Business, Spoken

Back in the early 1930s, farmers couldn’t get wired. The big-city electric utilities claimed that delivering power to customers spread out in rural areas wasn’t profitable. So eventually the locals rolled up their sleeves and did it themselves. They formed electric co-ops and strung their own damn wires, aided by cheap federal loans. Today there are nearly 900 rural co-ops still providing their co...

On the 3:13 pm train out of San Jose on a recent Friday, I hunched over a Macbook, brow furrowed. Hundreds of miles north in a Google datacenter in Oregon, a virtual computer sprang to life. I was soon looking at the yawning blackness of a Linux command line—my new AI art studio. Some hours of Googling, mistyped commands, and muttered curses later, I was cranking out eerie portraits. Learn more ab...

One Thursday last month, 19-year-old Robbie Barrat woke to a fusillade of messages on his phone. “I was half asleep but saw they all contained the same number,” he says. “Then I fell back asleep for a few hours. I didn’t really want to believe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The definition of cloud computing may be nebulous, but its promise is clear. Instead of filling a warehouse with servers and paying people to manage them, a company can pay a cloud computing provider to provide computing resources on demand and pay only for what it actually uses. This prospect lured organizations ranging from startups to massive corporations to stodgy government agencies onto clou...

When Alex Jones crashed the congressional hearings looking into big tech platforms back in September, Lord Voldemort kept coming to my mind. Even if you haven’t read the Harry Potter books, you probably know that almost no one in the wizarding world will speak this archvillain’s name aloud; he is referred to only as “he who must not be named” or “you know who. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Google parent Alphabet generated 86 percent of its revenue from advertising last year. On Friday the woman leading its best shot at building a second big revenue stream said she is moving on. Diane Greene, a storied cloud computing entrepreneur and executive, has been leading Google’s cloud computing division since early 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times published a blockbuster—five byline, 50 source, 5,000 word—report on the failures of Facebook’s management team during the past three years. It begins with Sheryl Sandberg yelling at one of her employees; it ends with her hand-written stage directions, captured by a Times photographer, as she sat before the Senate: “Slow, Pause, Determined. Learn more abo...

Amazon announced Tuesday that the 14-month public bidding war for its so-called second headquarters was coming to an end. After reviewing 238 proposals from cities across North America, the company says it will build two large regional offices in Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia as well as a smaller campus in Nashville, Tennessee. The search was largely a success for CEO Jeff Bezos, who ca...

The tech industry already spends tens of millions of dollars every year lobbying in Washington for federal regulations that will benefit their businesses---or, better yet, for no regulations at all. But while lawmakers on Capitol Hill have spent the last two years handwaving and making empty threats against Big Tech, regulators in the UK have been getting to work, strengthening their data privacy...

After a 14-month search, Amazon announced Tuesday that it will open a pair of regional offices in two major metropolitan areas where it already has a presence: the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, New York, and Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington D.C. The decision comes after over 230 cities submitted bids to be home of the Seattle-based company’s highly-anticipated second headqua...

It was a particularly chilly cold case. At 1 am on November 18, 2010, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department responded to reports of gunfire in a leafy cul-de-sac near Universal Studios. They found Jong Kim lying in front of his home and shot at least five times. Kim, a 50-year-old liquor store owner, later died in a hospital without regaining consciousness. Learn more about your ad choic...

Tuesday's midterms don't shed much light on the future of net neutrality. But advocates do see rays of hope shining through the fog of uncertainty. Democrats, who generally favor rules barring internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or otherwise discriminating against content, took control of the House. And even after losing ground in the Senate, the party is tantalizingl...

After it was revealed that the suspect in the shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue had threatened on the social media network Gab to kill Jews, multiple technology providers dropped Gab, including domain registrar GoDaddy, web hosting provider Joyent, and payment processors PayPal and Stripe. The moves knocked Gab offline for nearly a week, during which the company painted itself as a martyr for fr...

Google announced changes to how it will handle claims of sexual harassment among employees, including making arbitration optional for individual harassment and sexual assault claims. While additional transparency and protection for workers is a sign of progress, the change is incremental rather than transformative, because Google’s arbitration provision still prohibits collective action. Learn mor...

There is perhaps no greater example of Silicon Valley’s soft power than watching a debate around a grassroots proposal to fight homelessness transform into a Twitter war between tech billionaires and their preferred form of taxation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Both Republicans and Democrats woke up Wednesday morning claiming victory in Tuesday's midterms. Democrats patted themselves on the back for taking back the House of Representatives and flipping seven governorships from red to blue. And in a press conference, President Donald Trump praised his party, and himself, for gaining ground in the Senate. Americans remain sharply divided at the ballot box,...

Ten years ago today, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto sent an academic paper to a cryptography mailing list proposing a form of digital cash called "Bitcoin." The pseudonymous Nakamoto, whose true identity remains unknown, described an idea for "mining" a limited amount of this virtual currency through a peer-to-peer scheme that wouldn't depend on a bank, government, or any other central au...

If former state representative Stacey Abrams wins the race for governor of Georgia, she would be the US’s first black woman governor. She’s running in a tightly contested race against sitting secretary of state Brian Kemp, who in his official capacity as overseer of Georgia’s voter rolls has fought hard the past few months to remove people from the active voter lists who might be inclined to vote...

In 2016, the chip industry’s clock ran out. For 50 years, the number of transistors that could be squeezed onto a piece of silicon had increased on a predictable schedule known as Moore’s law. The doctrine drove the digital evolution from minicomputers to PCs to smartphones and the cloud by cramming more transistors onto each generation of microchip, making them more powerful. Learn more about you...

One upshot for Democrats after their devastating loss on election night 2016 was the birth of The Resistance. The last two years have seen millions of newly born activists with pun-covered signs take to the streets for the Women's March. Thousands of demonstrators have descended on town hall meetings to make their voices heard. Hundreds of women have been inspired to run for office. But the electi...

If you are one of the 20 million potential voters that MoveOn, a progressive advocacy group, believes could help swing the midterm elections in Democrats' favor, then chances are, over the next few days, you will see a MoveOn–sponsored ad in your Facebook news feed. It'll be a video of a real voter---not an actor or a politician---explaining why he or she is voting for a given candidate. Learn mor...

Big companies attract big attention, and none quite as much as Apple. Its quarterly reports have become something of a collective soothsaying moment for stock markets and the tech industry, and so Thursday’s report garnered its usual share of outsized attention. WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

On Friday, Cesar Sayoc was arrested in connection with the 14 pipe bombs sent to top Democrats, other critics of President Trump, and CNN earlier this week. The 56-year-old Sayoc appears to have been active on social media. A Twitter account prosecutors linked to him praised Trump, threatened top Democrats with death, and shared convoluted ultra-right-wing conspiracies about many of the people to...

When AT&T announced plans to acquire HBO's parent company Time Warner, competitors, consumer groups, and the Department of Justice argued that the combined company would harm competition. Now those critics say their concerns are being validated. HBO and Cinemax went dark on pay television provider Dish's satellite and video streaming customers after Dish and HBO failed to reach a deal to replace a...

You know when you try to go online at a Starbucks or on an airplane, first you get a little popup that asks you to accept some terms before you can get to the internet? That popup window exists in a sort of netherworld between actual internet connection and being offline--you pick it up via Wi-Fi, but until you click a box, you’re not actually online. A team of five developers realized in that gra...