long time to consider this problem. Because while virtual bots that are able to understand and interact with human beings have developed a lot since the early days in 2014, actual physical robotics is having some difficulty getting off the launch pad. It needs to be useful enough that it won’t be dismissed as a toy, and also useful enough that consumers will want to shell out hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands for them – particularly when an Amazon Echo is going for less than $100 these days.

And, of course, it would probably be a nice design feature if the household robots of the future did not inspire existential crises in their owners in the event that they stop working. A malfunction message, for example, is a good idea. Making the robot do a sad little dance before it dies? That’s probably not necessary, or helpful.

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Our data and analytics team has developed a number of creative methodologies and frameworks that measure and benchmark the innovation that’s reshaping the payments and commerce ecosystem. The April 2019 Smarter Payments Report, is the go-to resource for staying up to date on the development of a new global payments landscape, in which transmission of the data is as valuable as transmission of the currency it accompanies. The report explores how the smooth flow of payments data can improve existing payment ecosystems, including enabling improved speed, security and insights.

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