Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Ross Ulbricht. Image: Facebook On Wednesday, prosecutors in the Silk Road trial began to lay out the wealth of evidence found on the laptop taken from accused kingpin Ross Ulbricht when he was arrested in a San Francisco library in October 2013. The evidence presented by prosecutor Timothy Howard was the most comprehensive and…
Illustrations by Susie Cagle. I imagine that someday I may have a story written about my life, and it would be good to have a detailed account of it. — from Ross Ulbricht’s laptop, home/frosty/documents/journal/2012/q1/january/week1 When Ross Ulbricht, the alleged operator of a massive online drugs black market, was arrested on October 1,…
Facebook announced yet another tweak to the algorithm that governs its users’ News Feeds yesterday. The social network has introduced a new tool that allows users to flag a post as “a false news story.” The move follows a few other attempts by the platform to better delineate different types of content. For example, in…
BlackBerry CEO John Chen wants net neutrality to extend to content and applications, so that developers of apps for Android and iOS will be mandated to develop on the BlackBerry platform as well. Not all content and app providers have embraced openness and neutrality, Chen wrote in a blog post that the company said was…
Bill and Melinda Gates have taken on some of the world’s messiest problems, funding projects to improve the design of toilets and condoms and even create urine-powered fuel cells. Now, in their annual letter published today, they’re outlining ambitions to tackle another messy sector: banking. The central thesis of the letter, which lays out goals for the 15-year-old Gates Foundation’s next 15 years,…
It’s a measure of how much the economic and cultural landscape has changed in eight years that Apple’s app developers earned as much last year as Hollywood took in from U.S. box offices — $10 billion. There’s more to Hollywood’s revenue stream than the U.S. box office, of course. But as Horace Dediu wrote Thursday,…
Stewart Butterfield had one objective when he set out to raise money for his startup last fall: a billion dollars or nothing. If he couldn’t reach a $1 billion valuation for Slack, his San Francisco business software company, he wouldn’t bother. Slack was hardly starving for cash. It was a rocket ship, with thousands of…
Today Tumblr is announcing the launch of Creatrs, a new program that matches up Tumblrs artists with brands and advertising campaigns. The project has been in development for roughly a year. At a breakfast meeting at Tumblr’s offices in New York, head of creative strategy David Hayes explained the ways in which Tumblr is expanding its…
The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more. An example of…
Goodnight Moot: 4chan founder steps down after 11 years 4chan founder Christopher Poole (center), also known online as Moot, announced Wednesday that he is stepping down from the controversial online community. By Seth Fiegerman2015-01-21 17:04:28 UTC Goodnight Moot. Christopher Poole, founder of the controversial anonymous online community 4chan, announced Wednesday that he is stepping down…