Business, Spoken

Silicon Valley oligarchs have plenty of reason to lose sleep these days, but the looming prospect of Nov. 1 has to be high on the list. That’s the day that executives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter are scheduled to testify in back-to-back hearings before Senate and House committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill Thursday that would require online political advertisers to provide additional disclosures about who’s paying for their ads, but the measure may prove a half-step toward preventing foreign adversaries from influencing US elections online. During a press conference Thursday, Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar introduced the much-anticipated Honest Ads Act, co-sponsored by Republican Sen. John McCain. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tony Fadell is at the Grove, a spectacularly beautiful country estate outside of London. The event is Founders Forum: the ultra ­exclusive invite-only tech conference. Prince William is in the house. The guest list is lousy with knights and lesser officers of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Marissa Mayer, the now ex-CEO of Yahoo, and Biz Stone, recently returned to Twitter, are mingling with the other hundred or so invitees. But this is really Fadell’s moment. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Twitter could take credit for revolutionary political movements like the Arab Spring, it was easy for the company's executives to joke about their liberal stance on free speech. (Twitter, they said, was "the free speech wing of the free speech party.") But things are a bit more complicated now, as Twitter increasingly plays host to bullies, harassers, Nazis, propaganda-spreading bots, ISIS recruiters, and threats of nuclear war. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web, is in existential crisis. This has nothing to do with money. A couple of years ago, the site launched a panicky fundraising campaign, but ironically thanks to Donald Trump, Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or well-organized. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

LONGMONT, Colo. — In one back room at Skyline High School, you can learn all you need to know about St. Vrain Valley School District. It’s there that bins of materials sit next to past projects, exposing the district’s DNA. Boxes holding glue, Popsicle sticks, tape, pipe cleaners, compasses, zip ties and rulers lie nestled inside a 6-foot-high, student-constructed rack. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

White-collar automation has become a common buzzword in debates about the growing power of computers, as software shows potential to take over some work of accountants and lawyers. Artificial-intelligence researchers at Google are trying to automate the tasks of highly paid workers more likely to wear a hoodie than a coat and tie—themselves. In a project called AutoML, Google’s researchers have taught machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria tore through the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is still mostly an island deleted from the present and pushed back a century or so—with little clean water, little electric power, and almost no telecommunications. For telecom, the biggest problem is the lack of power, because most of the island’s transmission lines were knocked out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the distant Koprulu Sector of the Milky Way, Facebook’s Zerglings lingered in a restless swarm outside the enemy’s base. After the commander ill-advisedly opened the gate, the social network’s alien horde stormed in and slaughtered forces stationed inside, in a battle fought on the frontiers of artificial-intelligence research. The bloody incident was part of an annual competition of the videogame StarCraft for AI software bots that wrapped up Sunday. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Imagine you want to collect donations for a food bank. You could place an empty box on the street, walk away, and hope there’s food inside when you return. The likely result? Your box will be filled with trash. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Andrew Losowsky (@losowsky) is project lead ofMozilla’sCoral Project. The Coral Project builds open-source tools and guides to community practice to bring journalists closer to the communities they serve. Alternatively, you could think strategically. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices