TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Matt Alexander:

The reason advertising is the predominant means for Google’s revenue is because it is business model agnostic. Knowing it can advertise products to people atop its various platforms, Google can sustain and build virtually anything it wants for the maximum number of users. The cost of entry for a user into the Google ecosystem is a minuscule processing cycle occurring somewhere deep within an anonymous server farm to push a targeted ad towards you.

Perhaps you, as a technologist, balk at such an intrusion. Most, however, focus only upon the end-result.

For mobile, it isn’t the case that mobile advertising allows Google to “sustain” anything they would like to build. Estimates place mobile’s contribution to Google’s total revenue at 13 percent for 2013, despite all of the Android and iOS devices in use. What’s allowed them to experiment so much on the “desktop” web and on mobile is revenue generated from Google search advertisements, which have been strong for years.

That success allowed the experimentation to happen. As search increasingly shifts to mobile devices, however, revenue generated from mobile will have to grow substantially to replace desktop-based search, and grow dramatically to offset mobile’s lower advertising margin. Which means that advertising probably is not and will not be something that’s built atop its new mobile products and services, but will instead be built into the products and services themselves to maximize effectiveness. You won’t see ads in a yellow box besides search results on Google Glass. The pizza restaurant it suggests when you ask for a dinner recommendation might be the ad, or the nice Thai place a couple blocks away that Google Now recommends because it knows it’s almost dinner time and, from your search results and emails, it knows you like Thai food, might be as well.

Which is fine, in and of itself. But things can get into the gray spectrum really quick when a company is monitoring your location, search queries, emails, calendar, social network activity (if you use Google+), et al., in order to not only provide you with specific recommendations and timely information (“you need to leave in ten minutes for your 2pm meeting”), but also to better serve you targeted and timely adverts. Many people are fine with it, of course (I have my misgivings, but don’t find it morally wrong), but many people might not feel so good about their activity being logged so they can be sold to more effectively. And it’s certainly a lot easier to cross the line into abusing that power in order to maximize revenue rather than to maximize utility for the user when your primary source of revenue are the advertisements themselves.

That says nothing, either, about whether the world Google is creating with Glass and Google Now is a desirable one. But, nonetheless, Google is not a villain, nor is Apple a savior. As Matt notes, Google is filled with incredibly bright people working feverishly to create things they think will make people’s lives a little better. That’s absolutely true, and I’ve no doubt that Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s motivations are the same. That does not mean, however, that the business model they choose is divisible from the form their product and services take, nor that the products and services they create are necessarily beneficial. I don’t think it’s Google’s goal to push as many advertisements as possible through everyone’s eyeballs, but I’m also concerned about the philosophical motivation underlying Google’s path (and, for that matter, Facebook’s).

Glenn Greenwald:

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ – that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information – is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

Greg Sargent recounts a discussion he had with Mark Marzetti, a national security reporter for the New York Times, about whether the AP and Rosen cases, and the Obama administration’s earlier leak prosecutions, is chilling his sources’ willingness to talk:

“There’s no question that this has a chilling effect,” Mazzetti said. “People who have talked in the past are less willing to talk now. Everyone is worried about communication and how to communicate, and [asking if there] is there any method of communication that is not being monitored. It’s got people on both sides — the reporter and source side — pretty concerned.”

Mazzetti, who’s been reporting on national security since 2001, suggested that what we’re seeing under the Obama administration, which has investigated an unprecedented number leak cases, is something new. He noted that a kind of unwritten consensus existed under the Bush administration that even if officials were angry about leaks, probes into them never really ended up leading anywhere.

I suppose this is the “balance” President Obama seeks.

The Washington Post reported Sunday about a Justice Department investigation into James Rosen, Fox News’ chief political correspondent in Washington, for a story he wrote in 2009 that used apparently leaked classified information about North Korea:

Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target.

…

Court documents show abundant evidence gathered from Kim’s office computer and phone records, but investigators said they needed to go a step further to build their case, seizing two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal e-mails — and all of his e-mail exchanges with Kim.

Privacy protections limit searching or seizing a reporter’s work, but not when there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks. A federal judge signed off on the search warrant — agreeing that there was probable cause that Rosen was a co-conspirator.

Journalists are not protected from searches when they report unauthorized “leaks” of classified information. Think about that: what that means is journalists should only feel safe to report information that they obtain through other channels or that the government intentionally releases to them.

There’s nothing free about a press that faces investigation for reporting information the government doesn’t made public.

Square has a teaser page up for Square Cash. The tag line is “Email money to anyone’s debit card.” (Small side-note: that’s one of the best teaser pages I’ve ever seen.)

Sign me up, please. This sounds awesome.

Farhad Manjoo:

Tesla is trying to create this infrastructure by itself, which means everything’s moving more slowly than it could. If the entire car business worked together to improve this stuff, batteries and charging infrastructure would improve at a faster pace.

So how can Tesla persuade General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, and other car giants—not to mention other car startups that are similar in size to Tesla—to all work together to improve the world’s electric vehicle infrastructure? By licensing its tech to its competitors, in the same way that Google gives Android away to every phone-maker in the world.

That’s exactly what Tesla has started doing.

Interesting idea; I wasn’t aware that Tesla was licensing its motor and battery technology. Getting more electric cars on the road and a shared quick-charging infrastructure in place would certainly benefit everyone involved.

Research suggests that the brain corrects grammar errors while you listen to others speak:

The brain does all kinds of amazing things while you’re not paying attention (you know, like regularly remind you to breathe). But it’s also engaged in less critical but equally interesting tasks, like correcting the grammar of the person sitting across from you at dinner. A University of Oregon study has logged hard evidence that the brain processes and compensates for errors in grammar and syntax without your being aware of it.

The Verge’s Casey Newton has a good look at the new Google+ features:

Enter the data center. Google is betting that its powerful machine-learning algorithms will work not just to attract users to Google+, but to keep them there. And as with Instagram and Facebook before it, photographs will be central to the effort. Photographers were among the most enthusiastic early adopters of Google+, which alone among its peers displayed photos up to 2,048 pixels wide. (Last month Google began permitting full-size photos to be uploaded, though they count against the free 15GB shared-storage limit Google now has for Gmail, Drive, and Google+.) Until now, Google has worked to make Google+ the best online home for your photos. With today’s update, it wants to make your photos look better there than they do anywhere else.

There’s certainly some neat ideas here; surfacing the better shots (ones that aren’t blurry, under or over-exposed, and duplicates) is nice, for example, and if the auto-enhance isn’t overzealous, that’s convenient as well. (Some features, like combining multiple group photos together so you get one where everyone’s smiling, or automatically smoothing people’s skin to hide imperfections, might be a little less exciting.)

Google announced a lot of exciting things. Google search by voice, where Google will reply with answers instead of just search results in many cases, is coming to the desktop as well, and is continuing to get much better. Google+ is nice generally and the iOS application is quite lovely. Their new streaming music service looks pretty good. Despite that I think putting a screen in front of our eyes is a terrible idea, Google Glass is impressive work in many ways. Etc. etc. But while much of what Google is doing is nice in and of itself, there doesn’t appear to be a thread running through it all—it’s just a lot of stuff.

Google is doing incredible things and is capable of incredible things, but I think that’s their single biggest weakness: an inability to focus their work for a single thesis. I speculated in March that Larry Page was re-focusing Google; that may still be true, but this year’s Google I/O certainly doesn’t support that idea.

Terrible news:

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has been crippled by the failure of one of the reaction wheels that keep it pointed, the space agency is announcing this afternoon, according to astronomers close to the situation.

Hopefully they can get it fixed. Kepler is one of the most important space missions we’ve conducted in the last few decades.

Megan McArdle:

There’s a growing school of thought among columnists and television pundits which says that the “real” scandal in Washington is not the fact that a government agency investigated people based on their political leanings, but that 501(c)(4)s are multiplying like Typhoid bacteria, allowing anonymous donors to fund unlimited amounts of political speech.   These groups, it is rather tediously explained, should actually have been registered under section 527, which would require them to disclose their donors. A related genre is the column explaining how the real victims here are liberls*, the Obama administration and maybe the American public.

I’m going to stick with “the real scandal is a employees of a government agency using the large powers we have granted them to selectively investigate people based on their political beliefs” and “the real victims are the people who were investigated”, though of course, I think this is also terrible for the American people, because we deserve good government.

“Yes, this happened, and it shouldn’t have, but the real issue here is…”

Josh Barro:

A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on political 501(c)(4) organizations — which is what the IRS was trying to do when it touched off the scandal over Tea Party groups — focus on the claim that ideological, political groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required under the law. Not so fast.

Josh Barro:

A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on political 501(c)(4) organizations — which is what the IRS was trying to do when it touched off the scandal over Tea Party groups — focus on the claim that ideological, political groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required under the law. Not so fast.

Josh Barro:

A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on political 501(c)(4) organizations — which is what the IRS was trying to do when it touched off the scandal over Tea Party groups — focus on the claim that ideological, political groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required under the law. Not so fast.

Mad Mimi is a design-oriented email newsletter service founded in 2008. Developed to provide a mobile-app-like feel, and with a drag-and-drop email composer, Mad Mimi offers a simple, elegant user experience that helps customers create, send, and track beautiful html email campaigns.

Mad Mimi also offers robust APIs, integrations, and add-on features. This makes it a perfect fit for today’s visionaries, artists, and entrepreneurs, including great digital brands like Fancy and StumbleUpon, who use Mad Mimi to communicate with their customers.

Best yet, Mad Mimi is free for up to 2,500 contacts. We hope you’ll give us a try or email us with questions.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

The ACLU made a Freedom of Information Act request about text message surveillance, and they received an entirely redacted document.

Because transparency!