Category: Links

Fantastic resource.

Nate Hoffelder:

> Feedly announced their new URL shortening service this week, and it turns out that they are much more subtle scoundrels than I expected.

The kind of crap Feedly has been pulling makes me want to start trying to block their services.

Casey Johnston:

> Laurie Segall, the CNNMoney technology correspondent who interviewed Fadell, tried to clarify that Nest would not start feeding her ads about sweaters because it knows she is cold all the time. “Not that I know of, no,” said Fadell, smiling.

> “Can you promise?” Segall asked.

> Fadell laughed. “If we ever change it, I’ll let you know.”

What a smug response to the biggest concern his users have about the chosen company direction. Not only that, but it is telling that Fadell is the only one “reassuring” people, when it really needs to be Google making the assurances.

Google should really be taking this more seriously, because *I* of all people seem to not be the most vocal worrier.

In Sunlit you create stories that combine photos, location check-ins, and text. For trips, events, or any memories. You can share them with friends and everything syncs automatically.

Really great app and it's built off of the App.net backbone. I've been playing with it for a bit and I think this is going to be a great way to share moments in your life with family and friends. Previously I was using a shared Photo Stream, but this has a web component which makes things much easier.

Daniel Jalkut:

On that point, one reason I wouldn’t expect Apple to acquire a company like Nest is that the products are far too specific, far too niche. Apple doesn’t make very many specific things anymore. They make general tools and leave it to customers how they should best be used. In fact, over the past 10 to 15 years, Apple’s products are increasingly generalized, and more suitable to a wide range of uses (and customers) as the products become more refined.

John Moltz:

> And, if that’s not enough, the new chairwoman of the FTC who swooped in and demanded the consent decree was a partner at Quinn Emanuel, whose clients included Google and Samsung. In fact, it’s the same firm that leaked information to Samsung on contract agreements between Nokia and Apple.

Matt Drance:

> Put simply: the Internet we know and depend on will become something very different. The business relationship with your provider will change its focus from consumption (how many ones and zeros came over the wire) to behavior (what kind of ones and zeros). The latter is much more discriminatory and insidious.

Brian Fung (stupidly misleading title):

> Together, the four Amazon-hosted sites accounted for 6 percent of all malware Solutionary found in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the report. Amazon (whose chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post) is the leading malware host among global hosting providers, followed closely by GoDaddy.

And:

> A typical eight-character alphanumeric password might cost as little as $45 to crack.

Pretty wild to think about the fact that for $45 worth of Amazon servers you can crack some passwords. Also pretty wild to think about the fact that GoDaddy itself isn’t considered spam.

Bruce Schneier:

> Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn’t forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me — as someone with access to the Snowden documents — to explain to them what the NSA was doing.

This is amazing.

This is the kind of NSA story that really doesn’t bother me. Nonetheless it is epically neat. David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker:

> The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.

Elizabeth Dwoskin:

> The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people’s habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.

This is the shit that keeps me up at night.

Spencer Ackerman:

While Inglis conceded in his NPR interview that at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled by NSA’s bulk collection of all American phone data – a case in San Diego that involved a money transfer from four men to al-Shabaab in Somalia – he described it as an “insurance policy” against future acts of terrorism.

“I'm not going to give that insurance policy up, because it's a necessary component to cover a seam that I can't otherwise cover,” Inglis said.

This post has been going around because it seems very damning on the surface.

The NSA is best thought of as a tool, and while their one tool may not build you the entire structure, it may be a vital tool. If you really believe that all the NSA data collection programs has only foiled one terrorist attack then what you are saying is that big data is pretty useless.

I think that's far from the truth. More likely The NSA can only tie one specific foiled attack directly to NSA help, everywhere else the help was just help and not the end solution. I'd still like the program gone, but that doesn't mean I don't think it helps at all. I just think the cost of that help is far too high.

Kara Swisher and Liz Gaines interviewing Tony Fadell for Re/Code:

> Q: What about the privacy issues related to Google?
> Fadell: There’s perception and there’s reality and the reality of the situation is that the Nest data will stay with Nest. Our SLA will not change, our Terms of Service will not change. Nest data will be used to improve Nest data, that’s all.

I’m sorry, but if Nest *is* Google, then *Google* is Nest. Meaning that statement means Google gets the Nest user data. Even if the agreement is that right now Google can’t take that data — how long before Google changes its mind (as it is prone to doing)? A year? Tops?