It was a Thursday night and I had a date. Or, so I thought. 

Instead, I had an experience of something so strange that I’ve decided it needs a name: “cloaking.” 

I grabbed my backpack, donned my headphones, and blasted my pre-date anthem (Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman,” fyi) as I fired off a hurried WhatsApp to the man I was having dinner with. “Hey! So I’m leaving the office now. Will probs get there in like 20 mins,” I typed and hit send. 

Matthew (not his real name) had asked me to dinner earlier that week after we’d matched on Hinge. We bonded over our shared love of pasta and hatched a plan to go to Padella in Borough Market, London.

SEE ALSO: Jokey Tinder profiles are ruining the internet (and online dating, for that matter)

But, days after popping the pasta question, I was standing in line at the restaurant, staring ahead in the hope that I’d spot my date’s face in the crowd.

Thirty minutes had now passed since I’d sent my first WhatsApp, but when I checked if my match had read the message, I noticed something. Instead of the usual comforting double tick, there was just one lonesome tick. I text my friend to ask what it meant: “It means it hasn’t been delivered. He’s prolly still on the Tube, though!” I tried to iMessage him, but my message turned green rather than the usual blue. 

Then, when I opened Hinge, our conversation — which had once been peppered with dozens of flirty messages — was completely erased. I tapped out of the conversation and into my list of matches. Matthew was gone. 

“Oh my god,” I whispered to myself, my heart beating fast inside my chest. I jumped out of the queue and into the crowded street. People were whirling around me as I scrambled to find a way of contacting the man who almost certainly wasn’t joining me for dinner. I put my phone to my ear as I tried calling my absent date, but — as you can probably guess — it went straight to voicemail. 

This cannot be happening, I thought to myself. I texted my best friend Elisha to ask what I should do. “Have a glass of wine and see what happens in the next 20 mins or so,” she told me. So that’s what I did. As I nervously necked a £10 glass of rosé, I studied the WhatsApp messages Matthew and I had exchanged for clues. He’d been the driving force behind this date: he asked me out; he followed up on Hinge the night before; and he text me on the morning we were due to meet.

I just couldn’t figure out how we could go from extolling burrata to, well, blocked, in the space of a few hours. 

Had I said something to offend Matthew? Had this all been an elaborate set-up? Had I been catfished? 

“Still nothing?” Elisha text me. “Wanna come have dinner with me?” I hopped in an Uber moments later, and my driver, Bashir, asked me how I was. “I’m so angry for you!” he told me after I’d explained what’d happened. “People have no respect.” Seriously though, they really don’t. 

I, too, was angry now. Seething, in fact. Problem was: ordinarily, when someone upsets me, I confront them. I choose a mode of communication — text, WhatsApp, call, Slack, you name it — and I talk it out. But, Matthew had cut me off. 

Because Matthew had completely vanished without a trace, it didn’t feel entirely accurate to use the term “stood up”. This was like a strange and deeply upsetting synthesis of ghosting and getting stood up. 

The thing about Hinge is: when you match with someone, you get their full name. After a bit of not-very-arduous sleuthing, I found his Facebook profile. Next day, I decided to drop Matthew a message on Facebook. I thought long and hard about what I might say to this person, but the only thing I really needed to convey to him was the message that it’s really not OK to treat someone like this. 

Even if he never read it, I just knew it wouldn’t sit right with me if I didn’t get to have my say. 

After I sent the message, I felt a weight lift off of me. But, part of me was curious: had other people been blocked by their online matches before a date? Was this a thing? I’ve been ghosted, breadcrumbed, stashed, orbited, you name it, it’s happened to me. But this was a new one.

Eddy (who prefers to use her first name only) says she matched on Tinder with a guy who “ticked a lot of boxes” for her and they spent a few weeks talking on the app before exchanging numbers. 

“We WhatsApped for about a week and set a date for the Saturday — just a glass of wine in town — he even confirmed the date the day before!” says Eddy. 

But, when it came to the day of the actual date, things went awry. “I rocked up to our agreed meeting place and waited inside as discussed,” she says. “Ordered a drink so I didn’t look like a total loser and waited… and waited.” 

After 20 minutes, she realised that her date was a no-show and, at that point, she decided to message him. “I sent a message asking what was going on and what was he playing at?” Eddy explains. “Said that if he’d changed his mind then that was fine but he could at least have had the courtesy and respect for me to have said beforehand.”

Eddy’s Tinder match read the message and promptly blocked her on WhatsApp. She never heard from him again. 

The same thing happened to Shruti (who also prefers to use first names only). After matching with a guy on Bumble early in the work week, she began chatting regularly with him. “Conversation was interesting and he was funny,” says Shruti. “He was responsive — no long pauses, non sequiturs, asked about my life too, flirty but not inappropriate, no dick pics.”

“When I checked to see whether he had sent a message on Bumble instead, I found that he had unmatched me”

They chatted all day every day for three or four days and they decided to meet on the Friday for a drink. 

“I had terrible service in the bar so I couldn’t check my phone without leaving the bar,” says Shruti. “After about 15min I tried sending him a text just to confirm it was the right bar and then I went back in and ordered a drink.”

She says she took her time, and assured herself that her date had perhaps got caught in rush hour traffic. At the 45 minute mark, Shruti says her drink was gone and her date was nowhere to be seen. 

“When I checked to see whether he had sent a message on Bumble instead, I found that he had unmatched me sometime after we confirmed [the date],” says Shruti. “I know because I looked at his profile to make sure I’d recognise him.”

Shruti says she sent him a message afterwards but didn’t get a response. “Shocker!” she said. 

David (who’s using his first name only) matched with a woman on Tinder and they agreed to go for a drink together. “We had been texting each other all day saying ‘looking forward to it’, etc., then 30 minutes after she was due to arrive, I called but got no answer,” says David. At around the 30 minute mark, he says he “had a fair idea” that his date wasn’t coming. But, when he checked WhatsApp and discovered he’d been blocked, this vague idea turned into a certainty. 

He chose not to send a message to his Tinder match afterwards because he felt “quite mortified” and he “didn’t see the point.”  

This activity sadly seems to be something swipers are having to contend with. But, neither “ghosting” nor “stood up” quite do justice to this strange and upsetting phenomenon? 

Given that these people essentially don an invisibility cloak after setting up a date, perhaps the term “cloaking” sums up this practise. 

Vocabulary aside, though, cloaking (or whatever you want to call it) is a horrible, disrespectful act. If you’ve changed your mind about a date, have the decency to tell the person. It’s the right thing to do.

At first glance, Searching looks like just another cautionary tale about the dangers of the internet.

John Cho plays David, a dad who delves into his daughter’s virtual life after she goes missing. As you’d guess, he soon discovers there was a whole other side to his beloved Margot (Michelle La) that he never knew.

But of all the film’s twists and turns (and it’s a mystery thriller, so there are plenty), the biggest one might be that it’s not really anti-technology at all. 

SEE ALSO: Summer movie preview: What to watch if you’re in a dark and twisted mood

To director Aneesh Chaganty, this was key. “Everything, everything we watch about technology is about how our screens are alienating us, how we’re obsessed with likes, how AI is going to take over the world so we should just stock up on our canned foods now,” he told Mashable earlier this month in LA.

Searching, he said, was about “giving technology a more holistic perspective, because it’s both the problem in the movie and the heart of the solution.”

The central gimmick of the film is that it unfolds entirely on screens, including laptops, phones, and security cameras. What we see on those screens reveal the internet as a source of menace and danger — but also one of information, support, and connection. 

Above all, the concept demonstrates how completely we’ve woven these technologies into our everyday lives. Searching opens with a seven-minute montage chronicling the lives of the Kim family over the past decade or so — from the creation of a new computer account for young Margot to a series of postponed calendar events signaling her mother’s death from cancer. 

That it works — that you’re actually able to follow and get invested in this family just by following their digital activity — feels both improbable and inevitable. Searching plays on what Cho calls “computer nostalgia.” You probably didn’t really miss any of these old operating systems, icons, or programs. But when they do appear, they instantly evoke a particular moment in time, the way a smell or a song might in other contexts. 

It’s the surest sign that with Searching, movies have finally caught up to the past decade-plus of personal technology. “I was surprised, watching this movie, how much we’re all computer literate. My in-laws, who are in their 70s, watched it and loved it, and they said, Most importantly, we understood it,” explained Cho. “I said to Aneesh at some point, we couldn’t have made this film 10 years ago because our collective vocabulary wasn’t quite there yet.”

Searching feels fluent in that language in large part due to Chaganty’s insistence on using (mostly) real programs and sites. “I think for the most part, I’ve never seen technology portrayed accurately in movies,” he said, citing the fake websites, made-up UIs, and nonsensical display settings often used in other films.

“As an audience member, you’re willing to accept that, but there’s a click that happens, like, That’s not real,” he continued. “And to us, step one of this movie was setting it on an internet and on a computer that everybody recognizes.”

That meant not only showing familiar tools (FaceTime, Google Sheets) and spaces (Facebook, Instagram) but using them in familiar ways. Margot’s Facebook page is littered with connections to kids she’s barely friends with, while her Tumblr allows her to get more personal. Her relationships can be traced across Instagram and Venmo. 

Some of the stuff we see on there seems sinister, and some of it seems sweet, but all of it seems as real as anything we’ve seen in our own lives. Searching shrugs off the idea that our screen activity exists in some lesser unreality, separate from our genuine selves. It’s a useful counterpoint to stories like Ready Player One, where the lesson is that Online is no substitute for real life, or Black Mirror‘s “Nosedive” episode, which criticizes the phoniness of social media.

To that end, Searching also shoots Margot and David’s digital activity like, well, non-digital activity. “What we wanted to do was take these very mundane, normal things that people use every day and turn them into a cinematic canvas by using cinematic techniques, which is something that hasn’t been done before,” said Chaganty. 

Unlike 2014’s Unfriended, which showed a static laptop screen in real time, Searching employs zooms and pans and skips ahead in the manner of a more traditional movie. Still, that applies mostly to the apps we see onscreen, not the actors. Cho admitted that acting to a laptop presented its own “disorienting” challenge.

“I’m sure the next person will be like, This is what Searching did wrong, and even improve it from there.”

“The biggest thing was just no people. And I know that that’s the reality, looking at a screen, but it’s so nice to be able to look into a person’s face and then get something off of it,” he said. 

But, he acknowledged, that might be a “generational” thing — at 46, he’s decades older than the actress who plays his daughter. “Michelle La was saying that she found it very natural to act in front of a webcam, and I couldn’t believe it,” he said, looking slightly amazed. “So maybe I’m just old.”

Which points to another crucial point about Searching‘s place in the medium: As Chaganty points out, it’s just “the most recent experiment” in an ongoing effort by the big screen to do right by all those smaller screens. 

“We’re very new in our tech literacy, where it’s invaded our entire lives, that we live our lives on screens, that it’s going to take a matter of time and some iterations and some experiments for people to figure out what is the best way to show things onscreen,” said Chaganty. 

So, yeah, Searching may do better than most movies at showing what life online is like these days. But Chaganty, who noted how many movies before Searching have gotten the internet wrong, is not arrogant enough to assume he’s the one person who’s gotten it completely right. 

“I’m sure the next person will be like, This is what Searching did wrong, and even improve it from there,” he said.

For kids of a certain era, Windows 95 was part of our first experience with computers. 

If the relatively ancient operating system still holds a special place in your heart, you’ll be glad to know that it’s available as an app for Mac, Windows and Linux.

SEE ALSO: Chromebooks that also run Windows 10 may be in the works

Put together by Slack dev Felix Rieseberg, the 129mb file downloadable from GitHub allows you to reminisce on the old days of MS Paint and wasting time on Solitaire. 

The operating system is encased in electron, a framework for building cross-platform apps with HTML and CSS. 

There are, of course, some things that don’t work. Minesweeper doesn’t really let you do the sweeping, and Internet Explorer won’t let you surf the net — as it simply doesn’t connect to the web.

As Rieseberg suggests, if you were hoping to run Doom, you’re probably better off doing it through an actual virtualization app, but it surprisingly does work. He admits it only worked well “by accident and was mostly a joke.” 

The app still seems to work better than the Windows 95 copy installed on an Apple Watch, which takes about an hour to run.

As you’d figure, running Windows 95 these days is mostly just for a laugh.

[h/t The Verge]

A local news site wants you to get your facts straight before destroying their mentions. 

The National Enquirer kept a LITERAL SAFE of records that documented “hush money payments” during the 2016 presidential election. The tabloid essentially buried stories that would damage Trump’s campaign. 

SEE ALSO: Sarah Huckabee Sanders tries and fails to explain Trump’s odd comment on groceries

On Thursday, National Enquirer chief David Pecker was granted immunity, and angry people took to Twitter to voice their rage. 

Except, they directed their anger at the wrong Enquirer. 

The poor Cincinnati-based local news site put out an official announcement in the form of an ASCII bunny meme. 

Someone, let them take a break. 

They really weren’t here for snarky comments.

And really, whoever’s tweeting these clapbacks deserves a bonus.

So before you decide to complain about our rapidly imploding state of politics on Twitter, make sure you’re tweeting at @NatEnquirer, not @Enquirer.

Well this is disturbing. 

Apparently not content to merely meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, Russian trolls now stand accused of spreading a type of misinformation that could have literal deadly effects: anti-vaccine propaganda.  

So finds a new study published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, which found that Russian trolls pushed vaccine-related misinformation on Twitter in the run up to the 2016 election. 

SEE ALSO: Facebook just revealed yet another shady political influence campaign

“Content polluters seem to use anti-vaccine messages as bait to entice their followers to click on advertisements and links to malicious websites,” explained Sandra Crouse Quinn, study co-author and University of Maryland professor, in a press release. “Ironically, content that promotes exposure to biological viruses may also promote exposure to computer viruses.”

According to researchers from George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University, among the Twitter accounts studied were those “now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the U.S. election.”

“These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society”

While the specifics of this misinformation may be shocking, the playbook the trolls followed is not. Much like the Internet Research Agency pushed for race-based violence and posted both pro-Trump and pro-Black Lives Matter content, the tweets coming from Russian troll-operated Twitter accounts both cast doubts on the efficacy of vaccines and promoted them. 

“These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” study co-author Mark Dredze said in a press statement. “However, by playing both sides, they erode public trust in vaccination, exposing us all to the risk of infectious diseases. Viruses don’t respect national boundaries.”

And, according to the study, the trolls’ disinformation “was effective for propagating news articles through social media in the context of the 2015 Disneyland measles outbreak.”

In other words, those posting the anti-vaxx content were able to weaponize an outbreak that resulted in 125 confirmed measles cases for propaganda purposes. 

It turns out that the accounts on Twitter arguing that vaccines cause autism may not all be operated by idiots — some may also be helmed by paid Russian trolls attempting to subvert democracy. Which, well, doesn’t make me feel any better.