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AI

- Google Gemini Can Summarize Your Emails in Gmail. Should You Use It?

- The Rich Can Afford Personal Care. The Rest Will Have to Make Do With AI

- The Inside Story of Apple Intelligence

- The Crypto Industry Hails David Sacks, Its New ‘Czar’

- How ChatGPT’s Canvas Can Help You Use AI More Productively

GEAR | DEC 9, 2024 AT 7:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Google Gemini Can Summarize Your Emails in Gmail. Should You Use It?

David Nield

Artificial intelligence is now busy tackling some of the biggest problems to face humankind: Speeding up drug design, tackling cancer detection, and finding solutions to climate change. However, none of these issues are arguably as daunting as the task Google has set its Gemini AI bot on.

Specifically, the task of staying on top of your inbox. Gemini is now a part of Gmail on the web and on mobile devices, and as well as using it to find the right words in your emails, you can also get it to summarize long emails and threads for you.

Here I'll show you how these summary tools work and what else Gemini can do for you—and report on just how reliable it is at the moment. One caveat though: For now, Gemini in Gmail is only available if you or your employer are paying for Google One AI Premium ($20 a month), or for a Google Workspace account.

Get Gemini Summaries in Gmail

Gemini can summarize single emails, or lots of them.David Nield

There are a few ways to get Gemini summaries in Gmail, if the feature is enabled for your account. Most of them can be accessed through the Gemini logo, which is a distinctive black star shape. On the web, click the Gemini button in the top right corner of Gmail to bring up the side panel. There, you can see summaries for your inbox as a whole, or for the particular thread you have open.

In Gmail for Android and iOS, the Gemini button shows up in the top right corner if you're looking at a list of emails, or in the center at the top if you're viewing a particular thread. On mobile, there's also a specific Summarize this email button that appears when you're looking at a single email or a single thread of emails.

That Summarize this email button is the easiest way to get started, but you can also tell Gemini to "summarize today's emails," "summarize this week's emails," "summarize my unread emails," or "summarize the emails I got last month"—anything along those lines. After Gemini spends a few moments thinking, you'll get a response on screen, together with follow-up questions you might want to ask. (You can request a longer summary, for instance.)

The results will be presented as a series of bullet points, with Sources underneath: Click or tap on these sources to see the individual emails the information was pulled from. Using the icons alongside the responses, you're also able to copy the text elsewhere, give thumbs up or thumbs down feedback on the Gemini response, or clear the AI chat history.

Ask Gemini Other Questions in Gmail

There's more to Gemini than summaries.David Nield

I'm mostly focusing on the summary capabilities of Gemini in Gmail here, but there are plenty of other commands you can explore. In fact, you can ask Gemini just about any question you like about what's in your inbox, and it will at least attempt to provide a response—scouring through the gigabytes of data in your emails looking for answers.

For example, you might try "what have I and someone@email.com been emailing about lately?" or "what's the name of the hotel I stayed at in Glasgow?" The AI can pick out details from your inbox that it would otherwise take a lot of digging to find—where something is happening perhaps, or what the result of a particular decision was.

You can ask who emails you most often about a particular topic, or ask what topic a particular person is most often mentioning. Sometimes though, Gemini will trip up on specifics. It can't tell you how many emails you got across a certain time period, for example, or pull up dates from your emails (you'll just be referred to Google Calendar—though that integration may come later).

Some Gemini responses are simply standard Gmail searches. Ask to see your most important emails, for example, and you'll get the results of an "is:important" query in the search bar. Ask to see all the unread emails in your inbox, meanwhile, and Gemini just uses the "is:unread" search. It's usually easier to run these searches yourself than open up Gemini and ask about them.

So, How Well Does It Work?

Gemini gets its answers right, most of the time.David Nield

It's no secret that AI hallucinates and makes mistakes. At the bottom of every Gemini prompt in Gmail, you'll see a disclaimer about errors recommending that you double-check any information the tool provides. These AI bots are, by their very nature, not supposed to simply parrot or copy information as a simple Gmail search would—they're designed to make assumptions and connections, so there's always a margin for error.

The question is whether the convenience of these tools is worth the risk of occasionally shaky results. In my testing, Gemini did an impressively good job of summarizing messages most of the time. I never saw it completely invent something that hadn't been mentioned in an email, though it did occasionally miss an important point or two in its summaries.

I wouldn't necessarily rely on Gemini to summarize a long email thread from my boss and pick out the key details and stats. That's something I'd want to do myself. But for summarizing a year’s worth of emails with relatives to find the best talking points to bring to the next family dinner? That I could see myself doing. I wouldn't even need to open the emails.

It's particularly useful to have Gemini sum up emails from the last week, or the last month—though of course the more data you give it, the greater the chance of it missing something important. That may or may not matter to you, of course. If you've got thousands of emails you're never going to read anyway, you may as well see what Gemini makes of them before archiving them.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/google-gemini-summarize-emails-in-gmail/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

BUSINESS | DEC 7, 2024 AT 4:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The Rich Can Afford Personal Care. The Rest Will Have to Make Do With AI

By Allison Pugh

The burgeoning field of social-emotional AI is tackling the very jobs that people used to think were reserved for human beings—jobs that rely on emotional connections, such as therapists, teachers, and coaches. AI is now widely used in education and other human services. Vedantu, an Indian web-based tutoring platform valued at $1 billion, uses AI to analyze student engagement, while a Finnish company has created “Annie Advisor,” a chatbot working with more than 60,000 students, asking how they are doing, offering help, and directing them to services. Berlin-based startup clare&me offers an AI audio bot therapist it calls “your 24/7 mental health ally,” while in the UK, Limbic has a chatbot “Limbic Care” that it calls “the friendly therapy companion.”

The question is, who will be on the receiving end of such automation? While the affluent are sometimes first adopters of technology, they also know the value of human attention. One spring day before the pandemic, I visited an experimental school in Silicon Valley, where—like a wave of other schools popping up that sought to “disrupt” conventional education—kids used computer programs for customized lessons in many subjects, from reading to math. There, students learn mainly from apps, but they are not entirely on their own. As the limitations of automated education became clear, this fee-based school has added more and more time with adults since its founding a few years back. Now, the kids spend all morning learning from computer applications like Quill and Tynker, then go into brief, small group lessons for particular concepts taught by a human teacher. They also have 45-minute one-on-one meetings weekly with “advisers” who track their progress, but also make sure to connect emotionally.

We know that good relationships lead to better outcomes in medicine, counseling, and education. Human care and attention helps people to feel “seen,” and that sense of recognition underlies health and well-being as well as valuable social goods like trust and belonging. For instance, one study in the United Kingdom—titled “Is Efficiency Overrated?”—found that people who talked to their barista derived well-being benefits more than those who breezed right by them. Researchers have found that people feel more socially connected when they have had deeper conversations and divulge more during their interactions.

Yet fiscal austerity and the drive to cut labor costs have overloaded many workers, who are now charged with forging interpersonal connections, shrinking the time they have to be fully present with students and patients. This has contributed to what I call a depersonalization crisis, a sense of widespread alienation and loneliness. US government researchers found that “more than half of primary care physicians report feeling stressed because of time pressures and other work conditions.” As one pediatrician told me: “I don’t invite people to open up because I don’t have time. You know, everyone deserves as much time as they need, and that’s what would really help people to have that time, but it’s not profitable.”

The rise of personal trainers, personal chefs, personal investment counselors, and other personal service workers—in what one economist has dubbed “wealth work”—shows how the affluent are fixing this problem, making in-person service for the rich one of the fastest-growing sets of occupations. But what are the options for the less advantaged?

For some, the answer is AI. Engineers who designed virtual nurses or AI therapists often told me their technology was “better than nothing,” particularly useful for low-income people who can’t catch the attention of busy nurses in community clinics, for example, or who can’t afford therapy. And it’s hard to disagree, when we live in what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called ”private affluence and public squalor.”

Yet the contrast is sharp between how AI is used in the experimental school—nestled within an abundance of human attention—and how it is used in more deprived circumstances. In 2023, a Mississippi school district facing dire teacher shortages reported that students were learning geometry, Spanish, and high school science via a software program. But if students got stuck, reporters found, there was no human adviser on standby. Instead, the only option was to wait for the availability of a human instructor in the next town.

The concerns that are conventionally raised about AI are generally limited to privacy, bias, or job loss, and some companies in the socio-emotional AI space are working to address these common worries. Hume AI, based in San Jose and New York and valued at $219 million, recently released technology that recognizes emotions based on the user’s tone of voice; the tool is in use in hospitals to track patient mental health and in some new “AI companions.” At the same time, however, Hume has also established a nonprofit called the Hume Initiative, coming up with guidelines to “chart an ethical path for empathic AI,” which focuses on consent, equity, and transparency. But no one is talking about what happens when we limit human contact to those who can afford to pay a premium. Technology does not arrive on a blank slate, but intersects with existing inequalities, and in this case it amplifies the stratification of human connection. In 2025, the affluent will get their connective labor from humans. The rest will get theirs from a machine.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/wealth-inequality-personal-service-access-artificial-intelligence/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

BUSINESS | DEC 6, 2024 AT 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The Inside Story of Apple Intelligence

Steven Levy

Apple’s leaders claim the company wasn’t late to generative AI, but instead following what has become its familiar playbook: try to be the best, not the first.

Photograph: David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push this June. Conventional wisdom suggested this entrance was unfashionably late.

Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is arriving just in time—and that it's been stealthily preparing for this moment for years.

That’s part of the message I got from speaking with key Apple executives this fall about how they created what is now called Apple Intelligence. Senior vice president for software engineering Craig Federighi is a familiar character in an ongoing web series in the tech world known as keynote product launches. Less publicly recognizable is senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy John Giannandrea, who previously headed machine learning at Google. In a separate interview, I spoke with Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing. (These conversations helped prepare me for my sitdown with Tim Cook, which I did the next day.) All of the executives, including Cook, emphasized that despite the massively disruptive potential of AI, Apple was going to handle this game-changing tech with the same clarity and meticulousness the company is known for. To paraphrase a song by some musicians who also formed a company called Apple, the crew at Cupertino was always waiting for this moment to arise.

“We were doing intelligence in 2015, like predicting which apps you would use next and helping predict routes in maps,” says Joswiak. “We didn’t always talk about it publicly, but we were there and ahead of the curve.”

In 2018, Apple poached Giannandrea from Google, a move that Cook told me showed that Apple anticipated the coming AI transformation. The company created a new senior VP position for him, an unusual move for Apple that broke with its traditional hiring norms. Upon arrival, Giannandrea was struck by how much Apple was already exploiting cutting-edge AI in some of its most popular products. “Face ID is a feature you use every day, many, many times a day to unlock your phone, and you have no idea how it really works,” he says. “There’s a lot of deep learning going on privately on your phone just to make that feature work. But to the user, it just disappears.”

Federighi says that experimenting with OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, which was released in 2020, stoked his imagination. “Things that seemed on their way to becoming possible suddenly appeared eminently possible,” he says. “The next real question was whether it was possible to take advantage of the technology in an Apple way.”

Apple soon had multiple teams working on transformer-based AI models. So when ChatGPT captivated the world in November 2022, there was no need for Apple to assemble an internal task force for developing AI products—work was already underway to create features that would similarly “just disappear.” “We have ways of drawing together functional expertise across the organization to accomplish larger product transformations,” says Federighi. “When it came to making a bigger step in a public way, we pulled together many of those threads, in a way that's just very familiar to us at Apple.”

Apple also had reportedly moved some AI-savvy engineers from its discontinued smart-car project to the Apple Intelligence effort. When I brought this up, Federighi gave me a shrug that signaled, “Hey, I’m not going there.”

Not that any of this was easy. “This is a spot along a journey,” says Giannandrea. “Computer science is changing. For more and more of the things that we want to do, like speech recognition, language understanding, and summarization, the only way to do it is to build. And so this is a progression.”

Apple decided early on that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be a separate product, but instead something implemented on a systems level. Unlike a number of its competitors, Apple had no interest in producing artificial general intelligence, a quest that to the company seems unrealistic and almost frivolous. “The most credible researchers in the field believe there are many unsolved problems and breakthroughs required,” says Giannandrea. “The idea that you’re scaling up these technologies to go to AGI is very naive.” He says that Apple may very well be involved in important breakthroughs—not to kickstart the Singularity, but to improve its products. “We probably have more engineers working on what we call ‘investigations’ than we do working on what’s going to ship next year,” he says, referring to what is apparently the company's term for basic research.“I would say that people working at Apple are slightly more interested in what the impact of their work is going to be with consumers.”

“Apple is laser focused on things that are going to make your day-to-day life better,” says Joswiak. That ultimately involves making use of personal information, whether it's knowing who your close contacts are when you search for a specific photo, recalling places you’ve visited when you use maps, or keeping track of what you’ve downloaded from Safari. To fully make use of AI, Apple would need to organize the personal information of its users in a comprehensive fashion—a scary proposition the company felt it was uniquely qualified to pitch to its customers because of its very public focus on privacy. Protecting that privacy, however, turned out to be a major technical challenge.

“We had to innovate at the data center level, at the system level, at the OS level, at the cryptographic and security protocol level, at the distributed AI inference level … at every level up the stack to do what no one had done before—extend an on-device processing level of security that you have on your phone, to advance processing in the cloud,” says Federighi. “I hope it is the future of how everyone does this kind of process.” His conviction is so strong that he says he hopes other companies mimic the achievement, even if it means Apple losing its competitive advantage. “There are lots of cases where we have very mixed feelings about people copying what we do, but when it comes to our privacy practices, we were happy to set an example and encourage,” Federighi says.

Only when it built those privacy systems did the company unveil Apple Intelligence, and then small groups of features were released in waves to much fanfare. But the reality is that the first public iteration of Apple Intelligence isn’t quite blowing people away. Critics complain that its inbox summaries, email rewrites, and photo search, as well as a more conversational Siri, don’t seem much different than the gen-AI offerings already unveiled by competitors. But just as Apple crashed its rivals’ parties when it came to digital music streaming and smart watches, the company is confident, if not hubristic, that its Apple-tude will ultimately prevail. “This is a multi-decade thing,” says Giannandrea. “I was very excited about the stuff that we've announced this year, but I think Craig and I are much more excited about, like, what's in the next 10 years.”

Naturally, I asked the two executives to share details of what those future products might be. And also naturally, they refused. “You know us better than that,” says Federighi. Even if some competitors release similar innovations first, Apple will take it in stride. This crowd prides itself on being not first, but best. Generative AI may be the ultimate test to see if that philosophy still works.

Time Travel

This is not the first time I got an exclusive look at Apple’s AI journey. In August 2016, the company gave me a peek into how it was implementing the latest techniques in AI during a day of interviews with Federighi as well as executives Phil Schiller and Eddy Cue, and scientists Tom Gruber and Alex Acero. The message then, as now, was that Apple was on it, but doing AI in its own way.

Even as Apple is bear-hugging machine learning, the executives caution that the embrace is, in a sense, business as usual for them. The Cupertino illuminati view deep learning and ML as only the latest in a steady flow of groundbreaking technologies. Yes, yes, it’s transformational, but not more so than other advances, like touch screens, or flat panels, or object-oriented programming. In Apple’s view, machine learning isn’t the final frontier, despite what other companies say. “It’s not like there weren’t other technologies over the years that have been instrumental in changing the way we interact with devices,” says Cue. And no one at Apple wants to even touch on the spooky/scary speculations that invariably come up in AI discussions. As you’d expect, Apple wouldn’t confirm whether it was working on self-driving cars, or its own version of Netflix. But the team made it pretty clear that Apple was not working on Skynet.

“We use these techniques to do the things we have always wanted to do, better than we’ve been able to do,” says Schiller. “And on new things we haven’t been able to do. It’s a technique that will ultimately be a very Apple way of doing things as it evolves inside Apple and in the ways we make products.”

Ask Me One Thing

Luana asks, “Can Intel resuscitate or is it going to become Xerox?”

Thanks for the question, Luana. When I was watching supremely confident Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at this week’s WIRED Big Interview event, I kept thinking about the plight of Intel, which once stood atop the chip world with similar triumphalism. It invented the microprocessor! Building on that innovation, Intel became the default chip for the personal computer revolution. But ultimately, it fell victim to the Innovator’s Dilemma. The failures of its awkward attempts to elbow its way into the media world could be shrugged off, but not its big misses—the mobile revolution and the importance of graphic chips, earth-shattering events that its rivals exploited. Perhaps the coup de grâce was the rise of custom silicon by companies like Apple and Amazon, which further decreased their reliance on Intel’s offerings. At this point, who needs Intel?

I wouldn’t equate Intel with Xerox, though. The advances of the latter’s PARC division were never really exploited. The clueless top brass at Xerox’s headquarters sat by while Apple, and eventually everyone else, copied its graphical user interface. Intel, in contrast, built a fantastic business—so successful that it was easy to fall into complacency. I can’t say whether resuscitation is possible. (If twice-former CEO Pat Gelsinger can’t figure it out for a huge paycheck, don’t expect me to do it for free.) But Intel does have incredibly valuable expertise and assets, notably its chip fabrication plants. At least until Trump pulls the plug, it also has billions of dollars in funding from the Biden administration to produce those chips in the United States. If Intel doesn’t get bought by one of its competitors, maybe it can hang around until the next big opportunity arises—and a hungry new CEO is smart enough to bet the farm on it. Meanwhile, Huang might consider embroidering the Intel logo in the lining of his famous leather jackets as a persistent reminder of how the mighty can fall.

You can submit questions by leaving a comment below or sending an email to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

End Times Chronicle

It’s now official: Björk declared that the apocalypse has already happened. But don’t worry, “biology will reassemble in new ways.”

Last but Not Least

(This is a special Steven Levy–themed assortment of links for this year’s final Plaintext before I use up my vacation days.)

Here’s the complete Tim Cook Big Interview. I love Tim’s answer about Apple giving Stevie Wonder a demo of the Vision Pro mixed-reality headset.

If you want to watch me interviewing Cook, here’s a video.

At the WIRED Big Interview event, Figma CEO Dylan Field apologized for telling me that he wasn’t selling his company—hours after fielding an acquisition offer from Adobe. (The deal ultimately fell apart under scrutiny from regulators.)

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told me at the same event that she is still optimistic that AI won’t kill humanity—but it’s up to us to make sure that ends up being the case.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-the-inside-story-of-apple-intelligence/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

POLITICS | DEC 6, 2024 AT 12:44 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The Crypto Industry Hails David Sacks, Its New ‘Czar’

Joel Khalili Makena Kelly

David Sacks, a member of the infamous “PayPal Mafia,” will lead a group of advisers tasked with steering AI and crypto policy under the Trump administration.

Photograph: Steve Jennings/Getty

US president-elect Donald Trump has appointed venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks as White House AI & Crypto Czar, a newly created role meant to establish the country as the global leader in both fields.

Members of the cryptosphere have gathered to congratulate their new czar, a Trump loyalist from Silicon Valley who has previously expressed enthusiasm for crypto technologies and invested in crypto startups. The appointment is being celebrated by crypto executives and policy wonks as “bullish” for the industry, which under the previous administration was bombarded with lawsuits by US regulators. On X, Gemini chief legal officer Tyler Meader wrote, “At long last, a rational conversation about crypto can be had.”

Others have speculated that the dual-faceted nature of the role, covering both AI and crypto, could set the tone for experimentation around potential synergies between the two disciplines. Among VCs, Sacks “was very early in noting the importance of crypto to AI,” says Caitlin Long, CEO at crypto-focused bank Custodia. In his announcement, Trump wrote that the two areas were “critical to the future of American competitiveness.”

“There is no better person than David Sacks to help steer the future of crypto and AI innovation in America,” says John Robert Reed, partner at crypto-focused VC firm Multicoin Capital. “He's a principled entrepreneur and brilliant technologist that deeply understands each of these industries and where they intersect.”

“Initial reactions from the crypto industry on the Sacks appointment has been positive. Given his purview as a venture capitalist, he’s seen a lot of the innovation in crypto and AI that has been stunted in growth due to various political or regulatory issues the past few years,” says Ron Hammond, director of government relations at the Blockchain Association. “What remains to be seen is how much power the czar role will even have and if it will be more a policy driver position versus a policy coordinator role.”

In an X post, Sacks expressed his gratitude to Trump. “I am honored and grateful for the trust you have placed in me. I look forward to advancing American competitiveness in these critical technologies,” he wrote. “Under your leadership, the future is bright.”

In his role as czar, Sacks will lead a council of science and technology advisers responsible for making policy recommendations, Trump says. He will also develop a legal framework that sets out clear rules for crypto businesses to follow—something the industry has long demanded. That will reportedly involve working closely with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), two regulatory agencies that vied for jurisdiction over the crypto industry under the Biden administration. Earlier this week, Trump appointed crypto advocate Paul Atkins as SEC chair; members of the crypto industry contributed to the selection process, sources told WIRED in November.

Trump officials did not respond when asked to clarify whether the new position would be internal to the government, or whether Sacks would act as a “special government employee,” allowing him to continue in other private-sector roles. Sacks did not respond to a request for comment.

Sacks first made his name as one of the earliest employees at payments technology firm PayPal, which he built alongside Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and others. Like other members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” Sacks went on to set up multiple other business ventures. In 2012, he sold workplace software company Yammer to Microsoft in a deal worth $1.2 billion. Now he runs his own venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, which has previously invested in companies including AirBnb, Palantir, and Slack—as well as crypto firms BitGo and Bitwise.

Sacks also cohosts the popular All In podcast where he’s used the platform to boost Trump. He’s also shared a host of right-wing takes: At the podcast’s summit this September, Sacks questioned the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine.

Like Musk, Sacks was a vocal proponent of Trump during the presidential race. In an X post in June, he laid out his very Silicon Valley rationale: “The voters have experienced four years of President Trump and four years of President Biden. In tech, we call this an A/B test,” he wrote. “With respect to economic policy, foreign policy, border policy, and legal fairness, Trump performed better. He is the President who deserves a second term.”

That same month, Sacks hosted an exclusive fundraiser for the Trump campaign, reportedly generating as much as $12 million. Attendees reportedly included vice-president-elect JD Vance—who has previously described Sacks as “one of my closest friends in the tech world”—and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, cofounders of crypto exchange Gemini.

In the weeks since Trump won back the Oval Office, crypto markets have been on a tear. During the race, the president-elect made a host of crypto-friendly pledges, including a promise to set up a national “bitcoin stockpile.” In Sacks, Trump has picked a czar that the crypto industry believes will deliver on his campaign pledges.

On December 6, the price of bitcoin vaulted beyond $100,000 for the first time. “YOU”RE WELCOME!!! [sic]” Trump posted on Truth Social.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-industry-hails-david-sacks-czar/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

GEAR | DEC 6, 2024 AT 8:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

How ChatGPT’s Canvas Can Help You Use AI More Productively

David Nield

Canvas, which is available to OpenAI’s paid subscribers, is a little bit like an AI-powered Google Docs. Here’s how to use it.

With multiple AI platforms and bots competing against each other—there's Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, to name just a few—we're seeing new updates and upgrades appear on a frequent basis. One of the newest additions OpenAI has pushed out to ChatGPT is called Canvas, and it's a little bit like an AI-powered Google Docs.

OpenAI describes it as “a new way of working with ChatGPT to write and code,” and it means you're essentially collaborating with the AI on a text document or on program code. You can already do this in the main chat interface of course, but with Canvas it's a bit more like having an AI coworker with you.

Right now, you have to be a ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Pro, or ChatGPT Plus user (from $20 a month) to access the Canvas model. You'll find it in the drop-down menu at the top of the conversation screen, in the top left corner.

Getting Started With Canvas

The Canvas interface shows two side-by-side panes.

Photograph: David Nield

With Canvas selected as the AI model, you can start interacting with ChatGPT just as you would normally. Use the prompt box to describe the kind of code you need to write, or the type of text you need to generate. You do need to say something to indicate you want a new canvas to be created, though—something like “Create a document” or “Start a canvas” somewhere in your prompt will do it.

When the ChatGPT Canvas interface launches in full, you'll see the familiar chat conversation on the left, and whatever it is you're working on on the right. You've got a few different options here. You can enter a new prompt to get more text (or code), you can manually type in something yourself in the canvas pane, or you can select something ChatGPT has generated and ask for revisions.

Those different options are what makes Canvas a more collaborative mode. Up in the top right corner you'll find shortcuts for viewing earlier versions of your document, or copying the text elsewhere. Down in the lower right corner, meanwhile, you'll find a pop-up toolbox that gives you a variety of options, depending on whether you're writing text or programming code with ChatGPT.

If you're writing, you can find tools for suggesting edits, adjusting the length of the output ChatGPT has created, changing the reading level of the text, polishing up the written output, or adding emoji to the document. For example, click Reading level, and you can use the slider to make the text more or less complex.

For programming, the same pop-up toolbox gives you options for reviewing the code, porting it to a different language, fixing bugs, adding logs, and adding comments. For example, you can choose Add Logs, then click the arrow that appears, and ChatGPT will drop in log statements for the code.

Collaborating on a Document

Canvas offers simple formatting and versioning tools too.

Photograph: David Nield

As I'm a writer rather than a coder, I'll talk through the writing options in ChatGPT Canvas in more depth than the coding options. Just know that if you’re using Canvas for programming, the tools and options work in a similar way.

If you want to, you can just click inside the text the ChatGPT has produced and make changes. You can also add or insert entirely new paragraphs. Any text, whether it's been written by you or the bot, can be selected: That will then bring up a ChatGPT prompt window, where you can make changes to the selected text only. For example, you might want the selected text to be phrased more clearly, or you might want to expand on the ideas in the text to make it longer.

Each paragraph comes with its own comment icon (a small speech bubble), and you can click on these to focus the AI bot on one block of text in particular. Your ChatGPT prompts don't necessarily have to be about text changes. You could ask if a paragraph might be better placed elsewhere in a document, for instance, or get ChatGPT to explain something without actually making any changes.

As you make more requests to ChatGPT, it reports back on what it's doing in the pane on the left—and as usual, you can rate the responses you're getting with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If you find it easier, you can do all of your collaboration and editing through the conversation on the left.

You don't get much in the way of formatting tools, but you can highlight text and apply bold or italics, or create a heading. (A toolbar will instantly pop up with these options when you select text.) You can even get ChatGPT to insert headings at suitable spots, if your text needs to be broken up. It does feel like a much more interactive way of producing AI text, and is especially useful if you still want to do some of the work yourself.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-chatgpt-canvas-productivity/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

Business

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BUSINESS | DEC 9, 2024 AT 4:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Taking on the Tyranny of the Tech Bros

By Coleen M. Carrigan

The glow of the tech bros’ halo is dimming and, in 2025, the computing industry’s sheen of glamor will continue to fade, too. While other STEM fields are making strides in broadening participation in their workforces, year after year, computing, a supposedly innovative field, fails to recruit, retain, and respect women and nonbinary workers. For example, precision questioning, abstraction, aggression, sexism and a disdain for altruism—serving the social good—are a few of the core values driving culture in computing worksites. These values and the ways they are policed via bias, discrimination, and harassment in high-tech companies form the “Bro Code.”

The Bro Code perpetuates high tolerance of sexual harassment. It also contributes to the field’s failure to rectify its stark segregation. Only 21 percent of computer programming positions are held by women. Of that 21 percent, only 2 percent are African American, and only 1 percent are Latina. While sorely underrepresented in the field overall, women are disproportionately affected during industry’s downsizing. For example, nearly 70 percent of those laid off in the 2022 tech layoffs were women. This tracks with my experience in Big Tech. As soon as the company went public, stockholders demanded annual layoffs. For the first two years, the only people terminated in my department were women.

Further, due to their massive wealth and masterful branding, Bro Code bosses believe themselves to be wizards or priests. They lean into authoritarianism, prompted to repress complaints and resistance. Some programmers imitate this behavior. For example, in 2023, tech bros mobbed the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest conference for women and nonbinary tech workers. Women attendees I spoke with described men at the career expo simply barging in front of them in lines, and some said they were verbally harassed and assaulted.

In 2025, the march towards a future dictated by algorithmic lords will falter. Coalitions between feminist movements and labor activism will increase public scrutiny of tech culture. These efforts will start to crack the Bro Code. Bro Code bosses talk a big game about its socially revolutionary impact, but participants in my research felt thwarted when trying to use their technical skills to serve others. For instance, Lynn reported that the eye-tracking device she developed to help people with disabilities was repurposed for marketing analysis; Shauna’s lab mates nicknamed her “accessibility bitch” when she worked on projects to help those disenfranchised in computing.

As Big Tech continues to deliver empty promises instead of solutions to social ills—while dodging taxes, quashing regulations and fueling a yawning pay inequality gap—the public will continue to grow disenchanted with the industry. In 2025, thwarted altruistic efforts like Shauna and Lynn’s will accelerate growing skepticism about computing’s service to humanity.

Disenfranchised tech workers will continue to help us hold Bro Code bosses accountable for not only failing to live up to its widely publicized altruism, but also for their efforts to conceal the social harms of their products. As recent organizing activities by tech workers show, strong coalitions across workers are what scare these reigning elites the most. For example, in 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees across the globe staged a walkout against sexual harassment and systemic racism in the company. In 2025, activism against the militarization, racism, sexism and economic exploitation in the tech industry will skyrocket higher than Bro Code bosses' space jets.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/tyranny-tech-bros-silicon-valley-activism/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

GEAR | DEC 8, 2024 AT 9:00 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

To Build Electric Cars, Jaguar Land Rover Had to Redesign the Factory

Alex Christian

At Jaguar Land Rover’s historic Halewood factory in Merseyside, England, state-of-the art assembly robots are now building the cars of the future.

Photograph: JLR JaguarLandrover

Transforming a car manufacturing plant entering its seventh decade into a futureproof facility, ready for AI-powered autonomous driving, comes with natural challenges. Among them: 1960s architecture drawings—and the imperial system. “We had to survey everything and go out with the tape measure,” explains Dan Ford, site director at Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) site in Halewood, Merseyside, England. “But the drawing’s measurements were off: we struck a drainpipe.”

Besides that minor bump in the road (the Great British weather and an August downpour meant work was delayed by 48 hours), JLR’s £250 million ($323.4 million) upgrade of its Halewood plant has been smooth. Off the River Mersey, 10 miles from Liverpool, Halewood has long been synonymous with the British car industry—and JLR is the UK’s largest automotive employer. (The company's controversial Jaguar Type 00 will be built at a different factory in Solihull). Opened in 1963 by Ford of Britain to build the Anglia (the small family saloon starred as the flying car in the Harry Potter series), plans to transform the plant began in late 2020. Ford’s team ditched the tape measure for a digital twin, scanning 1,000 sqm (10,764 sq ft) of footprint, floor to ceiling, every weekend.

An ABB robot in the new extension ensures door faces are clean of debris before they pass through laser alignment.

Photography: JLR

Halewood has now been modded for cars of the future. A fleet of 750 robots (“our version of the Terracotta Army,” says Ford), laser alignment technology, and cloud-based infrastructure join 3,500 JLR employees on the factory floor, expanded by 32,364 sqm (348,363 sq ft) to produce the manufacturer’s next-generation vehicles. New calibration rigs measure the responsiveness of a vehicle’s advanced driver-assistance systems, such as its cameras and sensors. Safety levels can be calibrated for future autonomous driving, says Ford.

The first stage in Halewood’s redevelopment was its new body shop, with two floors separated by 2.5 meters (eight feet) of concrete to account for heavy machinery, capable of producing 500 vehicle bodies per day. The new build line is now in the commissioning stage: pre-production electrified medium-sized SUVs are set to be tested through 2025. Forty new autonomous mobile robots now assist Halewood employees with fitting high-voltage batteries. Other additions include a £10 million ($12.9 million) automated painted body storage tower, stacking up to 600 vehicles, retrieved by cranes for just-in-time customer orders.

A handheld microscope is used for a paint surface inspection, a final audit assessing depth coverage and quality.

Photography: JLR

Halewood is JLR’s first all-electric facility. The UK government’s zero emission vehicle mandate, part of its plan to transition to a net-zero economy, became effective at the beginning of 2024—22 per cent of all new car sales must be zero emission. The law has forced the industry to effectively fast-track electric vehicle production, up to an effective ban on the sale of new petrol cars by 2035; the EU has similar regulations in place. Each of JLR’s luxury marques will have a pure electric model by 2030, with the Range Rover Electric set for pre-order (the company’s only available battery-electric vehicle, the Jaguar I-Pace, launched in 2018, is being discontinued).

A high payload robot with black pneumatic suction cups ready to pick up a vehicle hood; surrounding pneumatic clasps secure the panel in place.

Photography: JLR

The plant’s final production line is now also 50 per cent longer, with 6km (3.7mi) to accommodate battery fitting. All-electric vehicles will be produced in parallel with JLR plug-in hybrids, like the Land Rover Discovery Sport and Range Rover Evoque, and its internal combustion engines. Traditionally, petrol cars are built around the engine, with full-vehicle length components: a drive shaft, fuel lines, and exhaust systems. But electric vehicles have a very different build, says Ford. “The battery goes in much later during the production process—electric drive units go onto front and rear subframes, with a large battery in the middle. That’s why we had to expand our production line, spread the process out, and keep our battery electric vehicles separate.”

JLR aims to be carbon-net zero by 2039. As a result, the manufacturer, part of Indian conglomerate Tata, says its £250 million investment in Halewood is set to double over the following years. The focus on electric energy and renewables will wipe 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) from the plant’s industrial footprint. Ford says plans include installing 18,000 solar panels, capable of producing 8,600 GWh—equivalent to 10 per cent of the site’s energy consumption.

A bird’s eye of the £250 million, 32,364 sqm body shop extension. The perimeter includes the original Halewood plant; the factory complex is shared with Ford.

Photography: JLR

But some new features are in the name of aesthetics, not sustainability. Nearly one mile of Halewood’s paint shop has been modified: the expansion of ovens and conveyors follows growing consumer demand for contrasting-color roofs; curing creates the premium finish. This meant the whole plant had to be shut down for five weeks, over summer 2023. “One-and-a-half weeks was just for clean-up,” says Ford. “The paint environment has to be incredibly clean—you literally need the dust to settle, clean, then settle again.”

The droids are also accommodating the tastes of well-heeled JLR customers. “We now have robots picking up doors and measuring the [car body’s] aperture, rather than a manual cladding line,” says Ford. “The preference from a discerning customer base is tight gaps around the doors, with flush finishes. An automated system can do that with nice even gaps, all the way around.”

This article first appeared in the January/February 2025 edition of WIRED UK.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/jlr-jaguar-land-rover-electric-vehicle-factory-halewood/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

GEAR | DEC 8, 2024 AT 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think

James Morris

Rather than having a shorter lifespan than internal combustion engines, EV batteries are lasting way longer than expected, surprising even the automakers themselves.

Photograph: Getty

EVs are practically worthless secondhand, because the huge batteries will need expensive replacement after a few years. At least, that’s what some articles or forum discussions in recent years may lead you to believe. However, while secondhand prices for EVs have been plummeting, evidence is building that their batteries could last longer than the eight-year warranties most come with. In fact, they could still be very usable even after 20 years, potentially giving full-electric cars a longer useful life than many fossil-fuel equivalents.

“There is an immense amount of consumer concern around the state of the battery that you buy in a secondhand vehicle,” says James Wallace, cofounder of Fortescue’s battery intelligence division Elysia. His company, formerly Williams Advanced Engineering prior to the Fortescue acquisition, has been developing software to optimize battery performance in intensive-use situations such as motorsport (including Formula E), mining, and for automaker JLR. Wallace is hoping Elysia’s technology will filter down to the mainstream, to help “give consumers more transparency on the secondhand batteries that they buy.”

People base assumptions on existing experience. When it comes to battery longevity, that’s mostly likely going to be their smartphones. Most of us see the battery life of our handsets start to drop after a couple of years. Apple’s Batterygate likely won’t have helped with the popular image of the durability of lithium-ion cells, either.

Built to Last

But there is growing indication that EV batteries are much sturdier than those in smartphones. Just for starters, you don’t tend to recharge your EV every day like your handset. It might be as infrequently as once a week or less. Real-world studies show how this affects an electric car’s battery. Consulting firm P3 recently analyzed 7,000 fleet electric vehicles, in partnership with Austrian battery testing specialist Aviloo. Their report showed that, on average, EV batteries have 90 percent capacity after 100,000 kilometers of driving, and at 300,000 kilometers they still have 87 percent of their original kilowatts left.

Similarly, data from fleet telematics company Geotab has revealed that battery depletion is much lower than originally predicted over time. While the P3 research is based on vehicles between three and five years old, mapping remaining battery capacity against mileage, the Geotab analysis looks at age. “We did a study in 2019, and then we did a more recent study as well,” says Charlotte Argue, senior manager for sustainable mobility at Geotab. “The most recent study was 11 different models and brands. Our 2019 study included 23 different models with multiple generations.”

In both these reports, Geotab was tracking the state of charge and measuring the energy flow of the vehicle in use, which was also the approach taken by P3 and Aviloo. “Using that we can estimate at any given time what the total battery capacity is in that vehicle's life,” says Argue. “Plotted over time, we can start to look at trends of how battery capacity is changing. In the most recent study, we looked at over 5,000 vehicles, and many trips.” Geotab saw that the average degradation rate was just 1.8 percent per year. In Geotab's 2019 study, it was 2.3 percent per year. “This most recent study didn't have as many of the early-gen vehicles,” says Argue, “telling us that battery management systems are getting better, and batteries are lasting longer.”

If this 1.8 percent annual degradation continued in a linear fashion, after 10 years an EV would still have 82 percent of its battery capacity, much more than the 70 percent most batteries are warrantied for after eight years.

Dial that forward 20 years and the car would still have 64 percent. If a vehicle started off with 300 miles of WLTP-rated range (the standard test cycle used in Europe), it could have 192 miles of range 20 years later. That remains quite usable, and now there are lots of cars on the market that begin with well over 300 miles of WLTP range.

We Don’t Know How Long EV Batteries Will Last … Yet

Of course, there is still guesswork involved here, because there are no 20-year-old mainstream EVs, and precious few even over 10 years. Many of the latter are Nissan Leafs, which lacked the thermal management that keeps batteries in their best health, so they probably aren’t the best guide for more modern EVs.

But BMW i3 cars from a decade ago are reportedly faring well, with most still providing over 80 percent of their original capacity. BMW, which has conducted its own studies, confirmed to WIRED that i3 batteries have lasted considerably longer than the company expected. Indeed, in 2023, BMW UK purchased the oldest i3 the company could find in its Approved Used network for testing. It was a 2013 BEV model fitted with a 22.6-kWh battery, chosen purely on age. The car had 83 percent battery capacity after almost 10 years on the road.

Tesla Model S vehicles from 2013 show a similar capacity, according to Plug In America results reported by Nimblefins. Tesla even has a 2015 Model S in its UK press fleet with more than 250,000 miles on the clock, on the same battery, with approximately 86 percent of its original capacity remaining.

However, Argue advises caution. “We can't predict the future. It's 1.8 percent per year to date,” she says. “There is an argument that there could be what we call a heel curve towards the end of the life of the vehicle, where the battery starts degrading faster than it did for most of its life. We haven't observed enough bad vehicles hitting that heel to be able to predict or analyze when that will happen. All we can say right now is if it continues to degrade at the average rate that we're seeing, these batteries should last 20 years or more.”

“We do see variation across different vehicles and models,” continues Argue. There are other factors as well. “So far, we haven’t seen a significant impact from high mileage on degradation rates, so you shouldn't be afraid to use your EV.” This finding is in line with P3’s research.

“But we have seen a correlation with the frequency of DC rapid charging,” warns Argue. “Cars that frequently rapid-charged did have an observable increase in degradation rates.”

Hot weather is also a factor that affects durability. “The worst case was three times more for a particular model driven in hot climates and using frequent rapid charging,” says Argue. This would mean losing 5.4 percent of battery capacity per year. However, “the best had on average 1 percent degradation per year. It's definitely a positive trend we're seeing.”

“When the electric vehicle market started, there was a large concern around the factors that can lead to increased battery degradation,” says Neil Cawse, CEO of Geotab. “For example, discharging completely, charging in cold weather versus warm weather, using high-speed charging versus low-speed charging. But battery tech has gotten much better, particularly around management systems—for example, making sure that lithium-ion cells charge properly when cold.”

This better battery performance could provide longer warranties for a higher remaining capacity. Toyota already offers a 10-year warranty on its EV batteries, and MG has been experimenting with a lifetime guarantee in Thailand. “You still generally have warranties that promise 70 percent state of health at eight years, but the degradation that we're seeing on those batteries is much less,” says Wallace.

Your EV Could Still Be Good After 20 Years

However, research so far has been based on how the car’s systems report the battery’s state of health. “I would take all those values with a pinch of salt,” says Wallace. “The reported state of health on the dashboard that the customer sees is often significantly different from what the actual state of health is from that battery.” According to a report published by Elysia in 2023, the true state of health can be up to 9 percent different from what is reported.

Another issue is the buffer that manufacturers leave in their batteries, which is the difference between the net and gross capacity in kWh. “OEMs are oversizing these batteries,” says Wallace. However, Argue explains that “there must be some safety buffer, because what we know from battery science is that if a battery sits completely full or completely empty for a prolonged period, that causes more stress. Having a buffer protects the battery from degradation.”

Wallace reckons this buffer is overly conservative, given the low degradation being seen with EV batteries. “They don't need as much excess capacity,” he says. “Smaller buffers mean smaller batteries, bringing down the cost of EVs.” Trouble is, Wallace believes many traditional automakers don’t yet have the necessary data about their own batteries to take this step.

Still, if batteries continue to last like the studies from P3 and Geotab imply, EVs could well be in better condition than combustion engine vehicles of the same mileage and age. The rest of an EV is less expensive to run as well. “The cost of maintenance is significantly lower,” says Cawse. “You maintain the brake pads and change the wipers—and that’s about it.”

A 10-year-old EV could be almost as good as new, and a 20-year-old one still very usable. That could be yet another disruption to an automotive industry that relies on cars mostly heading to the junkyard after 15 years.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/electric-cars-could-last-much-longer-than-most-think/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

BUSINESS | DEC 6, 2024 AT 11:15 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

A Federal Appeals Court Just Upheld the TikTok Ban. Here’s What Could Happen Next

Zeyi Yang Makena Kelly

The Supreme Court, president-elect Donald Trump, or an American buyer could still intervene to save the video platform, which is used by some 170 million Americans.

Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

A federal appeals court upheld a law that could result in TikTok being banned in the United States by the middle of next month, putting the future of one of the largest social media platforms in the country at risk. Citing national security concerns the Justice Department raised about the Chinese-owned app, a panel of judges on the US Court of Appeals in Washington DC decided in a 3:0 vote that the law could stand and TikTok could still be banned in the United States next year.

“We conclude the portions of the Act the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny. We therefore deny the petitions,” judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the court’s majority opinion on Friday. “Consequently, TikTok’s millions of users will need to find alternative media of communication.”

The case will likely now go to the Supreme Court, which could take it on or allow the appeals ruling to stand. Either way, the decision is likely to present questions for President-elect Donald Trump, who first tried banning TikTok in 2020 but more recently said he opposed the move because it would help the video platform’s competitor, Meta.

“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans' right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”

The Trump transition team and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

TikTok filed the lawsuit in May after President Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), which forces ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or see its app blocked from app stores in the country. TikTok argued that the law singles out TikTok because of the content on the platform, violating the First Amendment. A coalition of TikTok creators also joined the case, saying that their free speech rights would be infringed upon if over 170 million Americans are forced to leave the platform.

The appeals court ruled today that the PAFACA does not violate TikTok’s free speech rights.

“The Government does not suppress content or require a certain mix of content. Indeed, content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture, and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing,” Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion.

“Congress judged it necessary to assume that risk given the grave national-security threats it perceived. And because the record reflects that Congress’s decision was considered, consistent with longstanding regulatory practice, and devoid of an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas, we are not in a position to set it aside,” the concurring opinion by judge Sri Srinivasan said.

Both the US Department of Justice and TikTok have previously requested an accelerated ruling to come out by today. Since the law is upheld, the TikTok ban could take effect as soon as one day before Trump is inaugurated next month.

In reality, the app is most likely to survive a few more months. A 90-day extension of the deadline remains on the table for the Biden administration, which would leave the issue in Trump’s hands. What’s more certain to happen is that ByteDance would appeal the court decision today and take it to the Supreme Court next, which is expected to take the case and issue its decision later next year.

Friday's ruling will not come as a surprise to people who have been watching the case. In the oral arguments in front of the Appeals Court back in September, the judges appeared to have already bought the idea that the app poses a valid national security concern for the US. The remaining open question was whether a ban was an overcorrection that caused more relative harm to freedom of speech. The judges said definitively today that the answer to that was no.

“Courts tend to give wide latitude to the executive branch on issues of national security,” says Dewardric McNeal, a former Department of Defense official and the current the managing director of DC-based consultancy Longview Global. While Congress can theoretically repeal the PAFACA Act, it will be a tough case for Trump to convince them to do so because there’s a “large majority of the people on Capitol Hill who supported this law,” McNeal says.

In order to save TikTok, Trump could use powers of the executive branch to his advantage. “While you cannot completely disregard the law, you can decide how heavy you want to focus on the prosecution of the law, and how aggressively you want to execute the law,” McNeal says.

Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School, told WIRED earlier that the PAFACA Act is written so that the US president gets to decide whether TikTok is “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.” This carve out could create a legal path for the Trump administration to allow TikTok to continue operating in the US.

An alternative scenario that would allow Trump to avoid causing controversy with his Republican allies in Congress would be brokering a deal for TikTok to be sold to an American investor. At least two prominent bids to buy the app have already emerged, including one from Steven Mnuchin, the former US Treasury secretary, and Frank McCourt, an American real estate investor.

Updated 12/6/24 12:11 pm ET: This story has been updated with comment from TikTok.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/doj-tiktok-constitutional-lawsuit/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

Culture

- The Sticky Dilemmas of Pornhub’s Next Chapter

- The Digital Natives Will Revolt—and That’s Good for Everybody

- Finding the Real ‘Midnight Diner’

CULTURE | DEC 9, 2024 AT 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The Sticky Dilemmas of Pornhub’s Next Chapter

By Jason Parham

Videos of minors. Illegal data collection. Lack of oversight. Lawsuits. Problems have dogged the popular porn site for years. Is its promise of transparency enough for a reset?

ILLUSTRATION: JAMES MARSHALL

It was evening in Berlin and Alex Kekesi was surrounded by pornstars. Venus, the international adult entertainment convention, was underway, and Kekesi happened to be at dinner with several well-known creators when the discussion shifted to generative AI.

Kekesi listened as a few of the women shared similar stories from set. They expressed frustrations about their likeness being exploited. They talked of having to physically cross out language in their contract before filming. “Essentially it was, we’re gonna pay you for today’s stuff,” one woman said. “And then it’s a free-for-all after that. We can use this to create whatever we want.”

Kekesi empathized with the performers. It’s part of her job. As vice president of brand and community at Pornhub, the monstrously popular adult entertainment site, she puts in plenty of face time with creators, as well as fans of the platform, the press, and critics. Sometimes “that involves taking flack from them,” she told me over Zoom recently from her home office in Montreal. And there has been a lot of “flack” the past few years, even as she downplays Pornhub’s persistent troubles.

She was thrust into the role in 2023, following a particularly turbulent period for the company. On some level, Pornhub has always been controversial—it comes with the territory—but the problems of the platform in recent years represented an existential threat.

Rumblings began in 2019, when the owners of the GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys websites were charged in a sex trafficking conspiracy for deceiving and forcing women to perform in adult films, which they then uploaded online, including to platforms like Pornhub. In March 2020, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse urged the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Pornhub, citing incidents from “the past year,” including the GirlsDoPorn case. A New York Times column by Nicholas Kristoff that December brought even more attention to accusations that Pornhub hosted videos depicting sexual abuse, including of children. At first Pornhub denied any wrongdoing but reaction swiftly snowballed.

In Canada, where Pornhub is based, a parliamentary committee launched an investigation into the allegations. Visa and Mastercard suspended payment processing. Dozens of women sued Pornhub’s parent company, then called MindGeek and since renamed Aylo Holdings, alleging it had created and profited from a “bustling marketplace for child pornography, rape videos, trafficked videos, and every other form of nonconsensual content.” That lawsuit is still ongoing. Aylo also reached a deal with the US government last year, agreeing to pay a fine and install an independent monitor for three years in exchange for avoiding prosecution. In court, the company acknowledged that it had indeed made money off videos of sex-trafficking victims. There were other controversies, too: In 2022, Instagram banned Pornhub for violating its terms of service. (“We actually still don’t know to this day why we were banned” Kekesi says.) In 2023, the site was accused of illegally collecting user data in the European Union.

Pornhub has taken steps to address at least some of these problems. Following the Times article, it scrubbed the site of all “unverified content,” Kekesi said. Now anyone who wants to upload content to Pornhub has to not only verify their own identity; they also must supply proof of consent for everyone who appears in the scene, including documentation, IDs, and other paperwork. Pornhub also started issuing annual “transparency reports,” which it now does twice a year, publishing its content moderation practices. In 2022, the site introduced a chatbot intended to encourage people searching for child sexual abuse content to get help. Still, its lack of past oversight remained a hot topic—and a steady concern. In 2023, Aylo was acquired by Ethical Capital Partners, a Canadian private equity firm. “When they took ownership of the company, it really ushered in this new, I guess, era for Aylo—but I think for Pornhub, specifically—with a mandate very dedicated to transparency,” Kekesi said.

In the business of bodies and desire, everything has to be packaged just right for the fantasy to work. Presentation is what sells. Perfect lighting. Exact camera angles. Image also matters—just as much, it seems, if not more—to the companies behind your favorite x-rated content. At least, that’s the gist I got when I spoke with Kekesi.

To rebuild that trust—with creators, with users, with governments—Pornhub has leaned into a strategy of open communication. Kekesi was promoted from her previous role as marketing director to her current, more public-facing one (many sex-forward companies—Sniffies, for example—trot out executives in similar roles). “You know, because we’re from the adult industry, people—point blank—do not want to hear what we have to say,” she said. So the company launched Terms of Service, a podcast co-hosted by Kekesi and adult film star Asa Akira, to “set the record straight on things when it comes to Pornhub,” she said. Company ethics, moderation, sex worker rights; all of it is fair game on the show.

When I asked Kekesi if the previous ownership, capsized by a storm of allegations, had failed to be as open as they could, she didn’t hesitate. “Yes, there were obstacles,” she said.

Still, ongoing threats loom. Project 2025, the Republican playbook for a second Trump term, wants to criminalize porn nationwide. (Trump denied any connection to Project 2025 while campaigning, but he has been putting its authors forward for key government positions.) Already, twelve US states have instituted age-verification laws around porn consumption. Because PornHub doesn’t want to open itself to litigation under these new laws, it went on the offensive, blocking all access to its site in those states regardless of age. Kekesi said the company is in favor of the concept; it is “a good thing when it’s done properly.” Only, that’s not the case. “Look at how it’s happening now—it’s ineffective.”

In general, though, porn is more accessible than ever. Platforms like Onlyfans customize desire for a small fee. The riskier side of X operates in the vein of Backpage.com, where creators use the app to promote their work, engage with fans, and find gigs. That has also meant more competition for Pornhub. Kekesi never says it outright, but this is likely why the company has made a noticeable effort to appease the concerns of adult creators. “We are catching up and trying to be more visible and more present with the creator community,” she said. Netflix understood it. TikTok got it. The game is the game, no matter the industry. Healthy growth depends on original—and compelling—content, and Pornhub needs creators for that.

Quality is also a selling point in the era of generative AI, when depicting any fantasy could be just a few prompts away. Forecasting the next year, Kekesi said “moderation is the greatest place that we stand to win when it comes to AI.” Some creators have complained about the additional steps required to upload to Pornhub, Kekesi says, but she thinks the system is a success. “We were told over and over by different people—and competition—that that was the death knell. And we’ve proven otherwise.”

Pornhub’s brand reset—better transparency, stricter moderation and verification, creator-friendly—won’t entirely shift the conversation from where the company has fallen short. I wonder if it even matters. Negative public view didn’t hurt the company’s bottomline as much as public perception led many to believe. The company had an operating margin of 30 percent in 2022, according to Semafor.

Still, I admit, it’s a little silly to think that the second most visited porn site in the world wants you to like them—and more than that, to trust them—given that porn, for the consumer, has never really been about mass consensus but rather private satisfaction. But it’s the reason—one of many, anyway—Kekesi is everywhere these days. AVN, XBIZ, “all the trade shows,” she said. It’s about more than good press. To continue to compete, and to hold onto its dominance, most of all it needs the trust of creators, old and new. Without that, well, Pornhub’s next chapter is nothing more than a dream.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/sticky-dilemmas-of-pornhub-next-chapter/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

CULTURE | DEC 8, 2024 AT 4:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The Digital Natives Will Revolt—and That’s Good for Everybody

By Todd Eckert

In the late 19th century, before the invention of cinema and radio, every piece of music, performance, oration—even a natural view like a rainbow—was a unique event. Unrepeatable. Cinema and radio changed that, enforcing a massive shift in how we consumed popular culture. Several of the world’s dominant media companies were founded in that moment by men with a relentless sense of awe for the new media. It resulted in a phenomenal lack of restraint—they didn’t think they needed it. This was the future, and it was making them rich. More was obviously better.

Film and radio would eventually be combined into television—creating an even greater detachment from the performance at its core while supplanting human connection with strategic dopamine sparks. Of course people got hooked: More excitement and no effort equaled a better future. When streaming to personal devices became ubiquitous, that future merged even greater profitability with the law of diminishing returns—crushed empathy, spiked anxiety, and social inadequacy all became core to the human experience.

This has ultimately resulted in a general societal malaise, and I think 2025 will be that moment where some facets of society will begin to methodically detach from their screen-based addictions. I predict the leaders of this change will be the Gen Z digital natives for whom the simplicity of techless exchange will hold a similar novelty to its original technological advances.

Gen Z—currently between 13 to 27 years of age—are the people most deeply affected by digital addiction. After all, they were born in the wake of the invention of the internet. Their primary methods of understanding the world have been digital from the start. Actual agency—connection with other humans—has been largely unavailable for school work, coaching, and guidance. Even the informative mundanity of navigating normal life has been relegated to apps: the screen’s dominance institutionalized with all the restrictions and none of the learned experience for surviving them.

Except their instincts. It’s Gen Z’s instincts that are starting to evolve into a dominant force for change in modern society. What things cost—a massive issue for everyone—is driving much of how Gen Z views their priorities. They’re selecting user-generated content over pricey new media. They’re looking for longer meaning from experiences above the short-term gratification of materialism. In a recent US Gallup poll, more than 50 percent of the respondents indicated they don’t trust tech companies, the government, or the justice system.

Gen Z is also embracing the underconsumption-core and de-influencing trends, questioning the values awe-reverent media brought them, and heightening demands for a life-work balance that would have terrorized the generations before them. These are all positive to crucial developments for society.

So, in 2025, I believe the next step will be for Gen Z to embrace the simplicity of techless human exchange—events without the mediation of the ever-corrupting screen. It’s the shock of the new, a novelty as elemental as film in its infancy. It’s scary, sure—unpredictable—a real change in the digital life they/we are so dominated by. But it’s human and dimensional and full of stuff we can’t get online. It’s what we humans are at our messy core, and for all those reasons I believe we’ll see the virtues of screen retraction start to be celebrated, with Gen Z leading the way.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/digital-natives-gen-z-underconsumption-no-tech/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

CULTURE | DEC 6, 2024 AT 8:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Finding the Real Midnight Diner

Joe Ray

The restaurant featured in the hit TV show Midnight Diner is a wholly a fictitious izakaya. On a recent trip to Tokyo, I set out to find it anyway.

Photograph: Stanislav Kogiku/Getty Images

Every night in the darkest, most depressing depths of the pandemic, one TV show, which I watched over and over, helped get me through. Midnight Diner, a series on Netflix set in a Tokyo restaurant, became a healing balm and a reminder of the warmth of being around people.

The chef at this izakaya, referred to only as “Master,” cooks surrounded by a service counter on three sides, at which loyal regulars sit bathing in each others’ company. Perhaps thought of as a quirky cousin to the 1980s NBC sitcom Cheers, every episode tells a sweet, sad, or occasionally heartbreaking story. Master, a man of few words with a mysterious scar on his face, is like their conscience and a confidant, helping make sense of the world. Characters are kind, quirky, and loyal.

As a taxi glides dreamily through the Shinjuku neighborhood in the opening credits, Master gives a little voice-over: “When people finish their day and hurry home, my day starts … My diner is open from midnight to seven in the morning. They call it ‘Midnight Diner.’ Do I even have customers? More than you would expect.”

A little research confirmed that the izakaya in the show is wholly fictitious, yet I wanted to believe a place with that kind of food and that kind of feeling was real. On a recent trip to Tokyo, I set out to find one just like it.

“An Ideal in Your Heart”

I start seeing elements of what I hoped to find surprisingly quickly. I immediately find a postage-stamp-sized bar in my neighborhood where people are friendly and curious. At my first dinner out at an izakaya in the Nakano neighborhood, the food is surprisingly good for a casual spot: generous and unfussy sashimi, fish collar, smashed cucumbers with sesame, seared mushrooms, and an Asahi Super Dry or two. The busy, cheery waitstaff still takes the time to help me navigate the menu.

Barely 24 hours into my trip, I meet restaurant reviewer Mackey Makimoto at Toranomon Yokocho, a multi-restaurant project he has helped put together that's like a food court in heaven. He's sporting a short-brimmed fedora and is talking with a chef when I arrive with my fixer and translator, Mai Nomura. Over fried chicken, grilled sardines, fried oysters, and fried tofu, we bond over a love of Midnight Diner, but my first real question for him is whether a place like that exists.

“Izakaya is very Japanese. They started from sake shops, where customers wanted something to eat to go with their drink,” he says, “Communities would have a liquor shop, and people would buy sake to go, but then in the Edo period, they wanted to stay. At first it was only standing, but over time they wanted to sit. Eventually, they got hungry.”

This, Makimoto explains, is where the word izakaya comes from, its three characters roughly translating into “a liquor store you stay at.”

Over time, in this densely populated but sometimes lonely city, something else blossomed.

“I go to over 700 restaurants a year, but I don't always feel happy or cheerful in them. Here, I feel happy when I speak to the chef,” he says, gesturing into the central kitchen. “The food is good, but most important is that this is where you can meet people you want to meet. Customers become friends, and friends become community.”

“On the show, almost everyone comes in by themselves. They are lonely inside,” he says. “People who are single and lonely inside can be cheered by places like this. They can show us how to be warmhearted.”

So is it real? Is there one place like it? Can I go to Midnight Diner?

“There is none. It's utopia. It's an ideal in your heart.”

Yet he also knows what he would order there.

“Yakisoba with Worcestershire sauce,” he says in a nod to his neighborhood. “They always serve this at the summer festival in Nakano.”

This simultaneously raises and lowers my hopes, but he also pulls up an address on his phone for a place that might fit the bill and sends me off into the night.

Found in Translation

The next evening, following his instructions, I take a train out to the Keisei Hikifune station, walk through a residential neighborhood, then up to the restaurant's frosted glass sliders. Opening them reveals a bar with four women working behind it wreathed by customers and a handful of tiny tables along the opposite wall.

Everyone looks up as I poke my head in and, to my amazement, I am meeting people before I sit on a green stool at the corner of the bar. The guy two seats to the left is five cigarettes in. I meet my neighbors to the right: a rental car agent who works in the Tokyo Station and her chef friend who works at an izakaya. As we talk, a fish broker sits in the empty seat to my left.

Almost immediately, we've opened the translation apps on our phones and are chattering away.

“Do you like to drink?” the fish broker asks while sharing some sake. “I love alcohol.”

The apps and everyone’s willingness to use them allow us to have surprisingly intimate and detailed conversations. In all my years of travel writing, I've never used a translation app this way, and I'm stunned at how quickly it allows you to create a conversation with some depth to it.

First, I get them to tell me what to eat. I start with an herby meatball on a stick, ham tonkatsu, and an only-in-Tokyo casserole-like dish called monja. These are followed by slabs of wasabi-dabbed cheese wrapped in nori, horse mackerel sashimi, and grilled dried anchovies with mayonnaise. It's all good to very good, and there's a fair amount of sharing among strangers.

I ask about the clientele and how they all seem to know each other, and the rental car agent tells me that even if you're by yourself, “there are many people who often come, so everyone gets along well.”

The vibe of the evening is a slow crescendo, our chatter building to the point where three or four of us are simultaneously talking into our phones and thrusting them in front of one another, all with a remarkable sense of good cheer.

The fish broker is jokey and friendly, and it turns out he comes in about once a week. People sit close, lean in, and touch each other on the shoulder while they speak. Someone says, “The toilet here is interesting. You should go.” I comply, and it turns out to have a surprisingly large and vibrant fish tank. At one point, an elderly couple comes in, and along with ordering dinner and drinks they've brought in a bag full of homemade fried chicken for the owner. She distributes pieces of it to her patrons at the bar, a move received with great excitement. As this happens, I just look around, appreciating the happy bubble surrounding the restaurant and marvel at my luck. I've found something more magic than I dared to hope for. In all my years of writing about food and restaurants, this memory will be among the most indelible.

“You may have discovered the best shop in Tokyo,” says the fish broker.

While this was the most magical night of my trip, the bonhomie was not at all uncommon. In fact, it’s closer to the norm. So many nights end up with me walking out of a restaurant and snapping a selfie with a gaggle of new friends. To find these places, I’d wander smaller neighborhoods, take my time, look for little places with the right vibe, and keep my heart open. For semi-outgoing travelers who like to eat and meet locals, it's wonderful.

Local Flavors

A few days later, my intrepid interpreter Mai and I meet Takanori Nakamura, a food writer and television personality and the Japan chair for Asia's 50 Best Restaurants. He’s wearing a blue blazer with a puffy pocket square over a yellow argyle sweater and low-top cowboy boots, a dandy in a diner. The spot, an izakaya called Tohachi, is a few steps from the Nakameguro station, and one stop from where he lived as a university student in the 1980s. There's a mix of Eastern and Western seating styles, and the walls are festooned with paper tags called tanzaku that list menu items. Customers' personal shochu bottles line the half wall in front of our sunken bar seats.

Over little macaroni-salad otōshi—amuse-bouche–style appetizers—along with fish cakes, croquettes, sashimi, and delicious thin slices of fatty cured sausage, all washed down by fantastic regional sakes, he explains the importance of izakaya in personal terms.

“There are so many kinds of food at a place like this. It's very cozy and very inexpensive. If this restaurant is famous, it's because everything is homemade,” he says, noting how many restaurants now outsource work to centralized industrial kitchens. Here, it's homemade and familiar. “It's always maintained the same taste. The same! And the same family runs it. Yet when I came here 40 years ago, the competition between mom-and-pop and industrial was already happening. That's when I knew that I wanted to be a food writer.”

“This was a vital moment for me, and coming back here helps me remember that time,” he says, drawing a line in the air from the present to the past. As he talks, my eyes settle on the half wall in front of me where a laminated article with his photo on it sings the praises of the very fish cakes we are eating. “In Japan, each region has a different cuisine. It's kind of a wonderland. The sake here comes from all over the country. Izakaya is an assembly of all of the different parts.”

I'm about to ask what he'd order at his dream izakaya, then realize it's right in front of us.

Mai adds a little aside to her translating: “He's brought us to his Midnight Diner.”

I keep this in my head throughout the rest of the trip and keep finding that with that bit of openness on my part, I'd receive even more in return, having conversations with curious locals at almost every place I visit. On my last night, I go to the little neighborhood bar where for one week I've been a local, take a selfie with my new friends as I walk out and make my way back to my guest house, thinking up my own little variation on Master’s opening-credit monologue:

Do places like Midnight Diner even exist? More than I dared to hope.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/finding-the-real-midnight-diner/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

Gear

- Try These Tricks to Free Up More Screen Real Estate on a Mac

- India Could Be Apple and Samsung’s Solution to the Future of Phones

- Skip the Sea Kelp Supplements (2024)

GEAR | DEC 7, 2024 AT 7:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

A Few Tricks to Give Yourself More Screen Real Estate on a Mac

Justin Pot

There are several ways to keep the elements on your Mac’s screen from getting in the way of your work. Try these tips to free up some visual space.

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff/Getty

Does your Mac’s desktop feel … crowded? Is there not enough room on the screen for all the apps and tools you need to be productive?

You might think your only options are to get a MacBook model with a larger screen or buy an external display. Both of those tactics would certainly help, but before you spend a bunch of money know that you can give yourself quite a bit more screen real estate by tweaking your software settings.

To get started, open the System Settings app on your Mac, which you can find by clicking the Apple logo in the top-right corner then clicking System Settings. Head to the Displays section in the left sidebar. You'll see a few size options, ranging from Larger Text to More Space.

Justin Pot

Click the More Space option and everything on your Mac’s screen will become a little smaller. It will suddenly feel like you have way more space to work with.

Now, this won't be ideal for everyone. If you have vision trouble, then making everything on the screen smaller is going to have some downsides. Others simply may not like it. But the trade-off is that you can fit a lot more on the screen at once. I recommend giving this tweak a try.

There are a few other things you can do to free up space. The Mac, by default, shows the dock on the screen at all times. This means that a little bit of space is taken up by the dock’s string of app icons at all times. If you want that space back, you should consider hiding your dock. In System Settings head to the Desktop & Dock section and check the Automatically hide and show the Dock option.

Justin Pot

After doing this the dock will disappear, allowing you to use that space for whatever you're working on. When you want to use the dock, you can just move your mouse pointer to the space on the screen where it used to be, and it will pop up.

You can get a little more space by also hiding the menu bar. Within System Settings, go to the Control Center settings, then set the Automatically hide and show the menu bar option to Always.

Justin Pot

This will hide the menu bar at the top of the screen the same way you hid the dock before. Now, obviously, this gives you less space than hiding the dock does, and some people aren't going to love not having a clock on their screen at all times. But it's a little bit more space, and I find that not seeing all of my menu bar icons makes it a little easier to focus.

Need even more space? If you have an iPad you can use it as a second monitor for your Mac, as I explained here. Basically, if your iPad is nearby, you can head to Displays in System Settings, click the + button, and add your iPad as a display. I really like using this while on the road—it gives me a little bit of extra space to work with when I'm away from my desk and my external monitor.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/tips-tricks-more-screen-real-estate-on-a-mac/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

GEAR | DEC 7, 2024 AT 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

India Could Be Apple and Samsung’s Solution to the Future of Phones

Andrew Williams

A quarter of all iPhones could be made outside China by 2025, most likely in India—a rapidly growing market with hundreds of millions of potential customers. And the race is on, as Samsung and Chinese brands are betting big there too.

Photograph: Jasper James/ Getty Images

The giant companies that make the phones in our pockets have a problem. They have several, actually.

Capitalism’s lifeblood, growth, is slowing. Returning, and reinforced, Trump tariffs may significantly increase the costs of doing business. And there’s a question mark over whether any normal folks really care about the latest ruse to get people upgrading—AI in phones.

One potential solution addresses at least a couple of these areas: India.

The US and UK are desiccated husks compared to India. Smartphone penetration percentages are already in the 90s in the West. They’re tapped out. Meanwhile, India is on track to become the world’s third-largest economy according to Morgan Stanley, and there are hundreds of millions of future customers to be converted.

“There's no other market of the size which still has about 50 percent penetration, about half a billion people without a smartphone. So there's a lot of room for growth,” says Navkendar Singh, IDC India’s associate vice president of devices research.

In one important sense, though, India is quite different from key Western markets, because the phone isn’t just a complement to other devices like a home PC or laptop. It’s often the only device a person uses day to day.

“India is not a multi-device market,” Singh adds. “People don't buy a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. A phone remains, for 700 million people, the first and the only device with which they access the internet, compared to about 220 million PC users in India, including corporate PCs.”

A Different Market

Strategies that were successful in the US or Europe can’t simply be transferred to India, then. That’s illustrated by the number one phone brand in the country, a name plenty of reasonably tech-savvy Westerners may never have even encountered before, Vivo.

Vivo is seeing big success in India with phones like the X60.

Photograph: Vivo

Vivo represented 15.8 percent of the Indian phone market in the third quarter of 2024 according to IDC, comfortably overtaking Samsung. It’s no newcomer, either. Vivo was India’s third-place brand as far back as 2018, according to Canalys.

It has produced some great phones and pushed the envelope in phone camera tech in particular, claiming firsts for the use of a gimbal sensor stabilization in 2020’s Vivo X50 Pro and, later on, pixel shift in the Vivo X60 series.

If you are among those who have not encountered a Vivo phone before, you might assume it’s a local brand, an Indian one. It isn’t. Vivo is from the BBK group of phone manufacturers, alongside Oppo, OnePlus, Realme, and others. These are all Chinese companies, under a parent company large enough to cast a Lovecraftian shadow. These Chinese brands are responsible for shaping where the Indian phone market is in 2024.

“Because of cheap data and the entry of the Chinese brands into India over the past seven, eight years, [Chinese manufacturers] really democratized the price points,” says Singh.

A decade or more ago, trade shows were packed with feature phones made for developing markets like India. Feature phone dominance has been flipped, and India is now entering a stage where, just like the West, the public is more accepting of and more able to buy higher-priced phones.

"’Value for money’ has been the common psyche of an Indian consumer, but it is shifting swiftly towards buying more premium phones,” says Neil Shah, vice president at CounterPoint Research. “The phone has become central to every user, with a higher ROI than even buying a car, house, or insurance. Consumers are seeing smartphones as more of an investment opportunity.” A phone, in India, can at times be everything.”

The data backs that up. According to Counterpoint, the average sale price of a smartphone in India has risen from $192 in Q3 2020 to $293 in the same quarter in 2024.

It is this effect that has helped Apple perform so well in India, with an almost 60 percent reported increase in market share from Q3 2023 to 2024, according to IDC figures.

“Considering that the average selling price of Apple is so high, it's an achievement that Apple has done well in the past few years,” says Singh. “One of the major reasons is Apple is seen as an aspirational brand in India. It has a brand halo. Everybody would love to buy an iPhone. Not everybody can afford one.”

It’s such an appealing brand force, older generations of iPhone are estimated to account for two-thirds to three-quarters of iPhone sales each year. This in turn helps to explain why OnePlus, also popular in India, has had its market share eaten into in 2024 to the tune of almost 40 percent year-on-year, and why the mid-tier brand Realme is also on the decline. Crucially, it contributes to Samsung’s loss of almost 20 percent market share year-on-year.

“Samsung had opened all fronts, they are fighting all the battles,” says Singh. “I think there probably was some complacency also.”

This is where the Indian market starts to sound like that of Western countries. If Samsung overprices its usually competitive A-series one year, as it did in 2024, or another brand has a weak generation, it will have an effect. India not being a stagnant market does not make its players immune from the same stagnancy as elsewhere.

To prove the point, at the other end of that spectrum sits Nothing, the London-based company that became—in relative terms—the fastest-growing phone brand in India earlier this year. It also manufactures some of its phones there.

Phone brand Nothing is seeing huge growth in India, driven by sales of its Phone 2(a).

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

“Nothing is trying to appeal to a similar consumer as OnePlus, at least in its first four or five years,” says IDC’s Singh. For those who didn’t witness the rise of OnePlus firsthand, in 2013, it was an electric moment where a sense of innovation was combined with approachable prices. OnePlus cofounder Carl Pei is now Nothing’s CEO.

“India’s vibrant market, with its deep appreciation for technology and innovation, is optimal for a brand like Nothing to thrive,” Pei tells WIRED.

“Our 567 percent growth year-on-year in the region, driven largely by Phone (2a), reflects the strong demand for innovation in a market segment that has long felt stagnant. Phone (2a) redefined its category by offering a unique user experience true to Nothing, moving beyond the usual focus on value for money.”

A New Horizon?

Handset popularity is only the most surface-level element of the opportunities India provides for smartphone manufacturers, though. It is also serving as the key manufacturing insurance policy in a time of increasing tensions between China and the West—China is by far the most productive phone manufacturing hub in the world.

Apple’s iPhone 15 was made in India in partnership with long-term Taiwanese manufacturing partner Foxconn, which in hindsight now seems like the test run for the most recent iPhone 16 family. A portion of all of this year’s models, from the iPhone 16 to the iPhone 16 Pro Max, is made in India.

Two years ago, JPMorgan estimated that 25 percent of all iPhones would be made outside of China by 2025, up from 5 percent at the time. As of the end of fiscal year 2024, $14 billion worth of iPhones—around 14 percent of the global total—were made in India.

Still, Apple’s efforts seem piecemeal next to those of Samsung. It opened a huge phone manufacturing store in Uttar Pradesh’s Noida back in 2018. At the time it was called the largest phone factory in the world, and no one appears to have laid claim to the title since.

Not only that, Samsung also closed its last Chinese factory in 2019, meaning most of its phones are now manufactured in India, Vietnam, or South Korea. At face value, you could almost assume India has the potential to become a full replacement for China as a manufacturing base.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

It certainly makes sense commercially. India’s wages are low by Western standards, it’s not short of technical expertise, and there’s already a huge local market to service.

Samsung is by no means fully divested from the Chinese production line, though. Samsung now makes some (read: tens of millions) of its lower-end models in partnership with Chinese JDMs—joint development manufacturers—and that number has been increasing dramatically since 2020.

The Elec reports this JDM style of manufacturing will account for 25 percent of Samsung’s output in 2024. Any suggestion that a phone maker can simply shift its manufacturing base away from China to India is overly simplistic.

“You might be hearing terms of ‘manufacturing in India’ and ‘made in India,’ but you have to be slightly careful when the case right now is really ‘assembled in India,’” says IDC’s Singh.

Assembling a phone’s components and making those components are different ball games. And one can be an order of magnitude more complex and difficult than the other.

An Uncertain Future

The complexity of phone manufacturing, and why a quick switch to India is near impossible, can be most pointedly explored with a quick look into how CPUs are made.

Most phone makers don't design their own processors, for a start. An Android phone is likely to have a SoC (system on chip) processor from Qualcomm, MediaTek, or the lesser known Unisoc. However, even these brands do not physically produce the chips. They just design them—it’s why these companies are known as “fabless.”

Samsung is a key exception. It runs a foundry and has a chip manufacturing arm. But the fact that its most high-profile phones are still powered by Qualcomm chipsets is an indication of what an incredibly specialized field this is.

At present, all roads lead to semiconductor manufacturer TSMC when it comes to advanced chipsets. It makes an estimated 90 percent of them globally.

Apple’s M4 and A16 processors? Manufactured by TSMC. Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics cards? Their core silicon comes from TSMC. It's also making the brains for Tesla’s next-generation autonomous cars. Even though Intel has a foundry division, which was spun off into its own department in 2024 after losing $12.2 billion in 2022 and 2023, it still uses TSMC for its PC CPUs.

TSMC established the concept of the modern foundry—of making semiconductor systems designed by others—at its inception in 1987. It’s one of the most important companies in the world.

The issue? It’s Taiwanese. And one of the big worries for everyone—from tech startups to governments—is what happens to TSMC’s operations if China invades Taiwan. There’s no simple “divert manufacturing to India” answer to that predicament. The next few years may test how much the importance of globalized commerce can temper political enmity.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/india-could-be-apple-and-samsungs-solution-to-the-future-of-phones/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:46 AM EST.

GEAR | DEC 6, 2024 AT 10:02 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Skip the Sea Kelp Supplements

Boutayna Chokrane

Sea kelp, otherwise known as bladderwrack, has become a trendy superfood. But the modern hype doesn’t hold up.

Tim Awe/Getty Images

If you're on HealthTok, you may have noticed a buzz around sea moss, sea kelp, or brown seaweed, which has become the latest “superfood” to capture the attention of wellness enthusiasts. Historically, seaweed has been used in indigenous medicine for a variety of ailments; today, you can purchase it in capsules, powders, and teas.

There is some science to back up bladderwrack's more hyperbolic health claims. However, given some of the risks associated with consuming unregulated algae-derived products, you will probably be better off improving your diet in general. We break it down for you here. Interested in more wellness research? Don't forget to check out our advice for living forever in Silicon Valley and whether you should apply snail mucus to your face (you probably should).

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What Is Bladderwrack?

Photograph: Brook Science Photo Library/Getty Images

“Bladderwrack is a brown seaweed in the genus Fucus that grows in the intertidal regions of temperate areas,” says Loretta Roberson, an associate scientist at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory. “You can find it here in the United States and in Europe—Ireland to England—and most places on that same latitude.” The name comes from the air-filled sacs, or “bladders,” on the seaweed’s thallus. These teeny bladders help the plant float and stay closer to sunlight for photosynthesis.

Bladderwrack’s medicinal use dates back for centuries. “There was actually a large seaweed industry [in North America] where people would collect big wagonfuls of seaweed, and they would use it for a bunch of different purposes,” Roberson says. Indigenous peoples used it for poultices and teas, and by the early 1800s, it gained a reputation as a remedy for goiter—a swelling caused by thyroid issues. By the 1860s, it was promoted as a metabolism booster and treatment for obesity. Today, bladderwrack is available in various forms, from dried and powdered to capsule supplements and teas.

Why Would You Take Bladderwrack?

Bladderwrack supplements make bold claims: weight loss, glowing skin, thyroid support, and more. Some of the most common reasons why people take bladderwrack include:

It can help alleviate gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) symptoms. Bladderwrack contains alginic acid, which, when combined with magnesium carbonate, may relieve symptoms of GERD. This combination forms a barrier that protects the stomach lining from irritants, potentially reducing inflammation and heartburn.It can relieve constipation and diarrhea. Alginic acid also promotes smoother digestion.It can help soothe digestive irritation. The mucilage in bladderwrack—a gel-like substance—can benefit individuals with gastritis or indigestion by coating irritated mucous membranes along the digestive tract.

What Does the Science Say?

Bethany Marie Doerfler, a gastrointestinal specialist at Northwestern Medicine, says the touted health benefits are tied to bladderwrack’s antioxidant properties, but there have been very few studies evaluating its efficacy or safety in humans.

Like many seaweeds, bladderwrack is packed with antioxidants, including phenolics, phlorotannins, fucoxanthin, alginic acid, fucoidans, and small amounts of vitamins A and C. Doerfler points to alginic acid—found in over-the-counter products like Gaviscon Advance—as a compound with proven effectiveness.

“These derivatives are studied and considered safe, unlike bladderwrack supplements, which remain largely unregulated and untested,” Doerfler explains. “People often leap from identifying healthy components to assuming health outcomes, but [bladderwrack supplements] aren’t backed by research.”

Are Bladderwrack Supplements Safe?

Despite the “natural” label often attached to these kinds of supplements, they come with risks. Algae-derived products can accumulate heavy metals like arsenic and mercury from polluted waters, and even low concentrations over time can lead to serious health problems such as nerve damage or kidney dysfunction.

Another concern is the high iodine content in bladderwrack, which can interfere with thyroid function. According to Roberson, in some countries, there are regulations due to high iodine levels, which can affect thyroid health. There are no clear guidelines in the US on how much iodine is safe to consume, and the risks associated with excess iodine remain misunderstood. “We don’t know thresholds, doses, or potential interactions with other medications due to the absence of research,” Doerfler says.

Bladderwrack harvesting in unregulated regions can also be harmful to ecosystems. Over-harvesting is a real issue, and in some places, it’s led to bladderwrack depletion. Sustainable harvesting practices are crucial, as demonstrated by Iceland, where regulations maintain the health of the seaweed’s native population.

Who Should Avoid Bladderwrack?

Photograph: Helen Camacaro/Getty Images

Certain groups should be especially cautious about bladderwrack supplements:

Those who are pregnant or breastfeeding. Due to high iodine levels and potential contaminants, it’s advisable to avoid bladderwrack and limit overall seaweed consumption during pregnancy or breastfeeding.Those with thyroid disorders. Excess iodine can exacerbate thyroid issues, especially for people with hyperthyroidism.Those with bleeding disorders. Bladderwrack can increase bleeding risk, making it unsafe for individuals with clotting disorders or those prone to excessive bleeding.Those on certain medications. Bladderwrack can interact with several medications, including but not limited to blood thinners, antiarrhythmic drugs, and thyroid medications, among others.Those with an iodine allergy. Given the high concentration, it’s obviously a no-go for those allergic to iodine.

Rather than turning to supplements, Doerfler recommends focusing on dietary patterns and quality instead. “All the antioxidants you hope to get from a supplement, you can get from eating fruits and vegetables.”

The American Heart Association suggests five to nine servings of produce a day, with an emphasis on dark leafy greens and plant-based proteins. Think spinach, broccoli, and collard greens. Sustainable seaweeds like kombu, wakame, and sugar kelp, which are cultivated in New England and Alaska, can also offer similar nutrients.

What’s the Bottom Line?

The bottom line is that seaweed consumption in the United States is still a developing industry. While bladderwrack has a long history of medicinal use, its current status as a wellness/proactive-gut-health trend is far more hype than substance.

Keeping in mind the health risks that come from consuming unregulated supplements, it’s better to skip the pill and focus on a balanced diet. “Supplements can’t replicate the food matrix of fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals in whole foods, which interact with gut bacteria to produce health benefits,” Doerfler says. “There’s a role for targeted vitamin supplements for individuals with specific needs, but not for enhancing wellness with trendy products.”

So, for now, you’re better off passing on the algae-based supplements. Your wallet (and thyroid) can thank me later.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/pass-on-sea-kelp-supplements/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

Science

- Meet the Plant Hacker Creating Flowers Never Seen (or Smelled) Before

- These 3 Things Are Standing in the Way of a Global Plastics Treaty

- Everyone Is Capable of Mathematical Thinking—Yes, Even You

- A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas

- A Mysterious Respiratory Disease Has the Democratic Republic of the Congo on High Alert

SCIENCE | DEC 9, 2024 AT 6:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Meet the Plant Hacker Creating Flowers Never Seen (or Smelled) Before

Matt Reynolds

Biotechnologist Sebastian Cocioba started hacking plants to put himself through college. Now, from his home lab on Long Island, he wants to bring the tools of genetic engineering to the masses.

Photograph: Lanna Apisukh

Sebastian Cocioba’s clapboard house on Long Island doesn’t look much like a cutting-edge plant biology lab. Then you step inside and peer down the hallway to see a small nook with just enough standing room for a single scientist. The workshop is stuffed with equipment Cocioba scored on eBay or cobbled together himself with a little engineering knowledge. This is where the 34-year-old attempts to use gene-editing to create new kinds of flowers more beautiful and sweeter smelling than any that currently exist. And it’s also where he hopes to blow the closed-off world of genetic engineering wide open.

Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher outside his home in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.Photograph: Lanna Apisukh

Cocioba’s fascination with plants started in childhood, when he was enthralled by the intricate inner structure of a fallen maple leaf. During high school he noticed a dumpster full of orchids outside a Home Depot store. He took the plants—his mother’s favorites—and coaxed them back into bloom with the help of some growth hormone paste bought online. Soon he was selling the plants back to the store. “I had this racket going where I was taking their trash, reflowering it, and selling it back to them,” he says.

The money he earned doing that was enough to put Cocioba through the first couple of years of a biology degree at Stony Brook University. He completed a stint with a neglected plant biology group that taught him to experiment on a shoestring budget. “We were using toothpicks and yogurt cups to do petri dishes and all of that,” he says. But financial difficulties meant he had to drop out. Before he left, one of his labmates handed him a tube of agrobacterium—a microbe commonly used to engineer new attributes into plants.

A Petunia bioengineered by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher who works out of his home laboratory in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh

A shelf of bio engineered plants under grow lights in Sebastian Cocioba's home on October 30, 2024. The plant biotechnology researcher built a laboratory inside his home where he works out of in Huntington, New York.Lanna Apisukh

Test tubes of Petunias under a grow light in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024. The flowers were bioengineered by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher who works out of his home laboratory.Lanna Apisukh

Cocioba set about transforming his hallway nook into a makeshift lab. He realized that he could buy cheap equipment in fire sales from labs that were shutting down and sell them on for a markup. “That gave me a little bit of an income stream,” he says. Later he learned to 3D-print relatively simple pieces of equipment that are sold at extreme markups. A light box used to visualize DNA, for example, could be cobbled together with some cheap LEDs, a piece of glass, and a light switch. The same device would retail to laboratories for hundreds of dollars. “I have this 3D printer, and it’s been the most enabling technology for me,” Cocioba says.

All of this tinkering was in aid of Cocioba’s main mission: to become a flower designer. “Imagine being the Willy Wonka of flowers, without the sexism, racism, and strange little slaves,” he says. In the US, genetically modified flower work is covered by the lowest biosafety rating, so it doesn’t subject Cocioba or his lab to onerous regulations. Doing gene-editing as an amateur in the UK or EU would be impossible, he says.

Cocioba set himself up as a self-described “pipette for hire”—working for startups to develop scientific proof-of-concepts. In the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the plant biologist Elizabeth Hénaff asked Cocioba for help with a project she was working on: designing a morning glory flower with the Games’ blue-and-white checkerboard pattern. It just so happened that a checkerboard flower already existed in nature—the snake’s head fritillary. Cocioba wondered if he could import some of the genes from that plant into a morning glory. Unfortunately it turned out that the snake’s head fritillary had one of the largest genomes on the planet and had never been sequenced. With the Olympics looming, the project fell apart. “It ended in heartbreak, of course, because we couldn’t execute on it.”

A close-up view of Petunia tissue culture grown by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher based in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh

Test tubes of frozen DNA and plant enzymes inside the home laboratory of Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher based in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh

As Cocioba moved deeper into the world of synthetic biology, he started to shift his focus slightly—away from just creating new kinds of plants and toward opening up the tools of science itself. Now he documents his experiments on an online notebook that’s free for anyone to use. He also started selling some of the plasmids—small circles of plant DNA—that he uses to transform flowers.

“We’re at the golden age of biotech for sure,” he says. Access is greater, and the research community is more open than ever before. Cocioba is trying to recreate something like the 19th-century boom of amateur plant breeders—where hobbyist scientists shared their materials partly just for the thrill of creating new plant varieties. “You don’t have to be a professional scientist to do science,” Cocioba says.

Alongside this work, Cocioba is also a project scientist at the California-based startup Senseory Plants. The company wants to engineer indoor plants to produce unique scents—a biological alternative to candles or incense sticks. One idea he’s playing with is engineering a plant to smell like old books, olfactorily transforming a room into an ancient library. The startup is exploring a whole smellscape of evocative scents, Cocioba says, in part designed in his home laboratory. “I really, really, love what they’re doing.”

This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-plant-hacker-creating-flowers-never-seen-or-smelled-before/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

SCIENCE | DEC 8, 2024 AT 8:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

These 3 Things Are Standing in the Way of a Global Plastics Treaty

Steve Fletcher Samuel Winton

Global plastic pollution talks have stalled—but a treaty is possible if countries can agree on finances, the proper regulation of dangerous ingredients, and set limits on production.

Photograph: Andriy Onufriyenko; Getty Images

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

United Nations-backed talks for a global treaty to end plastic pollution wrapped up without an agreement in the early hours of Sunday, December 1. A new round of talks is expected in mid-2025.

Negotiations foundered over a cap on plastic production, restrictions on the use of certain chemicals in plastics and financial support to help developing countries switch to less polluting business models. These are staunchly opposed by the “like-minded group” of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and other major oil producers with powerful advocates for the petrochemical and chemical sectors, for whom plastic offers a rapidly growing market.

While no deal was agreed in Busan, South Korea, where the talks took place, there was a feeling of renewed determination to create an ambitious and robust plastics treaty. In a memorable moment during the debate, a delegate from Rwanda spoke about the need for reductions in plastic production to confront mounting pollution, and was met with a standing ovation.

Delegates stood up to applaud the Rwandan delegate’s remarks.

Photograph: Samuel Winton

A delegate from Mexico read out a list of 95 countries that support a global phaseout of plastic products containing chemicals of concern to prolonged cheering by aligned delegations. The spirit of collaboration and multilateralism was tangible.

Why Plastic Talks Faltered

During the late-night meeting, countries supportive of legal obligations to cut plastic pollution refused to accept a treaty limited to voluntary measures. The treaty must take action at each stage of a plastic item’s life cycle, they asserted. That includes reducing how much plastic is made.

The like-minded group prioritized better waste management and recycling, avoiding the fact that excessive overproduction of plastic is set to overwhelm even the most advanced systems.

Yet, observers also criticized the way in which Indigenous peoples were sidelined during the discussions, with no access to closed-door negotiations. The draft treaty text also failed to address gender equality and intergenerational equity.

Towards the end of the night, delegates agreed that the fifth intergovernmental negotiation committee would reconvene sometime in 2025 to continue developing the text of a treaty to end plastic pollution. Critically, delegates agreed that the next round of talks will build on progress made in Busan and not return to older drafts.

Many issues remain for consideration at the resumed negotiations in 2025. Here are three of the most significant.

1. Finance

Developing countries in particular need money to adopt business models to transition away from reliance on polluting single-use plastics. However, there is little consensus on how this money should be paid.

Plastic waste is an egregious burden on developing countries.

Photograph: Jason Swain; Getty Images

There is significant disagreement over whether to create a dedicated plastics fund, paid into by developed donor countries, or use existing mechanisms such as the Global Environment Facility.

The draft treaty text mentions fees or taxes on plastic production, which many delegates felt was essential for raising enough money to implement the global treaty. This is a red line for many plastic producer countries that see any such measure as punitive and imposing an unreasonable cost on trade.

2. Plastic Production

The high-ambition coalition cochaired by Rwanda and Norway considers measures to reduce plastic production essential, a position backed by considerable evidence.

Panama submitted an ambitious proposal requiring countries to adopt a global target to reduce the production of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels once the treaty is agreed.

However, targets for the reduction of plastic production are another red line for oil-rich countries. In the closing plenary, statements on behalf of the like-minded group, and the Arab group and others made it clear that they would not accept any such measures.

Most plastic is made from fossil fuels.

Photograph: Martin Ruegner; Getty Images

3. Safety

Research shows that over 16,000 chemicals are used or present in plastics and, while safety information is lacking for over 10,000 of these, 4,200 are known to be of concern.

Effectively regulating the use of chemicals in plastics must be a cornerstone of any plastics treaty. However, despite proposals and the support of over 100 member countries for global phaseouts of harmful chemicals, the draft treaty text only has passing reference to chemicals.

Agreeing the text of a treaty to end plastic pollution is difficult. More time will not guarantee an ambitious agreement, but it does provide for further discussions to unlock consensus on this most critical of global challenges.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/these-3-things-are-standing-in-the-way-of-a-global-plastics-treaty/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

SCIENCE | DEC 8, 2024 AT 2:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Everyone Is Capable of Mathematical Thinking—Yes, Even You

Kelsey Houston-Edwards

Mathematician David Bessis claims that mathematical thinking isn’t what you think it is, and that everyone can benefit from doing more of it.

Photograph: Laurence Geai for Quanta Magazine

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike other creative processes, like making music, which can be heard, or painting pictures, which can be seen, math is for the most part an internal process, hidden from view. “It sounded a bit magical. I was intrigued,” he said.

His curiosity eventually led him to pursue a doctoral degree in math at Paris Diderot University in the late 1990s. He spent the next decade studying geometric group theory before leaving research mathematics and founding a machine learning startup in 2010.

Through it all, he never stopped questioning what it actually means to do math. Bessis wasn’t content to simply solve problems. He wanted to further interrogate—and help other people understand—how mathematicians think about and practice their craft.

In 2022, he published his answer—a book titled Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity, which he hopes will “explain what’s going on inside the brain of someone who’s doing math,” he said. But more than that, he added, “this is a book about the inner experience of humans.” It was translated from the original French into English earlier this year.

In Mathematica, Bessis makes the provocative claim that whether you realize it or not, you’re constantly doing math—and that you’re capable of expanding your mathematical abilities far beyond what you think possible. Eminent mathematicians like Bill Thurston and Alexander Grothendieck didn’t owe their mathematical prowess to intrinsic genius, Bessis argues. Rather, they became such powerful mathematicians because they were willing to constantly question and refine their intuitions. They developed new ideas and then used logic and language to test and improve them.

According to Bessis, however, the way math is taught in school emphasizes the logic-based part of this process, when the more important element is intuition. Math should be thought of as a dialog between the two: between reason and instinct, between language and abstraction. It’s also a physical practice of sorts, like yoga or martial arts—something that can be improved through training. It requires tapping into a childlike state and embracing one’s imagination, including the mistakes that come with it.

“The mathematician’s message is for everyone: Look at what you can do if you don’t give up on your intuition,” Bessis said.

Everyone, Bessis says, has some experience with this process, meaning that everyone has practice thinking like a mathematician. Moreover, everyone can, and should, try to improve their mathematical thinking—not necessarily to solve math problems, but as a general self-help technique.

Quanta spoke with Bessis about what mathematicians are really doing when they’re “doing math” and what it means for math to be a form of self-help. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why did you write this book?

For maybe 20 years, I tried and failed to write it many, many times. Then in 2020, I reread texts that I had read a long time ago—accounts by the mathematicians René Descartes, Alexander Grothendieck and William Thurston. I realized that these three people, who were not connected to one another, were all telling the same story in different ways. That story resonated with what I had been living. After that realization, the book completely crystallized in a matter of weeks.

What we can learn from Descartes, Grothendieck and Thurston is that the nature of the mathematical process is not what people think.

At its core, Bessis says, mathematics is a game of back-and-forth between intuition and logic, instinct, and reason.

Photograph: Laurence Geai for Quanta Magazine

What do people think?

That math is a bunch of cryptic symbols on a piece of paper. This is what has been advertised as mathematics for millennia, because that’s what people see. But the whole journey—how you work with things in your mind, how math transforms you—is all secret. It’s not part of the curriculum.

Math is a sort of dialog between these external and internal processes. It is the activity of aligning your inner representation—your intuition—with some logical, external representation. You use a very rigid, crazy-looking formalism to test your intuition, to recalibrate, grow and reinforce it until you feel that you have a good understanding of something.

You claim that everyone is secretly doing math, even if they don’t realize it.

You have to force them to become aware of their own mathematical training. Can you see a circle in your mind? Can you make it bigger, smaller? Can you move it around? That’s weird, you know.

“High school students are often unhappy with math because they think it requires some innate things that they don’t have,” Bessis said. “But that’s not true; really it relies on the same type of intuition we use every day.”

Photograph: Laurence Geai for Quanta Magazine

Or say I ask, “What’s a billion minus one?” I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t immediately have the answer in their head. I have to think about it when I want to say it out loud, but I see it in my mind. And I think most people are like that. Even if they don’t see it—it’s not a visual perception—they have a strong feeling of the outcome.

This is really mathematical intuition. It’s obvious to people. But it’s also historical: 2,000 years ago, nobody would have been able to easily answer this question, because they were using Roman numerals.

It proves that what you view as very easy math is actually deep math that you’ve internalized. You learned a very abstract numbering system that transformed your intuition of numbers. It makes you find things completely obvious that 2,000 years ago would have made you look like Einstein. It’s not hardwired. You wired it yourself.

Do you believe in the notion of a mathematical genius, then?

It would be dishonest to deny that there are people who are incredibly good at math. There are 5-year-olds who are already genius mathematicians. You can see it: It looks like they’re communicating with aliens from outer space.

But I do not think this is innate, even though it often manifests in early childhood. Genius is not an essence. It’s a state. It’s a state that you build by doing a certain job.

Math is a journey. It’s about plasticity. I am not saying that math is easy. Math is hard. But life, whatever you do, is extremely hard.

Bessis is inspired by the practices of mathematical greats like Bill Thurston, Alexander Grothendieck and René Descartes.

Photograph: Laurence Geai for Quanta Magazine

If it’s not innate, but rather a process, does that mean that with practice I could eventually do math like Thurston?

No, not Thurston. I don’t think so. But maybe you’ll surprise me. Thurston gave a detailed account of how he decided at a young age to practice this kind of self-education every day. I don’t think you can catch up with that. Grothendieck and Descartes probably started very young, before they were even speaking.

The point I want to make is that high school students are often unhappy with math because they think it requires some innate things that they don’t have. But that’s not true; really it relies on the same type of intuition we use every day.

So how can one get better at math?

Whenever you spot a disconnect between what your gut is telling you and what is supposed to be rational, it’s an important opportunity to understand something new. And then you can start this game of back-and-forth. Can you articulate your gut instinct and place it within a rational discussion? If there’s still a disconnect, can you visualize why? As you play that game, your imagination will gradually reconfigure. And in the end, if you’re persistent, your instinct and your reason will align, and you will be smarter. This is mathematical thinking.

What can someone gain by improving their mathematical thinking?

Joy, clarity, and self-confidence.

Children do this all the time. That’s why they learn so fast. They have to. Otherwise, I mean, nothing makes sense. I think this is also why babies are super happy—because they have epiphanies all day long. It’s wonderful.

“When you do math, you’re exposed to the human thought process in a way that is really pure,” Bessis said. “It’s not just about understanding things, but about understanding things in a very childish, deep, naive, super clear, obvious way.”

Photograph: Laurence Geai for Quanta Magazine

For adults, this way of thinking can be very slow. But if you don’t give up, what you can do with your intuition is way beyond your wildest expectations. And this is universal. My book is a life lesson for all creative people, not just those who want to learn mathematical concepts. The mathematician’s message is for everyone: Look at what you can do if you don’t give up on your intuition.

Do you view this as a self-help book?

I’m actually more extreme than just saying this is a self-help book. I’m saying that, in a way, mathematics itself is a self-help technique.

How so?

Mathematicians have to be radically honest about what they don’t understand and what they think. That might help them see, for example, that an object is defined the wrong way. Or that a different definition will make a theory simpler. Or that this is not the important notion, that one is.

There’s something about honesty, about being radically candid, about trying to find ways to articulate what you really feel—it’s super hard. It takes practice.

When you do math, you’re exposed to the human thought process in a way that is really pure. It’s not just about understanding things, but about understanding things in a very childish, deep, naive, super clear, obvious way. It’s very good training for creativity. It’s a scaffold for your imagination.

When I look at my own life, and the way I managed to overcome personal challenges, I realize that my ability to think in a mathematical way helped. From an emotional standpoint, we all need math.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-is-capable-of-mathematical-thinking-yes-even-you/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

SCIENCE | DEC 7, 2024 AT 2:00 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas

Dylan Baddour

State leaders want nuclear reactors to provide consistent, low-carbon power for AI, oil extraction, and more. But in South Texas, people worry mining for fuel will poison their water.

Photograph: Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the old ranchlands of South Texas, dormant uranium mines are coming back online. A collection of new ones hope to start production soon, extracting radioactive fuel from the region’s shallow aquifers. Many more may follow.

These mines are the leading edge of what government and industry leaders in Texas hope will be a nuclear renaissance, as America’s latent nuclear sector begins to stir again.

Texas is currently developing a host of high-tech industries that require enormous amounts of electricity, from cryptocurrency mines and artificial intelligence to hydrogen production and seawater desalination. Now, powerful interests in the state are pushing to power it with next-generation nuclear reactors.

“We can make Texas the nuclear capital of the world,” said Reed Clay, president of the Texas Nuclear Alliance, former chief operating officer for Texas governor Greg Abbott’s office and former senior counsel to the Texas Office of the Attorney General. “There’s a huge opportunity.”

Clay owns a lobbying firm with heavyweight clients that include SpaceX, Dow Chemical, and the Texas Blockchain Council, among many others. He launched the Texas Nuclear Alliance in 2022 and formed the Texas Nuclear Caucus during the 2023 state legislative session to advance bills supportive of the nuclear industry.

The efforts come amid a national resurgence of interest in nuclear power, which can provide large amounts of energy without the carbon emissions that warm the planet. And it can do so with reliable consistency that wind and solar power generation lack. But it carries a small risk of catastrophic failure and requires uranium from mines that can threaten rural aquifers.

In South Texas, groundwater management officials have fought for almost 15 years against a planned uranium mine. Administrative law judges have ruled in their favor twice, finding potential for groundwater contamination. But in both cases those judges were overruled by the state’s main environmental regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Now local leaders fear mining at the site appears poised to begin soon as momentum gathers behind America’s nuclear resurgence.

In October, Google announced the purchase of six small nuclear reactors to power its data centers by 2035. Amazon did the same shortly thereafter, and Microsoft has said it will pay to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania to power its facilities. Last month, President Joe Biden announced a goal to triple US nuclear capacity by 2050. American companies are racing to license and manufacture new models of nuclear reactors.

“It’s kind of an unprecedented time in nuclear,” said James Walker, a nuclear physicist and cofounder of New York-based NANO Nuclear Energy, a startup developing small-scale “microreactors” for commercial deployment around 2031.

The industry’s reemergence stems from two main causes, he said: towering tech industry energy demands and the war in Ukraine.

Previously, the US relied on enriched uranium from decommissioned Russian weapons to fuel its existing power plants and military vessels. When war interrupted that supply in 2022, American authorities urgently began to rekindle domestic uranium mining and enrichment.

“The Department of Energy at the moment is trying to build back a lot of the infrastructure that atrophied,” Walker said. “A lot of those uranium deposits in Texas have become very economical, which means a lot of investment will go back into those sites.”

In May, the White House created a working group to develop guidelines for deployment of new nuclear power projects. In June, the Department of Energy announced $900 million in funding for small, next-generation reactors. And in September it announced a $1.5 billion loan to restart a nuclear power plant in Michigan, which it called “a first-of-a-kind effort.”

“There’s an urgent desire to find zero-carbon energy sources that aren’t intermittent like renewables,” said Colin Leyden, Texas state director of the Environmental Defense Fund. “There aren’t a lot of options, and nuclear is one.”

Wind and solar will remain the cheapest energy sources, Leyden said, and a build-out of nuclear power would likely accelerate the retirement of coal plants.

The US hasn’t built a nuclear reactor in 30 years, spooked by a handful of disasters. In contrast, China has grown its nuclear power generation capacity almost 900 percent in the last 20 years, according to the World Nuclear Association, and currently has 30 reactors under construction.

Last year, Abbott ordered the state’s Public Utility Commission to produce a report “outlining how Texas will become the national leader in using advanced nuclear energy.” According to the report, which was issued in November, new nuclear reactors would most likely be built in ports and industrial complexes to power large industrial operations and enable further expansion.

“The Ports and their associated industries, like Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), carbon capture facilities, hydrogen facilities and cruise terminals, need additional generation sources,” the report said. Advanced nuclear reactors “offer Texas’ Ports a unique opportunity to enable continued growth.”

In the Permian Basin, the report said, reactors could power oil production as well as purification of oilfield wastewater “for useful purposes.” Or they could power clusters of data centers in Central and North Texas.

Already, Dow Chemical has announced plans to install four small reactors at its Seadrift plastics and chemical plant on a rural stretch of the middle Texas coast, which it calls the first grid-scale nuclear reactor for an industrial site in North America.

“I think the vast majority of these nuclear power plants are going to be for things like industrial use,” said Cyrus Reed, a longtime environmental lobbyist in the Texas Capitol and conservation director for the state’s Sierra Club chapter. “A lot of large industries have corporate goals of being low carbon or no carbon, so this could fill in a niche for them.”

The PUC report made seven recommendations for the creation of public entities, programs, and funds to support the development of a Texas nuclear industry. During next year’s state legislative session, legislators in the Nuclear Caucus will seek to make them law.

“It’s going to be a great opportunity for energy investment in Texas,” said Stephen Perkins, Texas-based chief operating officer of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative environmental policy group. “We’re really going to be pushing hard for [state legislators] to take that seriously.”

However, Texas won’t likely see its first new commercial reactor come online for at least five years. Before a build-out of power plants, there will be a boom at the uranium mines, as the US seeks to reestablish domestic production and enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel.

Texas Uranium

Ted Long, a former commissioner of Goliad County, can see the power lines of an inactive uranium mine from his porch on an old family ranch in the rolling golden savannah of South Texas. For years the mine has been idle, waiting for depressed uranium markets to pick up.

There, an international mining company called Uranium Energy Corp. plans to mine 420 acres of the Evangeline Aquifer between depths of 45 and 404 feet, according to permitting documents. Long, a dealer of engine lubricants, gets his water from a well 120 feet deep that was drilled in 1993. He lives with his wife on property that’s been in her family since her great-grandfather emigrated from Germany.

“I’m worried for groundwater on this whole Gulf Coast,” Long said. “This isn’t the only place they’re wanting to do this.”

As a public official, Long fought the neighboring mine for years. But he found the process of engaging with Texas’ environmental regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, to be time-consuming, expensive, and ultimately fruitless. Eventually, he concluded there was no point.

“There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “I guess I’ll have to look for some kind of system to clean the water up.”

Uranium Energy Corporation’s mining site in Goliad County.

Photograph: Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News

Art Dohmann, vice president of the Goliad County Groundwater Conservation District, studies a map of Uranium Energy Corporation’s mining site in the county.

Photograph: Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News

The Goliad mine is the smallest of five sites in South Texas held by UEC, which is based in Corpus Christi. Another company, enCore Energy, started uranium production at two South Texas sites in 2023 and 2024, and hopes to bring four more online by 2027.

Uranium mining goes back decades in South Texas, but lately it’s been dormant. Between the 1970s and 1990s, a cluster of open pit mines harvested shallow uranium deposits at the surface. Many of those sites left a legacy of aquifer pollution.

TCEQ records show active cases of groundwater contaminated with uranium, radium, arsenic, and other pollutants from defunct uranium mines and tailing impoundment sites in Live Oak County at ExxonMobil’s Ray Point site, in Karnes County at Conoco-Phillips’ Conquista Project, and at Rio Grande Resources’ Panna Maria Uranium Recovery Facility.

All known shallow deposits of uranium in Texas have been mined. The deeper deposits aren’t accessed by traditional surface mining, but rather a process called in-situ mining, in which solvents are pumped underground into uranium-bearing aquifer formations. Adjacent wells suck back up the resulting slurry, from which uranium dust will be extracted.

Industry describes in-situ mining as safer and more environmentally friendly than surface mining. But some South Texas water managers and landowners are concerned.

”We’re talking about mining at the same elevation as people get their groundwater,” said Terrell Graham, a board member of the Goliad County Groundwater Conservation District, which has been fighting a proposed uranium mine for almost 15 years. “There isn’t another source of water for these residents.”

“It Was Rigged, a Setup”

On two occasions, the district has participated in lengthy hearings and won favorable rulings in Texas’ administrative courts supporting concerns over the safety of the permits. But both times, political appointees at the TCEQ rejected judges’ recommendations and issued the permits anyway.

“We’ve won two administrative proceedings,” Graham said. “It’s very expensive, and to have the TCEQ commissioners just overturn the decision seems nonsensical.”

The first time was in 2010. UEC was seeking initial permits for the Goliad mine, and the groundwater conservation district filed a technical challenge claiming that permits risked contamination of nearby aquifers.

The district hired lawyers and geological experts for a three-day hearing on the permit in Austin. Afterwards, an administrative law judge agreed with some of the district’s concerns. In a 147-page opinion issued in September 2010, an administrative law judge recommended further geological testing to determine whether certain underground faults could transmit fluids from the mining site into nearby drinking water sources.

“If the Commission determines that such remand is not feasible or desirable then the ALJ recommends that the Mine Application and the PAA-1 Application be denied,” the opinion said.

But the commissioners declined the judge’s recommendation. In an order issued March 2011, they determined that the proposed permits “impose terms and conditions reasonably necessary to protect fresh water from pollution.”

“The Commission determines that no remand is necessary,” the order said.

The TCEQ issued UEC’s permits, valid for 10 years. But by that time, a collapse in uranium prices had brought the sector to a standstill, so mining never commenced.

In 2021, the permits came up for renewal, and locals filed challenges again. But again, the same thing happened.

A nearby landowner named David Michaelsen organized a group of neighbors to hire a lawyer and challenge UEC’s permit to inject the radioactive waste product from its mine more than half a mile underground for permanent disposal.

“It’s not like I’m against industry or anything, but I don’t think this is a very safe spot,” said Michaelsen, former chief engineer at the Port of Corpus Christi, a heavy industrial hub on the South Texas Coast. He bought his 56 acres in Goliad County in 2018 to build an upscale ranch house and retire with his wife.

David Michaelsen, former chief engineer for the Port of Corpus Christi, owns property near Uranium Energy Corporation’s Goliad mine and has been fighting the permits over groundwater contamination concerns.

Photograph: Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News

In hearings before an administrative law judge, he presented evidence showing that nearby faults and old oil well shafts posed a risk for the injected waste to travel into potable groundwater layers near the surface.

In a 103-page opinion issued April 2024, an administrative law judge agreed with many of Michaelsen’s challenges, including that “site-specific evidence here shows the potential for fluid movement from the injection zone.”

“The draft permit does not comply with applicable statutory and regulatory requirements,” wrote the administrative law judge, Katerina DeAngelo, a former assistant attorney general of Texas in the environmental protection division. She recommended “closer inspection of the local geology, more precise calculations of the [cone of influence], and a better assessment of the faults.”

Michaelsen thought he had won. But when the TCEQ commissioners took up the question several months later, again they rejected all of the judge’s findings.

In a 19-page order issued in September, the commission concluded that “faults within 2.5 miles of its proposed disposal wells are not sufficiently transmissive or vertically extensive to allow migration of hazardous constituents out of the injection zone.” The old nearby oil wells, the commission found, “are likely adequately plugged and will not provide a pathway for fluid movement.”

“UEC demonstrated the proposed disposal wells will prevent movement of fluids that would result in pollution” of an underground source of drinking water, said the order granting the injection disposal permits.

“I felt like it was rigged, a setup,” said Michaelsen, holding his 4-inch-thick binder of research and records from the case. “It was a canned decision.”

Another set of permit renewals remains before the Goliad mine can begin operation, and local authorities are fighting it too. In August, the Goliad County Commissioners Court passed a resolution against uranium mining in the county. The groundwater district is seeking to challenge the permits again in administrative court. And in November, the district sued TCEQ in Travis County District Court seeking to reverse the agency’s permit approvals.

Because of the lawsuit, a TCEQ spokesperson declined to answer questions about the Goliad County mine site, saying the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

A final set of permits remains to be renewed before the mine can begin production. However, after years of frustrations, district leaders aren’t optimistic about their ability to influence the decision.

Only about 40 residences immediately surround the site of the Goliad mine, according to Art Dohmann, vice president of the Goliad County Groundwater Conservation District. Only they might be affected in the near term. But Dohmann, who has served on the groundwater district board for 23 years, worries that the uranium, radium, and arsenic churned up in the mining process will drift from the site as years go by.

“The groundwater moves. It’s a slow rate, but once that arsenic is liberated, it’s there forever,” Dohmann said. “In a generation, it’s going to affect the downstream areas.”

UEC did not respond to a request for comment.

Currently, the TCEQ is evaluating possibilities for expanding and incentivizing further uranium production in Texas. It’s following instruction given last year, when lawmakers with the Nuclear Caucus added an item to TCEQ’s biannual budget ordering a study of uranium resources to be produced for state lawmakers by December 2024, ahead of next year’s legislative session.

According to the budget item, “The report must include recommendations for legislative or regulatory changes and potential economic incentive programs to support the uranium mining industry in this state.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/a-uranium-mining-boom-is-sweeping-through-texas-nuclear-energy/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

SCIENCE | DEC 6, 2024 AT 1:52 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

A Mysterious Respiratory Disease Has the Democratic Republic of the Congo on High Alert

Marta Musso

The WHO has sent epidemiologists to the country to uncover the cause of the illness, which has killed more than 70 people, half of them children.

Photograph: Arlette Bashizi/Getty Images

Deaths in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from an as-yet unidentified disease are continuing to rise. So far there have been 71 confirmed fatalities, with 27 recorded in hospitals and 44 in communities in the southern province of Kwango. The World Health Organization (WHO) has sent a team of experts to the field to collect samples and conduct laboratory tests to try to identify the pathogen responsible.

The results of testing should be available either later today or tomorrow, Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a press conference earlier today. “Initial diagnoses lead us to think it is a respiratory disease, but we have to wait for laboratory results.” Of the hospitalized patients, 17 died due to respiratory problems. Kaseya stressed that there are many aspects still unknown about the disease, including whether it is contagious and how it is transmitted. About 380 cases are thought to have been identified so far, with nearly half involving children under 5.

People infected with the mystery disease present with flu-like symptoms, such as coughing, vomiting, “high fever and severe headaches,” Remy Saki, deputy governor of Kwango province, and Apollinaire Yumba, the DRC’s provincial minister of health, told Reuters. Authorities are urging citizens to exercise caution and avoid contact with dead bodies to avoid potential contagion. The number of infected people, however, continues to rise, as does the alert level.

This area of the DRC is highly fragile from a health perspective, with 40 percent of residents suffering from malnutrition, and access to medical care being difficult for many, with medicines in short supply. This new outbreak is coinciding with the DRC grappling with an epidemic of mpox, which the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern in August.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/drc-mysterious-respiratory-disease-children-who-africa/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

Security

- US Officials Recommend Encryption Apps Amid Chinese Telecom Hacking

- The Real Story of “The Order”

SECURITY | DEC 7, 2024 AT 6:30 AM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Security News This Week: US Officials Recommend Encryption Apps Amid Chinese Telecom Hacking

Andy Greenberg Lily Hay Newman

Plus: Russian spies keep hijacking other hackers’ infrastructure, Hydra dark web market admin gets life sentence in Russia, and more of the week’s top security news.

Photo Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

A consortium of global law enforcement agencies led by Britain’s National Crime Agency announced a takedown operation this week against two major Russian money-laundering networks that process billions of dollars each year in more than 30 locations around the world. WIRED had exclusive access to the investigation, which uncovered new and troubling laundering techniques, particularly schemes to directly change cryptocurrency for cash. As the United States government scrambles to address China’s “Salt Typhoon” digital espionage campaign into US telecoms, two senators demanded this week that the Department of Defense investigate its failure to secure its own communications and address known vulnerabilities in US telecom infrastructure. Meanwhile, Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker spoke at WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco this week about Signal’s enduring commitment to bring private, end-to-end encrypted communication services to people all over the world regardless of geopolitical climate.

A new smartphone scanner from the mobile device security firm iVerify can quickly and easily detect spyware and has already flagged seven devices infected with the invasive Pegasus surveillance tool. Programmer Micah Lee built a tool to help you save and delete your X posts after he offended Elon Musk and was banned from the platform. And privacy advocate Nighat Dad is fighting to protect women from digital harassment in Pakistan after escaping from an abusive marriage.

The US Federal Trade Commission is targeting data brokers who it says unlawfully tracked protesters and US military personnel, but the enforcement efforts seem likely to trail off under the Trump administration. Similarly, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has devised a strategy to impose new oversight on predatory data brokers, but the new administration may not continue the initiative. Some new laws are finally coming around the world in 2025 that will attempt to regulate the dysfunction of the digital advertising industry, but malicious advertising is still booming around the world and continues to play a big role in global scamming.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

US Officials Urge Americans to Encrypt Calls and Texts After Chinese Telecom Hacking

Remember how the US federal government spent much of the last three decades periodically decrying the dangers of strong, freely available encryption tools, arguing that because they enable criminals and terrorists, they should be outlawed or required to implement government-approved backdoors? As of this week, the government will never again be able to make that argument without privacy advocates pointing to a particular phone call where two officials recommended Americans use exactly those encryption tools to protect themselves amidst an ongoing massive breach of US telecoms by Chinese hackers.

In a briefing with reporters about the breach of no fewer than eight phone companies by the Chinese state-sponsored espionage hackers known as Salt Typhoon, officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI both said that amid the still-uncontrolled infiltration of US telecoms that have exposed calls and texts, Americans should use encryption apps to safeguard their privacy. “Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication,” said Jeff Greene, CISA’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity. (Signal and WhatsApp, for instance, end-to-end encrypt calls and texts, though the officials didn’t name any particular apps.)

The recommendation amid what one senator has called “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history” represents a stunning reversal from previous US officials’ rhetoric on encryption, and in particular the FBI’s repeated calls for access to backdoors in encryption. In fact, it was exactly this sort of government-approved wiretap capability requirement for US telecoms that the Salt Typhoon hackers in some cases exploited to access Americans communications.

Russia’s FSB Hackers Keep Hijacking Other Hackers’ Infrastructure for Spying

The hacker group known as Secret Blizzard, Snake, or Turla, widely believed to work for Russia’s FSB intelligence agency, is known for using some of the most ingenious hacking techniques ever seen to spy on its victims. One of the tricks that’s now become its signature move: hacking the infrastructure of other hackers to stealthily piggyback on their access. This week Microsoft’s threat intelligence researchers and security firm Lumen Technologies revealed that Turla gained access to the servers of a Pakistan-based hacker group and used its visibility into victim networks to spy on government, military and intelligence targets in India and Afghanistan of interest to the Kremlin. In some cases, Turla hijacked the Pakistani hackers’ access to install their own malware, while in other instances they appear to have used the other group’s tools for even greater stealth and deniability. The incident marks the fourth known time since 2017, when it penetrated an Iranian hacker group’s command-and-control servers, that Turla has freeloaded on another hacker group’s infrastructure and tooling, according to Lumen.

Admin of Russian Dark Web Market Hydra Sentenced to Life in Prison

The Russian government is known for turning a blind eye to cybercrime—until it doesn’t. This week 15 convicted members of the notorious dark web market Hydra learned the limits of that forbearance when they reportedly received prison sentences ranging from 8 years to 23 years, as well an unprecedented life sentence for the site’s creator Stanislav Moiseyev. Before it was taken down two years ago in a law enforcement operation led by IRS criminal investigators in the US and Germany’s BKA police agency, Hydra was a uniquely sprawling dark web marketplace, one that not only served as the post-Soviet world’s biggest online bazaar for narcotics but also a vast money laundering machine for crimes including ransomware, scams, and sanctions evasion. In total, Hydra enabled more than $5 billion dollars in dirty cryptocurrency transactions since 2015, according to crypto tracing firm Elliptic.

Suspected Ransomware Actor “Wazawaka” Reportedly Charged and Apprehended by Russia

Russian law enforcement charged and arrested a software developer last week who is suspected of prolific contributions to multiple ransomware groups, including building malware to extort money from businesses and other targets. The suspect is reportedly Mikhail Matveev, or “Wazawaka,” who has worked as an affiliate with ransomware gangs like Conti, LockBit, Babuk, DarkSide, and Hive. Social media reports indicate that Matveev confirmed his indictment and said that he has been released from law enforcement custody on bail.

Russia’s prosecutor general did not name Matveev, but described charges last week against a 32-year-old hacker under Article 273 of Russia’s Criminal Code, which bans the creation or use of malware. The move came as Russia seemed to be sending some sort of message about its tolerance for cybercrime with the sentencing of the dark web marketplace Hydra’s staff, including a life sentence for its administrator. In 2023, the US government indicted and sanctioned Matveev.

FBI Is Investigating Exxon Lobbyist Firm Over Hack-and-Leak Operation Targeting Activists

In a disturbing scoop (one we didn’t cover last week due to the Thanksgiving holiday), Reuters reporters have revealed that the FBI is now investigating a lobbying consultancy hired by Exxon over the firm’s role in a hack-and-leak operation that targeted climate change activists. DCI Group, a lobbying firm hired at the time by Exxon, allegedly gave a list of target activists to a private investigator who then outsourced a hacking operation against those targets to mercenary hackers. After the private investigator—an Israeli man named Amit Forlit, who was later arrested in London and faces US hacking charges—allegedly gave the hacked material to DCI, it leaked the activists’ internal communications about climate change litigation against Exxon to the media, Reuters discovered. The FBI, according to Reuters, has determined that DCI also first previewed that material to Exxon before leaking it. “Those documents were directly employed by Exxon to come after me with all guns blazing,” one attorney working with the activist group, the Center for Climate Integrity, told Reuters. “It turned my life upside down.”

Exxon has denied knowing about any hacking activities and DCI told Reuters in a statement that “we direct all our employees and consultants to comply with the law.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/encryption-apps-chinese-telecom-hacking-hydra-russia-exxon/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

SECURITY | DEC 6, 2024 AT 2:28 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

The Real Story of The Order

Ali Winston

The new film about an FBI agent chasing a white supremacist terror cell is based on a true story—and one that connects the headlines of 30 years ago to those of today.

Photograph Courtesy of Vertical

In The Order, director Justin Kurzel’s electric new film, Terry Husk, a haggard, possessed FBI veteran played by Jude Law, pores over a thin paperback with a blood-red cover, paging through diagrams of targeted killings, bombings, and a gallows erected in front of the United States Capitol.

“There are six steps in that book,” says a young sheriff deputized as his assistant, played by Tye Sheridan. He gives the Cliff Notes version as he scours the book, his eyes riveted.

“Recruiting,” he says. “Fundraising. Armed revolution. Domestic terror. Assassination.

“Number six is the day of the rope.”

The book is The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel that depicts the violent overthrow of the American government by armed white supremacist insurgents and the extermination of people of color and Jews in a race war. Photocopied pages from it were found in Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s getaway car when he was apprehended by law enforcement.

Along with Husk and Bob Mathews—the founder of a murderous underground white supremacist guerrilla outfit that counterfeited money and robbed banks and armored cars, played by Nicholas Hoult—The Turner Diaries is the third major character in The Order. Though Mathews formally named his group the Silent Brotherhood and claimed he took little inspiration from William Luther Pierce’s incendiary novel, he and his comrades did refer to their group as “The Order”—the same term used in the book for the protagonist’s genocidal militants.

The book’s crimson cover and lurid drawings resurface time and time again. Mathews reads excerpts to his young son before bedtime; a pastor at a neo-Nazi compound in Idaho proffers it to visiting law enforcement agents; and it turns up in the hands of FBI agents desperately seeking to plot out the insurgents’ next moves.

The Order unearths a critical chapter in the history of the American extreme right largely forgotten by the general public. The murder of Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg in 1984 by two of Mathews’ acolytes brought the Order to national attention 30 years ago and inspired not one but two Hollywood films in that decade—Betrayed and Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio. Since then, though, only close observers of prison gang and skinhead culture have had cause to track mentions of the Silent Brotherhood by tweaked-out Aryan Brotherhood killers or the annual “Martyrs Day” pilgrimage of Hammerskins from across the West Coast to Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound, where Mathews met his fiery death during a shootout with the FBI.

Now, as the country ponders a return to the 2016-2020 period, when Mathews’ ideological offspring ran riot from Oregon to Washington, DC, his saga is getting marquee billing.

While the film debuts almost a full decade into the American extreme right’s current revival, screenwriter Zach Baylin and producer Bryan Haas began developing the project back in 2016, before the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Baylin tells WIRED that he and Haas stumbled on The Turner Diaries while researching Ruby Ridge, the 1990s militia movement, and McVeigh (who slept with the book under his pillow) and casting around for a lesser-known story to explore the origins of American extremism.

“We were looking to encase the story of one of these groups inside a classic crime thriller,” Baylin says. They stumbled across The Silent Brotherhood, a 1989 book by reporters Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt that traced the entire arc of Mathews’ crime spree, from his teenage radicalization through the John Birch Society and Phoenix militias all the way through his death and the subsequent criminal trials of his followers.

“The crimes the Order committed and the way the investigation unfolded, it had the framework of the kind of film that we’d been talking about,” he said.

Flynn and Gerhart’s book, which began with their coverage of Berg’s assassination in his driveway and followed the Order’s saga through the federal pursuit, investigation, and prosecution, is remarkably detailed. Once members of the group were up for trial, Flynn and Gerhart spent hours interviewing them in the Arapahoe County jail, gathering priceless material that allowed them to reconstruct the terrorist group’s inner workings in minute detail. Readers of the book, which is back in print (with a new title) after three decades off the shelves, will note the film’s fidelity to life, particularly in the robbery and heist scenes. However, for Flynn and Gerhardt—who died in 2015—the minutiae of Mathews’ terror campaign were a mechanism to engage audiences with a deeper, darker reality.

“We didn’t write the book for the details. We wrote it to expose the banality of evil, so readers could understand where these folks come from and how endemic it is in American society,” says Flynn, who reported for the Rocky Mountain News for nearly three decades before it shuttered in 2009. Since 2015, he has served as a city councilman in Denver.

The Order is the sort of film America does not produce anymore. Its taut action scenes hearken back to Heat, To Live and Die in L.A., The French Connection, and Sidney Lumet’s police corruption canon (Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A); the droning soundtrack does not overwhelm viewers; and Adam Arkapaw’s washed-out cinematography encapsulates both the grandeur and the intimidating solitude of the interior Pacific Northwest. The dialog is sparing, direct, and—in spite of Mathews’ grandiose promises of a renewed whites-only bastion in the Pacific Northwest—remarkably free of proselytizing.

For a movie shot in such wide-open landscapes, The Order is tinged through with claustrophobia, a testament to the tension rife throughout Baylin’s writing and Kurzel’s meticulous direction. Like Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Michael Mann’s Heat, Hoult and Law only come face to face with each other a few times before their penultimate confrontation. However, Kurzel had both actors follow each other for a day and compile dossiers on their opposite number to develop a granular sense of how a manhunt actually functions.

“I wanted them to ask themselves, what does that feel like having a relationship with someone you’re trying to take down? You’re living with a phantom, in a way,” Kurzel says.

Law, whose slow-burn performance is unlike any prior role from his four decades on stage and screen, says the similarities between Husk and Mathews as two opposites of the same coin are at the core of The Order’s dramatic tension.

“They’re more alike than they’d ever admit—both are driven, charismatic, and know exactly how to manipulate those around them to achieve their goals,” he says. “Nicholas and I really leaned into that symmetry during our scenes together. It’s almost like they’re looking into a dark mirror—each recognizing qualities in the other that they either admire or fear. That underlying connection adds layers to their conflict, making it not just a clash of ideologies but also a deeply personal battle. It was fascinating to explore that tension with Nicholas.”

Mathews’ brief campaign of armed insurgency and domestic terrorism has continued to inspire generations of extremists in the United States and beyond, from McVeigh and the neo-Nazi bankrollers of the Aryan Republican Army to the killers of Germany’s National Socialist Underground, all the way through to contemporary groups like Atomwaffen Division, the Base and the Terrorgram Collective. The latter group, which federal law enforcement believes to be a “bold-letter, category one” domestic terrorism threat, circulates voluminous propaganda booklets that meld the ethos of The Turner Diaries with Ted Kaczynski’s anti-industrial-civilization ethos and neo-Nazi occultism.

Terrorgram’s materials, which include viable bomb-making instructions, camouflage and tactical guides, and instructions on how to disable critical infrastructure like electrical substations, water treatment plants and dams, have radicalized at least one so-called “saint,” or mass shooter, and are alleged to have been connected to a series of power grid attacks in North Carolina as well as several active federal prosecutions.

“William Pierce doesn’t build bombs,” Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Rolling Stone a quarter of a century ago. “He builds bombers.” In many ways, the Terrorgram Collective fulfills the same role now, and its publications have become the modern-day version of the Turner Diaries. Disseminated worldwide through the moderation-free wilderness of Telegram, the group’s message of hate and violence is now circulating independently of any organized group or ideology for disaffected, unbalanced “lone wolves” to latch onto as justification for future atrocities.

While The Order remains firmly rooted in the past save for one passing reference to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in a title card, during production there was no escaping the drumbeat of resurgent far-right militancy in the United States. Kurzel, the director, recalls watching news coverage of the January 6 insurrection and remarking on the gallows erected outside the Capitol building—a drawing of which features in the book and the exposition scene with law. “The Turner Diaries started to become more visible in a present-day setting in a way I was kind of shocked by,” he says, speaking to WIRED from his Tasmania residence. Indeed, following January 6, Amazon removed The Turner Diaries from its online inventory.

Hoult’s bravura portrayal of an ice-cool, controlled yet menacing Mathews through the Order’s campaign of armed robbery, counterfeiting, murder, and armed confrontation with the FBI is one of the film’s dual anchors. Aside from a striking physical resemblance to the Silent Brotherhood’s founder, Hoult closely studied his subject, aping Mathews’ mannerisms and movements from old documentary footage, studying texts that radicalized his subject, lifting weights, and cutting alcohol from his diet.

“Mathews was someone who thought and planned so in advance of what his ultimate goal was, I think he always kept in sight. That’s something Justin and I spoke about, that he wouldn’t lose his head on trivial things or things that would potentially harm his cause. In his mind, he’d already, in some ways, planned his destiny,” Hoult tells WIRED.

By choosing to play Mathews with reserve instead of bombast, as more of a watcher who carefully observes his surroundings and other people to better understand how to turn situations to his advantage, Hoult aimed to show audiences how someone with the charisma of his villain could attract followers and build a movement.

“I think that shows how they penetrate communities and societies in a different way, and perhaps people in the future might be less susceptible to people who behave like him,” he says.

As with any artistic project that focuses on extremism and mass violence, The Order’s production team walked a fine line between showing Mathews’ magnetism and the murderous project at the heart of his ideology and actions.

“I think you need to understand the pull of a figure like this,” says Kurzel, whose prior films Snowtown and Nitram depicted, respectively, youthful serial killers and Australia’s worst mass shooting, the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. “Mathews is definitely someone who understands their reach and how to communicate and gather people. There’s gonna be a certain kind of charisma about that.”

Haas, one of the film’s producers, echoed Kurzel's remarks about art pushing the boundaries of acceptability. “It felt like part of the movie was to show the appeal of Bob. He was someone who had charisma, and that tied to these really toxic ideas is really dangerous,” Haas says, praising the “unrelenting realism” the cast brought to their performances.

Ultimately, the hope of slipping an unsparing portrayal of domestic extremism—produced outside of the Hollywood studio system—into the December award season is to reintroduce a discussion of radicalization to American society. “If you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it—how a guy that, in the way Nick depicted him, could live down anybody’s street,” says Haas. “There are lots of people right now who are hurting and struggling and looking for answers.”

Updated: 12/6/2024 4:01 pm EST: This story was updated to clarify which character reads out six steps given in The Turner Diaries.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/real-story-the-order-fbi-movie-bob-mathews/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

Top Stories

- Keeping Your Personal Data Safe in the Age of Trump

POLITICS | DEC 6, 2024 AT 2:22 PM EST | VIEW ON WIRED

Keeping Your Personal Data Safe in the Age of Trump

By Leah Feiger

Donald Trump has threatened to go after a lot of people—journalists, political rivals and undocumented immigrants to name a few—and starting next year, he’ll have the entire national security apparatus at his disposal. What’s the best way to keep your personal information secure from surveillance, not just by the government, but also data brokers, tech companies, and online scammers? Leah talks with WIRED business editor Louise Matsakis and security editor Andrew Couts about what to expect and practical tips for your phone, computer, and life.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Andrew Couts is @couts.bsky.com. Louise Matsakis is @lmatsakis. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

Mentioned this week:

The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance by Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman

Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking US Soldiers and Spies to Nuclear Vaults and Brothels in Germany by Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron

A New Phone Scanner That Detects Spyware Has Already Found 7 Pegasus Infections by Lily Hay Newman

How to Listen

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for WIRED Politics Lab. We’re on Spotify too.

Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Donald Trump is returning to the White House with a long list of grievances. We know he wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants scattered across the country, that he’s vowed to go after journalists, and wants prosecutions of his political opponents. His allies in Congress are eager to roll back abortion and transgender rights, and there are calls, generally on the right, for a crackdown on left-leaning activist groups. As head of the national security apparatus, Trump will be in possession once again of a huge surveillance machine. It’s tempting to feel anxious about all of this, but there are a lot of compelling reasons to think about your cybersecurity that go way beyond what Donald Trump may or may not do. We wanted to do a little bit of a cybersecurity reset. What are the best practices for all of us, things that might protect us from a snooping government, internet scammer, or data collection company. Joining me to talk about the various ways we can protect our data is Andrew Couts, WIRED senior editor of security and investigations. Hey, Andrew.

Andrew Couts: Hey, great to be here.

Leah Feiger: And Louise Matsakis, WIRED senior business editor. Hey, Louise.

Louise Matsakis: Hey, it’s so great to be here.

Leah Feiger: Let’s kick this right off. This guide also exists on WIRED.com. You can click on the link in our show notes today. Who is this guide for? Why should people know how to protect themselves online?

Andrew Couts: The guide is for anybody who feels like they might be in a vulnerable situation from government surveillance, or it could include an abusive partner or anyone who really feels like they need to take extra steps to protect themselves. I would say entering these uncertain times of the incoming Trump administration, that's probably changing compared to how it was in the past few years or ever. It's really up to you as the reader or listener to read the guide, see if it applies to you, see if theres anything in your life that makes you feel nervous about it and take some steps to protect yourself.

Leah Feiger: Let’s talk about those specific people a little more. My dad listens to the show. Hey, dad. Should he be doing this? Should he be following the guide?

Andrew Couts: It’s really very subjective and so it might not apply to everybody, but there's really little downside to protecting yourself and taking extra steps to ensure that your privacy is secured as best that you can make it. I would say if you are an activist, if you're a political person publicly, if you are in a vulnerable community, the only downside is some inconvenience and having to make sure you’re on top of various settings and things. We tried to present our guide in a way that's on a sliding scale so you can mix and match what you think is appropriate for your life and for your risk level. It's not just government surveillance that this applies to, because we all know everybody's getting scam texts and calls all the time. It applies to that too because just because your data is safe with one of the apps you use, they could get breached and then that data is out there and it can be connected to all different types of information that's out there about you already, and it can make even people who aren't in the public eye or otherwise engaged in any behavior that might make them a target still vulnerable.

Leah Feiger: Let’s just take a quick step back for a moment and talk about some big picture information about how online surveillance currently works. It’s so integrated into our online experience. Like you said, how many times have I gotten messages that my apps have been breached, that this password is unsecure, it's a daily occurrence. Obviously, Louise, you're an expert on everything China. Andrew, you have been covering this for so long. Talk to me about this big picture. What are we actually even coming up against here?

Louise Matsakis: I think in the last few years it’s definitely gotten a lot worse. I think a lot of us are familiar with the experience of I want to buy a new pair of sneakers. I look at this pair of sneakers and then that pair of sneakers follows you around the internet everywhere. Suddenly you see it on your phone, you see it in your Instagram ads. The other day I had the experience of actually looking up a couch on Facebook marketplace, and then because my Facebook data is connected to my Instagram data, I started getting Instagram ads for couches and I was like, “Hey, Facebook.”

Leah Feiger: Incredible.

Louise Matsakis: “I can't afford a new $3,000 couch, which is why I'm looking for a used one.”

Leah Feiger: But thank you for waving it in my face.

Louise Matsakis: There’s also, I think, the most invasive form of surveillance in a lot of ways is location tracking. You're seeing advertisements based on your IP address, based on where you go every day. A lot of people have their Google history on, so Google knows literally what time you leave your house every day, what time you return, when you maybe go somewhere like Planned Parenthood or when you go to a protest and when you return from that protest. Often, a lot of times I encourage people to look at lawsuits when they want to see what data is available to law enforcement because you can see how your trove of text messages, iMessage, conversations going back sometimes maybe an entire decade between people end up being used as evidence. I think also it's good for people to know that sometimes protecting yourself can be inconvenient and make things a little bit harder, but it can also be nice and actually better for your life. I don't want to see those couches everywhere. I don't want to see those sneakers. Because I have a lot of my conversations now set to auto delete, I'm actually saving storage space and I don't really need those conversations from three months ago where I'm like, “Hey, I'm going to be five minutes late to have coffee with my friend.”

Leah Feiger: Well, you bring up such a funny point. I think when we're talking WIRED's Guide to Government Surveillance, like you said it has so many different levels to it. There's on one hand, yes, perhaps at some point if Kash Patel takes over the FBI, what does it look like for journalists and activists in this space? But then there's also the smaller, the day-to-day people should be allowed to do that too. Dad, if you're listening, get on it.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, exactly. I think privacy is a virtue that permeates all aspects of society and it's worth protecting whether you are a vulnerable activist or whether you are Leah’s dad.

Andrew Couts: Part of the issue here is that everybody knows you’re getting tracked for ads and your location is getting tracked for various reasons and all these things, and I think it’s often put in the context of advertising or some commercial uses. I think the two big issues right now are one, all of that data can now be purchased by the government instead of getting a warrant. They're basically able to just go around the Fourth Amendment. This is happening, police are doing this, Immigration Customs Enforcement is doing this. We do a lot of stories at WIRED that are based on location data. The most recent one was one about a data broker who supplied more than 3 billion data points on people in Germany. Why Germany matters to people in the US is that we have a lot of military installations and intelligence installations there. We were able to looking at the raw data, you could just literally track someone from a bunker where our nuclear weapons are stored to a brothel where they go after work, to their home and see their commute every single day.

Leah Feiger: Everyone go check the story out on WIRED.com. It's an amazing real life example of how this all is at play, but it’s crazy.

Andrew Couts: It’s crazy. I think the issue is that we just don’t know how this data is going to be used in the future. I think part of the issue here is just continued exposure that can lead to unintended consequences. So you might think you’re not vulnerable right now. We just don’t know what the future holds or how this data can be repackaged, shared, leaked, anything. Anytime your data is such sensitive data about where you go every single day or what websites you’re looking at, what apps are on your phone, all this stuff that might be used just to serve you an ad for a couch could also be used to embarrass you publicly or track you and surveil you in other different ways. I think it’s really important for people to understand that none of this stuff is happening in a bubble. It is all very porous in terms of who can get access to this data anywhere from a data broker who might just be a guy in his office in Florida, like one dude with a couple of computers. There’s a lot of data brokers out there and there are a lot of ones that are just some random person who has massive amounts of information on you, to the FBI or ICE or whoever it might be.

Leah Feiger: Let's talk about what you guys do. How do you lock up your cybersecurity? Do you use flip phones? What is your cloud storage? Are you only on Signal? All of these things I'm referencing by the way in the WIRED guide, go check it out. Where are you guys at?

Louise Matsakis: I have most of my conversations on Signal and I have the vast majority of them set to delete every four weeks. I find that that’s a good timescale for normal everyday conversations and then more sensitive conversations delete sometimes in as little as a few hours or a few days. Very rarely have I found that this is inconvenient for my life. Sometimes I ask a friend like, “Hey, that cool Airbnb, you stayed in that I know you already dug the link up to. Can you send that to me again?” But that's a pretty minor.

Leah Feiger: Small price to pay.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, small price to pay. I'm really careful about location tracking and then usually-

Leah Feiger: So you are not active on Find My Friends?

Louise Matsakis: No. Although I do track my Boomer mom.

Leah Feiger: Sure.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. Who won’t listen to this podcast, so sorry mom, I am tracking you. She knows this.

Leah Feiger: The big reveal, actually.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, but I actually don't let her.

Leah Feiger: It’s the Louise Global Surveillance blog.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, don’t let her track me back though. That’s my business. But when you get over the age of 70, your kid is allowed to see where you’re going.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely, amazing. Yeah.

Louise Matsakis: But I don’t use location tracking. I turn location tracking off for most of my apps and then I have a separate blank device and sometimes I bring that depending on where I’m going, particularly when I'm going to mainland China.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, I was going to ask, because you do reporting trips, you have sources all over the place. Are you bringing air gap devices? Is your work computer coming with?

Louise Matsakis: I usually will not bring my work computer. I'll bring a personal computer that doesn’t have very much information on it and I will bring a blank cell phone. I'll put various Chinese apps on that phone that I don’t really want. I don't really want WeChat just hanging out on my normal device for the most part. But those are pretty above and beyond precautions that I don't think the average person needs to take. But I think just making sure, do you really need 30 apps on your phone having your location? Because to Andrew's point about all of these data brokers, a lot of the time they're getting this location information, not from Google necessarily, or not from Facebook, not from these big companies that they don't need to sell that information. It’s literally often the game you downloaded and you forgot about. It's like the silly Candy Crush knockoff.

Leah Feiger: Oh God, I'm screwed. Yeah.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, it’s worth just looking at those sort of apps that you forgot about and realizing, “Oh, all of these applications have particularly your location information.” Those are the two things that I prioritize is ensuring that it’s not just protecting my data, but I don't have that data. If my device gets seized, it’s like those conversations are just not there. You only see the last few weeks at the most, and in most cases maybe you see that that person's contact is in my phone, but you have no idea what we talked about because that data has been erased and Signal is also end-to-end encrypted. It’s not being stored on a server somewhere where a court could make a subpoena for it or cops could try and get a warrant for it. Those are my two big things. There are a lot of other things you can do, but I think for the average person who knows where you’re going and what are your conversations and where are they and how they being stored and do you want to keep them all the time?

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. Absolutely. Andrew, how about you?

Andrew Couts: Yeah, I would echo basically all of those, though I'm not going on cool reporting trips to China, so that’s outside my knowledge. But just to reiterate on the apps, I would say one thing I do is I just limit the number of apps that are on my phone and I don't ever download ones that are just, there's no need for it. I'm not going to download the McDonald's app or something. There’s things that might be a little bit convenient, but McDonald’s doesn't need to have an app on my phone all the time.

Leah Feiger: OK, so talk me through that though, because I’m with you. I’m totally with you. What’s wrong with having these extra apps on your phone?

Andrew Couts: It really just depends on the specific app, but if they get access to your phone book, they can do contact mapping. If they get access to your location, obviously they can do behavior mapping so they can see what other stores you’re going into and just mapping out what your behaviors are, what your activities are. Usually, that’s just to sell you more stuff.

Leah Feiger: Which as Louise points out, you don’t have to have that either in your life.

Andrew Couts: Right, exactly. There’s just no reason for them to have any data about me, to Louise’s point that just the data shouldn't exist in the first place. I try to limit the number of apps. I also am very diligent about making sure my location settings are all up to date. Just nothing can track me unless I’m using the app and for a mapping app or can’t track me at all if I’m... Not to endorse Apple, but I use an iPhone, it has a lot of really good privacy features that people can take advantage of. Some of them make your life slightly less convenient, but I’d say the trade-off is well worth it. The most important... I’d say the one thing anybody can do to protect their privacy most is to use Signal and to get everyone they know to use Signal. I would say obviously there are benefits to protecting your conversations, but if you are thinking, “Well, WhatsApp also uses the Signal protocol,” if you’re into that nerdy stuff about how this encryption works, that’s true, but WhatsApp also collects all the metadata. I would highly recommend Signal over any other encrypted app that’s out there at the moment. Then I just try to limit what I'm doing on my devices that I think might be sensitive. I also, I think financial privacy is also really important and so I try to use cash on a regular basis. Obviously, it’s not very convenient.

Leah Feiger: Really?

Andrew Couts: Yeah, I do it for-

Leah Feiger: This is a new fact. I’m learning about you right here, right now. Everything else I could have predicted.

Andrew Couts: Well, just on the daily shopping and things like that, that when it's convenient for me to do it, I can’t do that through Uber or something. I don’t use Uber really, but I'm here in San Francisco this week, so I am. I’m going to delete the app as soon as I get to the airport, but around town grocery shopping and shopping for my dogs, I’ll use cash if I can because it’s still really private and it’s more private than cryptocurrency. It’s more private than anything at this moment.

Leah Feiger: Interesting. You guys haven’t mentioned the one thing that I’m personally a bit obsessed with, so maybe I’m actually wrong, so tell me if I’m wrong. I love my DeleteMe. DeleteMe, for everyone by the way, just is, how do I even describe it? It's a subscription tool to purge your information from data brokers.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, so what they do is there’s a lot of these sometimes they’re referred to as people look up sites and they’re basically these databases of... Sometimes they're actually scraping courts, so it will literally show when you filed for divorce, even if you can't see the actual court documents and it will show often your address. Sometimes they make family trees so it will show Leah is related to her dad and they both lived at the same address or whatever it is. It’s really sensitive information and there are services DeleteMe. There are other ones that will on your behalf will send a request saying like, “Hey, you need to take my data down.” I think that this is a really good thing that you bring up and it's really important because one of the most sensitive pieces of information about you is where you live, right, where you sleep every night. If you are an activist, if you are somebody who's posting a lot of things on the internet, if you are making other people mad, it is fairly likely that you might encounter somebody who is so mad at you or detests you so much that they want to know where you live. I’m not saying that people are going to necessarily come and show up at your house, but it’s really scary.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely.

Louise Matsakis: I've had this experience where people are saying, “I know where you live, this is your address,” and that is a very common form of harassment and there have been plenty of documented cases where people do show up. I think protecting that information is important and that’s obviously something that is not easy to change. Sometimes people just open a new email address because they’ve gotten too much spam to their old one, but it’s really hard to get a new apartment or buy a new house or whatever it is.

Leah Feiger: I would also say not even just people that are active online or making their opinions known or hated. You could work at a nonprofit and wake up the next day that a woman’s health organization that perhaps actually doesn't have that much to do with abortion and you and your colleagues are on blast from far right?

Andrew Couts: Absolutely. I think DeleteMe is a great service and it’s one that obviously it costs some money so not everybody is able to afford it, which is unfortunate, but if you can, I highly recommend it. I think other steps you can take just nuts and bolts. You can use a VPN to protect a lot of your information while you’re online. There are a lot of caveats to that. A lot of VPN companies are bad in the ways that we’re talking about here about data brokers or whatever else they have access to everything you’re doing online, so do your research on that. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has a great guide to how to figure out which VPN is good for you. The other thing is just make sure you’re not posting where you’re at on social media. If you’re going to post about being at a concert, maybe think about posting it after the concert is over or when you're not in that area, because to Louise’s point, we’re talking about government surveillance or threat actors or whatever these high-minded things. But a thing I’m nervous about is going into this new era of polarization, hyper-political ideas is that vigilante justice and people thinking there’s supposed to go after you because you made them mad about something, about anything. If they find your address, if they find all your contact information, etc. That can be extremely scary. Another thing I would say to do is if you want to protect your anonymity, definitely don’t use the same username on various different platforms. Don’t use the same email address, don’t use your phone number connected to apps if you can avoid it. All these things can be pieced together, especially when there’s a data breach and it's relatively trivial to do that. There are tools out there that make searching that information very easy. Anytime you can obfuscate your online identities, that's a very good thing to do just in the long-term.

Leah Feiger: We got to bring this into our current political situation here. We're obviously all gathered and talking about this for a very specific reason. Trump has threatened to go after government staffers who leak information to journalists. He’s threatened to go after journalists, he’s threatened to go after political enemies and he’s gone after journalists communications in the past. How can people prevent the government from reading their texts and emails?

Louise Matsakis: Under a regime that is concerned about retribution, it's hard. Again, I go back to do not have the data in the first place. When I've talked to sources, don't be on your company's Wi-Fi, do not forward emails, do not forward text messages, use a different device if you can take a picture of that email on your cellphone network, not on the Wi-Fi that your computer is connected to and send that over Signal. Then have that message auto delete, right? I think it's about when the government says, “Hey, produce this information,” the best thing to say is, “I don't have that information. That information does not exist.” Also, I think it’s important for people to realize if you’ve never been in this situation before, they’re not coming to you necessarily. They’re coming to the providers that you use like Google, like Facebook, like WhatsApp, and they are legally required or compelled to provide this information. In most cases they do and sometimes they do it extremely quickly. If the government can prove that there is an emergency, and in most cases this is good, right? When a mass shooter is on the loose, it’s good that Facebook provides information that might help them catch that person. There’s a reason that these mechanisms exist, but under a regime that is not concerned about constitutional rights and that is going after their perceived enemies, these protections can become weak. I think it’s about just not having that data to produce is the best thing you can do and to use services like Signal that are end-to-end. Because in that case when the government says, “Hey, Signal provide this information on Louise and Andrew.” Signal can't access it, they do not have it. Their response is, “Sorry, our technology does not allow for you to compel us to provide this information.”

Leah Feiger: Meredith Whitaker, what a goddess.

Andrew Couts: I would just add obviously encrypt everything you possibly can. iCloud backup can now be encrypted. iMessages are also end-to-end encrypted as are FaceTime audio calls. I don’t know a lot about Android, I’m sorry. I’m sure that there are comparable features on Android platforms. Look it up, find out what you can do on those. Just limit using the cloud as much as possible. To Louise’s point that anytime a company is storing something for you, that’s who some the authorities are going to go to. One other Apple feature is lockdown mode, which is specifically for vulnerable people. It will lock down a lot of the sharing or collecting of this data that we’re talking about being sensitive across the entire device. That’s another way of just not making that data exist. If you need to get a different device to use it, that’s certainly an option. I would say if you are thinking about getting a burner phone, you have to be very, very diligent with that. You can never have it connect to your home Wi-Fi network, for example, or connect to your office Wi-Fi. That information then makes you more vulnerable and can expose you. The last thing I would say is if you’re just getting started to thinking about what your risk levels look like and what your digital privacy hygiene looks like, all the information before now is already out there and so you can’t really control that. Whatever’s been collected on your life up until now can probably be accessed by someone somewhere, so factor that in. That doesn't mean give up, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing anything, but it’s definitely something you just need to be aware of that if you’re just starting now, you’re going to be safer, but you're not necessarily going to be bulletproof going forward.

Leah Feiger: I feel bananas even having to talk about this because obviously your government should be protecting you. One of the things that I feel like we’ve all just been beating the drum on recently is the PRESS Act, which would protect journalists from government spying and it has a lot of bipartisan support and passed in the House, but it’s currently held up in the Senate. Senate Democrats have been slow walking it. How do you recommend that people hold these things at once? This is a very broad question of your government should not be doing this to you and simultaneously it may be, and thus you have to take these steps.

Louise Matsakis: I think it’s unfortunate, but this is the way that it works in most parts of the world. It shouldn’t be that way and I think it’s good to be idealistic, but I think it’s important to remember that America is not special and this is how governments behave. This is how law enforcement behaves, and that if you accept that and think of it as the norm, not that you shouldn’t fight, but that it’s worth considering that. However, in other ways we are really behind. We do not have a national privacy law. We have a patchwork of protections in certain states like California where we all are currently, which is great, but it’s a real shame. I often say this and it surprises a lot of people. There are more consumer, important to say consumer, but there are more consumer privacy protections in China than there are in the U.S. That is a shame. That is something that we should be ashamed about and that should be changed. But I think day-to-day it’s just good to be pragmatic and to know that law enforcement’s going to be law enforcement, the government’s going to be the government, and it’s just worth having a default. I think having these things be set in a way that you don’t have to think about it every day and that these conversations are just deleting. I’m just using this email service that’s end-to-end encrypted. I have my DeleteMe subscription that I only need to renew once a year, that makes it a lot easier. I think paranoia is very emotionally draining and you don’t want to be in a position where you’re constantly worried and you're constantly paranoid. I think when you use these things and you set it and forget it, you can feel more empowered to live your life the way you want. Then the conveniences of not being tracked, of not seeing the catch all the time, of not.

Leah Feiger: The Autonomous couch.

Louise Matsakis: Not having to pay more for cloud storage every year because you’re not putting as much data into the cloud. These things compound over time and then you just have a nicer digital life. That’s what I want people to have.

Andrew Couts: I think during the first Trump administration, we became glaringly aware of the difference between laws and norms. I think the PRESS Act is a great reminder that there are still more norms out there that can be pushed aside. That’s what that law is attempting to do is to make it a law that you can’t do certain activities of surveillance and targeting of journalists that are at the moment just rules in the book. For example, the FBI has policy that they’re not going to prosecute journalists for publishing stories about classified information, but that's just a rule. If-

Louise Matsakis: It’s not a law.

Andrew Couts: It’s not a law and that can just be brushed aside and there’s other protections like that and I think we’re going to become aware of more that we haven’t even thought of at this moment. I wish we had a national privacy law. I wish we had better press protections that weren't based on agency rules, but there’s only so much we can do and we have to operate in the reality that were entering. A thing you can do to protect yourself is all the things we’ve been talking about here, but you can also vote, support legislation that comes up in Congress, be politically active in a way that supports your ideals and that protects everybody, including yourself.

Leah Feiger: On that note, we’re going to take a quick break and when we're back more on surveillance in the age of Trump 2.0. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. We've been talking about a lot of the different ways that the government can track us and these apps are bad and encryption is good, and having everything off of our phones and computers is also good. I think we need to talk a little bit about some of these tech companies and these apps that we’re using. Perhaps a way into that is all of these tech CEOs that have been congratulating Trump and kissing the ring. Does that give you any additional concerns when it comes to our conversations about cybersecurity?

Louise Matsakis: I think there’s two things. One is more of just a vibe shift, which is that I think a lot of these CEOs saw what happened during the first Trump administration and saw how he could fly off the handle and start tweeting about them. I think that they realize that he responds really well to flattery. I think you’re seeing a lot of CEOs just going and kissing the ring. They want to ensure that their businesses are protected and there’s a lot less standing up for principals, a lot less of the resistance. The second thing about corporations since the first Trump administration is that you've seen a lot more companies get into the advertising business. Amazon has an enormous advertising business now. Uber is now in the advertising business. I see ads in the Uber app. Even some of these new AI companies such as Perplexity, they said they're going to get potentially into the ads business as well. Another shift is that a lot more people are having really extensive conversations with chatbots, with things like ChatGPT, which is another place where you can not have your conversation save. I don’t think we've seen necessarily a case yet of OpenAI, or maybe not at least a high profile one, getting a subpoena for this information from their users, but it could happen if you're asking ChatGPT sensitive things. That’s the other shift is that it’s some of the kinds of data being collected and who is collecting it have changed. Advertising is really high margin business, so a lot more companies want to do it on top of their core business. I think considering that, that there's more companies that are hungry for your data than there were before, and that we are now in an environment where there is, I think, less appetite from corporations to push against things that the second Trump administration might do because I think they realize that this is an unpredictable guy who they can just be nice to and get what they want.

Leah Feiger: Oh, depressing.

Louise Matsakis: But yes.

Andrew Couts: The kissing of the ring thing, that seems just like what I would expect CEOs to do to protect their businesses above any other principles. I’m more concerned about what the internal policies are going to be and the norms that we've taken for granted from these companies. For example, many companies Google, Twitter, or X now rather, release transparency reports. They tell you how many subpoenas they get, how many they’ve fought, how many they’ve responded to, and we might not see as many of those. X, in particular, is one that we have to be especially cautious of because if you have the X app on your phone, it’s going to be collecting data about you regardless of whether you log on or not. Regardless of what you think about the discourse on X at the moment, that’s secondary to what the back end app is going to be collecting.

Leah Feiger: Right, especially when it’s CEO and owner are very involved in the administration.

Andrew Couts: Exactly. There’s no mystery to what Elon Musk is going to do with your data if he decides that he wants to do something with your data. He's fully within his right to do that, that’s his data basically.

Leah Feiger: Yes, we all gave it to him willingly.

Andrew Couts: Yeah, exactly.

Leah Feiger: This feels like a dumb question, but what does Trump want with your data?

Louise Matsakis: I think it depends a little bit on who you are, but I think throughout this campaign, Trump has made it extraordinarily clear that he feels like he was an enormous victim during his first administration and that he was prosecuted by the press, by the DOJ, by the FBI, by lawmakers. I think he is very eager to go after those people. Part of that process is seeing who were you talking to, who provided that information to those journalists that he hates and wants to get revenge upon. What were their conversations like? Who was talking to them? I think it’s personal in a lot of ways, but even if he can’t get a conviction, or even if a judge doesn’t want to go along with Trump’s antics or some of the checks and balances in our system do hold up, these things take so much time and a lot of what authoritarianism is about and what makes it so dangerous is that it throws a wrench into everything. It derails activists, derails journalists, derails opposition lawmakers from just getting things done. Even if people are not thrown into prison, it’s being harassed all day, having to appear in court over and over again, having to spend all of your money on legal fees, having a bunch of Trump’s allies harassing you all day. That is really exhausting and that is sort of the point. Even if they’re not able to get the data identifying you, targeting you and trying to get it, and the fear that that creates is enough to accomplish their goals.

Andrew Couts: It doesn’t even have to be anything more than your name and putting that out there publicly for you to be targeted by any number of people. We saw Kash Patel release a list of people in government who he considered enemies. Your life can be really upended just by, if Donald Trump sends out a tweet that says, "Andrew Couts is a piece of shit," that's enough to make my life chaos.

Leah Feiger: Let's get into one specific example that obviously we talk a lot about at WIRED and are quite familiar with, Pegasus. Biden signed an executive order keeping this incredibly sophisticated spyware called Pegasus, that’s been used against activists and journalists around the world. Biden signed an order banning it in the US. Do we think that ban is going to hold?

Andrew Couts: Absolutely not. That's one that’s going to go away immediately. We’ve already seen ICE... Wire broke the news that ICE purchased a different spyware or tried to, and that was immediately under review from the White House as soon as we reported that news. That’s the mechanisms that are protecting us at the moment. That can just be brushed aside literally with a stroke of a pen. I would say spyware is still a big problem. Apple’s done a lot to try to combat it, but we’re seeing... We published a story today about, there’s a company that creates a free and paid tool that can scan your device, and they've already found seven Pegasus infections, which may not sound like a lot, but in that of I think 2000 customers, something around that. But that’s a lot. It is a targeted malware that exposes everything on your phone. We talked a lot about singing the praises of Signal, but if you're infected with spyware, that just goes out the window. It’s all there, your camera can be turned on remotely. Your microphone can be turned on remotely. Everything on your device is accessible to whoever's infected you. If you’d asked me a year ago, "Should people be concerned about being targeted by spyware?" I'd say not unless you are doing some highly controversial political activism or a journalist publishing national security secrets, but now it's good to check, maybe download the free tool and just get checked out every so often.

Leah Feiger: Yikes. Big, yikes. Obviously, we talked about policy solutions. I mentioned the PRESS Act earlier. A lot of journalists and First Amendment advocates have been calling on the Senate to pass it or do something, anything. Obviously, it's stalled right now. Trump on Truth Social on November 20th posted, "Republicans must kill this bill." Before that, it had bipartisan support. What effect do you think that comments like Trump, not just about the PRESS Act, but about this entire apparatus at the moment could affect us going forward the first couple hundred days? Any thoughts, any predictions there?

Louise Matsakis: I think we’l probably see potentially fewer leaks than we did in the first administration. There was a lot of activity immediately from a lot of different agencies raising concerns about really disturbing behavior in all parts of the government as Trump took over, problems about a lot of different types of programs in every major agency. But I still believe in people who want to do the right thing and who see something that is concerning to them and wanting to stand up and to say something about it. There are still safe ways for them to generally keep their anonymity protected and to be able to talk to a journalist about what they're seeing. I think you'll still see some of that, but I think there’s going to be a lot more concern and that will keep a fair number of people quiet. I think journalists are going to have to get more creative about trying to figure out what’s going on inside the government.

Andrew Couts: Yeah, it’s hard to know what the priorities of the Trump administration will be, but we do know that mass deportations are at the top of that list. I think the blast radius we will experience from whatever that looks like is going to catch up a lot of people you might not expect, necessarily. The obvious things that could happen is if people start reporters who are covering that or activists who are speaking out against it could then be deemed national security risks, which give a lot more leeway for the government to target you or to take additional actions that circumvent some of the protections that are otherwise in place when it’s not a national security issue. We talked about norms versus laws earlier, and I think that’s where we're going to start to see the chasm between those two realities. It may not be sweeping arrests of every reporter at the New York Times or WIRED or wherever, but it might just be one. That has a chilling effect immediately. Everyone is going to be more concerned about their role in public life and in confronting the Trump administration about whatever it’s doing. I would say cracking the whip very quickly, whether it’s on immigration and then everything surrounding that, it seems to me a likely scenario.

Leah Feiger: Listeners, you can find many more of WIRED’s cybersecurity recommendations online, just look for the link in today's show notes. We'll be right back with Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. It is time for my very favorite segment of this show, which is Conspiracy of the Week, where our lovely guests bring their favorite conspiracies they've come across as of late or generally. I pick my favorite. Louise, what do you have for us today?

Louise Matsakis: I have a fun one. It's a little bit of a local story. I live in Los Angeles, and if you haven't been there, you might not know that in downtown LA there are tar pits, literally these giant puddles of tar that smell bad. They have been there literally since prehistoric times.

Leah Feiger: Wait, really? I've been to LA so many... This is new information.

Louise Matsakis: Yes, there is a tar pit park, and then there is a museum where actually they have a lot of the stuff that has been pulled out, so-

Leah Feiger: Oh my gosh.

Louise Matsakis: We’re talking like full woolly mammoths.

Leah Feiger: Wow.

Louise Matsakis: There’s an entire wall of, I don’t know what they're called, but it’s an ancient wolf basically. I’m not sure what the species is, but all of their skulls, because basically for hundreds, thousands of years, animals would just walk by and fall into them.

Leah Feiger: Oh my God.

Louise Matsakis: To date, they’ve only found, or so they say, one person who’s fallen in, and it was a prehistoric woman and her dog, but the-

Leah Feiger: Prehistoric women had dogs?

Louise Matsakis: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: I have so many questions.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. I'm sure the exact time period, it was a very early pet owner.

Leah Feiger: Yes.

Louise Matsakis: But the conspiracy that I’ve heard around LA is that the government is putting things in the tar pit. They're putting people-

Leah Feiger: To cover it up. Of course.

Louise Matsakis: Yes. They’re putting people in the tar pits and it’s like they know that they won’t be lifted out and that the archeologists who work there who are still excavating are in cahoots with the government to keep things in the tar pits.

Leah Feiger: OK. I have the dumbest question ever. In my mind, because obviously I grew up watching cartoons, putting stuff in tar. It’s like gooey.

Louise Matsakis: It is gooey.

Leah Feiger: How do you excavate that? What does that even entail?

Louise Matsakis: I am not an archeologist.

Leah Feiger: Fair enough. How are they pulling out their political enemies, I suppose is my question?

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. Well, I think that’s the thing is that they're keeping them in there.

Leah Feiger: They’re keeping them in there.

Louise Matsakis: But I’m not sure. It’s been a very long effort, but I'm not sure over the years how they’ve gotten all of the bones out and stuff, but they're very preserved so that part of the is like-

Leah Feiger: A little Pompeii action.

Louise Matsakis: Exactly. A little Pompeii action and that maybe one day when it’s safe to talk about what happened. We know that the bodies are there and we know that the information there.

Leah Feiger: I am so obsessed. If these tar pits were in New York, the mafia would’ve just dumped all of lower Manhattan into this.

Louise Matsakis: I guess it just takes a while to sink.

Leah Feiger: Godfather part four would’ve been a very different film.

Louise Matsakis: I think it takes some time to sink though, so that’s the thing is-

Leah Feiger: I want to go chuck stuff in there now. I didn't know this was a thing.

Louise Matsakis: You can literally see them and there's literally just a cone that it's like, "Don't go over there and be like, don't get your foot in the gear."

Leah Feiger: This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to go throw all of my non-encrypted devices into LA’s tar pit, a WIRED field trip. This was an incredible conspiracy. Andrew, can you top that?

Andrew Couts: I cannot. That’s amazing. My conspiracy is less fun, and it’s not even a conspiracy yet, but we’re recording this on Wednesday morning. The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot in Midtown Manhattan, and obviously gun violence is a daily occurrence in America, but such a brazen attack in the middle of Manhattan is just baffling.

Leah Feiger: Blocks away from Times Square.

Andrew Couts: Yeah. It is. If you’ve been into Manhattan, this is extremely wild, and I haven’t looked at the news since we’ve been recording this, so they may have already caught the guy, but regardless, just because of all the politics around healthcare. There was a big ransomware attack against a subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare that they paid $22 million to the ransomware gang that did it. It’s a very complicated thing, but there’s already some conspiracy theories swirling around that it’s like ransomware gang or whatever. I think it’s more likely something completely separate from that, but regardless of what it is, it just feels so wild that people are going to be talking about this forever. Regardless of what the facts come out.

Leah Feiger: Oh, a hundred percent, we’re going to log off and it’s thousands of conspiracies will have popped up in the last hour.

Andrew Couts: Indeed.

Leah Feiger: Wow. All right. Well, that’s still a good one because it’s, as you said, just truly bananas. I got to give this one to Louise. I'm obsessed with LA’s tar pits.

Louise Matsakis: Highly recommend if you ever come visit.

Leah Feiger: I'm going to the museum.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah, it’s a really fun thing.

Leah Feiger: That’s good stuff. That was really good. Thank you both so much for joining us today for this terrifying but really informative conversation.

Louise Matsakis: Thank you so much for having us.

Andrew Couts: Thanks for having us.

Leah Feiger: Hey, everyone. One final note next week will be our last show. We started this podcast in the heat of the 2024 election season, and we’re so grateful that you’ve listened along as we’ve covered all of the improbable and sometimes impossible feeling moments this year. Kamala Harris’s sudden elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket, brat summer, Elon Musk’s torrent of money into the race for Trump, the online Manosphere, far-right extremists and Trump’s win. We’ve done a lot. With the conclusion of the 2024 election, this podcast must also wind down WIRED, and I will continue to cover all of the ways the internet is shaping our politics and vice versa on our politics vertical on WIRED.com and through our newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. Don't forget to listen to WIRED's other podcast, Uncanny Valley. We'll be back next week. Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Boone Ashworth is our studio engineer. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast, and I'm your host, Leah Feiger. We'll be back in your feeds with our last episode next week. Thanks for listening.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/politics-lab-keeping-your-personal-data-safe/ on Dec 9, 2024 at 7:47 AM EST.

Table of Contents

Wired Daily Edition: 2024 Dec 9

AI

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The Rich Can Afford Personal Care. The Rest Will Have to Make Do With AI

The Inside Story of Apple Intelligence

The Crypto Industry Hails David Sacks, Its New ‘Czar’

How ChatGPT’s Canvas Can Help You Use AI More Productively

Business

Taking on the Tyranny of the Tech Bros

To Build Electric Cars, Jaguar Land Rover Had to Redesign the Factory

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Culture

The Sticky Dilemmas of Pornhub’s Next Chapter

The Digital Natives Will Revolt—and That’s Good for Everybody

Finding the Real ‘Midnight Diner’

Gear

Try These Tricks to Free Up More Screen Real Estate on a Mac

India Could Be Apple and Samsung’s Solution to the Future of Phones

Skip the Sea Kelp Supplements (2024)

Science

Meet the Plant Hacker Creating Flowers Never Seen (or Smelled) Before

These 3 Things Are Standing in the Way of a Global Plastics Treaty

Everyone Is Capable of Mathematical Thinking—Yes, Even You

A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas

A Mysterious Respiratory Disease Has the Democratic Republic of the Congo on High Alert

Security

US Officials Recommend Encryption Apps Amid Chinese Telecom Hacking

The Real Story of “The Order”

Top Stories

Keeping Your Personal Data Safe in the Age of Trump