Category Archives: Tech

The Gospel According to Peter Thiel

Michael Gibson still remembers his first day working for Peter Thiel. Like many of Thiel’s hires, he’d met the contrarian investor through several of the PayPal founder’s variously eccentric political ventures. A onetime self-described “unemployed writer in L.A.,” who’d left a doctoral program in philosophy at Oxford, Gibson had met Thiel through his work at the Seasteading Institute, a Thiel-funded attempt to create a libertarian “floating city” in international waters. Then Thiel asked him to help teach a class at Stanford Law School on philosophy, technology, and politics. And then Thiel asked him to work for his hedge fund. Gibson had no intention of working in finance, or any experience in doing so, but he and Thiel had, he felt, “gelled philosophically,”
— Read on www.city-journal.org/peter-thiel

Solving online events — Benedict Evans

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Events are a bundle of content, networking and meetings, and aggregate
people in one place at one time. When you try to take this online, half of
it breaks and most of it makes no sense bundled together. We need new tools
and new ways to think about networks, not ‘virtual conferences’.
— Read on www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/4/solving-online-events

Funerals in space: The people who send their ashes into orbit

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Services such as Celestis and Aura Flights send remains to the skies in an epic final journey.

Even in the freezing cold, Steven Schnider would often drag his wife Christine outside to look up at the night sky. He’d point out everything from planets to comets to satellites he’d tracked down using an app called Heavens Above.

“He’d say, ‘Do you see it?’ It’s right there. And it would be the faintest little piece of light going across the sky,” Christine recalls. “He was just so excited about it.”

When Steven was close to death in 2017, there was a consensus among family members that a space burial would be the best way to send him off. Their daughter took out her phone, did a quick search and pulled up a company called Celestis.

See More (CNET)

www.cnet.com/features/space-funerals-the-people-who-want-their-ashes-scattered-into-orbit/

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Check out this article from USA TODAY:

Apple Watch, Fitbit as first line of defense? Tests expand on whether wearables could predict coronavirus

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/05/27/coronavirus-tracking-apple-watch-fitbit-studies-aim-detect-covid-19/5270949002/

Hackers Release a New Jailbreak that Unlocks Every iPhone

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ios-13-jailbreak A renowned iPhone hacking team has released a new “jailbreak” tool that unlocks every iPhone, even the most recent models running the latest iOS 13.5.

For as long as Apple has kept up its “walled garden” approach to iPhones by only allowing apps and customizations that it approves, hackers have tried to break free from what they call the “jail,” hence the name “jailbreak.” Hackers do this by finding a previously undisclosed vulnerability in iOS that break through some of the many restrictions that Apple puts in place to prevent access to the underlying software. Apple says it does this for security. But jailbreakers say breaking through those restrictions allows them to customize their iPhones more than they would otherwise, in a way that most Android users are already accustomed to.

The jailbreak, released by the unc0ver team, supports all iPhones that run iOS 11 and above, including up to iOS 13.5, which Apple released this week.

Details of the vulnerability that the hackers used to build the jailbreak aren’t known, but it’s not expected to last forever. Just as jailbreakers work to find a way in, Apple works fast to patch the flaws and close the jailbreak.

Inside the NSA’s Secret Tool for Mapping Your Social Network | WIRED

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Edward Snowden revealed the agency’s phone-record tracking program. But thanks to “precomputed contact chaining,” that database was much more powerful than anyone knew.
— Read on www.wired.com/story/inside-the-nsas-secret-tool-for-mapping-your-social-network/

Smartphone data shows America’s cautious comeback

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Data from millions of mobile phones shows varying behavior across the United States in May as people responded to the loosening of stay-at-home orders, a Reuters analysis shows.

Americans returned to parks, restaurants and gas stations first. In most of the country, though, people continued to stay away from bars, fitness centers and religious institutions, which remain closed in many areas, according to the analysis of anonymized smartphone data from SafeGraph.
— Read on www.oann.com/smartphone-data-shows-americas-cautious-comeback/