Category: Free

I really thought we were moving towards a paperless society. And yet, here we are, with more Papers than ever.

Remember the story from yesterday, the one about the creators of Paper — FiftyThree — complaining about Facebook using the same name for their app, Paper? Well, today iOS developer MiSoft updated the description on their app, Paper, accusing FiftyThree, creators of Paper, of the same tomfoolery FiftyThree is accusing Facebook, creators of Paper, with. At the time of reporting, the trees were unavailable for comment.

More as the story unfolds.

A year ago John Carey started a site called Yesterday Was Only. I am bummed because I didn’t follow it right away (I didn’t know about it), but I love following it now. Carey shot over a thousands photos over the course of the year for the site, and they are all good. He’s now making them into a small book:

I am not limiting the amount of books sold but this will be the one and only run of the book. If you do not order now there will not be another opportunity to buy it in the future, once these first copies are gone, thats it. I will sign and number each copy based on the amount of them that are ordered when ordering closes.

I ordered one, and it’d be smart of you to get one too. These types of books, photography focused, are the only physical books that I buy anymore.

Tim Bray:

Anyhow, at the moment I’m paralyzed, which is not a bad thing, because the little X-E1 and its two lenses are happily uncrowded in my pretty-small camera bag. What a great time to be a photographer.

Indeed, what a great time.

Jessica E. Lessin:

If it wasn’t clear that Larry Page is playing—and winning—a game of chess against the rest of the technology industry, it has become clear in the past two weeks.
The Google CEO took aim at Apple and upgraded its entire hardware strategy by ditching struggling Motorola and buying Nest Labs, the thermostat company loaded with Apple alumni. And he made quick and shrewd acquisition of artificial intelligence company DeepMind, which Facebook had been interested in acquiring, landing a bunch of brains to help Google’s search and personalization services and beyond.

I can’t read the rest because it is behind a $400 paywall, but I can only assume the next line reads: April Fools.

Say he is playing chess all you want, but winning? He just sold a $12 billion dollar acquisition for less than $3 billion — how’s that winning. Are you telling me that this was his plan all along? If that’s what you are saying then you are a moron for thinking that is playing good chess.

And you declare him winning for buying Nest and DeepMind? How about we go ahead and wait to see what, if anything, Google does with those companies.

Ian Betteridge:

> The entire farce has cost Google somewhere in the region of $11bn, even once it’s managed to get $3bn back from Lenovo, which is desperate for a brand it can use to crack the American market.

Here’s the thing though, Gmail/Search/Maps is free — how could you possibly think ill of Google abysmal acquisition?

The Kickstarter description:

To make photo printing fun – for the first time by our reckoning – we’ve designed a photo finishing system ready for the 21st century. Museum quality (Giclée) printers, German 220 gram photo paper from sustainable sources, laser cutters, and robots with carbon fiber arms will allow Flag to deliver prints, for free, that are better than any you can pay for today. We want to turn your memories into mementos you can be proud of.

Our secret to making photo printing free? An advertisement on the back of each print. It will always be tasteful, and we are steadfast in our commitment to never sell or share your personal information with advertisers.

Let's leave my feelings about ads out of this for the time being.

Why are we encouraging this? At this writing 711 people have decided to pay at least $10 to see this happen. Wouldn't your money be better spent on buying prints instead of paying to fund a business to then get free prints? (And spoiler, I don't think this is a sustainable business.)

Funding a business on Kickstarter so that you can get a free app/service later seems like a wholly bad idea. It's like pissing your money away. Why not just pay for one of many other services that do this kind of high quality printing already? i doubt many of you would print more than 20 photos a year, especially at the likely small size these guys are offering for free (they don't seem to mention the size, I'm guessing 4×6, or 5×7). ((They do note that larger photos cost extra money, and in my book anything smaller than 8×10 is a useless print.)) I have an excellent photo printer and I barely print enough to keep the ink from drying out.

Somethings, I guess, I will never understand.

Our ability to deliver prints relies on making deals with advertisers who'll pay for your printing and postage and we are already talking to a number of significant potential advertisers.

Also of concern: no launch partners booked. Seems like that would be priority #1 if you spent the last three years planning this.

Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Mark Schone, with Glenn Greenwald:

> Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News detail how British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their U.S. partners in 2012 in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information, for analysis. At the time the documents were printed, they were also able to spy on Facebook and Twitter.

James Ball:

> So successful was this effort that one 2008 document noted that “[i]t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system.”

Also, take a look at the iPhone slide. Wow.

I put up a little photoblog on my personal domain. The goal is to just share a favorite photo I took. I am going to try and share daily, so be sure to grab the RSS feed.

I’ll try to limit pictures of my kids, but I can’t help it.

One thing to note: there’s sharing buttons.

Unlike this site I am giving WordPress’s standard suite of tools a try — what the hell.

Dark Sky released a huge update today. I don’t need to do a review (been on the beta, thankfully) because I’ll tell you with 100% confidence that this is the *only* weather app you need.

One of my favorite little things: it tells you the hours left of daylight, not just the sunset time. Love that.

*Finally.*

Will Leitch, on THE BEST CORNER IN THE NFL:
> The point is, Richard Sherman, that unlikely hero, that Stanford honors student, that beautiful lunatic, is going to be the center of the biggest event in sports for the next two weeks. The more you research him, the more you learn about him, the more you understand where he his coming from … the more you get it. So many athletes claim they aren’t respected, that they’re misunderstood, that No One Believed In Them. Sherman has the benefit of being right about that. It drives him. All told, I can think of few better representatives of what football is about.

See also: [Tommy Tomlinson](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tommytomlinson/2014/01/19/22-brief-thoughts-about-that-richard-sherman-interview/). Can’t wait to see the best corner in the NFL play again. ((And I don’t even like football.))

Good synopsis from Brian Fung on the NSA reforms Obama is enacting. The [EFF has given Obama’s reform a score](https://www.eff.org/node/78469) of 3.5 out of a possible 12… so that’s actually probably every thing you need to know.

[Obama’s full text remarks are here](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/heres-the-full-text-of-president-obamas-nsa-speech) and the policy directive is [here](http://www.scribd.com/doc/200382836/Presidential-Policy-Directive-regarding-Signals-Intelligence-Activities).

James Ball:

> The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

So what, right?

> On average, each day the NSA was able to extract:

> • More than 5 million missed-call alerts, for use in contact-chaining analysis (working out someone’s social network from who they contact and when)

> • Details of 1.6 million border crossings a day, from network roaming alerts

> • More than 110,000 names, from electronic business cards, which also included the ability to extract and save images.

> • Over 800,000 financial transactions, either through text-to-text payments or linking credit cards to phone users

> The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.

No big deal though…

Neat little interview series that Chris Gonzales is putting together. I’m honored to have gone first — it can only get better now.

Good news, now Google knows the temperature in your home to better tell which clothing to hock to you:

> Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has entered into an agreement to buy Nest Labs, Inc. for $3.2 billion in cash.

Interesting ‘research’ project from the EFF that looks at how much data you are sending out just from web browsing.

I have a contributing editor working on a post about Writer Pro’s Syntax Mode (not having to do with patents) and we would love to have your feedback. If you own Writer Pro and can take a couple minutes to answer some questions for us we would be grateful.

Click through to take it.

Thanks!