As explained in Computer: A History of the Information Machine, the personal computer was in large part a product of the “computer liberation” movement that grew out of the counter-culture of California in the 1960s. More specifically, those trends were in turn an outgrowth of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program that popularized drug use for “mind-expanding”…
No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things…
The world has changed incredibly quickly over the past few centuries and we can be sure it will continue to do so at an exponential rate. This has many people now questioning what we are doing here and in what direction our species is heading. “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.” – Brooks, from the…
Computers often seem like they’re above the supply chain. Putting aside hot devices like the latest iPhone and the different variants of the Microsoft Surface, it’s generally easy to get a computer of some kind that will allow you to do all sorts of interesting things. They’re mostly built for the long haul, too—designed to…
A team of researchers claim they’ve developed malware that can extract data from an isolated computer with no internet connection, camera or audio hardware—all by using sounds generated by the machine’s processor and cooling fans. In a new paper, researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University describe an attack meant to be used against isolated or…
