This (Server) Space for Rent

If space runs tight, you can easily expand your storage in your iCloud settings, as shown here, or move some of your files to another service.

Q. I’m getting warnings about my iCloud drive’s being full, and Apple wants to sell me more space. Are there other options that are easier and cheaper? I don’t need to back up my whole computer, just random stuff.

A. Apple gives every iCloud account holder five free gigabytes of space on its servers to store online copies of documents, photos and videos, as well as device backups. The files can all be reached from iOS devices, Macs and PCs running the iCloud software. Messages from iCloud mail accounts (and Apple’s older mail services using @me.com and @mac.com) are also stored within that space.

If you get warning messages, Apple suggests either buying more iCloud storage — or deleting old messages, files and iOS device backups to free up space within your original five gigabytes. Buying more storage directly from Apple is relatively easy because you do not have to download or install any new software — and the company may already have your credit card on file if you buy media content and apps from its iTunes, iBooks or App Stores. Prices start at 99 cents a month to tack on 50 gigabytes of storage space; 200 gigabytes costs $2.99 a month, and two terabytes of server space is $9.99 a month.

While Apple’s offer may be convenient, other companies have their own deals that get you more bytes for your buck, especially if you are just looking for file storage and don’t have a lot of space invested in Apple’s mail or iCloud Photos service. For example, Amazon Drive cloud storage also gives five free gigabytes when you sign up, but Amazon Prime members get unlimited photo storage on top of that; 100 gigabytes of extra space is $11.99 a year, and one terabyte is $59.99 annually.

The Box storage service gives its individual users a free 10 gigabytes of space, and its Personal Pro plan raises that to 100 gigabytes for $10 a month. Dropbox provides two gigabytes of storage for its free Basic plan, upgradeable to one terabyte with Dropbox Plus for $8.25 a month. The iDrive service starts with five gigabytes of free storage, and upgrades start at $69.50 a year for two terabytes of space.

You can also cobble together a network of free or inexpensive storage locations to stash your files by using the services provided by Microsoft and Google. Microsoft OneDrive includes five free gigabytes, and an upgrade to 50 gigabytes is $1.99 a month; Microsoft Office 365 subscribers get additional space with their plans.

Google Drive file storage currently starts with 15 gigabytes of free space, which can be expanded to one terabyte for $9.99 a month, or 10 terabytes for a monthly $99.99.

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If you plan to use the storage service with a mobile device, make sure the company offers a compatible app for your phone or tablet.

Elon Musk’s Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One.

The chief executive of SpaceX, Elon Musk, at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, on Friday.

ADELAIDE, Australia — Elon Musk is revising his ambitions for sending people to Mars, and he says he now has a clearer picture of how his company, SpaceX, can make money along the way.

The key is a new rocket — smaller than the one he described at a conference in Mexico last year but still bigger than anything ever launched — and a new spaceship.

Speaking on Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, Mr. Musk said he had figured out a workable business plan, although his presentation lacked financial figures to back up his assertions.

Mr. Musk has long talked about his dreams of colonizing Mars, and at the same conference last year, he finally provided engineering details: a humongous reusable rocket called the Interplanetary Transport System.

But he did not convincingly explain then how SpaceX, still a company of modest size and revenues, could finance such an ambitious project.

“Now we think we have a better way to do it,” he said Friday.

The new rocket and spaceship would replace everything that SpaceX is currently launching or plans to launch in the near future. “That’s really fundamental,” Mr. Musk said.

The slimmed-down rocket would be nine meters, or about 30 feet, in diameter instead of the 12-meter behemoth he described last year. It would still be more powerful than the Saturn 5 rocket that took NASA astronauts to the moon. Mr. Musk called it B.F.R. (The “B” stands for “big”; the “R” is for “rocket.”) The B.F.R. would be able to lift 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, Mr. Musk said.

For Mars colonists, the rocket would lift a spaceship with 40 cabins, and with two to three people per cabin, it would carry about 100 people per flight. After launching, the B.F.R. booster would return to the launching pad; the spaceship would continue to orbit, where it would refill its tanks of methane and oxygen propellant before embarking on the monthslong journey to Mars.

Elon Musk shared this image on Instagram on Friday with the caption: “Mars City. Opposite of Earth. Dawn and dusk sky are blue on Mars and day sky is red.”

But with the smaller size, the B.F.R. would also be useful much closer to Earth, Mr. Musk said. He said it would be able to take over the launching duties of SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 rocket, taking many satellites to orbit at once, as well as ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. A variation of the spaceship could be used to collect and dispose of relics of satellite and other debris cluttering low-Earth orbit, he said.

Because all parts of the rocket and the spaceship are to be fully reusable, the cost of operating them would be low.

Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that advocates human exploration and settlement of the planet, liked the changes that Mr. Musk has made. “This is a much more practical approach than he presented last year,” Dr. Zubrin said. “It means he is serious.”

The same spaceship could also land on the moon. “It’s 2017,” Mr. Musk said. “We should have a lunar base by now.”

Even on Earth, the rockets, traveling at up to 18,000 miles per hour, could make long-distance trips short — New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes, for example. Any two points on Earth would be less than an hour apart, Mr. Musk said.

After the presentation, Mr. Musk took to Instagram to elaborate on the price of those round-the-world rocket flights: “Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that.”

Mr. Musk maintained a highly optimistic schedule for his Mars dreams. He said the company had already started work to build pieces of the new rocket.

A cargo mission, without any passengers, could launch as early as 2022. “That’s not a typo, although it is aspirational,” he said. “Five years feels like a long time to me.”

Two years later, the next time that Mars and Earth would swing by each other, SpaceX would launch four B.F.R.s to Mars — two carrying cargo, two carrying people.

In the lead-up to Mr. Musk’s talk on Friday, the main entrance to the Adelaide Convention Center was closed and locked, with a swell of people outside waiting to get in.

“He’s such an iconic character,” said Paris Michaels, the chief executive of Air@Wave Communications in Sydney, who attended the congress. “I planned the day around making this event. I’m taking a later flight home, even though I’m averaging two hours’ sleep this week.”

SpaceX is not the only company with proposals for the Red Planet. A few hours before Mr. Musk’s talk on Friday, Lockheed Martin provided an update of its own Mars mission vision, called Mars Base Camp. Compared with Mr. Musk’s ambitions, the Lockheed Martin plan seems quaint and slow. It would not head to Mars until 2028, it would take only six astronauts, and the first trip would not even land on Mars but instead circle the planet for a year before returning to Earth.

An artist’s illustration of the Mars Base Camp spacecraft proposed by Lockheed Martin.

From Mars orbit, astronauts could control robotic explorers like rovers and flying drones.

Mars Base Camp is more of a suggestion to NASA of what the agency could do rather than a corporate strategy that Lockheed Martin would pursue by itself.

“This isn’t Lockheed Martin’s vision, and it’s not the only vision of how to get to Mars, but we put it out here so that we can globally begin the dialogue,” Robert Chambers, an engineer working on the Mars Base Camp concept, said during the presentation.

Unlike Mr. Musk’s dreams, Mars Base Camp would not require unproven business plans or novel technologies far beyond what already exists or is already in development. “We know how to do this,” Mr. Chambers said.

The spacecraft, which looks as one might expect a traditional NASA expeditionary mission to Mars to look, would incorporate both the Orion crew capsule that Lockheed Martin is building for NASA deep-space missions and the agency’s plans to put a space station high above the moon. This week, the Russian space agency announced that it would like to collaborate with NASA on this lunar space station, called the Deep Space Gateway.

Lockheed Martin is one of six companies that NASA selected to develop a prototype of a habitat module that could be used for the Deep Space Gateway. Lockheed Martin officials said their vision for Mars Base Camp did not depend on their design’s being selected.

The Mars Base Camp proposal would also fit within the NASA budget, Lockheed Martin officials said.

This year’s update unveiled a reusable, hydrogen-fueled lander that would take astronauts to the Martian surface on a follow-up mission. Up to four astronauts could live on the Martian surface for two weeks at a time in the lander.

Lockheed Martin has added to its Mars Base Camp concept a lander that could take astronauts to the surface of Mars for two-week stays.

 Reflecting the interest of many to return to the moon before going to Mars, Lockheed Martin officials said the lander could also be used to travel to different parts of the moon from the Deep Space Gateway.

Amid Facebook’s Troubles, Message to Advertisers Stays Consistent

Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s head of global marketing solutions, at an industry event last year.

“I want to start off with our mission,” Carolyn Everson, the vice president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, said this week as she faced a crowd of marketers from the stage of a theater in Times Square. Ms. Everson was there to extol the potential of video advertising on Facebook site and its apps during the annual industry confab known as Advertising Week New York.

Before opening a panel discussion, Ms. Everson highlighted Facebook’s recently established mission statement — “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” — and aimed to illustrate how to do that. She showed a series of videos on Facebook, including a fund-raising ad from Walmart, that had raised awareness about Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

“I don’t think there’s a better example of what happens when you have power of community and the combination of scaled global platforms than what happened recently with the hurricane,” Ms. Everson said.

Absent from Ms. Everson’s presentation — and others that Facebook executives used to urge advertisers to spend more on apps like Instagram and Facebook Messenger — was any discussion of the recent crises the social network has been grappling with: the misuse of its ad tools.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and Sheryl Sandberg, its chief operating officer, have each publicly promised to make improvements to its systems after the company disclosed that Russians had used fake accounts and Facebook ads to fan divisive issues during the presidential campaign, and the separate revelation that advertisers were able to target Facebook users who used terms like “Jew hater” to describe themselves.

That disconnect was on display on Wednesday night, as Facebook advertising executives mingled with reporters at the upscale 1 Hotel Central Park over cocktails and passed snacks that included duck confit taquitos and salmon caviar pancakes. Just before the event started, Mr. Zuckerberg responded to a claim from President Trump that Facebook was “anti-Trump.” The event, which Facebook told reporters in late August would be on the record — meaning discussions there could be reported on — was made off the record last week, a few hours after Ms. Sandberg posted her response to the issue of racist ads.

As Facebook sought to polish its reputation, industry leaders were wrestling with the misuse of marketing tools that had been developed for their benefit. Facebook is seen as an unavoidable force, not only because it’s the second-biggest seller of online advertising after Google, but also because it provides companies with unprecedented methods for targeting ads to people based on their tastes and habits.

“Sometimes our industry gets so enamored with new things that we lose sight of unintended consequences,” said Sarah Hofstetter, chief executive of the ad agency 360i. “Data and personalization is one of those things. It can be used for phenomenal targeting of potential consumers to buy cookies, toys and book hotel rooms, but it also can be used to target hate groups and inspire nefarious outcomes.”

She added, “Whether they like it or not, media companies have a tremendous responsibility to protect the public from itself.”

But while the social concerns over such misuse are clear, brands are not responding by changing the way they spend their advertising budgets, as they did earlier this year when ads for brands like AT&T were discovered on YouTube videos promoting terrorism and hate speech.

“We haven’t seen any clients question their investments in Facebook in response to the news, and I think the main reason for that is that no brands were directly or indirectly harmed by this activity,” said Aaron Shapiro, chief executive of the digital ad agency Huge. “It’s definitely something the marketing community is monitoring very carefully, because certainly, if it becomes a big enough issue where public association with Facebook starts to become negative, that’s a totally different story where advertisers would have to pay attention.”

Raja Rajamannar, the chief marketing officer of Mastercard, said that although he was confident that digital platforms would do their best to fix their issues, their unparalleled size made the point essentially moot. “I cannot block them off and say I don’t want to deal with them anymore because they’ve got a huge reach and that reach matters to me and it is very economical reach, too,” he said of Facebook.

Still, it is very likely that Facebook — and Google — will need to do more to show advertisers that they are policing abuse and that their ads actually deliver.

“The burden of proof that they are effective rises with every misstep on the social or political spectrum,” said Rob Norman, the chief digital officer of GroupM, the media-buying arm of the ad giant WPP.

Google and Facebook are often referred to as the “duopoly” within the ad industry; the research firm eMarketer projects that the two companies will collectively take in 63 percent of all digital ad investments in the United States this year.

Mr. Norman raised regulation as a possibility that could affect the dominance of the companies. He mused about the possibility of regulators saying “that targeted advertising of cohorts of let’s say, less than a million people, is now illegal.” A regulator could potentially argue that “the moment you can get it down to incredibly granular population groups, that’s where the bad actions start to take place,” he said.

There are also questions around how Facebook will handle disclosure of ads, for political and nonpolitical causes, going forward.

While advertising has “perennially been misused in political campaigns,” the anonymity associated with the Russian ads on Facebook makes it newly dangerous, said Jeff Goodby, co-chairman and partner of the agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

“What would stop any of our clients from going out and doing this now?” Mr. Goodby said. “It’s a possibility to just go out there and flood social media with things that are anonymous, seemingly innocent expressions of opinion, which is what we’re addicted to. But it’s interesting to think about what happens if we’re being manipulated by that — the very thing we’re addicted to suddenly becomes like a heroin, it hurts us suddenly, people use it against us.”

Zuckerberg’s Preposterous Defense of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, shown in Spain last year, defended his company this week from President Trump’s assertion that “Facebook was always anti-Trump.”

Responding to President Trump’s tweet this week that “Facebook was always anti-Trump,” Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, defended the company by noting that Mr. Trump’s opponents also criticize it — as having aided Mr. Trump. If everyone is upset with you, Mr. Zuckerberg suggested, you must be doing something right.

“Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”

This doesn’t hold water at all.

Are you bothered by fake news, systematic misinformation campaigns and Facebook “dark posts” — micro-targeted ads not visible to the public — aimed at African-Americans to discourage them from voting? You must be one of those people “upset about ideas” you disagree with.

Are you troubled when agents of a foreign power pose online as American Muslims and post incendiary content that right-wing commentators can cite as evidence that all American Muslims are sympathizers of terrorist groups like the Islamic State? Sounds like you can’t handle a healthy debate.

Does it bother you that Russian actors bought advertisements aimed at swing states to sow political discord during the 2016 presidential campaign, and that it took eight months after the election to uncover any of this? Well, the marketplace of ideas isn’t for everyone.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s preposterous defense of Facebook’s failure in the 2016 presidential campaign is a reminder of a structural asymmetry in American politics. It’s true that mainstream news outlets employ many liberals, and that this creates some systemic distortions in coverage (effects of trade policies on lower-income workers and the plight of rural America tend to be underreported, for example). But bias in the digital sphere is structurally different from that in mass media, and a lot more complicated than what programmers believe.

In a largely automated platform like Facebook, what matters most is not the political beliefs of the employees but the structures, algorithms and incentives they set up, as well as what oversight, if any, they employ to guard against deception, misinformation and illegitimate meddling. And the unfortunate truth is that by design, business model and algorithm, Facebook has made it easy for it to be weaponized to spread misinformation and fraudulent content. Sadly, this business model is also lucrative, especially during elections. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, called the 2016 election “a big deal in terms of ad spend” for the company, and it was. No wonder there has been increasing scrutiny of the platform.

However, at the slightest sign that Facebook might be pressured to institute at least some sensible oversight (as has happened recently in the German and French elections, when the platform mass-deleted fake accounts), right-wing groups and politicians can swiftly bring Facebook to its heels with charges of bias, because Facebook responds to such pressure as much of the traditional media do: by caving and hiding behind flimsy “there are two sides to everything” arguments.

This right-wing strategy has been used to pressure Facebook since before the presidential election. It was revealed in April 2016, for example, that Facebook was employing a small team of contractors to vet its “trending topics,” providing quality control such as weeding out blatant fake news. A single source from that team claimed it had censored right-wing content, and a conservative uproar ensued, led by organizations like Breitbart. Mr. Zuckerberg promptly convened an apologetic meeting with right-wing media personalities and other prominent conservatives to assure them the site was not biased against them.

Facebook got rid of those contractors, who were already too few for meaningful quality control. So what did it do to stem the obvious rise in the scale and scope of misinformation, fake news and even foreign state meddling on the site in the months leading up to the election? Clearly not enough — for fear, no doubt, that it would again be accused of bias.

Make no mistake: The flood of misinformation and fake news that went viral on the site was visible even to casual observers. A good chunk of such content featured outrageous claims about Hillary Clinton — that she had murdered F.B.I. agents, for example — as well as unfounded assertions that millions of undocumented immigrants were illegally voting.

Even the conservative pundit and wild-eyed conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, of all people, has expressed befuddlement at the charge that Facebook censored conservative content. He has correctly pointed out that Facebook had been a boon for right-wing groups, especially of the alt-right and Breitbart variety. There has been no change in this state of affairs since the election. Last week, the best-performing post on Facebook was a Breitbart article that called African-American athletes protesting police misconduct “millionaire ingrates.”

While there are plenty of left-wing conspiracy theories, outright fake news and fraudulent sites are more prevalent on the right, especially the far right. Opportunist fake news producers who were creating such content purely to make money typically gave up trying to monetize left-leaning fake news because it didn’t go viral as easily on Facebook.

After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg characterized the suggestion that such misinformation campaigns played an important role in the election to be a “crazy idea.” This week, Mr. Zuckerberg reconsidered that comment, saying it was too dismissive. But his latest comments are still too dismissive, portraying those of us who are worried about misinformation campaigns and deception online as intolerant censors bothered by “ideas and content.”

A more astute observer of American politics than Mr. Zuckerberg might consider that Mr. Trump’s comments are part of an effort to depict Facebook as anti-conservative, lest outrage about the company’s role in the 2016 election prompt the site to adopt policies that would make a repeat of 2016 more difficult.

For those of us who are tolerant of a wide range of ideas and arguments, but would still like deception and misinformation to not have such an easy foothold in society, Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments do not inspire hope. Indeed, people across the political spectrum should be able to agree that not making it so easy, and so lucrative, for fake news to spread widely is better for all of us, since fake news isn’t necessarily a right-wing phenomenon. But since Facebook has no effective competition, we can look forward only to being lectured on being more tolerant of “ideas” we don’t like, and to smug talk of the false equivalency of “both sides.”

In Power Move at Uber, Travis Kalanick Appoints 2 to Board

Travis Kalanick, the former chief executive of Uber, is a member of the board and has been embroiled in a fight with other directors.

SAN FRANCISCO — The divisions between Uber and its former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, are widening.

For the past few weeks, Mr. Kalanick, who had resigned as chief executive in June, kept a low profile. Last month, Uber installed a new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, and the company appeared to be trying to get past a turbulent period that included questions about its culture and changes in its top echelons.

But behind the scenes, Mr. Kalanick and Uber’s board continued to wrestle over who had control of the privately held company through the amount of stock they owned and the voting rights that those shares conferred.

Dara Khosrowshahi replaced Mr. Kalanick as the chief executive last month.

On Thursday, Uber and one of its investors, Goldman Sachs, made a proposal to the board that would reduce Mr. Kalanick’s voting power at the company, according to people briefed on the negotiations, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The board could vote on the proposal as early as Tuesday, these people said.

In response, Mr. Kalanick made a move late Friday to reassert his control. The former chief, who holds outsize voting rights at Uber, said he had added Ursula Burns, a former chief executive of Xerox, and John Thain, a former chief executive of Merrill Lynch and the New York Stock Exchange, to the eight-member board.

 Because of the proposal to reduce voting rights, it is “essential that the full board be in place for proper deliberation to occur,” Mr. Kalanick said in a statement.

In its own statement, Uber said Mr. Kalanick’s move “came as a complete surprise to Uber and its board.” That is why, it added, the company is “working to put in place world-class governance.”

The moves underscore the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between Uber and Mr. Kalanick, the company’s co-founder. Mr. Kalanick stepped down as chief executive after some of Uber’s investors said he could not remain. Since then, the former chief, who holds a seat on Uber’s board, has battled with other board members, including Benchmark, a venture capital firm that was an early investor in the company.

Benchmark had previously contended that Mr. Kalanick had too much power over Uber and had sued him in an attempt to reduce that control. That suit has been moved to arbitration, allowing Mr. Kalanick to keep his fight with Benchmark — and any potentially damaging disclosures — out of public view. Benchmark declined to comment on Friday.

Ursula Burns, a former chief executive of Xerox, is one of Mr. Kalanick’s new appointees to the Uber board of directors.

The back-and-forth also presents a problem for Mr. Khosrowshahi, who has to deal with a deeply divided board. Mr. Khosrowshahi had already had a taste of Uber’s ups and downs in recent days, when the company was told that it would lose its operating license for London, one of the biggest cities where it does business.

The power plays on Uber’s board are centered on a move made by Mr. Kalanick last year that allowed him to obtain outsize control of several board seats. At the time, he got Benchmark to approve an amendment to the company’s charter that gave him the right to nominate three new directors to add to Uber’s eight-member board. Mr. Kalanick occupies one of those seats, and he has contended that he gets the right to fill the other two seats.

To prevent Mr. Kalanick from exercising that right, Uber and Goldman Sachs proposed on Thursday to reduce his voting rights. If approved, the proposal would also reduce voting power for other early Uber shareholders and board members, including Benchmark, Lowercase Capital and Menlo Ventures.

John Thain, a former chief executive of Merrill Lynch and the New York Stock Exchange, was also added to the board by Mr. Kalanick.

Uber is also negotiating a sale of some of its existing shares to new investors, including the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. Goldman Sachs is also one of the financial firms that is managing Uber’s potential share sale to SoftBank.

The fight over voting speaks to the balance of power at young Silicon Valley start-ups. In recent years, entrepreneurs have asked for — and been given — more voting rights by venture capitalists and other investors who are eager to get into a hot deal. Other companies, like Snap and Facebook, also have structures that allow their founders to hold disproportionate voting power.

These sorts of bare-knuckle fights usually unfold behind the scenes in venture capital, where investors and founders have incentives to maintain a positive public persona. Entrepreneurs start companies more than once, and have to tap the same pool of firms for money over time. And the firms need to be perceived as founder friendly in order to cozy up to the most promising deals.

Mr. Kalanick’s two new appointees are well known in the business world. As chief executive of Xerox, Ms. Burns was the first African-American woman to run a Fortune 500 company. Ms. Burns, 59, received a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University and worked at Xerox her entire career, beginning as an intern in 1980 and becoming the head of the company in 2009.

Mr. Thain, 62, was one of Wall Street’s best-known figures until the financial crisis hit Wall Street in 2008. He became the head of the New York Stock Exchange in 2004, then the chief executive of Merrill Lynch in 2007. He sold the firm to Bank of America during the financial crisis and was later chief executive of CIT Group, a lender to small and midsize businesses, until he retired in 2015.

Google Prepares to Brief Congress on Its Role in Election

Google is cooperating with a congressional investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has become the latest Silicon Valley giant to become entangled in a widening investigation into how online social networks and technology products may have played a role in Russian interference in the 2016 election.

On Friday evening, Google said it would cooperate with congressional inquiries into the election, days after Facebook and Twitter provided evidence to investigators of accounts on their networks that were linked to Russian groups. Google was called to testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Nov. 1.

Google has also begun an internal investigation into whether its advertising products and services were used as part of a Russia-linked influence campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke anonymously because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the issue. Exactly when the inquiry began is not known, but it has been discussed inside Google over recent weeks, the person said.

The Wall Street Journal reported the internal investigation earlier.

Google’s search engine, with about a 90 percent market share, is an inescapable part of the internet, so it was no surprise that congressional investigators turned toward the company. Google is the only company that sells more digital advertising than Facebook, and its YouTube service is the go-to place for videos on the internet.

On Thursday, Twitter said in a closed-door briefing for the Senate and House intelligence panels that it had found about 200 accounts — a fraction of the number of potentially compromised accounts found by outside researchers — that appeared to be linked to a Russian campaign to influence the election.

Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sharply criticized Twitter for not aggressively investigating its own systems to provide a more complete picture of Russian activities.

The sharp rebuke of Twitter came after Facebook’s admission to the two intelligence panels that it had connected 470 profiles and pages to a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin. Facebook also said the pages had placed 3,000 ads on Facebook at a cost of about $100,000.

The technology news site Recode reported earlier that Facebook had shared some details about Russian-linked profiles on its platform with Google, but the search giant’s investigation is expected to broaden beyond those leads, according to the person familiar with the matter.

What direction the congressional investigation into Google will take is not clear. Google is much larger than Facebook or Twitter, and it has a wide range of services that played a role in the dissemination of so-called fake news during the campaign.

But it is not a social network like Facebook or Twitter, making it harder for blatantly untrue stories to catch on, or for public sentiment to be stirred up through carefully targeted posts.

Google has, however, long dealt with people trying to game its search engine to highlight misleading information or use its AdSense advertising network to finance eye-catching but false news stories. YouTube is also fertile ground for offensive videos and misleading news stories.

“We will of course cooperate with inquiries; we’re looking into how we can help with any relevant information,” Google said in a statement late Friday.

In April, Google said it had found that about 0.25 percent of its daily search traffic was linking to intentionally misleading, false or offensive information. The most prominent example occurred in the days after the election, when the top Google search result for “final election vote count 2016” linked to a story that incorrectly said that Donald J. Trump, who had secured the presidency by winning the Electoral College, had also defeated Hillary Clinton in the popular vote.

In an effort to keep false stories out of its results and offensive suggestions out of potential search queries, Google started an initiative called “Project Owl” to provide “algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content.”

Similar to the way content that receives more attention is often more heavily promoted on Facebook and Twitter, Google’s search engine gives more weight to results that are more frequently clicked on. It is one of hundreds of factors that go into ranking links.

The company has also been working on shutting access to AdSense for sites that spread misinformation. Google’s ad network is widely used by other websites and is often their only source of revenue. AdSense allows marketers to target users by different criteria, but it does not offer the same detail as Facebook, which can slice and dice its audience by their interests, including political leanings.

In late January, Google said it had permanently banned nearly 200 publishers from AdSense — a tiny number compared to the more than two million publishers registered on AdSense.

At the time, Google said it reviewed 550 sites “suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations” in November and December and took action against 340 of them.

IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S.

IBM employees collaborate in a casual work space at its new offices in Bangalore’s Bhartiya Center of Information Technology.

IBM has shifted its center of gravity halfway around the world to India, making it a high-tech example of the globalization trends that the Trump administration has railed against.

BANGALORE, India — IBM dominated the early decades of computing with inventions like the mainframe and the floppy disk. Its offices and factories, stretching from upstate New York to Silicon Valley, were hubs of American innovation long before Microsoft or Google came along.


But over the last decade, IBM has shifted its center of gravity halfway around the world to India, making it a high-tech example of the globalization trends that the Trump administration has railed against.


Today, the company employs 130,000 people in India — about one-third of its total work force, and more than in any other country. Their work spans the entire gamut of IBM’s businesses, from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT&T and Shell to performing cutting-edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self-driving cars. One team is even working with the producers of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergartners in Atlanta.

“IBM India, in the truest sense, is a microcosm of the IBM company,” Vanitha Narayanan, chairman of the company’s Indian operations, said in an interview at IBM’s main campus in Bangalore, where the office towers are named after American golf courses like Peachtree and Pebble Beach.

The work in India has been vital to keeping down costs at IBM, which has posted 21 consecutive quarters of revenue declines as it has struggled to refashion its main business of supplying tech services to corporations and governments.


The tech industry has been shifting jobs overseas for decades, and other big American companies like Oracle and Dell also employ a majority of their workers outside the United States.


But IBM is unusual because it employs more people in a single foreign country than it does at home. The company’s employment in India has nearly doubled since 2007, even as its work force in the United States has shrunk through waves of layoffs and buyouts. Although IBM refuses to disclose exact numbers, outsiders estimate that it employs well under 100,000 people at its American offices now, down from 130,000 in 2007. Depending on the job, the salaries paid to Indian workers are one-half to one-fifth those paid to Americans, according to data posted by the research firm Glassdoor.

Big in India

American technology companies have been expanding in India for years, drawn by the availability of low-cost, technically trained English-speaking talent. Indian government agencies and corporations have also become major buyers of hardware, software and services, spending about $38 billion last year.

What They Do in India

IBM

Things as diverse as cutting-edge research and managing computer networks for many of the world’s biggest corporations.

Oracle


Much of its software development. It has more employees in India than in any other country except the United States.
Dell
Research and development, consulting and management of computing systems. After acquiring the storage company EMC, Dell became a major force in India.

Cisco
Everything. The network equipment maker consciously set up its Bangalore campus 10 years ago as a “second world headquarters.”
Microsoft
Software development, cloud and cybersecurity services, as well as customer support and testing on how to bring the internet to rural areas.

Alphabet (Google)
Software development for services like Gmail, maps and YouTube, as well as ones aimed at the Indian market, such as voice dictation and mobile payments.
Ronil Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who studies globalization and immigration, said the range of work done by IBM in India shows that offshoring threatens even the best-paying American tech jobs.
“The elites in both parties have had this Apple iPhone narrative, which is, look, it’s O.K. if we offshore the lower-level stuff because we’re just going to move up,” he said. “This is a wake-up call. It’s not just low-level jobs but high-level jobs that are leaving.”
While other technology titans have also established huge satellite campuses in India, IBM caught the attention of President Trump. At a campaign rally in Minneapolis just before the November election, he accused the company of laying off 500 Minnesotans and moving their jobs to India and other countries, a claim that IBM denied.
Although he has not singled out the company for criticism since, Mr. Trump has tried to curb what he viewed as too many foreigners taking tech jobs from Americans. In April, he signed an executive order discouraging the granting of H-1B temporary work visas for lower-paid tech workers, most of whom come from India. IBM was the sixth-largest recipient of such visas in 2016.

The IBM logo — in English and in Kannada, a regional language spoken in Bangalore — identifies a company building at the Manyata Tech Park. Dozens of other foreign technology companies have offices nearby.

IBM, which is based in Armonk, N.Y., is sensitive to the perception that Americans are losing jobs to Indians. After Mr. Trump won the election, IBM’s chief executive, Ginni Rometty, pledged to create 25,000 new American jobs. Ms. Rometty, who helped carry out the India expansion strategy when she was head of IBM’s global services division, has also discussed with the new administration plans to modernize government technology and expand tech training for people without four-year college degrees. She also joined one of Mr. Trump’s now-defunct business advisory councils.


IBM declined to make Ms. Rometty or another top executive available for an interview. But the company noted that it is investing in the United States, including committing $1 billion to training programs and opening new offices.


Ms. Narayanan, who spent 12 years working at IBM in the United States and China before moving to India in 2009, said the company decided where to put jobs based on where it could find enough qualified workers and the customer’s budget. “It’s not as if someone says, ‘Oh, jeez, let me just take these jobs from here and put them there,’” she said.


William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, who has studied the globalization of business, said IBM and other tech companies had benefited greatly from the emergence of a low-cost, technically skilled English-speaking work force in India.


“IBM didn’t create this,” he said. “But IBM would be a totally different company if it wasn’t for India.”

IBM employees at one of the company’s research labs in Bangalore.

IBM, which opened its first Indian offices in Mumbai and Delhi in 1951, is now spread across the country, including Bangalore, Pune, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai.


Most of the Indian employees work in IBM’s core business: helping companies like AT&T and Airbus manage the technical sides of their operations. Indians perform consulting services, write software and monitor cloud-based computer systems for many of the world’s banks, phone companies and governments.


But researchers here also try out new ideas. Looking to build a new system for searching with images instead of words, a team in Bangalore turned to Watson to index 600,000 photos from the world’s top fashion shows and Bollywood movies. Last spring, a major Indian fashion house, Falguni Shane Peacock, tried the tool, which helps designers avoid direct copies or even do a riff on an old look, and generated new patterns for three dresses.

A model wears one of three dresses designed by Falguni Shane Peacock using IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence technology. Watson helped the Indian fashion house create the color palette, silhouette and patterns of the dress.

“It has the capability of doing research in a couple of seconds that would take a long time,” Shane Peacock, who runs the Mumbai firm with his wife, said in an interview.


IBM even has a Bangalore “garage” full of app designers who build corporate iPhone and iPad apps to simplify tasks like helping airline agents rebook passengers, bankers make loans and doctors update patient files.


During a recent visit, Ramya Karyampudi, a user experience designer, was at the whiteboard sketching out an app for a smart refrigerator that would solve the universal problem of what to make for dinner.


Starting with a drawing of a husband trying to plan a surprise meal for his wife, Ms. Karyampudi depicted the internet-connected refrigerator looking at what food was inside, sending over relevant recipes, telling him what extra ingredients he needed to pick up, and playing a video showing him how to cook it all.


IBM’s outsize presence in India today is all the more striking given that it left the country entirely in 1978 after a dispute with the government about foreign ownership rules.

Visitors look at a display of an IBM 1401 computer at the Visvesvaraya Industrial & Technological Museum in Bangalore. The 1401, introduced in 1959, dominated the early years of Indian computing.

IBM re-entered the country through a joint venture with Tata in 1993, initially intending to assemble and sell personal computers. IBM’s leaders soon decided that India’s potential was far bigger — both as a market and as a base from which to serve customers around the world. The company took full control of the venture, established an Indian branch of its famed research labs, and in 2004, landed a landmark 10-year, $750 million contract from Bharti Airtel, one of India’s biggest phone companies, which remains a major customer.


IBM’s chief executive at the time, Samuel J. Palmisano, was so proud of his India initiative that he rented out the grounds of the Bangalore Palace in June 2006, flew out the board, and told a crowd of 10,000 that IBM would invest $6 billion in India over the next three years.


Today, India does not just deliver services to IBM’s global clients. It is also a crucial market and the center of IBM’s efforts to help businesses serve the next big slice of customers: the billions of poorer people who have been largely ignored by the tech revolution.


For example, teams here have been applying IBM technology to process very small loans so that banks can make a profit on them.

People in the reception area at one of the Manipal Hospitals in Bangalore. The hospital chain is working with IBM to develop the Watson artificial intelligence platform for use in diagnosing and treating cancers.

IBM has also been working with Manipal Hospitals, a chain based in Bangalore, to adapt Watson to help doctors treat certain cancers. Presented with a patient’s medical history, the system taps into a database that includes advice from doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York to recommend the best treatments — including the price, a big consideration since most Indians lack health insurance.


Dr. Ajay Bakshi, Manipal’s chief executive, said the biggest potential for the technology was in rural hospitals with few doctors. Manipal has just begun offering online “second opinions” from Watson for 2000 rupees, or about $31. “It never sleeps. It never forgets. It doesn’t get biased,” he said.


IBM executives say projects like these represent the company’s future. “I am looking for India to be my hub for affordable innovation,” Ms. Narayanan said.

An IBM employee leaves her office at the Manyata Tech Park in Bangalore.