Bevir Media Inc.

Hack Brief: Don’t Be Trolled by This iPhone-Crashing Link Meme   Careful where you tap today as you browse social media, or you may suffer a fate worse than rickrolling. Mischievous Twitter users are passing around a link, often disguised with URL shorteners, to “crashsafari.com,” a website created in 2015 that immediately crashes iPhones and iPads. Feel free to try it here if you’re so inclined. See? There went a few seconds of your life, forever lost. The Hack Crashsafari appears to run javascript code that overloads the victim’s address bar with an infinite series of numbers. But Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at security firm F-Secure, believes that crashsafari.com and an identical site at crashchrome.com actually exploit browsers’ history feature to kill them on command. “The problem is that it creates thousands of history entries,” says Hypponen, citing a thread in a Chrome developer’s forum where the bug was reported in 2014. “It takes lon...

Cheerful Little Chart Tells You How You Might Die   A fascinating, if somewhat morbid, corner of the digital design world is devoted entirely to predicting your death. The people inhabiting this world do things like mine data from the Social Security Administration to create charts that illustrate when you’re likely to die . They create tools like an  Apple Watch concept app  that counts down how much (or how little) life you have left to live. And now this, an interactive chart that tells you how you’re most likely to die at a given age, based on your race and biological sex. It’s the work of statistician Nathan Yau, whom you may know from his website,  Flowingdata , or perhaps one of his other mortality calculators . Click to Open Overlay Gallery Nathan Yau Should you choose to walk down this dark and existentially fraught path, “How You Will Die” is straightforward: Enter your data and watch a grid of gray d...

The Zero1 Flexible Football Helmet May Save Players’ Brains   Football is a game of simple physics: One player has a ball, and many other players who do not have the ball want to stop him in his tracks. Sometimes this interaction happens at high speed. Speeds so fast that the parties involved bang into each other with a G force equivalent to a bowling ball being dropped on a head from 8 feet high. Football is a beautifully violent game, which is the reason Americans simultaneously exalt and fear the sport. It’s the reason people cheer when a cornerback makes the tackle or a linebacker pummels his opponent. It’s also the reason that one out of every three players in the NFL will experience some form of brain trauma during his career. According to an investigation from Frontline, there have been nearly 200 concussions so far this NFL season, and those are just the concussions that were officially reported. The NFL has a ver...

Beautiful Beatnik-Era Paper Planes From the Streets of NYC   There are many, many ways of folding a paper airplane, and from sometime in the 1960s to an undetermined year in the 1980s, Harry Everett Smith probably found one of each make on the streets of downtown New York. We’ll never know for sure, because the Beatnik artist, avant-garde filmmaker, and pseudo-anthropologist didn’t exactly catalog his collection. According to his surviving friends, he kept boxes upon boxes of them. But when he vacated rooms at the Chelsea Hotel and the Breslin, landlords probably threw some into the trash. He may have given some away as gifts. He lived at his friend Allen Ginsberg’s apartment for a while, and when Ginsberg sent him to Colorado to teach shamanism, he surely left many behind. Smith did, however, donate a portion of his paper airplane collection to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Studies. He died in 1991, and in 1994 the Smith...

Conquer Chicago’s Mountain of Data With This Powerful Tool   Chicago just launched a new website called OpenGrid, which is the city’s attempt at parsing the avalanche of data it’s been collecting for the past five years. OpenGrid is a more usable evolution of the city’s Data Portal, a bare-bones website that hosts all of the publicly available information, which includes everything from building permits to noise complaints to city employee salaries (surprise: this is the most popular data set). OpenGrid was developed over the past six months after Chicago government officials kept hearing that the data sets were too unwieldy to make use of. “We had people looking for certain kinds of data that we knew was on the data portal, but they weren’t finding it or finding it easily enough to make it usable to them,” says Brenna Berman, commissioner of Chicago’s department of innovation and technology. Indeed, the portal, while relatively clean for a governmen...

Kill the Password: A String of Characters Won’t Protect You   You have a secret that can ruin your life. It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you. Your email. Your bank account. Your address and credit card number. Photos of your kids or, worse, of yourself, naked. The precise location where you’re sitting right now as you read these words. Since the dawn of the information age, we’ve bought into the idea that a password, so long as it’s elaborate enough, is an adequate means of protecting all this precious data. But in 2012 that’s a fallacy, a fantasy, an outdated sales pitch. And anyone who still mouths it is a sucker—or someone who takes you for one. No matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you. Look around. Leaks and dumps—hackers breaking into computer systems and releasing lists ...

How GM Beat Tesla to the First True Mass-Market Electric Car Ten years ago, the room where I’m standing would have been filled with a deafening roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one trembling atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop coats used joysticks to adjust its throttle and load. ¶ Today, though, this former engine testing facility at General Motors’ Warren Technical Center, outside Detroit, is almost dead silent. From one end to the other—across a space roughly the size of two soccer fields—the room is blanketed with the low-frequency hum of cooling fans, interrupted only by the occasional clack of a keyboard and, on this particular morning, the chatter of Larry Nitz’s voice. ¶ “Let’s take a walk,” he says after we’ve lingered in the doorway a moment. A voluble guy with a head of gray curls, Nitz is chief of electrification at General Motors, and this facility—the largest automotive ba...