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Category: Technology

How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

Benjamin Wallace writes: The flood of new Miamians who have arrived, full or part time, during the pandemic includes tech investors (Peter Thiel, David Sacks), cryptocurrency bulls (Anthony Pompliano, Ari Paul), new-media tycoons (Bryan Goldberg, Dave Portnoy), start-up founders (Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Steven Galanis), and many more who aren’t yet billionaires but think the Magic City will give them their best shot. They’re breaking sales records for dock-accessed mansions by day and packing the new branches of Carbone and Red…

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Peter Thiel’s ideology dominates Silicon Valley

Peter Thiel’s ideology dominates Silicon Valley

Max Chafkin writes: Other Silicon Valley personas may be better known to the general public, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and even a few who don’t regularly launch rockets into space. But [Peter] Thiel is the Valley’s true idol — the single person whom tech’s young aspirants and millennial moguls most seek to flatter and to emulate, the cult leader of the cult of disruption. The blitzscaling strategy he and his employees pioneered at PayPal created the growth playbook for…

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A new company with a wild mission: Bring back the woolly mammoth

A new company with a wild mission: Bring back the woolly mammoth

Carl Zimmer reports: A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth. The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct. “This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for eight years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the…

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Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Will Douglas Heaven writes: When covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, hospitals were plunged into a health crisis that was still badly understood. “Doctors really didn’t have a clue how to manage these patients,” says Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studies predictive tools. But there was data coming out of China, which had a four-month head start in the race to beat the pandemic. If machine-learning algorithms could be trained on that data to…

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‘I will not be silenced’: Women targeted in hack-and-leak attacks speak out about spyware

‘I will not be silenced’: Women targeted in hack-and-leak attacks speak out about spyware

NBC News reports: Ghada Oueiss, a Lebanese broadcast journalist at Al-Jazeera, was eating dinner at home with her husband last June when she received a message from a colleague telling her to check Twitter. Oueiss opened up the account and was horrified: A private photo taken when she was wearing a bikini in a jacuzzi was being circulated by a network of accounts, accompanied by false claims that the photos were taken at her boss’s house. Over the next few…

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The spyware threat to journalists

The spyware threat to journalists

Steve Coll writes: Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative reporter from Azerbaijan, is an icon among the subtribe of journalists who work to expose cross-border financial corruption. She has broken big stories about money laundering and dodgy banking, despite being targeted by President Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian regime. Operatives planted cameras in her home in Baku and, in 2012, released a video of her having sex with her boyfriend. In 2014, she was arrested on trumped-up charges that included tax evasion; a court…

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Space tourism is a waste

Space tourism is a waste

Gizmodo reports: Bezos’ New Shepard rocket, made by his company Blue Origin, runs on a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Though neither of those emit carbon when they’re burned, producing liquid hydrogen usually does. Compressing and liquifying the oxygen for the fuel is also an energy-intensive process that, if not done using renewables, results in carbon pollution. Refining and burning these fuels isn’t just the equivalent of a tank of gas for your car. They’re not even necessarily…

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Saudis behind NSO spyware attack on Jamal Khashoggi’s family, leak suggests

Saudis behind NSO spyware attack on Jamal Khashoggi’s family, leak suggests

The Guardian reports: In the wake of the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the NSO Group emphatically denied that its government clients had used its hacking malware to target the journalist or his family. “I can tell you very clear. We had nothing to do with this horrible murder,” Shalev Hulio, the chief executive of the Israeli surveillance firm, told the US TV news programme 60 Minutes in March 2019. It was six months after Khashoggi, a Washington…

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Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

Paul Lewis writes: Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate. Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time. Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group,…

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Leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon

Leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon

The Guardian reports: Human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak. The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists. Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android…

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Massive ransomware attack may impact thousands of victims

Massive ransomware attack may impact thousands of victims

Bloomberg reports: Just weeks after President Joe Biden implored Vladimir Putin to curb cyber crime, a notorious, Russia-linked ransomware gang has been accused of pulling off an audacious attack on the global software supply chain. REvil, the group blamed for the May 30 ransomware attack of meatpacking giant JBS SA, is believed to be behind hacks on at least 20 managed-service providers, which provide IT services to small- and medium-sized businesses. More than 1,000 businesses have already been impacted, a…

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Big Tech’s threat to democracy

Big Tech’s threat to democracy

Matthew B Crawford writes: The convenience of the smart home may be worth the price; that’s for each of us to decide. But to do so with open eyes, one has to understand what the price is. After all, you don’t pay a monthly fee for Alexa, or Google Home. The cost, then, is a subtle one: a slight psychological adjustment in which we are tipped a bit further into passivity and dependence. The Sleep Number Bed is typical of…

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Before condo collapse, rising seas have long pressured Miami coastal properties

Before condo collapse, rising seas have long pressured Miami coastal properties

The Washington Post reports: The 12-story condo tower that crashed down early Thursday near Miami Beach was built on reclaimed wetlands and is perched on a barrier island facing an ocean that has risen about a foot in the past century due to climate change. Underneath its foundation, as with Miami Beach, is sand and organic fill —over a plateau of porous limestone — brought in from the bay after the mangroves were deforested. The fill sinks naturally and the…

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Government report can’t explain UFOs, but offers no evidence of aliens

Government report can’t explain UFOs, but offers no evidence of aliens

Politico reports: A new intelligence report sent to Congress on Friday concludes that virtually all of the 144 sightings of unidentified flying objects documented by the military since 2004 are of unknown origin, in an extremely rare public accounting of the U.S. government’s data on UFOs that is likely to fuel further speculation about phenomena the intelligence community has long struggled to understand. The report — the government’s first unclassified assessment in half a century — does not offer any…

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Same or different? The question flummoxes neural networks

Same or different? The question flummoxes neural networks

John Pavlus writes: The first episode of Sesame Street in 1969 included a segment called “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.” Viewers were asked to consider a poster that displayed three 2s and one W, and to decide — while singing along to the game’s eponymous jingle — which symbol didn’t belong. Dozens of episodes of Sesame Street repeated the game, comparing everything from abstract patterns to plates of vegetables. Kids never had to relearn the rules….

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The world relies on one chip maker in Taiwan, leaving everyone vulnerable

The world relies on one chip maker in Taiwan, leaving everyone vulnerable

The Wall Street Journal reports: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s chips are everywhere, though most consumers don’t know it. The company makes almost all of the world’s most sophisticated chips, and many of the simpler ones, too. They’re in billions of products with built-in electronics, including iPhones, personal computers and cars—all without any obvious sign they came from TSMC, which does the manufacturing for better-known companies that design them, like Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. TSMC has emerged over the past…

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