A federal appeals court has reinstated a Texas state law that bans “censorship” on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, allowing Texas to enforce the law while litigation continues. A US District Court judge had granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law in December, ruling that it violates the social networks’ First Amendment
Wow, my 401(k) is really taking a beating. Glad I put all that money into Bitcoin! Uhhhhh … The Plain View Weeks after introducing the iPhone in January 2007, Steve Jobs visited New York City to show his creation to top editors at a couple of publications. I hosted him for a lunch at Newsweek,
Earlier this year, former Apple software engineer Cher Scarlett received a distraught DM from an Apple retail employee at New York’s Grand Central Station. The employee had been working with a union to organize her store, but the partnership dissolved. Adrift, she messaged Scarlett to vent. The employee knew Scarlett as a founder of #AppleToo,
Encrypted messenger services have been quick to condemn the Commission’s proposal. Julia Weiss, a spokesperson for the Swiss messenger app Threema, says the company was not willing to undermine its users’ privacy in any way. “Building a surveillance system to proactively scan all private content was a terrible idea when Apple proposed it, and it’s
At a Mexican restaurant in North London a few weeks ago, a handful of small-time but remarkably discerning retail cryptocurrency investors predicted that terra and luna would crash. Several of them were scoffing at terra, or UST, a stablecoin whose price equivalence to the dollar is underpinned by algorithms and game theory rather than cash
On Monday evening, a few dozen shopkeepers and businesspeople gathered in the blue-carpeted hall of a conference center in the Italian-speaking city of Lugano, Switzerland, to learn how to start accepting cryptocurrency payments. Addressing them, alongside a lineup of accountants, entrepreneurs, and city officials like Mayor Michele Foletti, was Paolo Ardoino, the chief technology officer
Silicon Valley CEOs usually focus on the positives when announcing their company’s next big thing. In 2007, Apple’s Steve Jobs lauded the first iPhone’s “revolutionary user interface” and “breakthrough software.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai took a different tack at his company’s annual conference Wednesday when he announced a beta test of Google’s “most advanced conversational
For years, tech companies have relied on something called the Fitzpatrick scale to classify skin tones for their computer vision algorithms. Originally designed for dermatologists in the 1970s, the system comprises only six skin tones, a possible contributor to AI’s well-documented failures in identifying people of color. Now Google is beginning to incorporate a 10-skin
From the moment Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter and impose upon it his version of free speech, speculation swirled about whether he would let Donald Trump, the ultimate Twitter scofflaw, return to the platform. Well, the suspense is over. On Tuesday, Musk confirmed what most people suspected, announcing at a Financial Times
On March 29, Ukrainian forces rolled into the shattered streets of Irpin, northwest of Kyiv, littered with blackened wreckage and dead bodies. The destruction had knocked all 24 of the city’s cell towers offline, preventing traumatized survivors from letting friends and relatives know they were safe. “Most of those base stations had significant destruction,” says
There’s a lot of historical disinformation, and it’s one of the biggest issues in the Philippines. This ranges from outright denialism, saying that the atrocities during the martial law regime never happened. And there’s also the more extreme claims, like the “Marcos gold” myth. We know their wealth comes from stealing from the Filipino people
Now, even though there are a number of women-focused crypto spaces, Odeniran says women are still underrepresented. “I’ve been in spaces where I’m the only Black person, or the only woman, or the only Black woman,” she says. Odeniran says women need these spaces to get involved, but also for solidarity. Spaces where women are
So, I watched Elon Musk speak at TED, and I came away with a mix of empathy for the man and amazement at the depth of his self-importance. Since his subsequent decision to buy Twitter, most of the journalists I know have been either predicting the end of the internet as we know it or
In April 2017, Latice Fisher, a woman from Mississippi, arrived at a hospital suffering from a miscarriage. She was later indicted on a charge of second-degree murder. Prosecutors used her search history and her online purchase of the abortifacient drug misoprostol as evidence to allege that she had murdered her fetus. After Politico released a
When Jobs died, the big question surrounding Cook was whether he could nurture a product as groundbreaking as the iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad. In the 2010’s the company tried and failed to produce an autonomous electric car (an effort it has reportedly revived). But after a decade of Cook’s accomplishments becoming the stuff
As pandemic safety measures have lifted in the US, ride-hailing drivers risk deactivation for imposing their own mask rules. Nearly two weeks ago, Uber and Lyft removed in-app buttons that allowed US drivers to easily cancel rides if their passengers weren’t wearing masks—to protect themselves against Covid-19. “It’s an absolute tell for what they care
Upon release of GPT-2 in February 2019, OpenAI adopted a staggered approach to the release of the largest form of the model on the claim that text it generated was too realistic and dangerous to release. That approach sparked debate about how to responsibly release large language models as well as criticism that the elaborate
There’s a commercial for the cryptocurrency-trading platform FTX that has been airing throughout the NBA playoffs. It features superstar Steph Curry going through a goofy version of his day—eating cereal, making pasta, carving an ice sculpture—while narrator Shaquille O’Neal insists that Curry knows everything there is to know about crypto. An exasperated Curry repeatedly denies
After the “Voices of April” video was blocked, users re-uploaded it in ways they hoped would evade the censors’ detection. The video was posted upside down, its audio was paired with different images, and people posted fake movie posters that included a QR code linking to the clip. Hundreds also shared the video via the
Social networks grow up faster these days. It took Facebook eight years to reach 1 billion users but TikTok got there in just five. The fast-growing short-video app got squeezed by political and regulatory concerns at a younger age, too, over its Chinese ownership and influence on teen mental health. The pressure on TikTok is
I had come to watch Kelly film a haul. She skipped off to the living room to dance around—a warm-up—then led me upstairs to the carpeted second-floor landing where she does her shoots. There was a Christmas tree, a cat tower, and, in the middle of the landing, an iPad mounted on a tripod and
That touches on another distinction you make, between what you call a “caring CEO” and a micromanager. Where do you draw the line? You micromanage on key specific things. Being a great leader is choosing those battles, not fighting all of them. Make sure it’s mission-driven. In the chapter about quitting, you advocate leaving when
Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island have voted against unionizing, marking the first loss for the fledgling, worker-led Amazon Labor Union (ALU). When the tally concluded Monday, workers at the LDJ5 sortation center had voted 618 to 380 against union representation. The defeat marks a major letdown for the ALU, which had been
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the US Department of Defense turned to a team of machine learning and artificial intelligence experts to make sense of an avalanche of information about the conflict. “We have surged data scientists forward,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks told WIRED in a recent interview. These tech experts crafted code and
The SaksWorks coworking space in Greenwich, Connecticut, tucked inside what was once a Saks Fifth Avenue department store, feels like a well-appointed library where no one reads: fireplace, overstuffed couches, and large potted plants. When I visited on a Monday in March, the books lining each wall—grouped by color, not theme—made an appealing backdrop for
On a sweltering Tuesday last August, a new cryptocurrency was born. Called MiamiCoin, it was styled as a way for the crypto-savvy to support the Magic City, and maybe earn some cryptocurrency in the process. A tongue-twisting press release said that MiamiCoins were “programmable city-based tokens that unlock a new community-driven revenue stream for local
Jon Bell, a designer who previously worked on Twitter’s anti-abuse team, says weakening Twitter’s moderation would be a mistake. Outsiders—including Bell before he joined the company—often don’t realize how much work it takes to prevent the site from being overrun by toxic content, he says. Although Twitter has been criticized for not doing enough to
Freedom never comes for free. In Twitter’s case, the price was $44 billion, which Elon Musk will pay to liberate the platform from its responsibilities as a public company and transform it into a free speech Xanadu. Musk wants to open source the platform’s algorithms, exile spam bots, and allow people to tweet whatever they
“In this age of machine learning, it isn’t the algorithms, it’s the data,” says David Karger, a professor and computer scientist at MIT. Karger says Musk could improve Twitter by making the platform more open, so that others can build on top of it in new ways. “What makes Twitter important is not the algorithms,”
Within two hours of Twitter’s announcement that it had accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to buy the company and take it private, the first concerning signs flashed across Joe Mulhall’s screen. Mulhall is director of research at Hope Not Hate, a British antiracism and antifascism group that campaigns against bigotry. When Musk heralded his