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
New Google Harassment Policy Falls Short of Worker Demands
November 09, 2018 16:31 - 7 minutesGoogle announced changes to how it will handle claims of sexual harassment among employees, including making arbitration optional for individual harassment and sexual assault claims. While additional transparency and protection for workers is a sign of progress, the change is incremental rather than transformative, because Google’s arbitration provision still prohibits collective action. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Tech Backlash Just Hit San Francisco. Where Next?
November 09, 2018 07:10 - 7 minutesThere is perhaps no greater example of Silicon Valley’s soft power than watching a debate around a grassroots proposal to fight homelessness transform into a Twitter war between tech billionaires and their preferred form of taxation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Good News: Midterm Voters Drew the Line on Gerrymandering
November 08, 2018 16:32 - 7 minutesBoth Republicans and Democrats woke up Wednesday morning claiming victory in Tuesday's midterms. Democrats patted themselves on the back for taking back the House of Representatives and flipping seven governorships from red to blue. And in a press conference, President Donald Trump praised his party, and himself, for gaining ground in the Senate. Americans remain sharply divided at the ballot box, from which political party they support to initiatives on issues like climate change. Learn more...
After 10 Years, Bitcoin Has Changed Everything—and Nothing
November 08, 2018 07:10 - 8 minutesTen years ago today, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto sent an academic paper to a cryptography mailing list proposing a form of digital cash called "Bitcoin." The pseudonymous Nakamoto, whose true identity remains unknown, described an idea for "mining" a limited amount of this virtual currency through a peer-to-peer scheme that wouldn't depend on a bank, government, or any other central authority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Georgia Voting Machine Issues Heighten Scrutiny on Brian Kemp
November 07, 2018 16:32 - 9 minutesIf former state representative Stacey Abrams wins the race for governor of Georgia, she would be the US’s first black woman governor. She’s running in a tightly contested race against sitting secretary of state Brian Kemp, who in his official capacity as overseer of Georgia’s voter rolls has fought hard the past few months to remove people from the active voter lists who might be inclined to vote for Abrams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
To Keep Pace With Moore's Law, Chipmakers Turn to 'Chiplets'
November 07, 2018 07:10 - 8 minutesIn 2016, the chip industry’s clock ran out. For 50 years, the number of transistors that could be squeezed onto a piece of silicon had increased on a predictable schedule known as Moore’s law. The doctrine drove the digital evolution from minicomputers to PCs to smartphones and the cloud by cramming more transistors onto each generation of microchip, making them more powerful. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Democrats Uber-ized Activism. Can It Win Them the Midterms?
November 06, 2018 16:31 - 9 minutesOne upshot for Democrats after their devastating loss on election night 2016 was the birth of The Resistance. The last two years have seen millions of newly born activists with pun-covered signs take to the streets for the Women's March. Thousands of demonstrators have descended on town hall meetings to make their voices heard. Hundreds of women have been inspired to run for office. But the election didn't just activate progressive protesters and candidates. Learn more about your ad choices. ...
Can a Facebook Ad Really Sway Your Vote? MoveOn Thinks So
November 06, 2018 07:10 - 11 minutesIf you are one of the 20 million potential voters that MoveOn, a progressive advocacy group, believes could help swing the midterm elections in Democrats' favor, then chances are, over the next few days, you will see a MoveOn–sponsored ad in your Facebook news feed. It'll be a video of a real voter---not an actor or a politician---explaining why he or she is voting for a given candidate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Apple Abandons the Mass Market, as the iPhone Turns Luxury
November 05, 2018 16:32 - 6 minutesBig companies attract big attention, and none quite as much as Apple. Its quarterly reports have become something of a collective soothsaying moment for stock markets and the tech industry, and so Thursday’s report garnered its usual share of outsized attention. WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mail Bomb Suspect Cesar Sayoc Used Twitter to Threaten Targets
November 05, 2018 07:10 - 7 minutesOn Friday, Cesar Sayoc was arrested in connection with the 14 pipe bombs sent to top Democrats, other critics of President Trump, and CNN earlier this week. The 56-year-old Sayoc appears to have been active on social media. A Twitter account prosecutors linked to him praised Trump, threatened top Democrats with death, and shared convoluted ultra-right-wing conspiracies about many of the people to whom he is suspected of sending homemade bombs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...
HBO Goes Dark on Dish. Monopolist Move, or Publicity Stunt?
November 02, 2018 16:31 - 5 minutesWhen AT&T announced plans to acquire HBO's parent company Time Warner, competitors, consumer groups, and the Department of Justice argued that the combined company would harm competition. Now those critics say their concerns are being validated. HBO and Cinemax went dark on pay television provider Dish's satellite and video streaming customers after Dish and HBO failed to reach a deal to replace a contract that expired at midnight on Wednesday night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...
IBM’s Call to Code Prize Goes to a Team With ‘Clusterducks’
November 02, 2018 07:10 - 11 minutesYou know when you try to go online at a Starbucks or on an airplane, first you get a little popup that asks you to accept some terms before you can get to the internet? That popup window exists in a sort of netherworld between actual internet connection and being offline--you pick it up via Wi-Fi, but until you click a box, you’re not actually online. A team of five developers realized in that gray area was potentially a huge opportunity to save lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ...
Will 'Deepfakes' Disrupt the Midterm Election?
November 01, 2018 16:31 - 9 minutesPlenty of people are following the final days of the midterm election campaigns. Yale law researcher Rebecca Crootof has a special interest—a small wager. If she wins, victory will be bitter sweet, like the Manhattan cocktail that will be her prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Facebook Sketches a Future With a Diminished News Feed
November 01, 2018 07:10 - 6 minutesFor most of the past year, Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to convince the world that Facebook was fast becoming a very different company—one that accepted its enormous role shaping public opinion worldwide and would spend what it took to exercise its power responsibly. Many still have trouble believing him, and it's easy to understand why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
San Francisco Tech Billionaires Go to War over Homelessness
October 31, 2018 16:30 - 13 minutesProposition C, a bill to fight homelessness with a new business tax, slid into San Francisco’s DMs in the middle of the night, politically speaking. What happened was, in December of last year, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee died unexpectedly. Over the next seven months, the city lived through two mayors and a nail-biting election that dragged on for a week after voting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Here’s How Much Bots Drive Conversation During News Events
October 31, 2018 07:10 - 6 minutesLast week, as thousands of Central American migrants made their way northward through Mexico, walking a treacherous route toward the US border, talk of "the caravan," as it's become known, took over Twitter. Conservatives, led by President Donald Trump, dominated the conversation, eager to turn the caravan into a voting issue before the midterms. As it turns out, they had some help---from propaganda bots on Twitter. Late last week, about 60 percent of the conversation was driven by likely bot...
IBM Buying Open Source Specialist Red Hat for $34 Billion
October 30, 2018 16:31 - 4 minutesIBM just spent $34 billion to buy a software company that gives away its primary product for free. IBM Sunday said it would acquire Red Hat, best known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Red Hat is an open source software company that gives away the source code for its core products. That means anyone can download them for free. And many do. Oracle even uses Red Hat’s source code for its own Oracle Linux product. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...
Goodbye Gab, a Haven for the Far Right
October 30, 2018 07:10 - 7 minutesAt its birth, the social network Gab issued a call for free speech. “We promote raw, rational, open, and authentic discourse online," said Andrew Torba, the CEO and founder, in an early interview with WIRED. And now, as it fights for its life, it’s doing the same. The site has been knocked offline after the Squirrel Hill massacre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
October 29, 2018 16:31 - 9 minutesThe brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate this month, which Turkish officials say was carried out by Saudi agents, has sparked a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The kingdom has poured billions of dollars into the tech industry, and a number of prominent startups, including darlings like Uber, WeWork, and Slack, may now need to grapple with the consequences of enriching a brutal regime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption
October 29, 2018 07:10 - 11 minutesA few years after the Great Recession, you couldn’t scroll through Google Reader without seeing the word “disrupt.” TechCrunch named a conference after it, the New York Times named a column after it, investor Marc Andreessen warned that “software disruption” would eat the world; not long after, Peter Thiel, his fellow Facebook board member, called “disrupt” one of his favorite words. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
AI Researchers Fight Over Four Letters: NIPS
October 26, 2018 16:32 - 7 minutesThe future of humanity will be shaped by artificial intelligence. Now some of the best brains working on the technology are riven by a debate about a four-letter acronym that some say contributes to the field's well-documented diversity problems. NIPS is the name of AI’s most prominent conference, a venue for machine learning research formally known as the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Twitter's Dated Data Dump Doesn’t Tell Us About Future Meddling
October 26, 2018 07:10 - 10 minutesTwitter dropped an almost unfathomably large archive of tweets connected to two alleged influence campaigns on Wednesday. The trove included over 9 million tweets associated with 3,841 accounts connected to Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency, or IRA, as well as more than a million tweets attributed to a network of 770 Iranian propaganda-pushing accounts. Twitter has never before released an archive of this size. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Top Political Advertiser on Facebook Is...Facebook
October 25, 2018 16:31 - 5 minutesOn Tuesday, Facebook released a new tool that shows who's spending the most money on political ads on the platform in the US. At a glance, the Ad Archive Report suggests that Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke is the biggest spender, having plowed more than $5 million into Facebook ads since May. But the fine print reveals a more surprising finding: The advertiser spending the most on political and issue ads on Facebook is, well, Facebook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...
How Facebook's Messenger Got Its New Look in a New Jersey Basement
October 25, 2018 07:10 - 13 minutesOnly six social media apps in the world have a billion or more users, and four of them belong to Facebook. Tops is the eponymous flagship app, known as “Big Blue,” followed by three apps all focused on messaging: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. So when Facebook decided to do a significant redesign of the latter—currently used by 1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This Company Wants to Make the Internet Load Faster
October 24, 2018 16:32 - 10 minutesThe internet went down on February 28, 2017. Or at least that's how it seemed to some users as sites and apps like Slack and Medium went offline or malfunctioned for four hours. What actually happened is that Amazon's enormously popular S3 cloud storage service experienced an outage, affecting everything that depended on it. It was a reminder of the risks when too much of the internet relies on a single service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Risks and Rewards of Tech's Guerrilla Franchising
October 24, 2018 07:11 - 3 minutesCall It Franchising 2.0. The tech industry is setting its sights on the little guy, looking to turn ambitious go-getters into small-business owners. Tech companies provide the tools and support; you supply services. Bedeviled by last-mile delivery costs, Amazon began enabling entrepreneurs to launch their own package-delivery hubs this summer. Starting at a relatively modest $10,000, “delivery service partners” can lease fleets of 20 to 40 Amazon-branded vans. Learn more about your ad choices...
The Permanent State of Beta Is Ruining Consumerism
October 23, 2018 16:31 - 3 minutesEvery single gosh-darn good-for-nothing day, some piece of “frictionless” “seamless” “user-friendly” technology craps out on me. Touch ID fails—cool. Bluetooth can’t connect—awesome. If I’m on the road, Google Maps freezes at the most crucial turn. If I’m watching TV: “Sorry, we could not reach the Netflix service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Neha Narula and Alexis Ohanian Say It's Early Days Yet For Cryptocurrency
October 23, 2018 07:10 - 5 minutesSome people call bitcoin "the internet of money," suggesting the digital currency and related technologies could do for the financial system what the internet did to information distribution over the past few decades. But skeptics are still waiting for a "killer app," while bitcoin prices have never returned to their late 2017 peak when trading hit more than $20,000 per bitcoin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Paul Allen's Second Act
October 22, 2018 16:31 - 8 minutesWhen the Jeff Bezoses and Jack Dorseys of the world leap from the bow of the ships they’re sailing forth, what will happen to them? Where will they go? When Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft who died this week at age 65, left the business he started, he traveled the world. He collected paintings and learned to scuba dive. Scuba diving, he said at the time, “takes me away from myself.” Allen had it right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Google Wants China. Will Chinese Users Want Google?
October 22, 2018 07:10 - 7 minutesGoogle CEO Sundar Pichai was upbeat Monday when he told WIRED about internal tests of a censored search engine designed to win approval from Chinese officials. It will take more than a government nod for Google to succeed, however. That’s not only because of the political tensions raised by President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, which analysts say make Google’s expansion unlikely. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Anand Giridharadas on Saudi Money and Silicon Valley Hypocrisy
October 19, 2018 16:31 - 5 minutesSilicon Valley’s deep financial ties to Saudi Arabia illustrate “the hypocrisy behind the ‘change the world’ fantasy” pushed by tech companies, said journalist Anand Giridharadas. Saudi backing for popular apps like Uber, Slack, and Wag offers proof that “the most idealistic companies on earth---in rhetoric---are very happy to take the dirtiest money on earth to grow and grow and grow,” he said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Reid Hoffman and Joi Ito on Moving Fast But Not Breaking Things
October 19, 2018 07:11 - 6 minutesIt’s no longer enough to build lean companies quickly. The companies of the near future will need to be both fast and massive. And if it takes years to grow from a small startup to a major player in Silicon Valley, well. That’s just too slow. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says Silicon Valley now demands that companies double their size after three months, then six months, then a year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Inside Facebook's Plan to Safeguard the 2018 Election
October 18, 2018 16:31 - 7 minutesDeep in the bowels of Facebook's serpentine campus in Menlo Park, California is a room about 25-feet-square that may have a lot to do with how the world thinks about the company in the coming months. It looks like a Wall Street trading floor, with screens on every wall and every desk. And 20 hours a day---soon to be 24 hours a day---it's jammed with about two dozen geeks, spooks, hackers, and lawyers trying to spot and quash the next bad thing to happen on the company's networks. Learn more a...
You Can Now Run Some Code Hosted on GitHub
October 18, 2018 07:11 - 5 minutesSince launching in 2008, GitHub has become by far the largest place on the internet for hosting and collaborating on software code. The company, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, now hosts more than 85 million projects, and boasts 31 million monthly users. But while you've been able to store your code on GitHub, you couldn't actually run it. For that you needed a web server or a cloud service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Researchers Call for More Humanity in Artificial Intelligence
October 17, 2018 16:31 - 5 minutesArtificial intelligence researcher Fei-Fei Li has spent her career trying to make software smart—with some success. Lately she’s begun to ask herself a new question: How can we make smart software aligned with human values? “As much as AI is showing its power, it’s a nascent technology,” Li said at the WIRED25 Summit in San Francisco Monday. “What’s really important is putting humanity at the center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Paul Allen Thought Like a Hacker and Never Stopped Dreaming
October 17, 2018 07:11 - 8 minutesIconic tech-company founders often come in pairs: Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The world lost half of one such duo Monday when Paul Allen, who cofounded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 65. For the last three decades of his life, Allen was best known as a philanthropist and prolific entrepreneur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Amazon's Jeff Bezos Says Tech Companies Should Work With the Pentagon
October 16, 2018 16:31 - 5 minutes“If big tech companies are going to turn their back on US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Monday, defending government contracts amid a wave of employee protests. Bezos spoke at the WIRED25 summit, where Steven Levy, WIRED editor at large, asked his view of companies using the most advanced technology to aid the DOD. “We are going to continue to support the DOD and I think we should,” Bezos replied. Learn more about your ad choices. V...
What's Next for Instagram's Kevin Systrom? Flying Lessons
October 16, 2018 07:10 - 4 minutesKevin Systrom doesn’t know what’s next, but he’s starting by learning to fly. Three weeks after he and his Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger abruptly left the Facebook-owned company—and three days since his first solo flight—Systrom says he’s taking time to think about what problem he wants to attack next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Glen Weyl on Technology and Social Innovation
October 15, 2018 16:31 - 5 minutesSocial movements have spurred major transformations in society, from the end of slavery to universal suffrage, the rise of labor unions, and universal education. Yet somehow after decades of economic stability, we began to rely on technological rather than social tools to remake the world, says Glen Weyl, a principal researcher for Microsoft. While technology flourished, we “did not allow our social wisdom and social infrastructure to balance that out,” says Weyl. Learn more about your ad cho...
Help WIRED Track How Political Ads Target You on Facebook
October 15, 2018 07:11 - 6 minutesWith a user base of more than 2 billion people who can be chopped and sorted by almost any conceivable data point—men ages 21 to 45 living in the United States who are parents to preteens and like Fortnite; women with a bachelor’s degree who are away from family and whose friends are recently engaged—Facebook advertising is an incredibly powerful tool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Microsoft Calls a Truce in the Linux Patent Wars
October 12, 2018 16:31 - 6 minutesMicrosoft wants to make peace with Linux, saying this week that it will allow more than 2,600 other companies, including longtime rivals like Google and IBM, to use the technology behind 60,000 Microsoft patents for their own Linux-related open source projects. That could be good news for makers of "internet of Things" devices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What Does a Fair Algorithm Actually Look Like?
October 12, 2018 07:10 - 10 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
IBM Joins Fight Over Pentagon Cloud Contract Favoring Amazon
October 11, 2018 16:31 - 8 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Google Duplex, the Human-Sounding Phone Bot, Comes to the Pixel
October 10, 2018 16:32 - 9 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Can the FCC Really Block California's Net Neutrality Law?
October 09, 2018 07:10 - 8 minutesWithin hours of California governor Jerry Brown signing a sweeping net neutrality bill into law, the US Department of Justice sued the state, sparking the latest battle in the long legal war over the ground rules for the internet. Groups representing broadband providers followed suit on Wednesday, with their own lawsuit arguing that California's law was illegal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
After Troubles in Myanmar, Facebook Charges Ahead in Africa
October 08, 2018 16:31 - 16 minutesOver the past year, Facebook has faced a reckoning over the way its plan to connect the next billion users to the internet has sown division, including spreading hate speech that incited ethnic violence in Myanmar and disseminating propaganda for a violent dictator in the Philippines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Some Amazon Workers Fear They’ll Earn Less Even With a $15 Minimum Wage
October 08, 2018 07:10 - 7 minutesWhen Amazon announced Tuesday that it was raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all employees, even vocal critics of its labor practices like Senator Bernie Sanders praised the company. The retail giant’s decision will undoubtedly put more money into the hands of its workers—especially the some 100,000 temporary US employees Amazon plans to hire in the coming months for the holiday season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
BitTorrent's Creator Wants to Build a Better Bitcoin
October 03, 2018 16:31 - 9 minutesIn 2001, a 25-year-old unemployed college dropout named Bram Cohen crafted an elegant protocol for moving data around the internet. Titanic numbers of pirated songs and movies, and countless lawsuits, later, he’s putting the finishing touches on what he hopes will be another world-changing protocol—this time for moving around money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why Amazon Really Raised Its Minimum Wage to $15
October 03, 2018 07:10 - 9 minutesAfter months of increased public criticism about its grueling labor practices, Amazon announced Tuesday that it would begin paying all US employees, including part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers, at least $15 an hour and all UK employees at least £9.50 (with higher wages in London) beginning November 1. The move will affect 250,000 Amazon employees and 100,000 seasonal workers, according to the company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
These Tech Companies Will Need More Women on Their Boards
October 02, 2018 16:31 - 6 minutesSeveral major tech companies---including Apple, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook---will likely have to add women to their boards of directors by mid-2021 under a pioneering new California law aimed at bringing more women into corporate boardrooms. California governor Jerry Brown signed the measure, known as SB 826, into law on Sunday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices