From snapping photos with a cellphone to streaming music through a browser, much of the tech trickery we take for granted in 2017 looks simple on the surface but involves a complex series of computations and calculations behind the scenes to make the magic happen. As an example, take Google.com.
If you had any doubts about Apple releasing a bezel-free iPhone in September, you can probably throw those out the window. The company just pushed out a version of the HomePod firmware, and not only does the code tell us more about how Apple’s smart speaker will work, it also offers a few clues about the next iPhone.
Have you heard? A tiny bug in Cloudflare’s code has led an unknown quantity of data—including passwords, personal information, messages, cookies, and more—to leak all over the internet. If you haven’t heard of the so-called Cloudbleed vulnerability, keep reading. This is a scary big deal.
Getting kids to code is a great idea—but it’s not always easy. Now a team of researchers from Harvard has developed this little robot, called Root, that’s designed to make writing code a more tangible experience.
Don’t know your adverbs from your adjectives? This little web app colors text so that each part of speech is a different hue—just like text editors that highlight the syntax of different coding languages.
You shouldn’t always believe your eyes—because there’s much out there that you can’t see. A new, free algorithm created by UCLA engineers enables you to discern details in images that would be impossible to observe any other way.
To anyone who ever tells you that programming isn’t creative, show them this. In this video, Sébastien Rannou recreates the whole of Daft Punk’s “Aerodynamic” using just a hundred or so lines of code. And it sounds pretty damn great.
The <pointy brackets> are an archetypal pair of characters in the world of computing. But if you’ve ever wondered how they became so pervasive, you’re in luck.
If programming isn’t political enough for you, maybe you need to try a new language. How about TrumpScript, which lets you create code that the great Donald Trump would be proud to execute. If he could, you know, understand it.
Notice anything weird about your News Feed today? Scores of users are confused by typically smarmy “Friends on Facebook” messages that are celebrating 46 years of friendship. It appears to be a Unix glitch of colossal proportions.
Not that you need another reminder that government cybersecurity is screwed, but here we are: After a four-year federal probe, contractors will pay a combined $12.75 million in civil penalties to settle a suit alleging that they let Russian programmers write military code.
Twitter did a silly thing today. It took away its neutral star icon and turned it into a smarmy heart. Turns out, it’s extremely easy to replace that heart. Let me help you with this technique from Robert McNees.
This is the story of how I wrote a Twitter bot to automatically enter contests and ended up winning an average of four contests per day, every day, for about nine months straight.
If you’ve got a few spare minutes, you might enjoy a quick game of Tiny-Twitch. But then you’ll no doubt end up amazed by the fact that the source code for the whole thing can fit inside a single tweet.
If you work with code every day, you’re likely used to GitHub—a place to store code with all the revision history you ever need. Now, though, Google has its own take on the service, open as a beta release for you to use for free.
Everyone needs a hobby. For Lee Hsien Loon, that happens to be writing C++ Sudoku solvers and publishing them on the Internet. Lee Hsien Loong also happens to be the Prime Minister of Singapore.
We heard the rumors over and over: Android apps are coming to Windows 10. It sounded like a good way to let Windows Phone and Desktop users fill the gaps in the Windows Store—but it isn’t happening. Instead, Microsoft is making it ridiculously easy to port Android apps to the Windows Store. And everything else too:…
18F is a group within the U.S. General Services Administration that builds digital services for government. Recently, they asked whether their code passed the "Bechdel test" for tech. Here's what they found.
If you find Skype a little too... polished, then why not use your computer's abilities in a rather more retro way? p2pvc is a point-to-point color video chat system, only it runs in terminal and renders the images in ASCII.
In the wake of a police raid in Sweden that shut down the Pirate Bay as we know it, a number of opportunistic torrent sites have created clones. We've said before, Pirate Bay clones are potentially problematic. Nevertheless, Isohunt just launched a tool that makes it confusingly easy to set up your very own open…
