Business, Spoken

Lester Packingham Jr. registered as a sex offender in 2002 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl when he was 21. But that offense isn’t what brought Packingham to the Supreme Court of the United States on Monday. The crime this time around? A Facebook post. The post itself was benign enough. In 2010, Packingham took to Facebook to celebrate a recently dismissed parking ticket...

Within the next five years, Google will produce a viable quantum computer. That’s the stake the company has just planted. In the pages of Nature late last week, researchers from Google’s Quantum AI Laboratory told the world that a machine leveraging the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics will soon outperform traditional computers on certain tasks. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

After two decades of Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint ads, you know how the big telcos deliver cellular service to your smartphone. Each builds its own nationwide wireless network, boasting that its particular web of data centers, fiber lines, and antennas is faster and more reliable (or at least cheaper) than the others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, Snap starts its life as a publicly traded company—the buzziest tech IPO of the year and likely the most valuable in the US since Alibaba debuted in 2014. The event carries the fascination of an impending rocket launch: Is this thing actually going to take off? Or will it crash and burn in a huge, morbid spectacle (of Spectacles)? Snap has tried to sell investors on the idea that it has cach...

No one saw the crisis coming: a coordinated vandalistic effort to insert Squidward references into articles totally unrelated to Squidward. In 2006, Wikipedia was really starting to get going, and really couldn’t afford to have any SpongeBob SquarePants-related high jinks sullying the site’s growing reputation. It was an embarrassment. Someone had to stop Squidward. Learn more about your ad choice...

Earlier this month, in a classic late Friday afternoon news dump, the Federal Communications Commission announced a rollback of two key decisions made during theObama administration. In another era, few besidespolicy wonks and internet activists would have noticed such a thing. But these changes drew intense attention. These days, politics isn’t just what happens on the internet—it’s what happens...

Ascourge is killing people’s minds, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the world needs a massive campaign to stop it. Across the nation, people lament its rise, and the threat it poses to America. Opioids? ISIS? Nope. “Fake news.” Even homicidal dictators agree things have gotten out of control. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump claims his administration’s new and expansive executive order on undocumented immigrants is “getting really bad dudes out of this country.” But aggressive enforcement of immigration laws is also sweeping up vulnerable, far-from-bad people seeking help and care. Still, even setting aside the humanitarian issue, Trump’s anti-immigrant plan suffers from a fundamental flaw: bad math. L...

The Affordable Care Act is far from the only Obama-era policy Republicans want to take down now that they control the government. A set of internet privacy rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission last year has also become a target. Though it’s received far less attention than healthcare or immigration, the rollback would affect millions of consumers and bring basic changes to how the...

The tech industry isn't big on dress codes, employee handbooks, or rules. The Silicon Valley management philosophy is simple: Hire talented coders, give them tools to do their jobs, and get out of their way. The best coders should be rewarded, and those who just can't hack it should be let go. The problem is that, all too often, workplace problems boil down to more than just code. Yesterday widely...

Wall Street is a competition, a Darwinian battle for the almighty dollar. Gordon Gekko said that greed is good, that it captures “the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” A hedge fund hunts for an edge and then maniacally guards it, locking down its trading data and barring its traders from joining the company next door. The big bucks lie in finding market inefficiencies no one else can, succeedin...

This week, President Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly met with Time Warner executives to complain about CNN’s coverage of the president. Any visit from a White House official seeking to stifle journalists is disturbing. But Time Warner, which owns CNN, has another problem that’s all tied up in presidential politics. The cable and entertainment giant is seeking to sell...

When I ask Mark Zuckerberg if the presidential election changed the way he sees Facebook—if he made poor assumptions, if Facebook functioned in ways he didn’t intend—he pauses. I’ve interviewed Zuckerberg before, and he tends to pause like this, gathering his thoughts in complete silence, sometimes turning to face the empty space across the room. But this dead air lasts particularly long. Five sec...

About a decade ago, a handful of Google’s most talented engineers started building a system that seems to defy logic. Called Spanner, it was the first global database, a way of storing information across millions of machines in dozens of data centers spanning multiple continents, and it now underpins everything from Gmail to AdWords, the company’s primary moneymaker. But it’s not just the size of...

This story is part of our special coverage, The News in Crisis. When Edward Snowden leaked the biggest collection of classified National Security Agency documents in history, he wasn’t just revealing the inner workings of a global surveil­lance machine. He was also scrambling to evade it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Even before an electrical fire burned her house down in 2014, Jennifer Sneperger had trouble affording home internet. A little more than a year after the fire, she and her young son joined a program that fast-tracked them into a spot in a Sarasota, Florida, public housing complex. But the spot came with a condition: Sneperger had to get a job or go back to school. Learn more about your ad choices....

Working on a new product launch? Debuting a new mobile site? Announcing a new feature? If you’re not sure whether algorithmic bias could derail your plan, you should be. Algorithmic bias—when seemingly innocuous programming takes on the prejudices either of its creators or the data it is fed—causes everything from warped Google searches to barring qualified women from medical school. Learn more ab...

In February 1975, a group of geneticists gathered in a tiny town on the central coast of California to decide if their work would bring about the end of the world. These researchers were just beginning to explore the science of genetic engineering, manipulating DNA to create organisms that didn’t exist in nature, and they were unsure how these techniques would affect the health of the planet and i...

Last month, in response to news of President Donald Trump’s controversial executive orders, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that his company, whose founder Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant, would not exist if the US didn’t have sound immigration policies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Snap Inc. is a camera company. It's very important to Snap Inc. that you understand it's not a social networking app or a messaging service. It's something else. It's a camera company. "We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way that people live and communicate," it says in an S1 filing made public today, ahead of its $3 billion public offering. L...

To adapt one of our new president’s favorite aphorisms: We knew he was a troll when we elected him. Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump gleefully behaved more like a social-network scourge than a presidential candidate, combining a slash-and-burn approach to social norms with an aggressive strategy of constant provocation. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, in the not-quite-two-weeks since his...

Neural networks are all the rage in Silicon Valley, infusing so many internet services with so many forms of artificial intelligence. But as good as they may be at recognizing cats in your online photos, AI researchers know that neural networks are still quite flawed, so much so that some wonder whether these pattern recognition systems are a viable path to more advanced—and more reliable—forms of...

Nearly a decade ago, Comcast promised liberation from the tyranny of the cable box. But today its control seems here to stay—as does big cable’s control over how you consume the programming you pay for. This week, the Federal Communications Commission met for the first time under its new chairman, Ajit Pai, a Republican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two robotic arms face two closed doors. Both reach forward and miss the door handles entirely. So they reach again, and this time, they hit the handles head-on, rattling the door frames. So they try again. And again. Finally, they grab the handles cleanly and pull the doors open, and after a few more hours of trial and error, they can repeat the trick every time. Learn more about your ad choices....

During a primetime television appearance tonight, President Donald Trump announced his final pick for the man who could be the next Apprentice—er, we mean the next justice to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices