Jordan Kretchmer remembers what Travis Kalanick was like before Uber was Uber. Kretchmer was a 25-year-old college dropout with a lot of ideas, and Kalanick had even more. He was in his early thirties, an engineer who talked like a sales guy, smart as hell and high on life. He wore a cowboy hat and…

Former President George W. Bush isn't typically celebrated for his public speaking skills, but he made an important and insightful point the other day while delivering the commencement address at Southern Methodist University. He said: To those of you who are graduating this afternoon with high…

We don’t have to keep buying new gadgets. In fact, we should insist on the right to keep old ones running. Who hasn’t experienced a situation like this? Halfway through a classic Jack Lemmon DVD, my colleague Shira’s 40-inch TV conked out. Nothing showed up on the screen when she pressed the power…

Microsoft is returning to court to continue its fight against the US government's demand that it hand over emails stored at an Irish data centre. The messages involved are alleged to contain details of narcotics sales. In 2014, a court ruled in favour of the government's claim that because it had…

A United Airlines plane model looms over an employee.Photograph: Liu Jin/EPA United Airlines chief executive officer Jeff Smisek stepped down “effective immediately” on Tuesday with the airline citing an ongoing federal corruption investigation into the company. The airline is under investigation…

High in the mountains of Yellowstone National Park archaeologists noticed a tree stump emerging from a melting ice patch. They knew it was from another age, and a sign that they might also find ancient artifacts. Thousands of years ago when the earth’s climate cooled, ice encased trees and other…

I t was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field in the eastern Pacific. Rutgers microbiologist Costantino Vetriani, seated a few feet away from me in the dark control…

Jump to: Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 4Page 5 Kat Bailey By Editor in Chief A little more than fifteen years ago, Blizzard North set to work on what would become one of the most popular and enduring action RPGs ever - Diablo II. Finally stable after the success of Diablo, Blizzard North looked to create…

The Myth of Quality Time Credit Ben Wiseman EVERY summer for many years now, my family has kept to our ritual. All 20 of us — my siblings, my dad, our better halves, my nieces and nephews — find a beach house big enough to fit the whole unruly clan. We journey to it from our different states and…

For all the attention Apple has received this year for its new smartwatch and music service, or rumors about an updated TV device and building a car, the company is increasingly dependent on the iPhone. Since the handset was introduced in 2007, the company has never collected as large a percentage…

Image: Queensland University of Technology Advertisement Editor’s Picks World's Largest Swarm of Miniature Robot Submarines This Robot Submarine Inspects the Worst Pools Ever These Robots Will Stop the Jellyfish Invasion You might think that the biggest threat to the world’s coral reefs is humanity.…

Radical Self-Expression The weeklong Burning Man festival takes place once a year over Labor Day weekend in a remote alkali flat in northwestern Nevada. Two hours north of Reno, the inhospitable Black Rock Desert seems a poor place to create a temporary sixty-thousand-person city — and yet that’s…

“There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary in 1941. Indeed, finding a sense of purpose and doing what makes the heart sing is one of the greatest human aspirations — and yet too many people remain caught in the hamster wheel of unfulfilling work. In…

The Internet of Way Too Many Things At a design conference recently, I was introduced to Leeo , a new product that I initially understood to be a reboot of something really in need of a redesign: the smoke detector. As the designer explained his process, I quickly came to understand that Leeo was…

A quarter of a century ago, checking your email meant logging onto a mainframe and using a command-line email program like elm or pine . Today, many security experts continue to use and recommend mutt , elm's bastard love child. Christopher Soghoian , principal technologist at the ACLU's Speech,…

If you’ve ever needed to know how another piece of code works, or have been at the mercy of someone else’s bugs, you can always look at the source code… unless you don’t have it. In this talk, Conrad covers many concepts & tools that can used to reverse-engineer existing apps, as well as debug other…

Since late last autumn , Mira Mehta and Shane Kiernan have lived in converted chicken coops on a farm in Nigeria’s Nasarawa State—a two-hour drive, when roads are passable, northeast of Abuja, the capital of Africa’s most populous country. On December 23, they started transplanting tomato seedlings…

Save this picture! Agrasen ki Baoli, Delhi. Image © Victoria S. Lautman It’s hard to imagine an entire category of architecture slipping off history’s grid, and yet that seems to be the case with India’s incomparable stepwells. Never heard of ‘em? Don’t fret, you’re not alone: millions of tourists –…

In 2010, the English pop star M.I.A was riding high. Her first two albums were critically lauded for their experimentation and provocative lyrics. The second of those albums performed surprisingly well commercially, selling well over 500,000 records in the US, and spawning the irresistible anthem “…

A software vulnerability has been discovered in the web-based version of the popular WhatsApp messaging app for smartphones, which could allow hackers to trick users into downloading malware on their PCs. Last month, WhatsApp made its web client, known as WhatsApp Web, available to iPhone users for…

Companies like Apple say they are protecting their customers’ information by resisting government demands for access to text messages. A standoff has grown between the sides as the companies have embraced tougher encryption. WASHINGTON — In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice…

The Hughes Glomar Explorer was more than just a giant ship — it was a giant secret, possibly the biggest and strangest covert operation the CIA pulled off during the Cold War. But now, 40 years after its original mission, it’s finally headed to the scrapyard. The ship, now called GSF Explorer , had…

odd Wilson didn’t know these guys. But he didn’t usually handle the setups for the drug deals; it was an associate who typically made the connections — someone who had dated an Italian girl with an older sister who was tapped into Boston’s druggy Euro scene. Wilson and his partner, Larry Jenkins,…

Text: Osman Kibar January 2014. It was two o'clock in the morning. Federico Abad was sitting in his bed and chatting with a friend when the idea hit him. – I wanted to see a movie, but couldn't. What could I do? I just wanted to solve a problem, he says. The 29-year old designer wears a Disney…

The story of Walt Disney, for all its wholesome charm, would never earn a G rating. Like many of the brilliant cartoonist’s creations, it is a tale inextricably tied to death and, in Disney’s case, one that starts with a stunning act of animal cruelty — and we don’t mean the slaughter of Bambi’s…

Are you a morning person or a night person? Are you already buzzing at 6:00 a.m., or do you hit your energy peak later in the day or even well after midnight? A new finding shows the reason for this may go far beyond personal preference, and in fact, may be linked to genetics. Researchers from the…

I once saw a high school teacher lead a simple, powerful exercise to teach his class about privilege and social mobility. He started by giving each student a scrap piece of paper and asked them to crumple it up. Nathan W. Pyle / Via buzzfeed.com Then he moved the recycling bin to the front of the…

Inventor Nikola Tesla has certainly become one of the internet's darlings over the years. Part of the reason for that is because he managed to do a lot with his life. With that in mind, let's take a look at what was behind the brain that helped make Tesla so productive. Nikola Tesla is most famously…

Nuance is revered in higher education. That’s especially true in sociology, where scholars spend their lives digging into the fine grain of human social behavior, often finding even finer grain underneath. Which is why it came as such a surprise — and perhaps a relief — when Kieran Healy, an…

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Sep 01, 2015 I guess Monkey Island turns 25 this month. It's hard to tell. Unlike today, you didn't push a button and unleash your game to billions of people. It was a slow process of sending "gold master" floppies off to manufacturing, which was often overseas, then waiting for them to be shipped…

During Positive Hack Days V , I made a fast track presentation about eCryptfs and password cracking. The idea came to me after using one feature of Ubuntu which consists in encrypting the home folder directory. This option can be selected during installation or activated later. If you select this…

umair haque Jun 8, 2015 Tech isn’t really making a “sharing” economy. So what is it making? Quick — what does the stuff below have in common? A chat app bought for one fifth of the US educational budget . An Uber for dog-walkers . An app to have your trash taken out for you . On-demand butlers .…

A two-bedroom condo in Luma, a building under construction in First Hill, will be priced between $700,000 and $1,000,000 . That's what happens when you live in a city with a thriving premier company like Amazon. Charles Mudede Few discussions are as uninteresting and useless as those concerning…