Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
[if (mso)|(IE)]> [if (mso)|(IE)]> It’s me again — Mr. Sunshine — with more wretched news about the rotting carcass of our once adequate industry. 1. Digital GangstersWe begin in Jolly Ol’ England where a committee of Parliament denounced Facebook and its leadership as “digital gangsters.” According to The New York Times… “…After 18 months investigating Facebook and…
ContentItemController, generated at 16:20:31 Fri Feb 22, 2019, by cds6 Facebook planned to use its Android app to track the location of its customers and to allow advertisers to send political advertising and invites to dating sites to ‘single’ people, confidential documents show. Facebook project teams developed technology to allow the company to track the…
Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP You know who got a hefty pay increase between 2017 and 2018? The banks! According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s 2018 Q4 report, more than 5,400 federally insured banks made $236.7 billion in profits last year, and saw a $72.4 billion increase in profits from 2017. Per the Hill, $28.8…
After a pair of damning HuffPost stories and another by BuzzFeed News about Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s horrible alleged treatment of her staff, the New York Times today has its own story out about the 2020 presidential candidate’s relationship with her staff. This is how it begins: Senator Amy Klobuchar was hungry, forkless and losing…
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is…
A man was dragged to his death after a shoulder bag he was carrying got caught in a moving subway train in Midtown on Tuesday night, police sources said. The 39-year-old man from Queens was standing on the eastbound No. 7 train platform at Grand Central Terminal at about 7:20 p.m. when his bag got…
Image: Pinterest The anti-vaccination movement has become so widespread that the World Health Organization added it to its list of the top threats to global health in 2019. Social media companies are drawing criticism for not doing more to prevent the spread of misinformation about vaccines and Pinterest has come up with a novel solution:…
It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room…
Earlier this week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and the tech journalist Kara Swisher conducted a full 90-minute interview entirely on Twitter. The interview was meant to be an old-school “Twitter chat,” and users were instructed to follow along using the hashtag #KaraJack. It was a disaster. Attempting to follow a public conversation happening on Twitter is…
Scientists call it California’s “other big one,” and they say it could cause three times as much damage as a major earthquake ripping along the San Andreas Fault. Although it might sound absurd to those who still recall five years of withering drought and mandatory water restrictions, researchers and engineers warn that California may be…