Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is…
Image: Pinterest The anti-vaccination movement has become so widespread that the World Health Organization added it to its list of the top threats to global health in 2019. Social media companies are drawing criticism for not doing more to prevent the spread of misinformation about vaccines and Pinterest has come up with a novel solution:…
It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room…
Earlier this week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and the tech journalist Kara Swisher conducted a full 90-minute interview entirely on Twitter. The interview was meant to be an old-school “Twitter chat,” and users were instructed to follow along using the hashtag #KaraJack. It was a disaster. Attempting to follow a public conversation happening on Twitter is…
Google’s trick to more rapidly and cheaply deploy its super-speedy Google Fiber project has hit a wall, throwing a wrench into its broader attempt to get its gigabit service back on track across the nation. The internet titan had pinned its hopes on an experiment called “shallow trenching,” which enabled it to deploy gigabit internet…
.entry-header Credit Spotify CEO Daniel Ek with honesty; in a blog post announcing a major move into the podcast space, Ek wrote: More than 10 years ago we founded Spotify to give consumers something they couldn’t get — music any time, anywhere, and at the right price. Along the way, we broke the grip piracy…
While so many people have been focused on the disastrous potential of the EU’s Copyright Directive, we’ve been mentioning lately that another EU regulation, coming up right behind it, may be much more dangerous for the internet as we know it. The EU’s Terrorist Content Regulation is shaping up to be a true horror story,…
If you re-read the first few chapters of The Innovator’s Dilemma and you insert “Apple” every time Clayton Christensen mentions “a company,” a certain picture emerges: Apple is a company on the verge of being disrupted, and the next great idea in tech and consumer electronics will not materialize from within the walls of its…
Facebook orchestrated a multi-year effort that duped children and their parents out of money, in some cases hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and then often refused to give the money back, according to court documents unsealed tonight in response to a Reveal legal action. The records are part of a class action lawsuit focused…
A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound…