Business, Spoken

GitHub is the largest repository of open source software in the world. Everyone from Microsoft, which acquired the company last year, to Google to Walmart use it to host their open source projects. But GitHub is also the place where users report bugs, request features, and submit their own contributions to open source projects. It has wikis that developers can use to publish documentation. It has a web hosting service called Pages for content that doesn't quite fit into the wiki mold. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Conversations around today’s internet are stuck in a stifling binary. Either we hear that the digital revolution will either magically deliver us into an über-efficient world where we are all connected and uplifted, or our fears about it gone awry, threatening our democracies and economic security, will be realized. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was a few weeks before the 2016 election, and I was putting together a report on the future of online political discourse. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This June, as the news bristled with headlines about Facebook’s cryptocurrency-to-be and the price of bitcoin once again soared, the mood in the San Francisco offices of Coinbase was subdued. In 2017, the cryptocurrency exchange was close to the frenetic epicenter of the bitcoin boom. Millions of people used its app to dip their toes into cryptocurrency speculation. Then came the crash. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Microsoft’s recent victory in landing a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract called JEDI could make life more complicated for one of the software giant’s partners: the independent artificial-intelligence research lab OpenAI. OpenAI was created in 2015 by Silicon Valley luminaries including Elon Musk to look to the far horizon, and save the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At the G7 meeting in Montreal last year, Justin Trudeau told WIRED he would look into why more than 100 African artificial intelligence researchers had been barred from visiting that city to attend their field’s most important annual event, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, or NeurIPS. Now the same thing has happened again. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The cofounder of WhatsApp and the Signal Foundation thinks the use of encrypted communications tools will only increase in the future. “There’s a global education that’s happening,” says Brian Acton, who left WhatsApp in 2018 and now chairs the non-profit foundation, which promotes open-source, end-to-end encryption in messaging. “Back in the ‘90s, we all got the same hoax emails, and we all learned to ignore them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Imagine it’s late October 2020, and that there's fierce competition for the remaining undecided voters in the presidential election. In a matter of hours, a deepfake video depicting a candidate engaged in unsavory behavior goes viral, and thanks to microtargeting, reaches those who are most susceptible to changing their vote. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that AT&T has agreed to pay $60 million in a settlement that centers around secretly throttled unlimited plans in 2011. You might assume the fine has something to do with the broadband industry’s liberal use of the word “unlimited,” given that AT&T slowed connections to a crawl once customers had used a certain amount of data. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In some ways, the social media app TikTok couldn’t have rose to prominence at a worse moment. The platform for sharing short-form video clips is owned by the Chinese startup Bytedance, and surged in popularity just as the United States’ relations with China are turning icier than they have been in years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

America’s national security depends on the government getting access to the artificial intelligence breakthroughs made by the technology industry. So says a report submitted to Congress Monday by the National Security Commission on AI. The group, which includes executives from Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon, says the Pentagon and intelligence agencies need a better relationship with Silicon Valley to stay ahead of China. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There’s a rule in the world of blockchains so ingrained that some call it folklore. Bitcoin, the original iteration of blockchain technology, is great at two things. One is keeping data secure, with a ledger others can’t sabotage. The other is “decentralization,” or getting lots of people to work together without a central authority to call the shots. But those two nice properties come with a big tradeoff: Blockchains can’t scale. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Microsoft got where it is by ensuring that Windows ran on many different types of hardware. Monday, the company said its cloud computing platform will soon offer access to the most exotic hardware of all: quantum computers. Microsoft is one of several tech giants investing in quantum computing, which by crunching data using strange quantum mechanical processes promises unprecedented computational power. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Wikipedia is the arbiter of truth on the internet. It's what settles arguments at bars. It supplies answers for the information snippets you see on your Google or Bing search results. It's the first stop for nearly everyone doing online research. The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Three days after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg was asked the question on many people’s minds: Did the explosion of fake news and caustic political rhetoric on Facebook help Trump win? Zuckerberg dismissed the idea. "The idea that fake news ... influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," he said. The line has been reprinted so frequently many can cite it from memory. It didn't matter whether his comments were willful or accidental. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Pentagon says artificial intelligence will help the US military become still more powerful. Thursday, an advisory group including executives from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook proposed ethical guidelines to prevent military AI from going off the rails. The advice came from the Defense Innovation Board, created under the Obama administration to help the Pentagon tap tech industry expertise, and chaired by Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and chairman. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Martin Fleming doesn’t think robots are coming to take your jobs. The chief economist at IBM, Fleming says those worries aren’t backed up by the data. “It’s really nonsense,” he says. A new paper from MIT and IBM’s Watson AI Lab shows that for most of us, the automation revolution probably won’t mean physical robots replacing human workers. Instead, it will come from algorithms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Elizabeth Warren announced a new plan to fight corruption in Washington on Tuesday: The Democratic presidential candidate wants to ban giant corporations from hiring senior government officials until they have been out of public office for at least four years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As Mark Zuckerberg testified about all things Facebook on the House side of the Capitol last week, over on the Senate side some lawmakers were debating whether CEOs like Zuckerberg should face jail time if their companies misuse people’s personal data. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Mark Zuckerberg never calls me for advice. But he should. I would tell him to fire his entire communications and lobbying staff. They are incompetent. They have only made matters worse for the company. Did no one think to brief Zuckerberg on the two or three obvious lines of questioning he would face? If they couldn’t prepare him, they never should have let him sit there. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The corporate war to provide cloud computing for US warfighters is over. Late Friday, the Department of Defense announced that Microsoft has won the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, known as JEDI. The decision was the culmination of a two-year process that also included Google, IBM, and Oracle, and where Amazon was long seen as the favorite. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Like much of the internet, online reviews are often fake. No matter the platform—Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, or another—no matter the subject, where user reviews are public, fakery usually follows. The practice has surged in popularity in recent years as retailers scramble to capitalize on consumers’ love of ecommerce. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In early 2018, Amos Meiri got the kind of windfall many startup founders only dream of. Meiri’s company, Colu, develops digital currencies for cities—coupons, essentially, that encourage people to spend their money locally. The company was having some success with pilot projects in the UK and Israel, but Meiri had an idea for something bigger. He envisioned a global network of city currencies, linked together using blockchain technology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2018, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 18 million reports to their CyberTipline, constituting 45 million images depicting child sexual abuse. Most of these children were under the age of 12, and some were as young as a few months old. Since its inception in 1998, the CyberTipline has received a total of 55 million such reports. Those from 2018 alone constitute a nearly half of all reports over the past two decades. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google search is advancing a reading grade. Google says it has enhanced its search-ranking system with software called BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers to its friends. It was developed in the company’s artificial intelligence labs and announced last fall, breaking records on reading comprehension questions that researchers use to test AI software. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google has its own perfume—or at least one team of the company’s researchers does. Crafted under the guidance of expert French perfumers, the mixture has notes of vanilla, jasmine, melon, and strawberries. “It wasn’t half bad,” says Alex Wiltschko, who keeps a vial of the perfume in his kitchen. Google’s not marketing that scent anytime soon, but it is sticking its nose into yet another aspect of our lives: smell. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in 2007, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg gave some advice at Y Combinator's Startup School: Do a startup before you're old. In technology, he said, twentysomethings rule. The olds are useless. “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he said. “Young people are just smarter.” That comment has not aged well. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

While American lawmakers are still mostly talking about regulating the tech industry, their counterparts in Europe have been far more active. From consumer privacy protections and content moderation to antitrust enforcement, the European Union has introduced a host of new rules aimed at Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, and at the business practices that enabled them to amass so much power. Investigations have multiplied, as have the fines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

YouTube is the biggest social media platform in the country, and, perhaps, the most misunderstood. Over the past few years, the Google-owned platform has become a media powerhouse where political discussion is dominated by right-wing channels offering an ideological alternative to established news outlets. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Technical quarrels between quantum computing experts rarely escape the field’s rarified community. Late Monday, though, IBM’s quantum team picked a highly public fight with Google. In a technical paper and blogpost, IBM took aim at potentially history-making scientific results accidentally leaked from a collaboration between Google and NASA last month. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The operations overlords of WIRED make me use Airtable. It's a hip workflow tracker, with pretty color coding and copious tabs and a “robust” API that syncs with Slack. It's also, apparently, a superhero. The Captain America of spreadsheets. Airtable isn't just a shinier version of Excel—it's on a self-professed mission to “democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build tools that meet their needs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In November 2017, a Reddit account called deepfakes posted pornographic clips made with software that pasted the faces of Hollywood actresses over those of the real performers. Nearly two years later, deepfake is a generic noun for video manipulated or fabricated with artificial intelligence software. The technique has drawn laughs on YouTube, along with concern from lawmakers fearful of political disinformation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In January, Liz O’Sullivan wrote a letter to her boss at artificial intelligence startup Clarifai, asking him to set ethical limits on its Pentagon contracts. WIRED had previously revealed that the company worked on a controversial project processing drone imagery. O’Sullivan urged CEO Matthew Zeiler to pledge the company would not contribute to the development of weapons that decide for themselves whom to harm or kill. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As casual dining chains have declined in popularity, many have experimented with surveillance technology designed to maximize employee efficiency and performance. Earlier this week, one Outback Steakhouse franchise announced it would begin testing such a tool, a computer vision program called Presto Vision, at a single outpost in the Portland, Oregon area. Your Bloomin' Onion now comes with a side of Big Brother. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In March, Yoshua Bengio received a share of the Turing Award, the highest accolade in computer science, for contributions to the development of deep learning—the technique that triggered a renaissance in artificial intelligence, leading to advances in self-driving cars, real-time speech translation, and facial recognition. Now, Bengio says deep learning needs to be fixed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The social media company acquires CTRL-Labs, a “brain-machine-interface” startup that lets users control devices by tapping signals off a wristband. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

An international cybersecurity group has evicted the Chinese telecom company to comply with US sanctions. That could allow malware to spread more easily. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Regulators say Juul hasn't proved its claim that e-cigarettes are safer than tobacco, and uses misleading appeals to kids. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A bill approved by the state senate would set a three-year moratorium on police use of recognition algorithms. Privacy advocates want a permanent ban Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

State attorneys general revealed investigations into possible anticompetitive behavior by tech giants, adding to probes by Congress and federal agencies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Opinion: A growing black and brown diaspora of data must be used for equality, not oppression. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Pew Research Center reports 56% of Americans trust law enforcement to use the technology responsibly, despite concerns over fairness, and bans in some cities. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The short-term rental startup has settled lawsuits with Boston and Miami, agreeing to turn over data officials say they need to police the industry. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The artificial intelligence lab cofounded by Elon Musk said its software could too easily be adapted to crank out fake news. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Instagram users like Usher, Martha Stewart, and Rick Perry posted a meme warning about a new rule that doesn't actually exist. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices