Apps for storing your photos in the cloud
Apps for storing your photos in the cloud
At the end of the day, expertise or a lack of it will define your requirements in this space. Less savvy folks love Google+ Photos because the auto-upload is effectively unlimited for them with the appropriate size setting.
Media Analysis: Measles Outbreak Traced to Anti-Vaccine Church
An astounding story that should be part of the national conversation regarding vaccines. Seems straight forward.
However, USA Today doesn’t mention the church’s stance on vaccines until the 13th paragraph. Gawker, on the other hand, essentially reblogs the USA Today piece but moves the pastor’s anti-vaccine stance to the headline.
Great catch by Drew Breunig here. I don’t believe in god and I’m not religious, but respect that many do and are.
However, run as fast as you can from any religious leader who claims vaccines are dangerous.
When religion and science contradict one another, particularly on matters of health and public safety, religion must, without exception or hesitation, be set aside.
This should not be difficult for religious people to accept: Any rational god would insist on that anyway.
Kevin Spacey knows what viewers want
Kevin Spacey knows what viewers want
Actor Kevin Spacey, speaking at the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival:
Clearly the success of the Netflix model – releasing the entire season of House Of Cards at once – has proved one thing: the audience wants control. They want freedom. If they want to binge – as they’ve been doing on House Of Cards – then we should let them binge.
It’s so simple, and while Netflix and a few others have learned the lesson the music industry so painfully failed to learn for so long, the television industry still fails to recognize and adapt to the dissipation of distinctions between which piece of glass is glowing with their product.
How reality caught up with paranoid delusions
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 article, discussing at times the sometimes blurred line between fiction and mania, and generally looking at how paranoid delusions keep impressively abreast of modern technology.
Welcome to Google Island
If you follow one link from my blog this week, make it the one above. It’s well-written and disturbingly possible-seeming.
Facebook Testing VIP App With Some Celebs
Facebook Testing VIP App With Some Celebs
In 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 and it’s going nowhere.
And yes, I’m prepared to try some claim chowder if I’m wrong. I’m just pretty confident I’m not.
101 million of Facebook's 128 million daily U.S. users are on mobile devices
101 million of Facebook’s 128 million daily U.S. users are on mobile devices
My 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.
How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room
How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room
Eliot Higgins’ work is a prime example of how the Internet and user generated content are changing journalism on a molecular level.
What a fascinating read.
US government recognizes League of Legends players as pro athletes
US government recognizes League of Legends players as pro athletes
This is fascinating, especially with immigration such a hot topic recently.
Honda Launches National Campaign to Save Drive-In Theaters
Honda Launches National Campaign to Save Drive-In Theaters
Great idea but, more to the point, brilliant marketing.
Legislative failure to define essential terms
Legislative failure to define essential terms
The definition of terms essential to the application of a law is the most basic requirement for competent lawmaking.
Sometimes one or more terms are appropriately defined in an open way, to provide flexibility in the application of a law. This is not one of one laws. The shield law is meant to protect reporters, so defining what exactly a reporter is should be done wi surgical precision.
I am open to arguing how broad or narrow the definition of journalist should be in a shield law, but that conversation but result in a specific outcome that is codified in the new law.
It is impossible to have that discussion and achieve that specific codification when legislators shirk their fundamental responsibility.
As Morgan Weiland of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in the article linked above, Senators Feinstein and Durbin, and all the legislators who contributed to the poorly-drafted law, have failed in their duty to their constituents and the rest of our country. Hopefully a competent legislator will step in to correct their shortcomings as the law progresses.
Fast Company's Austin Carr profiles Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley
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, stuff-to-do discovery app, has put so much of himself into Foursquare. There are many profiles written about business and tech personalities, but few intrigued as much as this one does.
I think it’s because Carr really communicates how Crowley is finding himself at a cross-roads not only with Foursquare as a company, but with his life’s direction and essence.
U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke, reporting for Reuters Washington bureau:
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial.
This goes well beyond spying. This is, I would argue, exactly why people object to such domestic spying.
The logic is that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. However, the “Special Operations Division” probably isn’t infallible, since, well, no one is, and that means that you may have nothing to hide, and think you have nothing to fear, and be completely wrong.
Innocent people may have been convicted as a result of what appear on their face to be unconstitutional, extrajudicial practices.
Those arguing that the price for protection from terrorists and other would-be evil doers is letting the National Security Agency have a peak at our Gmail will have a much more difficult time making the same case for falsifying an evidence trail.
The defense was often held in the dark and, apparently, at least in some cases, investigators misled both the prosecution and judicial evidentiary discretion.
Oh, and as a cherry on top, here’s a gem from near the end of the Reuters story:
A DEA spokesman declined to comment on the unit’s annual budget. A recent LinkedIn posting on the personal page of a senior SOD official estimated it to be $125 million.
The monitoring of internet communications for sensitive information, it would seem, goes both ways.
A Day In The Life Of An iPhone Factory Worker
A Day In The Life Of An iPhone Factory Worker
This 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 truth is that much of the electronics industry, not to mention the apparel and the toy industries, are also built on the underpaid and overworked backs of non-Americans all over the world.
How the death of Google Reader is saving RSS
How the death of Google Reader is saving RSS
Ben 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 Newsblur says it now has 25 times the paid subscriptions it did in March.
Interesting. It looks like Google inadvertently revived the very market Reader killed when it debuted.
I’m still relying on Feedly right now, and they’re the paid option I’m most likely to go with whenever they begin offering a premium tier, but the options are admittedly plentiful.
And there’s no denying that the death of Reader, in retrospect, was probably the best thing to happen to RSS since, well, the birth of RSS.
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I like my headline (above the quote) better than Mr. Popper’s, which is “A month after Google killed its beloved Reader, the market for paid RSS tools is booming.” His is more informative, but for some reason mine just feels better. Arrogance? ↩
Twitter user arrested for threatening to rape and murder female activist
Twitter user arrested for threatening to rape and murder female activist
I wrote recently about my disappointment with Twitter’s response to a woman deluged with rape threats. Today, David Edwards of t The Raw Story reports that a man has been arrested in England for threats made against Caroline Criado-Perez.
Twitter said in a statement to Sky News :
[the] ability to report individual tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.
Good idea, let’s make that a priority.
Baton Rouge sheriff trying to enforce unconstitutional anti-sodomy laws
Baton Rouge sheriff trying to enforce unconstitutional anti-sodomy laws
It’s been ten years since Lawrence v Texas saw anti-sodomy laws declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but I suppose stupidity is eternal. At least the District Attorney is ending the absurdity by refraining from prosecution. There may yet be hope for Baton Rouge.