Articles by Wired
We found 26 results.
‘The Dispossessed’ Is Still One of Sci-Fi’s Smartest Books
Wired - TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Apr 2021
2 Apr 2021 – Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed depicts a society with no laws or government, an experiment in “nonviolent anarchism.” Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was impressed by the book’s thoughtful exploration of politics and economics.
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Wait, How Much Microplastic Is Swirling in the Atlantic?
Matt Simon | Wired - TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Aug 2020
18 Aug 2020 – Scientists calculate that the top 200 meters of ocean alone contains up to 21 million metric tons of plastic. And that wasn’t even counting microfibers.
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New Mac Ransomware Is Even More Sinister Than It Appears
Lily Hay Newman | Wired - TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Jul 2020
1 Jul 2020 – The malware known as ThiefQuest or EvilQuest also has spyware capabilities that allow it to grab passwords and credit card numbers.
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Inside the NSA’s Secret Tool for Mapping Your Social Network
Barton Gellman | Wired - TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 May 2020
24 May 2020 – In the summer of 2013, I spent my days sifting through the most extensive archive of top-secret files that had ever reached the hands of an American journalist. Edward Snowden had transmitted tens of thousands of classified documents to me, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. He revealed the agency’s phone-record tracking program. But thanks to “precomputed contact chaining,” that database was much more powerful than anyone knew.
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Meet the Activists Risking Prison to Film VR in Factory Farms
Andy Greenberg | Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Dec 2019
5 Dec 2019 – This animal liberation group actually wants to be put on trial. Their goal: force jurors to wear VR headsets and immerse them in the suffering of animals bound for slaughter.
→ read full articleHow Boring Old Pension Funds Might Curb Global Warming
Nick Stockton | Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 May 2017
18 May 2017 – Last week, some retirement funds and church endowments, along with BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, approved a proposal that Occidental Petroleum report its climate-related vulnerabilities. These aren’t save-the-planet activist shareholders, but investment companies. More than 1,500 institutional investors are members of the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment, which lists accounting for climate risk among its six tenets.
→ read full articleMajor Leak Suggests NSA Was Deep in Middle East Banking System
Andy Greenberg | WIRED – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Apr 2017
Friday [14 Apr] morning, the Shadow Brokers published documents that—if legitimate—show just how thoroughly US intelligence has compromised elements of the global banking system. Also included in the data dump, as in previous Shadow Brokers releases, are a load of fresh hacking tools, this time targeting a slew of Windows versions.
→ read full articleThe Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You
Emily Dreyfuss | Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Feb 2017
The aberrant occurrence is the story you’ll read and the picture you’ll see. It’s news because it’s new. The problem here is not just that this singling out creates a distorted version of what’s really happening. It’s that the human psyche is predisposed to take an aberration and conflate it with the norm. This cognitive bias itself isn’t new. But in a media environment driven by clicks, where politicians can bypass journalistic filters entirely to deliver themselves straight to citizens, it’s newly exploitable.
→ read full articleWikiLeaks Finally Brings Back Its Submission System for Your Secrets
Andy Greenberg, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 May 2015
It’s taken close to half a decade. But WikiLeaks is back in the business of accepting truly anonymous leaks.
→ read full articleHow Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm
Cory Doctorow, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Dec 2014
The Internet isn’t just the world’s most perfect video-on-demand service. It’s not simply a better way to get pornography. It’s not merely a tool for planning terrorist attacks. Those are only use cases for the net; what the net is, is the nervous system of the 21st century. It’s time we started acting like it.
→ read full articleEdward Snowden the Most Wanted Man in the World
James Bamford, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Aug 2014
In May [2014] I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013.
→ read full articleJudges Poised to Hand U.S. Spies the Keys to the Internet
Kevin Poulsen, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Feb 2014
How does the NSA get the private crypto keys that allow it to bulk eavesdrop on some email providers and social networking sites? It’s one of the mysteries yet unanswered by the Edward Snowden leaks.
→ read full articleUN Launches Its Own Spy Drone Program
Allen McDuffee, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Dec 2013
The United Nations has turned to spy drones for the first time in its history in an effort to increase pressure in militias in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, marking both a major technological advancement in the organization’s peacekeeping arsenal as well as a shift in how it views the use of unmanned aerial vehicles.
→ read full articleNASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration
Dave Mosher, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Sep 2013
In 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left Earth on a five-year mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Thirty-six years later, the car-size probe is still exploring and sending its findings home, being more than 19 billion Km away from the sun and the first man-made object to reach interstellar space. The distance it covered is almost incomprehensible, taking more than 17 hours for its signals to reach Earth.
→ read full articleThe Secret War: Cyber
Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Jul 2013
Inside Fort Meade, Maryland-USA, a top-secret city, as if designed by Kafka and with tens of thousands of people moving through more than 50 buildings, sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras. To block electromagnetic signals the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh.
→ read full articleIt Won’t Be Easy, But Here’s How You Can Keep All Your Conversations Private
Roberto Baldwin, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jun 2013
So how do you communicate without the whole world finding out that you’ve visited the doctor 12 times in the past six months for a mysterious rash? Well it’s not easy, but there are ways to keep your correspondence off the grid.
→ read full articleThe Whistleblower’s Guide to the Orwellian Galaxy: How to Leak to the Press
Nicholas Weaver, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jun 2013
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article ran in Wired Opinion last month (“Hear Ye, Future Deep Throats: This Is How to Leak to the Press”). It has been updated given recent events and reflects the author’s new findings about government recording of mail.
→ read full articleYemeni Tells Senators about ‘Fear and Terror’ Caused by U.S. Drones
Spencer Ackerman, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Apr 2013
For the first time, the Senate heard from someone who lives in a village where U.S. drone strikes are believed to have killed civilians. A “psychological fear and terror” has now taken ahold of his old neighbors, al-Muslimi said. “The drone strikes are the face of America to many.”
→ read full articleSuicide Drones, Mini Blimps and 3D Printers: Inside the New Army Arsenal
Noah Shachtman – Wired magazine,
26 Nov 2012
Flying grenades. Mini spy blimps. Robotic bomb-busters. Suicide-vest spotters. Battlefield 3D printers. The Army is retooling for a very austere, very remote way of war. And the gear that’s required is very different from the hardware that came before.
→ read full articleHouse Approves Sweeping, Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers
David Kravets,Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Sep 2012
The House on Wednesday [12 Sep 2012] reauthorized for five years broad electronic eavesdropping powers that legalized and expanded the George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The National Security Agency told lawmakers that it would be a violation of Americans’ privacy to disclose how the measure is being used in practice.
→ read full articleEcuador Grants Assange’s Request for Asylum, Defying UK Threats
Kim Zetter, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Aug 2012
The Ecuadorean government announced Thursday [16 Aug 2012] that it will grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asylum, defying threats from the UK government that authorities would forcibly seize Assange from the embassy if Ecuador granted Assange’s request. “We have decided to grant asylum to Julian Assange,” announced Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino at a press conference in Quito, to the sound of cheers from spectators.
→ read full articleUS Air Force’s Mega-Bunker-Buster Bomb Is Finally Ready
Spencer Ackerman - Wired,
30 Jul 2012
Just as the U.S. returns its attention to concealed weapons of mass destruction programs in Syria and (possibly) Iran, the Air Force is saying its mega-weapon for blowing up hidden factories of death is finally ready. That would be the Massive Ordnance Penetrator — all 30,000 destructive pounds of it. It’s an absolutely ginormous bomb.
→ read full articlePar:AnoIA: Anonymous Launches WikiLeaks-like Site for Data Dumps
Quinn Norton - Wired,
16 Jul 2012
Frustrated by the lack of impact from Anonymous’ otherwise famous hacks and data dumps, and the slow pace of material coming out of WikiLeaks, participants in the Anonymous collective have launched a WikiLeaks-like site called Par:AnoIA (Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency).
→ read full articleControversy Deepens Over Pesticides and Bee Collapse
Brandon Keim - Wired,
16 Apr 2012
Researchers led by biologist Chensheng Lu of Harvard University report a direct link between hive health and dietary exposure to imidacloprid, a so-called neonicotinoid pesticide linked to colony collapse disorder, the mysterious and massive die-off of bees across North America and Europe.
→ read full articleExclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
Noah Shachtman - Wired,
10 Oct 2011
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones. “We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”
→ read full articlePrisoners Help Build Patriot Missiles
Noah Shachtman, Danger Room - Wired,
14 Mar 2011
This spring, the United Arab Emirates is expected to close a deal for $7 billion dollars’ worth of American arms. Nearly half of the cash will be spent on Patriot missiles, which cost as much as $5.9 million apiece. But what makes those eye-popping sums even more shocking is that some of the workers manufacturing parts for those Patriot missiles are prisoners, earning as little as 23 cents an hour. (Credit Justin Rohrlich with the catch.)
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