Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage George Hotz is building a self-driving car by himself. By Ashlee Vance | December 16, 2015 Photographs by Peter Bohler From END BODY COPY CENTERED A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in…
In his well-known essay On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt defines bullshit as speech that is designed to impress but lacks a direct concern for the truth. Under such a definition, a large portion of what we read online today is likely to be bullshit. Some types of bullshit are political in nature, such as the misleading…
If you’re a black Airbnb user that’s had a sneaking suspicion hosts are giving you the run-around when you try to book a rental, you might be on to something. A working paper (pdf) from three Harvard Business School researchers suggests that users with black names have more trouble booking rentals. While the company doesn’t…
A monthlong Gizmodo investigation has uncovered compelling and perplexing new evidence in the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. According to a cache of documents provided to Gizmodo which were corroborated in interviews, Craig Steven Wright, an Australian businessman based in Sydney, and Dave Kleiman, an American computer forensics expert who died…
Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody. The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and…
One night, about 10 months ago, I got an email from a friend in Vermont, with the subject line “Is this you!?” I clicked it open, and the friend had sent me a link to a website called “Youredoingitwrong.com,” which is a site of all viewer-submitted photos of people doing things hilariously, ignorantly wrong in public….
Are you a loyal Twitter user? Brace yourself, because your favorite social media platform might get turned on its head: Twitter is experimenting with a new way of sorting your timeline that breaks with the reverse-chronological format it has used since its inception. Certain users have already been selected for testing, and a Twitter…
Every dollar in Mark Zuckerberg’s private charity is a dollar wrested from public coffers — and democratic control. The media-as-public-relations-machine was in full swing last week, abuzz over Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s public letter to their daughter that contained a $45 billion pledge to establish the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The mainstream media produced…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Looks like IBM needs to reengineer what it thinks about women. A tweet went out on IBM’s official Twitter feed asking women in tech to, I kid you not, “Join the #HackAHairDryer experiment.” Not hack computer software, math problems or something of social impact – a beauty product. According to IBM’s Twitter…