Welcome to the summer of 2020, where hot dogs, beach balls, and road trips are joined by protests, oximeters, and arguments about section 230(c). And, every week, your Plaintext newsletter. The Plain ViewI have become a Citizen addict. Citizen is an app, currently active in 18 cities, that’s sort of a supercharged police scanner—its home…
Are machine-learning algorithms biased, wrong, and racist? Let citizens decide. Essentially rule-based structures for making decisions, machine-learning algorithms play an increasingly large role in our lives. They suggest what we should read and watch, whom we should date, and whether or not we are detained while awaiting trial. Their promise is huge–they can better detect…
For the past two years, modern CPUs—particularly those made by Intel—have been under siege by an unending series of attacks that make it possible for highly skilled attackers to pluck passwords, encryption keys, and other secrets out of silicon-resident memory. On Tuesday, two separate academic teams disclosed two new and distinctive exploits that pierce Intel’s…
It was a crisp December morning in 2016 at the icy airfield near McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and Peter Gorham was watching a massive balloon fill with helium. Attached to the balloon was a gondola the size of a semi-truck cab that was designed to turn the entire frozen continent into the world’s largest radio…
Last month, the pharma company Takeda began recruiting patients for a clinical trial of a promising Covid-19 treatment involving antibodies drawn from the blood of recovered patients. It normally takes several weeks to collect people’s information, determine who may be suitable for the trial, and get the paperwork in order.With the coronavirus still spreading, Takeda…
The Last of Us , released by Naughty Dog and PlayStation in 2013 to cacophonous acclaim by the critical establishment, is perhaps the most significant exemplar of one of the biggest trends of its era of gaming: the dad game. Spawned (so to speak) by the fact that many upstart gaming studio heads began becoming…
It’s hard to buy gifts for dads—they usually have what they want, or they won’t exactly voice what’s on their wishlist. For this Father’s Day, dad will surely appreciate a phone (or video) call, especially in the midst of this pandemic. But if you want to buy him something to drive the point home, we…
My partner and I always drove to the hospital together. Every three weeks, for the past six months, we parked near the block-wide building, rode the elevator to the fifth floor, where a technician would draw two vials of his blood. Then we took the elevator to 6, and met with his oncologist. After that,…
The list of sophisticated eavesdropping techniques has grown steadily over years: Wiretaps, hacked phones, bugs in the wall—even bouncing lasers off of a building’s glass to pick up conversations inside. Now add another tool for audio spies: Any light bulb in a room that might be visible from a window.Researchers from Israeli’s Ben-Gurion University of…
As states and cities lift shelter-in-place restrictions, there’s still so much we don’t know about the coronavirus and how it spreads. Which has left a lot of people wondering: How safe is it, really, to start socializing again? Is wearing a mask a part of our lives for the foreseeable future—and is it possible to…
