Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
oday Snapchat finally gets a true developer platform, confirming TechCrunch’s scoop from last month about Snap Kit. This set of APIs lets other apps piggyback on Snap’s login for sign up, build Bitmoji avatars into their keyboards, display public Our Stories and Snap Map content, and generate branded stickers with referral links users can share back inside…
Uber said it may soon know if customers are drunk — even before they get picked up. The ride-hailing company said in a recent patent application that it has come up with a way to tell “the state of the user” by analyzing a number of factors. The patent imagines a world where you might…
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible. The SIGGRAPH 2018 computer graphics and design conference…
Let’s be honest: Are you going to read this or skim this? In a land of feeds, tidbits, and bullet points, readers don’t often get to the end of a piece — let alone absorb each sentence along the way. But what if you couldn’t comment until you actually read the whole piece? (We see…
The battle to protect your privacy is like a roller coaster, with breathtaking highs and turbulent lows. It is, after all, a constant game between the technology that guards your information and the trackers that find new ways to profile you. Apple hit a high point for privacy last week. Now Playing: Watch this: MacOS gets better…
THREE years ago, Walgreens (b. 1901) arrived in Silicon Valley for the same reason many old economy companies do: to hurry and join the digital vanguard before it was left behind. Walgreens quickly made a deal with Theranos (b. 2004), the medical diagnostics company and media darling that promised a revolutionary approach to blood tests….
In one generation, the Internet went from opening up new free markets to creating a series of Fake Markets that exploit society, without most media or politicians even noticing. 1. The open internet markets American culture loves to use the ideal of competitive free markets as the solution to all kinds of social problems. Though the vaunted…
Apple Inc. this week took more jabs at Facebook Inc. over its privacy practices. But this time the iPhone maker went one step further, signaling it plans to encroach on the social-media company’s turf. As it touted its newest operating software for the mobile devices on Monday, Apple unveiled forthcoming features that collectively bear the…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveils the new Tesla factory in Fremont, California, in October 2010. AP Tesla, the electric-car company helmed by the billionaire Elon Musk, is generating an incredible amount of waste in an effort to manufacture parts for the Model 3 at its Gigafactory in Nevada. Documents reviewed by Business Insider show…
The alt-right and white nationalist trolls who frequent Twitter and backwater message boards have found another gathering place online: the commenting platform Disqus. Used by publications like Rolling Stone and TMZ, Disqus says it gets about 2 billion unique visitors each month. It supports anonymous commenting and allows its users to comment on any Disqus-enabled…