Business, Spoken

On January 16, a new course launched on the online learning platform Coursera with an unassuming name: The Google IT Support Professional Certificate. It promised to prepare beginners for entry-level jobs in IT in eight to 12 months. That day, it attracted the largest-ever group of first-time Coursera users, almost half of them people without college degrees. By February, it was Coursera’s second-most-popular offering. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson interviewed YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki on Tuesday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Here is an edited transcript of the talk. Nicholas Thompson: So you have had a crazy year and a half. All the social media companies have had a crazy year and a half. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech companies are rushing to infuse everything with artificial intelligence, driven by big leaps in the power of machine learning software. But the deep-neural-network software fueling the excitement has a troubling weakness: Making subtle changes to images, text, or audio can fool these systems into perceiving things that aren’t there. That could be a big problem for products dependent on machine learning, particularly for vision, such as self-driving cars. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If broadband providers thought that they'd be subject to fewer regulations after the Federal Communications Commission voted in December to jettison its net neutrality protections, they could be disappointed. California state Senator Scott Wiener on Wednesday introduced a bill that would create a regime in some ways more strict than the Obama-era rules against blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against content. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Technology keeps making it easier to separate you from your money. PayPal enabled you to easily send money via the internet. Square allowed businesses to use a smartphone to accept your credit card. Apple Pay and Android Pay flipped this idea on its head and let you pay with your phone instead of a card. Despite this innovation in how consumers can pay businesses, the way businesses pay each other hasn't changed much. San Francisco startup Fundbox wants to give businesses another option. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Donald Trump blocked Broadcom's proposed $105 billion acquisition of fellow wireless chip giant Qualcomm on Monday amidst mounting fears that US could fall behind China on technology innovation. That’s a little odd, because on its face, the deal itself has nothing to do with China. Broadcom's key units are US-based; the company is headquartered in Singapore, which is generally considered friendly to the US. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Washington state Governor Jay Inslee Monday signed the nation’s first state law intended to protect net neutrality, setting up a potential legal battle with the Federal Communications Commission. The law bans broadband providers offering service in the state from blocking or throttling legal content, or from offering fast-lane access to companies willing to pay extra. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Predicting the winners and losers of March Madness is such a daunting challenge that it attracts math nerds like Starfleet voyagers lining up at Comic-Con. Statisticians, economists, Silicon Valley coders, the PhD quants at hedge funds and gambling syndicates: They’ve all tried to “solve” the outcome of the annual college basketball tournament’s 63 matchups. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

No matter where you situate yourself on the political spectrum, don’t try to deny that the 2016 US presidential election made you go “whaaaaaaat?” This isn’t a judgment; if you believe Michael Wolff’s book, even Donald Trump didn’t think Donald Trump was going to be president. Partially that’s because of polls. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In January, Facebook said it will reduce the volume of news in its news feed, in favor of more posts from friends and family. In fact, Facebook’s role in distributing news has been falling dramatically for more than a year. Data from Parse.ly, which tracks visits to more than 2,500 publisher sites, shows that ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, more than 40 percent of traffic to those sites came from Facebook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Apple's programming language Swift is less than four years old, but a new report finds that it's already as popular as its predecessor, Apple's more established Objective-C language. Swift is now tied with Objective-C at number 10 in the rankings conducted by analyst firm RedMonk. It's hardly a surprise that programmers are interested in Apple's language, which can be used to build applications for the iPhone, Apple Watch, Macintosh computers, and even web applications. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

From the street, you can hear children at play. Inside the one-story house in Fremont, California, a fish tank gurgles by the front door. A plastic bin filled with Legos sits in the sun room. Renuka Sivarajan, 37, runs a home daycare here. Her path to this point has been like the stock market of late. When Sivarajan first came to the US from India, in 2003, she worked for a tech company in Phoenix. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Forget free-range, antibiotic-free, and grass-fed—tomorrow’s burger will be lab-cultured. Scientists are creating a new slaughterhouse-free food group called clean meat: edible animal protein grown in a vat. Stem cells are extracted from animals, brewed in a bioreactor, fortified with nutrients like amino acids and glucose, and structured around collagen “scaffolds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On stage at a tech conference last month, Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, fired a warning shot to publishers who think they get a raw deal from Facebook. ”My job is to make sure there is quality news on Facebook and that publishers who want to be on Facebook … have a business model that works,” Brown said. “If anyone feels this isn’t the right platform for them, they should not be on Facebook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook has had a bumpy couple of years. It makes money in torrents, but the way it's handled the manipulations of its platform has led critics to charge it was being irresponsible and craven. In recent months it's finally begun to signal it understands that criticism and to make specific and potentially meaningful changes. But competitors, especially Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, have no intention of letting this crisis go to waste. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hims, a San Francisco-based e-commerce startup selling men’s wellness products, has raised $40 million in funding from venture firms IVP and Redpoint Ventures, according to sources familiar with the deal. The new round values Hims at $200 million not including the funding, the sources said. Launched in late 2017, Hims has already sold around $10 million worth of products for baldness and erectile dysfunction, according to a source. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Claire L. Evans has discovered the solution to our social media woes: “Go back to BBS.” She means bulletin board systems, those grunge-era digital hangouts, like the Well and Echo, where users linked up based on mutual interests and supported one another. (So civilized.) Earlier this year, Evans even installed BBS server software on her Raspberry Pi to test her theory. “That kind of small-scale, self-­policed social media could serve as a balm to us all,” she says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1965, tech pioneer Gordon Moore noticed a trend: The number of components on an integrated circuit was doubling every year. He predicted this would continue, resulting in wildly powerful digital devices. It was an audacious forecast (he later revised the interval to every two years), but Moore’s law more or less held for five decades, shrinking the computer from room-sized appliance to ­pocketable smartphone. The world of bits was transformed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I usually write in Google's online word processor Google Docs, even when noting the company's shortcomings. This article is different: it was drafted in a similar but more private service called Graphite Docs. I discovered it while exploring a nascent and glitch-ridden online realm known as the decentralized internet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At his coming-out hearing as chairman of the Federal Reserve on Feb. 27, Jay Powell made all sorts of news in finance-land, including a suggestion that the bank saw potentially faster inflation ahead. Also notable was his assessment of the causes for the volatility that roiled Wall Street and saw trillions of dollars lost, gained, lost, and then regained in a matter of days in early February. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February, far-right conspiracy site InfoWars published a series of videos on YouTube accusing survivor and activist David Hogg of being an actor. In response, YouTube took down several of the videos, and reportedly handed the publication at least one “strike,” for violating its policies on harassment and bullying. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon should treat all content flowing through their cables and cell towers equally. That means they shouldn't be able to slide some data into “fast lanes” while blocking or otherwise discriminating against other material. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s easy to make Jacob Hsu gush about the wonders of Baltimore. The former Silicon Valley executive moved to the Charm City in January 2017, to become CEO of Catalyte, a company that develops software using teams of non-traditional, algorithm-identified engineers. Once in Baltimore, Hsu was overwhelmed by the talent. He could work with city leaders and executives; he could recruit high-up federal employees—opportunities that would be impossible in the Bay Area. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Big tech has a lot of problems: fake news, sexual harassment, Russian interference, privacy concerns, and growing fears that too much screen time rots your brain. But even as they struggle to solve these day-to-day problems, the industry’s biggest players are putting more resources into another notoriously hard problem: health care. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Since entrepreneur Chris Mansi cofounded Viz.ai in 2016, the best-funded wizards of artificial intelligence have taken on board games, and created emoji that mirror your facial expressions. Meanwhile, Mansi has been developing algorithms to save the brain cells of stroke patients. This month, the Food and Drug Administration cleared Viz.ai to market its algorithms to doctors and hospitals. It was a small breakthrough toward using AI to make healthcare more efficient and powerful. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If banks and hedge funds start holding large amounts of cryptocurrencies, much of the money will flow---virtually, of course---through Murray, Kentucky. That’s home to Kingdom Trust, a small company that’s quickly become the crypto industry’s go-to option for holding its digital coins. The crypto revolution has a few kinks to work out before it can revolutionize anything. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last Thursday, the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission formally published a rule reversing long-standing and vital protections of the internet known as net neutrality. The FCC’s new rule would let big corporations restrict how consumers access their favorite websites by forcing them to buy internet access in packages, paying more for "premium” service, as with cable television. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Charles E. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Peter Thiel, never one to keep a low profile, made his most recent set of waves with reports that he is prepared to decamp from Silicon Valley to more benign haunts in Los Angeles along with several of his companies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” That was how Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming (1968), expressed the difference between pristine mathematics and buggy reality. “When programming, you abstract away the entire physical world as much as possible, because it’s messy. But then it comes back and bites you,” Paul Ford, cofounder of the platform-builder Postlight, told me. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After billionaire Joe Ricketts announced the shuttering of local news organizations Gothamist and DNAInfo last fall, readers across the country mourned the loss of the beloved sites, and worried about the vulnerability of journalism in the digital age. Now, a consortium of public radio stations, including WNYC in New York, WAMU in Washington DC, and KPCC in Southern California, has banded together to bring some of those sites back from the dead. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Federal protection for net neutrality will officially end in April. The Federal Communications Commission’s new regulations, which abandon rules against blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content, are scheduled to be published in the Federal Register Thursday. They will take effect 60 days later. As the FCC withdraws from protecting net neutrality, states are taking up the fight. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It takes a special sort of heartlessness to create a conspiracy video about a teenaged survivor of one of the deadliest school shootings in US history. But it takes a literally heartless algorithm to ensure that thousands, or even millions of people see it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Julia Enthoven didn’t think much of using her real name and photo in a chat feature on Kapwing, the website she co-founded last year. The site launched its online video-editing tools in October and has garnered 64,000 visits since. From the beginning, Enthoven’s team wanted feedback from users about bugs and feature requests, so they deployed a messaging widget from a company called Drift. Anyone visiting Kapwing’s website saw a chat box on the bottom corner of the page. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On a trip to Silicon Valley last year, Defense Secretary James Mattis openly envied tech companies’ superior use of artificial intelligence technology. To help close the gap, one Pentagon unit is now offering $100,000 in prizes to develop algorithms that can interpret high-resolution satellite images. The contest is called the xView Detection Challenge, and starts next month. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s indisputable: A broadband internet connection is vital to full participation in our society and economy. Increasingly, government services and job opportunities can only be accessed online. Indeed, homework assigned to seven out of 10 K-12 students in the US requires internet access, according to a recent study. The internet provides access to necessary information and a way to stay connected to friends and family, be they around the corner or around the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In December, when Facebook launched Messenger Kids, an app for pre-teens and children as young as 6, the company stressed that it had worked closely with leading experts in order to safeguard younger users. What Facebook didn’t say is that many of those experts had received funding from Facebook. Equally notable are the experts Facebook did not consult. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

William Andregg ushers me into the cluttered workshop of his startup Fathom Computing and gently lifts the lid from a bulky black box. Inside, green light glows faintly from a collection of lenses, brackets, and cables that resemble an exploded telescope. It’s a prototype computer that processes data using light, not electricity, and it’s learning to recognize handwritten digits. In other experiments the device learned to generate sentences in text. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a bombshell indictment Friday, implicating 13 Russian nationals and detailing a multi-year, costly, and widespread effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. At the center of that effort were Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, which the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) used to recruit American followers, plan real-life rallies, and spread propaganda about issues like religion, immigration, and eventually Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One of the most ubiquitous features of the internet is the ability to link to content elsewhere. Everything is connected via billions of links and embeds to blogs, articles, and social media. But a federal judge’s ruling threatens that ecosystem. Katherine Forrest, a Southern District of New York judge, ruled Thursday that embedding a tweet containing an image in a webpage could be considered copyright infringement. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Just before Facebook went public in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had a bound red book titled Facebook Was Not Originally Created to Be a Company placed on every employee’s desk. The book, written by Zuckerberg himself, ended with an urgent, even ominous rallying cry: If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. “Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You might see fewer ads on the web from now on. But you probably won't. On Thursday, Google Chrome, the most popular browser by a wide margin, began rolling out a feature that will block ads on sites that engage in particularly annoying behavior, such as automatically playing sound, or displaying ads that can't be dismissed until a certain amount of time has passed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The bike-sharing wars have escalated. What started as healthy competition between two powerful, well-funded Chinese companies and a handful of scrappy American upstarts has intensified into a trash-talking land grab involving electric scooters, electric bikes, and plenty of Silicon Valley-style ambition. In October, LimeBike the favored competitor of Silicon Valley venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Coatue Management, raised $50 million in funding. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Angel Torres was driving down a major Los Angeles boulevard in late 2016 when it happened: Ride requests from Uber and Lyft arrived at the same second. As he looked away from the road to decide which trip was more worth his time, he nearly rear-ended the car ahead of him. “It scared the crap out of me,” Torres says. He was new to juggling the two apps, and was so rattled by the near miss that he started pulling over every time he needed to accept a ride on one app or turn off the other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Do not let their names fool you. The silicon places---Silicon Slopes, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Beach, Silicon Peach, Silicon Bayou, Silicon Shire, Silicon Desert, Silicon Holler, Silicon Hill and, separately, Silicon Hills---do not aspire to become “the next Silicon Valley.” Sure, the country’s burgeoning tech enclaves in Utah and Kentucky and Oregon draw inspiration from the original. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the twilight of the 20th century, Bill Gates was well and truly a tentacular squid, with his sucker-covered limbs extending into every level of the computer industry. The one area that Gates didn’t dominate: the World Wide Web. And how he tried to conquer that newfangled internet led to an epic court battle that continues to shape how the world sees the five-headed beast that Big Tech has become. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In conservative circles, the pitchforks have been out for tech since at least the 2016 election season, with far-right media organizations like Breitbart and Project Veritas accusing the industry and its leaders of silencing Republican voices, advocating for open borders, and bankrolling Democratic campaigns. And yet, a new survey suggests that the tech backlash festering on the far-right fringes has also escalated on the industry's largely liberal home turf. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The bruised Mark Zuckerberg on this issue's cover? That's a photo-illustration created by Jake Rowland, a New York City–based artist known for his composite portraits. For this image, Rowland mashed together an existing image of Zuckerberg with a photograph of a hired model—made up to look battered—whose features resembled that of the Facebook confounder and CEO. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In December of 2016, Google announced it had fixed a troubling quirk of its autocomplete feature: When users typed in the phrase, "are jews," Google automatically suggested the question, "are jews evil?" When asked about the issue during a hearing in Washington on Thursday, Google's vice president of news, Richard Gingras, told members of the British Parliament, "As much as I would like to believe our algorithms will be perfect, I don't believe they ever will be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks. His message pertained to some walls at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters where staffers are encouraged to scribble notes and signatures. On at least a couple of occasions, someone had crossed out the words “Black Lives Matter” and replaced them with “All Lives Matter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices