I hate to break it to you, Apple executives, but you do not own the story of Steve Jobs. Even Steve Jobs didn’t own it, because there is no singular, definitive story of Steve Jobs, or anyone else. Rather, there are multiple stories, and in his case, deeply polarized takes on his managerial style,…

There is an unfortunate climate of fear in the software community today. It is primarily in ephemeral video interviews and podcasts that we get any semblance of coherent criticism and even then it is reticent. Worse than the fact that this criticism is relegated to verbal discussions is that it is…

As a kid in the 1960s, Jeff Held thought that having a nuclear company in his backyard made life more exciting in Apollo, Pennsylvania. About 2,400 people lived alongside the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), the town’s main employer. Held’s neighborhood subsisted on atomic lore:…

Adam Magyar’s gone viral. His recent series Stainless , in which video recordings of subway platforms are played out in super-slow-motion, has been rippling across the web . Magyar first films people on the platform from a speedily arriving train and then slows the footage down, highlighting details…

In 2011, Hanli Prinsloo decided she wanted to break the woman’s world record in free diving. She would need to dive to 213 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea and hold her breath for about four minutes. Until the 1960s, scientists believed it was not humanly possible. The increased water…

On the day he planned to make his sacred journey, or hijra, to the Islamic State, 19-year-old Mohammed Hamzah Khan woke up before dawn at his house in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook, Illinois, and walked to the nearby mosque to pray. It was Saturday, October 4th, 2014, an unusually cold morning,…

Jacob Silverman is the author of “Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection,” from which this article is adapted. Twenty years ago, the conditions facing the technology industry were not unlike those today. A burgeoning consumer market, declining manufacturing costs and…

A legendary design firm, a corporate executive, and a Buddhist-hospice director take on the end of life.

Trying to define the future of the massive video-sharing site is like trying to define the future of the written word. It’s no single genre. It encompasses the future of the moving image as a whole.

Tweet Many people may already know that all your devices try to broadcast your previous connections. I expect that many more have no idea that’s happening. There have been articles published about it before, but without specific examples. WiFi probes In order to connect to known networks which don’t…

Katharine Viner has been named as the new editor-in-chief of "The Guardian." She's the first woman to head the newspaper in its 194-year history.(Photo: Guardain News & Media, via European Press Agency) Major journalistic scoops are judged by their impact on society at large, but they can also…

The Hedgehog Review : Vol. 17 No. 1 (Spring 2015) Siva Vaidhyanathan Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 17.1 (Spring 2015). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.…

Benjamin Netanyahu has won again. He will have no difficulty putting together a solid right-wing coalition. But the naked numbers may be deceptive. What really counts is the fact that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases proto-fascist, figures. It is in no way…

The company’s shearling-lined sandals are like a Teddy bear that cuddles back. They are witty, provocative, and slightly silly. In 1936, Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Surrealist artist, had tea with Pablo Picasso at the Café de Flore, in Paris. Oppenheim was wearing a bracelet, of her own design, that…

When it comes to the NSA's mass surveillance programs, however, the FISA court is not acting like a court at all

But you’re not just waiting to see what a bot will come up with. You’re waiting and hoping, perhaps against hope, that it will have something uncanny and affirming to say about your circumstances, your wishes. #Fortune is just one of the nuanced, fascinating swath of games that tell our future. We…

I’ve been frustrated that artists are not allowed to have a nuanced position

Late Sunday night AllCrypt was hacked. We spent the last few days going over logs, speaking with other crypto exchange operators and law enforcement, and here is what we know. Around 8PM on Sunday (all times EDT) our marketing director’s blog account requested a password reset. Up until the writing…

von Martin Schmetz Islamistische Terrorgruppen setzen in mehrfacher Hinsicht auf das Internet. Für islamistische Gruppierungen wie Al Qaida oder den islamischen Staat stellen eigene Foren und Webseiten, Instant Messenger wie Kik oder WhatsApp sowie soziale Medien wie Twitter, Facebook oder Ask.fm…

They use screen aliases like IS Hunting Club, TouchMyTweets and The Doctor. They troll Twitter for suspected accounts of Islamic State fighters, recruiters and fund-raisers. Then they pounce. In what has become a cyber analogy to the battles in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere between governments and the…

Das könnte man so verstehen: Die Verantwortlichen in Norwegen haben etwas Rechtswidriges getan; das wissen wir zwar nicht, aber Herr Gabriel weiß das anscheinend. Und er weiß offenbar auch, wie sehr dieses Instrument der nach Schüssen herbeigerufenen Polizei geholfen haben soll, den noch anwesenden…

Chris Sacca's signature cowboy shirts make the trip to his new Montana home. (Credit: Jamel Toppin for Forbes) Between the parade of wet suits and abundant seafood and yoga joints, Manhattan Beach, just south of Los Angeles, tries to cling fast to its surf town roots. It’s a tough battle. Strolling…

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Dado Ruvic/Reuters. If you complain about social media (especially if you post that diatribe on Twitter or Facebook), your friends will tell you one thing over and over: If you think it’s so bad, don’t use it in the first place. Criticism, they propose, is a…

Many in Washington this week have been questioning whether the Federal Trade Commission made the right call when it rebuffed its own staff recommendation in 2013 to take Google to court over alleged anti-competitive practices. The debate was sparked by a Wall Street Journal story describing the…

As the web becomes a more visual medium, there are finally tools for searching by image. Steam engine ( Frédéric Bisson/Flickr ) I was walking through lower Manhattan on the way to work one morning a couple of years ago when I saw a guy in a hardhat peering through something like one of these things…

I am an engineer, and I am a writer. As an engineer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how text is stored, but relatively little about what information the text actually represents. To the computer, text is an abstract entity – a stream of 0s and 1s, and any semantic meaning is in the eye of the…

The gut is dead. Long live the data

On September 27, 2013, during a dimly-lit presentation at Stanford’s MedX conference, Dr. Stephen Friend told an audience about the future of medical research. “Imagine ten trials, several thousand patients,” said Friend, the founder of Seattle-based Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit that champions open…

Recorded Future finds that Tor is rising in popularity as an infrastructure for malicious Web activity. This post will demonstrate how we can create actionable alerts and data exports for defending against problematic Tor nodes. On October 23, 2014, Leviathan Security presented how binaries were…

Graeme Wood’s article “What does ISIS really want?” has become the most discussed foreign policy article of the year. Yet the piece’s power lies not in the title question, but in Wood’s blunt assessment of a paradox that leaves Western leaders flummoxed: How does one explain the traction of the…

Photo by Christian San Jose/Top Dawg Entertainment/UMG I’ve been rummaging in my skull the past few days for the skeleton key that might spring open the interlocking chambers of rap phenomenon Kendrick Lamar’s intricate, imbricated, and self-implicating new album. To Pimp a Butterfly, an immediate…

There are many ways to make up something sensationalist in the media. One of the practical ways is to speculate and create conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, there’s a demand for such stories and they have a very good chance of making a splash. So how can a global company with Russian roots play a…

View this image › Snapchat The internet is not a place of fierce loyalty. Create a transformational product or build a better service and people will use it. Thus Hotmail gave way to Gmail, and MySpace to Facebook. So you can understand why Google thought it could build a better social network in…

If you visited the Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad during the holy month of Muharram this past fall, you would be forgiven for thinking that Iraq, like its neighbor Iran, is a country whose official religion is Shiite Islam. The ministry’s walls are emblazoned with iconography and slogans…

Between high-stakes discrimination suits and the dubious behavior of so-called allies, there’s a tempest of awful gender relations in right now in Silicon Valley. But the loudest storms that make headlines are only a small part of tech’s sexism problem. It’s not just bad weather, it’s bad climate —…

A powerful new surveillance tool being adopted by police departments across the country comes with an unusual requirement: To buy it, law enforcement officials must sign a nondisclosure agreement preventing them from saying almost anything about the technology. Any disclosure about the technology,…

Updated, 2:45 p.m. | With 1.39 billion active users worldwide, Facebook’s social network is the closest thing we have to a universal communication platform. And people post — or try to post — just about everything you can imagine. On Monday, the company clarified its community standards to give its…

Inside The Lives Of The Wives And Widows Of ISIS

Peter Kafka / Recode When Gigaom’s managers announced the tech news publisher was laying off all of its employees on Monday, the news came as a shock to the site’s staff and its many admirers. But, behind the scenes, Gigaom’s managers and investors had known the company was in serious peril for more…

Photo: Heide Benser/Corbis Where are you the funniest, smartest, most Facetuned version of yourself? This week, the Cut explores the complexities, vanities, and pitfalls of self-presentation online We'll call him Michael, and my friend Demi was obsessed with him. An image search of his name would…