Tech 9: Stories From the Week You Need To Read Right Now

Image via Complex Original

The Internet news bubble has been beset with panicked reactions to the looming loss of net neutrality, but what would saving net neutrality actually mean? In a story for The Atlantic, Ian Bogost questions the values behind salvaging net neutrality, arguing that the Internet's current composition is already rotten with corporate duplicity and exploitation. Losing net neutrality wouldn't amount to a catastrophic loss of liberty as many argue, but only mark a shift of ownership from one group of oligarchy to another. "Choosing one set of disreputable billionaire overlords over another hardly counts as freedom, even less than choosing one brand of shampoo over another does," Bogost argues. "If unfettered Netflix delivery speed and the unbridled rise of 'the next Zuckerberg' really do best exemplify the social advantage of common carriage online, then our commonest laments are also venial, not mortal ones. We're choosing checkout lines, not foreclosing communal futures."

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A new king of SMS was crowned this week when Guinness World Records announced 16-year-old Marcel Fernandes surpassed us all in the thumbly arts. At a texting competition in New York this week, Fernandes claimed his title as fastest texter in the world by thumb-typing a long, complicated message in just 18.9 seconds. The message given to contestants was, "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."

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As more and more shopping has moved online a small industry has sprouted up around letting buyers virtually try out the products they want. Makeup company L'Oreal has joined the party with a new iPad app that uses the frontfacing camera to overlay virtual makeovers on shoppers to help them choose a particular shade of lipstick or eye shadow. Called Makeup Genius, the app has a certain escapist entertainment value on its own, part toy and part fantasy enabler, underscored by the fact that you won't actually be able to buy anything through it. 

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Rules governing Internet passwords are bizarre, but JetBlue's guidelines for creating new customer accounts are especially unusual, forbidding the use of the letters Q and Z. Writing for Geek, Ryan Whitwam traces this unusual policy back to the 1950s and the Sabre reservation system that was once standard for all airline bookings. Predating computers as we know them, Sabre used touch tone keypads with a group of letters corresponding to each number on the phone to transmit data. For several years there was no standard place for either Q or Z. Different phone manufacturers placed them on different numbers and so Q and Z were unusable in Sabre, and that prohibition survived all the way through JetBlue's current online interface.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is set to make his videogame debut this year in a 2D action adventure called Glorious Leader. Developed for PCs and mobile phones, the game will let players guide Un in war against the American army, shooting down planes and enemy soldiers while riding a unicorn. Developer Moneyhorse Games remains tight-lipped about who financed the game, but they insist it's not a publicity stunt. A spokesperson for the studio told the Daily Dot they "did not choose to make a project about North Korea, we were chosen," and that it was the "chance of a lifetime to bring light to the West from his Holiness' eternal flame."

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If Apple doesn't like to promote sex apps, plenty of people still use its apps to get off. One British model has decided to try and profit from the lingering desire to get more out of one's phone, selling her services as a Facetime partner for cash. "Men want that intimacy of being in your bedroom and talking to you on your phone," Amy Lu Bennett told Vice. "For them, it feels more like having a girlfriend, and actually-aside from guys who pay-I don't really FaceTime anyone other than my boyfriend, so I suppose it makes sense." Facetime also offers the added benefit of not taking a percentage of the model's fee, as would a traditional chat line.

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Opening Facebook in hopes of some pleasant news from friends only to discover an endless scroll of unwanted information from half-acquaintances is one of the defining experiences of the last five years. Writing for Slate, Dan Kois describes his recent experience of culling his own Facebook list and discovering a renewed sense of pleasure from it as a result. "It turns out that the Facebook birthday alert, located at the top of the site's news feed, doubles as an incredibly efficient way to cull your friends list," Kois writes. "Every day I am presented with two or five or eight friends who have nothing in common with one another but the date of their births. One by one I go through them and ask myself: Do I actually want to wish this person a happy birthday?" 

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Steve Jobs loved acid and the Beatles, but Apple has had a steadfast dislike for that other hippy passion: sex. This week Apple told one developer, Tina Gong, that her app, built around a talking vulva that issues tips to encourage women to masturbate more regularly, wouldn't be allowed in the App Store. According to Tong, 46 percent of women report masturbating only once a month, something she felt a cartoonish app might help remedy. Apparently Apple didn't agree, and they rejected Tong's app submission without explanation. "Ultimately, my feeling is that it would be a waste of energy to argue with them," Tong wrote in a blog post, picked up by New York's Allison P. Davis. Instead, she'll be releasing the app, HappyPlayTime, in browsers for everyone to enjoy. 

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A new Israeli company called Consumer Physics is attempting a novel work around to Google's limitations, with an infrared device the size of a keychain, capable of scanning any object you point it at and retrieving information about it from an Internet search. The company announced the scanner as a Kickstarter project, which quickly accumulated $1.2 million in donations, six times more than the original sum they asked for. "We are going to build the world's largest database of fingerprints for our physical world and give developers a platform to create new applications," CEO Dror Sharon told Wired. 

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