DNA Biohackers Sold A DIY Kit For Glowing Booze And Here’s What Happened

Josiah Zayner, CEO and founder of the Odin.

Allyson Laquian / BuzzFeed News

“Don’t be too impressed,” said Josiah Zayner as he cracked open the fridge. On the top shelf, next to Silk soy milk cartons, was the Bay Area biohacker’s latest creation: a bottle of amber-colored booze.

With the kitchen lights turned off, Zayner pointed a blacklight at the alcohol. And a faint green glow sparkled at the bottom of the bottle.

The drink tasted fizzy, faintly intoxicating, and sweet, thanks to the fermented honey that gives mead its alcoholic kick. “I don’t know if you feel like a Viking when you drink mead. I kind of do. Arrrr!” he said, adding, “You can taste the honey, you can taste the alcohol a little bit.”

Zayner, 35, had made the glowing booze partly with a do-it-yourself DNA kit that his startup, the Odin, has just started selling online. The company conceived it as a gimmick to introduce homebrewers to genetic engineering. But in the short time the kit’s been for sale, it’s also become a test for the citizen scientists to see how far they can push the FDA.

With the kit, customers can genetically engineer yeast to make mead that gleams like a lantern — the ideal refreshment for, presumably, poorly lit house parties. “Imagine a world in which after work you invite your friends over to have them try a custom beer you brewed that glows in the dark using your own genetically designed yeast,” the Odin’s website read early last week.

The FDA also began to imagine this world after the kit started selling last week, unknownst to the agency — and then it started asking whether fluorescent homebrew was safe.

By initially marketing the kit as a food-making device, the startup may have exposed a loophole in laws that haven’t caught up to a generation of biohackers tinkering with the DNA of bacteria, plants, and animals in their kitchens and garages.

“The system wasn’t set up to deal with things like this,” said Todd Kuiken, a senior research scholar at North Carolina State University’s Genetic Engineering and Society Center.

While humans have for centuries used yeast to make wine and beer, and homebrewing has been legal federally since 1978 and in all 50 states since 2013, the Odin’s light-up twist could give regulators a hangover-sized headache.

“I can’t imagine when they wrote the laws for this, [they said,] ‘Well, at some point, somebody’s going to be able to engineer yeast for beer that will make it glow in the dark,’” Kuiken said.

A green glowing line can be seen above the layer of yeast sediment on the bottom of this bottle.

Allyson Laquian / BuzzFeed News

Scientific research is traditionally conducted by scholars with multiple degrees and access to expensive equipment at universities and industry labs. But like its DIY bio brethren, the Odin, short for the Open Discovery Institute, wants to make those tools cheap and easy, so everyone can be scientists. Its five employees, who work out of a garage in a suburb across the bay from San Francisco, are used to operating on the fringe of the scientific establishment.

Zayner, the CEO and founder, is a former NASA research fellow with a biophysics and biochemistry PhD from the University of Chicago. Pushing the legal and physical limits of scientific experimentation is second nature for him: Earlier this year, he performed an unsanctioned fecal transplant on himself, using poop from a friend, to relieve gastrointestinal pain. In late 2015, he crowdfunded kits to alter bacteria with the gene-editing technology CRISPR; the Odin, a business he started in grad school, now sells them.

Zayner and his team dreamed up the newest kit as a way to make genetic engineering accessible and useful. Homebrewing, whose popularity has been skyrocketing, seemed like an activity that people would enjoy doing — more so than editing bacteria DNA — and maybe they’d pick up some biology in the process.

“There’s never been anything like this before, where somebody has a kit where they can engineer something they can do something with,” Zayner told BuzzFeed News. “Someone can genetically engineer something they can consume.”

When Zayner set out to advertise the kit, he believed he was in the clear due to what he saw as a legal distinction: the FDA regulates food products, including some alcohol — but the Odin wasn’t selling a beverage.

It’s selling equipment like a pipette and petri dishes, along with yeast and DNA, and providing instructions on how to genetically manipulate yeast cells so they express green fluorescence, the same genetic trait found in jellyfish. Originally, the Odin also instructed homebrewers to add the engineered yeast to water and honey, which the company didn’t provide. Left alone for one or two weeks, the yeast would convert the honey’s sugars into mead, a process called fermentation. Zayner told BuzzFeed News that the result is about 5% alcohol.

“Someone can genetically engineer something they can consume.”

Last week, I visited Zayner at his Castro Valley townhome for a taste test, knowing that what I was about to down hadn’t been FDA-approved. Zayner, who has bleached hair, nose rings, and ears rimmed with piercings, uncorked the bottle with a pop. Then he filled up a pair of shot glasses that said “Biohack the Shot.”

The liquid wasn’t exactly as bright as a glowstick, but under a blacklight, a slight gleam was visible at the bottom where a layer of yeast sediment had settled. Zayner said the three-week-old brew had been more luminous when it was actively fermenting.

“Cheers,” we said, clinking our glasses.

Earlier in the week, Zayner had said that he didn’t know what the consequences of his scientific and business experiment would be, nor was he afraid of finding out. He hadn’t contacted the FDA before making and putting the kit up for sale, originally for $225 and now $199.

“As far as we know, there’s no regulation on stuff like this,” he said, although he conceded that his team may have missed something while scouring the internet. “We’re kind of a small company, we’re off the radar. Does the government even care, would they even care? Even if they did, what would they do?”

It turned out that the government did care. After BuzzFeed News asked Zayner about the product’s legal status, he contacted the FDA, and learned the agency had been waiting for his call. Agency officials held a conference call with Zayner on Thursday. Zayner taped the call with their permission, and shared the recording with BuzzFeed News.

On the call, the two sides went back and forth. Three FDA staffers told Zayner that the green fluorescence protein was likely a color additive for food, and it hadn’t been recognized as safe to consume; Zayner questioned whether it was really a “color” additive when, he noted, the green glow was only visible under a blacklight. Zayner argued that the kits were being sold in part as an educational tool; the FDA disagreed.

“If we did continue to sell these kits, what would you guys do?” Zayner asked during the call.

Jason Dietz, an FDA policy analyst, told him that the agency could issue a warning letter or, at the extreme end, seize the company’s equipment — “that would be unlikely, I would hope,” he added. “Typically people, when they find they’re doing something unlawful, correct it, because it’s not good for business.”

By the next day, the Odin had tweaked its website. It revised its instruction manual to remove all mentions of using the yeast to ferment mead. Gone from the product page, as of Monday morning, was a photo of a full bottle of mead and most of the alcohol references, although the site still said that this type of yeast is meant for mead. It also said, “We see a future in which people are genetically designing the plants they use in their garden, eating yogurt that contains a custom bacterial strain they modified or even someday brewing using an engineered yeast strain.”

A screenshot of the Odin's page for its DIY yeast kit on Nov. 30.

BuzzFeed News / Via the-odin.com

A screenshot from Dec. 5.

BuzzFeed News / Via the-odin.com

Although he would go on to make the changes, Zayner, ever the provocateur, felt compelled after the call to point out to BuzzFeed News all the limits he saw to the FDA’s logic. He wondered: How could regulators justify potentially seizing his yeast when yeast, on its own, isn’t a food product? The Odin didn’t want to harm anyone, Zayner said, but why was the FDA worried about one fluorescent protein when studies show that beer yeasts in general have been evolving and mutating on their own for centuries?

FDA spokesperson Megan McSeveney told BuzzFeed News on Friday that the agency “does not have enough information at this time to determine the regulatory status of this product.” She added that food manufacturers are responsible for complying with federal, state, and local laws.

On Monday, Zayner wrote a blog post in which he backed down even more from the language used in the original advertising. Yeast made with the kits, he wrote, had not been FDA-cleared for consumption. “However,” he wrote, “we believe that there might be people who would attempt to use our kits to create alcohol against the FDA’s wishes so we wanted them be knowledgeable about the product.”

He added that the company planned to seek FDA clearance.

Provided that the federal agency approves, Zayner also hopes to make glow-in-the-dark beer the next craft brewing sensation. The Odin has teamed up with Inoculum Ale Works, a sour-beer brewery near Tampa, Florida that wants to make and sell the beer next year, perhaps online and in its future taproom. The brewery says it also plans to make beers genetically engineered to have citrus flavors, for example, or include a nutritional compound called squalene.

Inoculum CEO and co-owner Nick Moench told BuzzFeed News that, having spoken to some FDA staff, he’s confident that he and Zayner will be able to show that the green fluorescence protein is safe to consume. “This isn’t a small undertaking — it’s going to take some resource and perseverance,” he said via Gchat. “Fortunately we’re swimming in perseverance.”

The Odin isn’t the only company that’s genetically altering yeast to make food. Swiss company Evolva has created synthetic vanillin, the vanilla flavor in ice cream and cake, which prompted the environmental activist group Friends of the Earth to condemn it as an “extreme form” of genetic engineering. Other Bay Area biohackers are engineering yeast to make vegan cheese.

They all aim to create foods that are essentially identical to their conventional counterparts. “The idea with those things is you have a new way of producing it, but the product is chemically the same,” said Gregory Kaebnick, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank.

Allyson Laquian / BuzzFeed News

Glow-in-the-dark booze, however, would look quite unlike conventional homebrews — and that’s where the startup would potentially clash with the FDA. Before any substances, including color additives, can be added to food for sale, the agency requires them to either be approved by the agency, or be already generally recognized by experts as safe to eat.

Approved substances are listed in a federal database. Green fluorescence proteins are not on that list.

“Obviously, the Odin folks, they’re not interested in making people sick, they’re not deliberately trying to make something dangerous,” Kuiken said. But “from the FDA’s standpoint, that is probably something that they’re going to want to take a look at, because it hasn’t been looked at before.”

If a food item made with the Odin’s kit were to sicken people, Kuiken worries that the emerging biohacking community could suffer. Glowing plants, fecal transplants, and other boundary-testing science projects have similarly sparked debates over what ethical responsibility independent scientists have to police themselves.

“We’ve seen in the past when particularly some biotech companies just ignore the FDA, they can come down on them really hard, to the point where the companies can get shut down,” Kuiken said. “That’s something I think we’re all trying to avoid happening, and we want to encourage this kind of exploration, but it also needs to be done responsibly.”

Zayner, on the other hand, doesn’t think that cautious behavior necessarily benefits the DIY biotech community. Taking risks expands the possibilities of what they can do.

“It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission,” he said, “because they’re always going to say no to everything.”

LINK: Make-Your-Own Heroin Is Almost Here, Scientists Warn

LINK: This Startup Is Designing Yeast To Make Brand-New Scents, Flavors

Quelle: <a href="DNA Biohackers Sold A DIY Kit For Glowing Booze And Here’s What Happened“>BuzzFeed

How To Snapchat Your Thanksgiving Meal Without Destroying Your Family

Thanksgiving. Ugh. The one time a year you have to sit with family and pretend to care more about them than what’s on your phone. Here we go again, another three hours listening to ol’ uncle Seth drone on about the chick from pool yoga. Goddamit Uncle Seth, swallow your pride and get on Tinder already.

In a perfect world, we’d all be able to tune out our well-meaning relatives, engaging instead with the vibrant world of smartphone applications just an arm’s reach away. But alas, the minimal courtesy expected in today’s society still somehow includes keeping your device hidden in large family settings. In time, these backwards societal norms will change.

But for now, there&#039;s one tried-and-true method you can use your device’s most important app, Snapchat, while maintaining the peace with the only people in the world who love you. Read carefully, and you can keep hitting that social media dopamine spigot throughout the evening even though your phone should technically be in your pocket. If you follow these rules to the letter, you should be okay. But we make no promises.

Step 1: Grease the wheels by faceswapping grandma with a potato

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Your grandma very likely grew up in the age of the flip phone, a time where rudimentary games like Snake were the most sophisticated form of digital distraction (this why it was called the “Great Depression”). Grandma will therefore likely be least favorable to your phone’s presence at the meal, and so it’s damn important to win her over from the very start. You can charm granny into Snapchat acceptance by demonstrating the great strides phones have made since her childhood. Wow her with Snapchat’s sophisticated features, especially the one that will superimpose your face on a vegetable, and superimpose a vegetable on your face. Creating a granny potato-face is sure to delight her and the crowd, as will a potato granny-face. These giggles, mind you, will plow the way for more Snapchat usage.

Step 2: Use the “What I’m Thankful For” line to ream Facebook, Snapchat’s feature-thief

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As the meal goes on, you be presented with an opportunity to address the table, providing a few critical minutes to speak uninhibited about what makes you thankful. Some family members will use this opportunity to lie blatantly, proclaiming they’re thankful for each other or even a happy marriage. You, on the other hand, will tell the truth, explaining there&039;s little to be thankful for in a world Facebook can rip off Snapchat’s features with impunity. Here is your script:

“I, [insert your name], am thankful for our great technological warrior Evan Spiegel, whose bold camera-first social messaging format changed the world, making goofy selfies not only socially acceptable, but expected. I am thankful for Mr. Spiegel’s latest spark of genius, Spectacles, a revolutionary product that has assured the great battleship Snap Inc. a sea of earned media in the run up to its iconic initial public offering. But I must also express my deep disappointment in once-great social giants Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, former role models who have dishonored social media by duplicating Snapchat’s features the same way cousin Allison copied her best friend Marge’s math homework every morning for one year before getting expelled. Geez Allison. My fellow family members, what makes humanity great is our ability to push past the barriers constructed by those seeking to divide us and find common ground in our love of documenting our lives ephemerally on social media — sometimes even with puppy filters, as is our god-given right. Thank you Snapchat for making it possible for us to come together as a people, I am grateful to share this planet with you.”

Step 3: Chat up the IPO

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Cousin Nelson, who nobody really likes, is feeling pretty good thanks to a finance job that has him looking at spreadsheets 85 hours a week. Nelson, who recently learned to do his own laundry at the age of 31, will likely spend the evening asking you questions like “I have so much money but so little time to spend it, what should I do?” and “wow, how did you get fired from an unpaid internship?” Nelson will tell you he doesn’t “get” Snapchat, so blow his peanut brain by explaining the insane revenue multiple Snapchat is about to get on its upcoming IPO, where approximately $1 billion in annual revenue may net it a $25 billion valuation. As Nelson’s big dumb mouth hangs gaping wide after hearing this, snap a picture and post it as a Story.

Step 4: Crush dissent

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By now, the family is starting to come around to the idea of Snapchat. But you can tell Uncle Seth isn’t buying it. His grimaces as you build support are harshing the buzz of the entire gathering, and it’s time to address the matter. When Uncle Seth tells you he simply “can’t get past the sexting part,” challenge him to take out his phone and prove that he’s pure enough to level this criticism. Uncle Seth hands over his phone, but it’s a huge mistake. You begin going through his camera roll only to find… Oh dear…. Oh no…. Please no…. How in the even&#033;

Step 5: Snap away

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With your family now on board, you can document the rest of the feast worry-free. To get the most out of Snapchat, Mashable recommends turning your camera on night mode, adding extra text by copying and pasting from your notes app, and using emoji stickers to “add some oomph to your photos.”

Now, go forth. Don’t let your country down.

Happy Thanksgiving, America.

Quelle: <a href="How To Snapchat Your Thanksgiving Meal Without Destroying Your Family“>BuzzFeed

A Man Found An iPhone 4 At The Bottom Of A Lake — And It Still Works

Michael Guntrum, a resident of Knox, Pennsylvania, lost his iPhone 4 in March 2015 while he was ice fishing.

“We were having negative 25-degree weather, so me and two buddies went ice fishing,” Guntrum told BuzzFeed News. “We were sitting in our portable shanty, and I got a bite on my rod. I laid the phone on my lap, and it slipped off. Instead of landing flat in the snow, it hit its edge and rolled into the hole. I caught the fish — it was a blue gill — but it wasn&#039;t worth it.”

Normally, losing your iPhone at the bottom of an icy lake would be the end of this story.

But there&039;s more.

Kyle Lake, where Guntrum was fishing, ended up being drained in September 2015 because of structural deficiencies in its dam.

And…someone found his phone&#033;

Daniel Kalgren, a mechanical engineer who lives in western Pennsylvania, told BuzzFeed News he was treasure hunting with his metal detector in the empty lake basin this October when he found Guntrum&039;s iPhone under six inches of mud and clay. He was there “to find what people dropped off of boats,” he said.

Daniel Kalgren

“I took the phone home, cleaned it, and put it in rice — just out of curiosity to see if it would still work,” Kalgren told BuzzFeed News.

After two days, it turned on.

“It was the only thing I found that day. I was able to turn it on and use it to look up his number. He knows I have it now, and I&039;m going to mail it to him,” Kalgren told BuzzFeed News.

When Kalgren found Guntrum&039;s phone number on the recovered iPhone and contacted him, Guntrum said he didn&039;t believe it at first.

“I had just been talking about that lake early that day. It was eerie,” Guntrum said. “He sent me a picture and asked, &039;Does this look familiar?&039; and I recognized the screensaver.”

What kind of case is that?

The phone&039;s survival may have as much to do with its housing as it does with the phone&039;s hardiness. Kalgren&039;s said that Guntrum&039;s phone was in an Otterbox iPhone 4 case. Kalgren himself owns an iPhone 6S and keeps it in a Lifeproof case.

“I don&039;t know if my current phone would survive at the bottom of a 30-degree lake through a full winter. I&039;d like to think it would,” Kalgren said.

“I&039;m an Apple person, and this adds to the reasons why I only buy Apple devices,” Kalgren told BuzzFeed News.

“It&039;s pretty impressive it still works,” Kalgren said.

An Apple spokesperson said this isn&039;t the first time the company&039;s gotten this kind of report. “It never ceases to amaze us, all the incredible iPhone survival stories our customers have shared with us.”

So what&039;s Guntrum going to do with his long-lost phone when it arrives in the mail? He said he plans to have it repaired.

“My mom needs smartphone, so I&039;ll give it to her.”

Quelle: <a href="A Man Found An iPhone 4 At The Bottom Of A Lake — And It Still Works“>BuzzFeed

This Is What Happens When Millions Of People Suddenly Get The Internet

YANGON, Myanmar — The internet brought Donald Trump to Myanmar. Or, at least that’s how Shar Ya Wai first remembers hearing about the Republican president-elect.

“One day, nobody knew him. Then, everyone did. That’s what the internet is. It takes people who say crazy things and makes them famous,” the 19-year-old student said.

Like most people in this country of 50 million, which only recently opened up to the outside world, Shar Ya Wai is new to the internet. And on this day, she had walked purposefully into a phone shop in central Yangon to buy her first smartphone, a simple model by China’s Huawei that is popular among her friends. “Today I’ll buy this phone,” she said. “I guess I’ll find out how crazy [the internet] really is.”

It’s not that she’d never seen the internet before. She’d tried to stalk ex-boyfriends through a friend’s Facebook page and caught glimpses of the latest Thai pop bands on her uncle’s old tablet, which he bought secondhand a year ago. But her forays into the internet have been brief and largely left her perplexed. Here was a public space where everyone seemed to have so much to say, but it was disorganized, bombastic, overwhelming. It felt like the polar opposite of the quiet, sheltered life she’d lived until recently.

“My father is a measured person. He speaks carefully and always wanted us to speak carefully too,” she said, smoothing down her waist-length black hair, betraying her nerves. “I’m more energetic, like my mom. We speak a lot more, but it is nothing like what I see on the internet.”

It was her father who wanted her to put off buying a phone until she was old enough to “use it safely,” though she wasn’t really sure what that meant. She thought he might be referring to the men who post crass and vulgar photos online. Or he might be worried about the various scammers who are increasingly targeting the nascent internet in Myanmar. She wasn&#039;t sure because no one had ever told her how to stay safe online — what to do, or say, or write.

Still, on this day in mid-July, Shar Ya Wai pushed herself out of a crowded store in central Yangon, holding the cellophane-wrapped cell phone as though it were an injured bird. Her fingers cradled the top and felt for the button that would turn it on, but then hesitated.

“Maybe I should wait until later. I should wait until I’m with my family,” she said, and then admitted, “I’m scared.”

She has reason to be afraid. For nearly five decades, Myanmar lived under military dictatorships that suppressed all forms of dissent and limited free speech, leading to US and European sanctions that largely cut off the country from the rest of the world. That changed in 2011, when the military junta was officially dissolved and a nominally civilian government was established. In 2015, in the first national election since the military eased its hold, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy Party was voted into power. Of the changes to hit the largely Buddhist country since then, few have been as drastic — and as rapid — as the sudden arrival of the internet to the general public. It revolutionized everything, from how people interact with one another to how they get their news, once the exclusive purview of hyper-regulated state-sanctioned media.

“People don’t talk about the normal news they see on Facebook. They talk about the crazy stuff. I never knew about Trump and then everyone was talking about him.”

Today, news sites have become so popular that print magazines called Facebook and The Internet regurgitate stories spotted online for stragglers who have not yet joined the internet revolution. Many of them feature sensational and salacious tales, cribbed from Facebook pages with a very loose definition of facts. Drinking ice-cold water while eating hot food will give you a stomach ache&#033; Angelina Jolie has secretly adopted a Burmese baby but is keeping it locked away due to a deformity&033; A Thai cabinet minister is secretly dating an Olympic gymnast&033;

These stories, at least, do little harm. But there has also been an increase in articles that demonize the country’s minority Muslim community, with fake news claiming that vast hordes of Muslim worshippers are attacking Buddhist sites. These articles, quickly shared and amplified on social media, have correlated with a surge in anti-Muslim protests and attacks on local Muslim groups.

Violence against Myanmar’s minority Muslim community has plagued the country for decades; in the last month, 70 Rohingya Muslims were killed in a wave of violence so intense that Human Rights Watch says the burned-down villages can be viewed from satellites in space. Mobilized by the sudden freedom of online platforms like Facebook, groups that once lived on the fringes of the political landscape, such as radical Buddhist anti-Muslim groups, have suddenly found supporters across the country. And, what’s more, those supporters have found solidarity in extreme movements around the world, including the more radical, nationalist American groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, that have supported Trump.

If fake news had the power to influence people’s minds during the US elections, in a country with a well-established mainstream media landscape, what could it do in Myanmar, with a nascent news media, only recently freed from the military’s stranglehold?

“People don’t talk about the normal news they see on Facebook. They talk about the crazy stuff. I never knew about Trump and then everyone was talking about him,” Shar Ya Wai said. She remembered getting into a fight with one friend who suggested that a Muslim family living in his middle-class suburb should be evicted, because Trump was going to ban Muslims and that it seemed like a good idea. “My friend was saying, ‘That is a good idea. We should do like America and do it here too. No more Muslims&033;’”

Her friend, like many in Myanmar, had gone online, discovered an extreme point of view, and then used it to reaffirm his own ideology within his country’s political ecosystem. Today’s internet was built for that sort of sharing. It is often the voices that shout the loudest, and tell the most outlandish stories, that are most likely to make it to the top of the News Feed — whether the news itself is real or fake. Despite debate in the US over the role that fake news played in the recent presidential elections, Facebook has maintained that it did not play a large role. Mark Zuckerberg initially argued that it was “extremely unlikely” that fake news affected the vote, although he later said he did take the issue seriously. Facebook employees who spoke to BuzzFeed News have suggested that content should be marked as verified, if it comes from trusted news sources.

Facebook’s influence in Myanmar is hard to quantify, but its domination is so complete that people in Myanmar use “internet” and “Facebook” interchangeably. According to Amara Digital, a Yangon-based marketing agency, Facebook has doubled its local base in the last year to 9.7 million monthly users. That number is likely to spike again, after Facebook launched its Free Basics program, a free, streamlined version of Facebook and a handful of other sites.

There was this idea, Shar Ya Wai said, that Facebook was for saying anything you wanted.

And that’s what’s been happening — from extremist monks to political cartoonists. Dozens of people have been jailed for what they’ve written on Facebook, though human rights groups say the exact number is unknown as many arrests go unreported, especially outside the city centers, where the legal system is not as closely monitored.

For many in Myanmar, the internet and Facebook brought with it the banner of free speech and American values — but no one had told them what would happen if they tested the values of free speech under a government still feeling its way out of military control. Was it the responsibility of Facebook, or their own government, to teach them how to safely use the internet? Would Facebook protect them for what they wrote online? How do you give people the internet they crave while keeping them safe? And given how many Americans, including Trump, fell for fake news during the elections, how were people in Myanmar expected to judge what was real and what was fake?

Shar Ya Wai did, eventually, turn the phone on, after a stall next to the mobile store told her they couldn’t activate the SIM card and data plan without activating the phone and dialing in to one of Myanmar’s local carriers, MTN. As she left the store, her phone was on, though Facebook and other apps remained closed. “I will use Facebook. I have to … that is the world.”

She agreed to keep in touch over the next few weeks as she got used to life with the internet in her pocket.

Customers inside a mobile phone shop in Yangon.

Minzayar Oo / BuzzFeed News

Back in 2011, a SIM card for a mobile phone could cost upwards of $3,000, and was available only to those with high-level government connections. A handful of internet cafés existed, most of them in the capital, but were far too expensive for the average person. Less than 0.2% of the country was online, according to the International Monetary Fund.

In the years immediately following the easing of military&039;s rule, internet use climbed slowly. Laptops were rare and desktops rarer still. It wasn’t until 2014, when the country opened its doors to international telecom companies, that the floodgates really opened. Suddenly, mobile towers were everywhere.

“In 2011, our subscribers were in the thousands. Now, we are at 35 million in a country of 50 million,” said Elaine Weidman-Grunewald, vice president of sustainability and corporate responsibility at telecoms giant Ericsson. She visited the country earlier this year to check in with a program Ericsson is running to provide internet access and tablets to 31 schools in rural Myanmar, reaching roughly 22,000 students. In many cases, the tablets were the student’s first, and only, access to the internet. “The rate of mobile use in Myanmar is unbelievable. The first six months of this year, Myanmar was in the top three countries globally with new mobile subscriptions.”

The World Bank estimates that roughly 20% of Myanmar is now online, most of that in just the last two years. In comparison, internet use in the United States, where commercial providers began to offer the internet access in late 1989, took seven years to reach a point where 20% of the US was online. In India, which is one of the fastest growing internet markets in the world, internet use took off in 2000, but didn’t reach 20% of the population until mid-2015.

Myanmar, said Weidman-Grunewald, was unique in that its isolation from the internet was so complete for so long, and then, just as quickly, it opened up its whole country to the whole, unfiltered internet.

Nowhere is the sudden growth as evident as in the shops underneath the golden peaks of the Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon. Sheltered beneath the awning of the pagoda, shops that once sold stamps and watches have disappeared, replaced by storefronts crammed with mobile phones and accessories.

“This is all anybody buys,” said Mai Thu Sien, a 19-year-old salesman. He didn’t seem bothered to be squeezed onto a street bustling with other shops selling exactly the same thing. “There are many customers for phones. People buy and buy.”

For the equivalent of $3, Mai Thu Sien sets up an email address, opens up a Facebook account in any name the customer wants, and sends them on their way. When asked whether customers choose their own email address, Mai Thu Sien looked confused. “Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”

If they forget their login information, or get signed out, they simply come in for a new Facebook account. Of the dozens of people interviewed by BuzzFeed News in Myanmar, all said they had more than one Facebook account. None knew about Facebook’s policy that users must use their real names.

Two days after she bought her phone, Shar Ya Wai sent a text message saying that she’d opened up an account and was adding friends.

“I only have 12 right now,” she said, adding that a friend of her brother’s had set up the account and that she too had no idea it was linked to email address. “Everyone is really nice. My friend put up photos of a trip together to Mandalay.”

“It’s not as bad as I thought,” she said.

A street vendor selling mobile phone accessories in Yangon on July 17.

Minzayar Oo / BuzzFeed News

The taxi raced down a slip road to the airport and then juddered to a halt in front of a small shack with chickens pecking outside. Ashin Wirathu, a monk whose hardline anti-Muslim positions have earned him the nickname “the Burmese Bin Laden,” smiled as he rolled down his window to chat with a journalist he recognized. Wirathu — who has been imprisoned for sermons calling for the persecution of the Muslim Rohingya minority — was heading off to the airport for a vacation, but couldn’t resist one more chance to get his name in the news.

Wirathu rose to prominence as part of a group of extremist monks once known as the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, and then the “969” movement. Today, they are called Ma Ba Tha, after their Burmese acronym. Since the end of military rule, monks have assumed an increasingly public role in the largely Buddhist country. Wirathu, and the Ma Ba Tha movement, have denied any role in the Buddhist lynch mobs, which, in recent years, have killed more than 200, and displaced more than 150,000 of the country’s Muslims, who make up roughly 4% of the total population. Civil society groups allege that the state&039;s security forces have fomented recent outbreaks of violence against the Rohingya. But there is no denying that Ma Ba Tha&039;s bashing of Muslims as “cruel and savage” is often repeated by those who want to see all Muslims expelled from Myanmar — and they admit that their anti-Muslim stance has gained its largest following through Facebook.

The controversial Buddhist monk Wirathu.

Thierry Falise / Getty Images

This week, following news that Trump’s administration was being staffed with hardliners, Wirathu released a statement hailing Trump’s White House as a victory in the fight against “Islamic terrorism.”

“May US citizens be free from jihad. May the world be free of bloodshed,” Wirathu wrote in a public statement. It was one of many Trump received from figures across the world who appeared to feel emboldened by his win.

It was not the first time Wirathu had taken to Facebook to bolster his position globally. Following his release from jail in January 2012, where he had served a seven-year prison sentence for inciting anti-Muslim pogroms in 2003, Wirathu immediately took to the platform.

“If the internet had not come to [Myanmar], not many people would know my opinion and messages like now,” Wirathu told BuzzFeed News, adding that he had always written books and delivered sermons but that the “internet is a faster way to spread the messages.”

His first account was small, he said, and almost immediately deleted by Facebook moderators who wrote that it violated their community standards. The second had 5,000 friends and grew so quickly he could no longer accept new requests. So he started a new page and hired two full-time employees who now update the site hourly.

“I have a Facebook account with 190,000 followers and a news Facebook page. The internet and Facebook are very useful and important to spread my messages,” he said.

On the dozens of Facebook pages he runs out of a dedicated office, Wirathu has called for the boycott of Muslim businesses, and for Muslims to be expelled from Myanmar. He said he has a hard time keeping the pages open, since Facebook keeps shutting them down. He manages, nonetheless, to maintain an ever-growing online following.

“I’m glad blocking exists.”

Quelle: <a href="This Is What Happens When Millions Of People Suddenly Get The Internet“>BuzzFeed

Adult Swim Talent Want The Network To Cancel Its Alt-Right Comedy Show

Until this week, when president-elect Donald Trump named one of the alt-right&039;s new nabobs his chief strategist, perhaps the highest purchase gained by the ascendant movement was a six-episode, 15-minute sketch comedy show on Adult Swim called Million Dollar Extreme Presents World Peace.

Now, as America processes the news that Trump, the alt-right&#039;s hero and avatar, will become the most powerful person in the world, a group of Adult Swim talent — actors, directors, writers, and producers — is desperately trying to convince the network&039;s powerful boss, Mike Lazzo, not to renew the show for a second season.

“They&039;re gathering a long list of complaints from people,” said a source connected to the network. “All of these complaints will hopefully be able to keep a second season from happening.”

BuzzFeed News spoke with three sources who have regularly worked with Adult Swim, the late-night cable network owned by Time Warner that&039;s famous for its zany, cult-favorite comedies. All three sources spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment by the online community surrounding Million Dollar Extreme, the sketch comedy group behind World Peace, and by members of the group itself.

Indeed, the relationship between the MDE and its community is a major reason for the cancellation campaign. Sam Hyde, MDE&039;s most prominent member, is something of an icon on the alt-right websites where the show&039;s fans congregate. (He moderates a subreddit devoted to the group.) In these forums, thousands of fans gather to decode World Peace&039;s complex, if winking, symbology, which many devotees are convinced expresses an anti-progressive, pro-white ideology. It is because of this alleged dog-whistling — as well as what they claim are harassment campaigns from Hyde and his followers online — that the three sources say they and others want Lazzo to cancel the show.

According to one source with knowledge of the network&039;s operations, it&039;s likely that Lazzo is already aware of the show&039;s solicitations of the alt-right. The same source said that the Adult Swim standards department repeatedly found coded racist messages in the show, including swastikas, which were removed ahead of broadcast. None of this was enough, according to one of the sources, to convince Lazzo not to air the show.

“Lazzo makes every decision there. A lot of people at Adult Swim have been on him trying to get it not renewed,” said the source. “I know at least one person who is very high up there who was furious about it before it came out.”

Indeed, anger about the show, boiling over now, dates back at least to May, when Adult Swim announced during its annual presentation to advertisers that the show would be part of the network&039;s fall schedule. At a company party afterwards, unhappy conversations predominated.

“People with shows were aware of it and angry about it,” one of the sources told BuzzFeed News.

Now a few of them are going public.

On Monday, the actor and comedian Brett Gelman — who has appeared on several Adult Swim programs including “Brett Gelman&039;s Dinner in America” — announced over Twitter that he was severing ties with Adult Swim over World Peace and Lazzo&039;s defense on Reddit of the network&039;s lack of shows with female creators.

“The show is an instrument of hate,” Gelman told BuzzFeed News.

And in a since deleted tweet, actress Zandy Hartig of the network&039;s long-running Children&039;s Hospital implored Adult Swim to “please get rid of MDE and Sam Hyde. He&039;s an embarrassment for you and for me as someone who was very grateful to you.”

Hartig and Gelman have now joined Tim Heidecker, who rose to fame on the Adult Swim show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job&#033; as objects of scorn on the MDE internet. Heidecker, who has publicly ridiculed the alt-right, posted on Facebook yesterday that “I love and respect my friend Brett Gelman and I support his decision fully.”

Reached for comment, Adult Swim referred BuzzFeed News to a statement the network gave about World Peace in August:

Adult Swim’s reputation and success with its audience has always been based on strong and unique comedic voices. Million Dollar Extreme’s comedy is known for being provocative with commentary on societal tropes, and though not a show for everyone, the company serves a multitude of audiences and supports the mission that is specific to Adult Swim and its fans.

On Reddit, a poster who identified herself as Adult Swim senior director of programming Kim Manning described the show as “a source of HOT, HOT debate around the office…it has been for a long time…If you watch the show we produced, it&039;s not an alt-right speak piece…We argue about it a lot around the office. That&039;s all I can really say.”

Sam Hyde did not respond to a request for comment, but earlier today, in a series of tweets, he asked his fans not to harass Adult Swim employees:

Ultimately, whether the show comes back for another season is up to Lazzo, who sources say enjoys causing a stir. “I don’t think he&039;s down with the alt right,” said one source. “I think he&039;s a left-leaning guy. But when he sees someone pushing buttons — he’s very anti establishment — his instinct is that he’s doing something right.”

Quelle: <a href="Adult Swim Talent Want The Network To Cancel Its Alt-Right Comedy Show“>BuzzFeed

Lyft Kills The Pink Mustache And Launches National Ad Campaign Against Uber

Lyft

In its latest effort to gain more riders, Lyft, the number two ride-hail app behind Uber in the US, is replacing its signature hot-pink car mustache with a dashboard-mounted, cylinder-shaped device, called “Amp” that features colored LED lights to signal a car’s arrival. It will also begin running a national ad campaign against Uber.

Lyft, which once adorned the front bumpers of its vehicles with furry pink mustaches, abandoned them in favor of a illuminated LED “glowstache” last year. Now, in what executives call an effort to modernize the four year-old brand, Lyft will ship drivers a new device that it has spent more than a year developing. Lights on the Amp device will sync with its rider and driver apps. When a driver approaches the passenger, the passenger’s phone will light up in the same color as the driver’s LED light device, which will sit on the dashboard. The company would not say how much it cost to manufacture the devices, which it will provide free of charge to drivers.

Stephen Lam / Reuters

Lyft markets itself as a friendlier ridehail company and its signature pink mustaches were part of that branding. Lyft’s head of ride experience, Ethan Eyler, told BuzzFeed News that company executives began thinking about dumping the mustaches over a year ago. Eyler, who made mustaches for vehicles at his own company Carstache (which still exists) before joining Lyft, then began working on the glowing Amp device. The Amp also displays messages on its backside so passengers in the car can read a personalized “hello” greeting. Tali Rapaport, Lyft’s vice president of product, said Lyft could later program the device’s software with additional functionality, but would not say what those other functionalities might include, beyond other messages such as “Go Giants&#033;” if the San Francisco baseball team were scheduled to play a game, for example.

Since 2014, Lyft has made gains in 19 of the top 20 cities in which it competes with Uber, according to the research firm 7Park Data. Still, Lyft only has about 16% market share compared to Uber’s 84% as of August 2016, according to the firm, which also said “Uber’s US lead is simply too great to overcome and that Lyft has lost the US market.” Lyft was reportedly seeking a buyer this summer but didn’t receive any satisfying offers. John Zimmer, a Lyft cofounder, denied that the company was for sale at a Wall Street Journal conference in October.

Lyft’s investment into the new connected device is intended to make pickups just a few seconds faster, Rapaport said, if people can recognize their vehicles based on the color of the device that glows on the dashboard.

“Every second is a win. It’s a win for the driver because they’re able to make money faster. It’s a win for the passenger because it saves a second off their timing getting to their destination,” Rapaport said. “And we know that across the street at night, or in a crowded area, there’s a lot of, in the industry today, room for improvement in terms of passengers actually finding their cars.”

In the long-run, color-coding cars could help passengers figure out which self-driving Lyft car to enter after drivers are out of the picture – but that time is still years away.

Lyft is rolling out an ad campaign alongside its brand refresh. Airing nationally through the end of 2016, it targets 18-35-year-old demographic. Each ad depicts a group of men gathered around a conference table watching Lyft drivers and riders on a projector screen. The room is black, gray and white, and features a white logo that says “RIDE CORP” in font that recalls Uber’s brand. In the ad spots, the men plot ways to outdo Lyft. Lyft also pokes at the Uber-like company for not allowing riders to tip passengers in the app.

Oddly, though, the ads point out that Lyft conducts background checks of drivers via a third party, as if to draw a contrast with the other company in the ad. Uber, however, also conducts background checks using a third party company, and neither ride-hail company fingerprints its drivers.

Lyft said the ads will be aired nationally on television and shared online, and are intended to draw more riders into trying the app. What’s unclear, though, is whether people who aren’t already familiar with ridehail will understand the commercials at all, given that they compare Lyft to another ridehail company but don’t actually explain the concept of calling for a ride using an app on your phone. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in late 2015 found that only 15% of Americans have used ridehailing apps.

Quelle: <a href="Lyft Kills The Pink Mustache And Launches National Ad Campaign Against Uber“>BuzzFeed

The New MacBook Pro: A Perfectly Fine Laptop For No One In Particular

Apple&#8217;s new top-of-the-line laptop is impressively lightweight, but it may not be the home run longtime MacBook Pro users were hoping for.

BuzzFeed News; Apple

The all-new MacBook Pro is the laptop that loyal MacBook Pro users have been waiting for since 2012. But it might not be the one they were expecting.

Apple’s new laptop, which starts shipping in mid-December, is lighter and thinner than its predecessor. There’s a model with a tiny touchscreen called the Touch Bar, and a 13-inch model without, aimed at replacing the MacBook Air.

When the fourth-generation Pro offering was announced in October, the first major redesign for the premium laptop line in four years, the Maclash was very strong.

Gone is the strip of physical function keys, MagSafe charger, SD card reader, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, and USB ports. It&#039;s all been replaced with multiple USB-C ports and a headphone jack (OMG&#033;&033;), which is the only legacy input that remains.

Apple has removed the ports that some thought made the MacBook deserving of its Pro moniker.

“I’m out of apologia juice for defending Apple,” tweeted David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails web development framework. “Those complaining about Apple’s current Mac lineup are not haters, they’re lovers. They’ve spent 10+ years and 5+ figures on Macs,” tweeted @lapcatsoftware, a self-described longtime Mac developer.

Meanwhile, some Mac users complained that the the new MacBook Pro appears to be underpowered for its price. The machine runs on last year’s Intel Skylake chip, and not the more recent, slightly more powerful Kaby Lake (which the chipmaker claims is about 12% faster in raw performance).

So, were the complaints warranted?

In my week and a half-ish with the new MacBook Pros, I found the laptops to be impressively fast and lightweight, but perhaps not quite the home run for which diehard MacBook Pro users had hoped. I tried both Touch Bar and non-Touch Bar models. The 13-inch non-Touch Bar laptop is clearly a win for those looking to upgrade aging Airs, as it’s lighter, thinner, and more powerful than the Air line.
But it’s not clear who exactly the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is for — other than early adopters who won’t mind toting around a handful of dongles in order to push USB-C, the port of the future, forward.

The MacBook Pro’s marquee feature is the Touch Bar, a new Retina, multi-touch screen that displays a set of additional controls that change according to what apps you have open.

The Touch Bar is so slick and smooth, it feels frictionless. It’s a virtualization of the keys you’d typically find at the top of the keyboard, with some more bells and whistles.

The whole gang’s still there: the ESC key, music controls, volume control, the Launchpad shortcut that I’ve literally NEVER seen anyone use, a dedicated Siri button, etc. Touch Bar can be customized in a number of ways with actions like Screenshot and Show Desktop (my favorite *hide everything* trick for when people creep up from behind).

As one might expect at this early stage, the only apps with Touch Bar support right now are Apple-designed ones like Photos and Mail, and some applications make better use of Touch Bar than others.

My favorite is viewing PDFs in Preview, which you can quickly highlight with a single tap. The bar also allows you to stay in full screen longer in the Photos app by placing a menu of touch-based editing tools right at your fingertips. In Final Cut Pro, you can precisely trim clips with your finger, which feels more ergonomic than using your trackpad. In QuickTime, being able to scrub videos backwards and forwards with precision is pretty sweet, too.

Finger input feels easier, faster, and more precise than clicking and dragging on a trackpad. Another neat feature is that adjusting volume and brightness only requires a single swipe: Instead of multiple key taps, you can press and hold the volume icon and then move your finger back in forth to adjust.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Other Touch Bar functions, like tab preview in Safari, seem more forced.

As you can see here, Touch Bar&039;s Safari tab previews are insanely small and difficult to read; It’s hard to imagine anyone would select a tab using the Touch Bar instead of the control + tab shortcut. That said, it is fun to swipe through all 123,801,293 of your open tabs.

Another is the emoji bar in Messages, which, at first, seemed great for quickly selecting frequently used emoji. However, to find something specific, you have to scroll and scroll and scroll, which seems silly when there’s already a great keyboard MacOS shortcut for it (control + command + spacebar = emoji heaven).

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

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View Entire List ›

Quelle: <a href="The New MacBook Pro: A Perfectly Fine Laptop For No One In Particular“>BuzzFeed

Read Tim Cook's Email To Apple Employees After Donald Trump's Election

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Apple CEO Tim Cook broadcast an all-hands memo to U.S. Apple employees Wednesday evening calling for unity amid the uncertainty inspired by Donald Trump&#039;s upset presidential win.

In the memo, obtained by BuzzFeed News, Cook — in a nod to one of the most divisive presidential races in American history — tells Apple employees that “the only way to move forward is to move forward together.” And he reasserts Apple&039;s commitment to social progress and equality.

Cook does not mention Trump — who has publicly threatened Apple over the course of the past year — by name. Nor does he write that Trump&039;s behavior during his presidential campaign was antithetical to Apple&039;s position on diversity and equality. Instead, he simply says: “Our company is open to all, and we celebrate the diversity of our team here in the United States and around the world — regardless of what they look like, where they come from, how they worship or who they love.”

You can read Tim Cook&039;s full memo below.

Team,

I’ve heard from many of you today about the presidential election. In a political contest where the candidates were so different and each received a similar number of popular votes, it’s inevitable that the aftermath leaves many of you with strong feelings.

We have a very diverse team of employees, including supporters of each of the candidates. Regardless of which candidate each of us supported as individuals, the only way to move forward is to move forward together. I recall something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said 50 years ago: “If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” This advice is timeless, and a reminder that we only do great work and improve the world by moving forward.

While there is discussion today about uncertainties ahead, you can be confident that Apple’s North Star hasn’t changed. Our products connect people everywhere, and they provide the tools for our customers to do great things to improve their lives and the world at large. Our company is open to all, and we celebrate the diversity of our team here in the United States and around the world — regardless of what they look like, where they come from, how they worship or who they love.

I’ve always looked at Apple as one big family and I encourage you to reach out to your co-workers if they are feeling anxious.

Let’s move forward — together&#033;

Best,

Tim

Quelle: <a href="Read Tim Cook&039;s Email To Apple Employees After Donald Trump&039;s Election“>BuzzFeed