Psychedelics are having a moment and women could be the ones to benefit

“We started our company knowing that women over 40 are prescribed antidepressants at more than three to four times the rate of men, which has led to one in every five women taking an antidepressant to get through the day,” says Juan Pablo Cappello, cofounder and CEO of the ketamine therapy platform Nue Life, which […]

Phishers who breached Twilio and fooled Cloudflare could easily get you, too

Getty Images reader comments 20 with 18 posters participating Share this story At least two security-sensitive companies—Twilio and Cloudflare—were targeted in a phishing attack by an advanced threat actor who had possession of home phone numbers of not just employees but employees’ family members as well. In the case of Twilio, a San Francisco-based provider […]

10 malicious Python packages exposed in latest repository attack

Enlarge / Supply-chain attacks, like the latest PyPi discovery, insert malicious code into seemingly functional software packages used by developers. They’re becoming increasingly common. Getty Images reader comments 18 with 17 posters participating Share this story Researchers have discovered yet another set of malicious packages in PyPi, the official and most popular repository for Python programs […]

SGX, Intel’s supposedly impregnable data fortress, has been breached yet again

reader comments 10 with 9 posters participating Share this story Intel’s latest generation of CPUs contains a vulnerability that allows attackers to obtain encryption keys and other confidential information protected by the company’s software guard extensions, the advanced feature that acts as a digital vault for security users’ most sensitive secrets. Abbreviated as SGX, the […]

Crypto and the US government are headed for a decisive showdown

Elena Lacey | Getty Images reader comments 85 with 52 posters participating Share this story If you have paid casual attention to crypto news over the past few years, you probably have a sense that the crypto market is unregulated—a tech-driven Wild West in which the rules of traditional finance do not apply. If you […]

Small businesses count cost of Apple’s privacy changes

reader comments 104 with 78 posters participating Share this story Small businesses are cutting back marketing spending due to Apple’s sweeping privacy changes that have made it harder to target new customers online, in a growing trend that has led to billions of dollars in lost revenues for platforms like Facebook. Apple last year began […]

Setting our heart-attack-predicting AI loose with “no-code” tools

Enlarge / Ahhh, the easy button! Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 7 with 7 posters participating Share this story This is the second episode in our exploration of “no-code” machine learning. In our first article, we laid out our problem set and discussed the data we would use to test whether a highly […]

The Download: fixing social media, and US monkeypox vaccines

We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to our opponents. At the same time, we don’t want to be exposed to speech that is inappropriate or crosses a line. Technology companies address this conundrum by setting standards for free speech, a practice protected […]

Social media is polluting society. Moderation alone won’t fix the problem

Moderation (whether automated or human) can potentially work for what we call “acute” harms: those caused directly by individual pieces of content. But we need this new approach because there are also a host of “structural” problems—issues such as discrimination, reductions in mental health, and declining civic trust—that manifest in broad ways across the product […]

The cognitive dissonance of watching the end of Roe unfold online

Throughout the day, Wedd­ington and her staff “pumped reporters for information,” she later wrote in her 2013 book A Question of Choice. She found a lawyer friend who could go to the Supreme Court to pick up a copy of the opinion and read her “the significant portions,” but Weddington had to give interviews before […]