Blog

Erschienen am 25.8.2015

ZU HAUSE

iOS 9 content blocking will transform the mobile Web: I’ve tried it
Owen Williams, TNW
„The next version of iOS comes with a major new feature called ‘content blockers’ which will allow users to install apps that block trackers, advertisements and other unwanted content for the first time.“

The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons
Kev Needham, Mozilla
Mozilla ändert, wie Add-ons funktionieren. Das bedeutet wohl ziemlich sicher das Aus für Download-Helfer und andere, mächtige Erweiterungen. Die Kommentare unter der Ankündigung sind jedenfalls ziemlich übel.

SORRY.
Daniel Ek, Spotify
„We have heard your concerns loud and clear. We are also going to update the new Privacy Policy in the coming weeks.“

NERDS

There is a better way to read on the internet, and I have found it
Ezra Klein, Vox
Die Idee: Sämtliche digitalen Lesenotizen zentral gespeichert. Geht natürlicht nicht einfach so, braucht kleine Hacks. Für Bücher sieht das so aus: Kindle -> Clippings.io -> Evernote. Für alles andere: Website -> Instapaper -> IFTT -> Evernote. Und Boom, alle Notizen zentral in Evernote.

Writing a Game Boy Advance Game
Joe Savage
„I’ve been wondering recently: how easy is it to write a Game Boy (Advance) game?“ I mean: Who doesn’t? Exactly.

How to Escape the Public Internet
Navneet Alang, New Republic
Slack ist die Antwort, der Ausweg, das Licht. Jedenfalls für die Anhänger aus dem Silo-Lager.

ART

‚Space Jam‘ Forever: The Website That Wouldn’t Die
Erik Malinowski, Rolling Stone
„The site lives on, aging for 19 years but free from influence, to our enduring delight.“

The Autocanonizer
Paul Lamere
„It takes any song and tries to make a canon out of it. (…) There’s a Firefox issue that I will fix in the coming days. Or you can go and fix all this yourself because the code is on github.“

Furry Friend
„Frequency-Shaped Cat Purr Noise Generator“

ETC.

An honest guide to the San Francisco startup life
Padlet, Medium
„Since people are happiest in the company of friends and family, we make sure you have work-life balance. This means you can work-from-home; on weekends. Notable exception is Yahoo. They let you home-from-work by allowing you to bring your infant to the office.“

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Erschienen am 17.8.2015

CAPITALISM

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
Jodi Kantor und David Streitfeldaug, New York Times
Massive Recherche über die Arbeitsbedingungen der Amazon-Manager und -Verwalter. „In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them.“

A Trail of Evidence Leading to AT&T’s Partnership with the NSA
Jeff Larson, Julia Angwin, Henrik Moltke und Laura Poitras, ProPublica
„By following breadcrumbs we found throughout the trove of documents released by Snowden, we were able to prove that a program called Fairview was the cover term for the agency’s partnership with AT&T.“

How to See Invisible Infrastructure
Ingrid Burrington, The Atlantic
„I spent a weekend at the International Utility Locate Rodeo, where people compete to find hidden cables, water mains, and gas lines.“

KUUUUNST

The Expansion of Digitalism and the New Reality
Leah Constantine, Adhoc
Überblick mit toller Linkliste am Ende: „Art is one of the oldest forms of visual discourse we’ve ever known. From viewing, to sharing, and even buying, we are seeing the world of art change before us.“

DEFCON 23 Badge Challenge
Jason Thor Hall und Brett Buerhaus, Team PotatoSec
Auf der Hacker-Konferenz Defcon gab es wieder ein Rätsel zu lösen. Hier sind die glücklichen Gewinner: „We attempted to break the 1’s and -’s by converting them into 5 bit binary baudot and then use a colossus simulation to crack them.“

NEEEEERDS

heimcontrol.js
Willi Thiel
„Awesome home automation with Raspberry PI and Arduino using Node.js, MongoDB, HTML5 and Websockets.“

Open sourcing Grid, the Guardian’s new image management service
Sébastien Cevey, Guardian Developer blog
„From the beginning, the vision was to provide a universal and fast experience accessing media that is well organised and using it in an affordable way to produce high-quality content.“

Peaks.js: Audio waveform rendering in the browser
Chris Finch, Thomas Parisot und Chris Needham, BBC R&D Blog
„How we prototyped a browser-based zoomable audio waveform view that allows users to interactively extract segments of the audio to download or share.“

ETC.

„In Your Face, Paraguay“
Merlin Mann und John Roderick, Roderick on the Line, Episode 164
Erste halbe Stunde eingrooven, was dann kommt, ist eine der besten Podcast-Episoden überhaupt.

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Erschienen am 10.8.2015

NETZWELT

Alphabet Inc.
Brian Womack, Bloomberg
„Google Inc. is changing its corporate structure to separate its search, YouTube and other Web companies from its research and investment divisions.“ Sundar Pichai wird Google-Chef, die neue Umbrella-Corporation heißt Alphabet und hat die Adresse abc.xyz.

An Undead SOPA Is Hiding Inside an Extremely Boring Case About Invisible Braces
Sarah Jeong, Motherboard
„The most controversial parts of SOPA, an anti-piracy bill defeated in 2012 after a massive public outcry, may end up becoming de facto law after all, depending on the outcome in an obscure case that is working its way through the legal system without anyone noticing.“ And the New York Times Is On It!

The Man for Mars
Sue Halpern, The New York Review of Books
„Disruption ist ein fürchterliches Buzzword, aber auf Elon Musk passt er: „It required a lot of hubris to take on the aerospace industry and the automobile industry and the utilities, but he did, and he is, with precipitous consequences.“

MEDIEN

The Unbreakable Rebecca Black
Reggie Ugwu, BuzzFeed
„Four years ago, she introduced the world to the most hated (and maddeningly unforgettable) song in a generation, was passed over by the music industry, and turned into a punchline — all before she was old enough for a learner’s permit. Now 18, Rebecca Black is too famous to be normal and too normal to be famous.“

Virtual reality takes you inside the news from Syria to Trayvon’s shooting
Geneva Sands und Serena Marshall, Fusion
Immersive Journalism ist krass und kann sehr verstörend wirken. „Some people have been brought to tears, while others reached into their pockets to call 911.“

Vine is a sleeping giant (while everyone is focused on Snapchat)
Dan Frommer, Quartz
„A funny thing happened to Vine, Twitter’s short-form video app, after its initial buzz wore off: It kept going.“

ETC.

This guy created a hilarious, dystopian Facebook
Kristen V. Brown, Fusion
„Kolitz’s Internet dream world is a vision of backlash against the world that we live in today — one in which we hold the power, not our screens.“

Hacker würden „Mr. Robot“ gucken
Neue Serie über drogensüchtigen Hacker mit Hang zum Umsturz. Kashmir Hill: „Biggest takeaway from Defcon: Security community and hackers really, really love Mr. Robot.“ Erhältlich über Amazon, iTunes, Videoload und Xbox Video.

Und dann ist da noch Star Wars: True Detective Style

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Erschienen am 6.8.2015

NETZWELT

Twitter contest winning as a service
Hunter Scott
„This is the story of how I wrote a Twitter bot to automatically enter contests and ended up winning on average 4 contests per day, every day, for about 9 months straight.“

Spy agency whistle-blower posts top secret report to 4chan but users dismiss it as ‚fake and gay‘
Anthony Cuthbertson, International Business Times
Gute Geschichte aus Australien, ein paar Jahre her, jetzt erst durch Gerichtsakten öffentlich geworden.

How I Gave Up Alternating Current
Rob Rhinehart
Der Typ, der Essen durch Soylent ersetzt hat, stellt seine Stromversorgung um: „I expect power will be at a premium in our first space colonies, and DC only from solar cells. So, I embarked on an experiment to see if I could survive without the luxury of alternating current.“

MEDIEN

Mutually Assured Content
John Herrman, The Awl
„In 2015, the illusion of audience ownership is becoming harder to sustain.“ John Herrman ist nicht mehr der Geheimtipp, der er mal war. Und seine Serie, Content Wars, hat stärkere Ausgaben. Und doch, jedes Mal wieder.

Twenty-four hours with Tay Zonday
Eric Steuer, California Sunday Magazine
„These days, Tay is one of a small group from YouTube’s first wave of viral stars who’ve managed to eke out long-term entertainment careers.“

The Creator of Pepe the Frog Talks About Making Comics in the Post-Meme World
Sean T. Collins, Vice
„Long before 4Chan and Reddit made him an internet icon and the likes of Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj blasted his mug to the masses, the emotionally expressive amphibian meme known as Pepe the Frog was the work of a single man.“ Das erste Mal, dass ich das Wort Post-Meme World lese. Aber klar, passt.

BUSINESS

Google’s $6 Billion Miscalculation on the EU
Brad Stone und Vernon Silver, BusinessWeek
„Google lawyers never saw Oettinger coming. His portfolio was energy policy, so they had never met or discussed the case with anyone on his staff. Now suddenly he was an expert on Google and Internet policy, skillfully channeling the fears that German industrial giants like Daimler and Bosch had about Silicon Valley upstarts such as Tesla and technologies like driverless cars.“

Design machines
Travis Gertz, Louder Then Ten
Webseiten sehen zunehmend gleich aus. Plattformen machen alles noch gleicher. „I believe there’s an opportunity for those of us who are willing to stick our necks out.“ Ausführliche, tolle Übersicht über den Zustand des Webdesigns.

LOL

The New Devil’s Dictionary
Herausgegeben von T.C. Sottek, The Verge
Ich finde das alles sehr, sehr lustig:
„Apple (n.): A shadowy cult of technologists who sell Trojan horses containing U2 albums.“
„embed (v).: Socially permissible theft.“
„Google (n.): The kind of fun, colorful name you stick with to conceal the fact that your mega-corporation has become objectively terrifying.“
„smart (adj.): Capable of transmitting intimate details about your life to a major corporation or governmental entity.“

Erschienen am 29.7.2015

BYE-BYE

Why Grooveshark failed
Stephen Witt, The Verge
Josh Greenberg „had violated the tenets of intellectual property law, of course, but there was precedent for that. Nullsoft’s Justin Frankel had coded Winamp without licensing the underlying mp3 technology; YouTube’s Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had looked the other way as users had uploaded thousands of infringing videos; Napster’s Shawn Fanning had acted as if the entire concept of copyright was obsolete.“

The meteoric rise and slow decline of Neopets
Olivia Coy, The Kernel
„Within hours, chaos reigned.“

iTunes is the definition of cruft and technical debt
Marco Ament
„As much as I use, rely on, and mostly like Apple’s products, we all know that there are some toxic hellstews that are best avoided.“

ARTSY

Syd Mead, the Artist Who Illustrates the Future
Patrick Sisson, Curbed
„His film work alone, which includes Blade Runner, Aliens and TRON, gave a generation a glimpse into what technology and design may have in store.“

The reason every meme uses that one font
Phil Edwards, Vox
Eine Schrift von 1965, wie gemacht für das Internet: „Existing on millions of computers and standardized across the web, Impact was primed to become the de facto font of the meme.“

Tumblr GIFs of Japanese Life
Caroline Meathrel-Mack, Design Made in Japan
„For those nostalgic for the sights and smells of Japan, or even those who just plain love GIFs, is the site 1041uuu.tumblr.com.“

MEDIA

Business Insider Broadens Ambitions With New Tech Site
Lukas I. Alpert, Wall Street Journal
Über Tech Insider und den Start einer deutschen Version von Business Insider noch dieses Jahr.

Matt Buchanan and John Herrman Build Bridges out of iPhones
Tomorrow with Joshua Topolsky, Episode 16
The Awl! Uber! Gawker!

The Onion Creates ‚EDGEtv,‘ Parodying Dangerporn Journalism
via Digg

ETC.

Thirteen Months of Working, Eating, and Sleeping at the Googleplex
Joel Stein, Bloomberg Business
„Sure, there were challenges. It turns out that RVs aren’t very insulated against cold and rain, the way most homes are.“

Receiving Weather Satellite Images With An £8 Dongle
Matt Gray
„You can get weather satellite images directly from the satellite when they pass overhead.“

This Girl’s Selfies Will Make Your Selfie Stick Look Like Just A Stick
Mackenzie Kruvant, BuzzFeed
„Furby 4, a DJI Phantom 3 drone, has become a loyal companion in her travels. It makes your selfie stick look like the technology equivalent of a car phone.“

Erschienen am 20.7.2015

NETZWELT

All the ways hackers will try to kill you in the future
Simon Chetrit, Hopes & Fears
„If you’re not scared now, you will be.“

The Web We Have to Save
Hossein Derakhshan, Matter
Unter anderem ist Instagram ein Problem: „You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere. Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there.“

Stream of the Crop. A month-long journey to find the best music-streaming service
Emily Yoshida, The Verge
Spotify gegen Apple gegen Google gegen Tidal gegen Rdio. Bei der Telekom in Deutschland gewinnt natürlich immer Spotify, weil das Streaming nicht das Datenvolumen belastet. Aber wer das macht, verrät die Netzneutralität. Schlecht fürs Karma!

MEDIEN

The Pink Ghetto of Social Media
Alana Hope Levinson, Matter
„In news organizations, female leaders outnumber men in only one division. What does that mean for the future of women in the newsroom?“ Spoiler: Männer übernehmen irgendwann.

Warum Apple Werbeblocker auf dem Handy erlaubt
Es gibt gerade eine Diskussion über Online-Werbetechnik (adtech) und wie dadurch Lade- und Batterielaufzeiten von Smartphones leiden. Apple wird auch deswegen Werbeblocker in den kommenden iOS-Versionen ermöglichen. Für werbefinanzierte Medien wird das richtig bitter. Hier sind die wichtigsten Beiträge:

Safari Content Blocker, Before and After, John Gruber, Daring Fireball
Why Web Pages Suck, Ben Thompson, Stratechery
Ad tech is killing the online experience, Felix Salmon, The Guardian
The mobile web sucks, Nilay Patel, The Verge

SOCIAL

Why Slack is Exploding (as a Community-Building Platform)
Matt Diederichs, Hootsuite
Slack ist MySpace und ICQ und phpBB und sowieso die Zukunft.

Instagram Is the Best Social Network
Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic
„Instagram is broadcast, but in its endless scroll, it achieves something like intimacy.“

Casey Neistat’s Beme Is a Social App That Aims to Replace Illusions With Reality
Mike Isaac, New York Times
„The point of Beme, though, is to erase some of what Mr. Neistat sees as the facades created with social media in its current forms, stripping away the identities people consciously produce with the perfect Instagram filter or the cutesy doodles on a Snapchat photo.“

ETC.

What are Bloom filters?
Jamie Talbot, The Story
Wir müssen alle viel besser verstehen, wie das alles hier funktioniert. Gut, wenn die Lektion dann auch noch so locker runtererzählt ist: „You can think of a Bloom filter as a large set of numbered buckets, each one starting off empty.“

A Brief History of Flash
CommitStrip
In dieser Linksammlung gibt es nicht nur Kritik und Lob gleichzeitig für Instagram, es gibt auch klagende Worte wegen Werbeblockern und diesen lustigen Comic gegen das (Werbe-) Web-Format Flash. Ich hätte in Rap-Lyrics nach irgendwas mit Dialektik suchen können, schließe aber einfach mit: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Erschienen am 11.7.2015

NETZWELT

What the Reddit Rebellion Is Really About
David Auerbach, Slate
Die Firma Reddit vertraut vor allem auf die kostenlose Arbeit der Community. „But while AMAgeddon may be over, tensions remain high.“

Should you buy an Apple Watch?
Wolfgang Blau, Facebook
„I just feel that Apple sold me a rather useless device and shipped this far too early and at a far too high price point.“

Continental Grift
Susan Crawford, Backchannel
Mehr Content, weniger Access: „Deutsche Telekom wants to be like Comcast. What a bad outcome that would be for the Europeans.“

MEDIEN

Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?
Josh Dzieza, The Verge
Der Titel ist natürlich ein guter Trick, um die drei Millionen Unique User von The Awl anzusprechen. Mit 13 Mitarbeitern ist die Seite so etwas wie der Gegenentwurf zu BuzzFeed und Gawker — und funktioniert gleichzeitig als Talentschmiede.

The cult of Vice
Chris Ip, CJR
„Vice is no longer the edgy digital outsider, but a slick global empire lubricated with millions in investment and ad dollars that, coupled with a brash attitude, make the company a ray of light among the decaying temples of legacy journalism.“

Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world
Hari Kunzru, The Guardian
„It has sold millions of copies, is perhaps the greatest novel in the science-fiction canon and Star Wars wouldn’t have existed without it. Frank Herbert’s Dune should endure as a politically relevant fantasy from the Age of Aquarius.“

SPACE

Stuff in Space
James Yoder
„A realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL.“

Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every 10 Minutes
Derek Watkins, The New York Times
„Images from the Himawari-8 weather satellite’s first official day paint a living portrait of the western Pacific.“

Your ultimate guide to the Pluto flyby
Sarah Fecht, Popular Science
„It’s not everyday we get to explore a completely new planet. But on July 14, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will become the first to visit Pluto.“

Erschienen am 1.7.2015

NETZWELT

The internet is the answer to all the questions of our time
Cory Doctorow, The Guardian
„There are many fights more important than the fight over how the internet is regulated. Equity in race, gender, sexual preference; the widening wealth gap; the climate crisis. (…) Except for one thing: the internet is how every one of these fights will be won or lost.“

Dazu passt sehr gut der Greek Bailout Found auf Indiegogo. Dort wird gegen die Pleite Griechenlands gesammelt. Eine halbe Million Euro von insgesamt benötigten 1,6 Milliarden Euro ist schon versprochen. Bevor das jetzt als Quatsch abgetan wird: Allein die Möglichkeit ist faszinierend. Regierungen diskutieren und drohen, Bürger legen zusammen und setzen damit ein Zeichen für die Europäische Union.

Between Kickstarter’s frauds and phenoms live long-delayed projects
Casey Johnston, Ars Technica
„Many product-oriented Kickstarter projects, even the multimillion dollar ones, tend to stumble because they hit a logistics dead zone.“

With bots like these, who needs friends?
Tim Moynihan, Wired
„You can outsource communication to an automated archetype that approximates their role in your social sphere.“

Dylann Roof, 4chan, and the New Online Racism
Jacob Siegel, The Daily Beast
„4chan’s trolling culture didn’t just birth Guy Fawkes hacktivism — it also inspired the racist and neo-fascist sites where the Charleston terrorist lurked.“

Safari is the new IE
Nolan Lawson, Read the Tea Leaves
„I think there is a general feeling among web developers that Safari is lagging behind the other browsers. (…) So what can we do, when one of the major browser vendors is stuck in the 2010 model?“

RETRO

Hackers watch „Hackers“ (the movie)
Simon Chetrit, Hopes & Fears
„Hackers was a financial flop, but its hilariously over-the-top early CGI visuals, oddly prescient view on technology, and glam-cyberpunk aesthetic rendered it a cult classic.“

Original Gamer
Carli Velocci, Motherboard
„The Game Boy is an old, slow, clunky, goofy looking piece of hardware that is basically capable of nothing, but thats where its beauty lies.“

The Essential Cyberpunk Reading List
Diana Biller, io9
Sehr gute Übersicht. Aus den Kommentaren: „Actually, I see cyberpunk as the beginning of the end of readable science fiction. The literary quality of the cyberpunk genre is marginal at best, and its pretensions and tropes are quite ugly.“ Naja…

18 Years Later, Why Are People Still Playing Ultima Online?
Jake Tucker, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
„Player created civilisations, unique monsters, and the sheer mystery of the world combine to keep this ancient MMO compelling.“

ETC.

365 Days of Pixel Art
Ben Porter, Medium
„A year ago I started a pixel art club on Twitter called @Pixel_Dailies. Each day we (Dario and I) tweet out a theme and everyone spends a short time making some pixel art.“

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Erschienen am 21.6.2015

NETZWELT

This Is Twitter’s Top Secret Project Lightning
Mat Honan, BuzzFeed News
Twitter will jeden Tag sieben bis zehn News kuratieren. So ein bisschen wie Facebooks Instant Articles, also wahnsinnig schön und sehr mobiltauglich. Die Inhalte kommen von, äh, uns.

To Apple, Love Taylor
Taylor Swift
„I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months.“

Auf Nummer unsicher
Hakan Tanriverdi, Süddeutsche
„Staaten könnten sich, ihre Industrie und ihre Bürger besser beschützen, wenn sie es denn wollten. Sie wollen aber nicht; sie gehen lieber auf Nummer unsicher – weil dies vor allem den Geheimdiensten nutzt.“ (Der Text ist auf drei Seiten verteilt, und wenn man zu weit nach unten scrollt, lädt die Startseite. Super ärgerlich.)

MEDIEN

Can Politico make Brussels sexy?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus. The Guardian
Tara Palmeri ist 27, kommt aus New York und berichtet nun über die Europäische Kommission. “They hired a gutsy girl who worked at Page Six to come through and destroy this town”, sagt sie über sich selbst.

Platform Patched
John Herrman, The Awl
„It made sense at the time because it shared an extraordinarily weird context—particular configuration of the Facebook News feed—with the people reading it.“

Digital news consumers unlikely to pay for content and increasingly block ads
Michael Rosenwald, Columbia Journalism Review
„The takeaway from Reuters’ vast new study of the world’s digital news consumers.“

ETC.

Die lustigsten 10-Sekunden-Videos des Internets
„What’s your favorite video that is 10 seconds or less?, wollte aptninjas wissen und die Reddit-Gemeinde wartete mit geschlagenen 8300 Antworten auf.“

First and Final Frames
Jacob T. Swinney, Vimeo
Tolles Video. (via @k____k____)

mcdonalds.hiphop
„Big-Mac-Attack!“

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