Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight – inside your TV, fridge, car and office. These things know more about you than you might imagine, and many of them communicate that information over the internet. Back in 2007, it
Imagine a cup of tea. Wrap a piece of string around the circumference of the cup, and measure the length of the string. Then, lay your spoon on top of the cup, making sure it lies across the center of the cup, and measure the length from side to side – the diameter. Finally, divide the circumference by the diameter, and record the result. Next time you eat soup, repeat the process with the bowl. You will discover that the ratios of the circumference to the diameter in both cases are remarkably c
As the EU is moving towards the world’s first legislation on connected cars, the fight over access to vehicle data is intensifying. Should automakers hold all the power or should data be democratized amongst various stakeholders? In an intriguing piece, Reuters’ Nick Carey details how the EU’s future rulings are setting car makers against a coalition of insurers, leasing companies, and repair shops in the battle to own data generated by your connected vehicle. So far, automakers — serving as the
It’s been almost a week and I’m still thinking about Apple’s Studio Display. This isn’t because I adore it (although I do), it’s because I’ve seen the light and I know what the company needs to do: release a $500 monitor called the Apple Display. I can feel you salivating at the thought of that. Before we get into the specifics, let’s backtrack and talk about Apple’s just-released Studio Display — because it’s probably the most sensual I’ve felt towards a monitor since I first moved from CRT to
Covid-19 has opened the world’s eyes to the benefits of remote and flexible work, and many aren’t looking back — according to a survey by workplace platform Envoy, 71% of employees would choose a hybrid work model, only 12% want to work remotely every day, and just 16% want to work full-time in the office. Until now, technology hasn’t quite been able to keep up with this change of attitude — we can agree that video conferencing software sucks and a Zoom call doesn’t really cut it as an office pa
It’s hard to take a few breaths on the internet without hearing about Web3 lately. However, it’s not as accessible or ubiquitous as it might sound. Some Web3 properties and services require you to understand the moving parts involved, such as your cryptocurrency wallet, dApps (decentralized apps like the OpenSea NFT marketplace), and the blockchain they operate on. While this may sound complex (and some of it is), large chunks of Web3 experiences are still built on open-web technologies, and you
This article is part of our coverage of the latest in AI research. What is the next step toward bridging the gap between natural and artificial intelligence? Scientists and researchers are divided on the answer. Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and the recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, is betting on self-supervised learning, machine learning models that can be trained without the need for human-labeled examples. LeCun has been thinking and talking about self-supervised and unsupervised l
By: Alfred Ng and Jon Keegan There is an estimated $12 billion market of companies that buy and sell location data collected from your cellphone. And the trade is entirely legal in the U.S. Without legislation limiting the location data trade, Apple and Google have become the de facto regulators for keeping your whereabouts private—through shifts in transparency requirements and crackdowns on certain data brokers. Specifically, the app stores have cracked down on data brokers that market softwar
We’re now years into this great experiment in remote work. It started off as a Zoom, but now it feels more like a plod. Our work lives are lived on camera all day, every day—and it’s time to let people take a break. Face-muting is ok Communicating remotely isn’t new. For ages, we corresponded by mail. Then we added telegraphs, which increased the speed of communication. Then came telephones, which allowed us to communicate beyond cables. Fax, email, instant message—the communication options cont
By: Eve Zelickson Chances are at some point in your internet travels you’ve stumbled on a warning that reads something like “Your connection is not private. Attackers might be trying to steal your information.” The page usually gives you an option to proceed to the website anyway. But should you? Why did I get rerouted to this page? Today, we conduct more activities online than ever before: paying bills, buying groceries, and interfacing with doctors, to name a few. With more of these websites r