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When Ethical Hacking Can't Compete
Jim Urquhart / ReutersThe cybersecurity expert Chris Rock is an unconventional killer. At this year's Defcon hacking conference—one of the largest conferences of its kind, attracting more than 6,000...
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‘Manned’ Spaceflight Is So Last Century
NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg demonstrates how she washes her hair in zero gravity on the International Space Station, in July 2013. Reuters / NASAIn the summer of 1962, the House Committee on Science...
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A Network of Fragments
Ingrid BurringtonThroughout Donald Barthelme’s short story “See The Moon?” the narrator keeps saying that fragments are the only forms he trusts. It may be ill-advised to borrow mantras from a...
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Why Hollywood Engineers Are Baking Old Star Wars Reels
A visitor inpsects the puppet for "Yoda" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2002. Chip East / ReutersThere are thousands of recordings in the Star Wars audio archive, which contains the sounds recorded...
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Encyclopedias Are Time Capsules
Kai Pfaffenbach / ReutersLong before Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica there was Pliny the Elder: a first-century Roman soldier, a statesman, and a voracious scholar. His assistants read to him...
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Never Not Online
People film with their cameras during a ceremony in Tiananmen Square, December 2015. Damir Sagolj / ReutersWhat does it mean to “go online,” anymore? A huge number of people are there, wherever there...
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The Internet Is for Humans, Not Robots
Dozens of humanoid robots perform a synchronized dance in Tokyo, January 2015. Yuya Shino / ReutersPoor robots. The really good ones just can’t seem to keep up with the growing number of humans and bad...
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The Secrets of an Abandoned Microwave Tower in Kansas
Ingrid BurringtonWe were somewhere in Kansas when we found the second microwave tower. We’d found the ruins of one somewhere else in Kansas earlier during that day. This other one still had its...
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When Infrastructure Doubles as Public Art
Paul Sangha Landscape ArchitectureIn the alternately dour and idealistic world of water infrastructure, there are some pretty clearly delineated Good Guys and Bad Guys. The Bad Guys are everywhere:...
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Driverless Cars Are Like Elevators
A man descends in an elevator at the Lloyds Insurance building in London, in 2010. Andrew Winning / ReutersOne of the challenges in describing the potential of self-driving cars is that they promise to...
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Reader Theories on a Language Mystery
I recently shared with our readers a puzzling discovery I’d made: When tracking the published instances of the term “mass shooting” over time, there’s a huge spike in the 1940s, according to Google’s...
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The Promise and Peril of Universal Internet
Google co-founder Sergey Brin in front of a giant balloon to show "Project Loon" to Indonesian delegates at the Google office in Mountain View, California. Antara Photo Agency / ReutersIn 1812, at...
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The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
Brian Snyder / ReutersComputer scientists and cryptographers occupy some of the ivory tower’s highest floors. Among academics, their work is prestigious and celebrated. To the average observer, much of...
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The Hackers Who Hate Donald Trump
Jorge Lopez / ReutersFresh off a campaign to shutter thousands of Islamic State-affiliated Twitter accounts, Anonymous, the loosely affiliated group of hacker-activists, has turned its attention to a...
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R2-D2, the Original Smartphone
LucasFilmIt has been said that R2-D2, the squat blue-and-white robot from the Star Wars universe, gets his charm by being the perfect amount of robot—only a little anthropomorphized, but clearly more...
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A Surprising New Use for Drones: Obscuring Nudity
Quadcopters hovered back into the news on Monday, as the Federal Aviation Administration announced that most civilian-owned drones would need to be registered with the U.S. government by the middle of...
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Do Computers Need Pressure-Sensing Screens?
A man tries the iPhone 6 at an Apple store in Beijing in November 2015. Kim Kyung Hoon / ReutersThe computer mouse, when it first went mainstream, was awkward to describe but easy to use. “Instead of...
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We Need a New Pronoun for Artificial Intelligence
LucasfilmDeep inside a spaghetti bowl of suburban Maryland streets this weekend, I turned to a trusted guide for directions back to the highway. But this guide couldn’t figure out what direction we...
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How the Internet Changed Advice Columns
The famous advice columnist Ann Landers at home in 1990 Mark Elias / APIn the earliest days of the Bintel Brief, an advice column geared towards Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the...
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Hospitals Aren't the Only Ones Bleeding Stolen Health Records
BUCK Studio / CorbisWhen hackers stole the personal-health data of 10 million people from Excellus, a health-insurance company, it was just the most recent incident in a string of recent cyberattacks...
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