DoorDash CEO to change tipping policy “in the coming days”, says it will add all customer tips to driver's earnings, after a renewed backlash — Earlier this year, news reports exposed that not only did DoorDash (and others, like Instacart) sometimes lower its payout to delivery workers …
The Realme X was launched in India last week on July 15 and, today, the smartphone is all set to go on sale for the first time. The flagship device is Realme’s first phone to feature a notch-less display along with a pop-up camera. Also, it is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 SoC. The phone will go on sale at 12pm on Flipkart and Realme’s official website.
Realme X specificationsThe Realme X features a 6.53-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels and a 19.5:9 aspect ratio. Additionally, the device has a 91.2-percent screen-to-body ratio. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 chipset, paired with up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. The phone packs a 3745mAh battery, which supports 20W VOOC-charge technology.
In the optics department, the Realme X sports a dual rear camera setup: a primary 48MP Sony IMX586 sensor and a secondary 5MP depth sensor. The camera also offers features like Nightscape and Chroma Boost. Moreover, the 16MP selfie camera is housed in the pop-up camera module, which according to Realme, rises in just 0.74 seconds and has a fall-detection feature.
The fingerprint sensor lies under the display. The Realme X runs on ColorOS 6 based on Android 9 Pie.
Realme X price, availability, and sale offersThe base variant of Realme X is priced at Rs 16,999. It has 4GB RAM and 128GB of internal storage. In contrast, the top-end 8GB RAM + 128GB storage variant carries a price tag of Rs. 19,999. The device is available in a choice of two colours – Space Blue and Polar White – and will go on sale on Realme's official website and Flipkart at 12pm today.
Coming to the sale offers, Flipkart is offering no-cost EMI, 5-percent Unlimited Cashback to Axis Bank Credit card holders, and 5-percent discount for purchases made using an Axis Bank Buzz Credit card. However, if you decide to purchase the phone from Realme’s official website, you will get 10-percent MobiKwik SuperCash worth Rs 1,500 and Jio benefits worth Rs 7,000 that will be credited in the form of cashback vouchers.
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Video game industry is coming under increased pressure from static triple-A prices, a turn towards the cloud, developer burnout, and slower release schedules — At about this time next year, we'll have a pretty good idea of what the next generation of video games will look like.
It’s perhaps not for nothing that The Great Hack – the new Netflix documentary about the connections between Cambridge Analytica, the US election and Brexit, out on July 23 – opens with a scene from Burning Man. There, Brittany Kaiser, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, scrawls the name of the company onto a strut of ‘the temple’ that will eventually get burned in that fiery annual ritual. It’s an apt opening.
There are probably many of us who’d wish quite a lot of the last couple of years could be thrown into that temple fire, but this documentary is the first I’ve seen to expertly unpick what has become the real-world dumpster fire that is social media, dark advertising and global politics which have all become inextricably, and, often fatally, combined.
The documentary is also the first that you could plausibly recommend those of your relatives and friends who don’t work in tech, as it explains how social media – specifically Facebook – is now manipulating our lives and society, whether we like it or not.
As New York Professor David Carroll puts it at the beginning, Facebook gives “any buyer direct access to my emotional pulse” – and that included political campaigns during the Brexit referendum and the Trump election. Privacy campaigner Carroll is pivotal to the film’s story of how our data is being manipulated and essentially kept from us by Facebook.
The UK’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, in fact, became “the petri dish” for a Cambridge Analytica experiment, says Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr She broke the story of how the political consultancy, led by Eton-educated CEO Alexander Nix, applied techniques normally used by ‘psyops’ operatives in Afghanistan to the democratic operations of the US and UK, and many other countries, over a chilling 20+ year history. Watching this film, you literally start to wonder if history has been warped towards a sickening dystopia.
The petri-dish of Brexit worked. Millions of adverts, explains the documentary, targeted individuals, exploiting fear and anger, to switch them from ‘persuadables’, as CA called them, into passionate advocates for, first Brexit in the UK, and then Trump later on.
Switching to the US, the filmmakers show how CA worked directly with Trump’s “Project Alamo” campaign, spending a million dollars a day on Facebook ads ahead of the 2016 election.
The film expertly explains the timeline of how CA had first worked off Ted Cruz’s campaign, and nearly propelled that lack-luster candidate into first place in the Republican nominations. It was then that the Trump campaign picked up on CA’s military-like operation.
After loading up the psychographic survey information CA had obtained from Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, the world had become their oyster. Or, perhaps more accurately, their oyster farm.
Back in London, Cadwalladr notices triumphant Brexit campaigners fraternizing with Trump and starts digging. There is a thread connecting them to Breitbart owner Steve Bannon. There is a thread connecting them to Cambridge Analytica. She tugs on those threads and, like that iconic scene in ‘The Hurt Locker’ where all the threads pull-up unexploded mines, she starts to realize that Cambridge Analytica links them all. She needs a source though. That came in the form of former employee Chris Wylie, a brave young man who was able to unravel many of the CA threads.
But the film’s attention is often drawn back to Kaiser, who had worked first on US political campaigns and then on Brexit for CA. She had been drawn to the company by smooth-talking CEO Nix, who begged: “Let me get you drunk and steal all of your secrets.”
But was she a real whistleblower? Or was she trying to cover her tracks? How could someone who’d worked on the Obama campaign switch to Trump? Was she a victim of Cambridge Analytica, or one of its villains?
British political analyst Paul Hilder manages to get her to come to the UK to testify before a parliamentary inquiry. There is high drama as her part in the story unfolds.
Kaiser appears in various guises which vary from idealistically naive to stupid, from knowing to manipulative. It’s almost impossible to know which. But hearing about her revelation as to why she made the choices she did… well, it’s an eye-opener.
Both she and Wylie have complex stories in this tale, where not everything seems to be as it is, reflecting our new world, where truth is increasingly hard to determine.
Other characters come and go in this story. Zuckerburg makes an appearance in Congress and we learn of the casual relationship Facebook had to its complicity in these political earthquakes. Although if you’re reading TechCrunch, then you will probably know at least part of this story.
Created for Netflix by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, these Egyptian-Americans made “The Square”, about the Egyptian revolution of 2011. To them, the way Cambridge Analytica applied its methods to online campaigning was just as much a revolution as Egyptians toppling a dictator from Cario’s iconic Tahrir Square.
For them, the huge irony is that “psyops”, or psychological operations used on Muslim populations in Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks ended up being used to influence Western elections.
Cadwalladr stands head and shoulders above all as a bastion of dogged journalism, even as she is attacked from all quarters, and still is to this day.
What you won’t find out from this film is what happens next. For many, questions remain on the table: What will happen now Facebook is entering Cryptocurrency? Will that mean it could be used for dark election campaigning? Will people be paid for their votes next time, not just in Likes? Kaiser has a bitcoin logo on the back of her phone. Is that connected? The film doesn’t comment.
But it certainly unfolds like a slow-motion car crash, where democracy is the car and you’re inside it.
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Axios : CoinGecko: $TRUMP rose more than 600% overnight and was trading just over $32 as of 11AM ET, giving it a fully diluted market cap...
