If we won’t hold our politicians accountable, perhaps we’ll hold our technology accountable. We’d better start somewhere soon, before America is reduced to an unrecognizable Tower of Babel. This week, there were signs of hope for this, but also signals that the worst might be yet to come. I’ll start [Keep reading]
Identity theft was a bad news, even worse news story in 2017, a new report has found. Despite a painful transition to fraud-fighting chip-enabled credit cards, and a series of other changes designed to stem the tide of fraud, identity theft actually swelled to record highs last year. Making matters [Keep reading]
When ATMs were first invented, the obvious nightmare scenario involved someone figuring out how to walk around draining machines of all cash. Well, that nightmare has just arrived in the U.S. Hackers have figured out how to trick machines into spitting out all their $20 bills, hit-the-jackpot style, minuses the [Keep reading]
I recently had to undertake one of the most arduous, perilous tasks consumers face — updating all my credit card automatic payments. My card had expired of natural causes — rare in the age of account hacking — so off I went, chasing after every card-paying account I have. These [Keep reading]
“THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” Nor was it a false alarm. We have a real problem with emergency management systems in America and if we don’t fix it soon, we’re not going to need an enemy to inflict major damage to our society. We’re going to do it ourselves. Saturday’s [Keep reading]
While Americans continue to bicker over Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election, America’s next big election is also being hacked, right now, a U.S. information security company claims. Trend Micro says the same hacker group that targeted the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign has already laid [Keep reading]
Call it Bitcoin blowback if you will. And that didn’t take long. Bitcoin’s meteoric valuation rise late last year had the usual impact of such a speculative bubble — during the holidays, everyone from your barista to your grandfather to your taxi driver was asking questions about blockchain and also [Keep reading]
We’re all getting quite the lesson in “speculative execution” today, and why faster isn’t always better. It’s the oldest story in technology — and perhaps in human existence. In a race to make things faster and better and stronger, we’ve once again stumbled into danger, or flown too close to [Keep reading]
If you have any doubts that the companies you trust with your data are indeed watching you closely, a few new creepy ads should disavow you of that notion. In fact, it seems digital firms are starting to lean in to the creepy. The ad above, and the ads below, [Keep reading]
Standard Oil committed many sins on the way to infamy, and Teddy Roosevelt’s s&*t list, but a big one was “vertical integration.” Rockefeller’s people owned oil refineries, and trucks that delivered gasoline, and the gas stations that sold it, and so on. It owned businesses up and down the supply [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan