SANDBOXES are useful things. Children can build castles in them. Dogs and cats can poop in them, and grown-ups can prevent techmaggedon with them. We're rather more onboard with the latter, so let's tell you about the new Windows Sandbox feature which is rolling out next year. It's designed to allow you to test executable files (.exe) before they are exposed to the main Windows operating system. This is a big deal because .exe files can pretty much do anything they like, and if they are launched with Administrator privileges they can be disastrous harbingers of doom for your machine and for every machine you come into contact with. Basically, think of it as a virtualised version of Windows, running on its own kernel, yet clocking in at a mere 100MB and isolated from the outside world. Because that's what it is. Once you're done testing, the entire sandbox is deleted without trace. It's pretty straightforward, but not out-of-the-box, so it's recommended for advanced and enterprise users only - it will involve turning on virtualisation in your machine's BIOS which will scare the bejesus out of a lot of people. For that reason, Windows 10 Home users won't be able to access the sandbox feature. Sandboxes will also be able to access GPU and graphics card capabilities to make them run a little more smoothly. If this sounds like something that would help you, and you meet the criteria (your machine needs to be 64-bit, have at least 4GB (8GB ideally) of RAM, 1GB of disk space (preferably SSD) and at least a dual-core processor (though 4 hyperthreaded is recommended), then you'll be able to test Windows Sandbox in Insider Build 18305. All being well it should be in the 19H1 update to the operating system which is due to launch in the Spring. Assuming they get the last one working first. And lest we forget, now we can all start using the Pirate Bay again because we'll be able to test for viruses! Hooray for progress! µ

A DEVASTATING REPORT from the New York Times suggests that Facebook has been playing fast and loose with its users' privacy, giving special access to more than 150 high-profile companies, including Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. The Times claims it has got hold of hundreds of pages of documents tracking the social network's partnerships and data-sharing practices, corroborated by interviews with "about 50 former employees of Facebook." The picture it paints is not an encouraging one for anybody hovering over the "delete account" button - especially as the report claims that the deals with Amazon and Apple are still live to this day. Amazon's access allegedly lets the company access user's names and contact information via their friends on Facebook. Microsoft had a similar deal for Bing, where it could "see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent." But it's Netflix and Spotify's arrangements that are the most shocking: the report claims that the companies had the "ability to read Facebook users' private messages." Netflix denied it ever accessed private conversations, but did launch a feature in 2014 allowing members to recommend shows to friends via Messenger. It was "never that popular, so we shut the feature down in 2015," the company said. Other companies were quick to deny they were aware of, or used the special access. Amazon told CNN that its partnership is purely to ensure a smooth Facebook experience on its products, such as the Fire Tablet, and it "uses the information in accordance with its own privacy policy." Microsoft echoed this, saying its Bing partnership ended in February 2017, and that "throughout our engagement with Facebook, we respected all user preferences." Apple and Spotify also claimed they weren't aware of the special access granted. Whether aware or not, The Times reasons that the documents "raise questions about whether Facebook ran afoul of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission [FTC] that barred the social network from sharing user data without explicit permission." Facebook denies this. Responding to the report, Steve Satterfield, Facebook's director of Privacy and Public Policy, argued that the FTC agreement "did not require the social network to secure users' consent before sharing data because Facebook considered the partners extensions of itself — service providers that allowed users to interact with their Facebook friends." He added that Facebook's partners "don't get to ignore people's privacy settings," but concluded that the company has "got work to do to regain people's trust" which is putting it mildly. In a typically bullish response on Facebook's own newsroom, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, the company's director of Developer Platforms and Programs was explicit: "To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people's permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC." He did, however, concede that partners shouldn't have had access to "instant personalisation" APIs after features were officially shut down. "We've taken a number of steps this year to limit developers' access to people's Facebook information, and as part of that ongoing effort, we're in the midst of reviewing all our APIs and the partners who can access them." µ

Food banks have become the subject of heated debate in the UK. For some they are an indictment of 'austerity Britain' and reflect an increase in the numbers living in extreme poverty, while others see them as little more than a 'free lunch for scroungers', but findings from a new study suggest that the reasons for people's use of them is often more nuanced than is presented by politicians and commentators. The study, published in the journal Voluntary Sector Review, which involved in-depth interviews with 25 food bank users in Bristol found that benefit penalties and precarious employment were both important factors in food bank uptake, but that use was very often more complicated than being an 'unmediated response to hunger'. All interviewees for the study reported significant financial hardship. Some were in low-paid employment but were facing short-term financial difficulties due to changing jobs, moving home, servicing debt or other unusual costs. More frequently, participants were benefit claimants whose income had been reduced by delays in processing new or revised claims. Sudden loss of income The researchers heard many reports of benefit penalties causing financial hardship, such as the under-occupancy penalty or 'bedroom tax', or cuts in Jobseeker's Allowance. Typically, a sudden loss of income, caused by benefit penalties or delays, job losses, or equally sudden unanticipated costs, often relating to housing or heating, created a short-term budgetary crisis, which had caused hardship. Although, all of the people interviewed faced financial hardship, their use of the food bank was not always caused by hunger or lack of food. Some people used the food bank to free up income that they would otherwise have needed to spend on food. Extracts from interviews on why some of the people interviewed used the food bank in Bristol suggested: I missed an interview by five minutes with the Jobseeker's Allowance people and they sanctioned me so I lost two weeks' money. This is why I'm here today. I was just five minutes late, and I phoned them up beforehand and told them as well, but they still didn't accept it. I wouldn't have any, [food] yeah. No, because I haven't got the money, you see. I've only just claimed it. It's not just filling up the holes in the cupboard. I really haven't got the food there. I know I couldn't really afford to get a car, but it's a catch-22 thing really. I need a car to get a job, because I can't really do a lot of work without a car, but then I can't really afford the car. ... Basically if I didn't have to do the car then I would have been all right. The head gasket. I would have been all right. Supportive volunteers Another reason for using the food banks was the supportive and non judgemental approach adopted by the volunteers who staff them. This contrasted with the way that many of the users said they had been treated by staff in the state benefits system. Welfare professionals must follow strict rules about who is entitled to receive what, and they also have to impose penalties on people. The research suggests the food banks have a more flexible set of rules, which means they can respond to people's needs promptly, with less bureaucracy or conditions: I was slightly nervous and a little bit embarrassed, but once I came down it disappeared. It was so nice when you walked in and wasn't what I was expecting. People didn't judge me. I felt like I was begging, and I shouldn't be begging, but when you come down here they're so friendly and they put you at ease. You understand that there are a lot more people out there, like myself, who struggle as well.' You get treated like a human being here. At the benefit place, they just look at you as though you're a name and number, and they look at you and think: "Well, you should work. You shouldn't be on benefits." This is better, voluntary style. It's a lot better, a lot more human, where before it's like more pen and paper, everything's got to be done by the book. You don't get nothing for nothing from them, but these places are a lot better. Lead author, Dr. David Wainwright from the University of Bath's Department for Health explained: "The public debate about food banks has become highly polarised and politicised. For some commentators, food banks serve no other purpose than an alarm signalling the hardship caused by austerity measures and benefit penalties—an emblem of 'Broken Britain' - for others, they signify the Big Society in action. Our findings suggest a more nuanced reality. "Certainly, participants involved in our study faced genuine hardship that was often exacerbated by an inflexible and unresponsive benefits regime. They benefited from and appreciated the greater flexibility and deprofessionalised support that food banks can offer. "Many of these benefits are only possible because food banks sit outside formal welfare structures. A key implication of our study is that food banks should maintain their independence from the state, in order to preserve the benefits of flexibility and informal relationships with users. Food banks can never replace statutory welfare benefits and services, but they provide a way of responding to the tension and their expansion perhaps should not be entirely viewed in negative terms." Having documented the experiences of food bank users, the researchers plan to return to the food banks to interview the volunteers who work at them. The aim is to explore why people volunteer, what they gain from their involvement and how they relate to the people who use the food banks.

A team of researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center has found some evidence that adds credence to the theory that the basic ingredients for life came to Earth from asteroids. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes the experiments they carried out, what they found, and why they believe their work offers evidence of life arriving from elsewhere. Despite a lot of effort, scientists still do not know how life started on planet Earth. They also do not know if it sprang out of existing ingredients or if those ingredients came from somewhere else, via asteroid or comet. There are two current leading theories. The first suggests that life began in a hot spring on land or in a deep-sea thermal vent, because the right mix of ingredients were there to allow it to happen. The other main theory suggests that the basic ingredients for life arrived on a comet or asteroid and things took off from there. In this new effort, the researchers have found some evidence that supports the latter theory. One of the main ingredients of life is sugar—it provides energy. One kind of sugar, 2-deoxyribose, is the sugar component in DNA. In their lab, the researchers created space-like conditions and found they were sufficient for spontaneously creating 2-deoxyribose. More specifically, they put a sample of an aluminum substrate in a freezer, cooling it down to near absolute zero. They then placed it in a vacuum chamber. That allowed for simulating conditions in deep space. Next, the team piped in a water and methanol gas mixture, similar to that found in the interstellar medium. To simulate radiation from stars, they bathed the sample in UV light. The researchers report that initially, ice built up on the sample, but it was melted by the UV light. The team found that a small amount of 2-deoxyribose had formed along with some other sugars. Intrigued by their findings, the researchers examined samples from several carbonaceous meteorites that have been found over the years and found evidence of alcohols and deoxysugar acids—not exactly 2-deoxyribose, but the researchers note that their sampling was small—it might be found on others.

On May 12, 2016, Samantha Broberg—a mother of two and stepmother to two more—boarded the Carnival Liberty in Galveston, Texas with two girlfriends. Here’s what her family has been able to glean about the 33-year-old’s roughly 12 hours onboard that ship, which has a capacity of over 4,000 passengers and crew, and boasts a rum bar, a tequila bar, and a sports bar, as well as a casino and a Mexican cantina. Broberg—who at 5’5,” weighed 120 lbs—was served 19 drinks, her husband alleges in an ongoing civil suit (pdf) he brought against Carnival. Just before 2am, after leaving a bar, she climbed onto a deck chair that was pushed up against a railing on the pool deck. She sat for a few brief moments on the more than 3.5-foot-high railing, with her back to the sea, according to Carnival’s trial brief (pdf). Then she fell backward into the Gulf of Mexico, a moment that was caught by the vessel’s thermal camera system. As the night gave way to the early morning, Broberg was simply gone—drifting, sinking, struggling, we’ll never know. Broberg’s friends woke up and reported her missing to cruise staff sometime between 9am, her husband alleges (pdf), and the “middle of the next day,” according to Carnival’s trial brief. (Carnival declined to comment on this case.) COURTESY/KARL BROBERG The late Samantha Broberg and her husband and children. Carnival staff searched the ship, but it wasn’t until 5pm on Friday, May 13—a full 15 hours after her fall—Broberg’s husband alleges, that Carnival summoned the US Coast Guard (USCG), which launched a search and rescue mission. Broberg was later declared missing and presumed dead. At the Coast Guard’s directive, the Liberty continued on its course. Of the millions of people like Samantha Broberg who step onto cruise ships each year, few are aware that their personal safety is in the hands of one of the world’s most globalized, legally complex, and opaque industries. While the vast majority will not meet tragic fates like Broberg’s, her story shows how the expectations passengers have about their rights and safety on board a cruise ship do not always match the reality. “The expectations passengers have about their rights and safety on board a cruise ship do not always match the reality.” Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships—and another 41 from large ferries—an average of about 1.5 people per month. The cruise industry says that accidental “falls” don’t happen when passengers are behaving responsibly. And online commenters on cruise forums generally dismiss those who go overboard as drunk, careless, or stupid, and see these events, while unfortunate, as no more than a Darwinian culling of the vacationing population. And yet, even though a relatively small number of people fall from cruise ships into the sea—and critics of the industry tend to focus more on environmental damage and norovirus outbreaks—man-overboard incidents remain a vexing problem. Why do people still die as a result of them, despite the fact that technology exists to detect falls? And, after a person is swallowed by the ocean, what power do their loved ones have to find out what happened, hold any guilty parties responsible, or demand reform? The answers to these questions reveal a cruise industry that is surprisingly unencumbered by the accountability and consumer protection we expect from other industries, combined with poor labor practices that advocates and workers say have driven some crew members to suicide. Most of the nearly 30 million passengers (pdf) who travel on a cruise each year, roughly a third of them American, are blissfully unaware of this reality. When “man overboard” incidents get tabloid headlines, they’re framed as macabre, bizarre, isolated occurrences—not a problem that an average cruiser needs to worry about. Looking for more in-depth coverage from Quartz? Become a member to read our premium content and get 40% off your subscription for a limited time! “Intentional or reckless” The cruise industry often claims that cruising at sea is safer than vacationing on land. “Last year, almost 27 (26.7) million people took a cruise holiday, and there were nine overboard incidents involving passengers. This equates to about one incident per seven million passengers,” the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), the industry’s trade organization and lobbying arm, told Quartz in an emailed statement. Thanks to minimum railing heights of one meter (39 inches) and other structural barriers, CLIA insists that man-overboard incidents (known in the industry as MOBs) are only “a result of an intentional or reckless act” and there are “no known cases of someone acting responsibly who has accidentally fallen over the railing of a cruise ship.” Indeed, man-overboard incidents don’t happen often enough to deter many passengers from taking a cruise vacation. And yes, it’s true that some incidents are intentional acts. Because there is no official agency or centralized system for tracking MOBs globally, the most comprehensive data available come from Ross Klein, an academic and author from Memorial University of Newfoundland who has been researching the cruise industry and tracking MOB incidents since 2000. His data—which are what tell us that 325 people have gone over the railings of cruise ships and ferries in the past 18 years—are largely based on local media reports and tips from onboard observers, both crew and passengers, as well as those incidents verified by the cruise lines and authorities. (Klein includes passenger ferries that contain overnight cabins and multi-day itineraries due to the similar dynamics at play onboard, including alcohol service and entertainment for passengers.) Klein has testified in front of the US Congress four times, and been an expert witness or contributed expert opinions in several court cases, including Broberg’s. Even CLIA, in its 2018 operational incident report—which is assembled by the cruise and maritime management firm GP Wild and tracks “significant cruise industry casualties identified from the public domain”—cites Klein’s data as a source. For the period of 2009 to 2017, that report found 164 MOBs, an average of 18 incidents per year (or, put another way, one to two per month, assuming equal distribution). This figure is not directly comparable to—though also not wildly different from—Klein’s, due to a differing time window, and the fact that GP Wild does not include ferries, nor uncorroborated reports that result from direct tips to Klein. When the cruise industry says man-overboard incidents are all “intentional or reckless,” the suggestion is that nothing more can really be done to prevent these tragedies. It would be impossible to predict a person committing suicide, or a passenger choosing to climb on a railing, so how can the ship owners be blamed when a person does just that? As Carnival argued in its trial brief in the Broberg case, it was her “own negligence—in becoming intoxicated, climbing up on and sitting on a deck railing, or both—[that] was the cause of her injury.” [The cruise industry’s] stance seems to suggest that it’s normal to only safeguard people who are “acting responsibly.” But this stance seems to suggest that it’s normal to only safeguard people who are “acting responsibly.” In fact, it’s not hard to come up with examples from modern life (not to mention case law) where safety precautions are meant to protect even those who act foolishly and against their own self interest. From anti-hazing laws in fraternities, suicide barriers on bridges and other tall structures, and intoxication laws for those operating heavy machinery—authorities do all sorts of things on land to prevent self-inflicted harm or death, and to hold companies and entities responsible if they fail to take measures that could prevent such harm from happening. Furthermore, laws concerning the service or sale of alcohol on land in the US and other countries can hold a business or person liable for serving a visibly intoxicated person alcohol, if that person goes on to cause the injury or death of a third party. In the global cruise industry, one or two people are statistically likely to fall overboard from a cruise ship each month, and somewhere between 17% and 25% are rescued (according to Klein’s data and GP Wild’s, respectively). The percentage rescued might be significantly higher, advocates say, if cruise ships were to adopt a relatively new technology that would set off an immediate automated alert any time a person goes overboard. Of course, such alerts—and the likely false positives that would crop up in any such automated system—would also force ships to launch more search-and-rescue missions, potentially disrupting itineraries for thousands of paying passengers, and causing cascading expenses and hassles for cruise companies. That a cruise passenger’s statistical likelihood of dying as a result of an MOB is very low cannot be denied. But Michael Lloyd—a former sea captain with 50 years at sea, and now a marine-safety consultant, victims’ advocate, and cruise industry critic—posited a useful thought experiment. He asked me, as a journalist covering the travel industry, to imagine what would happen if, every month, one to two people died on an airplane for a predictable operational reason, such as sustaining a traumatic head injury during turbulence due to failure to wear a seatbelt. It’s a scenario I find impossible to imagine, after years of flight-safety demonstrations, seatbelt checks, and back-of-the-seat cards. “The airlines have got it absolutely right,” Lloyd says. “There is a clear chain of command that passengers follow, so safety measures are obeyed. Aircraft rarely ditch into the water and yet, the planes still carry life jackets and they still demonstrate them every time you get on a plane. That’s down to a difference in attitude towards safety and shows just how far the marine industry is still behind.” There’s also the fact that, as journalist and former airline pilot William Langewiesche hauntingly wrote in Vanity Fair of the sinking of a US-flagged cargo ship in 2015, “disasters at sea do not get the public attention that aviation accidents do, in part because the sea swallows the evidence.” EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK/EDDY LEMAISTRE The moment of impact Even though Broberg’s fall was captured on thermal camera, that camera footage was only viewed hours later, after her friends figured out she was missing. The system that captured her backwards topple did not alert the ship’s crew, or stop the ship to attempt to rescue her from the water. Had it done so, it might have made a difference. Any search-and-rescue mission will be reliant on an approximation of the victim’s location. But if someone falls overboard without being seen, as Broberg did, “there is little chance of survival,” according to captain Lloyd. If someone falls overboard without being seen, as Broberg did, “there is little chance of survival.” Indeed, though most cruise ships have video surveillance equipment installed, someone has to be monitoring those images at all times to know if a person has gone overboard—no easy feat on a mega-ship carrying thousands of people. A so-called “complete” MOB-detection system eliminates the need for a human to witness the incident in real time, either in person or on a CCTV screen. It does this by installing a network of sensors (including radar, infrared, and/or video) designed to detect when a body has fallen overboard. It then sends an automated alert to crew, who can immediately view roughly 10 seconds of footage from the triggered location on the ship to see if a search-and-rescue mission should be launched (or if it was a false alarm triggered by a seagull or wave). So why did the Carnival Liberty apparently have no such a system installed to detect Broberg’s fall? In its only comment for this story, Carnival told Quartz that “All of our ships have man overboard cameras and for several years now our company has been testing man overboard alarm systems. Historically these systems have been unreliable, generating a significant number of false alarms. The technology has been gradually improving and we continue to actively test it on our vessels.” Moreover, Carnival was not required to have a complete MOB-detection system installed. Section three of the Cruise Vessel Safety and Security Act (pdf)—a landmark piece of legislation passed by US Congress in 2010 to regulate the cruise industry—requires that cruise vessels which embark or disembark in US ports “shall integrate technology that can be used for capturing images of passengers or detecting passengers who have fallen overboard, to the extent that such technology is available.” Language in earlier versions of the bill did not allow cruise lines to choose between image capture or overboard detection technology. But thanks to wording change—one that, according to Klein, cruise industry lobbyists pressed for—vessels which only install video surveillance are not breaking the law. (CLIA did not respond to a request for comment on the question of lobbying for this change.) The US Coast Guard, which is responsible for policing cruise ships when they are in US waters, as well as enforcing the CVSSA, confirmed this reading of the law. It’s worth noting, as some critics have, that several US Coast Guard officials have gone on to work in high-ranking CLIA posts after retirement. CLIA did not respond for comment on this matter. On the whole, the cruise industry has argued that the complete MOB technology is not yet advanced enough to be used. That said, cruise lines remain vague when it comes the status of MOB-detection technology on their ships. While some cruise lines have mentioned installations of this technology in media reports, an evidence submission to the Coast Guard, and a press release, those lines declined to discuss specifics when asked by Quartz. In the reporting of this story, nearly every cruise line contacted—other than Royal Caribbean, the CEO of which I interviewed aboard the Azamara Pursuit on Aug. 29–declined to comment on the status of MOB technology on its own lines, instead preferring CLIA to speak for them. CLIA says that despite testing, “few systems have shown practical application on a cruise ship sailing the high seas.” Meanwhile, Richard Fain, the CEO of Royal Caribbean, says his “understanding is the tech is not yet at a viable stage. Like many areas of technology, the promise is often better than the actuality today … You do need technology to work. And actually work in real life, not in a laboratory and not in a sales brochure.” In 2016, after the US Coast Guard asked for a status update on MOB-detection technology, three commercial providers submitted evidence detailing the efficacy of their systems. The best-known of these systems is the MARSS MOBtronic, which has been commercially available since 2012 and is currently in use on one cruise ship and in development on another (MARSS did not reveal which cruise lines use its technology). It’s also used on mega yachts and commercial ships, according to the company, and soon will be deployed on New Zealand’s navy ships. Using radars and infrared cameras, the company says its system has been shown two false positives per week on average (which it notes is low compared to other systems) and has been tested extensively in all maritime conditions. MARSS senior vice president of research Alberto Baldacci told Quartz that all installations of the system “have been successful and the clients have shown high appreciation for our technology,” though he notes no real-life MOB incidents have yet occurred on vessels using the system. REUTERS/CARLOS BARRIA For cruise industry critics who want to see these systems installed across the entire industry, there is a glimmer of hope. The International Organization of Standardization (ISO) has been working with stakeholders in the industry—including Klein, cruise safety advocates, and CLIA—to establish a non-binding global standard for how these systems should work and be installed. The finalized standard is due in 2019 and, while it will remain entirely voluntary even once finalized, it will in theory provide best practices for companies looking to install this tech. The US Coast Guard told Quartz that “once the final ISO standard is promulgated, the Coast Guard will use that standard as the basis to draft enforceable regulations” in the US. Meanwhile, MARSS says its system is already compliant with a draft version of the standard—and falls well under the ISO’s maximum false positive rate of one per day on average—based on independent testing done by its clients. Rob Griffiths, vice president of maritime policy for CLIA, told Quartz that before this standard is finalized, false positives arising in real maritime conditions remain an issue. “CLIA member lines continue to conduct pilot programs with this novel technology and while some of these systems do show early promise, without an international standard and the associated testing protocols, it’s difficult to fully and adequately evaluate the systems,” Griffiths said. According to various manufacturers, the cost of such a system is between $300,000 and $500,000 per vessel—a significant expense, but less prohibitive when you consider that a 1,000-foot-plus mega-ship costs upwards of $1 billion (paywall) to build. Installing a system fleet-wide would be an expense in the tens of millions for the large companies. But in the absence of enforced regulation, Klein says, “why spend money they don’t have to?” Of course, automatic MOB technology could also trigger other costs for cruise companies. It’s easy to see how automated alarms—recording real MOBs and occasional false positives—could result in significant disruption to ship itineraries and tours, and routing and port delays, as well as missed flights and other inconveniences for passengers upon their return to land. (While cruise ships do sometimes participate in search and rescue missions, whether or not to so is often a calculation based on how far they’ve traveled since the incident, as well as guidance from authorities.) The financial consequences to cruise lines of this happening once or twice a month—and more, perhaps, with false positives—could certainly add up. Robert Gardana, the lawyer for Broberg’s husband—who spoke to Quartz broadly about MOB technology, but not the specifics of the case he is trying—argues that cruise ships shouldn’t wait until a law and corresponding regulation from the Coast Guard force them to implement what he says is clearly life-saving technology; the companies should install it voluntarily, or do it in response to litigation. There is some precedent for this happening in other industries, such as chainsaw manufacturers, Gardana points out: “Over the years, certain protections like chain-breaks have been added to chainsaws to diminish that potential risk of human-tissue injuries—which is something the chainsaw industry did on its own; it wasn’t forced to by way of regulation.” There’s a reason they’re called “booze cruises” James Walker is a Miami-based maritime lawyer who represented the cruise lines as a defense attorney until 1997, when he had what he calls a crisis of conscience and started representing crew, passengers, and other people affected by cruise-ship crimes and accidents. He’s also the author of a widely read blog where he closely tracks and critiques the industry. Walker says that in all the conversation about preventing MOB incidences, there is an unwillingness from the cruise lines to acknowledge their role in one obvious cause: “The fact that [people have] gone overboard because they are intoxicated from consuming the cruise line’s alcohol.” It’s hard to say how many MOB incidents involve alcohol. There is no centralized reporting mechanism and cruise lines are not required to divulge this information to anyone. Of course, there is also rarely a body to recover, autopsy, and determine what an individual’s blood alcohol level was when they fell, jumped, or were pushed. Klein’s data only includes a relatively small number where alcohol was definitively confirmed as a cause. But he emphasizes that those are only cases where media could confirm intoxication prior to the incident. Given that media reports are often based on information provided by the cruise lines, he notes that this number likely under-represents the role of alcohol. Broberg’s husband’s complaint alleges that “there is a direct correlation between Carnival’s over-service of alcohol and falling overboard, particularly in the early morning hours, after the cruise ship’s casino and other bars close.” It also charges that Carnival failed to follow its own procedures when it comes to an already-intoxicated passenger, which include refusing further service and escorting them back to their stateroom with an hour of supervision. Carnival argues in its trial brief that Broberg’s status as a “functional alcoholic” who had a “drinking problem, but could maintain the appearance of sobriety” meant her highly intoxicated state was concealed from crew members, so they couldn’t follow the protocol they are trained to carry out per Carnival’s Responsible Alcohol Service Manual. “The destination didn’t much matter, as long as the ship carried French champagne, Scotch whiskey, and Jamaican rum.” It’s no accident that drinking is so central to life on board a cruise ship. Cruises have their roots in the “booze cruises” of the Prohibition era, according to Kristoffer Garin’s book about the history of the American cruise industry, Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: “The destination didn’t much matter, as long as the ship carried French champagne, Scotch whiskey, and Jamaican rum.” From a business perspective, there’s also little incentive for the cruising companies to curb alcoholic indulgence. Each of the big three lines—Carnival Corporation & plc, Royal Caribbean Cruise Ltd, and Norwegian Cruise Lines—made between 26% and 30% of its 2017 revenue on drinks and extras sold onboard, according to their annual reports. One can surmise that is at least part of the reason guests are rarely allowed to bring their own booze—and why cruise enthusiasts spend so much time online dissecting the best drink packages, including popular all-you-can-drink options. But the fact that man-overboard incidents happen an average of 18 times per year on cruise ships—and that some of them involve alcohol, as Broberg’s case does—points to a predictable risk on seafaring vessels that are designed to provide a booze-soaked good time. “You’ve got passengers coming on a cruise ship…. they’re in an unfamiliar environment, they don’t know the rules, they don’t know safety, they’re naïve,” Klein says. “And then the first thing you do is they start plying you with alcohol. There’s no warnings around the railing. There is no alert to people about watching their alcohol consumption because it makes you vulnerable to crime.” The main purpose of these ships is clear: “Choose fun” is Carnival’s slogan. Norwegian’s is “Feel free.” That’s all well and good, but captain Lloyd says the cruise industry’s approach goes against centuries of maritime tradition, in which safety is the main priority, and the operational crew of the ship—not the entertainment and hotel side—is seen as the ultimate authority. He says the cruise industry’s emphasis on “fun” necessarily makes providing top customer service, and a good time for vacationers, its main priorities. “The rise of the modern ‘hotel’ cruise ships is something fundamentally different than what we had seen at sea before,” Lloyd says. “It was as if the ships were becoming part of Las Vegas rather than part of the sea. We saw this shift, and then the operational officers and crew of the ship [became] subservient to the hotel staff, who were seen as the money-makers.” Norwegian declined to reply to questions sent in regards to this story. Carnival did not directly respond to questions about the role of alcohol in MOB incidents. CLIA said ”however uncommon, CLIA cruise lines take seriously the possibility of guests engaging in unauthorized risky activity that could lead to them going overboard,” and is testing systems to detect when that’s happening, as well as enhancing crew training. Royal Caribbean told Quartz that the cruise line’s “staff is trained in ‘safe serve’ practices and we have strict guest conduct policies to discourage overconsumption.” It added: “we see no evidence that these incidents are more prevalent than they are in the general population.” Looking for help in a company town Let’s say you’re on a mega cruise ship, one designed to hold 5,000 or 6,000 passengers—plus around 1,000 to 2,000 crew. Then, your travel companion goes missing. What do you do? Of course, you turn to the ship’s security team. Which is to say: You turn to a multinational company that is rightly concerned about maintaining its reputation for offering fun, safe vacations for families. When you step onto a cruise ship, you arrive in a floating city of a few hundred to a few thousand souls that has no independent law enforcement on board. Once you set sail and pass into international waters, your rights are different from where you live, where you booked the trip, and where the brand you bought your ticket from is headquartered. In the event of any wrongdoing, crime, or foul play on board, passengers’ first points of contact are employees of the cruise line. In other words: You are looking for help in what is essentially a company town. With MOBs or serious crimes, of course law enforcement authorities are supposed to be alerted. But once the cruise line escalates the matter, who is in charge? Often, it’s the legal and justice system of a country most of the travelers have never set foot in. Thanks to several centuries of maritime law culminating in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which was signed in 1982 and ratified by 167 states, jurisdiction in international waters—also called “the high seas”—broadly lies with the flag state, or the nation where the ship is registered. Questions of labor, environment, and safety are also determined by the flag state. Should an incident happen while a vessel is sitting in a port, jurisdiction would lie with the port state, and cruise lines often report incidents that occur on the high seas to law enforcement in their next port of call, as well as to their ship’s flag state. REUTERS/JON NAZCA Together, Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian comprise nearly 80% of the cruise industry (paywall). And for the millions of travelers who climb aboard one of the big three cruise lines each year, there is a fair likelihood that the Bahamas, Panama, Bermuda, or Malta are in charge of their fate on the high seas. According to a database compiled by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2016, 70% of cruise ships are registered in these nations, commonly called “open registries” or “flags of convenience,” as ship owners needn’t have any meaningful tie to the nation to flag their ship there. The flag states also benefit from this arrangement, in the form of registration fees and tonnage tax from cruise companies who flag their ships there. US maritime laws and vessel requirements are much more stringent than those of, say, Bermuda or Panama—it’s no coincidence that only one large passenger cruise ship, Norwegian’s Pride of America, is currently registered in the US. This is despite the fact that Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, and Carnival all have their corporate headquarters in Miami, Florida, giving the impression that they are tried-and-true American brands. Presumably for tax purposes, these lines are incorporated in Liberia, Bermuda, and Panama respectively. The International Maritime Organization (IMO)—a specialized agency of the UN—develops the standards and regulations that are expected of flag states who have signed onto UNCLOS, as well as other maritime safety treaties. CLIA frequently notes, as it did to Quartz, that it experiences “robust enforcement” from the IMO. But there is actually no entity which polices whether or not flag states enforce these IMO regulations on the vessels they register. In other words, the IMO can’t prevent a flag state from continuing to register ships, even if that state is failing to uphold the standards and regulations that the IMO establishes. This leads to a situation where, in terms of cruise-ship safety and enforcement, “you’re only as strong as your flag state.” This leads to a situation where, in terms of cruise-ship safety and enforcement, “you’re only as strong as your flag state,” says Dr. Richard Caddell, director of the maritime law program at Cardiff University. “I think the flag of convenience states have improved considerably in many respects, but a high proportion of maritime casualties, especially involving massive pollution incidents, are still often registered to a flag of convenience.” CLIA, Norwegian, and Carnival did not respond to questions about flag of convenience registries. Royal Caribbean told Quartz that ”the cruise industry is heavily regulated in numerous jurisdictions” and that it works “closely with regulatory authorities to improve safety laws, and regularly participate in discussions and studies to advance industry best practices.” It added that it is compliant with all CVSSA requirements, regardless of where a vessel sails, and that its ships are regularly inspected by flag and port state authorities. A floating city with no police Cruise ships position themselves as carefree bastions of fun, with cocktails at every turn. Put another way, though, a cruise ship is a “floating city with no police,” which is how one advocate for cruise-ship safety, Kendall Carver, describes them. “If you had a town with 4,000 people, orientated around bars and drinking, without any presence of law enforcement, would you expect more things to go wrong than in the next town over?” In 2006, Carver founded the International Cruise Victims Association (ICV). For him, the cause is personal: In 2004, Carver’s 40-year-old daughter Merrian went missing from the Celebrity Cruises ship Mercury (owned by Royal Caribbean) while on a cruise to Alaska. Though a crew member reported her missing while the cruise was underway, Carver alleges his daughter’s disappearance was not reported to the FBI or to her family, who didn’t even know she had booked a cruise. According to Carver, when police finally traced Merrian Carver’s whereabouts to the ship via a credit-card receipt, it took Royal Caribbean three days to confirm she had even been on the ship. By the time police had confirmation, 28 days had passed since she was last seen. And nearly 15 years later, after subpoenas, private investigators, and much anguish, her family still has has no idea what happened to her. Royal Caribbean told Quartz that, in reference to the Carver case, “the FBI concluded there was no evidence of foul play in the disappearance and several court rulings dismissed any claims against the company. Our guests’ safety and security has always, and continues to be, our first priority.” Carver, who received the Ronald Wilson Reagan Policy Award from the US Justice Department in 2017 for his advocacy work, decided to press for change in the industry at large. ”If someone has told me when we started off what was involved with this subject,” Carver told me in August, “I wouldn’t have believed them.” REUTERS/JUAN MEDINA It’s true that millions of people go on cruise ships each year, so it’s statistically probable that some things will go wrong on board. Cases like Carver’s and other high-profile disappearances, have obsessed a corner of the internet and media for years. Did they jump? Were they pushed? Did they just walk off the ship? Did they fall victim to human trafficking? “If someone has told me when we started off what was involved with this subject, I wouldn’t have believed them.” Despite the mystery and morbid intrigue, CLIA often points to a 2017 analysis (pdf) carried out for the industry group, which found that reports of three crime categories—homicide, sexual assault/forcible rape, and aggravated assault—are much lower on cruise ships than on land. It’s important to note that the crime data analyzed only included statistics for crimes committed on ships that are required to report per the US’s CVSSA, the same piece of legislation that governs MOB technology. Among other provisions, the law requires that cruise lines report any of nine crimes—homicide, suspicious death, a missing US national, kidnapping, and assault with serious bodily injury among them—as soon as possible to the FBI when an American citizen is involved, regardless of where the crime occurred. (Thanks to a wording loophole in the CVSSA, another piece of legislation had to be passed in 2014—tacked onto a Coast Guard funding bill—to make sure that reporting meaningfully happened.) But cruise lines are not required to report crime and incident data for all passengers, crew, and across all lines, jurisdictions, and territories to any one authority or body. Instead, incidents are reported piecemeal to individual flag states and port states where required. The same is true of the maritime shipping industry at large, which is why it’s hard to find reliable accounting of MOBs in other shipping sectors. CLIA, when asked if it would support a centralized reporting system, did not respond. CLIA notes that in addition to being compliant with IMO standards and the CVSSA’s requirements—the latter including providing information to guests about their rights onboard a foreign-flagged vessel, and having a crew member trained in crime prevention and evidence collection on board—a victim’s home country has “full authority to investigate” in the event of a crime. However, that still requires the crime be reported in a timely manner and that an initial investigation be carried out by cruise-line employees in a way that preserves any evidence for independent officials. It also requires that concurrent jurisdiction be negotiated by the victim’s home country with the flag state, as well as the port state where the ship next docked. And it’s not unheard of for all this to happen while the ship—and the floating crime scene on board—sticks to a tightly scheduled itinerary. CLIA, Royal Caribbean, and Carnival did not respond when asked how often cruise vessels divert their itineraries to accommodate flag or port state investigations. Because of the complexity, some of these mysteries remain unsolved, and some victim’s families say the cruise lines aren’t doing enough to find answers—or even that they jump to conclusions that fly in the face of evidence. Among the aggrieved is the family of Nathan Skokan, aged 22 at the time of his death. In public announcements onboard the Independence of the Seas following Skokan’s MOB—as well as in a press release and media statements made immediately after—Royal Caribbean said that Skokan had jumped overboard intentionally. His family disputes this. In a lawsuit against Royal Caribbean, in which a jury trial began on Dec. 10, Skokan’s parents alleged that in his last 12 hours onboard the ship (pdf), he was served six martinis, at least seven vodkas, two vodkas mixed with Red Bull, and one cognac. They also allege that Royal Caribbean had already been told by eyewitnesses that the fall was not intentional when it made the announcement, and that a crew member had seen Skokan extremely intoxicated just 20 minutes before his death. In their suit, the Skokan family argues that Royal Caribbean prematurely and inaccurately called their son’s MOB in December 2016 an intentional act, adding to their trauma and anguish. Paul Hoffman, the Skokan family’s lawyer, reached by Quartz, declined to comment on behalf of his clients due to the ongoing trial. Royal Caribbean also declined to comment on a case still before the court. The labor below Vacationers like Broberg and Skokan aren’t the only people who plunge overboard on cruise ships. According to CLIA’s operational incident report, between 2009 and 2017, there were 43 MOB crew fatalities. Between 1995 and the first half 2017, 23% of MOBs were crew, according to Ross Klein’s data (this percentage was prepared by Klein for a legal case, which is why the date range goes back to 1995). So far in 2018, he has counted seven crew MOBs, with one of those resulting in a rescue. UNCLOS’s flag-state structure not only determines passengers’ rights, but the labor conditions of those who work onboard. Jacqueline Smith is a maritime coordinator from the International Trade Federation (ITF), a group of trade unions representing transport workers, including cruise ship workers. She says “the ‘veil of secrecy’ and lack of legislation or the willingness from the flag state to enforce legislation make it easier for companies that register their vessels in FoC [flag of convenience] registers to exploit seafarers.” It’s standard practice for cruise ship employees to sign contracts that commit them to three, six, or nine months of working seven days a week. Employment contracts that force arbitration in the event of any injury, mishap, or wrongful death—thereby limiting the compensation they are entitled to—are also commonly used. CLIA and Carnival did not comment on any questions regarding labor practices on cruise ships. Royal Caribbean told Quartz that in addition to abiding by all applicable International Labour Organization (ILO) standards for seafarers and negotiating crew contracts through collective bargaining with international unions, “all of our shipboard employees are provided with free room and board during service onboard, mandatory rest hours, medical coverage, sick pay, and disability pay, compensation in the event of death in service, a retirement plan and many other benefits.” It added that all onboard standards are agreed with industry bodies including seafarers’ trade unions. A large majority of cruise ship employees is hired from the Philippines—which accounts for roughly a third of cruise ship labor—and other poor countries. But as Walker writes, “few Americans seem concerned with the working conditions on cruise ships faced by citizens of the greater world community.” Meanwhile, Americans, British, Australians, and other employees from wealthier nations tend to have customer-facing roles, such as on-board entertainers and events leaders, and work shorter hours than their below-deck colleagues (a pattern mirrored in the US restaurant industry). REUTERS/BOBBY YIP One longtime cruise ship worker from the Philippines, who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity, helps moderate a private Facebook group for Filipinos working or looking for work in the industry, with more than 110,000 members. He says while provisions like the ILO’s Maritime Labor Convention, which went into effect in 2013, have helped improve life onboard, there are still plenty of realities that crew often need help adjusting to when they sign up for a job on a ship. Long hours, working seven days per week, the stress of high performance, being away from family, managers who abuse their power (particularly with female crew), and working amidst constant motion are among the stresses he has heard workers complain of. While pre-ship medical evaluations to screen for mental health are standard, the cruise ship worker said, ”If you’re hit by depression and too much stress from [your] working environment, it can create emotional stress.” “If you’re hit by depression and too much stress from [your] working environment, it can create emotional stress.” Another former cruise ship employee from the Philippines, who says he completed seven cruise ship contracts in the galley and hotel side, said in a Facebook comment: “Working on a cruise ship, especially an American cruise ship is like a hell, especially in the galley…eight- to nine-month contracts no days off, man you need to be mentally tough or else you might end up in depression that could end up in disappointments and lead to suicide.” Reached via Facebook, he says he now works in a tanker ship, where he has found better conditions. It’s hard to know for sure how many crew MOBs are a result of intentional acts or suicide. And of course, enough people work on cruise ships that it’s statistically probable some of them might commit suicide even if they never stepped on board. But Walker argues that there is little consideration of the fact that these harsh labor conditions might be leading some to jump. For example, in 2017 a 24-year-old crew member from Mauritius who worked as a pool cleaner allegedly jumped off Royal Caribbean’s Vision of the Seas. Though the CCTV did not capture the moment he fell, the Bahamas Maritime Authority (BMA)—who, as the flag state’s naval authority, conducted the investigation (pdf)—alleges he jumped from a blind spot on deck four. The BMA also revealed that roughly seven hours passed from the time he jumped to the time he was reported missing by his supervisor. Another three hours elapsed before a search of the ship was conducted and the US Coast Guard notified. Though it reported the incident, Royal Caribbean said in the report that it did not know whether the Coast Guard conducted a search-and-rescue mission. In addition, the report suggests no medical records were available on board to determine if the crew member had underlying mental-health conditions. Royal Caribbean told Quartz it reported the incident to the proper authorities and does not comment on employee medical records. The Bahamas Maritime Authority’s only suggestion in its report was that “a review of possible impediments to all cameras should be made and rectified where found.” Walker says this is typical, noting that thorough investigations into MOBs that involve crew don’t happen often enough and that when they do, they rarely address the underlying issues of mental health that many crew members may be facing. And to that end, there have been numerous calls on popular crew center websites and petitions to put psychologists on board cruise ships to provide mental health support to crew. However, Royal Caribbean told Quartz that it does not agree with the claim that there is a lack of mental health support for crew, leading to suicides. “Mental health issues are difficult anywhere in society and we see no evidence that these tragedies are more prevalent than they are in the general population.” It added that medical care for crew includes referrals to specialists where required. CLIA and Carnival declined to comment. A way forward It bears repeating that not many people each year fall overboard on cruise ships. But some do, month after month. There was another incident just last week in which a 26-year-old man went overboard in the Florida Keys, one of at least three MOBs in the last month, including a 69-year-old Dutch woman discovered missing in Martinique and a 27-year-old British crew member lost in Mexican waters. In each of these cases, the person’s absence was only discovered several hours after they disappeared. What responsibility do corporations have in the process of optimizing their business models to become multibillion-dollar floating profit machines? The familiar pattern of circumstances that tends to surround these incidents begs a question: What responsibility do corporations have in the process of optimizing their business models to become multibillion-dollar floating profit machines? While companies may be able to explain away how one person, or two, or even 100 people end up in the water—at what point does a low statistical likelihood become an imperative to make a change? And then there is the reality faced by loved ones of the deceased. Unlike in a plane crash, families like Broberg’s are limited in the amount of damages they can claim in a wrongful death suit when the death occurred on the high seas, insulating the cruise lines from any major financial fallout resulting from MOBs. As Walker told me earlier this year, “there is very little, if any, legal or financial accountability of the cruise lines when a passenger dies in international waters.” If a suit is filed in the US, it’s subject to the Death on the High Seas Act, under which surviving descendants of a maritime fatality can only claim for “pecuniary damages,” such as funeral expenses and lost wages the deceased individual might have earned, but not suffering or loss of companionship. This has prevented cruise lines from, say, being liable for the deaths of non-earning children who drown in their pools. For cruise passengers on cruises that don’t visit US ports, the Athens Convention, passed in 1974 and revised in 2002, limits liability for death or personal injury to roughly $350,000 per case (in some cases, it can go up to roughly $550,000). What’s more, long contracts, filled with legalese, which cruise passengers agree to when they buy their ticket, can limit cruise lines’ liability even further; in the case of Costa Concordia disaster—which killed 32 people—the cruise line’s contract stated it would pay no more than $71,000 per passenger in cases of death and personal injury. There are some avenues for change. US congresswoman Doris Matsui from California was an original co-sponsor of the CVSSA, and in 2017 proposed bipartisan legislation to further strengthen that bill, known as the Cruise Passenger Protection Act. Among other measures, the act would amend the clause pertaining to man-overboard technology to say that cruise lines must implement complete MOB-detection tech, not just image-capture. It would also entitle a deceased individual’s family to claim full compensation, similar to aviation accidents. Other measures that the cruise lines themselves could implement themselves include providing a “specific verbal briefing concerning MOB procedures,” which was the suggestion of one coroner in Australia during an inquest into the death of two passengers in the Tasman Sea on the Carnival Spirit in 2013. In addition, Lloyd notes that plexiglass railings could be used, rather than ones that are easy to climb, as Broberg did. Written signage could alert passengers of high-risk areas where people have fallen overboard before. Cruisers, for their part, are also starting to demand change; some cruise enthusiasts are beginning to encourage cruisers to ask cruise lines why, if this tech is available and MOBs continue to happen, it’s not being installed, especially on newer ships. Klein says that in addition to the cost, cruise lines’ unwillingness to implement common-sense measures to reduce the likelihood of MOBs could come down to the fact that doing so would involve admitting they happen on a semi-predictable basis. “Cruise lines argue these events are not foreseeable,” says Klein. “Logically, if they take steps to ameliorate the risk of going overboard, they admit foreseeability, which may introduce greater liability for their failure in reasonable duty of care.” And of course, those steps would require cruise lines to actively remind passengers that amid all that fun and freedom, there’s also risk—to acquaint them with the terrifying truth that every so often, a carefree cruise vacation turns into an unimaginable maritime tragedy. Correction: An earlier version of this post said MARSS MOBtronic will be installed on a US Navy ship. It will in fact be on New Zealand Navy ships. The US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. For a list of international numbers, please see here.

When you’re feeling down or stuck in a rut, it can be tempting to think about quitting your job, packing your bags, and going to someplace to snorkel with sea turtles on a journey of self-discovery. But not all of us have the financial means—or the desire—to blow up our lives full-stop. (Plus, even if you reach turtle nirvana, chances are you will eventually have to head home to replenish your funds.) Thankfully, in the age of wifi and international data plans, there’s a middle path: Taking your work on the road with you. This option isn’t available to everyone. But if you work for a company that allows remote work or if you’re self-employed, globe-trotting with your laptop in tow can be an excellent way to see the world—and far-flung friends and family—without breaking the bank. We’re two journalists who’ve had the chance to try this out ourselves. Here’s what we’ve learned about the advantages of working remotely, the practicalities to consider, and the pitfalls you’ll want to avoid. Why you should do it Sarah: This fall, I moved from New York to London for several months. The opportunity came at the perfect time: Having lived in the same city for five years and worked at the same company for three, I was eager for a bit of a shakeup. Working in an office across the Atlantic gave me the perfect balance between stability (a stable job, a steady daytime routine, a delightful set of coworkers) and excitement—from London’s affordable theater tickets and joyfully dog-friendly pubs to the cheap flights to places like Nice, Amsterdam, Rome, Paris, and Mallorca. I often stayed for long weekends in order to make the most of those side trips, working remotely on weekdays from coffeeshops and Airbnbs—which was a great way to take advantage of my time abroad and build in more travel than I otherwise would have gotten to experience. A few months away gave me some ideas about things I’d like to change in my daily life back home, most notably that I’ve got to start setting better work hours for myself. But it also made me more appreciative of everything I have back home. Rosie: As a former nomadic freelancer, I spent months on end living out of a well-packed suitcase and working in places as varied as Cape Town, Ho Chi Minh City, and Paris. When I started at Quartz in late 2017, I decided to try and keep up the challenge of doing my work on the go every now and then by utilizing the privilege of working for a remote-friendly company that happens to cover the world. In 2018, I spent a week each working from Paris, a suburb of Barcelona, and the Estonian capital of Tallinn. I have no doubt that travel has made my work better—going to new places is a great way to generate story ideas—but perhaps more surprisingly, I have found that working on the road makes me a better traveler, too. I love waking up in a new place and actually having a task: find coffee, find a workspace, as well as a happy hour, an exhibition, or a place to go swimming once the workday is over. It takes the pressure off of finding something to do and replaces it with the nice task of simply slotting myself into the daily flow of whatever place I’m in. Over and over, I find my favorite cities end up being the ones that I’ve worked from. How to do it Prioritize finding internet access that’s fast. There are certain things you can compromise on when moving accommodation often; wifi is not one of them. Make sure to tell your host or accommodation option ahead of time that you will require high-speed internet, and check reviews which mention wifi speed. If the connection is making you miserable, consider moving elsewhere. If the promised wifi doesn’t pan out, you can always try for a partial refund. You also might opt to pay for a generous mobile data plan or get a local data sim card; it’s a good redundancy for the inevitable moment the wifi drops ahead of an important call. Embrace work and play being one and the same. If you wouldn’t normally have a beer on a Monday, or take an hour-long lunch break, or assert strong work-life boundaries—now is the time to break with convention. You did not take the leap of travel just to stick to the same rigid routine you have at home. Examine the locals’ way of doing things and see how you might approach your own life differently. It’s entirely possible that resolving to take a full hour for lunch every day for a week will not just result in better lunches, but a creative breakthrough, too. Research places to work. While in some cities, like New York or London, you may be able to plop down in just about any cafe and open your laptop, it’s important to be culturally sensitive and aware when it comes to finding places to work in other locales. Almost every city or town will have a blog post devoted to listing the cafes that welcome laptoppers, and many cities have co-working spaces that allow you pay a daily rate (hint: just Google “digital nomad cafe + city name” to find them). If you’re not sure it’s acceptable, it never hurts to ask the cafe manager—and make sure you sample enough of the cafe fare to earn your keep. And don’t forget that if you get stuck, hotel lobbies are always a good bet. Be clear with your manager or clients. There can be a perception that working from a desirable, vacation-like location means you’re not actually working. It won’t take you long to realize that is far from the truth. But it’s important to be clear with your boss or your clients to manage their expectations. If you’re on a different time zone, explain up front how that might affect meetings or response times. Or if you’ll be in transit during office hours, make it clear ahead of time what you’ll be working on while offline. There is no reason your productivity needs to drop when you’re on the road, but your communication needs to improve. Be wise about housing. There are several ways to sort your accommodation when traveling for a long stint. Companies like Roam and Outsite offer properties around the world that are designed with working nomads in mind, but it’s worth noting that those options will likely be more expensive than finding lodging on your own. Airbnb offers more security than, say, finding a sublet on a listings site (though that’s an option too, just be hyper-cautious). And of course, don’t overlook the opportunity to sublet your place at home, if that’s possible, or perhaps use the end of a lease as a reason to temporarily put your stuff in storage while you roam the world. Things to avoid Feeling lonely. As anyone who’s ever moved to a new place can attest, it’s tough to make new friends as an adult—and it can be even harder when you’re only in a new spot for a short amount of time. A few tips for socializing while working abroad: Tell your social network where you’re heading, and ask if they know anyone you ought to meet up with. Don’t be afraid to go to concerts, readings, and other events solo, and try striking up conversations with people while standing in line or ordering drinks. Bring a book with you to a bar and smile at the people who settle in next to you. And peruse the options on websites like Meetup.com and Airbnb Experiences to find group activities that are up your alley. Working all the damn time. When you’re working on a different time zone than clients or co-workers, it’s easy to fall into the trap of extending your hours endlessly to accommodate theirs. Instead, use the time difference to your advantage. If it’s inevitable that you’ll be on a hour or two later than normal, use those hours in the morning to catch an exhibition or go for a long run. Or, if you must get up early to catch another time zone, take Friday afternoons off to accommodate for the extra hours. Bringing too much stuff. The beauty of working while traveling is being flexible; however, that becomes a lot more difficult if you’re carting around too much stuff. Moving Airbnbs on a whim, catching an early train, or braving a low-cost, long-haul flight are all infinitely easier if you can comfortably carry all your belongings. Of course you should bring a work setup that will allow you to get everything done, but it will serve you to embrace the idea that you can generally find whatever you might need in the place you’re going. Spending your money unwisely. The mere act of spending money can be more expensive abroad, so you’ll need to make a plan for how you’re going to minimize penalties over a long stint abroad. It should include a smart, low-cost approach to withdrawing cash, plenty of foreign transaction fee free cards, and knowledge about when you should, and shouldn’t, pay for something in local currency.

In the space of barely a decade, Paul Klee went from being one of the most celebrated artists of his generation to having his works forcibly removed from Germany’s very best museums. Nowadays, of course, he is heralded as a great. Klee is among the best-loved artists of the 20th century, with retrospectives in such museums as London’s Tate Modern and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Today (Dec. 18), on what would be the German-Swiss artist’s 139th birthday, he is being celebrated with a brightly colored Google Doodle. Screenshot Today’s Google Doodle honors the artist Paul Klee. Klee’s works are variously described as expressionist, cubist, futurist, surrealist, or simply abstract. In the late 1930s, the Nazis had another word for his work: “degenerate.” Of the over 15,000 artworks purged from German museums under Hitler, more than 100 were by Klee, who had become a well-respected figure in the German art world. Those works deemed the most shocking were put on display in Munich in 1937 in an exhibition titled Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”). Seventeen were by Klee. By that point, however, Klee had long since left Germany and moved to Switzerland after being incorrectly “outed” as a “Galician Jew” by a right-wing paper and losing his teaching job at the Düsseldorf Academy, in 1933. (“It seems unworthy of me to undertake anything against such crude attacks,” he wrote to his wife at the time. “For even if it were true that I am a Jew and came from Galicia that would not affect my values as a person or my achievement by an iota.”) The move coincided with some of the most fruitful years of his career: he produced almost 500 pieces in 1933 alone. In 1940, Klee died in Switzerland after developing the autoimmune disease scleroderma. In the course of his lifetime, he produced some 9,000 works of art, today in museums and private collections the world over. Reproductions of his work abound. He is heralded as a modern master and artistic trailblazer, who at once defied taxonomical categorization and set a richly colored example for hundreds of artists to come.

From freak dust storms to the once-in-a-century Kerala floods, Indian states were battered by extreme weather throughout 2018. Weather events claimed the lives of hundreds of people, besides causing millions of dollars worth of damage to houses, roads, and other infrastructure. But what’s worse is that researchers suggest they could become the new normal, a sign of how the dark side of climate change is already here. This despite the fact India is now stepping up efforts to combat it with ambitious targets to switch to renewable energy and electric vehicles. Here’s a list of the extreme weather events that hit various Indian states in 2018: Heatwaves In recent years, researchers have been warning about the growing risk of heatwaves across south Asia, and in 2018, India witnessed weeks of burning hot days. Towards the end of April and in May, temperatures in parts of northern India, besides some southern states like Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, surged above 45°C, putting thousands of people, especially those who work outdoors, at risk. In several states, these high summer temperatures combined with atmospheric disturbances to create violent thunderstorms and deadly lightning strikes accompanied by days of heavy rainfall. In May alone, at least 200 people were killed as thunderstorms and heavy winds repeatedly lashed states such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, and West Bengal, bringing down trees and houses, and forcing schools to close. In Rajasthan and UP, freak dust storms compounded the crisis, leaving over 100 people dead in the first week of May. REUTERS/ADNAN ABIDI Electricity department workers remove damaged poles stuck under uprooted trees after a dust storm hit New Delhi on May 16, 2018. Extreme rainfall While the monsoon is eagerly awaited in India, where rain-dependent agriculture accounts for a significant proportion of employment and GDP, this year’s downpour wreaked havoc across several states. In September, heavy rainfall caused landslides in the northern states of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, and Haryana, while flooding cities such as Bengaluru in the south. But it was the northeastern states and the southern state of Kerala that really faced the worst of flooding in 2018. Floods In June, states in the northeast, including Assam and Manipur, were hit by heavy flooding, leaving roads and bridges badly damaged and sending thousands of people into relief camps. Deadly floods have become increasingly common in Assam in particular, where an estimated 50,000 people were affected this year. A few months later, Kerala in the south faced its worst floods in nearly 100 years, which inundated every district and claimed the lives of over 400 people and caused damages of around $3 billion. The state received about 275% more rainfall than usual over seven days in August, forcing millions into relief camps. Many were marooned for days before being rescued from rooftops. The floods destroyed over 100,000 buildings and around 10,000km of highways—the state is still rebuilding them. REUTERS/SIVARAM V People on rooftops awaiting aid in a flooded area in Kerala in August 2018. India’s coastal states also faced several cyclones that left behind a trail of destruction this year. Cyclones This week, Cyclone Phethai made landfall in Andhra Pradesh, displacing thousands of people. It comes just about a month after Cyclone Gaja devastated neighbouring Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Puducherry. That cyclone, which caused wind speeds to surge to 120kmph, claimed the lives of at least 45 people and caused extensive damage to houses, crops, and infrastructure. It followed Cyclone Titli, a “rarest of rare” severe storm that ravaged the state of Odisha in October, killing at least 61 people.

Even his detractors would concede that Cyril Ramaphosa has greatly improved the political atmosphere in South Africa since assuming the presidency in February 2018. True, the scope for any further deterioration was minimal. So squalid was his predecessor’s rule that virtually any new leader from outside the Zuma patronage machine would have offered some respite and improvement. That said, Ramaphosa provided a reassuring presence and brought an impressive skills set to the position. He was considered a safe pair of hands, a skilled negotiator, conversant in international diplomacy and economics, untainted by corruption, and a competent administrator—all qualities sorely lacking in his predecessor. He has drawn on a substantial reservoir of goodwill—at home and abroad – from people who have been only too keen to give him the benefit of the doubt. As a result 2018 has been a year of relatively easy wins. But that indulgence is unlikely to continue long into 2019. South Africa has a systemic ANC problem rather than simply a Jacob Zuma problem. Merely improving on Zuma’s shameful presidency is to set the bar of achievement extremely low. Ramaphosa must deliver substantial improvements in 2019. He needs to improve the quality of governance. He must also combine economic progress with social justice. And do so in the heat of a general election campaign which is likely to be fiercely contested and in which he requires an emphatic victory to give credibility to his leadership. Unfortunately for Ramaphosa, however, all the principal barriers to his success resides within the African National Congress (ANC) itself. The broader national fixation with the malign nature of Zuma’s presidency perhaps allowed an underlying fact to be obscured, namely that the country has a systemic ANC problem rather than simply a Zuma problem. As he tries to advance his agenda Ramaphosa will confront this political reality sooner rather than later. A toxic legacy Ramaphosa has been handed a poisoned chalice. The nine-year Zuma presidency left South Africa in dire straits. The country remains one of the most unequal societies on earth. Anticipated growth is below 1%, unemployment is catastrophically high at over 27% and 12 million people continue to live in absolute poverty. The ANC often acts as a drag on Ramaphosa’s ability to fix things, and is often at odds with his agenda. And if that wasn’t enough, the education system (the best long-term hope for inclusive economic development) is chronically under-performing, corruption has become all pervasive and the country attracts insufficient levels of foreign direct investment. Zuma also left an array of state institutions and state-owned enterprises in a dysfunctional condition, often systematically looted by private interests around the former president. Ramaphosa has been actively seeking to address this array of problems. His agenda is both congested and complex. He is trying to restore clean, orderly and functional government and to build a state capable of driving development. He’s also working to halt and reverse the state capture and corruption of the Zuma era which is now being exposed by the Zondo commission. But instead of having a party that’s working with him, the ANC often acts as a drag on his ability to fix things, and is often at odds with his agenda. Why the ANC’s the problem The ANC is a cumbersome and unwieldy instrument with which to deliver effective government. Its eclectic character hinders decision making. For fear of antagonising various factions within the broad church, equivocation replaces policy clarity. Policies are replaced by bland declarations, a lowest common denominator approach designed to preserve ANC unity. In this sense the ANC is serving as a brake on the country moving forward in other ways too. In parts of the country ANC more closely resembles a criminal enterprise than political party. In addition, Ramaphosa’s commitment to restore constitutional rule is odds with the ANC’s culture of exceptionalism which drives its politics. A combination of its role as leader in the struggle and its huge election victories has caused the party to view itself as a unique political actor. It considers itself synonymous with the nation. And it dismisses its opponents as illegitimate or as threats to liberation of which it remains the sole custodian. Ramaphosa’s commitment also clashes with the long-standing ANC commitment to use the state as an instrument of its will. This is an approach that long predated the Zuma presidency. Ramaphosa’s desire for a capable state and his efforts to clean up state owned enterprises and promote efficiency and expertise fundamentally contradicts this approach. It also is at odds with the ANC practice of deploying functionaries throughout the state apparatus. This ensures party loyalty is prioritized over anything else. This means that Ramaphosa’s emphasis on technocratic capabilities will not be allowed to proceed unchallenged. Embedded corruption This brings us to the final ANC obstacle in his path. Corruption is now deeply embedded in the ANC at all levels. In parts of the country it more closely resembles a criminal enterprise than a political party. Tender corruption, the rampant plundering of state assets, and kickbacks have become the new normal. Attempting to turn back this tidal wave of malfeasance will lie beyond the powers of one individual, however well intentioned. A sustained anti-corruption crusade will pose an existential threat to the material self-interest of ANC elites. It will generate intense resistance even if, for appearances sake, that opposition will have to be couched in pseudo-political language. Complicating Ramaphosa’s position still further is his relatively fragile position in the ANC – a product of his narrow leadership victory in December 2017 – and the fact that he still has to deal with a divided National Executive Committee and an ANC “top six”. Both contain the very gangsterish and corrupt elements he is committed to defeating. Ramaphosa finds himself in the unenviable position of having to use the ANC as an instrument to clean up the state when the deep-seated corruption is largely the product of the very same organisation. Noble intentions and talk of “new dawns” notwithstanding, nobody should hold their breath waiting for success on that front. James Hamill, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It was only day two, and already the spectacle that is Dreamforce had left me no choice but to eat some weed. I chewed up half of a strong California gummy, the kind that you buy legally in an Apple store for stoners, and settled into a couch on a terrace overlooking San Francisco. I had come to the terrace because—being available only to the press—it was sparsely populated. A respite from the crowd of 170,000 who had converged on a small section of the city for this annual bash hosted by Salesforce, a company that makes tremendous amounts of money selling “cloud-based enterprise technology,” whatever that means. I personally know multiple people who have been in long-term relationships with Salesforce users or employees, and who still cannot explain what Salesforce is or does. That hasn’t stopped six times the population of the Michigan town I grew up in from paying $2,000 to come to this thing every year. Hotels are booked 12 months in advance. The terrace offered an excellent view of the Dreamforce “campus,” which takes over a few blocks of downtown San Francisco each year. It always has a Hawaiian theme. This is because Marc Benioff—Salesforce’s founder, co-CEO, and spiritual guide—began to develop his idea for the company when, in the late 1990s, he “rented a hut on the Big Island of Hawaii” and “enjoyed swimming with dolphins in the ocean and having enough time by myself to really think about the future,” according to his book, Behind the Cloud. Directly below my terrace was the “Dreamforest,” not so much a forest as a city-block-length slab of astroturf. A large archway made to look like a hollowed-out Hawaiian hut served as the entrance to the forest, perhaps a replica of the very hut Benioff retired to after discussing web 2.0 with the dolphins. On the other end of the forest was a pop-up waterfall next to a pop-up stage for live music. But the real action was between the fake hut and the fake waterfall, on the fake grass, the forest’s main trail. There, Dreamforce lovers rushed about for the chance to gather up all things Salesforce—a company that has, in the past 20 or so years, positively exploded into a $117-billion dollar behemoth, now the owner of the tallest building in San Francisco. On the Dreamforest trail, attendees were handing out and collecting swag, networking, and, I’m sure it’s happened once or twice, falling in love with a fellow customer relationship management enthusiast. Besides these people, I’d gone to the terrace to avoid two things. The first was the verb “to leverage.” This is a corporate-jargon favorite popular among people at the conference: Instead of saying, “Let’s use Cassandra on this project,” they’d say, “Can we leverage Cassandra here?” The second thing I was trying to avoid was the constant sight of well-paid Dreamforce attendees, on their way to events like Dreamtalks, Circles of Success, or Keynotes, scurrying past homeless San Franciscans. The pale blue lanyards issued to all of use conference-goers provided access to stacks of radiant apples and self-caring lunches like “Grilled Tofu Bánh mì.” Yes, the label even had diacritics. Do they donate the leftover lunches, I’d wondered, or should I just push this cart of 200 well-balanced meals out the front door as fast as I can? I figured the leftover meals probably did get donated, because Salesforce positions itself as a real do-gooder. In the two days I’d been there, I had heard more about “diversity” and “inclusion” than anything to do with actual products or technology. Just a few weeks after the conference, Benioff would criticize tech leaders like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey for not doing enough to help the city’s homeless. The next day, I saw conference workers throwing leftover meals into trash bins by the dozens. Guess you can’t include everyone. Blazing the trail In Behind the Cloud, Benioff writes that “journalists on deadline are too pressed for time to come up with their own metaphors, so they use the ones we supply.” One of his favored metaphors is that of the “trail.” Dreamforce attendees are referred to as “trailblazers.” Signs throughout the conference command: “BLAZE YOUR TRAIL.” Sure, I’ll use this metaphor. At the end of my trail was understanding why so many people are excited about Salesforce. Part of the excitement, it was clear, is about Benioff himself. For one thing, he is older and more seasoned than your stereotypical college-dropout starter-uper turned billionaire. He spent years working at an actual company, Oracle, before having his Hawaiian epiphany. Compared to the sometimes bizarre or tone-deaf behavior of people like Mark Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, Benioff gives the general impression of being a thoughtful and responsible leader. And despite his relatively advanced age (for Silicon Valley) of 54, he is on the rise. After spending much time in the relative obscurity of business-to-business—rather than consumer-facing—products, Benioff has been stepping into the mainstream, most recently buying Time magazine from Meredith Corp. for $190 million in September and publicly calling Facebook the “new cigarettes.” His broadest source of appeal, though, may be that he offers a humane alternative to the cold engineering logic that dominates tech. Zuckerberg and Dorsey get called in front of senators to explain how they have unwittingly ruined society; Bezos and Musk are reprimanded for underpaying employees and enforcing work conditions that put their health at risk. Meanwhile, Benioff is buddies with influential Democrats and walks around in Hawaiian shirts talking about “ohana,” the Hawaiian word for “family.” Salesforce is consistently rated among the best places to work. Benioff is buddies with influential Democrats and walks around in Hawaiian shirts talking about “ohana,” the Hawaiian word for “family.” Benioff also gives away a lot of money, donating $100 million for a new hospital in San Francisco. He has baked philanthropy into Salesforce with its famed 1-1-1 model, automatically giving away 1% each of its equity, employee hours, and product. He is a guy who takes stands on political issues, making explicit his allegiance to left-leaning, progressive policies like equal pay for women. And, as I would learn at Dreamforce, he is really into Buddhist monks. Did the key to Dreamforce’s popularity, I wondered, lie essentially in Benioff’s catchphrase “inclusive capitalism”—the idea that business, as Benioff likes to say, is “the greatest platform for change,” even greater than the state? It is an intriguing, humanistic twist on Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian tendencies, which sees cash and technology as more consequential than politics. The government is slow and broke, the logic goes. We are fast and rich. Let’s fix this. In Benioff’s case, though, the goals are not nerd fantasies like landing on Mars or uploading everyone’s brains to computers. He’s just trying to end homelessness in San Francisco and making sure people of all gender identities feel welcome at Dreamforce. Signs around the conference say that it “welcomes trailblazers of all gender identities” and tells attendees to “trust that each trailblazer knows which bathroom is right for them.” That is the “Benioff personality cult” explanation of Dreamforce’s strange popularity. I admit that was a bit convinced by that sign’s singular “them.” Another theory: Dreamforce is secretly a kind of urban Burning Man, where expo booths handed out not swag but hard drugs, and the “keynote speech” was just a big, awesome rave. Finally, and least conceivably, perhaps people simply wanted to learn how to make their business processes more efficient, improve relationships with their customers, and blah blah leverage something something. Were trails really the only things getting blazed here? The unwrapped limo I arrived in San Francisco a day and a half before Dreamforce started, giving myself time to load up on legal weed and find my way around the campus. I was meant to get a limo from the airport, courtesy of Zoho. My interactions with this company had followed a pattern that I would soon become familiar with: I had never heard of it, had no idea what it did, and it wanted to meet me at Dreamforce. I’d been invited by a woman named Amy, who worked at a PR firm representing Zoho. “It’s an unwrapped limo, and they will have some beverages (champagne as well as non-alcoholic),” she wrote in an email a few weeks before the conference. “No agenda—just a chance to unwind before the madness begins.” I didn’t know what an “unwrapped” limo was. Are limos usually wrapped? I said yes. But since I was arriving so early, it turned out Zoho wouldn’t have any limos for me, wrapped or not. I took a Lyft, disturbed by the mention of “madness.” I spent Monday, the day before the thing began in earnest, wandering around the campus and reading Benioff’s Behind the Cloud. This book contains 111 “plays.” As in, like, basketball plays. Benioff recommends running these plays to take your business to the next level. Being so numerous, the plays touch on all kinds of issues. Some relate to the whole inclusive capitalism thing. “The Business of Business Is More Than Just Business,” reads #64, meaning that companies should have values that go beyond making money. Many are title-cased truisms, like #67, “Choose a Cause That Makes Sense and Get Experts on Board” or #4, “Trust a Select Few with Your Idea and Listen to Their Advice.” One of the most insightful sections is on Salesforce’s famed events. The company is known to throw the best parties every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, with musical acts like The Killers and John Legend. So reading play #16, “Party with a Purpose,” could give me useful insight into the thinking behind Dreamforce, I thought. Benioff tells the story of one of Salesforce’s first events, held at the Regency Theater in San Francisco, in 2000: To tell our story, we transformed the lowest level of the theater into a space that represented enterprise software, aka hell. There were cages with actors playing captured enterprise salespeople locked inside. “Help, get me out,” they screamed. “Sign this million-dollar license agreement. I need to make my quota!” The parties, then, are more than just a celebration of Salesforce, or an opportunity for users to learn about it. They are spectacles of Salesforce’s dominance. The musical act for that event: the B-52s. The monks and the veterans The next day I saw Benioff in the flesh, up close, for his keynote address. The stage was a theater-in-the-round. To me, this signaled Benioff’s commitment to “inclusion.” He wanted to be right there, next to me and you. Enough of Tim Cook’s lectures and pacing. The arrangement also fit in nicely with the jungle decor: It was easy to imagine the stage as the site of prehistoric ritual sacrifice. If only that were true, because first onto the stage was Lars Ulrich, the drummer for Metallica, a band I have long hated. Ever since the B-52s, Dreamforce has been known for bringing in big-name musical guests. And Benioff likes to make friends with famous, usually aging, musicians. Stevie Wonder, U2, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have all performed at past Dreamforces. This year’s guest would be Metallica. But Lars wasn’t there to tell us about that. His message was about enterprise technology. Wearing the straw fedora of a suburban dad at the beach, Ulrich announced that Metallica had spent the last year “trying to apply Salesforce products into everything that Metallica does.” You know there are some lefty politics going on when the monks get priority over the veterans. I was seated about 15 rows from Lars. This was a pretty good spot, given that people had been waiting in line for hours to get any old chair. (Twelve million people who could not be there were also streaming the thing online. Twelve million!) The best seats in the house were reserved for speakers like Lars. Behind them was the Salesforce board of directors. Then came the Monastics, a group of a couple dozen Buddhist monks that Benioff ships in every year from Plum Village, a monastery founded by the Vietnamese zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Behind the several rows of shaven heads were members of “Vetforce,” which sounds like a kids’ TV show where veterinarians fight animal-related crime, but is really made up of military veterans in the Salesforce world. You know there are some lefty politics going on when the monks get priority over the veterans. Indeed, once it was Benioff’s turn onstage, it was easy to forget that the point of this conference was entreprise software at all. This speech was all about politics. Benioff ascended to the stage after being draped with a lei by the wife of Daniel Akaka, a former Democratic senator from Hawaii. As he spoke, I wrote down phrases like “fourth industrial revolution” and “inclusive capitalism.” I wrote down how Benioff, who stands 6-foot-5, locked his eyes on the camera, walked toward it menacingly, and beseeched everyone watching to physically go to their local public school and ask what they can do to help. JAKUB MOSER Marc and Lars. “We’re doing it together, we’re coming together,” he added as he made his way over to the section housing the monks. “Well this is appropriate—I’m right here with the Monastics! Welcome to the Monastics!” he shouted, the way a game-show host introduces the next contestant. Then he put his hands together and bowed, silently. The monks responded in kind, and in perfect unison. “Inclusive capitalism” was on display at the keynote when a series of videos highlighted the achievements of various “trailblazers.” One video focused on an organization called PepUp Tech. As far as specialized skills go, learning Salesforce is one of the surest ways to get a nice, middle-class, service-industry job. There is tremendous demand for people who can use the software, and little supply. So PepUp Tech teaches it to students from underserved communities. Salesforce paid for 70 of their students to come to Dreamforce. The video featured several women of color from PepUp Tech tearing up over memories of students telling them, literally, “you changed my life.” Giving more people access to high-paying tech jobs. Looks great. Soon after that, though, a darker, less altruistic interpretation of “inclusive capitalism” began to emerge. One that sees it not primarily as a way to bring in the excluded, but to boost the Salesforce brand, to fortify the cult, to attract talent and investors. To establish a place in history. After the PepUp Tech video, another told the story of billionaire Italian fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli, who uses Salesforce at his company. Cucinelli was himself in attendance. After the video finished, he took the microphone and spoke directly to Benioff in rapid-fire Italian, through an interpreter, as if he were the effusive prognosticator of an ancient king. “For your birthday,” Cucinelli pronounced, “I have a special request to submit to you.” This was how I learned that the keynote speech was happening on the day of Benioff’s 54th birthday. If “inclusive capitalism” has any chance of succeeding, one could hope for no better agent than Benioff. “I would like you, in this special world, which is the cradle of genius, you should envision something that lasts for the next 2,000 years,” Cucinelli continued. “In ancient Greece, Pericles 2,500 years ago stated, ‘as long as our Parthenon is standing, our Athens will be standing, too.’ In ancient Rome, Hadrian stated, ‘I feel responsible for the beauty in the world,’ and he states, ‘my Rome will be there forever.’ In my Florence, during the Renaissance, there is Lorenzo the Magnificent, another genius, who basically sits around the same table, Michelangelo, Leonardo, all together, and they design and plan for eternity…I think you, Marc, you could be the new Lorenzo the Magnificent of this side of the world.” Benioff was certainly positive about the first video, but this speech appeared to affect him in a deeper way. Salesforce Tower is now the tallest building in San Francisco. There is a children’s hospital in the city with his name on it. Maybe not quite 2,000 years, but those will last. And with Time under his belt, Benioff is in a position to become known as the guy who figured out how to improve the world while making loads of cash. He has deflected suggestions that he intends to run for political office by saying he can do even more good as a CEO. If “inclusive capitalism” has any chance of succeeding, one could hope for no better agent than Benioff. He’s a large, imposing, wealthy white man with ties to cultural icons and A-level politicians, but also to community leaders and local activists. Instead of making grand, world-changing gestures to “cure all diseases,” his focus is local, on things he has a personal stake in and can observe, like the well-being of the Bay Area. He has a chief philanthropy officer. Salesforce develops tools that make charitable giving easier for companies and organizations. His intentions appear to be good. But it’s also true that Benioff probably couldn’t have bought Time magazine, or built such a tall tower, if not for the exclusive capitalism that he hopes to rid the world of. This is the hard thing about being a billionaire who wants to do good: they only feel responsible for the beauty in the world so long as they still get to have lots and lots and lots of money. Benioff can donate tens of millions of dollars, marginally expanding the set of people who benefit from the status quo, without really losing any of his own wealth. And if anything, it raises his status even further. But if “inclusive” and “capitalism” turn out to be incompatible, would he be willing to give it all up for the greater good? Inside the Circle of Success A lot of the enthusiasm for Salesforce comes from all the philanthropy and social justice talk. But I suspect the real belief system underlying the cult of Salesforce isn’t, as Benioff likes to say, “doing well by doing good.” It’s “make enterprise software not suck.” What exactly, you might ask, is “enterprise software?” This phrase is just one of many jargon-y terms that I would learn over the course of the week. To gain fluency in this corporate dialect, I went to a “Circle of Success,” Dreamforce’s culty term for “roundtable discussions.” The discussion in question centered around using Salesforce at companies in the financial services industry. Despite this ostensibly bland topic, the room was packed. Dozens of people were lined up out the door, looking surly, as if hoping to get in to an exclusive nightclub. I had not registered for this session, and had to convince the conference bouncers that my press pass allowed me entry. They allowed me to attend on the condition that I wouldn’t take up a precious chair. What dawned on me over the course of this discussion was the sheer ubiquity of software. I agreed and sat in a chair at the far end of the room. Slowly, several people, all of them white, nearly all of them women, joined our table. One worked for a community bank in Wisconsin. Another for Freddie Mac. Two of the women, it turned out, worked for the company my brother founded, which often helps financial firms with Salesforce. This was the closest I had come to understanding what Salesforce is actually good for, beyond throwing swanky parties. Everyone at the table had used Salesforce to solve problems at their companies. It had worked well. They had many more problems, and wanted to figure out the best way to use the platform to solve those, too. As they discussed how best to “leverage Financial Services Cloud,” their heads nodded. What dawned on me over the course of this discussion was the sheer ubiquity of software. Yes, it is several years now since Marc Andreessen wrote that “software is eating the world.” But it’s not just the smartphones and websites that we have come to be familiar with as “software.” It’s literally everything. Do anything in a modern city and it will trigger a long string of computational processes. Test-drive a car, express interest in an insurance plan, apply for a loan, contribute to a nonprofit, use a credit card, call airline customer service, change a t-shirt order from “large” to “medium,” and you will be entered into a database, added to annual reports, sent automated emails, plugged into “people who buy X also buy Y” algorithms. This is obviously true for hip startups like AirBnb. It is also true for boring, ancient, bailed-out behemoths like Freddie Mac. Usually, the software that runs in the dark server rooms of non-tech companies either comes with hefty license fees or is barely functional, hacked together over years by in-house coders who have come and gone. Information relevant to the company may be spread across hundreds of spreadsheets and thousands of emails, accessible only from certain computers or networks. One of the chief complaints of the woman from Freddie Mac was that the company has “a lot of legacy systems” that need to be modernized. “Enterprise software”—specifically “customer relationship management” software—aims to solve, or at least alleviate, such problems. Benioff’s insight was to do so using the “cloud.” Instead of charging people for a license to use your software, a la Windows XP, have them pay for a subscription to use your service, which can be accessed anywhere. It’s like Gmail, but for all of the mind-numbing tasks of the modern salesperson, customer service representative, or middle manager, like inputting what happened on a call with a customer or generating inventory reports. No more understaffed IT departments, no more inaccessible spreadsheets, no more massive upfront costs. These days, most people use several cloud-based services, like Spotify or Dropbox. It’s why the Google Chromebook can be a thing, and why Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, can get by without ever using a computer. It’s why Salesforce can count among its several mascots SaaSy, named after “Software as a Service,” a dancing white circle with arms and legs, but no face, that displays the word “software” in a red circle with a red line crossing it out. Nothing to install, just the cloud. That is sassy. But Benioff was onto the idea early. Less than 20 years have passed since he staged a sassy fake protest at the annual conference of the incumbent CRM giant, Siebel Systems, with protesters chanting, “The internet is really neat, software is obsolete!” Now 89 of the companies on the Fortune 100 use Salesforce. For the past three years, Salesforce has grown over 20% year-over-year every single quarter. The forest trails, the Metallica concert, all the talk of philanthropy and inclusion, these are just nice-to-haves, icing on the CRM cake, ways to sex up the unsexy but highly profitable task of automating and streamlining sclerotic business processes. People were here because non-tech companies suck at tech, because they are dealing with ancient systems designed by a guy named Jared who never responds to emails, because there is a vast technological gap between the slick, intuitive applications they use as consumers and the obsolete crap they use at work. Every company has that person who says, “there must be a better way.” Like Katie Rausch from the small Wisconsin bank, or Judy Lillibridge, a woman I spoke to while aimlessly drinking free beer on the expo floor, who is trying to improve how the journal Science interacts with its subscribers. There were a lot of these people at Dreamforce. In which I bloviate about Salesforce Then again, a lot of people at Dreamforce not like Rausch or Lillibridge. They are doing… something else. At best this could be called “networking.” At worst, “desperate PR.” There are plenty of activities that involve little actual content and problem-solving, and even less expertise. I know this because I do not have any expertise in Dreamforce or Salesforce specifically or enterprise software in general, yet I somehow found myself on a conference panel entitled “Grand Predictions for Dreamforce 2019-2020.” I’d been invited by one Danny Finlay, on behalf a company called Radius. “Hi Danny,” I replied when I got the email. “I would be very interested in being on your panel. However, can I ask why you selected me?” Danny responded promptly: “We thought with your experience covering technology and data that you would be a perfect fit to discuss and provide insight on future trends in enterprise technology, as well as retrospectively look back at how past trends have fared.” Would I really be a perfect fit? It is true that, when I look back, I generally do so retrospectively, via the past. Would I really be a perfect fit? It is true that, when I look back, I generally do so retrospectively, via the past. I could not, however, name a single trend in enterprise technology. It didn’t seem to matter. I reiterated my lack of expertise in another email: “If that’s fine with you, it’s fine with me.” “Awesome,” Danny wrote, “we are very excited that you will be joining our panel and look forward to all the great insight.” Alongside me on this panel would be three men, seasoned industry analysts who had for years made a living literally providing “insight on future trends in enterprise technology.” The information Danny provided to me implied that 2,000 people were planning to attend this panel. This turned out to be an epic misrepresentation. I showed up to a room of about 30 empty chairs and an equal number of people, who were more focused on the lunch buffet than the little stage where I would be making my predictions. During a pre-call I had made it once again known that I knew next to nothing about Salesforce, and was once again reassured. It was decided that I would be asked in general about “data,” which over the course of three minutes I said was important but poorly understood. I was also asked about “predictions for Salesforce,” which over the course of two minutes I said would try to establish itself in the public consciousness as a model of “inclusive capitalism,” a topic people seemed to have no interest in relative to Salesforce’s recent $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, which specializes in “integration.” I also made a couple quips. https://twitter.com/jlrobinson6/status/1045026745932382210 A few days after Dreamforce, I got an email from Radius employee John Hurley, who I suspected may have put me on the panel either to troll me, or the panel, or both. “The panel session had the best anecdotal [response] across all 3 days,” wrote John. “I met with the CRM team from Dupont immediately after and they loved it—they said it was better than any other actual Dreamforce session.” How’s that for insight. Metallica, and Benioff’s secret During the panel pre-call, John had given me an interesting estimate. I asked him why people go to Dreamforce. “10% to learn, 20% to be inspired, and 70% to be entertained,” he said. Other people I asked disputed that 70% figure, but it is true that entertainment is difficult to avoid at Dreamforce. At around 4pm on each day of the conference, unlimited food and alcohol began to emerge across the campus, available to anyone with a blue lanyard. My conversation with a group of 20-somethings ended as soon as one of their peers came around pointing at each of them and inquiring, “Tequila shot? Tequila shot?” I downloaded an app called Partyforce, which listed dozens of Dreamforce-related parties. Temple, one of the main nightclubs in San Francisco, had an open bar for any lanyardist willing to wait in line for a bit. Plus, Metallica would be playing Wednesday evening. Aside from the big Metallica thing, these parties are run not by Salesforce, but by companies who pay large amounts of money to push their names out during the conference. I went to one hosted by something called WalkMe. On Partyforce, WalkMe had promised the party would be filled with “top influencers—across every industry.” It was not. It was more like a wedding after the kids have gone to bed. People who don’t normally have time to go out were suddenly on a dance floor, drunk on free, tepid liquor—the bar was out of ice—with nowhere else to be. I spotted two young-ish guys who looked like they did not belong in this “casual and professional environment for establishing valuable connections.” They stood next to the DJ booth, slightly away from the action. Rather than actual Metallica fans, the crowd was made up of people who decided they “might as well” see Metallica. “I’m in physical pain right now,” one of them told me. They were members of an elaborate ecosystem of Bay Area locals who despise Dreamforce and everything it stands for, yet take part in it because of the money-making opportunities it offers. I will call these the “reluctant creatives.” The guy in physical pain had done the audio for the party; next to him was the man in charge of visuals. They told me that they make in a week of Dreamforce what they do in months of regular work. The next night, I arrived early for Metallica (a sentence I have never expected to type). Another reluctant creative, DJ Mary Mack from New York, was playing a warm-up set to which assorted Salesforce mascots danced. There was SaaSy, Einstein, Appy, Cloudy. They were all there, bumping to LMFAO’s “Party Rock.” Free concerts at conferences are weird. Rather than actual Metallica fans, the crowd was made up of people who decided they “might as well” see Metallica. A whiff of weed smoke wafted through this crowd, and people whooped. As the warm-up set approached Metallica’s entrance, protestors had projected a message onto the building across the street, in massive letters: “Text BENIOFF to 384-387 to learn his secret.” Intriguing. A man in the group to my left followed these instructions, and received a lengthy response from Fight For the Future, a civil-rights group that focuses on the internet. The text informed this man that Salesforce had refused to cancel its contract with Customs and Border Protection. In this way, the group claimed, Salesforce was helping to facilitate family separations at the border. Earlier this year, hundreds of Salesforce’s own employees sent Benioff a letter asking him to cancel the CBP contract. They are not alone in this view: Earlier this year, hundreds of Salesforce’s own employees sent Benioff a letter asking him to cancel the CBP contract, writing, “We cannot cede responsibility for the use of the technology we create—particularly when we have reason to believe that it is being used to aid practices so irreconcilable to our values.” Benioff has said that the contract will stand, saying it is not relevant to family separation. When I asked the company for more details, they said they would provide information on background, then never did, despite repeated requests. The guy to my left awkwardly laughed off the message, and unfortunately, Metallica began to play. I had arrived so early to the concert that, even though I could only handle 15 minutes of the music, it took me another 20 to leave. This was the strongest message yet of just how many people had come to Dreamforce. Even a Metallica show was jam-packed. Free at last, I considered the text message. Fight for the Future protesters had been present throughout Dreamforce, displaying a 14-foot cage labeled with the Salesforce logo and the phrase “DETENTION CENTER.” In July, Benioff Benioff attempted to solve the problem with cash, offering the immigrant rights group Raices a $250,000 donation, which they refused. He also offered to speak to Jonathan Ryan, the organization’s executive director, about the contract. Emails obtained by the Guardian show that he backed out at the last minute. Benioff explained his absence: “I am sorry I’m actually scuba diving right now.” Ryan was baffled. Apparently he hadn’t read Behind the Cloud. Play #1, the very first one, is “Allow Yourself Time to Recharge.” Mind your mindfulness On Thursday, I went looking for the monks. They were not in the “mindfulness lounge” as promised. Disappointed, I wandered back to the Trailhead to see what new tech and products lied in wait in the forest. There I spotted a monk swiping her badge on a large LCD screen that read, “Learn new skills and win fun prizes! Complete your quest to unlike $1M to help end homelessness in the Bay Area.” Was this monk trying to upskill herself and land a job as a Salesforce administrator? I caught up with her and asked what she was doing at Dreamforce, of all places. Her name, I learned, was Sister True Reverence. She was a member of the California branch of Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery. Her task here, she said, was to help people destress, relax, and be fully aware. “Taking a breather should not be considered a negative thing,” she said. Next to us a man on a stage used the phrase “maximize your win-rate.” Sister True Reverence told me that Benioff and a few of his fellow tech leaders had met Thich Nhat Hanh in 2013. Of these, only Benioff took the teachings seriously. In 2015, Benioff had Thich Nhat Hanh and 29 other monks stay at his “other house” in San Francisco. Benioff credits the mysticism of the East with his dedication to philanthropic or otherwise do-gooder efforts. After his three-month stint with the dolphins in Hawaii, he spent another two months in India, where he had an “incredible awakening.” On this trip, he met privately with both the Dalai Lama and Ravi Shankar (the spiritual leader, not the sitar player). He also met with Mata Amritanandamayi, a Hindu guru with a large following. “It was she who introduced me to the idea, and the possibility, of giving back to the world while pursuing my career ambitions,” Benioff writes in his book. “I realized that I didn’t have to make a choice between doing business and doing good. I could align these two values and strive to succeed at both simultaneously. Never mind that Hinduism and Buddhism are not the same. The “doing well by doing good” philosophy is a strong part of Salesforce’s culture. Its 1-1-1 model has led to hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to charitable causes. That’s a lot of giving. But Benioff’s intentions are not so clear. During the keynote, his talk of charitable giving focused more on the fact that, in today’s world, successful businesses need to stand for something. That employees—like the ones who told him to put an end to the CBP contract—want to work for companies that they see as being on the right side of history. That being a do-gooder is a sound strategy for making money. Is “inclusive capitalism,” therefore, a genuine effort to improve the lots of those who have been excluded, or a strategic move to attract talent and impress investors? Does it matter, if the result is the same? If capitalism is going to include everyone, that needs to be a requirement, not a goal. It does matter, because if capitalism is going to include everyone, that needs to be a requirement, not a goal. Benioff’s formulation sounds nice, but doing business and doing good are not always aligned. Just look at Facebook. When the two are opposed, the choice should always be “good.” There should be no point at which “inclusive” stops and “capitalism” begins. San Francisco’s homelessness problem has grown alongside Salesforce and other tech companies, whose well-paid employees push up housing costs. Throwing the money you make from that arrangement at the problem, after the fact, does not absolve you. Benioff likes to say that “business is the greatest platform for change,” or alternatively, “The business of business is improving the state of the world.” He has said he’s too busy to run for office and that being a CEO gives him more power to change the world anyway. The push for “inclusive capitalism” implies that the system, as it is, is exclusive. By saying he can do more as a CEO than in government, Benioff is making the absurd claim that those best suited to fix this situation are the very people who have benefited most from it—he and his ultra-wealthy peers. They are responsible for the beauty in the world, and we should be thankful for any inclusion they deem to hand out to the rest of us. Having talked to oh-so-many white folks, I was relieved to join a group of African-Americans, the first I had seen all week, at a picnic table out in the Dreamforest. They were from PepUp Tech, the organization featured in the keynote, and from which Salesforce had paid for 70 people to come to Dreamforce. We talked about getting a job in Salesforce, networking, how the conference was going. After a while, one of the students asked, “My question is, where are all the black people?” Caught somewhere between “inclusive” and “capitalism.”

Yes, A Star Is Born is one of the best films of the year. No, we haven’t forgotten about Black Panther just because it came out way back in February. Of course we’re going to watch Roma on Netflix, just give us a second. (But seriously, watch it—it’s wonderful.) You know all this, don’t you? If you haven’t seen these films already, you’ve at least read about them ad nauseam in the countless “best of” and “top 10” lists that proliferate at this time of year. But here’s the thing: 2018 was a pretty outstanding year in film—so good, in fact, that you may well have missed some real gems amid the sheer volume of cinematic excellence. Below are five fantastic films from the past year that deserve the same cultural attention as 2018’s biggest blockbusters and consensus awards contenders, but have mostly flown under the radar. They’re all either streamable or still playing in theaters, so if you’re looking for a manageable list for viewing over the holidays, start here: Leave No Trace Debra Granik’s harrowing film about an Iraq War veteran with PTSD and his daughter living off the grid is one of the best of the year, featuring stunning performances from Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie. After debuting at Sundance in January, the film was quietly released in the US in the middle of the summer, where it earned a mere $6 million, surrounded by huge but demonstrably worse films such as Solo: A Star Wars Story and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. That’s a shame, because Leave No Trace is a vastly more vital, humane film than either of those. Any time Granik makes a film, it’s a treat. (Leave No Trace was her first feature narrative film since 2010, when she introduced the world to Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone.) No one captures life on the margins quite like Granik, and in Leave No Trace she crafted a compelling, heartbreaking argument about home, parenting, nature, and how sometimes all three can be versions of the same thing. You can rent Leave No Trace for $0.99 on Amazon. Thoroughbreds Thoroughbreds is a thoroughly weird, subversive, and entertaining take on the teen thriller genre. Come for the delicious noir tropes, stay for the final performance of Anton Yelchin. The immensely talented actor filmed his part in 2016 shortly before he died in a freak accident. Thoroughbreds is the cinematic debut of the playwright and director Cory Finley, whose understanding of pacing and tension would have you believe this is the work of a veteran filmmaker. It might remind some viewers a bit of Rian Johnson’s Brick, the indie film that helped launched Johnson’s career, which most recently included a little movie called Star Wars: The Last Jedi. But it’s the performances of actresses Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy that really elevate Thoroughbreds from a quirky psychological thriller to one of the most memorable black comedies of the last few years. Cooke, especially, is superb as a sardonic teenage sociopath who nonchalantly suggests her friend murder her abusive step-dad. Watch Thoroughbreds on iTunes, Amazon, or YouTube. The Endless I’ve thought about The Endless as much as any other film that came out this year. It’s an unassumingly menacing story that makes you feel like you’re seeing something that wasn’t meant to be witnessed, wasn’t meant to be unearthed at all. Directed by and starring the duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (who also made the solid 2014 body horror film Spring), The Endless tells the tale of two brothers who decide to drive out into the wilderness and revisit the cult to which they once belonged. That’s all you’ll want to know about the plot, because The Endless quickly ventures into some pretty bizarre, mind-bending territory. The movie has big ideas, and unlike a lot of big-budget, mainstream science-fiction, it actually delivers on most of them. It would be cool to see what The Endless might have been like with a Hollywood budget and marketing campaign, but instead the film plays out in its small, unique way—and is probably better for it. Stream The Endless on Netflix, Amazon, or YouTube. Wildlife Like Thoroughbreds, Wildlife is a mesmerizing directorial debut, although this one was a little less surprising. The actor Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood) is on the other side of the camera for the first time, directing the peerless Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal as the two halves of an imploding marriage, set against a wildfire in the hills of Montana in 1960. Gyllenhaal’s character, Jerry—recently fired from his job at a ritzy country club—decides to go off and fight the fire, leaving Mulligan’s Jeanette to care for their son herself. Mulligan is terrific in arguably a career-best role, but we see the whole thing unfold from the perspective of teenage Joe (Ed Oxenbould), who watches helplessly as his home life turns to blaze. A born filmmaker, Dano knows how to frame a shot. And like some of the best in the craft, he understands that sometimes less is more. Wildlife is a Raymond Carver story come to life, a beautiful and tragic slice of life that makes better use of subtext and the unsaid than any other film this year. Wildlife is still in select theaters, and we’ll update this story when it’s available to stream online. You Were Never Really Here Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ratcatcher) is one of the most fearless filmmakers around—when she makes a movie, you owe it to yourself to see it. That’s especially the case for the Scottish director’s latest entry, You Were Never Really Here, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a grizzled mercenary hired to take down a New York sex trafficking ring. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead provides the driving, inventive score of this propulsive revenge thriller. The film is dark and uncompromising, and often uncomfortable, but Ramsay never falls into exploitation, treating the subject matter with an assured thoughtfulness. Joaquin Phoenix seems put on this Earth to play this character, who lives somewhere in a space between Mad Max and Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. You Were Never Really Here isn’t “fun,” per se, but it is an impeccably woven tapestry of urban decay, and one man’s attempt to justify his existence within it. Stream You Were Never Really Here on Amazon or YouTube.

In 1919, a British writer named Rose Macaulay published What Not, a novel about a dystopian future—a brave new world if you will—where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state. You’ve probably never heard of Macaulay or What Not. However, Aldous Huxley, author of the science fiction classic Brave New World, hung out in the same London literary circles as her and his 1932 book contains many concepts that Macaulay first introduced in her work. In 2019, you’ll be able to read Macaulay’s book yourself and compare the texts as the British publisher Handheld Press is planning to re- release the forgotten novel in March. It’s been out of print since the year it was first released. The resurfacing of What Not also makes this a prime time to consider another work that influenced Huxley’s Brave New World, the 1923 novel We by Yvgeny Zamyatin. What Not and We are lost classics about a future that foreshadows our present. Notably, they are also hidden influences on some of the most significant works of 20th century fiction, Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Strangely similar worlds As the introduction to the new edition of What Not explains, both Macaulay and Huxley were close to editor Naomi Royde-Smith and their paths probably crossed. Huxley was Royde-Smith’s colleague at the Westminster Gazette and lived in her apartment for several months in 1923 while Macaulay was co-hosting weekly literary soirées in the same place. There’s no definitive proof that Huxley actually read What Not, but he likely did talk shop with Macaulay, and he definitely referenced many of her ideas in his most enduring and influential novel, Brave New World. In Macaulay’s book—which is a hoot and well worth reading—a democratically elected British government has been replaced with a “United Council, five minds with but a single thought—if that,” as she put it. Huxley’s Brave New World is run by a similarly small group of elites known as “World Controllers.” The citizens of What Not are ranked based on their intelligence from A to C3 and can’t marry or procreate with someone of the same rank to ensure that intelligence is evenly distributed. The lowest ranks are taxed for having idiotic babies, and the idea is to save the nation from future wars by creating a smarter society. Huxley’s book contains a similar human ranking system of “Alpha double plusses” to “Epsilon minus” castes whose associations are also regulated. In Macaulay’s regime, the United Council passes a Mind Training Act and creates a course required by the state to make people smarter. The law is promoted during a national “Brains Week.” Propaganda for the effort includes posters illustrating the perils of “free love.” Macaulay writes: There were also pictures of human love, that most moving of subjects for art. ‘Yes, dear, I love you. But we are both C2’ (they looked it). ‘We cannot marry; we must part for ever. You must marry Miss Bryte-Braynes, who has too few teeth and squints, and I must accept Mr Brilliantine, who puts too much oil on his hair. For beauty is only skin-deep, but wisdom endures for ever. We must think of posterity.’ Meanwhile, Huxley’s novel described brainwashing techniques designed by the Brave New World’s ”emotional engineers” for a similar effect. As Sarah Lansdale writes in the introduction to What Not, “Indeed it could be argued that the world of [Huxley] is the world of What Not some few decades into the future.” Brave New World is more futuristic and preoccupied with technology than What Not. In Huxley’s world, procreation and education have become completely mechanized and emotions are strictly regulated pharmaceutically. Macaulay’s Britain is just the beginning of this process, and its characters are not yet completely indoctrinated into the new ways of the state—they resist it intellectually and question its endeavors, like the newly-passed Mental Progress Act. She writes: He did not like all this interfering, socialist what-not, which was both upsetting the domestic arrangements of his tenants and trying to put into their heads more learning than was suitable for them to have. For his part he thought every man had a right to be a fool if he chose, yes, and to marry another fool, and to bring up a family of fools too. The two books differ in other important ways. The writers’ genders are a definite influence on the content, however similar the texts may be conceptually. Where Huxley pairs dumb but pretty and “pneumatic” ladies with intelligent gentlemen, Macaulay’s work is decidedly less sexist. In What Not, the female protagonist, Kitty, is a swashbuckling bon vivant with a sharp tongue, a stark contrast to any woman featured in Brave New World. Kitty is a bright and adventurous young woman who works for the Ministry of Brains as a clerk and is highly regarded by colleagues for her sharp wit, quirky life, and her style, as well as the quality of her production. Though the ministry values her, she’s intelligent enough to not be attached to the job or the propaganda she promotes, laughing at her duties while performing them exceptionally well. Macaulay’s work is more subtle and funny than Huxley’s. Despite being a century old, What Not is remarkably relevant and readable, a satire that only highlights how little has changed in the years since its publication and how dangerous and absurd state policies can be. In this sense then, What Not reads more like George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 (pdf). The seminal fake news novel 1984, is famous for bringing us Big Brother and Newspeak, alerting us to the dangers of propaganda and slipperiness of language. Orwell wrote the first fake news novel long before we assimilated the notion into our everyday lives. What’s often missed in contemporary discussions of this seminal text, however, is his sly sense of humor and love of language games. While Orwell never indicated that he read Macaulay, he shares her subversive and subtle linguistic skills and satirical sense. His protagonist, Winston—like Kitty—works for the government in its Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue in Newspeak, where he rewrites historical records to support whatever Big Brother currently says is good for the regime. Macaulay would no doubt have approved of Orwell’s wit. And his state ministries bear a striking similarity to those she wrote about in What Not. There is a clear connection between What Not and 1984, via Brave New World. Orwell was familiar with Huxley’s novel and gave it much thought before writing his own blockbuster. Indeed, in 1946, before the release of 1984, he wrote a review of Zamyatin’s We (pdf), comparing the Russian novel with Huxley’s book. Orwell declared Huxley’s text derivative, writing in his review of We in The Tribune: The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanized, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories. Apart from the similarly futuristic settings, the two novels share a preoccupation with the possibilities of science and math. But We takes it all bit further. In We, the story is told by D-503, a male engineer, while in Brave New World we follow Bernard Marx, a protagonist with a proper name. Both characters live in artificial worlds, separated from nature, and they recoil when they first encounter people who exist outside of the state’s constructed and controlled cities. Yet We is much more deliciously absurd and strikingly relevant now. The first-person narrative feels fresh today, as D-503 says: I feel my cheeks burn as I write this. To integrate the colossal, universal equation! To unbend the wild curve, to straighten’ it out to a tangent—to a straight line! For the United State is a straight line, a great, divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines! Although We is barely known compared to Orwell and Huxley’s later works, I’d argue that it’s among the best literary science fictions of all time, and it’s highly relevant, as it was when first written. Noam Chomsky calls it “more perceptive” than both 1984 and Brave New World. Zamyatin’s futuristic society was so on point, he was exiled from the Soviet Union because it was such an accurate description of life in a totalitarian regime, though he wrote it before Stalin took power. When he died in Paris in 1937, it had never been published in Zamyatin’s mother tongue. We was published in French, Dutch, and German. An English version was printed and sold only in the US. When Orwell wrote about We in 1946, it was only because he’d managed to borrow a hard-to-find French translation. Written for the new millennium Orwell was critical of Zamyatin’s technique. “[We] has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarize,” he wrote. Still, he admired the work as a whole. “[Its] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—[…] makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s,” Orwell concluded. I agree with Orwell that Zamyatin’s book is deeper than Huxley’s and seems to capture what humanity loses when the state takes over every aspect of life and even lobotomizes thinking citizens who rebel. However, I disagree with his critique of the Russian writer’s technique. We is a fantastic read for us postmoderns. Zamyatin’s D-503 is an engineer in a society obsessed with metrics and numbers, living in a time when people literally live in glass houses and are utterly disconnected from nature. Today, it reads almost like an in-joke, a satire of our own algorithmically driven culture where engineers are heroes and numeric measurements, with no context, drive so many decisions in business and elsewhere. Like our own tech magnates and nations, the United State of We is obsessed with going to space. The book opens with this compelling, resonant beginning, describing the latest government rocket project: This is merely a copy, word for word, of what was published this morning in the State newspaper: “In another hundred and twenty days the building of the Integral will be completed. The great historic hour is near, when the first Integral will rise into the limitless space of the universe. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the United State. A still more glorious task is before you: the integration of the indefinite equation of the COSMOS by the use of the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral. Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. Still, it’s notable that even before Zamyatin’s We, which has gained some appreciation over time, and before the enduring classics Brave New World and 1984, a female reporter in post-World War I London wrote a similarly satirical novel that wrestled with so many of the same questions as these seminal works yet never entered the literary canon. Perhaps in 2019 Macaulay’s What Not, a clever and subversive book, will finally get its overdue recognition.

In the Xinjiang region of western China, a network of internment camps holds up to 1 million detainees, mostly Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. The ruling Communist Party bills the camps as “education and training” centers for people “influenced by extremism.” By laboring on the production lines, Beijing claims, the detainees can work their way out of poverty, join modern China, and avoid being turned into religious radicals. But as the Associated Press and New York Times (paywall) report in separate investigations, a growing body of evidence shows the camps are also a source of forced, cheap labor to make products such as clothing, at least some of which is exported. The AP says it has tracked “recent, ongoing shipments from one such factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear,” which supplies clothing to the bookstores and sports teams of numerous US universities, such as Texas A&M, University of Pennsylvania, Appalachian State University, and many more. According to the AP, Badger Sportswear, based in North Carolina, received at least 10 shipping containers of polyester knitted t-shirts and pants from a factory in an internment camp in Xianjing this year. But it’s unclear exactly where the items ended up or what branding they may have had. It’s also impossible to know whether a particular item of clothing was made with forced labor, illustrating how murky global supply chains can be. The camp that produced the clothes contains 10 workshops operated by a privately owned Xianjing clothing manufacturer, Hetian Taida Apparel. The company acknowledged that its workforce includes detainees, though it said it’s not affiliated with the camps. ”We’re making our contribution to eradicating poverty,” its chairman, Wu Hongbo, told the AP. Badger Sportswear told the AP it has sourced from a Hetian Taida affiliate for years. About a year ago the affiliate, which was not named in the story, opened a new factory in western China, though Badger Sportswear says it sent out officials to visit the facility and make sure it was up to standards. The company’s sourcing policy “prohibits business partners from engaging in forced labor, including prison, bonded, indentured, and other forms of forced labor.” In a statement to the AP, Badger CEO John Anton said, “We will voluntarily halt sourcing and will move production elsewhere while we investigate the matters raised.” Quartz has reached out to Badger Sportswear for comment and will update this post with any reply. The AP couldn’t confirm whether workers at the factory received pay, or were free to come and go. But a dozen people who had been detained in an internment camp, or had family or friends in one, all told the AP that factory work was mandatory. Payment varied greatly. Some were paid nothing at all. Others earned just above the minimum wage, which starts at 1,460 yuan per month (around $210) before deductions in Xianjing. Some of those forced onto the production lines, they said, previously held professional jobs that paid 10 times as much. A similar picture of life in the camps emerged from the Times’s investigation. It seems that clothing is becoming a focus of the internment camp labor programs: Xinjiang’s provincial government announced a plan in April to attract garment and textile makers, promising subsidies to train inmates.

BABYLON HEALTH has become one of the breakout stars of the current class of UK tech start-ups, but several insiders have suggested that things aren't what they seem. The company, which has contracts to provide NHS services in the UK, uses, amongst its real-life medical staff, an AI chat-bot to do initial triage and basic diagnosis with patients, in an attempt to get quick results to simple cases. One current and one former member of Babylon staff have gone on record with Forbes, claiming that it misses 10-15 per cent of warning signs of serious conditions, and that a group of clinicians had gone straight to Ali Parsa, founder and CEO as recently as last Friday in an attempt to stall a planned software drop. But Babylon isn't taking things lying down and has hit back strongly at the claims that the Forbes article "used a distorted lens to magnify the views of a few anonymous individuals whilst ignoring the findings from multiple government regulators, dismissed the integrity of the hundreds of doctors who work with us and ignored the lengths we have gone to as we have shared our science with the world." It goes on to rebuke suggestions that it was ever designed to replace the advice of a real doctor: "Our aim is to use technology to empower doctors to make more accurate decisions and to reduce waiting times for patients - after all, how safe is it to be kept waiting for medical attention?" It adds that in its own tests, the bot was bang on 80 per cent of the time, which in such a fledgeling industry, is a pretty impressive bit of neural networking magic. In the UK, Babylon offers appointments with online doctors by video call via its widely advertised GP at Hand app, as well as the initial triage by AI. NHS England said: "The DCB 0129 safety cases submitted by Babylon and GP at hand for each of the Babylon technology products used in the GP at hand service have been considered. These are the Artificial Intelligence symptom checker, the Babylon clinical portal, and the Babylon Healthcheck service. Each safety case meets the standards required by the NHS and has been completed using a robust assessment methodology to a high standard." Babylon adds: "The globe is facing a drastic shortage of doctors and for many people healthcare is simply too expensive. We are working to help improve the lives of millions of people and we are doing so whilst meeting, and often surpassing, all the required regulations. Technology can be part of the answer to these problems - our 11 peer-reviewed publications are testament to this. "Babylon's aim is to put accessible and affordable healthcare into the hands of everyone on earth and we will continue in this endeavour." Babylon is amongst a gaggle of big names who are bringing AI to healthcare. Google DeepMind, for example, works in partnership with London hospitals to monitor kidney patients remotely, to save them coming in if their vitals are normal. More recently it has started using AI for ocular screening, spotting potential problems invisible to the naked eye. The message is clear - common sense is at the heart of this whole endeavour. AI is now mature enough to work alongside the health service and holds many benefits, but if you start coughing up blood and an AI tells you it's a sprained ankle, you're probably wrong. μ

MICROSOFT IS REPORTEDLY gearing up to launch two new Xbox consoles in 2020, codenamed 'Anaconda' and 'Lockhart'. According to a report at Windows Central, Microsoft will launch its so-called 'Scarlett' family of next-gen Xbox consoles in 2020. The flagship 'Anaconda' model, seemingly codenamed by a Nicki Minaj fan at Microsoft, will be the equivalent of the current Xbox One X, with improved hardware and souped-up internals from AMD. The console might also include SSD storage for the first time, in order to reduce game load times. A second console, codenamed 'Lockhart', will be a follow-up to the lesser-specced Xbox One S, according to the report, which describes it as "potentially around as powerful as the current Xbox One X hardware wise, with refinements under the hood." While gamers have another year-and-a-bit to wait until Microsoft shows off its next-gen Xboxes, earlier rumours claim Redmond is planning a disc-less version of the Xbox One S for 2019. The report also claims that both of these consoles, referred to by Windows Central as the "S-2" and "X-2", will support existing backwards-compatible Xbox and Xbox 360 games, along with current Xbox One titles. While these are the two next-generation Xbox consoles, Microsoft could also be preparing a disc-less version of the Xbox One S for 2019. Codenamed 'Xbox Scarlet Cloud', the console is expected to arrive as a cheaper, cut-down device, largely used to fuel interest in Project Xcloud, Microsoft's in-house game streaming service. Microsoft is also expected to offer a 'disc-to-digital' scheme, which would allow people to trade in their physical copies of games for digital version, essentially allowing them to ditch the older media format and embrace the as-a-service model. And ccording to a new report from WCCFTech, the so-called Xbox Scarlet Cloud will utilize a semi-custom AMD Picasso chip, set to be introduced as part of AMD's Ryzen 3000 lineup. µ

LINKEDIN - THE SOCIAL NETWORK where you occasionally click ‘accept' - may soon have a stablemate if rumours are to be believed. According to the USA Herald, sources indicate that Microsoft is sniffing around Upwork, and has plans to make it part of the company's family soon. While LinkedIn is popular among large companies, full-time employees and HR departments looking to tempt said full-time employees elsewhere, Upwork is a very different beast. A hub for freelancers, formed in 2013 with the merging of oDesk and Elance (sadly the didn't go for "Elanceodesk"), the site aims to connect self-employed types with businesses and individuals looking to staff short-term projects. It has more than 12 million registered users. USA Herald is incredibly vague about the nature of its sources, not even revealing which side of the potential transaction they sit on. The report states that a recent collaboration between the two companies - tools to help businesses provide temporary access to Enterprise Microsoft Office apps for the duration of a contract - was the first step on the road to a full acquisition. Given Microsoft's tightening grip on the enterprise space, it certainly feels like the kind of move the company would make. Certainly, the $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn seemed unlikely at first but is bearing fruit with the suit-and-tie social network celebrating another 37 per cent increase in revenue. Upwork has a more obvious direct revenue stream with a consistent flow of transactions between employers and temporary employees and charges the former between ten and 20 per cent of the value of a given project. On top of this, of course, any opportunity to get workers and businesses all cosy in the company ecosystem is good news for Microsoft. If the company want more freelancers using Microsoft Teams and Outlook, then this would be a great opportunity to appeal to them directly. µ

GOOGLE CHROME is looking at ways of stopping websites from nicking the 'back button' for their own nefarious purposes. If you dig around the crap part of the web for long enough, you'll find websites that have added code that results in the use of the back button taking you somewhere other than the last page you looked at. It can take various forms - a completely different site altogether, or reloading the page you are already on so you can never leave like some weird digital Hotel California. Known internally as "history manipulation", it's something that Google engineers have had in their sights for a while. Now, they have worked out a way for the system to reliably check if the trick is in use on a particular site. At this stage, it's an experimental process, evidenced only by Chromium and any positives are simply flagged to the user and the data sent back to Google for analysis. It's also worth pointing out that one Chromium code commit does not a Chromium feature make, and there's every chance that this will never see the light of day in its current form, notwithstanding that it's very "on message" for Chrome's recent updates. In recent months we've seen complete bans on any kind of "suspect" adverts, penalises unencrypted sites, Symantec certificates, plus of course Chrome led the way in the demise of Adobe Flash - (and good riddance). As ever, Chrome goes through three stages - Dev, Canary, Beta before hitting Stable, meaning it'll be a minimum of three months before this feature is available to the general public, and most likely a bit longer than that even, but it's good to know that Chrome is still looking for new ways of making us all that little bit safer. In the meantime, you'll know if it's live, if you're feeling intrepid enough to look in the flags menu - it'll look like this: #enable-skip-redirecting-entries-on-back-forward-ui µ

THE TIREYARD BLAZE (we needed something even worse that 'dumpster fire') that is the October 2018 Update to Windows 10 is now available. Ish. Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that the bug-strewn bork-box that got past beta-blocking is now available to all "advanced users". If you're not sure if that's you, then it's pretty simple - are you the type of person that goes into the update screen and hits "check for updates" a lot? Yeah, you then. As we discussed last week, Microsoft releases non-essential updates without flagging them for install, meaning they're only available with a manual check. Otherwise, they'll just install when you do the next Patch Tuesday run. When we heard that this was for 'advanced users', we kind of assumed that meant a manual install using the Windows Media Creation Tool, which is something that based on previous experience is really not suitable for your daily driver machine. There are still a number of blocks in place, where user machines could be affected by some of the unsquished bugs, but the major ones, like chewing up files have been removed, so most people outside a corporate environment should be good to go. For those who haven't been following this particular car crash, Microsoft first released the October 2018 Update as part of its bi-annual Windows-as-a-Service (WaaS) policy. It soon became clear that users without enough room on their hard drive for the download were having their personal files wiped to make room. This was then followed by a litany of avoidable borkage covering everything from disappearing ZIP files, to display drivers, to file association bugs - the latter is still not fixed and won't be till January. As it goes, we did try this morning and were greeted with a big fat negatory on our machine, so we're pretty sure that this is still not available to everyone, thus far. Probably for the best. If you're not missing it, best bet is still to wait till it's freely distributed. µ

A NEW YEAR means that our expectation of what makes a flagship Android phone gets reset. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 will no longer be the top dog, and the lineup of top-rated Android phones will mostly share the Snapdragon 855 as benchmarks blend into one. But the company at the front of the queue with a Snapdragon 855 in its eager mitts could be a bit of a surprise. It's not Samsung, Sony or LG - instead, it looks like laptop leviathans Lenovo will be the first out of the door with the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT, coming to China on 24 January. Very much of the "add more words to an existing product" school of marketing (see also: the OnePlus 6T Mclaren Edition), the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT is a follow up to the Lenovo Z5 Pro, itself a follow up to the Lenovo Z5. It's like Russian dolls. To be fair to Lenovo, it certainly offers enough over its predecessors to get more letters after its name, like a professor with PhD ostentatiously printed on every bank card. As well as likely being the first manufacturer to put the Snapdragon 855 inside a retail handset, the GT includes a ridiculous 12GB RAM and 512GB on internal storage. There are four cameras: two on the back (16MP and 24MP) and two on the front (16MP and an infrared 8MP). It's virtually bezel-less and does away with the notch by popping out the front-facing cameras when required. Although oddly, you'll apparently also need to do this to take a call, as that's where the earpiece lives, making the GT a weird long-lost relative of the phones used in The Matrix. It has a 6.39in OLED display (2,340x1,080), and it's powered by a 3,350mAh battery, which will make this an interesting case study for how power hungry the Snapdragon 855 is in real-world conditions. What won't be there is 5G. Lenovo has said that it hopes to make the first 5G-compatible smartphone, but it isn't this one. Which is just as well, as it would add extra cost for a feature that nobody can yet use, like putting an HDMI port in the Commodore 64. Speaking of cost, it's up for pre-order on 13 January, and the ridiculous 12GB/512GB configuration will set you back 4,398 yuan, which is around £504. There are no plans to bring it the UK, as far as we know, but expect a big old markup if it ever does show up on our shores. µ

THREE YEARS AGO, when spooked by Facebook's success and habit of eating other social networks' lunch, Twitter decided to do something drastic. To keep users engaged, it had to make sure the tweets it showed people were the most exciting, so it let algorithms take over, surfacing the ‘most interesting' tweets first, and doing away with the reverse-chronological timeline it had launched with in 2007. After three years of users moaning (perhaps Twitter didn't see the tweets, as algorithms decided they weren't the "most interesting"), the company is bringing it back. Kind of. Why "kind of"? Well, a few reasons. Firstly from a slightly pedantic viewpoint, it's only today if you own an iPhone. The web and Android versions will be coming in the next few weeks. But more importantly, the algorithm isn't going away: Twitter is just giving you a switch in the top right-hand corner of your timeline that will toggle between best and reverse-chronological. When you press the button - a little sparkly icon - things will temporarily appear as they happen, making it more useful for watching along with live events in real time. The Oscars, an election or the World Cup, say. This will revert to algorithmic sorting after a time, but apparently, Twitter will learn from your choices and if you keep pressing it, then it'll become the default. Which brings us to the third reason, Twitter is only ‘kind of' bringing back reverse-chronological tweets: you've actually had the ability to turn them on all the time, it's just a setting that's buried away from all but the most curious user. Go to Settings > Account > Content and under Timeline you'll find a box labelled "Show me the best Tweets first". Untick that, and you'll get a Twitter experience close to how it was back in 2007. Only with far more jerks, bots and jerky bots. Still, while this isn't entirely new, it's nice that Twitter is making it a bit more obvious now, and apparently it's already having a small impact. Keith Coleman, Vice President of Product at Twitter told The Verge that those who have been testing the toggle have "participated in more conversations than average." That makes sense: who are you more likely to reply to? Somebody who just said something interesting, or somebody who said something interesting eight hours ago? µ

APPLE REALLY WANTS you to watch its latest Carpool Karaoke episodes. So much so, that it has been pushing notifications to iPhone users - something the company views as a big no-no in its own developer guidelines. No, Apple. Bad. Desperate unsolicited push notifications are bad. pic.twitter.com/LOPUppKuwu — nilay patel (@reckless) December 15, 2018 Apple's App Store policies are quite clear on this point. "Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information," Apple writes. "Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges," the guidelines continue, though somehow we can't see Apple giving Apple a slap on the wrist. To add insult to injury, the notification - which seems to have been doing the rounds on December 7 and again on December 14 - doesn't appear to be based on preferences. Both people who watch Carpool Karaoke and those that don't have been strongarmed into watching episodes featuring Kendall Jenner, Hailey Baldwin, Jason Sudeikis and the Muppets. Yes, this is one of those rare situations where the show might actually be more annoying than the notification. It doesn't bode well for Apple's long-standing plans to get into original programming in a big way. With anything vaguely controversial reportedly blackballed by Tim Cook, it wouldn't be surprising if these notifications became a staple of Apple's promotion tactics going forwards - unless the backlash is so loud it can't be ignored. Hey @Apple if I ever get a notification like this again I'm switching to Samsung pic.twitter.com/mpGKYXiSka — Lex (@Just_John10) December 8, 2018 It's pretty easy to dismiss the alert and prevent the app from ever bothering you again, but that's not really the point. Apple clearly knows this kind of nagging is annoying, otherwise, it would let its developers do it with their apps. Perhaps the fact that Apple rides roughshod over its own rules is a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that while these tactics are unquestionably annoying, they remain infuriatingly effective. µ

THE GALAXY S10 looks set to be Samsung's most interesting smartphone yet, with talk of 5G support, an in-display fingerprint scanner and a ludicrous quad-camera setup. And some rumours speculate that there could be as many as four Galaxy S10 models, including an 'ultra-premium' Plus-branded variant and a cut-price 'budget' version. We've rounded up everything we know about Samsung's incoming Galaxy S10 lineup so far, and will update this article as we hear more. Release date Samsung will reportedly unveil the Galaxy S10 ahead of next year's MWC at a standalone event on 20 February. The phone will be available for preorder from that date, and will then be released on 8 March. Price According to a report at Gizmodo, the so-called 'budget' Galaxy S10 will offer 12GB storage and retail for £699, the regular S10 will offer 128GB or 512GB storage for £799 and £999, respectively, and the S10 Plus will offer 128GB, 512GB and 1TB variants priced at £899, £1,099 and an eye-watering £1,399. Latest news 19/12/18: The Galaxy S10 might have just suffered its first in-the-wild leak, after allegedly being sighted on a South Korean subway. The device was spotted by Twitter user inss0317 and first reported by WCCFtech, which asserts that the leaked image (below) shows off the S10 with its barely-there top and bottom bezels and its in-screen camera located in the top right corner. 17/12/18: UK retailer MobileFun has prematurely showcased its range of Galaxy S10 accessories, adding weight to rumours that the flagship could offer a triple-lens camera setup. The cases (below), made by Olixar, show that the S10 will look somewhat similar to its Note 9 sibling with its bulky dimensions and horizontal camera array. However, they also appear to show an additional camera lens, adding credibility to recent leaks that pointed to standard/wide/tele camera setup for the Galaxy S10. 14/12/18: The latest Android Pie beta has added weight to rumours that the Galaxy S10 will boast an 'ultra-wide' camera. As reported by SamMobile, the beta includes a toggle switch in the camera settings that will see ultra-wide images are saved without distortion. However, the report notes that this lens correction feature may just be for the A7 (2018) and A9 (2018), and Samsung has yet to comment. 12/12/18: Gizmodo, citing a source at a "major tech retailer", has revealed Samsung's Galaxy S10 launch plans. Three models - the regular S10, a Plus model and a cheaper 'flat'' model - will launch ahead of next year's Mobile World Congress at an Unpacked event on 20 February, according to the report. The phone will be available for preorder from that date, and will then be released on 8 March. Gizmodo also has the skinny know how much the device will cost; the so-called 'budget' model will offer 12GB storage and retail for £699, the regular S10 will offer 128GB or 512GB storage for £799 and £999, respectively, and the S10 Plus will offer 128GB, 512GB and 1TB variants priced at £899, £1,099 and an eye-watering £1,399. There's not much info on the rumoured 5G variant, but Gizmodo notes that 5G services won't be available on the S10 at launch, with its source claiming that they won't arrive until "late Q2 at the earliest." 10/12/18: An alleged prototype of the Galaxy S10 Plus has surfaced offline, suggesting that it could adopt a corner notch. Posted by SlashLeaks (below), the image suggests that rather than an Honor View 20-esque cutout, the flagship could adopt a chunky notch in the top right corner to house what looks like a dual camera setup. Evleaks doesn't agree, however, as he posted images over the weekend that depict three Galaxy S10 models with centrally-placed 'punch-hole' cutouts. A case manufacturer's expectations for the Galaxy S10 lineup: pic.twitter.com/lrExjvalcb — Evan Blass (@evleaks) December 8, 2018 5/12/18: A mega-leak courtesy of 91Mobiles and OnLeaks has given us a full rundown of the Galaxy S10 Plus. Leaked renders of the flagship show off the handset's near bezel-less screen, quad camera setup and Samsung's front-facing camera cutout, which looks set to house two front-facing cameras to facilitate the firm's improved face recognition technology. 91Mobiles also ‘confirms' that the S10 Plus will pack a 6.4-inch dual-curved edge AMOLED display, an ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint scanner similar to that seen on the OnePlus 6T, and a 3.5mm headphone jack alongside its USB-C port. The handset will measure in at 157.5 x 75.0 x 7.8mm, according to the leak, but will bulk-out to 9mm thanks to its protruding rear camera setup. 3/12/18: At least one variant of the Samsung Galaxy S10 could pack a whopping 12GB RAM. That's according to a report from Hong Kong's GF Securities, which claims that Samsung's incoming flagship will be the first to pack 12GB RAM; more than the 10GB RAM set to be stuffed inside the McLaren edition OnePlus 6T. The same report claims that Samsung will increase internal storage to 1TB; the kind of spec you'll usually find on a high-end laptop. GF Securities doesn't tell us much else we don't already know but notes that the Galaxy S10 will be available in white, black, yellow and green versions, some of which will be Huawei-a-like gradients. 30/11/18: The Galaxy S10+ has been spotted on AnTuTu, packing Samsung's newly-announced Exynos 9820 processor. Shown-off earlier this month, Samsung's next-gen Exynos SoC is its first to come with a neural processing engine (NPU) onboard, which means AI-centric tasks can be carried out on the chip itself. The firm also boasted that the processor will offer a 20 per cent boost in single-core performance compared to its predecessor, and a 40 per cent improvement in power efficiency. At the time, Samsung didn't say when we'd first be seeing its Exyos 9820 in the wild, but a new benchmark result from AnTuTu suggests it'll be making its debut inside the Galaxy S10. The benchmark, shared by Ice Universe (below), is allegedly for the Exynos-powered version of the Galaxy S10+ kitted-out with 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage. The device scored a respectable 325,076 on the benchmarking platform, trumping the Huawei P20 Pro's score of 273,295 but failing to match the iPhone XS, which tops AnTuTu's rankings with a score of 352,405. This is the first score（325076） of the Galaxy S10+, using the Exynos9820 processor from AnTuTu Bemchmark. pic.twitter.com/IRYlAvtVgL — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) November 27, 2018 The Galaxy S10+ will likely also launch with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 chip in certain markets, and this variant could topple Apple's flagship. A device running the next-gen flagship SoC has been spotted on AnTuTu with a score of 362,292. 23/11/18: The Galaxy S10 could eliminate bezels completely and won't adopt an iPhone-style notch, if a leaked screen protector is to be believed. The screen protector was leaked in a video shared by Ice Universe (below), and if legit, shows that the bezels on Samsung's Galaxy S10 will be almost non-existent. Galaxy S10 Screen Protector！ pic.twitter.com/LPn6OSOBAd — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) November 22, 2018 It won't adopt a screen cutout like the majority of new Android flagships, and despite recent rumours that the S10 would be among the first to feature a 'punch hole' selfie camera - adopting Samsung's recently-teased 'Infinity O' display technology - there's no sign of the camera hole in this latest leak. 21/11/18: Samsung is prepping a variant of the Galaxy S10 with 5G support and six cameras, according to the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper, citing "people familiar with the matter", reports that Samsung is planning to launch four variants of the Galaxy S10, including a 6.7in model - codenamed Beyond X - that will support 5G and pack six cameras; two in the front and four around the back. Adding weight to rumours of an MWC unveiling, the WSJ notes that Samsung will unveil this model in mid-February, but notes that its release will depend on the availability of 5G networks. It's unclear if the model handset will make it to Blighty, though; the report notes that Samsung is in talks with AT&T, T-Mobile and South Korean networks. The other three Galaxy S10 models won't be quite so ridiculously-specced, as the WSJ reports that they'll offer screens between 5in and 5.4in, and will offer between three and five cameras. However, the handsets might add a reverse wireless charging feature that would allow the handsets to wirelessly juice other devices, similar to Huawei's Mate 20 Pro. The WSJ also has some info on Samsung's barely-teased foldable 'Galaxy F' smartphone, which it claims could launch as the 'Galaxy Flex'. 13/11/18: The incoming Samsung Galaxy S10 will feature both a selfie camera and fingerprint scanner embedded into its display. At least that's according to notorious tipster Evan Blass, who tweeted on Tuesday (below) that the Galaxy S10 will be the first to feature a 'punch hole' selfie camera - adopting Samsung's recently-teased 'Infinity O' display technology. Instead of the controversial notch, this display will include a small hole in the top-left corner that houses the front-facing camera. Few preliminary Galaxy S10 details: - "Punch hole" style selfie cam cutout (sounds like Infinity-O display). - Ultrasonic, in-display FPS - Three rear cameras (standard/wide/tele) - One UI over Android Pie — Evan Blass (@evleaks) November 13, 2018 If Blass' latest predictions are on the money, the Galaxy S10 will also be the first Samsung flagship to feature an in-display fingerprint scanner. This will be an ultrasonic sensor, like that found on the OnePlus 6T and Huawei Mate 20 Pro. Elsewhere, the tweet adds weight to earlier rumours that the S10 will feature a triple-camera setup on its rear and Samsung's new 'One' UI served on top of Android Pie. Samsung's Galaxy S10 lineup, - which will reportedly include standard, plus-sized and budget models - is expected to make its debut at MWC next year, with a 5G model to follow in March. 27/10/18: Samsung will launch three Galaxy S10 models next year, according to a report at Bloomberg. Backing up earlier predictions by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Bloomberg's sources tell it that the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus will pack curved OLED screen with "almost no bezel" and an embedded fingerprint sensor. There won't be a notch, the report claims, with the front camera visible and tucked under the screen. Around the back, the S10 models will pack a Huawei-rivalling triple camera setup, and on the bottom, there won't be a 3.5mm headphone jack. Samsung is also plotting a "cheaper" variant of the S10, according to Bloomberg's sources, which won't boast the curved 'edge' screen that has been a hallmark of Samsung's phones since the Galaxy Note Edge in 2014. However, it might come with an in-display fingerprint sensor "depending on costs", the sources add. And backing up recent rumours out of Korea, the report claims that the Galaxy S10 will be Samsung's first 5G-capable smartphone. The firm is reportedly in talks with Verizon to launch a 5G version of the Galaxy S10 to the US, although it's unclear the model will be offered here in Blighty. The Bloomberg report also spills the beans on Samsung's long-rumoured foldable smartphone, codenamed 'Winner'. Despite speculation that the device could launch at Samsung's Developer Conference next month, the firm is reportedly still deciding whether the device will fold out vertically or horizontally. The device, tipped to arrive as the Galaxy X, won't feature an in-screen fingerprint scanner due to "technical difficulties|, but will offer users' an extra 4in display that can be used when the phone is closed. Samsung, naturally, didn't remark on the rumours, instead saying in a statement: "We're continually evolving our smartphone portfolio to provide our customers with new and exciting innovations and experiences. At this time, we don't have anything to share about future devices. Please stay tuned." 12/10/18: The Galaxy S10 could be the last Samsung flagship to retain the 3.5mm headphone jack. So says ET News, which reports that while the Galaxy S10 will likely keep the port, Samsung is planning to remove the headphone jack on either the Galaxy Note 10 or Galaxy S11. Instead, the company will rely on a combination of the phone's USC Type-C port and a bundled headphone dongle, according to the report. ET News doesn't say why Samsung would want to get rid of the headphone jack but speculates that, like other manufacturers, the company simply wants to save space for other parts. 3/10/18: A new report has detailed the triple camera setup that Samsung will shove onto the Galaxy S10. As per the report, seen by SamMobile, the Galaxy S10 will feature the same 12MP f1.5/2.4 variable aperture lens as the Galaxy S10, alongside a "super wide-angle" 16MP f/1.9 lens with a 123-degree field of view and a 13MP f2.4 aperture sensor. The report notes that the wide angle lens won't feature optical image stabilization and autofocus. This triple-camera setup looks set to feature on the highest-spec Galaxy S10 model, according to SamMobile. An "affordable" model will feature a single camera lens, while the standard Galaxy S10 will reportedly boast a dual camera setup. 24/8/18: A slip-up by Samsung has hinted that it'll be launching four different versions of the Galaxy S10. According to XML files hidden inside the firm's Android 9.0 update, spotted XDA-Developers, the four devices are codenamed 'beyond 0', 'beyond 1', 'beyond 2', and 'beyond 2 5G'. This adds weight to recent rumours that Samsung is planning to launch a 5G variant of the S10. According to online murmurs, this model will pack near-identical specs to the Galaxy S10 Plus (or 'beyond 2') but will feature additional sensors to facilitate 5G comms. While the leak doesn't tell us much else about the devices, XDA notes that all four handsets will likely launch with next-gen silicon from Samsung or Qualcomm (the Exynos 9820 or Snapdragon 8150), while the 5G model likely will pack either Qualcomm's Snapdragon X50 or Samsung's own Exynos 5100 modem. 17/9/18: The Galaxy S10 could pack a 19:9 aspect ratio display, according to leaked benchmarks. The HTML5test benchmarking tool published results of an SM-G405F running Android 9.0 Pie. While it's unconfirmed that this model number related to the Galaxy S10, SamMobile reports that the benchmark lists a resolution of 412 x 869 pixels, higher than the 412 x 846-pixel resolution listed for the Galaxy S9, suggesting the mysterious device will join Samsung's flagship S-Series lineup. While the listing doesn't tell us much else, these figures do suggest that the Galaxy S10 could pack a taller, 19:9 display, as opposed to the 18:5.9 aspect ratio on the Galaxy S9. This is backed up by recent rumours that the flagship will boast noticeably reduced bezels compared to its predecessor. These leaked benchmarks come hot on the heels of DJ Koh, CEO of Samsung's mobile biz, confirming that design changes to the Galaxy S10 will be "very significant". Speaking to Chinese media, Koh suggested that the firm's 10th-anniversary smartphone will be more than an incremental update - as the S9 was to the S8 - adding the S10 would be offered in "amazing" new colours. 10/9/18: The Galaxy S10 will reportedly be Samsung's "most expensive" smartphone yet, thanks to its added 5G tech. So says Korean website The Bell, which reports that Samsung will release a 5G version of the Galaxy S10 that could make the iPhone XS look cheap. The report notes that the model, which will feature the same specs as the S10 Plus, will require "four to five more antennas" than current 4G handsets, before concluding that "price of the series can be the most expensive." Besides its added 5G modules and high-end price-tag, The Bell reports that the S10 model will feature a 6.44in display and will be - along with the S10 Plus - the first S-series smartphone to arrive equipped with a dual camera on the front and a triple camera on the rear. The S10 lineup, set to be revealed at next year's CES, could be released "before and after March 5, when domestic mobile operators start 5G service", the report notes. 28/8/18: Samsung will equip all three Galaxy S10 models with an in-display fingerprint sensor, according to a report at The Investor. While earlier reports had suggested that the 'entry-level' S10 model would miss out on the scanner, it's now being reported that all three models will feature the in-screen tech. According to The Investor, the two high-end models will reportedly have an ultrasonic display-based fingerprint sensor, while the entry-level model will get an optical fingerprint sensor. "The two high-end Galaxy S models will come fitted with an ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint scanner while the other one will house an optical fingerprint sensor beneath the screen," an official from the display industry told the website. The ultrasonic sensor, which likely will be supplied by Qualcomm, will create 3D mapped fingerprint to scan a users' digits, making it more accurate than traditional scanners. It's not affected by grease, sweat or light, according to the report. The optical sensor, which will be 'three times cheaper' than the ultrasonic alternative, works like a digital camera, capturing a two-dimensional image of a fingerprint. It's not as accurate as the scanner set to debut on the two high-end S10 models, and will struggle to scan fingers if they're dirty, too wet or too dry, or if external lights get in the way. 25/7/18: Samsung is reportedly designing its own GPU that will sport an "entirely new design" and could make its debut in the Galaxy S10. The news, first broken by Graphic Speak and later corroborated by reliable tipster Ice Universe (below), claims that Samsung is developing an in-house GPU that delivers "leading performance/watt" in simulations. Samsung's self-designed GPU is the first new GPU design in the industry in 10 years. The GPU sports a novel architecture that could make it broadly useful from smartphones to supercomputer, with the best formance/watthttps://t.co/8IugvzR9HL — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) July 24, 2018 The GPU will sport an all-new architecture that could make it work in everything smartphones to supercomputers, according to an analyst briefed on the work. "This is really a big deal — it's the first new GPU design in 10 years," said Jon Peddie, principal of Jon Peddie Research. The Samsung GPU could "put it on par with Apple," Peddie added. "This design is so good, they could deploy it in every platform — it's a function of their ambition. If I owned it, it would be in everything including cockpits and supercomputers." The GPU, developed by Samsung newbie Dr. Chien-Ping Lu, a graphics veteran who previously worked at Nvidia and MediaTek, is expected to first appear in a Samsung Exynos smartphone processor - a sign that it could crop up in the firm's 10th anniversary Galaxy S10. The company has not decided whether it will license the technology, according to the report. 20/7/18: The Samsung Galaxy S10 will have significantly smaller bezels than its S9 predecessor, according to the latest rumours. While the Galaxy S9 was pretty much a carbon copy of the Galaxy S8 before it, despite rumours that it would boast significantly smaller bezels, it looks like Samsung has been saving these big upgrades for its 10th anniversary Galaxy S release. According to Twitter tipster Ice Universe, the Galaxy S10's screen to body ratio will be "greatly improved" compared to the S9. There's no word on specifics, but it's likely the Samsung will eliminate the bottom bezel on the device to achieve a screen to body ratio of around 90 per cent. Galaxy S10's screen to body ratio will be greatly improved. — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) July 20, 2018 Currently, the Galaxy S9 has a screen-to-body ratio of around 84 per cent. In a follow-up tweet, Ice Universe also suggests that the S10 will offer improvements in the battery department, saying: "If you use the more sophisticated packaging technology SLP, then the battery is definitely bigger than the S9, and the Samsung president said that he is working hard to solve the charging speed problem." 18/7/17: Qualcomm has shown off an early prototype of its ultrasonic fingerprint scanner that's expected to debut on the Galaxy S10. According to Twitter tipster Ice Universe, Samsung will be among the first to work with Qualcomm's in-display fingerprint scanning technology. He quotes Samsung CEO Dj Koh as saying that the S10 won't adopt an optical fingerprinting solution because "optical fingerprinting can cause a bad user experience." DJ Koh said that the Galaxy S10 does not use an optical fingerprinting solution because optical fingerprinting can cause a bad user experience. Otherwise, Samsung could adopt it two years ago. We will bring a better screen fingerprinting experience for S10. — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) July 16, 2018 Qualcomm's ultrasonic tech, tested by CNET, "uses sound waves to generate a map of your fingerprint, with the wave of pressure bouncing off the contours of your skin." The technology, which could spell the end of the physical home button, also offers a number of advantages over optical scanners, the report notes. It can scan a finger if it's wet, has a lag time of just 250 milliseconds, boasts a one per cent rejection rate and is measures in at just 0.15mm, so it won't result in chunky smartphones. Qualcomm has confirmed that the tech will start showing up in smartphones next spring. 17/7/18: Apple guru Ming-Chi Kuo has turned his attention for Samsung and is predicting that the Galaxy S10 will come in three sizes. In a report seen by Business Insider, Kuo says he expects the Galaxy S10 to be made available in 5.8in, 6.1in and 6.4in models - almost identical to the sizes that Kuo expects Apple's 2018 iPhones to come in. Adding weight to recent rumours, Kuo expects the larger two S10 models to include in-display fingerprint sensors, and the smaller model to include a fingerprint sensor on the side. Kuo adds that Samsung will "aggressively" promote the on-screen fingerprint scanning - likely because it's a feature Apple's not planning to include on its incoming iPhones. Kuo predicts Samsung could ship 40 million Galaxy S10 phones next year, mostly the two larger models - no doubt the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus. Samsung could also ship 14 million to 16 million Galaxy Note 10 phones next year, according to the report. 10/7/18: Samsung's Galaxy S10 Plus will arrive kitted out with five (five!) cameras, The Bell reports. Samsung is reportedly planning three Galaxy S10 models for 2019, with earlier rumours claiming the highest-spec Galaxy S10 Plus will include a P20 Pro-rivalling triple-lens rear camera setup, much like Apple's incoming iPhone X Plus. Korean website The Bell is now reporting that the S9 Plus successor will also feature a dual-camera setup on its front, likely to enable face-scanning tech similar to Apple's Face ID. Earlier rumours claimed Samsung's easily-fooled iris scanner will be replaced by a 3D-sensing camera on next year's S10 lineup. The report also has some more information on the S10 Plus' rumoured triple-lens setup, which will allegedly comprise a wide-angle lens, a telephoto lens, and a new 16MP, 120-degree ultra wide-angle lens. The standard Galaxy S10 (codenamed 'Beyond 1') and entry-level ('Beyond 0') models aren't expected to offer such high-end camera credentials, though. The S10 will offer the same tri-camera setup on the back but only one on the front, according to the report, while 'Beyond 0' will reportedly come with a standard two cameras - one on the front and one on the back. 9/7/18: Samsung is planning a 'budget' version of Galaxy S10 that won't feature an in-display fingerprint scanner, according to The Bell. Adding weight to earlier rumours (below), the Korean website reports that Samsung is developing three variants of the Galaxy S10, codenamed 'Beyond 0', 'Beyond 1' and 'Beyond 2'. The Bell states that while the latter two will be high-end devices that will feature screen-embedded fingerprint sensors, Beyond 0 will the first "entry-level" device in Samsung's S series lineup. This model won't feature an in-display fingerprint scanner, according to the report, and will instead feature a side-mounted sensor similar to that seen on Moto Z3 Play and past Sony devices. If legit, this will be the first time that Samsung adopts such positioning for a fingerprint sensor, with The Bell noting that it's likely to be located along on the right edge of the user's thumb. The decision to exclude an in-display fingerprint sensor on the Beyond 0 variant has been reportedly made, unsurprisingly, to cut costs. The Fingerprint on Display (FOD) tech on the S10 series, set to be supplied by chipmaker Qualcomm, costs $15 per module, according to the report - seven times more expensive than the $2 module currently found on Samsung's flagship phones. 26/6/18: Samsung might be planning to release three new Galaxy S10 devices next year, according to Korean website ET News. The report, which cites "multiple industry officials participating in the development of the next Galaxy S series", claims that Samsung is planning to follow in the footsteps of Apple, which will also allegedly launch three new devices later this year. The first device, codenamed 'Beyond 0', will reportedly feature a 5.8in screen and a single-lens camera setup, much like the current Galaxy S9. This will be joined by the ‘Beyond 1', which will also feature a 5.8in screen but will sport an upgraded dual camera setup. The 'Beyond 2', ET News claims, will pack a larger 6.2in screen, and likely will arrive as the Galaxy S10 Plus. It'll also sport a triple-lens camera similar to that seen on the Huawei P20 Pro if the report is to be believed. ET News doesn't have much else to say about the trio of incoming S10 models, but notes that Samsung is not yet ready to launch its first foldable smartphone - the Galaxy X - and is "rushing to develop it". According to recent rumours, it'll arrive at next year's MWC, with the S10 set to launch a month earlier at CES. 25/6/18: Samsung's Galaxy S10 will reportedly ditch the iris scanner in favour of an Apple-style 'Face ID' sensor. So says a report from South Korean website The Bell, which has heard from unnamed sources that the Galaxy S10 will adopt a 3D-sensing camera on its front that will replace the current, easily-fooled iris scanner. This won't be the only form of authentication on the device, as the report claims Samsung will also equip the S10 with an in-display fingerprint sensor. This, The Bell claims, is being developed by Qualcomm, Synaptics and the Taiwanese Institute of Technology, although the report notes that Samsung might "revise its strategy" should the tech not be ready in time for the smartphone's rumoured January launch. The report doesn't give much else away, but does note that - like the firm's previous releases - there will be two variants: the 58in Galaxy S10 and 6.3in Galaxy S10 Plus. 21/6/18: An alleged prototype of the Samsung Galaxy S10 shows that the flagship could adopt an iPhone X-schooling all-screen design. An image of the prototype was posted to Twitter by notorious tipster Ice Universe (below). While he doesn't specifically mention the Galaxy S10, his use of the word 'beyond' - believed to be the codename for Samsung's upcoming flagship - all but gives it away. This may be a design beyond. pic.twitter.com/lViQUsW1Jv — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) June 20, 2018 The hands-on picture shows that, if legit, the Galaxy S10 could adopt a full-screen design similar to that seen on the Oppo Find X - which would give it a 93 per cent-ish screen-to-body ratio, up from the 83.6 per cent ratio found on the Galaxy S8 and S9. Like the Oppo Find X, there's no sign of a front-facing camera - or indeed any sensors - on the front of the device, suggesting that Samsung could be next in line to adopt a pop-up front-facing camera rather than an iPhone X-style notch. Earlier this month, we heard that Samsung might avoid adopting an display cutout by equipping the S10 with futuristic, sound-emitting display tech. Before you get your hopes up, though we find it hard to believe that the so-called ‘prototype' shows gives a legitimate picture of the Samsung's 2018 flagship given that the launch of the flagship is at least six months away. According to recent rumours (below), the Galaxy S10 is likely to make its first official appearance at next year's CES in Las Vegas. 14/6/18: Samsung will avoid sticking a notch on next year's Galaxy S10 by adopting to futuristic, sound-emitting display tech, says ETNews. The Korean publication report that Samsung, along with LG, is gearing up to debut 'sound-emitting displays' on its smartphones starting next year, having previously shown off prototypes of the technology at the SID expo last month. This display tech will allow sound through to be emitted through a phone's screen, removing the need for a front-facing earpiece and, in turn, an iPhone X-style display cutout. This means that Samsung, if it was to adopt a pop-up selfie camera like the recently-announced Vivo Nex, could push the screen on the S10 all the way to the top edge of the device. 16/5/18: Samsung is reportedly planning to equip next year's Galaxy S10 with a ridiculously-sharp display that'll blow the iPhone X out of the water. According to Twitter tipster Ice Universe, the Galaxy S10's screen resolution is going to exceed 600ppi - trumping the iPhone X's 458ppi and the Galaxy S9's 570ppi screen. Rumored that the screen resolution of the Galaxy S10 will exceed 600PPI — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 14, 2018 It remains to be seen the display will match the eye-popping brightness of the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, though, which packs a 5.8in 3840x2160 4K screen with a pixel density of 760ppi. As well as a souped-up screen resolution, the Galaxy S10 is also expected to feature a screen to body ratio of 93 per cent - improving on the Galaxy S9's 83.6 per cent ratio. Further, it's looking, it's looking increasingly likely that the Galaxy S10 will the first Samsung's phone to feature an in-screen fingerprint reader after Ice Universe tweeted that the ultrasonic tech won't make it to the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. "It is almost certain that Note9 has no FOD [Fingerprint-reader On Display]", read the tweet. 4/5/18: Rumours claim Samsung will launch its Galaxy S10 flagship in January 2018, with plans to launch its long-awaited foldable smartphone at MWC in February. Korean newspaper The Bell, naturally, reports that the Samsung Galaxy S10 is likely to see an official unveiling at CES in January, with the "procurement of parts" to begin in October. While this isn't the first time we've heard that Samsung might launch its next flagship smartphone ahead of schedule, this rumour has a bit more meat. The Bell claims that the S10's launch has been pushed forward to make room for its long-rumoured foldable 'Galaxy X' smartphone. Samsung has reportedly asked suppliers to start supplying component for the smartphone this November, with plans to unveil the handset at MWC. The so-called Galaxy X will feature a"fold-in structure", The Bell notes, comprising three 3.5in OLED panels. The front of the product will reportedly be equipped with two 3.5in panels to create a 7in screen, with an additional 3.5in display on the rear. 3/5/18: Samsung's Galaxy S10 is codenamed "Beyond" and will be the first to feature a screen-embedded fingerprint sensor, according to Korean news outlet The Bell. Citing the "parts industry" as its source, the website claims that Samsung's 'Beyond' codename is fitting for the firm's 10th-anniversary flagship, with the firm aiming to "go beyond" what it has already achieved in the smartphone market. To do that, the Galaxy S10 will be the first Samsung smartphone to be kitted out with Fingerprint on Display (FOD) tech, according to the report, which notes that the firm has attempted to introduce the feature since the Galaxy S8 but failed due to "technical difficulties". Samsung will manage to embed a fingerprint sensor into the Galaxy S10's AMOLED screen, The Bell claims, although it's unclear who will be providing the firm with the futuristic tech. It is not currently known if the Galaxy S10 will also feature iPhone X-a-like 3D sensing technology on the front. "Unlike FOD, partners in the 3D sensing module are not detecting mass-production movements," one electronics industry official said. 18/4/18: The Galaxy S9 may be just weeks-old, but Samsung has reportedly finalised the design of next year's Galaxy S10. So says Korean website The Bell, which claims that Samsung's 10th-anniversary Galaxy S series phones will arrive early next year equipped with an in-display fingerprint scanner and a 3D sensing camera, similar to that found on the iPhone X. The handset's under-screen fingerprint sensor, the report claims, is currently being developed by Qualcomm and Synaptics in the US, and Aegis Tech in Taiwan. The Galaxy S10 and S10+ will likely be the first Samsung smartphones to come equipped with the tech, with recent reports noting that, despite earlier rumours, the Galaxy Note 9 is unlikely to carry the feature. The Galaxy S10's rumoured 3D-sensing module is being developed by camera firms Mantis Vision and Woodgate, The Bell notes. Further details about this feature remain vague, but it likely will offer iPhone X-style face-unlock functionality, improving on Samsung's current, and somewhat lacklustre iris-scanning solution. Elsewhere, the Korean report debunks speculation that the Galaxy S10 will feature the foldable AMOLED screen that we've heard so much about, and instead claims that Samsung will stick to same curved Infinity displays found on this year's S9 and S9+. The screens are allegedly getting bigger, though, with the S10 and S10 Plus tipped to feature 5.8in and 6.3in panels, respectively, 0.03in and 0.08in larger than their predecessors. That's all The Bell has to give, but an earlier report claimed that - somewhat unsurprisingly - the Galaxy S10 and S10+ will be powered by Samsung's as-yet-unannounced Exynos 9820 SoC, that's expected to debut inside the Galaxy Note 9. Samsung's Exynos variants are typically released in Europe, with Qualcomm's next-gen Snapdragon 855 processor set to power its US-bound version. Samsung, naturally, hasn't commented on the rumours. µ

Suppose you were building a cartel—a group of business interests who coordinate to fix high prices that consumers must pay. How would you design it? Received economic wisdom says transparency among cartel members is crucial: If colluding suppliers share information, they can keep prices high and monitor members of the cartel to make sure no one deviates from the cartel's norms. A newly published paper co-authored by MIT economist Alexander Wolitzky offers a different idea: Firms do not have to share information extensively in order to collude. Indeed, the paper contends, extensive information-sharing can help firms undercut cartels and gain market share for themselves. "If I'm thinking about entering your market, which I'm not supposed to do, but if I'm tempted to do it, then I can do it better if I have this information about your market," Wolitzky says. The corollary, he notes, is that there appear to be cases where "by not sharing information about their pricing behavior, the firms make it easier to sustain collusion." The paper is thus a rethinking of an important policy topic: In the U.S., Europe, and across the world, governments are charged with regulating cartels and collusion, in an attempt to ensure that consumers can benefit from market competition. Given the prevailing notion that data-sharing helps cartels, firms investigated for price-fixing can argue that they must not be illegally colluding if the evidence shows they have not been extensively sharing information with other businesses. "Because of this conventional wisdom that firms that collude share a lot of information, a firm's defense is, 'We weren't sharing so much information,'" Wolitzky says. And yet, as the new paper suggests, that level of cooperation may not be necessary for collusion to occur. The paper, "Maintaining Privacy in Cartels," is by Takuo Sugaya, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Wolitzky, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Economics; it appears in the December issue of the Journal of Political Economy. What's the whole story? The current paper adds to a body of academic literature whose best-known component is "A Theory of Oligopoly," a 1964 paper by economist George Stigler, which describes how the availability of information should help cartels maintain their grip on prices. Some subsequent empirical work also shows that in some conditions, increased transparency helps cartels sustain themselves. Sugaya and Wolitzky do not deny that a degree of transparency among cartel members helps collusion occur, but they complicate this picture by introducing alternate circumstances, in which less transparency helps cartels thrive and more transparency undercuts them. "We're investigating the generality of this [older] result, and whether it tells the whole story," says Wolitzky. The paper by the scholars builds a new model of firm behavior oriented around the "home-market principle" of collusion, in which cartels reduce the competitive supply of products in each other's markets—which may often be segmented by geographic reach. North American and European firms in the same industry, in this scenario, would stay away from each other's territory, thereby reducing competition. In the study, the authors contend that there are three effects that increased transparency has on cartels. Transparency within cartels enables firms to keep each other in check, and it helps them coordinate prices—but it also "lets individual firms tailor deviations to current market conditions," as they write in the paper. This last point, Sugaya and Wolizky assert, has been seriously underexplored by scholars in the past. In the model they propose, the "deviation gain"—what happens when a firms leaves the cartel—"is strictly larger when all prices and quantities are observable," that is, when the firm has more information about its erstwhile collaborators. Real cartels, low transparency The proposition that a relative lack of information-sharing coexists with collusion is not just an arbitrary function of the authors' model, but something supported by empirical evidence as well, as they note in the paper. The European Commission, for instance, has uncovered several cartels that seemingly made a point of limiting transparency: The firms in question largely shared just industry-wide sales data among all members, not extensive firm-level data. These low-transparency cartels include industries such as plasterboard production, copper plumbing tube manufacturing, and plastics—all of whom structured their collusion operations around intermediaries. Those intermediaries—industry associations, in some cases—handled the sensitive information and only distributed small portions of it to the individual firms. A more vivid example comes from a graphite manufacturing cartel, as Sugaya and Wolitzky recount. At a meeting of cartel representatives, each member secretly entered their own sales data into a calculator passed around the room, in such a way that the firms could only learn the industry-wide sales volume, not the specific sales data of each firm. Such examples indicate that "conventional wisdom may not tell the whole story" when it comes to cartels and transparency, Sugaya and Wolitzky write. To be sure, the new theory developed by the scholars does not propose a uniform relationship between transparency and collusion; it all depends on the circumstances. "It would be nice to have a very thorough characterization of when more information among cartel members makes colluding easier, and when it makes it harder," Wolitzky says. In the new model, Sugaya and Wolitzky do suggest that greater transparency corresponds with collusion specifically in volatile business conditions, which may necessitate more robust long-term projections of sales and demand. By contrast, given less volatile, more consistent consumer demand over time, firms need less transparency to deviate from tacit collusion agreements and undercut their erstwhile cartel partners. As the authors acknowledge, firm behavior within cartels, in a variety of these circumstances, could use further study.

A deep learning approach originally designed to teach computers how to play video games better than humans could aid in developing personalized medical treatment for sepsis, a disease that causes about 300,000 deaths per year and for which there is no known cure. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in collaboration with researchers at the University of Vermont, is exploring how deep reinforcement learning can discover therapeutic drug strategies for sepsis by using a simulation of a patient's innate immune system as a platform for virtual experiments. Deep reinforcement learning is a state-of-the-art machine learning approach originally developed by Google DeepMind to teach a neural network how to play video games, given only pixels as input and the game's score as a learning signal. The algorithms often exceed human performance, despite not being given any knowledge about the mechanics of the game. LLNL's deep learning approach treats the immune system simulation developed by their collaborators as a video game. Using outputs from the simulation, a "score" based on patient health and an optimization algorithm, the neural network learns how to manipulate 12 different cytokine mediators—immune system regulators—to drive the immune response to infection back down to normal levels. The research appears in a paper published by the International Conference on Machine Learning. "It's a complex system," said LLNL researcher Dan Faissol, principal investigator of the project. "Previous investigations have thus far been based on manipulating a single mediator/cytokine, generally administered with either a single dose or over a very short course. We believe our approach has great potential because it explores much more complex, out-of-the-box therapeutic strategies that treat each patient differently based on the patient's measurements over time." The treatment strategy the researchers propose is adaptive and personalized, improving itself on a feedback loop by continually observing cytokine levels and prescribing drugs specific to the individual patient. Each run of the simulation represents a different patient type and different infection initial conditions. "The challenge was to keep things clinically relevant," explained LLNL researcher Brenden Petersen, the technical lead for the project. "We had to ensure that all aspects of the simulated problem were relevant in the real world—that the computer wasn't using any information that wouldn't really be available in a hospital. So, we only provided the neural network with information that can actually be measured clinically, like cytokine levels and cell counts from a blood draw." Using the agent-based model with deep reinforcement learning, researchers identified a treatment policy that achieves a 100 percent survival rate for the patients on which it was trained, and a less than 1 percent mortality on 500 randomly selected patients. "The simulation is mechanistic in nature, which means we can virtually experiment with drugs and drug combinations that haven't been tested before to see if they might be promising," Faissol said. "The number of possible treatment strategies is huge, especially when considering multi-drug strategies that vary over time. Without using simulation, there's no way to evaluate all of them. The hard part is discovering a strategy that works for all patient types. Everyone's infection is different, and everyone's body is different." Playing video games may help researchers find personalized medical treatment for sepsis LLNL’s deep learning approach treats the immune system simulation developed by their collaborators as a video game. Using outputs from the simulation, a “score” based on patient health and an optimization algorithm, the neural network …more The team's research has shown that this adaptive approach can lead to novel insights, and the researchers hope to convince others to adopt the approach on sepsis and other diseases. "Our grand, long-term vision is a 'closed-loop' bedside system where measurements from a patient are fed into a decision-support tool, which then administers the correct drugs at the correct doses at the correct times," Petersen said. "Such treatment strategies would first have to be vetted and fine-tuned in wet-lab and animal models, eventually informing real treatments." Petersen said most of the hardware to execute such a closed-loop system already exists, as with simpler systems like insulin pumps that constantly monitor the blood and administer insulin at the right time. The Lab's deep reinforcement learning approach has yet to be tested in the real world, but based on the success using the simulation, the National Institutes of Health awarded LLNL and the University of Vermont researchers with a five-year grant to continue the work, primarily on sepsis but also on cancer. "This is an exciting project," said Gary An, a critical care physician at the University of Vermont and computational scientist who developed the original version of the sepsis simulation. "This is an incredibly novel project that brings together three cutting-edge areas of computational research: high-resolution multi-scale simulations of biological processes, extension of deep reinforcement learning to biomedical research and the use of high-performance computing to bring it all together." LLNL's director of Bioengineering Shankar Sundaram described the approach as "an illustrative example of the Lab contributing to the development of a potential therapeutic solution to a complex health problem critical to our biosecurity mission, applying and advancing our state-of-the-art capabilities in scientific machine learning and targeting improved causal, mechanistic understanding." LLNL researchers also have initiated a collaboration with Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida to see if a similar approach could learn effective drug therapy strategies using a simulation of cancer. Moffitt released a video game version of their simulation called "Cancer Crusade" that runs on mobile phones. "One strategy is to crowdsource the learning by analyzing treatments recorded from the top scoring players around the world," Petersen said. "We applied our deep learning approach and want to see how our computed treatments stack up against the top players—a 'man vs. machine' showdown." The sepsis project also has led to a new effort at LLNL researching adaptive and autonomous cyberdefense strategies using simulation and deep reinforcement learning.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a recipe for a renewable 3-D printing feedstock that could spur a profitable new use for an intractable biorefinery byproduct: lignin. The discovery, detailed in Science Advances, expands ORNL's achievements in lowering the cost of bioproducts by creating novel uses for lignin—the material left over from the processing of biomass. Lignin gives plants rigidity and also makes biomass resistant to being broken down into useful products. "Finding new uses for lignin can improve the economics of the entire biorefining process," said ORNL project lead Amit Naskar. Researchers combined a melt-stable hardwood lignin with conventional plastic, a low-melting nylon, and carbon fiber to create a composite with just the right characteristics for extrusion and weld strength between layers during the printing process, as well as excellent mechanical properties. The work is tricky. Lignin chars easily; unlike workhorse composites like acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) that are made of petroleum-based thermoplastics, lignin can only be heated to a certain temperature for softening and extrusion from a 3-D-printing nozzle. Prolonged exposure to heat dramatically increases its viscosity—it becomes too thick to be extruded easily. New composite advances lignin as a renewable 3D printing material Using as much as 50 percent lignin by weight, a new composite material created at ORNL is well suited for use in 3D printing. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory But when researchers combined lignin with nylon, they found a surprising result: the composite's room temperature stiffness increased while its melt viscosity decreased. The lignin-nylon material had tensile strength similar to nylon alone and lower viscosity, in fact, than conventional ABS or high impact polystyrene. The scientists conducted neutron scattering at the High Flux Isotope Reactor and used advanced microscopy at the Center for Nanophase Materials Science—both DOE Office of Science User Facilities at ORNL—to explore the composite's molecular structure. They found that the combination of lignin and nylon "appeared to have almost a lubrication or plasticizing effect on the composite," noted Naskar. "Structural characteristics of lignin are critical to enhance 3-D printability of the materials," said ORNL's Ngoc Nguyen who collaborated on the project. Scientists were also able to mix in a higher percentage of lignin—40 to 50 percent by weight—a new achievement in the quest for a lignin-based printing material. ORNL scientists then added 4 to 16 percent carbon fiber into the mix. The new composite heats up more easily, flows faster for speedier printing, and results in a stronger product. New composite advances lignin as a renewable 3D printing material ORNL scientists have created a new composite material for additive manufacturing that makes use of lignin, a biofuels byproduct. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory "ORNL's world-class capabilities in materials characterization and synthesis are essential to the challenge of transforming byproducts like lignin into coproducts, generating potential new revenue streams for industry and creating novel renewable composites for advanced manufacturing," said Moe Khaleel, associate laboratory director for Energy and Environmental Sciences. The lignin-nylon composite is patent-pending and work is ongoing to refine the material and find other ways to process it.