Yesterday was not an insanely awesome #sundayfunday for Google Ventures general partner Kevin Rose.Protestors gathered outside the Digg founder's San Francisco home in Potrero Hill with banners calling him "a parasite," threatening to "snip snip" his "ballz" (a reference to a joke Rose made in 2008 about cutting a woman's breasts with a pair of scissors), and demanding a $3 billion ransom.On Instagram, Rose posted a photo of the flier that demonstrators passed around to his neighbors, which said:With each new tech corporation comes a wave of fresh techies, who on average earn four times more than a normal service worker.We are the ones who serve them coffee, deliver them food, suck their cocks, watch their kids, and mop their floors.Nearly all of them are just like Kevin Rose and we are tired of this miserable and untenable situation.A report on IndyBay claims that the protestors were service workers and part of a group called The Counterforce, which takes its name from Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow.

In Pynchon's book, The Counterforce is "an alliance of misfits against the depredations of technology."The group previously claimed credit for protesting in front of the home of Anthony Levandowski, an engineer for Google X. Levandowski was prominently featured in The New Yorker's piece about self-driving cars, telling the magazine: "I only do cool shit."BothRose and Levandowski are publicly visible figures . . . who don't control Google's corporate coffers.Regardless, in Rose's case, the Counterforce's grievances culminated in a ransom note demanding $3 billion to create "anti-capitalist" communities that may or may not be located "in San Francisco or the woods":To this end, we now make our first clear demand of Google.We demand that Google give three billion dollars to an anarchist organization of our choosing.This money will then be used to create autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California.In these communities, whether in San Francisco or in the woods, no one will ever have to pay rent and housing will be free.

With this three billion from Google, we will solve the housing crisis in the Bay Area and prove to the world that an anarchist world is not only possible but in fact irrepressible.If given the chance, most humans will pursue a course towards increased freedom and greater liberty.As it stands, only people like Kevin Rose are given the opportunity to reshape their world, and look at what they do with those opportunities.Why does the Counterforce think it can get $3 billion for hounding Rose when activists weren't able to get anywhere close to their $1 billion goal in penance for private shuttle buses impinging on public transportation stops?bitcoin bay torontoEh, it's best not to seek a coherent argument from the ransom note, which is about as long as Gravity's Rainbow and just as postmodern.dogecoin carThe screed is so ludicrous that Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal suspects it might be a "false flag," carried out by different people than the service workers they purport to be.bitcoin money laundering case

Perhaps, like the macabre Defend the Bay bus protests in Oakland, the organizers figured a spectacle is worth the free social media advertising.The flier was posted on a Wordpress blog called kevinroseisaterribleperson.The author of the post goes by the handle nicolasflamel2014, either in reference to the self-proclaimed alchemist who donated most of his wealth to charity or Harry Potter.The Counterforce might be the most cofounding arm of the opposition, but others are also trying to shake some change from the tech sector's deep pockets.bitcoin btc meaningOn Friday afternoon, The New York Times reported that a rash of startups, including Meetup, Vimeo, Basecamp, Bit.ly, Shutterstock, and MailChimp were told that their sites would be hit with denial-of-service or DDoS attacks if they didn't pay "$300 worth of Bitcoins."bitcoin core stuckThe FBI is looking into culprit or group of culprits behind the Bitcoin ransom emails.bitcoin tl değeri

"Even after the attack was mitigated, the attacker continued to send increasingly whiny emails," notes the Times.The specter of ball violence does not seem to have shaken up Rose too badly.He acknowledged that his joke was "horrible" and that rising rents, evictions, and diversity "definitely" need to be figured out.that said, I did agree w/ them that we need to solve rising rents, keep the SF culture, and crack down on landlords booting folks out.— Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) April 6, 2014 SF is such a great place, definitely need to figure out a way to keep the diversity— Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) April 6, 2014 Along with the chastened tweets on gentrification, Rose couldn't help but take a swing at the demonstrators for relying on Google products.they recoded video on an android phone and said they were going to post it to youtube, which i thought odd.— Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) April 6, 2014 However Rose, who became a senior product manager for Google+ after selling his startup Milk, skipped past his similarly odd choice to post about the incident on Instagram and Twitter, rather than Google's social network.

kevin rose Entrepreneur-investor Kevin Rose is relinquishing his role as CEO of Hodinkee, a New York-based site for wristwatch enthusiasts, and moving back to California.According to a newly published Medium post, Rose will work as a venture partner at the early-stage venture firm True Ventures.Read More Product Hunt, the product aggregation site known for putting new tech products to a vote went off its regular tech product vertical today with the launch of Snoop’s new “Bush” album and a coinciding AMA with the rapper.Snoop spent several hours chatting with fans about everything from buying “house shoes” with bitcoin and the best way to support artists to how… Read More “Removed instagram friend-finding cause they blocked us!#nochill” This note in hip GIF app Phhhoto‘s latest release notes was how it announced its users can no longer easily follow their Instagram friends.Instagram confirmed to me that it has blocked Phhhoto’s Find Friends access, but it has a policy of not discussing platform enforcement issues regarding… Read More Apple’s focus should be on selling as many watches as possible, not becoming a fashion brand.

Read More “I did not like watches my entire life,” Digg co-founder Kevin Rose tells me.That’s an odd admission for a man who just launched Watchville, an app that aggregates news from top wristwatch blogs, and offers an atomic clock tool to help you set your timepiece and its moon phases.But Rose explains, “My father passed away and left me with one really nice watch.It was… Read More Sometimes multiple apps adopt similar ideas and designs as part of some peculiar cultural zeitgeist.But things get murkier when ideas become shared and adopted by long-time friends riffing on similar concepts.That appears to be what happened to Kevin Rose and Danny Trinh, who built separate photo-sharing apps that ended up looking eerily similar.Read More “If you made photos tiny and kept them tiny so they can’t be enlarged, would it reduce the anxiety around taking a photo and get people to take more photos?” Kevin Rose asks me.He’s not quite sure, but he’s going to find out with Tiiny, the new iOS app from his mobile laboratory North that launches this morning.

It lets you take a thumbnail-sized photo or GIF… Read More Digg, Milk, and Revision3 founder Kevin Rose recently left Google Ventures to start a new mobile development house called North, and now we have some details on the firm’s first app, Tiiny, which will launch soon.The basic idea is that Tiiny lets you share thumbnail-sized photos and animated GIFs to a grid of pics on your friends’ phones, and they disappear 24 hours later.Rather… Read More Serial entrepreneur, investor, and overall Internet good guy Kevin Rose is stepping down from his role of general partner at Google Ventures.The Digg and Revision3 founder will be moving into a part-time role at the firm, and will be using all his spare time to embark on a whole new adventure building a mobile startup called North.Read More More news Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose says that his San Francisco home was visited by protesters today, who held up a banner calling him a “parasite” and distributed leaflets with the same message.

What did he do to deserve this?Well, he invested in startups.Rose posted a photo on Instagram of what he said was a flier distributed to his neighbors.It says, in part: Read More Some days you’re on call for weekend news duty and it’s pretty boring and you get tired of just sitting around waiting for something to happen and you’re just sort of hanging out and watching Twitter and HOLY SHIT IS THAT KEVIN ROSE TOSSING A RACCOON?Why yes, yes it is.Read More In the most recent episode of my Foundation video series, I sat down with the founder of StyleSeat, Melody McCloskey.Melody shares how her frustration with finding a stylist inspired her to build the platform.She also talks through the challenges of reaching an audience who isn’t in front of a computer all day and how the web helps them grow their business and improve their client… Read More The latest episode of my Foundation video series comes to you filmed live from the Google Ventures Founder & CEO Summit last week.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Opsware and now General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.Read More In this edition of my Foundation video series, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad shares his inspiration for reinventing the radio.He reveals how a jailbroken iPhone played a key part in Pandora’s success, and explains why Thanksgiving is the biggest day of the year for the service., what it was like to be engineer during the… Read More Editor’s note: TechCrunch TV is very pleased to welcome a new show to our lineup, Kevin Rose’s Foundation series.Kevin, a partner at Google Ventures, has been producing high-quality, riveting one-on-one interviews with some of the tech world’s top entrepreneurs.I’m excited to announce that beginning today, TechCrunch will syndicate my Foundation video series… Read More We had the chance to catch up with entrepreneur and investor Kevin Rose during TechCrunch Disrupt, asking him about a multitude of startup zeitgeist topics, including the Y Combinator versus Google Ventures kerfuffle and what today’s high seed stage valuations mean for entrepreneurs.

Rose held that high valuations sometimes turns off potential investors, and then brought up how he had… Read More Last night, I wrote about Kevin Rose not responding to questions on his AMA on Reddit.Rose was at a birthday party last night but has returned to Reddit today and has posted YouTube responses to five Redditers’ questions.After all the coverage on Digg’s sale and Rose personally a few weeks ago and now on the launch of new Digg, it’s very interesting to hear Rose’s… Read More Kevin Rose began an AMA on Reddit on Tuesday evening and so far has answered zero questions.To be fair, he said ask me anything.He didn’t promise answers.Users have posted questions like, “What is your biggest regret with Digg?” Read More In one week, the Olympics kick off.When you think about it, they aren’t so different from our startup world.How many pitches have you heard that include the phrase “dream team?” If you had to compare the startup world to one sports league, what would it be?