SpaceX’s satellite internet service is coming to planes with Starlink Aviation
Internet is provided via the Aero Terminal, seen on top of the aircraft. | Image: SpaceX
SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink will soon be available on select airplanes with the official launch of Starlink Aviation next year, the company has announced. It claims the service will offer internet speeds of up to 350Mbps to each plane equipped with its Aero Terminal, which it says is fast enough for video calls, online gaming, “and other high data rate activities.”
It’s certainly a big leap up from the typical speeds offered by most in-flight Wi-Fi. OneZero reports that most flights either use air-to-ground systems which top out at around 10Mbps per flight (and only work while flying over land), while current satellite systems typically offer between 30Mbps and 100Mbps. Since these speeds are per plane, actual speeds can vary depending on the number of passengers using the internet in each flight.
Support pages on SpaceX’s site claim that its internet connections will be available throughout taxi, takeoff, flight over both land and water, and landing, with latency as low as 20ms. “Starlink Aviation will have global coverage,” an FAQ reads. “Since the satellites are moving in low-earth orbit, there are always satellites overhead or nearby to provide a strong signal at high latitudes and in polar regions — unlike with geo-stationary satellites.” Deliveries are expected to start in mid-2023.
On a recent test flight, Aviacionline reports that Starlink Aviation was able to offer 100Mbps internet speed onboard. The demonstration was conducted on a flight between Burbank and San José, California by JSX, which in April announced it would be one of the first air carriers to adopt the inflight internet service.
In September, JSX CEO Alex Wilcox said he expects to start making it available to passengers this month, and have each one of the company’s planes equipped with the system by the end of the year. Hawaiian Airlines also announced an agreement with Starlink in April, with installation expected to begin next year.
TechScape: Kanye’s dark twisted social media fantasy
The artist now known as Ye wants to buy the ‘free-speech’ social network Parler after being banned from major sites. But hopes for a rightwing splinternet, where anything goes, is not so easy
The purchase by the rapper, who legally changed his name to Ye last year, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.
“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” he said in a statement.
The Competition and Markets Authority told Meta in November that the only way to resolve competition concerns was to dispose of Giphy, the largest supplier of animated gifs to social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, which it acquired two years ago for $400m (£290m).
Meta appealed against the decision, which the regulator said would “protect millions of social media users” and stop Facebook “increasing its significant power in social media”, which was upheld by the Competition Appeal Tribunal on five of the six grounds challenged.
Lyft now lets you reserve parking spaces
The new Lyft parking feature allows users to search for and reserve parking spaces directly within the app. | Image: Lyft
Lyft users can now search, reserve, and pay for parking spaces from the app in cities across the US, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Drivers can access the new Lyft Parking feature by tapping the steering wheel icon located on the bottom-right corner of the Lyft app, according to Lyft’s website.
The parking reservation feature is made possible by a partnership between Lyft and SpotHero, a Chicago-based parking company, and is available through both the iOS and Android versions of the Lyft app.
Image: Lyft
The Lyft parking feature will show available spaces with pricing, much like a hotel reservation.
The SpotHero service is available in over 300 cities across the US and Canada but it’s unclear which cities are covered by the Lyft integration. Lyft only says that “Lyft Parking is currently available in select US markets.”
A demonstration of the new parking feature displays available parking spaces marked on a map with clearly labeled prices, much like an online hotel reservation. Users can search for available space at their final destination and then follow the in-app instructions and scan a QR code to reserve it. Those wanting to use the feature will need to add their license plate number and other car details to the app.
Logitech updates Crayon stylus with the USB-C port missing from the Apple Pencil
The Logitech Crayon, complete with USB-C charging port. | Image: Logitech
Logitech has released an updated version of its Crayon stylus to coincide with the announcement of Apple’s newiPads. The new stylus costs the same as the old model, $69.95, but now features a USB-C charging port rather than Lightning — a helpful change given the 10th-generation iPad’s switch from Lightning to USB-C.
The change means that the Logitech Crayon arguably has a much more elegant charging mechanism than Apple’s first-party $99 Pencil when used with the base-level iPad. Logitech’s new stylus can charge using just the USB-C cable that comes with the tablet — no fiddly USB-C-to-Lightning adapter required. The wirelessly-charging second-generation Apple Pencil isn’t compatible with Apple’s new entry-level iPad.
Apple’s product page notes that the Crayon can go up to seven hours on a single charge, compared to 12 hours for the Apple Pencil. MacRumors also notes that Logitech’s stylus doesn’t have the pressure sensitivity of Apple’s first party model. But when you’re talking about an accessory for Apple’s most affordable tablet range, these kinds of budget-conscious tradeoffs could be worth it.
‘They said: aren’t you that porn star?’ The woman hunting down image-based abuse
Mia Landsem, whose ex spread an intimate photo of her online, now spends hours each day helping others get images removed
“Faces of exes,” Mia Landsem read out loud, as she clicked on a link to a forum exposing intimate images of ex-girlfriends, her frowning brow illuminated by a three-screen computer. On the 25-year-old’s neck, underneath wisps of blond hair, are tattooed reminders in Norwegian to be “brave” and “don’t give a fuck.” An internet security expert by day, by night she has made it her mission to hunt down and report such images from her apartment in Oslo. “I try to focus on the worst ones,” she said. “I can maybe get a few groups removed in a day, but then 20 more appear.”
Digital image-based sexual abuse – a catch-all phrase that includes deepfake pornography, so-called “upskirting” and “revenge porn”, a term rejected by activists for implying the victim has done something wrong – is a global problem on the rise. Almost three out of four victims are women, according to a 2019 study by the University of Exeter. But there are male victims and female perpetrators.
Google TV now lets parents create watchlists for their kids
Image: Google
Google TV added kids profiles to the platform in 2021, giving young viewers their own portal designed to showcase only age-appropriate content. Today, the company is building upon kids profiles with new features, including parent-managed watchlists, recommendations on the homescreen, and supervised usage of the normal YouTube app. All of these software capabilities begin rolling out today and will continue to reach Google TV customers over the next several weeks.
Managed watchlists are exactly what they sound like: parents can add movies and TV shows to a universal watchlist that will appear on the child’s Google TV homescreen. This will make it easy for them to progress from one video to the next. Adding content to a kids profile is simple: just select a movie or TV show as you normally would, press the watchlist button, and choose the right account.
Image: Google
Parents can add age-appropriate content that’s easy for kids to access.
Google is also bringing specific content recommendations directly to the homescreen for kids profiles. Until now, that homescreen has just displayed various kid-friendly streaming apps — but without the actual recs that appear on adult accounts. According to the company, these recommendations are “based on the apps you’ve added and the rating settings you’ve set.” Google notes it’s easy to hide anything you don’t want to appear on the homescreen again.
And lastly, Google is trying to create a natural pipeline for moving young viewers up and onward from YouTube Kids and get them using the regular YouTube app — with adult supervision along the way. “If you have older kids in your home that are ready to move on from YouTube Kids, Google TV now supports a supervised experience on YouTube, so they can start exploring more of what YouTube has to offer with their Google TV kids profile,” Google TV product manager Saleh Altayyar wrote in today’s blog post. “This experience comes with content settings for pre-teens and older, adjusts the features your child can use, and lets you block channels and manage additional controls through the YouTube mobile app.”
Opening up the full YouTube vault to younger users seems like the biggest gamble of Google’s new steps, but there’s nothing forcing parents to take that step until they’re ready. These new kid-centric features come alongside a redesigned Family Link app that Google is introducing today. The new version makes it easier and quicker to find commonly used tools and features, and there’s now a Highlights tab that “shows a snapshot of your child’s app usage, screen time and recently installed apps.”
FedEx is shutting down its robot delivery program
FedEx’s Roxo robot was able to navigate autonomously, but was overseen by human operators at all times. | Image: FedEx
FedEx is stopping development of its last-mile delivery robot, Roxo. The news was first reported by Robotics 24/7, with FedEx confirming to the publication that the company would be shifting focus away from the bot to more “nearer-term opportunities.”
Roxo was announced in 2019 as a collaboration with DEKA, makers of the iBot wheelchair, which used multiple sets of wheels to “walk” up and down stairs, and raise its user from a sitting level to eye-height. Roxo also used multiple sets of wheels to climb steps and curbs. The robot had a top speed of 10mph, a cargo capacity of 100lbs (45kg), and was able to autonomously navigate around cars and pedestrians using cameras and LIDAR sensors. Human operators were used to oversee its movements and steer it manually if necessary.
Image: FedEx
Roxo’s design included a screen to communicate information to passersby.
Fedex’s chief transformation officer, Sriram Krishnasam, announced to staff this week that development of Roxo (part of an internal project named DRIVE) was shutting down.
“Although robotics and automation are key pillars of our innovation strategy, Roxo did not meet necessary near-term value requirements for DRIVE,” wrote Krishnasam, according to internal emails obtained by Robotics 24/7. “Although we are ending the research and development efforts, Roxo served a valuable purpose: to rapidly advance our understanding and use of robotic technology.”
Roxo had been trialled in various locations, including in the US, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan. FedEx said the robot was designed to travel in a three-to-five mile radius of local delivery centers, and previously said its “most advanced testing period” would be in 2021.
Roxo’s closure follows news earlier this month that Amazon is also stopping field tests of its last-mile delivery robot, Scout. Amazon said it’s not stopping development of the robot entirely but merely “scaling the program back.” The company said aspects of the program “weren’t meeting customers’ needs,” but didn’t go into detail as to why.
Nothing hikes price of Ear 1 earbuds by 50 percent
The Ear 1 earbuds released last year for $99. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Nothing is hiking the price of its debut Ear 1 earbuds from $99 to $149, the company’s CEO Carl Pei has announced. Citing “an increase in costs,” Pei said that the new price will come into effect on October 26th. No price changes were announced for Nothing’s more recently-announced Phone 1 smartphone.
In a followup tweet, Pei justified the price increase by noting the amount of development effort that’s gone into the earbuds since their original release last year. “When we started developing it, we only had 3 engineers,” the CEO said. “A year later, we have 185. During this time, the Ear 1 has received 15 firmware and tuning updates, and is a completely different product to when we launched it.”
When we started developing it, we only had 3 engineers. A year later, we have 185. During this time, the Ear (1) has received 15 firmware and tuning updates, and is a completely different product to when we launched it.
Inflation has become a significant problem across many of the world’s largest economies this year, and consumer tech has increasingly been caught in the crossfire. As a London-based company, it’s likely that Nothing has also been hit by the pound’s recent slump in value.
It’s an unfortunate price increase given that a lot of the appeal of the Ear 1 was the amount of functionality it offered at a relatively affordable price.
There’s lithium in them thar hills – but fears grow over US ‘white gold’ boom
The treasured mineral is critical for electric vehicles and could help slow global heating, but locals worry about the harmful extraction near tribal land
Deep in the parched landscapes of Nevada, there is a stirring boom. The mining of lithium holds the promise of a treasured resource that can help slow disastrous global heating.
Spurred by a growing demand for battery parts essential for electric vehicles, the US’s only major lithium mine, in Silver Peak, a remote outpost situated in desert scrub and nascent Joshua trees a three-hour drive north of Las Vegas, is doubling its production.
Noise cameras to be trialled in England to tackle ‘boy racers’
Government-backed scheme aims to crack down on road users who breach legal noise limits
Noise-detecting traffic cameras will be trialled in four areas in England in an attempt to crack down on “boy racers” who rev engines and use illegal exhausts, the Department for Transport has announced.
The so-called noise cameras will be installed on the roadside in Bradford on Tuesday, before a rollout in Bristol, Great Yarmouth and Birmingham over the next two months.
Fortnite’s Halloween update will turn you into a werewolf
Image: Epic Games
Spooky season has arrived in Fortnite. The game’s most recent patch has ushered in Fortnitemares, the annual Halloween event, and it includes the ability to turn into a werewolf.
As part of the update, there’s now a DJ hanging out at the Reality Tree, and players can perform a ritual to get access to an item called “howler claws” that results in the werewolf transformation. (If you don’t play Fortnite, I promise that sentence actually makes sense.) With the claws equipped, you’ll have a sense ability to find other players, a new melee attack, and a double jump. It sounds similar to the wraith-like abilities from 2020.
Elsewhere, the update also brings a new Zero Build version of the classic horde rush mode, the return of Halloween-themed items like candy and a pumpkin launcher, and a handful of quests to unlock free in-game items. Fortnitemares runs from now until November 1st.
Fortnite kicked off its latest season a month ago, and it includes new features like a metallic substance that can turn you into a chrome blob. Throw in werewolves, and Epic’s battle royale is as strange as it’s ever been.
Schneider Electric Ups the Ante on Smart Energy Management
Schneider Electric used Innovation World to announce four new solutions that provide companies with the apparatuses and assistance they need to strategize, digitize and decarbonize their daily operations, hasten sustainability goals and address the current energy calamity. These capabilities eliminate many of the globe's most potent greenhouse gases from energy-based infrastructures. The post Schneider Electric Ups the Ante on Smart Energy Management appeared first on TechNewsWorld.
Kanye West is buying ‘free speech platform’ Parler
Ye at Paris Fashion Week. | Photo by Edward Berthelot/Getty Images
Kanye West, the musician now known as Ye, is buying Parler, a social media platform that styles itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. The acquisition was announced by Parler in a press release, which said that it has entered into an agreement in principle with Ye that’s expected to close later this year.
“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” said Ye in a press statement.
Parler’s parent company Parlement Technologies said the acquisition would help create “an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome.”
Parler’s emphasis on free speech has made it a lightning rod for ring-wing conspiracy theorists. The platform was accused of helping rioters plan and coordinate the storming of the Capitol building that took place on January 6th, 2021. Following the riots, both Google and Apple removed Parler from their respective app stores. Apple cited the “threats of violence and illegal activity” on Parler, and said that the social media network had “not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety.” That same month, Amazon also kicked Parler off its web hosting service.
Parler was later reinstated on both appstores after agreeing to more closely moderate posts. Its website appeared back online in February 2021. Parlement Technologies’ press release notes that it will continue to provide “ongoing technical support” and offer cloud services via its “private cloud and data center infrastructure” after the acquisition. The company has previously suggested these cloud services are “uncancelable.”
In a press statement, Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer said the deal would “change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech.”
Said Farmer: “Ye is making a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again. Once again, Ye proves that he is one step ahead of the legacy media narrative. Parlement will be honored to help him achieve his goals.”
Parler is just one of the social media networks that have sprung up with promises of looser moderation policies compared to more mainstream platforms. Most notably in February former president Donald Trump’s media company launched Truth Social after Trump was banned from Twitter following the Capitol riots.
News of the acquisition comes a little over a week after Ye was locked out of his Instagram account and then Twitter account (the latter for posting an anti-Semitic tweet). “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” Ye wrote in a tweet on October 8th. “The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew.”
In recent years, Ye has expressed increasing support for right-wing causes, but his statements also frequently tip over into controversy and conspiracy. Earlier this month, he was criticized for wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan “White Lives Matter” at Paris Fashion Week and for comments made during a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson. Unaired segments of the interview showed Ye making anti-Semitic statements and espousing various conspiracy theories, including stating that fake children are being used to manipulate his own offspring.
Ye was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2016 and has since spoken openly about his problems with his mental health. In 2019, he said that during manic episodes he becomes “hyper-paranoid about everything, everyone.” Said Ye: “This is my experience, other people have different experiences. Everyone now is an actor. Everything’s a conspiracy.”
Meta’s virtual reality project will finally have legs – literally
Avatars in Mark Zuckerberg’s Horizon have so far hovered above ground with bodies ending at waist
A year after changing its name, the company formerly known as Facebook has revealed its plans to give the metaverse legs – literally.
Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality project is getting a raft of additions including a $1,499 (£1,356) “pro” headset, integration with Microsoft Office and the sitcom The Office, and, yes, the ambulatory appendages.
The Fascinating ESG Difference Between Michael Dell and Elon Musk
Musk, whose Tesla and Hyperloop efforts benefit from the world's focus on sustainability, appears to be anti-sustainability, while Michael Dell, where ESG isn't a natural sales driver for his company, is all in on preserving the planet. The post The Fascinating ESG Difference Between Michael Dell and Elon Musk appeared first on TechNewsWorld.
Android 12 arrives on the two-year-old Chromecast with Google TV
The Chromecast with Google TV 4K, originally released in 2020. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Android 12 is rolling out for the 4K model of the Chromecast with Google TV, 9to5Google reports. The update for the 2020 streaming dongle follows the release of Google’s cheaper HD model last month, which shipped with Android 12 out of the box. To download the update on the 4K dongle, navigate to the profile icon at the top right of the interface, then hit Settings, System, About, and select System Update.
The update doesn’t add any major new features to the two-year-old streaming dongle, but it contains a couple of new settings that should improve playback in certain situations. FlatPanelsHD reports that the biggest is a new frame rate matching feature that should cut down on judder by allowing the Chromecast to match the frame rate of content being played. There are also new settings to control HDR formats and surround sound.
9to5Google also notes that the update lets users cut off camera and microphone access for apps. So if you like to use your Chromecast with Google TV for Duo calls by, say, plugging in a webcam via a USB-C hub, then the new update offers more control over when apps can see and hear you. The release notes also list vague bullets for “increased security and privacy” and “bug fixes and performance improvements.”
Given the relative scarcity of updates for the streaming dongle since its release, any update at all is welcome news. Just don’t expect a complete overhaul.
Dave Scott, the CEO of Comcast’s Spectacor division, announced the shutdown in an internal memo obtained by Deadline before it was even sent, saying that the channel has had low viewership and has not “achieved sustainable financial results.”
I don't have a job anymore! Looking for new opportunities if anyone is interested in a social/digital content producer https://t.co/cgeaOCj7x2
“This is certainly not what we hoped for, and, as a result, we have made the very difficult decision to discontinue G4’s operations, effective immediately,” Scott writes.
G4 made its return last year on several networks, including Comcast / Xfinity, Verizon Fios, Cox, and Philo. It debuted with shows like Attack of the Show, Xplay, and Ninja Warrior, in an attempt to pander to the nostalgia of viewers who tuned into the network two decades ago. The company also had a multi-year agreement with Twitch, where it hosted the occasional stream before its return to linear television.
Scott adds that the company’s human resources team will reach out to staffers on the G4 team to “discuss other opportunities that may be available.”
Mercedes-Benz EQE SUV is a more down-to-earth luxury electric vehicle
The EQE SUV will be out by 2023. | Image: Mercedes-Benz
The Mercedes-Benz EQE has been SUV-ified. The German automaker revealed a higher riding, more utility-focused version of its EQE sedan, and while the price is still being kept under wraps, the EQE SUV is expected to hit US dealerships starting in 2023.
We’ve known that we’d be getting an SUV version of the EQE sedan since it was first revealed last year. Mercedes did the same for its flagship EV, the EQS, coming out with the SUV version earlier this month. It’s the fourth EV to be built on the automaker’s new EV platform.
With the EQE SUV, we’re getting three trim levels — one rear-motor and two dual-motor versions — as well as an AMG performance variant. The main difference between the EQE sedan and its SUV counterpart is size and interior space, with Mercedes positioning it as “the most spacious representatives of its class.”
In fact, the five-seater EQE SUV is more compact than the sedan: at 119.3 inches, it has a wheelbase that is 3.5 inches shorter. This gives it more agility and maneuverability when on the road, the company claims.
Image: Mercedes-Benz
The interior is almost all screen.
The rear-wheel drive launch model of the EQE SUV will use the same 90.6kWh battery pack that powers the base model of the EQS, which the company says will be good for up to an impressive 550 kilometers (341 miles) of driving on a full charge — though that figure is based on the more forgiving European WLTP standard, so a more realistic range estimate will likely be lower.
Still, that’s less range than the EQE sedan, which has a similar battery size but a more aerodynamic shape and smaller wheels, leading to 660 kilometers (410 miles) of range. The EQE SUV will put out 288 horsepower, or 536HP for the all-wheel drive version. The AMG variant will churn out up to 677HP on two electric motors and 21-inch wheels.
Image: Mercedes-Benz
The EQE SUV will get 410 miles of range on a 90kWh battery.
The EQE SUV will feature a 12.8-inch OLED touchscreen in the center dashboard as well as a 12.3-inch instrument cluster behind the steering wheel. The EV will include many of Mercedes’ other luxurious trappings, such as its MBUX digital assistant for help finding charging stations and the like and an HVAC-plus-audio experience that the automaker describes as “Energizing Comfort.” (Think nature sounds.) The EQE SUV will get over-the-air updates and upgrades, too.
In addition to the EQE sedan and EQE SUV, Mercedes is also releasing an electrified G-Wagen in mid-2024. The company says it will go all-electric by 2030, committing to invest €40 billion (about $47 billion) in the effort.
The EQS already looks like a worthy competitor to Tesla’s Model S Plaid — the company said it sold 30,000 EVs between July and September — so the forthcoming EQE and its 2023-arriving SUV version are all about trying to offer a somewhat more affordable and approachable way into what Mercedes-Benz is doing at the high end with its electric cars.
And as long as it executes, the EQE SUV could be a far more promising entrant into the market than some of Mercedes-Benz’s other early attempts, like the EQC, which was full of compromises due to being built on a combustion engine platform instead of being a ground-up electric vehicle — one of the goals that it established when it first revealed the Vision EQS concept in 2019.
Image: Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes has said it will go all-electric by 2030.
Bayonetta actor asks fans to boycott video game over pay row
Hellena Taylor, who voiced title character, says she was offered an ‘insulting’ $4,000 to reprise role
The English actor who stars in the hit Bayonetta video game series has asked fans not to buy the latest release in the franchise, after revealing that she was offered just $4,000 (£3,500) to reprise the role.
In an emotional series of videos posted to social media, Hellena Taylor, who voiced the title character of Bayonetta,said she had been replaced in the forthcoming third game in the series because she the proposed fee was an “insult”.
Microsoft’s out-of-date driver list left Windows PCs open to malware attacks for years
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Microsoft failed to properly protect Windows PCs from malicious drivers for nearly three years, according to a report from Ars Technica. Although Microsoft says its Windows updates add new malicious drivers to a blocklist downloaded by devices, Ars Technica found these updates never actually stuck.
This gap in coverage left users vulnerable to a certain type of attack called BYOVD, or bring your own vulnerable driver. Drivers are the files your computer’s operating system uses to communicate with external devices and hardware, such as a printer, graphics card, or webcam. Since drivers can access the core of a device’s operating system, or kernel, Microsoft requires that all drivers are digitally signed, proving that they are safe to use. But if an existing, digitally-signed driver has a security hole, hackers can exploit this and gain direct access to Windows.
The Microsoft recommended driver block rules page states that the driver block list "is applied to" HVCI-enabled devices.
Yet here is an HVCI-enabled system, and one of the drivers in the block list (WinRing0) is happily loaded.
I don't believe the docs.https://t.co/7gCnfXYIyshttps://t.co/2IkBtBRhkspic.twitter.com/n4789lH5qy
As noted by Ars Technica, Microsoft uses something called hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI) that’s supposed to protect against malicious drivers, which the company says comes enabled by default on certain Windows devices. However, both Ars Technica and Will Dormann, a senior vulnerability analyst at cybersecurity company Analygence, found that this feature doesn’t provide adequate protection against malicious drivers.
In a thread posted to Twitter in September, Dormann explains that he was able to successfully download a malicious driver on an HVCI-enabled device, even though the driver was on Microsoft’s blocklist. He later discovered that Microsoft’s blocklist hasn’t been updated since 2019, and that Microsoft’s attack surface reduction (ASR) capabilities didn’t protect against malicious drivers, either. This means any devices with HVCI enabled haven’t been protected against bad drivers for around three years.
Microsoft didn’t address Dormann’s findings until earlier this month. “We have updated the online docs and added a download with instructions to apply the binary version directly,” Microsoft project manager Jeffery Sutherland said in a reply to Dormann’s tweets. “We’re also fixing the issues with our servicing process which has prevented devices from receiving updates to the policy.” Microsoft has since provided instructions on how to manually update the blocklist with the vulnerable drivers that have been missing for years, but it’s still not clear when Microsoft will start automatically adding new drivers to the list through Windows updates.
“The vulnerable driver list is regularly updated, however we received feedback there has been a gap in synchronization across OS versions,” A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Ars Technica. “We have corrected this and it will be serviced in upcoming and future Windows Updates. The documentation page will be updated as new updates are released.” Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Pushing Buttons: the ghostly echo of games past sustains me
Climbing my first wall in Tomb Raider, playing Sonic the Hedgehog with my dad … snatches of games I’ve played over the years deliver a world unclouded by nagging doubts
It occurred to me recently that I’ve been playing video games for more than 40 years. Sitting on a bus home that evening, I tried to recall my actual real first memories of them. All I could catch were odd scraps. Seeing Pong on a neighbour’s TV, courtesy of a Grandstand 2000 console – I guess that would have been the late 1970s. Playing Space Invaders somewhere – in a pub? A chippy? I remember the first alien laser blast hitting one of my forcefield defences – a memory I possibly share with Hideo Kojima: he said those very shields gave him the idea for making a stealth game.
My memories of Commodore 64 games are similarly fractured. The voice synthesis at the start of Ghostbusters, the knocking at the spaceship door in Rescue on Fractalus!, the microchip mini-game in Paradroid. Little snatches of innovation that took my breath away. To me, the PlayStation/Saturn era is about glimpses of worlds opening up. Spinning through a curve in Colin McRae Rally and seeing the muddy countryside rolling out in front of me. Climbing that first wall in Tomb Raider and stumbling into the cavern network beyond. Those moments you open a new door in the Resident Evil mansion and a scene of opulent horror oozes out, as bright and icky as decaying fruit.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen on the alliance to hold social media accountable: ‘We need to act now’
The former Facebook manager joins the Council for Responsible Social Media, a new coalition created to press big tech to change
Frances Haugen left her role as a product manager at Facebook in 2021, bringing with her a cache of internal documents illustrating allegations of wrongdoing at the company.
But a year later, despite congressional hearings and investigations, Meta has made few meaningful changes to its policies, Haugen says, and as the US midterm elections approach, the stakes are high.
Elon Musk says Starlink will keep funding Ukraine’s government ‘for free’ despite losing money
Laura Normand / The Verge
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reversed his decision to stop funding the Starlink terminals sent to Ukraine, saying on Twitter that the company will continue to provide “free” satellite internet service to the government even if it means the company loses money.
“The hell with it,” Musk writes on Twitter. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”
The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free
On Friday, a report from CNN revealed that SpaceX asked the government if it can pay for any additional terminals sent to Ukraine, as well as for existing internet services. These expenses could reportedly amount to about $124 million by the end of 2022 and nearly $380 million over the next 12 months. Musk later added on Twitter that Starlink can’t fund services in Ukraine “indefinitely,” noting in another tweet that Starlink’s losing about $20 million a month to maintain its services.
According to Musk, Starlink has sent about 25,000 terminals to help Ukraine’s war efforts. The service has played an important role in keeping the Ukrainian military and civilians online during the war, as the country continues to suffer blackouts from Russia’s missile strikes, and the risk of cyberattacks remains high.
Musk faced criticism after polling Twitter users whether Ukraine should achieve “peace” with Russia by surrendering Crimea and other annexed regions. This prompted a reply from Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, who said “fuck off is my very diplomatic reply.” Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov later tweeted that Musk “is among the world’s top private donors supporting Ukraine,” and that “Starlink is an essential element of our critical infrastructure.”
One designer’s quest to build the world’s greatest desk accessories
Jeff Sheldon’s desk is a well-known thing on the internet – now he’s trying to upgrade it.
Ugmonk started as a T-shirt store — now founder Jeff Sheldon is trying to turn it into something much more ambitious. But as he knows, hardware is hard.
Jeff Sheldon’s desk is sort of famous. You might have even seen it before: Sheldon, the founder and CEO of a high-design shop called Ugmonk, uploaded a few photos to Unsplash several years ago, and his ultra-clean setup filled with natural wood and white colors has since been viewed more than 400 million times. People have been asking him for a decade where he got his cool monitor stand, even though it’s actually just an Ikea hack. The desk sits in Sheldon’s home office in suburban Pennsylvania, in the corner of a sun-soaked room with so many windows and so many trees just outside the windows that commenters occasionally ask if he lives in the jungle.
The day I meet Sheldon, he’s looking at that desk from the other side of his home office on a bright, hot day near the end of summer. He’s in jeans and a black T-shirt, and limping ever so slightly thanks to a recent soccer injury. His workspace looks normal enough — a little cleaner than usual, maybe, and Sheldon did just spend a few minutes making sure all the accessories were at perfect 90-degree angles. But a few feet away stand a handful of people and a heaping mound of camera gear. Two of them push a makeshift dolly with a Red camera on it, slowly, steadily in the direction of the desk, as Sheldon walks into frame and sits down. The shot ends in a perfect modern still-life: Sheldon hard at work, his dog Pixel lying on a bed a few feet behind him.
The crew is here to shoot a video for Ugmonk’s latest Kickstarter project for a line of desk accessories called Gather. Gather’s unofficial mission statement is, essentially, that it’s okay to be messy, but it should also be easy to clean up. Sheldon, who has young kids, seems to wage a perpetual battle between his minimalistic and fussy designer tendencies and the simple realities of life. And so Gather is, in one sense, just a set of beautiful containers: a wooden pen holder, a padded stand for your phone, an all-metal bin where you can stash business cards and random detritus, a monitor stand with a dedicated slot for your papers. A place for everything, Gather promises, even if everything’s not always in its place.
For Sheldon, though, Gather is also the most complicated, most ambitious, most difficult thing he has ever made. It’s actually his second attempt to make these kinds of products after the first didn’t go to plan. This time, all the pieces are extremely high quality and extremely high priced. Sheldon admires designers like Dieter Rams, Saul Bass, and Paul Rand and aspires to build things akin to the classic Eames chair. Maybe they won’t be heirloom desk accessories, maybe that’s not even a thing, but Sheldon’s aiming for “definitely heirloom quality.” In a world of cheap crap and planned obsolescence, Ugmonk wants to make things that last as long as you need them.
As the crew resets and director Jon Rothermel watches the footage on a monitor in the hallway, Sheldon obsesses about the details of the shot. He notices the clock on his computer and the clock on his wall are different; will anyone notice? He’s also worried about too many cables being visible and the way the desk shakes when he sits down and the way the sun hits his face when he leans slightly forward and the fact that, whoops, Pixel just left. They do five takes of this shot — which will be the all-important intro for the Kickstarter video — before Sheldon and Rothermel are happy with it.
A few minutes later, after a lot of close-up shots of Sheldon’s desk and the stuff on it, a grand switchover happens. The Ikea-hack monitor stand, the phone holder, the various bins and containers for all of Sheldon’s stuff, almost everything in those viral photos — all gone, all replaced with Gather components. The whole thing feels oddly ceremonious: Sheldon spent years working on a new set of desk accessories but hasn’t upgraded the home office that started it all until right now. His home office and his desk reflect more than a decade of work since he started Ugmonk to sell T-shirts. And now, with a few new pieces, he’s just moved into a new era.
Maybe I’m reading too much into all that. But after spending time with Sheldon, I can tell you confidently he felt it, too. To him, Gather is much more than a bunch of desk accessories.
The Gather pieces include a monitor stand, a headphone stand, and a bunch of organizing tools.
Learn by shipping
Sheldon started a company in 2008 as a side project. He was working full-time at a design firm in Vermont, not making much money and not having much to do thanks to the ongoing recession. Since college, he’d enjoyed entering T-shirt design contests hosted by companies like Threadless, Woot, and DesignByHumans and eventually started to win them. “You’d get, like, $500, and they send you five of the shirts.” In college, this felt like a fair trade, but as Sheldon started to win more often and enter the working world, he realized he was getting the short end of the stick. “They owned all the rights to my artwork,” he says, “and they’re printing five, 10, 15,000 of these shirts, and they’re making all the money. And I’m sitting here with a $500 check.”
Confident that people liked his designs, Sheldon decided to start selling the shirts himself. He borrowed $2,000 from his dad, set up a store on the Big Cartel platform, drew up some new designs in his trademark minimalistic style, printed them onto 200 American Apparel T-shirts, and started posting his stuff in forums and online. He named his shop Ugmonk — a meaningless word that Sheldon doesn’t want to explain because he’s worried people will be disappointed with how boring the story is — mostly because he didn’t want to call it something like “Jeff’s T-Shirt Designs.” He and his wife did most of the shipping, and much of the inventory lived in his parents’ basement.
In 2017, Sheldon decided to take a bigger swing and design a product from scratch. He wanted a place to put his phone, a home for his pens, just a simple organizer to stick behind his keyboard. So he designed a small, modular set, named it Gather, and launched a Kickstarter campaign. Sheldon hoped to get about $18,000 in preorders through the campaign and instead ended up with $430,960. It was a big enough deal that the Shark Tank producers called, he says, though Sheldon had to turn them down since he hadn’t actually made the product yet.
At the time, this seemed like a good problem to have. Sheldon even launched Gather as a separate brand on a separate website, thinking it might be bigger than Ugmonk and could ultimately replace it. He thought Gather might end up in Target. This was going to be huge.
Eager to fill all those orders and capitalize on the interest in Gather, Sheldon turned to a company in Texas that had a factory in China. And he quickly discovered exactly how it works to make products at scale. “We were injection-molding the parts,” he says, “which means the parts cost less than $1, but the molds cost between $20,000 and $30,000.” That meant no small batches, no experiments, only giant orders. The factory in China had never worked with wood before, it turned out, and the first models that came back were warped and wonky and generally nowhere near Sheldon’s standards. So he gave feedback to his contact in Texas, who took that feedback to China, and weeks later, more products showed up at his door. Rinse and repeat, over and over. For months.
Even after all the back and forth, Sheldon estimates now that 30 percent of the products he shipped to Kickstarter backers ultimately had to be replaced. Most users actually liked the product, and he eventually sold out his inventory, but too much of it just wasn’t up to Sheldon’s standards. He thought more than once about just scrapping the whole idea. “I was so disconnected from the process,” he says now. “I didn’t go to the factory, and I should have. I wasn’t the person communicating. I would just wait for photos or prototypes to show up at my house.” He decided, right then and there, that he didn’t want to be a big Target brand if this was what it took.
Gather has been two years in the works, with a huge amount of prototyping with local manufacturers.
“Hardware is hard” is a much-repeated maxim in the tech industry, and for good reason. Countless companies have built and marketed cool prototypes, only to discover that there’s a massive difference between making one product and 100 and an even bigger one between 100 and 100,000. Sheldon learned this lesson every step of the way. One of his first-ever batches of shirts came back unusable, which he says taught him a valuable lesson: “how to eat costs.” As the stakes got higher, he decided the only way to get what he wanted was to exert much more control over the process — and to aspire to making a few great things instead of countless crummy ones.
Even that was harder than it sounded, though. With his next product, a paper-based productivity system called Analog, another Kickstarter hit, Sheldon resolved to think smaller and more locally. He contracted with a printer in Indiana for the cards, hoping working domestically would help. It didn’t. There were just too many orders, and the quality suffered as a result. Sheldon had to throw away most of what was produced — though he kept a few of the failures as a reminder of how things really work. But then, through a friend, Sheldon got connected to a woodworker down the road in Pennsylvania who grew up working for his Amish father’s furniture business and eventually started his own. “They bailed us out of the Analog Kickstarter by replacing all the bad ones,” Sheldon says, “and got us connected to the Amish and Mennonite communities.”
Analog is now Ugmonk’s biggest product — Sheldon says it accounts for about 80 percent of Ugmonk’s sales. But he never stopped thinking about Gather. He still wanted to design desk accessories and had lots of ideas for new components. He found an industrial designer, Jack Marple, who agreed to help him figure out how to design and manufacture desk accessories in a more local, more predictable, higher-end way. They started sending 3D-printed prototypes back and forth and began reaching out to more local shops and fabricators.
They ultimately built a local supply chain, made up of largely Mennonite and Amish manufacturers, who they hoped could make Gather at a much higher quality. But getting up and running took a huge amount of work. A Mennonite-run company that mostly does metalwork for dairy farms agreed to be one of Ugmonk’s suppliers, for instance, but only after some convincing. “They’re making cattle shoots and plow pieces,” Sheldon says, “and I tell them it’s a stand for an iPhone... they still have flip phones.” But once Sheldon told them about the quality and craftsmanship he was looking for, they were in.
Over the last couple of years, Sheldon and his team — which was, for a long time, mostly Sheldon’s wife and family but now includes five part-time helpers and Tim Fortney, who became Ugmonk’s second full-time employee earlier this year — have spent countless hours driving between factories and warehouses, looking at prototypes and endlessly refining the Gather products.
Sheldon and Ugmonk spent years obsessing over every tiny detail of the Gather system.
Sheldon offers one example: “the edges of the metal” for the large monitor stand, he says, “when they came off the laser cutter, [the manufacturers] were doing the bending and the powder coating. Well, if you don’t file the edges just right, the powder coating will stick to the edge. And it’ll glob up and actually accentuate little imperfections.” If you’re cutting metal for a construction vehicle, nobody cares about the globs. But close up, those details matter — at least, they do to Sheldon. So now there’s another step in the process, “where they’ll file all the edges where it gets powder coated.” It’s more work and costs more to do, but for Ugmonk, it’s worth it.
All this makes everything slower and vastly more expensive. Sheldon estimates that building the new generation of Gather this way costs “four or five times” more than doing it the old way, with injection molds in foreign factories. But he likes that he can stand in the factory and watch the test runs happen. He likes being able to take the four or five bad eggs back and have them quickly replaced. “There’s a level of relationship,” he says, “of looking someone in the eye and sitting across the table from someone that you can’t hide from.” He acknowledges he’s a bit of a control freak but says he’s willing to do what it takes — and push others to do the same — to make great stuff. “It doesn’t scale,” he says, “and I’m okay with that.”
Making the Gather video required building beautiful office sets in otherwise rugged spaces.
Embrace the mess
After a few hours of shooting inside Sheldon’s house, the crew finishes by mimicking their opening shot — the slow roll toward Sheldon’s desk — with the full line of new Gather accessories now in place. Satisfied they’ve gotten it right, they relocate to Ugmonk’s new headquarters, a converted paper mill a few miles down the road from Sheldon’s house.
In a backroom of the building, Sheldon and Rothermel have spent weeks building two separate office sets into an otherwise barren and messy concrete space. In one corner, a dark, gamer-style setup with a full suite of black Gather gear. In the other, next to the window, a lighter wall with white accents, plants spilling off of shelves, a pink iMac, and all the white Gather components. Both are clean and camera-ready, at least once Sheldon finishes taping all the cables to walls and table legs. (Yes, he knows accepting some untidiness is part of the point. But he can only take so much.)
The point of these setups is to show how Gather can work for anyone. It drives Sheldon crazy that people are content to prop their monitor on a stack of books or put up with a crappy Amazon Basics laptop stand that is perpetually falling apart. But when he looks around at the people who work on their spaces, he says, caring about your setup is a tech-geek thing, somehow. He wants to bring a design-geek energy to the space.
After a 12-hour day, they’re still not done; another long shoot day follows soon after. Finally, with the video shot, the Ugmonk team spends weeks on every other detail of the launch. They oversee a test run of 30 full Gather sets, in both color options, to see how things come off the manufacturing line. (There are some small defects, like a slightly wobbly headphone stand, but those are quickly fixable.) They touch up the photos, debate the Kickstarter taglines, and sort out the prices. At the last minute, Sheldon remembers he needs to get the project approved by Kickstarter before it can go live, but luckily that goes well.
The Kickstarter launches on October 18th with a modest goal of $12,500. By the end of its first day, it hit $80,000. Sheldon knew this would happen — he just picked a low number because Kickstarter’s recommendation algorithms like projects that crush their goal quickly. By the time the campaign ends in December, he’s hoping for a number closer to $500,000, and if he’s really dreaming, it might even hit seven figures.
It’s a big dream and hardly guaranteed. Even with a Kickstarter discount, the Gather laptop stand is $129, the organizer set is $159, and the full 10-piece set — large monitor stand, laptop stand, organizers, and a magnetic base plate to hold them all in place — is $779. When everything goes on sale in April 2023, that set will cost $1,000. A grand for some desk accessories is a lot to ask.
Sheldon’s confident that people will see the value, though. He has collected a lot of devoted customers over the years — when he announced Ugmonk would stop selling T-shirts, which Sheldon says was because his supplier had become a problem, people flocked to the site to buy as many as they could. What he’s really worried about is whether he can deliver. “What if we get 5,000, 10,000 pieces,” he says, “and they’re all bad?” That would be an expensive and time-consuming problem.
But he has a decade of hard-won lessons in how the industry works and rests secure in the knowledge that, at the very least, that problem would be down the road and not across the world. “We’ve looked everybody in the eye, and we can go there,” he says. “That feels a lot better than the container coming from China, we open up the doors, and we’re like, ‘Oh no.’”
I asked Sheldon if the long-term goal was to become a full-on furniture manufacturer, to move from desk accessories to desks and chairs and tables and everything else. He initially said he might but then immediately began to fret about how the shipping logistics alone would change his small company for the worse. It might be more fun, he says, to find other places where these small things could be useful. “Maybe it goes on your kitchen table or your entry table.”
Then he starts to riff: “I want to do special editions of Gather, like, in a bright orange and just do 100 of them. I want to lean more into the artists’ way of doing it. I could literally just make one.” For him, making one is way more fun than making millions. And he knows exactly how to get it done.
AT&T ‘committed to ensuring’ it never bribes lawmakers again after $23 million fine
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
AT&T Illinois will pay $23 million after it admitted to making payments to former Illinois Speaker of the House Michael J. Madigan’s political ally in return for his “vote and influence over a bill,” according to a Friday press release from the Department of Justice (via Ars Technica). The company will also have to cooperate with the government’s investigation into the alleged misconduct and will have to set up a compliance and ethics program that the government will receive reports on. If the company keeps up its end of the bargain, the government will dismiss its prosecution.
According to the DOJ, in 2017 AT&T paid one of Madigan’s allies $22,500 through a lobbying firm that it worked with. AT&T employees tried to make it seem as if the ally had been hired for a specific purpose, but the person wasn’t actually expected to do any work. The president of AT&T Illinois was aware of the deal, and signed off on it being done covertly through the firm, saying in an email that the method was okay “as long as you are sure we will get credit and the box checked.” (In other words, as long as Madigan and his cohorts knew the company had scratched their backs.)
According to Ars Technica, AT&T Illinois was trying to influence a bill that would let it off the hook for providing landline telephone service to everyone in the state. The bill ended up passing, with the state house and senate voting to override the governor’s veto.
An unnamed AT&T spokesperson told Ars Technica: “We hold ourselves and our contractors to the highest ethical standards. We are committed to ensuring that this never happens again.” Given the hefty compliance program it signed with the government (the details take up seven pages in a document posted by the Department of Justice, and you can read them all below if you really feel like it), you’d hope that wouldn’t be the case.
Of course, that’s not to say that AT&T won’t try to use money to influence politics; it, along with other carriers and ISPs, spend millions in donations and lobbying to try and make sure the government passes laws that benefit them. All that’s usually above board, though; just don’t try to directly buy votes via a shady deal.
Peter Thiel’s midterm bet: the billionaire seeking to disrupt America’s democracy
Re-energized this election cycle, the tech entrepreneur joins other mega-donors apparently out to undercut the political system
Peter Thiel is far from the first billionaire who has wielded his fortune to try to influence the course of American politics. But in an election year when democracy itself is said to be on the ballot, he stands out for assailing a longstanding governing system that he has described as “deranged” and in urgent need of “course correction”.
The German-born investor and tech entrepreneur, a Silicon Valley “disrupter” who helped found PayPal alongside Elon Musk and made his fortune as one of the earliest investors in Facebook, has catapulted himself into the top ranks of the mega-donor class by pouring close to $30m into this year’s midterm elections.
Peter Thiel, Major U.S. Political Donor, Is Said to Pursue Maltese Citizenship Obtaining citizenship in Malta would provide another passport for Mr. Thiel, who is one of the largest individual donors for the U.S. midterm elections.
The quirks and oddities of a social network affect the community that grows up around it. Instagram’s lack of a repost feature pushed users to rely on hashtags to spread their pictures across the network, sowing the seeds of the heavily interest-based communities that still live there today. The anonymity offered by 4chan lead, perversely, to a uniformity of tone, as users conform to the zeitgeist of the site, unable to build a name for themselves as an individual. TikTok – built by people who knew what they were doing – carefully sculpted its quirks to nudge users in its preferred direction, boosting harmless dance trends and discouraging political rants of the sort that litter competitor YouTube.
Over the years, some of the largest social networks have filed those quirks off, pushing for a homogeneity that is more accessible to all, even at the expense of what makes them unique. Twitter’s strict text-only, reverse-chronological, 140-character timeline is now algorithmically curated, offering 280 characters plus a range of multimedia; Instagram posts can be reshared in Snapchat-style stories, which can also contain TikTok-style videos; TikTok pivoted towards political content and now plays a leading role in the culture wars.
“No modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with ‘go nuts, show nuts’ in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible.”
Apple Store workers in Oklahoma vote to unionize
Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Workers at Apple’s Penn Square store in Oklahoma City have voted to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, with 56 yeses, and 32 nos. According to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversaw the election, all regular full-time and part-time employees at the store were eligible to vote, 95 in total.
The election was only the second one carried out for a US Apple store. In June, workers in Maryland voted to unionize in association with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Another election was scheduled to happen in Atlanta, but the CWA called it off, claiming that the company had made a fair election “impossible” by intimidating workers.
Apple has faced several complaints about anti-union tactics, including in Oklahoma — earlier this month, the CWA filed charges against the company with the NLRB. According to the union, Apple interrogated and surveilled workers at the Penn Square store, held captive audience meetings (even during the busy iPhone 14 Plus launch day, according to a report from Public Radio Tulsa), and told that they wouldn’t receive the same benefits as non-unionized stores if they voted to organize. The latter point has been backed up by a report from Bloomberg that said Apple told employees at the unionized store in Maryland that they’d have to bargain for benefits being given to workers at its other stores.
Apple Store in Oklahoma City Becomes Second to Unionize Workers said pay was adequate and benefits were good, but complained that managers’ practices often seemed arbitrary.
A tweet about hair relaxer kits connected models from the boxes with women who grew up seeing them
A burst of tweets from women who, as children, modeled for relaxer brands is one of the latest instances of the Black Twitter community finding an unexpected connection and reminiscing over a shared experience.
The discussion kicked off after @prettiestluxury tweeted a collage of models who posed on a box of no-lye relaxer saying, “I remember wanting to be the face of a hair relaxer so bad.” That was followed by a quote tweet asking these women to “show themselves,” which became the centerpiece of a wider trend.
Jaelyn Evans, who was a model on ORS’ Olive Oil Girls No-Lye Relaxer box, said that she has since gone natural. Nomsa Sasa Madida, a makeup artist, also posted a photo update on Twitter showing prominent braids that she’s now wearing long after posing for a relaxer brand.
One connection people quickly made from the posts is that nearly all of the relaxer models appear to have decided to stop using those products and instead now have natural hairstyles. Going through the tweets, I thought most of all about how much I had wanted to achieve the same styles shown in the pictures.
The conversations caught my eye as so many women reminisced on the days when they used relaxer products. Though it’s been five years since I used a relaxer on my hair, the first thing that came to mind was the memory of going to the beauty supply store and seeing the boxes lined up with the models on the front.
Tarkor Zehn, an audio producer here at Vox Media, recalled what she felt when she came across the tweet thread:
I thought it was adorable! It was the best “where are they now” that I never knew I needed. It was super interesting to see how the vast majority of them had either transitioned to being natural or a few of them had alway been natural in the first place. Truly a direct representation on the evolution of Black hair and the impact of the natural hair movement.
BuzzFeed caught up with some of the models who shared some of their experiences and some details about where they are today. While some women in the threads said they hadn’t used the products they were posing for, all of the models quoted by BuzzFeed said that wasn’t the case for them.
A tweet from @chigirlmakeup read, “I heard y’all were looking for the hair box girls...here I go I was the original ORS perm box girl,” showed the box model posing with her natural hair in a photo collage next to a box of Olive Oil ORS relaxer. She followed up on her tweet saying that she’s been natural for over 10 years and modeled when she was in her early twenties.
The journey from pursuing those looks to presenting the world with braids, curls, and other styles based on how our hair looks naturally was a common thread among the models and the people who were happy to see them come on their timelines.
Ransomware hunters: the self-taught tech geniuses fighting cybercrime – podcast
Hackers are increasingly taking users’ data hostage and demanding huge sums for its release. They have targeted individuals, businesses, vital infrastructure and even hospitals. Authorities have been slow to respond – but there is help out there
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