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"A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library."

A number of American “phone farmers” are rigging up groups of 20 or even 100 phones in order to generate fake engagement with ads and make a few easy bucks, reports Vice.

The scheme works because people buy and sell ‘incentivized traffic’

Since it’s legal to pay someone for their attention, some apps — like Perk — pay viewers for watching videos — sometimes at a rate of about 1/1000 of a cent per video watched.

It works like this: A farmer buys as many cheap phones as possible and then arranges them to constantly play videos. 

The payouts are consistent, but tiny: A seasoned farmer with 20 phones reported earning between $50 and $100 per month.

Ad fraud is a bigger deal for some ‘farmers’ than others

It’s worth noting — nearly all of these phone farms violate the terms of service of the apps they use to earn money (although the apps seem reluctant to crack down on the low-grade fraud).

Some advanced farmers, however, set up software that simulates clicks and finger movements, enabling them to earn more money.

But the really fruitful farms operate outside of the US. In China, where 90% of views on some video sites are believed to be fake, some click farms with thousands of phones have been exposed by local outlets.

The post Americans are setting up hobby ‘phone farms’… but elsewhere, it’s big business appeared first on The Hustle.

Bitcoin had its boom in 2018, but this year a different currency is hot: physical gold.

In the first half of this year, central banks bought $15.7B of gold — the largest increase in 19 recorded years of data.

So, why are global investors so giddy for gold? 

Everyone wants to ditch the dollar…

The crispy American greenback is the world’s de facto global currency: Dollars make up 62% of all central bank foreign exchange reserves (dwarfing the #2 euro at 21%) and 90% of all foreign exchange trades.

But since dollar dominance damages other currencies during domestic downturns (see: the 2008 global financial crisis), other countries resist dollar dependence.

In 2009, China spearheaded an effort to replace the dollar with an International Monetary Fund-controlled global currency, but it never got off the ground. 

Now, China and others are going for — or back to — the gold

The noblest metal is becoming the gold standard once again: Central banks bought 73% more gold in the first few months of this year than last, led by China, Russia, and Turkey. 

That’s a return to normal, really: Nearly all global currencies were redeemable for gold before 1944. 

But in ’44, during a play-date in New Hampshire, world leaders said “America has a sh*t ton of gold and seems stable, let’s just peg all currencies to the dollar. What could go wrong?” (I’m paraphrasing).

Of course, things got spicy: America killed the gold standard in the ’70s, leaving the world’s currency reserve backed not by gold but by blind confidence in Uncle Sam…

Since that led to inflation and volatility, gold never really stopped glittering as an attractive alternative — and when the world doubts the dollar, it goes for the gold.

The post Much of the global economy is trying to ditch the dollar — and buy gold instead appeared first on The Hustle.

The budding blockchain behemoth Coinbase bought a company called Xapo’s “custody business,” which stores Bitcoin securely in a vault under a mountain in Switzerland, for $55m.

After the deal closes, Coinbase will have more than $7B in crypto assets under management — potentially storing as many as 5% of all Bitcoins in circulation.

But wait a second… why, exactly, does a crypto company need a physical vault built underneath a Swiss mountain?

Digital currencies still need physical custodians

Unlike wire transfers at banks — which leave digital trails and can therefore be recovered when stolen — blockchain-based transactions leave no trace… and are therefore nearly impossible to trace.

So the safest place to store crypto keys — strings of letters and numbers used to access cryptocurrencies — is not online (where they can be hacked without a trace) but in offline, IRL vaults.

Now “custodians” like Xapo, which offer physical vaults that consumers want to store their crypto-cash safely, are becoming common.

And these Bitcoin vaults have something to prove 

Crypto companies are focused on attracting institutional investors who’ve been reluctant to trade cold, hard cash for digital dollar-replacements. 

One way to win over wary wealth-managers is to make these custody services seem suuuuper secure — so, the more they look like evil supervillain lairs from James Bond movies, the better.

Xapo certainly fits the bill: The ultra-secure vault, which is built in an old Swiss military bunker, is hidden in an undisclosed location and protected from nuclear explosions, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks.

The post To securely store cryptocurrency, Coinbase buys a vault under a mountain in Switzerland appeared first on The Hustle.

With selections from Australia to Ireland, American shelves are filling up with new whiskies to try.

Moment just launched an exciting new product for smartphone photographers: a line of high-quality 37mm Cine filters and compatible filter mount that you can attach directly to your Moment smartphone case.

Previously, you could only use Moment’s filters on the company’s smartphone lenses, making it impossible to use a filter with your phone’s native wide or tele lenses. The new filters and filter mount changes this, allowing you to slap any screw-on 37mm ND or circular polarizing filter directly onto one of Moment’s smartphone cases.

As with all of Moment’s filters and lenses, the new 37mm ND and CPL filters use B270 cinema-quality glass and boast hydrophobic and scratch-resistant coatings. Plus, since they conform to the 37mm standard, you don’t even need to buy their filters: you can use the filter mount with any 37mm cine mount rings or filters you already own.

Here’s a quick intro and shooting demo that Moment put together to show off the new filters:

Today’s launch includes a rotatable circular polarizing filter (CPL), ND filters from ND4 through ND64, and a 37mm filter mount that connects to a Moment phone case on one side and lets you attach any 37mm filter on the other. The stainless steel filter mount will cost $10, the CPL filter costs $45, and the ND filters cost $35. Or you can pick up the whole filter set for $130.

No matter which filter you buy, they all come in a foam-lined CNC machined metal carrying case for protection.

If you’re interested in the new 37mm Cine filters or the filter mount, head over to the Moment website to learn more or order a set for yourself today. If you order within the next 72 hours, you’ll get 20% off any of the new filters or filter kits, so there’s a reason to move fast if you’re interested.

In the world of storage, you want your hard drive to last as long as you do, and maybe longer.

A Belkin-owned company made a smart water monitoring system that catches leaks and frozen pipes before they become problematic.

Segway has revealed a self-driving scooter that should be the next big thing for mobility firms and well-heeled electric scooter enthusiasts.

In terms of brand recognition, one has to admit it is remarkable that the name Zildjian—stamped on millions of cymbals worldwide—has such wide cultural currency. The product this company makes is not one most people get very close to outside of a drum kit in a grade school music room. You never see Zildjian advertisements, unless you are a musician, and you won’t encounter a Zildjian cymbal at your local all-in-one big box store. Yet Zildjian cymbals might even be more famous than iconic brands of electric guitars like Fender and Gibson or amps like Marshall and Vox.

Why is that? It’s easy, the company was founded 400 years ago in Constantinople and has remained in the Zildjian family since an alchemist named Avedis was given the surname by Sultan Osman II in the early 17th century. In all that time, Mozart praised Zildjians (then just called “Turkish cymbals”), they appeared at London’s Great Exhibition, and they have been essential to the kits of jazz and rock drummers for as long as both genres have existed. It will never be possible to buy this kind of publicity.

How has Zildjian, who incorporated in the U.S. in 1929, stayed in business so long and continued to maintain such a reputation for quality? It’s all down, they say, to a secret recipe, passed down from generation to generation, descended from Avedis himself, whose name graces the Avedis Varteresian Melting Room, where Zildjian castings are made. You can watch what happens to those castings in the fascinating 10-minute video above. “Only 4 factory employees and the owners of the company are allowed inside” the Melting Room, notes the video’s YouTube page, “due to their knowledge of the ‘Zildjian Secret.’”

We do not learn the secret recipe, nor do we learn how a trade secret can be kept for 400 years, but we do see Zildjians heated, rolled out, shaped, cut, hammered, lathed, finished, and, finally, “stamped with the Zildjian Logo as well as the model/size of the cymbal.” It’s generally pretty cool to watch unremarkable, everyday products go through the many stages of a factory production process. Watching the Zildjian process adds a layer of historical legend and intrigue, and the allure of seeing raw materials transformed into objects of visual and aural beauty.

See Zildjian’s YouTube page for a timestamped commentary on each step in the production.

via Laughing Squid

Related Content:

How Zildjian Cymbals Were Created by an Alchemist in the Ottoman Empire, Circa 1618

Visit an Online Collection of 61,761 Musical Instruments from Across the World

The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

See How Zildjian Cymbals Are Made In a Fascinating 10-Minute Short Film is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Fall is one of the best times of year to go for a bike ride, and it’s just around the corner!

Are crayons really a cool tool? Yes, if you buy the right crayons. We bought these Stockman Beeswax block crayons when my first daughter was one. All four of my children used them and we (amazingly) still have all eight of them. The block shape is perfect for toddler, child and adult-sized hands. There are no labels to peel off, no points to have to sharpen, and they are almost impossible to break under normal circumstances. They can be used to draw hard lines or do shading. They last an incredibly long time, since they are harder than standard crayons. They come in a nice tin that snaps and stays closed (and it continues to work after 20 years!) The only thing these crayons don’t do is fine-point coloring, but isn’t that what colored pencils are for? If you have kids or plan to have kids, make a lifetime investment and buy a set of these block crayons. In 20 years, you’ll thank me!

-- Martin Lange

Stockmar Beeswax Block Crayons ($20)

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Delivery-only establishments fired up their grills around 2013, when Grubhub backed the Green Summit Group, a restaurant startup that produced food for various delivery-only brands out of its own kitchen in New York.

Today, as more and more people order in, Grubhub and its competitors like Uber Eats, DoorDash and others have helped thousands of new age restaurants get off the ground through their apps all across the country.

But, while delivery app technology changes up the menu on the food service industry, it’s also taking a fresh Nakiri knife to the restaurant dining experience, and it’s phasing out some restaurants that have long relied on their own delivery service as a major revenue stream. 

I ain’t afraid of no ‘ghost-kitchen’

The shift has bolstered 2 new kinds of digital eatery establishments — “ghost kitchens” and “virtual restaurants.” 

Virtual restaurants, which are attached to real-life restaurants but make different food specifically for the delivery app market, are leading the charge — revitalizing some seemingly doomed local culinary staples.

Of course, as the world leans toward ordering in over sitting at a restaurant with no Netflix, it’s only a matter of time before Ghost kitchens, AKA remote kitchens that exist entirely for delivery services, become the new norm. 

It’s not just the big boys

CloudKitchens, founded by Uber’s ex-CEO Travis Kalanick, has leased space to several restaurants in LA (including Sweetgreen), and Pasadena, CA-based Kitchen United plans to build 400 ghost kitchens across the country over the next few years.

Ghost kitchens have also emerged in China. The country’s food delivery industry hit $70B in orders last year, and the Chinese-based Panda Selected recently raised $50m from investors.

Not every restaurant is adapting

Uber Eats and other delivery apps insist that their apps have increased sales for restaurateurs by an average of more than 50%. 

Many restaurants report that Uber’s figures are accurate.

But others — particularly those that relied on delivery orders for revenue since before Uber was even an idea in Travis Kalanick’s diary — have struggled to pay these platforms’ standard 15% to 30% commission fees and subsequently had to turn off their grills.

The post For better or worse, food delivery apps are reshaping American restaurants appeared first on The Hustle.