Last week, a series of smart home gadgets became dumb again. On November 6, Best Buy pulled the plug on its line of Insignia Connect products, including a convertible freezer/fridge, two kinds of smart plugs, a smart light switch, and a Wi-Fi-connected camera. Best Buy offered people who purchased the gadgets partial gift cards, not…

“I barely slept last night,” Jessica Zahn told me a few weeks ago. In Redmond, Washington, where she was, it was 9 in the morning. In New Zealand, though, it was 5 the following morning, and the moment Zahn and her team at Microsoft had been working toward for nearly two years was finally nigh.…

Over the past two years, attacks like Spectre, Meltdown, and variants on those techniques—all capable of tricking a broad range of processors into coughing up sensitive data—have shown how hard it can be to secure a chip. But it's one thing for a company like Intel to scramble to fix a vulnerability, and a very…

Once every 20 to 100 years or so, a US president gets impeached. This is the formal federal process wherein Congress investigates claims of wrongdoing against the sitting leader of the free world. Now it’s Donald Trump in the hot seat. Public hearings begin on Wednesday, November 13.The trouble began when a whistleblower’s complaint revealed…

When I was in college, I informed my parents that they could stop hoping I would achieve anything close to greatness: I simply needed too much sleep. While President Barack Obama was up late sending emails and writing letters into the wee hours, and all my friends were telling me they could “sleep when they’re…

Apple’s $250 AirPods Pro are good. So good that I forgot how weird I look with the twisted little golf tees hanging from my ears, or that these headphones—like most other wirefree models—will probably last only a couple of years before their batteries bite the dust. I’m not even afraid of being made into a…

In a speech late last month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared blockchain “an important breakthrough,” and promised that China would “seize the opportunity.” He detailed the ways the Chinese government would support blockchain research, development, and standardization. The significance shouldn’t be underestimated. Xi is the first major world leader to issue such a strong endorsement…

It was 11 days before Christmas in 2018, and Amazon’s warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, was operating at full tilt. At the rear of the facility, waves of semi trucks backed up to a long row of loading docks, some disgorging crates of new merchandise and others filling up with outbound packages. Inside the warehouse, within…

After months of hype—and a literal three-hour trailer—Disney+ finally touches down today. It does so with all the trappings of a hit: a competitive price, popular franchises stacked to the ceiling, Forky. Even more important to its inevitable success, though, is what it exhibits few signs of: growing pains.Athena seems like a hifalutin metaphor for…

Xpeng Motors, the Chinese electric vehicle startup backed by Alibaba and Foxconn, has raised a fresh injection of $400 million in capital and has taken on Xiaomi as a strategic…