IBM, one of several big tech companies selling facial recognition programs, is calling on Congress to regulate the technology -- but not too much. From a report: China has built a repressive surveillance apparatus with facial recognition; now, some U.S. cities are rolling it out for law enforcement. But tech companies worry that opponents will react to these developments by kiboshing the technology completely. IBM's proposal joins calls for federal facial recognition regulations from Microsoft, Amazon and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Big Tech is threatened by a yearlong groundswell of bans and proposed restrictions on facial recognition bubbling up in cities like San Francisco and states like Massachusetts. The companies say these moves would cut off beneficial uses of the technology, like speeding up airport security or finding missing children.

In a white paper, IBM is calling for what it calls "precision regulation." That means limiting potentially harmful uses rather than forbidding use of the technology entirely. IBM proposes treating various kinds of facial recognition differently. Face detection software, which simply counts the number of faces in the scene, is less prone to abuse than face matching, which can pick specific people out of a crowd. "There will always be usecases that will be off limits," IBM Chief Privacy Officer Christina Montgomery tells Axios. "That includes mass surveillance and racial profiling."

David Ruddock of AndroidPolice technology blog tries to make sense of last week's $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit by Google. He argues that Fitbit's offerings -- hardware, software, engineering talent, or even patent wall -- can't save Google's wearable operating system Wear OS. From his column: Hardware is what Google is after, with a blog post cleatly stating its acquisition of Fitbit is about future Wear OS devices, meaning you can probably kiss Fitbit's unloved smartwatch OS goodbye. So, that means we can count on Google leveraging Fitbit's renowned hardware to finally give Wear OS the horsepower and capabilities it needs to compete with Apple, right? Well, no. Fitbit's smartwatches have been most lauded for their long battery life, which has historically been enabled by extremely slow but highly power-efficient processors. The Versa 2 allegedly comes with significant performance improvements, but as a smartwatch, it just isn't very... smart. Michael Fisher points out in his review that the Versa 2's near week-long life on a single charge is only impressive when looked at in a very generous light. The Versa 2 doesn't have GPS, the battery only lasts that long when not using the always-on display (with AoD, it's closer to 3 days), the watch itself doesn't work for almost anything but fitness tracking on its own, and most of your interactions with it end up happening on your smartphone anyway. I can also tell you from experience that the Apple Watch Series 5 lasts about two days on a charge with the always-on display enabled (and Samsung's watches last even longer), so Fitbit managing a day more which a much less useful watch isn't exactly game-changing technology.

In short, Fitbit's products are not ones Google should be excited about buying. The hardware is nothing special, and the software is clearly going in the dumpster. What has Google bought, then? The sad, very practical truth is probably patents and engineers. Fitbit does develop at least some of its hardware in-house, and likely has a decent number of patents related to fitness tracking and basic wearable technology, including those stemming from its acquisition of Pebble. Its product engineers would receive resources and tools at Google that Fitbit may not have afforded them. In short: Google's purchase is almost certainly a speculative one. Google is hoping that Fitbit's technology portfolio and its engineering talent can create a better, faster, stronger Wear OS watch. That isn't the kind of acquisition that screams "our product is successful," it's one that looks far more like a Hail Mary from a company that is rapidly losing any hope of remaining relevant in the wearables space. A more cynical view of Google's acquisition might argue that this is more about Fitbit's brand and users than anything else. If Google simply markets its in-house smartwatches as Fitbits running Wear OS, it would be more able to tap into Fitbit's existing customer base and retail relationships. Customer base is something Wear OS is sorely missing at the moment, and Fitbit is a brand that many consumers recognize, albeit mostly for the company's "dumb" fitness trackers, not its smartwatches. Speaking of, given Google's focus on Wear OS as part of this acquisition, my guess is that those more popular but very basic trackers will be discontinued.

A bug in Apple's App Store removed more than 20 million ratings from apps both big and small. "The issue began on October 23, 2019 and wasn't resolved until yesterday, October 29," reports TechCrunch. "Apple hasn't yet explained how such a sizable and impactful change to app ratings occurred." From the report: This massive ratings drop was spotted by the mobile app insights platform Appfigures. The firm found that more than 300 apps from over 200 developers were affected by the sweep, which wiped out a total of 22 million app reviews from the App Store. On average, apps saw a 50% decrease in ratings in the affected countries, which included the U.S.

The U.S. was hit the hardest, however, as some 10 million ratings disappeared. But the sweep was global in nature, hitting all 155 countries Apple supports. China, the U.K., South Korea, Russia and Australia also felt a noticeable impact. A few apps were hit harder than others. Hulu, for example, lost a whopping 95% of ratings in the U.S., while Dropbox and Chase lost 85%. Several companies affected by the bug declined to comment, but told us that the rating removals weren't done at their request -- they were just as surprised as everyone else. Of the more than 300 apps that got hit, about half (154) saw a drop of more than 100 ratings, Appfigures said. Some of the impacted companies (and Appfigures) confirmed to TechCrunch the missing ratings were restored as of yesterday.

Software developer Chris Krycho writes: Over the past few months, I have been trying to get up to speed on the Apple developer ecosystem, as part of working on my rewrite project. This means I have been learning Swift (again), SwiftUI, and (barely) the iOS and macOS APIs. It has been terrible. The number of parts of this ecosystem which are entirely undocumented is frankly shocking to me. Some context: I have spent the last five years working very actively in the JavaScript front-end application development world, working in first AngularJS and then Ember.js. Ember's docs once had a reputation of being pretty bad, but in the ~4 years I've been working with it, they've gone from decent to really good. On the other hand, when I was working in AngularJS 5 years ago, I often threw up my hands in quiet despair at the utter lack of explanation (or, occasionally, the inane explanations) of core concepts. I thought that would have to be the absolute worst a massive tech company (in that case, Google) providing public apis could possibly do. I was wrong.

The current state of Apple's software documentation is the worst I've ever seen for any framework anywhere. Swift itself is relatively well covered (courtesy of the well-written and well-maintained book). But that's where the good news ends. Most of SwiftUI is entirely undocumented -- not even a single line explanation of what a given type or modifier does. Swift Package Manager has okay docs, but finding out the limits of what it can or can't do from the official docs is difficult to impossible; I got my ground truth from Stack Overflow questions. I've repeatedly been reduced to searching through WWDC video transcripts to figure out where someone says something relevant to whatever I'm working on. Several people have complained in recent years that Apple's documentation is often incomplete or missing altogether. A developer has tried to figure out. Accidental Tech Podcast, a popular podcast that talks about Apple's ecosystem, discussed the issue in a recent episode.

'Spacetime foam' might just be the wildest thing in the known universe, and we're just starting to understand it. From a report: A persistent cosmological puzzle has been troubling physicists since 1917: what is the universe made of? Complicating this already-mind-boggling question is the fact that our best theories conflict with our observations of the universe. Albert Einstein, according to scientific folklore, felt a unique responsibility for introducing this entire problem, reportedly referring to it as his "biggest blunder." Essentially, Einstein's novel theory of general relativity didn't hold up when used to describe the universe as a whole. General relativity described the "geometry" of spacetime as being a trampoline-like surface; planets are heavy bowling balls that distort the surface, creating curves. If a less heavy ball (like a marble) was placed near the bowling ball, it would roll along the surface just like the motion of planets in orbit. Thus, orbits are explained not by a gravitational "force" but by curvature in spacetime.

This proposal worked when considering small regions of spacetime. But when Einstein applied it to the entire universe, its predictions didn't fit. So, Einstein introduced the "cosmological constant," a fixed value that represents a kind of anti-gravity, anti-mass, and anti-energy, counteracting gravity's effects. But when scientists discovered that the universe was expanding rather than static, as Einstein had believed, the cosmological constant was set to zero and more or less ignored. After we learned that the universe's expansion is accelerating, however, scientists could no longer conveniently cancel out Einstein's anti-gravity suggestion. What was previously assumed to be empty space in the universe now had to be filled with huge amounts of mysterious anti-energy in order to explain observations of the universe's ever-quickening expansion. Even so, observations of the universe's expansion suggest that the energy is 60 to 120 orders of magnitude lower than what recent quantum field theory predicts.

What this means is that all of this extra energy is somehow missing when we look at the universe as a whole; either it's effectively hidden or very different in nature to the energy we do know about. Today, theoretical physicists are trying to reconcile these mysteries by examining the structure of so-called "spacetime" in the universe at the smallest possible scale, with surprising findings: spacetime might not be the trampoline-like plane scientists once envisioned -- it might be a foamy mess of bubbles all containing mini-universes living and dying inside our own.

After a 2013 factory collapse killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh, most of the biggest U.S. apparel retailers joined safety-monitoring groups that required them to stop selling clothing from factories that violated certain safety standards. Amazon didn't join. The Wall Street Journal reports: According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, the site today offers a steady stream of clothing from dozens of Bangladeshi factories that most leading retailers have said are too dangerous to allow into their supply chains. A yellow gingham toddler top embroidered with flowers was among those clothes, listed on Amazon for $4.99 by a New York City retailer. The Journal traced the top to a factory in Chittagong, Bangladesh, that has no fire alarms and where doors are of a type managers can lock and keep workers in. A laborer at the factory, 18-year-old Nasreen Begum, said she spends 12-hour days there stitching shirts with 300 others. "You're trapped inside until the time you complete the orders," she said.

The Journal found other apparel on Amazon made in Bangladeshi factories whose owners have refused to fix safety problems identified by two safety-monitoring groups, such as crumbling buildings, broken alarms, and missing sprinklers and fire barriers. U.S. retailers such as Walmart, Target, Costco Wholesale and Gap have agreed to honor bans imposed by those two groups, to have their supply chains inspected and to disclose to the groups the factories that supply them. The Journal found clothing including pants, sweaters, clerical robes, fishnet body stockings and other items, that originate from blacklisted factories and end up on Amazon.

Counterfeits aren't the only problem when shopping on Amazon, reports CNBC. The grocery section is "littered" with expired foods. From baby formula and coffee creamer to beef jerky and granola bars, items are arriving spoiled and well past their sell-by date, Amazon customers say. Interviews with brands, consumers, third-party sellers and consultants all point to loopholes in Amazon's technology and logistics system that allow for expired items to proliferate with little to no accountability.

Consumer safety advocates worry that as the marketplace grows, the problem will only get worse...

CNBC scanned the site's Grocery & Gourmet category, finding customer complaints about expired hot sauce, beef jerky, granola bars, baby formula and baby food, as well as six-month-old Goldfish crackers and a 360-pack of coffee creamer that arrived with a "rancid smell." A data analytics firm that specializes in the Amazon Marketplace recently analyzed the site's 100 best-selling food products for CNBC and found that at least 40% of sellers had more than five customer complaints about expired goods....

Amazon's spokesperson said the company uses a combination of humans and artificial intelligence to monitor the 22 million-plus pieces of customer feedback received weekly for product quality and safety concerns... Sarah Sorscher of the Center for Science in the Public Interest says Amazon's technology is clearly coming up short. "Expiration dates are a red flag for what else is harder to see," she said. "If you can't do something as basic as check an expiration date, then what else are you missing...? They've chosen to set up a business model where they don't take responsibility for the food that they sell," said Sorscher. "Traditional grocery stores have a lot of products, but they don't put it on the shelf if it's not safe."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Yannis Assael at DeepMind and his colleagues trained a neural network, a type of AI algorithm, to guess missing words or characters from Greek inscriptions, on surfaces including stone, ceramic and metal, that were between 1500 and 2600 years old. The AI, called Pythia, learned to recognize patterns in 35,000 relics, containing more than 3 million words. The patterns it picks up on include the context in which different words appear, the grammar, and also the shape and layout of the inscriptions.

Given an inscription with missing information, Pythia provides 20 different suggestions that could plug the gap, with the idea that someone could then select the best one using their own judgement and subject knowledge. "It's all about how we can help the experts," says Assael. To test the system, the team hid nine letters of a Greek personal name from Pythia. It managed to fill in the blanks. In a head-to-head test, where the AI attempted to fill the gaps in 2949 damaged inscriptions, human experts made 30 per cent more mistakes than the AI. Whereas the experts took 2 hours to get through 50 inscriptions, Pythia gave its guesses for the entire cohort in seconds. The arXiv paper is available here.

McGruber shares a report from Deseret News, a newspaper published in Salt Lake City: The body of Erin Valenti, a tech entrepreneur who had been missing since Monday, was found Saturday in the trunk of her rental car. The 33-year-old Valenti was the CEO of Utah-based Tinker Ventures, a company that develops web and smartphone applications.

In a Wednesday Facebook post, Valenti's husband, Harrison Weinstein, wrote that she had been missing since Monday night and was last seen in Palo Alto Monday afternoon and was wearing "torn jeans and a white T-shirt." Valenti was scheduled to receive an award at an event Wednesday hosted by Utah-based Women Tech Council but never appeared at the event in Salt Lake City, according to organizers. Police said the Santa Clara County Coroner's Office will determine the manner and cause of death and have not released any further details on the incident.

iPhone users in Hong Kong have noticed a change in the latest version of iOS: the Flag for Taiwan emoji is missing. From a report: Previously restricted on Chinese iOS devices, all other regions of the world have continued to enjoy access to all flags in the iOS emoji font, until now. The change, first discovered by iOS Developer Hiraku Wang, means that users with an iOS device region set to Hong Kong will see one less flag on the emoji keyboard than if the region is set to anywhere else in the world (other than China mainland, which also hides this flag). Notably, the emoji Flag: Taiwan is still supported by iOS in Hong Kong. As of iOS 13.1.2, released last week, this is now hidden from the emoji keyboard but remains available by other means. Apple's Hong Kong approach differs from the complete ban on the emoji in China. Any iPhone purchased in China, or purchased elsewhere with the region set to China mainland, replaces the flag of Taiwan with a missing character tofu so it cannot be used or displayed in any app, even via copy and paste.

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Babies in the womb have extra lizard-like muscles in their hands that most will lose before they are born, medical scans reveal. They are probably one of the oldest, albeit fleeting, remnants of evolution seen in humans yet, biologists say, in the journal Development. They date them as 250 million years old -- a relic from when reptiles transitioned to mammals. It is unclear why the human body makes and then deletes them before birth. The biologists say the developmental step may be what makes thumbs dextrous. Thumbs, unlike other digits, retain an extra muscle.

The biologists are planning more work looking at other parts of the human body in detail. They have already studied the feet and know extra muscles develop and disappear there too while babies grow in the womb. Monkeys and apes still have these muscles and use them to climb and manipulate objects with their feet. Lead author Dr Rui Diogo, from the Howard University, said: "Some of the things we are losing, it's not that we are getting better humans and more progress. No. We are really losing things that will make super-humans. "Super-humans would be keeping those muscles because you would be able to move all your digits, including your feet, as thumbs. "We lost them because we do not need them." Dr Sergio Almecija, an anthropologist who studies ape and human evolution, at the American Museum of Natural History, said the findings provided a deeper appreciation of human development but raised many questions.

"The novelty of this study is that it allows us to visualize -- with precision -- when exactly during our development some structures appear and/or disappear," he said. "The important question for me now is, 'What else are we missing? What will we find when all the human body is inspected at this detail during its development?" 'What is causing certain structure to disappear and then to appear again? We can now see how it happens but what about the why?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to video games and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media. Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 41% of teenage boys said they spend too much time playing video games while only 11% of girls said they do. Marc Potenza, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, teamed up with researchers at universities in China to find out why. Using functional MRIs, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, the team studied neural responses in young male and female gamers, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing and craving -- a motivating factor in addiction. When the men and women were shown photos of people playing video games, those parts of the men's brains showed higher levels of activation than those parts of the women's brains. Brain regions that have been implicated in drug-addiction studies also were shown to be more highly activated in the men after gaming. The researchers said the results suggest men could be more biologically prone than women to developing internet gaming disorder.

But girls and women aren't free from problems when it comes to digital media. Data from Pew shows that, in general, women use social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest far more than men. Many girls and women are drawn to those photo-sharing sites because they like to form bonds and find similarities, says Rosanna Guadagno, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Even if women only use those sites more than men because that is where their friends are, many experts and parents say they have found that girls appear to have a greater fear of missing out, which compels them to keep up with what their friends are posting. Some recent studies show that girls feel the ill effects of too much social media use, such as depression and anxiety, more than boys do.

India is planning to set up one of the world's largest facial recognition systems, potentially a lucrative opportunity for surveillance companies and a nightmare for privacy advocates who fear it will lead to a Chinese-style Orwellian state. Bloomberg reports: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government will open bids next month to build a system to centralize facial recognition data captured through surveillance cameras across India. It would link up with databases containing records for everything from passports to fingerprints to help India's depleted police force identify criminals, missing persons and dead bodies. The government says the move is designed to help one of the world's most understaffed police forces, which has one officer for every 724 citizens -- well below global norms. It also could be a boon for companies: TechSci Research estimates India's facial recognition market will grow sixfold by 2024 to $4.3 billion, nearly on par with China.

But the project is also ringing alarm bells in a nation with no data privacy laws and a government that just shut down the internet for the last seven weeks in the key state of Kashmir to prevent unrest. While India is still far from implementing a system that matches China's ability to use technology to control the population, the lack of proper safeguards opens the door for abuses.

The remains of a man who went missing two decades ago in Florida have been found in a submerged car visible on Google Maps. The BBC reports: William Moldt, 40, was reported missing from Lantana, Florida, on November 7, 1997. He failed to return home from a night out at a club when he was 40 years old. A missing person investigation was launched by police but the case went cold. On August 28 this year -- 22 years on -- police were called to reports of a car found in a pond in Moon Bay Circle, Wellington.

When the vehicle was pulled from the water, skeletal remains were found inside. One week later the remains were positively identified as belonging to Mr Moldt. A report by the Charley Project, an online database of cold cases in the U.S., said "a property surveyor saw the car while looking at Google Earth." "Amazingly, a vehicle had plainly [been] visible on a Google Earth satellite photo of the area since 2007, but apparently no-one had noticed it until 2019," according to the report. What appears to be a silver car submerged in the pond can still be viewed on Google Maps.

In a direct and urgent call to address gun violence in America, the chief executives of some of the nation's best-known companies sent a letter to Senate leaders on Thursday, urging an expansion of background checks to all firearms sales and stronger "red flag" laws. From a report: "Doing nothing about America's gun violence crisis is simply unacceptable and it is time to stand with the American public on gun safety," the heads of 145 companies, including Levi Strauss, Twitter and Uber, say in the letter [PDF], which was shared with The New York Times. The letter -- which urges the Republican-controlled Senate to enact bills already introduced in the Democrat-led House of Representatives -- is the most concerted effort by the business community to enter the gun debate, one of the most polarizing issues in the nation and one that was long considered off limits. The debate and the decision to sign -- or not sign -- are a case study in how chief executives must weigh their own views and the political risks to their businesses. Missing from the list, however, are some of America's biggest financial and technology companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

Microsoft's 2019 summer interns have created Microsoft: the Musical, an 8-minute video whose director describes it as "a Tony Awards-style musical theater opening number."

Long-time Slashdot reader Your Average Joe shared the Verge's article about the video: 150 full-time employees and interns at Microsoft have volunteered their mornings, weekends, and nights to create a Microsoft musical video. The video was shot in various buildings at Microsoft's corporate campus in Redmond, Washington and it features interns and staff members singing and dancing about how it's "all happening here."

It starts off with a section about co-founder Bill Gates, before some classic lines like "all around the world our products are well known, except for when we tried to make a phone!" The musical even briefly acknowledges the company missing a beat with Vista, and features former CEO Steve Ballmer's famous "developers, developers, developers" chant.
The video's description on YouTube says the music is "coming soon" to Apple's iTunes store as well as Spotify.

Directed by one of Microsoft's data science interns, it opens with a narrator remembering that "There once was a lad whose eyesight was bad, but his vision was crystal clear. He looked a line that was clearly defined and declined to align by its rigid design." (Was that a reference to the antitrust case Microsoft settled in 2001?) A later lyric emphasizes that "more than plain old gadgets is the gall that makes the magic..."

The narrator then introduces a woman with a book as Bill Gates, explaining to her that "These days, Bill Gates is more of an idea."

I think it's appalling that there's absolutely no mention of recently-deceased Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. (Although they found room for a tongue-in-cheek reference to "Clippy's strength of will.") But among other things, this whole video project really begs the question: what else did they leave out about Microsoft?

A reader shares a report form Space.com: There's a puzzling mystery going on in the universe. Measurements of the rate of cosmic expansion using different methods keep turning up disagreeing results. The situation has been called a "crisis." The problem centers on what's known as the Hubble constant. Named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble, this unit describes how fast the universe is expanding at different distances from Earth. Using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Planck satellite, scientists estimate the rate to be 46,200 mph per million light-years (or, using cosmologists' units, 67.4 kilometers/second per megaparsec). But calculations using pulsating stars called Cepheids suggest it is 50,400 mph per million light-years (73.4 km/s/Mpc). If the first number is right, it means scientists have been measuring distances to faraway objects in the universe wrong for many decades. But if the second is correct, then researchers might have to accept the existence of exotic, new physics. Astronomers, understandably, are pretty worked up about this discrepancy. In April, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirmed that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang.

"We are measuring something fundamentally different," said Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University. "One is a measurement of how fast the universe is expanding today, as we see it. The other is a prediction based on the physics of the early universe and on measurements of how fast it ought to be expanding. If these values don't agree, there becomes a very strong likelihood that we're missing something in the cosmological model that connects the two eras."

Ryan Bigg: I recently upgraded from a 2015 MacBook Pro to a 2018 MacBook Pro. So I've been using this computer as a work computer for almost 3 months now and, my god, the keyboard drives me mental. Even writing this blog post now on the train and there's:
duplicated "o's" that I've had to go back and fix, or missing ones -- guess how fun it is to write a book about a Toy Robot with this particular problem
double spaces -- or no spaces
a Command key that registers 9 out of every 10 times
words like "times" that inexplicably get spelled like "timies", or "about" that gets spelled like "abouot"

Apple is all about the thinness of their laptops. I do not particularly care about the thinness of this device. For the most part, it sits on one of two desks that I use or it sits on my lap on the train. Maybe I use it on the couch from time-to-time. I do not care about the thinness of this device while I am using it. I only care about it when I store it away, in my backpack. This keyboard has a key travel distance that, I am sure, is measured in microns or perhaps nanometers. It feels like I am typing on a concrete slab. Key presses inexplicably duplicate. Or don't register at all. All for thinness. This keyboard is a catastrophic engineering failure, designed by a company that should know better. A company with more money in the bank than several countries combined. This keyboard would be, by far, the part of the MacBook Pro that is used the most by everybody who owns one, and it is so poorly engineered for the pursuit of thinness. The author is a junior engineering program lead at Culture Amp, an analytics platform that specializes in staff surveying and analytics.

China is intercepting texts from WeChat users living outside of the country, mostly from the U.S. Taiwan, South Korea, and Australia. NPR reports: The popular Chinese messaging app WeChat is Zhou Fengsuo's most reliable communication link to China. That's because he hasn't been back in over two decades. Zhou, a human rights activist, had been a university student in 1989, when the pro-democracy protests broke out in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. After a year in jail and another in political reeducation, he moved to the United States in 1995. But WeChat often malfunctions. Zhou began noticing in January that his chat groups could not read his messages. "I realized this because I was expecting some feedback [on a post] but there was no feedback," Zhou tells NPR at from his home in New Jersey.

As Chinese technology companies expand their footprint outside China, they are also sweeping up vast amounts of data from foreign users. Now, analysts say they know where the missing messages are: Every day, millions of WeChat conversations held inside and outside China are flagged, collected and stored in a database connected to public security agencies in China, according to a Dutch Internet researcher. Zhou is not the only one experiencing recent issues. NPR spoke to three other U.S. citizens who have been blocked from sending messages in WeChat groups or had their accounts frozen earlier this year, despite registering with U.S. phone numbers. This March, [Victor Gevers, co-founder of the nonprofit GDI Foundation, an open-source data security collection] found a Chinese database storing more than 1 billion WeChat conversations, including more than 3.7 billion messages, and tweeted out his findings. Each message had been tagged with a GPS location, and many included users' national identification numbers. Most of the messages were sent inside China, but more than 19 million of them had been sent from people outside the country, mostly from the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea and Australia.

When Amazon scrubbed plans to build a second headquarters in New York City earlier this year, the reason appeared rooted in a debate about unions, tax subsidies and housing costs. Then there was the burn book. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] The Wall Street Journal reports: In a private dossier kept at the time, whose existence has gone previously unreported, Amazon executives cataloged in minute detail the insults they saw coming from New York politicians and labor leaders, according to a copy viewed by The Wall Street Journal. By late January, Amazon executives had been pummeled at two public hearings. The burn book, which was kept in a Microsoft Word document called "NY Negative Statements," had separate sections for a half-dozen politicians and officials who had gone from thorns in the company's side to formidable opponents of a deal that now looked to be in jeopardy.

The document recorded how opponents mocked the helipad Amazon planned to build, pushed the Twitter hashtag #scamazon, and brought up the company's work for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a sore spot among some Amazon employees. It was an eight-page, bullet-pointed, Calibri font testimony to Amazon's sensitivities. The burn book is one indication of just how ill-suited Amazon and New York were to each other, a buttoned-up corporation that didn't talk publicly about its unhappiness up against a raucous political circus that had no problem running its mouth. This account is based on interviews with multiple people who were part of the deal.