This past July, before he was banned from Wikipedia, Techyan was one of dozens of volunteers preparing to speak at the free-knowledge movement’s annual conference, Wikimania. Born in China’s northeast, Techyan, as he’s known in the Wikipedia community, had been editing Chinese Wikipedia since his early teens. As one of its three dozen elected administrators, he hoped his presentation would put a more positive spin on what, lately, had become Wikipedia’s ugliest battle
For years, people have been using the web-based collaborative platform Figma to brainstorm raw ideas, roughing them out in visual form as one might do on a conference-room whiteboard. They did so even though Figma—officially an interface design and prototyping tool—was never meant for that particular purpose. But when the company saw its customers embracing its product for whiteboarding, it put creating something optimized for the task on its to-do list. And for a long time, t
Online holiday shopping is expected to reach a peak of $910 billion in 2021—a cybercriminal’s jackpot after a record-breaking year of cybersecurity breaches like Colonial Pipeline and Kaseya. Shoppers overwhelmed by stress, and retailers distracted by supply chain challenges and staffing shortages will undoubtedly be more susceptible to phishing attempts and other social engineering attacks this year. Cybercriminals don’t take time off—and neither should your cy
Connecting teams in a business is like taking all the parts of a house: the electrical, the plumbing, sheetrock, flooring, foundation, roof, windows, insulation, and putting them all together to create a home. None of those parts are that functional without the others. Bringing our company’s culture together in actions and goals was the vision for 2021. We intended to accomplish this in 2019 and recognized then there was a lot of groundwork to do. We had no foundation to support where we
Looking for a holiday present that won’t fall victim to any supply-chain snafus? If so, there’s always crypto. The vast majority of Americans have never invested in or traded a cryptocurrency, but buying crypto is easier than you might think—and, as a gift, offers the potential of a big upside. Although cryptocurrency prices have recently plunged, crypto is predicted to keep growing in the coming years, and is (slowly) becoming popular with more online retailers—
If there were a Nobel Prize for Overcoming Bureaucratic Adversity, do you know who would win it? Katalin Karikó. Her story of enduring decades of little to no support for her research into the properties of mRNA, which led to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, has transcended science. It exposes a blind spot of our current scientific institutions to find and nurture every passionate scientist and line of inquiry. What can we learn from Karikó’s story to make sure we aren&
The holiday travel season is upon us and while your destination might involve family, food, and fun, getting there can be an exercise in frustration, futility, and frowning. It doesn’t have to be awful. Well, that awful anyway. Here are four indispensable apps for making holiday travel less painful. PackPoint: Leave nothing behind If you hate packing, give PackPoint a try. You tell the app how many days you’ll be gone, which types of activities you’ll be doing, how many fanc
Fully autonomous vehicles may not hit the roads until 2030 at the earliest, according to a McKinsey report. But when it comes to vehicles on the farm, that same timeline is nowhere near soon enough. Farmers need autonomy now, and they need it at scale. The need for autonomy on the farm isn’t for the sake of technological advancement alone. The need is born of the pressures farmers face today in their operations. Farmers have been embracing the most cutting-edge technologies in the market
A few months ago, the Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian tweeted a cryptic message about a “mind-blowing” webcam. In the photo Ohanian shared, the camera looked like a monolithic slab, punctured by a dozen microphone holes with an abnormally large lens on its left side. Its makers hailed from Apple, Beats, and Uber, he explained, and he had invested in the product. “Webcams, welcome to 2021,” he wrote. That webcam turned out to be the Opal C1, a $300 desktop camera whose
When Apple’s iOS 15 iPhone operating system debuted early this fall, it introduced a number of privacy enhancements. Mail Privacy Protection, for instance, hides your IP address from senders. On-device speech recognition for Siri processes voice requests on your phone, so they never get transmitted to the cloud. A host of iCloud Plus privacy features were also integrated into iOS 15, including iCloud Private Relay (Apple’s Tor-like web-surfing privacy service) and Hide My Email (wh