Business, Spoken

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that AT&T has agreed to pay $60 million in a settlement that centers around secretly throttled unlimited plans in 2011. You might assume the fine has something to do with the broadband industry’s liberal use of the word “unlimited,” given that AT&T slowed connections to a crawl once customers had used a certain amount of data. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In some ways, the social media app TikTok couldn’t have rose to prominence at a worse moment. The platform for sharing short-form video clips is owned by the Chinese startup Bytedance, and surged in popularity just as the United States’ relations with China are turning icier than they have been in years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

America’s national security depends on the government getting access to the artificial intelligence breakthroughs made by the technology industry. So says a report submitted to Congress Monday by the National Security Commission on AI. The group, which includes executives from Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon, says the Pentagon and intelligence agencies need a better relationship with Silicon Valley to stay ahead of China. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There’s a rule in the world of blockchains so ingrained that some call it folklore. Bitcoin, the original iteration of blockchain technology, is great at two things. One is keeping data secure, with a ledger others can’t sabotage. The other is “decentralization,” or getting lots of people to work together without a central authority to call the shots. But those two nice properties come with a big tradeoff: Blockchains can’t scale. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Microsoft got where it is by ensuring that Windows ran on many different types of hardware. Monday, the company said its cloud computing platform will soon offer access to the most exotic hardware of all: quantum computers. Microsoft is one of several tech giants investing in quantum computing, which by crunching data using strange quantum mechanical processes promises unprecedented computational power. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Wikipedia is the arbiter of truth on the internet. It's what settles arguments at bars. It supplies answers for the information snippets you see on your Google or Bing search results. It's the first stop for nearly everyone doing online research. The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Three days after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg was asked the question on many people’s minds: Did the explosion of fake news and caustic political rhetoric on Facebook help Trump win? Zuckerberg dismissed the idea. "The idea that fake news ... influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," he said. The line has been reprinted so frequently many can cite it from memory. It didn't matter whether his comments were willful or accidental. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Pentagon says artificial intelligence will help the US military become still more powerful. Thursday, an advisory group including executives from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook proposed ethical guidelines to prevent military AI from going off the rails. The advice came from the Defense Innovation Board, created under the Obama administration to help the Pentagon tap tech industry expertise, and chaired by Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and chairman. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Martin Fleming doesn’t think robots are coming to take your jobs. The chief economist at IBM, Fleming says those worries aren’t backed up by the data. “It’s really nonsense,” he says. A new paper from MIT and IBM’s Watson AI Lab shows that for most of us, the automation revolution probably won’t mean physical robots replacing human workers. Instead, it will come from algorithms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Elizabeth Warren announced a new plan to fight corruption in Washington on Tuesday: The Democratic presidential candidate wants to ban giant corporations from hiring senior government officials until they have been out of public office for at least four years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices