WIRED Autocomplete gathers the internet’s most searched questions about celebrities and goes right to the source for the answer. We’ve interviewed more than 150 actors, artists, YouTubers, and others, using Google’s autocomplete feature (hence the name!). As the presidential primaries got underway this year, WIRED asked Democratic candidates to participate in the series. Joe Biden,…
Many of those around Donald Trump have evinced a certain moral or political flexibility, but few have eclipsed the purely distilled, cynical hypocrisy of Mike Pompeo. As a Tea Party, Koch-backed member of Congress, he built his political reputation almost solely on two issues: lambasting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the Benghazi attack and…
Here’s a future scenario. Soon after you get your jury summons in the mail, you receive a SurveyMonkey link. Under oath—a checkbox and e-signature sufficed—you answer several questions not just about your personal background but also your Wi-Fi connectivity. Do you solemnly swear that you have home broadband?Now you’ve been selected as a juror, and…
“There’s nothing from the CDC that I can trust,” snapped US coronavirus task-force leader Deborah Birx at a White House meeting earlier this month. According to news reports, Birx was frustrated at the agency’s tally of coronavirus deaths, as she and colleagues worried that reported numbers were up to 25 percent too high. However, if…
For the last year, governments around the world have pressured Facebook to abandon its plans for end-to-end encryption across its apps, arguing that the feature provides cover for criminals and, above all, child predators. Today Facebook is rolling out new abuse-detection and alert tools in Messenger that may help address that criticism—without weakening its protections.Facebook…
As we all shelter-in-place and work from home more, figuring out how to make your internet faster has become a necessity.The good news is that some internet service providers have have increased speeds for low-income customers. Others have suspended broadband data caps.That makes the internet to your front door less of a bottleneck, but eliminating…
Data breaches have become an all too common threat in recent years, exposing personal information through attacks on companies and institutions. Some of these assaults are the result of sophisticated nation-state espionage operations, while others are fueled by online criminals hoping to sell the stolen data. Over the first two weeks of May, a hacking…
Pandemic life is lived in the cloud. Work, school, and dating have been virtualized by Zoom calls and instant messages. Friends share meals or moments via Instagram and badly lit webcam video.Out of view, the logged-on life requires many more photons and electrons to zip through precision-engineered glass and silicon inside data centers. As the…
Climate scientists are predicting that as many as 20 named hurricanes will develop in the Atlantic basin during the six-month season that officially begins on Monday. The prediction of a super-busy season comes from separate teams at Colorado State University, Pennsylvania State University, and AccuWeather and is based on sea surface temperatures in both the…
It was supposed to be a magical destination wedding. Jenny Cooper and Sean Steuer, who live in Los Angeles, had invited 120 people to join them at the Hyatt Ziva Puerto Vallarta in Mexico—an all-inclusive resort with five infinity pools, a swim-up bar, and entertainment that includes folkloric dancing and acrobatic performances. Cooper’s mother had…
