Month: September 2019

Amazon hasn’t divulged exact numbers for how many Echos, Fire TVs, Eeros, or Ring cameras it sells each year, but in January, it revealed that people have bought more than 100 million Alexa-equipped devices overall. At Wednesday’s event, Amazon hardware executive Dave Limp said there are “4 billion interactions” happening through the Ring home-security system
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Privacy problems are age-old. The extravagant Sun King, Louis XIV of France, popularized the envelope as he used them to protect his letters from the prying eyes of the chambermaid or shopkeeper. In the colonial era, adhesive envelopes and patterned lining helped hide the contents of commonly intercepted mail. Along with increased regulation, these efforts
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About 80 Google contractors in Pittsburgh voted to unionize with United Steelworkers on Tuesday, in a historic move for white-collar workers at the search giant. The tech workers, who are employed by Google contractor HCL Technologies, are only a few of the many contractors that make up the bulk of Google’s labor force. But Tuesday’s
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Last week on Thursday, the CEO of Seattle software company Chef defended the firm’s contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after a former employee as a protest deleted open source projects used by Chef customers. In an open email to employees, Chef CEO Barry Crist said he had made a “principled decision” to work
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Computer server management software is usually pretty boring. But when that software is sold to a federal agency that separates families and detains children, even esoteric technology can become the center of controversy. On Monday, activist Shanley Kane highlighted a contract between Seattle-based software company Chef and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Chef develops and
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Thousands of workers from Amazon, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Square, and other tech companies are expected to walk out today as part of a worldwide climate change strike led by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg. After Amazon workers announced they were joining the demonstration last week, employees from other Silicon Valley firms began joining in. The
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The House antitrust subcommittee investigating Silicon Valley has already received plenty of tips from workers at tech firms, large and small, according to its chair, Representative David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island). “There’s a lot of information that we’ve been gathering that people have shared with the committee but haven’t done publicly because they’re fearful of economic
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Computer viruses, malware, and other cybersecurity threats are a global problem. But politics are intruding on the global response. The cybersecurity organization Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (First) confirmed Wednesday that it suspended Huawei’s membership due to US sanctions against the company. The decision was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal. First
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a new set of programs designed to reduce the company’s carbon footprint Thursday, including purchasing 100,000 electric trucks. The announcement comes just one day before at least 1,550 Amazon workers plan to walk out over what they say is an inadequate response to the climate crisis. Bezos’ promises fall short
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The ImageNet researchers attribute the inclusion of offensive and insensitive categories to the overall size of the task, which ultimately involved 50,000 workers who evaluated 160 million candidate images. They also point out that only a fraction of the “person” images were actually used in practice. That’s because references to ImageNet typically mean a smaller
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Six years later, who does Patreon serve best? Some 125,000 creators use the service, and according to the data-tracking site Graphtreon, they draw in more than 5 million pledges monthly. One of Patreon’s top-earning clients, grossing $139,000 monthly from 31,000 patrons, is the bitingly funny leftist-politics podcast Chapo Trap House, whose cohost, Will Menaker, has
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Written more than 2,300 years before the invention of the iPhone, Plato’s The Phaedrus includes what has become one of the most weaponized examples of reactionary techno-skepticism. “But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing,” Socrates says to the titular Athenian aristocrat. He then tells the fable of the
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Facebook’s 2018 was a parade of privacy scandals, congressional pressure, and executive squabbles. The social and ad network capped off its annus horribilis with a curveball: asking consumers to spend $200 or more to install an internet-connected camera called Portal in their homes to make video calling easier. Reviews of the Portal devices were middling
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Your brain is a lot like your DNA. It is, arguably, everything that makes you uniquely you. Some types of brain scans are a lot like DNA tests. They may reveal what diseases you have (Parkinson’s, certainly; depression-possibly), what happened in your past (drug abuse, probably; trauma, maybe), or even what your future may hold
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Sometimes, basic information is missing because it’s proprietary—an issue especially for industry labs. But it’s more often a sign of the field’s failure to keep up with changing methods, Dodge says. A decade ago, it was more straightforward to see what a researcher changed to improve their results. Neural networks, by comparison, are finicky; getting
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We all love Wi-Fi, except when we can’t connect. We take for granted being able to have wireless access at home and the office, on airplanes, in cafés around the globe, and if we’d be so lucky, floating on the International Space Station. But what if Wi-Fi hadn’t happened? It almost didn’t, at least not
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Online, value is quantifiable. The worth of a person, idea, movement, meme, or tweet is often based on a tally of actions: likes, retweets, shares, followers, views, replies, claps, and swipes-up, among others. Each is an individual action. Together, though, they take on outsized meaning. A YouTube video with 100,000 views seems more valuable than
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Do you feel that too? That malaise that stretches its soul-sucking tentacles toward us through our news feeds and our televisions (do we still watch those?) and even slipping into our Insta comments. (Duck! A trolling tweet almost hit you upside your head.) The climate, good lord. The heads of state with dictatorial inclinations and
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Last month, members of the California legislature were subject to a surveillance experiment, courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union. Their portraits were fed into Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition software and compared with a database of 25,000 arrest mug shots. Twenty-six lawmakers were incorrectly identified as matches. The would-be suspects included Assemblyman Phil Ting, a
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A bill passed by California lawmakers Wednesday could put guardrails on the gig economy and its reliance on “independent contractors.” The legislation, Assembly Bill 5, may reshape the way some of the state’s marquee companies—including Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash—as well as many janitorial services, truckers, and musicians do business. The bill passed the State Senate
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It’s September, and all across the country high school seniors are setting up their Common Application accounts, retaking SATs, and struggling to write (or procrastinating the writing of) 650 words that convey, in a tidy narrative, who they are, the challenges they have overcome in their 17 years on Earth, and why, Dear College Admissions
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