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Inside the fall of Uber founder Travis Kalanick

Charlotte Henry ·

The fall of Uber’s founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick was nearly as dramatic as his company’s rise. Mr. Kalanick quit as CEO in June, after a prolonged period of scandal. He tried to negotiate a graceful exit but, as Bloomberg Businessweek detailed, in the end, it was a typically chaotic departure.

Then, contrition period over, [Mr. Kalanick] got up, called a board member, demanded a new PR strategy, and embarked on a yearlong starring role as the villain who gets his comeuppance in the most gripping startup drama since the dot-com bubble. It’s a story that, until now, has never been fully told.

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Google is a Vital Cog in the U.S. Spying Machine

Andrew Orr ·

Microsoft isn’t the only one working closely with the U.S. spying machine. Google has been doing it for years. The company’s roots are tied to the CIA, and it has worked with the NSA as well.

Here’s a sign of how vital Google has become to the US government: in 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into its system by what the company believes was a group of Chinese government hackers, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the NSA…

This mixing of military, police, government, public education, business and consumer-facing systems – all funnelled through Google – continues to raise alarms.

Is it just me, or is it unnerving that companies are allying themselves closer with the military?

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How Books Have Changed in the Digital Age

Andrew Orr ·

Books have changed in the digital age. Although plenty of people still read paper books, or ‘pBooks’, eBooks are here to stay. Past prognosticators foretold the rise of the Future Book, but that future is different than they thought.

…We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book…

It’s an interesting read. Books themselves haven’t changed much, but a lot of things around books have.

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Ryan Welsh on Why The Singularity Isn't Coming Soon

Andrew Orr ·

Digital Trends interviewed Ryan Welsh, CEO of an AI company called Kyndi that is building an Explainable AI platform for government, financial services, and healthcare.

We’re very far away from artificial general intelligence … If you’re in the industry and you work with A.I. systems, you understand how limited they are, specifically around sensory motor and natural language understanding … Systems are very good at parsing sentences, but not really good at understanding the semantics or the pragmatics of language.

I always thought the Singularity was odd. Basically, it’s the belief that AI will get so powerful it will become god-like and give us all sorts of advanced technology. It’s religion for the atheistic Silicon Valley types.

Test Your Knowledge With Quiz Pursuit Trivia App
Cool Stuff Found

Test Your Knowledge With Quiz Pursuit Trivia App

Andrew Orr ·

With millions of unique quiz questions and thousands of topics, QuizPursuit is one of the best trivia games out there. With this fun and engaging quiz game, you can enhance your knowledge, while having a fun trivia game experience. And with the Levels feature you can boast to your friends about your expertise in your chosen topics of interest. Play this quiz game by yourself or invite and challenge friends for a fun round of trivia. No matter what your topic of interest is, we’ve got you covered. Choose from thousands of interesting topics, including sports, entertainment, science, and general trivia. The more questions that you answer on a particular topic, the higher the levels you reach. What’s more is that you win nuggets to advance through levels. You can use these nuggets to wager with your friends in challenges. You can double your wagered nuggets by winning the challenges. App Store: Free

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Why Mark Zuckerberg is Untouchable at Facebook

Charlotte Henry ·

Facebook has been hit with one crisis after another recently. On Tuesday, The New York Times revealed that it allowed companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix, to access user’s personal data to a far greater extent than those users were aware of. Normally, such a stream of scandal would put a CEO and Board Chairman like Mark Zuckerberg under serious pressure to resign. However, as Emily Stewart explains on Vox, Facebook’s structure means Mr. Zuckerberg is unlikely to go anywhere, anytime soon.

There have long been questions about whether too much influence within Facebook has been placed with Zuckerberg and, among some investors, pushes for him to renounce his position as chair of the board. But because of the way Facebook’s shareholder structure is set up — and the number of shares Zuckerberg holds — there’s no way for anyone to force him out.

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Some 2018 iPad Pros are Shipped Bent but Apple said that's Normal

Charlotte Henry ·

Some 2018 iPad Pros were shipped with a slight bend in their aluminium chassis. However, Apple told The Verge that this is not a defect. The company said it is a side effect of the manufacturing process. Apple insisted that the issue will not get worse over time, or have a negative effect on the device’s performance.

It’s an issue that seems to be more pronounced on the LTE model, as there’s a plastic strip that breaks up the iPad’s flat aluminum sides; it’s where the antenna line divides two sections of metal that some users have noticed a bend. Apple did not say the perceived flaw is strictly limited to the cellular iPad Pro, however, and some buyers of the Wi-Fi model also claim to have encountered it. Even if only cosmetic, the issue is out of character for Apple, which has rooted its reputation in manufacturing devices with best-in-industry fit and finish