Business, Spoken

Back in the early 1930s, farmers couldn’t get wired. The big-city electric utilities claimed that delivering power to customers spread out in rural areas wasn’t profitable. So eventually the locals rolled up their sleeves and did it themselves. They formed electric co-ops and strung their own damn wires, aided by cheap federal loans. Today there are nearly 900 rural co-ops still providing their communities with electricity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the 3:13 pm train out of San Jose on a recent Friday, I hunched over a Macbook, brow furrowed. Hundreds of miles north in a Google datacenter in Oregon, a virtual computer sprang to life. I was soon looking at the yawning blackness of a Linux command line—my new AI art studio. Some hours of Googling, mistyped commands, and muttered curses later, I was cranking out eerie portraits. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One Thursday last month, 19-year-old Robbie Barrat woke to a fusillade of messages on his phone. “I was half asleep but saw they all contained the same number,” he says. “Then I fell back asleep for a few hours. I didn’t really want to believe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The definition of cloud computing may be nebulous, but its promise is clear. Instead of filling a warehouse with servers and paying people to manage them, a company can pay a cloud computing provider to provide computing resources on demand and pay only for what it actually uses. This prospect lured organizations ranging from startups to massive corporations to stodgy government agencies onto cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Alex Jones crashed the congressional hearings looking into big tech platforms back in September, Lord Voldemort kept coming to my mind. Even if you haven’t read the Harry Potter books, you probably know that almost no one in the wizarding world will speak this archvillain’s name aloud; he is referred to only as “he who must not be named” or “you know who. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google parent Alphabet generated 86 percent of its revenue from advertising last year. On Friday the woman leading its best shot at building a second big revenue stream said she is moving on. Diane Greene, a storied cloud computing entrepreneur and executive, has been leading Google’s cloud computing division since early 2016. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times published a blockbuster—five byline, 50 source, 5,000 word—report on the failures of Facebook’s management team during the past three years. It begins with Sheryl Sandberg yelling at one of her employees; it ends with her hand-written stage directions, captured by a Times photographer, as she sat before the Senate: “Slow, Pause, Determined. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amazon announced Tuesday that the 14-month public bidding war for its so-called second headquarters was coming to an end. After reviewing 238 proposals from cities across North America, the company says it will build two large regional offices in Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia as well as a smaller campus in Nashville, Tennessee. The search was largely a success for CEO Jeff Bezos, who can use valuable data from the losing cities to inform Amazon’s business and future expansion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The tech industry already spends tens of millions of dollars every year lobbying in Washington for federal regulations that will benefit their businesses---or, better yet, for no regulations at all. But while lawmakers on Capitol Hill have spent the last two years handwaving and making empty threats against Big Tech, regulators in the UK have been getting to work, strengthening their data privacy laws and taking steps toward more restrictions around content online. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After a 14-month search, Amazon announced Tuesday that it will open a pair of regional offices in two major metropolitan areas where it already has a presence: the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, New York, and Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington D.C. The decision comes after over 230 cities submitted bids to be home of the Seattle-based company’s highly-anticipated second headquarters, which originally promised to employ 50,000 white collar workers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was a particularly chilly cold case. At 1 am on November 18, 2010, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department responded to reports of gunfire in a leafy cul-de-sac near Universal Studios. They found Jong Kim lying in front of his home and shot at least five times. Kim, a 50-year-old liquor store owner, later died in a hospital without regaining consciousness. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tuesday's midterms don't shed much light on the future of net neutrality. But advocates do see rays of hope shining through the fog of uncertainty. Democrats, who generally favor rules barring internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or otherwise discriminating against content, took control of the House. And even after losing ground in the Senate, the party is tantalizingly close to having enough support from Senate Republicans to pass new net neutrality protections. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After it was revealed that the suspect in the shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue had threatened on the social media network Gab to kill Jews, multiple technology providers dropped Gab, including domain registrar GoDaddy, web hosting provider Joyent, and payment processors PayPal and Stripe. The moves knocked Gab offline for nearly a week, during which the company painted itself as a martyr for free speech and milked the media for attention. On Sunday, however, Gab returned to the web. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google announced changes to how it will handle claims of sexual harassment among employees, including making arbitration optional for individual harassment and sexual assault claims. While additional transparency and protection for workers is a sign of progress, the change is incremental rather than transformative, because Google’s arbitration provision still prohibits collective action. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There is perhaps no greater example of Silicon Valley’s soft power than watching a debate around a grassroots proposal to fight homelessness transform into a Twitter war between tech billionaires and their preferred form of taxation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Both Republicans and Democrats woke up Wednesday morning claiming victory in Tuesday's midterms. Democrats patted themselves on the back for taking back the House of Representatives and flipping seven governorships from red to blue. And in a press conference, President Donald Trump praised his party, and himself, for gaining ground in the Senate. Americans remain sharply divided at the ballot box, from which political party they support to initiatives on issues like climate change. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ten years ago today, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto sent an academic paper to a cryptography mailing list proposing a form of digital cash called "Bitcoin." The pseudonymous Nakamoto, whose true identity remains unknown, described an idea for "mining" a limited amount of this virtual currency through a peer-to-peer scheme that wouldn't depend on a bank, government, or any other central authority. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If former state representative Stacey Abrams wins the race for governor of Georgia, she would be the US’s first black woman governor. She’s running in a tightly contested race against sitting secretary of state Brian Kemp, who in his official capacity as overseer of Georgia’s voter rolls has fought hard the past few months to remove people from the active voter lists who might be inclined to vote for Abrams. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2016, the chip industry’s clock ran out. For 50 years, the number of transistors that could be squeezed onto a piece of silicon had increased on a predictable schedule known as Moore’s law. The doctrine drove the digital evolution from minicomputers to PCs to smartphones and the cloud by cramming more transistors onto each generation of microchip, making them more powerful. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One upshot for Democrats after their devastating loss on election night 2016 was the birth of The Resistance. The last two years have seen millions of newly born activists with pun-covered signs take to the streets for the Women's March. Thousands of demonstrators have descended on town hall meetings to make their voices heard. Hundreds of women have been inspired to run for office. But the election didn't just activate progressive protesters and candidates. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you are one of the 20 million potential voters that MoveOn, a progressive advocacy group, believes could help swing the midterm elections in Democrats' favor, then chances are, over the next few days, you will see a MoveOn–sponsored ad in your Facebook news feed. It'll be a video of a real voter---not an actor or a politician---explaining why he or she is voting for a given candidate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Big companies attract big attention, and none quite as much as Apple. Its quarterly reports have become something of a collective soothsaying moment for stock markets and the tech industry, and so Thursday’s report garnered its usual share of outsized attention. WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Friday, Cesar Sayoc was arrested in connection with the 14 pipe bombs sent to top Democrats, other critics of President Trump, and CNN earlier this week. The 56-year-old Sayoc appears to have been active on social media. A Twitter account prosecutors linked to him praised Trump, threatened top Democrats with death, and shared convoluted ultra-right-wing conspiracies about many of the people to whom he is suspected of sending homemade bombs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When AT&T announced plans to acquire HBO's parent company Time Warner, competitors, consumer groups, and the Department of Justice argued that the combined company would harm competition. Now those critics say their concerns are being validated. HBO and Cinemax went dark on pay television provider Dish's satellite and video streaming customers after Dish and HBO failed to reach a deal to replace a contract that expired at midnight on Wednesday night. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You know when you try to go online at a Starbucks or on an airplane, first you get a little popup that asks you to accept some terms before you can get to the internet? That popup window exists in a sort of netherworld between actual internet connection and being offline--you pick it up via Wi-Fi, but until you click a box, you’re not actually online. A team of five developers realized in that gray area was potentially a huge opportunity to save lives. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Plenty of people are following the final days of the midterm election campaigns. Yale law researcher Rebecca Crootof has a special interest—a small wager. If she wins, victory will be bitter sweet, like the Manhattan cocktail that will be her prize. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For most of the past year, Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to convince the world that Facebook was fast becoming a very different company—one that accepted its enormous role shaping public opinion worldwide and would spend what it took to exercise its power responsibly. Many still have trouble believing him, and it's easy to understand why. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Proposition C, a bill to fight homelessness with a new business tax, slid into San Francisco’s DMs in the middle of the night, politically speaking. What happened was, in December of last year, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee died unexpectedly. Over the next seven months, the city lived through two mayors and a nail-biting election that dragged on for a week after voting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last week, as thousands of Central American migrants made their way northward through Mexico, walking a treacherous route toward the US border, talk of "the caravan," as it's become known, took over Twitter. Conservatives, led by President Donald Trump, dominated the conversation, eager to turn the caravan into a voting issue before the midterms. As it turns out, they had some help---from propaganda bots on Twitter. Late last week, about 60 percent of the conversation was driven by likely bots. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

IBM just spent $34 billion to buy a software company that gives away its primary product for free. IBM Sunday said it would acquire Red Hat, best known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat is an open source software company that gives away the source code for its core products. That means anyone can download them for free. And many do. Oracle even uses Red Hat’s source code for its own Oracle Linux product. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At its birth, the social network Gab issued a call for free speech. “We promote raw, rational, open, and authentic discourse online," said Andrew Torba, the CEO and founder, in an early interview with WIRED. And now, as it fights for its life, it’s doing the same. The site has been knocked offline after the Squirrel Hill massacre. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate this month, which Turkish officials say was carried out by Saudi agents, has sparked a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The kingdom has poured billions of dollars into the tech industry, and a number of prominent startups, including darlings like Uber, WeWork, and Slack, may now need to grapple with the consequences of enriching a brutal regime. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A few years after the Great Recession, you couldn’t scroll through Google Reader without seeing the word “disrupt.” TechCrunch named a conference after it, the New York Times named a column after it, investor Marc Andreessen warned that “software disruption” would eat the world; not long after, Peter Thiel, his fellow Facebook board member, called “disrupt” one of his favorite words. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The future of humanity will be shaped by artificial intelligence. Now some of the best brains working on the technology are riven by a debate about a four-letter acronym that some say contributes to the field's well-documented diversity problems. NIPS is the name of AI’s most prominent conference, a venue for machine learning research formally known as the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Twitter dropped an almost unfathomably large archive of tweets connected to two alleged influence campaigns on Wednesday. The trove included over 9 million tweets associated with 3,841 accounts connected to Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency, or IRA, as well as more than a million tweets attributed to a network of 770 Iranian propaganda-pushing accounts. Twitter has never before released an archive of this size. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Tuesday, Facebook released a new tool that shows who's spending the most money on political ads on the platform in the US. At a glance, the Ad Archive Report suggests that Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke is the biggest spender, having plowed more than $5 million into Facebook ads since May. But the fine print reveals a more surprising finding: The advertiser spending the most on political and issue ads on Facebook is, well, Facebook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Only six social media apps in the world have a billion or more users, and four of them belong to Facebook. Tops is the eponymous flagship app, known as “Big Blue,” followed by three apps all focused on messaging: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. So when Facebook decided to do a significant redesign of the latter—currently used by 1. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The internet went down on February 28, 2017. Or at least that's how it seemed to some users as sites and apps like Slack and Medium went offline or malfunctioned for four hours. What actually happened is that Amazon's enormously popular S3 cloud storage service experienced an outage, affecting everything that depended on it. It was a reminder of the risks when too much of the internet relies on a single service. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Call It Franchising 2.0. The tech industry is setting its sights on the little guy, looking to turn ambitious go-getters into small-business owners. Tech companies provide the tools and support; you supply services. Bedeviled by last-mile delivery costs, Amazon began enabling entrepreneurs to launch their own package-delivery hubs this summer. Starting at a relatively modest $10,000, “delivery service partners” can lease fleets of 20 to 40 Amazon-branded vans. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every single gosh-darn good-for-nothing day, some piece of “frictionless” “seamless” “user-friendly” technology craps out on me. Touch ID fails—cool. Bluetooth can’t connect—awesome. If I’m on the road, Google Maps freezes at the most crucial turn. If I’m watching TV: “Sorry, we could not reach the Netflix service. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Some people call bitcoin "the internet of money," suggesting the digital currency and related technologies could do for the financial system what the internet did to information distribution over the past few decades. But skeptics are still waiting for a "killer app," while bitcoin prices have never returned to their late 2017 peak when trading hit more than $20,000 per bitcoin. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the Jeff Bezoses and Jack Dorseys of the world leap from the bow of the ships they’re sailing forth, what will happen to them? Where will they go? When Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft who died this week at age 65, left the business he started, he traveled the world. He collected paintings and learned to scuba dive. Scuba diving, he said at the time, “takes me away from myself.” Allen had it right. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was upbeat Monday when he told WIRED about internal tests of a censored search engine designed to win approval from Chinese officials. It will take more than a government nod for Google to succeed, however. That’s not only because of the political tensions raised by President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, which analysts say make Google’s expansion unlikely. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Silicon Valley’s deep financial ties to Saudi Arabia illustrate “the hypocrisy behind the ‘change the world’ fantasy” pushed by tech companies, said journalist Anand Giridharadas. Saudi backing for popular apps like Uber, Slack, and Wag offers proof that “the most idealistic companies on earth---in rhetoric---are very happy to take the dirtiest money on earth to grow and grow and grow,” he said. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s no longer enough to build lean companies quickly. The companies of the near future will need to be both fast and massive. And if it takes years to grow from a small startup to a major player in Silicon Valley, well. That’s just too slow. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says Silicon Valley now demands that companies double their size after three months, then six months, then a year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Deep in the bowels of Facebook's serpentine campus in Menlo Park, California is a room about 25-feet-square that may have a lot to do with how the world thinks about the company in the coming months. It looks like a Wall Street trading floor, with screens on every wall and every desk. And 20 hours a day---soon to be 24 hours a day---it's jammed with about two dozen geeks, spooks, hackers, and lawyers trying to spot and quash the next bad thing to happen on the company's networks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Since launching in 2008, GitHub has become by far the largest place on the internet for hosting and collaborating on software code. The company, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, now hosts more than 85 million projects, and boasts 31 million monthly users. But while you've been able to store your code on GitHub, you couldn't actually run it. For that you needed a web server or a cloud service. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Artificial intelligence researcher Fei-Fei Li has spent her career trying to make software smart—with some success. Lately she’s begun to ask herself a new question: How can we make smart software aligned with human values? “As much as AI is showing its power, it’s a nascent technology,” Li said at the WIRED25 Summit in San Francisco Monday. “What’s really important is putting humanity at the center. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Iconic tech-company founders often come in pairs: Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The world lost half of one such duo Monday when Paul Allen, who cofounded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 65. For the last three decades of his life, Allen was best known as a philanthropist and prolific entrepreneur. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“If big tech companies are going to turn their back on US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Monday, defending government contracts amid a wave of employee protests. Bezos spoke at the WIRED25 summit, where Steven Levy, WIRED editor at large, asked his view of companies using the most advanced technology to aid the DOD. “We are going to continue to support the DOD and I think we should,” Bezos replied. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices