ARAB TIMES, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2016

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Alcoholics Anonymous: If you know someone who can’t stop drinking and would like to help them please check us out and we promise to try to help at www.aaarabia.org There are no fees. This is a genuine public service.

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Drinking problem?: You are no longer alone! AA can help you stop. Totally confidential helpline 66028605.

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Narcotics Anonymous: NA can help with addiction problems. Totally confidential: 94087800 English/Arabic.

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Cancer online support group: If you are Cancer patient or family member fi ghting with this deadly disease, come join our online support group. Best way of dealing with this disease is providing support and share our experience with each other. There are lot of things which even doctors can’t tell so be member of this website and start sharing your experiences which may help others. October is recognized as National Breast Cancer Aware-ness Month (NBCAM). The primary purpose is to promote self examination and screening mammography as the most effective way to save lives by detecting breast cancer at early stage. For more information visit: http://fi ght-ingwithcancer.webs.com/

LatestStalls available in Eid Fair: Jannah Crew Teenage Muslimah Club Presents Eid Fair 2016, stalls now available. Please call for more infor-mation 65714754.

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Share your story with Amricani: Do you or any of your family members, acquaint-ances or friends happen to have a story with the American Missionary hospital in Kuwait (Mustashfa Lemraicani) during the years from 1914-1967, the offi cial period of offering medical services in Kuwait?

Please share with us your story or your memory during those old days by writing the event and sending it to the following email ad-dress: Mystory@darmuseum.org.kw

Notes: 1. Please send your story only to the above mentioned email. Story shared in Instagram, Facebook or Twitter will not be considered.

2. Please write your story or memory and sign it with your full name, and your contact number.

3. It will be great if you send us your per-sonal photos or those of the place related to the story (optional).

Your story will be part of a new book to be published by DAI.

I am confi dent that your contributions will be an essential part of the history of Amricani. Share with us!

Oct 5

KTAA membership meeting: Kuwait Textile Arts Association (KTAA) membership meeting on Oct 5, 2016 from 10:00 am to 12 noon at the Beit Sadu, Arabian Gulf Street, opposite the Kuwait National Library.

Former and future members are invited to a meet and greet membership meeting, with a ‘Show and Tell’ demonstration. If you are a lover of fi bre arts, crochet, quilting, and textile arts you are welcome to network, share and learn a textile art. Come to join our group. Membership and membership information offered during the meeting, KD 20 donation per annum, non-members KD 1 per meeting. RSVP: WhatsApp +96566753002.

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DAI storytime is back: Storytime at Yarmouk starts on Wednesday, Oct 5, at 4 pm. Storytime at Amricani starts on Saturday, Oct 8 at 3:30 pm. Registration is not necessary. We will start promptly on schedule, so please arrive a bit early.

Oct 6

IOC to conduct Arts Fest: Indian Overseas Congress (IOC) conducts its 10th Arts Festi-val- IOC-FEST-2016 for the Indian Commu-nity in Kuwait on Oct 6 and 7, 2016 at United Indian School, Abbasiya.

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Travel

Tech

Electronic memories and records

Who inherits selfie? US seeks to fill privacy law gapsSPRINGFIELD, Ill, Oct 3, (AP): When a loved one dies, laws cover how their houses, cars, and other property are passed on to relatives. But the rules are murkier — and currently far more restrictive — when it comes to pictures on Facebook, emails to friends or relatives and even financial records stored in online cloud accounts.

Google, Facebook and other companies have said a federal privacy law approved decades before digital storage became common prevents them from releasing electronic memories or records unless the account owner grants permis-sion — even if the person is dead. Without an estate plan, families must try to crack their loved one’s passwords or take the costly step of litigating the matter to access photos and emails — and some have, with little success.

The laws governing how to divide belongings after someone dies have not caught up with the technological advances that have permeated the ways people communicate, but states have be-gun trying to bridge that gap. This year, Illinois was one of 19 states that passed similar laws to clarify what internet companies can release after someone dies and when information should remain inaccessible.

“I post quite a bit on Facebook. I post a lot of photos. If something were to happen to me, maybe my wife would like to have access to those photos,” said Rep. Emanuel Chris Welch, a state legislator from suburban Chicago who sponsored Illinois’ measure on the topic.

With the new laws, unless a person expresses otherwise, companies will release basic infor-mation from a user, such as the person’s email contact list, to help find friends or gather an inventory of a person’s assets. But to get the actual contents of the emails — even the subject

FB launches new ‘marketplace’

Facebook launches ‘lite’ version of Messenger overseasNEW YORK, Oct 3, (AP): Facebook is launching a “lite” version of it’s Messenger chat app. It is aimed at emerging markets, where many people use older phones that don’t have enough room to store or ability to run the full-featured application due to slower internet speeds or other issues.

“Messenger Lite” will be available on An-droid devices in Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Venezuela beginning on Monday. The company did not say when it would be available in other countries or whether it is also coming to Apple de-vices (although Android is far more popu-lar in emerging markets than even older iPhones).

There is already a “Facebook Lite” avail-able for people whose phones are too old or simple to run the full-fledged Facebook.

Messenger Lite is a similarly slimmed-down version of Messenger. It will let people send text, photos and links but won’t do video calls, for example.

The move comes as the social media gi-ant moves to force users to adopt Messen-ger if they want to send each other direct messages, instead of the main Facebook site or app. It is working: more than 1 billion people use Messenger each month.

For a while, there was a loophole — you could log in to Facebook’s mobile website to access messages. But Facebook is end-ing this option, too, so Messenger will be people’s only option.

David Marcus, head of messaging prod-ucts at Facebook Inc., said in an interview that Messenger’s goal is to be a “product for everyone, not only people who can af-

ford a higher-end device and more expen-sive data plan.”

Also:NEW YORK: Facebook says some 450 million people use its site — mainly the “Groups” feature — to buy and sell stuff lo-cally, anything from cars to baby clothes to furniture. Now, the company is launching a separate “marketplace” section that seeks to make it easier to do this.

The last time Facebook tried its hand at such a marketplace was nine years ago, and it didn’t really go anywhere. Like Face-book itself at the time, it was a desktop computer-only product. The latest effort, or course, works on mobile devices, so it’s easier to snap a photo of the item you are selling and upload it on the site.

lines — or photos and documents stored in a cloud service, people must proactively specify who they want to have their digital belongings.

The federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986, doesn’t anticipate the release of online information when execut-ing wills. Because probate law is typically left to the states, the laws legislatures are passing could effectively set new rules.

The Chicago-based Uniform Law Commis-sion wrote the legislation states are passing with the support of internet companies, but that

wasn’t always the case. Initially, the com-mission wanted administrators of a person’s estate to have access to everything from users’ accounts in cases where someone did not leave instructions about what to do with their digital assets.

Only one state, Delaware, managed to pass that version of the commission’s proposal, but 27 legislatures tried and failed in 2014.

Carl Szabo, senior policy counsel at NetChoice, an industry group that represents the interests of such companies as Facebook,

Google and PayPal, said the revised legislation “balances the needs of the bereaved with the privacy interests of the account holders and the people with whom they corresponded.”

West Virginia, Utah, and Iowa are among the dozen other states that have drafted bills seek-ing to join the 19 that enacted laws.

Facebook allows users to choose a “legacy contact” to access their account, and Gmail has an “account trustee” option. In instances where people use those options, the companies’ agree-ments with them will supersede the state laws.

Even with the new laws, planning is neces-sary at a time when many still don’t think about the contents of their internet accounts as property.

“This is one of those many examples where the law really gets its power by giving people the knowledge that it exists,” said Washington state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, the sponsor of the law passed there this year.

The promise of privacy companies offer users has led to heartache and frustration for the families of account holders who have had to go to court for the right to access their relative’s emails and photos.

In 2005, Yahoo turned over more than 10,000 pages of emails in a CD to the family of Lance Cpl Justin Ellsworth, a marine from Michigan whose family went to court for the material. But others have not been successful.

The family of John Ajemain in Massachu-setts has been unable to get his emails from Yahoo after his death in 2006. And in 2012, Facebook quashed a subpoena from the family of Sahar Daftary, a model who fell to her death from an apartment building in Manchester, England, in 2008.

In Virginia, after Ricky Rash’s 15-year-old son, Eric, killed himself in 2011, Facebook provided a CD with the contents of his account but not his password. Rash still struggles with the notion that for decades people have stumbled upon mementos while cleaning out a late parents’ home, but in the digital age those keepsakes can be out of reach.

“What is the difference of the shoebox full of letters and pictures under the bed or in the attic?” Ricky Rash asked. “You go in as a child taking care of your parents’ estate, you may find something in those memoirs that surprises you.”

In this photo taken on Sept 21, 2016, tourists make their way down Lombard Street, also known as the ‘most crooked street’ in San Francisco. (AP)

San Francisco’s ‘Crookedest Street in the World’

Tourists swamp curvy Lombard StreetSAN FRANCISCO, Oct 3, (AP): Lombard Street, the scenic San Francisco thorough-fare known as the “Crookedest Street in the World,” has become so thronged with gawkers that residents say it feels more like an overcrowded amusement park than a residential road.

City transit leaders are considering possible solutions, including charging a toll, requiring reservations, adding more parking-control officers and encouraging visitors to reach the single-lane street on foot or by cable car.

In the summer months, an estimated 6,000 people per day visit the street, which offers views of the city that are as beautiful as the road is winding.

“There have been days when you have 250 people at the bottom of the street tak-ing pictures and hundreds of people up and down the sidewalks and another hundred at the top,” said Greg Brundage, who has lived on the hilly street for 20 years. “It’s a mob scene.”

Sightseers have visited the landmark road for decades, but in the past four or five years, they have flooded it. Cars waiting to drive down the 600-foot-long street often stretch back for three blocks, clogging the Russian Hill neighborhood, residents said.

The curvy street wasn’t intended to be a tourist attraction.

Residents built the hairpin turns on the red brick road in 1922 because its 27-de-gree grade was too steep for the era’s cars

to climb. Neighbors added the lush gardens filled with hydrangeas and roses 30 years later.

ViewsThe sweeping views and the fact that

a cable car stops at the top of the street contributed to its popularity. Its worldwide fame only increased after it was featured in movies and commercials.

The recent congestion has been com-

pounded by tour buses that drop off hordes of tourists in the morning, leaving them to wander the residential area for up to two hours, residents said.

“A lot of airplanes from Asia arrive early in the morning, and tourists can’t check into their hotels, so the buses pick them up, bring them down here and drop them off for an hour, two hours, and it doesn’t cost them anything,” said Brundage, who heads the Lombard Hill Improvement Association, which pays for the street’s upkeep.

Lombard Street’s visitor overload coin-cides with a tourism spike in San Fran-cisco, which welcomed 24 million visitors in 2015, compared with 18 million in 2010, according to city figures.

Residents say they are not equipped to handle an increasingly chaotic scene where visitors leave behind trash, pick flowers from the landscaping, disregard signs, use doorways as toilets and, at times, become aggressive.

They point out car break-ins and robber-ies also have increased.

Brundage said his wife has been attacked twice after honking at people standing on her driveway, one of the few flat areas about halfway down the street. He’s had to chase away people who climb to his roof for a better photograph.

On a recent Sunday, the street bustled with tourists. Some of them ignored signs and directions by traffic control officers in neon yellow vests, and jaywalked or

stepped into Lombard Street to take pic-tures, among them a man in a white fisher-man’s hat creating a 360-degree video in the middle of the street.

Jim Hickman, who has lived on Lombard for more than two decades, said managing crowds and enforcing the rules need to be top priorities for city officials.

A report with potential solutions will be presented before the end of the year to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which will then make recommendations.

“I’m a tourist, too, and I understand people want to enjoy the place, but we’re not the Eiffel Tower, we’re not Union Square, we’re not the Golden Gate Bridge,” Hickman said. “These other places have facilities. There are laws that are enforced, and we don’t have any of that available to us.”

Sophie Arnoux, who was visiting from Southern France with her family, said they first drove down the street, then parked their car and went back on foot to walk down the sidewalk.

“It’s one of the most beautiful streets in the world,” Arnoux said. “It’s a must-see, like Champs Elysees.”

Arnoux said she would be willing to pay a fee to drive down the street as long as it was reasonable.

Asked if she would live along the street, she said, “No way!”

“It’s a beautiful place, but there are too many people and lots of cars,” she said. “It would be annoying to live here.”Continued on Page 25

Traffic makes its way down Lombard Street, also known as the ‘most crooked street’ in

San Francisco. (AP)