The Inside Story of Apple Intelligence
Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push this June…..
Tag: plaintext
Bluesky Says It Won’t Screw Things Up
Like the conflicted cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, journalists, pundits and people who eschew MAGA merch have looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how….
The New Hatred of Technology
People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good….
Donald Trump Isn’t the Only Chaos Agent
Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack….
AI Will Understand Humans Better Than Humans Do
Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited….
A High-Profile Geneticist Is Launching a Fusion-Power Moonshot
Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of….
You Can Now See the Code That Helped End Apartheid
John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay….
Social Media Tells You Who You Are. What if It’s Totally Wrong?
A few years ago I wrote about how, when planning my wedding, I’d signaled to the Pinterest app that I was interested in hairstyles and tablescapes, and I was suddenly….
AI's Big Gift to Society Is … Pithy Summaries?
Companies keep rolling out AI features that boil down various kinds of text. They’re making us dumber.
Meta pays the price for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext
Getty Images Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees. Meta disclosed….