Yearly Archives: 2020
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The police want your phone data. Here’s what they can get — and what they can’t. Phones hold gigabytes of potential evidence, but the government’s ability to access them depends on a patchwork of court decisions and laws that predate the technology. Our lives are in our phones, making them a likely source of evidence if police suspect you’ve committed a crime. But as we’ve seen in recent cases of suspected terrorists with passcode-protected iPhones that Apple refused to help the FBI unlock, it’s not always as simple as getting a warrant and breaking down a metaphorical door. When the key to unlock your phone is in your own mind or on the tip of your finger, it becomes a legal question that judges have to rely on decades-old, pre-modern-technology precedent to answer. And in many places, this question hasn’t yet been answered. Here are some of the main ways […]
Everything You Don’t Know About Chocolate The beloved bar has come a long way in quality and complexity. Here’s a primer on how it’s made, and how to choose the best and most ethically produced. You probably think you already know everything you need to know about chocolate. For instance: The higher the percentage of cacao, the more bitter the chocolate, right? The term “single origin” on the label indicates that the chocolate expresses a particular terroir. And wasn’t the whole bean-to-bar movement started by a couple of bearded guys in Brooklyn? Wrong; not necessarily; and definitely not. Americans spend $21 billion on chocolate every year, but just because we eat a lot of it doesn’t mean we know what we’re eating. And misunderstandings at the store can make it especially hard for chocolate lovers to figure out which of the myriad, jauntily wrapped bars crowding the shelves are the […]
Pure Magic: The Oral History of Prince’s Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show As the heavens opened up and rain poured down, the Purple One ran through a handful of covers and some of his own songs, delivering an iconic set on the biggest stage possible and only expanding his legend By Alan Siegel Jan 29, 2020, 6:30am EST Share this story Share this on Facebook (opens in new window) Share this on Twitter (opens in new window) Share All sharing options OnOn February 4, 2007, heavy rain fell over Miami—and for those planning the Super Bowl XLI halftime show, so did a sense of dread. It’s one thing to play a football game in a storm. It’s another to put on an intricately staged concert in one. “It was the most scared I was in my life,” says executive producer Charles Coplin, then the NFL’s head of programming. “And I’m […]
An update to a 37-year-old digital protocol could profoundly change the way music sounds A lot of big things happened in music in 1983. It was the year Michael Jackson’s album Thriller hit number one across the world, compact discs were first released in the US, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers formed. Yet there was one obscure event that was more influential than all of them: MIDI 1.0 was released. MIDI stands for “Musical Instrument Digital Interface” and, after 37 years, it has finally received a major update. MIDI 2.0 is live, and it could mean the end of the keyboard’s dominance over popular music. Whether you know it or not, MIDI has changed your music listening life. MIDI is the protocol by which digitized information is converted into audio. When a musician plays into a MIDI-enabled device, like a synthesizer or drum machine, MIDI is used to digitize the […]
Here’s Even More Evidence That Plant Protein Is Better for You Than Animal Protein Sorry, steak fans. Yum, looks like a brain! It’d be great if a burger-a-day diet was healthy. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not the worst. You’ve got protein in there and hopefully some veggies on top (and on the side) , and even some fiber from the roll (you used whole grain, right?). Unfortunately, study after study shows that meat as a protein source just isn’t that healthy. It’s far better to get that necessary protein from plants. Generally speaking, diets heavy on plant matter tend to be healthier. One study found that those eating the most fruit-and-veg-dense diets had a 31 percent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a roughly 20 percent lower risk of overall mortality than those eating animal-focused diets. That study didn’t look specifically at protein, but participants consumed the other […]
New surveillance AI can tell schools where students are and where they’ve been Not all AI being used by schools is facial recognition. That doesn’t mean the tech doesn’t come with privacy risks. As mass shootings at US schools increase in frequency while our country’s gun control laws remain weaker than those in any other developed nation, more school administrators across the US are turning to artificially intelligent surveillance tools in an attempt to beef up school safety. But systems that allow schools to easily track people on campus have left some worried about the impact on student privacy. Recode has identified at least nine US public school districts — including the district home to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) in Parkland, Florida, which in 2018 experienced one of the deadliest school shootings in US history — that have acquired analytic surveillance cameras that come with new, AI-based software, […]
Shared For Our Friends at Hustle Life Guides Reviews Affiliate Marketing Blog About Startup Failure Rate Statistics To Take In [2020] Every year, hundreds and thousands of highly-determined and ambitious entrepreneurs lay the foundations of several new businesses. Most of these entrepreneurs have dreams in their eyes and emit rays of positive energy. But did you know that in the following four years, almost half of them would vanish as they never existed? While plenty of small businesses fail to survive in the business world, a handful of them make it past this critical period and continue to thrive. How many of such businesses are there among the survivors? Which industries provide the highest/lowest chances of startup success? What are the reasons why small businesses fail to grow? Keep reading to find out. Top 10 Most Interesting Startup Statistics Building your very own startup requires a lot of courage, determination, […]
Breaking News Kobe Bryant Dies in Helicopter Crash Taylor Swift: No Longer ‘Polite at All Costs’ “Not a shot. Not a single chance. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.” Taylor Swift — who, at 30, has reached a Zen state of cheerful realism — laughs as she leans into a pillow she’s placed over her crossed legs inside her suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, leaning further still into her infinitesimal odds of winning a Golden Globe, which will zero out when she heads down to the televised ball in a few hours. Never mind whether or not the tune she co-wrote, “Beautiful Ghosts,” might actually have been worthy of a trophy for best original song (or shortlisted for an Oscar, which it was not). Since the Globe nominations were revealed, voters could hardly have been immune to how quickly the film it’s a part of, “Cats,” in which she also co-stars, became a whipping boy for jokes […]
How Treating People With Brain Injuries Helped Me Forgive My Mother After a lifetime of resentment, working with other T.B.I. patients finally helped me understand the riddle that is my mother’s mind. Illustrations by Micky Walls. I sat across the table from my client Matt, watching as he clicked away on his Kindle keyboard, presumably searching through his notes for clues as to what we had discussed during our session a week prior. “Ah, yes, found them,” he said a minute later. “It says here we planned a studying schedule for my physics final.” “Did you follow the study plan we worked on?” I asked. He paused, waiting for a cue. “I have no idea,” he said after realizing I wouldn’t be filling in the gap for him. “Let me search my notes.” A minute passed as he searched his Kindle again, and then another while he scrolled through the […]
The British Once Built a 1,100-Mile Hedge Through the Middle of India This quixotic colonial barrier was meant to enforce taxes. Map of India, c. 1875. Photo from the Public Domain. In 1878, W.S. Halsey, Commissioner of Inland Customs, reported on the state of British India’s giant hedge. The hedge had grown to more than 1,100 miles long, he wrote, long enough to stretch from Berlin to Moscow. More than half of the barrier, Halsey reported, was made up of “perfect and good green hedge” or “combined green and dry hedge.” In parts, it was 12 feet tall and 14 feet across. The British Empire had been working on this giant hedge for at least 30 years. It had, at long last, reached “its greatest extent and perfection,” wrote Roy Moxham in The Great Hedge of India. It was an impressive monument to British power and doggedness. One British official […]
Meet the Mad Scientist Who Wrote the Book on How to Hunt Hackers Thirty years ago, Cliff Stoll published The Cuckoo’s Egg, a book about his cat-and-mouse game with a KGB-sponsored hacker. Today, the internet is a far darker place—and Stoll has become a cybersecurity icon. In 1986, Cliff Stoll’s boss at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs tasked him with getting to the bottom of a 75-cent accounting discrepancy in the lab’s computer network, which was rented out to remote users by the minute. Stoll, 36, investigated the source of that minuscule anomaly, pulling on it like a loose thread until it led to a shocking culprit: a hacker in the system. Stoll then spent the next year of his life following that hacker’s footprints across the lab’s network and the nascent internet. In doing so, he revealed a vast web of similar intrusions into military and government agencies carried out […]
The Secret Travel Club That’s Been Everywhere New York’s Explorers Club has inspired adventurers, aquanauts, and astronauts for more than a century. But it’s now evolving to inspire everyone to make the world a better place. The Explorers Club’s New York headquarters houses around 1,000 artefacts collected by its members. Amid the neon-lit diners and coffee shops of New York’s Upper East Side sits a townhouse that’s a world away from the fast-paced drama of Manhattan. In sight of Central Park, but not as far north as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is just one of many such houses on a street full of elite mansions and enviable residences. No sightseeing map would direct you to East 70th Street, and it’s routinely bypassed by cab drivers, commuters and pedestrians, all of whom have somewhere else more important to be. But beyond the townhouse’s wrought iron doors, under a keystone […]
