The worst part of navigating the internet is the wait. While you stare at a white screen, your computer (or let's be real, your phone) is chasing down thousands of little snippets of code, which point to other pieces of code, over and over again, through ad trackers and Javascript libraries.
Last fall, NextVR made history, broadcasting the Golden State Warriors' home opener against the New Orleans Pelicans in 3D VR. Starting tomorrow at Madison Square Garden, the Southern California company will embark on its second major event: live streaming more than 15 hours of the Big East men's basketball tournament in VR.
Even if you've never heard of 4chan — or if you incorrectly think it's the name of a single hacker — as long as you use the internet, you've probably been affected by it. An anarchical freewheeling image-posting forum launched in 2003, the website known as 4chan is also the birthplace of the Anonymous hacker movement and also many popular internet memes (including LOL Cats). Last year, the website's creator Christopher Poole, known by his 4chan username "Moot," announced he was stepping down from the website. Earlier today, he declared he'd be joining Google (on his personal Tumblr).
Last month, Facebook announced that its Connectivity Lab had mapped 21.6 million square kilometers (8.3 million square miles) of land to find where people were living. With this data, the company would have the information necessary to make flight plans for its internet drone, Aquila, or show which populations were located too far from a water supply.
On Saturday, March 5, 2020, computer programmer Ray Tomlinson passed away. He is credited with creating the first email system and including the @ symbol in email addresses, among other things. This article, written by John Free and originally published in the September 1980 issue of Popular Science, explores how "electronic mail" would come to revolutionize communication, both in the office and at home, as well as the then-current and future technologies that made it all possible.
Daily life is a data-rich environment. After a crime, a natural place to look for evidence is the suspect's social media accounts, to see if there are any useful nuggets buried among empty ephemeral nothings. Fortunately, there are tools for just this sort of thing. Last month, security researcher Justin Seitz explained how to make a software tool that can find guns in pictures. Yesterday, he released a how-to guide for feeding that same tool to social media posts.
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