Amazon buys Whole Foods, Uber’s CEO finally resigns and the NSA surprisingly contributes to the Open Source community. 🎉
Amazon Buying Whole Foods: An Industry Shudders
It’s happening: Amazon is finally getting into retail’s biggest moneymaker of all — the $800 billion grocery business.
“Amazon is placing its bet on the future of the food industry,” says Errol Schweizer, a former Whole Foods executive who is now an industry adviser, “and they see Whole Foods as the leadership.” Most Amazon watchers are focused on the some 450 stores the e-commerce behemoth scoops up in the deal. These brick-and-mortar locations instantly give it a national physical presence, as well as a network of mini distribution centers for fresh produce — by far the most challenging part of the grocery delivery business because of spoilage and the fragility of fruits and vegetables.
Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
Would I dare say it was about time? I hope they’ll finally get their act together.
Travis Kalanick stepped down Tuesday as chief executive of Uber (…) after a shareholder revolt made it untenable for him to stay on at the company. (…) Earlier on Tuesday, five of Uber’s major investors demanded that the chief executive resign immediately. The investors included one of Uber’s biggest shareholders, the venture capital firm Benchmark, which has one of its partners, Bill Gurley, on Uber’s board.
The End of Net Neutrality Could Shackle the Internet of Things
I never thought of the impact of (the lack of) Net Neutrality on the IoT. This definitely doesn’t look good.
Dismissing the rules could be a big problem for the future of the Internet of Things, since companies like Comcast–which is already working on its own smart home platform–certainly have the motivation to create fast and slow lanes for particular gadgets and services. If your internet provider can decide which personal assistant or smart home gadgets you can or can’t use, the broadband can dictate the winners and losers in the Internet of Things race. That wouldn’t bode well for competition, innovation, or you. (…) providers might also be free to force you to rent a cable modem or WiFi router the same way you already have to rent a cable box, or even to charge you for each computer, tablet, or IoT gadget you connect to the web.
While we’re on the subject, check out how Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality.
The myth of the ‘cool tech girl’
Yes, we still need to fight sexism in our industry…
The cool tech girl is a toxic myth, she helps men feel safe in their sexism. She enables the persistent and perpetual gender discrimination in our field. She’s hurting you, and me, and she needs to fuck right off already.
The RNC Files: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak
Remember when we talked about having non-secured Amazon Web Services S3 buckets?
UpGuard has discovered an open database containing information on what appear to be approximately 198 million American voters left misconfigured by a GOP analytics firm.
Technology
Russia’s Cyberwar on Ukraine Is a Blueprint For What’s to Come
We can’t expect this happening only to Ukraine, right? Scary times ahead for sure!
A hacker army has systematically undermined practically every sector of Ukraine: media, finance, transportation, military, politics, energy. Wave after wave of intrusions have deleted data, destroyed computers, and in some cases paralyzed organizations’ most basic functions. “You can’t really find a space in Ukraine where there hasn’t been an attack”
Data-Mining 100 Million Instagram Photos Reveals Global Clothing Patterns
Fascinating to see what you can do with 100 Million Instagram photos!
They used a standard face recognition program to filter out all the pictures that did not contain a face, and they also filtered for a visible torso, leaving a set of 15 million photos of people showing the upper half of their body, along with their location and the date. Next, they trained a machine-learning algorithm to recognize various types of clothing and accessories in images. Finally, they let the machine lose on the 15 million photos in their data set and then used another algorithm to search for clusters of images with similar visual themes and track how these varied across time and from one location to another. The clustering algorithm found some 400 different visual themes, such as people wearing white T-shirts and glasses, or wearing red V-neck tops or black dresses, or not wearing tops at all!
Move Over, Bitcoin. Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment.
Another day in the fascinating world of crypto currencies. This again shows how volatile virtual currencies remain.
The price of Bitcoin has hit record highs in recent months, more than doubling in price since the start of the year. Despite these gains, Bitcoin is on the verge of losing its position as the dominant virtual currency. The value of Ether, the digital money that lives on an upstart network known as Ethereum, has risen an eye-popping 4,500 percent since the beginning of the year.
Web development / Web design
NSA OSS Technologies
Besides leaking important hacking tools, NSA sometimes contributes to the Open Source community. Check out their Github repository for more info.
The NSA Technology Transfer Program (TTP) works with agency innovators who wish to use this collaborative model for transferring their technology to the commercial marketplace. OSS invites cooperative development of technology, encouraging broad use and adoption. The public benefits by adopting, enhancing, adapting, or commercializing the software. The government benefits from the open source community’s enhancements to the technology.
RESTful API Design Tips from Experience
A lot of overy insightful tips for designing great RESTful API’s.
Some things you should know before using Amazon’s Elasticsearch Service on AWS
A Cloud Guru — Amazon’s Elasticsearch Service on AWS is a powerful but fragile piece of infrastructure with a ton of things that can cause the AWS service to become unstable
Will Vue.js Become a Giant Like Angular or React?
Vue.js is a close partner of Angular and React in more and more article titles, taking the world by a storm. What makes Vue.js win developers’ hearts?
Teller — The API for your bank account
How many times have you thought to yourself “Damn, I really wish my bank account had an API”? I bet the answer is a lot. Well, today is the last day you will ever think that again because we are pleased to announce that the Teller API beta program is now open to the public.
Bits and pieces
Twitch just scored an exclusive streaming deal with Blizzard for 20+ major e-sports events. More news on the blockchain front: Ethereum price crashed from $319 to 10 cents on GDAX after huge trade and see how price manipulation works in the Bitcoin ecosystem.