Blog

    • How services like Cameo and Substack have opened up new ways for prominent media figures and journalists to make a living from smaller audiences (Ben Smith/New York Times)

    Ben Smith / New York Times: How services like Cameo and Substack have opened up new ways for prominent media figures and journalists to make a living from smaller audiences  —  With short videos and paid newsletters, everyone from superstars to half-forgotten former athletes and even journalists can, as one tech figure put it, “monetize

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    • Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit fails to launch rocket to space during first test flight

    Virgin Orbit’s 747 Cosmic Girl and rocket LauncherOne | Image: Virgin Orbit Update May 25th, 4:05PM ET: Virgin Orbit’s test flight ended in failure shortly after LauncherOne dropped from under the company’s carrier 747 airplane. Virgin Orbit confirmed that the drop was successful, but that the mission “terminated shortly into the flight.” No further details

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    • Book excerpt looks at NSA's Big Awesome Graph initiative, an attempt to map people's social networks out of an enormous trove of intercepted communications (Barton Gellman/Wired)

    Barton Gellman / Wired: Book excerpt looks at NSA’s Big Awesome Graph initiative, an attempt to map people’s social networks out of an enormous trove of intercepted communications  —  Edward Snowden revealed the agency’s phone-record tracking program.  But thanks to “precomputed contact chaining,” that database was much more powerful than anyone knew. Book excerpt looks

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    • FCC may move ahead with a $16B plan to boost rural broadband access, even without a clear picture of service gaps, as ISPs' coverage data lacks granularity (Ryan Tracy/Wall Street Journal)

    Ryan Tracy / Wall Street Journal: FCC may move ahead with a $16B plan to boost rural broadband access, even without a clear picture of service gaps, as ISPs’ coverage data lacks granularity  —  Under FCC’s latest plan to fund to internet providers’ service expansions, many rural customers who lack broadband could be counted as

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    Go read this incredible history of the SimCity studio’s forgotten business games division

    {$inline_image} A screenshot of Project Challenge, a project management simulator. | Thinking Tools Popular “simulation games” like SimCity aren’t literally training players to run something like a city. But what would happen if they did? In the 1990s, SimCity studio Maxis tried to find out. In an exhaustively researched essay at The Obscuritory, librarian and

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