On a sweltering Tuesday last August, a new cryptocurrency was born. Called MiamiCoin, it was styled as a way for the crypto-savvy to support the Magic City, and maybe earn some cryptocurrency in the process. A tongue-twisting press release said that MiamiCoins were “programmable city-based tokens that unlock a new community-driven revenue stream for local
Month: April 2022
Jon Bell, a designer who previously worked on Twitter’s anti-abuse team, says weakening Twitter’s moderation would be a mistake. Outsiders—including Bell before he joined the company—often don’t realize how much work it takes to prevent the site from being overrun by toxic content, he says. Although Twitter has been criticized for not doing enough to
Freedom never comes for free. In Twitter’s case, the price was $44 billion, which Elon Musk will pay to liberate the platform from its responsibilities as a public company and transform it into a free speech Xanadu. Musk wants to open source the platform’s algorithms, exile spam bots, and allow people to tweet whatever they
“In this age of machine learning, it isn’t the algorithms, it’s the data,” says David Karger, a professor and computer scientist at MIT. Karger says Musk could improve Twitter by making the platform more open, so that others can build on top of it in new ways. “What makes Twitter important is not the algorithms,”
Within two hours of Twitter’s announcement that it had accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to buy the company and take it private, the first concerning signs flashed across Joe Mulhall’s screen. Mulhall is director of research at Hope Not Hate, a British antiracism and antifascism group that campaigns against bigotry. When Musk heralded his
When someone Inês Marinho trusted shared an intimate video of her online without her consent in 2019, she compared it to a chronic disease she would have to live with for the rest of her life. First the video was shared through WhatsApp, then Telegram and Twitter. Eventually it found its way onto popular porn
Matt Hirsch has long loved the idea of electric vehicles and first leased his Hyundai Ioniq in 2020. He even installed a charger right next to the driveway of his suburban Boston home, where he does most of his topping up. But lately the relationship has started to fizzle. Sometimes he takes longer trips, forcing
Such social media battles may be unusual when considering a takeover of a massive business, but Musk is himself unusual, says Cary Cooper, a business professor at Manchester Business School. “He’s not a traditional businessman,” he says. “He’s a man that is pretty creative and pretty innovative. He’s a unique guy and does things in
Morgan Meaker is a senior writer at WIRED covering European business. Before that, she was a technology reporter at The Telegraph and also worked for Dutch magazine De Correspondent. In 2019 she won Technology Journalist of the Year at the Words by Women Awards. She was born in Scotland, lives… Read more
Hi, everyone. CNN+ has gone to the graveyard. I got a head start writing the postmortem—when it first launched. Now we’ll never see them embrace TikTok. The Plain View One of the US government’s best innovations so far this century was establishing a chief technology officer. Since Barack Obama created the post, you would expect
Fiona Yu, a partner at the Chinese investment firm Northern Light Venture Capital, who also lives in Shanghai, says the lockdown has been challenging but manageable. She believes that people are able to get enough food, if not exactly what they’d like. “I think most of the people, especially young people, they are willing to
Angharad Paget-Jones, from Port Talbot, Wales, doesn’t expect to ever get on the housing ladder. Despite what money-saving advice and guides on the internet say, “it’s not as easy as stopping drinking coffee in the morning or canceling your Netflix subscription,” she says. Paget-Jones, 28, needs a home of her own to live in. As
Elise Joshi was scrolling through Twitter’s standard rage-bait late one night in February when she saw a Tweet that galled her enough to take action. Starbucks, the supposedly progressive coffee chain, had just fired seven employees who were trying to unionize a store in Memphis, Tennessee. (Starbucks told CNN the firings weren’t retaliatory, but the
Since February, the nurses at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Virginia, have had an extra assistant on their shifts: Moxi, a nearly 6-foot-tall robot that ferries medication, supplies, lab samples, and personal items through the halls, from floor to floor. After two years of battling Covid-19 and related burnout, nurses say it’s been a welcome
As we move further into the 21st century, more and more aspects of our lives are being controlled by algorithms. Facebook decides which posts we see in our newsfeed, Google shows us the results of our searches based on their complex ranking system, and Amazon recommends products based on our past purchase history. It’s no
A French social media platform launched by Alexis Barreyat in 2020, BeReal is attracting dedicated users on US college campuses after gaining popularity overseas. Essentially, BeReal sends users a prompt at a random time each day, urging them to snap a picture and send it to their friends. You only have two minutes to respond,
David Cottrell got his $39,999 Tesla Model Y last February. The compact electric hatchback was a fantastic car, he says. But just a few months later, he decided to input the make and model into the website of an online used car retailer. Surprise! The Tesla was already worth $10,000 more than he and his
To enter the conference hall at TED, the world’s premier jamboree of futuristic optimism, is to enter what feels like a bubble floating in space: a tiered theater built inside a giant, darkened ballroom and suffused with reds and blues and pinks and purples, at the center of which a succession of extraordinary people tell
More than 200 longtime Wikipedia editors have requested that the Wikimedia Foundation stop accepting cryptocurrency donations. The foundation received crypto donations worth about $130,000 in the most recent fiscal year—less than 0.1 percent of the foundation’s revenue, which topped $150 million last year. Debate on the proposal has raged over the last three months. “Cryptocurrencies are
Other responses to the takeover attempt have focused on what Musk would do if it goes through. Musk’s direct mention of free speech in the letter accompanying his bid has people worried that if he does take over the platform, he could roll back some of the platform’s measures against hate speech. “I would argue
In 2020, London-based fashion designer Scarlett Yang created a garment that looked like glass, changed texture in response to temperature and weather, and dissolved if you left it in water. This wasn’t a sci-fi fever dream or magic trick, but a design made possible by modern technology. Yang’s clothing was made from algae extract, which
For practical purposes, the M1 Ultra acts like a single, impossibly large slice of silicon that does it all. Apple’s most powerful chip to date has 114 billion transistors packed into over a hundred processing cores dedicated to logic, graphics, and artificial intelligence, all of it connected to 128 gigabytes of shared memory. But the
In early April, as Ukraine started to regain control of Bucha and other small towns northwest of Kyiv, appalling imagery began to spread on Telegram and other social networks. Photos and videos showed bodies in the streets and anguished survivors describing loved ones, civilians, killed by Russian soldiers. In Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine, attorney Denys
The video of the two men wrestling has been shared 41,000 times on Facebook, although the post was taken down on April 7, after WIRED brought it to the platform’s attention. The TikTok account that originally posted it was taken down overnight on April 6. Posts that are shared more than 10,000 times are very
Greg Yetman is codirector of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), a part of the Climate School at Columbia University. As part of a NASA contract, CIESIN has been exploring ways to deliver socioeconomic data by observing the Earth since the early 1990s. Yetman says things like understanding that it’s common for
In June 2021, Twitter told the world “you don’t need an edit button, you just need to forgive yourself.” Twitter founder Jack Dorsey even held firm against Kim Kardashian’s pleas when she cornered him at Kanye West’s birthday party in 2018. For years, the platform has held out against editing tweets. Until now. An edit
Even tech companies like Netflix and PayPal require manual effort and often pages of documentation if the bereaved do not have access to the deceased’s login information. But Empathy, another after-loss software company, wants to change that. A premium feature leverages what technology is good at—financials and prefilling forms—to automate closing the deceased’s accounts. Empathy
Activist shareholders, which we can assume Musk is in this case, generally take their stakes for one of three reasons, says Anil Dash, CEO of software development startup Glitch. They either wade in to split up the company in a move that Dash says wouldn’t make sense for Twitter, to appoint a captive CEO (which
The maze of policies and supplemental policies can get complicated quickly. First off, most personal auto insurance plans don’t cover workers when they’re driving for hire. Secondly, payouts vary based on the trip phase: Transporting passengers, traveling to pick them up, and waiting for a new ride can all come with different benefits. If a
You might have heard of crypto Twitter, the corner of the social network where accounts have Bored Apes as profile pictures, posts are rife with talk of tokens, blockchains, and buying the Bitcoin dip, and Elon Musk is venerated. Photograph: Christian Peacock Then again, you might have heard of Twitter Crypto, the business unit devoted