Technology

Meet Wilson, a new iPhone app that plans to change the way you discover and listen to podcasts. The company describes the app as a podcast magazine. It has the same vibe as Longreads, the curated selection of longform articles.

With its minimalistic design and opinionated typography, Wilson looks like no other podcasting app. On an iPhone X, the black background looks perfectly black thanks to the OLED display. It feels like an intimate experience.

Every week, the team selects a handful of podcast episodes all tied together by the same topic. Those topics can be the Supreme Court, the LGBTQ community, loneliness, dads, the World Cup…

Each issue has a cover art and a short description. And the team also tells you why each specific podcast episode is interesting. In other words, Wilson isn&t just an audio experience. You can listen to episodes in the app or open them in Apple Podcasts.

Navigating in the app is all based on swipes. You can scroll through past editions by swiping left and right. You can open an edition by swiping up, and go back to the list by swiping down. This feels much more natural than putting buttons everywhere.

Wilson also feels like tuning in to the radio. Podcasts are great because they let you learn everything thereto learn about any interest you can have. But it also narrows your interests in a way. Podcast apps are too focused on top lists and &you might also like& recommendations.

Gone are the days when you would switch on the radio and listen to a few people talk about something you didn&t know you cared about. Human editors can change that. Thatwhy Wilson can be a nice addition to your podcasting routine.

YouTube highlighted its growth and promised better communication with creators about its tests and experiments, the company announced today in its latest of an ongoing series of updates from CEOSusan Wojcicki focused on YouTubetop five priorities in 2018. The majority of her missive today & which was also released in the form of a YouTube video & were wrap-ups of other announcements and launches the company had recently made, like the new features released at this yearVidCon including Channel Memberships, merchandise, and Famebit.

However, the company did offer a few updates related to those launches, including news of expanded merch partnerships. But YouTube didn&t detail the crucial steps it should be taking to address the content issues that continue to plague its site.

YouTube said one way itimproving communication is viaCreator Insider, an unofficial channel started by YouTube employees, which offers weekly updates, responds to concerns, and gives a more behind-the-scenes look into product launches.

In terms of its product updates, YouTube said that Channel Memberships, which are currently open to those with more than 100,000 subscribers, will roll out to more creators in the &coming months.& Meanwhile, merch, which is now available to U.S.-based channels with over 10,000 subscribers, will add new merchandising partners and expand to more creators &soon.&

At present, YouTube is partnered withcustom merchandise platform Teespring, which keeps a cut of the merchandise sales while YouTube earns a small commission. The company didn&t say which other merchandise providers would be joining the program.

YouTubeFamebit, which connects creators and brands for paid content creation, is also growing. YouTube says that more than half of channels working with Famebit doubled their YouTube revenue in the first three months of the year. And it will soon launch a new feature that will allow YouTube viewers to shop for products, apps, and tickets right form the creatorwatch page. (This was announced at VidCon, too.)

Content problems remain

There was little attention given to brand safety in todayupdate, however, beyond a promise that this continues to be one of YouTube&biggest priorities& and that itseeing &positive& results.

In reality, the company still struggles with content moderation. It even fails to follow-up when therea high-profile case, it seems. The most recent example of this is YouTubetakedown of the &FamilyOFive& channel this week.

The channelcreators,Michael and Heather Martin, are serving probation in Maryland after being convicted of emotionally and physically abusing their children in &prank& videos for their prior DaddyOFive channel. They lost custody of their two younger children as a result.

Unbelievably, the family returned to YouTube as FamilyOFive and FamilyOFive Gaming, and continued to produce videos reaching a combined 400,000+ subscribers. Seemingly without remorse for their past actions, their new channel featured more abuse & one of their children took a shot to their groin in one video, and another was harassed to the point of a meltdown in another.

The family has claimed itall &entertainment,& but the justice system obviously disagreed. Itoutrageous that convicted child abusers would be allowed to continue to upload videos of their children to YouTube. The site needs to have much stricter policies not only around bans, but about the use of children in videos entirely. Kids do not have the autonomy to make decisions about whether or not they want to be filmed, and aren&t able to comprehend the long-term impacts of being public on the internet.

While FamilyOFive is an extreme example, YouTube is still filled to the brim with parents exploiting their kids for cash & the stage moms and dads of a new era, raking in the free toys, products, and cash from brands who see YouTube as the new TV, and its creators and their children as the new, less regulated actors.

Unfortunately for children, existing child actor laws that protect children from exploitation and set aside some portion of their earnings outside of parents& reach haven&t always applied to YouTube stars. YouTube now complies with local child labor laws, it says, but itnot involved in enforcement. And even with a policy in place, itclearly not enough to dissuade parents from filming their kids for cash.

Growth

YouTubepost today also highlighted other growth metrics. It noted it now has 1.9 billion logged-in monthly users, who watch over 180 million hours of YouTube on TV screens every day. Overall interactions, such as likes, comments and chats, grew by more than 60% year over year, andlive streams increased by 10X over the last three years. Over 60 million users click or engage with Community Tab posts.

YouTube says it answered600% more tweets through its official Twitter handles (@TeamYouTube, @YTCreators and @YouTube) in 2018 than in 2017 and grew its reach by 30% in the past few months.

And the company noted its plan to expand Stories to those with more than 10,000 subscribers, plus the launches of its newCopyright Match tool, screen time limitation features, andYouTube Studio&snew dashboard which will roll out in 76 languages in the next two weeks.

In whatbelieved to be the biggest data breach in Singaporehistory, 1.5 million members of the countrylargest healthcare group have had their personal data compromised.

The breach affected SingHealth, Singaporebiggest network of healthcare facilities. Data obtained in the breach includes names, addresses, gender, race, date of birth and patients& national identification numbers. Around 160,000 of the 1.5 million patients also had their outpatient medical information accessed by unauthorized individuals. All patients affected by the hack had visited SingHealth clinics between May 1, 2015 and July 4, 2018, Singapore newspaper The Straits Times reports.

&Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System confirmed that this was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack,& a press release from SingaporeMinistry of Health stated. &It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs.&

The hackers appear to have accessed the sensitive data by compromising a single SingHealth workstation with malware and were then able to obtain privileged account credentials with which they accessed the patient database. The breach was first noticed on July 4 and a police report was filed on July 12.

During a press conference, investigating authorities disclosed that Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was &specifically and repeatedly targeted.&

The Prime Minister elaborated on the incident on his Facebook page: