Vladimir Putin
Why do diplomats use this alien WhatsApp emoji for Vladimir Putin? | Technology | The Guardian – its hardly diplomatic to carry on this in this way even if it is referring to Vladimir Putin. Secondly, I am pretty confident that Vladimir Putin and his team have a good insight into it. Finally I’d still want to be using Signal rather than giving Facebook indirect oversight of messaging. Given the ubiquity of WhatsApp, I would have thought that the security services that report into President Vladimir Putin would have found a way to crack WhatsApp
China
How did China’s Xi Jinping secure ‘core’ status in just four years? | South China Morning Post
Culture
This Cheesy, 1980s Promotional Video for a Northern Nightclub is UK Nightlife’s Finest Hour | Thump – OMG
Economics
Is the Gig Economy Cannibalizing or Creating Jobs? Here’s Some Early Evidence. – The Experts – WSJ – that the spreading gig economy (at least in the case of ride-sharing) is, in fact, substituting for some payroll employment, or at least depressing its growth.
Independent work: Choice, necessity, and the gig economy | McKinsey & Company – good read
Finance
The Story of the Self Destruction of Deutsche Bank – SPIEGEL ONLINE – fascinating read
China Prepares To Impose Curbs, “Capital Controls” On Bitcoin – inevitable to control capital outflows. Given China’s market maker status it could also weaponise bitcoin
Gadgets
VCR era ends due to lack of chips – and demand | Electronics EETimes – interesting analysis of the engineering that went into analogue video recorders
Innovation
Tim Cook on Apple’s strategy and Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to be Done” theory – Business Insider – basically do the new products actually have use cases?
Luxury
Why the fashion world won’t let Amazon in
Media
Tokyo Festival: Online Piracy on the Rise in Japan | Variety – problems with assessing traffic on Alexa as a sample. Also piracy has made up for problems getting Japanese content to market and even made markets for them
Microsoft Keeps Dossiers on Journalists and Sent Us One By Accident | Gizmodo – reminds me of the Fred Vogel dossier sent a number of years ago, its not NSA level dirt unfortunately
Online
Google is returning to China? It never really left | Technology | The Guardian – There has been issues accessing dashboards though
Merkel: murky internet giants distort perception of reality – The Local – “the algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like: what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?”
“These algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to to a distortion of our perception, they narrow our breadth of information.”
Security
Troy Hunt: The Red Cross Blood Service: Australia’s largest ever leak of personal data – just wow!
Divorced by Apple in California | josh.com – which nukes Apple’s security measures if true
Software
The Wix Mobile App, a WordPress Joint | Matt Mullenweg – not terribly surprised by this. WordPress represents the old ethos of web 2.0, Wix represents the Uber or Facebook Hotel California mentality
Technology
Microsoft Is Looking Like the New Apple | MIT Technology Review – this isn’t the headline Apple want. Its kind of like the immediate aftermath of Windows 95. I think Apple’s interface design call is right but its marketing, product design and pricing is fucked. If they had put 32GB RAM in the machine, hadn’t upped the pricing and messed with the ports as badly this wouldn’t be a problem. It’s execution which is failing them
Wireless
LG mobile unit records possible worst quarterly loss ever at nearly $400 million – wow this is sad, I felt LG had done a good job with the phone and will discourage design innovation in the future
Xiaomi Mi MIX Is An Edgeless Concept Phone That’s Actually Available For Purchase: Snapdragon 821, 6 GB RAM And More : TECH : Tech Times – big challenge to get back its crown in China from Huawei and Oppo. P9 or this? No contest to be honest with you the MIX wins hands down