In what's threatening to become an annual tradition, executives from Twitter and Facebook will testify before Congress Tuesday. And unlike last fall's session, this round will include the top brass, including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presumably gets a pass, given his solo session this past April. […]
Multiple ways to authenticate.Image: LightRocket via Getty Images About time, Instagram. On Tuesday, Instagram announced several changes intended to improve security for its 1 billion users. Among the changes is the ability to use third party authenticator apps to log in to Instagram, including DUO Mobile and Google Authenticator. Instagram did not previously support this […]
In June, privacy advocates celebrated the passage of a historic bill in California that gave residents of that state unprecedented control over how companies use their data. Two months later, the party's over. Lobbying groups and trade associations, including several representing the tech industry, immediately started pushing for a litany of deep changes that they […]
For the past week, psychologists all over America have been freaking out. The cause of their agita was an observation by a psychology graduate student from the University of Minnesota named Max Hui Bai. Like many researchers, Bai uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, where individuals sign up to complete simple tasks, such as taking surveys […]
Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin […]
Days after President Donald Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore, the president touted the strength of the two leaders' relationship. "I can now call him," he told reporters at the White House on Friday. "I gave him a very direct number. He can now call me if he has any […]
One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam. After nine months at […]
In a series of undercover videos filmed over the last year, Britain's Channel 4 News caught executives at Cambridge Analytica appear to say they could extort politicians, send women to entrap them, and help proliferate propaganda to help their clients. The sting operation was conducted as part of an ongoing investigation into Cambridge Analytica, a […]
Bob Mueller is famously nonchalant amid life’s toughest moments. Much of that public calm stems from the fact that he’s a Magnificent Bastard and, specifically, the lessons of December 11, 1968. That day, then Second Lieutenant Mueller’s squad—part of the Second Platoon, Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment, the so-called “Magnificent Bastards”—was on patrol […]
President Trump claimed in a tweet over the weekend that the controversial Nunes memo “totally vindicates” him, clearing him of the cloud of the Russia investigation that has hung over his administration for a year now. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if anything, the Mueller investigation appears to have been picking […]