Is there any way to keep white people from using computers, before this whole planet is ruined? I ask because the two enterprising white entrepreneurs above just made yet another app for avoiding non-white areas of your town—and it's really taking off! 
 
 Crain's reports on SketchFactor, a racist app made for avoiding "sketchy" neighborhoods, which is the term young white people use to describe places where they don't feel safe because they watched all five seasons of The Wire: 
 
 SketchFactor, the brainchild of co-founders Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington, is a Manhattan-based navigation app that crowdsources user experiences along with publicly available data to rate the relative "sketchiness" of certain areas in major cities. The app will launch on the iTunes on Friday, capping off a big week for the startup, which was named as a finalist in the NYC BigApps competition. According to Ms. McGuire, a Los Angeles native who lives in the West Village, the impetus behind SketchFactor was her experience as a young woman navigating the streets of Washington, D.C., where she worked at a nonprofit. [...] After meeting Mr. Herrington, an electrical engineer who was taken with the SketchFactor idea, the two quit their Washington D.C.-based jobs and decamped to New York City with funding from family and friends. As one of the finalists in the BigApps competition, SketchFactor is poised to receive more attention when it launches. 
 
 With firsthand experience living in Washington, D.C., where white terror is as ubiquitous as tucked-in polo shirts, grinning caucasians Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington should be unstoppable in the field of smartphone race-baiting—they're already finalists in a $20,000 startup contest! But don't worry: they're not racist. It says so right on their blog, which asks people to share "sketchy" stories about strangers they spot: 
 
 Who we're not: racists, bigots, sexists. Any discriminatory posts will be deleted. 
 
 Oh, well in that case. The app launches tomorrow, so it's probably safest to just stay indoors until then. 
 
 To contact the author of this post, write to biddle@gawker.com 

 WUSA was doing a story about an app that alerts people to sketchy neighborhoods. 
 
 Reporter Mola Lenghi, photographer James Hash and an intern were talking to residents of a northwest DC neighborhood when thieves broke into their vehicle and stole some gear. 
 
 Among the many stolen articles was the gear of photojournalist James Hash, the backpack of reporter Mola Lenghi, and the purse of intern Taylor Bisciotti. Bisciotti’s cell phone was in her purse, and that ended up being a lucky break for the crew. Using the “Find my iPhone’ application the crew was able to track the phone. After filing a police report the crew tracked the phone to dumpsters in another D.C. neighborhood. The crew was able to recover some of the stolen items from the dumpsters. The entire crew returned to WUSA9′s broadcast house unharmed. 
 
 You can see the video after the jump. 
 
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 [FTVLive]
– A TV news crew out of DC that set out to determine whether a local neighborhood was indeed as "sketchy" as a new app suggested ended up becoming crime victims, reports Mediabistro. As the three-person crew from WUSA-TV interviewed residents of the Petworth neighborhood to see how they felt about the "sketchy" designation (they weren't thrilled), someone busted into the parked van and stole most of their gear. The thieves also stole one crew member's purse, and she was able to track it to a nearby dumpster because her phone was inside. As for that app, the crew didn't name it, but Business Insider says it sounds like a new one called SketchFactor. The idea is to give users a sense of a particular neighborhood's "sketchiness" factor, and it's not sitting well with critics. At Valleywag, for instance, Sam Biddle calls it racist because it's all about helping white people avoid black neighborhoods. "Sketchy," he adds, is "the term young white people use to describe places where they don't feel safe because they watched all five seasons of The Wire." (Click here and here to read about two other news crews that got mugged on the job.)