Business, Spoken

Over the past year, Facebook has faced a reckoning over the way its plan to connect the next billion users to the internet has sown division, including spreading hate speech that incited ethnic violence in Myanmar and disseminating propaganda for a violent dictator in the Philippines.

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When Amazon announced Tuesday that it was raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all employees, even vocal critics of its labor practices like Senator Bernie Sanders praised the company. The retail giant’s decision will undoubtedly put more money into the hands of its workers—especially the some 100,000 temporary US employees Amazon plans to hire in the coming months for the holiday season.

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In 2001, a 25-year-old unemployed college dropout named Bram Cohen crafted an elegant protocol for moving data around the internet. Titanic numbers of pirated songs and movies, and countless lawsuits, later, he’s putting the finishing touches on what he hopes will be another world-changing protocol—this time for moving around money.

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After months of increased public criticism about its grueling labor practices, Amazon announced Tuesday that it would begin paying all US employees, including part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers, at least $15 an hour and all UK employees at least £9.50 (with higher wages in London) beginning November 1. The move will affect 250,000 Amazon employees and 100,000 seasonal workers, according to the company.

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Several major tech companies---including Apple, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook---will likely have to add women to their boards of directors by mid-2021 under a pioneering new California law aimed at bringing more women into corporate boardrooms. California governor Jerry Brown signed the measure, known as SB 826, into law on Sunday.

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The nation’s largest state just adopted sweeping net neutrality protections, setting up a potential legal showdown with the Federal Communications Commission over the future of the internet. California Governor Jerry Brown Sunday signed a bill banning broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content passing through their networks.

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Elon Musk has long established himself as a both a visionary CEO and a lightning rod for attention, good and bad. The bad reared its head dramatically this week as the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with securities fraud for misleading investors with August tweets about taking Tesla private.

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There are significant, real-world benefits to having an accepted and recognized identity. That’s why the concept of a digital identity is being pursued around the world, from Australia to India. From airports to health records systems, technologists and policy makers with good intentions are digitizing our identities, making modern life more efficient and streamlined.

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For all the advances being made in the field, artificial intelligence still struggles when it comes to identifying hate speech. When he testified before Congress in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “one of the hardest” problems. But, he went on, he was optimistic that “over a five- to 10-year period, we will have AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems.

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Coraline Ada Ehmke has been writing software professionally since 1994. For the past decade, she’s been active in the Ruby programming language community and has created numerous open source tools to help fellow Ruby programmers. But these days she's best known for a different type of code altogether.

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