Every time Congress holds a hearing about Silicon Valley companies, people mock the legislators for being out of their depth. Last week’s effort by the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was no exception. “The technological ignorance demonstrated by our elected officials … was truly stunning,” Shelly Palmer, CEO at the Palmer Group, a…
If you want to discourage folks from doing something naughty, tax the hell out of it. Take cigarettes, for example: On average, in high-income countries you get a 4 percent drop in demand for every 10 percent price hike. Or consider pollution: Countries like Sweden have begun to tax carbon to fight climate change—basically, you…
Even though the Defcon security conference has moved entirely online the year, United States Air Force is going forward with Hack-a-Sat, a months-long competition that culminates with hacking a real orbiting satellite starting on Friday. But another project at Defcon’s Aerospace Village this week should have at least as much impact and a potentially much…
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.In these uncertain times, it’s tougher than usual to justify spending as much as a fully loaded Dell XPS 15 costs. But boy, the screen is gorgeous, and the power under it will crunch through whatever you throw at it—video…
Mark Zuckerberg put his lungs on the line in March 2016. On a trip to Beijing seemingly aimed at helping persuade the government to let Facebook operate inside China, the CEO made time for a jog-cum-photo-opp in a polluted Tiananmen Square.Back home in Silicon Valley, meanwhile, China’s leading social media company, Tencent, was enjoying an…
Dogs are not very high tech. Dogs inspire us to put our phones down. They live perfectly and completely in the moment. Even so, as our lives have become more technologically advanced, so has our relationship with our dogs. Advances in technology have provided the opportunity to give our canine best friends longer and healthier…
The early hours of June 13, 1944, were unseasonably cold. In east London, on a high plateau south of the Thames, British firemen awoke in darkness to the sounds of air-raid sirens. They trudged from their watchmen’s hut and crossed the tarred parade ground and roadway toward the small, brick, concrete-roofed fire station of their…
Editor’s note: As this story—the cover of our September issue—went to press, TikTok’s fate remained uncertain. We’ve updated the story with the latest news. Everything will change in six days, when George Floyd stops breathing under the knee of a white police officer. But for now, it is May 19, an ordinary day during a…
In April, the actress Julie Nolke uploaded a video called “Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self” to YouTube. The premise: A cheerful, optimistic Nolke from January of this year receives a visit from Nolke from April Covid-19 quarantine, and she grows increasingly horrified as her future self recounts the first few months of annus…
The nice thing about being a frog is that you don’t have to chew your food—just gulp, and down the hatch. The problematic thing about being a frog is that you don’t have to chew your food, which means that if you’ve happened to nab the aquatic beetle Regimbartia attenuata, your food might come out…
