Inhoudsopgave van February 2018 - WIRED

EACH WINTER, crackling and splintering ice echoes across the Uncompahgre Gorge, roughly 10 miles northeast of Telluride, Colorado. The sound signals high season at Ouray Ice Park, the world’s first and largest man-made frozen climbing grounds. The gorge’s walls are crisscrossed by 2 miles of pipes, crowned by a network of valves, showerheads, and faucets. Each night, the fixtures unleash more than 100,000 gallons of runoff down the jagged cliff face, cooling the rock. Once the temperature dips below 28 degrees, that gushing water is turned to a mist and the droplets freeze together to form a blanket of ice more than 10 feet thick. Then ice farmers like Xander Bianchi, a former mechanical engineer, shape more than 100 routes into the pitch, dribbling water down freezing chains to form…

Rich Lee had armor implanted in his shins in 2016. Soft until struck, the polymerfoam tubes could withstand the full force of a baseball bat swing. The procedure seemed promising—until his stitches burst, prompting him to rip out the tubes. It hurt like hell, but it won’t stop him from his next trial. Lee is part of a loosely connected group of biohackers—garage geneticists, chemists, and grinders (those who modify their own bodies)—who are stretching the capabilities of DIY augmentation. When humans optimize into something out of a scifi flick, you can thank these reckless pioneers for blazing our enhanced future. Good Vibrations Lee, CEO of Cyborgasmics, is developing the Lovetron 9000, an implantable vibrator that rests on a man’s pubic bone. The swipe of a magnet activates continuous pulsation,…

IF YOU’RE ALREADY spending the entire 9-to-5 workday gazing at the clock, you may as well invest in a timepiece worthy of prolonged ogling. Every 30 seconds, the current time slowly materializes on the Etch’s thermoelastic membrane. Seven-segment numerals, reminiscent of a classic LCD clock, sit beneath the slate-colored face. To display the time, the smooth, stretchy skin is pulled into the crevices needed to form the correct digits. The result looks like the numbers are carved into stone, an effect compounded by the concretelike hue of the membrane. Moments later, the figures disappear—time, of course, is fleeting. So go ahead, stare all you want. Someday soon you may want to evaluate your career choices. But for now, with a timepiece this engaging, those hours won’t seem like a waste.…

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For most of modern history, the easiest way to block the spread of an idea was to keep it from being mechanically disseminated. Shutter the news paper, pressure the broad cast chief, install an official censor at the publishing house. Or, if push came to shove, hold a loaded gun to the announcer’s head. This actually happened once in Turkey. It was the spring of 1960, and a group of military officers had just seized control of the government and the national media, imposing an information blackout to suppress the coordination of any threats to their coup. But inconveniently for the conspirators, a highly anticipated soccer game between Turkey and Scotland was scheduled to take place in the capital two weeks after their takeover. Matches like this were broadcast live…

Young-adult novelist Nine months before my fifth novel, American Heart, was published, I got an email saying “There’s a discussion happening on Twitter about the problematic white-savior narrative in your novel.” I thought that was strange. The only thing that had been released was the publisher’s two-sentence description: “American Heart, about a fifteen-year-old girl who lives in a world where detainment camps for Muslim Americans are a reality; when she decides to help a Muslim woman who is in hiding, the unlikely pair set off on a dangerous journey hitchhiking their way through the heart of America, discovering courage and kindness in the most unexpected places.” When I looked on Twitter, there was a raging discussion saying that it was a terrible, white-supremacist novel. Then, in October, Kirkus gave American…

Headlines (and timelines) can make it seem like a rising tide of white supremacists, Nazis, and trolls is one “free speech rally” away from swamping us all. To be sure, hate in America is more visible than it’s been in decades, helped along by the internet—the factory where bots, propaganda, and real people slosh around together in an agita-inducing flurry. But all that makes it easy to overestimate how many far-right extremists there are. We pulled together some numbers and facts to put the hate-mongering into context. TWITTER BOTS AND TOXIC #HASHTAGS Twitter bots have distorted and weaponized political conversation in the US and abroad, and have been used to get non-bot users kicked off the platform. But even with robotic assistance, many of the most hateful hashtags—the ones that…

Writer, activist, author, So You Want to Talk About Race Editor at large, the Establishment I was in the middle of Montana on a road trip with my two sons, and the only place open was a Cracker Barrel. We were the only black people there, surrounded by Southern Americana that seemed to harken back to a time that maybe wasn’t the best for black people. To blow off steam, I made a quip on Twitter wondering if they would let my black ass walk out of there. The next thing I knew my phone just blew up. It was surreal. Some clickbaity conservative websites were sharing my tweet as this egregious example of racism against white people. People saw that I was on a road trip and said they…

IN OUR DECEMBER cover story, Brooke Jarvis recounted the astonishing, harrowing details of one of the few online harassment cases that has made it to court. John H. Richardson examined entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s dream of augmenting the human brain with a device called a neuroprosthesis. Anna Wiener traveled to Germany to tour Adidas’ new Speedfactory, where the tech industry is both inspiration and existential threat. And in our January issue, Chris Jones spent time with a moonlighting meteorologist in Houston who guided the city through Hurricane Harvey. Re: “Me Living Was How I Was Going to Beat Him” “THIS IS, BY FAR, THE MOST INSANE STORY I’VE READ ON CYBERHARASSMENT.”Subrahmanyam KVJ (@SuB8u) on Twitter Re: “Me Living Was How I Was Going to Beat Him,” about the saga of Allen…

DAVID CAGE SCOFFS at the notion that videogames are fun. “They should trouble you, move you, make you react,” he says. As founder of the studio Quantic Dream, the French developer has been stunning and confounding players for two decades with cinematic games that tackle heady issues of love, death, domestic abuse, oppression, and the afterlife. “Some people are shocked when a game evokes real-world issues,” he says. “But this platform is about becoming the characters, not just seeing them from the outside like in a film.” ¶ Detroit: Become Human, slated for release this spring, is the auteur’s most ambitious work yet. Cage wrote the game’s 2,000-page script and employed more than 250 motion capture actors. Set in Detroit, the future capital of AI manufacturing, the plot revolves around three…

THIS YEAR, Rocket Lab plans to blast a 56-foot vehicle into orbit on a mission to revolutionize access to space. The aerospace startup’s affordable launchers are among the first to be tailored to commercial satellite customers. But the rocket won’t take off from Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Air Force Base—it was manufactured in Auckland and will launch from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. “Tech entrepreneurs are doing all kinds of edgy stuff here that hasn’t been tried before,” says Berkeley grad and software developer turned Wellingtonbased angel investor Dave Moskovitz. “Stuff that’s like, whoa, why would you go to New Zealand for that?” It’s a question that’s been whispered about Silicon Valley elites for the past few years, ever since Peter Thiel quietly became a Kiwi citizen; since LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman…

NEXT TIME YOU GET a promotion at work, don’t agitate for the corner office. You won’t need it. Pretty soon, your office will be as big and messy and private as you like, because you’ll be the only one who can see it. ¶ The early days of virtual and augmented reality have focused mostly on gaming, but Pokémon Go and Superhot are just a tiny part of how you’ll ultimately use smart glasses once they’re capable enough—and unobtrusive enough—to fit on our faces and into our lives. Most of the people developing mixed-reality tech think the venue where AR will really thrive is the workplace. ¶ Picture it: You get to the office, grab a keyboard off the shelf (because air typing still sucks), and find an open space.…

In the fall of 2016, Keegan Hankes, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, paid a visit to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. This was not unusual; part of Hankes’ job at the civil rights organization was to track white supremacists online, which meant reading their sites. But as Hankes loaded the page on his computer at SPLC’s headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, something caught his eye: a pop-up window that announced “Checking your browser before accessing … Please allow up to 5 seconds.” In fine print, there was the cryptic phrase “DDoS protection by Cloudflare.” Hankes, who had worked at SPLC for three years, had no idea what Cloudflare was. But soon he noticed the pop-up appearing on other hate sites and started to poke around. ¶ There’s…

The email arrived just as Megan Squire was starting to cook Thanksgiving dinner. She was flitting between the kitchen, where some chicken soup was simmering, and her living room office, when she saw the subject line flash on her laptop screen: “LOSer Leak.” Squire recognized the acronym of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate organization whose leaders have called for a “second secession” and the return of slavery. An anonymous insider had released the names, addresses, emails, passwords, and dues-paying records of more than 4,800 members of the group to a left-wing activist, who in turn forwarded the information to Squire, an expert in data mining and an enemy of far-right extremism. Fingers tapping across the keyboard, Squire first tried to figure out exactly what she had. She pulled…

Facebook’s ongoing effort to police terms-of-service violations has led to some puzzling takedowns, which in turn have resulted in outcry from users. Here’s a look back at some of its alleged blunders. November 2007 Search function seems to omit results for then-presidential candidate Ron Paul, advocacy group MoveOn.org, and the word “privacy.” April 2011 Removes a photo, originally from the British soap opera EastEnders, depicting a gay couple kissing. August 2013 Reportedly filters out content related to Kurdish opposition in Turkey, including maps of Kurdistan. 2014 Allegedly removes thousands of “blasphemous” posts at behest of Pakistani government. May 2014 Reverses policy after years of removing photos of breastfeeding mothers on the ground that they are “obscene” content. May 2016 It's reported that news curators have suppressed conservative Trending items. July…

I had a view, and my view was this: Serial sexual abusers should submit to castration. Castration, I believed, would sideline the abuser’s compulsions and thus keep the world safe from him (or her lol). While castration hasn’t been tested on abusers in the Harvey Weinstein style, it’s been used with success on child molesters, bringing the recidivism rate, or so I’d read somewhere, from 75 percent to 2 percent. (Another upside: Castration is rumored to forestall male-pattern baldness.) Of course I meant an entirely bloodless course of hormone therapy. Not a hatchet. I’m not some harridan. The abusers would just get shot up with something called an anaphrodisiac, a brew to suppress androgens and other traces of Aphrodite in the blood. My opinion was built on a couple of…

VIRGIL GRIFFITH discovered the allure of hacking in 1993, while slumped at an Intel 80386 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was 10, and he was on a losing streak at Star Wars: X-Wing. To hit the leader board, he’d need a fleet of ace wingmen, but he only had one X-Wing fighter that could hold its own in the game’s World War I–style dogfights. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Digging around in the game’s code, Griffith found that each pilot had its own file, so he cloned his good fighter. Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste—fully 20 times. This gave him, he told me years later, “a plentiful supply of the best wingmen from then on.” Players without Griffith’s workaround were out of luck. Those brave pilots,…

The gig economy used to be so blissfully, mindlessly simple: Open app, order service, autopay. Boom—that’s pay. it. Then sidegig platforms started turning this refreshingly straightforward transaction into an on-demand guilt trip by asking customers to tip. Wait. Before you @ me (#heartlesscheapskate), hear me out. I have no problem opening my digital wallet so that the first-name-only hero shuttling me through rush hour traffiffic or building my Ikea bookcase can earn what they deserve. I just don’t want their paycheck left to the discretion of randos like me. Because guess what? I’d rather these companies pay their workers more. It’s maddening to be expected to subsidize their race to-the-bottom price wars with my cash and conscience. After all, in an Uber the rules aren’t so clear. How much do…

v. Swiping computer processing power through a web browser to illicitly mint cryptocurrency. People who streamed the TV drama Billions last fall may have been hit by some real-life financial chica nery. While they watched, a rogue script on the Showtime website directed their PCs to engage in “mining” operations for a bitcoin-like digital currency. ¶ Doing currency mining on your own machine is perfectly legit. Basically, you’re solving gnarly math problems to verify transactions; in return, you get some new coins. But the Showtime cryptojacker tapped into the CPUs of unsuspecting viewers and used their spare cycles to do the spadework. Not legit. ¶ But do we care? Jackers pick so many pockets at once that the cost per victim is minimal: a fraction of a cent in electricity…

IN 1978 A YOUNG woman named Maria Klawe arrived at the University of Toronto to pursue a doctorate in computer science. She had never used a computer—much less written a line of code—but she had a PhD in math and a drive to succeed in a male-dominated field. She was so good that, nine months later, the university asked her to be a professor. Today, however, computer science is one of the few STEM fields in which the number of women has been steadily decreasing since the ’80s. In the tech industry, women hold only around one-fifth of technical roles. In light of these stats, the prevailing view in Silicon Valley these days is “This is terrible, let’s fix it.” In Southern California, Klawe has done what tech has not.…

Songwriter and activist I had an alert that would go off whenever Trump tweeted, and I would reply to most of his tweets. I think it was a Sunday morning: I posted a GIF of the Pope kind of looking at Trump funny, and my tweet said, “This is pretty much how the whole world sees you.” After that, my phone was very quiet all day. I thought, well, maybe he’s golfing. Then I came back to my computer in the evening and saw that he had actually blocked me. And I just laughed. I’m nobody. I can’t be more than a gnat to him. I felt incredulous, and then amused, and then concerned, all within moments of each other. Then I started thinking, you know, this is something that…

Former Google engineer Last year I wrote an internal document calling for a more open discussion of Google’s diversity policies, citing research on average gender differences between men and women. Before it went viral, responses from coworkers ranged from “I totally agree” to “Is this true?” or “I disagree because …” Once it leaked, rational discussion was impossible: Extreme voices got amplified. It was all about “Oh, this sexist pig” or “Those leftists are all stupid.” One manager said, “I intend to silence these views; they are violently offensive.” In the real world, you interact with people near you. You might disagree with them, but you still treat them humanely. When you interact with an avatar, that’s not a person anymore. People become objectified. I was objectified as all the…

Late last fall, in the gleaming white lobby of Madison Square Garden, uniformed attendants were posted at security stations to make thousands of smartphones stupid. Chris Rock was playing his 10th show in a 12-city international tour, and at every stop, each guest was required to pass through the entryway, confirm that his or her phone was on vibrate or silent, and then hand it over to a security guard who snapped it into a locking gray neoprene pouch—rendering it totally inaccessible. The besuited man ahead of me in line, clearly coming straight from the office, had two cell phones, each of which required its own little bag. The kid behind me groaned that he wouldn’t be able to Snapchat his night. The friend whom I’d come to meet was…

Cofounder, the Daily Wire; conservative pundit In May 2016, I posted a nice message on Twitter saying we were grateful to God that our son was born. I immediately got a flood of anti-Semitic messages about his birth, ranging from gas-chamber memes of me to talk about cockroaches and the odd racist tweet. The alt-right had been at me since March, when I came out as #NeverTrump. I knew they would come after me when I made political statements on Twitter, but when I’m tweeting out thanks to God for the birth of my baby son? I was taken aback by the insanity of it. You have a choice when it comes to these things: Are you going to give it more light, more heat? Or do you try to…