corporations

For many companies, those indirect emissions dwarf all the rest. Some companies and business groups contend that it is unfair to hold them responsible for pollution that they may not directly control. A graphics card maker, for example, may say it cannot control the coal plants that power its suppliers' factories in distant countries; an oil company might argue that it doesn't control how its customers use its products. They may drill it, but customers burn it. In California, Wiener and others are making their second…

From underground radar to better cameras for cars, established firms are increasingly benefitting from innovations developed at technology incubators. In turn, established companies are increasingly directly sponsoring or creating such incubators, sparking a growing trend in which innovative, early-stage startups are helped along their journey to successful products by the leading companies in the field. Just last week Swedish carmaker Volvo launched a new effort to support startups, focusing specifically on the…

Table showing compound markups compared to conventional markups in a few industries. The compound markups are substantially greater than the conventional ones. Credit: Constantin Colonescu, Author provided Inflation, followed by poverty and social inequality are the most pressing issues worrying people around the world right now. Canada has not been immune from the rising cost of living and is still fighting an inflation rate…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain It's been happening a lot lately. General Electric, once the epitome of a sprawling conglomerate, is splitting into three stand-alone health care, energy, and aerospace corporations. The Kellogg Company is trifurcating as well, while Johnson & Johnson is splitting in two: one company for pharmaceuticals and one for consumer products. …

Corporations in energy, finance and telecommunications got together last week to square off on their cyber-defense skills, a match that participants claimed was the first tri-industry exercise organized entirely by the private sector.Power companies Southern Co. and Southern California Edison, telecoms operators AT&T Inc. and Lumen Technologies Inc., and Mastercard Inc. and…

Patrick Wardle is known for being a Mac malware specialist — but his work has traveled farther than he realized. A former employee of the NSA and NASA, he is also the founder of the Objective-See Foundation: a nonprofit that creates open-source security tools for macOS. The latter role means that a lot of Wardle’s software code is now freely available to download and decompile — and some of this code has apparently caught the eye of technology companies that are using it without his permission. Three different…

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter hasn’t been finalized yet, but the world’s richest man is keeping busy by kicking around ideas for potential changes to the platform. His latest suggestion? Charging corporations and governments to tweet. “Ultimately, the downfall of the Freemasons was giving away their stonecutting services for nothing,” tweeted Musk. “Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users.” As is often the case with Musk, there’s no commitment to this…