Podcast: A chat with the directors of ‘A Glitch in the Matrix’ and ‘Users’

Are we living in a simulation? That’s what Rodney Ascher aims to explore with his new documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix, which premiered at Sundance this week. In this special interview episode, we chat with Ascher about how he broke down such a co...

‘Users’ is a fascinating meditation on life and parenting in the digital age 

One of the earliest  images in Natalia Almada's virtuoso documentary Users is of an infant, tightly wrapped and strapped to a Snoo smart crib, robotically being rocked to sleep to the sound of manufactured white noise. By recreating many of the sensa...

Browser add-on verifies that sites actually honor their privacy policies

Just because a website presents a privacy policy, doesn’t mean its code is actually abiding by that policy. To make the internet a little more secure, researchers from Waterloo University in Ontario created a browser plug-in that verifies whether a w...

DoJ pushes Google and Apple to ID 10,000 users of a gun scope app

The US government has reportedly ordered Apple and Google to hand over the names, phone numbers and IP addresses of at least 10,000 users of a gun scope app. The data request is part of an investigation into weapons export violations, but it has priv...

Apple fires hundreds of contractors hired to listened to Siri recordings

Apple fired more than 300 contractors in Cork, Ireland, The Guardian reports. The contractors were hired as part of a "grading" program that reviewed audio recorded by Siri. News broke last month that those contractors often heard sensitive informati...