Technology

Over the last year, the worldwide web has started to look less worldwide. Europe is floating regulation that could impose temporary bans on US tech companies that violate its laws. The United States was on the verge of banning TikTok and WeChat, though the new Biden administration is rethinking that move. India, which did ban

Lyft is adding an option to allow people to order a ride in a more retro way — by phone call — a year after Uber tried doing the same before shutting it down. The ride-hail company said Wednesday it launched a special service in dozens of Florida cities to allow people to call a

California’s net neutrality law can go into effect after a federal judge on Tuesday handed a defeat to broadband providers who had pushed to overturn the law. Industry groups had asked the US District Court for the Eastern District of California to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the legislation, but the groups’ request was denied.

Before last year, 28-year-old Meredith Giuliani thought voice notes were “kind of weird,” and she mostly stuck to texting. But after the pandemic hit, audio messages became a daily routine for her and many of her friends. “This is my way to debrief and tell everybody what’s going on,” she told CNN Business. “It’s not

Mukesh Ambani has spent years trying to turn his inherited oil business into a tech empire. In 2020, that pivot really kicked into overdrive. Between March and November last year, even as the coronavirus upended lives and devastated economies around the world, India’s richest man was handed more than $27 billion to make a bet

Adam Neumann, the disgraced former CEO and cofounder of WeWork, may soon have a massive payday as part of a possible settlement with SoftBank, the company’s largest investor, but the amount under discussion is far less than the golden parachute originally offered. Neumann, who stepped down in late 2019 after a disastrous attempt to take

Nearly 30,000 Macs worldwide have been infected with mysterious malware, according to researchers at security firm Red Canary. The issue was somewhat confounding to Red Canary researchers, who said it’s not clear what the malware’s goal is. In a blog post, the firm said it did not observe the malware delivering “malicious payloads” — essentially,

Peloton is releasing a lower-priced treadmill to become more than a purveyor of high-end stationary-bikes. The public company, which reported revenue of more than $1 billion for the quarter ending in December, already has one treadmill on the market, called Tread+, which has earned celebrity endorsements from the likes of Miley Cyrus and Lizzo who

Microsoft is joining forces with publishers in Europe to call for an Australia-style system that would force tech platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for content. The company said Monday that it would team up with media industry groups like the European Publishers Council to lobby for such a policy, which

Nearly a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, many Americans remain stuck trying to work, attend school and socialize from home. For tens of millions of them, this is made more difficult because they lack access to fast, reliable internet at home. That means millions of American kids are unable to do at-home schoolwork. Millions of

Surging iPhone sales in the final three months of 2020 pushed Apple ahead of Samsung as the world’s biggest smartphone maker, according to new research. The launch of the 5G iPhone 12 series propelled Apple to the number one position in the fourth quarter, Gartner said in a statement on Monday. The last time Apple

Hours after Google tried to turn the page on a months-long controversy over the abrupt departure of one leader of its Ethical AI team, the other leader said she was fired. The announcement quickly sent shockwaves through the artificial intelligence industry. In a tweet Friday afternoon, Margaret Mitchell wrote, “I’m fired.” Mitchell, a Google researcher

After safely landing on the surface of Mars Thursday, NASA’s Perseverance rover has sent back a never-before-seen view: what it looks like to land on Mars. The rover also returned some beautiful postcards of its landing site. The first image shared during a NASA press conference Friday was “exhilarating” for the team when they received

Uber is reviewing how it treats thousands of drivers in the United Kingdom after the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that they should be classified as workers and not independent contractors. The unanimous decision could deliver a major blow to the company’s business model in one of its most important markets, and opens the door

Facebook’s decision to block people from sharing news in Australia has been rebuked by lawmakers around the world, raising the specter of a much wider showdown between the world’s biggest social media platform and the governments and news organizations fighting to check its power. Elected officials and media publishers in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany

Just days after Maryland became the first state in the country to impose a tax on digital advertising targeting Big Tech, lobbying groups representing companies including Amazon, Facebook, Google are trying to stop it. In a lawsuit filed Thursday, the groups allege that the state law is “deeply flawed” as well as “unlawful” and “unconstitutional.”

Facebook allegedly gave its advertisers “inflated and misleading” metrics on how many people their ads could reach for years, according to newly revealed court documents in a long-running lawsuit against the company. The documents, unsealed on Wednesday by the US District Court for the Northern District of California, cite emails from a Facebook employee saying