Month: March 2019

The US government says Facebook’s ad business creates housing discrimination. On Thursday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed charges against Facebook, arguing that the company’s ad platform allows advertisers to unlawfully exclude people from viewing housing ads based on characteristics such as race, national origin, and religion. Google and Twitter, meanwhile, have
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In a move that’s months in the making, Facebook announced Wednesday that beginning next week, it will take down posts supporting both white nationalism and white separatism, including on Instagram. It’s an evolution for the social network, whose Community Standards previously only prohibited white supremacist content while allowing posts that advocated for ideologies like race
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In the late 1980s, Canadian master’s student Yoshua Bengio became captivated by an unfashionable idea. A handful of artificial intelligence researchers was trying to craft software that loosely mimicked how networks of neurons process data in the brain, despite scant evidence it would work. “I fell in love with the idea that we could both
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Check out the companies making headlines after the bell: Shares of KB Home jumped 2 percent in extended trading Tuesday following the release of the homebuilder’s mixed first-quarter earnings. KB Home posted earnings per share of 31 cents on revenue of $811.5 million. Wall Street estimated earnings per share of 26 cents on $831.8 million,
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Some of the basics about Apple’s high-profile video plans are still unclear. The company’s unveiling of its new video services today, hosted at their Cupertino headquarters, didn’t amount to much more than a “high-gloss version of hand-waving,” writes Peter Kafka. Big stars like Steven Spielberg, Reese Witherspoon, and Oprah Winfrey spoke at the event about
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Emily Pickett, a doula in Louisville, Kentucky, is used to hearing hard truths from expecting mothers. Her job is to guide women through pregnancy, acting as confidante and supporter; understanding their deepest stressors—an abusive partner, a struggle with drugs—is important to ensuring healthy pregnancies. In the largely poor and black neighborhoods of Louisville’s West End,
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Government usually isn’t the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia’s chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation’s push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens.
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New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft apologized to his family, friends and fans and vowed to regain their confidence and respect in his first public statement since being charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution as part of a human-trafficking probe in South Florida. His statement, below, comes after prosecutors offered Kraft a deal on
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Pinterest’s business is growing steadily, but not at the same clip as other big advertising–driven tech IPOs from the past decade. According to new IPO paperwork filed Friday that offered the most detailed look yet at Pinterest’s business, Facebook, Twitter, and Snap were all showing faster pre-IPO growth. Pinterest reported revenue of roughly $756 million
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Facebook employees had access to the passwords of hundreds of millions of users. It’s another damaging revelation about the social media giant, which has faced sustained criticism over its privacy practices in recent years. The security publication Krebs on Security first reported that Facebook had stored personal passwords of users on unencrypted company servers in
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Microsoft’s programming language TypeScript has become one of the most popular languages among developers, at least according to a report published by the analyst firm RedMonk this week. TypeScript jumped from number 16 to number 12, just behind Apple’s programming language Swift in RedMonk’s semiannual rankings, which were last published in August. Microsoft unveiled TypeScript
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Public investors are doing something counterintuitive: They’re valuing unprofitable companies higher than they are profitable ones that entered public stock exchanges last year. Those are the findings from a new PitchBook report on the stock performance of US unicorns. The study looked at the median stock-price change for startups valued at more than a billion
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