Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The General Data Protection Regulation will go into effect on May 25th, and no one is ready — not the companies and not even the regulators. After four years of deliberation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was officially adopted by the European Union in 2016. The regulation gave companies a two-year runway to get…
President Trump’s decision to block his Twitter followers for their political views is a violation of the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, saying that Trump’s effort to silence his critics is not permissible under the U.S. Constitution because the digital space in which he engages with constituents is a public forum. The ruling rejects administration…
The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online draws on in-depth interviews by scholar Whitney Phillips to showcase how news media was hijacked from 2016 to 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups. Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry…
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has agreed to meet with a group of publishers next week at four of its global offices to discuss their concerns about its preparations for Europe’s forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation, according to people familiar with the matter. Some publishers have been critical of Google’s stance on the sweeping new data-protection law…
Then I gave up and wrote it my damn self. Illustration: Jeremy Sorese for Bloomberg Businessweek ByMay 17, 2018, 4:00 AM EDT What a time for artificial intelligence! Google announced a new AI-powered set of products and services at its I/O conference for developers, including one called Duplex that makes phone calls for you…
In late April, the white nationalist Christopher Cantwell — commonly known as “the Crying Nazi” — made an appearance on a YouTube channel run by Andy Warski that boasts nearly 275,000 subscribers. Cantwell was there to talk about how he would build a whites-only country within the United States. At one point during the livestream,…
Many web publishers have been jilted by Facebook. Now they are quickly falling hard for Apple News. They just hope that this new love leads to new revenue. After a shaky start which led many in the media world to doubt whether Apple was serious about the product (the Wall Street Journal reported in 2016…
If I get addicted to vaping, I thought, in March, I will always remember this Texas strip mall. I was walking out of a store called Smoke-N-Chill Novelties, in Southwest Austin, holding a receipt for $62.95 and two crisp, white shrink-wrapped boxes. I got into the driver’s seat of a rental car and began to…
Gabriel2052’s library of motor movements will know what I’m turned on by, his fingertips ghosting across the back of my neck with the right force-per-unit area. His motorized parts will know how to spread goosebumps across my skin, and his sensors will detect when my breath quickens in response. When we sleep, he will be…
In 1989, a man armed with a hunting rifle and a knife entered a Montreal university and systematically killed 14 women, before killing himself. “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker … I have decided to put an end to those viragos,” he wrote in his…