Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Fascinating report. "Today, with Gadhafi dead and a provisional government of former rebels in charge, we can begin to uncover the secret, high tech spying machine that helped the dictator and his regime cling to power"
"As much as we think the old world of phone numbers may one day disappear, and we’ll eventually be calling each other through Facebook or something, the practical reality is that they won’t." They're a gold mine for web advertisers
On Netflix and their risky bet on original programming. "Extreme expenditures on content — a planned $3.7 billion over the next five years — represent either a massive protective moat or a hole deep enough to drown in"
Four college students plan to take on Facebook, with a decentralised social network. They hit Kickstarter for funds. It goes crazy. They make front page of the New York Times. 600k users join. Then comes the suicide
"The concept of what we 'possess' online is based on the increasingly outdated concept of the digital 'file'. What happens to the law in a streaming, cloud-connected world? A world where here are no more 'files'?"
"When we disparage the digital environment as 'overwhelming', what we're also faulting it for is its lack of a narrative. The Internet moves, but it doesn't necessarily move forwards." It lacks a plot. But this may change
They did at first. They thought apps would be a digital enabler of paid content and single-copy sales. Wrong. Apps are fiendishly difficult to make. Horribly expensive. Readers don't like walled gardens. And Apple is the boss
Best piece yet on the notorious Kim Dotcom, and file-sharing website Megaupload. "His plan was to create a more artist-friendly distribution platform where creators would get paid more than they do when Apple sells their product"
"Leonardo da Vinci sketched out tanks, helicopters, and mechanical calculators centuries before the first examples were built. Now another of his flights of imagination has finally been realized." Light-field photography has arrived
George Hotz started the hacker wars. The grungy teenager from New Jersey was the first person to unlock an iPhone. But it was when he defeated Sony's PS3 that things started getting really out of hand
Portugal's PlanIT Valley aims to be first "sentient" city. But if faces challenges. "Humans will act in ways that even the smartest computer model can fail to anticipate — which is fine, until you put your entire city in its hands"
"Asking whether Google makes us stupid, as some cultural critics recently have, is the wrong question. It assumes sharp distinctions between humans and technology that are no longer, if they ever were, tenable." Here's why
25 years ago, the first GIF was created. Here's the story of their first quarter century, and a look at how modern artists are using the moving image format in novel ways
