In retrospect, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz realizes that all the hype was a big mistake. “I think we were arrogant,” he says. It’s nearly 11 pm on a Monday night in late July, and we are in the back room of an Italian restaurant not far from the Fort Lauderdale beach. It’s a place he often takes visitors who make the trek from Los Angeles or San Francisco to Mickey Mouse’s Florida homeland for a demo. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 08, 2018•23 min
Early Monday morning, Apple pulled several podcasts associated with notorious conspiracy theorist and protein powder peddler Alex Jones from the iTunes store. The decision opened the floodgates to a wave of suspensions that continued throughout the day. First came Facebook, which said it unpublished four pages affiliated with Jones after receiving new reports over the weekend that videos on those pages violated Facebook's policies on hate speech. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-...
Aug 08, 2018•6 min
The battle lines over net neutrality are firmly drawn. On one side are internet advocacy groups, large tech companies, and most Democrats. On the other are free-market adherents, telecom companies, and most Republicans. Then there’s Charles "Chip" Pickering, a conservative Republican former member of Congress and CEO of a telecommunications-industry group called Incompas. He supports net neutrality. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 07, 2018•10 min
In April, the founder of multibillion dollar Chinese startup Bytedance made a striking public statement. “Our product took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values,” Zhang Yiming said, in a message widely distributed by state-controlled media. He pledged that Bytedance would work harder to “promote positive energy and to grasp correct guidance of public opinion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 06, 2018•8 min
So it finally happened. Apple announced stellar quarterly earnings; investors liked them; the stock rose; and Apple became the first US company to surpass $1 trillion in market value. In our love for big numbers, that made it a big story. WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED Contributor and president of River Twice Research. Never mind that if you adjust for inflation and go global, Apple isn’t actually the first trillion-dollar company. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...
Aug 06, 2018•8 min
Miriam Adelson is an accomplished physician who’s published around a hundred research papers on the physiology and treatment of addiction, and runs a high-profile substance-abuse clinic in Las Vegas. She’s also publisher of Israel’s largest newspaper, and, with her billionaire husband Sheldon, a philanthropist and influential Republican party donor. Yet Wikipedia does not have an entry for her. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 03, 2018•6 min
In 2010, Google made a moral calculus. The company had been censoring search results in China at the behest of the Communist government since launching there in 2006. But after a sophisticated phishing attack to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, Google decided to stop censoring results, even though it cost the company access to the lucrative Chinese market. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Aug 03, 2018•6 min
Small internet providers expect a helping hand from the Federal Communications Commission Thursday, a move that could spur competition and perhaps lower prices. But the commission is also considering a more sweeping proposal that would hurt upstarts to the benefit of industry giants like AT&T. Both issues revolve around how much access upstarts should have to facilities and equipment owned by their bigger rivals. Thursday’s vote is about arcane rules for moving wires on utility poles. Learn ...
Aug 02, 2018•8 min
Pop quiz: What tech mogul dropped out of Harvard after two years to found a tech company that conquered the world? If you answered Mark Zuckerberg, congratulations! You are correct. And if you answered Bill Gates, congratulations: You are also correct! And the interesting thing is, it’s not just Harvard. The more you compare the two, the more similar they seem. It’s as if they were cloned from the same DNA: They both were born the only boy into a wealthy family. Learn about your ad choices: dove...
Aug 02, 2018•10 min
At Google’s cloud computing conference in San Francisco last week, CEO Sundar Pichai mused on his company’s commitment to openness, and artificial intelligence. “We create open platforms and share our technology because it helps new ideas get out faster,” Pichai said. Then he namechecked TensorFlow, the machine learning software Google developed and uses internally. The company open sourced the code in 2015, and it has since been downloaded more than 15 million times. Learn about your ad choices...
Aug 01, 2018•9 min
Lawyers for a group of UK residents whose Facebook data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica are now threatening to sue for damages. In a 27-page letter served to the company Tuesday, they accuse Facebook of violating British data privacy regulations. The letter before claim, as it's called, is the first step in the UK's legal process for filing a class action suit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 31, 2018•9 min
There’s a not so subtle irony to the President of the United States tweeting that Twitter is suppressing prominent conservative voices in America---and almost instantly receiving tens of thousands of likes, retweets, and replies. But such are the times. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 30, 2018•7 min
A year ago today, Airbnb announced a wise move designed to to increase the company’s presence in black neighborhoods: a partnership with the NAACP. By the time the press release crossed the wires, the move was a long time coming. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 30, 2018•6 min
Last September, the software company Atlassian launched a new workplace chat app called Stride, aimed squarely at taking on the similar app Slack. “We’ve been thrilled by the excitement we’ve seen from the tens of thousands of teams who have adopted it as their communication platform,” the company gushed in a March blog post. Now, less than a year after the launch, Atlassian is pulling the plug on the product, along with its earlier workplace chat app HipChat. Learn about your ad choices: doveta...
Jul 27, 2018•4 min
On May 11, 2017, a reporter named Trey Yingst, who covers the White House for the conservative news network OANN, tweeted a photo of a framed map of the United States being carried into the West Wing. The map depicted the 2016 election results county-by-county, as a blanket of red, marked with flecks of blue and peachy pink along the West Coast and a thin snake of blue extending from the northeast to Louisiana. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 27, 2018•7 min
Your house is full of Amazon Alexas streaming Spotify; in the car, you pull up YouTube on your phone to play "Everything Is Awesome" (again!) for the kids. SoundCloud rocks. When was the last time you bought music on any physical medium? But back in the old days, music barely existed online. "Downloading music required people to search for websites where songs were posted. Most were unreliable. Links broke," we wrote more than a decade ago. "Traffic spikes slowed download times. Learn about your...
Jul 26, 2018•3 min
Google Glass lives—and it’s getting smarter. On Tuesday, Israeli software company Plataine demonstrated a new app for the face-mounted gadget that understands spoken language and offers spoken responses. Plataine’s app is aimed at manufacturing workers. Think of an Amazon Alexa for the factory floor. The app points to a future where Glass is enhanced with artificial intelligence, making it more functional and easy to use. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 26, 2018•5 min
In “The Political Education of Silicon Valley,” which appears in the August issue of WIRED, Steven Johnson looks at the changing political worldview of the tech sector, a shift from the libertarianism of the 1990s to a more progressive, pro-government outlook today. One of the exemplars of that transformation is Ro Khanna, who was elected in 2016 to represent California’s 17th congressional district in the heart of Silicon Valley. In early May, Johnson sat down with Rep. Learn about your ad choi...
Jul 25, 2018•5 min
Few companies in the history of business have been pilloried like Facebook in the last two years. The list of offenses, largely self inflicted, reads like a rap sheet. It ignored its growing role in media and politics. It dismissed fake news as unimportant. It let fake accounts proliferate. It was too slow to find and shut down foreign hackers and spies. It allowed third parties to download and sell user data without telling anyone. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 25, 2018•5 min
If you followed Rebecca Hirschfeld’s @Beckster319 account on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, you would have seen that she’s an actress, an obsessed fan of David Bowie, not so much of Donald Trump, and will eat anything pumpkin flavored. Around the same time, if you looked at Markiya Franklin’s @internalmemer account, you’d figure she supports Black Lives Matter and is a diehard K-Pop fan. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 24, 2018•13 min
Juul Labs, the San Francisco-based e-cigarette company, is under pressure from parents, schools, public health advocates, lawmakers, and the Food and Drug Administration for its popularity with younger users, who have gravitated to Juul’s discrete rechargeable vaping device and nicotine pods in flavors like mango and fruit medley. Now come the lawsuits. Since April, consumers have filed at least three complaints against Juul. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 24, 2018•5 min
Companies are waging an invisible data war online. And your phone might be an unwitting soldier. Retailers from Amazon and Walmart to tiny startups want to know what their competitors charge. Brick and mortar retailers can send people, sometimes called "mystery shoppers," to their competitors' stores to make notes on prices. Online, there's no need to send people anywhere. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 23, 2018•9 min
The Ugandan parliament referred a controversial new social media tax to a committee for further consideration on Thursday, after protesters took to the streets of Kampala last week. The tax, which went into effect July 1, charges 200 Ugandan shillings (or $0.05) per day of use for 60 mobile apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp. Critics say it puts an undue burden on the poorest members of society, and that it is an assault on freedom of expression. Learn about your ad choic...
Jul 23, 2018•9 min
Last year, as thousands of women shared their stories of sexual assault and harassment with the hashtag #MeToo, Amanda, a 30-year-old from Oregon, was looking for a supportive place to share her own experiences. Soon enough she was invited by a friend to join a Facebook group for survivors of sexual assault that had thousands of members. The group was easy to find: As recently as this month, the page associated with it ranked higher in some search results than the #MeToo page verified by Faceboo...
Jul 20, 2018•11 min
A Texas-based nonprofit helping migrant families detained at the US southern border has refused a substantial donation from Salesforce after the tech company declined to cancel its contracts with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 20, 2018•4 min
European regulators took a big swing at Google Wednesday for abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system, fining the company €4.34 billion ($5 billion) and ordering changes to Android designed to put Google rivals on a more level playing field. But it’s not clear that the fine or the operational changes will have much effect. “Google has basically won,” says Maurice Stucke, co-founder of The Konkurrenz Group and a law professor at the University of Tennessee. Learn about your ad...
Jul 19, 2018•7 min
Dawn Song, a Berkeley computer-science professor and MacArthur fellow, is a fan of cloud computing. She also thinks it needs a major rethink. “The cloud and the internet have fundamentally changed our lives mostly for good,” she says. “But they have serious problems with privacy and security—users and companies lose control of their data. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 19, 2018•6 min
Toward the tail end of a sparsely attended hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Republican congressman John Rutherford turned to the three witnesses before him---representatives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter---and asked a question that left them speechless. Congress, he explained, has already amended Section 230, the law that protects tech platforms from liability for what people post, by creating an exception for content related to sex trafficking. Learn about your ad choices...
Jul 18, 2018•9 min
Sinclair Broadcasting's proposed $3.9 billion takeover of the Tribune company, which would have expanded the conservative media company's footprint to nearly three-fourths of American households, suddenly appears in trouble. Today, Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai effectively came out against the acquisition by proposing to refer it to a hearing with a judge. In theory, the deal could still go ahead if the judge finds no problems with the acquisition or if the decision is appeale...
Jul 18, 2018•5 min
Prime Day, which began Monday, is one of Amazon’s biggest promotions of the year, when the retailer offers deals to subscribers to its Prime service. This year, some Amazon workers in Europe are striking during Prime Day, hoping to draw draw attention to working conditions like proposed cuts in wages and health benefits. In solidarity, some consumers have been boycotting the company and its many subsidiaries, like Twitch and Whole Foods. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 17, 2018•4 min
