Technology

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Waze helps beat you beat traffic and annoy residents

Ms. Menard’s suburban Los Angeles street of ranch houses, Cody Road, has turned into a thoroughfare with enough gridlock to make Times Square at rush hour feel tranquil. On early mornings when headlights are still needed, it resembles one long funeral procession.

The culprit: Waze, the popular app owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google that provides alternate routes to busy boulevards and packed freeways. Launched in 2007, Waze has 50 million users world-wide and about two million in Los Angeles, its biggest U.S. market.

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Media Trafficking in Cuba

Smuggled hard drives. Satellite dishes hidden in fake rooftop water tanks. Market-driven distribution methods. A 26-year-old kingpin. It’s only a matter of time before this is the subject of a TV series – and distributed in the same way of course to complete the circle.

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Cuba: Internet delivered weekly, by hand.

The Paquete is an alternative to the web in a country where, according to some estimates, fewer than 5% of homes are connected.

It consists of a terabyte of data bringing together the latest music, Hollywood movies, TV series, mobile phone apps, magazines and even a classifieds section similar to Gumtree or Craigslist.

Every week, unidentified curators compile a selection of content and deliver it via a complex network of hundreds of distributors who, much like old-fashioned newspaper delivery boys, bring the Paquete to the door of its subscribers.

It’s all carried out outside any legal framework in Cuba – and with seemingly little regard for international copyright law.

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Cuba: No internet access? Create your own.

A few years ago, some computer gamers based in Havana strung a small web of ethernet cables from house to house so they could play video games together. The network continued to grow quietly, and today it’s called StreetNet: a bootleg internet for Havana with more than 10,000 users. It was an innovation forged by necessity in a country where only 5 percent of citizens have access to the uncensored internet.

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Emoji Deciders

“The Unicode Consortium” may sound like the dark cabal of villains in a James Bond movie. And though they aren’t plotting world domination in a volcano lair, they do hold a lot of power — over your text messages.

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The Space Wars heat up

A US space expert, Brian Weeden, tracked the Luch satellite and said it moved to a position in June where there were no other Russian satellites, but which put it “right in between two operational Intelsat satellites… where it remained until mid-September”.

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Air Force One is old.

​No, “Air Force One” is not actually a plane, but rather the callsign assigned to the plane the President of the United States is currently on. But the two planes that don the moniker most frequently are ancient, and while replacements are on the way, they won’t arrive for a while.

According to The New York Times, the Department of Defense is currently trying to button up a contract for the next iteration of Air Force One mainstays. The current pair—first flown in 1987—are modified Boeing 747-200Bs, a model that was initially introduced way back in 1971 but hasn’t been in production since 1991. Replacement parts are no longer manufactured, leaving the Air Force with the trouble of having them custom made.