Weekly Web Harvest for 2017-04-16

Internal company data, stolen by a hacker and provided to Motherboard, provides new insight into FlexiSpy, its founder, and the sprawling, predatory consumer spyware market at large. The company grew from its customer base of vindictive spouses, and ended up connecting with firms which sold malware to some of the world’s most oppressive regimes.

The correct way to play Pac Man, of course, is to consume as much as possible while running from the ghosts that relentlessly pursue you. This was a valuable early lesson in what it means to be an American.

It also taught me that technology and ethics aren’t so easy to separate, and that if you want to know how a system works, it helps to follow the money.

This week saw the latest chapter in the utterly wonderful saga of Juicero, the $400 juice machine maker that attracted $120 million in venture capital funding. On Wednesday, a bombshell Bloomberg report exposed the secret that threatened to ruin the company: You can get almost exactly the same juice without the company’s expensive press by squeezing their damn bags yourself with the hands God gave you.

Today, Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn hit back with a Medium post designed to dispel this misinformation and argue that you should not, in fact, attempt to squeeze the bag yourself. Do not squeeze the bag. Do NOT squeeze it.

The Zalando Data Intelligence Team is searching for a new top analyst. We already know of an excellent candidate with top analytical and programming skills. Unfortunately, we don’t know her exact whereabouts but we only have some vague information where she might be. Can you tell us where to best send our recruiters and plot an easy to read map of your solution for them? This is what we could extract from independent sources:
The candidate is likely to be close to the river Spree. The probability at any point is given by a Gaussian function of its shortest distance to the river. The function peaks at zero and has 95% of its total integral within +/-2730m
A probability distribution centered around the Brandenburg Gate also informs us of the candidate’s location. The distribution’s radial profile is log-normal with a mean of 4700m and a mode of 3877m in every direction.
A satellite offers further information: with 95% probability she is located within 2400 m distance of the satellite’s path (assuming a normal probability distribution)

“Does your organization clone out the tripod?”
Brings up all sorts of interesting questions about depicting reality . . .

City of Chicago has multiple technology tools that you can use to connect residents to the city. Robust open data can inform you of recent activity anywhere in the city, whether it is crime, licenses, or arriving buses. Some of our APIs also let you communicate to city officials, such as the Open311 API that lets you open service requests or the ClearPath API that lets users submit tips or see upcoming community meetings. This page connects you to the documentation to help developers create tools for their neighbors.