The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge takes over the world

On the day when thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest police brutality, Hollywood actor Samuel L. Jackson urged his fellow celebrities to contribute their voices to the popular movement. Calling out all the high-profile figures who poured buckets of ice over their heads for the Ice Bucket Challenge, Jackson sings:

“I can hear my neighbor crying ‘I can’t breathe,’ now I’m in the struggle and I can’t leave, calling out the violence of the racist police. We ain’t gonna stop till people are free.”

Following backlash, the ALS Association says it’s given up on its attempt to trademark both “ice bucket challenge,” and the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.” In a note on its Facebook page today, the ALS Association said it understood people’s concerns over any one group owning those phrases, adding that it planned to withdraw both applications, which were filed earlier this week.

According to the group, the trademark effort was originally intended to keep would-be fraudsters from cashing in on the success of Ice Bucket Challenge. In a statement yesterday, the ALS Association said it made the decision only after seeing “many examples of unscrupulous profiteers trying to drive revenue to themselves, instead of the fight against ALS.”

No one could’ve predicted what a sensation the Ice Bucket Challenge would become. It’s everywhere. It’s unavoidable. And now that it’s earned the ALS Association over $94 million in charity, the organization has filed for a trademark seeking ownership of the phrase “ice bucket challenge.” The August 22nd filings also request a trademark covering “ALS ice bucket challenge,” a slightly-more-specific description that’s proven equally popular across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media. The ALS Association wants complete control over “ice bucket challenge” whenever the three words are being used for charitable fundraising purposes.

The move is raising some eyebrows, but it’s not hard to understand where the ALS Association is coming from. There’s definitely now a very real link between the Ice Bucket Challenge and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or Lou Gehrig’s disease). Clearly the organization doesn’t want anyone hijacking the term for fraud or other less than admirable causes. But would a trademark really do much to thwart scammers looking to deceive people by riding on the back of this summer’s feel-good campaign?

The camera opens on a man in a fully buttoned black shirt standing in front of a red wall, squinting into the sun. He pours a shot of espresso into a metal bucket, raises a trumpet, and begins to play Somewhere Over the Rainbow, badly. Someone off stage pours the bucket of espresso over the man’s head, followed by a bucket of ice water.

David Lynch’s Ice Bucket Challenge is everything you would hope it to be. He was nominated by Laura Dern and Justin Theroux. I won’t spoil his nominee.

As the rest of the world continues to dump buckets of cold water over their heads in support of ALS research, some Palestinians have created their own version of the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise awareness about the ongoing crisis in Gaza. Known as the Rubble Bucket Challenge, the campaign invites social media users to douse themselves in sand, gravel, and other materials from buildings that have been destroyed during Israel’s seven-week military offensive. The choice of materials was both deliberate and necessary: they couldn’t use ice water, participants say, due to deteriorating conditions on the ground.

“In Gaza we don’t have water and when we have water, we can’t make ice since the electricity is off most of the time,” writes Gaza resident Abu Yazan, alongside a video he uploaded to Facebook Tuesday morning. “So my cousin Hafiz, [my] nephew Khalid and I used remains of a destroyed house to participate in this challenge.”

When the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge first started, the rules were simple: donate money toward fighting ALS or dump a bucket of ice on your head. It was meant as an incentive to be charitable — not, as it later evolved, to be both charitable and cold.

Cheers to you, Sir Patrick Stewart, although I worry that raise of his glass was a non-verbal challenge to everyone watching to do it. Stay classy.

It had to be done. Some unscrupulous marketer was always going to try and capitalize on the global popularity of the Ice Bucket Challenge — whose goal is to raise money to fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — as a cheap ploy to sell you more stuff. In this case, it’s Samsung, whose Galaxy S5 shows off its water-resistant design by taking a cold shower and calling out the iPhone 5S, HTC’s One M8, and the Lumia 930 to try and do the same. Oddly enough, the waterproof Xperia Z2 doesn’t seem to make Samsung’s list.

Samsung has made a “generous” contribution to a UK organization fighting the same disease as the ALS Association, but the video itself is a pure commercial for the phone, leaving out any mention of or encouragement to participate in the charitable drive.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that is presently sweeping the US has reached hip hop mogul Dr. Dre, courtesy of a challenge from his new employer, Apple CEO Tim Cook. When Cook took a reasonably sized bucket of ice over the head last week, he nominated Dre as one of the three people he wished to see either doing the same or donating $100 to the fight against ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Being the larger than life persona that he is, Dre’s ice bucket is suitably oversized and delivered via a custom-built mechanism to ensure he’s fully drenched. Eminem, Snoop Dogg, and Kendrick Lamar were Dre’s choices for the next episode of the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Folding your legs like that on a weird wooden chair looks extraordinarily uncomfortable, but then again, pretty much everything about the Ice Bucket Challenge is designed to be uncomfortable.

In the silent video posted to Instagram filled with as much emotion as the ice water itself, Ms. Gaga challenged a hodgepodge of people to get wet: Adele, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, executive Arthur Fogel, and Streamline Records founder Vincent Herbert, all of whom she hashtags “#RichPeople.”

Mark Zuckerberg laid down the challenge, and Bill Gates has answered: he’s taken a bucket of ice water over the head in the name of charity. Gates is the latest major name in the tech industry to join the quickly growing roster of people who have completed the Ice Bucket Challenge, which involves daring someone to either get soaked or donate money to a charity focused on Lou Gehrig’s Disease — or more likely, do both.

Gates’ video is easily the most impressive that we’ve seen, showing him accepting the challenge and building a rig to soak himself. There are also some fun touches to it, from Gates’ obvious use of a Surface to the blueprints he’s making using Comic Sans. Gates also chooses some fun names to pass the challenge on to — out of all of them, we’re most looking forward to seeing whether Elon Musk answers the call.

Add another two to the list: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have successfully completed the ice bucket challenge. And like Apple CEO Tim Cook, they did it in front of a huge crowd of spectators. Apparently Silicon Valley employees really like seeing their bosses get drenched with freezing cold water.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is the latest notable person to undertake the Ice Bucket Challenge, and doused himself with icy water in the name of charity at a company event earlier today. The challenge was created to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. So far, numerous celebrities and tech personalities have undertaken the challenge, including Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller, who posted a shot of himself getting doused on a beach today.

As part of the challenge, you can either choose to donate or douse yourself with water, though many have done both. Under the rules you also get to call out others who have to do the challenge themselves, or face social shame. Schiller challenged Cook as part of his run; now Cook has challenged Disney CEO and Apple board member Bob Iger, musician Michael Franti, and Dr. Dre, who joined Apple as part of its $3 billion acquisition of Beats in May.

You’ve probably seen a good number of photos this week of the rich and famous dumping buckets of ice water over their heads. Here’s why.

Everyone you’ve seen is participating in the Ice Bucket Challenge. The challenge involves daring a person to dump a bucket of ice water over their head within the next 24 hours, or else donate money — usually $100 — toward fighting ALS. Even if a person completes the challenge, they’re more than welcome to donate money too.

The ice bucket challenge, a viral phenomenon in which people dump cold water on their heads to raise money and awareness for ALS research, has been moving along steadily; Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo have all participated. Next up: Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller, apparently spending some time on a lovely beach. As part of the challenge, those who take the plunge can challenge other people, and Schiller named Apple CEO Tim Cook, meaning we could see him involved soon, too.

The ice bucket challenge — a viral phenomenon where, you guessed it, people dump ice-cold water on their heads for charity — is quickly reaching Harlem Shake-level proportions. The rules are simple: dump a bucket of water on your head or donate $100 to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research; if you dump the water, you can challenge other people to do the same. Tech industry giants like Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have already taken the plunge, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo just took the challenge, too. Impressively, they’ve all been pros about it so far.

Following Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s dousing in ice-cold water as part of a campaign to raise money in the fight against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has done the same.

“That was really cold,” he said, after emptying the bucket over his own head.

Since Satya Nadella became Microsoft’s third CEO in February, we’ve gradually learned more about him. He writes long memos, quotes poetry, and doesn’t like to talk about the Nokia acquisition. But today we learned another, possibly even more important thing about Satya Nadella, and it is this: he will let you dump a huge bucket of water on his head for charity. Nadella is helping raise money to help fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and Microsoft contributed by staging a hackathon. (The result was a cool new way for people to communicate with the Surface using their eyes.)

But the real action was in the video embedded in this unfathomably long post on the corporate blog today. It shows Nadella taking what’s known as the “ice bucket challenge,” which the company describes as: “a social media movement wherein people post videos of themselves dumping a bucket of ice water over their heads. Once they’re sopping wet with cold water, they then challenge others to either do the same or make a donation to an organization dedicated to fighting ALS, and that’s just what Nadella did.”