Business, Spoken

Say you were a villainized e-cigarette startup, with a $13 billion cash investment from the tobacco giant that owns Marlboro, and blamed for kicking off a vaping epidemic among teens. You’d lay low, right? Maybe play nice with the FDA. Log off Instagram. Throw a few coins at a youth prevention campaign. Juul, however, is opting for a more aggressive route. Juul Tuesday confirmed that it plans a na...

As tech giants figure out how to keep users from engaging with fake and misleading news online, a new Gallup poll suggests one potentially effective approach. In the survey, which was commissioned by journalism startup NewsGuard and its investor, the Knight Foundation, more than 60 percent of respondents said they were less likely to share stories from sites that were clearly labeled as unreliable...

You've probably heard by now that bees are dying in record numbers. They're being poisoned by pesticides while urbanization encroaches on bees' natural habitats, leaving them with fewer places to live and fewer wildflowers to feed on, says Harvard biologist James Crall, who studies bumblebees. The die-off comes as the world’s human population is expected to grow from 7 billion in 2010 to 9. Learn...

At Wake Radiology in North Carolina, roughly 50 doctors scrutinize x-rays and other images for local medical providers. Within a few weeks, they should start to get help on some lung CT scans from machine-learning algorithms that highlight potentially cancerous tissue nodules. Although Wake is based in a region known as the Research Triangle, for its intensity of high-tech R&D, the lung-reading so...

As the internet has evolved over its 35-year lifespan, control over its most important services has gradually shifted from open source protocols maintained by non-profit communities to proprietary services operated by large tech companies. As a result, billions of people got access to amazing, free technologies. But that shift also created serious problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Only a few months ago, Apple was crowned the first company to be valued at more than $1 trillion. Now, in the wake of a surprise profit warning, its entire future is being questioned. Both reactions are extreme. A victory lap wasn’t warranted last summer, nor is a eulogy now. The company is at an inflection point. Apple, like others before it, is attempting to navigate the shift. It’s fair to wond...

Apple Wednesday warned investors that its revenue for the last three months of 2018 would not live up to previous estimates, or even come particularly close. The main culprit appears to be China, where the trade war and a broader economic slowdown contributed to plummeting iPhone sales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most years, I round up the news of the year in technology through a collection of quotes, arranged roughly by some combination I make up of their importance and how much I like them. Here they are for 2018. 14. “He was that kind of guy. You know, an asshole. But a really gifted one. Our asshole, I guess.” —A coworker at Google about Anthony Levandowski, the controversial self-driving car engineer....

The Chinese internet is not like the internet in the rest of the world. More than 150 of the world’s 1,000 most popular internet sites are blocked in China, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Instead, domestic platforms like Baidu, WeChat, and Sina Weibo thrive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the past several years, giant tech companies have rapidly ramped up investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. They’ve competed intensely to hire more AI researchers and used that talent to rush out smarter virtual assistants and more powerful facial recognition. In 2018, some of those companies moved to put some guardrails around AI technology. Learn more about your ad choic...

Earlier this month, I was on the phone with Ryan Fox, cofounder of New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm that tracks Russian-related influence operations online. The so-called Yellow Vest protests had spread across France, and we were talking about the role disinformation played in the galvanizing French hashtag for the protests, #giletsjaunes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

At the beginning of 2018, it didn't seem like the open source movement could get any bigger. Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system; websites including Facebook and Wikipedia; and a growing number of gadgets have open source software under the hood---literally, in the case of cars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Surveying the reactions to the latest revelation that Facebook played fast and loose with user data, it was hard not to harken back to what Scott McNally, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, told a group of reporters, including one from WIRED, in 1999: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2018 was the year that Big Tech’s mission statements came back to haunt it. When employees felt that their products were damaging the world and that management wouldn't listen, they went public with their protests. At Google and Amazon, they challenged contracts to sell artificial intelligence and facial-recognition technology to the Pentagon and police. At Microsoft and Salesforce, workers argued...

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Every January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces a personal challenge he will undertake in the year ahead. In 2016, he committed to running 365 miles before the year was up. In 2017, he milked cows and rode tractors as part of his resolution to meet more people outside the Silicon Valley bubble. Last January, he took a different tack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com...

The Future Book was meant to be interactive, moving, alive. Its pages were supposed to be lush with whirling doodads, responsive, hands-on. The old paperback Zork choose-your-own-adventures were just the start. The Future Book would change depending on where you were, how you were feeling. It would incorporate your very environment into its story—the name of the coffee shop you were sitting at, yo...

Labor organizing is gaining renewed momentum among some Amazon employees in the United States. The retail giant—run by the richest man in the world—is now one of the largest employers in the country, with more than 125,000 full-time hourly associates working in its fulfillment and sortation centers alone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It took about 30 minutes for Williamson County commissioners to unanimously approve a roughly $16 million incentive package for Apple Tuesday morning, bringing the total amount the tech giant is likely to receive in exchange for choosing Austin as the site for its newest campus to a cool $41 million. The new addition is set to be Apple’s second campus in the Austin, Texas area—located less than a...

Anti-government protests have raged across France for four weeks now, effectively shutting down the nation’s capital at times as rioters sporting yellow vests (gilets jaunes) wage massive public demonstrations, loot stores, and clash with police. The gilets jaunes protest began in response to a planned gas tax hike, but it soon devolved into a more amorphous outpouring of rage. Learn more about yo...

Most electronics suffer a debilitating aquaphobia. At the ­littlest­ spillage—heaven forbid Dorothy’s bucket—of water, our wicked widgets shriek and melt. Microsoft, it would seem, missed the memo. Last June, the company installed a smallish data center on a patch of seabed just off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands; around it, approximately 933,333 bucketfuls of brine circulate every hour. L...

On a recent Tuesday night, during a session of rash bedtime scrolling, I sold my Facebook data to a stranger in Buenos Aires. Reckless, maybe, but such was my newfound life as a digital vigilante. My tipping point was the Facebook hack, exposed in September, in which I—along with some 90 million other potential victims—was temporarily locked out of my account. I imagined my identity rippling acros...

In 2006, Jeffrey Hammerbacher, then a recent Harvard graduate in math, became an early employee at a budding company founded by another Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. After building Facebook’s data team, Hammerbacher left the company in 2008. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee had the opportunity to question one of the most powerful people on the planet---Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, the company that filters all the world's information. And they blew it. Over the course of three and a half hours, the members of the committee staked out opposite sides of a partisan battle over whether Google search and other products are biased...

It's been one year since the Federal Communications Commission voted to gut its net neutrality rules. The good news is that the internet isn't drastically different than it was before. But that's also the bad news: the 'net wasn't always so neutral to begin with. As we predicted last year, broadband providers didn't make any drastic new moves to block or cripple the delivery of content after the F...