Senators Want to Know Amazon Retaliated Against Coronavirus Whistle-Blowers

Democratic senators on Thursday questioned whether Amazon retaliated against whistle-blowers when it fired four employees who raised concerns about the spread of coronavirus in the company’s warehouses.In a letter sent to Amazon, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a frequent critic of the e-commerce giant, and eight other senators asked Amazon to provide more information about its policies for firing employees.“In order to understand how the termination of employees that raised concerns about health and safety conditions did not constitute retaliation for whistle-blowing, we are requesting information about Amazon’s policies regarding grounds for employee discipline and termination,” the letter said.The letter was also signed by Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, as well as Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Edward J. Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin. It asked Amazon if it tracked unionization efforts in its warehouses and whether it tracked employees who participated in protests or spoke to the news media.The letter increased pressure on Amazon and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, who has been called to testify before Congress in an antitrust investigation and has been a frequent target for criticism from President Trump. A number of senators and representatives have already written to Mr. Bezos expressing concern about warehouse safety.An Amazon spokeswoman said: “These individuals were not terminated for talking publicly about working conditions or safety but, rather, for violating — often repeatedly — policies, such as intimidation, physical distancing and more.”She added that while Amazon supported employees’ right to criticize or protest working conditions, “that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies.”“We look forward to explaining in more detail in our response to the senators’ letter,” the spokeswoman said.Cases of the coronavirus have been reported in more than 100 Amazon warehouses, and several workers have died. State and local officials in Kentucky and New Jersey have asked Amazon to close facilities where workers have fallen sick.Despite the sophistication of Amazon’s vast e-commerce business, it depends on warehouse workers to keep shipments flowing, and many of those workers fear their warehouses are contaminated by the coronavirus.Mr. Bezos said during a call with Amazon investors last week that the company expected to spend $4 billion on safety measures and other expenses related to the coronavirus during the current quarter.In March, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, a worker in its Staten Island facility who had organized a protest to demand stronger safety protocols there. Amazon said Mr. Smalls had violated a quarantine order to attend the protest.In an email to other Amazon executives, the company’s top lawyer, David Zapolsky, called Mr. Smalls “not smart or articulate.” Mr. Zapolsky, who also suggested that Amazon portray Mr. Smalls as the leader of a movement to unionize Amazon workers, apologized for the remarks after they were published by Vice News.Two weeks later, Amazon fired two designers, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham. Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham had pressed the company to reduce its carbon footprint, and had announced an internal event for warehouse workers to speak to tech employees about their workplace conditions shortly before they were fired. Amazon said the two employees had repeatedly violated corporate policies.“Warehouse workers have been under incredible threat,” Ms. Cunningham said in an interview Wednesday evening. “We wanted to give space for warehouse workers to be able to talk openly and honestly about the conditions they were facing and why they felt so unsafe.”In late April, Amazon fired Bashir Mohamed, a warehouse worker in Shakopee, Minn. Mr. Mohamed said he had raised concerns about workers’ inability to remain socially distant inside the warehouse. Amazon said Mr. Mohamed had violated several policies, including one that required workers to follow social distancing guidelines. Read the full article

Vallejo Official's Removal Is Sought After He Throws Cat During Zoom Meeting

The city Planning Commission meeting in Vallejo, Calif., last week followed the same humdrum pattern of so many municipal meetings: There was the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll call, followed by various reports.That posed the usual challenges: Commissioners with microphones muted when they were trying to be heard, some of them appearing half offscreen at times or talking over one another.But things took an unexpected turn about 2 hours and 24 minutes into the session after one of the commissioners, Chris Platzer, was asked if he had any comments after reviewing a project application.“Yes, this is the section where you can, Commissioner Platzer,” the commission’s chairman said.The cat meowed loudly again. “OK, first, I’d like to introduce my cat,” Mr. Platzer said, lifting it close to the camera and then, with two hands, tossing it off screen.The cat squeaked as it was being thrown, and a thud could be heard.One commissioner on the videoconference put his hands to his forehead and covered his eyes in response.The meeting concluded 26 minutes later, but that was hardly the end of it.Bob Sampayan, the mayor of Vallejo, which is about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and Robert McConnell, a City Council member and the liaison to the commission, have asked for the council to consider Mr. Platzer’s immediate removal at a meeting on Tuesday, a city spokeswoman, Christina Lee, said on Monday.“The city does not condone the behavior that Vallejo Planning Commissioner Chris Platzer exhibited during the April 20th Planning Commission meeting,” she said. “This type of behavior does not model the core values of the City of Vallejo.”After the planning meeting adjourned, Mr. Platzer was heard using expletives, she said, adding that the mayor and Mr. McConnell discussed his behavior immediately after the episode and called for his removal within 48 hours.Stephanie Bell, senior director of cruelty casework for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the group was prepared to place the cat “in an understanding, loving home” if Mr. Platzer’s “lack of patience or understanding” made cat guardianship inappropriate.“The cats in our care rely on us for everything, including food, respect and affection, and no one should ever punish them for seeking our attention,” she said. “While cats are known for agility, this cat was thrown and could have slammed into furniture, the wall or the ground.”As of Monday morning, the city had not received a formal resignation from Mr. Platzer, Ms. Lee said; however, The Times-Herald of Vallejo reported on Saturday that it had received an email from him suggesting that he was stepping down.Mr. Platzer, who could not be reached on Monday, was appointed to the volunteer position in August 2016 and his term was set to expire in June.“I did not conduct myself in the Zoom meeting in a manner befitting of a planning commissioner and apologize for any harm I may have inflicted,” he wrote in the email, The Times-Herald reported. “I serve at the pleasure of the council and no longer have that trust and backing.”He added, “We are all living in uncertain times and I certainly, like many of you, am adjusting to a new normalcy.”The Zoom episode was one of the latest to surface as officials adjust to remote working. In Florida, a judge this month admonished lawyers for getting too lax in their dress during their videoconference court appearances. Read the full article

When Facebook Is More Trustworthy Than the President

“Pandemic does not mean panic-demic,” he said Friday afternoon. He was seated cross-legged on a black leather sofa., trying out lines. “Do you like that? Or is that corny?” He decided it was good and corny.Dr. Varshavski delivers solid health information to young people, much of it through videos of him reacting to memes and TV shows. When the coronavirus crisis began, he responded. And because YouTube's system now favors authoritative voices, videos like his “The Truth About the Coronavirus” rank high in recommendations. It has drawn more than five million views.Mr. Varshavski also debunks misinformation from many directions. One of his targets Friday was an influencer who talks to deer. Another is the TV star Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has been recommending zinc tablets and elderberry syrup. (A spokesman for Dr. Oz said the products have been shown to be helpful with the common cold.) Then, of course, there’s President Trump.Responsible voices like Dr. Varshavski’s and a whole generation of researchers, reporters, and even tech company employees seem, at least right now, to be breaking through. Mr. Zuckerberg, the industry’s most committed optimist, says the power of social media will be viewed “as a bigger part of the story if we do our job well over the coming weeks.”When I talked to Mr. Zuckerberg and other social media executives last week, I kept returning to the same point: Will the flow of responsible information last beyond this crisis? Could it extend into our upcoming presidential campaign?“I hope so,’’ Twitter’s Mr. Dorsey wrote. “Up to all of us.”Mr. Zuckerberg was less sanguine. Right now, Facebook is tackling “misinformation that has imminent risk of danger, telling people if they have certain symptoms, don’t bother going getting treated …. things like ‘you can cure this by drinking bleach.’ I mean, that’s just in a different class.”That black and white clarity cannot easily be extended back into the grays of political battles, he said. While social media may be mirroring the solidarity of the moment, it’s hard to see how it would prolong it.“It’s perhaps a positive sign that, despite how polarized people are worried that society is, people can pull together and try to get things done and support each other and recognize people who are heroes on the front lines fighting this stuff,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. Given that the pandemic is likely to go on for a while, he said: “It’s hard to predict exactly how it plays out beyond that. And that’s not really my job, anyway.” Read the full article

High-Flying Trading App Robinhood Goes Down at the Wrong Time

“This is a huge black eye for them and they really need to do something to earn back the trust of their clients,” said Ben Carlson, the director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management in New York and the author of the blog, A Wealth of Common Sense. “I can’t recall another time when an entire platform was down all day like this.”During the market turbulence, other trading firms that cater to small investors have also experienced difficulties. The website for mutual fund giant Vanguard experienced “sporadic unavailability” on Friday because of heavy trading volumes, a spokesman said. TD Ameritrade also said trade confirmations were slow to process on Friday. But none were down as long as Robinhood, which has made it particularly easy to buy and sell not only traditional stocks, but also riskier investment products like cryptocurrencies and options, a contract that makes it possible to bet on stocks going up or down.Many Robinhood customers nursing losses on Monday, when markets rose, had purchased options contracts to bet that the markets would fall. When markets instead surged, they were unable to get out of the contracts because the app was down.Taylor Dalton, 29, said he had recently decided to invest roughly $8,000 in stocks and option contracts through Robinhood, including “put” contracts on airline stocks, which would give him the opportunity to profit if their shares declined.“Yesterday, I had plans to close out all of my options and take a profit,” said Mr. Dalton, who co-owns a cupcake and coffee bar franchise. “Now I am in the red,” he added, referring to his gains that have been erased, “and I am not sure what to do.”As for Robinhood, he said, “I am definitely never using them again.”Nathaniel Popper reported from San Francisco and Tara Siegel Bernard from New York. Read the full article

Judge Halts Work on Microsoft’s JEDI Contract, a Victory for Amazon

A federal judge in Washington ordered Microsoft on Thursday to halt all work on a $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon, in a victory for Amazon, which had challenged the awarding of the contract.In a sealed opinion, the judge, Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the Court of Federal Claims, ordered work to stop on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI, until Amazon’s legal challenge was resolved. The 10-year contract was one of the largest tech contracts from the Pentagon, and Microsoft was set to begin work on it this month.The decision adds to the acrimony surrounding the lucrative deal, which was a major prize in the technology industry, and ratchets up the legal battle around the transformation of the military’s cloud-computing systems. Amazon had been seen as a front-runner to win the JEDI contract, but the Department of Defense awarded it to Microsoft in October.Amazon protested and said the process had been unfair. The internet giant claimed that President Trump had interfered in the bidding for the contract because of his feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and owner of The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively covered the Trump administration, and the president has referred to the newspaper as the “Amazon Washington Post” and accused it of spreading “fake news.”“This is all setting the stage for a major court fight between Amazon and Microsoft, with the D.O.D. caught in between,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities who has been tracking the JEDI contract. “It’s a political football that’s being kicked around.”Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president of communications, said in a statement on Thursday that the company was “disappointed with the additional delay” but that it believed “we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require.”“We believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft,” he added.Lt. Col. Robert Carver, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was disappointed by the decision, which has “unnecessarily delayed implementing D.O.D.’s modernization strategy and deprived our warfighters of a set of capabilities they urgently need.” He added that the Defense Department was “confident in our award.”Amazon did not return a request for comment.When Microsoft was awarded the contract, the Defense Department was explicit that the bidding process had been correctly executed. “The acquisition process was conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations,” it said at the time. “All offerors were treated fairly and evaluated consistently with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria.”In public, Mr. Trump has said there were other “great companies” that should have a chance at the contract. But a speechwriter for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a recent book that Mr. Trump had wanted to foil Amazon and give the contract to another company.In December, Amazon filed its legal challenge against the awarding of JEDI, saying that Mr. Trump used “improper pressure” on the Pentagon at its expense. The company also argued that its cloud-computing services were superior to Microsoft’s and that it was better situated to fulfill the contract’s technical requirements.Since then, Amazon has escalated the battle. The company asked the court this week to let it depose Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Amazon argued that hearing from them was crucial to determine if they had intervened against it in the contract. Mr. Esper had recused himself from the contract award decision in October, citing his son’s employment at IBM, one of the early bidders on the JEDI contract.“The question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the D.O.D. to pursue his own personal and political ends,” an Amazon spokesman said at the time.The Pentagon said it was strongly opposed to Amazon’s deposition request. Microsoft said Amazon “only provided the speculation of bias, with nothing approaching the ‘hard facts’ necessary” to demand them.In another court filing this month, Amazon argued that an injunction was necessary to prevent it from losing the profit it could earn from the contract.JEDI “will transform D.O.D.’s cloud architecture and define enterprise cloud for years to come,” wrote Kevin Mullen, an attorney representing Amazon in the case.The JEDI contract has also been in the spotlight because it is viewed as crucial to the Pentagon’s efforts to modernize its technology. Much of the military operates on computer systems from the 1980s and ’90s, and the Defense Department has spent billions of dollars trying to make them talk to one another.Mr. Ives, the analyst, has said that landing the JEDI contract put Microsoft in a position to earn the roughly $40 billion that the federal government is expected to spend on cloud computing over the next several years.On Thursday, Judge Campbell-Smith also required that Amazon pay a $42 million deposit that the court will hold in case it later determines that the injunction was wrongfully issued and that Microsoft is owed damages. Amazon must submit a plan for offering the money to the court by next Thursday, and it must agree to redactions to the judge’s order no later than Feb. 27 so that it can be made public.The preliminary injunction was a “prudent decision” given the complexities of the deal and the monetary stakes, Mr. Ives said, and the $42 million demanded from Amazon would not be a burden for the company.“It’s less than a rounding error relative to their treasure chest,” he said. He added that he expected Microsoft to prevail in the deal.Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting. Read the full article

Data of All 6.5 Million Israeli Voters Is Leaked

Israel’s Privacy Protection Authority said it was looking into what it called a “grave” security lapse by the maker of an app promoted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party that led to the exposure of personal data of all 6.5 million eligible voters in Israel, including full names and identity card numbers.The flawed website for the app, called Elector, failed to secure personal details in the voter registry, which also included the address and gender of each voter, even those who did not use it, and in some case phone numbers as well, the Haaretz newspaper first reported on Sunday, raising concerns about identity theft and foreign interference.The maker of Elector did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, but in a statement issued to the Israeli news media, it sought to play down the potential consequences, describing the leak as a “one-off incident that was immediately dealt with” and saying it had since bolstered the site’s security.The data required essentially no hacking skills to access, and it was unknown how many people had downloaded the registry.Mr. Netanyahu had encouraged supporters to download the app, which offers news and information related to the March 2 election, the third in less than a year after the first two failed to provide an outright winner and efforts to form a coalition came up short.In a statement issued in response to the reports on Sunday, the Privacy Protection Authority, a unit of the Justice Ministry, said that responsibility for complying with Israeli privacy law involving use of the voter registry “lies with the parties themselves.”It stopped short of announcing a full-fledged investigation, however, and said it could not give further details at this stage. Ran Bar-Zik, a developer for Verizon Media who wrote the story the Haaretz published on Sunday, was alerted to the breach over the weekend.In an interview on Monday, he said he had received a tipoff about the Elector website breach on Friday night. The message was sent in English to Cybercyber, a Hebrew podcast that he runs that he hosts with two colleagues. As evidence, the tipster included Mr. Bar-Zik’s own details and those of his wife and son.“It was spooky,” Mr. Bar-Zik said.Explaining the ease with which the voter information could be accessed, Mr. Bar-Zik wrote in a blog post that visitors to the app’s website could right-click to “view source,” an action that reveals the code behind a web page.The code revealed the user names and passwords of site administrators, and using those credentials would allow anyone to log in and download the voter information.Mr. Bar-Zik said he chose the Likud administrator and “Jackpot! Everything was in front of me!”“When we talk about hacking, we imagine people in hoodies doing technical stuff,” Mr. Bar-Zik said. But in the Elector case, he added, no hacking technique was necessary.One Israeli website said it had been able to access the personal information of, among others, Mr. Netanyahu; his wife, Sara; the chief of staff for the Israeli military, Aviv Kochavi; and Nadav Argaman, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency.The leak was believed to be the largest disclosure of Israeli voter information since 2006, when an employee of the Interior Ministry stole the population registry and then published it.The exposure of the database of Israeli voters could have significant consequences. Databases listing personal information of private citizens can be exploited for a number of purposes, including by criminals looking to make money through identity theft, or by foreign state-backed hackers looking to spy on Israeli voters ahead of a critical election.“This is a treasure for foreign countries with geostrategic interests in Israel,” Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, head of the Media Reform Project at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Jerusalem, told Channel 12 news.Massive voter databases are one more reason that cybersecurity officials across the world have warned that new technology is best kept out of the hands of election officials and political parties.Most recommend that new technology, including voting machines and apps used by political parties, be tested for months, or even years before it is deployed to the general public.Cybersecurity experts specializing in election technology have begun holding specialized sessions at the world’s largest annual conference for hackers, DefCon. During the sessions they hack into voting machines and other technology used during elections around the world in an effort to lay their vulnerabilities bare.Last week, an app introduced by the Iowa Democratic Party to help tally votes during the Iowa caucus failed on the day of the vote, throwing the first-in-the-nation contest into chaos.The app, which had been privately developed for the party and had not been tested by independent cybersecurity experts, had been kept a secret by the party until the weeks leading up to the vote.When it was eventually unveiled, many had trouble downloading and using it. Cybersecurity experts quickly found the app was riddled with bugs and potential vulnerabilities. Read the full article

The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election

But Democrats should also blame their party’s leadership for entrusting such an important process to new technology in the first place — not just in Iowa, but in places like Nevada, where Democrats are reportedly planning to use a similar mobile app to tally votes in the state’s primary election later this month.It’s enough to make you wonder: Have these party officials ever been to a polling site or a caucus venue? They are not pristine WeWorks with blazing fast internet connections and an army of Geek Squad workers on call. They are mostly high school gyms, nursing homes and church basements with cinder-block walls and horrible cellphone service. The people who work at them are volunteers, and many are — how can I put this delicately? — members of the generation that still refers to the TV remote as “the clicker.”Using a proprietary app to report vote totals is the kind of thing that sounds simple on a start-up’s whiteboard, but utterly falls apart in a chaotic real-world environment, where connections drop, phones malfunction and poorly tested apps strain under a surge of traffic. Add an army of frenzied poll workers, impatient voters and twitchy news media, and you might as well have asked the caucus workers to whip up their own JavaScript.I’m not opposed to technology in political campaigning. Want to use Facebook ads to drum up donors? Go for it. Want to put your voter database on the blockchain? Be my guest.But when it comes to the actual business of registering and counting people’s votes, many of the smartest tech experts I know fiercely oppose high-tech solutions, like “paperless” digital voting machines and mobile voting apps. After all, every piece of technology involved in the voting process is a possible point of failure. And the larger and more interconnected the technical system, the more vulnerable it is to an attack.“Many of the leading opponents of paperless voting machines were, and still are, computer scientists, because we understand the vulnerability of voting equipment in a way most election officials don’t,” said Barbara Simons, a computer scientist and board chair of Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit, in an interview with The Atlantic in 2017.In Iowa, there is a silver lining: The caucus system doesn’t use voting machines at all, and its public, open-air nature means that it is less susceptible to tampering than a secret ballot. In addition, state officials this year required caucusgoers to fill out paper “presidential preference cards,” which could be used in case of a recount. So despite the delays, there is at least some certainty that the results will be accurate when they are finally announced. Read the full article

How to Run a Business in 2020

In recent years, stars have lent their names to all kinds of sneaker collaborations. Puma had Rihanna. Reebok had Gigi Hadid. Adidas had Kanye West. Nike had … Jesus Christ?Not exactly. In October, a pair of “Jesus shoes” — customized Air Max 97s whose soles contained holy water from the River Jordan — appeared online for $1,425. They were designed by a start-up called MSCHF, without Nike’s blessing.The sneakers quickly sold out and began appearing on resale sites, going for as much as $4,000. The Christian Post wrote about them. Drake wore them. They were among the most Googled shoes of 2019.The only thing that didn’t happen, said Kevin Wiesner, 27, a creative director at MSCHF, was a public disavowal of the shoes by Nike or the Vatican. “That would’ve been rad,” he said.Now, in the MSCHF office in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a pair stands like a trophy.MSCHF isn’t a sneaker company. It rarely even produces commercial goods, and its employees are reluctant to call it a company at all. They refer to MSCHF, which was founded in 2016, as a “brand,” “group” or “collective,” and their creations, which appear online every two weeks, as “drops.”Many of those drops are viral pranks: an app that recommends stocks to buy based on one’s astrological sign (which some observers took seriously), a service that sends pictures of A.I.-generated feet over text, a browser extension that helps users get away with watching Netflix at work.As Business Insider recently noted, the present and future profitability of these internet stunts is dubious. Yet, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, MSCHF has raised at least $11.5 million in outside investments since the fall of 2019.In the high-risk, maybe-reward world of venture capital, the group’s antics are well known. Nikita Singareddy, an investment analyst at RRE Ventures, compared MSCHF to Vine and Giphy. All three, she said, offer “lots of delight” and encourage content sharing.“Sometimes investors are a little too serious about monetizing something immediately,” Ms. Singareddy said. “With MSCHF, there’s faith that it’ll pay off. There’s an inherent virality and absurdness to all the projects that they’ve created, and it’s something people want to share and ask questions about.”For starters: What is it?

‘This Is How We Live’

The MSCHF office says as much about the company as any of its products.A giant white pentagram covers the entrance floor. On a visit in December, an inflatable severed swan’s head dangled from a ceiling beam, and a rubber chicken bong — a recent drop — sat on a coffee table, full of weed.“My mom thinks we make toys,” said Gabriel Whaley, 30, the chief executive.MSCHF has 10 employees, nine of whom are men. The company Twitter and Instagram pages are private, so most of its direct marketing takes place not on social media but through text messages from a mysterious phone number.Though the team used to run a marketing agency, working with brands like Casper in order to fund MSCHF projects, they stopped taking on clients last year. Now, they pretty much do whatever they want.“The cool thing that we have going for us is we set this precedent that we’re not tied to a category or vertical. We did the Jesus shoes and everyone knows us for that, and then we shut it down,” Mr. Whaley said. “We will never do it again. People are like, ‘Wait, why wouldn’t you double down on that, you would have made so much money!’ But that’s not why we’re here.”The point, he said, is to produce social commentary; the “story” the sneakers told was more important than turning a profit. “There are several youth pastors that have bought a pair, and even more who are asking, like, ‘I love sneakers, and I love God. I would love a pair of these,’ and that wasn’t the point,” Mr. Whaley said. “The Jesus shoes were a platform to broach the idea while also making fun of it: that everybody’s just doing a collaboration now.”In order to prepare each drop — be it an object, an app or a website — MSCHF’s employees log long hours. Most mornings, Mr. Whaley gets to the office around 7; the rest of the team arrives by 10. They often stay late into the evenings, conducting brainstorms, perfecting lines of code, shooting live-streams or assembling prototypes. Weekends, Mr. Whaley said, aren’t really a thing.“It’s not just a full-time job,” he said. “This is how we live. The distinction between your work and normal life doesn’t really exist here, and it’s just because this is what we were all doing whether we were getting paid or not in our former lives. So nothing has really changed, except we have more power as a unit than we did as individuals.”Though Mr. Whaley eschews corporate titles, functional groups exist within MSCHF: idea generation, production, distribution and outreach. In their past lives, most of the staffers were developers and designers, some with art backgrounds, working at their own firms and for companies like Twitter and BuzzFeed. The oldest employee is 32, and the youngest is 22.Some C.E.O.s of Fortune 500 companies have tried to mentor Mr. Whaley and “shoehorn” MSCHF into a traditional business, he said. They insist MSCHF is building a brand, that it needs a logo, a mission, a go-to product that people recognize.But MSCHF doesn’t have a flagship product, or market its releases traditionally. “It just happens that anything we make tends to spread purely because people end up talking about it and sharing it with their friends,” Mr. Whaley said.That’s part of the appeal for V.C. firms. With software companies, for example, there are “very clear metrics and paths to monetization that are tried and true,” Ms. Singareddy said. For MSCHF, that path is less obvious.“Some of the best investments, even early on it wasn’t clear what the result would be, but you’re making an investment in the team,” she said. “That’s what makes a company like MSCHF so exciting. Venture is about taking reasoned risk — it’s a true venture capital opportunity.”

Banksy for the Internet

Mr. Whaley talks a lot about what MSCHF is and who the people who work there are — and aren’t. Running ads on subways, or trying to build a social media following, or landing a spot on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list isn’t who they are. He cringes at the word “merch.” (“The day we sell hoodies is the day I shut this down.”)To observers, critics and followers, the company’s portfolio may amount to a very successful string of viral marketing campaigns, a series of jokes or something like art.“I don’t see anybody doing exactly what MSCHF is doing,” said Frank Denbow, a technology consultant who works with start-ups. “Everybody is able to get a one-off campaign that works, but to consistently find ways to create content that really sticks with people is different. It reminds me of Banksy and his ability to get a rise out of people.”On Twitter and Reddit, users trade theories and tips about MSCHF’s more cryptic offerings, such as its most recent, password-protected drop, Zuckwatch — a website that looks like Facebook and appears to be commentary on data privacy.Among these ardent fans, the drops are treated as trailheads, or entry points, setting off mad, winding dashes in search of cracking the code. Other followers, less devoted, may only know MSCHF for its Jesus shoes, which Mr. Wiesner said have been knocked off by sellers around the world. He is happy about it. “If we can make things that people run away with, that’s absolutely the dream,” he said. “Most of what we make is us personally running away with stuff.”Ahead of the presidential election, MSCHF’s employees plan to take on more political projects. (A drop in November, involving a shell restaurant, enabled users to mask political donations as work expenses; it was promptly shut down.) The company also hopes to expand beyond apps and objects to experiences and physical spaces.“Everything is just, ‘How do we kind of make fun of what we’re observing?’” Mr. Whaley said. “Then we have as much fun with it as possible and see what happens.” Read the full article

I Quit My Smartphone - The New York Times

Thanks to the Allen Carr technique for quitting smoking. Jan. 20, 2020 About a year ago, I noticed a distressing tendency in myself to drift off while the people I loved were talking. It didn’t matter if they were talking about a book they had read or recent health problems or crushing grief or revelations from therapy. Never before had I struggled to listen, but now I couldn’t help checking out. Several times in the last year, my husband has had to ask in the middle of a conversation, “Where did you go?” Where did I go? Nowhere good. Usually my mind returned me to the small computer in my pocket, to an unanswered email, to a “like” or a retweet, to a comment I found threatening or flattering (though increasingly, any kindness I received through a device acted on my nervous system like derision). Suffice to say, I went away. In giving my attention to the device, I withheld it from the person I value most. And there were other troubling symptoms. It was hard to read or write for sustained periods, which is concerning because that is my job. I was forcing myself to push through a handful of pages before reaching for the phone as reward — orienting toward the activities I loved as if they were chores, and toward the object as a source of pleasure (though it was more often a source of anxiety). I hadn’t deliberately chosen to worship my smartphone, but when you repeatedly bow your head to something, stroking it thousands of times a day, it begins to shine like an idol. I tried to moderate, leaving the phone off or at home when I went for a walk. But rather than feeling free, I felt more tightly leashed, worried about missing phantom emergencies. I’d reflexively pat my body down, like I did when I first quit smoking: the addiction policing the addict. Come to think of it, this was all beginning to feel very familiar. Once upon a time, I smoked a half a pack a day. Sometimes I smoked more, sometimes less, but I was a smoker through and through. Before I quit, I couldn’t imagine life without cigarettes, my constant companion, my carcinogenic security blanket! I leaned on them for everything. They calmed my stress, anger and fear. They underscored celebration and increased pleasure. I used them as an excuse to be outdoors, to escape socializing, or as entree to a circle of others. I loved the good will fellowship of smokers, the gift economy of bumming. I loved the ceremony of packing a fresh pack, undressing the cellophane, lighting up, stubbing out. I loved it all. Frankly, I still think smoking looks cool, and quite often sexy. No one thought I would quit smoking — least of all me — but I did. Not because I was fed up with smelling bad, or being sick all the time, or because I knew smoking caused cancer and heart disease. Instead, it was because every hour on the hour, no matter where I was, who I was talking to or what I was doing, an internal timer would go off alerting me to my master’s need, pulling my focus away no matter how desperately I wanted to stay in the moment. “Each cigarette causes the craving for the next, to fill the emptiness caused by the nicotine leaving your body.” I had read this in “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking,” a 1985 book by Allen Carr that helped me (and purported millions of others) to quit cold turkey. To paraphrase a key point: You do not smoke because you need something to do with your hands, or because you love the ritual of it, or any of the other excuses people make. You smoke because you’re addicted to a powerful drug called nicotine. “Get it clear in your mind,” he writes. “CIGARETTES DO NOT FILL A VOID. THEY CREATE ONE!” I wound up kicking nicotine by never smoking another cigarette. It was that simple. It was hellish at first, and then I got used to it. Smartphones are not cigarettes (I’d argue their charms are fewer), but like cigarettes, those who design and peddle them have worked hard to cultivate addiction in their users, creating voids that only they can fill. I don’t deny the convenience and timesaving benefits in having a smartphone, but I don’t think convenience is what is driving people to stroke their screens about 2,600 times a day. So I got rid of my smartphone. And brother, it was approximately one million times easier than quitting smoking. I can check my email and social media platforms on a laptop as needed, but now that they are out of my pocket they no longer nag at me. Turns out using a dumbphone is like riding a bike; T9 (the old-fashioned texting we used to do using the nine numerical buttons) is not nearly as bad as I’d remembered. I have a gazetteer in the car, and when that fails, I ask people for directions. (This typically prompts the Samaritan to pull out a smartphone.) It took about 72 hours to teach my body that we had gone back to the old ways, and though I had assumed it would take much longer, the change was almost instantaneous. Moderation requires effort and will power, but when the device is gone there is nothing to resist. I can read a book for hours in a sitting, and when my loved ones speak I hear the story they’re telling. Which is to say, I am free again to enjoy the things I have always loved, to worship the god I choose. Lisa Wells lives in Seattle and is the author of “The Fix,” a collection of poetry. Photo illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Read the full article

I Quit My Smartphone - The New York Times

Thanks to the Allen Carr technique for quitting smoking. Jan. 20, 2020 About a year ago, I noticed a distressing tendency in myself to drift off while the people I loved were talking. It didn’t matter if they were talking about a book they had read or recent health problems or crushing grief or revelations from therapy. Never before had I struggled to listen, but now I couldn’t help checking out. Several times in the last year, my husband has had to ask in the middle of a conversation, “Where did you go?” Where did I go? Nowhere good. Usually my mind returned me to the small computer in my pocket, to an unanswered email, to a “like” or a retweet, to a comment I found threatening or flattering (though increasingly, any kindness I received through a device acted on my nervous system like derision). Suffice to say, I went away. In giving my attention to the device, I withheld it from the person I value most. And there were other troubling symptoms. It was hard to read or write for sustained periods, which is concerning because that is my job. I was forcing myself to push through a handful of pages before reaching for the phone as reward — orienting toward the activities I loved as if they were chores, and toward the object as a source of pleasure (though it was more often a source of anxiety). I hadn’t deliberately chosen to worship my smartphone, but when you repeatedly bow your head to something, stroking it thousands of times a day, it begins to shine like an idol. I tried to moderate, leaving the phone off or at home when I went for a walk. But rather than feeling free, I felt more tightly leashed, worried about missing phantom emergencies. I’d reflexively pat my body down, like I did when I first quit smoking: the addiction policing the addict. Come to think of it, this was all beginning to feel very familiar. Once upon a time, I smoked a half a pack a day. Sometimes I smoked more, sometimes less, but I was a smoker through and through. Before I quit, I couldn’t imagine life without cigarettes, my constant companion, my carcinogenic security blanket! I leaned on them for everything. They calmed my stress, anger and fear. They underscored celebration and increased pleasure. I used them as an excuse to be outdoors, to escape socializing, or as entree to a circle of others. I loved the good will fellowship of smokers, the gift economy of bumming. I loved the ceremony of packing a fresh pack, undressing the cellophane, lighting up, stubbing out. I loved it all. Frankly, I still think smoking looks cool, and quite often sexy. No one thought I would quit smoking — least of all me — but I did. Not because I was fed up with smelling bad, or being sick all the time, or because I knew smoking caused cancer and heart disease. Instead, it was because every hour on the hour, no matter where I was, who I was talking to or what I was doing, an internal timer would go off alerting me to my master’s need, pulling my focus away no matter how desperately I wanted to stay in the moment. “Each cigarette causes the craving for the next, to fill the emptiness caused by the nicotine leaving your body.” I had read this in “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking,” a 1985 book by Allen Carr that helped me (and purported millions of others) to quit cold turkey. To paraphrase a key point: You do not smoke because you need something to do with your hands, or because you love the ritual of it, or any of the other excuses people make. You smoke because you’re addicted to a powerful drug called nicotine. “Get it clear in your mind,” he writes. “CIGARETTES DO NOT FILL A VOID. THEY CREATE ONE!” I wound up kicking nicotine by never smoking another cigarette. It was that simple. It was hellish at first, and then I got used to it. Smartphones are not cigarettes (I’d argue their charms are fewer), but like cigarettes, those who design and peddle them have worked hard to cultivate addiction in their users, creating voids that only they can fill. I don’t deny the convenience and timesaving benefits in having a smartphone, but I don’t think convenience is what is driving people to stroke their screens about 2,600 times a day. So I got rid of my smartphone. And brother, it was approximately one million times easier than quitting smoking. I can check my email and social media platforms on a laptop as needed, but now that they are out of my pocket they no longer nag at me. Turns out using a dumbphone is like riding a bike; T9 (the old-fashioned texting we used to do using the nine numerical buttons) is not nearly as bad as I’d remembered. I have a gazetteer in the car, and when that fails, I ask people for directions. (This typically prompts the Samaritan to pull out a smartphone.) It took about 72 hours to teach my body that we had gone back to the old ways, and though I had assumed it would take much longer, the change was almost instantaneous. Moderation requires effort and will power, but when the device is gone there is nothing to resist. I can read a book for hours in a sitting, and when my loved ones speak I hear the story they’re telling. Which is to say, I am free again to enjoy the things I have always loved, to worship the god I choose. Lisa Wells lives in Seattle and is the author of “The Fix,” a collection of poetry. Photo illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Read the full article

Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO — Federal prosecutors in Brazil on Tuesday charged the American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes for his role in the spreading of cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force.In a criminal complaint made public on Tuesday, prosecutors in the capital, Brasília, accused Mr. Greenwald of being part of a “criminal organization” that hacked into the cellphones of several prosecutors and other public officials last year.The Intercept Brazil, a news organization Mr. Greenwald co-founded, has published several stories based on a trove of leaked messages he received last year.Mr. Greenwald could not immediately be reached for comment. Read the full article

Who’s Watching Your Porch?

Ring offers a front-door view of a country where millions of Amazon customers use Amazon cameras to watch Amazon contractors deliver Amazon packages. Read the full article

SpaceX’s Explosive Test May Launch Year of Renewed Human Spaceflight

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The rocket launched. It exploded.SpaceX and NASA declared the blast a success.Usually the destruction of a rocket means a failed mission. But on Sunday, SpaceX was demonstrating a crucial safety system of its Crew Dragon spacecraft, a capsule that is to carry astronauts for NASA to the International Space Station.There was no one on board during Sunday’s flight. The passengers this time were two test dummies with sensors to measure the forces that real astronauts would experience if the capsule’s escape system were ever needed. The system proved itself, even during a phase of the flight when atmospheric forces on the spacecraft are most severe. About nine minutes after the test, the intact capsule landed in the Atlantic Ocean.“Overall, as far we can tell thus far, it was a picture-perfect mission,” said Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, during a news conference after the test.This accomplishment may set the stage for opening a new era in spaceflight. For more than eight years since the last space shuttle flight, no person has launched to orbit from the United States. Instead, NASA has had to rely on Russia for the transportation of its astronauts.Now SpaceX and Boeing, the companies hired by NASA, are nearly ready for their first crewed flights, and probably not just of NASA astronauts.“We’re on the cusp of commercializing low-Earth orbit,” said Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator. “I want to see large amounts of capital flowing into activities that include humans in space. And those activities could be industrialized biomedicine. It could be advanced materials, and it could be people that want to go to space for tourism purposes.”Boeing and SpaceX may not be the only companies taking people to space from the United States. Two companies, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, seem to be on track to carry their first customers on expensive, short-hop space tourism flights soon. The number of people heading toward space could surge, even if most experience weightlessness for just a few minutes.The abort test was postponed one day because of rough seas and gusty winds on Saturday at the planned splashdown site. On Sunday, the waves were beginning to calm, but a storm was moving toward the launchpad.At 10:30 a.m., conditions on both land and sea were good enough to allow the Falcon 9 rocket to blast off into the sky.At 84 seconds after liftoff, powerful thrusters on the Crew Dragon pushed the spacecraft away from the rocket quickly, reaching a speed of more than twice that of sound. The rocket then exploded.Mr. Musk said the capsule, with its heat shield, should be able to survive fiery conditions that erupted before the capsule made its escape.“It could quite literally look like something out of Star Wars, fly right out of a fireball,” he said. “We want to avoid doing that.”Coasting to an altitude of more than 130,000 feet, the capsule then performed a carefully designed choreography — jettisoning the bottom of the spacecraft, firing small thrusters and deploying its parachutes — before it splashed into the ocean about 20 miles from where it started.The next Crew Dragon mission is to take two NASA astronauts, Douglas G. Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, to the space station.Mr. Musk said that flight would likely occur in the second quarter of the year, between April and June. The Falcon 9 rocket and a new Crew Dragon capsule for that flight will be ready in Florida by the end of February, he said, but safety reviews will take some time.The crew on the space station is to drop to three in April when three astronauts currently there return to Earth on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.The mission for Mr. Hurley and Mr. Behnken is currently scheduled to last two weeks, but could be extended, which would prevent a drop-off in scientific research at the station. For a longer stay, the astronauts would need additional training.“So far on space station, our responsibility is to take care of ourselves while we’re there, not make a mess,” Mr. Behnken said.Mr. Bridenstine said that a decision on whether Mr. Hurley and Mr. Behnken would stay longer would be made in a few weeks. He also said that NASA was still negotiating to buy an additional seat on a Soyuz.“I think it’s important we have options,” Mr. Bridenstine said.

A slow trek back to orbit

The last time NASA astronauts launched from the United States was July 8, 2011, when the space shuttle Atlantis blasted off on its last flight from Florida.Thirteen days later, it glided to a landing back at the Kennedy Space Center, where it is now a museum piece. Since then, astronauts from NASA and other nations flying to the space station have been hitching rides on Russian Soyuz rockets, at a current price of more than $80 million each.From Alan Shepard’s first flight in 1961 through the Apollo moon landings to the space shuttles, NASA was in charge of designing, building and operating its rockets and spacecraft.After the retirement of the shuttles, NASA planned to continue that approach with the Constellation program started under President George W. Bush. NASA aimed to develop the Ares 1 rocket to take astronauts to the space station.But costs for Ares 1 and the accompanying Orion capsule kept rising and the schedule slipped repeatedly. The Obama administration canceled the program.To replace Ares 1, NASA turned to commercial companies, the approach it uses for launches of satellites, cargo to the space station and robotic planetary probes. But relinquishing the transportation of astronauts was a bigger shift for the space agency.When NASA awarded the commercial crew contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014, the hope was that the flights carrying astronauts would begin by the end of 2017. The contracts set fixed prices, unlike earlier big NASA contracts where contractors were reimbursed for costs with an additional fee.Watchdogs in government have questioned the management and costs of the program, and both Boeing and SpaceX have suffered technological setbacks along the way. SpaceX successfully sent an uncrewed Crew Dragon to the space station a year ago, and the company was gearing up to conduct the in-flight abort test.But in April, during a ground test, the capsule that was to be used for the abort test — the same one that had gone to orbit — exploded. No one was injured, but that pushed back SpaceX’s schedule as it figured out what happened and how to fix it.In December, Boeing launched one of its Starliner capsules without crew, but the mission ended early, without going to the space station, because of a problem with the spacecraft’s clock.

All aboard?

Many space enthusiasts hope that the commercial crew program will spur new business in space.Last June, NASA announced that it would allow space tourists to make trips to the space station, and one company, Axiom Space, says it has one passenger signed up already for a 10-day trip that will cost $55 million. An Axiom mission could launch as soon as summer 2021.However, another company, Bigelow Space Operations, which also said it planned to launch space tourists to the station, backed away a few months later.“NASA still has a substantial amount of work to do,” said Robert T. Bigelow, the founder and chief executive of the company. “We learned last year when we secured a SpaceX launch and options for three others that unfortunately it was premature. So, therefore, we had to cancel those agreements.”NASA is also expected to soon announce the winner of a competition to attach a commercial module to the International Space Station, providing more room for visitors.Still, putting people in orbit will most likely remain a small slice of the money invested on space ventures.“There’s certainly a business to made with human spaceflight,” said Chad Anderson, chief executive of Space Angels, an investment firm focused on start-up space companies. But, he added, his company saw human spaceflight more as a high-profile catalyst than a big business.The areas of major growth, he said, will be global positioning systems, earth observation and communications, none of which require astronauts.Closer to the ground, another pair of American companies could take passengers on brief trips to the edge of space.The spacecraft built by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic basically just go up and down like a big roller coaster and never accelerate to the speeds needed to reach orbit. Virgin’s officials are optimistically saying that commercial flights will begin this year. Blue Origin has not yet carried any passengers.Neither company’s trip to space will be in financial reach of the average person. Virgin Galactic charges $250,000 for a seat. Blue Origin has not yet said what it will charge.But the companies could greatly increase the number of people who travel to space. In the 58 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, fewer than 600 people have followed him there. Read the full article

Tech Bro Uniform Meets Margaret Thatcher. Disruption Ensues.

In the case of Mrs. Thatcher, the silk scarf, which, along with the skirt suit and pussy-bow blouse, became signifiers of the Iron Lady, the woman who put on her absolutely appropriate clothes like armor in her battle to liberate the markets and bring “tough capitalism” to Britain.Combining both, Mr. Denny, 37, found the shape, literally, of an idea.Mr. Denny is known for work that explores the culture of technology and its effects on society. He grew up in New Zealand and moved to Germany in 2007 to attend art school. After graduating, as he began developing his signature, he started “following” individuals he saw as paradigm changers: reading their press, their speeches and books; checking in as their careers progressed.Peter Thiel was one. Mr. Denny’s 2019 exhibition, “The Founder’s Paradox,” held in Auckland, New Zealand, featured Mr. Thiel (for one), the billionaire tech venture capitalist who is known for buying up swaths of land in that country, as a figure called Lord Tybalt, in art inspired by fantasy board games. Dominic Cummings, the architect of Boris Johnson’s electoral victory, is another. Ditto Mrs. Thatcher.“She was very visible in the 1980s, shaping a new kind of politics that emphasized the individual, deregulation and global neoliberalism,” Mr. Denny said, speaking on the phone from Berlin a few days before the opening.Though Mr. Denny has previously had exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Serpentine in London, and represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, this is the first time he has used fashion in his work, and it is partly because of the former prime minister. Read the full article

The F.A.A. Wants to Start Tracking Drones’ Locations

The Federal Aviation Administration proposed wide-sweeping regulations on Thursday that would require that all but the tiniest drones incorporate technology that would enable them to be tracked at all times while flying in United States airspace.“Remote ID technologies will enhance safety and security by allowing the F.A.A., law enforcement and federal security agencies to identify drones flying in their jurisdiction,” the federal transportation secretary, Elaine L. Chao, said in a statement.As drone operators, manufacturers and others involved in the rapidly expanding drone industry began sifting through the 319-page proposal on Thursday afternoon, responses varied wildly. While some applauded the F.A.A. for finally creating a system to rapidly identify owners of rogue — potentially deadly — drones, others declared that this was going to drastically hinder drone efficiency and cost effectiveness. Since 2015, operators of all drones that weigh more than half a pound have been required to register their devices, by submitting their names along with their email and home addresses to the F.A.A. Some federal facilities — prisons, for example — are authorized to use systems to detect the presence of drones, said Reggie Govan, a former chief counsel to the F.A.A. who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.But at the moment, officials do not have a quick way to identify the owner of a given drone or to track the location of drones that have been registered by a particular person. Even airports and power plants currently lack the legal authority to track drones, Mr. Govan said. At the simplest level the proposed regulation requires all drones over 0.55 pound to emit a very particular kind of signal. “Once you have drones that are emitting an identifier then you can have a system that can track all drones,” Mr. Govan said, adding that he applauded the regulations.Brendan Schulman, vice president for policy and legal affairs at DJI, a Chinese company that is one of the leading manufacturers of small consumer drones, said that for the past several years, industry leaders and government stakeholders had been trying to figure out how to create a sort of drone “license plate system.” He said that the proposed system could make sense. His primary concern is that the cost and burden to drone pilots and operators remain low — something he is still evaluating. (DJI was embroiled in another government drone matter, with mounting security concerns that the cameras and other technology on its drones could send surveillance data back to China.)But for Paul Aitken, a founder of DroneU, a drone pilot training company in New Mexico, the costs immediately struck him as excessive. The new regulations require all registered drones within 36 months to begin carrying a specific type of remote identification system that broadcasts over the internet. Often finding an internet connection is not feasible in the locations where drone operators fly, Mr. Aitken said. According to his reading of the rules, if you don’t have cellular service or another way to connect to the internet, operators will have to limit flights to 400 feet laterally, which is roughly to the end of a block — and back.Search and rescue missions often require going at least four times that distance, he said. “People will literally die from these rules,” he said, adding that other “industries that are thriving with drones like utility inspection, precision agriculture, land surveying, ranch management and even some construction management would suffer greatly” given that the rules undermine efficiency, which for many is part of the appeal of drones.He is also concerned that drone pilots will have to publicly disclose their locations. “Pilots need privacy to protect them from fear-based citizens who think that drones are spying on them,” he said.A New York City councilman, Justin Brannan, said he thought this was a step in the right direction, however. It is currently illegal to fly a drone in most of New York City. “We need to create a framework for drones to legally and safely operate here in New York City because I do believe the benefits will outweigh the risks,” he said.The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, as the proposed legislation is called, will be open for a 60-day comment period. At that point the regulations become law.Jonathan Rupprecht, a Florida-based lawyer who specializes in drones, was left with many questions as to how this would be enforced. He pointed out that the F.A.A. had rarely prosecuted violations of drone regulations — such as flying in a careless manner or flying an unregistered aircraft — over the last decade. “They should refrain from biting off more than they can chew,” he said. Mr. Rupprecht said that focusing on locations that need protecting, instead of creating an unwieldy tracking system for the entire United States, would be more realistic. Read the full article

The Watch Is Smart, but It Can’t Replace Your Doctor

But this result wasn’t calculated from any of the numbers above. It specifically refers to the subset of patients who had an irregular pulse notification while wearing their confirmatory patch. That’s a very small minority of participants. Of the 86 who got a notification while wearing a patch, 72 had confirmed evidence of atrial fibrillation. (Dividing 72 by 86 yields 0.84, which is how you get a positive predictive value of 84 percent.)Positive predictive values, although useful when talking to patients, are not always a good measure of a test’s effectiveness. When you test a device on a group where everyone has a disease, for instance, all positive results are correct. A flipped coin would have a positive predictive power of 100 percent in such a population, even though it’s a terrible test.Other test characteristics like sensitivity (if you have a disease, how likely the test is to be positive) and specificity (if you don’t have a disease, how likely the test is to be negative) are more effective in evaluating the overall quality of a test. This study, unfortunately, was not designed to determine those characteristics.Other methods to screen and diagnose people with atrial fibrillation are available. A systematic review of mobile health devices for atrial fibrillation found 22 studies between 2014 and 2019 that reported on many of them. Some had sensitivities and specificities pretty close to the ideal of 100. None are close to as large as this study, though.Even blood pressure monitors, ubiquitous in physician’s offices, can screen for atrial fibrillation. A systematic review of them found that they had sensitivities greater than 85 percent and specificities greater than 90 percent.Here’s the thing, though. Experts aren’t even sure if screening is a good idea to begin with.After all, if we felt strongly enough about detecting asymptomatic people who might have atrial fibrillation, we could screen everyone with electrocardiograms. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has considered doing this among adults 65 and older, who are at higher risk for stroke. The group found that the evidence was insufficient to recommend doing so, because it’s not clear that this level of screening is better than current care. Just taking a pulse as part of a checkup is a pretty good screen all by itself.There is also a concern that electrocardiogram screening could turn up a lot of false positives, leading to misdiagnosis and unnecessary further testing, which incurs its own risks. Remember that even with the Apple Watch, most of the people who got notifications did not have atrial fibrillation. Read the full article