Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Last month, Stefan Esser blogged about a zero-day vulnerability in OS X, without having informed Apple about the problem first. Unfortunately, today has brought the discovery of the first known exploit. Adam Thomas, a researcher at Malwarebytes, discovered a new adware installer, and while testing it, he discovered something very strange: his sudoers file had been modified!…
There will tweets. There will be liveblogs. There will be thinkpieces. It’s the GOP debate tonight—and everyone on the Internet will have a whole lot to say. One more way to weigh in: The Washington Post is inviting anyone on the Internet to annotate the numbers, the zingers, the truths, and the lies that make their…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Reddit CEO Steve Huffman introduced an updated set of user policies Wednesday, which included details for how Reddit would be “quarantining” certain communities and banning ones which were particular awful, including the infamous r/CoonTown. Quarantined communities will be hidden from the general Reddit community and only visible to members of those specific subreddits…
It all started when a “self-taught engineer, extreme introvert, science-nerd, anime-lover, college dropout” wrote that she was tired of stereotypes. Isis Wenger, a 22-year-old platform engineer in San Francisco, got talked into being one of a handful of colleagues featured in a hastily organized recruiting campaign for her company OneLogin, she wrote on Medium. The…
Uber, Silicon Valley’s prized amoral unicorn, is presumed to be a financial titan and a sure-thing IPO in the near future. Which may be true. But one thing that’s frequently missing from the conversation about its inevitable dominance over virtually every facet of our lives is the answer to a fundamental question: Does it make…
After installing Windows 10, Feeling like your Internet Bandwidth is dropping away? Windows 10 is stealing your network bandwidth. Along with the privacy features related to Wi-Fi Sense, Windows 10 users should check for another hidden by default feature that uses your network bandwidth to share updates with other Windows 10 users across the Internet….
Lucy Dikeou, a 21-year-old senior at Stanford University, has long used English and the pictorial images known as emoji to text on her iPhone. A few months ago, she started messaging in a third language: GIFs. When Ms. Dikeou recently wanted a friend to stop sending her pictures of food, she responded with a GIF…
Prayers up for hitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot that aspired to see the entire country via the kindness of strangers and made it as far as Philadelphia before getting curbstomped. Thanks to surveillance footage, we know how hitchBOT ended up as a pile of limbs: a brief clip shows a man in what appears to be…
First things first. “HitchBOT,” for all practical purposes, was a garbage can with an iPhone in it. It could not walk or stand or fire lasers or open a can of beans. By what standard was this piece of useless shit a “robot” in the first place? The answer: a shabby standard. A Canadian one….
Setting out from Boston, hitchBOT wanted nothing more than to see America, really see it, from sea to shining sea. Unfortunately, the friendly thumbs-upping robot got its head bashed in after getting only as far as Philadelphia. Lauren O’Neil, a journalist with Canada’s CBC, tweeted a photo of what looks like the poor state the…