A coalition of 23 gun reform advocacy groups has graded several U.S. businesses on their gun safety policies, and it will come as no surprise to know that most of the class is failing.

The Gun Safety Scorecard was released Wednesday by the Business Must Act Coalition, which includes organisations such as Guns Down, March for Our Lives, and Gays Against Guns. The scorecard gives a letter grade to 29 popular retailers based upon their action — or inaction — in preventing gun violence. 

Disappointingly, 16 retailers scored Fs — over half of the businesses assessed. The retailers were selected to provide a cross-section of American businesses, and weren’t limited to those involved in gun sales. The coalition chose which businesses to evaluate based on popularity and size, which makes for some strange names showing up on the list.  Read more…

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Back before Uber and Lyft ride-sharing (yes, there was a time!), hailing a regular cab didn’t always guarantee a ride. In San Francisco, for instance, drivers would often deny passengers rides to neighborhoods on the far west side of the city, or across the Bay, or Golden Gate Bridge. Then Uber and Lyft came along, and drivers were none the wiser as to where you were headed until they’d already accepted the ride and you were in the backseat. Oakland here we come! 

But changes to the Uber driver app, introduced this week for California drivers, would let drivers officially reject ride requests.  Eventually, all California drivers will see trip information including destination, estimated ride time and mileage, ride type, and potential earnings range. At the moment, only about a third of drivers in the state have the new feature. By mid-January, every driver will be able to see destination information. Riders, however, won’t actually know if a potential ride match was denied because it’ll happen before a driver accepts a ride. But even though that will all happen behind the scenes, riders could still be left waiting for a ride match to an “undesirable” destination, like a faraway place or inconvenient airport drop-off. Read more…

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Elon Musk apologized to the jury before reading some of his tweets aloud while testifying in court Wednesday.

“I was calling myself Treelon at that time,” he said, explaining an unusual Twitter avatar and name displayed on the screen.

The room tittered, but the brief aside was more relevant to the case than it might seem. This extremely Elon explanation was what he was really fighting for in court this week: the right to keep being a troll on Twitter. 

Musk is on trial for allegedly defaming Vernon Unsworth, a member of the mission that rescued the Thai boys’ soccer team that became trapped in a cave in July 2018. In a CNN interview, Unsworth criticized Musk’s efforts to help — and Musk lashed out on Twitter as a result.  Read more…

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The new Apple iPhone 11 Pro has an interesting issue: it’s collecting mysterious location data from its users, even when it technically shouldn’t be.

Security researcher Brian Krebs of KrebsOnSecurity recently discovered that the iPhone 11 Pro was displaying the small arrow icon, which denotes the use of location data on iOS devices, even though he had turned off location data for all apps and system services individually.

This issue does not appear to affect any previous models of the smartphone or other devices using iOS 13.

Krebs reached out to Apple thinking it was an error. Apple support forums have been talking about this issue as if it was a bug since September. Read more…

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Reddit users criticized the platform’s massive investment from a Chinese tech giant with a photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, an event that China censors all mention of to this day. It’s now the site’s most upvoted post of 2019. 

“Given that Reddit just took a $150 million investment from a Chinese censorship powerhouse, I thought it would be nice to pots this picture of ‘Tank Man’ at Tiananmen Square before our new glorious overlords decide we cannot post it anymore,” u/FreeSpeechWarrior captioned the photo.  

Reddit received a $150 million investment from Tencent in February, the Chinese company behind WeChat and League of Legends. It’s the world’s largest gaming company, and very much compliant with China’s censorship. Although they aren’t within Chinese borders, WeChat users in the United States can have blocked keywords or certain messages filtered if their IDs were created in mainland China. China continues to block American platforms like Twitch, Google, Facebook, and intermittently blocks Reddit as well.  Read more…

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Half a century ago, before the first Apple computer was even sold, climate scientists started making computer-generated forecasts of how Earth would warm as carbon emissions saturated the atmosphere (the atmosphere is now brimming with carbon).

It turns out these decades-old climate models — which used math equations to predict how much greenhouse gases would heat the planet — were pretty darn accurate. Climate scientists gauged how well early models predicted Earth’s relentless warming trend and published their research Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Most importantly, the results underscore that climate scientists were always right about how greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide trap heat and warm the surface. It was, and is, well-understood science. Read more…

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TL;DR: Although it’s a small discount, you can get a pair of AirPods Pro for $14 off on Amazon — they aren’t in stock yet, but you can lock-in that low price right now.

We’re honestly pretty surprised, but Apple’s new noise-canceling AirPods Pro have a small discount again.

While they aren’t currently in stock, you can still secure $14 off the high-quality earbuds as soon as… well, right now. Just don’t expect them to come in time for the holidays — if you were planning on getting them as a gift for someone else, you’re better off grabbing them directly from Apple (though we could be wrong, just an educated guess). Otherwise, you can get, like, a nice lunch or something with that extra $14.  Read more…

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Two USC researchers argue that in order to empathize with humans, robots must care about their own health. This includes a fear of mortality. Read more…

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The Tesla CEO is being sued for defamation by Vernon Unsworth, the man Musk referred to in the tweet. Read more…

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Civilization’s carbon emissions — like Earth’s temperature, sea level, and the rate of ice sheet melting in Greenland — are still going up.

Researchers at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO) in Oslo, Norway spend each year tediously compiling the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases humanity expels into the planet’s atmosphere. This year, their Global Carbon Budget Report projects that carbon dioxide emissions continued growing in 2019, though by a lower-than-usual amount of around 0.6 percent, reaching a new record high.

Compared to the huge carbon emission numbers in the early 2000s, when emissions jumped by some three percent each year, this is a small increase. But, critically, the 2019 emissions trend illustrates that global society’s carbon emissions aren’t falling, haven’t even peaked, and certainly don’t bode well for meeting the U.N.’s hugely ambitious target for curbing Earth’s warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures, agreed upon at the historic Paris climate accords. Read more…

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