Four short links: 25 April 2018
Music Biz, Amazon DNS Hijack, Embedded Platform, and Tech Change
- Music Industry’s “Fantastic 2017” — That $1.4 billion of growth puts the global total just below 2008 levels ($17.7 billion), meaning that the decline wrought through much of the last 10 years has been expunged. The recorded music business is locked firmly in growth mode, following nearly $1 billion growth in 2016. Cory Doctorow makes the point that while the “music industry” is booming, artist incomes aren’t growing at the same rate. Or, indeed, at all.
- Amazon’s DNS Hijacked For Two Hours — in service of raiding a cryptocurrency website.
- Nerves — Pack your whole application into as little as 12MB and have it start in seconds by booting a lean cross-compiled Linux directly to the battle-hardened Erlang VM. Let Nerves take care of the network, discovery, I/O, firmware updates, and more. Focus on what matters, and have fun writing robust and maintainable software. Nifty approach to a very real problem.
- Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change (Neil Postman) — this is incredibly prescient and good. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.[…] A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on. That is why we must be cautious about technological innovation. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable, and largely irreversible. See also a related talk by Postman. (via Daniel G. Siegel)
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