Some months ago, the Washington Post waded into the debate about the NSA, pervasive surveillance, and end-to-end encryption with a call for Apple and Google to magically “invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant.” This was met with a chorus of contempt and opprobrium. Read More

 The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked; needed to take them apart, make them better, and put them back together again. People who existed a little apart from society’s established hierarchy … and often saw that hierarchy as another machine to be deconstructed and improved. Read More

 DIGITAL CURRENCIES ACCEPTED HERE proclaims the plaque at my local froyo place, emblazoned with the Bitcoin logo: but when I ask how I would pay with Bitcoin, the Australian woman behind the counter shrugs and says, “I think we have a tablet somewhere with instructions on the back? …Nobody’s ever tried to pay me with it.” Read More

 This year, my New Year’s Resolution was to finally cut the cord. The timing is right, and the content selection available today on streaming services make the process much less painful than it was in years past. There’s plenty to watch – a glut of quality shows to keep me entertained for years, in fact. Meanwhile, my vastly reduced Verizon bill is the biggest payoff to… Read More

 Dear Google: what happened? Android sales are falling. Chrome has become a bloated hog. Analysts are calling you “the new Microsoft,” or worse, “the new Yahoo!” And worst, most damning of all: you have squandered our trust. You used to be special, Google. Or at least we used to believe you were special. But you seem more and more like just another megacorporation. Read More

 It seems clear that Apple wants to get into music streaming in a big way, and as Josh Constine reported yesterday, Apple could even be looking at buying Taylor Swift’s record label. With Dr. Dre and Beats in the fold, Apple looks to be setting itself up for a monster launch, one that could sweep existing players like Spotify by the wayside. There is a widely held belief that when… Read More

 Anonymity? Privacy? How quaint. We live in a world bedecked with ever more cameras, ever more sensors, ever more drones, ever more data, ever fewer things that can be hidden. TLS and Tor can hide your activities online, true — but, realistically, everything important you do, online or off, can easily be audited and tracked by governments and/or corporations. Read More

 2015 is the year I finally cut the cord with cable TV. No more flipping through programs mindlessly, no more massive lineup of channels I never watch, no more DVR’ing. In doing so, I’ve been determined to rely on streaming-only services for access to TV and movies, and my current lineup today includes Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video, and Hulu, with the occasional movie rental… Read More

 I know I’m late to the party by some accounts. Early adopters cut the cord years ago and haven’t looked back. For me, turning off cable TV was an idea I flirted with, yet I just kept renewing my package deal for some reason. But there has been no better time to finally severe ties with big cable, and their pricey television packages that have you paying for hundreds of channels… Read More

 When not opining here on TechCrunch I’m a software engineer for the fine folks at HappyFunCorp (1) and I’m occasionally called on to diagnose and fix projects that have gone horribly wrong (2). The more I do this, the more I notice commonalities among problem projects–“antipatterns,” if you will. Here I give you three more of my ongoing list of such. Names have… Read More

 Things are getting pretty strange out there. Roughly a year ago I wrote a post entitled “This Industry Is Completely Ridiculous.” Since then, as you probably already know, our world has gotten even more surreal. If anything the ridiculousness is accelerating. It’s like the tech industry is subject to a Moore’s Law of weird. Read More

 One of President Obama’s guests at this year’s State of the Union address was Kathy Pham, a health IT expert formerly of Google and IBM. Pham recently joined the federal government to make it easier for veterans to access the benefits they have earned – like her brother, who earned a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan. Kathy is exactly what this country needs. Uncle… Read More