Month: May 2022

When asked about Chatterjee, Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds provided a company statement confirming he was “terminated with cause.” Freidenfelds also provided a statement from Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president at Google Research, saying that “we firmly uphold our standard for respectful discourse among our researchers.” Gharamani’s statement did not mention Chatterjee by name. The episode adds

Last year, as bitcoin’s price rose as high as $68,000, miners were having a blast. Their profits, according to some estimates, were hovering just under 90 percent, and many of them decided to expand their operations at a frantic pace, bracing for an even larger 2022 bonanza. That windfall has not come to pass. Over

As the global chip shortage stretches toward the two-year mark, manufacturers are pulling some unusual tricks to keep production lines moving. Carmakers are using semiconductors taken from washing machines, rewriting code to use less silicon, and even shipping their products without some chips while promising to add them in later. With the shortage of semiconductors

In March 2021, a Turkish court ordered the news site Diken to remove a critical story about an ally of the country’s president, Recep Tayip Erdogan. Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish lawyer and digital rights activist, posted a tweet urging his followers to read the story before the decision went into effect. Then the court ruled

Hi, everyone. Another grim week. The plain truth is that we have got to stop selling weapons of war to random civilians. The Plain View In 1727, 21-year-old Benjamin Franklin invited, as he put it, “my most ingenious acquaintance[s] into a club of mutual improvement.” He dubbed his new club the Junto, after the Spanish

On an early April morning, around 4 am, a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. But a traveling autonomous vehicle, operated by the General Motors subsidiary Cruise without anyone inside, was blocking its path. While a human might have reversed

By 2016, Nishimura announced that the costs of running 4chan were simply too high and suggested the site’s closure was imminent. In 2018, Nishimura attempted to cleave the site in two—leaving 4chan intact, with its obscene and pornographic boards, but creating a safe-for-work alternative, attractive to advertisers, on 4channel. The separate domains continue to this

Microsoft just showed how artificial intelligence could find its way into many software applications—by writing code on the fly. At the Microsoft Build developer conference today, the company’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, demonstrated an AI helper for the game Minecraft. The non-player character within the game is powered by the same machine learning technology

Amazon’s organizing warehouse workers have been rattling the ecommerce giant, winning union elections, and staging walkouts to agitate for better working conditions. Now, one worker is trying a novel tack. Today, Daniel Olayiwola will become the first warehouse worker in company history to present his own resolution at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting. Earlier this year,

The appetite to travel again after more than two years of lockdowns and mask mandate debates has yielded one completely predictable result: Many airports and airlines are unprepared for a massive surge in traffic, and things might get much worse this summer. Spring Break 2022 was an opportunity to see whether air travel could scale

People have forgotten what unregulated markets are like. We’ve had 90 years of the SEC and reasonably regulated, well-behaved stock markets. And it turned out really well. People can trade in some sort of confidence that there are rules and so on. And people talk about crypto and Bitcoin and so forth as if this

Florida’s law remains blocked, and the state is keenly interested in the outcome of the Texas battle. Florida on Wednesday filed a Supreme Court brief supporting Texas, and the Florida brief was cosigned by 11 other states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and South Carolina. “Amici states have a strong

Hey, everyone. Elon now doesn’t want to buy Twitter because it can’t count its bots. You’d think an AI guy like him would let the robots speak. The Plain View Stratolaunch was based on a dream. Paul Allen, the unspeakably wealthy cofounder of Microsoft, had grown up in the thrall of space exploration, devouring books

With each passing year, emissions from cars keep rising. Global carbon emissions from passenger road vehicles measured 2.5 gigatonnes in 2000. By 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, that had increased to 3.6 gigatonnes. The reason? People keep buying gas-guzzlers. Around 15 million new vehicles were sold in the United States

Few people love car dealerships. They’re stressful and sprawling, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that someone is getting a raw deal. But as the auto industry increasingly goes electric and moves online, companies like Honda are rethinking every aspect of the purchase process—including the spaces in which it happens. Honda announced today that

Automated accounts have become more sophisticated and complex in recent years. Many fake accounts are partly operated by humans, as well as machines, or just amplify messages written by real people (what Menczer calls “cyborg accounts”). Other accounts use tricks designed to evade human and algorithmic detection, such as rapidly liking and unliking tweets or

The US government has said it will fund data-gathering on the conflict in Ukraine. In addition to laying the groundwork for war-crime prosecutions, the move would share critical, real-time data with humanitarian organizations. The newly established Conflict Observatory will use open source investigation techniques and satellite imagery to monitor the conflict in Ukraine and collect

So you’re saying that you could have done it earlier, but it was good to wait for blockchain because no one would have believed you otherwise? I’m not saying that. But there is a truth to that framing. It has less to do with blockchain and more to do with competition in the market for

The researchers warned that while AI is becoming more powerful and increasingly accessible to anyone, there is nearly no regulation or oversight for this technology and only limited awareness among researchers, like himself, of its potential malicious uses. “It is particularly tricky to identify dual use equipment/material/knowledge in the life sciences, and decades have been

On May 10, two fighter pilots performed a high-altitude proto-metaverse experiment. A few thousand feet above the desert of California, in a pair of Berkut 540 jets, they donned custom AR headsets to connect to a system that overlaid a ghostly, glowing image of a refueling aircraft flying alongside them in the sky. One of

Cryptocurrencies have long been seen as the Wild West of money transfers, but few online payment and money transfer platforms have been as blatant in appealing for illicit cash as one highlighted but not named in a memorandum opinion unsealed on May 13 in the US District Court in Washington, DC. The platform is apparently

As companies increasingly involve AI in their hiring processes, advocates, lawyers, and researchers have continued to sound the alarm. Algorithms have been found to automatically assign job candidates different scores based on arbitrary criteria like whether they wear glasses or a headscarf or have a bookshelf in the background. Hiring algorithms can penalize applicants for

In Suzhou, China, online toy shop owner Cameron Walker relies on Amazon to ship nearly a million packages for his business every year. The 42-year-old’s toy business, which designs and manufactures toys and craft materials in China and then sells into English-speaking markets including the UK, US, and Canada, has been running on Amazon’s third-party

A federal appeals court has reinstated a Texas state law that bans “censorship” on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, allowing Texas to enforce the law while litigation continues. A US District Court judge had granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law in December, ruling that it violates the social networks’ First Amendment

Wow, my 401(k) is really taking a beating. Glad I put all that money into Bitcoin! Uhhhhh … The Plain View Weeks after introducing the iPhone in January 2007, Steve Jobs visited New York City to show his creation to top editors at a couple of publications. I hosted him for a lunch at Newsweek,

Earlier this year, former Apple software engineer Cher Scarlett received a distraught DM from an Apple retail employee at New York’s Grand Central Station. The employee had been working with a union to organize her store, but the partnership dissolved. Adrift, she messaged Scarlett to vent. The employee knew Scarlett as a founder of #AppleToo,

Encrypted messenger services have been quick to condemn the Commission’s proposal. Julia Weiss, a spokesperson for the Swiss messenger app Threema, says the company was not willing to undermine its users’ privacy in any way. “Building a surveillance system to proactively scan all private content was a terrible idea when Apple proposed it, and it’s

At a Mexican restaurant in North London a few weeks ago, a handful of small-time but remarkably discerning retail cryptocurrency investors predicted that terra and luna would crash. Several of them were scoffing at terra, or UST, a stablecoin whose price equivalence to the dollar is underpinned by algorithms and game theory rather than cash

On Monday evening, a few dozen shopkeepers and businesspeople gathered in the blue-carpeted hall of a conference center in the Italian-speaking city of Lugano, Switzerland, to learn how to start accepting cryptocurrency payments. Addressing them, alongside a lineup of accountants, entrepreneurs, and city officials like Mayor Michele Foletti, was Paolo Ardoino, the chief technology officer

Silicon Valley CEOs usually focus on the positives when announcing their company’s next big thing. In 2007, Apple’s Steve Jobs lauded the first iPhone’s “revolutionary user interface” and “breakthrough software.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai took a different tack at his company’s annual conference Wednesday when he announced a beta test of Google’s “most advanced conversational