In 2008, the soccer player Mathieu Flamini moved from Arsenal, where he’d spent four years as a tough but classy midfielder, to AC Milan in Italy’s Serie A. At the same time, unknown to his colleagues in the dressing room at the San Siro, he quietly embarked on another new journey. Flamini, now 38, grew
Month: October 2022
Elon Musk is buying Twitter for $44 billion after the least sexy will-they-won’t-they saga of all time. And while Musk attempted to reassure advertisers yesterday that “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences,” the acquisition raises practical questions about what the social network’s nearly 240 million active
A week before Elon Musk closed his $44 billion Twitter deal, Cassie LaBelle, a writer who is part of a transgender community on Twitter, started a Discord server. “I don’t know if Musk is gonna buy & destroy Twitter or not,” she wrote, but she hoped her server would be an interesting experiment. Beyond that,
2012: Facebook plays catch-up with mobile. Not many people realize that Facebook had an existential scare when the action in computing shifted from the desktop to our pockets. This made Zuckerberg paranoid about being behind again when the next big thing arrived. He was determined to avoid what Clay Christensen called the Innovator’s Dilemma, which
After months spent trying to undo the deal he initiated, Tesla founder Elon Musk will pay $44 billion to take ownership of Twitter, honoring an agreement made in April. The news was confirmed this morning by the US Securities and Exchange Commission after a day of high drama at Twitter. Late yesterday, The Washington Post
Self-driving car developer Argo AI suddenly announced that it was closing its doors this week. Some of its 1,800-odd employees, already reduced by summer layoffs, are to be offered jobs to “work on automated technology with either Ford or Volkswagen,” Catherine Johnsmeyer, an Argo spokesperson, said in a statement. The two auto giants had sunk
After months spent trying to undo the deal he initiated, Tesla founder Elon Musk now owns Twitter. While official confirmation is still pending, Musk has reportedly wasted no time making big changes. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the company’s chief executive, Parag Agarwal; chief financial officer Ned Segal; general counsel Sean Edgett and Vijaya
Drivers like Hubert might be skeptical of Uber’s deals, but within some unions there is real hostility toward the company. “We don’t expect anything from Uber. It is a predatory multinational that cares little about workers, little about its customers, and tries to impose its rules by force on the states where it operates,” says
Next week, a law takes effect that will change the internet forever—and make it much more difficult to be a tech giant. On November 1, the European Union’s Digital Markets Act comes into force, starting the clock on a process expected to force Amazon, Google, and Meta to make their platforms more open and interoperable
In the years since, a wave of investment from companies large and small has spread face recognition around the world, has installed always-listening virtual assistants into homes, and has seen AI technology become integral to just about every gadget, app, and service. The race is now on to find the applications of generative AI that
So what, you might ask—it’s just plastic! After all, if you accidentally swallow a shirt button, it’ll pass straight through you, right? But when it’s broken down into microscopic fibers, spherules, and shards, it behaves very differently. These particles leach out toxic chemicals, including carcinogens. Their rough surfaces snag other toxins and microbes, transporting them
Other community members have attacked Aptos for its failure to release the tokenomics—a description of the distribution of tokens, how they will function, and when they will be released into circulation—ahead of the launch date, which is considered bad form. It’s a little like asking someone to enter into a contract without first setting out
The prices seem almost too good to be true: Lenovo wireless earbuds for $3.70, an eyebrow pencil for 59 cents, two outdoor solar lamps for $6.39—all delivered for free. Welcome to Temu, which brings the rock-bottom prices and frenetic energy of Chinese ecommerce to US shoppers. Temu’s website and mobile app launched on September 1,
The new appeals process can save an app after it has been rejected, but developers say the most frustrating and time-consuming aspects of Apple’s process appear unchanged. An app can be bogged down by weeks or months of written exchanges with reviewers via Apple’s App Store Connect website before it is formally rejected. In 2020,
“Thousands of documents are great, but millions of lines of data are better. And so when you look at call detail records or open source intelligence research or you look at social media, those types of things can tell you a lot,” Riggleman says. “And I think it can actually direct the way that you
Some people have argued that the stunt discredited the wider climate movement. I don’t buy that for a second. Instead, I suspect it is far more likely to produce a helpful radical flank effect, making more moderate forces in the climate movement, such as the UK’s Green Party, more appealing to the mainstream. In fact,
Industry experts say the problem will only get worse. “In 10 years, I see a lot fewer shops, and I see a lot more people looking for shops,” says Rick White, who coaches auto repair shop owners through his company, 180biz. An industry survey taken late last year found 96 percent of shops reporting delays,
Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer declined to answer WIRED’s questions on how the company’s business is changing, the role of advertising in that, or whether ATT was related to its ad plans. “A user’s data belongs to them, and they should get to decide whether to share their data and with whom,” Bauer says. ATT’s rules
The strip club industry has its problems. Dancers have been suing clubs for decades for misclassifying them as independent contractors when they claimed they should be employees. Although AB 5 did mean dancers received unemployment insurance during the pandemic, it was not the solution dancers were hoping for. “It didn’t really answer a problem I
The Amazon Labor Union, which made history in April by unionizing the first Amazon warehouse in the US, lost its latest campaign today, at a facility in Schodack, New York. Workers voted 406 to 206 against joining the union, the second loss out of ALU’s three unionization campaigns at Amazon warehouses. The result is a
When Chinese-language misinformation appears on US platforms like YouTube or Facebook, activists say it seems to get less actively moderated than English content, a pattern that has also been documented for other communities in the US that use languages other than English, particularly Spanish. Although Meta and Twitter have both announced efforts to label misleading
When I present this very mundane answer to him, Broeksmit is unconvinced. He keeps creating new tokens, watching their value skyrocket, then deflate a few days later. But the reality of what is going on eventually catches up with him. As of February 19, the balance of his wallet is zero. (So is mine.) His
Another part of the keynote was a scripted conversation between Meta’s vice president of metaverse, Vishal Shah, and his boss, chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. After touting the variety of virtual environments people have created in Horizon Worlds, Shah rhapsodized about how great it will be when people can wander in via the web. The
Anyone could have seen the blow coming. What the world didn’t expect was quite how much Alex Jones would have to pay for weaponizing disinformation and piling misery onto the Sandy Hook families as they mourned their lost loved ones. Jones was found liable for defaming the parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary
In November 2021, Facebook announced it would delete face recognition data extracted from images of more than 1 billion people and stop offering to automatically tag people in photos and videos. Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University, in Canada, told WIRED at the time that he considered the policy change a PR tactic
“The Biden administration believes that the hype around the transformative potential of AI in military applications is real,” says Allen of CSIS. “The United States also has a pretty good understanding of which computer chips are going into Chinese military AI systems, and they are American, which is viewed as unacceptable.” The new export restrictions
When Hurricane Ian churned over Florida in late September, it left a trail of destruction from high winds and flooding. But a week after the storm passed, some people in three of the worst-hit counties saw an unexpected beacon of hope. Nearly 3,500 residents of Collier, Charlotte, and Lee Counties received a push notification on
Pfefferkorn also encourages asking your school to perform an audit of its monitoring software, which could reveal what kind of content the algorithm is tracking and how. An audit might reveal whether the software is truly effective or is picking up on false alarms. Encourage your school to document and inform parents of exactly what
Many tech companies were fully remote before the pandemic, but the burgeoning Reddit community r/Overemployed, a community of 92,300 members that fields advice and tips on how to juggle jobs without anyone noticing, shows how workers freed from their offices are able to operate under the radar. Marten runs a weekly advice session on the
In 2001, the company lawyers had arranged a meeting with RIAA and MPAA—big teams of lawyers flying in from the East Coast to meet in their lawyers’ office in Beverly Hills on a Friday. On that Wednesday, they found an internal memo leaked from the organizations they were supposed to meet that called them “Public