Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve tried to delete your Uber account previously, you might have noticed that it’s not as easy as it may seem. Simply removing the app from your smartphone doesn’t do much. Removing the app doesn’t remove server data and if you wanted to do that you had to contact Uber’s support team. However, Uber is now making it easy to properly delete your user account should you feel like it.

This is part of a new update from Uber that’s designed to provide new and improved privacy controls to users. It’s providing users with more choice and control over the information they share with Uber.

The new options include more control over the notifications that users receive from Uber and the contacts shared with the service. Users can also choose to share or withhold location data from inside the app, previously this choice could only be made at the operating system level.

The Uber app is now going to have a dedicated menu called Privacy Settings where all existing and future privacy controls will be placed. The Remove Stored Contacts setting will also be located in this new menu.

Uber users won’t have to get in touch with its support team anymore to properly delete their account. The app now provides access to a self-service deletion process which immediately deactivates the account and starts a 30-day countdown.

The account and all data associated with it is permanently deleted from Uber’s servers after the 30-day limit is up. Users can reactivate their accounts at any time within 30 days.

Uber says that this update will be rolling out to all users across the globe over the next few weeks.

Delete Uber Account Easily Now After Latest Update , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

It has only been a few weeks since Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said during an investor call that we might see Windows 10 laptops powered by ARM processors by the end of this year. He mentioned that the company’s Snapdragon 835 processor would expand into mobile PC designs running Windows 10. According to a new report, Lenovo and Microsoft might be the first companies to launch ARM Windows 10 laptops.

Microsoft is trying its hand at ARM-based PCs for the second time after Windows RT, a version of Windows 8 it created for ARM-based computers, failed to take off. It will enable these processors to run the full desktop version of Windows 10 which means that users won’t get a watered down experience.

If that is indeed the case, this should eliminate many of the challenges that Microsoft faced with Windows RT. ARM-based Windows 10 laptops would be proper Windows machines as they will be powered by the full desktop version of Microsoft’s operating system.

The report claims that Microsoft and Lenovo might be the first companies to launch ARM Windows 10 laptops. Microsoft might launch a new Surface model that’s powered by an ARM processor and Lenovo’s new 2-in-1 laptop is expected to be the same.

Whether or not that really happens remains to be seen. It’s not like every rumor we hear online turns out to be true.

ARM Windows 10 Laptops From Lenovo And Microsoft Expected Soon , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

While the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps might be common, everyday communication features on smartphones in the US, in developing countries around the world these apps can be a little resource-heavy for the less powerful devices used or in low data bandwidth conditions. To help address that situation — and continue to draw in more users — Facebook Lite and … Continue reading

Nicholas Heron, The University of Queensland

When he was captured by the Fascist militia in December of 1943, Primo Levi (1919-1987) preferred to declare his status as an “Italian citizen of the Jewish race” than admit to the political activities of which he was suspected, which he supposed would have resulted in torture and certain death.

As a Jew, he was consequently sent to a detention camp at Fossoli, which assembled all the various categories of persons no longer welcome in the recently established Fascist Republic. Two months later, following the inspection of a small squad of German SS men, he was loaded onto a train, together with all the other Jewish members of the camp, for expatriation from the Republic altogether.

His destination, he was to learn, was Auschwitz; a name that at the time held no significance for him, but that initially provided a sense of relief, since it at least implied “some place on this earth”.

Of the 650 who departed Fossoli that day, only three would return. Yet Levi’s magnificent testimony of the Lager, Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man) – which he would compose in the immediate aftermath of the resumption of his life in Turin, and which was first published 70 years ago in 1947, making it one of the earliest eyewitness accounts we have – is far from a heroic description of his “survival in Auschwitz” (as the American title given to his text would have it). Although in an important sense it is also that.

Indeed, what is striking about Levi’s contribution, still today, is the conspicuous absence of a heroic register from its pages, whose appropriateness in this context – which is in large part what Levi teaches us – must surely be as questionable as the temptation to invoke it is strong.

With characteristic, but unsettling irony, it is the word fortune that appears instead in the very first sentence of his text (“It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944…”) and that sets the tone for all that follows. In the camp, it is not virtue that governs fortune; it is fortune that governs virtue.

It is the original title of Levi’s book that in truth gives expression to what will be his principal concern. Yet this is easily misunderstood. It is not exactly a question, and certainly not one that solicits an answer. But it is not even a question whose answer would be provided by the text itself, which claims no such privilege.

As we learn from the poem that opens the text, it must be understood instead to contain an implicit imperative: “Consider if this is man…” It is an order, a command (“I command these words to you”); one that is linked, moreover, to an imprecation:

Carve them in your hearts

… Repeat them to your children,

Or may your house fall apart,

May illness impede you,

May your children turn their faces from you.

It is thus an admonition that we (“You who live safe/In your warm houses”) not avert our gaze. But since Levi, remarkably, includes even himself in this category, it functions also as a kind of self-admonition.

For the description of what Levi calls the “ambiguous life of the Lager” alters our understanding of the very structure of witnessing. And it does so by bringing to light the existence of a distinct oppositional pair much less evident in ordinary life: the drowned (i sommersi) and the saved (i salvati).

In Auschwitz, all the ritual humiliations appeared as if designed to hasten the prisoner’s descent to what Levi termed “the bottom”. But this process was especially accelerated in the case of those he called the drowned: “they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea”.

These were the prisoners who, for whatever reason (and the reasons were many), never adjusted to the brutal regimen of life in the camp; whose time in the camp was thus consequently very brief; yet whose number was apparently endless.

In the jargon of the camp, these were the Muselmänner, the “Muslims”, whose tenuous existence, even prior to their imminent selection for the gas chamber, already hovered in an indistinct zone between life and death, human and non-human. These, according to Levi, were the ones who had truly seen all the way to the bottom: the ones who (as he would later powerfully record) had truly seen the Gorgon.

With respect to the “anonymous mass” of the drowned, the number of the saved, on the other hand, was comparatively few. Yet by no means did it consist of the best, and certainly not of the elect. To invoke the guiding hand of providence in the midst of such atrocity was nothing short of abhorrent to Levi.

He is unflinching on precisely this delicate point: with rare exceptions, the saved comprised those who, in one way or another, whether through fortune or astuteness, had managed to gain some position of privilege in the structured hierarchy of the camp.

More often than not, this entailed the renunciation of at least a part of the moral universe that existed outside the camp. Not that the saved, any more than the drowned, are to be judged on this account. As Levi insists, words such as good and evil, just and unjust, quickly cease to have any meaning on this side of the barbed wire.

It was nonetheless his conviction that those who had not fathomed all the way to the bottom could not be the true witnesses. Yet far from invalidating the survivor’s testimony this made it all the more urgent.

According to Levi, it is the saved who must bear witness for the drowned, but also to the drowned. For in him is mirrored what he himself saw.

“Consider if this is a man…”: the imperative issued by Levi’s text is thus not that one should persist in seeing the human in the inhuman. It is more like its opposite: that one bear must witness to the inhuman in the human. And that our humanity in some sense depends on this.

Nicholas Heron, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Queensland

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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WASHINGTON ― Marty Baron initially wasn’t planning to come to this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but decided he “should be here.”

“The White House said that they weren’t sending anyone out of solidarity with the president,” The Washington Post’s executive editor told HuffPost upon entering the Hilton Ballroom on Saturday night. “I think people are here out of a sense of solidarity.”

Journalists “feel a common purpose” these days in supporting the fundamental role of the press, Baron said, and they “don’t necessarily need the razzmatazz to celebrate what it is we do and rededicate ourselves to what we do.”

That’s a good thing because the glitz was dialed down significantly, with few celebrities making the trek to Washington and a decidedly more earnest feel to the proceedings. News organizations that previously jockeyed for Hollywood A-listers instead invited more of their own rank-and-file reporters and producers. Some outlets, like HuffPost and CNN, nodded toward the future generation of the craft by filling tables with high school and college journalists. 

Longtime attendees remarked how the vibe was different and more reminiscent of gatherings from decades past, before the ballroom was overrun by boldface names and selfie-snapping scribes. “I think it’s a great reset,” Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan told HuffPost, noting that the dinner had evolved from its core focus of saluting journalism to “quite a bit of a celebrity night.’

“In the 12 years I’ve come to this dinner, I’m finally excited this is about the journalists who cover Washington and the White House and not about the celebrities,” said Thomas Burr, a correspondent for The Salt Lake Tribune and recent National Press Club president.

Though some of the flashiest parties were canceled this year ― like the New Yorker’s Friday night soiree atop the W Hotel and the ultra-exclusive Vanity Fair-Bloomberg after-party ― there were still big late-night ragers, like MSNBC’s post-dinner bash at the Organization of American States, and a slew of pre-parties and boozy brunches all over town. 

Journalists also flocked to the Saturday afternoon taping of Samantha Bee’s “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” which aired against the last hour of the actual dinner. And they were entertained at the dinner by Hasan Minhaj’s hilarious, and at times moving, roast of the president and the press.

But even as drinks flowed and trays of hor d’oeuvres passed by all weekend, broader existential questions were in the air.

“Just like in the campaign, there is so much that is unprecedented, stuff that we’ve never seen before and we’re trying to figure out what our role is and how we do it best,” said Terence Samuel, a veteran Washington Post editor. “This weekend has always been some kind of weird Rorschach test about who we are and what we do. It’s even more pronounced this year.”

What’s also unprecedented is that this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner didn’t include the White House.

A sitting president hasn’t skipped the dinner in decades, and it’s the first time in the event’s nearly century-long history that no one attended from the White House. President Donald Trump, who privately courts the media while recklessly attacking journalists publicly as the “enemy of the people,” decided not to attend Saturday because of what he considers unfair treatment.

Instead, Trump tried counter-programming the annual dinner by staging an event of his own in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and while in front of his faithful, unsurprisingly blasted the “fake news” media. 

But as Trump dusted off familiar press-bashing lines at a campaign-style rally, the journalists who cover the presidency were rallying around the First Amendment back home.

RealClearPolitics dubbed its pre-dinner bash “A Toast to the First Amendment” and Washington editor Carl Cannon did just that while recalling how newspapers existed even before the presidency and published the Declaration of Independence. “The First Amendment is in the Constitution, but freedom of the press predates this country,” he said. “It’s an essential American trait that helped create the country, not the other way around.”

Of the First Amendment theme, Emily Goodin, the site’s managing editor, said that “in a time when there’s accusations of fake news and actual fake news that is about there, it’s good to reframe the focus on the quality journalism that so many organizations do and toast that.”

The First Amendment was everywhere in the Hilton Ballroom, from the banner onstage to the pins given out to all attendees. White House Correspondents’ Association President Jeff Mason even read the First Amendment during remarks in which he also pushed back against the president’s most heated anti-press rhetoric.

“We are not fake news. We are not failing news organizations,” Mason said. “And we are not the enemy of the American people.”

Legendary reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein next recalled their dogged pursuit of the “best obtainable version of the truth” that led to breaking the Watergate scandal and taking down a corrupt presidency. Woodward also echoed Mason in telling Trump in absentia, “Mr. President, the media is not fake news.”

Such lines drew cheers, and at times standing ovations, from the journalists in attendance. But the real test of the solidarity evident in the room Saturday night will occur next time critical organizations get barred from a White House press briefing or if Trump’s Justice Department targets journalists for doing their jobs.

But for a few hours Saturday night, journalists seemed to take pride in reaffirming the virtues of journalism and mingling with colleagues even if the feel was more upscale office party than Oscar party. 

“Perhaps this is one of the positive things Donald Trump has done,” Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn said. “He’s taken away a little glitz from what is supposed to be an evening commemorating and celebrating journalism.”

Corn said executives and advertisers have helped shift the event in recent decades to become “Hollywood on the Potomac,” resulting in many reporters, bookers and producers who do the work each day in newsrooms not getting inside the ballroom. If the dinner becomes “boring enough,” he said, “advertisers and executives won’t want to come back next year without celebrities.”

But next year might not be so boring. As HuffPost pointed out to Corn, Trump just told Reuters he would “absolutely” come in 2018.

“That’s the worst piece of news I’ve heard today,” he said.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.