Journal

Kevin Hart is petite for Foot Locker, young athletes inspire for Samsung, and Brooks jogs with the undead.

If we’re all being honest here, I’m going to come out and say I missed Newcastle this Super Bowl. The meta-ad attitude, frolicking in the ridiculousness of the big game hype, the millions spent, and the fact we’re all watching anyway. Everyone and their mother’s brother took some time to review the Super Bowl ads this year, but to follow up its game ad Shock Top and comedian TJ Miller did some ad criticism of their own for a brilliant focus group of two. Onward!

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Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick talk about working with Ryan Reynolds to make the long-gestating film uncompromisingly, definitively Deadpool.

It takes supreme humility to forego traditional writing credits for the film you wrote. Or it would, at least, if you didn’t instead bill yourself and your co-writer as The Real Heroes Here, which is exactly what Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick did on Deadpool.

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“Brain wallets” were designed to be so safe you could store them in plain sight on the Internet. Wrong!

It’s always a pain to memorize a password. This is why we so often choose weak ones. A technique used for protecting bitcoin wallets (called a “brain wallet”) seemed to offer a workaround. You use a strong form of cryptography to convert a password that you only keep in your mind—thus reducing vulnerability to malware and other attacks—into something that resists brute force. Brain wallets could thus be stored in the clear (effectively unencrypted) in the bitcoin blockchain, making them always available to an owner without weaknesses that would expose their value to others.

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What do Theranos, 23andMe, and Zenefits have in common? These well-hyped companies failed to meet regulatory requirements.

In 2013, 23andMe got slapped by federal regulators for failing to respond to emails. In 2015, the much-hyped biotech startup Theranos was cited by the feds for serious deficiencies that put patient safety in “immediate jeopardy.” And last week, Zenefits, a company that claimed to demystify compliance, announced that its CEO would resign for, you guessed it, problems with compliance.

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The global economy hits home, and it’s not pretty.

Recently, workers at an Indianapolis plant operated by Carrier, an air-conditioning manufacturer, came to work like any other day. Except it wasn’t like any other day. Instead, they got to hear a speech explaining that they were losing their jobs because the company was moving the factory to Monterrey, Mexico, to save money. Carrier is owned by United Technologies Company, which made $7.6 billion last year.

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Uber and American Airlines are partnering for door-to-door travel.

American Airlines announced a new partnership with ride-hailing app Uber that will encourage travelers to book a ride home from the airport.

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From the Homebrew Computer Club to the US Festival to his new project, Apple’s cofounder has been a community builder for decades.

If you were starting an event that sat at the intersection of technology and pop culture, you could scarcely imagine a better founding myth than one involving an encounter between Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Marvel impresario Stan Lee. As the designer of the Apple II’s hardware and software, Woz played a monumental role in the personalization of computers that ushered in the era that would bring us not just PCs but smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smart TVs, and much more. And the Marvel comics that Lee co-created and wrote in the 1960s are the stuff that modern myths are made of.

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For Leendert Jan Vis, digital art isn’t about perfection—it’s about spontaneity.

You probably don’t recognize the name of Dutch artist Leendert Jan Vis, but an awful lot of people enjoy his work every day. Over the past three decades, his cheerful and quirky animals have appeared on over 250 million greeting cards as well as in picture books, as stuffed animals, and on a variety of products.

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Companies like Tesla and Fitbit are offering cash rewards to non-employees who find security flaws.

It’s one of the biggest threats to the Internet of Things: Bugs.

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It’s that time again for the health industry’s nerdiest tweetfest.

In 2012, a government employee (_@emma_sandoe) came up with the idea for an extremely nerdy Internet meme: #healthpolicyvalentines. Health policy wonks loved it, and immediately flocked to Twitter to share their Valentine’s Day wishes.

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