Month: August 2019

A Porsche that was expected to sell for over $20 million flopped on the auction block Saturday night, after the sale was thrown into disarray by a technical error. The car, a 1939 Porsche “Type 64” that was already facing controversy in the collecting world, hit the auction block Saturday night at RM Sotheby’s in
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There’s an arms race afoot over who can store cryptocurrency safest. Perhaps you’d like your bitcoin buried in a vault under a mountain in the Swiss Alps? Xapo has offered that as a service to wealthy investors, for free. Coinbase, best known for its popular cryptocurrency exchange, prefers elaborate key-printing rituals along with a Faraday
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Amazon’s biggest asset can also be a headache for its customers. The so-called “everything store” really does sell almost any item consumers might want, but it’s often cumbersome and time-consuming to sort through them all. To avoid “choice overload,” the retail giant has come up with certain signals designed to help people distinguish high-quality products
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Facebook announced on Thursday that it would expand a fact-checking program to its Instagram image-sharing service. Instagram users in the US can now report content they believe is false, but it’s not clear that the system, which is already overwhelmed, can handle more suspect information. “Facebook did not ever scale the fact-checking program on Facebook
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Imagine a couple of caffeine-addled biochemistry majors late at night in their dorm kitchen cooking up a new medicine that proves remarkably effective at soothing colds but inadvertently causes permanent behavioral changes. Those who ingest it become radically politicized and shout uncontrollably in casual conversation. Still, the concoction sells to billions of people. This sounds
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For the past two years or so, I’ve been reporting on tensions inside Google’s workforce—between Google’s management and its employees, and between pro-diversity Googlers and those on the far right, some of whom made a practice of leaking the company’s internal communications to the media. In the course of that reporting, several of my sources
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It was the spring of 2010 and Erik Johnson had just graduated from the University of Vermont with a bachelor’s in economics. Two years prior, Johnson had moved to Burlington from Boston to finish his degree, attracted by the Green Mountain State’s natural beauty and laid-back culture. Vermont had a lot of perks for an
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