Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Google’s Chrome browser turns 10 today, and in its short life it has introduced a lot of radical changes to the web. From popularizing auto-updates to aggressively promoting HTTPS web encryption, the Chrome security team likes to grapple with big, conceptual problems. That reach and influence can be divisive, though, and as Chrome looks ahead…
Here’s a picture of Marlowe to make this post suck less. As most of you know, I deactivated my Twitter account earlier this month. It had been a long time coming, for a whole host of reasons, but Twitter’s decision to be the only social network that gives Alex Jones a platform to spew hate,…
Wil Wheaton has left Mastodon after facing pressure and hostility from both the community and the staff. Yesterday, Wheaton got bofa’d. A bofa is an adolescent prank named after its most popular iteration, bofa. The prank works like this; you drop bofa into seemingly innocuous conversation, and when they ask what is bofa, you say…
Google isn’t one to shy away from bold claims. “We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. And it’s probably true. Think of a security key as like a two-factor authentication code that’s sent to your phone — but instead a USB stick in your pocket….
Mapbox, the mapping startup that competes with the likes of Google Maps and Here to power location services on apps like Snapchat and Foursquare, says that a version of its New York map calling the city ‘Jewtropolis’ was an act of human vandalism that has now been removed across the hundreds of apps that pull…
ImageFacebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, told Congress this year that he wanted the company to “be a platform for all ideas.”CreditCreditTom Brenner/The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board last week. Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social…
Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people…
Can Twitter be saved? I’m not talking about last week’s social media stock price plunge. It’s the ritualization of Gamergate-style uproar and dishonest brigading that has me disillusioned with the platform. I know soul-searching about Twitter is a bit of a journalistic trope at this point, since we all seem to be simultaneously enraptured with…
Since announcing her new job with The New York Times, a widespread campaign of harassment has targeted Verge reporter Sarah Jeong for a number of tweets she wrote years ago. Many of those now reacting to these tweets have intentionally taken them out of context, and she has since received an unrelenting stream of abuse…
Photo: AP Yesterday, the New York Times announced that it had hired Sarah Jeong, who is by all accounts an extremely talented tech reporter, as a new member of its editorial board. Today, Jim Hoft, once accurately called the “dumbest man on the internet” by Media Matters, published a collection of Jeong’s tweets which he…