Tech Links: June 18, 2012

Business

How the Business of Streaming Music Will Change Culture…For the Better

How Garmin Failed to See the iPhone Threat

Entertainment

15 Google Maps with Stunning 45-Degree Views

Internet

Could Cops Use Google To Prevent Murder? Murderers often turn to the Web for tips on killing. Could search data help the police stop those crimes before they happen?

Forget selling ad space. Facebook should be selling credit, argues The Daily Beast's Steven Weiss.

Here's a list of new top-level domains that will soon compete with .com and other TLDs

Reading & Discussion

Does HTTP need a status code for censorship? Perhaps

The Feynman Files. For the first time, FBI records for Dr Richard Feynman have been released to the public. They document the Bureau's apparent obsession in the 1950's with outing him as a communist sympathizer, and include notations from several background checks as well as interviews with his colleagues, friends and acquaintances.

Science

Why We Don’t Believe In Science

Software

The Graphics Interchange Format is 25 years old. Originally released by CompuServe to replace RLE - a file format which was limited to black and white only, the GIF (which you're probably pronouncing incorrectly) evolved over the next 25 years - first gaining color, then better color, then the ability to repeat itself, and finally an adoring audience willing to take GIFs to the next level.

Technology

The App of Life: Technologies are transforming city life in countless ways: everything from finding a date to finding a bus in an instant. "Thanks largely to smartphones, this is probably the best time ever to live in a packed city... Steve Jobs was a lifelong suburbanite, but it turns out he perfected the city."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending about $1.1 million to develop a way to physiologically measure how engaged students are by their teachers’ lessons. This involves “galvanic skin response” bracelets that kids would wear so their engagement levels could be measured.

BitCoin appears to be gaining a measure of stability, at least temporarily, through anger at banks, paypal, visa, etc., the activities of currency traders, and increased activity, as well as the promise of multi-signature transactions. BitCoin has suffered lots of setbacks in the past months due to non-serious platform providers and their shocking lack of security. As a digital asset that's anonymous and therefore extremly difficult to trace, BitCoin is a criminal's wet dream and Bitcoin fraud is already a problem. There are already root kits custom made to steal BitCoin wallets (which are basically .dat files on your computer).

Infograph: The Science of Star Trek
 
Tiny satellites will use Kinect to dock with one another

Welcome to the Hybrid Age: We are on the verge of living in a human-technology civilization.