A No Brainer: Why Twitter Should Clone Snapchat Stories, Also

At the beginning of this year, Twitter product head Kevin Weil left the company for Instagram where he promptly cloned Snapchat Stories. (Hi, Instagram Stories). The brash, shameless move gave Instagram a way to spark more sharing of the carefree, fun videos it previously lacked. And, by taking the heat (and even some praise) for blatantly copying another app, Weil and company made it easier for others to follow along — including his former employer.

In fact, if executed properly, Stories could make even more sense within Twitter than it does within Instagram or Snapchat.

Skeptical? Consider the following:

• Twitter's wants to be the destination for live updates and the Stories format is proving itself as one of (if not the) best ways to share video of what’s happening in the moment. Stories take little editing and are necessarily short form (like Twitter itself). They are also snackable, unlike many live streaming videos that require concentrated attention.
• If someone shot a compelling video on Twitter Stories, people could easily share it with the world via a tweet. And thanks to the Retweet, a key Twitter feature that makes tweets blow up, a video contained in a Twitter Story could go viral faster than a video on any other platform.
• The chance of a Twitter Story spreading like wildfire would incentivize public figures and brands to invest the time and energy needed to make Stories great.
• Since you follow people on Twitter because you&039;re interested in what they&039;re saying and doing, you could expect their Twitter Stories to be relevant to you in a way that transcends mere friendship.
• Currently, when you share a video on Twitter, there&039;s pressure for it to be really good. If Twitter added disappearing videos that don&039;t appear in the timeline automatically, there would be less pressure involved, and hence more videos shared to Twitter. This is critical at a time when video is becoming the dominant content format on Twitter.
• Having Stories reside in a top bar of Twitter would give people using the platform access to interesting videos every time they open the app, without having to scroll through the timeline.

When you find a worthy video within Stories a &039;Tweet&039; button could get it into the timeline quickly. This could give added life to videos within Twitter Stories in a way that Instagram simply can&039;t provide. Or even Snapchat itself.

Alex Kantrowitz / Via Taylor Lorenz

And heck, Weil, and Instagram&039;s CEO Kevin Systrom, have already largely made the argument for Twitter cloning Instagram&039;s by-all-accounts successful Snapchat clone:

“I think that the Stories format is seeing broad adoption and I think will be adopted by a lot of folks,” Weil told BuzzFeed News when Instagram Stories launched. “It’s a new format, it’s a powerful format, it’s one that I think will be adopted across the industry.”

Asked if it should consider introducing Stories to its product, Twitter declined to comment.

Quelle: <a href="A No Brainer: Why Twitter Should Clone Snapchat Stories, Also“>BuzzFeed

Apple Music Exec Shuts Down Rumors Of A Tidal Deal

Andrew Burton / Getty Images

Apple&#039;s appetite for acquiring music streaming services, and the agonies and ecstasies that come along with them, has apparently been satisfied. Squelching reports that have persisted since June, a member of Apple Music&039;s senior leadership said the company has no current plans to acquire Jay Z&039;s Tidal or any other rivals.

“We&039;re really running our own race,” Jimmy Iovine, who heads Apple Music, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “We&039;re not looking to acquire any streaming services.”

The comment was in response to a question about a Wall Street Journal report from late June that Apple was “in talks” to acquire Tidal, which has fiercely competed with Apple Music for exclusive access to A-list artists. Until now, no one from Apple has commented publicly on the alleged talks. Iovine did not deny that such discussions had taken place, but said that no acquisition deal was currently in the works.

Following the June report, some suggested that picking up Tidal could help Apple shore up its bid for dominance in the streaming world, in which the two companies&039; mutual competitor Spotify has a head start.

Apple Music currently has around 17 million paid subscribers, compared to Spotify&039;s 40 million, according to the companies&039; latest announced figures. In addition to being a boon to its subscriber base, acquiring Tidal, which has said it has around 4.2 million subscribers, would have potentially helped Apple&039;s relationships with some of the biggest names in pop music. Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye West, and Madonna are among several high-wattage equity partners in Tidal that may have been incentivized to work with Apple on future releases. In late July, West urged Apple to move forward with a deal, saying that it should “give Jay his check.”

For now at least, Apple says it will pass.

On its own, Apple Music has picked up two million subscribers over the past three months, and a revamped, more streamlined version of the service was launched on Tuesday as a part of the new iOS 10 release. Since Jay Z acquired Tidal&039;s parent company Aspiro AB for $56 million in March of 2015, it has struggled to find its footing, churning through three chief executives in less than a year. Earlier this week, it reported a net loss of $28 million for 2015, more than double its losses from the year before.

When reached by BuzzFeed News, a representative for Tidal did not have a comment.

Quelle: <a href="Apple Music Exec Shuts Down Rumors Of A Tidal Deal“>BuzzFeed

LeBron James Haunts My Dreams, And This Week He Haunted My Virtual Reality

Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images

I haven&#039;t watched a single second of the 2016 NBA Finals since the night of June 19th, when LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and the rest of the Cleveland Cavaliers completed the biggest comeback in basketball history to defeat the Golden State Warriors — and break my fragile Northern Californian heart.

But that&039;s not to say that I haven&039;t seen the NBA finals since then. Watching occurs in the eyes, but sight happens in the brain. For about three hours after the end of Game 7, well into early Monday morning, I lay on my back, trying to sleep. But every time I closed my eyes, I saw the same thing: LeBron James striding across the court, Andre Iguodala swinging the ball around his hips, raising it to the rim, and then LeBron swatting it away.

I was able to repress every other memory from those cursed Finals — Kyrie&039;s go-ahead three pointer to win it all, Draymond Green&039;s series altering nut-shot. But LeBron still haunts my dreams, even though I haven&039;t watched a moment of that game, or The Block, ever since.

Until Tuesday, that is. I was invited, along with many other reporters, into the bowels of the NBA store in midtown Manhattan to see FOLLOW MY LEAD: The Story of the 2016 NBA Finals, a roughly 25-minute virtual reality documentary produced by the NBA, Facebook-owned VR company Oculus, and the production company m ss ng p eces (it&039;s really spelled that way). I strapped on a Samsung Gear VR and returned to my darkest hours, this time in full, immersive virtual reality.

It wasn&039;t pretty.

Matthew Zeitlin / BuzzFeed News

The film, which its creators say is one of the longest continuous-narrative VR videos to be made using video footage, will be released for free by Oculus Wednesday.

It&039;s style will be familiar to anyone who&039;s watched HBO&039;s 24/7 series, ESPN&039;s 30 for 30, or an NFL Films documentary: a pseudo-heroic narrative from a celebrity (Michael B. Jordan) that relentlessly dramatizes the circumstances of a sporting event. The NBA and Oculus got lucky in this case, because the 2016 Finals had one of the most compelling sports narratives in years: the league&039;s greatest player trying to vanquish its best ever team, in a rematch that also pitted the most culturally and economically ascendant region in the country — if not the world — against Cleveland.

“We wanted to prove you could do longform sports documentary in VR,” Eugene Wei, the head of video at Oculus, told me. “We wanted to prove you could do longform in VR period. A lot of people say VR has to be short, so let&039;s do something that&039;s storytelling versus experiential.”

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

The experience tends toward the cinematic — Wei said that the typical shot lasts six to eight seconds, which might be a little long for a traditional broadcast, but relatively short for VR.

So while Oculus, which sells its own VR gear, wants to see the virtual reality documentary evolve to compete and eventually surpass traditional video, the NBA wants people to get a new and exciting way to see a game. The league has already experimented with a VR broadcast, and the documentary is a way for tech-equipped fans “to have an opportunity to attend an NBA game,” said league media executive Jeff Marsilio.

To film games, they had cameras behind the rim, on the scorer&039;s table on the sideline, in the crowd, and cameras on the court to catch the post-game pandemonium.

So what does the Oculus version of the sonorous sports documentary give you, a virtual spectator there in the stadium? At first glance, you can look around and see a lot of people holding cell phones. And because for the most part, all the action is taking place on the court right in front of you, there isn&039;t much benefit to turning your head left or right and peering into the stands.

But when you do, it&039;s a sea of cell phones, photographing and filming the action. When you see Steph Curry or LeBron James being interviewed after the game, you can look around to see members of the sports press, filming it on their cell phones.

And when you see LeBron walking off the court (the camera sits around his collarbone level, so you look down on Kyrie Irving and up at Timofgey Mozgov), you again see everyone with their cell phones filming. The irony is that thanks to the very technology that helps enable VR, the NBA will try to get fans to be as engaged as the fans actually at the games…looking at their phones.

But being able to pan to, say, Jay Z and Beyonce sitting courtside, provides the tantalizing prospect of just being able to turn your head and watch them during the lulls in the game.

Wei said this effect is typical, and what people actually tend to expect from a VR broadcast — a simulation of really being there. “The endpoint of VR is the sensation of reality,” Wei said. “Anything that breaks the fourth wall accelerates your sensation of being there.”

So even when a Warriors fan yells right into the camera, it&039;s good for the experience — it&039;s a way of avoiding what Wei calls the “Ghost Effect,” named for the Patrick Swayze film where a man dies and comes back as a spirit who is physically present but is invisible to humans who aren&039;t Whoopi-Goldberg.

Pool / Getty Images

When it comes to filming game action with the VR cameras, there are shortcomings for the time being: The cameras can be big and stationary, and the lenses are wide and don&039;t zoom. It means the action can appear blurry if it&039;s farther from the cameras.

These shortcomings are also barriers to having regular VR broadcasts of what Marsilio calls the “crown jewel” of the NBA: the live game. While they were able to get a lot of access for the special VR broadcast, the cameras would compete with space that&039;s already taken up by regular TV cameras and photographers.

“It&039;s like snowboarding in the early day of the medium, the learning curve is very steep,” Wei said.

But at closer distances, issues like the blurriness are overcome by how thrilling it all is — the sensation of being there, the oohs and ahhs of the crowd, its silence and explosion right into your ears, with the shock of LeBron dunking right at you. If you could watch live games this way, it would blow traditional TV out of the water, and the NBA knows it.

“If we can bring the world truly courtside, live at the game, it would be the greatest thing we could achieve in VR,” Marsillio said.

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

Quelle: <a href="LeBron James Haunts My Dreams, And This Week He Haunted My Virtual Reality“>BuzzFeed

Ted Cruz Is Picking A Big Fight Over The Internet, And Top Republicans Are Backing Him

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has a new battle to fight in the Senate: trying to block the long-planned transfer of the internet&#039;s technical management from the US government to an international body. Cruz is calling the move an internet “giveaway” and warns that it will open the Web to Russian, Chinese, and Iranian manipulation. But experts say blocking the transition would actually accomplish what Cruz fears, by undermining the stability and credibility of the internet’s current, long-standing stewardship model.

The internet is a complex network beyond the control of any one country, but one part of it — its global domain naming system, which allows you to type one unique Web address that takes you to the right site no matter where you are in the world — is technically under the control of the US Commerce Department. Since 1998, the Commerce Department has been contracting out this responsibility to an international nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). However, the internet’s creators envisioned it as a space free from the interventions of governments — including the United States. So that vision led to plans for the Commerce Department to remove itself as the middleman and cede its management role to ICANN entirely on Oct. 1.

“No one controls the internet.”

Sen. Cruz and his allies in Congress are arguing that if the domain name system switches to new management, antagonistic foreign governments might censor what people see online, undermining the openness of the Web. But during a contentious hearing in the Senate Wednesday, a top Commerce Department official and the President of ICANN dismissed Cruz’s concerns of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian manipulation of the Web.

Cruz has led been at the center of quixotic quests to block Obama Administration efforts before — including in 2013, when efforts to defund Obamacare led to a government shutdown — but he often did it to the chagrin of party leadership. This time, however, he’s been quite successful gathering support on Capitol Hill. Cruz counts more than two dozen lawmakers as allies in opposition to the transfer of management to ICANN, including Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, whose office told BuzzFeed News that Republicans are working on a provision to block the transfer by attaching a provision to a short-term spending bill that must pass by Sept. 30th for the government to remain open.

“Imagine an internet run like many Middle Eastern countries, that punish what they deem to be blasphemy,” Cruz said, predicting what might happen if the transition happens. “Or imagine an internet run like China or Russia, that punish and incarcerate those that engage in political dissent.” To illustrate his point, Cruz hypothesized that ICANN, if it was no longer answerable to Commerce Department, could take down a website for political purposes. But Lawrence Strickling, a high-ranking official in the Commerce Department who testified at the hearing, rejected Cruz’s line of argument. “You’re not positing a realistic scenario,” Strickling said. “ICANN would never be involved.”

Representatives from ICANN say that Cruz and his allies’ concerns about a loss of internet sovereignty or political manipulation stem from a misunderstanding of what internet management means in practice. “No one controls the internet,” said ICANN president and CEO Göran Marby during the same hearing. The stewardship of the domain name system has “nothing to do with content or freedom of expression,” he said. While forms of internet censorship like government filtering, blocking, and traffic monitoring occur in many parts of the world, these practices operate on a different layer of the internet, not in the naming system that ICANN manages.

“We don’t determine … what can or cannot be on a website,” Theresa Swinehart, a senior advisor to Marby, told BuzzFeed News. “We don’t play a role in anything other than making sure the addressing function actually works, so that you can get to a certain website.”

A Commerce Department rep argued that Cruz&039;s plan to block the transfer of internet stewardship would actually be “a gift to Russia.”

Proponents of the transfer say that the transition to a multi-stakeholder model has been decades in the making. ICANN’s stewardship, they say, will continue the inclusive, globally oriented framework of the Web.

The Commerce Department’s Strickling also argued that blocking the transfer of internet stewardship would actually be “a gift to Russia,” emboldening it and other countries who are vying for a government-controlled management system, rather one overseen by ICANN. “If this transition doesn’t go forward, our credibility as a power in terms of supporting the multi-stakeholder model will be shot,” he said. “There will be people who say that the United States has reneged on its promises, and [this] will be exploited by these foreign governments.”

But Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, insisted that the Obama administration has not properly vetted the transition. He said significant questions remain about the transition, including the possiblie unconstitutional transfer of US government property, as well as human rights and free speech issues.

“It’s clear that the administration hasn’t conducted a thorough legal analysis of many issues outstanding,” he said. Congressional debate on the spending bill that may include the provision to defund the ICANN transition is expected to begin later this week, as lawmakers continue to hammer out the details of a short-term government funding package.

Quelle: <a href="Ted Cruz Is Picking A Big Fight Over The Internet, And Top Republicans Are Backing Him“>BuzzFeed

Hundreds Of Millions Of People May Soon Be Blocked From Using Grindr

Suryo Wibowo / AFP / Getty Images

Grindr, Hornet, and a total of more than 80 other apps and websites with LGBT content face a ban in Indonesia, the world&#039;s fourth most populous country, following a closed-door interagency summit held Wednesday at the country&039;s Ministry of Communications.

“The participants of the meeting all agree to block websites promoting LGBT,” Aidil Chendramata, director of information security for the Ministry of Communications, told BuzzFeed News following the meeting. The panel included representatives from the Ministry of Human Development, the National Police, and the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was represented by a member of the country&039;s Muslim clerics association. “Most of the contents are leading toward pornography [and have] violated the law on pornography and the law on child protection,” Chendramata said.

The move comes several months after the Ministry of Communication announced it would craft a ban on LGBT “propaganda” in March, part of an unprecedented crackdown on LGBT rights in the country. The Constitutional Court is separately considering a petition that could make homosexuality a crime in Indonesia for the first time.

The meeting was initially convened to review a police request to block Grindr and 17 other gay apps they allege were used by a child prostitution ring. But the meeting reviewed a broader list, said Ericson Siregar, an officer with the National Police Criminal Investigations Department who participated in the meeting, because the Ministry of Communication had “previously investigated gay applications” and identified dozens for “promoting LGBT.”

“We would be pleased if the communication ministry blocked [gay apps] without hesitation because the smell of pornography is so strong on them, such as exhibiting nudity,” Siregar said.

Human rights activists have been alarmed at the impact this has had on the LGBT community, but internet companies and free speech advocates say this crusade is part of a much bigger battle as US-based social media companies have become a major force in the country of 250 million people.

The decision to ban LGBT content is simply the low-hanging fruit, said a representative from one global internet company with offices in Indonesia, and an easy target for conservative figures.

“We should all be concerned when we see these kinds of decisions being made, to ban an entire category of apps,” said the representative, who asked not to be named due to his company’s sensitive relationship with the Indonesian government. “It’s easy to see them starting with gay apps, and then finding a way to censor other parts of the internet… It’s easy to see them banning anything that represents the US or American values, as they see it. That’s what we are afraid of.”

Pro-LGBT activists protest on February 23, 2016 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Ulet Ifansasti / Getty Images

Indonesia&039;s plan could cause an immediate quandary for Apple and Google, because Communications Ministry Head of Investigations Teguh Arifiadi said they will block the apps by requesting they be removed from the Apple App store and Google Play. (Apple and Google did not immediately respond to request for comment.)

“We will ask the stores to take down the apps for Indonesia,” Arifiadi told BuzzFeed News. He said specific decisions will be made on all 80 applications “as soon as possible” once allegations against them are “verified.”

Indonesia is 90% Muslim, and the call to reign in LGBT content online has been enthusiastically endorsed by the country&039;s largest religious organizations, which have increasingly warned that the internet is bringing toxic influences from abroad.

Said Aqil Siradj, chairman of the Nahdlatul Ulama, the world&039;s largest Muslim organization claiming 91 million members, described the internet as an “oppression against Islam” during a speech delivered in August.

“All news and information is dominated by Westerners, by outsiders — they intentionally aim to influence our mind, our way of thinking,” he said, so that “our next generation might not recognize anymore” fundamental aspects of their faith “because their thought have been shaped by Facebook, Twitter, social media, YouTube.”

In an interview following the speech with BuzzFeed News, Siradj added that Indonesia’s Islamic institutions were also fighting on a second online front — against extremist Islamic groups overseas.

“On Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, there are right-wing extremism, radicalism … ISIS also uses it, Al-Qaeda also uses it, other terrorists such as Jamaah Islam, Jamaah Tabliq Al-Hijrom, Mujahiddin also use it — so it is not only LGBT,” Siradj said. “Radicalism is not the nature or role of Islam in Indonesia…. Radicalism in religion all comes from the Middle East.”

“It is quite strange to ban people from finding friends.”

Grindr did not respond to repeated requests from BuzzFeed News to discuss Indonesia&039;s moves against the service. But Sean Howell, CEO of Hornet, said Indonesia would be by far the largest country to announce a ban on gay apps. Grindr and some other apps are blocked in some other countries, including Turkey, but he was aware of only the United Arab Emirates having a ban that affects so many apps in the single sector.

“There’s lots of reasons that [this move] is terrible,” Howell said. “How many other Islamic states will follow this? The internet, rather of being a tool of freedom, is becoming a tool of dictator states.”

A State Department spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that “the United States believes strongly in Internet freedom and supports the principle that has been recognized in successive multilateral resolutions that the same human rights people have offline must also be protected online.”

“We encourage the Government of Indonesia to ensure that any steps it may take that could result in limitations on access to social media sites are carefully considered, openly discussed, and consistent with the Government’s international human rights obligations,” said the spokesperson.

Yuli Rustinawati, chair of the LGBT group Arus Pelangi, said police should be focusing on the sexual abuse allegations against the child prostitution ring and not use it as a pretense to attack the LGBT community online. If the proposal moves ahead it will make the already embattled LGBT community even more vulnerable, she said.

“If gay applications are closed down, it only makes the community even more isolated as they won&039;t be able to find friends via the virtual world,” Rustinawati said. “It is quite strange to ban people from finding friends.”

Quelle: <a href="Hundreds Of Millions Of People May Soon Be Blocked From Using Grindr“>BuzzFeed

Here's How Amazon's New Echo Dot Is Actually Different

Amazon announced a redesigned, cheaper device with its personal assistant Alexa built in.

Today, Amazon unveiled the second generation Echo Dot, a smaller version of its best-selling Echo.

The Dot has a small built-in speaker, but its major advantage over the Echo is that you can connect the Dot to your high-quality home stereo system through a 3.5mm audio cable or a Bluetooth speaker (wireless headphones work, too). The Amazon Echo can only play audio through its built-in speaker. Those without a home audio system should opt for the Echo.

The small, hockey puck-shaped gadget is powered by Amazon&#039;s voice-activated personal assistant Alexa. You can ask the Dot questions like, “Alexa, what&039;s the weather like today?” or “What&039;s in the news?” Alexa also works with over 3,000 different apps (Amazon calls them “skills”) and responds to hundreds of different commands.

With its competition Google Home launching later this year, Amazon appears to be beefing up its hands-free speaker offerings. The second generation Echo Dot is slated for an Oct. 20 ship date – and here&039;s everything you need to know about it.

Amazon

The original Echo Dot was $90 and the all-new version is $50.

And, because this is Amazon, the new Dot can be bought in packs of six (buy five, get one free, so $41.67 each) or ten (buy eight, get two free, so $40 each).

The new Dot aims to fix the older model’s voice recognition problems.

Some Echo dot reviews cited voice recognition inferior to the larger Amazon Echo. To power the device&039;s seven microphones, the second-generation Dot includes an improved speech processor that can recognize when you say the Dot&039;s wake word (either “Amazon” or “Alexa”) with more accuracy.

Amazon

The Echo Dot, which was previously unavailable for purchase on Amazon&039;s website and only sold to existing Echo customers, is available for pre-order for all US and UK customers and will ship October 12.

People with addresses in Germany and Austria can also pre-order a Dot. They&039;ll arrive in those countries on October 26.

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Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s How Amazon&039;s New Echo Dot Is Actually Different“>BuzzFeed

You Can Now Request Self-Driving Ubers In Pittsburgh

Uber&#039;s self-driving Ford Fusions in Pittsburgh

Ciara Allen / BuzzFeed News

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — once a titan of the steel industry — has a new claim to fame: first city in the United States to let passengers hail rides in self-driving cars.

Beginning Wednesday morning, Uber customers in the former steel town who&039;ve agreed to participate in the company&039;s self-driving car pilot program will have a reasonable chance of being picked up in an autonomous vehicle — albeit one carrying both a safety driver (ready to take the wheel during emergencies) and a co-pilot (to monitor the car and its route on a laptop).

Uber&039;s Pittsburgh pilot program is kicking off with just a handful of self-driving Ford Fusions, but will later expand to include an additional 100 self-driving Volvos. For now, the cars aren&039;t entirely autonomous. A human driver brings the car to the road before hitting the silver button that activates autonomous mode. This safety driver sticks around for the duration of the ride, ready to intervene should something go awry on the journey. Also aboard is a co-pilot in the front passenger seat, watching for glitches and anomalies and sending notes to Uber’s developers, who are refining the algorithms the cars use to navigate.

When automated elevators were first introduced in the 1950s and human operators were no longer needed to man them, the transition was so jarring that some elevator manufacturers added voice narration to reassure people — “Please press the button for the desired floor.” For Uber&039;s driverless car pilot, backup drivers and co-pilots will likely serve a similar purpose — a reassuring presence for people coming to terms with something new and unfamiliar.

Cameras will record the rides of passengers who agree to be part of the pilot program, and Uber says that footage will help improve the experience over time. Riders will receive phone calls asking for feedback on their trips: What did they like? Did anything make them nervous? Were they at all uncomfortable?

“If you think about it, every month, Uber drives over a billion miles,” Anthony Levandowski, who leads Uber’s self-driving efforts, explained. “That data gives us insight into how a city works, where are people driving, where are they getting into accidents, how pickups and drop-offs work.” Levandowski should know. He worked on Google’s self-driving car team before co-founding the self-driving truck startup Otto, which Uber acquired this summer.

Ciara Allen / BuzzFeed News

As fascinated as we might be by the idea of self-driving vehicles, the thought of actually riding in one is sometimes cause for trepidation. Indeed, 3 out of 4 US drivers said they feel “afraid” to ride in a self-driving car, according to an AAA survey of 1,832 US drivers ages 18 and older in January. Only 1 in 5 said they would trust an autonomous vehicle enough to ride in one. That’s more anxiety than the Pew Research Center noted in a 2014 survey, which found that 48% of people would be interested in riding in a driverless car if given the opportunity.

Perhaps with this in mind, Uber has docked an iPad in the back of every Ford Fusion as a sort of informational distraction. It displays the car’s route and also gives riders a sense of what the car itself “sees” — multicolored outlines of other vehicles on the road, and whatever else its sensors are picking up at the time.

A human driver and a co-pilot will man each self-driving Uber.

Ciara Allen / BuzzFeed News

But why Pittsburgh?

“Pittsburgh is an ideal environment for us,” Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center, told BuzzFeed News. “Pittsburgh is an old city. It has organic road networks. It has a real traffic problem. It experiences extreme weather. We really feel that if we can master driving in Pittsburgh, we can easily master driving in other cities around the world.”

“If we can master driving in Pittsburgh, we can easily master driving in other cities around the world.”

But there are other reasons as well. Pittsburgh is home to Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center, which opened about 18 months ago. The company ravaged nearby Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics unit, poaching about 40 researchers to work on its own driverless car program. And Pittsburgh is an Uber-friendly city. As the city’s mayor, Bill Peduto, recently told the New York Times, “It’s not our role to throw up regulations or limit companies like Uber.”

While Uber is free to send its autonomous cars anywhere in the city, the company will focus on the most popular routes and areas, and ones that mirror traffic patterns in other cities.

Ciara Allen / BuzzFeed News

Bryant Walker Smith, chair of the Planning Task Force for the On-Road Automated Vehicle Standards Committee of the Society of Automotive and Aerospace Engineers, told BuzzFeed News that Uber&039;s self-driving car pilot program in Pittsburgh will give people a more realistic view of the potential and limitations of automated driving.

“The public will play an important role in shaping both social and legal expectations for these vehicles,” Walker Smith said. “That&039;s why companies like Uber should publicly share their safety philosophies — how they define, measure, document, and monitor the reasonable safety of their vehicles now and into the future.”

Self-driving cars have long been expected to upend the transportation industry, and there are a number of companies racing to deliver viable autonomous vehicle solutions. Google has been testing its self-driving cars on the road for years. Ford claims it will mass produce self-driving cars by 2021. Meanwhile, US Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is saying we’ll all be riding in self-driving cars within five years — and his agency is the one writing the rules that will govern them. But Uber’s Pittsburgh pilot marks the first larger effort to put people — real people, outside of technologists and media — in self-driving cars in real-world circumstances. And that&039;s a big deal.

Quelle: <a href="You Can Now Request Self-Driving Ubers In Pittsburgh“>BuzzFeed

Simone Biles, Serena Williams Among Olympic Athletes To Have Medical Files Hacked

Clive Brunskill / Getty Images

SAN FRANCISCO — The hacked medical files of Olympic athletes Simone Biles, Elena Delle Donne, Serena Williams, and Venus Williams were made public Tuesday by a Russian group that cybersecurity experts say was previously responsible for breaches into the Democratic National Committee and White House.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) confirmed in a statement posted on Tuesday that its database, which included medical files of athletes competing in the Olympics, was hacked by the Russian group that cybersecurity companies have named “Fancy Bear.”

“WADA deeply regrets this situation and is very conscious of the threat that it represents to athletes whose confidential information has been divulged through this criminal act,” Olivier Niggli, WADA&#039;s executive director, said in the statement. “WADA condemns these ongoing cyber-attacks that are being carried out in an attempt to undermine WADA and the global anti-doping system.”

Niggli added that law enforcement had determined that the “attacks are originating out of Russia,” without clarifying which agency the body had worked with.

“Let it be known that these criminal acts are greatly compromising the effort by the global anti-doping community to re-establish trust in Russia further to the outcomes of the Agency’s independent McLaren Investigation Report,” Niggli said.

The WADA statement did not mention which cybersecurity company had discovered the breach in their system that accessed the files of the US athletes. WADA did not respond to a BuzzFeed News request for clarification.

The cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect was cited in a previous report that found that the same group of Russian hackers had gained access to the WADA database and gotten into the account of Russian whistleblower, Yuliya Stepanova, an 800-meter runner whose revelations of widespread doping in Russian track and field led to that team being banned from competing in Rio.

Clive Brunskill / Getty Images

ThreatConnect had found that the group — which they call Fancy Bear, but which is also known as Tsar Team and APT 28 by other cybersecurity firms — had hacked into WADA through spear phishing emails. Those emails, which often appear to come from trusted sources and have legitimate information, contain malicious malware which, once opened, gives the attackers access to the system. Cybersecurity experts say that spear phishing is the simplest, most surefire method for hackers to access a computer system.

In a post on the group from August, ThreatConnect said Fancy Bear had called itself Anonymous Poland (@anpoland) when it leaked data stolen from WADA servers on Stepanova. The hackers used the name Anonymous Poland much in the same way that they used the name “Guccifer 2.0” when leaking information during the DNC hack, in both cases blaming known hackers to try and deflect attention from themselves.

“We assess that the phishing and Stepanova&039;s compromise most likely are part of targeted activity by Russian actors in response to the whistleblower and the WADA&039;s recommendation to ban all Russian athletes from the Olympic and Paralympic games in [Brazil],” ThreatConnect said. “Successful operations against these individuals and organizations could facilitate Russian efforts to privately or publicly intimidate them or other whistleblowers.”

ThreatConnect did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday or answer questions on how far the breach of the WADA servers went.

As part of the released records Tuesday, the hacking group said it plans to release more medical files of US athletes. The group wrote that following their review of the medical files, they had found evidence of US athlete doping: “This is other evidence that WADA and IOC&039;s Medical and Scientific Department are corrupt and deceitful.”

U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart has already responded in a statement, saying, “It’s unthinkable that in the Olympic movement, hackers would illegally obtain confidential medical information in an attempt to smear athletes to make it look as if they have done something wrong. The athletes haven’t. In fact, in each of the situations, the athlete has done everything right in adhering to the global rules for obtaining permission to use a needed medication. The respective International Federations, through the proper process, granted the permission and it was recognized by the IOC and USADA. The cyber-bullying of innocent athletes being engaged in by these hackers is cowardly and despicable.”

Quelle: <a href="Simone Biles, Serena Williams Among Olympic Athletes To Have Medical Files Hacked“>BuzzFeed