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The opening chords of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” rocked a hotel ballroom in New York City as a nattily dressed British man strode onstage several weeks before last fall’s U.S. election. I see the bad moon rising, I see trouble on the way The speaker, Alexander Nix, an Eton man, was very much among his own kind—global elites with names like Buffett, Soros, Brokaw, Pickens, Petraeus and Blair. Trouble was indeed on the way for some of the attendees at the annual summit of policymakers and philanthropists whose world order was about to be wrecked by the American election. B

A crappy cup of airplane tea and the rise of Donald Trump led to the launch in May of an outfit with the wacky name of All Turtles, which might usher in a new way to think about tech startups around the world. The All Turtles story began with Phil Libin, who used to be CEO of the app company Evernote and lately has worked as a partner at the venture capital firm General Catalyst in Silicon Valley. Last fall, Libin boarded a JetBlue flight from Boston to San Francisco. As the plane leveled off, he ordered tea. Libin plopped the tea bag in the hot water, then got distracted for about 10 minute

Something unexpected happened recently at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab. Researchers who had been training bots to negotiate with one another realized that the bots, left to their own devices, started communicating in a non-human language. In order to actually follow what the bots were saying, the researchers had to tweak their model, limiting the machines to a conversation humans could understand. (They want bots to stick to human languages because eventually they want those bots to be able to converse with human Facebook users.) When I wrote about all this last week, lots

The 40 or so students sitting before him nod. They’re assembled here at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for a class called Entrepreneurship from Diverse Perspectives, where female and minority entrepreneurs and investors are invited to speak. The hope is to cultivate an appreciation for the value of diversity among the country’s next business leaders. If you’ve ever heard Tristan Walker speak, diversity was almost certainly the topic. A Stanford grad himself, he keynotes conferences on the subject. He’s been a fixture at SXSW. Almost any newspaper article, radio segment or magazine st

The European Union imposed a 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) fine on Google last Tuesday for manipulating its search engine results to favor its own comparison shopping service. It is just the latest institution to recognize the increasing monopolization of the technology industry. Google has about a 90 percent market share in searches, while Facebook has a penetration of about 89 percent of internet users. Economists have a fancy name for this phenomenon: “network externalities.” In traditional product markets, one customer’s choice (for example, a particular car tire) does not directly affec

Donald Trump’s grand plan for a joint cybersecurity team with Russia ended even before it began. On Friday, after his unexpectedly long meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, both sides said they were going to work together on cybersecurity issues. “The two leaders … agreed to explore creating a framework around which the two countries can work together to better understand how to deal with these cyber threats, both in terms of how these tools are used to in interfere with the internal affairs of countries, but also how these tools are used to threaten infrastructure, how these tools a

It's Prime time! Bonnie Kittle via Unsplash If you're a person who's obsessed with getting a good deal, you probably already know what's happening tomorrow. If not, allow me to give you the good news: it's Amazon Prime Day Eve. That means tomorrow, July 11, thousands of products will go on sale on Amazon. Sound overwhelming? Don't worry, I'm about to break it down. Prime Day is essentially Amazon's second Black Friday on which the retailer offers thousands of deals on products ranging from Dustbusters to TVs to crop tops to spatulas. It all starts today, July 10 at 6 p.m. PST (that's 9 p.m. f

Stripe unveiled a partnership deal with two of China's biggest digital payment services, giving the San Francisco-based startup access to hundreds of millions of Chinese customers. Businesses that use Stripe can now accept Alipay and WeChat as payment methods on their websites, according to a statement from Stripe. Stripe provides software that lets businesses accept payments online, and offers tools to help with data security, fraud prevention, accounting, and billing. "By deepening our existing partnership with Alipay, we're enabling businesses around the world to instantly access the once-i

If the Colonel comes calling, who will answer? For KFC's 30th anniversary in China, the chicken chain is celebrating by releasing a shiny, fire-engine red, limited edition smartphone with Colonel Sanders' face on it. The fast food company partnered with Chinese electronics giant Huawei, which is also marking its 30th anniversary this year. Both brand logos are on the body, along with the date 1987, the year KFC entered China. The fried chicken chain was one of the first big Western brands to enter the Chinese mainland, and it's still much bigger than McDonald's in China. It has tried to keep i

Amazon may have invented it, but other retailers are cashing in on Prime Day. In advance of the shopping discount period Amazon christened Prime Day two years ago -- falling on July 11 this year -- eBay is rolling out a series of ads urging consumers to give its site a second look for the best deals. In one, Amazon Prime is clearly called out: A male newscaster looks distraught as a voiceover says, "You thought you had a prime deal, but did you check eBay?" Suzy Deering, chief marketing officer for North America at San Jose, Calif.-based eBay, said the new spots function as a more value-driven

Spare a thought for the poor U.S.-Russia Joint Impenetrable Cybersecurity Unit, which didn't even survive an entire news cycle this weekend. President Trump pitched the joint cyber-team with Russia in a tweet on Sunday. He went on to rule out the idea in a second tweet on Sunday evening. Then again, the notion had about as much chance of acceptance in the U.S. national security world as ketchup on a hot dog in Chicago. "It's not the dumbest idea I've ever heard, but it's pretty close," said South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, appearing on Meet the Press. "Partnering with Putin on a

"Are you real?" If you've seen the TV series Westworld, you may remember this line. A man named William has just arrived at Westworld, a sort of wild west theme park where people can interact with human-like robots. The host who greets him looks and sounds 100 percent human. But is she? Her response when William poses this question: "Well, if you can't tell, does it matter?" If you can't tell, does it matter? People have been wrestling with this question since the advent of robotics. What would it mean to have machines that are essentially just like us? Will robots ever become fully conscious

A new hoax circulating Facebook is being spread by well-meaning users. It’s a chain message that issues a warning and calls on users to spread the message by re-sharing on their account. Here’s what the message says, CBS reports: There’s a user named Jayden K. Smith who’s a hacker that will gain control of your account if you add them as a friend on Facebook. Fortunately for you, this hacker does not actually exist. Users are spreading the word on Facebook and further perpetuating the false hacker warning. There are different variations of the message, but the gist is the same — Smith will st

Three years after launching an online magazine for young entrepreneurs called Foundr, Nathan Chan decided it needed a Wikipedia page. “Any legitimate brand has one,” he says. “All our competitors have pages.” There were just two problems. Wikipedia strongly discourages people from creating their own pages. And the site’s five-million-plus articles are largely created by 200,000-some volunteer editors, and it’s unlikely one of them would suddenly take an interest in a small startup and build a page themselves. Related: 6 Ways To Increase Your Brand's Online Credibility This spring, Chan posted

Technology is the new sex ed class for many teens of the 2010s. While the internet may be rife with pornography, its role in teaching teens about sexual and reproductive health has been less well recognized. But a recently published report illuminates how crucial technology has become for adolescents.   The report, called TECHsex 2017 and published by Youth+Tech+Sex, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California, provides data and insights from a large national survey and small group interviews in seven U.S. cities. Following up on a similar report published in 2011, TECHsex 2017 take

The Washington Post’s report last week on Russian cyber efforts to disrupt the 2016 election—and the Obama administration’s months-long debate over how to respond—ended on a foreboding note. Among the measures apparently adopted in response to the hack was “a cyber operation that was designed to be detected by Moscow but not cause significant damage,” involving “implanting computer code in sensitive computer systems,” according to anonymous officials who spoke to the paper. The code could be used to trigger a cyberattack on Russia in response to another Russian cyberattack on America, whether

Updated: Sunday, July 9 at 9:09 p.m. ET Nothing connected to the internet is safe from hackers. And I mean nothing. Modern cybersecurity is a constant cycle of breaches and patches. Systems are compromised, security experts play catch up, and eventually hackers find a new way in. Each side tries to outwit the other. But at any given moment, one of them is always a step ahead. President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand that. “Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded,” he tweeted on Sunday. Yes,

Sen. John McCain laughed off President Donald Trump’s pledge to work with Russian President Vladimir Putin on forming an “impenetrable Cyber Security unit” to resolve “election hacking, & many other negative things,” publicly mocking the idea during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation. “I’m sure that Vladimir Putin could be of enormous assistance in that effort since he is doing the hacking,” McCain cracked, referring to allegations Putin personally directed a Russian intelligence operation to leak embarrassing info about Democrats during the 2016 elections. “I mean it’s, look, I support thi

Straightforward measures will protect your computer. Negative Space There was a time when anti-virus software was the height of computer security, especially if you were a Windows user. But the landscape of threats has changed, and we live in an era of sweeping, global campaigns, like the ransomware “WannaCry” infection and the more recent Ukraine-focused “NotPetya” attack. What role does anti-virus and antimalware software play in keeping your machine safe? We spoke with four security experts to hear what they had to say. Across the board, each expert still recommends using software that prot

ON A BRISK NIGHT LAST JULY, I TOOK A LONG WALK through the streets of San Francisco with Travis Kalanick, from Uber’s headquarters in the gritty Mid-Market neighborhood to the Ferry Building on the waterfront and nearly to the Golden Gate Bridge. Kalanick likes these walking meetings. It’s how he got to know Anthony Levandowski, a former Google self-driving-car engineer, whose company Uber bought, only to have Google parent Alphabet sue Uber for Levandowski allegedly stealing its technology. On that summer evening, Kalanick was in an expansive mood. We talked about how he raised billions for

THE PROLIFERATION OF smart tech raises three fundamental questions: What is the nature of work? What does it truly mean to be human? And—let’s face it—how can you make a buck off this? Those with the third question in mind will find a lot to like in the latest book by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, who became famous with a self-published e-book called Race Against the Machine in 2011 and even more famous after The Second Machine Age in 2014. Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (W.W. Norton & Co., $28.95) is the most practical of the authors’ excursions yet. It’s writte

SAN FRANCISCO — The attack had the hallmarks of something researchers had dreaded for years: malicious software using artificial intelligence that could lead to a new digital arms race in which AI-driven defenses battled AI-driven offenses while humans watched from the sidelines. But what was not as widely predicted was that one of the earliest instances of that sort of malware was found in India, not in a sophisticated British banking system or a government network in the United States. Security researchers are increasingly looking in countries outside the West to discover the newest, most cr

The massive cyberattack nicknamed Petya has ravaged computers around the world, even knocking out radiation monitoring computers and compromising the U.S. drug company Merck. Like the WannaCry attack in May, it was ransomware that demanded a few hundred dollars in bitcoin to unlock frozen data. To security specialist Golan Ben-Oni, it also had echoes of a lesser-known attack in April on his company, the New Jersey-based conglomerate IDT Corporation. Here & Now‘s Robin Young talks with Ben-Oni (@gbenoni) about the latest attack and his campaign to protect his company against the next one. On th

The Trump administration has been remarkably on-message on social media over the past week — that is, if you only look at official Twitter accounts, rather than the president's personal feed. The administration tweets touted immigration legislation, provided support for the GOP's health care bill, defended the president's travel ban and pushed energy policy. Meanwhile, President Trump's personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, was dominated by grievances and attacks against the press, culminating in a controversial GIF tweeted out Sunday showing Trump body-slamming a person with a CNN logo

The latest generation Eero and a Beacon. eero October 21, 2016, was a rough day on the internet. Dyn, a company that provides domain-name services, was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Perhaps you tried to visit sites like Twitter or Reddit and found that they didn’t work—that’s because of the attack on Dyn. The siege utilized a botnet, an exploit in which devices are co-opted to work towards a sinister goal, like flooding a specific website with traffic. In this case, the botnet was called Mirai. A botnet requires a multitude of devices, and there are plenty of those conn

In the world of media, artificial intelligence may be hot, but it's no shiny object. Concepts like artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing are bleeding into all facets of the ad business. Today, media shops can set up AI dashboards that alert them to strange patterns in their metrics, and some agencies are looking at ways to use AI to make their internal processes more efficient and make employees happier. And, of course, clients are looking for work that has AI woven in, whether it's Alexa skills or chatbots. Any time an explosive new technology takes hold, a

President Trump claimed this month on Twitter that the news media was “working hard” to convince people he “should not use social media.” But it was precisely his knack for social media, he implied, that helped win him the presidency. Is this true? If so, why might Trump be politically effective on Twitter? To better understand how political discourse works on Twitter, we recently analyzed more than half a million public tweets on three political topics — same-sex marriage, gun control and climate change — in the year leading up to the 2016 election. Our research, which was published this mont

• Karlsruhe, Germany The hack began as trash talk. Germany’s voting computers were so vulnerable to tampering that they could be reprogrammed to play chess, the hackers boasted. But then the machines’ maker dared them to try. Bound by honor and curiosity, the hackers got their hands on one of the computers and had it playing chess after about a month. “We have to admit,” they later wrote, “that it does not play chess all that well.” This wasn’t just a prank. The hackers, several of them associated with the Hamburg collective known as the Chaos Computer Club, or CCC, also proved they could ma