The 20 most-read stories of 2023

From time to time, you reside by means of a 12 months that you understand you are going to bear in mind. Generally it is due to a private milestone. Different instances it is due to noteworthy occasions that affected all of us in a technique or one other. And in some years, it is as a result of we had been all shocked by unanticipated and fast technological advances.

2023 positively will probably be a 12 months that will probably be remembered. On the tech aspect, the largest story was AI, due in no small half to fast advances in massive language fashions. We had information about area flight, hackers, working programs, and even music gamers.

Learn on to seek out out which tales resonated essentially the most with our readers all year long.

Relying on the screenwriting, time journey may be top-of-the-line plot units in a film… or one of the vital complicated, if executed poorly. As we’ve come to raised perceive the character of time, Hollywood has begun producing extra flicks that use it as a part of the story.

Our ace science reporter Jennifer Ouellette occurs to be married to a physicist with his own subreddit, so we determined to show them unfastened on the subject of time journey and the flicks to see which movies had the very best mixture of leisure and scientific rigor. Learn on to seek out out the place Invoice & Ted’s Glorious Journey, 12 Monkeys, and Scorching Tub Time Machine ended up.

Largely thought-about relics of a bygone computing period, over 10,000 mainframe computer systems are nonetheless used in the present day. Used primarily by Fortune 500 corporations, most of those mainframes are bought by IBM. With a lineage courting again to technological developments of the Fifties, these computer systems nonetheless excel with some high-volume use instances, particularly these involving banking.

There was a bunch of corporations within the mainframe sport, however Rand, GE, NEC, Honeywell, and nearly everybody else both not exists or is not constructing mainframes. IBM is now the one mainframe producer that issues, so take a look at the story to be taught why some corporations nonetheless do a few of their computing on mainframes as an alternative of within the cloud.

I can not bear in mind a top-20 listing that did not embody a macOS assessment. However this can be the furthest down the listing it has ever appeared, and <spoiler> that is truly the one OS assessment to seem on this 12 months’s listing.</spoiler>

That is due in no small half to how main OS updates come out like clockwork annually, even when there are not any main new options to excite customers. As of late, OS updates may be met with grumbling because of pointless UI adjustments and {hardware} obsolescence. Sonoma is one other “low key” replace, as Andrew Cunningham described it in his traditional, complete assessment. Name it “Ventura plus” or no matter you want—Sonoma is enterprise as traditional.

Ah, it is our first 0-day of the 2023 countdown. This one primarily affected customers of third-party app shops and concerned the Pinduoduo app, downloaded tens of millions of instances. As Dan Goodin described it:

“[T]he malicious Pinduoduo app contains performance permitting for the app to be put in covertly with no capability to be uninstalled, falsely inflating the variety of Pinduoduo day by day energetic customers and month-to-month energetic customers, uninstalling competitor apps, stealing consumer privateness information, and evading numerous privateness compliance rules.”

Yikes.

The variations of the app in Google Play and Apple’s App Retailer didn’t include the backdoor.