Some people call bitcoin "the internet of money," suggesting the digital currency and related technologies could do for the financial system what the internet did to information distribution over the past few decades. But skeptics are still waiting for a "killer app," while bitcoin prices have never returned to their late 2017 peak when trading hit more than $20,000 per bitcoin. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 23, 2018•4 min
When the Jeff Bezoses and Jack Dorseys of the world leap from the bow of the ships they’re sailing forth, what will happen to them? Where will they go? When Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft who died this week at age 65, left the business he started, he traveled the world. He collected paintings and learned to scuba dive. Scuba diving, he said at the time, “takes me away from myself.” Allen had it right. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 22, 2018•8 min
Google CEO Sundar Pichai was upbeat Monday when he told WIRED about internal tests of a censored search engine designed to win approval from Chinese officials. It will take more than a government nod for Google to succeed, however. That’s not only because of the political tensions raised by President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, which analysts say make Google’s expansion unlikely. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 22, 2018•6 min
Silicon Valley’s deep financial ties to Saudi Arabia illustrate “the hypocrisy behind the ‘change the world’ fantasy” pushed by tech companies, said journalist Anand Giridharadas. Saudi backing for popular apps like Uber, Slack, and Wag offers proof that “the most idealistic companies on earth---in rhetoric---are very happy to take the dirtiest money on earth to grow and grow and grow,” he said. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 19, 2018•4 min
It’s no longer enough to build lean companies quickly. The companies of the near future will need to be both fast and massive. And if it takes years to grow from a small startup to a major player in Silicon Valley, well. That’s just too slow. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says Silicon Valley now demands that companies double their size after three months, then six months, then a year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 19, 2018•5 min
Deep in the bowels of Facebook's serpentine campus in Menlo Park, California is a room about 25-feet-square that may have a lot to do with how the world thinks about the company in the coming months. It looks like a Wall Street trading floor, with screens on every wall and every desk. And 20 hours a day---soon to be 24 hours a day---it's jammed with about two dozen geeks, spooks, hackers, and lawyers trying to spot and quash the next bad thing to happen on the company's networks. Learn about you...
Oct 18, 2018•6 min
Since launching in 2008, GitHub has become by far the largest place on the internet for hosting and collaborating on software code. The company, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, now hosts more than 85 million projects, and boasts 31 million monthly users. But while you've been able to store your code on GitHub, you couldn't actually run it. For that you needed a web server or a cloud service. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 18, 2018•4 min
Artificial intelligence researcher Fei-Fei Li has spent her career trying to make software smart—with some success. Lately she’s begun to ask herself a new question: How can we make smart software aligned with human values? “As much as AI is showing its power, it’s a nascent technology,” Li said at the WIRED25 Summit in San Francisco Monday. “What’s really important is putting humanity at the center. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 17, 2018•4 min
Iconic tech-company founders often come in pairs: Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The world lost half of one such duo Monday when Paul Allen, who cofounded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 65. For the last three decades of his life, Allen was best known as a philanthropist and prolific entrepreneur. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 17, 2018•8 min
“If big tech companies are going to turn their back on US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Monday, defending government contracts amid a wave of employee protests. Bezos spoke at the WIRED25 summit, where Steven Levy, WIRED editor at large, asked his view of companies using the most advanced technology to aid the DOD. “We are going to continue to support the DOD and I think we should,” Bezos replied. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Oct 16, 2018•4 min
Kevin Systrom doesn’t know what’s next, but he’s starting by learning to fly. Three weeks after he and his Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger abruptly left the Facebook-owned company—and three days since his first solo flight—Systrom says he’s taking time to think about what problem he wants to attack next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 16, 2018•4 min
Social movements have spurred major transformations in society, from the end of slavery to universal suffrage, the rise of labor unions, and universal education. Yet somehow after decades of economic stability, we began to rely on technological rather than social tools to remake the world, says Glen Weyl, a principal researcher for Microsoft. While technology flourished, we “did not allow our social wisdom and social infrastructure to balance that out,” says Weyl. Learn about your ad choices: do...
Oct 15, 2018•4 min
With a user base of more than 2 billion people who can be chopped and sorted by almost any conceivable data point—men ages 21 to 45 living in the United States who are parents to preteens and like Fortnite; women with a bachelor’s degree who are away from family and whose friends are recently engaged—Facebook advertising is an incredibly powerful tool. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 15, 2018•5 min
Microsoft wants to make peace with Linux, saying this week that it will allow more than 2,600 other companies, including longtime rivals like Google and IBM, to use the technology behind 60,000 Microsoft patents for their own Linux-related open source projects. That could be good news for makers of "internet of Things" devices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 12, 2018•5 min
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Oct 12, 2018•10 min
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Oct 11, 2018•7 min
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Oct 10, 2018•8 min
Within hours of California governor Jerry Brown signing a sweeping net neutrality bill into law, the US Department of Justice sued the state, sparking the latest battle in the long legal war over the ground rules for the internet. Groups representing broadband providers followed suit on Wednesday, with their own lawsuit arguing that California's law was illegal. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 09, 2018•7 min
Over the past year, Facebook has faced a reckoning over the way its plan to connect the next billion users to the internet has sown division, including spreading hate speech that incited ethnic violence in Myanmar and disseminating propaganda for a violent dictator in the Philippines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 08, 2018•15 min
When Amazon announced Tuesday that it was raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all employees, even vocal critics of its labor practices like Senator Bernie Sanders praised the company. The retail giant’s decision will undoubtedly put more money into the hands of its workers—especially the some 100,000 temporary US employees Amazon plans to hire in the coming months for the holiday season. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 08, 2018•7 min
In 2001, a 25-year-old unemployed college dropout named Bram Cohen crafted an elegant protocol for moving data around the internet. Titanic numbers of pirated songs and movies, and countless lawsuits, later, he’s putting the finishing touches on what he hopes will be another world-changing protocol—this time for moving around money. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 03, 2018•9 min
After months of increased public criticism about its grueling labor practices, Amazon announced Tuesday that it would begin paying all US employees, including part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers, at least $15 an hour and all UK employees at least £9.50 (with higher wages in London) beginning November 1. The move will affect 250,000 Amazon employees and 100,000 seasonal workers, according to the company. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 03, 2018•8 min
Several major tech companies---including Apple, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook---will likely have to add women to their boards of directors by mid-2021 under a pioneering new California law aimed at bringing more women into corporate boardrooms. California governor Jerry Brown signed the measure, known as SB 826, into law on Sunday. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 02, 2018•5 min
The nation’s largest state just adopted sweeping net neutrality protections, setting up a potential legal showdown with the Federal Communications Commission over the future of the internet. California Governor Jerry Brown Sunday signed a bill banning broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content passing through their networks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Oct 02, 2018•6 min
Elon Musk has long established himself as a both a visionary CEO and a lightning rod for attention, good and bad. The bad reared its head dramatically this week as the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with securities fraud for misleading investors with August tweets about taking Tesla private. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 01, 2018•7 min
There are significant, real-world benefits to having an accepted and recognized identity. That’s why the concept of a digital identity is being pursued around the world, from Australia to India. From airports to health records systems, technologists and policy makers with good intentions are digitizing our identities, making modern life more efficient and streamlined. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Oct 01, 2018•6 min
For all the advances being made in the field, artificial intelligence still struggles when it comes to identifying hate speech. When he testified before Congress in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “one of the hardest” problems. But, he went on, he was optimistic that “over a five- to 10-year period, we will have AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems. Learn about your ad choice...
Sep 28, 2018•9 min
Coraline Ada Ehmke has been writing software professionally since 1994. For the past decade, she’s been active in the Ruby programming language community and has created numerous open source tools to help fellow Ruby programmers. But these days she's best known for a different type of code altogether. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Sep 28, 2018•8 min
Google’s first public attempt to explain its reported interest in entering the Chinese market failed to appease critical members of Congress at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday. The hearing, which was attended by Google, AT&T, Amazon, Apple, and Charter Communications, began as a broad discussion of possible privacy legislation. But it concluded as a pointed condemnation of Google over recent reports that the company is building a censored search engine for China. Learn about...
Sep 27, 2018•6 min
For Democrats, there are already plenty of signs pointing to a good election night this November. There's the record number of House candidates outraising their Republican incumbent rivals. There's the unlikely rise of Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke giving Ted Cruz a real run for his seat. There are the upset victories in state legislature races, like the one in Virginia last fall. And of course, there are polls showing Democrats with a steady lead over Republicans on a generic ballot. Lea...
Sep 27, 2018•7 min
