It’d Be Crazy Easy for Brazil to Block the Web Right Now April Glaser, Wired The world is watching Brazil right now due to the whirlwind of (partly literal) garbage surrounding the Olympics. That might be enough to deter them from shutting down the internet in the country (and the impeachment proceedings of their president…

Pokémon Go. Or Don’t. I uninstalled Pokémon Go this week. I share the opinion of Eevee himself that the game is inherently broken. Don’t get me wrong. The game works at what it does really, really well. It’s a testament to the power of the franchise and the gamification system that even without servers always…

Yahoo Down. Long Live Yahoo? Yahoo is a bellwether of the internet, having existed nearly as long as the world wide web, and serving as the portal along with AOL for most early users of the web. Like AOL, Yahoo is one of the largest sources of news and content on the web, yet it…

I’m still recovering from a few weeks away from the internets. Somehow I got more time to read new articles last week than this one, so apologies for the brevity this week. Thank you to Lisa for taking over for the last few weeks and adding a new voice to the newsletter! No More Twitter…

Sixty Years of AI It was the summer of 1956 when a team of computer scientists convened at Dartmouth college for the first summit on artificial intelligence. Since then the predictions made at the conference (which was based on the assumption that a handful of researchers could crack the problem with a few years of…

Mark Zuckerberg Is Right to Tape His Webcam. But He Shouldn’t Have To. Will Oremus, Slate It’s not that weird that someone as high profile as Mark Zuckerberg considers basic cyber security. After all, as we mentioned a few weeks ago, even the CEO of Facebook is not immune to hacking. A good point is…

Orlando, the City Beautiful and Strong I am gay, half-Latin, and I live in Orlando, Florida. I have never been involved with any violent crimes and was thankfully not involved with the horrific murders that took place in my city on Sunday morning, but this is the closest anything that notorious has occurred to me.…

The rise and fall of Urlesque, the site that wanted to take memes mainstream Rae Votta, Daily Dot I admit, I was never even aware of the existence of Urlesque (which is no longer active but with remnants existing in HuffPost Comedy), but hearing this retelling of the site’s short existence at AOL by one…

Hacks, Hacks, Hacks The increase in data breaches begets data breaches There are always hacks coming along, but it seems that popular social networks have been getting a lot of it lately. LinkedIn, Tumblr, and even the “Do I still have a site here?” Myspace have had security breaches that are just coming to light.…

I’m at php[tek] this week, and while I’ve been busy with talks, games, and community nights, there’s so much news to cover. I’m pumped on PHP and on the future of the internet! We Love Peter Thiel! (ed. note: can we make this read less lawsuity?) A few months ago I wrote about the outcome…