Recent Articles

Dan Lewis in his daily email newsletter:

Somehow, we learned on a subconscious level to treat the emoticon as if the person who typed it was actually smiling at us.

Fascinating, I wonder how emoji effects this. Does it further entrench the ‘smile’?

In 2004 customers took an average of 8 minutes to order, but ten years later they take an average of 21 minutes. All because they are dicking around on their phones. Overall eating times increased by 50 minutes and it's mostly related to time spent on phones. Amazing and sad.

Dave Wiskus:

Design is how it works. If you were only hiring a designer to make your app pretty, you were already focused on the wrong problem.

Jamie Condliffe:

In a research paper published to arXiv, Daniele Quercia from Yahoo Labs explains how a new algorithm could optimize directions for beauty. “The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant,” he writes.

Personally I would love this.

Justin Williams:

To do pretty much all of the things I actually want to do with this thing on my wrist, I don’t need a big honking screen. I just need a lot of sensors. The same sensors that are in your phone, just crammed into a tiny bracelet.

Pairs well with the latest episode of the podcast.

I run a small business in addition to the business that is this website, and Shawn’s advice is spot on. Read the entire thing if you work for ourself.

Amy Schatz:

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia asked the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday to look into whether Facebook’s experiment on the ability to manipulate emotions on Facebook using the data of 700,000 unwitting users may have violated the company’s privacy agreement with the federal government.

Finally, but really go look at the Facebook response. They are practically flipping everyone off with that statement.

Very cool little set of data. I’m all for the Kurt Vonnegut schedule.

Om Malik:

While many of the technologies will indeed make it easier for us to live in the future, but what about the side effects and the impacts of these technologies on our society, it’s fabric and the economy at large. It is rather irresponsible that we are not pushing back by asking tougher questions from companies that are likely to dominate our future, because if we don’t, we will fail to have a proper public discourse, and will deserve the bleak future we fear the most.

This post has been making the rounds, and why not? It’s a very detailed and beautiful look at the creation of what looks to be a lovely bag. It’s nerd heaven.

What struck me was the fact that no one actually talked about the bag itself, which doesn’t look all that great to me. I haven’t used it, so I can only comment on what I see.

I did manage to hear from one person who owns the bag, and loves it.

Thomas Verschoren says of the bag:

I ordered this bag the day it became available and after using it for few months now, I have to say, it’s one of the best bags I ever bought.

I still see major flaws, and for the money I think there are better messenger bag options, but it does look nice on the outside.

Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain:

In one 2005 document, intelligence community personnel are instructed how to properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance. In the place where the target’s real name would go, the memo offers a fake name as a placeholder: “Mohammed Raghead.”

See, this is why the US is hated. This bullshit right here.

Here’s a link to get VMware working under Yosemite.

Seth Rosenblatt:

Avast didn’t have to resort to much digital jiu-jitsu to recover the data from the phones it acquired, McColgan said. His team used “fairly generic, publicly available,” off-the-shelf digital forensics software such as FTK Imager, a drive-imaging program.

“Although at first glance the phones appeared thoroughly erased, we quickly retrieved a lot of private data. In most cases, we got to the low-level analysis, which helped us recover SMS and chat messages,” Avast researchers Jaromir Horejsi and David Fiser wrote in the report.

Yikes. Makes me wonder how well iOS fairs.

We basically all assumed this right? I did. What’s most damning about this report is two fold:

1. It shows the NSA either lied (by omission, or directly) about knowing that Snowden did have access to this data, and did take it.
2. This also shows that the NSA weasels its way around the law whenever and wherever it can.

This is a tough spot to comment on this. The NSA’s job is foreign intelligence, and it seems fair game to gobble up transmissions from US citizens that correspond with foreign targets. Or, put another way, we would all be rooting for Chloe and Jack to hack into servers and analyze this data to stop a terrorist plot on 24.

What strikes me as the most troubling aspect is that for most of these, there is no real urgency to the intelligence. It’s one thing (in my mind) to aggressively bend, or break, laws if there is an assumed imminent terrorist attack. It’s a completely different thing if it is just routine preventative measures.

So to me, I’m fine with going all wild west if we know something big is about to go down and we are aggressively trying to stop that, but I am not fine with aggressive tactics as a matter of course.

Where that line is drawn, and by whom, is the impossible part of all this.