Matt Buchanan
A Scary Google Chart
From Google's transparency report: "Government surveillance is on the rise. As you can see from the graph below, government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world."
Matt Buchanan
Why Social-Media Shaming Is OK
Because saying something horrible on the Internet is no different than saying it in real life.
Matt Buchanan
General Petraeus And Paula Broadwell Used Terrorist Email Tactics To Communicate
They shared a pseudonymous Gmail account and wrote "intimate messages," which they saved in the account's drafts folder, so they could each read the messages without leaving a trail of sent and received email. The Washington Post notes that "the trick has achieved notoriety as a tactic of terrorists who are rightly wary of espionage."
Matt Buchanan
Watch Romney Fade Away In Real Time
Disappearing Romney tracks Mitt Romney's Facebook "like" count in real time. There's something oddly hypnotic about it.
Matt Buchanan
A Life Unraveled
Alex Payne's essay on technology and the unraveling of his life: "Technology is just people, though. People like me. We get it wrong. And even when we get it right, people are people: they ignore the algorithms and recommendation engines and scores and weightings. People do what makes sense to them, then and there."
Matt Buchanan
Why MTV Doesn't Play Music Videos Anymore
"Your generation, not the one before you, not the one after you — your generation — decided to steal music."
Matt Buchanan
Why It's OK These Guys Are Throwing iPads In The Back Of A Wal-Mart
These two guys are supposedly throwing iPads in the back of a Wal-Mart. And you know what? The iPads are fine.
Matt Buchanan
The Problem With Apple Software
Despite the increasingly popular perception, the major problems with Apple software aren't tied to the proliferation of wooden surfaces and dark linen. It's the way it works, as laid out on Counternotions.
Matt Buchanan
How To Remake A Game
This trailer for Karateka, a remake of the 1984 classic by the game's original creator, is a handy guide.
Matt Buchanan
The Best Most Awful Email Address You Can Ever Get
Perhaps the most infamously noxious URL ever — goatse.cx — can now be a part of your e-mail address. As Adrian Chen reports, an Australian IT consultant purchased the domain and is now using it to host Goatse email. Sign up today.
Matt Buchanan
Why AT&T Is Opening Up FaceTime
Formerly restricted to users only with its new Mobile Sharing plans, AT&T is slowly opening access to Apple's FaceTime videochat over the air, starting with anybody that has a tiered LTE data plan. But as The Verge's Chris Ziegler points out, this isn't a move we should be cheering too much, given that it comes in the wake of regulatory pressure. "This is AT&T's world — the FCC is just living in it."
Matt Buchanan
Say Hello To Secret Pinterest
Pinterest is finally letting users create secret boards. And it could be a huge change for the site.
Matt Buchanan
Your Twitter Account Probably Wasn't Hacked
Twitter reset passwords for a bunch of users and sent them an e-mail that their account may have been compromised. Turns out it was an overreaction.
Matt Buchanan
Revenge Of The Native Apps
Tumblr, like Facebook before it, has reverted from being an app that was basically a web page inside of an app body into a full-blown native iOS app with the latest update. The reason? Speed and performance. The dream of "write once, deploy everywhere" is perhaps more blissful than ever with the explosion of mobile platforms, but clearly nothing beats native, yet.
Matt Buchanan
Square Wallet Now Works At Starbucks
It begins. Square's Wallet app — which I think is the best mobile payment solution around, because it's seamless yet requires human interaction — is now accepted at over 7,000 Starbucks locations. It's using a lame QR code deal at Starbucks instead of the full-on magic system, but getting people to link Square to their credit or debit card is half the battle.
Matt Buchanan
What Apple's Spending Says About The Rest Of The Tech Industry
It's perhaps a look at the shape of things to come.
Matt Buchanan
Yep, Google Looks Different Now
The search results page just got a little cleaner.
Matt Buchanan
Inside Obama's Data Machine
One can only imagine how sophisticated the data operations of campaigns are going to be in 2016, given the leaps made in Obama's campaign alone between this election and 2008. That dinner with Sarah Jessica Parker? It's what the data wanted.
Matt Buchanan
An Xbox Tablet Makes A Lot Of Sense But It Also Makes No Sense
The Verge hears that the Xbox Surface, a 7-inch gaming tablet, is currently in serious development at Microsoft. It makes sense because Xbox is Microsoft's strongest brand, it needs a 7-inch tablet and it needs a portable gaming experience. It doesn't make sense because Microsoft should already have a portable gaming experience with Windows Phone, and the whole idea of an Xbox Surface is some messy branding.
Matt Buchanan
Tech Companies Really Want You To Vote
Google, Facebook, and others have all rolled out ambitious campaigns to get their users to vote today.
Matt Buchanan
