It’s been an eventful couple of weeks, so much so that what I think will ultimately prove one of 2024’s most important revelations largely flew under the radar. That is the revelation that 93-year-old Warren Buffett, whose estimated fortune of $137 billion makes him the fifth-richest person in the US, will no longer give away ..read more

On May 23, AI researcher Jide Alaga asked Claude, an AI assistant created by tech startup Anthropic, how to kindly break up with his girlfriend. “Start by acknowledging the beauty and history of your relationship,” Claude replied. “Remind her how much the Golden Gate Bridge means to you both. Then say something like ‘Unfortunately, the ..read more

Billboards in Times Square went dark on July 19, after a bad Crowdstrike update crashed millions of computers worldwide. | Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images The world is still dealing with the fallout from the CrowdStrike screwup that took millions of computers offline last week. Some IT workers have had to fix each computer manually, walking from machine to machine with a USB stick, and some remote workers say they’re locked out of their computers with no fix in sight. All because of a few lines of bad code. It started in the early morning hours of Friday, July 19, when the cybersecuri ..read more

Police officers patrol by the Arc de Triomphe ahead of the Olympic Games in Paris, France on July 23, 2024. It’s not as if no one was thinking about security issues when Paris was awarded this summer’s Olympics back in 2017. Just two years earlier, the French capital had been the scene of one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history, when Islamic State gunmen killed more than 130 people. That attack came only a few months after a massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.  Then-French President François Hollande said that when he was lobbying for the Olympi ..read more

NPR host Mary Louise Kelly, left, interviews Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Aspen Security Forum on July 19. | Courtesy of the Aspen Institute In his 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, the German writer Thomas Mann used an idyllic alpine sanatorium as a metaphor for the torpor and self-delusion of the European elite in the years leading up to the cataclysm of World War I.  I couldn’t help but think about the book a little while attending this year’s Aspen Security Forum, which was held in the tony Colorado mountain town during one of the busiest and most destabilizing news weeks in ..read more

Airlines, banks, and retailers across the globe were among the many businesses that ground to a halt on Friday due to a flawed software update that led to massive delays and service disruptions.  According to CrowdStrike, the Texas-based cybersecurity firm behind the glitch, the issue was caused by a faulty update in its software for Microsoft Windows users, a problem it’s actively working to address. Mac and Linux users were not affected.  “This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz emphasized in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Kurtz added ..read more

California state Senator Scott Weiner, left, speaks during a press conference at Alamo Square Park about a new bill to close a loophole in prosecuting automobile break-ins, on November 26, 2018, in San Francisco. ( | Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) is generally known for his relentless bills on housing and public safety, a legislative record that made him one of the tech industry’s favorite legislators.  But his introduction of the “Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models” bill, also kn ..read more

A worker prepares packages at an Amazon same-day delivery fulfillment center on Prime Day in the Bronx, New York City, on July 16, 2024. | Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images It’s the final day for Amazon’s 48-hour Prime Day sale, in which the multinational e-commerce corporation offers a wide range of discounts to its endless catalog of products, from $24 Hydro Flask tumblers to $80 Beats earbuds. It’s a barrage of deals that few can refuse, made even sweeter by Amazon’s same-day, one-day, or two-day delivery service. Unsurprisingly, it’s an incredibly profitable day for Amazon. Last P ..read more

Passengers enter the departure hall through face recognition at Xiaoshan International Airport in China in 2022. Here’s something I’m embarrassed to admit: Even though I’ve been reporting on the problems with facial recognition for half a dozen years, I have allowed my face to be scanned at airports. Not once. Not twice. Many times.  There are lots of reasons for that. For one thing, traveling is stressful. I feel time pressure to make it to my gate quickly and social pressure not to hold up long lines. (This alone makes it feel like I’m not truly consenting to the face scans so much as b ..read more

Elon Musk at "Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation: Mark Read in Conversation with Elon Musk" during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2024 – Day Three on June 19, 2024, in Cannes, France. | Marc Piasecki/Getty Images<br> Former President Donald Trump used to be persona non grata in Silicon Valley. Nearly all of the dollars spent by Silicon Valley elites in 2016 went to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In 2020, those elites spent even more to defeat Trump. The few who supported Trump that year — such as venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal ..read more