We’re a little more than halfway through our series on gadgets that break things — covering goodies like the network-sniffing WiFi Coconut and the poison USB stick known as the Rubber Ducky.
Stay tuned for four more entries coming over the next two weeks.
A very good line from Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter today, explaining Twitter’s drop in users and YouTube’s shrinking revenue.
[www.garbageday.email]
The Senate still hasn’t taken a floor vote, and America’s central telecom regulator has been deadlocked at 2-2 for Biden’s entire presidency. This piece from November 2021 (!) is still a pretty good summary of the state of play.
It’s a bad situation for net neutrality advocates, and if Republicans take back the Senate in two weeks, it will only get worse.
None of this would be necessary if they’d published it to a tokenized blockchain.
The universally beloved Matt Levine just published a massive feature on cryptocurrency. It takes up whole issue of Businessweek and runs over 44,000 words, making it just a few pages shorter than Great Gatsby.
I haven’t read it yet (I’ll get to it, I swear), but if the first few pages are any indication, it’s really good.
[Bloomberg.com]
A great business profile of the instant-delivery service GoPuff, the best of a crop of startups that may still never be able to make a profit.
[Bloomberg.com]
The New York Times takes a look at the world of subscription newsletters and concludes the party may be coming to a close. It’s more a media story than a tech story, but if you wondered why Substack HQ seems a little quieter lately, this is basically why.
[The New York Times]
Remember when Google had to pay a couple hundred bucks to all the Photos users in Illinois because it didn’t get their consent to build facial recognition into the service?
Well, now the same lawsuit is getting filed in Texas, so you can get ready for that. Some day we’ll have a federal privacy law and won’t have to do these things state-by-state, but until then, Google is paying for a lot of lawyers’ summer homes.
As Makena Kelly reported last week, the RNC has opted out of Google’s political spam pilot, even while they complain that those spam filters are biased against them.
But there’s a flip side to that coin: Democrats did sign up for the pilot program, and as a result, a lot of Dem fundraising emails that used to be labeled as spam are now sailing through to your inbox.