Business, Spoken

Rolling your eyes is not allowed at TED. There’s no rule in the conduct policy (I assume, I haven’t actually checked), it’s just one of those powerful unspoken maxims that goes ignored at your peril. When they hand you your TED badge, you’re consenting to check your cynicism at the door. The TED Conference, which has taken place annually since 1990, was founded on the principle that spreading ideas from passionate people can change the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Trump Friday confidently declared that the US will lead the world in deploying the next generation of wireless services known as 5G. “The race to 5G is a race that the United States must win,” Trump said at a White House event, flanked by farmers in cowboy hats and workers in hardhats. “It’s a race that we will win. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook is trying to redefine authoritativeness on the internet as part of its efforts to fight the spread of misinformation and abuse on its platforms. On Wednesday, the company rolled out a slew of announcements that aim to promote more trustworthy news sources, tamp down on Groups that spread misinformation, and give the public more insight into how Facebook crafts its content policies writ large. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Legislation to restore the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules passed a big hurdle Wednesday. But it’s far from becoming law, and faces long odds. The House of Representatives approved the bill in a 232 to 190 vote. No Democrats voted against the bill. Representative Bill Posey of Florida was the only Republican to vote in favor of it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tuesday's House Judiciary Committee hearing on the rise of hate crimes and white nationalism devolved into a four-hour squabble over who’s most hated, and who’s doing the hating, in America. The members of the committee and some of the eight witnesses who sat before them battled over whether anti-semitism or anti-black hate is most deserving of their attention, and whether it’s white supremacists or Muslims or Democrats or the President who harbor the most hate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Big Disruption, a satirical novel written by Jessica Powell, Google’s former head of communications, is set inside the lush and bountiful Silicon Valley headquarters of Anahata, a massive 10-year-old tech giant in love its own mythology about open-door board meetings and profound yet “napkin-able” ideas. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Verizon launched its mobile 5G network last week in "select areas" of Minneapolis and Chicago, and a speed test shared by a Verizon spokesperson showed an impressive download speed of 762Mbps. But the single speed test displayed by Verizon was conducted near a tower with clear line of sight to that tower. Actually finding a 5G signal elsewhere in Verizon's launch areas is much more difficult, according to tests by The Verge and CNET. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Congress held a hearing on hate, and it went exactly as you thought it might Congress called the leaders of tech to a hearing on the rise of hate crimes and white supremacy, but instead of illuminating solutions and building bridges, the haters got their way and the tech giants got off scot free. The hearings were mostly full of arguments and partisanship, an unfortunate par for the course that led to no real answers or progress on the issue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook was designed for the living, but as the social network grew older, it also needed to decide what should happen when users die. In 2015, Facebook began allowing people to assign a legacy contact to be in charge of their account in the event they pass away, but the system wasn't perfect and users found some of the associated policies upsetting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Silicon Valley’s use of nontraditional employment arrangements, where workers typically aren’t afforded the same privileges as employees, has grown faster than full-time jobs, even as tech giants come under fire for their treatment of Uber drivers, Google cafeteria workers, or Facebook content moderators. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two Chinese software developers are trying to harness the power of open source software to improve working conditions for coders. Last weekend, Katt Gu and Suji Yan, published the “Anti-996 License,” which requires any company that uses the project's software to comply with local labor laws as well as International Labour Organization standards, including the right for workers to collectively bargain and a ban on forced labor. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In July 2016, Ethereum endured an early test of faith. The people behind the barely year-old blockchain had taken Bitcoin’s idea of decentralized money and run with it, building a digital landscape where users, based on a mutual trust in code, could interact and create applications. Then hackers emptied $50 million from one of those applications, the DAO. Facing a crisis, a core group of developers swiftly altered Ethereum’s code to return the lost funds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google says the fiber optic cable it's building across the Atlantic Ocean will be the fastest of its kind. When the cable goes live next year, the company estimates it will transmit around 250 terabits per second, fast enough to zap all the contents of the Library of Congress from Virginia to France three times every second. That's about 56 percent faster than Facebook and Microsoft's Marea cable, which can transmit about 160 terabits per second between Virginia and Spain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Microsoft employees protested the company's treatment of women After a female employee posted about hitting a "brick wall" for promotions, Microsoft employees protested CEO Satya Nadella in a meeting this morning. The CEO was reportedly empathetic to their concerns, and promised more transparency about advancement within the company going forward. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A group of Microsoft employees appeared at an employee meeting with CEO Satya Nadella Thursday to protest the company’s treatment of women. The protesters asked Nadella to address claims of discrimination against women in promotion and advancement, as well as claims of sexual harassment, raised as part of a widespread discussion that has been building steam on internal company forums for the past two weeks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s a well-worn idea that bitcoin is helping to trash the planet, throwing fuel on an already burning world while providing value to very few people. By one recent estimate, the energy used to keep the network going, a process known as mining, is enough to power Hungary. But now a Montana county in the heart of crypto-mining territory is taking matters into its own hands, invoking a local climate emergency in a bid to make bitcoin greener. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After a long drought, the go-go days of hot technology IPOs appear to be back. The new age began last week with the long-awaited public offering of shares in ride-hailing service Lyft, which raised more than $2 billion for the company with a valuation climbing to over $26 billion before falling back to earth on Monday. To put that in perspective, Lyft’s valuation after the IPO rivaled those of Snapchat, Dropbox, and Spotify; it’s larger than all of this year’s IPOs combined. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

While millions of Americans were enjoying a warm spring weekend, Facebook employees were hard at work responding to an avalanche of news about their company. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Virtual private networks (VPNs) can help protect your internet traffic from prying eyes. VPN services route your email, web browsing, and other internet activity through the service provider's servers, making it appear to outsiders that you're only accessing those servers. VPN services help users in China, for example, reach blocked sites by making it appear they’re accessing something else. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In a move that’s months in the making, Facebook announced Wednesday that beginning next week, it will take down posts supporting both white nationalism and white separatism, including on Instagram. It’s an evolution for the social network, whose Community Standards previously only prohibited white supremacist content while allowing posts that advocated for ideologies like race segregation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For our eyes, reading is hardly a smooth ride. They stutter across the page, lingering over words that surprise or confuse, hopping over those that seem obvious in context (you can blame that for your typos), pupils widening when a word sparks a potent emotion. All this commotion is barely noticeable, occurring in milliseconds. But for psychologists who study how our minds process language, our unsteady eyes are a window into the black box of our brains. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The US government says a Chinese gaming company's ownership of gay dating app Grindr poses a national security risk, according to a report from Reuters. Beijing Kunlun Tech acquired a 60 percent stake in Grindr in 2016 and bought the rest in 2018. But, according to Reuters, the Chinese firm didn't clear the acquisition with the agency known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which evaluates the national security impacts of foreign investments in US companies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Facebook moves against white nationalist content After months of grappling with its stance, Facebook has finally decided to ban white nationalist content on both Facebook and Instagram. Starting next week, US users who attempt to search for or post this type of content will be redirected to a nonprofit that works to help people leave hate groups. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the late 1980s, Canadian master’s student Yoshua Bengio became captivated by an unfashionable idea. A handful of artificial intelligence researchers was trying to craft software that loosely mimicked how networks of neurons process data in the brain, despite scant evidence it would work. “I fell in love with the idea that we could both understand the principles of how the brain works and also construct AI,” says Bengio, now a professor at the University of Montreal. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Emily Pickett, a doula in Louisville, Kentucky, is used to hearing hard truths from expecting mothers. Her job is to guide women through pregnancy, acting as confidante and supporter; understanding their deepest stressors---an abusive partner, a struggle with drugs---is important to ensuring healthy pregnancies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Apple’s event Monday ended up featuring one piece of hardware after all: a new credit card, which it plans to launch this summer in the United States. The aptly-named Apple Card, created in partnership with Mastercard and Goldman Sachs, will live within the existing Wallet app on iPhones and as a traditional physical card. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Government usually isn't the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia's chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation's push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I have superpowers, OK? One of them is predicting earthquakes. Don’t go showing me “government” “reports” disproving my awesome abilities. Twice already this year, I have shaken awake before my house has. So you will believe me when I tell you, unblessed mortals, that my seismological Spidey sense discerns a Third Event. This catastrophe won’t involve literal tectonics. What I’m detecting is the quivering instability of the metaphorical. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Microsoft's programming language TypeScript has quietly become one of the most popular languages among developers, at least according to a report published by the analyst firm RedMonk this week. TypeScript jumped from number 16 to number 12, just behind Apple's programming language Swift, in RedMonk's semiannual rankings, which were last published in August. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a color scheme: off-white text accented with a buttery yellow-orange and a neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer author William Gibson. The colors were part of a theme called "Solarized Dark" for the popular MacOS code editor TextMate. To be honest, I didn't think much of Solarized at first. But I soon found that I couldn't work with any other color scheme. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In January 2018, the top policy executives from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter testified in a Senate hearing about terrorism and social media, touting their companies’ use of artificial intelligence to detect and remove terrorist content from groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Tuesday, Facebook reached a historic settlement with civil rights groups that had accused the company of allowing advertisers to unlawfully discriminate against minorities, women, and older people by using the platform’s ad-targeting technology to exclude them from seeing ads for housing, jobs, and credit—three areas with legal protections for groups that have historically been disenfranchised. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fei-Fei Li heard the crackle of a cat’s brain cells a couple of decades ago and has never forgotten it. Researchers had inserted electrodes into the animal’s brain and connected them to a loudspeaker, filling a lab at Princeton with the eerie sound of firing neurons. “They played the symphony of a mammalian visual system,” Li told an audience Monday at Stanford, where she is now a professor. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

European officials Wednesday fined Google €1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) for more than a decade of abusive practices in how it brokered online ads for other websites like newspapers, blogs, and travel aggregators. This is the third billion-dollar antitrust penalty levied against Google by the European Commission, which has fined the company more than $9 billion for anticompetitive practices since 2017. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After each new horrific mass shooting, an all-too-familiar cycle often plays out: Reporters (myself included) race to attempt to unpack an alleged shooter’s possible motivations by piecing together clues from their social media accounts and online postings before it all gets scrubbed from the internet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The college admissions bribery scandal has all the components of a made for TV movie, including celebrity cameos, suspense, and unexpected twists and turns. Behind the broken admissions process and the drama, however, a different educational crisis is looming. According to a 2018 Korn Ferry study, by 2030, there could be a global talent shortage of more than 85.2 million people, costing an estimated $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenue. In the U.S. alone, the study forecasts $1. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The internet is an ocean of algorithms trying to tell you what to do. YouTube and Netflix proffer videos they calculate you’ll watch. Facebook and Twitter filter and reorganize posts from your connections, avowedly in your interest—but also in their own. New York entrepreneur Brian Whitman helped create such a system. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On October 27, 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an email to his then-director of product development. For years, Facebook had allowed third-party apps to access data on their users’ unwitting friends, and Zuckerberg was considering whether giving away all that information was risky. In his email, he suggested it was not: “I’m generally skeptical that there is as much data leak strategic risk as you think,” he wrote at the time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The first five days or so of SXSW in Austin are always dedicated to the “interactive” portion of the festival. The city’s downtown streets swell with lanyard-laden “entrepreneurs” and “founders” wearing that familiar uniform of T-shirts screen-printed with their company’s clever logo, an outfit made professional by throwing a blazer over the ensemble. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last spring, Chris Cox, the chief product officer of Facebook, was promoted to also oversee Whatsapp, Messenger, and Instagram. It seemed, at the time, almost like succession planning. If Mark Zuckerberg were to ever leave the company, Cox, his longtime confidante, and a representative of the engineering and product side, would be set up to run it. But today Cox has announced that, after 13 years at the company, he’s leaving. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

5G is coming, and with it a massive boost in bandwidth that will feed artificial intelligence applications, enable the long fabled Internet of Things, and deliver more streaming video. Lots of streaming video. But all that extra bandwidth won't be much use if the average consumer can't afford a 5G connection, or if those connections are hobbled by restrictive bandwidth caps. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A wave of antitrust interest is washing over Europe and much of the United States, and Spotify is riding its crest. The Swedish audio-streaming giant lodged a complaint against Apple with the European Commission on Wednesday, accusing the company of abusing its position as owner of the App Store to stifle competition. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

So, it finally happened. A leading American politician has said aloud what many have whispering: it’s time to break up Big Tech. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren just fired the opening salvo and called for the federal government to take action: “Today’s big tech companies have too much power— too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Bay Area is famed for nurturing speculative investments like flying cars, floating cities, and the notion that a ride hailing service can turn a profit. A new utopian investment opportunity arrived Monday: Shovel dollars into a San Francisco artificial intelligence lab cofounded by Elon Musk and you’ll receive a share of the profits when (or if) it figures out how to create machines smarter than humans. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As soon as you visit a modern website, it starts feeding you reasons to leave. First by begging you to download its app from the app store, then with a dialog box urging you to sign up for a newsletter. Next will come a request to send you alerts, followed by either an onslaught of ads or a plea to turn your ad blocker off. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last week, presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced an ambitious plan to break up big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon and block them from selling their own products on their platforms. Warren called out Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp and Google's acquisition of online advertising giant DoubleClick as examples of the deals she'd like to see reversed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m on the eighth floor of a nondescript building in the Flatiron District, sitting across from Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley. He pulls out his phone to show me an unreleased, nameless game that he and his skunkworks-style team Foursquare Labs have been working on. Think “Candyland,” but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woods, the game’s virtual board includes place categories associated with New York City neighborhoods. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The world's largest telecommunications-equipment company, China's Huawei, is suing the US government. But the suit isn't just about US law. It's part of Huawei's larger campaign to defend its role as a global provider of telecom gear amid fears that its technology is or could be used by the Chinese government for spying. In essence, Huawei is challenging the US government to prove its suspicions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Wednesday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, described a sweeping new vision for his platform. “The future of communication,” he wrote, “will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.” The post raised all kinds of questions about Facebook’s business model and strategies, as well as the tradeoffs the company could face. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If there’s one choice that Facebook has made repeatedly over the past 15 years, it’s been to prioritize growth over privacy. Users were consistently encouraged to make more of their information public than they were comfortable with. The settings to make things public were always a bit easier to use than the ones to make things private. Data was collected that you didn’t have any idea was being collected and shared in ways you had no idea it was being shared. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices