Tech 9: Stories From the Week You Need to Read Right Now

The government may have shut down this week but the tech world kept on rolling. It was a wild and strange week, with Snapchat announcing a major change to its service, Samsung caught lying about the power of its phones, and Facebook announcing a Stepford Wives-style community with creepy new company apartments. To get you caught up on all the craziness, here are 9 tech stories from the week you probably missed but totally shouldn't have.

Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, n+1, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.

This week Snapchat announced a significant new addition to its messaging service with a feature called Story. Individual messages won't be discarded immediately anymore, but saved in chronological order for a period of 24 hours. The idea is to capture the stream of messages anyone in your friends list is sending out and make it viewable, creating an impressionistic story arc of what's happened to them over the course of a day. The feature will delete messages older than 24 hours to preserve some sense of the service's signature ephemerality. Are you ready to open up that much?

Read the story here.

In a wonderfully dramatic narrative of the iPhone's beginnings in this week's New York Times, Fred Vogelstein recounts how when Steve Jobs demo'd it live on stage for the first time in 2007, the prototype was barely operational. "The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn't play an entire clip reliably without crashing," he writes. "It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not." What would have happened to Apple if during that press conference the phone had frozen or crashed in public view? Would the magical haze surrounding the iPhone have been lost forever? It's impossible to answer, but the history of events leading up to that moment are worth reliving, if only to consider how differently it all could have gone.

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Reporting for ArsTechnica, Ron Amadeo discovers Samsung's Note 3, its newest device in the phone-tablet hybrid category, has been designed to trick CPU benchmarking programs into rating its processors as faster than they really are. The practice is a sneaky way to exploit many reviewers over-reliance on a few basic benchmarking programs. "In Geekbench's multicore test, the Note 3's benchmark mode gives the device a 20 percent boost over its 'natural' score," Amadeo writes. "With the benchmark boosting logic stripped away, the Note 3 drops down to LG G2 levels, which is where we initially expected the score to be, given the identical SoCs."

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Since launching in 2011, Silk Road has become one of the most reliable ways to buy drugs online, doubly effective for its acceptance of anonymizing Bitcoins. This week its founder, who passed under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts" was arrested by the FBI on charges of drug conspiracy, money laundering, and hacking. In a post on Medium, Khadijah M. Britton delves deeper into the life of the Dread Pirate, known in civilian life as Ross Ulbricht, who had a young man living in Austin. He described his experiment to create a free and open marketplace as "an economic simulation to give people first-hand experience of a world without systemic use of force." Ironically the purveyors of systemic force tracked him down, and stopped his experiment just when it seemed as if it might be going somewhere.

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This week, Facebook announced plans to build a 394-unit apartment building on 630,000 square feet of land next to its Menlo Park headquarters, with apartments only rented to employees of the company. The move is a strange and almost Soviet-style expansion following a trend of tech companies treating their employees to affordances that once used to come from the government, things like exclusive bus lines to take commuters into the suburbs for work and free education. The apartment bloc will be filled with community amenities, including a sports bar, coffee shop, convenience store, and gyms staffed with personal trainers. There are no official odds on when the facilities first yuppie serial killer will emerge, but it probably won't take more than a generation.

Read the story here.

Microsoft's Kinect has produced a string of mostly underwhelming or outright broken games, but hackers have made spectacular use of its infrared 3D sensors. The newest example comes from a group of students in Switzerland, who've used the camera to control a computerized version of a symphony. The students built an app that allows users to record a sound sample and upload it to a server where they can be arranged into a musical score, with each sampled part assigned to be played through a separate laptop. The performance space is filled with a few dozen laptops, with each mapped to an area of 3D space watched by the Kinect camera. When the conductor moves her hand into that area the sample is played, and music is made.

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It's probably not a good sign that every possible use of Google Glass seems quietly disturbing. The newest potentially sinister use is an app capable of recognizing objects that a person is viewing. Built by the machine learning company AlchemyAPI, the app uses a simulated version of neural networks to analyze whatever is in view through Glass's camera. The app is currently able to recognize basic objects like desks and chairs, but its possible in ten years time such an app could know more about what you've seen and done than you do. At which point, the opposite of chaos is likely to rain. Read the story here.

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It's often thought that the stock market is a place of tremendous complexity and sophistication, but it is also a shrine to colossal stupidity and knee-jerk irrationality. One example came this week when when, following Twitter's formal filing to go public, a rush of buy orders came in for a company trading under the symbol "TWTRQ." The company, Tweeter Home Entertainment, had been a junk stock of almost no value, but suddenly experienced a massive surge with over 14 million shares sold to buyers assuming it was that other tweet-based entertainment company. If you bought in, hopefully you sold back out at the right time.

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For years, companies like Wordpress and Squarespace have encouraged the masses to approach web design as a matter of choosing between pre-made templates. This week Google added another new tool to its arsenal of free Internet-based productivity software to try and turn bloggers into actual designers. Google's Web Designer application, which runs in browser the same way its word processing and spreadsheet apps do, is a simple but decently flexible piece of software that promises to demystify the process of CSS and HTML for the uninitiated. It could also be a Trojan Horse that allows the world's biggest peddler of data to create a library of design content it can monetize later on. Only time will tell.

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