The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak, the Anonymous Messaging App; New York Times, May 27, 2017

Valeriya Safronova, New York Times; The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak, the Anonymous Messaging App

"At the end of that year, Mr. Droll and Mr. Buffington laid off 60 percent of their employees, and last month, they shut down the operation, selling off intellectual property and employee contracts to Square Inc., a mobile payment company, for $1 million. A few months earlier, Hive, a college-based chat app with a similar color scheme to Yik Yak’s, popped up in the iTunes and Google Play stores, with Mr. Buffington in one of the screenshots. Whether it was an attempt at reinvention under the Yik Yak umbrella or a side project is unclear, but it is no longer available...

Morgan Hines, who will start her fourth year at Northeastern University in Boston this fall, never encountered nastiness on Yik Yak. “I thought it was funny,” she said. “It formed a lot of camaraderie between students. There would be random shout-outs to things happening on campus, like people who are attractive or being annoying in the library, or a fire alarm going off at 4 a.m.”

But Ms. Hines criticized Yik Yak’s hyper-localization. “Yik Yak was for pockets of people on campus,” she said. “If the fire alarm went off at 4 a.m., it only went off at your building, so no one else will give it a thumbs-up.”

That hyper-localization is also what made the cases of harassment particularly galling. Ms. Musick, one of the plaintiffs, said, “With Yik Yak, in the back of your mind, you know they’re not from around the world or other parts of the state, they’re right there in your classroom, in your dining hall. On a campus with 4,500 students, that’s a pretty small group of people. This isn’t some creepy guy in his mom’s basement in Indiana.”"

Pittsburgh's smart city efforts include autonomous driving, open data, and renewable energy; TechRepublic, 11/18/16

Teena Maddox, TechRepublic; Pittsburgh's smart city efforts include autonomous driving, open data, and renewable energy:

"Pittsburgh is the home for CMU and it has helped with the push to add new technology. Pittsburgh is partnering with the university to serve as an urban lab for CMU's research and development. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between CMU and the city serves as a formal partnership to allow CMU to try new tech around Pittsburgh without undergoing a lengthy approval process, similar to how the city is able to send maintenance crews out to do small projects without first seeking funding, Peduto explained...

The city has formed partnerships with county and universities to create an open data platform. Pittsburgh is providing the public with real-time data about crime, emergency calls, building permits, or anything else being measured."

Pearls Before Swine; GoComics.com, 12/20/15

GoComics.com; Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine: [Never Read the Terms and Conditions]

How open data can help save lives; Guardian, 8/18/15

Eleanor Ross, Guardian; How open data can help save lives:

"The most interesting thing with providing raw data, says Shadbolt, is that you provide the information and the apps “think” about it when a situation arises. “The whole genius of the web is that you don’t even know how the data you put up will be used. For this reason it’s best to collect more information than you think you might ever need.”

Emma Thwaites, a spokesperson for the Open Data Institute, explains that data layering is where open data can have the most impact. “That’s when you can really see where the black spots are. Overlay air pollution, crime stats, and fuse the data together, and you can see the likelihood of the most dangerous things. From this you can work out where to position your ambulances, or fire stations. Data helps you to find the epicentre.”

As well as benefiting the local community, open data can also be used to help individuals."

Seeking Students’ Short ‘Hamlet’ Videos; New York Times, 10/29/13

New York Times; Seeking Students’ Short ‘Hamlet’ Videos: "“Brevity is the soul of wit,” declares Polonius in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” And perhaps short videos of lines from one of the Bard’s most-loved plays will expose the souls of their performers, too. So The New York Times invites student actors and actresses to submit their performances of lines from “Hamlet” using Instagram. The Times’s critics have been cataloging the recent bounty of professional performances of Shakespeare’s plays. And with several stagings of “Hamlet” opening soon, we’d like to see how high school and college students interpret key lines from the play using the cameras and apps on the smartphones they might be carrying... The deadline to submit a video link is Dec. 1, [sic???] 2103. The best videos will be featured on nytimes.com later in December... By submitting to us, you are promising that the content is original, doesn’t plagiarize from anyone or infringe a copyright or trademark, doesn’t violate anybody’s rights and isn’t libelous or otherwise unlawful or misleading. You are agreeing that we can use your submission in all manner and media of The New York Times and that we shall have the right to authorize third parties to do so. And you agree to the rules of our Member Agreement, found online at our website."

Future of Newspapers: Profitless? Go Wireless; Wired's Duel Perspectives Blog, 7/14/09

Douglas Wolk via Wired's Duel Perspectives Blog; Future of Newspapers: Profitless? Go Wireless:

"The Wall Street Journal's publisher Les Hinton has called Google a "digital vampire," but even his paper, one of the last holdouts of subscription-based online content, has made its articles' full text accessible via Google searches. Using free content as bait for paying customers doesn't work for newspapers. And the revenue from internet advertising is less a stream than a dribble — nowhere near enough to support a robust paper (or paperless paper) on its own.

Still, there's a crucial distinction that might yet save news organizations. Users are pretty clearly uninterested in paying for content on the open internet, but what they are, in practice, willing to pay for is mobile content...

One possible future of news as a commodity is hyperlocal information — the sort of thing that's already becoming popularized by services like Yelp, whose incarnation as an iPhone app offers directions to nearby restaurants and services, complete with with user reviews."

http://www.wired.com/dualperspectives/article/news/2009/07/dp_newspaper_wired0714

Unofficial Software Incurs Apple's Wrath; The New York Times, 5/13/09

Via The New York Times; Unofficial Software Incurs Apple's Wrath:

"Jailbreaking is different from unlocking an iPhone, in which users modify the software so the phone can be used on unauthorized wireless carriers...

But according to Apple, jailbreaking is illegal and a breach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...

In a legal filing with the United States Copyright Office last year, Apple says jailbroken iPhones rely on modified versions of Apple’s operating software that infringe on its copyrights.

In addition, the company says jailbreaking encourages the piracy of approved iPhone applications and is an expensive burden...

Apple filed its brief in response to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s request that the copyright office recognize an exemption to the digital copyright act that would permit jailbreaking of iPhones and other devices. The copyright office is expected to rule on the issue by October.

Jailbreaking your own iPhone does not infringe on any copyright, and the tools that help iPhone owners modify their devices do not distribute anything that belongs to Apple, said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates more openness on the Internet. “In our view, consumers are allowed to adapt software for their own personal use,” he said."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/technology/13jailbreak.html?pagewanted=1&sq=copyright&st=cse&scp=5