Business, Spoken

Facebook says it built Messenger Kids, a new version of its popular communications app with parental controls, to help safeguard pre-teens who may be using unauthorized and unsupervised social-media accounts. Critics think Facebook is targeting children as young as 6 to hook them on its services. Facebook’s goal is to “push down the age” of when it’s acceptable for kids to be on social media, says Josh Golin, executive director of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

FCC chair Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal net neutrality provisions and reclassify broadband providers from “common carriers” to “information services” is an unprecedented giveaway to big broadband providers and a danger to the internet. The move would mean the FCC would have almost no oversight authority over broadband providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The notorious 404 error, “Not Found,” is often, not totally erroneously, referred to as “the last page of the internet.” It’s an obligatory heads-up with an outsize reputation; it is a meme and a punch line. Bad puns abound. The error has been printed in comics and on T-shirts, an accessible and relatable facet of what was once relegated to nerd humor and is now a fact of digital life. That the 404 should have crossover appeal seems fitting. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

President Donald Trump isn’t known for consistency. He has even occasionally waffled on immigration, his signature issue. This tendency has been on display in recent weeks, as two federal agencies made starkly different moves on telecom policy. First, the Department of Justice sued to block AT&T's proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Executives at ascendant tech titans like Amazon and Google tend to look down on their predecessor IBM. The fading giant of Armonk, New York, once sustained itself inventing and selling cutting-edge technology, but now leans heavily on consulting. Renting out people to help other companies with tech projects is a messier and less scalable business than selling computing power on a distant cloud server, and leaving the customer to do the grunt work. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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The world is commonly divided into industrialized and emerging economies. A new study of how technology will transform demand for workers suggests we might talk of the automated and automating worlds instead. Economic think tank McKinsey Global Institute forecast changes in demand for different kinds of labor across 45 countries as technologies improve to perform physical or office tasks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Federal Communications Commission's plan to jettison its net-neutrality rules found a surprise supporter this week in respected technology industry analyst and blogger Ben Thompson. In a blog post Tuesday, Thompson argued that he supports net neutrality, but thinks the FCC is right to repeal rules that ban broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down, or otherwise discriminating against legal content. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

FRESNO, Calif. — A group of seventh- and eighth-grade girls sat around a lunch table discussing a new game-like app they use in school. Danna Rodriguez somewhat sullenly said she didn’t want to care about Strides, which tracks points students earn for attendance, grade-point average and using the app itself, among other things. But she can’t help herself. She does care. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For a year or two in the early 2010s, a certain genre of cheesy, irresistibly uplifting headline was unavoidable on Facebook. You know the trope – someone died in an inspiring way, a potentially bad situation led to an unlikely friendship, a dog saved someone’s life. Followed, almost always, by “You’ll never believe what happened next.” It was a sure bet to make content go viral, and traffic-hungry publishers flooded Facebook with curiosity-gap headlines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices