Before they hand control of the House of Representatives over to Democrats, House Republicans are mounting one more effort to hold Silicon Valley giants accountable for what they say is rampant liberal bias at tech companies. In the hot seat this time: Google CEO Sundar Pichai. On Tuesday, Pichai will testify before the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing focused on transparency, data collection, and filtering. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 11, 2018•10 min
In Montreal Thursday, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau boasted about his country’s leading position in artificial intelligence and openness to international collaboration. A few miles away, the world’s largest AI conference proceeded without scores of researchers denied visas by Trudeau’s government. All week, Montreal has played host to 8,000 people attending the conference, NeurIPS, which ends Saturday. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 11, 2018•6 min
Doug Engelbart was the first to actually build a computer that might seem familiar to us, today. He came to Silicon Valley after a stint in the Navy as a radar technician during World War II. Engelbart was, in his own estimation, a “naïve drifter,” but something about the Valley inspired him to think big. Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs—communication and collaboration. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 10, 2018•7 min
On Saturday, President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires to discuss a trade deal. On the same day, Canadian authorities arrested the chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. The arrest comes at a delicate moment in the trade talks, in which the countries are slapping tariffs on each others’ products. Trump and Xi reportedly agreed on a 60-day truce before extending the tariffs to more goods. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-cho...
Dec 10, 2018•6 min
In 1988, the US and other nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to study and respond to consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. In Montreal Thursday, the governments of France and Canada said they will establish a similar group to study and respond to the global changes being wrought by artificial intelligence technology. They say the panel is needed to rein in unethical uses of AI, and minimize the risk of economic disruption such as job losses caused by automation. Lea...
Dec 07, 2018•6 min
What do a patent application drawing for troll socks, a cartoon scorpion wearing a hard hat, and a comic about cat parkour have in common? They were all reportedly flagged by Tumblr this week after the microblogging platform announced that it would no longer allow “adult content. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 07, 2018•9 min
Phishing just won’t go away. Nearly three-quarters of organizations polled by security company Proofpoint saw phishing attacks last year. Sometimes attackers are able to fool even security-savvy users. A company called MetaCert is trying to fight phishing emails with an extraordinarily simple method. The company has spent seven years compiling a database of web addresses known to be used by phishers, and the company and its users are constantly reporting more. Learn about your ad choices: doveta...
Dec 06, 2018•7 min
In an unprecedented move Wednesday, British lawmakers published hundreds of pages of internal Facebook emails and other documents that had previously been ordered sealed as part of an ongoing legal case between Facebook and a now defunct app developer called Six4Three. The documents, which date back to 2012, provide a rare window into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's thoughts on how to expand his social media juggernaut as users made the transition from desktop to mobile phones. Learn about your a...
Dec 06, 2018•14 min
Tumblr was never explicitly a space for porn, but, like most things on the internet, it is chock full of it anyway. Or at least it was. On Monday, to the shock of the millions of users who had used the microblogging site to consume and share porn GIFs, images, and videos, Tumblr banned the “adult content” that its CEO David Karp had defended five years prior. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 05, 2018•12 min
Google says a very small percentage of its search results are personalized, a claim that has helped insulate the company from scrutiny over filter bubbles, especially compared with Facebook and YouTube, a Google subsidiary. But a new study from DuckDuckGo, a Google rival, found that users saw very different results when searching for terms such as “gun control,” “immigration,” and “vaccinations,” even after controlling for time and location. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
Dec 04, 2018•5 min
Kate Brandt has a radical idea for how we’ll have to live in the future, if we’re going to be in balance with nature. She envisions a world without landfills, where ownership is obsolete, and everything down to the socks on our feet is rented and shared. Brandt is Google's sustainability officer. And she’s obsessed with one idea: the “circular economy,” which aims to eliminate waste. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Dec 04, 2018•8 min
The past three months have not been kind to large public technology companies. Amid crescendos of criticism about monopolistic power, these companies saw their market value plummet. The rampant selling has leveled off, at least for the moment, so it’s an opportune time to ask: What comes next? WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. This was hardly the first drop in these firms’ share prices, and it won't be the last. Learn about your ad...
Dec 03, 2018•7 min
Over the past year, two popular forums for men who identify as involuntary celibates, or incels, have been banned by Reddit and a domain registrar in response to members’ history of toxic misogyny and celebrating violence against women. Now, some of these men are trying to turn the tables. Members of the incel community—including the official Twitter account for incels. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Dec 03, 2018•11 min
Two years ago, Alphabet researchers made computing history when their artificial intelligence software AlphaGo defeated a world champion at the complex board game Go. Amazon now hopes to democratize the AI technique behind that milestone—with a pint-size self-driving car. The 1/18th-scale vehicle is called DeepRacer, and it can be preordered for $249; it will later cost $399. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 29, 2018•5 min
Time is running out for Congress to restore net neutrality protections this year. The Federal Communications Commission last year voted to jettison Obama-era rules prohibiting broadband internet providers from blocking or otherwise discriminating against lawful internet content. Earlier this year, the Senate passed legislation to restore those protections. But the Senate used an unusual legislative maneuver that requires the House of Representatives to pass the same bill by Dec. 10. Learn about ...
Nov 28, 2018•5 min
A British lawmaker suggested that Facebook was made aware of suspicious Russian behavior on its platform as early as 2014 during a hearing on fake news and disinformation that took place in London on Tuesday. The MP, Damian Collins, was drawing on a cache of internal Facebook documents that he seized last week, and which the social networking giant has fought for months to keep sealed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 28, 2018•14 min
Among the biggest spenders on Facebook political ads during the midterms are some names you’d probably expect. There’s Beto O’Rourke, who lost to Ted Cruz in Texas’s recent Senate race. There’s President Trump—both his campaign and his Super PAC. There are billionaires like JB Pritzker, incoming governor of Illinois, and Tom Steyer, the environmentalist leading the campaign to impeach Trump. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 23, 2018•14 min
Instagram Monday said it would again crack down on users who pursue “inauthentic activity” to boost an account’s popularity. Within hours, BlackHatWorld, a forum popular with self-proclaimed “black hat” social media marketers, was in crisis. In a section of the forum usually reserved for sharing the best deals on obtaining fake Instagram followers, concerned users started at least 13 threads to discuss the policy change. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 23, 2018•9 min
In recent weeks, at least five big tech companies have revised their policies for handling sexual-harassment complaints, saying they will no longer force employees to submit those claims to arbitration, a process that tends to favor employers. But many of the new policies come with hitches: They may apply only to claims of harassment and assault, and not claims of discrimination, retribution, and hostile work environment that often accompany harassment. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx....
Nov 22, 2018•5 min
The price of bitcoin dropped another 10 percent Tuesday, extending a decline that has sent the virtual currency down 33 percent in the past month and 46 percent in the past year. Boom and bust cycles are par for the course for bitcoin. So far this year, there have been only three days where the S&P 500-stock index dropped more than 3 percent, with the worst being a 4 percent drop in February, says Duke University finance professor Campbell R. Harvey. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...
Nov 22, 2018•4 min
Back in the early 1930s, farmers couldn’t get wired. The big-city electric utilities claimed that delivering power to customers spread out in rural areas wasn’t profitable. So eventually the locals rolled up their sleeves and did it themselves. They formed electric co-ops and strung their own damn wires, aided by cheap federal loans. Today there are nearly 900 rural co-ops still providing their communities with electricity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 21, 2018•5 min
On the 3:13 pm train out of San Jose on a recent Friday, I hunched over a Macbook, brow furrowed. Hundreds of miles north in a Google datacenter in Oregon, a virtual computer sprang to life. I was soon looking at the yawning blackness of a Linux command line—my new AI art studio. Some hours of Googling, mistyped commands, and muttered curses later, I was cranking out eerie portraits. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 21, 2018•7 min
One Thursday last month, 19-year-old Robbie Barrat woke to a fusillade of messages on his phone. “I was half asleep but saw they all contained the same number,” he says. “Then I fell back asleep for a few hours. I didn’t really want to believe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 20, 2018•7 min
The definition of cloud computing may be nebulous, but its promise is clear. Instead of filling a warehouse with servers and paying people to manage them, a company can pay a cloud computing provider to provide computing resources on demand and pay only for what it actually uses. This prospect lured organizations ranging from startups to massive corporations to stodgy government agencies onto cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.or...
Nov 20, 2018•8 min
When Alex Jones crashed the congressional hearings looking into big tech platforms back in September, Lord Voldemort kept coming to my mind. Even if you haven’t read the Harry Potter books, you probably know that almost no one in the wizarding world will speak this archvillain’s name aloud; he is referred to only as “he who must not be named” or “you know who. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 19, 2018•6 min
Google parent Alphabet generated 86 percent of its revenue from advertising last year. On Friday the woman leading its best shot at building a second big revenue stream said she is moving on. Diane Greene, a storied cloud computing entrepreneur and executive, has been leading Google’s cloud computing division since early 2016. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nov 19, 2018•4 min
On Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times published a blockbuster—five byline, 50 source, 5,000 word—report on the failures of Facebook’s management team during the past three years. It begins with Sheryl Sandberg yelling at one of her employees; it ends with her hand-written stage directions, captured by a Times photographer, as she sat before the Senate: “Slow, Pause, Determined. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Nov 16, 2018•16 min
Amazon announced Tuesday that the 14-month public bidding war for its so-called second headquarters was coming to an end. After reviewing 238 proposals from cities across North America, the company says it will build two large regional offices in Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia as well as a smaller campus in Nashville, Tennessee. The search was largely a success for CEO Jeff Bezos, who can use valuable data from the losing cities to inform Amazon’s business and future expansion. Learn a...
Nov 15, 2018•7 min
The tech industry already spends tens of millions of dollars every year lobbying in Washington for federal regulations that will benefit their businesses---or, better yet, for no regulations at all. But while lawmakers on Capitol Hill have spent the last two years handwaving and making empty threats against Big Tech, regulators in the UK have been getting to work, strengthening their data privacy laws and taking steps toward more restrictions around content online. Learn about your ad choices: d...
Nov 14, 2018•8 min
After a 14-month search, Amazon announced Tuesday that it will open a pair of regional offices in two major metropolitan areas where it already has a presence: the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, New York, and Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington D.C. The decision comes after over 230 cities submitted bids to be home of the Seattle-based company’s highly-anticipated second headquarters, which originally promised to employ 50,000 white collar workers. Learn about your ad choices:...
Nov 14, 2018•9 min
