In the spring of last year, cybersecurity researcher Takeshi Sugawara walked into the lab of Kevin Fu, a professor he was visiting at the University of Michigan. He wanted to show off a strange trick he'd discovered. Sugawara pointed a high-powered laser at the microphone of his iPad—all inside of a black metal box, to…

Happy Monday, welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s pop-culture news roundup. What’s happening today? Well, we have good news and bad news. We’ll start with the good news, which is sure to make your spidey senses tingle. Let’s get going!Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Is Getting a SequelFirst off, here’s some news pretty much…

In 2010, washed-out images of skinny and ethereal white women became the internet’s newest favorite aesthetic. On Tumblr, the platform du jour, there were photos of women, shoeless, in fields of flowers pouting lazily at the camera; women standing at windows in their underwear looking dreamily out onto a European street; there was even one…

Microsoft got where it is by ensuring that Windows ran on many different types of hardware. Monday, the company said its cloud computing platform will soon offer access to the most exotic hardware of all: quantum computers.Microsoft is one of several tech giants investing in quantum computing, which by crunching data using strange quantum mechanical…

Begun, the flurry of Star Wars activity has. With less than two months to go until the release of the next—and, currently, only scheduled—movie, and less than two weeks until the debut of The Mandalorian on Disney+, it’s no surprise that there’s a lot going on in a galaxy far, far away right now. But…

When President Trump visited Pittsburgh last month, he complained about how the Paris climate treaty was unfair to the United States.“I withdrew the United States from the terrible, one-sided climate accord, it was a total disaster for our country,” Trump told a cheering crowd at a natural gas conference. “They were taking away our wealth.…

There’s a rule in the world of blockchains so ingrained that some call it folklore. Bitcoin, the original iteration of blockchain technology, is great at two things. One is keeping data secure, with a ledger others can’t sabotage. The other is “decentralization,” or getting lots of people to work together without a central authority to…

Better than expected revenues couldn’t divert investor attention from the fact that Uber still managed to lose more than $1 billion in the most recent quarter as the company’s stock…

Workday announced this afternoon that it has entered into an agreement to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for $540 million. The company raised more than $60 million on a…

WeWork’s efforts to cut costs following the ouster of its chief executive officer and a delayed initial public offering looks to be impacting its subsidiaries. Meetup, which WeWork acquired for…