"The Tolkien estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered," Tolkien scholar and series supervisor Tom Shippey told the German Tolkien Society. During this period, Sauron tries to reform Middle-earth for the better but falls into evil, becoming a powerful and oppressive ruler. "Sauron invades Eriador, is forced back…

Yu's presentation was rather technical but in a nutshell, HarmonyOS is positioned as a future-proof, "microkernel-based, distributed OS for all scenarios." The platform is open source, and it's actually more of a competitor to Google's upcoming Fuchsia, given that both are microkernel-based and can be used on multiple types of devices at once. In his…

For the last two years, hackers have come to the Voting Village at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas to tear down voting machines and analyze them for vulnerabilities. But this year’s Village features a fancy new target: a prototype secure voting machine created through a $10 million project at the Defense Advanced Research…

Automatic license plate reader cameras are controversial enough when law enforcement deploys them, given that they can create a panopticon of transit throughout a city. Now one hacker has found a way to put a sample of that power—for safety, he says, and for surveillance—into the hands of anyone with a Tesla and a few…

Rides on Utah Transit Authority buses would be free, under a proposal by a leading mayoral candidate.David Sailors/Getty ImagesIf a leading candidate for mayor gets his way, residents of Salt Lake City may soon be able to drop their transit cards from their wallets, purses, and pockets, Former state senator Jim Dabakis wants to eliminate…

A few short decades ago, the archetypal hacker was a bored teenager breaking into his school's network to change grades, à la Ferris Bueller. So today, when cybersecurity has become the domain of state-sponsored spy agencies and multibillion-dollar companies, it may be refreshing to know that the high school hacker lives on—as do the glaring…

If you can’t trust your bank, government or your medical provider to protect your data, what makes you think students are any safer? Turns out, according to one student security…

It's easy to forget that the world is not as it seems. We humans are equipped with a particular set of senses that give us particular insight into the world—we see in visible light, for instance, not infrared, and we see in 3D, not 2D. Indeed, 3D vision is so core to our being that…

The Kobalt EC-1, Part I: Founding Story and Overview You may not have heard of Kobalt before, but you probably engage with the music it oversees every day, if not…

The first time I called into an elevator, I picked up my iPhone and dialed the number—labeled on my list as the Crown Plaza Hotel in Chicago—and immediately heard two beeps, then a recording of a woman's voice, who told me to press one to talk. When I did, I was suddenly in aural space…