While Apple is a strong proponent of user privacy, a new lawsuit accuses the company of disclosing and selling certain iTunes purchase data. In the lawsuit, customers from Rhode Island and Michigan accuse Apple of selling personal listening information about its customers, without consent. The lawsuit alleges that someone can purchase a list of iTunes customers who meet a certain set of requirements, such as a list of people who are college-educated and purchase country music from the iTunes Store:

“For example, any person or entity could rent a list with the names and addresses of all unmarried, college-educated women over the age of 70 with a household income of over $80,000 who purchased country music from Apple via its iTunes Store mobile application,” the customers said.

Since the evidence for those larger groupings is naturally scarcer than it is for closer relationships, we have to be as careful and as scientific as possible.My brother was almost nine years old when I was born and, like me, was three years ahead of most other students in his school. I was a student at Columbia Grammar for seven years, from sixth through twelfth grade, and having attended a private school must have helped me later with admission to a good university. When it came time to apply for admission to Yale University I had to fill out a form that asked, among other things, what my major subject would be if I were admitted.

In a sufficiently long chain of operations the cumulative effect of these individual probabilities of failure may (if unchecked) reach the order of magnitude of unity-at whichpoint it produces, in effect, complete unreliability. I might mention that an electromechanical relay ( a telephone relay) is at present considered acceptable if its probability of failure on an individual operation is of the order 10-s. The operations of logic (syllogisms, conjunctions, disjunctions, negations, etc., that is, in the terminology that is customary for automata, various forms of gating, coincidence, anti-coincidence, blocking, etc., actions) will all have to be treated by procedures which allow exceptions ( malfunctions ) with low but non-zero probabilities.

PC Magazine interviewed Neal Stephenson about his new upcoming book Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell , as well as “the digital afterlife, and why social media is a doomsday machine.” [Possible spoilers ahead]:Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot’s reader in 2004 , and since then has “spent years as an advisor for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin,” the article points out. He’s also currently the “chief futurist” for Magic Leap — though he tells his interviewer that some ideas go back much further.Part of his new book builds on “a really old idea” from security researcher Matt Blaze, who in the mid-1990s talked about “Encyclopedia Disinformatica”, which Stephenson describes as “a sort of fake Wikipedia containing plausible-sounding but deliberately false information as a way of sending the message to people that they shouldn’t just believe everything that they see on the internet.”

True, nearly one in four adults in this country has not read a book in the last year. But the book — with a spine, a unique scent, crisp pages and a typeface that may date to Shakespeare’s day — is back. Compare that with the 28 million Americans who read a book of verse in the first year of Trump’s presidency, the highest share of the population in 15 years.

… as well as photos of “influencers” who have submitted photos:

And amongst all that, a variety of sick-looking kid stock photos:

The captions under the sick kid photos serve as a reminder that the Hotel Bed Jumping Community is some kind of charity. Another caption reads “We have been providing FREE hotel rooms to followers to capture content to put towards the #jumpforkids campaign”. It went something like this:

Nowhere does Tanya from TPT Marketing mention the mattress company they are collaborating with: I only found out by looking into the #jumpforkids hashtag which links up with the initiative by Puffy Beds.

PC Magazine interviewed Neal Stephenson about his new upcoming book Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell , as well as “the digital afterlife, and why social media is a doomsday machine.” [Possible spoilers ahead]:Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot’s reader in 2004 , and since then has “spent years as an advisor for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin,” the article points out. He’s also currently the “chief futurist” for Magic Leap — though he tells his interviewer that some ideas go back much further.Part of his new book builds on “a really old idea” from security researcher Matt Blaze, who in the mid-1990s talked about “Encyclopedia Disinformatica”, which Stephenson describes as “a sort of fake Wikipedia containing plausible-sounding but deliberately false information as a way of sending the message to people that they shouldn’t just believe everything that they see on the internet.”

(Reuters) – Early last year, Grindr LLC’s Chinese owner gave some Beijing-based engineers access to personal information of millions of Americans such as private messages and HIV status, according to eight former employees, prompting U.S. officials to ask it to sell the dating app for the gay community. While it is known that data privacy concerns prompted the crackdown on Kunlun, interviews with over a dozen sources with knowledge of Grindr’s operations, including the former employees, for the first time shed light on what the company actually did to draw U.S. ire and how it then tried to save its deal. About a month after CFIUS’ September order, Kunlun told the panel the Beijing team’s access to Grindr’s database had been restricted, the source close to the company said.

To everyone who shapes technology

The principles were created by hundred and fifty humans in 48 hours at Techfestival in Copenhagen as the next step after The Copenhagen Letter. Were made by humans. These principles will evolve.

Before the spreadsheet, I had an idea I think many share: Marriage and family should more or less work. Good marriages and happy families are born of love and care, not spreadsheets and a daily happiness score. People’s weird ideas about gender, about mothers and fathers and marriage and nuclear families, about who should do what and how much of it, about what really makes us happy, are deeply entrenched, often in ways we don’t even recognize.