It’s the simple bargain that made companies like Google and Facebook into giants: in exchange for the convenience of running your life from a smartphone, you hand over gobs of data on your every activity. It zips up into the cloud where algorithms do…well it’s hard to be exactly sure, but everyone's at it. Oh, except Apple. Tim Cook has aggressively positioned the company as uninterested in collecting user data, and boasts that it sets Apple apart. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...
Jul 18, 2017•6 min
Officially, the online search giant Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” According to two new reports—one from the Wall Street Journal and one from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Campaign for Accountability’s Google Transparency Project, the company doesn’t just organize. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 17, 2017•8 min
You may not know how you know it, but you probably know today is Amazon Prime Day—a 30-hour-long, made-up shopping holiday from the online retail giant, where 85 million Prime subscribers get access to hundreds of thousands of discounts through Amazon’s site. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 14, 2017•10 min
You're probably used to pop-ups on websites begging you to sign-up for an email newsletter, enter a contest, or watch an ad. But tomorrow the web will be plastered in a different sort of pop-up as some the tech's biggest companies fight to maintain a free and open internet. Last May, the Federal Communications Commission began the process of dismantling the net neutrality rules it adopted in early 2015. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 13, 2017•13 min
Hello, and welcome to Who Extorted It Better? Time to meet our contestants! One is an avid user of Twitter, frequent golfer, and the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth: Donald Trump! The other is a major international news organization full of great journalists and run by bean-counting execs who helped put Donald Trump in office: CNN! Ready? Aaaaaaaannnd extort! Ooh, strong opening move from the president, hinting that if CNN continued its critical coverage of his administration, well, ...
Jul 12, 2017•13 min
Shortly before am on February 23, 2016, an incendiary email landed on a nonprofit listserv, blasting a federal program that many of the listserv’s members rely on to bring high-speed internet to low-income and rural Americans. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 11, 2017•21 min
When most people think about diversity, they think recruiting and hiring, and it ends there. They are mistaken. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Bärí A. Williams (@bariawilliams) is head of business operations, North America, at StubHub. She previously served as lead counsel for Facebook and created its supplier diversity program. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 10, 2017•8 min
On Wednesday, one day after Facebook had announced that two billion people use its service every month, ProPublica released a bombshell investigation into the company's hate-speech censorship guidelines. The report included documents that revealed that Facebook's rules often end up protecting the rights of those in power over those who are powerless. These two revelations are inextricably entwined, each enabling and necessitating the other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choice...
Jul 07, 2017•8 min
For months now, social media companies have been grappling with how to minimize or eradicate hate speech on their platforms. YouTube has been working to make sure advertisers' content doesn't show up on hateful videos. Instagram is using AI to delete unsavory comments. And earlier this week, ProPublica reported on the internal training materials Facebook gives to the content managers who moderate comments and postings on the platform on how to calculate what is and isn’t hate speech. Learn about...
Jul 06, 2017•10 min
The net neutrality debate can seem complicated. But at its heart, the issue rests on two simple realities: First, for more than a decade, the status quo in the US has been an open internet that supports thriving innovation among websites, apps, and new digital services. Second, innovators and consumers are dependent on a few large broadband providers that serve as gatekeepers to the internet. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Terrell McSweeny (@TMcSweenyFTC) is a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. ...
Jul 05, 2017•10 min
These are confusing times. Everyone’s a potential Russian agent. Facts can no longer be trusted. People keep putting Newt Gingrich on TV. Nothing about our current world makes sense. So it's understandable that even Donald Trump might have a hard time getting a handle on things. Over the past month, Trump has asked no fewer than 15 questions of the world on Twitter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 04, 2017•12 min
Captain Renault: “I’m shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here.” Croupier: [hands Renault money.] “Your winnings, sir.” Renault: “Oh, thank you very much. Everybody out at once!” WIRED OPINION ABOUT Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, and the author of the forthcoming book WTF? What’s the Future, and Why It’s Up to Us, due out from Harper Business on October 10. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 03, 2017•12 min
Every word has at least one meaning when it stands alone. But the meaning can change depending on context, or even over time. A sentence full of neutral words can be hostile (“Only whites should have rights”), and a sentence packed with potentially hostile words (“Fuck what, fuck whatever y'all been wearing”) can be neutral when you recognize it as a Kanye West lyric. Humans are generally good at this kind of parsing, and machines are generally bad. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...
Jun 30, 2017•11 min
"Not everything that happens in your life is good," Robin Hunicke says. "But everything that happens is a part of your story." We're sitting in a small apartment across the street from the LA Convention Center the week of E3 2017, talking about her new game, Luna. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 29, 2017•5 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 28, 2017•6 min
Staring down a packed room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown San Francisco this March, Randy Gallistel gripped a wooden podium, cleared his throat, and presented the neuroscientists sprawled before him with a conundrum. “If the brain computed the way people think it computes," he said, "it would boil in a minute." All that information would overheat our CPUs. Humans have been trying to understand the mind for millennia. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jun 27, 2017•8 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 27, 2017•10 min
Amidst all the turmoil both online and off, it might have been easy to miss, but guess what? Summer is here! And you know what that means: Things are heating up. And we're not just talking about the mercury rising. From the halls of Congress to the tubes of the internet, heated discussions and hot takes abound. Think you might have missed something online over the last week? Grab a cool beverage and lean back—everything you need to know is right here. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.or...
Jun 26, 2017•10 min
To cash in on the growing anxiety that we are fast becoming a bunch of Wi-Fi-enabled cyborgs, the marketplace has spawned a new consumer category: products to free you from the crushing grip of always-on digital ubiquity. There are digital detox retreats: off-grid playgrounds where the habitually frazzled do downward dog in grassy fields and type letters on manual typewriters. There are $76 bath salts, too—minerals specially formulated to cleanse the bodies and minds of digital natives. Learn ab...
Jun 26, 2017•14 min
Sean Spencer was ready to give up. For two years, since suffering a major panic attack, the entrepreneur had been living under a cloud of depression. Nothing seemed to make it better. He took traditional antidepressants, but they made him “want to die.” Meditation gave him a fleeting sense of relief, but it wasn’t enough to get him through the day. Out of desperation, he finally traveled to a clinic to try a controversial new therapy: ketamine IV infusions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail....
Jun 23, 2017•7 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 22, 2017•10 min
You live, it’s true, in a Golden Age of Television, and at least some of that gold comes in the form of lucky coins from leprechauns that reanimate unfaithful dead spouses. Which is to say, some of the most premium-est of premium TV right now is genre—science fiction and fantasy. It’s American Gods, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Westworld, The Leftovers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 21, 2017•1 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 21, 2017•20 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 20, 2017•7 min
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 16, 2017•23 min
Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop says nothing about the future of technology. The team in Redmond didn’t concern itself with the way things will be in 2025—which ports users will want, what kind of device they’ll use, how they’ll feel about bezels. Instead, Microsoft built a laptop optimized for 2017. Contrast that approach with Apple’sMacBooks. To trim every millimeter from its laptops, Apple invented a shallower keyboard. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jun 15, 2017•9 min
President Trump's irate and irrational tweets have already gotten him in plenty of trouble, and will, no doubt, continue to be an issue as he pushes for approval of his controversial travel ban before the Supreme Court. Now, free speech advocates are condemning Trump not just for what he's saying on the platform, but for what he's preventing his constituents from saying to him. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 14, 2017•6 min
Apple’s iMac updates and new HomePod speaker drew most of the attention at the company’s World Wide Developers keynote. But tucked away in the middle were a short few minutes in which software chief Craig Federighi casually launched Apple into one of the tech industry’s fiercest competitions– the contest to help developers build the next generation of AI-powered applications. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 13, 2017•7 min
Net neutrality isn’t the simplest concept to grasp. Explaining it works best via example: Net neutrality means, say, that internet providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon, which also have their own television and streaming video services, can’t create “slow lanes” for competing services. They can’t gum up traffic from sites such as Netflix and Dish’s SlingTV in favor of their own. But net neutrality doesn’t just cover streaming video. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choice...
Jun 12, 2017•8 min
Fourteen-year-old Isabel Catalan stares intently at her laptop as she walks me through a recent assignment one sunny morning a few weeks before summer vacation. The studious eighth grader and I are sitting in a tiny, colorful classroom at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy, a small private elementary school in the tree-lined Philadelphia suburbs, which also happens to be my alma mater. In most ways, Norwood feels a lot like I left it nearly 20 years ago. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-c...
Jun 09, 2017•10 min
