technology

Better eye droppers could save a lot of money on prescription drugs.

Could blockchain help?

The real reason behind data-localization requirements.

A case study in how the country creates, disseminates, and consumes information.

Alan Jacobs on how Silicon Valley came to dominate our vision of the future.

Entrepreneurs are leveraging technology, including smartphone apps, to accomplish what bureaucracies are incapable of achieving alone.

Barton Swaim, Luddite 2.0

Alan Jacobs reviews Edward Tenner’s ‘The Efficiency Paradox.’

Drones are an evolving security threat, from intel gathering to targeting individuals. Is the U.S. prepared?

Facebook and Twitter suffer blows while the rest of the tech market strengthens.

Um, no.

It’s the telecoms who are invading our privacy.

Marco Rubio warns that the United States is not ready for the havoc that impersonation technology can wreak.

Elon Musk is in the news. (Again.) The latest announcement came last Thursday when Musk’s Boring Company signed a contract with the city of Chicago to build an "express loop" from O'Hare Airport to the city's downtown. In one important way, the deal is wholly unlike most of Musk's other projects—it…

A little parenting heresy on smartphones and screen time.

In a move that will surprise no one who reads science-fiction, Amazon is now selling a facial recognition tool, called Rekognition, to local police departments, marketing it as a “low cost” way to track persons of interest. According to the company, this tool recognizes “tens of millions of faces”…

On May 15, Facebook released its first-ever “Community Standards Enforcement Report.” Despite its numbingly bureaucratic title, the report contains startling details about the scope of the challenge facing the company as it tries to monitor violent, extremist, and false content on its platform;…

Imagine that in a few days, or maybe a few years, the United States suffers an unprecedented ransomware attack.

You’ve got to admit it’s getting better.

The politics of applause.

The darkest show on TV—Netflix’s tech-dystopian ‘Black Mirror’—is itself a sign of hope for a human future.

Facebook’s unofficial approach to violating the privacy of its users has always been “ask for forgiveness, not permission.” This week’s testimony by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before a joint Judiciary and Commerce Committee in the Senate on Tuesday and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on…

The one big thing Zuckerberg's testimony didn't address.

From hero to zero.

Silicon Valley has long been the Wild West of capitalism, but we may finally be reaching a point where Congress feels both entitled and justified in starting to regulate monopolistic tech giants. Exhibit A: The announcement Wednesday that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be testifying before…

“Believe me,” said—well, not really “said,” but posted—Mark Zuckerberg. Raising Chico Marx’s old question, Who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?

One of the great legislative challenges of history, from the Hittite abominations to the regulation of internet porn, has been anticipating the latent evils unleashed by man’s ingenuity. Now, child sex dolls—robots engineered to warm to the human touch and disturbingly lifelike in their…

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering a plan to integrate drones across U.S. national airspace. Several large corporations have proposed a low-altitude control grid, which they would operate, to manage these unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), popularly referred to as drones. For…

Can a GoFundMe Bring Back a Beloved Theme Park? Probably not. But that’s not stopping a man in my native Cleveland who wants to bring back the famous Geauga Lake theme park. He’s started a GoFundMe to raise $20 million bucks to start bringing the park back. That’s a fraction of price you’d need to…

The end of video? When I was younger, I recall a photoshop the Sidney (Ohio) Daily News did on the front page of Tonya Harding becoming a wrestler. The story was about the wonders of digital photo editing technology, and was essentially the first "fake news" I ever saw. Now, such technology is…

Dear Matt,

You surely saw the news: At 8:07 on January 13, a quiet Saturday morning in Honolulu, Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency sent out to a million cell phones a text that read, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Does America really have only 11 main cultures? That's what a new map by Colin Woodard suggests, and it has lots of people arguing. I grew up in Yankeedom (Cleveland), went to school in the Midlands (Saint Louis), and now live in Tidewater. Naturally, Saint Louis and Cleveland are more similar to…

It was one of those too-rare instances when a lot of clicking and digital pulling-on-threads and serendipitous stumbling-on-facts actually resulted in something other than another hour lost down the internet rabbit hole.

A few years ago I wrote a piece called “Bitcoin Is Dead” and about once a week since then I’ve gotten an email from some aggrieved techno-utopian saying, “Oh yeah? How about issuing a correction—bitcoin rocks!”

Let’s say that someone—maybe Jack Donaghy, or Steve Jobs, or God—appeared in a dream and asked you to come up with the worst idea in the history of the internet. What would you tell them?

The Berkshire Museum, a venerable, century-old museum of art and history in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is making enormous changes to its dowdy displays. Two years of planning, 22 focus groups (uh-oh), and two multimillion-dollar fundraising drives have yielded a “New Vision,” described as a bold,…

The Scrapbook has a smartphone, but we are sorely tempted to go back to a flip phone. Or maybe something with a dial. Smartphones were supposed to make everything easier, but we’re not so sure.

The Scrapbook has a smartphone, but we are sorely tempted to go back to a flip phone. Or maybe something with a dial. Smartphones were supposed to make everything easier, but we’re not so sure.

Remembering Jerry Pournelle (1933-2017).

YOU get a baby, YOU get a baby, EVERYONE GETS A BABY! If you're not hip to the popular memes kids are using, that's an Oprah reference. Amazon mistakenly sent out an email to lots of people yesterday—perhaps hundreds of thousands—suggesting somebody bought something off of their (in most cases…

Plenty are the benefits of new technologies, but several news items in the last week are making us yearn for the days of Rolodexes, Polaroid photos, and library card catalogs with actual paper cards.

The Fourth Amendment is in a sorry state. The constitutional provision intended to protect us and our property from unreasonable searches and seizures has been weakened over decades—a fact that ought to be of acute concern at a time when surveillance technology is increasingly intrusive and…

Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites…

The Fourth Amendment is in a sorry state. The constitutional provision intended to protect us and our property from unreasonable searches and seizures has been weakened over decades—a fact that ought to be of acute concern at a time when surveillance technology is increasingly intrusive and…

Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites…

This week on the Confab, senior writer Michael Warren talks about the terrible week in Trump. John Yoo tells us what new technologies mean for the rules of war.​

In Chaos Monkeys, his memoir about his rocky career in high tech, Antonio García Martínez lists a few pithy rules for understanding how Silicon Valley really works. The best of these insider insights: “Company culture is what goes without saying.” That is, if you want really to understand the firms…

In Chaos Monkeys, his memoir about his rocky career in high tech, Antonio García Martínez lists a few pithy rules for understanding how Silicon Valley really works. The best of these insider insights: “Company culture is what goes without saying.” That is, if you want really to understand the firms…

There’s a secret society in Silicon Valley. “Imagine an engineer at Google, let’s say he’s a conservative—a red meat conservative. Does he want to go work at the Heritage Foundation? Probably not,” Aaron Ginn, age 29, tells me at a “hacienda-style” D.C. bar called Mission, apparently in reference…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Where is President Trump’s response to the terrorist attack in London? Not the June 3 attack, when three Muslim men in a van drove over several pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing many more in a market. Eight were killed and nearly 50 injured, and it prompted a series of tweets from Trump…

By most measures, Will Manidis is like many other American high school students. He plays lacrosse for Westtown, his Quaker boarding school outside Philadelphia. He’s captain of Westtown's robotics team, which has deepened his interest in math and computer science. Last fall, in the heat of the…

By most measures, Will Manidis is like many other American high school students. He plays lacrosse for Westtown, his Quaker boarding school outside Philadelphia. He's captain of Westtown's robotics team, which has deepened his interest in math and computer science. Last fall, in the heat of the…

Not long ago I visited a friend who'd moved to Silicon Valley to work in the startup industry. He had undergone a baffling change: The formerly sports-jacketed East Coaster had become a gluten-free, paleo-dieting, T-shirt-wearing Burning Man.

Not long ago I visited a friend who’d moved to Silicon Valley to work in the startup industry. He had undergone a baffling change: The formerly sports-jacketed East Coaster had become a gluten-free, paleo-dieting, T-shirt-wearing Burning Man.

The electric power system makes our modern, mobile, information-age economy possible. But it is organized in much the same way it was in 1884, when Thomas Edison created the first system of power plants to light up homes and businesses in lower Manhattan. By way of comparison, the iPhone, which is…

If you've been to an Olive Garden anytime in the last year, you'll notice the Italian casual dining chain no longer offers unlimited pasta on the menu. More consequentially, the Olive Garden menu itself is displayed by a computer monitor at your table. It's called Ziosk, a black 7-inch touchscreen…

I want to share a fantastic Bloomberg Businessweek piece on the Medallion Fund by Katherine Burton.

Since Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat last week, there have been a lot of stories about Clinton campaign hubris. Specifically, the Democrats seemed to badly whiff on a lot of campaign fundamentals: don't nominate someone under FBI investigation who has no retail political skills; have a clear…

In a rush to beat out the latest iPhone, Samsung rolled out its Galaxy Note7 with one minor flaw: The battery. I'd hate to be the engineer who had to explain that one to company vice chairman and heir apparent Lee Jae-yong: "You see, sir, well, it's the battery. No big deal. It just, on occasion,…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask it here.

A new article from the Urban Institute, a Washington-based community-engagement research organization, calls out Pokémon GO's failure to break down barriers and reach marginalized groups.

A program overseen by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as part of the "reset" with Russia wound up enhancing Russia's military technology and funneling millions of dollar to the Clinton Foundation, according to a new report by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer and the Government…

Though I am an Apple user—phone and laptop—and happy with both, the tepid response to the latest Apple dog and pony show left me feeling a bit of schadenfreude. The digital revolution is pushing other technologies into the grave, and like a lot of people, I mourn that—in the way, probably, that an…

Elise Viebeck of The Hill reports that:

The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol features guest Jim Manzi:

As any visitor to New York City discovers, the Big Apple isn’t the best place to get a hotel room. Rates top $300 per night, the highest in the country, and supply is quite limited.

While the rise of the barbarous Islamic State and the spread of the modern day plague of Ebola has many concerned about the state of civilization here on earth, some at the White House are turning their attention beyond our planet. A Tuesday entry on the White House blog solicits ideas for…

Over at the New Atlantis, Alan Jacobs has a post arguing that Twitter has changed in a fundamental--and fundamentally unpleasant--way. A sample:

The results of a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) audit released Tuesday found that "[w]hile the IRS is complying with GSA requirements to recycle or donate used information technology (IT) equipment, TIGTA found several areas for improvement." The IRS got rid of more than…

A buddy of mine who works in tech has been telling me for years that we're all doomed. The problem, he says, is that there are too many systems that are too unsecure. When Stuxnet hit, the only aspect of the hack that surprised him was that the American security establishment was willing to show…

With growing amusement (and only mild alarm), my wife and I have been noticing how our parents’ quirks have gotten, well, quirkier. My mother and father, for instance, steadfastly refuse to text-message. “I don’t want to get charged,” my mother says. And besides, “Why do you need to text when you…

President Obama met some Japanese robots and didn't like it. "I have to say that the robots were a little scary, they were too lifelike. They were amazing," Obama said at a technology display while visiting Japan.

Employers’ requests for the limited number of H1-B visas that allow foreign skilled workers to work and live here has wildly exceeded the supply. After all, the visas allow employers to hire foreigners, rather than bid up wage rates to attract American citizens, or incur the cost of training…

Healthcare.gov has eliminated the web chat customer service option. Sometime around the beginning of March, the online chat feature that has been present since Healthcare.gov was launched disappeared.  Although previous posts on the Healthcare.gov blog still refer to the "live chat" feature, the…

The CEO of AOL, Tim Armstrong, said on CNBC this morning that "Obamacare is an additional $7.1 million expense for us as a company."

Steve Jobs knocked their socks off (if in fact “they" were wearing socks) when, as Megan Garber of the Atlantic writes:

The Iranian president tells Fareed Zakaria of CNN that, under the nuclear deal, there will be no limitations to nuclear technology and no destruction of centrifuges:

Megan R. Wilson of The Hill reports that:

It's well over a year since the United Nations intellectual property agency got caught undermining the U.N.’s own sanctions—shipping U.S.-origin computers and related high-tech equipment to North Korea and Iran. In classic U.N. fashion, the World Intellectual Property Organization, known as WIPO,…

Michio Kaku is a sort of pop physicist who makes a specialty of glibly forecasting future technology. He had a piece in the New York Times recently making 10 “predictions for the future,” and they’re about as facile as one would expect from a stalwart of the TED Talk circuit. Take just two…

In my recent WEEKLY STANDARD essay, “Privacy Be Damned,” I warned about the operational problems and privacy issues raised by the “health exchanges” that HHS will force tens of millions of Americans to use as of October 1 of this year. In that essay, I noted that “the HHS inspector general and the…

Reuters reports that the federal government is "months behind" its efforts to set up data security measures for the state health insurance exchanges, set to open on October 1, as created by Obamacare:

Just this week, news broke that the "world’s first entirely 3D-printed gun" was successfully built and test-fired by an engineer in Texas.  The technology involves a special printer that uses melted polymers to generate plastic components for a variety of uses, now including working firearms.…

Remember the IBM computer, called "Watson," that played Jeopardy and won?  That was a delightful stunt. Now, Watson is getting real.

In December 1972, Eugene Cernan took a long climb up a short ladder on the lunar surface and became the last human being to set foot on another world. It was forty years ago this week that Apollo 17 completed its quarter million mile journey home, marking the last time to date humans have traveled…

Consumers are justifiably confused when it comes to picking out a smartphone. Many high-end iPhones and Androids contain features that are not terribly useful in everyday life. Not-so-early adopters also worry that they will purchase a state-of-the-art phone for $399 and then, just a few months…

Last April, the Iranian Oil Ministry and the National Iranian Oil Company noticed a problem with some of their computers: A small number of machines were spontaneously erasing themselves. Spooked by the recent Stuxnet attack, which had wrecked centrifuges in their nuclear labs, the Iranians…

Investigating Chinese surveillance is a rather lonely job. For all the dissidents yammering about dramatic arrests and torture and harvesting of organs, you can’t really guarantee publication or much of an audience unless you can prove that there are links to America: brand name corporations, scary…

This is starting to become a familiar refrain:

The passing of Steve Jobs has sparked an immense amount of reflection and appreciation—just as his retirement did months ago, and the publication of Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs will do later this month. But for all the talk of Steve Jobs and the world that he created, attention must be paid…

Andrew Biggs and Matthew Jensen: Cutting spending, not raising taxes, is the path to prosperity.

This week the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on COICA (the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeit Act). It sounds like harmless enough legislation, or at least it did to members of the committee who voted for it unanimously, 19-0, during the lame duck session last year. But…

The New York Times has published a piece on Charles Krauthammer's love of chess:

"What we have is the world's best chess player vs. Garry Kasparov."