Parents cave in to kids' relentless begging for Apple's wireless white earbuds; schools ban the. From a report: AirPods, once just an adult status symbol, are turning up on the playground. Kids' persistent nagging for the tiny wireless earbuds have parents groaning about the cost, the risk of loss or theft and concerns that they scream "privilege." [...] The desire for the high-end tech may well be due to the fact that even very young children see them all over social media, but it also speaks to the rising popularity of "hearables," which my colleagues predicted will be among the life-changing technologies of 2020. By the end of the year, eMarketer predicts, more than one-third of the U.S. population will be using smart ear-worn devices. Johnny Sanchez's (anecdote in the story) 10-year-old son was begging for AirPods because his three older siblings all have them. Mr. Sanchez, a technology manager at an entertainment company in Los Angeles, finally gave his youngest child his AirPods when he upgraded his own. "We've talked about how it feels cool to have them but you don't rub it in peoples" faces," said Mr. Sanchez. Mr. Sanchez doesn't have to worry about his son showing off to his classmates because he said his elementary school has banned AirPods. Other schools have banned them and regular earbuds too, arguing they cause students to be distracted and can be used to cheat on tests.

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Ben Smith, current editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed News is a good choice to be the new media columnist at the NYT. He has more of a bloggers perspective imho. I like that when he got his hands on the famous Steele dossier he shared it with the world. He got in hot water with other professional news people, but why would a reporter feel compelled to keep such a hot news item private? Isn't their job to make important information public? I came to like him listening to this podcast with David Remnick of the New Yorker.

Practice Fusion, a medical records startup that attracted more than $150 million from VCs, including at Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Artis Ventures, has received its share of negative press since selling to its older, publicly traded rival Allscripts in a $100 million cash deal in early 2018. Yet it appears that Practice Fusion, founded in 2005, was run even more poorly than has been previously reported. TechCrunch: In fact, the company was just tied to the drug overdose epidemic that has killed tens of thousands of Americans in just the last few years alone. How is it possible that a seemingly boring, venture-backed, San Francisco-based medical records startup could have that kind of impact? In a word: kickbacks. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Practice Fusion solicited and received pay from an (unnamed for now) major opioid company in exchange for using its EHR software to influence doctors in the act of prescribing opioid pain medications. Specifically, according to court documents released earlier today by federal prosecutors in Vermont, Practice Fusion solicited a nearly $1 million payment from the opioid company, promising that in exchange it would create alerts in its software that would cause physicians to write more prescriptions for extended release opioids than were medically needed. Practice Fusion has agreed to pay $145 million to resolve the DOJ's criminal and civil investigations, including a $26 million criminal fine and a $118.6 million civil settlement that "also resolves allegations of kickbacks relating to thirteen other CDS arrangements where Practice Fusion agreed with pharmaceutical companies to implement CDS alerts intended to increase sales of their products."

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Joni Ernst has lost her mind.

For the first time a hole has been hot-water drilled through Thwaites Glacier to access the sea water below. Where is the water from and why is it melting the glacier so vigorously? From a report: The images are murky at first. Sediment sweeps past the camera as Icefin, a bright yellow remotely operated robot submarine, moves tentatively forward under the ice. Then the waters begin to clear. Icefin is under almost half a mile (600m) of ice, at the front of one the fastest-changing large glaciers in the world. Suddenly a shadow looms above, an overhanging cliff of dirt-encrusted ice. It doesn't look like much, but this is a unique image -- the first ever pictures from a frontier that is changing our world. Icefin has reached the point at which the warm ocean water meets the wall of ice at the front of the mighty Thwaites glacier -- the point where this vast body of ice begins to melt. Glaciologists have described Thwaites as the "most important" glacier in the world, the "riskiest" glacier, even the "doomsday" glacier. It is massive -- roughly the size of Britain. It already accounts for 4% of world sea level rise each year -- a huge figure for a single glacier -- and satellite data show that it is melting increasingly rapidly. There is enough water locked up in it to raise world sea level by more than half a metre. And Thwaites sits like a keystone right in the centre of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet -- a vast basin of ice that contains more than 3m of additional potential sea level rise. Yet, until this year, no-one has attempted a large-scale scientific survey on the glacier. The Icefin team, along with 40 or so other scientists, are part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a five-year, $50m joint UK-US effort to understand why it is changing so rapidly. The project represents the biggest and most complex scientific field programme in Antarctic history.

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A security flaw in LabCorp's website exposed thousands of medical documents, like test results containing sensitive health data. From a report: It's the second incident in the past year after LabCorp said in June that 7.7 million patients had been affected by a credit card data breach of a third-party payments processor. The breach also hit several other laboratory testing companies, including Quest Diagnostics. This latest security lapse was caused by a vulnerability on a part of LabCorp's website, understood to host the company's internal customer relationship management system. Although the system appeared to be protected with a password, the part of the website designed to pull patient files from the back-end system was left exposed. That unprotected web address was visible to search engines and was later cached by Google, making it accessible to anyone who knew where to look. The cached search result only returned one document -- a document containing a patient's health information. But changing and incrementing the document number in the web address made it possible to access other documents. The bug is now fixed.

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Facebook has been determined to give people privacy controls while they're on the social network, but on Tuesday, it rolled out a long-promised tool that hopes to give people control from the social network. From a report: In a blog post on Data Privacy Day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the "Off-Facebook Activity" tool would finally be launched globally, a tool that allows people to manage how Facebook tracks them across the internet. Zuckerberg had promised this feature since May 2018, which at the time he called a "Clear History" button. While it had slow roll-outs around the world, starting last August, it should be available now to the 2.4 billion people who use Facebook every month, Zuckerberg said. In the blog post, he explained the delay was because "we had to rebuild some of our systems to make this possible." "Other businesses send us information about your activity on their sites and we use that information to show you ads that are relevant to you," Zuckerberg said in the post. "Now you can see a summary of that information and clear it from your account if you want to."

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Just when you thought nostaliga-mining had already reached its peak: Atari is in talks to build a series of gaming hotels across the country. From a report: The hotels, which will be created in conjunction with innovation and strategy company GSD Group and real estate company True North Studio, promise to be a "one-of-a-kind video game-themed destination." The hotels are planned for Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Jose, and the first is set to break ground in mid-2020. At first glance, a video game-themed hotel might sound too gimmicky to be anything other than an old company's pipe dream. But there's reason to believe that, if executed well, the Atari Hotel could actually work. As the company reports in its press release, more than $152 billion was spent on games last year alone. And games love to get together and compete.

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The organizers of the DEF CON cyber-security conference have announced today that they are putting this year's China edition "on hold" due to the ongoing Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. From a report: "China has announced a six-month hold on events like ours as part of the effort to combat the coronavirus outbreak," the DEF CON team said in a forum post today. DEF CON is one of the Top 3 most prestigious cyber-security conferences today. The conference is held each year in Las Vegas, in the month of August. The Chinese edition of the DEF CON conference, which would have reached its second edition this year, was set to take place in Beijing between April 17 and April 19. Organizers said they are currently putting the DEF CON China 2.0 conference on hold, but have not officially canceled the event.

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United Nations scientists have warned that most countries are on track to totally botch the climate goals needed to curb catastrophic global warming. But there's at least one bright spot. From a report: Scotland is on track to move its energy sector to 100 percent renewables by the end of this year. That's just in time to host the United Nations' international climate talks in November. At least someone's doing something right. Environmental organization Scottish Renewables put together a report tracking the country's renewable progress. It shows Scotland renewables provided 76 percent of the electricity consumption based on 2018 data in the report, and the percentage is expected to keep rising and will reach 100 percent soon. That's because unlike many countries, Scotland is actually moving away from fossil fuels rapidly. Scots have completely kicked coal, shutting down the nation's last coal-fired power plant in 2016. And it only has one working fossil fuel-based energy source left, a gas-fired plant in Aberdeenshire (though two more gas plants are slated to be built).

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors' exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31. BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan. Speed matters during an outbreak, and tight-lipped Chinese officials do not have a good track record of sharing information about diseases, air pollution, or natural disasters. But public health officials at WHO and the CDC have to rely on these very same health officials for their own disease monitoring. So maybe an AI can get there faster. "We know that governments may not be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion," says Kamran Khan, BlueDot's founder and CEO. "We can pick up news of possible outbreaks, little murmurs or forums or blogs of indications of some kind of unusual events going on." Khan says the algorithm doesn't use social media postings because that data is too messy. But he does have one trick up his sleeve: access to global airline ticketing data that can help predict where and when infected residents are headed next. It correctly predicted that the virus would jump from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo in the days following its initial appearance.

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The launch of the iPad ten years ago was a big surprise to everyone in the industry -- including to Microsoft executives. Steven Sinofsky, the former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, shares Microsoft's perspective as well as those of the other industry figures and press on the iPad: The announcement 10 years ago today of the "magical" iPad was clearly a milestone in computing. It was billed to be the "next" computer. For me, managing Windows, just weeks after the launch of Microsoft's "latest creation" Windows 7, it was a as much a challenge as magical. Given that Star Trek had tablets it was inevitable that the form factor would make it to computing (yes, the dynabook...). Microsoft had been working for more than 10 years starting with "WinPad" through Tablet PC. We were fixated on Win32, Pen, and more. The success of iPhone (140K apps & 3B downloads announced that day) blinded us at Microsoft as to where Apple was heading. Endless rumors of Apple's tablet *obviously* meant a pen computer based on Mac. Why not? The industry chased this for 20 years. That was our context. The press, however, was fixated on Apple lacking an "answer" (pundits seem to demand answers) to Netbooks -- those small, cheap, Windows laptops sweeping the world. Over 40 million sold. "What would Apple's response be?" We worried -- a cheap, pen-based, Mac. Sorry Harry! Jobs said that a new computer needed to be better at some things, better than an iPhone/iPod and better than a laptop. Then he just went right at Netbooks answering what could be better at these things. "Some people have thought that that's a Netbook." (The audience joined in a round of laughter.) Then he said, "The problem is ... Netbooks aren't better at anything ... They're slow. They have low quality displays ... and they run clunky old PC software ... They're just cheap laptops." "Cheap laptops" ... from my perch that was a good thing. I mean inexpensive was a better word. But we knew that Netbooks (and ATOM) were really just a way to make use of the struggling efforts to make low-power, fanless, intel chips for phones. A brutal takedown of 40M units. Sitting in a Le Corbusier chair, he showed the "extraordinary" things his new device did, from browsing to email to photos and videos and more. The real kicker was that it achieved 10 hours of battery life -- unachievable in PCs struggling for 4 hours with their whirring fans. There was no stylus..no pen. How could one input or be PRODUCTIVE? PC brains were so wedded to a keyboard, mouse, and pen alternative that the idea of being productive without those seemed fanciful. Also instant standby, no viruses, rotate-able, maintained quality over time... As if to emphasize the point, Schiller showed "rewritten" versions of Apple's iWork apps for the iPad. The iPad would have a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics. Rounding out the demonstration, the iPad would also sync settings with iTune -- content too. This was still early in the travails of iCloud but really a game changer Windows completely lacked except in enterprise with crazy server infrastructure or "consumer" Live apps. iPad had a 3G modem BECAUSE it was built on the iPhone. If you could figure out the device drivers and software for a PC, you'd need a multi-hundred dollar USB modem and a $60/month fee at best. The iPad made this a $29.99 option on AT&T and a slight uptick in purchase price. Starting at $499, iPad was a shot right across the consumer laptop. Consumer laptops were selling over 100 million units a year! Pundits were shocked at the price. I ordered mine arriving in 60/90 days. At CES weeks earlier, there were the earliest tablets -- made with no help from Google a few fringe Chinese ODMs were shopping hacky tablets called "Mobile Internet Devices" or "Media Tablets". Samsung's Galaxy was 9 months away. Android support (for 4:3 screens) aways. The first looks and reviews a bit later were just endless (and now tiresome) commentary on how the iPad was really for "consumption" and not productivity. There were no files. No keyboard. No mouse. No overlapping windows. Can't write code! In a literally classically defined case of disruption, iPad didn't do those things but what it did, it did so much better not only did people prefer it but they changed what they did in order to use it. Besides, email was the most used too and iPad was great for that. In first year 2010-2011 Apple sold 20 million iPads. That same year would turn out to be an historical high water mark for PCs (365M, ~180M laptops). Analysts had forecasted more than 500M PCs were now rapidly increasing tablet forecasts to 100s of million and dropping PC. The iPad and iPhone were soundly existential threats to Microsoft's core platform business. Without a platform Microsoft controlled that developers sought out, the soul of the company was "missing." The PC had been overrun by browsers, a change 10 years in the making. PC OEMs were deeply concerned about a rise of Android and loved the Android model (no PC maker would ultimately be a major Android OEM, however). Even Windows Server was eclipsed by Linux and Open Source. The kicker for me, though, was that keyboard stand for the iPad. It was such a hack. Such an obvious "objection handler." But it was critically important because it was a clear reminder that the underlying operating system was "real" ...it was not a "phone OS". Knowing the iPhone and now iPad ran an robust OS under the hood, with a totally different "shell", interface model (touch), and app model (APIs and architecture) had massive implications for being the leading platform provider for computers. That was my Jan 27, 2010. Further reading: The iPad's original software designer and program lead look back on the device's first 10 years.

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Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers. An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers' personally identifiable information (PII). From the report, shared by reader AmiMoJo: Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers. The danger in sending even small bits of information is that analytics and tracking companies are able to combine these bits together to form a unique picture of the user's device. This cohesive whole represents a fingerprint that follows the user as they interact with other apps and use their device, in essence providing trackers the ability to spy on what a user is doing in their digital lives and when they are doing it. All this takes place without meaningful user notification or consent and, in most cases, no way to mitigate the damage done. Even when this information is not misused and employed for precisely its stated purpose (in most cases marketing), this can lead to a whole host of social ills. Ring has exhibited a pattern of behavior that attempts to mitigate exposure to criticism and scrutiny while benefiting from the wide array of customer data available to them. It has been able to do so by leveraging an image of the secure home, while profiting from a surveillance network which facilitates police departments' unprecedented access into the private lives of citizens, as we have previously covered. For consumers, this image has cultivated a sense of trust in Ring that should be shaken by the reality of how the app functions: not only does Ring mismanage consumer data, but it also intentionally hands over that data to trackers and data miners.

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Braintrust query: Is there an icon like this: in the current version of Font-Awesome? I'd like to upgrade to the latest, but without this or something very close to it, I can't.