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Spotify's bet on Gimlet and Anchor gives it a foothold into podcasting to apply its listener monetization skills without worrying about sending money to labels (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Ben Thompson / Stratechery: Spotify’s bet on Gimlet and Anchor gives it a foothold into podcasting to apply its listener monetization skills without worrying about sending money to labels  —  Credit Spotify CEO Daniel Ek with honesty; in a blog post announcing a major move into the podcast space, Ek wrote: Spotify's bet on Gimlet

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China is taking early steps to protect consumers' privacy from tech companies, even as it intensifies government surveillance (Slate)

Slate: China is taking early steps to protect consumers’ privacy from tech companies, even as it intensifies government surveillance  —  When Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress last spring, he argued that regulating Facebook’s use of personal data would cause the United States … China is taking early steps to protect consumers' privacy from tech companies,

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Facial recognition tech sucks, but it’s inevitable

Is facial recognition accurate? Can it be hacked? These are just some of the questions being raised by lawmakers, civil libertarians, and privacy advocates in the wake of an ACLU report released last summer that claimed Amazon’s facial recognition software, Rekognition, misidentified 28 members of congress as criminals. Rekognition is a general-purpose, application programming interface

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Gimlet's Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber on weighing remaining independent and being acquired, the days before the deal, and reach, data, and discoverability (Recode)

Recode: Gimlet’s Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber on weighing remaining independent and being acquired, the days before the deal, and reach, data, and discoverability  —  Blumberg and Lieber spoke with Recode’s Peter Kafka on the latest episode of Recode Media.  —  On Friday, Recode broke the news … Gimlet's Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber on

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Google's policies about inclusion of small publishers in Google News, one of the biggest news platforms on the internet, are opaque and applied at random (Owen Williams/Charged)

Owen Williams / Charged: Google’s policies about inclusion of small publishers in Google News, one of the biggest news platforms on the internet, are opaque and applied at random  —  There’s been a lot of discussion about the future of publishing over the last few years, particularly as Facebook traffic began cratering … Google's policies

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A Tiny IDE For Your ATtiny

When writing code for the ATtiny family of microcontrollers such as a the ATtiny85 or ATtiny10, people usually use one of two methods: they either add support for the chip in the Arduino IDE, or they crack open their text editor of choice and do everything manually. Plus of course there are the stragglers out there using Eclipse.

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A reporter chronicles what it's like to get by without using or accessing a single product from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft for one week (Kashmir Hill/Gizmodo)

Kashmir Hill / Gizmodo: A reporter chronicles what it’s like to get by without using or accessing a single product from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft for one week  —  Reporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN.

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