Inside the US campaign to cut China out of the technology supply chain: Nikkei Asia has an excellent overview of how the current tensions between the US and China are reshaping the technology supply chain. The shift of manufacturing to non-China locations and the pressures on suppliers is something we don’t think about, but they are worth our attention. Any disruption in quality and supply can damage high-flying technology stocks, like Apple, which can bring a quick end to our stock market boom.
How Signal became the messaging app for the age of privacy and distrust: Time magazine reports on the rise of the app that is free from corporate ownership and is liberally funded by Brian Acton, the co-founder of Whatsapp who left Facebook with his billions. I would have liked to know more about Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal. Nevertheless, this is a good and essential read — average humans don’t care enough about privacy and encryption , and they need to start paying attention to it. I’m including this piece because of the rise of organizations such as Five Eyes, which have no respect for privacy and humans and begin with the assumption of criminal behavior.
Don’t blame Cobol: The unemployment insurance systems failed during the pandemic, and everyone, including the government, blamed sixty-year-old programming language COBOL. The Logic Mag explains what failed. Just a great story.
The future of the movie theater is quite bleak, reports The New York Magazine. The answer is right in your face, as I pointed out in a piece from earlier this week.
Remember HotorNot? Like Digg, it is a part of Internet history we should remember and be grateful for — or not!
Hedgefund vs. Footnoted: A scary tale of an independent researcher, Michelle Leder, and her website, Footnoted. Leder’s work has my admiration, and it is sad to see her face off with a deep-pocketed hedge fund. What is happening to her site is a risk every single journalist faces when they start their operations.
Heart Breaker: An amazing story of a romancing grifter who preyed and stole from lonely women on dating sites. I am always amazed at how much we fall for scams when searching for love, despite having so much information on the internet.