Business
Amazon Go: We’re All F*cked
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…
The media is a business and journalism is a job. Get it together. – Medium
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…
Facebook now flags and down-ranks fake news with help from outside fact checkers | TechCrunch
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 says it’s in talks to buy its own video shows – Recode
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…
Yahoo Says 1 Billion User Accounts Were Hacked – The New York Times
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…
Uber blames humans for self-driving car traffic offenses as California orders a halt | Technology | The Guardian
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)…
Indie web and curation
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…
My President Was Black – The Atlantic
“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…