David Heinmeier Hansson remembers the moment he decided he was fed up with email. It was two years ago, and Hansson, the cofounder and CTO of Basecamp, was working with fellow cofounder Jason Fried on the company’s tool for managing customer relationships. Basecamp makes project management and communication software, and Hansson realized what he wanted…
While many use Google Stadia to enjoy the benefits of the free monthly games from Stadia Pro, buying games keeps them in your library even when your Stadia Pro membership lapses. Starting today, Google Stadia is offering steep discounts on some of its best games including Borderlands 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2. Since launch,…
While Meet lately has received the brunt of attention in the video conferencing space, Duo is still around for more personal conversations. After announcing a slew of new features last month, Google Duo is now rolling out support for group calls with up to 32 participants on the web. For the past several years, group…
“Donkervoort D8 GTO-JD70” might not roll off the tongue with ease, and it may look like the love child of a Lotus/Caterham 7 and a Transformer, but when you pack the kind of performance it does, these things don’t matter. The D8 GTO-JD70 — so named because it’s built to celebrate company founder Joop Donkervoort’s 70th…
Five years ago, when Jeffrey MacKie-Mason first joined the University of California team that negotiates with academic publishers, he asked a colleague what would happen if he failed to strike a deal. What if, instead, he simply canceled their subscription? “I was told I would be fired the next day,” the UC Berkeley librarian says.…
The Internet Research Agency is infamous for flooding mainstream social media platforms with compelling disinformation campaigns. The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, deploys strategic data leaks and destabilizing cyberattacks. But in the recent history of Russia’s online meddling, a third, distinct entity may have been at work on many of the same objectives— indicating that…
Spot, Boston Dynamics’ famous robot dog, dutifully follows my every command. The machine traipses forward, then automatically scrambles over a raised bed of rocks. I make it side-step. I command it up a flight of stairs, which it tackles with ease. It meets its match when I steer it at a medicine ball, though; it…
Security experts have warned for years that the drive to connect every device imaginable to the internet would offer a bonanza for hackers. Now researchers have found that one chunk of software designed to enable those internet connections is itself riddled with hackable vulnerabilities. As a result, security flaws have ended up in hundreds of…
In 1996, while making music for the Fox Family Channel, Inon Zur received a phone call from the man who would later become his agent. This man, Bob Rice, represented composers for video games. He asked Zur whether he had any interest in the medium. Zur told him he didn’t know anything about video games,…
In the first quarter of 2020, domestic automakers saw their sales fall by nearly one-half from a year ago. This was due mainly to the Covid-19 crisis, which shuttered factories and dealerships, and put millions of people out of work. With the ranks of the unemployed now including nearly one in every seven American workers,…
