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WeWTF, Part Deux
So, the mother of all party crashers took a dump in the We IPO punch bowl. The crasher? Math. The autopsy will show the shelving of this IPO was death by S-1.
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Is everything an MLM
Last week, I linked to a NYT article about the spread of CorePower Yoga: how its business model is contingent upon enrolling thousands in expensive “teacher training” courses, even though there’s already a surfeit of teachers out there.
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Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
David analyzes the root causes of the Boeing 737 Max crash. Read here.
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But I'm Not a Lawyer, I'm an Agent
Just over a quarter century ago, when I was a young scribbler traipsing around the metro desk of the Baltimore Sun, I had an early opportunity to learn a lesson about money, about ethics, about capitalism and, in particular, about the American entertainment industry. And Dorothy Simon, she raised no fools. I only…
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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not
The world needs ideas and innovation to make progress. Creative and talented people are everywhere, but the opportunity to develop is limited to only a small number of well-off children. The world loses out as a result.
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Software Below the Poverty Line
Open Source Freelancer
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What I Learned Trying to Secure Congressional Campaigns
You know how it happens. You try to secure one Congressional campaign, and then another, and pretty soon you can't stop. You'll fly across the country just to brief a Green Party candidate in a district the Republicans carried by 60 points. You want more, more, always looking for that next fix.
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Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours
Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and no…
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Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Down to Users and Misses the Point
Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today (paywalled, but summarized here) relies on all-too-familiar refrains to explain the dubious principles and so-called “facts” behind Facebook’s business model. It’s the same old song we’ve heard before. And, as usual, it wildly misses users’...
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Nigerian Teens Are Making Sci-Fi Shorts with Slick Visual Effects
For the past year, a group of teens in Nigeria called the Critics Company have been uploading short sci-fi films to their YouTube channel. Using a smartphone wi
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Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
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Reasons Not to Use Apple (2018)
Apple reportedly had objections to what Jon Stewart said in his video program — it canceled the show after he had criticized China, and something the article describes as "AI". (It could be that what he criticized was actually large language models, which may be an important issue but are not "intelligence" .)
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Google's Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
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CNIL imposes a financial penalty of 50M euros against Google
This page is no longer available. Order to comply or sanctions issued by the CNIL may be made public. In this case, a time limit shall be specified in the decision. Once this time period has expired, the organisations that have been given formal notice or sanctioned are no longer identified in the public decision. For…
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Attorney General Barr and Encryption
Last month, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy—what is commonly known as “going dark.” Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically…
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No more XS4ALL is unthinkable
They are the example of how it should be, the Dutch ISP called XS4ALL. They were bought in '98 by the former state-owned KPN, but continued to operate independently. Born from a group of hackers and the first ISP in the Netherlands, today they are still the example that we measure other ISPs by.
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The Mueller Report Can’t Be Copyrighted, Is Flagged by Copyright Bots Anyway
Did you know that anything created by federal government employees, under American law, can’t be copyrighted? They go right into the public domain. That means it’s impossible for there to be any copyright infringement on, say, a report by the Special Counsel on the investigation into the President...
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How Apps on Android Share Data with Facebook (2018)
Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. Using…
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EU’s Parliament Signs Off on Disastrous Internet Law: What Happens Next?
In a stunning rejection of the will of five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Single Market...
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People Met in Hotel Lobbies (2017)
Selections from the Washington Post's Gilded Age coverage of notable visitors to the city
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It's time to switch to a four-day working week, say two experts
Working less would have a range of benefits for workers and employers and the world should embrace the four day working week, was the message two experts brought to Davos 2019.
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Senate Testimony on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy
Idle Words > Talks > Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy (Senate hearing)
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EFF’s Tweet About a DMCA Takedown Is Now Subject to an Overzealous Takedown
Get ready for a tale as good as anything you’d see on television. Here’s the sequence of events: the website TorrentFreak publishes an article about a leak of TV episodes, including shows from the network Starz. TorrentFreak tweets its article, Starz sends a copyright takedown notice. TorrentFreak writes about the…
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Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway
I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. A forme...
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An Honest Living
What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition.
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Make More Land
We used to make land. We built long wharves for docking ships, and then over time filled in the areas between them. Later we built up mudflats wholesale to make even larger areas. Here's a map of Boston showing how much of the land wasn't previously dry: (Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map &…