Facebook bought Onavo, a VPN service, in 2013 to collect, analyze, and market its users’ browsing behavior —the very kind of activity that any person would believe a VPN serves to protect . It is now underhandedly promoting the app to track even more people’s online activity.
Steven Wright, writing for Polygon, on Analogue , a company that specializes in high-end retro hardware, and its founder Christopher Taber: “When I first started, it was like there was this closed door and I kept knocking on it and knocking on it,” [Taber] says. “And now, maybe the door’s not open, but I’ve got a hell of a lot of people knocking here with me.” It’s nice to see small-batch…
Parimal Satyal writes about the web’s increasing user-hostility : We’re quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. What the author misses is the commercialization of the platform. The web as we know it today is run by professional, profit-seeking organizations. Unless users collectively begin paying for content, and earn the right to a…
Chavie Lieber, writing for Racked, on eBay’s existential crisis : It’s dedicated to remaining an online marketplace—nothing more than a platform on which buyers and sellers can interact—a position that’s hard to justify as it’s become less enticing to both kinds of users. It hasn’t invested in warehouses or inventory; it hasn’t introduced competitive shipping programs. It now needs to both…
“Desert Train” is a one-hour video: Take a relaxing train ride straight out of this garbage world. On the plus side, watching this is a more productive use of time than reading productivity articles on Medium. See also: Stephanie Merry’s article on Norway’s “slow TV” from 2015.
Blinkbat Games’s Desert Golfing is an addictively simple, endless golfing game ($2) for iOS and Android. It’s a single-player throwback to the 1990s shareware classic Bang! Bang! .
Maciej Cegłowski talks about the future of AI, the hypothetical dangers, and the too-real zaniness of its biggest proponents . The transcription is a longer read (his motto is “brevity is for the weak”), but it is deeply amusing and thought-provoking.
The EFF writes critically about GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare’s decision to drop the Daily Stormer as a customer : Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t. What has gone largely without…
In a 10-minute video, Raymond Schillinger, reporting for Bloomberg , chronicles the golden era of helicopter commuting in New York City and finds signs of a modern-day industry revival .
Google fired James Damore yesterday for writing about diversity and the Mountain View campus’s “ideological echo chamber” on a private, internal message board intended for critiques of the company’s policies. The memo’s full text is worth the read. His swift termination reminds me of how dictators welcome dissent with open arms, but only as a tool to sniff out and exterminate any detractors. With…
Michael O. Church criticizes those who conflate smug intellectuals with pilfering titans : We have a problem in this country. The economic elite is destroying it, and the intellectual elite is largely powerless to stop the wreckage, and while there are many sources of our powerlessness, one of the main ones is that we get the bulk of the hate. The plebeians lump us all together, because the…
Vincent “Vino” Malone writes on /r/legaladvice : Backstory, in brief: For the past three years I’ve run the competitive e-sport pasta blog All of Garden . During the yearly Never Ending Pasta Bowl promotion, I eat Olive Garden for every meal, every day. I take pictures of the food and do little reviews. Here is a post that shows the kind of content I create. Today I got this email from Darden’s…
Adam Nagourney and Conor Dougherty, reporting for the New York Times , were assigned this month’s “house prices are crazy!” article : Heather Lile, a nurse who makes $180,000 a year, commutes two hours from her home in Manteca to the San Francisco hospital where she works, 80 miles away. “I make really good money and it’s frustrating to me that I can’t afford to live close to my job,” said Ms.…
While working at Glassdoor, my boss was CEO Robert Hohman. He has a mean streak and repeatedly assaulted me during my short tenure as his assistant. If I made a typo in a report or forgot to CC him in an email, he’d sneak up on me and strangle me with Ethernet cables or beat me with a baseball bat. The company itself is corrupt full-tilt. Helen Girick, the head of the Content & Community team,…
Welch is similar to Johnstown, PA ( previously ) in that it’s dying; the county it sits in has lost 80% of its population over two generations. And the shuttering of the town’s Walmart drained any lingering hope for the town’s survival. Most of the residents aren’t bitter, but one person interviewed said: It’s ridiculous. People round here can’t get healthcare, they can’t get jobs and now the good…
In time for U.S. Independence Day, The Guardian republished a collection of some of the first color photo lithographs of America’s national parks by William Henry Jackson .
Jeanette Hägglund photographs architect Ricardo Bofill’s The Red Wall , an apartment complex built in 1973 on Spain’s southeast coast. The building’s distinctive geometry and color may have inspired the designers of the smartphone game Monument Valley .
Danielle Tcholakian, writing for Longreads, summarizes some great articles on why we work so much, take so few vacation days, and fear ubiquitous automation .
Rachel Abrams and Robert Gebeloff, reporting for the New York Times , on Johnstown, PA facing an economic era after manufacturing and retail : But fewer people can afford his products now that the good jobs are long gone, and Mr. Apryle has had to make adjustments. A cash-for-gold sign hangs in the window. He started selling knickknacks on eBay. Eventually, he stopped wearing a tie. “I might as…
Olivia Solon, reporting for The Guardian , on how Facebook told low-paid contractors to use their personal Facebook accounts to moderate extremist content : [The moderators] first suspected there was a problem when they started receiving friend requests from people affiliated with the terrorist organizations they were scrutinizing. Astounding.