Welcome to Reading List, Gizmodo’s Sunday afternoon round-up of the best writing from around the web. This week we’re featuring pieces from Ars Technica, Variety, Businessweek, and Discover.
- Ars Technica‘s Cyrus Farivar submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for his Passenger Name Record, the individualized data collected by airlines, cruise ships and hotels whenever someone makes travel plans. Those files are given to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and as Farivar found out, they often contain un-obscured personal information — including IP addresses and full credit card numbers. [Ars Technica]
- David S. Cohen explains the dust-up between Andy Serkis, who performed the motion-capture acting for Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and the VFX animators who turned man into beast. Of the two, which deserves credit? Cohen says that’s asking the wrong question. [Variety]
- Michael Riley looks back to 2011 to explain how Russian hackers managed to sneak into the Nasdaq, exploring how one of the world’s most important and secure financial systems could get hacked — and why we still don’t understand exactly how it happened. [BloombergBusinessweek]
- Christie Wilcox takes down the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, explaining how the pop-culture glance at marine biology uses bad science and outright hoaxes to put ratings ahead of knowledge. [Discover Magazine]
Image: Shutterstock / Hamik