Read the best tech articles from around the internet, or watch the most insightful technology videos from platforms like Youtube, Vimeo or leading tech publishers like The Verge, Wired, Fast Company, Techcrunch and many more.
Toyota revealed plans to build a prototype “city” of the future on a 175-acre site at the base of Mt. Fuji in Japan. Called the Woven City, it will be a fully connected ecosystem powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?
Nokia dominated the first decade of the cellphone boom, becoming a beloved brand around the world and pumping billions of dollars into the Finnish economy. Then, along came Steve Jobs and his iPhone in 2007 and ruined everything. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost. Nokia sold its phone business to Microsoft. And Finns took a serious hit to their country pride.
Many US-based companies continue to consign their moderators to the margins, shipping their platforms’ digital waste to “special economic zones” in the Global South. The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech.
Salesforce Park, in downtown San Francisco, sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center. It is a lush, five-and-a-half-acre rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows and meticulously landscaped, climatically harmonious, drought-tolerant flora. San Francisco’s newest public space reflects Big Tech’s influence—and a city’s anxieties.
Life in the 21st century, we are told, is faster than ever. Time is scarce, the pace of everyday life is accelerating, and everyone complains about how busy they are. For all the smart tech, we still feel pressed for time. Are digital services the problem, or are we humans to blame?
Whitney Wolfe Herd set out to build a safer dating app for women, but it’s not clear that she’s made a measurable difference. According to a company user survey, about a third of Bumble women had received lewd photos from men, whether through text or other social media that Bumble couldn’t control.
Transactions have given rise to a complex data-selling ecosystem. At the heart of it are credit card processing networks, including Visa, American Express, and Mastercard, the latter of which took in $4.1 billion in 2019 for services that include marketing analytics as well as fraud detection.
Undercover reporter, Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz, spent six months this year working at Cat@Net, which describes itself as an “ePR agency comprising specialists who build a positive image of companies, private individuals and public institutions – mostly in social media.”.
A deep learning model developed by NVIDIA Research turns rough doodles into highly realistic scenes using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Dubbed GauGAN, the tool is like a smart paintbrush, converting segmentation maps into lifelike images.
Twenty years after it sputtered onto the web, it’s now a de facto pillar in our fact-checking infrastructure. Its pages often top Google search and feed the knowledge panels that appear at the top of those results. Big Tech’s own efforts to stop misinformation also rely upon Wikipedia.
Game-making algorithms are almost as old as video games, but their use has typically been limited to generating terrain and other simple digital art. The next frontier is using increasingly sophisticated machine-learning techniques to design entirely new kinds of games that have, to date, evaded the human imagination.
The length of time our “collective attention” is on any given event has grown shorter, and topics become popular and then drop out of public view at an accelerating rate. It’s no surprise if it feels harder and harder to dwell deeply on any topic.
The second half of humanity is joining the internet. People in countries like India will change the internet, and it will change them. You have a whole bunch of languages that don’t enjoy very good support in terms of web browsers or input. And you have a whole bunch of people who can’t actually read or write.
The untold story of how Homepolish’s extremely Instagrammable house of cards came tumbling down. Instead of building a design juggernaut, the founder constructed something much more precarious — a fear-based culture where sound strategy couldn’t flourish, and where the pressure to grow led to reckless decision-making.
I recently did an online privacy checkup: Google was sharing my creditworthiness with third parties. If you would like Hearst, the publishing giant, to stop sharing your physical mailing address with third parties, you have to mail a physical letter with your request to the company’s lawyers.
Most transport apps have become walled gardens, each hoping you will choose one brand for all your getting-around needs. The more important battle is raging under the surface: A battle not over how you get from A to B, but over who gets to manage your journey.
For all the triumph of America’s new planes and tanks during World War II, a silent reaper stalked the battlefield: accidental deaths and mysterious crashes that no amount of training ever seemed to fix. At first, pilots took the blame for crashes. The true cause, however, lay with the design. That lesson led us into our user-friendly age—but there’s peril to come.
In one of the largest state-sponsored computer hacks ever detected, Qatar’s proxies cyberattacked more than 1,400 high-status and ordinary citizens who were exercising their free-speech rights in democracies across North America, the Middle East, Asia and Europe, according to U.S. court filings.
Just one per cent of Sweden’s GDP circulates as cash. As debates over the need for cash rage along lines of age, wealth and location, the country is looking to create a digital currency.
Were ride-hailing companies doing enough to protect passengers from negligent drivers? Maybe Grab’s growth and its perceived triumph over Uber the day before my accident had come at a cost. Was it possible that, for all the convenience ride-hailing services offered, they were making cities less safe?
The military wants future super-soldiers to control robots with their thoughts. The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we’re born with and beyond the ones we can organically attain.
What is happening on the other side of the barrier? There we find people who respond to state controls with creativity and spunk. While some spend their days trawling cat videos, others create oases of subversion within the reality that they’ve been dealt.
Mexico’s drug war has left tens of thousands of casualties in secret graves. Now, the mothers of the missing are digging them up, armed with iron rods and quadcopter drones.
It started with an Elon Musk Twitter meltdown and ended with a fake mass shooter. A former security manager says the company also spied and spread misinformation.
Travel providers now use artificial intelligence software to re-price their offerings, sometimes dozens of times a day, to maximize revenue. For business and leisure travelers, the result is a variation of the cat-and-mouse game, where travel companies are almost always the cat.
One Twitter user recently posted that her family never got to say goodbye to her grandpa when he died a few years ago, but when she visited her grandpa’s farm through Street View, there he was, sitting at the end of the road. Thousands of people responded with their own Google Street View stories.
Lindsay Ellis is a video essayist. She makes videos commenting on films, TV shows, and other media. More than 860,000 people subscribe to her YouTube channel. But there is also this difficult aspect to what Ellis does: online hate.
Seizures of counterfeit products at U.S. borders have increased 10-fold over the past two decades as e-commerce sales have boomed. The total value of seized goods – if they had been real – reached nearly $1.4 billion in 2018. Most are coming from mainland China or Hong Kong.
A mobile-storytelling platform called Quibi has loomed on the content horizon, promising that, when its app launches this spring, it will be a home to a huge library of short-form shows made specifically for your phone. But Snapchat has been operating in that space for years. It’s harder than you’d think.
For $12 an hour, “data associates” listened to snippets of random conversations and jotted down every word on their laptops. Amazon would only say the work was critical to a top-secret speech-recognition product. The clips included recordings of intimate moments inside people’s homes.
For almost two decades after becoming world champion in 1985, Garry Kasparov dominated the game with a ferocious style of play and an equally ferocious swagger. In 1997, at the height of his powers, Kasparov was crushed and cowed by an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue.
I spend my days staring into the faces and homes of my colleagues on my computer. I see what colors they’ve painted their walls, what sort of art they’ve chosen to hang up. I see whether they sit at a desk or on a couch. I watch them watch themselves, see them fix their hair, and straighten their posture.
The reality is that there’s no new technology but a technique that allows hearing sounds as if you were in the middle of it. That feeling of music that runs through your head, thanks to the use of headphones, is the result of equalization techniques, panning and effects combined together.
This essay is going to scare you. There is a better-than-average chance that, at some point in the last several years, your personal information was stolen. Not something small like a credit card account, but the good stuff, your Social Security number coupled with your birthdate.
