Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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The U.S. digital ad market grew by nearly $12 billion last year, with Google and Facebook collecting 77 cents of each new dollar spent, according to eMarketer. Peter and Maria Hoey June 19, 2017 5:30 a.m. ET Facebook Inc. FB -2.59% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL -0.02% Google tower so far above the rest of the…
Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people…
Image: Maxpixel I was hoping to start 2018 off with a positive blog, like some of my colleagues, but then I glanced at my feeds and saw ‘chocolate extinction’ all over them. Apparently, news broke over the new year that chocolate was going to go extinct in mere decades, as climate change threatens the survival…
Cloudflare’s network powers internet connections to millions of websites, but most of the 2.8 billion people who use its network every month have never heard of the company. That is, until last August, when Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince made the controversial decision to cut off its service to white supremacist website “The Daily Stormer” in…
By the end of the thread, McCarthy made it clear that these trolls are part of the “alt-right.” “The problem I’m stating here is not that ‘there are trolls on the internet’ but that people who proclaim to be on our side are trying to tear down women in our in-group,” she wrote. Another self-described “conservative woman”…
react-text: 248 On Saturday, at /react-text react-text: 249 a Charlottesville rally populated by alt-right activists and white supremacists, a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring 19 and /react-text react-text: 251 killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer /react-text react-text: 252 . The man arrested in connection with the murder, James Alex Fields, Jr., had previously /react-text…
Researchers said it was “trivial” to identify users and view their browsing habits in purchased ‘anonymous’ browsing data. SHARE TWEET In August 2016, a data broker received a phone call from a woman named Anna Rosenberg, who worked for a small startup in Tel Aviv. Rosenberg claimed she was training a neural network, a type…
react-text: 137 There may be no more direct metric of social influence than one’s ability to change language. Getting your friends to talk like you, after all, is a hallmark of adolescent power (“Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” barks Regina George, blond queen bee of the 2004 teen…
Advisers who represent what remains of Gawker Media Group in bankruptcy are exploring whether they can bring a viable lawsuit against Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who helped finance Hulk Hogan’s successful legal battle against the publisher. Gawker on Tuesday asked a bankruptcy judge for permission to subpoena Mr. Thiel to obtain information upon…
In the few days since Electronic Arts and BioWare let fans start playing the first 10 hours of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I suspect things haven’t gone according to their internal marketing plan. Instead of people sharing the cool moments they’re having in space, they’re retweeting the awkward animations and various examples of a lax attention to detail….