Business, Spoken

During a pair of explosive pre-trial hearings last week, the lawsuit between self-driving Alphabet spinoff Waymo and Uber over trade secrets got an unlikely, new star player. It wasn't an engineer, like Anthony Levadowski, the former Google engineer who allegedly brought reams of Waymo trade secrets to his next big gig as head of autonomous driving at Uber.

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Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai has proposed repealing longstanding net neutrality rules. Only he has a different phrase for them: “The Obama administration’s heavy-handed regulations.” Wait a second: Did Obama really invent net neutrality? Even in a country with famously short attention spans, at least some people might have noticed that net neutrality has been around longer than that.

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The history of artificial intelligence is a procession of one-trick ponies. Over decades researchers have crafted a series of super-specialized programs to beat humans at tougher and tougher games. They conquered tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess. Most recently, Alphabet’s DeepMind research group shocked the world with a program called AlphaGo that mastered the Chinese board game Go. But each of these artificial champions could play only the game it was painstakingly designed to play.

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The recent outpouring of sexual harassment and assault allegations has helped expose not only high-profile predators, but the culture of secrecy that shielded them. Now lawmakers and advocates want to empower victims, and make it harder for serial harassers to hide, by restricting the use of nondisclosure agreements, the confidentiality provisions that obscured decades of complaints against Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, and Roger Ailes by muzzling their accusers.

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Facebook says it built Messenger Kids, a new version of its popular communications app with parental controls, to help safeguard pre-teens who may be using unauthorized and unsupervised social-media accounts. Critics think Facebook is targeting children as young as 6 to hook them on its services. Facebook’s goal is to “push down the age” of when it’s acceptable for kids to be on social media, says Josh Golin, executive director of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

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FCC chair Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal net neutrality provisions and reclassify broadband providers from “common carriers” to “information services” is an unprecedented giveaway to big broadband providers and a danger to the internet. The move would mean the FCC would have almost no oversight authority over broadband providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.

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The notorious 404 error, “Not Found,” is often, not totally erroneously, referred to as “the last page of the internet.” It’s an obligatory heads-up with an outsize reputation; it is a meme and a punch line. Bad puns abound. The error has been printed in comics and on T-shirts, an accessible and relatable facet of what was once relegated to nerd humor and is now a fact of digital life. That the 404 should have crossover appeal seems fitting.

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President Donald Trump isn’t known for consistency. He has even occasionally waffled on immigration, his signature issue. This tendency has been on display in recent weeks, as two federal agencies made starkly different moves on telecom policy. First, the Department of Justice sued to block AT&T's proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner.

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Executives at ascendant tech titans like Amazon and Google tend to look down on their predecessor IBM. The fading giant of Armonk, New York, once sustained itself inventing and selling cutting-edge technology, but now leans heavily on consulting. Renting out people to help other companies with tech projects is a messier and less scalable business than selling computing power on a distant cloud server, and leaving the customer to do the grunt work.

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