Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
High-profile Bay Area denizens are skipping tap water in favor of drinking unfiltered, untreated, and expensive “raw” water that comes straight out of the ground, Nellie Bowles reports for The New York Times. Proponents claim that raw water’s health benefits include naturally occurring minerals and microbes. But the reality for any inadequately treated water from…
Photo: Getty Chanticleer Holdings, which owns nine Hooters restaurants and other regional burger chains like Little Big Burger, announced today that it was putting its loyalty programs on the blockchain. And just like other companies that have recently issued press releases with the word “blockchain,” its stock price shot through the roof. The Nasdaq-listed stock, BURG,…
For Indian techies, 2017 was the stuff of nightmares. One of the top employment generators until a few years ago, India’s $160 billion IT industry laid off more than 56,000 employees this year. Some analysts believe this spree was worse than the one during the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, hiring plummeted, with entry-level openings having…
“We’re making the world a better place.” The phrase is thrown around so often in the tech world that it became a punch line on the HBO satire Silicon Valley. Executives controlling the largest tech titans—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—might even believe it. But in a searing presentation at Business Insider’s IGNITION conference in…
To protect net neutrality, we need internet infrastructure that isn’t owned by big telecom. The net neutrality battle has been exhausting. It has come at enormous cost in time, energy, attention, and money. Fundamentally, the net neutrality fight is one where the best possible outcome is preserving the status quo: an internet landscape and connection…
In 2016 I noticed something odd on Twitter — without context or explanation, Andrea Shepard, a Tor developer, had posted a string of random letters and numbers. Some days later, news broke that the Tor Project had cut ties with Jake Appelbaum, a lauded activist and the most high-profile of their developers, in response to allegations of…
Tesla’s Elon Musk: Not a mass transit fan. Richard Drew/AP The Tesla CEO’s recent comments about public transportation triggered a firestorm of criticism. Here’s why. Like many tech entrepreneurs, Elon Musk is trying to reinvent public transit. But his comments at an event last month, as reported by Aarian Marshall in Wired, made many…
In the last year ProPublica has uncovered a number of different flaws in our advertising systems. Several of them were serious failures on our part. It’s why we apologized and took immediate action to prevent them in the future. Today ProPublica has raised new concerns about companies, including our own marketing team, using Facebook…
As Oath continues to consolidate its many offerings and bring new products to market for its ad clients, brands like The Home Depot and Pottery Barn are testing some of its new ad formats. Today’s consumers “expect more from advertisers and marketers need the right tools to build brand love,” according to Oath’s CRO, John DeVine,…
ToutCIM Group bought Uber Technologies Inc.’s Uptown Station in Oakland in one of the city’s biggest real estate deals of 2017. CIM paid $180 million for the 356,000-square-foot building, according to property records. The building’s renovation is expected to be completed in late 2018. It’s unclear how much additional money is required to complete the…