PlanetScale co-founders (from left): Jitendra Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane

“What we’re discovering is that people we thought were at one point competitors, like AWS and hosted relational databases — we’re discovering they may be our partners instead since we’re seeing a reasonable demand for our services in front of AWS’ hosted databases,” says CEO Jitendra Vaidya. Competing database startups were raising big rounds, so PlanetScale connected with Andreessen in search of more firepower. But while a $22 million round from Andreessen Horowitz would be exciting for almost any startup, the funding for PlanetScale could assist the whole startup ecosystem.

That, after all, is all part of having a home – and part of a housing policy that has now made Finland the only EU country where homelessness is falling. But if Housing First is working in Helsinki, where half the country’s homeless people live, it is also because it is part of a much broader housing policy. It has invested heavily, too, in homelessness prevention, setting up special teams to advise and help tenants in danger of losing their homes and halving the number of evictions from city-owned and social housing from 2008 to 2016.

On top of the usual risks posed by cycling in a city whose drivers have been convincingly ranked as the very worst in the United States, riders there are dealing with a special new psychological trauma: The city keeps ripping out protected bike lanes it only recently installed. Unmentioned in Baltimore’s latest bikelash is something that might conceivably make drivers more supportive of protected bike lanes: Protected lanes for cyclists make them safer, too. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Denver and the University of New Mexico found that protected and separated bike lanes are strongly linked to lower fatality and injury rates not only for people on bikes, but for people in cars.

Apple introduces ‘Sign in with Apple’ to help protect your has a new way to stop third-party sites and services from getting your information when you sign up to an app. “Now this can be convenient, but it also can come at the cost of your privacy, your personal information sometimes get shared behind the scenes and these logins can be used to track you,” said Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi at its annual developer conference. Federighi said users can create a new account on an app using its own one-click button “without revealing any new personal information.”

Six months later, Azeteng boarded a bus to Abeka Lapaz in the west of Accra, where he walked along the side of the nine-lane George W Bush Highway until he reached a nondescript two-storey building, home to CSIT Limited — purveyors of computer products and technical solutions, including secret cameras. So he told his priest: he intended to get himself smuggled on the desert migrant route to Europe, using a secret camera in his glasses to document the crimes of the smugglers. Many, like Azeteng, already have a phone number of one of the city’s connection men, who house migrants for a few days before selling them on to be taken across the desert.

Prepared by Jay Mathews, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, it notes how the Western media’s pack instinct created the false massacre story. Ironically, the Western media, which barely noticed the massacres in certain countries, still go out of their way to paint a false picture of “a brutal Chinese government willing to march in and massacre its protesting students in the hundreds, if not thousands”. An April 17 review in this newspaper of Philip Cunningham’s book, Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising , – whose blurb on Amazon still manages to talk about a Tiananmen Square massacre – provides a clue.

There have been many calls to break up the large Internet monopolies; Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. A good way to explain this is to go back to the architecture that Twitter used in its early days when there were many third-party Twitter clients. Imagine if Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc were protocols, not applications, and there were many high-quality clients to participate in these networks.

I still couldn’t believe that Google was in essence reading your email and cataloging your purchases on it’s own. And so we click to find out…

We get it from Google’s mouth:

“This purchase was found in your Gmail” (emphasis added, because properly rendered it should read “We found this financial transaction sifting through your email”). If you have lots of historical email at Gmail (or anyplace else) you can use our IMAP migration tool to painlessly copy everything over from Google, except, alas, your purchase history.

PlanetScale co-founders (from left): Jitendra Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane

“What we’re discovering is that people we thought were at one point competitors, like AWS and hosted relational databases — we’re discovering they may be our partners instead since we’re seeing a reasonable demand for our services in front of AWS’ hosted databases,” says CEO Jitendra Vaidya. Competing database startups were raising big rounds, so PlanetScale connected with Andreessen in search of more firepower. But while a $22 million round from Andreessen Horowitz would be exciting for almost any startup, the funding for PlanetScale could assist the whole startup ecosystem.

It is a special utf-8 character which has a zero width and so you can’t see in in your normal browser. But you will use it probably most for having nice hashtags without killing the readability of your tweet. Be aware of techniques which use zero width characters to fingerprint texts, e.g. adding a user ID to copied text, to detect whistleblowers.