Month: July 2021

Companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent were once regarded with national pride. Now they’re being slapped with fines and other penalties. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced a six-month campaign on Monday to regulate internet companies, particularly practices that “disrupt market order, damage consumer rights, or threaten data security.” That followed repeated fines
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In a bid to protect its investments in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cells, the carmaker is lobbying against the transition to electric vehicles. Executives at Toyota had a moment of inspiration when the company first developed the Prius. That moment, apparently, has long since passed. The Prius was the world’s first mass-produced hybrid car, years
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Money is pouring into autonomous trucking startups, just as many are souring on the short-term prospects for self-driving cars.  In 2016, three veterans of the still young autonomous vehicle industry formed Aurora, a startup focused on developing self-driving cars. Partnerships followed with major automakers, including Hyundai and Volkswagen. CEO Chris Urmson said at the time
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Researchers think these flexible semiconductors will be able to monitor your heartbeat or tell you whether your milk has spoiled. Like anyone who designs computer chips for a living, James Myers is, at his core, a silicon guy. “Silicon is brilliant,” he says. Brilliant because it’s a natural semiconductor—able to both conduct electricity and act
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Autonomous vehicles use the equivalent of 200 laptops to get around. Some want to tap that computing power to decode viruses or mine bitcoin. Like Dogecoin devotees, the mayor of Reno, and the leaders of El Salvador, Aldo Baoicchi is convinced cryptocurrency is the future. The CEO and founder of Canadian scooter maker Daymak believes
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The White House, lawmakers from both parties, and federal agencies are all working on bills or projects to constrain potential downsides of the tech. There’s bipartisan agreement in Washington that the US government should do more to support development of artificial intelligence technology. The Trump administration redirected research funding towards AI programs; President Biden’s science
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It’s time to retire one of the most half-baked ideas for regulating Big Tech.  Should Google get treated like your local telephone company? The idea that dominant, front-facing internet platforms should be regulated as common carriers or public utilities has been kicking around for a while. But it got a fresh jolt in April, when
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Businesses destinations are out, tourist spots are in. The old rules governing fares and flight schedules have been thrown out the window. Before, air travel had certain rhythms. Business travelers flew out on Monday mornings and back on Thursday evenings, filling pricier seats. Come summer, price conscious leisure travelers took to the skies. Crowds flew
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Tourists neither commit nor attract crimes. But a study finds that violent offenses rose in neighborhoods where more homes were converted to short-term rentals. The presence of more Airbnbs in a neighborhood may be linked to more crime—but not in the way you might think. Researchers from Northeastern University reviewed data in Boston from 2011
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Pandemic-induced supply disruptions and competition from China put more pressure on US companies to manufacture semiconductors at home. American innovation, from smartphones to search engines to gene sequencing, is built on a foundation of impossibly intricate, perfectly etched silicon. But few of those semiconductors are actually made in the US. Only 12 percent of chips
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The pandemic ushered in a new wave of pet owners—and unleashed business opportunities for companies that cater to them. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Americans filled airports and highways nearly as much as on holidays before the pandemic. For many people, the busy travel weekend will be followed by a return to the office
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Search Atlas displays three sets of links—or images—from different countries for any search. Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has earned it an aura of objectivity. Its dominance in search, and the disappearance of most competitors, make its lists of links appear still more canonical. An experimental
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Google, Nvidia, and others are training algorithms in the dark arts of designing semiconductors—some of which will be used to run artificial intelligence programs.  Artificial intelligence is now helping to design computer chips—including the very ones needed to run the most powerful AI code. Sketching out a computer chip is both complex and intricate, requiring
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Law enforcement officials say the tool can help them combat misinformation. Civil liberties advocates say it can be used for mass surveillance. Since 2016, civil liberties groups have raised alarms about online surveillance of social media chatter by city officials and police departments. Services like Media Sonar, Social Sentinel, and Geofeedia analyze online conversations, clueing
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Over the next six months, five professionals from outside of journalism will give WIRED readers an inside perspective on their changing fields. WIRED’s Resilience Residency was announced earlier this year to provide non-journalists the opportunity to report on how technology and science are transforming their own industries. Over 200 people answered our call for proposals,
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Chinese entrants swept all five categories, featuring technologies to improve civic life. But the advances could also be tools for surveillance. Four years ago, organizers created the international AI City Challenge to spur the development of artificial intelligence for real-world scenarios like counting cars traveling through intersections or spotting accidents on freeways. In the first
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In her final column, Megan lays down some hard truths about work exhaustion. Dear OOO, I’ve been sort of going through the motions at my job for several months now. For a while, I couldn’t quite figure out what was up, because I’ve always liked my job and been enthusiastic about doing it, but when
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