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#Virtual Mobile Number App
otpserviceproviders · 9 months
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hanlimz · 1 year
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JUNGWONSPIDERMANAU
cass. pls dont say that and just. LEAVE. expand. i would like to hear your thoughts 🎤
bc truly spider-man/peter parker was my first love and personally i have had the idea for a jake as spider-man au for quiet a bit now but it has never really taken off but now i NEED to hear all your thoughts.
(also if u have any good spider-man au fic recs pls send them my way thnx 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩)
PLSSS I COULD TALK FOREVER!!!! BUT OKAY—here are some bullet points plus a small blurb/summary/idk? i literally am going to write so much im so SORRY??? (this has convinced me n i will be writing a fic LMAOO)
(+ two vvvv good spiderman fic recs!!)
it’s safe here (with me) by @enhypenandpaper !! | very cute story, well-written, i love when writers can put their own unique spin on scenes that inspire them it’s rly motivating and wonderful (i need to rb this on my fic rec blog asap) (jake x reader)
i’ll save you (again) by @jayflrt !! | amazing stupendous wonderful show-stopping ,, literally one of my Favorite reads on this app .. this author manages to encapsulate both spiderman And jake sosososo well .. they also make it a point to rly flesh out the other friendships mentioned and I Love That (jake x reader)
general hcs (?):
won is the dorkiest spiderman ever .. stutters over his quips, never has anything cool to say to the villains he fights, doesn’t know how to respond to ppl thanking him
one time someone he saved tried to ask for his number and he panicked and said he was banned from both t-mobile and verizon (he’s not btw)?? 
another time he just got done saving a group of ppl n said “no thneeds necessary” ?? bc he was trying to say “no need to thank me” n “no thanks necessary” at the same time
but he’s also the sweetest .. any time someone asks to “repay him” he’s a double it n give it to the next person kinda guy .. he always tells them to stop by the soup kitchen or donate old clothes to thrift stores or just be kind to someone else
also ,, on another note ,, won has the Biggest crush on u and knows u like to help out at the local preschool, so he always tells ppl to buy and donate extra school supplies
sometimes when he’s out patrolling late at night, he’ll see u on ur way home from the library n quietly follow u to make sure u get home safe
tries to talk to u once after seeing a spiderman article open on ur computer and u indulge him for a moment, saying how bad u felt abt the daily bugle’s tabloid pieces .. won’s p sure his heart exploded
but overall, he’s very gentle and kind .. ever the king of duality tho .. he can beat a bitch up when need be, but most of the time—won’s just a high school senior trying to get into MIT and make the person he’s been in love with since the beginning of fall semester feel the same way abt him
ANYWAYS in a high school!au setting i see a lot of ppl like to hc jungwon as class/stuco president, but i think he’s definitely more on the quiet side .. he’s popular, yes, but not too popular if that makes sense. for him, though, this is perfect ... he flies under the radar, and him missing school a couple days in a row every month or so goes virtually unnoticed. HOWEVER, you’ve always had a sneaking suspicion .. it’s not like you and won are Rivals—there would be no merit in picking an unnecessary fight with the boy who volunteers at the soup kitchen on the weekends and feeds the stray cats near the gym and asks the lunch ladies how their days are going—but, there’s something strange going on. you’re sure of it.
jungwon comes into school one day w a busted lip and a black eye. everyone is fawning over him, asking him what happened—did he get mugged, did his face hurt, did he give the other person a run for their money? you don’t bother checking in on him when he takes his seat next to you. you just hand him his calculus test (he did better than you again n it’s infuriating) and clench your jaw, willing yourself to disappear. that familiar, green monster hangs in the shadows behind you, and its breath fans across your neck as it attempts to coax a physical manifestation of jealously from your lips. eventually, you excuse yourself to the nurse’s office and skip the rest of the day.
later that night, you’re trying to study in your room, but you keep getting distracted by the daily bugle’s twitter updates. spiderman is out and about again, and they won’t let the poor guy’s good reputation rest. it’s all “spiderman fights villain and knocks over streetlight onto local man’s car” and “spiderman forgoes saving lady’s churro to destroy half of grand central station”—and, honestly, you feel a bit bad. he’s trying his best. but, as rain patters against your window, the sound threatens to lull you to sleep. exhaustion overtakes your body, your eyes are drooping, and your head keeps falling from your hands. and then BOOM—the loudest noise you’ve ever heard startles you from your fatigue-induced trance. with a look of fear in your eyes, you glance over your shoulder to look at the window and the sight that greets you is enough to freeze every molecule in your body.
the aforementioned hero is clinging to the side of your building, banging his fist on the glass and practically begging to be let in. his movements are frantic and a bit scary. you open the window as quick as you can and let him slide through the small gap you’ve created. there are copious tears in his suit, blood flows from a nasty gash on his shoulder. rushing around on some crude form of auto pilot, you grab a clean shirt from your closet and press it into his wound. you tell him to hold it there and instruct him to sit in your desk chair. he's sopping wet from head to toe, and all you manage to think about is how glad you are that your parents are away for the weekend.
eventually, after only almost vomiting once, the cut is clean and bandaged up. "you're so lucky that i've been trying to get rid of this shirt forever, mr. spiderman," you scoff as he perches on the sill of your window, preparing to swing away into the night. "if i had grabbed one of my favorite outfits, i would've killed you before that wound could have."
a giggle escapes from his lips, and for a moment, you find yourself taken aback. he sounds like a high schooler—young, lively, and everything but the twenty-something year old man you thought he would be. "sorry about that ... i'll have to swing by and drop off some laundry detergent one of these days," he laughs. his voice sounds so familiar, but your mind is still reeling from your recent discovery. the hero offers you a wave and gestures toward his previous seat. "sleep well—and, good luck on that calculus homework."
the next day at school, jungwon is nowhere to be seen. you thank whatever happens to reside in the sky that he can't see the bright red 67 at the top of your most recent calculus test. the next next day, however, jungwon comes in with his arm in a sling. as his seatmate, you're the one that has to help him out for the rest of the week. but, when you're sitting in free period, you happen to take another glance at the bandages around his shoulder as jungwon naps next to you. a sharp column of ice pierces through your lower abdomen; under jungwon's sling, the lowest layer of bandages are covered with dried blood and sweat.
they look eerily familiar. almost like the ones you used to patch spiderman up over the weekend.
but, jungwon couldn't be spiderman. he couldn't be—he's too sweet, too gentle, too kind. peeking over at his backpack, you note that it seems a bit bulkier today; a recognizable purple cap winks at you from the unzipped main pocket. a chill tickles the length of your spine as you register what happened to be resting against his class notebooks.
laundry detergent?
you pause for a moment.
oh.
oh god.
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andsour · 4 months
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🍋 ୧ . ִֶָ honeylemon's lightstick , ⠀ׂ 𖹭⠀࣭ ! the matnabong ( trans. "yummybong" ) is the official lightstick of honeylemon. the lightstick is one of the group's best–selling pieces of merchandise , selling out online and flying off shelves in stores and concert venues.
ib : venusvity !!
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released in january of 2021 , the matnabong ver. 1 was an instant hit among fans. many thought it to be simple but pretty , and that it captured the essence of the group very well. it features a heart–shaped lemon , encased by a clear , pink plastic dome , as well as a white base and handle with a single pink button. when connected to the matnabong mobile app , it can glow a number of different colors , but its default is yellow. paired with the pink of the dome , at honeylemon's concerts , it creates the group's signature strawberry lemonade ocean.
... inclusions ♡
retail price : $41 / ₩48,030
one random member photocard
wrist strap
user manual
battery holder
three triple a batteries
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announced on december 4 , 2023 , matnabong ver. 2 will be honeylemon's second lightstick. opinions on the new design are currently very mixed , with some loving it and others upset that it's doubled in price , despite not changing much. being made by the same manufacterer , it has virtually the exact same functions , but instead features a circular lemon with a pink heart at it center and a differently shaped base. the button has also changed , now white and glowing pink when turned on. it is currently available for pre–order on the seventh heaven shop website , and has already amassed 300,000+ sales.
... inclusions ♡
retail price : $82 / ₩95,940
one random member photocard
one random member photocard w honeyshoppe plushes ( pre–order benefit )
one sheet of member + group name stickers
one sheet of honeyshoppe stickers
wrist strap
user manual
battery holder
three triple a batteries
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my-reality-my-rules · 2 years
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list of sites and apps i recommend for designing your DR shenanigans
part 1 - avatar creation (DR self)
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as it is in the title! I've been meaning to post this for a while now, so here it is ((: hope y'all have fun making new DR pics lmao
[warning: semi-long post]
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LIST INCLUDES:
Artbreeder
Everskies
Hero Forge
Lily Diary
Live Portrait Maker
Metahuman
Picrew
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Artbreeder
WHAT: Artbreeder, formerly known as Ganbreeder, is a collaborative, machine learning-based art website. Using the models StyleGAN and BigGAN, the website allows users to generate and modify images of faces, landscapes, and paintings, among other categories. [lifted from Google Search]
PROS: allows for realistic avatar-making. overall, has a pretty good range when it comes to the genes/features to be selected. everything's also free to use. images can be mishmashed at any rate. thousands of AI-generated photos are also free and available for use.
CONS: controls are quite difficult to maneuver, especially for people new to the site. certain genes are also inconvenient to use—offsetting another gene in the process of balancing them. additionally, also highkey racist when it comes to the cultural-based gene designs (e.g., the east asian or desi features). limited number of uploads.
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
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[*photo enhanced with Remini]
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Everskies
WHAT: Welcome to the Everskies mobile game, an avatar maker and life simulator game that combines the dress up concept, where you can create your own character to match different clothes, hairstyles, shoes, and much more. You can also meet new friends, chat with people, and design your avatar fashion style as you want. Your second life with the virtual world is in Everskies! Join it! [taken from the mobile app description]
PROS: has a very wide range of clothing options. pieces from every style can be found—from punk to e-girl fashion, to forties clothing and little space. includes mini-games and competitions, as well as gifting and tipping to other users. outfits can be bought as a whole, or pieces can be bought separately.
CONS: not much, unless you like to splurge and immediately spend the 10,000 starting stardust for buying clothes and/or magazines. some features also require in-app purchases.
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
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Hero Forge
WHAT: Hero Forge® is an online character design application that lets users create and buy customized tabletop miniatures and statuettes. [lifted from the official Hero Forge website]
PROS: allows for interracial character creation (e.g., fantasy creatures like tieflings or gnomes). includes preset outfits that can be edited. little to no boundaries when it comes to avatar-making. custom colours and posing, down to all the littlest details. additionally, the site has save slots, so you can check your characters at any time. you can also order to have these printed out (which means you can even have a miniature of your DR self).
CONS: none, unless you're unwilling to actually subscribe to the company.
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
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Lily Diary
WHAT: Lily Diary is a dress-up game where you can decorate avatars and backgrounds. You are free to put your saved avatars anywhere you want! [lifted from the App Store]
PROS: includes a wide collection of preset outfits to try on, both free and paid for in-game. clothes can be layered and flipped. has a good range when it comes to facial features and colour palettes. also allows for stage and background editing for making screenshots of avatars.
CONS: a bit limited when it comes to the outfits to be worn. for example, there are traditional outfits whose poses cannot be changed, and some clothes are challenging to layer.
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
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Live Portrait Maker
(version 1 - girls), (version 2 - guys)
WHAT: Create your own fashionable, animated 2.5D girl. | From the creator of Live Portrait Maker - create your own animated 2.5D guy. [lifted from Google Play]
PROS: has an animated avatar whose line of vision follows the movement of the user's finger/cursor. facial features are editable singularly; includes options like tilting and resizing, as well as widening and lengthening.
CONS: includes some in-app purchases, if you're unwilling to spend for the more interesting items to be used.
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
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Metahuman
WHAT: MetaHuman Creator is a free, cloud-streamed tool you can use to create your own digital humans in an intuitive, easy-to-learn environment. Using MetaHuman Creator, you can customize your digital avatar's hairstyle, facial features, height, body proportions, and more. [lifted from the official Unreal Engine website]
PROS: includes a collection of faces to sculpt and combine, as well as provides specific measurements for smaller body details. editable background and lighting. also includes animation for the avatar, both in full body and in face, complete with 3D camera rotation.
CONS: some of the presets are limited when it comes to having a wide range of options to choose from (e.g., clothes or lack of eye colour variety). also requires high-speed internet in order to work at full functionality (including fast, ray-traced graphics).
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
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[apologies if the resolution looks a bit bad—lmao i was running on 9 FPS at the time]
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Picrew
WHAT: Picrew is a layered paper doll-style avatar maker website. It was initially developed by the two staff of the Japanese company TetraChroma Inc from July 2017, and officially released in December 2018. [lifted from Wikipedia]
PROS: perfect for making animated pictures of characters. incredibly diverse when it comes to design—from skin tones, eye colours, to the most outlandish facial features. also caters to representing people with disabilities and doesn't shy away from expressing minorities as well.
CONS: none that i can immediately think of. the only real trouble I've faced is a situation wherein the artist creating the picrew hasn't finished it yet—but that's not entirely a problem. or perhaps unavailable designs in a picrew (e.g., red eyes), but there are usually substitutes.
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
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[LINK: The Lady of Hera]
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danelloevee-sky · 1 year
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About: the suggestion of region-locked servers
Since not everyone has read the Sky Economy Q&A here is the segment where it came up (transcripts below)
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Image transcript
What is the team planning to do to address the impact of increased IAP prices on players? Because of ongoing inflation and real-life events, these IAPs are no longer in many players’ purchasing power.
Prices for in-app purchases (IAP) outside of the US increased unevenly for some countries last year when Apple and Google adjusted prices to reflect changes in the real-world economy. In response, publishers with games in certain regions increased the amount of virtual currency given in each purchase to try to offset the new price. They were able to do this because their games were available in only a few countries, or even just one country. Sky is available in dozens of countries, so this kind of offset may help in one country but create additional problems in others. The Sky team has considered setting different prices for different countries based on the strength of their economies, but not everyone on the team agrees that it's the best strategy. This is because it comes with cultural costs. We want to create a positive online community that promotes good behavior like inclusivity, compassion, and generosity. It moves us to see that this has led to people from different countries forming genuine friendships, even if their nations are in conflict. Meanwhile, a popular feature in Sky that we added based on player feedback is the ability to gift items to other players who can't afford them. We've made many in-app purchases giftable, and have even introduced Season Passes that can be gifted. However, setting different prices for different regions can have certain consequences. One is pricing arbitrage, where people profit by exploiting price differences through trading. While we limit trading in Sky, people can still make a profit by scaling the number of transactions with enough buyers. We've seen similar arbitrage in other countries with mobile phone carriers and discount coupons, for example. In games, this leads to fraud, stealing, and toxic behavior in a community. These harmful impacts could be prevented in the community by limiting players to servers for only their specific region or country. But, this would hurt our community's ability to meet friends outside their own country. Some of us at the studio think the trade-off would be worth it, while others prefer the current simpler approach that allows more people to be together. We want to know your thoughts too! Share them with us by using the hashtag #SkyRegions on social media. Lastly, while foreign currency rates are improving over time, Apple and Google haven't adjusted their prices accordingly. We may need to reevaluate our prices if they don't change.
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mariacallous · 8 months
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Last week, Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as “X.” New CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted that X would be “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking,” a step toward Musk’s vision of creating the “everything app” for the Western world. Musk has been focused on this vision for Twitter since before he even bought it, repeatedly praising the Chinese app WeChat in a June 2022 town hall at Twitter. WeChat is known for doing virtually anything an app can do—messaging, audio/video, meetings, translation, social networking, shopping, payments, ride sharing, food delivery, and more. It’s an indispensable app in China, and Musk wants to build X into that app in the United States.
Musk has been laser-focused on his vision of the everything app for longer than most realize. He’s also long been obsessed with the letter X—he named his original online bank X.com, founded SpaceX, and even named his son “X Æ A-12.” His X-ray vision, if you’ll forgive the pun, dates back to his founding of the original X.com. Musk described that firm, which would eventually merge with Confinity to form PayPal, as a “global financial nexus” that could handle bank accounts, mortgages, credit, insurance, stocks—anything and everything financial.
On the face of it, none of this seems unreasonable. Such an app would be one of the most valuable companies in the world if it succeeded. It’s a tall task, but Musk has been involved in the founding of three separate multibillion-dollar companies. WeChat (along with competitors such as AliPay) has proven that such apps can reach scale and be wildly successful. And WeChat was initially built on the back of parent company Tencent’s popular social network, QQ. If it can be done, why not Musk? And why not start with Twitter?
Unfortunately for Musk, his vision of creating a Western WeChat is doomed to failure. Companies like Meta and Alphabet have made attempts before. These companies have every advantage—more cash available than Musk, larger pools of technical talent, better public reputation, and more successful lines of business in the app ecosystem. Nevertheless, none have succeeded in building an everything app. WeChat exists in a very specific Chinese context, and attempts to brute force it in a very different context will crash and burn.
The most important function of an aspiring everything app is payments, which unlock enormous value for the app and convenience for the user. But mobile payments in China are an outlier—87 percent of Chinese people used mobile payments in 2021, almost double the next highest nation. And that outlier status comes from the unique way that China’s payment economy developed.
China’s explosive economic growth over the 2000s saw the country transition from being a mostly unbanked, cash-based economy to a phone-based, app-payment economy without ever having a middle phase of adopting credit cards. As China’s new middle class grew, credit cards were available to a limited upper class—but never became a commonplace part of national financial infrastructure.
What China did have was a lot of cheap smartphones. By the early 2010s, most people there still didn’t have a PC, but they had a mobile phone, and increasingly they were switching to cheap smartphones. But those smartphones were mostly low-end products, with limited processing power and storage space. A high number of bloated apps wasn’t going to cut it for an average user, so many basic functionalities began to cluster inside a small number of super-apps. With the public hungry to abandon cash, apps like WeChat were the natural and widespread solution. Most vendors didn’t have existing relationships with payment companies. But they were happy to jump all the way to taking mobile payments—especially since all they needed to do so was a cheap smartphone, not an expensive terminal. China essentially leapfrogged credit cards all the way to mobile payment.
The United States in 2023 is not in that same position. Americans, for the most part, are not newly middle class and unbanked. Americans love credit cards, have deep experience with them, and use them regularly. And the country is filled with an enormous number of financial firms competing at every level—banking services, credit services, payment apps, stock brokerages, and more. Musk’s X will be entering a far more crowded and competitive market for customers who are already using far better and more developed alternatives.
Competitive is the key word there, because there are many Western companies that would have loved to compete with apps such as WeChat. But China’s government long ago banned nearly every non-Chinese alternative to native Chinese apps in areas including social media, video sharing, messaging, news, search, finance, and more. The list of apps banned in China is so extensive that it’s likely faster to point out the few that aren’t banned.
With so much of the competition absent, it was much easier for Chinese apps to dominate many fields at once as Chinese internet adoption skyrocketed. The Chinese government mostly didn’t pick favorites domestically at first—but it kept out foreign competition and let domestic products thrive. Twitter/X doesn’t live in that same world. The U.S. government won’t protect Musk from competition.
One of the ironies in all this is that the window to develop an everything app may be over in China as well, as the Chinese government’s approach to the tech sector has changed. During China’s boom years, the state often took a laissez-faire approach to tech regulation. The Hu Jintao government and even the early Xi Jinping years saw a booming economy, where tech companies were allowed to grow rapidly and dominate markets as long as they cooperated with censorship, handed over information to the government, and paid off the right people. Analyst XiaoFeng Wang explicitly links this flexible environment with WeChat’s growth, saying, “The more flexible regulatory environment in China at the time gave internet companies like Tencent and Alibaba more room to extend to a wide range of businesses. WeChat benefited from that and grew into a super-app.”
But the Chinese government has grown deeply worried about the power of the super-apps, for both good and bad reasons. Any power that does not reside directly in the party’s hands is distrusted at a time when Xi has demanded total party leadership of everything—and the influence and reach of tech companies has been sharply curtailed in the last few years, wiping billions off their value. Chinese regulators were also genuinely worried about the sheer degree of anti-competitive practices. It had become common, for instance, for firms to block links to their competitors’ products. Breaking down those “walled gardens” has become a major part of regulation since 2021.
Building a super-app would be hard in China today—and even harder in the United States or Europe, with their anti-monopoly legislation and political skepticism toward powerful tech companies. Even if Musk’s X could theoretically succeed, it probably wouldn’t be allowed to do so legally.
Yet paradoxically, while regulators raised eyebrows, elements of the Chinese government also welcomed the opportunities that WeChat and other ubiquitous apps offered. Chinese firms exist at the pleasure of the state and are always subordinate partners to it. WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, is well known for collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party in areas large and small, producing sycophantic patriotic games and engaging in widespread censorship and espionage. Foreign Policy has reported that Tencent was even partially funded by the Ministry of State Security in its early days.
These incidents highlight why an app such asWeChat would be permitted to thrive—because it’s useful to the party. In the James C. Scott sense, WeChat increases the legibility of Chinese society. You can’t control what you can’t see, so make sure you can easily see everything. If all of Chinese daily life is funneled through a single portal, it’s that much easier for the party to observe and control lives. Monitoring a single WeChat account could allow police to see an individual’s travel patterns, spending, and social contacts, which is why many dissidents or activists avoid using the app when possible.
Chinese consumers have become more privacy-conscious about the data they hand over to companies—but are hopeless or unaware of the amount of information the government can get from them. Western companies hoping to emulate WeChat not only don’t have the government on their side, but also face a much tougher and more skeptical audience. And in Musk’s case, who—apart from the most ardent of fans—is going to trust him with their money at this point?
WeChat and its counterparts in China grew up in unique, nonrepeatable circumstances. They faced a massive middle class with plenty of cheap smartphones but no traditional banking or credit cards. They were protected from Western competition by the Chinese government. That same government applied a very light regulatory touch as the companies grew, and also encouraged centralization as a way to maintain greater control.
None of those factors exist in the United States today, and Musk’s dream of building the X app for everything is essentially impossible without them. American consumers already have dozens of easy payment choices through credit cards, debit cards, and existing mobile apps. Musk won’t be protected from competition by the government. Instead, he’ll be treated in a more hostile manner by regulators concerned about privacy, monopoly power, and his general history with flouting the law.
Larger and more important tech firms than Twitter—or, as Musk now insists, X—have tried and failed in this area. Meta owns several social networks and several messaging apps, and has tried expanding into areas like marketplaces, video, payments and more. But most of these experiments have failed to reach any sort of scale, and Meta’s successes have come from disaggregating and breaking things apart rather than bundling them together. Google’s Alphabet parent company has succeeded in a wide variety of areas such as search, video, email, payments, and more. But its attempts to build a social network flamed out spectacularly, and like Meta, their biggest successes have come from separated apps and brands, not a singular everything app.
For all its cultural importance and for all that the chattering class is addicted to it, Twitter’s just never been that large. Meta has nearly 4 billion monthly active users across its family of apps. Twitter/X, even if you believe Musk’s suspiciously cropped data, is a bit more than a 10th of that. Meta and Alphabet are orders of magnitude larger and more important than Twitter/X. If they’ve tried and failed to create the everything app, there’s no reason to believe that Musk can succeed.
Musk’s vision for the original X.com impressed Silicon Valley. By 2000, X.com had merged with Confinity, and Musk took over as CEO of the new company. He focused his vision on the global financial nexus, the proto-everything app, despite investor and board skepticism. He pursued that idea maniacally, to the detriment of PayPal/X’s core product of payment by email. He also insisted on branding the company as “X,” despite PayPal’s strong existing brand.
And in less than a year, he was coup’d out of the company and replaced as CEO by Peter Thiel. PayPal was saved as a company because its board ejected Musk. This time around there’s no board that matters except Elon, and there’s no one to save him from himself.
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Brazil creates an app to block stolen cell phones: ‘They will be a useless piece of metal’
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Cell phone theft in Brazil is one of the most frequent crimes in big cities, almost a ritual that you have to go through at least once in your life. There are types for all tastes: from theft in the middle of a crowd to armed robbery, including the latest rising trend: shattering the window of a vehicle by surprise and tearing the device from its owner’s hands in milliseconds. Normally, the trauma of loss is followed by a string of painful bureaucratic efforts, and in many cases, the unpleasant surprise of finding a hole in the bank account.
The Brazilian government, through the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, has decided to take action and on Tuesday presented a project that aims to make life easier for victims and reduce robberies. It’s called Celular Seguro (Safe Cell Phone) and it’s a very simple application that will get underway this week. Users must register the cell phone number, or save the number of a trusted person who would be authorized to manage notifications from one’s cell phone. When the theft occurs, the user activates a warning button, which automatically reaches the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel), which then renders the device inoperative. In theory this could already be done, but it was almost science fiction, as it required endless minutes on the phone talking to an automated system.
The great novelty is that now, in addition to speeding up the process, the system will also automatically notify the bank in order to block the mobile application, so thieves cannot hack into it. According to the government, banks have promised to act within a period of between 10 and 30 minutes. Virtually everyone who operates in Brazil has joined, so the coverage will be quite broad.
Continue reading.
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nickgerlich · 2 months
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Prying Apart The Grip
The iPhone was introduced in July 2007. It’s hard to believe we are coming up on the 17th anniversary of what is now a necessary device—be it Apple or a competitor—for daily living. Apple ushered in a whole new way of life, merging phone, camera, and music player into one device.
Of course, those three were just the tip of the iceberg, and developers wanted a way to get their cool new web-based applications onto those phones. So Apple wisely opened the App Store in 2008. While the number of apps peaked at 2.2 million in 2017, it has settled into a comfortable groove at 1.8 million, thanks to Apple sifting through the mess and deleting some older apps that no longer worked.
But buried in the details of the App Store agreement that developers had to sign with Apple—who vetted each app for safety and security—was some fine print: Every in-app sale would be divided 70/30 between the developer and Apple. Basically, there was and still is a 30% Apple tax just for playing, at least in the US. Every time a user buys something in an app, then Apple gets a healthy chunk of it.
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But that is now changing in Europe, where the EU has become the tail that wags the dog.
Remember all those Cookies boxes we have to check off on virtually every website we visit? We can thank the EU and their GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It was easier for everyone to just make it the global standard, even if they are annoying.
And then there was Apple’s announcement last year that all new phones going forward would feature a USB-C connector, instead of the Lightning port. This too was in response to the EU mandating that all phones must have the same connector, and rather than have two global systems, Apple sided with the EU. Admittedly, it does simplify things for everyone, except for Apple users during this transition period. Legacy phone users will have a bunch of obsolete connectors real soon when they upgrade.
The third wave of EU influence just passed, and it is the opening up of the App Store to competitors who wish to have their own stores, thus bypassing the Apple ecosystem. Furthermore, it marks what will be the end of that 30% Apple tax, something that Spotify has been dreaming about ever since it wanted to upsell users with its audio books program. They are pretty happy right now.
Apple, of course, is concerned, arguing that third-party app stores may not pass muster in terms of safety and security, and users could be at risk. Point well taken. I’m betting they are more concerned about losing their revenue sharing program, though.
But for now, this is only going to happen in Europe, but you can bet that US regulators will be watching closely. It could just as easily be mandated here. Apple has enjoyed a tightly-held monopoly in many aspects of its phones, ceding only accessory items to third-party makers. You know. Things like connector cords and dongles that allow you to connect to your laptop all the things that were once standard on a MacBookPro.
Here in the US, we are not accustomed to the heavy hand of government telling companies how to run their business, and if someone wants to take the chance of using proprietary connectors and being the only source of mobile apps, then so be it. The risk is on them.
In the case of Apple, though, this has played out very well for them. It all depends on how the FTC feels about such monopoly power. Apple has 58% share of smartphones in the US, with the remainder scattered across the Android platform. That’s power. If the US were to follow the EU regarding the App Store, it would at least loosen some of the grip this company has on our daily lives.
Maybe that's not such a bad idea, and this coming from a guy who is very laissez faire in worldview. As much as I am an Apple fanboy, with many phones, tablets, and computers through the years, I often feel like Apple is guilty of abusing its position by using customers as product testers, and forcing us to buy things we really don’t want, like those silly dongles so I can read a memory stick or SD card.
Besides, I feel for Spotify on this one, because it has the potential to pose a formidable threat to Audible in the audio book world, except that for now Apple will always have its hand out. Audible, of course, is an Amazon property, and dodges the Apple tax.
Furthermore, 17 years is a long time to have such a death grip on a market. I’m good with following the EU’s lead on this, because in the end it will likely be good for consumers. And isn’t that what it’s all about?
Dr “iReckon” Gerlich
Audio Blog
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kushitworld · 5 months
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The Latest Trends And Technologies In E-Commerce Website Development
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E-commerce Development Trends: Explore the latest trends and technologies in e-commerce website development, including payment gateways, product recommendations, and checkout optimizations.
The world of e-commerce is continuously evolving, and staying ahead of the curve is essential for businesses looking to succeed in the competitive online marketplace. As technology advances and consumer preferences shift, e-commerce website development must adapt to meet changing needs. In this article, we will explore the latest trends and technologies in e-commerce website development, including advancements in payment gateways, product recommendations, and checkout optimizations.
1. Advanced Payment Gateways
Payment gateways are the backbone of e-commerce, enabling secure and convenient online transactions. Recent developments in payment gateways have made the payment process smoother, faster, and more secure.
Digital Wallets: Integrating digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay offers users a convenient and secure way to make purchases, reducing cart abandonment rates.
Cryptocurrency Payments: Accepting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum can open up new markets and cater to tech-savvy customers interested in digital assets.
One-Click Checkout: Simplify the checkout process with one-click checkout options, reducing the number of steps required to complete a purchase.
2. Personalized Product Recommendations
One-size-fits-all approaches to product recommendations are a thing of the past. Today’s consumers expect personalized shopping experiences. E-commerce websites are leveraging advanced technologies to provide tailored product recommendations.
Machine Learning Algorithms: Machine learning algorithms analyze user behavior and preferences to make accurate product recommendations. These algorithms continuously learn and adapt to deliver the most relevant suggestions.
AI-Powered Chatbots: Chatbots can assist users in finding products and make recommendations based on individual preferences. These chatbots offer real-time interactions and enhance the shopping experience.
Personalized Email Marketing: E-commerce websites are utilizing customer data to send personalized email recommendations, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
3. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
AR and VR technologies are making inroads into e-commerce, transforming how consumers interact with products online.
Virtual Try-On: In the fashion and beauty industry, virtual try-on solutions allow users to “try on” clothing, accessories, and makeup virtually, enhancing confidence in their purchase decisions.
360-Degree Product Views: Providing interactive 360-degree product views allows customers to examine products from all angles, improving their understanding of the product’s details.
Virtual Showrooms: VR-enabled virtual showrooms offer immersive shopping experiences, allowing customers to explore and interact with products in a virtual environment.
4. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
Progressive Web Apps are hybrid web applications that combine the best of web and mobile apps. They offer fast loading times, offline accessibility, and enhanced user experiences.
Improved Performance: PWAs load quickly and efficiently, reducing bounce rates and improving user engagement.
Offline Access: Users can access PWAs even when they have no internet connection, making them valuable in regions with unreliable connectivity.
Push Notifications: PWAs can send push notifications to users, re-engaging them and promoting new products or offers.
5. Voice Commerce
Voice commerce, also known as v-commerce, is on the rise. With the proliferation of voice-activated devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home, e-commerce websites are adapting to voice search and shopping.
Voice Search Optimization: E-commerce websites are optimizing their content and product descriptions for voice search to ensure that products are discoverable through voice queries.
Voice-Assisted Shopping: Users can add items to their shopping carts, place orders, and track deliveries using voice commands, simplifying the shopping experience.
6. Checkout Optimizations
The checkout process is a critical area for e-commerce website improvement. Reducing cart abandonment rates and streamlining the checkout process is a top priority.
Guest Checkout: Offering guest checkout options reduces friction for first-time shoppers who may be hesitant to create an account.
Multiple Payment Options: Providing a variety of payment options, including credit cards, digital wallets, and Buy Now, Pay Later solutions, caters to diverse customer preferences.
Abandoned Cart Recovery: Implementing abandoned cart recovery strategies, such as sending reminder emails or offering discounts, can win back potential customers.
Conclusion
As the e-commerce landscape continues to evolve, businesses must adapt to meet the ever-changing needs and preferences of online shoppers. Embracing these e-commerce development trends and technologies can provide a competitive edge, enhance user experiences, and drive growth in the digital marketplace. By staying up-to-date with the latest advancements, businesses can create successful and future-proof e-commerce websites that cater to the demands of today’s tech-savvy consumers.
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seanske · 6 months
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TRENDS IN ICT
Here are a few major trends in ICT, or Information and Communication Technology:
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1. Artificial Intelligence: AI is rapidly growing and being applied to more and more fields. This includes natural language processing, computer vision, and expert systems.
2. Internet of Things (IoT): This is the network of connected devices that can communicate with each other and exchange data. This is a major trend in smart homes and cities, as well as in industries such as manufacturing and agriculture.
3. Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is the ability to store, access, and process data over the internet instead of a local server. This is a trend in both business and personal computing.
4. Big Data: This is the collection, storage, and analysis of large amounts of data from a variety of sources. This is a trend in industry, and it is leading to new advances in AI and IoT.
5. Cybersecurity: This is a growing concern due to the increased number of data breaches and cyber attacks. This is a trend in both public and private sectors.
6. 5G: This is the fifth generation of mobile communication technology. It promises faster speeds and greater bandwidth, which is a trend in mobile computing.
7. Augmented Reality: This is a technology that superimposes virtual objects onto the real world, allowing people to experience "augmented" reality. This is a trend in mobile apps and gaming.
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otpserviceproviders · 9 months
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buygoodsales · 7 months
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How to Get the Best Deals on Products .The Ultimate Guide to Buying Products on Sale .
Know before Buying Products on Sales.
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Buying products on sale is a great way to save money. But with so many sales and discounts available, it can be difficult to know where to start. Here is an ultimate guide to help you find the best deals on products and save money.
Best deals on products Seasonal sales
Many retailers offer discounts on seasonal items during the off-season. For example, you can find great deals on winter clothes in the spring and summer. and also Holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a great time to find deals on a variety of products. Retailers often have clearance sales to get rid of excess inventory. This is a great way to find deals on discontinued items or last-season styles. and  Outlet stores sell discounted merchandise from brand-name retailers. This is a great place to find deals on name-brand products.
Second-hand stores sell used items, including clothes, furniture, and electronics. This is a great place to find deals on gently-used items. Buying products on sale .
Do your research: Before you buy anything, do your research to find out the fair market value of the product. This will help you avoid overpaying. check price on the online platform like Amazon , Flipkart and all . Because to know the price difference from offline retailer and online platform so that you can compare the best product at good price .
Use price comparison tools: There are a number of websites and apps that allow you to compare prices from different retailers. This is a great way to make sure you're getting the best deal. There are many number of the tools which give You the best Analytics graph of price difference so that people can check the price up and down on that product in the online platforms because they want to give you the best .
Sign up for retailer newsletters: Many retailers offer email newsletters that notify you of sales and promotions. This is a great way to stay up-to-date on the latest deals. Here one thing you can also do is giving your Mobile number if you know them or trust them because through this they can send you the message of offers and high sales and Seasonal discount on the each product which help you to reduce the time of research .
Use coupons and promo codes: Many retailers offer coupons and promo codes that can save you money on your purchase. Be sure to check for these before you checkout. Uncover a treasure trove of savings through coupons and promotional codes. Retailers frequently provide these codes, translating into significant price reductions when applied during checkout. Remember to scout for these virtual keys to savings.
Shop around: Don't just buy from the first retailer you see. Compare prices from different stores to make sure you're getting the best deal.
Negotiate: If you're buying a big-ticket item, don't be afraid to negotiate the price. Many retailers are willing to negotiate, especially if you're a loyal customer and Embarking on a significant purchase journey? Don't hesitate to flex your negotiation muscles. Retailers often respond favorably, particularly when dealing with loyal customers. Your prowess in negotiation can unveil hidden discounts.
How to get discounts
Be a loyal customer: Many retailers offer discounts to loyal customers. Sign up for their loyalty program and start earning points or rewards . and Forge a digital connection with your preferred retailers on social media platforms. Their posts often unveil hidden gems – sales and promotions that would otherwise remain concealed. Stay effortlessly updated on the latest deals through these channels.
Use a credit card with cash back rewards: There are a number of credit cards that offer cash back rewards on your purchases. This can be a great way to earn money back on your shopping.
Shop with cashback websites: There are a number of websites that offer cashback rewards when you shop through their website. This is a great way to earn money back on your shopping.
Use a price drop protection service: There are a number of services that will refund you the difference if the price of an item drops within a certain period of time after you purchase it. This is a great way to ensure you're getting the best deal.
Shopping tips
Set a budget: Before you start shopping, set a budget and stick to it. This will help you avoid overspending.
Make a list: Before you go shopping, make a list of the items you need. This will help you stay focused and avoid impulse purchases.
Shop online: Online shopping can be a great way to find deals. Many retailers offer discounts and promotions on their websites.
Shop during off-peak times: Retailers are more likely to offer discounts during off-peak times, such as weekdays or during the off-season.
Conclusion
Embrace Timing Flexibility: Not all sales are born equal. The off-season and weekdays often play host to some of the most remarkable deals. Keep your shopping schedule versatile. Explore Every Avenue: The first option isn't necessarily the best. Allow yourself the luxury of exploring multiple retailers, comparing prices, and ensuring you're capturing the most favorable deal.
Seek Expert Advice: If the path to remarkable deals seems intricate, don't hesitate to seek assistance. Sales personnel possess a wealth of insights that can steer you toward the most lucrative deals. A simple question can lead you in the right direction .By following these tips, you can find the best deals on products and save money. So don't wait any longer, start shopping today!
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foryourbenefit · 7 months
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"Earn Money Through Your Mobile Phone: Atta Poll - Your Opportunity for Extra Income!"
In today's fast-paced world, an increasing number of individuals are seeking opportunities for additional income to enhance their budgets and achieve financial goals. Often overlooked is the fact that technology can be a helpful aid in this endeavor. One such convenient and effective method of earning money through your mobile phone is by participating in paid surveys. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the Atta Poll app, which offers users daily surveys in exchange for supplemental income.
Why Earn Money Through Mobile Surveys?
Earning money through mobile surveys presents a simple way to generate extra income that can be used for various purposes – from covering bills to saving up for a vacation or indulging in small luxuries. It also provides a productive way to utilize spare time that might otherwise be wasted on boredom or unproductive forms of entertainment.
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Atta Poll - Your User-Friendly Survey App
One of the applications that enables individuals to earn money by participating in surveys is Atta Poll. This app has gained popularity among users due to its simplicity, transparency, and long-standing experience in the field. It operates in various markets, allowing users to earn money regardless of their geographical location.
How Does Atta Poll Work?
Registration: After downloading the app from the App Store or Google Play, you can register using your email address or Facebook account.
Daily Surveys: Atta Poll sends you surveys to your phone every day. Completing a survey is straightforward and usually takes just a few minutes. The questions cover a wide range of topics, such as products, brands, services, shopping preferences, and more.
Points for Surveys: For every completed survey, you earn points that can be redeemed for rewards or cash.
PayPal Payouts: A significant feature of Atta Poll is its ability to provide payouts directly to your PayPal account. This means that the accumulated points can be transformed into real money that you can spend or save.
Advantages of Using Atta Poll
User-Friendly Interface: The app is intuitive and easy to navigate, making it accessible to individuals of all technological backgrounds.
Daily Opportunities: The availability of daily surveys means you have the chance to earn extra income virtually every day.
Security: Atta Poll prioritizes user data protection, ensuring a safe experience in today's digital landscape.
PayPal Payouts: The option to receive money in your PayPal account offers a convenient and secure method for receiving your earnings.
In Summary: Earn through Atta Poll by Taking Surveys!
Earning money through mobile surveys is an intriguing opportunity to supplement your income, whether you're a student, a full-time employee, or a retiree. The Atta Poll app allows you to make productive use of your spare time while generating extra income. With the option for PayPal payouts, you have full control over your earnings. Download Atta Poll today and start earning through survey participation – it's an excellent chance to boost your income from the comfort of your own home!
Download the Atta Poll app on your phone and start earning right away!
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coochiequeens · 9 months
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Let’s start with a few facts about “The state of digital in India in 2023” Here There were 692.0 million internet users in India at the start of 2023 when internet penetration stood at 48.7 percent. India was home to 467.0 million social media users in January 2023, equating to 32.8 percent of the total population. A total of 1.10 billion cellular mobile connections were active in India in early 2023, with this figure equivalent to 77.0 percent of the total population,With better access to information online, let’s explore some of the benefits this revolution has brought for women’s empowerment.This internet penetration and expansion of digital reach has helped women in multiple ways — women have developed a greater sense of awareness, Feminist digital platforms, online educational media, instructional blogs and videos, safety apps, and the like, have opened up women to a virtual space that gives them avenues for self-assertion.Let us look at some of these points in greater detail-
Rural Education
To seek real change we must build from the bottom up, as we say, “Real India resides in villages”. mobile technology has brought the world to [women’s’] fingertips, which in turn allows them to stay ahead of current affairs and encourages financial independence by facilitating online transactions (a large number of UPI transactions per month is an example of the same). We must collectively as a society encourage these trends. We do not need to o very far from our home to promote and create awareness about these, something as simple as teaching your domestic helpers to use a smartphone can go a long way in empowering them and their families. Access to information and education is now just a click away. Women do not have to leave their comfort zones or withstand the worst of traveling distances to attend a skill-building program or a workshop they are interested in. Online education has proven to be far more convenient and flexible for women everywhere. Google Meet, Zoom calls, Teams, and several other popular communication technology platforms have made this possible.
Having A Voice
Digital media has encouraged women to speak up and discuss issues that are crucial to their very survival. This has brought topics such as sexual harassment, domestic violence, female sexuality, and the gender divide front and center instead of hidden away behind closed doors with largely men deciding the narrative. Many campaigns have gathered steam thanks to this digital amplification, with the #metoo movement being a prime example of this around the world. This medium has also helped them to spread positive & affirmative initiatives as well
Entrepreneurship
The age of the Internet and e-commerce has created numerous opportunities for women to come into their own and explore business opportunities they never had before. Today women sell their artwork, homemade food, painting, etc across India or the world through marketplace applications, these businesses don’t consume large capital as well, therefore, becoming a nutshell including women with all kinds of unique business ideas, they are executing to perfection from more economical and acceptable within society. In their own homes.
Bringing mothers back into the workforce
Many women voluntarily chose to give up their careers in favor of raising children & other household responsibilities, With digital becoming the primary mode of communication including in the business world, women can more readily balance the demands of motherhood and their jobs from the privacy of their homes, a fine balance between Work from Home and Work from Office. Therefore, longevity & Participationof women in the workforce have increased.
Building community (Feminist digital platforms)
There are women-specific communities on different social platforms be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. These communities connect has given a big boost and freedom for women to share each other’s ideas, raise any concern and create a helping eco system to support. Digital platforms have helped women to also articulate their experiences in words or artistic forms, and share them with the other women of the world.Gender equalityIt is said that if you want to succeed in any field, get that project accepted among women (applicable in most cases) as women form almost ~50% of the world’s population. With digitization increasing, many opportunities are being created in every field for women, some are explained in the above topics, therefore, we have started to see equal participation of women in all walks of life. One of the biggest examples in Tennis is, prize money in all the grand slams has been made equal for both men and women, which used to have a huge disparity. Organizations have been working to bridge the pay gap and become gender-neutral in compensation. Large corporates have already announced equal gender participation in board representation/ composition
Safety apps
Finally yet important is the introduction of safety apps. Technology has made it possible to track the physical and emotional safety of women all the time through the use of safety apps. In times of potential dangers or violence, these safety apps have time and again enabled women to seek the help of family members, neighbors, friends, and even the police. Therefore, these apps have given some assurance to family members, thus allowing women to move around more freely.
Let me play devil’s advocate, it’s not all as rosy as it seems, there are many challenges in empowering women through digitization. Internet penetration among women is low — According to the Mobile Gender Gap Report 2023, compiled by global not-for-profit telecom body GSMA, the gender gap in mobile internet usage in India stood at 40 percent in 2022, as against 41 percent in 2021. Three main reasons for this gap were identified as — Handset cost, Ability to read & write, and awareness to use the internet. As a society, we all need to work toward solving these issues.
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surveyearn24 · 10 months
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Get Install and  register in the credit sesame app
Get Install
Your FREE credit score is just a couple clicks away. We just need your mobile number and SSN to pre-fill your name, address, and birth date
Play now
Because there's no credit check or bank account required, prepaid cards unlock ... Use the Netspend mobile app to access your account virtually anywhere Install the older version( it has to be older than the available version) of the app.
Now tap the app (the app of which you want two versions)
Tap the “Tools” in the drop-down menu.
Select “Clone Application”
Wait for a some time (depends upon app size) and you will see dialog box, where you can go to the cloned file or directly install the clone file.click here
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mariacallous · 30 days
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In 2019, a government contractor and technologist named Mike Yeagley began making the rounds in Washington, DC. He had a blunt warning for anyone in the country’s national security establishment who would listen: The US government had a Grindr problem.
A popular dating and hookup app, Grindr relied on the GPS capabilities of modern smartphones to connect potential partners in the same city, neighborhood, or even building. The app can show how far away a potential partner is in real time, down to the foot.
In its 10 years of operation, Grindr had amassed millions of users and become a central cog in gay culture around the globe.
But to Yeagley, Grindr was something else: one of the tens of thousands of carelessly designed mobile phone apps that leaked massive amounts of data into the opaque world of online advertisers. That data, Yeagley knew, was easily accessible by anyone with a little technical know-how. So Yeagley—a technology consultant then in his late forties who had worked in and around government projects nearly his entire career—made a PowerPoint presentation and went out to demonstrate precisely how that data was a serious national security risk.
As he would explain in a succession of bland government conference rooms, Yeagley was able to access the geolocation data on Grindr users through a hidden but ubiquitous entry point: the digital advertising exchanges that serve up the little digital banner ads along the top of Grindr and nearly every other ad-supported mobile app and website. This was possible because of the way online ad space is sold, through near-instantaneous auctions in a process called real-time bidding. Those auctions were rife with surveillance potential. You know that ad that seems to follow you around the internet? It’s tracking you in more ways than one. In some cases, it’s making your precise location available in near-real time to both advertisers and people like Mike Yeagley, who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies.
Working with Grindr data, Yeagley began drawing geofences—creating virtual boundaries in geographical data sets—around buildings belonging to government agencies that do national security work. That allowed Yeagley to see what phones were in certain buildings at certain times, and where they went afterwards. He was looking for phones belonging to Grindr users who spent their daytime hours at government office buildings. If the device spent most workdays at the Pentagon, the FBI headquarters, or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency building at Fort Belvoir, for example, there was a good chance its owner worked for one of those agencies. Then he started looking at the movement of those phones through the Grindr data. When they weren’t at their offices, where did they go? A small number of them had lingered at highway rest stops in the DC area at the same time and in proximity to other Grindr users—sometimes during the workday and sometimes while in transit between government facilities. For other Grindr users, he could infer where they lived, see where they traveled, even guess at whom they were dating.
Intelligence agencies have a long and unfortunate history of trying to root out LGBTQ Americans from their workforce, but this wasn’t Yeagley’s intent. He didn’t want anyone to get in trouble. No disciplinary actions were taken against any employee of the federal government based on Yeagley’s presentation. His aim was to show that buried in the seemingly innocuous technical data that comes off every cell phone in the world is a rich story—one that people might prefer to keep quiet. Or at the very least, not broadcast to the whole world. And that each of these intelligence and national security agencies had employees who were recklessly, if obliviously, broadcasting intimate details of their lives to anyone who knew where to look.
As Yeagley showed, all that information was available for sale, for cheap. And it wasn’t just Grindr, but rather any app that had access to a user’s precise location—other dating apps, weather apps, games. Yeagley chose Grindr because it happened to generate a particularly rich set of data and its user base might be uniquely vulnerable. A Chinese company had obtained a majority stake in Grindr beginning in 2016—amping up fears among Yeagley and others in Washington that the data could be misused by a geopolitical foe. (Until 1995, gay men and women were banned from having security clearances owing in part to a belief among government counterintelligence agents that their identities might make them vulnerable to being leveraged by an adversary—a belief that persists today.)
But Yeagley’s point in these sessions wasn’t just to argue that advertising data presented a threat to the security of the United States and the privacy of its citizens. It was to demonstrate that these sources also presented an enormous opportunity in the right hands, used for the right purpose. When speaking to a bunch of intelligence agencies, there’s no way to get their attention quite like showing them a tool capable of revealing when their agents are visiting highway rest stops.
Mike Yeagley saw both the promise and the pitfalls of advertising data because he’d played a key role in bringing advertising data into government in the first place. His 2019 road show was an attempt to spread awareness across the diverse and often siloed workforces in US intelligence. But by then, a few select corners of the intel world were already very familiar with his work, and were actively making use of it.
Yeagley had spent years working as a technology “scout”—looking for capabilities or data sets that existed in the private sector and helping to bring them into government. He’d helped pioneer a technique that some of its practitioners would jokingly come to call “ADINT”—a play on the intelligence community’s jargon for different sources of intelligence, like the SIGINT (signals intelligence) that became synonymous with the rise of codebreaking and tapped phone lines in the 20th century, and the OSINT (open source intelligence) of the internet era, of which ADINT was a form. More often, though, ADINT was known in government circles as adtech data.
Adtech uses the basic lifeblood of digital commerce—the trail of data that comes off nearly all mobile phones—to deliver valuable intelligence information. Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks showed that, for a time, spy agencies could get data from digital advertisers by tapping fiber-optic cables or internet choke points. But in the post-Snowden world, more and more traffic like that was being encrypted; no longer could the National Security Agency pull data from advertisers by eavesdropping. So it was a revelation—especially given the public outcry over Snowden’s leaks—that agencies could just buy some of the data they needed straight from commercial entities. One technology consultant who works on projects for the US government explained it this way to me: “The advertising technology ecosystem is the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man. And it wasn’t built by the government.”
Everyone who possesses an iPhone or Android phone has been given an “anonymized” advertising ID by Apple or Google. That number is used to track our real-world movement, our internet browsing behavior, the apps we put on our phone, and much more. Billions of dollars have been poured into this system by America’s largest corporations. Faced with a commercially available repository of data this rich and detailed, the world’s governments have increasingly opened up their wallets to buy up this information on everyone, rather than hacking it or getting it through secret court orders.
Here’s how it works. Imagine a woman named Marcela. She has a Google Pixel phone with the Weather Channel app installed. As she heads out the door to go on a jog, she sees overcast skies. So Marcela opens the app to check if the forecast calls for rain.
By clicking on the Weather Channel’s blue icon, Marcela triggers a frenzy of digital activity aimed at serving her a personalized ad. It begins with an entity called an advertising exchange, basically a massive marketplace where billions of mobile devices and computers notify a centralized server whenever they have an open ad space.
In less than the blink of an eye, the Weather Channel app shares a ream of data with this ad exchange, including the IP address of Marcela’s phone, the version of Android it's running, her carrier, plus an array of technical data about how the phone is configured, down to what resolution the screen resolution is set to. Most valuable of all, the app shares the precise GPS coordinates of Marcela’s phone and the pseudonymized advertising ID number that Google has assigned to her, called an AAID. (On Apple devices, it’s called an IDFA.)
To the layperson, an advertising ID is a string of gibberish, something like bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912. To advertisers, it’s a gold mine. They know that bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 owns a Google Pixel device with the Nike Run Club app. They know that bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 often frequents Runnersworld.com. And they know that bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 has been lusting after a pair of new Vaporfly racing shoes. They know this because Nike, Runnersworld.com, and Google are all plugged into the same advertising ecosystem, all aimed at understanding what consumers are interested in.
Advertisers use that information as they shape and deploy their ads. Say both Nike and Brooks, another running shoe brand, are trying to reach female running aficionados in a certain income bracket or in certain zip codes. Based on the huge amounts of data they can pull from the ether, they might build an “audience”—essentially a huge list of ad IDs of customers known or suspected to be in the market for running shoes. Then in an instantaneous, automated, real-time auction, advertisers tell a digital ad exchange how much they’re willing to pay to reach those consumers every time they load an app or a web page.
There are some limits and safeguards on all this data. Technically, a user can reset their assigned advertising ID number (though few people do so—or even know they have one). And users do have some control over what they share, via their app settings. If consumers don’t allow the app they’re using to access GPS, the ad exchange can’t pull the phone’s GPS location, for example. (Or at least they aren’t supposed to. Not all apps follow the rules, and they are sometimes not properly vetted once they are in app stores.)
Moreover, ad exchange bidding platforms do minimal due diligence on the hundreds or even thousands of entities that have a presence on their servers. So even the losing bidders still have access to all the consumer data that came off the phone during the bid request. An entire business model has been built on this: siphoning data off the real-time bidding networks, packaging it up, and reselling it to help businesses understand consumer behavior.
Geolocation is the single most valuable piece of commercial data to come off those devices. Understanding the movement of phones is now a multibillion-dollar industry. It can be used to deliver targeted advertising based on location for, say, a restaurant chain that wants to deliver targeted ads to people nearby. It can be used to measure consumer behavior and the effectiveness of advertising. How many people saw an ad and later visited a store? And the analytics can be used for planning and investment decisions. Where is the best location to put a new store? Will there be enough foot traffic to sustain such a business? Is the number of people visiting a certain retailer going up or down this month, and what does that mean for the retailer’s stock price?
But this kind of data is good for something else. It has remarkable surveillance potential. Why? Because what we do in the world with our devices cannot truly be anonymized. The fact that advertisers know Marcela as bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 as they’re watching her move around the online and offline worlds offers her almost no privacy protection. Taken together, her habits and routines are unique to her. Our real-world movement is highly specific and personal to all of us. For many years, I lived in a small 13-unit walk-up in Washington, DC. I was the only person waking up every morning at that address and going to The Wall Street Journal’s offices. Even if I was just an anonymized number, my behavior was as unique as a fingerprint even in a sea of hundreds of millions of others. There was no way to anonymize my identity in a data set like geolocation. Where a phone spends most of its evenings is a good proxy for where its owner lives. Advertisers know this.
Governments know this too. And Yeagley was part of a team that would try to find out how they could exploit it.
In 2015, a company called PlaceIQ hired Yeagley. PlaceIQ was an early mover in the location data market. Back in the mid-2000s, its founder, Duncan McCall, had participated in an overland driving race from London to Gambia across the land-mine-strewn Western Sahara. He had eschewed the usual practice of hiring an expensive Bedouin guide to help ensure safe passage through the area. Instead, he found online a GPS route that someone else had posted from a few days earlier on a message board. McCall was able to download the route, load it into his own GPS device, and follow the same safe path. On that drive through the Western Sahara, McCall recalled dreaming up the idea for what would become PlaceIQ to capture all of the geospatial data that consumers were emitting and generate insights. At first the company used data from the photo-sharing website Flickr, but eventually PlaceIQ started tapping mobile ad exchanges. It would be the start of a new business model—one that would prove highly successful.
Yeagley was hired after PlaceIQ got an investment from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Just as it had poured money into numerous social media monitoring services, geospatial data had also attracted In-Q-Tel’s interest. The CIA was interested in software that could analyze and understand the geographic movement of people and things. It wanted to be able to decipher when, say, two people were trying to conceal that they were traveling together. The CIA had planned to use the software with its own proprietary data, but government agencies of all kinds eventually became interested in the kind of raw data that commercial entities like PlaceIQ had—it was available through a straightforward commercial transaction and came with fewer restrictions on use inside government than secret intercepts.
While working there, Yeagley realized that the data itself might be valuable to the government, too. PlaceIQ was fine selling software to the government but was not prepared to sell its data to the feds. So Yeagley approached a different company called PlanetRisk—one of the hundreds and hundreds of tiny startups with ties to the US government dotted around office parks in Northern Virginia. In theory, a government defense contractor offered a more secure environment than a civilian company like PlaceIQ to do the kind of work he had in mind.
PlanetRisk straddled the corporate world and the government contracting space—building products that were aimed at helping customers understand the relative dangers of various spots around the world. For example, a company that wanted to establish a store or an office somewhere in the world might turn to PlanetRisk to analyze data on crime, civil unrest, and extreme weather as they vary geographically.
PlanetRisk hired Yeagley in 2016 as vice president of global defense—essentially a sales and business development job. The aim was for him to develop his adtech technology inside the contractor, which might try to sell it to various government agencies. Yeagley brought with him some government funding from his relationships around town in the defense and intelligence research communities.
PlanetRisk’s earliest sales demo was about Syria: quantifying the crush of refugees flowing out of Syria after years of civil war and the advancing ISIS forces. From a commercial data broker called UberMedia, PlanetRisk had obtained location data on Aleppo—the besieged Syrian city that had been at the center of some of the fiercest fighting between government forces and US-backed rebels. It was an experiment in understanding what was possible. Could you even obtain location information on mobile phones in Syria? Surely a war zone was no hot spot for mobile advertising.
But to the company’s surprise, the answer was yes. There were 168,786 mobile devices present in the city of Aleppo in UberMedia’s data set, which measured mobile phone movements during the month of December 2015. And from that data, they could see the movement of refugees around the world.
The discovery that there was extensive data in Syria was a watershed. No longer was advertising merely a way to sell products; it was a way to peer into the habits and routines of billions. “Mobile devices are the lifeline for everyone, even refugees,” Yeagley said.
PlanetRisk had sampled data from a range of location brokers—Cuebiq, X-Mode, SafeGraph, PlaceIQ, and Gravy Analytics—before settling on UberMedia. (The company has no relation to the rideshare app Uber.) UberMedia was started by the veteran advertising and technology executive Bill Gross, who had helped invent keyword-targeted ads—the kinds of ads that appear on Google when you search a specific term. UberMedia had started out as an advertising company that helped brands reach customers on Twitter. But over time, like many other companies in this space, UberMedia realized that it could do more than just target consumers with advertising. With access to several ad exchanges, it could save bid requests that contained geolocation information, and then it could sell that data. Now, this was technically against the rules of most ad exchanges, but there was little way to police the practice. At its peak, UberMedia was collecting about 200,000 bid requests per second on mobile devices around the world.
Just as UberMedia was operating in a bit of a gray zone, PlanetRisk had likewise not been entirely forthright with UberMedia. To get the Aleppo data, Yeagley told UberMedia that he needed the data as part of PlanetRisk’s work with a humanitarian organization—when in fact the client was a defense contractor doing research work funded by the Pentagon. (UberMedia’s CEO would later learn the truth about what Mike Yeagley wanted the data for. And others in the company had their own suspicions. “Humanitarian purposes” was a line met with a wink and nod around the company among employees who knew or suspected what was going on with Yeagley’s data contracts.) Either way, UberMedia wasn’t vetting its customers closely. It appeared to be more eager to make a sale than it was concerned about the privacy implications of selling the movement patterns of millions of people.
When it came time to produce a demo of PlanetRisk’s commercial phone-tracking product, Yeagley’s 10-year-old daughter helped him come up with a name. They called the program Locomotive—a portmanteau of location and motive. The total cost to build out a small demo was about $600,000, put up entirely by a couple of Pentagon research funding arms. As the PlanetRisk team put Locomotive through the paces and dug into the data, they found one interesting story after another.
In one instance they could see a device moving back and forth between Syria and the West—a potential concern given ISIS’s interest in recruiting Westerners, training them, and sending them back to carry out terrorist attacks. But as the PlanetRisk team took a closer look, the pattern of the device’s behavior indicated that it likely belonged to a humanitarian aid worker. They could track that person’s device to UN facilities and a refugee camp, unlikely locales for Islamic State fighters to hang out.
They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.
There were other oddities. In one data set, they found one phone kept transiting between the United States and North Korea. The device would attend a Korean church in the United States on Sundays. Its owner appeared to work at a GE factory, a prominent American corporation with significant intellectual property and technology that a regime like Pyongyang would be interested in. Why was it traveling back and forth between the United States and North Korea, not exactly known as a tourist destination? PlanetRisk considered raising the issue with either the US intelligence agencies or the company but ultimately decided there wasn’t much they could do. And they didn’t necessarily want their phone-tracking tool to be widely known. They never got to the bottom of it.
Most alarmingly, PlanetRisk began seeing evidence of the US military’s own missions in the Locomotive data. Phones would appear at American military installations such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida—home of some of the most skilled US special operators with the Joint Special Operations Command and other US Special Operations Command units. They would then transit through third-party countries like Turkey and Canada before eventually arriving in northern Syria, where they were clustering at the abandoned Lafarge cement factory outside the town of Kobane.
It dawned on the PlanetRisk team that these were US special operators converging at an unannounced military facility. Months later, their suspicions would be publicly confirmed; eventually the US government would acknowledge the facility was a forward operating base for personnel deployed in the anti-ISIS campaign.
Even worse, through Locomotive, they were getting data in pretty close to real time. UberMedia’s data was usually updated every 24 hours or so. But sometimes, they saw movement that had occurred as recently as 15 or 30 minutes earlier. Here were some of the best-trained special operations units in the world, operating at an unannounced base. Yet their precise, shifting coordinates were showing up in UberMedia’s advertising data. While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.
Initially, PlanetRisk was sampling data country by country, but it didn’t take long for the team to wonder what it would cost to buy the entire world. The sales rep at UberMedia provided the answer: For a few hundred thousand dollars a month, the company would provide a global feed of every phone on earth that the company could collect on. The economics were impressive. For the military and intelligence community, a few hundred thousand a month was essentially a rounding error—in 2020, the intelligence budget was $62.7 billion. Here was a powerful intelligence tool for peanuts.
Locomotive, the first version of which was coded in 2016, blew away Pentagon brass. One government official demanded midway through the demo that the rest of it be conducted inside a SCIF, a secure government facility where classified information could be discussed. The official didn’t understand how or what PlanetRisk was doing but assumed it must be a secret. A PlanetRisk employee at the briefing was mystified. “We were like, well, this is just stuff we’ve seen commercially,” they recall. “We just licensed the data.” After all, how could marketing data be classified?
Government officials were so enthralled by the capability that PlanetRisk was asked to keep Locomotive quiet. It wouldn’t be classified, but the company would be asked to tightly control word of the capability to give the military time to take advantage of public ignorance of this kind of data and turn it into an operational surveillance program.
And the same executive remembered leaving another meeting with a different government official. They were on the elevator together when one official asked, could you figure out who is cheating on their spouse?
Yeah, I guess you could, the PlanetRisk executive answered.
But Mike Yeagley wouldn’t last at PlanetRisk.
As the company looked to turn Locomotive from a demo into a live product, Yeagley started to believe that his employer was taking the wrong approach. It was looking to build a data visualization platform for the government. Yet again, Yeagley thought it would be better to provide the raw data to the government and let them visualize it in any way they choose. Rather than make money off of the number of users inside government that buy a software license, Mike Yeagley wanted to just sell the government the data for a flat fee.
So Yeagley and PlanetRisk parted ways. He took his business relationship with UberMedia with him. PlanetRisk moved on to other lines of work and was eventually sold off in pieces to other defense contractors. Yeagley would land at a company called Aelius Exploitation Technologies, where he would go about trying to turn Locomotive into an actual government program for the Joint Special Operations Command—the terrorist-hunting elite special operations force that killed Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zarqawi and spent the past few years dismantling ISIS.
Locomotive was renamed VISR, which stood for Virtual Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. It would be used as part of an interagency program and would be shared widely inside the US intelligence community as a tool to generate leads.
By the time Yeagley went out to warn various security agencies about Grindr in 2019, VISR had been used domestically, too—at least for a short period of time when the FBI wanted to test its usefulness in domestic criminal cases. (In 2018, the FBI backed out of the program.) The Defense Intelligence Agency, another agency that had access to the VISR data, has also acknowledged that it used the tool on five separate occasions to look inside the United States as part of intelligence-related investigations.
But VISR, by now, is only one product among others that sell adtech data to intelligence agencies. The Department of Homeland Security has been a particularly enthusiastic adopter of this kind of data. Three of its components—US Customs and Border Protection, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the US Secret Service —have bought more than 200 licenses from commercial ad tech vendors since 2019. They would use this data for finding border tunnels, tracking down unauthorized immigrants, and trying to solve domestic crimes. In 2023, a government inspector general chastised DHS over the use of adtech, saying that the department did not have adequate privacy safeguards in place and recommending that the data stop being used until policies were drawn. The DHS told the inspector general that they would continue to use the data. Adtech “is an important mission contributor to the ICE investigative process as, in combination with other information and investigative methods, it can fill knowledge gaps and produce investigative leads that might otherwise remain hidden,” the agency wrote in response.
Other governments’ intelligence agencies have access to this data as well. Several Israeli companies—Insanet, Patternz, and Rayzone—have built similar tools to VISR and sell it to national security and public safety entities around the world, according to reports. Rayzone has even developed the capability to deliver malware through targeted ads, according to Haaretz.
Which is to say, none of this is an abstract concern—even if you’re just a private citizen. I’m here to tell you if you’ve ever been on a dating app that wanted your location or if you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are 24/7, there is a good chance a detailed log of your precise movement patterns has been vacuumed up and saved in some data bank somewhere that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies. It includes foreign governments. It includes private investigators. It even includes nosy journalists. (In 2021, a small conservative Catholic blog named The Pillar reported that Jeffrey Burrill, the secretary general of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, was a regular user of Grindr. The publication reported that Burrill “visited gay bars and private residences while using a location-based hookup app” and described its source as “commercially available records of app signal data obtained by The Pillar.”)
If you cheated on your spouse in the past few years and you were careless about your location data settings, there is a good chance there is evidence of that in data that is available for purchase. If you checked yourself into an inpatient drug rehab, that data is probably sitting in a data bank somewhere. If you told your boss you took a sick day and interviewed at a rival company, that could be in there. If you threw a brick through a storefront window during the George Floyd protests, well, your cell phone might link you to that bit of vandalism. And if you once had a few pints before causing a car crash and drove off without calling the police, data telling that story likely still exists somewhere.
We all have a vague sense that our cell phone carriers have this data about us. But law enforcement generally needs to go get a court order to get that. And it takes evidence of a crime to get such an order. This is a different kind of privacy nightmare.
I once met a disgruntled former employee of a company that competed against UberMedia and PlaceIQ. He had absconded with several gigabytes of data from his former company. It was only a small sampling of data, but it represented the comprehensive movements of tens of thousands of people for a few weeks. Lots of those people could be traced back to a residential address with a great deal of confidence. He offered me the data so I could see how invasive and powerful it was.
What can I do with this—hypothetically? I asked. In theory, could you help me draw geofences around mental hospitals? Abortion clinics? Could you look at phones that checked into a motel midday and stayed for less than two hours?
Easily, he answered.
I never went down that road.
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