Chaotic week, right? In addition to the piles of work, your brain was preoccupied with thoughts of chemical weapons and Jesse Pinkman’s fate. Keeping abreast of your social-media streams was thus nearly impossible, and now you're afraid of sounding ignorant should your pals want to talk iPhone 5S or NSA. You can avoid that embarrassing fate by taking a quick spin through the WIRED Dozen, our new weekly compendium of the past seven days' most essential reads. Give the pieces below a few minutes of your time and you’ll be perfectly equipped to hold your own in any comments section, Twitter exchange, or barroom debate.
Google Gets Slapped by Men in Black
A few years ago, Google’s roving Street View cars swiped reams of private data from unsecured WiFi networks. This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for individuals to sue Google over the intrusions. The opinion chides the company for contending that unencrypted data is always fair game: “Surely Congress did not intend to condone such an intrusive and unwarranted invasion of privacy when it enacted the Wiretap Act.” [Ninth Circuit Court (PDF)]
Stop Fetishizing Startup Culture
We’ve all come to believe that the most successful businesses are those that create first and ask questions later—-often after that first stab at a product has failed miserably. Just Enough Research author Erika Hall argues that this belief is utter hogwash, and that a slower, more deliberate approach to development often wins the day. A large number of commenters (how can we put this delicately?) passionately disagree. [WIRED Opinion]
Because Astronauts Cannot Live on Freeze-Dried Peaches Alone
Transporting a single pound of food to the International Space Station costs $10,000, which is why NASA is keen to figure out how to raise vegetables in space. The trick is to limit the amount of energy and water required, as well as fend off potentially harmful space microbes. Astronauts will also have to learn not to grow too emotionally attached to their vegetables; in one past experiment, an ISS crew developed such intense affection for a space-grown zucchini that it equated eating the veggies with cannibalism. [Modern Farmer]
How Rock Band Became Roadkill
The tale of the Rock Band franchise’s demise is tailor-made for future business-school textbooks. The games, created by Boston’s Harmonix development studio, once seemed destined to enjoy Halo-like popularity for years to come. But after selling $1 billion worth of product in a 15-month stretch, Harmonix became too ambitious for its own good. Seriously, no one raised their hand in a meeting and said, “Maybe, just maybe, the market could do without Lego Rock Band?” [Gameological]
Reports of Groupon’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
The company whose swift decline gave you nice hit of schadenfreude is actually in the midst of a comeback; its stock hit a 52-week high this week, confounding critics who had classified the company’s IPO as one of history’s great business disasters. As our own Marcus Wohlsen explains, the turnaround is all about Groupon realizing that email is a relic of the past. [WIRED Business]
Pay Some Attention to The Misogynist Behind the Curtain
When Pax Dickinson, CTO of Business Insider, lost his job after writing a series of offensive tweets, his defenders grumbled that the punishment didn’t fit the crime. The reporter who first highlighted Dickinson’s crude views felt compelled to respond with a post on why, exactly, jests about female stupidity (and boobs) should elicit more than just eye rolls in Silicon Valley. [Valleywag]
Cutting Through the iPhone 5 Haze
The reaction to this week’s iPhone 5 announcement was surprisingly muted—-maybe because we’ve finally realized that incremental product improvements are not quite as history-altering as we’ve been led to believe. You can safely ignore the lengthy think pieces in favor of Gadget Lab’s elegant little explainer on which new iPhone deserves to be in your pocket. [Gadget Lab]
Microsoft Coulda Been a Contender
You know the modern-day Microsoft as the boring plodder of tech, seemingly doomed to also-ran status whenever it tries to compete against true innovators. But this promotional footage from 2000 reveals that Microsoft’s R&D squad was once ahead of its time, predicting the likes of social media and tablets. The soon-to-depart Steve Ballmer gets a heap of blame for creating a stultifying environment where such products could never flourish. [Bloomberg]
US Government Unsurprisingly Caught Lying About Its Secret Surveillance Program
As is usually the case when the government enters damage-control mode, the official response to Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations has been peppered with falsehoods. WIRED's David Kravets sifted through a mountain of speeches and testimony to identify the six biggest whoppers told so far. James Clapper, our director of national intelligence, gets the Pinocchio Award for the ballsiest bending of truth. [Threat Level]
Apple is the New Sony?
One of the industrial designers who helped Steve Jobs create the original Macintosh is no great fan of the Tim Cook regime, which he takes to task for its emphasis on profit over innovation. A notch too harsh, perhaps, but you can’t help but listen. [Quartz]
McMansions Gone to Seed
The housing bust didn’t just alter lives for those unfortunate souls whose mortgages became albatrosses—-it altered the American landscape. Photographer Michael Light took to the skies to document how a vast swath of Nevada was irrevocably transformed over the past two decades—first by an out-of-control appetite for gargantuan homes, and then by economic decline. Future McMansion builders might want to read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” before breaking ground in the desert. [Raw File]
The Cops’ Favorite Hackers
Eleven years ago, a pair of Italian programmers created Ettercap, an open-source toolkit for hackers. Among Ettercap’s many admirers were the Milanese police, who enlisted its creators to help them eavesdrop on Skype calls. That gig convinced the programmers that their futures lay in writing hacking software for law enforcement—-something they have done with tremendous success as the founders of Hacking Team. But have they given ample thought to what can happen when their code falls into the wrong hands? [The Verge]
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Brendan I. Koerner is a WIRED contributing editor and the author of The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking.
