Kenya’s Threat to Ban Facebook Could Backfire
In June, Global Witness and Foxglove found that Meta continued to approve ads in Amharic targeting Ethiopian users that included hate speech and calls for violence....
Gig Workers Are Losing Their Hard-Won Rights
Not all of Just Eat’s orange-clad couriers were switched to salaried contracts, and the company did continue to use self-employed gig workers hired via outsourcing companies...
Data Centers Are Facing a Climate Crisis
When record temperatures wracked the UK in late July, Google Cloud’s data centers in London went offline for a day, due to cooling failures. The impact...
Big Tech Can’t Stop Obsessing Over Apple and TikTok
Every three months, Wall Street watches with anticipation for bumper results from Big Tech companies. Over the course of a little more than a week, Snap,...
Instagram Proves When You’ve Lost the Kardashians, You’re Screwed
Hello, friends. My name is Kate Knibbs, and I’m a senior writer at WIRED covering culture and media. I’ll be your substitute Plaintext guide this week,...
Drone Contraband Deliveries Are Rampant at US Prisons
It’s not children who are committing these heists, of course. It’s people running jobs on the inside and the outside. Internet-connected cell phones and electronic money...
The Case for Making Public Transit Free Everywhere
Free fares also remove the financial cost of creating ticketing systems and enforcing them. In Boston, an extension of a free fare trial was in part...
The CHIPS Act Passes Congress to Boost US Semiconductor Production
A protracted global chip shortage, triggered by pandemic spending and worsened by supply chain disruption, also helped spur the legislation. Shortages of certain often cheap but...
Martin Shkreli Is Back With a Web3 Drug Discovery Platform
Martin Shkreli—the notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive fresh from prison after his 2017 fraud conviction—announced his latest, eyebrow-raising venture this week: the creation of a blockchain-based Web3 drug...
The Fallout From Apple’s Bizarre, Dogged Union-Busting Campaign
At a roundtable that Bowles attended in May, a meeting leader said they were going to answer “questions from the team,” despite the fact that he...