Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Our phones’ GPS and location capabilities are a key part of what make them magical — enabling them to speed our commutes, hail rides, and find the devices when we lose them. These capabilities are also ground zero for the looming fight over defining the boundaries of privacy and acceptable uses of our personal information….
Germany is about to remind Facebook Inc. that the tribulations of 2018 are far from over. In fact, they’re about to get even more real. The country’s Federal Cartel Office intends to ban Facebook from collecting user data from third parties, the newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported. This will also prohibit data sharing between WhatsApp and…
Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred dollars, he said he could find the current location of most phones…
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here for more. Nothing gets me through a workout like cranking up some bangers. And while in-ear headphones can create head-thumping bass by sealing your ears off from the…
Google has scrambled to remove third-party apps that led users to child porn sharing groups on WhatsApp in the wake of TechCrunch’s report about the problem last week. We contacted Google with the name of one these apps and evidence that it and others offered links to WhatsApp groups for sharing child exploitation imagery. Following publication of our…
Photo: AP With the government shutdown, Donald Trump has been looking for ways to distract the public from his failure to BUILD THE WALL, and a trip to Iraq seemed like a publicity slam dunk for his image at a critical time. Surely he couldn’t fuck this up, right? Unfortunately for the administration, any goodwill…
Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: a shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number six, shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s…
Medium, the publishing website run by Twitter Inc. co-founder Ev Williams, expressed interest in buying New York Magazine and other media properties, according to people familiar with the situation. Williams discussed the topic with Pam Wasserstein, chief executive officer of the magazine’s parent company, New York Media, said the people, who asked not to be identified because…
The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user. One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor…
The news industry these past few years has been a middle schooler with low self-esteem, trailing around after the popular kids at Facebook, letting them copy our homework and take our lunch money in hopes that we might have some of that success rub off on us. As in every teen movie ever made, this…