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| Jan 31, 2018 | Politician Accidentally Doxes His Old Boss By Reading Encrypted Signal Messages in Front of a Bunch of Cameras | Using a secure messaging app to communicate with your political allies is a great idea in this day and age, where government hackers actively try to break into the email accounts of high-profile politicians and staffers in order to plaster ... |
| Jan 23, 2018 | The Activist Developer Who Helps Journalists Protect Data and Sources | A couple of years ago, a journalist that used SecureDrop, the WikiLeaks-style submission system that allows sources to submit documents anonymously to newsrooms, couldn’t decrypt a file. The journalist asked Harlo Holmes for help.
Holmes, w... |
| Jan 16, 2018 | Google’s Confusing Gmail Security Alert Looks Exactly Like a Phishing Attempt | Last week, my partner got a strange email alert from Google—or at least it looked like it came from Google.
Alarmed and confused, she immediately forwarded it to me.
“What the what?” she wrote in the email.
My partner is not a security geek... |
| Jan 8, 2018 | Snowden’s App Probably Can’t Protect You From Targeted State Surveillance | Right before Christmas, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden launched a new app to turn an Android phone into an internet-connected alarm system that can help at-risk users guard or at least monitor against attackers trying to tamper with their... |
| Dec 12, 2017 | Italian Prosecutor Makes Request to Close Hacking Team Investigation | The damaging data breach that exposed the secrets of an infamous surveillance tech company might go unsolved forever. After more than two years, the Italian prosecutor who was investigating the attack on the Milan-based Hacking Team has ask... |
| Dec 11, 2017 | Google Releases Tool To Help iPhone Hackers | Google has released a powerful tool that can help security researchers hack and find bugs in iOS 11.1.2, a very recent version of the iPhone operating system.
The exploit is the work of Ian Beer, one of the most prolific iOS bug hunters, an... |
| Nov 28, 2017 | ‘Dumb’ MacOS Bug Allowed Anyone to Get Admin Privileges Without a Password | UPDATE, Wednesday Nov. 29, 11:58 a.m. ET: On Wednesday morning, Apple issued a patch for the bug. The company also released a statement:
"Security is a top priority for every Apple product, and regrettably we stumbled with this release... |
| Nov 27, 2017 | Newly Discovered Facebook Bug Allowed Anyone To Delete Your Photos With A Poll | New features in software always bring bugs. Still, some are worse than others. When Facebook rolled out its new polling feature earlier this month, which allows people to post votable questions on anything from what to have for dinner to wh... |
| Nov 21, 2017 | Uber Paid Hackers $100,000 to Cover Up a Breach Impacting 57 Million Customers | Hackers stole the personal data of 57 million Uber riders in 2016, and the company paid the cybercriminals $100,000 to keep the data breach under wraps, according to a blog post published by Uber and a story by Bloomberg.
“Two individuals o... |
| Oct 25, 2017 | Infrastructure for the ‘Bad Rabbit’ Ransomware Appears to Have Shut Down | Looks like the bad bunny is already back in the box.
The new ransomware that infected hundreds of computers in Russia and eastern Europe Tuesday, appears to have already shut down operations, according to multiple security firms that were m... |
| Oct 3, 2017 | More Than 80% Of All Net Neutrality Comments Were Sent By Bots, Researchers Say | The Trump administration and its embattled FCC commissioner are on a mission to roll back the pro-net neutrality rules approved during the Obama years, despite the fact that most Americans support those safeguards. But there is a large numb... |
| Sep 21, 2017 | This Ransomware Demands Nudes Instead of Bitcoin | For years, cybercriminals have been extorting victims by locking their computers with malware. The hackers promise to give the victim their files back as long as they fork over the cryptocurrency—typically Bitcoin—within the stipulated time... |
| Sep 13, 2017 | Startup That Sells Zero-Days to Governments Is Offering $1 Million For Tor Hacks | A notorious startup is offering up to $1 million in rewards to security researchers who can find bugs and develop techniques to exploit the anonymous web surfing tool the Tor Browser.
On Wednesday, Zerodium, a US-based company that buys exp... |
| Sep 12, 2017 | Researchers Catch Microsoft Zero-Day Used To Install Government Spyware | Government hackers were using a previously-unknown vulnerability in Microsoft's .NET Framework, a development platform for building apps, to hack targets and infect them with spyware, according to security firm FireEye.
The firm reveal... |
| Aug 14, 2017 | Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Pleads Not Guilty to Creating Banking Malware | Monday, the well-known security researcher who became famous after helping to stop the destructive WannaCry ransomware outbreak pleaded "not guilty" to creating software that would later become banking malware.
Marcus Hutchins—bet... |
| Sep 26, 2016 | Welcome to Motherboard Luxury Week | Personal submarines. The best doctors. Pet tigers.
And touring real estate in virtual reality, so you can buy a mansion without ever visiting it.
These are but a few of the stories you can look forward to over the next few days as part of L... |
| Aug 16, 2016 | Hack of NSA-Linked Group Signals a Cyber Cold War | Early Saturday morning, a group of hackers calling themselves The Shadow Brokers made a shocking claim: they had hacked an NSA-linked group, and were selling the spy agency's "cyber weapons" to the highest bidder.
In a rambli... |
| Jul 13, 2016 | Pitch Us On the Hacks We Can’t See | Hacks, data breaches, and malware have become daily routines, an unavoidable, fundamental part of the internet. Large companies, big government agencies, power plants, regular people, and even makers of hacking tools have gotten hacked in t... |
| May 9, 2016 | Welcome to Uber Earth | Do you remember when you first heard about Uber? Did you think you would hear about it again? Did you expect you would hear about it over and over, for years and years?
If you did, kudos to you. Perhaps you should consider a career in ventu... |
| Feb 10, 2015 | Yes, Your Smart Dildo Can Be Hacked | Like everything else these days, sex toys can be connected to the internet—and that means they can be hacked.
It's easiest at this point to assume everything can be hacked, but we know connected dildos are an actual risk thanks to sec... |
| Mar 12, 2014 | It Takes 100 Hours to Analyze a Human Genome for Disease | This story came from Motherboard, our tech website. Read more at Motherboard.tv. Photo via Wikimedia user Zephyris
Despite the promise of the $1,000 genome sequence, personalized medicine is likely to remain a luxury product—and not a very ... |
| Apr 5, 2013 | If You're Not Careful, Bitcoins Aren't As Anonymous As You Think | Image created by the article's author
Have you bought drugs on The Silk Road with bitcoin, or made other illicit transactions on the dark web using the crypto-currency? Have you simply been trying to buy upvotes on a Reddit link? It tu... |
| Nov 21, 2012 | How the Michelangelo Virus Infected Us and the World Learned the Name "McAfee" | Wow, so computer security pioneer John McAfee is wanted for murder in Belize and he’s on the run and blogging about it about stuff. In any case, that McAfee name was forged some 20 years ago during the Michelangelo computer virus scare, in ... |
| Oct 31, 2012 | Why We're Fascinated by Catastrophe | Confession. I see the East Coast today and feel something (among many other things) unwelcome: jealousy. I moved back West only a month ago, leaving behind Maryland after five years. The landscapes and psychic geography are still fresh in m... |
| Oct 30, 2012 | These Are Actual Words Spoken by Bush's FEMA Director About Sandy and President Obama | Do you remember noted United States’ national embarrassment Michael Brown? You know, the director of FEMA during Katrina? The legend of failure responsible for untold human misery in New Orleans? Well he has some thoughts about President Ob... |
| Oct 30, 2012 | Sandy's HurriCrane Could Use a Drone | Because fuck, sending some poor saps up 80-some-odd stories to inspect that thing, right?
Hurricane Sandy has, if anything, made a perfect case for using small unmanned aerial systems to size up damage and to carry out search and rescue ope... |
| Oct 30, 2012 | STORMFURY: Remembering the U.S.'s White-Knuckled Mission to Kill Hurricanes | Sandy, the Frankenstorm, may be nearly history, but the hurricane season is just hitting its stride. We’ve got until November 30, after all, to keep the hatches battened, and it’s anyone’s guess what kind of dervishes the mid-Atlantic will ... |
| Oct 4, 2012 | Hiking Up a Big Pile of Nuclear Waste in Weldon Springs, Missouri | Between 1940 and 1941, the US Army purchased 17,323 acres of land just outside of St. Louis, MO. On those acres happened to sit three towns, Hamburg, Howell, and Toonerville, all of which were evacuated over the course of a year. 700 people... |
| Sep 29, 2012 | "Are These Guys Just Having Fun?" Watch This 1990s Video About Hacking | The hacker is the phantom of the opera of the Internet. Well before Anonymous started pulling their shenanigans, the person who broke things to make them work better has had an enormous impact on the rich narrative of our online reality. Th... |
| Sep 11, 2012 | It's Too Quiet: The Eerie Early Morning TV of 9/11 | Fashion Week was just getting underway in New York. George W. Bush went for an early morning jog in Florida. Iraq shot down a Predator drone. The weather was still summer and perfect and still. Until 8.46 AM, September 11, 2001 was another ... |
| Jun 14, 2012 | To Visit the Internet You Must Leave the Internet: An Interview with "Tubes" Author Andrew Blum | It's tempting to think that Andrew Blum chose Tubes as the title for his book for pure fun, because, really, how absurd was it that Senator Ted Stevens once used this word to explain the Internet? But Blum’s title is more interesting, ... |
| Jan 20, 2012 | When The Noise Gets Louder Than The Money: Online and IRL, Anti-Censorship Protests Are Really Raising Hell | For a protest that was supposed to make its point by making the Internet a much quieter place, there was certainly a lot more noise than usual during Wednesday’s anti-censorship web blackout, both online and IRL. The ruckus, as you should p... |
| Jan 19, 2012 | File Sharing Without The Internet: The Saharan Bluetooth Experience | A couple of months ago, Techdirt wrote about an EU politician’s plan to build Internet surveillance into every operating system. As we pointed out then, this could easily be circumvented by using non-Net means for swapping files. It may not... |
| Jan 13, 2012 | SOPA Backers Are Pirates Themselves | We all know how passionate politicians can get about intellectual property enforcement once they’ve been handed a couple nice checks from the entertainment industry. But Texas representative Lamar Smith, despite being the mastermind behind ... |
| Dec 16, 2011 | Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works | I remember fondly the days when we were all tickled pink by our elected officials’ struggle to understand how the internet works. Whether it was George W. Bush referring to “the internets” or Senator Ted Stevens describing said internets as... |
| Dec 16, 2011 | Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works | We usually strive to come up with our own headlines for posts on Techdirt, but Joshua Kopstein’s post on Motherboard.tv has such a perfect title that we’re reusing it here: Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works... |
| Dec 15, 2011 | Break In Case Of Censorship: What Are Our Free Speech Fail-safes If SOPA Passes? | As I'm writing this, Congress is getting ready to vote on the single most destructive piece of legislation that the internet has ever faced. SOPA, penned by a team of corporate shills who now have swell lobbyist jobs to show for it, is... |
| Dec 15, 2011 | How To Beat SOPA | As I’m writing this, the Senate is getting ready to vote on the single most destructive piece of legislation that the internet has ever faced. SOPA, penned by a team of corporate shills who now have swell lobbyist jobs to show for it, is a ... |
| Dec 3, 2011 | Is China Burrowing Into the Doomsday Game? | In case you were wondering, as I’ve been, as to what recently compelled the U.S. to renege on an international accord impelling signatory states to dismantle their weapons of mass destruction by the end of April 2010, Georgetown researcher ... |
| Dec 1, 2011 | Say Hello to Big Brother's Hidden Tracking App | Ever since the issue came to a head with Apple’s location tracking debacle earlier this year, mobile phone carriers and manufacturers have been adamantly insisting that nothing on a mobile phone is logging or sending sensitive data without ... |
| Dec 1, 2011 | Carrier IQ, Big Brother's Hidden Tracker App, Must Be Stopped | Ever since the issue came to a head with Apple's location tracking debacle earlier this year, mobile phone carriers and manufacturers have been adamantly insisting that nothing on a mobile phone is logging or sending sensitive data wit... |
| Nov 30, 2011 | The Juiciest Scandals Leaked By Chinese Microblogs | Media censorship and China go together like holiday gluttony and a New Year's gym membership. Or peanut butter and jelly. Hell, whatever inane coupling you'd prefer to substitute into this analogy; the point is that this is nothin... |
| Nov 29, 2011 | Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Beauty and Truthiness of Knowing | Is it better to know or not to know? What are the most valuable qualities of knowledge, and how does its acquisition justify the various ills it occasionally visits upon the world and its people? And what is the deal with Mars?
When these b... |
| Nov 28, 2011 | Cybering For A Peer-to-Peer Consumer Society | Were it not for the fact that Cyber Monday takes place online, and that it enables businesses of all sizes to make some bank on America’s annual consumer binge ritual, it would probably be just another addendum to the depraved human behavio... |
| Nov 23, 2011 | Motherboard TV: Sound Builders: Diego Stocco Makes Beautiful Music From Literally Whatever | Composer and sound designer Diego Stocco can afford to buy instruments (he composes music for video games and films). But he prefers to find them, wherever he goes: sand, cornflakes, trees, and other sorts of things that most “professional”... |
| Nov 22, 2011 | In the Net Censorship Copyfight, Lessig Strikes At The Root | For creative professionals who depend on the internet to make their living, the internet blacklist bills being forced through Congress right now are bad news. If passed, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and its Senate doppelganger the PROTECT-... |
| Nov 22, 2011 | Occupy Wall Street With Robot Activists [Instructables How-To] | With the Occupy Wall Street movement only gaining momentum, recently with the attempt to shut down Wall Street on OWS’s two month anniversary, we’ve been seeing a lot of OWS-fueled creative work… most notably the projected “bat signal” on t... |
| Nov 22, 2011 | Bad Apps Are A Government Spending Cut We Can All Agree On | With Obama's Deficit Super Committee poised to fail yet again in their mission to formulate a balanced debt reduction plan, American taxpayers are starting to get hot under the collar. They're steamed not just about the utter inco... |
| Nov 21, 2011 | Occupy's Internet Tower Will Live On, For Now | Despite turning up empty handed on a first pass through heaps of personal belongings confiscated last week from Occupy Wall Street's epicenter at Zuccotti Park, Isaac Wilder returned this past Friday to a reclamation booth at a Departm... |
| Nov 18, 2011 | Who Smashed the Laptops from Occupy Wall Street? Inside the NYPD's Lost and Found | If you're looking to recover any personal effects swept up early Tuesday morning in the NYPD raid on Zuccotti Park, epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, there's only one place that may have what you're looking for. O... |
| Nov 17, 2011 | The Internet Is Fighting Hollywood's Blacklist Bill By Censoring Itself | Maybe you recall hearing about the PROTECT-IP Act, the $200 million Hollywood-funded Senate bill that aims to stop online piracy by doing things like giving copyright owners and the government the ability to hijack websites and censor searc... |
| Nov 16, 2011 | After Press Blackouts, The Copupation & Re-Occupation of Zuccotti Park | By the time the news vans arrived in force, the morning sunlight had already caressed the corners of Zuccotti Park. They were too late. The space had been, for nearly 2 months, the foremost base of operations for Occupy Wall Street, the mov... |
| Nov 14, 2011 | Mapping the Promised Lands: Welcome To the 'Slacker Strata' | Wherever you don’t get ripped off buying skunk bud you're less likely to find a surplus of drinking establishments, according to a preliminary, admittedly "flippant" finding recently released by a group of economic-informatio... |
| Nov 11, 2011 | MIDI-sync Your Schedule To Attend In/Out Fest Tonight | Like its circuitbending cousin Bent Festival, In/Out Fest inhabits the electronic music fringe of handmade synthesizers, hacked videogame consoles and more custom MIDI controllers than you can shake a Arduino-compatible stick at. If your se... |
| Nov 7, 2011 | Downed Israeli Websites Were Totally Not Hacked | Israeli officials are blaming a broad technical malfunction for downed national defense, domestic intelligence and spy agency websites on Sunday. This comes just three days after what appeared to be a threat from the hacking collective Anon... |
| Nov 4, 2011 | Sorry FBI, There Are Probably No Drug Cartels In Second Life | Even when it means breaking the law, there are few places the FBI won’t go these days to check if you’re up to no good. Your car, your computer and your local mosque are all fair game. Now they’re adding to that list the final frontier of v... |
| Nov 2, 2011 | The Computer-Generated Acid Trips of the '60s and '70s | Bell Labs was the place to be in the 1960’s if you wanted to participate in some of history’s greatest breakthroughs in computer science. It was here that Max Mathews invented computer music and Dennis Ritchie developed UNIX and the C progr... |
| Oct 27, 2011 | Game Not Over: Welcome To The Next Videogame Golden Age | Whether they require controllers, rocks or even our own bodies to be played, games have been around forever. They were, for a long time, the stuff of diversion; something to do "when the hunt is over and the wolves have been chased awa... |
| Oct 25, 2011 | A Brief Catalog of All the Very Valuable Things the U.S. Has 'Misplaced' Over the Years | A U.S. government van full of presidential gear that had been stolen from a Virginia Marriott hotel parking lot turned up recently — unscathed, apparently, with all its precious cargo accounted for — in a neighboring hotel's parking lo... |
| Oct 24, 2011 | After Massive Floods In Thailand, Get Ready For The Hard Drive Drought | If you're looking to grab a new storage device and back up some of your precious data, better hop to it. This may come as a shock, but a majority of the stuff inside your computer is manufactured in the third world. This means that, in... |
| Oct 24, 2011 | In the Uncensored Internet Age, There's Nothing Scarier Than A Hot Mic | Internally and externally monitoring yourself is something we should all attempt, but rarely do.
I would not describe myself as a paranoid person, especially regarding the internet. I discuss drugs and sex at length on Gchat, have shameless... |
| Oct 20, 2011 | Heads Up, Hoverboarders: Here Comes Quantum Levitation | Few motifs of science fiction cinema have been more appealing to us than the subtle defiance of gravity offered by futuristic hovercraft. So every once in a while we check in to see how humanity is progressing on that front, and whether the... |
| Oct 18, 2011 | The U.S. Almost Hacked Libya With the Italian Luxury Vehicle of Cyber Weapons | In the lead up to American-fronted strikes on Libya last March, the Obama administration seriously considered waging cyberattacks to impair the Qaddafi government's integrated air-defense system, which threatened allied airstrikes, The... |
| Oct 17, 2011 | Entering the Void of the Text Adventure Vision Quest | The text adventure is a jarring experience for the average computer games enthusiast today. Spoiled by expectations of sophisticated graphics and sound, the player is denied any imagery of the imaginary spaces they must traverse, aided only... |
| Oct 14, 2011 | Drone Games: Our Problems Are Bigger Than USBs | The U.S.'s fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles may not have been poisoned, after all. Maybe the drones – or those flying them with joysticks from air-conditioned trailers at Creech Air Force Base in rural Nevada – are just really into on... |
| Oct 13, 2011 | Hackers to the Rescue: Illegal Government Spyware Swatted By eVigilantes | Operating within the treacherous gray regions of internet law, computer hackers have come to be vilified by many for their various deeds. But that may not be the case for much longer in Germany, where the hacker group Chaos Computer Club ha... |
| Oct 12, 2011 | See Some Entries For DARPA's Crowdsourced Drone Building Contest | In an attempt to speed up innovation and lower the cost of rolling out new technologies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has taken a host of new initiatives aimed at building up their network of private contractors. Th... |
| Oct 12, 2011 | The U.S.'s First Drone Could Drop Nukes | Recent developments (exploits? gaffs?) concerning American unmanned aerial vehicles read like something out of a bad Tom Clancy novel: Drones are dropping Hellfire missiles on Americans abroad. Drone fleets – and more particularly, their of... |
| Oct 12, 2011 | The Drones Are Sick | What happens when the largest and most powerful military force on the planet finds a computer virus in its fleet of unmanned aerial drones? Soon we may find out the answer.
As you probably know, unmanned aerial vehicles have become one of t... |
| Oct 11, 2011 | Despite What Your New Phone Says, There Is No Such Thing As 4G | To a certain sort of person, the one that travels abroad and doesn’t like to leave their iPhone at home, Apple’s newest objet d’obsession delivers a wonderful feature: it’s a ‘world phone,’ which means it can receive signals from both GSM a... |
| Oct 10, 2011 | Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street: "The Problems of the Commons Are Here" | After a march to Washington Square Park from their headquarters in lower Manhattan, the latest in a line of notable individuals to show up in support of the fast-expanding economic justice movement led by Occupy Wall Street has been Sloveni... |
| Oct 7, 2011 | Remembering Ada Lovelace, the World's First Programmer | This post originally appeared on Motherboard in March of this year.
Like many throughout the history of computer science, the story in The Social Network is one dominated by males. Shot after shot, a young Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard ma... |
| Oct 7, 2011 | Steve Jobs, Kraftwerk, and the Curse of Beautiful Technology | At risk of sounding like an insensitive fanboy in light our good friend Steve Jobs' passing, I'm going to begin this by expounding upon something I've always liked about Apple's fiercest competitor in the mobile market, ... |
| Oct 7, 2011 | The Nintendo Console That Fought Chinese Piracy, And Lost | If you’re a fan of consumer tech and gadgets, you’ve probably already come to know China as that magical place where patents practically don’t exist, and counterfeit electronics are the rule of the day. From sprawling urban marketplaces in ... |
| Oct 6, 2011 | How the Vocoder Helped Save Us From Nuclear Apocalypse | Guitars and saxophones look cool, stylophones are retro-neat, and nothing helps you say moody loner like a harmonica. But the vocoder does more than just give you a robot voice. In its earliest version, it helped grease the clunky wheels of... |
| Oct 6, 2011 | The Arctic Ocean Is Looking Less 'Arctic' And More 'Ocean' With Sea Ice Melting Faster Than Ever | Russian shipping companies are stoked. Used to be that if you had a supertanker full of a couple hundred-thousand tons of gas needing to get to, say, South Korea, you had to steer the thing clear around Scandinavia, down through the Atlanti... |
| Oct 5, 2011 | What Does It Take To Eliminate the Kelihos Botnet? | If your email inbox or spam folder has ever received messages from shady Nigerian princes or ebullient Viagra salesmen, chances are it was sent there care of the Kelihos botnet, a massive network of infected computers that sends around 3.8 ... |
| Oct 3, 2011 | Inside Occupy Wall Street's Information War: Whose Message Is It Anyway? | On Saturday, the marchers of Occupy Wall Street were cheered upon returning to Zuccotti Park, the economic justice movement's place of indefinite residency in Manhattan's financial district. Drums beat to a tribal soup of writhing... |
| Sep 30, 2011 | NASA Is Now Trying to Colonize a Planet Called Twitter | In the old days, it didn’t take much more than a rocket launch to get people excited about space exploration. These days, without a manned spaceship and with minimal support from a cash-strapped Washington, they’re shooting for the moon on ... |
| Sep 29, 2011 | Minimalism Worship: These Sweet Loops Were Made With Only One Line of Code | ‘Doing a lot with very little’ has been the primary axiom of demoscene code warriors since the 1980s. It gave birth to the 4k movement, which led to some truly amazing minimalistic java games, and then to even more extreme examples which cr... |
| Sep 19, 2011 | No Room for Nintendo in the Third Dimension | After Price Cuts & Peripherals, A Grim Outlook For Nintendo's 3-Dimensional Safari.
Despite having the benefit of a loyal fanbase and the currents of a 3D retro revival blowing at their back, Nintendo's latest handheld, the 3D... |
| Sep 16, 2011 | Documenting All Of The Cool Stuff Brooklyn Is Slowly Losing | Anyone with even a few years of Brooklyn residency under their belt has undoubtedly seen how rapidly the borough is changing. Warehouses that were once populated with twirling gypsies, DIY beer distillers and nihilistic bike punks now greet... |
| Sep 14, 2011 | Learning How Your iPhone Was Made: There Was an App For That | Now there's an iPhone game about the real people who suffer and die to make iPhones, and Apple doesn't like it very much.
It didn't take long for Molleindustria's Phone World to get pulled from the App Store — 2 hours an... |
| Sep 13, 2011 | Murder by Tylenol Redux: Food and Drug Terror Still a Headache | To coincide with today’s Senate subcommittee hearing on agro-defense and new reporting that the Department of Defense’s food anti-terror plans are costly, unwieldy and otherwise fractured, Motherboard pulls from its recent history with this... |
| Sep 13, 2011 | Life In Post-Econopocalypse America: An Unnerving Mockumentary About How Future Jobs Will Suck | During last week’s Presidential address / jobs bill sales pitch, there was something Obama said that might have sent a chill down your spine. While making clear his refusal to stand by while large corporations force workers to lowball thems... |
| Sep 12, 2011 | Video Games M.C. Escher Would Love | You might not realize this until you get poked in the eye, but sight’s pretty great. It’s not just what allows us to move about a space confidently but also, in the words of a cliche, what you need to do with something before you can believ... |
| Sep 3, 2011 | Hungry Like An Optoelectronic Wolf: Downloading Animal Senses Into Human Reality | Tucked away in our pockets, the tiny camera-computers we’ve taken to carrying around with us have gotten fairly good at enhancing our otherwise offline natural world. But while this augmented portrait of our surroundings allows us to easily... |
| Sep 1, 2011 | Armenia's Loneliest Soviet Arcade Survived An Earthquake, Communism | Arcades are hard to find nowadays, but they have a tendency to appear in the most unlikely places: Basements in Brooklyn, run-down shacks in Afghanistan, and now, tourist traps in the former Soviet Union.
Armenia’s northwest capital city of... |
| Aug 29, 2011 | Why We Love Messing With AI Bots | One day, artificial intelligence will be powerful enough to blend seamlessly with consciousness. Its presence will be so ubiquitous, its influence so permeating, that all of human civilization will be guided and micromanaged in accordance w... |
| Aug 28, 2011 | All Watched Over By the Largest Video Wall in the World | If you want to look at most of the world’s telephone calls, you’ll need a very large screen.
Twelve feet high and 250 feet wide, the largest video wall in the world is the centerpiece of AT&T’s Global Network Operations Center, where th... |
| Aug 26, 2011 | Fullscreen: Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age (1984) | “They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant and, I think, more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of.”
A lot has changed about hackers and how people perceive them. But at least the las... |
| Aug 24, 2011 | Stanford Gets Blessed With High-Speed Fiber, How About The Rest of Us? | Like some sort of archangel descended from internet heaven, Google has bathed Stanford University in glorious high-speed goodness as part of the beta test of their new gigabit fiber network. Since the program was announced, the service, whi... |
| Aug 22, 2011 | A Tale of Two Computers: When Atari & Commodore Fought For The 80s | In 1985, personal computers were gearing up for another major throwdown. In response to the release of the Macintosh just a year prior, many systems were finally beginning to approach reasonable price points, causing an immense spike in hom... |
| Aug 19, 2011 | Hey You, Get Off Of My Code: What People Are Saying About Software Patents | If there’s a single issue aside from net neutrality that will profoundly affect the future of innovation, it’s software patents. As average people become increasingly dependent on the intangible algorithms that give life and purpose to the ... |
| Aug 17, 2011 | America Hacks the Planet | Major Pwnage: Marine specialists receiving the 2006 NSACSS Director’s Trophy
Somewhere between the breathless reporting on China’s state-sponsored hacking offensive, the perceived threat of hackers from former Soviet republics, and the “hac... |
| Aug 14, 2011 | Happy 81st, Neil Armstrong! | Neil Armstrong hasn't signed an autograph since 1994 – he found out people were just selling his name and profiting off him. When speaking to a room full of students at the Naval Academy, the young men present were asked not to bring u... |
| Aug 9, 2011 | Make Your Own EL Wire Costume Like M.I.A. [Instructables How-To] | Janet Hanson, the founder and Chief Fashion Engineer of Enlighted Designs, has designed costumes for artists like Daft Punk, M.I.A. and Kanye West. Needless to say, a lot of people are curious about how she makes her clothes.
Our friends at... |
| Aug 9, 2011 | The Cop iPhone App That Knows Your Face and Can Send You to Jail | Before we talk about the facial recognition technology thats being rolled out to police stations nationwide next month, here’s a question for you: Who would you rather have access to face recognition tech: cops or that weird heavy-breather ... |
| Aug 8, 2011 | A Warning About the "Dark Side" of the Web from the Birthplace of the Web | CERN’s computer storage facility
On August 8, 1989, someone published a web page at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. It was the first web page.
Exactly twenty years later, CERN's Computer Secu... |
