On Tuesday, Massachusetts became the second state this year to sue ride-hail companies Uber and Lyft for treating their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. State attorney general Maura Healey told reporters the Covid-19 pandemic motivated her to ask a state court judge to enforce a 2004 labor law to reclassify the drivers.“What the…
Since WannaCry and NotPetya struck the internet just over three years ago, the security industry has scrutinized every new Windows bug that could be used to create a similar world-shaking worm. Now one potentially “wormable” vulnerability—meaning an attack can spread from one machine to another with no human interaction—has appeared in Microsoft’s implementation of the…
When the world fully transitions from cars that run on dinosaur juice to cars that run on electricity, humanity will have eliminated a major source of planet-warming carbon dioxide and a major threat to human health—air pollution kills nearly 550,000 children under age 5 each year. But a hidden environmental threat from cars will persist,…
Silicon Valley dreamers have long envisioned a world where every child is holding a laptop. It sounds good on paper, but it’s proven stubbornly difficult to manifest in reality. Not only do you need a computer cheap enough to sell to cash-strapped schools, but you also need software to engage a notoriously distracted audience: kids.…
One of the biggest surprises of parenthood has been dealing with the overwhelming amounts of stuff. Take going to the beach, for example. Before kids, a quick beach trip was as complicated as putting on a pair of shorts over a bathing suit, tossing a tallboy in a backpack, and biking to the water.Now, I…
Sensitive data needs to be encrypted both at rest and in transit—that is, when it’s passively stored and when it’s being sent from one spot to another. Covering these two bases protects information a lot of the time, but still doesn’t account for every scenario. Now Google Cloud Services—which counts PayPal, HSBC, and Bloomberg as…
Even while much of Washington tries to practice social distancing, FBI director Christopher Wray made it a point to travel three blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the bureau’s headquarters last Tuesday for a speech to a small audience, most of them in masks. Wray has kept a low profile throughout his nearly three-year tenure as…
The Covid party craze continues to sweep the nation—or, at least, the nation’s news organizations. The latest example comes from Texas, where a 30-year-old man is said to have confessed on his death bed that he had attended one. “Just before the patient died,” announced Jane Appleby, chief medical officer at Methodist Hospital in San…
Starbucks is trying. In 2018 the coffeehouse company became a national punching bag after a café manager called the police on two Black men for sitting and not ordering anything in one of its Philadelphia locations. Ever since, company leaders have been working, fully caffeinated, to make amends for this racist misstep. Right after the…
Oppo has long been a leader in engineering fast-charging solutions — it developed the tech behind the Dash Charge system used in OnePlus phones, for example, and has achieved even faster results in many of its own devices. Today, the company is taking a further step forward with the announcement of a 125W system that…
