Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me… or Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck I found Shane Snow’s essay on prison reform — “How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix the Prison System” — through hatelinking. Friends of mine hated the piece so much that normally articulate people were at a loss for…
Deputy Washington Editor of the New York Times, Jonathan Weisman, announced this morning that he is abandoning Twitter as a social media platform after Twitter bizarrely claimed that threatening to kill “k*kes” is not a violation of the company’s terms of service. Twitter, like much of the Internet, has become a cesspool of hate. While I still…
How to Not Protect Your Users Two weeks ago, Twitter sent my personal info to a group of creeps and stalkers who have been harassing me for well over a year. This is the story of how and why that happened, which I’m relating in hopes that Twitter will do better. My info was sent…
A new startup wants to take a “deep dive” into the private social media activity of prospective tenants—their chats, check-ins, how many times they’ve posted words like “pregnant” or “loan”—and score their “personality” for their potential landlord. Why would anyone let this happen? Because “people will give up their privacy to get something they want,”…
I am on the record as liking Uber. I like its service, which has revolutionized urban mobility by improving convenience, taking cars off the road, and (most likely) reducing incidents of impaired driving. I’m partial to its swashbuckling style, particularly when confronting taxi interests and municipal regulators who are more concerned with self-preservation than the…
In the early days of the social web, putting someone’s name in multiple parentheses was meant to give that person a cute virtual hug. Today, it’s something far more sinister. Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white nationalists have begun using three sets of parentheses encasing a Jewish surname — for instance, (((Fleishman))) — to identify and…
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft reached an agreement with the EU on Tuesday to block illegal hate speech from their services in Europe. The four internet giants have agreed that they will investigate reports of offensive dialog within 24 hours and either remove or disable access to the content, if it’s found to violate EU…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Facebook, Twitter, Google’s YouTube, Microsoft as well as the European Commission unveiled a new code of conduct to remove hate speech according to community guidelines in less than 24 hours across these social media platforms. The EU has ramped up efforts leading to this code of conduct following the recent terrorist…
You probably saw the news about the Chinese guy who created his own robotic Scarlett Johansson in his flat, right? Ricky Ma has caught the attention of many during the past weeks not just because he managed to build a robot that looks just like the American actress, but also because he did this all…
Miitomo offers a disquieting prophecy of social networking’s future, one in which we largely cede the actual labor of interacting with other people to the networks themselves.Nintendo On Sunday, a new co-worker wearing a pair of cat ears dropped by to say hello. I would have liked to offer her a drink, but I…