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- Nancy Mace Curses, Berates Confused Cops in Airport Meltdown: Police Report

- Meta Claims Downloaded Porn at Center of AI Lawsuit Was for ‘Personal Use’

- The Man Who Invented AGI

- Christian Influencers Are Throwing Their Hatch Clocks in the Trash

- Republicans Claimed Biden Censored YouTube. 20 Employees Seem to Say Otherwise

- How Do Metal Detectors Work?

- What Hellen Obiri Packs to Run the NYC Marathon 2025

- Guillermo del Toro Hopes He’s Dead Before AI Art Goes Mainstream

- Elon Musk Really Doesn't Get 'The Lord of the Rings'

- How to Hack a Poker Game

- WIRED Roundup: AI Psychosis, Missing FTC Files, and Google Bedbugs

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- “I Sweated So Much I Never Needed to Pee”: Life in China’s Relentless Gig Economy

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POLITICS | JAKE LAHUT | OCT 31, 2025 AT 4:45 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Nancy Mace Curses, Berates Confused Cops in Airport Meltdown: Police Report

Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican congresswoman, unleashed a tirade against law enforcement at the Charleston International Airport on Thursday, WIRED has learned.

According to an incident report obtained by WIRED under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, Mace cursed at police officers, making repeated derogatory comments toward them. The report says that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supervisor told officers that Mace had treated their staff similarly and that they would be reporting her to their superiors.

According to the report, officers with the Charleston County Aviation Authority Police Department were tasked with meeting Mace at 6:30 am to escort her from the curb to her flight and had been told that she would be arriving in a white BMW at the ticketing curb area. Around 6:35, the report says, they were told she was running late; they never saw the car arrive.

Shortly before 7 am, the report stated, dispatch told the officers that Mace was at the entrance for the Known Crewmember program—a trusted access lane with a smaller checkpoint overseen by the TSA and intended for flight crew members.

When officers quickly located her, according to a supplemental incident report filed by one of the officers, the congresswoman immediately began “loudly cursing and making derogatory comments to us about the department. She repeatedly stated we were ‘Fucking incompetent,’ and ‘this is no way to treat a fucking US Representative,’” the report states.

As officers escorted her to her gate, according to the report, she brought a South Carolina Senate colleague into the fracas.

“She also said we would never treat Tim Scott like this,” says one officer tasked with escorting Mace says in the report.

“The entire walk to gate B-8 she was cursing and complaining and often doing the same into her phone,” an officer writes in the report. In the main incident report, an officer notes that Mace was yelling into her phone, either on a phone call or dictating text messages. “After standing in the vicinity of B-8 for several minutes with her continuing her tirade, she finally boarded the aircraft.”

After Mace’s flight took off, the report states, an American Airlines gate agent approached the officers. According to the report, he “stated he was in disbelief regarding her behavior. He implied that a US Representative should not be acting the way she was.”

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The report goes on to state that officers checked with a TSA supervisor, who told the officers “he was very upset with how she acted at the checkpoint.” This supervisor, according to the report, told the officers that Mace had “talked to several TSA agents the same way” and that they would be “submitting a report to his superiors about her unacceptable behavior.” TSA agents are not currently being fully paid, due to the ongoing government shutdown.

“Apparently, simply arriving at an airport now makes for a worthy headline. We are forced to take the Congresswoman’s safety extremely seriously. After the world watched Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the threats against her have only intensified. Our security procedures are based solely on legitimate safety concerns, and any attempt to politicize this reality is both dangerous and reckless,” Mace's director of operations Cameron Morabito wrote to WIRED in a statement.

On X, Mace appeared to address part of the story, writing, “for the FAKE NEWS: This is the entrance ALL Members of Congress use at the airport. Are you going to write that Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott use the same entrance or no? Or no?”

TSA and American Airlines did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One of the officers noted in the report that after watching video footage, they were able to determine that Mace had originally been dropped off in a BMW that was not white.

“Any other person in the airport acting and talking the way she did, our department would have been dispatch (sic) and we would have addressed the behavior,” the incident report concludes.

Update: 10/31/2025: This story has been updated with a statement from representative Nancy Mace's director of operations.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/nancy-mace-berates-cops-airport-meltdown/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | ASHLEY BELANGER, ARS TECHNICA | OCT 31, 2025 AT 2:34 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Meta Claims Downloaded Porn at Center of AI Lawsuit Was for ‘Personal Use’

This week, Meta asked a US district court to toss a lawsuit alleging that the tech giant illegally torrented pornography to train AI.

The move comes after Strike 3 Holdings discovered illegal downloads of some of its adult films on Meta corporate IP addresses, as well as other downloads that Meta allegedly concealed using a “stealth network” of 2,500 “hidden IP addresses.” Accusing Meta of stealing porn to secretly train an unannounced adult version of its AI model powering Movie Gen, Strike 3 sought damages that could have exceeded $350 million, TorrentFreak reported.

Filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Monday, Meta accused Strike 3 of relying on “guesswork and innuendo,” while alleging that Strike 3 “has been labeled by some as a ‘copyright troll’ that files extortive lawsuits.” Requesting that all copyright claims be dropped, Meta argued that there is no evidence that the tech giant directed any of the downloads of about 2,400 adult movies owned by Strike 3—or was even aware of the illegal activity.

Strike 3 also cited “no facts to suggest that Meta has ever trained an AI model on adult images or video, much less intentionally so,” Meta claimed.

“These claims are bogus,” Meta’s spokesperson told Ars.

Meta Argues Downloads Were for “Personal Use”

Notably, the alleged downloads spanned seven years, starting in 2018. That’s about four years before Meta’s AI efforts “researching Multimodal Models and Generative Video” began, making it implausible the downloads were intended for AI training, Meta claims. An even more “glaring” defect, Meta claims, is that Meta’s terms prohibit generating adult content, “contradicting the premise that such materials might even be useful for Meta’s AI training.”

Instead, Meta claims, available evidence “is plainly indicative” that the flagged adult content was torrented for “private personal use”—since the small amount linked to Meta IP addresses and employees represented only “a few dozen titles per year intermittently obtained one file at a time.”

“The far more plausible inference to be drawn from such meager, uncoordinated activity is that disparate individuals downloaded adult videos for personal use,” Meta’s filing says.

For example, unlike lawsuits raised by book authors whose works are part of an enormous dataset used to train AI, the activity on Meta’s corporate IP addresses allegedly only amounted to about 22 downloads per year. That is nowhere near the “concerted effort to collect the massive datasets Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training,” Meta claims.

Further, that alleged activity can’t even reliably be linked to any Meta employee, Meta claims.

Strike 3 “does not identify any of the individuals who supposedly used these Meta IP addresses, allege that any were employed by Meta or had any role in AI training at Meta, or specify whether (and which) content allegedly downloaded was used to train any particular Meta model,” Meta wrote.

Meanwhile, “tens of thousands of employees,” as well as “innumerable contractors, visitors, and third parties access the internet at Meta every day,” Meta argued. So while it’s “possible one or more Meta employees” downloaded Strike 3’s content over the past seven years, “it is just as possible” that a “guest, or freeloader,” or “contractor, or vendor, or repair person—or any combination of such persons—was responsible for that activity,” Meta claims.

Other alleged activity included a claim that a Meta contractor was directed to download adult content at his father’s house, but those downloads, too, “are plainly indicative of personal consumption,” Meta argued. That contractor worked as an “automation engineer,” Meta noted, with no apparent basis provided for why he would be expected to source AI training data in that role. “No facts plausibly” tie “Meta to those downloads,” Meta claims.

“The fact that the torrenting allegedly stopped when his contract with Meta ended says nothing about whether the alleged torrenting was performed with Meta’s knowledge or at its direction,” Meta wrote.

Meta Slams AI Training Theory as “Nonsensical”

Possibly most baffling to Meta in Strike 3’s complaint, however, is the claim about the “stealth network” of hidden IPs. This presents “yet another conundrum” that Strike 3 “fails to address,” Meta claims, writing, “why would Meta seek to ‘conceal’ certain alleged downloads of Plaintiffs’ and third-party content, but use easily traceable Meta corporate IP addresses for many hundreds of others?”

“The obvious answer is that it would not do so,” Meta claims, slamming Strike 3’s “entire AI training theory” as “nonsensical and unsupported.”

Finally, Meta noted that Strike 3 cannot claim that Meta should have been better at “policing” its network for illegal activity. “Monitoring every file downloaded by any person using Meta’s global network would be an extraordinarily complex and invasive undertaking,” Meta claims, citing precedent that only requires Meta employ a “simple measure” to monitor such activity.

Meta is hoping the court will agree that Strike 3 failed to prove Meta had anything to do with the alleged illegal downloads. Strike 3 has two weeks to respond, TorrentFreak reported.

For Meta, defeating the lawsuit is not just a matter of avoiding damages but also defending its commitment to ensuring its AI video tools don’t generate explicit content that’s increasingly regulated. In the filing, Meta claims that Strike 3 provided no evidence that Meta trained AI on its content, because “there was none.”

“We don’t want this type of content, and we take deliberate steps to avoid training on this kind of material,” Meta’s spokesperson told Ars.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/meta-claims-downloaded-porn-at-center-of-ai-lawsuit-was-for-personal-use/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | STEVEN LEVY | OCT 31, 2025 AT 2:08 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Man Who Invented AGI

In the summer of 1956, a group of academics—now we’d call them computer scientists but there was no such thing then—met on Dartmouth College campus in New Hampshire to discuss how to make machines think like humans. One of them, John McCarthy, coined the term “artificial intelligence.” This legendary meeting and the naming of a new field, is well known.

In this century, a variation of the term has stepped to the forefront: artificial general intelligence, or AGI—the stage at which computers can match or surpass human intelligence. AGI was the driver of this week’s headlines: a deal between OpenAI and Microsoft that hinged on what happens if OpenAI achieves it; massive capital expenditures from Meta, Google, and Microsoft to pursue it; the thirst to achieve it helping Nvidia to become a $5 trillion company. US politicians have said if we don’t get it before China does, we’re cooked. Prognosticators say we might get it before the decade is out, and it will change everything. The origin of that term, however, and how it was originally defined, is not so well-known. But there is a clear answer to that question. The person who first came up with the most important acronym of the 21st century so far— as well as a definition that is still pretty much the way we think of it today—is unfamiliar to just about everybody. This is his story.

Nano Nerd

In 1997, Mark Gubrud was obsessed with nanotechnology and its perils. He was a fanboy of Eric Drexler, who popularized the science of the very very small. Gubrud began attending nanotech conferences. His particular concern was how that technology, and other cutting-edge science, could be developed as dangerous weapons of war. “I was a grad student sitting in the sub-sub basement at the University of Maryland, listening to a huge sump pump come on and off very loudly, right behind my desk, and reading everything that I could,” he tells me on a Zoom call from the porch of a cabin in Colorado.

That same year, Gubrud submitted and presented a paper at the Fifth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, called “Nanotechnology and International Security.” He argued that breakthrough technologies will redefine international conflicts, making them potentially more catastrophic than nuclear war. He urged nations to “give up the warrior tradition.” The new sciences he discussed included nanotechnology, of course, but also advanced AI—which he referred to as, yep, “artificial general intelligence.” It seems that no one had previously employed that phrase. Later in the paper he defined it:

“By advanced artificial general intelligence, I mean AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed, that can acquire, manipulate and reason with general knowledge, and that are usable in essentially any phase of industrial or military operations where a human intelligence would otherwise be needed.”

Drop the last clause and you have the definition of AGI that most people use today.

“I needed a word to distinguish the AI that I was talking about from the AI that people knew at the time, which was expert systems, and it was pretty clear that was not going to be the kind of general intelligence they were,” he explains. The paper wasn’t circulated widely, and its impact was minimal.

Real AI

Fast forward to the early 2000s, a time when AI Winter still chilled the field. Some perceptive researchers sensed a thaw. In 1999, Ray Kurzweil predicted in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines that AI would be able to match human cognition by around 2030. This struck a chord with computer scientist Ben Goertzel, who began working with like-minded collaborator Cassio Pennachin to edit a book on approaches to AI that could be deployed for wide use, as opposed to using machine learning to address specific and bounded domains, like playing chess or coming up with medical diagnoses.

Kurzweil had referred to this more sweeping technology as “strong AI,” but that seemed fuzzy. Goertzel toyed with calling it “real AI,” or maybe “synthetic intelligence.” Neither alternative enchanted the book’s contributors, so he invited them to bat around other ideas. The thread included future AI influencers like Shane Legg, Pei Wang, and Eliezer Yudkowsky (yep, the guy who would become the doomer-in-chief).

Legg, who then had a master’s degree and had worked with Goertzel, came up with the idea to add the word “general” to AI. As he puts it now, “I said in an email, ‘Ben, don't call it real AI—that's a big screw you to the whole field. If you want to write about machines that have general intelligence, rather than specific things, maybe we should call it artificial general intelligence or AGI. It kind of rolls off the tongue.” Goertzel recalls that Wang suggested a different word order, suggesting the pursuit should be called general artificial intelligence. Goertzel noted that when pronounced out loud the acronym GAI might introduce an unintended connotation. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he quickly adds. They stuck with Legg’s AGI.

Wang, who now teaches at Temple University, says he only vaguely remembers the discussion but says he might have suggested some alternatives. More importantly, he tells me that what those contributors dubbed AGI in circa 2002 is “basically the original AI.” The Dartmouth founders envisioned machines that would express intelligence with the same breadth as humans did. “We needed a new label because the only one had changed its common usage,” he says.

The die was cast. “We all started using it in some online forums, this phrase AGI,” says Legg. (He didn’t always use it: “I never actually mentioned AGI in my PhD thesis, because I thought it would be too controversial,” he says.) Goerztel’s book, Artificial General Intelligence, didn’t come out until mid-decade, but by then the term was taking off, with a journal and conference by that name.

Gubrud did manage to claim credit in naming AGI. In the mid-2000s, Gubrud himself called it to the attention of those popularizing the term. As Legg puts it, “Somebody pops up out of the woodwork and says, ‘Oh, I came up with the term in ‘97,' and we're like, 'Who the hell are you?' And then sure enough, we looked it up, and he had a paper that had it. So [instead of inventing it] I kind of reinvented the term." (Legg of course is the cofounder and chief AGI scientist at Google’s DeepMind.)

Gubrud attended the second AGI conference in 2006 and met Goertzel briefly. He never met Legg, though over the years he occasionally interacted with him online, always in a friendly manner. Gubrud understands that his own lack of follow-up edged him out of the picture.

“I will accept the credit for the first citation and give them credit for a lot of other work that I didn't do, and maybe should have—but that wasn't my focus.” he says. “My concern was the arms race. The whole point of writing that paper was to warn about that.” Gubrud hasn’t been prolific in producing work after that—his career has been peripatetic, and he now spends a lot of time caring for his mother—but he has authored a number of papers arguing for a ban on autonomous killer robots and the like.

Gubrud can’t ignore the dissonance between his status and that of the lords of AGI. “It’s taking over the world, worth literally trillions of dollars,” he says. “And I am a 66-year-old with a worthless PhD and no name and no money and no job.” But Gubrud does have a legacy. He gave a name to AGI. His definition still stands. And his warnings about its dangers are still worth listening to.

This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-man-who-invented-agi/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

GEAR | JULIA FORBES | OCT 31, 2025 AT 1:15 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Christian Influencers Are Throwing Their Hatch Clocks in the Trash

Few sunrise alarm clocks have reached the level of popularity set by Hatch, the combination light and sound machine designed to help support natural circadian rhythms. Which is why I was surprised to notice it trending on TikTok, not for its gentle sunrise light feature or recently released Hatch+ programming—but for being a symbol of the occult.

The problem began, innocently enough, with an anti blue light promotional campaign, released by Hatch on October 13 and titled “Goodnight, Phone.” It consists of a one-minute, 30-second Hollywood-esque trailer starring actress Kiernan Shipka, who delivers a convincing scream-queen performance with the theme that blue light exposure after your bedtime can lead to nightmarish sleep. The trailer is, admittedly, a bit PG-13—Shipka pulls a long, bloody phone cord out of her mouth, and is attacked by a zombie version of herself in bed.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

- Courtesy of Hatch

Hatch

Restore 3

$170

Amazon

$170

Hatch

“It’s Time to Sleep”

With a Hatch device and a subscription to Hatch+, users are able to change their alarm sounds, from white noise and ocean waves to the “hoa hoa hoa” introduction from the vampire classic Twilight, and Hatch+ is also promoting its library of Halloween-themed bedtime stories, like a narration of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

For some, the creepy trailer and vampire-themed Hatch+ programming were a bridge too far, and by October 24, according to Hatch, the brand found itself trending on “DemonTok,” the TikTok hashtag for discussions of monsters, demons, and related subjects.

As “Hatch demonic ad” and “Is the Hatch alarm clock demonic?” quickly became top search terms, several users posted videos of themselves throwing their devices into the trash in protest, including TikTok Christian influencer Charity, who goes by the username “CharityIsMe.”

In an over seven minute anti-Hatch video Charity posted, “Hatch Sound Machine and their demonic ties,” she includes a screen recording of another seasonal Hatch promo, the now-deleted “Fallelujah,” depicting a woman getting ready for bed. The Twilight “hoa hoa hoa” alarm sound appears to turn the Hatch device red, while a narrator intones, “It’s here—the season where we dabble in the dark arts. Set the right light vibes. Dress like a small Victorian child for bed. And regulate our circadian rhythm with restorative phone-free sleep. Fallelujah. It’s time to sleep.”

I asked fellow WIRED reviewer Nena Farrell, who tests sunrise alarm clocks, to try the Twilight programming on her Restore 3 to see whether the red hue appeared. It didn't—turns out the red is the “date night” setting, which you have to go out of your way to select. But it didn't matter—people use Hatch alarm clocks for their kids, many social media comments pointed out, for whom this kind of programming was both terrifying and inappropriate.

One viral TikTok post was captioned, “My husband said we will anoint our sound machines in the name of Jesus! Hatch for Sleep [Hatch's social media username], you have some explaining to do.” Another post states, “When you realize the past couple months you and your husband kept saying you heard things at night, you weren't crazy its [sic] just your evil hatch machine."

Another post even goes so far as to say in its caption, “I will not support Hatch for Sleep, who is OPENLY BLASPHEMOUS. It's not just about the creepy ad… it's the blatant DISRESPECT & evil against the KING OF KINGS. I will be turning these machines into dust so that can't be used by anyone else.”

TikTok content

Treasure to Trash and Back Again

According to Erin Merani, Hatch’s vice president of marketing, this series of events was not, in fact, a planned marketing stunt, and Hatch is still figuring out the ramifications of the demon discourse. While Merani is glad the ads and programming “caught people’s attention,” she wants to clarify they were all meant for fun, and she's heartened by how many users have rushed in to defend Hatch.

“We saw a lot of community jumping into the comments and saying, ‘Wait a minute, we missed the plot here!'" she says. "This is a Halloween-themed ad about their adult—not baby—product actually being the thing that will save you from the real evil: your phone. Your phone is actually keeping you up at night.’” To be clear, Hatch makes two devices, one specifically for kids and the other for adults. Any pop culture references, like Twilight, are exclusive to adults only via Hatch's Restore 2 and 3 devices—they can't be accessed on the Hatch Baby.

Then, a new trending topic arose about 48 hours later: “If you’re going to throw your Hatch device away, send it to me.”

Hatch took it and ran with it. “We used the cues of the community and sort of rode that wave with this idea of, ‘Hey, we know this is happening, and we wanted to address this while also pointing at having a little bit of fun with it," Merani says.

Enter Hatch's new “RePossession Program.” “We saw this overwhelming outreach of people who wanted to be ‘repossessed,'" Merani says, "so we were able to point people to our refurbishment program, to be able to keep those devices out of landfills and send ‘repossessed’ units out.”

So far, Hatch has had more than 10,000 related social media inquiries about receiving “repossessed Hatch devices,” and only 10 requests to send Hatch devices back to the company.

Ultimately, if you have a Hatch device and would like to send it back, you can contact customer service to arrange a return. On the other hand, you can now purchase refurbished machines (from the repossessed campaign and otherwise) here. No matter what side of the conversation you find yourself on, we can all agree on one thing: sleep is important, and you should definitely spend less time on your phone.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/why-does-hatch-have-christian-influencers-throwing-their-clocks-in-the-trash/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

POLITICS | MAKENA KELLY | OCT 31, 2025 AT 11:55 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Republicans Claimed Biden Censored YouTube. 20 Employees Seem to Say Otherwise

In a letter to a House committee last month, legal counsel for Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, claimed that president Joe Biden’s administration sought to “influence” the company to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation. Republicans celebrated the letter as an apparent admission of Democratic censorship.

But Democrats seem to be throwing cold water on the allegations. In a new letter to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan first reported by WIRED, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin shares half a dozen excerpts of transcripts with 20 Alphabet employees. According to the letter, none of them claim they were ever pressured to suppress or remove content at the behest of the Biden administration. The interviews come from several years of conversations with Youtube employees focused on policy and health, and in trust and safety roles; they appear to undercut years of GOP accusations of the Biden administration censoring social media platforms during the pandemic.

“As thousands of pages of transcripts of testimony make clear, not a single one of Alphabet’s employees testified about any coercion or undue pressure from the Biden administration,” Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat, says in the letter. “Are you now asserting that all of these witnesses lied to or misled the Committee? Is it more likely that all of these 20 witnesses got together to plan and provide false testimony or that you wrote an unsworn letter contradicting all of them to placate President Trump and his servants?”

The release of the full transcripts would need to be approved by Republicans on the committee, a spokesperson for the Democrats tells WIRED. (Congressman Jim Jordan’s office did not respond to a request for comment. He is the GOP leader of the committee.)

“Jim Jordan’s quest to find evidence of a censorship regime that never existed is well into its third year, and he continues to suppress the testimonies of the many, many witnesses who contradict his fantasy,” claims Renée DiResta, a disinformation expert and associate research professor at Georgetown University.

A week after counsel on behalf of Alphabet sent that letter to the committee in September claiming that they were pressed by the Biden administration, YouTube agreed to dismiss and settle a lawsuit involving the suspension of President Donald Trump’s account on the platform after the January 6 US Capitol riots (YouTube, which paid $24.5 million, admitted no fault in the settlement).

Alphabet and YouTube did not immediately respond to requests for comment from WIRED.

These findings land in the middle of an escalating political fight over the influence federal agencies and the White House have over the content moderation decisions exercised by platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.

In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that the US government could continue corresponding with social media companies over the content on their platforms. The case, Murthy v Missouri, was filed in 2022 by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri who alleged that government agencies unlawfully coerced social media platforms into censoring speech related to topics like Covid-19 and election misinformation.

While the Trump administration had criticized Biden for allegedly collaborating with tech companies, that hasn’t stopped Trump’s entanglement in Silicon Valley. Earlier this month, the Trump administration flagged to Meta a Facebook page officials alleged was being used to “dox and target” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Later, Meta removed the page.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, the administration has ingratiated itself with tech CEOs. Last month, executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook joined Trump for a White House dinner, showering the president with praise.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/republicans-claim-biden-censored-youtube/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | RHETT ALLAIN | OCT 31, 2025 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

How Do Metal Detectors Work?

Why would you want to detect metal? Oh, I don't know … maybe you want to find some gold in the ground. You could dig up ALL the dirt, or you could find the location that has the gold before you dig. Or maybe you’re looking for buried metallic meteorites. You could even use a metal detector to find that ring you lost at the beach. These devices are quite useful.

But do you know how they work? Aha! When you think about it, it’s not obvious. There are different types of detectors, but they all draw on the same cool physics of electric and magnetic fields. Let's take a look, shall we?

Go With the Flow

First, what makes metals different than other materials? Any solid object is made of atoms, each with negatively charged electrons buzzing around a positive nucleus. In nonmetals like plastic or glass, the electrons pretty much stick to their original atom.

In a metal like copper, however, the outer electrons swim around freely and are shared by all the atoms. That’s why electricity can flow through a metal—if you apply an electric field, you get a flow of electrons in a certain direction, which we call electrical current. Metals are conductive.

Faraday’s Law

So how do you make an electric field? The simplest way is to just apply a charge on the surface of a metal object by adding some electrons to it—this is what a battery does. Obviously that won’t work for our purposes, though. You’d need access to the metal before you find it, which makes no sense.

But there's another way to go. It turns out that a changing magnetic field also makes an electric field. This is the basic idea of Faraday's law. If you move a magnet near a metal conductor, the motion will create a changing magnetic field that produces an electric field. If that electric field is in a metal—boom: You get what’s called an eddy current.

And Vice Versa

It goes the other way too: Just as a changing magnetic field creates an electric current, an electric current creates a magnetic field. Remember that old science fair project where you wrap a wire around an iron nail and connect the ends to a battery? When the juice flows, the nail becomes temporarily magnetic and can pick up paper clips.

But as we just saw, you don't need a battery. A changing magnetic field creates eddy currents in a metal, and these eddy currents then make their own magnetic fields. Wait! It's even crazier. Because these eddy currents create magnetic fields, there will be an interaction between a metal and the thing making a changing magnetic field.

You are now ready for your first, very simple metal detector. To make a changing magnetic field we’re just going to use a moving magnet. In the demo below, I put a magnet on top of a coin and then pulled up quickly. The movement creates eddy currents in the coin, and these currents make a magnetic field that interacts with the magnet. See? The coins jump up.

To be clear, when the magnets are in contact with the quarters and stationary, there is no attraction at all. These quarters contain no magnetic metals. But when I move the magnets away, it creates eddy currents in the coins that make them temporarily magnetic.

Why does the coin in front show a stronger effect? It’s a 1959 quarter that’s mostly made of silver. The other is a modern quarter made of a copper alloy. Because silver has a lower electrical resistance than copper, the changing magnetic field makes a stronger eddy current in that one. Nice! It’s not just a metal detector but one that can tell the difference between copper and silver.

Of course, walking around with a magnet on a stick, bobbing it up and down, would be a tiresome and impractical way of looking for metal. We need a better method.

Look Ma, No Magnets

In fact, we don’t even need magnets. In the next demo I have a coil of wire wrapped around an iron core. This is a four-step process: (1) When the coil is plugged into an outlet, we get an alternating electric current. (2) This changing current creates a changing magnetic field in the iron core. (3) The changing magnetic field induces an electric current in the aluminum ring. (4) This induced current makes a secondary magnetic field, but with an opposing polarity, so it creates a repulsive force. Voilà, the ring is launched into the air! How cool is that?

Got it? We went from a changing electric current in the coil to a changing magnetic field in the iron core to an electric current in the ring to a magnetic field in the ring. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just make buried gold jump out of the ground? Sadly, this isn’t practical either, but it points us toward a solution.

Real Metal Detectors

In fact, most metal detectors use this same idea. Basically, you’re shifting an electric current from your device to a piece of metal underground and back to your device, causing it to beep. (And remember, this works because only metals conduct electricity.) The means of shifting the current is the creation of magnetic fields. This is how wireless chargers work too!

So how do we detect that telltale magnetic field from an underground object? One way is to add a second coil in the device, so we have an emitter coil and a receiver coil. The only problem is that the first coil will already induce a current in the second coil. But there are some tricks we can use to eliminate the interference.

For example, if we position them just right so that their opposing magnetic fields overlap and negate each other, we can have a net zero magnetic effect. We call these “balanced coils.” Then, when a piece of metal is nearby, the added magnetic field will make them unbalanced, and there’s your detection.

That Resonates With Me

Another fun trick is to detect metal using resonance. If you’ve ever pushed a kid on a swing, you know about resonance. The swing moves back and forth with some natural frequency (determined by the length of the chains). If you push the swing with the same frequency, even with just a light touch, it will go higher and higher. Push at the wrong time and you mess it all up.

In general, with any oscillating object, applying an external force at the same frequency increases the amplitude of the oscillation. That’s resonance. This is what happens when a singer shatters a wine glass by holding a note at a pitch that matches the particular vibration frequency of the glass. (It’s the pitch control, not the loudness of opera singers that lets them do this.)

We can harness resonance as a signal by creating an oscillating circuit. To do this, we hook up an inductor (our coil of wire) and a capacitor, which is a component that stores energy in an electric field. Now, if you hold this system over a buried piece of metal, it will change the oscillation frequency of the circuit. Ping! Treasure detected!

What you’re hoping for, of course, is something like the 13th-century gold coin found by a guy in England, which sold for $850,000. However, if you've ever actually used a metal detector, you know that a lot times it’s a pull tab from a soda can. That’s OK. The fun is in the hunt—and figuring out why it works.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/how-do-metal-detectors-work/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

GEAR | BOUTAYNA CHOKRANE | OCT 31, 2025 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Hellen Obiri's New York City Marathon Starter Pack

The four-time world champion shares the gear, fuel, and rituals that will power her through this year's New York City Marathon.

Courtesy of Maurten; On; Shokz;

Welcome to Starter Pack, a gear-obsessed series that gives WIRED readers a peek into how notable personalities live, shop, and tinker.

Marathon runner Hellen Obiri starts her day like many of us: by checking her phone. First, she looks at the weather, then her schedule, and finally her group chats. After that, “I say a word of thanks to God,” the 35-year-old Kenyan athlete tells WIRED on the phone. “To protect me because I’m going to have a long day. From there, I prepare myself for my run.”

This Sunday, November 2, 2025, marks Obiri’s fourth New York City Marathon—which, as of last year, was the biggest marathon in the world. It runs through all five boroughs, crossing iconic bridges and ending in Central Park. The 2022 race was her debut; she placed sixth. “It was amazing,” she says, recalling the roar of the crowd. “When you do something like this for the first time and you like the place, you’re going to say, ‘This is my best place to be.’ New York is my best place to be.”

If she’s lacing up for a 6:30 a.m. run (which she often does), she keeps breakfast light: a banana. If she’s running later—say 9:30—or on marathon day, she has a more traditional breakfast: cereal, two slices of toast, scrambled eggs, and a banana, washed down with black tea. In 2023, Obiri won the marathon, and in 2024, she finished second—just 14 seconds behind Sheila Chepkirui. When I ask what she’s aiming for this Sunday, she doesn’t miss a beat: “I’m looking for a win.”

Below, Obiri shares her marathon day starter pack.

Running Shoes

Photograph: On Running

On Running

Cloudboom Strike LS

$330

On Running

Obiri believes that everyone should own a pair of running shoes. For her, that shoe is the Cloudboom Strike LS. She has worn these shoes while winning the Boston Marathon and competing in the Paris Olympics, and the NYC Marathon. The ultralight mesh upper, crafted with On’s LightSpray technology, feels nearly elastic, wrapping around the foot like a second skin. The hyper-foam max cushioning provides the plushest ride offered by On, delivering springy propulsion when speed is most essential. The laceless design eliminates any distractions during runs, and the slightly elevated heel (4 mm higher than the forefoot) shifts the load forward, making it ideal for midfoot and forefoot strikers like Obiri.

The Best Running Socks

Courtesy of On

On

Elite Run Sock High

$30

On

For marathons, Obiri steers clear of new socks that might cause discomfort. Her trusted companion is the Elite Run Sock High, which is almost certain to accompany her during the race. Crafted from lightweight polyamide fabric, these socks ensure her feet remain cool and dry, even over the longest distances. The compression zones, ventilation panels, and built-in arch support work together to minimize fatigue, allowing Obiri to maintain peak performance. Plus, extra cushioning around the Achilles tendon protects against blisters, so she can lock in on the race ahead.

Open-Ear Headphones

Courtesy of Shokz

Shokz

OpenRun Pro 2

$180

Amazon

$180

Shokz

$180

Best Buy

When Obiri runs, she listens to gospel music. Her self-made playlist features Christian gospel tracks from Kenyan artists, including Msanii Music Group. Her current favorite pair of workout headphones is the OpenRun Pro 2, an upgraded version of the classic bone-conduction headphones. The new dual air conduction units enhance power, depth, and bass, while minimizing the bone conduction "tickle." These headphones are rated IP55 for sweat and rain resistance, and the physical buttons make it easy to pause or adjust the volume without breaking her stride.

Running Fuel

Courtesy of Maurten

Maurten

Gel 100 (12 Servings)

$45

Maurten

For Obiri, Maurten gels are essential. Each packet contains 25 grams of carbohydrates in a hydrogel form, which is less syrupy and much easier to digest than most endurance gels. Made with just six ingredients—water, glucose, fructose, and three gelling agents (sodium alginate, gluconic acid, and calcium carbonate)—these gels are both clean and efficient. Obiri also carries the Maurten Race Bottle, which has a capacity of 400 ml.

A Light, Versatile Pack

Courtesy of On

On

Track Pack 35L Lite

$150

On

“I need to travel with my handbag,” Obiri says. “I don’t like to carry fancy bags, so I use the Track Pack for everything.” Made from ripstop fabric with a durable nylon base, this versatile pack is designed with a variety of thoughtful details. It includes both external and internal zipper pockets for organized storage, compression straps for adjusting its size, and generously sized bottle holders to keep you hydrated. It's perfect for athletes and anyone with an active lifestyle.

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that's too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/hellen-obiri-starter-pack/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

CULTURE | ANGELA WATERCUTTER | OCT 31, 2025 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Guillermo del Toro Hopes He’s Dead Before AI Art Goes Mainstream

Guillermo del Toro loves a challenge. Nothing the 61-year-old director does could be termed “half-assed,” and each of his movies is planned, scripted, and storyboarded with immense attention to detail.

Such discipline is evident in Frankenstein, his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. It’s a movie del Toro has been trying to make for years, and it shows. The elaborate sets and costumes—as well as some embellishing of Shelley’s story—could only be the work of someone as connected as he is with his source material.

Raised in a deeply Catholic family in Guadalajara, Mexico, del Toro was so enthralled when he saw the 1931 Frankenstein film at age 7 that he opted to make Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s creature his “personal messiah,” he told NPR. Since then, he has made a career out of transforming so-called “monsters” into heroes—from the kaiju of Pacific Rim to the fish-man of The Shape of Water, the latter of which earned him Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture.

Frankenstein, which is currently playing in select theaters and will hit Netflix on November 7, marks the latest and probably most extravagant of del Toro’s love letters to mistaken monsters. WIRED hopped on Zoom with the director to talk about AI, tyrannical politicians, and the fateful summer in 1816 during which Shelley was inspired to write the book he treasures so much.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ANGELA WATERCUTTER: I’d like to begin at the ending. You close Frankenstein with a quote from Lord Byron. “The heart will break, yet brokenly live on.” You’re adapting Mary Shelley. Why give Byron the last word?

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: Well, to me, the movie is an amalgam of Mary Shelley’s biography, my biography, the book, and what I want to talk about with the Romantics. One of the strands that I felt was missing, but very present, was war. Basically, the metronome of their lives is in many ways the Napoleonic Wars, and this is part of Byron’s poem for Waterloo. There's no better way to express what the movie's about than that quote. This comes from a very personal experience for me. The fact that your heart will be broken, you will be pulverized, and the sun will rise again, and you're going to have to keep living.

Byron is also the one who provoked Shelley to write the book. He was with her and Percy Bysshe Shelley and writer John Polidori on Lake Geneva when they had a competition to write the best horror story. She came out with what was probably the best of the bunch.

I like The Vampyre by Polidori. It’s really raw and full of the desire and hatred he had for Byron. [Laughs.]

I recently came across a story I’d never heard before, which was that Shelley allegedly kept Percy’s heart after the sailing accident that took his life.

No, it is not allegedly. It is a fact. The death and funeral of Percy Shelley, which has been mythologized into an almost hagiography piece, is that after he died he looked as if he was asleep. Really, when they rescued him, he was rotting away. He was falling apart. They had to hire soldiers and sailors to drag the chunks of his body. I don't know if you know this, but in a cremation, one of the last things to burn is the heart, because it's such an incredibly strong muscle.

I didn’t.

Shelley's heart passed from hand to hand but ended up on Mary's desk. Yeah, that's a fact. [Editor's note: While some disputed it was his heart, Shelley and her friends believed it to be her husband's organ.]

When I saw the Byron quote at the end, I thought that might have been what you were referring to.

Her allegiance to Percy beyond the grave is very, very moving. The fact that they eloped when she was 16 is crazy to me. They were basically like a band of punks.

Bringing this back to the book itself, why tackle something so well-known? Obviously, you do it in your own style and bring a lot of new elements in. But Frankenstein has been adapted a lot.

Look, I think you can tackle any of the eternal tomes. I’ve done it with Pinocchio; I’ve done it with Frankenstein. I think they get renewed.

This is not your run-of-the-mill Frankenstein with the mad scientist and the creature grunting his way around, being chased by villagers with torches. This is very true to the spirit of the novel. This is divided in an almost epistolary form into different very, very separate sections of narrative with very particular voices. The narrative that frames the movie, which is the furthermost North. Then you have Victor telling his story of childhood, his youth, and then the Creature comes in and brings an almost fairy-tale or parable feeling to the movie. All I can say is what's new is me.

Do you see a modern relevance or resonance with the story of Frankenstein? The idea of someone trying to play God and bring something into the world, perhaps against better advice.

I happen to not believe that the novel is anti-science. The Goodwin-Shelley household of Mary’s youth was really pro-scientific. I think that Frankenstein is actually closer to Paradise Lost. It’s man rising up to God and saying, “Why am I here when I didn't ask to be born?” Which is a very romantic—and by romantic, I mean the Romantic movement—question.

Yeah. Victor is someone who believes very much in science, but he’s also tragic. He almost doesn’t ever confront what he’s done.

In fact, there is a big harangue Victor does in the book toward the sailors saying, You should follow your captain all the way. He is not repentant.

Now, in my opinion, the arrogance of Victor is very common now: the tyrant that believes himself to be a victim. But that is true, or has been true since the beginning of time.

What would be some examples for you?

Absolutely everyone from political figures to Silicon Valley tech bros. You name it. Including artists and film directors. The fact that we enthroned tyranny as a form of certainty, as if it was an attribute. I think the people I most admire are people that are riddled with doubts. Certainty and self-victimization oftentimes go hand-in-hand.

When I think about playing God, I also think of AI. Which is also perhaps something that never asked to be born. You’ve been an outspoken critic of AI. Do you see parallels between the makers of AI and, say, Victor?

I was not interested in making any [in this film]. I understand [using] it in engineering and biochemistry and mathematics, because those are permutations. In art, I don’t think anyone asked for it. Nobody raised their hand and said, “Could you invent this?”

No one asked for Sora.

Look, the real threshold has not been crossed. It’s not people making this, it’s people consuming it—at a cost. I will gladly pay $4.99 for a song by the Beatles or Dylan, you name it, but who is going to pay $4.99 for something created with AI? When that threshold is crossed, then we'll see.

Do you think that’s possible?

I don't know. I mean, I'm extremely glad I'm 61. So I don't have to worry about this. With a little bit of luck, I'll die before that takes root. I'm much more interested in talking about anything you want except that.

I’ll change the subject. You recently said that you were glad to have made this as a father yourself rather than the son of your father. Could you talk about that.

Well, it happened during the decades. I think that you start pondering the power of forgiveness at a certain age. You have to be an adult to understand somewhat that your father is a guy. Your mother is a woman. They're fallible. They are full of their own tragedy and history. But for you, at a totemic level, they're gigantic shadows. The more you age, the more you realize it is not an occupation. This is something that is foisted upon them by life. And there's a moment where you understand that the lineage of pain can pass or can stop with you.

You obviously admire Shelley a great deal. Do you feel like she wasn’t given the credit she was due when she was alive because of her gender? Given that Frankenstein is so much about fathers and sons, it’s telling that it was written by a woman.

The first thing is, although the figure of a father is not very present in the novel, it is in the rest of her work. Her last two novels deal with tyrannical father figures, almost antagonistic to a large degree. And her relationship with her father was, to say the least, tense.

Number two, the fusing of birth and death, which happens from her mother onwards, including her own infant deaths and miscarriages. It's very powerful in the sense that she almost muses about the granting of life without female agency.

I don't want to venture a Freudian thesis or anything, but having gone through a similar past—my grandmother died after my mother was born; my mother had a series of miscarriages to the point where I feared the arrival of a new sibling because I thought my mother is going to die—that is very present in my movies. So there's a kinship that I feel exists there.

I think of you as somebody who’s very forward-looking, someone who has ideas about where cinema has been and where it should go. At a time when studios are merging and making moves to streaming, what do you see happening in the industry going forward?

I don't know. I think that anytime you venture something, the landscape changes. There was a moment five years ago where every single studio had a streaming arm.

As an industry, the guiding principle is more commercial. As an art form, it is so diverse and beautifully alive that things happen in the most unexpected places. Even when you think about streaming, the fact is more often than not it is the anomaly that prevails. Baby Reindeer, Squid Game—these things that come out of nowhere are the ones that end up really dispersing over hundreds and hundreds of millions of homes. That didn't exist before.

Does that mean we’ll be seeing another stop-motion project from you? It’s hard to believe your Pinocchio was already three years ago.

The next project is stop motion, but my interest with stop motion is to move it away from the children's table and making it into an art form that can discuss R-rated or PG-13 [topics]. I’m adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. That’s hardly Disney. My interest with the form is very different and has always been, and my interest with horror or fantasy is very different. I think the stop motion that I am hoping to see flourish is closer to the European model than the American one.

What’s the status of The Buried Giant? Do you have a script? Your preproduction process is always so involved when it comes to concepts and storyboarding, so I’m wondering what the timeline looks like for something like this.

So we went into a really serious investigation of the mechanicals on the faces, and we've been at it for about eight months, nine months. We have made some progress, and we are doing research on the textiles to miniaturize some stuff that is not easy to miniaturize. I'm writing the screenplay. I’ve presented some pages to the studio. We’re going to do some tests and storyboarding of that and then hopefully next year will start shooting.

We talked a little bit earlier about Frankenstein being something that you had been wanting to make for a while. Is there still something else on the shelf that you've always wanted to do? I feel like I interviewed you 10 years ago and you were saying you wanted to do H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. What other dream projects are still out there?

I have written or cowritten about 42 screenplays, and I've done 13 movies, about twentysomething movies that have not been made. Now, for a lot of them, you grow in a different direction than you were back then when you wrote them. I mean, I am actually tempted to look for something different. To try tools that I normally don’t try, including with The Buried Giant, trying to push the technology and the form of stop motion a little bit.

Would you ever do something totally out of your wheelhouse? Like romantic comedy?

I want to do crime if I can.

I think a lot of people would want to see a Guillermo del Toro noir film.

I'm not talking about noir. I just think crime is so interesting, because it allows you to investigate human nature. I'm very intrigued by that. In my library, the main library is fantasy, and the second most numerous is crime.

Please make a movie of the robbery at the Louvre. I can’t stop thinking about that.

[Laughs] That robbery was a lot simpler than anyone figured.

It was just a lift on a truck and a couple mopeds, basically! Regardless, I’d love to see a del Toro crime film.

Well, I'm writing one for Oscar Isaac, Fury. I just don’t want to look backwards. I want to look forward to seeing what else is out there I can do.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/guillermo-del-toro-hopes-hes-dead-before-ai-art-goes-mainstream/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

CULTURE | JOHN SEMLEY | OCT 31, 2025 AT 5:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Elon Musk Really Doesn't Get The Lord of the Rings

Musk has recently used Tolkien references to push anti-immigration messaging, as has the Department of Homeland security. They've got it all backwards.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels—and the associated “legendarium” of characters, histories, myths, maps, and constructed languages—have served as a bedrock of so-called “nerd culture” since their publication in the mid-1950s.

With its clear-cut characterizations, and (more-or-less) cleanly delineated lines between Good and Evil, Tolkien’s imagined Middle-earth—a vast and geographically variegated realm teeming with elves, dwarves, wizards, dragons, orcs, and halflings—can be fairly called archetypal. It is the sort of modern myth that can be adapted to any time, place, or scenario. Well, almost any.

Recently, the US Department of Homeland Security has taken to “Shire-posting.” That is: using quotes and imagery from Tolkien’s books (and director Peter Jackson’s blockbuster movie adaptations) as part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enrollment efforts. One meme, posted to X on Wednesday, quoted the character Merry (played by Dominic Monaghan in the films) warning his friend, “There won’t be a Shire, Pippin”—a reference to the peaceable hobbits’ verdant homeland being encroached upon by the forces of the evil wizard Sauron, and his designs to bring the whole of Middle-earth to heel.

Such mythic myopia seems widespread of late. Elon Musk took to X this week to defend British far-right figure and anti-immigration agitator Tommy Robinson, with recourse to Tolkien’s tale: “The hobbits,” Musk waxed, “were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.”

Gondor, for anyone who was too busy being cool in high school to pore over the made-up histories of Middle-earth, was a kingdom of brave warriors called Númenóreans, also known as “men.” It is perhaps worth mentioning that, by the time of the Lords of the Rings unfolding, the throne of Gondor is absent, and the kingdom itself has fallen into disrepair under the shoddy care of a bunch of lazy, corrupt stewards. The so-called “hard men” of Gondor have become cowards, and quislings. More to the point, it’s generally accepted that Tolkien’s hobbits survive (and thrive) because of their humility and noble earnest virtues. Not because they had tough guy warriors running defense for them. Plenty of Musk’s reply guys pointed out that his post propagated a total misreading of the novel.

Throughout Trump’s second term, various government agencies have drawn from a well of pop culture references—from Pokémon to Halo—in a transparent effort to appear relatable, or “based.” (“Based” is an honorific typically bestowed by the right on anyone or anything brazenly sexist, racist, or otherwise “un-woke.”) But The Lord of the Rings posts scan as especially egregious—or just stupid—because they seem so antithetical to Tolkien’s work, and the worldview it expresses.

I am not super-familiar with Tolkien’s extended appendices and all the hefty tomes of non-canon Middle-earth arcana, but as enthusiastic reader of Tolkien as a boy (who had a psychedelic poster for the Lord of Rings books on his bedroom wall), I don’t seem to recall any scenes of Frodo, Samwise, Gandalf, Galadriel, and the gang ripping around in an unmarked van, wearing face-smothering neck gaiters, hassling immigrants at carwashes, and kicking down housing complex doors in late night raids. If anything, such scenes bear more direct comparison to “The Scouring of the Shire,” the penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings, which sees the hobbits returning home from their epic adventure to find their sleepy province tyrannized by ruffians and two-bit rent-a-cops, all in the thrall of a decrepit wizard.

“Attaching yourself to Tolkien is part of a larger psychological phenomenon,” says Emma Vossen, a Tolkien scholar and assistant professor of Game Studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. “Those who wish to oppress need to see themselves as underdogs (i.e., Hobbits) to justify their actions and values to themselves. It’s very similar to the way the far right uses and abuses the bible to justify their actions.”

Musk, in particular, has a track record of running afoul of nerdery. Gamers still mock him for his brutal character build in the dark fantasy game Elden Ring. (“I don’t think I could design a worse build if I tried,” one Redditor noted.) When he boasted about being good at the hack-and-slash adventure game Diablo IV, many speculated that he was paying other players to play the game for him—or otherwise just straight-up cheating. More than a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself among gamers, geeks, and dweebs, Musk’s purported interest in the high-fantasy genre can also be read as an attempt to be taken seriously by his Silicon Valley technocrat peers.

When Antichrist-obsessed mega-billionaire VC Peter Thiel founded his data analytics intelligence outfit (which has been working hand-in-glove with ICE), he named it Palantir, after the indestructible, crystal ball-like “seeing stones” from The Lord of the Rings. (The company’s Palo Alto office is dubbed “The Shire.”) Vice president JD Vance, a Thiel acolyte, likewise named the venture capital firm he cofounded in 2019 Narya, after Gandalf’s magical power ring. In 2018, Salesforce Tower in San Francisco was even lit up to resemble the evil, all-seeing Eye of Sauron, for Halloween, arguably one of those “Are we the baddies?”–type publicity stunts.

Robin Anne Reid, editor of the Studies in Tolkien scholarly volumes, says she and other academics who study Tolkien “have been horrified by the appropriation of his work by the alt-right and the Silicon Valley technocrats.” That said, Reid notes that such culture war appropriations of Middle-earth are nothing new. Because of their massive popularity, and that near-mythic, archetypal quality, Tolkien’s works have been claimed across a broad swath of cultural and political movements.

The 1960s counterculture glommed on to Tolkien’s epic in different ways. Ballantine Books’ 1965 paperback reissue of the books exposed Middle-earth to a new generation. Rock bands from Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath and Rush mined The Lord of the Rings for inspiration. Suffice to say, images of idle, shoeless hobbits, tooting on their pipe-weed chimed with certain of the era’s sensibilities. Hippies sported “Frodo Lives!” pins and slapped “Gandalf for President” bumper stickers on their jalopies.

Tolkien was also taken up by the Italian far-right, who found in the books a grand struggle between tradition and modernity. In the 1970s, fledgling neofascists attended anti-communist outdoor concerts dubbed “hobbit camps.” In 2023, Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni cut the ribbon on a museum exhibit dedicated to Tolkien, installed at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art and bankrolled the Italian culture ministry. Meloni herself once claimed, “I don’t consider The Lord of the Rings fantasy.”

“Those of us who love what Tolkien really stood for despair at the misuse and misunderstanding of his works by folks who only seem to have given them a surface reading,” says Janet Croft, editor of the peer-reviewed journal Mythlore, published by the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit that promotes fantasy literature. “They become blind to the deeper moral issues and implications of his life-long project.”

Even more casual readers of Tolkien will point out that the author himself was a conservative, a monarchist, and so Catholic that he backed fascist dictator Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. He also compared his money-hoarding dwarves to Jews, writing that they were “constructed to be Semitic,” naturally raising questions of his antisemitism. At the same time, he was a vocal opponent of Nazism and its notions of racial hierarchy, criticizing Hitler’s “lunatic laws” in a letter to his publisher. Born in South Africa, Tolkien had also claimed he had “the hatred of apartheid in my bones.”

Of course, cleanly mapping the ideological worldview of an English philologist and fantasy writer born 133 years ago over the contemporary political landscape can feel a bit futile. But even a basic skim of the works themselves reveals patent contempt for the sort of bullying authoritarianism that agencies like ICE enforce.

Speaking to Tolkien’s anti-authoritarian streak, Croft points me to a letter the author sent to his son, Christopher, while he was at Royal Air Force training camp during the Second World War. “The most improper job of any man,” the elder Tolkien wrote, “is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”

Remind you of anyone?

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-and-the-trump-administration-really-dont-get-tolkien/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

SECURITY | LAUREN GOODE | OCT 31, 2025 AT 5:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

How to Hack a Poker Game

Last week, the US Justice Department published an indictment involving NBA stars and members of the mob for allegedly running a network of rigged gambling games. One of their rigging tactics was a manipulation of a Deckmate 2 automatic shuffling machine—almost identical to an experiment done by senior correspondent Andy Greenberg and his hacking crew for WIRED’s Hacklab. Hosts Michael Calore and Lauren Goode sit down with Andy to break down how the machines can be compromised, and what the vulnerabilities behind it say about our tech devices at large.

Articles mentioned in the episode:

How Hacked Card Shufflers Allegedly Enabled a Mob-Fueled Poker Scam That Rocked the NBAHackers Rig Casino Card-Shuffling Machines for ‘Full Control’ Cheating

You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Andy Greenberg on Bluesky at @agreenberg. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

How to Listen

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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 “Uncanny Valley.” We’re on Spotify too.

Transcript

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

Michael Calore: Hey, Lauren. How are you doing?

Lauren Goode: Hey, Mike. I'm good. How are you?

Michael Calore: I am fantastic today. Thanks.

Lauren Goode: You rarely hear that. Happy for you.

Michael Calore: Before we dive into the show, I have to ask, are you a poker player?

Lauren Goode: Not exactly.

Michael Calore: What do you mean “not exactly”?

Lauren Goode: No, I mean, so you've probably heard of this little thing called CES—

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: —that happens every year in Las Vegas. So for several years I would go cover CES often for your team and would play a little bit of pai gow poker. Are you familiar with pai gow?

Michael Calore: Oh, yeah. It's one of those games I don't understand.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, it's a combination of pai gow, which is a Chinese game with dominoes and American poker and it's played at casinos. You get two hands, you get a set of five cards and a set of two cards, and you're essentially playing against the dealer and it's quote-unquote “poker.” So that's the extent of the gambling that I do.

Michael Calore: Oh, I'm already lost.

Lauren Goode: How about you? Do you have a poker face?

Michael Calore: No, I have sportsbook face, which is me just staring at my phone waiting for the scores to come in.

Lauren Goode: Is that a real thing? I think we just coined that.

Michael Calore: I think so.

Lauren Goode: So if I'm not mistaken, you're asking this because our guest today definitely has some recent experience playing poker.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Andy Greenberg, welcome to Uncanny Valley. We're so thrilled to have you on the show. How are you doing?

Andy Greenberg: Glad to be here again. Good to talk to you both.

Michael Calore: All right, Andy, get your chips ready, because we're about to double down on poker cheating.

Andy Greenberg: OK, here we go. With as many poker puns as possible in this episode.

Michael Calore: This is why WIRED's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. Today we are hacking our way through a poker game. Recently our colleague Andy Greenberg and the crew at WIRED's Hacklab experimented with how the card shuffler machine DeckMate 2, one of the most common machines used in casinos, card houses, and private games could be altered to cheat in a poker game. Then last week the US Justice Department published an indictment against 31 people, among them NBA stars and members of the mafia for allegedly running a network of rigged gambling games. One of their rigging methods and the one described in detail in the indictment was a manipulation of the DeckMate 2 shuffling machine in almost exactly the same way that Andy and the Hacklab folks at WIRED previously showed. We'll dive into why their hackability matters for everyone involved, even for those of us who don't frequent the poker table. I'm Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture.

Lauren Goode: I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior correspondent.

Andy Greenberg: And I'm Andy Greenberg, senior writer covering hacking, cybersecurity, surveillance, and apparently cheating at poker.

Michael Calore: So Andy, let's start with what made you want to chase the story? Why did you and the team here at WIRED get interested in seeing if you could rig the DeckMate 2 shuffling machine?

Andy Greenberg: Well, this story actually goes back three years kind of in its origin. So this group of security researchers who I talk to pretty frequently at a company called IOActive, they actually got this idea from watching this kind of streams televised game of poker at Los Angeles's Hustler Live Casino. There is this notorious game that every poker player in America, it seems like, is now familiar with, where this inexperienced player who was being staked by a pro—like given lots of money to gamble with—called the bluff of this other veteran player on a major, major pot. And she called that bluff with a terrible hand like a Jack and a four basically. And there's no way every poker player knows that you would ever know that you could call a bluff with a hand that bad unless you somehow knew that the other player's hand was even worse.

It would make no sense unless you were cheating. Poker players tell me at least, of course, the player who called that bluff, she denies cheating. But this was a huge scandal, and there was a big investigation into the game. There was actually a kind of official report written about the incidents in which Hustler Live Casino had to try to get to the bottom of what happened. And in that report they looked at all the different possibilities of the ways that the new player might have cheated, including hacking the automated shuffler machine called the DeckMate that was used in that game and actually used in casinos and private games and gambling establishments all around the world, this machine that automatically shuffles cards. And in that investigative report it stated, “Well, we can rule out the automated shuffler because this thing is basically unhackable, it cannot be compromised.”

That's what it said in the report. So coming back to my sources, these researchers at IOActive, the security firm, they read that, and to any hacker, honestly, a description like that is just an invitation to prove someone wrong. If you hear that something is unhackable, then you cannot help—apparently if you are a hacker—but try to find its vulnerabilities, which they did. And so by 2023, they had found a whole collection of vulnerabilities in the DeckMate 2 that they were about to present at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas. And they told me about it. By the summer of 2023, they had in fact come up with this technique where they could insert a little device that they had developed into the USB port that sits exposed on the back of a DeckMate 2 shuffler, often by player's knees under the table, the machine kind of sits flush with the table.

The body of it is below the table, including this exposed USB port, and you can stick a little device into that port and then alter the code of the machine, get access to—this is kind of unbelievable—but the DeckMate 2 has a camera inside of it, put there by the manufacturer. So their hacking device will gain access to that camera and learn the entire deck order as it's being shuffled and then transmit that deck order to a cheating player so that they would know what is in everybody's hand in a game of Texas Hold‘em and be able to bet or fold and essentially cheat perfectly and undetectably.

Michael Calore: So why does the company put a camera inside the automated shuffling machine?

Andy Greenberg: Well, ironically, that camera is inside the machine to prevent cheating, to ensure that the integrity of the deck basically. It looks to see that all 52 cards are there, that nobody has slipped in an extra ace or something. But yes, it is completely nuts. It feels to me that there is a camera inside this thing where if you're able to hack, and there were in fact vulnerabilities in the firmware as well, that allowed the security researchers at IOActive to alter the code of the machine undetectably. And that means that you can get access to that camera and learn the deck order. It did not seem like a good idea to have a camera inside of this thing waiting to be accessed by hackers.

Michael Calore: So you hooked up with these researchers recently in Las Vegas. DEFCON is the big hacker conference that takes place in Las Vegas every year and you're like, “OK, we're in Las Vegas. I know that these guys have this hacked machine, I want to see if it works.” So tell us about your experiment.

Andy Greenberg: Right. So in 2023, we at WIRED broke the story of the vulnerabilities in this machine thanks to IOActive telling me about them. And then now in 2025, two years later, we on the video team for our Hacklab series were just thinking, "What is a fun hacking demonstration we can show on camera?" And so I had this idea of what about that automated card shuffler that got hacked two years ago? Maybe we could, if that vulnerability still exists in these machines, we could demonstrate that.

And that's like this really cool Hollywood hack to show on video. And so we got Joseph Tartaro, the lead researcher from IOActive to join us and not only demonstrate how to hack a DeckMate 2 card shuffler, but we had him and two unsuspecting players sit in on a real game of Texas Hold'em in which he hacked the shuffler and acted as my cheating partner.

And we actually tried out this exploit in a real game where I cheated against people who had no idea that the shuffler had been hacked. When I finally met Joseph in person in Vegas, I did want to see how the DeckMate 2 works firsthand. He was able to open up the machine and show me how it operates.

Andy Greenberg (clip): How does the DeckMate 2 work internally? Is it actually the same way that I would take a deck and riffle, shuffle it like this? Is it doing that mechanically inside?

Joseph Tartaro (clip): No, actually it has 20, 23 or 26 different shelves and it will generate a random number. So it'll eventually just produce a deck. It's really used to make sure that the casino just gets more hands an hour. Let me show you. See the door opened here. And now we wait.

Andy Greenberg (clip): And the dealer just pulls the deck out of this little container at the top.

Joseph Tartaro (clip): Correct. There's your deck.

Andy Greenberg (clip): Yeah, here we go.

Lauren Goode: So if the point of the hacking technique is to learn the perfect order of the deck, then what happens once the dealer starts cutting the deck?

Andy Greenberg: That is a really good question. It seems like if you just cut the deck when it came out of the shuffler before everybody's hands are dealt, then that would solve this problem of the cheater knowing the order. But in a game of Texas Hold'em, once you see what's in your hand or you see the three flop cards, the first cards that are put out publicly onto the table, you'll know exactly where the dealer has cut to or where a player has cut to before the hands are dealt. And so with the app that IOActive built, this custom cheating app that receives the order of the deck, you can actually quietly put into the app the cards in your hands or the flop cards on the table, and as soon as you do that, it will tell you what's in everybody else's hand. That solves the problem of somebody cutting the deck.

Michael Calore: So something that's still sticking in my mind is that in order to compromise the machine, you have to plug this custom-made device that IOActive developed into the USB port of the DeckMate 2. So how do you do that? How do they actually get access to the machine if they're in a situation where they're at a casino or they're at a private game and they want to cheat?

Andy Greenberg: Right. So the way that Joseph, the security researcher describes this is that port is often sitting under the table by your knees in a casino. So if you're bold enough to pretend you dropped your chips or a sandwich or whatever, you can just duck under the table, plug in this device and start cheating. The company that sells this shuffling machine from the very beginning said that that's not a realistic scenario. Things are monitored too closely in a casino. That's not actually possible. I really don't know. And of course we didn't test that out in our demo in a real casino. It seems like it could be possible. Joseph points out that people even sometimes charge their phones in that port because it provides power too.

So you could use a malicious Android phone, like an Android phone set up to carry out the same exploit instead of his little hacking device plugged into the shuffler. But also there's this whole other threat model. Once you've seen that by hacking the shuffler through the USB port, you can cheat in this incredibly effective way. That also means that a maintenance person who has access to the machine before the game or the host of the game themselves, if the casino is in on it, if the host of this private game, if it's their shuffler, they can hack their own machine and allow somebody to cheat and you would never know.

Lauren Goode: So Andy, how do the cheaters who are at the table actually participate in this? How do you see what's going on if you're not a person who's sitting there staring at your phone screen that has access to all of that digital information?

Andy Greenberg: Well, I think the point you're raising maybe is that you're not supposed to be messing with your phone in the middle of a high-stakes poker game.

Lauren Goode: Right. Exactly.

Andy Greenberg: If you're in the game, you're not allowed to use your phone in some casinos, in certain private games if enough money is on the line. So the system that Joseph and I set up in our hacking demo that we kind of just figured out on the fly through a bit of experimentation was that he, being my cheating partner, would fold and get out of the game on the hands where we would cheat. And then once he was out of the game, he was able to pick up his phone and nobody would think twice about that. So he would look at his hand, he would fold, then he would pick up his phone and quietly put into the app on his phone, the two cards in his hand, and then he would know who had the best hand.

In fact, he would know everybody's hands, and then he would silently signal to me how to bet or to fold. And the way we actually did that was through a kind of system of covert signaling that used the number of chips he was holding in his hand. I'm an absolutely terrible poker player, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I would just watch Joseph's signals on these hands where he had folded and was out of the game and was instead my cheating partner to see how many chips he was messing with in his hand. And through those chips alone, he would give me the signal of what to do and he would know when I had the best hand, and he would tell me to bet big and I would win these massive pots.

Lauren Goode: What was he doing with his hands? What did he do with the chips?

Andy Greenberg: Our system was just like play with one chip means fold, play with two means call, play with three means raise. And so I would just do as I was told, and when I had the winning hand and I saw him messing with those three chips, I would sometimes go all in and take these unsuspecting players for enormous sums of money.

Lauren Goode: This is a Bond movie? This actually is a Bond movie.

Andy Greenberg: Yes.

Lauren Goode: Andy, you are WIRED's James Bond.

Andy Greenberg: Well, it's funny you should say that because we experimented with other ways of cheating too and other ways of hacking the shuffler. You can not only learn the exact order of the deck, but you can actually reorder the deck by hacking it too. And Joseph tried that, and he demonstrated to me that he could in fact replicate the exact hand from Casino Royale or Bond as a straight flush. And we played out that hand too. He can with code alone deal you exactly the hand he wants you to have. But that just seemed like a kind of actually clumsy way of cheating where it would start to become apparent if you had these crazy amazing James Bond hands too often. So instead we just stuck with this much more subtle technique of learning the deck order rather than messing with the deck order.

Michael Calore: Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to find out how this cheating strategy worked out for Andy, and why the FBI, the Mafia, and the NBA are all involved with the DeckMate 2 machine.

[break]

Michael Calore: Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Today we're talking about hacking poker games. So Andy, you're sitting in a room in Las Vegas at a poker game. You're not playing with real money, but everybody at the table has chips and everybody wants to win. You are sitting next to your co-conspirator from IOActive, and then there are two unsuspecting players at the table with you. Joseph is watching the cards on his app. He knows who at the table has the best hand and he's signaling to you to fold, to call, or to raise by playing with a certain number of chips in his hand. Did you clean them out? Did this work?

Andy Greenberg: Well, I am actually such a bad poker player that I was still losing for the first hour of the game, which was kind of amazing. I thought this was going to be the most humiliating evening of my life that I went all the way to Vegas, set up this incredibly elaborate experiment to cheat, and still lost. That really almost happened. But that was just actually bad luck. We were not actually hacking the shuffler to give me good hands. We were just hacking the shuffler to know when I had the best hand.

And so it took me more than an hour to start getting good hands. And then once I did, I would know exactly when I had the best hand thanks to Joseph's signals. And yes, we did eventually just clean out these two players. If it had been real money, it would've been a very lucrative scheme. And ultimately I felt pretty bad about having done this to them on camera. And by the end of the night I did confess to them.

Andy Greenberg (clip): I have to confess, both of you are far better poker players than I am, and I was cheating this whole game. I guess the question is, can you tell how I was cheating?

Speaker 1 (clip): I did not tell anything was up.

Speaker 2 (clip): Maybe you looked at your phone a couple times. I don't know.

Andy Greenberg (clip): Actually it was Joseph who was looking at his phone. It was the shuffler. The shuffler was hacked. It transmitted via Bluetooth the exact order of the deck to Joseph's phone. He was then signaling to me whether I should bet or fold because, honestly, I'm a terrible poker player. I have no idea what I'm doing.

Michael Calore: So that experiment was run over the summer. And I want to switch gears now to the news from the government's indictment last week, because the indictment document alleges that members of several organized crime families and some well-known figures from the NBA, including Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and a former player and assistant coach named Damon Jones, were all part of a network of rigged gambling games. Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier was charged in a separate alleged gambling scheme as well. But for the main scheme, the rigged card games, it seems that one of the methods used was very similar to the one that you and Joseph used in your experiment. I have to know how you reacted to the news when you saw that the DeckMate 2 was actually named in the indictment.

Andy Greenberg: I mean, I could not believe it. I'd seen the headlines that morning of these NBA figures who had been arrested in this scheme, and then I just got busy with other work. I had no sense at all that this was any kind of hacking operation. It took me hours to start reading other people's reports and then finally the indictment. And I just could not believe it, that they had actually done almost exactly what we had done. We published our video on October 10th, and then just two weeks later, this alleged Mafia-run gambling scheme had actually done almost exactly the same thing that we had just revealed. I mean, it was a bizarre coincidence.

Lauren Goode: After you did read the indictment, what did you learn about how similar this operation was to the one that you experienced? Were there other hacking mechanisms used?

Andy Greenberg: Well, it was actually kind of remarkable how close it was to the scheme that Joseph and I had developed, almost just by chance it felt like. I mean, we were just making it up on the fly practically. They didn't use a USB device to hack their shuffler on the spot. These were private games where the host of the game had set up a rigged game. So it was their shuffler, they had hacked it ahead of time, but they had done almost exactly the same thing of not reordering the deck but rather learning the deck order and transmitting it. In fact, they transmitted it over the internet to some remote operator in a different state, according to the Justice Department, who would then send the deck order back to one of the players in the game.

Just like Joseph being my cheating partner, they had these players in the game who they called the quarterback or the driver, the kind of secret cheating mastermind in the game who I think similarly was there so that they could look at their cards and then fold, then pick up their phone and it wouldn't be suspicious. And then start once they learned the deck order from their phone signaling to everybody else in the game, they were using exactly the same covert signaling system that Joseph and I had developed, but they were actually using it to steal hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of dollars from these victims.

Michael Calore: That's wild. So in the years that you've been reporting about the DeckMate 2, you've reached out to the company that makes it several times and they've told you on different occasions that they've addressed the security concerns. Maybe they disabled the USB port or made other changes to the hardware, the software, and the security experts that you've spoken to I'm sure have thoughts about these changes that they've made. Are they enough?

Andy Greenberg: Well, it's interesting because in 2023 when I wrote about the DeckMate 2 for the first time, back then Light & Wonder, the parent company of Shuffle Master, which sells the DeckMate 2, told me that this just wasn't realistic. That it really didn't matter, that this could never be pulled off in a casino. Kind of not really even thinking about the fact that you could use a rigged shuffler in a private game or in an unlicensed card house or someplace like that. But then we did reach out again to Light & Wonder ahead of our video demonstration just this past summer. That's when I learned that Light & Wonder had in fact pushed out security updates to its shufflers in casinos in Las Vegas, in Atlantic City all around the world if you have a contract with them.

They even made those security updates available to people who have secondhand unlicensed shufflers. And that security update may in fact patch the vulnerabilities that we were hacking in our demonstration. But the problem it doesn't solve is when people are hacking their own DeckMate 2 and they're not going to put in the security update before they rig their own machine. So there's this kind of insider problem that is not fixed by some update to the firmware. The problem there, it really is that Light & Wonder has just been manufacturing and selling a machine for years that has a camera inside. That was probably a bad idea.

Lauren Goode: So I'm curious what the big takeaway is here. For people who don't play poker, go to the casino all that regularly except for me and Mike making our regular pilgrimage to CES. Why should people care about this story aside from the fact that it is a twisted tale?

Andy Greenberg: To me, I guess it's just kind of a parable about modern technology. The more that we digitize simple devices and processes, something as simple as shuffling a deck of cards. When you make that a digital device, when you make it a smart tool, then you've introduced the risk that it can be hacked. And that's true not just of automated shufflers and casinos where a lot of money's on the line, but also of medical devices in hospitals and smart devices in our homes, including security systems, including things that we depend on in our daily lives. The more that we add digital tooling into the kind of infrastructure of our lives, the more vulnerable it becomes to being messed with, meddled with, sabotaged, surveilled, that is the modern world that we live in. And sometimes it would be better if we just stuck with a bit more of an analog approach.

Lauren Goode: As I like to say, "Shut it all down."

Andy Greenberg: That's what we say here at WIRED, "Do not use technology."

Lauren Goode: If you go to the casino, make sure it's a really dumb casino. And by that I mean not digitally connected.

Michael Calore: And also to makers of smart home devices, stop putting cameras in things, please. We don't need more cameras in our homes.

Andy Greenberg: I mean there's also just a much more specific lesson here. One that I heard from poker, from gambling experts when I was working on this story, which is that if you go to a private poker game, especially one with a lot of money on the line and you see an automated shuffler, get out of there. Just do not play, leave.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, don't be taken for a mark.

Michael Calore: Word to the wise. OK, we need to take another break and then we'll come right back.

Lauren and Andy, thank you both for a great conversation today. Hopefully no one takes our discussion as inspiration for going and hacking a poker game. And if that happens, we are not liable. We just want to make that clear. So now let's go into the final segment of the show. It's called WIRED and TIRED. This is an opportunity for us to tell people what we think is WIRED and what we think is tired. Lauren, would you like to go first?

Lauren Goode: Sure. Mine are not tech related at all. I'm sorry to say.

Michael Calore: Love it.

Lauren Goode: Our producers were like, "Make it techy." And I'm like, "I have a food recommendation." So my WIRED is Brazilian Coconut Sweet Bread.

Michael Calore: What?

Lauren Goode: It's exactly what it sounds like.

Michael Calore: Brazilian Coconut—

Lauren Goode: Sweet bread.

Michael Calore: Sweet Bread.

Lauren Goode: It's delicious. And there's a cafe, Mike, that I'll take you to that has it, it's delicious. That's it. If you can find it anywhere in your neighborhood or city, I highly recommend trying it.

Michael Calore: It's like if there's a Brazilian cafe or a Brazilian—

Lauren Goode: Or just look up the recipe if you like to bake.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, it's amazing. That's all. My TIRED, told you, my TIRED is really obvious product placement. It's out.

Michael Calore: Was there a recent television show or movie or piece of content that you watched recently?

Lauren Goode: Yes. And I think you know exactly which one I'm talking about, right?

Michael Calore: No.

Lauren Goode: Have you watched Nobody Wants This Season 2?

Michael Calore: No.

Lauren Goode: The product placement is so obvious in this show and I'm really enjoying the series, but it's sponsored by Airbnb and halfway through one of the episodes they're like, let's do an Airbnb experience making pasta.

Michael Calore: Oh, boy.

Lauren Goode: And it's like, "Oh no." And then there's this other really obvious part where Kristen Bell, at least twice uses this L'Oréal skin serum and the camera kind of zooms in close on it before she uses the skin serum. And it's really to L'Oréal or Estée Lauder, it might be Estée Lauder. See, you know what? I don't care. I'm just going to bungle it because I don't want to give them an extra product placement but it's like one of those skincare conglomerates. And I'm watching and I find it distracting and I know their product placement is just a part of films, TV shows, everything, but do it discreetly, do it better.

Michael Calore: Yeah. My favorite indiscreet product placement was in the show Entourage from HBO. It was on TV, I don't know, 15 years ago.

Lauren Goode: Oh, I remember it.

Michael Calore: And the characters used to say to each other, "I'll BBM it to you."

Lauren Goode: No. Time capsule.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Which is like, even if you had a Blackberry—

Lauren Goode: Yeah, you never said that.

Michael Calore: Nobody ever said that.

Lauren Goode: No, it's so true.

Michael Calore: They would text it to you.

Lauren Goode: Incredible.

Michael Calore: But no, I'm going to BBM it to you.

Andy Greenberg: Just the fact that we even know what BBM-ing is just kind of means it worked.

Lauren Goode: Or maybe it's more, "What is that, guys? I don't remember that. I'm too young." All right, Andy, give us your WIRED, TIRED.

Andy Greenberg: Well, I am not a video game reporter, but I did buy the—everybody has been talking about this game Silksong. It was $20 on the Switch. I bought it for my 9-year-old son, and I thought that I would play this cute little game and I just cannot believe how fricking hard it is. Nobody is talking about the fact that this incredibly popular game—it makes you want to cry. Like me, not my son, like me, the adult. I cannot stop playing it.

But I have been more frustrated playing this game than I have been maybe in anything else in my life or work for years. This is my extremely amateur video game trend watching observation that for a while all these games got really easy like Candy Crush and Farmville and Angry Bird stuff where you just basically can't lose. And people seem to love that and games got incredibly easy. And now it feels like we're in this era where games are just absurdly hard, including these—what look like casual games for kids are in fact some of the most challenging things you will do in your life. And actually I think it's great. So yeah, I would say TIRED are easy games and WIRED is games that are ridiculously hard and making me want to cry.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: So you're saying it's easier to hack a poker game than it is to play some of these games?

Andy Greenberg: I will say that I did almost cry on the day when we were cheating in the poker game as well because I thought I might lose and that the entire video team was going to murder me.

Lauren Goode: All right, Mike, what's yours?

Michael Calore: So my TIRED is eBooks, and I am not saying that eBooks are passe or anything, I still love eBooks, but lately I've been putting the Kindle down and picking up actual paper books just because the titles that I want are really hard for me to get on eBooks. So I get eBooks mostly from the library here in San Francisco through the Libby app. And if you have a Kindle and you have a Libby app, you know how that goes. Sometimes you have to wait three or four months to get a good book that you like. And it's gotten to the point now where if I want to borrow the ebook and I'm waiting for it, I walk into a bookstore and there's already a used copy of that book available. So I just buy the used copy of the book and then I read the paper book.

So I've been doing that a lot over the last year. My bookshelf has swollen and so have the shelves next to my bed, but that just feels like a shift in my life that eBooks, who needs them anymore? I think my Kindle probably hasn't had a charge in the battery for months at this point. However, the thing that I have been getting very, very into, my WIRED is audio books on Spotify because I have a Spotify premium subscription—it’s the one that's like $12 a month—and it comes with 15 hours of audiobook listening every month, every 31 calendar days. That's like an audiobook every month or maybe two if you listen to the shorter ones. And they have them right when they come out and they don't have everything. Spotify still sells audio books. So if you want to listen to a brand new book, it may be available, but you may have to pay a little bit of money to get it.

But still, if you don't have crazy mainstream tastes, there is a very good chance that the audiobook that just came out is available to you as a Spotify paid subscriber. So I would say explore the audio book options on Spotify if you like audio books and if you're like me and you use Libby for audio books and you don't want to have to wait two months to get the audio version of your book, you can just go to Spotify and listen to it right away. So that's my WIRED. My WIRED is like go hard on the thing that you're paying for and not using and TIRED is just read the analog book.

Andy Greenberg: When this started on Spotify, actually when I learned that all of my books that I've written were available on Spotify, I actually checked with my agent too about what the deal is. Everybody says that Spotify notoriously underpays musical artists, right? But it turns out that if you listen to 10 minutes of one of my books on Spotify, that counts as a full audiobook sale. Wow. I get paid the same royalties as you would if you had downloaded it from Audible or something. So you can do this, I guess is what I'm saying. At least that's the deal with Penguin Random House who publishes my books.

Lauren Goode: That's good to know.

Michael Calore: So if you have 15 hours, that means you can pay royalties out to what 70 authors every month if you wanted to just by listening to the first 10 minutes of a bunch of different audiobooks.

Andy Greenberg: I would actually recommend that you listen to the first 10 minutes of my books 70 times.

Lauren Goode: From different accounts.

Michael Calore: All right, well that brings us to the end. So thank you Andy for being here. Pleasure talking to you both as always.

Lauren Goode: Thanks, Andy, for taking us deep inside your dark world of hackers.

Andy Greenberg: Anytime.

Michael Calore: Thank you for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you'd like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. Today's show is produced by Adriana Tapia and Marc Leyda. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed the episode. Marc Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Pran Bandi is our New York Studio engineer. Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director, Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's, head of Global Audio.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/uncanny-valley-podcast-how-to-hack-a-poker-game/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | ZOË SCHIFFER | OCT 30, 2025 AT 5:27 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

WIRED Roundup: AI Psychosis, Missing FTC Files, and Google Bedbugs

In today’s episode, Zoë Schiffer is joined by senior editor Louise Matsakis to run through five stories that you need to know about this week—from how SEO is changing in the era of AI to how frogs became a protest symbol. Then, Zoë and Louise dive into why some people have been filing complaints to the FTC about ChatGPT, arguing it has led them to AI psychosis.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

People Who Say They’re Experiencing AI Psychosis Beg the FTC for HelpForget SEO. Welcome to the World of Generative Engine OptimizationThe FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan’s TenureThe Long History of Frogs as Protest SymbolsGoogle Has a Bedbug Infestation in Its New York Offices

You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Louise Matsakis on Bluesky at @lmatsakis. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

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

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, WIRED's director of business and industry. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week. And later, we'll dive into our main story about how several people have filed complaints to the FTC claiming OpenAI's ChatGPT led them or people they love into supposed AI psychosis. I'm joined today by WIRED's senior business editor, Louise Matsakis. Louise, welcome to Uncanny Valley.

Louise Matsakis: Hi, Zoë. It's great to be here.

Zoë Schiffer: So Louise, our first story this week is actually one that we worked on together, part of our ongoing collaboration with Model Behavior, and it's all about how this holiday season, more shoppers are expected to use chatbots to figure out what to buy. I'm curious, before we dive into this, how you decide your own holiday shopping, Louise, especially if you have absolutely no clue what to get someone?

Louise Matsakis: I am definitely annoying, in the sense that I really pride myself on my gift giving, but we all have people in our life who are, despite all of that, difficult to shop for. So yeah, I definitely will look around the internet for 10 best things to buy your father-in-law this holiday, or whatever.

Zoë Schiffer: Yes. Okay. So this year, people are going to be following a little bit different of a trend. According to a recent shopping report from Adobe, retailers could see up to a 520 percent increase in traffic from chatbots and AI search engines compared to 2024. AI giants like OpenAI are already trying to capitalize on this trend. Last week, OpenAI announced a major partnership with Walmart that will allow people to buy goods directly within the chat window. We know this is a big focus for them. So as people start relying on chatbots to discover new products, retailers are having to rethink their approach to online marketing. For decades, the focus was on SEO, search engine optimization, which is this dark magic that's used to basically increase online traffic primarily through Google. Now, it looks like we're entering the era of GEO, or generative engine optimization.

Louise Matsakis: I think the GEO in many ways is not really a totally new invention. It's kind of like the next iteration of SEO. And a lot of the consultants who are working in the GEO industry definitely came from the world of SEO. And a big reason that I'm confident that this is the case is that at least for now, we know that these chatbots are often using search engines to surface content. Right? So they're using the same types of algorithms to surf the web that Google does, or Bing or whatever, DuckDuckGo. Clearly, some of the same rules would apply. And also, people are the same. I do think that the way that we interact with chatbots is significantly different from the way that we interacted with search engines, but the underlying questions we have are pretty similar. Right? Like, why is my boyfriend not texting me back? What's this weird rash? What do I get for my father-in-law for Christmas? These questions are the same, and so therefore the types of content that brands are trying to get into those answers remains largely the same.

Zoë Schiffer: Right, exactly. But you can imagine from a retailer's perspective, this is kind of scary, because even dealing with Google was a huge headache for people. Every time Google would change the algorithm, the industry would kind of be an upheaval for a little while as they tried to understand what Google wanted to see and tailor their content accordingly. So now, people are talking to chatbots and they're like, "Oh my gosh, is all of the work that I've put into all of these different webpages for naught? Do I need to recalibrate it for this new world?" We actually spoke with Imri Marcus, who's the CEO of a GEO firm called Brandlight. And he estimated that there used to be about a 70 percent overlap between the top Google links and the sources cited by AI tools like ChatGPT. But now, he says the correlation has fallen below 20 percent. So Louise, if I'm a small business owner of some sort, how am I tailoring my content? What am I doing different in this new world?

Louise Matsakis: I think you probably have a lot more explanations for how the product could be used. So let's just say—I don't know—we're selling soap. You might have a long bulleted list of different ways that the soap could be used. It's good for bubble baths. It has these acne fighting properties or whatever it is, and I think you would have all of that spelled out. Whereas before, you might focus more on the brand identity of your website and focus on like, how do you want to sort of phrase things because you're anticipating people coming to the website? You're not anticipating this third party in the middle where people are asking the chatbot questions.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, exactly. It did give me a little hope, because I feel like we were so in the era of, you look up a recipe and you have to read through a 5,000 word blog on this person's life story before you actually get to the recipe. And I'm like, like a chatbot, I just want the bulleted list of ingredients. Maybe that's where we're headed.

Moving on to our next story, our colleagues, Lauren Goode and Makena Kelly, reported on how the FTC has taken down several blog posts about AI that were published during Lina Kahn's tenure. If you're familiar with Lina Kahn, she's the former chair of the FTC. And her pro-regulation positions toward the tech industry, you can already imagine why this could be concerning. One of the blog posts that was taken down was about open-weight AI models, which is basically models that are released publicly, which allows anyone to inspect, modify, or reuse. The post ended up being rerouted to the FTC's Office of Technology. Another blog post titled Consumers are Voicing Concerns about AI, which was authored by two FTC technologists, had the same fate. And yet, another post about consumer risks associated with AI products now leads to an error screen, saying just page not found.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. This is just really concerning, I think, for a number of reasons. The first is just that it's important for historical reasons, for national reasons to not lose this information. It's totally normal for different administrations to have different opinions, but it's not normal or at least, it hasn't been in this country for blog posts like this to just disappear. And in this case, it's particularly strange because one of these posts was about, as you mentioned, Lina Kahn's support for open-weight models and for open source in general, and this is something that members of the Trump administration have also agreed with. I think in this case, Lina Kahn is on the same side with people like David Sachs, who's the AI and Crypto czar of the Trump administration.

So that's what's kind of mysterious and confusing here, is if these are things that ostensibly the Trump administration also agrees with, why erase them? Is it about erasing Lina Kahn's legacy? Is it about wanting to get rid of any mention of things that happened during the Biden administration? It's sort of difficult to parse the logic, and I think that it leaves businesses and tech companies kind of confused about where the administration stands. The point of these blog posts is, yeah, to inform the public, but they also serve as regulatory and business guidance for companies to understand like, we get that maybe a law has not been passed about this, or maybe it's not clear if this practice is illegal, but it seems like it could be, right? Or it seems like this is the way that this administration is interpreting the law. And so otherwise, you're kind of just left in the dark.

Zoë Schiffer: It's worth pointing out that this also isn't the first time that the FTC under the Trump administration has removed posts related to AI regulation. Earlier this year, the FTC removed about 300 posts related to AI, consumer protection and the agency's lawsuits against tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft. Let's switch gears a little bit. I promise, this is more of a fun one. So last Saturday, around seven million people filled American cities for the latest No Kings protests, which is a series of nationwide protests criticizing what participants see as authoritarian measures by the Trump administration. And if you've been paying attention, you've probably noticed that there were quite a bit of people wearing frog costumes.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. These frogs rule, and I actually can tell you that this is not the first time I've seen these frogs. So this specific frog costume, I actually first saw in China because people were wearing them in viral TikToks in China. And a lot of times, they were playing really loud cymbals and doing really intense breakdancing in city centers and stuff.

Zoë Schiffer: One thing about Louise, is she will always find the China angle, and we love that for her. There really is one quite a lot of the time. But it turns out, there's actually kind of a story here. There's lore. Our colleague, Angela Watercutter, did a deep dive into what's behind the frogs and political protests. First, she pointed out the obvious, putting on costumes helps protesters avoid surveillance. And it also helps them counter the narrative that protesters are like violent extremists, as the Trump administration has been describing them. Angela spoke with Brooks Brown, one of the initiators of this movement called, Operation Inflation. They've been giving out free inflatable costumes, and he told her that it's also less likely that someone watching will say, "Maybe the frog deserved it if they get pepper sprayed or something." So there's real strategy here.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. I can definitely see how it's harder to sell the narrative that these protesters are dangerous when they're wearing a bunch of inflatable frog costumes. And it's really interesting, because about a decade ago, a frog meant something completely different. Remember Pepe the Frog back in 2015 or so? It was a far right symbol. And in 2019, during the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, they also adopted Pepe the Frog, but it meant something different in that context as well. So it seems like the frog is highly adaptable.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. The frog has had many, many lives and it seems like it has come full circle. Last weekend, images circulated on Bluesky of the inflatable frog punching Pepe in the face. So it's not just online memes though. These costumes have made it all the way to the courts. On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit lifted the block that barred Trump's National Guard deployment in Portland. Susan Graber, the dissenting judge, sided with the frogs and said, "Given Portland protesters' well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits and inflatable frog costumes when expressing their disagreement with the methods deployed by ICE, observers may be tempted to view the majority's ruling, which accepts the government's characterization of Portland as a war zone as absurd." One more quick story before we go to break. If you live in New York City, this tale might be unfortunately, familiar. This week, I got word that Google employees working at one of the company's New York campuses, should stay home because of a bedbug outbreak in the office.

Louise Matsakis: Oh God, you would not see me in the office for weeks if there was a bedbug infestation. How did they find out about this?

Zoë Schiffer: So basically, they received this email on Sunday, saying that exterminators had arrived at the scene with sniffer dogs and "found credible evidence of their presence." There, being the bedbugs. Sources tell WIRED that Google's offices in New York are home to a number of large stuffed animals, and there was definitely a rumor going around among employees that these stuffed animals were implicated in the outbreak. We were not able to verify this information before we published, but in any case, the company told employees as early as Monday morning that they could come back to the office. And people like you, Louise, were really not happy about this. They were like, "I'm not sure that it's totally clean here." That's why they were in our inboxes wanting to chat.

Louise Matsakis: Can I just say that if you have photos or a description of said large stuffed animals, please get in touch with me and Zoë. Thank you.

Zoë Schiffer: Yes. This is a cry for help. I thought the best part of this is when I gave Louise my draft, she was like, "Wait, this has happened before." And pulled up a 2010 article about a bedbug outbreak at the Google offices in New York.

Louise Matsakis: Yes. This is not the first time, which is heartbreaking.

Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we dive into why some people have been submitting complaints to the FTC about ChatGPT in their minds, leading them to AI psychosis. Stay with us.

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer. I'm joined today by WIRED's Louise Matsakis. Let's dive into our main story this week. The Federal Trade Commission has received 200 complaints mentioning OpenAI's ChatGPT between November 2022 when it launched, and August 2025. Most people had normal complaints. They couldn't figure out how to cancel their subscription or they were frustrated by unsatisfactory or inaccurate answers by the chatbot. But among these complaints, our colleague, Caroline Haskins, found that several people attributed delusions, paranoia, and spiritual crisis to the chatbot.

One woman from Salt Lake City called the FTC back in March to report that ChatGPT had been advising her son to not take his prescribed medication and telling him his parents were dangerous. Another complaint was from someone who claimed that after 18 days of using ChatGPT, OpenAI had stolen their "sole print" to create a software update that had been designed to turn this particular person against themselves. They said, "I'm struggling, please help me. I feel very alone." There are a bunch of other examples, but I'm curious to talk to you about this, because Louise, I know that AI psychosis is something that you have been doing a lot of research on specifically.

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. I think it's important to unpack like, what do we mean by AI psychosis? What's interesting and noteworthy to me about chatbots is not that they're causing people to experience delusions, but they're actually encouraging the delusions. And that's sort of the issue, is that it's this interaction where it's validating people saying like, "Yeah, the paranoia you're experiencing is totally valid." Or like, "Would you like me to unpack why it's definitely the case that your friends and families are conspiring against you?"

The problem is that it's interactive and it can encourage people to spiral further. There's always been people who are experiencing mental health crises and are taking signs that they shouldn't, thinking that a number that they saw somewhere indicates that they're Jesus or that something they saw on social media reflects the fact that they're being followed, or that the FBI is out to get them, or whatever it is. But now, we have these tools that with endless energy and they can go on and on, can directly respond to those delusions and encourage them, and specifically engage with exactly what this person is experiencing, rather than another person who would say, "Hey, you don't seem to be well," or a physical object in the world, that that street sign or something is not going to then flash another number and say like, "You're right. That's your lucky number. That's a sign from God," or whatever. It's really interactive.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I feel like you're getting at something that we've been talking about a lot, which is like, in what ways is this different from other technological shifts that have happened, which have been correlated with certain rises in mental illness?

Louise Matsakis: Yeah. I think that mental illness has always been a part of our species. And new technological developments have always sort of changed how we understand madness, but I do think we're seeing that happen again in this case and that this is really something new. And we should also note that these FTC complaints are part of a growing number of documented incidents of so-called AI psychosis, in which interactions with generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, but also Google Gemini, have induced or worsened users' delusions. And we know that this has led to a number of suicides. Also, ChatGPT has been implicated in at least I think, one murder. So we're sort of seeing that something is going on here and I don't think we fully understand it.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. And it's interesting, the approach that OpenAI is taking in this moment. Because you and I have both talked to people at the company extensively, and it's clear that they're taking this seriously. They are paying attention to what's going on, and they've rolled out a number of safety features. But what they haven't done is say like, "We're going to shut these conversations down when they happen. We're just not going to engage." They have instead been consulting with mental health experts. They have a council of advisors now who are professionals in this space, and they're really saying some version of, "Look, people turn to us oftentimes when they don't have anyone else to talk to, and we don't think the right thing is to shut it down." Which I don't know, in my mind, it opens OpenAI up to a ton of liability.

Louise Matsakis: It definitely does, and I think that the reality is that they don't understand this either. With any sort of new technology, there's always going to be risks. I think that this is different and really noteworthy and is concerning, but it's not necessarily clear to me that shutting down the conversation or directing people to talk to someone else in their life, that the outcome would change and that it's also hard to tell how serious somebody is. I've written about, and you edited a story that I wrote, Zoë, that showed that sometimes these chatbots slip into role playing, and that's what people want, right? They're like acting out a fantasy. They're maybe working on a science fiction book, or they're engaging in the equivalent of cosplay or fan fiction, right? And the line between fantasizing and exploring dark secrets and believing all of those things, and internalizing them and losing your grip on reality, I think is more subtle than we might think it is or that we want it to be.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. Yeah, yeah. The company is walking this very interesting line right now. On the one hand, it's said very publicly, "We want to treat adults like adults. We want to allow people a lot of freedom in how they interact with ChatGPT if they're over a certain age." On the other hand, they're dealing with these potentially extremely sensitive use cases and they're fending off so many lawsuits at once. So it'll be really curious to see how this all evolves.

Louise Matsakis: Definitely. I think what I would really like to see, and I don't know if this is possible, given that these lawsuits are still ongoing, but I want to see a clinical trial. I think that it would be really powerful for OpenAI to give a lot of this data obviously, anonymized. But give this data to mental health experts who can then systematically look at this. Because I think the scary thing is that mental health professionals are flying blind. I've talked to a number of them who don't necessarily use ChatGPT that much themselves, so they don't even know how to handle a patient who is talking about these things, because it's unfamiliar and this is all so new. But if we had open research that was robust and peer-reviewed and could say, "Okay, we know what this looks like and we can create protocols to ensure that people remain safe," that would be a really good step, I think, towards figuring this out.

Zoë Schiffer: Completely. It is continually surprising to me how even people with a ton of literacy on how these technologies work, slip into anthropomorphizing chatbots or assigning more intelligence than they might actually have. You can imagine the average person that isn't deep in the science of large language models, it's really easy to be completely wowed by what they can do and to start to lose a grip on what you're actually interacting with.

Louise Matsakis: Oh, totally. We are all socialized now to take a lot of meaning from text, right? A lot of us, the primary mode that we communicate with our loved ones, especially if we don't live together, is through texting, right? So it's like you have this similar interface with this chatbot. It's not that unusual that you don't necessarily hear the chatbot's voice, although you can communicate with ChatGPT using voice now, but we already trained to take a lot of meaning from text to believe that there's a person on the other end of that text. And there's a lot of evidence that shows we're not socializing as much as we once did. People feel lonelier. They feel less connected to their communities. They have fewer closer friends. I think we were really primed to feel that way, and I think people shouldn't be ashamed if they feel that way or think that something's wrong with them.

It's totally normal to be engaged by this entity that's paying a lot of attention to you, that's willing to listen to whatever you want to talk about, and then often, is really sycophantic and is really validating. Part of having a healthy relationship with another human is that they're not always going to validate you, right? They're going to have boundaries. They're going to have limits. And I think it can be really alluring to have this presence that doesn't have any of those boundaries and never gets tired of talking to you, never thinks that you're wrong. And it's normal to feel that way, but the question is like, how do we create guardrails?

Zoë Schiffer: Right, exactly. I think we've seen on a national stage what happens when you're surrounded by people who agree with you no matter what, and it's not good.

Louise Matsakis: No, it's not great.

Zoë Schiffer: Louise, thank you so much for joining me today.

Louise Matsakis: Thanks so much for having me.

Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about why the AI infrastructure boom and the concerns around it have reached a complete fever pitch. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Condé Nast head of global audio is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/uncanny-valley-podcast-wired-roundup-ai-psychosis-ftc-files-google-bedbugs/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

SECURITY | DELL CAMERON | OCT 30, 2025 AT 12:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

ICE Wants to Build a Shadow Deportation Network in Texas

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is exploring plans to launch a privately-run, statewide transportation system in Texas. The agency envisions a nonstop operation, funneling immigrants detained in 254 counties into ICE facilities and staging locations across the state.

Early planning documents reviewed by WIRED describe a statewide transport grid designed for steady detainee transfers across Texas, with ICE estimating each trip to average 100 miles. Every county would have its own small, around-the-clock team of contractors collecting immigrants from local authorities deputized by ICE. It is a subtle transfer of the physical custody process into the hands of a private security firm—authorized to carry firearms and perform transport duties “in any and all local, county, state, and ICE locations.”

The proposal emerges amid the Trump administration’s renewed campaign to expand interior immigration enforcement. Over the past year, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has poured billions into detention contracts, reactivated cross-deputation agreements with local police, and directed ICE to scale up removals inside the US. The plan fits neatly into that strategy; a logistical framework for a system built to move detainees faster and farther, with fewer federal agents ever seen in public.

The proposed system surfaced this week after ICE issued a market probe titled “Transportation Support for Texas.” The listing includes draft operational requirements outlining staffing levels, vehicle readiness rates, and response times, along with detailed questions for vendors about cost structures, regional coverage, and command-and-control capabilities.

According to the document, ICE envisions 254 transport hubs statewide—one for each Texas county—each staffed continuously by two armed contractor personnel. Vehicles must be able to respond within 30 minutes, maintaining an 80-percent readiness rate across three daily shifts. ICE’s staffing model adds a 50-percent cushion for leave and turnover, raising staffing needs by half over the baseline necessary to keep the system running uninterrupted.

WIRED calculates this would require more than 2,000 full-time personnel, in addition to a fleet of hundreds of SUVs roving the state at all hours.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

What the plan describes, in essence, is a shadow logistics network built on agreements with local police departments under the 287(g) program. These once symbolic gestures of cooperation are today a pipeline for real-time biometric checks and arrest notifications. Transportation is merely the next logical step. For ICE, it will create a closed loop: Local authorities apprehend immigrants. Private contractors deliver them to either a local jail (paid to house detainees) or a detention site run by a private corporation. The plan even specifies that contractors must maintain their own dispatch and command-and-control systems to manage movements statewide.

ICE is all but extricating itself from the process—becoming little more than an overseer that sets routes, response times, and reporting standards—while effectively turning immigration enforcement into a service industry; a continuous, privatized, and largely unseen system capable of moving detainees hundreds of miles overnight while operating without direct federal presence.

In June, the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 8, requiring any sheriff who runs a jail to seek a 287(g) agreement with ICE. The law aims to create “uniformity and cooperation among all counties,” according to the bill’s sponsors. Governor Greg Abbot signed the bill on June 20. It is scheduled to take effect at the start of the new year.

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Sheriffs will be required to choose one of three federally-defined 287(g) models: jail enforcement, task force, or warrant service. The jail enforcement model lets local officers screen and process immigrants for ICE inside jails. The warrant service model authorizes them to serve and execute ICE administrative warrants on detainees in custody. The task force model allows deputized officers to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants during their regular police duties.

The program has rapidly expanded under the Trump administration. In September, DHS celebrated a 641 percent increase in 287(g) partnerships, claiming “more than 1,000 local and state law enforcement agencies in 40 states” are now working with ICE.

There are financial incentives for agencies willing to sign up. Local departments that sign 287(g) agreements can have each deputized officer’s salary, benefits, and overtime costs fully covered by the federal government. They are also eligible for quarterly performance bonuses of up to $1,000 per officer based on arrests and their responsiveness to ICE requests.

In a separate move, the Texas Attorney General’s office signed the first statewide 287(g) agreement with ICE at the start of the year, delegating selected state investigators to perform immigration-officer functions: interrogating individuals about their status, making arrests without warrants, and preparing charging documents.

In practical terms, Texas is poised to no longer simply cooperate with federal immigration authorities, but function as an annex of them: a state-run extension of federal enforcement built into its everyday policing, transforming state sovereignty into an instrument of national policy.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/ice-is-building-a-24-7-shadow-transportation-network-across-texas/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | XIAOWEI R. WANG | OCT 30, 2025 AT 12:15 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

“I Sweated So Much I Never Needed to Pee”: Life in China’s Relentless Gig Economy

“Often, sweat was dripping down my back within the first two hours of a shift and would not stop dripping until the next morning,” writes Hu Anyan in the new English translation of his bestselling book I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. “I sweated so much I never once needed to pee.” This passage was on my mind as I read his book in Tianjin during one hot, Labubu brainrot summer, during which yet another unprecedented annual heat wave had forced almost everyone inside—except for the tireless couriers and delivery workers, whose services are in higher demand when temperatures soar.

Courtesy of Astra House

Hu’s writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he's now a prolific, established author in the country. While his other books, like Living in Low Places, are more about his internal life, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a focused, refreshing, on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work, set against the slow simmering background of China's economic rise. In addition to his stint as a courier in Beijing, Hu also recounts his adventures opening a small snack shop, his time working as a bicycle store clerk, and his brief stint as a Taobao seller. Hu's minimal, hypnotic prose reveals the perverse beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly precarious economy.

When people outside China read about it, it can be easy to imbue the place with a foreign otherness, as if only Chinese people are capable of working around the clock in mind-numbing conditions. Some of Hu’s earlier jobs, such as running an ecommerce shop during the “golden age of Taobao,” or the frantic energy of parcel sorting do speak to the particularly Chinese context of a rapidly developing economy. Yet other elements, like the punishing precarity, the ways profit pressures twist work relationships, or the mundane angst of labor, will all be quite familiar to an American reader these days. Hu's direct writing style lays bare how toiling in a logistics warehouse, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville, are similar: the night shifts, a drink after work, petty arguments and factions, stuffing items into polypropylene bags.

Hu recently spoke to WIRED about his journey to becoming an internationally acclaimed writer, Gen-Z and tangping (lying flat) culture, and his vision of work and freedom.

Did working as a courier offer you flexibility to earn money while being a writer?

Hu Anyan: My writing and logistics work didn't happen simultaneously. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or doing the night shift sorting parcels in Guangdong, I wasn't writing. I wasn't even reading, and after work I had to decompress. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, that was actually a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already in the final preparations for ceasing operations, so every day, by one or two in the afternoon, we'd already finished delivering all the goods.

For courier work, you have to clock in at 7 am. Then at night, you have to finish delivering all the packages, returning to the station to hand in remaining goods before you leave. Between 70 and 80 percent of food delivery workers in China are part-time. They don't have attendance requirements and don't need to clock in every day.

In recent years, I’ve seen a lot of news about robot delivery. Do you think people are anxious that robots will replace them?

In reality, there isn't much anxiety about robots replacing delivery people. My colleagues at the time didn't worry their work would be replaced by robots. Certainly other jobs, like video editing, advertising, and design might be, but for this kind of physical work, there’s less of that anxiety. From what I observed, I think that the Chinese government will have more regulation than the US government to make sure automation serves people. Only if technology makes people's lives better is it useful technology. If its development makes more people live unhappily or only makes 10 percent of people live better, it actually has no value for advancement.

What were the backgrounds of your colleagues? You have a college degree, which I thought was interesting and unexpected for someone doing courier work.

For night-shift logistics sorting, probably no one had attended university, and probably only people who don't have better choices would take a job like that under those circumstances. As for couriers, there are actually people who received higher education. At my last job, our station had eight people. Besides me, one other colleague had a junior college degree, and the person who I replaced also had a junior college degree.

From my personal experience—I’m not an expert who studies social issues—I've seen that many college students in China can’t find good jobs. In my last courier job, the other college graduate was actually our station manager’s high school classmate. Our station manager graduated from high school, didn't attend college, and eventually found a courier job in Beijing and became the station manager. His high school classmate, who attended junior college, was recruited by our manager and worked as the manager’s employee. This might not be an isolated case—many college students after graduation can’t directly go into professional positions. If they look for a basic entry-level position, their income is very low, definitely lower than couriers and delivery workers.

What do you think of tangping, or lying flat culture, the social trend in China where young people reject overwork in favor of minimalist lifestyles? Your book is so eloquent in how it understands work culture. I was surprised by how diligent you were and how you made sure everyone got their packages.

I was born in the 1970s, so maybe my seriousness is mostly because of my generation’s education at the time, which made us afraid to be criticized or reprimanded by company leadership or bosses. There’s a feeling that people must complete their duties, not cause trouble for others, not drag others down. During my generation, China was still a planned economy, all state owned, no private sector, so many people didn’t need to do career planning. Once you graduated, the school would arrange and assign your work, and you’d just do it for a lifetime. People from that time were relatively conservative, with a closed, traditional mindset.

Many people in this new generation have ideas about planning for their future. China has changed so rapidly over the past three or four decades, and much of what I say to them is already outdated, doesn’t fit with their current circumstances, and has no reference value.

Lying flat culture has only appeared in China recently, why? Like I said, previously China wasn’t a market economy. From the 1990s to the 2000s, after China’s opening up, many people viewed making money as a main—even the only—purpose in life. From a Western perspective, Chinese people at that time probably seemed strange, they were working close to 30 days a month.

This younger generation born after the 2000s, their parents are actually all born post-’70s, even post-’80s. So from childhood, maybe they haven't experienced too much material scarcity, and don’t have as much of an impulse to get what you couldn’t before. Many young people feel that for making money, forming this kind of neijuan [intense competition] is a waste of life, and that you end up just living meaninglessly. The rewards you end up obtaining aren’t that big.

In a lot of Chinese-language interviews, the interviewer mentions how simply you live. Do you think living simply allows one the kind of “freedom” that you express in your book?

In my thirties and after, the jobs I took occupied relatively large amounts of my time. For example, at the bicycle store in Shanghai, I worked at least 80 hours a week. You basically have no leisure time left. During this time, I only worked, and after work, I had nothing else belonging to myself. Under these circumstances, if you can't feel a sense of autonomy, sense of value in work, you easily feel a lack of existence.

For example, if you work at Foxconn, you don’t assemble an entire iPhone to completion. You just screw on this one part, and only in this way is your efficiency maximized. One day, when you stop screwing on this one part, they can replace you with another person. You’re just a tool, a saw blade, a hammer, a screwdriver. You’re not a person with a soul, emotions, judgment, a living person. If this is the highest-income job you can find, and you might have to work in this job for the next 10, 20, 30 years to support your parents and family, you’ll definitely feel despair.

Under these circumstances, the freedom I talk about is pursuing this kind of personal value you can’t pursue in work. A unique thing. For example, creative pursuits are so bound to your personal uniqueness. Even if two people jointly experienced the exact same event, if you let them reflect or retell it in writing, their retelling won’t be completely the same. So the freedom I mention in my book, it’s not a general freedom, it’s specific: not being bound by work that is uncreative or makes you just a tool.

You asked about a simple kind of life. If you pursue more economic rewards, material conditions, then the time and energy you invest in work will be more. At the end of 2019, when I was laid off from the courier company, my savings were about 100,000 yuan. Not much. But I dared not work anymore and decided to write for a while. If you have higher material pursuits, it’s harder to be free, because you’ll constantly invest more energy and time into making money.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/made-in-china-i-deliver-parcels-in-beijing-author-interview/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | EMILY MULLIN | OCT 30, 2025 AT 11:04 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

A New Startup Wants to Edit Human Embryos

Seven years after the first gene-edited babies were revealed, biotech startup Manhattan Genomics is reviving the idea of editing human embryos to make disease-free children.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES

In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and used the embryos to start pregnancies.

The backlash against He was immediate. Scientists said the technology was too new to be used for human reproduction and that the DNA change amounted to genetic enhancement. The Chinese government charged him with “illegal medical practices,” and he served a three-year prison sentence.

Now, a New York–based startup called Manhattan Genomics is reviving the debate around gene-edited babies. Its stated goal is to end genetic disease and alleviate human suffering by fixing harmful mutations at the embryo stage. The company has announced a group of “scientific contributors” that includes a prominent in vitro fertilization doctor, a data scientist who worked for de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, and two reproductive biologists from a major primate research center. A scientist who pioneered a technique to make embryos using DNA from three people is also involved.

“I like to take on challenges when I see them,” says cofounder Cathy Tie, a former Thiel fellow who left college at 18 to start her first company, Ranomics, a genomics screening service. As Tie sees it, that challenge is to make the idea of human embryo editing more acceptable in society.

The idea of editing human embryos is tantalizing, because any changes made to the reproductive cells are heritable. Snip out a disease-causing mutation in an embryo and it would be deleted from future generations as well. But gene-editing technology also has the potential to cause unintended “off-target” effects. Edit the wrong gene by mistake and it could give rise to cancer, for instance. Those mistakes would also be passed down to any future children.

While newer forms of gene editing are more precise, there are still ethical issues to contend with. The prospect of being able to manipulate the DNA of a human embryo has raised fears of a new kind of eugenics, where parents with the means to do so could make “designer babies” with traits that they select.

Tie says the goal of Manhattan Genomics—originally called the Manhattan Project when the company first launched in August—is disease correction, not enhancement. Unlike the original Manhattan Project, a secretive US government program during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons, Tie says her venture will operate openly and transparently. “We’re revolutionizing medicine, and this technology is definitely very powerful. That’s what I think is the commonality here with manipulating the nucleus of the atom and manipulating the nucleus of the cell,” she says.

Earlier this year, Tie launched another gene-editing startup, the Los Angeles Project, with biohacker Josie Zayner. The two aimed to make glowing rabbits and other fantastical pets by editing them at the embryo level. Tie is no longer involved in that company, which later changed its name to the Embryo Corporation after her departure.

Tie’s announcement of Manhattan Genomics comes after a whirlwind public romantic relationship with China’s He. In May, she posted a photo of the two during what appeared to be a marriage celebration. However, she tells WIRED that they are no longer together and were never legally married. Their relationship, she says, was purely personal, and He is not involved with her new company. (He confirmed separately to WIRED that he and Tie are not together and he is not involved in Manhattan Genomics.)

Manhattan Genomics cofounder Cathy Tie.Photograph: Zemo Zhang

The company’s other cofounder is Eriona Hysolli, previously the head of biological sciences at Colossal Biosciences, which earlier this year claimed to have brought back extinct dire wolves by editing the embryos of modern-day gray wolves.

Manhattan Genomics’ scientific contributors—so called because they will take a more hands-on role than traditional biotech advisers—include New York-based IVF doctor Norbert Gleicher and data scientist Stephen Turner, previously the head of genomics strategy at Colossal Biosciences, where he sequenced embryos before and after gene editing and analyzed off-target effects. Carol Hanna and Jon Hennebold, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), are providing expertise on primate embryology. A scientist who has conducted gene-editing work on human embryos was originally included among the list of scientific contributors, but when contacted by WIRED he said he was not officially working with the company.

John Quain is advising the company on ethics. Quain, a technology writer and a fellow in the bioethics program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, gave a talk at a philosophy event last year titled “Drawing the Germline: Why Moratoriums on Human Heritable Genetic Engineering Should Be Lifted.”

Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a biologist at OHSU, is consulting with the company on human embryo research. Mitalipov is known for developing a “three-parent baby” technique that involves removing the nucleus of a human egg and placing it into another. (Mitalipov did not respond to an interview request from WIRED).

In what Tie sees as a sign of growing interest in human embryo editing, she says the company received more than 150 applications from qualified scientists in the first 24 hours of posting a role for a genome engineer.

She did not specify what genes Manhattan Genomics will target first, but says the company will focus on ones that have the strongest correlation with disease and are the simplest to go after, such as those that cause Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anemia—known as monogenic disorders because they are caused by mutations in a single gene.

Since He’s experiments in 2018, scientists have honed newer, more precise forms of Crispr, which Tie plans to test and compare for safety and efficacy. She says the company will start with studies in mice then move to monkeys. Human trials are still many years off and would likely face regulatory obstacles in the US. A congressional rider bans the Food and Drug Administration from considering trials involving intentionally modified human embryos that are used to start a pregnancy.

“We are obviously at a very early stage, and it will take significant work in collaboration with the FDA to get to a practical clinical application,” Gleicher tells WIRED. “But I am optimistic that for carefully selected indications, it should be doable within a reasonable time frame.”

At least initially, Gleicher sees embryo editing being used in cases where an IVF patient has only a few embryos to work with and all of them are affected by a single-gene disease. Age is a major factor in the number of eggs, and thus embryos, an IVF patient is able to produce, so Gleicher says older patients may especially benefit. “This is, indeed, what attracted me to the project,” he says.

Gleicher’s New York-based clinic, the Center for Human Reproduction, serves a large population of patients over the age of 40. He says his patients frequently ask why it’s not yet possible to “improve” or “fix” embryos.

Turner got involved with the company through Hysolli, his colleague from Colossal, but says he wasn’t immediately supportive of Manhattan Genomics’ vision. “Embryo editing raises serious ethical and scientific questions. I agreed to get involved because I want to see this work, if it proceeds at all, done transparently, under independent oversight, and focused on preventing severe disease,” he says, adding that if those conditions aren’t met, he will no longer be involved.

Even if the company manages to show that embryo editing can be done safely, there may be few use cases for it—at least in terms of preventing serious inherited diseases.

“For mutations that are inherited, in the vast majority of cases they can be addressed by embryo screening rather than embryo editing,” says Kiran Musunuru, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who is developing gene-editing treatments.

A type of testing used in IVF called preimplantation genetic diagnosis can evaluate embryos for specific inherited genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, or Tay-Sachs. “There are very rare cases where no healthy embryos are possible, like when the two parents both have cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease,” Musunuru says. In those cases, he says donated healthy sperm or eggs could be used instead.

He also points to the fact that many genetic diseases are caused by spontaneous mutations that are not inherited from their parents. These “de novo” mutations are difficult to detect with preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and Musunuru says in those cases, gene-editing treatments would have to be given at the fetal stage or after birth. Musunuru was part of a team that created a custom Crispr treatment for an infant with a rare and often fatal metabolic disease.

Fyodor Urnov, a professor of molecular therapeutics at UC Berkeley and a scientific director at its Innovative Genomics Institute, says he worries that the interest in human embryo editing for reproductive purposes is driven by a “quasi-eugenics” mindset, rather than a true desire to fix genetic disease. “Why is money being poured into this? Because at the end of the day, those who have money want to ‘improve’ their babies,” he says.

At least one other company, Bootstrap Bio, is also seeking funding for human embryo editing. And in June, Coinbase CEO and billionaire Brian Armstrong posted on X that he was ready to invest in an embryo editing company. “I think the time is right for the defining company in the US to be built in this area, approaching it in a scientifically rigorous way, solving an unmet need,” he wrote. Manhattan Genomics has not disclosed its investors or how much it has raised, though Tie says Armstrong is not an investor.

Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, says he has concerns about heritable gene editing bypassing the typical route of academic research and being taken up by tech startups.

“Research might be slower or less efficient in academia, but it requires institutional oversight and the restrictions that come with government funds,” he says. Kahn served on an international commission convened by the US National Academy of Medicine, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the UK’s Royal Society from 2019 to 2020 to assess the potential clinical applications of heritable human genome editing. In a report released in September 2020, the commission recommended that gene-edited human embryos should not be used to create a pregnancy until scientists can establish that precise genomic changes can be made reliably without introducing undesired changes.

The committee did not propose an outright ban on human embryo editing but recommended proceeding cautiously and incrementally. It said that countries should have extensive societal dialogue before determining whether to permit its use. And even then, the technique should first be used only for those couples who have little or no chance of having a genetically related baby that does not inherit a serious monogenic condition—such as in the extremely rare case of a parent that carries two mutations for Huntington’s disease. Humans carry two copies of each gene, and each parent passes one of them on to their children. As only one copy of a mutated gene is needed to cause Huntington’s, one parent with two copies would pass on the disease to all embryos.

“When we were working on that report, I think we all thought this research would live in the academic environment, and so the rules would apply. But when you’re outside of that environment in a startup, the question of how do we make sure this happens responsibly becomes much more important,” Kahn says.

Tie says the company plans to follow the recommendations laid out in the commission’s report.

Just this year, the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, and the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy called for a 10-year moratorium on heritable gene editing, warning that it “remains far too risky and ethically fraught for clinical use.”

Tie maintains that human embryo editing is a valid route to explore. She says after announcing the company in August, dozens of people with genetic diseases in their families reached out to express their support. “Even though it’s not going to be used in the clinic right away,” she says, “it is still worthwhile to fight to get this to be evaluated seriously by regulators.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/startup-edit-human-embryos-manhattan-genomics-cathy-tie/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | JAY BENNETT | OCT 30, 2025 AT 10:20 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

NASA’s Quiet Supersonic Jet Takes Flight

The X-59 successfully completed its inaugural flight—a step toward developing quieter supersonic jets that could one day fly customers more than twice as fast as commercial airliners.

COURTESY OF: Lockheed Martin/Michael Jackson

About an hour after sunrise over the Mojave Desert of Southern California, NASA’s newest experimental supersonic jet took to the skies for the first time on Tuesday. The X-59 Quesst (Quiet SuperSonic Technology) is designed to decrease the noise of a sonic boom when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier, paving the way for future commercial jets to fly at supersonic speeds over land.

The jet, built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, took off from US Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. Flown by Nils Larson, NASA’s lead test pilot for the X-59, the inaugural flight validated the jet’s airworthiness and safety before landing about an hour after takeoff near NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

“X-59 is a symbol of American ingenuity,” acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy said in a statement. “It's part of our DNA—the desire to go farther, faster, and even quieter than anyone has ever gone before.”

Commercial planes are prohibited from flying at supersonic speeds over land in the US due to the disruption that breaking the sound barrier causes on the ground, releasing a loud sonic boom that can rattle windows and trigger alarms. The Concorde, which was the only successful commercial supersonic jet, was limited to flying at supersonic speeds only over the oceans.

When a plane approaches the speed of sound, pressure waves build up on the surface of the aircraft. These areas of high pressure coalesce into large shock waves when the plane goes supersonic, producing the double thunderclap of a sonic boom.

The X-59 will generate a lower “sonic thump” thanks to its unique design. It was given a long, slender nose that accounts for about a third of the total length and breaks up pressure waves that would otherwise merge on other parts of the airplane. The engine was mounted on top of the X-59’s fuselage, rather than underneath as on a fighter jet, to keep a smooth underside that limits shock waves and also to direct sound waves up into the sky rather than down toward the ground. NASA aims to provide key data to aircraft manufacturers so they can build less noisy supersonic planes.

A Jet Like No Other

The X-59 is a single-seat, single-engine jet. It is 99.7 feet long and 29.5 feet wide, making it almost twice as long as an F-16 fighter jet but with a slightly smaller wingspan. The X-59’s cockpit and ejection seat come from the T-38 jet trainer, its landing gear from an F-16, and its control stick from the F-117 stealth attack aircraft. Its engine, a modified General Electric F414 from the F/A-18 fighter jet, will allow the plane to cruise at Mach 1.4, about 925 mph, at an altitude of 55,000 feet. This is nearly twice as high and twice as fast as commercial airliners typically fly.

Perhaps the most striking change on the X-59 is that it does not have a glass cockpit window. Instead, the cockpit is fully enclosed to be as aerodynamic as possible, and the pilot watches a camera feed of the outside world on a 4K monitor known as the eXternal Visibility System.

“You can't see very clearly through glass when you look at it at a very shallow angle, and so you need to have a certain steepness of the view screen to have good optical qualities, and that would develop a strong shock wave that would really corrupt the low-boom characteristics of the airplane,” says Michael Buonanno, the air vehicle lead for the X-59 at Lockheed Martin.

The X-59 has repurposed components of other NASA aircrafts.

COURTESY OF: Lockheed Martin

For this first flight, the X-59 flew at a lower altitude and at about 240 mph, according to NASA. During future tests, the jet will gradually increase its speed and altitude until it goes supersonic, NASA said, which occurs at about 659 mph at 55,000 feet, or 761 mph at sea level. The speed of sound varies according to temperature and to a lesser degree pressure, causing it to decrease at higher altitudes.

“The primary objective on a first flight is really just to land,” James Less, a project pilot for the X-59 who will be conducting future flights, tells WIRED. Less flew an F-15 fighter jet in formation with the X-59 as a support aircraft during the flight, observing the new experimental jet for any issues.

“I'm looking for anything external to the airplane that the pilot can't see,” Less says. Generally the first thing he would check for is that the landing gear retracted successfully, but on this initial flight the X-59 intentionally left the landing gear down. “If the aircraft is leaking any kind of fluids, be it fuel or hydraulics, as a chase pilot, you can usually see that … Also I'm looking for other traffic, air traffic, just to point that out to him.”

Following the X-59’s successful touchdown at Armstrong, NASA and Lockheed Martin engineers will review the flight data to prepare for the jet’s future, faster flights.

The Future of Supersonic Flight

The eXternal Visibility System is just one of the modern technologies needed to build a low-boom airplane like the X-59. Decades of computational fluid dynamics research and wind tunnel testing were also required to arrive at the final design.

“We've really had the opportunity to spend a lot of time on the computational fluid dynamics application to these low-boom aircraft,” Lori Ozoroski, the commercial supersonic technology project manager at NASA, tells WIRED. “We've gone from this computational domain around an aircraft of something that's got a couple of million cells as you divide up the space around it to … things with a couple million cells, and now we're pushing a billion cells.”

Once the X-59 gets up to speed, the next step will be to make sure the quieter sonic thumps really are tolerable for people on the ground.

“We have been planning a test campaign where we will fly over various communities in the US, polling them with a survey and understanding how annoyed people are,” Ozoroski says. The flights will produce both loud and quiet sonic booms to see how people react, she explains.

“Our plan is to gather all this data, doing approximately one-month tests in a couple of locations around the country, and then providing all that data to the FAA and the international regulatory community to try to establish a sound limit, rather than the speed limit.”

If the program is a success, it could pave the way for new commercial supersonic aircraft that would cut travel times in half, something that companies such as Boom Supersonic are trying to achieve.

The jet has joined the ranks of innovative NASA X-planes , dating back almost 80 years to the Bell X-1 that Chuck Yeager piloted on the first faster-than-sound flight in 1947.

“I grew up reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and reading about the X-planes out at Edwards, and never imagined that I'd be in a position to do something like this,” says Less, who is eagerly awaiting his turn at the X-59’s stick. “This will be the highlight of my career.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/nasas-quiet-supersonic-jet-takes-flight/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

POLITICS | DAVID GILBERT | OCT 30, 2025 AT 9:40 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

No, SNAP Benefits Aren’t Mostly Used by Immigrants

As roughly 42 million Americans face the loss of food stamps this weekend, far-right influencers, extremists, and conspiracy theorists are using the crisis to push racist disinformation about who receives these benefits.

As a result of the government shutdown, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will not be funded as of November 1, according to a message on the website of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the program. While this loss of benefits could be catastrophic for millions, that hasn’t stopped the rush of disinformation. A number of conspiracy theorists and right-wing influencers are claiming that immigrants are the main recipients of food stamps, while AI-generated videos on TikTok push racist stereotypes of Black people demanding more benefits.

These claims simply do not align with reality, given that the majority of people who receive SNAP benefits are white Americans, according to data collected by the USDA. The data also shows that deep-red states like Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana are among those with the highest percentage of food stamp recipients.

“These narratives are being circulated to suggest that undeserving groups are getting the bulk of SNAP benefits and therefore to make the suspension of SNAP benefits seem like less of a crisis,” says Tracy Roof, a political scientist at the University of Richmond. “The reality is that the overwhelming majority of recipients of SNAP are people born in the US, and many are in families with children or are elderly or disabled. Of those able to work, most do.”

A chart posted by an influential far-right X account with the screen name “The General” has boosted this conspiracy theory, suggesting that the vast majority of people in receipt of benefits are non-white immigrants, with Afghan, Somali, and Iraqi US residents making up the top three supposed recipients. This chart, which was initially published in June on a website called the Personal Finance Wizards, according to PolitiFact, is entirely fabricated. The USDA does not collect the ethnicity of SNAP recipients beyond broad categories like White, African American, and Hispanic.

USDA data shows that almost 90 percent of SNAP recipients are American-born citizens. 1.1 percent of recipients are refugees, and 3.3 percent are other noncitizens.

The General’s post has been seen 6.3 million times and has been widely shared by other people, including influential right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh, who quoted the post on X and wrote: “We import the third world and force working-class Americans to feed and house them at gunpoint. Civilizational suicide.” Other posts that also shared the chart were shared hundreds of thousands of times. X did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to a user’s question about the chart’s accuracy, X’s AI-powered chatbot Grok wrote: “Yes, the chart accurately reflects USDA data on SNAP recipients by race from recent reports,” before disagreeing with the chart and concluding “absolute numbers show Whites as the largest group.”

The chart also appeared to inform a segment on right-wing news channel Newsmax this week about the end of SNAP funding. Newsmax did not respond to requests for comment.

Other racist conspiracies have also taken hold. On TikTok, as first reported by The Root, multiple racist accounts posted what appear to be AI-generated videos of Black women ranting about their food stamp payments being cut off. These videos do not depict real people or real incidents.

One TikTok account dedicated to producing racist AI slop videos that feature a Black woman named “Lakisha” posted a video showing the woman screaming at what appears to be a government official. “What the hell you mean you can’t reload my EBT card?” the AI-generated woman shouts. This post and other similar videos depict incidents that did not occur, though some commenters appeared to think they were real. “Accurate and sad. They milk the system on our back,” one user wrote.

After WIRED published this article, TikTok confirmed it had removed the videos in question for breaching the company’s community guidelines. A spokesperson for the company also says that it is in the process of placing search restrictions that would limit the reach of similar content.

On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed that the Democratic party is purposely keeping the government shut down in order to trigger violent civil unrest following the loss of food stamps.

“It's the Democrats creating the martial law, civil war, race-war scenario,” Jones told Bannon. “They are doing it again,” he added, comparing President Trump to former president Abraham Lincoln. Multiple threads on The Donald, a fringe pro-Trump message board, also claimed without evidence that Black people would begin looting en masse this weekend as a result of SNAP’s lapse in funding.

The Trump administration has focused its ire on Democrats and immigrants. “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” states a message posted on the USDA website. “Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”

While the administration blames Democrats for the lapse in SNAP funding, GOP congressional leadership has said it would block a Democratic bill that would allow the program to be funded. The bill is “a cynical attempt to buy political cover for Democrats to allow them to carry on their government shutdown even longer,” Senate majority leader John Thune said in Congress on Wednesday.

But some Republicans do want SNAP funding to continue. Senator Josh Hawley proposed his own bill to fund the program this week, which 10 other Republican senators have publicly supported. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said Hawley’s bill “would pass overwhelmingly” if it is put to a vote.

These critical benefits are set to run out on Saturday.

Update: 10/31/2025: In response to WIRED's reporting, TikTok has removed the AI videos mentioned in the article, and a spokesperson says the company is in the process of placing search restrictions that would limit the reach of similar content.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/disinformation-conspiracy-theories-snap-benefits/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

CULTURE | CHRIS BARANIUK | OCT 30, 2025 AT 9:10 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

If You Hated A House of Dynamite, Watch This Classic Nuclear Thriller Instead

Somewhere over the Arctic reaches of North America, a nuclear bomber flies in a squadron, awaiting its orders. When a secret code appears on a machine in the cockpit, the crew looks at each other, stunned. The code is instructing them to attack. Ripping open a sealed envelope marked “Top Secret,” the pilot reads the name of their target: MOSCOW. They set their course. The end of the world has begun.

Or so they think. It’s actually all a big mistake—the result of a computer glitch at a military base that sent the attack code to the bomber by accident. This is the premise of Sidney Lumet’s 1964 masterpiece Fail Safe—a movie that asked Cold War audiences to question unbridled nuclear weapons proliferation at a time when, to many, building up a massive arsenal seemed like an imperative.

I watched Fail Safe recently to remind myself just how good it is after I was left disappointed by A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s portrayal of a nuclear crisis, which arrived on Netflix on October 24.

Some political analysts argue that nuclear war has never been more likely than it is today. And yet, despite that ongoing threat to humanity’s very existence, few films or TV shows seem to agonize about the prospect anymore. A House of Dynamite bucks the trend by thrusting nukes back into the spotlight.

In the film, radar systems detect an intercontinental ballistic missile of unknown origin barreling toward the US.

Analysis of the missile’s trajectory soon reveals its likely target: Chicago. A weapon like that, government officials tell each other, could kill 10 million people on impact. Many more will likely die due to radioactive fallout created by the nuclear blast. The missile will hit in just 19 minutes, meaning there’s no time to evacuate Chicago. All America can do is try to shoot down the ICBM, while contemplating catastrophe.

The first act is gripping. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), a senior officer in the White House Situation Room, quickly recognizes the magnitude of what is unfolding on the big board in front of her and her colleagues. We feel the urgency of each desperate action, order, and argument that follows.

But A House of Dynamite is nearly two hours long. Those 19 minutes till impact are both elongated and played out no fewer than three times, from three slightly different perspectives. In the second act, we join generals and government officials on a bizarre Zoom call as they try to work out what, if anything, they can do. And in the third act, we follow the US president, played by Idris Elba, who looks hopelessly bewildered, even before he learns about the incoming ICBM. In short, the tension gradually dries up, the script falls flat, and we never even find out what comes of it all. The ending, or lack thereof, has enraged some viewers.

In Fail Safe, by contrast, the tension never eases. The drama gradually builds to a climax that involves personal sacrifice and other dreadful choices. Some of the key people involved must finally reckon with the situation they and their colleagues have created.

In A House of Dynamite, the crisis blasts into view from outside. Some unidentified other has sent the ICBM, leaving everyone scrambling. Most of the characters are figured as victims. In Fail Safe, though, there are hotheads and war-mongers, too.

It’s all the more pointed because the film is adapted from a best-selling novel that was—incredibly—first published right in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Other films released in 1964, including Seven Days in May and the better-remembered Dr. Strangelove also deal with questions around nuclear posturing and the inherent risks of nuclear proliferation.

The title Fail Safe invokes the checks and balances intended to prevent a nuclear war starting by accident. “Who checks the checker?” asks a senator on a tour of a military control room shortly before the film’s crisis begins. “That's what really bothers me. The only thing everyone can agree on is that no one's responsible.” In 2025, automation seems ubiquitous—we regularly grasp for an answer to the question “Who is accountable?” when AI, or automated vehicles, go wrong. The senator’s line hits even harder today than it did when it was written.

But Fail Safe also serves up a heady cocktail of human personalities and interests. There’s the general who is unexpectedly horrified by nuclear weapons; the political scientist determined to eliminate any and all threats to America; and the president (Henry Fonda) who finds that, when it really matters, his supposed authority actually means nothing.

The bomber crew’s orders are to ignore any commands once their attack run begins. Voices on their radios, training has told them, could be imitated by the enemy. And so as lead pilot Colonel Jack Grady (Edward Binns) nears his target, Fonda insists that he return to base, bellowing: “Damn it, Grady, this is the president!” All to no avail.

It’s a situation that has been called “the human button,” in which military personnel are trained to carry out the procedures for launching a nuclear attack without hesitation or deviation. These procedures may be repeatedly rehearsed in order to induce a kind of unthinking muscle memory. The idea is that, should the order ever come in, that’s it. Soldiers in silos and submarines would carry out the last rites like automatons. Then, the world will be over. It’s important that the enemy knows and believes this will be the case. That’s a key part of deterrence, the idea that having and maintaining a nuclear arsenal, as well as plans to use it, secures a state against possible threats from enemy states.

Many have questioned whether this chain of events would really unfold so neatly. In 1983, for instance, one real-life Russian duty officer did famously deviate from the doomsday script. Stanislav Petrov received a computer warning that several nuclear missiles had been fired toward the Soviet Union from the US. In principle, this ought to have triggered an immediate retaliatory strike against the US. But Petrov had a hunch it was a false alarm and, against protocol, chose not to alert his superiors, potentially averting Armageddon.

A House of Dynamite envisions a world where deterrence has, inexplicably, failed. Yes, this is arguably the fault of all those who have supported nuclear posturing, that’s what the film’s title is about. But Fail Safe is much more successful at showing how and why the worst risks come from within. It depicts the hubris and viciousness of certain individuals involved, as well as the ridiculousness of the complex systems and protocols that people put between one another. We risk losing ourselves in it all.

Early in Fail Safe, before the chilling alarms and frantic phone calls, there’s a scene in which two old-school Air Force pilots hang out and play pool. One complains that younger pilots don’t have the individuality, the humanity, of his generation of war-fighters.

“You could tell them apart. They were all people,” he says. “These kids … You open them up, you'll find they run on transistors.”

Ironically, the pilot who utters these words is none other than Colonel Grady, the human button who goes on to fly unwaveringly toward Moscow.

In Fail Safe, after the initial computer error, the system takes over and functions exactly as designed.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/if-you-hated-a-house-of-dynamite-watch-fail-safe-instead/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

GEAR | BEN DOWSETT | OCT 30, 2025 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Inside the Star-Studded, Mob-Run Poker Games That Allegedly Steal Millions From Players

To the uninitiated, the arrests of Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones last week for allegations of involvement in rigged illegal poker games may have appeared like an unusual collision of worlds. How could prosecutors claim that former NBA players (one a current coach), professional gamblers, and even mafia members all ended up rubbing elbows as part of the same high-tech cheating scheme that allegedly began in 2019 and ran for several years?

But while some of the elements that appear to have led to a yearslong FBI investigation and sweeping arrests are certainly unique, underground poker games like these are somewhat commonplace. They’re often fueled by celebrities—the role prosecutors say Billups and Jones played here. They’re often backed or otherwise aided by organized crime. And they still regularly feature seedy characters running schemes, chief among which is cheating.

I dug inside the underbelly of private high-stakes poker games to find out how they work, why they’re often targets for the mob or other sordid characters, and why the Billups Games appear to be an especially unique kind of scam.

Let’s Play

Like with many elements of their lives, privacy is often paramount for celebrities who want to gamble. That’s how these private games typically get started.

“The general ecosystem is such that there are athletes, celebrities, wealthy businessmen, and the sort that are high-profile individuals that want to gamble but don’t necessarily want to do it under the constructs of a casino setting,” says Matt Berkey, a well-known poker professional who has played in private games like these for years. “It’s a social setting. Usually there’s party favors, girls, all the things you can’t have at the casino.”

Even in “straight” games that involve no cheating, celebrities like Billups and Jones (also often referred to as “whales”) are typically the straws that stir the drink. They’re generally wealthy and relative poker amateurs. Others in the game are often there explicitly to play alongside them. Conditions of the game are catered to their whims.

When professional poker players are invited to fill seats in the game, the celebrities often dictate this process too. Pros are often invited specifically because a whale has seen them on TV or because they’re known to be fun and willing to give plenty of action despite their skill advantage.

To the outside eye, that appears to have been how the Billups Game allegedly took shape.

“I heard about it back then, when it first happened. I think a lot of people in the community heard about it, because it just popped up out of nowhere,” says Ryan Feldman, owner and producer of Hustler Casino Live, a popular livestreamed poker broadcast. Feldman has played high-stakes poker for years, including in private home games like these (though never specifically in the Billups Games, he says).

“As an NBA fan, I thought it was cool,” Feldman says. “I was also intrigued, because I know Chauncey, I used to work with him at ESPN. I thought it was cool that he was suddenly into poker. I had a friend or two that I knew of that played in the game.”

Only certain kinds of poker pros end up in games like these. Some steer clear altogether, preferring the more regulated casino atmosphere that includes extensive surveillance, security, and the backstop of government oversight. Two well-known poker tournament professionals who asked to remain anonymous told me that in their position, receiving invites to these kinds of games is more of a red flag than anything. “If I ever get invited to a game like that, I assume it’s because they intend to cheat or rob me,” one says.

Others are willing to attend if they’re confident in the game’s trustworthiness. The high-stakes poker community is relatively small, and word-of-mouth information from trusted sources can help cautious players avoid the seedier games.

In the case of the Billups Games, at least some segments of that high-stakes community were suspicious almost immediately. Berkey, for instance, tells me he declined an invite specifically due to cheating concerns. (In the federal indictment, Billups was charged with several counts of wire fraud conspiracy and money-laundering conspiracy.)

Playing Host

My sources tell me that their decisions about whether to attend these games revolve around their trust—or lack of it—in the host, or the “game runner.” Pros who attend need to know the host is running a straight game; a track record with established players is naturally important.

These hosts are often people with “a network of some capacity,” as Berkey puts it, both among the wealthy and the gambling communities. “If you look at Molly, who ran Molly’s Game, she was just very well-to-do and connected in the LA scene,” Berkey says of Molly Bloom, the titular character of both a book and movie involving her life as a host in the high-stakes poker world. “She then was able to expand that out into New York City until ultimately she got taken down.”

The host’s role in these games can be quite fraught.

“When you’re talking about home games, the phrase ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ kind of applies here,” Berkey asserts. “Because you’re fully at the hands of whoever is hosting the game … They’re in control of the dealers, they’re in control of the decks, they’re in control of the tables, the shuffle machines.”

They’re also in charge of the books, and that’s where the drama often begins.

These aren’t casinos with cages, cameras, and fully monitored methods of depositing and withdrawing money. Credit is regularly utilized, both to appease players and to avoid issues with traceable movements of large cash sums.

“People don’t always pay,” Berkey says. “And when that becomes an issue, now it’s the host’s job to make good on the books in some capacity, otherwise they’re going to lose all their clientele.”

Enter the mafia, who, in addition to running some of the poker games, often fill a role they’re well known for in popular culture: settling debts.

“Say you have someone who loses a lot of money,” says Zach Jensen, a content developer and mafia expert at Las Vegas’ Mob Museum. “Getting them to pay up, the mob can step in and do that. Extortion, intimidation, and violence too.”

As Jensen explains it, the mob may not be anywhere near the size or power of its one-time might. It operates in a more under-the-radar manner today. But it’s still very active in many of its old tricks, and illegal gambling remains a big part of the picture.

In fact, at least one name that appears in the Billups indictment has roots in the mafia’s glory days.

“There’s an Angelo Ruggiero Jr. listed in there,” Jensen says. “His father, Angelo Ruggiero, also known as ‘Quack Quack,’ was a close friend of John Gotti and part of his crew.”

Those who fall into pits of recurring debt are common targets for further exploitation.

“They’re going to want to collect that debt, and they might work with you,” Jensen says. What they might do, he alleges, “especially if you’re a player in the NBA, they might say, ‘You owe me a lot of money, but I can knock some of that off if you do something for me during your next game.’”

Face Cards

Whether these or other types of motivations led to Billups’ and Jones’ alleged involvement in rigging these poker games is impossible to glean based on the information we have today. But the indictment clearly alleges both were active participants in the scam.

Both allegedly served as “face cards” to draw other players to the game, not an unusual role for celebs even in more legitimate settings. Here, though, both former athletes allegedly knew they were front men helping lend faux legitimacy to a fixed game—a level of perceived legitimacy that may have caused other players to let their guard down.

None of the cheating methods alleged in the indictment are new, necessarily. Each, though, underscores the general depth and complexity of the scheme.

One alleged method involves use of “electronic poker chip trays” or cell phones that could read cards placed on the table, which were initially identified by some outlets and social media posts as “x-ray technology.” Those in poker circles, though, believe something was lost in translation here; this likely refers to the use of RFID card reader technology that’s also used to livestream poker on TV or YouTube.

Use of card decks marked on their reverse sides with invisible ink only seen by special glasses or contact lenses is another alleged strategy, allowing the wearer perfect knowledge of everyone’s cards at the table. This is another that’s been well-known in poker circles for some time; these products aren’t hard to find online. They also aren’t especially sophisticated.

“Those decks are really cheap,” Berkey says. “It means they were using, like, a gas station deck, basically. Anybody who’s not an idiot should have figured out that deck wasn’t any good.”

Again, though, many players apparently didn’t spot the tell—perhaps because playing with a legend like Billups distracted them.

Another alleged method is the use of a rigged card shuffling machine. The Deckmate 2, the most popular shuffling machine used in casinos and in private card games today, can be altered to give potential cheaters knowledge of the cards in each player’s hand. WIRED and researchers from IOActive recently teamed up to show how a compromised Deckmate 2 machine can be used to cheat at poker as a proof of concept.

“If I’m ever at a private game where I think something might be possibly shady, and they’re using a Deckmate 2, I would not want to play,” Feldman says. “I’ve always advised friends, if you’re at a private game and you think it might be shady, and you see a Deckmate 2, just run. There’s no reason for it in a private game. It’s just too risky.”

Berkey says virtually all of these alleged cheating methods almost certainly require host involvement—and the help of others.

One role alleged here was the “Operator,” an individual located off-site who obtained hand-by-hand card information via whichever form of cheating technology was being used in the game. According to the indictment, the Operator purportedly communicated that info to the “Quarterback” or “Driver” in the game, who then used predetermined signals to share it with other members of the team and direct their actions at the table.

Scams like these aren’t going anywhere as long as illegal gambling exists, with its various opportunities to exploit greed and dishonesty. But those in the poker world actually see a silver lining to cases like these being publicly exposed.

“Normally when there’s cheating in poker, it’s really hard to catch the people or do anything about it,” Feldman says. He says this is the first time he’s heard of people “getting in trouble” for allegedly manipulating a poker game. “It at least puts that warning out there to other people that try and cheat at poker, like hey, if you do this there’s a chance that you could go to jail.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-billups-games-mob-rigged-star-studded-poker-games-that-cheat-players-out-of-millions/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

SCIENCE | ISABEL O’BRIEN | OCT 30, 2025 AT 6:31 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

A Fight Over Big Tech’s Emissions Has the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Caught in the Crossfire

An ideological war over how tech giants can account for AI data center emissions has bled into the international arena.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES

Last week’s request for public comment from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) doesn’t look like a major win for a tech giant to the naked eye. In fact, it seems almost clerical. But for Google and Microsoft, the announcement constitutes a considerable win in their years-long battle against their competitors over how to account for the carbon emissions of data centers and, by extension, AI.

The announcement shows that the GHGP is one step closer to implementing a mandatory hourly accounting method for electricity emissions—a carbon-accounting system Google and Microsoft have advocated for since 2020 and 2021, respectively.

“We support the proposed Scope 2 updates, which would increase the accuracy and the decarbonization impact of carbon inventories,” says Google spokesperson Mara Harris. Microsoft declined to comment.

As Google celebrates the GHGP’s move, other actors in the emissions space, even those traditionally aligned with Google’s preferred carbon-accounting methodology, note that the fight to get here wasn’t all pretty.

“There’s an intensive lobbying effort going on here, one that these major corporations have each staked considerable reputation and money into, and they are getting a bit ugly,” says Jesse Jenkins, an associate professor at Princeton University and the leader of the Google-funded ZERO (Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization) Laboratory.

Out of Scope

Scope 2 is a subcategory used by the GHGP to account for a company’s indirect emissions from purchased electricity, steam, heat, or cooling. For tech giants, Scope 2 emissions have surged as AI has driven massive growth in data center energy use. As these loads have grown, so too has the pressure to find a new way to account for them.

The GHGP announced its intentions to revise its Scope 2 accounting standards at the end of 2022, eventually accepting a $9.25 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund. Suddenly, the battle between tech giants had spilled out of the white papers and into the real world, with a GHGP-sponsored “working group” set to hammer out the details of what the new standards should be.

Some, though, believed it was never a fair fight.

“Our understanding was that we would have an arena for ideas to go back and forth. It seemed like [from the beginning] it was pretty well-baked where it was going to go,” says a working group member and supporter of an alternative form of Scope 2 accounting, known as “emissions first,” who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

The emissions-first camp is broad. It encompasses the Emissions First Partnership, a group founded by Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce, which argues that companies can maximize annual emission cuts by swapping renewable energy certificates (RECs), even if clean power is purchased far from where it’s used. It also includes a related approach known as “emissionality,” or the “marginal emissions” method, which aims to add stricter rules, ranking RECs by their marginal emissions benefit to ensure they support what is hopefully new, impactful clean energy. (Emissions First declined to comment; Salesforce did not reply to a request for comment.)

The emissions-first approach stands in stark contrast to the hourly accounting method championed by Google and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft. Their standard, utilized by Google under its 24/7 Carbon Free Energy by 2030 goal and Microsoft under its similar 100/100/0 by 2030 vision, aims to match every hour of electricity use from a company facility (mainly data centers) with new, carbon-free power that is theoretically produced locally, ultimately aiming for around-the-clock clean energy.

A War of White Papers

Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have poured considerable resources into advancing their respective accounting methods. According to a report published today by the climate nonprofit InfluenceMap, over 25 major studies on emissions accounting have been released since October 2017. Since the GHGP Scope 2 revision process opened in November 2022, there have been at least 13 related pieces of corporate-sponsored research. Of those, Google has sponsored seven, Meta has sponsored three, Amazon has sponsored two, and Meta and Microsoft have cosponsored one.

Despite the relatively even match seen in the academic publishing space, critics argue that there was no ideological balance on the working group the GHGP created to revise the Scope 2 accounting standards.

Of the 45 members, there is no representation from Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce. In fact, the Emissions First Partnership had to lobby the GHGP for the late inclusion of a representative from Heineken (who joined in March 2025), an Emissions First Partnership member, in an attempt to balance the working group’s representation.

“Following the close of our rolling application window in early 2025, we conducted a gap assessment to address any perceived gaps raised by the Independent Standards Board and stakeholders. Based on this review, the Independent Standards Board appointed additional members across all five Technical Working Groups in February and March 2025,” David Burns, GHGP’s director of governance, tells WIRED. “While we will always consider stakeholder views sent via our formal communications channels, no company or coalition has any role in our decisionmaking, including appointments to technical working groups.”

Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft have direct representatives in the group, as do organizations such as Energy Tag, a nonprofit that has received grant funding from Google. (Energy Tag did not respond to requests for comment.)

Google, for its part, stated through spokesperson Mara Harris that it supports “the continued development of credible metrics to estimate and credit the avoided emissions from carbon-free electricity procurement outside of a company’s carbon inventory,” which theoretically could include the marginal impact method.

Hot and Cold

Despite the perceived bias of the working group, it did manage to move forward with a “Goldilocks” strategy that embraced both mandatory hourly matching and an emissionality method. The group voted on this Goldilocks method in June, ultimately deciding to advance both methods to public comment.

Controversially, the latter half of the proposal—the emissions-first element, called the “marginal impact method,” or MIM—was essentially shot down by the GHGP’s International Standards Board, which stated that despite its majority support from the working group, the marginal impact method needed “further foundational development” before it could move to public comment. That decision was made at the end of July.

However, by the time public consultation was launched in October, the board seemed to have walked back on its decision, sending the hourly accounting proposal to formal public comment and the marginal emissions proposal to an intermediate public comment step that is meant to inform further refining work.

The reasoning behind the reversal remains unclear. There was internal pressure from the Scope 2 working group itself. Nearly a dozen members of varying ideological backgrounds signed a private letter in August, reviewed by WIRED, addressed to the International Standards Board, asking for it to reconsider putting the emissions-first approach on hold and put it out for comment with the hourly matching provision.

“We recommend meeting in early September to ensure we have the appropriate time to respond to feedback,” the letter read.

One signatory divulged that no such meeting took place, though the GHGP did receive a great deal of pushback through formal complaint channels about putting the emissions-first approach on hold. When WIRED asked the GHGP if the letter or outside pushback influenced its decision to reverse the International Standards Board’s decision, the GHGP did not give a response. Rather, a spokesperson for the GHGP, Alison Cinnamond, stated that, “We did not move the full MIM proposal to public consultation. We did advance questions on consequential accounting that are relevant to MIM. The ISB also did not override any previous decision.”

An Unstable Truce?

It’s tempting to say that both the hourly accounting advocates and the emissions-first camp have gotten what they want: Both methodologies advanced to a form of public comment. However, emissions-first advocates argue that the marginal emissions proposal that has been sent to public comment is a “watered down” version of what was proposed for the Scope 2 working group.

Additionally, the marginal emissions approach has been demoted from the Scope 2 working group, with any further work to be done on the topic now going through the Actions and Market Instruments working group. This group had a four-month lapse in meetings between May and September of this year due to the loss of two key employees as well as funding issues. According to a source familiar with the situation, the marginal impact method advocates from the Scope 2 working group were not included in either the September meeting, where the marginal impact method was discussed, or the October meeting.

“The process followed was exactly as outlined in GHG Protocol’s published workplans,” says spokesperson Alison Cinnamond, noting that the marginal impact method wasn’t covered at all at the October meeting. The Scope 2 working group will have the opportunity to engage with the work of the Actions and Market Instruments group in the future, Cinnamond says, but notes that “specific next steps for that engagement are still being determined.”

As such, for many emissions-first-oriented players, even if the marginal impact method manages to get developed within the Actions and Market Instruments working group, it won’t be enough.

The mere reality that some actors will have a mandatory hourly matching requirement has been enough to drive some actors to drastic action. Multiple sources have reported that they have heard rumors of disgruntled companies, tech and non-tech alike, looking to leave the GHGP.

One day after the announcement of the Scope 2 public comment, a rival carbon-accounting coalition made of major Fortune 500 companies (including Exxon Mobil and Air Liquide) was announced: Carbon Measures. Of the corporate members listed on their its, none seem to be members of the Emissions First Partnership. According to Shea Agnew, a spokesperson for Carbon Measures, the launch of the platform has been in the works for months and has no relation to the goings-on at the GHGP.

When asked if their companies were among those considering such a maneuver, both Amazon and Meta declined to comment; according to a source familiar with the two companies’ strategies, they have no immediate plans to leave the GHGP.

Marching Forward

Beyond rumors of members leaving, which has threatened the GHGP’s status as a near-universal standard setter in the carbon-accounting market, the GHGP is facing another existential threat: funding issues. A source with knowledge of the GHGP’s funding situation claims that the aforementioned $9.25 million from the Bezos Earth Fund has run dry, though the nonprofit is listed on the GHGP’s website as a current funder. The Bezos Earth Fund did not reply to a request for comment.

And raising new funds isn’t easy. Companies are looking for more return on investment in the GHGP as climate-related work in the private sector comes under greater scrutiny by the Trump administration.

“The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is definitely in a bit of a financial bind. No one wants to support them because they can’t have their name associated with it, but they depend on philanthropic and corporate money to run. And they’re going in a direction that a lot of companies don’t like the outcome of,” says a source with intimate knowledge of the GHGP’s funding situation.

Instability in the GHGP’s financial position, as well as within its ranks, has come at an inopportune time for the organization. Not only are regulatory regimes in the European Union and California codifying the GHGP’s standards into law, but the GHGP is forging a new partnership with the International Organization for Standardization to further “harmonize” the two organizations’ various carbon-accounting standards.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/greenhouse-gas-protocol-caught-in-big-techs-friendly-fire/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

POLITICS | VITTORIA ELLIOTT | OCT 30, 2025 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Federal Workers Are Barely Making It Through the Government Shutdown

The US government shut down 30 days ago. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen federal workers who have struggled to pay bills, worked side gigs, and relied on free food programs to get by.

Photograph: Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

In late September, a federal worker based abroad learned that her husband, who is also a federal worker and a military veteran, had “high risk, very aggressive cancer.” Doctors told the couple that the cancer needed to be removed immediately or it would no longer be treatable.

Her husband is covered by TRICARE, the health care program offered to members of the military and veterans. “You basically pay upfront, and then you're reimbursed,” says the federal worker, who asked to remain anonymous as she is not authorized to speak to the press. “Typically with big surgeries like this, you get preapproval and the payment process is easier,” she says.

But on October 1, just days before her husband went in for surgery, the government shut down. This meant that his claims can’t be paid until the government reopens. “As soon as the shutdown happened I didn't hear from any more [TRICARE] representatives. I've tried to call and can't get anyone on the phone,” says the federal worker. The couple is out tens of thousands of dollars.

These are just two of the 750,000 furloughed federal workers trying to make ends meet as the government reaches 30 days in shutdown. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen federal workers who have struggled through the last few weeks and described picking up side gigs, taking advantage of free food programs, or working under demoralizing conditions to survive.

Food banks and other organizations like chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen have stepped in to try and soften the blow for furloughed feds, offering free meals. But on entering Andrés’ DC restaurant Jaleo, a Justice Department employee says, they were overwhelmed with a feeling of despair. Sitting along the restaurant’s bar were feds quietly eating free sandwiches. “Something about that was really sad to me,” says the Justice Department worker. “It just felt like, wow, we really are just abused people.”

To make up for the missed pay, some workers are picking up side gigs, like babysitting or playing live music, to earn extra cash.

“I'm worried about my mortgage as I don't have much in savings, but I'm fortunate to make some cash [with] random backup gigs around town and have a partner who can help some. I am very fortunate, so trying to help colleagues who I know don't have that support,” says one General Services Administration worker.

“I've really generously had some friends with babysitting offers,” says a National Institutes of Health worker. “There are avenues in which I can try to make some extra money here and there. But of course, that's a drop in the bucket, and compared to my normal paychecks, it's not really cutting it.”

Employees are also concerned about the impact of the shutdown on their families. A Department of Commerce employee tells WIRED that the stress of the shutdown is filtering into life at home. “We are a full fed family. This administration, during this shutdown, is about as anti-family as I have seen any public institution be,” they say, noting that the drain on morale has made it hard to keep things light at home. “The one suffering? Our kid. We do our best to talk through it, and we have a good history of resiliency around big moves, but we know our kiddo isn't even getting close to the best that we could be doing for her.”

“We’re making do with less while telling our kids why we can’t afford certain things right now,” a Department of Labor employee tells WIRED, who says that with their income eliminated, their family has lost 65 percent of its income. “We are asked daily if we’re going to visit family out of state for Thanksgiving, and we say we don’t know.”

Even for the “excepted” federal employees who are still working (with or without pay), the picture appears bleak. Without other “non-essential” staff, federal workers tell WIRED it’s impossible to move projects forward, meaning that even when the government reopens, systems will likely be backlogged. “Paperwork is piling up and will take a lot of time to untangle, just like during the Covid snarl,” says one employee at the Internal Revenue Service. “We verify certain statuses for government contractors, nonprofits, and state and local services, like firefighters and police, so they can receive subsidies to keep them open. It is already affecting them and will only get worse.”

One employee at the Social Security Administration says that their whole team has been working without pay during the shutdown. “Furloughed employees may be able to claim unemployment compensation or seek temporary employment,” they say, but excepted employees can’t do that. “We have all the costs associated with working, such as commuting costs and daycare expenses, without the paycheck to cover these costs.”

And while federal workers are supposed to receive back pay when the government reopens, they’re going into debt just to make it through each day. “We will not be compensated for the interest we pay on our credit cards, nor for the hit our credit scores take,” they say.

A FEMA worker tells WIRED that without savings, they’ve had to charge most expenses to a credit card; they applied for a 0 percent interest shutdown loan from a credit union, but are still waiting for the cash to hit their account. The government, they said, has not been helpful in providing resources.

“All the info I’m getting is from grassroots groups,” they said. They recently learned about a possible credit from the Salvation Army that would help pay utilities and are signing up for that.

“Last week, I actually thought, what if it never reopens? It doesn’t seem like anyone is working for it to reopen, and the impacts aren’t being felt by the general public,” says an employee with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). “If it does reopen, will they repay us?”

Some government workers first looked at the shutdown as a welcome reprieve from the chaos of the last 10 months; amid an Elon Musk-tinged takeover, they’ve weathered several rounds of RIFs, or reduction in force, emails encouraging resignations, and taken on heftier workloads to compensate for the smaller workforce already this year.

“This is the only breath and moment of happiness I've felt in almost a year, and the guilt of admitting that eats me alive, when I'm not able to keep myself numb from it,” one GSA worker tells WIRED. For many, that relief faded when it became clear that the shutdown wasn’t ending anytime soon.

“When the shutdown began, I was grateful for downtime. Hearing the birds singing during the day brought tears to my eyes,” says the HUD employee. “I thought I could rest, get ahead on Christmas shopping, and cover some days the kids are out of school. I’ve been through this. But as it progresses with no end in sight, I’m scared to spend money.”

The federal worker abroad says that the shutdown has been “disheartening” and enraging. Like many federal employees who spoke to WIRED, she says she doesn’t blame the Democrats for the shutdown, but is instead looking at Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House. “If I missed deadlines on my budgets, like he has, and if I just decided not to come into work and locked the door to my office, I would get a performance improvement plan, and I would have to prove that I could do my job. And if I didn't do that, I would be fired. We took the same oath, we're both federal employees. He is getting paid. I am not. He is getting health care. I am NOT.” (Johnson’s office did not reply to a request for comment as to whether he is still collecting his paycheck.)

“I met my husband at the entrance of the East Wing,” she added. “It's gone. And I feel like the rest of the country is going with it.”

Additional reporting by Molly Taft.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/federal-workers-barely-making-it-through-government-shutdown/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

THE BIG STORY | MANISHA KRISHNAN | OCT 30, 2025 AT 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

How KPop Demon Hunters Star EJAE Topped the Charts

EJAE, the voice and the writing talent behind “Golden,” has gone platinum.

The night before our interview, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter found out that record sales from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack had surged past a million units. Jimmy Fallon, of all people, delivered the news alongside a glimmering framed record when she was appearing on The Tonight Show with Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami for the first full live performance of “Golden.” Together the trio make up the singing voices of girl group Huntr/x in Netflix’s animated musical turned bona fide phenomenon. If you have a kid, you probably don’t need a refresher, but the movie follows Huntr/x’s Rumi, Mira, and Zoey as they juggle being astronomically famous while moonlighting as demon hunters (EJAE sings as the purple-haired Rumi). Their singing voices double as their weapons, shielding their fans from the soul-sucking minions of underworld ruler Gwi-Ma.

That Fallon appearance, and the Saturday Night Live appearance that predated it, might have been the first times that American audiences actually saw (and heard) the human being behind that inescapable song. The adventure fantasy—the directorial debut of Korean-Canadian filmmaker Maggie Kang, who codirected it with Chris Appelhans—is Netflix’s most popular film of all time, with over 400 million views. When Netflix released a sing-along version in theaters, it brought in nearly $20 million, dominating the box office. The soundtrack is one of the highest charting of the year, with more than 7 billion streams. “Golden,” which EJAE partially came up with on a cab ride to the dentist, was number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for eight weeks (as of this writing, it’s only bested by Taylor Swift but remains in the top 10). The promotional tour for the film, which debuted in June, seems to have never ended.

Five-foot-nine and wearing heels, EJAE towers over me when we meet at Netflix’s Manhattan offices. She’s wearing her hair in three braids, reminiscent of Rumi’s iconic hairstyle. Despite looking every bit the part of a K-pop star, EJAE doesn’t consider herself famous. Nor does she particularly want to be, which is somewhat unexpected, considering she was a trainee at famed K-pop label SM Entertainment for more than a decade.

Not unlike American boy-band-forming talent machines of the ’90s, K-pop trainee programs start teaching future stars as children. Trainees keep intense schedules, where they sing, dance, rap, and manage their physical appearances and personas in the hopes of debuting into a K-pop group and becoming an idol. For EJAE, that moment never came. She was passed over time and time again until she was dropped by the label at 23, which she describes as “grandma age for the K-pop industry.” Her voice and her personality, she felt, were better suited for the behind-the-scenes role of songwriting. A decade on, she’s been thrust into the limelight in perhaps the most meta way imaginable—as the voice of a K-pop star that people can’t seem to get enough of. (She has also just released a single of her own music.) She tells WIRED how she’s navigating her newfound success, what it’s like being in the grueling K-pop machine, and the key to writing an absolute banger.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

MANISHA KRISHNAN: How’s it going? Were you just doing a photo shoot upstairs?

EJAE: Oh yeah. I’ve been doing a lot. We’ve been up since like 5 am.

You must be so tired.

I’m so tired. Fallon yesterday and SNL.

I was getting my nails done yesterday and “Golden” came on. It’s been on the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks. What’s it like knowing that every kid in America knows the words to your song?

Oh my God, it’s like a dream come true as a songwriter. Kids are so blunt—so the fact that they love it, it’s like, I feel real proud of myself.

The toughest demographic.

It is hard to get kids’ stamp of approval, so I feel like a cool person.

The movie came out in June. It’s become Netflix’s most-watched project. There’s Oscar buzz. You’ve been doing the late-night circuit. What has been the most dramatic part of all of this for you?

They’re all quite dramatic and crazy and so surreal. But yeah, I mean obviously SNL and Fallon were just definitely peak, especially Fallon, because he gave us the plaque, the platinum plaque.

Oh, amazing.

He really surprised us. I was genuinely so stunned. We were all crying.

When you were on SNL, were you nervous to sing?

I’m always nervous to sing. I’m nervous in the studio to sing, so the fact that I’m performing it is a huge jump for me. My comfort zone and usually where I feel the best singing is my own little corner in my house in Brooklyn.

What is your relationship with fame right now? Do you consider yourself famous?

No. I consider the song famous, which I love. Fame is a tricky thing. I was a K-pop trainee myself, and my grandpa’s an actor, so I’ve seen fame from different angles, and it’s very beautiful in the front, but it can get very, very dark. I feel like fame is definitely not for the faint of heart, and so I’m trying to navigate through it.

I was a trainee and then I got dropped and I wasn’t singing. But to be honest, that was an intentional choice. I was like, being an artist and a singer doesn’t fit my personality. I kind of let that go. So suddenly getting all this attention is very new. I can’t quite say it’s natural for me. I love being behind the scenes. But I’m trying to get used to it. I don’t know if I should get used to it, but yeah, it’s very fascinating, and I’m always grateful.

In light of everything that’s going on right now, have you sort of changed your mind about whether or not you want to be a performing artist?

Songwriting has always been my therapy, and it’s kind of where I get away from everything. So I’m like, maybe I can combine that, and maybe being a songwriter is my artistry. As an artist, I don’t really want to have my personal things be in the lyrics. I want the lyrics and the songs to be quite universal for everyone to connect to, like how “Golden” did. So I kind of want my songs to be pop stars, not necessarily me.

Photograph: Michelle Watt

Can you tell me a little bit of the story of “Golden,” and did you know it was going to be a hit right off the bat?

I mean, in our little circle, yes, it was a hit but definitely not this caliber at all. The melody came quite instantly. It was on my way to the dentist.

The most inspired.

Getting a gold filling, by the way. So the melody came really fast, but when we finished it, I had this session with Mark [Sonnenblick], my cowriter, right after, and Mark was so excited. I was like, “I have this melody.” He heard it and was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” So when we finished the whole song and the lyrics, we just looked at ourselves and we’re like, “Wow, I think this is a smash.”

Is there a formula to making a K-pop hit or an algorithm to it, or is it just different every time?

For a K-pop hit, a US hit, and a global hit, it’s all quite different. I think for a K-pop hit, being hooky is definitely important. Global hit, I’ve noticed, is a concept that everyone can say—everyone knows what “Golden” means. Everyone has a feeling of wanting hope in their life, especially right now at this time. In the US that’s also important too. So I think universally, when the concept is really good and it’s easy to say, and when there’s a good melody and a great message, you have a hit.

Do you think the intense political atmosphere right now is part of why this movie and this song have taken off?

I think so. A friend of mine told me that his friend has kids, and KPop Demon Hunters is bringing light to their kid that they can hold onto and just kind of focus on that and kind of ignore the dark times right now. It brings them hope. It has a really beautiful message, makes them want to love all of themselves, all their flaws and all their good parts too.

I want to go back to you being a trainee for SM Entertainment. How old were you when that happened? Can you tell me a little bit about that world?

I had a dream of wanting to become a singer when I was 3, 4, and then I started auditioning around 10 or 11. I got in and started training quite immediately. You learn how to dance, sing, jazz dance, rap, Chinese, Japanese, the whole thing. All day, literally. So if we have school, right after school we go immediately to train. Every couple months there would be a showcase of what you’ve learned. Every Monday, all the trainees would join in one room, and we would go in front of the camera and sing and do our dance moves. It’s like a weekly checkup. So that was quite something, and we would have to weigh ourselves every week too. So it was intense. I’m not going to lie.

What was the criticism like? Was it harsh? How do you cope with that at a young age?

Damn, I don’t think I knew what coping meant at that age. We just take it literally, especially when you’re 11, when you’re going through puberty is when girls are so sensitive. I feel like when we’re teenagers, we are very sensitive to a lot of things. It wasn’t easy. It’s very competitive, and you’re kind of trying to do this job that’s essentially an adult job, you know what I mean? All I could do was work hard and always try to put my best foot forward. I was always craving a compliment, like, “Oh, you did so good today.” I just wanted something.

Did you get those very often?

Not really. Not much. It’s very objective. Looking at it now as an adult, I understand the reason behind certain things when it comes to marketing or something like that, but at a young age it’s not easy to hear. So I’m glad the fame is coming now, not when I was a kid.

Looking at where you are now, does it give you any satisfaction, just thinking back on the people who maybe didn’t believe in you or who didn’t give you an opportunity? You can be petty.

Back then I was not at the level that I am now. I couldn’t sing those high notes back then, so I get where they were coming from. I think everything happens for a reason. But I do feel satisfied in the fact that I didn’t give up and I just kept going. And I think the biggest regret I had when I got dropped was I felt like I let down 11-year-old EJAE, who really wanted to become a singer. So in that respect, I hope I made her proud.

I was listening to an interview with the film’s codirector Maggie Kang and she was saying how it took her years to even be able to pitch this movie. What does it mean to have this breakthrough moment and for that to be an Asian story and a Korean story?

Oh my God, it means the world. It means so much as a Korean American, Asian American woman. And it just feels so cool to be finally portrayed as not the typical portrayal of Asian women—subservient and quiet and passive and always listening. Cause I’m not really like that. I’m quite outspoken, I’m quite blunt. And I just feel like finally there’s a superhero movie about Korean women, and they’re so funny. They’re goofy. They’re not just solely strong and badass, but they eat their food crazy. I do that all the time. We binge on our food.

What do the next few months look like for you? How are you going to leverage what’s happening now? I’ve seen fans say that they want you to go on tour and have holograms of the characters. Would you do that?

Who knows? I mean, I’d be down, but it’s not up to me. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, KPop Demon Hunters fans are amazing. They’re so nice. So nice.

You sound surprised.

No, no. It can be scary, but they’re so welcoming, so understanding, so encouraging. So hell yeah, I would love to meet them too.

I did actually want to ask you about the K-pop fandom, because it seems kind of intimidating.

It’s intimidating, absolutely. I do appreciate their passion. When I was a K-pop trainee there was a boy band called TVXQ. They were huge at that time. And I still remember, there was a third-floor dance practice room, and to walk up from the first floor we had to pass this glass door. Fans were all over that door, and they would try to open it. Once they had a little bit of a crack open, and whenever female trainees would go up, they would throw trash and call us really bad names. I just remember feeling so scared.

What do you think that was about?

It’s tricky when you’re idolizing someone so much. It can get very dark, fast—and toxic. A lot of the fans are teenagers, and I feel like when you’re a teenager, you’re going through puberty, you feel lots of intense emotions.

What is your relationship to ambition right now?

What a cool question. Toxic. I’m kidding.

Same.

It can be, right? I swear. That’s like “Golden.” “Golden” is a bittersweet song. Technically it sounds like it’s hopeful. It is. Don’t get me wrong. But in that moment with Rumi and the character, she’s so focused on the honmoon and getting that achievement that she kind of ignores her flaws. Even in the movie, you see her saying “no more hiding” while she’s hiding. That’s a really important part of that song. So as much as it’s great to strive and be ambitious and go, always do it in a healthy way, always keep talking to yourself while you’re doing it. Don’t ignore your health. Don’t ignore your mental health. A great balance, I think, is important.

Are you able to balance that, though? You did say you’ve been up since 5 am.

You got me there. I’m sometimes more ambitious; sometimes I let it go. I think it’s important to be flexible.

What would mean more to you? A Grammy or an Oscar?

Both.

You want both?

Absolutely. It’s just like the team works so hard, and the soundtrack and the movie just works like a synergy in itself. It has to be both.

That’s pretty ambitious.

It is. It’s a dream.

Updated 10/30/25 11:45pm ET. Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

Styling by Jacquie Trevizo. Styling assistance by Lindsey Trounson. Set design by Marie-Yan Morvan. Hair by Mark Alan Esparza. Makeup by Kevin Cheah. Nails by Taku Okamura. Suit by Sergio Hudson. Shoes by Jimmy Choo. Jewelry by Grace Lee.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/how-k-pop-demon-hunters-star-ejae-topped-the-charts/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | LAUREN GOODE | OCT 29, 2025 AT 10:09 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Meta, Google, and Microsoft Triple Down on AI Spending

Three of the biggest US tech giants—Microsoft, Meta, and Google—sent investors a blunt message when they reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday: Their lavish spending on AI infrastructure is only just getting started.

Meta said that its capital expenditure would total between $70 billion and $72 billion this year, up from its previous lower forecast of $66 billion to $72 billion. Meta’s chief financial officer Susan Li said that she expected the company's spending would be “notably larger" next year. The social media giant’s soaring investment matches its soaring revenue: Meta reported raking in $51.24 billion last quarter, up 26 percent year over year.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would keep pouring money into infrastructure to meet rising demand for AI and to prepare for potential major breakthroughs in the technology. "There's a range of timelines for when people think that we're going to get superintelligence," Zuckerberg said on a conference call with analysts. "I think that it's the right strategy to aggressively front-load building capacity, so that way we're prepared for the most optimistic cases."

Meta has moved aggressively to recruit AI talent in recent months, offering some researchers compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The company also cut some 600 jobs last week in what it said was an effort to make its AI teams more efficient. Meta has reorganized its AI teams numerous times over the past eight months.

Meta assured investors that its AI investments were already reaping rewards for the company, but didn’t share many specifics. Meta did say AI was benefiting its ad business and virtual reality product lines, and predicted it would propel those divisions to new heights in the future.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said it expected its 2025 capital expenditures to be between $91 billion and $93 billion. Earlier this year, Alphabet estimated that number would be just $75 billion. Like at Meta, the increase in spending was matched with an increase in revenue. The tech giant said it earned a record $102.3 billion in the third quarter, up 33 percent from a year ago.

Most of Alphabet’s spending will likely be funneled into data centers and other artificial intelligence initiatives. Google said it earned $15.15 billion from its cloud business in the third quarter, a 35 percent increase from the same period in 2024. Gemini, Google’s general purpose AI app, now has 650 million monthly active users, up from 450 million last quarter. (For comparison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users.)

Microsoft reported revenues of $77 billion for the quarter ending on September 30, up 18 percent from a year ago. Its cloud business revenue was up 26 percent year over year. Its capital expenditures were $34.9 billion this quarter, with much of the investment going toward AI infrastructure. That figure is nearly $5 billion more than previously forecasted, and a 74 percent jump from the same quarter a year ago.

While Microsoft didn’t offer a specific forecast for its AI capital expenditures for the next quarter or coming year, the company’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, said that the company’s total spend will “increase sequentially, and we now expect the fiscal year 2026 growth rate to be higher than fiscal year 2025.”

Tech companies are making these ambitious plans for more capital spending under the assumption that demand for AI will only continue to grow. But some analysts are raising concerns that the AI market is a bubble and will eventually burst.

Those worries are being fueled by announcements about enormously expensive, multi-year data center projects and staggered investments. Last month, Nvidia said it would invest “up to $100 billion” in OpenAI, provided that the ChatGPT maker builds and deploys at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers using Nvidia’s chips. OpenAI, meanwhile, said just yesterday that it was planning to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources worth $1.4 trillion.

Microsoft has committed to putting a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, and it continues to use the company’s frontier AI models, but took a $3.1 billion hit in net income this quarter due to losses from that investment. Microsoft said that the ongoing nature of its partnership with OpenAI will result in increased volatility. Going forward, Hood said, the company will exclude any impacts from its OpenAI investment in its financial outlooks.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts there are two “critical” things to consider about how the company views its capital expenditures. The first is that it is finding ways to make its fleet of data centers “fungible,” or interchangeable, meaning they can be easily modified to meet changing customer demands in the future. The second is that the company is expecting to continually modernize its infrastructure.

“It’s not like we buy one version of Nvidia and load up for all the gigawatts we have. Each year, you buy, you ride Moore’s law, you continually modernize and depreciate it, and you use software to grow efficiency,” Nadella said.

Mark Moerdler, a senior research analyst covering global software at Bernstein, says that Microsoft is “building capacity in tranches over time and can shift resources, which gives them a lot of protection.” But, he added, “Is there an overall AI bubble? It’s possible, and that they did not answer.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-google-meta-2025-earnings/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

SECURITY | LILY HAY NEWMAN | OCT 29, 2025 AT 4:20 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, its widely used 365 services, Xbox, and Minecraft started suffering outages at roughly noon Eastern time on Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft said was “an inadvertent configuration change.” The incident—which marks the second major cloud provider outage in less than two weeks—highlights the instability of an internet built largely on infrastructure run by a few tech giants.

Microsoft's problems specifically originated from Azure's Front Door content delivery network and emerged just hours before Microsoft's scheduled earnings announcement. The company website, including its investor relations page, was still down on Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft provides updates was having intermittent issues as well.

Microsoft described in status updates on Wednesday that it went through a process of sequentially rolling back recent versions of its environment until it could pinpoint the “last known good” configuration. At 3:01 pm ET, the company said it had identified and pushed this stable configuration and that “customers may begin to see initial signs of recovery. We are currently recovering nodes and routing traffic through healthy nodes.”

A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services. Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts." The company did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED about the nature of the configuration change that caused the outage.

In addition to occurring on Microsoft's earnings day, the outage comes nine days after Azure rival Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage that impacted sites and services around the world. Major cloud providers, often called “hyperscalers,” standardize and often improve baseline security and reliability for their customers, but problems and outages can cause them to become single points of failure for large populations of critical digital services

“Even Azure’s outage status page is down,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a longtime security operations and compliance manager and a vice president at the data infrastructure company Inrupt. “Another configuration change error—we are in the age of integrity breach more so now than ever.”

Azure blocked customers from making configuration changes to their instances while it worked to address the issue. The company said in a status update at 3:22 pm ET that it expects “full mitigation” of the situation by 7:20 pm ET.

“Organizations may think they’re insulated by their choice of cloud provider, but dependencies run deeper,” says Munish Walther-Puri, an adjunct faculty member at IANS Research and the former director of cyber risk for the city of New York. “When key partners rely on other hyperscalers, exposure multiplies. As AI becomes the next layer of critical infrastructure, these outages demonstrate the brittleness of our digital backbone.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-microsoft-azure-outage-shows-the-harsh-reality-of-cloud-failures/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

GEAR | BRAD BOURQUE | OCT 29, 2025 AT 2:15 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Pixel Watch 3 Is $100 Off

Are you an Android user who is constantly looking at Apple Watch owners with envy? You're in luck, as the Pixel Watch 3 is marked down to just $200 at Amazon in several colors. I spotted three discounted colors of the 45mm aluminum version in matte black, champagne gold, and polished silver.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

- Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

- Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Google

Pixel Watch 3

$300 $250 (17% off)

Amazon

$350 $200 (43% off)

Best Buy

$350 $270 (23% off)

Google Store

While Apple users have always had the Apple Watch, it's taken Google a little while to catch up with its first-party hardware offerings. They've come a long way in the last few years, enough that the previous generations of the Pixel Watch are capable enough to recommend, while still seeing significant discounts. This version benefits from a lot of the Wear OS updates of the last few years, while only missing out on a few features of the updated Pixel Watch 4.

The health and fitness tracking on the Pixel Watch have received a number of improvements since Google purchased FitBit back in 2019. This model has improved heart rate tracking and sleep data, and can automatically detect what kind of workout you're doing. Unfortunately, one of our writers didn't have the best experience with the AI-powered running coach, but that's more the fault of AI and less of accurate measurements.

One advantage the Pixel Watch has over the Apple Watch is looks. Round watches tend to look more natural, and the rounded glass face has a unique and elegant look that stands out, although you'll have to choose from straps made specifically for the Pixel Watch. We were impressed with the battery life on the larger version, which was able to run for around 24 hours on a single charge with one or two tracked activities per day. That should be enough to get you through the day and track your sleep as well, as long as you aren't working out constantly.

Ultimately, there's a reason the Pixel Watch tends to stay on top of our list of favorite smartwatches for Android users. It's uniquely elegant, and particularly good for Pixel smartphone owners, so a healthy discount just makes this an even more appealing choice.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/pixel-watch-3-deal-1025/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

BUSINESS | WILL KNIGHT | OCT 29, 2025 AT 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance Workers

Even the best artificial intelligence agents are fairly hopeless at online freelance work, according to an experiment that challenges the idea of AI replacing office workers en masse.

The Remote Labor Index, a new benchmark developed by researchers at data annotation company Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), a nonprofit, measures the ability of frontier AI models to automate economically valuable work.

The researchers gave several leading AI agents a range of simulated freelance work and found that even the best could perform less than 3 percent of the work, earning $1,810 out of a possible $143,991. The researchers looked at several tools and found the most capable to be Manus from a Chinese startup of the same name, followed by Grok from xAI, Claude from Anthropic, ChatGPT from OpenAI, and Gemini from Google.

“I should hope this gives much more accurate impressions as to what's going on with AI capabilities,” says Dan Hendrycks, director of CAIS. He adds that while some agents have improved significantly over the past year or so, that does not mean that this will continue at the same rate.

Spectacular AI advances have led to speculation about AI soon surpassing human intelligence and replacing vast numbers of workers. In March, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, suggested that 90 percent of coding work would be automated within a matter of months.

Previous waves of AI have inspired misplaced predictions about job displacement, for example concerning the imminent replacement of radiologists with AI algorithms.

The researchers generated a range of freelance tasks through verified Upwork workers. The tasks span a range of work including graphic design, video editing, game development, and administrative chores like scraping data. They combined a description of each job with a directory of files needed to perform the work and an example of a finished project produced by a human.

Hendrycks says that while AI models have gotten better at coding, math, and logical reasoning in recent years, they still struggle to use different tools and to perform complex tasks that involve numerous steps. “They don't have long-term memory storage and can't do continual learning from experiences. They can't pick up skills on the job like humans,” he says.

The analysis offers a counterpoint to a benchmark of economic work offered in September by OpenAI called GDPval, which purports to measure economically valuable work. According to GDPval, frontier AI models such as GPT-5 are approaching human abilities on 220 tasks across a range of office jobs. OpenAI did not provide a comment.

“We have debated AI and jobs for years, but most of it has been hypothetical or theoretical,” adds Bing Liu, director of research at Scale AI.

Liu and Hendrycks concede that the new benchmark is not a perfect yardstick for AI’s economic impact. Many professions include tasks not covered by the measure. In reality, many freelancers are also likely to use AI as a tool in a way that amplifies their productivity.

The idea that AI is already taking jobs is gaining momentum however. This week Amazon announced that it would cut 14,000 jobs in a move that it partly blamed on the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, wrote in a publicly shared memo. “It's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).”

If the Remote Labor Index is any indication, however, AI is unlikely to be stepping into any of these vacated roles.

Are you worried about AI taking your job? Let me know by sending an email to ailab@wired.com.

This is an edition of Will Knight’s AI Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/ai-agents-are-terrible-freelance-workers/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

AI

- Extropic Aims to Disrupt the Data Center Bonanza

- Donald Trump Is the First AI Slop President

- The Director of a Raunchy 3-Hour Dracula Movie Says AI Is Gross and Slimy. That’s Why He Used It

BUSINESS | WILL KNIGHT | OCT 29, 2025 AT 1:11 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Extropic Aims to Disrupt the Data Center Bonanza

Extropic, a startup developing an exotic new kind of computer chip that handles probabilistic bits, has produced its first working hardware along with proof that more advanced systems can tackle useful tasks in artificial intelligence and scientific research.

The startup’s chips work in a fundamentally different way than chips from Nvidia, AMD, and others, and they promise to be thousands of times more energy-efficient when scaled up. With AI companies pouring billions of dollars into building data centers, a completely new approach could offer a far less costly alternative to vast arrays of conventional chips.

Extropic calls its processors thermodynamic sampling units, or TSUs, as opposed to central processing units (CPUs) or graphics processing units (GPUs). TSUs use silicon components to harness thermodynamic electron fluctuations, shaping them to model probabilities of various complex systems, such as the weather, or AI models capable of generating images, text, or videos.

The first working Extropic chip has now been shared with a handful of partners, including frontier AI labs, startups working on weather modeling, and representatives from several governments. (Extropic has declined to provide names.)

“This allows all sorts of developers to kick the tires,” says Extropic CEO Guillaume Verdon, who gained notoriety within the tech world as a colorful and sometimes controversial online persona called Based Beff Jezos and a new techno philosophy known as effective accelerationism or e/acc before founding the startup. Verdon and his cofounder, Trevor McCourt, who is Extropic’s CTO, previously worked on quantum computing at Google before pursuing their novel computing approach.

One of those who is now testing the new hardware is Johan Mathe, CEO of Atmo, a startup using AI models that can forecast with higher resolution than is otherwise possible. It’s customers include the Department of Defense. Mathe says that Extropic’s chips should make it possible to calculate the odds of different weather conditions far more efficiently.

Extropic is also releasing software called TRHML that makes it possible to simulate the behavior of an Extropic chip on a GPU. Mathe has used this software as well as the real chip. “I was able to run a few p-bits and see that they behave the way they are supposed to,” Mathe says.

The company’s hardware, called XTR-0, consists of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip, which can be reconfigured for different tasks, combined with two of its first probabilist chip, X-0, each of which contains a handful of p-bits.

The XTR-0.

Courtesy of Extropic

Single daughterboard.

Courtesy of Extropic

Instead of conventional bits corresponding to either a 1 or a 0, the new chip features probabilistic bits, or p-bits, that model uncertainty. Although limited in scale, the new chip demonstrates the potential of the company’s new approach.

“We have a machine-learning primitive that is far more efficient than matrix multiplication,” McCourt says. “The question is, how do you build something on the scale of ChatGPT or Midjourney.”

In a paper posted to arXiv, the company lays out how a larger chip with thousands of p-bits, which it claims it can deliver next year, could be used to create a new kind of diffusion model—an important type of model that is used to generate images and videos and to guide robots’ actions.

“It could be a huge win,” Mathe says of the forthcoming chip, dubbed Z-1, which Extropic says will have 250,000 p-bits.

“Their approach to the physics of information processing could prove transformative over the next decade, particularly as conventional transistor scaling hits fundamental limits,” adds Vincent Weisser, CEO of Prime Intellect, a startup working on distributed AI approaches. “If scaled practically, it could deliver orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy efficiency and density, critical for workloads where energy per operation is a bottleneck.”

Verdon and McCourt argue that the incredible amount of money being poured into building AI data centers ignores the incredible energy requirements that such a boom would entail. “Even if we have a 1 percent chance of success—and we think it’s much higher than that—it’s worth trying,” McCourt says.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/extropic-aims-to-disrupt-the-data-center-bonanza/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

POLITICS | JAKE LAHUT | OCT 29, 2025 AT 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Donald Trump Is the First AI Slop President

President Donald Trump, a septuagenarian known for his general avoidance of keyboards and computers, has somehow become America’s first generative AI president.

The most infamous example of his experimentation with AI-generated videos came ahead of the No Kings protests earlier this month. In the clip, the president is decked out in full Top Gun gear, piloting a fighter jet bearing “KING TRUMP” on its side. Instead of a traditional pilot’s helmet, however, the president is wearing a literal crown, just in case the rest of the visuals were too subtle. The plane succeeds in its mission: dumping inconceivable amounts of shit upon fictionalized No Kings protesters in New York’s Times Square.

This is just the latest AI slop Trump has posted. He’s also shared a racist depiction of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a mustache and sombrero, a highly dystopian, bizarre “Trump Gaza” video, and more.

You have to wonder—how do these videos end up on Trump’s official account in the first place?

The president of the United States, I’ve learned, is at the very least capable of posting AI videos on main: According to a senior White House official, there are times when Trump will come across a video he finds particularly funny or amusing—either on Truth Social or through other unspecified channels—save it to his camera roll, and release it into the world. Most of the time, though, it’s staffers who identify a clip and gain approval for it to be posted on the president’s main account. Either way, Trump isn’t making the actual videos himself.

The White House remains cagey as to how the fighter jet video, specifically, ended up happening, and who, exactly, hit the button to post it.

As a general trend, it appears Trump is typing away on social media less than in his peak posting days, a former Trump campaign official tells me. He has long relied on dictation and annotated printouts, while still being prone to the more than occasional covfefe-esque typo.

Long before his descent into the AI slop trenches, Trump saw the value in having a team manage his Twitter presence. Trump would go on to strike fear into Republican politicians and business executives with his news-making and market-moving tweets throughout his first term in office, before getting suspended from the platform after inciting the January 6 insurrection. In the social media wilderness, he founded Truth Social in October 2021.

In the Truth Social era of the Trump White House, the president usually delegates his social media posts to two key staffers.

There’s Dan Scavino, a longtime Trump adviser who has climbed all the way from an assistant manager position at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester to director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, officially replacing Sergio Gor earlier this month. As Scavino has expanded his portfolio and delegated more of his longer-standing duties around the social media operation, Natalie Harp, a key Trump aide who’s been referred to internally as “the human printer,” has become an increasingly powerful figure in what type of content emanates from the administration.

Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist and de facto MAGA loyalty czar who has Trump’s ear, tells me she estimates that 95 percent of the time, it’s Scavino or Harp who physically execute the Truth Social posts, which is in line with the guesstimates of other Trumpworld sources I spoke with. (Trump’s share of the posting from the peak Twitter era was “significantly higher than that,” the former campaign official adds.)

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Trump administration’s use of generative AI videos. We don’t know who is making the ones he doesn’t simply encounter in the wild and getting them in front of the president. We also don’t know if there’s a preferred service among the accounts from which the videos originate, such as xAI’s Grok Imagine or Open AI’s Sora.

Regardless of the software at play, the president has brought the nation into new territory with his use of this technology. Sure, it may not be the more sci-fi and Machiavellian version of deepfakes once feared. But it’s still a bad spot to be in.

For years, experts have warned of the perils deepfake videos could pose to our democracy. Those of us covering US politics in this era have been waiting for “the big one,” a doctored video of something so severe that it upends an election, triggers a stock market meltdown, or starts a war.

That day may well come. For now, though, we’re on a far dumber part of the timeline. As I tried to discern what the White House’s strategy is when it comes to these videos, it became increasingly apparent that there is none—except for, perhaps, trolling and mockery for their own sake.

And still—we have an aging president who has been prone to mistaking B-roll footage on Fox News from Portland in 2020 with real conditions on the ground and is now playing it fast and loose with the type of AI that blurs the lines between truth and fiction, between the serious and the absurd. What could go wrong?

This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-ai-slop-white-house/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

CULTURE | JOHN SEMLEY | OCT 29, 2025 AT 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

The Director of a Raunchy 3-Hour Dracula Movie Says AI Is Gross and Slimy. That’s Why He Used It

Radu Jude is the internet’s favorite filmmaker. Or at least its most controversial.

In 2021, the Romanian writer-director bagged the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a black comedy about a school teacher whose career is threatened when a hardcore porno she makes with her husband goes viral. Shot largely on the streets of Bucharest during Covid-19 lockdowns, the film documents the eerie, empty aesthetic of urban centers in the era and captures real citizens snarling and cursing at the camera and at the film’s lead actress. His follow-up, 2023’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, nailed a different strain of post-Covid alienation. Its heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), toils away 9 to 5 making shady workplace safety videos for a faceless multinational while moonlighting on TikTok, pretending to be a misogynist influencer (modeled after Romania’s own model of toxic masculinity, Andrew Tate).

Despite their regional particularities—unfolding across what he calls “the margins of Europe”—Jude’s films reflect an anxious feeling that is increasingly global: the derangement of being jacked into the internet, 24/7. With their mix of high intellectual pontification and vulgar low-humor, Jude has won over audiences at film festivals and art-houses who vibe on his absurd, caustic, somewhat doomer-ish wavelength, which vibrates somewhere between Jean-Luc Godard and Beavis and Butt-Head. With his latest film, Dracula, Jude seems intent on challenging, and even alienating, his most devoted admirers.

Opening in theaters October 29, Dracula takes the myth of the uniquely Romanian monster and feeds it into an AI generator—figuratively, and literally. The film is structured around a filmmaker (Adonis Tanta) tasked with making a blockbuster vampire film. Bereft of ideas, he provides an artificial intelligence app a series of prompts, and it spits out the various short (and not-so-short) films that comprise the actual movie. In one vignette, an actor in a pornographic stage production of Dracula is hunted down by a mob of tourists. In another, the Count plays as a maniacal boss overseeing a workshop of tech workers. There is plenty of blood and gore. And even more in the way of full-frontal nudity, animated and otherwise.

Clocking in at nearly three hours and abounding with actual AI images (of Count Dracula, of the Romanian warlord Vlad Tepes that inspired the famous vampire, and much, much else), the film seems almost deliberately enervating. In a climate where many in the film and creative industries see generative AI as an affront to both the medium and their careers, Jude’s use of the technology has proved contentious. Cheeky, satirical, obscene AI-generated images are, after all, still AI-generated images.

When he appeared via Zoom following a screening at the recent New York Film Festival, framed by an AI-generated backdrop, one skeptical cinephile snarked that Jude himself was officially “on fraud watch.”

Jude finds himself in the exact sort of knot his movies tend to draw tighter and tighter. His films have previously used mock-executions to explore the repression of historical memory, pornography to expose the cultural hypocrisy around adult sexuality, and misogynist posturing to grapple with the appeal of such postures. With Dracula, he weaponizes AI to damn AI? Or—as some purists believe—is stooping to use the technology at all a betrayal of cinema and the human creative spirit itself?

To figure this out, WIRED spoke to Jude, who appeared from France via Zoom, backgrounded by an AI-generated image of Donald Trump brandishing an AR-15 rifle while riding a cartoon kitty cat.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: Who’s that behind you? President Trump?

Radu Jude: I used this image at a European festival, where I was asked to give an online talk. Now that I’ve been invited to discuss my film with some American friends, I thought I’d offer them something they’d appreciate. This image was shared by Trump himself, when he was campaigning as the defender of cats and dogs.

Dracula opens with this director who can’t think of any ideas for a Dracula movie. So he turns to AI. Is this a real temptation you’ve had as a filmmaker?

Not a temptation. But a problem. This project had many, many false starts. When ChatGPT appeared I had this idea of structuring the movie around that. I tried a few scenarios with ChatGPT, I tried to get it to make a Dracula porn film set in Auschwitz, and it rejected it. So I thought I could jump in and make things that the machine wouldn’t do. I was pretending that I am the AI machine. The other issue was the budget. We found a way to cut the budget was to use AI imagery. And we just did it. I felt entitled to do it, without being aware that in some more important culture industries, like in the United States, it’s a big issue. So of course the film is a critique of AI images. But it also came from a curiosity of how they work. For me, it’s a new tool. And like any new tool, you can use it or not use it.

Did you also feel entitled because you were satirizing AI images and even showing off how gross they are? I’m sure you know, or have at least discovered making festival appearances, that among certain people in the film industry, there’s a hard line with AI. They don’t want you to use it, even if you’re making fun of it.

It’s not the same attitude where I come from as it is in France, or the UK, or the United States. You know, Romania is a tiny country with a nonexistent film industry, basically on the margins of Europe. So there’s no stakes involved. There’s nothing to lose. But I respect any perspective on this. If you don’t want to use this, or even reject it, that’s fine. There is a resistance to something that is new and which is also, of course, problematic. I can understand the need to regulate AI, because there’s economic issues and aesthetic issues and even environmental issues. I’m aware of those things. But I’m trying to put it in balance. I decided to use it and take the risk and accept the backlash.

You seem to relish the backlash. Pissing people off a little bit doesn’t seem to bother you.

I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that. I would say it’s normal and healthy if a work of art provokes different kinds of reactions—including rejection. That’s the only domain in our existence where backlash, or conflict, gives way to good things. In politics it’s not like that. In war, of course, it’s not like that. In art, the exercise of engaging in something different—and even rejecting, or being violent against it, or accepting it with a certain gusto—is good. Every reaction is good. Every emotion is good, and there’s really no hierarchy to that. I think there’s a human need to be appreciated. But I also think that to be rejected is part of the appreciation, in a way.

I want to know about the process of actually generating these images. They’re slimy and pulsating and hypersexual. Again, I can’t think of a better word than “gross.” There’s an irony here, because AI images always aspire to hyperrealism. Did you have to work even harder to make them look so bad?

Yes. These images are made to seem more and more photorealistic. But there is always an element of kitsch to them or an element of really bad taste. There’s nothing beautiful. But if you go to the other extreme and accept the bad images, you might find some images that are not photorealistic but have a certain poetry because of their errors. You may have someone with three hands, or a person with four heads, or with genitalia in their chest. I always kept the wrong results because I found them nicer and poetical somehow. You have to really spend a bit of time and say, Oh my god, this is not only ugly and gross and slimy, but it is something that has a certain digital poetry. AI poetry, maybe it can be named. Maybe that’s a new genre.

There’s a vulgarism, or a primitivism to it.

Yes, a primitivism.

It’s weird to ascribe that to a machine that’s not thinking. But they have that quality. Like they’re the product of a monstrous mind.

It’s true. But the fact that it’s generated by a machine doesn’t change it that much. Because even a photograph is generated by a machine. But of course it’s a different ontological thing.

About those ontological differences: You’ve talked before about the “empire of images,” where great works of cinema and Renaissance masterpieces and TikTok videos and AI slop all belong to the same domain. They’re all, in some way, the same. What do you mean by the “empire of images”?

Maybe I was wrong to say they’re the same. Of course there are differences. The composer John Cage is a big influence on me. He had the same attitude toward sounds. [He believed] there are no bad sounds. Everything is music. If you listen to the rain, it’s music. If you listen to traffic, it’s music. To discover that sounds are beautiful like that, I think you need a certain openness. So that’s what I meant. Not that they’re all equal. And I think that’s another way to enjoy life. Instead of saying, “Oh there’s so many ugly things! Where is the beauty in our world?!” If you consider all those things as worthy of interest, then I think we have a better enjoyment of life.

In the film, one character quotes the line from Marx’s Capital, comparing capitalism to vampirism. Do you view AI technology as similarly vampiric, taking the creative labor of other artists and sapping it?

I think it’s the perfect metaphor for AI. And one of the big problems that this technology has. I used AI for this film because it seemed like the perfect match.

So you’ve done Dracula, you’ve experimented with AI. Is this technology you think you’ll use going forward? Or is it like Oppenheimer with the atomic bomb: You’ve used it once so that nobody shall ever use it again?

It depends. I understand there is a backlash in the United States. I’m in the middle of a new film right now that doesn’t use a second of AI. But I’m also finishing the postproduction on a short film that uses an AI-generated voice reciting some Dante poems. So, I’m not rejecting it. I don’t have an intention for my next project to use it, necessarily. But if I find I need to do it, I will do it, with no problems.

Here there’s a great suspicion about it. People here are very vigilant about AI.

And they should be! There are higher stakes. There’s a lot of money involved, millions and billions. It's a huge industry, and you have to defend it. Come to Romania! You can do it, no problem.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/the-director-of-a-raunchy-3-hour-dracula-movie-says-ai-is-gross-and-slimy-thats-why-he-used-it/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:27 PM EDT.

Business

- How to Keep Subways and Trains Cool in an Ever Hotter World

SCIENCE | CHRIS BARANIUK | OCT 29, 2025 AT 1:25 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

How to Keep Subways and Trains Cool in an Ever Hotter World

The highest temperature that Jonathan Paul has ever recorded in a London Tube station is about 42 Celsius, or 107.6 Fahrenheit. Paul, a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, uses his thermometer-equipped smartphone to take such readings. 42C is the kind of heat that would send someone running to the nearest air-conditioned building. Underground, though, they can’t. There’s nothing but stifling tunnels and screeching trains down here.

The Tube network runs through thick clay, and that dense material has been soaking up heat generated by trains since the tunnels were first dug, in some cases more than 100 years ago. Fitting air-conditioning units to trains risks heating up the tunnels even more, as warm air from inside carriages gets dumped into the aging tubes.

But Paul has an idea to cool the tunnels themselves. “Water, as a refrigerant, can hold huge amounts of heat,” he says. “It’s everywhere beneath London.” He’s working on a technology that would use groundwater at roughly 10 Celsius to ferry excessive heat away from underground stations. And he’s testing it deep in a chalk quarry to the west of London, near the town of Reading.

Trains, being metal tubes packed with people, are hard to cool down. But as summers get hotter due to climate change, ensuring public transport remains comfortable and safe is becoming ever more important. It’s a global issue. Train riders in Japan and Morocco have complained about insufficient air-conditioning during heat waves this year, and a 2023 study reported train carriage temperatures as high as 47 degrees Celsius in India.

Paul, for one, has witnessed the effects of overheating on commuters using overground trains. “I’ve seen four people faint this summer,” he says.

The first air-conditioned trains date back roughly a century. One 1933 article put it like this: “Until now, every one has dreaded a railway journey in summer.” If only they could have seen the future. Today, trains and underground transport networks can be so uncomfortable during heat waves that many passengers avoid using them altogether.

Paul and his colleagues believe their solution will work. Climb 20 meters down a ladder into that chalk quarry near Reading and you will find it. There are multiple galleries of varying sizes carved into the chalk, separated by doors. “We’re trying to simulate real-life conditions in the Tube,” says Paul—though things down in the quarry are a little more drab. “It’s very dark, it’s quite dingy.”

In 2022, he and a colleague published a paper that described how water from subterranean rivers or aquifers could be pumped into heat exchangers attached to the ceiling above subway platforms. Hot air sucked into these exchangers would pass some of its warmth to the water, allowing cool air to blow out the other side. The warmed water would flow gently away through the ground—perhaps to be cooled down or otherwise treated elsewhere.

A prototype of this setup is now installed at the chalk quarry. “For nominal pumping rate over the course of about an hour we can shift the temperature of the [bedroom-sized] room down about 10-11 degrees [Celsius],” says Paul. He and his colleagues still need to test how it would perform in large rooms, and, crucially, he’s not sure whether Transport for London (TfL)—the body that operates the Tube—would ever implement it for real.

However, Paul argues the system could be a significant improvement on a similar technology tested by TfL back in 2006. That technology, which is no longer in use, attempted cooling using groundwater that had leaked into‚ and then been pumped out of, Victoria Tube station in central London. Paul suggests that this fluid wouldn’t have been as cool as water directly tapped from nearby aquifers or subterranean rivers. He adds that his system uses special filters to reduce the risk of chalky water causing excessive limescale and blockages.

WIRED asked TfL whether it would consider using the system Paul and his colleagues have come up with. Although TfL declined an interview, Melvin Lim, a spokesman, says the body has had to “carefully prioritize” investments in recent years. He emphasized the introduction of new trains for the Piccadilly Line next year, which will feature air-conditioning: “We stay open to measures that will help manage the impact of increasing temperatures due to climate change.”

TfL, to its credit, has made many efforts over the years to try to deal with the problem of hot tunnels, including attaching cooling panels to tunnel walls. The panels, which circulate water to remove heat from the air, were deployed in a trial in 2022, though they are not currently in use. Paul argues that such a system could be prohibitively expensive.

Hassan Hemida at the University of Birmingham says Paul’s water-cooling technology is a “good idea,” though it remains to be seen how much heat it could really remove from a real-life, busy Tube station full of people.

Certain railways simply push the boundaries of our ability to cool things down, says Hemida. He gives the example of super-high-speed trains traveling at, say, 400 kilometers per hour. They force air out of their way at high velocities, meaning the air pressure surrounding heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment on the roofs of those trains can drop significantly. “Then, you cannot suck air into the HVAC system,” he says. Ultimately, that could cause the air-conditioning unit to fail. “I have been contacted by colleagues from China, and they want to find a solution for this problem,” Hemida adds.

More and more train operators are adopting air-conditioning systems as standard, though. London’s still relatively new Elizabeth Line features air-conditioning, for example. And a spokesman for Škoda Transportation, which recently rolled out air-conditioned metro trains in the capital of Bulgaria, says: “Generally, every vehicle we produce now is equipped with AC.” Sharon Hedges, senior engagement manager at Transport Focus, an industry watchdog, adds: “As people think about procuring new rolling stock, these are the kind of things that need to be uppermost in minds now.”

Heat waves are one thing in Britain. What about the Egyptian desert? German tech company Siemens is supplying Egypt with a new set of high-speed trains that can travel at speeds of up to 230 kilometers per hour. The firm’s Velaro trains are used in many places around Europe, but for Egypt, Siemens has really put them through their paces. Last summer, the company took one of the trains to a test facility in Austria and exposed it to unpleasant conditions, including temperatures as high as 60 degrees Celsius and high winds. “We are achieving 26 degree inside temperature at the hottest outside conditions,” says Björn Buchholz, head of HVAC and door systems.

“We added a special filter system,” he adds, explaining that this will help to remove sand and dust entering from the Egyptian desert, to keep the AC operating as designed.

A Siemens Velaro train in Egypt.

Photograph: Courtesy of Siemens

While air-conditioning is popular with weary summer travelers, passive cooling measures also have a role to play, says John Lawrence, a consultant for the rail industry at JPL Diversified. Many train stations already have awnings, which shade platforms and carriages while passengers board. But this isn’t always the case. “[The train] can be sat there quite merrily baking in the sunshine—take the opportunity to get rid of some of that solar gain,” says Lawrence.

Once a train is out in the open, highly reflective paints or coatings could help, too. In the UK, the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB), an independent standards and research organization, is planning to trial a selection of such technologies on trains next year. “There is a decent chance that some kind of wrap or reflective coating becomes a cost-effective approach for dealing with this,” says Richard Walker, deputy director of research at RSSB.

Different trains might need slightly different solutions depending on whether they take a north-south or east-west route, adds his colleague Scarlett Hayward Mitchell, a research support analyst. That orientation could affect which parts of the vehicle are more frequently exposed to strong sunshine.

Doing anything with railways is expensive these days. So updates to air-conditioning systems, or liveries, are most likely to take place when train operators make scheduled updates to their rolling stock. In the UK, a program to transfer some rail services into public ownership—making them part of a new entity called Great British Railways—could be a good excuse to invest in new paintwork or liveries for trains. This is partly why the RSSB has decided to research reflective materials right now, explains Walker.

Meanwhile, Paul and his colleagues continue to work on their underground cooling technology at their chalk quarry test site. “We’re building slowly in order to present a case that this can be rolled out operationally,” he says. “We’re maybe a year away from it.”

If he, or anyone, can interest TfL—and successfully cool down the Tube—then perhaps anything’s possible.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-keep-trains-cool-hot-world-global-warming-subway-london-underground-tube/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:28 PM EDT.

Culture

- OnlyFans Goes to Business School

CULTURE | MANISHA KRISHNAN | OCT 29, 2025 AT 6:30 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

OnlyFans Goes to Business School

OnlyFans has tapped the founder of a lingerie company and former nude model to launch business classes on the platform.

Rachael McCrary, a longtime lingerie designer and founder of the company Spice Rack, is launching four videos on OnlyFans Wednesday. The videos are quite different from the usual OnlyFans fare. They’ll focus on pitching investors, building a brand, and navigating being an entrepreneur as a woman, McCrary tells WIRED. More videos will follow. She’s also creating a Spice Rack x OnlyFans clothing line that will launch on the site later this year.

The move is OnlyFans’ first foray into making content focused solely on building a business. It’s part of the platform’s continued push into safe-for-work content that’s meant to complement the adult content it’s known for.

“OnlyFans is a community of over 4 million creator businesses, so it makes sense that we are the perfect platform to share tips on entrepreneurship,” Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans, tells WIRED in a statement. “As we’ve seen in other genres like comedy and sport, it takes just one creator to recognize the opportunity and others will follow suit.”

McCrary, 48, said she met Blair at the tech conference Summit Baja last November, when they came up with the idea.

As a former SuicideGirl—a community of alt pin-up girls founded in the early 2000s—she says she felt stigmatized by her past when working in corporate fashion. At one of her jobs, she says her colleagues looked at her SuicideGirls photos while she was at work.

“I just wanted to start crying,” she says.

Then she decided to launch her own businesses, but “pitching underwear to tech VCs, I already felt like I had to prove myself more,” McCrary says. According to Inc., only 1 percent of VC-funded companies were wholly led by women in 2024. Spice Rack, which McCrary says is backed by Sequoia Partners China and Mucker Capital, is among them.

“Being naked on the internet and raising venture capital from the largest funds in the world is a very rare Venn diagram,” McCrary says, adding that OnlyFans was already looking to expand into more non-adult content. “We decided to do a masterclass format of business classes.” The first two classes will be free, while the others will require a subscription to McCrary’s page.

Over the years, McCrary says, she’s been approached by many young women, including sex workers, seeking advice on how to start their own businesses or pivot away from adult content. After she revealed her past as a SuicideGirl on a panel in 2022, she says an adult content creator came up to her and said, “I didn't know that you were naked on the internet, and that makes me feel like I can have a career after this.”

McCrary says she’s heard from OnlyFans creators who want to launch clothing lines or are looking to leave their corporate jobs.

“They're already gotten into entrepreneurship, and some of them have learned how to do it really, really well. So how can we sort of expand on that past the barrier of what they're doing ... to make it an even bigger business?”

In 2021, OnlyFans announced that it was banning the sexually explicit content it's known for, only to reverse that decision a few days later. That same year, cofounder Tim Stokely stepped down from the company; in May, he launched Subs, a new subscription-based creator-driven platform. At the time, he told WIRED he’d heard from creators who were frustrated by the limitations of OnlyFans or wanted a platform that was more “brand-friendly.”

“OnlyFans is home to a wide range of content, offering creators of all genres the opportunity to reimagine how they can engage with their fans and monetize their content,” Blair says.

“That’s exactly what Rachael is doing here, using her skills and experience as a business leader to inform and engage with her followers while demonstrating the potential of the platform as a place for business content and a place to inspire others to be bold and disruptive.”

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/onlyfans-goes-to-business-school/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:28 PM EDT.

Science

- Rainfall Buries a Mega-Airport in Mexico

SCIENCE | ANNA LAGOS | OCT 29, 2025 AT 2:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Rainfall Buries a Mega-Airport in Mexico

Lake Texcoco Ecological Park—which opened two years ago, becoming one of the largest urban parks in the world, covering 55 square miles—has its share of challenges. It is difficult to reach without a car. Squatters continue to build homes in its El Caracol section. And farmers from the settlements of Texcoco, Atenco, and Chimalhuacán are demanding compensation for lands that were expropriated for the controversial, and now canceled, New Mexico City International Airport (NAICM) previously being built on its lands. There is work that was paid for, but that will never be completed, for that enormous planned airport. All of this is true.

Architect Iñaki Echeverría, director of the project, starts by acknowledging the first issue, the main point of contention for many: accessibility. “Obviously, I knew accessibility wouldn’t be completely resolved to everyone’s satisfaction,” he says. Faced with budgetary constraints, Echeverría had to choose: “Either we focus on resolving all the legal and accessibility issues, or we create this park, clean it up, and create a showcase demonstrating that restoration efforts like this one are viable.”

Nabor Carrillo Lake, located within the boundaries of the new park.

Photograph: LUIS GORDOA

The story of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico at the time, announced plans for a new transport hub for Mexico City. It would be built on the largely dry bed of Lake Texcoco, the body of water that had once surrounded Mexico City’s ancient ancestor, Tenochtitlán, the center of the Aztec empire. The marketing promise was that NAICM would be one of the greenest airports in the world. The terminal, designed by Norman Foster—winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1999 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2009—was going to be the first to obtain LEED platinum certification, the highest international recognition for energy efficiency and sustainable design.

Its site, Lake Texcoco, had already lost more than 95 percent of its original surface area, and in 2015 plans were made to drain it completely to build the airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexico’s president in 2018, he canceled the plan. It would end up costing more than $13 billion and would leave behind serious environmental damage: The incomplete project destroyed a key refuge for migratory birds; carved up mountains in the State of Mexico (the federal region that surrounds Mexico City); razed agricultural land; and altered the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous people that includes the Mexica (or Aztecs).

Echeverría, who says he has been obsessed with the area for nearly three decades, was appointed by the new government to restore the local ecosystem. “It felt like I was stepping onto Mars,” says the architect, reflecting on being placed at the helm of the project. The park covers an area equivalent to 21 times the area of Mexico City’s enormous Bosque de Chapultepec park. Echeverría offers his own comparisons: “This place is three times the size of the city of Oaxaca and, as a reference for those outside Mexico, it’s roughly three times the size of Manhattan.”

The restoration project wasn’t a mere whim of Mexico’s new president, but the culmination of a century of visions and plans. “We’ve been skating around this for 75 years,” Echeverría says, citing restoration projects that were proposed as early as 1913, including ones by Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a celebrated early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Macías in the 1950s. What was missing, Echeverría says, “wasn’t a lack of ideas, but of political will.”

By 2015, Lake Texcoco had lost more than 95 percent of its original surface area.

Photograph: Conagua

The wetlands within the park represent a small portion of what was once a much larger oasis that was drained over the centuries. This process began with the founding of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in the 14th century and progressed rapidly under the empire’s Spanish conquerors, who drained most of the lake. “Perhaps if we had been conquered by the Venetians, things would have been different,” Echeverría says. “But here, they had to tame the swamps. They were wetlands, and they destroyed them.”

The area of the lake, which in 1521 covered 232 square miles, had fallen to 154 square miles by 1608. At the end of the 18th century, in José Antonio Alzate’s map, known as the Mapa de las Aguas (the Map of the Waters), the lakes in the Mexico basin are isolated, separated by vast tracts of land. By 1856, Lake Texcoco had shrunk to 135 square miles; at the beginning of the 20th century, it was only 103 square miles; and in the 1960s, all that was left was barely 62 square miles.

Ahead of the construction of the proposed airport, further modifications were made to the former wetlands. Nine rivers were diverted to the Dren General del Valle, a drainage channel, including the Papalotla, Coxcacoaco, and Texcoco rivers, while 16 hydraulic works were built to prevent water from reaching the new airport site. Almost 24 miles of tunnels were built to send water to the north of the Mexico Valley Basin. Between 60 and 80 hills in 15 municipalities were mined for gravel, increasing desertification, health impacts, and wind erosion in the region. In addition, the development ramped up pressure on the already threatened water security of the Valley of Mexico.

“Everything was arid and red,” explains Echeverría, “and I was surprised to see how much the area had changed. Places I knew from 20 years ago were completely altered or destroyed. I also felt a bit of disbelief at the damage that construction and engineering was capable of.”

But in March 2022, the land for the park was declared a Protected Natural Area, an important step in reversing the impact of these engineering works. To Echeverría, after many years of trying to kickstart the restoration of Lake Texacoco, it seemed as though the fortunes of the area had finally changed. “I had worked on the project for many years. I had mourned it and buried it, and then suddenly it was as if it had been resurrected. The lake refused to die and we were here to help it. It really is a very courageous step for the future of the Valley of Mexico. I felt incredibly excited to be able to take up the lake again.”

Echeverría’s resolve would define the project. “I’d rather have someone come along now and say that while we haven’t solved the accessibility issue, there’s somewhere to go,” he says. In a megacity with tens of millions of people commuting every day, restoring the valley’s watershed, providing green spaces for residents, and mitigating climate change is no small feat.

Debate surrounding the canceled airport can blind people to the park’s true potential, Echeverría says. “This intervention and the protection of this area keep alive an opportunity for a viable future for the Valley of Mexico. That is the most important aspect of the project, in my opinion.”

In March 2022, the land was declared a Protected Natural Area, an important step in reversing the impact of destructive hydraulic engineering projects.

Photograph: Luis Gordoa

I first visited the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park two years ago. Now, at the end of 2025, the water seems to be reclaiming its place. The rains of recent months have caused the land to flood and birds to repopulate the lakes and float on the blue-green waters, peeking out from the plants. Cyclists, skaters, and soccer players make use of the park.

The area is home to more than 60 percent of the bird diversity in the State of Mexico, including species like the Mexican duck (Anas diazi), and it’s a refuge for a large number of migratory birds, such as the snowy plover (Charadrius nivosus) and western sandpiper (Calidris mauri). It receives an annual average of 150,000 waterfowl and shorebirds that travel along the central flyway, a migratory route that runs down North America. Due to the abundance of birds found here, this wetland is designated as an Area of Importance for Bird Conservation in Mexico (AICA), and approximately 78 percent of the proposed Protected Natural Area is located within the AICA. Of the roughly 19,500 acres identified as priority areas for conservation, 65 percent received an even higher designation—as urgent priorities.

As well as restoring the ecosystem, the project has allowed the park to become a recreational space.

Photograph: LUIS GORDOA

The park’s increasing green areas won’t benefit only birds—they’ll also regulate temperatures, lower health costs by mitigating particulate (PM 10) pollution, capture CO_2, raise biodiversity more generally, and establish better flood control. The site will be able to capture more than 1.4 million tons of carbon per year through its green and wooded areas. Environmental efforts such as grazing, reforestation, increasing protected green areas, and the recovery and remediation of water bodies will result in a reduction in bare soil, according to the National Commission for Protected Areas.

The area has also been designated as a Ramsar Site, recognizing it as a wetland of international importance. It is key to the regulation of water in the Valley of Mexico, benefiting millions of residents of the metropolitan area.

Echeverría is not seeking to restore the lake to its pristine state of 700 years ago. He is implementing what he calls “living engineering” or a “soft infrastructure,” a concept that merges design with engineering and prioritizes evolving strategies over rigid plans. “When your design is more of a strategy, it becomes flexible and therefore more resilient to uncertainty,” he says.

Echeverría's plan incorporates structures that were part of the proposed airport.

Photograph: Luis Gordoa

Instead of building the wetlands from scratch, Echeverría has reused portions of the abandoned airport and previous hydraulic projects. The method consists of letting nature do its work. Echeverría talks, for example, about the nine rivers that supply water to the area: “We reconnected them, which allowed two things to happen. One is that lagoons continue to form, and the other is that the water became cleaner and conditions improved.”

This work will allow the recovery of a number of important bodies of water located in the park, including the Ciénega de San Juan, the Xalapango and Texcoco Norte Lagunas, and Nabor Carrillo Lake. These are all essential for migratory birds, as well as local fish and frog species.

The abandoned airport project cost more than $13 billion and left behind serious environmental damage.

Photograph: Seila Montes

The philosophy behind Echeverría’s work wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was formed in New York, through the study of urban design via landscape design and observing how natural systems operate. His working methodology was also inspired by studying the work of theologian Raimon Panikkar, who focused on syncretism and the union of opposites.

For Echeverría, that was the key to a project that had been defined by conflict. “The issue of hybridization was what interested me most in all this. Because many mythological beings actually illustrate hybridization and the union of opposites,” he explains. “What I was trying to do was talk about opposites. About infrastructure and the city, but also about the countryside and the landscape. Different places and ideas that are always in dialectical opposition. I wasn’t interested in dialectics as a method, I was more interested in the idea of dialogue. That’s where a lot of my working methodology came from.”

A bird-watching tower in the park.

Photograph: Luis Gordoa

The project is a rejection of the logic “that all this can be fixed with pipes,” as Echeverría characterizes some approaches to Mexico’s water drainage issues. He compares that approach to that of simply building more roads to solve traffic problems. “No matter how many roads you build, car dealers will always sell more cars, and they will fill them up.” In contrast, the park functions as a “buffer zone” that absorbs water to “give the drainage time to work,” without flooding the city. The architecture itself follows this philosophy of resilience. “We use precast concrete,” he explains, because “it allows for easier replacement work” and guarantees “a quality of work that is not easy to achieve when you have on-site production.”

The area is key to the regulation of water in the Valley of Mexico, benefiting millions of residents of the metropolitan area.

Photograph: Luis Gordoa

For Echeverría, what has been achieved at Lake Texcoco has lessons for other depleted environments. The climate crisis—one of the greatest threats to ecosystems around the world—is not a death sentence, but rather a call for innovation. “The good news is that because we’ve done things so badly, there’s a lot of room for improvement,” he says. “This moment of crisis is the perfect moment for creative industries and for people with ideas. Anything goes and everything can be reimagined.”

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español. It was translated from Spanish by John Newton.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/rainfall-buries-a-mega-airport-in-mexico/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:28 PM EDT.

Security

- Ex-L3Harris Cyber Boss Pleads Guilty to Selling Trade Secrets to Russian Firm

SECURITY | KIM ZETTER | OCT 29, 2025 AT 1:13 PM EDT | VIEW ON WIRED

Ex-L3Harris Cyber Boss Pleads Guilty to Selling Trade Secrets to Russian Firm

Peter Williams, a former executive of Trenchant, L3Harris’ cyber division, has pleaded guilty to two counts of stealing trade secrets and selling them to an unnamed Russian software broker.

Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

A former executive at a company that sells zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits to the United States and its allies pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to selling trade secrets worth at least $1.3 million to a buyer in Russia, according to US prosecutors.

Peter Williams, a 39-year-old Australia native who resides in the US, faced two charges related to the theft of trade secrets. Williams faces a maximum sentence of 20 years—10 years for each count—and a possible fine of $250,000 or up to twice the amount of the losses incurred from his crimes. Prosecutors noted at the hearing, however, that based on his specific circumstances, sentencing guidelines suggested he’d more likely face a sentence of between 87 and 108 months in prison, and fines of up to $300,000. As part of the plea agreement, he has agreed to pay restitution of $1.3 million.

Williams will be sentenced early next year. Until then, he will remain on house confinement at his apartment, must undergo electronic monitoring, and is permitted to leave his home for one hour each day, according to the plea agreement.

Williams worked for less than a year as a director at L3 Harris Trenchant—a subsidiary of the US-based defense contractor L3Harris Technologies—when he resigned in mid-August from the company for unspecified reasons, according to UK corporate records. Prosecutors, however, said at the hearing that he was employed by the company or its predecessor since at least 2016. Prior to his time at Trenchant, Williams reportedly worked for the Australian Signals Directorate, during the 2010s. The ASD is equivalent to the US National Security Agency and is responsible for the cyber defense of Australian government systems as well as the collection of foreign signals intelligence. As part of its signals intelligence work, the ASD has authority to conduct hacking operations using the kinds of tools that Trenchant and other companies sell.

This month the Justice Department accused Williams of stealing eight trade secrets from two companies and selling them to a buyer in Russia between April 2022 and August 2025, a time period that coincides in part with Williams’ employment at L3 Trenchant.

The document does not name the two companies, nor does it say whether the buyer, described by prosecutors as a Russia-based software broker, was connected to the Russian government.

Prosecutors said that the unidentified Russian company was in the business of buying zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits from researchers and selling them to other Russian companies and “non-NATO countries.” Prosecutors also read a September 2023 social media post by the Russian company that said it had increased payouts for some mobile exploits to between $200,000 and $20 million. A September 26, 2023, post on X by Operation Zero, which describes itself as the “only Russian-based zero-day vulnerability purchase platform,” used identical language.

Operation Zero did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During Wednesday's hearing, prosecutors also said that Williams reached out to the company using an encrypted email account under the name John Taylor to negotiate deals for the software secrets he sold them. In the plea agreement, they say he signed separate contracts for each sale under the name John Taylor. Prosecutors claim that in one case he even agreed to provide three months’ worth of support or software updates to the products he sold the Russian company, which would earn him additional payments.

L3 Trenchant faces no criminal liability.

According to the US attorney overseeing the case, Tejpal S. Chawla, the FBI alerted L3 Trenchant sometime in 2024 that some of its software had leaked, including source code. As TechCrunch reported last week, Trenchant was investigating an alleged leak of its hacking tools by employees earlier this year—an investigation that Williams, then general manager of the firm, oversaw, prosecutors said during Wednesday’s hearing. As part of that investigation, Tech Crunch reported, Williams conducted a video-conference call with a different Trenchant employee, who was suspected of leaking several zero-day exploits that Trenchant had discovered in the Chrome browser. (This individual denied to TechCrunch that they were the source of any leaks.)

Williams was voluntarily interviewed by the FBI multiple times this summer, including once on July 2, when he described to FBI investigators the most likely way that an insider would have been able to extract the software from the company’s protected server. The same month, prosecutors say, Williams signed a contract with the unnamed Russian company worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, using the alias John Taylor and an email address with the same name. This deal followed a separate contract that prosecutors say Williams signed in June. The FBI again interviewed Williams in August and confronted him about the sale of company secrets, prosecutors said. The prosecution said Williams admitted to the sales at that time.

Prosecutors assert that Williams made at least $1.3 million from the sale of the trade secrets and have moved to seize his assets, including a home in DC, funds held in several banking and crypto accounts, and a list of luxury items that includes nearly two dozen high-end and replica watches and other designer goods. Prosecutors said that Williams used proceeds from the sale of the secrets to make a down payment on the DC house this year.

Trenchant, known formally as L3 Harris Trenchant, develops hacking tools for the US government and its allies. L3 Trenchant was formed after L3 Technologies purchased Azimuth Security and Linchpin Labs in 2018 and combined the two companies. L3 Technologies later merged with a military communications equipment provider to form L3Harris.

Azimuth was a developer of zero-day exploits based in Australia, and Linchpin Labs was a software firm founded by former intelligence officials from Five Eyes countries. (Five Eyes is a surveillance partnership formed by the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.) Trenchant develops various forms of hacking tools for browsers such as Chrome, as well as Apple’s iOS, Android, and desktop and network computing systems.

Updated 2:43 pm ET, October 29, 2025: Added additional details from Wednesday's hearing and clarified the number of trade secrets Williams is accused of selling, and the time period during which he is alleged to have sold those trade secrets.

Updated 4:55 pm ET, October 29, 2025: Added details about Operation Zero, a Russia-based zero-day purchasing platform.

Updated 9:15 am ET, October 30, 2025: Clarified details pertaining to Williams' sentencing.

This article was downloaded from https://www.wired.com/story/peter-williams-trenchant-trade-secrets-theft-russian-firm/ on Oct 31, 2025 at 7:28 PM EDT.

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Ex-L3Harris Cyber Boss Pleads Guilty to Selling Trade Secrets to Russian Firm