Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185), shares some thoughts from long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: We’d like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That’s another matter… Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project’s popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites…
Tag: yelp
Are Food Delivery Services Actually Losing Money?
Food delivery services like Grubhub should be thriving, especially during the pandemic. But they’re not, The Markup reports: In August 2019, analysts from the investment firm Cowen estimated that Uber Eats was losing $3.36 on every order and would continue to lose money on every order for the next five years. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi acknowledged that Uber Eats is not…
What Would The Internet Look Like If America Repeals Section 230?
“REVOKE 230!” President Trump tweeted Friday, and NPR reports that the movement to revoke its safeguards “is increasingly becoming a bipartisan consensus… But experts caution that eliminating the legal protections may have unintended consequences for Internet users that extend far beyond Facebook and Twitter.” “We don’t think about things like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive and all these other public goods that…
Even If You’re Trying To Avoid Grubhub By Calling Your Favorite Restaurant Directly, Grubhub Could Still Be Charging It A Fee
Customers trying to avoid online delivery platforms like Grubhub by calling restaurants directly might be dialing phone numbers generated and advertised by those very platforms — for which restaurants are charged fees that can sometimes exceed the income the order generates. BuzzFeed News reports: Here’s how phone fees work: Grubhub (which also owns Seamless, MenuPages, Tapingo, and LevelUp) generates a unique…
Yelp To Stop Auto-Creating GoFundMe Fundraisers After Outrage From Business Owners
Yelp has paused an effort in partnership with GoFundMe that automatically opted tens of thousands of small businesses into fundraisers after complaints from restaurant and bar owners, the company tells The Verge. From the report: Yelp launched the initiative earlier this week in response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but it did so without informing any of participants. Some business owners…
Silicon Valley Leaders’ Plea to Democrats: Anyone but Sanders
The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Keith Rabois, onstage in January at a tech conference, said his first choice for president was a Democrat, Pete Buttigieg. And, sure, it would be a close call for Joseph R. Biden Jr. over President Trump. But Bernie Sanders? The New York Times: At that, Mr. Rabois, who has been a top executive at or invested…
Software that Swaps Out Words Can Now Fool the AI Behind Alexa and Siri
Software called TextFooler can trick natural-language processing (NLP) systems into misunderstanding text just by replacing certain words in a sentence with synonyms. From a report: In tests, it was able to drop the accuracy of three state-of-the-art NLP systems dramatically. For example, Google’s powerful BERT neural net was worse by a factor of five to seven at identifying whether reviews on…
Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data
An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world’s biggest companies, a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag has found. From the report: Our report relies on leaked user data, contracts, and other company documents that show the sale of this data is both highly…
Google Maps Tests a Social Networking Feature
Google Maps will soon begin testing a new feature that’s more common to social networks like Facebook, rather than a maps app: the ability to find and follow other users. From a report: In Google Maps’ case, it’s specifically rolling out the ability to follow top “Local Guides” — its community members who actively review business and share to Google Maps…
Yelp is Screwing Over Restaurants By Quietly Replacing Their Phone Numbers
A new report by Vice reveals yet another marketing tactic by Grubhub that attempts to maximize the commission fees it can charge to restaurants when customers order through the service. Yelp, a Grubhub partner, quietly hides a Grubhub-affiliated phone number when you choose to call a business from the Yelp app. An anonymous reader writes: According to Vice, a Yelp listing…