Older People Using TikTok To Defy Ageist Stereotypes, Research Finds

Older TikTok users are using the online platform, regarded as the virtual playground of teenagers, to defy ageist stereotypes of elderly people as technophobic and frail. The Guardian reports: Research has found increasing numbers of accounts belonging to users aged 60 and older with millions of followers. Using the platform to showcase their energy and vibrancy, these TikTok elders are rewriting expectations around how older people should behave both on and off social media. “These TikTok elders have become successful content creators in a powerful counter-cultural phenomenon in which older persons actually contest the stereotypes of old age by embracing or even celebrating their aged status,” said Dr Reuben Ng, the author of the paper Not Too Old for TikTok: How Older Adults are Reframing Ageing, and an assistant professor at Yale University. Interestingly, said Ng, most TikTok elders are women who “fiercely resist common stereotypes of older women as passive, mild-mannered and weak, instead opting to present themselves as fierce or even foul-mouthed,” he said. […]

The paper looked at 1,382 videos posted by TikTok users who were aged 60 or older and had between 100,000 and 5.3 million followers. In total, their videos, all of which explicitly discussed their age, had been viewed more than 3.5 billion times. Ng found that 71% of these videos — including those from accounts such as grandadjoe1933, who has 5.3 million followers, and dolly_broadway, who has 2.4 million followers — were used to defy age stereotypes. A recurring motif was the “glamma”, a portmanteau combining “glamorous” and “grandma”, with videos including those of a 70-year-old woman joyfully parading around the streets in a midriff-bearing top.

Almost one in five of the videos analyzed made light of age-related vulnerabilities, and one in 10 called out ageism among both younger people and their own contemporaries. Other videos positioned older users as superior to younger people. “I may be 86 but I can still drink more than you lightweights” says one clip. “I may be 86 but I can still twerk better than you,” says another, showing an octogenarian leaping up from a fall down the stairs with a twerk.

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Solar-Powered Desalination Device Wins MIT $100K Competition

The winner of this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is commercializing a new water desalination technology. MIT News reports: Nona Desalination says it has developed a device capable of producing enough drinking water for 10 people at half the cost and with 1/10th the power of other water desalination devices. The device is roughly the size and weight of a case of bottled water and is powered by a small solar panel. The traditional approach for water desalination relies on a power-intensive process called reverse osmosis. In contrast, Nona uses a technology developed in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics that removes salt and bacteria from seawater using an electrical current.

“Because we can do all this at super low pressure, we don’t need the high-pressure pump [used in reverse osmosis], so we don’t need a lot of electricity,” says Crawford, who co-founded the company with MIT Research Scientist Junghyo Yoon. “Our device runs on less power than a cell phone charger.” The company has already developed a small prototype that produces clean drinking water. With its winnings, Nona will build more prototypes to give to early customers. The company plans to sell its first units to sailors before moving into the emergency preparedness space in the U.S., which it estimates to be a $5 billion industry. From there, it hopes to scale globally to help with disaster relief. The technology could also possibly be used for hydrogen production, oil and gas separation, and more.

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FreeBSD 13.1 Released

FreeBSD 13.1 has been released today. Some of the new features include UEFI boot improvements for AMD64, a wide variety of hardware driver improvements, and support for freebsd-update to allow creating automated snapshots of the boot environment to try to make operating system updates foolproof. Phoronix reports: Some of the other changes with FreeBSD 13.1 include enabling Position Independent Executable (PIE) support by default on 64-bit architectures, a new “zfskeys” service script for the automatic decryption of ZFS datasets, NVMe emulation with Bhyve hypervisor, chroot now supports unprivileged operations, various POWER and RISC-V improvements, big endian support improvements, support for the HiFive Unmatched RISC-V development board, updating against OpenZFS file-system support upstream, and many other changes throughout this BSD open-source ecosystem. Downloads and the full change-log for FreeBSD 13.1 can be found here.

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‘I Want An iPhone Mini-Sized Android Phone!’

Eric Migicovsky, founder of smartwatch company Pebble and lover of small Android phones, decided to take matters into his own hands and “rally other fans of small phones together” to put pressure on phone manufacturers to consider making a small Android phone — complete with all the premium features one could expect to find in a larger device. Essentially, what he wants is an iPhone Mini-sized phone running Android. Is that too much to ask?

Here’s an excerpt from his manifesto (via smallandroidphone.com): My Dream Small Android phone
Optimizes for only 3 things:

– Sub 6″ display, matching size and design of iPhone 13 Mini
– Great cameras
– Stock Android OS

If you can hit these three bullets, you’ve built the perfect phone. Currently there are ZERO premium Android phones with less than 6″ displays. No amount of money can buy one right now. Focus on these three bullets, all other specs are flexible.

Price: $700-800 (again, we have no alternatives so we should be willing to pay a bit more!) In a call-to-action, Migicovsky asks readers who agree with him to sign up on this page to help “convince a manufacturer to build us our dream phone.” He adds: “If no one else makes one I guess I will be forced to make it myself, but I really really don’t want it to come to that!”

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Hong Kong Considers Blocking Telegram As Part of Crackdown On Doxing

‘Black Mirror’ Returns For Season 6

According to Variety, a new series of “Black Mirror” is in the works at Netflix. From the report: It’s been almost three years since Season 5 of the dystopian drama premiered on the streaming service in June 2019, but sources indicate that a new anthology series of “Black Mirror” is shaping up, and casting is now underway. While details about specific stories are being kept under lock and key, Variety understands that Season 6 will have more episodes than Season 5, which comprised of just three instalments and starred Andrew Scott, Anthony Mackie, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Topher Grace and Miley Cyrus. A source close to the production tells Variety that the latest season is even more cinematic in scope, with each installment being treated as an individual film. This is, of course, in line with recent seasons of “Black Mirror,” for which episodes usually exceeded 60 minutes and had incredibly high production values.

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Judge Rules California Law Requiring Women On Corporate Boards Is Unconstitutional

A Los Angeles judge has ruled that California’s landmark law requiring women on corporate boards is unconstitutional. CBS News reports: Superior Court Judge Maureen Duffy-Lewis said the law that would have required boards have up to three female directors by this year violated the right to equal treatment. The ruling was dated Friday. The conservative legal group Judicial Watch had challenged the law, claiming it was illegal to use taxpayer funds to enforce a law that violates the equal protection clause of the California Constitution by mandating a gender-based quota.

The state defended the law as constitutional saying it was necessary to reverse a culture of discrimination that favored men and was put in place only after other measures failed. The state also said the law didn’t create a quota because boards could add seats for female directors without stripping men of their positions. Although the law carried potential hefty penalties for failing to file an annual report or comply with the law, a chief in the secretary of state’s office acknowledged during the trial that it was toothless.

The law required publicly held companies headquartered in California to have one member who identifies as a woman on their boards of directors by the end of 2019. By January 2022, boards with five directors were required to have two women and boards with six or more members were required to have three women. The Women on Boards law, also known by its bill number, SB826, called for penalties ranging from $100,000 fines for failing to report board compositions to the California secretary of state’s office to $300,000 for multiple failures to have the required number of women board members. Fewer than half the nearly 650 applicable corporations in the state reported last year that they had complied. More than half didn’t file the required disclosure statement, according to the most recent report.

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Google Lets Personal Users Stay On ‘No-Cost Legacy G Suite’ With Custom Gmail Domain

Back in April, Google delayed when G Suite legacy free-edition users had to start paying for Workspace. The company will now let you stay on a “Free Legacy Edition of G Suite for personal use” as the “no-cost” alternative in a rather notable policy change. 9to5Google reports: This “no-cost” option is for people that aren’t interested in paying for Workspace but want to retain access to their data and not just export via Google Takeout. For the past few months, people have been waiting to join a waitlist for this alternative. In a change of plans, there’s no longer a waiting list, and these old users can sign-up for no-cost Legacy G Suite now. Head to your account’s Google Admin Console as there are many reports of it going live this afternoon. You have until June 27 to pick a transition path.

Most notably, you can “continue using your custom domain with Gmail.” […] Besides the custom Gmail domain, you will “retain access to no-cost Google services” and “keep your purchases and data.” […] However, you must confirm to Google that your usage is for non-commercial personal use: “Google may remove business functionality from this offering and transition businesses to Google Workspace. Additionally, this option will not include support.”

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Georgia Gets a Second Electric Vehicle Facility? Hyundai Plans $7B Plant

Hyundai is expected to announce that it’s building “a massive electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia,” reports the Associated Press, citing a U.S. official “familiar with the anticipated announcement.”

The plant is expected to bring thousands of new jobs to Georgia.
The plant could grow to include 8,500 employees and would be built on a 2,200-acre (890-hectare) site that state and local governments own near the hamlet of Ellabell, Georgia, said two people familiar with Georgia’s talks with Hyundai…. The second person said Hyundai would invest more than $7 billion and could also build some cars powered by gasoline engines at the site, with an announcement in Georgia set for May 20…

It would be the second massive electric vehicle plant announced in Georgia in less than a year. Rivian Automotive in December announced it would build a $5 billion, 7,500-job electric truck plant about 45 miles (70 kilometers) east of Atlanta.

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Luna Cryptocurrency’s Collapse Led to Multi-Million-Dollar Exploits, Closure of a Crypto Money Market

The Record reports that the decentralized money market Venus Protocol “announced on Thursday evening about $11 million had been lost due to people exploiting the historic collapse of the Luna cryptocurrency and its sister stablecoin UST.”
Venus Protocol and several other platforms use Chainlink to provide its users with real-time price estimations of the tokens on its platform that are available for lending and borrowing. But the tool began having issues with Luna on Thursday as the price continued to fall precipitously. “As a result, it was possible to deposit UST and LUNA as collateral and borrow other tokens, with an underpriced collateral valuation….” decentralized finance researcher Vali Dyor explained.
Venus Protocol says they became “aware of errant price behavior for LUNA,” and “Upon investigation, it was learned that the price feed had been paused by Chainlink due to extreme market conditions.”

“The price on Venus was last listed at about $0.107 while the market price was $0.01. In order to de-risk this situation, the protocol was paused using PauseGuardian via multisig. Upon this desyncing event, it was discovered that 2 accounts had suspiciously deposited a sum of 230,000,000 LUNA valued at over $24,000,000. Assets were borrowed totalling around $13,500,000.”

Venus Protocol has a “Risk Fund” that will be used to cover the shortfall, the Record reports. But they added that Venus Protocol wasn’t the only one having problems:

As the price of Luna cratered overnight, exchanges and markets were forced to make difficult choices on how to approach the cryptocurrency. Binance stopped all trading of Luna and UST on its platform but the moves have done little to stop all cryptocurrency values from being depressed across the board.

DeFi platform Blizz Finance announced that it was attacked in the same way Venus Protocol was, but they did not release an estimate on the losses incurred. But they said the protocol was “drained” before it could stop the process.

And then Blizz Finance posted a post-mortem early Sunday morning:

Large amounts of LUNA were deposited and used to drain all available lendable assets… Prior to the incident the Chainlink team did attempt to notify us that the oracle would pause, however we did not receive the message in time. We were unaware of Chainlink’s minimum price circuit breaker. This behaviour is not mentioned anywhere within Chainlink’s documentation…

Blizz has no treasury or development fund and a significant portion of the stolen assets belonged to our team. As such we regret to announce the protocol has been paused and we do not intend to resume operations. We will be shutting down the front-end and closing official communication channels in the coming days….

We are very sorry for the losses incurred by our users. We thank the community for their support on this journey and deeply regret that this is how it came to an end.

They posted one additional detail on Twitter. “We are reaching out to a Chinese community who is believed to have doxxed individuals who participated in the attacks.”

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