Der Untersuchungsausschuss des Bundestages zur Ausspähpraxis von Nachrichtendiensten wurde möglicherweise ausgespäht. Nach Informationen der “Welt” gibt es den Verdacht, dass das sogenannte Krypto-Handy des Ausschussvorsitzenden Patrick Sensburg gehackt wurde. Das Gerät wird deshalb beim Bundesamt…

The most recent photo of Felipe García, an architect, taken just weeks before he disappeared in Northeastern Mexico in March 2013. He was wearing this shirt the day he vanished. Photo: Tanya Elizabeth Gonzalez Vaya. Used with permission. It could have been any other morning. Felipe del Jesús Peréz…

But I think I'm getting ahead of myself a bit here. Today's Washington Post has the story of a nasty bug  in some TLS/SSL servers and clients, one that has the potential to downgrade the security of your TLS connections to something that isn't really secure at all. In this post I'm going to talk…

Technology companies are scrambling to fix a major security flaw that for more than a decade left users of Apple and Google devices vulnerable to hacking when they visited millions of supposedly secure Web sites, including Whitehouse.gov, NSA.gov and FBI.gov. The flaw resulted from a former U.S.…

Security experts have discovered a potentially catastrophic flaw that for more than a decade has made it possible for attackers to decrypt HTTPS-protected traffic passing between Android or Apple devices and hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, including AmericanExpress.com, Bloomberg.com,…

This is less an issue in the industrial IoT, which involves adding sensors to pipelines or machinery, and doesn't have the same implications for society. The risk affects the everyday consumer version, which is only just emerging.

The pickup truck accelerated. Jose Isabel Coj Cumar could see the glow of the sun through the thin black fabric that concealed him and the five other men in the bed of the truck. They lay staggered side by side, packed so tight Jose Isabel could scarcely move. The truck swerved then drove faster,…

This is going to be a two-part post—one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what we should do about it.  If you’re already afraid of machine intelligence, you can skip this one and read the second post tomorrow—I was planning to only write part 2, but when I…

Seriously, billionaires and pundits warning us about our impending AI doom is is such a distraction. Does AI have its dangers? Yes. And nobody talks about them. The danger of AI is that is will put increasing power in the hands of those who have the data and the know-how, i.e. large corporations and…

[ Click here to see a list of all interviews ] I am emailing experts in order to raise and estimate the academic awareness and perception of risks from AI. Below you will find some thoughts on the topic by Shane Legg , a computer scientist and AI researcher who has been working on theoretical models…

Hooray for technology! It makes everything better for everyone!! Right? Well, no. When a new technology, like ebooks or health trackers, is only available to some people, it has unintended consequences for all of us. Jon Gosier, a TED Fellow and tech investor, calls out the idea of "trickle-down…

It has now become clear that Barack Obama is under enormous pressure to intensify the campaign against ISIS. Last week, as the White House held a summit on countering extremist violence in which Obama declared, “we are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” sources at the Pentagon told…

Last week, as discussions of striped dresses and llamas dominated the headlines, academia and policy coalesced in a way that rarely happens. On February 25th, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee to provide the annual worldwide threat…

Truly obsessed adults, though, have spent hundreds of hours creating full-scale replicas of the Death Star, the Empire State Building and cities from Game of Thrones. The word “Minecraft” is Googled more often than the Bible, Harry Potter and Justin Bieber. And this single game has grossed more than…

The title of this post is a question sent to XSS by reader after this blog covered the removal of Superfish two weeks ago. Other readers sent in questions related to the topic of SSL connections and Man-in-the-Middle attacks, all hinging on the same premise – how can the average person, someone who…

Few analysts or writers will outright say it, but I will: the Apple Watch is going to flop. And I bet a lot of other people are thinking the same thing for many good reasons. Apple has become a perennial hit maker, the company other companies copy. Apple really gets design. In the past 14 years, it…

The password is one of the weakest forms of security. DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, wants to solve this problem by turning people and their behavior into passwords through its Active Authentication program. Pawel Kopczynski/Reuters View Caption No matter how strong it is, the password is one…

Vor rund einem Jahr setzte der Deutsche Bundestag den NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss ein. Er soll prüfen, ob der BND massenhaft Internetdaten durchsucht. Die Ausschussarbeit und Recherchen des Tagesspiegels zeigen: Die Überwachung ist längst graue Behördennormalität. Alle wissen davon – auch das…

Mohammed Emwazi first came to CAGE in 2009 after being detained, interrogated and recruited by Mi5 on what was meant to be a safari holiday to Tanzania. Thereafter, the harassment continued and intensified which led to him losing two fiancée's, his job and new life in Kuwait. The harassment and…

What, exactly, social networks and advocacy groups should make of the dangerous, well-intentioned phenomenon of “viral” suicide

SAN FRANCISCO — For Apple, the hard part — making a smartwatch — is nearly over. Soon it will be time for the harder part: selling the long-anticipated Apple Watch to consumers who, so far, are not very excited about the idea of wearing computers on their bodies. The first batch of smartwatches from…

The travel agency where a plane ticket was purchased for Akhror Saidakhmetov, one of three Brooklyn men charged with conspiring to support the Islamic State. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS VIA LANDOV August 8, 2014, was a glorious summer day in Brooklyn: the sky was clear and the…

Since the Korean War ended in 1953, the North and South have been separated by a heavily guarded demilitarized zone (2, 5, 8, 9)— the world’s starkest border between technological haves and have-nots. Joe Pugliese Kang Chol-hwan, leader of the dissident group NKSC, with a popular video player caleed…

Share I N SEPTEMBER OF 2014, I found myself standing on a narrow, potholed street in Kiev, east of the Dnieper River, in an area known as the Left Bank. I didn’t even know, at that point, whom I was meeting. I knew only that Khalid, my contact in Turkey with the Islamic State, had told me his…

ATTICA, N.Y. — On the evening of Aug. 9, 2011, one month before the 40th anniversary of the bloody Attica prison riot, a guard in that remote facility in western New York was distributing mail to inmates in C Block, one of the vast tiers of cells nestled behind its towering 30-foot walls. The…

Tech start-ups mint new millionaires every day. Many of these people are young Stanford and MIT graduates who live in Silicon Valley and spend years building their companies while subsisting on ramen noodles and Red Bull. Typically, they’re not funeral industry workers from Central Pennsylvania who…

In the summer of 2004, a 15-year-old boy, needy and eager for attention, was driven down a road that stretched through the endless flatlands of Maryland’s eastern shore. The boy, known in court records as R.R., arrived at a dirt driveway, where a sign on top of a wooden post announced Last Chance…

I. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is having a moment, albeit one marked by crucial ambiguities. Cognoscenti including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, among others, have recently weighed in on its potential and perils. After reading Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence,” Musk even…

I love the Internet. It has powered my career, the company I lead—Etsy—and our community of users. The truth is that a free and open Internet matters to a lot of us. And that’s why I’m so happy to see FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler taking action this week to protect it. If the Internet hadn’t been so wide…

Just Checking InBy Virginia Heffernan and Paul FordVirginia Heffernan and Paul Ford have never met, but have often crossed paths—we live in New York City; were editors at Harper’s Magazine; write about technology; and write for The Message on Medium. For no particular reason we’ve started sending…

Getty Images The hacking tool, believed to be a product of the NSA, is significant because subverting the firmware gives the attackers God-like control of the system in a way that is stealthy and persistent even through software updates. The module, named “nls_933w.dll”, is the first of its kind…

February 23, 2015 By Paul Voosen Magic has entered our world. In the pockets of many Americans today are thin black slabs that, somehow, understand and anticipate our desires. Linked to the digital cloud and satellites beyond, churning through personal data, these machines listen and assist,…

Twitter is two things. It is a concept — everyone in the world connected in real time — that’s so obvious in retrospect that it is impossible to imagine it not existing. It is also a product that has had a rough time living up to that concept. Much of its battles have had to do with convincing the…

Isis doesn’t want people to work, it just wants them to suffer

Someone once observed that the difference between Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher was that whereas Thatcher believed that she was always right, Blair believed not only that he was right but also that he was good. Visitors to the big technology companies in California come away with the feeling that…

The same week researchers reported that the National Security Agency had been embedding surveillance tools in the guts of thousands of machines in Iran, Russia and other countries, it was revealed that the world’s largest personal computer company had been doing something similar to its…

Many of us have random impulses, but Bill Murray is the man who acts on them, for all of us. Consider, for example, the time a couple of years ago when he caught a cab late at night in Oakland. Facing a long drive across the bay to Sausalito, he started talking with his cabbie and discovered that…

Abstract:      Research shows that evidence-based algorithms more accurately predict the future than do human forecasters. Yet, when forecasters are deciding whether to use a human forecaster or a statistical algorithm, they often choose the human forecaster. This phenomenon, which we call algorithm…

This is a very short summary with lots left out—here is the long version: http://startupclass.samaltman.com You should start with an idea, not a company. When it’s just an idea or project, the stakes are lower and you’re more willing to entertain outlandish-sounding but potentially huge ideas. The…