Polymath Central

Thousands of Internet-connected servers sold by the world’s biggest manufacturers can be remotely backdoored by exploiting critical vulnerabilities—some more than a decade old—that lurk deep inside system motherboards, according to…

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in…

Old.reddit.com’s days appear to be numbered. Reddit has strayed from saying that it will shutter the website, which many long-time Redditors prefer for its layout, navigation, and fewer feed recommendations.…

Routine cybersecurity testing of frontier AI models sparked a series of unexpected security incidents—the most serious case arising when Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model attempted to insert malicious code into an…

In a 51–44 vote Wednesday, the US Senate confirmed Erica Schwartz as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite failing miserably to convince senators last month that…

Over the past few years, it has become a rather rare treat when I end up genuinely, unequivocally enjoying the latest superhero film. Mostly I find them to be middling…

Google got a slow start with generative AI after seemingly being caught flat-footed by Microsoft’s Copilot reveal. What a difference a few years make. Now, Google is at the forefront…

The city of Houston, where I live, has been ground zero for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. So far this year there have been two named storms, Arthur and Bertha,…

SpaceX says it has a plan for Starlink Mobile to compete against the big three wireless carriers and take a large number of customers away from them. SpaceX has so…

YouTube currently requires that content creators let viewers know “when they use AI to meaningfully alter or generate photorealistic content.” The policy draws some strange boundaries. It applies to “AI-generated…