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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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