What does Genesis frontman and prog rock god Peter Gabriel see when he looks in your eyes? The light, the heat and also an interspecies Internet capable of allowing highly intelligent animals to communicate with humans. Naturally. Read More
We suppose there’s worse ways to end a blue winter Monday than by watching another startup cash out. Business Insider is reporting that Twitter has acquired social TV analytics firm Bluefin Labs. While headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (nestled in the warm bosom of its mother institution, MIT), CEO J.P. Maheu is based here in the New York City.
So far there’s no number, but Business Insider says it’s Twitter’s largest acquisition to date, north of the $40 million it paid for Tweetdeck, suggesting a price tag somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Cha-ching! Read More
Hackers have defaced the MIT.edu website in response to the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who was being prosecuted with the cooperation of M.I.T for illegally downloading JSTOR files over the university’s network and uploading them for free use by the public. Mr. Swartz hung himself in his Brooklyn apartment 10 days ago, and a memorial was held for him at Cooper Union in New York on Saturday. Read More
In a press release published to Pastebin last night, the hacktivist collective Anonymous announced its plans for the second phase of #OpAngel, an operation executed in reaction to the suicide of famed hacker Aaron Swartz.
Mr. Swartz, a champion of the open Internet, was integral to the creation of RSS and defeating SOPA/PIPA. Over the Read More
It seems we’ve reached a Les Miserables moment in the government’s war on cyber crime, one in which a government fearful of preserving order would seek to sentence a young man to decades in prison for the digital equivalent of stealing a loaf of bread. Read More
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will launch an investigation into its role in the suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, as recriminations mounted after the 26-year-old programmer hanged himself in his Brooklyn home on Friday.
“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many,” said MIT President L. Rafael Reif in a written statement. “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.” Read More
Yesterday, before venturing forth to the casting call for Bravo’s Start-ups: Silicon Valley spinoff, we made a rather wonkier stop, at this month’s meeting of the MIT Enterprise Forum. The topic of the panel? Space, the final frontier, and aerospace investing in particular.
As we arrived, a brief SpaceX video with a Top Gun-style soundtrack was wrapping up. Adam Harris, the company’s VP for Government Affairs, let slip a little, “Yay!” as it came to a close. Read More
Yesterday, we told you about the new charges being brought against early Reddit employee and activist coder Aaron Swartz. He’s now facing 13 federal counts after allegedly downloading large portions of JSTOR, an academic database filled with articles and data, in order to release it to the public for free use.
Today it seems that Mr. Swartz has a potentially influential ally in his corner–Bettina Neuefeind, wife of Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig. Read More
You may remember activist coder Aaron Swartz, an early Reddit employee who was charged with four felonies last year for daring to illegally download academic articles off of JSTOR through the MIT network. Now, the 25-year-old Mr. Swartz, who serves as the executive director of the progressive political action committee Demand Progress, has been charged by the federal government with nine more felonies for breaching hacking laws, bringing the total to 13. Read More
It’s a question as old as semiconductors: Once you’ve racked up a couple of billion dollars investing in the tech sector, what are you to do with all that cash? Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner–who’s made himself quite a nice little nest egg betting on companies like Facebook and Groupon–has a somewhat novel answer. The New York Times reports that he’s founded his very own Nobel Prize.
The Fundamental Physics Prize will dole out $3 million each to worthy, boundary-pushing thinkers. No experimental proof required, says Mr. Milner: Read More
