The percentage of US workers represented by a union has fallen for decades, down to 10 percent last year. But unions have recently scored wins in tech, drawing in the retail clerks at Apple, warehouse workers at Amazon, video game testers at Microsoft, and coders in corporate offices at places like Google. Pockets of workers disenchanted with tech companies’ handling
Month: February 2023
James Jordan had worked as an Uber driver in Los Angeles for five and a half years by the spring of 2022. But in late March, after a flurry of customer complaints, Jordan found that his account had been permanently deactivated, leaving the single father of five, for whom Uber was his only source of
In December 2022, an investigation by The Caravan found dozens of Hindu nationalist YouTube channels that were broadcasting extremist content, with viewing figures in the hundreds of millions. Senior BJP leaders had been interviewed on some of the channels, which were “rapidly out-performing mainstream news channels in terms of their reach.” Amnesty International’s Patel says that
The proposed Maryland bills were developed with input from a working group that saw state lawmakers meet with prosecutors and public defenders, law enforcement agencies, and civil liberties groups like the ACLU and the Innocence Project. Maryland is a unique place to debate face recognition regulation, says Andrew Northrup, an attorney in the forensics division
NuScale says it stands by cost estimates based on its new design, and that it has long been in touch with regulators about the revisions. “We don’t expect any surprises,” says José Reyes, NuScale’s CTO and cofounder. UAMPS spokesperson LaVarr Webb acknowledges the uncertainties of the design approval process, but says that the $89 price
The jump in online car sales came in part from consumers doing more of everything online during the pandemic. Automakers responded to the moment by accelerating their existing plans for digital sales. General Motors had launched a website years ago allowing customers to find, customize, and order a vehicle, but it saw a 50 percent spike
“Many people here and across the world were pissed off about some of his posts,” says Pranskevičius, who is based in Kyiv. “But what we’ve seen is that Starlink has continued to work. It’s been invaluable to most individuals and also to people on the front line, where there might be no connectivity at all.” An
Earlier this month, entrepreneur Corey Jaskolski pulled out a pen and drew his best guess at what the surveillance balloon shot down by a US jet would have looked like from space. Then he fed the sketch and “a gob” of recent satellite images from the area where the balloon was taken down into algorithms developed by
In 1987, then-CEO of Apple Computer, John Sculley, unveiled a vision that he hoped would cement his legacy as more than just a former purveyor of soft drinks. Keynoting at the EDUCOM conference, he presented a 5-minute, 45-second video of a product that built upon some ideas he had presented in his autobiography the previous year.
The defense industry is ready to supply them. “We are entering the new era of the machine-versus-machine battlefield,” says Johannes Pinl, CEO and founder of Monaco-based defense company MARSS, which is building an autonomous drone defense system designed to target the Shahed kamikaze drones. He thinks Russia is already using the Iranian drones autonomously (although weapons
When Cindy first tried the Artemisia Anti-Hemorrhage Formula dietary supplements that she purchased on Amazon, she had no reason to suspect that she was eating donkey. A California native and lifelong vegetarian, she assumed that the world’s largest online retailer had vetted the bottle’s claims of being made from “100 percent pure, natural herbs.” But
Two days after Russian troops retreated from Kherson on November 11, Ukraine Railways CEO Alexander Kamyshin arrived in the city accompanied by Ukrainian special forces and a small team of railway workers. They reached the central train station even before the regular army arrived to secure the city, and got to work. Six days later,
Last Thursday, the US State Department outlined a new vision for developing, testing, and verifying military systems—including weapons—that make use of AI. The Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy represents an attempt by the US to guide the development of military AI at a crucial time for the technology. The document
Nicolae Fratea is on a mission to purge his Facebook timeline of weird political adverts. Every couple of days, he’s presented with accounts that, on the surface, look innocent—they often share the same innocuous profile picture of a cathedral in Chisinau, Moldova. But when he scrolls past, these pages present him with what he describes
“We hope that Congress will explore solutions to their concerns about TikTok that won’t have the effect of censoring the voices of millions of Americans,” says TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter. “The swiftest and most thorough way to address national security concerns is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement that we worked with them on
At the one-year anniversary of its launch, the Buy Nothing app had been downloaded 600,000 times, but only 91,000 people were regularly using it, not many more than at the beginning. Meanwhile, the Facebook groups from which the founders had disengaged were thriving without them. Global membership had surpassed 7 million. When I asked what Rockefeller
Teach a robot to open a door, and it ought to unlock a lifetime of opportunities. Not so for one of Alphabet’s youngest subsidiaries, Everyday Robots. Just over a year after graduating from Alphabet’s X moonshot lab, the team that trained over a hundred wheeled, one-armed robots to squeegee cafeteria tables, separate trash and recycling, and yes,
Recent laws in both Texas and Florida have sought to impose greater restrictions on the way platforms can and cannot police content. Gonzalez v. Google takes a different track, focusing on platforms’ failure to deal with extremist content. Social media platforms have been accused of facilitating hate speech and calls to violence that have resulted in real-world harm,
Henry Kirk always thought he would eventually leave his job as an engineering manager at Google and start his own company. But when he became one of the 12,000 employees let go by the tech giant in January, he decided his time had come—albeit in an earlier and unexpected fashion. Kirk and five others laid off from
Meta’s new subscription service looks pretty familiar. For between $11.99 and $14.99 a month, Instagram and Facebook users will get a blue “verified” mark, access to better security features, and more visibility in search. Their comments will also be prioritized. The package has strong echoes of Twitter’s Blue subscription service, launched under new owner Elon
Wakeling has been particularly impressed with Harvey’s prowess at translation. It’s strong at mainstream law, but struggles on specific niches, where it’s more prone to hallucination. “We know the limits, and people have been extremely well informed on the risk of hallucination,” he says. “Within the firm, we’ve gone to great lengths with a big
Carla Francome campaigns for better cycling routes in Haringey, North London, where she moved a few years ago in search of a community—“an area where I could make friends that would go to the park with me on a Saturday,” she says. “And where there are cafés nearby, and everything is in walking distance.” Her
After GNI rejected their demands, workers called a strike from January 11 to 14. On the last day, more than 500 security personnel were dispatched to the industrial park. Workers who were present during the strike say that security forces fired pellet guns at the crowd. “They fired pellets everywhere. It was chaos,” says one GNI worker.
Juneau gets most of its electricity from lakes that offer a clean hydropower resource. This means that it is particularly ecofriendly to install electrified heating systems in the city. But, to be fair, Juneau lies at the warmer end of the state and doesn’t tend to experience the same blisteringly cold winter weather that can afflict
Roblox is testing a tool that could accelerate the process of building and altering in-game objects by getting artificial intelligence to write the code. The tool lets anyone playing Roblox create items such as buildings, terrain, and avatars; change the appearance and behavior of those things; and give them new interactive properties by typing what they
Alphabet pulled the plug on Loon in early 2021. It was a business decision, not a reflection on the technology—basically, its mission became moot as remote areas managed to get connected without receiving signals from the mutant offspring of Phileas Fogg. Still, the Loon team working in partnership with a company called Raven Aerostar (more recently the
During a trip home to Johannesburg, South Africa, while completing an engineering master’s program in Japan, Pelonomi Moiloa attended the largest machine learning community gathering she’d ever seen in Africa, just a few miles from where she grew up. In all, 600 people from 22 nations attended 2017’s Deep Learning Indaba, held at the University
Britta Eder’s list of phone contacts is full of people the German state considers to be criminals. As a defense lawyer in Hamburg, her client list includes anti-fascists, people who campaign against nuclear power, and members of the PKK, a banned militant Kurdish nationalist organization. For her clients’ sake, she’s used to being cautious on
“It’s kind of a last-man-standing situation,” says Fred Thiel, CEO of US-based Marathon Digital Holdings. His crypto-mining company, among the largest in the world, has found itself—like the rest of the industry—in the path of a perfect storm. Over the past year, the sector has been battered by a slump in the price of bitcoin,
Tesla told the agency this week that customers had filed warranty claims matching the situations highlighted by NHTSA on at least 18 occasions between spring 2019 and fall 2022. The filing notes that the carmaker said it was not aware of any injuries or deaths related to the flaws detected by the agency. The NHTSA