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Here are some of the more interesting items that the tech reporters and editors of The New York Times found on the Web recently. More Scuttlebot can be found here.
Recapping Snowden’s Revelations
Forbes.com Technology | A nice, quick rundown of what Snowden has revealed so far. â€" Nicole Perlroth
Instagram’s Video Will Make You Feel Like Scorsese
Fastcodesign.com | Instagram’s new video feature is perfect for preserving the fantasy of the application, argues one tech writer.  â€" Jenna Wortham
Why Facebook and AOL Think You Need a News Reader
Minyanville.com | When the end of Google Reader was announced, millions were upset, but a billion said, in effect, “Huh? What’s a news reader?†â€" Howell Murray
Why Everyone but Google Wants to Build a Reader
GigaOm | Everyone else is building RSS readers to replace the GoogleReader. Did Google miss the concept of engagement?  â€" Damon Darlin
U.S. Surveillance Is Not Aimed at Terrorists
Bloomberg | Prism “may only be good for g! athering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists.â€Â  â€" Nicole Perlroth
High School Students May Help Build the Next Snapchat
Theverge.com | A new service called Squawk Messenger takes ephemeral to the next level.  â€" Jenna Wortham
Sony Announces New ‘Smart’ Watch
Digital Daily | Sony is taking a stab at building the next generation of “smart†watch, this time with near-field communications.  â€" Ashwin Seshagiri
Pandora’s Internet Radio Royalty Ripoffbr/>USA Today | Pink Floyd takes on Pandora in the fight over Internet radio royalties.  â€" Claire Cain Miller
Hands-On Video: Apple’s iOS 7 for iPad
9to5mac.com | An early look at Apple’s revamped mobile operating system, iOS 7, running on an iPad. â€" Brian X. Chen
Google Ventures is 10 miles and a world away from Sand Hill Road, the home of start-up investing.
As I wrote in an article published Monday, Google relies on cold hard data in a field dominated by intuition and connections. And all of its money comes from Google instead of outside investors, though many other companies also have venture arms, including Microsoft, which on Tuesday announced the formation of Microsoft Ventures.
But the differences at Google Ventures run deeper than that.
To start, there is the way it divides carried interest, the profits from successful investments. Known as carry, it is how venture capitalists get super rich. And at the vast majority of firms, it is only available to partners.
p>At Google Ventures, all 60 employees, from partners to assistants, get a share of the carry.Bill Maris, Google Ventures’s managing partner, said other venture capitalists hoard carry because they were greedy.
“But I’m greedy, too,†Mr. Maris said. “The only way to be successful is to give everyone a stake, so if you work at Google Ventures, you have some financial interest.â€
Then, there are the weekly meetings. At almost all firms, these happen on Monday mornings and include only partners. At Google, they are on Tuesdays and anyone, not just partners, is invited.
The Tuesday timing is to account for long weekends and to be available to entrepreneurs for pitch meetings when other venture capitalists are busy, Mr. Maris said, and because no one likes to have a meeting first thing Monday morning.
Inviting all staff members is part strategy, part culture, he said. Strategically, it helps to get more perspective on a potential deal. A researcher may have gone ! to school with an entrepreneur, or an assistant may have used a start-up’s app, for instance. The investors also want to know if the design team wants to work with a certain rock star designer, or if the marketing team has enough time or interest to help a start-up in dire need of marketing advice.
Culturally, Mr. Maris said that Google valued openness over hierarchy in general, and that he believed people were more likely to do a good job at work if they had a say in what they do.
“What makes people happy at work is to get paid enough that you don’t feel exploited and to pick what you work on,†Mr. Maris said. “No one wants to be told, ‘We decided to do this, now go do it.’ â€
And when investing partners propose new start-ups to finance, only Mr. Maris has veto power. So far, he has never used it.
Last summer, Betaworks, a technology incubator in New York, raised eyebrows when it announced it had bought the remains of the once-hot social news site Digg for half a million dollars.
Fast forward to nearly a year later: Betaworks is rolling out Digg Reader, a free RSS reader, to the public, on Tuesday.
The timing could not be better. Google is planning to close Google Reader, one of the more ubiquitous RSS readers, on July 1. Betaworks is determined to not only restore some of Digg’s former glory and reputation, but also offer an alternative and replacement for Google Reader.
Jake Levine, the general manager for Digg, said the company’s first priority was to “rebuild the product that people are so sad to be losing.â€
He said the first iteration of the Digg Reader, which would be available on the Web and for the iPhone and iPad, wold be simple and efficient.
“Digg.com is a casual tool, you don’t get a personalized experience,†said Mr. Levin. “This is the other end of the spectrum, for the power user, the hyper news consumer.â€
Mr. Levine said Betaworks planned to continue to introduce new features to the Digg Reader, including social-sharing features and integration with other popular Web services like Evernote and If This Then That. He also said the mobile versions of the products would have more experimental features than the Web version to start.
Although Betaworks’ timing is precipitous, the company faces steep competition from companies like Twitter, Flipboard and other readers like Feedly, which have been gaining an audience, as well as Facebook, which is said to be working on a mobile news reading product of its own. But Betaworks has proved itself to be a factory for creative new services! . The company already rolled out a revamped homepage for Digg.com, which aggregates news from around the Web and attracted millions of fans for Dots, its minimalistic mobile app game, as well as introduced a search engine for GIFs called Giphy.
Betaworks executives also have a few cards up their sleeves, including advice and pointers from the original members of Digg, including Kevin Rose, its founder, and Daniel Burka, the creator director at the original site.
Mr. Levine said the company’s ultimate goal was to solve an pain point for the Internet.
“Anyone that uses the Internet knows there’s too many good things to read and not enough time to read them,†he said. The Digg Reader is “a hint of our interest and vision for†a solution to that.
In an effort to draw awareness to just how unsafe the Internet has become, Google will be adding statistics about malware to its transparency report.
Google’s transparency report currently documents criminal requests and national security requests from government’s worldwide, though it does not include requests from the federal government’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court regarding Google’s foreign users.
Since that court made headlines this month, Google and other tech companies have been trying to contain the public relations crisis that has resulted from revelations that they have been aiding government surveillance efforts when ordered to by the court. Google has since filed a legal motion asking the government to relax its gag order and allow the company to disclose the number of FISA requests it receives.
At he same time, Google said on Monday it would also be expanding its transparency report to include new numbers around malware and phishing attacks on the Internet. In 2006, Google started searching for, and flagging, suspect Web sites for its users. It is now flagging some 10,000 sites a day.
The company said its transparency report would now document how many people see its security warnings each week, where malicious sites were hosted around the world (and by which Internet Service Providers), how long it took for Web masters to clean up their sites, and- somewhat depressingly- how quickly Web sites got reinfected after they were scrubbed of malware.
“We want to make as much information available about the state of the Web as we see it, so everyone else cares about this problem,†Niels Provos, a principal engineer at Google, said in an interview Monday. “It’s a prevalent problem. It’s not rare.â€
Mr. Provos said his team had been working on gathering relevant statistics ! for the last six months and that Google would begin updating its transparency report weekly.
“By putting this out there, we want to educate Web masters that this is very real, that the danger of you getting infected is very large,†Mr. Provos said.
In an effort to draw awareness to just how unsafe the Internet has become, Google will be adding statistics about malware to its transparency report.
Google’s transparency report currently documents criminal requests and national security requests from government’s worldwide, though it does not include requests from the federal government’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court regarding Google’s foreign users.
Since that court made headlines this month, Google and other tech companies have been trying to contain the public relations crisis that has resulted from revelations that they have been aiding government surveillance efforts when ordered to by the court. Google has since filed a legal motion asking the government to relax its gag order and allow the company to disclose the number of FISA requests it receives.
At he same time, Google said on Monday it would also be expanding its transparency report to include new numbers around malware and phishing attacks on the Internet. In 2006, Google started searching for, and flagging, suspect Web sites for its users. It is now flagging some 10,000 sites a day.
The company said its transparency report would now document how many people see its security warnings each week, where malicious sites were hosted around the world (and by which Internet Service Providers), how long it took for Web masters to clean up their sites, and- somewhat depressingly- how quickly Web sites got reinfected after they were scrubbed of malware.
“We want to make as much information available about the state of the Web as we see it, so everyone else cares about this problem,†Niels Provos, a principal engineer at Google, said in an interview Monday. “It’s a prevalent problem. It’s not rare.â€
Mr. Provos said his team had been working on gathering relevant statistics ! for the last six months and that Google would begin updating its transparency report weekly.
“By putting this out there, we want to educate Web masters that this is very real, that the danger of you getting infected is very large,†Mr. Provos said.
Wang Xiaobo/EPA When it comes to surveillance blocking, all refrigerators are not equal.Before a dinner of pizza and fried chicken late Sunday, Edward J. Snowden insisted that everyone put his cellphone in the refrigerator, my colleague Keith Bradsher reported.
Why a refrigerator? The answer does not, as some might assume, have anything to do with temperature. In fact, it does not matter particularly if the refrigerator was plugged in. It is the materials that make up refrigerator walls that could potentially turn them into anti-eavesdropping devices.
“What you want to do is block the rado signals which could be used to transmit voice data, and block the audio altogether,†Adam Harvey, a designer specializing in countersurveillance products explained. Refrigerators made from metal with thick insulation could potentially do both, he says, regardless of whether it is mild or icy within.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times A Faraday cage is a metal shield that protects anything inside from electrical charges. This means a person wearing a Faraday suit, as pictu! red here, is protected from the high-voltage arcs of a Tesla coil.On the data-transmission front, thick metal walls can create a sort of electromagnetic barrier, which enables the device to function as something known as a Faraday cage. A true Faraday cage is a space where radio waves cannot pass and therefore data cannot be transmitted. Although all fridges don’t function this way, those constructed with more metal have the potential to serve this purpose.
Another household object that functions similarly, Mr. Harvey has learned through his research into cellphone data transmission, is a stainless steel martini shaker.
“It’s a perfect Faraday cage - it will block all radio signals unless you decide you need to pour yourself a martini,†he said. Although this sounds like a plot point in a James Bond movie, Mr. Harvey has actually done extensive tests on the shaker in the process of developing a surveillance-blockng cellphone case called the OFF Pocket.
Blocking data transmission, of course, is a different issue from muffling audio. Although a thick refrigerator door is good at masking sound (as anyone who has lost a cat inside one knows), soundproofing is not necessarily integral to its design. An ideal refrigerator for a person on the run would be one that functioned as an acoustic anechoic chamber â€" a sort of Faraday cage for sound â€" meaning that not one hint of a syllable could make it from the Pepsi-laden kitchen table to the phone in the veggie crisper. Given that refrigerators’ insulation levels vary, however, from an audio perspective, burying the phone in a pile of clothes one room over, Mr. Harvey suggested, might be a more reliable solution for someone seeking to subvert prying ears.
Those new to these issues are most likely asking the question - why not just ask everyone to turn off his phone and remove the batteries? Beyon! d the fac! t that many phones these days do not easily enable battery removal, identifying a pure off is complicated.
“A lot of modern devices (not just phones) do have states that are somewhere in between fully on and fully off, where some circuits
are powered up and others are powered down,†Seth Schoen, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that focuses on rights in the online world, explained by e-mail. (Snowden appears to be a supporter of the organization, as he was photographed with an E.F.F. sticker on his laptop.) “These modes often allow the device to wake up autonomously if certain conditions are met, such as pressing a certain key or even receiving certain data over the Internet on a wired Ethernet connection (known as ‘wake-on-LAN’).â€
Battery removal can be equally deceptive. Even once one figures out how to extract the primary bttery, there may be additional power sources within the apparatus.
“Some phones use an additional battery for memory management; it’s unclear whether this battery could be used by logging and/or tracking systems such as Carrier IQ,†Mr. Harvey explained, referring to software that monitors mobile phone users.
After many years of halting starts and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, in-flight Wi-Fi is coming into its own, with 8,700 domestic flights, 38 percent of the total, offering Internet connectivity, according to a report by Routehappy.com, which ranks tens of thousands of daily flights by quality of comfort and amenities, Joe Sharkey reports in The New York Times.
It remains to be seen, however, how viable in-flight Wi-Fi will be as a business â€" though Gogo, which leads the field with systems on more than 80 percent of all Wi-Fi-enabled flights in North America, had an initial public offering of stock on Friday. Gogo, which has its air-to-ground-based system in more than 1,900 airplanes flying domestically, plans to use proceeds of the stock offering partly to finance a planned international rollout using Ku-band satellite technology, which allows the service to work over ocens. That will enable the company to sell its services on overseas flights.
With competitors like Panasonic Avionics, Row 44, ViaSat and OnAir active in the field, market share will be fiercely contested. And the Gogo offering went off against the sobering reality that, so far, only a small number of passengers have been choosing to pay for Wi-Fi, which can cost $12 or more a session. Gogo, for example, said that in the first quarter of this year, 6.2 percent of passengers on planes with its Wi-Fi systems opted for its service, a slight improvement from the 5.6 percent who took it in the 2012 first quarter.
Still, not all supporters measure the fledgling in-flight Wi-Fi business by an admittedly sluggish current rate of use. With a rapidly growing number of passengers carrying Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones and tablets, and with signals coming from the Federal Aviation Administration that restrictions may be eased on the use of such devices during taxiing, takeoff and landing, airlines that fai! l to offer in-flight connectivity are likely to be at a competitive disadvantage, said Mary Kirby, the editor in chief of Airline Passenger Experience, a magazine and Web site.