Wayne Rash

Nobody knows for sure how many people will travel from their homes to see the solar eclipse on Aug. 21, but the estimates place those numbers in the millions. This means that across the US, cities and towns, parks and nature preserves will see unprecedented crowds for the day. Hotels and campgrounds along the way […]

In some ways, Scandinavia is a data center designer’s dream location. The region has weather cool enough so that the computers can be chilled with natural air. It’s got plenty of cold water in its fjords while electricity is cheap and abundant. Couple that with a skilled and educated workforce as well as a stable […]

I watched the growing chaos in the nearby city of Charlottesville, Va. with horror on Aug. 12. During my time as news director of the television station there, I grew to know the city and its residents well and I knew that the hatred and violence that I saw did not originate from there. But […]

NEWS ANALYSIS: Venture investment firm Benchmark Capital has filed suit claiming that former CEO Travis Kalanick fraudulently hid critical information from the board of directors. Benchmark Capital wants former CEO Travis Kalanick to be gone from Uber, apparently forever. Kalanick, who gave up his position as CEO of the ride-sharing company he founded, is being […]

It was like watching an autonomous vehicle at its best. A Ford Transit passenger van with an empty driver’s seat cruised through heavy traffic in the crowded streets of Arlington, Virginia, without a hitch. The steering wheel seemed to turn by itself; the vehicle obeyed every traffic rule, signaled for turns, and gave way to […]

It’s clear that James Damore, the former Google engineer who was terminated for a memo he wrote suggesting that women are constitutionally unsuited for jobs in technology never met the late U.S. Navy Rear Admiral and computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper. I suspect that he has no idea who she was, but considering his short […]

Renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking is famous for his plain language explanations of physics. But he’s also known for his ability to communicate and conduct research using a tablet computer that he controls with only his eyes. Hawking does this with a custom-built eye tracker provided by Intel that allows him to pick […]

At first it doesn’t seem like much of a threat for a third party to hear you talking to your Amazon Echo’s virtual assistant, Alexa. After all, saying “Alexa, order me an Uber” is already being shared with Uber, your credit card company and of course the Alexa app on your phone. Other requests are […]

If you saw the first reports about Facebook’s artificial intelligence chatbots, you might believe that the robot revolution was about to overthrow human civilization. The reports said that the bots were talking among themselves using a language that humans could not understand. The word was that Facebook’s bots had slipped their leashes and were taking […]

Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) have introduced the Senate version of a bill to modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The new bill, which would modernize the original ECPA to require warrants for access to electronic communications such as email, also adds a requirement for a warrant for location information. The original […]

The news that Adobe had set an expiration date for the Flash Media Player was likely greeted in various ways at Web businesses around the world, depending on whether they had already migrated to more modern multimedia platforms. In some IT departments, the word that Adobe will stop supporting the media player at the end […]

When Microsoft first launched Windows back in 1985, things were different. In those days Windows wasn’t an operating system. Instead, Microsoft Windows 1.0 was an application that ran under MSDOS, which was a command line operating system designed for 16-bit Intel 8086-based computers. You invoked it by typing “Windows” on the command line. When Windows […]