One of the most shocking parts of the recently discovered spying network Equation Group is its mysterious module designed to reprogram or reflash a computer hard drive's firmware with malicious code. The Kaspersky researchers who uncovered this said its ability to subvert hard drive firmware—the…

Recently I visited Whisk, a Manhattan store that sells kitchen goods, and next to the cash register was a strange, newfangled device: a 3-D printer. The store bought the device—which creates objects by carefully and slowly extruding layers of hot plastic—to print cookie cutters. Any shape you can…

If we want lions and tigers to survive, it might be time to start vaccinating them. At least, that's the latest thinking of some of the world's leading wildlife vets, who are confronting one of the most devastating bouts of canine distemper virusever diagnosed. "This is a high impact disease with…

Researchers have increased the size of mouse brains by giving the rodents a piece of human DNA that controls gene activity. The work provides some of the strongest genetic evidence yet for how the human intellect surpassed those of all other apes. "[The DNA] could easily be a huge component in how…

Um… So I think it's officially my next film. #alien A photo posted by Brownsnout (@neillblomkamp) on Feb 18, 2015 at 3:55pm PST Alien is coming back! And we’re not talking Prometheus 2 ! (Whew!) Writer/director Neill Blomkamp announced via his Instagram yesterday that he will take on the 30-year-old…

Twelve miles in on the rutted dirt road we pull over in a dry wash and get out of our vehicles. We are on the western edge of the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, not far from the sandstone rim where the Grand Canyon plunges 3,000 feet to the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers. The…

J ohn Ruskin called it the pathetic fallacy: to see rainstorms as passionate, drizzles as sad, and melting streams as innocent. After all, the intuition went, nature has no human passions. Imagine Ruskin’s surprise, then, were he to learn that the mathematics of perception, knowledge, and experience…

Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas Annotated pages from David Foster Wallace’s copy of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Imagine you are asked what single alteration in people’s behavior might best improve the lot of mankind. How foolish would you have to be to reply: have them…

The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States' excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will…

The animals in the ocean have been getting bigger, on average, since the Cambrian period - and not by chance. That is the finding of a huge new survey of marine life past and present, published in the journal Science . It describes a pattern of increasing body size that cannot be explained by random…

Thirty years have passed since a pair of physicists, working together on a stormy summer night in Aspen, Colo., realized that string theory might have what it takes to be the “theory of everything.” “We must be getting pretty close,” Michael Green recalls telling John Schwarz as the thunder raged…

Karl and Santa Reichert, visiting from Beijing, with Eri, the daughter of their Tokyo hosts, Takashi Sabetto and Li Hsuan Yang. Credit Yoichi Nagano for The New York Times L et me introduce you to Yoppy. Yoppy is young and friendly and lives in a small apartment in the Shinagawa neighborhood of…

The mere utterance of Vanport was known to send shivers down the spines of "well-bred" Portlanders. Not because of any ghost story, or any calamitous disaster—that would come later—but because of raw, unabashed racism. Built in 110 days in 1942, Vanport was always meant to be a temporary housing…

A MERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National…

The story of the rise (and fall) and rise of Punit Renjen—who was named Deloitte Global’s CEO in 2015 —begins in the heartland of Haryana. Still a teenager when the country was divided in 1947, Renjen’s father was forced to forgo engineering school in the UK and eventually moved to Rohtak. In this…

Published March 17, 2017 Passcode signs off The Monitor’s cybersecurity and privacy project ends March 31. As the Monitor winds down its cybersecurity and privacy project, Passcode founders give special thanks to readers, writers, contributors, and sponsors, and look back on some of their favorite…

W alter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he…

Yanis Varoufakis. Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck I n 2008, capitalism had its second global spasm. The financial crisis set off a chain reaction that pushed Europe into a downward spiral that continues to this day. Europe’s present situation is not merely a threat for workers, for the…

In an interview at Vox , Robert Lustig makes the case for treating sugar like a controlled substance, similar to alcohol and tobacco. The case is very easy to make, of course. Sugar is, for many people, every bit as addictive as other abused substances; people self-medicate with it for many of the…

Getty Images “What we really need is a Manhattan Project for cybersecurity.” It’s a sentiment that swells up every few years in the wake of some huge computer intrusion—most recently the Sony and Anthem hacks. The invocation of the legendary program that spawned the atomic bomb is telling. The…

Despite the post-Snowden spotlight on mass surveillance, the intelligence community’s easiest end-run around the Fourth Amendment since 2001 has been something called a National Security Letter. FBI agents can demand that an Internet service provider, telephone company or financial institution turn…

It is a common misconception that we know our own minds. As I move around the world, walking and talking, I experience myself thinking thoughts. "What shall I have for lunch?", I ask myself. Or I think, "I wonder why she did that?" and try and figure it out. It is natural to assume that this…

In the days following the massive breach of JPMorgan Chase’s computers last summer, the bank’s security chief, James Cummings, rarely left his operations center in its Manhattan headquarters. He directed a select group of colleagues to search for links to the Russian government. There was little…

courtesy Fidel Salinas A year ago, the Department of Justice threatened to put Fidel Salinas in prison for the rest of his life for hacking crimes. But before the federal government brought those charges against him, Salinas now says, it tried a different tactic: recruiting him. A Southern District…

What would happen if U.S. nuclear attack submarines—some of the most sophisticated and expensive American weapons of war—suddenly became obsolete? Imagine a scenario where these important systems became the hunted instead of the hunter, or just as technologically backward as the massive battleships…

THE father of Major Major, a character in Catch 22 , a novel by Joseph Heller, makes a good living not growing alfalfa. “The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not…

EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection Share It Share on Facebook Copy link San Francisco - People have a Fourth Amendment right to privacy when it comes to their genetic material, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues in an amicus brief filed this week with the…

How to Grow a Forest Really, Really Fast Shubhendu Sharma is working to reforest the world, one tiny patch at a time Karen Frances Eng Feb 18, 2015 A forest planted by humans, then left to nature’s own devices, typically takes at least 100 years to mature. What if we could make the process happen…

I extracted the certificate from the SuperFish adware and cracked the password (" komodia ") that encrypted it. I discuss how down below. The consequence is that I can intercept the encrypted communications of SuperFish's victims (people with Lenovo laptops) while hanging out near them at a cafe…

A Lenovo ThinkPad X300 laptop computer. LenovoPhotograph: Lenovo Lenovo , the largest PC manufacturer in world, has been accused of fatally compromising user security by installing an adware application on all its Windows computers as they leave the factory. The software, called Superfish, purports…

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA — What do the Sahara desert and the Amazon rainforest have in common? Until recently, archaeologists would have told you they were both inhospitable environments devoid of large-scale human settlements. But they were wrong. Here today at the annual meeting of the AAAS (which…

In particular, Google sounds the alarm over the FBI’s desire to ‘remotely’ search computers that have concealed their location.Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images Google is boldly opposing an attempt by the US Justice Department to expand federal powers to search and seize digital data,…

Scientists say they have every hope that the Hubble Space Telescope will keep working for at least another five years, perhaps more. The famous observatory is about to celebrate its 25th birthday. Key figures on the mission told a major conference in California that the instruments it uses to detect…

Technology Gadgets Reviews Anyone who works on documents with complex formatting will know the frustrations of Word. Switching to another product has, by and large, made life easier, writes Peter Moon. By Paul Smith Updated Feb 9, 2015 — 2.33pm, first published at 12.17pm A year ago, we did the…

Google faces the prospect of a fresh competition investigation after Russia's biggest search engine filed a complaint with the authorities. Yandex alleges that its rival has an unfair advantage because it insists device-makers set Google as the default search setting if they want to pre-install its…

Above: Avernum 2 is Jeff Vogel's latest creation, his 22nd in 22 years of independent development. Image Credit: Spiderweb Games Jeff Vogel’s been writing games, by himself, mostly in his basement, for longer than most people have been playing: 22 games in the past 22 years . The most recent, the…