There are two things Na’ama is deeply passionate about: stanning Taylor Swift and denouncing Israeli occupation in Palestine. 

The Israeli-born fan is so fiercely for Palestine, in fact, that she says she went to prison for two months for refusing to enlist in Israel’s mandatory military service. She still managed to slide in a hot take about Swift’s pregnancy rumors, though. Twitter users are obsessed with her story. 

It started on Tuesday morning, when Na’ama tweeted a bizarre update after a two month period of laying low.

“As many of you know, I haven’t been very active in the past couple of months because I was in prison,” she said from her stan account @LegitTayUpdates, adding that she planned on returning to updating her followers on the latest Swift gossip.  Read more…

More about Twitter, Taylor Swift, Israeli Defense Force, Culture, and Web Culture

Over the past couple of years, YouTube has taken steps to tackle one of the company’s biggest challenges: the rise of toxic content on the platform.

Just recently, the company addressed misinformation with products like information cards, which fact check certain video search results. Anti-vaccination videos, which could harm the public, have been demonetized. YouTube has even promised to address its long-criticized recommendation product, so that it would stop actively promoting extremist and conspiratorial content.

There’s no doubt that YouTube is taking platform safety more seriously now than ever before. YouTube certainly wants its users to know that. However, a report from Bloomberg now shines a light on how YouTube was consistently warned about these problems by its employees well before it decided to address them. And while YouTube stresses how it’s centered on these issues over the past two years, one such rejected proposal could have helped stifle the spread of Parkland shooting conspiracies just last year. Read more…

More about Youtube, Extremism, Misinformation, Fake News, and Tech

BMW has big plans for its iNext electric and fully autonomous vehicle, but making the car will require a streamlined, coordinated, and automated manufacturing system — something Microsoft wants to help them build. 

On Tuesday, BMW and Microsoft announced a partnership to launch a new open-sourced industrial manufacturing platform called the Open Manufacturing Platform, or OMP. It’s based on Microsoft’s Azure, which BMW already uses to run its more than 3,000 machines at 30 production and assembly sites around the world.

It wasn’t immediately clear how much money each company is putting into the partnership. Read more…

More about Microsoft, Azure, Manufacturing, Bmw, and Open Source

It’s been a struggle for internet companies to contain a live streamed video of the Christchurch terror attack.

In light of this, internet service providers are teaming up to block sites which refuse to take down the video, echoing calls by police and government for people to stop sharing it.

A Vodafone New Zealand spokesperson said it was working alongside other large internet service providers in the country, such as Spark, 2Degrees and Vocus to “identify and block access to sites” distributing the video. Read more…

More about New Zealand, Christchurch, Internet Service Providers, Tech, and Cybersecurity

Get ready for head-to-head battles during your commute, as Activision and Tencent delivered details and a trailer for Call of Duty: Mobile on Monday.

Call of Duty: Mobile will take the form of a standalone, free-to-play, first-person game brimming with maps like Nuketown and Crash, along with characters and weapons from the COD series, including Black Ops and Modern Warfare. 

There’s no exact date for the game’s launch, but Activision and Tencent have announced that they’ll be releasing pre-launch beta versions of the game for folks who pre-register on the website and via Google Play. Once officially launched, the game will also be available on the iOS App Store too. Read more…

More about Mobile Games, Call Of Duty, Mobile Gaming, Entertainment, and Gaming

In Dead Pixels, we follow a group of friends who pass the majority of their time together on the green pastures of the online game Kingdom Scroll — a fictional RPG that just happens to look a whole lot like World of Warcraft.

Since the four gamer friends don’t seem to have that much to do with each other beyond Kingdom Scroll, it’s easy to see the show as a commentary on how young people are spending their lives in fantasy universes while losing touch with the outside world and the people in it.  

But according to Alexa Davies, star of the new Channel 4 comedy, that’s not the case. Dead Pixels, Davies explains, is not a commentary on the stereotypical view of gaming culture as a virtual world populated by those who feel safer online. Read more…

More about Gaming, Dead Pixels, Alexa Davies, Culture, and Movies Tv Shows

Food Network’s Chopped invokes a certain kind of screaming-at-your-TV-screen carnal energy — the baskets! the knife injuries! the leaving an ingredient off the plate when it’s sitting RIGHT THERE! 

After 10 years and 40 seasons on the air, Chopped still delivers some of the most whiplash-inducing twists on television. Like say when host Ted Allen reads out a seemingly cohesive basket, only to have the last ingredient be something like pickle-flavored cupcakes. 

In Chopped‘s world of televised culinary surprises, there are still a number of things that always go predictably wrong. As the host of Chopped, Ted Allen has stood front and center for just about every kitchen disaster you can imagine, so we asked him to dish on the most common mistakes made by chefs tackling the unforgiving beast that is a Chopped basket.  Read more…

More about List, Memes, Culture, Chopped, and Food Network

Mixed martial arts fans are going to need an ESPN+ subscription if they don’t already have one.

UFC has expanded a deal with ESPN which will make all of its pay-per-view events exclusive to the Disney-owned sports network’s ESPN+ service. Starting with UFC 236 on April 13, an ESPN+ subscription will be required to purchase a UFC PPV event.

The MMA promoter originally signed a five-year, $1.5 billion TV rights deal with ESPN less than one year ago. The expanded deal brings UFC’s popular PPV events, as well as multiplatform rights, to the Disney-owned network through 2025.

More about Espn, Mma, Ufc, Ppv, and Espn Plus

Elon Musk is determined to get to Mars and return home, but in order for a spacecraft to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, it needs to be able to withstand the heat. Yesterday, SpaceX tested the heat shield tiles that allow the company’s Starship interplanetary spacecraft to do just that.

As Engadget reports, Musk explains in the Twitter thread that the temperatures endured by the heat shield tiles reached 1,650 degrees Kelvin (2,500 degrees Fahrenheit). The hexagonal shape also helps keep the heat from causing any damage, with Musk stating there’s “no straight path for hot gas to accelerate through the gaps.” Read more…

More about Spacex, Tech, and Space

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