He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back
How a hacker shamed and humiliated high school girls in a small New Hampshire town, and how they helped take him down.
How a hacker shamed and humiliated high school girls in a small New Hampshire town, and how they helped take him down.
Stephanie Clifford Wired Jun 2019 25min Permalink
How an industrial designer became Apple’s greatest product.
Ian Parker New Yorker Feb 2015 Permalink
At Facebook’s worst-performing content moderation site in North America, one contractor has died, and others say they fear for their lives.
Casey Newton The Verge Jun 2019 25min Permalink
For years, it was the largest portal for sex on the internet. Now its fate could shape the future of Silicon Valley.
Christine Biederman Wired Jun 2019 25min Permalink
For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.
Maciej Cegłowski Idle Words Jun 2019 Permalink
How Adam Neumann turned WeWork into a $47 billion business.
Reeves Wiedeman New York Jun 2019 45min Permalink
Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube, where he was pulled into a world filled with conspiracy theories, misogyny and racism.
Kevin Roose New York Times Jun 2019 15min Permalink
On labor organizing at a Silicon Valley giant and what happens when a company loses touch with its motto of “don’t be evil.”
Beth Kowitt Fortune May 2019 20min Permalink
Exposure to the internet did not make us into a nation of yeoman mind-farmers (unless you count Minecraft). That people in the billions would self-assemble, and that these assemblies could operate in their own best interests, was … optimistic.
A co-founder makes the case for government intervention.
Chris Hughes New York Times May 2019 25min Permalink
For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
In a small Minnesota town, an IT technician found his way to the darkest corner of the web. Then he made a deadly plan.
Mara Hvistendahl Wired Apr 2019 25min Permalink
“The key differentiator of Super-Aggregators is that they have three-sided markets: users, content providers (which may include users!), and advertisers. Both content providers and advertisers want the user’s attention, and the latter are willing to pay for it.”
Ben Thompson Stratechery Apr 2019 Permalink
More than 250 people have died since 2011 taking pictures of themselves in dangerous locations.
Kathryn Miles Outside Apr 2019 15min Permalink
Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs.
Nicholas Thompson, Fred Vogelstein Wired Apr 2019 40min Permalink
How proposals to change recommendations and curb conspiracies were sacrificed for engagement.
Mark Bergen Bloomberg Apr 2019 15min Permalink
An investigator set out to discover the source of one scammy robocall. Turns out, his target made them by the millions.
Alex W. Palmer Wired Mar 2019 20min Permalink
Steve Jobs, age 29.
"It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare."
David Sheff, Steve Jobs Playboy Feb 1985 1h Permalink
Are some celebrity mediums fooling their audience members by reading social media pages in advance? A group of online vigilantes is out to prove it.
Jack Hitt New York Times Magazine Feb 2019 20min Permalink
How can you know if you’re about to get replaced by an invading algorithm or an augmented immigrant? “If your job can be easily explained, it can be automated,” Anders Sandberg, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, tells Oppenheimer. “If it can’t, it won’t.” (Rotten luck for people whose job description is “Predict the future.”)
Jill Lepore New Yorker Feb 2019 30min Permalink
The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America.
Casey Newton The Verge Feb 2019 30min Permalink
At the end, Theranos was overrun by a dog defecating in the boardroom, nearly a dozen law firms on retainer, and a C.E.O. grinning through her teeth about an implausible turnaround.
Nick Bilton Vanity Fair Feb 2019 15min Permalink
Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?
Clive Thompson The New York Times Magazine Feb 2019 35min Permalink
On living with the internet.
Patricia Lockwood London Review of Books Feb 2019 30min Permalink
It was Hell.
Kashmir Hill Gizmodo Feb 2019 20min Permalink