When hackers break into the databases of the great and good—like Adobe
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Monday, November 4, 2013
Massive Credential Hacks Are the Crosswords of the Future
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On The Air This Week, We're Exploring Digital Childhood
This week, we'll explore the touchscreen generation.
Alex Couros/Flickr
This week, we'll explore the touchscreen generation.
Alex Couros/Flickr
We are really excited to start a new team-centered, theme-driven reporting effort. ("We" refers to your NPR tech reporting team — Steve Henn and Laura Sydell out in the Bay Area, and me, here at NPR's headquarters in Washington.)
As much as we can, we will craft our tech and culture coverage around a certain theme each week, meaning each of us will report one story as part of the theme and you'll hear those stories on our flagship shows. At the conclusion of each week, they'll get mashed into a whimsical podcast you can download.
For our first attempt at a theme week, we chose "raising digital natives," or, more simply, technology and our kids. It's especially good timing — the American Academy of Pediatrics this morning released updated guidelines on whether parents should allow screen time, relaxing previous rules. (We'll link to it when the group publishes it.)
And the non-profit Common Sense Media is out with new numbers showing that among children under two, that 38 percent had used mobile devices like iPhones and tablets. For children 8 and under, the average amount of time children spend using mobile devices has tripled since a similar survey two years ago.
The comedian Louis C.K.'s rant about parents, kids and cell phones hits on some of the struggles:
Team Coco/YouTube
Louis C.K.'s rant against kids and cell phones.
What struck us was how well Louis C.K. expressed his fears about what all this technology was doing to his kids. So many of us are trying to help kids navigate this stuff. So this week, we want to have a conversation with you through our stories on the air and here on the blog.
If you're a parent or a kid, or a friend of parent or a kid or were a kid once — we are going on a ride through a digital childhood. On the air, I'll be reporting on babies and screen time — how early is too early? Steve Henn will explore the complex design thinking behind your kid's favorite video games and Laura Sydell takes a closer look at ask.fm, which critics fear is making it easier for teens to be bullied online.
But we want to hear from you: What's your approach to technology and your children? What do you want to learn more about when it comes to the way children and teens are coming of age in our tech-obsessed culture?
There's likely much more material to be mined, so, help us shape what our reporting looks like going forward. Email me, leave a message in the comments or tweet us @NPRAllTech.
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Kerry in Egypt on first visit since Morsi ouster
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to board his aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, Nov. 2, 2013. Kerry is in Cairo pressing for reforms during the highest-level American visit to Egypt since the ouster of the country’s first democratically elected president. The Egyptian military’s removal of Mohammed Morsi in July led the U.S. to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. It seems the State Department expected a frosty reception for Kerry ahead of Monday’s scheduled start of Morsi’s trial on charges of inciting murder. (AP Photo/Jason Reed,Pool)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to board his aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, Nov. 2, 2013. Kerry is in Cairo pressing for reforms during the highest-level American visit to Egypt since the ouster of the country’s first democratically elected president. The Egyptian military’s removal of Mohammed Morsi in July led the U.S. to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. It seems the State Department expected a frosty reception for Kerry ahead of Monday’s scheduled start of Morsi’s trial on charges of inciting murder. (AP Photo/Jason Reed,Pool)
CAIRO (AP) — Secretary of State John Kerry says that U.S.-Egypt relations should not be defined by assistance.
At a joint news conference following a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, Kerry said that the suspension of aid to Egypt is not a punishment. He was referring to the legal requirements for withholding more than $1 billion in assistance after the Egyptian military in July toppled the democratically elected government.
Kerry said the topic was mentioned only briefly in his meeting with Fahmy and that he believed Egyptian authorities understood that rationale.
Kerry made an unannounced trip to Egypt Sunday on the first leg of a nine-day trip to the Mideast and Europe. This is Kerry's first trip to Egypt since the military's action.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-11-03-United%20States-Egypt-Kerry/id-b82776f9c7404fac89f69440ed262974Similar Articles: Origami Owl elizabeth berkley carrie underwood Wentworth Miller mila kunis
NYC stop-frisk ruling halted by appeals court
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court block of a judge's ruling that found the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy discriminated against minorities may be short lived, depending on the outcome of next week's mayoral election.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday that the ruling by U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin would be on hold pending the outcome of an appeal by the city, a fight that could be dropped if Democrat Bill de Blasio, who is leading the polls by 39 points, has his way.
De Blasio has said he would drop objections to the decision, which had called for a monitor to oversee major changes to the police tactic.
His Republican rival, Joe Lhota, said the city's next mayor must push forward with the appeal.
"For the next 60 days, we don't want an outsider coming in who doesn't know anything about crime fighting, putting the lives of our police officers and the lives of the public on the line," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday on his weekly WOR Radio show.
Police officers have "had their names dragged through the mud over the past year and I think they deserve a lot better than that," Bloomberg said. "We want them to understand that we support them and we are in conformity with the requirements of the law."
The topic became an election flashpoint, resonating nationwide. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly was shouted down over the tactic by students during a speech at Brown University earlier in the week.
"This is indeed an important decision for all New Yorkers and for the men and women of the New York City police department who work very hard day in and day out to keep this city safe," Kelly said Thursday.
The three-judge panel also took the unusual step of removing Scheindlin from the case. It said she ran afoul of the code of conduct for U.S. judges by misapplying a related case ruling that allowed her to take the case, and by giving media interviews during the trial. It noted she had given media interviews and public statements responding to criticism of the court. In a footnote, it cited interviews with the New York Law Journal, The Associated Press and The New Yorker magazine.
In the AP interview, Scheindlin said reports that Bloomberg had reviewed her record to show that most of her 15 written "search and seizure" rulings since she took the bench in 1994 had gone against law enforcement was a "below-the-belt attack" on judicial independence. She said it was "quite disgraceful" if the mayor's office was behind the study.
Scheindlin said in a statement later Thursday she consented to the interviews under the condition she wouldn't comment on the ongoing case.
"And I did not," she said.
Scheindlin said some reporters used quotes from written opinions that gave the appearance she had commented on the case but "a careful reading of each interview will reveal that no such comments were made."
In 2007, Scheindlin told the same lawyers who had argued a similar case before her to bring the stop and frisk case to her, because she said the two were related. Not long after, the current case was filed by the attorneys.
The appeals court said a new judge would be assigned at random to handle further decisions and said it would hear arguments in March on the formal appeal by the city. That judge may choose to make alterations to Scheindlin's rulings, but it would be unlikely.
Scheindlin decided in August that the city violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics by disproportionally stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking them. She assigned a monitor to help the police department change its policy and training programs on the tactic.
Stop and frisk has been around for decades, but recorded stops increased dramatically under Bloomberg's administration to an all-time high in 2011 of 684,330, mostly of black and Hispanic men. Four minority men who said they were targeted because of their races filed a lawsuit, and it became a class-action case.
To make a stop, police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime is about to occur or has occurred, a standard lower than the probable cause needed to justify an arrest. Only about 10 percent of the stops result in arrests or summonses, and weapons are found about 2 percent of the time.
Scheindlin heard a bench trial that ended in the spring and coincided with a groundswell of backlash against the stop-and-frisk tactic. She noted in her ruling this summer that she wasn't putting an end to the practice, which is constitutional, but was reforming the way the NYPD implemented its stops.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the four men who sued, said it was dismayed that the appeals court delayed "the long-overdue process to remedy the NYPD's" stop-and-frisk practices and was shocked that it "cast aspersions" on the judge's professional conduct and reassigned the case.
___
Associated Press writer Jake Pearson contributed to this report.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-11-01-Stop%20and%20Frisk/id-71368bb7a29d42e28d01a3420cd0b712Similar Articles: dexter 911 Memorial justin timberlake
Meet Lesson.ly, A Training-As-A-Service Startup That Is Clocking Quick Revenue Growth
If you work for a large company, you likely dealt with an onboarding process. Perhaps little quizzes or pamphlets. I recently enjoyed this precise exercise while joining TechCrunch a few months ago, given that our corporate boss AOL is a fan of all things ancient.
The gist is that corporate training is a pain in the ass for the poor schmuck on the receiving end, as well as for those who have to get new recruits up to speed. Lesson.ly wants to change that by providing a flexible, online software solution to help businesses train new employees. Corporate training-as-a-service is the play. The company likes to think of itself as the ”MailChimp of teaching and learning software.” I tend to dislike “X for Y” comparisons, but in this case it fits well enough to bear repeating.
The sexiest thing online? No. But it’s an interesting pain point to solve, and one that likely has a wide market, given the ubiquity of corporate training.
As a service, Lesson.ly is currently functional, and attractive, though not as deep in its feature set as it needs to be. Lesson.ly was founded last July, and only left beta this March, so that is to be expected.
Companies using the product can create courses for their employees, assign each to various individuals, track their progress, and quickly view scoring. Creation of lessons is the biggest friction point for Lesson.ly users, so the company does hold some customers hands when getting their material in place.
Of course, companies can quickly white-label their tests, keeping their brands on top.
Lesson.ly caught my eye because I know its founder, Max Yoder, who formerly founded Quipol. I covered Quipol when Yoder was focused on it. It’s transformed into a side project for now.
The company raised a single round of funding this July, led by Gravity Ventures. Also participating in the funding was Collina Ventures and a few angels. Lesson.ly declined to disclose the size of the round, but did note that it is seeking additional capital.
I spoke with Yoder about the progress of his young company. Given its model and market, the scorecard for Lesson.ly is revenue and customer growth. According to Yoder, his company has grown its revenue 245 percent month-over-month since January of this year.
Now, if you start from a very small number — remember that Lesson.ly is a corporate infant — it isn’t hard to chart aggressive figures. Lesson.ly’s service starts at $100 per month for a company with the need to train up to 25 people. Naturally, it charges more if you need more capacity.
Lesson.ly has three full-time employees, though it is in the process of adding two salespeople. I suspect that Lesson.ly’s first round was modest in size, and the company now needs growth capital to hire customer-facing denizens, as well as backend workers.
The company has big plans. I asked Yoder how long it would take for Lesson.ly to reach a run rate of $1 million, and he replied that it would take around 12 months. So, come next November, we’ll have a very simple measuring stick for the firm. Yoder also stated that he expected the company’s customer base to triple in the next six months.
We expend quite a lot of our total bandwidth covering companies with exploding user bases, huge valuations, and zero revenue. Yoder and his small crew are betting that they can take a business model that has been proven to work, apply it to a sleepy, even dull, sector, which is interesting. And if the company can scale its revenues as quickly as it hopes, it could join Nexmo among the ranks of the profitable young tech companies.
Still, Lesson.ly is small enough that it could topple over and be blown away. That said, from what I have seen inside the small, Indianapolis-based firm, that doesn’t seem too likely.
Top Image Credit: Flickr
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Apple confirms it's 'unclear' whether there will be enough Retina iPad minis to meet demand
While Apple CEO Tim Cook may have put one rumor to rest during today's earnings call, he basically confirmed another one: When asked about the availability of the iPad mini with Retina display, Cook said that the new model will start shipping "later in November," but that it's "unclear whether we'll ...Category: Dusty Baker national coffee day Jeff Daniels reggie bush lsu football
Etsy's New Policy Means Some Items Are 'Handmade In Spirit'
Rae Padulo creates handmade ceramics, like these holiday ornaments, for her Etsy-based company, mudstar ceramics. She's disappointed with the site's new policy to allow outsourced manufacturing. "There's nothing wrong with factory-made," she says, but "that's not what Etsy started out to be."
Courtesy of Rae Padulo
Rae Padulo creates handmade ceramics, like these holiday ornaments, for her Etsy-based company, mudstar ceramics. She's disappointed with the site's new policy to allow outsourced manufacturing. "There's nothing wrong with factory-made," she says, but "that's not what Etsy started out to be."
Courtesy of Rae Padulo
Under online marketplace Etsy's new policies, vendors can now use an outside manufacturer to help make their goods.
That is not going down well with some longtime sellers, who are calling the new policies a turnaround from the site's original mission.
"Their moniker is, you know, a place to buy handmade. It doesn't say a place to buy factory-made," says Rae Padulo, a potter who began selling dishes and ornaments on Etsy in 2009.
"There's nothing wrong with factory-made — it's just, that's not what Etsy started out to be," she says. "It started out to be a place where you could get something special, something one-of-a-kind, something made by a human being."
Padulo says Etsy is abandoning makers of handcrafted goods, who, like her, only have one pair of hands.
Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson says the company is still behind lone artisans — they make up most of its one million sellers. Still, it wants to support those whose businesses are growing, and under the old rules, that was difficult. Successful vendors were frustrated that they couldn't get enough help with their work.
"We heard from a wedding seller, for example, who said that when wedding season came around she was in a state of mild panic attack, because she just reached her limit and was working, you know, 18 hours a day," Dickerson says.
Under the new policy, anyone who wants to work with an outside manufacturer has to apply and be vetted by Etsy, which makes sure the arrangement meets its ethical guidelines.
Alexandra Ferguson started her pillow business on Etsy several years ago working from home. She's since expanded her line to makeup cases made out of organic cotton with recycled felt lettering.
Ferguson's business has tripled in the last two years. She now works out of a small factory in Brooklyn with 11 employees.
Ferguson says she's proud to be creating manufacturing jobs in New York City. "That Etsy is now encouraging and embracing that growth, to say it doesn't matter how many employees you have — you can have 25, you can have 50, you can have 100 — just means we've now been given free rein to hire as much as we need to sustain our growth," she says.
But not all vendors want to grow their businesses like Ferguson did, especially those who were attracted to the site's small business ethos.
And some of its rivals are hovering, hoping to attract disappointed vendors. Padulo says she's heard from the CEO of a site called Zibbet.
"He sent an email to every account and said, 'I make a commitment: We will only sell handmade items on this site. We will never sell manufactured items,' " Padulo says. "It's music to a lot of sellers' ears, you know?"
Padulo says she's enjoyed being part of Etsy but may close her shop after the holidays.
Dickerson says he hates to lose sellers because of the new policy. But in the eight years that Etsy has been online, the creative world has changed. For example, some sellers are creating jewelry using 3-D printing.
"Those are handmade, I think, in spirit, even though they're designed on a computer and printed," he says.
He says Etsy sellers can now turn their hands to whatever innovation comes next.
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