Business, Spoken

In recent weeks, at least five big tech companies have revised their policies for handling sexual-harassment complaints, saying they will no longer force employees to submit those claims to arbitration, a process that tends to favor employers. But many of the new policies come with hitches: They may apply only to claims of harassment and assault, and not claims of discrimination, retribution, and hostile work environment that often accompany harassment.

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The price of bitcoin dropped another 10 percent Tuesday, extending a decline that has sent the virtual currency down 33 percent in the past month and 46 percent in the past year. Boom and bust cycles are par for the course for bitcoin. So far this year, there have been only three days where the S&P 500-stock index dropped more than 3 percent, with the worst being a 4 percent drop in February, says Duke University finance professor Campbell R. Harvey.

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Back in the early 1930s, farmers couldn’t get wired. The big-city electric utilities claimed that delivering power to customers spread out in rural areas wasn’t profitable. So eventually the locals rolled up their sleeves and did it themselves. They formed electric co-ops and strung their own damn wires, aided by cheap federal loans. Today there are nearly 900 rural co-ops still providing their communities with electricity.

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On the 3:13 pm train out of San Jose on a recent Friday, I hunched over a Macbook, brow furrowed. Hundreds of miles north in a Google datacenter in Oregon, a virtual computer sprang to life. I was soon looking at the yawning blackness of a Linux command line—my new AI art studio. Some hours of Googling, mistyped commands, and muttered curses later, I was cranking out eerie portraits.

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One Thursday last month, 19-year-old Robbie Barrat woke to a fusillade of messages on his phone. “I was half asleep but saw they all contained the same number,” he says. “Then I fell back asleep for a few hours. I didn’t really want to believe.

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The definition of cloud computing may be nebulous, but its promise is clear. Instead of filling a warehouse with servers and paying people to manage them, a company can pay a cloud computing provider to provide computing resources on demand and pay only for what it actually uses. This prospect lured organizations ranging from startups to massive corporations to stodgy government agencies onto cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others.

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When Alex Jones crashed the congressional hearings looking into big tech platforms back in September, Lord Voldemort kept coming to my mind. Even if you haven’t read the Harry Potter books, you probably know that almost no one in the wizarding world will speak this archvillain’s name aloud; he is referred to only as “he who must not be named” or “you know who.

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Google parent Alphabet generated 86 percent of its revenue from advertising last year. On Friday the woman leading its best shot at building a second big revenue stream said she is moving on. Diane Greene, a storied cloud computing entrepreneur and executive, has been leading Google’s cloud computing division since early 2016.

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On Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times published a blockbuster—five byline, 50 source, 5,000 word—report on the failures of Facebook’s management team during the past three years. It begins with Sheryl Sandberg yelling at one of her employees; it ends with her hand-written stage directions, captured by a Times photographer, as she sat before the Senate: “Slow, Pause, Determined.

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Amazon announced Tuesday that the 14-month public bidding war for its so-called second headquarters was coming to an end. After reviewing 238 proposals from cities across North America, the company says it will build two large regional offices in Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia as well as a smaller campus in Nashville, Tennessee. The search was largely a success for CEO Jeff Bezos, who can use valuable data from the losing cities to inform Amazon’s business and future expansion.

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