Ben Thompson, writing at Stratchery:

This is the bet: while in the 1990s the complexity of the Internet made it difficult for businesses to go online, providing an opening for IBM to sell solutions, today IBM argues the reduction of cloud computing to three centralized providers makes businesses reluctant to commit to any one of them. IBM is betting it can again provide the solution, combining with Red Hat to build products that will seamlessly bridge private data centers and all of the public clouds.

IBM believes their play to staying relevant in the “cloud” era, if you’ll call it that, is to acquire RedHat. Good luck to them. The tweets about the acquisition are fantastic:

"Bureaucratic, old-school legacy software vendor which survives on services revenues in massive acquisition shock as it is purchased by IBM" – @lproven

— David Gerard (@davidgerard) October 29, 2018

Dear Red Hat staff, congrats on your new home in IBM. This IBM memo may be useful.

"Do not interact with [CEO] Ginni or the group unless they approach you first. This means no selfies, no bathroom run-ins, elevator pitches, or water fountain soirees…"https://t.co/40bBw3rSSt

— The Register (@TheRegister) October 28, 2018

Thanks to Jason Kottke, I came across CBC Uncover: Escaping NXIVM:

NXIVM calls itself a humanitarian community. Experts call it a cult. Uncover: Escaping NXIVM is an investigative podcast series about the group, its leader Keith Raniere and one woman’s journey to get out.

This is a great podcast and if you liked Serial, Making a Murderer, and others like it, definitely check it out. It’s available on just about every podcast platform you can think of.

Netflix comes at us with a new tale about Robert the Bruce, King of Scots. Coming November 9th to the service and select theaters, this is Outlaw King. 

As a part of his latest special, 100% Fresh, out now on Netflix, Adam Sandler drops a beat on about what most of us carry always: a phone, wallet, and keys.

Killer reporting from Daisuke Wakabayashi and Katie Benner over at The New York Times:

Mr. Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men.

Shocker. However you interpret this, Rubin denied the coercion on Twitter, but not the payments.

The article goes into detail about a host of other accounts too:

In 2013, Richard DeVaul, a director at Google X, the company’s research and development arm, interviewed Star Simpson, a hardware engineer. During the job interview, she said he told her that he and his wife were “polyamorous,” a word often used to describe an open marriage. She said he invited her to Burning Man, an annual festival in the Nevada desert, the following week.

Um, creepy?

At Mr. DeVaul’s encampment, Ms. Simpson said, he asked her to remove her shirt and offered a back rub. She said she refused. When he insisted, she said she relented to a neck rub.

“I didn’t have enough spine or backbone to shut that down as a 24-year-old,” said Ms. Simpson, now 30.

A few weeks later, Google told her she did not get the job, without explaining why.

…She said the official asked her to stay quiet about what had happened, which she did — until Mr. DeVaul’s public profile began rising in articles in The New York Times and The Atlantic.

I don’t want to spoil too much of this. Just read it. It’s really good.

From Polygon:

Now we’re getting somewhere. Cameras and photographs are just one way of seeing the world, a way that in so many regards does not reflect the way that we see. But there are other ways of creating an image, and Garbut’s explanation of Red Dead Redemption 2’s philosophy of lighting, well, paints a picture, if you’ll pardon the expression.

“[We] looked to reality, we looked to the places that we were riffing from. […] However, there were certain areas like lighting where there were some direct inspirations. Owen Shepherd, our lighting director, looked to the pastoral and landscape painters like Turner, Rembrandt and American landscape painters from the 19th century such as Albert Bierstadt, Frank Johnson, and Charles Russell.”

In my opinion, that’s not where Red Dead Redemption 2’s painterly influences stop, but it’s a great place to begin.

This is a great piece by Arthur Gies and the images are stunning. I started playing RDR2 last night when it opened up at midnight EST (9pm at my home) and the visuals are simply stunning. The game is almost 100GB in size and after seeing some of the scenes capes so far in the game, it’s totally worth it. 

(featured image: Red Dead Redemption 2, courtesy of Rockstar by way of Polygon)

In a not surprising turn of events, it’s reported that the GrayKey box used by law enforcement to brute-force their way into your phone does not work with iOS 12 devices.

From Forbes:

Multiple sources familiar with the GrayKey tech tell Forbes the device can no longer break the passcodes of any iPhone running iOS 12 or above. On those devices, GrayKey can only do what’s called a “partial extraction,” sources from the forensic community said. That means police using the tool can only draw out unencrypted files and some metadata, such as file sizes and folder structures.

I consider this a net win. This is what the court system and warrants are for. 

It’s not new, but I stumbled across Alton Brown on an episode of Hot Ones, and I loved it.

From Facebook:

Facebook’s Ad Archive is a searchable database. It includes ads related to politics and issues of national importance that have run on Facebook or Instagram.

This report is a weekly summary of the archive and includes data for ads that have been viewed by people in the US for the time period selected above.

Making this report available to the public is part of Facebook’s efforts to increase transparency in advertising.

A step in the right direction, for sure!