Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Added by PressForward
AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked Someone used an algorithm to paste the face of ‘Wonder Woman’ star Gal Gadot onto a porn video, and the implications are terrifying. Image: Screenshot from SendVids There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body,…
Technology Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models Into This Year’s Holiday Parties “Ambiance and atmosphere models” contractually obligated to pretend they’re party guests are in record demand from local agencies. By December 7, 2017, 12:45 PM EST Photo Illustration by 731; Photos: Getty Images Along with a seemingly endless string of harassment and discrimination scandals, Silicon…
Going beyond search, the internet giant is promoting a single result over all others, and many are contentious, improbable or laughably incorrect Google handles 90% of the world’s internet searches, and it increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions. Here’s how the algorithms are—and aren’t—working Google became the world’s go-to source of information…
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…
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.05% has struck again. Only this time the internet giant is shaking up an industry it hasn’t yet entered. Amazon’s potential entry into the pharmacy-services industry helped spur CVS HealthCorp.’s CVS -2.94% $66 billion bid for insurance giant Aetna Inc., AET 11.54% according to a person familiar with the matter. An acquisition of a major insurer was among roughly a dozen strategies CVS’s management team…
Let’s Examine the ‘Rick and Morty’ McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce Debacle Three 1 oz. packets of sauce sold on eBay for $848. Image: Adult Swim Saturday, thousands of fans of Rick & Morty—a comedic television program that traffics in jokes normies could never understand such as “people with autism like Minecraft” and “Reddit exists”—lined up at McDonalds…
Gee thanks, Gus. Gus isn’t a real person, but it’s the pseudonym Senator Al Franken assigned to the Equifax Inc. employee who holds a lot of the blame for the theft of 145.5 million Americans’ personal data. Former Chief Executive Officer Richard Smith told Franken and other senators Wednesday that Equifax was breached largely because of…
Ev Williams is in New York to have meetings. He’s meeting with writers to discuss producing original content for his Medium platform; he’s meeting with editors about potential work with the company; and he’s meeting with journalists like me to try and describe just what Medium is now. After the company’s latest strategy shift away…
As Confederate statues come down across the American South, there is a question of what to do with them once they’ve fallen. Should these metal and stone colossuses be melted down and broken up? Discarded? Should the wishes of those who, like President Trump, see sentimental and historical value in the statues, be respected? And…
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…