Bevir Media Inc.

There’s not much overlap between the America that President Obama described on stage at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night and the one Donald Trump outlined in Cleveland last week. The country Trump painted during his turn in the spotlight is clouded in corruption, crime, and ever-present threats. In that version, America is a place where terrorists are always at the doorstep, where you’ll never find a job, where immigrants pose a threat to public safety, where the whole world is the enemy. This America has never endured such darkness. It’s little wonder, then, that Trump promises to restore America to what it once was—some better past when it was strong, proud, safe, and great. In his slogan “Make America Great Again,” the most important word is “again.” The America that Obama depicted was the emotional, spiritual, and directional opposite. Where Trump described a national nightmare, President Obama articulated the American Dream. Where Trump’s wo...

Tim Bryant and Brian Knudson spent two years preparing for the Cyber Grand Challenge, a $55 million hacking contest cooked up by Darpa , the visionary research operation inside the U.S. Defense Department. But when the contest begins next Thursday evening in a ballroom at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, Darpa won’t let them participate. That’s because the contest pits code against code. It’s a battle of autonomous systems designed to identify security holes in software programs they’ve never encountered—and patch those holes on the fly. Working with others at defense contractor Raytheon, Bryant and Knudson spent those two years building such a system. Today, contest organizers will roll a supercomputer into the Paris Hotel that includes the latest version of Raytheon’s creation, and once that happens, Bryant, Knudson, and the rest of the ten-person team, dubbed Deep Red, can’t guide their system or change it in any way. They become bystanders...

To overcome its fear of the future as a big dumb pipe, Verizon continues to look to the past. Last year, it spent $4.4 billion for AOL and its surprisingly advanced ad tech. Today, it’s spending another $4.8 billion on Yahoo, a surprisingly popular content company. That’s a lot of money for companies that have devolved into punchlines over the last several years. But it’s also Verizon’s best shot at staying relevant. Today’s Yahoo acquisition isn’t any kind of pivot. It’s not even really a surprise; Verizon has reportedly been eyeing the crown jewel of ’90s Internet for months. It’s a continuation of an ongoing strategy to become more than just a shuttler of bits and bytes from one place to another. In a world of increasing (and increasingly warranted) regulation of Internet service providers, content and ad companies like AOL and Yahoo are more than nostalgia plays. They’re a way forward. A Smart Pipe Telecom companies today are grippeded by the fear of being reduc...