Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A week ago, James Damore was anonymous. Now, the Google engineer who lost his job after he wrote a viral antidiversity screed has become an icon of the alt-right, with more than 40,000 Twitter followers (literally overnight) and a dedicated online constituency. This didn’t happen by accident: Damore’s swift lionization as a casualty of both…
You’re half-way through a gaming session and the world is breaking apart around you as you run from attacking aliens. Firing as you go, you turn a corner and suddenly your view is filled with the sight of a brand new sedan. You see a cute dog at your local coffee shop. When you lean…
Blast from the past, disguised as news: The Financial Times is going to have an app in Apple’s App Store. Wait! Don’t go! I’m going to (try to) make this more interesting. The reason the FT’s move qualifies as news is because the FT left the App Store back in 2011 in a dispute over Apple’s subscription rules. At…
You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it. Until about a week ago, you would have heard very little from me publicly about…
Our own Napier Lopez spotted an odd change in Google’s search service on Android today: search results don’t include URLs like they used to. Instead, they only display the page’s title, a thumbnail of a featured image from the site, and a blurb. It isn’t clear if Google is merely running a test or gradually…
“Meh. There’s always Death to look forward to,” my dad would say whenever I would air my frustrations with a world that was at odds with the one I had conjured in my mind. Though I found his blatant disregard for my artful misery frustrating in my youth, I later found myself boomeranging the exact…
Researchers said it was “trivial” to identify users and view their browsing habits in purchased ‘anonymous’ browsing data. SHARE TWEET In August 2016, a data broker received a phone call from a woman named Anna Rosenberg, who worked for a small startup in Tel Aviv. Rosenberg claimed she was training a neural network, a type…
On Wednesday, US authorities detained a researcher who goes by the handle MalwareTech, best known for stopping the spread of the WannaCry ransomware virus. In May, WannaCry infected hospitals in the UK, a Spanish telecommunications company, and other targets in Russia, Turkey, Germany, Vietnam, and more. Marcus Hutchins, a researcher from cybersecurity firm Kryptos Logic,…
If there’s any brand that knows Facebook, it’s NowThis. In January 2015, the digital video news publisher for millennials shut down its site and became a distributed publisher, and it quickly became one of the most-watched news publishers on Facebook, with its video-with-text-overlay style widely copied. But growth has its limits on Facebook, which has its…
iRobot The Roomba is generally regarded as a cute little robot friend that no one but dogs would consider to be a potential menace. But for the last couple of years, the robovacs have been quietly mapping homes to maximize efficiency. Now, the device’s makers plan to sell that data to smart home device manufacturers,…