Alphabet shut down Loon in early 2021. It was a business decision, not a speculation on technology – in fact, its mission became moot as outlying areas managed to connect without receiving signals from mutant descendants. Phileas Fogg. However, the Loon team, working in partnership with a company called Raven Aerostar (most recently the Aerostar...
Long gone the days when fanfiction was treated as a vicious pleasure, consumed exclusively on a glowing iPad screen under the covers at night and never discussed outside of Tumblr. We live in an era when supernatural star Misha Collins boasts about Dean/Castiel fanfic stats on Twitter, Harry Styles Fanfiction has been adapted into a...
I’m in crossroads. Just a few weeks ago, I reviewed the Samsung Galaxy A14 5G calling it a phenomenal phone that only costs $200, proving that you really don’t need to pay a ton of money to get a great smartphone. Now I’m looking at the top $1,200 Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and $800 Galaxy...
Monitor A weekly column dedicated to everything that happens in WIRED the world of culture, from movies to memes, from television to twitter. Gather, comrades. We need to talk about bunding. Not really; many other people are already discussing this topic in depth, but if we didn’t, there could be a lot less sexuality in...
Roblox is testing a tool that can speed up the process of creating and modifying game objects by forcing artificial intelligence to write code. The tool allows anyone who plays Roblox to create items such as buildings, terrain, and avatars; change the appearance and behavior of these things; and give them new interactive properties by...
New Zealand fighting two consecutive extreme weather events – a massive flood followed by a cyclone – that have claimed at least 12 lives and left hundreds of thousands of people behind without power. Strong winds and the waters of Cyclone Gabriel washed away coastal roads on the northern island, and bridges shattered. Landslides covered...
Soren Iverson blames Spotify, if “blame” is the right word. Back in 2015, the music streaming company launched Wrapped, a year-end summary for each user that offered information about their music listening habits and the year’s most popular artists. Other brands have begun to borrow the idea, a shameless if fun ploy to increase engagement....
History of data leaks Data leaks have become more common and dangerous over the decades. However, some of them stand out as instructive examples of how security breaches have evolved, how attackers can orchestrate these attacks, what can be stolen, and what happens to data after a breach. Digital data leaks began long before the...
These words accurately describe the scene I encountered in January, about 70 years after the novel was published. The drought seemed like a distant memory; the green slopes of the hills contrasted with the swift, muddy current of the Salinas. Along River Road, I met a couple taking a morning walk along a muddy path...
Discovering that hackers having hidden access to your corporate network for three years is bad enough. Web hosting company GoDaddy admitted to something even worse this week: A group of hackers it repeatedly spotted on its network have returned — or never left — and have been wreaking havoc on its network since at least...
