Techmeme: Researchers can construct 90% of a user's web activity by monitoring traffic to ad-trackers (Russell Brandom/The Verge)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

April 6, 2014, 12:55 PM

Top News

Sean Hollister / The Verge:

Android TV revealed: Google's simple set-top box interface for movies, shows, apps, and games — Exclusive: this is Android TV — Google's plans for the living room come into focus with a simple TV interface, apps, and games — Every so often, some enterprising computer company will claim they've finally fixed the TV.

Claire Cain Miller / New York Times:

For some, “bro” culture offers one explanation for why there are so few women in tech — Technology's Man Problem — Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged. — She was at a friend's house last Sept. 8, watching the live stream …

Tweets: @coreyhaines, @glennf, @r343l, @athenedonald, @r343l, @ericries, @mims, @ejacqui, @beep and @nrrrdcore

Rohin Dhar / Priceonomics Blog:

How revenues of publicly-traded RetailMeNot, primarily referral fees, depend largely on SEO — The SEO Dominance of RetailMeNot — You're about to buy a delightful pair of pants from your favorite online store when you notice a small box near the checkout button labelled “Promo Code.”

Tweets: @r0h1n and @jason

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Microsoft unveils Windows in the car, battles Apple CarPlay — Microsoft has been powering a lot of different car entertainment systems over the years. Ford, Kia, BMW, Nissan, and Fiat have all used special versions of Windows to create their own interfaces and systems …

More: Gizmodo, WMPoweruser, Digital Trends, iPhone Hacks, Windows Phone Central and AmongTech

Jason Torchinsky / Jalopnik:

Tesla owner scans Model S's internal network through its disguised ethernet port, receives security call from Tesla — The Tesla Model S Is Basically A Good Looking IT Department On Wheels — It's pretty well known that modern cars are full of little computers talking to each other.

More: DragTimes, Tesla Motors Club, SlashGear, Green Car Reports, VentureBeat, Slashdot, atmaspheric and Softpedia News

Tweets: @osma, @1ndus and @fredericjacobs

Robert McMillan / Wired:

NASA to release a searchable database of 1,000+ software projects, make some code open source — Wanna Build a Rocket? NASA's About to Give Away a Mountain of Its Code — Forty years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, NASA open sourced the software code that ran the guidance systems on the lunar module.

More: Gizmodo, Gigaom, Salon and The Connectivist

Brenden Mulligan / Medium:

Apps should wait until the user can be shown the benefits before requesting iOS permissions — The Right Way to Ask Users for iOS Permissions — How Cluster dramatically increased iOS access conversion … Cluster is the first native mobile app I've designed, and the experience has taught …

Tweets: @brezina and @hunterwalk. Thanks:@taylorhughes

Russell Brandom / The Verge:

Researchers can construct 90% of a user's web activity by monitoring traffic to ad-trackers — How advertising cookies let observers follow you across the web — Back in December, documents revealed the NSA had been using Google's ad-tracking cookies to follow browsers across the web …

More: Freedom to Tinker and Schneier on Security

Michael Wolf / Forbes:

Future of wearables in general can't be predicted based on survey about fitness tracker usage — Here's What's Wrong With The Guardian Article On Wearables — This week, The Guardian's Charles Arthur wrote an article suggesting the jury is still out on the wearables category …

Thanks:@nextmarketco

Naval Ravikant / Startup Boy:

Cryptocurrencies are more a protocol for value transfer in networks than a currency for humans — The Fifth Protocol … Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet. — Humans don't *need* math-based cryptocurrencies when dealing with other humans.

Tweets: @andrewchen, @smc90, @mdudas and @rohit_x_

Simon Parkin / New Yorker:

Some indie game developers who suddenly strike it rich are experiencing guilt and depression — The Guilt of the Video-Game Millionaires — One night in March, 2013, Rami Ismail and his business partner Jan Willem released a game for mobile phones called Ridiculous Fishing.

More: The Verge, BGR, Engadget and Polygon

Tweets: @hallstigerts, @helvetica and @helvetica

New York Times:

Meetup, Basecamp, Vimeo, and Bit.ly among startups hit with DDoS attacks after ransom demands — Tech Start-Ups Are Targets of Ransom Cyberattacks — Scott Heiferman and Gary Burns had less than four minutes to decide whether to pay up or go down. — One Thursday morning …

More: TechSpot. Tweets: @heif, @nicoleperlroth, @eastdakota and @kashhill

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:

Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.

Equals:

Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards. Build once, iterate for years.

Zoho:

App Spotlight: Grow Payments for Zoho CRM — App Spotlight brings you hand-picked solutions that enhance your Zoho apps and tools. Visit Zoho Marketplace to explore all of our apps, integrations …

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:

OpenAI Finally Ships Its Superapp, Meta's AI Price War, ChatGPT Cheating At Brown

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

The Upstarts Podcast:

Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The 'Waymo' Lab For New Materials

Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.

Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.

Hard Fork:

Do Social Media Bans Work? + A Conversation About A.I. Consciousness + Tool Time

The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.

Subscribe to Hard Fork.

Access:

The AI writing app fighting AI slop

A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.

Subscribe to Access.

Lenny's Podcast:

Adam Mosseri: AI is a tailwind for authenticity

Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.

Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.

Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:

Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:55 PM ET, April 6, 2014.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.