Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” ―Carl Sandburg Elon Musk built Tesla, Inc., by turning Tesla into a great story. This story — one that’s partly about…
President Donald Trump defied a federal court judge who ruled Wednesday that it was unconstitutional for the president to block people on Twitter over their dissenting political views. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled that comments on Trump’s personal Twitter account—and those of other officials in the U.S. government—were public forums and that blocking critics for…
Photo: Jeff Chiu (AP) Throughout Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s excellent new book about fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, the $9 billion company keeps running into the same problem: would-be investors or retailers want to see a demonstration of its technology. This is an issue for Elizabeth Holmes’s company, because their shit…
Companies hiring for technical positions often slip language into their job postings that appeals to men. They say they’re looking for “ninjas,” who seek to “obliterate competition,” and are capable of “dominating.” By now, these wordings are a well understood form of bias that produces more male candidates than female. But one job in the…
Illustration: Gizmodo What’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine an Amazon Echo doing? Think realistically. Would it be something simple but sinister, like the artificially intelligent speaker recording a conversation between you and a loved one and then sending that recording to an acquaintance? That seems pretty bad to me. And guess what: it’s…
Image: Getty This week, Facebook announced that it be would rolling out a new system to combat revenge porn and explicit photos being shared on the site, Messenger, or Instagram. And all the social media network needs to protect your nude photos is…for you to first submit your nude photos. Friends, please do not submit…
“James Fields did nothing wrong,” the post on Facebook read, referring to the man who drove a car through a crowd protesting against white supremacy in Charlottesville in August 2017, killing one. The post accompanied an article from Squawker.org, a conservative website. In training materials given to its army of moderators, Facebook says the post…
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation laws are now in effect, and we’re getting a sense of what publishers have decided to implement on their websites as of May 25 — whether they’ve decided to block European Union and European Economic Area-based traffic outright, set up buckets of consent for readers to click through, or something…
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Uber had disabled an emergency braking system in a self-driving vehicle that struck and killed a woman in Arizona in March even though the car had identified the need to apply the brakes, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report released on Thursday. The report into the first fatal…
Facebook and Google are breaking the new EU privacy rules that came into force on Friday, according to complaints filed by an activist who has already challenged Facebook in a privacy case and won. Max Schrems and his non-profit organisation None Of Your Business have filed four complaints under the General Data Protection Regulation —…