Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names…
How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder. Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photo by ISerg/Getty Images Plus. Millions of Americans were using telehealth company and prescription drug provider GoodRx—yet probably didn’t know that it was sharing their prescription medications and health conditions with…
“What Cheese Are You?” was a quiz that appeared online in February 2014. BuzzFeed, the digital media company that published the quiz, returned to the same theme in December 2016 (“What Delicious Cheese Are You Based on Your Zodiac Sign?”), February 2018 (“Everyone Has a Cheese That Matches Their Personality—Here’s Yours”), August 2019 (“This…
For a long time we have existed in a weird world where if as a human you want to use a website you agreed to a long terms-of-service either explicitly or implicitly… But if you were a robot accessing a website the rules of the road were pretty basic: 1. There was some usual blanket…
Media buyers keep insisting that the role of third-party verification firms are critical when assessing everything from brand safety to viewability in the programmatic market. But news publishers feel powerless when their content is misclassified and subsequently demonetized by upwards of 30% compared to inventory deemed as “safe,” according to Luis Romero, svp and head…
Banking unit was biggest to enter FDIC receivership since 2008 Prominent VC firms advised portfolio companies to pull cash Why the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Matters March 17, 2023, 12:08 PM UTCUpdated onMarch 17, 2023, 1:01 PM UTC Silicon Valley Bank’s former parent company filed for bankruptcy a week after a run on deposits…
PAIR is a new identity solution from Google that allows publishers and advertisers (using Google’s buying platform, DV360) to match first-party data to deliver personalized ads. Google announced PAIR in a blog post outlining the concept last week. PAIR stands for Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation, and as far as ad tech acronyms go, it’s not…
Strike-busting troops gathered in Colorado in 1914, after the Ludlow Massacre It was spring in Colorado when the National Guard killed the strikers: April, 1914. Workers at John D. Rockefeller’s big interest in the state, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, had been on strike since the previous September, and had long since begun to…
Remind me why, exactly, these guys have so much control over technological innovation? Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Liu Guanguan/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images, gpointstudio/iStock/Getty Images Plus, and francescoch/iStock/Getty Images Plus. If the technological innovation coming out of Silicon Valley is as important as venture capitalists insist, the past few days suggest they…
Did Silicon Valley Bank implode because one (1) of its 11 board members is Black? Or because one (1) of those 11 board members is LGBTQ+? One of the nation’s most prominent economic columnists is wondering. In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler writes: “SVB notes that besides 91 percent of their…