123709060
submission
harrymcc writes:
Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance Jr. doesn’t like the potent encryption offered by current smartphones. He has urged Apple and Google executives to build backdoors into their operating systems, with no luck. So he is spending millions on technology designed to break into the iPhone and other smartphones. Over at Fast Company, we published a deep dive on Vance’s efforts to break smartphones in the interest of bringing criminals to justice.
122578390
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harrymcc writes:
This week at CES, Delta is previewing a display technology called parallel reality. Created by a startup called Misapplied Sciences, it uses pixels that can aim different colors at different physical locations, allowing for signage that shows different information to multiple people at the same time. Delta plans to install it at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport by midyear to allow travelers to see just their own travel info rather than a sea of flights. I talked with the CEOs of Delta and Misapplied Sciences, along with others, for a story on the tech over at Fast Company.
121612700
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harrymcc writes:
Atari’s first home computers, the 400 and 800, were announced at Winter CES in January 1980. But they didn’t ship until late in the year—so over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards has marked their 40th anniversary with a look at their rise and fall. Though Atari ultimately had trouble competing with Apple and other entrenched PC makers, it produced machines with dazzling graphics and sound and the best games of their era, making its computers landmarks from both a technological and cultural standpoint.
120832392
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harrymcc writes:
In the late 1990s, lots of people were concerned that the Y2K bug could lead to power outages, financial collapse, riots, and worse when the clock rolled over to January 1, 2000. Hundreds of books about the problem and suggestions on how to respond (quit your job, move to the country, stockpile food) not only capitalized on this fear but helped to spread it. Over at Fast Company, I marked the 20th anniversary of the "crisis" with a retrospective on the survival guides and what we can learn from them.
120425098
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harrymcc writes:
From Berkeley, Calif. to Somerville, Mass., a growing number of cities are banning the use of facial recognition, based on concerns such as the technology’s iffy accuracy and the potential for police abuse. Now Portland is working on a law—which could be in place by next spring—that would prevent use of facial recognition by both government agencies and private companies. Over at Fast Company, Sean Captain has a report on the impetus behind the proposed legislation.
118699456
submission
harrymcc writes:
On November 9 2004, a new version of Mozilla’s browser called Firefox shipped. It was taking on one of the most daunting monopolies in tech: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which had more than 90 percent market share. But Firefox was really good, and it became an instant hit, ending Microsoft’s dominance of the web. Over at Fast Company, Sean Captain took a look at the browser’s original rise, the challenges it faced after Google’s Chrome arrived on the scene, and the moves it’s currently making to put user privacy first.
118256952
submission
harrymcc writes:
On October 29, 1969, a graduate student in a UCLA computer science lab logged into a computer hundreds of miles away at the Stanford Research Institute. It was the first connection via ARPANET, which—after 20 years as a government and academic network—evolved into the modern internet. Over at Fast Company, Mark Sullivan marked the anniversary by visiting the room where the historic login took place and talking to three of the people who made it happen.
117052208
submission
harrymcc writes:
Go to Amazon, Walmart.com, and eBay, and you can find an array of companies selling laser cutters and engravers for a few hundred dollars—dramatically less than you’ll pay for a brand name such as Glowforge. But these budget models lack the safety features required to keep lasers safe, and may even have ignored the required FDA paperwork to put them on the market. Over at Fast Company, Glenn Fleishman wrote about the dangers of these devices. When alerted of specific models, the ecommerce sites removed them—but many others remain for sale.
115836068
submission
harrymcc writes:
On September 20, 1989, Apple unveiled the Macintosh Portable, the first battery-powered Mac. It was a Mac through and through, but it was heavy and expensive, sold poorly, and turned out to be a dead end. Over at Fast Company, I wrote about its reception and how it led to one of Apple’s most important hits, the PowerBook.
115544182
submission
harrymcc writes:
On the night of October 26, 1960, CBS aired a special--coproduced with MIT--about an emerging field of technology called "artificial intelligence." It featured demos--like a checkers-playing computer and one that wrote scripts for TV westerns--along with sound bits from leading scientists on the question of whether machines would ever think. It was well reviewed at the time and then mostly forgotten. But it's available on YouTube, and surprisingly relevant to today's AI challenges, 59 years later. I wrote about it over at FastCompany.com.
114248612
submission
harrymcc writes:
The We Company, parent of coworking giant WeWork, is readying an IPO based on the idea that it’s a wildly ambitious tech platform, not just s renter of office space. But Fast Company’s Sean Captain reports that WeWorks use WPA2, an outdated version of Wi-Fi that doesn’t provide WeWork members with sufficient protection against hackers. Worse, WeWorks in multiple cities in the U.S. and abroad all use the same Wi-Fi password—and it’s one that’s so easy to guess that it appears regularly on lists of the worst passwords you can choose.
111008468
submission
harrymcc writes:
Jay Adelson, the cofounder of Digg, has a new, deeply personal startup: Scorbit. It aims to connect existing pinball machines to the internet, giving them networked leaderboards, compatibility with smartphone apps, and other newfangled features. But Scorbit faces a major competitor in Stern, the pinball giant whose new Spike platform is attempting to introduce similar functionality. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman reports on the dueling systems and the general pinball resurgence now underway.
109793262
submission
harrymcc writes:
If your computing history goes back far enough, you remember serial ports and parallel ports and PS/2 connectors and the generally gnarly process once required to hook up peripheralsâ"most of which was eliminated in the late 1990s by USB, a technology now so pervasive that itâ(TM)s easy to forget we didnâ(TM)t have it all along. The do-everything, plug-and-play standard was developed at Intel, and over at Fast Company, some of the people responsible for it tell the little-known story of how it came to be.
109592042
submission
harrymcc writes:
In the 1960s, Bob Moog helped invent electronic music as we know it by popularizing the synthesizer. He died in 2005, but Moog synthesizers are still widely used by top musical acts. And now his life, work, and legacy are the subject of a new museum in Asheville, NC, his hometown, Over at Fast Company, Sean Captain took a look at the museum, Moog's accomplishments, and the history of music produced with his instruments--from the classical blockbuster "Switched-On Bach" onwards.
109367814
submission
harrymcc writes:
Radio Shackâ(TM)s Model 100 wasnâ(TM)t the first laptopâ"but it was the first popular one, and an innovative machine on multiple fronts. It was also the last computer to ship with Microsoft software personally coded by Bill Gates. I recently came across an internal training film intended to help Radio Shack staffers explain the Model 100â(TM)s benefits to potential customers. Iâ(TM)ve shared itâ"and some thoughts on the systemâ(TM)s importanceâ"over at Fast Company.
