Silicon Valley will return for its seven-episode, sixth and final season in October, HBO revealed today at TCA. A specific date was not announced.

It was a beautiful winter day in San Francisco, and Zoe was grooving to the soundtrack of the roller-skating musical Xanadu as she rode an e-scooter to work. The 29-year-old tech worker had just passed the Uber building when, without warning, a homeless man jumped into the bike lane with his dog, blocking her path.

There would be nothing more disruptive than the sudden discovery of aliens. Perhaps that's why a small contingent of Silicon Valley is so interested in UFOs—and wants to know who's piloting them. With US Navy pilots coming forward to talk about their encounters with anomalous aerial vehicles, UFO hunters are starting to feel vindicated. The cross-section of technologists who are also UFO enthusiasts believe that they not only exist, but that we can make significant scientific breakthroughs by studying them.

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that technology doesn’t change who we are, it magnifies who we are, the good and the bad. Our problems – in technology, in politics, wherever – are human problems. From the Garden of Eden to today, it’s our humanity that got us into this mess, and it’s our humanity that’s going to have to get us out. First things first, here’s a plain fact.

72% of LA's software engineering grads on AngelList left the area for their first job, compared to just 34% of Bay Area grads. Here's how LA can recover.

Two missed opportunities from the Federal Trade Commission, on Google and Facebook, led us to the monopoly crisis we face today. By David Dayen.

53.5 per cent of tech employees strongly agree that their company makes customer data protection a top priority, according to a survey conducted by Blind, an anonymous workplace chat platform. Blind asked thousands of tech employees if they believed protection of customer data is a top priority at their company, with response options being ‘Strongly Agree’, ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’ and ‘Strongly Disagree’.

Plenty of people and companies have had a hand in leading the globe down the destructive, possibly irreversible path to climate catastrophe. In his New York Times Best Seller “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?,” Bill McKibben, who has written over a dozen books about the environment and has been called “the world’s best green journalist,” fingers the Koch brothers, the Republican Party and fossil fuel companies worldwide, among countless others.

U.S. regulators on Friday approved a new stock exchange that is the brainchild of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a move that will give high-growth technology companies more options to list their shares outside of the traditional New York exchanges. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved the creation of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, or LTSE, a Silicon Valley-based national securities exchange promoting what it says is a unique approach to governance and voting rights, while reducing short-term pressures on public companies.

Statistics like this throw into sharp relief the challenge for Silicon Valley and its leaders in 2019.

Silicon Valley firms don’t want to simply monitor your behavior; they plan to shape it, too. By Katie Fitzpatrick.

Hundreds of Google staffers met on Friday and discussed what activists allege is a frequent consequence of criticizing the company: Retaliation. By Mark Bergen, Josh Eidelson.

For the first time in decades, U.S. politicians and billionaires ask whether American-style capitalism can survive.

The rumors spread like wildfire: Muslims were secretly lacing a Sri Lankan village’s food with sterilization drugs. Soon, a video circulated that appeared to show a Muslim shopkeeper admitting to drugging his customers — he had misunderstood the question that was angrily put to him. Then all hell broke loose. Over a several-day span, dozens of mosques and Muslim-owned shops and homes were burned down across multiple towns. In one home, a young journalist was trapped, and perished.

US senators introduced a bill on Wednesday that will allow the Federal Trade Commission to inspect if corporations are using algorithms that are biased, discriminatory, and insecure. The bill, known as the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2019, was backed by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY).

Three blocks from Mark Zuckerberg’s $10 million Tudor home in San Francisco, Jake Orta lives in a small, single-window studio apartment filled with trash. There’s a child’s pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg’s house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg’s bin.

You may not have noticed it, but there’s a feeding frenzy under way in the tech world. Traditionally, such frenzies are driven by greed. This one, interestingly, is driven by fear, though you’d never guess that from its cover story, which is that it’s all about “ethics”, specifically the ethics of using (and, more commonly, abusing) personal data. Suddenly, wherever you look, data ethics has become the obsession du jour of governments, tech companies and regulators. Everyone and his dog is now publishing data-ethics guides, codes and pious exhortations.

When Stanford announced a new artificial intelligence institute, the university said the “designers of AI must be broadly representative of humanity” and unveiled 120 faculty and tech leaders partnering on the initiative.

In Silicon Valley, an open house can be more than an open house. At a six-bedroom, seven-bath home in the town of Menlo Park, a flamenco dancer swirled and a guitarist fingerpicked in a kitchen alcove. Outside, pesto pizza was pulled from the pizza oven. A face painter splotched unicorns on pudgy cheeks. A barista whipped up lattes. There were squishy toys for kids and videos of the house for potential homebuyers, who could keep the video-players.

China’s first emperor ordered his subjects to search for the elixir of life in a quest for immortality. In 16th century France, nobles would drink gold in a bid to extend their lifespans. Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king at the heart of humanity’s earliest epic poem, found a magic herb, but a snake ate it. In 2015, a woman on the MTV series True Life: I’m Obsessed With Staying Young bathed in pig blood.