Business, Spoken

Before they got down to business for the day, students in Devin Tatro’s social studies class were offered a quiet moment of self-reflection: On this golden fall afternoon at Nome-Beltz Junior/Senior High School, were they feeling chipper, distressed, or somewhere in between? About 20 students gazed at their laptops, an online poll open on each screen.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

YouTube is trying to reduce the spread of toxic videos on the platform by limiting how often they appear in users' recommendations. The company announced the shift in a blog post on Friday, writing that it would begin cracking down on so-called "borderline content" that comes close to violating its community standards without quite crossing the line.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In London last month, a team from Alphabet’s UK-based artificial intelligence research unit DeepMind quietly laid a new marker in the contest between humans and computers. Thursday, it revealed the achievement, in a three-hour YouTube stream in which aliens and robots fought to the death. DeepMind’s broadcast showed its artificial intelligence bot, AlphaStar, defeating a professional player at the complex real-time-strategy videogame StarCraft II.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Governments and companies worldwide are investing heavily in artificial intelligence in hopes of new profits, smarter gadgets, and better health care. Financier and philanthropist George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos Thursday that the technology may also undermine free societies and create a new era of authoritarianism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bing is back online in China. Late Wednesday evening in the US, reports surface that Microsoft's search engine was blocked in China. Bing is now available again in the country, but it remains unclear if the outage was caused by technical issues or if the Chinese government intentionally blocked the search engine, if only temporarily. “We can confirm that Bing was inaccessible in China, but service is now restored,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The web can be an annoying and creepy place. Big animated ads try to distract you from what you’re reading, while ads for products you’ve already bought stalk you. That’s led many people to install ad blockers or other tools to inhibit websites from tracking them. According to a survey by identity management company Janrain, 71 percent of respondents use ad blockers or some other tool to control their online experience.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pages and groups are the tools Facebook misinformation peddlers love the most. Creating a network of anonymous pages is one of the easiest ways to quickly spread fake news or propaganda on the social network. This tactic has most famously been used by Russian trolls—even long after the 2016 presidential election. Earlier this month, Facebook took down a cohort of deceptive pages linked to Russian state media.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back in the 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee and his team were creating the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, they made a list of the error codes that would pop up when something went wrong. You’ve surely encountered many of them: “404 Not Found,” which pops up if you click on a dead link; “401 Unauthorized” when you hit a page that needs a password; and so on.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Airbnb’s “live like a local” fantasy can quickly morph into a nightmare when your host’s sun-dappled apartment photos turn out to conceal a roach infestation. But hotels can be so homogeneous. Now a new crop of startups is offering a hybrid alternative: apartment hotels, lodging that promises the comfort and roominess of a homestay (minus the flaky homeowner) with the consistency and in-room amenities of a hotel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tech giants are battling to position their smart speakers as the center of the digital home. But Microsoft, which lost the mobile wars to Apple and Google, is trying to ensure that it will have a place, no matter who wins. Microsoft has its own voice-based digital assistant, Cortana, that could theoretically power a challenger to the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod for countertop space. Indeed, Cortana is already core to a smart speaker from Harman Kardon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices