Technology

Trading Domain Names For A Day With The Candidates

11:39am August 24, 2013

Michael Deutsch loves politics so much so that he systematically purchases Internet domain names that political campaigns might want. But it's not a get-rich-quick scheme. When the campaigns come knocking, asking to take over the domains, he bargains for face time with the candidates.

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Hackers attend the 2011 Def Con conference in Las Vegas. The 2013 conference as well as the Black Hat hacker conference kicks off this week.

National

What We're Watching As World's Big Hackers Meet In Las Vegas

2:24pm August 22, 2013

by Steve Henn

Each summer, thousands of security researchers, hacktivists, black hats, white hats and feds descend on Las Vegas for Black Hat and Def Con. A look at the stories and trends we're keeping an eye on.

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President Obama is seen on a video camera as he delivers a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2010. In addition to footage of official events, the White House now has thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes video that it will archive.

Future Historians: Good Luck Sifting Through Obama Video

12:43pm August 22, 2013

by Ari Shapiro

While a photographer has been an official part of the White House staff since John F. Kennedy was president, an official videographer is something new. Scholars say the thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes footage could be a vital resource, but it may not be very easy to use.

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About a year since launching, Vine says it has more than 40 million registered users.

National

How Vine Settled On 6 Seconds

8:53pm August 20, 2013

by Laura Sydell

According to numbers released Tuesday, Twitter's one-year-old video-sharing app Vine now has about 40 million registered users. The app lets users shoot a maximum of six seconds per Vine, so we wanted to know why the limit's set at six seconds and not a second longer.

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Teenagers turn to their phones and social media to find rides.

Teens Use Twitter To Thumb Rides

5:25pm August 20, 2013

by Bianca Brooks

Need a ride to the party or the concert? Instead of making endless phone calls, these days teens turn to social media to arrange transportation. It's called ridesharing, a form of cyber-hitchhiking used by a generation that isn't rushing to get a driver's license or dream car.

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Nate Anderson is a senior editor at Ars Technica. His work has also been published in The Economist and Foreign Policy.

Books
Arts

Wild, Wild Web: Policing An Early, Lawless Internet

2:36pm August 20, 2013

There was a time when many thought the Internet was beyond government regulation, its very chaos a source of creativity and strength. Nate Anderson's The Internet Police looks at how law enforcement went about changing that.

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BlackBerry smartphones on a table during a "BlackBerry Brunch" in June in Berlin.

The End Of Buttons: The New Gesture-Control Era

6:58pm August 19, 2013

by Elise Hu

The newest smartphones are abandoning both physical and on-screen buttons in favor of gestures. As with so much behavior change ushered in by technology, the change happens before we take wider notice.

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The San Francisco Public Library has been digitizing its historical document collections for years, including the scrapbooks of famed homicide detective Theodore Kytka. The SFPL is among scores of libraries and archives adding their digital collections to

Education

Combining The Nation's Digitized Libraries, All In One Place

6:58pm August 19, 2013

by Laura Sydell

Libraries have been digitizing their collections for years, but the materials can be hard to find. Enter the Digital Public Library of America. Worried that Google has an outsized hand in digitizing books, the DPLA is combining, on one site, the digital collections of libraries nationwide — free.

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This NASA diagram shows the two Voyager spacecraft inside the magnetic bubble around the sun. But Marc Swisdak believes it's already crossed the heliopause into interstellar space.

Has Voyager 1 Left The Solar System?

2:52pm August 19, 2013

by Geoff Brumfiel

For the past decade or so, scientists have been waiting for the Voyager 1 spacecraft to cross into deep space. New research suggests it already has — over a year ago.

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Carnegie Mellon's autonomous car, developed with General Motors, is by all appearances a normal Cadillac SRX crossover — except for the big red button in the middle of the dashboard. In an emergency, the button allows the car to be switched immediately

Hitting The Road Without A Driver

2:19pm August 19, 2013

by Brian Naylor

Engineers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing the ultimate in automotive sophistication: the driverless car. When NPR's Brian Naylor went there to check it out, he thought he'd be going for a spin on a test track. Instead, the car drove itself through suburbia.

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