Printed eyes, Lego cars, Chuck Norris splits and Obama vs NSA: #StuffToKnow this week

The NSA is really getting wave after wave of pressure from all sides to curb their tactics after Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing caused a ripple effect of outrage across the globe. Yahoo’s Flickr finally caught up with the embedding trend. Chuck Norris puts Jean-Claude back in his place. Oh and by the way we can print eye balls now and ride around in Lego cars running on air.

INTERNET

Obama Panel Recommends an End to NSA Bulk Data Storage
Unfortunately the new 300 page report doesn’t really push for the NSA to stop spying on its citizens, rather it recommends various ways to give oversight to it all (as in who watches the watchers). Even though the government doesn’t actually have to do what the report says, even Obama himself has stated “proposing some self-restraint on the NSA and initiating some reforms that can give people some more confidence.”

Zuckerberg Selling $2.3 Billion Worth of Facebook Stock to Pay Taxes
Don’t worry the guy still has US$19-billion. Doesn’t that hurt? There is a kid out there who just gave away $2.3-billion and it barely vexed him.

Snowden’s Leaks Finally Forced Companies to Enhance Security
The ripple effect through the tech landscape due to the revelations made by Edward Snowden on how our private information in the cloud is vulnerable to the NSA as well as hackers has caused many website to up their game. Surprisingly, Yahoo! took quite a bit of nudging before they became encrypted.

Yahoo Introduces New Style Of Flickr Embeds To Seed Content Outside Of The Site
Took them long enough. Finally the photo sharing site that gives you a free terrabyte to host images allows you to embed images on other sites. This easy way for Flickr to get traffic and links back oddly took longer than it should have. Even Instagram, a vastly younger image-focused site, allows it. Anyway this is what the embed looks like, with their logo popping up when you hover over it.

WhatsApp passes 400-million monthly active users, up 100-million in just 4 months
The cross platform messaging app is jumping in leaps and bounds. They gained 50-million new users in two months, and 100-million new users in the past four months. These numbers are for active users not just people who downloaded the app. I’m sure iMessage and BBM wish they could have those numbers, though I would like to assume the Facebook app could give them a run for their money in terms of the amount of messages sent via the app.

Chuck Norris Tops Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Epic Split
This is just awesome. The legend of Chuck Norris is in full form in this video response to Jean-Claude’s epic split that went viral a few weeks ago. I dare you to not love it.

TECH

3D-printed eye cells could “cure blindness”
3D Printing will be the biggest wave of tech advancements of next year, I’m convinced of it and I’m not alone. Here is a quote from the article: “researchers used an inkjet printer to print living retinal cells”. If that doesn’t amaze you and excite your mind with the potential this kind of technology has then you obviously don’t grasp its magnitude.

Incredible Lego car’s 256 plastic-pistoned engine actually runs
Any person who played with Lego as a kid will be envious of Steve Sammartino who has a life-sized, drivable car made of Lego. It runs on air, I swear — okay fine compressed air, but still you have to admit that is a cool toy.

ENTERTAINMENT

No One Buys Music on the Web Anymore. Except When They Buy a Million Beyonce Albums in Five Days.
In less than a week Beyonce sold a million copies of her new album. Not bad when you consider that it had no marketing, no promotion, no nothing, it just dropped into iTunes (exclusively mind you). That of course was the reason it did so well — the surprise launch of a full album complete with individual videos for each stunned the media and cause a tidal wave of social media exposure for Mrs Jay-Z way more than any marketing campaign could have done.

Obama Wishes Washington Was More Like ‘House of Cards’
United States President Obama stated in jokingly in a press conference that he wishes Washington politics were as “ruthlessly efficient” as in the Netflix show ‘House of Cards’. Although in fairness Kevin Spacey’s character has to kill people to get things done efficiently.

NICE FIND

Some advice from Reddit:

Let me know if I missed anything this week in the comments… they’re also a good place to leave any big things I should mention next time.