Browser Daily Newsletter 1297
One Startup’s Struggle To Survive
Gideon Lewis-Kraus | Wired | 22nd April 2014
Gritty portrait of start-up culture in San Francisco, from the perspective of two struggling entrepreneurs. It's relatively easy to raise a modest amount of money to model your idea; but then it's a lot harder to raise serious money to launch your business. That's when the terror creeps in. You work and worry like crazy. You lose weight, you age fast, you don't sleep. "Too late for promise, too early for results" (10,600 words)
How To Outguess Passwords
William Poundstone | Medium | 21st April 2014
How do you create a password that is arbitrary enough to defeat hackers, but simple enough to remember easily? Here's a brisk guide to current practice, including a piece of immediately actionable advice: "Instead of thinking of a phrase and converting it to a password (which won’t be all that random), get a truly random password and convert it to an easy‑to-remember phrase" (3,145 words)
Champion Of Chinese Art — Or Villain
David Pilling | FT Magazine | 25th April 2014
Enthralling portrait of C.T. Loo, titan of the Chinese antiques trade in the early 20C, smart country boy from Zhejiang who arrived in France as a ship's cook, but with the eye of a connoisseur. He ransacked China's treasures, paying dodgy prices for looted goods; he also educated Western collectors and museums about pre-Qing Chinese art, and stocked Western collections. “He was a genius. Evil and a genius at the same time" (3,900 words)
Pelican Books Take Flight Again
Paul Laity | Guardian | 25th April 2014
Orlando Figes, Bruce Hood, Robin Dunbar and Ha-Joon Chang relaunch the Pelican imprint after a 25-year absence. The first Pelican was George Bernard Shaw's Intelligent Woman's Guide To Socialism, a best-seller in 1928. Freud's Psychopathology Of Everyday Life flew off the shelves a decade later. Nostalgia has fetishised the brand, and small wonder: Margaret Mead, Virginia Woolf, Arthur C. Clarke were all Pelican authors (3,300 words)
The Internet Is Protected By Two Guys Named Steve
Chris Stokel-Walker | Buzzfeed | 25th April 2014
The upside of Heartbleed: It shone a spotlight on the OpenSSL team, which consisted of one developer in England, a business manager in America, and occasional contributors who were, in effect, maintaining a key piece of internet infrastructure in their spare time. Now their importance has been recognised, and they are getting some help — not a lot, but enough to hire a second full-time developer (4,480 words)
See Chernobyl And Live
Alexander Nazaryan | Newsweek | 17th April 2014
Notes from visiting Chernobyl and the neighbouring ghost-town of Pripyat, "a museum in handsome disarray". Ruin-porn tourism is booming. Thousands walk though the deserted maternity ward, the barren supermarkets, the rusting amusement park. The fatal reactor is dormant but not dead, under concrete poured hastily to seal it 30 years ago. If the concrete fractures, a "radioactive dust storm" may follow (5,340 words)
Video of the day: The Importance Of Kindness
What to expect: Two-minute homily from George Saunders, with simple animation
Thought for the day:
"No one cares what you did. They just care what you’re doing" — Bob Lefsetz