Technology

Child-monitoring apps might need a reboot

August 19, 2026
Pam Wisniewski’s digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she’d been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-­mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she…

The Download: how people really use AI, and Flock’s design choices

August 18, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. We still don’t know how people are really using AI AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using their products. But they only release the…

We still don’t know how people are really using AI

August 18, 2026
AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say.  “There is no independent source to corroborate it,” says Anka Reuel, a Computer Science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research…

The role of the astronaut is in flux

August 18, 2026
When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles.  While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of…

What Flock’s defenders are missing

August 17, 2026
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent…

The Download: dead robot friends and the “censorship-industrial complex”

August 17, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies? When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him how to calm down when he was anxious or mad. Six years later, she…

How much hydrogen awaits us underground?

August 17, 2026
In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat…

What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?

August 17, 2026
When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they’ve known each other,…

The Download: Flock’s new rules, cloning’s future, and children’s cells

August 14, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Flock is tightening its rules in response to a growing surveillance backlash The police-tech giant Flock is changing officers’ access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move comes…