In 2014 consumer expert and Silicon Valley startup founder Nir Eyal wrote Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. But five years later, the New York Times reports he’s offering consumers a new book about how to resist those habits — even while arguing that “addiction” is the wrong way to describe technology’s hold on people: There was a problem, yes, but…
Tag: Silicon Valley
When Sun Microsystems’ Founders and Former Employees Hold a Reunion
Last week Infoworld reported on a reunion of more than 1,000 former employees of Sun Microsystems including all four founders of the company — Andreas Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy — at just their second reunion since the 2010 Oracle acquisition. Prior to the formal festivities, the company founders met with a small group of press persons. Pondering…
Google Loans Cameras To Volunteers To Fill Gaps in ‘Street View’
NPR explains why a man “applied to borrow a 360-degree camera through Google’s Street View camera loan program.” Kanhema, who works as a product manager in Silicon Valley and is a freelance photographer in his spare time, volunteered to carry Google’s Street View gear to map what amounted to 2,000 miles of his home country. The Berkeley, California, resident has filled…
Feds Order Apple and Google To Hand Over Names of 10,000+ Users of Gun Scope App
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Own a rifle? Got a scope to go with it? The government might soon know who you are, where you live and how to reach you. That’s because Apple and Google have been ordered by the U.S. government to hand over names, phone numbers and other identifying data of at least 10,000 users…
Silicon Valley Heavyweights Fire Up Plan For an Open Lunar Settlement
pacopico writes: Aerospace technology has gotten better. The price of rocket launches has come down. So much so that a group of space friends in Silicon Valley now think it’s possible to create their own settlement on the moon for less than $3 billion. They’ve formed a non-profit called the Open Lunar Foundation that looks to begin launching probes to the…
Is Silicon Valley Building a Chinese-Style Social Credit System?
schwit1 shared this thought-provoking article from Fast Company:
Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China’s social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity…
The Big Levandowski: Could an Uber Engineer’s Indictment Discourage Workers From Changing Jobs?
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For nearly 20 years,” writes WIRED’s Alex Davies in How Anthony Levandowski Put Himself at the Center of an Industry, “the French-American Levandowski has played a kind of purposeful Forrest Gump for the world of autonomous driving. Rather than stumbling into the center of one momentous event after another, Levandowski has put himself there. And he…
Google Contractors In Pittsburgh Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Contract workers at Google’s office in Pittsburgh have just announced their intention to unionize. 66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they’re asking the…
California High School In Silicon Valley Is Locking Up Students’ Cellphones
San Mateo High School administrators have instituted a new policy to lock up students’ cellphones. “Each school day, nearly 1,700 students place their devices in a Yondr pouch that closes with a proprietary lock,” reports NBC News. “School administrators unlock them at the end of the day.” The goal is to help students focus on the teacher and other students. From…
Google DeepMind Co-Founder Placed On Leave From AI Lab
Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of Google’s high-profile AI lab DeepMind, has been placed on leave after controversy over some of the projects he led. Bloomberg reports: Mustafa Suleyman runs DeepMind’s “applied” division, which seeks practical uses for the lab’s research in health, energy and other fields. Suleyman is also a key public face for DeepMind, speaking to officials and at events…