Amazon Has No Idea On How to Stop Someone Who Is Sending Sex Toys To Strangers

Ben Collins, Daily Beast: Someone Is Sending Amazon Sex Toys to Strangers. Amazon Has No Idea How to Stop It.

Getting unsolicited packages from unknown strangers is creepy. Being unable to stop it only makes them creepier.

The first time Nikki unexpectedly received a sex toy in an Amazon box, she thought there must have been a mix-up at the factory. She’d bought some mascara that hadn’t arrived yet.

“At first I believed it to be a mistake,” she said.

But then the other packages came, one by one. A cord to a Bluetooth device was next. No gift receipt, no footprints and, as she’d discover over the next week, no help. The last package had headphones.

“The weird part about it is if this were a prank or a hacker sending things to women on the internet, it’d be expensive. I looked [the sex toy] up, and it’s $25, which is sort of substantial,” she said.

“It seems so personal.”

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CSN Editor: The weird thing is that they cannot stop it.

Amazon's List Of HQ2 Contenders Is Now Down To 20 Finalists

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

The top 20 finalists. (Madison McVeigh/CityLab)

City Lab: Amazon Whittles Down List of HQ2 Contenders to 20 Finalists

The list skews toward larger cities and metropolitan areas along the Eastern corridor, stretching as far north as Toronto and as far south as Miami. And it looks like some of the economic incentives might be paying off.

We’re one step closer to finding out where Amazon’s coveted HQ2 will call home. The company has whittled down the list of 238 cities to 20, it announced Thursday morning. The list of finalists skews toward larger cities and metropolitan areas along the Eastern corridor, stretching as far north as Toronto and as far south as Miami.

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CSN News: My money is on Dallas/Austin or Atlanta.

Why Are Amazon's Data Centers In The 'Heart' Of Spy Country?

Amazon Data Center CNN

The Atlantic: Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country

The company powers much of the Internet, but its cloud facilities are difficult to find.

Once in a while—not quite often enough to be a crisis, but just often enough to be a trope—people in the United States will freak out because a huge number of highly popular websites and services have suddenly gone down. For an interminable period of torture (usually about 1-3 hours, tops) there is no Instagram to browse, no Tinder to swipe, no Github to push to, no Netflix to And Chill.

When this happens, it usually means that Amazon Web Services is having a technical problem, most likely in their US-East region. What that actually means is that something is broken in northern Virginia. Of all the places where Amazon operates data centers, northern Virginia is one of the most significant, in part because it’s where AWS first set up shop in 2006. It seemed appropriate that this vision quest to see The Cloud across America which began at the ostensible birthplace of the Internet should end at the place that’s often to blame when large parts of the U.S. Internet dies.

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CSN Editor: Convenience, an existing infrastructure, lower costs, the U.S. government not far away .... all of these are good reasons on why Amazon has its centers in northern Virginia. But what I found even more interesting after reading this report was this sobering statistic .... Today, up to 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide travels through this region.

Inside An Amazon Warehouse (Pics)

CSN Editor: The link is here. What's my take .... impressive.

The Battle For The Amazon

The Battle For The Amazon Heats Up Again -- Time

The Amazon rainforest is the most important patch of land on the planet. The trees have been called the lungs of the Earth and that's far more than just a metaphor: they absorb more than 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, return oxygen in exchange and help regulate the climate of the Western Hemisphere in the process. The forest itself is the hottest of biodiversity hotspots, home to countless species of plants and animals that we have yet to discover — and even tribes of indigenous human beings who have never been contacted by the outside world. There's a reason that "save the rainforest" became a default slogan for environmentalism in the 1980s; saving the Amazon really did mean helping to save the planet.

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My Comment: They have been talking about deforestation in the Amazon basin for decades. But it appears that after decades of development .... the impact that is now beginning to be felt everywhere.

Is Amazon Changing The Rules For Books And Movies?

Amazon Studios is crowdsourcing movie-making, creating test movies that fans can review, with storyboard art in the place of video. This image is from a possible upcoming release called "Touching Blue." (Credit: Amazon)

How Amazon Is Changing The Rules For Books And Movies -- CNet

The online retail giant is tapping its huge customer base and vast technical underpinnings to reshape the way books, movies, and television programs are made.

If you want a glimpse into the way Amazon sees your digital future, look no further than Jeff Ragsdale's new book, "Jeff, One Lonely Guy."

Last October, after being dumped by a girlfriend and mired in depression, Ragsdale posted a flier around New York City on a whim that read, "If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me." It listed his mobile phone number. Calls streamed in, by the dozens, then the hundreds, and now well into the tens of thousands.

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My Comment: They have the loyal fan base.

Amozon's Cloud Uses 1% Of The Internet

An Amazon data center in Sterling, Virginia. Photo: Eric Hunsaker/Flickr

Amazon’s Secretive Cloud Carries 1 Percent Of The Internet -- Wired Enterprise

Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure is growing so fast that it’s silently becoming a core piece of the internet.

That’s according to an analysis done by DeepField Networks, a start-up that number-crunched several weeks’ worth of anonymous network traffic provided by internet service providers, mainly in North America.

They found that one-third of the several million users in the study visited a website that uses Amazon’s infrastructure each day.

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Amazon Drought 'Severe' In 2010

Amazon Drought 'Severe' In 2010, Raising Warming Fears -- BBC

Last year's drought in the Amazon raises concerns about the region's capacity to continue absorbing carbon dioxide, scientists say.

Researchers report in the journal Science that the 2010 drought was more widespead than in 2005 - the last big one - with more trees probably lost.

The 2005 drought had been termed a "one in a century" event.

In drought years, the Amazon region changes from being a net absorber of carbon dioxide into a net emitter.

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My Comment: This is not the first time that a drought has occurred in the Amazon .... but if it continues .... it will be a good reason to be concerned.

TechBytes: Amazon Apps Store

From ABC News:

Amazon is reportedly getting ready to open a new online application store. The Wall Street Journal reports that the apps would be for smartphones running Google's Android software. Google also has its own online store with about 80,000 apps. Apple's store has about 250,000 apps.

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