HomePod should have been delayed longer. Elon Musk's rollercoaster week: Falcon Heavy sends a Tesla to Mars just as Tesla has its worst quarter ever. iPhone boot code leaked online. Chrome will shame insecure websites. YouTube suspends Logan Paul for generally being a horrible human being. Rethinking Facebook and Google. T-Mobile warns of phone hacking scam. Uber settles with Waymo. ESPN's new streaming service will not show ESPN.
Reads, Listens, Watches
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events
🎧 This Week in Google 443 Made on Earth by Humans | TWiT.TV
The Superbowl commercials were ok, but Elon Musk's Tesla in space is the best ad ever. Nest is no longer separate from Google. Viacom buys VidCon. Alphabet's big tax bill kills company profits. Google's new Twitch competitor. Zuckerberg's mea culpa birthday message. RIP John Perry Barlow.
Leo's Picks: Why Paper Jams Exist and Google Motion Stills AR Mode
Jeff's Number: Wired abandons banner ad model they invented, goes behind a paywall
Stacey's thing: Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
👓 Crowdsourcing trusted news sources can work — but not the way Facebook says it’ll do it | Nieman Journalism Lab
A new study finds asking Facebook users about publishers could "be quite effective in decreasing the amount of misinformation and disinformation circulating on social media" — but Facebook will need to make one important change to its plan.
👓 Facebook’s Campbell Brown: “This is not about us trying to make everybody happy” | Nieman Journalism Lab
“If someone feels that being on Facebook is not good for your business, you shouldn’t be on Facebook. Let’s be clear about that…I don’t see us as the answer to the problem.”
👓 Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20 | Nieman Lab
"I am like a vaudevillian. I'm the last guy dancing on the stage, by myself, and everyone else has moved on to movies and television."
An interesting take of blogging twenty years on. Most of the other blogs that he mentions don’t have a monetization strategy at all, but it’s great to hear a sketch of how a “one person” blog attempts to monetize.
👓 Jetpack 5.8: A Focus on Speed with Faster Search and Lazy Loading Images | Jetpack for WordPress
Today’s release of Jetpack 5.8 includes several features that have graduated from beta testing. We are very excited to bring them out for you to try. Let’s take a closer look at what we’ve included in this update, and how today’s additions will help you speed up your site and deliver faster...
I like the idea of Elastic Search being added in here and that alone might make it worth the subscription price! I’m surprised that it wasn’t bundled in from the start or that Elastic Search isn’t making an smaller subscription version available via plugin for a smaller price.
🎧 Bill Gates | The Atlantic Interview
The mission of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to ease suffering around the world may be somewhat at odds with the "America First" sentiments that propelled Donald Trump into the presidency. But Bill Gates is moving ahead with enthusiasm. He tells Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor in chief, why he's still optimistic, and how he feels about no longer being the richest man in the world.
Here’s a case where this podcast runs a bit off the rails in interviewing someone perhaps too “popular”. It’s a good interview and certainly a “get”, but I’m not sure I learned too much interesting here that I haven’t seen or heard elsewhere. Much of the strength of what I’ve heard thus far stems from interviews with people that are slightly off the beaten path, but with serious messages and interesting viewpoints. The other strength is that the show can give them additional time and depth than they might receive on other shows. I’m not saying that Bill Gates doesn’t have anything interesting or important to say, just that he isn’t revealing anything particularly new here that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
👓 Webmasters: Have some (sub resource) integrity! | InfoSec Guy
Earlier today it was discovered that a large number of websites (over 4,000) – including UK government and NHS websites – had been compromised with a “cryptominer”. A cryptominer is a piece of software that “mines” cryptocoins like Bitcoin, LiteCoin, Ethereum, etc, which in turn generate income. When a cryptominer is included within the code of a website and a visitor visits a web page on the site, his/her web browser becomes a “miner” and their device’s CPU is used to “mine” coins for whoever placed the cryptominer within the code. Essentially, someone else profits at your expense (and at the detriment to your device, if its CPU is being maxed out through mining), and all this takes place without your knowledge!
👓 Slack is the opposite of organizational memory | Abe Winter
slack empowers your worst people to overwhelm your best. It has that in common with the open office. It normalizes interruptions, multitasking, and distractions, implicitly permitting these things to happen IRL as well as online. It normalizes insanely short reply times for questions. In the slack world people can escalate from asking in a room to @person to @here in a matter of minutes. And they’re not wrong to – if your request isn’t handled in 5 minutes it’s as good as forgotten.
An interesting take. There is obviously still room for a better mouse trap here.
👓 TEDxManchester 2018 – transcript | Dan Hett
Yesterday I stood on stage at the sold-out TEDxManchester at the Bridgewater Hall, and spoke to about 2,400 people about my experiences. It was terrifying, but ultimately a really positive experience. I've barely decompressed, and I'm going to write a full blog post about it all when my head is back together a bit, but for now here's the transcript of what I said, more or less:
A stunning and powerful story about the true effects of terrorism…
👓 Children aren’t starting puberty younger, medieval skeletons reveal | The Conversation
Children are entering puberty younger than before, according to recent studies, raising concerns that childhood obesity and hormone-contaminated water supplies may be to blame. However, our archaeological research suggests that there’s nothing to worry about. Children in medieval England entered puberty between ten and 12 years of age – the same as today.
Of course, naturally, this isn’t the publicly perceived story. There’s still some science missing from the overall arc of the story, but people who believe that chemicals in the environment and hormones in food are causing children to start puberty at younger ages should be questioning why they think this is the case.
If anything, perhaps better first world lives may be pressuring the age down a bit, but even then it sounds like there’s a lower limit. Evolutionary effects are also certainly at play as well.
👓 On digital archaeology | Andrew Eckford
The year is 4018. German is widely studied by scholars of classical antiquity, but all knowledge of the mysterious English language has died out. Scene: A classics department faculty lounge; a few professors are relaxing.
I worry about things like this all the time. Apparently it’s a terrible affliction that strikes those with a background in information theory at higher rates than the general public.
👓 Disaster strikes for couple who sold everything to sail around the world | The Mirror
Tanner Broadwell, 26, and Nikki Walsh, 24, have just £60 left after their vessel they had used all their funds to buy capsized at sea off the coast of Florida
Clickbaity article. They were young and honestly didn’t lose that much in the grand scheme. How do inexperienced sailors eschew insurance on a new boat though?
👓 State launches Aetna probe after stunning admission | CNN
California's insurance commissioner has launched an investigation into Aetna after learning a former medical director for the insurer admitted under oath he never looked at patients' records when deciding whether to approve or deny care.
Things you often suspected were true sadly, sometimes, are.
👓 The Songs That Bind | The New York Times
Data drawn from Spotify listeners reveal that we are all teenagers in love.
Apparently our musical tastes are firmed up in our early teens… this explains a lot for me.