Weekly Links #14

Here is a weekly selection of important information bits, thoughtful opinion pieces and interesting analyses from the digital and technology world. Published every Thursday.

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• The Shut-In Economy
  
  There have been many critical articles about the “gig economy” lately. This one is worth reading anyway, even though I personally disagree with the idea that the reduction of service- and retail-based superficial human interaction must be a bad thing. I find the class divide happening here and also touched in the text more worrisome.
• HideMyAss! Your secret’s safe with Jack
  
  Great story about how a 16-year-old founded and grew a service that provides anonymity on the Internet.
• Peak Cable
  
  It sounds insane to me, but there are people in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere) who pay hundreds of Dollars a month for cable TV.
• Facebook Finds Strength As A Family, Not An App
  
  As described 2 weeks ago, Facebook is now a family of apps and services, not one social network anymore.
• Oculus VR’s Chief Scientist: “We’re All Headed Down the Rabbit Hole Together”
  
  A teaser from the article worth pondering over: “Virtual reality, as provided through headsets like the Oculus Rift, is reality. “
• Upworthy cofounder Peter Koechley apologizes for the clickbait “monster” his site unleashed on the internet
  
  Applogy rejected.
• Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can’t Stop
  
  The great thing about the Internet is that there always is someone who figures out a way to annoy and question the establishment. That’s very healthy in my eyes.
• The rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the open web
  
  Excellent essay from 2013 by Katharine Viner, who recently got named the first female editor in chief at The Guardian.
• Why Not Utopia?
  
  I think we definitely need to strive for utopia, no matter whether we’ll ever get there.
• It’s the relationship, stupid
  
  Facebook wants to convince media companies to publish their full articles to Facebook. Jeff Jarvis points out that publishers need to demand access to the activity data in order to turn it into a good deal for them.
• All aboard San Francisco’s startup bus craze
  
  A slightly polemical account of a trip on one of San Francisco’s new private buses.
• We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops
  
  It’s kinda crazy that at least in the Californian city of Oakland, one can obtain the datasets collected by the Police during systematic license plate scanning.
• Alibaba And The Cognitive Dissonance Of American Data Policy
  
  About the implications of when cloud companies establish sites in countries with diverging views on basic ideological and political questions.
• Berlin from the eyes of Nordic and Baltic startups
  
  Lots of spot-on and also some surprising observations and experiences. Good read for both locals as well as those who want to establish themselves in Berlin.
• Uber outnumbers yellow taxis in New York
  
  If I think of those typical New York photos on which you can see a sea of yellow cabs on the streets, this appears significant to me.
• How to setup your own private, secure, free* VPN on the Amazon AWS Cloud in 10 minutes
  
  Sounds awesome. One can never have too many working VPN tunnels. I’ll definitely try this.