Twitter is "strongly encouraging" its almost 5,000 global employees to work from home due to concerns over the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, the company said Monday. From a report: The social media company made the suggestion as part of a blog update one day after it suspended all non-critical travel for workers, including pulling out of the South by Southwest conference scheduled for later this month in Austin, Texas. Twitter says it's mandatory for employees in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea to work from home, but that other offices will remain open for those who choose or need to come in. "We are working to make sure internal meetings, all hands, and other important tasks are optimized for remote participation," the company wrote on its blog. Twitter's policy on working from home is a step beyond what most companies in the U.S. are doing as the virus spreads.

Nvidia's GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service that lets you play games stored on dedicated GeForce graphics-enabled PCs across a wide array of devices. While it lets you play PC games you already own, the game publisher must allow it on the service. "Today, Nvidia is revealing that Activision Blizzard is no longer playing ball, pulling down its catalog of games including Overwatch, WoW, and the Call of Duty series," reports The Verge. From the report: That means one of the service's biggest publishers, as well as its Battle.net catalog of games, will no longer be available just a week after the service's formal launch -- a launch that was already missing many games from Capcom, EA, Konami, Remedy, Rockstar and Square Enix, all of which seemed to have pulled out after Nvidia's beta period ended. Nvidia wouldn't tell us why this is happening now, but it's strange, because Nvidia previously told us it was contacting every publisher ahead of launch to make sure they were OK with their games staying available with the service. Did Activision Blizzard reneg on a deal, or did Nvidia fail to get permission? We're waiting to hear back from Nvidia; Activision Blizzard didn't respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Nvidia says it hopes to work with Activision Blizzard to bring the games back, but the company confirmed to us that things are pretty cut-and-dried for now -- you shouldn't expect them to magically reappear after a few days (or even a few weeks) thanks to a deal. Nvidia also declined to tell us whether it'd be open to sharing a slice of its subscription fees with publishers, citing the quiet period before its earnings. It's true that Blizzard, at least, has an EULA that specifically prevents users from playing a game on cloud gaming services, but that doesn't seem to explain this move. Activision's EULA doesn't contain anything of the sort, and again, Activision Blizzard didn't seem to have any problem with it during the GeForce Now beta.

In search of affordable housing, tech employees move all the way into the Central Valley. Private tech shuttles follow. From a report: It's 2:30 a.m. in the Central California farm town of Salida, and the only sound is the tech bus pulling into an unmarked lot surrounded by barbed wire. Men and women in work boots board in the moonlight. Next stop is 11 miles away in Manteca, and then it's another 55 miles to Fremont on the San Francisco Bay, where -- an hour and a half hour later -- the 4 a.m. shift at the Tesla factory starts. Welcome to life on Silicon Valley's new frontier. When tech companies first introduced private shuttles for their employees more than a decade ago, they served the affluent neighborhoods in San Francisco and the Peninsula. Now the buses reach as far as the almond orchards of Salida and the garlic fields of Gilroy.

Tech companies have grown tight-lipped about the specifics of their shuttle programs in the wake of high-profile protests in San Francisco. But Protocol was able to locate enough stops for company shuttles to confirm that some tech shuttles now drive all the way out to the Central Valley, an agricultural hub once a world away from the tech boom on the coast. "That just tells you the story of the Bay Area," said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of regional think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. "We're going to be in these farther-flung places, and that's our reality because we're not going to be able to create affordable housing." Tech shuttle sprawl speaks to the unique pressures that the industry has put on the region. High tech salaries have driven up housing prices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and the East Bay, forcing white- and blue-collar workers alike to move farther away from their jobs. The crisis is compounded by anti-development politics that make it hard to build new housing and patchwork public transit systems that make it difficult for commuters to get to work without driving.

Sprint is officially pulling the plug on its decaying Virgin Mobile prepaid service and will transfer current customers to its Boost Mobile brand starting in February. From a report: The move doesn't come as a complete surprise as Sprint has long been pulling back marketing and distribution for the brand, most recently in October severing ties with Walmart as a distribution partner. Since then Virgin Mobile could only be purchased through an online portal, as Walmart was the last remaining brick-and-mortar sales channel, following earlier decisions in 2019 to pull the brand from Best Buy stores and Meijer. These moves were noticed by Jeffrey Moore at Wave7 Research, who previously predicted that Virgin Mobile was not long for this world. Back in November he told FierceWireless that it had been 31 months since Virgin Mobile had changed its rate card and the brand's press portal hadn't seen an update in 19 months.

Laura June, reporting for Input: Two days after Input reported that there were hundreds of unofficial -- often disturbing -- knock-off Disney and Nickelodeon gaming apps aimed at children in Apple's App Store, the company has begun removing the apps from the store. Some of the games found had been available for longer than a year. It remains unclear -- partially due to the way App Store guidelines are written -- on exactly how many fronts the apps in question violated Apple's policies, though many of the titles at least infringed on the IP of the characters they portrayed. It's also unclear if the apps were removed because Disney and other companies filed complaints, or if Apple removed them on its own. As of this afternoon, it seems nearly all of the apps mentioned by name in the initial report were no longer available in the App Store.

Game worlds can be blueprints for the real world, liberating spaces where rules can be reinvented and the invisible made visible. From a report: For architects, the sheer scope of this artificiality means video games can be both playgrounds and testing grounds. "In games, there is the idea that an object has a visual solidity and a material solidity, and it doesn't have to have both," says Luke Pearson, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. "It takes you right back to the start of having to construct a space. You have to invent your own rules and logic for how things work." Pearson and his colleague Sandra Youkhana run the Videogame Urbanism studio at Bartlett. They investigate the future of cities through video games, teaching students how to use virtual worlds to interrogate the ways they think about materials.

"We want to push beyond the idea that the future of game technology in architecture is only in making photorealistic, VR representations for developers to look at penthouses," Pearson says. At a time when it's perfectly normal to segue from navigating the real-world walls of a city into the fantastical vistas of a game, the realms of architecture and games are arguably closer than ever. There is growing interest in pulling one into the other. Architect and film director Liam Young recently called on young architects to apply their skills to designing digital environments "that a billion people play in every day" instead of cutting their teeth designing "rich houses for rich people."

AmiMoJo quotes a report from The Guardian: The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time U.S. companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd's of London and Asian insurers as the "last resort" for fossil fuels, according to a new report. The report, which rates the world's 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal -- the biggest single contributor to climate change -- "is on the way to becoming uninsurable" as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance.

Ten firms moved to restrict the insurance cover they offer to companies that build or operate coal power plants in 2019, taking the global total to 17, said the Unfriend Coal campaign, which includes 13 environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Client Earth and Urgewald, a German NGO. The report will be launched at an insurance and climate risk conference in London on Monday, as the UN climate summit gets underway in Madrid. The first insurers to exit coal policies were all European, but since March, two U.S. insurers -- Chubb and Axis Capital -- and the Australian firms QBE and Suncorp have pledged to stop or restrict insurance for coal projects. At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9 trillion, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry's global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6 trillion in assets were divesting from fossil fuels.

Sadly, it's looking like the Ford F-150 versus Tesla Cybertruck tow battle probably won't happen. TechCrunch reports: Tesla CEO Elon Musk poked the figurative Dearborn, Michigan bear in the middle of the company's Cybertruck unveiling when he played a video of the futuristic electric truck pulling an F-150 in what was pitched as a head-to-head contest. Many were quick to question whether it was a fair fight, including astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson. But what really got Musk's attention was a tweet from Sundeep Madra, VP of Ford X, the automaker's venture incubator.

Madra tweeted to Musk challenging the CEO to send Ford a Cybertruck to do an "apples to apples" test. Musk, who is well versed in the Twitter troll, responded with a "bring it on." It seems Madra's tweet wasn't meant to be a serious challenge, but a "tongue in cheek" troll, according to Ford. "Sunny's tweet was tongue in cheek to point out the absurdity of Tesla's video, nothing more," a Ford spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. "With America's best-selling truck for 42 years, we've always focused on serving our truck customers regardless of what others say or do. We look forward to our all-new F-150 hybrid coming next year and all-electric F-150 in a few years."

President Trump on Wednesday toured a Texas plant that makes high-end Apple computers, chatting with Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, and accepting a plate with the words "Assembled in USA." From a report: It was a pretty typical publicity event, until the end. Mr. Trump walked in front of the news cameras and took credit for the plant, suggesting it had opened that day. "For me, this is a very special day," he said. Mr. Cook stood next to him, stone-faced. The plant has been making Apple computers since 2013. Immediately after Mr. Trump's comments, Mr. Cook thanked the president and his staff. "I'm grateful for their support in pulling today off and getting us to this far. It would not be possible without them," he said. He did not correct the record. The moment was part of a bizarre afternoon in Texas, where the president played up a six-year-old factory as evidence of his three-year-old presidency's success in bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. It showed Mr. Trump's willingness to leverage his influence over American companies in his pitch to voters that he deserves another four years in the White House. And it illustrated the complicated position that Mr. Cook and other corporate executives find themselves in with this president, forced to stand silently by while he sometimes misleads about their businesses.

[...] On Wednesday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Cook a "very special person" because of his ability to create jobs. He turned to Mr. Cook and said, "What would you say about our economy compared to everybody else?" Mr. Cook replied, "I think we have the strongest economy in the world." "Strongest in the world," Mr. Trump said. The president then took questions on the impeachment inquiry and launched into a tirade against "the fake press." Mr. Cook stood silently nearby.

The streaming service is happy to pretend it's a moral force bringing the power of documentary filmmaking to new markets. Until that becomes inconvenient. The Outline: This past January, at the request of the Saudi Arabian government, Netflix spiked an episode of its comedy news show Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, owing to the subject matter, which was the Saudi Arabian government's murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Speaking at the New York Times's DealBook conference in New York earlier this month, Hastings affirmed the company's decision in no uncertain terms: "We're not in the news business," Hastings said, according to Variety. "We're not trying to do 'truth to power.' We're trying to entertain... We don't feel bad about [pulling the 'Patriot Act' episode in Saudi Arabia] at all." A few days ago, Netflix did the same thing again. A new (apparently good) documentary on the web streaming service about John Demanjajuk, a Ukrainian guard at Treblinka who was caught decades after the Holocaust while living a quiet suburban life in Ohio, drew the ire of Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki. "Central to [Morawiecki's] complaint were maps seen in the series that place Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz within the borders of modern-day Poland," again, according to Variety. "The U.S. streamer now says that it will amend the series by adding on-screen text, likely below the maps, to spell out the fact that the death camps sat in territory occupied by the Nazis."

The basis for why Saudi Arabia and Poland would whine to Netflix is straightforward enough. Saudi Arabia wants to bury, as quickly possible, any memory of the time that it botched the Khashoggi cover-up, and had to eat international crow for a few months before most of the world moved on. Poland, meanwhile, is presently led by right-wing politicians who believe that Poland gets an excessively bad rap for helping to carry out the Holocaust, so much so that these politicians attempted last year to pass a law that could impose prison time on people who accused the Polish nation of complicity in the Holocaust. If one really wanted to, you could make a by-the-numbers case for why Hastings has decided to cave to these foreign governments.

In July, GitHub blocked several accounts to prevent users in Iran from accessing several portions of its service. A few days later Amazon Web Services followed suite. With major cloud services pulling support for developers in the country, many lost their academic work and several apps ceased to function. A solution for these developers now is to cut reliance on American giants and build their own services. But there's a catch: Internet in Iran is heavily censored, so they can't rely on local networks.

After Trump backed away from the nuclear deal, there's been a tremendous pressure on tech companies to block IPs from Iran. Plus, Mozilla decided to omit a whole transparency section in its report on the country succumbing to the government pressure. With sanctions on one side and censorship on the other, there's a tough road ahead for developers. Ivan Mehta, a journalist at The Next Web, looks at the issue.

"Facebook is facing a lot of pushback for Libra, its proposed cryptocurrency, but that's not stopping the social media giant from forging ahead," reports the Motley Fool: Earlier this week, it announced the 21 founding members of its digital token project at the signing of the Libra Association charter in Switzerland. The founding members include Uber, Lyft, Spotify, and PayU, among others... Despite all the odds against it, Facebook is forging ahead, pulling out all the stops to convince the world's skeptics that it is capable of controlling a digital currency that can't be regulated.

Its latest attempt: warning regulators of the impending danger from China if Libra fails. David Marcus, the Facebook executive heading up the Libra initiative, told Bloomberg that China is moving ahead with its own digital payments system, which could have global appeal. That could be a big threat to the U.S. if regulators drag their heels in approving Facebook's digital coin. He painted a picture of an environment five years hence in which a large portion of the world won't have to worry about sanctions from the U.S. because they will have a digital currency waiting in the wings.

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: Mercedes-Benz car owners have said that the app they used to remotely locate, unlock and start their cars was displaying other people's account and vehicle information.

TechCrunch spoke to two customers who said the Mercedes-Benz' connected car app was pulling in information from other accounts and not their own, allowing them to see other car owners' names, recent activity, phone numbers, and more. The apparent security lapse happened late-Friday before the app went offline "due to site maintenance" a few hours later....

"There was a short interval [Friday] during which incorrect customer data was displayed on our MercedesMe app," said Donna Boland, a spokesperson for Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz.... "When we became aware of the issue, we took the system down, identified the issue and resolved it," she added.

U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang "is full of it," argues Slate's senior business and economics correspondent, challenging Yang's contention (in a debate Tuesday) that American jobs were being lost to automation: Following the debate, a "fact check" by the AP claimed that Yang was right and Warren wrong. "Economists mostly blame [manufacturing] job losses on automation and robots, not trade deals," it stated. But this was incorrect. No such consensus exists, and if anything, the evidence heavily suggests that trade has been the bigger culprit in recent decades. All of which points to a broader issue: Yang's schtick about techno doom may be well-intentioned, but it is largely premised on BS, and is adding to the widespread confusion about the impact of automation on the economy.

Yang is not pulling his ideas out of thin air. Economists have been debating whether automation or trade is more responsible for the long-term decline of U.S. factory work for a while, and it's possible to find experts on both sides of the issue. After remaining steady for years, the total number of U.S. manufacturing jobs suddenly plummeted in the early 2000s -- from more than 17 million in 2000 to under 14 million in 2007... [But] America hasn't just lost manufacturing workers; as Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research notes, the number of factories also declined by around 22 percent between 2000 and 2014, which isn't what you'd expect if assembly workers were just being replaced by machines. In a 2017 paper, meanwhile, economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University concluded that the growth of industrial robots in the U.S. since 1990 could only explain between between 360,000 and 670,000 job losses. By comparison, the proof placing blame on trade and China is much stronger. Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter Schott of Yale have found evidence that the U.S.'s decision to grant the People's Republic permanent normal trade relations in 2000 led to declines in American jobs...

New technology will change the economy and the way people work. It already is. But those shifts will be more complex than Yang admits and probably won't look like the wave of mass unemployment that he and his like-minded supporters tend to envision... It's not just unrealistic. It's lazy. When you buy the sci-fi notion that technology is simply a disembodied force making humanity obsolete and that there's little that can be done about it, you stop thinking about ideas that will actually prevent workers from being screwed over by the forces of globalization or new tech. By prophesying imaginary problems, you ignore the real ones.

The Kik Messenger app has officially been acquired by U.S.-based holding company MediaLab. The news comes just one day before the app was scheduled to shut down. From a report: The blog post noted that MediaLab plans to keep the app alive and also outlines ideas it has to improve the app moving forward. It is noted that the acquiring company plans to partner with Kik CEO Ted Livingston and the remaining 19 team members and is still dedicated to expanding the Kin integration.

MediaLab stated that it has a long term commitment to Kik and seeing the app succeed, but also noted the urgent need to cover expenses. The blog post stated that in the coming weeks ads will be introduced to Kik Messenger. The holding company acknowledged that some Kik users may not like this idea, but stated plans to bring in the ads in a "non-intrusive" way that "in no way takes away from what makes Kik great." "No annoying full screen video takeovers or things like that," the blog post stated. Other changes MediaLab plans to make to the app include pulling back features it said were not optimized. Kik's video chat toggle and third party bots platform will be discontinued, with MediaLab noting that it wants to eradicate spam bots and unwanted messages. It also stated it will update the app's software to make it faster, more reliable, and "less buggy." "Ted Livingston and the rest of the team at Kik have spent the last nine years building something truly special," the blog post stated. "At the risk of sounding cheesy, we are still passionate believers in what the internet promised to bring in its early days -- a connected and shared experience amongst people regardless of geography or time zone. Kik is one of those amazing places that brings us back to those early aspirations."

Photographer Peter Adams launched a "Faces of Open Source" portrait project in 2014. This week he posted a special announcement on the web site of Bell Labs: Later this month, Bell Labs will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unix with a special two day "Unix 50" event at their historic Murray Hill headquarters. This event should be one for the history books with many notable Unix and computer pioneers in attendance...!

As I was making those photographs (which will be on display at the event), I gained much insight into Bell Labs and the development of Unix. However, it was some of the more personal stories and anecdotes that brought Bell Labs to life and gave me a feel for the people behind the code. One such time was when Ken Thompson (who is an accomplished pilot) told me how he traveled to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in order to fly in a MiG-29 fighter jet... Brian Kernighan told me about how a certain portrait of Peter Weinberger found its way into some very interesting places. These included the concrete foundation of a building on Bell Labs campus, the cover images printed onto Unix CD-ROMs, and most notably, painted on the top of a nearby water tower.

Which brings us to another important piece of Unix mythology that I learned about: the fictitious Bell Labs employee G.R. Emlin (a.k.a. "the gremlin").... A lot of this folklore (including the gremlin) is going to be on display at the Unix 50 event. The archivists at Bell Labs have outdone themselves by pulling together a massive collection of artifacts taken from the labs where Unix was developed for over 30 years. I was able to photograph a few of these artifacts last year, but so much more will be exhibited at this event -- including several items from the personal archives of some attendees.

As if that wasn't enough, the event will also showcase a number of vintage computers and a look into Bell Labs future with a tour of their Future X Labs.
The article includes some more quick stories about the Unix pioneers at Bell Labs (including "the gremlin") and argues that "the decision to freely distribute Unix's source code (to anyone who asked for it) inadvertently set the stage for the free and open source software movements that dominate the technology industry today...

"In hindsight, maybe 1969 should be called the 'summer of code.'"

UPDATE (10/4/2019): "Apple has reportedly reversed its decision to ban the app HKmap.live," reports BoingBoing.

Apple had banned the app, which allows Hong Kong protesters to track protests and police movements in the city state, despite increasing international condemnation against the violence used by the authorities, MacRumors had reported: According to The Register, Apple has told the makers of the HKmap Live app that it can't be allowed in the App Store because it helps protestors to evade the police. "Your app contains content - or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity - that is not legal ... specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement," the American tech giant told makers of the HKmap Live on Tuesday before pulling it. Opposition to the Chinese state and the Hong Kong authorities has grown louder, driven by an escalation in violence against protesters over the past week. On Wednesday, thousands of people took to the streets of Hong Kong to denounce the shooting of an unarmed teenage student by police. Tsang Chi-kin was shot in the chest at point-blank range on Tuesday. He remains in hospital in stable but critical condition after surgery to remove the bullet, which narrowly missed his heart.

Last week NBC News ran an opinion piece by a certified nutritionist arguing that plant-based/meat-free alternatives at major fast food chains "aren't actually any healthier."

Bloomberg got a response from two of the major meat-substitute companies: According to Impossible, the attacks are all part of a "smear campaign to sow fear and doubt about plant-based meat." The company said its burgers and other offerings are better for people than animal products, delivering as much protein and bioavailable iron as beef without the associated downsides. And "processed" criticism doesn't fly, it said in a statement, given that all food involves some kind of processing. Beyond makes similar claims about its foods. "We know that consumers are increasingly pulling away from red and processed meat because of the levels of cholesterol and associated health baggage," said Will Schafer, vice president of marketing. The company also touts what it calls a simple production process that's more humane and sustainable than livestock production.

There's a lot of competition out there and on its way for Beyond and Impossible, including from Kellogg Co. and Tyson Foods Inc., which sold its stake in Beyond before that company went public. The Native Foods vegan chain and Ted's Montana Grill, co-founded by Ted Turner, are making their own veggie burgers, emphasizing what they call "whole" ingredients. "It just seems to go against the grain to me if you want to eat healthier that you would choose manufactured, chemically-produced products," said George McKerrow, Ted's chief executive officer and co-founder... Gene Grabowski, a partner at the communications firm kglobal, predicted a long fight between the real-meat and fake-meat forces. Much is at stake. A Barclays reports estimates the plant-based sector could reach $140 billion in sales globally in the next decade.
The director of nutrition at the nonprofit consumer advocacy group the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told Bloomberg that it's not any healthier to order an Impossible or Beyond burger when eating out.

"The bottom line is that all burgers at restaurants are too high in calories, saturated fat, and sodium, whether beef or plant-based..."

Several popular YouTubers -- including including Logan Paul, Marques Brownlee, and Emma Chamberlain -- have launched podcasts in the last year, "proving YouTube is a bonafide podcast network," writes Alex Castro via The Verge. "They're all available through traditional audio platforms, like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but many also offer video versions that live on dedicated YouTube channels where they've become incredibly popular." From the report: These creators have figured out how to make podcasts work on a platform that wasn't designed for them, leveraging YouTube's search algorithm to meet new audiences, make more money, and expand into a medium that's expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. Some of the top podcasts on YouTube are pulling in millions of views every few days or weeks. Top shows, like Ethan and Hila Klein's H3 Podcast or Joe Rogan's Joe Rogan Experience, have dedicated audiences who use YouTube notifications as an RSS feed, letting them know when a new episode is available to watch. While the podcasts are also distributed via Spotify and Apple Podcasts, YouTube acts as a first stop.

To reach even bigger audiences, YouTubers have figured out that they can break their show into pieces and spread it across multiple channels. H3 Podcast, Cody Ko and Noel Miller's Tiny Meat Gang, and The Joe Rogan Experience run as full-length episodes on their main podcast channel, but those episodes are then broken down into tiny individual cuts. These cuts, often referred to as clips or highlights, exist on a completely separate channel. They're also arguably more important when it comes to using YouTube as a way to grow the podcast. The H3 Podcast uses one of the most popular takes on the "YouTube podcast" format. Ethan and Hila Klein have three channels: H3H3 Productions (6 million subscribers), H3 Podcast (2 million subscribers), and H3 Podcast Highlights (1.3 million subscribers). The main channel is used for longer commentary pieces, special collaborations, and comedic sketches, but the latter two are solely dedicated to the podcast. Creating a separate channel for clips lets podcasters take advantage of YouTube's recommendation algorithm, which surfaces content on specific subjects a viewer is already interested in.

Federal investigators asked Google for help finding two men who'd robbed a Wisconsin bank in October of 2018: They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes after they entered, carrying the bag full of cash, three drawers from the vault and teller station, and the keys to the bank vault itself. In the months since, police and federal agents have struggled to track down the bank robbers. Local media sent out pictures from the bank's security cameras, but it produced no leads.

Finally, police hit on a more aggressive strategy: ask Google to track down the bank robbers' phones.

In November, agents served Google with a search warrant, asking for data that would identify any Google user who had been within 100 feet of the bank during a half-hour block of time around the robbery. They were looking for the two men who had gone into the bank, as well as the driver who dropped off and picked up the crew, and would potentially be caught up in the same dragnet. It was an aggressive technique, scooping up every Android phone in the area and trusting police to find the right suspects in the mess of resulting data. But the court found it entirely legal, and it was returned as executed shortly after.

That kind of warrant, known as a reverse location search, has become increasingly common in recent years... In each case, police weren't tracking the location of a specific suspect -- where normal standards of reasonable suspicion would apply -- but instead pulling the names of every individual who had been in the vicinity when a crime took place. For civil liberties groups, it's a dangerous and potentially unconstitutional overreach of police power. But those concerns haven't been enough to keep police from filing reverse location search warrants when a case runs dry, or to convince judges to reject them.
The Verge reports that Minnesota over 20 of the same kind of warrants have been served just in the state of Minnesota -- though in the Wisconsin case, it's not even clear that it did any good.

"When The Verge reached out to the FBI's Milwaukee division to ask if any charges had been brought, officers said the case was ongoing and they could not provide any additional information as a result. With nearly a year elapsed since the warrant was served, that suggests this particular reverse location search may not have been as fruitful as investigators hoped."