Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Deputy Washington Editor of the New York Times, Jonathan Weisman, announced this morning that he is abandoning Twitter as a social media platform after Twitter bizarrely claimed that threatening to kill “k*kes” is not a violation of the company’s terms of service. Twitter, like much of the Internet, has become a cesspool of hate. While I still…
(iStock) On June 4, the satirical news site the Science Post published a block of “lorem ipsum” text under a frightening headline: “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.” Nearly 46,000 people shared the post, some of them quite earnestly — an inadvertent example, perhaps, of life imitating comedy….
In June 2006, a 16-year-old girl began a video blog on YouTube. Her name was Bree, she’d been lurking in the burgeoning community for a while. She was a self-described dork, she thought her hometown was really boring – “Maybe that’s why I spend so much time on my computer …” She was funny, friendly,…
Ten years ago, the UAE embarked on a $22 billion mission to build a zero-carbon city powered by the sun, cooled by the wind, and entirely dependent upon mass transit. But building the world’s first sustainable metropolis proved far trickier than anyone anticipated, and just 5 percent of Masdar City stands today. French photographer Etienne Malapert…
A Facebook executive said Tuesday that she expects the social platform to probably be “all video” in five years. Videos are now viewed 8 billion times daily on Facebook, up from 1 billion views a year ago, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said at a Fortune conference in…
Begin: WordPress Article Content AMP, which is essentially Google’s answer to Facebook’s fast-loading Instant Pages, first launched on Google’s mobile search results pages but it’s now being integrated into a wider number of products. As AMP reaches a wider audience, publishers are obviously also interested in being able to sell different types of ads on these…
How to Not Protect Your Users Two weeks ago, Twitter sent my personal info to a group of creeps and stalkers who have been harassing me for well over a year. This is the story of how and why that happened, which I’m relating in hopes that Twitter will do better. My info was sent…
In the wake of the leak of tens of millions of Twitter and old Myspace passwords this week, you may have heard a lot about two-factor authentification, the supposed impenetrable firewall between you, the unsuspecting cloud-based electronics user, and a hacker. I’m here to tell you that if someone is deeply intent on hacking you,…
The Apple ecosystem is well known for very rarely letting any dodgy apps enter it because of the company’s stringent security checks. But recently, nearly two dozen malicious pieces of software managed to get hosted on the App Store, and subsequently downloaded by Chinese users. This is because attackers found an unorthodox route to exploit:…
In an economy where the idea of a woman is often more commercially appealing than the actual presence of one, it is seemingly a natural development that the White Girl brand is now run by a group of men. The story goes that viral Twitter account White Girl Problems was launched in March 2010 after…