But Mr. Tan’s passion, as it is for a growing number of tech industry leaders, is San Francisco politics. He is one of a cadre of love-them-or-hate-them tech executives and investors with lots of opinions about the city and endless piles of cash to, as they say in the tech industry, move fast and break … Read more
Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube This week, we look at a mess of corporate drama in artificial intelligence. Stability AI has announced that its founder and C.E.O., Emad Mostaque, is leaving the company. Meanwhile, Microsoft hired away two of the co-founders and much of the staff of Inflection, … Read more
General Motors said Friday that it had stopped sharing details about how people drove its cars with two data brokers that created risk profiles for the insurance industry. The decision followed a New York Times report this month that G.M. had, for years, been sharing data about drivers’ mileage, braking, acceleration and speed with the … Read more
Relative to the 496 billion Canadian dollars the federal government spent last year, the amounts are small. But this week’s revelations surrounding millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent billings by subcontractors, along with the continuing ArriveCAN app scandal, show what a big mess developing software can be for the government. Even after an extensive investigation, … Read more
A federal judge in California on Monday dismissed X’s lawsuit against a nonprofit organization that studies hate speech online, ruling that the social media company’s case was designed to punish researchers for speaking freely about the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate in July in U.S. … Read more
As a Tunisian human rights activist in the 2000s, Amira Yahyaoui staged protests and blogged about government corruption. In interviews, she described being beaten by the police. When she was 18, she said, she was kidnapped from the street, dropped off at the Algerian border and placed in exile for several years. Ms. Yahyaoui’s compelling … Read more
For years, the U.S. investors who backed ByteDance, the Chinese internet company that owns TikTok, have wrestled with the complexities of owning a piece of a geopolitically fraught social media app. Now it’s gotten even more complicated. A bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok is winding its way through the Senate after sailing through … Read more
Two years in prison for tax and securities violations. Eleven years for deceiving investors. A 150-year sentence for the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The country’s most notorious white-collar fraudsters — like Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes — have received a range of punishments for their crimes, from relatively short prison terms to effectively a … Read more
Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency mogul who was convicted of fraud, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday, capping an extraordinary saga that upended the multi-trillion-dollar crypto industry and became a cautionary tale of greed and hubris. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentence was shorter than the 40 to 50 years that federal prosecutors had recommended, … Read more
In February last year, a new Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 Max plane was on one of its first flights when an automated stabilizing system appeared to malfunction, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing soon after they took off. Less than two months later, an Alaska Airlines 737 Max plane with eight hours of … Read more