Former Windows executive Steven Sinofsky, explaining the name of his new blog:

The title comes from something impressed upon me early in my career, which is that learning as an engineer comes from the process of starting, then finishing, and iterating on products–getting products to market and putting the broad feedback loop to work.

Funny, that’s why I picked this website’s name. Great minds… Although I would have called it “Learn by Shipping.” That -ing after “learn” is bugging me.

Still bugging me.

Abdel Ibrahim, interviewing Mailbox founder Gentry Underwood at The Tech Block:

Any plans for an Android app?

Definitely. Startups focus or die, so we picked one device (iPhone) and one platform (Gmail) to start, but we’ve designed our infrastructure from the beginning to support scaling to other devices and platforms as quickly and easily as possible once we feel Mailbox is “working” on the first set.

Good news, because it’s beautifully-designed and functionality looks to be top of mind from the screenshots I’ve seen.

This is unfortunate. There are processes in place that are designed to ensure the preservation of various constitutional rights. The warrant process is one of the most important, and for many people email is far more ubiquitous than other forms of correspondence and property that do require a warrant for seizure in most situations.

This is interesting: Netflix delivers its streaming option via one of Amazon’s cloud storage and content distribution networks. I try to avoid summarizing other peoples’ work, but the other interesting bit here is that Amazon’s in-house streaming video service saw no interruption.

If I was a paranoid conspiracy theorist, I’d throw around phrases like “net neutrality concerns” right about now. Is Amazon prioritizing their own content over the content of competitors whose content they’re contracted to deliver?

People who prefer Spotify to Rdio either don’t know Rdio exists (Rdio’s problem) or are totally crazy (their problem).

What makes Rdio the better service:

• New release notifications for the music you love
• UI and UX don’t suck
• Web client is solid
• Album-focused approach instead of playlist-focused approach
• Remote control Rdio on one device from another

Nilay Patel at The Verge reads some Terms of Service and drops some knowledge bombs. It’s definitely a must-read if you’re a Google, Dropbox, iCloud, or Skydrive user. So, if you’re on the internet at all, basically.

Tor gets a headline at WSJ.com.

Jessica Guynn of the LA Times:

The FTC wants to know what the brokers do with the information. It also wants to know if the data brokers let consumers review and correct their personal information or opt out from having their personal information sold.

I can guess that they sell it as “background check” data to both reputable and shady services of that kind, and almost certainly none of them allow correction or opt-out.

It’s one thing to consent to tracking efforts by Amazon, Google, and Facebook, whose labyrinthine Terms of Service are at least publicly-available. It’s another thing to be tracked without consent, without even agreeing to a TOS we didn’t really read, by companies who profit by selling that information to still other companies.

We need legislation on this, as in most other areas of consumer privacy, and especially on the internet, mandating opt-in only participation in data collection like this.

Nice.

Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan’s theory of the paywall suggests a local paper of high caliber can survive erecting a paywall.

Maybe he is right, but can two local papers survive?

It will be good to see the Inquirer and the Daily News broken out into their own websites, if only for the fact that they have very different voices. But, as Philly.com is currently an amalgam of the two, with its own original content as well, I’m curious to see what it will look like after the websites split.

The Next Web's Emil Protalinski, quoting HP's head of enterprise services Mikle Nefkens:

“This means the attacks average out at about 1,833 per minute or 30 every second.” Those figures are simply astonishing. Extrapolating the other way, it means the US Navy is attacked some 96.36 billion times every year.

If you ever doubted the importance of cyber-preparedness, this should go a long way toward assuaging those doubts.

Oh. So. Meta.

It’s true, but not really because lots of people can follow Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Facebook, but because many reporters actually do. This was not going to go unreported.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jennifer Lynch explains how EFF got data on active drones over US soil. I’m not prone to slippery slope arguments, but with the volume of cyberattacks directed at the US each year, it’s not ridiculous to suggest that our drones may be vulnerable to hijacking.

Ronnie Polidoro, writing at NBC:

“When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years,” Cook told Williams. “It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

This is the only interesting bit of the article. I’m not sure why he would tease it in an interview like this one, that will ostensibly reach a large viewership of non-geeks, unless they were close to their TV solution.

As an aside, “assembling” some iMacs in the US is not the same as “making” them here, and it’s a distinction I suspect will be lost on many.

This is wonderful stuff: with a shortage of STEM talent these days, it’s imperative to involve all those who are interested, and this project serves to reduce the barrier to entry for deaf students.

(Via Evening Edition)

This is important, and Richard Dunlop-Walters’s The Brief has a great, ongoing summary of the issue and the news coming out of the World Conference on International Communications. It may seem dry at first, but this stuff could have far-reaching effects on privacy and internet governance, so it’s worth at least a quick glance.

lilly:

What I meant to say about this article about online education: MOOCs are a breakthrough in distribution of educational content, but not really a breakthrough in the way that we learn. What this article points out is that there are more important developments in the way we teach and learn…

Mr. Lilly makes some great points. There is a great opportunity here for colleges to partner with coworking organizations to integrate local “MOOC clubs” into the surrounding community.

I know they’re not the same thing, but it’s interesting to watch News Corp. fail with The Daily while Marco Arment’s The Magazine is gaining altitude, despite production by a relative publishing newb and one other staffer.

One thing is clear: digital publishing does not belong exclusively (or even primarily) to the Old Publishing incumbents.

Josh Constine at TechCrunch:

There no big launch event yesterday because Facebook didn’t need one. In fact, it probably didn’t want one, considering it didn’t even notify bloggers like me as it usually does.

This isn’t going to end well. I predict that a backlash will build over the next couple of weeks, nothing dire, but familiar fare by now for Facebook. They should have come out with PR about the easy privacy controls they have implemented to allow seamless and secure photo uploading. Instead they tried to sneak it in on the weekend.

It’s one of my favorite services, and the first I decided to pay for on a monthly basis. I think Libin, despite his transparent business style and easy-going manner, is genius of the caliber of any CEO at a company ten times Evernote’s size. He built something awesome, gives most of it away, and amplifies the magic for a small monthly fee.

You don’t get to 45 million users without being awesome.

Joseph Goldstein, writing for the Times:

Mr. Sussmann suggested that the Police Department could limit its subpoenas to phone calls beginning on the hour, not the day, of the theft, and ending as soon as the victim has transferred the number to a new phone.

Mr. Sussman is exactly right. I suspect the intent here on the part of NYPD is an admirable one: we have data available that can help us track thieves, so let’s use it.

But it’s not hard to limit the information requested to only the information that could possibly be of use in finding the suspect.

Erik Eckholm, reporting for the New York Times:

Referred to Jonah by a rabbi when he was 18, Mr. Levin began attending weekend retreats at $650 each. For a year and a half, he had weekly private sessions with Mr. Downing as well as weekly group sessions. He quit, he said, after Mr. Downing had him remove his clothes and touch himself, saying it would help him reconnect with his masculinity. Mr. Goldberg has defended Mr. Downing’s methods as sometimes appropriate for men dealing with body image problems.

Golberg and Downing have no license to practice psychology or therapy. They took money from men in exchange for the promise of “curing” their homosexuality. And, as this passage demonstrates, Downing took advantage of at least one young man’s vulnerability.

Deplorable.

Conversion “therapy” is one of religion’s dark arts, with no basis in reality and the primary purpose of enriching cynical snake-oil salesmen by feeding off the self-hatred of confused individuals. No god wants you removing your clothes and touching yourself for a fake “therapist.”

Sadly, the California ban on this absurd abuse of religion only applies to licensed therapists. This would leave “religious counselors” like the scum described in this story able to continue to profit from the desperation of people who can’t live with the thought that their god will hate them if they’re true to who they are.

If you think gay people need to seek healing in the form of getting “un-gayed,” you’ll get no respect from me.

Richard Williamson is his name, and shipping a less-than-perfect mapping application on the iPhone 5 was his game, until, as Bloomberg's Adam Satariano reports, Senior Vice President Eddy Cue fired him.

As an aside, I really like that Bloomberg lists both the reporter’s and the editor’s name and email address at the bottom of stories. More publications should do that.

Someone’s gonna get fired…