This week’s News Roundup covers the Wikileaks CIA leak on device hacking and the misreporting that’s been happening around it this week; two “fake news” stories – Facebook’s commencement of its flagging of fake news and Google’s failure to surface true news in its search snippets feature; and reports that Nest is working on some new smart home gear.

Our Question of the Week is “Can Uber be saved from itself?” Uber has been through the ringer the last few weeks as a result of a set of mishaps largely of its own making, but there’s also a long history of questionable, immoral, and illegal behavior as well as poor treatment of both employees and drivers at Uber. Aaron walks us through the ethical shortcomings that lead to behavior like this, and how Uber could change for the better, based on experience from other companies and his expertise as an ethics expert.

Our Third Segment is a conversation about the narrative that seems to be emerging about Windows PCs gaining on the Mac and to some extent becoming “cool” based on a few recent articles. We have a brief discussion about how much of this is real and how much of it is confined to a narrow set of users who happen to be influential.

Our Weekly Pick is a TV show recommended by Jan.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

• News Roundup (links are to Tech Narratives comments on each item):
  • Wikileaks CIA leak
  • Facebook starts flagging fake news and Google starts pushing it in snippets
  • Nest is working on new products
• Question of the Week:
  • Tech Narratives narrative on Uber’s Toxic Culture
  • An Open Letter to the Uber Board and Investors from the Kapors
  • Quartz piece on Uber’s culture and values
  • New York Times piece on Uber’s culture
  • Jan’s Recode piece on CEOs and corporate culture, focused on Uber
  • Business Insider piece on Uber’s values
  • A New York Times piece from 2014 about Uber
• Mac vs PC articles from this week (Tech Narratives links):
  • The Verge
  • Business Insider 1 and 2
• Jan’s Weekly Pick was the Great British Baking Show, a TV show from the UK with two seasons available on Netflix.

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