In the News Archive

Every technology embodies the values of the age in which it was created. When the atomic bomb was being developed in the mid-nineteen-forties, the destruction of cities and the deliberate targeting of civilians was just another military tactic. It was championed as a means to victory. The Geneva Conventions later classified those practices as war crimes - and yet nuclear weapons have no other real use. They threaten and endanger noncombatants for the sake of deterrence. Conventional weapons can now be employed to destroy every kind of military target, and twenty-first-century warfare puts an emphasis on precision strikes, cyberweapons, and minimizing civilian casualties. As a technology, nuclear weapons have become obsolete. What worries me most isn’t the possibility of a cyberattack, a technical glitch, or a misunderstanding starting a nuclear war sometime next week. My greatest concern is the lack of public awareness about this existential threat, the absence of a vigorous public debate about the nuclear-war plans of Russia and the United States, the silent consent to the roughly fifteen thousand nuclear weapons in the world. These machines have been carefully and ingeniously designed to kill us. Complacency increases the odds that, some day, they will. The “Titanic Effect” is a term used by software designers to explain how things can quietly go wrong in a complex technological system: the safer you assume the system to be, the more dangerous it is becoming.

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, Google, Apple, and Uber clarified their positions on President-elect Donald Trump's comments about a possible Muslim registry. "In relation to the hypothetical of whether we would ever help build a 'muslim registry' - we haven't been asked, of course we wouldn't do this and we are glad - from all that we’ve read - that the proposal doesn't seem to be on the table," a spokesperson for Google told BuzzFeed News in an email.

BuzzFeed News asked all three companies whether they would help build or provide data for a Muslim registry. An Apple spokesperson said: "We think people should be treated the same no matter how they worship, what they look like, who they love. We haven't been asked and we would oppose such an effort."

The higher temperatures are in part due to especially warm air coming from the south during this year's winter, the report says. And that's where things get scary. Shrinking sea ice and glaciers used to be a thing of the summer, but now that trend is carrying over into the winter months, says Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA's Arctic Research Program. "The pace of change that's happening in the Arctic ... is truly unprecedented," he says.

Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.

Like LOL, like, entrenched in all kinds of sentences, used subconsciously, and difficult to parse the real meaning of without careful consideration, has all the hallmarks of a piece of grammar - specifically, in the pragmatic department, modal wing. One thing making it especially clear that the new like is not just a tic of heedless, underconfident youth is that many of the people who started using it in the new way in the 1970s are now middle-aged. People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality, and the person of a certain age who claims never to use like "that way" as often as not, like, does - and often. As I write, a sentence such as There were like grandparents and like grandkids in there is as likely to be spoken by a forty-something as by a teenager or a college student. Just listen around the next time you're standing in a line, watching a talk show, or possibly even listening to yourself.

Samsung has announced that it has acquired Harman, the company behind over 20 brands including audio companies AKG, JBL and Harman/Kardon, as well as a suite of connected car technologies.

Although you're probably more familiar with Harman for their audio brands, the company earns around two thirds of its revenues from automotive-related segments where it produces telematics, security and 'embedded infotainment' solutions.

Y Combinator is extremely influential in tech startups and startup culture.

Peter Thiel, an investor who often participates in Y Combinator, is donating $1.25 million to Donald Trump's political efforts, which has incited outrage among the tech community with many calling for Y Combinator to sever ties with Thiel.

Y Combinator has apparently decided not to. President Sam Altman defended this position in a blog post, framed as a Clinton endorsement, that begins with a partial overview of how reprehensible and dangerous Trump is, but ends with a defense of continuing Thiel's involvement in Y Combinator that's effectively framed as a free-speech or tolerance issue.

First, Chris accepted a position at Apple. We wish him well.

Second, the circumstances of Chris' departure from The Verge raised ethical issues which are worth disclosing in the interests of transparency and respect for our audience. We're confident that there wasn't any material impact on our journalism from these issues, but they are still serious enough to merit disclosure.

Chris began working for Apple in July, but didn't tell anyone at The Verge that he'd taken a new job until we discovered and verified his dual-employment in early September. Chris continued actively working at The Verge in July, but was not in contact with us through most of August and into September. During that period, in the dark and concerned for Chris, we made every effort to contact him and to offer him help if needed. We ultimately terminated his employment at The Verge and Vox Media the same day we verified that he was employed at Apple.

AlphaGo's surprising success points to just how much progress has been made in artificial intelligence over the last few years, after decades of frustration and setbacks often described as an "AI winter." Deep learning means that machines can increasingly teach themselves how to perform complex tasks that only a couple of years ago were thought to require the unique intelligence of humans. Self-­driving cars are already a foreseeable possibility. In the near future, systems based on deep learning will help diagnose diseases and recommend treatments.

Yet despite these impressive advances, one fundamental capability remains elusive: language. Systems like Siri and IBM's Watson can follow simple spoken or typed commands and answer basic questions, but they can't hold a conversation and have no real understanding of the words they use. If AI is to be truly transformative, this must change.

There are several key takeaways from Dimond's Stylator project, the most important of which is that it touches upon a crucial aspect of the implementation of handwriting recognition: do you create a system that tries to recognise handwriting, no matter whose handwriting it is - or, alternatively, do you ask that users learn a specific handwriting that is easier for the system to recognise? This would prove to be a question critical to Palm's success (but it'll be a while before we get to that!).

The source code for Apollo 11's guidance computer has been available for a while (Google hosted it several years ago, for instance), but would you know how to find it or search through it? As of this week, it's almost ridiculously easy. Former NASA intern Chris Garry has posted the entire Apollo Guidance Computer source code on GitHub, giving you a good peek at the software that took NASA to the Moon. As Reddit users point out, it's clear that the developers had a mighty sense of humor -- line 666 of the lunar landing turns up a "numero mysterioso," and there's even a reference to radio DJ Magnificent Montague's classic "burn, baby, burn."

We live, we are so often told, in an information age. It is an era obsessed with space, time and speed, in which social media inculcates virtual lives that run parallel to our "real" lives and in which communications technologies collapse distances around the globe. Many of us struggle with the bombardment of information we receive and experience anxiety as a result of new media, which we feel threaten our relationships and "usual" modes of human interaction.

Though the technologies may change, these fears actually have a very long history: more than a century ago our forebears had the same concerns. Literary, medical and cultural responses in the Victorian age to the perceived problems of stress and overwork anticipate many of the preoccupations of our own era to an extent that is perhaps surprising.

Warren had different beefs with Google, Apple and Amazon, but the common thread was that she accused each one of using its powerful platform to "lock out smaller guys and newer guys," including some that compete with Google, Apple and Amazon.

Google, she said, uses "its dominant search engine to harm rivals of its Google Plus user review feature;" Apple "has placed conditions on its rivals that make it difficult for them to offer competitive streaming services" that compete with Apple Music; and Amazon "uses its position as the dominant bookseller to steer consumers to books published by Amazon to the detriment of other publishers."

"Google, Apple and Amazon have created disruptive technologies that changed the world, and ... they deserve to be highly profitable and successful," Warren said. "But the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors that want their chance to change the world again."

In 1993, Prince frustrated contract lawyers and computer users everywhere when he changed his name to glyph known as "The Love Symbol." Though he never said so explicitly, it's generally understood that the name change was attempt to stick it to his record label, Warner Bros., which now had to deal with a top-tier artist with a new, unpronounceable, untypeable name. But it wasn't just Warner Bros. that had a problem: The Love Symbol proved frustrating for people who wanted to both speak and write about Prince. Writers, editors, and layout designers at magazines and newspapers wouldn't be able to type the actual name of the Artist Formerly Known As Prince. So Prince did the only thing you could do in that situation: He had a custom-designed font distributed to news outlets on a floppy disk.