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I will miss Amazon’s Dash buttons

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Amazon revealed earlier this year that it was discontinuing its Dash buttons, the stick-on buttons that let you quickly reorder household items like trash bags, detergent, and much more. While Amazon said existing devices would continue to work “so long as the public keeps using them,” the company

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Why we like fake stuff on Facebook

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales One of my favorite essays for understanding modern life was published in May of 2016 by Jeremy Gordon. In “Is Everything Wrestling?”, Gordon examined the way that the news cycle had come to resemble a scripted WWE spectacle. As in a wrestling match, the boundaries between reality and fiction had

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There’s now a cryptoart lottery using Bitcoin blockchain to pick a winner — and it’s brilliant

We’ve heard about auctions using blockchain to record sales of expensive works of art. We’ve seen the abstract musings of the cryptoart world, too. But what about a cryptoart charity auction that’s using blockchain to pick the winner? Well, an initiative being run by a trio of firms including cryptocurrency swap exchange service ChangeAngel, crypto-clothing

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UrbanClap, an India-based on-demand home services marketplace with a presence in ten Indian cities and in the UAE, raises $75M Series E led by Tiger Global (The Economic Times)

The Economic Times: UrbanClap, an India-based on-demand home services marketplace with a presence in ten Indian cities and in the UAE, raises $75M Series E led by Tiger Global  —  On-demand home services marketplace UrbanClap has raised $75 million in its Series E round led by Tiger Global with participation … UrbanClap, an India-based on-demand

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Facebook open-sources APIs to help fight child exploitation and terrorist propaganda

Facebook today announced it’s open-sourcing two technologies that help it curb the spread of problematic content like child exploitation, terrorist propaganda, or graphic violence online. These technologies aid the social network in detecting identical and nearly identical photos and video in order to weed out content that’s been flagged as being in violation of its

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Apple is suspending Siri response grading, the program in which humans review recordings of Siri queries for quality control, in response to privacy concerns (Matthew Panzarino/TechCrunch)

Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch: Apple is suspending Siri response grading, the program in which humans review recordings of Siri queries for quality control, in response to privacy concerns  —  In response to concerns raised by a Guardian story last week over how recordings of Siri queries are used for quality control, Apple is suspending the

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