3

A Soccer App Used People's Phone Mics To Look For Pirate Broadcasts

If you're a regular visitor to your local sports bar, there are a few things that you don't openly talk about -- the weird smell coming from the men's room, the questionable hand-washing practices of the fry cook, and above all else, the legal status of their cable. But as soccer fans in Spain recently found out, keeping their local watering holes' cable secrets now requires a little less tact and a little more "leaving the phones at home."

In a turn of events that would give Fox Mulder a rock-solid validation boner, the country's official soccer league app, La Liga, was found to be using GPS to detect when a phone had entered a bar during an Atletico Madrid or Barcelona game. It would then activate the phone's microphone to listen in for the sounds of soccer being played. If it didn't hear any, no foul (or anything else soccer-related, for that matter). If it did, the app then compared the phone's location against a list of nearby bars that had a license to broadcast games, narcing on any establishment that didn't.

La Liga"Compare stats! Check scores! Bankrupt local businesses under the crushing weight of copyright litigation!"

2

Instagram Is Spurring Restaurants To Create Distinctive-Looking Food (Which Tastes Awful)

These days, it's hard to go a week without some genius chef unveiling a new cool-looking culinary wonder. We're talking about rainbow unicorn frappuccinos, cronuts, gold-plated pizzas, rolled ice cream -- all spectacles designed to satisfy not just our appetites, but also our need for likes, shares, and whatever they do on Pinterest.

It's too bad, then, that most of this stuff tastes like absolute ass.

One side effect of the push by restaurants to make their offerings the trendiest, sprinkliest, most unimaginable things imaginable is that the onus has shifted from making food that tastes good to making food that looks good ... and those two wheels don't always intersect.

Take Starbucks' rainbow unicorn frappuccino, which derived most of its distinctive look from baristas adding shitloads of high-sugar syrups and artificial colors. The end result might have been so Instagrammable that many stores ran out, but according to those weirdos who actually drank it, it was everything from "an astringent whipped cloud of sour evil" to "sour birthday cake and shame" to being so flavorsome that it "made the rest of the drink curdle like expired milk."

Michelle OshenDespite having as much sugar as ... holy shit, 17 Oreos!?

Between this and the health risks, we have to ask: Was this Starbucks' ways of ending the War on Christmas before it began?

And then there's dishes like the Burger Cheesebomb, a burger entirely drenched in cheese fondue, or the offerings at Black Tap Burger & Beer in New York, which are comprised of milkshakes topped with entire slices of cake. All perfectly fine dishes for about one bite, until the novelty wears off and you're faced with having to eat the dairytastic monstrosity you paid $19 for. Hope those new Instagram followers are worth the diabetes.

1

Smart Home Devices Are Being Exploited By Abusive Partners In Terrifying Ways

George Orwell's 1984 centers around an oppressive, violent government that uses always-on surveillance not only to keep tabs on every citizen under its control, but to also dish out unimaginable pain and torment on dissenters. Unfortunately, such a setup does exist in today's world -- not in regards to state surveillance (although we're trying our hardest to get there), but in your favorite cutesily named smart home devices.

According to a recent expose by The New York Times, there's a growing trend in domestic violence cases for abusers to use smart home devices -- such as Hive and Nest -- to make their victims' existence a living hell, even after they've been kicked out of the home. From turning off air conditioners to turning up the thermostat to playing loud music through smart speakers to ringing doorbells to permalocking the front door to, of course, using cameras to spy on your every movement, it seems that the tools designed to sate our capacity for laziness can, in the wrongest of circumstances, be used to sate our capacity for cruelty.

Christian Delbert /Adobe StockThey say there's no set look for an abuser, but this is still not what we were envisioning.

The effects on victims can be devastating. One compared it to "jungle warfare," but without the jungle, since the attacks could come from anywhere. The worrying thing is that there are no obvious solutions to this problem. At first glance, you'd think one could simply change the settings to lock out the abuser or remove the smart devices altogether ... but it's hard to do that unless you have access to the account (guess who probably has that locked down tight?), can recognize that you're being abused, or even know if there are smart devices in your home.

Moreover, there's no sign that there's even a way of making this illegal. We only recently started cracking down on revenge porn, for crying out loud. How long do you think it's going to take the legal establishment to pick up on abusers using indentured virtual robots to harass people? Let's put it this way: We might have actual robots by that time.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter dedicated to depressing history facts. It's not as heartbreakingly sad as it sounds, promise!

Kinda makes you want to go low-tech and just try some watercolors.

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