The last two years have been a rollercoaster ride for Matt Oczkowski. On the night of the 2016 presidential election, he sat inside then-candidate Donald Trump's San Antonio campaign headquarters, where he led a team of anxious data scientists crunching numbers throughout the day before an unexpected victory party at a local bar much later that night.

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At Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, executives are trying to assuage thousands of employees protesting a contract with the Pentagon’s flagship artificial-intelligence initiative, Project Maven. Thousands of miles away, algorithms trained under Project Maven—which includes companies other than Google—are helping war fighters identify potential ISIS targets in video from drones.

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Companies hiring for technical positions often slip language into their job postings that appeals to men. They say they’re looking for “ninjas,” who seek to “obliterate competition,” and are capable of “dominating.” By now, these wordings are a well understood form of bias that produces more male candidates than female. But one job in the digital economy falls predominantly to women.

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You might not be hearing much from big tech on net neutrality lately. But the likes of Google and Facebook are still invested in the fight behind the scenes. Last year's "Day of Action" prompted Amazon, Google, Facebook, and many others to pen blog posts or host banners urging users to file comments in support of the Federal Communications Commission's Obama-era net neutrality rules against blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content.

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On Monday, the Supreme Court slowed recent momentum to give workers---including many in the tech sector---the right to a day in court. The Supreme Court case centered around clauses in employment contracts that require employees to resolve disputes through arbitration, and preclude them from joining with others to file class-action lawsuits.

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For months, a growing faction of Google employees has tried to force the company to drop out of a controversial military program called Project Maven. More than 4,000 employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a petition asking Google to cancel the contract. Last week, Gizmodo reported that a dozen employees resigned over the project. “There are a bunch more waiting for job offers (like me) before we do so,” one engineer says.

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Friday is the dawn of a new era in consumer privacy. It wasn’t supposed to look like the promotions tab in Gmail---full of emails that may or may not be useful, none of which you want to click on, all with fine print that makes the offer less attractive. For months, companies have been bombarding inboxes with privacy updates, nominally in order to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, a supercharged set of privacy laws in the European Union, which go into effect Friday.

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News Feed, the algorithm that powers the core of Facebook, resembles a giant irrigation system for the world’s information. Working properly, it nourishes all the crops that different people like to eat. Sometimes, though, it gets diverted entirely to sugar plantations while the wheat fields and almond trees die. Or it gets polluted because Russian trolls and Macedonian teens toss in LSD tablets and dead raccoons. For years, the workings of News Feed were rather opaque.

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On Monday, I sat down with nine members of the team at Facebook fighting fake news: Eduardo Ariño de la Rubia, John Hegeman, Tessa Lyons, Michael McNally, Adam Mosseri, Henry Silverman, Sara Su, Antonia Woodford, and Dan Zigmond. The meeting began with introductions, led by Tucker Bounds and Lindsey Shepard from the marketing and communications team. Then we spoke in depth about Facebook’s recent product changes and the way the News Feed can be adjusted to counter false news.

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Google’s quantum computing researchers have been planning a party—but new results from a competing team at China’s Alibaba may have postponed it. The China-America corporate rivalry on an obscure frontier of physics illustrates a growing contest between nations and companies hoping to create a new form of improbably powerful computer. In March, Google unveiled a chip called Bristlecone intended to set a computing milestone.

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