After China’s crackdown, the cryptocurrency crowd is looking for a new haven. The Central American nation thinks it’s the answer. Eric Grill is sitting on the patio of a house with multicolored walls, screeches of nearby tropical birds covering his voice as he expounds on the future of Bitcoin in El Salvador. Grill, an American
Month: June 2021
A judge dealt the Federal Trade Commission a setback this week in its quest to break the company up—but also provided a roadmap for how to proceed. You may have heard about how the government’s effort to break up Facebook was dealt a death blow by a federal judge on Monday. Per The New York
The deputy director of the White House science office plans to tackle algorithmic bias and start candid conversations about the past. The pandemic taught us a lesson that we needed to learn again, says Alondra Nelson: Science and technology have everything to do with issues of society, inequality, and social life. After a year in
Columbus, Ohio, won a $50 million grant five years ago to use tech to solve old problems. But technical hurdles, bureaucracy, and the pandemic dashed many plans. In 2016, Columbus, Ohio, beat out 77 other small and midsize US cities for a pot of $50 million that was meant to reshape its future. The Department
After its wildly successful Coinbase exit, the VC firm signals its commitment to cryptocurrencies with a third fund. In 2013, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led a funding round for a startup called Coinbase. Cryptocurrency had hardly gone mainstream, but Coinbase, just a year out of Y Combinator, positioned itself as the financial exchange
The managers are accused of selling tech to Libya and Egypt that was used to to identify activists, read private messages, and kidnap, torture, or kill them. Earlier this week, French authorities indicted four former executives of the surveillance firm Nexa Technologies, formerly called Amesys, for complicity in torture and war crimes. Between 2007 and
Megan offers advice for casting your net—because there’s no excuse for a hiring pool where everyone looks the same. Dear OOO, I’m a (white, male) hiring manager at a not-very-diverse company. I would like to help make us more diverse, but we only seem to get people who look like us applying for jobs, and
The dermatology AI app won approval for use in the EU but not with the FDA, an odd twist on Europe’s reputation for tough rules on tech. Billions of times each year, people turn to Google’s web search box for help figuring out what’s wrong with their skin. Now, Google is preparing to launch an
As people redefine their relationship to the office, some entrepreneurs see an opportunity to reimagine everything from housing to education. For most knowledge workers, this summer spells the end of the Great Remote Work Experiment and the beginning of a return to normal. People are shuffling back into offices, dusting off desk space, and returning
The National Institute of Standards and Technology measures how many photons pass through a chicken. Now, it wants to quantify transparency around algorithms. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a federal agency best known for measuring things like time or the number of photons that pass through a chicken. Now NIST wants
Jeffrey Fang was a ride-hailing legend, a top earner with relentless hustle. Then his minivan was carjacked—with his kids in the back seat. Jeffrey Fang, DoorDash delivery guy, knows you judge his parenting skills, and he’ll join in your condemnation in a moment. He’ll explain that bringing his kids along on his Saturday night shift
A study found that a system used to identify cases of sepsis missed most instances and frequently issued false alarms. A complication of infection known as sepsis is the number one killer in US hospitals. So it’s not surprising that more than 100 health systems use an early warning system offered by Epic Systems, the
Online dating exploded in popularity during the pandemic, and the number of new startups has grown. But will they last? The pandemic could have doomed online dating. Instead, it sent singles swiping more than ever before. Sanctions on in-person meetups drove the adoption of new products, like video dating, and persuaded more people to pay
Systems in Boston, Cleveland, Las Vegas, and the San Francisco Bay Area are offering reduced fares or free rides. Others are considering abolishing fares altogether. Last week in Washington, DC, the board of the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority did something almost unheard of: It offered riders more service for less money. During the Covid-19 pandemic,
Amazon’s annual sales event this year is unfolding against a backdrop of mounting pressure from labor activists. In case our homepage didn’t tip you off, today (and tomorrow) is Prime Day. For Prime members, that means deals, deals, deals. For Amazon’s warehouse workers, it usually means mandatory extra time, or MET as the company abbreviates
Lina Khan’s ascendance to the top of the FTC, and a set of bipartisan antitrust proposals, shows just how much has changed in Washington—and how suddenly. In the summer of 2017, my boss at the Washington Monthly, a policy-focused magazine in DC, asked me to cover a bombshell story: the Democratic Party had included an
The measure would make private use of the technology illegal but would not apply to police. It awaits the mayor’s signature. After years of failed attempts to curb surveillance technologies, Baltimore is close to enacting one of the nation’s most stringent bans on facial recognition. But Baltimore’s proposed ban would be very different from laws
Language models like GPT-3 can write poetry, but they often amplify negative stereotypes. Researchers are trying different approaches to address the problem. In July 2020, OpenAI launched GPT-3, an artificial intelligence language model that quickly stoked excitement about computers writing poetry, news articles, and programming code. Just as quickly, it was shown to sometimes be
Megan weighs in on how to navigate office in-groups—and why having a few people in your corner isn’t a bad thing. Dear OOO, I’ve been at my job for about three years, and I really like it. The work is always interesting and challenging, my manager pushes me to grow and always has my back,
The companies revealed upgrades for their phones that protect data and reduce reliance on the cloud. It also binds users more tightly to their ecosystems. Since the dawn of the iPhone, many of the smarts in smartphones have come from elsewhere: the corporate computers known as the cloud. Mobile apps sent user data cloudward for
By employing a neural network, the company says its numbers will be more accurate—and allow it to offer to buy more homes. Stories of people getting cash offers for their homes tens of thousands of dollars over asking price have become normal. This year, inventory in the US housing market hit a record low while
A growing number of people are seeking a wider diversity of news sources or opinions contrary to their own to combat information silos within social media. Last October, students in Sarah Candler’s seventh-grade English class in rural Tennessee were discussing the presidential election, echoing each other’s pro-Trump sentiments. One student dared the others: “Who’s a
The Black Lives Matter protests drew sympathetic public statements from investors in 2020. One year later, signs of progress are harder to find. It’s no secret that the venture capital industry, for as long as it’s existed, has been overwhelmingly white. Last summer, as the murder of George Floyd focused national attention on racial inequalities
Guest columnist Alan Henry offers advice for putting yourself out there online. Dear OOO, I love working remotely, but I feel more isolated than ever. How do I make friends with my coworkers? My company switched to remote work during the pandemic, and no one is in a hurry to go back to the office
Remote work generally reduces driving. But the travel behavior of telecommuters isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Before everything got weird and terrible, there were these things called rush hours. Between, say, 6 am and 10 am, many people would leave their homes to go to work or school, filling roads, buses, subway cars,
She was a star engineer who warned that messy AI can spread racism. Google brought her in. Then it forced her out. Can Big Tech take criticism from within? One afternoon in late November of last year, Timnit Gebru was sitting on the couch in her San Francisco Bay Area home, crying. Gebru, a researcher
Pinduoduo, which recently passed Alibaba as the shopping site with the most customers, connects 12 million farmers to more than 800 million users. As China locked down amid the Covid-19 pandemic early last year, Huang Honglin—who sells passion fruit grown by his parents and neighboring farmers in Jiangxi province—worried about getting their crops to traditional
Unable to find enough workers, employers are turning to technology to perform tasks—and women are likely to be the hardest hit. Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, a fast-food chain in Ohio, hardly seems an obvious venue for cutting-edge artificial intelligence. But the company’s drive-thrus are showcasing technology that reveals how the Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating the
The tech giant wants its core product to infer meaning from human language, answer multipart questions—and look more like Google Assistant sounds. Google often uses its annual developer conference, I/O, to showcase artificial intelligence with a wow factor. In 2016, it introduced the Google Home smart speaker with Google Assistant. In 2018, Duplex debuted to
The promise of a crackdown is sending the country’s crypterati scrambling for the exit. The man shooting the video wears a face mask, rimless glasses, and a white hard hat. He is traipsing near the entrance of a warehouse full to the brim with stacks of internet-connected machines sitting idle in half-darkness. As the man