An iPhone application that attempts to detect whether ISPs are throttling online services is now available on Apple’s App Store, despite Apple originally refusing to allow it onto iPhones and iPads.
The Wehe app has been available for iOS at this link since last night. It had already been available for Android on the Google Play store for at least a month.
Wehe tests the speeds of YouTube, Amazon, NBCSports, Netflix, Skype, Spotify, and Vimeo in different ways and uses variances in measured results to judge whether or not traffic is being throttled to your device.. But Apple initially refused to let the app into the App Store, telling its creator that “your app has no direct benefits to the user.”
Apple quickly changed course after news articles were written about the rejection.
Apple’s app store review team “mentioned something about how there are lots of apps that claim to do something they cannot possibly do (e.g., medical diagnosis from sensors that don’t exist), and so they have to be careful,” Wehe app creator David Choffnes told Ars after the app was allowed on the store.
Although the app can be downloaded now, the testing system’s servers may be under heavy load today. We’ve gotten some error messages and delays and can’t seem to finish running any tests.
Choffnes is a Northeastern University professor who researches distributed systems and networking. He’s gathering data for a study on Internet providers’ treatment of different kinds of Internet traffic. A summary of the data collected so far is available here.
“Our goal is to understand differentiation (e.g., throttling policies) worldwide and how they evolve over time,” Choffnes told Ars.
The summary data says 573 users have run 3,355 tests, and that 10.7 percent of tests revealed “differentiation.” The results may reflect video policies that carriers have disclosed, such as Verizon throttling smartphone videos to 480p or 720p quality, or T-Mobile’s “Binge On” video optimization.
We’d hesitate to say any individual results prove the existence of throttling that carriers haven’t disclosed publicly. As we noted yesterday, testing whether a carrier is throttling is complicated because online services themselves play a major role in service quality, and numerous other network variables can affect throughput. How each web service is structured, what content delivery methods or networks they use, the distance from a user to a service’s closest CDN node, and other factors can affect speeds.
Choffnes said that his research team took steps to minimize the effects other network variables might have on the results. “We use our own servers for our tests, and we run multiple tests to rule out transient performance issues that would lead to false positives,” he said.
Still, the app might provide some interesting and useful information to iPhone and Android users, especially now that the Federal Communications Commission has repealed its net neutrality rules that ban blocking and throttling. (The rules are still in place for at least 60 more days.)
Speed testing services can be used to detect slowdowns before carriers admit to them. In July, Verizon Wireless customers noticed that Netflix’s speed test tool appeared to be capped at 10Mbps; Verizon acknowledged the new speed limit after users noticed it, and later expanded the video throttling policy across its network.
“I think the important thing is to provide transparency so that users can actually compare ISPs and use knowledge of their policies to make more informed decisions,” Choffnes said.
Hosni Kalaya set fire to himself in the same weeks that Mohamed Bouazizi died from doing so in 2011 in Tunisia. He fears he inspired his brother’s self-immolation in 2015.
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Hosni Kalaya set fire to himself in the same weeks that Mohamed Bouazizi died from doing so in 2011 in Tunisia. He fears he inspired his brother’s self-immolation in 2015.
Ruth Sherlock/NPR
In downtown Tunis, Hosni Kalaya watches from the sidelines as Tunisians celebrate the seventh anniversary of the country’s revolution. A wide-brimmed baseball cap keeps in shadow his face, badly disfigured by burn scars.
Kalaya is the less well known instigator of Tunisia’s 2011 uprising. Like Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit seller who set himself on fire after police confiscated his fruit cart, Kalaya’s self-immolation in those same weeks also caused Tunisians to take to the streets in protests that ultimately forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from power.
But for 42-year-old Kalaya, Jan. 14 marks a much grimmer moment: He sees it as the anniversary of the moment he inspired his half-brother’s suicide.
“My brother was younger than me and always looked to me for inspiration,” he says. “I feel guilty, because I feel that somehow gave him the idea to do this.”
In 2015, five years after Kalaya’s desperate act, Saber Khalfati, his 25-year-old half-brother, walked to a garden near his home, poured a can of gasoline over himself and lit the match.
Khalfati was not alone. In recent years, self-immolation in Tunisia has gone from being relatively rare to commonplace.
Manoubia Bouazizi (center) holds signs showing her son Mohamed, along with her daughters, Basma (left) and Leila, in 2011. Mohamed’s self-immolation in December 2010 was part of the spark of the revolution that later ousted a dictator in Tunisia.
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Manoubia Bouazizi (center) holds signs showing her son Mohamed, along with her daughters, Basma (left) and Leila, in 2011. Mohamed’s self-immolation in December 2010 was part of the spark of the revolution that later ousted a dictator in Tunisia.
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Dr. Mehdi Ben Khelil, a physician at the Charles Nicolle hospital in Tunis, took part in a nationwide study that compared self-immolation fatalities in Tunisia before and after the 2011 revolution. The study, which looked at cases between 2006 and 2015, found that the number tripled since the uprising.
Khelil also has data from a more recent, still unpublished study. “I have also the figures from 2017, and I can tell you we still have three times more the cases of self-immolation as before the revolution,” he says.
Before the revolution, an average of 10 to 12 people per year died due to self-immolation, Khelil says. Now that figure has risen to an average of 30 to 40 people per year.
Dr. Amen Allah Messadi, the head of the intensive burns unit at the Ben Arous hospital in Tunis — the main burn ward in the country — has noticed a significant increase in the number of patients admitted to the hospital due to self-immolation.
He did a study that found 25 such patients were admitted in 2010. In the years since the 2011 revolution, that number grew and has remained significantly higher. In 2016, 102 such patients were admitted. Last year, it was 88 people.
Khelil says that in the months immediately after the 2011 revolution, this could be explained by what’s known as the “copycat effect,” when people imitate an action by a celebrity or one that has been widely discussed in national and international media.
“We saw pictures of Mohamed Bouazizi and his family everywhere,” Khelil says. “He got posthumous prestige.”
This effect generally is expected to last a short while.
“We would expect a decrease three years after the revolution,” he says. “But what we have observed is that this increase remains high, even until now.”
He says most of the people who set themselves on fire are young men, mainly living in urban areas, who are unemployed or day laborers.
Most used to be single. But, Khelil says, he’s noticed an increase in recent months in self-immolation cases by married men.
The psychological profile of the average victim is changing, too. Before the revolution, says Khelil, self-immolation victims often had a history of mental illness. But now, more and more people with no previously recorded psychological problems are doing this.
A statue of a fruit cart in the main square of Sidi Bouzeid, dedicated to Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit vendor who died in 2011 after setting himself on fire.
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A statue of a fruit cart in the main square of Sidi Bouzeid, dedicated to Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit vendor who died in 2011 after setting himself on fire.
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“We have people who know what they doing,” he says.
To better understand this, Khelil says, you have to consider poverty. Tunisia is struggling with an economic crisis, and many Tunisians, especially young Tunisians, cannot find jobs. Youth unemployment is at 35.4 percent, according to the World Bank.
This is bitterly disappointing for Tunisians who hoped for a better future.
“People were expecting a lot just after the revolution; they were waiting to improve themselves, to improve their economic capacities. And slowly they are losing hope,” says Khelil.
Kalaya says his half-brother Khalfati set himself on fire after he lost his job as a cleaner in a hospital in their hometown of Kasserine.
“He did it because he wanted to be heard,” says Kalaya.
Khalfati had seen how Kalaya suffered from his self-immolation. Kalaya spent a year in the hospital, mostly unconscious. He says doctors were shocked that he even survived.
When he woke, he could barely recognize his own reflection. Now, skin grafts cover his neck and face; scars drag down his lips. His ears are half-burned away, and his hands reduced to stubs.
But, Kalaya says, it’s impossible to understand the pain of setting yourself alight until you have experienced it. He remembers feeling terror and regret and smelling his own flesh singeing seconds before he lost consciousness.
Touti Ferid, 38, shows his burn scars in his home.
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Touti Ferid, 38, shows his burn scars in his home.
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“If anyone really knew the pain they were going to experience,” says Kalaya, “they would never have done it.”
Khelil, the doctor, says many of “today’s self-immolation cases [are] intended as a way of getting attention, often from government officials with the power to give them a job.”
“It’s become a manner of communication. By self-immolating, the victim will have the opportunity to share his problems with others: He forces others to witness the act, and they often hope to force officials to take action on their case,” he says.
Touti Ferid, 38, is a self-immolation survivor in Subaytilah, a town not far from Sidi Bouzeid, where Bouazizi the fruit seller set himself on fire. He speaks with NPR on the steps of the town hall where, in December 2016, he set himself in flames.
He says it was an act of desperation. He graduated in computer science in 2009, but has never been able to find a job in his field. He spent years making trips to the town hall to speak to officials about securing a public-sector job — any job. The local government promised him some, he says, but they never came through. He says the jobs often went to those who could afford to bribe officials.
“November came and left, December came, and my situation didn’t change. And then my mother fell sick,” Ferid says.
One cold winter day, while he was at home with his sick mother, the electricity was cut off because they hadn’t been able to pay the bill. Something snapped inside Ferid.
“I felt helpless,” he recalls. “I couldn’t afford my mother’s health care, I couldn’t pay my electricity bill, and I have no work. And the local government humiliated me.”
Ferid bought gasoline from a local kiosk and marched through the front entrance of town hall. There, in the lobby, he set himself on fire.
“I wanted to do it there so the officials would know that I did this to myself and so they would feel responsible,” he says.
People near him in the lobby managed to put out the flames. Ferid spent the next seven months in the hospital being treated for burns thatcovered his legs and some of his chest.
Back at his home, in a simple living room, which is also where Ferid sleeps, he rolls up his pants to reveal legs covered in skin grafts and scars. Walking can be painful, and the skin is not fully healed in some places. He needs bandages for his legs, but says he can’t afford to buy them.
He still has no job, and now he has to pay the hospital for treatment fees. He says debt collectors have threatened to imprison him.
Many Tunisians who set themselves on fire and survive say they regret the act. Ferid isn’t one of them. He says he feels so hopeless he can’t promise he won’t do it again.
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“In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible," Zeynep Tufekci writes in our special issue about online free speech. But while the social internet gives everyone a voice, it also has countless ways of punishing people for speaking.
An African American writer calls out racist hate speech—and gets suspended from Facebook. A young adult author watches her unpublished novel ignite a firestorm on Twitter before anyone has even read it. A Muslim civil rights attorney self-censors, and then finds herself hoping that a white man will say what she was thinking. A well-known conservative firebrand suddenly becomes one of the biggest targets of far-right trolls. A Google engineer writes a controversial memo, and instantly becomes a villain to one army of online readers and a hero to another.
These are just a few stories—told in the subjects’ own words—that capture what it’s like to live and post in this, our corrosive, divisive, democracy-poisoning golden age of free speech.
Magda Antoniuk
HOLLY O’REILLY
Songwriter and activist
On being blocked by Trump, and suing him for it
I had an alert that would go off whenever Trump tweeted, and I would reply to most of his tweets. I think it was a Sunday morning: I posted a GIF of the Pope kind of looking at Trump funny, and my tweet said, “This is pretty much how the whole world sees you.â€
After that, my phone was very quiet all day. I thought, well, maybe he’s golfing. Then I came back to my computer in
the evening and saw that he had actually blocked me. And I just laughed. I’m nobody. I can’t be more than a gnat to him. I felt incredulous, and then amused, and then concerned, all within moments of each other. Then I started thinking, you know, this is something that shouldn’t happen.
The things that I want to say are directed not just to Trump but to the other people who are on his feed. If they’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh and following Trump’s tweets, then Twitter is at least a place where they can get an opposing opinion. But he’s blocked people who disagree with him. When you look at his feed now, it’s mainly just people who are praising Dear Leader. That’s the part that bothers me. So when the Knight First Amendment Institute contacted me, kind of out of the blue, and asked if I would be interested in talking to them about taking part in a lawsuit against Trump, I said sure. Public officials should not be able to block you on social media.
—As told to Chelsea Leu
Magda Antoniuk
LAURA MORIARTY
Young-adult novelist
On being deemed “problematicâ€
Nine months before my fifth novel, American Heart, was published, I got an email saying “There’s a discussion happening on Twitter about the problematic white-savior narrative in your novel.†I thought that was strange. The only thing that had been released was the publisher’s two-sentence description: “American Heart, about a fifteen-year-old girl who lives in a world where detainment camps for Muslim Americans are a reality; when she decides to help aMuslim woman who is in hiding, the unlikely pair set off on a dangerous journey hitchhiking their way through the heart of America, discovering courage and kindness in the most unexpected places.â€
When I looked on Twitter, there was a raging discussion saying that it was a terrible, white-Âsupremacist novel. Then, in October, Kirkus gave American Heart a starred review. It called the book “a moving portrait of an American girl discovering her society in crisis.â€
The same people who had been outraged about the description were even more outraged about the starred review. Four days later, Kirkus said it didn’t think its review was sensitive enough—even though the reviewer was a Muslim woman. Kirkus retracted the star and asked the reviewer to reflect on her language. So now it says, “It is problematic that Sadaf is seen only through the white protagonist’s filter.â€
I think much of the YA industry is cowed. These are important conversations to have, but someone screams “Racism!†and it’s like screaming “Fire!†People just start running and panicking. I’ve been compared to Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s ridiculous.
People said, “You haven’t been censored,†and I agree. I haven’t; the reviewer has been. They censored her.
— As told to Kat Rosenfield
Magda Antoniuk
JAMES DAMORE
Former Google engineer
On being fired for writing “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamberâ€
Last year I wrote an internal document calling for a more open discussion of Google’s diversity policies, citing research on average gender differences between men and women. Before it went viral, responses from coworkers ranged from “I totally agree†to “Is this true?†or “I disagree because …â€
Once it leaked, rational discussion was impossible: Extreme voices got amplified. It was all about “Oh, this sexist pig†or “Those leftists are all stupid.†One manager said, “I intend to silence these views; they are violently offensive.â€
In the real world, you interact with people near you. You might disagree with them, but you still treat them humanely. When you interact with an avatar, that’s not a person anymore. People become objectified. I was objectified as all the racism and sexism in the world.
When whole topics become taboo—like the idea that there are gender differences—many issues become impossible to solve.
An environment where employees compete and talk over one another—what I’d argue is a male-Ânormative one—hurts people who prefer to work together and build each other up. That’s disproportionately women. Many women (and some men) will feel unheard, excluded, and underappreciated, particularly because they aren’t treated as they’d treat others. But people who are unaware of these differences may see employees who don’t thrive in this environment as incompetent.
There was definitely a temptation to recant at certain points. But that would be so harmful to this discussion—because I think what I said was valid, and because it would discourage anyone else from speaking up. And that hurts everyone in the end.
— As told to Sarah Fallon
Magda Antoniuk
IJEOMA OLUO
Writer, activist, author, So You Want to Talk About Race; Editor at large, the Establishment
On being suspended from Facebook
I was in the Âmiddle of Montana on a road trip with my two sons, and the only place open was a Cracker Barrel. We were the only black people there, surrounded by Southern Americana that seemed to harken back to a time that maybe wasn’t the best for black people. To blow off steam, I made a quip on Twitter wondering if they would let my black ass walk out of there.
The next thing I knew my phone just blew up. It was surreal. Some clickbaity conservative websites were sharing my tweet as this egregious example of racism against white people. ÂPeople saw that I was on a road trip and said they hoped I would fall off the edge of the Grand Canyon. They hoped my kids and I died in a car accident. ÂPeople Photoshopped pictures of my head onto the body of a gorilla. I was seeing images of Âpeople being lynched. IÂ tried to report what I could. Twitter actually did a really good job, but Facebook was a different story. I started posting screenshots to show people what IÂ was facing.
I was at Disneyland, getting ready to take the kids out for the day, when I found out that Facebook had given me a three-day suspension for posting images of the harassment that I was getting on Facebook. I started bawling. It wasn’t even all the hate, but knowing that our most powerful social media engines were complicit. I tried my best to explain it to the kids in a way that wouldn’t make them feel like their mom was a target.
After I wrote a post on Medium about it, Facebook called to apologize. But many black activists and writers of color don’t have 115,000 followers on Twitter and 53,000 followers on Facebook, like I do, who can be mobilized to force these platforms to do the right thing. It really is the life of a black woman online.
For weeks after, the moment I got any sort of negative commentary, I would panic, my blood pressure would go up, and I’d wonder, oh God, is this going to happen again? To this day, I still get hate messages about Cracker Barrel.
— As told to Nitasha Tiku
Magda Antoniuk
BEN SHAPIRO
Cofounder, the Daily Wire; conservative pundit
On being the target of anti-Semitic abuse on Twitter
In May 2016, I posted a nice message on Twitter saying we were grateful to God that our son was born. I immediately got a flood of anti-Semitic messages about his birth, ranging from gas-chamber memes of me to talk about cockroaches and the odd racist tweet. The alt-right had been at me since March, when I came out as #NeverÂTrump. I knew they would come after me when I made political statements on Twitter, but when I’m tweeting out thanks to God for the birth of my baby son? I was taken aback by the insanity of it.
You have a choice when it comes to these things: Are you going to give it more light, more heat? Or do you try to ignore it? At that point the abuse had become so overwhelming that it was like, I can’t let go of this anymore. So we wrote about the tweets on the Daily Wire.
I didn’t file a complaint with Twitter. I am not a fan of tattling to the referee. If I have to choose between receiving a bunch of garbage on Twitter from evil people and Twitter arbitrarily deciding who to ban, I’ll take the evil garbage. What I oppose about Twitter’s policies is that Twitter does not make clear what those policies are, and they are not equally applied. If people are making death threats at me from the right, there’s a pretty decent chance Twitter will shut it down. If they are doing the same thing from the left, I’m not sure they will.
If I were in charge of Twitter, the standard would be: No threats of violence and no implications that people should do violence. That would probably include “You belong in a gas chamber.†Beyond that, have at it.
— As told to Vera Titunik
Magda Antoniuk
ZAHRA BILLOO
Civil rights attorney
On censoring myself
Years ago, on Memorial Day, I tweeted about how I feel conflicted around the holiday. I wasn’t sure how to honor people who I believe died in illegal wars. My tweets got picked up by the far right, and twisted into a narrative about how the Council on American-ÂIslamic Relations, where I work, wanted to cancel Memorial Day. My tweets didn’t come close to suggesting that, but Fox News did a story.
It escalated. I got hate mail for days on end. At work, we stopped answering the phone for a week because of the vitriol. Now we get a renewed spate of threats each Memorial Day.
Then, in 2016, at the Democratic convention, Khizr Khan gave a powerful speech. But again I felt conflicted. He was doing incredible work but on a platform that was given to him because his son had fought and died
in another illegal war. This time, though, I didn’t say anything. I was worried about fallout. I talked to others who felt as I did, but we all hesitated to voice our concerns publicly. I went to bed that night and had this very distinct thought: “I hope Glenn Greenwald will write about the irony of what the DNC was doing.†I’m a civil rights lawyer, an American Muslim woman, and I went to bed hoping that a white man would say what I felt I couldn’t.
When I was inundated with threats years back, I had been married. Now I was living alone. I look over my shoulder, I make sure all the gates are closed. My apartment complex has security cameras. I live very differently as a single Muslim woman. Some right-wing supporters of the military will say the army men died to preserve my freedom of speech. But if I use that speech, they say they want to kill me.
— As told to Maria Streshinsky
Tech, Turmoil, and the New Censorship: Zeynep Tufekci explores how technology is upending everything we thought we knew about free speech.
“Nice Website. It Would Be a Shame if Something Happened to It.â€: Steven Johnson goes inside Cloudflare’s decision to let an extremist stronghold burn.
Everything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You: Doug Bock Clark profiles Antifa’s secret weapon against far-right extremists.
Please, Silence Your Speech: Alice Gregory visits a startup that wants to neutralize your smartphone—and un-change the world.
The Best Hope for Civil Discourse on the Internet … Is on Reddit: Virginia Heffernan submits to Change My View.
This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now.
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You’ve got love simple hacks like this that give you access a tool you don’t otherwise have or can’t afford. Adam Fleisch modified $5 Harbor Freight airgun and a .77 fitting and a soda bottle to create a super-cheap but what appears to be effective sandblaster gun.
The only really futzy part was creating the 1/2″ feed hole in the blower tube using a grinding wheel. But that can be easily done. Then it’s just a matter of drilling a hole through the soda bottle, filling it was blast medium, and firing away. Not sure how robust this solution is, but for a one-time or periodic blasting work, I’d imagine this would work just fine. It certainly wouldn’t cost a lot, in money or time, to find out.
In a German murder trial in which an Afghan refugee has been accused of rape and murder, health data from the refugee’s iPhone is being used by the prosecution as proof of murder.
Hussein K admitted to raping and strangling 19-year-old medical student Maria Ladenburger in a park in Freiburg, Germany in October 2016 until she lost consciousness, according to the German website The Local. But some details of the surrounding Ladenburger’s death by drowning, which occurred directly after the assault, have been hazy. Those details include K’s age and what he was doing around the time that Ladenburger drowned in a river.
Investigators turned to his phone for some clues to what K was up to when Ladenburger drowned, employing a cyber-forensics firm to crack it when he refused to give up his passcode. The iPhone’s Health app, which comes pre-installed in iOS 8 and later, records data like how many steps he took and guesses at what kind of activity he was doing throughout that day. The data from his phone showed peaks of strenuous activity that suggested he had been climbing stairs, supporting the investigators’ theory that that he had dragged Ladenburger down a riverbank and then climbed back up. Geolocation data, meanwhile, showed he was in the area. A police officer reenacted the scene and produced similar results in the app.
The trial has been ongoing since September. A sentence is expected early this year.
Anker’s new Nebula entertainment brand officially launched its second portable projector this year at CES, and despite its shortcomings, it’s one of the most compelling new gadgets of the year.
Everyone from Elon Musk to Donald Trump wants to send a manned mission to Mars in the not too distant future, but there are quite a few problems that need to be solved before we can achieve that goal. A major one is the issue of energy. Long-term stays on Mars, or anywhere else for that matter, will require lots of energy, as will the trip back to Earth. However, loading a rocket up with all of the necessary fuel won’t work — we would need too much. So a way to create fuel on the go is a must and researchers at NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Department of Energy announced today that they’ve conducted successful tests of a system that can do just that.
Kilopower is a small nuclear reactor that can generate a reliable power supply. Versions range from 1 kilowatt — enough to power a basic toaster — to ten kilowatts and Kilopower project researchers said in a Space.com article that around four or five of the latter would be needed to power a habitat on Mars. "Kilopower’s compact size and robustness allows us to deliver multiple units on a single lander to the surface that provides tens of kilowatts of power," Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said during a press conference today.
Testing of the Kilopower system has gone smoothly so far and in March, the team plans to conduct a full-power test. To hear more about how Kilopower works, check out the video below.
