Showing results by author "Tom Simonite" in All Categories

Police departments, government offices, corporations, and countless individuals have been victims of malicious software that encrypts data and demands payment for its return. But a spate of recent ransomware infections at hospitals has some experts worried that patient care could suffer.

It sends texts with last-minute requests for extra shifts and won’t consider requests for a raise. Yes, the software that manages drivers for Uber has a few things in common with unpopular human bosses.

The theoretical underpinnings of quantum computing are well established. And physicists can build the basic units, known as qubits, out of which a quantum computer would be made. They can even operate qubits together in small groups. But they have not made a fully working, practical quantum computer.

Early this week the Austrian security company SEC Consult found that more than three million routers, modems, and other devices are vulnerable to being hijacked over the Internet. Instead of giving each device a unique encryption key to secure its communications, manufacturers including Cisco and General Electric had lazily used a much smaller number of security keys over and over again.

Facebook keeps its map of the social connections of the 1.6 billion people who use the service each month to itself. But it is giving away for free new maps it is building that describe patterns of population density in the world’s poorest countries in unprecedented detail.

This week at Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the social network’s plans for the next decade. Here’s how he plans to keep the more than 1 billion people that use Facebook every day engaged - and lure in still more users.

Facebook has built the first of what it hopes will be a large fleet of solar-powered drones that will bring Internet connectivity to hundreds of millions of people beyond the reach of today's telecommunications infrastructure. Aquila, as the V-shaped carbon fiber craft is known, is powered by two propellers and has a wingspan of about 42 meters, roughly equivalent to a Boeing 737 airliner.

The octopus was about five feet off the ground, over my right shoulder. I turned and stepped closer to walk around it. Anyone watching might have thought I looked silly - I had a bulky black virtual-reality headset strapped onto my face. But at least there wasn’t a cable running down my back to connect it to a PC.

In August last year, IBM unveiled a chip designed to operate something like the neurons and synapses of the brain.

Will faster data storage and chips with built-in lasers help turn Intel around?

Twitter unveils initiatives aimed at making money from its users’ data and behavior.

A reincarnation of one of the oldest ideas in artificial intelligence could finally make it possible to truly converse with our computers. And Facebook has a chance to make it happen first.

A professor who created an algorithm that may overturn an orthodoxy of computer science has the field’s experts excited.

To rescue its struggling business, Hewlett-Packard is making a long-shot bid to change the fundamentals of how computers work.

The No. 2 executive at Microsoft is fighting the U.S. government in a series of cases that will shape online privacy - and the cloud business.

The airy Berkeley office space of startup Rigetti Computing boasts three refrigerators - but only one of them stores food. The other two use liquid helium to cool experimental computer chips to a fraction of a degree from absolute zero. The two-year-old company is trying to build the hardware needed to power a quantum computer, which could trounce any conventional machine by tapping into quantum mechanics.