Monsanto’s Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming | Vanity Fair

Gary Rinehart clearly remembers the summer day in 2002 when the stranger walked in and issued his threat. Rinehart was behind the counter of the Square Deal, his “old-time country store,” as he calls it, on the fading town square of Eagleville, Missouri, a tiny farm community 100 miles north of Kansas City. The Square…

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Cooking Panda Owner Is the Latest Digital Publisher to Shut Down After Facebook Changes – WSJ

Add another name to the list of publishers that is shutting down and blaming FacebookFB 0.53% : Render Media. The digital media company behind recipe video publisher Cooking Panda and news and politics site Opposing Views says it is planning to close shop, pointing to a combination of factors, including recent changes by Facebook to improve the quality…

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‘Everyone was a bit suspicious’: Scarred news publishers are wary of Facebook’s latest Watch gambit – Digiday

Slot 1 In February, a week before Campbell Brown said onstage at Recode’s Code Media that Facebook would carve out a section within its Watch video hub for news publishers, the company’s head of news partnerships threw out the idea in a meeting in New York with several publishers, including traditional media companies like CNN…

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A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal” – MIT Technology Review

Article Topper: Vertical The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp. There’s never been anything quite like Nectome, though. Next week, at YC’s “demo days,” Nectome’s cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming…

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How Google is using its search clout to steer publishers to use AMP – Digiday

Google and Facebook can exert their power on publishers in varied ways. Take Google’s effort to get publishers to adopt its fast-loading article page code, Accelerated Mobile Pages. In theory, adoption of AMP is voluntary. In reality, publishers that don’t want to see their search traffic evaporate have little choice. New data from publisher analytics firm…

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POE: An Economic Tool for Crowdsourcing Truth – Poet Blog

Po.et is a shared, open, universal ledger designed to record metadata and ownership information for digital creative assets. Po.et is a continuation of Proof of Existence, the first non-financial application of the blockchain. By creating an open platform on the Bitcoin blockchain, Po.et aims to create the most institutional, globally-verifiable record of digital creative assets….

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Amazon’s answer to UPS is reportedly getting its first proper launch in LA – The Verge

Amazon will finally launch its shipping service for businesses in LA in the “coming weeks,” according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The service, dubbed Shipping with Amazon or SWA, will directly compete with companies like Fedex and UPS. However, it will be initially restricted to companies selling goods on Amazon’s own…

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