Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Added by PressForward
“Anonymised” data lies at the core of everything from modern medical research to personalised recommendations and modern AI techniques. Unfortunately, according to a paper, successfully anonymising data is practically impossible for any complex dataset. An anonymised dataset is supposed to have had all personally identifiable information removed from it, while retaining a core of useful…
Paris riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets near the famous Champs-Elysees boulevard against “yellow vest” protesters who are staging another weekend of demonstrations against French President Emmanuel Macron. The French government said 31,000 people were protesting across France, including 8,000 in Paris. Around 700 people have been arrested so far today. Police tried push…
In a tell-all memoir, the pornographic actor Stormy Daniels details salacious descriptions of her time with Donald Trump, wonders if he is fit to be president and claims he offered to cheat for her in his reality TV show. Stormy Daniels: ‘little girl from Baton Rouge’ posing big problem for Trump A copy of…
The Institute of Economic Affairs is facing two official investigations after it emerged that the thinktank offered potential US donors access to UK government ministers as it raised cash for research to promote free-trade deals demanded by hardline Brexiters. The Charity Commission announced on Monday that it had opened a regulatory compliance case into the…
German researchers have discovered unknown persons are using bitcoin’s blockchain to store and link to child abuse imagery, potentially putting the cryptocurrency in jeopardy. The blockchain is the open-source, distributed ledger that records every bitcoin transaction, but can also store small bits of non-financial data. This data is typically notes about the trade of bitcoin,…
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to…
Court documents filed in the US have revealed the editorial concerns of the publisher Simon & Schuster about the manuscript of the “alt-right” controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos’s autobiography Dangerous. Having reportedly secured the book for an advance of $255,000 (£200,000), Simon & Schuster cancelled the deal in February after a recording emerged that appeared to show…
The US government has announced significant cuts in its United Nations budget obligations for 2018-2019 in what will be interpreted as a further ratcheting up of pressure from the Trump administration looking to bend decision-making at the international body to its will. In a statement released over the holiday, the US Mission to the United…
A top Uber executive who reportedly obtained the medical records of a woman who was raped by her Uber driver was only fired after journalists learned of the incident, it emerged on Wednesday. According to reports on the tech website Recode and in the New York Times, Eric Alexander, the president of business for Uber…
The White House correspondents’ dinner is a fixture of the Washington scene, a spring event at which the cream of political journalism shares bonhomie, fine food and comedy roasting with the politicians it reports on – including the president. Under Donald Trump, however, the dinner is facing uncertainty. Trump, who has repeatedly attacked “the very…