Voyager

My impression of Organic Maps immediately improved when I started driving. It talks! It knows exit numbers! It can tell you which lanes to use! Sure, it isn’t as polished as Google Maps, but all of the functionality is present. The UI is high-contrast and easy to read, although I wish the text showing exit numbers/street names was a little bigger. When you’re simply on the road and following directions, Organic Maps feels every bit as intuitive as Google Maps.

As my fiancee and I prepared to set off into the boonies, I plugged in the address of our hotel. About 45 seconds later, Organic Maps returned the 300-mile route to our destination. It can take a lot longer to calculate longer routes using your phone’s processor instead of a huge cloud server. It didn’t really bother me though; 45 seconds is nothing compared to the 6-hour trip ahead. If that’s the cost of using a maps app that doesn’t spray your personal data all over the internet, I’ll pay it.

If you noticed something funky going on with Salesforce and its software-as-a-service empire today, it's not you: it's recovering from an hours-long outage.

As of writing, Salesforce said at 1829 UTC (1130 PT) in a status update that all of its clouds are returning to normal after suffering about a four-hour downtime.

Well, all except for Salesforce's Tableau and Mulesoft, which remain down or affected to some extent.

The IT breakdown started at 1448 UTC, and we're told by the enterprise software giant this hit "customers across multiple clouds including, Commerce Cloud, Mulesoft, Tableau, Core, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Marketing Cloud Intelligence, and Omni Channel."

As a result, "users are unable to log into Salesforce or access any of their services," the biz admitted.

Two hours later, the team said its ClickSoftware, Trailblazer, and Data Cloud products were also affected. At first a third-party cloud provider was thought to be to blame for intermittent networking issues causing Salesforce services to fail.

Then the tech titan said, actually, a cloud provider wasn't at fault, and Salesforce engineers "successfully executed a rollback to mitigate the issue." By 1752 UTC, the biz said its cloud systems were getting back on track, and customers should be able to log in and use their applications as usual, as long as those apps weren't Tableau or Mulesoft.

Archive link:
https://archive.ph/LSYjQ

Something feels a bit off with Airbnb these days. Those searching for a quaint and homey place to stay now often have to brave high prices, inconsistent fees, laborious checkout demands, and untrustworthy photos and descriptions. You risk ending up, like I did in Vermont, in one of multiple cookie-cutter units listed by the same host, units that lean less “cozy ski lodge” and more “IKEA display room that has never known human touch.” Not only are customers mad, expressing their outrage across social media, but cities have also been cracking down. Earlier this month, New York City instituted a drastic new law that effectively bans most short-term rentals, resulting in the disappearance of 15,000 Airbnb listings. The company’s woes are tied to just how big it has become. Airbnb was launched in 2008, a year after beginning as three air mattresses on the floor of its founders’ living room, but it is no longer a scrappy, community-minded platform powered by the gig economy. It’s an industry in itself, full of endless hosts and large property companies that manage dozens or hundreds of listings at a time. The relentless increase in quantity has stretched the quality thin. Like any tech company, Airbnb has pursued growth. Along the way, it may have gotten more than it bargained for. The promise of Airbnb seems so simple and obvious now, but it was at first a revelation: What if you could make money off that guest room no one uses, or the empty apartment sitting over your garage? In turn, travelers could get a cheap stay with an on-call host who could provide a uniquely personalized travel experience. That’s not to say a one-night stay on a stranger’s couch was ever what dominated Airbnb; entire homes instead of shared units have made up the majority of listings since the year it was founded, an Airbnb spokesperson told me. But that Airbnb felt more casual than a hotel was always part of the draw. By 2011, an app first headquartered in the founders’ apartment had reached 1 million nights booked.

Soon, Airbnb got so big that everyone wanted in. At first, people with vacation homes in coveted areas such as Lake Tahoe and the Hudson Valley noticed Airbnb’s success and saw an opening, says Jamie Lane, a senior economist at AirDNA, a data-analytics firm that specializes in Airbnb and other short-term-rental platforms. Hosts renting out vacation homes or properties they don’t themselves inhabit means, however, that unlike in Airbnb’s original concept, the hosts aren’t one room away to give recommendations, or just around the corner if something goes wrong with check-in. Instead, the keys go in a lockbox, and the recommendations are typed up and put in a binder that sits on a kitchen table. It’s now very common for Airbnb hosts to never see or interact with their guests at all. The moment people began buying new properties for the express purpose of turning them into Airbnbs, it was clear: Airbnb had turned corporate. Since 2015, the number of Airbnb listings in the United States has jumped from roughly 150,000 to almost 1.5 million, Lane told me. There are now Airbnbs that have been precisely engineered for specific kinds of travelers. “You have properties that are fully dedicated to bachelorette parties,” says Neal Carpenter, who runs a Nashville-based rental-property-management and consulting service called The Air Butler. “It’s like, ‘Here’s the 12 chairs and the full-length mirror where all your friends can get ready together. Here’s the neon cowboy hat and the greenery wall in the living room for your Instagram posts.’” There are multiple Lord of the Rings–style hobbit-house Airbnbs, a spaceship Airbnb, and an Airbnb located inside a freestanding harbor crane.

In other words, the difference between Airbnb and hotels has become smaller and smaller. The standard Airbnb host still has an average of just 1.5 listings, Lane said, but “mega-hosts”—larger companies or wealthy individuals with 21 or more properties that throw their significantly more substantial resources behind them—now make up 30 percent of active listings. Some hotels even took a if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them attitude in 2018, when Airbnb began allowing boutique hotels and B&Bs to list their rooms on the platform. The mere existence of a company like AirDNA is another indicator of Airbnb’s dominance—as are the Airbnb consultants who make a living helping hosts maintain their properties, and the number of online ads from these consultants about how to earn my first $100,000 on Airbnb that have followed me since I first started reporting this article.

Philip Paxson's family are suing the company over his death, alleging that Google negligently failed to show the bridge had fallen nine years earlier.

Mr Paxson died in September 2022 after attempting to drive over the damaged bridge in Hickory, North Carolina.

A spokesperson for Google said the company was reviewing the allegations.

The case was filed in civil court in Wake County on Tuesday.

Mr Paxson, a father of two, was driving home from his daughter's ninth birthday party at a friend's house and was in an unfamiliar neighbourhood at the time of his death, according to the family's lawsuit.

His wife had driven his two daughters home earlier, and he stayed behind to help clean up.

"Unfamiliar with local roads, he relied on Google Maps, expecting it would safely direct him home to his wife and daughters," lawyers for the family said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

"Tragically, as he drove cautiously in the darkness and rain, he unsuspectingly followed Google's outdated directions to what his family later learned for nearly a decade was called the 'Bridge to Nowhere,' crashing into Snow Creek, where he drowned."

Local residents had repeatedly contacted Google to have them change their online maps after the bridge collapsed in 2013, the suit claims.

The Climate of Misinformation report by Climate Action Against Disinformation looked at Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter for their content moderation policies and efforts to mitigate inaccurate information such as climate denialism. The group, which is made up of dozens of international climate and anti-disinformation organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, released the report to draw attention towards climate misinformation on major platforms and makes the claim that big tech has become a “complicit actor” in accelerating the spread of climate denial.

Twitter’s low rank in the survey was because it failed to meet almost any of the organization’s criteria for climate misinformation policies, which ranged from having clear and publicly available information on climate science to having clearly articulated policies on what actions the company will take against the spread of misinformation. The report noted that billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk’s purchase of the company last year added to the confusion over how policies are enforced and how the company makes content decisions.

“Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company has created uncertainty about which policies are still standing and which are not,” the report stated.

Twitter received its only point in the report for fulfilling one of the researchers’ requirements that platforms have an easily accessible and readable privacy policy. Twitter was also the only platform to lack a clear reporting process for flagging harmful or misleading content for higher review.

Tech platforms have long struggled with creating effective or coherent policies on content moderation, while events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election resulted in swaths of misinformation circulating online. Amid conservative backlash and labor cuts in the tech industry, many companies have also deprioritized content moderation and opened the door to potential surges in misinformation on their platforms.

Although the other platforms fared better, none ranked especially high on the report’s scale – Pinterest scored highest with 12 points out of a possible 21. Issues ranged from a lack of clear definitions of what constituted climate misinformation, failure to enforce existing policies in a transparent way and a lack of proof that companies apply these policies equally across different languages. None of the companies release public reports on how their algorithmic changes affect climate misinformation, according to the report.

The organization’s authors advocate for a number of changes to big tech’s policies, including establishing clear guidelines on climate and updating privacy policies to show when private data is being sold to advertisers that could be linked to the fossil fuel industry.