Covered this week; How every member got to Congress… Apple shuts a big chunk of Facebook down, and they deserve it… One great photo from every Super Bowl… Finding Lena, the patron saint of JPEG’s… Rethinking Google Analytics… What happens when the only person who knows a valuable password, dies? Buddy Holly, gone 60 years but still influencing…
January 28, 2019
A fascinating, animated infographic that shows you the path every member of Congress followed to get to the House of Representatives. Nobody does it like the New York Times.
The United States does not grant titles of nobility. There are no lords, barons or dukes here. That said, Congress is made up of people who have credentials and experiences vastly different from those of most citizens. Considering education, career, family background and personal wealth, it seems that America has a ruling class – or at least a limited number of ways to enter the halls of power.
January 29, 2019
When you have a behemoth like Facebook who fucks with all of our privacy, seemingly not giving a shit about anything that gets between them and making money… it’s great to see an even bigger behemoth hit back for us all. Apple takes privacy seriously Zuckerberg, times come when you should follow their lead.
Apple said that Facebook was in “clear breach of their agreement with Apple.” Any developer that breaches that agreement, Apple said, has their distribution certificates revoked, “which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.”
January 30, 2019
Just a short one today… this collection ran in the USA Today this morning… an iconic image rom each of the first 52 Super Bowl’s… sorta cool.
January 31, 2019
This is a fantastically interesting story… I knew Lena Forsen’s image, I just never knew the story behind it. These sorts of stories that lean back to the roots of tech never fail to entertain. The First Lady of the Internet.
Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.
February 1, 2019
I’ve been using Google Analytics for years… can’t say much of the data collected as outlined in this article were ever things I thought much about… but that’s because much of what could be considered ‘intrusive’ in what Google collects was never of interest to me anyway and I just looked past it. Now that I’ve read this though, it has given me some food for thought.
Ss Google has come under fire for a host of privacy scandals and consumers have grown wary of a general lack of privacy on the internet, a series of new startups has launched in the past few months to provide privacy-centric analytics, claiming not to collect any personal data and only display simple metrics like page views, referral websites, and screen sizes in clean, pared-down interfaces.
February 2, 2019
This is a strange, strange story… but a turn of events that you figure had to happen eventually… and along the same lines, still wondering how it’s possible that both Prince and Aretha Franklin didn’t leave wills?
A cryptocurrency exchange in Canada has lost control of at least $137 million of its customers’ assets following the sudden death of its founder, who was the only person known to have access to the offline wallet that stored the digital coins. British Columbia-based QuadrigaCX is unable to access most or all of another $53 million because it’s tied up in disputes with third parties.
February 3, 2019
Sometimes when you hear how many years have passed since this or that event, you can’t believe how long it has been… in this article, Alexandra Pollard reflects on the plane crash of February 3, 1959 that took the lives of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens along with their pilot. She also looks at the legacies that have endured.
Twelve years later, on his single “American Pie”, Don McLean dubbed the tragedy “the day the music died”. It was an apt description; all three singers on board had talent in abundance. The Big Bopper’s smash hit, the playful, rockabilly number “Chantilly Lace”, had made him a star, and Ritchie Valens was helping pioneer the Mexican American Chicano rock movement. But it was Holly who was changing the landscape of rock’n’roll music.
