Technology

By design, smart speakers have microphones that are always on, listening for so-called wake words like “Alexa,” “Hey, Siri,” or “O.K., Google.” Only after hearing that cue are they supposed to start recording. But contractors hired by device makers to review recordings for quality reasons report hearing clips that were most likely captured unintentionally, including […]

A federal grand jury has charged two Japanese businessmen for their role in an alleged global conspiracy to fix prices for components used in computer hard disk drives February 14, 2020, 6:48 PM 2 min read SAN FRANCISCO — A grand jury charged two Japanese businessmen for their role in an alleged global conspiracy to

The national housing market has cooled, but in Los Angeles the ultrarich are still shattering price records. An heiress to the Formula One racing empire sold her home for $119.75 million last July. In December, Lachlan Murdoch paid $150 million for a home in Bel Air. The latest buyer at the top: Jeff Bezos, the

A few years ago, Anna Ponnampalam did something out-of-the-box. She entered a lottery. But she wasn’t buying scratch-off tickets promising cash for life. She was trying to win funding for her medical research. Her application wasn’t successful. All proposals go through an initial quality and eligibility check, which hers did not pass; those that get

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has appealed to an audience in Germany for countries to steer clear of Chinese tech giant Huawei as they build their next-generation cellular networks February 14, 2020, 3:40 PM 2 min read MUNICH — U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appealed Friday to an audience in Germany for countries to steer

Each week, we review the week’s news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Hello, I’m Dai Wakabayashi, and I cover Google in San Francisco for The New York Times. For the most part, writing about smartphones over the last few years has been pretty boring. Can you get that excited

Tesla is pricing its second offering of stock at $767 apiece February 14, 2020, 12:41 PM 1 min read PALO ALTO, Calif. — Tesla priced its second offering of stock at $767 apiece Friday. An announcement Thursday that Tesla would put an additional $2 billion worth of stock on the market surprised almost everyone. Just

MILTON KEYNES, England — Last summer, a teenager named Tom Austin decided on a whim to record a rap song. He’d never made music before. But even as he was writing down lyrics — picking out references from an iPhone note of random stuff he’d been keeping — he was strangely sure of himself. “I

That possibility fuels organizations working to expand Israel’s tech sector, such as The Hybrid, which helps Arab-led start-ups scale up, and WMN, an advocacy and mentoring organization for women entrepreneurs in Tel Aviv and the north of Israel. Tech has also taken hold in Jerusalem, and is growing in Nazareth as well as cities near

NASA’s space snowman is revealing fresh secrets from its home far beyond Pluto By MARCIA DUNN AP Aerospace Writer February 13, 2020, 8:12 PM 4 min read CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s space snowman is revealing fresh secrets from its home far beyond Pluto. More than a year after its close encounter with the snowman-shaped