WIRED November 2019

DARKTRACE WAS FOUNDED in 2013, when members of the UK intelligence community approached leading mathematicians from the University of Cambridge with a problem: the existing approach to cybersecurity was failing. The resulting solution was a system that has shifted the industry paradigm. Rather than relying on pre-defined data sets to spot future cyber-threats, Darktrace uses AI to understand the organizations that it protects. Max Heinemeyer, Darktrace’s Director of Threat Hunting, is quick to point out the company’s diverse team, a natural outcome of its academics-meet-agents background. “I look across the office and see developers and coders, hardcore double-PhD machine learning experts, and what we call the ‘dev-analysts’ team,” says Heinemeyer. “They all talk to each other—all the time. This flow of information is so important to break down the knowledge barriers.” Largely in their…

Candidly, I was about four wines deep by high noon. Hold the judgment, if you please. It was one of those whoopsie-daisy kinds of Saturdays where the sun begs you to sip its splendor in the form of semi-effervescent California whites at your favorite neighborhood cantinas. Minimal risk of indecorum on my part—of all the creative names my enemies call me, Ripley D. Lightweight isn’t one of them. Though, yes, I do suffer that lightest pinkening of cheeks, a lush’s flush, when I imbibe. Perhaps also a certain slackening of step and sense. So sue me! Presently, I had a decision to make. Where to next? I polled the locals, who could agree only on a nonrecommendation: Wherever I went, it must not be that winery down the way. “I’ve worked…

“Even more than his invention for revealing a cell’s active genes, Jason Buenrostro himself. Like many scientists, he’s passionate about his work. But he’s also humble and empathetic. If Jason represents the next generation of scientific research, I’m all for it.” —Contributor Jennifer Kahn (page 56) “Talking with Hany Farid about his work with political leaders to encourage the tech industry to protect us against deepfakes, without creating mechanisms that could be exploited to suppress online expression.” —Senior writer Tom Simonite (page 70) “SpinLaunch, a company ditching conventional rockets to dramatically lower the cost of access to space. If successful, the company will lay the foundation for a truly robust space economy that is essential for turning humans into a multiplanetary species.” —Staff writer Daniel Oberhaus (page 61) “Joanna Pearlstein. Working on a…

Readers share their wonder, anger, and advice: RE: “MISSION OUT OF CONTROL” I want to call WIRED on its bro-centric recounting of Apollo 11’s history. The only mention of women was in reference to them as weavers of the copper wire that converted “code to machine-readable binary.” However, Margaret Hamilton was a major contributor to the development of the software discussed in the article, and was conspicuously missing. —Candace Egan, via WIRED.com RE: “THREE YEARS OF MISERY INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S HAPPIEST COMPANY” Nitasha Tiku’s article is great, but it fails to point out the hypocrisy of Google’s reluctance on Project Maven while benefiting from dual-use systems like GPS for free. Googlers apparently didn’t want to associate with a defense program that could potentially aid drone strikes. What do they think makes those drone strikes work?…

The year 2015 was a heady time to do marketing for tech startups. The venture baronry that controlled the fates of founders had decided that markets, rather than engineering or personnel, made or broke new companies. If you were a strategist or a creative, swagger came with the job, along with corporate Uber and free lunches of glistening sushi. You’d enter a pitch meeting in your sharp blowout and bravura nail art—every time; it was all about the rose gold accent nail that year—extremely confident that a solid creed preceded you. The only thing startups need is markets. ▪Marketing was on fleek, just as “on fleek” was on fleek. Those were the days. I was the editorial director of a tech marketing shop based in San Francisco, and—having come up…

It was a sweltering August Saturday in Hong Kong, and the authorities had just shut down one of the most important technologies in the city: the MTR, Hong Kong’s uber-efficient subway system. So the protesters walked. ▪The demonstrators were in their 12th week of continuous action; they’d been marching, singing, occupying streets, forming human chains, confronting police. They started when the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam—a leader essentially handpicked by Beijing—introduced a bill that would allow Hong Kong’s government to extradite suspects to main-land China for prosecution. Hong Kong is a “special administrative region” of China, with an independent judiciary and much wider freedoms than those found on the mainland. Fearing that the extradition law would lead to the further erosion of those freedoms, large numbers of protesters took to…