Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Google’s push to become a privacy-positive company over the past year has been, depending on how you look at it, an act of , a brilliant , or straight-up . So when Google CEO Sundar Pichai the company’s latest moves in the privacy-protecting space on Twitter yesterday, the biggest surprise—at least to me—was the I…
It’s easy to feel right now. Cities across the country are seeing unarmed protesters by police officers who enjoy both the full support of the current and of the itself. Congress is, in 2020, whether to . And there’s ! Meanwhile, even the people who emerge from this moment unscathed physically will, undoubtedly, find their…
For the thousands of people and on George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department—or even for bystanders caught up in the demonstrations—arrests, injuries, and even are becoming commonplace in this moment. And just like protests we’ve experienced , confrontation with police comes coupled with risks to people’s lives through digital means,…
When theologian Martin Luther debuted his Ninety-five Theses in 16th-century Germany, he triggered a religious Reformation — and also a media revolution. 1630 map of the Maluku Archipelago (Moluccas, or Spice Islands) The printing press, invented approximately 50 years before the 95 Theses, extended Luther’s reach from the door of the cathedral to the entirety…
data preprocessed in process/process-data.js data processed in process/freebird/process-graphic.js asset wrapper : start ASSET : START If you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States. The Times Privacy Project…
data processed in process/process-data.js These are the actual locations for millions of Americans. At the New York Stock Exchange … … in the beachfront neighborhoods of Los Angeles … … in secure facilities like the Pentagon … … at the White House … … and at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Palm Beach resort. One nation, tracked An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry…
Camilla Hodgson in San Francisco September 17, 2019 Print this page On a foggy September lunchtime in San Francisco, a group of researchers and data scientists sat around foldable plastic tables in what was once a Christian Science church, evangelising about open-source information and the democratisation of knowledge. The 50-strong party, which had been assembled…
How are you supposed to react when a robot calls you a “gook”? At first glance, ImageNet Roulette seems like just another viral selfie app – those irresistible 21st-century magic mirrors that offer a simulacrum of insight in exchange for a photograph of your face. Want to know what you will look like in 30…
You can’t really blame journalist and activist Lauren Duca for being a little nervous about agreeing to an interview. When I first asked to profile her in advance of her new book, How to Start a Revolution: Young People and the Future of American Politics, I did it over Twitter DM. She agreed, but seemed…
When you buy a product like Philips Hue’s smart lights or an iPhone, you probably assume the people who wrote their code are being paid. While that’s true for those who directly author a product’s software, virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through “open-source” projects on…