Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
If you haven’t heard, Amazon just launched a promo for a storefront that sells meal kits and grocery basics with no checkout lines. It’s based in Seattle and currently open to Amazon employees, with the public launch set for early 2017. While Amazon hasn’t explained their “Just Walk Out” technology that powers the storefront, they do…
Facebook is partnering with fact checking organizations to eliminate the scourge of fake news from your feed, only it doesn’t seem like partnering. Aren’t partners supposed to treat each other like equals? Many of the common objections* to journalism by the alt-right center around news being click-bait and rather uninformed discussions of impression-based advertising. The…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, and ABC News will help Facebook make good on four of the six promises Mark Zuckerberg made about fighting fake news without it becoming “the arbiter of truth”. It will make fake news posts less visible, append warnings from fact checkers to fake news in the feed, make…
Facebook, which has long relied on other people to provide it with content, is going to start paying for its own stuff, too. Facebook is starting to talk to TV studios and other video producers about licensing shows, with the hope of boosting the social network’s video efforts. The talks, which include discussions for scripted…
A Yahoo conference last year. The company said it discovered a 2013 attack after analyzing files provided by law enforcement. Credit Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo, already reeling from its September disclosure that 500 million user accounts had been hacked in 2014, disclosed Wednesday that a different attack in 2013 compromised more than…
California regulators ordered Uber to remove its self-driving vehicles from the road on the same day that the company’s vehicles were caught running red lights – violations the company immediately blamed on “human error”. “It is essential that Uber takes appropriate measures to ensure safety of the public,” the California department of motor vehicles (DMV)…
Evernote’s terms of service allow Evernote employees to look at your stuff for slim-to-no reasons. Medium has similarly frankly god-awful terms. This very newsletter is subject to terms that give MailChimp broad authority to screen my content, share that content internally or with advisors, and otherwise market my existence (in aggregate) to third parties. This…
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I. “Love Will Make You Do Wrong” In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no…
Despite beating Facebook in the early PR battle against fake news, Google is still indirectly helping fund publishers that intentionally spread misleading information. Google’s digital infrastructure touches nearly everything on the internet, including fake-news websites. So unlike tech companies with less reach, Google requires much more than mere blacklists to block fake news publishers from…