In May after pressure from civil rights leaders, the company published a report documenting the sex and race of its employees “to be candid about the issues,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s executive in charge of human resources, wrote at the time.

As Dr. Sid Gilman approached the stage, the hotel ballroom quieted with anticipation. It was July 29, 2008, and a thousand people had gathered in Chicago for the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease. For decades, scientists had tried, and failed, to devise a cure for Alzheimer’s. But in…

Ross Ulbricht, charged for operating the Silk Road black market, doesn’t have to wait the full 33 days until the start of his courtroom trial for the prosecution and defense teams to start trading blows. Ulbricht’s lawyers recently charged the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with illegally…

Last week, I saw my friend on a computer screen. He appeared during the final few minutes of the video in which ISIS fighters executed the British aid worker Alan Henning. It was the first time I’ve seen him in more than a year. I’m so frightened it might be the last because they’re threatening to…

Turkey’s Refusal to Fight ISIS Hurts the Kurds

In den letzten Monaten rückt die Kommunikations- oder besser: Einschüchterungskultur im Netz wieder verstärkt in den Vordergrund. Das ist gut, denn dieses Thema wird weiterhin im netzpolitischen Diskurs nahezu vollständig ignoriert oder beiläufig als Randnotiz erwähnt. Dabei leiden viele Menschen…

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Manche Dinge lassen mir einfach keine Ruhe. Seit dem Vortrag von Anne Wizorek auf der re:publica 2013 in dem sie unter anderem davon berichtet, wie sie aufgrund #aufschrei angegriffen wurde, denke ich darüber nach wie diese Art Wahnsinn (und es ist nichts anderes) gestoppt werden kann. Der Fall…

RECENTLY, IT HAS BEEN GETTING HARDER to disappear on this planet. A surveilling drone began passing over the remote forests of northeastern Nigeria earlier this year, tracking the separatist group Boko Haram, catching glimpses of hasty encampments and escapes along dirt trails. When the militants…

Over the last decade, as the biggest force in tech history hurtled toward irrelevance (albeit lucratively), a few blamed Microsoft’ s woes on founder Bill Gates, while most pointed to his successor as C.E.O., Steve Ballmer. Bethany McLean charts the breakdown of their relationship, the growing…

Then One/WIRED It took the upheaval of the Edward Snowden revelations to make clear to everyone that we need protection from snooping, governmental and otherwise. Snowden illustrated the capabilities of determined spies, and said what security experts have preached for years: Strong encryption of…

Photo by Polka Dot Images/Thinkstock From mere faux pas to outright harassment, Twitter increasingly acts as a pressure cooker for the worst of humanity. Longtime literary troll Ed Champion was finally suspended from Twitter last month after trying to blackmail a writer in real time. The death of…

Most everybody has a basic knowledge of the company….Sergey and Larry killed it at search when everyone thought search was over…the VCs made them pick Eric Schmidt for “adult supervision”… search ads provided a bottomless well of cash that enabled them to buy, launch or invent YouTube, DoubleClick,…

Was sollte das sein? Mit sparsamen Sätzen skizzierte der Mann, wie sich in zwölf Jahren Afghanistaneinsatz eine Machtstruktur entwickelt habe, durch die die deutsche Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik gelenkt werde. Strategien, Ausrüstung, Ausbildung. Alles werde durch eine Afghanistan-Brille gesehen.…

October 7, 2014 [Note: I didn’t want to have to write this. But here it is. I’m not linking it to the blog, and it won’t likely stay up long, but you are welcome to contact me here if you want to put it somewhere else before I take it down. It is long and rambling and unedited and one of the few…

You’ve read the 3 free articles available to you this month. Get unlimited access to The California Sunday Magazine on the web, iPhone, iPad, Android devices, and Kindle e-readers. Log in Join You’ve read 1 of 3 free articles this month. Join A couple of months ago, I met Cory Strassburger, a…

Hackers — Gabriella Coleman, McGill University The Culture vs. the Cultures of Hacking In the 1950s a small group of MIT-based computer enthusiasts, many of them model train builders/tinkerers, adopted the term “hacker” to differentiate their freewheeling attitude from those of their peers. While…

Last week Apple announced that it is closing a serious security vulnerability in the iPhone. It used to be that the phone’s encryption only protected a small amount of the data, and Apple had the ability to bypass security on the rest of it. From now on, all the phone’s data is protected. It can no…

Voice is the next big thing in mobile OCTOBER 01, 2014 One of the very big and obvious trends in mobile in the last couple of years has been the explosion in new messaging forms, enabled by the permissionless innovation of the internet and by the emergence of the smartphone as a social platform. So…

Photo by Attila Acs My first girlfriend was someone I met through a MUD, and I had to fly 7,000 miles to see her in person. I read a paper version of the Jargon File at 15 and it became my bible. Just reading its descriptions of the internet I knew it was world-changing, even before the web, and as…

Stories from 716 women who left tech show that the industry’s culture is the primary culprit, not any issues related to science education. I knew something was up when Sandhya, a talented project manager I only knew slightly, asked me if we could have lunch. She had recently come back from maternity…

Simply put: Terrorists have good reasons to use social media.

IMAGINE a world suddenly devoid of doors. None in your home, on dressing rooms, on the entrance to the local pub or even on restroom stalls at concert halls. The controlling authorities say if you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you shouldn’t mind. Well, that’s essentially the state of affairs on…

The ongoing protests for democracy in Hong Kong have been dubbed by many as the “Umbrella Revolution.” But days before the term was created, the dominant internet meme supporting the protests was built around student selfies accompanied by hashtags #HKClassBoycott and #HKStudentStrike. This was in…

2014 Gigaom, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Coming up at Gigaom Structure Connect 2014Oct. 21-22, 2014, San Francisco3 weeks away!Roadmap 2014Nov. 18-19, 2014, San FranciscoGrab your ticket now!

Last week I wrote about . Since that piece was intended for general audiences, I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and apparently the !) are still wondering about the nitty-gritty details of Apple’s design might work, I thought it might be helpful to sum up what we know and…

Die Welt hat sich in den letzten 23 Jahren verändert seitdem der Chaos Computer Club angetreten ist, die Wirkung von technologischer Entwicklung auf Menschen und Gesellschaft zu begleiten. Technik und elektronische Kommunikation sind in Unternehmen, Verwaltung und Unterhaltung inzwischen eine…

I can’t remember taking screenshots until about five or six years ago. I wish I had taken screenshots earlier. Many times I have tried to recall something particular about the Friendster interface, the collage-like way AOL “channels” opened up to navigate, or how posts threaded on a web forum I…

Last Monday, I had 60 followers on Twitter. Today, I have more than 4,300. Not to brag or anything, but that’s more than Benjamin Wittes; more than Bobby Chesney; more than Jack Goldsmith; more than my boss, Daniel Byman. But here’s the problem: A healthy number of them are Islamic extremists,…

On Wednesday, Cody Wilson’s libertarian non-profit Defense Distributed revealed the Ghost Gunner, a $1,200 computer-controlled (CNC) milling machine designed to let anyone make the aluminum body of an AR-15 rifle at home, with no expertise, no regulation, and no serial numbers. Since then, he’s sold…

The tone of the answering machine message was routine, like a reminder for a dental appointment. But there was also an undercurrent of urgency. “Please call me back,” the voice said. “It’s important.” What worried me was who was calling: a senior attorney with the Justice Department’s secretive…

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On 24 August 1965 Gloria Placente, a 34-year-old resident of Queens, New York, was driving to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Clad in shorts and sunglasses, the housewife was looking forward to quiet time at the beach. But the moment she crossed the Willis Avenue bridge in her Chevrolet Corvair,…

People come to Los Angeles so they can have an experience like Pendleton Ward’s: Two years after arriving, he was about to move into his car. Three years after that, he had one of the biggest cult hits on television: a rapturously surreal post-apocalyptic animated saga that has since spawned a…

Malware-based espionage targeting political activists and other opposition is nothing new, especially when it comes to opponents of the Chinese government. But there have been few attempts at hacking activists more widespread and sophisticated than the current wave of spyware targeting the mobile…

Many of us believe it wasn’t the FBI who discovered the hidden Silk Road server, but the NSA (or other intelligence organization). We believe the FBI is using “parallel construction”, meaning creating a plausible story of how they found the server to satisfy the courts, but a story that isn’t true.…

“She’s one of the women who has been written out of the history of computing,” his daughter replied. While some in tech know of her, Ms. Lovelace, who lived from 1815 to 1852, is far from a household name.

Alex Washburn / WIRED It’s been just two months since researcher Karsten Nohl demonstrated an attack he called BadUSB to a standing-room-only crowd at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showing that it’s possible to corrupt any USB device with insidious, undetectable malware. Given the…

On July 1, 2003, some half a million Hong Kong people took to the streets to protest a national-security bill, proposed by Hong Kong’s government and backed by Beijing, that was widely believed to restrict freedom of speech. I had just moved to Hong Kong, where I worked as a journalist for three…

Bewegen Sie die Karte und erkunden Sie Berlin 1989 © Berliner Morgenpost, 2014 Von Uta Keseling, Julius Tröger, Moritz Klack (webkid.io), Max Boenke, David Wendler Mitarbeit: André Pätzold, Christian Schlippes Fotos: Uta Keseling (32), pa/AP, pa/Matthias Kupfernagel (7), Imago (1), pa/ZB(8),…