Bevir Media Inc.

A Year Ago, The Dress Murdered the Idea of Objective Color   A year ago I wrote a story attempting to explain the perceptual science behind why some people looked at a picture of a woman’s dress and saw it as blue while others saw it as white. People really, really cared—not, I now know, because anyone gave a damn what color the dress actually was, but because its color seemed so manifestly obvious that when someone else saw it as something else, it felt like an affront, a threat to one’s self-image. Whoever disagreed with you wasn’t just wrong but, like, nuts, right? We’re all just one screenshot away from turning into a nation of Internet commenters, I guess. It was a thrill, then, to use a scientific explanation (albeit, I’ll grant you, a speculative one) not to drive a wedge between opposing opinions but to unite them. I talked to some researchers who specialize in color vision, and they told me that the picture of the dress was a sort of optical illusion ...

The Xperia Agent Is Sony’s Bold Plan to One-Up the Amazon Echo   The Amazon Echo has become a hit because day by day, week by week, it’s kept getting better. All the upgrades happen invisibly, which is precisely the point: The voice-controlled speaker-turned-personal-assistant has no screen and very little interface. All Amazon has to do is keep dreaming up answers to sentences that start with “Alexa.” You can’t software-upgrade your way into a projector, though. Or roll out an app update that turns that speaker into a super-cute robot. The Echo probably can’t respond to “Alexa” followed by a furious waving of your arms. That’s why Sony, as it set out to build the new Xperia Agent concept, crammed every idea and sensor it could into a single box. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Sony launched a handful of products alongside the Agent: the Xperia Ear headset, the Xperia Eye camera, and the Xperia Projector. “They are concepts,” says Don Mesa, Sony’s hea...

Microsoft’s New Android Keyboard Cuts Down On App-Jumping   We used to call ginormous phones “phablets,” and they were novelties. Now they’re just phones. And as big as they are—the Nexus 6 may have been too big—everyone’s making devices with ever bigger screens, and people are buying them . This makes sense. After all, everyone’s spending more time on mobile devices and less time on computers . As phones increasingly replace desktops and laptops, the need for a larger screen for typing, reading, surfing, streaming, and gaming becomes really important. A bigger phone can also accommodate a bigger battery, and obscure less of the screen beneath your fat thumbs as you’re typing and swiping. But even the biggest smartphone screen is more cramped than a flight on Spirit Air, making things that would be multi-window tasks on a computer very tedious. To share a link, a contact, or a chunk of text, you’ve got to hop, skip, and jump between apps, poking and dragg...

A Field Guide to Actors’ Faces When They Lose at the Oscars   Sunday night, Bryan Cranston, Matt Damon, Michael Fassbender, and Eddie Redmayne will sit in the audience at the 88 th annual Academy Awards and face one of the toughest acting challenges of their careers: Trying to look happy about losing to Leonardo DiCaprio. The four Best Actor nominees are among the many contenders whose names (probably) won’t be called at this year’s ceremony, and whose reactions will be captured in real time in front of millions of viewers. Is broadcasting their shared defeat a cruel way to treat these already-insecure, harshly over-scrutinized artists, especially since their work—the result of exhausting inner turmoil and harsh rejection—inspires and informs us? Yup! But let’s not dwell on that. Instead, let’s look at the various ways that previous losers have reacted, physically and emotionally, when their names weren’t called. The About-Face The go-to reaction since the...

This Bottle Crossed the Atlantic to Send an SOS for Wildlife   Oceans are vast. That fact is established to the point of cliché. Even without centuries of desensitizing poetry, prose, and metaphor, the ease with which humans cross over bodies of water—either electronically or in airplanes—leaves most of them without any real idea of what that vastness actually feels like. I certainly had very little sense of the ocean’s breadth when I stood on a beach in Staten Island in October of 2013 and watched George Boorujy throw a bottle into Raritan Bay. Twenty-eight months later, that bottle—and the two rolled-up pieces of paper inside it—washed up on France’s southwest coastline. Brigitte Barthélémy and her husband Alain were combing a beach for driftwood when they came upon it. Tossing bottles into the ocean is a side project for Boorujy, a New York artist whose primary job is painting photorealistic wildlife portraits to hang in a Chelsea gallery. (His drawings als...

The Volcanoes of Nicaragua Sure Have Been Cranky This Year   Every year, there seems to be a country that is having more than its fair share of volcanic eruptions. This is the sort of thing that happens when you have a random distribution of volcanic eruptions over time (and space to some degree, along the areas that have volcanoes). This year, it is Nicaragua that seems to be the focus of eruptions—at least more so than usual. The biggest newsmaker is Momotombo , where the volcano has produced numerous explosive eruptions over the last few weeks, including some that have been quite spectacular (see above and below), sending ash as high as ~3.6 kilometers (12,000 feet).  Some of the images of the eruption look downright Tolkienian , but really what is being seen in the night images is all the glowing volcanic debris covering the upper slopes of Momotombo. The eruption’s main hazard has been ash falling on the area around Momotombo, so authorities in Nic...

In Republican Debate, Candidates Back FBI Over Apple   Thursday night’s Republican debate was the knock-down, drag-out, screaming slugfest pundits have been predicting, with both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz attacking frontrunner Donald Trump on everything from his record of hiring foreign workers to his ties to Hillary Clinton. Oh, and Ben Carson wants you to know he and his hands were there, too. But the one moment that united the bloodthirsty brood, now whittled to just five candidates, came when CNN’s Dana Bash asked about the court order the FBI recently obtained demanding that Apple help the government hack into the San Bernardino shooter’s locked iPhone. The candidates’ consensus: Apple needs to comply. For Republican candidates—all champions of free market capitalism—taking on the country's most valuable company is a fraught endeavor. Rubio, who has sought to align himself with the tech industry throughout this race, said that the government is not ...

Encrypted-Messaging App Telegram Now Has 100 Million Users   Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov built a messaging app predicated upon its ability to keep private things private, so it’s no surprise that he agrees with Apple on the issue of encryption. “I would definitely side with Tim Cook on this,” he said on Tuesday, speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The surprise may be just how much his opinion matters. Less than three years after Durov and his brother launched Telegram, he now reports that 100 million people use the free encrypted messaging app every month, up from 60 million people last May. That growth is coming from all over the world. While that’s a small number compared with the billion people who pull up WhatsApp every month, or the 800 million people who go on Facebook Messenger , it’s illustrative of the early growth that signaled each of these services had mainstream appeal. “Every day, 350,000 new users sign up for Teleg...

Islamic State video makes direct threats against Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey   SAN FRANCISCO — A video purportedly made by supporters of the Islamic State makes direct threats against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for combating terrorism on their Internet platforms. The 25-minute propaganda video was released by a group calling itself "the sons of the Caliphate army." In it, photographs of both technology leaders are targeted by bullets. The video was spotted by Vocativ deep web analysts on the social media service Telegram, which is used by ISIS. The extremist group says it's responding to growing efforts by Facebook and Twitter to suspend accounts and remove posts that the social media services say incite violence and promote terrorism. The video shows hackers changing profile accounts and posting Islamic State propaganda. They allege they hacked more than ...

The Sony Hackers Were Causing Mayhem Years Before They Hit the Company   The hackers who crippled Sony in 2014 weren’t striking for the first time. New research indicates that these hackers are part of a prolific group that’s been active since at least 2009, and which appears to be responsible for more than 45 families of malware used in attacks since then. Using the Sony malware as a starting point, a number of researchers have traced connections between that hack and a constellation of other attacks that they say can be attributed to a team of hackers they’re calling the Lazarus Group. The hacking group’s activity apparently began with a volley of unsophisticated DDoS attacks in 2009 that struck three dozen US and South Korean web sites over the Fourth of July holiday weekend. From then, the attackers diligently honed and developed their techniques and tools, changing methods as needed and occasionally growing more destructive. Their activity culminated in ...

Google Wants to Save News Sites From Cyberattacks—For Free Mehdi Yahyanejad thought that after Iranians voted on June 12, 2009, he would finally get some rest. Yahyanejad, the editor-in-chief of the social news and citizen journalism site Balatarian.com, had been working around the clock to cover the election. So when hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shocked the country by defeating reformer Mir Hussein Moussavi in a suspiciously large landslide, sending protestors flooding into the streets, the 33-year-old Iranian immigrant was on vacation in Big Sur, California. Instead of enjoying his summer holiday, Yahyanejad spent the next week locked in front of a computer, fighting to keep his site from getting crushed by a crippling cyberattack. That digital bombardment, seemingly launched by the Iranian government to keep his site down during a critical political moment, was only the first of many. For years, every time there was new protest, the site got hit with a s...

Flaws in Wireless Mice and Keyboards Let Hackers Type on Your PC   That tiny dongle plugged into your USB port and paired with your wireless keyboard or mouse isn’t as monogamous as it pretends to be. For millions of cheap peripherals, those innocent-looking radio receivers may be carrying on a sly, long distance relationship—letting an antenna-wielding intruder silently type malicious commands on your PC. That’s a new warning from researchers at the Internet of things security firm Bastille, who released an advisory today that seven different companies’ wireless keyboards and mice are vulnerable to an exploit they’ve dubbed “mousejacking.” The attack—which affects a broad collection of devices sold by Logitech, Dell, Microsoft, HP, Amazon, Gigabyte and Lenovo—lets an interloper inject mouse movements or keystrokes at a rate of a thousand words per minute from an nearby antenna, even when the target device is designed to encrypt and authenticate its communicat...

How to Not Lose Your Data if You Forget Your iPhone Password   It could happen to anyone: you have a few too many drinks and you can’t remember your new password, so you try a few versions before getting it right. But if you’ve enabled a certain iOS 8 security feature on your iPhone, be careful. Unless you backed up, entering the wrong passcode more than six times in a row to unlock your screen will cut you off from your phone’s data forever. This optional iPhone safeguard is suddenly in the news amid reports that Apple is refusing to help the FBI bypass the security measure in order to access data on an iPhone 5c that belonged one of the shooters in this December’s San Bernardino attack. Password protecting your iPhone screen is an opt-in setting, but it’s a smart move. When you lock your phone screen, you protect your private data from casual snooping and more sinister intrusions. But if you do enable this passcode lock, you’d better be confident in you...