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Purpose and Function of a Drone (Ananya)

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Purpose and Function of a Drone (Ananya)

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Airpods don't fit everyone's ears because of their size so, not everyone has the ability to use airpods.

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Drones can be unaffordable for people with tight budgets because they are a very expensive piece of technology so not everyone can have access to a drone.

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Drones have a wide range of functions. They were innovated to monitor climate, carry out search operations after natural disasters, photography, filming, and delivering goods. Although the intention of creating drones was good at first, recently people have been misusing drones in a way that violates people's privacy. Drone owners are using the camera feature of the drone to take pictures or record people without their consent. In other cases, smugglers are using drones for cross-border delivery. Drones can be used to our advantage if we use them for their positive aspects if used for farming.

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Purpose & Function of Google Meet (Marlene)

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Purpose & Function of Google Meet (Marlene)

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Virtual meetings should not replace personal interactions - Philadelphia Business Journal

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It might be fun to work from home for a while, but after the newness wears off and you become immune to the kids screaming or the dog barking, wouldn’t it be more fun if we could just go back to the office?

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Google Meet makes it easy to start a secure video meeting. Join from any modern web browser or download the app, and you're ready to go.

What is Google Meet

Google is making enterprise-grade video conferencing available to everyone. Now, anyone with a Google Account can create an online meeting with up to 100 participants and meet for up to 60 minutes per meeting.

Businesses, schools, and other organizations can take advantage of advanced features, including meetings with up to 500 internal or external participants and live streaming to up to 100,000 viewers within a domain.

How to sign up for Google Meet

For personal use

If you're already using Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube, or another Google product, just sign in to your existing Google Account.

Don't have a Google Account? Get Started Now.

For business use

If you're already a Google Workspace user, just sign in to your existing account.

If you don't have a Google Workspace account, see plans and pricing to learn about options for business.

From your phone or tablet

Download the Google Meet mobile app

Join, host, or share your screen from the Google Meet mobile app. Download from Google Play or Apple Store.

How to start a video meeting

Create a new meeting

To create a new video meeting, log in to your existing Google Account or sign up for a new account.

Invite others to your online meeting

Send a link or meeting code to anyone you want to join the meeting. For the no-cost version of Google Meet, guests will need to create or sign in to an existing Google Account to join.

Join a meeting

Tap the meeting link from the invite, enter the meeting code from your host here, or call into the meeting using the dial-in number and PIN in the invite.

For help on working from home using Meet, please see our working remotely toolkit.

How to use Google Meet's no-cost features

Enjoy video conferencing for up to 100 participants at no cost. Google Meet also offers counter-abuse measures like anti-hijacking to help protect your data and privacy.

Unlimited number of meetings

Connect with anyone-coworkers, clients, classmates-as often as you'd like.

Invite up to 100 participants to a meeting. If you're using Google Meet at no cost, anyone you invite will need to sign in with a Google Account to join the meeting for added security.

Adjustable layouts and screen settings

Meet automatically switches the layout in a video meeting to display the most active content and participants.

To switch the layout, click the three dots in the lower corner of the Meet screen.

Integration with Google and Microsoft Office apps

Join meetings directly from Gmail or Calendar.

Microsoft Office users can be added to an invite and see meetings on their Microsoft® Outlook® calendar.

Security, compliance, and privacy

Anti-abuse features on by default

Google Meet employs an array of anti-abuse measures to keep your meetings safe, including anti-hijacking features and secure meeting controls. It also supports multiple 2-step verification options including security keys.

Compliance to support regulatory requirements

Our products, including Meet, regularly undergo independent verification of their security, privacy, and compliance controls. For a full list of certifications and attestations, visit the Compliance resource center.

Meet does not have user attention-tracking features or software.

Meet does not use customer data for advertising.

Meet does not sell customer data to third parties.

Google Meet for education, healthcare, and nonprofits as part of Google Workspace

Educators, nonprofits and healthcare professionals looking for video conferencing can get Google Meet through Google Workspace, which includes additional privacy features and tools.

Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals

Schools can use Google Meet for no charge as a part of Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals. Meet, Classroom, and the rest of Google Workspace can be used to support compliance with regulations like COPPA, FERPA, and GDPR.

Google Workspace for healthcare

Use Google Meet as a part of Google Workspace to enable HIPAA compliance when caring for patients remotely with virtual visits. With Google Workspace you can also store data securely in Drive and go paperless with digital intake forms.

Google Workspace for Nonprofits

Eligible organizations can use Google Workspace for Nonprofits at no charge. Get Google Workspace's secure business apps like Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Meet to help your nonprofit collaborate more effectively.

How leading companies use Google Meet

"We're big fans of Meet... It's helpful to be able to see every participant. This is extremely helpful these days. All our internal meetings are on Meet right now as we are all working from home."

"In just under three months, we saw people working differently...with over 57,000 hours of Google Meet sessions conducted in one month alone, allowing our employees to collaborate while in the office and on mobile, connecting our global teams."

"We need to interact with many people at once and see their reactions, with everyone simultaneously seeing the same deck in Slides. We couldn't do any of this without Google Meet."

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How to Use Google Meet Video Conferencing | Google Meet

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Google Meet makes it easy to start a secure video meeting. Join from any modern web browser or download the app, and you're ready to go. Google is making enterprise-grade video conferencing available to everyone. Now, anyone with a Google Account can create an online meeting with up to 100 participants and meet for up to 60 minutes per meeting.

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Whenever people use online applications like Google Meet, in-person interaction is reduced, and people may miss out on bonding opportunities and clearer demonstrations.

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Generating Google Meet links is entirely free, and it has built-in collaboration tools such as poll, screen-sharing, muting, messaging, and breakout rooms. Because it's free with several features, people may choose to use it over other applications that aren't free.

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If you have a Google account, you can instantly generate as many Google Meet links as you want, so you can connect with people whenever.

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Although Google Meet is intended to provide free conferencing to everyone, it is only available to people who have Google accounts. If someone doesn't use Google or doesn't have access to Google at all, they would not be able to connect with their colleagues, students, teachers, or relatives using Google Meet. In addition, Google Meet can only be used by groups of no larger than 100 members, meaning that this app is not suitable for nationwide or international conferences. Also, the graphics and sound quality are better for those with better devices. This means that it's less likely for people living in less wealthy areas to use Google Meet.

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Obviously a disadvantage is that computer are so modernized, so has crime. With the touch of a button anything can happen.

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What is a cyberattack? Explore IBM's cyberattack solution Subscribe to Security Topic Updates

A cyberattack is any intentional effort to steal, expose, alter, disable, or destroy data, applications, or other assets through unauthorized access to a network, computer system or digital device.

Threat actors start cyberattacks for all sorts of reasons, from petty theft to acts of war. They use various tactics, like malware attacks, social engineering scams, and password theft, to gain unauthorized access to their target systems.

Cyberattacks can disrupt, damage and even destroy businesses. The average cost of a data breach is USD 4.35 million. This price tag includes the costs of discovering and responding to the violation, downtime and lost revenue, and the long-term reputational damage to a business and its brand.

But some cyberattacks can be considerably more costly than others. Ransomware attacks have commanded ransom payments as high as USD 40 million (link resides outside ibm.com). Business email compromise (BEC) scams have stolen as much as USD 47 million from victims in a single attack (link resides outside ibm.com). Cyberattacks that compromise customers' personally identifiable information (PII) can lead to a loss of customer trust, regulatory fines, and even legal action. By one estimate, cybercrime will cost the world economy USD 10.5 trillion per year by 2025 (link resides outside ibm.com).

Report Cost of a Data Breach

Get insights to better manage the risk of a data breach with the latest Cost of a Data Breach report.

Related content
Register for the X-Force Threat Intelligence Index

Why do cyberattacks happen?

The motivations behind cyberattacks can vary, but there are three main categories:

Criminally motivated attackers seek financial gain through monetary theft, data theft, or business disruption. Cybercriminals may hack into a bank account to steal money directly or use social engineering scams to trick people into sending money to them. Hackers may steal data and use it to commit identity theft or sell it on the dark web or hold it for ransom.

Extortion is another tactic that is used. Hackers may use ransomware, DDoS attacks, or other tactics to hold data or devices hostage until a company pays. According to the X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, 27 percent of cyberattacks aim to extort their victims.

Personally motivated attackers, such as disgruntled current or former employees, primarily seek retribution for some perceived slight. They may take money, steal sensitive data, or disrupt a company's systems.

Politically motivated attackers are often associated with cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, or "hacktivism." In cyberwarfare, nation-state actors often target their enemies' government agencies or critical infrastructure. For example, since the start of the Russia-Ukraine War, both countries have experienced a rash of cyberattacks against vital institutions (link resides outside ibm.com). Activist hackers, called "hacktivists," may not cause extensive damage to their targets. Instead, they typically seek attention for their causes by making their attacks known to the public.

Less common cyberattack motivations include corporate espionage, in which hackers steal intellectual property to gain an unfair advantage over competitors, and vigilante hackers who use a system's vulnerabilities to warn others about them. Some hackers hack for sport, savoring the intellectual challenge.

Who is behind cyberattacks?
Criminal organizations, state actors, and private persons can all start cyberattacks. One way to classify threat actors is by categorizing them as outsider threats or insider threats.

Outsider threats aren't authorized to use a network or device but break in anyway. External cyberthreat actors include organized criminal groups, professional hackers, state-sponsored actors, amateur hackers, and hacktivists.

Insider threats are users who have authorized and legitimate access to a company's assets and misuse their privileges deliberately or accidentally. This category includes employees, business partners, clients, contractors, and suppliers with system access.

While negligent users can put their companies at risk, it's only a cyberattack if the user intentionally uses their privileges to carry out malicious activity. An employee who carelessly stores sensitive information in an unsecured drive isn't committing a cyberattack - but a disgruntled employee who knowingly makes copies of confidential data for personal gain is.

What do cyberattacks target?
Threat actors typically break into computer networks because they're after something specific. Common targets include:

Money

Businesses' financial data

Client lists

Customer data, including personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive personal data

Email addresses and login credentials

Intellectual property, like trade secrets or product designs

In some cases, cyberattackers don't want to steal anything at all. Rather, they merely want to disrupt information systems or IT infrastructure to damage a business, government agency, or other target.

What effects do cyberattacks have on businesses?

If successful, cyberattacks can damage enterprises. They can cause downtime, data loss, and money loss. For example:

Hackers can use malware or denial-of-service attacks to cause system or server crashes. This downtime can lead to major service interruptions and financial losses. According to theCost of a Data Breach report, the average breach results in USD 1.42 million in lost business.

SQL injection attacks allow hackers to alter, delete, or steal data from a system.

Phishing attacks allow hackers to trick people into sending money or sensitive information to them.

Ransomware attacks can disable a system until the company pays the attacker a ransom. According to one report (link resides outside ibm.com), the average ransom payment is USD 812,360.

In addition to directly harming the target, cyberattacks can have a host of secondary costs and consequences. For example, theCost of a Data Breach report found that businesses spend an average of USD 2.62 million on detecting, responding to, and remediating breaches.

Cyberattacks can also have repercussions for victims beyond the immediate target. In 2021, the DarkSide ransomware gang attacked the Colonial Pipeline, the largest refined oil pipeline system in the US. The attackers entered the company's network by using a compromised password (link resides outside ibm.com). They shut down the pipeline that carries 45% of the gas, diesel, and jet fuel supplied to the US East Coast, leading to widespread fuel shortages.

The cybercriminals demanded a ransom of almost USD 5 million in bitcoin cryptocurrency, which Colonial Pipeline paid (link resides outside ibm.com). However, with help from the US government, the company eventually recovered USD 2.3 million of the ransom.

What are the common types of cyberattacks?

Cybercriminals use many sophisticated tools and techniques to start cyberattacks against enterprise IT systems, personal computers, and other targets. Some of the most common types of cyberattacks include:

Social engineering
Social engineering attacks manipulate people into doing things that they shouldn't do, like sharing information they shouldn't share, downloading software they shouldn't download, or sending money to criminals.

Phishing is one of the most pervasive social engineering attacks. According to theCost of a Data Breach report, it is the second most common cause of breaches. The most basic phishing scams use fake emails or text messages to steal users' credentials, exfiltrate sensitive data, or spread malware. Phishing messages are often designed to look as though they're coming from a legitimate source. They usually direct the victim to click a hyperlink that takes them to a malicious website or open an email attachment that turns out to be malware.

Cybercriminals have also developed more sophisticated methods of phishing. Spear phishing is a highly targeted attack that aims to manipulate a specific individual, often by using details from the victim's public social media profiles to make the ruse more convincing. Whale phishing is a type of spear phishing that specifically targets high-level corporate officers. In a business email compromise (BEC) scam, cybercriminals pose as executives, vendors, or other business associates to trick victims into wiring money or sharing sensitive data.

Denial-of-service attacks
Denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks flood a system's resources with fraudulent traffic. This traffic overwhelms the system, preventing responses to legitimate requests and reducing the system's ability to perform. A denial-of-service attack may be an end in itself or a setup for another attack.

The difference between DoS attacks and DDoS attacks is simply that DoS attacks use a single source to generate fraudulent traffic, while DDoS attacks use multiple sources. DDoS attacks are often carried out with a botnet, a network of internet-connected, malware-infected devices under a hacker's control. Botnets can include laptops, smartphones, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Victims often don't know when a botnet has hijacked their devices.

Account compromise
Account compromiseis any attack in which hackers hijack a legitimate user's account for malicious activity. Cybercriminals can break into a user's account in many ways. They can steal credentials through phishing attacks or buy stolen password databases off the dark web. They can use password attack tools like Hashcat and John the Ripper to break password encryptions or stage brute force attacks, in which they run automated scripts or bots to generate and test potential passwords until one works.

Man-in-the-middle attacks
In a man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack, also called an "eavesdropping attack," a hacker secretly intercepts communications between two people or between a user and a server. MitM attacks are commonly carried out via unsecured public wifi networks, where it's relatively easy for threat actors to spy on traffic.

Hackers may read a user's emails or even secretly alter the emails before they reach the recipient. In a session hijacking attack, the hacker interrupts the connection between a user and a server hosting important assets, like a confidential company database. The hacker swaps their IP address with the user's, making the server think they're a legitimate user logged into a legitimate session. This gives the hacker free rein to steal data or otherwise wreak havoc.

Supply chain attacks
Supply chain attacksare cyberattacks in which hackers breach a company by targeting its software vendors, material suppliers, and other service providers. Because vendors are often connected to their customers' networks in some way, hackers can use the vendor's network as an attack vector to access multiple targets at once.

For example, in 2020, Russian state actors hacked the software vendor SolarWinds and distributed malware to its customers under the guise of a software update (link resides outside ibm.com). The malware allowed Russian spies to access the sensitive data of various US government agencies using SolarWinds' services, including the Treasury, Justice, and State Departments.

Cyberattack prevention, detection, and response

Organizations can reduce cyberattacks by implementing cybersecurity systems and strategies. Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting critical systems and sensitive information from digital attacks by using a combination of technology, people, and processes.

Related solutions

IBM Security® QRadar® Suite
Outsmart attacks with a connected, modernized security suite. The QRadar portfolio is embedded with enterprise-grade AI and offers integrated products for endpoint security, log management, SIEM and SOAR-all with a common user interface, shared insights and connected workflows.

X-Force incident response team
Proactive threat hunting, continuous monitoring and a deep investigation of threats are just a few of the priorities facing an already busy IT department. Having a trusted incident response team on standby can reduce your response time, minimize the impact of a cyberattack, and help you recover faster.
Explore X-Force incident response

Ransomware protection solutions
To prevent and combat modern ransomware threats, IBM uses insight from 800 TB of threat activity data, information on more than 17 million spam and phishing attacks and reputation data on nearly 1 million malicious IP addresses from a network of 270 million endpoints.
Explore ransomware protection solutions

Resources Cost of a Data Breach report
The Cost of a Data Breach report shares the latest insights into the expanding threat landscape and offers recommendations for how to save time and limit losses.
X-Force Threat Intelligence Index
The IBM Security® X-Force® Threat Intelligence Index offers CISOs, security teams and business leaders actionable insights to help you understand how threat actors are waging attacks, and how to proactively protect your organization.
Cyberattack Preparation and Execution Frameworks
The X-Force cyberattack preparation and execution frameworks provide a logical flow representative of attacks today and incorporate phases not typically included in other frameworks.

Cybersecurity threats are becoming more advanced and more persistent, and demanding more effort by security analysts to sift through countless alerts and incidents. IBM Security QRadar SIEM helps you remediate threats faster while maintaining your bottom line. QRadar SIEM prioritizes high-fidelity alerts to help you catch threats that others simply miss.

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Cyberattacks are unwelcome attempts to steal, expose, alter, disable or destroy information through unauthorized access to computer systems.

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I (Leo) did this

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The internet has many biases. For one it takes a lot of resources for the providers to use and maintain, which means it will have a cost. Those who are on the lower end of the income spectrum and also those in underdeveloped countries obviously have a lower chance of obtaining an internet connection. Also those in rural areas do not have it as their infrastructure is not on par with major cities which are more connected. Obviously this can hinder one's ability to easily communicate with another which can be harmful but was not intended.

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By: Leo Lu

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Apple is resorting on going back to their old designs with all the variety of different ports, like the HDMI port, and the SDXC

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they are more portable and have a lot features 

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they are more portable and have a lot features 

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by ezun

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Texting can lead to shorter, less meaningful conversations between people because it doesn't encourage face-to-face communication.

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Since a person's location can be tracked at any time with an AirTag present on one of their items, the person does not actually have a sense of privacy. Instead, their privacy is invaded, since their location is known at every minute, and a person can see their overall movement trends, where they go most frequently, etc.

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It's just too easy. Delayed on your way to a meeting, you text, "sorry running late." You leave for work in the morning after a fight with your partner and spend the train ride typing a monologue of hurt and anger. You get a second invitation for Saturday night, so you text the person you originally made plans with: "Apologies, not feeling well, need to cancel."

Our increasing preference for texting over email and phone calls creates a higher quantity of interactions, but it decreases their quality, harming our relationships.

On the surface, these texts may seem like an acceptable way to handle daily communication, but they actually are all examples of ways to avoid conflict, from making lying easier to dodging in-person confrontation. Our increasing preference for texting over email and phone calls creates a higher quantity of interactions, but it decreases their quality, harming our relationships. Indeed, it's a far cry from paying attention and listening to the thoughts and feelings of another person, and it's missing the human contact and learning that comes from true dialogue.

The problems with texting begin with the way it reduces conversation to words or photos on a screen; the way it converts the interchange of human connection to brief, stilted fragments. Even with a plethora of emojis and exclamation points, the absence of intonation muddles the communication.

As a psychotherapist, I see this phenomenon almost daily, along with the unintended consequences it causes. Patients often read me text messages during therapy sessions in hopes that I can decipher them, since without facial cues and tone of voice, it can be challenging to understand the intention of the message.

Worse, it encourages passive - or more often passive-aggressive - behavior, what I call "hit and runs." Typing on a screen invites impulsive responses. Absent the ability to see the reflection of pain or hurt on someone's face, it's easy for people to pound out anger or meanness. You don't risk interruption or need to take a breath, but what may serve one person as a chance to clear the air often ends up overwhelming the recipient.

Lying is also easier with texting, since it doesn't betray the motivation behind the message. Are you texting home to say you're working late while out for drinks with a coworker? Is your cold really that bad, or is the prospect of another family dinner unappealing? Written words can hide a great deal of emotion, and if forced to leave a voice message or deliver news in person, your lie could come through because of weak intonation or guilt (or both).

And although texting enables more frequent contact, it also can be used to curtail conversation. The best example of this is the egregious way texts are used as preemptive apologies, as in the reflexive "sorrys" that accompany notes one is running late. But is the sender really sorry, or the apology merely a brush-off to keep conflict at bay?

Indeed, preemptive apologies are offered in hopes of not having to deal with the consequence of having offended someone. While I can hear that you are sorry, I also need a chance to say that I am hurt if we are really to resolve the incident. Without the chance to express my feelings, the apology will be less meaningful, as reconciliation is strengthened when both parties have a say. Do I appreciate a text from a patient that she is on her way and will be 15 minutes late? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that we won't talk about why she was late, especially if it's a pattern.

At root, texting is lazy, and our relationships suffer when we don't invest in them. A "Happy Birthday!" text - even with cake and champagne emojis - will never bring the same smile as a card in the mail or a phone call. Such actions take time and planning. I've had patients show me the texts people have sent them to express condolences after the death of a loved one. No matter how many crying emojis are used, this is just wrong. A card and a stamp take effort that demonstrate the sender understands the importance of the event in the other person's life. A conversation allows deep emotions to be shared, and the risk involved in opening up this way is not only worth it but necessary for real connection.

From multitasking to abbreviated, one-sided sharing of information that's supposed to pass as conversation, text messages often leave the receiver feeling short-changed, confused or devalued. That people are in touch through texting with greater frequency and immediacy than ever before means that, ironically, the opportunity for disappointment is also greater. Recently, a patient told me of a text she received from her husband who was at home with her at the time but unwilling to come upstairs and tell her to her face how angry he was. She didn't know whether to be more upset by what he said or by his behavior.

Our skills for conversing are getting rusty and will only get worse as more people use virtual assistants, online shopping and other apps that help us avoid actually talking to another human being. Texting breeds not just grammar and spelling illiteracy but, more importantly, emotional illiteracy as well.

Texting breeds not just grammar and spelling illiteracy but, more importantly, emotional illiteracy as well.

So if you're running late, please text, but don't think that exempts you from talking about it in person. If you want to send a heart emoji, go for it, but don't forget to tell me you love me when you get home. If I've hurt your feelings, by all means text me - to arrange a time when we can actually discuss what happened.

The disappointment, anger and conflict that might arise in this and other authentic conversations don't have to be scary. Conversations that allow me to hear your voice, see your expressions and support true dialogue are still the gold standard for bringing us closer. A good conversation is the best antidote to loneliness that I know. And for that to happen, please silence your phone and leave it in your pocket. Then, let's talk.

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Opinion | How texting is ruining personal relationships

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Text messages can't provide the human contact and perspective that come from true dialogue, but they can encourage laziness and passive-aggressive behavior.

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Texting allows for convenient communication for people anywhere. However, it can discourage face-to-face interaction and it's easier to hide behind a screen when people text each other. It's easier to lie when someone only sees written words that are used to convey your thoughts and emotions. It encourages more frequent contact but can also be used to shorten conversations that need to be elaborated on.

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A computer that is powerful, but lacking wanted features 

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A computer that is powerful, but lacking wanted features 

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Although, without the ports, many people cannot deny the Macbook's utility and efficient software, which allows it to be one of the best computers today. This computer allows most people to achieve their tasks, but not all, since the some of the ports had an effect on some people's overall MacBook experience.

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In 2021, Apple released its 13-inch Macbook Pro. However, one thing this computer did not have that affected its purchasing was the variety of ports usually included. Some examples of these ports could be HDMI Port or the SDXC port. Therefore, some Apple customers were not able to purchase the product due to the limited ports, or had to buy a port-addition in addition to buying the Macbook Pro. In this case, Apple did not regard everyone's opinions of the ports.

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Ryan Linton

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Online shopping is, well, online, and is branded toward all types of customers. You also cannot express certain cultural factors online, especially human factors. Online shopping hurts local physical stores and encourages conforming to "mass-produced" products typically. Much local culture is lost in small businesses that can't beat the convenience and quantity of online shops.

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Discord allows users to communicate from anywhere in the world, with an online, free platform that you can open in your browser. You don't need a cell phone or data, just a device that can open popular browsers(Chrome, Firefox, etc.) and a connection to the Internet.

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Motherboard obtained reports of stalking, harassment, and abuse using AirTags, targeting victims of intimate partner violence.

One year ago this month, Apple unveiled the AirTag, a shiny, half-dollar-sized coin with a speaker, Bluetooth antenna, and battery inside, which helps users keep track of their missing items. Attach an AirTag to your purse, keys, wallet, or even your car, and if you lose it, the device will ping every nearby Apple product with Bluetooth turned on to triangulate its location. Those devices send its location back to you on a map, showing where the AirTag has been and its current location.

Police records reviewed by Motherboard show that, as security experts immediately predicted when the product launched, this technology has been used as a tool to stalk and harass women.

Motherboard requested records mentioning AirTags in a recent eight month period from dozens of the country's largest police departments. We obtained records from eight police departments.

Of the 150 total police reports mentioning AirTags, in 50 cases women called the police because they started getting notifications that their whereabouts were being tracked by an AirTag they didn't own. Of those, 25 could identify a man in their lives-ex-partners, husbands, bosses-who they strongly suspected planted the AirTags on their cars in order to follow and harass them. Those women reported that current and former intimate partners-the most likely people to harm women overall-are using AirTags to stalk and harass them.

In one report, a woman called the police because a man who had been harassing her had escalated his behavior, and she said he'd placed an AirTag in her car. The woman said the same man threatened to make her life hell, the report said.

Motherboard is excluding specific details from these reports so as not to identify victims, for their safety.

Most cases involved angry exes; one woman called to report that her ex had slashed her tires and left an AirTag in the car to watch her. A woman in another police report said she'd found AirTags attached to her car multiple times, and knew it was her ex, who has a history of assault. She said she knew it was him because he was showing up to her locations at the same time as her.

In another police report, a woman said she started noticing something beeping inside her vehicle every time she left her house; she found an AirTag in her car and confronted an ex who admitted to putting it there to see if she was "cheating."

Seeing exes mysteriously appear wherever and whenever they went out was a major red flag for several women who made these reports. One woman kept spotting her ex following her. At one point, he found and cornered her. She took her car to a mechanic, who found an AirTag in it.

Multiple women who filed these reports said they feared physical violence. One woman called the police because a man she had a protective order against was harassing her with phone calls. She'd gotten notifications that an AirTag was tracking her, and could hear it chiming in her car, but couldn't find it. When the cops arrived, she answered one of his calls in front of the officer, and the man described how he would physically harm her. Another who found an AirTag in her car had been wondering how a man she had an order of protection against seemed to always know where she was. The report said she was afraid he would assault or kill her.

One woman came into a police station to report that she was getting notifications for weeks about AirTags nearby, and had found multiple AirTags mounted under her car. She suspected a man who had been violent toward her before, who was now appearing wherever she went.

Have you been a victim of harassment using AirTags? We'd love to hear from you, and you can remain anonymous. Contact Samantha Cole on the secure messaging app Signal at +1 646 926 1726, or email samantha.cole@vice.com.

Not all cases involved exes; in some, the women were still in relationships or marriages with the men stalking them, and became physically violent when they were confronted about the AirTags.

The overwhelming number of reports came from women. Only one case out of the 150 we reviewed involved a man who suspected an ex-girlfriend of tracking him with an AirTag.

AirTags have also attracted some attention as a potential vector for human trafficking. One of the records said the caller "believed she's being tracked to become a victim of a scheme she observed on Instagram." On TikTok last year, a woman went viral for posting a video holding an AirTag with the caption, "This is something you see in movies 🥺😣🤯😱 #fyp #sextrafficking." The video provides no context beyond her finding the AirTag behind her license plate. Police themselves have spread the notion that AirTags are being used by sex traffickers, but there's no evidence that this is happening.

Of the 150 total police reports mentioning AirTags that these departments provided, less than half mentioned AirTags as part of robberies or thefts-the sort of stories where someone had an AirTag in their purse or attached to a bike or car that was subsequently stolen. Several involved people who got AirTag notifications on their phones but couldn't find a device anywhere; some of these reports mention the callers saying they'd heard about the danger of AirTags on the news. (One said she "wasn't sure" if this was related to "human trafficking" or not, and had no one to suspect, but called the police when she received a notification.)

AirTags have always implemented a notification feature that alerts people with iPhones if an AirTag is traveling with them; anyone not using an iPhone or Apple device, however, would never know.

"That was a completely ridiculous way to launch a new device, without having taken into account its use in a domestic violence situation," Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. "But specifically, the blind spot that Apple had was people who live outside of the Apple ecosystem."

We've known for years that abusive domestic partners sometimes use software installed on their targets' phones to track and control them. AirTags are different because they're widely advertised by one of the biggest consumer tech companies in the world, cheap at only $29, and easy to plant inconspicuously on a car or in a bag.

"Stalking and stalkerware existed before AirTags, but Apple made it cheaper and easier than ever for abusers and attackers to track their targets," Albert Fox Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Motherboard. "Apple's global device network gives AirTags unique power to stalk around the world. And Apple's massive marketing campaign has helped highlight this type of technology to stalkers and abusers who'd never otherwise know about it."

A handful of reports of people being tracked with these devices have attracted national attention. In December, a woman found an AirTag attached to her car, and suspected someone put it there to try to steal the vehicle. In January, a Philadelphia woman said she'd been followed from afar by someone with an AirTag. That same month, police in Dearborn, Michigan said that they'd seen an uptick in reports from people who received AirTag notifications, with the caveat that at least some of those were likely people getting notifications from nearby AirTags that weren't actually targeting them.

To try to stress-test Apple's safety features on AirTags, journalists at the Verge and the New York Times have experimented with AirTags in their own lives, using controlled environments to replicate the stalking scenarios that security experts have warned the public about. These stories didn't shy away from the potential use of AirTags as a tool of abuse, but most coverage of AirTags in the real world, so far, has focused on AirTags as tools for car thieves.

The stories that haven't yet appeared in the news are those of domestic violence victims. It's difficult for targets of such intimate partner violence as stalking or harassment to come forward publicly; exiting such a situation is incredibly dangerous, before even bringing in the complications posed by talking to a hometown reporter about it. Police reports obtained by Motherboard, though, show that while the use of AirTags as a tool by strangers that's hyped on social media appears to be rare, their use as a tool of control by abusers against women is not.

AirTags are far from the only physical location trackers on the market, and any of these can be used for malicious purposes. In recent years, however, they've gotten more convenient and user-friendly for a mass market. Tile, a tracker similar to AirTags, announced last month that it was implementing new anti-stalking features in its app.

Location stalking is "as old as GPS technology itself," Mary Beth Becker-Lauth, domestic violence community educator at the nonprofit organization Women's Advocates, told me. But historically it's taken some technical knowledge to implement against another person. "Until fairly recently, the women (and they were always women) who'd come to our program for support while being stalked/tracked had an abuser/stalker who worked in IT or who was highly tech-savvy," she said.

AirTags, being a device you can just tape to the underside of a car or pop into a purse, are more insidiously easy for abusers to use. Apple's "it just works" ethos is part of the appeal of AirTags, too, but in this case, it's exploited to its worst ends.

"The fact that most women who are finding AirTags on their person know who might have put them there is right in line with demographic research on stalking," Becker-Lauth said. "Nearly three out of every four stalking victims know their stalker, and the most common relationship between a stalking victim and their stalker is a current or former intimate partner. So it makes sense that these women have someone they can point to immediately and say 'This sounds like something he would do.'"

"Stalking and stalkerware existed before AirTags, but Apple made it cheaper and easier than ever for abusers and attackers to track their targets"

In a response to a request for comment about these reports, Apple sent a link to its latest company blog post in February, outlining recent security updates.

"AirTag was designed to help people locate their personal belongings, not to track people or another person's property, and we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products," the blog post says. "Unwanted tracking has long been a societal problem, and we took this concern seriously in the design of AirTag. It's why the Find My network is built with privacy in mind, uses end-to-end encryption, and why we innovated with the first-ever proactive system to alert you of unwanted tracking."

The company also published instructions for what to do if you find out an AirTag is tracking you, but domestic abuse experts say that confronting an abusive partner or ex or disabling their tracking can be dangerous.

Perhaps more telling is the way Apple has responded to security concerns with piecemeal, reactive updates to the technology. Apple launched an Android app that will notify users of AirTags in December, but users have to learn about and then install the app, then allow it permission to work in the background-steps many people won't follow through with. In June 2021, three months after the product launched, it shortened the window for a feature where the AirTag would chime if it was separated from its owner; originally, it was three days, which they changed to between eight and 24 hours-ideally, alerting a stalking target to the device in their vicinity. In February, following the New York Times' experiment, Apple announced even more security features, including warnings at setup that tracking people without their consent is a crime, more precise tracking of the AirTag for the person being tracked, and louder chimes.

The fact that there are so many reports from people about AirTag stalking means Apple's security measures, such as the notifications, are working as intended, said Galperin. "It's not that somebody has randomly found an AirTag. It's that the anti-stalking mitigations that Apple has implemented are finally working, and the results are that some smaller subset of those people are then going to police," she said. "So, yes, we did understand from the very beginning that this was going to be a major problem. But part of it I think is just reflected in the fact that stalking is a major problem. And that having the AirTag alert go off is actually something that a person can bring to the police as solid evidence, which sometimes they otherwise do not have."

Some experts said that what the company has done is still not enough. "This is too little too late," Cahn said. "These gimmicks do little to prevent AirTags from being misused, and they often only notify targets once the damage is done and their location has been tracked. There's no technical fix that can prevent AirTags from being abused. As long as Apple continues to sell a cheap, easily-hidden tracking device, stalkers will continue to use it. The only solution is to stop selling and supporting AirTags. This product is far too dangerous to stay on the market."

"I wish Apple had been more proactive and done troubleshooting to reduce the risk of bad actors before this product was released," Becker-Lauth said. "But honestly, no trackable technology is going to be completely safe."

If people aren't going to stop using these devices for harassment, it may be up to device manufacturers to figure out how to make them safer. Last week, industry outlet 9to5Google spotted a new feature Google may be working on: "Unfamiliar device alerts" and a "Unfamiliar Tag Detected Notification" in the safety settings for Android devices.

Galperin told me that the next step for device manufacturers is to set a safety standard for the industry to follow.

"The thing that I am most looking forward to is seeing the makers of physical trackers agree on a standard that can then be implemented in operating systems, so that people have detection of trackers working in the background all the time, automatically, no matter what kind of phone that they have," she said. "I think that's the only reasonable and effective mitigation to this mess we're in."

And people who go to the police to report being stalked or harassed should have better resources to protect themselves from abusers if they do go to the police. In most of these reports, when a woman reported a stalker, the responding officer either offered them a domestic violence hotline phone number, or advised them to file (or re-file) for a protective order. Some of the officers wrote that they'd heard of AirTags being used to steal from people before, but others seemed to not understand what an AirTag was or how to disable it.

"Police often have no idea how to respond to AirTags, but even if they did, that wouldn't be a solution," Cahn said. "We can't arrest our way out of Apple's mess. In many jurisdictions, it's unclear if using AirTags is a crime, and even if it is, mass incarceration is a terrible solution."

Laws against tracking someone's location vary from state to state, either as part of stalking laws or specifically in terms of tracking a car without the owner's consent.

"At the very least, these women should be believed. The safety of victim-survivors from control and violence does not appear to be a priority for many of the police departments in this country," Becker-Lauth said. "We should be taking these women's experiences so, so seriously, because when they tell a police officer or domestic violence advocate that they are being stalked, what they're really saying is that their life is in danger, usually because of the person doing the stalking."
Timothy Marchman contributed reporting to this story.

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Police Records Show Women Are Being Stalked With Apple AirTags Across the Country

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Motherboard obtained reports of stalking, harassment, and abuse using AirTags, targeting victims of intimate partner violence. One year ago this month, Apple unveiled the AirTag, a shiny, half-dollar-sized coin with a speaker, Bluetooth antenna, and battery inside, which helps users keep track of their missing items. Attach an AirTag to your purse, keys, wallet, or even your car, and if you lose it, the device will ping every nearby Apple product with Bluetooth turned on to triangulate its location.

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Airtags are only able to be tracked on apple smartphones, they exclude androids, all though the airtags could be put on a device other than apple, they cannot be tracked on a device that does not have ios. These airtags are supposed to be purchased indiviudally and you do have to pay extra.

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Many games are really addictive, these games are purposefully created to create an addiction and once kids, adults, or others get addicted it may be hard to stop, this addiction creates barriers in social and outside life, many kids get stuck to computer screens and spend more time playing online videos games than going outside or socializing.

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Discord was originally targeted toward members of the video game community, including players, streamers, and developers. As Discord was targeting gamers, they primarily looked to attract adults and young adults and succeeded. The vast majority of servers and users got the app due to something video game-related.

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by ezun

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Back to glossary

What is Automation Bias?
Automation bias is an over-reliance on automated aids and decision support systems. As the availability of automated decision aids is increasing additions to critical decision-making contexts such as intensive care units, or aircraft cockpits are becoming more common. It is a human tendency to take the road of least cognitive effort while leaning towards "automation bias". The same concept can be translated to the fundamental way that AI and automation work, which is mainly based on learning from large sets of data. This type of computation assumes that things won't be radically different in the future. Another aspect that should be considered is the risk of using a flawed training data then the learning will be flawed.
What is Machine Bias?
Machine Bias relates to the ways in which algorithms exhibit the bias of the algorithm used or their input data. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping us uncover new insight from data and enhance human decision-making one such example is the face recognition feature used to sign into our smartphones. Unintended bias can come from many causes (Wikipedia lists 184), but the three main drivers are:

incomplete data samples

incorrect datasets.

skewed learning that happens through interactions over time, also known as interaction bias

We can prevent data bias by using a comprehensive and broad dataset, reflective of all possible edge use cases, the more comprehensive the dataset, the more accurate the AI predictions are going to be. Let's take a look at several points you should take into consideration when working on your AI. Choose the right learning model for the problem. There's probably no single model that you can follow in order to completely avoid bias, but there are parameters that can inform your team as it's building. You will have to identify the best model for a given situation as well as troubleshoot ideas before committing to them Choose a representative training data set. Making sure to use training data that is diverse and includes different groups. Monitor performance using real data. You should be simulating real-world applications as much as possible when building algorithms.
Additional Resources

Back to glossary

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Back to glossary Automation bias is an over-reliance on automated aids and decision support systems. As the availability of automated decision aids is increasing additions to critical decision-making contexts such as intensive care units, or aircraft cockpits are becoming more common. It is a human tendency to take the road of least cognitive effort while leaning towards "automation bias".

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by ezun

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by ezun

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by ezun

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Purpose and Function of Speech-to-text softwares

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Purpose and Function of Speech-to-text softwares

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“Clow-dia,” I say once. Twice. A third time. Defeated, I say the Americanized version of my name: “Claw-dee-ah.” Finally, Siri recognizes it.

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Speech Recognition Tech Is Yet Another Example of Bias

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Speech Recognition Tech Is Yet Another Example of Bias

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"Clow-dia," I say once. Twice. A third time. Defeated, I say the Americanized version of my name: "Claw-dee-ah." Finally, Siri recognizes it.

Having to adapt our way of speaking to interact with speech recognition technologies is a familiar experience for people whose first language is not English or who do not have conventionally American-sounding names. I have even stopped using Siri because of it.

Implementation of speech recognition technology in the last few decades has unveiled a very problematic issue ingrained in them: racial bias. One recent study, published in PNAS, showed that speech recognition programs are biased against Black speakers. On average, all five programs from leading technology companies like Apple and Microsoft showed significant race disparities; they were twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers as opposed to white speakers.

In normal conversations with other people, we might choose to code-switch, alternating between languages, accents or ways of speaking, depending on one's audience. But with automated speech recognition programs, there is no code-switching-either you assimilate, or you are not understood. This effectively censors voices that are not part of the "standard" languages or accents used to create these technologies.

"I don't get to negotiate with these devices unless I adapt my language patterns," says Halcyon Lawrence, an assistant professor of technical communication and information design at Towson University who was not part of the study. "That is problematic." Specifically, the problem goes beyond just having to change your way of speaking: it means having to adapt your identity and assimilate.

For Lawrence, who has a Trinidad and Tobagonian accent, and others part of our identity comes from speaking a particular language, having an accent, or using a set of speech forms such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE). For me as a Puerto Rican, saying my name in Spanish, rather than trying to translate the sounds to make it understandable for North American listeners, means staying true to my roots. Having to change such an integral part of an identity to be able to be recognized is inherently cruel, Lawrence adds: "The same way one wouldn't expect that I would take the color of my skin off."

The inability to be understood by speech recognition programs impacts other marginalized communities. Allison Koenecke, a computational graduate student and first author of the study, points out a uniquely vulnerable community: people with disabilities who rely on voice recognition and speech-to-text tools. "This is only going to work for one subset of the population who is able to be understood by [automated speech recognition] systems," she says. For someone who has a disability and is dependent on these technologies, being misunderstood could have serious consequences.

There are probably many culprits for these disparities, but Koenecke points to the most likely: training data. Across the board, the "standard" data used to train speech recognition technologies are predominantly white. By using narrow speech corpora both in the words that are used and how they are said, systems exclude accents and other ways of speaking that have unique linguistic features, such as AAVE. In fact, the study found that with increased use of AAVE, the likelihood of misunderstanding also increased. Specifically, the disparities found in the study were mainly due to the way words were said, since even when speakers said identical phrases, Black speakers were again twice as likely to be misunderstood compared to white speakers.

Additionally, accent and language bias lives in the humans that create these technologies. For example, research shows that the presence of an accent affects whether jurors find people guilty and whether patients find their doctors competent. Recognizing these biases would be an important way to avoid implementing them in technologies.

Safiya Noble, associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, admits that language is tricky to incorporate into a technology. "Language is contextual," says Noble, who was not involved in the study. "Certain words mean certain things when certain bodies say them, and these [speech] recognition systems really don't account for a lot of that." But that doesn't mean that companies shouldn't strive to decrease bias and disparities in their technologies. However, to try to do this, they need to appreciate the complexities of human language. For this reason, solutions can come not only from the field of technology but also from the fields of humanities, linguistics, and social sciences.

Lawrence argues that developers have to be aware of the implications of the technologies they create, and that people have to question what purpose and who these technologies serve. The only way to do this is to have humanists and social scientists at the table and in dialogue with technologists to ask the important questions of if these recognition technologies could be co-opted as weapons against marginalized communities, similar to certain harmful developments with facial recognition technologies.

From the tech side, feeding more diverse training data into the programs could close this gap, says Koenecke. "I think at least increasing the share of non-standard English audio samples in the training data set will take us towards closing the race gap," she adds. They should also test their products more widely and have more diverse work forces so people from different backgrounds and perspectives can directly influence the design of speech technologies, says Noble.

But both sides agree that tech companies must be held accountable and should aim to change. Koenecke suggests that automated speech recognition companies use their study as a preliminary benchmark and continue using this to assess their systems over time.

With these strategies, tech companies and developers may be able to make speech recognition technologies more inclusive. But if they continue to be disconnected from the complexities of human language and society without recognizing their own biases, there will continue to be gaps. In the meantime, many of us will continue to struggle between identity and being understood when interacting with Alexa, Cortana or Siri. But Lawrence chooses identity every time: "I'm not switching, I'm not doing it."

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Speech Recognition Tech Is Yet Another Example of Bias

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"Clow-dia," I say once. Twice. A third time. Defeated, I say the Americanized version of my name: "Claw-dee-ah." Finally, Siri recognizes it. Having to adapt our way of speaking to interact with speech recognition technologies is a familiar experience for people whose first language is not English or who do not have conventionally American-sounding names.

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Unsupervised artificial intelligence (AI) models that automatically discover hidden patterns in...

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Detecting and mitigating bias in natural language processing

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Detecting and mitigating bias in natural language processing

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Detecting and mitigating bias in natural language processing

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Another front in the fight against AI bias.

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There is bais in speech-to-text software and it's very obvious. For example, a research released in 2020 by a group of academics from Stanford and Georgetown Universities looked into major speech-to-text programs to see whether they had any racial discrepancies. They discovered that these tools misinterpreted — and so mistranscribed — Black speakers nearly twice as often as white ones. For Black speakers, the average mistake rate was around 35%, whereas for white speakers it was around 19%. This is a great example of a foundation in today's world.

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Ilf Dhuka

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Airpods - Function & Purpose (Christiana)

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Airpods - Function & Purpose (Christiana)

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Many video games have a monetary feature where real money can be used to purchase in-game items. These items can often boost the success of the player, but can get to the point where a player cannot be successful without paying a fee. This can ruin the fun and the environment of the game, and developers exploit this as a means to earn more money.

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Two years ago, Apple killed the headphone port. I still haven't forgiven them for it.

When Apple announced that the iPhone 7 would have no headphone port, I was pretty immediately annoyed. I figured maybe I'd get over it in a few months. I didn't. I figured if worse came to worse, I'd switch platforms. Then all of the other manufacturers started following suit.

This, of course, isn't a new annoyance for me. I've been hating headphone adapters on phones right here on this very website since two thousand and nine. For a little stretch there, though, I got my way.

It was a world full of dongles and crappy proprietary audio ports. Sony Ericsson had the FastPort. Nokia had the Pop-Port. Samsung had like 10 different ports that no one gave a shit about. No single phone maker had claimed the throne yet, so no one port had really become ubiquitous... but every manufacturer wanted their port to become the port. Even the phones that had a standardized audio jack mostly had the smaller 2.5mm port, requiring an adapter all the same.

Then came the original iPhone with its 3.5mm headphone port. It was a weird recessed 3.5mm port that didn't work with most headphones, but it was a 3.5mm port! Apple was riding on the success of the iPod, and people were referring to this rumored device as the iPod Phone before it was even announced. How could something like that not have a headphone port?

Sales of the iPhone started to climb. A few million in 2007. Nearly 12 million in 2008. 20 million in 2009. A tide shifted. As Apple's little slab of glass took over the smartphone world, other manufacturers tried to figure out what Apple was doing so right. The smartphone market, once filled with chunky, button-covered plastic beasts (this one slides! This one spins!), homogenized. Release by release, everything started looking more like the iPhone. A slab of glass. Premium materials. Minimal physical buttons. And, of course, a headphone port.

Within a couple years, a standard headphone port wasn't just a nice selling point - it was mandatory. We'd entered a wonderful age of being able to use our wired headphones whenever we damn well pleased.

Then came September 7th, 2016, when Apple had the "courage" to announce it was ditching the 3.5mm jack (oh, and also by the way check out these new $150 wireless headphones!).

Apple wasn't the first to ditch the headphone port - but, just as with its decision to include one, its decision to remove it has turned the tide. A few months after the portless iPhone 7 was announced, Xiaomi nixed the port on the Mi 6. Then Google ditched it from its flagship Android phone, the Pixel 3. Even Samsung, which lampooned Apple for the decision, seems to be tinkering with the idea of dropping it. Though leaks suggest the upcoming Galaxy S10 will have a headphone port, the company pulled it from the mid-range A8 line earlier this year. If 2016 was the year Apple took a stab at the headphone jack, 2018 was the year it bled out.

And I'm still mad about it.

Technology comes and goes, and oh-so-often at Apple's doing. Ditching the CD drive in laptops? That's okay - CDs were doomed, and they were pretty awful to begin with. Killing Flash? Flash sucked. Switching one type of USB port for another? Fine, I suppose. The new USB is better in just about every way. At the very least, I won't try to plug it in upside down only to flip it over and realize I had it right the first time.

But the headphone jack? It was fine. It stood the test of time for one hundred damned years, and with good reason: It. Just. Worked.

I've been trying to figure out why the removal of the headphone port bugs me more than other ports that have been unceremoniously killed off, and I think it's because the headphone port almost always only made me happy. Using the headphone port meant listening to my favorite album, or using a free minute to catch the latest episode of a show, or passing an earbud to a friend to share some new tune. It enabled happy moments and never got in the way.

Now every time I want to use my headphones, I just find myself annoyed.

Bluetooth? Whoops, forgot to charge them. Or whoops, they're trying to pair with my laptop even though my laptop is turned off and in my backpack.

Dongle? Whoops, left it on my other pair of headphones at work. Or whoops, it fell off somewhere, and now I've got to go buy another one.

I'll just buy a bunch of dongles, and put them on all my headphones! I'll keep extras in my bag for when I need to borrow a pair of headphones. That's just like five dongles at this point, problem solved! Oh, wait: now I want to listen to music while I fall asleep, but also charge my phone so it's not dead in the morning. That's a different, more expensive splitter dongle (many of which, I've found, are poorly made garbage).

None of these are that big of a deal. Charge your damned headphones, Greg. Stop losing your dongles. The thing is: they took a thing that just worked and just made me happy and replaced it with something that, quite often, just bugs the hell out of me. If a friend sent me a YouTube link and I wanted to watch it without bugging everyone around me, I could just use whatever crappy, worn out headphones I happened to have sitting in my bag. Now it's a process with a bunch of potential points of failure.

"But now its water-resistant!" Water-resistant phones existed before all of this, plenty of which had/have headphone ports. As a recent example, see Samsung's Galaxy S9 with its IP68 rating (matching that of the iPhone XS).

"But it can be slimmer!" No one was asking for that.

"But the batteries inside can be bigger!" The capacity of the battery barely jumped in the years from the 6S to the 8 - from 1,715mAh to 1,821mAh. It wasn't until a few years later with the iPhone X, when the standard iPhone started getting wider and taller, that we saw super big jumps in its battery capacity.

Will this post change anything? Of course not. Apple blew the horn that told the industry it's okay to drop the headphone port, and everyone fell right in line. The next year - and the year after that - Apple sold another 200 million-plus phones. At this point, Apple doesn't even bother giving you the headphone adapter in the box. Apple's mind is made up.

But if you're out there, annoyed, stumbling across this post after finding yourself with a pair of headphones and a smartphone that won't play friendly together in a pinch, just know: you're not the only one. Two years later, I'm still mad at whoever made this call - and everyone else in the industry who followed suit.

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Two years later, I still miss the headphone port

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Two years ago, Apple killed the headphone port. I still haven't forgiven them for it. When Apple announced that the iPhone 7 would have no headphone port, I was pretty immediately annoyed. I figured maybe I'd get over it in a few months. I didn't.

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Now that phones are more common, especially among youth, phone addictions are prevalent. This unhealthy obsession with phones can cause psychological issues and give way to cyberbullying especially through social media.

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Even to apple users, using apple headphones is no longer as accessible.

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IPhones won’t come with headphones or power adapters in the box from now on – TechCrunch

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That drawer full of bad headphones and extra power adapters for your phone won’t get any more cluttered if you decide to pick up a new iPhone 12. Apple will no longer include those items in the box, part of a redoubled effort to reduce its environmental footprint. In a segment of its iPhone-c…

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Airpods are very expensive and not accessible to everyone. They pair to any device, including android, but key features are often not available in non-apple-devices. iPhone users are also coerced into buying Airpods as newer iPhones do not have aux-ports, making it difficult to listen to music with wired headphones. The dongles and headphones previously provided are also no longer provided.

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Christiana Arnette

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Smartphone Function and Purpose (Anupama)

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Smartphone Function and Purpose (Anupama)

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Smartphones over time (Anupama Subramanian)

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Smartphones over time (Anupama Subramanian)

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Greater access to international products (Anupama)

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Greater access to international products (Anupama)

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With more online shopping, people are more likely to be able to buy international products and experience different cultures more than ever before. International entertainment is readily available, and cultural foods can be shipped home very easily. This has the potential to result in greater cultural awareness. People who have moved internationally also have greater access to traditional products that they may not be able to find otherwise.

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Relatively inexpensive compared to alternatives in the USA (Anupama)

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Relatively inexpensive compared to alternatives in the USA (Anupama)

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More than 30 years after the debut of the World Wide Web, internet use, broadband adoption and smartphone ownership have grown rapidly for all Americans - including those who are less well-off financially. However, the digital lives of Americans with lower and higher incomes remain markedly different, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted Jan. 25-Feb. 8, 2021. In fact, the shares of Americans in each income tier who have home broadband or a smartphone have not significantly changed from 2019 to 2021.

Roughly a quarter of adults with household incomes below $30,000 a year (24%) say they don't own a smartphone. About four-in-ten adults with lower incomes do not have home broadband services (43%) or a desktop or laptop computer (41%). And a majority of Americans with lower incomes are not tablet owners. By comparison, each of these technologies is nearly ubiquitous among adults in households earning $100,000 or more a year.

Americans with higher household incomes are also more likely to have multiple devices that enable them to go online. Roughly six-in-ten adults living in households earning $100,000 or more a year (63%) report having home broadband services, a smartphone, a desktop or laptop computer and a tablet, compared with 23% of those living in lower-income households.

Pew Research Center has studied Americans' internet and technology adoption for decades. In continuing this research, the Center surveyed 1,502 U.S. adults from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, 2021, by cellphone and landline phone. The survey was conducted by interviewers under the direction of Abt Associates and is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, education and other categories. Here are the questions, responses and methodology used for this analysis.

Conversely, 13% of adults with household incomes below $30,000 a year do not have access to any of these technologies at home, while only 1% of adults from households making $100,000 or more a year report a similar lack of access.

With fewer options for online access at their disposal, Americans with lower incomes are relying more on smartphones. As of early 2021, 27% of adults living in households earning less than $30,000 a year are smartphone-only internet users - meaning they own a smartphone but do not have broadband internet at home. This represents a substantial increase from 12% in 2013. In contrast, only 6% of those living in households earning $100,000 or more fall into this category in 2021. These shares are statistically unchanged since 2019, when the Center last polled on this topic.

This reliance on smartphones also means that the less affluent are more likely to use them for tasks traditionally reserved for larger screens. For example, smartphone owners with lower incomes were especially likely to use their mobile device when seeking out and applying for jobs, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center report.

The disparity in online access is also apparent in what has been called the "homework gap" - the gap between school-age children who have access to high-speed internet at home and those who don't. In 2015, 35% of lower-income households with school-age children did not have a broadband internet connection at home, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

The digital divide has been a central topic in tech circles for decades, with researchers, advocates and policymakers examining this issue. However, this topic has gained special attention during the coronavirus outbreak as much of daily life (such as work and school) moved online, leaving families with lower incomes more likely to face obstacles in navigating this increasing digital environment. For example, in April 2020, 59% of parents with lower incomes who had children in schools that were remote due to the pandemic said their children would likely face at least one of three digital obstacles to their schooling, such as a lack of reliable internet at home, no computer at home, or needing to use a smartphone to complete schoolwork.
Note: Here are the questions, responses and methodology used for this analysis. This is an update of a post originally published March 22, 2017, and later updated on May 7, 2019 by Monica Anderson and Madhumitha Kumar.
Read the other posts in our digital divide series:

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Digital divide persists even as Americans with lower incomes make gains in tech adoption

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The shares of Americans in each income tier who have home broadband or a smartphone have not significantly changed from 2019 to 2021.

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Expensive to poor internationally, yet a necessity (Anupama)

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Expensive to poor internationally, yet a necessity (Anupama)

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This post was written by Teddy Woodhouse From luxury to lifeline: Reducing the cost of mobile devices to reach universal internet access. , Web Foundation Research Manager for Access and Affordability. Follow him on Twitter @TeddyWoodhouse.
Mobile devices, once seen as consumer luxuries, are today the essential first step to getting online. But for billions of people around the world, they remain too expensive. That's the conclusion of new research from the Alliance for Affordable Internet and the Web Foundation, looking at the affordability of mobile devices in 70 low and middle-income countries.

This is a problem because mobile phones are the cheapest devices available to access the internet today. They will be the way that the next billion people connect. That so many people are unable to afford the upfront cost of a handset is a drag on progress towards universal internet access and a more inclusive digitalsociety, a goal that unites governments, technology companies, civil society organisations, and the United Nations.

A lifeline, not a luxury

The Covid-19 crisis has made this goal of internet access for everyone more urgent than ever. The internet - and the devices that let people use it - are not luxuries. They are lifelines. Now being used for everything from remote learning and working to contact tracing and telehealth, internet connectivity has never been more important.

Yet, almost half of the world's population remains offline. And those without internet access are disproportionately women, and people on low incomes and in rural areas - groups already likely to be most affected by the impacts of the pandemic. In order to avoid a world where digital inequalities drive further inequalities in health, wealth, and education, we need action to address barriers to connectivity.

The cost of connectivity

The biggest factor keeping people offline is cost. The internet is still not affordable for many around the world. This applies to data, which is still too expensive for most people in low-income countries. And, as our report shows, the cost of internet-connected devices is another financial barrier preventing many from getting online.

This report surveys the cost of devices in 70 countries with a combined population of over five billion people. In each of these, we collected the cheapest available price for a smartphone from the website of a major mobile network operator. We used these prices to calculate the affordability of devices - their price relative to income.

Here's what we found

Nearly 2.5 billion people live in countries where the cost of the cheapest available smartphone is a quarter or more of the average monthly income. This is equal to the share of monthly income the average European household spends on housing and utilities.

In some countries devices were less affordable still. In Sierra Leone, the average person needs to save six months' salary to buy the cheapest available smartphone. In India, where almost 18% of the global population now lives, the price of the cheapest smartphone from leading operator Jio was 206% of average monthly income. This is striking in a country that has some of the lowest priced internet data in the world.

Other countries have very affordable devices, showing stark differences for different populations. Botswana topped the survey for most-affordable devices, with a low-cost smartphone priced at just 4% of average monthly income, with Jamaica (5%), Mexico (5.7%) and Costa Rica (6%) following closely behind. We also see a wide disparity among people living in regions of the world. In Africa, devices were least affordable at 62.8% of average monthly income compared with 11.7% in the Americas and 16.2% in Asia Pacific (excluding India). With India included, the Asia Pacific figure jumps to 87.4% owing to the country's role as an outlier with a very large population and high costs.

Worryingly, the Covid-19 crisis could make phones less affordable, with twin factors of disrupted supply chains (consultancy firm IDC estimated the largest year-on-year drop for smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2020) and increased poverty as the full effect of pandemic's disruption to jobs starts to bite around the world.

Government policies can lower handset costs

Internet access is critical not only for individuals' wellbeing, but also for the health of a country's economy. With the economic disruption of Covid-19, digital growth will be particularly important. Governments are not short of incentives to prioritise policies that ensure as many people as possible can access the internet.

Device affordability is driven by a range of factors, such as production costs and market competition, consumer preferences and the average income in a country. But governments and multilateral bodies have a range of tools at their disposal to make mobile devices more affordable for consumers:

1. Reduce taxes on low-cost devices

Policymakers can make quick progress on device affordability by reducing taxes that apply to low-cost devices. When this saving is passed down to the consumer, this brings down prices and, if applied only to devices below a certain price, can encourage manufacturers and retailers to drop prices to qualify for the tax exemption and encourage greater competition in the low-cost device market.

2. Use universal Service and Access Funds (USAFs) to subsidise devices

The poorest households face the largest affordability barrier. USAFs exist to make telecommunications services available to the widest number of people possible, particularly marginalised and underserved communities. This should include addressing the device affordability barrier which few USAFs currently cover. These funds can be used to make devices more affordable, including with subsidy programs for those least able to buy devices.

3. Support projects to help people spread the cost of devices

For many, a major barrier to buying a device is the large upfront cost. While some countries have well-established credit systems letting consumers spread the cost of a handset over monthly payments, for many people such facilities are not available, particularly in lower-income countries, the places where people are least likely to have large amounts of cash on hand for such purchases. Where credit facilities are available, they may not be available to those living on lower incomes.

One important way to make devices more affordable for these users is to develop and scale innovative financing models to reduce the upfront capital people need. Several examples already exist, many of them supported at a pilot-level by funders like development agencies. The next step is to move this from experiments to scale successful projects. The public and private sectors and civil society should work together in partnership to support projects like this to make more financing options available for consumers.

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Policy action to lower the cost of devices in these countries - many of which have low levels of internet penetration - can help make the internet more accessible for billions more people.

For more updates on our work, follow us on Twitter at @a4a_internet and sign up to our newsletter.

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Mobile devices are too expensive for billions of people - and it's keeping them offline - Alliance for Affordable Internet

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This post was written by Teddy Woodhouse From luxury to lifeline : Reducing the cost of mobile devices to reach universal internet access. , Web Foundation Research Manager for Access and Affordability. Follow him on Twitter @TeddyWoodhouse. Mobile devices, once seen as consumer luxuries, are today the essential first step to getting online.

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The ability to text, call, or communicate with anyone*, anywhere**.
*who has a phone
**where there is service

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Online shopping targets less informed people who might not know the true cost of a product and may pay more than they should. Online shopping also allows for easy price changing that can be used to increase the cost for specific groups. Online shopping is also biased towards people with more money due to having the options to pay extra and get the product sooner, and shipping costs, which usually increase the more rural an area is.

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Online video games can be a wonderful place for people to play together and socialize, but they can also be a haven for the worst behaviors of mankind. While the positive effects are plentiful, so are rampant issues of sexual harassment, cyberbullying, and intolerance. Advertisers also run amok in free-to-play games, promoting their products in the digital world and beyond.

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By Jackson S houba
(there's a space in my last name because without it padlet replaces it with 🤬)

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Smart phones are slowly becoming a general societal norm. Many people assume that those above the age of 13 own a smart phone, and flip phones are becoming increasingly rare. However, there is a somewhat significant population for whom smart phones are expensive. Thus, those who could not ordinarily afford one may feel pressured to find means to get one. These phones also have extensive access to the internet, and apps can be expensive. This can pose as a major distraction. People also store a lot of personal information on their phones. This can be abused through hacking and fraud. However, access to this information can also be pivotal towards resolving conflicts.

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(Anupama Subramanian)

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FMI is intentionally targeted to iPhone users. This excludes Android users and those without phones, but those people don't need the product. Some people in power can abuse others by forcing them to use it.

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A man is crediting an Apple Watch feature for helping to save his father following a bicycle fall in Washington state. Gabe Burdett described in a Facebook post that he was on his way to meet his father, Bob, in Riverside State Park for mountain biking, but his dad didn't arrive at their meet-up location.

While he was waiting, Burdett received a text from his father's Apple Watch that read: "Emergency SOS Bob Burdett called emergency services from this approximate location after Apple Watch detected a hard fall."

The watch alerted Burdett that it had called 911 with his father's location. As he later found out, his father flipped his bike and hit his head, knocking him unconscious.

PSA: Last Sunday while trying to meet up with my dad for some mountain biking in Riverside State Park (MTB in RSP), I...
Posted by Gabe Burdett on Friday, September 20, 2019

"He didn't remember flipping his bike and he didn't remember anything really happening until he was in the ambulance, and even then he was pretty out of it," Gabe Burdett told CBS affiliate KREM.

An ambulance arrived and his father was transported to the hospital within 30 minutes of the fall. "It's been an amazing tool. ... You think of fall protection as something like falling off a ladder, but not for doing something you do all the time," he said.

Bob got X-rays and a CT scan, and Gabe said he's doing "great." He urged Apple Watch users in his Facebook post to take full advantage of its features, especially fall detection.

"IF YOU OWN AN APPLE WATCH, set up your HARD FALL detection-it's not just for when you fall off a roof or a ladder," he wrote. "Had he fallen somewhere on the High Drive trails or another remote area, the location would have clued EMS in on where to find him. Amazing technology and so glad he had it!"

Christopher Brito

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Man credits this Apple Watch feature for helping save his father

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A man is crediting an Apple Watch feature for helping to save his father following a bicycle fall in Washington state. Gabe Burdett described in a Facebook post that he was on his way to meet his father, Bob, in Riverside State Park for mountain biking, but his dad didn't arrive at their meet-up location.

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When people are incapacitated, people can find their location

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Anchor to increase the size of the padlet

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Anchor to increase the size of the padlet

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Move this down and to the right to make the Padlet bigger

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1. Add a new Effects Chart

1. Include a video that explains the purpose and function

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2.  Add an effect to an existing Effects Chart

3. Comment on ANY item

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