Six Robots & Us

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. Before you get your week started, consider taking a look at Mercury's transit this morning -- it might be your last chance to see it for quite a while. Also, the Halo TV series is finally in production, and Apple's Mac Pr…

Cloud kitchens, ghost kitchens, dark kitchens. No doubt by now you know a little about these businesses that are moving into underused or more affordable properties that can be turned into shared workspaces for the purposes of cooking up meals exclusively for…

2019 offered a blistering catalog of books to peruse, on top of the prodigious publishing schedules of the past few years (if you think we are at Peak TV, you might want to check out your local bookstore for a counterpoint). We already checked in with Extra C…

Laser scanning technology, Lidar, is getting cheaper and could be how machines see in the future.

As the world fixates on Disney stealing Netflix's subscribers, Disney Plus' launch will give Netflix something else to seize upon: fresh ideas.

Hello! While most of Wall Street was focused on deal talks between Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade this week, another financial services deal caught my eye. Honey, which makes a browser extension that surfaces coupons while you shop online, sold to PayPal fo…

On this day 25 years ago, the Sony PlayStation released in Japan. A lot of us here at Kotaku have pretty fond memories of the PlayStation, from bartering for access with our siblings to sitting in dark, dusty basements, illuminated only by the light of an old…

Min-Liang Tan was “officially pissed off,” he wrote in an email to members of Razer’s marketing team in February of 2014. The gaming hardware company hadn’t made the business website Fast Company’s 2014 list of “Most Innovative Companies,” and in his email, p…

Twenty-six years in the making, Rod Stewart's incredibly detailed model railway is called "Grand Street and Three Rivers City." It's an imaginary U.S. city from the 1940s and takes up 1,500 square feet of his home in Los Angeles. Photos of the 74-year-old mod…

Infuriate your racist Facebook uncle this Thanksgiving with a Leopard RGB shirt. Read the rest

I know a guy who works at Boston Dynamics. He spends all day fussing over how to get a robot leg to bend the right way. It's kind of boring, but he likes tinkering with things. And hey, it's a job. When he sees people freaking out about whatever new robot the…

Daniel Moghimi, Berk Sunar, Thomas Eisenbarth and Nadia Heninger have published TPM-FAIL: TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks, their Usenix security paper, which reveals a pair of timing attacks against trusted computing chips ("Trusted Computing Modules" or…

The energy budget for a traditional shower for every person on the planet would exceed the entire world's (present-day) supply of wind power: even as we bring more renewables online, the energy consumption for planetary daily hot showers just doesn't pencil o…

An Australian woman's creepy, violent ex-boyfriend hacked her phone using stalkerware, then used that, along with her car's VIN number, to hack the remote control app for her car (possibly Landrover's Incontrol app), which allowed him to track her location, s…

Roger McNamee made a fortune as one of Silicon Valley’s earliest champions. Now he’s one of its most fervent critics, Brian Barth writes.

Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to the strange new world of the present, Joshua Rothman writes.

Will the future of space exploration involve swarms of smart robots aiding human pioneers by mining for resources, or even autonomously preparing new locations on other planets for human habitation? California-based startup OffWorld certainly thinks so. Here'…

Patricia Marx on her experience test-driving virtual reality, which included walking with Jesus, shopping for a sofa, and flying like a bird over New York City.

We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer.

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