Everything You Need To Know About A Trump Server's Chats With A Russian Bank

“At the end of the day, we don’t know what happened.”

Gustavo Caballero / Getty Images

SAN FRANCISCO — Did Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have a special email server used exclusively to communicate with a Russian bank with ties to President Vladimir Putin? On Monday night, the internet was abuzz with speculation after Slate published a story claiming that a number of experts had not only found the email server, but had concluded there was a “sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank,” a large, private bank in Russia whose oligarch founders have close ties to Putin.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton piled into the news cycle with a tweet calling for an investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia.

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Quelle: <a href="Everything You Need To Know About A Trump Server&039;s Chats With A Russian Bank“>BuzzFeed

Talkshow, A Public Messaging App, Is Shutting Down

Talkshow, a public messaging app that debuted in April, is shutting down at the end of this month.

“While we have enjoyed the conversations that have happened on Talkshow, and are grateful for the community that has formed around the product, we don’t see it getting big enough to have the impact we had hoped for,” the company said in an email. “We’re sorry, and we’re going to try to handle this transition in the right way.”

The app, developed by former Twitter product head Michael Sippey, displayed group messaging threads in public. The threads, ranging from sports talk to dating tips, were certainly intriguing.

But ultimately, Talkshow becomes yet another upstart social app to die, trying to compete for attention with Facebook and Snapchat, two giants that have seemingly sucked all the air out of the room in social. Word of Talkshow&#039;s shut down comes a week after Vine, a Twitter-owned video service, said it too would close.

BuzzFeed News has reached out to Talkshow for further comment and clarification.

Quelle: <a href="Talkshow, A Public Messaging App, Is Shutting Down“>BuzzFeed

Instagram Introduces New Shopping Feature To Get You To Buy More Stuff

Instagram is introducing new mini shops in an attempt to sparks sales of products in its feed.

The shops, which are debuting in a test with 20 partners next week, allow you to tap on items you see in pictures and explore them in more detail inside the Instagram feed. A “shop now” button is included within the mini shops, and hitting it will open a checkout web page for the product you’re looking at inside Instagram.

Warby Parker, Abercrombie & Fitch, Coach, JackThreads, and more are participating in the test, which will be live in the US only to start. The retailers won’t be able to promote the shops with advertising for now, though that will likely come down the road.

Instagram already sells ads that include a “shop” button, but the new mini shops are meant to bridge the gap between the moment you become aware of a product and when you decide to buy it. They also give you more information as you consider buying something, a step that naturally occurs when you shop offline.

“You can get inspired [online], and you can buy — it’s that in between state between the shop window and the cash register that doesn’t exist today,” Instagram’s director of market operations, Jim Squires, told BuzzFeed News.

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter have all introduced commerce to their platforms over the past two years, but so far the results have been less than spectacular. Twitter, for one, ceased development on its buy button and disbanded its commerce team. Retailers have also played down other platforms&#039; programs, and a study by the research firm GlobalWebIndex found that only 14% of people aged 16 to 64 want to see buy buttons on Instagram.

“There’s work to be done,” Squires said.

Still, Instagram has long been a place where people arrange transactions in comments underneath photos of items they like. And now, it&039;s trying to develop a product that captures the spirit of those conversations in an effort to generate even more sales.

Quelle: <a href="Instagram Introduces New Shopping Feature To Get You To Buy More Stuff“>BuzzFeed

If Trump Wins, He Can Keep Obama's Twitter Followers — But Not His Tweets

Barack Obama was the first US president on Twitter, and he won&#039;t be the last. So what happens to the @POTUS Twitter handle after the election?

When Obama leaves office on January 20, 2017, Twitter will transfer his tweets to the new account @ POTUS44, which will contain all of his previous tweets, according to a statement from the White House. The 45th US president, whoever that will be, will then receive the handle @ POTUS, which will begin tabula rasa with no tweets on the timeline.

As for Instagram and Facebook, the incoming presidential administration will own the White House username, URL, and followers, and it will also begin its term with a blank timeline. The same is true of the Vice President and First Lady&039;s social media accounts.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, Bill Clinton will likely be referred to as the “First Gentleman of the United States.” The White House&039;s statement did not cover the account @ FGOTUS, though the account currently sports an “about me” stating “I&039;m obviously with her.”

The current accounts for the Vice President, First Lady, White House, and other associated accounts will become “VP44,” “FLOTUS44,” “WhiteHouse44,” and so on, the White House&039;s statement reads. The accounts with “44” appended will remain under the control of Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, and their staffers.

Obama was also the first president to use Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook Live to engage with the public. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will preserve the social media created by Obama&039;s administration in a publicly accessible archive.

NARA will also archive content from other digital arms of the Obama administration. The We the People petition platform and Obama&039;s version of WhiteHouse.gov will also be available in the NARA archives. You can follow the transition on @WHWeb.

Donald Trump (@ realDonaldTrump) and Hillary Clinton (@ HillaryClinton) have amassed 12.8 and 10.1 million followers, respectively, while @ POTUS has 11.1 million at the time of reporting. Trump has remarked in the past that he would “totally accept the election results if I win” and has made claims that the election is rigged, making it unclear how he would approach a digital transition of power.

Neither Hillary Clinton&039;s nor Donald Trump&039;s campaign responded immediately to requests for comment on how they would handle a digital transition of power or if they would keep posting from their existing accounts.

Here is an archive of all 317 of @POTUS&039; tweets scraped by BuzzFeed News.

Quelle: <a href="If Trump Wins, He Can Keep Obama&039;s Twitter Followers — But Not His Tweets“>BuzzFeed

Ex-Googler Raises $2 Million, Debuts Platform To Let You Build Your Own Pokémon Go

When Pokémon Go incited mass augmented reality hysteria this summer, one big question that emerged was whether the game’s success would usher in an era of AR applications, or whether enthusiasm for the genre would fizzle. Ex-Googler Dmitry Shapiro is betting that we’ve only seen the beginning of experiences that overlay the digital on the physical world. He&#039;s debuting an app that allows anyone to create Pokemon-Go style games within it, and he’s raised $2 million from the likes of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and venture capitalists Greylock Partners to push it forward.

The platform, called Metaverse, can host an unlimited number of AR applications. Anyone can make games or other experiences inside it by using a builder to create Pokemon-style “experiences” and dropping them onto a map that hews to the real world. You can quickly build these worlds, and you don’t have to know how to code, though the creation of more elaborate uses will demand more effort.

Just like with Pokémon Go, you walk up to experiences inside the Metaverse and tap them to interact with them. But unlike Pokémon Go, the Metaverse won’t be limited to one “world.” Its founder, Shapiro, wants it to be a home for multitudes of user-generated scavenger hunts, interactive stories, and even AR worlds directing you to things like public bathrooms. Users can sort through and hop in and out of these worlds at will.

“YouTube made it trivially simple for people to publish video,” Shapiro told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “You could think of this as being a YouTube for interactive experiences.”

The point: Make it easy for anyone to build these experiences, freeing them from the effort needed to develop AR technology, and hopefully they’ll create stuff people want to explore.

Scene from a Metaverse scavenger hunt

GoMeta

According to Google Trends, interest in both augmented reality and Pokémon Go has steeply dropped off since the Pokemon craze hit its peak in July. So Metaverse might be fighting an uphill battle. But in a best-case scenario, it could create the framework from which many successes like Pokémon Go emerge. “The last great platform has dramatically changed what we see on our phones in front of us,” said Greylock VC Josh Elman, referring to mobile operating systems. “I believe the next great platforms can be to change what we see in the world around us.”

And Eisner, in an emailed statement, said he’s particularly excited about the interactive storytelling that can be done within the platform. “Metaverse is a new medium, potentially the invention of a new genre of interactive film, and I believe that incredible stories will be told on this platform.” he said. “The opportunities that exist for storytellers large and small are staggering.”

Metaverse already demonstrated how part of its app works with cash scavenger hunts in San Diego and the LA area this fall. And for Halloween, the app created a world overlaid with spooky experiences that you can walk up to and interact with. But Tuesday, the platform is opening up its key product, the one that allows anyone to build their own worlds, or “dimensions” as it calls them.

The dimension builder is fairly straightforward, allowing you to upload your own objects or pick from the app&039;s built-in set, which ranges from Donald Trump to an astronaut. Then you can set the objects to say certain things and offer multiple choice responses for users that tap on them. Shapiro said his niece and her friends are using the platform to drop characters on each other’s houses, which then relay messages when tapped. It’s an example of the wide array of uses that you can imagine for the platform.

Though it’s still an open question whether AR will take off, Shapiro is not shy about his ambitions. “I’m not trying to build a new Google Maps or Waze,” he said. “I’m trying to build a new fundamental platform that will dramatically increase the things that regular consumers can do with technology.”

Quelle: <a href="Ex-Googler Raises Million, Debuts Platform To Let You Build Your Own Pokémon Go“>BuzzFeed

Why Samsung Still Doesn't Know What's Causing Galaxy Note7 Explosions

A participant wearing a Samsung Galaxy Note7 costume walks in Kawasaki, Japan after a Halloween parade on October 30, 2016.

Kim Kyung-hoon / Reuters

Six weeks since Samsung first recalled its once-ballyhooed Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, and more than three weeks since it stopped selling them entirely, the company still doesn&#039;t know what, precisely, is causing its flagship phone to catch fire. For the Korean electronics giant, that has spelled disaster. The company stands to lose 17 billion dollars in revenue, even as its reputation plunges in key markets across the world.

An official accident report Samsung filed with the Korea Agency of Technology, which Buzzfeed News obtained, confirms the company still doesn&039;t know what led to 35 reported cases of battery-induced Note7 damage around the world. According to the document, despite an initial diagnosis of “marginal errors” during the battery cell manufacturing process that ultimately resulted in a heat-producing short circuit in Note7 phones, it&039;s unclear if this is the cause behind all the fires. Samsung confirmed the report is authentic, but declined to comment on its ongoing investigation.

In other words, one of the 20 richest companies in the world, a global conglomerate worth half a trillion dollars, can&039;t quickly figure out what&039;s causing one of its flagship products to reportedly set cars on fire. Even though Samsung is bleeding money and trust with each day it doesn&039;t have an answer, it very well may be months before the company has an explanation — and can try to assure consumers its next phones won&039;t have the same problem.

“If I was Samsung, I&039;d be gathering phones like crazy. Those have the best clues.”

None of this is surprising to Glen Stevick, a mechanical engineer, failure analyst, and the founder of Berkeley Engineering and Research, which has studied dozens of lithium ion fires. Stevick, who helped determine what made the Deepwater Horizon explode, said that getting to the bottom of a major consumer recall case like this takes time — six months to a year “to know everything.” That would, by certain standards, be quick: It took nearly two years after the first reports of problems with the lithium ion batteries in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner for the National Transportation Safety Board to release its official report.

That&039;s because, according to Stevick, these are huge undertakings, and not ones that just take place in a lab. Before Samsung&039;s engineers can start to analyze the exploding phones, the company has to collect them.

“If I was Samsung, I&039;d be gathering phones like crazy. Those have the best clues,” Stevick said.

That means not just the 35 phones that caught fire, but hundreds of other Note 7s in various states of use. Only then, said Stevick, can “you start slicing those batteries and putting them under an electron microscope. Gradually the issues will appear.”
What Samsung&039;s failure analysis team would be looking for, Stevick said, are dendrites: microscopic lithium fibers that can grow — vine-like — over time from the anode (negative pole) of the battery, across a thin separator, to the cathode (positive pole). When the two poles connect, watch out: You&039;ve got a short circuit and a potential fire.

The two main culprits behind out-of-control dendrite growth, charging too deeply and charging too fast, happen to be correlated with features consumers want: namely, better battery life and faster phone recharging. But it&039;s not as simple as blaming one or the other. Perhaps both are a problem. Perhaps the electrolyte separator — which keeps the anode and cathode apart – is too thin and therefore too easy for the lithium tendrils to bridge. Or perhaps the design of the battery case squished the battery too much, again making it easier for the two poles to connect.

Or maybe, as Samsung initially claimed, there were battery manufacturing issues, things like, as Stevick put it, “someone leaving a door open in the clean room,” allowing in dust that could lead to a short circuit. Maybe that was a one-time mistake, affecting only a limited set of batteries, that has since been solved. Or maybe not.

Ruling out all of the potential causes, and their permutations, simply takes time. And plotting these issues to a predictive curve is a major challenge, Stevick said, one that can take carefully analyzing hundreds and hundreds of phones.
“Those things can overlap on you,” Stevick said, “And you can be all over the place trying to fix it. It isn&039;t easy.”

Jihye Lee contributed to the reporting in this story.

Quelle: <a href="Why Samsung Still Doesn&039;t Know What&039;s Causing Galaxy Note7 Explosions“>BuzzFeed

The Growing Pains Of "League Of Legends,” The World's Most Popular Video Game

Visitors listen to commentators after a battle between international teams during a League of Legends tournament on May 8, 2014 in Paris.

Lionel Bonaventure / AFP / Getty Images

League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena game, is the most popular video game and one of the most-watched esports in the world. One hundred million people play it on their PCs every month. And today is the finale of the game’s month-long World Championship Series. In front of 18,000 people in Los Angeles’ Staples center and tens of millions more online, the final two teams, Samsung Galaxy and SK Telecom T1, will fight.

Working in teams of five from a giant stage with a Jumbotron above their heads, players will each take control of one of 133 magical heroes — choices include a warrior, a mummy, and a nine-tailed fox — to try to destroy their enemy’s base. Just like Olympic athletes prepare for a chance at the big games, the professionals playing in the LoL world championships have practiced the game relentlessly for years to earn their spots in the competition.

As the League Championship Series (LCS), has grown, though, its players have started to expect more from the game that they’ve helped make into such a success. Riot Games, which created League of Legends, raked in $1.6 billion in revenue in 2015. Teams, by contrast, say they’re having trouble making enough money to sustain themselves.

The life of a professional gamer isn’t all joy and joysticks

It takes hundreds of hours for players to master something they call “the meta,” short for metagame. It’s the arcane book of plays for the millions of battle situations they can find themselves in. Players who spoke to BuzzFeed News when they were in San Francisco to play in the first round of championship games said they practice at least eight hours a day, six days a week. The season runs from January to October if a team does well. Before tournaments, that daily schedule can lengthen with extra preparation, and players can find themselves locked in battle for as much as 14 hours per day.

They could practice less, but, as Alexander “Abaxial” Haibel, coach of the Brazilian team INTZ, told BuzzFeed News, “then you would be bad.” The current career of a professional player is two to four years. There are very few veteran players.

Despite all that hard work, “the [monetary] gain from being a player or a caster [an announcer] in the LCS right now is not good enough,” Jacob “YamatoCanon” Mebdi, coach of the Splyce LoL team, told BuzzFeed News.

Capital is flooding into the discipline as more mainstream backers hope to cash in on the niche game’s high viewership stats. The Philadelphia 76ers just bought two esports teams, and some players are worth millions. But not everyone is raking in money. Andy “Reginald” Dinh, owner of Team SoloMid (TSM), arguably the most famous team in LoL, publicly castigated the gamemaker in August for failing to understand the dire financial situations of most pro teams.

According to the team owners and staff that spoke to BuzzFeed News in San Francisco, most, if not all, League of Legends teams run in the red.

A League of Legends World Championship match in San Francisco

Blake Montgomery

Splyce team owner Marty Strenczewilk told BuzzFeed News that his franchise, comprised of eight teams playing different games besides League of Legends, invests in LoL as a means of brand exposure, not making money. That team, he said, loses money. Other games earn revenue for his business.

Dinh expressed similar sentiments in a blog post: “I made no money for two years and had to borrow from my parents because I believed so much in the game…The reason why I started to invest in other games was because LCS left me no choice…Other publishers are more collaborative and provide more opportunities for teams and players to make revenue.”

In North America and Europe, Riot pays all starter players in the professional league $12,500 per split, which is what players call the two three-month seasons per year. If a player is good enough to start on one of the 20 teams in the LCS, he or she can take home a slice of the $2 million awarded to the winning World Championship team.

The total LoL world championship prize pool is $5 million. Defense of the Ancients 2, a less popular esport, offers championship winnings of $20 million. Riot has kept the pool low intentionally by not opening it up to crowdfunding in the past, which DoTA uses to increase its prizes. DoTA fans buy championship-specific in-game items and activities, and their purchases contribute to the tournament’s pool. Riot has adopted the crowdfunding model this year.

Whalen “Magus” Rozelle, director of esports at Riot Games, told BuzzFeed News, “We don’t focus on the prize pool because it’s just for winners, but it seems we’ve underdone the pool.” He expects it to increase in the future.

After Dinh’s public criticism, Riot released a letter offering some concessions and promises to keep improving the league’s economics. The company said it would start offering winning teams a quarter of the revenue from the “skins” — cosmetic, digital modifications players can buy for their champions — that carry the teams’ names. (Riot has previously kept the revenue from team skins for itself.) The company also said it’s working to expand its media distribution, though it wouldn’t offer any details. (Riot does not give any part of broadcast revenue to LCS teams.)

Even still, Hans Christian “Liq” Durr, manager of Splyce’s League of Legends team, told BuzzFeed News, “Riot’s recent move is a baby step in comparison to the digital items in [games like] Counter Strike: Global Offensive or DoTA [Defense of the Ancients] 2. There are not as many possibilities for revenue in LoL as there are in other disciplines.”

Announcers, known as “casters” within esports, at a League of Legends World Championship match in San Francisco.

Blake Montgomery

So how can teams make enough money to keep playing?

According to Harris Peskin, general counsel and chief of operations for the LoL team H2K, sponsorships are the primary way a team earns money. But, like everything else in professional League of Legends, it’s complicated. Riot controls what sponsors a team can represent.

Rozelle told BuzzFeed News that Riot draws a sharp distinction between sponsoring the teams and sponsoring the league. To players, however, that separation may not be so clear. In August, Riot demanded that TSM remove an HTC-sponsored YouTube video from the team’s own channel that showed team members playing a game with an HTC Vive virtual reality headset. Riot saw it as an ad for a competing game. HTC responded by saying it wanted to support the sport but could see very few ways to continue doing so because of the severe limitations Riot placed on sponsors.

Rozelle sees it differently: “We want teams to have lots of sponsors, and we don’t believe our guidelines are too stringent,” he told BuzzFeed News. “We do impose greater restrictions on sponsorships of the league itself than on teams, but that’s not money we’re taking away from players. We allow teams to have a tremendous number of sponsors — just look at the logos all over their jerseys.”

Teams are counting on more than what they’re wearing to make money. “Our sponsors don’t just want a jersey logo,” Splyce’s Strenczewilk said. “Sponsorship is such a challenge because Riot is so controlled, so structured… They exercise the most involved control of any esports publisher.”

The “Summoner&#039;s Cup,” the prize for winning the tournament.

Blake Montgomery

That’s not an exaggeration. Riot Games occupies a singular place even within esports: In addition to owning LoL, it owns and operates the professional league. That would be like if the NFL itself had created football and owned all the channels that broadcast football games. Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, and other esports publishers operate their leagues through partners with sports management expertise.

That vertically integrated ownership means that Riot looks unfavorably at any attempts to start an LCS competitor. Rozelle outlined the company’s views by saying, “Third-party organizations don’t provide a stable foundation. High quality production and stability are byproducts of Riot owning the league and the game. We’re responsible for the evolution of the ecosystem from top to bottom.”

A single high-level league also means that team owners and players have no option to leave if they aren’t satisfied with Riot’s management of their profession. Strenczewilk told BuzzFeed News, “The ecosystem of the game and the league is weaker because Riot owns them both.”

What comes next?

One way forward for LoL teams may require following the lead of professional sports leagues like the NFL, MLB, and NBA, to establish a players’ union.

Several Splyce players see organization as “inevitable,” but they didn’t have an idea of when, or how, a union would coalesce. INTZ’s coach Haibel told BuzzFeed News, “It’s starting to happen as we begin to think more about the future. Right now, there’s very little job stability or future prospects. The short player careers limit the kind of long-term thinking needed for a union.”

Rozelle told BuzzFeed News that a LoL players’ union will probably come about and that Riot would be “heavily involved” in its creation. He wouldn’t speculate as to what that involvement would look like, though he told BuzzFeed News that he doesn’t feel a union would be a bad thing.

If Riot is as involved in the creation of a players’ union as it has been so far with every other aspect of League of Legends, that could complicate the LCS even further. Dennis Coates, a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County who studies sports economics, told BuzzFeed News, “If the ownership would organize the players and negotiate with itself for the players’ salaries — as it seems likely to do — that would be a clear conflict of interest.”

Colin Nimer, a freelance esports journalist, told BuzzFeed News that in his experience, most esports have a few years of popularity. But dozens of new games hit the market every year, and some of them will inevitably become esports that compete with LoL. A 100 million people playing LoL per month means that Riot has succeeded in selling its game to a huge audience. But there’s no guarantee that audience will stay.

Professional play has been integral in making LoL so successful. If the game&039;s professionals can’t sustain their careers, Riot’s revenue and relevance may also fade.

Quelle: <a href="The Growing Pains Of "League Of Legends,” The World&039;s Most Popular Video Game“>BuzzFeed