Robinson Meyer:
Later this year, the company will release its “Keurig 2.0” product. It will use a whole new type of K-Cup that affords customers “game-changing functionality” and “excellent quality beverages.” To achieve all this quality and game-changery, the company will also stop supporting “unlicensed pods.”
Won’t be long now before AeroPress models will refuse to brew any beans not purchased from Tonx.
Bruce Schneier explaining why collecting data that you don’t look at is still dangerous:
Computer algorithms are intimately tied to people. And when we think of computer algorithms surveilling us or analyzing our personal data, we need to think about the people behind those algorithms. Whether or not anyone actually looks at our data, the very fact that they even could is what makes it surveillance.
Today's Situation Report from Foreign Policy (daily read for me) has a good run down/synopsis of the mess in Ukraine and how the U.S. could respond. None of it is “good”.
Thomas Wong:
I have a German friend who once said ”Ich hab’ kein Geld für billige Sache“ (I have no money for cheap things), and I think it encapsulates how I feel about having buckled down to make this purchase.
As Wong notes, there aren’t many reviews of this particular bag out there — but it’s one I have long been curious about. He loves the bag, and this is a great review of it.
I don’t think it is my cup of tea, ((Then again I hate tea.)) but I will say it seems to be a much better bag than I would have guessed. Wong has lovely pictures, and the patina on the bag after a year of use is perfect. Do read the backpack strap section because — oh my — does that seem cumbersome.
Good overview of Slack — I’ve been using it since it came out and man is it great.
Glenn Greenwald:
The broader point is that, far beyond hacktivists, these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.
They are using the same tactics that both make the web great, and make it so fragile. That this level of deception is taking place can and will pull more and more things people read online into question. That, overall, is very bad for the web.
Alex Heath:
Gotofail is limited to Apple’s apps and services, like Safari and Messages. So third-party browsers like Chrome should be fine.
I’m not sure how reassuring it is that Chrome is using it’s own set of security tools. On the one hand, they likely don’t have this bug, on the other hand… Well, I’m just not sure which is more scary: that iOS had a bug this big since iOS 6, or that Chrome uses it’s own security standards.
This is a pretty nasty bug, and it still isn’t patched on OS X. Gruber does a good job of going through the likely scenarios. Personally I’d go as far as #4 on his list, if only because I believe that the NSA has good reason to usurp security on the iPhone.
Ellen Nakashima and Josh Hicks:
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Wednesday ordered the cancellation of a plan by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to develop a national license-plate tracking system after privacy advocates raised concern about the initiative.
Color me surprised.
Now Verizon wants to sell your desktop history. Luckily Bryan Clark made a guide on how you can opt out.
Shawn Blanc:
In that vein, I consider shawnblanc.net a success. There isn’t a specific website, blog post, ebook, or podcast episode, that I would point to as being “it”. But that’s the point. I hope that over the past three years, I have contributed a little bit to the ever expanding and ever improving creative space we’re a part of.
He must be mistaken, it has been three years already and he hasn’t written weekly top ten posts? Someone get him the blogging handbook already.
Bruce Schneier:
The Review Group believes that moving the data to some other organization, either the companies that generate it in the first place or some third-party data repository, fixes that problem. But is that something we really want fixed? The fact that a government has us all under constant and ubiquitous surveillance should be chilling. It should limit freedom of expression. It is inimical to society, and to the extent we hide what we're doing from the people or do things that only pretend to fix the problem, we do ourselves a disservice.
Looks like it’s back to Google Docs, Ben:
Today brings some sad news: Editorially is closing its doors. The application will remain available until May 30, at which point the site will go offline.
Editorially is — was — a collaborative writing tool which was used right here at TBR. In fact, I have the beginning of a piece I’m writing in there right now, which has been seen and commented on by Ben and edited by our editor James. It is — was — a pretty awesome tool, and one that will be sorely missed.
Guys, very sorry but a few hundred of you are getting legitimate email confirmations from me via aweber.com. This is because I need to send you a one time email pertaining to your account on this site.
I am very sorry, and hoped to avoid this, but I cannot keep getting my email flagged as a spam sender so I needed to use a service.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald:
As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.
What amazing reporting, and a horrible program by the US.
I’m supposed to be on break, but this is a great kit to get you started on the Fujifilm system.
The X-M1 with kit lens. The lens isn’t the best, but the camera has a great sensor in it. By all accounts it is a solid entry level camera. Get it here for $600 on Amazon. There are also deals on all XF lenses so you could go body only and get the fantastic 35, 23, or compact 27 (the 27 is only $199).
Godspeed, my friend. We’re pullin’ for ya!
Addendum: It just occurred to me — several hours after posting this and a while after posting the follow up — that those seeing this screenshot who don’t understand the context might be worried about Ben.1
And you should. He and his lovely wife just had their second kid and that diaper bill is about to go through the roof.
I’m working on an initialism for a new standard of RSS Synchronization. It’s really, really simple synchronization, so the working title is RRSRSSS.
Before Google Reader shut down last year, before any of the alternatives had launched, I preemptively replaced it with Fever, hosted on a small Linode VPS.
I never really used Fever to its full potential. The web interface can’t compete with Reeder and I could never really understand how the ‘hot’ list worked, or what one is supposed to do with ‘kindling’ and ‘sparks’. For me, Fever was a glorified RSS read-position synchronization service. I also wanted to add feeds to Fever from Reeder, but apparently that’s not possible due to the Fever API. I thought perhaps one of the new Google Reader replacement services would be worth a try.
I tried to sign up for Feed Wrangler, but the service was unavailable, errors littered the screen every time I tried to ‘Join for $19/year.’
My confidence in RSS synchronization services was at an all time low. Google Reader was gone, Fever was costly to run, had many more features than I needed and Feed Wrangler did not inspire confidence.
It was time to put a little more “really” in Really Simple Syndication.
I added a new manual account to Reeder on my iPhone and then added four (4) RSS feeds to that account. Then I refreshed the feeds, checked that I’d read all the current articles and exported that list via email to my iPad where I imported it to Reeder.
I read my RSS feeds once per day. I estimate that on average there are ten things to read each day. I have since added two new feeds to my list, making a total of six (6), feeds. After adding a new subscription, I simply ‘share’ the accounts via email from Reeder on one device, then import them on the other.
Because the volume of things to read is low I have no trouble remembering what I’ve read between devices. There’s no need to automatically synchronize anything.
If you find yourself overwhelmed by your RSS subscriptions, or unread count, or if you’d like to spend less time pruning your RSS inbox and more time doing something productive, I urge you to try this experiment for a month: Export your current RSS subscriptions as a backup, then delete that account from your RSS readers (all of them). Add a new manually refreshed account to your RSS reader, then add up to five (5) feeds to that account. Think carefully about your choices. Select feeds that provide quality material.
Try Really Really Simple RSS Syndication (RRSRSSS) today. Cut the junk. Remove the clickbait. Spend between thirty minutes and one hour, once per day, reading your RSS feeds, then spend the remainder of your time doing something useful, like finishing that novel you started writing in college, or finally learning to water ski.
Another story, this one from Chris Ashworth, founder of Figure 53, not to be confused with FiftyThree, creators of Paper. Or, well, one of them.
Eight years ago, in 2006, I founded a company called Figure 53. We make tools for artists. We spend our days building products for OS X, iOS and the web.
[…]
So it was with some concern when two years ago, in 2012, I noticed a new company named FiftyThree. A company with a strikingly similar name to ours, making software for artists.
Phone calls were made, opinions expressed, trademark filings filed, filings rejected and amended, and in the end it appears as though they’re coming to some sort of reasonable conciliation. It’s interesting to me, though, that one company can so perfectly embody both the David and Goliath archetypes, in separate situations so remarkably similar in nature.
