Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Washington Post is taking a proactive approach to digital display advertising issues with a new project that is set to fix bad code, while saving brands from code errors and cross-platform bugs in ad code. The Ad Performance and Safety Protocol (APSP) focuses on accidentally harmful ad behaviors to ensure a better user experience…
Last week was an online security nightmare and few people noticed. Here’s what you need to know. Mr. Warzel is an Opinion writer at large. Ms. Jeong is a member of the editorial board. ImageCreditCreditPhilippe Huguen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images This article is part of a limited-run newsletter. You can sign up here. Instead…
Here’s an argument you hear a lot: the gigantic cash burn rates at the likes of Tesla and Uber are nothing new, because today’s established tech greats also churned through tons of cash in their early years. In fact, we keep hearing from champions of these glamor stocks on business TV shows and pundits’ blogs…
Angry Birds is so 2009, you might say. “I haven’t played Angry Birds since 2012, at the latest,” you might insist. It doesn’t matter. Angry Birds is still part of your life. As the first wildly successful mobile game, it’s an avatar for the way our understanding of what’s private and what’s personal has…
AirPods are a product of the past. They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt. The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine…
One jaw-dropping moment during the Senate’s hearing on Tuesday came when Sen. Ted Cruz asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?” Unsatisfied by Zuckerberg’s response that Facebook is a “platform for all ideas,” Sen. Cruz continued, “Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing your views, or are you a…
Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads.Hasn’t worked out that way. Ron Amram has been in the brand marketing business for about 20 years. In the 2000s he was media director for Sprint’s prepaid cellular group, mainly figuring out where the carrier should spend its ad dollars—print, outdoor, digital, or broadcast. TV was…
It all seemed so inevitable: that Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. and co-founder of Twitter, would appear onstage at last week’s TED ideas conference, in Vancouver; that the conference theme would be “Bigger Than Us,” an ambiguous invocation of either inspiration or fear; that Dorsey, during a session called “Power,” would calmly acknowledge the proliferation of…
Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and Deliveroo. These words are now part of our everyday lexicon. The gig economy has changed the world. I find it hard to remember when I didn’t see hundreds of delivery scooters zipping around the city near our office. Nor do I easily recall when it was unusual to see somebody happily…
Transformational change cannot occur suddenly — and sudden changes rarely turn out to be transformational. It’s clear that common practices at many of our largest tech platforms must change, but hoping for a shouting-at-the-barricades revolution is unrealistic and possibly unhelpful. While we — representing doctors, health tech professionals, and elements of the policymaking community — recognize and share public dissatisfaction with…