Browsed by
Category: Technology

Homo erectus, not humans, may have invented bone tools at least 800,000 years ago

Homo erectus, not humans, may have invented bone tools at least 800,000 years ago

Science News reports: A type of bone tool generally thought to have been invented by Stone Age humans got its start among hominids that lived hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens evolved, a new study concludes. A set of 52 previously excavated but little-studied animal bones from East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge includes the world’s oldest known barbed bone point, an implement probably crafted by now-extinct Homo erectus at least 800,000 years ago, researchers say. Made from a piece…

Read More Read More

How ‘disruption’ became a way of justifying Silicon Valley’s unconstrained power

How ‘disruption’ became a way of justifying Silicon Valley’s unconstrained power

Adrian Daub writes: There are certain phrases that are central to the sway the tech industry holds over our collective imagination: they do not simply reflect our experience, they frame how we experience it in the first place. They sweep aside certain parts of the status quo, and leave other parts mysteriously untouched. They implicitly cast you as a stick-in-the-mud if you ask how much revolution someone is capable of when that person represents billions in venture capital investment. Among…

Read More Read More

An arms race for space has begun

An arms race for space has begun

Time reports: American intelligence analysts have been watching a pair of Russian satellites, identified as Cosmos 2542 and 2543, for months. Or rather, they have been watching them since they were one satellite, deployed by a Soyuz rocket that took off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Nov. 26, 2019. It was 11 days after that launch that the first satellite split in two, the second somehow “birthed” from the other, and no one in the U.S. military was happy about…

Read More Read More

I’ve seen a future without cars, and it’s amazing

I’ve seen a future without cars, and it’s amazing

Farhad Manjoo writes: As coronavirus lockdowns crept across the globe this winter and spring, an unusual sound fell over the world’s metropolises: the hush of streets that were suddenly, blessedly free of cars. City dwellers reported hearing bird song, wind and the rustling of leaves. (Along with, in New York City, the intermittent screams of sirens). You could smell the absence of cars, too. From New York to Los Angeles to New Delhi, air pollution plummeted, and the soupy, exhaust-choked…

Read More Read More

Art, adornment and sophisticated hunting technologies flourished not only in prehistoric Europe but across the globe

Art, adornment and sophisticated hunting technologies flourished not only in prehistoric Europe but across the globe

Gaia Vince writes: In 1868, workmen near the hamlet of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil in southwestern France opened up a rock shelter and found animal bones, flints and, most intriguingly, human skulls. Work on the road was paused while a geologist, Louis Lartet, was called to excavate the site. What he discovered would transform our understanding of the origins of humanity. Lartet unearthed the partial skeletons of four adults and an infant at the Cro-Magnon rock shelter, as well as perforated shells…

Read More Read More

Apple, Google debut major effort to help people track if they’ve come in contact with coronavirus

Apple, Google debut major effort to help people track if they’ve come in contact with coronavirus

The Washington Post reports: Apple and Google unveiled an ambitious effort Friday to help combat the novel coronavirus, introducing new tools that could soon allow owners of smartphones to know if they have crossed paths with someone infected with the disease. The changes the two companies announced targeting iPhone and Android devices could inject valuable new technological support into contact tracing, a strategy public health officials say is essential to allowing people to return to work and normal life while…

Read More Read More

The internet is invading the night sky

The internet is invading the night sky

Marina Koren writes: Last year, Krzysztof Stanek got a letter from one of his neighbors. The neighbor wanted to build a shed two feet taller than local regulations allowed, and the city required him to notify nearby residents. Neighbors, the notice said, could object to the construction. No one did, and the shed went up. Stanek, an astronomer at Ohio State University, told me this story not because he thinks other people will care about the specific construction codes of…

Read More Read More

Don’t blame shadowy foreign hackers for the chaos in Iowa

Don’t blame shadowy foreign hackers for the chaos in Iowa

Zeynep Tufekci writes: The [Democratic] party paid [the for-profit tech firm] Shadow $60,000 to develop an app that would tally the [Iowa caucus] results, but gave the company only two months to do it. Worried about Russian hacking, the party addressed security in all the wrong ways: It did not open up the app to outside testing or challenge by independent security experts. This method is sometimes dubbed “security through obscurity,” and while there are instances for which it might…

Read More Read More

Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse

Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse

Margaret Sullivan writes: Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Twitter. As it became obvious late Monday night that a technical glitch would dramatically hold up the results of the long-anticipated Iowa caucuses, social media exploded with dark ideas about what had happened. The hashtag “MayorCheat” was trending, a nasty shot at Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg promoted by Mike Cernovich, the rabble-rousing pro-Trump media personality, who tweeted out his conspiracy theory in the early hours Tuesday about connections between the…

Read More Read More

The only election safe for democracy is a low-tech election

The only election safe for democracy is a low-tech election

Kevin Roose writes: After Monday’s Iowa caucus debacle, I’ve decided that Americans should vote by etching our preferred candidate’s name into a stone tablet with a hammer and chisel. Or maybe by dropping pebbles into a series of urns, as the ancient Greeks did. Or possibly just by voting the way we voted for much of the 20th century, on punch-card machines that spit out paper ballots to be hand-counted by election workers, with zero iPhones in sight. Basically, we…

Read More Read More

Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade

Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade

The Washington Post reports: Ten years ago, Google executives rarely spoke to Congress. Amazon employed just two of its own registered lobbyists in Washington. And Facebook had only recently graduated to a real office after running its D.C. operation out of an employee’s living room. Since then, though, these technology companies have evolved into some of the most potent political forces in the nation’s capital, a Washington Post analysis of new federal records reveals, with just seven tech giants accounting…

Read More Read More

Venture capital shaped the past decade. It could destroy the next

Venture capital shaped the past decade. It could destroy the next

Nathan Heller writes: For a certain sort of nineteenth-century person—the sort with high risk tolerance and little revulsion to brutality—a natural career lay in whaling. The odds of success here were, by almost every measure, poor. An expedition first needed to find whales in the vastness of the oceans. If it succeeded, it had to approach the whales in silence, with a small craft; strike with a harpoon; stay afloat, intact, engaged, and oriented as the poor creatures thrashed about,…

Read More Read More

The nightmare economy created by Silicon Valley’s overlords

The nightmare economy created by Silicon Valley’s overlords

Lia Russell writes: Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent “service fee” that replaced the previous default tip of 10 percent. The change had no impact on customers, who could be forgiven for assuming that the new fee would still go to the workers who shopped for their groceries and delivered them to…

Read More Read More

Which tech companies are really doing the most harm?

Which tech companies are really doing the most harm?

Jonathan L. Fischer writes: Maybe it was fake news, Russian trolls, and Cambridge Analytica. Or Travis Kalanick’s conniption in an Uber. Or the unmasking of Theranos. Or all those Twitter Nazis, and racist Google results, and conspiracy theories on YouTube. Though activists, academics, reporters, and regulators had sent up warning flares for years, it wasn’t until quite recently that the era of enchantment with Silicon Valley ended. The list of scandals—over user privacy and security, over corporate surveillance and data…

Read More Read More

The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The secretive company that might end privacy as we know it

The New York Times reports: Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and…

Read More Read More

With a new weapon in Trump’s hands, the Iran crisis risks going nuclear

With a new weapon in Trump’s hands, the Iran crisis risks going nuclear

William Arkin writes: Ten days before Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2016, the United States nuked Iran. The occasion: a nuclear war exercise held every year in late October. In the war game, after Iran sank an American aircraft carrier and employed chemical weapons against a Marine Corps force, the Middle East commander requested a nuclear strike, and a pair of B-2 stealth bombers, each loaded with a single nuclear bomb, stood by while the president deliberated. “Testing…

Read More Read More