Over the past year, Juul, the vaping sensation that dominates 70 percent of the US e-cigarette market, has tried to cultivate the image of decent corporate citizen that wants to play by the rules. The company is known for its legions of obsessive young users who have embraced Juul’s discrete, flash-drive-shaped e-cigarettes and pleasing nicotine pods in flavors like fruit medley and mango. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 17, 2018•9 min
Congress is finally turning its attention to Silicon Valley. And it’s not hard to understand why: Technology impinges upon every part of our civic sphere. We’ve got police using AI to determine which neighborhoods to patrol, Facebook filtering the news, and automation eroding the job market. Smart policy could help society adapt. But to tackle these issues, congressfolk will first have to understand them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 16, 2018•5 min
The Federal Communications Commission has reportedly dropped a proposed change in how it handles complaints that critics argued could have left consumers with fewer avenues to resolve problems with telecommunications carriers like AT&T and Verizon. The agency is scheduled to vote Thursday on proposed changes to the complaint process, but according to the Washington Post, the most controversial changes have been removed from the draft. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 16, 2018•4 min
Federal prosecutors have charged a former Apple employee with stealing trade secrets related to Apple's autonomous vehicle program. Xiaolang Zhang allegedly worked on Apple’s secretive self-driving car project. Zhang left Apple in April saying he was going to work for a Chinese electric vehicle company called Xpeng Motors. He is accused of copying more than 40GB of Apple intellectual property to his wife's laptop before leaving the company, according to court documents. Learn about your ad choic...
Jul 13, 2018•4 min
It may soon be harder to get the Federal Communications Commission to listen to your complaints about billing, privacy, or other issues with telecommunications carriers like AT&T and Verizon. Today, the agency approved changes to its complaint system that critics say will undermine the agency's ability to review and act on the complaints it receives. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 13, 2018•3 min
Perhaps a healthier Twitter is one with smaller follower counts—even if that comes as a blow to your ego. That’s what the company is hoping, anyway. Over the last several months, Twitter has embarked on a renewed push to fight abuse and spam, as well as encourage “healthy” debates and conversations, and on Wednesday the social network announced it was expanding that effort to profiles that have been “locked” for suspicious behavior. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 12, 2018•5 min
In January, I sat down with Liane Hornsey, who until yesterday was Uber’s HR chief, to discuss the progress she’d made helping to reform Uber’s culture. The company had invited me to report on its turnaround, in the run-up to the release of its redesigned drivers app. But I was interested in something else: how were things at Uber since CEO Dara Khosrowshahi arrived? She told me that she had asked an employee—a three-year veteran at Uber—how it felt to be there. Learn about your ad choices: dove...
Jul 12, 2018•7 min
For nearly as long as there have been ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, there have been apps that help riders compare fares and travel times. These aggregator apps allow riders to survey all the services in an area and check prices and wait times—an efficient version of what many do already. There are always fresh versions of these apps popping up. The newest one, Bellhop, officially launched in New York this week. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 11, 2018•6 min
Last month, the Trump administration announced that it would halt itspolicyof separating young asylum-seekers from their parents. For those Americans angered by their government’s cruel treatment of children as young as a few months old, this was a hard-fought victory. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 11, 2018•7 min
The gig economy has a problem. Freelancing is increasingly common, but it’s still difficult and costly to access benefits without a 9-to-5 job. For the lowest-paid workers, it can be close to impossible. In the past few years, many have seized on the idea of “portable benefits": insurance and paid time off not bound to a single employer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 10, 2018•7 min
There are smart speakers, which connect wirelessly to other devices, and then there’s the new era of smart speakers, designed to offer services through voice-controlled virtual assistants. Sonos, for a long time, was all about the former, having been a pioneer of high-quality, WiFi-connected speaker systems. Now it’s entered the next era with products like Sonos One and Sonos Beam, which work with Amazon’s Alexa and other virtual assistants. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
Jul 10, 2018•7 min
There once was a legendary troll, and from its hideout beneath an overpass of the information superhighway, it prodded into existence the internet we know, love, and increasingly loathe. That troll, Ken ZZ03, struck in 1995. But to make sense of the profound aftereffects—and why Big Tech is finally reckoning with this part of its history—you have to look back even further. In 1990, an online newsletter called Rumorville accused a competitor, Skuttlebutt, of being a “scam. Learn about your ad cho...
Jul 09, 2018•4 min
Last month, a California Assembly committee voted to remove key protections from a state-level net neutrality bill. Critics said the changes opened loopholes that would allow broadband providers to throttle some applications, or charge websites or services for "fast lane" access on their networks. Now those key protections are coming back. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 09, 2018•3 min
Reddit’s little mascot, Snoo, contains multitudes. The precious, ever-smiling alien hangs out at the top of hundreds of subreddits, mixing with the locals like a savvy politician. In r/trees, a community for marijuana enthusiasts, Snoo puffs a joint. In r/gonewild, Snoo poses for a selfie in a wig and lingerie. In r/Asceticism, Snoo dematerializes into the cyberether, its form the mere wisp of an outline. Cheeky bugger. Indeed, Snoo’s existence has always been something of an inside joke. Learn ...
Jul 06, 2018•5 min
Widespread internet outages around the United States on Friday afternoon quelled productivity and sent irate customers to Twitter to complain. Comcast and Xfinity suffered the biggest service interruptions across its internet, cable, and landline products. The company, which has more than 29 million business and individual customers, said on Friday that the outages stemmed from fiber optic cables at two internet infrastructure companies that were cut or otherwise disrupted. Learn about your ad c...
Jul 06, 2018•4 min
It’s no secret that the federal government is way behind the private sector when it comes to modernization and technology. Because of these outdated systems, many federal agencies rank staggeringly behind the private sector when it comes to customer service. WIRED OPINION ABOUT US Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) (@RepRatcliffe) is chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure. US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-ch...
Jul 05, 2018•4 min
Earlier this month Microsoft announced plans to buy the code-hosting and collaboration site GitHub for $7.5 billion. It's hard to overstate how important GitHub is to modern software development. The service boasts about 28 million users and hosts 85 million codebases for a wide variety of organizations, including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Walmart, and the US government. Much is open source code, a far cry from Microsoft’s roots making highly proprietary software. Learn about your ad choi...
Jul 05, 2018•4 min
Dell Technologies is going public again, five years after going private to transform itself amid slowing personal computer sales. Dell has certainly changed in those years, but it needs to change even more if it doesn't want to find itself back in the same position. Since going private, Dell has invested heavily in expanding its business selling hardware, software, and services for data centers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 04, 2018•4 min
Everywhere you look, regulators are cracking down on Airbnb. In Paris, the company’s largest market, hosts must now register with the city government and can only list their homes for 120 nights each year. In Amsterdam, new rules, which go into effect in 2019, will restrict hosts to listing for just 30 nights annually. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 04, 2018•7 min
When Steve, a thirtysomething engineer, launched a software company in San Francisco a few years ago, he and his cofounder faced the daunting task of hiring a team, from low-level engineers to a new VP. Novices, they nonetheless had an advantage: access to Option Impact, an exclusive database of tech salaries that has become a go-to reference for Silicon Valley startups. That insider information, Steve realized, has immense value. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 03, 2018•4 min
There is a travel story that Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, formerly called Priceline, likes to tell. While planning a recent family trip to Iceland, his wife wanted to check out “another site,” which Fogel carefully avoids naming, but is clearly Airbnb. The home rental she found there looked good, so she tried to book it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jul 03, 2018•8 min
In the game Armor Blitz, players assemble an army of anime “tank girls.” When the game debuted on Google Play in November 2016, it grossed just $23,400 in six months, less than half its production cost. Then the same game relaunched on the adult-gaming platform Nutaku—now with the notable addition of hentai cartoon porn. Blitz went on to bank more than $160,000 in six months. The thriving erotic-gaming industry that originated in Japan is now going global. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.p...
Jul 02, 2018•3 min
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is bringing in its first female general partner, former federal prosecutor Katie Haun, to help manage a new $300 million fund dedicated to investing in cryptocurrency and blockchain-related projects. Andreessen Horowitz has long invested in cryptocurrency companies, including the digital-wallet company Coinbase and the game company Cryptokitties. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jul 02, 2018•4 min
Silicon Valley has a long and secretive history of building hardware and software for the military and law enforcement. In contrast, a recent wave of employee protests against some of those government contracts has been short, fast, and surprisingly public---tearing through corporate campuses, mailing lists, and message boards inside some of the world’s most powerful companies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 29, 2018•9 min
Sixty-two years ago this summer, Dartmouth professor John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, has come to think it’s unhelpful. Talk of AI has become hard to avoid due to surging investment from companies hoping to profit from advances in machine learning. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 29, 2018•3 min
Apple waded knee-deep into the muck of political news delivery Monday with the announcement of a special section in Apple News devoted to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections, which will determine whether Republicans hold onto their majorities in Congress. From now until November, you will see a little Midterm Elections 2018 banner above the curated Top Stories section of the app. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 28, 2018•7 min
Hani Goodarzi is trying to cure cancer. At the new lab he runs at the University of California, San Francisco, he and his team try to understand the disease’s molecular processes, building on his research into disease metastasis. Important, life-saving work. He has grants to write, and bench work to oversee, but right now all he can think about is the pain President Donald Trump’s travel ban will cause students and postdocs from Iran, where he was born. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx....
Jun 28, 2018•7 min
In the latest installment of the simmering trade war, the Trump administration reportedly plans to impose restrictions on Chinese investments in US technology companies and American technology exports to China. If implemented as rumored, any company with more than 25 percent Chinese ownership would be barred from investing in US companies that produce “industrially significant technology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jun 27, 2018•8 min
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced on Twitter Saturday that she and her family had been asked to leave the Red Hen, a small restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. The Red Hen's co-owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, reportedly asked Sanders to leave because of her involvement in Trump administration policies like separating migrant children from their parents. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Jun 27, 2018•8 min
On Father’s Day, Alex Gil was IMing with his colleague Manan Ahmed when they decided they had to do something about children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. Since May, the US government had taken more than 2,300 kids away from their families as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' new "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which calls for criminally prosecuting all people entering the country illegally. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Jun 26, 2018•13 min
