Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i WIRED

HUMANITY HAS HAD astonishing success alleviating famine, disease, and war. (It might not always seem that way, but it’s true.) Now, Homo sapiens is on the brink of an upgrade—sort of. As we become increasingly skilled at deploying artificial intelligence, big data, and algorithms to do everything from easing traffic to diagnosing cancer, we’ll transform into a new breed of superhuman, says historian and best-selling author Yuval Harari in his new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Which is great, except that we might also become so dependent on these tools that our species will become irrelevant—our value determined only by the data we generate. WIRED spoke to Harari about this coming life in the matrix just before he left for his annual 45-day tech-free meditation retreat. WIRED:…

acoustic prism n. / -'kus-tik 'pri-z m / Much as an optical prism splits light into a rainbow of colors, this low-tech Swiss invention—a metal tube with precisely placed holes—breaks sound into its constituent frequencies, no electronics required. It could be used for cheap, sturdy sonar. PhaaS n. / 'fas / Based on softwareas- a-service (SaaS) business models, PhaaS packages, sold on the dark web, provide everything a newbie cybercriminal needs to run a phishing con, including templates for scams, fake web pages, and access to servers. One even offers tech support and tutorials. cellular PC n. / 'sel-y -l r 'p?-'s? / A mobile device that can run standard desktop software. Microsoft coined the term to tout a cellconnected gadget expected later this year. The endgame may be a…

ANY LAMP can shine a light on your marketing plan. But if your desk goals stop at functionality, you’re doing it wrong. The Flow Table Lamp doesn’t just illuminate, it invigorates, with a design that, contrary to its name, doesn’t evoke water so much as a maximally pared bonsai tree. A flat LED chip eliminates the need for bulky bulbs and keeps the profile sleek. Better still? You can adjust the lamp’s positioning like a crane, optimizing for lighting or aesthetics (or both). And while it’s never easy to sacrifice desk space, with a base that’s just 7.5 inches across, the Flow leaves plenty of room for laptops and tillandsias. Brilliant! $370…

There is a term for news organizations that predate the internet— legacy media—and you may have heard that they’re dying. But in researching who was watching and reading what at the end of 2016, one thing became clear: Some of the oldest voices in the news are still the biggest. Just the print issue of The New York Times reaches more people every day than the Huffington Post does, and the nightly news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC each have many millions more viewers than even the highest-trafficked news site. At least for now. DAILY AUDIENCE NUMBERS, EXPLAINED Print In addition to the country’s most prominent daily newspapers, we focus on a few major weekly and monthly publications that people read throughout the week and month. Web To calculate…

RELATED PODCAST Code Switch Five minority journalists confront thorny, occasionally uncomfortable issues of race and identity in NPR’s cathartic weekly show. WHEN MORGAN DEBAUN was a student at Washington University in St. Louis during the early Obama years, she and a handful of friends often found themselves at this one lunch table in a campus cafeteria. It was big and round, whereas the other tables in the cafeteria were long and rectangular, and it was perfect for the hours the group spent talking about what shows they were watching, what music they were listening to, and whatever was happening in the news or around campus. They were among the very few black students at the predominately white university, and the table became a place of both sanctuary and celebration. Over…

MY FIRST COLUMN as editor in chief of WIRED ran in issue 21.03, exactly four years ago. I didn’t train as a writer, but I’ve found real creative pleasure in these issue notes—though the actual words never come as easily as I (or my editor) wish they might. This is the hardest one yet, because it’s my last. ¶ WIRED is a place designed to find the future, and my final issue is all about the future of what we do here every day: the news. We set out, as always, to avoid navel-gazing clichés and instead to understand what’s actually going to change in light of 2017’s new challenges and dangers. You’re going to read important thinking—Gabriel Snyder on the technology that drives The New York Times, Samanth Subramanian…

Live-Action Adaptations: It’s Hard to Hit the Sweet Spot Slavish Imitation Beauty and the Beast The Emma Watson vehicle is a way-too-faithful remake. Once upon a time was enough. Smart Interpretation Wilson Woody Harrelson manages to make Daniel Clowes’ middleaged misanthrope kinda … likable? Gross Appropriation Ghost in the Shell We love Ghost in the Shell. We love ScarJo kicking ass. But the whitewashing? Not so much. Wolverine’s Final Cut After this month’s postapocalyptic Wolverine flick, Logan, Hugh Jackman will finally hang up his adamantium claws. That might be a good thing for pacifists, because what he does best isn’t very nice, bub. Here’s a look at how minutes onscreen translates to body count over Jackman’s 17 years as the muttonchopped mutant. The 800-ish- Pound Gorilla In Kong: Skull Island,…

THE STONERS HAVE SPOKEN: Recreational marijuana is now legal in eight states and Washington, DC. Thanks to the passage of Proposition 64, California is one of them, making it the country’s largest cannabis market—the state will start issuing sales licenses by January 1, 2018. Now, as long as the Trump administration doesn’t confiscate our stash, regulators, lawyers, and scientists have some big hazy questions to navigate, from how to keep digital tabs on up to 25,000 licensed growers to how to evaluate THCrelated DUIs. Here’s a road map California and future pot-friendly states will follow as they roll toward regulation. Taxes will fill state coffers. Marijuana taxes are tricky. Too little and the state loses out. Too much and tokers turn to the black market. California’s 15 percent excise tax…

ELEANOR LUTZ is a matchmaker, but not for people. Instead she pairs knotty scientific topics with sublime visuals and publishes them on her blog, Tabletop Whale. And these aren’t random setups: She once illustrated the topography of Mars as a Victorian-era explorer’s map, connecting two periods of voyaging and discovery. Ikea assembly guides inspired an infographic on embryonic development. Recently she hitched diagrams of viruses to a trading card motif because, like baseball players or Pokémon species, each virus has a unique profile. “There are so many facts and equations and awesome things about science,” says Lutz, a graduate student in insect neuroscience at the University of Washington. “I want those cool ideas to be accessible.” For her latest project, she wanted to create a series of cards showing plants…

THE NEWS MEDIA IS IN TROUBLE. The advertising-driven business model is on the brink of collapse. Trust in the press is at an all-time low. And now those two long-brewing concerns have been joined by an even larger existential crisis. In a post-fact era of fake news and filter bubbles, in which audiences cherry-pick the information and sources that match their own biases and dismiss the rest, the news media seems to have lost its power to shape public opinion. ¶ It’s worth remembering, though, that as recently as 30 years ago, people worried that the press had entirely too much power. In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published a book called Manufacturing Consent, which argued that the US media puts a straitjacket on national discussion. The news, they…

WHEN EDWARD SNOWDEN leaked the biggest collection of classified National Security Agency documents in history, he wasn’t just revealing the inner workings of a global surveillance machine. He was also scrambling to evade it. To communicate with the journalists who would publish his secrets, he had to route all his messages over the anonymity software Tor, teach reporters to use the encryption tool PGP by creating a YouTube tutorial that disguised his voice, and eventually ditch his comfortable life (and smartphone) in Hawaii to set up a cloak-and-dagger data handoff halfway around the world. ¶ Now, nearly four years later, Snowden has focused the next phase of his career on solving that very specific instance of the panopticon problem: how to protect reporters and the people who feed them information…

BRANDS used to designate exactly where they wanted their ads to appear. Now they increasingly rely on automated advertising—a system that matches ads to anonymized profiles of consumers, based on data like what they have searched for. AD TECH COMPANIES track consumers as they browse the internet, serving ads on any site they visit—provided it hasn’t been blacklisted. WEBSITES that traffic in hardcore violence, hate speech, or pornography tend to get blacklisted, but sites with content that is less clearly objectionable are often fair game. Which is why even sites publishing fake news can profit by hosting ads based on your browsing history.…

After predicting the future for the past 25 years, we were ready to spend some time there. The result is our first-ever sci-fi issue, which features, to our great delight, many of our favorite authors: Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin, Westworld writer Charles Yu, and James S. A. Corey, of the Expanse novels, to name a few. Some of their visions of tomorrow—mind-reading devices, solicitous aliens, clones, and perpetual war—are bound to come true. Let’s just hope it’s the less-apocalyptic ones. Re: The Sci-Fi Issue “THIS ISSUE IS ART! LOVE WHAT YOU ALL ARE DOING. THANKS.” Jeremy Grant via email Re: The Sci-Fi Issue “I’d like to thank all the authors and WIRED staff for a truly delightful issue. As a sci-fi fan, I loved it. And it’s good…

Camphor One of the muscle balm’s two active ingredients (meaning the FDA recognizes its medicinal properties), camphor reduces pain through distraction by activating your skin’s temperature sensors and tricking you into feeling cold. There’s only so much input the nervous system can handle in one location, so forcing the body to focus on the chills has the effect of masking the underlying pain. Menthol The other active player, menthol, is an alcohol extracted from mint oil. Like camphor, it triggers your cold receptors, which might be why it reduces blood flow and swelling— just like an ice pack. Because it also seems to interact with opioid receptors, menthol may have painkilling effects beyond its powers of distraction and inflammation reduction. Dementholized Mint Oil Though it’s the byproduct of the menthol…

Apple’s typing accessory doesn’t cut it. Promote your iPad Pro with a real keyboard. Razer Mechanical Keyboard Case BEST FOR: Nostalgic futurists The six rows of backlit keys in Razer’s luxe black case rest on mechanical switches, making typing on your tablet like using a 21st-century typewriter. Designed for the big 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the case’s keys offer roomy QWERTYing, and a kickstand keeps the screen angled just so. Turn off the backlight and the battery lasts weeks. $170 Logitech Create BEST FOR: Entrepreneur in residence at the local Starbucks With Logitech’s case hosting your iPad Pro, your office is anywhere there’s a flat surface. The Create engages via the tablet’s Smart Connector, so there’s no futzing with Bluetooth or charging the battery. Even on the smaller 9.7-inch model, the…

ARTHUR GREGG SULZBERGER doesn’t remember the first time he visited the family business. He was young, he says, no older than 6, when he shuffled through the brass-plated revolving doors of the old concrete hulk on 43rd Street and boarded the elevator up to his father’s and grandfather’s offices. He often visited for a few minutes before taking a trip to the newsroom on the third floor, all typewriters and moldering stacks of paper, and then he’d sometimes go down to the subbasement to take in the oily scents and clanking sounds of the printing press. This was the early ’80s, when The New York Times was nothing but ink on paper and was printed in the same building where the journalism was created. His memories are hazy, perhaps because…

WIBBITZ USA Today has used this AI-driven production software to create short videos. It can condense news articles into a script, string together a selection of images or video footage, and even add narration with a synthesized newscaster voice. NEWS TRACER Reuters’ algorithmic prediction tool helps journalists gauge the integrity of a tweet. The tech scores emerging stories on the basis of “credibility” and “newsworthiness” by evaluating who’s tweeting about it, how it’s spreading across the network, and if nearby users have taken to Twitter to confirm or deny breaking developments. BUZZBOT Originally designed to crowdsource reporting from the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, BuzzFeed’s software collects information from on-the-ground sources at news events. BuzzBot has since been open-sourced, portending a wave of bot-aided reporting tools.…

WEB The anonymity network Tor obscures your identity by routing your online traffic through computers worldwide. Access it via the web-based Tor Browser to visit any site related to your planned contact with the press. Find a directory of the 35 or so news organizations that maintain Secure- Drop portals—Torenabled inboxes for anonymous tips. Then choose an outlet and leak away. PHONE Buy a burner— a cheap, prepaid Android phone— with cash from a nonchain store in an area you’ve never been to before. Don’t carry your regular phone and the burner at the same time, and never turn on the burner at home or work. Create a Gmail and Google Play account from the burner, then install the encrypted calling and texting app Signal. When you’re done, destroy the…

“PREVIOUS GENERATIONS bought Renoirs and Cézannes,” Dan Lanigan says. “We’re buying stormtrooper helmets and Ghostbusters proton packs.” The burly TV producer is referring to his obsessive (and costly) pursuit of prop collecting. “This is the fine art of my generation.” ¶ It used to be an underground hobby. People did it, but nobody talked about it—not only because it was embarrassing to admit that you coveted Charlton Heston’s slave collar from Planet of the Apes but also because, since such things were studio property, it was illegal to own them. Shady studio insiders and a cabal of collectors struck deals in private. That all changed in 1970, when MGM cleared some clutter from its soundstages with a three-day auction. Among the frayed costumes and antique furniture that hit the block…

Ramen is a health food; Two Weeks Notice is a superior film to Notting Hill; no one wins in a tiebreaker in my new board game Inis; deadlines are just a social construct; the Law of Optical Volumes; Japan’s disastrously accurate highway signs; wine is definitely a healthy juice drink, chocolate is medicinal, and the warmth emanating from my phone is just love, not danger; he’ll stop tweeting so much now; we don’t need a Bluetooth-enabled patio umbrella; playing Gauntlet on my Nintendo emulator will ultimately make me more productive; purposefully hiking the redwoods in a downpour; “I’m sure the writer has sourcing for this …”; Wrong Theory; the drought’s gotta be over by now; Sudafed by day, codeine by night; I bet I can eat just one; the walrus…