Beats Solo Pro review

If you like to use your wireless headphones with a cable when the battery runs out, I've got some bad news: the Solo Pro doesn't have a 3.5mm jack. You can still use them wired, but you'll have to buy a Lightning-to-whatever cable to do it. Apple's quest to kill the headphone jack continues, and…

Continue Reading Beats Solo Pro review

How Do We Bring Equality to Data Ownership and Usage?

“Science at its core is systematically racist and sexist,” said computational biologist Laura Boykin at the WIRED 25 conference in San Francisco on Friday.Boykin works for the Cassava Virus Action Project, which uses DNA sequencing technology to help farmers in Africa find pathogens in the staple crop in real time. But in a conversation on…

Continue Reading How Do We Bring Equality to Data Ownership and Usage?

AI Researcher Anca Dragan on Helping Robots Understand Humans

When humans and robots cross paths, the results aren’t just frustrating—the autonomous car, say, that’s too shy to turn left—they can also be fatal. Consider last year’s Uber crash, in which the self-driving algorithms weren’t coded to yield to an unexpected human jaywalker.At the WIRED25 conference Friday, Anca Dragan, a professor who studies human-robot interaction…

Continue Reading AI Researcher Anca Dragan on Helping Robots Understand Humans

It’s Time to Rethink Your Data—Including Your Smell Data

We don’t mean to be impolite, but—your personal data is showing. It’s everywhere. Facebook and Google and Amazon and a million other companies scoop it up and then dish it out, for billions of dollars, to advertisers and analysts and anyone else who wants to buy it. It’s owned by people you’ve never heard of…

Continue Reading It’s Time to Rethink Your Data—Including Your Smell Data

Ben Horowitz on a Murder, Genghis Khan, and Corporate Culture

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, thinks that the best way to convey to executives the importance of new employee orientation is through a story about a brutal prison murder.At the WIRED25 Festival in San Francisco on Friday, Horowitz said that when it comes to explaining these concepts to CEOs, the straightforward…

Continue Reading Ben Horowitz on a Murder, Genghis Khan, and Corporate Culture

The Race to Bring Meat Alternatives to Scale

Uma Valeti makes a lot of promises, but one weighs heavier on his mind than others. He’s only got a few years to make good on the pledge he recently made to his daughter. That on the day she graduates high school, he’ll throw a party for her and her friends where they can chow…

Continue Reading The Race to Bring Meat Alternatives to Scale

Slack’s Stewart Butterfield on Making Workers More Productive—Or Not

Stewart Butterfield, one of the cofounders of Slack, acknowledged at the WIRED25 conference in San Francisco on Friday that it’s difficult to tell whether the company’s workplace-messaging software actually makes companies more productive.“Economic measures of the impact of productivity in IT investment, for like 35 years or so, have been kind of hard to do,”…

Continue Reading Slack’s Stewart Butterfield on Making Workers More Productive—Or Not

African AI Experts Get Excluded From a Conference—Again

At the G7 meeting in Montreal last year, Justin Trudeau told WIRED he would look into why more than 100 African artificial intelligence researchers had been barred from visiting that city to attend their field’s most important annual event, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, or NeurIPS.Now the same thing has happened again. More than…

Continue Reading African AI Experts Get Excluded From a Conference—Again

Instagram Will Test Hiding ‘Likes’ in the US Starting Next Week

If you post a picture, and no one sees how many people liked it, does it still exist? Instagram users in the United States are going to find out next week. Months after the company tested hiding "like" counts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Ireland, Italy, and Brazil, CEO Adam Mosseri announced today at…

Continue Reading Instagram Will Test Hiding ‘Likes’ in the US Starting Next Week

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on the Struggles of Policing the Web

For years, the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare maintained that as a sort of internet utility—providing speed, reliability, and security services to sites around the world—it had no role in moderating content online. But more recently, Cloudflare has stoked controversy by removing support, first for the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer in August 2017 and…

Continue Reading Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on the Struggles of Policing the Web