Enlarge When Diablo 3 released 11 years ago, it was a mess. Put aside the action role-playing game’s infamous server problems at launch—a product of the series going online-only for the first time—the game itself had fundamental issues. At core was its ill-conceived and universally reviled real-money auction house,...

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches in March, 2023. (credit: SpaceX) Nearly seven years ago, on a steamy morning in Florida, a small team of SpaceX engineers was fueling a Falcon 9 rocket for a pre-launch firing test of its nine Merlin engines. It had been a difficult but successful year for the California rocket company,...

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) I’ve had an emotional connection with Street Fighter since I was 13 years old. It was early March 1991, and my friend and I were celebrating his 14th birthday in Santa Cruz, California, spending as much of our weekend at the boardwalk arcade as possible. His mom handed us each a $20 bill...

Enlarge (credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) In November 1988, a graduate student at Cornell University named Robert Morris, Jr. inadvertently sparked a national crisis by unleashing a self-replicating computer worm on a VAX 11/750 computer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Morris...

Enlarge / The aftermath of the Fort McMurray fire. (credit: Katie Daubs) Editor's note: we have been made aware that the draft form of the book that was reviewed contains some significant errors. We are looking into the details of the errors further. We are leaving the piece up in the mean time, as it provides some context...

Enlarge Smartphone malware sold to governments around the world can surreptitiously record voice calls and nearby audio, collect data from apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, and hide apps or prevent them from running upon device reboots, researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team have found. An analysis Talos published...