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Business, Spoken

WIRED•play.prx.org
Business

Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.

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Episodes

7/26 PM The Best Algorithms Struggle to Recognize Black Faces Equally

French company Idemia’s algorithms scan faces by the million. The company’s facial recognition software serves police in the US, Australia, and France. Idemia software checks the faces of some cruise ship passengers landing in the US against Customs and Border Protection records. In 2017, a top FBI official told Congress that a facial recognition system that scours 30 million mugshots using Idemia technology helps “safeguard the American people. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-c...

Jul 26, 2019•13 min

Teen Love for Snapchat Is Keeping Snap Afloat

When 17-year-old Emma Logan wants to make plans with her friends, she turns to Snapchat. “At this point it’s just the easiest way to contact everyone,” she wrote via text. “I use it if I’m trying to get them to respond.” All her friends have Snapchat, and they all check it more frequently than they do their text messages “(no matter how much I hate that lol). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 25, 2019•8 min

Congress Is Pissed at Facebook and the FTC

Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike are furious over reports that the Federal Trade Commission is prepared to settle with Facebook over widespread privacy violations for just $5 billion. But that doesn’t mean there’s currently an acceptable bipartisan solution floating around the marble halls of the Capitol. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 24, 2019•8 min

Amazon Warns Customers: Those Supplements Might Be Fake

On the second evening of Prime Day, Amazon’s annual sales bonanza, Anne Marie Bressler received an email from Amazon that had nothing to do with the latest deals. The message, sent from an automated email address Tuesday, informed her that the Align nutritional supplements she ordered two weeks earlier were probably counterfeit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 24, 2019•9 min

7/18 Was Bitcoin Created by This International Drug Dealer? Maybe!

The messages started arriving on a Sunday afternoon in mid-May. “Just wanted to draw your attention to this,” one began. “Rumors are starting to surface,” another informed me. “I’d be very interested in getting your thoughts,” a third suggested. My correspondents, mostly strangers, were polite but insistent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 22, 2019•28 min

That Global Ban on Huawei? Not So Much Anymore

For years the US government has warned the world that Chinese telecom giant Huawei is not to be trusted. Some governments agree: Australia and Japan have blocked Huawei gear from their next-generation 5G wireless networks. But others, including US allies, disagree. A UK Parliament committee rejected a proposed ban on British telecom carriers using Huawei gear. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 19, 2019•5 min

No More Deals: San Francisco Considers Raising Taxes on Tech

At a recent postmortem for the so-called Twitter tax break, the divisive San Francisco policy that drew tech companies to a beleaguered stretch of downtown, the tone at City Hall was chilly. Tech offices---the likes of Twitter, Zendesk, and Uber---had indeed arrived as promised, but residents of the city’s Mid-Market neighborhood told officials that little uplift came with the logos. “I’ve seen the number of people who are sleeping on the street increase. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.pr...

Jul 18, 2019•10 min

'Blitzscaling' Is Choking Innovation—and Wasting Money

Is venture capital harming entrepreneurship? At first blush, this seems like an odd question. VCs have been the lifeblood of virtually every successful tech startup for generations, enabling entrepreneurs to create and refine innovative products and rapidly scale to self-sustaining profitability. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Leonard Sherman is an Executive in Residence and faculty member at Columbia Business School. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 18, 2019•12 min

7/17 The Toxic Potential of YouTube’s Feedback Loop

From 2010 to 2011, I worked on YouTube’s artificial intelligence recommendation engine—the algorithm that directs what you see next based on your previous viewing habits and searches. One of my main tasks was to increase the amount of time people spent on YouTube. At the time, this pursuit seemed harmless. But nearly a decade later, I can see that our work had unintended—but not unpredictable—consequences. In some cases, the AI went terribly wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...

Jul 17, 2019•6 min

Amazon Pledges $700 Million to Teach Its Workers to Code

Amazon announced Thursday that it will spend up to $700 million over the next six years retraining 100,000 of its US employees, mostly in technical skills like software engineering and IT support. Amazon is already one of the largest employers in the country, with almost 300,000 workers (and many more contractors) and it’s particularly hungry for more new talent. The company currently has more than 20,000 vacant US roles, over half of which are at its headquarters in Seattle. Learn about your ad...

Jul 16, 2019•5 min

A $700 Million Amazon Pledge, Credit Card Hackers, and More News

Amazon makes an expensive pledge to its workers, a hacker group hits 17,000 domains, and butt plugs are being used for scientific research. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today's Headlines Amazon pledged $700 million to teach its workers to code This morning, Amazon announced a $700 million initiative to retrain US employees for high-skill, mostly technical jobs over the next six years. Le...

Jul 15, 2019•2 min

Twitter and Instagram Unveil New Ways to Combat Hate—Again

Twitter and Instagram would like us all to be a little bit nicer to each other. To that end, this week both companies announced new content moderation policies that will, maybe, shield users from the unbridled harassment and hate speech we wreak on each other. Instagram’s anti-bullying initiative will rely on artificial intelligence, while Twitter will use human moderators to determine when language “dehumanizes others on the basis of religion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-ch...

Jul 12, 2019•7 min

This New Poker Bot Can Beat Multiple Pros—at Once

Darren Elias knows poker. The 32-year-old is the only person to have won four World Poker Tour titles and has earned more than $7 million at tournaments. Despite his expertise, he learned something new this spring from an artificial intelligence bot. Tom Simonite covers artificial intelligence for WIRED. Elias was helping to test new software from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 12, 2019•7 min

The World Cup Was a Prime Target for Amazon Counterfeiters

The US women’s national soccer team is extremely good at two things: scoring goals and selling merchandise. Even before it won a second consecutive World Cup championship Sunday, the players’ home jersey, which is designed by Nike, became the top-selling soccer jersey ever in one season on Nike.com, according to the athleticwear company. Sales were still going strong after the historic victory. But on Amazon Monday, another story unfolded. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 11, 2019•5 min

How a Blockchain Could Help Roll Out Berkeley’s Next Fire Truck

Last year, Ben Bartlett, a member of the Berkeley city council, proposed an unusual idea to his colleagues: putting affordable housing on the blockchain. The city was facing an unprecedented housing crisis and the prospect of cuts to federal housing assistance. Why not turn to local residents to help fund a solution? The city would issue bonds, as governments often do when they need to finance big-ticket projects, and break them up into small pieces called “minibonds. Learn about your ad choices...

Jul 10, 2019•7 min

Facebook’s New Content Moderation Tools Put Posts in Context

Facebook has begun pilot tests of new content moderation tools and policies after an external audit raised numerous issues with the company’s current approach to tackling hate speech. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 10, 2019•5 min

'Mirror Worlds' Creator Wants to Displace Facebook—With Blockchain

David Gelernter’s giant macaw, Ike, has taken a tumble. One moment he was there, offering agreeable squawks as Gelernter spoke, and then, in a flash of lightning, he wasn’t. Ike is fine, the 64-year-old Yale computer scientist assures me, simply stunned. “Luckily he’s as light as a bird. So he can fall great lengths and it doesn’t bother him,” he says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 09, 2019•8 min

Health Brands Hims and Hers Flout Facebook’s Rules on Drug Ads

On television and radio, the ads are fairly innocuous: “Hey guy,” a female narrator says playfully in one TV spot for Hims, a men’s wellness brand that sells prescription drugs to treat erectile dysfunction, oral herpes, social anxiety, hair loss, and other conditions. “Hi there. Welcome to Hims.” The ad invites viewers to “get ED treatment started for only $5,” next to a close-up of a young man pressing a white pill seductively to his lips. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...

Jul 05, 2019•9 min

Twitter Will Quarantine Politicians’ Tweets If They Violate Rules—Finally

The next time a public official, politician, or a certain president violates Twitter’s rules, the company says users will notice. The offending tweet will either be removed from the platform entirely, or quarantined behind a new gray interstitial that warns users that it ran afoul of the platform’s content guidelines and limits its reach. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 03, 2019•6 min

The One Free Press Coalition Spotlights Journalists Under Attack

In May 2019, WIRED joined the One Free Press Coalition, a united group of pre-eminent editors and publishers using their global reach and social platforms to spotlight journalists under attack worldwide. Today, the coalition is issuing the fifth monthly “10 Most Urgent” list of journalists whose press freedoms are being suppressed or whose cases are seeking justice. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 03, 2019•7 min

Surprise! Huawei Can Actually Innovate—and Win Fans

Huawei doesn’t leap to mind as an innovative company. In the US, the Chinese telecom giant is best-known for the government’s national security concerns---and allegations that it stole intellectual property from companies like Cisco and Motorola. Yet Huawei was the fifth-biggest research and development spender in the world in 2017, according to a European Union report. Its €11.3 billion ($12.9 billion) R&D spend that year outpaced Intel (€10.9 billion), Apple (€9. Learn about your ad choice...

Jul 02, 2019•7 min

Greed Is to Blame for the Radicalization of Social Media

Last week, Reddit quarantined "r/The_Donald," a pro-Trump message board, after the company determined that the subgroup had encouraged and threatened violence. Likewise, Twitter is signaling that it will flag—but not remove—posts by government officials who violate its rules. As with YouTube’s demonetization (rather than deletion) of anti-gay videos, these are welcome, but insufficient measures. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Jul 02, 2019•4 min

Big Data Supercharged Gerrymandering. It Could Help Stop It, Too

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices ruled Thursday that the highest court doesn’t have the power to address partisan gerrymandering, the practice in which politicians redraw district maps to help their own party win more elections. In two cases, Lamone v. Benisek and Rucho v. Common Cause, the court split along ideological lines 5 to 4. Chief Justice John G. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jul 01, 2019•6 min

The Cypherpunks Tapping Bitcoin via Ham Radio

Every six hours, at his home in the high desert outside Kingman, Arizona, midway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, Brian Goss downloads the latest blocks from the bitcoin blockchain via satellite. He receives the transmission through a dish he installed this January; it arrives with messages, too---tweets, blogs, odes to Satoshi---sent by bitcoiners around the world. Goss rebroadcasts them from a radio device perched on his roof, in case the neighbors care to tune in. Learn about your ad choices: d...

Jun 28, 2019•7 min

Wayfair Employees Are Walking Out. Here's Why

A group of workers at the ecommerce company Wayfair staged a walkout in Boston Wednesday afternoon, to protest the company’s sale of furniture to a government contractor that manages detention centers amid an ongoing humanitarian crisis at the southern border. The walkout is taking place in Copley Square, near Wayfair’s headquarters. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jun 27, 2019•4 min
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