In Germany, the age group of 14-29 are consuming streamed video more than classic TV. This will definitely mean that TV executives will ask for laws against streaming, to preserve their business model - similar to what has happened with print media.

Websites about mental illnesses are passing their collected data to advertising companies. When something is free, it’s very likely that you are the product. But in this case, the people who are the product are actively looking for help and might not even be capable of judging the consequences of their browsing.

It looks like human speech may have a universal transmission rate of 39 bit per second.

Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information […]: they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second.

This is extremely interesting, as it applies to written languages, where information density per syllable was investigated, as well as spoken languages. The conclusion is also fascinating:

But the “why” is another question entirely. Pellegrino and his colleagues suspect that the answer has everything to do with the limits imposed by […] how much information our brains can take in—or produce—at any one time. […] De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. “It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together.”

A list of dumb password rules (with screenshots!). My personal favorite from the past was a password for a bank which could not contain special characters and no numbers and could not be longer than 8 characters.

One of the big questions of our time can be summed up into one sentence: Should you block or filter illegal content which is uploaded to the internet?

This is a classic example of hidden complexity:

In Tetris, a randomizer is a function which returns a randomly chosen piece. Over the years, the rules of how pieces are chosen has evolved, affecting gameplay and actual randomness.

Everyone who has ever played around with random numbers has already met the concept of “floods” and “droughts”, but possibly not with that name. It’s interesting to see which solutions they came up with to strike the right balance between keeping the game unpredictable, but still beatable and fun.