. Wired:

One year after the first revelations of Edward Snowden, cryptography has shifted from an obscure branch of computer science to an almost mainstream notion: It’s possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.

But it’s also possible to go a step closer toward true privacy online. Mere encryption hides the content of messages, but not who’s communicating. Use cryptographic anonymity tools to hide your identity, on the other hand, and network eavesdroppers may not even know where to find your communications, let alone snoop on them. “Hide in the network,” security guru Bruce Schneier made his first tip for evading the NSA. “The less obvious you are, the safer you are.”

I’m not nearly paranoid or worried enough to go through a lot of this effort but it’s still an interesting idea – what if you needed to be completely anonymous?

.

The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Starbucks is teaming up with Arizona State University on an exclusive program that could send thousands of its baristas, store managers, and other employees to ASU Online for their undergraduate degrees, with the coffee company picking up about three-quarters of the tuition tab.

The unusual program, the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, will be available to more than 100,000 of its employees. The partnership, which could cost Starbucks hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is likely to add luster to the company’s reputation for corporate social responsibility.

While it’s not the “Starbucks pays for college!” story some media outlets portray it to be, it’s still a great perk of working for the company and a way for employees to get or complete a degree.

ScreenCrush: In 1984, music videos were still a fairly new phenomena and on the day of the soundstage shoot all the pieces were in place. The song was finished. Actress Cindy Harrell would play the female lead opposite Parker. But, … Continued

.

Computerworld:

Samsung has now announced 11 different Android tablets since the start of 2014. Here’s the thing: Choice is beneficial only when it means something. Flooding consumers with a billion overlapping variations of the same basic concept does little more than cause confusion and dilute your brand.

Put another way, when faced with that menagerie of confusingly named and difficult to distinguish options, what’s a typical consumer going to do? You guessed it: Buy an iPad.

Amazing – and not in a good way.

.

Chicago Tribune:

A motorcyclist who shot video of himself speeding away from police was sentenced to four years in prison Friday.

The charges stem from an October, 2012, incident in which Hamza Ali Ben Ali tried to goad a Westmont police officer into a high-speed chase after the officer tried to stop him along Cass Avenue. A seven-minute video shot from a camera affixed to Ali’s Honda CBR 1000 shows a police car with flashing lights following the motorcycle into a gas station before the motorcycle zooms away.

Two weeks later, footage of the pursuit was uploaded to YouTube.

This guy can only be described as the stupidest person in the world right now.

.

Daring Fireball:

“Only Apple” has been Tim Cook’s closing mantra for the last few Apple keynotes.

Is this true, though? Is Apple the only company that can do this? I think it’s inarguable that they’re the only company that is doing it, but Cook is saying they’re they only company that can.

I’ve been thinking about this for two weeks.

I spoke at a MUG group this evening and made a similar point and there’s no doubt this is Tim Cook’s Apple.

.

TechCrunch:

App developers know that having good ratings and reviews means more users will be wiling to download their app. And thanks to ratings’ influence on Apple’s ranking algorithms, it will help their app be better discovered via the App Store’s Top Charts as well. Because of this, some — okay, many — developers manipulate their apps’ positions by posting fake ratings and reviews. It’s sort of common knowledge these days, in fact. Any brief, glowing, five-star review is immediately suspect.

As it turns out, it’s suspect to Apple, too. And now the company is doing something about it.

This is one of the reasons why I never pay any attention to ratings on the App Store. The only ratings I care about are from friends or trusted sources.

. Politico:

Sports are a reflection of national character and aspirations, and it is no coincidence, I think, that soccer has had a hard time catching on in the United States. Simply put, soccer—call it “football” if you must—is a tragic game, and thus it cuts deeply against the grain of the American ethos.

Americans are an optimistic people. We like scoring too much to enjoy a game that is more about preventing success than achieving it.

We go through this conversation every four years.

.

MoMA:

Biophilia is a software app and music album with interactive graphics, animations, and musical scoring that reflects Björk’s interest in a collaborative process. It’s also the first downloadable app in MoMA’s collection.

This app looks fascinating and weird, just like Björk.

.

The Guardian:

One holiday snap has been manipulated thousands of times on thousands of computers. Here’s how a woman on a beach in Bora Bora taught the whole world to tinker with pictures.

If there’s a “Photography App Hall of Fame”, Photoshop would be the first inductee.

I live here. It’s really a spectacularly beautiful part of the world.

I still remember being absolutely blown away by the movie and its special effects and wanting to turn right back around and watch it again.

. NPR:

Jack White celebrated the release of his latest solo album, Lazaretto, with this live concert at the historic Fonda Theater in Hollywood, Calif.

I’ve always been a big fan of White. I’ll likely never see him in concert so this video is the next best thing for me.

.

The Guardian:

Before the live-music industry became a billion-dollar behemoth, being on the road was, for many bands, a wild west of sex, drugs and even some rock’n’roll. Hedonism was rife, and it wasn’t just the musicians who pillaged. Their road crews were right there with them, benefiting from a macho atmosphere where the expectation was that after they had unloaded the gear they would match their employers in debauchery.

But that era has long passed, and with it the idea of roadies as folk legends. They have since osmosed into “techs” – low-key professionals who often have degrees and treat the job as a job.

I was a roadie for one weekend. Damn near killed me.

.

CNET:

Do you love noodles? Could you eat them every day? Well, it looks like you now can with the Philips Noodle Maker.

As the name suggests, this kitchen appliance creates fresh noodles from scratch and takes about 15 minutes to make around 500g. All you need to do is toss in the egg, flour and water or more exotic ingredients such as carrot juice and the machine will take care of kneading the dough and then automatically extruding the noodles through a noodle-making cap.

OMG I would absolutely love this thing.

In another example of “Apple opening the kimono” (see what I did there?), here is a video that, while typical of many other “Grand Opening” videos, shows a little of the behind the scenes efforts that go into one of these store openings.

The Isle of Man TT is an insane motorcycle race held every year on a tiny island in the Irish Sea. It concluded last week. Last year, the record for the average speed was set at 131+mph. Average. On city streets and backroad country lanes. With spectators literally an arm’s length away.

“In its 104 years, 234 riders have died. In the week I was there, seven people lost their lives. Three riders and four members of the public.”

.

Scott Hurff:

If you build products for a living, there’s a lot to learn from iOS 8’s iMessage changes — both on the user interface side and on the customer development side. Let’s examine iOS 8’s changes, and let’s compare them to the status quo in iOS 7.

Some interesting info here from the POV of a designer who thinks about this stuff all day long.

There’s so much wrong and so much right with this video.

.

LA Weekly:

The pun comeback has heightened visibility for the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships in Austin, Texas, where last year Ziek won both major events: In Punniest of Show, judges rate a contestant’s 90-second prepared routine. In the Punslingers tournament, contestants face off one-on-one to see who can come up with the most puns on words in a given category.

I had a girlfriend in college who loved puns. I had to break up with her.

.

The Verge:

Honeywell is rethinking the way it tackles home automation with Lyric. It’s a $279 Wi-Fi thermostat (available today to purchase through HVAC contractors; it’ll be available in Lowe’s stores by August) that is one of the most visually appealing products in the space, as well as an obvious response to the Nest Learning thermostat. But perhaps more importantly, Lyric is also a platform. The company’s ambition is to launch a full suite of Lyric products that can all be controlled your smartphone.

Good to see competition in the space and maybe an option for those of you who don’t like Nest’s new overlords.

.

Re/code:

Information computation and visualization from a new company called Five uses academic word lists corresponding with psychologists’ established notion of the “big five” personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness. Based on the volume of words used from the lists, each person is assigned a warped pentagon that’s shaped around their own personal leanings.

The people at Five are hoping you’ll be freaked out by how well they can describe you.

First of all, it’s based just on Facebook, not “the internet”. And the results didn’t freak me out at all. How about you?

Macworld:

Online retailer and distributor Dr. Bott, a fixture in the Apple-accessory market since the late 1990s, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in its home state of Oregon, according to public records and information provided to Macworld. The original petition was filed on May 1, with notices sent to creditors later in the month.

Founded in 1999, Dr. Bott was originally a distributor providing accessories to independent Macintosh resellers.

Many of us will hope that Dr Bott can get on the other side of this bankruptcy mostly intact. They have been a long time Mac vendor and a great friend to many in the Mac Community.

.

HiddenCashYVR:

I’m hiding envelopes around town and tweeting clues about where to find them. Each envelope contains a $100 bill. It’s an opportunity to do something nice for others, and in due course encourage them to do something nice for someone else.

These twitter accounts have been popping up all over the US and Canada. There are even ones that are hiding beer and another here in Vancouver, marijuana.

.

Vox:

The monarch butterflies are disappearing. Over the past 20 years, fewer and fewer butterflies have been making the long journey down to Mexico to survive the winter.

Scientists have proposed a few possible reasons for the decline, from habitat loss in Mexico to bouts of unusually severe weather. But a new paper this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology argues that the biggest culprit here is likely the decline of milkweed plants in the United States — the main food for monarch caterpillars before they turn into butterflies.

The story of how these beautiful delicate creatures make their way from as far as Canada to Mexico is amazing. It would be a tragedy to see their decline.

.

The Verge:

The Gumball 3000, an annual celebration of wealth, exotic machinery, and a casual disrespect for traffic laws — think Cannonball Run, but real — and this year, participants are driving from Miami to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, stopping briefly in New York to hop a plane across the Atlantic (yes, cars too).

The Gumball, which raises money for charitable youth organizations, has a reputation for attracting celebrities. Hip hop artist Xzibit lost his license driving it in 2007. This year, Eve is involved. So is David Hasselhoff.

Every few minutes, a participating car would arrive, each more ridiculous than the one before it: I saw a completely chromed Aston Martin, Porsches of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé covered in what appeared to be velvet.

The Ferrari 458 Italia “Purrari” made me weep…

In a PSA run in Hong Kong, Volkswagen sent text messages to people while they watched footage of a driver who gets in an accident while texting.

. Fast Company:

You could be forgiven for thinking that the picture of the bearded man found on all Burt’s Bees product is just that–an illustration designed to humanize the company. But Burt Shavitz is a real man, and he’s the subject of a new documentary that delves into the life of a curmudgeonly beekeeper and former photographer who improbably became the face of a global brand.

The trailer for “Burt’s Buzz” looks very interesting.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The National Football League had a long and expensive list of confidential requests before it awarded the 2018 Super Bowl to Minneapolis.

Free police escorts for team owners, and 35,000 free parking spaces. Presidential suites at no cost in high-end hotels. Free billboards across the Twin Cities. Guarantees to receive all revenue from the game’s ticket sales — even a requirement for NFL-preferred ATMs at the stadium.

I knew the NFL wrung concessions out of host cities but some of these are amusing.

. Digital Trends:

Instead of pushing desktop lovers away, Apple has made moves to make life easier for those who reside in the world of traditional computing, and their mobile compatriots.

The more I read from early users of Yosemite, the more I’m looking forward to it.