Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In August 2017, the FBI organized a secret meeting of digital advertising and cybersecurity experts in a secure room in a Manhattan federal building. The roughly 30 people in attendance met to create a coordinated response to a massive ad fraud scheme that posed a risk to the global digital advertising industry and sparked a…
This following is from an SEC filing released today by Verizon regarding it’s “Oath” media business. That’s the unit which owns the assets of Yahoo, AOL and Huffington Post … Verizon’s Media business, branded Oath, has experienced increased competitive and market pressures throughout 2018 that have resulted in lower than expected revenues and earnings. These…
Harvard Business School invented the “leadership” industry—and produced a generation of corporate monsters. No wonder Sandberg, one of the school’s most prominent graduates, lacks a functioning moral compass. Sandberg arrives for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on September 5, 2018. By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call. The ongoing three-way public-relations car wreck involving Washington, Facebook, and…
This week, protesters scaled the Arc de Triomphe, burned cars, and clashed with police in the third consecutive weekend of riots in France. More than 300 people were arrested in Paris last weekend alone, and 37,000 law enforcement officers have been deployed around the country to restore order. The “Gilets Jaunes” or “Yellow Jackets” protests…
Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama and screenwriter Diablo Cody realized their film was in trouble well before it hit theaters in September 2009. During the marketing phase of postproduction, the pair discovered the movie — in which mousy Needy Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried) learns that her best friend Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) has been possessed by…
Paris riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets near the famous Champs-Elysees boulevard against “yellow vest” protesters who are staging another weekend of demonstrations against French President Emmanuel Macron. The French government said 31,000 people were protesting across France, including 8,000 in Paris. Around 700 people have been arrested so far today. Police tried push…
Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google. This may sound melodramatic, but it’s not. The “browser engines” — Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla — are “inside baseball” pieces of software that…
Millennials are a murderous bunch, a generation of homicidal maniacs. At least that’s the impression you get from reading news stories about my generation. According to the headlines, we’ve wreaked carnage across the economy with our fickle, selfish tastes. So far we have “killed” or are “killing” dinner dates, hotels, credit cards, grocery stores, cinemas, Home Depot, diamonds, banks, gyms, department stores, vacations, cruises and casinos, the car…
Russia interfered with the 2016 U.S. elections, former Secretary of State and Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said during a Thursday evening visit to Houston. Making his first public appearance in nearly nine months, Tillerson spoke at a fundraiser for the MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he participated in a conversation with CBS News veteran…
Lobbyists representing the Saudi government reserved blocks of rooms at President Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel within a month of Trump’s election in 2016 — paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months, according to organizers of the trips and documents obtained by The Washington Post. At the time, these…