Windows 10 launched nearly three weeks ago, and while millions of people are upgrading there have been a number of privacy concerns around the new OS. Default settings send information to Microsoft, enable bandwidth sharing to distribute updates to other Windows 10 users, and turn on a Wi-Fi…

The flyer gets results, officials say. Credit Franklin County Sheriff When the sheriff in Franklin County, Ky., posted a flier on Facebook asking local drug dealers to snitch on their competition, the response was more than a little incredulous. That is, until a tip sent to a phone number on the…

Apple The other day, my father asked me a question about his laptop. I marveled as he handed it over: a 2008 aluminum MacBook (the bizarre one-off model that lacked a FireWire port ). Even after seven years, this hunk of metal and glass was going strong. Sure, I put in a new battery and replaced the…

Some of the Tenderloin’s longtime residents are learning newfound wealth for some does not mean newfound prosperity — or even livability — for everyone. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Last spring, Carlo Gascon’s organization took a chance on this city’s extraordinary technology…

Jeff Tietz | Harper’s | May 2002 | 35 minutes (8,722 words) This essay by Jeff Tietz first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Harper’s and was later anthologized in The Best American Crime Writing: 2003 Edition. Tietz has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity…

Amazon employees entering the company’s offices in Seattle. It recently became the most valuable retailer in the country. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.…

Because Amazon is mostly men, the men's bathrooms were usually crowded. I worked there for four years, in the midst of Amazon's greatest expansion of headcount. Even though the company had just moved to its new office in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, there was barely enough space for…

When we wrote about the intermediary liability provisions in a reported May 2015 leak of the Intellectual Property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) last month, we hadn't actually seen the text. But thanks to the publication of that leak by Knowledge Ecology International yesterday and…

and other red pills Josh Whiton Aug 7, 2015 photo by Josh Whiton Money was a great invention. With it, we found a way to get people to do things for us, or give things to us, without resorting to abject slavery or direct force. In this way, for thousands of years, money has been helping contribute…

Yesterday the New York Times and ProPublica posted a lengthy investigation based on leaked NSA documents, outlining the extensive surveillance collaboration between AT&T and the U.S. government. This surveillance includes gems such as AT&T’s assistance in tapping the main fiber connection supporting…

Baby elephants are a welcome sight in Zakouma National Park in Chad. Thanks to stepped-up enforcement, the park hasn't lost an elephant to poachers since 2012. Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. Brent Stirton/National…

And nobody could stop them. Chaédria LaBouvier Aug 17, 2015 L ast week I was on my way to visit Medium’s headquarters in San Francisco to discuss a project that I’m working on, mainly focused around police brutality. Funnily enough (or not so), I ended up being over an hour late, because this…

Humans have been all over the Earth. We've conquered the lands, flown through the air and dived to the deepest trenches in the ocean . We've even been to the Moon. But we've never been to the planet's core. We haven't even come close. The central point of the Earth is over 6,000km down, and even the…

When the weather is bad I take a bus to work. I’m forever grateful to the person at the bus stop who informed me that you can text New York’s MTA service to find out exactly where the bus is and when it’s going to arrive. Sure, an app that put the bus on a map would be more rich in information, but…

The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain

A sculpture of Nefertiti at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Credit Photograph by Markus Schreiber / AP Update, November 10th: preliminary infrared scans have, indeed, found signs of a hidden chamber behind the painting on the north wall. More tests are planned. On the north wall of the burial chamber…

On a giga coaster, altitude, rather than speed, has become the defining characteristic. Giga coasters have a drop of 300 to 399 feet, roughly the length of a football field. We tested four of them. This is not a rhetorical question these days . Theme parks have engaged in a dizzying quest for height…

Year: 2015 In the spirit of welcoming the new year, we have a #BreakPointCA gift for you. In this episode of Breakpoint, Paul and Jonathan share their thoughts around debugging, diagnostics and reveal the secret of how they came up with the name "BreakPoint". In case you have any feedback or…

During the July 1 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on back doors, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates claimed that the government doesn’t want the government to have back doors into encrypted communications. Rather, they wanted corporations to retain the back doors to be able to access…

An international team of researchers have discovered a cave that contains inscriptions detailing the crippling effects of climate change on a region. In a study published today in the journal Scientific Reports , a team of researchers from the UK and China describe finding inscriptions on the walls…

Photo: Getty Images The first profile I saw on the dating app Raya was Patrick, 21. He had sandy-brown hair, wide-set blue eyes, and a pet monkey. In the photo, the animal perched on his shoulder, wearing a onesie and stroking his hair. It was cute, in a weird-text-from-your-little-brother’s-friend…

Christopher Meloni in the Netflix original series “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp." Saeed Adyani for Netflix Netflix Inc. said it plans to shut down the last of its data centers by the end of the summer, which will make it one of the first big companies to run all of its information…

Scientific beliefs are destined to supersede and replace primitive religious views, once argued 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte. His scientific positivism birthed today’s scientism : the notion that science has exclusive access to the truth. “Science” is usually equated by proponents…

Lindsey Cool was nearing the end of labor at the St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho, in 2003 when her doctor decided to use internal electronic fetal monitoring. An electrode was attached to the baby's scalp to monitor his heart rate. Everything was fine during contractions; the…

Hard as he tried, Murray Gell-Mann could never make himself into a legend like his rakish colleague and collaborator, Richard Feynman -- even if he was probably the greater physicist Barry Blitt ALONG the far wall of the spacious, newly renovated bookstore at the California Institute of Technology ,…

Recently we wrote about the now-famous hack of a Jeep Cherokee . At Black Hat USA 2015 , a large security conference, researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek finally explained in detail, how exactly that hack happened. At the start of their research Miller and Valasek tried to hack the…

The book is dead, long live the book. Digital technology has certainly had a profound effect on the traditional book publishing and retailing industries, but has it also given the book a new lease of life? At one point it looked as if the rise of e-books at knock-down prices and e-readers like…

Artisan goods marketplace Etsy Inc., which promised to be a beacon for transparency as a public company, recently implemented a strategy that shrouds its offshore tax-cutting arrangements in secrecy. Because of a change in how its Irish subsidiary is registered, Etsy no longer needs to publicly…

PALO ALTO, Calif.—Here in the center of Silicon Valley’s tech boom, one of America’s wealthiest enclaves is wrestling with an uncomfortable dilemma: whether it can afford to lose the city’s only trailer park. A block from multimillion-dollar homes and a few miles from the headquarters of Google Inc.…

Lam Yinbun was only 14 years old when the Imperial Japanese Army defeated British forces defending colonial Hong Kong in 1941. The occupation lasted more than three years, ending with Japan's unconditional surrender on 15 August 1945. Ahead of the 70th anniversary of that day, Mr Lam will join a…

Opinion How California Is Winning the Drought Credit Jon McNaught FOR California, there hasn’t ever been a summer quite like the summer of 2015. The state and its 39 million residents are about to enter the fifth year of a drought. It has been the driest four-year period in California history — and…

Koko the gorilla is best known for a lifelong study to teach her a silent form of communication, American Sign Language. But some of the simple sounds she has learned may change the perception that humans are the only primates with the capacity for speech. In 2010, Marcus Perlman started research…

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, tried to damage rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious, according to two former…

An employee inspects a Volkswagen automobile at a Volkswagen AG showroom in Berlin, Germany. Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg Thousands of cars from a host of manufacturers have spent years at risk of electronic car-hacking, according to expert research…

Have members of the Federal Reserve already engineered a soft landing? And are they even asking that question? The thought came to me while reading Barry Ritholtz's recent piece on policy normalization : Today, the panic is a receding memory. Interest at zero is an emergency setting. Why do we still…