Business, Spoken

In many US cities, ride-sharing is a commodity. Both drivers and riders pull up Uber and Lyft interchangeably on their phones, weighing which to use based on price and wait time. That’s a problem for ride-sharing companies. In an industry where new apps like Via, Juno, and Gett are coming online regularly, riders have myriad choices.

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In December 2014, John Rust wrote to the head of the legal department at the University of Cambridge, where he is a professor, warning them that a storm was brewing. According to an email reviewed by WIRED, Rust informed the university that one of the school’s psychology professors, Aleksandr Kogan, was using an app he created to collect data on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

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Has Apple monopolized the market for iPhone apps? That's the question at the heart of Apple Inc. v. Pepper, a case the Supreme Court agreed to hear Monday, which could have wide-reaching implications for consumers as well as other companies like Amazon. The dispute is over whether Apple, by charging app developers a 30 percent commission fee and only allowing iOS apps to be sold through its own store, has inflated the price of iPhone apps.

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The bitcoin Hodlers, ICO hustlers, and Lambo-owning crypto millionaires would like you to know that the cryptocurrency revolution is upon us. Before long you’ll be making breakfast on the blockchain! But as the trustless, decentralized world of digital tokens expands—and Fortune 500 companies, banks, restaurant chains, and even countries (ahem, Venezuela) cautiously wade in—a credibility problem persists.

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How much do you slack off at work? If you’re the average white-­collar drone, the odds are it’s an astonishing amount. A 2015 survey by a UK firm asked 1,989 office workers how many hours they spent “productively working” each day. The average: A paltry two hours and 53 minutes. The rest of those eight-hour workdays consisted of kicking back: checking social media, reading news, or talking to friends. Viewed one way, this is absolutely dismal.

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Tim Armstrong has spent the last year under renovation. After AOL, the company Armstrong has run for the past nine years, merged with newly acquired corporate sister Yahoo in June, Armstrong was tasked with uniting the two. First he announced a new brand name-–Oath---suggesting a move away from the stale early days of the internet that many people associate with AOL and Yahoo.

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The company that championed the idea of moonshots---ambitious ideas that can “make the world a radically better place”---is still struggling to make incremental change when it comes to diversifying its ranks of black, Latinx, and female employees. But as the conversation around diversity in Silicon Valley has evolved and grown more sophisticated, so has Google’s approach to the problem.

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Last summer, a sign appeared on the door to a stuffy, windowless room at the office of Manhattan artificial intelligence startup Clarifai. “Chamber of secrets,” it read, according to three people who saw it. The notice was a joking reference to how the small team working inside was not permitted to discuss its work with others at Clarifai.

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The Seattle City Council voted 9-0 last month to approve an annual $275-per-employee tax on big employers like Amazon. The tax was expected to raise about $47 million a year for services for the homeless and construction of affordable housing. But Tuesday, less than a month after passing the tax, the council voted 7-2 to repeal it.

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HBO, CNN, Warner Brothers, DC Comics, and the rest of the Time Warner empire will soon be owned by AT&T thanks to a decision by by a federal judge Tuesday to approve the telecommunications giant's $85 purchase of the media conglomerate. The Department of Justice filed suit to stop the merger last November, arguing that the merger would lead to higher television prices and fewer choices for consumers. US District Judge Richard J.

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