President Trump is trying to recruit an “army” of poll watchers for Election Day. As part of his ongoing disinformation campaign about election fraud, these aggressive appeals to his supporters are raising worries about voter intimidation—or worse.Meanwhile, Facebook just announced new rules that will no longer allow “militarized” language for poll watching on its platform. When asked...

When the coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year, Alonso Yañez, CIO of Walmart’s operations in Mexico and Central America, sprang into action, triggering the retailer’s crisis management plan and leading its ongoing response. After quickly upgrading his remote-access infrastructure, Yañez sent all 1,000 of his IT staffers home, where they have been working ever since. That...

Ahead of an October 20 attempt to bring extraterrestrial rocks from an asteroid called Bennu to Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has delivered new insights into its chemistry and geology. Bennu, currently over 321 million kilometers from Earth, was chosen for study because it’s a carbonaceous chondritic rock—rich in organics, and thought to have formed in the early, oxygen-rich days of...

Busted: A bot powered by OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 language model has been unmasked after a week of posting comments on Reddit. Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30 million users. It was posting in bursts of roughly once a minute. Fooled ya—again: It’s not the first time GPT-3 has fooled...

As covid-19 began to spread earlier this year, it soon became clear that prisons and jails are particularly susceptible to outbreaks. In response, criminal justice systems around the world started looking for alternatives to incarceration.  Many turned to electronic ankle monitors as a solution. They used this technology to quickly relocate people from secure custody to the relative safety...