There’s a compression library called xz-utils. You’ve never heard of it. It’s in every Linux distribution, most servers, probably your phone. One guy maintains it. Or he did, until recently. This year, someone found a backdoor in xz-utils. Not a bug. A deliberate backdoor, carefully hidden over months through seemingly …

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Noland Arbaugh is paralyzed from the shoulders down. He’s also the first person with a Neuralink chip in his brain. Last month, I watched him play chess on a computer using only his thoughts. It was both incredible and underwhelming. The demo showed Arbaugh moving a cursor across a screen, clicking on chess pieces, …

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I spent two weeks living in the metaverse. Well, trying to. Turns out the future of human interaction is mostly empty conference rooms and legless avatars. Meta’s been burning through cash—$46 billion since 2019—building Horizon Worlds, their flagship metaverse platform. I figured I should actually try it before …

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Google’s data centers consumed 18 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023. To put that in perspective: that’s more than Tunisia. And it’s getting worse. AI is the problem. Training a single large language model can emit as much carbon as five cars over their entire lifetimes. Every ChatGPT query uses electricity. Every …

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Remember when blockchain was going to revolutionize everything? Decentralize finance, eliminate middlemen, change the world? Yeah, about that. Most enterprise blockchain projects died quietly. But there’s one use case that actually works: tracking stuff. Boring? Absolutely. Profitable? Ask Walmart. They’ve been using …

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Netflix has 18,000 edge servers worldwide. I learned this while interviewing their infrastructure team, and my first thought was: “Who the hell manages 18,000 servers?” Turns out, that’s the entire challenge with edge computing in one sentence. Everyone loves talking about how edge computing brings compute closer to …

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I’ve been testing 5G across three major US carriers for six months. Want to know the punchline? Most of the time, I can’t tell the difference from 4G. The carriers will hate me for saying this, but it’s true. Yeah, occasionally I’ll hit a speed test that makes me gasp—982 Mbps download in downtown Seattle, 1.2 Gbps …

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You know things are weird when a ransomware group announces they’re shutting down and pivoting to “legitimate security consulting.” That’s exactly what happened last month with BlackVault, a cybercrime operation that’s been extorting companies since 2022. They published a farewell message on their dark web leak …

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Thirty days. That’s how long I committed to using GitHub Copilot for every single coding task. No cherry-picking easy wins, no turning it off when things got complicated. I wanted to know: is this actually useful, or just glorified autocomplete? The short answer? Both. And neither. Week one was rough. Copilot suggested …

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Last week, I got off a call with Dr. Sarah Martinez from IBM’s quantum research division, and honestly, I’m still processing what she told me. They’ve cracked something that’s been driving quantum physicists crazy for years. The new Condor processor—IBM’s latest quantum chip—maintains qubit coherence for 127 …

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