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 interne
As thousands of civilians risk their lives to resist a Russian onslaught, a global group of cyber guerillas have joined the fray too. They’ve disabled Kremlin-backed websites, leaked personal data, exposed disinformation, hijacked TV signals, and even hobbled infrastructure. One early and ongoing attack, launched in January, disabled the internal systems of a train network in Belarus, a country of 9 million people that’s sandwiched between Russia and Ukraine and has long been under
Google search is failing you, and not just because of its privacy and search quality issues. When you search the web, you won’t get any personal results from apps like Dropbox, Notion, or even Google’s own Google Docs. If you’re looking for a specific spreadsheet you made in Google Sheets, or a Slack conversation your recently had with a coworker, you’ll need to go looking into each individual app. It’s a pain and a waste of time. Now a new breed of tools
On a Zoom call the other day, a coworker of mine made a remark about the artwork I have hanging on the wall behind me: two very generic-looking pictures of deer. So generic, in fact, that I have thought about them exactly twice: the day I hung them and when my coworker mentioned them. It was then that I decided to dedicate the rest of my Zoom existence to using the virtual background feature (here’s how to do it, if you haven’t already played with it). And while Zoom has a decent c
When it comes to Elon Musk, it can be hard to separate the man from the myth. But in her new podcast The Evening Rocket, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore manages to see through Musk’s mystique, explain his worldview, and decipher his visions of the future by going back to the sci-fi stories he grew up on—stories, Lepore says, that Musk sometimes misread. This week, Lepore joins host Rufus Griscom on the Next Big Idea podcast. Listen to the ful
If you’re ever feeling overwhelmed by an excess of open windows on your Mac, a new tool called Later can help. By clicking a button on the Mac menu bar, you can hide all open windows from your desktop, then bring them back at a later time. I’ve been using a review copy of Later provided by the developer and have found it useful for clearing out desktop clutter when it’s time to focus. It can also be helpful for hiding apps and browser tabs during a Zoom presentation. To hide
Congress passed its 2022 omnibus spending bill this week, expanding coverage of telehealth services under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—a big win for telehealth companies and the more than 130 million patients who rely on socialized medicine. But some experts warn that as more telehealth services become covered by insurers, the government may lose interest in healthcare initiatives that get patients the most care for their dollar. The provision does a few things. First, i
A new report from Harvard researchers finds that TikTok remains a rich source of misinformation and disinformation about Ukraine—and explains why it spreads so easily. The same tools and features that have brought the funny (and sometimes the genius) out of regular people on TikTok can also be used to manipulate content to spread misinformation at scale, the research suggests. The report, called “TikTok, The War on Ukraine, and 10 Features That Make the App Vulnerable to Misinforma
So far, more than 2 million Ukrainians have fled their country in just two weeks. Among several companies offering assistance to Ukrainians is a gay dating app based in Germany and the Netherlands called Romeo. Romeo, which is similar to Grindr with its geo-location-based grid of users, created a group called “Shelter For Ukraine,” where users can offer LGBTQ-friendly shelter for displaced Ukrainians. The Russian invasion has been particularly scary for Ukraine’s LGBTQ
Zoom fatigue is overwhelming for a lot of people these days. And meetings in the metaverse, so far, have seemed more like playing a reheated version of Second Life. But the use of holograms could make remote meetings a lot more interesting in the years to come. At this year’s South by Southwest conference, a startup founded by an AI researcher and a veteran of Ubisoft, is looking to bring the technology a step closer to the mainstream. Matsuko, a finalist in this year’s Extended Re