The House That Spied on Me

I installed internet-connected devices to serve me, but by making the otherwise inanimate objects of my home “smart” and giving them internet-connected “brains,” I was also giving them the ability to gather information about my home and the people in it. The company that sold me my internet-connected vacuum, for example, recently said that it collects a “rich map of the home” and plans to one day share it with Apple, Amazon, or Alphabet, the three companies that hope to dominate the smart home market. Once I made my home smart, what would it learn and whom would it tell?

Source: The House That Spied on Me

Troll factories, bots and fake news: Inside the Wild West of social media

A group of maybe a dozen people can create the impression of anything between 20,000 and 40,000 tweets in an hour. They can then push that hashtag into the trending lists. It throws a smoke screen over the whole idea of one man, one vote. Somebody who controls 10,000 bots or 100,000 bots, they are controlling 100,000 voices and they distort the debate,” says Nimmo.

Source: Troll factories, bots and fake news: Inside the Wild West of social media

WWI’s Zeppelin Bombings Popularized the Trend of ‘Pyjamas’

Pyjamas were both warmer and more practical than thin nightdresses during air raids, but attractiveness was important for some, too. “The zeppelin raid has not only set a fashion for respirators but it has, ridiculously enough, given rise to an attempted fashion in clothes,” sneered one Guardian columnist in August 1915. The column went on: “Zeppelin pyjamas can be made of honest flannel. Very much more often they are made of crepe de chine, or, failing that, of Japanese silk. Favorite colors are dark blue and pale pink. Needless to say the former color is most suited for its purpose”—presumably to blend into the night.

Source: WWI’s Zeppelin Bombings Popularized the Trend of ‘Pyjamas’

Why Some Apps Use Fake Progress Bars

Benevolent deceptions can hide uncertainty (like when Netflix automatically loads default recommendations if it doesn’t have the bandwidth to serve personalized ones), mask system hiccups to smooth out a user’s experience (like when a progress bar grows at a consistent rate, even if the process it’s visualizing is stuttering), or help people get used to a new form of technology (like the artificial static that Skype plays during quiet moments in a conversation to convince users the call hasn’t been dropped).

Source: Why Some Apps Use Fake Progress Bars

Fire and Fury

I would be reading Fire and Fury but there appears to be not a single copy left for sale in all of Westchester County.

Snapchat blocked snaps from its New Year’s Eve party, so let’s check Instagram

This is more or less the exact opposite of dogfooding

You can vicariously enjoy all sorts of fun New Year’s Eve celebrations on Snapchat, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico to Lebanon, but the massive Snap party isn’t among them. … The reason, according to Daily Beast reporter Taylor Lorenz, is that Snap put a digital cone of silence over the Microsoft Theater, blocking public snaps from the area, and told its employees not to post to social media from the party—on Snapchat or otherwise.

Source: Snapchat blocked snaps from its New Year’s Eve party, so let’s check Instagram

How brands secretly buy their way into Forbes, Fast Company, and HuffPost stories

Yael Grauer, a freelancer who’s written for Forbes and many other outlets, says she’s gotten as many as 12 offers like Satyam’s in a single month, which she always rejects. Some are surprisingly straightforward, like a marketer who simply asked how much she charged for an article in Slate or Wired. Others are coy, like a representative of a firm called Co-Creative Marketing, who heaped praise on her writing before asking whether she could get content published in Forbes or Wired on behalf of a client. Another marketer offered Erik Sherman, a business journalist, $315 per article to mention her client’s landscaping products in Forbes, the Huffington Post, or the Wall Street Journal — though she cautioned that the mentions would need to “not look blatant.” Sherman declined, telling the marketer that the offer was “completely unethical.”

Source: How brands secretly buy their way into Forbes, Fast Company, and HuffPost stories