Business, Spoken

GitHub is the largest repository of open source software in the world. Everyone from Microsoft, which acquired the company last year, to Google to Walmart use it to host their open source projects. But GitHub is also the place where users report bugs, request features, and submit their own contributions to open source projects. It has wikis that developers can use to publish documentation. It has a web hosting service called Pages for content that doesn't quite fit into the wiki mold. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Conversations around today’s internet are stuck in a stifling binary. Either we hear that the digital revolution will either magically deliver us into an über-efficient world where we are all connected and uplifted, or our fears about it gone awry, threatening our democracies and economic security, will be realized. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was a few weeks before the 2016 election, and I was putting together a report on the future of online political discourse. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This June, as the news bristled with headlines about Facebook’s cryptocurrency-to-be and the price of bitcoin once again soared, the mood in the San Francisco offices of Coinbase was subdued. In 2017, the cryptocurrency exchange was close to the frenetic epicenter of the bitcoin boom. Millions of people used its app to dip their toes into cryptocurrency speculation. Then came the crash. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Microsoft’s recent victory in landing a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract called JEDI could make life more complicated for one of the software giant’s partners: the independent artificial-intelligence research lab OpenAI. OpenAI was created in 2015 by Silicon Valley luminaries including Elon Musk to look to the far horizon, and save the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At the G7 meeting in Montreal last year, Justin Trudeau told WIRED he would look into why more than 100 African artificial intelligence researchers had been barred from visiting that city to attend their field’s most important annual event, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, or NeurIPS. Now the same thing has happened again. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The cofounder of WhatsApp and the Signal Foundation thinks the use of encrypted communications tools will only increase in the future. “There’s a global education that’s happening,” says Brian Acton, who left WhatsApp in 2018 and now chairs the non-profit foundation, which promotes open-source, end-to-end encryption in messaging. “Back in the ‘90s, we all got the same hoax emails, and we all learned to ignore them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Imagine it’s late October 2020, and that there's fierce competition for the remaining undecided voters in the presidential election. In a matter of hours, a deepfake video depicting a candidate engaged in unsavory behavior goes viral, and thanks to microtargeting, reaches those who are most susceptible to changing their vote. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices