Security engineer Ivan writes: For some reason Apple allows "subscription scam" apps on the App Store. These are apps that are free to download and then ask you to subscribe right on launch. It's called the freemium business model, except these apps ask you to subscribe for "X" feature(s) immediately when you launch them, and keep doing so, annoyingly, over and over until you finally subscribe. By subscribing you get a number of "free days" (trial) and then they charge you weekly/monthly/yearly for very basic features like scanning QR Codes. I've been trying to monitor apps that have these characteristics: 1. They have In-App purchases for their subscriptions. 2. They have bad reviews, specially with words like "scam" or "fraud". 3. Their "good" reviews are generic, potentially bot-generated. This weekend I focused on 5 apps from 2 different developers and to my surprise they are very similar, not only their UI/UX but also their code is shared and their patterns are absolutely the same. A side from being classic subscription scam apps, I wanted to examine how they work internally and how they communicate with their servers and what type of information are they sending.

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A great summary of what remains of Carmelo Anthony's career.

1969 was incredible. The moon landing, Woodstock and the Mets win the World Series.

At least 16 military officers have been arrested in attempted coup d'etat, governing army council says.

Microsoft is finally revealing exactly how many people are using its Slack competitor Microsoft Teams. From a report: The software maker says that more than 13 million people are using Microsoft Teams daily, along with more than 19 million weekly active users. This is the first time Microsoft has revealed an active user count, and the company's previous update was that 500,000 organizations were using the service back in March. This figure is above the more than 10 million people who use Slack daily. Slack revealed its 10 million daily active user count earlier this year, and it used the same figure back in April in a financial filing. Team communication service Slack, which has been around for much longer, was valued at north of $20 billion when it went public last month.

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Nana Akufo-Addo says the continent must 'take our destiny in our own hands' and transform dynamic with Europe.

Multiple users are reporting issues while trying to load Twitter. Third-party internet firm DownDetector corroborates the claim, saying more than 10,500 users have reported issues with Twitter in the last 15 minutes. (Update: 47,000+ reports in last 25 minutes). TweetDeck, a service offered by Twitter, is also facing an outage. Twitter apps are also not loading new tweets. Update at 19:00 GMT: Twitter has acknowledged that users are facing issues accessing its service. The microblogging platform said it is investigating the matter. Update at 20:00 GMT: In a statement, Twitter said it has resolved the issue.

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In some of Ethiopia's remote villages, aid agencies are helping restore access to clean water.

Several far-right figures including some who push conspiracy theories and spread false rumors reportedly among invitees.

Experts in workplace psychology overwhelmingly agree that burnout is a growing public health crisis. An excerpt from a long report: When the FT set out to investigate this issue, we asked readers to describe how their employers handle mental health issues, including stress, burnout, anxiety and depression. More than 450 people responded from 43 countries. Although they were a self-selecting group, their responses were significant: the majority felt unsupported, alienated or discriminated against on the basis of their mental health. Two-thirds believed their work had a somewhat to extremely negative effect on their health, and 44 per cent said they did not think mental health was taken seriously by their organisation. Half said they either didn't know where at work to go, or had nowhere to go if they needed support. Even as many companies strengthen their policies to close the gender pay gap and end sexual harassment, mental wellbeing often remains an afterthought. "This is not about buying Fitbits for employees and teaching them deep breathing so we can pile on more work," says Donna Hardaker, a workplace mental health specialist at Sutter Health, a not-for-profit healthcare network. "You must address the micro and the macro. There is a deeply entrenched cultural idea that workplaces are fine; it's the employees who are the problem. But employers have a social responsibility to not be harming the people who are working within their walls." A failure to support employees is also costing companies a fortune: an estimated 615 million people suffer from depression and anxiety and, according to a recent World Health Organisation study, this costs an estimated $1tn in lost productivity every year. Companies that do not have systems in place to support the wellbeing of their employees have higher turnover, lower productivity and higher healthcare costs, according to the American Psychological Association. They also face significant legal risks.

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Google admitted on Thursday that more than 1,000 sound recordings of customer conversations with the Google Assistant were leaked by some of its partners to a Belgian news site. From a report: These conversations are used by companies such as Google and Amazon -- which takes clips from the Amazon Echo -- to improve voice responses from their smart assistants. They are supposed to be kept confidential. But Belgian news site VRT said on Wednesday that a contractor provided it with samples of these sound samples, which VRT then used to identify some of the people in the clips. It also examined the sorts of conversations that Google collects when people say "OK Google," into a phone or a Google Home product. Among other things, VRT heard customer addresses. Sources who talked to the publication also described hearing recordings of a woman in distress and people talking about medical conditions. Google has now admitted the recordings were leaked. "We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data," Google product manager of search David Monsees said in a blog post. "Our Security and Privacy Response teams have been activated on this issue, are investigating, and we will take action. We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again."

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I came up with a title for my book of memories on my bike ride. I found a simple idea that ties all my observations together. It goes like this.

Kurt Vonnegut was right.

That's it. If you read Sirens of Titan you'll know what I mean. The ending. And pretty much every other book he wrote, all were so funny because the truth is funny, that is if you believe what Vonnegut said which I do.

Someone asked where my GitHub repos are.

Gibraltar had seized an Iranian oil tanker suspected by the UK of carrying two million barrels of crude oil to Syria.

Multiple users are reporting issues while trying to load Twitter. Third-party internet firm DownDetector corroborates the claim, saying more than 10,500 users have reported issues with Twitter in the last 15 minutes. TweetDeck, a service offered by Twitter, is also facing an outage.

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