Showing results by author "Tom Simonite" in All Categories

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.

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.

Facebook and Google compete intensely for your time online and for the ad dollars of corporations. But now the two companies are collaborating on efforts to use balloons and drone aircraft to expand Internet access to the four billion people that don’t have it.

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?

The world’s poor could benefit from a system that is blanketing half Earth’s surface with a signal that provides free access to Wikipedia and other useful websites.

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.

Engineering the structure of metals and ceramic materials at the nanoscale can give them superpowers that might transform how we build just about everything. They can become incredibly flexible, strong, and extremely light all at the same time, and gain the ability to spring back into shape after being crushed flat.

Dropbox, the provider of online data storage, is adding productivity features as it wades into the corporate market dominated by Microsoft and Google.

That Google and other companies track our movements around the Web to target us with ads is well known. How exactly that information gets used is not—but a research paper presented last week suggests that some of the algorithmic judgments that emerge from Google's ad system could strike many people as unsavory.

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.

Ingesting a heap of drug data allows a machine-learning system to suggest alternatives humans hadn’t tried yet.