Technology Archive

Before his arrest, Virgil Griffith had a reputation as a “cult hacker,” a “tech-world enfant terrible.” A 2008 profile in The New York Times Magazine, published when he was 25, called him the “Internet Man of Mystery,” and cast him as “a troublemaker … A twerp. And a magnet for tech-world groupies,” drinking White Russians and “revel[ing] in the attention of his female fans.” Griffith had become notorious the year before, when he launched WikiScanner, a website that used IP address databases to expose the anonymous editors of Wikipedia entries. The site’s release brought on a wave of news coverage, […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. TikTok was set to be taken off U.S. app stores this past weekend, but the news that the Chinese-owned app struck a tentative deal with Oracle and Walmart allowed it a one-week reprieve from President Donald Trump’s ban. The deal still must be formally reviewed by the Trump administration, and the Chinese government will need to approve it, too. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian has branded the ban, and other moves against […]

In late April, Luca Esposito was reflecting, like many of us, on how the coronavirus pandemic had upended his family’s life. Esposito wrote in a blog post that his elderly father in southern Italy had turned to WhatsApp to order groceries, because he could no longer visit the store in person; that his children’s school had struggled to adapt to the demands of online learning; and how remote working, once a privilege of senior managers, in his view could become the norm. As the executive director of the World Lottery Association, or WLA, a lobby group that represents national, state […]

Millions of children headed back to school this week, but the environment they’ve returned to is anything but familiar. Those in classrooms are facing radically different health and safety protocols, while many others are still confined to their homes, using remote tools to communicate with their teachers and classmates. This week on the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s Elliot Waldman was joined by Rebecca Winthrop, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, to discuss how COVID-19 is changing the face of education. Winthrop and her colleagues have found that the pandemic is exposing new […]