Brands have long been able to bid for the premier slot at the top left of Amazon's listings, but during the pandemic the online retailer has begun using this position for its private-label items, raising antitrust concerns. From a report: Until recently, when Amazon customers typed "melatonin" into the site's search bar, a variety of sleep supplements would appear in the most coveted real estate on the listings results -- top left on the first page. One of consultant Jason Boyce's clients, a seller of natural supplements, often sought to outbid competitors for the best spots by promising Amazon about $6 each time someone clicked on the product. While the brand never attained the top left slot, it regularly landed in the top row. But in late March, Boyce noticed that Amazon's own brand, Solimo, had taken over the top left, while his client's product had been bumped to a lower row. Then Boyce typed "ground coffee" in the search bar, only to find AmazonFresh Colombia ground coffee in the top left, pushing down another client. Although customers don't necessarily realize it, brands have for years been able to bid on search terms to secure the most visible listing positions at the top of Amazon's product search results pages, where their products carry a "sponsored" tag above the description. Now, they still bid for top-row placements, but the best spot -- the top left on the first page -- is unavailable across dozens of product search terms, according to consultants and ProPublica's own review. During the pandemic, Amazon has begun to use that position for its own private-label products, without bidding, under the heading "featured from our brands." The domino effect of Amazon's new strategy has demoted competitors' listings for products including diapers, copy paper, kids' pajamas, mattresses, trail mix and lightbulbs. By putting its own private brands in some of the most valuable slots, Amazon is sacrificing short-term ad revenue to build up sales of its private brands over time, consultants said. The new approach violates Amazon's mantra that every decision must put the customer first, said Tim Hughes, a consultant who used to work in product management at Amazon.

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Space Force, the branch of the US armed services established by the Trump administration last December, now shares a name with a Netflix comedy starring Steve Carrell. From a report: The military reportedly isn't too concerned about possible confusion over the fictional show's name. Netflix, however, has reportedly secured trademark rights in Europe, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere for Space Force. Currently, the Air Force only owns a pending application for registration of the name Space Force in the US based on intent to use, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Records obtained by the publication showed that Netflix was submitting applications for the name "Space Force" internationally back in January 2019.

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There was so much happening so quickly during the first days of the protests. I couldn't figure out what was going on in NYC. And that's just one city. This podcast filled in some of the blanks, if you're confused I highly recommend it. It pays to watch The Fog of War every so often for a reminder of how confusing war is. In America, our military thought the Vietnam War was a war against communism. On the other side it was a war for independence. We fought that war for years, at huge cost, and we didn't even agree on what the war was about. Think about that.

If our social platforms are going to be gatekeepers, then they need to acknowledge their role in the information ecosystems. It is knowing what to boost and what to ignore that makes a good platform, writes veteran technology journalist and now a venture capitalist Om Malik. From his essay: The battle of good email versus spam email has taken a long time, but it has been worth fighting. The struggle between real information and fake information is no different. Unfortunately, what we have is ambivalent algorithms on our social platforms that blindly amplify both hope and hate. This gets complicated pretty quickly. Without access to the same platforms currently being used to gaslight our country, we won't see the awful videos of police in conflict with the people they should protect. Without the same platforms, it would be harder to tell that the media just glorifies the titillating stuff, whether it is the opinion page of the old Gray Lady or the fake looting of a non-existent Rolex store. I am the first to admit that this is one hard and messy problem. The challenge we face today is that technology's supreme commanders fail to fight the real monkey on their back -- how the modern internet works. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, or Google, the core principle of these companies is engagement and growth. More engagement means more growth, and that means more attention and thus more money. If Facebook removed news from your feed and just restricted it to social items, like baby pictures, ravings of a crazy uncle, and event announcements, there is a good chance that engagement on the platform would decrease. Twitter would be a lot less engaging if it reverted back to its original premise of showing the latest, not the loudest. And what if Google stopped rewarding frequent visits as one of the measurements for showing the results on its search engine? I think you know.

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Twitter is developing a new in-app system for requesting verification, according to a recent finding from reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, which Twitter has since confirmed. The discovery involves an added "Request Verification" option that appears in a redesigned account settings screen. This feature is not launched to the public, Twitter says. From a report: Wong typically digs into Twitter's and Facebook's to discover features like these, making a name for herself as someone who scoops upcoming additions and changes to popular social apps before they go live. In this case, she's stumbled upon one of Twitter's most-requested features after an edit button: a way to acquire the coveted blue checkmark typically reserved for public figures.

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It may seem obvious, with double-digit unemployment and plunging economic output. But if there was any remaining doubt that the U.S. is in a recession, it's now been removed by the official scorekeepers at the National Bureau of Economic Research. From a report: The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee -- the fat lady of economic opera -- says the expansion peaked in February after a record 128 months, and we've been sliding into a pandemic-driven recession ever since. In making the announcement, the committee pointed to the "unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy." At the same time, the committee noted the recession could be short-lived. The U.S. added 2.5 million jobs last month, after losing more than 22 million in March and April. Many forecasters expect economic output to begin growing again in the third quarter.

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A new study on kids' app usage and habits indicates a major threat to YouTube's dominance, as kids now split their time between Google's online video platform and other apps, like TikTok, Netflix and mobile games like Roblox. From a report: Kids ages four to 15 now spend an average of 85 minutes per day watching YouTube videos, compared with 80 minutes per day spent on TikTok. The latter app also drove growth in kids' social app use by 100% in 2019 and 200% in 2020, the report found. The data in the annual report by digital safety app maker Qustodio was provided by 60,000 families with children ages four to 14 in the U.S., U.K. and Spain, so its data isn't representative of global trends. The research encompasses children's online habits from February 2019 to April 2020, takes into account the COVID-19 crisis and is specifically focused on four main categories of mobile applications: online video, social media, video games and education. YouTube, not surprisingly, remains one of the most-used apps among children, the study found. Kids are now watching twice as many videos per day as they did just four years ago.

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The COVID-19 crisis hit most tech companies hard, but it buried Sandbox VR. From a report: "We went from a relatively healthy business," CEO Steve Zhao said, "to zero revenue." Sandbox was operating 10 VR centers in North America and Asia that allowed groups of customers to step into virtual worlds. Every one had to close due to shelter-in-place orders. "Literally, 100% of the revenue is gone," Zhao said. At the end of April, Sandbox laid off 80% of its staff. Among the departures were then-CEO Siqi Chen and many of the company's key developers. Left with a skeleton crew of 20, Zhao is now trying to figure out not only how to reopen existing locations but survive. "We have to rethink our strategy," he said. Sandbox VR is not alone in its struggles. Numerous operators of VR centers and arcades, including The Void, Dreamscape, Zero Latency and Spaces, have been forced to shut down their retail locations amid the pandemic and are now facing major financial and logistical challenges. It's an abrupt change of fate for an industry that just months ago was seen as a pivotal booster of VR, and heralded by some as the future of theme parks and other forms of location-based entertainment.

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With dozens of digital contact tracing apps already rolled out worldwide, and many more on the way, how many people need to use them for the system to work? One number has come up over and over again: 60%. From a report: That's the percentage of the population that many public health authorities documented by MIT Technology Review's Covid Tracing Tracker say they are targeting as they attempt to protect their communities from covid-19. The number is taken from an Oxford University study released in April. But since no nation has reached such levels, many have criticized "exposure notification" technologies as essentially worthless. But the researchers who produced the original study say their work has been profoundly misunderstood, and that in fact much lower levels of app adoption could still be vitally important for tackling covid-19. "There's been a lot of misreporting around efficacy and uptake ... suggesting that the app only works at 60% -- which is not the case," says Andrea Stewart, a spokeswoman for the Oxford team. In fact, she says, "it starts to have a protective effect" at "much lower levels." The Oxford models found that "the app has an effect at all levels of uptake" as illustrated by this graph which shows every level of adoption slowing to pandemic to some extent. Because of the way such digital contacting tracing and exposure notification apps work -- by notifying users if their phone has been in proximity to the phone of somebody who later gets a diagnosis of covid-19 -- blanket coverage is preferable. The greater the number of users, the higher the likelihood that it will help at-risk people to self-quarantine before they can infect others.

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In a scathing indictment of Facebook's content moderation strategy, a new study identifies the company's decision to outsource such work as a key reason its efforts are failing. From a report: The NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a report today that calls on Facebook to end the outsourcing practice and commit to bringing the work in-house so moderation receives the resources and attention it deserves. The report also calls for a massive increase in the number of moderators, as well as improved working conditions that include better physical and mental health care for moderators who are subjected to disturbing content throughout the workday. The report comes as Facebook's reputation continues to degrade following years of controversy over its handling of disinformation, fake news, and other dangerous content on its platform. Such criticism has intensified in recent days, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg facing a backlash from employees over his failure to censure tweets by President Trump that appear to violate the platform's policies against inciting violence. While the problems facing Facebook's content moderation have been widely reported, the study's principal author, Paul Barrett, said he wanted to highlight the fact that while content moderation is fundamental to keeping the platform usable, the company has relegated the work to a secondary role by primarily employing underpaid contractors in remote locations.

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At Living Videotext, my first company, I used to pore over the regcards when they came back. After they were entered in the database they were cycled back to me a few months later, I would call a few and find out how they were doing with the product, and if they were really using it (I could tell) I'd ask what they wanted to see fixed or added. After a while there was a consensus, and they were usually the things I also wanted added or fixed (and they already had been, I was CEO and lead developer). I saw my job as using the product myself, and also listening to the other people who used it. Actually it was my favorite part of the job.

There are concerns coronavirus might be starting to spread in parts of England again.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Western Digital has been receiving a storm of bad press -- and even lawsuits -- concerning their attempt to sneak SMR disk technology into their "Red" line of NAS disks. To get a better handle on the situation, ArsTechnica purchased a Western Digital 4TB Red EFAX model SMR drive and put it to the test ourselves. [...] Recently, the well-known tech enthusiast site Servethehome tested one of the SMR-based 4TB Red disks with ZFS and found it sorely lacking. The disk performed adequately -- if underwhelmingly -- in generic performance tests. But when Servethehome used it to replace a disk in a degraded RAIDz1 vdev, it required more than nine days to complete the operation -- when all competing NAS drives performed the same task in around sixteen hours. [...] We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate's Greg Belloni, who stated on the company's behalf that they "do not recommend SMR for NAS applications." At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. With that said, we can see why Western Digital believed, after what we assume was a considerable amount of laboratory testing, that their disks would be "OK" for typical NAS usage. Although obviously slower than their Ironwolf competitors, they performed adequately both for conventional RAID rebuilds and for typical day-to-day NAS file-sharing workloads. We were genuinely impressed with how well the firmware adapted itself to most workloads -- this is a clear example of RFC 1925 2.(3) in action, but the thrust does appear sufficient to the purpose. Unfortunately, it would appear that Western Digital did not test ZFS, which a substantial minority of their customer base depends upon.

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