Atlantic Media president Justin Smith has announced he’ll be leaving to become CEO of Bloomberg Media Group. It’s an interesting move, and one that indicates Bloomberg wants to become more of a consumer brand. After all, when you look at Smith’s history it’s pretty clear that he has a knack for creating strong publications with direct consumer appeal - even reinventing ones that have lost their caché, like The Atlantic.
Steve Gibson, the security guru and co-host of Security Now! with Leo Laporte, did an episode a few weeks ago in which he explains how PRISM works without direct access to companies’ servers. He’s determined that the process involves upstream intercepts at ISPs and major Internet companies like Google, using fiber optic splitters - hence the name PRISM. The details are very interesting, and worth a listen.
My Chromecast arrived yesterday! I was lucky enough to order it via Amazon Prime before they sold out, so I didn’t end up with a weeks-long wait. For those unfamiliar, Chromecast is a new device for televisions to stream content directly from the cloud, controlled by your phone, tablet or computer. It’s about the size of a USB thumb drive and plugs right into an HDMI port, allowing you to stream just about any content on the Internet, straight from the source.
The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements [The Atlantic] When Prisoners Protest [New York Times] Everything You Need to Know About PRISM [The Verge] Why I Hate Read Receipts [Ars Technica] Raising the Wrong Profile [New York Times] Existential Depression in Gifted Children [The Unbounded Spirit] What I Learned About Digital Addiction by Going Swimming with My Cellphone [GigaOm]
The Family That Tweets Together Stays Together [NPR: Shots] Silicon Valley’s All Twttr [GigaOM] The terrorist as rock star [Dave Fargo] The Problem With Medium [Medium] Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism [The Atlantic]
Bros Get Wasted; Girls Get Tipsy: Why Boozy Talk Matters I’ve known plenty of girls who use the same drinking language as guys, but apparently different language indicates different attitudes about alcohol. The Pixar Theory All Pixar movies exist on a timeline in the same universe. Mind-blowing. Why Citizen Developers Are The Future Of Programming Degrees aren’t as important to programming as many people think.
Last night I had a first-time experience: dropping my phone and the screen cracking. I was a bit in shock, and a bit pissed off. All I could think was how much it was going to cost to rectify the problem. The crack doesn’t cover the whole screen, but it’s enough to be really annoying. That’s immaterial though, as nobody wants their phone screen to crack…or so I thought. I went on Twitter to gripe about having broken it.
Wearable tech certainly seems to be the next hot space for hardware. Google Glass, the myriad activity trackers like Fitbit and Nike FuelBand, the list goes on. The Pebble Smartwatch is an interesting entrant into this space not only because of its features, but because it came to life through the largest Kickstarter campaign to date. It started the now-growing trend of consumer electronics launching with funding from the consumers.
Heml.is (pronounced without the dot) was announced yesterday as a new messaging platform built from the ground up to be secure and private. Their goal is to develop an app for iOS and Android that uses proven open standards and high-grade private key encryption to keep your conversations totally encrypted and away from prying eyes, while being user-friendly and attractive. They’re obviously striking a nerve with users, because in less than 36 hours they’ve managed to raise nearly 90% their $100,000 funding goal.
Summer May Be Best Time to Make Babies Not quite what you think it is. But also, exactly what you think it is. From Subject Line To Signature: How To Do Work E-Mail Right Most work emails suck. Do your part to make them suck less. Opinion: Military Pay and Benefits Unsustainable We need to start having serious conversation, unfettered by hyperbole, about the massive and growing costs of servicemember pay & retirement benefits.
