Peering is essentially an arrangement between two bandwidth providers where they send and receive traffic from each other for free. The logic is that the data sent from one network to another is reciprocated. Verizon runs one of the largest last mile networks and owns the descendants of MCI. Cogent is one of the largest bandwidth providers, and its network is spread across the globe in hundreds of cities.

Cogent and Verizon peer to each other at about ten locations and they exchange traffic through several ports. These ports typically send and receive data at speeds of around 10 gigabit per second. When the ports start to fill up (usually at 50 percent of their capacity), the internet companies add more ports. In this case, through, Verizon is allowing the ports that connect to Cogent to get crammed. ”They are allowing the peer connections to degrade,” said Dave Schaffer, chief executive officer of Cogent said in an interview. “Today some of the ports are at 100 percent capacity.”

“Think of it as the on-ramp to the freeway being log-jammed,” Shaffer said. And that means your Netflix content, especially content sent by Netflix’s content delivery network, slows down, and you get pixelated pictures and buffering.

While not naming Netflix directly, Verizon has indicated to Cogent that the reason behind its actions is that Cogent is moving traffic for a large video provider. Schaffer confirmed the Netflix is one of their largest customers. “Over the past year Netflix has become a big partner for us. This is a business model problem, not an engineering problem,” Schaffer said.

Our sources tell us that Netflix recently bought 2 Terabits of bandwidth capacity in part to get around such cramming that was happening in places where it sends traffic directly to certain internet service providers.

When we called Verizon about this story asking if Verizon was having a problem with Cogent over peering issues associated with Netflix, Verizon spokesman Bill Kula said he’d get back to us. A few minutes later he sent the following reply that didn’t answer our question:

Verizon operates one of America’s lowest-latency, highest capacity networks. The various classes of Internet speeds we offer are among the fastest in the nation. Time and again, customers rate us best in class in various reports and surveys. Our customers enjoy a consistently superior Internet experience because our networks can adapt and grow with their use.

Netflix has been growing like crazy and it now accounts for a whole lot of Internet traffic — almost one out of every 3 bits (32.3 percent) sent downstream to users in North America is Netflix traffic according to Sandvine, a company that makes traffic monitoring gear for ISPs. That’s a lot of congested ports.

Netflix’s growing popularity has made it a target of ISP (internet service providers) vitriol and anger, especially those who offer competitive services. Verizon, for instance owns 50 percent of Redbox, a video-over-the-Internet service that is competitive with Netflix. Time Warner Cable and Comcast are other large providers that has allowed degradation of the online video experience on its networks — after all the logic is that as people start to have a bad Netflix experience, they start to look for alternatives — perhaps the ISP’s own pay TV offering.

This isn’t the first application last mile network operators have tried to degrade — last year the wrath of the Baby Bells and cable companies fell on Megaupload, a file sharing company started by Kim Dotcom, Schaffer said. That too was one of the big bandwidth-hungry services popular with the end customers of the ISPs — actual consumers.

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Wi-Fi is now one of the most essential services a hotel can provide apart from a bed, and yet poor internet connection is on the top 3 list of complaints from hotel guests around the world.

Nah! It is really my #1 complaint.

There was time when all of us road warriors walked around with a laptop and a phone (probably a Blackberry). Now we carry around a phone, a tablet (or a Kindle) and a laptop. I am guessing connected cameras are coming next and a slew of other gadgets with a built-in need for the network. And at the same time we are all going to be using cloud services for everything; listening to music, watching videos, working, buying and ordering food. In such a world, the network (both in terms of stability and quality) takes on greater importance.

The common refrain is — well let’s just use LTE. And while we all like to believe that LTE is the panacea to our networking woes, the fact remains that we still are heavily reliant and will be reliant on Wi-Fi, especially when on the go. According to ABI Research, there were a total of 4.9 million hotspots owned by carriers (including those run by the likes of Boingo and iPass) and the total number will hit about 6.3 million in 2016.

Of course, the place where one feels the pain most acutely is in the hotels — who in my opinion are the worst offenders in providing decent and generous connectivity. It is not as if they don’t have a way to quietly tuck in the charges into our room rates! As someone who spends a sizable amount of time on the road checking into random hotels, I can safely say that bad Wi-Fi is one of my biggest complaints.

According to Hotel Chatter’s 2013 Hotel WiFi Report:

• Nearly two-thirds of hotels offer some kind of free Wi-Fi. (It is hard to say if it really is free if the price of the hotel room goes up a few dollars a night and we don’t know about it.)
• The standard amount of bandwidth in a hotel with free Wi-Fi is usually about 1Mbps per each room. (I can categorically state that is not really true.)

It doesn’t matter if the hotels (or motels) are big or small. It doesn’t matter if they are in New York or Nashville, the fact of the matter is that both the quality of network connections and the bandwidth available on the network simply sucks. Even in the best of hotels one struggles to 500 Kbps to 600 Kbps. Try watching Netflix at that bandwidth, or in my case the MLB game! I guess our shifting media habits are killing the in-room video-on-demand business, a lucrative sideline for the hotel industry. (When I am in a really bad mood, I am likely to call it a nice racket!)

Sure, I can do some basic surfing and emails on this so-called free Wi-Fi, but that’s about it. And someone who needs to blog — and thus keep up with a whole slew of news and information sources when on the go — it is virtually impossible to use the Wi-Fi for even getting the work done. I almost always take the upgrade option, paying more for more bandwidth only to find that it still sucks. Unless these guys get their act together and build high-quality robust networks, they can’t really expect people to pay up.

For now, I almost always end up using the LTE network (if it is available.) But we are already starting to see that LTE networks are getting crowded and slower and slower. So it is not difficult to imagine things are going to get a lot worse for those of us dependent on-the-go internet.

Like I said — I love the connectivity in the hotels, I just hate the poor quality networks.

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Google Internet Balloons, before the launch in New Zealand. Photo courtesy of Trey Ratcliff (under Creative Commons)

Of course, now we might have to take this whole balloon-based broadband thing seriously — Google is putting a lot of money, time and effort behind it. In a blog post, the company announced Project Loon:

Today we’re unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access. We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below.  It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters.  The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it. This is still highly experimental technology and we have a long way to go.

Google has launch its balloon-based Internet connectivity technology as a trial down in the Canterbury area of New Zealand. It kicked off the program by sending 30 balloons up in the air and 50 testers will be connecting to those balloons. They will launch more balloons in countries which have the same latitude as New Zealand.

This isn’t the first time Google has talked about balloon-based broadband. In 2008, there was talk that Google was looking to work with a company called Space Data Corp., and send balloons up in the air and provide connectivity in rural areas. SDC specialized in sending balloons to about 20 miles up in the air to provide connectivity to truckers and oil companies. It recently started experimenting with the idea of blimp-based broadband in Africa.

Google is obsessed with the idea of connecting more and more people to the Internet, especially in the developing world, and there isn’t a single technology that can get it done. So it has been toying with many ways to provide connectivity in areas that are un-connected. While I don’t have any doubts that Google’s mission to connect the world is driven by the profit motive, I still find the idea of pushing for seamless connectivity exciting. Seamless connectivity, as you know, has been a bit of a personal passion for me.

Looking at it from the outside, you can see that Google is putting two of its core strengths — algorithms and cloud computing infrastructure — to work on what has been a difficult problem to solve. Google admits the idea is crazy but highly experimental, which makes it all the more worthwhile to follow the project. I am also looking forward to sinking my teeth into understanding how this works (or not.)

P.S. Check out these awesome behind the scenes photos Trey Ratcliff took of the Google Loon project and shared them on his Google+ page.

This video below shows how Project Loon works.

Featured image courtesy Flickr user Pink_Sherbet_Photography.

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Getty Images

After becoming popular with high school students last fall, the app has recently begun drawing in a set of young, privacy-conscious financiers. In an industry where a stray Facebook photo of a drunken escapade can get a junior banker fired on the spot, Snapchat’s disappearing photos have made it a useful tool for Wall Street’s party crowd. It’s impossible to measure the Snapchat activity of bankers or any other subset of users, given that the app produces no real public metrics. But interviews with a number of Wall Street workers suggests that Snapchat is quickly becoming the go-to social network for corporate underlings who want to keep their public profiles strictly professional, yet can’t resist the appeal of a controlled social media environment that lets them run wild.

More than Snapchat, it seems Wall Street (like many young people) is wary of Facebook and the social norm around that service. Still, the popularity of Snapchat must be driving Wall Street security chiefs bat-shit crazy — yet another hole to plug in their always leaking information ship!

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• iOS 7 – unpolished by design: my friend Cap Watkins weighs in on one of the most debated topics.
• iOS 7: Beyond the flatness. Great recap by Dan Frommer.
• iOS 7 went too far in the other direction, thinks Mike Rundle.
• Schiller’s zinger: Apple’s rallying cry. Ken Segall, formerly of Apple, breaks down Apple’s performance at the event.
• See Apple’s remarkable evolution from iOS 6 to iOS 7. Fast Company compares the two and offers their take on the design shift.
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• Is UX design the next arms race? It is a little dry, but it is packed with broader thinking around user experience design.

This is the second billion dollar exit where Facebook lost out. In case of Tumblr, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offered around $500 million to David Karp, but Marissa Mayer charmed Karp and, of course, more than doubled the money she was willing to pay for Tumblr. It was rumored that Facebook were in the running to buy Waze, but couldn’t pull the trigger.

Actually, selling to Google (or anyone else) was actually the only outcome for this company — even though it had tens of millions of people using the software in dozens of countries worldwide, it would have been pretty hard for them to turn social commuting into a real business. Google, on the other hand, can simply layer this on its maps and try and use the data to drive more real world transactions.

As I pointed out in a post about the new Google Maps, Google will ultimately create more natural advertising formats for maps-driven interfaces and Waze helps them towards that objective. That said, it is a great exhale for Waze’s investors, who were facing the prospect of building a real business — a much harder proposition than most in Silicon Valley understand or are willing to admit.

The big winners in this deal are investors that include Magma Ventures, Blue Run Ventures and Vertex Ventures, who were earliest backers of the company. Sources say they each made well north of $100 million from the deal. The surprise (and ironic) winner might be Microsoft, which is rumored to have invested in the company as a strategic investor.

The company had raised $12 million in its Series A funding in early 2008 and was valued at around $20 million at that time. It snagged another $25 million Series B funding in November 2010 and was valued at just under $100 million after that round of funding. The company received cash from Qualcomm Ventures and Microsoft in addition to other internal investors.

Horizon Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers were the last money into the company, but they too have made a nice chunk of change on this deal. In October 2011, the company received another $30 million in funding from Horizon Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers at a pretty hefty valuation – around $250 million, according to sources.

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@om without having played with it: visually it lacks affordances and a clear visual hierarchy. Happy to chat.—
Gino Zahnd (@gino) June 11, 2013

Multitasking, tabs, Control Center, AirDrop, and general interactions are looking fantastic in iOS 7. But wow, the ugly stick.—
Jason Santa Maria (@jasonsantamaria) June 10, 2013

You gotta wonder if they took their phones outside and looked at all that thin-lined icon + transparency stuff in the sunlight.—
Josh Brewer (@jbrewer) June 10, 2013

An interesting observation: designers who have actually done any mobile OS design work really seem to dislike iOS7. /cc @om—
Sami Niemelä (@samin) June 11, 2013

@om Icons seem poorly designed and over-complicated. Not enough spacing. Color palate is extreme. Menus like Control Center seem cluttered.—
Matt Galligan (@mg) June 11, 2013

@om on purely visual level it feels unfinished and not that well designed. Helvetica Neue Ultra Light is a weird choice for type, too.—
Sami Niemelä (@samin) June 11, 2013

Am I alone in thinking the iOS 7 home screen icons look ugly, poorly balanced, and of an unattractive color palate? http://t.co/MYt1JMIzje—
Matt Galligan (@mg) June 11, 2013

@om I think it’s really just the icons. The apps themselves look decent. I’d rather the icons have no gradient than look like they do.—
Andrew Burwell (@Raddock) June 11, 2013

Apple designers and engineers: you should be proud. Herculean task to redesign and re-imagine your entire OS. Respect.—
Cap Watkins (@cap) June 10, 2013

Tom Coates, co-founder of Product Club, who in a past life worked at BBC and Yahoo’s Brickhouse, wrote back on Twitter in a string of tweets:

At least in part because it looks so much like wireframes with placeholders for things. Bit like a webpage with Times New Roman….It’s cramped in places, childish and garish in others, icons blend in with the background. And some of the design fetishes it has are as egregious if not worse than ios6 — frosted glass, fake depth, sliders with shadows. There are many good things about it too. Don’t get me wrong. App switcher is nice, etc. Interaction wise it looks and feels solid.

But on the other side of the coin are those who actually appreciate the new look.

The good news: the new UX is a big improvement and the UI skin can be iterated and polished over time #iOS7 #WWDC13—
Ben Cline (@yocline) June 11, 2013

@Mike_FTW @om There's work to do; no question (looking at it, a shit ton, for what it's worth). But the general direction is the right one.—
Raphael Schaad (@raphaelschaad) June 11, 2013

@akosner @om Classic issue with most design critique, people over inflate the value of visual design. OS7 is indeed pretty, but other issues—
Scott Jenson (@scottjenson) June 11, 2013

Mike Monteiro (of Mule Design) wrote in a Twitter DM (direct message):

It’s a breath of fresh air. Where was Apple going with the current crap? This opens up all manner of possibilities. I’m excited because it’s new. And fresh. The Forstall crap went to its logical conclusion. Any design system that can no longer be extended is death. The new stuff is a fresh start. Eventually it’ll die too. But right now I’m excited about how it can grow and be extended. It’s not perfect. But, as a designer, that excites me. As a consumer? I dunno.

Craig Mod, who is one my favorite design and content-focused thinkers, wrote:

iOS7 shows us that we’re at a point where design of digital device interfaces simply cannot be accurately assessed from afar. These are living things — systems. Where the physics, the parallax, the subtlety of the movements are all part of the ‘design’ and surface design is just a rather boring tip of an otherwise very deep iceberg. Until we live with the new OS for days, it’s hard to say how successful the new design is or isn’t. What was outlined today looks like a very rational base on which to extend the OS — somewhat timeless, far more timeless than what we had before. The only truly red flags I saw (aside from bad iconography which is trivial to fix) were the decisions around translucency. I’ve never seen an instance where translucency brings clarity, not muddle, to an interface. And from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like it falls on the muddle side in iOS7, too.

Justin Rhoades, a Portland-based designer, said:

I think the design had to be reset so that newer interaction models could surface. More gestures, more animations. They added a physics engine to the SDK. It’s like a pendulum swinging from obvious visual affordances to engaging kinetic ones. The parallax effect, the physics of the messages bubbles and I’m sure many other ‘kinetic’ behaviors are new to devs in iOS7. Apple wants apps to use more motion and less visual design.

There is a furious debate going on over at Quora, where someone asked the question: is iOS7 an improvement? You can either check that out, or take a moment and share your thoughts regarding the new iOS 7 in the comments.

We’ll be digging into experience design at our annual RoadMap conference in San Francisco in November. Tickets will go on sale later this Summer, and you can sign up here to get first access to them.

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If Google buys Waze, then someone from Waze needs to send my colleague Mathew Ingram, a T-shirt. He astutely pointed out that Google should be snatching this company from Facebook or regret it later. Here is what he wrote:

Waze — which won our Launchpad event at Mobilize in 2009 — provides real-time informationabout everything from road closures and accidents to traffic backups and police speed-traps. The information is superimposed on a scrollable map, and there are also a number of social features built in, which allow users to see and share information, including messages, with other drivers. Waze even provides gas-price data.

Facebook has its own reasons for wanting a service like Waze, I think Google would be the real loser if it went to either of these companies, for the simple reason that Google Maps is a big part of the company’s mobile appeal — at least for me, and I would suspect for many others. Google Maps also has traffic data, and it is also based on real-time information, which comes from other users of the service who have their GPS location turned on. It is pretty accurate — but I don’t find it nearly as useful as Waze. I didn’t think enough people would take the time to enter information about things like traffic or speed traps into Waze to make it useful, but I was wrong. And Google doesn’t seem to have any plans to try and duplicate that, since it is more focused on automating that whole process, in typical Google fashion.

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Jeff Lawson pitches me at my local Starbucks in 2008

It is one of the reasons why the company raised a whopping $70 million in new funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures, who co-led the most recent round of financing. The company has so far raised a total of $102.7 million in funding in three rounds. Its early backers include Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Founders Fund, Manu Kumar, and Union Square Ventures. That is quite something for a company that got turned down by twenty odd investors before the first dollars rolled into the bank account.

My sources tell me the company — while still unprofitable — is growing at break-neck speed and is on track to do $50 million in 2013 revenues.  While it doesn’t have profit margins that are as rich as classic software-as-a-service companies, it still has a gross margin in excess of 45 percent. This scorching growth is one of the reasons why the company is now valued at close to $500 million.

An initial public offering is a distinct possibility, although I also wonder if Amazon will bring Jeff (who in a past life was chief technology officer of StubHub) back home by buying this company. In a nutshell, Twilio is a cloud-based communications platform that allows app developers to add voice and texting capabilities to their applications by including a few lines of code.

We, in Silicon Valley, collectively celebrate the fast and the furious, the pretty and the sexy, the nouveau. Somehow we have lost appreciation for the simple fact that it takes (what seems like a lifetime of) agony, sacrifice and ingenuity to build something of lasting value. And that is the reason I wanted to tell the story of Jeff is because he has done what very few founders get to achieve — to build what it seems is a business that has stayed true to its roots and succeeded by helping others succeed.

The Telecom Disruptor

I was introduced to Lawson by McClure, who had been helping me in the early days of GigaOM and started jumping up and down, insisting I meet Jeff. So, I did. And as Jeff sat next to me in my favorite Starbucks, giving me the pitch, I couldn’t help but think to myself: Twilio looks like a dozen odd startups, that were providing voice APIs and betting on telecom minutes arbitrage.

As someone who had been following voice-over-the-internet and telecom for over a decade, I knew it was a sucker’s game and it would take a lot more than just founder-bluster to build a real business. I guess that skepticism is a natural byproduct of watching an industry chase pennies.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone: Lawson met a total of twenty angels and VCs and they all were not keen on his company. He didn’t care and just launched the product right after the 2008 financial crisis had hit. Of course, what I had missed was that this was a non-telecom guy who was  fed up with the telecom industry’s practices.

In his previous life, he had wanted to find a simple way to add communications into his businesses’ work flow much like he would add code to his software. Instead he was left dealing with expensive contracts and massive gear, which he didn’t need. He and his two co-founders (Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis), essentially set-out to replace that archaic architecture. They saw what Amazon was doing with its cloud platform, and they wanted to do the same for communication. ”The company started to meet our own needs,” said Lawson, a 35-year-old quirky and charming engineer from Michigan.

Hackathons Rule

Photo of Jeff Lawson at a company event, courtesy of Twilio via Flickr

Despite strong competition from more entrenched companies, Twilio kept plugging along. They stayed hyper-focused on developers. Quite a few of my friends were playing around with Twilio and built very basic apps on it. Others hacked together personal messaging systems. Some wanted to make voice-to-blog plugins. Twilio, it seemed, had found its people. We stayed in touch and we often wrote about this tiny company that kept beating the odds.

Our stories dovetailed again when they moved into the first GigaOM office on Pier 38, just after we moved out. That office had a lot of good karma (if not enough heat). It wasn’t until they offered an easy way to integrate SMS into their apps that their star zoomed.

Jeff jokes that while Amazon didn’t really have to work at finding their customers, Twilio had to seek out its potential customers. Enter, Hackathons!  ”The art of creating software and building new things was starting to get celebrated at these hackathons,” Lawson said. Twilio embraced the hackathons with gusto and became an active participant — where there was a hackathon, there was Twilio. I remember seeing Danielle Morrill, one of the early Twilio employees pretty much at every hackathon I attended — carrying the proverbial company flag.

My colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote a prescient piece and observed:

…future isn’t voice, but apps that provide the context for the best means for communication. It may be voice, it may be video or it may be text, but Lawson (while not committing to anything beyond expressing interest in video) expects Twilio to be there on the back end enabling developers to offer communication with a minimum of fuss.

Over a period of time, Twilio turned their voice-inside-apps service into a platform and the apps based on that platform started to grow big, some almost overnight. One of them, GroupMe was acquired by Skype for $85 million. Another similar app, Beluga was snapped up by Facebook. Just as Amazon Web Services (AWS) was making it dead simple for startups to get started, Twilio was making it easy to add communications capabilities.

The success of GroupMe was the aspirational story that helped cement Twilio’s story into the app ecosystem. I guess, when you look back, the rise of iPhone app economy was the best thing that happened to Twilio, which saw a big boom in the number of developers using its messaging and voice platform. ”I see API replacing the dial tone,” says Lawson, who is convinced that the future of communications is through application interfaces.

In a blog post announcing the funding, one of Twilio’s new investors, Scott Raney, wrote:

Twilio is also a part of a broader trend towards services and APIs catering directly to developers.  More and more, developers are making critical decisions regarding the nature of the products they are building. Like Redpoint’s earlier investments in Heroku and Stripe, Twilio is at the forefront of this movement.

Since the heady days of Beluga and GroupMe, others have embraced Twilio and started to build their businesses based on Twilio’s services. I recently came across a company called SendHub, that has built a brian-dead simple phone and messaging system that marries two crucial trends — “bring your own device” and “distributed workforces.”

The premise behind this Silicon Valley company is pretty simple: if there are no desk-phones and employees are spread across the country, how can a PBX system invented for monolithic mid-20th century organizations be useful, regardless of the fact it uses voice-over-the-internet for transporting technologies? How can we think just about voice as a communication tool, when we are texting more, sharing files, doing conference and constantly tapping into the CRM systems. It reminded me of Google Voice, except reinvented for today’s needs.

In the past a similar company would have spent its entire first few years trying to build the network underpinning its business (think Google Voice & RingCentral), but these guys signed up for Twilio (and Amazon) and focused all there resources on building the new communication experience. It has allowed the company to start bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales.

Culture Defines Customer Experience

Photo courtesy of Twilio, via Flickr.

When I asked Lawson what has made his company work, he pointed to his company’s nine core values and how they add up to creating the best experience – whether it is for customers or for the employees. “Experience is how something makes you feel,” he said. “When you see a U2 concert, that is an experience and has a lasting impression.”Lawson is pretty convinced that Twilio’s model of customer acquisition and keeping them around works, mostly because they are hell bent on creating an awesome experience.

“Telecom services are worse than enterprise software,” he said. The industry wants to conduct a transaction before you as a customer taste any success. “We want you to succeed and then willingly conduct a transaction,” he added. “A transaction before success is stupid.” It is one of the reasons why they only have four-percent annual churn in their customer base.

“This is what creates the long term customer and that is what makes our model work.” In order to create that experience, Twilio has done a few unusual things. For instance, the company expects every employee (even non-technical ones) to create an app based on Twilio and also handle customer service for a few days. “It is because we want everyone to have empathy with our customers’ problems,” Lawson said.

The Evolution of the CEO

A company’s culture is set by its leader and that is why I find Jeff quite fascinating. A brilliant engineer, he has found a way to overcome the challenges of being an engineer-founder. When I asked him what has made him work, Lawson said his attitude has been: to adapt and reinvent. “I think you learn that what worked for past nine months when you were only 10 people doesn’t work when you are 30 people, so you adapt and learn [a] new way,” he said.

To illustrate the point I want to tell the story of the company’s mascot – an Owl. During its early days, the company fell in love with a Reddit meme about drawing an Owl. You draw a circle and figure rest of it out! That is how Lawson sees the company — there are no instructions. Just start, figure the rest of it out, learn and improve. And that is how he sees his job as the CEO.

Today Twilio is 160 people. By the end of the year it will be 200 people, but by then, Lawson said that he will have changed once again as a CEO and have learned to do things differently. “There is a new playbook every 6-to-9 months,” he said. “You just need to know what are non-negotiable values.”

“We are not telecom people and we don’t want to be those guys,” Lawson said. “We are hackers and [are] for the hackers.” That’s non-negotiable.

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Here are some picks for this weekend.

• The Silent War: Michael Gross writes a detailed behind-the-scenes story of the ongoing cyber wars that involve the United States and Iran.
• War through a woman’s eyes: Did you know that some of the top war photographers today are women? This is a story of them.
• Are coders worth it? Aeon magazine asks the question. It is provocative and worth reading.
• “The Great Gatsby” & the epidemic of pornography masquerading as style: Colin McDowell talks about what is wrong with today’s fashion world.
• There is no such thing as invention, writes David Galbraith.
• Babe Ruth & Feature Lists: Why prioritized feature lists can be poisonous: Ken Norton warns against the problem of too many features. And he channels Babe Ruth, so I had to link to him.
• Why Yellow Fever is different than “having a type”: Chin Lu writes in the Bold Italic. I don’t really need to add anything other than say: read this piece.