Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Added by PressForward
I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
WeWork Cos. is tapping the bond market for the first time and in doing so, has provided a rare glimpse into the startling numbers behind its breakneck expansion. The co-working company, which is seeking $500 million to finance yet more growth, has amassed a global portfolio of more than 14 million square feet, approaching the…
We’ve known for some time now that Americans are increasingly dying younger, but the scale and nature of the problem has been a little bit murky. There was speculation that the downturn in American life expectancy was all thanks to “deaths of despair,” but some experts have said that might not be the full story,…
YouTube has a porn problem on some of its popular videos, and it seems to be coming from the same mysterious source. Twitter users and YouTubers have been complaining about an ad that has shown up before videos on popular YouTube pages, including Pewdiepie, Markiplier, and Dude Perfect. The ad shows a woman gyrating (not…
“Hang on, I just have to put my soles on,” I call after the kids, who are racing out the door for a trip to the market. The soles in question are two dove-gray, rubber flaps that snap to the bottoms of my slippers, which I have just imported from London. A slipper-transformer that will…
Add another name to the list of publishers that is shutting down and blaming FacebookFB 0.53% : Render Media. The digital media company behind recipe video publisher Cooking Panda and news and politics site Opposing Views says it is planning to close shop, pointing to a combination of factors, including recent changes by Facebook to improve the quality…
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,…
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to…
The Illinois Republican Party is condemning the man poised to be its nominee for Congress in the state’s third congressional district as a Nazi. So how did he end up on the ballot? The answer points to failures of democratic safeguards on every level, from a state party unable to recruit an alternative candidate in…
The giant porn site puts deepfakes in the same category as revenge porn. In its search of a platform that will host fake porn videos of celebrities created with a machine learning algorithm, the deepfakes community briefly turned to Pornhub, a porn site that gets over 75 million visitors a day. Tuesday, Pornhub told Motherboard…