Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
One of the lesser-known casualties of Newt Gingrich’s ghoulish Contract with America was the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a small government agency charged with producing impartial reports for Congress and other officials about issues of scientific and technological concern. From 1972 until 1995, the OTA produced studies, often with the help of academic experts,…
EFF has run a full-page ad in this month’s Wired, addressed to the technology industry, under the banner “Your threat model just changed,” warning them that the incoming administration has vowed to spy on and deport millions of their fellow Americans on the basis of religion and race, and that they are in grave risk…
The newest Raspberry Pi operating system, PIXEL, is pretty slick, but it was always limited to just the Raspberry Pi. Now, you can test drive it on a Mac or PC too. To use PIXEL, you just need to burn a live DVD or live USB, then boot from that. To make one,…
Media center-infused smart speakers and Bluetooth speakers are pretty common these days, but over on Hackaday, user Carlo Maria Curinga made one of the slickest looking little speakers we’ve seen yet. The hardware here includes a Raspberry Pi, a DAC, an amp, speaker, and a little LED matrix for visual feedback. On the software end,…
For months, YouTubers have complained that their view counts are down. New data from the third-party stat tracker SocialBlade confirms what YouTubers fear: viewership is lower across the board. SocialBlade crunched some numbers for Kotaku and determined that, since the first half of the year, YouTube views are now 5-7% lower. Between July and September,…
On March 15, 2002, 15 Saudi girls burned to death inside their school in Mecca. They were not trapped by fallen debris, or unaccounted for by firefighters. The mutaween, Saudi Arabia’s religious police, would not allow the girls to leave their burning school because they were not covering their hair or wearing their abayas. The…
Apple launched a new series of MacBook Pro laptops this fall, and Consumer Reports’ labs have just finished evaluating them. The laptops did very well in measures of display quality and performance, but in terms of battery life, we found that the models varied dramatically from one trial to another. As a result, these laptops…
Throughout the ‘Fake News’ uproar of the post-election cycle I kept thinking back to this line that I wrote in The Boy Kings about the launch of News Feed in 2006. The story concerns a moment when a Facebook coworker tested a News Feed story by putting the two of us ‘in a relationship’ on…
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.John Lamparski/Getty Images A bug in a recent version of Twitter’s Android app inflated video advertising metrics by as much as 35%, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider. Twitter let advertisers know about the error earlier this week. The company has issued advertisers refunds for over-billing from video campaigns that ran…
The year 2016 has seen it all: the death of a gorilla and the birth of an irredeemable meme; the resurgence of fascism and the rise of the alt-right; the election victory of Donald Trump and the complete deterioration of modern American politics. And yet, the year perseveres, collecting momentum and shattering our preconceived notions…