Business, Spoken

One of the most ubiquitous features of the internet is the ability to link to content elsewhere. Everything is connected via billions of links and embeds to blogs, articles, and social media. But a federal judge’s ruling threatens that ecosystem. Katherine Forrest, a Southern District of New York judge, ruled Thursday that embedding a tweet containing an image in a webpage could be considered copyright infringement. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Just before Facebook went public in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had a bound red book titled Facebook Was Not Originally Created to Be a Company placed on every employee’s desk. The book, written by Zuckerberg himself, ended with an urgent, even ominous rallying cry: If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. “Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You might see fewer ads on the web from now on. But you probably won't. On Thursday, Google Chrome, the most popular browser by a wide margin, began rolling out a feature that will block ads on sites that engage in particularly annoying behavior, such as automatically playing sound, or displaying ads that can't be dismissed until a certain amount of time has passed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The bike-sharing wars have escalated. What started as healthy competition between two powerful, well-funded Chinese companies and a handful of scrappy American upstarts has intensified into a trash-talking land grab involving electric scooters, electric bikes, and plenty of Silicon Valley-style ambition. In October, LimeBike the favored competitor of Silicon Valley venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Coatue Management, raised $50 million in funding. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Angel Torres was driving down a major Los Angeles boulevard in late 2016 when it happened: Ride requests from Uber and Lyft arrived at the same second. As he looked away from the road to decide which trip was more worth his time, he nearly rear-ended the car ahead of him. “It scared the crap out of me,” Torres says. He was new to juggling the two apps, and was so rattled by the near miss that he started pulling over every time he needed to accept a ride on one app or turn off the other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Do not let their names fool you. The silicon places---Silicon Slopes, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Beach, Silicon Peach, Silicon Bayou, Silicon Shire, Silicon Desert, Silicon Holler, Silicon Hill and, separately, Silicon Hills---do not aspire to become “the next Silicon Valley.” Sure, the country’s burgeoning tech enclaves in Utah and Kentucky and Oregon draw inspiration from the original. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the twilight of the 20th century, Bill Gates was well and truly a tentacular squid, with his sucker-covered limbs extending into every level of the computer industry. The one area that Gates didn’t dominate: the World Wide Web. And how he tried to conquer that newfangled internet led to an epic court battle that continues to shape how the world sees the five-headed beast that Big Tech has become. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In conservative circles, the pitchforks have been out for tech since at least the 2016 election season, with far-right media organizations like Breitbart and Project Veritas accusing the industry and its leaders of silencing Republican voices, advocating for open borders, and bankrolling Democratic campaigns. And yet, a new survey suggests that the tech backlash festering on the far-right fringes has also escalated on the industry's largely liberal home turf. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The bruised Mark Zuckerberg on this issue's cover? That's a photo-illustration created by Jake Rowland, a New York City–based artist known for his composite portraits. For this image, Rowland mashed together an existing image of Zuckerberg with a photograph of a hired model—made up to look battered—whose features resembled that of the Facebook confounder and CEO. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In December of 2016, Google announced it had fixed a troubling quirk of its autocomplete feature: When users typed in the phrase, "are jews," Google automatically suggested the question, "are jews evil?" When asked about the issue during a hearing in Washington on Thursday, Google's vice president of news, Richard Gingras, told members of the British Parliament, "As much as I would like to believe our algorithms will be perfect, I don't believe they ever will be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices