Mark Pesce

FeatureOn the first of July I walked up the main drag of Japan's eighth-century capital, Nara. As a mid-sized Japanese city, there are combini – convenience stores – every block or so. First among these is 7-Eleven, with over 20,000 outlets spread across its islands. In front of the first 7-Eleven I came across, a young employee …

ColumnLast year I bought one of those nifty new fitness tracker wristwatches. It counts my steps and gives a me bit of a thrilling buzz on when I've reached my daily goal. A small thing, but it means a lot. This means I'm always under surveillance – in the best possible sense, my fitness tracker has its eye on me, continuously …

ColumnThe future often arrives looking like an expensive toy. From the first microcomputer to the latest self-piloting drone, these "toys" hide a larger truth: they're the canvas upon which our imagination plays, as we dream up braver, bolder visions. We think physically, with our bodies, and our toys help us get our hands around what …

ColumnSomewhere in the second hour of sorting through a handful of travel reservations that had been added to my calendar, I started to suspect I'd been lied to – by a computer. Searching in vain for a ticket that I seemed to have received – by the entries in my calendar – I realised that an itinerary I'd drawn up as a suggested …

ColumnSomewhere between Cambridge Analytica and Christchurch, historians of the future will draw a line and say: "This marked the peak of FAANG's influence." FAANG? That's Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google – the current tech heavy-hitters listed on NASDAQ. The competition regulators have suddenly found themselves pipped …

ColumnA year ago this column mourned the death of Moore's Law, the 1965 paper so beloved by both engineers and computer scientists because of ongoing performance benefits seemingly so effortlessly achieved. We suggested in our death notice that in lieu of flowers, donations should be lavished on Intel shares. Researchers now …

ColumnAt the annual spectacular of crap that we optimistically term the Consumer Electronics Show, I found myself locked into a room with Alexa. And yes, disembodied AI servant though she may be, she still filled every corner of a rather spacious room with all of the various products now connected to and enabled by Alexa - …

Arriving at a recent conference organised by one of the government's many regulatory bodies, I received my obligatory lanyard – and something else, credit-card-shaped, emblazoned with the branding for event. "What's this?" I asked. "Oh, that's a USB key." I presume the conference organisers mistook my wild-eyed stare of …

Earlier this year I lamented the inevitable death of Moore's Law - crushed between process node failures and exploits attacking execution efficiencies. Yet that top line failure of Moore's Law hides the fact that chips in general are now cheap. So cheap that the cost of making a device "smart" – whether that means, aware, …

🎶I am the definition of an Internet Monopoly, I Hoover up your data then I model its topology, I influence your buying and your vote with my psychology, And if you ever twig, you’ll get my insincere apology!🎵 https://t.co/tIjMxPR8jm — Christopher Biggs (@unixbigot) April 27, 2018 Every morning in recent weeks and for a …

At a riotous final concert at San Francisco’s Winterland auditorium, The Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Rotten notoriously trolled the crowd with a final line, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” as the band walked offstage after a fifteen-minute set. That phrase came to mind when stories surfaced last month in Pro …

A colleague recently excused himself from a meeting because he had to go and judge a robotics contest. It quickly struck me this was a very modern inversion, because we're constantly judged by robots. We're observed and recorded everywhere we go online thanks to cookies, certificates and loyalty codes. All of that goes into …

If you saw someone being assaulted, you'd probably whip out your phone and dial for help. But when one of our newly ubiquitous devices hears a crime, it does nothing. If Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri hears an assault, or a rape, they sit there waiting for their cues to act. But that's a load of malarkey. Listening for a …

On the November 3, 2017, Brad Dwyer set to work unearthing the mysteries of Apple’s released-that-day iPhone X and its strange new TrueDepth camera. The engineer and entrepreneur wanted to create an app to leverage that new forward-facing face-scanning camera - to build one of the in a first generation of "face-driven games - …

In the middle of the night, the 83-year-old woman received a call. A caller identifying himself as a policeman angrily reported that her grandson – identified by name – had landed in jail. He'd hit a policeman while driving and TXTing. The policeman said they needed $4,000 in bail – immediately. The old woman hung up, but the …

DEATH NOTICE Long beloved by both engineers and computer scientists because of ongoing performance benefits ceaselessly and seemingly effortlessly achieved. From the age of 50, Moore's Law began to age rapidly, passing into senescence and then, at the beginning of this month, into oblivion. Moore's Law leaves a thriving …

Over the holidays I bought Apple’s newest, shiniest face scanner. For the first fortnight - and periodically since then, that constant lift-and-scan felt weird. As though my smartphone had suddenly become too intimate, too familiar. This is hardly the thin end of the wedge. It started with passcodes - which many people didn’t …

On a walk across the show floor at January's Consumer Electronics Show, a friend working in technology for nearly thirty years expressed unease at where it all seemed to be headed. As I pulled my head away from a consumer door lock containing an embedded retinal scanner, I replied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about." …

Cryptocurrencies open the door to a world where everyone has their price. To understand why, consider Ethereum, a cryptocurrency that rests on the distributed ledger tech described by Satoshi Nakamoto in his 2008 white paper but includes a scripting language. That makes it, quite literally, "smart money.’ The idea of smart …

This month's release by Apple of the iPhone X with FaceID begins the first wave of consumer products designed from the ground up for continuous awareness of space, place and face - crowning a half a century of research in augmented reality destined to fuse our rising sea of data onto the real world. Over the last few years, …

We redesigned the world for automobiles and now it's time to redesign it for robots. To understand why, consider the sad story of the clothes-folding robot. It turns out that after many years and much research you can get a robot to fold your laundry. But the robot basically sucks at it for pretty much the same reasons that …

We’re leaking location data everywhere, and it's time to fix it by design. An example: if you go on safari in Africa, you'll be asked to turn off your smartphone's location tracking capabilities. The reason is that most people have no idea that every photo they take with their phone embeds location data in the exchangeable …

The pell-mell rush to get everything connected and intelligent has led us into some dark corners. Robot vacuum cleaners that map your home - in order to faithfully fulfil your wishes for a clean residence - then sell your data to the highest bidder. Dolls that listen to a child, and share a bit too widely. That sort of thing. …

InterviewIn an era defined by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple and Samsung, it's understandable, easy even, to become complacent and look only to Silicon Valley for tech innovation and leadership. Smartphones, touchscreen, mega search, the app economy... if all these things and more didn't come from a handful of US tech firms, they …

At the end of 2013 (the world seemed much simpler back then) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave a rare interview to CBS’ 60 Minutes program during which he revealed - with an almost Jobsian flourish - an autonomous deliver drone that would drop packages on customers' doorsteps 30 minutes after they pressed the ‘buy’ button. Like most …