https://medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes/52-things-i-learned-in-2016-299fd1e6a62b#.sjtk4d2zqSome select items:
Call Me Baby is a call centre for cybercriminals who need a human voice as part of a scam. They charge $10 for each call in English, and $12 for calls in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. [Brian Krebs]
Google’s advertising tools can track real-world shop visits. If a customer sees an ad then visits the relevant store a few days later, that conversion will appear in Google Adwords. Customers are tracked via (anonymised) Google Maps data. They’ve been doing this since 2014. [Matt Lawson]
A Japanese insurance company is offering policies that cover social media backlash. [Tyler Cowen]
There are six million iPhones in Iran, despite them being banned by both the Iranian government and international sanctions. [Christopher Schroeder]
A Californian company called Skinny Mirror sells mirrors that make you look thinner. When installed in the changing rooms of clothes shops, they can increase sales by 18%. [Kim Bhasin]
In Hong Kong, you can buy a $15,000 device called an IMSI Catcher which harvests the mobile phone numbers of everyone walking past, collecting up to 1,200 numbers a minute. [Ben Bryant]
Uber — which offers bank accounts to new drivers who don’t have their own account — is the largest acquirer of small business bank accounts in the USA today. [Brett King]
In 2013, the Dubai Government launched a scheme encouraging healthy living by offering a gramme of gold for every kilo of weight lost. [Nancy Shute] (see also: 48 things I learned while designing a new bank in Dubai)
PornHub used 1,892 petabytes of bandwidth in 2015, equivalent to filling all the storage on all of the iPhones sold in 2015 with porn. [Yana Tallon-Hicks]
Lyft recruits, trains and manages new drivers almost entirely via text messages from disposable Twilio VOIP phone numbers. [The Driver]
El Paquete is the underground Cuban Internet; a 1TB hard disk filled with US music, films, TV shows, magazines and smartphone apps, passed around by street dealers. You can copy what you like for $8 a week. “My friends assure me, El Paquete and chill is definitely a thing” [Wil Fulton]
Twitter has enough money in the bank to run for 412 years with current losses. [Matt Krantz]
Most iPhone case manufacturers don’t get advance notice from Apple about new designs; they rely on rumours. Case maker Hard Candy went out of business after producing 50,000 custom-moulded cases for a leaked iPhone design that never appeared. [Tim Fitzsimmons]
Projects at the ‘Stupid *expletive deleted*it that no one needs and terrible ideas’ hackathon in February included a browser plugin that hides content but shows ads, a 3D cheese printer and a Dark Web wedding list service. [Sam Lavigne & Amelia Winger-Bearskin]
To reduce PTSD in drone pilots, military psychologists have considered developing a Siri-like app for the pilots. The pilots would ‘let crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens. Siri, have those people killed.’ [Robbie Gonzalez]
Japan Airlines serves KFC to economy class travellers during the Christmas season. The in-flight KFC has 15% more salt to compensate for the lower pressure and humidity. [Alison Fensterstock]
A Dutch bike manufacturer reduced shipping damage by 70–80% by printing a flatscreen TV on their boxes. [May Bulman]
In rural China, farmers sometimes steal natural gas in huge plastic bags. A bag of natural gas is enough fuel for up to one week. [Hi She]
iPhone maker Foxconn has replaced more than half its workforce with robots since the iPhone 6 was launched. [Ben Lovejoy]
