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YouTube Star Jailed for 15 Months After Tricking Homeless Man

Charlotte Henry ·

YouTube star ReSet tricked a homeless man into eating biscuits filled with toothpaste and posted the video online. He has been sentenced to 15 months in prison, ordered to pay his victim €20,000, and banned from social media for five years, the Guardian reported.

ReSet, who was born in China but grew up in Spain, was among the 200 most popular YouTubers in Spain and Latin America, with 1.1 million followers. In 2017 he accepted a dare to scrape the cream out of Oreo cookies and replace it with toothpaste. He found a Romanian man who was living on the streets of Barcelona, handed him the doctored biscuits and a €20 note, and filmed the encounter. The man later vomited. “Maybe I went a little too far, but look on the bright side: this helped him clean his teeth,” ReSet, 21, said. “I don’t think he’s brushed them since he became poor.”

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Square Sends Sensitive Receipts to the Wrong Person

Charlotte Henry ·

It is always awkward if you purchase something embarrassing or sensitive, and someone finds the receipt, right? Or your partner finds the receipt for a present you bought them? Well, the Wall Street Journal found that Square has been sending millions of receipts to the wrong person. It has created some very difficult situations.

Square has forwarded receipts documenting transactions as mundane as a cup of coffee and as sensitive as an obstetrician’s visit to people who were uninvolved in the purchases, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In some cases, neither the purchaser nor the recipient could say why Square sent receipts to the people it did. At issue are the methods that tech companies employ to make money off of the financial data of their users, as well as the degree to which those companies disclose or get consent from their users about those efforts. Data on individuals’ credit-card transactions can be particularly delicate and more revealing than their social-media posts or web-browsing activity.

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WDDC 2019: Apple is a Privacy-as-a-Service Company

Charlotte Henry ·

Away from the excitement of new Mac Pros and operating systems for Mac and iPad, another thing stood out at WWDC 2019. Apple is making privacy-as-a-service a core part of its offering, as Darrell Etherington noted at TechCrunch.

Apple has been playing up its privacy game for at least a few years now, and in the Tim Cook era it’s especially come to the fore. But today’s announcements really crystallize how Apple’s approach to privacy will mesh with its transformation into becoming even more of a services company. It’s becoming a services company with a key differentiator – privacy – and it’s also extending that paradigm to third-parties, acting as an ecosystem layer that mediates between users, and anyone who would seek to monetize their info in aggregate.

Podcast

Professor of Space Resources Dr. George Sowers – Background Mode Interview

John Martellaro · · Add Comment

Dr. George Sowers holds an undergraduate degree in physics from Georgia Tech and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado in Quantum Field theory. He has worked for Lockheed Martin and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) where he was the chief scientist and vice president. Currently, he’s a professor of Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.

We chatted about George’s evolving career, from geologic engineering to physics to rocket launches with Lockheed Martin to General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Mechanics (QM), life at the ULA and finally to lunar mining. We pondered the philosophical differences between GR and QM, and then we turned to the benefits of mining water ice at the poles of our own Moon. We finished with some great advice for young engineering and physics students.

Podcast

Mac Pro: You Want It? You Got It! – Mac Geek Gab 764

John F. Braun & Dave Hamilton · · Add Comment

Yes, some things happened at WWDC, and your two geeks discuss them. But first, some Cool Stuff Found. We can’t ignore that stuff, after all! Then it’s time for a jam session all about macOS Catalina, the new Mac Pro, and a few other things related to Apple’s announcements this week. All very cool stuff, and you’re guaranteed to learn at least five new things!