Security paranoiacs have warned for years that any laptop left alone with a hacker for more than a few minutes should be considered compromised. Now one Dutch researcher has demonstrated how that sort of physical access hacking can be pulled off in an ultra-common component: The Intel Thunderbolt port found in millions of PCs.On Sunday,…
Objects are made of atoms, and atoms are likewise the sum of their parts—electrons, protons, and neutrons. Dive into one of those protons or neutrons, however, and things get weird. Three particles called quarks ricochet back and forth at nearly the speed of light, snapped back by interconnected strings of particles called gluons. Bizarrely, the…
Before Covid-19 hit the San Francisco Bay Area, photojournalist Justin Sullivan could upload a raw file to Getty Images in a few seconds. Now, it can take several minutes. “Between the hours of 2 and 6 pm, the internet just flatlines,” Sullivan says. “Everyone’s on Zoom calls and watching movies or whatever.” That “whatever” includes…
The global pandemic has eliminated so many public events, and it sucks. Sports, canceled. Concerts, canceled. Graduations, canceled. In Louisiana, where I live, there are usually a bunch of awesome spring festivals; not this year. Also canceled, just about every school- and state-level science fair and, as far as I can tell, pretty much every…
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, ransomware attacks have increased 148 percent over baseline levels from February 2020. This follows an already devastating surge in ransomware attacks against state and local governments. Hackers made headlines on August 16, 2019, after they remotely blocked access to critical data in 22 localities in Texas. That same year, Baltimore’s city…
As of this writing, it’s been about two months since most of the United States started sheltering in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus, since bars and restaurants closed, since schools closed, since the Covid-19 hospitalization numbers started to rise in New York. It’s been a long time, but it’s felt even longer.…
It continues to be pretty awful out there in the world. Flying cars might not be coming anytime soon, the Google sister company Sidewalk Labs canceled its fantastical plans to build the city of the future in Toronto, and suffering government budgets will make it harder to fix roads. And yet! WIRED found some bright…
There’s only so many ways I can phrase it: the reality we’re living in sucks. People are battling the novel coronavirus, are out of work, and some are learning to grieve without being able to hug their loved ones; healthcare workers are facing supply shortages and trying to not get sick themselves, and we’re all…
The numbers are staggering. On May 7, 2,231 Americans died of the disease Covid-19, bringing the total number of deaths in the United States to 75,662, and more than 270,000 worldwide. The economic effects have been nothing short of American carnage. At the end of April the US Congressional Budget Office hinted that the second…
Halo: The Master Chief Collection continues its PC rollout, with Halo 2 Anniversary releasing on May 12, and plans already underway to get Halo 3 to users as soon as possible. Microsoft recently released the first screenshots of Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST on PC, and now they’ve announced that the first “flight” (their…
