Google’s Iron Grip on Android (Ars Technica) — While Google will never go the entire way and completely close Android, the company seems to be doing everything it can to give itself leverage over the existing open source project. And the company’s main method here is to bring more and more apps under the closed source “Google” umbrella.
How to Live Without Being Tracked (Fast Company) — this seems appropriate: she assumes that every phone call she makes and every email she sends will be searchable by the general public at some point in the future. Full of surprises, like To identify tires, which can come in handy if they’re recalled, tire manufacturers insert an RFID tag with a unique code that can be read from about 20 feet away by an RFID reader..
method.ac — Complete 50 challenges. Each challenge is a small, design related task. They cover theory and practice of one specific design subject. Challenges are progressively more difficult, and completing them gives you access to more intricate challenges.
IBM Watson’s Cancer Moonshot (Venture Beat) — IBM is ready to make a big a bet on Watson, as it did in the 1970s when it invested in the emergence of the mainframe. Watson heralds the emergence of “thinking machines,” which learn by doing and already trump today’s knowledge retrieval machines. I for one welcome the opportunity to be a false negative.
