Over the last two years, security researchers have dug up one technique after another that lets a hacker trick Intel’s microprocessors into spilling a computer’s deepest secrets. As those flaws have been exposed, chipmakers have scrambled to patch them. But for one serious form of those attacks it turns out that Intel still hasn’t successfully…
The modern industrial era was literally built on steel and concrete, readily available materials that gave buildings the strength to stretch hundreds of stories into the sky. Unlike wood, steel and concrete don’t catch fire from a mere dropped lantern. Soon, city-razing conflagrations, like those of San Francisco in 1906 and Chicago in 1871, were…
Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s entertainment news roundup. There’s been a lot happening in national and international news lately, so you’d be forgiven for missing the latest in the world of pop culture. Let’s get you caught up.Billie Eilish Pretty Much Swept the GrammysLast night, during a telecast that was…
Magali Chesnel suffers from vertigo; she also loves taking pictures from very high heights. The former hasn’t precluded the latter. In 2016, she was bicycling through the colorful salt marshes in the Camargue region of her native France when she saw a flyer advertising a 45-minute ride in a two-seat ultralight airplane—a hang-glider-like craft that…
Dyson has an enormous product line-up of vacuums, often in four different configurations, and it keeps older models in production as newer ones dethrone them. Padded with discounts, the vacuums move closer down the ladder to entry-level models until they eventually go out of production. Even after Dyson stops making them, you can still find…
On Tinder, an opening line can go south pretty quickly. Conversations can easily devolve into negging, harassment, cruelty—or worse. And while there are plenty of Instagram accounts dedicated to exposing these “Tinder nightmares,” when the company looked at its numbers, it found that users reported only a fraction of behavior that violated its community standards.Now,…
The town of Rotterdam, New York, has only 45 police officers, but technology extends their reach. Each day a department computer logs the license plates of around 10,000 vehicles moving through and around town, using software plugged into a network of cameras at major intersections and commercial areas.“Let’s say for instance you had a bank…
This story is part of a series on parenting—from surveilling our teens to helping our kids navigate fake news and misinformation.I’m a father of two teenagers, 13 and 17. I don’t want your pity, but I do want your understanding. It’s true what they say about the hazards of parenting teenagers. It is indeed more…
This story is part of a series on parenting—from surveilling our teens to helping our kids navigate fake news and misinformation.What does it mean for a kid to be media literate? It sounds generally positive and important, like a good dental checkup or a flawless report card. The field is broad and definitions vary, but…
Monday, January 27, 2020. By Ellis Rosen, with cartooncollections.com. You might not even need a baby monitor, but they can come in handy. Here are WIRED’s picks. (And if you use an internet-connected camera to watch your kids, here’s how you can keep it more secure.) This week WIRED is publishing a series on parenting—from…
