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

It was a tumultuous week, with the startling news of Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, a company few people appear to have known existed. Meanwhile, news of violent social revolt in Ukraine and Venezuela spread across social media, competing for media watchers’ attention with the Sochi Winter Olympics. To help you make sense of everything that happened in the interim, here are 9 of this week’s most compelling tech stories you might have missed but definitely shouldn’t have.

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

This week, The Verge's Jesse Hicks reports on how Wikipedia handles the vast influx of vandal edits and trolls seeking to deface its pages with fake information or jokes. The company built a monitoring tool called AntiVandalBot, which screens all new edits for potential markers of fraudulence, automatically removing those that fail its test. For those cases that are less obvious, AVB forwards cases to a second bot called VandalProof, which collates the edits for a final examination by a human. The technology has evolved over the years to the point where it can now process more than 9000 edits per minute, and has secretly been one of the most important aspects of Wikipedia maintaining its reputation of reliability while at the same time being ever-vulnerable to trolls and hacks.

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In a feature for GQ this month, just made available on the magazine's website, Emily Witt recounts the origin story of dating app Tinder. Built by two friends who grew up in the same Beverly Hills neighborhood, but forced to attend separate private schools, the app grew out of an attempt to solve the problem of knowing whether or not a person you're attracted to actually wants to be approached. Like many exciting young startups, the origin story is rife with anecdotes of privileged indifference to problems larger than dating and social neuroses. The duo flit from the Beverly Hills Hotel to the Soho House, and one dates the daughter of the CEO of Dell Computers, whom they've nicknamed "Tinderella."

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Google continued its march into the creepily invasive sector of the tech world with the announcement of Project Tango, a prototype cell phone equipped with 3D sensors capable of taking 250,000 measurements every second. The phone will combine data about the physical surroundings of its user with more general GPS data to create highly specific feedback about your surroundings. Google cites example uses of the phone being able to take specific measurements of furniture and living spaces before shopping trips, the ability to give specific directions based on small landmarks and not just street names, as well as support for new kinds hide and seek games. The company has 200 units, which will be available to developers beginning in March.

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Shortly after Sony announced first quarter sales of PlayStation 4 surpassed all previous PlayStation consoles, Amazon appears to be ready to join the home video game fray. Recode's Peter Kafka reports that Amazon is preparing an all-in-one TV box to launch in March, a product it had originally wanted to have out for Christmas but had to postpone. In addition to the now standard features of streaming video and plugging into Amazon's digital cloud services, the box is said to function as a video game console as well, squaring with Amazon's recent purchase of Killer Instinct developer Double Helix, as well as several other smaller game developers.

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This week Netflix admitted that its video streaming speeds had fallen by as much as 14 percent in the last month, in many cases slowing regardless of the end user's connection speed. The decline stems from an ongoing disagreement with major ISPs including Comcast and Verizon, who've wanted Netflix to pay more for the increasing number of users streaming, which the company has so far refused to do. According to one report, the addition of 1080p streaming on Netflix has quadrupled web traffic over the last six months, something that end users are blissfully unaware of, but which service providers see as an opportunity to demand more money.

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Though Google likes to portray its search engine as a disinterested go-between, this week brought forth another reminder of just how much power the company has with its ability to make things findable. Google has taken action to prevent technology company Vivint from coming up in its searches after a string after accusations of misleading sales practices and possible legal action. In the past, Google has also lowered the search rankings of Expedia and Rap Genius following charges of unethical behavior. Though the company claims to use its power fairly, the fact that it has such power is in itself disturbing.

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This week the United States Postal Service announced that Apple founder Steve Jobs will soon be joining the pantheon of American legends like Rosa Parks, George Washington, and Albert Einstein with the issuance of his own postage stamp. Set for release in 2015, Jobs stamp will be part of a new class of stampees that includes Wilt Chamberlin, Dora the Explorer, Harvey Milk, Jimi Hendrix, and John Lennon. The final visual design of his stamp is on-going, meaning somewhere in DC people are arguing about whether bow ties are better than turtlenecks. We'll all find out the answer next year.

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The idea of being stalked on Facebook, Twitter, or OKCupid is an increasingly familiar one, but apparently LInkedIn has experienced a sharp rise in stalkerish behavior as weel. Reporting for BuzzFeed, Charlie Warzel explains how the world's most boring social network has worked to add a "block" feature to protect users from unwanted attention. The change was undertaken after an online petition was started after one woman reported how her boss checked her profile every day, and would constantly question her about new connections or small changes made. Going by the petition, thousands of others have experiences similarly uncomfortable exchanges.

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Though the Internet era is still young, we are surrounded by companies that often feel like immovable dinosaurs. In FastCompany this week, John Paul Titlow reports on one company, DuckDuckGo, which is trying to unseat the biggest dinosaur in the Internet tar pit: Google. Started in Philadelphia in 2008, and expanded with a $3 million investment from venture capital in 2011, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that attempts to deliver results in the form of an answered question rather than a list of semi-coherent links. The site also promises user privacy, forgoing Google's habit of building huge data stores based on its users. The site doesn't log users IP addresses, save their search histories, and doesn't want anyone to create a persistent profile. The site is still small, but its grown by 200-500 percent each year since launching, and with 4 million daily searches, it may be nearing its own mass market tipping point.

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