#stevenlevy

[ecologiadigital]

If you didn't get to it during the week, now might be the time to see how @amazon used its considerable assets to make an AI comeback. Just sayin' https://t.co/zfugjc8vk0

— Steven Levy (@StevenLevy) February 3, 2018

[newsablenz]

Steven Levy from Medium on the future of news. 

“There’s always going to be an appetite for great original work and it’s going to show up in forms that we can’t anticipate now”

[mytuesdaysgone]

If you're interested in understanding how the company was formed from a search-engine perspective, stick with the first few chapters and then read "Big Data" by Mayer-Schonberger.  As "Millenials", we appreciate the relevance since we watched Google emerge as a leader in tech from the sidelines.  However, if you've lived in Silicon Valley, you've had about all you can handle from the Googlers.  An inside look at self-absorbed and socially inept engineers only reminds me why I left San Francisco.  Just watch an episode of the TV series "Silicon Valley" which is equally terrible.  

[mycrumpledjournal]

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age : Book Review

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy My rating: 4 of 5 stars Steven Levy always does a good job of making a complex and potentially dry subject readable for a wide audience, using an approach similar to the approach he took in Hackers; he uses the personal history of the participants as a lens to study the history of a technology development. Crypto outlines the history of cryptography as it lurched towards public availability. Levy provides an overview of both technical and political obstacles that occurred along the way. Examines issues of control, personal freedom, and national security. This is the story that Steven Levy tells. Although the book tends to portray researchers outside the NSA as skillful and lucky heroes, and those inside the NSA as pompous but brilliant ideologues, it's a compelling story. The book is roughly chronological, starting with Whit Diffie's independent discovery of public key cryptography, one of the major breakthroughs that made the field feasible, the story of RSA, the ill-fated Clipper chip, and concessions the NSA was forced into against overwhelming pressure. Mr. Levy outlines the development of a people's cryptography and its collision with the U.S. government. This book is about privacy in the information age and about the people who saw many years ago that the Internet's greatest virtue was its greatest drawback: free access to information that leads to a loss of privacy. From a developer's standpoint, the story is interesting because it explains many of the features of cryptography as we know it today, making it easier to put them to efficient use. For example, what was the big deal with keys longer than 40-bits that the government restricted them from export? And just how much safer are 128-bit keys? Sure, we all have heard the number of hours or millennia today's computers take to break such keys, but why those specific numbers? As with most complex controversies, both the government and the outsiders make compelling arguments for their case. Cryptography has long been the province of governments, and wars have been won and lost on the success of keeping secrets secret. But in a demographic society, individual privacy is almost sacrosanct, even though it is not explicitly guaranteed in any of the documents on which the U.S. is founded. Crypto tells the story of how these conflicting interests have been sorted out to the current state of affairs.

  If you are looking for a book about crypto in order to understand "how it works", forget this book.If you want to understand how people with one obsession can change the world, just read it.

  P.S: yeah, yeah, I know I’m obsessed with Levy’s books! K? No need to start tat again!!

[mycrumpledjournal]

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness : Book Review

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book covers the iPod from just about every angle. How it was made, how people responded to it, where it fits in the history of portable music players, why it’s “cool”. The most surprising thing to me is how long ago the pre-smartphone world feels. The book was published in 2006 (1 year before the iPhone), but it feels like the stone age when Levy gushes about how small and light the iPod is..! An Interesting read :)

[mycrumpledjournal]

Hackers : Book Review

Hackers by Steven Levy My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is an updated version of the original Hackers By Steven Levy first published 25 years ago. There is a 14 page afterword that updates stories about Bill Gates, Stewart Brand, Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Richard Greenblatt, Richard Stallman, Lee Felsenstein, Paul Graham, and introduces Mark Zuckerberg. A word of advice, Don't read this book as an A to Z or a history book. Read it if you want to FEEL the beginning. Did you ever hack something? Ever flip a character bit in an early role-playing game? Ever write assembly code on a PDP-11? Ever own an Apple II? The three eras covered in this book really take you into the experience and give you a sense of what it was like in the early days of this industry. And Stephen Levy is a great writer. I read everything he writes cover to cover with ease and interest.

[mycrumpledjournal]

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives : Book Review

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy My rating: 4 of 5 stars Every page of Mr. Levy's book is packed with detailed information about Google's technology and business, certainly detailed enough to reveal the essence of each topic. If you want a good history of Google's early years, this is the book for you. The author, a Google booster, had unparalleled access to current and former Google employees and presents more information about the history and development of the company than has reached print before. If you're interested in the causes of Google's recent stumbles, though, the author's hagiographic approach gets in the way of understanding. There are a dozen "evil" approaches from the "don't be evil" company that simply are not adequately explained. It has a few shortcomings, but overall they are insignificant compared to the amount of information that one can glean from it.