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About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. Google’s once underappreciated side bet has become Earth’s dominant computing platform

Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android.

Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014

In 2007, Mr. Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and introduced the world to the iPhone. If you watch the full speech, you’ll be surprised by how he imagined our relationship with this iconic invention, because this vision is so different from the way most of us use these devices now.

“It’s the best iPod we’ve ever made,” Mr. Jobs exclaims at one point. “The killer app is making calls,” he later adds. Both lines spark thunderous applause. He doesn’t dedicate any significant time to discussing the phone’s internet connectivity features until more than 30 minutes into the address.

Mr. Jobs seemed to understand the iPhone as something that would help us with a small number of activities — listening to music, placing calls, generating directions. He didn’t seek to radically change the rhythm of users’ daily lives. He simply wanted to take experiences we already found important and make them better

The hack also exposed how popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp have vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.

In October, WhatsApp sued the NSO Group in federal court, claiming that NSO’s spy technology was used on its service to target journalists and human rights activists. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has patched the flaw that the malware used.

“This case really highlights the threats that are posed by a lawless and unaccountable private surveillance industry,

President Donald Trump just slammed Apple for refusing to allow the US government access to the iPhones "used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements."

Trump's tweet came hours after Apple declined requests from US Attorney General William Barr and the FBI to unlock two iPhones believed to have been used by a 21-year-old man who killed three sailors in a shooting last month at a Pensacola, Florida, Air Force base.

Apple's commitment to protecting the privacy of its users is well known. The iPhone maker has hammered on privacy as a marketing pitch in recent years, with CEO Tim Cook repeatedly calling privacy a fundamental human right. Cook told CNN in 2018 that he wants governments around the world to restrict how much data companies can collect from their customers.

When Mr. Carlson first began to look for sealed VHS cassettes, they were considered so much plastic trash. “Back to the Future,” “The Goonies,” “Blade Runner,” were about $20 each on eBay. He put them on a shelf, little windows into his past, and started an Instagram account called Rare and Sealed.

The current cultural tumult, with its boom in fake images, endless arguments over everything and now the debut of imperious A.I. chatbots, increases the appeal of things that can’t be plugged in.

One thing people are eagerly seeking with the new technology is old technology. Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, which he used to write a shelf of important novels, went for a quarter-million dollars. An Apple 1 computer fetched nearly twice that. A first-generation iPhone, still sealed in its box, sold for $21,000 in December and triple that in February.

As much as it pains me to say this: privacy is on its deathbed. I came to this sad realization recently when a stranger began leaving comments on photos I had uploaded to Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app

There it was: a full name. With that, I searched Google and before I knew it, I had this person’s phone number, home address and place of employment.Creepy, right? I even had a link to a running app that she uses that showed the path of her morning run. This took all of 10 minutes.

A friend who works in technology recently told me I would never be able to figure out her age online. She had gone to great lengths to hide it. It took me exactly two minutes.

The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as

To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

Last month, some of President Obama’s top intelligence advisers met in Silicon Valley with Apple’s chief, Timothy D. Cook, and other technology leaders in what seemed to be a public rapprochement in their long-running dispute over the encryption safeguards built into their devices.

But behind the scenes, relations were tense, as lawyers for the Obama administration and Apple held closely guarded discussions for over two months about one particularly urgent case: The F.B.I. wanted Apple to help “unlock” an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, but Apple was resisting.

When the talks collapsed, a federal magistrate judge, at the Justice Department’s request, ordered Apple to bypass security functions on the phone.

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

he preeminent cyber-prophet of the day

The next frontier—devices that can detect an authorized user based solely on the quirks of how they interact with it—is just around the bend.

Will new unlocking methods enjoy the same Fifth Amendment protections that prevent the government from forcing a person to give up their passwords?

Out of a million people, 17 suicides isn’t much—indeed, American college students kill themselves at four times that rate. Still, after years of writing what is (at best) buyers’ guidance and (at worst) marching hymns for an army of consumers, I was burdened by what felt like an outsize provision of guilt—an existential buyer’s remorse for civilization itself. I am here because I want to know: Did my iPhone kill 17 people?

But the work itself isn’t inhumane—unless you consider a repetitive, exhausting, and alienating workplace over which you have no influence or authority to be inhumane. And that would pretty much describe every single manufacturing or burger-flipping job ever.

I believe that humankind made a subconscious collective bargain at the dawn of the industrial age to trade the resources of our planet for the chance to escape it. We live in the transitional age between that decision and its conclusion. In this middle age, the West built a middle class. It’s now eroding and may be less enduring than the American Dream itself—a dream we exported to the rest of the world by culture and conquest. Nevertheless, most Americans have food, cars, gadgets. How can we begrudge a single person these luxuries if we want them ourselves?

The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds.

Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.

Moreover, provocateurs and ridiculers expose the stupidity of the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are people who take everything literally. They are incapable of multiple viewpoints.

Ms. Pao contends she was discriminated against.

What is really under examination in this trial is the question of why there are so few women in leadership positions in Silicon Valley. At stake is any hope that the tech world can claim to be a progressive place, or even a fair one.

Were women simply not interested in becoming venture capitalists, “or did the venture capital world fight them off?”

For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.

The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.

The council, in a meeting that took place on Feb. 10, voted first to reject Ms. Beyda’s nomination, with four members against her. Then, at the prodding of a faculty adviser there who pointed out that belonging to Jewish organizations was not a conflict of interest, the students revisited the question and unanimously put her on the board.

RUTH BADER GINSBURG isn’t planning on going anywhere any time soon.

The second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court, she’s part of the generation who came of age after World War II and led a revolution that transformed women’s legal rights, as well as their role in the public world. There’s a famous story about the dean at Harvard Law inviting Ginsburg and her tiny group of fellow female law students to dinner, then asking them how they’d justify having taken a place that could have gone to a man.

“The kind of raw excitement that surrounds her is palpable,” Carmon said. “There’s a counterintuitiveness. We have a particular vision of someone who’s a badass — a 350-pound rapper. And she’s this tiny Jewish grandmother. She doesn’t look like our vision of power, but she’s so formidable, so unapologetic, and a survivor in every sense of the word.”

Aside from the thicket of legal issues raised by the case, does Apple have a moral obligation to help the government learn more about the attack? Or does it have a moral obligation to protect its customers’ privacy? Or how about its shareholders? And which of these should take precedence?

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has long spoken about running his company based on certain values. He has used his position to advocate gay rights, for example, and pushed the company to be more “green,” once going so far as to tell a shareholder who questioned the return on investment of taking such stances, “If you want me to do things only for R.O.I. reasons, you should get out of this stock.”

The debate over Apple’s stance is just the latest in a series of questions about corporate patriotism. In recent years, questions have been directed at companies that renounce their United States citizenship to move to a country with a lower tax rate. Others, including Apple, have faced questions about tax strategies to shelter income abroad. And companies’ social responsibility programs, say for clean energy or water efficiency, have been scrutinized

Cruz wraps himself in an American flag and spits on all the institutions that it represents.

America didn’t become the richest country in the world by practicing socialism, or the strongest country by denigrating its governing institutions, or the most talent-filled country by stoking fear of immigrants.

It got here via the motto “E Pluribus Unum” — Out of Many, One.

The technology giants said they would embed a feature in iPhones and Android devices to enable users to track infected people they’d come close to.

The technology giants said they were teaming up to release the tool within several months, building it into the operating systems of the billions of iPhones and Android devices around the world. That would enable the smartphones to constantly log other devices they come near, enabling what is known as “contact tracing” of the disease. People would opt in to use the tool and voluntarily report if they became infected.

underscores the seriousness of the health crisis and the power of the two companies whose software runs almost every smartphone in the world. Apple and Google said their joint effort came together in just the last two weeks.

The abandonment of iTunes heralded a broader shift in how Americans are assumed to approach their digital lives. You could call it the victory of Gmail.

it encouraged an approach that, anywhere else, would be called hoarding. “With tons of storage space, you’ll never need to delete an email,” said a recent Gmail tutorial. “Just keep everything and easily find it later.”

The computing realities of the 2000s have displaced the dreams of the ’90s. Instead of the libertarian-communitarian global village that Wired magazine and other prophets of the California ideology once imagined—where people control their individual digital domicile, then freely distribute the fruits of their orchard—we have been displaced to a kind of rentier’s frontier, where there’s enough space for everyone as long as you pay a low monthly fee.