In early December 2016, Adam was doing what he’s always doing, somewhere between hobby and profession: looking for things that are on the internet that shouldn’t be. That week, he came across a server inside New York University’s famed Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing, headed by…

Juicero tickled social media’s insatiable schadenfreude for rich people getting swindled – but it shed light on a bigger problem.Photograph: Company handout I f you’ve used the internet at any point in the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard of Juicero. Juicero is a San Francisco-based company…

Is therapy the key to curbing crime? (Photo: Keith Allison ) How much crime takes place simply because the criminal makes an impulsive, very bad decision? One employee at a juvenile detention center in Illinois estimates the overwhelming percentage of crime takes place because of an impulse versus…

Last week, a key event occurred in the history of personal computing. It marks the beginning of the death of the operating system that we recognize today as Microsoft Windows. This euthanizing of Windows has been planned for at least five years, and Microsoft knows that it is necessary for the…

Hedge fund trading may be the highest paying job in the world, so to learn more, we spoke with a former manager at one of the world’s leading hedge funds. They gave us the following information, which allowed us to make a rough estimate of the typical earnings of hedge fund traders. We also ran this…

Our previous installment described the rise of automatic telephone switches, and of the complex relay circuits to control them. Now we shall see how scientists and engineers developed such relay circuits into the first, lost, generation of digital computers. The Relay at Zenith Recall to mind the…

Justin Fantl Late last summer , Dawn Paquin started keeping her money on a prepaid debit card from Walmart instead of in a traditional checking account. The wages from her factory job—she works from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., inspecting blades on industrial bread-slicing machines—now go directly onto the…

Long-term side-effects of taking antidepressants are sometimes ignored or misunderstood.Illustration: Noma Bar S arah never planned to take antidepressants for 14 years. Three years after she began taking them, when she was 21, she went to her GP and asked to stop: 20mg of Seroxat a day had helped…

When Butterworth was captured, he admitted to authorities that he had served under the notorious Captain William Kidd, arriving with him in Boston before making his way to New Jersey. This would seem quite damning. Governor Andrew Hamilton and his entourage rushed to Monmouth County Court to quickly…

Last year, I went to Nigeria with Mark Zuckerberg. One of the first stops on the trip was a program that taught kids how to code. When Zuckerberg entered the room, many of the young students had a hard time pulling themselves away from their projects, even to gawk at one of the world’s richest men.…

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These…

Smuggle in food, smuggle out video Stephanie Buck May 1, 2017 An amateur video smuggled from North Korea to China on June 10, 1997 shows a mother and child in a detention camp set up for the victims of starvation. (AP Photo/APTV) J apanese journalist Ishimaru Jiro paid his last official visit to…

Science Fiction Interfaces A project by nnkd Archive RSS Interface Design for Lone Echo Ui Art Lead: Davison Carvalho, Art Direction: Nathan Phail-Liff, Ui Concept Art: Ash Thorp, Mike Sekowski, Bruno William, UI / UX design: Shaheed Khan Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 Synthesizer modules via…

The short version: I'm loading over 1 billion breached accounts into HIBP. These are from 2 different "combo lists", collections of email addresses and passwords from all sorts of different locations. I've verified their accuracy (including my own record in one of them) and many hundreds of millions…

(Image: file photo) The UK government is planning to push greater surveillance powers that would force internet providers to monitor communications in near-realtime and install backdoor equipment to break encryption, according to a leaked document. A draft of the proposed new surveillance powers ,…

Sunset over the pyramids of Meroë. All Photos: Christopher Michel In 2011, photographer Christopher Michel chanced upon an online course about ancient Egypt and signed up. What was intended to be a diversion led, some six years later, to a voyage of 8,509 miles, to the orange deserts of Sudan.…

Courtesy: Fight for the Future Last month, Congress voted to repeal FCC rules that would prevent internet service providers from selling your personal web browsing and app usage data. It was a decision that’s unpopular across the country , regardless of party affiliation. If the politicians that…

O nce you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory about the quantum origins of consciousness. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and…

Abstract Rapid advancements in human neuroscience and neurotechnology open unprecedented possibilities for accessing, collecting, sharing and manipulating information from the human brain. Such applications raise important challenges to human rights principles that need to be addressed to prevent…

A 17th-century map of the moon. Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-95176 When Dr. John Wilkins looked out into the night sky in 1640, he was sure that in his lifetime humans could find a way to sail among the stars—and he knew how they would get there. Over three centuries before spaceflight became a…

Enlarge / 2FA via SMS happens worldwide, all. Raimond Spekking A known security hole in the networking protocol used by cellphone providers around the world played a key role in a recent string of attacks that drained bank customer accounts, according to a report published Wednesday. The…

Answering questions at a Senate oversight committee hearing this morning, FBI Director James Comey has hinted at growing consensus between technology companies and intelligence agencies over the controversial issue of how to access encrypted data. He also supported what appears to be a fresh push by…

A team of researchers from the Brunswick Technical University in Germany has discovered an alarming number of Android applications that employ ultrasonic tracking beacons to track users and their nearby environment. Their research paper focused on the technology of ultrasound cross-device tracking…

In the background of Colorado Springs, Pike’s Peak dominates the sky. But just to that mountain’s southeast looms another geological ripple. Cheyenne Mountain—a rounded, rocky thing that rises 9,565 feet above sea level—looks wild and quiet. But deep inside the mountain, a crew of humans toils in…

Final Fantasy V concept art by Yoshitaka Amano One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V . There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States. To…

Andy’s* first fake ID arrived from China a few weeks into his freshman year of college. He and a friend, both 18, decided they had better get IDs to buy beer, so they placed an order with IDGod, the biggest online fake ID vendor in the world . IDGod is both the name of the vendor and a real person,…

I t was night, stormy, and the oil rig Transocean Winner was somewhere in the North Atlantic on 7 August 2016 when her tow-line broke. No crew members were on board. The rig was being dragged by a tugboat called Forward, the tethered vessels charting a course out of Norway that was meant to take…

The future of hunting and fishing is under attack. States are trying to wrench control of public lands from the federal government in order to drill, mine, sell off, and—ultimately—steal our national sporting heritage. Here’s why public lands must remain in public hands Kicked Out Why shouldn’t…

If you’re looking for the middle of nowhere, the Bjaeldskovdal bog is a good place to start. It lies six miles outside the small town of Silkeborg in the middle of Denmark’s flat, sparse Jutland peninsula. The bog itself is little more than a spongy carpet of moss, with a few sad trees poking out.…

There are plenty of privacy-invading marketing ploys to worry about in life. Some examples are in your face, some are more subtle. And a relatively new kind manages to be outright invisible. In the most inconspicuous hustle of all, apps have increasingly incorporated ultrasonic tones to track…

In 2016, the National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records about Americans’ phone calls, despite Congress passing a law the previous year — the USA Freedom Act — intended to curb bulk surveillance. These records are comprised of metadata about calls (which includes time, duration,…

The plasma in the center of this fusion reactor is so hot it doesn't emit light; it's only the cooler plasma located at the walls that can be seen. Hints of magnetic interplay between the hot and cold plasmas can be seen. National Fusion Research Institute, Korea Let's pretend, for a moment, that…

Enlarge Gammew Last week, Ars introduced readers to Hajime, the vigilante botnet that infects IoT devices before blackhats can hijack them . A technical analysis published Wednesday reveals for the first time just how much technical acumen went into designing and building the renegade network, which…

Steve Myers / The Lens The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office is sending out notices like this that threaten jail time if people don’t come in for questioning. But they’re not legal documents because they haven’t been authorized by a judge . Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a…

Enlarge / CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Facebook's 2016 "F8" conference. Facebook Facebook's secretive advertising practices became a little more public on Monday thanks to a leak out of the company's Australian office. This 23-page document discovered by The Australian (paywall), details in…

When Taj Manku's son was around 11, he asked his father how cellphones worked. The boy knew there were towers that communicated with the phone, but nothing in the air suggested a connection was being made. "I said, 'Well, it's sort of a light, but you just can't see it,'" Manku recalls. If you could…

Medical researchers have been able to create certain kinds of living cells with 3D printers for more than a decade. Now a few companies are getting closer to mass production of higher-order tissues (bone, cartilage, organs) and other individually tailored items, including implants. This kind of…

My mate Lars Klint shared this tweet the other day: Your password is not unique. pic.twitter.com/ga4GwxtzrQ — Lars Klint (@larsklint) April 16, 2017 Naturally, I passed it on because let's face it, that's some crazy shit going on right there. To which the Twitters responded with equal parts abject…

A British inventor, who built an Iron Man-style flight suit, has flown it at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. Richard Browning's short flight took place outside the Vancouver Convention Centre in front of a large crowd. Since he posted the video of his maiden…

The movie nearly got an R rating for male nudity 20 years ago before becoming an improbable franchise. Now all the players — Elizabeth Hurley, Robert Wagner, Michael De Luca, Seth Green and others — open up about awful test screenings, shooting at Scientology headquarters and luring Carrie Fisher.…