Business, Spoken

More than a decade after the first iPhone was released, it suddenly dawned on us that we could be addicted to our smartphones. We'd certainly developed quite the habit: Almost 50 percent of people say they couldn’t live without their phones, which we check every 12 minutes and touch an average of 2,600 times a day. "Likes are “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as empty as they are alluring. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As public attitudes towards Silicon Valley and Big Tech continue their rapid pivot from admiration to vilification, the current occupant of the White House has sought to lead the chorus. Several weeks ago, he launched a tweet-driven crusade against Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos, accusing the company of ripping off the US Postal Service and harming Americans by not collecting more sales tax. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

During Mark Zuckerberg's over 10 hours of Congressional testimony last week, lawmakers repeatedly asked how Facebook makes money. The simple answer, which Zuckerberg dodged, is the contributions and online activities of its over two billion users, which lets marketers target their ads with razor precision. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Woodman School is a tiny, whitewashed schoolhouse lodged in a remote clearing in Montana's Lolo National Forest. It has a total of 35 students, and in January, all of them got the same assignment: Write a letter to local lawmakers explaining why you want internet access at school. “If we had internet, we could do tests at our own school and not have to get bussed to Lolo and take tests on their computers,” scrawled one Woodman third grader on a sheet of looseleaf. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google’s heavy investment in artificial intelligence has helped the company’s software write music and beat humans at complex board games. What unlikely feats could be next? The company’s new head of AI says he’d like to see Google move deeper into areas such as healthcare. He also warns that the company will face some tricky ethical questions over appropriate uses for AI as it expands its use of the technology. The new AI boss at Google is Jeff Dean. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Somewhere between my eighth and eighteenth turmeric lattes, I realized I was dangerously close to falling for TED. The annual conference, which gathers elite technologists, thought leaders, scientists, economists, futurists, visionaries, activists, physicists, poets, enthusiasts, academics, entertainers and billionaires has a binary reputation: For anyone who hasn’t been, it’s an object of easy mockery. For anyone who has, it’s a religion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you are part of the rarified group of tech insiders who mostly live in the Bay Area, your perception of Mark Zuckerberg is different. You have likely done business with Facebook: your company’s been bought by it, or you’ve been crowded out of a promising market when Zuckerberg decided to launch there. You’ve driven past Zuckerberg’s San Francisco compound in the Mission, or given birth at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Modern life is one big photo shoot. The glassy eyes of closed-circuit TV cameras watch over streets and stores, while smartphone owners continually surveil themselves and others. Tech companies like Google and Amazon have convinced people to invite ever-watching lenses into their homes via smart speakers and internet-connected security cameras. Now a new breed of chips tuned for artificial intelligence is arriving to help cameras around stores, sidewalks, and homes make sense of what they see. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the last two months Michael Marks has turned down a dozen offers to make keynote speeches at conferences. His company, construction startup Katerra, is three years old, but the attention surge is very recent. “Construction technology has gotten kinda buzzy,” he says. That may be. But more likely, interest in Katerra has spiked because in January, the company landed an astounding $867 million in venture funding led by the SoftBank Vision Fund. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Streaming service Netflix is famous for its unique culture. The most well-known example is the company’s no-vacation policy, which allows employees to take off as many days as they choose, whenever they choose. That policy is just a symbol of a broader attitude in the company, according to CEO Reed Hastings. “There’s a whole lot of that freedom,” Hastings said on stage Saturday, at the TED conference in Vancouver. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was about three hours into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, when all of the attention quickly shifted from Zuckerberg’s glistening brow to the exhibit looming over Missouri Republican Billy Long's head. "Who are they?" Long asked, referring to the two women whose larger-than-life faces filled the giant poster board. Zuckerberg paused, before offering, almost in question, "I believe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After 10 hours of verbal flogging by an incensed Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed like a leader whose pedestal had cracked. Over and over during his testimony this week, he apologized for lapses in his company’s handling of user data. He emerged from the hearings with months’ worth of homework for him and his team. But life’s not so bad for Zuckerberg. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The open source movement changed how companies build software. Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo employees pitched in during the early days of the data-crunching software Hadoop. Even after the relationship between Apple and Google soured, the companies' coders kept working together on an obscure but important piece of software called LLVM. Microsoft now uses and contributes to the Linux operating system, even though it competes with Windows. The embrace of open source isn't about altruism. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Gwynne Shotwell has a difficult job. Her boss, Elon Musk, is known for wild, impossible ambitions on wild, impossible timelines. There’s even a term for his rosy view of what’s achievable and when: “Elon time.” As president and COO of Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX, Shotwell must convey Musk’s crazy expectations to a workforce of thousands, without discouraging them with impossible-to-achieve goals. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Follow Mark Zuckerberg's Wednesday testimony here. The hearing is scheduled to start at 10 am EDT. Mark Zuckerberg testified for almost five hours Tuesday in a televised Senate hearing about Facebook’s privacy practices and data abuse. More than 40 Senators had five minutes each to ask questions. Zuckerberg’s most frequent response? “My team will follow up with you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a less than warm welcome in Washington, DC, where he testified before a joint hearing of two Senate committees Tuesday. Among the crowds of spectators lining up to watch Zuckerberg get grilled were members of the activist group CodePink, wearing oversized sunglasses with the words, "Stop Spying," written across them. Another group wore t-shirts with the hashtag #DeleteFacebook scrawled on them in red Sharpie. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Eileen Carey says she has regularly reported Instagram accounts selling opioids to the company for three years, with few results. Last week, Carey confronted two executives of Facebook, which owns Instagram, about the issue on Twitter. Since then, Instagram removed some accounts, banned one opioid-related hashtag and restricted the results for others. Searches for the hashtag #oxycontin on Instagram now show no results. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last fall, when Congress called on Facebook to answer for its failures during the 2016 election—including selling ads to Russian propagandists and allowing fake news to flourish on the platform—the social networking giant sent its general counsel, Colin Stretch, leaving lawmakers wanting for face time with the company's founder. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A coalition of more than 20 child-health, privacy, and consumer groups is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether YouTube is violating a federal law designed to protect children on the internet. The groups are expected to file a complaint with the FTC on Monday. The relevant federal law, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, requires website operators to obtain parents' permission when collecting personal data about children younger than 13. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week in security we took a closer look at Fin7, also known as JokerStash, Carbanak, and a host of other names. The cybercrime group rakes in as much as $50 million a month by stealing credit card numbers, most recently from the company that owns Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, and more. They’ve got an interest in ATM hacks, too, and their professional acumen has turned them into what researchers estimate is a billion-dollar enterprise. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Spotify’s successful direct listing could change the way tech’s “unicorns” go public, possibly even saving them some money. But let’s not get self-righteous about it---this is still capitalism. Typically, when companies go public, they follow an elaborate series of protocols. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When China’s government said last summer it intends to surpass the US and lead the world in artificial intelligence by 2030, skeptics pointed to a major problem. Despite gobs of data from the world’s largest online population, lightweight privacy rules, and 8 million fresh college graduates in 2017, the country doesn’t have enough people skilled in AI to overtake America. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Smart algorithms have taken Google a long way. They helped the company dominate search and create the first software to conquer the complex board game Go. Now the company is betting that algorithms that understand images and text will draw business to its cloud services, make augmented reality popular, and prompt us to search using our smartphone cameras. But some of the algorithms Google is staking its future on aren’t equally smart everywhere. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2016, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation sent a letter to a fast-growing content marketing network called RevContent. The nonprofit watchdog was concerned about the way some of RevContent’s advertisers portrayed women. The network regularly ran ads for mail-order bride services, for example, or ones that featured close-ups of women’s breasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2011, when Spotify launched its streaming music service in the U.S., the future of digital media lied squarely in the realm of advertising. Sure, everyone knew ad-based models—sometimes called “the Internet’s original sin”—had flaws. But companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and were able to grow very large, very quickly by attracting big audiences to their free services and selling ads. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At least one person was killed and four others wounded following a shooting at YouTube's headquarters Tuesday afternoon. Four victims were being transported to local hospitals, though the extent of their injuries was unknown. San Bruno police say one woman was found with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and is believed to be the shooter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

All Matt Maloney wanted to know was whether Chicago-style deep dish pizza is better than New York-style thin crust. It’s a simple question. If he were anyone else, Maloney would have had to get violently anecdotal. Deep dish, while delicious, is obviously not so much a pizza as a casserole; conversely, if you want to put pizza toppings on a cracker, why not just order a flatbread? (Maloney is from Chicago, so you can guess which side he comes down on.) But no. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

AT&T spent last week in court slugging it out with the Department of Justice over its $85 billion plan to acquire Time Warner. The DOJ argues the deal could lead to higher cable television prices for consumers, while AT&T says the deal is routine and that the agency is blocking it for political reasons. On the surface, the deal bears a strong resemblance to Comcast's 2011 acquisition of NBC Universal in a deal valued at about $30 billion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Thursday, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, gave a speech laying out a new national strategy for artificial intelligence in his country. The French government will spend €1.5 billion ($1.85 billion) over five years to support research in the field, encourage startups, and collect data that can be used, and shared, by engineers. The goal is to start catching up to the US and China and to make sure the smartest minds in AI—hello Yann LeCun—choose Paris over Palo Alto. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Mark Zuckerberg isn't responding to the latest scandal engulfing his company, he's actually trying to fix Facebook: He's trying to redirect its obsession with growth---in users and in the time they spend on Facebook---to focus on whether those users have good experiences on the platform. The problem is that he'd prefer the world not know exactly how obsessed with these metrics his company was. And the world is not cooperating. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The headlines about the trade wars being touched off by President Trump’s new tariffs may telegraph plenty of bombast and shots fired, but the most consequential war being waged today is a quieter sort of conflict: It’s the new Cold War over data protection. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was a somber scene outside New York’s City Hall on Wednesday afternoon. Four coffins sat at the foot of the steps; one by one, taxi drivers covered them with white flowers, before assembling on the steps and shouting for the city to “stop Uber’s greed” and “stop making us slaves.” It was the second such gathering in two months, as drivers and their advocates mourned another suicide that they attribute to the rise of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last week the internet jumped on a new research paper proclaiming that the bitcoin blockchain contains child pornography. The authors of that paper conclude that if you’re one of the thousands of people running a full copy of the bitcoin software, or even just a curious researcher downloading the transaction history, you’re breaking the law. Because removing any data from the blockchain destroys the functionality of the system, this legal trouble could spell doom for cryptocurrencies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Oracle's nearly eight-year legal battle with Google just won't end. Tuesday a federal appeals court ruled that Google violated Oracle's copyrights when it built a custom version of the Java platform for its Android operating system. The court sent the case back to a district court to decide how much Google should pay Oracle. But Google can appeal to the Supreme Court. And it should, because the decision will affect not just Google and Oracle, but the entire software industry. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1933, Thupten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama, died at the age of 57. According to Tibetan Buddhist doctrine, the spirit of a departed Dalai Lama chooses the next body into which he will be reincarnated. So when a group of elders noticed that Gyatso’s head had pivoted from facing south to facing northeast during the embalming process, they took it as an omen. A search party left Lhasa for the northeastern province of Amdo, where they found a 2-year-old boy named Lhamo Thondup. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At age 25, Anjney Midha has a stronger resume than some people twice his age. Before graduating from Stanford, he joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He led the firm’s investment in Magic Leap, the mysterious and much-hyped augmented reality company. Then he ditched venture capital to pursue a dream that had followed him from a technology-free young adulthood on a bird sanctuary in India, to the hyper-connected streets of Singapore, to his days at Stanford. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A grinning 4-year-old boy clambers up and down an inflatable backyard water park, collecting oversize Easter eggs, goaded from behind the camera by his mom. The boy, Ryan, stomps the eggs open and unveils plastic toys. It looks like a home movie, but it’s actually the most-watched video on one of the most-watched YouTube channels in the world, Ryan ToysReview. It has been viewed more than 1.1 billion times since 2016, and the leaders of a new startup, Pocket. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

See this fancy pink water bottle I’m holding? Now watch as I bash my head in with it. This is not, I assume, what the makers of the $38 “beauty essential” intended. What they promised was “glamour sipping like a boss.” They wanted me to “be brave. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The sixth-month anniversary of Hurricane Maria’s grinding-up of Puerto Rico brought what might feel like good news. According to AEE, the Electrical Energy Authority, almost 93 percent of Puerto Ricans—1,365,065 people—now have power. The process has been agonizing—a misguided early repair contract to the unlikely Whitefish Energy for $300 million got cancelled, and it took months for crews from better-suited firms to get started. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When administrators in Ohio’s Mentor Public Schools were buying MacBooks during the 2015-16 school year, the local Best Buy was offering a lower price than Apple, even after the company’s standard discount for school districts. Superintendent Matt Miller pushed for a better deal, but Apple said it would not budge from its price list. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The drumbeat to regulate Big Tech began pounding long before the Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked Facebook—six long years ago, the Obama administration pushed a “Privacy Bill of Rights” that, like most other legislative attempts to safeguard your data online, went nowhere. But this time, as they say, feels different. Thanks to repeated lapses from not just Facebook but all corners of Silicon Valley, some sort of regulation seems not only plausible but imminent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Even if you're not a gadget geek, you likely know whether your laptop is powered by an Intel chip or one from a competitor like AMD. The sticker plastered next to your keyboard won't let you forget. But even if you know your Ryzens from your Ice Lakes, you probably don't put much thought into who makes the memory chips that store your data and keep your laptop and smartphone working. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder and former CEO, wasn’t gone very long. After he resigned from Uber in June 2017, Kalanick spent time hobnobbing at elite conferences like Davos and getting good at smartphone games. This month, he announced 10100, a fund for his personal investments. On Tuesday Kalanick elaborated on his plans: 10100 acquired a controlling stake in City Storage Systems, a holding company which invests in distressed real estate assets, for $150 million. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A year ago, The Intercept published a story about a Trump campaign affiliate that was circulating personality tests to collect Americans’ personal information. The company, called Cambridge Analytica, had already been unveiled by the Guardian in a chilling report that detailed its voter-targeting operation. There was every reason to be concerned. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform,” wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement that addressed a series of news stories reporting Facebook’s data had been misused. In the 937-word statement, posted on his Facebook profile Wednesday afternoon, Zuckerberg outlined all that Facebook has done and plans to do to keep our data safe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The technology at the heart of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin—blockchain—has captured the world’s attention, much as the internet, peer-to-peer file transfers, apps, and the cloud did before it. Simply put, blockchains are distributed databases that can be securely updated without the need for central intermediaries. That makes them relevant to a whole host of uses, including everything from food safety to digital identity to insurance records. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two weeks ago, Facebook learned that The New York Times, Guardian, and Observer were working on blockbuster stories based on interviews with a man named Christopher Wylie. The core of the tale was familiar but the details were new, and now the scandal was attached to a charismatic face with a top of pink hair. Four years ago, a slug of Facebook data on 50 million Americans was sucked down by a UK academic named Aleksandr Kogan, and wrongly sold to Cambridge Analytica. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You return home to your penthouse apartment after a long day at work auctioning Cryptokitties and other cryptogoods on a peer-to-peer marketplace. You grab a bottle of tangerine-flavored weed soda from the fridge and sink into your couch. With a flick of your hand, the overhead light switches on. A wooden side table, custom-built by a robot in India, holds a box containing your antidepressant patches. You peel off the back and slap one on your arm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We all know how it feels to be low on energy at the end of a long work day. Some call-center agents at insurer MetLife are watched over by software that knows how it sounds. A program called Cogito presents a cheery notification when the toll of hours discussing maternity or bereavement benefits show in a worker’s voice. “It’s represented by a cute little coffee cup,” says Emily Baker, who supervises a group fielding calls about disability claims at MetLife. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Consumers have long wondered just what Google and Facebook know about them, and who else can access their personal data. But internet giants have little incentive to give straight answers — even to simple questions like, “Why am I being shown this ad?” On May 25, however, the power balance will shift towards consumers, thanks to a European privacy law that restricts how personal data is collected and handled. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices