Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Germany is about to remind Facebook Inc. that the tribulations of 2018 are far from over. In fact, they’re about to get even more real. The country’s Federal Cartel Office intends to ban Facebook from collecting user data from third parties, the newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported. This will also prohibit data sharing between WhatsApp and…
BRUSSELS — President Trump unleashed a blistering attack Wednesday on Germany and other NATO allies, wasting no time to take the offensive before a week of high-stakes diplomacy on both sides of the former Cold War divide. The series of meetings — beginning with NATO and capped by a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin…
A slow-simmering scandal in Austria has brought into public view potentially disastrous divisions among Western intelligence agencies. As far-right politicians have joined coalition governments in Austria and Italy and taken ministerial positions in charge of security and law enforcement, concerns have grown among intelligence professionals that they will ignore or even encourage the threat of…
BERLIN — The fallout was swift the morning after German Chancellor Angela Merkel reached an uneasy late-night immigration compromise with hard-line coalition allies, an agreement that appears to have saved her fragile government, at least for now. To keep her government intact, Merkel was essentially forced to abandon the “Willkommenskultur,” or culture of welcoming, that she…
Politically and economically, unions are sort of an odd duck. They aren’t part of the apparatus of the state, yet they depend crucially on state protections in order to wield their power. They’re stakeholders in corporations, but often have adversarial relationships with management. Historically, unions are a big reason that the working class won many…
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,…
BERLIN (AP) — German bureaucrats — notorious for their ability to create lengthy tongue twisters consisting of one single word — are celebrating the doubling of Twitter’s character limit. Twitter announced Tuesday it’s increasing the limit for almost all users of the messaging service from 140 to 280 characters, prompting a mix of delighted and…
In its zeal to deport unauthorized immigrants, the U.S. risks turning itself into a quasi-police state — all for little or no benefit to the native-born. First of all, net illegal immigration to the U.S. ended a decade ago: But there are still about 11 million to 12 million unauthorized immigrants remaining in the U.S….
Researchers said it was “trivial” to identify users and view their browsing habits in purchased ‘anonymous’ browsing data. SHARE TWEET In August 2016, a data broker received a phone call from a woman named Anna Rosenberg, who worked for a small startup in Tel Aviv. Rosenberg claimed she was training a neural network, a type…
(CNN)President Donald Trump shared an awkward moment with German Chancellor Angela Merkel during her visit to the White House Friday, apparently declining to shake her hand, a traditional gesture in such settings. During an Oval Office photo-op, a tense Trump barely looked at his German counterpart while quickly answering a few questions from the press….