Image: dustin drankoski/mashable The App Store's most popular free app isn't what you think it is. It's called Sarahah, and in the past week, it's surged to the top of the App Store in regions like Australia, Ireland, the U. S, and the UK. Created by Saudi Arabian developer Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq, the app is essentially a social network that lets you send and receive anonymous messages. Sarahah was built on the premise that people are more willing to be honest when their messages are anonymized, and it's become particularly popular in Arab-speaking regions and also among English-speaking teenagers. Development for the social network started back in November 2016, when it was still a simple website and didn't have an app. Its creator, who has a degree in computer science, wanted to get into app development when he came up with the idea. His original vision for Sarahah, which means "frankness" or "honesty" in Arabic, was to create a tool that would help employees provide unfiltered feedback to their employers.
Her books include Jazz People (1970), The Face Of Black Music (1976), As Serious As Your Life: The Story Of The New Jazz (1977), and the autobiography Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Life In The Jazz World (1989). For this edition of The Wire Salon, Val has selected a number of photos from her personal archive, which will be projected during the talk and used as entry points to discuss her long and remarkable life in music, photography, politics and beyond. The talk will be hosted by Tony Herrington, while DJ Derek Walmsley will top and tail the night playing a mix of hard bop, soul jazz, free jazz and more. The Wire Salon: An Audience With Val Wilmer takes place at London Cafe Oto, 16 July, 7. 30pm.
"There's an issue in the workplace people need to communicate frankly to their bosses, " said Tawfiq, who works full-time as a business systems analyst at an oil company in Saudi Arabia. My ultimate goal was 1, 000 messages Tawfiq quickly realized that the service could be useful outside of a corporate settings. Friends might want to anonymously provide constructive feedback to each other as well. So in the fall of 2016, he launched the website and began sharing it within his group of friends. "There was something special about it, " he said. "My ultimate goal was 1, 000 [shared] messages. " But by the end of the year, he only reached a couple of hundred messages, and decided to try a new approach. Inspired by the so-called "connectors" in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (essentially, people who know everyone), Tawfiq decided to share the app with a friend who he considered to be an major influencer. Searches for Sarahah's website in Saudia Arabia spiked in January 2017 after Tawfiq decided to apply techniques he read about in "The Tipping Point" to Sarahah.
Since 2011, the United States and Mexico have used them jointly to monitor illegal immigration. Their use is regulated by law to avoid hampering air traffic or interfering with aviation positioning instruments, including radars. In the US this type of regulation is promoted by the FAA, while in Europe the major step forward was taken with the Riga Declaration. In Italy, the National Agency for Civil Aviation (ENAC) introduced in July 2015 a second version of the "Remotely Piloted Aerial Vehicles Regulation" (APR), which classified the drones into two categories based on weight, providing different limitations. All these regulations go in the right direction, but they are not completely exhaustive: in fact, there is not a specific reference in terms of privacy violation. Drones have powerful cameras, advanced sensors and sophisticated data processing capabilities. For these reasons, they could be subjected to tampering, hijacking or theft of sensitive information, as proved by the British company Sensepoint.
Furthermore, the extraordinary shooting skills extend to the airspace the possibility, already offered by smartphones, to record a video in few seconds without drawing attention and with a consequent number of problems related to the processing of personal data. While in Hollywood there is not a massive usage of recordings made by drones due to the lack of specific regulations, amateur videomakers make a wide use of them, as demonstrated by the shooting of the Concordia wreck, the poachers in Massachusetts (drones are very useful in the fight against poaching) or the abandoned Hashima Island in Japan. At the moment, the main problem related to the domestic and commercial use of drones is represented by the great confusion under regulatory terms. This was also observed at European level by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which in June 2015 produced a report entitled " Privacy and Data Protection Issues Relating to Utilization of Drones". The adoption of a proactive approach to implement the concept of "privacy by design" and the introduction of measures starting from the planning phase seem the most viable solution.
Tawfiq thinks it was bolstered by Arab expatriates living in Canada — and soon, that helped garner the attention of other users in western countries, including people in the U. S. and Australia. The app then started spreading like wildfire among social media-addicted teens who were posting links to their Sarahah profiles to Instagram Stories requesting anonymous feedback. Then Snapchat rolled out a major update and changed everything. While teens were already swapping Sarahah messages on Instagram, Snapchat rolled out an update that let users post links to websites inside of snaps. It took only a few days before Sarahah reached a new level of popularity following the Snapchat update. Sarahah spiked i popularity immediately after Snapchat's update tat added links to snaps. Image: sensor tower Snapchat launched its update on July 5. Three days later, Sarahah broke into the App Store's top 1, 500 apps for the first time, according to analytics from Sensor Tower. Four days later, it jumped to the #104 spot; two days after that, it was #17; and then, three days later, it reached #1, beating Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and every other major social network in just a matter of days.
"The society here, we're very connected with family and friends, and we're very honest, " Tawfiq told Mashable. "We express our feelings frankly — we do it all the time. " But, Tawfiq says there can be social barriers that prevent people from speaking openly. Breaking barriers, that's what everybody wanted "There are barriers like age, sometimes it's the position, you can't go to someone who is a grandfather and tell them everything you think about them, " he said. "Breaking these barriers, that's what everybody wanted. " Following Sarahah's success in Arab countries, Tawfiq decided to finally create an app version of the service. He hired a third-party company to help with the development and Sarahah went live in the App Store June 13. It was the first time Sarahah was available in English, and the website received more than two million unique visitors a day for the first week. Shortly after it hit the App Store, people all around the world began to notice Sarahah. The app started to gain traction in Canada, too.
They are the technological "pop" phenomenon of recent years. Starting from the original military use for spying and bombing, drones – radio-controlled aircraft with remote pilot – are broadly used in the civil field nowadays, thus opening the way to opportunities and risks. It was 1916, during the Great War, when Aerial Target and the "flying bomb" V1 made their first appearance. Thus began the story of the "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle" (UAV), able to remain on the ground or to settle on a vehicle thanks to a remote control directing its movements. Especially in the last two years, the drone retail sector took off. It ranges from the aerial video footage, to monitoring operations, to viral initiatives such as Amazon Prime Air. New projects, as the first postmen aircraft, will start soon. Anyone can afford a drone: while full optional models require a real investment, basic drones cost just a few hundred euros. The drones offer countless opportunities. Police forces have already used them in different fields such as, for example, the monitoring of organized criminal activity or emergencies when natural disasters occur, the assessment of structures affected by earthquakes or other disasters and the search operations for missing persons.