Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) I’ve had an emotional connection with Street Fighter since I was 13 years old. It was early March 1991, and my friend and I were celebrating his 14th birthday in Santa Cruz, California, spending as much of our weekend at the boardwalk arcade as possible. His mom handed us each a $20 bill for the change machine, and we were determined to stretch our quarters as far as we could. Scrolling brawlers like … [Read more...]

Enlarge (credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) In November 1988, a graduate student at Cornell University named Robert Morris, Jr. inadvertently sparked a national crisis by unleashing a self-replicating computer worm on a VAX 11/750 computer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Morris had no malicious intent; it was merely a scientific experiment to see how many computers he could infect. But he made … [Read more...]

Enlarge / The aftermath of the Fort McMurray fire. (credit: Katie Daubs) At noon on May 3, the fire chief in the oil town of Fort McMurray was on TV telling everyone that the situation was in hand and they should stay at work and school and go to little league or whatever as usual. He had been watching the fire for a couple of days, but business as usual was what they did in Alberta in the spring; it was wildfire season, after all. At … [Read more...]

Enlarge Smartphone malware sold to governments around the world can surreptitiously record voice calls and nearby audio, collect data from apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, and hide apps or prevent them from running upon device reboots, researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team have found. An analysis Talos published on Thursday provides the most detailed look yet at Predator, a piece of advanced spyware that can be used against … [Read more...]

Enlarge / Part of the system of reticulated tunnels (egress complex) of a mound of Macrotermes michaelseni termites from Namibia. (credit: D. Andréen) The mounds that certain species of termites build above their nests have long been considered to be a kind of built-in natural climate control—an approach that has intrigued architects and engineers keen to design greener, more energy-efficient buildings mimicking those principles. There … [Read more...]

Enlarge / HP sometimes bricks third-party ink and toner that's over 90 percent full, Imaging Technology Council claims. (credit: Getty) HP printers have received a lot of flak historically and recently for invasive firmware updates that end up preventing customers from using ink with their printers. HP also encourages printer customers to sign up for HP+, a program that includes a free ink-subscription trial and irremovable firmware … [Read more...]