I think it has sucked so far.
Cold-weather Super Bowl: Coming soon to Gillette?
I sure hope not.
N.Y. officials bust prostitution ring
Officials decided to act now in the hopes of disrupting parties that might have been in the works for Super Bowl weekend.
Why ruin the weekend and make it that much colder?
Because the Kraft Curse lives?
Now for the best part ($4m dollars for 30 seconds worth of pistachios?) of the whole game:
"Super Bowl ads made specifically for you" by Nick Wingfield | New York Times, January 31, 2014
The biggest mass-market advertising event in the country....
But already the technology has privacy advocates and legal experts brimming with concern about the implications.
I don't see why, do you?
Smartphone users could potentially be spammed with advertisements, they say, and a company that collects the data might be inclined to sell it.
“When it rolls out, you will see all this utility for it,” said Ryan Calo, an assistant professor of law at the University of Washington in Seattle. “And at some point the economic incentives will come into play, and it won’t be pretty.”
The transmitters, often called beacons, will be in several hundred stores and public areas in the coming months, including at two dozen Major League Baseball stadiums and many Macy’s and American Eagle Outfitters retail stores. Apple has the devices in more than 250 stores.
Related: Apple says it didn’t know about NSA hacking
While location-based alerts and advertisements have long been a feature of smartphones, the new technology requires less from users. When Apple updated the software for iPhones several months ago, the company included a new feature, iBeacons, that displays alerts even when a user is not running an app.
Technology executives say Apple is further along with its version of the technology, which is why most alerts of this kind are now sent to iPhone users. But smartphones running Google’s Android operating system can also be targeted.
Once users download a brand’s app and give permission to receive alerts, they can get messages whenever their phone drifts within range of one of these beacons.
For brands like Major League Baseball, which had more than 10 million users of its MLB.com At Bat app last year, the potential for outreach is enormous. Brick-and-mortar stores are quickly warming to the technology, too, thrilled by the prospect of being able to fine-tune marketing messages and gather more data about customers, just as online competitors like Amazon have for years.
And it will all be turned over to the government.
“The power of this is it really is able to connect the real world, the brick-and-mortar world, with the virtual world with a level of granularity that hasn’t existed before,” said Manish Jha, the NFL’s general manager of mobile....
Privacy advocates say they are concerned that the proliferation of beacons would add considerably to the vast amounts of data marketers are gathering about consumers, like mapping relationships for people who happen to visit the same location repeatedly.
The companies installing the beacons say they will respect the privacy of people who use the technology. Jha of the NFL, for instance, said the league was not connecting personal and location data with its Super Bowl experiment. Supporters of the technology say most people will find the benefits of using it, like discounts and helpful tips, worth the trade-off of sharing data.
As long as you don't get hacked.
In a test at a Miami Dolphins game at Sun Life Stadium in Florida last month, Qualcomm used the technology to alert fans about where to find the shortest concession stand lines.
And the companies say they realize they need to avoid sending irrelevant or excessive alerts. Todd Dipaola, chief executive of InMarket, a company that has begun testing beacons inside grocery stores in Cleveland, San Francisco, and Seattle, said that approach would not last long.
“There’s one penalty for annoying your consumer — that’s the death penalty,” he said, and then described the process of deleting an app. “They hold down the app, push the X, and it’s gone.”
Right to the NSA storage warehouse.
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Sorry I can't fake it anymore, folks, but this is no longer fun.
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Charting the 48 Super Bowls
Feeling very much like saying f**k this today.
