Month: November 2022

One effect of AB 481 is to add local oversight to hardware like the kind obtained through a US Department of Defense program that sends billions of dollars of military equipment such as armored vehicles and ammunition to local police departments. Equipment from the program was used against protesters in the wake of the police killings

“I’ve lost my social skills!” I texted to a friend while en route to my first in-person conference in four years. The workshop itself wasn’t new—I’d been to the same one every other year for the past decade. But between the last live one in 2018, the virtual one in 2020, and this one in 2022,

Electric vehicles have never been more popular. Just about every automaker is in the midst of an electrification effort, spurred on by impending government regulations around the world aimed at reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. But is the movement having an effect? Here in the US, plug-in vehicles are selling better than ever, despite

Rebecca was getting ready to start her work day at Apple this June when she heard that the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. The decision would trigger laws banning or restricting abortion in 13 states, including Texas, where she lived. Gutted by the news, the Austin-based corporate employee debated skipping work, but pressed ahead.

Removing child exploitation is “priority #1”, Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk declared last week. But, at the same time, following widespread layoffs and resignations, just one staff member remains on a key team dedicated to removing child sexual abuse content from the site, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who

Hundreds of thousands of investors just had billions picked from their collective e-pockets. Yet, crypto remains the untouchable queen in the antiquated marble halls of the US Capitol. Sure, a handful of lawmakers are waving—or at least limply holding—red flags after cryptocurrency exchange FTX imploded earlier this month. Even as hundreds of millions of dollars

To ensure Genesis wasn’t hamstrung by the loss, its parent company, Digital Currency Group (DCG), bailed it out. But in the aftermath, Genesis cut 20 percent of its workforce to reduce costs and Michael Moro, its longtime CEO, stepped down. Genesis again found itself on the wrong side of a collapse earlier this month; when FTX filed for

Jane—not her real name—has wanted a baby for years. The Twitter employee, whose identity has been protected because she is unable to speak to the press under the terms of her contract, has a blocked fallopian tube. “I’m not young,” Jane says. “So basically, my chances of conceiving naturally were quite low. But with this,

In 2014, I bought 25,000 dogecoin as a joke. By 2021, it was briefly worth over $17,000. Problem was, I couldn’t remember the password. Determined to get my coins back, I embarked on a journey that exposed me to online hackers, the mathematics behind passwords, and a lot of frustration. Although most people don’t have

The FTC’s treatment of Facebook helps illustrate the danger to Musk and Twitter. In 2019, following a complaint alleging violation of a 2012 order, the agency hit the company with a record $5 billion in fines, and named CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally responsible for compliance and certification of documents under penalty of perjury. Heavy fines could

Then there’s Mastodon’s code. As Truth Social was under development in 2021, the Software Freedom Conservancy accused it of violating a free and open source software licensing agreement for taking Mastodon’s code. Anyone can use Mastodon’s code, but they must make the source code public. Truth Social called its code “proprietary,” which violated the licensing agreement.

Elon Musk reactivated Donald Trump’s Twitter account last weekend, reversing a ban imposed in January 2021 after his posts were deemed to have incited violence at the US Capitol. Trump has not started using his account again, but social media researchers have warned for months that his return could bring a wave of division and disinformation on

Decentralized exchanges differ from their centralized counterparts (like FTX, Binance, Coinbase, and others) in a few important ways. Most notably, instead of relying on an intermediary to match buyers with sellers, DEXs let users transact on a peer-to-peer basis—and keep custody of their own funds. This arrangement is one example of what’s known as decentralized

Changes to the way Google handles search rankings are intended to push up content from real people, not content farms optimizing content for search engines, and that works in tandem with other efforts like improving results for product-review pages, Sullivan says. Not that there’s anything wrong with SEO, the practice of optimizing web pages so

The tech industry might be reeling from a wave of layoffs, a dramatic crypto-crash, and ongoing turmoil at Twitter, but despite those clouds some investors and entrepreneurs are already eyeing a new boom—built on artificial intelligence that can generate coherent text, captivating images, and functional computer code. But that new frontier has a looming cloud of its own. A class-action lawsuit filed in a

Unlike Polis, Twitter’s project has to find consensus not for one question at a time but for any conceivable controversy on the platform. Community Notes does that by estimating the diversity of viewpoints among participants, based on how different users rate the helpfulness of notes from others. Twitter’s version of bridging the divide is to

Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to just over 11 years in prison for defrauding investors by falsely claiming her technology could detect diseases from a drop of blood. The sentencing of the former Theranos CEO marks the end of the young founder’s Silicon Valley saga—one in which she wooed investors with empty promises and idealism

Why do it? When I wrote about Musk’s tweeting earlier this year, I leaned toward the idea that Twitter itself had led him into this 280-character recklessness. I described Twitter as a superhighway from your foot to your mouth. But now that he owns the company, it’s gotten worse—and seemingly more intentional. Musk seems to

“It’s a good learning moment for the industry,” says Hayden Adams, creator of UniSwap, the world’s largest decentralized exchange (DEX). “The fact that [FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried] had the ability to do [what he did] speaks to the fact he was building a centralized product over which he had full control.” Unlike traditional exchanges, which

“Twitter has seemingly neglected security for a very long time, and with all the changes, there is risk for sure,” says David Kennedy, CEO of the incident response firm TrustedSec, who formerly worked at the NSA and with the United States Marine Corps signal intelligence unit. “There’s a lot of work to be done to

“I’m a white person, and despite there being a range of skin tones available for emoji these days, I still just choose the original Simpsons-esque yellow. Is this insensitive to people of color?” —True Colors Dear True, I don’t think it’s possible to determine what any group of people, categorically, might find insensitive—and I won’t

“Me and other people who have tried to reach out have gotten dead ends,” Benavidez says. “And when we’ve reached out to those who are supposedly still at Twitter, we just don’t get a response.” Even when researchers can get through to Twitter, responses are slow—sometimes taking more than a day. Jesse Littlewood, vice president

Lyft customers know it as the bright-pink app to tap when they need a car ride or to rent a bike or scooter. Today the company announced it wants to be the place to go to care for your own car. Lyft’s app will offer a way to find and reserve parking in 16 cities,

From the moment Elon Musk closed his Twitter deal, the network’s diehard users have taken steps to eulogize it. People have downloaded their own archive from Twitter. Others have started threads with screenshots of their all-time favorite tweets. And there’s an ongoing Google doc cataloging Twitter trends and memes, a guide that could serve one

So, are you on Mastodon yet? If you’re looking for advice on how to join and find your friends, we’ve got you covered. If you’re trying to decide when and whether to migrate, what factors are you weighing? Let me know in the comments below. The Wages of Hubris Are … ? Tech news hasn’t

Following two weeks of extreme chaos at Twitter, users are joining and fleeing the site in droves. More quietly, many are likely scrutinizing their accounts, checking their security settings, and downloading their data. But some users are reporting problems when they attempt to generate two-factor authentication codes over SMS: Either the texts don’t come or

In 18 years working in bicycles, Eric Bjorling had never seen anything like April 2020. With no end to the pandemic in sight, people were desperate for things to do. “They had time on their hands, they had kids, they needed to physically go outside and do something,” says Bjorling, head of brand marketing at

What did you make of Elon Musk poking fun of Mastodon in a recent tweet? Honestly, it was really a good thing for us. It’s free advertising, and he’s just making a fool of himself. I could barely see the screenshot because the screen was so dirty, but I think he was making fun of

That means it will be very difficult for the thieves to abscond with their profits in a spendable form without being identified, says Michelle Lai, a cryptocurrency privacy advocate, investor, and consultant who says she’s been tracking the movements of the stolen FTX funds with “morbid fascination.” But the real question, Lai says, is whether

Aaron Kaplan, a securities attorney and co-CEO of trading platform Prometheum, says that although the final outcome for FTX and its customers is not yet crystal clear, there is precedent in scenarios such as this for people never to recover their funds. Unfortunately, those caught up in the collapse are left with little in the