Nothing to hide
Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance | Wired.com – both Wired and danah boyd have done great articles about the nothing to hide argument against privacy. The problem with nothing to hide as a framework flips the relationship between governments and their people. People become servants of the government, rather than the government serving the people.
danah boyd | apophenia » where “nothing to hide” fails as logic – danah compares nothing to hide with the stress and hassle of being audited by the tax authorities constantly being held over citizens. Nothing to hide would be corrosive in nature to societies
Business
India’s largest pharmacy group halts sales of Ranbaxy drugs – FiercePharma – surprised that this hasn’t hammered generic drugs companies harder
Consumer behaviour
Mapping China’s middle class | McKinsey & Company – (reg wall)
Millennials become the ‘smartphone generation’|chinadaily.com.cn
Has China exaggerated the “Leftover Women” problem? | ChinaHush – impact of traditional values versus modern roles for women places unrealistic expectations on them
Why young adults are more connected than ever before | FreshNetworks London
Culture
Fuck the Forest Documentary Sees Failure in Carnal Idealism – SPIEGEL ONLINE – it’s like a social enterprise meets Nathan Barley. I really don’t know what to say
A Big Night Out in… Magaluf! | VICE United Kingdom – It’s Blake’s “Jerusalem” remixed by Avicii.
A heads up for the June 2013 OED release | Oxford English Dictionary – tweet as in a micro blog post got in despite not having been a term used for 10 years
Economics
China Debt Sale Fails for First Time in 23 Months on Cash Crunch – Bloomberg
China’s Great Uprooting – Moving 250 Million Into Cities – NYTimes.com – huge upheaval
China Lending Data May Be Overstated, Credit Suisse Says – Bloomberg
A Strong Yuan Hurts China in More Ways Than One – Bloomberg
UK Energy Crunch Looms Larger – Euromonitor International
Is China Facing A Minsky Moment – Business Insider
How economic change alters nature of work in UK over 170 years – FT.com – four out of five people now work in the services sector
Finance
Derivatives: Innovation In The Era of Financial Regulation | Demos – or just read Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
FMCG
Canadian watchdog files criminal charges against Nestlé, Mars
Coca-Cola Opens Bottling Plant in Myanmar – Euromonitor International
‘Badger-friendly’ milk to be sold in just three UK supermarkets | guardian.co.uk
Finance
Fueled by cheap credit, two Thai tycoons spend $27 billion on acquisitions – Quartz – Iceland with sweet chilli sauce?
Innovation
Slideshow: Inside IBM’s superconductor lab
Exclusive: Hewlett-Packard has slashed R&D spending to fraction of valley norms – SiliconValley.com – surprised how much Yahoo! spends on R&D
Luxury
Luxury goods in China: Beyond bling | The Economist – China remains the biggest prize in the luxury industry, but the low-hanging fruit is gone. Luxury firms must now venture beyond the coastal cities where they have made easy fortunes, cultivate new types of customers and market niches, and experiment with new business models
Media
France won’t support EU-US free-trade talks if film, TV industry are affected – The Washington Post
The Washington Post Launches “Sponsored Views” – The Washington Post – sells op-ed spots as advertising
BMI sues Pandora, calling radio station purchase a ‘stunt’ | The Verge
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predict ‘massive implosion’ in film industry | The Verge – “You’re at the point right now where a studio would rather invest $250 million in one film for a real shot at the brass ring,” he said, “than make a whole bunch of really interesting, deeply personal — and even maybe historical — projects that may get lost in the shuffle because there’s only 24 hours.”
“The Purge”: A Horror Flick About…Income Inequality?! | Mother Jones – science fiction and horror have always been ways that culture dealt wtih societal issues
For New Business Development, Agencies See Facebook As Overrated – err yes, which is one reason why the numbers don’t stack up on Facebook and TBG Digital were so controversial
Paramount Accuses JPMorgan Chase, Content Partners of Conspiracy | The Wrap Movies – now go and read this piece about Hollywood business practices by Bob Cringely and then come back and revisit this article again
Why Reach Is The Best Facebook Metric To Focus On – AllFacebook
Online
Why Google Reader Really Got the Axe | Wired.com – not all audiences are created equal
Yahoo to broadcast Sky News morning show across website network | guardian.co.uk – reinforces stereotypes about the kind of audience Yahoo! has
ISPs to include porn filters as standard in UK by 2014 (Wired UK) – Perry said parents were “complacent” about the risks of online pornography, pointing out that only four in ten parents use some kind of internet filtering at home.
CERN | Restoring the first website – gives you an idea of how transient digital history is, even with open standards rather than proprietary document standards
Yahoo invites people to get a new ID | CNET News – interesting move, one of the things that AOL had problems with was running out of meaningful IDs. Also says a lot about how much Yahoo! IDs are dormant
Facebook to introduce clickable hashtags | guardian.co.uk – acknowledgement that a lot of content on Facebook is syndicated from Twitter?
Security
Whistleblower welcome in China – Xinhua – interesting op-ed, but not state-sanctioned offer
Diane Abbott warns of ‘forces’ against ‘effective protection of children online’ (Wired UK) – difficult ethical call but Digital Britain under threat by people trying to do the right thing as they see it
NSA revelations damaging for American tech companies … especially in China – GeekWire – interesting perspective on how the ‘trojan horse’ status of US tech companies may affect their brands abroad
The Changing and Terrifying Nature of the New Cyber-Warfare | Vanity Fair – goes all Daily Mail with its headline copy
Cassidy: NSA Prism surveillance program sullies digital relationships – SiliconValley.com
Hiding Data with Temporal Cloaking Might Thwart Surveillance | Motherboard
Software
Finnish carrier DNA confirms it will be the first to launch Jolla phones running Sailfish
TelecomTV | News | Google in the dock as EC investigates Android the Trojan Horse – “IBM rose and fell across about 40 years, Microsoft arguably across 30. It looks like Google might complete the cycle well inside 20.”
Windows NT grandaddy OpenVMS taken out back, single gunshot heard • The Register – and you think that ‘data center’ technology is innovative, in reality it hasn’t changed in 30 years
Technology
CIA spooks picked Amazon’s ‘superior’ cloud over IBM • The Register – IBM years behind
Telecoms
At the Cable Show, an industry fights cord-cutting with technology | The Verge
Web of no web
Google Glass Teardown – It is currently available in limited beta to eminent members of the tech community and to a selection of “Glass Explorers”. As members of the latter program, we are delighted to be able to explore Glass.
Growing up on a rich diet of dystopian tech fiction, we were filled with both intrigue and concern about Glass and decided to take our model apart to bring you a detailed view into the electronics guts of the device.
Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society.— Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Wireless
Apple import ban stokes smartphone patent war with Samsung – DailyHerald.com – no going back from this fight
ITC recommends import ban against Android-based Samsung devices | MacNews
Downbeat Galaxy S4 View Hits Samsung Shares – Korea Real Time – WSJ
Apple Said to Start IPhone Trade-In Program in Stores – Bloomberg – like the saying goes: the entry level Porsche is a secondhand Porsche