Picture a system that makes decisions with huge impacts on a person’s prospects – even decisions of life and death. Imagine that system is complex and opaque: it sorts people into winners and losers, but the criteria by which it does so are never made clear. Those being assessed do not know what data the system has gathered about them, or with what data theirs is being compared. And no one is willing to take responsibility for the system’s decisions – everyone claims to be fulfilling their own cog-like function.

As it turns out, the video card wars are going to charge into 2019 quite a bit hotter than any of us were expecting. Moments ago, as part of AMD’s CES 2019 keynote, CEO Dr. Lisa Su announced that AMD will be releasing a new high-end, high-performance Radeon graphics card. Dubbed the Radeon VII (Seven), AMD has their eyes set on countering NVIDIA’s previously untouchable GeForce RTX 2080. And, if the card lives up to AMD’s expectations, then come February 7th it may just as well do that.

Scientists have combined two types of qubit on a single device, potentially overcoming some of the barriers to practical quantum computing. Quantum computing has been on the horizon for a number of years, but there’s more than one problem in making the idea scalable and practical. While the resulting machine could handle maths problems far larger than the greatest modern supercomputer, right now, researchers are struggling to produce a machine that can come up with any coherent answers at all.

​With the arrival of USB-C a few years back, plugging into laptops, tablets and smartphones became even easier than before. But there are potential security risks. The USB Type-C Authentication Program launched today aims to address such issues.​

Donald Knuth, master of algorithms, reflects on 50 years of his opus-in-progress, “The Art of Computer Programming.”

Rare scenes from the early days of personal computer shopping.

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device.

Smartphones have achieved the ridiculous level of market penetration they have thanks in no small part to their universal utility: While in the not-too-distant past you might have carried around a separate MP3 player, game console, PDA, flashlight, and any number of other accessories in addition to your cell phone, having all this functionality baked into one device is what helps make the general-purpose smartphone so appealing.

Matt is right on point here. I think the iPhone is the personal computing device of our generation. Our parents had the PC revolution, and it was a massive change unlike almost anything we’ve seen before. The PC was the center of everything for decades, but the smartphone is the new king of the hill. In the first quarter of 2017 it’s estimated 348 million smartphones were sold worldwide, while 62 million PCs we sold in the same time period.

A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart—then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in the heart of Silicon Valley—gave what has come to be known as the "mother of all demos." On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others.

Fifty years ago last Sunday, a computer engineer named Douglas Engelbart gave a live demonstration in San Francisco that changed the computer industry and, indirectly, the world. In the auditorium, several hundred entranced geeks watched as he used something called a “mouse” and a special keypad to manipulate structured documents and showed how people in different physical locations could work collaboratively on shared files, online.

Last week we noted that the general consensus at this point is that Bloomberg screwed up its story about a supposed supply chain hack, in which it was claimed that Chinese spies hacked Supermicro chips that were destined for Apple and Amazon...

Chinese authorities have begun deploying a new surveillance tool: "gait recognition" software that uses people's body shapes and how they walk to identify them, even when their faces are hidden from cameras. Already used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, "gait recognition" is part of a push across China to develop artificial-intelligence and data-driven surveillance that is raising concern about how far the technology will go.

Quantum physicists from the University of Alberta, Canada, announced this week that they have developed a new technique for storing quantum information into pulses of light. The physicists created "a new way to store pulses of light—down to the single-photon level—in clouds of ultracold rubidium atoms, and to later retrieve them on demand by shining a ‘control' pulse of light,” Lindsay LeBlanc, assistant professor of physics and Canada Research Chair in Ultracold Gases for Quantum Simulation, said.

Apple Mac Minis used to work fine on Linux, but that appears to no longer be the case... Or for any other Apple hardware with the T2 security chip enabled.

Let’s start with the most important piece of information. The official MSRP for Radeon RX 590 is 279 USD. This is a suggested price for nonexisting reference model (I mean there is a slide with a reference design, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be available). That said, the 279 USD price tag is likely just a starting point. The price of RX 590 is therefore 40 USD higher than RX 480 at launch and 50 USD higher than RX 580 at launch (we are talking about 8GB models here).

Yoshitaka Sakurada is responsible for ensuring the 2020 Olympic Games are not hacked.

This is probably not the byline you were expecting for a review of some Apple hardware. It comes as a bit of a shock to both of us, to be honest, but here we are: I have a Mac mini on my desk, along with a Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard. It's all hooked up to an LG 4K 21.5-inch display, all supplied by Apple.

Amid the gush of money and enthusiastic predictions being thrown at quantum computing comes a proposed cold shower in the form of an essay by physicist Mikhail Dyakonov published in IEEE Spectrum this month – The Case Against Quantum Computing. Whatever your view of QC’s prospects, Dyakonov’s commentary is worth a read. Error correction – or more accurately the inability to monitor variables and correct errors at the scale required – is the big stumbling block, he writes, but there is a good deal more to his piece.

The human mind can be a confusing and overwhelming place. Despite incredible leaps in human progress, many of us still struggle to make our peace with our thoughts. The roots of this are complex and multifaceted. To find explanations for the global mental health epidemic, one can tap into neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, or simply observe the meaningless systems that dominate our modern-day world.

The Pixel Slate is a 2-in-1 device like no other. It’s not the most polished product we’ve ever used, but Google has laid the foundation for letting mobile and desktop software sit side-by-side. Here’s what Google has changed in Chrome OS to make it all work -- as well as where it all falls apart.

Smartphones have changed the way we live life. Along with the new tech, early on, we got an entire subculture of hackers who wanted to unlock their smartphones to use on other carriers or with different software. This same trend continues today, but now also with our … cars? Redditor trsohmers took on the challenge of hacking the infotainment system in his Tesla Model 3 and was able to gain root access — also known as admin access, for the Windows users in the room.

Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans.

I spent two years trying to get someone to tamper with my laptop, so I could then detect it. Somewhere along the way, I realized this might never happen.

You didn't think scientists would let IBM's "world's smallest computer" boast go unchallenged, did you? Sure enough, University of Michigan has produced a temperature sensing 'computer' measuring 0.04 cubic millimeters, or about a tenth the size of IBM's former record-setter. It's so small that one grain of rice seems gigantic in comparison -- and it's so sensitive that its transmission LED could instigate currents in its circuits.

Apple's meteoric rise to the most valuable company in America can practically be traced back to one day. For much of the 1990s, Apple was slogging through an identity crisis. The company's first two home computers, the Apple II and the Mac, were falling out of favor, and Apple was losing serious ground to its competitors.

Malicious code or deliberate design faults can be inserted into everyday business products before they even leave the original manufacturer. Here's how you can protect yourself.

Apple has updated its 13-inch and 15-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pros today with Intel’s latest eighth-generation chips. It’s also offering up to 32GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD storage — if you’re willing to pay for it. While the base models of Apple’s laptops still cost the same (starting at $1,799 for the 13-inch model or $2,399 for the 15-inch model), the updated MacBook Pro now tops out at a whopping $6,699 for the top configuration. That’s $2,400 more than the best 2017 MacBook Pro you could buy.

Microsoft has a new plan to win back consumers after the company killed off hardware, software, and services and let some of its most loyal fans down

How much are you going to like having Microsoft in charge of your desktop?

Just how tiny is the world's smallest computer? According to a team of University of Michigan electrical and computer engineering professors, the new device they created is dwarfed by a grain of rice. It could even be described as the size of a speck of dust.

Intel now offers SSD performance by the inch.

Why it matters: If analysts are correct, we could be seeing very significant price drops in SSD and perhaps even DRAM it 2019. The industry is currently facing a very large surplus of NAND flash memory. They say to expect a price correction over the next several quarters.

In 1843, Ada Lovelace published the first nontrivial program. How did it work?

An AI is set to try and work out how a potentially limitless supply of energy can be used on Earth. It could finally solve the mysteries of fusion power, letting researchers capture and control the process that powers the sun and stars. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University hope to harness a massive new supercomputer to work out how the doughnut-shaped devices, known as tokamaks, can be used.