Business, Spoken
2,340 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★ - 16 ratingsGet in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.
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Episodes
Republicans in Congress Are Talking Net Neutrality, at Least
February 11, 2019 07:11 - 8 minutesThree Republican members of Congress introduced net neutrality-related bills Thursday, but Congress is still a long way from a bipartisan deal to restore rules banning broadband providers from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content. During a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Greg Walden (R-Oregon), and Bob Latta (R-Ohio) all said they had proposed net neutrality bills. Learn more about y...
Jeff Bezos Escalates the Feud with the National Enquirer
February 08, 2019 16:32 - 6 minutesBeing rich may make you an alluring target for blackmail. But being really, really rich may make you immune. In an extraordinary blog post published on Medium Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accused The National Enquirer of attempting to blackmail him by threatening to publish 10 intimate photos unless Bezos stopped an investigation into how the tabloid obtained his private messages and images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Facebook’s Top PR Exec Is Leaving the Toughest Job in Tech
February 08, 2019 07:10 - 6 minutesFollowing more than two years of constant turbulence for Facebook, the company’s vice president of communications, Caryn Marooney, is leaving the company, Facebook has confirmed. Marooney, who previously co-founded the technology communications firm The Outcast Agency, joined Facebook in 2011 as director of technology communications, after representing the company at Outcast. Most recently, she has been responsible for all global communications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcast...
Your Next Game Night Partner? A Computer
February 07, 2019 07:10 - 7 minutesWhen the arrow appeared next to the birdcage, I finally understood what my partner was trying to say. The game was a clone of Pictionary—I had to guess the phrase based on a drawing. My partner had initially depicted a duck next to a cage, plus a hand, and a pond. Only after I asked for another drawing and the arrow was added did I realize the hand was “releasing” the duck, not feeding it. “You win!!!” I was told, after typing in the full answer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...
A Crypto Exchange CEO Dies—With the Only Key to $137 Million
February 06, 2019 16:31 - 8 minutesMore than 100,000 cryptocurrency holders have learned a hard lesson in finality, after the 30-year-old CEO of a major Canadian exchange died, effectively freezing the company’s assets. In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia last week, Jennifer Robertson, widow of QuadrigaCX CEO Gerry Cotten, wrote that the company owes its customers $190 million, but can’t access the funds to pay them back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Teens Don't Use Facebook, but They Can't Escape It, Either
February 06, 2019 07:10 - 11 minutesJace has never lived in a world without Facebook. His father already had an account by the time he was born. Even before Jace could understand the concept of Facebook, he felt its influence every time his dad had him stop what he was doing and pose for photos that were destined to be shared online. Today, the 13-year-old Virginia teenager doesn’t use the site himself, even though his dad signed him up. “It’s kinda lame,” he says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adch...
By Defying Apple’s Rules, Facebook Shows It Never Learns
February 05, 2019 16:30 - 9 minutesIf an app on Facebook behaved the way Facebook has been behaving, Facebook would probably have shut it down by now. Tuesday’s scathing TechCrunch investigation all but guarantees it. The report found that Facebook has been paying people as young as 13 years old to download an app that grants Facebook access to users’ entire phone and web history, including encrypted activity and private messages and emails. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Google Says It Wants Rules for the Use of AI—Kinda, Sorta
February 04, 2019 16:31 - 8 minutesLast April, Google cofounder Sergey Brin wrote to shareholders with a warning about the potential downsides of artificial intelligence. In June, Google CEO Sundar Pichai released a set of guiding principles for its AI projects after employee protests forced him to abandon a Pentagon contract creating algorithms to interpret drone footage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The World’s Fastest Supercomputer Breaks an AI Record
February 04, 2019 07:10 - 7 minutesAlong America’s west coast, the world’s most valuable companies are racing to make artificial intelligence smarter. Google and Facebook have boasted of experiments using billions of photos and thousands of high-powered processors. Late last year, a project in eastern Tennessee quietly exceeded the scale of any corporate AI lab. It was run by the US government. The record-setting project involved the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Summit, at Oak Ridge National Lab. Learn more about your ...
This Hearing May Decide the Future of Net Neutrality
February 01, 2019 16:32 - 6 minutesNet neutrality advocates are heading to court Friday for what may be their best chance to restore federal regulations banning broadband providers from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content. The Federal Communications Commission passed robust net neutrality protections in 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
US Ratchets Up the Pressure on Huawei With New Indictments
February 01, 2019 07:10 - 5 minutesEmbattled Chinese telecom giant Huawei has some new problems. The US Department of Justice Monday unsealed a 13-count indictment against Huawei and its CFO Meng Wanzhou, alleging the company misled banking partners about violations of US sanctions against Iran. The charges include bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Meng, who is also the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested in Canada last month and is awaiting extradition to the US. Learn mor...
Real Facebook Oversight Requires More Than a 40-Expert Board
January 31, 2019 16:31 - 7 minutesWhen Facebook announced in November that it would launch an independent oversight board, questions arose about what that might look like and how it would work. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for one, compared the would-be governing body to the Supreme Court, in its potential capacity to review the biggest issues of the day and set a sort of Facebook case law. On Monday, Facebook released a draft charter answering questions about how such an institution might function. Learn more about your ad ...
If Convicted, Huawei Faces Bigger Problems Than Fines
January 30, 2019 16:31 - 6 minutesChinese telecom giant Huawei could face millions in fines if convicted of all charges in two indictments unsealed by the US Department of Justice Monday. But the money is likely the least of Huawei’s worries. The first indictment accuses Huawei and its executives, including CFO Meng Wanzhou, of crimes including bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice related to alleged violations of sanctions forbidding the sale of US-made equipment to Iran. Learn more about your ...
All This Newfound Cynicism Is Going to Hamper Big Tech
January 30, 2019 07:10 - 8 minutesEarlier this month, a WIRED contributor managed to subvert all the warm, fuzzy feelings produced by the “10-year challenge” meme on social media by asking the question that has haunted free thinkers throughout history: Am I doing what I want to do, or what they want me to do? The challenge, which has flourished on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, seems like harmless stuff, offering a forum for regular folks and celebrities alike to use photos to boast about getting better with age (or in the...
Family Trust Shows Silicon Valley’s Secret Obsessions
January 29, 2019 16:31 - 8 minutesWhen Dave Eggers published The Circle in 2013, critics thought the novel’s hyperbolic message about an omnipotent tech company would open the world’s eyes to the harms of Silicon Valley’s growing power. Perhaps there’s as much to learn about tech culture from Family Trust, the debut novel from Kathy Wang, a former product manager for a data-storage company. Family Trust is also a zippy page-turner set in Silicon Valley, but Wang focuses on tech’s middle class. Learn more about your ad choices...
Alaska Schools Get Faster Internet—Partly Thanks to Global Warming
January 29, 2019 07:10 - 14 minutesBefore they got down to business for the day, students in Devin Tatro’s social studies class were offered a quiet moment of self-reflection: On this golden fall afternoon at Nome-Beltz Junior/Senior High School, were they feeling chipper, distressed, or somewhere in between? About 20 students gazed at their laptops, an online poll open on each screen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
YouTube Will Crack Down on Toxic Videos, But It Won’t Be Easy
January 28, 2019 16:32 - 6 minutesYouTube is trying to reduce the spread of toxic videos on the platform by limiting how often they appear in users' recommendations. The company announced the shift in a blog post on Friday, writing that it would begin cracking down on so-called "borderline content" that comes close to violating its community standards without quite crossing the line. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
DeepMind Beats Pros at StarCraft in Another Triumph for Bots
January 28, 2019 07:10 - 7 minutesIn London last month, a team from Alphabet’s UK-based artificial intelligence research unit DeepMind quietly laid a new marker in the contest between humans and computers. Thursday, it revealed the achievement, in a three-hour YouTube stream in which aliens and robots fought to the death. DeepMind’s broadcast showed its artificial intelligence bot, AlphaStar, defeating a professional player at the complex real-time-strategy videogame StarCraft II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...
The ‘Mortal Danger’ of China’s Push Into AI
January 25, 2019 16:31 - 25 minutesGovernments and companies worldwide are investing heavily in artificial intelligence in hopes of new profits, smarter gadgets, and better health care. Financier and philanthropist George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos Thursday that the technology may also undermine free societies and create a new era of authoritarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Bing Went Down in China and No One Will Say Why
January 25, 2019 07:10 - 4 minutesBing is back online in China. Late Wednesday evening in the US, reports surface that Microsoft's search engine was blocked in China. Bing is now available again in the country, but it remains unclear if the outage was caused by technical issues or if the Chinese government intentionally blocked the search engine, if only temporarily. “We can confirm that Bing was inaccessible in China, but service is now restored,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. Learn more about your ad choices...
Google's Proposed Changes to Chrome Could Weaken Ad Blockers
January 24, 2019 16:31 - 6 minutesThe web can be an annoying and creepy place. Big animated ads try to distract you from what you’re reading, while ads for products you’ve already bought stalk you. That’s led many people to install ad blockers or other tools to inhibit websites from tracking them. According to a survey by identity management company Janrain, 71 percent of respondents use ad blockers or some other tool to control their online experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Facebook Cracks Down on Networks of Fake Pages and Groups
January 24, 2019 07:10 - 7 minutesPages and groups are the tools Facebook misinformation peddlers love the most. Creating a network of anonymous pages is one of the easiest ways to quickly spread fake news or propaganda on the social network. This tactic has most famously been used by Russian trolls—even long after the 2016 presidential election. Earlier this month, Facebook took down a cohort of deceptive pages linked to Russian state media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Shouldn’t We All Have Seamless Micropayments By Now?
January 23, 2019 16:31 - 6 minutesBack in the 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee and his team were creating the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, they made a list of the error codes that would pop up when something went wrong. You’ve surely encountered many of them: “404 Not Found,” which pops up if you click on a dead link; “401 Unauthorized” when you hit a page that needs a password; and so on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Airbnb-Hotel Hybrids Offer More Homey Comfort With Less Risk
January 23, 2019 07:10 - 3 minutesAirbnb’s “live like a local” fantasy can quickly morph into a nightmare when your host’s sun-dappled apartment photos turn out to conceal a roach infestation. But hotels can be so homogeneous. Now a new crop of startups is offering a hybrid alternative: apartment hotels, lodging that promises the comfort and roominess of a homestay (minus the flaky homeowner) with the consistency and in-room amenities of a hotel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Microsoft Wants Cortana to Play Nicely With Amazon and Google
January 22, 2019 07:10 - 4 minutesTech giants are battling to position their smart speakers as the center of the digital home. But Microsoft, which lost the mobile wars to Apple and Google, is trying to ensure that it will have a place, no matter who wins. Microsoft has its own voice-based digital assistant, Cortana, that could theoretically power a challenger to the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod for countertop space. Indeed, Cortana is already core to a smart speaker from Harman Kardon. Learn more about your ad ...
How AI Will Turn Us All Into Filmmakers
January 21, 2019 16:31 - 4 minutesIn high school, Mackenzie Leake shot a movie about being afraid to get her driver’s license. “A very millennial subject,” she jokes. It gave her a punishing lesson in editing video: Leake spent countless hours, over the course of weeks, “scrubbing” through her footage to find the best shots, then painstakingly assembling them. “It’s a ton of grunt work,” she notes. Now, seven years later, she’s trying to accelerate the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
India’s Plan to Curb Hate Speech Could Mean More Censorship
January 21, 2019 07:10 - 8 minutesNew rules proposed by the Indian government to rein in tech giants and combat fake news could have a profoundly chilling effect on free speech and privacy online. The proposed changes involve Section 79 of the IT Act, a safe harbor protection for internet “intermediaries” that’s akin to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the US. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Millions Silicon Valley Spends on Security for Execs
January 18, 2019 16:32 - 6 minutesProminent Silicon Valley companies spend liberally to protect their intellectual property. Some also shell out considerable amounts to protect their executives. Apple’s most recent proxy statement, filed earlier this month, shows the company spent $310,000 on personal security for CEO Tim Cook. But that’s a fraction of other tech giants’ expenditures. Amazon and Oracle spent about $1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Huawei's Many Troubles: Bans, Alleged Spies, and Backdoors
January 18, 2019 07:11 - 7 minutesBad news keeps piling up for Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Last week an employee was arrested in Poland on espionage charges. This week, the company's products, which include both phones and network gear, were banned from Taiwanese government systems, the South China Morning Post reported, over concerns that Huawei could build backdoors into its products on behalf of the Chinese government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Unbearable Untidiness of Our Digital Lives
January 17, 2019 17:59 - 4 minutesEarlier this month, I spent my last days of notification-free vacation by KonMari-ing my closets. The sun was hiding, burnout was in the air, and the winds of change shoved me toward self-optimization---pack light for the apocalypse, purge my way to an uncluttered mind. Marie Kondo’s maxim---keep only items that spark joy–promised a sense of agency. Unlike anxiety baking, bath bombs, sheet masks, it was a not retreat from the world, but a chance to prep for some inevitable fight. Learn more a...
Anti-TrumpActivists Defend Fake-Washington Post Stunt
January 17, 2019 07:10 - 6 minutesOn Wednesday, a group of hoaxsters affiliated with the progressive non-profit group The Yes Men circulated fake versions of The Washington Post, dated May 1, 2019, imagining a world in which President Trump has suddenly left office. Throughout the morning, the activists distributed print copies of the edition in front of the White House and debuted a website called My-WashingtonPost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
A Poker-Playing Robot Goes to Work for the Pentagon
January 16, 2019 16:32 - 8 minutesIn 2017, a poker bot called Libratus made headlines when it roundly defeated four top human players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em. Now, Libratus’s technology is being adapted to take on opponents of a different kind—in service of the US military. Libratus—Latin for balanced—was created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University to test ideas for automated decision-making based on game theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Virtual Reality’s Latest Use? Diagnosing Mental Illness
January 16, 2019 07:10 - 9 minutesDiagnosing psychiatric and neurological conditions is tricky. Physicians have long reported that diagnoses are fraught with complications and subtleties. Anywhere from 35 percent to 85 percent of mental health conditions go undetected and undiagnosed, according to the World Health Organization, depending on where you live in the world. Needless to say, in order to treat depression, Alzheimer's, or autism, it must first be detected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/ad...
Tech Workers Unite to Fight Forced Arbitration
January 15, 2019 16:31 - 5 minutesTech workers may be new to labor organizing, but they’re learning quickly. When a November walkout by 20,000 Google employees protesting the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment claims led to small changes that fell short of the organizers’ demands, some activists inside Google decided to broaden the fight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
MacKenzie Bezos and the Myth of the Lone Genius Founder
January 15, 2019 07:10 - 8 minutesWhen award-winning novelist MacKenzie Bezos and her husband Jeff Bezos, the chief executive and founder of Amazon, announced on Twitter Wednesday they were getting divorced, public discussion over the uncoupling quickly centered on the impact it might have on Jeff’s company, and on each sides’ net worth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The FTC Thinks You Pay Too Much for Smartphones. Here’s Why
January 14, 2019 16:31 - 6 minutesThe Federal Trade Commission thinks you're paying too much for smartphones. But it doesn’t blame handset makers like Apple and Samsung or wireless carriers. Instead, the agency blames Qualcomm, which owns key wireless-technology patents and makes chips that can be can be found in most high-end Android phones and many iPhones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Attack on an Ethereum Currency Highlights a Crypto Weakness
January 10, 2019 16:32 - 6 minutesThe promise of digital cryptocurrencies like bitcoin is that you don't need to trust the people you send or receive money from because the software makes it technically impossible for anyone to cheat the system. Instead of relying on humans and their flawed judgment, you rely on the laws of mathematics. But a recent attack on the cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic---not to be confused with the original Ethereum project---shows once again how hard it is to remove human frailty from digital system...
Juul’s Answer to Its PR Crisis? The Millennial Marlboro Man
January 10, 2019 07:11 - 7 minutesSay you were a villainized e-cigarette startup, with a $13 billion cash investment from the tobacco giant that owns Marlboro, and blamed for kicking off a vaping epidemic among teens. You’d lay low, right? Maybe play nice with the FDA. Log off Instagram. Throw a few coins at a youth prevention campaign. Juul, however, is opting for a more aggressive route. Juul Tuesday confirmed that it plans a national TV ad campaign, featuring ex-smokers who used Juul to help them quit traditional cigarette...
Here's What Happens When News Comes With a Nutrition Label
January 09, 2019 16:31 - 9 minutesAs tech giants figure out how to keep users from engaging with fake and misleading news online, a new Gallup poll suggests one potentially effective approach. In the survey, which was commissioned by journalism startup NewsGuard and its investor, the Knight Foundation, more than 60 percent of respondents said they were less likely to share stories from sites that were clearly labeled as unreliable. They were also more likely to trust stories from websites marked as credible. Learn more about ...
The Buzz Behind an App That Can Monitor Beehives Remotely
January 09, 2019 07:10 - 6 minutesYou've probably heard by now that bees are dying in record numbers. They're being poisoned by pesticides while urbanization encroaches on bees' natural habitats, leaving them with fewer places to live and fewer wildflowers to feed on, says Harvard biologist James Crall, who studies bumblebees. The die-off comes as the world’s human population is expected to grow from 7 billion in 2010 to 9. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How Health Care Data and Lax Rules Help China Prosper in AI
January 08, 2019 18:06 - 7 minutesAt Wake Radiology in North Carolina, roughly 50 doctors scrutinize x-rays and other images for local medical providers. Within a few weeks, they should start to get help on some lung CT scans from machine-learning algorithms that highlight potentially cancerous tissue nodules. Although Wake is based in a region known as the Research Triangle, for its intensity of high-tech R&D, the lung-reading software hails from elsewhere—China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adc...
Blockchain Can Wrest the Internet From Corporations' Grasp
January 07, 2019 07:10 - 7 minutesAs the internet has evolved over its 35-year lifespan, control over its most important services has gradually shifted from open source protocols maintained by non-profit communities to proprietary services operated by large tech companies. As a result, billions of people got access to amazing, free technologies. But that shift also created serious problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Forget the iPhone Shortfall. Apple's All About Services Now
January 04, 2019 16:31 - 7 minutesOnly a few months ago, Apple was crowned the first company to be valued at more than $1 trillion. Now, in the wake of a surprise profit warning, its entire future is being questioned. Both reactions are extreme. A victory lap wasn’t warranted last summer, nor is a eulogy now. The company is at an inflection point. Apple, like others before it, is attempting to navigate the shift. It’s fair to wonder if it can; it’s premature to conclude that it can’t. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ...
The Silver Lining in Apple’s Very Bad iPhone News
January 03, 2019 16:33 - 7 minutesApple Wednesday warned investors that its revenue for the last three months of 2018 would not live up to previous estimates, or even come particularly close. The main culprit appears to be China, where the trade war and a broader economic slowdown contributed to plummeting iPhone sales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Best Tech Quotes of the Year
December 31, 2018 16:32 - 5 minutesMost years, I round up the news of the year in technology through a collection of quotes, arranged roughly by some combination I make up of their importance and how much I like them. Here they are for 2018. 14. “He was that kind of guy. You know, an asshole. But a really gifted one. Our asshole, I guess.” —A coworker at Google about Anthony Levandowski, the controversial self-driving car engineer. Published October 22 13. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
California Could Soon Have Its Own Version of the Internet
December 31, 2018 07:10 - 6 minutesThe Chinese internet is not like the internet in the rest of the world. More than 150 of the world’s 1,000 most popular internet sites are blocked in China, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Instead, domestic platforms like Baidu, WeChat, and Sina Weibo thrive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
2018 Was the Year That Tech Put Limits on AI
December 27, 2018 16:31 - 8 minutesFor the past several years, giant tech companies have rapidly ramped up investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. They’ve competed intensely to hire more AI researchers and used that talent to rush out smarter virtual assistants and more powerful facial recognition. In 2018, some of those companies moved to put some guardrails around AI technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
2018 Was a Rough Year for Truth Online
December 26, 2018 16:31 - 9 minutesEarlier this month, I was on the phone with Ryan Fox, cofounder of New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm that tracks Russian-related influence operations online. The so-called Yellow Vest protests had spread across France, and we were talking about the role disinformation played in the galvanizing French hashtag for the protests, #giletsjaunes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why 2018 Was a Breakout Year for Open Source Deals
December 25, 2018 16:31 - 6 minutesAt the beginning of 2018, it didn't seem like the open source movement could get any bigger. Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system; websites including Facebook and Wikipedia; and a growing number of gadgets have open source software under the hood---literally, in the case of cars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why Are We So Surprised by Facebook’s Data Scandals?
December 25, 2018 07:10 - 8 minutesSurveying the reactions to the latest revelation that Facebook played fast and loose with user data, it was hard not to harken back to what Scott McNally, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, told a group of reporters, including one from WIRED, in 1999: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices