We need more tech satire like HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’

Image credit: Eddy Chen/HBO Eddy Chen/HBO Sponsored Links When Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, it came out swinging as the Office Space of our time: a hilarious and sometimes all-too-real reflection of a tech industry high on its own supply. Over the past five years, the show, created by Mike Judge (Office Space, King of…

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Why Ring Doorbells Perfectly Exemplify the IoT Security Crisis

There's been a lot of creepy and concerning news about how Amazon's Ring smart doorbells are bringing surveillance to suburbia and sparking data-sharing relationships between Amazon and law enforcement. News reports this week are raising a different issue: hackers are breaking into users' Ring accounts, which can also be connected to indoor Ring cameras, to…

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Greta Thunberg Blasts ‘Creative PR’ in Her Climate Speech

This story originally appeared on HuffPost and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.At a high-level event Wednesday at the United Nations climate summit, Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg slammed world leaders for “misleading” the public with insufficient emission-reduction pledges and dove into the growing science that shows governments must act quickly to prevent…

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Revolt! Scientists Say They’re Sick of Quantum Computing’s Hype

This spring, a mysterious figure by the name of Quantum Bullshit Detector strolled onto the Twitter scene. Posting anonymously, they began to comment on purported breakthroughs in quantum computing—claims that the technology will speed up artificial intelligence algorithms, manage financial risk at banks, and break all encryption. The account preferred to express its opinions with…

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Anti-Vape Laws Could Do More Harm Than Good

Since July, a mysterious vaping-related lung illness has swept the country, sickening more than 2,200 people and killing 48. As the illnesses and deaths proliferated, so too did vaping bans. The city of San Francisco had already banned e-cigarette sales, and by September Massachusetts outlawed all e-cigarettes, followed by prohibitions against vaping products in Michigan,…

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The War on Polio Just Entered Its Most Dangerous Phase

This time two years ago, it must have felt as though the long international campaign to eradicate polio—launched in 1988 and decades past its hoped-for end date—was at last nearing its goal. There were only 17 cases of naturally occurring polio in the world in 2017, half the number from the year before and incomprehensibly…

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The Tale of WeWork Is Being Made Into a TV Show

Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Monitor, WIRED’s pop culture roundup. What’s happening this week? Well, the WeWork saga is being turned into a TV show, and Marvel TV is shutting down. There’s also a trailer for the movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. Here we go.Succession’s Cousin Greg Will Play…

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A Kung Fu Master’s Leap Breaks the Internet—but Not Physics

What would I do without internet videos? It's not just viral cat memes but also amazing humans like this guy, Xiao Qiang. In this short clip, the kung fu fighter appears to leap onto a bucket of water several feet off the ground—then bounce off the surface of the water like a trampoline. Whaaaat?It’s an…

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Here’s How to Survive Sitting in the Bleachers This Winter

Most stadiums are frigid by December. Sitting or standing for hours is hard enough on a nice day, but it can feel like torture when the sky is pelting you with snow, sleet, or rain. You don't generate as much heat when you're stationary, and drinking alcohol exacerbates body heat loss. If only it were…

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Room to Breathe: My Quest to Clean Up My Home’s Filthy Air

This past winter, I played the roll of reluctant shut-in. I was recovering from a health calamity which forced me to spend my days working from a sofa in my den. I had never spent so much time inside my home—a 131-year-old, two-and-a-half-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill Historic District. I live here with…

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