How I Made It to Opening Night Without Getting Spoiled
A rundown of how I avoided Infinity War spoilers this week using Twitter's mute-keywords feature, plus some stray thoughts on Facebook and Twitter earnings and the early GDPR email flood.
Turns Out My Data Got Scraped Too
Facebook started showing everyone a notice this week about whether Cambridge Analytica got their data. Mine did. Here's what that actually looked like on my own account.
Spotify Skipped the Ceremony
Spotify skipped the usual IPO circus and just started trading on the NYSE yesterday. Some thoughts on the direct listing structure, and a separate complaint about Discover Weekly going stale.
Panera Bread Sat on a Data Leak for Eight Months
Panera Bread sat on a data leak for eight months after a researcher warned them, and their own damage estimate doesn't match what independent researchers found.
So MyFitnessPal Got Popped Too
MyFitnessPal (owned by Under Armour) disclosed a breach affecting about 150 million accounts. A personal rundown of getting the email, the bcrypt vs SHA-1 detail, and yet another round of password cleanup.
Elon Deleted Two Facebook Pages Last Night
Elon Musk deleted the Facebook pages for both Tesla and SpaceX overnight after a Twitter dare, and the offhand way it happened says more than another Cambridge Analytica recap would.
A Ten-Minute Facebook Privacy Cleanup That Actually Does Something
A practical walkthrough of the Facebook settings actually worth changing this week — Apps and Websites, the data download, and ad preferences — not another Cambridge Analytica recap.
29 Candles for the Web, and the Guy Who Built It Sounds Worried
The web quietly turned 29 this week, and Tim Berners-Lee marked it with an open letter that reads less like a birthday card and more like a warning.
The Machine That Did the Talking
Stephen Hawking died today, and while everyone else is talking black holes, I want to talk about the open-source software and cheek-twitch sensor that actually gave him his voice.
The Banana Phone Is Back and I'm Weirdly Into It
HMD Global brought back the yellow Matrix-famous Nokia 8110 slider at Mobile World Congress last week, and it's got me thinking modern phones lost all their personality.
1.35 Terabits and a Very Dumb Reason It Worked
GitHub just survived the biggest DDoS ever recorded, and the mechanism behind it (misconfigured memcached servers) turned out to be way dumber, and way more relevant to small server owners, than you'd expect.
My Whole Building Goes Quiet at 9 PM Now
My whole building has started going quiet at 9pm sharp because everyone's playing HQ Trivia. A rundown of the nightly ritual, the flag question that got me, and why the app keeps crashing.