Business, Spoken

Like much of the internet, online reviews are often fake. No matter the platform—Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, or another—no matter the subject, where user reviews are public, fakery usually follows. The practice has surged in popularity in recent years as retailers scramble to capitalize on consumers’ love of ecommerce.

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In early 2018, Amos Meiri got the kind of windfall many startup founders only dream of. Meiri’s company, Colu, develops digital currencies for cities—coupons, essentially, that encourage people to spend their money locally. The company was having some success with pilot projects in the UK and Israel, but Meiri had an idea for something bigger. He envisioned a global network of city currencies, linked together using blockchain technology.

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In 2018, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 18 million reports to their CyberTipline, constituting 45 million images depicting child sexual abuse. Most of these children were under the age of 12, and some were as young as a few months old. Since its inception in 1998, the CyberTipline has received a total of 55 million such reports. Those from 2018 alone constitute a nearly half of all reports over the past two decades.

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Google search is advancing a reading grade. Google says it has enhanced its search-ranking system with software called BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers to its friends. It was developed in the company’s artificial intelligence labs and announced last fall, breaking records on reading comprehension questions that researchers use to test AI software.

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Google has its own perfume—or at least one team of the company’s researchers does. Crafted under the guidance of expert French perfumers, the mixture has notes of vanilla, jasmine, melon, and strawberries. “It wasn’t half bad,” says Alex Wiltschko, who keeps a vial of the perfume in his kitchen. Google’s not marketing that scent anytime soon, but it is sticking its nose into yet another aspect of our lives: smell.

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Back in 2007, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg gave some advice at Y Combinator's Startup School: Do a startup before you're old. In technology, he said, twentysomethings rule. The olds are useless. “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he said. “Young people are just smarter.” That comment has not aged well.

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While American lawmakers are still mostly talking about regulating the tech industry, their counterparts in Europe have been far more active. From consumer privacy protections and content moderation to antitrust enforcement, the European Union has introduced a host of new rules aimed at Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, and at the business practices that enabled them to amass so much power. Investigations have multiplied, as have the fines.

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YouTube is the biggest social media platform in the country, and, perhaps, the most misunderstood. Over the past few years, the Google-owned platform has become a media powerhouse where political discussion is dominated by right-wing channels offering an ideological alternative to established news outlets.

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Technical quarrels between quantum computing experts rarely escape the field’s rarified community. Late Monday, though, IBM’s quantum team picked a highly public fight with Google. In a technical paper and blogpost, IBM took aim at potentially history-making scientific results accidentally leaked from a collaboration between Google and NASA last month.

Technical quarrels between quantum computing experts rarely escape the field’s rarified community. Late Monday, though, IBM’s quantum team picked a highly public fight with Google. In a technical paper and blogpost, IBM took aim at potentially history-making scientific results accidentally leaked from a collaboration between Google and NASA last month.

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