While there are few things as awesome as the Internet, we all need time off from it occasionally. Here’s a handy guide to help you catch up with the tech news you missed, along with interesting reads from The Next Web and beyond.
This weekend was dominated by the sad news that Aaron Swartz, who co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification aged just 14 and was involved in the early days of Reddit and the Creative Commons movement, had been found dead, aged 26. It’s well worth reading the posts by his friends Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig, which we’ve linked to below.
In the news
- Windows Phone users report playback issues with YouTube, days after the Google Maps brouhaha
- The Norwegian Ministry of Finance may open source cash registers to prevent tax fraud
- This is the funniest Windows error message you’ve ever seen
- Windows RT mod boosts touch response on your Surface
- Astounding: National Geographic is celebrating its 125th anniversary, in pictures of course
- With more than 2.5m visitors so far, Google’s London Web Lab experiments are still going strong
- Oracle ships Java 7 Update 11 with vulnerability fixes, increased security level for Java applets
Good reads
- Larry Page ignored Steve Jobs’s deathbed advice, and Google is doing great
- 11 Indian startups strut their stuff on Demo Day at Microsoft’s accelerator in Bangalore
- A quiet killer: Why video games are so addictive
- How to start your social media year off with a bang
- 14 startups we predict will go even bigger in 2013
- Lebanon is tough for tech entrepreneurs, but that’s not holding them back
- 29 new inspiring responsive designs on the web
- 38 Of the most beautiful typeface designs released this winter
Interesting stories from beyond The Next Web
- RIP, Aaron Swartz [Boing Boing]
- Prosecutor as bully [Lessig Blog]
- From guard shack to global giant: How did Lenovo become the world’s biggest computer company? [The Economist]
- The Genius of Samsung: How the biggest tech company in the world got that way. [Slate]
Image credit: Thinkstock
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