Business, Spoken

In a move that’s months in the making, Facebook announced Wednesday that beginning next week, it will take down posts supporting both white nationalism and white separatism, including on Instagram. It’s an evolution for the social network, whose Community Standards previously only prohibited white supremacist content while allowing posts that advocated for ideologies like race segregation. Learn m...

For our eyes, reading is hardly a smooth ride. They stutter across the page, lingering over words that surprise or confuse, hopping over those that seem obvious in context (you can blame that for your typos), pupils widening when a word sparks a potent emotion. All this commotion is barely noticeable, occurring in milliseconds. But for psychologists who study how our minds process language, our un...

The US government says a Chinese gaming company's ownership of gay dating app Grindr poses a national security risk, according to a report from Reuters. Beijing Kunlun Tech acquired a 60 percent stake in Grindr in 2016 and bought the rest in 2018. But, according to Reuters, the Chinese firm didn't clear the acquisition with the agency known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United Stat...

Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Facebook moves against white nationalist content After months of grappling with its stance, Facebook has finally decided to ban white nationalist content on both Facebook and Instagram. Starting next week, US users who attempt to search for or post this type of content will be redirected to a nonprofit that works to help people leave hate groups. Lear...

In the late 1980s, Canadian master’s student Yoshua Bengio became captivated by an unfashionable idea. A handful of artificial intelligence researchers was trying to craft software that loosely mimicked how networks of neurons process data in the brain, despite scant evidence it would work. “I fell in love with the idea that we could both understand the principles of how the brain works and also c...

Emily Pickett, a doula in Louisville, Kentucky, is used to hearing hard truths from expecting mothers. Her job is to guide women through pregnancy, acting as confidante and supporter; understanding their deepest stressors---an abusive partner, a struggle with drugs---is important to ensuring healthy pregnancies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple’s event Monday ended up featuring one piece of hardware after all: a new credit card, which it plans to launch this summer in the United States. The aptly-named Apple Card, created in partnership with Mastercard and Goldman Sachs, will live within the existing Wallet app on iPhones and as a traditional physical card. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Government usually isn't the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia's chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation's push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens. Learn more about your ad cho...

I have superpowers, OK? One of them is predicting earthquakes. Don’t go showing me “government” “reports” disproving my awesome abilities. Twice already this year, I have shaken awake before my house has. So you will believe me when I tell you, unblessed mortals, that my seismological Spidey sense discerns a Third Event. This catastrophe won’t involve literal tectonics. What I’m detecting is the q...

Microsoft's programming language TypeScript has quietly become one of the most popular languages among developers, at least according to a report published by the analyst firm RedMonk this week. TypeScript jumped from number 16 to number 12, just behind Apple's programming language Swift, in RedMonk's semiannual rankings, which were last published in August. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a color scheme: off-white text accented with a buttery yellow-orange and a neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer author William Gibson. The colors were part of a theme called "Solarized Dark" for the popular MacOS code editor TextMate. To be honest, I didn't think much of...

In January 2018, the top policy executives from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter testified in a Senate hearing about terrorism and social media, touting their companies’ use of artificial intelligence to detect and remove terrorist content from groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Tuesday, Facebook reached a historic settlement with civil rights groups that had accused the company of allowing advertisers to unlawfully discriminate against minorities, women, and older people by using the platform’s ad-targeting technology to exclude them from seeing ads for housing, jobs, and credit—three areas with legal protections for groups that have historically been disenfranchised....

Fei-Fei Li heard the crackle of a cat’s brain cells a couple of decades ago and has never forgotten it. Researchers had inserted electrodes into the animal’s brain and connected them to a loudspeaker, filling a lab at Princeton with the eerie sound of firing neurons. “They played the symphony of a mammalian visual system,” Li told an audience Monday at Stanford, where she is now a professor. Learn...

European officials Wednesday fined Google €1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) for more than a decade of abusive practices in how it brokered online ads for other websites like newspapers, blogs, and travel aggregators. This is the third billion-dollar antitrust penalty levied against Google by the European Commission, which has fined the company more than $9 billion for anticompetitive practices since 20...

After each new horrific mass shooting, an all-too-familiar cycle often plays out: Reporters (myself included) race to attempt to unpack an alleged shooter’s possible motivations by piecing together clues from their social media accounts and online postings before it all gets scrubbed from the internet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The college admissions bribery scandal has all the components of a made for TV movie, including celebrity cameos, suspense, and unexpected twists and turns. Behind the broken admissions process and the drama, however, a different educational crisis is looming. According to a 2018 Korn Ferry study, by 2030, there could be a global talent shortage of more than 85.2 million people, costing an estimat...

The internet is an ocean of algorithms trying to tell you what to do. YouTube and Netflix proffer videos they calculate you’ll watch. Facebook and Twitter filter and reorganize posts from your connections, avowedly in your interest—but also in their own. New York entrepreneur Brian Whitman helped create such a system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On October 27, 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an email to his then-director of product development. For years, Facebook had allowed third-party apps to access data on their users’ unwitting friends, and Zuckerberg was considering whether giving away all that information was risky. In his email, he suggested it was not: “I’m generally skeptical that there is as much data leak strategic ri...

The first five days or so of SXSW in Austin are always dedicated to the “interactive” portion of the festival. The city’s downtown streets swell with lanyard-laden “entrepreneurs” and “founders” wearing that familiar uniform of T-shirts screen-printed with their company’s clever logo, an outfit made professional by throwing a blazer over the ensemble. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

Last spring, Chris Cox, the chief product officer of Facebook, was promoted to also oversee Whatsapp, Messenger, and Instagram. It seemed, at the time, almost like succession planning. If Mark Zuckerberg were to ever leave the company, Cox, his longtime confidante, and a representative of the engineering and product side, would be set up to run it. But today Cox has announced that, after 13 years...

5G is coming, and with it a massive boost in bandwidth that will feed artificial intelligence applications, enable the long fabled Internet of Things, and deliver more streaming video. Lots of streaming video. But all that extra bandwidth won't be much use if the average consumer can't afford a 5G connection, or if those connections are hobbled by restrictive bandwidth caps. Learn more about your...

A wave of antitrust interest is washing over Europe and much of the United States, and Spotify is riding its crest. The Swedish audio-streaming giant lodged a complaint against Apple with the European Commission on Wednesday, accusing the company of abusing its position as owner of the App Store to stifle competition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So, it finally happened. A leading American politician has said aloud what many have whispering: it’s time to break up Big Tech. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren just fired the opening salvo and called for the federal government to take action: “Today’s big tech companies have too much power— too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. Learn more about your a...

The Bay Area is famed for nurturing speculative investments like flying cars, floating cities, and the notion that a ride hailing service can turn a profit. A new utopian investment opportunity arrived Monday: Shovel dollars into a San Francisco artificial intelligence lab cofounded by Elon Musk and you’ll receive a share of the profits when (or if) it figures out how to create machines smarter th...