Thursday, October 25, 2012
More interactive Tweets, in more than 2000 waysWhat ever happened to seeing a link and clicking on it? I don’t want garish, heavy embedded crap all over Twitter. But alas, it’s not my company or design to screw up, so I’ll stop whining (but not sulking).Thursday, October 25, 2012
Supreme Court Will Address Antitrust State Action ExemptionSteve Semeraro at the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog: Government actors are charged with a duty to act in the public interest and thus can generally be trusted to restrain trade only when the public will benefit. Private actors, by …Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Invention as ArtThis is a great article on patent drawings and models, as selected for Co.Design by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan.Tuesday, October 23, 2012
iPad mini - Every inch an iPad.Everyone is shitting their pants over this thing, but I’m more excited by the new MacBook Pro.Tuesday, October 23, 2012
FTC Publishes Facial Recognition GuidelinesCarl Franzen, of TPM Idea Lab: There are two cases where the FTC believes that companies need to get a consumer’s “affirmative express consent,” that is, an “opt-in,” before using information captured via facial recognition: When identifying anonymous …Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Amazon outage takes out Reddit, Foursquare, HerokuLee Hutchinson, writing at Ars Technica: These kinds of outages are a jarring reminder of the true nature of “the cloud”—it’s still just servers in data centers. Amazon’s market power in ebooks leads to some questionable behavior, as well as some …Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Introducing the New Entertainment Experience from XboxYusuf Mehdi, Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Division: […] we will rapidly accelerate the reach of Xbox entertainment from more than 67 million consoles to literally hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. …Monday, October 22, 2012
Amazon’s “phantom” 20% VAT for UK ebook salesIan Griffiths and Dan Milmo of The Guardian, quoting ” a contract seen by the Guardian,” presumably between Amazon and one of its UK publishing “partners”: If the base price exceeds the base price … provided to a similar service then … …Monday, October 22, 2012
Sloppy SSL implementation begets Android app vulnerabilitiesDan Goodin at Ars Technica explains how researchers found that 8% of apps in a 13,500-app sample were susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. Hopefully developers will revisit their SSL implementations or, better yet, Google will update …Saturday, October 20, 2012
Online release of Boy Scouts’ ‘perversion files’ breaks decades of secrecyDespicable.Friday, October 19, 2012
Nebraska court strikes down restrictions on internet use for sex offenders on free speech groundsProfessor David Post of Temple Law served as an expert for the plaintiffs — yes, sex offenders — in this case. His focus, as he points out in his Volokh Conspiracy post, was on the overbroad nature of …Friday, October 19, 2012
Brazilian newspapers leave Google News en masseCarlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, president of Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, on his association’s withdraw from Google News: Google News’ presence in the Brazilian market is small. We believe (the loss of traffic) is an acceptable price …Friday, October 19, 2012
Alto: Aol’s attempt to redesign emailAustin Carr, writing at Fast Company's Co.Design blog: It’s actually proved to be a more modern and nimble alternative to many of its mainstream counterparts, and boasts many novel features that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, even with its beautiful …Thursday, October 18, 2012
Verizon Activated 3.1 Million iPhones In Q3 2012, But Only 651K Were iPhone 5sMG Siegler, commenting on the TechCrunch post by Chris Velazco, linked above: In other words, the iPhone 5 was on sale for just nine days before the quarter ended. And it was supply-constrained the whole time. Mr. …Thursday, October 18, 2012
2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals: DOMA violates Equal ProtectionLarry Neumeister, for AP: The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its 2-to-1 ruling only weeks after hearing arguments on a lower court judge’s findings that the 1996 [“Defense of Marriage Act”] was unconstitutional. This is …Thursday, October 18, 2012
New $249 Samsung ChromebookThis is certainly interesting. And at half the price of an entry-level Microsoft Surface, it even comes with a keyboard!Thursday, October 18, 2012
Wireless attack could fatally turn pacemakers against patientsPatrick Gray, writing at The Register: Jack also warned of a worst-case scenario in which a worm could infect multiple devices, spreading from patient to patient, re-flashing the devices with malicious code as it foes. This code could be …Thursday, October 18, 2012
White House review: no active spying by HuaweiJoseph Menn, quoting an anonymous source for Reuters: We knew certain parts of government really wanted” evidence of active spying, said one of the people, who requested anonymity. “We would have found it if it were there. I don’t know enough about …Monday, October 15, 2012
The Plain Text ProblemMichael Schechter, writing at his blog A Better Mess: They want to take their backlog of DOC, DOCX and RTF files and convert them into either Markdown files or plain text files with Markdown formatting. At the moment, there’s no solution that’s viable for average computer …Monday, October 15, 2012
SoftBank buys 70% stake in Sprint Michael J. De La Merced and Neil Gough, in The New York Times: In a statement on Monday, SoftBank, a big Japanese telecommunications company, said it would pay $8 billion to buy newly issued Sprint stock worth about $5.25 a share. It will then pay $12.1 billion to …Saturday, October 13, 2012
Richard Branson on Design And if you’re building a spaceship company like Virgin Galactic, you might as well build the sexiest beast ever built—the sexiest spaceship, the sexiest mother ship, the sexiest space port. Getting every little bit of the design right is so important. Love this guy.Friday, October 12, 2012
Deli sues feds for refusing to trademark its ‘Philadelphia’s Cheesesteak’Michael Hinkelman, writing at the Philadelphia Daily News: Campo’s claims in its civil complaint that its sandwich is “so superlative” and “gloriously gluttonous” that only it could be called “Philadelphia’s …Friday, October 12, 2012
iDermal: The Magnetic Implant iPod HolderWelp, absolutely no potential for unfortunate consequences there.Friday, October 12, 2012
Microsoft To Make Same Privacy Change Google Was Attacked For; No One Seems To CareThis is a good piece by Danny Sullivan of Marketing Land about the lack of coverage Microsoft’s privacy policy consolidation got this week compared to what Google got on a similar move earlier this year. Mr. …Thursday, October 11, 2012
Councilman Kenney Bashes Immigration LawsPhiladelphia Councilman James Kenney made the following comment at the Restaurant Industry Summit, quoted by Randy Lobasso at Philadelphia Weekly's PhillyNow blog: After 9/11, everyone became a ‘terrorist’—including that Mexican guy on a bike going from his …Thursday, October 11, 2012
Tumblr Puts More Focus On Photos With Photoset, Its New Standalone iOS AppDrew Olanoff, at TechCrunch: By not forcing you to log into your Tumblr account, the company could attract a brand new set of users who just want to pull photos together without the hassle of creating a page, tagging things …Thursday, October 11, 2012
Lawmakers blast advertisers for ignoring ‘Do Not Track’ on Microsoft’s ExplorerThe Digital Advertising Alliance, announcing they’ll ignore “do not track” browser headers: A ‘default on’ do-not-track mechanism offers consumers and businesses inconsistencies and confusion instead of …Wednesday, October 10, 2012
US Is Bleeding High-Skilled ImmigrantsGregory Ferenstein, writing at TechCrunch about Vivek Wadhwa’s latest research: Nearly a quarter (24.3 percent) of engineering and technology companies had at least one foreign-born founder; in Silicon Valley, it’s nearly half (43.9 percent). Nationwide, …Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Twitter List CopyI just completely overhauled my Twitter lists, a few days after impulsively unfollowing everyone who didn’t follow me back. I deleted many lists and added many users to the ones I kept. I used Twitter List Copy to import all the users on other people’s lists into pre-existing lists …Saturday, October 6, 2012
Why We’ll Never Stop Talking About Steve JobsMat Honan, writing at Wired: Jobs, like the titans of industry before him, realized that when we think about how the world works, we are actually thinking about the way people have made it to work. And that means that if you don’t like the way the …