Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
About 20 PC games — including The Elder Scrolls Online and Conan Exiles — have removed a piece of third-party spyware tracking users’ activity outside of the game, and dozens more are said to still have it more than a week after it came to light on Reddit and Steam forums. Called Red Shell (yes,…
Three years ago, Lisa Linh quit her full-time job to travel the world and document it on Instagram, where she has nearly 100,000 followers; since then, she has stayed in breathtaking hotels everywhere from Mexico to Quebec to the Cook Islands. Often, she stays for free. Linh is part of an ever-growing class of people who have…
Several major acquisitions have helped Google and Facebook on their way to unprecedented dominance over the advertising supply chain, antitrust analysts argued at the Open Markets Institute forum in Washington last week. Why it matters: Many blame these two companies for absorbing the majority of ad revenue that would’ve gone to traditional media. Show…
You’ve likely seen the above photo of two fresh-faced and hoodie-clad Asian women on your Facebook feed, your email inbox, your Google searches, this Yahoo article — wherever your web browsing may take you. EverQuote, the company advertising this photo, is a legitimate company based in Cambridge, Mass., that helps you choose the best car…
Every hour of every day a million little crimes are committed online. And every time it happens, hundreds of legitimate businesses all over the world, with boards and shareholders and mission statements — some of them publicly listed — put the proceeds of those crimes in their own pockets. They do so knowingly. Some people…
This feels like something from a William Gibson cyberpunk dystopia novel, where the government has become so weak and useless, private corporations have been taking over the basic upkeep of the nation. But it’s not a William Gibson novel, there’s no plucky protagonist with some sort of cybernetic implant, it’s just America in 2018, with…
It’s not just you. Those pesky robocalls — at best annoying disturbances and at worst costly financial scams — are getting worse. In an age when cellphones have become extensions of our bodies, robocallers now follow people wherever they go, disrupting business meetings, church services and bedtime stories with their children. Though automated calls have…
The battle to protect your privacy is like a roller coaster, with breathtaking highs and turbulent lows. It is, after all, a constant game between the technology that guards your information and the trackers that find new ways to profile you. Apple hit a high point for privacy last week. Now Playing: Watch this: MacOS gets better…
Apple Inc. this week took more jabs at Facebook Inc. over its privacy practices. But this time the iPhone maker went one step further, signaling it plans to encroach on the social-media company’s turf. As it touted its newest operating software for the mobile devices on Monday, Apple unveiled forthcoming features that collectively bear the…
The arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation’s enforcement May 25 has hurled the digital media and advertising industries into a tailspin. Since the early hours of May 25, ad exchanges have seen European ad demand volumes plummet between 25 and 40 percent in some cases, according to sources. Ad tech vendors scrambled to inform…