Sometimes, an author can get away with writing about anything if it’s done with charm and grace. In this case Wired’s Jason Kehe decided to try living with a flip phone for eight months to see what he might learn. The story is not so much about the awkward disconnectedness of it all, but rather the remarkable social and technical impact.

Frankly, I’m embarrassed to write about this semifailed experiment. Disconnection has become the most congratulated, least convincing narrative gimmick of recent times, a widely excusable hypocrisy.

The author writes with a certain colorful, literary irony and sparkle. As a result, his social commentary about our fixation and dependence on the smartphone is delightful reading in and of itself. And yet, and yet, the author manages to make us ponder. What have we done to ourselves as humans?

A woman from Florida was recently saved by her Apple Watch after she was trapped in a car underwater.

Amanda Antonio told first responders in Hillsborough County, Fla., that she used her Apple Watch to locate her iPhone to call 9-1-1 after her car rolled in a ditch full of mud and water. “It’s up to my waist,” Antonio said according to a transcript of the call obtained by Spectrum Bay News 9, a television station covering the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. She later said, “It’s now up to my chin. I’m freezing. I’m so scared.”

An elite Intel team is still fighting Meltdown and Spectre, two security vulnerabilities that affected millions of devices.

Throughout 2018, researchers inside and outside Intel continued to find exploitable weaknesses related to this class of «speculative execution» vulnerabilities. Fixing many of them takes not just software patches, but conceptually rethinking how processors are made.

I recommend reading Wired’s article, it’s an interesting look into Intel and how serious the two flaws still are.

Hackers warned thousands of Chromecast users of a security flaw…by hijacking their devices. They were the latest people to work out how to force the Chromecast to play any YouTube video they want. For good measure, the hackers, who go by the names Hacker Giraffe and J3ws3r, encouraged users to subscribe to controversial YouTube personality PewDePie’s channel. Techcrunch spoke to researchers concerned that the vulnerability could leave exposed devices vulnerable to more damaging attacks.

The bug, dubbed CastHack, exploits a weakness in both Chromecast and the router it connects to. Some home routers have enabled Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), a networking standard that can be exploited in many ways. UPnP forwards ports from the internal network to the internet, making Chromecasts and other devices viewable and accessible from anywhere on the internet.