Month: February 2021

Non-fungible tokens provide a way to invest in and own digital imagery. But is it just another crypto fad—or the future of intangible art? It started with CryptoKitties. In December 2017, the dopey-looking cartoon cats, created by Canadian company Dapper Labs, debuted as tradable collectibles, like Pokémon cards for the bitcoin era. Each image was
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Plus: The Ford heir, presidential briefings, and a sad day for gadget lovers. Hey, everyone. As we creep into a year of lockdown, I am buoyed by the vaccine and terrified by the variants. Triple masks, anyone? The Plain View “Where should we go next?” asked Steve Jobs. It was almost exactly 10 years ago,
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A judge ruled earlier this week on the law, which has faced challenges from lobbyists representing internet providers as well as the Trump administration. California can start enforcing the net neutrality law it enacted over two years ago, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a loss for internet service providers. The broadband-industry lobby groups’ motion
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A wave of startups, features, and tools has sprung up around the popular audio app. And some are looking to cash in. About a month ago, Marcin Brukiewicz scored an invite to Clubhouse and started spending hours on the audio app. Brukiewicz, a Polish physician, joined rooms discussing the future of healthcare and medical technology,
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Welcome to Megan’s weekly advice column for surviving our work-from-home existence. Dear OOO: Is everyone judging my background on Zoom? All of my coworkers have these lovely setups with stark white bookcases and hanging plants, but I’m lucky if I can sweep the laundry off the bed behind me in time for my morning meeting.
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A Boeing 777 shed huge chunks of metal over a Denver suburb over the weekend—but wasn’t in danger of going down itself. It feels like a nightmare scenario for airplane passengers: You take a look out the window in between mini-pretzel bites to see an engine cloaked in flames, shedding pieces of metal mid-flight from
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Margaret Mitchell was the co-leader of a group investigating ethics in AI, alongside Timnit Gebru, who said she was fired in December. For the second time in three months, a prominent researcher on ethics in artificial intelligence says Google fired her. On Friday, researcher Margaret Mitchell said she had been fired from the company’s AI
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The country’s highest court ruled that the 25 drivers who filed a lawsuit should be considered workers and entitled to minimum wage and vacations. For four years, the employment status of Uber drivers in the United Kingdom has been like a colorful beach ball: insubstantial, batted from court to court, appearing different depending on where
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An IBM researcher found his name on two papers with which he had no connection. A different paper listed a fictitious author by the name of “Bill Franks.” David Cox, the co-director of a prestigious artificial intelligence lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was scanning an online computer science bibliography in December when he noticed something odd—his
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Google, Facebook, and others promise more flexibility to work from home. But they’re charging ahead with plans for more offices. Kim Walesh has lived steps from downtown San Jose for two decades, and she readily admits that her neighborhood is not what you’d expect for the so-called “capital” of Silicon Valley—“small” and “undeveloped” are her
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Videofeeds sometimes fail, defense attorneys can’t confer with clients, and witnesses have a hard time reviewing documents.  Last August, one of the world’s most infamous sex criminals— Harvey Weinstein—was due to appear virtually in a New York courtroom on a request to extradite him to California to face charges there. Reporters, due to Covid-19, mostly
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Plus: The Obama campaign’s data wiz, the limits of content moderation, and a video filter gone awry. Hi, everyone. Another week without Donald Trump’s tweets and Facebook posts. At least we have clips of his “perfect” speeches replayed in the Senate trial. Good times. This is a special free edition of Plaintext. To read future
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In a 2018 paper, researchers said they found evidence of an elusive theorized particle. A closer look now suggests otherwise. In March 2018, Dutch physicist and Microsoft employee Leo Kouwenhoven published headline-grabbing new evidence that he had observed an elusive particle called a Majorana fermion. Microsoft hoped to harness Majorana particles to build a quantum
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The autonomous vehicle startup purchased Uber’s struggling self-driving technology division in December. Autonomous driving startup Aurora announced on Tuesday that it has scored a partnership with Toyota to build self-driving taxis based on the Toyota Sienna minivan. Aurora says it’s aiming to have a fleet of Sienna prototypes ready for testing on public roads by the
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Covid-19 has upended churchgoing in the US. Like so much else with the pandemic, the impacts are not felt equally. For Clay Scroggins, preaching on Zoom was never part of the plan. As lead pastor at Buckhead Church in Atlanta, he was accustomed to services in a 3,000-seat auditorium, with live music and a jumbotron
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The maker of electric vehicles said it had invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin and plans to accept the cryptocurrency as payment for its cars. For a brief moment on Sunday, before Tesla said it had invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin and planned to let people use the cryptocurrency to pay for its cars, bitcoin’s price
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A warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, could become the first Amazon union in the US. But it won’t happen overnight. It might be the most tracked shipment in Amazon history: 5,800 mail ballots are being sent out to the union-eligible workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, fulfillment center on Monday. In the coming weeks they’ll be used
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A new bill directly targets the most egregious excesses of online platform immunity. By the end of last year, there were few better symbols of bad-faith politics than Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that gives online platforms legal immunity for user-generated content. After a fairly sleepy existence since its passage in
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A study finds that algorithms learn to associate words with other words. “Democracy” can equal “stability”—or “chaos.” Artificial intelligence is hardly confined by international borders, as businesses, universities, and governments tap a global pool of ideas, algorithms, and talent. Yet the AI programs that result from this global gold rush can still reflect deep cultural
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