Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Iam at the San Francisco International Airport some barely recent morning, registering for a travel program called Clear when the automated kiosk assisting me makes a strange request: “Stand still while we scan your irises.” I’ve barely digested this first ask when another takes its place: this time, the kiosk wants my fingerprints. I find…
Some U.S. publishers have blocked visitors from the E.U. to their sites rather than comply with the wide-ranging General Data Protection Regulation to protect people’s online privacy. The Washington Post went an extra step and put up a paywall for E.U. visitors, upselling them to a $90 a year “premium EU subscription” in exchange for…
Ninja at the Fortnite Pro Am Image: Epic Tyler “Ninja” Blevins might be on top of the streaming world right now, but even he’s not immune to being yanked back down to earth by the sometimes absurdly demanding realities of the job. For the past couple days, Ninja’s been living it up at E3, retweeting…
When Nintendo unveiled Smash Bros. Ultimate at E3 on June 12th, the Japanese developer promised a bevy of smaller tweaks to the platform brawler. According to Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai, some fighters are more expressive now, while others feature new voice acting and sound effects. What wasn’t announced: the anatomical proportions of some characters…
Uber said it may soon know if customers are drunk — even before they get picked up. The ride-hailing company said in a recent patent application that it has come up with a way to tell “the state of the user” by analyzing a number of factors. The patent imagines a world where you might…
Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa is drawing scrutiny after sharing a social media post from a British white nationalist who has described himself in the past as an admirer of Hitler’s Germany and a “Nazi sympathizer.” King, whose racially inflected comments on subjects such as immigration and Western culture have drawn headlines for years, retweeted the…
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Karleen Smith used to work at the Macy’s in Landmark Mall, putting price tags on summer dresses, housewares and the latest styles of shoes. On Saturday, Ms. Smith, 57, returned to her former store, not as an employer or a customer, but as a resident. The former Macy’s in this vacant shopping…
This feels like something from a William Gibson cyberpunk dystopia novel, where the government has become so weak and useless, private corporations have been taking over the basic upkeep of the nation. But it’s not a William Gibson novel, there’s no plucky protagonist with some sort of cybernetic implant, it’s just America in 2018, with…
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible. The SIGGRAPH 2018 computer graphics and design conference…
French Licorne nuclear test, July 3, 1970. Image: Pierre J/Flickr There are currently about 15,000 nuclear warheads on Earth—enough to blow our planet to kingdom come. It’s complete overkill, literally. But how many nukes is enough to deter an enemy? And how many nukes could an aggressor nation drop on an enemy before the effects…