Business, Spoken

In 2018, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 18 million reports to their CyberTipline, constituting 45 million images depicting child sexual abuse. Most of these children were under the age of 12, and some were as young as a few months old. Since its inception in 1998, the CyberTipline has received a total of 55 million such reports. Those from 2018 alone cons...

Google search is advancing a reading grade. Google says it has enhanced its search-ranking system with software called BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers to its friends. It was developed in the company’s artificial intelligence labs and announced last fall, breaking records on reading comprehension questions that researchers use to test AI software. Learn more about y...

Google has its own perfume—or at least one team of the company’s researchers does. Crafted under the guidance of expert French perfumers, the mixture has notes of vanilla, jasmine, melon, and strawberries. “It wasn’t half bad,” says Alex Wiltschko, who keeps a vial of the perfume in his kitchen. Google’s not marketing that scent anytime soon, but it is sticking its nose into yet another aspect of...

Back in 2007, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg gave some advice at Y Combinator's Startup School: Do a startup before you're old. In technology, he said, twentysomethings rule. The olds are useless. “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he said. “Young people are just smarter.” That comment has not aged well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoic...

While American lawmakers are still mostly talking about regulating the tech industry, their counterparts in Europe have been far more active. From consumer privacy protections and content moderation to antitrust enforcement, the European Union has introduced a host of new rules aimed at Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, and at the business practices that enabled them to amass so much power. Inve...

YouTube is the biggest social media platform in the country, and, perhaps, the most misunderstood. Over the past few years, the Google-owned platform has become a media powerhouse where political discussion is dominated by right-wing channels offering an ideological alternative to established news outlets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Technical quarrels between quantum computing experts rarely escape the field’s rarified community. Late Monday, though, IBM’s quantum team picked a highly public fight with Google. In a technical paper and blogpost, IBM took aim at potentially history-making scientific results accidentally leaked from a collaboration between Google and NASA last month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...

The operations overlords of WIRED make me use Airtable. It's a hip workflow tracker, with pretty color coding and copious tabs and a “robust” API that syncs with Slack. It's also, apparently, a superhero. The Captain America of spreadsheets. Airtable isn't just a shinier version of Excel—it's on a self-professed mission to “democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build tools that meet...

In November 2017, a Reddit account called deepfakes posted pornographic clips made with software that pasted the faces of Hollywood actresses over those of the real performers. Nearly two years later, deepfake is a generic noun for video manipulated or fabricated with artificial intelligence software. The technique has drawn laughs on YouTube, along with concern from lawmakers fearful of political...

In January, Liz O’Sullivan wrote a letter to her boss at artificial intelligence startup Clarifai, asking him to set ethical limits on its Pentagon contracts. WIRED had previously revealed that the company worked on a controversial project processing drone imagery. O’Sullivan urged CEO Matthew Zeiler to pledge the company would not contribute to the development of weapons that decide for themselve...

As casual dining chains have declined in popularity, many have experimented with surveillance technology designed to maximize employee efficiency and performance. Earlier this week, one Outback Steakhouse franchise announced it would begin testing such a tool, a computer vision program called Presto Vision, at a single outpost in the Portland, Oregon area. Your Bloomin' Onion now comes with a side...

In March, Yoshua Bengio received a share of the Turing Award, the highest accolade in computer science, for contributions to the development of deep learning—the technique that triggered a renaissance in artificial intelligence, leading to advances in self-driving cars, real-time speech translation, and facial recognition. Now, Bengio says deep learning needs to be fixed. Learn more about your ad...

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The social media company acquires CTRL-Labs, a “brain-machine-interface” startup that lets users control devices by tapping signals off a wristband. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An international cybersecurity group has evicted the Chinese telecom company to comply with US sanctions. That could allow malware to spread more easily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Regulators say Juul hasn't proved its claim that e-cigarettes are safer than tobacco, and uses misleading appeals to kids. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A bill approved by the state senate would set a three-year moratorium on police use of recognition algorithms. Privacy advocates want a permanent ban Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

State attorneys general revealed investigations into possible anticompetitive behavior by tech giants, adding to probes by Congress and federal agencies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Opinion: A growing black and brown diaspora of data must be used for equality, not oppression. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Pew Research Center reports 56% of Americans trust law enforcement to use the technology responsibly, despite concerns over fairness, and bans in some cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The short-term rental startup has settled lawsuits with Boston and Miami, agreeing to turn over data officials say they need to police the industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The artificial intelligence lab cofounded by Elon Musk said its software could too easily be adapted to crank out fake news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Instagram users like Usher, Martha Stewart, and Rick Perry posted a meme warning about a new rule that doesn't actually exist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices