Business, Spoken

Evan Spiegel wants the world to know something: His company, Snap, doesn’t admire Facebook, doesn’t want to be like Facebook, and believes that Snap’s approach to its users and their data is better for the world. Appearing onstage at the Code Conference in Palos Verdes, California, Tuesday night, Spiegel said that Facebook may have changed its products and mission but “fundamentally they will have...

So, about that trade war. Recent days have presented a dizzying series of reversals followed by reversals of reversals over whether, when, or if the United States will impose punitive tariffs on China in response to unresolved issues, ranging from intellectual property theft to lack of access to domestic Chinese markets. On Tuesday, the White House made a splashy announcement that it will move ahe...

The last two years have been a rollercoaster ride for Matt Oczkowski. On the night of the 2016 presidential election, he sat inside then-candidate Donald Trump's San Antonio campaign headquarters, where he led a team of anxious data scientists crunching numbers throughout the day before an unexpected victory party at a local bar much later that night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

At Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, executives are trying to assuage thousands of employees protesting a contract with the Pentagon’s flagship artificial-intelligence initiative, Project Maven. Thousands of miles away, algorithms trained under Project Maven—which includes companies other than Google—are helping war fighters identify potential ISIS targets in video from drones. Learn m...

Companies hiring for technical positions often slip language into their job postings that appeals to men. They say they’re looking for “ninjas,” who seek to “obliterate competition,” and are capable of “dominating.” By now, these wordings are a well understood form of bias that produces more male candidates than female. But one job in the digital economy falls predominantly to women. Learn more ab...

You might not be hearing much from big tech on net neutrality lately. But the likes of Google and Facebook are still invested in the fight behind the scenes. Last year's "Day of Action" prompted Amazon, Google, Facebook, and many others to pen blog posts or host banners urging users to file comments in support of the Federal Communications Commission's Obama-era net neutrality rules against blocki...

On Monday, the Supreme Court slowed recent momentum to give workers---including many in the tech sector---the right to a day in court. The Supreme Court case centered around clauses in employment contracts that require employees to resolve disputes through arbitration, and preclude them from joining with others to file class-action lawsuits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

For months, a growing faction of Google employees has tried to force the company to drop out of a controversial military program called Project Maven. More than 4,000 employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a petition asking Google to cancel the contract. Last week, Gizmodo reported that a dozen employees resigned over the project. “There are a bunch more waiting for job offer...

Friday is the dawn of a new era in consumer privacy. It wasn’t supposed to look like the promotions tab in Gmail---full of emails that may or may not be useful, none of which you want to click on, all with fine print that makes the offer less attractive. For months, companies have been bombarding inboxes with privacy updates, nominally in order to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation...

News Feed, the algorithm that powers the core of Facebook, resembles a giant irrigation system for the world’s information. Working properly, it nourishes all the crops that different people like to eat. Sometimes, though, it gets diverted entirely to sugar plantations while the wheat fields and almond trees die. Or it gets polluted because Russian trolls and Macedonian teens toss in LSD tablets a...

On Monday, I sat down with nine members of the team at Facebook fighting fake news: Eduardo Ariño de la Rubia, John Hegeman, Tessa Lyons, Michael McNally, Adam Mosseri, Henry Silverman, Sara Su, Antonia Woodford, and Dan Zigmond. The meeting began with introductions, led by Tucker Bounds and Lindsey Shepard from the marketing and communications team. Then we spoke in depth about Facebook’s recent...

Google’s quantum computing researchers have been planning a party—but new results from a competing team at China’s Alibaba may have postponed it. The China-America corporate rivalry on an obscure frontier of physics illustrates a growing contest between nations and companies hoping to create a new form of improbably powerful computer. In March, Google unveiled a chip called Bristlecone intended to...

One day last summer, Microsoft’s director of artificial intelligence research, Eric Horvitz, activated the Autopilot function of his Tesla sedan. The car steered itself down a curving road near Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, freeing his mind to better focus on a call with a nonprofit he had cofounded around the ethics and governance of AI. Then, he says, Tesla’s algorithms let him down...

I had just learned everything there was to know about the fish in front of me. Now, a small part of its fleshy, red body was in my mouth. Five minutes earlier, I saw a video showing the waters in Fiji where it was caught, where it traveled on ice, and how exactly it ended up inside a sushi hand roll. The massive yellowfin tuna had been tracked across the globe via the Ethereum blockchain. Learn mo...

Twitter announced Tuesday that it will begin to hide all tweets from some accounts in conversations and search results. The goal is to identify and filter trolls and harmful users, based not on any specific tweet, but on how they use the social network holistically. The new effort is part of Twitter's two-month-old initiative to discern what it means for the platform to be "healthy." Previously, T...

French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Washington highlighted how differently our two nations are thinking about the future. In March, the French government unveiled a national strategy for artificial intelligence technology that has a clear goal: make France a global leader in AI. In the last year, China and the European Union have taken similar steps. If we’re serious about having a...

Ted Livingston knows what it’s like to be copied by Facebook. After his messaging app, Kik, launched profile codes in 2016, Facebook’s Messenger app did the same. Kik launched chatbots, and Facebook Messenger soon followed. Same goes for features like stickers and usernames. But unlike some startups that Facebook has copied out of existence or bought and shut down, Livingston has managed to keep h...

Almost exactly 20 years ago, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the term of existing copyrights by 20 years. The Act was the 11th extension in the prior 40 years, timed perfectly to assure that certain famous works, including Mickey Mouse, would not pass into the public domain. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Lawrence Lessig (@lessig) is the Roy L. Furman professor of...

Amazon says it will move forward with plans for a new office building in Seattle after the city council slashed a proposed corporate tax by nearly half. Amazon halted plans for the new building earlier this month in response to the proposed tax, which is designed to help the city's growing homelessness problem. The city council approved the smaller tax bill unanimously on Monday, and Seattle mayor...

I bent down, rested my knees on a prayer cushion, and began typing into a small computer. In front of me were dozens of candles, flowers, Japanese lucky cat figurines, and several wallet-sized picture frames. They held photos of Vitalik Buterin, the Canadian programmer who cofounded the computing platform Ethereum, as well as of Satoshi Nakamoto, a man in his 60s with the same name as the founder...

For decades, sports betting has been illegal in the US outside Nevada. With a Supreme Court ruling Monday, that’s about to change, likely before the upcoming NFL season kicks off. But don’t get too excited—or horrified, depending on your perspective—about the future of online sports gambling just yet; it won’t come all at once, and it won’t be everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

President Donald Trump has long promised to get tough on China. So why is he so worried about saving jobs there? Last week the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE said it had halted its major operations after the US government moved to ban US companies from selling software or components to ZTE. On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping were working together to save ZTE. "...

Henry and I are not hitting it off. First he ignores my question about how he spent the weekend. Then he tells me, cryptically, that he likes to get up early to spend time “working on himself.” What does he mean by that? I ask. He isn’t sure. He makes intense eye contact and arches an eyebrow. “Sometimes I have too much information at the same time in my brain.” Oh. OK. I notice Henry’s washboard...

It takes chutzpah to walk on stage in front of thousands and declare that most of the people in the room are totally full of shit. That’s how Jimmy Song, a venture partner at Blockchain Capital, entered Monday at Consensus, the biggest cryptocurrency conference of the year, at New York’s Hilton Hotel. That he did so sporting a black cowboy hat and boots was merely a bonus. Learn more about your ad...

Every time you visit a website, you leave behind a trail of information, including seemingly innocuous data, like whether you use an Android or Apple device. And while that might feel like a mere personal preference, it turns out that lenders can use that type of passive signal to help predict whether you'll default. In fact, new research suggests that those signals can predict consumer behavior a...