Business, Spoken

At his coming-out hearing as chairman of the Federal Reserve on Feb. 27, Jay Powell made all sorts of news in finance-land, including a suggestion that the bank saw potentially faster inflation ahead. Also notable was his assessment of the causes for the volatility that roiled Wall Street and saw trillions of dollars lost, gained, lost, and then regained in a matter of days in early February. Lear...

After the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February, far-right conspiracy site InfoWars published a series of videos on YouTube accusing survivor and activist David Hogg of being an actor. In response, YouTube took down several of the videos, and reportedly handed the publication at least one “strike,” for violating its policies on harassment and bullying. Lear...

Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon should treat all content flowing through their cables and cell towers equally. That means they shouldn't be able to slide some data into “fast lanes” while blocking or otherwise discriminating against other material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s easy to make Jacob Hsu gush about the wonders of Baltimore. The former Silicon Valley executive moved to the Charm City in January 2017, to become CEO of Catalyte, a company that develops software using teams of non-traditional, algorithm-identified engineers. Once in Baltimore, Hsu was overwhelmed by the talent. He could work with city leaders and executives; he could recruit high-up federal...

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Big tech has a lot of problems: fake news, sexual harassment, Russian interference, privacy concerns, and growing fears that too much screen time rots your brain. But even as they struggle to solve these day-to-day problems, the industry’s biggest players are putting more resources into another notoriously hard problem: health care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

Since entrepreneur Chris Mansi cofounded Viz.ai in 2016, the best-funded wizards of artificial intelligence have taken on board games, and created emoji that mirror your facial expressions. Meanwhile, Mansi has been developing algorithms to save the brain cells of stroke patients. This month, the Food and Drug Administration cleared Viz.ai to market its algorithms to doctors and hospitals. It was...

If banks and hedge funds start holding large amounts of cryptocurrencies, much of the money will flow---virtually, of course---through Murray, Kentucky. That’s home to Kingdom Trust, a small company that’s quickly become the crypto industry’s go-to option for holding its digital coins. The crypto revolution has a few kinks to work out before it can revolutionize anything. Learn more about your ad...

Last Thursday, the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission formally published a rule reversing long-standing and vital protections of the internet known as net neutrality. The FCC’s new rule would let big corporations restrict how consumers access their favorite websites by forcing them to buy internet access in packages, paying more for "premium” service, as with cable television. WIRED...

Peter Thiel, never one to keep a low profile, made his most recent set of waves with reports that he is prepared to decamp from Silicon Valley to more benign haunts in Los Angeles along with several of his companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” That was how Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming (1968), expressed the difference between pristine mathematics and buggy reality. “When programming, you abstract away the entire physical world as much as possible, because it’s messy. But then it comes back and bites you,” Paul Ford, cofounder of th...

After billionaire Joe Ricketts announced the shuttering of local news organizations Gothamist and DNAInfo last fall, readers across the country mourned the loss of the beloved sites, and worried about the vulnerability of journalism in the digital age. Now, a consortium of public radio stations, including WNYC in New York, WAMU in Washington DC, and KPCC in Southern California, has banded together...

Federal protection for net neutrality will officially end in April. The Federal Communications Commission’s new regulations, which abandon rules against blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content, are scheduled to be published in the Federal Register Thursday. They will take effect 60 days later. As the FCC withdraws from protecting net neutrality, states are taking u...

It takes a special sort of heartlessness to create a conspiracy video about a teenaged survivor of one of the deadliest school shootings in US history. But it takes a literally heartless algorithm to ensure that thousands, or even millions of people see it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Julia Enthoven didn’t think much of using her real name and photo in a chat feature on Kapwing, the website she co-founded last year. The site launched its online video-editing tools in October and has garnered 64,000 visits since. From the beginning, Enthoven’s team wanted feedback from users about bugs and feature requests, so they deployed a messaging widget from a company called Drift. Anyone...

On a trip to Silicon Valley last year, Defense Secretary James Mattis openly envied tech companies’ superior use of artificial intelligence technology. To help close the gap, one Pentagon unit is now offering $100,000 in prizes to develop algorithms that can interpret high-resolution satellite images. The contest is called the xView Detection Challenge, and starts next month. Learn more about your...

It’s indisputable: A broadband internet connection is vital to full participation in our society and economy. Increasingly, government services and job opportunities can only be accessed online. Indeed, homework assigned to seven out of 10 K-12 students in the US requires internet access, according to a recent study. The internet provides access to necessary information and a way to stay connected...

In December, when Facebook launched Messenger Kids, an app for pre-teens and children as young as 6, the company stressed that it had worked closely with leading experts in order to safeguard younger users. What Facebook didn’t say is that many of those experts had received funding from Facebook. Equally notable are the experts Facebook did not consult. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

William Andregg ushers me into the cluttered workshop of his startup Fathom Computing and gently lifts the lid from a bulky black box. Inside, green light glows faintly from a collection of lenses, brackets, and cables that resemble an exploded telescope. It’s a prototype computer that processes data using light, not electricity, and it’s learning to recognize handwritten digits. In other experime...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a bombshell indictment Friday, implicating 13 Russian nationals and detailing a multi-year, costly, and widespread effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. At the center of that effort were Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, which the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) used to recruit American followers, plan real-life rallies, and spread...

One of the most ubiquitous features of the internet is the ability to link to content elsewhere. Everything is connected via billions of links and embeds to blogs, articles, and social media. But a federal judge’s ruling threatens that ecosystem. Katherine Forrest, a Southern District of New York judge, ruled Thursday that embedding a tweet containing an image in a webpage could be considered copy...

Just before Facebook went public in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had a bound red book titled Facebook Was Not Originally Created to Be a Company placed on every employee’s desk. The book, written by Zuckerberg himself, ended with an urgent, even ominous rallying cry: If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. “Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we...

You might see fewer ads on the web from now on. But you probably won't. On Thursday, Google Chrome, the most popular browser by a wide margin, began rolling out a feature that will block ads on sites that engage in particularly annoying behavior, such as automatically playing sound, or displaying ads that can't be dismissed until a certain amount of time has passed. Learn more about your ad choice...

The bike-sharing wars have escalated. What started as healthy competition between two powerful, well-funded Chinese companies and a handful of scrappy American upstarts has intensified into a trash-talking land grab involving electric scooters, electric bikes, and plenty of Silicon Valley-style ambition. In October, LimeBike the favored competitor of Silicon Valley venture firms Andreessen Horowit...

Angel Torres was driving down a major Los Angeles boulevard in late 2016 when it happened: Ride requests from Uber and Lyft arrived at the same second. As he looked away from the road to decide which trip was more worth his time, he nearly rear-ended the car ahead of him. “It scared the crap out of me,” Torres says. He was new to juggling the two apps, and was so rattled by the near miss that he s...