Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There are fatalities after a man opened fire during a Shabbat service on Saturday morning. Four police officers have also been shot and wounded. A suspect has been arrested. Multiple people have been killed, and four police officers wounded, after a gunman opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Saturday morning. A suspect…
On Thursday, viewers of MSNBC’s Morning Joe were treated/subjected to co-host Mika Brzezinski waxing philosophical about the recent wave of mail bombs that have been sent to prominent Democrats who have, coincidentally, been singled out by President Donald Trump over the past several months. While Mika began by blaming Trump’s rhetoric for creating an environment…
ImageAndy Rubin, the creator of Android, left Google in 2014 with a $90 million exit package. The last payment is scheduled for next month.CreditCreditTomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg The internet giant paid Mr. Rubin $90 million and praised him, while keeping silent about a misconduct claim. Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, left Google in 2014 with a…
Illustration: Angelica Alzona (Gizmodo Media Group) When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think…
Image: Gizmodo Somewhere in the heart of Facebook HQ, a shadowy team toils behind the closed doors of what would appear to be an average conference room. This is Facebook’s War Room, and it’s the thin line standing between us and chaos. Gizmodo did not visit the War Room, but early Thursday morning, almost simultaneously,…
The Secret Service said Wednesday that it had intercepted packages containing “potential explosive devices” addressed to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in New York and former president Barack Obama in Washington. The devices were recovered not long after an explosive device was found in a mailbox at the Bedford, N.Y., home of George Soros, the liberal…
Back in August, I wrote a big post about the impossible choices that large internet platforms have to make concerning content moderation. A large part of the point of that post is that there is no perfect content moderation, and especially at scale, there are going to be large swaths of people who disagree with…
For years we’ve talked about the journalistic perils of what journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” or the pretty common misconception that journalists should prioritize factual symmetry in news reporting, instead of actually trying to get to the truth. This usually results in “he said, she said” reporting where both sides are…
GMAIL’S “SMART REPLY” FEATURE OFFERS three options in a choose-your-own-adventure game at the bottom of received emails: “Got it.” “Got it, thanks!” and “Looks good!” are common choices. Sometimes the suggested responses are lightly ridiculous. An “I love you” email can prompt “It works!”—perhaps an overcorrection from an early bug when the algorithm was saying “I love…
TAPACHULA, Mexico — As the migrant caravan advanced through Mexico en route to the US on Monday, 15 days before midterm elections, President Donald Trump attempted to stoke new fears, tweeting that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in.” “I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy [sic],” he…