Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Visitors want fast websites, but advertisers want brand safety and viewable ads. In the end, ad concerns often end up winning at the expense of the user experience. According to data ad tech consultancy RedBud — examined for Digiday across 15 of the top 20 U.K. publishers — brand safety, viewability and verification tags represent…
Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data. Facebook is probing a…
Tuesday afternoon, a contingent of Kickstarter employees went public with their intention to unionize under the name Kickstarter United. According to an email provided to Gizmodo, however, senior staffers at the crowdfunding company are already attempting to push back against the plan to make Kickstarter the first major tech firm to have a union. “The…
As Amazon steps up its effort to show Wall Street it can generate profits, the e-commerce giant is aggressively blocking money-losing products from advertising on its site. In recent months, Amazon has been telling more vendors, or brand owners who sell their goods wholesale, that if Amazon can’t sell those products to consumers at a…
When Alex, now a high-school senior, saw an Instagram account he followed post about something called QAnon back in 2017, he’d never heard of the viral conspiracy theory before. But the post piqued his interest, and he wanted to know more. So he did what your average teenager would do: He followed several accounts related to it…
Founded in 2014, Omni is a startup that offers users the ability to store and rent their lesser-used stuff in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland. Backed by roughly $40 million in venture capital, Omni proclaims on its website that they “believe in experiences over things, access over ownership, and living lighter rather than…
Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and Amazon are all working to keep dangerous anti-vaccination rumors and hoaxes from getting attention. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, unintentionally it seems, is doing the opposite. Dorsey, who has been on a media tear lately, sitting for interviews with lots of podcasters, tweeted on Tuesday that he had a “great conversation” with author…
“When you hear someone playing a piano, would you ever ask if the piano is the artist?” asks Mario Klingemann, an AI artist whose work Memories of Passerby I recently sold at auction for £40,000. Though his answer is ‘no,’ it may not actually be so simple, since instead of an inanimate machine, his medium…
Cookie-based ad targeting that doesn’t work in a mobile-dominant world is being replaced by people-based advertising. The Washington Post is trying to get ahead of the trend with a new ad product, FeedBuilder, that creates multiple versions of an ad and then contextually targets them to people based on what they’re reading. The tech favors…
Photo: Moises Saman/Magnum Photos There’s a famous Ursula K. Le Guin short story called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” about a fantasy city called Omelas, a joyous metropolis without guilt or violence, populated by “mature, intelligent, passionate” people who celebrate beautiful festivals and shop at (duh) a “magnificent Farmer’s Market.” Le Guin is…