Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
This post was updated on Tuesday when Facebook confirmed it took the page down for “IP violations” but didn’t cite go into specifics. On Monday, Facebook took down the Facebook page for celebrity news and gossip site The Shade Room. The page, which was verified, has (had?) more than 4.4 million likes. The Shade Room’s…
As even the most deft social media ninja will tell you, social media campaigns are hard. But it really seems like the New York Police Department should have seen this one coming. A coalition led by the NYPD and Manhattan’s top prosecutor launched a campaign to “highlight the impact encryption is having on public safety…
Reed Hastings got it right. It just took longer than he thought. “We expect Amazon to continue to offer their video service as a free extra with Prime domestically but also to brand their video subscription offering as a standalone service at a price less than ours,” the Netflix CEO told his investors in a…
As a young astronomer, Joan Schmelz worked alongside men and the pinups they tacked to the lab walls. She didn’t have a precise vocabulary for the subtle harassment she experienced every day. Schmelz’s supervisor gossiped about her to colleagues and demeaned her, making inappropriate comments that highlighted their uneven power dynamic. When Schmelz, now a…
Now with Kerning! We have a Special Celebrity Guest Comment of the Week this week, from the very person who we wrote about right here at Yr Wonkette! Thursday, we ran a story about Matthew Keys, a jerkbaby who was convicted of computer criming for distributing his LA Times administrator login and password to an…
Why don’t “booth babes” get considered to be Women In Games? I am not the first person to ask this question. Model View Culture’s “Feminists in Tech: Please Stop Treating Sex Work as a Contagion” serves as a concise introduction to the topic. That article is a year old. This topic, and variations upon it,…
I’m a big fan of Dan Lyons, the former Newsweek senior reporter who used to write the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog, and now is a comedy writer on the HBO show “Silicon Valley.” I’m looking forward to seeing him at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley, promoting his…
Happy Equal Pay Day! Facebook and Microsoft just announced that their companies have closed the wage gap; both have announced that they pay all employees the same wages for the same work. Let’s give them a firm pat on the back for catching up to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, shall we? Only 53 years and the tech industry finally…
The biggest disaster on Kickstarter keeps getting getting bigger. Coolest, the company that pulled in $13 million in funding to build a cooler, and then repeatedly delayed shipping the product to its backers while simultaneously putting it up for sale on Amazon, has fucked up once again. According to an update sent to its Kickstarter backers that…
Photo: mskyrakennedy/Instagram Have you heard of the “Snap Pack”? So christened yesterday by the New York Times, the Pack is a group of privileged 22-year-olds living, loving, and Snapchatting in New York City. They are the sons and daughters of Matisses, Kennedys, and Trumps, and now some of them are…