The McDonald’s ice cream machine is notoriously fickle. Like an Italian sports car, it’s efficient and powerful, but temperamental and fragile. Two entrepreneurs invented a device to improve them. Then things got weird 1/
Photos by Gabriela Hasbun wired.trib.al/fw0OVcf
This all started with the Frobot. A decade ago, Jeremy O’Sullivan and Melissa Nelson invented an automatic frozen yogurt dispenser built around a Taylor soft-serve machine—the same kind used by McDonald’s restaurants. But they found it was constantly breaking 2/
In fact, the Taylor ice cream machines inside McDonald’s are infamous for being constantly out of order. According to stats collected by the website McBroken.com, between 5% and 16% of all US McDonald’s ice cream machines are offline at any given time 3/
So O’Sullivan and Nelson pivoted to selling a small gadget called Kytch that fits inside Taylor's ice cream maker, intercepting its internal data like a spy bug and sending it out via Wifi to McDonald’s franchisees to help maintain and fix the machines 4/
McDonald’s restaurant owners loved Kytch. The McDonald’s corporation and Taylor did not. Taylor sent Kytch a cease and desist and McDonald’s warned franchisees that Kytch breached ice cream machines’ “confidential data.” Their efforts decimated Kytch’s business 5/
Now Kytch is fighting back. Read the story of a tiny startup that disrupted what it sees as a milkshake shakedown, sparking a cold war involving private detectives, a lawsuit, alleged collusion, and an act of betrayal 6/ wired.trib.al/fw0OVcf
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SCOOP: Arab and Muslim workers at Meta allege that its response to the crisis in Gaza is one-sided and out of hand. “It makes me sick that I work for this company,” says one employee.
But when a club for Muslim workers revealed plans to spend $200 in company funds to serve nine dozen cupcakes in watermelon colors at the event, Meta management called the offering disruptive.
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Bellingcat’s trajectory tells a scathing story about the nature of truth in the 21st century. Hard facts have been devalued. Online, everyone can present, and believe in, their own narratives, even if they’re mere tissues of lies. wired.com/story/how-to-l…
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Even before Sam Bankman-Fried, Faruk Fatih Özer had built a crypto empire. Now, the 27-year-old is facing a prison sentence of 11,196 years.
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🧵 For 13 years, Del Harvey ran Twitter’s trust and safety team–if there was an issue with content people would say “DM Del.” Now, Harvey pulls back the curtain on Twitter’s decisions to mute, ban and block posts in the pre-Elon era 1/
But Del Harvey isn’t even her real name, although that’s what everyone knows her as. In 2003, Harvey worked for a nonprofit called Perverted Justice that investigated online predators. That led to Harvey working in TV with the NBC series “To Catch a Predator.” 2/10
Five years later, when a friend reached out and suggested Harvey take a job at a fledgling tech company, it seemed like a walk in the park compared to catching pedophiles. 3/10
🧵The Far North is thawing, unleashing clouds of planet-heating gas. Scientists rely on an arsenal of tech to understand permafrost environments better and sniff out just how nasty the problem really is. wired.trib.al/TwLiZ8G
As Arctic temperatures rise thawing permafrost releases methane, a gas that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. Those clouds of methane raise global temperatures, which thaws more permafrost, which releases more methane. It’s a problem. 2/7
To reckon with how big of a problem we’re facing a group of self-described “methane detectives” use various instruments to determine how much organic matter exists within permafrost sites which will give them some idea of how much methane that site will release as it warms. 3/7