Twitter your government, ads waste bandwidth and your time, maybe Uber drivers are contractors, Facebook benefiting from stolen Youtube videos, and more Geek News of the week.
Jun, a small Andalusian town founded by the Romans 2,200 years ago, is using Twitter to reduce bureaucracy, serve its citizens, and run a more efficient administration.
Mayor Jos
With no content blocked, there are 38 3rd party scripts (scripts not hosted on the host domain) running when the homepage is opened, which takes a total of 11 seconds. Some of these scripts are hosted by companies I know, Google, Amazon, Twitter and lots from companies I don
Consider your average Uber driver. He clearly works for Uber. He is indispensable to the operations of the company. It sets his pay and tells him how to do his job. It fires him if he falls below certain strict standards. But he also clearly works for himself. He has no boss. He chooses his own hours. He accepts and rejects work at will.
According to American employment law, though, our driver must be one or the other, a 1099 contractor or a W2 employee. And the gulf between the two in terms of mandated government protections and benefits is as wide as the line between them is blurry. As such, thousands of on-demand-economy employees and scads of lawyers are at war in court to determine what camp our average driver should fall into.
What is Freebooting?
What is freebooting?
Last year on his podcast Hello Internet, the Australian filmmaker Brady Haran coined the term freebooting to describe the act of taking someone
A patent application by Zodiac Seats France calls for a design that puts every other passenger in a row facing backward. The design idea could fit up to 80 more passengers in a plane, depending on the current seat layout.
Alex Stamos, the recently appointed chief security officer at Facebook, has
Most web browsers load Flash and other plug-in content as soon as you open a web page. Enable
The team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon built an automated testing rig called AdFisher that pretended to be a series of male and female job seekers. Their 17,370 fake profiles only visited jobseeker sites and were shown 600,000 adverts which the team tracked and analysed.
The authors of the study wrote:
Roughly 1,000 companies make smartphones. Just one reaps nearly all the profits.
Apple Inc. recorded 92% of the total operating income from the world
