Technology

As we reported last month, a Wisconsin company called Three Square Market has become the first company in the US to offer microchip implants to its employees. The firm, which designs software for breakroom markets, wants employees to use microchips to help facilitate vending-machine payments. The firm wanted to use its employees as test subjects for their product. And though the program was strictly voluntary, it marks an uncomfortable beginning of a trend that could someday result in all humans being involuntarily microchipped.

Authored by Claire Connelly via RenegadeInc.com,

Google has come under scrutiny by free-speech organisations for shutting down neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, seemingly too distracted to notice the tech giant has been waging a censorship campaign against news organisations that publish content which conflicts with the narrative of the Washington establishment, along with Facebook and Twitter on the grounds of ‘fake news’.

As social media and internet companies scramble to ban or otherwise cut ties with extremist and far right-wing websites like the neo-nazi Daily Stormer, which were unceremoniously dropped by the likes of GoDaddy, Google and security firm Cloudflare earlier this week after helping to organize last weekend's deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, a prominent nonprofit has come forward to defend them.

With the recent leak of the “Google Manifesto” and the maelstrom of media backlash that followed, Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes that it seems that concerns around diversity in the technology industry have finally reached a boiling point.

Today’s infographic from Information is Beautiful breaks down the demographics of 23 major tech companies, based on statistics from 2016. It also provides comparisons to the composition of the U.S. population in general, the top 50 U.S. companies, Congress, and Fortune 500 CEOs.

Ethereum investors have been eagerly awaiting more news about the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the enterprise platform that’s supposed to transform Ethereum into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) of the future. The announcement of the co-venture between several of the largest US tech companies coincided with the beginning of a massive runup in the value of Ethereum. Some have speculated that enabling the Ethereum network to process a million transactions a second could potentially boost the value of ether tokens past $2,000 a coin. They’re currently trading at $290.