Or how well do you know your smol space rocks.
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Thursday, October 1, 2015
What A "Kosher" Taxi App In Jerusalem Really Looks Like
A taxi drives in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina.
Bernat Armangue / AP
JERUSALEM — With just one touch of a button in Jerusalem, you can now order a taxi with a baby car seat, a cold drink, fresh flowers — or a “kosher” driver.
David Shmuel, 60, is one of those drivers working with Gett, Israel’s homegrown and most popular taxi app. Shmuel’s not kosher in the rabbi-certified sense; rather, he is part of Gett’s “kosher” taxi fleet — Gett Mehadrin — in which customers can order a driver who does not drive on the Jewish Sabbath, from Friday evening to Saturday night, in keeping with strict Jewish law.
“It’s like milk at a supermarket,” Shmuel told BuzzFeed News during a taxi ride on a July night in Jerusalem. “There are lots of options. Some people like a certain kind — kosher.”
Gett launched the Mehadrin taxi fleet in March. It’s only available in Israel, and there are now around 1,000 Mehadrin drivers out of Gett’s 6,700 nationwide as of August, according to Iris Hermon, the head of marketing for Gett in Israel. The fleet accepts any Gett driver — from all races, religions, and genders — and includes a few Arab drivers, though Hermon declined to provide an exact figure. Nationally, Gett Mehadrin accounts for up to 20% of the company’s monthly rides, the majority of which are in and around Jerusalem, according to Hermon.
The new service, depending on whom you ask, is either entirely reasonable, entirely racist, or not something the average Jerusalemite thinks twice about having these days. It has also gained a reputation among some drivers as the “Jewish driver” option in a city defined by cycles of religious and racial divides.
“It’s racist,” agreed Ahmed Abu Tir, an east Jerusalem resident and Gett driver. He, like all the Palestinian drivers interviewed, referred to it as the “Jewish driver” option.
Abu Tir knows that unlike Gett, many of west Jerusalem’s cab companies won’t hire drivers like him, or will send a Jewish driver on request even though that’s illegal. Still, when his wife calls, he doesn’t like to respond in Arabic if he has a Jewish passenger: He worries they’ll become suspicious.
Gett told BuzzFeed News that claims of discrimination are misplaced.
“It’s about service,” Hermon said. “We never treat one driver differently than another.”
Hermon said Gett developed the Mehadrin option in response to customer feedback. This arrangement, she said, is a part of modern Jerusalem life: If Gett did not have the Mehadrin option, then the city’s large and politically powerful ultra-orthodox communities would boycott them, as they do with most businesses open on the Sabbath.
Uber, which launched in Israel in 2014, does not have a specific fleet catering to the ultra-Orthodox. For now, Israeli law forbids the popular UberX system, in which a registered driver can turn their private car into a cab.
Gett and Uber also do not operate in the occupied Palestinian territories, where Israel has not granted Palestinian telecommunication companies in the West Bank and Gaza enough bandwidth for their own access to 3G internet yet.
Gett's Facebook page
Jerusalem’s population today is about one-third ultra-Orthodox Jews, one-third secular Jews, and one-third Christian and Muslim Palestinians, often referred to as Arabs by Israelis. Jerusalem, which Israel declared its capital despite objections from the international community, is largely split between the Jewish west and the Palestinian east.
The city’s transportation system reflects many of these political and religious divides. Today the Palestinian east side has a bus system and taxi companies to serve its communities, while in the west, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have pushed for a gender-segregated bus system. Much of West Jerusalem, including public transportation, shuts down on the Jewish Sabbath and holidays.
It’s also a city where transportation has been a site of violence, from Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli buses a decade ago to more recent tensions around Jerusalem’s light rail, on which a wide range of the city mixes as the rail crosses from east to west.
In such a politically charged space, residents say, racial and religious profiling by Western standards is also fairly commonplace.
Abu Tir of Gett feels it in the subtleties of interactions. At a previous cab company where he worked for three years, he went by the name Amir instead of Ahmad: He chose a more ethnically ambiguous name, he said, after people repeatedly canceled on him because of his distinctively Arab name and look.
The rider said she would cancel rides with Arab drivers. Gett told her they didn’t want her business.
Now he can’t do that at Gett, as each rider receives his registered name, picture, phone number, car type, and license plate with every order. On the one hand, he thinks this provides an improvement: Some Jewish passengers, he reasoned, feel more comfortable getting in the cab knowing that Gett is tracking the interaction. Like many Gett drivers, Abu Tir works for both a Jerusalem taxi company and picks up customers via the app to maximize his time. Still, after the violence surrounding last summer’s Gaza War, including some alleged attacks on Arab cab drivers, he said he’s looking to leave the business.
When Herzel Moshe, 60, first joined Gett in 2012, he said there “were a lot” of incidents of riders canceling on Arab drivers. Moshe has been driving cabs for over 30 years and is now Gett’s Jerusalem city manager with a small operating office adjacent to a gas station.
“At the beginning it [Gett] was something different,” he said. “As I told you, many stations did not take Arab drivers like Gett.”
Now, according to Moshe, dropped orders happen less and less because of two changes. “They know all the drivers,” he said, pointing to a Palestinian driver in the office, calling him a veteran. “They have the Gett Mehadrin option.”
Hermon, Gett’s marketing director, said that riders cancel orders for many reasons and it was impossible to say if riders were specifically dropping Arab drivers, because the app has no way to track this and the company does not distinguish between Arab and Jewish drivers. If a rider repeatedly drops orders, they build up “bad karma” in the system, she said, which can lead to the suspension of their account for various periods.
Some Arab taxi drivers in Jerusalem say they try not to speak Arabic on the phone in the car with Jewish passengers.
Ahmad Gharabli / AFP / Getty Images
Last year, Gett made headlines when it told off a rider who criticized the service on Facebook for having so many Arab drivers. The rider said she would cancel rides with Arab drivers. Gett told her they didn’t want her business.
When Gett launched the Mehadrin option in March, the criticism and calls to boycott came from the other direction.
Several users posted that they would stop using Gett and criticized the fleet for being racist toward Arabs by creating a taxi driver criteria that in practice appeared to create a "Jewish" option.
This time Gett went on the offensive, saying it was simply expanding its service to meet religious needs, and reminded customers that any driver can join the fleet.
A user, responding to that, said, “It is perhaps not meant to be racist, but it turned out that way.”
Moshe was less fazed. “That’s Jerusalem,” he said of the city’s ups and downs in taxi tensions. “That’s Jerusalem that has Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Here, there is friction.”
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The Technology Solution To Ad Blocking Nobody’s Talking About
Anti-adblocking technology may be publishers’ best weapon as they confront the problem.
Harry How / Getty Images
On an internet without advertisements, the banner ad seemed more than a little out of place.
Rendering on a website within the latest version of Google Chrome, the ad defied logic, displaying even though the red logo of AdBlock — one of the world's most popular ad-blocking extensions — lit up in the browser's top right-hand corner, indicating it was live and humming.
The ad didn't show up by accident. Nor was its appearance due to some glitch in AdBlock software. It loaded because it was protected from ad blockers thanks to a relatively new technology, one that gives publishers a chance to fight back against a force that, if widely adopted, could threaten their business.
"As long as there's a technical solution that will work, I prefer going that route," the publisher of the ad-block-defying website, who declined to be named in this story, told BuzzFeed News.
Though it's difficult to get an accurate read on its size, ad blocking has recently emerged as a major threat to the online media industry — at least in the minds of those counting the dollars. The introduction of ad blocking technology to Apple's iOS 9 operating system earlier this month set off alarm bells, leading some to worry that the mobile ad revenue flowing to the publishing industry might soon be at risk.
Ad blocking is the talk of Advertising Week, a convention held in New York City this week. It's viewed as such a pressing issue that the Interactive Advertising Bureau scheduled a last-minute press conference to discuss it. But unlike a number of the digital advertising industry's most serious problems — such as fraud and the selling of unviewed ads — the ad-blocking issue appears solvable.
"From a technical perspective, AdBlock is defeated," Matt Adkisson, president of SourcePoint, an anti-ad-blocking technology company, said in an interview. SourcePoint, the company that served the AdBlock-defying ad mentioned above, has been been in business for a year and claims to have served hundreds of millions of ads on behalf of nearly 100 clients.
SourcePoint is a one of a handful of new companies developing software to slip ads past ad blockers. Its technology works largely by detecting the ad-serving URLs and calls that trigger ad blockers and cloaking them or concealing them. "We replicate all these calls in a way that ad block cannot see them," said Adkisson.
A point worth noting: Though the publisher of the website mentioned earlier is serving up ads that confound ad blockers, he's also serving up fewer of them. He doesn't want to upset his ad block-using visitors too much. "Right now, if I give them a better ad experience, it's kind of what they're saying they're after," he said.
For the publishers who turn to it, anti-ad-blocking technology does come with a caveat: It makes ad delivery harder to measure, since the process of cloaking ads strips away much of the tracking functionality found in traditional digital advertising. But Adkisson said there are workarounds that can bring some of that functionality back. And, importantly, the technology doesn't change the way a website renders to someone without ad blocking, so the limitations on measurement don't apply across the board.
Though it may not be perfect, this technological solution to ad blocking may give publishers a chance to fight back in a meaningful way, especially since it can work across desktop and mobile — including on iOS 9. Should the technology be widely adopted, it's possible it could help web publishers avert the end-of-days scenario some fear might unfold.
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"Metal Gear Solid V" Is So Good I Want To Cry
Why I love Hideo Kojima’s demented and hilarious masterpiece.
Konami
Two and a half years ago, at a gaming industry conference in San Francisco, the mercurial Japanese developer Hideo Kojima took the stage for a keynote presentation with his entire face wrapped in white bandages. To particularly devoted fans of Kojima's Metal Gear series, this made sense. The bandages were a reference to Joakim Mogren, a fictional Dutch game developer at the center of an elaborate ruse Kojima had concocted to sow confusion about the newest installment in the series. (Joakim Mogren is an anagram for Hideo Kojima.) Shortly after the presentation began, Kojima removed the bandages and introduced Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
To many in the crowd, it was a bizarre move. This wasn't E3, an annual gaming hypefest targeted at consumers. It was the relatively staid, often technical Game Developers Conference. Metal Gear is a legendary title in gaming, but Kojima had invited an odd crowd to its debut: grown-ups in the games business, people with jobs, people who could hardly be expected to know or care about Joakim Mogren or any of the strange feints of a man who can come across as a kook. The reaction in the room was one of tolerant amusement, like you might extend to an eccentric uncle at a wedding. I hadn't paid attention to Kojima's bafflingly complex games — or his hijinks — since I was a teenager, and I remember sitting there thinking, What the hell is the deal with the bandages?
Via YouTube
Earlier this month, I sat down to play The Phantom Pain based on the good word of mouth the game was getting. It had me laughing almost immediately. The opening scene of the game takes place in a hospital, where players are immediately confronted with not one, but two characters whose faces are totally covered in white bandages. It was the punch line to a two-and-a-half-year-long joke that no one outside of Konami had even realized was happening.
"So this was his plan all along," I whispered aloud, to no one.
It was the perfect introduction to Metal Gear Solid V, which is the most surprising and delightful video game I have played in years, and a complete vindication of one of gaming's most notorious eccentrics.
Eccentric! Metal Gear Solid V is a game in which you attach high-powered balloons to your unconscious enemies in order to whisk them back to your secret base in the Seychelles. It's a game in which you can ship yourself around that secret base in a cardboard box to save time. It's a game that revolves around an anticolonial plot to eradicate the English language. It's a game set in a 1984 in which you get perfect internet service in the wadis of Afghanistan.
It's also a game with a special button combination to make your horse poop.
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Wednesday, September 30, 2015
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