“Bug fixes.” “Jam packed full of Super Amazing Things.” “Every 3 weeks, we polish up the Pinterest app to make it faster and better than ever.” “To make our app better for you, we bring updates to the App Store every 2 weeks…Every update of our Facebook app includes improvements for speed and reliability. As other new features become available… Read More

 I am a tall straight white cisgendered Canadian man in excellent health, i.e. I won pretty much every available lottery on the day I was born. People expect me to excel at things, or at least they don’t expect me not to. Concierges at five-star hotels are eager to help me, and rarely even ask me whether or not I am a guest. Read More

 There is so much to admire about Apple. They make superb, beautiful products. Their amazing comeback story is unparalleled in corporate history. Steve Jobs has become something akin to a modern-day patron saint of the tech industry. Tim Cook is, rightly, enormously respected. So why do I think they represent so much of what’s wrong with the tech world? Read More

 Let us talk frankly about technology and sex, which are, as the old ad has it, two great tastes that taste great together. Let’s talk about vibrators, and teledildonics, and orgasms, and KinkBNB, and VR porn, and “Uber for escorts.” And let’s talk again about how our collective inability to about our collective inability to think about, talk about, and invest in sex in… Read More

 We live in a cyberpunk novel. Every major nation-state clandestinely develops (and/or purchases) carefully targeted malware, and constantly probes—or penetrates—other nations’ defenses while desperately evaluating their offensive capabilities. Criminal undergrounds ransom ordinary users’ computers for bitcoin. Fortune 500 companies are breached almost monthly. Read More

 Greetings from the gaudy hellscape of Las Vegas, and that overcrowded maelstrom of surly hackers known as DEF CON! What follows is a brief rundown of the talks here (and its big corporate sister Black Hat) that seemed particularly interesting. Short version: software is eating the world; software can be hacked; ergo, the world can be hacked. Be afraid. Read More

 It’s a truism that all software has bugs and security holes. It’s another that license agreements invariably make software vendors immune to liability for damage or losses caused by such flaws. But, to my surprise, Black Hat’s founder and keynote speaker are arguing that software product liability, presumably mandated by governments, is inevitable. If they’re right,… Read More

 Thursday was, I think, a historic day–though whether it becomes a memorable milestone like the launch of the Altair 8800, or an obscure footnote à la CP/M, remains to be seen. Thursday was the day that the Ethereum Project finally launched, after much sound and fury, including raising ~US$10 million (in Bitcoin.) It’s a fascinating, wildly ambitious project, and it is vaporware… Read More

 Most people don’t understand how technology works. When they flip a light switch, or tap their phone, what happens next is essentially magic to them. Oh, they may be able to handwave a bit about electrons and volts and microprocessors and radio waves and packet-switched networks, but they’re just mouthing the words. They don’t actually understand any of those things. Read More

 Everything is broken. Just ask any security engineer. Way back in 1998, the members of the hacker collective L0pht testified to Congress that they could take down the entire Internet in 30 minutes by abusing BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, an obscure but critically important routing system. That was seventeen years ago and BGP is still vulnerable. Everything is terrible. Read More

 Once upon a time, long ago, there were computers, and they were very large. Warehouse large. Multi-story large. Tractor-trailer large. So large that in those mythical days of yore, now lost in the mists of time, men were real men(1), women were real women(2), and bugs were actual physical bugs(3), to paraphrase Douglas Adams. Read More

 While today’s cord cutters are replacing their former TV-viewing activities with popular streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, the shift away from linear television on to on-demand, online streams has allowed a variety of niche services to pop up, too. Available for a few more dollars per month, viewers now have the option of further customizing their over-the-top video… Read More