Category: Technology

Did you imagine the thing being better?  You probably did. This was the main experiment in the studies conducted by Adam Mastroianni, a postdoc at Columbia Business School and author of the newsletter Experimental History. The results showed that to an almost absurd degree, we all respond to that prompt by imagining things being better.  In the […]

On a chilly but humane November night in Toronto, Allison Williams and I slip into an expansive conversation about the polite ways one can manipulate an audience. Williams is an actress, one of the more self-aware of her generation; audience manipulation is her not-so-secret weapon. And I’m abundantly aware that, as a writer profiling her […]

This means that LastPass users should go through their vaults and take extra steps to protect themselves—including changing all of their passwords. Start by turning on two-factor authentication for as many of your accounts as possible, particularly high-value accounts like your email, financial services, and highly used social media accounts. This way, even if attackers […]

In the 5th century, in early medieval Ireland, Conall Gulban, an Irish king, gave his name to an area of land at the northwest tip of the Irish coast. His kingdom was called Tír Chonall, the “land of Conall”—or, today, Donegal.  Somewhere along the king’s descendant line, known as Cenél Conaill or “kindred of Conall,” […]

But for anyone involved in fending off Russia’s cyberattacks on Ukraine over the past eight years, Russia’s preference for civilian over military targets has long been apparent, says Viktor Zhora, a senior cybersecurity-focused official in Ukraine’s State Services for Special Communications and Information Protection, or SSSCIP. Zhora, whose cybersecurity firm worked on incident response for […]

A critical part of your research is reading a toy’s privacy policies before you turn it on or set it up. (More on this in the next section.) Look Out for These Words in the Fine Print Current children’s privacy laws in the US don’t do much to protect kids in the 21st century, says Cross. So […]

Moment offers several tripod mounts compatible with MagSafe-compatible phones, but my favorite by far is the multi-threaded mount. It’s just a flat disc of metal with several holes drilled in it (also why this kind of mount is affectionately called a Swiss cheese plate), and each hole corresponds to a different size of tripod screw.  […]

Technology plays a significant role in community building—especially for historically marginalized groups. Women use apps to track all sorts of things, including their periods (nearly a third of all women in the US); the LGBTQ+ community uses apps to meet like-minded people; and activists campaigning via democratic means use social media and messaging apps to […]

Apple first released Swift Playgrounds as an iPad app in 2016, and a MacOS version followed in 2020. It’s free and lets you edit code in one window and see how it will look in the finished app in another (in real time). There are built-in lessons and challenges to work through, and you can […]

Artificial intelligence has promised much, but there has been something holding it back from being used successfully by billions of people: a frustrating struggle for humans and machines to understand one another in natural language. This is now changing, thanks to the arrival of large language models powered by transformer architectures, one of the most […]