One of the most ubiquitous features of the internet is the ability to link to content elsewhere. Everything is connected via billions of links and embeds to blogs, articles, and social media. But a federal judge’s ruling threatens that ecosystem. Katherine Forrest, a Southern District of New York judge, ruled Thursday that embedding a tweet containing an image in a webpage could be considered copyright infringement. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 19, 2018•2 min
Just before Facebook went public in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had a bound red book titled Facebook Was Not Originally Created to Be a Company placed on every employee’s desk. The book, written by Zuckerberg himself, ended with an urgent, even ominous rallying cry: If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. “Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-ch...
Feb 19, 2018•12 min
You might see fewer ads on the web from now on. But you probably won't. On Thursday, Google Chrome, the most popular browser by a wide margin, began rolling out a feature that will block ads on sites that engage in particularly annoying behavior, such as automatically playing sound, or displaying ads that can't be dismissed until a certain amount of time has passed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 16, 2018•6 min
The bike-sharing wars have escalated. What started as healthy competition between two powerful, well-funded Chinese companies and a handful of scrappy American upstarts has intensified into a trash-talking land grab involving electric scooters, electric bikes, and plenty of Silicon Valley-style ambition. In October, LimeBike the favored competitor of Silicon Valley venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Coatue Management, raised $50 million in funding. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.or...
Feb 16, 2018•6 min
Angel Torres was driving down a major Los Angeles boulevard in late 2016 when it happened: Ride requests from Uber and Lyft arrived at the same second. As he looked away from the road to decide which trip was more worth his time, he nearly rear-ended the car ahead of him. “It scared the crap out of me,” Torres says. He was new to juggling the two apps, and was so rattled by the near miss that he started pulling over every time he needed to accept a ride on one app or turn off the other. Learn ab...
Feb 15, 2018•11 min
Do not let their names fool you. The silicon places---Silicon Slopes, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Beach, Silicon Peach, Silicon Bayou, Silicon Shire, Silicon Desert, Silicon Holler, Silicon Hill and, separately, Silicon Hills---do not aspire to become “the next Silicon Valley.” Sure, the country’s burgeoning tech enclaves in Utah and Kentucky and Oregon draw inspiration from the original. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 15, 2018•11 min
In the twilight of the 20th century, Bill Gates was well and truly a tentacular squid, with his sucker-covered limbs extending into every level of the computer industry. The one area that Gates didn’t dominate: the World Wide Web. And how he tried to conquer that newfangled internet led to an epic court battle that continues to shape how the world sees the five-headed beast that Big Tech has become. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 14, 2018•5 min
In conservative circles, the pitchforks have been out for tech since at least the 2016 election season, with far-right media organizations like Breitbart and Project Veritas accusing the industry and its leaders of silencing Republican voices, advocating for open borders, and bankrolling Democratic campaigns. And yet, a new survey suggests that the tech backlash festering on the far-right fringes has also escalated on the industry's largely liberal home turf. Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...
Feb 14, 2018•6 min
The bruised Mark Zuckerberg on this issue's cover? That's a photo-illustration created by Jake Rowland, a New York City–based artist known for his composite portraits. For this image, Rowland mashed together an existing image of Zuckerberg with a photograph of a hired model—made up to look battered—whose features resembled that of the Facebook confounder and CEO. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 13, 2018•3 min
In December of 2016, Google announced it had fixed a troubling quirk of its autocomplete feature: When users typed in the phrase, "are jews," Google automatically suggested the question, "are jews evil?" When asked about the issue during a hearing in Washington on Thursday, Google's vice president of news, Richard Gingras, told members of the British Parliament, "As much as I would like to believe our algorithms will be perfect, I don't believe they ever will be. Learn about your ad choices: dov...
Feb 13, 2018•10 min
One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks. His message pertained to some walls at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters where staffers are encouraged to scribble notes and signatures. On at least a couple of occasions, someone had crossed out the words “Black Lives Matter” and replaced them with “All Lives Matter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 12, 2018•1 hr 10 min
For startups, achieving unicorn status is a big deal. Companies valued at more than $1 billion look more formidable to competitors, customers, and recruits---and less like the fly-by-night startups they may actually be. Thus, for the past three years, startup founders have asked investors to grant them billion-dollar valuations, regardless of whether they’re worth that by any traditional business metric. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 12, 2018•14 min
Tucked into a back corner far from the street, the baby-food section of Whole Foods in San Francisco’s SoMa district doesn’t get much foot traffic. I glance around for the security guard, then reach towards the apple and broccoli superfood puffs. After dropping them into my empty shopping cart, I put them right back. “Did you get it?” I ask my coworker filming on his iPhone. It’s my first paid acting gig. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 09, 2018•15 min
Tristan Harris holds his iPhone in the air, so the whole crowd of educators, technologists, doctors, and researchers before him can see the virtual wasteland of his iPhone's home screen. Gone are the cluttered, candy-colored icons that a busy brain sees as digital snacks. In their place are but a few utilitarian apps, all set to the same bleak palette of black and white. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 09, 2018•7 min
The tech industry is having a moment of reflection. Even Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook are talking openly about the downsides of software and algorithms mediating our lives. And while calls for regulation have been met with increased lobbying to block or shape any rules, some people around the industry are entertaining forms of self regulation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 08, 2018•6 min
Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit that offers emotional support through text messaging, has spent four years connecting people in extreme emotional duress with online counselors. Now its founder is creating a startup called Loris.ai to help companies teach employees how to communicate. “There are a lot of companies right now that are fearful of having hard conversations,” says Nancy Lublin, the founder of both Crisis Text Line and Loris.ai. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 08, 2018•6 min
JPMorgan Chase has plenty of “quants” who hunt profits with computers. In 2018 the bank is adding employees you might call quantums. The computers they’ll use work on data using the intuition-defying processes of quantum mechanics. America’s largest bank by assets is forming a small group of engineers and mathematicians to examine how quantum computers could help in areas such as trading or predicting financial risk. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 07, 2018•6 min
Depending on who you ask, blockchains are either the most important technological innovation since the internet or a solution looking for a problem. The original blockchain is the decentralized ledger behind the digital currency bitcoin. The ledger consists of linked batches of transactions known as blocks (hence the term blockchain), and an identical copy is stored on each of the roughly 200,000 computers that make up the bitcoin network. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 07, 2018•13 min
In May of 2017, nearly a year after Gawker shut down, a story mysteriously disappeared from its archives. The 2015 article detailed leaked emails written by Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton, which had become public after the company’s servers were breached in 2014. The story was removed as the result of an undisclosed lawsuit—and served as a troubling reminder that journalism on the internet is fragile, and subject to censorship by wealthy and well-connected individuals. Learn about your ad choi...
Feb 06, 2018•7 min
Not long after Uber’s pugnacious founders first tested their app among San Franciscans, a pair of Harvard Business School classmates from Malaysia seized upon a similar idea: They wanted to build Uber, but for Asia. In 2012, they launched a ride-sharing service with 40 drivers in Kuala Lumpur. Eventually, they settled on the name Grab. Six years later, Grab dominates the ridesharing market in Southeast Asia, boasting 2.3 million drivers in 168 cities across eight countries. Learn about your ad c...
Feb 06, 2018•7 min
So you still have no idea how to talk about cryptocurrencies at a cocktail party. That's fine: Your livelihood doesn't depend on it. But for a certain segment of the population—investors, industry analysts, lawyers, really anyone who's tech-adjacent for a living—it's suddenly their job to have something "smart" to say. And if they have any hope of establishing themselves as authorities on the subject, they're not allowed to shut up about crypto. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-c...
Feb 05, 2018•7 min
For the past few years, Facebook’s quarterly earnings calls have been something of a victory lap. Even at its massive scale---$40 billion in annual revenue and more than half of the world’s internet users, the company manages to grow consistently each quarter, even beating analyst expectations. Wall Street has rewarded the company with a stock price that can only go up, increasing 560 percent in five years and placing Facebook among the most valuable companies in the country. Learn about your ad...
Feb 05, 2018•5 min
Artificial intelligence is overhyped—there, we said it. It’s also incredibly important. Superintelligent algorithms aren’t about to take all the jobs or wipe out humanity. But software has gotten significantly smarter of late. It’s why you can talk to your friends as an animated poop on the iPhone X using Apple’s Animoji, or ask your smart speaker to order more paper towels. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Feb 02, 2018•9 min
In the first issue of WIRED, published 25 years ago this year, founding editor Louis Rossetto declared that “in the age of information overload, THE ULTIMATE LUXURY IS MEANING AND CONTEXT.” (Caps his.) If anything, that simple observation rings even truer today. That’s why WIRED has always valued depth. We dig deep into our subjects, reveling in wonky engineering details that other publications skip. We think deep thoughts about the future. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choice...
Feb 02, 2018•5 min
Virgil Griffith discovered the allure of hacking in 1993, while slumped at an Intel 80386 system in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was 10, and he was on a losing streak at Star Wars: X-Wing. To hit the leaderboard, he’d need a fleet of ace wingmen, but he only had one X-Wing fighter that could hold its own in the game’s World War I–style dogfights. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Feb 01, 2018•7 min
The interstate highway system wasn't built in the name of convenience or even commerce. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, he did it in the name of national security. In fact, the official name of the system is the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Now some in the Trump administration are arguing that the federal government should build a broadband wireless network for much the same reason. Learn about your ad ch...
Feb 01, 2018•11 min
A coalition of 97 child health advocates sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday asking him to discontinue Messenger Kids, a new advertising-free Facebook app targeted at 6-to-12-year olds. Advocates say the app likely will undermine healthy childhood development for preschool and elementary-school-aged kids by increasing the amount of time they spend with digital devices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 31, 2018•7 min
The cryptocurrency world, with its volatility, is all about FUD—fear, uncertainty, doubt. And nothing is generating more FUD right now than an unusual currency called tether. Unlike bitcoin and its many siblings, tether is what is called a stablecoin, an entity designed to not fluctuate in value. With most cryptocurrencies prone to wild swings, tether offers people who dabble in the market the option of buying a currency that its backers say is pegged to the US dollar. Learn about your ad choice...
Jan 31, 2018•10 min
Chalk it up to a New Year’s Resolution or maybe just the ongoing fallout from Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is looking to do things a little differently this year. At the beginning of January he posted that his goal for 2018 is to “focus on fixing… important issues” facing his company, referring to election interference as well as the issues of abusive content and addictive design. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jan 30, 2018•7 min
James Altucher would like to remind us of the math behind cryptocurrency: Two hundred billion dollars in supply. Two hundred trillion dollars of potential demand, even more if you throw in contract law. There’s 10,000 man-years of science behind it. The investment opportunity is bigger than you think, and trust him, he knows. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jan 30, 2018•11 min
