Business, Spoken

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

Kevin Systrom doesn’t know what’s next, but he’s starting by learning to fly. Three weeks after he and his Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger abruptly left the Facebook-owned company—and three days since his first solo flight—Systrom says he’s taking time to think about what problem he wants to attack next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Social movements have spurred major transformations in society, from the end of slavery to universal suffrage, the rise of labor unions, and universal education. Yet somehow after decades of economic stability, we began to rely on technological rather than social tools to remake the world, says Glen Weyl, a principal researcher for Microsoft. While technology flourished, we “did not allow our social wisdom and social infrastructure to balance that out,” says Weyl. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With a user base of more than 2 billion people who can be chopped and sorted by almost any conceivable data point—men ages 21 to 45 living in the United States who are parents to preteens and like Fortnite; women with a bachelor’s degree who are away from family and whose friends are recently engaged—Facebook advertising is an incredibly powerful tool. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Microsoft wants to make peace with Linux, saying this week that it will allow more than 2,600 other companies, including longtime rivals like Google and IBM, to use the technology behind 60,000 Microsoft patents for their own Linux-related open source projects. That could be good news for makers of "internet of Things" devices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Within hours of California governor Jerry Brown signing a sweeping net neutrality bill into law, the US Department of Justice sued the state, sparking the latest battle in the long legal war over the ground rules for the internet. Groups representing broadband providers followed suit on Wednesday, with their own lawsuit arguing that California's law was illegal. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the past year, Facebook has faced a reckoning over the way its plan to connect the next billion users to the internet has sown division, including spreading hate speech that incited ethnic violence in Myanmar and disseminating propaganda for a violent dictator in the Philippines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Amazon announced Tuesday that it was raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all employees, even vocal critics of its labor practices like Senator Bernie Sanders praised the company. The retail giant’s decision will undoubtedly put more money into the hands of its workers—especially the some 100,000 temporary US employees Amazon plans to hire in the coming months for the holiday season. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2001, a 25-year-old unemployed college dropout named Bram Cohen crafted an elegant protocol for moving data around the internet. Titanic numbers of pirated songs and movies, and countless lawsuits, later, he’s putting the finishing touches on what he hopes will be another world-changing protocol—this time for moving around money. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After months of increased public criticism about its grueling labor practices, Amazon announced Tuesday that it would begin paying all US employees, including part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers, at least $15 an hour and all UK employees at least £9.50 (with higher wages in London) beginning November 1. The move will affect 250,000 Amazon employees and 100,000 seasonal workers, according to the company. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Several major tech companies---including Apple, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook---will likely have to add women to their boards of directors by mid-2021 under a pioneering new California law aimed at bringing more women into corporate boardrooms. California governor Jerry Brown signed the measure, known as SB 826, into law on Sunday. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The nation’s largest state just adopted sweeping net neutrality protections, setting up a potential legal showdown with the Federal Communications Commission over the future of the internet. California Governor Jerry Brown Sunday signed a bill banning broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content passing through their networks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Elon Musk has long established himself as a both a visionary CEO and a lightning rod for attention, good and bad. The bad reared its head dramatically this week as the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with securities fraud for misleading investors with August tweets about taking Tesla private. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are significant, real-world benefits to having an accepted and recognized identity. That’s why the concept of a digital identity is being pursued around the world, from Australia to India. From airports to health records systems, technologists and policy makers with good intentions are digitizing our identities, making modern life more efficient and streamlined. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For all the advances being made in the field, artificial intelligence still struggles when it comes to identifying hate speech. When he testified before Congress in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “one of the hardest” problems. But, he went on, he was optimistic that “over a five- to 10-year period, we will have AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Coraline Ada Ehmke has been writing software professionally since 1994. For the past decade, she’s been active in the Ruby programming language community and has created numerous open source tools to help fellow Ruby programmers. But these days she's best known for a different type of code altogether. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google’s first public attempt to explain its reported interest in entering the Chinese market failed to appease critical members of Congress at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday. The hearing, which was attended by Google, AT&T, Amazon, Apple, and Charter Communications, began as a broad discussion of possible privacy legislation. But it concluded as a pointed condemnation of Google over recent reports that the company is building a censored search engine for China. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For Democrats, there are already plenty of signs pointing to a good election night this November. There's the record number of House candidates outraising their Republican incumbent rivals. There's the unlikely rise of Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke giving Ted Cruz a real run for his seat. There are the upset victories in state legislature races, like the one in Virginia last fall. And of course, there are polls showing Democrats with a steady lead over Republicans on a generic ballot. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Monday night, when the cofounders of Instagram announced that they had quit Facebook, reportedly over Mark Zuckerberg’s meddling, it marked the end of an era in more ways than one. It shattered the partition that protected the beloved photo-sharing app from the sins of its parent company. The departures also extinguished the idea of Facebook as a “family of companies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Twitter on Tuesday announced a new policy addressing “dehumanizing speech,” which will take effect later this year, and for the first time the public will be able to formally provide the company with feedback on the proposed rule. The policy will prohibit “content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cobbling together a DIY dossier about a celebrity is a time-honored internet tradition. Scan a few Wikipedia pages, click through some Google images, scroll through social media accounts, maybe some dubious gossip sites, and you have a snapshot of the person’s life. Now Google wants to do that detective work for you, accessible in a format that owes a lot to Instagram stories, except showcasing the highlights of a person’s life instead of just their day. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When it came into being in 2006, Twitter seemed perplexing. Publishing teensy, 140-character updates? Whatever was that good for? Twitter seemed like a ghastly mashup of the preening narcissism and nanosecond attention spans that defined the worst trends in digital culture. Tim Ferriss, writer of productivity books, called it “pointless email on steroids.” Who cares what you had for lunch? But critics misunderstood it. What Twitter truly portended wasn’t small, it was huge. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Henry Zhu makes software that's crucial to websites you use every day, even if you’ve never heard of him or his software. Zhu manages a program called Babel, which translates code written in one version of the programming language JavaScript into code written for another version of the language. That might not sound like a big deal. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When we launched WIRED, we were accused of being Pangloss­ian optimists. I embraced that as a badge of honor. The Digital Revolution was reinventing everything, and that was good. Twenty-five years on, that optimism is no longer justified—it’s necessary. Indeed: militant optimism. WIRED’s premise was that the most powerful people on the planet weren’t the politicians or generals, priests or pundits, but the people creating and using new technology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When a man overseeing $5.7 trillion speaks, the global business community tends to listen. So when BlackRock founder Larry Fink, head of the world’s largest asset management company, posted a letter to CEOs demanding greater attention to social impact, it sent shockwaves through corporations around the globe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

(Whispers) Amazon Alexa will soon notice if you talk to it sotto voce—and whisper its response back to you. The new feature, announced by Amazon today alongside new devices including a microwave and a wall clock at an event in Seattle, is one of several upgrades that will expand the virtual assistant’s ability to listen to and understand the world around it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In recent years, Facebook has faced lawsuits, media exposés, and even federal charges alleging that its ad-targeting tools help advertisers discriminate based on age or race for jobs, housing, and credit. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union claims Facebook is also allowing employers to discriminate against women. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

WIRED ICON Mark Zuckerberg, Cofounder of Facebook NOMINATES Dreamers, Undocumented youth A few years ago, I taught a class on entrepreneurship at a local middle school. I quickly realized that some of my best students—ones with the motivation and talent to build great businesses—weren’t even sure they’d be able to go to college. They were undocumented immigrants, brought here as children. You know them as Dreamers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When I woke up today, the first thing I saw on Twitter was people desperately warning that something gross was trending. Whatever you do, they agreed, do NOT click on trending topics, which appeared to mostly have to do with video games: Nintendo, Mario Kart, the beloved character Toad. I braced myself, figuring that, because of Twitter’s algorithm, whatever was grossing people out so much would soon be inserted into my timeline no matter what I or the people I follow did. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices