Business, Spoken

In February, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story urging regulators to break up Google because the company abuses its dominance in search to crush promising competitors. The next day, representatives from two conservative think tanks published blog posts defending Google and attacking the article’s call for antitrust enforcement. Both think tanks have received funding from Google. Both blog posts referenced studies by a professor who has received funding from Google.

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After a hellish year of tech scandals, even government-averse executives have started professing their openness to legislation. But Microsoft president Brad Smith took it one step further on Thursday, asking governments to regulate the use of facial-recognition technology to ensure it does not invade personal privacy or become a tool for discrimination or surveillance.

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Before they hand control of the House of Representatives over to Democrats, House Republicans are mounting one more effort to hold Silicon Valley giants accountable for what they say is rampant liberal bias at tech companies. In the hot seat this time: Google CEO Sundar Pichai. On Tuesday, Pichai will testify before the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing focused on transparency, data collection, and filtering.

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In Montreal Thursday, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau boasted about his country’s leading position in artificial intelligence and openness to international collaboration. A few miles away, the world’s largest AI conference proceeded without scores of researchers denied visas by Trudeau’s government. All week, Montreal has played host to 8,000 people attending the conference, NeurIPS, which ends Saturday.

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Doug Engelbart was the first to actually build a computer that might seem familiar to us, today. He came to Silicon Valley after a stint in the Navy as a radar technician during World War II. Engelbart was, in his own estimation, a “naïve drifter,” but something about the Valley inspired him to think big. Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs—communication and collaboration.

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On Saturday, President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires to discuss a trade deal. On the same day, Canadian authorities arrested the chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. The arrest comes at a delicate moment in the trade talks, in which the countries are slapping tariffs on each others’ products. Trump and Xi reportedly agreed on a 60-day truce before extending the tariffs to more goods.

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In 1988, the US and other nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to study and respond to consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. In Montreal Thursday, the governments of France and Canada said they will establish a similar group to study and respond to the global changes being wrought by artificial intelligence technology. They say the panel is needed to rein in unethical uses of AI, and minimize the risk of economic disruption such as job losses caused by automation.

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What do a patent application drawing for troll socks, a cartoon scorpion wearing a hard hat, and a comic about cat parkour have in common? They were all reportedly flagged by Tumblr this week after the microblogging platform announced that it would no longer allow “adult content.

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Phishing just won’t go away. Nearly three-quarters of organizations polled by security company Proofpoint saw phishing attacks last year. Sometimes attackers are able to fool even security-savvy users. A company called MetaCert is trying to fight phishing emails with an extraordinarily simple method. The company has spent seven years compiling a database of web addresses known to be used by phishers, and the company and its users are constantly reporting more.

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In an unprecedented move Wednesday, British lawmakers published hundreds of pages of internal Facebook emails and other documents that had previously been ordered sealed as part of an ongoing legal case between Facebook and a now defunct app developer called Six4Three. The documents, which date back to 2012, provide a rare window into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's thoughts on how to expand his social media juggernaut as users made the transition from desktop to mobile phones.

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