Getty Images The internet is far less secure than it ought to be. One of the most fascinating and frightening incidents in computer security history started in 2022 with a few pushy emails to the mailing list for a small, one-person open source project. A user had submitted a complex bit of code that was now waiting for the maintainer to review. But a different user with the name Jigar Kumar felt that this wasn’t happening fast enough. “Patches spend years on this mailing list,” he complained. “5.2.0 release was 7 years ago. There is no reason to think anything is coming soon.”. A month later ..read more

The Zoomer tween in their natural habitat. | Leon Neal/Getty Images Did smartphones actually “destroy” a generation? The kids are not all right — and the device you are probably reading this on is to blame. So argues the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt insists that smartphones and social media are fueling a “surge of suffering” that’s inundating teens all across the Western world. By Haidt’s account, smartphones and the addicting social media apps we download onto th ..read more

Rescue teams demolish a building which collapsed following an earthquake on April 3, 2024 in Hualien, Taiwan. | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images From Taiwan to South Korea to Silicon Valley, some of the most important nodes in the global tech economy are in disaster-prone places. When a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan’s eastern coast on April 3, the first concern involved the risk to people and property. Here, the news was not as dire as initially feared — only nine people have been reported killed as of Wednesday evening, along with hundreds of injuries. Considering that Wednesday’s quake was ..read more

Food delivery apps have recently added new fees in response to minimum pay rules in New York City and Seattle. | Getty Images/iStockphoto As delivery discourse rages, don’t forget the middlemen: apps like UberEats, DoorDash, and Grubhub. No one is happy about the delivery apps. Not the customers, who feel gouged by an avalanche of fees. Not restaurants, who feel gut-punched by the commission apps take from them. Certainly not delivery workers, who have long been rewarded with a pittance for doing a job that, in a city like New York, has a higher injury rate than that of construction workers. A ..read more

Will TruthSocial deliver the windfall Trump needs? | Anna Barclay/Getty Images Trump’s social network has made him one of the richest people in the world — at least on paper. Former President Donald Trump’s net worth has skyrocketed to about $7.5 billion since Trump Media, the parent company for his social network Truth Social, went public earlier this week. The question for Trump’s presidential bid — and his various legal troubles — is whether he can actually cash in on those gains. His 2024 campaign and the Save America political action committee supporting it have posted dismal fundraising ..read more

Malorny/Getty Images Why AI agents that could book your vacation or pay your bills are the next frontier in artificial intelligence. ChatGPT and its large language model (LLM) competitors that produce text on demand are very cool. So are the other fruits of the generative AI revolution: art generators, music generators, better automatic subtitles and translation. They can do a lot (including claim that they’re conscious, not that we should believe them), but there’s one important respect in which AI models are unlike people: They are processes that are run only when a human triggers them and o ..read more

Sam Bankman-Fried attends court in July 2023 for a federal case that accused him of fraud, conspiracy, and other charges. | Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images The criminal conviction of the once-lionized cryptocurrency billionaire will have ripple effects on the entire industry. Last November, after just a few hours of deliberation, a New York jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried of fraud and conspiracy in the public flameout of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which stands accused of stealing as much as $10 billion from customers. On March 28, Bankman-Fried, who gained international promin ..read more

Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images The energy needed to support data storage is expected to double by 2026. You can do something to stop it. In January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its forecast for global energy use over the next two years. Included for the first time were projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. The IEA estimates that, added together, this usage represented almost 2 percent of global energy demand in 2022 — and that demand for these uses could double by 2026, which would make it roughly eq ..read more

Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by a cargo ship on March 26. | Scott Olson/Getty Images Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone. Line up a few years’ worth of tragedies and disasters, and the online conversations about them will reveal their patterns. The same conspiracy-theory-peddling personalities who spammed X with posts claiming that Tuesday’s Baltimore bridge collapse was a deliberate attack have also called mass shootings “false flag” events and denied basic facts about the C ..read more

Caleb Luke Lin for Vox And how it could fizzle. Artificial intelligence is already making people rich. Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of chip company Nvidia, which controls 80 percent of the data-center AI chip market, has seen his net worth explode from a mere $4 billion five years ago to a staggering $83.1 billion as of March 24 on the back of bottomless demand for his company’s product. ChatGPT maker OpenAI is reportedly valued at $86 billion, with rivals Anthropic and Inflection at $15 billion and $4 billion as of their most recent funding rounds. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altma ..read more