Business, Spoken

Say you were a villainized e-cigarette startup, with a $13 billion cash investment from the tobacco giant that owns Marlboro, and blamed for kicking off a vaping epidemic among teens. You’d lay low, right? Maybe play nice with the FDA. Log off Instagram. Throw a few coins at a youth prevention campaign. Juul, however, is opting for a more aggressive route. Juul Tuesday confirmed that it plans a national TV ad campaign, featuring ex-smokers who used Juul to help them quit traditional cigarettes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As tech giants figure out how to keep users from engaging with fake and misleading news online, a new Gallup poll suggests one potentially effective approach. In the survey, which was commissioned by journalism startup NewsGuard and its investor, the Knight Foundation, more than 60 percent of respondents said they were less likely to share stories from sites that were clearly labeled as unreliable. They were also more likely to trust stories from websites marked as credible. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You've probably heard by now that bees are dying in record numbers. They're being poisoned by pesticides while urbanization encroaches on bees' natural habitats, leaving them with fewer places to live and fewer wildflowers to feed on, says Harvard biologist James Crall, who studies bumblebees. The die-off comes as the world’s human population is expected to grow from 7 billion in 2010 to 9. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At Wake Radiology in North Carolina, roughly 50 doctors scrutinize x-rays and other images for local medical providers. Within a few weeks, they should start to get help on some lung CT scans from machine-learning algorithms that highlight potentially cancerous tissue nodules. Although Wake is based in a region known as the Research Triangle, for its intensity of high-tech R&D, the lung-reading software hails from elsewhere—China. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As the internet has evolved over its 35-year lifespan, control over its most important services has gradually shifted from open source protocols maintained by non-profit communities to proprietary services operated by large tech companies. As a result, billions of people got access to amazing, free technologies. But that shift also created serious problems. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Only a few months ago, Apple was crowned the first company to be valued at more than $1 trillion. Now, in the wake of a surprise profit warning, its entire future is being questioned. Both reactions are extreme. A victory lap wasn’t warranted last summer, nor is a eulogy now. The company is at an inflection point. Apple, like others before it, is attempting to navigate the shift. It’s fair to wonder if it can; it’s premature to conclude that it can’t. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Apple Wednesday warned investors that its revenue for the last three months of 2018 would not live up to previous estimates, or even come particularly close. The main culprit appears to be China, where the trade war and a broader economic slowdown contributed to plummeting iPhone sales. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most years, I round up the news of the year in technology through a collection of quotes, arranged roughly by some combination I make up of their importance and how much I like them. Here they are for 2018. 14. “He was that kind of guy. You know, an asshole. But a really gifted one. Our asshole, I guess.” —A coworker at Google about Anthony Levandowski, the controversial self-driving car engineer. Published October 22 13. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Chinese internet is not like the internet in the rest of the world. More than 150 of the world’s 1,000 most popular internet sites are blocked in China, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Instead, domestic platforms like Baidu, WeChat, and Sina Weibo thrive. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For the past several years, giant tech companies have rapidly ramped up investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. They’ve competed intensely to hire more AI researchers and used that talent to rush out smarter virtual assistants and more powerful facial recognition. In 2018, some of those companies moved to put some guardrails around AI technology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this month, I was on the phone with Ryan Fox, cofounder of New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm that tracks Russian-related influence operations online. The so-called Yellow Vest protests had spread across France, and we were talking about the role disinformation played in the galvanizing French hashtag for the protests, #giletsjaunes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At the beginning of 2018, it didn't seem like the open source movement could get any bigger. Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system; websites including Facebook and Wikipedia; and a growing number of gadgets have open source software under the hood---literally, in the case of cars. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Surveying the reactions to the latest revelation that Facebook played fast and loose with user data, it was hard not to harken back to what Scott McNally, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, told a group of reporters, including one from WIRED, in 1999: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

2018 was the year that Big Tech’s mission statements came back to haunt it. When employees felt that their products were damaging the world and that management wouldn't listen, they went public with their protests. At Google and Amazon, they challenged contracts to sell artificial intelligence and facial-recognition technology to the Pentagon and police. At Microsoft and Salesforce, workers argued against selling cloud computing services to agencies separating families at the border. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Every January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces a personal challenge he will undertake in the year ahead. In 2016, he committed to running 365 miles before the year was up. In 2017, he milked cows and rode tractors as part of his resolution to meet more people outside the Silicon Valley bubble. Last January, he took a different tack. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Future Book was meant to be interactive, moving, alive. Its pages were supposed to be lush with whirling doodads, responsive, hands-on. The old paperback Zork choose-your-own-adventures were just the start. The Future Book would change depending on where you were, how you were feeling. It would incorporate your very environment into its story—the name of the coffee shop you were sitting at, your best friend’s birthday. It would be sly, maybe a little creepy. Definitely programmable. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Labor organizing is gaining renewed momentum among some Amazon employees in the United States. The retail giant—run by the richest man in the world—is now one of the largest employers in the country, with more than 125,000 full-time hourly associates working in its fulfillment and sortation centers alone. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It took about 30 minutes for Williamson County commissioners to unanimously approve a roughly $16 million incentive package for Apple Tuesday morning, bringing the total amount the tech giant is likely to receive in exchange for choosing Austin as the site for its newest campus to a cool $41 million. The new addition is set to be Apple’s second campus in the Austin, Texas area—located less than a mile from the company’s existing facility, established five years ago. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Anti-government protests have raged across France for four weeks now, effectively shutting down the nation’s capital at times as rioters sporting yellow vests (gilets jaunes) wage massive public demonstrations, loot stores, and clash with police. The gilets jaunes protest began in response to a planned gas tax hike, but it soon devolved into a more amorphous outpouring of rage. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most electronics suffer a debilitating aquaphobia. At the ­littlest­ spillage—heaven forbid Dorothy’s bucket—of water, our wicked widgets shriek and melt. Microsoft, it would seem, missed the memo. Last June, the company installed a smallish data center on a patch of seabed just off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands; around it, approximately 933,333 bucketfuls of brine circulate every hour. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On a recent Tuesday night, during a session of rash bedtime scrolling, I sold my Facebook data to a stranger in Buenos Aires. Reckless, maybe, but such was my newfound life as a digital vigilante. My tipping point was the Facebook hack, exposed in September, in which I—along with some 90 million other potential victims—was temporarily locked out of my account. I imagined my identity rippling across the internet, thanks to the single sign-in convenience of Facebook Connect. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2006, Jeffrey Hammerbacher, then a recent Harvard graduate in math, became an early employee at a budding company founded by another Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. After building Facebook’s data team, Hammerbacher left the company in 2008. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee had the opportunity to question one of the most powerful people on the planet---Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, the company that filters all the world's information. And they blew it. Over the course of three and a half hours, the members of the committee staked out opposite sides of a partisan battle over whether Google search and other products are biased against conservatives. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's been one year since the Federal Communications Commission voted to gut its net neutrality rules. The good news is that the internet isn't drastically different than it was before. But that's also the bad news: the 'net wasn't always so neutral to begin with. As we predicted last year, broadband providers didn't make any drastic new moves to block or cripple the delivery of content after the FCC's order revoking its Obama-era net neutrality protections took effect in June. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars to telemedicine and mixed reality to as yet undreamt technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier will require high-speed, always-on internet connections. GLOSSARY The Spectrum All radio wave frequencies, from the lowest frequencies (3 kHz) to the highest (300 GHz). Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech has a diversity problem. This isn’t new. Women and minorities have long been woefully underrepresented in startup land, a problem that founders have insisted they are trying their best to fix. However, a new survey conducted by venture firm First Round Capital suggests that many startup founders may have given up hope of achieving diversity in tech, with most doubting that gender or racial parity will be achieved anytime soon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1999, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison suspected that Microsoft was secretly funding the seemingly independent advocacy groups that were loudly defending Microsoft amid a heated antitrust investigation. Seeking proof, Oracle’s law firm hired Terry Lenzner, a private investigator from Washington, DC, who had dug up dirt on Bill Clinton’s female accusers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In February, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story urging regulators to break up Google because the company abuses its dominance in search to crush promising competitors. The next day, representatives from two conservative think tanks published blog posts defending Google and attacking the article’s call for antitrust enforcement. Both think tanks have received funding from Google. Both blog posts referenced studies by a professor who has received funding from Google. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After a hellish year of tech scandals, even government-averse executives have started professing their openness to legislation. But Microsoft president Brad Smith took it one step further on Thursday, asking governments to regulate the use of facial-recognition technology to ensure it does not invade personal privacy or become a tool for discrimination or surveillance. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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

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

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

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-choices

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

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

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: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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 ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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

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-choices

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

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 choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.org/ad-choices

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.org/ad-choices