| Iran cracks down on social media, a YouTube star apologizes and a smart lock startup shuts down. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for January 2, 2018. (Also, I'm on vacation today but I made time to write the newsletter anyway — because I love you. Yes, you.) 1. Telegram and Instagram being restricted in Iran Iranian state television has said that authorities are temporarily blocking those services in order to "maintain peace." The country's ICT minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi tweeted directly at Telegram founder Pavel Durov and claimed that one of the platform's channels "is encouraging hateful conduct, use of Molotov cocktails, armed uprisings, and social unrest." How big is Telegram's footprint in Iran? Last year, Durov said the service had 40 million monthly users there, which is about half the country's population. 
2. YouTube star Logan Paul apologizes for video of apparent suicide victim The video was taken at Aokigahara, a forest in Japan that is known for suicides. Titled "We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest" with a thumbnail image of Paul standing in front of a blurred out body, the video got more than 1 million views before being removed. 3. Smart lock maker Otto suspends operations Hardware is hard. It's a cliché for a reason. 4. Lab-made meat startup SuperMeat raises $3M seed to develop 'clean' chicken SuperMeat aims to grow meat from real animal cells, feeding them the correct nutrients to produce muscle and fat. 5. Amazon shipped over 5 billion items with Prime in 2017 The company has never before released details around how many items it has shipped via Prime in a year's time, and it declined to provide the previous year's figures for comparison purposes. 6. Researchers can now make neighborhood voting predictions from Google Street View images The main clue from those images? The make and model of cars. 7. A look back at Uber's hellish year Before 2017, Uber seemed invincible. Now? Not so much. | 
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