Technology

Inmates in Idaho successfully hacked the software of the prison-issued tablets to issue themselves nearly a quarter of a million dollars in credits on the devices that are often one of their only connections to the outside world. The tablets, made by prominent prison vendor JPay, give inmates the ability to use email, listen to music and transfer money, among other basic computing functions, but charge fees for some services.

The Associated Press reports that Idaho prison officials discovered 364 inmates leveraging a software vulnerability to increase their JPay account balances. In Idaho, the devices are the result of a partnership between JPay and CenturyLink. The latter company confirmed the software vulnerability but declined to offer further details beyond stating that it had since been resolved.

Of the 364 inmates exploiting JPay, 50 inmates were able to issue themselves credits for more than $1,000. One inmate was able to use the software flaw to self-issue a credit of almost $10,000. The company has recovered about a quarter of the total of around $225,000 so far and has suspended some functions for inmates until they reimburse the stolen credits.

&This conduct was intentional, not accidental. It required aknowledge of the JPay system and multiple actions by every inmate who exploited the systemvulnerability to improperly credit their account,& Idaho Department of Correction spokesperson Jeff Ray said in a statement on the JPay incident.

The individuals exploiting the JPay system are incarcerated at a handful of Idaho prisons, including Idaho State Correctional Institution, Idaho State Correctional Center, South Idaho Correctional Institution, Idaho Correctional Institution-Orofino and a private Correctional Alternative Placement Plan building.

On its website, JPay describes itself as a &highly trusted name in corrections because we offer a fast and secure method of sending money,& which seems up for debate given the recent turn of events. The company has a presence in prisons across 35 states.

Urinary tract infections are highly uncomfortable and distracting, and they are very common for women because of the female anatomy. In fact, according to the Mayo Clinic, many women experience more than one infection during their lifetimes.

Many of the afflicted try resolving the infection on their own — using heating pads, drinking more water, taking pain medications. But often, these infections become quickly more advanced, a doctor is called, an in-patient visit is made, and the whole terrible episode is only ended after a trip to the pharmacy for some antibiotics.

Until now, at least.

A young San Francisco-based startup called Scanwell Health just this week began selling directly to consumers the first and, for now, the only FDA-cleared urine testing app that allows someone to test their urine at home using a paper test strip and a camera phone. (Its app uses sophisticated color metrics to analyze the strip and determine whatwhat.)

The kits are just $5. A call to Scanwell to confirm the results — it relies on outside physicians — will cost another $25. But that prescription service will also call in an order for antibiotics immediately if therean infection. (Users can also order the antibiotics, but it takes a couple of days for them to arrive.)

The startup — which has so far raised just $120,000 from Y Combinator — was founded by Stephen Chen, a Harvard MBA who has the kind of backstory that makes investors slobber.

Right out of school, he joinedTeco Diagnostics, a now 33-year-old maker of in-vitro diagnostics and medical devices, first as an R-D manager and later as a GM. Using what he&d learned there, he left Teco in 2013 to create a separate company, Petnostics, which makes a urine test for pets that can help identify a range of issues, from diabetes to kidney stones to bacterial infections. He even pitched the company on the show &Shark Tank,& which was hosting open tryouts within distance of his home a couple of years ago, and he landed $300,000 in exchange for 20 percent of the company.

While the exposure was great, the terms were not, suggests Chen, who says he ultimately didn&t take the money. He didn&t need to, apparently. Petnostics is still a going concern and it has generated enough revenue to support the development of Scanwell, which Chen says was always part of his master plan. In fact, Chen started the FDA approval for Scanwell nearly three years ago. The reason: UTI testing for humans is a much bigger market, especially when factoring in the billions of dollars that are wasted on emergency room trips for UTIs each year. Though hard to fathom, a visit to the ER for the condition can cost a stunning $2,600.

What happens from now depends on how effectively Scanwell reaches its target market, but so far, it seems, so good.

Though the direct-to-consumer service will take some time (different states have different regulations around over-the-phone prescription services), people in California and select other states can use the service today. In the meantime, Scanwell is making its kits available on as many college campuses as possible, given UTIs tend to be prevalent at schools because students are sexually active.

The company is also looking to work more closely with insurance companies, arguing it can help them improve their own quality ratings by using Scanwell kits to reduce Medicare and other insurance payouts.

Not last, the four-person team is already working on other urine-based tests, including a test that identifies chronic kidney disease, and another test for cardiovascular diseases.

Says Chen, &Paper tests are so cheap. They can reach people through the mail. Itkind of like when AOL used to send out a bunch of discs. We can work with health providers to work with their patient populations and reach them more effectively through home tests.&

Hopefully, they&ll agree with Chen. Certainly, as he notes, home access to diagnostics is &long overdue.&

Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, itgoing to end up with commercials. Users won&t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But thereno way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second after they appear on our screens.

We&re on the cusp of the shift to Stories. Facebook estimates that across social media apps, sharing to Stories will surpass sharing through feeds some time in 2019. One big reason is they don&t take a ton of thought to create. Hold up your phone, shoot a photo or short video and you&ve instantly got immersive, eye-catching, full-screen content. And you never had to think.

Facebook CPO Chris Cox at F8 2018 charts the rise of Stories that will see the format surpass feed sharing in 2019

Unlike text, which requires pre-meditated reflection that can be daunting to some, Stories are point and shoot. They don&t even require a caption. Sure, if you&re witty or artistic you can embellish them with all sorts of commentary and creativity. They can be a way to project your inner monologue over the outside world. But the base level of effort necessary to make a Story is arguably less than sharing a status update. Thathelped Stories rocket to more than 1.3 billion daily users across Facebookapps and Snapchat.

The problem, at least for Facebook, is that monetizing the News Feed with status-style ads was a lot more straightforward. Those ads, which have fueled Facebookascent to earning $13 billion in revenue and $5 billion in profit per quarter, were ostensibly old-school banners. Text, tiny photo and a link. Advertisers have grown accustomed to them over 20 years of practice. Even small businesses on a tight budget could make these ads. And it at least took users a second to scroll past them — just long enough to make them occasionally effective at implanting a brand or tempting a click.

Stories, and Stories ads, are fundamentally different. They require big, tantalizing photos at a minimum, or preferably stylish video that lasts five to 15 seconds. Thata huge upward creative leap for advertisers to make, particularly small businesses that&ll have trouble shooting that polished content themselves. Rather than displaying a splayed out preview of a link, users typically have to swipe up or tap a smaller section of a Story ad to click through.

And Stories are inherently skippable. Users have learned to rapidly tap to progress slide by slide through friends& Stories, especially when racing through those with too many posts or that come from more distant acquaintances. People are quick with the trigger finger the moment they&re bored, especially if itwith an ad.

A new type of ad blindness has emerged. Instead of our eyes glazing over as we scroll past, we stare intensely searching for the slightest hint that something isn&t worth our time and should be skipped. A brand name, &sponsored& label, stilted product shot or anything that looks asocial leads us to instantly tap past.

This is why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg scared the hell out of investors on the brutal earnings call when she admitted about Stories that, &The question is, will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed And we honestly don&t know.& Ita radically new format advertisers will need time to adopt and perfect. Facebook had spent the past year warning that revenue growth would decelerate as it ran out of News Feed ad inventory, but it&d never stressed the danger as what it was: Stories. That contributed to its record-breaking $120 billion share price drop.

The shift from News Feed ads to Stories ads will be a bigger transition than desktop ads to mobile ads for Facebook. Feed ads looked and worked identically, it was just the screen around them changing. Stories ads are an entirely new beast.

Stories ads are a bigger shift than web to mobile

There is one familiar format Stories ads are reminiscent of: television commercials. Before the age of TiVo and DVRs, you had to sit through the commercials to get your next hit of content. I believe the same will eventually be true for Stories, to the tune of billions in revenue for Facebook.

Snapchat is cornered by Facebookcompetition and desperate to avoid missing revenue estimates again. So this week, it rolled out unskippable vertical video ads it actually calls &Commercials& to 100 more advertisers, and they&ll soon be self-serve for buyers. Snap first debuted them in May, though the six-second promos are still only inserted into its longer-form multi-minute premium Shows, not user-generated Stories. A Snap spokesperson said they couldn&t comment on future plans. But I&d expect its stance will inevitably change. Friends& Stories are interesting enough to compel people to watch through entire ads, so the platform could make us watch.

Snapchat is desperate, and thatwhy italready working on unskippable ads.If Facebookapps like Instagram and WhatsApp were locked in heated battle with Snapchat, I think we&d see more brinkmanship here. Each would hope the other would show unskippable ads first so it could try to steal their pissed-off users.

But Facebook has largely vanquished Snapchat, which has seen user growth sink significantly. Snapchat has 191 million daily users, but Facebook Stories has 150 million, Messenger Stories has 70 million, Instagram Stories has 400 million and WhatsApp Stories (called Status) leads with 450 million. Most peoplefriends around the world aren&t posting to Snapchat Stories, so Facebook doesn&t risk pushing users there with overly aggressive ads, except perhaps amongst U.S. teens.

Instagramthree-slide Stories carousel ads

Thatwhy I expect we&ll quickly see Facebook start to test unskippable Stories ads. They&ll likely be heavily capped at first, to maybe one to three per day per user. Facebook took a similar approach to slowly rolling out auto-play video News Feed ads back in 2014. And Facebookapps will probably only show them after a friendstory before your next pal&s, in-between rather than as dreaded pre-rolls. Instagram already offers carousel Stories ads with up to three slides instead of one, so users have to tap three times to blow past them.

An Instagram spokesperson told me they had &no plans to share right now& about unskippable ads, and a Facebook spokesperson said &We don&t have any plans to test unskippable stories ads on Facebook or Instagram.& But plans can change. A Snap spokesperson noted that unlike a full 30-second TV spot, SnapchatCommercials are up to six seconds, which matches an emerging industry trend for mobile video ads. Budweiser recently made some six-second online ads that it also ran on TV, showing the formatreuseability that could speed up adoption. For brand advertisers not seeking an on-the-spot purchase, they need time to leave an impression.

By making some Stories ads unskippable, Facebookapps could charge more while making them more impactful for advertisers. It would also reduce the creative pressure on businesses because they won&t be forced to make that first split-second so flashy so people don&t fast-forward. Employing unskippable ads could also create an incentive for people to pay for a hypothetical ad-free Facebook Premium subscription in the future.

If Facebook makes the Stories ad format work, it has a bright future that contrasts with the doomsday vibes conjured by its share price plummet. Facebook has more than 5X more(duplicated) Stories users across its apps than its nearest competitor Snapchat. The social giant sees libraries full of Stories created each day waiting to be monetized.