In May, a lawyer who was defending their client in a lawsuit against Columbia's biggest airline, Avianca, submitted a legal filing before a court in Manhattan, New York, that listed several previous cases as support for their main argument to continue the lawsuit. But when the court reviewed the lawyer's citations, it found something curious: Several we

On January 1, 2023, the Internet in Louisiana looked a little different than the Internet in Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas—its next-door state neighbors. And on May 1, the Internet in Utah looked quite different, depending on where you looked, than the Internet in Arizona, or Idaho, or Nevada, or California or Oregon or Washington or, really, much o

In January, a mental health nonprofit admitted that it had used Artificial Intelligence to help talk to people in distress.  Prompted first by a user's longing for personal improvement—and the difficulties involved in that journey—the AI tool generated a reply, which, with human intervention, could be sent verbatim in a chat b

The list of people and organizations that are hungry for your location data—collected so routinely and packaged so conveniently that it can easily reveal where you live, where you work, where you shop, pray, eat, and relax—includes many of the usual suspects. Advertisers, obviously, want to send targeted ads to you and they believe those ads have

How many passwords do you have? If you're at all like our Lock and Code host David Ruiz, that number hovers around 200. But the important follow up question is: How many of those passwords can you actually remember on your own? Prior studies suggest a number that sounds nearly embarrassing—probably around six.  After decades of requiring

Becky Holmes knows how to throw a romance scammer off script—simply bring up cannibalism.  In January, Holmes shared on Twitter that an account with the name "Thomas Smith" had started up a random chat with her that sounded an awful lot like the beginnins stages of a romance scam. But rather than instantly ignoring and blocking the advances—

Government threats to end-to-end encryption—the technology that secures your messages and shared photos and videos—have been around for decades, but the most recent threats to this technology are unique in how they intersect with a broader, sometimes-global effort to control information on the Internet. Take two efforts in the European

In November of last year, the AI research and development lab OpenAI revealed its latest, most advanced language project: A tool called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is so much more than "just" a chatbot. As users have shown with repeated testing and prodding, ChatGPT seems to "understand" things.  It can give you recipes that account for whatever dietary restr

In 2020, a photo of a woman sitting on a toilet—her shorts pulled half-way down her thighs—was shared on Facebook, and it was shared by someone whose job it was to look at that photo and, by labeling the objects in it, help train an artificial intelligence system for a vacuum. Bizarre? Yes. Unique? No.  In December, MIT Technology 

Last month, the TikTok user TracketPacer posted a video online called “Network Engineering Facts to Impress No One at Zero Parties.”  TracketPacer regularly posts fun, educational content about how the Internet operates. The account is run by a network engineer named Lexie Cooper, who has worked in a network ope

When did technology last excite you?  If Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is to be believed, your own excitement ended, simply had to end, after turning 35 years old. Decades ago, at first writing privately and later having those private writings published after his death, Adams had come up with "a set of rul

On June 7, 2021, the US Department of Justice announced a breakthrough: Less than one month after the oil and gas pipeline company Colonial Pipeline had paid its ransomware attackers roughly $4.4 million in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key that would help the company get its systems back up and running, the government had in turn found where&nbs

Decades ago, patching was, to lean into a corny joke, a bit patchy.  In the late 90s, the Microsoft operating system (OS) Windows 98 had a supportive piece of software that would find security patches for the OS so that users could then download those patches and deploy them to their computers. That software was simply called Windows Update. 

A thief has been stalking London.  This past summer, multiple women reported similar crimes to the police: While working out at their local gyms, someone snuck into the locker rooms, busted open their locks, stole their rucksacks and gym bags, and then, within hours, purchased thousands of pounds of goods. Apple, Selfridges, Balenciaga, Harrod's&md

Growing up is different for teens today.  Issues with identity, self-expression, bullying, fitting in, and trusting your friends and family—while all those certainly existed decades ago, they were never magnified in quite the same way that they are today, and that's largely because of one enormous difference: The Internet.  On the Internet, t