Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business…
Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did an interview with The Verge outlining the company’s plans for AI, augmented reality, and wearables. Unlike Meta’s previous metaverse pivot, it seems like the company is much more confident this time that they’re building the future. Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Alex Heath that Meta’s new Orion glasses, which…
AI is becoming synonymous with things that are unbelievable, generic, or just a little bit off. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; MadMusclesPlans/X It’s an exciting time at the cutting edge of AI research. Massive companies are spending tens of billions of dollars to build, train, and deploy new AI models with which they hope to automate a…
Two years ago, retail media networks were at a crossroads. At the time they were weighing whether to become traditional walled gardens or allowing the programmatic ecosystem open access to data. Retailers are long past that point. Hundreds of store operators launched retail media businesses in the past couple years alone. And most of the…
Beginning next week, the search giant will face off against the US Justice Department over allegations that the company’s adtech practices are anti-competitive. In a historic trial set to begin on Monday, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) will take on Google, challenging the way it monetizes advertising and accusing it of stifling competition in…
A new study underscores the urgent need for more effective brand safety tools to ensure that brands can reliably prevent their ads from appearing alongside harmful content. A report published today reveals that ads for hundreds of the world’s biggest brands – including Meta, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Amazon, Disney, Nestle, Mercedes, Walmart, Marriott and…
Here’s your monthly Garbage Intelligence. It arrives the first Friday of every month, instead of the usual Garbage Weekend issue. It’s a snapshot of everything that’s happening around the web. Before we dig into the data, here are this month’s three big takeaways… NOVEMBER IN JULY The US Presidential race went from historically low polling…
Google to kill cookies with consent Google yesterday announced that it no longer intends to deprecate third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. From its blog post, A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web (emphasis mine): Early testing from ad tech companies, including Google, has indicated that the Privacy Sandbox APIs have the potential to…
TikTok collected data about its users’ views on sensitive topics and censored content at the direction of its China-based parent company, the Justice Department said Friday, making its most forceful case to date that the video-sharing app poses a national-security threat. The sensitive topics TikTok tracked included the views of its U.S.-based users on gun control,…
The FBI was given access to unreleased technology to access the phone of the man identified as the shooter of former President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation. As the FBI struggled to gain access on Sunday morning to the phone, they appealed directly to Cellebrite, a digital intelligence company founded in Israel that…