Meet Shingy, AOL's "Digital Prophet"

“‘Wanted to show you a little brain fart I had on the plane,’ he said. It was a cartoon he had drawn of a bear wearing zebra-print pants and a shirt covered in ones and zeros.

‘Love it, love it, love it,’ Nardini said. ‘I’m thinking of the bears more as a metaphor.’

‘A thousand per cent,’ Shingy said.”

Shing

The Great Bitcasa Purge

“Originally, Bitcasa offered an ‘infinite storage’ plan for €79 per year, but no such plan exists on their ‘new storage infrastructure’.”

CNN caught using Microsoft Surface as iPad kickstand

“Unfortunately for Microsoft, this is just another of several gaffed sponsorships its had over the last few months. The company also sponsors the NFL and provides team with Surface tablets on the sideline to review plays, but commentators have a hard time remembering to not call it an iPad.”

Verizon Injecting Perma-Cookies to Track Mobile Customers, Bypassing Privacy Controls

“Verizon Wireless has been silently modifying its users’ web traffic on its network to inject a cookie-like tracker. This tracker, included in an HTTP header called X-UIDH, is sent to every unencrypted website a Verizon customer visits from a mobile device. It allows third-party advertisers and websites to assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors’ web browsing habits without their consent.”

[...]

“Verizon does provide a sort of limited opt-out for individual customers, but it appears that the opt-out does not actually disable the header. Instead, it merely tells Verizon not to share detailed demographic information with advertisers who present a UIDH value. Meaningful protection from tracking by third parties would require Verizon to omit the header entirely.”

"My Uber is down there!"

“Officers tried to clear the streets and re-establish order in the face of chaos. But now a video emerges that shows who the real hero was: an everywoman pleading for our god-given right to get to our ride-sharing car.”

Remove iTunes gift album "Songs of Innocence" from your iTunes music library and purchases

Here’s my take on the U2 thing: It’s not that I don’t like music. It’s not that I don’t like free things. I even like a couple of U2 songs.

It’s that my various document libraries, and especially my iTunes library, are sacred. You DO NOT touch them. If I entrust them to your cloud service, you double-triple especially DO NOT touch them.

This “free gift” could have just as easily been issued as a redemption code, and nobody would have minded. Instead it was pushed into everyone’s library apparently just so the band could brag about having the most widely-“owned” album of all time. It had that layer of marketing slime on it that most Apple promotions do not. THAT’S what made it so upsetting to me.