Business, Spoken

It only took one click. And then, for 11 startling minutes---or blissful ones, depending on your politics---the constant drumbeat that is the @realdonaldtrump Twitter handle was muted, taken offline Thursday evening by a Twitter customer-service worker on his or her last day. The President, for one, seems to have taken the bold move as a compliment. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/92640...

Among the spending choices for governments of poorer nations, kick-starting the technological revolution may at first seem like a low priority. Compared with critical infrastructure, healthcare, or schools, improved digital access and less waiting times for birth certificates feel like luxuries that should come further down the road, or perhaps be left to private enterprise. But there is reason to...

On their second day in Capitol Hill, lawyers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google took a bipartisan beating as they faced tough questions about the role their platforms played in Russian attempts to divide the American electorate. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee grilled the tech executives about their responses to Russian interference in the 2016 election, arguing that the companies are...

As special counsel Robert Mueller issues the first indictments in his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, executives of three technology titans will face questioning by Congress this week about Russian use of their platforms. Representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google are set to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday, then the Senate and House intel...

One of the biggest cases for the US Supreme Court’s current term could mark a watershed moment for the Fourth Amendment. InCarpenter v. United States, the court will consider whether police need probable cause to get a search warrant to access cell site location information (CSLI), data that's automatically generated whenever a mobile phone connects to a cell tower. Learn more about your ad choice...

The moment I first realized that everything had changed for Facebook was right after the 2016 US presidential election with one of the first of many Zuckerbergian mea culpas. Not that first post-election post, his horribly disingenuous dodge that improbably asserted that Facebook could not have influenced the election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

News that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix approached Wikileaks founder Julian Assange last year to exploit Hillary Clinton’s private emails has amplified questions about Cambridge's role in President Trump's 2016 campaign. Shortly after The Daily Beast reported Nix’s contact with Assange Wednesday, the Trump campaign’s executive director sought to downplay Cambridge's role. Learn more about...

In 2010, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai believed that his company, and several other social-media upstarts---Twitter, Tumblr, Path---could carve out successful niches against Facebook. But Facebook had other plans. That year the company introduced a feature that allowed users to “check in” at any location, a copy of the main feature of Foursquare’s app. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

The financial industry today looks stable and boring, with a few megabanks ever-more entrenched and markets that may not offer the same risks and rewards as before the 2008-2009 financial crisis but which remain highly profitable for incumbents. That stasis, however, masks looming challenges to the sclerotic incumbents. Two such challenges were much in evidence this past week: Bitcoin and China. L...

Caloua Lowe bounds up the rickety, worn staircase of a three-story, red brick building in Camden, New Jersey on a sunny September morning, the wooden steps creaking under the pressure of her red-sandaled feet. The walls display framed, Photoshopped images: a mockup of Vogue, album covers featuring young men standing shoulder to shoulder with rap legends like Jay-Z. Learn more about your ad choices...

Silicon Valley oligarchs have plenty of reason to lose sleep these days, but the looming prospect of Nov. 1 has to be high on the list. That’s the day that executives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter are scheduled to testify in back-to-back hearings before Senate and House committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill Thursday that would require online political advertisers to provide additional disclosures about who’s paying for their ads, but the measure may prove a half-step toward preventing foreign adversaries from influencing US elections online. During a press conference Thursday, Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar introduced the much-anticipat...

Tony Fadell is at the Grove, a spectacularly beautiful country estate outside of London. The event is Founders Forum: the ultra ­exclusive invite-only tech conference. Prince William is in the house. The guest list is lousy with knights and lesser officers of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Marissa Mayer, the now ex-CEO of Yahoo, and Biz Stone, recently returned to Twitter, are min...

When Twitter could take credit for revolutionary political movements like the Arab Spring, it was easy for the company's executives to joke about their liberal stance on free speech. (Twitter, they said, was "the free speech wing of the free speech party.") But things are a bit more complicated now, as Twitter increasingly plays host to bullies, harassers, Nazis, propaganda-spreading bots, ISIS re...

Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web, is in existential crisis. This has nothing to do with money. A couple of years ago, the site launched a panicky fundraising campaign, but ironically thanks to Donald Trump, Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or well-organized. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LONGMONT, Colo. — In one back room at Skyline High School, you can learn all you need to know about St. Vrain Valley School District. It’s there that bins of materials sit next to past projects, exposing the district’s DNA. Boxes holding glue, Popsicle sticks, tape, pipe cleaners, compasses, zip ties and rulers lie nestled inside a 6-foot-high, student-constructed rack. Learn more about your ad ch...

White-collar automation has become a common buzzword in debates about the growing power of computers, as software shows potential to take over some work of accountants and lawyers. Artificial-intelligence researchers at Google are trying to automate the tasks of highly paid workers more likely to wear a hoodie than a coat and tie—themselves. In a project called AutoML, Google’s researchers have ta...

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria tore through the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is still mostly an island deleted from the present and pushed back a century or so—with little clean water, little electric power, and almost no telecommunications. For telecom, the biggest problem is the lack of power, because most of the island’s transmission lines were knocked out. Learn more about your ad choices....

In the distant Koprulu Sector of the Milky Way, Facebook’s Zerglings lingered in a restless swarm outside the enemy’s base. After the commander ill-advisedly opened the gate, the social network’s alien horde stormed in and slaughtered forces stationed inside, in a battle fought on the frontiers of artificial-intelligence research. The bloody incident was part of an annual competition of the videog...

Imagine you want to collect donations for a food bank. You could place an empty box on the street, walk away, and hope there’s food inside when you return. The likely result? Your box will be filled with trash. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Andrew Losowsky (@losowsky) is project lead ofMozilla’sCoral Project. The Coral Project builds open-source tools and guides to community practice to bring journalists cl...

Tony Haile spent seven years trying to save the internet from click-based hell. As CEO of Chartbeat, a software and data provider to publishers, he showed editors, in real time, which stories were “trending” on their sites. He hoped the information would convince media companies and advertisers that their primary way of doing business online---through banner ads, sold through split-second digital...

In 2014, Mayor Gary Phillips of San Rafael, California, wanted to start studying the city’s data. He asked his staff to build a dashboard where he could track 10 key metrics, including the city's violent-crime rate, its sales-tax income, and its paramedic response times, and see how they fluctuated over time. In theory, it was a smart idea that could lead to better-informed spending and decision-m...

Apple has a reputation for entering markets late—think portable music players or smartphones—and then blowing away competitors with a superior product. When it comes to Apple’s virtual assistant Siri, that storyline appears to be playing out in reverse. Apple revealed Siri with the iPhone 4S in October 2011, one day before cofounder Steve Jobs died. Talking to a device to set alarms or answer mess...

Earlier this year, Susan Fowler sparked an uproar in the technology industry with allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Uber. An internal investigation led to more than 200 employee complaints and at least 20 terminations. But Fowler may not be able to sue Uber in court. When she joined the ridesharing company, Uber required her to resolve any disputes through private arbit...

A well-respected online furniture retailer is teaming up with a stalwart of the gig economy, a broker for people who do household tasks. The furniture retailer gets better customer service; the giggers get gigs assembling furniture. Good deal, right? Oh, separately, Ikea bought TaskRabbit this week. Your confusion is understandable. In that first graf I was talking about Wayfair. You know, the wor...