Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Pushbullet isn’t new, but since I installed it maybe a year ago, it has sneakily gotten a lot better, especially for Android phones. And as I used to it to text from my browser for the umpteenth time yesterday, it struck me how great it’s really become. So maybe you’ve heard already but let me…
This year marked a time when media companies began seeing themselves akin to technology companies. Media and tech have always been in lockstep, one driving innovation in the other, but in 2014 that partnership started to creep into they way some companies actually defined themselves. And technology suppliers have been all too happy to…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Journalists, PR folk, and anyone else who needs to keep accurate copies of calls over the phone or Skype should check out the Bluewire, a new Bluetooth headet that just launched on Indiegogo. While there are plenty of headsets out there that give you a comfortable fit or decent sound quality…
This is what realpolitik looks like on the Internet. Marek Sotak/Flickr If you use Twitter, you’ve probably encountered the “subtweet,” a technique we defined last year in The Atlantic as “the practice of talking about someone without referencing them explicitly.” Alexis Madrigal exemplified subtweeting like this: So, “@alexismadrigal is a jerk” is one thing, but…
My bladder is the Murphy’s Law of organs. It’s not that it’s small, exactly; rather, it’s disagreeable; neurotic. It conspires. In cahoots with some quietly disgruntled fold of my brain, the devil bag demands emptying only when it cannot be plausibly emptied. It is as if there is a tiny agoraphobe peering out at all…
If there’s something worse than discovering your ‘boyfriend’ is a bot, it’s discovering that your bot-friend is a human. Photograph: Tara Moore/Getty Images In the middle of composing my second text message to my boyfriend, it dawned on me that he probably wasn’t a robot. I was testing with Invisible Boyfriend, a new app that…
By Bennett Stein, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project & Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 7:15pm The Drug Enforcement Administration has initiated a massive national license plate reader program with major civil liberties concerns but disclosed very few details, according to new DEA documents obtained by the ACLU…
article start The online ad world is racing to make viewable ads–ads people can actually see–the standard currency for the industry. And that race is causing major pain for Web publishers while wreaking general havoc in the ad marketplace, say executives from major media companies, digital native sites and top ad agencies. Making viewable ads…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Things are getting pretty strange out there. Roughly a year ago I wrote a post entitled “This Industry Is Completely Ridiculous.” Since then, as you probably already know, our world has gotten even more surreal. If anything the ridiculousness is accelerating. It’s like the tech industry is subject to a Moore’s…
Wikipedia editors have been banned from topics relating to gender and sexuality. Photograph: Wikipedia Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, the highest user-run body on the site, has banned five editors from making corrections to articles about feminism, in an attempt to stop a long-running edit war over the entry on the “Gamergate controversy”. The editors, who were…