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While the Internet burned with the ongoing problem of the Heartbleed bug, which forced people everywhere to reset their passwords and double check their drives, the tech world chugged along in bizarre fashion. Everything from lab-grown sex organs to an Oculus Rift nature documentary made headlines, though you might have missed these stories in the avalanche of worry-mongering. To help catch you up, here’s nine tech stories from this week that you might have missed but definitely shouldn’t have.
Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, NewYorker.com, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.
Lab-Grown Vaginas Successfully Implanted Into Women
It sometimes feels like we live in an age of the fiction turning real. This week The Verge picked up a story about human vaginas being grown in a laboratory, and then implanted into women who'd been born with a rare genetic condition that causes girls to be born with underdeveloped or missing vaginas.
"[Life] does not end knowing that you have the disease," one of the patients said, "because there is a treatment and you can have a normal life." Place your bets now for how long it will take for size-obsessed men to crack the code for penis-replacement surgeries.
Read the story here.
New Study Finds Twitter Surprisingly Accurate at Predicting Unemployment
This week a study run through the University of Michigan published its findings suggesting Twitter posts could be used to predict whether or not the person had a job or had been fired. The Washington Post's Emily Badger describes the challenges of parsing Twitter language about employment, which can hinge on vague phrases like "let go," or how it could be misunderstood as people arguing about the politics of employment, instead of talking about their personal situations. The researchers settled on 10 signal phrases to search for and found that their unemployment statistics were eerily similar to those published by the Department of Labor. It's just another example of how social media, and the amount of posts we put up, could be revealing more than we know.
Read the story here.
Condoleezza Rice Joins Dropbox's Board of Directors
Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice joined the board of Dropbox this week, hoping to help the cloud storage company with international expansion and security. Rice's addition raised a number of concerns about the company's trustworthiness moving forward because of, as The Wire's Brian Feldman points out: she authorized wiretaps on UN officials without first obtaining a warrant, and had general support for state-driven surveillance.
The move underscores how difficult it can be to find companies that are both technically secure and ethically trustworthy. As Feldman notes, perhaps the only true way to store your data without having to worry about who's accessing it is to "put everything on a portable drive, encase it in cement, and bury it deep in the ground where only you can find it, hiding the record of its location within a series of complex riddles and puzzles."
Read the story here.
Call of Duty Turns into a Spectator Sport with $1 Million Prize
Could there be a LeBron James of Call of Duty? This week the third annual Call of Duty World Finals took place in Los Angeles, with players competing for a $1 million top prize. The phenomenon of eSports has been around for decades, but over the last few years the niche industry has slowly begun transforming itself, with League of Legends, Dota 2, and Starcraft II tournaments filling stadiums around the world. Writing for The Guardian, Keith Stuart describes how Call of Duty is the newest addition to this trend, with a sporting focus on team and tactics. "Victory doesn't just go to the competitors with the quickest trigger fingers," he writes, "it goes to the one's who communicate with their comrades most effectively. Information is as vital a currency as ammunition."
Read the story here.
Holograms Are the Future of Concerts
Holograms are becoming increasingly used, appearing everywhere from airport kiosks to Coachella's main stage. Recently MIA and Janelle Monae got in on the act by appearing in each other's concerts at the same time, though they were 3,000 miles apart. In a story for Vice's Creators Project, Abdullah Saeed reports on how this virtualization of the music star is only going to expand in the future, like it already had with fictional personas Hatsune Miku and Gorrillaz. With pop sensations like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Justin Beiber already being more of a constructed spectacle than not, we seem only a few years away from a tipping point where our idols aren't even real people. Some are now experimenting with 3D projections that can be viewed from all sides. Martin expects the next step to be photorealism. "Is it real? Is it not? You're not necessarily going to know,' [musical performance director Chris Martin] predicts."
Read the story here.
The Baby Madness on Your Facebook Feed is an Illusion
A grand cliché of social media is that it's filled with posts about babies and brunch. Writing for Wired this week, Clive Thompson reports on how our perceptions of the frequency of these posts is really off, and that it's the babies and brunch posts that poke through the noise because we do care about them, even if they're not what we think we want to see. Researchers found "new mothers post [on Facebook] less than half as often. When they do post, fewer than 30-percent of the updates mention the baby by name early on, plummeting to not quite 10 percent by the end of the first year."
Read the story here.
Airbnb Hides Warning That Users Are Breaking the Law
Housing laws can be among the most complicated and locally-specific of any in the country. Reporting for ValleyWag, Nitasha Tiku discovers how Airbnb encourages users to post their own places for rent while obscuring warnings that doing so may be illegal in their state or city, as is the case in New York where all sublets cannot be shorter than 30 days, and in San Francisco where a special permit is required to sublet for less than 30 days.
Tiku made a number of sample postings to see if Airbnb provided any information about local laws and found in every case that the warning was hidden so deeply in the site's jargon and paperwork that no one was going to see it. This may seem like a small detail, but as Tiku notes, a number of people have suffered serious consequences for their Airbnb postings, including one San Francisco couple that was evicted after subletting their apartment through the site.
Read the story here.
How to Become Virtually Immortal
Escaping death is an old human fantasy, and one new company is trying to build a business model out of it. Writing for the New Yorker, Laura Parker explains Eterni.me's promise of collecting a dead person's entire online history, analyzing it, and creating an automated version of them to keep their likeness "digitally alive" for friends and family.
"A hundred years down the track you might not only be able to talk to your mom who died a year ago, but to your grandmother who died when you were sixteen, and your great-grandmother who died before you was born," Susan Bluck, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, tells Parker. "So it means that we could, in some way, forge relations with ancestors who lived and died well before our own lifetime."
Read the story here.
David Attenborough Planning Next Documentary on Oculus Rift
When Facebook bought virtual reality headset-maker Oculus Rift, it was clear the technology would be used for more than playing games, though what exactly that would mean was still up in the air. This week a small piece of that picture became clearer when famed British documentarian David Attenborough announced his next film, Conquest of the Skies, would be created specifically for Oculus Rift. The nature documentary currently shooting in Borneo will be filmed with an eight camera rig to produce a full 360-degree view for audiences that have Oculus Rift.
"I think we'll see millions of these things [Rift headsets] being sold," director John Morris told Real Screen. "In terms of the creative challenge, we look at this as being comparable to the beginning of the film industry."
Read the story here.