Taking in the new flick Chamber of Secrets is the perfect solution to all your problems because, as it turns out, nothing in the Harry Potter universe is quite what it seems.
My favorite new example of authoritarian obfuscation has to be the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's new techno-surveillance system Total Information Awareness.
Having billed myself as a "media nerd" for so long, I suppose it was inevitable that I'd eventually find myself in the only lab I've ever heard of whose principal area of investigation is simply "media" -- MIT Media Lab.
The money was good, and Peter had started to see the lights of MIT at the end of this peculiar tunnel. But that was when he began getting the e-mails. Panic was making his circuit diagrams swim.
A tour of MIT's complex computing infrastructure reveals a geek's paradise, complete with talking computers and even a Linux machine that can be worn like a jacket.
In Cambridge, Mass., the one thing that terrorists may want to bring down isn't a particle accelerator, but an innocuous, flammable wafer factory. Go figure.
Copyrights, patents and proprietary information -- from movies to expressed gene sequences -- will be available for a price on the dark net, the black e-market
A recent scientific study says women are "wired for emotion." It seems science is in the eye of the beholder, who generally turns out to be a raging sexist.
A newly developed area northwest of the campus called Technology Square@MIT occupies an odd geographical and institutional middle ground between academia and industry.
Communities can't thrive if they never answer to the least reputable of their members. So, for now I'm waiting for a new community system, one whose wisdom will destroy reputations and replace them with something more meaningful.
A news story about a woman chopping off her boyfriend's buttocks provides inspiration and insight into streaming movie piracy, kitty reality shows and desktop graffiti.
If we can create a machine whose reactions seem entirely human, do we need to waste our philosophical time wondering whether circuits can ever feel the way neurons do?
VeriSign has often been sloppy about maintaining accurate information about the ownership of domain names -- sometimes handing off ownership quite literally at the drop of a fax.
You thought the exploits of an angry geek were bad? Sure, a geek can mess with your computer. But a wonk, who obsesses over public policy, can destroy your world. Or fix it.
A number of companies have gotten fucked when their 'net logs reveal patterns of sexually abusive emails or porn surfing. So why do they keep those logs? To fuck employees in return.
Digerati elders Kevin Kelly and Stuart Brand have launched the Long Bets Foundation, a project that hopes to hold "futurists" responsible for their predictions.
Three online companies -- Yahoo!, Morpheus and KaZaa -- have all learned an important lesson from AOL is: give away free stuff and then treat your customers like shit.
Since the days of computer-generated New Wave music, we have lost our irrational fear of computers, only to replaced it with something far stupider: unconditional love.
Democratic communication has its downside. You get to hear exactly what people are really thinking, and sometimes that's way more information than you wanted.
Blogs -- sites published constantly by anyone and everyone -- have turned me into a nervous person. Reading them makes me want to run around in circles squeaking like a beaver.
