Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy (Fast Forward Your Product Career: The Two Books Required to Land Any PM Job)

VPNs create a sort of end-to-end encryption between you and the websites you’re visiting, so your router can’t harm you.[700] Technologists often say that VPNs create a direct, secure “tunnel” between you and websites.

For instance, in 1983 the US government made GPS data publicly available — and today over 3 million jobs, from truck driving to precision farming, rely on open GPS data.[1275] (Self-driving cars do, too.

Amazon is famously ruthless when it tries to expand its e-commerce empire. In 2009, Amazon noticed an up-and-coming online retail startup called Quidsi, which sold baby products on Diapers.com. Amazon sent an executive to have lunch with the Quidsi founders and offered to buy the company. The founders said no.[1440] But then Amazon started aggressi

computers only have two letters — 0 and 1 — and store all kinds of information, from text to images to movies, using a series of 1’s and 0’s. Each 1 or 0 is called a bit. Bits are too small to be of much use on their own, so we usually measure data in bytes, which are groups of eight bits.

Blocking a website entirely is pretty obvious, so many ISPs prefer a more subtle approach: “throttling.” Throttling is when ISPs slow down content from particular websites, often competitors’.[1220] In 2013 and 2014, Comcast and Verizon slowed down content from Netflix,[1221] perhaps because they wanted to give a boost to their own video-streaming

Sponsored content is highly effective for advertisers: native ads are clicked on over twice as much as banner ads.

So, to summarize, your browser now knows to use HTTPS to grab the homepage of 216.58.219.206, an IP address that humans fondly call google.com. Your browser packages up this “request” and sends it to the huge computers, or “servers,” that power Google’s website.

When Western companies expand into emerging markets, they tend to just import their existing apps and business models.

The startup Nuro figured that, while self-driving cars aren’t yet