Messaging Apps Have an Eavesdropping Problem : In early 2019, an eavesdropping bug in group FaceTime calls would have let attackers activate the microphone, and even the camera, of the iPhone they were calling and eavesdrop before the recipient did anything at all. The implications were so …

Apple Walks a Privacy Tightrope to Spot Child Abuse in iCloud : For years, tech companies have struggled between two impulses: the need to encrypt users’ data to protect their privacy, and the need to detect the worst sorts of abuse on their platforms. Now Apple is debuting a new cryptographic system …

John Deere Doubles Down on Silicon Valley and Robots  : There’s much talk about bringing more Silicon Valley-style innovation to America’s heartland. But when the heartland needs tech, it still comes to Silicon Valley. John Deere Thursday said it would acquire Bear Flag Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup that makes …

Protecting the Immune-Compromised Keeps Everyone Safe : Earlier this summer, when I began planning my family’s first real vacation in two years, I carefully chose which National Parks we’d visit. White Sands, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Joshua Tree, and Sequoia National Park easily made the cut—lots …

Amazon’s Massive GDPR Fine Shows the Law’s Power—and Limits : We were promised huge fines, and GDPR has finally delivered. Last week Amazon’s financial records revealed that officials in Luxembourg are fining the retailer €746 million ($883 million) for breaching the European regulation. The fine is unprecedented: It’s the biggest …

Dyson Omni-glide Stick Vac Review: A Better Broom Substitute : Dyson has carved out a pretty unique niche in the higher end of the home appliance industry. The company has a long history of turning plebeian products—air purifiers, hair dryers, vacuums—into exquisite, insanely priced prestige items that somehow always perform …

These Games Taught Me to Love the Fremium Grind : Like most people who play games, I took several months of indoor isolation as an opportunity to play a lot more of them. I went through the biggies: Cyberpunk, Doom Eternal, the much-appreciated PC release of Horizon: Zero Dawn. But …

These Algorithms Look at X-Rays—and Somehow Detect Your Race : Millions of dollars are being spent to develop artificial intelligence software that reads x-rays and other medical scans in hopes it can spot things doctors look for but sometimes miss, such as lung cancers. A new study reports that these …

What Rat Empathy May Reveal About Human Compassion : Bartal expected to see this activity in the rescuer rats, because human empathy appears in these areas. But she was surprised that even the ones that didn’t rescue their cage mates showed the neural traces. “The rats actually process the …

Facebook’s Reason for Banning Researchers Doesn’t Hold Up : When Facebook said Tuesday that it was suspending the accounts of a team of NYU researchers, it made it seem like the company’s hands were tied. The team had been crowdsourcing data on political ad targeting via a browser extension, …