How did the Republican Party become the party of Trump?

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters says the religious right and social conservatives "got basically everything that they wanted" from Trump's presidency. Peters' new book is Insurgency.

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Chrome's New Tool Lets You Revisit Your Old Google Rabbit Holes

Google Chrome is rolling out Journeys, a feature that lets you revisit your old browsing sessions based on the subject matter you were searching for. From a report: If you type a word in the address bar that's related to some convoluted rabbit hole you've been down in the past, you'll see a "Resume your research" option that links you to the related sites you've visited before. So far, it sounds like it could be a much more viable solution than digging through your search history for that one site you kind of remember visiting three weeks ago. If you were knee-deep in research about axolotls, you should see all the related pages you accessed in Journeys whenever you type in the creature's name at a later date. The Journeys page will prominently display the sites you've spent more time on and will also provide suggestions based on what you've searched for.

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6 quick takeaways from this year's Oscar nominations

Fears of an #Oscarssowhite redux go largely unfounded in this year's acting nominations, and the actress categories provided some real surprises. The battle for best picture will be fascinating.

(Image credit: Netflix; Apple TV+; NEON; Janus Films)

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As the Largest Computer Networks Continue To Grow, Some Engineers Fear that Their Smallest Components Could Prove To Be an Achilles' Heel

An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine for a moment that the millions of computer chips inside the servers that power the largest data centers in the world had rare, almost undetectable flaws. And the only way to find the flaws was to throw those chips at giant computing problems that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. As the tiny switches in computer chips have shrunk to the width of a few atoms, the reliability of chips has become another worry for the people who run the biggest networks in the world. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and many other sites have experienced surprising outages over the last year. The outages have had several causes, like programming mistakes and congestion on the networks. But there is growing anxiety that as cloud-computing networks have become larger and more complex, they are still dependent, at the most basic level, on computer chips that are now less reliable and, in some cases, less predictable. In the past year, researchers at both Facebook and Google have published studies describing computer hardware failures whose causes have not been easy to identify. The problem, they argued, was not in the software -- it was somewhere in the computer hardware made by various companies. Google declined to comment on its study, while Facebook did not return requests for comment on its study. "They're seeing these silent errors, essentially coming from the underlying hardware," said Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University electrical engineer who specializes in testing computer hardware. Increasingly, Dr. Mitra said, people believe that manufacturing defects are tied to these so-called silent errors that cannot be easily caught. Researchers worry that they are finding rare defects because they are trying to solve bigger and bigger computing problems, which stresses their systems in unexpected ways. Companies that run large data centers began reporting systematic problems more than a decade ago. In 2015, in the engineering publication IEEE Spectrum, a group of computer scientists who study hardware reliability at the University of Toronto reported that each year as many as 4 percent of Google's millions of computers had encountered errors that couldn't be detected and that caused them to shut down unexpectedly. In a microprocessor that has billions of transistors -- or a computer memory board composed of trillions of the tiny switches that can each store a 1 or 0 -- even the smallest error can disrupt systems that now routinely perform billions of calculations each second.

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Josh Neuman, popular YouTuber and skateboarder, dies in a plane crash in Iceland

Neuman and three others were killed during a sightseeing flight to create commercial content for the Belgian streetwear brand Suspicious Antwerp. Neuman was 22.

(Image credit: Screenshot by NPR/YouTube)

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IRS To End Use of Facial Recognition To Identify Taxpayers

New submitter Beerismydad writes: The IRS said Monday it will suspend the use of facial recognition technology to authenticate people who create online accounts after the practice was criticized by privacy advocates and lawmakers. The agency said it would no longer use a third-party service, called ID.me, for facial recognition. Critics of the software said the database could become a target for cyberthreats. They also expressed concern about how the information could be used by other government agencies, among other concerns. Earlier Monday, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called on the agency to end its use of the ID.me software. After the IRS announced the practice would be suspended, Wyden said "the Treasury Department has made the smart decision to direct the IRS to transition away from using the controversial ID.me verification service. No one should be forced to submit to facial recognition to access critical government services."

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Microsoft To Block Internet Macros By Default in Five Office Applications

In one of the most impactful changes made in recent years, Microsoft has announced today that it will block by default the execution of VBA macro scripts inside five Office applications. From a report: Starting with early April 2022, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Word users will not be able to enable macro scripts inside untrusted documents that they downloaded from the internet. The change, which security researchers have been requesting for years, is expected to put a serious roadblock for malware gangs, which have relied on tricking users into enabling the execution of a macro script as a way to install malware on their systems. In these attacks, users typically receive a document via email or which they are instructed to download from an internet website. When they open the file, the attacker typically leaves a message instructing the user to enable the execution of the macro script. While users with some technical and cybersecurity knowledge may be able to recognize this as a lure to get infected with malware, many day-to-day Office users are still unaware of this technique and end up following the provided instructions, effectively infecting themselves with malware.

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