Money Watch

A handful of former students claiming to be “made poor by the business of education” are protesting their student loans by refusing to pay them.

They’re calling themselves the Corinthian 15, named for their number and the now-defunct chain of for-profit schools they attended, Corinthian Colleges.

Corinthian was largely sold off last fall for parts after its practices came under the scrutiny of federal regulators. A lawsuit by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accused it of an illegal and “predatory lending scheme,” and using falsified job placement figures to “lure” students in.

But not all students qualified for that program, and even those who did qualify would see only 40% of their debt forgiven.

The Corinthian 15, meanwhile, said the loans they’re on the hook for amount to “an immoral system that profits from our aspirations.”

“We paid dearly for degrees that have led to unemployment or to jobs that don’t pay a living wage. We can’t and won’t pay any longer,” they wrote in an open letter to the federal Education Department, one of

Netflix’s “House of Cards” is back for a third season, and the binges are underway.

If you’re avoiding spoilers, rest assured — there are none here. As the show’s creator Beau Willimon says, a twist you don’t see coming is “a magical thing.”

“I’m going to sound sort of corny here,” Willimon said, “but it’s a magical thing to experience a surprising element of the story for the first time and have it truly be surprising. It’s like a spell. It’s a sort of act of voodoo. It’s that thing that happens to you as a viewer, that you can never have again, because you know now.”

In a wide-ranging interview with CNNMoney, Willimon talked about the significance of the third season — which debuted all at once on Friday morning — and how the very word “television” is being redefined.

“Is the term ‘TV show’ even really applicable anymore?”

“House of Cards” is what Willimon calls “a paradigmatic shift in the way that people consume their entertainment.” Not everyone who watches season three will watch all of the episodes at once, but many will — and what matters is the choice.

The arrival of new distribution options like Netflix are causing

The dress: See the real color for yourself

What matters most about #TheDress isn’t the color scheme. It’s the popularity of the story.

BuzzFeed’s now-famous Thursday story — simply titled “What Colors Are The Dress?” — now looks like it’ll become the sprawling web site’s most-viewed post ever.

“We’ve had other huge hits,” BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith said. But this one “went bigger faster.”

Maybe that’s the lesson for BuzzFeed and its many rivals: The speed with which #TheDress happened. Stories that previously would have “gone viral” over a period of days can now achieve the same success in hours.

Smith credits the proliferation of mobile devices and the ever-increasing “universality” of the Internet.

“The network is so much more fully built out than it was even a year or two ago,” he said.

To his point, 79% of Thursday’s views of “What Colors Are The Dress?” (which was basically an optical illusion) came from mobile devices like iPhones. The huge proportion of mobile viewership underscores why technology companies — and, more recently, media companies — have been talking about being “mobile-first.”

When Smith was on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, and I commented about the mobile-focused future, he said “It’s the present, not the future.”

“Certainly,” he said, “the way we think about our readers is a person holding

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