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Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... ? Learn More It’s not often you get to interview a nuclear engineer and a physician who run a tiny vaporizer factory out of an oversized garage outside of San Francisco so today is your lucky day. Two weeks ago we spent some time with the guys from Thermovape, a homegrown, self-funded hardware company that just happens to produce some of the coolest and most effective vaporizers I’ve seen. For the uninitiated, the product is called the Thermo Essence Thermovape, a smoking cessation tool and “botanical vaporizer.” It’s designed for vaporizing the essentials out of botanicals like pot and tobacco as well as and oils. It’s not smokin...

As Spring cracked the Moscow frosts and March rains doused the streets, a computer in an innocuous server farm somewhere in the heart of the city winked to life. It was 2007, a year when many people became truly invested in online life. Twitter was a year old and the most popular smartphone was the Blackberry Curve – a pure email machine. It was a year ripe with promise for cyber-everything. And a group of hackers, unnamed to this day, wanted to grab their piece. The server first sent a blast of emails containing a link to a piece of software that many around the world wanted to download. Once they grabbed the Trojan Horse, the infected program took over computer after computer, creating something security experts call a botnet – a collection of infected machines controlled by a central command and control unit (CnC). This Moscow server, hidden behind IP address 72.232.49.214, began receiving incoming messages from a number of computers around the world. A whole swath of California l...

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More “IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry?” Steve Jobs asks us. “No,” we cheer in unison. “The entire information age?” He asks again, “Was George Orwell right about 1984?” Then the Apple CEO introduces us to the famous 1984 commercial directed by Ridley Scott that has since become a classic — some would say one of the most important commercials of all time. “Cut!” Welcome to the set of jOBS. Yes, you read that right. jOBS. A movie about the life of Steve Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher, Matthew Modine, and Dermot Mulroney. Directed by Joshua Michael Stern. Welcome to HOLLYWOOD. Well, Pasadena. Whether or not it feels “too soon” for Hollywood to be making a film about Steve Jobs, it’s happening. Not once, but...

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... ? Learn More A Reddit user found this video recorded on his brand new HP laptop. It was stored in the My Documents folder and clearly depicts the mundanity of life inside a hardware manufacturing plant. This was taken in the Quanta Chongqing Manufacturing City in Chongqing and the worker seems to be testing the camera on this particular model. Usually evidence of this testing is wiped out. It wasn’t in this case. Essentially, you’re looking at the face of modern manufacturing. He’s not mistreated, he’s not chained to his desk, but he’s building the same thing, over and over again, a prospect not many of us would relish. It’s a mund...