Month: December 2018

Most 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.
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Tesla has outmaneuvered the Securities and Exchange Commission by appointing Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson to its board, management expert Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told CNBC on Friday. The electric-car company made the appointments on Friday to comply with an SEC settlement. “The SEC has been had on this one,” said Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the
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We learned a lot this year: Amazon could be the next advertising giant, tech workers can push powerful executives into change and, despite all the writing on the Facebook wall, few of its executives are leaving. As 2018 comes to an end, we’re taking a look at the biggest stories in tech, media and commerce
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First algorithms figured out how to decipher images. That’s why you can unlock an iPhone with your face. More recently, machine learning has become capable of generating and altering images and video. In 2018, researchers and artists took AI-made and enhanced visuals to another level. Scroll through these examples to see how software that can
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LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has burst onto the leaderboard of political donations in the age of Trump, cementing his status as a powerbroker in Silicon Valley politics. But over the last few weeks, Hoffman has been learning one of the hard lessons that almost all billionaires discover as they leap into political combat: This isn’t
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Earlier 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. Conversations like these are
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On the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Imgur CEO Alan Schaaf explained how the image sharing site is trying to be a “beacon of hope to attract the people that are sick of social media’s toxicity.” Part of the solution, he told Recode’s Kara Swisher, is that Imgur doesn’t subscribe to free
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2018 was the year that Big Tech’s mission statements came back to haunt it. When employees felt that their products were damaging the world and that management wouldn’t listen, they went public with their protests. At Google and Amazon, they challenged contracts to sell artificial intelligence and facial-recognition technology to the Pentagon and police. At
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At 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. The world’s largest companies, including Walmart and
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In 1994, soon after Jeff Bezos incorporated what would become Amazon, the entrepreneur briefly contemplated changing the company’s name. The nascent firm had been dubbed “Cadabra,” but Bezos wanted a less playful, more accurate alternative: “Relentless.” (Relentless.com redirects to Amazon.com to this day.) Twenty-four years later, perhaps no adjective better describes Bezos’ empire than the
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Tumblr has long housed some of the most self-expressive, marginalized communities of the internet. The site welcomed LGTBQ and sex-positive bloggers, artists and creators, self-proclaimed nerds and those in need of support. Now, with a strict and poorly executed ban on adult content, Tumblr is alienating power users and pushing some to other sites. The
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For 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
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