Week of April 15, 2019

A few things of note from around the Internet this week:

Misguided

From Ben Thompson:

Indeed, the hidden victims of overly broad regulation focused on companies like YouTube and Facebook are all of the infrastructure providers that makes sites like Stratechery possible. Any hosting provider with a brain — or email service or message board or anything that hosts content from users — would be wise to simply block Australia completely. This law is a disaster, and a reminder that tech companies owe it to the Internet to get their houses in order before everything becomes far, far worse.

At a time when human talent is so often the binding constraint, and amid so many calls to improve the educational system, these kinds of ideas deserve further attention.

Disney

It's infeasible but I would give every one a private jet—it's a transformative experience. Abigail Disney on what it’s like to grow up with unimaginable wealth:

Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.

Attack

Tim Maughan asks the question: is the Internet really unbreakable?

It’s both an exciting and frightening idea, that activists and protest groups—rather than military, paramilitary, or nation state forces—might be able to cause disruption and chaos via DIY methods of attacking internet infrastructure, but how realistic is it really?

Detail

There is only one copy of the highest resolution scan of the Notre Dame Cathedral which could be integral as it is rebuilt.

Blaer estimated that, despite the high resolution of the scans and panoramic photographs, the files would be roughly a terabyte, small enough to fit on a single hard drive, but unlikely to be stored in the cloud. All those data now exist on a single disk, a tiny portal into the past, which is sitting somewhere on Earth. Blaer thought it might be in the hands of Tallon’s students at Vassar. But Ochsendorf thought the data were most likely with the rest of Tallon’s archive, in the possession of his widow, Marie, who held Andrew in her arms as he died.

Huge

Two tweets about the first image of a black hole ever captured.

MIT CSAIL @MIT_CSAIL

Here's the moment when the first black hole image was processed, from the eyes of researcher Katie Bouman. #EHTBlackHole #BlackHoleDay #BlackHole (v/@dfbarajas)

April 10th 2019

17,580 Retweets58,152 Likes

Seamus Blackley @SeamusBlackley

The black spot in this image is larger in diameter than our solar system. It weighs more than our galaxy. Its halo is matter literally being ripped apart and accelerated to near light speed as it disappears, forever, into a gravitational prison from which there is no escape.

April 10th 2019

25,781 Retweets95,143 Likes

Crypto

Deep dive on how Banksy authenticates his (or her) work:

Can an information system be art? Because, like I said, it’s flipping sweet, and all executed in Banksy’s trademark tongue in cheek style. This whole authentication process would easily be my favourite artwork by Banksy.

Perk

I think this is a really great, original (to me) take:

Sometimes I think of Kickstarter as the original sin for modern patronage. Kickstarter, with its fundraising goals, email updates, and reward tiers, inadvertently created a blueprint for every other crowdfunding platform thereafter. But we never stopped to think about whether we repeated these behaviors because they were actually good for creators, or because that’s just how Kickstarter did it.