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Instagram Fundraisers Want Your Credit Card Information

Andrew Orr ·

Instagram Fundraisers will let you easily donate to non-profit organizations on the platform. It’s also a way for Facebook to get its hands on your credit card information.

New code and imagery dug out of Instagram’s Android app reveals how the Fundraiser stickers will allow you to search for nonprofits and add a Donate button for them to your Instagram Story. After you’ve donated to something once, Instagram could offer instant checkout on stuff you want to buy using the same payment details.

Facebook tried to get banks to give up your data, but now it will have to settle for this instead.

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Steven Spielberg Worried About How Streaming Will Affect Theatrical Movies

John Martellaro ·

The Verge writes: “Over the weekend, in a speech at the Cinema Audio Society’s CAS Awards, director Steven Spielberg reminded listeners yet again that he’s specifically dedicated to a theater-based cinematic experience as ‘a firm believer that movie theaters need to be around forever.'”… and “for all the high-quality content streaming services are producing and regardless of the quality of people’s home theater setups, ‘there’s nothing like going to a big dark theater with people you’ve never met before, and having the experience wash over you.’” (Image credit: Gage Skidmore.)

What do you think?

Podcast

The Mesh Wi-Fi Industrial Complex – Mac Geek Gab 749

John F. Braun & Dave Hamilton · · 2 Comments

Wanna know how to force Safari to download a media file instead of playing it? Want to know how to use the same drive on USB-C and USB-A Macs? Want to know how to secure erase your NAS drive? John and Dave have your answers! There is also a lot of concern about the future of eero, so your two geeks discuss that, too. All this and more, just press play and enjoy learning at least five new things!

Podcast

TMO Background Mode Encore #6 Interview with Science Communicator Dr. Kiki Sanford

John Martellaro · · Add Comment

Dr. Kiki Sanford makes her sixth appearance on Background Mode. Kiki is a neurophysiologist with a B.S. in conservation biology and a Ph.D. avian neurophysiology from the University of California. She’s a popular science communicator and creator of This Week in Science (TWIS) podcast and radio show.

In this episode, we chat about the science of rising sea levels, neural networks and vocoder technology trained to recognize brain patterns related to listening to human speech, how learning two human languages in childhood positively affects the brain, rebooting the human immune system, whether intelligence is sexy, and the colonization of Mars and whether it will be commercially exploited or preserved by all nations like the Earth’s Antarctic. Dr. Kiki is always a delight to listen to and learn from.

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No, You Probably Don't Take Privacy and Security Seriously

Andrew Orr ·

Zach Whittaker is tired of the same old line companies use, like when they suffer a data breach: “We take your privacy and security seriously.”

The truth is, most companies don’t care about the privacy or security of your data. They care about having to explain to their customers that their data was stolen…About one-third of all 285 data breach notifications had some variation of the line. It doesn’t show that companies care about your data. It shows that they don’t know what to do next.

I’m betting there’s a template that public relations employees have that they copy and paste into official emails sent out in the wake of security stuff like this.

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Just 12% of U.S. Patent Inventors are Women

Charlotte Henry ·

Data released in February 2019 by the U.S. Patent and Trademarks office revealed that in 2016 just 12% of inventors with a U.S. patent were female. This is actually a fall from the 1980s when the number hit 21%. A report from MarketWatch outlined that the reasons for this fall mirror many of the reasons there is a lack of women in STEM fields more broadly. They include gender bias and societal expectations as well as difficult workplace environments.

The number of patents with at least one woman inventor grew from 7% in the 1980s to 21% in 2016, according to an analysis released this month by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. But there’s a long way to go: Women made up just 12% of all patent inventors in 2016. “There’s untapped potential,” said Amanda Myers, the acting deputy chief economist at the USPTO. “There might be very intelligent and creative women who are not accessing the innovation system. That has real consequences for economic growth as well as our global competitive position.”