Franchising was the plan before the first film crashed and burned, with Lynch and star Kyle MacLachlan (playing Paul Atreides) set to shoot both Dune sequels back-to-back in 1986. Miniature spaceship models, costumes, and props from the first film were placed in storage by producer Dino De Laurentiis for use on these follow-ups, while the director hammered away on a Dune II script. “I wrote half a

Apple's AirTags are meant to help you effortlessly find your keys or track your luggage. But the same features that make them easy to deploy and inconspicuous in your daily life have also allowed them to be abused as a sinister tracking tool that domestic abusers and criminals can use to stalk their targets. Over the past year, Apple has taken protective steps to notify iPhone and Android users if

Harmful algal blooms are taking over as the world warms and grows richer in carbon dioxide—and there’s no easy fix. An algal bloom clogging a waterway near Lough Neagh in Northern IrelandChris Baraniuk Standing on the marina, Rob Skelly peers into the darkness of the river where bright speckles of algae drift in the water. A neon green invader. “It’s starting to build,” he says. “Tomorrow, you’ll

Meta promised to make Threads compatible with the decentralized protocol underlying Mastodon. Proponents of interoperable social media can’t agree whether to welcome or fear it. Days after Meta launched its new app, Threads, this month, a software engineer at the company named Ben Savage introduced himself to a developer group at the World Wide Web Consortium, a web standards body. The group, whic

A European Union ruling against Meta marks the beginning of the end of targeted ads. Surveillance capitalism just got a kicking. In an ultimatum, the European Union has demanded that Meta reform its approach to personalized advertising—a seemingly unremarkable regulatory ruling that could have profound consequences for a company that has grown impressively rich by, as Mark Zuckerberg once put it, 

While the infamous imageboard’s ties to mass shootings have long been clear, its relationship with a Japanese toymaker has remained remarkably murky. Over the past 19 years, the imageboard 4chan has been tied to Gamergate, the inception of QAnon, the incubation of a particular brand of online racism, and a raft of domestic terror attacks that have killed scores of people. Tragically, references an

A surprising number of the top 100,000 websites effectively include keyloggers that covertly snag everything you type into a form. When you sign up for a newsletter, make a hotel reservation, or check out online, you probably take for granted that if you mistype your email address three times or change your mind and X out of the page, it doesn't matter. Nothing actually happens until you hit the S

In 1913, Henry Ford revolutionized car-making with the first moving assembly line, an innovation that made piecing together new vehicles faster and more efficient. Some hundred years later, Ford is now using artificial intelligence to eke more speed out of today’s manufacturing lines. At a Ford Transmission Plant in Livonia, Michigan, the station where robots help assemble torque converters now in

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act barred the humans who made hiring decisions from discriminating on the basis of sex or race. Now, software often contributes to those hiring decisions, helping managers screen résumés or interpret video interviews. That worries some tech experts and civil rights groups, who cite evidence that algorithms can replicate or magnify biases shown by people. In 2018, Reuters

A secret experiment in 2007 proved that hackers could devastate power grid equipment beyond repair—with a file no bigger than a GIF. A control room in an Idaho National Labs facility.Photograph: JIM MCAULEY/The New York Times/Redux Earlier this week, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against a group of hackers known as Sandworm. The document charged six hackers working for Russia