At some point in the next two years, the pollsters and ad makers who steer American presidential campaigns will be stumped: The nightly tracking polls are showing a dramatic swing in the opinions of the electorate, but neither of two typical factors — huge news or a major advertising buy — can…

Consider the tilde. There it is, that little squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your ­computer keyboard. The symbol dates back to ancient Greece, though tilde comes from Spanish, and in modern English it’s used to indicate “approximately” (e.g., ~30 years) or “equivalence” (x ~…

You think you know someone. Then you find your college email account. Towards the end of a dinner party with four old friends, when the wine gave way to whiskey, we began reminiscing. The subject turned to how much we didn’t remember from those years and an alarming fact surfaced: Someone at the…

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—In the 1970s, on this campus known for scientific innovation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students engineered a rather unlikely experiment: a football team. MIT had no intercollegiate football squad at the time. The student body in 1901 voted 119-117 to discontinue it. So…

Bill Cosby’s legacy, recast: Accusers speak in detail about sexual-assault allegations Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Pinterest Share via Email More Options Resize Text Print Article Comments 1180

Don’t you hate it when someone claims to have a magical new technology, but won’t tell you how it works? When I saw that a super stealthy startup called Magic Leap had raised $542 million to make animals appear out of thin air, I resolved to find out exactly what was going on. Here’s what I…

Facebook verdient sein Geld vor allem mit jungen Mitgliedern. Eine 19-Jährige schreibt, warum sie dem Netzwerk nicht mehr traut und es künftig meiden will. Eine junge Frau beim Chatten | © dpa Ihr Facebooknutzer, seid auf der Hut – vor allem die Jüngeren unter euch! Das soziale Netzwerk hat…

Hacker is a contested word. Just as it was starting to mean a poet, an artist of digital materials, it became associated with cybercrime. So, it is a word whose meaning depends entirely on context. When I speak about the early MIT hackers, about the Apple founders in their garage, about Bill Gates…

There was a circle of friends who lived on the southern edge of Damascus in a district called Yarmouk. They were artists, mainly. Actors, filmmakers, photographers, and musicians. Their neighborhood was a maze of alleys and tightly packed, four-story cement block buildings, and it smelled faintly…

Mostly I remember his face — the anger and hatred and evil as he realized his plan was not going to succeed. There is no sound to this memory. The traffic and background noise that must have existed are gone, edited out as superfluous. All that I have left is an image. Zubayri Street on a Saturday…

How Disney Turned ‘Frozen’ Into a Cash Cow

Christopher Mims, writing in the WSJ, “The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It”: Everything about apps feels like a win for users — they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet…

At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns.…

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “GamerGate,” the culture war that continues to rage within the world of video games, is the game that touched it off. Depression Quest, created by the developers Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler, isn’t what most people think of as a video game at…

75+ tools for investigative journalistsA @Journalism2ls selection.Monitor NewsFeedly, powerfull feedreader: https://feedly.com/Nuzzle, news shared by friend & connections: http://nuzzel.com/Newsle, news about friends and connections: https://newsle.com/Social Sensor, smart algorithm selected news:…

Bitcoin is often characterized in the media as a volatile virtual commodity that can optimize speculation even more efficiently than gold, securitized subprime mortgages, or tulips. That’s not how I think about it. For me, Bitcoin is a transformative addition to Internet communication protocols that…

In mid-December 2009, engineers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, began to suspect that hackers in China had obtained access to private Gmail accounts, including those used by Chinese human rights activists opposed to the government in Beijing. Like a lot of large, well-known…

The Daily Beast On Thursday, around the same time ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced that he had survived a U.S. airstrike and promised in a recorded message to “erupt volcanos of jihad,” American officials were meeting to discuss just how hard it was to track the militant group. Baghdadi…

Tor is susceptible to this kind of traffic analysis because it was designed for low-latency. Chakravarty explains: “To achieve acceptable quality of service, [Tor attempts] to preserve packet interarrival characteristics, such as inter-packet delay. Consequently, a powerful adversary can mount…

As Google’s core business continues to thrive, Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology—ingestible nanoparticles, balloons that beam down broadband—that could define the future. There’s a joke about Larry Page that’s been making the rounds at Google X, the “moon shot” factory where Google is…

Tristan Walker is in the house. He is posted up in the vestibule of the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California, where the hottest venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz, has just hosted a screening of a new documentary starring the rapper Nas. Nas is here, too, but from the way…

This essay is the first of a series of reports from The Nor, an investigation into paranoia, electromagnetism, and infrastructure. On the morning of Thursday, 30th October 2014, I set out to walk the perimeter of the London Congestion Charge Zone, a journey of some twelve miles around the centre of…

Eric Schmidt may have stepped down as Google CEO in 2011, but he hasn’t been any less vocal in his current role as executive chairman. Schmidt is known for his outspoken views and often provocative statements on just about everything in the technology world — follow this StoryStream to keep track of…

At around 8:30am on the morning Dante Orpilla planned to pay back the woman who had saved his life, he made a phone call.

A few days ago, a video produced by a third party “viral video creative agency” for the anti-harrasment NGO, “Hollaback,” went viral. The two-minute clip showed a conventionally attractive, white, actress walking the streets of New York for “10 hours”, and being repeatedly catcalled. But you…

Obviously Google’s ban wasn’t great news for us, but we’ve been amazed by the support from our community: over 100,000 people installed our products in the first 48 hours after the ban and we’re now averaging about 100,000 installs per week. Also, the ban inspired a bunch of great press coverage,…

I wrote this for the FT, but it’s behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it’s probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate. But the density and breadth of the Silicon…

(Reuters) - Samsung said its collaboration with Microsoft on Windows phones raised antitrust problems once Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia’s handset business, according to a court filing. The filing late on Thursday stems from Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) lawsuit accusing Samsung…

ouldn’t the world be a happier place if 90 per cent of the people with jobs put their feet up instead and left the robots to do the work? Why didn’t the last house you bought cost only 5 per cent of what you paid for it? And is there any reason why you or your children shouldn’t one day enjoy…

Der digitale Medienfluss, der Stream, ist dabei, sich in eine Umweltbedingung zu verwandeln. In etwas, das überall und immer da ist. Früher öffnete sich einmal pro Abend mit der Tagesschau das Nachrichtenfenster in die Welt. Heute fließen Meldungen, Informationen, Unterhaltung permanent. Etwas so…

How we experience content via connected devices – laptops, phones, tablets, wearables – is undergoing a dramatic change. The idea of an app as an independent destination is becoming less important, and the idea of an app as a publishing tool, with related notifications that contain content and…

The Internet’s First Family

As much as the Internet has already changed the world, it is the Web’s next phase that will bring the biggest opportunities, revolutionizing the way we live, work, play, and learn. That next phase, which some call the Internet of Things and which we call the Internet of Everything, is the…

By Steve Johnson sjohnson@mercurynews.com It will help you avoid traffic jams as you travel from work to that hot new spot you’ve been dying to try out, tell you on the way about the bar’s half-price coupons and let you check your home video monitors while knocking back a few to see if your cat is…

Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Fullscreen Ringo Starr would later say he could “feel” the city as they landed, the day the Beatles came to New York, could feel the energy that came along with a frenzied reception the Fab Four had recently become accustomed to: armies of shrieking young girls. The…

The API call is coming from inside the house! Except that it’s not—not yet, anyway. You don’t need an overactive imagination to envision a smart home as a house of horrors. Reality is scary enough—remember when a hacker took over a family’s baby monitor and yelled at their infant? Add to that…

WASHINGTON — If there’s one thing the FBI hates more than Osama bin Laden, it’s when Osama bin Laden starts using the Internet. So it should be no surprise that the feds are getting unusually jittery about what they claim is evidence that bin Laden and his terrorist allies are using…

If I think back to my favourite stories growing up, the books that made me sit up at nights reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Plague by Albert Camus, more recently Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell or even The Cat In The Hat by Dr. Seuss. What really struck me was that these stories were…

The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes. To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was the jury trial, which served not…

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