Facebook Admits Its Ads Are Too Annoying

Facebook says its ad targeting technology has irked its users and will be upgraded 

Tom Simonite

September 27, 2013

For years, Facebook’s leaders have claimed that its useful and wildly popular service could target ads so well they wouldn’t be out of place in a stream of updates from a person’s friends and family. On an earnings call in May, founder Mark Zuckerberg said that even as his company increased the number of ads on the service, people still reported “satisfaction with all content, including ads.”

But today the company admitted that its ad targeting technology needs work. A blog post by Hong Ge, a manager in charge of ads in the company’s news feed, says:

“We are currently working on some updates to the ads algorithm to improve the relevance and quality of the ads people see.”

Those changes are said to be happening over “coming weeks”. They will involve the company paying more attention to signals from people that have been shown an ad that is irrelevant, such as them clicking the “report” or “hide” links on Facebook’s ad units.

Why Facebook isn’t already paying attention to such feedback from the people it supposedly runs its service for isn’t explained. It may be deduced from the way Ge’s post carefully balances promises to both ad-beseiged users of Facebook and the companies paying Facebook to besiege them.

Ge cautions marketers that they may see “some variation in the distribution of their ads” as the changes to ad targeting roll out, but that in the long run they will benefit from reaching the right people. Facebook has two kinds of customers – those that pay with money and those that pay with time and attention. The company’s ad technology has apparently not managed to balance the happiness of the two as well as Zuckerberg and others at Facebook have claimed it could.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519716/facebook-admits-its-ads-are-too-annoying/

New IPCC Report Strengthens Certainty of Climate Change

The new climate report largely reaffirms scientists’ claims.

• By Kevin Bullis on September 27, 2013

Why It Matters

Climate change will impact future generations dramatically.

Sooner melt: This image shows an iceberg that likely calved from Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier in west Greenland. Ice sheets in Greenland are are now melting six times faster than in the 1990s, and the acceleration has ice scientists worried.

The latest report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that scientists are more certain than ever that humans are causing global warming, and that climate change will get worse if greenhouse gas levels continue to rise.

The report is influential with policymakers because it represents the consensus of hundreds of scientists who have worked for years to draw conclusions from the scientific research on climate change.

The report, the first of four IPCC reports scheduled for this year, focuses on the science of climate change. The other reports will take a closer look at the likely impacts of climate change and what can be done to minimize them.

Steve Jobs Left a Legacy on Personalized Medicine

A type of DNA test the Apple CEO hoped might save his life is becoming widely available. 

Antonio Regalado

September 27, 2013

 
Final slide: In 2011, Steve Jobs spent $100,000 to discover the genetic basis of the cancer that killed him.

If you need proof of how information technology is influencing biotech, take a look at Foundation Medicine, the Boston-area diagnostics company that went public on Wednesday.

Its stock price quickly doubled after the IPO. And one reason is surely its links to stratospheric tech names from the West Coast. The company is backed by both Google and Bill Gates, and the core idea behind its technology was once tried out on Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Foundation sells a $5,800 test that looks in detail at the DNA of a person with cancer. The concept is that a comprehensive catalogue of genetic mutations in a person’s tumor will show exactly what’s driving the cancer and help doctors choose what drug will work best (see “Foundation Medicine: Personalizing Cancer Drugs.”)

Some Robots Are Starting to Move More Like Humans

• By Aviva Hope Rutkin on September 27, 2013

Why It Matters

Robots are incapable of performing many physical tasks. Taking inspiration from nature could help.

Muscle man: The torso of Roboy, a new tendon-driven robot developed at the University of Zurich, reveals its inner workings.

Robots usually look rigid and nonhuman, with joints engineered to avoid the elasticity that can make their movements less predictable and harder to control. Roboy, a robot developed by Rolf Pfeifer and colleagues in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich, is an example of a different approach that is slowly gaining momentum.

Roboy has a four-foot-tall human shape and a set of “muscles” inspired by the human musculoskeletal system. The plastic muscles work together via electrical motors and artificial tendons. Tendon-driven systems like Roboy mimic the flexible mechanics of biology, and could result in a new class of robots that are lighter, safer, and move in a more natural way.

Paper-killer Evernote Sees a Future in Post-its

Evernote is working with companies it initially sought to supplant to make everything more memorable. 

Rachel Metz

September 26, 2013

 
Duly noted:, Note-taking app maker Evernote announced partnerships with Post-it maker 3M and others at its annual conference Thursday.

Evernote which makes popular note-taking software that allows you to create and synchronize digital notes across gadgets, unveiled a decidedly retro image of its future at its annual conference Thursday in San Francisco: Post-it Notes.

In front of a crowd of nearly 1,000 reporters, developers, partners, and Evernote employees, Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, and Jesse Singh, global leader of the Post-it and Scotch brands for 3M, introduced a new Evernote mobile app that can easily digitize the ubiquitous office notes.

Mobile Broadband Access Surges Worldwide

A new United Nations report predicts the number of mobile subscriptions will exceed the global population next year

David Talbot

September 26, 2013

A new United Nations report makes clear that broadband access is surging around the world.  By the end of 2013, there will be 2.1 billion mobile broadband connections, or almost three times the number of fixed-line ones, it predicts.   Some countries are already completely saturated: Japan and Singapore each had more subscriptions than people, reflecting ownership of multiple devices.  Others are lagging: China had 17 mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 residents last year.  

Overall, the report is well worth reading for a deep look at what it calls the “far-reaching change brought abosut by the smartphone.”  It notes:

Mass connectivity via basic and advanced data access technologies seems assured, with the number of mobile subscriptions set to exceed 7 billion and overtake the total world population in 2014.  Mobile subscriptions in Africa and the Middle-East alone exceeded one billion in [the first quarter of] 2013.

Of course, the downsides are also becoming clearer.  We’ve have a long string of revelations about the depth of U.S. National Security Agency surveillance of the Internet and mobile communications (see “NSA Spying is Making Us Less Safe”).  And in some countries, the Internet operates at the whim of the government, as we were reminded on Wednesday as the Sudanese government apparently shut off of the Internet amid anti-government protests.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519696/broadband-access-surges-worldwide-but-growth-is-uneven/

Google Tweaks Search to Challenge Apple’s Siri

Upgrades to Google’s search engine will make it better at understanding conversational queries – helping its mobile search apps tread on Siri’s toes.

• By Tom Simonite on September 26, 2013

Why It Matters

Making search better able to understand natural language and speech could allow major changes in how people use mobile devices.

Google announced a series of upgrades to its search engine and mobile search apps today that strengthen its ability to understand queries in the form of natural sentences like those used in conversation. The changes are particularly focused on enabling more complex spoken interactions with Google’s mobile apps, boosting the company’s challenge to Apple’s Siri personal assistant.

“We are making your conversation with Google more natural,” said Amit Singhal, who leads search technology at Google. He spoke at a press conference held in the Menlo Park garage that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made their first office space in 2000.

A Genetic Matchmaking Movie Isn't So Far-Fetched

An upcoming film, The Perfect 46, is about a fictional genomics company with a not-so-fictional idea.

Susan Young

September 26, 2013

What if finding “The One” meant finding the person whose genome is most compatible with your own?

 

 

That’s the question raised by an upcoming movie called The Perfect 46. Writer/director Brett Ryan Bonowicz presented a near-final version of the film on Wednesday night at the Consumer Genetics Conference in Boston. Self-driving cars and disposable electronic package trackers set the film in an unspecified year in the future, but one that isn’t so far away that you can’t find a VCR or bulky television set.
 

The story centers around a genome-analysis company, The Perfect 46, that has developed an algorithm to determine the likelihood of prospective parents having a child with genetic disease. The promise is that future generations could be free of single-gene disorders like cystic fibrosis or even complex diseases like diabetes, if only everyone would work together to prevent these conditions in their children.

A Robo-Desk for Weary Office Workers

Apple, IDEO alums build a $4K computerized desk. 

Rachel Metz

September 26, 2013

There’s an old episode of The Simpsons in which Homer lies in a hospital bed while waiting for heart surgery, raising and lowering the bed while saying, “Bed goes up, bed goes down.” That’s the first thing that came to mind when I checked out the Stir Kinetic desk, a “smart” height-adjustable desk with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a built-in touch screen that aims to get you moving around while you work, instead of just sitting at your desk all day.

During a demonstration at an apartment in San Francisco’s Soma neighborhood, Stir founder and CEO JP Labrosse told me the idea for the desk stemmed from his time as a member of the original iPod team at Apple, where he first encountered colleagues with adjustable desks and got hooked on using one himself. Labrosse says the ability to change his working position throughout the day makes him feel more energized and focused.

How Images Become Viral on Google+

What makes an image go viral? The first study of image virality on Google+ reveals some curious tips 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

September 26, 2013

Network science has changed the way we think about the spread of information, diseases and even fashions. Perhaps its most important revelation is that the connectivity of the network matters when it comes to the viral spread of almost everything.

For example, the eventual size of a forest fire is determined by the connectivity of trees—how close they are together, for instance—but it is almost nothing to do with the size of the spark that started the fire in the first place.

The same idea explains why some internet messages become viral while others that seem just as interesting or funny or outrageous, never get anywhere. It’s all to do with the state and connectivity of the network at the moment the message is released.

Struggling to Translate Neuroscience Gains Into Treatments

Despite promising results in controlling neuronal activity, leaders in brain research still wrestle over turning their work into treatments.

• By Susan Young on September 26, 2013

Why It Matters

Advances in neuroscience technology could improve the treatment of a variety of brain disorders and injuries.

Recent achievements in neurotechnology are nothing short of stunning—blind people can see parts of their world again, and a woman who has been paralyzed for a decade can feed herself using a robotic arm. Leaders in the field presented these and other advances at the Aspen Brain Forum last week, while at the same time debating how quickly these technologies will lead to treatments for neurological disease and injury.

At the Aspen meeting, which was cosponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, Robert Greenberg, CEO of Second Sight, described how his medical-device company developed a prosthetic-sight system (see “Bionic Eye Implant Approved for U.S. Patients”). In its current form, the system transmits image data from a camera to a 60-pixel implant in the retina. However, the company is talking about a future version of the system that bypasses the eye altogether and instead sends the image information directly into the visual cortex.

A Hospital Takes Its Own Big-Data Medicine

Experts from Facebook and genetics labs team up to help doctors make personalized predictions about their patients.

• By Courtney Humphries on September 26, 2013

Why It Matters

Data science could help hospitals meet new government demands to cut spending.

Part of our Business Report:

A Cure for Health-Care Costs

Health-care spending is out of control. Can technology save us money?

Personal genome: Mount Sinai researcher Joel Dudley discusses how DNA sequencing could change health care.

On the ground floor of The Mount Sinai Medical Center’s new behemoth of a research and hospital building in Manhattan, rows of empty black metal racks sit waiting for computer processors and hard disk drives. They’ll house the center’s new computing cluster, adding to an existing $3 million supercomputer that hums in the basement of a nearby building.

The person leading the design of the new computer is Jeff Hammerbacher, a 30-year-old known for being Facebook’s first data scientist. Now Hammerbacher is applying the same data-crunching techniques used to target online advertisements, but this time for a powerful engine that will suck in medical information and spit out predictions that could cut the cost of health care.

What Apple’s M7 Motion-Sensing Chip Could Do

Apple’s always-on motion-sensing M7 chip points the way to an era of mobile gesture-recognition and “ambient intelligence.”

• By David Talbot on September 25, 2013

Why It Matters

Sensors that are always on will reveal new ways for mobile devices to be useful.

The motion-processing M7 chip in the new iPhone 5S will serve as an aid to fitness-tracking apps, says Apple. But over the long term, the chip could help advance gesture-recognition apps and sophisticated ways for your smartphone to anticipate your needs, or even your mental state, researchers say.

While smartphones have long contained motion-sensors—accelerometers to detect speed, gyroscopes to detect orientation, and compasses—these are kept off when the phone is “asleep” to avoid tying up the main processor and draining the battery. The M7, operating separately from the main processor, aggregates all of the data from those sensors and allows them to stay active and be analyzed all the time, even when the phone itself is asleep.

The First Carbon Nanotube Computer

A carbon nanotube computer processor is comparable to a chip from the early 1970s, and may be the first step beyond silicon electronics.

• By Katherine Bourzac on September 25, 2013

Why It Matters

For progress in computer power to continue, new materials will be needed for the most basic components.

Tube chip: This scanning electron microscopy image shows a section of the first-ever carbon nanotube computer. The image was colored to identify different parts of the chip.

For the first time, researchers have built a computer whose central processor is based entirely on carbon nanotubes, a form of carbon with remarkable material and electronic properties. The computer is slow and simple, but its creators, a group of Stanford University engineers, say it shows that carbon nanotube electronics are a viable potential replacement for silicon when it reaches its limits in ever-smaller electronic circuits.

The carbon nanotube processor is comparable in capabilities to the Intel 4004, that company’s first microprocessor, which was released in 1971, says Subhasish Mitra, an electrical engineer at Stanford and one of the project’s co-leaders. The computer, described today in the journal Nature, runs a simple software instruction set called MIPS. It can switch between multiple tasks (counting and sorting numbers) and keep track of them, and it can fetch data from and send it back to an external memory.

How Google Converted Language Translation Into a Problem of Vector Space Mathematics

To translate one language into another, find the linear transformation that maps one to the other. Simple, say a team of Google engineers 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

September 25, 2013

Computer science is changing the nature of the translation of words and sentences from one language to another. Anybody who has tried BabelFish or Google Translate will know that they provide useful translation services but ones that are far from perfect.

The basic idea is to compare a corpus of words in one language with the same corpus of words translated into another. Words and phrases that share similar statistical properties are considered equivalent.

The problem, of course, is that the initial translations rely on dictionaries that have to be compiled by human experts and this takes significant time and effort.

In Search of the Next Boom, Developers Cram Their Apps into Smart Watches

Clever apps might persuade people that they need a wrist-worn computer.

• By Timothy Carmody on September 25, 2013

Why It Matters

Smartphones and tablets created a rich ecosystem of apps, unlocking new experiences for users.

Wrist action: Apps already available for the Galaxy Gear include Banjo, which shows social posts by people nearby, and Atooma, which lets users program different tasks.

The age of wearable computing is upon us. Forget the debate over how capable or fashionable the first devices are, how popular they may eventually become, or even whether we fully understand what we’re getting into with these devices (see “The Paradox of Wearable Technology”). The big question is simply: what will they do? And the answer will have much to do with the apps that emerge.

Both hardware makers and software developers hope that wearables, like the smartphone, tablet, and television, will become a new platform for application development. The two most promising platforms are the headset and the smart watch. But while the only viable headset is Google’s still-in-beta Glass, smart watches and smart watch apps have arrived. These early smart watches may also help clarify what does and doesn’t work for software development in the broader emerging category of wearable technology.

Quora’s Search for What the Internet Doesn’t Know

Former Facebook chief technology officer Adam D’Angelo is trying to build a repository of expertise and wisdom online. Can it make enough money to stick around?

• By Tom Simonite on September 25, 2013

Why It Matters

There’s room on the Internet for a storehouse of personal experiences and hard-earned insight; the challenge has been how to create it.

Answer man: Adam D’Angelo, founder of Quora.

When the Q&A site Quora launched in 2010, it seemed like there was little space for a major new source of information on the Internet. Social networks and news sites took care of current affairs, from personal lives up to worldwide events; Wikipedia rounded up reference information from online and offline sources.

Three years later, Quora has made a good case that the Web was missing out on a valuable knowledge source. By encouraging people to write down their personal experiences, expertise, and advice, the site has compiled some arresting content of the kind that marks the most memorable of face-to-face conversations. Examples range from an astronaut trainer explaining prelaunch rituals to an inside account of Apple’s culture of secrecy.

Quora’s cofounder and CEO, former Facebook chief technology officer Adam D’Angelo, told MIT Technology Review’s Tom Simonite about his mission to make the Web more interesting by having people tease out information from one another and using smart technology to curate and filter it.

World’s Largest Solar Thermal Power Plant Delivers Power for the First Time

The $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar power plant can now generate electricity. But was it worth the money? 

Kevin Bullis

September 24, 2013

Powered up: One of three towers at Brightsource Energy’s Ivanpah power plant glows as thousands of mirrors focus sunlight on it to generate electricity for the first time. 

Years from now, when the Solyndra debacle has long faded from memory, the most visible legacy of the controversial U.S. DOE loan program could very well be a field of nearly 200,000 mirrors in the desert.

Today, Brightsource Energy announced that its huge, DOE-funded solar thermal power plant at Ivanpah, California, delivered power to the grid for the first time. It was part of a test to demonstrate the system, which uses mirrors to focus sunlight on towers to generate steam. The steam is then used to spin turbines and generate electricity. The plant isn’t quite finished yet, but is expected to be done by the end of the year.

One Way to Solve Fracking’s Dirty Problem

GE has demonstrated technology aimed at addressing one of the biggest challenges with fracking: water pollution.

• By Kevin Bullis on September 24, 2013

Why It Matters

Fracking contaminates huge amounts of wastewater with toxic chemicals.

Hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—has unlocked vast amounts of oil and natural gas from shale rock in the United States, and has the potential to do the same around the globe (see “Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map”). But fracking also consumes huge quantities of water, which it contaminates with a heady mix of toxic chemicals, a problem that threatens to slow this expansion.

GE says it has a technology that could help—an energy-efficient process that could cut the cost of water treatment in half. The technology could also decrease the chances of toxic waste spills.

Concerns about water pollution and other environmental issues related to fracking have led some places, including France and New York State, to block the process. As fracking increases in dry areas and places that lack adequate treatment and disposal options, pressure to block it could grow.

Cyborg Astrobiologist Put Through its Paces in West Virginian Coalfields

Astrobiologists are overwhelmed by the huge volume of images from other planets. Now they have help in the form of a system that automatically identifies objects of interest in geological images

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

September 24, 2013

The search for life on other planets is hotting up. The seemingly endless train of Mars rovers have found convincing evidence of a warmer and wetter climate on Mars. The Huygens and Cassini spacecraft have found lakes, beaches, rivers and rain on Titan (albeit of the the oily variety). And Europa’s dark, warm ocean looks increasingly inviting for astrobiologists.

Then there are the ever-increasing hordes of exoplanets in the habitable zones around other stars.It’s never been a better time to be an astrobiologist.

One problem that this new breed of scientist faces is data overload. Each image from Mars has to be pored over by a human expert before the rover’s next move can be planned and executed.

Startup Shows Off Its Cheaper Grid Battery

Sun Catalytix is making a new type of flow battery that could store hours’ worth of energy on the grid.

• By Martin LaMonica on September 24, 2013

Why It Matters

Increasing use of intermittent renewable power sources, such as wind and solar, will require improved technology to store grid energy.

Battery stack: Sun Catalytix’s prototype charges and discharges by circulating electrolyte liquids through grooves in square plates separated by a membrane.

Startup Sun Catalytix is designing a flow battery for grid energy storage that uses custom materials derived from inexpensive commodity chemicals. It joins dozens of other companies seeking to make a device that can cheaply and reliably provide multiple hours of power to back up intermittent wind and solar power.

The MIT spinoff, which hopes to differentiate itself with a novel chemistry and inexpensive mechanical systems, is testing a small-scale five-kilowatt prototype. It projects that a full-scale system, which it expects to make in 2015 or 2016, will cost under $300 per kilowatt-hour, or less than half as much as the sodium-sulfur batteries now used for multihour grid storage.

Will Any Health App Ever Really Succeed?

There are wildly successful apps for mapping, sending e-mail, and catapulting birds. Why aren’t there any for health care?

• By Rachel Metz on September 24, 2013

Why It Matters

Smartphones are the fastest-spreading consumer technology in history, but they’re still little used in health care.

Part of our Business Report:

A Cure for Health-Care Costs

Health-care spending is out of control. Can technology save us money?

Geoffrey Clapp thinks a mobile app can make health care better—so much so, in fact, that his upcoming app is called just that: Better.

The app is being tested at the Mayo Clinic, which is an investor in Clapp’s startup, and is slated to launch in October. It aims to let people use a smartphone to reach a doctor, find a diagnosis, or keep track of their medical records. Storing personal medical data and using health-tracking features will be free, but users will be charged monthly fees for instant access to nurses and health coaches.

Better, also the name of the company, is among a slew of health and fitness companies concentrating on the mobile Internet market. So far, however, health apps have failed to take off. To the disappointment of “e-health” advocates who hope to see such apps transform the medical landscape, the number of Americans using technology to track their health or fitness didn’t change between 2010 and early 2013, according to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Crowd Investing Is the New Way to Finance Technology Development

Now private companies can try to raise funds from the public at large.

• By Antonio Regalado on September 23, 2013

Why It Matters

The technology that gets created often comes down to what gets funded.

During a “demo day” in Silicon Valley last August, entrepreneur Mattan Griffel took the stage with a well-practiced, carefully timed pitch.

“We teach people how to code, online, in one month,” said Griffel, adding meaningful pauses between the words. The startup he cofounded, One Month Rails, will “change the face of online education,” Griffel promised.

Such technology salesmanship used to be reserved for a select audience of angel investors, like those who attended the invitation-only Y Combinator event where Griffel’s video was filmed.

But starting Monday, Griffel’s pitch appeared on the Internet, next to a clickable blue button that says “Invest.” Buying into his startup is now almost as easy as purchasing a toaster on eBay.

“Crowd investing” is the idea that anyone should be able to invest easily in startup companies. That idea took a big step forward thanks to new federal regulations that allow startups, for the first time, to invite large swaths of the public to invest in them.

Cyclists’ Time-Trial Dilemma Solved

On a closed track against a powerful head/tailwind, what racing strategy should a cyclist adopt? One engineer has derived a simple rule-of-thumb that gives the answer 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

September 23, 2013

 

Here’s an interesting question about bicycle racing. Imagine you are racing around a circuit in conditions that offer you a steady tailwind along one straight and a similar headwind along the other.

Your goal is to complete a certain number of laps in the shortest possible time. What should your racing strategy be? In other words, what speed should you ride into and against the wind to achiee the highest possible average speed?

Today, Alan Brad Anton gives us the answer thanks to a neat exercise in nonlinear optimisation. His goal in this calculation is simple. “I seek a “rule of thumb” that can be implemented on-the-fly, in your head, without requiring sophisticated calculations, pre-race measurements in a laboratory, or on-course communications with a coach,” he says.

Wallet.AI Aims to Serve Up Location-Based Financial Advice

An app called Wallet.AI wants to put a financial advisor in your pocket.

• By Rachel Metz on September 23, 2013

Why It Matters

The data we generate with our smartphones can be analyzed to offer deeper insights about our behaviors.

While navigating this increasingly connected world, you leave a trail of data about where you go, what you buy, and who you interact with. If you use a smartphone, this trail intensifies with every tweet and Foursquare check-in.

This may alarm some people, but Omar Green sees it as key to a smarter way to manage finances than a spreadsheet or piece of paper.

Green is founder and CEO of personal finance startup wallet.AI, which is among a growing number of app-makers incorporating so-called contextual awareness into their software. The company is building software that includes a mobile app to sort through your data trail and, combined with insights about your spending habits, offer up timely financial advice. It might range from warning you not to spend more than $20 a day if you want to make rent at the end of the month to, perhaps, nudging you during a daily Starbucks run to get a drip coffee rather than your usual vanilla latte.

Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe

The security researcher Bruce Schneier, who is now helping the Guardian newspaper review Snowden documents, suggests that more revelations are on the way.

• By David Talbot on September 23, 2013

Why It Matters

Leaked government documents have revealed extensive surveillance of Internet and phone data, including of Americans.

Cryptic answers: Bruce Schneier says he does not keep any of Snowden’s stolen NSA documents on his laptop.

Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and author on security topics, last month took on a side gig: helping the Guardian newspaper pore through documents purloined from the U.S. National Security Agency by contractor Edward Snowden, lately of Moscow.

In recent months that newspaper and other media have issued a steady stream of revelations, including the vast scale at which the NSA accesses major cloud platforms, taps calls and text messages of wireless carriers, and tries to subvert encryption.

This year Schneier is also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In a conversation there with David Talbot, chief correspondent of MIT Technology Review, Schneier provided perspective on the revelations to date—and hinted that more were coming.