Paper pushing: What happened to voting machines in Virginia?

Over the course of the 2016 presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump asserted the election was going to be “rigged” by unspecified actors. No evidence was ever offered to support that claim, and his concerns about election integrity curiously seem to have evaporated on November 9. But the uncertainty and doubt generated by those statements, and […]

Ask a technologist: Should I invest in cryptocurrency?

Late in the evening of Halloween 2008, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakomoto published a white paper to an obscure email list. The paper described a new system of exchanging value, named “Bitcoin,” which wouldn’t require the involvement or intervention of a third party. At the time, the paper was largely ignored. But nearly 10 years later, […]

Ask a technologist: Will losing net neutrality protections affect me?

In December, the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal its own 2015 ruling about how Internet service providers should be regulated, saying it was eliminating “heavy-handed micromanagement” of the Internet. Many users saw it differently, and lamented what they saw as a loss of important safeguards. At the heart of the FCC’s ruling is […]