Amazon Clinic launches as a message-based virtual care service

Amazon Clinic is a new message-based virtual healthcare service that offers accessible treatments for a variety of common health concerns. | Image: Amazon Amazon has launched Amazon Clinic, a message-based online healthcare service that offers treatments for over 20 “common health conditions” such as allergies, dandruff, hair loss, birth control, erectile dysfunction, and acne. Amazon…

Algorithms quietly run the city of DC—and maybe your hometown

Enlarge (credit: Dmitry Marchenko/Getty Images) Washington, DC, is the home base of the most powerful government on earth. It’s also home to 690,000 people—and 29 obscure algorithms that shape their lives. City agencies use automation to screen housing applicants, predict criminal recidivism, identify food assistance fraud, determine if a high schooler is likely to drop…

Germany widens antitrust probes of Amazon to loop in special abuse controls

Germany’s antitrust watchdog has moved to widen an existing investigation of Amazon’s business in the market in light of special abuse powers it confirmed are applicable to the ecommerce giant’s business in the country this summer. The Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said yesterday it is extending two ongoing “abuse control proceedings” against Amazon to include…

Shudder’s gory ‘Slash/Back’ trailer sees teen girls taking on an alien invasion

If horror movie history has taught us anything, it’s that there’s nobody more equipped to take on a budding alien invasion than a plucky group of teens. Set in the Inuit village of Canada’s Baffin Island (it’s the first feature ever to be filmed in the hamlet of Pangnirtung, Nunavut), Shudder‘s Slash/Back sees four Indigenous…