Hi there š Sorry for the 24-hour delay this week. Lots of good stuff I collected the past 8 days so l
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December 20 · Issue #24 · View online
Technology, Startups & the Future. I'm lucky when it comes to finding amazing content written by others and want to share that luck with you. Find me at http://twitter.com/bryceadams š
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Hi there š Sorry for the 24-hour delay this week. Lots of good stuff I collected the past 8 days so letās jump right in. I havenāt had time to comment on anything, so please forgive me for that. Rest assured, all of these articles deserve your time so give the ones that stand out a read!
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The State of Technology at the End of 2016
Each of these epochs laid the ground work for what followed: PCs were where browsers ran, and browsers enabled the build-out of cloud services that made mobile so compelling. Then, the omnipresence of mobile devices created the conditions for social media, specifically Facebook, to dominate a staggering amount of attention. What, then, has Facebook wrought? Well, Donald Trump, for one.
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Renegade Facebook Employees Form Task Force To Battle Fake News
The group is hoping to challenge the position by CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the platform has no responsibility to address the issue following the election of Donald Trump.
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The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
WASHINGTON ā When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk. His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named āthe Dukes,ā a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.
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At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis, The AI Assistant He Built For His Family
Facebookās CEO still loves to code. Hereās an exclusive peek at his new project, which plays music, makes toast, and occasionally annoys his wife. This was a fun read. Sure, thousands of people have likely building similar assistants for their homes for years, but itās nice to hear that even the CEO of one of the worldās biggest companies can find time to pursue his hobbies. One thing that stood out to me was Markās comments when his commands were taking several attempts to work, or the demos werenāt going exactly as planned. You can really get a feel for his passion and sensitivity about it. Anyone who has built something, whether itās a piece of furniture, art, software or hardware knows that sense of pride and ownership you have over it. You care deeply about how its perceived and used and just want to share it with the world, fully-aware that itās not perfect and never will be. But thatās okay.
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The Inside Story Behind Pebbleās Demise
If the myth of Silicon Valley is to be believed, Eric Migicovsky should be ebullient. After all, he has failed. For the past nine years, he spent time and made timeāāā24/7āāāwith Pebble, a smartwatch company he started as a 21-year old whelp while studying abroad in the Netherlands city of Delft, known more for pottery than technology. His trajectory has been niche legendary: struggling Y Combinator startup, Kickstarter hero, builder of a platform, and seller of over two million smartwatches. Sounds like a lot, but it wasnāt enough. Pebble was losing money, with no profit in sight. So on December 6, Migicovsky sold Pebbleās key assets, including its intellectual property, to Fitbit, which will reportedly hire about 40 percent of his workforce.
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Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower
In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the rand Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg.
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Google has reportedly stopped developing its own self-driving car
Google has reportedly shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers.
Which is a good introduction to the following pieceā¦
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Say hello to Waymo: whatās next for Googleās self-driving car project
For nearly eight years, weāve been working towards a future without the tired, drunk or distracted driving that contributes to 1.2 million lives lost on roads every year. Since 2009, our prototypes have spent the equivalent of 300 years of driving time on the road and weāve led the industry from a place where self-driving cars seem like science fiction to one where city planners all over the world are designing for a self-driven future. Today, weāre taking our next big step by becoming Waymo, a new Alphabet business. Waymo stands for a new way forward in mobility.
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Appleās Tim Cook assures employees that it is committed to the Mac and that āgreat desktopsā are coming
The consensus was that Apple is no longer interested in keeping up its desktop business because the portable market was eating it alive. In a posting to an employee message board, CEO Tim Cook seems intent on putting that particular branch of discussion to bed.
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Look Whoās Back! Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader
After years of missteps, the software giant is among the few titans of the 1990s to figure out the new world of mobile technology and cloud computing. One cultural change: CEO Satya Nadella took aim at the companyās ānot invented hereā biasā¦
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Google's Improbable Deal to Recreate the Real World in VR
Let a thousand virtual worlds rain down from the clouds. Or the cloud as Google backs a tiny British startup with its massive computing infrastructure.
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Who said what inside the Trump tech meeting: Immigration, paid maternity leave and becoming the āsoftware presidentā
The leaders of tech were closemouthed about their meeting with President-elect Donald Trump yesterday in New York, saying little about it ā before and after, in public and online. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos called the confab āvery productiveā ā the verbal equivalent of dead air ā but execs including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Apple CEO Tim Cook and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk did not comment about what was said in the room, and most of the press reports afterward were very vague. Great reporting by Recode.
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āFind my Phoneā is an amazing short film about a stolen cell
For your weekend consumption I present Find my Phone, a 30 minute film about a stolen phone. The filmmaker, Anthony van der Meer, rigged an Android cellphone with Cerebus, a command-and-control system for Android that can survive a memory wipe. The app allowed van der Meer to record video, take photos, and even listen in on calls ā all while tracking the phone around Amsterdam. Van der Meer pieced together a life out of fragments of the thiefās life and, when he finally faced the thief, he pulled back into anonymity, letting the phone go.
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The chilling stories behind Japanās āevaporating peopleā
As a newlywed in the 1980s, a Japanese martial arts master named Ichiro expected only good things. He and his wife, Tomoko, lived among the cherry blossoms in Saitima, a prosperous city just outside of Tokyo. The couple had their first child, a boy named Tim. They owned their house, and took out a loan to open a dumpling restaurant.
Then the market crashed. Suddenly, Ichiro and Tomoko were deeply in debt. So they did what hundreds of thousands of Japanese have done in similar circumstances: They sold their house, packed up their family, and disappeared. For good.
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