Thursday, May 29, 2014
AT&T, acquiring DirectTV, “vows” to stick to FCC’s Open Internet rules for 3 yearsNathan Mattise, reporting at Ars Technica: The two companies will demonstrate “continued commitment for three years after closing to the FCC’s Open Internet protections established in 2010, …Thursday, May 22, 2014
Mark Zuckerberg on survival of the most passionate I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it’s kind of irrational at the time, so it kind of selects for the people that care most about doing it. A great point. That young man is going places.Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Internet Privacy and What Happens When You Try to Opt OutJanet Vertesi tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet: The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, …Friday, March 28, 2014
Facebook buys virtual reality company OculusFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting virtual reality will follow mobile as the next major communication paradigm. While I’m not sure that’s true with VR tech alone, the massive user base and data stores of Facebook, used wisely despite a minefield of …Thursday, March 20, 2014
I want to tell you about one great podcast every week. This shouldn’t be a problem for at least a and a half or so because I am currently subscribed to about 80 podcasts. The first Podcast of the Week is CMD + Space. An interview show by Myke Hurley, CMD + Space typically features a wide-ranging …Wednesday, March 12, 2014
The image above is the first screen you see when you open Popcorn Time. The app, available on Mac, Windows and Linux, streams movies from the peer-to-peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent. The technology is similar to what old school music swapping service Napster used from about 1999 to 2001, …Sunday, March 2, 2014
Tim Cook and the same question When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he hammered them with questions until he was satisfied. “Why is that?” “What do you mean?” “I don’t understand. Why are you not making it clear?” He was known to ask the same exact question 10 times in a row. Once upon a time …Thursday, February 20, 2014
DHS wants to track license platesICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen, on the license plate tracking system recently proposed by the Department of Homeland Security: It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the …Friday, February 14, 2014
Facebook Opens Up LGBTQ-Friendly Gender Identity And Pronoun OptionsFollowing up on my recent tirade, this made me happy. Facebook has massive amounts of influence, and is influenced by massive amounts of people, and changes like this are a positive step forward in how technology reconciles with …Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Introduction I focused in the first of this three-post series on how I capture information for use at home, work, for study, and in creative pursuits. This article is part two in that series, where I’ll spend about 500 words talking about how I name, organize, and save files across several platforms …Saturday, January 25, 2014
Mac turns 30Steve Jobs, in 1985: We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people — as remarkable as the telephone. The remarkable thing is that, at least for people my age, ~30, as old as the Mac itself, the computer is far more remarkable than …Friday, December 13, 2013
CrunchBase and People+ settleA TechCrunch reporter had this to say about his employer’s sister product: Put another way: The CrunchBase team ended up looking like it didn’t really understand how Creative Commons worked, or at least that’s what the vast majority of online commentary suggested. …Monday, December 2, 2013
Stephen Wolfram is building a ghost for the machineStephen Wolfram, putting modesty aside as he often and justifiably does, to discuss his most ambitious project to date: The level of automation is incredibly higher than people could ever have before – it’s incredibly powerful. Anything that …Thursday, November 21, 2013
Is Google Play Newsstand a viable alternative to standalone Android apps?No.Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Winamp is deadVery sad news. I’ve used Winamp for its entire life, all 15 years.Wednesday, November 6, 2013
AOL lawyers don’t understand Creative Commons. At all.David Kravets writes at Wired about AOL’s demand that an app called People+ stop using a complete replica of AOL’s tech company database. AOL’s CrunchBase is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution: We provide CrunchBase’s content …Sunday, November 3, 2013
Pivot while there’s still timeBobby Ghoshal, co-founder of the now-defunct social news app Flud: A year after pivoting to the enterprise we were out of business […] because we ran out of money and investors didn’t have enough data to make a decision to jump on board. I buy this reasoning. I …Friday, November 1, 2013
Google’s party bargeMystery one day, party barge the next.Thursday, October 31, 2013
States cite lack of federal progress in pursuit of privacy reformSpecial interest groups oppose federal privacy reform to prevent onerous new regulations. But this effort must, at some point, become counterproductive. A multitude of state-specific privacy frameworks that, by (federal) law, can’t …Thursday, October 31, 2013
Google “zealously” private about mystery bargeI thought this was interesting but not really worth mentioning here, until the Coast Guard visited, apparently, as USA Today reports, under a presumably Google-imposed gag order. I’m an avid Google user, incredibly open on the internet, and …Sunday, October 27, 2013
Whose Fault Is a Driverless-Car Crash?Some possibilities not contemplated in this brief Time piece: software developer for driving computer component designer/manufacturer of driving computer technician who performed final calibration of driving computer technician who installed driving computer …Monday, September 9, 2013
John Gruber on the convergence of smartphones and tablets John Gruber: Better, I think, not to treat smartphones and tablets as separate categories, but merely as different sizes of the same thing. I think he is absolutely right, but even a year ago I would have argued like a lunatic against that …Sunday, August 25, 2013
How reality caught up with paranoid delusions it was not in the least like losing one’s reason… I was rationalising all the time, it was simply one’s reason working hard on the wrong premises. — novelist Evelyn Waugh, speaking retrospectively of his own psychotic episode This is a fascinating …Thursday, August 15, 2013
Welcome to Google IslandIf you follow one link from my blog this week, make it the one above. It’s well-written and disturbingly possible-seeming.Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Facebook Testing VIP App With Some CelebsIn case you thought I was becoming a Facebook fanboy, let me just say that this celeb crap is something Zuck will be adding to his list of regrets within the year. Granted, that’s probably a very short list, but this VIP thing is a distraction an a gimmick …Wednesday, August 14, 2013
101 million of Facebook’s 128 million daily U.S. users are on mobile devicesMy headline says it all. If you still had any doubt about the importance of mobile to anyone doing anything on the Internet, this stat should disabuse you of that uncertainty. Amazing.Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Fast Company’s Austin Carr profiles Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley This profile of Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley by Austin Carr at Fast Company does a great job of humanizing the app and its maker. That’s probably because the man behind the location-sharing and, more recently, …Sunday, August 4, 2013
A Day In The Life Of An iPhone Factory WorkerThis is something everyone should read. Apple isn’t the only company benefiting from working conditions like this, and that makes it worse, not better. The dominant press narrative is that Apple is profiting from the misery of toiling foreign workers. The …Saturday, August 3, 2013
How the death of Google Reader is saving RSSBen Popper, at The Verge1: Some Reader partisans may have given up on RSS after the shutdown, but the majority seem to have migrated to other platforms. In the weeks following the announcement, Feedly saw 3 million Google Reader refugees sign up and …Monday, July 15, 2013
Tim Stevens is no longer editor-in-chief at EngadgetTwo years is a good run, and the site looks and reads far better than it did before his reign, but Tim Stevens’ exit from his role as editor-in-chief at Aol property Engadget is bad sign for the site and it’s owner. It’s never a good sign, in …