Weekend Thoughts - 4.21.18

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Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Another week, another update on Facebook's latest scandal. You may recall that two weeks ago I sided with John Gruber's opinion that the total number of users that were affected was likely more than 87 million—Facebook second publicly-admitted figure. Well, it turns out we were right. Apparently, far more than 87 million people had their private data harvested out of Facebook by political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Color me not surprised.

2. Earth has a growing problem with pollution, but one group of scientists may have found one solution that may help resolve the issue—a mutant enzyme that eats plastic. The enzyme was found accidentally when the scientists started investigating a bacterium that was found in a Japanese waste dump in 2016. The discovery of this enzyme is important, and putting it to use may prove to be a completely new way of tackling the pollution crisis on our planet.

3. I thought this was pretty neat—a TL;DR for Terms of Service called ToS;DR. It's a crowdsourced database that houses website terms of service that proves a letter grade (from Grades A to E) for each site you visit, based off of things like data-retention and the rights the site can assert regarding your contributions.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Image by SatyaPrem, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.