In 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was fed up with Facebook’s pushy interface. The platform had a way of coercing people into giving up more and more of their privacy. The question was, what to call that coercion? Zuckermining? Facebaiting? Was it a Zuckerpunch? The name that eventually stuck: Privacy Zuckering, or when “you are…
Eric Westman needed a laser. And someone who knew how to use it. It was April, and the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was still burning through New York City. Five hundred miles away, in Durham, North Carolina, Westman had been hard at work for weeks, raising money to pay out-of-work costume designers and sewing hobbyists who’d…
Weird things happen in and around New York City nearly every day, so the appearance of a suspicious package at George Soros’ residence in Westchester County didn’t initially raise many eyebrows at the FBI’s hulking New York field office.Late on the evening of Monday, October 22, 2018, the office received an alert known as a…
On Tuesday, following weeks of speculation, Joe Biden’s campaign texted supporters to let them know that he’d selected Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. The news was hardly a surprise, but it marked an important moment in history: Harris is the first woman of color on a presidential ticket. But that isn’t the only…
GET YOUR FIXES ON — A few of the more notable updates in this month’s patch batch from Microsoft. Dan Goodin – Aug 12, 2020 11:55 am UTC Microsoft on Tuesday patched 120 vulnerabilities, two that are notable because they’re under active attack and a third because it fixes a previous patch for a security…
Last month was an odd sort of anniversary at Microsoft. In the summer of 2015, Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood and Wiz Khalifa’s See You Again topped the charts while speculation about the iPhone 6S was running wild. And that July, Microsoft announced one of its most spectacular fails — ever. Satya Nadella, just a year…
Depending on where exactly in the world you’re located, you may find the notion of paying for 5G unnecessary, and Samsung already confirmed both the Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy Note 20 Ultra will be available in LTE-only configurations. However, that “entry-level” configuration of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra will only be offered with 8GB…
One surprising result of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a spike in consumer demand for imitation meats. According to a Nielsen report, during the first nine weeks of the crisis in the United States, grocery store sales of faux meat products increased 264 percent. The reasons included concerns about illness at meatpacking plants, the possible…
In 1714, the British government was desperate for a scientific solution to a deadly problem. In the empire’s haste to explore—and conquer—the globe, British ships were frequently colliding with land before they knew they had reached it, because sailors had no way of keeping track of how far east or west they had traveled. Rather…
To live in San Francisco for the past 20 years has been to live with outrage that a society so innovative and compassionate can so reliably fail to meet even the most basic challenges of public life. This city never stopped being pretty—salmon boats on the bay, coyotes in the park—and the local spirit of…
