Google not only reserves the right to take away or vaporize our data for any reason, but it also reserves the right to discontinue services, the means to access it, whenever it wants. It does this more often than you probably realize and most recently with Google Reader, which disappears on July 1.

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

Some dude thinks web browsers should be more like smartphone apps:

By [...] using custom-configured Web browsers (let's call them DesktopApps), we could address the Internet's inherent security flaws. These DesktopApps could be branded appropriately and designed to launch automatically to Bank of America's or Facebook's Web site, for example, and go no further. Like their mobile application cousins, these DesktopApps would not present an URL bar or anything else making them look like the Web browsers they are on the surface, and of course they would be isolated from one another. Within these DesktopApps, attacks such as XSS, CSRF, and clickjacking would become largely extinct because no cross-domain connections would be allowed—an essential precondition.

A spectacularly dumb idea. The whole point of the web is that we only need a browser to do (almost) anything. This guy would bring back the bad old days of having to install lots of single-purpose client apps on every computer.

The unique IDs that Apple bakes into iOS mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads, have long been the subject of criticism by privacy experts. In contrast to the cookies used to track consumers on the web, which can be deleted (at least by those consumers tech-savvy enough to navigate to obscure browser settings), UDIDs cannot be deleted or removed. As long as the consumer uses a particular iPhone, the UDID will stay the same. Unsurprisingly, advertising companies embraced the UDID as a way to effectively track and target users of mobile Apps.

While today’s Redditors want you to think they’re enlightened savants bringing us the truth against the wishes of an oppressive right-wing government, the truth is that they have declined much like “Anonymous” did at 4chan. They lost their impetus because they became inward looking. On the internet, they’re superstars. In reality they’re boring people with boring jobs, selfish hobbies, inflated self image and an unquenchable anger toward anyone who has more than they do.

I once helped my uncle select a new laser printer for his small business. The printer was a Laserjet 5 made by Hewlett-Packard. That was 15 years ago; the printer still works beautifully. It is made of metal and feels robust. In contrast, current printers, whether from HP or anyone else, feel like plastic junk. Whenever I open a compartment on my current printer, I worry that I will snap off a piece of the case and break it beyond repair.

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

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Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. "You know Roger is crazy," Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. "He really believes that stuff."

This article has an idiotic title and, like so many other reports on Fukushima lately, contains a hefty dose of alarmist bullshit, but it also brings up a very valid issue: that of Tepco trying to escape its responsibility and generally pinch pennies by using subcontractors instead of employees, both in its cleanup efforts and in its daily operations.

Job offers come not from TEPCO but from Mizukami Kogyo, a company whose business is construction and cleaning maintenance. The description indicates only that the work is at a nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture. The job is specified as three hours per day at an hourly wage of 10,000 yen (about US$122). There is no information about danger, only the suggestion to ask the employer for further details on food, lodging, transportation and insurance.

Those who answer these offers may have little awareness of the dangers and they are likely to have few other job opportunities.

Security researchers presenting at the Where 2.0 conference have revealed a hidden, secret iOS file that keeps a record of everywhere you've been. The record is synched to your PC and subsequently resynched to your other mobile devices. The file is not transmitted to Apple, but constitutes a substantial privacy breach if your PC or mobile device are lost or seized. The researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, have released a free/open application called "iPhone Tracker" that allows you to retrieve the location data on your iOS device and examine it. They did not discover a comparable file on Android devices.

Det är förmodligen så man ska se på Spotify; det är ytterligare en livsuppehållande åtgärd för en industri som egentligen borde få somna in för gott. Det kommer heta att det är piratkopierarnas fel, man kommer skylla på ungefär allt som går att skylla på för att försöka skyla de egentliga orsakerna; en trasig och förlegad upphovsrätt och fullständigt föråldrade affärsmodeller inom upphovsrättsindustrin.

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Spotifys affärsmodell är väldigt rätt, en Internetbaserad tjänst som ger dig ett musikbibliotek som är många gånger större än det du själv orkar sortera och indexera på egen hand, men det hjälper inte när de samtidigt tvingas hålla en obsolet och döende dinosaurie vid liv. Utan den dödvikten tror jag att Spotify hade varit markant mer framgångsrik, artisterna hade definitivt fått markant mer betalt och mycket av dagens kritik hade aldrig ens uppstått men med dagens beslut kommer kritikerna knappast bli tystare.