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Amazon: Kindle Books Outsold Real Books This Christmas
Wired: "Happy Christmas. I got a coffee pot. You? If you got a book, it’s likely that it wasn’t made of paper. The succinct title of this Amazon press release tells the whole story: “On Christmas Day, for the First Time Ever, Customers Purchased More Kindle Books Than Physical Books.”
According to the release, “Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon’s history.” Amazon still refuses to break out actual Kindle sales figures, but the following snippet shows you just how good a holiday season Amazon had: “On Amazon’s peak day, December 14, 2009, customers ordered over 9.5 million items worldwide.” That’s a number that would bring most servers to their knees, let alone physical delivery fulfillment systems."
Interesting? It's interesting to me, too. Why? Well...it's all about software. Stay tuned...
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Happy 10th year, JCertif!
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Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
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InfoQ Reading List
QCon London 2026: Morgan Stanley Rethinks Its API Program for the MCP Era
Morgan Stanley engineers Jim Gough and Andreea Niculcea showed how they're retooling the bank's API program for AI agents using MCP and FINOS CALM. Live demos covered compliance guardrails, deployment gates, and zero-downtime rollouts across 100+ APIs. First API deployment shrank from two years to two weeks. They also demoed Google's A2A protocol running alongside MCP.
By Steef-Jan WiggersQCon London 2026: Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet
Christine Lemmer-Webber, Executive Director at the Spritely Institute, and David Thompson, CTO at the Spritely Institute, presented “Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet” at QCon London 2026, where they discussed how Spritely works to decentralize the Internet with new foundational technologies that put users in control.
By Michael RedlichHow to Shape the Engineering Culture in Software Companies
You can find your way through an organization by figuring out what artifacts people leave behind, David Grizzanti mentioned at InfoQ Dev Summit Boston. He compared culture to anthropology, suggested studying behaviors, power dynamics, and decisions first, and then patiently model and reward new norms, build allies, and use influence and leading by example, to shift engineering culture over time.
By Ben LindersQCon London 2026: Refreshing Stale Code Intelligence
At QCon London 2026, Jeff Smith discussed the growing mismatch between AI coding models and real-world software development. While AI tools are enabling developers to generate code faster than ever, Smith argued that the models themselves are increasingly “stale” because they lack the repository-specific knowledge required to produce production-ready contributions.
By Daniel DominguezAI Model Discovers 22 Firefox Vulnerabilities in Two Weeks
Claude Opus 4.6 discovered 22 Firefox vulnerabilities in two weeks, including 14 high-severity bugs, as nearly 20% of all critical Firefox vulnerabilities were fixed in 2025. The AI also wrote working exploits for two bugs, demonstrating emerging capabilities that give defenders a temporary advantage but signal an accelerating arms race in cybersecurity.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
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