The price of bitcoin dropped another 10 percent Tuesday, extending a decline that has sent the virtual currency down 33 percent in the past month and 46 percent in the past year. Boom and bust cycles are par for the course for bitcoin. So far this year, there have been only three days where the
Month: November 2018
Recode Daily will take a publishing holiday on Thanksgiving Day and on Friday, Nov. 23. We’ll be back in your email inbox first thing Monday morning. Happy Thanksgiving to all our U.S. readers and their loved ones. Black Friday is the busiest time of year for professional line sitters, who make up to $45 an
Could Discord get bought? That’s the question humming through corners of Silicon Valley in recent months as several giant tech companies have kicked the tires on the hot gaming chat company that investors valued earlier this year at $1.6 billion. Recode is not aware of any formal offers for a complete buyout of Discord. But
On Nov. 1, 20,000 Google employees and contractors walked out of the company’s offices around the world, one week after the New York Times reported that Google had protected three executives accused of sexual misconduct, including Android founder Andy Rubin. But the protests were about more than just how Google handles harassment. On the latest
European stocks are set to open Wednesday’s session in the black, clawing their way back from the sharp losses seen in the previous session. The FTSE 100 is seen 15 points up at 6,965, the CAC 40 is set to open 20 points higher at 4,943, while the DAX is poised to start the session
In recent weeks, at least five big tech companies have revised their policies for handling sexual-harassment complaints, saying they will no longer force employees to submit those claims to arbitration, a process that tends to favor employers. But many of the new policies come with hitches: They may apply only to claims of harassment and
Instagram Monday said it would again crack down on users who pursue “inauthentic activity” to boost an account’s popularity. Within hours, BlackHatWorld, a forum popular with self-proclaimed “black hat” social media marketers, was in crisis. In a section of the forum usually reserved for sharing the best deals on obtaining fake Instagram followers, concerned users
Starting in 2010, Facebook started giving users the option to download their Facebook data, the collection of posts, photos, friends and even previous locations that Facebook has collected from you over the years. Until this spring, when Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal became public, a lot of people didn’t even know that this data download was
Five Below Inc.: “We almost pulled the trigger and told the ActionAlertsPlus.com club that it was the right level to buy. I mean, this thing’s all the way down to $103. It is incredibly oversold. I like it here, just like I like some of the techs. I like that one.” Splunk Inc.: “This is
Last Thanksgiving, Americans sat with their families, gave thanks for the bounty and talked about bitcoin. At least it seemed as though people everywhere, young and old, were suddenly interested in cryptocurrencies and wondering if they should board the decentralized currency train. There were even guides about how to discuss cryptocurrencies with your relatives at
We still have time to learn to love robots. The New Yorker’s new technology-themed issue kicks off with the entertaining first-person story of reporter Patricia Marx’s serial relationships with domestic robots, beginning with Roomba and moving through Amazon’s Alexa; Jiba (“the first social robot for the home”); Loomo, a new hoverboard designed by Segway; and
On the 3:13 pm train out of San Jose on a recent Friday, I hunched over a MacBook, brow furrowed. Hundreds of miles north in a Google data center in Oregon, a virtual computer sprang to life. I was soon looking at the yawning blackness of a Linux command line—my new AI art studio. Some
Back in the early 1930s, farmers couldn’t get wired. The big-city electric utilities claimed that delivering power to customers spread out in rural areas wasn’t profitable. So eventually the locals rolled up their sleeves and did it themselves. They formed electric co-ops and strung their own damn wires, aided by cheap federal loans. Today there
One Thursday last month, 19-year-old Robbie Barrat woke to a fusillade of messages on his phone. “I was half asleep but saw they all contained the same number,” he says. “Then I fell back asleep for a few hours. I didn’t really want to believe.” The number in those messages was $432,500—the winning bid at
European stocks are set to open in the red Tuesday, as investors keep abreast of market news and await any further developments surrounding Brexit. The FTSE 100 is seen 14 points down at 6,987, the CAC 40 is set to open 14 points lower at 4,965, while the DAX is poised to start the session
Ten things need to change for the stock market to come back from its Monday declines, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said as high-profile technology stocks Facebook and Apple led the major averages lower. “When does this rout end? When do the buyers come in? When do the sellers finish?” he wondered aloud on “Mad Money.” “Frankly,
Amid increasing public scrutiny, many major tech companies are reconsidering a practice that bars workers from taking their employer to court over workplace issues such as sexual harassment. In the past two weeks alone, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, eBay and Square all announced they’d end forced arbitration for cases of sexual harassment. Forced arbitration is an
Facebook is not a part of the government. That means, unlike an American government body that has to abide by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it can kick off users who violate its rules. However, says First Amendment scholar Jameel Jaffer, we should have a discussion about that power and whether Facebook should
Nvidia continued to slide as much as 8 percent Monday before settling down around 6.5 percent. The chip-maker fell as much as 19 percent Friday after missing on revenue and guidance in its third-quarter 2019 earnings report. Nvidia was just one of several tech stocks that dipped Monday, including the FAANG stocks, some of the
When Alex Jones crashed the congressional hearings looking into big tech platforms back in September, Lord Voldemort kept coming to my mind. Even if you haven’t read the Harry Potter books, you probably know that almost no one in the wizarding world will speak this archvillain’s name aloud; he is referred to only as “he
Among the biggest spenders on Facebook political ads during the recent midterm campaigns are some names you’d probably expect. There’s Beto O’Rourke, who lost to Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race. There’s President Donald Trump—both his campaign and his super PAC. There are billionaires like J.B. Pritzker, incoming governor of Illinois, and Tom Steyer,
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has faced criticism about his company’s contract to sell software to the U.S. federal immigration agency, Customs and Border Patrol. Earlier this year, hundreds of Salesforce employees signed a letter urging Benioff to cancel the contract because of the agency’s role in enforcing President Trump’s controversial family separation border policy; Salesforce
Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t name names when he spoke out against the privacy practices of big tech companies during a keynote speech in Brussels last month. But he didn’t have to. “We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them,”
In June, less than a week after the shocking suicides of celebrities Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins felt compelled to address the matter head-on with his employees. From Orlando, where Robbins was attending a conference called Cisco Live, he sent a company-wide email. “In light of recent tragedies, I wanted to
When Sahara Lotti started her lash extensions company, Lashify, in 2017, she didn’t know what she was getting herself into. It wasn’t making and selling fake lashes that stumped her—she was more than prepared for that—but rather the bizarre and shadowy industry that seemed to envelop her. The suggestions started early. Months before Lashify had
Auto industry officials are cautiously breathing a sigh of relief after hearing word from Washington that the Trump administration may delay, possibly even scrub, a move that could impose new tariffs of up to 25 percent on imported vehicles and car parts. President Donald Trump met with his trade advisers on Tuesday to discuss, among
The definition of cloud computing may be nebulous, but its promise is clear. Instead of filling a warehouse with servers and paying people to manage them, a company can pay a cloud computing provider to provide computing resources on demand and pay only for what it actually uses. This prospect lured organizations ranging from startups
Google could pay upwards of $110 million, without subsidies, to buy large swaths of land in San Jose, according to a new city document detailing its negotiations with the company on its plan to build a mega-campus 15 miles south of its headquarters. The plan describes sites that cover around 21 acres, some owned by
Upon leaving Oracle in September, after a 22-year career at the software giant, Thomas Kurian told friends and colleagues that he was going to take a step back and decide what to do next. One person he exchanged LinkedIn messages with was a former boss at Oracle, Gary Bloom, who has spent the past six
In July, executives from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter testified before Congress about their company’s content moderation practices. While Facebook’s head of global policy Monika Bickert spoke, protesters from a group called Freedom From Facebook, seated just behind her, held signs depicting Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg’s heads atop an octopus whose tentacles reached around the