After more than a year of stalemate, Congress has used an unconventional procedural measure to bring a controversial cybersurveillance bill to the floor. Late last night, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) announced a 2,000-page omnibus budget bill , a last-minute compromise necessary to prevent…

George Hotz is taking on Google and Tesla by himself. A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in San Francisco to check out a project he’s been working on. He says it’s a self-driving car that he had built in about a month. The claim seems absurd.…

Connect your smartphone by visiting g.co/lightsaber/7gbb0 on your desktop browser GOTO CALIBRATION Calibrate To activate your lightsaber you must first calibrate your phone. Calibration Complete You’re ready to begin your escape. To enhance your experience, turn up the sound on your phone. GOTO…

What if, instead of waiting for sunlight to reach solar panels on the ground, balloons were used to capture solar energy up in the air, where space is not restricted, where yields would be multiplied and clouds would never interrupt production? This idea, which is not as far-fetched as it seems, is…

Short Overview:3 ISIS Twitter accounts ‘trace back to UK govt computers,’ claim hackers According to a group of four young computer experts who call themselves VandaSec, a number of Islamic State supporters’ social media accounts are being run from internet addresses linked to the Department of Work…

For the past half-dozen months, I've owned and operated a tiny quadcopter that I built from parts sourced online. It's only 110 millimeters wide, weighs about one pound, has a very small camera, and is more likely to be blown into a tree by a mild breeze than injure anyone. And as of next week, I…

Just after midnight on March 22, 2000, police crawled through the transom of the studio belonging to a 48-year-old Conceptual artist in Brooklyn. The police discovered the artist, Mark Lombardi, neatly dressed in a dark-blue shirt and matching pants and socks, hanging from a noose slung over one of…

EFF Urges Appeals Court to Find Secret Subpoena Power Unconstitutional New York - The Electronic Frontier Foundation, joined by several civil liberties organizations and online service providers, filed a friend-of-the-court brief yesterday in the case of Doe v. Gonzales arguing that National…

The World Bank provided some relief from bad news this week with some fresh, positive data: For the first time ever, it estimates that the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty will fall below 10 percent. Using an updated international poverty line of USD $1.90 a day, the Bank…

Podcasting is getting huge. Here's why.

From two angles so far, we’ve seen how Americans spend their days, but the views are wideout and limited in what you can see. I can tell you that about 40 percent of people age 25 to 34 are working on an average day at three in the afternoon. I can tell you similar numbers for housework, leisure,…

The story of the “Cipher Dispatches” is told by Richard John in his book, Network Nation : Inventing American Telecommunications . Read the original “Cipher Dispatches” story in the New York Tribune . The Wall Street Journal covered Hillary Clinton’s speech in which she urged Silicon Valley to do…

John Searle is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His Talk at Google is focused on the philosophy of mind and the potential for consciousness in artificial intelligence. This Talk was hosted for Google's Singularity Network. John is widely noted for his…

Enlarge UK police said they have arrested a 21-year-old man in connection to the November breach of electronic toymaker VTech , a hack that exposed personal data of almost 12 million people, including gigabytes worth of headshot photos and chat logs for millions of kids and parents . The unnamed man…

An engraving from Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of Pirates . (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons ) For twenty-odd years during the 17 th century, on the coast of Madagascar, there was a democratic colony comprised of surprisingly noble pirates who lived together in peace and harmony.…

MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht guided the bill through Parliament | Archive The agreement is the biggest overhaul of European privacy laws in two decades. Marking the biggest changes to privacy laws in the European Union in two decades, negotiators agreed on data protection rules Tuesday night that will…

BCR Incubator Jessica Ekomane BCR Incubator AMET THIS IS GOODBYE BCR Incubator NAEE ROBERTS THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU LIVE FROM COURREGES BCR & ABLETON SUMMER SCHOOL BEGINNERS SEPTEMBER BCR & ABLETON SUMMER SCHOOL BCR RETROGADE BCR & ABLETON SUMMER SCHOOL- TRIX FOR VOX BCR & ABLETON SUMMER SCHOOL…

341 SHARES Facebook Reddit While NASA has a long history of sending probes and rovers into space, advancements in robotics has made deployment of human-like robots an increasingly attractive prospect. But it turns out that controlling such humanoid robots remotely is challenging. NASA and Sony have…

On a sunny morning in March, Marcus Westbury brandished his iPad as if it were a window into another world. The screen depicted the street we were standing on in downtown Newcastle, Australia, circa 2008. Decades of suburban flight, a devastating 1989 earthquake , and the implosion of the city’s…

A D-Wave 2X quantum computer in the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters ‘T he world is not only queerer than we suppose,” said JBS Haldane . “It is queerer than we can suppose.” Haldane was a biologist…

The future of unmanned combat and America's aircraft carriers remains locked in a semi-clandestine procurement tug of war under the the UCLASS (Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance & Strike) program. Some think the Navy's first fixed-wing combat drone should be more for surveillance,…

Photo: Everett Collection; Photo Illustration: Jaclyn Kessel With the imminent release of the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens , many theatergoers are re-watching the original movies to reacquaint themselves with those stories from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. This time, however,…

In 2006, the Bethesda Games Studios team that brought fantasy RPG The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion to life comprised over 300 people. In 2013, in an interview prior to the launch of Watch_Dogs, Ubisoft managing director Pauline Jacquey said that a typical open world action game requires between 400 and…

Irradi a ted The hidden legacy of 70 years of atomic weaponry: At least 33,480 Americans dead Will the nation’s new nuclear age yield more unwanted fallout? Loading the player...

About 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, the little town of Boulder City, Nevada has made a name for itself as the home of Nevada Solar One , a giant solar thermal energy power plant that produces enough power to take 20,000 cars off the roads a year. But now, Boulder City is aiming to stake a new…

Egor Homakov Dec 1, 2015 I get this question way too often. My answer isn’t going to be helpful for anyone: it was a black swan, but here is my story anyway. I was 18 years old dude who just moved to St Petersburg to work full-time as Software Engineer. I arrived from a small Russian town Saransk ,…

sailko Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects even if you own them. That's the result of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which extends the copyright of artistic objects like designer chairs from 25…

ON A trolley in a government clinic in rural Ethiopia lies Debalke Jemberu. As a medic and a nurse winkle the sperm-carrying tubes out of his testicles, he explains why he decided to have a vasectomy. He is a farmer, growing wheat, sorghum and a local staple grain called teff. But his plot is barely…

While there were many casualties of the 2008-9 financial crisis, some of the more benign behaviors from the “good old days” have returned as healthy as ever. This year, for example, publicly traded companies are on track for their highest level of stock repurchases by dollar volume since 2007. 1 In…

Courtesy of Comedy Central The Hollywood Reporter is celebrating the fifth anniversary of its revamp. To mark the occasion, I was asked to come up with the most influential court decision in the past five years. How to do this? It's akin to picking the MVP of a given baseball season. Should I…

Onlinecensorship.org Tracks Content Takedowns by Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Sites Share It Share on Facebook Copy link San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Visualizing Impact launched Onlinecensorship.org today, a new platform to document the who, what, and why…

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is considering a rule change that would make the educational resources the Department funds a lot more accessible to educators and students—not just in the U.S., but around the world. We hope to see it adopted, and that it sets the standard for similar policies…

Work & Family When a Promotion Means Losing Friends at Work Many new managers discover a downside to moving up: Colleagues who used to be their friends aren’t anymore. Here’s how to navigate the changing social dynamic at work. On-Demand Grandkids and Robot Pals to Keep Senior Loneliness at Bay…

For immediate release: December 8, 2015 Boston, MA – Diacetyl, a flavoring chemical linked to cases of severe respiratory disease, was found in more than 75% of flavored electronic cigarettes and refill liquids tested by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Two other potentially…

With the second week of climate talks in a relatively steady holding pattern, the most interesting news out of Paris today had nothing to do with the negotiations themselves. Greenpeace used the platform of COP21 to release results of an undercover investigation that revealed just how easy it is to…

Could Finland become the first country in the world to introduce a universal basic income? It’s quite possible: The Finnish government likes the concept, and it’s putting serious resources behind a national experiment. Starting in 2017, up to 100,000 Finns could get up to 1,000 euros a month, in…

A customer checked out weapons at Pony Express Firearms in Parker, Colo., on Monday. Many Americans have been stocking up. Credit Rick Wilking/Reuters Two television entrepreneurs in California think they have just what America needs: a 24-hour shopping channel for guns. Using the tag line “Live…