San Francisco's famous Golden Gate Bridge has started "singing" following recent changes to bicycle-path railings that appear to make music as the wind blows through them, residents have reported. The Guardian reports: Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz, a Golden Gate Bridge, Highway & Transportation District spokesperson, said the sounds stemmed from long-planned wind retrofitting. "The new musical tones coming from the bridge are a known and inevitable phenomenon that stem from our wind retrofit project during very high winds. The wind retrofit project is designed to make the Bridge more aerodynamic under high wind conditions and is necessary to ensure the safety and structural integrity of the Bridge for generations to come," Cosulich-Schwartz said.

"We knew going into the handrail replacement that the bridge would sing during exceptionally high winds from the west, as we saw yesterday. We are pleased to see the new railing is allowing wind to flow more smoothly across the bridge." Others who posted videos of the novel sound appeared more at ease, however. One described it as "so peaceful." Another said: "So crazy but also kinda beautiful!!" "We can hear this in our house more than three miles away from the bridge. It's crazy making," one user wrote Friday evening.

Brands have long been able to bid for the premier slot at the top left of Amazon's listings, but during the pandemic the online retailer has begun using this position for its private-label items, raising antitrust concerns. From a report: Until recently, when Amazon customers typed "melatonin" into the site's search bar, a variety of sleep supplements would appear in the most coveted real estate on the listings results -- top left on the first page. One of consultant Jason Boyce's clients, a seller of natural supplements, often sought to outbid competitors for the best spots by promising Amazon about $6 each time someone clicked on the product. While the brand never attained the top left slot, it regularly landed in the top row. But in late March, Boyce noticed that Amazon's own brand, Solimo, had taken over the top left, while his client's product had been bumped to a lower row. Then Boyce typed "ground coffee" in the search bar, only to find AmazonFresh Colombia ground coffee in the top left, pushing down another client. Although customers don't necessarily realize it, brands have for years been able to bid on search terms to secure the most visible listing positions at the top of Amazon's product search results pages, where their products carry a "sponsored" tag above the description.

Now, they still bid for top-row placements, but the best spot -- the top left on the first page -- is unavailable across dozens of product search terms, according to consultants and ProPublica's own review. During the pandemic, Amazon has begun to use that position for its own private-label products, without bidding, under the heading "featured from our brands." The domino effect of Amazon's new strategy has demoted competitors' listings for products including diapers, copy paper, kids' pajamas, mattresses, trail mix and lightbulbs. By putting its own private brands in some of the most valuable slots, Amazon is sacrificing short-term ad revenue to build up sales of its private brands over time, consultants said. The new approach violates Amazon's mantra that every decision must put the customer first, said Tim Hughes, a consultant who used to work in product management at Amazon.

If our social platforms are going to be gatekeepers, then they need to acknowledge their role in the information ecosystems. It is knowing what to boost and what to ignore that makes a good platform, writes veteran technology journalist and now a venture capitalist Om Malik. From his essay: The battle of good email versus spam email has taken a long time, but it has been worth fighting. The struggle between real information and fake information is no different. Unfortunately, what we have is ambivalent algorithms on our social platforms that blindly amplify both hope and hate. This gets complicated pretty quickly. Without access to the same platforms currently being used to gaslight our country, we won't see the awful videos of police in conflict with the people they should protect. Without the same platforms, it would be harder to tell that the media just glorifies the titillating stuff, whether it is the opinion page of the old Gray Lady or the fake looting of a non-existent Rolex store.

I am the first to admit that this is one hard and messy problem. The challenge we face today is that technology's supreme commanders fail to fight the real monkey on their back -- how the modern internet works. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, or Google, the core principle of these companies is engagement and growth. More engagement means more growth, and that means more attention and thus more money. If Facebook removed news from your feed and just restricted it to social items, like baby pictures, ravings of a crazy uncle, and event announcements, there is a good chance that engagement on the platform would decrease. Twitter would be a lot less engaging if it reverted back to its original premise of showing the latest, not the loudest. And what if Google stopped rewarding frequent visits as one of the measurements for showing the results on its search engine? I think you know.

It may seem obvious, with double-digit unemployment and plunging economic output. But if there was any remaining doubt that the U.S. is in a recession, it's now been removed by the official scorekeepers at the National Bureau of Economic Research. From a report: The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee -- the fat lady of economic opera -- says the expansion peaked in February after a record 128 months, and we've been sliding into a pandemic-driven recession ever since. In making the announcement, the committee pointed to the "unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy." At the same time, the committee noted the recession could be short-lived. The U.S. added 2.5 million jobs last month, after losing more than 22 million in March and April. Many forecasters expect economic output to begin growing again in the third quarter.

A new study on kids' app usage and habits indicates a major threat to YouTube's dominance, as kids now split their time between Google's online video platform and other apps, like TikTok, Netflix and mobile games like Roblox. From a report: Kids ages four to 15 now spend an average of 85 minutes per day watching YouTube videos, compared with 80 minutes per day spent on TikTok. The latter app also drove growth in kids' social app use by 100% in 2019 and 200% in 2020, the report found. The data in the annual report by digital safety app maker Qustodio was provided by 60,000 families with children ages four to 14 in the U.S., U.K. and Spain, so its data isn't representative of global trends. The research encompasses children's online habits from February 2019 to April 2020, takes into account the COVID-19 crisis and is specifically focused on four main categories of mobile applications: online video, social media, video games and education. YouTube, not surprisingly, remains one of the most-used apps among children, the study found. Kids are now watching twice as many videos per day as they did just four years ago.

A study that analyzed the top 54 open source projects found that security vulnerabilities in these tools doubled in 2019, going from 421 bugs reported in 2018 to 968 last year. From a report: According to RiskSense's "The Dark Reality of Open Source" report, released today, the company found 2,694 bugs reported in popular open source projects between 2015 and March 2020. The report didn't include projects like Linux, WordPress, Drupal, and other super-popular free tools, since these projects are often monitored, and security bugs make the news, ensuring most of these security issues get patched fairly quickly. Instead, RiskSense looked at other popular open source projects that aren't as well known but broadly adopted by the tech and software community. This included tools like Jenkins, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Chef, GitLab, Spark, Puppet, and others. RiskSense says that one of the main problems they found during their study was that a large number of the security bugs they analyzed had been reported to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) many weeks after they've been publicly disclosed. The company said it usually took on average around 54 days for bugs found in these 54 projects to be reported to the NVD, with PostgreSQL seeing reporting delays that amounted to eight months.