Enlarge / Illustration of a coronal mass ejection impacting the Earth’s atmosphere. These events can cause geomagnetic storms. Getty Images | Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library reader comments 84 with 55 posters participating Share this story SpaceX had to ditch most of its latest batch of Starlink satellites because they were disrupted by a geomagnetic storm […]
Monthly Archives: February 2022
Meet the scientist at the center of the covid lab leak controversy
Some in the West agree. “I’m quite distressed by people throwing this kind of extremely serious allegation around,” Nancy Connell, a microbiologist and member of NIH’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, told me in February last year, when she was with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s highly irresponsible.” But even if the […]
The Nvidia – Arm chipmaker mega-merger is officially dead
Peter Griffin, Editor. 09 February 2022, 10:25 am A bid by US computer chip giant Nvidia to buy major UK-based rival Arm has been scrapped as regulators all over the world raised concerns about the implications of the deal for the global chip market. The US$40 billion acquisition of ARM by NVIDIA was originally floated […]
Firm planning 100,000 satellites claims it will “clean space” by capturing debris
Enlarge / Greg Wyler in February 2019 when he was at OneWeb. Getty Images | Washington Post reader comments 21 with 18 posters participating Share this story A company led by satellite-industry veteran Greg Wyler says it plans to launch about 100,000 small communication satellites into low Earth orbit. The company, E-Space, yesterday announced that it received […]
The metaverse is a new word for an old idea
I have spent a lot of my career, both in Silicon Valley and beyond, insisting that all our technologies have histories and even pre-histories, and that far from being neat and tidy, those stories are in fact messy, contested, and conflicted, with competing narrators and meanings. The metaverse, which graduated from a niche term to […]
Health sites let ads track visitors without telling them
reader comments 20 with 16 posters participating Share this story All too often, digital ads wind up improperly targeting the most vulnerable people online, including abuse victims and kids. Add to that list the customers of several digital-medicine and genetic-testing companies, whose sites used ad-tracking tools that could have exposed information about people’s health status. […]
Microsoft will block downloaded macros in Office versions going back to 2013
reader comments 20 with 17 posters participating Share this story In the interest of combating ransomware and other malware, Microsoft is planning a major change in how its Office software handles macros: when files that use macros are downloaded from the Internet, those macros will now be disabled entirely by default. Current versions of the […]
Protecting your business in the age of ransomware
Ransomware is hitting close to home for organizations of all sizes and sectors. With attacks making headlines daily, it’s no surprise that 62% of surveyed IT decision-makers are concerned about coping with malware and ransomware, according to the Dell Technologies 2021 Global Data Protection Index (GDPI). It’s not only the rising drumbeat of the bad […]
Why the balance of power in tech is shifting toward workers
According to Collective Action in Tech, a project tracking the industry’s organizing efforts, every year since the walkout has seen more workers speaking out. The big tech companies’ image as friendly giants had been shattered. Part of the walkout’s legacy, Stapleton says, was “helping people see the gap between how companies present themselves and how […]
Most Frequently Asked Questions About NFTs(Non-Fungible Tokens)
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the most popular digital assets today, capturing the attention of cryptocurrency investors, whales and people from around the world. People find it amazing that some users spend thousands or millions of dollars on a single NFT-based image of a monkey or other token, but you can simply take a screenshot […]