The news: Facebook has launched its “Off-Facebook Activity” tool, which lets users manage and delete the data that third-party apps and websites share with Facebook. It was originally called the “Clear History” button when it was announced in 2018, as the company came under fire for sharing …Continue reading
Meet America’s newest military giant: Amazon
In July, when President Donald Trump was in the Oval Office with the Dutch prime minister, he took a few moments to answer questions from reporters. His comments, in typical fashion, covered disparate subjects—from job creation to the “squad” of congresswomen he …Continue reading
Two former Twitter employees have been charged with spying for Saudi Arabia
The news: The US Justice Department has charged two men who used to work at Twitter with accessing personal information on critics of the Saudi Arabian regime, which they collected and passed on to Saudi officials, the Washington Post reports.
Bill Gates explains why we should all be optimists
Look at how long people are living, the reduction of under-five mortality, the reduction in how poorly women are treated. Globally, inequity is down: poorer countries are getting richer faster than the richer countries are getting richer. The bulk of humanity lives …Continue reading
Alibaba already has a voice assistant way better than Google’s
In May, Google made quite the splash when it unveiled Duplex, its eerily humanlike voice assistant capable of making restaurant reservations and salon appointments. It seemed to mark a new milestone in speech generation and natural-language understanding, and it pulled back the …Continue reading
A big tech company is working to free the internet from big tech companies
Perhaps the most grandiose proclamation made by blockchain enthusiasts is that the technology, and others like it, can form the basis for a new kind of internet, one in which control over access to websites is distributed among users instead of staying …Continue reading
Don’t just ditch Facebook—start your own social-media site instead
Fed up with political propaganda bots and discriminatory online ads? You may think the answer is to delete your Facebook and Twitter profiles and head offline, but there might be a better way: build your own networks. “These systems are affecting billions …Continue reading
Getting e-mail on your skin is actually a thing now, thanks to Facebook
Ever wish you could just “read” incoming smartphone messages by feeling them on your arm? Well, Facebook researchers are creating a device that could do just that, by translating words into something like real-life pokes. The researchers built a prototype of a …Continue reading
Facebook’s app for kids should freak parents out
Fifteen years ago, Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, calculated that the world would need to add about a nuclear power plant’s worth of clean-energy capacity every day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Recently, he …Continue reading
Tesla Will Build the World’s Biggest Lithium-ion Battery
Elon Musk has announced that Tesla will install a bank of lithium-ion batteries in South Australia with a total capacity of 129 megawatt-hours—making it the world’s largest li-ion battery. The scheme essentially provides a…