Have you heard of Google AMP? That stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it’s a way of making webpages so that they load faster and display more efficiently on mobile devices. Oh, and it puts your website under Google’s control. Polemic Digital has an explanarant (that’s part explanation, part rant) on AMP making the case not to adopt it. It’s an interesting read, and here’s a taste:

AMP allows Google to basically take over hosting the web as well. The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website’s own hosting environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to further enhance user experience.

As a side benefit, it also allows Google full control over content monetisation. No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved and regulated by Google. If anything happens that falls outside of the AMP standard’s restrictions, the page in question simply becomes AMP-invalid and is ejected from the AMP cache – and subsequently from Google’s results. At that point the page might as well not exist any more.

All you scientists and Mark Watney (The Martian) fans: need some pocket change? «Looking to turn carbon from the planet Mars into useful compounds such as sugar, NASA is offering up to a cool $1 million to anyone who can solve how to accomplish such a process.» Sure beats potatoes, grown the Watney way. What a sweet challenge.

Peter Kafka of Re/code has great coverage of social media Congressional hearings on Wednesday. In attendance were Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CTO Cheryl Sandburg. The senior vice president Google wanted to send wasn’t high-ranking enough for the Senate committee that conducted the hearing. Here’s a snippet:

Sheryl did fine. Jack did quite well, all things considered. Google’s empty chair took a beating. And internet trolls showed up in real life to show what internet trolling looks like in real life.

And that’s pretty much all you need to know about what happened when Silicon Valley came to D.C. today.

Except that Re/code really has a lot more, and I found it a very interesting read.

Just the other day, the TMO staff was wondering about the recent spate of Apple Store thefts and how to stop them. It turns out that San Francisco Police Officers Association President Tony Montoya noted that two stores in S.F. have been immune so far. From Cult of Mac: «His theory about why they’ve escaped the Apple crime spree? Because both have uniformed officers stationed there.»  Interesting details here.