Month: August 2022

Ariel Koren, a Google employee who became a face of worker protests against the company’s contract with the Israeli government, announced her resignation yesterday. The Jewish marketing manager says she faced retaliation from management and some colleagues for expressing pro-Palestinian views within the company. In October she joined other Google and Amazon employees in public

Unions have also disputed how railroads have used new  congressionally-mandated automated emergency braking systems to justify plans to remove conductors from trains, which would leave the engineer the sole human in charge of up to 3 miles of rail cars moving at up to 70 miles an hour. While the new braking system automatically stops

It’s a heady time to be a car executive. Lawmakers worldwide are pushing the auto industry to electrify, and fast. US companies are under pressure to do that without giving a boost to rival nations, primarily China. Reengineering decades of internal combustion-centric technology, business models, and supply chains should be easy, right? Meanwhile, another revolutionary

Hi, folks. We won’t have Fauci to kick around much longer. But we’ll always have Covid. The Plain View In late 1969, Daniel Ellsberg made a brave and consequential decision. As an employee of the RAND Corporation, a US government contractor, he had access to classified documents that contradicted top officials’ promises that the Vietnam

Bros says that the situation we face is not a market failure, but a regulatory one. Bros was involved in the liberalization of the French market and its integration into the European internal energy market. The liberalization process needs to take place, then control be given to a regulatory entity that is completely independent. At

A day after the six-month anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine, a new report reveals never before seen information about Russia’s filtration camp system in eastern Ukraine, in which civilians and prisoners of war are detained, interrogated, and, at times, forcibly deported to Russia. The researchers have also identified what they believe

When it comes to the electrified future of transportation, passenger vehicles get all the love. Automakers are eager to sell you their latest and greatest muscled up EVs, like Ford’s electric version of the F-150 truck. General Motors makes electric Hummers now. Tesla, and its fan base, exists. Regulators are helping out: California this week

In 2016, the WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann described home as “a feeling” rather than something you own. He was introducing WeLive, his company’s concept for rental apartments, where lease terms were flexible and apartments came furnished, right down to the linens and toiletries. The idea swapped traditional tenancy for “membership,” allowing people to move between

“If what Zatko alleges is true, Twitter has violated its users’ trust and deceived the Federal Trade Commission and its directors,” says Christopher Bouzy of Bot Sentinel, whose access to Twitter data was threatened with removal this week. As for the timing of that warning, which would restrict Bouzy from collecting data about deactivated and

In 2021, when Roshan Patel was raising his startup Walnut’s first round of funding, his email inbox overflowed with interest from investors. Venture capitalists loved his idea of applying the fast-rising concept of buy-now, pay-later, a $100 billion industry, to health care bills. Patel secured $3.6 million that spring and kept in touch with a

Rideout says about 7,000 patients had signed up to the RWT service. “It’s just not generating sufficient funds for us to be able to justify the expenditure or system integration the trust wants us to do,” Rideout says. “We just couldn’t afford to continue to invest.” The transition to a new provider won’t impact patient

So, I think consumers rightly and reasonably have become more cynical and more skeptical of a lot of these sorts of offerings. And I think that’s especially true going back to the car example. Part of the reason the story about BMW had that traction is the sense that, even though we don’t fully understand

Algorithms have been used to generate art for decades, but a new era of AI art began in January 2021, when AI development company OpenAI announced DALL-E, a program that used recent improvements in machine learning to generate simple images from a string of text. In April this year, the company announced DALL-E 2, which

Cryptocurrencies are often criticized for being bad for the planet. Every year, bitcoin mining consumes more energy than Belgium, according to the University of Cambridge’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. Ethereum’s consumption is usually pegged at roughly a third of Bitcoin’s, even if estimates vary. Although some 39 percent of the energy going into bitcoin mining

In 2017, Holliday contributed to a RAND report warning that resolving bias in machine learning requires hiring diverse teams and cannot be fixed through technical means alone. In 2020, he helped found the nonprofit Black in Robotics, which works to widen the presence of Black people and other minorities in the industry. He thinks two

Late last week, Google research scientist Fei Xia sat in the center of a bright, open-plan kitchen and typed a command into a laptop connected to a one-armed, wheeled robot resembling a large floor lamp. “I’m hungry,” he wrote. The robot promptly zoomed over to a nearby countertop, gingerly picked up a bag of multigrain

Last year in Hungary, six people discovered their phones had been hacked by NSO group’s Pegasus, after they were tipped off by the Pegasus Project, an investigation by 17 media outlets in different countries. There is no direct evidence the Hungarian government deployed this spyware against local journalists and activists, says Ádám Remport, legal officer

That stigma no longer seems to apply. There may not necessarily be more who lean right, but you no longer see stories with titles like “The Secret Republicans of Silicon Valley.” They’re tweeting! They even have a role model: Elon Musk, the closest thing that tech has to a philosopher-king. Last May, he startled people

In the Past year, Sebastián, a developer based in Ecuador, has received more LinkedIn messages from recruiters trying to poach him than ever before. One particular message caught his eye: It was from a Miami-based delivery startup. Sebastián, who asked that his last name not be used to avoid jeopardizing his current employment, was excited

Student advocates say that feature constitutes a prepayment penalty, which is forbidden under federal rules governing student loans. In its March announcement, the Department of Education declared that ISAs are by definition private education loans. The department has not yet determined whether that means that ISA payment caps violate the prepayment penalty rules, deputy press

Jared Mauch, the Michigan man who built a fiber-to-the-home internet provider because he couldn’t get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast, is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money. When we wrote about Mauch in January 2021, he was providing service to about 30 rural homes, including his own, with his

However, after several decades, it appears as if captcha’s dominance over the internet could be waning. Apple has decided to give the technology the boot, and its impact on things like email analytics and ad tracking have already had an impact. At its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, the company announced it would be

A Nebraska woman and her 17-year-old daughter are facing felony and misdemeanor charges related to allegedly performing an abortion after 20 weeks, which has long been illegal in the state, and concealing a fetus. Reports from the Lincoln Journal Star and Motherboard revealed this week that law enforcement collected evidence for the charges in part

Kapoor and Narayanan organized a workshop late last month to draw attention to what they call a “reproducibility crisis” in science that makes use of machine learning. They were hoping for 30 or so attendees but received registrations from over 1,500 people, a surprise that they say suggests issues with machine learning in science are

In the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin criminalized anything it considered “false information” about state entities or the war in Ukraine. In response, on March 6, TikTok suspended livestreaming and new content on the app for Russia-based users. But a new report reveals that certain Russia-based accounts continue to upload videos to

Very few people are ever on the receiving end of the FBI search warrant—even fewer end up escaping criminal charges. The fact that a former president of the United States now ranks among the former provides the strongest indication yet that Donald Trump may soon face the latter. Monday’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in

We all know climate change is going to be bad. How bad? Can we stop it from becoming catastrophic? (Choose your own definition of “catastrophic.”) Tell me your view in the comments here—and then, if you’re in the Bay Area on September 28, you might enjoy Re:WIRED Green, our one-day event on how human ingenuity

Rose Furigay, the former mayor of the city of Lamitan in the Philippines, was attending her daughter’s graduation when she died on July 24. A man shot and killed her and two others at the graduation ceremony at the Ateneo de Manila University’s School of Law. The shooting suspect was quickly identified as Chao Tiao

Perhaps seeing that the law is going to come for crypto sooner or later, the industry has been rallying behind an effort to pass a new regulatory framework just for crypto—one that spares the full wrath of the Howey test. Companies, including Coinbase, have petitioned the SEC to issue new, digital-currency-specific rules. In the Senate,

After decades of creating war machines and home cleaning appliances, iRobot agreed to be acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion, according to a joint statement by the two companies. If the deal goes through, it would give Amazon access to yet another wellspring of personal data: interior maps of Roomba owners’ homes. iRobot got its