Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In March of last year, Fusion published an article detailing the ways in which Nextdoor, a social network for neighbors, had become a home for racial profiling. In the “Crime and Safety” forum of many Nextdoor communities, users were reporting people as “suspicious” seemingly based primarily on the color of their skin. Nextdoor CEO Nirav…
July 27, 2016 07/27/2016 11:19 a.m. The Dark Internet Humor of Harambe Jokes By Brian Feldman Share Share Tweet Share Share Email Print Photo: SelectALL/Cincinatti Zoo/Getty Images What is so funny about dead animals? The answer is: Nothing. And yet Harambe, the gorilla who was shot and killed in May by security personnel at the…
It has been more than three months since Gizmodo first published a story claiming Facebook’s human editors were suppressing conservative news content on the site’s Trending Topics section. Facebook vehemently denied the report, but has been dealing with the story’s aftermath ever since. On Friday, Facebook announced another small but notable change to Trending Topics:…
Facebook will no longer employ humans to write descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy over allegations of political bias in May. Topics appearing in the Trending section will now appear solely as a short phrase or single word, with an indication of the number of people discussing it on the social…
A Texas-based former porn star who says her career was ruined by years of online harassment is suing Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for $1 billion in federal court. As the Daily Mail first reported on Wednesday afternoon, Paree La’Tiejira—who appeared in over 40 adult films under the alias Lady Paree—filed a lawsuit in the Southern district…
Image: Gizmodo NSO Group, a company that sells hacking services to governments so they can spy on journalists and dissidents, exploited gaping security holes in iPhone software, according to a report byLookout Security and Citizen Lab. But don’t worry: Apple just pushed a fix. The New York Times reports: The NSO Group’s software can read…
Having Blackbox ship your stuff to customers is cheaper than doing it yourself. Blackbox works like a co-op of indie artists. If everyone pays for postage, warehouse space, and packaging themselves, the cost is very high. But if we all pool our resources, we’re as big as any company purchasing at volume. This gives us…
Some of the most powerful espionage tools created by the National Security Agency’s elite group of hackers have been revealed in recent days, a development that could pose severe consequences for the spy agency’s operations and the security of government and corporate computers. A cache of hacking tools with code names such as Epicbanana, Buzzdirection…
In October of last year, Twitter made the hard decision to remove the tweet count data the way it was presented at the time, without replacing it. I would say they simply removed the API access, but that’s not strictly true, because there was no real API for that data. They announced the news in…
As of 2014, Twitter estimated that as many as 23 million of its 271 million users were bots, or automated accounts taught by code to Tweet according to the desires of their creators. For example, you might see that one bot posts a photo from NASA’s Cassini mission every hour, while others recycle politicians’ old…