Business, Spoken

Accelerators like Y-Combinator have had online programs, but the pandemic might force even its elite core program to go entirely remote for the first time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The food service industry is facing pandemic-related layoffs and closings, but tech-savvy chef Eric Rivera is using online platforms to keep his business in the black. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Food producers, distributors, and warehouse operators say supplies are plentiful, so long as stores can be restocked. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Health officials want to close beaches crowded with spring breakers to slow the spread of coronavirus. Local businesses fear the financial impact. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all announced this week that thousands of content moderators are being sent home—leaving more of our feeds in the hands of machines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Netflix is slowing streams in Europe in an effort to preserve bandwidth amid the pandemic. But US providers seem to be holding up to the surge in usage. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Drivers for Uber and Lyft in Seattle say demand for rides has plummeted, and they have few workplace benefits to fall back on. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Microsoft's founder has been slowly inching away from his company. Now Gates has stepped down from the board seat he held for 44 years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google and the White House are working together now, but they're still not describing the same website. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Digestive is a peculiar font. Its ornate, wiggly letters make it look a bit like calligraphy by aliens from outer space. But Digestive isn't just unusual in how it looks. It's also unusual in how it was sold. Thanks to Future Fonts, a platform for selling fonts that are still works-in-progress, Digestive was already gracing magazine covers, concert posters, and even perfume boxes, before designer Jérémy Landes considered it finished. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The announcement earlier this week that Intuit, the financial software giant, would be buying the personal finance company Credit Karma for $7 billion was striking. The tech industry is under more antitrust scrutiny than ever; just a few weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission announced a broad inquiry into the past decade of acquisitions by the five biggest tech giants, with a focus on mergers that kill off budding rivals. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Thursday, 18 stories above the streets of Manhattan, the rooftop bar of one of the more than a dozen Marriott hotels in Midtown played host to an unusual crowd. Some were Airbnb hosts, others repped the burgeoning homesharing startup scene, most were wannabe rental empire titans—all were members of New York City’s booming short-term rental industry interested in learning how to turn their Airbnb side hustle into a hospitality superbrand. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amazon is cracking down on third-party merchants who violate its policies while selling items related to the new coronavirus disease known as Covid-19. Following reports by WIRED and others of price gouging and misleading claims, the retail giant confirmed it had removed or blocked over one million products that falsely advertised to defend against or cure the illness, as well as tens of thousands of items—such as face masks—that were listed for inflated prices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story is part of a collection of pieces on how we work today, from video conferencing to using productivity apps for off-label purposes to appeasing our robot overlords. When J. Lo and Shakira put on their “provocative” performance during the Super Bowl halftime show in January, was it an act of female empowerment or a demeaning objectification? Just kidding. People will never agree on that. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may very well have fundamentally changed the fight against climate change this week. In an Instagram post Monday, the world’s richest man committed $10 billion of his personal fortune to set up the new Bezos Earth Fund, which would support “scientists, activists, NGOs—any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Federal Communications Commission is once again seeking comment on its repeal of its Obama-era net neutrality rules. But the new comment period isn't focused on the usual issues that underpin the net neutrality debate, such as blocking or throttling content. Instead it will focus on less-noticed aspects of the agency's decision with regards to public safety and the agency's oversight of broadband internet providers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fans of games like Dungeons & Dragons know that the fun comes, in part, from a creative Dungeon Master—an all-powerful narrator who follows a storyline but has free rein to improvise in response to players’ actions and the fate of the dice. This kind of spontaneous yet coherent storytelling is extremely difficult for artificial intelligence, even as AI has mastered more constrained board games such as chess and Go. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Artificial intelligence has made big strides recently in understanding language, but it can still suffer from an alarming, and potentially dangerous, kind of algorithmic myopia. Research shows how AI programs that parse and analyze text can be confused and deceived by carefully crafted phrases. A sentence that seems straightforward to you or me may have a strange ability to deceive an AI algorithm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University in Wuhan, China, is at the heart of the outbreak of Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that has shut down cities in China, South Korea, Iran, and Italy. That’s forced the hospital to become a testbed for how quickly a modern medical center can adapt to a new infectious disease epidemic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Onstage during last night’s primary debate in Nevada, Mike Bloomberg found himself with no friends. But he’s got a plan to make some new ones in California. In advance of the state’s pivotal primary on March 3, the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign is hiring more than 500 “deputy field organizers” in the state, at a $2,500 monthly salary for part-time work. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You stroll into the office a little past 9 am. You got here in a company-sponsored bus that featured cushioned seats, Wi-Fi, and a distinct lack of eye contact. You are wearing weekend casual, even though it is a Wednesday. The office kitchen has green juice and kombucha growlers, which are free, as are breakfast and lunch. The office is lined with screens where your remote colleagues might pop up as talking heads. The CEO hoverboards past you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Have you ever really looked at a photon? Part wave, part particle, all perfection. Yet they bring out the worst in some ­people, who bring out the worst in me. Let's start with the obvious: Photons, in all their quantum quintessence, can improve the security of internet connections. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A $10 billion climate fund has been proposed and bluetooth devices are exposed, but first: a cartoon about a modern day Lion King. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Garry Kasparov is perhaps the greatest chess player in history. For almost two decades after becoming world champion in 1985, he dominated the game with a ferocious style of play and an equally ferocious swagger. Outside the chess world, however, Kasparov is best known for losing to a machine. In 1997, at the height of his powers, Kasparov was crushed and cowed by an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Gabriel is a professional transcriber, and for years he earned a middle-class living. In the early 2000s he'd make up to $40 an hour transcribing corporate earnings calls. He'd sit at his desk, “knock it out” for hours using custom keystrokes, and watch the money roll in. “I sent my son to private schools and university on transcribing,” he tells me. “It was a nice life.” But in the past decade, the bottom fell out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last June, at a swanky, strobe-lit event in Washington, DC, Brendan Blumer, the 33-year-old CEO of a blockchain company called Block.one, unveiled a new product with Steve Jobs-like theatrics: a social network called Voice. A year earlier, Blumer’s company had raised $4 billion selling a crypto token called EOS. It was, by far, the largest-ever initial coin offering—more money than just about any US initial public offering that year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The number of Airbnb listings in London has quadrupled in the last four years as more and more of the city’s housing stock has been gobbled up by short-term rental companies. As of May 2019, 80,770 properties in London were listed on Airbnb, with a staggering 23 percent, or 11,200, of these thought to be in breach of a legal 90-day limit in the capital. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, many observers scratched their heads. The smaller messaging platform had annual revenues in the low tens of millions. How could it be worth so much? Soon enough, however, Facebook’s logic became clear. While little noticed in the US, WhatsApp was already a juggernaut overseas, with hundreds of millions of users. In countries where Facebook was not as popular, the acquisition gave Mark Zuckerberg’s company an immediate foothold. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1997, Hiroaki Kitano, a research scientist at Sony, helped organize the first Robocup, a robot soccer tournament that attracted teams of robotics and artificial intelligence researchers to compete in the picturesque city of Nagoya, Japan. At the start of the first day, two teams of robots took to the pitch. As the machines twitched and surveyed their surroundings, a reporter asked Kitano when the match would begin. “I told him it started five minutes ago!” he says with a laugh. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You’ll likely have one less choice for mobile service soon. Last year, nine states and the District of Columbia filed suit to block T-Mobile's $26.5 billion acquisition of Sprint. Tuesday, a federal judge ruled against the states, allowing the merger to move forward. The deal still needs approval from the California Public Utilities Commission, but it's not clear if the commission can actually block the deal. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One evening last June, residents from the Hillesluis and Bloemhof neighborhoods on the south side of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, crowded into a community room at their local playground. Many wore headscarves and some arrived after a protest march from a local mosque. The residents had assembled to learn more about a government system called SyRI that had quietly flagged thousands of people in their low-income communities to investigators as more likely to commit benefits fraud. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Article 13—a controversial piece of copyright legislation that is now called Article 17 but is more colloquially known as "the meme ban"—is no more, in the UK at least. Last week, the country's minister for universities and science, Chris Skidmore, confirmed that the UK will not implement the EU Copyright Directive after leaving the EU. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. The directive limits how copyrighted content is shared on online platforms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With the coronavirus growing more deadly in China, artificial intelligence researchers are applying machine-learning techniques to social media, web, and other data for subtle signs that the disease may be spreading elsewhere. The new virus emerged in Wuhan, China, in December, triggering a global health emergency. It remains uncertain how deadly or contagious the virus is, and how widely it might have already spread. Infections and deaths continue to rise. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For decades, .org domain names have been the home for nonprofit organizations on the internet. Groups including the Red Cross, the Sierra Club, and the Heritage Foundation use them, as do many smaller, less well-known organizations. Now, the nonprofit organization in charge of .org domains could be sold to a for-profit company in a $1.1 billion deal that’s attracted protesters and the attention of California’s attorney general. The organization managing . Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The last three and a half years haven’t been so great for social media platforms. They’ve been accused of fomenting genocide, breaking Western democracies, and abetting mass shooters. The CEOs have sweated in front of Congress, meditated deep in the forests, and deleted the very apps that made them billionaires. Amid this drama, Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, has been like a man whistling as he bikes safely beside the century’s craziest car crash. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

John Elberling likes to play the long game. In 1986, when he was 40, he pushed for a ballot measure to cap office development in San Francisco, to protect the city’s character from rogue developers. The voters approved it, but it didn’t matter much, because it turned out the city didn’t need so many big offices. That is, until now. Three decades later, San Francisco is finally feeling the cap’s intended pinch—thanks to a recent influx of tech. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Happy Khao Thai has an address on San Francisco’s Mission Street, but don’t go there looking for a storefront. A sign on the sidewalk reading “Food pick up here” points, improbably, through the maw of a demolished theater, of which all that’s left is the marquee. Behind it, in what would have been the lobby, is a parking lot, and way in the rear—backstage, perhaps—are a pair of portable toilets and a trailer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In October, Google celebrated a breakthrough that CEO Sundar Pichai likened to the Wright brothers’ first flight. Company researchers in Santa Barbara, California, 300 miles from the Googleplex, had achieved quantum supremacy—the moment that a quantum computer performs a calculation impossible for any conventional computer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last week, a global gaggle of billionaires, academics, thought leaders, and other power brokers gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s signature annual event. Climate change! The global economy! Health! The agenda was packed with discussion of the most pressing issues of our time. True to form, much of the musing ventured away from root causes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The town of Rotterdam, New York, has only 45 police officers, but technology extends their reach. Each day a department computer logs the license plates of around 10,000 vehicles moving through and around town, using software plugged into a network of cameras at major intersections and commercial areas. “Let’s say for instance you had a bank robbed,” says Jeffrey Collins, a lieutenant who supervises the department’s uniform division. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last month, researchers at OpenAI in San Francisco revealed an algorithm capable of learning, through trial and error, how to manipulate the pieces of a Rubik's Cube using a robotic hand. It was a remarkable research feat, but it required more than 1,000 desktop computers plus a dozen machines running specialized graphics chips crunching intensive calculations for several months. The effort may have consumed about 2. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story is part of a series on parenting—from surveilling our teens to helping our kids navigate fake news and misinformation. What does it mean for a kid to be media literate? It sounds generally positive and important, like a good dental checkup or a flawless report card. The field is broad and definitions vary, but the main thrust of literacy education is to prepare our children to be adept at accessing, creating, and thinking critically about all types of media. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A new United Nations-sponsored report offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of the challenges to global electoral integrity posed by the onslaught of misinformation, online extremism, and social media manipulation campaigns, and calls for a series of reforms from platforms, politicians, and international governing bodies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

David Barnett, a former philosophy professor and the founder and CEO of PopSockets, says his interactions with Amazon have often amounted to “bullying with a smile.” Like many companies, PopSockets, which makes a popular plastic grip that can be attached to smartphones, discovered several years ago counterfeit versions of its products available for sale on Amazon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two Microsoft employees sat opposite one another in a Washington State Senate hearing room last Wednesday. Ryan Harkins, the company’s senior director of public policy, spoke in support of a proposed law that would regulate government use of facial recognition. “We would applaud the committee and all of the bill sponsors for all of their work to tackle this important issue,” he said. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

To anyone with eyes in their kneecaps, the notice outside gadget retailer B8ta’s glossy store next to San Francisco’s new NBA arena is obvious. “We care about your privacy,” the small plaque proclaims, offering a web address and QR code. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Alexa, are you eavesdropping on me? I passive-aggressively ask my Amazon Echo this question every so often. Because as useful as AI has become, it's also very creepy. It's usually cloud-based, so it's often sending snippets of audio—or pictures from devices like “smart” doorbells—out to the internet. And this, of course, produces privacy nightmares, as when Amazon or Google subcontractors sit around listening to our audio snippets or hackers remotely spy on our kids. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You walk into the office and greet a digital avatar that replaced the company receptionist a few years ago. After sliding your badge into a reader, you smile and nod, even though you know “Amy” is not a real person. You sit down at your cubicle and start browsing the web. Then the trouble starts. You receive an email requesting a meeting. “Bob” wants to chat about your job performance. You fire up a Zoom chat and another digital avatar appears on the screen. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A bipartisan group of senators Tuesday introduced a bill designed to give Chinese telecom giant Huawei more competition in the market for 5G equipment by pumping more than $1 billion into 5G-related research and development. While the funds could be a boon for smaller companies, it’s paltry compared with what the telecommunications and wireless industries already spend on R&D. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last September, as California legislators considered Assembly Bill 5, a measure designed to limit which workers can be classified as independent contractors, companies like Uber and Lyft bemoaned a potential blow to their bottom lines—bottom lines that were, for the record, already suffering. But one gig economy CEO cheered the bill from the sidelines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices