Business, Spoken

The girls were dancing on a neon tank, wearing sequined bikinis lit up by red and green laser light. A strobing fixed-wing aircraft passed overhead like the acid-trip kissing cousin of a Mitsubishi A6M Zero, with more sequined women dangling from it, trapeze-style. Flashing robots had preceded them — wheeling through the room, pumping their fists at the crowd — while the audience, seated on tiers of glittery red plastic swivel chairs, waved glow sticks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was like a nightmare crossover between Gossip Girl and Black Mirror. Socialites, models, and celebrities, promised extravagant beachside benders, flocked to the Bahamas only to find feral dogs, luggage gone AWOL, and accommodations resembling FEMA camps. Social media feeds exploded with tales of wealthy millennials stranded on an island with little food or water. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

During a brief break in the online broadcast, Tom Hanks leaned toward Jack Dorsey. “So, has this been good for Twitter or bad?” he asked. Hanks was only semi-serious, but the Twitter CEO didn’t have an answer. Which is fair. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Airbnb is trying to change the narrative. For so long, the nearly nine-year-old home-sharing platform pushed for growth by barging into new markets and new cities around the world, regulations be damned. So the news that the company agreed this week to settle its lawsuit against the City of San Francisco seems jarring. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Circle, a film adaptation of the best-selling novel by David Eggers about a mega-Silicon Valley company that has sinister plans to control the world, opened recently to tepid reviews and unimpressive box office. That shouldn’t obscure the fact that the issues it attempts to address—and which the novel brilliantly took on—are ones that need to be dealt with, urgently. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The GOP-led Federal Communications Commission this week released the first details of its long-anticipated plan to roll-back Obama-era net neutrality protections. The good news for net neutrality advocates: You can already voice your official displeasure on the FCC’s proposal. The bad news: It’s quite possible no one will listen. The FCC’s Republican commissioners never supported the net neutrality rules, and they’re not likely to change their minds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The world finds itself in an age saturated with anxiety—at least, that’s the sense created by the daily deluge of news portraying a grim present of economic hardship, global tensions, terrorism, and political upheaval. The five-year-old site Upworthy doesn’t want you to see the world that way. At one time, if Upworthy was known at all, it wasn’t for its mission, but for its attention-gathering headlines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You read the news. But if Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' hunch is right, you'll want to edit it, too. Wales is raising money to bring a new model of ad-free news creation to the web: one that would mix professional journalists with volunteer editors. Wales, like so many other idealists who believe in a better public discourse, wants to fix the fake news problem he sees as driven by a clickbait economy where accuracy comes second to intrigue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“What if you could type directly from your brain?” Regina Dugan said, as the same words appeared on the towering screen behind her, one digital character at a time, a cursor leading the way. “It sounds impossible,” she continued, taking another measured step across the stage. “But it’s closer than you may realize.” Dugan once oversaw Darpa, the visionary research arm of the US Department of Defense. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If Congress were to fail to pass a spending bill before the end of the day Friday, the government could shut down. That’s why President Trump just blinked. He shelved a plan to demand that funding for a border wall be included in that bill after both Democrats and Republicans voiced fierce opposition. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Yann LeCun once built an AI chip called ANNA. But he was 25 years ahead of his time. The year was 1992, and LeCun was a researcher at Bell Labs, the iconic R&D lab outside New York City. He and several other researchers designed this chip to run deep neural networks—complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks on their own by analyzing vast amounts of data—but ANNA never reached the mass market. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Every day across the nation, people doing work for Google log in to their computers and start watching YouTube. They look for violence in videos. They seek out hateful language in video titles.They decide whether to classify clips as “offensive” or “sensitive.” They are Google’s so-called “ads quality raters,” temporary workers hired by outside agencies to render judgments machines still can’t make all on their own. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

David Kosslyn and Ian Thompson are the founders of a virtual reality company called Angle Technologies. Two years into this stealth project, backed by $8 million in funding, they won’t say much about the virtual world they’re building—at least not publicly. But they will say that they’re building it in a way that alters the relationship between computer hardware and software. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, wins today’s special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district—a seat Republicans have held since 1979—it won’t be because he’s young. It won’t be because he’s idealistic, camera-friendly, or Star Wars-savvy. Mostly, it will be because Ossoff is lucky enough to be the first Democrat to stand a real chance of starting to claw back the ground ceded to Republicans on Capitol Hill. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Regulators are now off the backs of big internet providers. Thanks to a resolution signed by President Trump earlier this month, consumer-friendly privacy rules passed by the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission won’t take effect. Rules designed to protect net neutrality—the idea that internet providers shouldn’t be able to give certain content preferential treatment—seem likely to fall next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the late summer of 1954, a brilliant young psychologist was reading the newspaper when his eye fell on a strange headline on the back page: prophecy from planet clarion call to city: flee that flood. it’ll swamp us on dec 21, outer space tells suburbanite. His interest piqued, the psychologist, whose name was Leon Festinger, read on. “Lake City will be destroyed by a flood from Great Lake just before dawn, Dec. 21. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Emergency responders in northern Texas watch as an imaginary crisis takes over their social media feeds. A mass shooting has broken out at a music festival, they learn, and a terrorist organization is taking credit. The shooters livestreamed the entire grisly scene, and news outlets are already picking up the story. Word of the tragedy spreads like a virus online, riddled with misinformation and panicked confusion. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Online advertising is terrible. Ads clutter your screen, slow down your computer, and drain your batteries. Publishers saddle pages with tracking technology that vacuums up your data so they can, ostensibly, serve you more relevant ads (though this practice really just leads to serious privacy concerns). Sometimes ads even try to install malware on your computer. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ravi Gupta is standing with both hands resting on the lip of a lucite podium. Some 600 audience members, including his mother, are staring intently back at him. Few of them have ever worked in politics before, but they’re all here to hear the former Obama administration staffer tell them how they can help save the progressive cause. He just has one problem: He forgot his laptop at the airport. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The day Richard Feynman died, the blackboard in his classroom read: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” When Ian Goodfellow explains the research he’s doing at Google Brain, the central artificial intelligence lab at the internet’s most powerful company, he points to this aphorism from the iconic physicist, Caltech professor, and best-selling author. But Goodfellow isn’t referring to himself—or any other human being inside Google. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Comcast thinks it has an answer to cord-cutting: getting into the wireless mobile network business. But that alone might not be enough to stop its traditional cable customers from flocking to online video. Today the company announced that it will launch its own mobile phone and internet service called Xfinity Mobile. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

YouTube TV has arrived, and with it the potential to change how television works. Google-owned YouTube’s first foray into true cable-like television takes to the internet equivalent of the airwaves in select cities today: 40-plus channels of entertainment, news and sports for $35 per month, the so-called skinny bundle. So far, the service is still a little wonky. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For years, the humble Arduino microcontroller—a cheap, open source, midnight-blue circuit board emblazoned with a tiny white infinity loop—has been a favorite tool of the DIY electronics crowd. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Uber just released its first diversity report. For years, the ride-hailing giantshunnedthe practice adopted by most other major Silicon Valley companies. But Uber’s scandals have snowballed. Multiple claims of misogyny and sexual harassment suggest a company that doesn’t just have isolated problems but a pervasive culture of sexism. Uber’s responses have included a much-hyped conference call led by board member Arianna Huffington and this week the diversity report. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On a dreary Thursday afternoon in March, the halls of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, swelled with people who spend their lives trying to salvage the economies of America’s forgotten towns. Hailing from across the country, they hurried past Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office in their sharp suits and jewel-toned dresses, each one carrying a different proposal for how to keep their cities and states afloat. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Trump’s long-promised changes to the country’s high-skilled worker visa program may have to wait another year. The H-1B visa application process begins today, and the requirements for companies looking to hire foreign talent, have gone unchanged, despite President Trump’s repeated threats to reform a program he says undermines American workers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Trump administration may not believe that automation threatens today’s American workforce, but try telling that to a travel agent or a truck driver or a factory worker or an accountant. One recent study found that for every one robot introduced to the workforce, six related human jobs disappear. But those six humans still need to get by. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Late last year, Israel-based entrepreneur Matan Uziel saw a notification he’d never seen before pop up on YouTube’s backend—the part of the site where creators upload their videos. “I saw a yellow dollar sign. At first I didn’t understand what it was,” Uziel says. “Then I moved my cursor over it. I saw it meant my video was not advertiser-friendly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On the surface, bitcoin is having a very good year. The price of the digital currency reached record highs well over $1,000 after years of stagnation following a major crash. But if you pull back the curtain, the civil war rages. The global community of companies, coders, and opportunists who control the bitcoin network is now on the verge of revolt after more than two years of infighting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You don’t need to be in government to know how slowly it moves. In business, that kind of inefficiency makes entrepreneurial mouths water. So it’s no surprise that America’s businessman-turned-president wants to speed things up. Now President Trump appears to want to pick up his predecessor’s legacy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning. Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today, while you’re not watching, the Senate could gut rules protecting your internet privacy. Last year the Federal Communications Commission passed a set of strict privacy regulations that ban broadband internet providers from selling your browsing data without your consent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Intel just unleashed a new kind of computer memory it believes will fundamentally change the way the world builds computers. But it won’t tell the world what’s inside. The company calls this new creation 3D XPoint—pronounced “three-dee cross-point”—and this week, after touting the stuff for a year-and-a-half, Intel finally pushed it into the market. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As far back as the 1880s, people stood on the curb outside the New York Stock Exchange taking bets on political elections, and newspapers would report the odds as a way of predicting the results at the polls. In the years since, economists refined the concept, and more recently, prediction markets have tapped into the wisdom of the crowds via the internet, forecasting everything from presidential races to sporting events to stock prices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The way tech companies deal with online harassment and abuse is broken. YouTube allows anti-Semitism to stay live. Twitter waffles as targeted harassment runs rampant. Facebook takes down an iconic photo that shouldn’t be banned. Now one German politician is tired of letting platforms make excuses. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hangovers are a fixture of South by Southwest. Free branded booze abounds, turning late nights into too-early mornings filled with product demos and repetitive panels. But determined marketers and wide-eyed founders pitch on through the pain, in the unbridled belief they might just be SXSW’s next breakout star. Or at the very least, its next Meerkat. But this year, the conference itself feels a lot like a hangover. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Igor Mordatch is working to build machines that can carry on a conversation. That’s something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He’s not a linguist. He doesn’t deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He’s a roboticist who began his career as an animator. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Next month, a venture capital firm called Blockchain Capital plans to do something that could change the way companies get funded—and perhaps even the way they operate. Instead of an Initial Public Offering, in which a company sells stock via a regulated exchange like Nasdaq, the San Francisco-based VC firm is making an Initial Coin Offering, selling its own digital token as a way of raising money for its latest venture fund. Anyone who buys a token will be buying into the fund. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Have you heard? Uber is hiring. CEO Travis Kalanick wants a chief operating officer. Heapparently came to this decision in the midst of the company’s worst PR crisis yet. Accusations of a misogynistic company culture,aGoogle lawsuit, and allegations that it misled regulators with phantom rides leave the company in an almost permanent state of damage control.Hiring a COO almost certainly is Kalanick’s attempt to show that he, and his company, can grow up. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Congressional Budget Office just released its much-awaited report analyzing the possible effects of the American Health Care Act, the GOP plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. The verdict is a doozy. Twenty-four million fewer Americans would have health insurance by 2026, according to the CBO, with 14 million of them losing coverage in 2018. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Imagine a world where Comcast slows video streaming from Fox News’s website to a pixelated crawl while boosting Rachel Maddow—who happens to star on Comcast-owned MSNBC. What if Verizon, which owns the liberal Huffington Post, charged you more to visit right-wing Breitbart. Or maybe Google Fiber bans access to the alt-right social network Gab. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Here’s a math problem: Ten startup founders and CEOs hurtle down the long highway from Omaha to Lincoln, Nebraska, in a cornflower blue bus. One of the execs builds construction management software. Another runs a blog-hosting startup. A third makes medical devices used in colon surgeries. They sit facing each other on two banquettes, swapping war stories and offering each other advice on hiring and raising money. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For decades, two companies worked side by side to build the very foundation of personal computing. Microsoft built the operating system—Windows—and Intel built the chips. But Wintel is no more. Sure, Windows will continue to run on Intel chips. But Wintel as a mighty alliance has died. It’s been fading for years, and this week Microsoft snuffed out the last of it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the FCC, doesn’t like the net neutrality rules enforced by the agency President Trump named him to lead. He voted against them as a commissioner in 2015, and in a speech after Trump’s election said their days arenumbered. But until this week, Pai hasn’t explainedhow he would go about reversing the rules. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Lester Packingham Jr. registered as a sex offender in 2002 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl when he was 21. But that offense isn’t what brought Packingham to the Supreme Court of the United States on Monday. The crime this time around? A Facebook post. The post itself was benign enough. In 2010, Packingham took to Facebook to celebrate a recently dismissed parking ticket. “Praise be to GOD, WOW!” he wrote. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Within the next five years, Google will produce a viable quantum computer. That’s the stake the company has just planted. In the pages of Nature late last week, researchers from Google’s Quantum AI Laboratory told the world that a machine leveraging the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics will soon outperform traditional computers on certain tasks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After two decades of Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint ads, you know how the big telcos deliver cellular service to your smartphone. Each builds its own nationwide wireless network, boasting that its particular web of data centers, fiber lines, and antennas is faster and more reliable (or at least cheaper) than the others. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today, Snap starts its life as a publicly traded company—the buzziest tech IPO of the year and likely the most valuable in the US since Alibaba debuted in 2014. The event carries the fascination of an impending rocket launch: Is this thing actually going to take off? Or will it crash and burn in a huge, morbid spectacle (of Spectacles)? Snap has tried to sell investors on the idea that it has cachet other social platforms don’t. Invest in us, the company urges. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

No one saw the crisis coming: a coordinated vandalistic effort to insert Squidward references into articles totally unrelated to Squidward. In 2006, Wikipedia was really starting to get going, and really couldn’t afford to have any SpongeBob SquarePants-related high jinks sullying the site’s growing reputation. It was an embarrassment. Someone had to stop Squidward. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this month, in a classic late Friday afternoon news dump, the Federal Communications Commission announced a rollback of two key decisions made during theObama administration. In another era, few besidespolicy wonks and internet activists would have noticed such a thing. But these changes drew intense attention. These days, politics isn’t just what happens on the internet—it’s what happens to the internet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices